Kevin Kelly | Excellent Advice for Living

Srinivas Rao: Kevin, welcome back to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Kevin Kelly: It's my pleasure. Always a delight to chat with you. And I'm especially happy to share my thoughts with your fans and audience. Yeah. You have a new book

Srinivas Rao: out called Excellent Advice for Living. And I think the thing that struck me most was that it was a departure from some of your previous books that were largely focused around technology and innovation, where as this one is really life advice that you've compiled over 50, 60 years, it sounds like.

But before we get into the book, I want you to start asking, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up influencing and shaping what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Kevin Kelly: That's a great question. My mom was a housewife we, she had five kids in five years. So at one point she had a one year old, two year old, three year old, four year old and a five year old.

I was the oldest of the five. And that was her full time job. My dad began as a degree in meteorology in the forties. And that was one of the first places to ever use computers to try and predict the weather. He got involved then in trying to program computers, but he wasn't really a born programmer.

He was much more like interested in that. And so he knew enough programming to consult on it. And he got a job with a consultancy, Pricewaterhouse. Helping people computerize their business. And one of their clients was time life, the magazine. And so my dad wound up working. Leaving PricewaterhouseWorking for a time, life in their, what we would now call their IT department and it was called at that time operations research.

And again, they were trying to basically digitize or they didn't use that term. Computerize the company time life. If you could imagine having a million subscribers to your magazines without computers it's like it boggles my mind how they could possibly have kept track of. Of people's subscriptions without a computer at that scale.

So anyway, that was one of the first things they did. And then they went on to try and bring computers into the rest of the company. Including doing a page layout which my father was involved in, but. That was not his true, he was not that technical and he eventually wound up working in some of TimeLife's new acquisitions.

One of them was Manhattan Cable TV, which became over time HBO. So my dad inadvertently wound up being involved in the new media of cable TV. Even though I grew up without TV, we didn't have it in our house when I was younger. So in a weird way. He was, and I had, I wanted nothing to do with what my dad was interested in.

So I was not interested in computers and I was not interested in. Big publishing, but that's very

Srinivas Rao: fate has a sense of humor. Yes, exactly.

Kevin Kelly: I went to be a hippie. I was I was a hippie. I didn't own anything. I had a bicycle and a sleeping bag and I was spent most of my time in Asia. Remote parts of Asia for many years, and I was interested in photography at a time before photography was cool.

And when photography was very expensive and very difficult to do, originally you had to develop, you had to be a chemist, you had to develop your own pictures and all that you had, and chemistry and optics. And it was expensive when I was photographing in Asia to take a color picture of a scene would be an equivalent of 5 per snapshot per picture today.

Imagine if you had to pay 5 every time you snap the picture on your phone, it's crazy. So that's what my dad did. A couple of questions come from that the first is about growing up in a family of that many kids I wonder what growing up in such a large family taught you about navigating social dynamics and how that has ended up applying to both your professional life and your business

career.

Yeah. Yeah I was the oldest of five, so all, so we went through everything together. We went through elementary school basically as a group. We went through middle school and high school together. And my closest brother, who's only one year younger than I am, we shared a room for most of our lives.

We've never had an argument in our entire lives, even that. So I think I didn't learn, it was very tight quarters, we weren't wealthy we were sharing bedrooms and everything else. So I think I learned to share pretty early and we really wasn't that much of a difference between us so that we could really feel like we were comrades.

So yeah that was I think our family is not very vocal, I, even to this day, when both my parents have passed, but I have no idea what their political alignment was. I have no idea. I have no idea what, who they voted for. I have no idea what they thought. They just never, ever...

Disgusted. It was old school in that way where my, my parents were reserved in that way, maybe even emotionally reserved. I was comfortable with that because that's how we grew up.

Srinivas Rao: How in the world do you get from photography to And I don't see why am I following this way. And I don't think your trajectory is very linear. And even hearing you talk about photos, I was thinking about this because when my sister had her baby, my dad and I were talking about this. He's 70 and I asked him, Like, how many photos do you have of when you were a kid?

