Artificial Intelligence? The shadow of a leader? Jerusalem conversion experiences? WIRED Magazine’s Kevin Kelly brings all that and more to this insightful conversation. 

Kevin is the founding editor for the publication and has authored a number of books including his most recent volume: Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. In this episode, he unpacks some of that wisdom and joins Henry as they work through complex questions about the relationship between AI and the Imago Dei. 
If you like this episode, don’t forget to give it a rating and share it with others. You can also follow the podcast on your favorite platform for new episodes every week.

Episode Transcript

Rusty Rueff: Hey there and welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. When WIRED magazine first came on the scene way back in 1993, it quickly became the go to source for questions about tech and questions about culture. At the helm of the publication was the founding executive editor and today's guests and a friend of mine, Kevin Kelly. Kevin has been an important voice for people wanting to understand the effects of technology for nearly 50 years now. In addition to his role with WIRED, Kevin is a prolific writer with a number of articles and books, including his most recent volume Excellent Advice for Living, Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. His work has been featured in the New York Times, The Economist, Time Magazine, and many others. He was also featured in Tim Ferriss, his book, Tools of Titans. He joins the show today to share insights from his book, then talk about the ever changing technology landscape and give us hope for the future, even when it seems dim. He also tells us about his powerful conversion experience. Let's listen in.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. We're here with a really special guest. If you've tuned in before. You've probably heard me say that before. And yet each time I say it, it can also be true. And this one is clearly no exception. We have Kevin Kelly, who among many, many other things, is the founder of WIRED magazine, which has been an inspiration and encouragement to so many of us that are in technology. And when I found out through his relationship with Rusty that he was a Christian and maybe Rusty told me this two or three years ago, maybe even longer ago than that, I'm like, Oh my goodness, we've got to get Kevin on the program while today it's happening. We have Kevin with us. Kevin, thank you very much for joining.

Kevin Kelly: Well, it's my pleasure and privilege and so delighted you invited me. I'm really looking forward to this. By the way, Wired was founded 30 years ago, basically last month. So it's been

Henry Kaestner: Happy birthday.

Kevin Kelly: Right? Yes. A lot has changed over 30 years.

Henry Kaestner: Well, you and I were talking right before we went live and I told you that it's conversations that you were having and people like George Gilder were having back then talking about how important bandwidth was that gave rise to David Morgan, who had read a George Gilder article. Read about the same time you guys are starting to talk about it, read an article, registered the domain name bandwidth, of which then bandwidth, of course, came out and then Republic Wireless and then relay, but then sovereigns and then Faith Driven Entrepreneur. So it is maybe also a kind of a 30th anniversary for the Faith Driven Entrepreneur movement too maybe.

Kevin Kelly: That's exactly right. One of my pieces of advice is that we tend to overestimate what we can do in the short term and underestimate what we can do in the long term. So if you give yourself 30 years to get something done, you can do accomplish an incredible amount. And achieve, tremendous even in a decade versus you know, thinking about the next six months.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. May God find us faithful to that and that's really encouraging. Okay. So you guys would probably be familiar with the Dos X-Man, who is labeled as the most interesting man. And I would submit you that that's not the case, that it is Kevin Kelly or at least very least the Christian version of the most interesting man alive is Kevin Kelly. Because of his interest in technology and creation care, his faith. And he has a new book in which he distills some of this was and we're going to talk about that here in a little bit. But before we go much further in that, and I want to kind of go through this excellent advice for living, which I had been consuming and continue to consume. And I hope that our audience will as well. I want to hear a bit about your journey, a little bit of biographical, and you can start as early as you want. I most certainly, though, one hit the conversion story from Jerusalem, so you start where you want, but make sure you hit on Jerusalem, please.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah. So briefly, I was kind of like a science and art nerd in high school. I took all the science courses I could possibly cram into doubling up on math and science. And at the same time, I was interested in art. My parents wanted me to decide whether I wanted to go to art school or, you know, MIT. And if there had been a gap year back in those days or internship, I would have done that. But I wound up hating my first year of college because it was grade 13. I just needed to get out of a classroom and do something. And so I dropped out of college and went to Asia because my best friend from high school was studying Chinese to be a missionary in Taiwan. And I went to visit him and I had my head blown. It was like, Oh my gosh, this is like. There's a different world here. This is like Taiwan in 1972 was just incredibly alien, and it was next to Japan, in the Philippines. And then I wound up kind of visiting these, hopping to photograph. That was my excuse. And I just constantly was learning. And so I did this for almost ten years and awarded myself an honorary degree in Asian Studies at the end, because I felt that I had earned I learned so much. But part of what I was doing was, you know, I was photographing the ceremonies and the things that were disappearing very fast as they modernized. And I would often go to there were a lot of religious ceremonies, religious costuming, festivals, traditions, because they were in some ways the most colorful. So I had an interest in the religions of that time, and I would read as much as I could about them and ask questions and be around the people. And for people who I mean, no matter what kind of religion they were, they were incredibly kind and generous to a fault and welcoming and just. Christlike. And I was also reading the New Testament in the Bible while I was waiting on the bus to leave, because that's mostly what I did was wait on busses to leave, the busses didn't go anywhere until they were full. And that was how I got around. So I spent a lot of my adult life waiting for the bus to get full so I could leave and I would spend that time reading. And so I happened to arrive in Jerusalem on Easter to photograph it as part of my explorations of Asia. And I was there. I got locked out of my hostel in Jerusalem on the Saturday night before Easter, and I wound up roaming around and having to sleep in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher because it was the only that was open the hostels had a curfew, which I didn't know and I was actually locked out. And then I kind of just found myself wandering over to the ceremonies Easter morning for the Sunrise service. And I, much to my astonishment, I had a conversion experience that I was not expecting. I was not looking for, I was not ready for.

