Kevin Kelly is a writer, futurist, and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His books include The Inevitable, about future trends, and What Technology Wants, a theory of technology. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.
Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/wXML1wXlVmI
Kevin Kelly is a writer, futurist, and Senior Maverick at Wired magazine. He co-founded Wired in 1993, and served as its Executive Editor for its first seven years. His books include The Inevitable, about future trends, and What Technology Wants, a theory of technology. He is founder of the popular Cool Tools website, which has been reviewing tools daily for 20 years. From 1984-1990 Kelly was publisher and editor of the Whole Earth Review, a subscriber-supported journal of unorthodox conceptual news. He co-founded the ongoing Hackers’ Conference, and was involved with the launch of the WELL, a pioneering online service started in 1985.
Check out the video here: https://youtu.be/wXML1wXlVmI
Amy: [00:00:20.6] Kevin Kelly is an author, futurist, and co-founder of Wired Magazine. He's always early in spotting important tech trends, and he writes about them with insight and eloquence.
I got to know Kevin when he invited me to write about early MMOs for Wired.
That Article Killers Have More Fun. Became a wired cover story and was featured in my first book, community Building on the Web.
Kevin continues to inspire me and millions of others. I especially love his latest book. Excellent Advice for a Living, which came into being with a simple question, what do I wish I'd known when I was a kid.
Kevin: I realized as I was getting [00:01:00] older, that there really was advice that I wished I had earlier, because I use these advices, they’re not just theoretical. They're actually little refrains that I tell myself to remind myself, and so I decided that, well, maybe my kids could use this too.
Amy: Join us as we take a deep dive into the wisdom of a lifetime well lived, shared by someone. Tim Ferris dubbed the most interesting man in the world, Kevin Kelly.
Amy: Thank you so much, Kevin for joining us today.
Kevin: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me. It's real pleasure to chat with you again, and I'm really eager to, share stuff with your audience.
Amy: Me too. I was lucky enough to get an advanced copy of your book. I'm obsessed with it. So I'm so excited to talk about it. We're gonna start with a little bit of history so people get some context, those who aren't as familiar with you. And then we're gonna plunge into the book. [00:02:00] I'm gonna pull out some of my very favorite quotes.
It's really hard to choose. So I was remembering back when we met you and I, and it was actually because of the Game Developer's conference where you came and gave a visionary speech that was controversially accepted.
Do you remember that?
Kevin: I do. It was think it was the only, I think it's been the only time I've ever given a talk where I was booed.
Amy: I was shocked cuz I was completely into your point of view. And so we connected and then we were coast side neighbors.
Kevin: That's right.
Amy: You got me to write an article, probably the first article in Wired about online MMO gaming.
Kevin: Yeah. Yeah.
Amy: And Killers Have More Fun.
Kevin: Yeah. I still think gaming does not get the respect that it (de) deserves.
Amy: In what way?
Kevin: I think it's, well, first of all, I think it's more fundamental to our own being. This idea of playing in games and, I like the title of, Michael Shas book, serious [00:03:00] Play. I think that, it, there, there's a serious side to, playing in games, and that we should, do more with it, even in the, our work environment, the.
Commercial environment, the school environment. I think it's, under underappreciated in terms of what it can do. And so, I, I'm a big supporter of you and others who are trying to innovate in that area.
Amy: Thank you. Yes, it's it's a growing wave. You, 15 years ago when we connected it's, or more. At this point I was, I felt often like I was swimming upstream and now there are so many people in so many ways fully embracing integrating games. Not just games, but the development process that games go.
Right. That leads to them into their work. So it's a very exciting time. So, you've written [00:04:00] a number of books that were both prescient and influential. So when you write, a lot of people, myself included, pay attention. One of the things you also wrote that has been getting quite a bit of new interest lately is your Thousand True Fans and that was 15 years ago that you wrote it. So I was really curious, what was the spark that led you to write that article? And then now here we are, 15 years later, how, what's happened? How have things changed? How's your point of view changed?
