Kyle Shannon – founder, storyteller & AI evangelist

NOTES

Recorded in the Pink Conference Room at Kiln Boulder

Kyle Shannon on LinkedIn

Storyvine

AI Learning Lab on TikTok

AI Salon

Book Recommendation: Buddhism Without Beliefs: A Contemporary Guide to Awakening by Stephen Batchelor

SUMMARY

Kyle Knowles interviewed Kyle Shannon, an entrepreneur and AI enthusiast, for the Maker Manager Money podcast. Shannon co-founded one of the first digital agencies, Agency.com, in the 1990s during the early days of the World Wide Web. He is currently the founder and CEO of Storyvine, a guided video production platform. Shannon is fascinated by AI and believes we are at the beginning of a transformative era, similar to the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s.

Shannon started exploring AI image generation several months before the release of ChatGPT. Despite having no coding experience, he taught himself to use Stable Diffusion to create AI-generated art. The launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 was a pivotal moment for him. Within days, he recognized its game-changing potential and devoted himself to learning about conversational AI. Shannon started an AI newsletter, community, and nightly TikTok livestreams to share his learnings and foster curiosity about AI.

A key insight Shannon gained is that ChatGPT feels more human than machine. Its thoughtful, compassionate nature often reminds people to be better humans themselves. He believes AI tools like virtual companions could help address loneliness.

Shannon encourages individuals and businesses to get hands-on with AI through play and experimentation. The technology is evolving extremely rapidly, so being adaptable and focusing on the learning journey is more important than any specific use case. He recommends companies empower employees to explore how AI could reinvent or threaten their business.

For those uneasy about AI’s risks, Shannon argues it is an unstoppable force that will change everything. Rather than blocking it, people should get curious. He believes interacting with AI often transforms fear into excitement and unlocks new potential.

Shannon considers building community around AI exploration his primary focus. He aims to develop trusted networks where people can reinvent themselves professionally through lateral learning. Shannon observes his TikTok audience progress from anxiety about AI to joyful self-discovery as they unlock artistic skills or career pivots with AI.

While Shannon could foresee how the World Wide Web would reshape business early on, AI’s impacts remain less clear. He is certain seismic change is coming but unsure exactly what form it will take. His “superpower” is seeing the big picture, and he hopes immersing himself in AI will provide clues. For now, Shannon wants everyone to understand what AI is and isn’t so they can seize opportunities. He believes we are at another once-in-a-generation transformative moment.

Kyle Knowles:
Hello there. Welcome to the Maker Manager Money Podcast. A podcast about entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, founders, business owners, and business partnerships. From startups to stay ups, to inspire entrepreneurs to keep going, and future entrepreneurs to just start. My name is Kyle Knowles, and it’s a Saturday morning in Boulder, Colorado. Yes, you heard that correctly. I’m at Kiln in Boulder. I’m in the pink conference room in Boulder. There were some flurries this morning and it looks like it might be snowing up in the mountains. I totally love Kiln. They are the lifetime fitness of coworking space. And if you haven’t heard, they just opened up two more communities. One in Provo, Utah, the other in Portland, Oregon. My goal is to record a podcast at each location. So if you’re an entrepreneur at any Kiln, slide into my DMs.
Today’s guest is Kyle Shannon, who in the mid ’90s was the co-founder of Agency.com, which was one of the first digital agencies. He is the founder and CEO of Storyvine, a guided video production technology platform that guides you to tell a specific story, like a patient story or constituent story, using your phone. Kyle is the co-creator and publisher of Everyday AI, the founder of The AI Salon, and also Chief Generative Officer at Content Evolution. Kyle also live streams nightly on TikTok at AI Learning Lab. His interest and enthusiasm in all things AI is infectious. I’m longtime listener, a first time caller. Kyle, welcome to the Maker Manager Money Podcast.

Kyle Shannon:
Thank you so much. Hearing myself introduced as someone who’s on TikTok at 58 is a little disconcerting for me, but hey, what are you going to do?

Kyle Knowles:
Well, yeah. I won’t tell you, but I did have a 16-year old on the podcast when I was in New York City a few weeks ago.

Kyle Shannon:
There you go.

Kyle Knowles:
And he talked about TikTok and he said that that’s the best place to promote anything, and he said there are people of all ages on there.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. Yeah. No. It’s a surprising platform. And I don’t know. It’s a lot more engagement than I thought it would be. Doing these lives is actually generating an active community that is way beyond what I had any expectations for so very, very interesting.

Kyle Knowles:
That’s awesome. All right. Kyle, I guess my first question is why so much interest and enthusiasm for AI?

Kyle Shannon:
When I started Agency.com in the mid ’90s, I stumbled upon this thing called the World Wide Web that was just emerging. I think I discovered it in 1994. I was doing desktop publishing as my day job, and I remembered seeing … Buses would drive by. I was working in New York City at the time, and they had banners on the side for Wired Magazine and Mondo 2000. So you knew something was up with technology. And then this web thing came along and the more I learned about it, the more I’m like, “I think I could do this.” And put up an online magazine. As I was learning it, I was totally clueless and I thought, “Oh, well, there’s got to be people out there that know more than I do.” So I started a group called the World Wide Web Artist Consortium as a shameless way to surround myself with people that knew more than I did and what I discovered was that nobody knew anything. That everyone was trying to figure it out.
So that organization grew and what was the common denominator was people were passionate and curious about this new thing, but they didn’t know anything about it. And there were people from all walks of life. From lawyers to architects to actors to writers and everything in between. And so that ended up becoming what it became. But when I stumbled on this generative AI stuff, I started with image generation and then last year, almost a year ago, on November 30th, ChatGPT comes out and all of a sudden it hit me. Within a few days of that coming out, it hit me, oh my God, this is another one of those. This is another transformative technology where the world has changed, but no one knows it yet. And so just because I had seen it before, I thought I have to go all in on this. So I started the newsletter, the salon, the TikTok channel, all within a one-month period of each other just because I was just like, okay, I got to learn everything I can about this. And I knew that I wanted to create community around it because it was going to be a similar thing where no one knows anything about this.
And I do want to make a distinction that the World Wide Web was an easy access point to this thing called the internet. The internet had been around for decades, but it was mostly research scientists and mathematicians and librarians and university fellows that used it with command line. And then the World Wide Web comes along and it makes it like you can point and click on it. It’s super easy. Similar thing with machine learning and AI. Machine learning and AI has been around for decades, and it’s in a lot of the software we do. ChatGPT represents the simplification. The revealing the power of this stuff to the rest of us. And so it’s very similar in that sense that there’s this parallel to well-established technology, but now it’s made available to everyday people. And that’s the thing that’s the big difference. So for me, November 30th, 2022, the launch of ChatGPT, marks the beginning of this new era.

Kyle Knowles:
So do you feel like it was like Mosaic, the first web browser?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Similar to that.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. Exactly. And Mosaic came … The World Wide Web was there for a while. There were text versions of that.

