Joanna: Oh, good. It's interesting, because you talk there about almost changing your process over the years and changing the way you see and you learn to write by writing and figure out what you think. But I wondered how your writing process, in particular, has changed over the years because you've written some very different types of books. What I found out was, later on — they didn’t have enough to process what it was. And it was later on that those trips became more and more important to them as they were able to digest and process it. Even though they maybe didn’t appreciate it at the time, or seem to be paying attention, they were actually reprocessing later as they grew up, and those trips became more important to them than they were at the time. In a world that’s rapidly evolving, it’s essential to anchor ourselves to elements that are stable, or at least not subject to frequent changes. These elements are our values and character, the principles we uphold. These principles dwell in the same realm as wisdom. Because there’s a value — here’s what it is, and that is something related to what I say, is that there’s a tendency to always want to keep moving, but often what I’m looking for is right next to me. I can sometimes miss that ability to go deeper because I’m still traveling. I’m still in that motion mode. COWEN: But do you ever find that, say, you need to write a piece to figure out what you think about something, or maybe it’s the act of painting that is giving you the idea of the image, and there’s no way to reverse engineer that?

That, of course, has changed over time. But that’s the journey that I’ve been on, is leaving that behind. Joanna: Yeah, hopefully. Well, it's funny because there's kind of an obsession in the writing community about finding your author voice.I got into art as a kid, and I almost went to art school after high school, which I should have done, but I didn't. So it's always been a part of how I see things. I eventually kind of gravitated to photography because it was a combination of my other love, which was science. So it's kind of technical and art at the same time. And when I started, you had to do the chemistry, and go into the darkroom, and do the magic chemistry, and so it's very technical. And that was very much a part of me.

Then, secondly, there’s very little projects that might take 25 years or more to do, whether infrastructural or otherwise, and more of those — garnered by the number of people who understand that there’s a benefit to having payoffs come not just for the current generation but future generations — would allow longer-term, maybe even bigger projects to become more normal and conventional than they are right now. KELLY: It was all I could do to try and get them to ride a bicycle to work. I actually accompanied my son a couple of times — it was a pretty long haul; I have to say that. If you don’t find at least seventeen golden nuggets of advice from Kevin Kelly’s list, you’re not awake.”—Daniel Pink The idea is, “Well, I might study accounting, but I intend not to dwell there for very long, because I want to head out into the frontier where there’s something.” I would say it’s an ongoing process where you’re asking yourself, “Is this someone else’s idea of success? What’s buried in me that I can do that may be a little bit different than others?” I’m trying to think of somebody who really regretted having done too much in their lives. I think I’ve not met anybody who’s ever told me that. I’ve met people who told me that they regretted not doing things. I think minimizing regret is still a good idea.I would say one thing: that when they were younger, they were often overwhelmed by the stuff. I took my young girls by myself to parts of Tibet when it was very, very rough and tumble, and they were a little intimidated by the huge Tibetans and the strangeness of it. And I felt in some ways it was a failure, because they would rather play cards on the train than look out the window. It was like, “You’re missing this. This is the Himalayas,” whatever.