Kevin: Yeah. It, it, it's funny because I, for a while I was talking A Thousand True Fans, to people in the kind of industry I was saying, I did the kind of arithmetic and If you do the arithmetic, this, this should be possible.
And and I kind of left it at that.
I never really developed it into, something that was, more thought out than that. And [00:05:00] I did that and I was talking for several years and years. Saying, you know, I thinkthat if you did this and this, you could make this work. And, again, this was before there was Kickstarter, before there was crowdfunding platforms.
And so it was a very abstract idea. And I was at a party, I think I remember. And I was talking to someone in, I think like Hollywood or media business, and I kind of. In retelling this for the first time, stated it as a premise and I realized, oh my gosh, I need to write this down because it's, there's something there that I think would work.
So, so it was always kind of a theory, a theoretical. Like proposition of like, in theory this could work though. I didn't know anybody who was doing that. I'm saying, yeah, I think this could work. And so, I wrote it up as a blog post and I got a lot of pushback, including from our mutual friend Jaron Lanier
Amy: I just saw him the other day. He says, hi.
Yes. [00:06:00] And he, so what did Jaron say?
Kevin: Well, Jaron is, was considered himself a musician, even a professional musician, and made, made some things that were for sale and made some money. And he saying,it, that, it, there was no evidence that of this ever happening. And, and that he says, all the success of the independents were people who had left labels.
They had kind of gotten their reputation, their audience from the label system or the, the studio system or the publisher and then left.
And that this idea of kind of a bottoms up organic thing was just not happening. And so, based on that, I actually said, well, that's a… So I started to do research to see if I could find any examples.
And that was, that was my second attempt. And I was beginning to find one or two people who seemed to have had an organic bottom up. Example and of course now I [00:07:00] encounter people almost every day who tell me that this theory, this framework enabled them or inspired them to make thousand true fans. And there are definitely plenty of examples of people who are organically developing from the customers directly a livelihood.
And so, so I would say the origins. was a theoretical construct that I was very tenuous about, and I put it out as a way of seeing whether it was true or not.
Amy: So you had a hypothesis and then you got some data from the world.
Kevin: Yep.
Amy: So now here we are, 2023. What happened? why did that happen? And Jaron was wrong. I mean, I understand why he was thinking that way for sure, but what happened?
Kevin: I think what happened was technology, technology developed the tools to, like Kickstarter, like all the other crowdfunding, like, [00:08:00] social media that enabled, people to, important, match up.
So, so, so the whole premise of a thousand true fans is that, just to restate for those who don't know, is that if you have direct interaction and contact with your audience and you have them pay you directly, that you, when you disintermediate.
Enter the other layers of labels and producers and publishers and stuff, and get all the money yourself. That you don't need a very big audience at that point to be able to have a livelihood. And that's all premised on this kind of interacting with your audience directly.
And that's, and not just interacting, but more importantly finding them and them finding you this matching of them, which, Part of the second half of that puzzle. Not just that you can have them give you money because that's we did that with the kind of crowdsourcing platforms, but actually being able to find you and you find them, and that's what's the kind of social media platforms were able to do is this. they facilitated and [00:09:00] made it little easier than it was before for someone who was really into something obscure. To find other people who are also into that same obscure thing and and connect.
And that enabled this kind of, idea that your interest may only be one in a million, may only, maybe only one in a million people that have the same interests that you do. But if you have a global audience and you're able to connect to each other, then there is probably a thousand people on the planet with that one in million interest given the billions of people on the planet.
And so, those thousands of people can find each other with social media and then fund each other with pla crowdsourcing. And there are probably other,other tools that also facilitate this connecting with the, the niche groups. And so that's what happened. I think it was, I think it probably could not have happened, 20 years ago.
The, the tools were just not there.
Amy: And the business and revenue models,
Kevin: Yeah. The
Amy: right? Like YouTube [00:10:00] is so huge for creators.
Kevin: Right.
Amy: And then there's Patreon and crowdfunding, et cetera. It's so interesting, Kevin, that you focus in on matchmaking because like with many things, that's where gaming is pushing that frontier. In gaming, we deal with match online gaming in particular.