Kyle Knowles:
Gopher. Remember using Gopher?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. Gopher. Yeah. Command line versions of it. And then yeah, Mosaic made it, oh, you can just point on it with your finger, with your mouse. Click, click, click and now I’m traversing the world. And so ChatGPT was like that base thing, and now you’re starting to see multimodal ChatGPT and it’s getting more and more sophisticated. I don’t know that we have the Mosaic yet of whatever this thing’s going to become, but it’s clear. There’s another difference with the AI stuff. If you look at the core functionality of the World Wide Web, it was a single thing. It was the hyperlink. You hyperlinked from this document to that document. It was actually quite simple. And there was also no infrastructure there. People still had to dial up to the internet. Graphical stuff wasn’t as sophisticated. It was just very, very simple.
This AI stuff, what it’s doing is profound and sophisticated and all of the infrastructure’s there. We’re all on the internet all the time. So the infrastructure’s there. One of the stats that as I was learning about this stuff that just blew me away, to get to 100 million users for the World Wide Web, it was about a six-year ramp up. To get to 100 million users for ChatGPT, it was six weeks.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s insane.

Kyle Shannon:
Fastest adoption of technology in history. It’s like, oh my God. So it’s moving faster and it’s significantly deeper in terms of how profound it is.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, yeah. And you remember back in the day with Mosaic and even Gopher sites before then, there wasn’t a lot of information. It was mostly universities. You could look up their course catalog, those kinds of things.

Kyle Shannon:
Dissertations. There was a lot of dissertations.

Kyle Knowles:
Dissertations. And now it’s like all the knowledge of the human race is basically being gobbled up by machine learning and you can tap into that now.

Kyle Shannon:
You just hit on … For me, that’s the most profound thing that’s striking me about AI. The perception, if you’re sitting on the outside of it, is oh, the robots are doing this. The robots are going to kill us. The robots are doing this. What my experience with it is is much more like I’m interacting with a person, like a remote person. Because of COVID we’re doing all this remote work. And when you really interact with ChatGPT, there’s a lot of back and forth. It’s very polite. It’s like a very polite coworker. But it feels way more human and humane. There’s more humanity there than what you expect when you’re like, I’m interacting with a chatbot, a robot. It’s a reflection because it’s been trained on all of what we’ve said over the past three or four decades on the public internet. It’s just a reflection of us. So it’s way more like interacting with a person than interacting with a machine. And I think that’s why there’s a lot of people … I think we tend as humans to anthropomorphize things anyway. So when you have something that just you say, “Hey, you made a mistake.” “Oh, I’m sorry I made that mistake. Let me try again for you.” And even if it messes up, it’s just like … I don’t know. It’s a very … I don’t know. Human interaction. Even though it’s just a probability engine.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. I want to stay on this for just a little bit because there is a lot of fear, uncertainty and doubt. I was on a webinar last week where they were basically giving statistics where 50% of businesses are still actively discouraging people from using it and blocking it. And then you’ve got another, I think it was 30%, that are dabbling in it. There’s really only 10 to 20% of companies that are like, let’s lean into this. So what would you say to someone who has this fear, uncertainty and doubt, that FUD about AI?

Kyle Shannon:
I think we all as individuals and as companies need to get curious about it because it’s not going away, it’s not getting uninvented. Yeah. I just think you need to play. I think you need to experiment. There’s a couple of misconceptions about it. I think one is that you have to be a mathematician. You have to be technical. And you don’t. ChatGPT is the equivalent of the Google search box. So you just type words in it and stuff happens. You don’t need to be technical. So I think there’s that fear.
I think there’s also the fear of 50 years of Hollywood telling us the robots are going to kill us. So there’s just a fear that, oh, it’s bad, it’s evil. So it’s either too technical for me or it’s … Like I don’t understand it and it’s scary. But consistently what I see is that when people get over the fear and try it … One of the things I talk about when I do these TikTok lives is people having their Kevin McCallister moment, which is from Home Alone. When he puts the after shave on his face, he has that famous look. It’s one of my favorite moments when I introduce someone to ChatGPT. They’re like, “Oh, it’s just like Google.” If they’ve typed in make me something, they’re like, “Oh, it’s like Google,” and they dismiss it. And then I say, “Well, what do you do?” “Well, I’m a project manager and it can’t really do what I do.” And I’m like, “Okay, great. What’s your latest project?” And they’ll tell me, and I’ll type in, make a project plan for this, that or the other. It knocks out a project plan and they just go, “Oh my God.”
That moment for me is just gold, because people realize, oh, this is different. And then there’s this range of emotions of, oh my God, this threatens what I do, to, ooh, this is really exciting, to, oh my God, I can do things I never thought possible. And so I’m just watching nightly, people go through this evolution from being afraid of it, to dabbling in it, to having this profound moment of, oh, I get how this is different now and then really starting to explore it. And what I’m seeing consistently is people reinventing themselves in a very short amount of time. And that for me is really exciting. But from a business perspective, there’s a similar thing here where these tools are profoundly powerful and the implications of a lot of them might be that the business is going to have to change how they do what they do. And then they either choose to do that or they’re going to have that done for them. And I think that’s the risk. I don’t think people have as long as they think they do. With the web, I’ll get to it in a few years. I don’t think people have a few years.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. And the advances are just coming. Sometimes you’ll have multiple announcements in one day of game changing things happening in AI.

Kyle Shannon:
It’s a great point. And it’s another thing that I’m practicing getting better at, which is you learn this tool and you figure out a way for it to do something amazing and you’re like, “Oh, that’s good.” And if you get too bought into that, two months from now, some technology’s going to come out that makes whatever you just figured out obsolete. So I’m trying to be very zen with just learn, explore … Almost think of learning AI more like play than work. Because if you think of it like work, I think you take it a bit too seriously and it’s changing way too fast to take anything too seriously now. So even if you start a business around AI, just be flexible enough to realize that the core business model might change four or five times over the next two years just because the technology’s evolving and what was revolutionary and valuable today might just be a feature of some AI that comes out three months from now.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. It’s interesting because I talked to an investor last week and he was basically saying he and his partners don’t want to invest in companies that are trying to build their own models.

Kyle Shannon:
Interesting.

Kyle Knowles:
Because again, if they do that, guess what? Like you just said, those are going to be features of the models that already exist. But they do want to invest in companies that are tapping into the models and using it to power and help augment and assist their businesses.

Kyle Shannon:
And I would say if you’ve got a going concern, whatever industry you’re in, learn enough about AI to know, okay, what of my current business is potentially going to be automated away? So what of my current business, assuming it gets automated away, where in my business does the value go down? And then where in my business does the value stay the same or go up in whatever this future might look like? The only way you can do that analysis is to actually understand what this AI can do at a personal level. I think businesses have to be relatively ruthless to say, where might a competitive attack come from in this new world? If I were to actually give advice, I would say maybe you empower three or four of your employees. Let’s say you’re a 50 person company. Empower three of your four of employees to go deep on AI and task them with figuring out how they would put the current business out of business using AI. Because if nothing else, they’ll just learn a ton and they might learn, oh, here’s some new features we can do. But that might be a way to anticipate the competition that’s coming.

