Beller, I think as an individual as a company, you wanna work on something that nobody has a name for, okay? When there's no name for what you're doing, that means that there's no category and you have it difficult to explaining to people even what it is doing. That means that you're on the path to the only. Kevin, thanks for being on the podcast today. You know, the great Chris Michael has been talking about introducing us for years.
And finally, a few weeks ago, you and I had a chance to take a hike down near Pacifica, down near your home, and it was, delightful, and I really enjoyed it. And so glad we're getting a chance to keep going. Yeah. It was a wonderful day and a beautiful backdrop. To a fantastic conversation. So thank you. So when I describe you to people, I first start off by saying that you're just relentlessly curious and you're a person who lives and breathes ideas.
And my wife always says that I don't need food, and I just eat ideas. And I think that you're just like that and even more so. I've also noticed, Kevin, that having been the founder of wired and one of the people at the whole earth catalog and been involved in so many of these sort of cultural entrepreneurial projects that we've seen over the last few decades, that you're just a nonstop content producer.
I mean, you have so many projects Beller it's a video channel or whether it's a graphic novel or whether it's books or podcasts like you're doing with us today. So many different mediums. For content. And the first thing that I feel is, like, you're almost creating a network effect around yourself for ideas where you're putting ideas out you're putting questions out into the ether in all these different ways. And then the ideas are coming back to you. And I see this world. Do you feel that way?
Is that think you've purposely architected in your life? That's a wonderful way to put it. I like that image of the network effects which for people who don't know, the way it operates is that the more you give it, the more it produces, and the more it attracts giving. And so it feeds in kind of avalanches outward in that way. And I think, yes, you're exactly right. That that's what's happening.
You're exactly wrong, and then I was anything deliberate about think it fell into it more than anything else, but it does work that way in which the more ideas you have, the more ideas that on looses and attracts to you, so you have yet even more ideas. And I think that is sort of the secret sauce of this world of network communications is that they exhibit these network effects in all dimensions. And if you can tap into 1, it's wonderful because you can go for quite a ride.
And I think all kinds of aspects of our lives are this, and I would say it's true not only for ideas, but I would say there's a universal truth buried even deeper that is true for giving that if you are a giver, the more you give, the more you get, the more you get, the more you give, and that also is a network effects. Yeah. That is a cultural effect that very few cultures I've been a part of have, but it's certainly one that I feel in the Bay Area having moved here from Boston.
Do you feel that that is universally true, or do you think that some geographies, cultures, people exhibit a more pay it forward, giving type of motion than others? I would say both. I would say it is a universal principle, and there are certain areas that amplify it more than others. And I think you are also correct that Silicon Valley has institutionalized some aspects of this where it has emphasized sharing to maybe a a greater degree than other cultures have.
Are there any sort of principles, any missions that are driving you at this point that aren't particularly just something you fell Flint? Something that crystallized. The people listening to this are early stage and young entrepreneurs. Right? We got 250,000 people who tend to listen to this, and they tend to be in that category. Trying to help them see or things that others don't Pete.
And I get the strong sense having read a lot of your stuff that you see a lot of things most people don't Right. And are there principles that you've crystallized? Well, we mentioned sharing. I would say there's a couple other kind of classic virtues, like gratitude, I think, is fundamental, which is very aligned with humility, but gratitude is very related to luck.
Basically, it's appreciating how lucky we are, and I think luck is a huge component and not talked often enough because there is an element of luck. And if you are really honest about your successes, there's a huge degree of it that is attributed to luck. And I think I respect those people who acknowledge the luck in their life, which is a form of gratitude, that's more on the personal level. One of my missions is to be a good ancestor to try to incorporate more, a long term view.
Now this is countered in some ways to the mission of a young startup, which is often battling for survival long enough to be able to take the long view.
And so there's a very immediate now oriented framework for startups, and that's understandable, but I think if you want to zig where others are zagging, and this is sort of Jeff Bezos's idea is if you think about things that don't change very fast, if you operate on a longer term perspective, you have an advantage because everyone else is completely shortsighted. And I think that taking a longer view of things can set you apart.