He's two or three. And we said, did you realize this kid my nephew has had more photos taken of him in four months than all of us probably combined have had taken of us in our lifetime. It's

Kevin Kelly: true. I speaking of photography, my family had a brownie camera. They would have a there was a roll 24 roll, 24 exposures in one roll.

And they would do one a year, one, 24 pictures a year. So they'd take some around Christmas us opening presents, maybe one on Halloween over the costumes, maybe one at Easter. And I, when I was a kid, I built a model railway layout that I did the wiring for it. I was like 10 years old. I would do all this stuff.

Later on, when I was 12, I built a nature museum with exhibits and had kids collecting stuff with how rocks, ultraviolet, how winds work, all this stuff. And I built a chemistry lab later on when I was older. There's not a single picture of any of that. Not a single what? Never. It wasn't that I lost them, they were just never taken.

No one ever thought to photograph that. So yeah, so we're in a different world where photography is default. And by, by the way if you had told when I was photographing seriously in, in Asia and I would take two rolls of film a day at 76 exposures. When I would tell people that their draws were dropped to the floor, that they found that there was just unimaginably, that was an insane, and they would say that was insane amount of pictures to take in one day.

And the idea that everybody would be taking them really would just, nobody would believe that. They would say what would I, why would I take 20 pictures a day? That's how couldn't anybody do that? And that's just to show how we change. What we do based on the availability of it.

And we're talking about AI. It's when AI enables us these new abilities. We right now may have difficulty imagining how we would use them or why we would use them, but we are going to use them because they're available.

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Explore more at ikea usa. com. Again, that's ikea usa. com. Yeah. How do you go from that to WIRED magazine, because I remember you telling me some of these things the first time we spoke, and you were pretty early at the forefront of writing about some of these things, thinking about some of these things, because I'm pretty sure if I remember correctly, WIRED was founded when I was in

Kevin Kelly: college.

Yeah, it was actually founded almost exactly 30 years ago. It was, we launched the first issue, I think it was in February of 2003. And no 1993, sorry, 1993. And how, it's a very chacrutinous journey full of detours and completely unplanned and unintentional and inadvertent.

So I as I said, I was a kind of a hippie ish person who dropped out of college, went to Asia with a. Tiny amateur camera and I got on Asia because it became my university. I everything was happening on the street and everything was open and everything was different and weird and unbelievable.

And it was hugely diverse. Between Turkey and Japan and Siberia and Indonesia it's this huge diversity and half the people in the world live there. And I just. Couldn't have enough of learning from Asia. And but I wasn't interested in really technology and that kind of stuff.

And came back started to write about travel cause I knew a lot about that. I decided I wanted to go in business, try business. And I decided the best way, I thought about going to business school, but I decided the best way was actually to do something, to make a little business, take 200 and see if I can start a business.

I would learn more that way, which was absolutely true. And so I started, I was trying to do a mail order catalog about travel books that I knew about that nobody else knew about. That were, that I would import like this guy named Rick Steves that nobody had heard of. He had some books and Tony and Maureen Wheeler had books called Lonely Planet.

And so I started to make a mail order catalog for these books. And I was working at a science lab in the University of Georgia. And they had a computer, an Apple IIe to do the number crunching. And I figured out that you could get a modem. Transmit the stuff that I would type up to make a catalog, to send it to a local printer to print out to print.

And that modem opened up the world to me when I dropped the modem onto the little Apple, there was this, there were bulletin boards. There was the beginning of the online world. This is in the early eighties, like 81 or 82. And that changed my relationship because for the first time there was a technology that seemed to me to be closer to human scale, it seemed more organic, it seemed almost like Amish in a certain weird way of being able to communicate with others who are like minded wherever they were and there was something about that and I became interested in online, I was starting to report on the online world as if it was another continent.

It was like another Asia, another country. And then I got myself invited on to some of these experimental ones. And one of them, the experimental places was where the Whole Earth Catalog was writing was doing computer reviews, software reviews, tool reviews. And then I got hired at the catalog and we started to do other things online, including making the first public access.

