Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: I do. There's a great book called Humankind that changed my mind that brought the evidence showing that our received wisdom, the thing we're taught in school, so to speak, that humans are naturally selfish and that when -- all things being equal, particularly if it gets tough, people will retreat to being completely selfish and self-interested and mean. And I think the evidence is the opposite, in my own experience is opposite, that people generally are kind, you can generally trust strangers, that all things being equal, people want to help each other. And that bias runs through my book, which is that the universe is generally abundant, that's the bias of the universe, that there's this other weird paradox at the foundation of the universe of the human condition anyway, which is that the more you give, the more you get, that the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous. The more you give, the more you get, if that's true for everybody, then where does it come from, right? I mean it's like if you give away and you're getting more and everybody does that, the arithmetic doesn't add up. And that's the paradox. So the paradox is that the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous, and so much flows from that, that by giving away, you're increasing your own happiness. And that's the other little bit of advice, giving away 10% of what you take in may seem like you've just reduced your purchasing power by 10%. But every person who does this will tell you that the happiness and the satisfaction and your life's well-being will increase by tenfold. That 10%, you don't even notice. So yes, so I think people naturally want to be kind given all things. And what we want to do is to make that as easy as possible.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: I have a background in philosophy, and so I can't help myself but focus on your advice that's very big and grandiose and about life and work. But the book is also full of very tiny bits of advice and very tactical bits of advice. Are there any few that stand out to you as like your favorites that make you chuckle or make you happy? [00:00:00] S1: There are some very, very practical ones that I was very happy to include because again, I was writing this for my kids originally, which is that if you lose track of something in your household or your workshop or your garage and you finally find it, don't put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first look for it. I repeat that to myself all the time when I'm putting things back, okay, put it back where I first look for it. That's a piece of advice. And another one was I picked up from an editor 30 years ago at Whole Earth. She told me this, and it's been true, which is that if you get invited to do something 6 months from now, ask yourself if you would do it if it was tomorrow morning. And very few events will pass that muster. And so I use that to say no. I'm just imagining, okay, would I get up tomorrow morning to fly whatever it is or to go into that or meet whatever it is? And if it isn't a resounding yes, then it's a no. [00:00:00] S0: I love your rule of seven in research, too, that if you just keep pushing for seven levels, you will ultimately hit bedrock, like it's hard to go deeper than seven levels.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S0: I love your rule of seven in research, too, that if you just keep pushing for seven levels, you will ultimately hit bedrock, like it's hard to go deeper than seven levels. [00:00:00] S1: Part of the trick is you're trying to research something, and they don't know. And so you say, well, who might know or can you tell me who might know. You kind of use the last round to help you develop the next round. Who do you think might know? Where do you think it might go? So you can kind of cascade down to seven levels, but if you're willing to do that to seven levels, you would generally get a reliable answer. [00:00:00] S0: Did collecting all of this advice change your mind or change you in any material ways? [00:00:00] S1: I don't know about other people, but I find that I actually don't know why I do things, and I don't know exactly how I would describe what I'm doing or whatever. And that this process required me to articulate things, and it brought more understanding of what my path is and where I'm going. And so it didn't really change it as much as it illuminated it, and that illumination is valuable. And so I have a better idea about what it is I'm doing than before I started.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S1: I don't know about other people, but I find that I actually don't know why I do things, and I don't know exactly how I would describe what I'm doing or whatever. And that this process required me to articulate things, and it brought more understanding of what my path is and where I'm going. And so it didn't really change it as much as it illuminated it, and that illumination is valuable. And so I have a better idea about what it is I'm doing than before I started. [00:00:00] S0: I'd like to spend a minute or two just having the benefit of having you on the call to ask about your conception of technology. Before reading this book, like I said, I've been preparing this for a long time because I read all your other books about technology. Your notion of The Technium has been very influential on me and how I think about how I spend my time and how I invest and everything else. How do you think about the history of technology and the stock of -- you call it The Technium, the stock of technology that exists in the world and why that's such a natural extension of human beings?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: In brief, the main insight about The Technium, which is my term for the systems of all the technologies in the world, is the understanding that they don't stand alone, that they're a web that you can't make a hammer without a saw. Saw cuts the handle, and the hammer is needed to make the saw. And so they're all codependent. And we use computers to make everything, and we need plumbing and the farmers to make the computers. And so there is this web, this ecosystem of technologies all codependent on each other and that the bigger this ecosystem gets, the more it adapts the same things that any system of that complexity has, which it has its own internal biases and tendencies. All systems, whether it's living systems or even mechanical systems that are complex enough, will exhibit recurring tendencies independent of all the parts. So this Technium that we have, this ecosystem, all the technologies in the world, has certain behaviors that are independent of us humans, the creators, and independent of the parts. And so the question is, what are those general tendencies? What are those ones in the sense of -- the tendency of a plant is to lean towards the light and Wonderful idea. Do you think that if you were to draw the time line of technology, it seems like we harnessed information with the printing press, we've sort of harnessed energy with oil and fossil fuels and that maybe we're about to harness intelligence with AI. Is that a clean progression? And is it fair to put AI on the same scale as those other two? Yes. I mean I think ultimately, it will be even bigger than those other two. Intelligence is not the only thing necessary to get things done. But in fact, evolution itself is a kind of learning. If you abstract it out, the topography of things that learn are similar to the things that evolve. Evolution is learning. Our brains are doing similar kinds of -- mathematically, abstractly, they are very, very related. Learning and evolution are very, very analogous. So a mind is an accelerated version of evolution. It's learning much, much faster than evolution can itself. So we're accelerating evolution with the mind. And so that's very, very powerful when you can accelerate evolution.
· Kevin Kelly, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
So all the things we see, all the good things that we've seen evolve on this planet, we're accelerating those processes now and making things that are dry in silicon or other materials. And so that's very exciting. That's a huge, huge powerful force that we're unleashing for the first time on the planet, okay? And so I think it's way beyond fire and even our own invention of language in the long term. We're just at the very, very beginning. We haven't really done very much comparatively to what we'll be doing, but it is momentous moment where for the first time, we're figuring out what it is. And as humans, this is big because we evolved with other sentient beings. There are a lot of other -- Neanderthals and beyond when we were evolving. But at least for the past 50,000 years, we've been the sole sentient being on the planet. [00:00:00] S0: The hegemons.