Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Well, a lot of 0s, and the more 0s you have, the more weight it is. First of all, it's distorting for your kids and your families. It's just an incredible burden for children. And secondly, the weight of it just becomes something you always have to attend to. If you're a responsible person, you're going to take it seriously. And it just becomes something that you can never escape because you can't spend it. It's almost impossible to give away by yourself. So you're suddenly running an organization, and it's a whole another job, and they may not be the most authentic thing for you, right? I mean a lot of the billionaires I know, if you get them to be honest, it's a lot of luck. It's a good luck or bad luck. I like to ask young people, my kids' friends do the exercise of, okay, I have my magic wand. I'm going to give you $1 billion, which is what your wish is, right? And so what are you going to do with $1 billion? Tell me. Just make the list. And so they -- well, you know, maybe I'll travel around the world or I'm going to buy a boat or something or a house or whatever. I say, you haven't spent any of that money yet. Tomorrow it's all going to come back. You have $1 billion. You cannot spend it. So now what you're going to do with your $1 billion? And it turns out that their dream, whatever it is, can be accomplished for so little compared to $1 billion that in most cases, money is simply not the gating factor for what most people want to do. There was a great scene in -- I think it was the Wall Street where this guy joined the Wall Street and his whole goal, just a couple more years, going to make my fortune, and then I'm going to quit so I can buy the motorcycle and ride across China. And all of those travelers just laugh hilariously because you could work at McDonald's for six months, save enough money to buy a motorcycle to ride across China. You don't need to go on to Wall Street to make your billions to do that. And so I find that the focus, you certainly need to have enough to do the things that you want. But for most people's dreams, it's a misplaced hurdle, imagine didn't have enough money because in fact, what we know about innovation is that all the real breakthroughs come but in the places where there's not enough money, start-ups. The reason why a start-up can succeed is because the big company wants to buy their solutions.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
They've got money. They're going to buy their solutions. But the solutions can't be bought. They have to be invented. They have too much money to do the hard work of being ingenious and frugal and thrifty and all the other -- stubborn and persevering that a start-up can do. So the start-up doesn't have any money. So they're forced to invent the things in a way that if you had money, you'd never get to. And that's why all the breakthroughs happen at the edges, and they happen in start-ups. That lacking of the resources is actually the feature, is actually the benefit. And that's why when young people are starting off who have very little resources, they don't understand they actually have an advantage over the established companies. That lack of resource is an advantage to them. [00:00:00] S0: I'd love to talk about the relationship between creation and imagination. I wonder if in your experience, people are sort of naturally endowed with like a level of imagination or if it's way more changeable, that I can do things to expand my imagination because it seems so much like the people that I admire the most are creative and creators. Like they're manifesting something, maybe that's their form of self-expression, like we talked about earlier. But that requires tremendous imagination. Where do you think that comes from? Can you cultivate it?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. I have slowly concluded, and maybe this is a changing of the mind, that almost any virtue or quality or talent can be improved. They're certainly unequally distributed. And everybody has a higher or lower degree of the natural amount to begin with. But this is the beauty of it. No matter where we start, we can always get better at it. And I think imagination is a skill that can be taught and can be learned and can be improved even though there are certainly people who have or are more naturally inclined in that direction than others. And the same with optimism. I think optimism is something that you can learn and become more optimistic, and it's like you have it. And that's true for playing music and everything else. And so a lot of the work, almost going back to what I was saying before about imagination, is mostly forgetting what is the expected answer. I know this from doing lots of workshops with corporations and groups of people from all walks of life, and we were trying to get them to like imagine futures. And it was so, so hard to have them let go of what they've seen in Hollywood or what they've seen in the movie or what they have been told is possible. And that ability, what Brian Eno and I call the unthinkables, to inhabit those kind of improbable worlds is a skill that has to be learned. It has to be regained. I mean I think we have it in childhood, but we are rewarded in other ways for paying attention to reality and understanding what it is that everybody accepts, what the consensus is. That's a variable skill, and that kind of overwhelms our ability to imagine crazy weird stuff because we're not usually rewarded for that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: So imagination, cultivating it is like an exercise in subtraction, not addition. Like it's not a blank canvas. That's what I would have said. It's like a painter at a blank canvas. No, it's like a sculpture. It's like removing stuff. [00:00:00] S1: It's mostly about removing stuff these days. I would say that's the first step. You remove it and you want to fill it up in a different direction. And by the way, the little sidestep, I think this is one of the ways that AI will help us, and that is because AI is capable of these orthogonal weird directions that is very difficult for humans to let go of. They're much easier. So working with them to help us inhabit a possibility space in a different way than -- we find it hard on our own because of our education and biases and inabilities. So that's where I see is one of the roles of some of the AIs, is assisting us in our imagination. [00:00:00] S0: I'd love a case study on imagination. When you think of the most imaginative person you've ever encountered, who comes most immediately to mind? What was their story?
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: I'd love a case study on imagination. When you think of the most imaginative person you've ever encountered, who comes most immediately to mind? What was their story? [00:00:00] S1: I know some writers, some fiction writers, who naturally can just go off and imagine crazy things, and that's partly their ability to fill in details. And then I have other people that I know who are, what I would call lateral thinkers, and they have an imagination very much in this direction of overcoming the orthodoxy, overcoming the conventional wisdom. And they'll take something ordinary and just come at it in a slightly skewed direction like laterally on a very, very regular basis. And it's like, oh, I would have never thought of that. They are -- I believe, have trained themselves to do that. Like Marvin Minsky, who was a very imaginative guy, used to pretend he was a Martian or a robot. He would just approach everything as if he's from another planet, and he would be examining music, okay, well, what is it about music? Why are you people so affected by music? It doesn't make sense to me. And he would kind of investigate things, looking at them from this lateral position just as a habit. So that's a kind of imagination. [00:00:00] S0: I used to love the Nintendo idea. I think they had something like lateral thinking with withered technologies or something like new use cases for very old things or something like that.
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. So there are various forms of imagination. But the point is that the possibility space for ideas is very, very, very large. It's probably the largest possibility space that we can imagine. And we tend, as humans and living in our lives, to kind of retread the same ones. And so anything you can do to get out of those ruts is very powerful but not always useful. I mean if you can go too far, all we all know from start-ups and innovation and invention is that you want to be one or two steps away. If you're 5 or 10 steps away, it doesn't help anybody. There's nobody there. If you have some crazy idea but can't put it into words or pictures or communicate it, then it's lost. If it's an idea so far ahead of its time, it could be right. But if you can't get to it in a couple of steps from today, then it's not really useful. So like other things, there's an art to the imagination to being actually valuable to people, is constrained by how many steps away you are, it will take someone to get there. So if only you can arrive at that place, it's not worth anything. You have to get other people there. Either to see it and inhabit it with you, like in the story, to actually be able to replicate it in terms of making something, whatever it is, there's an art to this imagination because you can't be too far away because then it's not useful to anybody. You have to have this adjacent possible that people talk about. You want it to be adjacent but not so distant that, well, it may be true someday or we could appreciate it 100 years from now. It would be a lot more useful if you could do something that was more adjacent.