Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success

Kevin Kelly has spent over 30 years experiencing the edge of new technology: from the earliest days of the internet to the first years of Burning Man. But he’s always treated the frontier as a place to visit, not somewhere to live. It’s partially how he’s been able to stay grounded through tech’s various hype cycles. As founding executive editor of Wired and author of The Inevitable, Kelly spends as much time analyzing the latest in AI as he does reading about significant moments in history. It’s a discipline he traces back to his work with the Long Now Foundation, which he cofounded to encourage long-term thinking, reaching from the last 10,000 years to the next. On this week’s AI & I, Dan Shipper revisits his conversation with Kelly. They get into why historians can be the best futurists, and how our bid to understand what intelligence is has parallels with early scientists' attempts to figure out electricity. Kelly also describes the joy he found in creating an AI-generated saga featuring Leonardo Da Vinci, Christopher Columbus, and Martin Luther—one that will only ever be read and enjoyed by him. If you found this episode interesting, please like, subscribe, comment, and share! To hear more from Dan Shipper: Subscribe to Every: https://every.to/subscribe Follow him on X: https://twitter.com/danshipper Timestamps for YouTube: 0:00 Start 0:50 Introduction 1:10 Why Dan and Kelly love Annie Dillard 12:52 How to predict the future like Kelly 16:10 What the history of electricity can teach us about AI 20:13 How Kelly thinks about the nature of intelligence 25:44 Kelly's advice on discovering your competitive advantage 29:33 How Kelly assembled a bench of star writers for Wired 34:43 How Kelly used ChatGPT to co-create a book 39:12 Using AI as a mirror for your mind 43:43 What Kelly learned from betting on VR in the 1980s Links to resources mentioned in the episode: Kevin Kelly on X: https://twitter.com/kevin2kelly The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly: https://www.amazon.com/Inevitable-Understanding-Technological-Forces-Future/dp/0525428089 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard: https://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323 1,000 True Fans by Kevin Kelly: https://www.amazon.com/1000-True-Fans-Kellys-Simple-ebook/dp/B01N9P9O4G Full episode transcript: https://every.to/podcast/transcript-be243312-ea22-4193-8c56-b9cd45a79a87

• 0:00Speaker 00

  What I've learned with the future is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true. Jaron Lanier showed me VR in eighty seven. I was completely blown away and I thought, oh my gosh, this is the future. The VR that we had back then is not that much different than the VR you get now. The difference was that was multimillion dollars and it's now a hundred dollars. I've been very, very surprised about how slow that has been. You could say VR is still waiting for its LLM moment. AI is a fifty year overnight success.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Kevin, welcome to the show.

• 0:52Speaker 00

  It's a pleasure to be here. I'm glad to be seen.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  I am very excited to have you. In addition to being a personal hero of mine, I am a longtime Wired reader. I had like a gigantic shelf of magazines growing up. So it's sort of crazy to get to chat with you. There's a lot of things I want to talk to you about, but I want to start with, we have a mutual love of Annie Dillard.

• 1:16Speaker 00

  We do.

• 1:16Speaker 01

  She's my favorite writer and I know she's your favorite writer as well. Tell me why you like her.

• 1:27Speaker 00

  For those who are familiar with Annie, she burst onto the scene with a meteorite of a book called Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that for some reason, it's a count of her spending some year on musing, kind of like a Henry David Thoreau intimate investigation of a creek in Virginia or West Virginia. I don't remember. And so it was just the writing and the style and the ideas and her blazing brilliance in being able to capture

• 2:10Speaker 00

  this into a few words. It was almost like poetry. There was prose. It somehow just worked on my brain. And I don't know enough about literature to describe her in relation to other writers and what doesn't work for me as much. But there was something about her spirit as well as her writing, which was very expansive, cosmic, enthusiastic, questioning. She talked about feeling as if at one point in the story that she was a bell that someone else had rung. And I felt exactly the same in response to her writing. It was like she

• 2:55Speaker 00

  was ringing my bell in a curious way.

• 2:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, lifted and struck. There's another part in the early part of the book where she talks about the tree with the lights in it.

• 3:05Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  And that moment is so very evocative of like one of her big themes, which is you can just be sort of walking around in, in ordinary life and ordinary nature and somehow like the veil is lifted from your eyes and you can experience these moments of transcendence where everything feels like it's glowing from within.

• 3:27Speaker 00

  Yeah. So there was this, her kind of cosmic poetic, you know, ability to kind of take these moments. But then interstitial with that were these findings, these weird little trivia bits that you'd find in some obscure book that you would be grounded in before the next jump. It was, it was a very distinctive way of kind of wrapping rhapsodic ecstasy with very concrete science trivia or oddities. And that combination just somehow appealed to me.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. The, the thing I remember is she spends a long time talking about Henley's loops, which are like this little part of the kidney.

• 4:20Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:21Speaker 01

  And it's just like, where does that even come from? And yeah, I think like she sort of zooms out to the biggest stuff and then zooms into the smallest stuff.

• 4:29Speaker 00

  Right.