To the internet, which was called the well in 1984. And so that, that was the route. It was coming through the online world, living online, learning to write online, learning to type and that, that world of seeing people blossom and collaborate online was how I became interested in technology. And it forced me to re look at all technologies.

And to see it in a different light because I saw a more organic view of it through the online communities in the online world. I want to bring back a clip from our last conversation, which I think will make a perfect segue into what's going on in the world today, as well as your new book. Take a listen.

Srinivas Rao: I truly do

Kevin Kelly: believe that this is both the very best time in the history of the universe, as far as we can tell, at least the history of this world, to make something. Because the tools for creation have never been more easily gotten, they've been, never been cheaper, they've never been better, they've never been as diverse.

And they truly are, make things more accessible. So if you want to make something that has been made already, like in terms of a book, a movie, a song, some of the tools. to do that

,

are just about free. And which means almost anybody in the world can get their hands on it. And all, and many of these things in previous generations were prohibitively expensive and really relegated to the elites.

But now you can make a book that looks as good as a book that hottest bestseller author can make. And you can distribute it. It costs very little to do. I thought that would be an interesting jump off point from our previous conversation because of the fact that I feel like what you said there, which I think it was probably five years ago, is a hundred times more true today than it was then.

Srinivas Rao: And I remember as I was saying before we hit record, I read your article that you called picture limitless creativity at your fingertips. And I think the couple of things that struck me most were a couple of lines. You said that generative AI will alter how we design just about everything.

Oh, and not a single human artist will lose their job because of this new technology. Talk to me about that idea in the connection with what you said to me in that clip.

Kevin Kelly: That no one's going to lose their job, you mean? Yeah. Yeah. In addition to being the best time to make

things. Yeah so it is still the best time to make things.

It's even better than five years ago. Just parathetically, one of the advances on these generative AIs, which can produce Unlimited and kind of ceaseless creativity in the picture of two dimension, like a photograph or a painting is that that's not really the real superpower. The real superpower is going to be used in making video and games and 3d worlds because those are things right now that are still not as easy to do yourself.

It takes. Team and money still even today with current tools, if you want to make a movie, a long feature length movie is still requires an incredible team and a budget of some sort, but with future AI tools, like the image generators. You'll be able to do that from your bedroom and that will be a huge thing because right now the moving image is the center of our culture.

It's not books, it's not it's not opera it's not text, it's not blogs, it's not even TikTok or social media. It's the moving image is this, is the kind of the gravity, the pivot of our culture. And so being able to produce those in full dimensions and fully rendered scenes that are inhabited and populated by characters who are consistent over time, that's a huge step in this kind of making everything available.

So we have not yet got there, but we're on our way. And that's why these generative tools are so exciting because they're pointing us in that direction. So yes, so I think that's still true. The question about employment is I think a little bit of a distraction. I've been trying to find an actual case of somebody who lost their job.

Due to AI in any capacity, whether it's a radiologist, a lawyer, an artist or something, I haven't found anybody. The real name says I lost my job because of AI thing. I might be able to find somebody in whose business it was transcribing text or audio into text. There were people who do that. And I can't imagine anybody still doing that by human because it's.

AI is so much better, but I haven't yet actually gotten their name to see whether they actually did lose their job or whether they've just worked for someone else whatever. I don't know. So the reason is that I think our tasks will change. You'll still have the job doing whatever it is, designers, they these things right now are primarily partners.

They're the universal intern. They are partners at the best. As long as the audience for the kind of finished product is a human, humans are going to be in involved because we have a very good sense of what other humans like. And AI is as well trained as they are. They don't have a clue. And and so we we're going to primarily the relationship we'll have is of interns, assistants, partners, guides things on the side the kind of what I call the centaur stance of a hybrid of a team, and that's.

There will be certain amount of stuff that's completely generated by AI that doesn't have any human involved, but that's mostly going to be used for where there is no, where it's blank right now. It's we'll have pictures where there are no pictures at all or sound and music where there is no sound.

So like right now this conversation right now has no scoring, no soundtrack, but it could have a soundtrack in the back that's being generated.

