💻 Transcription of our Kevin Kelly interview

Transcription of our interview with Kevin Kelly, on his latest book, Great Advice for Living and on AI, the next hundred years, Warp News and much more.

Warp Editorial Staff 12.Jul.2023 26 min read

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Transcription of our interview with Kevin Kelly, on his latest book, Great Advice for Living. You can watch the video here:

Also, don't miss The Case for Optimism, which Kevin wrote for Warp News a couple of years ago.

Mathias Sundin, host:
Welcome everyone to Warp News. We write fact-based optimistic news and other types of content on technology, science, and human progress. And who better to talk with about that than Kevin Kelly? Who is now out with his latest book Excellent Advice for Living.

The future is created by optimists

Mathias Sundin: That essay you wrote for us is based on this advice and it's also on my T-shirt: Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. Please explain this. Why is the future created or decided by optimists?

Kevin Kelly: Well, in retrospect, if we look at all the things that surround us now, especially all the cool vital, the best things that we make from, you know, from a phone to smartphone to electric cars, you know, to vaccines, MRA vaccines, it just go down the list. They were all created by someone in the past who imagined these impossible things at the time, and more importantly, believed that they could be made. That these impossible things could be real.

And so our present has been created by the optimists of the past who were willing and capable of imagining something good and then believing enough to carry through and make it happen. And that means that today there are people who will be imagining things that seem to be impossible or unlikely, improbable, hard to do, who believe that they can be done.

They who have the optimism to believe that while they don't exist today, they will exist tomorrow and they'll be better for us. And they're the ones who are going to make it happen. And in fact, if we look at it that way, then the only ones who are making the future, the future world that we will have are basically the optimists.

So these incredibly complicated things that we want in the future cannot happen accidentally or inadvertently. You can't kind of arrive at doing these things without some kind of previsioning, some kind of imagining them first and seeing, making your way there. You can't just sort of accidentally arrive at these things. And so it becomes ever more important that we have more people trying to imagine a future that they want.

This doesn't negate the reality of the problems or the severity of the problems, nor does it negate the fact that we need people who are focused on the problems. But we have plenty of those. I just don't have enough of the people who are focusing on the future.

The solutions, they're much harder to see The problem about, or the issue with problems is that they're very easy to see. It's entropy. It's the easy path. The easy path is that most things will fail. Most stuff is junk. Most things won't work. Most things are problems. That's the easy thing because that's entropy. The more difficult thing is doing these ecotropic, really complicated things that are improbable, and therefore they require a lot more work to even imagine. They're more expensive to imagine, you could say, and so fewer people do them because it's a lot harder work. And all I'm suggesting is we need more of that.

Mathias Sundin
And how do we get more optimists or more people that are more optimistic? How do we create the optimist?

Kevin Kelly
So I think optimism, while there's certainly a temperamental aspect to it, is actually a skill that you can acquire, that you can come become better at, that you can deliberately choose to do.

And I think for me, I found that the best trick, the best strategy is to take a longer view, the longer the view that you have of both the past and into the future, the easier it is to be an optimist. The longer view enables you to understand that you can accumulate good stuff even with a very small difference because it's compounded over time. And that means that over the long term, you're able to overcome even fairly severe setbacks and, you know, temporary diseases and all these other things that are a part of life. They are actually overcome by compounding benefits over time if you take the long view. So the longer your view I think the easier it is to be an optimist.

Mathias Sundin
Yeah, and our mission is to make the future come sooner and we think we can achieve that by helping to change the mindset of humanity or at least many, many humans so they become more optimistic, and because I'm optimistic that we can achieve that even though it's very very hard, I feel you get a lot of energy from that because of course you run into whatever new thing you're trying to create or change you're trying to make, you run into problems and obstacles and all that.

Kevin Kelly's next project: The 100-year desirable future

So another, and tie into that I heard when I've listened to a few of the other interviews you've done around your new book which is your next project. So tell us about that it sounds sounded very interesting.