• 4:30Speaker 01

  But another thing that's really interesting about her writing, and I'm, I'm curious how you've thought about this in your own work, is she spends a lot of time talking about the beauty of the world, but she also spends a lot of time talking about the worst of the world. Like there's an entire chapter on insects and how gross insects are. She's also angry about it and not afraid to be angry about it, you know? And I think a lot of writers are usually either one or the other. Either you're like really angry or you're really, everything's beautiful and awesome. And she does both pretty well.

• 5:05Speaker 00

  That's true. She said, I think either she said in the book or elsewhere that she wrote the book as if there was a patient of cancer dying in her room.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Oh, wow.

• 5:16Speaker 00

  And she was talking to them. So yeah, that was, yeah, it is not just saccharine. It's not just sweet kombaya. It's, yeah, she's, she can be pretty harsh too. And that is part of the attraction of, you know, the sweet sour flavor.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  How has she, if at all, influenced how you write or edit?

• 5:38Speaker 00

  Well, in some ways, it's why I write at all, because I came across that book in the weirdest of all places. It was in a library, American library in Candy, Sri Lanka.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 5:56Speaker 00

  And I walked in because there was air conditioning and there was a book, why they had the book there, I don't know. But there was a book, it opened up and from the first immediate paragraph, I once had a tomcat, you know, like I was, I was, I was caught and I didn't put it down. And it was like, I don't know what she's doing, but I want to do that. If I could do that, I would, you know, I'm it. I'm golden.

• 6:25Speaker 01

  I feel the same way. Have you read any of her others, any of her other stuff?

• 6:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. I didn't, I didn't write, read her fiction book, but the other essay, books of essay, Teaching Us How to Talk and

• 6:39Speaker 01

  Holy the Firm, The Writing Life.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  Yeah, Holy the Firm and all those, yes. And her account of the eclipse has the total eclipse. It's sort of never to be equaled. Anybody who writes about eclipse has to start with Annie's version.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's so funny because like, the reason I started with Annie is I love her so much and I, and she evokes all the same kind of feelings in me that I think she evokes for you and, and gives me that same kind of energy to write stuff. If I write stuff after I've read something that she's written, it just, it brings something out in me that I just love. And also, no one else I know likes her or even really has heard about her. Like, I feel like a lot of her work is, it's maybe taught in school, but it's like kind of the thing that you're assigned, but people don't like as much.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Well, they probably also don't read the whole thing. They probably would have understood is they only get the excerpt.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:45Speaker 00

  You know, it's probably some one passage about the lights in the trees or whatever.

• 7:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, it is true because, because she didn't really, I mean, she wrote a couple of other books, but she didn't really go on to have a huge amount of work and a huge amount of output for whatever reason. I actually sent her a book that I did when I was riding my bicycle across the country. I did a haiku and a sketch every day. And I sent her the book, the original. And because I thought, I was inspired by her. I just thought that she would enjoy it. And she actually sent some nice words in response to the book and sent it back. So that was my kind of my one, it was the one time when I kind of wrote

• 8:33Speaker 00

  to a hero.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  That's really nice.

• 8:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, she did reply.

• 8:40Speaker 01

  I bet a reply, a reply from Annie is probably pretty rare. So that's, that's pretty great.

• 8:46Speaker 00

  I think I still have it. I think it's right behind me. I should dig it up and see. She did, there was one little drawing. She said she really liked that little drawing. So that was, that was good.

• 8:55Speaker 01

  Yeah. Another thing, to move on from Annie for a second, one thing that you wrote in your book, The Inevitable, that I really loved and thought was interesting is after living online for the past three decades, first as pioneer in a rather wild, empty quarter, and then later as a builder who constructed parts of this new continent, my confidence in this inevitability is based on the depth of these technological changes. I really love the, the sort of like pioneer to builder transition. I've been watching this show, it's an old HBO show called Deadwood. I don't know if you've seen it.

• 9:30Speaker 00

  I haven't seen it.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  But it's, it's basically about Deadwood. I think now it's South Dakota, but it was like, it was a mining town in Indian Territory before it was annexed into a state. And so it had no law. And the whole show is kind of about that transition from pioneer to like order out of chaos. And I think there's a lot of resonance with what sort of what you wrote and, and this, yeah, the transition from pioneer to builder feels like something that's deeply embedded into tech. Even with every single wave, like in the, in this new AI wave, there's this whole movement of pioneers, like kind of figuring out the whole new landscape. And then the builders kind of move in. Tell me about what that's been like for you to

• 10:16Speaker 01

  participate in and watch over the last couple of decades.

• 10:18Speaker 00

  Yeah. There are a lot, you know, there are always feelings of loss as the kind of the freedom of no laws, the unvarnished, the unconstrained ability to do what you want without having to ask permission. That goes away. And oh, actually, I was just, just, just had another experience that was like that, which was Burning Man.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  And I was reminded because I did a podcast with Burning Man today and they, we were reminiscing about, you know, my, the first, ninety six or so, the first time I was a Burning Man, when there were no streets, there were no, there's no adult supervision at all. There was no sense of order. There was, it was, it was crazy and chaotic and wonderful, but.

