hi everybody today talk with a very talented illustrator Ash Lam there's a very good chance you've probably seen Ash's Creations in your timeline he is well known for creating the minimalistic illustrations that capture interesting ideas and observations about life you can see some examples on the screen right now of some of his more recent Creations during our chat we talk about everything from how he got started the key to Marketing Online the power of platforms extending the idea of open world video games to real life artificial intell and a whole lot more this going to be a fun chat you don't want to miss this so stick around nope there's no zero Ash great to chat with you I've been following your content online for a very

long time I've also been following your content stolen and reposted by other people long period of time we'll talk more about that but just introduce

yourself well it's a pleasure thank you so much for having me I just want to let the audience know that this is my first proper podcast so it's an absolute pleasure to do it with you and my name is Ash Lamb I'm 22 years old I turned 22 in January and I've been a content creator for about two years so it was all a coincidence I'll get into the story later on but I've been creating visual ideas especially on Twitter for about two years visual ideas on philosophy business life anything that I'm curious about I create visuals and I share them for everyone to

see so I have to ask what that you started how do you begin like at what point did you decide I'm I'm going to get into computer going into Tech I'm going to create visuals and then share them so I want to hear the full Journey

okay so it's a pretty interesting story so I was working at a web design agency and it was my first um like full-time job and I was feeling a bit lethargic a big bored and I was procrastinating one night and I didn't want to do the work and I was just browsing on on on the internet just looking for ideas and for some reason I decided that I wanted to turn my notion my notion page into a public website and notion didn't have that as an option so I did a bit of research and I found this amazing platform called super doso and I decided to use it and it went really well and I built my first website so that was my first website um again it

wasn't code but I felt really proud of myself and I did a bit of research and I found out that this platform wasn't built by some large Corporation it was built by a you know uh someone like me someone young that likeed to build things for other people but this person was documenting the journey on Twitter so he was essentially making the whole journey public for everyone to see and I decided to create a Twitter account just to follow his work I didn't have any intention of posting my own stuff but one thing led to another and I fell down the rabbit hole and I decided to start posting in my own ideas without any success I got like zero likes on average but I kept going and I kept going and I

kept being introduced to other people creating different stuff and that's when I discovered Jack Butcher and he's a British he's I think he's from Britain and he's a visualizer very popular visualizer and he started this whole movement of creating visual ideas so instead of just sharing text based tweets grabbing an idea you find interesting and turning it into something Visual and I got his course and I learned how to do it myself and the rest is history so it's been a very interesting journey and what I love the most about my journey is that it hasn't been planned it wasn't some Grand strategy it was all curiosity Randomness and one thing leading to

another yeah as you find out like most journeys of that sort are never planned you know they often talk when we building a product build for yourself do something you really love and gradually figure out how to make it apply to lot of people but if you start off with the idea of like you know I want to build something that's going to like you know attract a large audience it's always like the incentives are a bit misaligned in getting you to the destination very very exactly exactly what was the first visual you remember ever

creating good question so I've always had a love for for illustration so I've always been very creative since a very very young age so I've always been making random drawings whenever I had the time so I cannot remember what was my first visual but I do remember because I started posting like just sketches on Twitter but they weren't visual ideas they didn't have a meaning or a message behind and one day I realized I found this very interesting post by David Perell and he talked about this idea called um the personal Monopoly which consists in combining you your interest together instead of just focusing on one thing specializing on one thing just saying okay so I like philosophy I like business I like code I

like illustration let's put it all together and let's see what happens and that way you stand out from the rest so I just picked something I found interesting and I just made a visual and I fell in love with it because people resonated with it because when there's a message behind you know other people want to tune in and comment and share with their

friends very true and in terms of like what was your inspiration for some of the early visuals you drew like I used to sketch a lot as a kid and for me was video games you know I used to take like all the video Like You Know sketch them like Mega Man was my my favorite character and like all the Super Mario characters and so on so for you you start illustration What was your thing you often like you know gravitated

towards um that's interesting so I've always been a Nintendo fan so I'm a huge fan of Zelda Zelda is my all-time favorite game Mario Kart obviously Mario Brothers so that those franchises have always inspired me a lot like a lot and I started playing Zelda when I was maybe 10 years old so it's always been in the back of my mind and even though my work doesn't really resemble that style it's always been inspiring to me to put my own ideas into the world and try to create a story because I always try to include a little character in my visual that's what I do differently because I like to make things a little bit more playful so instead of just creating beta based like very elegant visuals I like

to make things a bit more fun and treat it as as it as if it was a

game you know I have to ask you about this which Zelda was your favorite one

you started with okarina of time o of

time okay I'm dating what about you link

to the past the link to the past wow amazing one I think Zelda's Awakening on like I think the handheld ones I think it's a very similar visual style the isometric top down V where it's not completely flat but has a slight fake 3D okay yes yes I know that yeah yeah exactly um for watch console was linked to the past Super Nintendo this was like Super Nintendo yeah 1983 or2 when it came out and that into an open-ended action RPG game because I never I always play linear games where you just like start off as a clear destination that was the first game where I was like wait I have options in how I can actually complete my level and and that completely opened up a whole new world

for me and in in many ways that also like had a big influence like how I approached my career and this life in general as well it's like there opportunities and open-ended questions that you don't have to answer in the order it's meant to be answered you can take side quests and and just like do other fun things and get back to the main activity at some point later on

well that's a really good point because I always like to think that the greatest game there is is the Great online game you know I used to be pretty addicted to video games when I was younger and that was until I realized that why play video games if I can just you know be on social media growing my own thing and connecting with others it's almost the same as you say you can take all the side quests you want you can also take big main main quests and try to build a big product there's so much to do that there's no time left to play video games yep did you ever play like some of the bigger RPGs like Skyrim or Fallout and

oh definitely look my my favorite um RPG is the

witch oh absolutely have you played The

Witcher three I have that's like that's the one game I played completely into in almost 200 300 hours fully all the me

too it's great it's like it's one of those games where the story is just absolutely fantastic gripping very open ended but the visuals are amazing as well like every now and then you just like go over a hill and you see like the water the castle you see like the light coming through it's like it's almost like a mixture of like Lord of the Rings and like Zelda all the best of the music it's fantastic you can even take pictures I think inside the game so just imagine how beautiful it is that the developers decided to add this feature it's so fun exactly I never played the remastered version though they re-released The Witcher on like the more modern consoles I think both the PS5 and

the Xbox x and I as well really but the graphics were great that was great back then they made it even nicer you know believe it or

not haven't I haven't tried those yet you know my time for gaming has gone

down quite a bit exactly exactly that's actually really cool that you played some of those games as well because you know there's something about like you mentioned everything we do online is very much like that like you know everyone you track was an NPC and you actually talk to them you realize oh they're actually real like you know it's a story arc to them there's a character path between that and the thing that always struck me the most about these kind of games is that I I find that so many things we do as in everyday life is a game of probability you know and in all these games you have like skills you can you know increase and the higher skill level the higher probability of

being able to be successful in like a negotiation or like you know some Act of like you know some ACT you're doing and so even today whenever I encounter like an you know something at work or my side projects I'm like okay my chance of getting the answer I want here is probably 30% what can I do to increase its odds a little bit and that mentality comes 100% from games like Fallout and The Witcher and so on where you have to kind of figure okay I can't I can't deal with this you know lock right now or I can't go to this area until I strengthen myself in these areas before I do that and so I go finish all the side quest and come back to it and then I'm like oh

