Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | Android | iHeartRadio | Podchaser | Email | TuneIn | RSS | More
Overview
J is back, and this time he’s talking about his latest book series which deals with using A.I. for your writing. Our conversation entails the happenings from 20 books to 50k Vegas. J has a lot of thoughts about the future of publishing and the use of A.I.
Book
YouTube
Transcript
Stephen: Cool.
Great. Alright. I’m just gonna start us off. New episode, Discovered Wordsmith. I’ve got Jay Thorne which he has been on here.
It’s been about a hundred and twenty episodes ago Wow. Since he was on. Yeah. It’s been a while. He just made the mistake of saying, whatever you wanna ask, go ahead.
That love child that you fostered in Hindus are Hindi Himalayas. Tell us about that, Jay. This is breaking news.
J: I can only talk about things that have really happened, Steven.
So I
Stephen: You’re a writer. What the heck? Oh, come on. So alright. Hopefully, everybody knows Jay because I’m not gonna go into his background.
He’s been on here before. I’ll put links in that. I really wanna get on these new books he’s been writing. Let’s just hit that right from the start. You are writing Or have written a series of books about AI, writers using AI, and more about that.
So There’s probably gonna be a million questions on that. I’ve got several written down I definitely wanna cover. So First of all, let’s just start. Tell us about not only what the books are about, but why you wanted to write these books, Especially right now because, that could get death threats from some people writing a book like this.
J: Yeah.
I say this Sort of tongue in cheek, but it’s certainly true. I don’t get nearly the amount of hate because I’m a middle aged white guy, and I have that privilege, and it’s terrible, but it’s the truth. And I see other folks, Women and other people who get hate for it, and it’s just it’s so unfair. But that’s, that’s how the Internet is in general. But
Stephen: Joanna seems to get a lot of people.
And it’s really, folks, she’s been doing this forever. She’s one of the most best voices for all of us. So yeah. Yeah.
J: I think it’s I think it’s lessened more recently, but certainly early on, she took a lot of heat especially in her comments on her website.
But,
Stephen: because I think most are starting to realize. Hey. It’s everywhere. Everybody’s using it. Maybe it’s not so bad.
But, anyway, we’re already off topic. So tell us about your bugs and why you’re writing these. Okay.
J: So I’m trying to think about how far back I have to go to put to give you context for this.
I would say probably two or three years ago maybe, Pseudowrite was just being rolled out in a beta form. And Joanna was telling me she’s you got you have to check this out. That’s this new AI writing tool. And every couple months or every so often, she would say, hey. Listen.
You gotta try this out. And every time I did, I just wasn’t impressed. I was like, I don’t know. It’s not very good. It’s weird.
It, it doesn’t do what I want it to do. And what comes out of it, I have to spend so much time cleaning it up. It’s just not worth it. And so For years, I was very resistant, and I was like, I don’t like it. It’s not very good.
And I said I enjoy the process of creating the words. So whether I think it’s ethical or moral or makes any sense is kinda beside the point. I don’t wanna farm out the most fun part of the experience. It’d be like being a musician, and you love playing live shows. And someone’s hey. There’s this Technology where you don’t have to go on stage. You would be like I don’t want that. Thanks. Other people can do that. It’s fine. I’m just saying that’s not, that’s not what I want.
And I’m saying this because I’m very transparent about it, and she and I’m proud of the fact that I changed my mind because she teases me all the time. And she was like, You hated this, and we almost had a falling out over it. And I’m like, I did. You’re right. And I changed my mind.
That’s what learning is. You’ve discovered something, you learn something, and you Change your mind.
Stephen: You can be called Ebenezer Scrooge because isn’t that what he did?
J: It’s out whatever. Whatever you wanna call me.
I don’t care. So fast forward to GPT CHI GPT three, which is comes out about a year ago. And, again, she’s you gotta try this. And I try it, and I’m like, again, not really excited about it, but it’s starting to get a little bit better. And I’m like, oh, you know what?
Another three to five years, this thing’s gonna be really cool. The following week? Yeah. Literally, just a few months later, this is probably April chat g p t four rolls out, And there’s a paid version, and Joanna is okay. I’m serious.
You really have to try this. And because I admire her and respect her, and we’re good friends, I was like, okay. I will. And so I signed up for the subscription. I got access to four, and that was the moment.