Henry Kaestner: How did that happen?

Kevin Kelly: I don't know how it happened. It just happened.

Henry Kaestner: Like all of a sudden you blew like, oh my goodness, all this stuff.

Kevin Kelly: You know, there were singing. It's like, Oh, this seems like the real thing. And then it was kind of like, Well, what does that mean? There was no, like, this thing, the veil drop or anything like that. It was like, okay. So I went back in kind of a daze and I was like laying down. I remember the hostel was opened by then. I was lying down in the hostel and it's like and you know, you heard about Jerusalem syndrome.

Henry Kaestner: No.

Kevin Kelly: Which is Jerusalem attracts all kinds of people, weird people who either believe that they're the Messiah or they're completely they, you know, they're talking to the Messiah. I mean, just like it really attracts people who, you know, that these very strong and there were people in the hostel like that and I was like, Oh my gosh, I'm now one of them. You know, I'm now the crazy guy who's talking to them. And so I was lying there trying to think about what it meant, what did you do? And I had a very distinct assignment. That's the best I can give. It was to go and live as if I had only six months to live. And I said that that's like crazy. I'm in perfect health. I'm not going to, but I need to complete that assignment. So that's what I did. I left and I went back and I decided what would I do? And the surprise to me was I wasn't going to climb the Himalayas with all the things I've been doing that already. So like, my answer to what I would do is I would go back and see my brothers and sisters and see my parents. And there's like, I was shocked, but that was what my answer was. But anyway, that's what it did. And part of it was I didn't have a car, you know, very much. So I decided to ride my bicycle from San Francisco to New York and visit my brothers and sisters along the way.

Henry Kaestner: Ride on your bicycle.

Kevin Kelly: Yes. Oh, my bicycle. So I set off from San Francisco on a bicycle, and it was three months to visit. My brother was in Idaho and another brother in Arkansas and my sister up in New England. So I just rode around. I could buy food along the way. It was just camping and I was riding to my death. It was like I had six months. That was the countdown I was going along. And so the thing is, the point of the story is that at the end of that night, I didn't tell anybody because I was like, totally crazy. But I was at my parents house. I rode back right at my parents house in New Jersey, and I was staying. It was like I was totally 100% prepared. I did everything ready for the evening of the last day that it had, and I kind of like it was completely all that I could do to prepare myself. I'd given everything away and I own nothing, you know, whatever. And then the next morning I was reborn. I suddenly had my life before me. I literally had a re born because I had been not thinking about the future because I had only six months to live, I denied everything. It was like I didn't take my camera because what's the point? And so I had the reborn experience that didn't have in Jerusalem.

Henry Kaestner: That must have been incredibly liberating and amazing. So number one, you're alive and now you get your whole life in front of you.

Kevin Kelly: So now suddenly I can think about the future. And that was sort of one of the reasons why I believe and theme of the future that we need, that we have to have, that that's an important part of our own psyches because it was so devastating to not have a future. For me, that was my experience. And so I became interested in sort of inhabiting and imagining futures because I could see the value in having that hope and having a picture of where we went ahead, too.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, because you had become a futurist, you may not like that designation, but humor me with it. I mean, you've been one that thinks about the future absolutely more than the average person. And. So I want to talk about you starting WIRED magazine. But I am interested, there are 15 years between that conversion experience and you founding WIRED magazine. What does it look like for a young person who now has 15 years in front of him and his big future? Was it there during that time that your love of technology and what's going on was birthed there? What happened next?

