The Power of Being Lost | Kevin Kelly on Impact Theory

You can't be a scientist that's 100% efficient. If you're a scientist 100% efficiency, that means you're discovering nothing new. You're not making any experiments that fail. It's through that failure that we learn. It's the trial and error. It's the the error part is hugely important. And so the challenge for me is that you don't want to over specialize. You you always want to be testing yourself and trying to go wider to make sure that you are not optimizing prematurely. Everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. You're here because you believe that human potential is nearly limitless, but you know that having potential is not the same as actually doing something with it. So our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right. Today's guest is the legendary futurist who co-founded Wired Magazine. A multiple time New York Times best-selling author, his stunningly accurate take on the intersection of humanity and technology have made him the de facto gravitational center of the very culture of tech. Silicon Valley have called his books must-reads and Hollywood has leaned on him heavily for the creation of believable futures. His work deciphering macro trends in technology cannot be overstated and as the executive editor and self-proclaimed senior maverick at Wired, he twice led his team to winning the prestigious National Magazine Award for General Excellence. Additionally, his own writing has appeared in many distinguished publications including the New York Times, The Economist, Science, and The Wall Street Journal. Pretty amazing if you ask me for a college dropout who traded a formal education to spend roughly a decade roaming the deepest recesses of Asia photographing nearly forgotten people and their disappearing traditions and at one point making ends meet by running a newsletter in Tehran, Iran. But this hands-on approach to life is what ultimately put him at the center of the then emerging world of technology. As a rule, he does not just read about things, he experiences them and usually long before anyone else. He was deeply immersed in the internet by 1981. He co-founded the Hackers Conference in 1984, launched Cyberthon, the first round-the-clock VR Jamboree in 1990, and wrote a treatise on the biological nature of technology in '94 before most people even had computers. Outside of technology, he's also a founding member of or involved with some of the most profound nonprofits around, including the Long Now Foundation, the Rosetta Project, which is building an archive of all documented human languages, and the Last, which is exploring how to revive or restore endangered or extinct species, including the woolly mammoth. So, please help me in welcoming the man that Tim Ferriss called the real-life most interesting man in the world, the best-selling author of The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly. That was great. Yes, it was great. Good to have you. Wow, what an intro. Writing intros is a lot of fun for me. It's where I really find the guest. Obviously, I'd been very aware of your work and what you've done. Um, but like I didn't know anything about what you were doing traveling Asia. I didn't know about your love for photography. So, in putting those together, I'm really trying to like get inside what makes you you. And I would say you've lived a really atypical life. What are your thoughts on building a life versus finding it or uncovering your passions inside versus creating them? I think there's really no difference between inventing something and discovering it. The steps that you take are almost identical. So, the language is really not so important. But the main task that you want to have is to understand that you have to make it happen, that you have to uncover it or discover it that this is something that is an option for you and even for people who may not feel as privileged as I was in growing up I think that there is far more choice in how they come to what they want to do and how they find themselves than they think at first and it's a long long process. I think I'm I'm an older guy so I have a nice big long resume because I've been around a long time and so I think that's the benefit of keep going where I've been going which is mostly trying to find out what it is that I can do that only I can do. That's the real challenge and that is something that I think takes your life to figure out. What I find really fascinating is that you talk about process and the notion of doing things that only you can do but at some point it's having to learn to learn. It's getting good at something. It's investing the time to build a skill set and what did that look like for you especially when you did it it had to have seemed so counterintuitive just to drop out of college after a year and I think you said one of your only regrets in life is that you actually went for a year. Exactly. So how is that a regret and then what did it look like to go explore? Yeah so so um uh you know I grew up in the 50s and 60s and um there was a little bit more of a sense of a plan to life. There was a sequence a ladder that you went through an expectation. There weren't things like gap years or internships. You were