Kevin Kelly
So my next project is what I call Protopia: The 100-year desirable future. So I am trying to take my own advice and imagine a world on this planet that's full of all these technological inventions like ubiquitous AI of various species and levels, of cheap working genetic engineering of everything in our lives, including wild species and you know, kind of constant monitoring of ourselves to put ourselves into these metaverses and then to imagine all this being a place that I want to live in, being it, not a scary dystopian hell, but a place that we can't wait to get to.

And it's hard. It's hard to imagine how all these things play out in a very positive way. But that's my scenario, that's my assignment to make this as a scenario. It's what we call normative scenario, meaning it's not a prediction. I'm not saying this is what's going to happen. I'm saying this is what I would like to happen and to complete the project to make it plausible, I am also trying to put it into 10-year increments so that all the in-between steps that would happen would be clear. Because I think that's one of the mistakes of a lot of scenarios or even science fiction stories is that they have a world that doesn't usually make much sense because the intermediate steps are not present. It's like bicycles, even 100 years are not going to go away, all right. There are going to be bicycles in 100 years. And you know I don't see any futures where people are still riding bicycles, let alone electric bicycles. So, it's kind of going through the 10-year increments, the scenario of 10-year increments. So it actually has a history is the larger thing to help me keep it plausible and honest.

So, that's the project and we'll see whether A) it is possible and B) whether it's useful. I would like it to be possible and useful, besides my own interest. And so this is like a lot, most of my projects is something I do first for myself. I am the audience. And secondly, I'm hoping that if it does work, that it would be useful for science fiction authors to write stories in this world. Again, this is not a prediction, but to actually make a world that we could have science fiction stories written in it that would not be dystopian but would be protopian, and that this would be kind of like a background thing where it's the world is really not the character, it's just a world that's futuristic, that's positive that people could write their the thrillers or science fiction thrillers or their dramas inside. So there would be a complete world that would be ready for them to write stories in.

Mathias Sundin
Yeah, that's really smart, because in science fiction it's easier to put some drama in a dystopian future.

Kevin Kelly
It's much better to put the drama into dystopia, because then you have, you have the native conflict in the horror. And that's the reason why we don't have very many, because the alternative is sort of boring.

Mathias Sundin
Yeah. There's Star Trek maybe and maybe a few others, but there's not much to go on. If you want to build your world, you have to do all the thinking, all the thinking you're doing now.

Kevin Kelly
By the way, Star Trek is not on our planet, so it doesn't do that.

Mathias Sundin
Right. And it's a long, long jump into the future. So yeah, exactly. But this is your vision. It's not a crowd-sourced project, it's your thoughts? If it's successful, it feels like a natural continuation, that people add their visions of the future.

Kevin Kelly
Absolutely, it would be really prime to once we kind of know what it is, and the problem initially is, is that I don't know what it is. I don't know what format is it. Is it like a book, which I don't think it is. Is it like a world? Is it like a game? Is it just the data? Is it a database? I don't know. And so a once we kind of know what it is, then we can kind of make it crowd-sourced. But crowdsource is too early.

Forget everything you expect of the future

Mathias Sundin
All right, here's another piece of advice from your book. The hard part in predicting the future is to forget everything you expect it to be. This one I didn't really understand.

Kevin Kelly
Yeah, well, in having done many, many scenario workshops with a GBN, which was a boutique future consulting company. That kind of invented and perfected the scenario process for helping corporate businesses, institutions try to think about the future and doing these exercises with people. It was very clear that the biggest hurdle for folks was forgetting what they thought the future ought to be, because the thing about their future is not going to be reasonable. It's not going to be the expected, so letting go of the expected was the most difficult part.

Mathias Sundin
How do you do that?

Kevin Kelly
We used to do a little exercise called the Unthinkables, where you start with seemingly unthinkable things. You take something that just says that that's never going to happen. And you say, well, what happens if it did happen? How would we get there from that kind of process of loosening because then you, as you're going through it, you realize, well, actually it's not as unthinkable as I thought it was originally.