And part of what happens when you take a longer view is you think less about things like competitors and you think more about civilizational scale, infrastructural necessities, feeding the network, all these other kinds things that in the long run will be more important and may liberate you in having an approach that others don't. And by the way, your ancestors will thank you. Got it. And what is causing the short term thing Is it a sense of survival? Is it a amygdala problem?
Is it a No. I think it's partly just the nature of startups. You have immediate needs. No. Maybe there are institutional things that we can do as a society to help early stage companies not be so short sighted, but I think it's hard to do it on their own just because of the pressures of getting started and survival.
And it also, by the way, I have to say it may be that longer term thinking may not be something that we should expect, and it might be something that we have to invent other kinds of institutions for governments can certainly do some amount of it. They're not allowed to fail. Non profits to some degree are kind of a 3rd category that could do longer stuff. Yeah. But they don't have that much power, but maybe we can is all we do. We invent different structures.
We can invent maybe institutions that have the legal, social, economic power, you do things in the world that have a little bit longer term, and let me just give you an example. It's like one of the things that we don't do very well is long term re there is very few experiments that last more than 4 years, which is the average post Pete tenure. So we don't even have a very good facility for doing a long range research that might take a long to do or 2 may take 20 years to pay out.
So you're funding some kind of basic research that you have no of making sense even or being developed at least for 20 years. And maybe during your lifetime, it may be during your and, you know, to the funders and the government that may look like, waste.
So you might need another kind of an institution that would protect that research for the duration or maybe as some argument, maybe there's some way we can turn the value that's created by that research and have it come back and pay into that and of just going to all the entrepreneurs who bank on it. So I think we can be innovative in ways in which we can be good ancestors and not always think long term.
It may be that your audience here, the entrepreneur, starting things, but this may not be Flint of mind for them, and it should be front of mind if they have any level of success. So some of your someday be the reigning dominant make tycoons. So please remember this. Yeah. So you get companies with work effects that are gonna be around one time because they're hard to dislodge, whether it's Craigslist or Facebook or whatever.
And at some point, those people running those companies have to emerge from their chrysalis of short term thinking into being more of a steward of the future. They have to take that emotional sort of journey that maturation process one of the things that network effects does is it imprisons the winners of those network effects in a prison of success, and they're imprisoned by their success.
Because the way things work is that the truly disruptive game changing innovation breakthrough business is going to come from outside of their core success. That's just a general pattern And the reason why it comes from outside their success is because the more successful a company is, the more likely they are to use money to try to solve a problem. So they have some problem.
There's something that doesn't work, whatever it is, and there's bank loads of money or cash and Pete, and they're gonna apply remedy to the problem. And there's an old Jewish saying that any problem that can be solved with money is not really a problem. And so what happens that they try to buy solutions now is the start ups would like to do that too, but they don't have any resources. They don't have any money. They don't have people. They don't have anything.
And so they have to be really scrappy, and they have to invent and figure out and innovate a solution without resources. And that is the solution that works. That's the solution that is going to spread and succeed because they have used genius to solve it instead of money. And so it begins to rise and as much as the big companies, then would say, okay. Well, then we'll just move over to there and take over. But the problem is that to do so means that they have to come down from the optimization.
They have been working so hard to produce So the excellence that they're all working toward, the optimization and the efficiency problem is is the new innovation is always in a territory where there's low profits. It's unproven. It's high failure rate. It's a terrible place to do business. The only people who do business, they're a crazy start up. No James person's gonna be there.
And so to move a successful company down into that territory requires devolution, requires going backwards, requires undoing their optimization and their quest of excellence. It means doing less. And there's nobody or nothing in the company that is very successful that is good and going in that direction. They can't really deoptimizing head and move their thinking everything else into this territory where it's terrible business.