this is very trivial and I apply that to life all the time as you mentioned before um that's a beauty of playing games that aren't linear you know open world games are so fun that's why they take ages to complete because you can almost invent your own story that's why they're so addictive yep I mean we can talk about games all day and you know maybe one day could maybe in real life at point but no let's get back to let's get back to you know your the work you've been doing online so when did you realize that you were on to something big here because you mentioned you first started posting things there you know you weren't getting a lot of traction but then

something you know over a period of time though started clicking you know what

was that so here's my sex secret recipe I like to call it and it's pretty simple I like to call it um well I didn't invent the name Jack Butch invent the name but it's basically permissionless Apprentice so instead of talking about yourself and just posting things that are related to your own story make a list of people you look up to and try to add value to them in public so that's the the key always in public so most people just would send an email a private email to someone instead just do it on in on Twitter for example and that way they they are much more likely to share it with their audience and then Their audience will see your stuff and people will be more interested in you as

a as a byproduct of helping someone else so that's what worked the best for me and I didn't have again I didn't this wasn't a strategy at the time it just happened but because I had so many Heroes I looked I looked up to I just liked visualizing their most popular qu quotes and most of them saw them and Sh shared them with their audience and that helped me grow in a very short period of time and I had so much fun because I got to even meet some of them which was mind-blowing to me completely

surreal and when you were creating them I I'm assuming you put like your your Twitter handle in the image itself so even if it was shared without the context people would know where to go

back to exactly exactly which I didn't by the way at the start I made a mistake to not add my domain because again I was really naive and I thought that no one would steal my work but people always find a way to get back to you if they if they are interested in you they'll find a way by asking others or just reverse engineering how the visual was shed but again it's great fun it was surreal for me to visualize someone's quote and then see them like it comment on it and share it with their audience and that's how I manag to connect with others yeah

doesn't actually finding you actually I actually end up doing a Google image search a reverse image search on someone oh really there was no comment under like you know the website maybe it's been early on or some of have actually removed it not actually they deliberately removed it and you know but I was able to like find you and that's how I was like oh wow this actually really cool work and I've been like following you you know from that's cool so your visual style has been very consistent you know it's changed a little bit over the years have been like f some earlier images like you know it changed over time but you pretty much had a good vision from the very beginning that you just stayed at it you

know how did that come up

about so it is true that it's changed quite a bit throughout the years because I like um a philosophy I have when it comes to creativity is perfection through iteration not revision so instead of trying to come up with a perfect style and then sharing it with the world just makes tiny iterations every week every month and then you can see how your style slowly improves as time goes on but yes I love to keep things minimal simple to the point sustainable right because I cannot spend hours and hours on every visual because that would be unsustainable in the long term so I just like to keep it simple straight to the point so people can um absorb the idea much faster reduce the amount of colors I use all I always use

the same line thickness it's a 14 pixel thickness on appropriate which is my tool of choice and yes it works really well adding con straints to your work so you can do things much faster and you don't have to spend hours thinking about each decision and you can just focus on the on the message on the

essence what tools do you use you might use procreate what's your exactly so I

basically use the basic version of prate on my iPad which is a secondhand um 11inch iPad with the apple pencil which is amazing and then I sometimes edit the visuals um after on my Mac using um Affinity but that's it it's pretty simple there's no complicated setup going on just pretty

straightforward yeah you often shared regularly that it doesn't matter what tools you're ultimately using you know it's the idea and the output that matters and there are many ways of

creating it exactly I keep getting DMS by people who are just starting out in their Journey asking me what tools do I use because I think that the tools are what makes make the biggest difference but that's not true you know I've people share visuals drawn on a napkin literally like just taking a picture with their phone and posting them and they perform better than my visuals because they are more authentic that there's something to them that people resonate with so there there are no excuses whatever you have just do what you can and you can upgrade your tools as you

go yep do you ever see a world where you know you mentioned about like how you can very quickly get visuals out you know we have to ask AI of course of course is like the really big thing these days and do you ever see a world where you might look into a situation where like you know the important unique thing you add like you know your personal Monopoly is the ideas you have on the table how it gets created you know it can learn on your previous style and then you might use an AI to basically create the visuals for yourself do you ever see yourself doing

that I've tried I've tried I've made a few experiments and here's the issue with AI in its current form obviously um AI cannot as far as I'm concerned cannot reproduce such precise visuals because again I've I I spend the most time thinking about the idea not so much about how it will visually look and and that AI has a hard time doing for example if I create because I I use metaphors visual metaphors to communicate ideas and that's pretty tricky to do with AI because you have to be incred in fact it takes longer to write the corre prompts than to make the visual by hand it would take ages to tell AI exactly what you want on you know exactly which element you want in

the image in what way what size it's too precise so way I just creates very like rough sketches that you can use as reference but you have to edit them a lot in order to create something that communicates an

idea yep no that that is very true and it's one of the things also keeps evolving over a period of time like what AI was able to do like a year ago it's like you know we've grown Leaps and Bounds it seems like in that time for example true video generation one you're like wait how did we go from like you know really bad ver of Will Smith eating like pizza or something or french fries now spaghetti yeah spaghetti spaghetti right to now like more realistic versions of like a cat walking through this like busy field and it looks mostly you know realistic so it's one of those things where like you know keep watching it to see where the where the future of it might ultimately go exactly we'll see

I mean apparently the the difference is quite big so maybe in a few years from now ai can make visuals with a click of a button like visual ideas not just visuals we'll see exactly exactly so

when you you know at some point right you decided you're getting a lot of tractor you're doing really well in this and you started you I think you launched a course right like a course that people can send enough to learn more how did that come about like when you decide that okay now I've hit critical math or I think I want to share my learnings

with a broader audience so again I kept getting emails so I started a newsletter before launching my course just to go more in depth into my process and whatnot and I kept getting emails from people asking me how I was cing visuals and at one one day I decided that again I had no other option I had to make a course because everyone wanted to know what my Pro process was and it would be a prettyy interesting way to monetize my my little project little internet project so again I blocked out maybe one or two months to put down everything I knew about creativity and visuals on an otion document and I created a A reduced version of the course I shared it with a few early

users and with their feedback I kept making iterations until I had something more um extensive and it went really well people loved my course because it helped them communicate their ideas even if they did even if they weren't looking to become a content creator it help maybe in presentations for example I had many professionals who wanted a way to make more engaging presentations instead of using old boring you know PowerPoint slides they wanted a way to make Their audience their like physical audience more engaged in the room so visuals worked well for that and now I'm working on the second iteration of the course I decided to take it down so to free up some time to work on the next Edition and I want to make something a

bit more condensed because I on the first version I I you know I got a bit too obsessed with adding fluff to make it feel you know like a real course I thought that the longer the better but that's not always the case you know yeah very true

do you charge for the course yes I did

when it was um available around $199 so that was the base price yeah go ahead price for that oh I can't remember I think I just made a list of courses that I had taken and I just you know um came up with an average price point and I used that as the first price for the