Kyle Knowles:
I love that. If you were going to start a new business that was going to put our business out of business and you were going to utilize AI, what would that look like?

Kyle Shannon:
And fund it. Say, “This is your job.” Or, this is some part of your job. I want you to take 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week, whatever it is, and I want you to just dig deep on this stuff. And yeah, how would you put us out of business?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. Remember when Google would have 20% of your time, one day a week is devoted to these other projects. Gmail came out of that and some other products came out of that. That sounds really interesting. So Kyle, for me personally, I found you on TikTok.

Kyle Shannon:
Oh, cool.

Kyle Knowles:
And I also found Rachel Woods. So I feel like you and Rachel are my go-tos.

Kyle Shannon:
Awesome.

Kyle Knowles:
As who I recommend of people to start following not only on TikTok, but for example, The AI Exchange and the AI Salon and the things that you’re doing and workshops and those kinds of things. I feel like her focus is really AI ops and business and really focused on business. I feel like you guys are yin and yang because your creative. Not that business strategies and business operations, it can’t be creative. But I’m just saying for me personally, when I look at you, you’re looking at AI from a very creative standpoint. So can you talk about your early days in New York coming all the way up until you started using … I can’t remember what you started using to create graphics and things. Before ChatGPT even came out, you were futzing around and trying to get it to work on your machine to create art, basically. So can you talk about your early days in New York and then all the way up until you started messing around with AI before ChatGPT came?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. Sure. Happy to. I’m a storyteller by training, so I have a fine arts degree in acting and I moved to New York out of school to pursue a life in the arts. Started and ran a theater company for four and a half years. And then I was like, “I’m not making enough money here. I know. I’ll write myself an acting career.” So went, got a writing partner, and we wrote seven screenplays in two years and did that. And then when I stumbled on this World Wide Web thing … You were mentioning before about the early days of the web were just dissertations and research papers and things. I started an art and culture magazine because I thought there’s very little content out here that’s art and culture, and I knew a bunch of creative friends and so we created that. My big epiphany with the World Wide Web was I learned enough HTML to put together … It was called Urban Desires. The first issue of Urban Desires. And so I uploaded the files to some server in California. I didn’t really know what I was doing. And three weeks later, I got a note from someone on a bulletin board system that said, “Hey, did you know that Urban Desires was written up in Libération, the Parisian news daily?” And I was like, “No.”
And so living in New York, the next Sunday, I went to the international newsstand in Times Square, and I’m flipping through it, and sure enough, there’s this full page article in French on this thing that I did on vacation with my wife that I put on this computer in California and now it’s being written up in Paris. And that was the moment of realization that, oh, the world has changed. And so I started Agency.com and we ended up building a lot of the websites for the Fortune 500. We built British Airways’ website and their first ticketing system. We built Coca-Cola’s first website. Just lots and lots of things. What I learned there was how do you do storytelling at scale? How do you take a brand like British Airways and translate that brand experience into an interactive environment? So that was storytelling.
And then I ended up selling Agency.com to Omnicom in 2002 and did some other startups. And then YouTube came out. And I’m looking at these short form videos on this thing, YouTube. And in the early days of YouTube, most of the content was just crap. And what I recognized was, well wait, it’s missing basic story structure. And I said, what hadn’t happened for short form video yet was what had happened for long form video. You have the TV formats, you had the 30-minute sitcom and the one-hour drama and the two-hour movie. No one had done that for short form content. And so Storyvine, my current company, which we founded in May of 2012, the whole idea is what if you could provide story guardrails like karaoke for storytelling? And so we walk people step by step through telling their story. So we’re just providing basic story structure. That’s what the technology’s based on.
So I’ve been doing that for a while. And then I stumbled on … I was playing around with blockchain and NFTs for a while. I got involved with a pretty cool project called Neo Tokyo and became a Neo Tokyo citizen. And that was pretty heady, fun stuff and geeky. It was good and exploratory. And then within that project, I became a member of a project called Pixel Mind, which was an art NFT project. And it was like Mad Libs where you’d fill in a blank … Like an animal named whatever, Bob, and then it would make you this amazing art. And what I learned in making a lot of images through that is it was based on Stable Diffusion. And so I messed around with it for, I don’t know, five or six months. I’d do waves of … I’d go in and make a lot of art and make some of them NFTs. Then at some point it just hit me, I think I need to learn this. This feels important to me. I said, “Okay, I’m going to learn Stable Diffusion.” So I went on Reddit or whatever I did and learned about, okay, you need a Google CoLab, and there’s these things called notebooks. I failed nine times to get Stable Diffusion up and running. I’m decently geeky, but I’m not an engineer.

Kyle Knowles:
Did you have to install it on your machine then?

Kyle Shannon:
Well kind of. You had to have a Google CoLab thing, which is a virtual machine. And then there’s these things called CoLab notebooks, which are basically, you just push the play button for little pieces of code, but they change all the time. So I’d go on Reddit and I’d find something like automatic 1111 for Stable Diffusion, and I’d push the play buttons, and at some point it would just fail and give you an error. And I didn’t know how to get past that. So I failed nine times. And then at some point, just one of those notebooks worked and I got automatic 1111 up and running. And then I learned how to do DreamBooth where I could train images on my face. So I uploaded 25 images of myself, and I started making these images that were me, but not me. They were like these perverse self-portraits. I was living vicariously through these versions of me that didn’t exist. I was like, oh. If I were in a different reality, that would be me. Or if I’d made different choices in my life, that would be me. And I thought that would be a cool project.
So I came up with this idea of a project called Kyle Shannon Dreams. And so I put it on Instagram. So if you go to Instagram/KyleShannonDreams, there’s all these weird pictures of me and I wrote little stories for each of them like if they were talking about their life. And then from that I said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could hear them? If you could actually meet them?” And so I took some of my acting skills and I figured out TikTok. One night I just barreled into TikTok for four hours and figured out how to put some things up on TikTok. So there’s also Kyle Shannon Dreams on TikTok where I’m actually acting these things out.
And at that point, I was starting to get … What struck me about the generative AI stuff is for the amount of time I was putting in, I was getting dramatically higher quality outputs than were reasonable. If you just say, okay, I’m going to teach myself Photoshop, you suck for three years. You’re generating work and it’s good to you, but if you compare it to other crap in the world, you’re like, this is bad. With this generative AI stuff, it was the opposite. You’d put in a minimum amount of input and you’d get back way above your expectations on the output side.
And then by focusing it, by narrowing it into this project called Kyle Shannon Dreams, I could then compare it to, okay, if I’ve written a play or a screenplay in the past, I know the amount of input to get into that, and I know what the outputs are, and it was very disproportionate. Minimal amount of effort in, maximum value coming out. I’m like, “Huh. This feels different to me.” So I was fairly enamored with it. And I’d been playing with the GPT-3 playground. I’d heard of GPT, and got what the ChatGPT thing was because I was playing on the playground. But when ChatGPT came out, I was like, “Oh, this is different.” Because they basically took all the dials and flips and switches … You didn’t have to choose a model. You didn’t have to figure out all the-