Matchmaking systems are just such a huge part of, well, how did the right players find each other to play together and. . It's an ongoing science, right? It keeps developing, but the creator economy really needs some form of matchmaking as you point out, and that's also probably an area for innovation.
Kevin: Yeah, Absolutely. (Go) Going forward and, there are all kinds of reasons why it's slow and part of it a lot to do with privacy issues, which are very complicated and how much we want to disclose. But that's, I always say that there's kind of a little, slider.
There's a slider between being totally opaque and totally private on the other end. It's totally transparent, but totally [00:11:00] personalized. And so there's personalization comes with transparency and so we kind of always have these trade offs that we have to do between. Wanting to be completely personalized and matchmaking is personalized. And yet at the same time, that transparency, we may not want to be as transparent to be as personalized.
And that's the natural trade off that we have to kind of work out for each person really, basically in each, situation.
The, going forward, I think there's, I think we've only begun this little. Movement in towards the thousand two fans, creator, economy. And I think we're still in the early days of what's really possible.
And having kind of mass niche audiences, we see from YouTube that is possible to actually break out of that niche and to become big time. And big time in ways that equivalent to blockbuster hits and stars in the past.
And, so, so, so that's the other advantage is that you can have a [00:12:00] thousand tree variants, but you don't need to limit yourself to that. You actually can grow and become bigger still using these same, platforms. And that's one of the things that we are still kind of exploring is that whole long trajectory of actually moving out of that. Level into the millions and the billion level and what happens there and how does that impact the other people who are still in niches? So, so I think we're still in the early days of this creator economy.
Amy: We are, and a lot of what we see is when people get really big like that, they recreate the monolithic structures that they're trying to rebel against. So, same as it ever was.
Kevin: And they have to because one of the, one of the things I want to always remember, remind people when we're talking about the thousand two fans is that this is not, this path is not for everybody because it makes dealing with your fans part of your job and maybe half of your job.And not every creator wants to spend time babysitting pants.
[00:13:00] And they may not even be suited for that. They may just want to paint all day, or they may just wanna write and they don't wanna have to deal with it. And that's perfectly fine.
Amy: And those people are on Substack
Kevin: Yeah, that's
Amy: right? That's the other thousand true fans for writers.
Kevin: Yeah, that's perfectly fine. And as you get big, you probably are going to start to, to create those intermediate layers just to ensure that you have the time to create and that's also fine as well.
I think what becomes important though, is if you can. So this is not really the right word, own, but you wanna be able to own your audience. You wanna be able to have control of that relationship, and that's what doesn't often doesn't happen as you get big and on these platforms, meaning that if Facebook decides to kick you off, will you still have your audience?
Okay. If a big platform decides to shift, , do you still have your audience? And that's why it comes back to this important thing of you having a direct [00:14:00] relationship with your audience. And that is really the key thing in this. And, particularly as we s. You know, I'm old enough to realize that I can outlive the platforms. It's like these platforms are very ephemeral, really. They seem to be dominating and taking over the world, but they are very fragile and ephemeral, and you have to kind of remember that.
Amy: Email and texting, baby, get those digits right. I mean that really is, this is so fundamental, but it's this piece of advice that I've heard thousands of times. You gotta build your email.
Kevin: Yeah.
Amy: Any platform can pull the rug out from under you, disappear, change its policies.
Kevin: Right, right. This is
Amy: Get outlawed in the US right?
Kevin: Yeah. This is my friend Craig Mods constant refrain is that, yeah, you wanna have your email list. and he's gone so far. He has his own version of Kickstarter. He's called the Craig Starter, and it's an open source version of Kickstarter. And his idea is that, yeah, you wanna be able to kind of not [00:15:00] own, own the audience, but own that channel with your audience. And so, I think that, that's one of the challenges going forward is, how you maintain that control of the relationship and engagement using these very large, platforms.
Kevin:So, lots to be done still.