kind of just a little bit on a theme ride where you were just going to go to the next station and so I had a kind of a more of a binary choice of you go to college or you don't. Um dropping out was was not as cool as it is today. At the time, this was a little bit more of like defeat than it was an you know an exercise in self- expression. Um so I I dropped out um after instead of studying for my finals, I was reading um Ayn Rand and uh Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead where there was this architect who was doing his thing and I was susceptible to the Whole Earth Catalog which said you should basically invent your life. Um and I said I I decided to to try and do that to try and see how far I could go in you know um trying to assemble something that seemed to me to be worth giving my energy to. There was very little sense of success at that point. You know, in 1969, 1970, um the prospects of not going to college was mean you were going a different tract. Right? This was you were you were not ever going to be rich, you were not ever going to be really successful, but that was okay with me because I just felt that um it was kind of like the Henry David Thoreau idea that you would find yourself and that was enough of an achievement in life if you could find yourself. And so there was a sense of like I'm going to do things because I was passionate about it and I was passionate about photography. I decided to follow that where it went with no expectation that that would ever be a career or lead to any kind of success. And so I have to say that, you know, it looks kind of cool in retrospect, but at the time it's kind of like, you know, I'm a kid with no prospects and no money, lot of time. Um but that actually in retrospect was probably the best place to be. One of the things that I cling to, I don't know, because I didn't have the fortitude to go against the grain like that when I was younger, when I find people that did, I really want to understand. Like because I think people watching now live in a different world where they are going to have to create their own life. Yeah. But they still have the familial pressures of following a traditional track. So, how did you have the fortitude to look at your parents who were saying, "Think of the example you're setting for your siblings." Like and and face that down and Well, I mean, I I have to say, so as a as a kid even, I I was a little I was always very self-motivated person. So, as a kid, I had a I built a chemistry lab in my basement, I had a nature museum as a little kid, and I had kids in my neighborhood recruited collecting stuff for me. And so, I had a little bit of like I was doing things on my own to begin with. I was a maker in that sense. At a time when maker wasn't really, again, cool or uh admired. In the 1960s and even the '70s, if you told someone that you were working at a startup, that was a way of saying you were unemployed. The whole point that people wanted to do was to go work for a big corporation, go through college, and and and arrive at a place that had a brand name. And so, um so, my efforts to kind of do this again, there was no big plan. It was it was more temperamental um uh orientation that I that I liked to be motivated by the things I was interested in, and I sort of didn't care about success at that time. That was not I would never describe myself as a successful person when I was younger. I was influenced in kind of finding me, and maybe that was my measure of success, and I didn't feel I had found it. So, I was on a I was on the process, but I I never have have you ever told anyone that I was trying to be successful? That was not in my vocabulary. Um and I think that's maybe a more recent framing of things where we can actually tell people that you are successful because you have found yourself. That it's independent of how much money you make. It's independent of how much how many followers you have. It's really about whether you have come to find out what it is that you can contribute what impact you can have that no one else will have. What I love about your story is looking back on your life knowing how successful you become and how you find your way to the absolute core of what most people think of now is like the the center of coolness. Right. Technology, the center of wealth creation, technology, the center of America's power, Silicon Valley. Like you've got this concept of um premature optimization. Right. Which I found so interesting. Mhm. What is it and how do you think that helped you? So the the concept of premature optimization is a very technical fancy term that comes from biology of all places. And um biologists like to think about the evolution of a species of an organism over time as what they call hill climbing. So you can imagine a picture in your mind of a landscape with hills and stuff that over time a species is sort of climbing the hill and then at the top of the hill is maximum adaptation. It's kind of like perfection. It's sort of like the giraffe in the savanna or the you know starfish underwater who has found the perfect place to be for that environment. So they are climbing the hill. And the problem is of course in the real world of evolution those hills are going up and