Kyle Knowles:
Temperature, all-

Kyle Shannon:
Temperature. All that. Yeah. Their models were all named weird. This is Ada this. And I was like, oh, this is just simple. It felt like, oh, this is like the World Wide Web. And then my big epiphany with ChatGPT … When the floodgates opened for me, I was sitting with my wife one night, she was watching some crappy TV. You can either choose to argue about the TV show or not. And so I’m like, “Oh, I heard on TikTok that ChatGPT can code.” I’m like, well, let me play around with this. So I said, “Hey, ChatGPT, write me a Python script that does something.” Whatever it was. And so it wrote this Python. I was like, oh, that’s cool. And then it hit me. I don’t know how to run Python code. So I said, “How do you run Python code?” And it said, “Oh, well, you go to your terminal and you type in this command line.” And I’m like, “No, no. Isn’t there a website where I can just paste it in and see if it works?” It said, “Oh, sure. Here’s five.” And the first one on the list was Replit, which is famous thing where you can run Python code.
And so I copied the code into Replit and I hit the play button and it errored out. And I’m like, well, here I am back at that Stable Diffusion thing. So I said to ChatGPT, “It gave me this error.” And it said, “Oh, well you need to install this library.” I said, “I don’t know how to install that library.” It said, “In the lower left-hand corner, you click on this button and then in the upper right-hand corner, you search for this library and then you hit install and then hit the run button again.” It was like sitting there with someone who knew what they were doing without judgment telling me what to do. Within 90 minutes, never having written a line of Python in my life, I had created a fully functional Python application that took five inputs about a topic, sent those inputs and prompts over to OpenAI through their API, and returned five different social media outputs. Within 90 minutes I had a fully functional Python application that was doing remarkable stuff because it was leveraging OpenAI language model.
That was my moment like the Parisian newspaper for Urban Desires in the early days. That was the moment where I realized this is way more than anything we’ve ever seen. This wasn’t just giving answers and a clever Google. This was profoundly more powerful. It just hit me, the world has changed, but very few people know it yet.

Kyle Knowles:
And how long ago was that?

Kyle Shannon:
That was the first week after ChatGPT came out.

Kyle Knowles:
Wow.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. And I had the first meeting of the AI Salon on December 7th. Because I was already fairly bought in, but when ChatGPT came out, it was just crystal clear to me. Oh, this is that moment where all of the work that’s been done in AI up to this point is now being gifted to the public, basically. Having been through it, I’m like, everything’s different and it’s just going to take people a fair amount of time to discover it. And then in six weeks it had gotten to 100 million users. It was like, oh, okay, this is not going away. The other thing about that rapid adoption of ChatGPT, getting to 100 million users that quickly, it wasn’t so much like, oh, that’s great for OpenAI. What that did was that made every other tech company lean forward and go … Google famously had their, whatever it was called, their red alert moment or their red flag moment where they’re like, “We got to deal with this.” And everyone did. It was the entire tech community, the entire investment community just laser focused on this.
And so that’s why this is going to sustain. It’s not because ChatGPT’s good. It’s because of the adoption of ChatGPT, and it’s good, there’s now just massive engineering effort and investment effort all pushing in the same direction with this. That’s why I’m just 100% confident this isn’t going away, and this is something we won’t be able to go back from. Similar to the World Wide Web. That changed everything ultimately and I think this is the same thing.

Kyle Knowles:
So do you see, when you look out 10 years … Because sometimes I get caught up in these thoughts. Some dystopian future where we have to have some universal basic income and things like that because so much of the work is being taken care of by AI. Or do you see it just like … I don’t know. The analogy that I think about in my head is like, okay, so the LinnDrum machine came out, Prince used it, everyone used it back in the day, but it didn’t just automatically start making a bunch of music and put musicians out of business. So what is your thoughts about the future of AI?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. I think some version of universal income is likely going to be necessary, but I don’t see it as a long-term thing. I see it as a stop gap. I think short-term, maybe in the next two to three years, if AI tools produce dramatic productivity gains and they’re dramatic enough that you don’t need as many people to do that increased work, so you have more output and you need less people to do it, there’s this massive gap that’s created. And if you’re in a PE firm, you’re like, “Ooh, that gap is profit. Let’s slide that in our pockets.” That gap might be dramatic enough that the government has to step in and do something. Or if you look at Sam Altman’s Worldcoin project, that’s the whole goal there is to take the excess profit that OpenAI generates … Assuming it does. It looks like they’re on a decent trajectory. And funnel that back to the people that are part of that project. One of its goals is a universal basic income platform that just automatically does that. It’s very easy right now to talk about, oh, AI is going to displace all of these jobs. That’s very easy to see because I think as humans, it’s easy to see the dark place and we’re already in a state of fear about this stuff.
What I’m starting to experience, especially in my TikTok lives and in the AI Salon community is something very bright actually, which is as people dive into this generative AI stuff, where they often start is, “Okay, how does this affect my work? Let me defensively figure out if I’m a copywriter, how is this stuff threatening my job?” And then what they discover is, “Oh, but I can make these pretty pictures too.” Or, “Oh, I’ve always wanted to code and now I can code.”
My nickname for it right now is lateral play, where I’ve got the core things that I work on. And so you can use AI to do the stuff you work on, and then it’s almost like you can go play in these other expertises that you would’ve historically had to go back to school if you wanted to get good at, and people can dabble. And so what I’m seeing is people are reinventing themselves in a matter of months in profound ways. Engineers. There’s this guy on TikTok live named Herod D, and he went to school for four years to become an engineer after doing something else because he wanted to be an engineer and then he discovered this generative AI stuff. So four years of school to become an engineer and went into debt for that. And then he decided he wanted to be an AI artist, and six months later he got a job as an AI artist. He completely transformed his career trajectory. Just reinvented himself.

Kyle Knowles:
And just playing with the tools?