I was like, holy this is different. It was a it was just it’s very deceiving because In the tech world, if you think about software going from version three point five to four, you think it’s very incremental. It’s just very small tweaks or changes. It’s not a big deal. But from three point five to four with chat GBT was a massive difference.
And I immediately saw What was gonna happen? I immediately saw how writers were gonna be able to use this, and I was coming off Of being in the blockchain and crypto space and dealing with NFTs, and that was that was crashing and burning right at Time that AI was kinda coming up, and the difference between the blockchain and the NFT technology that I was really interested in And the AI was that my mom could use the AI. I could tell my mom go to the site and just type something, And you’ll get a response. Whereas when I was trying to get people in the crypto and NFTs, it was like you need a wallet, and you have to go by this exchange and buy it, then you have Transferred over here, and then you have to put this seed phrase in and it was just too much.
Seeing where it was headed I decided to build on the three story method brand because one of the things that I also realized right away is that if anyone can use AI, then everyone will use AI. So what’s gonna differentiate you?
And I thought for me, it’s gonna be my story methodology. That’s what’s gonna differentiate me. Any money can sit down and make the Creative writing prompt. But if there’s no substance behind it, if you have no experience in storytelling, your prompts can be pretty average.
Know, it’s gonna just be pretty bland or vanilla. So I immediately started incorporating three story method into these different ideas. And so I thought about, what about if you were a discovery writer? What if you wanted to map out a series? What if you wanted to do editing?
And Fast forward to now as we’re recording this in November I think I’ve published, I don’t know, seven seven books, maybe, six, Seven months so far.
Stephen: They should have four or five of them.
J: Yeah. Yeah. And I have another one on board for next week.
And, Really, I’m just striking while the iron’s hot. I’m I have the brand. I’ve built the reputation. Not all the people who following me are crazy about Some of them are giving me one star reviews. That’s fine if it’s not your thing.
Whatever. But I think for the most part, people trust me having been in the space since Two thousand nine. They know I have a reputation with author’s best interest at heart, and and so that’s how the books came to
Stephen: be. Okay. Nice.
What you said there’s a series. What are the focus of the different books, the titles in focus?
J: Yeah. I’ve been bouncing around a little bit. So they’ve all been published within the three story method series.
So it’s up to book twelve now in the series, and the original Methodology book is like book one. And they’ve really they’ve been I’ve been following Trends and following my interest. So they started out with the creative process of plotting or pantsing, and that’s what the earlier books were about. Now I’m getting more into the marketing stuff, like email list management nonfiction writing. So it’s like I What happens is I discover a way to use it, and then I try it out.
And if it works, as I’m doing it on my second monitor, I keep a running list of what I’m doing, and then that becomes the next book. Essentially, I’m testing it out myself to see if it works. And if it does, I turn it into a
Stephen: book. So why aren’t you afraid that it’s going to replace you anymore? It will.
It already has. We’re not talking to the real Jay, this is an avatar. This is j a I,
J: Jai.
Stephen: You got his letters to your name.
J: Okay.
So you ask a good question, and this is a bit of a polarizing controversial position. Yes. And hear me out because it’s gonna it’s a bit of a mindbender. So I am cautiously optimistic about the AI in the creative fields. However, I believe that the end game is the end of the entertainment industry as we know it.
So In the short term, I think AI is gonna be an incredibly powerful tool for creatives to do things they’ve never done before. Here’s the problem. AI is not standing still. AI continues to develop. And you’ve been in you’re in the tech world, Steven.
You know how this works. You when you see a new tool, you in your mind immediately goes to what’s the end game? Like, where is this headed? Not where is it now. Right now, it’s a writer’s tool. Where it’s gonna be is this. You’re gonna come home from work, and you’re gonna be like, you know what? I feel like reading a novel, and you’re gonna be like, hey, AI. I wanna read a book.
And An AI is gonna be like, oh, really? And you’re gonna go, you know what I like. And thirty seconds later, you’re gonna have a book, and you’re gonna be reading it. And the AI is gonna know because it tracks everything. It’s gonna know what genres you like.