And so what happens is startups are left to keep doing things until they pass some threshold of basic viable customer satisfaction, and they're already at the works to fix their end and it's too late and they're off to the business. So that's the advantage. And so what that means for startups is you need to sort of amplify and augment and enhance the fact that you have lack of resource That is actually your chief asset.
To put people in the cooker to come up with something new, and then each of the pieces of the company are interlinked to each other and need to support each other. And that whole ecosystem of that startup, even if it's six people or twelve people, you can't get that same small ecosystem functioning in a large corporation because they have completely different infrastructure and mental models and what they consider to be good. Beller, they also have just too much resource and too much money.
They're gonna solve it by applying flood of resources, and they're gonna miss the true innovation, which you can only get to if you don't have those resources. If you have to be scrappy. Gotta be a desperado almost. Disparado. Exactly. You have to be desperate. And so that desperation that you want so bad to get out of is actually your chief asset in the beginning. I wouldn't say you shouldn't be a hurry, but you should understand that is to your benefit.
And someday, if you're successful, you may lament the fact that your company is no longer that scrappy. And then Morgan, we look back and say, those are the good old days. Right. In many ways they were. So that's one thing. And the other kind of related idea is this idea of premature optimization, which I think is the downfall of many individual Pete. We're all into optimizing things, but thing is you have to be extremely careful about what you're optimized.
You wanna scale the wall, but you wanna make sure your ladder is leaning against the right wall. Once you get on the process of optimization, it the reason. They just said it's very hard to come back down and de optimize.
And so this process of keep scanning territory scanning the landscape, scanning relentless curious way to see if there are other ways of doing it even while you're in Morgan trying to make things better and perfect of just reminding yourself and confirming that that is the path because in this kind of a landscape, with things change fast, there may be a better way happening while you're doing it, and you don't wanna get stuck in that. You wanna be able to be agile.
It's interesting because there's an inner battle that you have with yourself about, am I doing the right thing? You sort of check-in. If you do it too often, you'll tire yourself out. But if you don't do it often enough, you're gonna find yourself in the Pete. But then this further complication is that you've brought on employees. You've brought on investors. You've brought on people in the press who believe in you and are their reputations on the line to talk about you.
And now suddenly you realize you're in the wrong spot. What do you do? Right. It's very much like raising kits. You want kits to be exposed to all these things and not to optimize on one thing too early at the same time. Wanna teach some grit and follow through and persistence, and it's a balance about, you know, too much of one versus too much of the other. So there is an art full balance, and that is the kind of a thread that a entrepreneur is trying to thread.
You know, we're talking here about sort of character and personality and mental mindsets. And I'm gonna go back to this idea of this chrysalis where, you know, we're transforming from a short term founder to a long term steward wanna focus on this for a minute because we know that network effects bring and build durability, defensibility, long term utility, value. Right? And that's where you get the so much value.
So ultimately by building those types of business by investing in those types of companies with network effects, we want to be growing future stewards at scale. I mean, that's kind of the hope, right, that, you know, through looking at these projects, getting people putting their ladders on the right wall, we're now growing future stewards at Beller, but are there certain types of people that you've noticed who are optimized to handle that responsibility and that opportunity?
Once they get there? Do we have a mismatch? Are the people who are capable of getting to that positions? You know, the people who have directly those personality types and mental models that make them ill suited to be stewards. I don't have that much experience in, you know, talking to armies of, entrepreneurs and be able to sort things out. So I don't have an intuition about, a, whether there are special people like that and b, what character would be.
I think The one thing that I have been impressed by in talking to, I would say, many high achievers, not just entrepreneurs, but in the wall, classes from actors, singers, musicians, you know, business people, writers, the whole thing. I would say that the sort of the more Currier cue their career path was the higher they went. Almost none of them have a direct Pete.
And, anybody on a kind of direct path, I would be kind of article of that I think a kind of meander is I almost would say essential, but certainly conducive to really coming a world class individual and only. So I resonate with this idea that is often attributed to Jerry Garcia of Greer but I'm not sure he's the first to say, which is don't be the best.