down. They're changing as one organism adapts to another, there's co-evolution going on, which means the hills are changing. And so, what can happen with an organism is that it becomes perfectly adapted to that hill. It's on the top of the hill, the summit, is optimized. But there's a bigger hill that's growing up over here because things have changed, and suddenly they're not on the bigger hill anymore. They're on a false summit. They've optimized prematurely cuz they can't get to the big hill. And that's true for companies. Companies like Olivetti, the Italian typewriter company, could optimize typewriters, but then the word processors came up, which were even a bigger hill, and they're stuck. They're prematurely optimized on mechanical typewriters. And the challenge is for organisms, for organizations, for individuals is that the only way you can get up to the bigger hill is to go down. Is to go back down that devolve, become less perfect, become less optimized, become less profitable, what all the things that you don't want any company or person to do. And so, you have to have this period where you're kind of going backwards, letting go. And so, um the issue always is that you, as you're climbing the hills, you always want to be surveying this landscape more and more to make sure that you're not prematurely optimizing, that there aren't bigger, you know, mountains to climb. Or if you're skill-wise, that you are not perfecting a skill that's going to be obsolete, that you are going wider and wider as you climb up so that you don't get stuck on the false summit. And so, the the the the the challenge for me, um and for others in this world where things are changing so fast, is that you don't want to over-specialize. You you always want to be testing yourself and trying to go wider to make sure that you are not optimizing prematurely. I love that so much and I really hope people are listening to that. And that certainly has been true in my life. So I start my entrepreneurial journey anyway in technology, discover I do not enjoy that, start over after almost a decade in nutrition, have massive success, after almost a decade again transition out of that and into media. And so always it it is this starting over. And you've got a powerful notion about how useful and powerful unlearning is. Right. What does that process look like? How do people do that in their life? How do they stomach the downturn and believe that they can go back up? What's that process? Yeah, so so so part of the general lesson I would say from the kind of digital firmament that we're in right now, this kind of constant upgrading, the speed and acceleration of new things, is that all of us are going to be perpetual newbies. We're all new. You know, the the the the millennials these days kind of rub their hands, "Oh, we're digital natives." It was like, "Yes, this year." But in 10 years from now, you're going to be a newbie like everybody else and have to relearn everything and unlearn what you already knew. And so there is a sense in which constant lifelong learning is the main node that you have to be in. Um and that part of learning that that people who study it understand is that a lot of it is is unlearning what you already knew, kind of forgetting or trying to overcome ingrained patterns of thought previously. So you have to sort of like you have to think differently about things. And by the way, that's one of the reasons why I travel a lot because I find that there's almost nothing that forces me to unlearn and think in a different pattern than traveling in a real sense of kind of being on the ground and and confronting things that I don't understand that everybody else understands. You talked about the the shifting peaks and unlearning, but you've also talked about, okay, in a world where all this stuff is moving, the thing you have to get good at is learning to learn and that really learning a specific skill may not be as useful as it once was. So, what can people that are in the thick of the job market now that are going to get slapped around by robotics and AI? Like how should they be thinking? So so you know, a very common question really related that a lot of parents ask me is oh yeah, I hear all this stuff is coming AI and the VR and what should my kid be studying in school? And I think really there's no language that's going to survive very long. There's very few even skills that aren't going to be obsolete by the time you graduate. So most of the jobs that you will have, I'm talking to somebody maybe who's in the high school right now, are probably jobs that don't exist right now. And so then this idea of well the only really skill you want to learn in say school is the meta skill of how to learn. And what's really interesting to me is that that's almost taught nowhere. And it turns out that um almost nobody, including me, really knows how we learn ourselves. So it's not just how to learn how to learn, but how you learn best how to learn. That's a high bar. And to do that is not going to be something you're just trying around. You need to be You need to have teachers. You need to be tested. You need to be scored. You need to practice. There are lots of different ways to learn, so each variety you have to test yourself and