Kevin Kelly: Well, I kind of was a slightly hippie ish growing up, and I my bias, my hero in high school was Henry David Thoreau. Walden, you know, went to the woods, built his own house and lived by himself and so had a hands, arms, lives with technology. As I said, I owned a bicycle and a camera, but I was not at all interested in the big stuff, you know, big computers. My dad had these computers. I didn't was no interest in that. I had no interest in industry. You know, grew up in New Jersey with a chemical factory that is like I was sort of repulsed by it in some sense. And then living in Asia, in the places where I was, I was living in places where there was almost no technology at all. I had the experience of like in northern Afghanistan in the seventies, which was completely medieval. It was literally a medieval town with medieval social structures, medieval no electricity, I mean, a whole town, entire towns with no electricity. They have little guys come around with light, the lanterns, the kerosene lanterns at night for the street lamps. It was remarkable. So I had that experience of living without the technology. I was very comfortable with that. But what happened was I started writing about travel because that was the one thing I started to know, and I wanted to share my love of travel for the whole Earth. KELLOGG which was the thing that I loved it was was the one publication that I worldly hoped to work at someday. And because it was kind of a do it yourself thing, kind of merge my interest in science and art. And I started writing travel stuff because it was the one thing I knew more about than anybody else. And I had the opportunity to use a computer in the lab that I worked at to do a mail order catalog to send the stuff I typed to a printer. And so there was a modem. There was a modem on the computer, an apple two E. This is like in early eighties. There was a modem on the computer and something happened. I discovered that there was this emerging they call the bulletin board world, the online world. And for the first time I felt that there was technology that felt human scale. It was communication, it was people, but people I felt like empowered, but I felt that there was new power there. And I decided I wanted to write about that as if it was a new country erupting. That was my thesis. So I got invited. I got myself invited on to explore some of these emerging things in early eighties online, and I was reporting on them as if there was a new country. And I wrote about it called a Network Nation. And that was the whole thing of marrying the computer to the telephone and having that communication that began for the first time to see that there was something about technology that could really benefit me and other people. And it wasn't that kind of cold, hard thing is somewhat like an Amish barn raising. And as I got into that more and more and as kind of learn more about how to do it and what it was and living online, I began to become a little bit more interested in where it was taking us and what was happening and with some other technologies that were related. And so it made me kind of rethink the role of technology in our lives in the cosmic scale thing, like what is this thing cosmically? So that was the beginning. It came from the experience of living online in the eighties and seeing the way in which you kind of liberated many, many things and saying, Well, there's there's something really good here that's not the kind of industrial scale technology that was overpowering. It's actually quite humane. And so that was the beginning of where I began to think more about the future in a serious way.

Henry Kaestner: That's very interesting. So I've never thought about technology exactly that way. I think that most of us haven't. I mean, I think of it as a new nation with its own language, with its own mores, with its own social structures. And if you think about it that way, you almost think of it like kind of this like egalitarianism, maybe skewing a little bit intellectual, but nonetheless some sort of democratic egalitarian type of system, almost kind of like a almost like a nirvana. I mean, if you think about it that way, if you think of it as a nation, you do think about it differently. And then I want to talk about WIRED magazine and founding, but maybe I'll just go ahead and I'll skip ahead to that and we'll come back to WIRED magazine. If you're right, if we jump around a little bit. So this nation that you started reporting on, the emergence of this new nation that emerged in the early eighties is now a nation that's been around for 40 or 50 years. And it's it's held some promise to its citizens, and it's created a lot of opportunities for its citizens. And it also is going through some. Maybe growing pains. Just comment. I just keep on that riff about the nation of technology.

Kevin Kelly: Well, I have a friend who's a very vocal writer, John Perry Barlow, who is unusual among the citizens of this new nation. He was an online guy, but he was a Republican Deadhead from Wyoming. You know, it's like your head explodes, right? Yeah. But he actually wrote this manifesto where he said this nation should be independent, which I thought was totally bonkers. And I ran it in WIRED. And it's very notorious because basically, you know, he was saying they wanted to be separate. He wanted it to be its own thing and have independence called the Declaration of Independence for this new online nation word. And that, to me, never made sense. I'm not a utopian. I felt that what was happening was we were going to take this online world and marry embedded into the real world. And that was the two worlds is cyber world. This online nation that we were embedded into the actual physical world, and that we would have this marriage of these two, the both intangible and the tangible. And I think that's, to me, a much more likely direction and destination rather than a separate nation that has an independence and it's separate from the world.

Henry Kaestner: So there's more of an AR versus a VR type of world.

Kevin Kelly: Right. So the AR world, they are a vision is that you have this overlay. You can see the intangible digital world on top of or inside of the actual world. And that to me is feels more like where we're going rather than that we're going to have these separate entities where you're, you know, like kind of like the metaverse from the crash. And so in 30 years, so my take on the general direction is that we are starting to have this integration rather than having a separate sphere.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Okay. So I'm interested to get your takes in light of that with two things. One is artificial intelligence and the other one is blockchain. So just riff on both of those. I think about blockchain, you're talking about kind of like, you know, this Declaration of Independence that I think about blockchain and the promise of crypto kind of fitting in that camp. But then I think about, well, how do I think about artificial intelligence in light of kind of the technology world kind of coming down on our own and the integration. So maybe take which other one is more interesting to you first, please?

Kevin Kelly: Well, I'll say a few words about crypto because it's much shorter.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah.

