Tim Ferriss - Kevin Kelly

1) Kevin Kelly discusses Long Bets, a service set upto encourage long-term thinking. Kelly made a bet that the global population of the world by 2060 would be the same as it was in 2003. He believes that the world is coming up to a peak of human population that we would then plummet on the other side due to falling birth rates which is common all around the planet including the US. The implications of declining birth rates are not entirely clear but we have no experience in having living standards with a smaller population.

2) Kevin discusses how little we know about the global level of understanding in many aspects such as population, fresh water, andelectricity generation. Kelly stresses that as a species, we are moving into an era where we are becoming a global community with a global economy and view,connecting all the internets together, but we are not there yet. He then goes on to talk about the artificial intelligence (AI) stuff, and how even though it is considered that these mechanical systems are imitating biology, they have the same dynamics.

3) Kevin discusses the 11-year process of creating his graphic novel, Silver Cord. Collaborating with friends from a church community, including those who worked for Pixar, Kelly and his team generated the story in screenplay form. The premise revolved around interdimensional beings, called angels, who look down on humans and weep at how we waste the embodiment they crave. They resort to cheating by getting embodied in robots, leading to rogue beings. The team's hope was tocreate a brilliant form for communicating science fiction, which could simultaneously appeal to the movie industry.

4) Kevin discusses the genesis of his work and how he aims to influence people through physical interaction, appreciating life more, and embodying real life experiences. The section then moves onto Kelly's work, 1,000 True Fans, which has gained immense popularity after being included in Tim Ferriss' book. Kelly explains how the piece offers an alternative option for success that wasn't given significance earlier, and how his work now has evidence of indigenous organic growth.

5) Kevin and Tim talk about the concept of a thousand true fans and how it can be a great place to start for any aspiring entrepreneur. They also discuss the importance of accumulating customers one by one and focusing on customer satisfaction. They touch upon the failed campaign to discover all the species of life on Earth, an idea that Kevin Kelly had randomly come up with but that Stewart Brand decided to pursue. The two also discuss Stewart Brand's invention, The Whole Earth Catalog, which was a guide to the world before there was an Internet.

6) Kevin discusses his work with Stewart Brand and the failed endeavor to create a comprehensive catalog of all species on Earth. Kelly explains that they were too early in terms of technology being available to assist in the project, as apps like Merlin and Seek that can identify bird songs or plants were not yet available. Instead, they only managed to create a catalog of existing species, which shocked them as they realized that there was no list of all the existing species on the planet in 2008. Despite the failure, Kelly praises Brand's legacy as the "Forrest Gump of 25 seminal moments in history" and discusses his military background and fitness routine, as well as his interest in resurrecting extinct species like woolly mammoths.

7) Kevin explains how he, Stewart, and Ryan Phelan initially wanted to bring back the woolly mammoth through their program All Species and their current program, Revive and Restore, which involved winterizing existing Asian elephants through breeding to reverse engineer mammoths. Kelly then discusses optimism and its importance in making good, complicated things work. He emphasizes that believing in the improbable and imagining good scenarios is critical, as most things that work are improbable. Kelly gives an analogy of a car, where brakes are essential, but it is essential to focus on making the engine stronger to move forward.

8) Kevin discusses the momentum of progress and the possibility that it may be linked to population growth and density, leading to the question of whether we may face regression or a movement towards degrowth. Kelly explains that there is a difference between growth that is focused on adding more and more stuff and a growth that is aimed at increasing complexity and knowledge. He introduces the concept of exotropy, which is the idea of increasing order that comes at the cost of increasing entropy, and states that we can shift our growth towards focusing on the quality of things instead of just selling more. For example, better quality refrigerators that use less energy are often not accounted for in GDP measurements.

9) Kevin discusses the merits of new metrics and how changing our understanding of progress and development can create new opportunities and options for people. He shares a personal story of traveling to a remote town in Afghanistan in 1975 and experiencing a different century, where choices and options were limited. He contrasts that with the modern era, where technology has created limitless options and opportunities, including the rise of AI and its potential impact on employment.

10) Kevin and Tim discuss the impact of generative AI on traditional jobs and industries. While Kelly believes that AI will replace tasks but not jobs, Ferriss argues that some rank and file jobs in industries such as logo design may be affected. However, Kelly points out that while AI will produce a lot of art and illustrations, most of it will be used for areas where there is currently no content. Additionally, he believes that artists will not lose their jobs but instead will become directors or conductors managing the AI interns that produce the art.