So I am really interested in companies and businesses, individuals, who are the only who've become the own, and that to me is a much better place to be than just merely the best. The only would be I who, does magic for humans.
I don't remember his name, but he's magician magician that has a very special style where he's a street musician going out on the street, and he has wrapped up his magic, you know, prattle into kind of themes about, like, fatherhood or motherhood or telling the truth or things like that. So as far as I can tell, he's like the only person doing it. That's a niche. For him, certain kind of magic and a sermon, you know, maybe put that way. Justin Willman. There you go.
Yeah. So he's an only in my book. He's not really competing against other magicians. He has this little niche to himself. Beller, I think as an individual and as a company, you wanna work on something that nobody has a name for. K? When there's no name for what you're doing, that means that there's no category and you have it difficult to explaining to people even what it is that you're doing.
That means that you are on the path to the only because there's no category if you're trying to become, like, the best basketball player in the world, that's a 0 sum game. There's only a limited number of Major League players, and it's fixed But if you're going to become, you know, the best horseback golf pro, right, somebody who's playing golf from a horseback, I'm just making You're not competing against anybody. That's one of a kind. So you are kind of making your own niche.
You're not having to displace someone or take someone else's job. And but isn't that a little bit painful to be on the periphery, to be on the edge? You're not mainstream then because people don't really know what you do, and you're at dinner parties like, what do you do? You play golf on a horse. Okay. Let's talk about something I understand. Right. Exactly. It is. It's really hard. And here's the other hard part, difficult part.
What you wanna be doing for these things is not just, you know, trying to do cough on a horse unless you have exactly that right combination of talent. Right?
So if you wanna be arriving at a place that either use an individually or use a company, have the absolute required set of skill and Flint, So it's like you're trying to find something in your own life where you're arriving that your special mix of talents is particularly suited Morgan the same thing with the company is that if you're trying to do something that you can't do, you're never gonna be the only.
You have to be doing something that you are equipped particularly especially equipped to do. And so that's a high bar to get to for individuals and companies is to even be aware and it often will take a long time for you to arrive as an individual to understand what your gifts are. That's where the meandering comes from. That's where this long path comes from. And so when you're trying to do that as a company, that's also a high bar.
Not only do you have trouble telling people what you're doing Morgan convincing investors that you will succeed, but you also have to be incredibly self aware of your own abilities and Flint. Yep. And you have to be lucky, as you said before, maybe a little bit. Right. Always. You know, this is, a question you probably get asked a lot, but for our listeners, you come into this utopian technological view of wired. It's the only. Right? I mean, it's an example Morgan only Absolutely.
Because nobody understood what we were doing. There was no market. There was no category to show the magazine on. They said, what is this? We were definitely in only. So what compelled you at the time? So many things. It seems like, you know, it's something that James out of the blue, but, of course, there was a it's a time, a very gradual ramp up. What came together? For that to be born. The major parents of wired were Louis Roseto and James Medcalf.
And I was trying to put out a magazine, a similar kind of magazine at Hallworth. It was called signal. In fact, even today, I had a podcast with some guy who had uncovered the original book of signal and was this lamenting that you hadn't seen it when it came out in the eighties. Because everything in a wired was kind of covering. But the difference was I was talking about ideas and tools and talking about this new emerging world, and Loce and Jane, they're great of genius say, no. No.
We wanna talk about the people who are making the tools and ideas. We're gonna wrap all these tools and these around people. We're gonna have people on the cover and just like, that was absolutely correct and right. And that was the genius thing. And so Lewis and Jane made, a prototype, which they showed me and looking for an editor. And Lewis said one thing, that sold me. He said, I am trying to make a magazine that feels as if it's been mailed back from the future. I said, okay. Sign me up.
That will work for me. And so what we were trying to do at that time was kind of very simple. There was a business proposition editorial, and we really kept them different. The editorial proposition was very blunt. It was like, there is a revolution and you've gotta wake up to it. This digital stuff is going to become the central thing. Now that seems perfectly obvious to us now. But believe me, the resistance to that was unbelievable. People totally, constantly dismiss it.