Kevin Kelly: And AI is endless. So the crypto thing, I have family members who are, you know, kind of involved in the world. And I would say to them, look, I'm willing to have the conversation about crypto, but we can't talk about money, can't talk about making money or saving money. Those conversations are very short. Because the value of blockchain and crypto so far has really not been identified other than it's about money. And I find money very boring in that way. So crypto and blockchain I think are incredibly potent and very sweet technologies. The idea of having decentralization, having the public ledger, all these things are really powerful, but they just haven't found where they are valuable because there is a great cost to them. So the benefit of decentralization is this agile, that it's very adaptive, that it's very powerful, the downsides, it's incredibly inefficient. And that's true for biology, for evolution, Evolution is incredibly adaptive, but it's incredibly inefficient. You know, making a million frog eggs to have three live, that's like crazy inefficient, but it's very adaptable, it's very good. And so making decentralized systems is the way to do it is very powerful, but there's a cost to it. And so far we haven't found the kind of tasks where it's going to be worth paying that cost. So what we're left with is the money making part of it. And the way I say about crypto is it has to be something where there's value to it. Even if it's losing money, even the price is crypto going down. So like if you buy a house, even if the market goes down and the house loses value, it's still valuable to you. Well, right now most of the crypto is like, show me the blockchain where it's valuable, even if it's losing money. If it's an expense and not a place that's making money, not a profit center. So we haven't yet reached there. And so I think it's possible it could, but it hasn't yet. And so I'll say, well, come back to me when there's some value other than money making money.

Henry Kaestner: So before we move on to artificial intelligence, I just want to drill down on one thing and I hesitate a little bit to ask it, because this is going to betray my lack of knowledge in crypto and blockchain. And it really is. I mean, I feel like I'm an investor, so, you know, I can think about investors back in the nineties or like I'm, I can invest in the Internet. That doesn't make any sense. I feel that way sometimes about blockchain and crypto. And yet one of the other uses for money is to give it one of the things you make it, you spend it, you save it, but you also give it. So I'm wondering about when you think part of this is that I've met a guy recently named John Steele in South Africa and it because I'm fascinated by poverty to financial spiritual poverty, just fascinated by poverty. And he says, well, on the financial poverty side, you need to have systems that will be able to allow for digital identity micropayments and connectivity. If you bring that to a country like Central African Republic, then you've really freed them up. And my thought is that crypto might afford some measure of of a digital identity. It doesn't solve for the connectivity part, but maybe the digital identity and the micropayments part of that. But maybe I'm just misunderstanding its use or its potential for emerging markets. Any thoughts?

Kevin Kelly: Right, Right. So again, my goal to talk about the money part. Yep. All right. But the identity, Sure, it's possible to have a decentralized identity, but it's expensive to do it that way. And so is it going to be worth it? I don't know. Most of the identity systems, like in India, which has been a raging success. Oh, my gosh. Because for the first time, I mean, this identitiy thing in India was really hard because of people being born without birth records and all kinds of things and never being able to get into the system. But they now have a, you know, federally mandated centralized identity system. And it's really unleashed. And it isn't decentralized at all. It's very ordinary runs on a database. But then it's been really powerful. So I don't know, it's possible that you could have identity system that was decentralized and was worth that price. I don't know. I haven't seen it yet. But let's go on to A.I., please. So we're going to be talking about A.I. for the next hundred years. So right now there's a.

Henry Kaestner: So what happens? What happens at the end of the hundred years? The machines take over 100 years.

Kevin Kelly: Well, I mean, the main thing is this, because it's so close to us and what it is that we're doing, that part of what we're doing is we're redefining who we are as humans. Okay. I mean, this is very, very clear. The reason the recent A.I. stuff that's been happening with chat bot and the image generators, it is because guys are really so smart. They've actually been that smart for a while. It's that we thought have an interface to them, which is this text and language interface. We can talk to them and hear them. They can hear us, we can talk back and forth. And that's the new thing, is that we've had these powers, they've been there. But now so we have the interface, this conversational interface, so anybody can do this and we're discovering each day things that they could do that we didn't know that they could do. Even the adventures didn't know they could do. But the thing about it is, is that compared to where we'll be even in 30 years, nothing's happened. I mean, it's like we haven't even started yet. We'll look back and say, Well, you don't have a and we don't have the AI because we've only been able to synthesize one aspect of our brain, which is pattern recognition. There's all these other things that our minds do that we haven't even begun to replicate. But what's shocking is not that the AI are so smart, but that things that we thought required a lot of. Intelligence turned out to be dumber than we thought. So, like, chess turned out to be more mechanical. A process than we thought. Playing chess. Driving a car turned out to be more mechanical than we thought. Painting a picture turned out to be more mechanical than we thought. Creativity is more mechanical than we thought. We've now programed into these things. They're creative with a small, lowercase c. They're not big creative. But that lowercase creativity, something we can do. It's just like evolution. It's something we can put into machines. It's not a supernatural thing. It's just it's a mechanical process. And that's what we do. So all these things that we thought were higher things are much more elementary than we thought. And the next shot we're going to have is emotion. We often think of that what we need to be conscious and and aware and superintelligent to have an emotional robot. No, no, no. Emotion is like, you know, animals can be emotional emotions, a very primitive thing. It's actually not hard at all to put into these AI and bots. And we're going to realize, oh, my gosh, you know, programing, emotional machines is more mechanical than we thought. And so that's what's happened, is that we're kind of redefining, well, you know, maybe we're more mechanical than we thought or what is it that we do that's different from that? And we're going to be asking ourselves that question every year from now on as well. What's special about us? I mean, why are we here? What are we for? What are we going to be doing? And that's the conversation I think is going to be going on for many, many decades.