• 11:12Speaker 00

  There was a second year, I think there was somebody who died because they got run over by a car and they were just sleeping on the sleeping bag. And so it was like, oh, we need streets. Okay. And so,

• 11:28Speaker 00

  and over, over years and years of Burning Man, they have more and more of the layering of law and order. And they have tons and tons of police and sheriffs and whatnot and laws and the bureaucratic stuff that I had to go through. Cause I did artwork last year. It was unbelievable. It was like dealing with somebody in India. And so, but at the same time, I think Burning Man is better than ever. And so you lose something, but actually I think

• 11:58Speaker 00

  there's more to be gained by adding that layer of organization and structure and governance. And so what you want to have is though you still want to have those zones where there's a frontier. You want to keep making new territory that generates new frontiers. And some people are better on the frontier than back at the center. And I think that's a wonderful way the world would work. And so for me, I want to maintain both of constantly new frontiers where those are suited to not having to have many rules.

• 12:41Speaker 00

  Are able to thrive. And then those who prefer to have the discipline of working within rules also can thrive.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  What about in your own life? Because,

• 12:56Speaker 01

  you know, as someone who's interested in new technology that requires being on the frontier. And the interesting thing about the frontier is if you're a little bit of a restless spirit, it's pretty cool.

• 13:09Speaker 01

  But being a restless spirit is, it can be hard. It can be lonely. How have you balanced that in your own life or dealt with in your own life?

• 13:18Speaker 00

  So I tend to visit the frontier. I'd spend a lot of my adult life in the very remote parts of Asia where there is very little infrastructure. I spent a early portion of my adulthood for many extended time in areas where there was very little modern infrastructure. And I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it, but I would have died if I needed to live there.

• 13:49Speaker 00

  I mean, so it was a great place to visit, but it was only great because I was going to leave. I have the same kind of things with the frontiers. It's like, yeah, Burning Man is fantastic for two weeks, but it'd be horrible. I have to live there year round. And, you know, being at the frontier of the internet and or AI, my understanding is, is that,

• 14:11Speaker 00

  you know, it's moving, it's a moving frontier. It's going to move. I can keep going up to the, to the edge to see what's happening, but I don't need to stay there. And I'm going to actually come back and report anyway. So I have the liberty of, you know, being a nomad in that sense of occupying it. So for me, it's a fantastic place to spend the time in, but not a, a place that I want to spend all my time in.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And how does that work? Cause I understand sort of the frontier of going to another country and be able to come home. But with technology, you can be at the frontier in your house.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And so is that, is that structured for you? Like there are, there are periods in your life or periods in your day where you're sort of immersing yourself in what's new? And then periods where you're kind of in the sort of stability of whatever you're familiar with? Or how does it work?

• 15:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, right. So one of the things that I discovered over time is the, all the, my favorite people who were best about the future were actually great historians too. So I would balance reading something about AI with trying to read something historical in the past. And a balance, you know, wrestling with the latest AI stuff with working in my workshop and using my hands. So for me, yes, that's exactly what it is. Jeff Bezos said, you know, he was trying to build a business on the things that didn't change.

• 15:47Speaker 00

  And so the Long Now Foundation, which I've been very central to, is trying to take a long-term view and not just to forward, but also the past. And so for me, I would spend time on this ephemeral frontier, but also then try to think about the next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  As you're digging into the current AI wave, what are the historical periods that you're thinking about or diving into?

• 16:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually I spent a good amount of time recently reading about the

• 16:23Speaker 00

  discovery and or invention of electricity.

• 16:29Speaker 00

  Because my contention right now is we have no idea what intelligence is, that we're as ignorant of it as

• 16:39Speaker 00

  Isaac Newton and others were of electricity when it was first encountered. And Isaac Newton, one of the smartest humans ever, was totally wrong about electricity. Right? He had this wrong weird ideas about it that were just, that were just wrong.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  What did you think about it? I, I have not heard anything about Isaac Newton and electricity. That's really interesting.

• 17:04Speaker 00

  He was one of the people who kind of thought that there was this either Flog, Flog, Flogastan? Have you heard of Flogastan?

• 17:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, Flogestin. Yeah, yeah.

• 17:13Speaker 00

  So it was, it was

• 17:15Speaker 01

  The thing that creates fire.