Less teenage boys in the basement. This is CB Radio. This is never gonna be mainstream. I'm never gonna buy anything on their name. That's totally ridiculous, preposterous. And so on down the line, it was a hard sell. It was not an obvious thing. There were a group of people in Silicon Valley who immediately got it. But this was not mainstream America. We went out to the niche, and that comes to the business proposition because this was, again, the genius loose and chain.
I was running a magazine and signal was part of it in Holworth where it was user generated content. We were doing the internet on newsprint. Where the users were writing it, and it was going back to them. There was no ads. It was user supported. Subscription supported very fast. And it was very internet y and blogging, but the business model was, you know, was subscription. Pretty simple. Lewis and Jane wanted to have a real glossy magazine with ad support.
And so the business proposition was to the advertisers was very simple. Look, here's a bunch of people who are not just very interesting, but they're well paid. And they are reading no magazines. They're not watching TV. They have they're maybe hanging out online. But nobody's reaching them. We can reach them. And what is that market? Well, we don't have a name for it. There's no other magazines like this. This is the only. But believe us, these are the audience that you want.
And we can reach them with this magazine. That was the proposition. And that somehow flew because when you're doing something where you're the only It is very hard to get other people on board. It's hard to get employees. It's hard to get investors. It's hard to get advertisers. You have to do a lot of really good convincing. Right. And for 10 years, we kept expecting another competitor to come up and never did. Because no one could still see it. No one could still see it.
Yeah. And the thing too and this was the sorry story of wired, which has a whole Morgan itself, is that at this same time, we were inventing the web wired invented the quick through ad banner, wired. We had one of the first online publications. We had our own search engine, and we were on our way to do an ad auction before the magazine or before the company was split up and sold during the bust and wired.com was separated from the magazine. It was a total test because we had a failed IPO.
So the only point about that was not only Pete we doing the magazine, but we were doing online publication world at same time. And we had more people working on the digital side than we had working on the magazine, which was all lost once the magazine was sold. So the point there was we were the only in a couple of that's part of the reason why there was no competitors because we were way ahead in trying to discover things, make mistakes, not everything worked.
That's part of the thing, but we were only in many, many dimensions. Yeah. And so you guys actually in position at that time to be the Google. Yes. Right? We were on our way to be the Google. We could have been the Google, but we had short term thinking VCs who were spooked by the dotcom who wanted to break up and sell the most valuable part of the magazine, which was a wire.com, taking away from the brand, and then we kept saying, no. Relax. This is a temporary thing.
The the bust is good for everybody. Just don't try and sell now, but we lost control because we had fail IPO is very complicated. Yeah. So the founders lost control of the company, and we left shortly afterwards. So I guess I'd like to fast forward a little bit to maybe a decade later when you pop out this wonderful book. What does technology want? You have this beautiful description about how before we saw technology, we didn't even see that it was surrounding in a way.
It was sort of like the 2 fish swimming in the water. They don't know how the water is today, but then suddenly we saw it for what it was, and we couldn't believe that we hadn't seen technology earlier. And this is back in, let's say, 1800 because we didn't think until 1800 about technology is a thing. I mean, that's remarkable. It was even later. It was, like, 1850 before the first, basically, use of the word technology came about.
And it was used to describe a course, I think, at MIT talking about what was formally called Practical Arts or something like that. And so this was kinda like the first sense that there was a something there that was more than just a kind of a parade of inventions. Which is really how we thought of technology and how many people still do.
And this was similar to the way we thought about the natural world before Darwin, which was a cabinet full of a series of different really curious organisms with no real understanding how they all fit together. Today, most people's minds, they have a kind of parade of different inventions with Pete, and there's no sense that they all fit together what's kind of driving them.
And I'm offering a theory of technology, which uses the concept of a system of all the technologies that are self codependent on each other is, I call it, technium, and it means that there really are no standalone technology Pete, all the species depend on the other species for their survival. And the same thing with technology, a computer needs a factory. The factory needs a computer.