become better in that. And so so to actually learn how to learn would require would require years of discipline improvement. And we don't have that. So, that means that neither I nor you really have have learned how to optimize our own learning. But, that should be the general common thing that you're going to be taught in school and that when you graduate you have a meta-skill of knowing how you learn and whatever kind of problem comes up, you at least know your best method for learning that. I think that idea is so powerful and one of the coolest things that I came across while I was researching you is the book that you referenced Art & Fear. Yeah. And pottery class. Tell us that cuz that hit me like a ton of bricks. So, so the idea of about art is that um only flawed people make art and that um the way that you want to do art and the only way you're ever going to make great art is to do it a lot. And this is true for science, for innovation, for business is that you have to make lots of it. You have to do it again and again and again because um that's really the only way to to get to these optimization points um is is by doing again and again. And and the great example to kind of prove this point was this professor art professor who had a pottery class. And he gave his students two choices to be graded. In one choice, they could submit one or two pieces and get their grade evaluated on those one or two pieces. They could put all their effort into making these as great as they could um and they would be graded on the worth of those two pieces. The other one he says, you can just do it by weight. I'm going to grade you on poundage. How many pounds of stuff that you make every year or by the end of the year. And he said, what the the remarkable thing was that at the end of the year, almost invariably, the best piece came not from the people focusing on the few, but the people who were making lots of the pieces. Okay, so the best piece will always come out of that lot. And I think there is lots of lessons for us in culture and in business. And just in the sense that you have to kind of come back and repeat and repeat and repeat because you don't know what works. You whatever you're going to do, you just have to do it lots of it. And that kind of goes back to the 10,000 hours of practice, you know, this idea of um you know, mastering, becoming a master of by doing it a lot of times. And what I think makes that story so powerful is putting you in context a bit. Wired, certainly when you were in charge, wasn't so much about the technology itself as it was the um the culture around the technology, which then makes me think how much of Wired was influenced by this period where you're finding your voice, right? So, when I think about somebody watching this and I think about how many of them feel lost and they have no idea what to do with their life. Your story is this incredible beacon of there's a process. There's a process. Don't optimize too early. Go get lost. You've said that um optimization is overvalued, success is overvalued, uh wealth is overvalued. I mean, you've got like this whole list of all the things that we all think are like the things we're supposed to strive for. So, what does it mean to find your voice? Yeah, yeah. You know, I mean, I'm taking to heart cuz I have my son is just graduating from college next in May, right? And um he's been working very hard. He you know, he's good grades all the way through school. He always worked hard, studies hard. He has internships this every a And so, my advice to him graduating was, "Look, you need to goof off for a couple of years. Don't try to get a job. You know, live at starvation wages. Just have enough money to have beans and oatmeal, whatever it is. And goof off. Just play around. Imagine you were a billionaire, you know, and you're taking a sabbatical or something. Just play a little bit. And um I I I I I I I think um part of this finding yourself is playing with no goal. That's what play is. It's you're you're busy, you're doing stuff. The reason why the young is always discovering new things is they have so much time to waste. I'm a big believer in in inefficiency. I think efficiency is for robots. Efficiency is for the AIs and the and the robots, the machines. And and I really think that people should should be inefficient, deliberately productively inefficient, playing around, trying stuff, mastering some video game that takes 50 hours just because it's fun. I think that's where the the new ideas will come. That's where the the the the new direction. So, so there there there is there is a sense in which I really value that kind of um goofing off, playing, trying, hobbies, um exploring just because you can. Um and if you read the biographies of anybody who's successful, they all have that period of time in their lives when they were lost, didn't know it. So, so I embrace that sense of being lost. I love that. And I really think that people don't take the time to do that. And I want to put it in the context of innovation. So, you've talked really powerfully about this. What's the secret to innovation and how does play and getting lost and taking chances and failing all feed into that? Yeah, so so so the um the first thing I would say