Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: What do you think explains the best -- I guess I'll just call it content media. What do you think unites the very best things that you've created and that you've appreciated that others have created?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: One thing I learned about magazines was that the best magazines at the best times, because magazines can outlive individuals like The New Yorker, say, is that they work best when they are an expression of the personality of the editor. The more idiosyncratic creations are -- to me, that's one of the commonalities. If you unleash the creators to really give them that room to create unencumbered or unconstrained by the lawyers, by the bureaucracy, by committees, by the thought police, whatever it is, the more that there can actually be an expression of idiosyncratic -- to me, the stronger it is. We have that with novels because it's the sole person usually -- if they have any kind of clout, they can demand certain things. It's much harder to do with other media like a movie because there's just so many people involved. And that's one of the reasons why I think AI is going to be hugely transformative because we'll be able to have a 90-minute movie made by a single person, auto-generating all these other characters and stuff at their command, their direction, the director. That will be true for games, true now in newsletters. The newsletters I follow are by people with very strong personalities. And we own books that you like, there's somebody with a very strong point of view that we don't see that as much in the screen that's now the center of our lives. And I think we missed that, and I think AI will help us regain that by actually enabling individuals or very, very small partner teams to create works in this medium with the screen.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: When you were running WIRED, and WIRED obviously was like the expression of your taste and personality, what practices or what did you do to protect that, that seems incredibly desirable in any publication that it's like the taste of the person magnified or something?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: Yes. We projected about owning more than 50% of which we lost to a very terrible, terrible story. We lost control, and that's why we had to sell, and that's when we all left, okay? We left, not because it wasn't fun anymore but because we lost control of it. We weren't having to report to anybody. We were just trying to make the magazine that we wanted to read. And it was totally fun because we could say anything. That was one of the ways I would say is you have to retain control, the ownership of it. And this goes back to what I was talking about articulating, for me, there was something that we were very slow to see it wire, but I did learn that. There's a bit of advice in my book about what we learned from the advertising people, which is to get your message across, you have to simplify, simplify, simplify and then exaggerate. There was a sense of like us coming to understand what it was that we're doing in our role and being able to, again, articulate that to the people. So this idea of the optimistic view was not something that was so evident at the very beginning, but it became evident that, that was our role, that, that was what we were doing in part, that, that was sort of what we were about. And that helped tremendously in terms of deciding whether this is a wire story or not. There's tons and tons of direction to go. And so being able to brand it in that sense was us being partly enabled by articulating it ourselves and being able to do that.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:00:00] S0: Do you think then -- like it's so interesting thing across our conversation how maybe the meta piece of advice is don't be the best, be the only. It seems like in business, in creating, in family, in career, in spirituality, this is the advice to end all advice. Do you think that's right?
· Kevin Kelly
[00:00:00] S1: I think that's right. Again, that came from my time at WIRED. We have story meetings every month, and we were trying to make assignments to story ideas that we had. There were three editors. And I'd have these ideas like this is a really great story. We got to find a really great author, writer for this. This is a really great story. And then nobody else in the room thought it was a good idea. I was like, I don't know, or no or that's no, skip that. And so I would kill that idea and go onto the next idea. They got more ideas, okay? So we do more ideas. But then maybe a year later, that was a really good idea. I really think we should do this. It's still valid. This is really important. I think this would be a great piece. In this case, it was like, no, I don't get it. What's the point? If you came back a third time, I have me trying to kill it. If you came back a third time, I would say, let me try this one more time. And if it got killed the third time, then I would say, oh, I get it now. This is a piece that I have to do. I have to write this one. Because I can't give it away. I think it's really important. I'm the only one who kind of appreciates it. And so those are always my best pieces. It was like, oh, and then when I'm writing it, it's like, there's no competition, but I've been trying to give it away for years. There's no competition. So I can just do this, and it's easy because it's me. And so there was a sense of like, okay, I'm the only. And so when I go on from that, what I learned was to always ask myself, yes, this would be fun to do. Yes, I'm really good at this. Yes, I could get paid to do it, but is there anybody else who could do it? And that's true in business as well. Because if there's someone else doing it, then I don't want to do it. I want to go on immediately to the thing that no one else is doing. The only is in the best, it's highly competitive, the only one, #1 and you can easily be displaced and become #2 instantly. And so you want to be in this direction where you are working, doing things that you find easy, that other people find hard, that only you appreciate. And so that's true for companies, too. You really want to be doing something, not trying to become another OS, another social media app, come on. Those are occupied. Those are occupied by players with network effects. You're not going to work there.