On this special episode of Design Matters, we take a look back at the collective brilliance of writers interviewed in 2023. Best of Design Matters 2023 with Alexandra Horowitz, Rick Rubin, and Kevin Kelly is live!
Debbie Millman:
TED Audio Collective. Support for this show comes from Yale University Press and their Catwalk Series of fashion books, which explore the world’s top fashion houses through extensive catwalk photography from their runway shows. The series includes books on Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton, Yves Saint Laurent, Prada, Versace, Vivienne Westwood, and Chloe with Givenchy coming out this fall.
Go to YaleBooks.com to learn more about the nine Catwalk Series volumes and use code DebbieTwentyFive on YaleBooks.com to get 25% and free shipping on any Catwalk Series books. Thank you to Target for sponsoring this episode.
Alexandra Horowitz:
They are delighted every time you return home. And who is like that?
Rick Rubin:
I’m more in tune with the planet now because I’m living the way people lived thousands of years ago.
Debbie Millman:
Are you afraid of dying?
Speaker 1:
No, because I’ve already rehearsed it.
Speaker 2:
From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman. For 18 years, Debbie Millman has been talking with designers and other creative people about what they do, how they got to be who they are, and what they’re thinking about and working on. On this episode, to mark the end of 2023, we’re going to hear excerpts from some of the best interviews with writers that Debbie did in the past year.
Alexandra Horowitz:
There’s something about just listening, which they seem to do.
Rick Rubin:
The ideas come through the artists, not from the artists.
Speaker 1:
I realized that I had a future again.
Lilah Raptopoulos:
I want to tell you about a new show from the Financial Times called “Life and Art” from FT Weekend, hosted by me, Lilah Raptopoulos. “Life and Art: is twice a week. On Mondays, I have a guest on to talk about life and how to live a good one. Everything from winter travel, to cooking, to living more creatively. And on Fridays, we talk art. Two FT journalists and I discuss a piece of culture that’s in the air, new music, movies, and more. Find life and art from FT Weekend wherever you listen.
Debbie Millman:
I interview a lot of writers on design matters, fiction writers, non-fiction writers, design writers, comic book writers, journalists, you name it. They often come on the podcast to talk about a recent book, and I use the occasion to not only talk about that book, but also to talk about who the writers were before they wrote that book. Books after all don’t come from nowhere, and I like to get a sense of what went into their creation.
In this end of the year episode, I’m going to play three excerpts from interviews I did with three very different writers in 2023. First Step is one of my favorites, Alexandra Horowitz. She’s a professor of psychology at Barnard College, and she’s written a whole shelf of books about dog cognition, including her latest, The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves. Before she started studying dogs, she did research on the white rhinoceros.
Alexandra Horowitz:
Well, the white rhinoceros is a fantastic species. I didn’t know much about them at all, just except for that they were an African species. There were many fewer of them than there used to be. They’re not endangered I think anymore. They are matrilineal, so they live in groups of women. And the males who are usually smaller than the females only approach when they’ve received kind of advanced word that a female is ready to mate.
Debbie Millman:
How progress.
Alexandra Horowitz:
Otherwise, they’ll just get beat up. Yeah, they’re really not interested in his company at all. They don’t hang out with the males at all, but they’ll endure his company if they’re interested in mating. And the way they leave this communication that they’re interested in mating is through their dung actually. And they leave these kind of huge heaps of dung. They’re like bulletin boards with all the information about all the rhinoceros.
It has all the health, and mating, reproductive status, et cetera. They’re basically leaving a message. Once they leave, the male can go, and sniff, and see if he can pursue one of the females. So, we’re basically looking at how does their behavior relate to their endocrinology and that people would go in and gather samples, and check their hormone levels, and then we would try to sync it with their behavior.
So, it was the first time that I’d really looked at behavior of an animal over a long period closely where you start to think about them as individuals who have their own life histories. And you also think about the fact that their individual life history, while having interesting analogs to a human life history, it was full of its own complexities, some of which I might not be aware of.
For instance, I didn’t use my sense of smell to do much in my life, particularly, certainly not to find out information about other people except for maybe accidentally, and even then, really inadvertently. So, it made me kind of aware of the types of things that would later drive my research, like the looking closely, looking over a long period of time, the importance of sort of individual animals, and the perceptual world of non-human animals, which is, in so many ways, much more expansive than ours.