It’s gonna know what conventions you enjoy. It’s gonna know what types of stories you like to read. Not gonna have to tell it anything. You’re just gonna have to say, I wanna read a book, and it’s gonna customize a book right to you. Now that might sound a little Farfetched right now, but I don’t think it is.
I don’t think that’s that far off. So I think what’s gonna happen is this. I’m not saying that writing is gonna end. I’m not saying that Authors will become extinct. What I’m saying is the business model as we’ve known it is gone.
Alright? So if you think about what has happened since Two thousand nine. Think about rapid release and KDP page reads and reader magnets. All the Stuff that we’ve all been learning and teaching, myself included, that’s all over. Because I think, eventually, what will happen is the AI will become so good That it will generate on demand entertainment for you customized to what you like.
And if you don’t think I’m you don’t think this is true, Think about what’s happening with music right now. Right now, if I if an AI has access to my Spotify history, It knows what I listen to, how I listen to it, when I listen to it. It could start creating AI generated music All on a tone and kind of slide it into my playlist, and I might not even know. I might think it’s a new band that’s got a nineties grunge feel, And it could be completely AI generated.
And that’s that kind of stuff is already happening. Again, I don’t wanna be a downer, and I’m not necessarily that humans will no longer create art. I think we will create art as long as we’re around. But I think we’re gonna revert back to where we were prior to the twentieth century, Where people make art for their friends, for their family because they enjoy it. But this idea of having an industry around entertainment, I think that’s going away.
Stephen: Wow. That’s super scary because technology has always changed and altered things, through time. When Photoshop first came out, it was the end of any design and anybody could do it. Not Very true. When digital cameras came out, when regular cameras came out, it was the end of, whatever.
Things were so you’re right. And that is a Huge. So oh, okay. So that’s, not the first time I’ve heard that type of thing, and you can see it, already going on, like you said. So are you saying you wrote these books so you could sell them now while you had the chance?
And what’s the plans then later? Because these books will become irrelevant.
J: Yeah. I honestly, my plans later is I don’t plan on being a commercially viable author. That’s just not in my future.
Stephen: That’s assuming you already have an unpicking.
J: That’s good. That’s good. No.
In all seriousness, I think you’re gonna have, you’re gonna have your a one top tier authors who might continue to sell books for a while? You’re gonna have a in a they’re gonna have an audience that they’re gonna serve. But think about think longer term. Think about kids that are being born now. They will never know a world without AI generated art.
They have no attachment to human created art. I hear this argument. People say, humans will always prefer other humans’ art or AI will never be as good as humans. And I’m like, first of all, if you’re still saying always and never in twenty twenty three, you’re you have your head in the sand because you’re not paying attention to what’s going
Stephen: on here. Every time you say tech will never do something, it every time does.
J: Yeah. Every time And the people who are saying that are the people who have the AI companies right now who are trying to sell services to other people. But that’s So so, anyways, there’s gonna be a window. There’s gonna be a sunsetting window where I think a generation or two is gonna die off, And those peep and we’re included in that. And that generation or two who die off will be the ones that have an emotional attachment to one hundred percent human generated art, And everybody born after that isn’t gonna care.
So my long term goal Is that I’m gonna write, and I’m gonna make music for myself because I enjoy doing it. I am giving up on the idea of making money On it, which quite frankly wasn’t even a thing before the nineteen fifties anyway. It’s we act like this has been around forever, and it hasn’t. I’ve had that argument with people. A small blip.
We’re not entitled to this lifestyle, and I’m always astounded when people act as though this is our Our birthright it’s in the constitution that we should get paid to publish books. Like That’s had an
Stephen: argument with people about football in high school. I was like, okay.
J: Yeah.
Yeah. All so what I’m doing right now is I am there’s nothing I can do about this. There’s nothing you can do about this. There’s no regulation. There’s no there’s no laws.
There’s no organization that’s gonna stop this. This AI is if the genie’s out of the bottle, it’s gonna keep getting better and better. So I can’t do anything about it. So my position is I’m gonna make the most of the situation. I’m gonna do the best I can with what I’ve got right now.
And right now, AI is a tool. And if it helps authors for the next two to three years make better stories, then that’s, that’s what I’m gonna do. But I don’t have any sort of vision for this. I don’t think I’m gonna be writing these books even a year from now. I already I can already see that This tailing off.