Saul can make a hammer handle, hammers needed for the saw, and you have this kind of codependency in this ecosystem of 100. It's not thousands of, technologies that are required to support each other. And as we make things more and more complicated, that more and more true. You and me and the smartest fifty people that we knew, and we could not make, an iPhone. Right? I mean, it's just That's right. Not from scratch. From scratch.
It just acquire so many other technologies, which themselves require other ones that is a system. And this system, I call the Technegan, which is all the technologies in the world together. And that tech team, like any system has biases, has tendencies, has strange attractor, has a leaning And I call that wants, which is a strong word, but it just like a bacteria wants food, even though it's not conscious. This is not a conscious one. It's desire or leaning a tendency.
And so that idea of the whole system, I think, is is important to keep in mind that it will have certain tendencies. Like, what would be a tendency? What I'm saying is the tendencies that it wants grow out of the fact that this is an extension of self organizing principles of the universe and life and that it is actually the same dynamics that run through evolution in life we best think of detecting them, not as something that humans make of our mind.
Birth of it is actually back at the big bang that it's cosmological force that's running through the galaxies and the planets in the life and then it's being accelerated through the Technium man will go beyond us so that there's this kind of long arc of this force. What Technium wants is very similar to what evolution wants, which is headed towards increased complexity, increased diversity, increasing specialization, increasing these and other things.
So we can kind of talk about what those are, but not destinations, not even destinies, but they're directions. To where we're going. And if I'm true, if this is true, if this is right, what that means is that all things being equal, the technology in the future will become more complicated, more complex. All the things we make will tend to have more specialized versions of themselves that as we go along, we will keep making more diverse kinds of things.
Increased mutualism means that more and more technology will depend on other technologies and not on humans. Meaning that, like, a lot of the technology we will make will never see a human. We'll never be touched by a human. It's all gonna be in the service of other machines, true of life. There's, you know, 50% of the organisms on this planet are parasitic. They are actually wholly codependent on other organisms. They can't live without those other organisms.
Those are some of the kind of directions that technology is headed for, and there are others. But if we understand that we can look for what those other directions are, what it kind of leaning towards. And I to answer your original question to start this with, what am I doing? What are my goals? Of my goals is to listen to the technology, to listen to it, to see if we can discern where it tends to wanna go outside our own desires of where we hope goes.
The way that we can do that, I think, is by watching how people actually use a technology versus how it was vented for. I think you can see how outlaws and kids use it. I think we can give it a couple generations then we can tell more through the use of it and the street use of it. There's ways that we can listen to the technology to try and discern what its biases are. Got it.
And eventually, does that mean that, you know, we are like Hans Morgan exit in the seventies gonna merge with the intelligence of the universe? And that that is sort of the ultimate flowering of complex light on this planet. I don't think there is a destination. I think there's directions. So I'm not this kind of to Beller a shutdown new sphere, omega point where we're all gonna converge. I think maybe Hans is a little bit more like that.
I think we kind of radiate at work expanding into the universe with more and more possibilities until we fill all possible universes or all possible planets with all possible ways. That's partly a destination. That's more of a direction. Right. It's an infinity state. I'm sorry. Exactly. Yeah. Got it. And so, you know, bringing it back a little bit one of the inputs to the Technium, to this organic growing of technologies and evolutions, which I think we would agree is accelerating.
Part of the inputs to it is this whole VC startup ecosystem. Right? A lot of our most intelligent people are now being drawn, not into McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, but hopefully into start These startups are very tactical, very short term as we've discussed. They're very applied. It's one feeder into the overall organism of technology, right, the overall tech how do you think we're doing?
As you look around and look at people's behavior, like, you or yourself, one of these startup people with wired and the wired digital and all that. What should we be doing differently? That's a really great question. What happens in America, particularly what happens in Silicon Valley is just a small part of what's happening on this planet. I spent a lot of time in China My wife is Chinese, gets bilingual. So I care a lot about what's happening in China.