Debbie Millman:
You also spent many hours at the local dog parks and beaches with your famous dog, Pumpernickel, where you began to see the interplay between him and other dogs in entirely new ways. And he wrote this about the experience, and I found it so moving and so vivid that I’d really like to share it verbatim with our listeners. It’s about a paragraph, if you don’t mind.
Alexandra Horowitz:
Sure, sure.
Debbie Millman:
Where I once saw and smiled at play between Pumpernickel and the local Bull Terrier, I now saw a complex dance requiring mutual cooperation, split-second communications, and assessment of each other’s abilities and desires. The slightest turn of a head or the point of a nose now seemed directed, meaningful. I saw dogs whose owners did not understand a single thing their dogs were doing. I saw dogs too clever for their playmates. I saw people misreading canine requests as confusion and delight as aggression.
I began bringing a video camera with us and taping our outings at the parks. At home, I watch the tapes of dogs playing with dogs, of people, ball, and Frisbee-tossing to their dogs. Tapes of chasing, fighting, petting, running, barking with new sensitivity to the possible richness of social interactions in an entirely non-linguistic world. All of these once ordinary activities now seem to me to be an untapped font of information.
When I began watching the videos in extremely slow motion playback, I saw behaviors I’d never seen in years of living with dogs. Examined closely, simple play frolicking between two dogs became a dizzying series of synchronous behaviors, active role swapping, variations on communicative displays, flexible adaptation to others’ attention, and rapid movement between highly diverse play acts.
What I was seeing were snapshots of the minds of the dogs visible in the ways they communicated with each other and tried to communicate with the people around them. And two, in the way they interpreted other dogs and people’s actions. I never saw pumpernickel or any dog the same way again.
It’s like one of those Christian moments for me. I just love that whole vivid experience. I saw it so deeply and with such detail, and it felt like in that experience, your whole life changed.
Alexandra Horowitz:
It really did. It’s the thing that’s right in front of you that you’ve never seen. And in fact, that way of looking has infected me in other directions as well. But just with dogs, just with this one subject, it’s profound to see that something you thought you knew had all this dimensionality, which was invisible and which in fact makes it run, makes it work, and is essential to its existence. So, thank you for highlighting that. It was profound for me and it changed the course of … It created my professional career as well.
Debbie Millman:
How did the experiences with Pumpernickel translate into even considering this line of research? Before your work, there really wasn’t a cognitive science of dogs.
Alexandra Horowitz:
Yeah. I was sensitive to and interested in dogs. I was a dog lover. I was like all the people who were dog lovers, identical. I just was interested in and fascinated by dogs, had the same types of generalized questions that a lot of people direct toward me now. “What does my dog thinking? What does my dog know about me?” I had those questions, but I just didn’t think of them as scientific questions that were answerable potentially.
Debbie Millman:
Oh, Alexandra, I had those questions too, but hired a dog whisperer just to give you a difference in sort of life path.
Alexandra Horowitz:
There you go. That’s right. That’s a different avenue. So, I think that, that was meaningful to me, not just with her, but in every direction.
Debbie Millman:
Why do we love dogs so much?
Alexandra Horowitz:
Their responsiveness to us I think is …
PART 1 OF 4 ENDS [00:10:04]
Alexandra Horowitz:
… their responsiveness to us, I think is central to it. They are not unique as domesticated animals, not unique as animals who are tamable or friendly or have the cognitive capacities they do. But they are really unusual in their responsiveness to us, their interest in us, their agreeableness with us, and their seeming ability to read us so well. And frankly, we like that a lot. That’s a kind of responsiveness that I think I look for in other human beings, this kind of sensitivity that dogs seem to come with automatically. I think that’s the center of it.
Debbie Millman:
I think having now had dogs for most of my adult life, I’ve seen how for me and for others, they sort of are able to crack hardened hearts open in a way that sometimes other people can’t. And I don’t know if it’s because of the trust or the unconditional sense of love that they provide us, but I’m sure you’ve witnessed that over and over again.
Alexandra Horowitz:
Yeah. And when you say unconditional, I think that’s such an interesting observation, right? That you yell at a dog, get angry at a dog, accidentally step on a dog, and you turn around and they’re completely ready to start over again. And that’s maybe sometimes not to their benefit, but they are delighted every time you return home. And who is like that? Who in our lives is like that?