And my assumption is that probably by early next year, the AI is It’s going to be so good that a lot of the books that I’ve written and published about it are going to be unnecessary.
Stephen: Yeah. You’ll just ask AI to write and improve second edition Yeah. Go to the beach.
J: Yeah.
I don’t know. As we’re recording this the GPTs came out. They’ve been out for about a week, and I’ve been playing around with that. And It is basically the next step. It is if you we’re gonna do a computer coding, but do it by just telling the computer what you wanted.
That’s what these GPTs are. So an example, I was working on one and editing one where I would say, Okay. Here’s my here’s the first draft of my novel. Tell me what’s wrong with the pacing, the character development, the you name it. I just tell it that.
Like and it just it will either fix it or and that’s why I’m saying that is not that far from the next step of Created for me.
Stephen: And the other thing with technology is that a lot of times, it Doesn’t get rid of what’s there. It changes it in different ways.
So people that used to do drawing with art, they do it now digitally. And then they use Canvas to manipulate photos and stuff like that. So there is still an element. We may not even see and realize where we fit into some of this. There still may be some difference in elements.
But, like you said, it’s not the author sitting there For six months, a year, five years for some people putting words on a page, it’s a different way of sculpting and doing it. And that’s an unprecedented in the past. It’s happening at such a fast changing rate. We don’t even know what’s going on sometimes every day, every week let alone in six months. Yeah.
And
J: I’ve had some people tell me wow, that’s a really pessimistic outlook. And I’m like, No. It’s really not. If you listen to what I’m saying, what I’m saying is the gold rush mentality of the past fifteen years is over. And traditionally pub traditional trad pub was never a gold rush mentality.
That was always in a very exclusive club. We’re just simply going back to the way things were, Which is people really writing stuff because they want to, because it’s the process that they enjoy. I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all. Again, I don’t think that let me back up. I think another misconception folks have is that if I could just write full time, my life would be complete.
I had just go sit in a cabin in the woods And just work on my stories and get paid for it. That’s heaven. And I can tell you firsthand, that is not true. That’s what I thought I wanted until I had it, and it’s not what you think it is. And I know people poo this.
And they’re like, no. That’s not true. You hear celebrities say this all the time. You think you want fame, but if everyone could experience fame for a day, they might think twice about it.
And I’m not saying authors are famous. What I’m saying is that vision you have, that idealized version of yourself sitting in a cabin in the woods writing is not what you think it is. And every author I know who has had that experience, it fundamentally changes their relationship to the art. Because when you are writing And publishing for money, it changes your approach. It changes how you feel about it, and it becomes more like a job.
Stephen: The grass isn’t always greener No. Because now it’s digitally created. And, it’s funny. I heard the same thing about, Winners of lotteries, the big lotteries that people like, Oh, my life would be so great. This was in Forbes or money or something.
And they were talking to financial advisers, the guy that won that four billion dollars or whatever. They said he’s gonna be broke in ten years. He’s going to be living in an apartment that’s worse than what he had with nothing to show for it and a lot of creditors asking for the money he doesn’t have Because he went crazy and bottled this up. So what you just said, people always think this is so great this other way, and it’s Not always. We mess it up.
And that’s what the author thing is. But, there’s Still some things in there at least right now even with AI because AI doesn’t, at the moment, Give us necessarily always the best. You gotta tweak it. You’ve been doing that with your stories. You’re how did you learn and teach yourself, and what do you do to tweak those prompts to get back what you want instead of Taking what’s there and editing ninety percent of
J: it anyway.
Yeah. Yeah. I this is one of those moments where you just you’re in the right place at the right time. Know, that’s what happened to me. It’s I don’t think it’s ever happened to me before in this way, but I you said for joy.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. There’s that. Yeah.
I Think You know this, but a lot of people don’t. And then I spent almost twenty five years as a classroom teacher. And one of the things that I had to do was I had to learn how to ask questions, And I had to learn how to listen because anyone who’s had children or been around children, you know they don’t do what you tell them to do. That’s not how it works. Right?
You have to listen. You have to ask questions. And a lot of times in learning, just asking the right questions Prompts people to think a certain way, and you help create these openings for them. And and that’s a very, succinct way of explaining what I think good teaching is. And when I even right now, I think AI is basically like a seventh grader.