And what I would love to see is a similar kind of thing that happened here in Silicon Valley happened in China and other places in the world, India and Brazil and all these other places. We want us to see more of that. In addition to your specific question about maybe what can Silicon Valley do better, I would like to see more of this sprouting up around the world. This being Silicon Valley's mindset, Silicon Valley's methods.
We were talking earlier about the kind of sheerness, the sheer network effects network effects of sharing of gratitude and the kind of accelerated learning. One of the things we didn't get to talk about that I have a other fascination with is the underappreciated value of YouTube as a means of accelerating learning and culture around the world. More of that So it's not just Silicon Valley. It's sort of the spread of this sharing, accelerated learning kind of a culture.
And, you know, I don't have a Melissa what I think Silicon Valley needs to do or not to do. But I do have a couple of prescriptions and that may go beyond. I think it is crucial and fundamental and essential that we spend more money as a society on basic science and research of the type that may not pay off And so that is one of the unalloyed, unirrefutable investments that pay off. And if we take a long term view, And it's very hard to make that argument because it may not pay off.
I mean, because it may take several decades to pay off, but we know that that is by far one of the best we can make. What I want to do is to move us to do more of that. I don't think that's the job of startups, but they certainly will benefit from us doing that. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, I I never want us to lose an opportunity to be self critical and to improve, and that's why I asked you the question.
What I heard back a little from you is that, well, there's actually a lot of good going on. And what's going on Beller in Silicon Valley, the cultural aspect, the accelerated learning, the iteration, the paying it for, the mental models, the culture we Beller up Pete. You're like, hey. You know what? I go around the world, and I like the rest of the world, but boy, I really like Silicon Valley. Like, I really like the way these people think.
If we could have more of that where that would make the world better faster. And so maybe us thinking about how we articulate, how we encapsulate, how we promote what we do have here that we don't use it, lose it, and that that helps to spread it around the world. Yeah. I mean, you're much closer to the kind of front lines of this culture and probably therefore have maybe more specific suggestion. I'm a groupie hanging out with these folks and scientists.
I look at things in kind of a global point of view, and as what I would say as laud as Silicon Valley might be. It is better than many of the other places trying to do what it is done. And again, I don't have prescriptions on how they do it. My one suggestion to them is I don't think that you can copy. You wanna be the only everyone wants to be Silicon Valley in software. Well, no, no, that's already taken. Believe me. Be the Silicon Valley is something else fashion or Hollywood.
They're doing it there. They have a different working system, a whole culture with these kind of ad hoc companies that come up and do things. It's sort of entrepreneur in that way. And so that's really great because they're only there. So we need a whole bunch of other onlys. They're doing other things. Maybe it's genetic engineering. Maybe it's gonna be AI. I don't know. But there's lots of opportunities to be the only in having a culture with network effects.
And, again, Silicon Valley and even Shenzhen area work with network effects. The more startups there are, the more that wanna come, the more they wanna come, the more the attractive it becomes. And so you wanna have that kind of only network effects in a physical geographical place around the world, but they're not just all trying to do software. Mhmm. That's a great point. Everybody's gotta find their own niche and the overall technium. We all have a role to play an old specialized niche role.
Right. And every single organism alive today, every species of life that is hacking the rule. This is the learn by doing all species, which was this program to catalog all the living species on the planet and hang around with the taxonomists. And they all have their creatures that they know about. And when you talk to them, you find out that every single is trying to hack the laws of biology.
If some work around some weird little thing that they're doing, you know, the males are inside the females or the, you know, whatever. Just weird sexual practices weird reproductive processes all trying to hack the basic assumptions of biology, and that's sort of also what every startup is gonna be doing one way or other is you're kind of trying to find a hack around the usual way of doing things. Mhmm. Hey. What are the three books you wish every startup founder would read?
Finite and infinite games by James Karcz. It's kind of a hard book to read. You don't need to read much of it. Read the first chapter in the last chapter. Divides the world into 2 kinds of James, games that are finite, which may have winners or losers, and, the rules are known, and you play to win. Then there's infinite games where the rules are ambiguous and the whole point of the game is to keep playing the game.
