My guest today is Kevin Kelly, who co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for the first seven years. As one of the most important futurists of our generation, he&#8217;s published a number of books including The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules for the New Economy which is my favorite one. Coolest of all, he&#8217;s also a founding member of the board of the Long Now Foundation, a non-profit devoted to encouraging long-term thinking.
We discussed the Long Now Foundation at the end of this episode in a conversation about what it means to be a good ancestor for future generations. A couple of things stood out from this conversation. First, I like how Kevin focuses on clarity above all else whenever he writes. He sees himself as a great editor, and writing is the process by which he discovers what he&#8217;s thinking. Second, we build off the ideas of Marshall McLuhan who was the founding saint of Wired Magazine. Through McLuhan, we explored Kevin&#8217;s Christianity, how screens are shaping consciousness, and how our technologies have a gravitational life of their own. Please enjoy my conversation with Kevin Kelly.
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Show Notes
2:22 &#8211; Exotropic energy and how Kevin uses it to explain the negative entropy we see throughout the universe.
6:24 &#8211; Why California has become the world hub of extropy.
10:33 &#8211; The transition from the written word to text and screens and how it affects our psyche.
15:27 &#8211; What made Marshall McLuhan&#8217;s writing so paradoxical and engaging.
18:34 &#8211; How science fiction has usurped religious teachings as the modern leader of theological thought.
24:06 &#8211; Why our limitation as seeing the future only &#8220;through the rearview mirror&#8221; is driven by a disease Kevin calls &#8220;thinkism&#8221;.
31:25 &#8211; How the Amish have utilized an evidence-based method in their adoption of new technologies.
44:46 &#8211; Why technology that we create will always be weaponized in the end.
49:01 &#8211; Why Kevin believes that the evidence shows the increase of accessibility of and power in technology has not correlated with our ability to harm.
53:15 &#8211; How moral progress is a natural byproduct of technological progress.
57:26 &#8211; Why Kevin sees a fundamental transformation in how Maslow&#8217;s Hierarchy of Needs is thought about and utilized in people&#8217;s lives.
1:05:25 &#8211; Why Kevin&#8217;s futurology is much closer to simply noticing the present that it is divination.
1:15:20 &#8211; How moving away from improving everything&#8217;s efficiency is against the very things we desire as humans.
1:23:35 &#8211; Why writing for Kevin is nothing but a means to an end to discovering his thoughts.
1:29:43 &#8211; How thinking with &#8216;the long now&#8217; can help us become better ancestors and leave a better world for the future.

David Perell

Kevin Kelly: Seeing the Future

My guest today is Kevin Kelly, who co-founded Wired Magazine in 1993 and served as its Executive Editor for the first seven years. As one of the most important futurists of our generation, he&#8217;s published a number of books including The Inevitable, What Technology Wants, and New Rules for the New Economy which is my favorite [&hellip;]