If you tell Chi P T to write something, it’ll be extremely concrete just like a seventh grader. It’ll write exactly what you want, and you’re like, no. That’s What I meant. So I think right now, part of the skill set in using these tools is communication, and that’s what writers are good at.
Alright. So if you’re a good writer, you’re a good listener you’re a good podcast interviewer, you can transfer those skills to AI, and you can ask it questions. You can say to it, tell me what I should be asking you. There are these little things that you can do. Again, these are skills I picked up in the classroom That I think work with AI.
And so I think that’s been the key for me is having more of a conversation. Like, when I see These post on x or these books that are, like, the five hundred thousand dollar chat GPT hack. I’m like, that’s BS. That’s it’s not about a prompt. It’s about a process, and a process is more like a conversation, which is why they’re called chatbots.
Stephen: Exactly. And you mentioned education. There is an area that I totally foresee being Totally unrecognizable in twenty years that there’s so many issues right now with our education system, so many changes going on. And of the things I remember reading a while back was, how do we know our education system works?
Have we ever really looked at it and proved That our education system does work. Spoiler
J: alert. It doesn’t.
Stephen: Exactly. And people are realizing that, and there’s so many changes.
I’ve been working with some schools on the video game thing, and some of these kids, man, when they get this stuff, the tech stuff, they’re just Gone. You don’t even have you sit back. And I’m like, so why are we paying all these teachers when AI just A teaching job is going to be not so sought after, I think, in the future. Just one area.
Yeah. No. But tell parents that. Tell parents that, yeah, our education system really isn’t working. My kid needs to go to college.
Why? Nobody wants it anymore, and they don’t get it. It’s such a different world, and twenty years from now, it’s gonna be so different from what we have
J: now. Yeah.
I mean, I can’t pretend to even look forward a year from now. It’s just it’s mind boggling to even try and contemplate that. If humans are terrible predicting Future, we’re all awful at it. No one does a good job at it. But one thing I can tell you is that our lives will look radically different Maybe in a year or two.
It’s just everything we do is gonna be completely different. That I know. Now what that is, I don’t know. And that’s why I say don’t get depressed if you’re an author and you’re thinking great. I’m just you know, I can’t write books anymore.
I no. You can. You just might not be able to sell them anymore. There’s a big difference there.
Stephen: Which Kinda, we’ve been saying for a while.
Your books are the gateway to other things. I tie I’m working on a series of books For video game creation and stories in video game. So that ties into the classes I’m teaching, the books, the classes. And, it’s More and more added. I’m working with some of the local esports teams and with the high schools.
We’ve got a new local digital paper, and I’m like, hey. You don’t have anybody covering esports. We need that added. So it’s One aspect.
And like you said, author’s looking for this as a full time author. But if you have things other business aspects that tie into it, that’s your best bet.
J: Yeah. Author wasn’t a profession on the tax forms prior to nineteen thirty. Author.
So yeah. Just consider yourself we should all be grateful that we had a small opportunity to have that experience, but, that’s and, just back from twenty books Vegas, the last one, and Becca Syme, a very well respected researcher and coach in our circles, Basically, stood on stage and said what I’ve been saying for two years. She validated what I said, which is the gold rush is over. And all the stuff that we’ve been doing, like I said, the rapid release and the pay per click ads and the reader magnets, all that stuff doesn’t work anymore. It’s over.
Stephen: And I’ve been seeing that looking at various things just with my stuff. Tell us a little bit about twenty books. This was the last one. Everybody listening, don’t get too excited because you can’t go to one.
J: You can get excited because Joe Solari is taking it over, and he’s already doing some great things with it.
He bought the contract from Craig Martell, Michael Anderlecht for the next three years at the Horseshoe Casino. So there is gonna be a conference. There’s gonna be a convention there the next three years, but it will not be twenty books. It’s called Author Nation, and Joe has this vision of making it both an author and a reader event, and he’s really going big on this. He announced the keynote on Thursday night is gonna be the one and only Gen x legend, Kevin Smith.
The OG indie filmmaker, author, comic book guy. He yeah. So it’s gonna be really cool. It this past one, ironically, was my first and last twenty books. Jay broke it.