Amy: Unsolved problems are exciting. So let's talk about your new book. Excellent Advice for a Living. I know that you were inspired by starting to write down advice for your adult children, young adult children.
Kevin: Yeah.
Amy: And so what was the spark that led this to becoming a book coming out shortly?
Kevin: Yeah, I'm, I've never been much of an advice giver in our lives, in our kids' lives. I was much more following I think what our, my parents did, which was they reared and trained us by. Doing rather than saying. I mean, and that was true because I paid much more attention to how my parents behaved than what they said.
And I [00:16:00] think that's probably true for most kids. They're not really listening to you, but they're watching you very carefully, . And, so, so we weren't, and then the advice giving family and I didn't preach very much. and that seemed to have worked. , I realized as I was getting older, that there really was advice that I wished I had earlier, things that I had kind of realized.
and I kind of realized that Manuel, because I use these advices,they're not just theoretical, they're actually little refrains that I tell myself to remind myself, and I wish, like I was reminding myself earlier about this, and so I decided that, well, maybe my kids. Could use this too.
Maybe there are things to be said to them now that they can kind of rehearse in their mind that would be useful and that they don't have to wait to be 70 before they realize them. So I started to, I wrote some down, just off the top of my head for my 60th birthday. and there were kind of just things that there were.
[00:17:00] making a list out of what I knew with nothing else other than I was gonna give him away on my birthday as a kind of an Irish present where you give presents on your birthday. And so, I posted it, I shared it among family and they were enthusiastic. So I decided to post it and they went viral and to, to a degree that I was surprised by.
And. I was encouraged by that to do it again next year cuz I, once I got going, I realized I had more to say and I did a couple more years on my birthday in a row and they also went viral. And I said, okay, there's something here for others as well. And I decided to kind of keep going and put it into a handy book that you could hand to someone graduating student or some young person and
Amy: Great use case.
Kevin: And that's sort of, and that's what we did. So I, itit was, I wanted it to be a small kind of gift book, something small and not intimidating. And the form of the advice is [00:18:00] tweets basically. I didn't realize it at the time, but looking back on it, yeah, they're little tweets. They're just, they're tweetable bits that.
take an entire, each one takes a kind of an entire book and tries to compress it into a single sentence. And that aspect of trying to compress it was something that I really enjoy. That's my kind of writing is telegraphic, is trying to take out a lot of stuff and put it into as few words as possible, and that was the game that I played while writing.
It was like, there's a lot to say on this, but can I reduce it all to one sentence and have it be practical and have it. positive and encouraging. And so, that's the origins of it. it was fun to do. and I also really try to only write down things that I truly, honestly believe. Not that this, that I heard, but actually that I can endorse and say yes.
I think, I really believe this is true. as much as possible that it could be actionable. [00:19:00] That, that it would, if you reminded yourself about it, it would be useful.
Amy: I wanna dig in on this book because it's got just so many great things I've been tweeting and more and more on LinkedIn as well, and on YouTube, sharing little quotes from your books as we've led up to this interview.
one of the things I love about these quotes is there's so much wisdom about human nature, and that's hard to get when you're young. When you're young, you're figuring out human nature, but your, a lot of your quotes about human nature, me, is a, psych graduate and I'm just always so interested in people and how they work.
Here's a couple. I wondered if there was a story behind these. here's one which is really echoing Carl Young. A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others.
Kevin: Yes. Yeah. So [00:20:00] boom.
Amy: Right?
You realize that it's like flipping a switch.
Kevin: Exactly, right. Yeah. I don't think there was not a particular moment or something in my own life that gravitated that this was more just an observation of say my, the things that I would notice in others. And it's like, this sounds familiar. this is sort of my own way of acknowledging that I'm dealing.
the same challenges. And so, being able to kind of reduce that again, this sort of long involved stuff and complicated. I wanted to put it into a little reminder. A little reminder is yeah, if you find, just remind yourself if examine your own. personality when you find someone else irritating and what it is that you find are irritating about them.
Because there may be something there and it doesn't always, but it may be in that little journey of trying to look at yourself at that moment will help you a little bit.