• 17:16Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was this kind of, well, no, it was just this kind of element and that there was another element. And this, and, and the, the discovery of electricity was happening at the same time that basically we were understanding what elements and atoms and compounds were. So Davies and Faraday and those guys,

• 17:37Speaker 00

  were almost discovering stuff about electricity weekly. And the origins of the Royal Academy came out of the weekly meetings that they would have where they would sell tickets and do demos

• 17:53Speaker 00

  with electricity and make sparks and stuff. And one of the biggest news items in the shocks was when they, and I forget who it was, maybe Faraday proved that electricity would happen in a vacuum. Because there goes the ether. You don't need ether. It's like, well, then what is it? Okay. And, and there was, you know, some of the earliest beliefs, electricity was that it was primarily a biological phenomenon. And there's all those, all those

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Reflexes and

• 18:33Speaker 00

  And so there were just endless theories about what it is. And they all reminded me of all the theories we have about what intelligence is, because we don't really know what it is. And I have been saying, I suspect that intelligence is not an element, but a compound. That it is made up of a complex of different cognitive elements. And we haven't even identified yet, in the same way that salt's not a element. Salt is actually a compound of some elements that they had not yet identified. So we can think of the kind of the current AI is we're making some kind of salt and we don't even know what it's made from.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think that's true. Where it makes my mind go, and I'm curious how you would respond to this is,

• 19:25Speaker 01

  we actually do know what it is, but we don't know it in the same way that we know what electricity is. So we don't have a explicit, exact mathematical theory in the same way that we can talk about, talk about electricity. And we don't have a way to decompose it into parts that, that, that reduce down and then recombine into it. But we do know what it is on a, in a different way. Like I'm talking to you and I know that you're intelligent. And that's harder to grasp. It's not, it's not the same kind of graspy. I can pin it down to the wall kind of thing, but I think that that just may be a property of, of intelligence, that it is sort of like this fuzzy thing. How do you think about that?

• 20:09Speaker 00

  Well, I'm, I know, you may be confusing recognizing something with, with knowing it. So I think we can recognize it. But I actually don't think we know what it is. And in fact, I think our brains are incredibly opaque to introspection. Deliberately, I, I, I, I think we have this complex things that, that deliberately does not allow the organism to interfere and meddle with it. Could you imagine if we had access to the source code, we'd be,

• 20:37Speaker 00

  we would be completely wrecking ourselves. And what the it is, again, I, I, I think we humans have a very peculiar complex of things that if we map it out in the possibility space of all possible minds, which is a very high dimensional space, that we're going to be, our compounds way at the edge. We're an edge species. We're not at the center of anything. The, the galaxy or the solar system or evolution. We are an edge, our kind of intelligence will be revealed to be a very peculiar mixture. That's evolved for us. And then what we're going to be doing with AIs is making hundreds of

• 21:20Speaker 00

  various other kinds and filling out that possibility space with many types of thinking. And so we'll look back and, you know, we, we won't even recognize maybe some of these other things as intelligence right now. Because it doesn't, we don't have a very good definition, you know? It's like, what are the definitions or what are the marks for something that doesn't like a human like intelligence? The, some people say, well, there isn't anything. There's only universal intelligence. And we're just going to make more of it. That there's only one thing. And I, that's possible, but I suspect that's wrong. I suspect that there is many compounds and that they will

• 22:05Speaker 00

  be engineered to do different things. And to some degree, we won't understand even how they work, but.

• 22:13Speaker 00

  That's because they're different. And so um uh I I I think we we are very much like the early days of electricity where we simply didn't have a clue about what it was, even though we could use it, even though we could recognize it.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Where does your intuition that it's made up of compounds come from?

• 22:32Speaker 00

  Well, and several rings. One is Marvin Minsky was the first to suggested it called the um society of mind. And then these days, the AIs have mixture of experts um where they are already doing that, where they already are taking different kinds of cognition and making them into compounds. And so I think we'll have various layers of this, like tissues, where you have cells and and or molecules made from elements. And so we're going to make some very high chain, heavy compounds of intelligence at some level, made up from lots

• 23:10Speaker 00

  of little bits of elemental cognition. What we haven't done yet is done the chemistry of identifying what some of the basic cognitive units are, or the cognitive elements. And um um we may be starting to do that.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  Thinking about the way neural networks work, a way to look at them is they learn many, many thousands or millions of rules for what to do in particular situations that they can partially apply and run many, many of those rules in parallel to find the right set that sort of applies to a particular situation. So in that case, like, intelligence is a compound of rules that are about like little micro correlations um that are applied depending on how relevant they are to a particular situation. Um but it's interesting to think

• 24:08Speaker 01

  about um how much of those rules are uh contingent, like they're just situational versus they're they're sort of your universal. Um because we do know, for example, how neural networks function at a low level, like we know the atomic units. And in fact, like, the specific architecture, the specific set of atomic units that you use doesn't really matter for the high level behavior. It does to some extent, but you can get basically the same behavior to no matter the the the simple components you use.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Right.

• 24:40Speaker 01

  So there's something like, oh, it's hard to understand in between the simple components and the like outward behavior that we observe.