I that’s all my fault. I’m not really I’m real not that interested in really big conferences, and I’m not a big fan of Vegas as a city. But I wanted to go and see people who I hadn’t seen in a long time. The pandemic kind of, that made it difficult to get together with people for a number of years. And I’m glad I did.
I got to spend time with people I hadn’t seen in a while or never. And it was great, but it was definitely a It was a milestone. It was a marker of an ending. And it’s it wasn’t just me saying this that this version of publishing is ending. Twenty books is ending.
If that’s not a big signal, I don’t know what is. Clearly, this is colored through my perspective, but I talked to so many people who were Either thinking about a transition, in a transition. And to be fair, this started way before AI came on board.
Authors were seeing a decline in royalties, decline in page reads, decline in reader engagement. This was this all started Several years ago, this isn’t just because of AI. So I think this was the trajectory of the industry. As Becca said, it’s a maturation. so Now instead of being this startup techie innovative space, it’s now it’s now a mature industry.
Three. It’s calcified with in into certain rules much the way traditional publishing is. Again, it’s not a judgment. It’s not a good or bad thing. It’s just you have to realize that the rules we’ve been playing under no
Stephen: longer apply.
And that’s a, valid point. Things always change. They always have. People that get so upset about it, I don’t guess, like it’s always changed. And just with books, look at libraries.
You used to go to a library to have a book. Now, there’s meetings. Now, they had records. And now then they had cassettes. Then they actually, some libraries used to have reel to reels.
And then they had CDs. And now you can use your digital tablet to get digital music and movies. And They don’t even have VHS out there anymore. They don’t even have the cassettes now.
It’s play on. So things constantly change, and people are like, oh, I wish Libraries were like they used to be. What do you mean? With DVDs and movies.
Okay. But some people are saying they want it when it was just, books that you weren’t allowed to talk. So Yes. Yeah.
And,
J: you’re we’re the same age. You probably remember in the early in the mid I remember having a conversation with my family. I told them I set up a Citibank online banking account, and they were like, oh, I would never bank online. That there’s I would never purchase anything. You put my credit card on the Internet.
Are you crazy?
Stephen: Yeah. And all my kids were like, you mean I have to go to the bank?
It’s What’s a bank? Great. Isn’t my check just supposed to appear, and ain’t I supposed to just get the money with this card?
J: I don’t think my kids have ever seen a checkbook. I don’t think they’d even know
Stephen: what to do with one. Yeah. We I had one child that kept getting upset because their bank account went under. It’s would you balance your checkbook?
They’re like, what’s that? I looked. There was money in there. Yes. But you wrote a check.
Yeah. It doesn’t come out automatically when you write it, But it’s just how things have changed, and it’s always been that way. Tech is always that way, always changing. So Alright. So what are your future book plans?
How many more of these are you looking at? Are you looking to do any anything else with that?
J: We’ll see. Right now, I’m going on a idea by idea basis. If I get an idea in chat GPT and I think authors would benefit from it, Then I pursue it.
And right now, I still have a number of those ideas. I’m looking ahead to The the fall of next year, I’m looking at possibly some leadership positions in schools or small colleges. I think we talked a little bit about education earlier. I think education is gonna be a place where they’re gonna need a lot of support. I think it’s gonna be An ugly, brutal move forward.
I can say this because I was in the industry for a long time. Education is a very conventional industry. It’s very slow to change. And and the technology is gonna leave it behind, and the kids are gonna be the ones To suffer. And I’m looking I’m looking in that realm but I’m putting my money where my mouth is.
I’ve I have two or three trunk novels that are just gonna sit on my hard drive for now. I really have no interest in publishing those. I’m writing a lot of sort of memoir Why are personal narrative things because I want to, not because I’m trying to sell them? And I have unpublished and discontinued many of my author services Because I can’t with a clear conscience sell support to people to a system that doesn’t exist anymore. And I, I get I have, Not explicitly, but I’ve had some interactions with some folks online who are saying things like, oh AI will never be as good as humans.
And they’re saying that because they’re selling services to others. And I think that I just think that’s wrong. And, and That might not be their intention. They might not being malicious about it, but I’m not gonna be part of that. So I have, I’ve stopped my mastermind group.