Amy: That, I love this piece of advice cuz it really taps into self [00:21:00] autonomy and all the things that drive self autonomy, which is, such a key feeling like you have responsibility for your own life. So a related, wonderful aphorism is when someone tells you what ticks them off, they're telling you what makes them tick.
Kevin: Yes.
Amy: Whoa.
Kevin: Yeah.
Amy: Related.
Kevin: Yeah. Exactly. Like I am get very annoyed by people who are. Promptness, as I say in the book, is a sign of respect and I feel disrespected when, when people are not prompt. And so I have to kind of look at myself and say, okay, what is that about? Right? Why is that important to.
Amy: Right. Again, extracting a lesson out of an uncomfortable feeling. It's like if it's gonna be uncomfortable, might as well learn from
Kevin: Right, and that's another bit of advice, which is that you can reckon your personal growth by the number of uncomfortable conversations that you're willing to have.
Amy: [00:22:00] Oh, that's such a good one.
Kevin: Yeah.
Amy: And speaking of actionable, that's very actionable.
Kevin: It is.
Amy: Not easy.
Kevin: Never easy. Yeah. You can sit down with somebody that you respect or love and. Have a difficult conversation, and you'll both grow.
Amy: Yep. So you have traveled a lot. You've published some amazing books of photography, vanishing Asia, which you've very generously gifted us. It's on my coffee table. I love that.
Kevin: It is your coffee table.
Amy: I know. Wow. you've got some great travel quotes, and again, you've got some experience backing this up.
One of the ones that really stuck out for me, a major part of travel is to leave stuff behind. The more you leave behind, the further you'll advance. Can you unpack that
Kevin: Yeah. The copy editor was saying, do you mean like travel stuff or other stuff? I said.
Amy: Yes.
Kevin: Yes. They wanted to change it to [00:23:00] clarify. no. think I like the ambiguity. So, in the first, as travel advice is absolutely true that,I believe that your journey will just be improved by leaving half the stuff you intend to take back.
Because part of what you are, where you are going is to leave, your home is to leave what is familiar and to leave what is comforting and to ha and to embrace a little bit of discomfort. that's actually part of the intent. And that intention is to get a little lost, is to have a little discomfort, is to, is to see things in a new way in addition to, relaxing and all the other things we want.
So that's hard for many people. That's a very, very difficult step for many people is to, it's to kind of strip down and and be discomfort and, there's no comfort in being discomfort, which is the paradox. And so, when I travel, I'm kind of at the far [00:24:00] end of. Strip down go light.
Kevin: I'm way off the chart. Not everybody can really enjoy it or deal with that and that's fine, but I would say whoever you are, go a little further than you have gone before on your next trip, just take a little bit less and you'll find it. Rewards your journey tremendously.
Amy: Awesome. So another quote that resonated so strongly for me, and it's a lesson that I learned that I also heard from very wise people early in my career. Let me quote you to make something good, just.
To make something great, just redo it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.
Kevin: Man, I wish I had known that when I was young. The idea of redoing something was just, I, it was to me like a horrible failure. I mean, I just couldn't even consider it. It just seemed wrong. [00:25:00] It seemed like the professionals would never, the professionals would just do this one shot, and it was actually through YouTube and watching YouTube and people who were really good making things that I.
they intend to throw one away. They intend to remake these all the time. They're always making mistakes and they're always recovering. They're redoing them. They're not just sort of accepting it, they're just gonna redo it. It was like, oh my gosh, that's so powerful. And once I started doing that.
Kevin: It really changed, the pleasure of making it.
And it certainly changed the quality of what I was doing. That's the only way that you get to something really good is that you, you have to permit yourself to, to remake him. So for me now, part of the process of making anything is prototyping where, I mean, there's like, there's no intention at all of making the final thing all at one shot.
you're going to creep up to it and prototype it with many different ways and then [00:26:00] gradually, work towards this thing that you're gonna constantly be remaking. And that's even as something simple as a chair or something, or like a, a box. It's like, okay, first I'm, make it a cardboard and make sure it's the right space and shape and that it's useful and I'll make something else intermittent.