It's much more fun and better for everybody and much more rewarding and etcetera, and this is his case for infinite games. Which is also sometimes called the non 0 sum game. So it's an infinite game. And what you wanna be doing as a startup is looking for the infinite game because that network effects take place in infinite James so they can spam getting stuck on 0 sum games where there's winners and losers is the losers game. So sign up infinite games.
I read, hiring smart, and I haven't which was a really good book about how to hire. I remember it. It was recommended at Harvard Business School 20 years ago. Yeah. But the idea of learning how to hire I do remember one of the things that if Bezos was saying very early on about hiring says, one of the chief qualities that I look for when I'm hiring a Pete is their ability to hire because that's all we're doing is we're growing so fast that we want to hire Morgan.
And that is sort of my straining factor. So learning how to hire smart, I think, is really good. And there were some good suggestions there. It's a very practical thing. And and number 3, Stuart Brands, how buildings learn, which says that every bid building is a prediction. And all predictions are wrong. So when you're building something, you're making a prediction of how it's gonna be used and you're likely to be wrong over the long term.
It's gonna be changing all You know, that's sort of a little bit kind of like ideas of pivoting. So the idea is that, you know, every company in a certain sense is a prediction, and most predictions will be wrong. And he's suggesting things about different ways to accommodate or counter that while you were building something that was fixed and substantial.
And so I think there could be good analogs about trying to build a company as if it was a building and how you want to counter the fact that you were going to have to keep changing it. That you're gonna have to keep modifying as you go along. It's not a perfect 100% mapping, but it might be useful.
Mhmm. I'll tell you when I was sure everyone would read, which is, from counter to Cyber Culture, which is a book that glued you in it and tells the story of Silicon Valley and the culture that you've been talking about and where it came from and why it is so unique and why it so good. And, it's a great history written by a Stanford professor. It's called him, counterpart Turner. Right. Fred Currier, and he was talking about the kind of role of stored in the whole earth catalog and wired.
And it's such a testimony to what this place can be if, people stay focused. So last question for you, Kim, what's the next 10 years for you? What's what's that hold for you? I am one of those people who don't make plans, particularly at that scale. I have no idea what it'll be doing in 10 years, let alone even 2 years. But, I know one thing that I Morgan this year, I made a and that was for 50 years. I've been still a photographer. I've had it still camera in my head.
I've been text based, book based. I've been a person of the book, and I have made a very conscious deliberate effort to become a person of the screen to try to have video camera in my head and to do everything video first. So I may write I know the textbook, but it was something drive from something I do in video. So I am doing everything in video first, and then I can go out to the other media from that.
And that's because I have become convinced that the center of culture is no longer books my kids, their friends don't read books of any sort. They don't read my books, and that the center of the culture is in the moving images. And on all size screens. And they spend their time as I do these days watching YouTube, and I want it to be at the center of the culture learning how to do that video. It's been a huge hurdle for me because I have a still camera. Now I've gotta move it.
It's a lot more effort. There's so many things to learn to master, not just no longer, you know, Photoshop. I've gotta get Premier or I've gotta get Adobe 3 d files. It's just a few step, but that's what I'm committing to. So I would say you know, in the next decade, I hope to be immersed in video and maybe whatever comes after video with the smart glasses, you know, ARR and that kind of stuff. That's where I wanna be. That's where I'm deliberately trying to stake out.
That's where I think the future of culture particularly around here is going to swim in that is the new environment. And I haven't been that at ease with it in terms of being able to create it, and I'm trying to master it. Fantastic. It's a good way to end up. I think you're absolutely right. Good for you. Kevin Kelly, thank you so much. My pleasure, James. Thank you for having me. It was such a delight to talk to you as always.
I wish we were walking you as we did this, but we are sitting waving our arms instead. You've been listening to the NFX podcast. You can rate and review this show on Apple podcast, and you can subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. For more information on building iconictechnologycompaniesvisitnfx.com.