And I think another element of this, being able to crack someone’s veneer for instance, is I’ve been thinking about it a lot because I worked in words for such a long time. Is there wordlessness? A lot of people like to voice what their dogs are saying, and that’s a sort of way of animating the quiet member of this conversation that you always feel like you’re having with your dog. But really I think it would be alarming if they said anything out loud. There’s something about just listening, which they seem to do.
Debbie Millman:
Alexandra Horowitz.
Rick Rubin is one of the most celebrated record producers of our time. He’s won nine Grammy Awards and over the years he has produced a who’s who of musical artists from Adele to Jay-Z. Early in 2023 he surprised everyone by publishing a book, not about musicians or producing music, but about the process of being a creative person titled The Creative Act: A Way of Being. It’s a meditation on how creativity works. And when I spoke with him from Costa Rica where he has a home, we got right to it.
Rick Rubin:
In the same way that the seasons change, who orchestrates that change? Who orchestrates the bee moving from flower to flower? It’s all instinctual. All these things happen on an instinctual basis. And if we’re in tune, we can be guided in the same way that a hummingbird is guided to build a nest, the same way we can get back to our true connection if we get out of our own way.
If we try to make it this is the way I think it, that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s if you’re in tune with the planet and you’re playing your role in this giant orchestra that’s going on all the time. And that’s the culture moving forward. That’s everything we see. Everything we get to see is either natural or added to the nature by us. And I’m arguing that we are an extension of nature, nature continuing to unfold. We’re part of it.
Now, we can be part of it in a way that upsets nature. And nature wouldn’t do that. I remember I was in Hawaii years and years ago and I was listening to a public radio station there, and there was an old, a very old Hawaiian man being interviewed. He might’ve even been reading poetry. It was very beautiful. And one of the things that he said was, “When I look at my island, when I go on boat and I look back at my island, I see all the things that man made on my island, and none of them make it more beautiful than it was before. None of them make it better.”
The book is arguing that if we are really in tune with what’s going on, we would be making things that make the world a better place. We can’t help but do it. And when I say a better place, maybe I say more in balance because so much of it is balance. Nature gives us terrible storms that wipe out communities. That’s all part of this balance.
If we can tap into this energy that’s happening all around us at all times, it’s clear what our choices will be. It’s almost as if it happens for us, if we really stay still, really tune in.
In the early days of my career, I used to live very against the planet. I would stay up all night, which is not a natural thing to do. I lived in very controlled spaces that were manmade spaces where I didn’t have much connection to nature. And I found since living in more outdoor spaces, spending much more time outside, I’m more in tune with the planet now because I’m living the way people lived thousands of years ago.
And I think that that helps. It helps me tune into this energy. And I’m not suggesting that’s for everybody. There are degrees of all of this. But I think if we can tune in to what’s going on around us, it becomes clear what our part is.
Debbie Millman:
The whole notion of tuning in feels sort of cosmic and magical to some degree. And you go on to state in the book, if you have an idea you’re excited about and you don’t bring it to life, it’s not uncommon for the idea to find its voice through another maker. This isn’t because the other artists stole your idea, but because the idea’s time has come. And I’m wondering if you think ideas come through the artist rather than from the artist?
Rick Rubin:
Yes, the ideas come through the artist, not from the artist. The artist may make connections between things, but the grand vision doesn’t come from us. And I think the more artists you speak to, they would all tell you this. The ones who really have done it consistently over a period of time tend to get more mystical just through the reality of their experience. It just happens through when you see something remarkable happen over and over again that you can’t explain, you start to realize, well, that’s how it is because it happens all the time. And once you let your guard down because you see it happen all the time, you can welcome it. You can put yourself in a position to allow it to happen more often.
Debbie Millman:
This reminds me of something Elizabeth Gilbert said about the American poet Ruth Stone. And I wanted to read you verbatim what she said because I think it’s really a perfect example of tuning in and what happens when you do that.
She stated that Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, has been a poet her entire life and described when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she’d be out walking in the fields, working in the fields, and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. She said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming because it would shake the earth under her feet. And she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell.
She would run like hell to the house and she’d be getting chased by this poem. And the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it. And she said it would continue on across the landscape looking as she put it for another poet.