11) Kevin discusses his predictions for the development of artificial intelligence (AI). He highlights that AI will consist of multiple varieties, each engineered for specific tasks, with some unseen behind the scenes, serving as infrastructure plumbing. Kelly also mentioned that consciousness will be a liability, meaning there will be advertising AIs as conscious-free, so there are certain tasks where consciousness as part of AI will not be applied. He emphasized that some regulatory top-down control of the AI industry will be necessary, as observed through the success story of Wikipedia.

12) Kevin discusses how the AI technology that's available today has been around for at least a decade, but now we have a language interface, a conversational interface with them, making the power of it completely in our faces. He compares this to the early stages of the internet and the web, where it took an interface change to make it accessible and mainstream. Kelly explains that he is using AI to generate and post an AI picture every day and has been doing so for almost a year. He spends almost as much time on the AI-generated images as he does when creating them himself, interacting and having a conversation with the AI over time.

13) Kevin discusses how he's been using chatbots like ChatGPT, Bing and Google to help him write drafts of books and scripts. He explains that these chat models generate the "wisdom of the crowd" kind of knowledge and are helpful in creating broadly correct and very average content. By asking the chat models to summarize what's known about a particular topic, he can get a good starting point for writing or expanding his ideas. He also explains how chat models can help find internal inconsistencies or weak plot points in scripts and lists talking points for books as well.

14) Kevin discusses the potential of AI language models like ChatGPT to generate headlines or prompts for content creation. He gives examples of how people have used this tool to come up with punchlines, blog headlines, and questions for podcast guests. They also talk about the potential for personalized models that can be trained on an individual's transcripts and productions to make content creation more efficient. They also discuss the different scenarios for AI development and how it could become more pervasive and tailored but may not necessarily make huge deductive reasoning or learning leaps.

15) Kevin explains that he began writing down bits of advice that could help him change his behavior, and he liked to reduce it to a little sentence that he could repeat to himself. He then started to write these down regularly, and realized that a lot of it was advice that he wished he had known earlier. Kevin began this idea of extracting and encapsulating them into handles of something that he could give to his kids, and eventually released it to the public, writing a book called "Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier". The book contains his doodles and is tweetable, and the advice is practical, actionable, and unconventional.

16) Tim and Kevin offer various pieces of advice, including spending time with family without screens, the importance of sleep, and not trying to be the best, but rather being the only. Kelly suggests living a life that is hard to explain to others, where you are the only one doing what you do, and how it takes a tremendous amount of self-knowledge and awareness to reach that level, but it's worth it in the end when you don't need a resume and there is no competition. Ferriss also suggests asking friends what comes easy to you that is hard for others, as it may help identify one's unique skills and strengths.

17) Kevin and Tim discuss the benefits and challenges of traveling with children. Kelly suggests that parents should let their children choose the vacation destination based on their interests and passions. He also recommends trying new things and even turning a vacation into an adventure by adding an element of disaster. Kelly and Ferriss also discuss the advantages of playing tourist in one's hometown or region, including gaining new insights and experiences. Finally, they agree on the value of following passion over destination and cultivating a sense of investment in the travel experience.

18) Kevin emphasizes the importance of taking time off and goofing around, especially for young people who often go straight from college to work without taking a break. He suggests that sabbaticals, with a different rhythm and structure from one's usual routine, can be very effective, with a minimum duration of six weeks. Sabbaticals could involve doing something completely different like reading books or shadowing someone, and for Tim Ferriss, who is used to making things, it could be interesting for him to just watch someone else work in a different field, like animation. Kevin Kelly then talks about his love for YouTube, where he watches people work and create things, and suggests that it is a great resource for learning and inspiration.

19) Kevin talks about the power of watching people make things on YouTube, as it is an accelerant on the learning process, where people can discover and improve on techniques and ideas much faster than waiting for papers to be published. However, he notes the problem that YouTube's vast world is invisible, like being blindfolded in libraries of Alexandria. He also shares his advice on prioritizing maximizing the time spent on doing things one loves instead of minimizing the time taken to increase productivity. In addition, Kelly explains his popularity in China, which was an accident as his book, Out of Control, was translated and crowdsourced by some fans at the beginning of the 2000s and was influential to Jack Ma and Pony Ma.