course yeah because one of the hardest parts often times like knowing what do you charge for something you don't want to undercharge yourself but you also don't want to overcharge and seems like it your approach was actually have hit

all the right spots exactly and you can always ask your audience you know people forget that they can always ask people what they think you know just ask them make an open question what would you pay for this or what would you think would be a fair price for this and you'll get lots of you know a lot of people will be willing to share their thoughts with you and then you can come up with a middle ground and see how it goes and you can always change the price you don't have to stick with it just because you've come up with a price doesn't mean you have to keep it forever you can make small iterations and see what works what doesn't maybe you can add different

options maybe a one-on-one coaching session for people who want to go deeper there are an unlimited amount of options and inspiration too you know so very true you with

content creation right one thing I've always struggled with and I see many content creators struggle with as well is how much of the content should be posted on like a network you don't fully control like let's say Twitter X or LinkedIn or Facebook which is how much of it should be on your own personal blog and brand which you can basically say is like you know it's going to be here for a while how do you balance that because your content is very Visual and it is shared very widely but you also have it on your own site as well walk me through the be a thought process there

well that's a good point I made the mistake to not create a newsletter earlier you know because I didn't even know that that was an option when I was starting as a content creator and then I came up um I came across review which doesn't exist anymore I think Twitter Acquired revie and then shut it down when Elon Musk bought Twitter and revu helped me you know um basically grab my best like take my best um fans or my truest fans and take them to a place that without algorithms because your account could be suspended any day you never know even by mistake you don't have to do anything wrong to get blocked on on any of these platforms which is a big risk and it's pretty dangerous

especially if you've built a business on top of it so it's always good to have a way to communicate with the people who truly care about you um in a way that doesn't involve like algorithms or strict um you know terms and conditions and

whatnot so true and I I didn't mind on review as well and of course oh really yeah that because so it was so easy right before subst it was yes it was trivial because before then I used MailChimp and MailChimp was expensive you know it was like like you know like a certain number of subscribers you're paying like several hundred a month for basically just the ability to write some text and send it and they were the only ones that were basically able to do at scale where you weren't blocked by spam Bots and things like that and so when review was like wow this is amazing like I can finally you know like detach myself from this like huge expensive operation for basically free I don't

remember ever paying for review actually maybe for the domain it was free it was completely free free yeah and then you know of course you know it went away but luckily substack came about and it has like import feature and things like that

exactly yeah it suback is great sub suback works really well

yeah and it's it's such a interesting thing because you know the incentives are for all the major networks is to capture your audience and make it a part of their own like that's their number one goal it's not to like basically say like you know how can I make Ash successful how can I make you know Kupa successful or like it's like I want to make them successful with the end goal of making my network itself successful so they con the algorithm like you put a link for example to say like I want to go you know explore your website more I'm going to know tweak the you know tweak the visibility of it so more people cannot see it now because I want to incentivize you to spend more time on

the network and not have a link there and and it is so tricky because as they have gotten more and more prevalent it almost seems like the way you acquire new traffic is through them but ultimately you want to figure a way to like how do you again going back to the game analogy how do you take those people who now are seeing you on let's say LinkedIn for example how do you turn them into people who then go and visit your actual website or newsletter knowing full well that the traditional ways of like putting a link directly there will mean that you won't get it to showing to various people so it's like how do you game the system a bit to make sure that you win and the network wins

as well have you found a way because every time I post a link to my website or newsletter I get not blog but the the Tweet or post doesn't get any views maybe a few views but it's obviously getting like you know like capped by the algo so right now I'm struggling with it I don't know what approach to take to convince people to take a look at my work on my personal

website yeah so I don't have a perfect answer yet I'm still experimenting find out but one thing I've done recently is for especially for like the you know the video chats that you and I are having right now I take very small Clips like let's say like 15 or 20 second clip of what I think is like a really interesting part that people really like and I just post only that to the networks directly and say like you know and include that as I see in some ways and that gets you oh wow that's actually an interesting Insight let me dig in and do a little bit more at which point the friction of like opening the first comment or things like that it's perfectly worthwhile because the people

are hooked they're bought in on the same thing and I do a lot of long form content writing and so for what I do for those things is that I actually create a small video of me scrolling through the entire article from top to bottom so people are like oh it's not just a traditional article there's like visuals and animation and things like that and so that get people hooked as well so that's what I found is like a way of trying it out but the thing is I also see like other people who do none of that they just post your link directly and then just like you know put everything in the first tweet to take them away from let's say Twitter or LinkedIn and they get

massive engagement also so I'm like doing something wrong or there's something that you know needs to be done better but you know my 90% of my content is Google search like I aim for the long taale where I'm not going to be writing about the most Cutting Edge or latest things but over a period of time when you have actual questions using some of this you'll find me as like one of the top results on heavily for that particular model so I'm not very active in social media in that sense because it's it's timec consuming you know the all the all the best studies I've seen is like you need to post regularly daily multiple times a day for like Tik Tok and things I'm like

I don't have time for that and some's going to post when I can when I can hopefully find value with it but through Google they'll be able to find me downside of course is that that connection between you the person and the content you're creating is completely lost if you're going through Google because the problem people something very transactional it's like I'm trying to figure to Sol something they go there spend 15 seconds getting the answer they leave and never come back and so my bounce rates are very very high and it's um you know again I haven't figured out what works but I figured out many ways that don't work yet so I feel like I'm narrowing in eventually on a solution so you've been

focusing on SEO

essentially correct correct and not where I'm like using these like tools to see like what the top keywords are and things like that it's mostly on like what's a problem that I'm having as someone who enjoys and I just write about that and I make sure link to other content I've created but I've never actually done like a proper SEO like analysis and because I've done actually I've done it a long time ago and everything that needed to be done as a part of it just seemed like a little gameification to me and I was like I don't want to do some of these kind of things because it doesn't feel right and of course I also work at Google as part of my day job and so I'm like no I I

don't want to do anything that might like cause any like you know wrong kind of publicity for myself that will you know that'll like makes my day job complicated I'm like no I'm just going to post content do the best I can and if the content clicks great if it doesn't it's okay I'm going to keep creating content un I'll win with

volume I see so what do you think about AI then because I keep seeing people on Twitter mentioning that SEO is completely dead there's no point in focusing on it anymore because chats will basically replace Google search which isn't true in my case because I always I keep using Google search like 80% of the time I only use chats when I have a very technical specific problem that I need to dig into but in most cases I just prefer just searching and see what comes up do what do you think I

think it's it's a risk you know I think for a certain class of things that people use search for today I think they will find themselves using an AI assistant more I'll give you an example with some data actually you know the number of keywords that hit Google search console for me you know like let's say about a year ago was around like you know million you know keywords month go through Google and come there today it's around two million and that 80% is 100% attributed you not 100% but largely attributed to people going like you know the most common questions are like how do I make a webcam work in my HTML or how do I round a corner in my canvas those are the exact same

questions you can ask an AI assistant on the AI will only give you like a verbal answer it'll give you the code snpp and everything directly for you there so the most common things that people would search for for technical things on Google before I think they're increasingly using an AI which makes sense because the audience they tend to Target is techsavvy enough where they are going to be using an AI assistant for a lot of the work they're doing as well and so for me direct traffic to my site has dropped significantly because they're clicking the links through like Google they're getting similar information actually from my website in the AI results because if you look at the attribution for it say like you know