Henry Kaestner: We'll get a start on that, because you alluded the fact that there's a small c creative and a big C creative. So we pray every day or often that God's kingdom would come on Earth as it is in heaven. Do you see the emergence of A.I. in this discussion over the next hundred years as a facilitation of that or a hindrance to it?

Kevin Kelly: This the facilitation of it? Because I think there's a couple different metaphors we can use. But for me, the most promising framework to think about AI is artificial aliens. So if you can imagine, what if we actually had engaged in contact with other civilizations in the universe, how that might disturb or inform or encourage us in our faith, Right? It's like going to meet other aliens. And so it's like, well, do you have a messiah? Do you have a savior? You know, it's like there's like there's so many questions we're going to have. Where do we fit into? Where is our own story fit into the cosmic story and how universal is it and and what does it mean? And so who knows when or if we'll ever make contact, but we're going to actually create artificial versions of that on this planet. We're going to make beings that will eventually have some.

Henry Kaestner: Before we go on there, because that's a huge thing. Do you think there's intelligent life on other planets?

Kevin Kelly: Absolutely. Without a doubt. Without a doubt. I mean, like, you know, you look at the Web once. Okay, so you have a picture here where there's, you know, trillions and trillions and trillions and trillions of galaxies. Well, these little is not a star of the galaxy. And each of those have a billion stars in them. So, absolutely, it's this actually is a really good book called Astro Theology. The whole book is about the premise of other civilizations and Christianity. Basically. It's a theology of other civilizations and the historical arguments, because even back in medieval times, they were talking about, are there other civilizations or are they covered or not? You know, this is a very big thing. So I absolutely believe that the universe is filled with others. And the question is, what about them or what's their role or how does this play into it? And so we're again, we have no certainty that we ever have any context, but we're are have certainty that we're going to make these artificial beings. We are made in the image of God. God is a creator. We are going to create other beings to have free will and consciousness. Just as God made us. We're going to replicate this. That's what it means to be made in the image that we are creator of beings. And so we're going to be doing that. And the question is what is their role? And so that's why I've been working on this catechism for robots. It's like, what do we tell them, where they come from, what's their purpose, what's their relationship?

Henry Kaestner: So think about creation, mandate, be fruitful and multiply. Take dominion over all things. Do we take dominion over this artificial intelligence? And do we teach them their rightful place in the order? Or are we teaching them to also take dominion over all things? And are they ever in conflict?

Kevin Kelly: You have two good questions. Yeah. You know, I wrote a book called Out of Control. It's my first book. And there was this idea that when you make these systems and they have their own initial agenda and maybe even wants and purposes and tendencies and if not free will. It's like children. It's like, how do you raise children? You kind of want to instill in them knowing that at some point they're going to be out of your control. So it's like the genius of having that. It's very dangerous. There is a danger in power in having things be creative and truly have, you know, some measure of Genesis themselves. So we don't know. I mean, I think this goes back to this thing of the next hundred years where we are going to be confronting ourselves as we make these other kinds of things. And it's like, who controls them? Or already we're having this problem with the chat bot. It's like, who owns the copyright of the things that are made? Do they have any rights? And it seemed like science fiction even just 20 years ago to be talking about that, but were very, very quickly coming up, like, who is responsible for it? There's a woman professor at MIT who's been arguing that we should adopt some of the law from the biblical time when onward about dealing with your animals. Like if an animal does something, are you responsible? You know, there's a lot, you know, that kids and others talking about that, but that we should adopt some of those laws to the AI. But I think that's not going to be enough.

Henry Kaestner: When you talk about a creation and giving them free will and then being both potentially aghast at some of the things you come up with, but then also amazed there seems to be something that unites humans in our search for and maybe you'd say this isn't something that unites all humans. But I think that one of the things that unites us all is this search for wisdom is just it's knowledge is wisdom. And the beginning of all knowledge, the beginning of a wisdom is the fear of God. So I had the fear of God. You have the fear of God. Question is, there's this artificial intelligence that we create, that we create with some level of free will and consciousness. Do they also have a fear of God, or are we their gods?