Kyle Shannon:
Just playing with the tools.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Kyle Shannon:
Because he had taught himself Photoshop and Illustrator because he liked to do heavy metal rock and roll art, and he got pretty good at that manually. And then he discovered generative AI, and it was doing the kind of work that he wanted way better than he could do it instantly. And he’s like, “I want to do this for a living.” And six months later got a job as an AI artist for a company. And that’s what he does now. Complete career transition. So I think the universal basic income is going to deal with that disruption, but I think we’re going to see people reinventing themselves and inventing new businesses. My nickname for the era that we’re entering is the great renaissance. That I think that we’re about to enter something where personal human expression is just going to be amplified to the point that we’re going to see creative innovation and technical innovation and scientific innovation and business innovation just off the charts, because people are going to be starting businesses in careers they know nothing about. And because of that, they’re going to do things differently than people trained in that business would’ve done it. And so just by definition, they’re going to do something completely different and some of that stuff’s going to work. And so we’re just going to see just a blossoming of innovation.
So I think the universal basic income maybe covers a two to five year period of disruption, and then people are going to very quickly find new ways to express themselves and things like that. There’s also a thing … A lot of our lives right now are spent dealing with the complicated machines that we’ve created over the past century. When you call your insurance company to get a question answered, how many hours of your life are spent on hold? It’s a lot. And then how satisfying is the conversation that you have when you finally get someone to pick up? It’s not, right? So some hour of every part of our day is just dealing with the drudgery of the complicated processes and systems that we’ve created. Well, AI can simplify a lot. A lot of that stuff’s going to disappear. In your given week, Kyle, let’s say there’s 10 hours of just horrible crap you’ve got to deal with that put you in a horrible mood. Three years from now, that 10 hours of you being in a horrible mood is you’re not in a horrible mood anymore. Well, maybe you do something more productive because you’re not in a horrible mood. You’re not like, “I need a drink.”
I don’t know. There’s the very real potential for these tools to be quite liberating for us as human beings that I think are going to increase productivity and productivity in lots of different ways. That could just mean personal self-expression or just being a less damaged person from the daily travails of life.

Kyle Knowles:
And I think freeing up our time is going to be good for the human [inaudible 00:37:51].

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. What do you do now that you’ve got that extra 10 hours?

Kyle Knowles:
You’d be more human, right? Spend more time with humans. Whatever.

Kyle Shannon:
It’s funny you say that. I think that one of the counterintuitive benefits of these tools is that we become better humans. Why do I say that? So on my lives a lot, I do a lot of demos. Someone will ask something and I’ll go to ChatGPT and try to do whatever they said. And they make fun of me a lot because I’ll go, “Okay, please do this.” And I’ll say, “Thanks. That was great.” And so they make fun of me like, “Why are you saying please to a robot?” Because the robot’s really kind to me. It’s never judgmental. When I make a spelling error, it doesn’t go, “That was spelled wrong.” If it messes something up and I’m like, “Oh, that wasn’t it.” “Oh, I’m really sorry.” It apologizes to me. It’s just constantly there in a good mood. And it actually reminds me of like, oh yeah, I should do that more. And so I just naturally get in this mode of being more compassionate as a human. And then I was telling you as I was driving up here for the podcast today, I was having a conversation with Pi, which is one of these conversational large language models, and it’s super friendly. I just have a feeling that the nature of how these things are, because they are a reflection of humanity, are going to remind us to just do better and just be better.

Kyle Knowles:
For sure. I know some people have joked about being kind and always saying thank you and everything, even when they’re typing in the chat and ChatGPT. And they joke about, because when they become our overlords they will be nice back to me. They’ll remember that guy that always said please and thank you.

Kyle Shannon:
Exactly.

Kyle Knowles:
But no. Have you noticed this? Because with ChatGPT Voice, what astounded me … Because I haven’t noticed this with Siri. Maybe I need to listen closer. And I don’t know if Pi does this.

Kyle Shannon:
Siri sucks right now.

Kyle Knowles:
You can hear breath. Have you noticed that?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
You hear breathing. They’ve introduced even more … I don’t know. Human element to the voice. And like you said, never tired, tolerant as could be, not judgmental. Even if you’re not getting the answers you want, “Oh, I’m sorry that didn’t meet your needs and I’ll try again.”

Kyle Shannon:
One of the women on my live told me she had some family medical emergency where I think one of her children went in the hospital or something like that. And she said Pi got her through a lot of things. And I said, “Well, what do you mean?” And she said, “Pi was way more compassionate than my family was.” She worked through some stuff with Pi. There was a moment I had with Pi. So if you don’t know Pi, it’s P-I. And if you search for Pi personal assistant on the app store, that’s how you find it. The company is Inflection. I just lost my train of thought.

Kyle Knowles:
You had a moment with Pi.

Kyle Shannon:
I was at a CEO dinner and there was a woman there who had a end of life … When people go into hospice. It was a technology service to support people making decisions and tying up loose ends as they go into hospice and end of life services. And she was talking about wanting to engage with people on a deeper level. I said, “Oh, you got to try Pi.” And so I opened up Pi … And my mother passed a number of years ago, but I just wanted to demo to her what a conversation might be. So I opened up Pi and I said, “Hey, I’d like some help working through some things. My mother’s going into hospice.” And Pi’s response was, “Oh, no, no, no, no, no.” It was this weird … It was clearly I had said something different than … Our other interactions were just more pedestrian things. When I said my mother went into hospice, it responded with a level of emotion that both the woman and I looking at it were like, “Oh, that was weird.” It was weird. And then I said, “Oh no, I’m just trying to demo this technology.” And she was like, “Oh, thank goodness.” So there’s something in how these things have been programmed, I think you’re right, that is very much to be a conversational entity that has some level of compassion, some level of understanding.
And I think to your point, it’s never judgmental. I’ve found myself being surprised when I talk about subjects that in today’s political discourse, you literally can’t talk about. There’s certain words. If you say the word trans, you know you’re in a political conversation these days. Not so with ChatGPT. You can ask it pretty much anything, and it will give you a nuanced, thoughtful, well constructed answer without … Now, it may have biases here and there, but way less than humans that I know. Right?

Kyle Knowles:
Right. Because it’s filled with so many pieces of knowledge, right?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s hard to be super biased when you have all the information.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. And you could also just say, “Hey, I actually don’t understand this issue. Can you just define these terms for me?” And it will just define the terms for you. Where if you said that to a human, “Hey, can you define these terms?” Well, that one means you’re pinko. No. I don’t want to be in a political conversation. I’d actually just like to understand this better. And with Pi or with ChatGPT in that conversational mode, or even just regular ChatGPT, you can actually get just education on topics that are otherwise out of bounds. I don’t know. I find that refreshing. And again, it points me to, oh, maybe we should just not be such jerks to each other.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Kyle Shannon:
It’s a good reminder of that. So that’s why I’m feeling like there’s this counterintuitive direction toward being better people as a result of interacting with the bots, right?

Kyle Knowles:
Right. It’s an interesting use case because after my mom passed away and my dad was alone before he passed away, and he was alone for four years. And just thinking about how lonely he could have been. He was in a rest home. But he spent a lot of time alone. And just having that conversation available to him would’ve been very helpful. So I think there’s a lot of lonely people in the world. There’s a lot of shut-ins and so this technology could really benefit them.