And so you kind of want these sort of heretical thoughts. That's like, the US could break up. Right. What if the US breaks up into different, you know, Texas and the West Coast. Okay. Well, that's sort of unthinkable. Is that how likely is it? Well, it seems unlikely, but it's possible. And over the long term, you know, and so let's go through that. Let's see what that looks like and what would that mean and what would the early signs be and all that kind of stuff. And so you begin to loosen up. And so originally it was like an unthinkable idea. But okay, the more you look at it, the more you say, for example, there have been no U.S. President, no US president has ever died under the same flag that they were born under. Basically the borders of the US have been changing the entire time of a very short life. So anyway, that's just an example of this idea.

Mathias Sundin
OK, so you force yourself to think something and then your mind opens up a bit.

Kevin Kelly
Right, because where we're going, I mean, right now, what we have in the world today would not have been believable 30 years ago. You would have been thrown out of the class as making up something that was too hard to believe.

The best time to make something is now

Mathias Sundin
Then I understand. Let's see the next one here. This is the best time ever to make something. None of the greatest, coolest creations 20 years from now have been invented yet. You are not late. This is one of your other famous essays. But explain it, why is this the best time to create? Why wasn't it in 1997, for example?

Kevin Kelly
So it's the best time from the perspective of history because we've never had as many tools available for individuals anywhere on the planet. No matter what your station in life is then, than now, there's never been cheaper money available. Ever. There's never been as big a market for your creations than ever before in history. So we can just go through the list of reasons why the equipment that you would need to do something or make something happen has never been as good as has been in the past as today.

Let's just take AI as an example. There are no AI experts compared to what they'll be in 30 years. Looking back 30 years, people will say you didn't even have AI. There were no AI experts. There are no virtual reality creation experts. There's no genetic engineering of the human germline clone, Human clone experts, OK, so, compared to the future, this is the time when there's very little competition for all these new inventions because they don't exist. So therefore there's an opportunity for you to be the expert if you want to be. So even in terms of the timeline of history, this is the best time ever compared for the past and to the future to start something.

How does Kevin Kelly use AI?

Mathias Sundin
Right. And speaking of those tools that we have available now, over the last 12 months or so, we've gotten some new very impressive tools ChatGPT and Midjourney and the others to create images. I'll see you you're doing daily AI art. How do you use these tools and what is your take on them?

Kevin Kelly
Well, the tools are rapidly evolving by the day. Just two days ago Photoshop announced they built in variety of the image generators into Photoshop itself, something called Generative Fill. And they've had content-aware fill, which was a kind of a very crude version of that for years. But this is using AI to be able to extend pictures, photographs. Make them, you know, extend the borders or fill in areas or change things, in a way that humans could do with hours and hours and hours of expertise work. So it's not doing anything new. It's just that it's doing it fast and without the skill of a person.

So someone like me who has very little retouching skills with Photoshop I can do it and it's just it's just amazing and I was repairing some images, repairing some images like repairing some images that I have for years been unhappy with and now I can kind of fix them to my like. And that's just one easy, simple way. Of course, we can imagine it's like Photoshop on steroids. So all the things that Photoshop is going to be used for now, the people who are professionals doing it will have even more tools. It'll be even faster, they'll do more amazing things and it'll, you know, it's already kind of present in Hollywood and movies.

That's the I've been saying for a long time, the next step is really not doing 2D pictures, because that's easy. As it said humans can do it. But where it really gets powerful is when these same tools are moved into video-making worlds where it's where it really is beyond an individual to be able to do these. Now individuals can do these, do these meaning make a feature film? OK. Or small team, so that's that's where the superpower really is.

Mathias Sundin
When you write a prompt and you get a feature-length movie out of that.