Wikipedia or c.com and things like that but at that point though right it's it's you're you're presenting your content in the frame of whatever the AI assistant is your logo is missing the the things that make you visually be like oh this orange and this like pixelated look and design that's ca's website that is completely glossed over so youve kind of become this very impersonal messenger of information but the personality that I tend to go for is completely lost and so I and so I pivoted more doing videos actually because I'm like okay know that text based content this point is going to be commodity there's going to be no more text based content I'm going to create that will really be unique and it's part of it's going to be a syst b

is going to be regurgitated by the AI at some point it be combined with other sources of information so what the end user gets will be a higher quality result where it combines my answer and me answer from like other really smart people and things like that so I'm like it's not the right thing for me to go against that because the developer who's asked this question is getting the best possible results so it's good for them that I'm you know that I do this and video isn't something they've been able to replicate just yet I've seen the transcription demos where you can type in some script give you some examples of yourself talking and it creates these versions for you it's good but it's

misses missing some of the quirks and in a lot of my videos actually use like slides and visuals as part of talking to it it hasn't been able to mix and match those things effectively yet I'm saying the word yet because I do absolutely see a world where it's going to be doable because if they can create all these other things it's not rocket science to basically take me talking and have like some slides and visuals created and and how this all work but you know it's a constant you know battle to chase after like you know make sure technology isn't completely catch up to you and so that's what I've been doing and of course I I also publish books you know I work with

a publish content and there's a large enough audience worldwide there I know often get emails from people going like you know I'm in this library and I saw this book and I learned about it it's actually really cool so there's a world that will not be you know using the internet and Ai and all these things at least early on and so I still have that outlet right now but if you ask me five years from now I think it'll be a very different answer almost to the point I'm like you know what I'm basically just doing live sessions from like teaching people in real life because that hasn't been replaced with AI just yet I hope get there but it very well might well

it's a very uncertain future we have very interesting I think about it a lot I even lose sleep about it thinking about it I'm curious do you post those videos on YouTube or where where do you

post them I I post them on YouTube that's where they go because long form and I also you know like to have like I buil a network over the years on YouTube itself and that's where it goes and then I post like maybe like short five 10c versions of it on Twitter I use Link it in Twitter and you get the thumbnail preview below but of course the algorithm is like no just upload the videos directly so I upload the videos as well and I've now gotten to the model where I actually record my videos in this format in in PowerPoint where I have like you know basically two halves of the screen and why I've done it that way is that that makes it easy for me to

then repurpose that into Tik Tok videos where it's vertical as opposed to horizontal without any modification and at some point I going talk about how I do that you know in the future but yeah because like otherwise I'm spending a lot of time going like okay Instagram needs to be square ratio LinkedIn needs to be widescreen you know YouTube if under a minute needs to be vertical and then like Tik Tok needs to be vertical I'm like I don't have time for this you know my goals is to educate people and then do all these things and I also like to learn these tools that way I can empathize with the creators and and I build tools for living at my day job as well so I'm like I like to learn how

decisions are made why people do the things they do and create the tools the way they create them and so I didn't want to Outsource that or like defer that to someone else even though they probably do a much much better job than me in doing all of this and so I've been like tweaking all these ways on making my video creation as efficient as

possible well that's so interesting it's easy to tell you're an

engineer oh yeah unfortunately you know I'm an engineer of like video games and so you know it basically is like a combination of like The Best of Both Worlds I mean the two key word words are optimization and

efficiency exactly think like you know when I was like you know much younger and I had like no obligations I had like all the Time in the World to like you know fiddle with this right now my time is like very constrain you know have a family and all these things I'm like I don't want to like miss out on like you know all of that and so where I can optimize is on these things because like you know I don't want to optimize like the time I spend my my wife and daughter and like you know family members and friends I'm like no that's like the thing that's gonna be you know lasting forever but I can absolutely like you know be like you know what that Tik Tok

video it's okay it's not zoomed in exactly right it's push a larger version a smaller screen it's okay if you really want to look at a coding screencast go to YouTube but if you're on Tik Tok and you're still watching it you tell something is interesting to you so just go ahead and know I'm sacrificing like quality for Speed like kind of you know a bad you know image compression algorithm it's like yeah jpeg is fine you know what it's fine it's fine you know yes PG be better but 80% jpeg out the door done not even talk about it well it's worth it in the end right because you get to spend more time with your loved ones doing what you love so that's what matters at the end of the

day especially if all this content will get commoditised there's no point in spending thousands of hours you know obsessing over a zoom or something yeah you know it's one of the things where you also see like the worry in like Hollywood and like the other movie movie studios where they're like you know I think like one of the more recent like I think contract negotiations and Strikes really caused by like you know the use of AI in making all these visuals and these things work and you know I watched Dune 2 recently and I'm like fantastic movie absolutely like you know amazing but then I'm also like you know how long will it be before AI can create some of these scenes you you know because like

yes you know the director is extremely talented so it cannot create some of those shots exactly the way it was done but at some point though AI is all about just training it just trains on Legacy data and then creates it based on that world so unless you're like pushing the envelope which very few directors probably are majority are like trying to create great content using traditional techniques that's a kind of world where AI is always going to be like yeah this is fine if you're using a style that you know like Spielberg ory or someone else like came up with like a couple of decades ago and like how you pan and zoom and so on we will absolutely create a video of exact that sort and so the

question then becomes how much time do you spend staying on The Cutting Edge where just like one step ahead of the AI before you know you get just burned out

well I think the key is not to compete against AI this is what I've realized instead focus on your own personal stories and double down on your personality so in your case you're obviously a really funny person you have really good humor and you have a really obvious person personality so instead of writing really technical like articles for people who are trying to solve a very specific problem double down on your way of communicating things like Ali abdal does you know he started sharing very um like transactional um or like informational content and people discovered him because of the problems he was solving but people decided to stay because they like how he talked how he communicated his ideas and and it doesn't matter what what the videos are

about people will watch them because they resonate with who he is and I don't think AI can't compete with that just yet or in anytime soon because again it's human that's human nature so that's what I want to focus this year in creating a deeper connection with my audience and with anyone who likes my stuff and I'm still thinking of how to do it but I think that's what I'll double down on

yeah very very you know it do a really good path to pursue and I noticed that you also do YouTube videos I think you posted your first video I think of my first video this last come how did that come out what what tools did he use how did that

whole well first and foremost that took ages to put together so I OB I obviously underestimated the amount of time it would take me to create a video at that level because I animated each frame by hand because I'm a perfectionist and it took me quite a lot of time I used procreate to to animate each frame traditionally essentially and I also used dingi resolve the free version to just put stick everything together and then I just recorded a voice over and it was great fun I really it took a lot of work so it's unsustainable I'm now trying to look for a much better way to do it but oh my goodness did I have fun it was so rewarding and I got a chance

to go deeper and I'll definitely be showing my face on the next videos and experimenting with different ways of doing things it's the thing like showing your face makes it more personal you

know that's exactly to it as well so how do you make the squiggly lines like you know actually look like they're waving their every frame like was it did you do manually or was like a tool that did it