about innovation this is with respect to my current interest in artificial intelligence and what we'll do as humans when we have lots of AI. Um the all the processes that we most value, like being creative or exploring, art, even human human relationships, are all inherently inefficient. Um you can't be a scientist that's 100% efficient. If you're a scientist 100% efficiency, that means you're discovering nothing new. You're not making any experiments that fail. It's through the failure that we learn. It's the trial and error. It's the the error part is hugely important. The really big innovations are always coming from outside. And so that sense of kind of like what I want to nurturing the edges. Trying to be at the edge of things, which again is not the natural inclination if you want success. You want to be at the center. You want to be where it's happening. You want to be in the the room where it happens. But in fact, you don't want to be at the room. You want to be at the edges because that is where it's going to happen. However, the edges is where all the failure happens, too. Right? So in order to support innovation, you have to be comfortable with failing. You have to be comfortable with things not working out. You have to be at ease with the long term saying, "I know that most of these are not going to to work out, and I'm going to just accept it." That was the Thomas Edison's great insight when he made the first idea factory, which was that most of these are going to fail, but each each time I make a failure, I know something that I didn't know before, and that's an advance. And so I think part of the innovation process is understanding that most of the time it's going to fail, that that is the price that and you have to be really comfortable with trying things that don't work. So, putting that into your belief that you're always looking for something that only you can do. What does that process look like for you? And quite honestly, why is it important to only do something that only you can do? It's a really fair question. So, um I thought that I think there's kind of like stages that a normal person um who's in say the the workforce entails. And the first one that I was in, most people are in, is when you get your first job, you were really concerned about doing the job right. Doing it well. Making sure you don't screw up. And after you accomplish that and you're at ease with that, you then say, "Well, you know, I'm I'm good at this now. I think I'd like to go on and start to do things that um are fun. Okay? And then um you can do that. And then after a while, maybe well, they're fun, I can do them well, and they pay a lot. So, that's like success for most people. It's like, "Okay, that's what How can it be better? I have something that I like to do, I get paid to it, and I do it well." And then what happens though is that there going to be maybe more opportunities for you to do something well and get paid and have fun. Um and then you you need another criteria to decide, "Well, how do I decide what I'm going to do?" And the answer there is that um you really want to look for the things that no one else is going to do unless you do them. So, in other words, if someone else is going to do it, you don't have to do it. And so, for me, that came from my experience at Wired that this insight where as an editor, mostly mostly what I'm trying to do is give assignments to writers to write stories that I come up with. And um often times, I'd have an idea for a story that was really good, and I couldn't sell it to any any writer. I said, "Okay, it must have been a stupid idea." But then the idea would come back a year later and I would try to give it away to someone else and nobody would take it. They would say, "That's not a very good idea." And I'm thinking, "I thought it was a pretty good idea. I guess not." And then it then it go away. And then if it came back a third time, I would try it. And then I'd say, "You know, this is a really good idea. I can't get rid of it. I can't kill it. No one else wants it. I have to do this idea." And those are always the best ones for me because it was obvious no one else was going to do it. I couldn't even give it away. I couldn't even pay people to do it. And so those became the best stories. Those became the best writing because um there was no one else who was going to do that. I think that idea makes so much sense when people understand about you that you use I know I'm going to die as a way to like razor sharpen your decision-making. Right. Um two things I find utterly fascinating. One, you have the clock that based on actuarial tables, if I'm not mistaken, counts down the number of days that you're expected to live, which is unnerving, I think, for most people. Futurama based an episode on your clock. Very interesting. But the thing that really captured my imagination was when you decided to live truly live like you only had 6 months left. Right. Right. What was that? Why did you do that first of all and then what was that experience actually like? It's kind of complicated about why I did the only 6 months to live. Um I would do better by referring listeners to the one of the first episodes of This American Life podcast where I told my story for the first