And then there were those moments where she would almost miss it. She’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her. And she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. And she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards from the last-
Rick Rubin:
Wow …
PART 2 OF 4 ENDS [00:20:04]
Debbie Millman:
… and intact, but backwards from the last word to the first.
Rick Rubin:
Wow. So cool. I love it. Beautiful.
Debbie Millman:
I was reading your book and I’m like, “Oh my God. Ruth Stone. That’s what happens.”
And then I also read that Tom Waits would do that. He’d be driving in the car and if he couldn’t get to where he was going fast enough, he’d be like, “Don’t you see I’m driving?”
Rick Rubin:
Beautiful. What’s interesting about that story, about both of those stories is not just the cosmic transmission aspect, it also tells us the commitment that the artist needs to make, that when it’s happening, we have to be present for it. We must be present for it, because it’s coming and it’s going. And I talk a lot in the book about it being this is, there’s a section of the book called “An Area of Thought 24/7,” and it’s about the commitment. It’s funny, because we say it’s not really about us. Yes, it’s not really about us, but if we’re not actively participating with all of ourselves at all times, it doesn’t happen.
So that it takes a tremendous work ethic and commitment to wait for lightning to strike, to wait for it to happen. And then there’s another part in the book where we talk about you can’t just wait for that, so you have to show up to work either way. And sometimes through that experimentation process, before the lightning strikes, we still have to show up at, whether it’s our recording studio or our table to write, where we’re going to sculpt, or our design table, whatever it is, we show up and we show up on a regular enough basis that hopefully, hopefully the lightning will strike more often. And if it doesn’t, we’re going to be so much better at crafting, that when it does strike, we’re going to be able to make a much more beautiful thing using the information that comes through.
Debbie Millman:
Rick Rubin.
Now it’s time for an ad I created with our sponsor, Target.
Tom di Maria:
20% of Americans have some form of disability that we have excluded from our lives, from partnerships, from creativity, and that is about to change.
Debbie Millman:
Tom di Maria is the director emeritus at Creative Growth, an art nonprofit based in Oakland, California. The organization advances the inclusion of artists with developmental disabilities and contemporary art, by providing them with supportive studio environments and gallery representation.
Tom di Maria:
Creative Growth artists make work that’s visually appealing and references their own worldview, and many of artists have been coming every day for 35 or 40 years.
Debbie Millman:
I loved reading about one of your artists who is blind, and it really pushed me to reconsider how people make and approach art.
Tom di Maria:
Monica Valentine is an artist who has orthotic eyes and can’t see, and makes elaborately intricate sculptures out of pins, and colored sequins, and beads, and styrofoam, that are organized by color that she says she feels in her hands. There is a enjoyment of the work of an artist from Creative Growth, so personal, it’s so visceral, and we still have to knock down doors and say, “This work is contemporary.”
But that is really changing. Now people come to us and say, “Can we include your artists in this exhibition?”
Debbie Millman:
What would you consider to be some of your biggest successes over the years?
Tom di Maria:
I think one of the biggest successes, if I look back over 20-plus years, is really how artists with disabilities are in so many different venues. If you go into San Francisco Museum of Modern Art right now, there’s William Scott painting on the wall. And for William to go there with this family, and to have viewers come and see it in a contemporary context is amazing.
Debbie Millman:
Next year, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art will showcase a major acquisition of work by the artists into the museum’s permanent collection.
Tom di Maria:
And I think if anyone then doubts that the walls and the barriers are not going to come down, this will be a moment to say like it’s all changing. I think what’s interesting with the Creative Growth artists is that they don’t really separate the world of design from the world of art.
Debbie Millman:
Creative Growth artists have also partnered with brands, and one of their favorite design collaborations was with a longtime supporter, Target.
Tom di Maria:
A transformative moment with our relationship with Target, is the partnership that we did with Method. So Method said, “We really want to bring your artists’ work forward. We want them to be designers for us.”
So the Method team came and it’s like, what does that design smell like? And we came up with the whole package, and we sold millions of bottles. Of all the projects, and museums, and exhibitions that Creative Growth has done, walking down the block to our Target store with the artists and they see the product on the shelf was amazing.
Debbie Millman:
How have these design collaborations impacted Creative Growth?
Tom di Maria:
I think it just broadens the scope of how our artists can be seen in contemporary society. As creative leaders, the artists feel like they’re valuable and they’ve done something to contribute. If you grow up with a disability in America, you’re often measured by your deficiencies, not by your accomplishments. And when Creative Growth changes that idea, and everyone has these accomplishments that they’re proud of, they become different people.