automatically for you no I used the be sh for that so that was helpful yes I like that you noticed that um I I was so happy when I discovered that the VIN resolved have had this feature it's just an effect that you can create using notes connecting them together took me quite a bit of time to figure out but now I have this way of making things look like more fancy than they really are but everything else was frame by frame and if you pair a few animations with this effect it it looks like the whole thing is animated by hand so that was a sneaky trick I used no which

actually really cool I also like how you describe it you know you actually are building nodes and you're connecting the nodes to basically you know creating this output because you know like said I work in developer tools and design tools my entire career like I just I started with flash many years ago then I moft creating de developer tools and design tools so for me it's always been fascinating to see like how can you use tools to help people be more creative and build things in a way that is also scalable so that way when you're handing to the developer and things like that it really works well and I just like how you were naturally able to go like yeah I'm just going toting noes and make

these things work because the reason is that you know there's always an old saying in tools right maybe maybe me like maybe 10 other people probably talk about all the time is like you want to solve the problem the domain you're solving it in so if you're having a visual problem you want to solve it visually you know you don't want oh that's a good point let's say you want to draw a square or a circle right you don't want to draw code or like you know like letters to draw a square you want to be like just draw a square like I'm going to use it like a pencil icon or whatever draw the circle and what we found over the years is that when it

comes to modifying the properties of something especially if it's like a cause and effect kind of relationship the node-based drawing is the one that people resonate with more naturally which is why you see in like you know the most basic example is like in music electronic music you know you often have like you know the amps and you have like the the mixers and so on it's just a series of wires that connect to like various other you know mixers and like all these things and it naturally resonates so you might be like wait I'm doing music but something in our brain makes this cause and effect thing with like boxes and lines this naturally work and so you try to see like so many cases

like so many 3D tools specifically or animation tools and rigging tools and so on they always use this like line and box concept for making these things work visually and it's always been like fascinating to see that carried over even today because people were like once tools get better no one's ever going to do this like 30 years ago like AutoCAD and you know did like some of these things early on but even now it's like still being used it's always great to see that that you know that style of solving problems and tooling continuing

well even website Builders right back then you had to use code to build a simple HTML layout and now you can just use framer for example which is what I use to build my websites and you can do it 10x faster and have much more fun in the process and you don't have to spend hours wrestling with HTML and CSS to just create a very basic

layout exactly right if I had to pick like you know one field where that AI is going to completely you know turn upside down it really is web development in so many ways because the reason why I say that is back in the day this how you built websites you use like Dream Weaver or front page and you did it visually you published it at some point in the middle you know it was like no you must learn all the internal details of how something needs to be done and that got the world really complicated where to get Hello World up on screen you spend like you know a couple of days of like learning about all these weird you know extra things and now you're back to a

model where you know what I'm what a web page is basically text on page it's visuals it's something that is just exactly it's just something that I can easily see and make sense of there's no reason why it needs to done in all these very complicated ways like the abstractions will truly be Abed Away by Ai and by tools oh it's a really good point and it makes me think as as you already know I've been trying to learn the basics of codes in the past few months and I've been having a lot of fun but there's this voice in my head that keeps telling me that I'm just wasting my time and that I should just focus on something else and I don't know if I

should find a middle ground or if maybe this is the best time ever to learn how to code because if you know how to code you can leverage AI much better that's also true right because you have to know what to ask in order to get a decent result so what do you think because you're a complete expert and I would love to hear your thoughts is it worth it am I wasting my

time I mean it goes back in one of two ways right like let's use an example of like you know you want to paint a really know Great Masterpiece on like canas for example right some schools they'll tell you to do that first get the wood buy the canvas stretch the canvas yourself mix learn how to mix the paints buy the basic powders mix it together at the ratio right and all these things and that'll give you more fundamental understanding of what you ultimately want to do your goal of course is to create like something you you have an idea in your head you want to visualize it you want to go from like zero to an idea to something that I can show people

and like that's my destination I want to share what I created with the world that's the fastest path I want to get there now the question is can you get there can you show people something that you know that truly represents what you're trying to create without having to learn all these fundamental steps and things like that if you're someone in the who's in the business of selling the wood selling the canvas or making the paint mixes and so on you're going to be like no you absolutely need to know this you need to know all of these things when I look at web development I find that that group of individuals dominates so much of the conversation you know they always are like the ones who work

for like the you know the the Big Tool makers or the framework makers or the the nitt details are like you must learn react you must learn view you must learn angle you must all these things for some people you might need to know that because what you're creating needs to require that level thing for 90% of the world you don't you just want to go to an art store buy the canvas the way it is already made you just buy the brushes buy the you know acrylics or oil painting you know acrylics are great because you know they dry quickly and it affect is mostly pretty good in many ways as well just do that and you have an idea can share with people and most

of the world will not know the difference between that ask make that painting by stretching the canvas on its own or you go to store and just make the Cannabis they're going to be mesmerized create and so from that point of view when you look at it entirely from like who am I building it for and will they care 90% of the answer is no do the shortest level of steps you need to take to make them happy which in the case of websites and web development you don't need to go and do all these things like I've been blogging now for like almost you know since 1998 so almost like you know 26 years at this point I use dream weer even today and people

like really I'm like I used dream weer and I used FTP and I used Cloud flare for my CD and I'm like yeah it works you know while you're spending like six months learning about this latest technology that I spend those six months creating content and creating all these things and no one knows like no one cares when they visit your website going like exactly built it you know it's like wait they're like wow it's really fast loads really Snappy works on my mobile device it's accessible I'm like great I hit all the check marks how I built it it's entirely up to me on how I did that exactly imagine a use refusing to use the website because it hasn't built on the latest framework

right it doesn't make sense no one cares exactly and so that's why I look at you know like you mentioned earlier right AI is a tool it's just going to help you you know speed up your process and how you get your ideas through that's exactly how I view everything that we do in general as well it's like I might have an incentive to say you know you must use tools a b and c and and then have this approach but if I take a step back though that's just my incentive you know the end result for the user is not going to be very valuable so it really about like the problem you're trying to solve and I think for 90% of people maybe even 100% of people probably like

you know a year from now all you need is like maybe a newsletter maybe like WordPress you know still very very great for like being able to create content have a theme you can customize it personalize it want to the less amount of time you can spend on the on the mechanics of getting something done as opposed to getting something done I think that's the really the best way like I call it theatrics you know like a classic thing of like you know especially large organizations and companies you worked as a web developer for an agency and things like that you know it's like you know some of the work you do is just Optics it's just to kind of give you the illusion that you're

really doing work but the reality is that there's no real purpose doesn't adjust the quality of your output by you making you know this approach or not it's just Dogma that teams and people follow and so I've been very much on a you know how can I make sure I don't fall into the Trap of mistaking the Optics of doing something with actually doing something and it's so easy to get into that trap at some point where you're like oh I spent six months creating hello world in you know in react when the reality was like you never need to do it in the first place because that's not why you started doing this you if you want to learn it great but if your goal was to build a website

or if you want to build something to share with people you probably spent way too much time on something that didn't move you closer to that goal that's interesting and I agree however as long as you enter the realm of web apps not just websites with content I think it's beneficial to understand the fundamentals because then the difference is exponential when you use a because if you understand how things work and you don't have to be an expert just learn the basics maybe go through the auding project right and just go through the basics then you can ask chat GTP much much better questions and you can create proper apps not just content app content apps that actually work and scale so that's where I'm at right now