So that's the kind of thing where we have this kind of completely automated, auto generated creativity is not to replace what we're currently have with creative work, but in places where there isn't, so it's the places where there are no handle illustrations. That's where we're going to be using completely generated AI stuff or places where we don't have a video.

Cool. That's where we're going to use completely generated stuff. The things where we pay a lot of attention to that stance, those people, I think are not going to lose their jobs, their job is just going to be transformed where they. We reward AI whisperers, people who are really good at working with AI.

They will have an advantage in producing things just if you can use Photoshop or Adobe premiere and you're making things that's, those are the tools that you want to get good at. And I think it's. And that goes beyond just the generative stuff to other ways that these AIs will facilitate what it is that we do.

Yes, it will replace some jobs, but on almost every case where it replaces this, it's either something we aren't doing and wouldn't do or something that we hate doing. Yeah. So yeah, it should be picking lettuce. It should be mopping floors. That'd be good.

Srinivas Rao: Regardless of the type of work you do, your space impacts everything from your productivity, to your creativity, to your well being.

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Explore more at ikea usa. com. Again that's ikea usa. com. Yeah I, you mentioned that I've been working on this book, The Artificially Intelligent Creative and a conclusion that I came to was if you can combine human creativity with artificial intelligence, what you get are creative superpowers.

To your point, like I, the minute you said that about this podcast, my thought was if I wanted to, I could go into say a chat GP two tool and say, take my conversation with Kevin and reorganize it in an NPR narrative style podcast. And then I could totally do that. And then I would have to do the work.

And so what I realized was that your imagination matters so much more. I remember very distinctly, I had a mentor who would go around the country and he would ask people, this was in 2013, 2011 or so, right after the Great Recession. And he would ask them, do you know how to use the internet?

And of course they'd look at him dumbfounded. And then he would say, great, show me something that you've made using the internet. And that always stayed with me. And so my default question always became when I saw a new piece of technology, what can I make with this that I couldn't before? And I realized that technical competence would actually start to decline in importance and the ability to imagine what was possible with the tool would be the thing that mattered most.

And that's what I'm finding every day as I'm going through these various experiments with AI. I

Kevin Kelly: might disagree a little bit on your technical competence. I just think it shifts from, yeah, I don't have to know Photoshop, but I have to learn how to talk to the AI, I have to be really good about describing.

So there's a different technical skill. In that case, we may think that it's going to be verbal. But in fact, I think a lot of the this visual stuff we've done visually and meaning that, you know, Instead of, I'll sketch something to the AI as a first sketch and say, okay, here's, it's like you're talking to an actual other assistant.

I'll sketch it out and they'll take the sketch and work in it. I'll use a little arrow. I'll say no. Like right here, I want it darker and I'll scribble there and stuff. And and so that skill is the skill of directing. It's the skill of conducting. It's the skill of producing, which are all arts themselves.

And I think that technical stuff heads in that direction. But it's still something, it's still a skill that some people will be better at than others because of the amount of time and the way they've deliberately increased their powers, but it's still skill that can be learned and has to be learned.

And I don't think the illness goes away at all. I think it just shifts. It's funny you say that because I shared with you my little Fresh Prince of Bel Air parody. And in an attempt to animate it and do all this stuff, I finally got to my point of frustration.

Srinivas Rao: I realized, wait a minute, I need to be self directed enough to learn how to use this Adobe Character Animator tool. So I literally was like, great, then I can ask this to be my teacher and say, create a curriculum for me, which was mind boggling to me that it could do that and give me a relatively decent curriculum to take on these various self directed learning projects, which I realized to your point it is, I, in fact, I included a section titled how to talk to AI because I was watching a friend struggle with the note taking app that I use and he was like, I don't get it.

Why is it not doing these things? So I literally gave him a tutorial. And of course, after that, his eyes got wide open. He was holy shit, this is insane. I'm like, yep, it is. Let's get into the book. I think that, as I mentioned, this book was really a departure from a lot of your previous books.