Debbie Millman:
Through strategic partnerships with organizations like Creative Growth, Target leverages their resources to help reduce disparities, to provide equitable and inclusive opportunities, and to strengthen the diverse needs of the communities they serve. Visit Target.com to learn more.
About 30 years ago, Kevin Kelly co-founded Wired Magazine, where he currently holds the title of Senior Maverick. He writes books about technology and the future, and he’s extremely optimistic about both. His latest is Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I’d Known Earlier. When he was a young man, Kevin Kelly had a profound religious experience in Jerusalem, which of course I asked him about.
Kevin Kelly:
I don’t know if I can explain it.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, that’s a good point.
Kevin Kelly:
But I can tell you, the short version is that I was working in Iran during the Khomeini Revolution, got kicked out, went to Jerusalem to photograph Easter, and had a conversion experience in Easter where I really believed that Jesus was the Cosmic Jesus. Cosmic Jesus, again, taking that view of the Godhood and understanding that when you have a free will, we’re going to discover this ourselves when we make robots that have free wills, is that when a robot that you made decides to do harm, the question is, what are the consequences? Should the robot absorb? Does the maker of the robot have any degree of capability? And how do we satisfy the need for justice while still also be loving? And for me, the answer is that the Godhood, the Creator takes on the penalty itself. It absorbs the penalty in part in order to relieve the being with free will from eternal guilt and the burden of having to suffer the consequences of doing harm. And so for me, that’s the Cosmic Jesus.
Debbie Millman:
So that everybody is forgiven.
Kevin Kelly:
Right. And so, that set me off on a course of an assignment that I believe I got, which was to try and live as if I was going to die in six months. That set me off on a different course, where I kind of graduated from photographing and traveling, and I was trying to prepare for this short time of no regrets and trying to deal with things to be ready. And what I didn’t understand at the time, but did later on, was this was providing me with a rebirth experience, where I actually went through the whole thing and then didn’t die, but was reborn in a very, very visceral, tangible way that I could not have believed.
And so, what was interesting about having six months to live was that I could only do that by denying a future. So every day I was giving up the future. I was not thinking about, I wasn’t taking photographs, because what’s the point? You’re not going to be there in six months. And that restricting of the future was another lesson, because when it came out of it on the other side, I realized that having a future was one of the most human things that was really necessary for our own humanity, was to have something in the front of us. And that if you take that away, you take away a lot of humanity.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah, I mean, that’s really the only thing that…
PART 3 OF 4 ENDS [00:30:04]
Kevin Kelly:
Take away a lot of humanity.
Debbie Millman:
Yeah. I mean, that’s really the only thing that differentiates us from other species is our ability to imagine a scenario or a future.
Kevin Kelly:
So, I became much more interested in thinking about the future after that.
Debbie Millman:
It’s interesting, because you had this sense that you were going to die, and it does seem like that six months was a death of sorts in that you were rebirthed in a new way, thinking about time in an entirely new way. Did you have a sense that this was more a metaphysical death, or did you believe that it was going to be a physical death and that you might get hit by a car, or be involved in some tragic accident, and no longer exist?
Kevin Kelly:
I was taking it very literally that I was preparing for the complete death where I would go to sleep that night and not wake up. That was the assignment to me was to prepare in every way as if this was a complete physical reality. So, I was acting as much as I could to be responsible in taking that seriously in every respect. So, when I went to bed that night, I was prepared to physically die.
Debbie Millman:
Initially, you thought that with six months to live, you would climb Mount Everest, or go scuba diving, or get in a speedboat and see how fast you could go.
Kevin Kelly:
Right. That would be the natural inclination. You live life for the fullest. But in fact, I surprised myself because I wanted to see my parents and my brothers and sisters, and do ordinary things. Yeah, that was a surprise to me.
Debbie Millman:
You found the ordinary quite exotic when you went back.
Kevin Kelly:
Yes. And that’s I think part of the marvel of life is finding the extraordinary, and the ordinary, and finding the ordinary and the extraordinary, and I think that was a gift.
Debbie Millman:
You wrote about what you did when you were back home with your parents. You said that you helped around the house, you dug up shrubs, you worked on a deck, you moved furniture, you washed dishes. Were you bored doing those things, or were you feeling very fulfilled by doing those things?