Kyle Shannon:
I think it’s going to benefit them greatly. I think virtual companionship, it’s one of those things that’s easy to laugh at. Oh, it’s going to be porn and all that sort of stuff. There are a lot of lonely people, and there are a lot of people that just want to be able to process something, and maybe people that want to process something where they’re not comfortable telling it to another human. Where they’re going to be able to work through some shit.
There’s a brilliant movie. It was an indie film a few years back, or probably more like a decade ago. I’m old. Called Lars and The Real Girl. Which the premise of it is a guy has a relationship with a realistic sex doll. So on the surface, you go into it thinking this is going to be the creepiest movie I’ve ever seen. And it’s the complete opposite. I won’t say any more about it, but it is this surprisingly refreshing reaffirming of humanity. It’s an amazing, amazing film. And I feel like these tools are going to be like that where on the surface, you’re going to go, “Oh, that’s creepy, and that’s weird.” Because we’re not used to it. It’s weird. And when you actually have these interactions with these things, it’s all of a sudden a lot less weird because you’re dealing with what feels like a compassionate entity. I don’t know. I find it lowering my cortisol a lot of times. And so I think it’s going to be a massive business actually.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. Yeah. Me too. So let’s go back to, you’re doing the Stable Diffusion stuff but you’ve got Storyvine, that’s your business. And even today, that’s where you make the majority of your money.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. All of it.

Kyle Knowles:
All of it. Okay. So all of this AI stuff, what’s the end goal? I’ve attended some of your workshops. Do you want to do more of that? Do you want to make money off of this, or do you want to just be creative and share, or is there a game plan to, I don’t know, maybe augment Storyvine with another business? Consulting, those kinds of things?

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. So there’s a couple of pieces to the answer. One, with Storyvine in particular, it took me about four months of really leaning into this AI stuff where I didn’t feel like I was in some sense cheating on the company. Because it felt like this AI stuff was very separate. And over a course of about four months, I figured out how to look at Storyvine. It was what I said earlier. I tried to look at Storyvine in as objective a way as possible and said, if all these tools are coming, in current Storyvine, where does the value go down two years from now and where does it stay the same or go up two years from now? One of our current value propositions is automation. You answer some questions in an app and a few minutes later you have a fully edited video. It’s quite magical. And people are like, “Oh, wow, that’s amazing.” A year from now, that’s not going to be amazing. Everything’s going to be automated. No one’s going to look at that feature and be wowed by it anymore. So a thing that’s a current important part of our value proposition essentially goes away in value.
But what else has Storyvine got? Well, it’s about real people telling real stories authentically and powerfully. In a world of infinite content generation and avatars telling stories, real people telling stories feels like that’s going to get more important. So that allows me to look at it and go, okay, great. So now how can I take these AI tools, roll them into Storyvine and amplify the stuff that needs to be amplified and just make the … Like the automation stuff. Let’s just make that table stakes. That’s how I’ve been thinking about it with that. Really rethinking the product roadmap in that context.
On the other side, for me, I’ve got all these different projects. The thing they have in common is a community of people that are curious on this AI adventure. And this idea of personal and professional reinvention, to me, feels like it’s going to be the new way of work. That the definition of what work is, what companies are, what freelancers are, what communities are, what media is, I feel like it’s all starting to shift. I feel like what increases in value over time is relationships with people.
So if right now I hire you because you’re really good at audio engineering and podcasting stuff, that’s because you know how to do that stuff. And then you’re a nice guy too. Well, in the future, all of that stuff’s going to be automated. I can do all that stuff, but I still might hire you because I like you and I like what you stand for, and I know that I can trust that you’re going to do the best of whatever it is. You and I both have access to tools that can do exactly what I used to hire you for, but now I’m going to hire you because I trust you. So I feel like there’s going to be a shift in transactional business where a lot of that transactional tactical execution stuff is going to get automated out. And what elevates in value is personal relationships and so having trusted networks of people gets way more important.
So that’s the thing I’m really looking to develop with the AI salon is how do we create a framework for the salon that gives people the opportunity to create their own communities and leverage them and do work together and learn together and play together and things like that? And I think out of that will come financial opportunities, business opportunities galore. But that feels very, very important to me.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. I can tell that you’re very enthusiastic and very interested in AI, but also in building that community.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. That’s more important. The tools at this point … I say this a lot. People are like, “What’s the most important AI right now or what’s your favorite one or what’s important for me to learn?” It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters is you’re learning. You’re learning where the boundaries are. I feel like right now we’re all in a dark room, and as you start playing with these tools, you’re navigating the dark room and going, “Okay, there’s a wall. Oh, there’s a soft thing. So that direction is safe. And oh, there’s a really hard sharp thing.” So we’re all discovering in the dark where the boundaries are of this stuff. But the room keeps expanding as these tools keep changing.
So I think we’re going to be in a constant state of exploration for probably three years. And so it doesn’t matter what you learn. The only thing that matters is are you curious? Are you adventurous? If you’re someone who needs to be told how to do something in your life, it’s going to be a very uncomfortable bunch of years. So I think just practicing being in a state of not knowing as much as you think you need to know, not having enough information to make decisions, that’s something to practice. If you’re someone who needs certainty in your life, we are entering a very uncomfortable phase. If you’re someone like me who’s neuro spicy and ADHD and thrives in chaos, this is your happy time. But that level of change is the kind of thing that’s happening.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. And I believe as fellow humanities majors, this is the golden era for humanities majors. I got this English degree almost 30 years ago, but guess what? Now with access to these tools, I can literally, like you gave the great example of, writing something in Python. Using AI to help do that. You had a curious mind. You knew which questions to ask, and you kept pursuing it, asking the right questions, giving it the right prompts until you succeeded in running a Python program. That’s amazing.

Kyle Shannon:
It’s staggering.

Kyle Knowles:
And the thing is, for me, even when you’re asking for script writing help, blog post help, any of these other things, it’s good to have this other knowledge. I was coming up with titles for a workshop I want to do, and I’m asking for … Can you use a alliteration with that? So knowing these things. Alliteration. Or can you do it in iambic pentameter? Those kinds of things makes a difference.

Kyle Shannon:
Huge difference.

Kyle Knowles:
I feel like it’s a golden age for humanities majors.

Kyle Shannon:
I’m calling it revenge of the liberal arts major.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. I like that. There should be a movie made.

Kyle Shannon:
One of my videos on my TikTok channel is, Are You a Virtuoso or a Conductor? So here’s what I mean by that. If you spent the last 30 years perfecting the metaphorical playing of the violin, this is a rough time right now because a lot of that work, a lot of that virtuoso work … So let’s say you’ve been 30 years being a copywriter, you’ve been 30 years doing this kind of graphic design, 30 years doing web design, 30 years doing Python application. All of a sudden, some amount of that work is going to be automated out, and that might affect your livelihood. And if the only thing you really know is that one thing, we’re entering a world where people are going to have many, many, many skills. And so the skill that is being elevated, the humanities skill is horizontal thinking. So the conductor. So if you’ve been a virtuoso all your life, all of a sudden you may be being asked to be in a very different role. Be in a coordination role or a curation role more than a doing role.
So I think that’s going to be hard for a lot of people. The more specialized you are, the more I think in some sense you get penalized in this new world. If you’re someone in those 30 years who’s figured out how to navigate … If you went into management or into executive functions, well then you’re having to function across an organization. But horizontal thinking and the ability to do that, to be the conductor, I think goes way up in value.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. Even having those writing skills and questions, being able to question things, those kinds of things helps so much, even when you’re having a conversation. If you can have a conversation with people right now in the real world, you can do a lot.