I have, I’ve like I said, I’ve unpublished certain things. I’ve ended my community partly because I’m transitioning to something new, but also partly because that’s just stuff that isn’t relevant anymore.
Stephen: Yeah. You mentioned that I got an author mad at me at a round table because they had a book on how to be a writer, that type of thing. And one of the first things I said was, my word of advice is Write a whole lot more and quit buying books and reading about how to be a writer.
They did not appreciate me. But it’s the truth. I’ve told that the kids and stuff. And your thing with education, from my viewpoint also, That’s the area that is going to be changing even more than anything else, and it’s the area that needs The most work and help.
And there’s so many things we fail with our kids and don’t understand and realize it. Absolutely. I had that when my kids were younger. They didn’t have homework, and I asked the teacher about it. They said studies show that homework doesn’t really help.
That the if the kids don’t understand it, They don’t understand it at home. They don’t get the homework done, and then they’re just more confused. They’re like and a lot of kids hate it. Blah blah. It they found that homework doesn’t help, and I’m like, that’s Very interesting.
But there are still people like, where’s your homework? You need to sit down and do homework and but if it’s not the best way to learn, And why do it?
J: Yeah. And, this is this could be a whole another episode.
Yeah. Part of the problem with education is that parents The only perspective parents have of education is their own, which is often twenty to thirty years out of
Stephen: date. Which was already Out of
J: date. Which is it was dated then. Yeah.
Exactly. And so when parents, parents expect to see kids sitting in single desks In rows with the teacher at the front of the room talking and that is not how people learn
Stephen: anymore. No. No. I talk about edX, Which I don’t know if you’ve seen that online courses.
They offer certificates and maybe even a few small degrees, something like that. But when I mention that to parents and stuff at Talks, I’m like the guy who started it had one class Where there were more people that finished it with their certificate than have attended MIT in the whole history of MIT. So if you could reach that many people in one class in three months, then why are we building these buildings and going to these places? It just it doesn’t end. I get oh, man. I have practically get attacked from primary teachers mostly. It’s like they just will defend it to the death. But it’s like that’s just not where it is
J: anymore.
No. No. And it’s really hard for people our age and older to Come to terms with that. There’s this sort of nostalgic glow they put on, their own upbringing as if that was somehow ideal, and yet we forget that There was a lot about living in the growing up in the seventies and eighties that sucked.
Stephen: BuT, I think I’d pick Gen X pretty. Oh, we’re still
J: the best. But Oh, absolutely.
Stephen: I saw a meme the other day. It said Gen X Still the only generation that knows how to set the clock on a VCR.
Yeah. Truth. That was great. Alright, Jay. Is there anywhere you wanna tell people that they can find you or where to get your books and all of that?
J: Yeah. If you’re really interested in seeing where AI is going, especially if you’re, like, a creative professional if you’re doing any kind of creative work and you’re wondering how AI fits into that, I have a week a free weekly newsletter I’ve been publishing since March called Creative AI Digest. Go to creative a I digest dot com. You can subscribe. You’ll get it every Monday, and it’s just my take on where things are going.
It’s real it’s not breaking news. There’s a bunch of newsletters that are doing breaking news. I’m not doing that. I’m being more thoughtful about the tools and the stories and things that are coming out that I think are relevant to people like us.
Stephen: Nice.
Nice. And you’re doing some Gen x thing with Jim. Yeah.
J: That’s a passion project.
Jim Kukul and I are Buddies, we both live here in Cleveland, and we have something called Legacy X, which we’ve been we’ve been working on, and It’s still in development. We’re not we don’t have anything fully formed, but the idea is we wanna help other Gen Xers Leave a legacy. And by legacy, we don’t mean a fancy boat and vacation home. We’re talking about the stuff that matters. That’s at legacy project dot org if you’re interested.
But right now, there’s just not much there but I can certainly follow-up with you as we develop
Stephen: it. By this could be a month or so before this goes out. So by then it might it’ll be closer to something.
J: Yeah.
And we’re not being exclusive. If you are a millennial with a Gen x mindset or a boomer with a Gen x mindset, you’re welcome to. It’s it’s more about the attitude than anything
Stephen: else. There you go.
Alright, man. I appreciate you taking some time and we will talk later. Yeah. Thanks
J: for having me on,