because I've been thinking of building a few ideas I've had but I don't know enough to leverage AI to build them right so I know plenty to create content websites that's that's amazing and it has been completely democratized for most people however as long as you want to build as soon as you want to build an app I think you need to have some level of understanding to build something decent absolutely true you know it's like you don't know what you don't know sometimes and the more you know about the behind the scenes details like you mentioned you'll be able to more precisely use the right words and right choices because it's always very subtle right and it's kind of like exactly from like you know something that shows like

you know 50% Mastery of a topic to 80% Mastery just it's only 30% it's a number but the reality might be like it might be like two years exactly to get that point but then you can quickly spot someone who has that extra 30% of knowledge because when you talk to them you get that sense of like okay they know they can jump back and forth in you know in time and in depth and breadth of the topic to be able to quickly get you to the answer you're trying to get to and even foresee where you might be going next so the solution they providing it has has like experience baked into it behind the scenes so yeah very true we'll see where all this goes

you know it's all a matter of experimenting having fun we're so early in the process right and we're only getting start when it comes to AI you know there's so much to do so much to see yeah but I still do hold the hope that you know even for building like a very heavy app you don't need to know all those details like all you like you know here's like let's say a slide deck of like screens that my app needs to have or here's I'm going to write I'm going to verbally describe my application like a traditional spec or a product requirements document PRD and I'm going to give it to my AI assistant he's going to create the entire website for me with all the interactions and

things like that I do think we'll get there you know probably sooner rather than not and because I'm seeing like early signals of like people being able to build single page websites with just like a screenshot of a of their design or like a a sketch on a napkin and using AI to make this work and they look at tools like you know both like Microsoft power apps which are using some AI capabilities on you see builder. I has a lot of tools for like building like you know like apps based on a template but using AI to extrapolate large of details for it I think there's going to be a world where you know what we call Professional developers the ones who know how to make the canvas and to you

know tie the wood together and so on and then we have like low code and no code like your framers and like your web flows of the world that's going to melt together because the end result really is can you look at the out put and be able to be like okay I told my AI to create something for me it created 10 versions of what I think what it thinks my actual you know idea of the final desent should be do I have enough context to be able to choose which of those 10 I like which of these 10 I do not like and then use that to help the AI refine it further and further in many cases at this point you become more like

a creative director like an art director where you have aam of people pitching you ideas you know enough about the industry or the context to be like this a good idea this a bad idea but that doesn't maybe always require to know like what kind of pen do they use for making the art or what is the thickness of the of the board they printed this on you need to know all that the bigger question is will this will my client like it will this sell and things like that which might be an art director kind of a thing every domain has their own set of like you know areas where they're going to be focusing on you know like I always imagine in my case right I would

love people to be like you know telling AI like I want to teach people this complicated way of sorting numbers and I want to do so in a way that's humorous includes visuals use my old visual style to like you know learn from that and then it creates like 10 variations of a document for me and I'm like okay I like this I don't like this I like the intro in this one I don't like the way you describe the body part of this one too much fluffier too much humor unnecessary and then it goes back uses my feedback to create round two and round three and round four at that point I do think that the output based on how I prompted it how I interpret it would be exactly what

I wanted to do with me actually having written a a single word or drawn a single Pixel without actually having you know Outside The Prompt that I gave it I do think programming will get to that world and so like I always think about like Should students learn computer science today or should they go into like you know learning really deep technical skills do they go into it my hunch is like no probably not because as long as you know what makes a good app and what doesn't make a good app usually based on output like you know is it performant is it look good on my phone user experience user experience like that's what really matters how it gets built at that point I don't care you

know I don't care if the AI is using like react or if it's using like you know some Library like you know like motion or frame or you know whatever I don't really care that point because all I really care about is I have a problem my customers have a problem my users have a problem is my app helping you to solve that this goes back to what we talked about earlier is like will people really care how you create your visuals or like how you create some of these things as long as it the message very very effectively and so yeah so I guess to answer your question from like a l a roundabout you know view it's like no I don't it's good for you to learn it

after you've gotten to the point where like I have a product in Market I have some breathing room I just want I'm curious to know like how was some of these things done like I like to learn about like older programming languages just because I'm like oh I'm curious see what it does but I wouldn't make that my first step as part of what I'm doing it's mostly a curiosity thing of like I just want to get deeper into what I'm already doing but it wouldn't be at the expense of not having shipped anything not having solved the main problems here

to solve yeah that's a very good point and also remember that no code is someone else's code so someone will have to maintain all these codes so we we would still need new computer scientists to do that don't you think absolutely

but if you look at the number of people you need for that though it becomes very very different but here's the thing right let's say that let's say the market is you know this large I'm going to make it a screen so it actually shows up here and in order to build a website like let's say you know I want to create like ash lam.com you know in a world before we had low code and no code and so on it required me to understand HTML CSS and JavaScript and I understand like where do I host it how do I make sure it's performant and things like that and then after that how do I I need to learn about the the visual skills that you

have like the color skin the rounded Corners like arrangement of things the the style of presenting like testimonal like that so it requires shifting from like a very technical mechanical world to more of a a creative world and then it's a Content itself like how do I write the words in a way that Mak sense like how do I get people like you know hooked on like the the tagline before they go further into it like how do I style the last word in the sentence so you gets extra emphasis like that's where the art and creativity comes in that you know you can't really teach people you just have to learn it through like your indirect ways of like your history and art and sketching and having

observed great designers and great artists and and things like that so it requires you to learn a huge set of like skills over a period of time that you know it takes probably you know five six 10 years maybe a lifetime for some people to ultimately get get better at but if now you're able to say like you know what I can bypass all this HTML CSS and JS jargon I can bu going to bypass all that I'm even going to bypass like the copyrighting angle of it because the AI does a really good job like you know taking like you know look at like what David ogleby did for like marketing like in the 50 example like you know learn from his style of marketing and use that

in making this work and so now what we've done is like we've taken jobs and roles that required like four or five three or four people who had went to college went to like degrees and so on to be like nope it's being done by AI altogether and so now you're basically the point where like the only the real big value you're adding is the your uniqueness you know what makes you tick like you your combination of philosophy and art and and all of these things into like your final output that's something that AI can't really create at least hopefully not for a very long time and you know so that's the part you're focusing on everything is automatically abstracted away for you and so that

means the number of people you needed before to like make this work has gone down significantly the time we have spent on learning about this has gone down significantly as well and so you will need computer scientists but you only need computer scientists those who genuinely care about creating Frameworks and creating these tools because they're like oh I I love waking up every morning I love creating tools that's me I love creating tools I love that's you and things like that great but there aren't too many of me out there I can count on like maybe like you know I probably about 50 people in the industry I know of like who have that it was probably a lot larger like you know eight nine

years ago when I first got in the industry like like you know Adobe and Microsoft and IBM and Autodesk and so on I was like okay there's a lot of people who are doing tooling and things like that you know as part of their day-to-day job now it's like a smaller and smaller number and it's not because people don't care about tooling anymore it's just that there's not an opportunity anymore where you can use that to basically make things work we commoditized around like BS code and like you know all these various areas and like it's a great place to be and so that's what's going to happen to computer science as well you will still need computer scientists but you won't need them in the number you needed