• 24:48Speaker 00

  I mean, you know, Danny Hill has made a computer with tinker toys. So you can make computers out of all kinds of elements, logic gates and stuff like that. So I don't want to confuse sort of like your neural nets. I don't think that is the basic unit. I think there is a type of reasoning or learning or something that happens with the neural nets that we haven't quite identified yet. That I would say that's that that would be the the element is is what is that process of pattern matching, or if that is what it

• 25:27Speaker 00

  is, or deduction, or it's a logic, or what's the workflow for doing deduction? And it could be, uh, you know, could be agnostic to the actual platform.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  It seems like it must be um in in some way. But yeah, that's interesting. Um, one of the things I love about um the way that you've set up your career, and and I think probably also the um, the way that you think about just creative work in general is um, it's about being honest and authentic to who you are instead of what you think you should be doing. And I found that over and over again, like, especially like at the beginning of a career, it's like really easy to be like, I need to do things in this particular way. And then at some point, you're like, I don't know, this kind of, at least for me, you're like, this isn't working as well as it should. And this kind of sucks. And like, I guess I have to like, do the thing that's like, more honest to who I am

• 26:23Speaker 01

  and more shaped to who I am. And and it it removes all of this like daily friction. Um, so like, honestly, like, hearing you talk about that in various forums over the year has been like quite helpful for me. How does that look now after many years of thinking that way? Is that still something that's that's on your mind that's difficult that you have to like unstick yourself from? Or are you kind of, do you get used to living that way after a while?

• 26:52Speaker 00

  Um, yeah, I mean, my own life was never very planned or deliberate in that sense. I had I had more directions than destinies or destinations. A phrase that I like or advice that I like to give these days is about, don't aim to be the best, aim to be the only, be the only. But that was not something that I was doing consciously when I was younger. That was something that I only realized I was doing much later. And it's I it's part of the book about wisdom I wish I had known earlier is I really did wish

• 27:33Speaker 00

  that someone had told me that earlier. Um, and so I think I did some a bunch of things very intuitively without necessarily um having a grand plan about it. And so so I kind of naturally move in that direction. And um, this this idea of being the only was made clear to me first at Wired, where I was trying to assign stories that I had to

• 28:09Speaker 00

  other writers and often not getting any traction with a great idea that um I couldn't sell to anybody. And after years of kind of um trying to kill it, I would wind up doing it myself and then realizing, oh, that's because only I can do it. And that's what I should be focusing on to begin with. And um, so that was, so I think the the clarity of it, I I think I have more clarity of it, but I'm still kind of doing what I've always done, but maybe being a little bit more aware of the the actual process of of doing it.

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, um, I I resonate very much with this, like, trying to get writers to to do an idea. Um, so every the company that I run, it's a media company. And um, it's so different from other any other business, because like, uh, I come from the software world. And if you have a product idea, and you build a little bit of it, you can have someone else like build a lot, build most of the product. And it's totally, it can be great. But getting a writer to write your idea, it's never any good. Almost, almost never. There's like, the people who are good ghostwriters are like, such a small portion of writers.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  That actually wasn't, that actually wasn't my experience. My experience was that the writers were even better. So, you know, I assigned, uh, I had this, I discovered reading IEEE spectrum that they were laying the um fiber or, you know, fiber optic cables around the globe. And I thought, hmm, they're wiring up, you know, the news sphere. Um, that'd be a great story. So I signed Neil Stephenson to that. He he, you know, he he just did this masterpiece that I could never, ever have done. Um, and Bruce Sterling and the other great writers, um, they did a much better job of writing it than than I ever could have.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  Well, I wish I had Neil Stephenson writing for me.

• 30:18Speaker 00

  Well, okay, here's the thing. This is what I tell every aspiring is, get the young science fiction writers of today and give them journalistic assignments. They love it. Because they're born storytellers, you're paying them to go learn something that they want to learn, and they'll come back with something amazing.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  I think that's the key thing. And and what I what I'm more talking about, rather than like, it's it's I I've I've worked with a lot of like, really talented writers. Everyone that I work with, I think, is super talented. But trying to get someone to write about something they don't really want to write about, it's never going to be that good. Um, in my experience.

• 30:54Speaker 00

  Well, yeah, but yeah. So so you have you have to match it to something that they're interested in. So um, yeah, that's that's the, that's the trick. I wasn't giving them, I wasn't making them write something they weren't interested in. But I was, and sometimes that's how the conversation would start, you know, okay, what's something you're really interested in um that we can help make happen, that we can pay you to educate yourself in? And, you know, we could jointly come up with an idea. Um, and, I mean, if again, if I was running a magazine, that's the first thing I would start doing is finding the youngest science fiction writers and giving them assignments.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  I should, uh, I should look into that. Mostly, I just uh find people who write good tweets that I'm that I find interesting.

• 31:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's fine. I I that's a good way, too. But um, uh, find someone who can tell a good story and has a little bit of a um ability to kind of fantasize or, you know, whatever. So um, you know, and and Neil was not Neil when we were first starting, you know, he he he was still at the beginning of of his career, which is, of course, why he agreed to it.

• 32:09Speaker 01

  Yeah. One of the things you you talk about a lot is being a reluctant writer um and born editor. And one of the, just getting into AI for a second, one of the things that strikes me about AI is it it puts you into editing mode much quicker.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, it does.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  How has that worked for you?

• 32:27Speaker 00

  It's been great, because it's, I can get over that big hump, just just kind of helping get something on the page and starting to work within kind of illuminating.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  The spots that I'm most ignorant of and yeah, for me, it's a really great way to start.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Is there anything that has worked particularly well, like as part of your workflow to like to get it started?