Kevin Kelly:
I was a little bored, because after three months, I got on a bicycle and rode across the US to visit my brothers and sisters. So, no, I get bored pretty easily.
Debbie Millman:
You returned home again on October 31st from a 5,000-mile trek on your bicycle to visit your siblings. Nobody knew this entire time that you were in a race against the clock, so to speak, and that you were expecting to die on November 1st, but you didn’t die. Did that surprise you when you woke up on November 1st? Did you think like Groundhog Day?
Kevin Kelly:
No, as I was saying, I literally felt like I was being born. When I was opening up my eyes, the experience from the visual, from my whole body was a gift like being born because as I was opening my eyes and coming to, I realized that I had a future again, that I had everything. So, it was, yes, a surprise in that sense.
Surprise is not the exact word. It was a gratitude. It was an appreciation. It was like if you were conscious and you were born, what would that feeling be? How would you describe that? If you were, instead of being born as a baby, you were born as an adult, there would be an exhilaration that you would feel, and that’s what I felt.
Debbie Millman:
You had your religious epiphany when you were 27, and you thought you only had six months to live. After you realized that you were not going to die, you created a countdown clock on your computer to count down the days you had left after figuring out your anticipated life expectancy based on some Medicaid actuary charts. That told you that your new projected age of dying was going to be 78.68 years old, I believe you’re now 70.
Kevin Kelly:
71.
Debbie Millman:
According to the date, duration calendar, you figured out the estimated last day of your life was now going to be January 1st, 2031. How do you think about that day now?
Kevin Kelly:
So, the thing about it is, the good news is that my longevity has been increasing. So now, when I look at the tables, it’s like 81 or something. And there’s also something about the longer you live, the higher your chances of living longer, and then there’s medical advances. And so in some senses, in the last couple of years, I haven’t been losing any dates. I’ve actually been able to maintain the same 5,080 days, and so that’s been a bonus, some gravy. But I think I run it just to sharpen my commitment and my focus during the day, because each day is … If I have 5,080 days to do everything on my list, then it’s doing what I am right now. Is it what I want to do? And the answer is in this case, yes, absolutely, but it helps me focus in that way.
Debbie Millman:
I went and did the same thing after reading about you doing this. I have about 10,000 days left.
Kevin Kelly:
There you go.
Debbie Millman:
I am projected to live until 91, which means only two-thirds of my life is over. I have another big chunk, a big third. What’s interesting is that my grandmother lived till 91 and her sister lived till 91. My mother is currently 81, still going. So, I’m kind of feeling good about that. And so, the 10,000 days is something now I’m thinking about.
Kevin Kelly:
We’ll see. You may say 10,000 days is a lot, but to me, for all the things I want to do, even 10,000 days doesn’t seem like enough.
Debbie Millman:
No, it doesn’t. It doesn’t. It doesn’t. Are you afraid of dying?
Kevin Kelly:
No, because I’ve already rehearsed it. I’m not looking forward to it at all. I don’t want it, but I’m not afraid of it.
Debbie Millman:
Are you afraid of anything?
Kevin Kelly:
I’m afraid of being wrong about so many things. There are lots of things that I believe that I’m sure will be totally wrong. It’s a different kind of fear, but in terms of actual things that exist today that I am afraid of, no.
Debbie Millman:
I mean, from what I understand, you haven’t been wrong about that much. I mean, I think the one article … No, no, no. The one article that I think you were really embarrassed about was something called the roaring zeros or something like that.
Kevin Kelly:
No, there’s plenty of things, beliefs that I have that I’m sure I’m wrong about that people in the future will look back and be embarrassed. My descendants will be embarrassed by what I believe.
Debbie Millman:
But fortunately, I think there’s going to be enough other good stuff to sort of cover that stuff up. Kevin Kelly, those were just a few of the writers I interviewed in 2023. You can listen to the full episodes on our website, designmattersmedia.com, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Next week, I’ll have excerpts from interviews with three award-winning female filmmakers I conducted in 2023. This is the 18th year we’ve been podcasting Design Matters, and I’d like to thank you for listening. And remember, we can talk about making a difference, we can make a difference, or we can do both. I’m Debbie Millman and I look forward to talking with you again soon.
Speaker 3:
Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland.
PART 4 OF 4 ENDS [00:38:35]