before to be able to create the kind of things needed because those jobs will no longer be as relevant as they were you might have them will you be able to command the same amount of like you know salary and like your quality of life and like that probably not and this is going to be kind of like the old example of you know in the 1700s there were a lot of people who made Horseshoes and like you know blacksmith and so on and then as cars became more popular as things became more resilient and we had like carbon fiber and things like that you didn't really need as much smithing work as much as you might have needed to before and so you had creative

destruction is a classic term for like people who went from like an older task to being able to do something new my only worry with AI specifically is okay you know the idea is that you now you replace like lower value tasks with higher value tasks and it's a constantly shifting scale but with AI replaces some of these things what is the higher value task because the higher value task itself what we've for told is like going to be Irreplaceable for a long time is being replaced very rapidly the kind of creative thinking like legal like law professionals and accountants and act and things like that I'm like okay so what do we do with all these individuals like what is the transition people who

were like know blacksmithing they can become machinist and tooling specials and so on you know the jump was high but there was a path here but you take someone who's like a computer scientist what is your next step where would they go after that what skills they have they learned that'll then make them be effective like oh they're math you know they know mathematics they can like to you know use mathematics I'm like well a can do that as well like I asked a any question about like you know model the growth of like the bird population in like North America when you know the weather is X Y and Z it'll give me that answer very quickly and give me the work and I'm like that's actually reasonably

well done That's My worry is that you know where does creative destruction take us when there isn't anything beyond what exact do that's going to command a quality of life that's hopefully better you know machinists made more than blacksmiths blacksmiths made more than the people who are like digging in the minds too I not car at the or whereas I don't know what's going to be like what is the next big thing that we can all work on because the world isn't need an infinite prompt Engineers because prompt engineering brings a skill set back down to anybody who has an idea and a way of representing it they can be effective in it so so yeah that's my that's the worry that's what keeps me up at night well

the next step is Enlightenment exactly right life talk about like you unal basic income and things like that yeah I don't where it's gonna land you know and I and I think we to figure out quicker because you know if you people were told like five years ago that AI will create full motion for 4K videos that look almost like w yeah like absolutely not you're being like you know you're being too alarmist here but given the speed at which we were seeing things moving this is an answer we to find out sooner oh it's

fascinating yeah I saw Sora um last month and I was blown away you know those videos look completely realistic and they'll be definitely replacing stock footage as far as I'm concerned 100% yes yes like I stopped using like stock libraries for a lot of time I'm like you know what I can just actually get spreite sheets for like some things that they do from the AI assistant and you know and then use that and modifi on my own yeah it's there's a lot to think about it's a bit sad in some ways right especially as a creative because I love creating for the sake of creating and I'm not looking for ways to optimize my process so I'll see where this leads

yeah also one last thing right the way you know before you start wrapping up is like you know for your videos right so I used to never have background music Loop in my videos because I'm like okay I don't know which Sound Library I should use like how to create it and the ones I want to use like do drum beat way too expensive and then I found this AI music generator by Google they created like I think like the AI music lab or something like that you describe like you know I want to create like you know a basic like drum beat or like an ambient space Loop or something like that it creates like eight n versions of it and there a little check boox is like do you want

this to be loopable I'm like yes make it loopable so it clicks like the beginning and end of it all like adjusted to make it work it's been so convenient so like every video now I you know I have a different very quiet like 30% volume Loop that goes on the background you know and I'm like and I was able to do that using AI because I have zero I could I play the piano but I have zero you know idea of like how do I create music on my on a computer basically like what Medi tools I use and so on like so I had no idea about it but AI was able to solve that for me and I look at that going like you know there's going to be

a world where people don't know coding or don't know how to create visuals they don't know how to use Photoshop or procreator illustrator or any these or figma for example right they use AI and just like I was like blown away like I now have music in my videos they're going have visuals in their content as well a professional musician would be

like wow that Loop is low quality that's like terrible music yeah true but to me who has no idea what isn't or isn't good I'm like this solved it for me and so that was like one of the epiphanies I had was like there's be more and more of it where you know people is my daughter's like going to be six years old she's going she might grow up in a world but she's able to create things without realizing the details of how it goes into creating it and that's what's really actually excited part about AI as well I talking bit Doom and Gloom here but the exciting part is more people out there will now be able to be part of the you know what we call the Creator

economy and be able to do really good things the question of course is how do existing creators and is the economy large enough to support that exactly and

that's but will content be valuable Enough by then because if everyone can do it then no one well not no one can but you know if everyone can do it then the value diminishes maybe exactly whole supply and demand kind of a thing right

I felt like for a long time there was always demand but Supply was limited because few people knew the magic tricks to like get everything up and running but in a world where Supply becomes infinite we've always seen that demand doesn't scale you know only so many people in the world the population like shrinking in many countries as well it's like how do you maintain a certain level of quality and and things and sustain a like a like a living for all the content creators when it becomes a commodity everyone will be a media company exactly

right a walking media all you need to yes a working Media Company yeah it's going to be mind-blowing in fact Netflix won't even exist because people will create their their own movies on the spot they will do you ever you ever play I think was it called Baler Dash it was interactive Netflix movie where actually like the movie plays and questions and then depending on the answer you choose the scene changes completely have you

played some of those I haven't but it reminds me of the witch exactly it's basically liveaction film now has like choices you make based on like what you're doing and it changes it but imagine that becomes Dynamic where you know before it required someone to actually be in a set requireed recording all these like 80 different variations but in the future it'll be prestig generated you know you just best and you know for me the thing is going to be most exciting is like I love like I love like gritty TV the wire or The Sopranos and things like that those have ended but imagine with AI I'm like you know give me two more seasons of Sopranos and the AI creates new seasons of shows that

have ended the actors some of them have already like you know passed away like think James gandini you know passed away like you know a while ago but they're able to create new episodes and it looks in feels exactly like the same thing those are some of the things where I'm like I feel bad for the creators I feel like David Chase who created The Sopranos and so on but as a consumer of the content I'm like this is perfect and the thing is my version of Sopranos that created for me would be very different than your version of it you know because of your interest and taste that they optimizes for so Rec creating this like really interesting world where personalization is taken to like an

unnatural extreme

level it's crazy I mean as they say um um what's What's the phrase was a popular quote um uh the one about uh I can't remember now reality is always crazyer than science fiction yeah right so we're about to experience a completely what like ready player one you know the popular movie and book yes something similar to that at some point I imagine something completely crazy where we we have that the option to immerse ourselves in this VR AR world where we can create our own reality on the spot and then no one wants to get out of this world because why live a real why live in the real world if you can just you know be in a simula maybe we are in a simulation

anyway exactly right exactly well Ash it's been great chatting with you about you know everything we started off talking about and then we deviated to AI but exactly but it was a it's the elephant in the room it's the elephant in the room it is the elephant in the room so any parting thoughts anything that you know you want the audience to

know before we end it well two things firstly I'll be writing a a maybe not long form but I'll be writing a newsletter issue about AI because I just want to synthesize everything I've learned and you should too I don't know if you've written a long form post already about AI but I would love to have you know a proper piece from you