• 32:58Speaker 00

  Um, well, I use it for rese- I use some of them for research too. And that's another way. What you're while you're researching, you're summarizing stuff and synthesizing. So there are these elements that begin to

• 33:11Speaker 00

  to take place. It's the L I L M's are really good at organizing things. And that's another, see, I'm not that organized normally. I don't, I don't, I kind of, I'm a gardener rather than architect in terms of things. And so I can get a little bit more further along in thinking about it in an architectural way.

• 33:32Speaker 00

  So for me, it's a, yeah, it's a great way to start on things.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  What are you using day to day AI wise? Like what, which models?

• 33:40Speaker 00

  I'm using mostly OpenAI right now.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Do you use any, like any particular one? Like are you using four oh oh one oh three?

• 33:49Speaker 00

  Um, I have the oh one pro.

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Do you like it?

• 33:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I, I've done some of, you know, for a very deep research and it's, it's, it's astounding. I'm just reminded again, again, that this is a skill. Using him, getting the most of him is a skill that will take your 10,000 hours. And it's definitely not just pushing the buttons. It's not just clicking. And so

• 34:22Speaker 00

  it, it's very apparent to me that, you know,

• 34:27Speaker 00

  I need to spend a lot more time whispering and understanding how it is and what is, how to use it. And so my needs right this moment are not so that I'm using that level of research every day.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  Do you have specific examples of like when you've used it for research that it has like blown you away?

• 34:49Speaker 00

  I did something, and this is a little bit of something I've been meaning to write about, which is I, I, I had this fantasy. I had had some observation that I realized that Leonardo da Vinci, Martin Luther and Christopher Columbus were all alive at the same time. And I said, I was, this is my conversation with the AI. I said, imagine it's a snowy evening and all three are stuck in the same hotel together and they have a conversation. You know, give me the conversation based on, you know, based on your writings and or their interests and their personalities and their. And so they did the conversation. I said, that was amazing.

• 35:33Speaker 00

  But they, they got along so well, they decided to collaborate on a project. What would that project be? And this was the AI's idea. The AI's idea was that they would want to start a new city in the new world that was based around science and religious freedom. And I said, okay, you know, start writing Wikipedia articles about this city and start. We'll start, start filling it in. And then we had characters and peoples and histories. And then I was going on with, starting to tell, actually to tell research stories based on these characters.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  And then I introduced other things like other contemporaries, like Queen Victoria, who was alive at the same time. She was the main rival. Trying to take down the city. There was, they reached China 10 years before the Portuguese. And then they would bring all the books from China. And so I was just making this bigger and bigger, bigger thing, world building. And I started, I got 10 different novels from it. And then I had them, had it synthesized and iron out all the contradictions between the novels and make a big epic saga. And then I had it write the, making book covers and writing the marketing materials.

• 36:59Speaker 00

  And the point of all this is that I'm not going to show it to anybody because the, I don't need to. The joy of creating it

• 37:08Speaker 00

  was better than reading it. It was, it was the audience of one. And so what I'm hypothesizing is a lot of the generative stuff, the 50 million images that are generated each day with AI, 99.999% have the audience of one. They're generated for the pleasure of the co-creator. And this idea of people will be making feature-length movies

• 37:40Speaker 00

  for themselves and the, the, the pleasure will be in the generating of the movie, the code generating of the movie that you're directing. You'll be directing the movie for yourself. And

• 37:58Speaker 00

  anyways, that was a project I was using Pro because the, the, the degree of historical realism and fantasy was mind bending.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  That's really cool. I love that. It seems like there's an interesting line from a thousand true fans to an audience of one.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  How have you thought about that?

• 38:18Speaker 00

  Well, of course, there's no economic model for the audience of one.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  There is for OpenAI.

• 38:28Speaker 00

  Right, exactly. I think this is in, you know, this is the abundance mindset where you have the time to, to do this. So, so I, I think this is not so much a business or someone's career. I think this is kind of a different form of entertainment or self-expression. It's just like Sunday painting or keeping a journal or, you know, someone doing ice skating. It's, it's a form of self-expression and relaxation and enjoyment, entertainment. So it's, it's closer to entertainment than it is to actually, you know, a career.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  It reminds me a little bit of, have you, are you familiar with active imagination?

• 39:17Speaker 00

  No.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  It's a, um, uh, it's part of like Jungian psychotherapy. The idea being you can do active imagination where you,

• 39:31Speaker 01

  you take a dream that you've had recently and you sort of like re-enter the dream world while you're waking. And you explore some of the archetypes and themes, either by writing them out or just like exploring them to, to, to and with yourself. And in doing that, it kind of reflects back to you things that might be like a little bit more latent in, in your psyche. So the fact that you're playing around with these characters and you're, and these novels are going in different directions or whatever, and the decisions that you're making might say something to you about what you're processing or like what you're, what you're currently thinking about that.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  In addition to just being really fun, it might tell you something about yourself.

• 40:10Speaker 00

  Mm hmm.

• 40:12Speaker 00

  Yeah. So it may be something like that. In fact, you know, I mean, I think there will be very, very good AI therapists.