Kevin Kelly
Just to be clear, that will never happen. Yes, you will write a prompt and you get a feature length film, but it'll be unwatchable. Yeah, it's like photography, the painters in the 1800s, we're saying, well, this photography, this is not art and it's going to ruin painting because you just press the button. And what we know about photography is that it's not just pressing the button. Yeah, anybody can press the button and you'll get an image, but it won't be very good. And the same thing with the AI video I'm generating. Yeah, you'll press the, click it and you'll get something, but it won't be any good. To actually get something may take a year of work for an individual, but nonetheless, that's okay. They're spending a year writing a novel. It's doable, but it's incredible amount of work. And they'll be clicking that button a million times.

Mathias Sundin
No, exactly. And I'm writing a book right now using ChatGPT and of course I could have written that in three hours or something, but it would be unreadable or it would be something no one read. Not even my mother. So I have to spend time on it, but when I spend time on it, when I increased my skills in prompting, then the outcome both in ideas and feedback on what I write is greater. This is the same thing but just the possibility of being skilled at that and creating video or movies or whatever opens up so much.

Kevin Kelly
So if we look at the way you're using it and the way I'm using it the framing that we want to take away from this is, is that these AIs, in plural, there's huge variety of them. They're already different you know. Midjourney is different from DALL-E. Which is different from ChatGPT. All these different AIs in plural. The framing that we want to have is our relationship is with copilot, interns, assistants, team members, colleagues there.

It's a cooperative collaborative relationship and it's not not a replacement, it's not a replacement, it's a relation, it's a collaboration. And so, so that's how we're going to be using them and they'll be a little bit more than a tool in that sense of they're going to have their own personalities, their own quirks. They'll be far more interactive and setient than a tool, but they're, you know, we're using them as tools.

It's kind of like a work animal, like having a horse move your goods. It's a tool. You're using it as a tool, but it's a living being that has its own, its own dynamics. And so these are going to be working with them in that sense of, yeah, we're using them as tools, but in fact they're sentients that responds to us. And so the relationship is much closer to an intern or an assistant and maybe when they get even better, maybe a teammate or a duet.

Kevin Kelly on doomsday AI

Mathias Sundin
Speaking of AI, the fast progress in the last few months here has really sparked the debate about the dangers of AI, especially human extinction. Some people want to pause something around AI. What is your stance on the current debate and how should we think about AI alignment in the future?

Kevin Kelly
So there's different levels of the alignment. I mean the thing about these models is they've been trained on the average human work. I mean the best of human content and the worst of it. And so it kind of averages out to this machine, to kind of predict what the average human might do next. And the average human is slightly racist, and sexist, and ageist, and all these other things, and maybe mean. So we want them to be better than us and so this idea of aligning their values is legitimate that that aspect of trying to make them better than we are on average, I think is a worthy thing to work on.

There is the existential risk element which says that it goes beyond the concern, it goes beyond just making them aligned with their values. But there's a safety issue where they're going to take over. Or in some ways become so powerful and out of control that it hurts us. And I think that is a greater than zero probability, but so low that we that it shouldn't inform our policy very much. So just yesterday compares it to a pandemic or climate change. I think it's closer to an asteroid impact. An asteroid impact would be devastating, but there's a very, very little chance that it actually happens. However, because it would be disastrous, we really should have people in a program trying to spot them and deflect them and figure out what to do. And there's a group of people called B-1216 and its serious scientists, astronomers, other people who are concerned about the consequences of an asteroid impact and are doing everything they can to prevent that from happening on Earth. OK, well I think we have something similar to. But here's the thing about that, we aren't making policy decisions based on the fact that we might have an asteroid impact, deciding that we're going to make asteroid proof buildings.

Mathias Sundin
Right. We're not regulating that.

Kevin Kelly
Right, we're not regulating it. And so I would say the same thing with this existential threat of AI. Yes, this is more than a zero probability that it will happen. There should be some people working at. But we shouldn't be making policies and regulating based on that low probability of it, because it is a very low probability in my estimation and the reason why we differ from Elon to Elizer Yudkowsky is that they tend to overestimate, overrate the role of intelligence in the world of making things happen. So there are guys who like to think and they think that thinking is the most important thing.

