Transcript

#432: Books I've Loved — Kevin Kelly

Optimal minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. And I'll save your personal question. Now it is seeming like that. My cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal empty. No

Books I've loved on the Tim Ferris show is exclusively brought to you by Audible. There couldn't be a better sponsor for this series, my dear listeners and readers. I have used Audible for so many years. As long as I can remember, I love it. Audible has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I listen when I'm taking walks. I listen while I'm cooking. I listen whenever I can. And if you're looking for a place to start, I can recommend three of my favorites. The first

Is the Tau of Seneca. by Seneca, if you want to hear my favorite letters of all time, touches on stoic philosophy, calmness under duress, etc. Next is The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, G A I M A N, one of my favorites. Even if you're a nonfiction purist, this is the fiction book that you need to listen to. Neil also has perhaps the most calming voice of all time. And third, Greg McEwen's Essentialism. Subtitle The Disciplined Pursuit of Less. This is one of my favorite books of the past few years. Combines very well with the eighty twenty principle.

But more on Audible. Every month, Audible members get one credit for any audiobook on the site, plus a choice of multiple Audible originals from a rotating selection. They also get access to daily news digests from the likes of the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post. as well as guided meditation programs. And here are some other amazing audible features. And I use a bunch of these. You can download titles and listen offline anytime, anywhere. I use this feature. Even when I could get access, I'll put my phone on, say airplane mode, because I don't want to get bothered with notifications and I'm taking a walk to clear my head and you can listen to titles offline in a case like that, or on a plane or whatever. Obviously I'm not flying much these days. The app

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That's Tim Ferris Show listeners, a free audiobook with a thirty day trial. Membership. And uh again, my list if you want to check them out, the Tow of Seneca. The graveyard book? Essentialism, those are just three. There's so many good ones out there.

Just go to audible.com. Slash Tim and browse unmatched selection of audio programs. Then download your free title and start listening. It's that easy. Let's check it out. Go to audible.com slash Tim Or text Tim T I M to five hundred five hundred to get started. Today.

Check it out, audible.com slash Tim. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is usually my job to sit down with world class performers of all different types. startup founders, investors, chess champions, Olympic athletes, you name it. to tease out the habits that you can apply in your own lives.

This episode, however, is an experiment and part of a short form series that I'm doing simply called Books I've Loved. I've invited some amazing past guests, close friends, and new faces to share their favorite books. describe their favorite books, the books that have influenced them, changed them, transformed them for the better. And I hope you pick up one or two new mentors. In the form of books. from this new series and apply the lessons in your own life.

I had a lot of fun. putting this together, inviting these people to participate, and have learned so, so much myself. I hope that is also the case for you. Please Enjoy. Yeah. Hi, this is Kevin Kelly.

I'm Senior Maverick at Wired Magazine. And I'm an author of a couple of books, mostly about future technology. But in a previous life. I ran a magazine called The Whole Worth Review. And co evolution quarterly.

that reviewed books on a regular basis Um, and in that capacity I have Bread through Yeah. I don't know, many, many, many thousands of books. I'm speaking right this moment in a two story library of my own.

that's filled with many, many thousands of books that I own. I love books. I read books, I write books. And so I care about the kind of books that change people's minds and I want to talk about a few of those kind of books briefly. I went to

Tell you about four books that have changed my mind and maybe they'll change your mind. Um, I think the power of a book to change people's mind is in an amazing Superpower? That we could hand something

Changed how you thought and maybe even looked at the world. The kind of books I'm gonna recommend are non fiction books, but fiction can certainly do that. There have been books of fiction that I've read that have changed my view, but I'm going to talk about four non fiction books. The

Changed my mind and And um I'm gonna start with the most recent one, one that has just come out. A matter of weeks ago. And it's called

Open borders. And Open Borders is a graphic novel. That's What we call it.

Comic book for adults. And it's a graphic novel written by an economist. Brian Kaplan. And the graphic novel is illustrated by an artist, Zach Wienersmith. Um, and together they have made this comic book for adults, which is about

The science and ethics of immigration. And it's probably one of the most radical books that I have read in years. And it's radical because it has a radical idea, and the radical idea simply is that Everybody in the world individually in every country in the world would benefit from having open borders

Meaning the For anybody to live anywhere they want. uh if they obey local laws. Now there are going to be variations of that principle.

But the basic premise is is that you have open borders, that you don't have borders that restrict where people can live and work. And in a certain kind of intellectual level, we could can imagine some future society on this planet where it becomes a universal human right. To be able to

migrate and live anywhere you want on the planet as long as you pay local. And That idea is seems very strange to many people right now. It seems unworkable or idealistic or in some ways simply a fantasy. And Brian Kaplan in this book goes through the scientific Economic reasons.

All research And evaluated Uh and makes a Very clear, fast fun case with comics. About

Why our kind of intuitions may be wrong about this And why the fact is is that it is the most and best economic thing we could possibly do For ourselves and for others. And there again, there are many objections about that you may have many obvious ones.

Um and he goes through all of them offering reasons why those objections aren't true. Show why it's not true. But At the end of the book he even goes a little bit further and says well, even if you kind of don't accept all my arguments and you decide That

maybe we meet some halfway measures. He offers a bunch of different what he calls keyhole solutions. That are less than this perfect open borders, but it's still superior to what we have.