Kevin Kelly: Yeah. So the thing that I always kind of really assist with, as we were talking about them in plural, there are going to be hundreds of different species of AIs. There's not one monolithic AI. There's many, many species, many varieties, all engineered to do different things with different personalities, different capabilities. Some of them will be very, very vast, working in large scale, maybe even planetary. Others will be much smaller. They'll be more like an animal. They're aliens. They're going to be like a thousand different species of them. And we're going to try all different kinds of things. A lot of them will be made without consciousness because consciousness is actually a liability, right? So they'll be AI advertised as conscious, free, Right? You have to worry about these. They're not self-aware because self-aware it can be very expensive. It's a liability. There will be others that they will engineer and some kind of awareness. And partly that is just to explain them. We're already we're having this issue of like they do things that we don't understand. Why are they doing it, how they make the decision? Well, you have another kind of A.I. looks over their shoulder and tries to explain what they're doing. And that's sort of the beginning of kind of self-awareness. So we're going to program in self awareness to some of them because it's going to be useful. So one thing is that there's going to be many varieties, some of which might be more complicated and have levels of self-awareness for whatever reason. And we may have different attitudes or different reasons to program in some way versus the other. So the kind of questions you're asking is great questions, and the answer is we don't have answers for them and we haven't thought about them. For most part, people have been very reluctant to take it seriously. It seems to science fictiony to kind of waste good, honest thinking about until recently. And now I think finally people are realizing this is not a philosophical question, like if you have a car, self-driving car, there was the old philosophical trolley problem. You know, should the car veer to the right and kill a lot of people or to the left and kill a few people? And that seemed like a remote philosophical question. But now when you have a self-driving car, you actually have to answer it. You have to give it an answer. You can't just wave your arms and say, Oh, I don't know. You have to say it's either going to prioritize the safety of the passengers or the pedestrians. So we can program in values to these. That's easy, because this code, the difficulty is we don't know. Our own ethics are so shallow and inconsistent and vague. We don't actually know how to make these better than us. We don't know what that means. We want them to be better than us. We don't want them to be as racist or sexist, as mean as average person. We want them to be better than us. What does that mean? And so as we try to make these better than us, we have the opportunity to improve ourselves.

Henry Kaestner: I wonder what the role of prayer is in this. I wonder if so your point is that not a lot of people have been talking about this because it's just been all hypothetical. So presumably there's not been a lot of people that have been praying about it, but now it's here. And so a number of us need to be praying that God's will would be done to protect us and it can as well be done. I wonder if and then we'll stop this exploring. I want to get to talk about your book here and say I have one last question I want to ask you about that. But real quickly, can we can we program these new beings, especially ones who are conscious to pray?

Kevin Kelly: Good question.

Henry Kaestner: Okay. So next question is your point. Before you can answer all the questions or not answers all these questions. Okay. So I love the illustration that we started this off with, which is this sense of we've got this six months bike ride we have this minimalist existence was just us, a bike and a camera, and we were going to this destination. You and I are both on the backside of 50. We talked about this being a 100 year conversation. You and I are likely not going to be around for the full 100 years of. Is there a technological advance that you're hoping that you are around to see? It's like you're you're not diminished moment or like, okay, I just saw that now God, you can take me home.

Kevin Kelly: Oh, boy. That's such a great question. You know, I think my views on AI so gradualistic. I think there is such a span. There's nothing binary about it that I'm not sure that I can see a moment. But there is another technology that I think would be transformative in the world, and that would be nuclear fusion, making an artificial sun on the planet for energy. Yeah. And I think, you know, having that would sort of launch civilization into another league if you actually had economical, smaller versions of this around the world, that would be very transformative. So that would be kind of cool. I don't know if it's like like a die now. I don't know if I feel that, but I think it would be really cool.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. Okay. So I'm with you on that. I actually have a friend of mine who's a part of that movement, and his science fiction is real, and he very much feels it's real that maybe we'll tackle that on another podcast. I want to get to the book. Okay. I love the simplicity of a title that tells you everything you need to know about the book. Excellent advice for living. I'm like, All right, I'm in, I'm in. I probably am. Try to figure out like, what makes this person give me excellent advice. And so I'm sold on Kevin Kelly being able to provide that. I love the way you put it together. The book reads like emails Fix your Faith. I mean, it reads like proverbs. It reads like the books of Proverbs. Are these themes, forgiveness and gratitude. But then you get to some other things, like experimentation, which is cool and advice about debt and all that. I mean, some standouts for Faith driven entrepreneurs as you're looking at this. Maybe we'll start here because we're all point people. You cannot get smart people to work extremely hard just for money.

Kevin Kelly: Okay.

Henry Kaestner: That's excellent advice. Number 129. Okay, maybe start there, but just share with us some excellent advice. Really knowing that our audience are primarily a group of faith driven entrepreneurs that are out there. Entrepreneurship can be a lonely journey. It doesn't need to be. But you've been an entrepreneur. You've seen other entrepreneurs just preach to us, please.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, I mean, it's, I think, related to maybe another piece of advice I have I'm going to maybe not say exactly is it's in the book, but this idea that if you don't care about their people, they're not going to care about your mission. The kind of what we know is that what drives people is more than money. And that's true for even the greediest person, too, and that people are looking for meaning they're craving things that matter, they want to be appreciated. And all those other people factors are actually much bigger than we often give credit to. Sometimes they're subterranean, they're not visible, sometimes they're they're hidden, but they're there. And leaders, I think, often understand that. And they can work and communicate at the emotional level, which is really important. It's not all about money, although that is a big thing and is important. But for motivation, you just need more.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, So there are some things that I think are counter maybe different about the book than maybe one would expect, but makes me just think that there's so much more wisdom in this. You talk a lot about family. You talk about things like dinners without screens. I mean, this guy is a big technologist, right? Dinners without screens and things like that, instilling family rituals. And tell us about how you've balance your vocation with your love of family.