And in order to make things happen in the world, intelligence is required, but it's not the major thing necessarily. It's not the smartest people who are making the things happen in the world, and it's not the smartest people in the room, necessarily, who are making things go forward. And so intelligence alone is insufficient to make change in the world. You need to have persistence. You need to have empathy. You need to have ingenuity, resourcefulness, and all kinds of other things for that to happen. And so when they talk about AI, AI in a black box may be really super smart but doesn't mean they can actually make things happen in the world or affect things.

So I differ from their evaluation of the role of intelligence. It's something we want. But alone is insufficient to make things happen in the world.

Mathias Sundin
Yeah, because they often make a very big jump. Just reaching the intelligence of one human is not enough. Because one human is not very smart. You and I can't make all the stuff in the world. It's humanity that is smart, based on thousands of years of knowledge. So that's the first step but then they also make a jump from that to "Yeah, and then it controls the world." But there are a lot of dictatorships around the world. How will you turn them into democracies? You won't do that just like that. The dictator is not the smartest person. They're the toughest, most controlling people. So there's many, many steps for an AI to control humanity.

Kevin Kelly
Right, and their answer is always "is it was so smart to figure it out, and it wants to" and all I can say is, you put Einstein and a tiger in a cage and see if the smartest one wins. Smartness is not sufficient. And here's the other thing, what we know from nature is that the will to survive always trumps the will of predation. Most predators fail in killing the prey. Nine times out of ten they don't work because the will to survive is much greater. And so you have eight billion, nine billion people, the will to survive is incredibly stronger than the will to eliminate them. And so that will is independent of intelligence. You can be super smart but not have the will. So again, just being really, really smart doesn't mean that you can trump and overcome the wills to survive of 8 billion people.

To be remarkable, read books

Mathias Sundin
Next advice: To be remarkable, read books. Explain this, why are books so important?

Kevin Kelly
When I say a book, I want to be clear that I'm talking about the logical, conceptual thing of a sustained long argument or narrative which is contained in the book. Whether it's on paper or in digital bits in the sky. So, I think what I should have said is, to be remarkable, read the books that nobody else is reading, which would be even better, but if you can read any books these days, there is something about the transmission of information from one mind to another mind that we haven't yet been able to do any other way.

I am a huge, huge fan of YouTube. I think YouTube is way underrated in terms of its impact on the culture. I think that its conveyance and learning are stellar and really great for many things, and in many cases better than a book. I think in the future there will be some marriage of books plus video. TV that you read, movies or books that you watch. I think, going back to now, we haven't yet eclipsed the power of words on a page to transmit complicated sophisticated knowledge and information and so, if you're not reading, you're missing out on ways to improve yourself. And the remarkable part of it is that you can read, you can read the ancients, you can become educated by the past in a way that even YouTube hasn't quite caught up into doing. And that will make you remarkable because most people are not doing that. The reason why reading books will make you remarkable is because so few people are reading books. I hate to say that, but that's sort of where it's at.

Mathias Sundin
So, if you were to give a few book tips of your favorite books. Books that will make people more remarkable if they read them.

Kevin Kelly
Oh my gosh. You know, it's funny because if you're in the habit of re-reading books, it's kind of scary sometimes because there's lots of books that really changed my life and I've gone back to read them and it's like they don't work as well. They don't hold up. Or others cases, they might improve, but all I'm going to say is I think there are seasons in people's lives. I know there are books that my friends have just sworn that changed their lives, and I read them and they bounce off of it, and vice versa, things that it was like 'my gosh, you need to read this'. And they're kind of, 'yeah, it's all right'. So, that's why you want to read widely because you can't really tell what it is that you actually need or to hear right now that will unleash something in you that you didn't know, or find something you didn't know you're looking for.