And I'm maybe not giving it credit because it sounds very dull and boring, but in fact because it's a graphic novel, it reads very f fast. It there's a kind of actually humor element in it. And um it's very, very clear It's very methodical. And

I believe it might even change your mind if you have some doubts about the premise. So that's Open borders. Very new. Very current.

Very radical. Very persuasive. And Fun to read. The second book is one that's a little bit older and is written by a friend of mine, Stuart Brand, who used to be

the editor and was the founder of the whole earth catalogs. And he's read a lot of books too. But he wrote a book that I really found changed my mind about the spaces that I live in. the structures that we work in

the buildings that surround our lives. And his book is called How Buildings Learn by Stuart Brand. And it's an illustrated book with lots of pictures. But the main thesis of this book is that when you make a building, when you build something, when you build a structure, when you build a home or office building or even a factory, you're making a prediction about what you think it's gonna be used for'cause'cause you're gonna design it for us with certain uses in mind. And like all predictions, most of these

Buildings will be not used over the long term for what they were originally built for. people build homes and they have additional kids and they need to remodel and then they they begin to remodel, or they or they uh want a home office. And so Commercial buildings or

constantly being renovated and r for different kinds of stores, or differ from a store to a warehouse, a warehouse to a store. And stores idea is is that we should build buildings with the idea that they're going to be modified. So you want to make them sort of easy already to be modified by the current people who are using them. And that the buildings that sort of last the longest are actually ones that have been modified many times and therefore they are the ones that sort of are more able and capable of being modified, and he calls that learning. So this is idea that

When we wanna make Our surroundings, our offices, the places that we live in, we should keep in mind that we're probably going to modify what they're being used for, and therefore we're going to modify those spaces. And so we want to make adaptable structures, adaptable spaces, and it doesn't mean some high tech thing that might m even mean

making something a square shell that's very easy to modify within. It kind of depends. But the point is is that Buildings are a adaptable and adapted in time. So you want to think of these structures as having the element of time. That changed my mind. The change my mind was a book.

Called The Innovator's Dilemma by Clay Christensen is kinda famous now. It may not be a hundred percent correct in all its details because it was based on some data that was preliminary, but the basic idea is that when you're trying to do innovation That there's a dilemma in the innovation. There's a dilemma in in the organization that's trying to make the innovation. And the dilemma is simply that

In the short term. It makes more sense to incrementally improve what you know how to do. rather than throwing it out and starting over and taking a chance on something new and maybe bigger that might not work. And that

In a business sense, it always makes more sense. At the business bottom line in the short term to just incrementally improve what works. And that to

Take a chance to to to do the risk of innovation, which is very likely to fail. And that's almost the definition of innovation, is that most of the time it's going to fail. Um With the chance that you may have a hit a higher yield. Doesn't Really make

short term economic sense. You have to take a longer view. It c it the calculus only works if you're willing to take a longer view. And so the dilemma is how do you do that? How do you Balance. that risk of improving Excellence.

in what you know how to do versus Going with non excellence, going with Failure. In trying something new. So

People think that It's always obvious. that you want to innovate. But the point of this book is that it's actually not obvious. that you actually have to kinda go beyond the obvious. You have to kinda push through

The obvious. Because the obvious thing is to not innovate. And so he gives case studies about why he believes this is true and that aha to m

Really change my mind about thinking about how you be creative because To some people. Being creative seems natural and the obvious thing to do. But if you really are creative It's not going to always be so obvious as

And that is actually When you want to remember. This book which is that you have to take a longer term view to kind of continue

Trying to innovate. Innovators dilemma, Clay Christiansen. And the last one I want to talk about is uh another book that changed my mind called The Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse. This is a little known book. It's kinda hard to read. It's written by kind of a

Theologian A lot of it I mean it was kind of written in the language of religious orientation. Uh a lot of it is really maybe not so useful, but read the first and last chapters. And the basic premise that changed my mind was

To understand that in the world there were two kinds of games. There were finite games in which there were winners and losers. We often call that a zero sum. If somebody wins, someone else has to lose. And in those kind of games the rules are fixed. You have fairness if you someone is breaking the rules, it's unfair, you don't want to play. And

You play until somebody wins. And most of the games in the world they're about winning and losing. But there's another kind of game. Called the infinite game. And there is There aren't winners or losers. the rules are not fixed. You're kind of constantly changing the rules just to extend the game. And the purpose of the game is just to keep the game going. The purpose of the game is to bring as many people in to play the game. The purpose of the game is to kind of invent new games.

And that Non zero sum, or what we might want to call the positive sum is really the basis of most of the good things we have in life. In a certain sense you could say that a company that is working or successful is an infinite game because If it's really doing its job well, it's not

taking from other competitors is actually enabling Other people. to do their own thing. It's actually creating jobs and creating money flow and creating new objects and services and goods that can be improved upon and used by others and maybe making an ecosystem. It's in some ways enlarging the pie rather than just taking a slice of the pie. And that idea of kind of the ever expanding pie is the view that I now see the world and in helps me kind of look at things and even decide what to do

By saying Is this a finite game? And then I don't want to play. Or is this an infinite game in which sign me up? So finite infinite games.

James Carse. Those are four books that changed my mind and maybe they will change yours. I hope they do. Thanks Tim for giving me a chance to rant about some favorite books. Bye. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday at provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend. And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off.

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