Kevin Kelly: It's funny because going back to the history of Wired. Wired had close to maybe 100 employees, and I was still the only person who had kids out of 100.

Henry Kaestner: Wow.

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, it was very young. Was just mostly kids right out of college and stuff. And so I just I had the privilege of being one of the co-founders, and so I could kind of set my own agenda. And part of that agenda was, you know, how we can be home for meals. And that was just part of the deal, so to speak, was like, Yeah, you get me, but I'm going to come home for meals in the evening. And so that was one way. And I think.

Henry Kaestner: Let me drill on that just a second if you do not mind, Rusty who you and I both know is fond of talking about the shadow of a leader. So when you started off you had almost all childless folks. But you know, WIRED has been around for 30 years and there have been people coming on board. He talks about it's what we do in our behaviors and the example we set through our actions. It helps to create a corporate culture. Would you say that you're insisting on being home for family dinners is something then that your employees felt that much more freer to adopt in their own families?

Kevin Kelly: It didn't happen in the time that we were still there, but we did actually spend a lot of time talking about the company culture and acculturation of people coming in. And one of the early things that Wired did that was very unusual at the time, it's become kind of standard right now was we designed the offices to look like a home office. It was like, okay, we have the ability to design what we want, what should this look like? And we said, Well, looks like this are your home office. And so that was the thing. It was very dog friendly again at the time, 30 years ago. It's very innovative. It's kind of the norm now. And so those are the superficial things. But there was other kind of a cultural thing where we actually really tried to spend some time with new hires and try and say, here's sort of what we think, here's what we think is important, here's how we're going to try and do things. And the magazine was sold after seven years. We lost control. It's a very sad thing. We had an IPO that failed, prompted the sale of the company and the founders left at that point. So I don't know if we had stayed on longer whether those kinds of things would have had the shadow effect that Rusty talks about in the first seven years. There were just ones that I keep getting married in the first seven years now.

Henry Kaestner: Well, I'm going to presume that that would have been the case. I really believe in the shadow of leader and Rusty talks passionately about it. So if you're listening to this, Yes. Do you understand that having the values you need to see this all throughout this book, all throughout this book about excellent advice for living, you're going to see a real focus on the family. And I think that's going to be important for your own family. I also would submit to you, this can be really important for all the children of your employees. Yes super important.

Kevin Kelly: So that there are a couple of kind of entrepreneur advice that are buried in there. I don't know if you get to it, but maybe if I can jump to it. So please, for me, the one of the most profound encapsulation so that I kind of return to and I wrote these originally so I can repeat them to myself, like there a kind of give me myself a little handle onto this big whole book of wisdom, kind of reduced to a little tweet that I could hold and repeat to myself. And one of them is Don't aim to be the best, be the only. Okay. And that's true for corporations and companies as well as individuals.

Henry Kaestner: That's kind of like a Peter riff on Peter Till Zero, the one. Don't be a disruptor within the industry. Create a new industry entirely.

Kevin Kelly: Right, exactly. If you're trying to be best your competition, if you're the best basketball player, but if you're the only, it's like you're the only. That's the thing. You're inimitable, you have your own moat, you know, whatever it is. But that's a high, high bar to get to, particularly for individuals, because it requires an incredible amount of self-knowledge and self-awareness to understand what it is that you are the only about what it is that you do better than anyone else or whatever it is that you can do that no one else can do. And for most of us, like myself, it takes almost your entire life to kind of work on trying to get there. And by the way, this is something you can't uncover or discover yourself. You need family, friends, siblings, colleagues, customers, everybody else around you to help you uncover that. And that's why we are born in the middle of many people. And so that journey of like. Trying to get to The only is another piece of advice for the young people is, if at all possible, try to work on something where nobody has a name for what it is that you're doing, which takes a while to explain to your mother what it is that you do. It's this is this idea that that's where you want to be. You want to be ahead of the language ahead of where there's competition, basically. And, you know, your title should be like something that nobody else has. And it may take a long time before you can figure out what that is. That's a good sign.

Henry Kaestner: Means you're on the right track. So I was going to ask you if there are any hacks to getting there earlier. I'm really glad to hear that you said that it happens in community because otherwise you've got blind spots. You're not going to be able to see it.