And. I got the sense that this was basically a book of all the things you'd ever wanted to tell your children.

Kevin Kelly: Yes. It became that, but actually it started off as a book that I wrote for myself in a certain way. These little bits of advice, which I tried to take an entire book of wisdom, an entire lifetime of experience and try to reduce it down to a single sentence.

That was my little challenge was. They call this complicated things I might know about say investment and then reduce it to one or two sentences. And those sentences are a reminder to me. I like to make them into kind of a way that I can repeat them to myself. So like an example of kind of wisdom that I repeat to myself would be when I can't find something in my house and I know I have one and I'm going around looking for it and I finally find it.

I'm going to, I tell myself, when I replace it, don't put it back where I found it, put it back where I first looked for it. And that has made a huge difference. So every time I do that, I remind myself, okay, I'm putting this back, don't put it back where I found it, put it back where I first looked for it.

And these ideas these little wisdoms and Proverbs and maxims are for me to put them in a form that are very easily. For me to remember, and I remember them, but doing them. So another piece of advice is. Whenever there's a contentious issue with two sides, try to find the third side.

The third side will break it apart. The third side will be the release from that two sided controversy. And it's a way of what's the word, triangulating out that kind of insolvable dilemma. And And so I repeat to myself, okay I see two sides, people arguing back and forth.

What's the third side? Let me see if I can find the third side. So I, so these things are for me to repeat. And I thought, and I'd wished some of them that I had known a while ago. I wish that it didn't take me 70 years to get that. And so I decided to write them down for my kids now so that they would have something to repeat.

And also it helped me. I'm trying to distill what I knew down into something that I can repeat for myself. I

Srinivas Rao: want to go through a few of them because like I said, it would be ridiculous for us to try to do this. It can go through all of them in our conversation, but I wanted to go through the ones that caught my attention the most.

One of the very first ones was if you can avoid seeking approval of others, your power is limitless. Which. Yeah. That one I think struck me because I grew up in a in the Indian culture, which is basically the ultimate validation seeking society, right? What do we do? Hell, look who's running 50 of the companies in the world now and part of me wonders how much of that is motivated by the need for parental validation.

But we also live in this Yeah. Yeah, wait a say, we mostly do not meet. It's, you take, and you meet To the same. No, I think I think I realized that pretty early on I have other versions of the same kind of insight, which is don't, I would try to remember exactly how I said it, but don't don't measure your insight with someone else's outside, right?

Kevin Kelly: Because everybody is projecting to a certain extent and you don't know what they're actually like. And they're often not as accomplished inside as they make themselves appear. But I think rather than trying to seek to accomplish, I have a kind of a contrary idea, which I did realize pretty early on, which is that if at all possible, you want to work on things that nobody have words for right now, where there's no names for

,

what it is that you do.

Like for instance, what you're doing right now, we don't even know what to call that. Nobody, you'd have to spend some time kind of explaining. When it is, you can't just say I'm a accountant I'm a basketball player or I'm a a math professor. To explain what you're working, it takes some time.

And that's a really important sign that you are marching to your own drum, that you're on your own way, that you're finding this is broke breakthrough territory. This is where you really want to be because it's much more going to be reflective of. Your own talents and your own skills.

And I, I say, yeah, try to head to do things that, that they don't have a name for because you're much more likely there to do things that only you can do. And that's another piece of advice. That's my favorite. I remember that one.

Srinivas Rao: That was probably the one, yeah, that stood out to me the most.

Kevin Kelly: Don't aim to be the best.

You need to be the only, you can be the only when you're, that means that you're going to be doing things that people don't have a name for. I wrote a book with a subtitle, only is better than best. So that's literally the entire ethos of everything that I do. So speaking of that, there, there are two things that you say.

Srinivas Rao: One is that getting a job is not ideal for the longterm because then you only get paid when you're working and pair that with the other one, which you just talked about. And you said that if nobody else does what you do, you'll never need a resume. I wanted to talk about those two things because I know that the question of a thousand true fans and the viability of it in such a noisy world came up.

