Ep 26: Kevin Kelly (Part 2) - WIRED Co-Founder, Polymath, Most Interesting Man In The World?

Tim Ferriss (0:00)

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If you didn't catch the first part, you might want to do that before venturing in, but we cover a lot of topics and it's a conversation.

So if you don't mind your stories as more of a jigsaw puzzle, then by all means, keep on listening. So without further ado, please enjoy part two of The Tim Ferriss Show with Kevin Kelly. All show notes, links, et cetera, can be found at fourhourworkweek.com forward slash podcast. And thank you for listening.

SPEAKER_2 (2:18)

Optimal, minimal, at this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

Tim Ferriss (2:40)

Does religion play a large part in your life right now?

Kevin Kelly (2:44)

In a certain sense, not in a kind of a ritualistic sense. I just wrote a book called What Technology Wants.

Tim Ferriss (2:49)

Excellent book. I highly recommend it.

Kevin Kelly (2:52)

It was a theory of technology and I was trying to put technology in the context of the cosmos. So I think what religion gives me is permission to think about cosmic questions. I'm right in the middle of finishing a Kickstarter-funded graphic novel that's about angels and robots. And the intention there was to fictionalize the idea that robots would some days have souls, but these souls would be coming from angels. And so that there was this intersection of these two kind of impossible worlds of conscious robots who were ensouled by angels. And the reason why this was sort of interesting was that the idea was that the angels that ensoul us have been trained, they had been given moral guidance. But if you don't give the spirit some kind of moral guidance, then they can wreak havoc, and so it was this idea that when we make robots, we're actually gonna have to train them to be ethical.

We just can't make a free being and not train it. So it was a way to rehearse and think about some of the consequences of technology today. So I think my religion gives me permission to ask those questions without embarrassment, to say, well, what is the general direction of the arc of evolution? Is it pointed somewhere? How does technology fit into the greater cosmos? What does it mean?

What drives it? Why is there more of it? Is this a good thing? And so I think having a kind of, I consider this kind of an other view. So I have a other view that I'm sympathetic to other world views. I don't necessarily have to believe all the other world views, but I get the idea that if you have another world view, that can be very helpful in seeing other world views.

So people have a world view even though they don't know it, but I have a world view and I know that I have a world view.