Kevin Kelly: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Big time.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, good. Okay. We're at the part of the program now and it's going to end, just so you know, at the end is going to ask you what you're hearing from God through His word, believing that Scripture is alive. It's informative, and it can help us as entrepreneurs in our journey. But before we get there, I've got a bunch of rapid succession. And the key here, the rules are I have to ask the question in less than 15 seconds, you have to answer less than 30. And then then I'll bring our faith driven entrepreneurs, especially for those who are commuting to work. To work on time. Okay, here we go. You have a deep love and appreciation for Asia. Tell us about that. Is it part of that trip to Taiwan, I presume?

Kevin Kelly: I began there and I spent the next 50 years photographing disappearing traditions in Asia. And I made books about this. And those traditions are going away very fast. I think there's still value in looking at them and not nostalgic, because at the same time, Asia is actually now the future. More than half the people on this planet live there and they are rapidly kind of making their own version of what the future should be. So go visit and see what they have in mind, because what they think about things is probably more important than what the U.S., which is 1/10 the population thinks.

Henry Kaestner: I am so with you, I was there last week in K.L. and in Jakarta, and I love Asia. Okay. Wired named Marshall McLuhan its patron saint. I don't think our audience knows much about him. Can you give a quick overview of his work and why it's so important to Wired's mission?

Kevin Kelly: Well, Louis Rossetto, the main co-founder of Wired, was enamored of McLuhan and his understanding of how media in general worked. And he wanted to honor McLuhan, whom I had never really read very much. And I think that's part of the point is you don't read McLuhan, you hear about him is his idea that this kind of weird, oral written blend Lewis wanted him to be on the message. So I said we should make sure patron saint, which was an honor to him, and also kind of a joke because he was very Catholic in his background. And so the idea was that McLuhan was suggesting that, you know, the medium itself has actually more influence on people than the messages that the medium conveyed. That was his basic thing, is that the medium if you have social media, you're going to be affected by that. If you're using it, no matter what is said on it, just the shape and the power of the medium will influence us. And I think that's the primary McLuhan insight. And so that if you go online, no matter what you say on it or how it's used, it's going to shape you because of the nature of that online media. And I think that's true and it's a profound insight.

Henry Kaestner: Okay. So it's a good insight. It's challenging, encouraging for us at the FDE podcast. What's a story that you wish you could have written or published in Wired that never happened before your departure?

Kevin Kelly: Yeah, there was a very simple one. It wasn't even really a writing, but it was I wanted to photograph all of the people at work in the two block radius of where WIRED was south of Market. As a document, knowing that in 30 years we would look back on those and they would say a lot about what we thought was going on. You know, the dated computers and everything. And for various reasons, even though I can't pay for that, it never happened. And I still regret it because it would have been an incredible exhibit, an incredible document today.

Henry Kaestner: But each one of our listeners can do a version of that.

Kevin Kelly: Yes, and I did actually. I did have them do it at the 20th anniversary. We did a version of that going around, and I interviewed people and we documented it, and it was as good as I thought it was going to be. But we should have had done it when? 30 years ago. But you can do it. And I recommend doing it.

Henry Kaestner: Okay, Two last ones. What's a charity organization you like to support?

Kevin Kelly: I like to support. Right now we do Borders without Frontiers for their work partners, and Health is another one that we support for member who unfortunately died recently.

Henry Kaestner: So the Doctors Without Frontiers, the Medecins Sans Frontieres.

Kevin Kelly: Yes, Right. And doctors Partners with Health, who is committed to bringing world class medical care to anywhere in the third developing world like Haiti, if that's possible. And he was doing that. And every project, it's something we've been supporting for 20 years, which is giving the gift of breeding animals to people in developing world, which entails a bit of passing on of like passing that forward. So the the deal is you get to breeding animals and at some point you have to give to breeding animal to someone else.

Henry Kaestner: To be fruitful and multiply. Yep. Last one. What is God telling you through his word? Maybe today. Maybe it's this week, but sometime recently.

Kevin Kelly: So the thing that I'm working on is that making God bigger. I want to believe in the biggest God possible. And I think our ideas and concepts are very bounded by our own experience. And I'm trying to. Imagine the biggest God possible because that's the God I want to follow.

Henry Kaestner: What a great way to end. And just my very, very, very quick riff on that. I have been fascinated by the revivals that are happening and made me go back and look at some. Nicky Gumbel talks about the one in the Hebrides and the big element of revivals is to understand the holiness of God. Calvin might say that, you know, it's the chief and a man is to know God and enjoyed forever. And if we can all endeavor to know God and not fear him is he might be afraid of him, but just to just be in awe of him. I think that's the beginning of all wisdom and the best chance we have to be our best version of the only. Which is another big takeaway from our talk today, which I love, which is not to be the best, but to be the only and then to be intentional about seeking God and community and friendship out to figure out what is that? What a great quest. Kevin, this has been awesome. Thank you very, very much for your time, for your your insight you've had in my life and so many others.

Kevin Kelly: And my pleasure. Thank you for your interest in my book. Excellent Advice for Living, which will be out in May 2nd. And I really, really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you.

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