time. It has to do with a religious experience in Jerusalem where I had an assignment to live as if I'm going to die in 6 months. And I was very healthy 20-year-old. I knew that it was very unlikely, but I also knew that I absolutely had to do this. And so I took it seriously and I went through the whole thing, what would I do if I had 6 months to live and I did that. And it was I was surprised by what I did. But the important thing of course is that I didn't die and I came back and I had a rebirth on that on the moment when I woke up after the 6 months cuz I was fully 100% prepared. I did everything, gave my money away, all this other stuff and I was totally prepared for it. And um when I woke up the next morning it was like I was reborn. It was like I had my entire life in front of me again. And so I think that was the part of the exercise. But the thing was is I kind of I have already kind of rehearsed that and tried to live since then without any regrets with trying to minimize the regrets that I would have when it came to die so that I would not have things to repair. Part of what I did in preparing for that was to go back and try to make up, apologize, do all the kinds of things that you would like to have done if you were going to die. And now I try to do that kind of like as I go along. And um I have a clock to remind me of you know, to kind of focus my efforts during the day because um if you it translates the time left that I have into days. Okay, again these are just based on actuarial table. Maybe I'll live longer, maybe I won't but that'll be a bonus. When you look at your future of your life in days, there aren't that many days. And um I find that that helps me decide, you know, what do I want to do today because I have, you know, 7,820 days which do everything I want to do. That's not very much. One thing that I found really interesting going into that story was originally you were like, oh I the the 6 months to live story. I want to go back and spend time with my family. You do that but after a couple months you realize you need to do something different. What was that process? What did you end up doing? Well, so so um I'd spent a lot of time in Asia traveling all around Asia at that point, but um when I had 6 months to live, part of what I wanted to do was to visit my brothers and sisters who lived across the US and had never seen the US. So, I rode my bicycle from San Francisco to New York via Idaho and Texas and Indiana. It was it was really a kind of a 5,000-mile bike ride. Whoa. And um I just bought a bicycle, a random bicycle. I had no training. I had no special equipment. There were no other bicyclists riding cross country in that year, in the '70s. I mean, I was by myself. There was there wasn't again, there wasn't cool to be riding bikes. And um I was I was, you know, having a last visit with my brothers and sisters, and then I decided that I would I really wanted to kind of like do ordinary things um for my parents. Um my mother had a back problems at the time, so I wanted to kind of like take out the trash for her. It was like I was really surprised by that because I thought if I had 6 months to live, if you'd asked me earlier, I'd say, "Oh, I'll climb the Everest, you know, I want to go um you know, caving or kayak down the Amazon." But actually, I wanted to do the ordinary things. That's really interesting. All right, I can't have a renowned futurist on the show and not ask, "What do you think is going to happen in the future? What does the future look like? How afraid or excited should we be? And what should we be thinking about?" That's I like that one. Each new technology, every new technology will create almost as many new problems as it does new solutions. And so So, we're going to hear about the problems that all these new technologies have, from social media to AI, to VR. And and I think I My job is to really talk about the unexpected opportunities that these are going to bring. Because everyone else is going to be talking about the unexpected problems that they'll have. And part part of my challenge is that um Hollywood and science fiction writers today almost universally are painting and promoting dystopian stories. How terrible it will be and there's not one single movie that I can think of or even a science fiction story where it depicts a future in the near future even that I want to live in or that you'd want to live in. They're all dystopian and and and horrible because they make better stories. The thing about storytellers is they have gotten so good. They they understand that the that a happy future is boring. And so they're all depictions of terrible futures. And so our all our images about robots and AIs are all tainted with this idea that they're going to be terrible. And what I'm trying to do is to present an alternative future that has ubiquitous AI and pervasive virtual reality and total sur- tracking. That's a future that we want to live in because I think that's where where we're going. I think we will have a place that is better than today and even better if we had a vision that we're working towards. And so um part of what I would talk about now, how we should feel about it is that we should be excited by the whole new opportunities, most of