And I remember I wrote a counter argument to that, even though I had I believed strongly in the principles of a thousand true fans. I remember I thought let me start with this idea and see if it resonates. And it was a hundred true fanatics instead of a thousand true fans.

But in talking about that in a noisy world is this still a viable way of thinking about doing your own thing and being the person who doesn't need a resume. Yeah. So the premise of the thousand true fans in brief was that if you have direct engagement with your fans, customers, audience.

Kevin Kelly: And you don't have the intermediate with a publisher or a studio or a label. If you have direct engagement with your fans, you don't need as many of them as you think. You could theoretically make a living with just a thousand true fans being if they're going to buy whatever you produce, no matter what it is, they're your true fans.

And that was. There was a theory, there was a hypothesis when I first suggested it more than 15 years ago. And it's now viable because of the platforms like Kickstarter, Patreon. YouTube monetization, all these other social media stuff and other tools have now enabled people to do that.

So there are many people in the world, and I know that because they told me, who have are supported by their fans directly. And they are millions of fans. Again, there's thousands of them rather than millions. And that's a huge difference, that's a much more feasible thing to aim for than to become a mega star and have to have millions of fans.

There's huge disadvantages to millions of fans. So anyway, that's become much more feasible. There are a lot of people doing it. There are a lot of more tools to make it, do it, and you can have hybrid versions. You can still do some things with your fans directly and others. With the New York publisher, as I do, I've done several very successful Kickstarter campaigns, but I also work with New York publishers like this book, excellent advice is being published in New York.

And it just depends on what I'm trying to do, but at least have that option and it's really a great option to have for people who are starting out. It's still viable. It's still really good. It's still. Extremely powerful way to, to do it. But the caveat is that you have to, it's a, at least a full time job, maybe a halftime job dealing with your fans and not everybody is suited for it.

Not everybody wants to do it. Some people would just want to write, they don't want to have to deal with fans every day. Some people are incapable of it. They're just not, personality is not suited to try and make that engagement with fans and being on social media and being there. So there is a cost to it that you have to be willing to pay.

And also as you scale up, or if you're a duet or a duo or a team, you have to multiply the numbers by the number of people there. And that also gets bigger in terms of the number that you need. But I think in general this is still a really viable option for people. And it's often a great place to start.

Even if you don't end up there it's a great, easy way to start. And the thing about it is this niche world is that even if what you're interested in appeals to only one in a million people, it's really obscure, it's really odd, it's really weird. But because there's billions of people in the world, that means that there's gonna, there could be at least another thousand people like you with the same one in a million taste.

And that's good news. You can have a business around that. You could be a creator in that way, appealing to the one in a million, but there's a thousand of you in the world. And so the test is the technology that we're trying to develop is how to match up, how to connect how to have those people find you and you find them.

And that's still something that we need better tools

Srinivas Rao: for. I based on that article and my own experiences had made the observation that as the media landscape became more and more fragmented loyalty would become far more important than reach.

Kevin Kelly: Exactly. I

Srinivas Rao: think that's true.

Absolutely. One other thing that you say in this book that caught my attention was this, following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis. If you don't know what you're passionate about, a better path for most people is to master something. Yeah. Mastery of one thing, you'll command a viewpoint to steadily find where your bliss is.

And it echoes some of Kel Newport's point of so good they can't ignore you. Which I think that this sort of passion narrative is catchy. It sounds good. It makes for nice commencement speeches. But it doesn't map to reality for a lot of people.

Yeah.

Kevin Kelly: And I find that with our own kids with the same was that we were always encouraging them to follow your bliss follow your passions. But when they got to school, it's this is I don't know what I'm interested in. I don't have a passion. What do I do? And the realization was master something, masterpiece.

Put in the thousands of hours and master something. It almost doesn't matter because you're not going to stay there. You, once you've mastered it, you can use that mastery to help you keep moving into other things, but you have to master something. And and so that's that's what I've seen work best with the kids of the friends that I have is those that kind of early on get the idea that they're going to master something.