I'll use something that's like it to see, to make sure. And so there is this, it’s a journey. and a process, and that is true, whether it's something physical or making a book, and I was gonna, I don't have it right before me. I'm holding up my book, but I made a prototype version. Of this myself on Amazon, a little tiny one.
And when I made the finishing Asia, I made a one prototype book that I just had printed and I took it to a book binder in Oakland and they bound this single copy. And it was, and I learned a lot by doing that, which was that there was originally, it was just one volume and it was just like two huge, so, articles are prototyped and they're made and they're [00:27:00] evolved and they're kind of, they go through this process and that's true for almost anything that we do.
Amy: And you spent so many years as an editor.
Kevin: Yeah.
Amy: And that's the heart of the editing process in so many ways, is driving the rewrite.
Kevin: Exactly. And another piece of, since you brought up editing, is that these, this process is a two-phase process. There is the creative phase and then there's the editing phase. And while you are making you, in some ways, don't want to think about the fact that. You don't want to be editing or critiquing or in some ways trying to hold back that process in that moment when you were going forward.
You want to just go full bore and be unleashed in your making in without concern about having to then, fix it or [00:28:00] edit it. And so when writing. , I have to put on my writing hat, which is, I'm just gonna write this and it's not gonna be very good, but I don't care. I'm just gonna write it and write it and see how far I can get.
And then we'll go back and try and fix it and redo it. And then that second time when I'm redoing it, and again, I'm not think, I'm trying to be like, I'm just gonna make, I'm gonna be in the making, making phase. And then we'll go back and try and make it better. And so, if you are, bringing in that kind of editing too soon, the kind of critic too soon you can be paralyzed. and that's a little bit what maybe writer's block is where you are. you've got that editing function too early. So you kind of do wanna be able to do both sequentially.
Amy: That's really great advice. So, this one. really interesting and such good advice. There's a pair that goes with it too. Part one is don't be in haste when you're in a hurry. You are more easily conned or
Kevin: Yeah, yeah. It, it [00:29:00] is true urgency. Well, first of all, I talked about the tyranny of the urgent.
we really should do anything urgently. Most other people's emergencies should not be our urgency. So, this is true just generally, but it's also particularly true in terms of spam and getting, calls.
If something, if someone is urgent and need your help urgently and unless you, is dear friend of yours, and you know for sure you have to be very suspicious of other people's urgencies. take your time. I call you back, control the channel, blah, blah, blah. But that's also true just in terms of at work and where someone is an urgent task.
And the problem with urgency is they can often crowd out the important. So we tend to do the things that are urgent and not get to the things that are I. And so I think we should just be suspicious of anything urgent. You have to really say, well, yeah, you're in a hurry, but that's not necessarily my priorities.
And [00:30:00] so, so you we should be skeptical and question that you're gonna see and always really trying to focus on the important things at one level. And then just in terms of day to day, the urgencies are usually often a cover for scams and. insecurity, and then if we're in a hurry to get something done, we're like, there's a deal, there's a bargain, and we've gotta do that.
That's when we're easily, conned because, our, her our urgency to, to get the deal completed, to sign the dotted line because it's such a good deal, is often again, making us blind to the downsides and that we don't do due diligence and et cetera, so, so I would say yes, be very skeptical of urgency.
Amy: Awesome. I really love that. And related if someone is trying to convince you, it's not a pyramid scheme,
Kevin: It is a pyramid scheme. crypto not, it's not a pyramid scheme. no, it's not. It's
Amy: Yeah.
Kevin: Yeah. [00:31:00] Yeah.
Amy: Yeah. There's a rabbit hole. We could go down with crypto. That probably we should put a pin in.
Thank you so much for being here, and it was a pleasure. To soak up a little Kevin time, which is always a delight.
Kevin: It was a real pleasure to be here. Thank you, Amy, for the chance to share my rant and, my advice, which is in this little book, which will be out in May. I appreciate the opportunity to share it with you and your fans. Bye-bye.