which are going to be very hard for us to even visualize right now. Just as um 150 years ago when there were 75% of Americans were on farms and now there's like less than 1%. If you went back in a time machine to those farmers and say, "Here's your pink slip because your grandchildren not none of them are going to be on this farm. And they would say, "Well, what are they going to do?" And you'd say, "They're going to be mortgage brokers and web designers and yoga teachers." And they would they would they would say that's ridiculous. It's That's ridiculous. And there are they are ridiculous in a certain sense. And so, most of these jobs that are coming are also going to be totally ridiculous to us now. They're going to sound like implausible. And I think um but but but but most of those opportunities are are going to be are going to surprise us. They're going to be new. They're going to be hard for us to visualize right now. But, I think we can try to prepare ourselves for those opportunities. And that's what my thing would be. It's inevitable that artificial intelligence will come. It'll be pervasive. It's not inevitable what kind of AI we have. Who rules it? Who owns it? What governs it? What the character is? Those are completely up to us. We have no choice. The AI is coming. It's inevitable. We have a whole lot of choice in what kind, how it's regulated, etc. And so, it's by engaging it though that we can steer. It's by actually using it that we actually can find out. So, we don't want to prohibit it. We want to be slow to regulate it. We want to embrace it and use it as a way of steering it. All right, before I ask my last question, where can these guys find you online? My initials KK. So, I have a website kk.org. My email is kk@kk.org. I tweet kind of. Um at Kevin Two Kelly. Um Facebook I'm the Kevin Kelly with the laughing face. Uh there are a lot of Kevin Kellys. By the way, I have a newsletter that I'm very proud of. Every week we send out six recommendations of cool stuff to people. It's called Recommendo. Kind of like really six brief things of great things to listen to, people to follow, movies to see, destinations, places to go, tools to use, apps, books that I've read. So, it's called Recommendo. Try that. I will definitely be signing up for that. Um final question, what's the impact that you want to have on the world? Yeah, so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to um increase learning, increase joy of learning, helping people to um stay lifelong learners. And um I I my my sermon is about necessity of remaining young, playing, trying, and learning. And I think that um if I had an impact in increasing giving people confidence that that's something that they can indulge in, something that they should devote resources to, that they should be slow to ossify what they know, maybe slow to become expert in something, that they would take more time to try stuff, to explore and play. And that's and to embrace the technology that allows and increases our choices and possibilities. I love that. Kevin, thank you so much for being on the show. That was incredible. Thank you. Absolutely. Guys, I'm telling you right now, this is one of the most incredible examples of a human being that really found his voice, that went on a journey of discovery, cultivation, creating something in himself. And the fact that he does that, finds something authentic, is always trying to focus on what he can do that other people can't do, what he loves that it doesn't matter whether other people respond to it or not. It speaks to him and he wants to indulge in it more. In doing that, he's not only become insanely successful, he's really become meaningful at the center of something that all of our lives are built around. It it's incredible that that tale is a dropout hippie who wandered around Asia for almost a decade taking photos of beautiful things and heartbreaking things and uplifting things. I mean, it's just incredible and if you ever get the chance, just type in Asia Grace into a search engine and you will get to see some of the miraculously beautiful photos that he took with those 500 rolls of film that he carried on his back. It is a journey of human becoming is the easiest way that I can say it and you can swap out in your own life. Technology was what ended up being his, but yours can be anything, but to see that it is a process, a beautiful process of not becoming a master too early. If you heard what he was just saying, to not think about becoming a master, not overly focus on becoming successful and he said some of the people that he respects the most in life as they approach 70 are still asking themselves the question, "What am I going to be when I grow up?" And he said that life is about answering that very question. Guys, dive in, you will not regret it. It will shape your life if you let it. All right, if you haven't already, be sure to subscribe and until next time, my friends, be legendary. Take care. Kevin, that was amazing. Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching and being a part of this community. If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe. You're going to get weekly videos on building a growth mindset, cultivating grit, and unlocking your full potential.