New format – I find interesting people and ask them five interesting questions. Here is the first installment with Paul Kedrosky. Do read Paul’s blog Infectious Greed, CNBC promo and watch the YouTube video. On with the five questions:
1. BA: I noticed that people who have a significant online presence travel and network a lot. Does your blog and media appearances turbocharge the offline people connections or your real life connections turbocharge you online and media persona?
PK: Both. I need both to inform one another, or I become the boy in the bubble. Offline conversations remind me how inane most of what goes on online is; online conversations remind me how slow, serial and silly most offline conversations are. It’s a dysfunctional but reasonably happy mental marriage.
2. BA: Besides the wonderful weather, what are there cultural differences between East and West coast (for you, subjectively)? Are the cultural boundaries in flux globally? Are we merging or breaking apart into niche interest tribes?
PK: I used to think we were different, but to the extent that was the case it is increasingly less so. Most people from here aren’t from here (southern California) anyway, so in some sense there is no here here. To the extent that Godin-esque tribes are emerging, they have very little to do with geography and much more to do with connectivity.
For example, if I wanted to I could read current economic pessimism porn all day long. I could simultaneously have conversations all the while with people who think it perfectly rational to have most of their money in gold coins, have a year of canned food in the garage, and who think that taxation and the Federal Reserve are both illegal. Most of those people are entirely decent, but totally baffled why others don’t feel the same way. Those “tribes” don’t break down in geographic terms, but are everywhere and nowhere at once.
3. BA: Do you think that one person supporting a family, like in the 50s America, is an aberration or it might happen again?
PK: It will happen again, but it won’t be on a straight-line glide path from here. We’re going to break a lot of assumptions about how a developed economy works over the next few years, from the cost of education to the services governments provide, and on outward. We have become insidiously dependent on a lifestyle built on an edifice of debt and consumption, and the pendulum will, as always, swing hard in another direction.
4. BA: Do you think people who attend TED are out of touch or are in touch better than most of us?
PK: Both. You meet wonderfully smart and connected people at TED who are gob-smackingly bright and connected and informed; and you meet others who are so focused on tiny projects fascinating to them that they have no idea Lehman failed last September. It is one of the things that is refreshing about TED, the challenge of dropping what you imagine people should know and should care about and should be interested in, and just starting all over from scratch.
5. BA: If you had a choice, all things being equal, to go to TED or the Burning Man, where would you go and why?
PK: I’d pick TED. I hate camping.
Marginally more seriously, I understand the appeal of Burning Man, and it’s obviously great for some people, but at this point in my life I don’t have the patience for anything that isn’t over-organized. I need to plan for my inevitable day-before pre-conference penchant for cancellation.