I posted the four or five books that I felt changed my life, the course of my life, and included in it was The Whole Earth Catalog which I eventually wound up working for and running. It was so influential. The Bible, which I think is both the most underrated and the most overrated book at the same time. It doesn't say what you think it says, no matter what you think it says. And so, read it. It's so instrumental in our culture. You really owe it yourself to read it once all the way through. And I could go on from there. There are books and science fiction stories that, in retrospect, I wouldn't even recommend, but were hugely influential on me as a kid at the time.

If I had a reading list to current fiction today or current nonfiction, I really liked Humankind, which is making the argument that I think people need to hear, which is that the default human response is not selfishness but selflessness. That at our core, we are a collaborative, social, helpful animal to each other and that's the mark of what makes us humans. Unlike most animals, we've sort of transcended slightly some of the animal instinct for self preservation only, and work more with groups, more socially to try to have the group survive. And that altruism is native to humans and not, as we've been told, people will only be selfish, particularly in a crisis, and so he shows pretty good evidence of why that's wrong and why we should shift. Which is in perfect alignment with my observations about the world, which is that you can trust strangers and that most people, for most times, will do good. And if you bank on that, if you work on that, and you treat them as if they're going to treat you, you'll be rewarded, you know, unfairly in some ways.

Mathias Sundin
Yeah. And several of your advice in your book now is along those lines that you can actually trust people. I really love Humankind and the title is great Humankind. And he has a story in there of Lord of the Flies. And Lord of the Flies is fiction, but it's treated like nonfiction. Feels like it's happened for real. But he found a real Lord of the Flies and it didn't turn out that nasty. It's a great story and everyone should read it. I shouldn't tell it but it's the opposite of Lord of the Flies and a very beautiful story of the real Lord of the Flies.

Kevin Kelly
He has several documentaries on YouTube where you can actually see the kids and go back and visit them and hear their version of it. Because they went back and they kind of recreated some of the scenes on that very island with the same kits. And so that's a perfect example of what I mean by changing my mind overtime, not because of the book, but the book confirms the change of mind that I had.

For maximum results, focus on your biggest opportunities

Mathias Sundin
Next advice. You mentioned this a little bit earlier. For maximum results, focus on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems. Why?

Kevin Kelly
Because I think problems are the spark that might ignite the fire, but the fuel has to be the opportunities.

So, one of the greatest pieces of advice, for startups and entrepreneurs was from Paul Hawken which is where you are a dissatisfied customer already. So, starting with your dissatisfaction, like waiting in line at the post office, so you do stamps.com. It's this idea where it's a problem. But that's just the spark. The real fuel comes from it. Well, here's an opportunity. Here's something where nobody's done anything. And so you are running on the fuel of the opportunity, even though that initial spark might have been a problem rather than getting too focused on your competitors, which is a common.

So competitors are a problem. If you're running a business, you have a competitor, you're focusing on the fact that they're taking your customers or that they're occupying that space on the shelf there, and those are problems, but if you're focused on your opportunities, it's like where are there bigger opportunities? And we're not thinking about competitors at all. We're only thinking about what's new and what we can do. The thing about problems is that they are limited by definition. They're limiting and the thing of opportunity is that they're unlimited. So it's that open-ended aspect of the problems meaning they have no limits. There is no boundary in which you can go, which gives you a far more room to maneuver and far more upside. Whereas by definition the problems are limited and that's often their problems, if they are, as if they aren't limiting. And so it's not that you can't deal with them or use them, but you want to focus. You want to focus on the open-ended side of the equation because that will often give you solutions for their problems.

How to grow Warp News?

Mathias Sundin
Okay, I have a last question and in that I want you to give me advice that is not in your book. I run Warp News and what we've been successful in is that when people find us, we have good conversion to our free newsletter and from that good conversion to our paid newsletter. But we've been growing too slowly and there are many different reasons why and you don't know the details of Warp News, of course.