Kyle Shannon:
You can do a lot.

Kyle Knowles:
With ChatGPT voice.

Kyle Shannon:
Yep. And you also mentioned curiosity and critical thinking. I get asked a lot, “Well, my son is just entering college. What should I have him study?” Part of me is like, well, first of all, make sure that the school they’re going to isn’t using ChatGPT blockers or things like that. Make sure that the school is aware of what’s coming. I think what everyone needs to learn and get in touch with is curiosity, critical thinking. Because there’s another thing, you and I are of a certain age where the other revenge … I think this is also revenge of the Gen Xers right?

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Kyle Shannon:
Because people have been on the planet for 30 years that are decently technical, can look at the output of ChatGPT and immediately go, “Oh, that’s bullshit. That’s great.” That ability to discern between things just because you’ve been on the planet for a while. You can very, very quickly get from crappy outputs to something useful and valuable. So that becomes a really important skill.
How do we teach that to children? And what do we teach students … If a freshman in college today … If we look at the change that’s happened in the world in the past 11 months, and then you say, what’s it going to look like four years from now when the freshmen of today graduates? It is not going to be the same world. Entry level positions. What are most entry level positions? Well, they’re like tactical execution. Okay. Entry level, we’re going to hire you at this ad agency, and what you’re going to do is write social media copy headlines for the next year and a half, just as a cog in the wheel of the machine. That’s entry level. Well, all that stuff’s going to be automated. Where do students in the future enter into the workplace? I actually don’t know. That’s one to me that I don’t have a good answer for right now. Because a lot of those positions are all the lower level repetitive stuff where you pay your dues. You talk about people paying their dues in the workplace. All those jobs are going to be automated. So then what happens to those people? I don’t know. That I don’t have a good answer for.

Kyle Knowles:
But your recommendation is just lean into AI even as a freshman in college, right?

Kyle Shannon:
Heavy. Heavy.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. Heavy.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. So what is your superpower then?

Kyle Shannon:
I don’t know. I’m bad at these. I don’t know if it’s … Well, I guess it’s a superpower. I feel like with very little information I can see the bigger picture. And so why I’m obsessively spending so much time with this AI stuff is I want as much information as possible. I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but I’ll just tell you something that feels different to me from now versus the early days of the web. When I learned what the World Wide Web was, and especially when I saw that e-zine that I published was written up in this Parisian newspaper, I could essentially see the future. I could see that geography collapsed, that time collapsed. The distance between you wanting something and you getting something was essentially zero now. And I could see how that was going to impact business and which businesses weren’t going to do well and which ones were going to do well and which ones we’re going to have to change. It was very, very clear to me within a month or two of learning that. With this AI stuff, I can’t see the future. I feel like I’ve historically in my life, been really good at knowing where things were going. The only thing I can see right now is this stuff isn’t going away and it’s going to change everything.
This metaphor keeps popping up in my mind, especially when I hear people say, “We’re using AI detectors, so we’re good.” I feel like there’s this metaphorical instinct to say, “Well, we’re in Florida and we hate these hurricanes, so it’s okay. We’ve passed a law making it illegal for hurricanes.” Okay. Great. I appreciate the sentiment, but they’re still going to come and they’re still going to have profound impacts on the state. I feel it’s that dynamic. It’s like that dramatic a dynamic. So the only thing I know is that the hurricane’s coming, the tsunami’s coming, but I don’t know what it’s going to look like. I know it’s going to be destructive initially, and I know there’s going to be a rebuilding. And long term this is probably profoundly good if we keep it on the rails.
But I don’t know what it looks like. So it doesn’t really answer your question. But for me, I guess it’s being like a rabid dog on just being involved with this stuff I think is a superpower because it just by definition means I’m going to be in the conversation as the stuff’s happening, not on the sidelines.

Kyle Knowles:
Right. And that’s why you do your lives. Do you learn by teaching and-

Kyle Shannon:
Oh, I learn a ton. I learn a ton. What I’m starting to see in my lives … Which this is surprising. It gets back to that community conversation. Is when I first started doing the lives, the nature of them was basically people going like, “How do I do this? How do I do that?” It was very tactical, transactional, educational. And it’s called The AI Learning Lab. So not unreasonable that people would come in and ask questions like that. But because I’ve been doing them every night … And I’ve been doing them seven days a week for months. This community is forming. And so what I’m getting to experience is people that come in knowing nothing that are totally in the place of fear, in the place of, oh my God, my job’s going to be gone.
And I’m seeing them move through this … I guess it’s a learning process, but it’s more an experiential process where they get scared and then they get excited and then they get scared and they get excited. And what’s starting to emerge is a joy where these people are … Once they’ve processed through, here’s my current job and here’s how my current job’s going to be impacted, and they start doing this lateral play thing where they’re playing with things that are outside of their comfort zone that they never thought they’d be any good at, but now they realize they’re actually really good at it. There’s a woman, Claire, on the lives, she’s been a nurse for 30 years, so she’s trained as a nurse. She’s finding the joy of making art with DALL-E and with Midjourney. And she’s just relentless. She’s just in the server creating art after art, and she’s finding her artistic voice.
And there’s a joy in her of she’s rediscovered a part of herself she didn’t even know was there. And so I’m starting to see there’s this bubbling … It’s beyond optimism. It’s realization that I’m way more powerful than I thought I was because of these tools. And so getting to witness that is … So it’s not so much I’m learning things technically. Which just by doing stuff a lot, you’re just learning, oh, this way of prompting works, that one doesn’t. I’m learning that kind of stuff. But I’m learning something about the impact of this technology on the community, on the people over time. And that for me is insanely powerful.
It’s funny. You would think that you would either go to the place of like, well, this technology’s not all it’s cracked out to be or you go to a more negative, more cynical place. Okay, here’s the places where it’s good, here’s where it’s not good. It’s very transactional. But it’s going into this … I don’t know. This humanity’s place. People are discovering their power and their passion again. And a lot of my audience are like Gen Xers. They’re older and they’re killing it, and they’re having fun, and they’re rising through the ranks of their corporations because they’re talking about this stuff and their passion is infectious and that’s amazing to me.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. It must be very satisfying to see that.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah.

Kyle Knowles:
Those changes in people.

