🎷 Mind Jazz on Infinite Loops 🛠️ Show & Tell w/ Kevin Kelly

Two very different conversations, each delightful.

This is a quickie! I was just a guest on podcasts with two people I find very interesting: Jim O’Shaughnessy of O’Shaughnessy Ventures and Kevin Kelly.

I know Jim from Twitter, where he constantly shares inspiring excerpts from his voluminous reading. A legendary investor who has turned his attention to changing the world with his wealth, he provided a small seed grant to Humans On The Loop, but more importantly OSV funds dozens of other fascinating tech, media, and community betterment projects. Their show Infinite Loops is consistently solid and inspiring and it was a serious honor to make it onto their guest roster.

In Jim’s words:

“This whirlwind discussion is impossible to sum up in a couple of sentences (see the number of books & articles listed below!). Ultimately, it is a conversation about a subject I think about every day: how we can live curious, collaborative and fulfilling lives in our deeply weird, complex, probabilistic world.”

Full show notes here. OSV does a great job of distilling key takeaways and linking to our copious citations, but the episode is worth a listen for the sheer enthusiasm and warmth of our exchange.

Kevin is a prominent voice in Silicon Valley for his involvement with the Whole Earth Catalog, as founding editor of Wired Magazine, and his numerous clear and thoughtful books about the future of technology. I’ve followed his work for most of my adult life, interviewed him three times for Future Fossils (episodes 128, 165, and 203), and highly recommend those discussions to anyone who likes basking in an understanding seasoned over decades of exploration. But his own podcast Show & Tell is far lighter and more approachable fare: he just asks his guests to bring four “cool tools” they use on a regular basis and to explain why they like them. It’s a simple, breezy, fun program that has turned me on to many interesting people through their relationship to the discrete objects of their built environment.

Full show notes here.

In it I nerd out on four of the most distinctive items in my kit:

1:01 – Boss RC-505 mkII Loopstation
16:53 – Brunton Transit pocket compass
25:47 – Black Diamond Storm 500-R headlamp
33:17 – FLUXX by Looney Labs

This one may not swing for the fences like my conversation with Jim, but it’s a great way to get to know me through these four data points, and I think you’ll find every episode just as rewarding.

For those of you who missed my last update, I am about to start hosting video hangouts with paid subscribers, the first of which will be on Saturday 18 January at 2 pm Mountain Time. Really looking forward to seeing y’all’s faces and seeing what emerges through the group for our first live call in a while!

Lastly for now, another bump about some upcoming events I’m glad to be a part of:

More essays, dialogues, new original music, and research roundups very soon!

Thank you and take care.