too uh you know I I want to write it the the you know the thing is like you know this goes deeper into like you know my style of writing content because my day job involves like living the intersection of tools and Ai and basically bring to reality lot of things I talk about I always I'm trying not to like blend the waters too much where like I might have an opinion that goes very much against what like Google as a whole might have which they very well might have as well and I'm like I I have so many other things I could rather talk about and not create conflict and drama you know because I see drama will always seek me so these are some topics that I

will talk to you about like you know in a podcast more casual form or in person it might be a while before I write about it in like a written form mostly because I don't want to add to the existing narrative on AI that these companies spend a lot of time like crafting with like all these various people but it is in the back of my mind always though yeah you're in a tricky situation I forgot about that but yeah know it's a fun trick it's constraints like you mentioned right I don't exactly you know a lot of people do talk about things that work in their jobs as well but that also creates kind know do create you know unnecessary things that take time

away from things I do care about I do enjoy the things I do in my day job that aren't related to AI specifically so I'm like why would I you know muddy the waters a bit when I don't have to it's really the way look at it but I look forward to reading your things though I like I will I'll let you know when it's out I can't wait it'll be pretty

contrarian I'll tell you that because I have a few ideas lingering around nice about contrarian takes these days is that I know that AI did not write it because trained by AI so I'm like okay it's basically learned from like 80 million versions of the same content but if it's completely different I'm like ah this is a unique take but I'm also just waiting for the AI to be like write a contrarian take on you know on the future of AI and it might just start do I'm not even like you know whatever I say the time the shelf life of how I predicted AI will go the speed has been rapid much faster than I ever imagined

it would be oh really do you think so oh

yeah it's you know I imagine like we where we are today I thought we'd be like you know there maybe two years from now that we're already here completely

you know mindblown so you're a technologist so for how long have you been thinking about

AI I'd say for almost 10 years wow amazing ever since you know this goes back to video games again right I think it was Skyrim Skyrim like almost 10 12 years ago started randomly generating Quests for you I think they called the radiant Quest system oh is that true wow right so 10 years ago yeah almost like when did Skyrim even come out was it like 12 years 13 years now basically yeah probably on the time frame right yeah so I was like wait why this Quest the same I'm going to a cave it looks different but it keep collecting a similar set of things over and over again it never seems to end and when I went online I realized to make the game

last longer and cases these quests are randomly generated the worlds are randomly generated the what you do and the people you talk to dialogue randomly generate I'm like wow this is a I never expected this and then when I started digging deeper into it that's when I started realizing okay there's going to be a world where AI is going to be more effective in doing some of these things we're not there yet you know we had chat Bots forever right you know go to a support site you know you ask a chat a question and try to like give you some answers it wasn't it was pattern matching it was basically looking at what keyw you're using and your pattern matching and that's been around forever

and if you look at AI in general Airline booking systems Travel Systems they've been using AI for a very long time to make kind of make sure like you know how do I anticipate Peak demand how do I anticipate delays and things like that if you look at like a credit card companies like anti fraud detection and so on they've been using AI for like almost you know 20 years in many ways where they're like okay this person is in locations a b and c could they have actually been made this purchase or would they actually you know be is is like a fraudulent activity and so so much of AI has been been happening under the covers for a very long time like Photo tagging like Google photos you I

could search for like clouds and every photo had clouds like well that was there like years ago or in you know iPhones nowadays can like know press and select like a picture of somebody it cops everything else out and makes it C that's like almost like five six years ago that was introduced so we've always had AI it was just never in an area that intruded upon my areas of expertise I'm like yeah I'm writing code I'm doing all these things but a always existed and you know video games had it when I started seeing like the Skyrim example I'm like wait a minute a developer basically programmed all of this and now it's able to create this I'm like okay what is it to prevent it from creating a

slide deck or a pitch deck I'm giving to like my my leadership teams how what is it preventing from writing a document on like what is the next big feature we need to do based on this customer feedback we're seeing in all these areas and that's what got me thinking about AI a long time ago in so many ways but it wasn't until really chat GPT came out like almost two years ago or three years ago I forget when it came out first yeah yeah that's when I was like wait a minute this is an actual manifestation of the things that I've been ruminating about for quite some time we need to solve you know get involved in it very very quickly and which is why I work on

tooling and AI like you know at at Google right now it's like yeah in the back of my mind always sudden ate away at me but the speed at which we got I was surprised I was blindsighted to be fair like even though I was thinking about it I didn't expect it to just happen and then it happening and evolving and being iterated upon very quickly also completely surprised me Sora completely blew me away as well and I'm only and of course like the music example I mentioned before like that was a more person like wow this actually solved the problem that I actually had because I had no idea how to make this music Loop work without paying a large amount of money and I didn't even know

like if I like it or not whereas here it's like I have infinite choices I can like change it every single day if I wanted to and get a new version of it out yeah and so so that's where I'm like okay I've hit the limit of my imagination at this point where like what can AI do and cannot do I I can imagine more things but nothing is out of the ordinary out of like the realm of possibility at this point like anything is possible and so and so that's why I'm like I still say yeah that's why I'm blindsighted by it I'm surprised at how quickly things have moved well I'm

surprised that you're surprised because imagine how surprised I am if if you're if you if you've been thinking about AI for 10 years and you're mind blown I'm 10x more mind blown than you are so the sky is the limit I imagine yeah it very

much is and you know that's exciting part about it as well you know if I take if I take my you know my hats off here and I'm like okay what is the air really going to solve for me it's going to solve a lot of things you know like I one of the things that you know we worked on recently and I think we we Shar it publicly as well it's like you know you share a picture of a you know you load you show a cupcake to an AI assistant it'll reverse engineer the ingredients you need to like my team like built it and like we shipped it like you know pretty recently I'm like these are really cool fun examples of things that would have

never been possible before because imagine like watching movie for example right and you're like wait what is that vehicle or what is that food they're eating at the table or there pause screenshot send to AI or just ask the AI like you know like Alexa or Siri or you know whatever AI assistant is explain to you what's going on in the scene it'll give you all the details like imagine you can even know like who the Director of Photography for that particular scene or like what kind of a camera will use like little details of that sort are now possible you know because of it we'll

also have a robot eventually that cooks that creates that cupcake in real life

exactly this is like the Sci-Fi version of like what people thought the world was going to be like cuz you know you remember like all those books were like here's where the year 2000 will be oh yeah that's that's that you know I think the progress up until year 2000 was pretty slow maybe for the next 15 years that's pretty slow as well but in the last five years we've gotten exponential at being able to realize the vision of like an HG Wells or like someone from like you know back in the day you know and so so I'm really excited for some of these things let's see where everything leads it's interesting it's exciting and

there's it's out of our control too so it's no good worrying about it exactly

right you know just embrace the change learn to you know figure do but don't try to stop it and try try to like you know go against it because you know it's like trying to stop like a giant wave that's coming at you it's like you might succeed for a brief bit but you you might be more successful like you know using as opportunity like you I'm ride the wave and like make a you know like be like a nice surf for your in a video

oh that would make for a good vision ual I'll write that down I like that

metaphor that's a good one thank you happy to it's been a pleasure talking to

you likewise Ash thank you so much great fun