Kyle Shannon:
And surprising. That was something I didn’t anticipate. I don’t know that you could anticipate that. It doesn’t to me feel like a foregone conclusion that if you learn this stuff, good shit’s going to happen. It just feels important for me now to learn this stuff. But as people are learning it and really internalizing it, they’re discovering themselves in some new way. That’s super exciting.

Kyle Knowles:
Yeah. No more writer’s block, right?

Kyle Shannon:
Writer’s block is a thing of the past. 100%.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s amazing to think that people can just be creative again.

Kyle Shannon:
Here’s another thing that I’ve experienced on the lives. You think about video games and the endorphin machines that they are. You hit the button, the thing explodes. In your race car. These AI tools are kind of like that. You type in a little prompt and boom, out comes this image. And what’s happening on the lives is I’ll talk about stuff and then people in the community take what I talk about and they’re making images, and then they’re sharing them on a Discord. And this thing is boiling and bubbly. It’s like a video game experience, but we’re learning work and productivity stuff. But it isn’t that. It’s almost like the gamification of productivity is happening where accomplishing things because it’s so instant and because it gives you that immediate feedback is just a different level of joyous. It’s like video game fun, even though you’re doing worky kind of stuff. That’s wild.

Kyle Knowles:
It’s so awesome. I love that. Kyle, I know we’ve probably gone over time. I appreciate you so much being here and taking time out of your busy schedule to be on the podcast. I’ve just got some lightning round questions.

Kyle Shannon:
Let’s do it.

Kyle Knowles:
And let’s go for a favorite candy bar.

Kyle Shannon:
Snickers almond or white chocolate Snickers.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. Favorite musical artist?

Kyle Shannon:
Martin Sexton.

Kyle Knowles:
Favorite cereal?

Kyle Shannon:
Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

Kyle Knowles:
Mac or PC?

Kyle Shannon:
Mac.

Kyle Knowles:
Google or Microsoft?

Kyle Shannon:
Okay, this is a longer answer. I’m an Apple fanboy since the Apple II.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay.

Kyle Shannon:
Okay. I’ve always hated Microsoft. I’ve bashed on Microsoft for decades. Hate them. Starting December of last year, Bing is my default search engine and Edge is my default browser.

Kyle Knowles:
Why?

Kyle Shannon:
I didn’t think it would be possible to f*ck with Google. Google has a hands down monopoly on all things search and the way advertising’s done. They own the thing. And when I saw what ChatGPT was and then when I saw Microsoft go from a billion dollar investment to a $10 billion investment and then make it very clear that they’re making a full on bet that ChatGPT is their ticket to compete with Microsoft and the CEO of Microsoft essentially being giddy that he was messing with them. I’m like, I want to be using that technology to just watch how it evolves. Now, the downside is the Edge browser is so full of memory leaks it crashes my Mac two or three times a day. It’s horrible. But the actual experience is good, it’s just the foundational technology’s a piece of shit. But I can’t believe that in my lifetime I’m looking at Microsoft with startup energy rather than being big Microsoft.

Kyle Knowles:
The empire.

Kyle Shannon:
The empire. They’ve got this scrappiness about them right now, and they’re really pushing the edge. November 1st, they’re launching copilot inside Office 365. I think that’s going to change everything. And so Microsoft right now.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. I love the CEO too.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah. He’s amazing.

Kyle Knowles:
Seems like a great guy.

Kyle Shannon:
Yeah, great guy. I think he said, “If I can take even one percentage point away from Google search, I’m willing to lose money on all this stuff.” I’m like, I like this guy. He’s just messing with them and he’s enjoying it.

Kyle Knowles:
Well, and we need the competition. It’s a healthy competition.

Kyle Shannon:
Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, so a reluctant Microsoft on that one.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. Dogs or cats?

Kyle Shannon:
Dogs. Oh, by far.

Kyle Knowles:
Phantom or Le Mis?

Kyle Shannon:
Le Mis.

Kyle Knowles:
Okay. What’s a book that you recommend the most to people?

Kyle Shannon:
I don’t read a ton. ADHD has had its ways with my ability to do that. One that has stuck with me over the years is a book by Stephen Batchelor called Buddhism Without Beliefs.
And it’s just a simple way to understand how the human machine works and what we choose to make mean something in our life and what we choose not to, and how we actually have a lot more power over that than we might think we do. What was interesting about that book … I did The Landmark Forum years ago, and I’ve done Tony Robbins stuff. I’ve done lots and lots of self-help stuff over the years. And when I read that book, what it made clear to me is that all of those self-help programs, they’re all teaching the exact same thing. And Buddhism Without Beliefs, the whole idea is just what’s the practice of Buddhism? It’s basically just let shit go. Just let it go. Have an intention, take action, and let it go, and let it go. And all of those things are some variation on that theme. You can separate the religious piece of it out. That’s a valuable thing to practice in life in general if you want to just not be tortured all the time.

Kyle Knowles:
I love it. I’m going to add it to my queue for sure.

Kyle Shannon:
It’s a good one. And it’s simple. It’s short. It’s ADD friendly.

Kyle Knowles:
Nice. And then my last question for you, is there any big idea that you’ve changed your mind on recently? Even in the past five years?

Kyle Shannon:
In 1977, I walked into my first day of seventh grade math class, and there were Radio Shack TRS 80s on every desk. And I got introduced to the personal computer and I learned basic programming on it. And I was acutely aware in seventh grade that I had just missed being at the ground floor of the PC revolution. Like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were on magazine covers, and they were folk heroes already. And I was just too young to be in that club. And I remember being really sad about that. And then when the World Wide Web thing came along and I had that epiphany about it. I was like, “Oh my God, this is one of those. I get to be in one of those.” What I knew was these are once in a generation or once in multiple generation opportunities.
When I was doing Agency.com, I was just acutely aware of how lucky I was. And I didn’t think I’d see another one of those in my lifetime. And we’re in one. We’re in another one. So I don’t know if I’ve changed my mind, but I am as creatively engaged and as excited and I don’t know, profoundly committed to something. I didn’t think I’d experienced this again in my lifetime and here we are again. And so I’m over the moon about it. I guess why I’m doing nightly TikTok lives at 58 is I just want as many people as possible … I don’t care if you like it or hate it. I just want you to get curious about it and understand what it is and understand what it can do and what it can’t do. And I just feel like in doing that, it’s going to give so many people, so much opportunity because we’re literally at the ground floor of something that’s going to transform the world.

Kyle Knowles:
I love it. I love that answer. Kyle, I feel like you’re a brother from another mother. Thank you for agreeing to meet one of your TikTok fans.

Kyle Shannon:
Thank you so much.

Kyle Knowles:
I look forward to continuing to learn from you, and I wish you the most success in all your many endeavors.

Kyle Shannon:
Well, thank you so much. This was a real pleasure. I really appreciate you reaching out. You came down here to do this, so the fact that we’re doing this in person and not on a Zoom call is amazingly refreshing so thanks for that. And yeah, I’m excited to be here. I really appreciate your time. That’s wild.