Is they're not going to stay there. They're very unlikely with this kind of fast moving world to, to continue. Although some might, my, my wife is one of those people who. Decided what she wanted to be in high school. And she became that, but most of us don't have that kind of a path. We move around, but if we move from mastering something to mastering another thing, that's really the path to do it.

So even if you don't know what it is, Choose something at random and just decide you're going to become world class about it and that will set you off. I want to finish with two final things. One was another quote from the book where you said the stronger your beliefs, the stronger your reasons to question them regularly.

Srinivas Rao: Don't simply believe everything you think you believe. You're the co founder of a media outlet and we're in a media landscape that is notorious for The spread of misinformation. And I think in a lot of ways, one of the things that I found to be really dangerous, but also fascinating about the internet is that it's become this breeding ground for confirmation bias.

That's true. So how do you get people who are stubborn about their own beliefs to develop this habit? And why is that so important? I think this issue of who, how do we trust things? And we, part of the thing about Chat GPT is that it will make up stuff. It's creative. It's imaginative. How do we learn what to believe what it says or does and how much how much truthfulness is it? And that kind of bleeds over to just generally, how do we believe anything that we read?

Kevin Kelly: I think this is the big frontier that we're going to address. And I think it's It's technological. I think it's I think we need new tools that we don't have. I think there there's a, I think we need some very deep infrastructural things to work. I, in my own experience, I wrote an article in 1984, a cover story for Holworth, where I was publisher and editor.

That was called the end of evidence, the end of photography as the evidence of anything. This was before Photoshop, but we were, I was, I found out about about a machine that was basically Photoshopping before Photoshop. And so it was like, Oh my gosh, we're never going to be able to believe photographs anymore.

And that was in 84. So what can we believe? It turns out that the only way you can tell from a photograph, whether to believe or not, or a piece of text. Or some sound is not by looking at the text or the photograph or the sound. It's by looking at the source. So we are going to come to something where we have to embed in a kind of maybe cryptological way, the source of the provenance of things, because that's really the only way that we can rapidly tell whether to trust something or not is where did it come from, who made it?

Are they trustworthy? And then we have to have ways to assign. Trust to those kinds of institutions or sources. So what I'm suggesting is, yes, there's a lot of kind of techno literacy needed, a lot of kind of good internet etiquette or critical thinking skills for individuals, but that's not enough.

I think we're also going to need a infrastructural development and new tools to help us get to the point where we can know what to trust. in this age of disinformation. I want to finish with my final question. I know you got to get going here. Yeah. What is it that you think makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Which is really important because I think what you want to do in life is aim towards being a kind of person that's very hard for AI to predict, right? That's, we don't want to be predictable, cause it's auto complete. These things are just auto complete. And if you can be, if you can be auto completed by a bot.

Then you're not distinctive enough to be the only. What can you do? I think one of the things I would say is your views on one, this is a piece of advice from the book, your views on one issue should not be able to not be predicted from your other views. If, it is, if your views on one thing can be predicted from your views and others, that means that you're basically, you're in a group of an ideology of some sort or other.

I would say try to have your own personal earned views on things, which means it's a lot more work but constantly question what you believe because here's the other thing, it's another piece of advice, it's a certainty that many of the things that I believe today. will be cringeworthy and embarrassing in the future.

And my goal is to find out where am I wrong. So I, so it's like, where, what do I believe that is wrong? And I spent a lot of time on that. And that would be a way to do is to assume you're wrong. At least 25% of your beliefs. I'm.

Srinivas Rao: What does it say there? Yeah, let's

Kevin Kelly: see here. And there'll be links there.

If you search for Amazon for excellent advice for living, it's all now a pre order and it's a little tiny pocket book that's ideally made to give to others as a reminder for some of these bits of advice, much of which is ancient. But I put it into my own words. Shreya, thank you for hosting me, inviting me to.

Chat with you. I really appreciate the opportunity. And appreciate the

Srinivas Rao: time. Yeah, absolutely. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that. Today's episode is brought to you by King's College London, an institution with nearly 200 years of impact, renowned for its world leading research and commitment to addressing the real issues facing humanity today.

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