• 40:21Speaker 00

  And maybe to the extent that we may not even make that distinction, maybe some particular AI companions, AI buddies, AI partners will perform some of that and people will use them in that capacity, even though they're maybe nominated as that. And again, this is something else I've been saying is I think people are going to be shocked by the degree of emotion, emotional bonding that we will have as we put emotions into the AIs. And some people will be very, very close to these on a always on basis and very dependent on them to do their best.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. One thing that, um, I don't know if you saw, but just came out today, like a couple of hours ago.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  No, I haven't seen them in podcasts all day.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  You're in for a treat when you get off the, when you get off the podcast grind, but OpenAI released a new memory system for ChatGPT. So previously ChatGPT, you could ask it to save memories, but it would like do it when it was really explicitly told to. And, you know, when it like really thought, okay, this is definitely something I need to store. But what the new memory system does is it just, it, it is able to access all the past history of all your chats that are relevant automatically. So you can ask things like,

• 41:44Speaker 01

  what do you know about me that from all of our chats that I might not know about myself? And it will just go through all these historical chats and tell you a lot of really interesting things. I've been playing, I was playing around with it all day before we, we got on the show. I think you'll really, I think you'll really like it. And I think to that sort of emotional attachment point, I want to use something that feels like it knows me.

• 42:05Speaker 00

  Sure.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  I get, I get more, I get more, more attached to it. I personally think that's really good, but there's, there's trade-offs, obviously. And I'll be curious to see how that changes how we relate to each other to over the next couple of years.

• 42:19Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. That's cool.

• 42:23Speaker 01

  I've been, I've noticed that you're also doing a lot of tweeting with, uh, it looks like AI-generated images. Are you using, are you using native image gen for that?

• 42:31Speaker 00

  I think they're mostly mid-journey.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Mid-journey.

• 42:33Speaker 00

  Yeah. Which for me, I just have a habit of that. It's, it's comfortable.

• 42:42Speaker 00

  I know Dolly, I mean, not Dolly, the chat now has some, which I've tried and it's pretty good, but I just,

• 42:49Speaker 00

  I actually like the public aspect of the mid-journey Discord where you actually.

• 42:57Speaker 00

  It was a huge, quick learning curve because you're seeing what the prompts other people were doing and how you could get there. And I like that public aspect of it.

• 43:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. I'm curious if we, if we zoom back out.

• 43:13Speaker 01

  You've seen a lot of different technology waves. I think one of the interesting things about this particular one is

• 43:22Speaker 01

  how scared people are. And that's probably been true to some extent of previous ones. But I think in a lot of ways, like with mobile, it was like, people didn't even care. It just like wasn't even on their minds for a while. At least in my lifetime.

• 43:42Speaker 01

  And I'm curious what you've learned about like seeing all these different waves come and go, like what you've learned about the future and how to think about the future.

• 43:53Speaker 00

  That's a pretty big question. I think

• 43:57Speaker 00

  the first thing I think about all the places that I was wrong.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Where were you wrong?

• 44:01Speaker 00

  Oh, so many, so many times. I was very wrong about VR. I saw Jared Lanier showed me VR in eighty seven, something like that in his lab. And I was completely blown away. And I thought, oh, my gosh, this is this is, this is the future. This is amazing. And to be clear, the VR that we had back then, which was thirty, forty years ago, it's crazy. I can't remember. It's a lot of years ago, many decades, is not that much different than the VR you get now.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  The difference was that that was multimillion dollars and it's now a hundred dollars. That's the main difference was not that it was actually that much better now. It is, it is better, but it's not a million times better, but it's a million times cheaper. And so

• 45:04Speaker 00

  I was, I've been very, very surprised about how resistant, how slow, how how slow that has been, because I really expected that to take off.

• 45:20Speaker 00

  I was wrong about eBay, just as a trivial example. I thought, I don't get, you know, what's, it's, who would use this? And I just didn't have the imagination to

• 45:37Speaker 00

  to see it. I was early to blockchain, but I didn't think Bitcoin was really going to be much. I didn't understand. I didn't, I didn't foresee the way in which it became this

• 45:52Speaker 00

  store of value. And I expected like everyone else that it could be used for micro payments.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  But

• 46:03Speaker 00

  it was, I didn't understand or we didn't appreciate it. We didn't know how expensive it was going to be to do a processing. And so, so my expectations about the role of blockchain, I also thought that we would have more of a headway into things that were not financial. And again, so blockchain became completely overwhelmed by the amount of money in it. And it became about money and finance. And I was thought that it would be used for things that had nothing to do with finance. And that really didn't happen. So

• 46:41Speaker 00

  so that's when I think about what I've learned with the future is, is that it's easy to make predictions and hard to make predictions that are true.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  Well, if we, if we go back to the specific cases, it seems like there is one case where you're like, this has definitely got a future. And another, and two other cases where you're like, this, no, I don't think these are really that, that great. And what do you think you missed? Let's talk about the first one. You're like, this definitely has a future. What do you draw from that? What do you think you, you missed there that made it much harder than you expected to get people to adopt it?