One of the reflections I've made over the last year or so is that I should ask people for more advice. I've started doing that and it's really amazing. That's advice from me: Start asking people for advice. So now I'm going to ask you for advice. How should we go about growing Warp News faster?

Kevin Kelly
That's a really big question. I always start with the why. Why you want to do this, what the end result would look like, what the success state is and work back from that because that will tell you. So, let's say Warp News is a raging success over the next 10 years. What would that mean? What would that look like at the end of 10 years?

Mathias Sundin
We would be a fairly large global news company and the importance of it being large is that then it would have reached many people. So both help change their mind and sort of strengthen their optimism. But also then it would be a successful business that other news media could see that, "oh OK, it's not just negative clickbait that works". There's an audience for something else here and also there's some real journalism in here. That's what I hear from other news media journalists. "What you're doing is not real journalism. We're doing it. We're scrutinizing the big companies or politicians." But they only do that from one perspective, is my answer. They only look at "Oh that sounds too good to be true." They never look at "Oh that sounds too bad to be true". So that kind of success I think would help bring about a change in other news media and of course not just the the current ones but also other sorts of our competitors.

Kevin Kelly
So, you mentioned success in terms of internally with your business, but I'm talking more about externally. What would be the impact? One of the things that you mentioned in your little summary was the word 'read'. So, would you continue to focus on the the words part of it? Because, going back to what we're saying earlier, I think the center of the culture has moved away from books. We're no longer book people, the books were people on the screen and it may not be that people will continue to want to read their news. It may be that it is something more that you watch and so there's that one thing in terms of your description of what you imagine it being successful and, how often or what's the frequency or what?

Again, you're raging. You're wildly successful. What do you see? Does it become news? You do you see that people are going to be in the successful version, the big version of it? Are people reading or getting news from you every day? Is this hourly? Is this daily? Is this weekly? Do you imagine the successful state that you would be in Daily News? In this way you have a special filter that there will be processing Daily News or is it something else?

Mathias Sundin
Definitely daily. And I said 'read' because that's what we do today and that's what we know, but you're definitely right. We need to, in this successful scenario, expand into sort of everything and what that is in 10 years, we can know some of it but not all of it. But yes, definitely daily news. And I'm thinking, since Warp Institute, the organization behind Warp News, is a community of optimistic forward-looking people. I think we're going to be able to find more and more stories from them. They create new projects, companies and all that and we can tell those stories over the long term.That will create short-term news but also long-term stories. That others can both learn from and be inspired from. So sort of a positive spiral of content.

Kevin Kelly
Wired was very much cast in the same kind of mold of wanting to be optimistic and have a role in the world, but I would say that, one of the geniuses that Lewis Rosetto brought to it, because I was kind of running something similar, maybe not as decidedly optimistic as Whole Earth, but it was certainly conceptual news; is genius was like wrapping it around people and their dreams. So my stuff was pretty conceptual and it had a very avid but small readership. But Lewis wanted to make it into these ideas wrapped around people or people wrapped around the ideas. You have people on the coverage. You talk about the people who are making these things, what their dreams are and what they want. And that was the difference that moved it into a different level entirely of much larger numbers and a much bigger audience because of that people component. So that would be maybe the only thing I would say is you might consider, doing what Wired did, which is wrap it around people and their dreams.

Mathias Sundin
That's very good advice and thank you so much. And thank you for taking the advice to talk to me and our audience and to everyone listening or reading this later, please check out Kevin Kelly's latest book.

Kevin Kelly
Excellent Advice for Living. There's 450 little bits of the three or four that we mentioned, there's 450 more of them. Lots of them. It's a very easy read.

Mathias Sundin
It's an easy read, but you can stop and think about all of the advice and they're quite different also. So thank you very much for that Kevin, and I'm really looking forward also to your new project to see the outcome of that. So talk to you again soon I hope. Thank you very much.

Kevin Kelly
Best of success with your publication. I'm really glad it's there and I'm wishing you great fortune with it.

Mathias Sundin
Thank you very much.