• 47:19Speaker 00

  I think it required a lot of biology and

• 47:23Speaker 00

  understanding or being able to work with biological things rather than just our mind. You, you have focusing on your eyes. You, you have

• 47:36Speaker 00

  just the weight of the thing on your head. There's just a lot of biological things in addition to the hardware things. You have hardware biology and that that is just going to go slower. And so one of the things I take from that is I think the arrival of robots is going to take a lot, lot, lot longer than people think because we have a 25 watt supercomputer and a quarter horsepower engine. And, and there's no,

• 48:07Speaker 00

  there's no way we can do all that kind of stuff with that kind of efficiency, anywhere close to that. And so the amount of, of power that we need to either compress or to eliminate by making more efficient things is, is, is a huge, huge, huge gap. And so that, again, that physicality of it, particularly around our bodies and stuff, or the scale of our bodies, I think is, is going to be a lot slower. And that's what I've taken away from the thing, that what I've learned about VR is that it's going to take a lot more time than, than just making AI.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Well, that's interesting because I was going to bring up AI as an interesting parallel example where it also took a lot longer to do AI than we thought it would. But then it just all seemed to suddenly happen in like 10 years. And I'm curious what you think the leading indicators are for something like, okay, so AI didn't work for 50 years. And then like suddenly in like 2010 or so, it started to like, there was some like glimmers of hope. And then ChatGPT a couple of years ago is like, really, wow, this is a thing.

• 49:15Speaker 01

  And VR, like if we wanted to measure where we are in that cycle, do you have a thought for that?

• 49:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, you could say VR is still waiting for its L M moment, right? Where, where, where there's some

• 49:28Speaker 00

  technical breakthrough

• 49:31Speaker 00

  in the lenses or focusing or something or projection that

• 49:39Speaker 00

  allows for that. So

• 49:42Speaker 00

  it's interesting too, that the L M's were kind of not working on reasoning directly. They were, they were doing language translation. And that's, they noticed that there was some reasoning happening in language translation, which was completely unexpected.

• 49:59Speaker 00

  And maybe it's the key technology for VR, AR will come from somewhere else. But it hasn't happened yet and doesn't look like it's happening right now.

• 50:14Speaker 00

  So I, yeah. We, you know, AI is a, it's a 50 year overnight success.

• 50:22Speaker 01

  What about, what about going back to the other two examples? So eBay and blockchain of like, hey, like, I don't, this isn't really that interesting.

• 50:32Speaker 00

  Right, right. So eBay,

• 50:36Speaker 00

  I think with the auction stuff, and I think the only reason why eBay worked is that people moved beyond the auction. I use eBay all the time and I've never used auction. I just have no patience for it. And so I think the idea that it was this idea that it was auctions and that I didn't connect to, and I was never really interested in. I, I could be wrong, but for me eBay has only now succeeded because most people aren't using the auctions. But I don't know if that's really true or not. Do you use auctions on eBay?

• 51:10Speaker 01

  I, I only, I got really into eBay when I was like 10 and I was like, I want to sell everything in my dad's garage, you know?

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Did you?

• 51:18Speaker 01

  I didn't end up doing it because it just, selling things online as a 10 year old was, it was a complicated situation. But I was really into it for that reason, but I've never really bought anything on eBay. I never, I've never, I never bid.

• 51:32Speaker 00

  So eBay is actually very, very useful. It's kind of like there's Amazon and then there's, you know, Alibaba. And then there's eBay, which is sort of like all the things that either

• 51:44Speaker 00

  aren't officially for sale or, you know, they're way out of stock or out of print or they're totally obscure. And so for me, if you, if I can't find it on Amazon, Alibaba, and then you're, then you're onto eBay. Etsy is another level, which is like, you know, handmade stuff. But there's eBay is really good for like really obscure stuff. And then they do have the option of auction, but I never used it. But anyway, so for me, the, the thing was this idea of auctioning

• 52:19Speaker 00

  for everything didn't seem like that was going to work. But for a while it, it did. And that was just me personally, just not being much of a bargainer type.

• 52:29Speaker 01

  I guess you can't win them all.

• 52:33Speaker 01

  I know you have a hard stop.

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Kevin, it was really great to get a chance to chat. Thank you so much.

• 52:42Speaker 01

  Would love to do this again soon.

• 52:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, it was a pleasure. Great things and I'm glad there's another Andy Diller fan.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Oh, my gosh, folks, you absolutely positively have to smash that like button and subscribe to AI and I. Why? Because this show is the epitome of awesomeness. It's like finding a treasure chest in your backyard, but instead of gold, it's filled with pure, unadulterated knowledge bombs about ChatGPT. Every episode is a roller coaster of emotions, insights and laughter that will leave you on the edge of your seat craving for more. It's not just a show, it's a journey into the future with Dan Shipper as the captain of the spaceship. So do yourself a favor, hit like, smash, subscribe and strap in for the ride of your life. And now, without any further ado, let me just say, Dan, I'm absolutely hopelessly in love with you.