← Miracle Mentality with Tim Storey (Motivation, Self Help, and Mental Health)
Miracle Mentality with Tim Storey (Motivation, Self Help, and Mental Health)
Tech Legend Tim O’Reilly on AI, Humanity, and What Really Matters | Motivation | E11
00:47:19
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Hello, my name is Tim Storey. Welcome to Miracle Mentality.
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Remember, rooftops drawing spaceships on the ground.
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It's for the dreamers, the doers, the believers in something greater. In each episode, I'll invite you to rise above the mundane, to push past the messy and learn to live boldly in the miraculous. Every episode will have practical wisdom, spiritual insight, and my guests will explore what it takes to activate your miracle mindset. Remember to subscribe, follow and and life. Welcome to the Miracle Mentality. This is a podcast where I like to interview people that I think are doing extraordinary things, that they have different mindsets. And I came across somebody named Tim O'Reilly. Tim, really good name. And so I began to study him. And I literally spent about four hours researching what he's done. Who he is called one of my friends who's in the same business as him. He said, do you realize you're talking to a tech giant? Somebody that's really helped pave the way. So what a privilege it is to have my guest on. And we're going to find out about his journey in just a moment. Welcome to this program. Tim O'Reilly. Good to see you.
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Thank you so much for having me.
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Let's start with a funny story about you when you were younger and you needed glasses to see better, and your older brother talked you out of wearing glasses. Can you give us that brief story?
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I was legally blind as a kid. I mean, probably too much reading. I kind of would go home and lie on my bed up close, read a book a day for probably my first, you know, 20 years. Not, well, obviously not until I. I learned to read. But that was pretty early. So my brothers and I were all nearsighted. And my older brother, we went to school and he said, we shouldn't wear our glasses in class. We'll become dependent on them. So I would always keep them in my pocket, put them on when I had to see the blackboard. And I went through life that way, which meant that I was terrible at sports. I was probably the only kid who ever struck out at kickball, you know, because I was. I was literally blind. And, and it wasn't until I was in high school and I started to have a social life. And people would pass me in the hall and say, hi, Tim. And I would kind of turn around and go, who was that? I went, yes, it's totally stupid. My brother Sean gave me really bad advice.
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I also read that you lived close to the school, and even at lunchtime you'd go home or on breaks and Read books. Where do you think you got that fascination for reading?
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It's hard to say. I mean, some people take to it and others don't, but for me it's just this ability to step into another world and occupy it for a time. And I found it fascinating, but no, I have no idea why.
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It's interesting to talk to somebody that others kind of put you in the hall of fame, but yet you're living the life. Many times when I'm interviewing like hall of fame athletes, they'll say, you know, yeah, that happened, but I still feel like a regular person. So in technology of the Internet and what happened with Web2 and all these things that I've read about with you and watched interviews with you, you know, you've been able to play such an important role in where we are as a society now, with technology for your own life. When you were younger, did you see any of that coming? Was there any inkling of this happening even when you were in high school?
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When I was in high school, I'd already gotten a kind of inflated idea of what my life was going to be about because of this guy, George Simon, who I'd met when I was 14 years old. He ran the Explorer troupe and it was devoted to non verbal communication. He was doing all these interesting things at the intersection of Eastern philosophy and general semantics. And I took to his stuff like a duck to water. And it changed my life. If you're not familiar with general semantics, it was this kind of a pop philosophy thing that was very popular in the 30s and it had a resurgence in the 60s and 70s, but it's basically the most famous statement is the map is not the territory. And the idea is that you have to train yourself to separate to understand the process of abstraction. Korzybski his basic idea was so many of the ills of society come because we get stuck in the labels and we don't actually go back to the realities that underlie them. So that became something that I really got trained in as a teenager. And it's really the ability to say, wait a minute, this is the received knowledge. Let me look at this stuff fresh, you know, a new map. You know, you hear stories of people when GPS first came out, just like driving off a bridge that wasn't there because they were just so stuck in the map. But that's true in our lives too. Yes, you know, so a lot of the things that I have done have really just been looking at the world slightly differently and saying this map doesn't actually fit What I'm seeing. And I could go through some of those stories. They're ancient history now, but it's a fundamental skill.
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Yes.
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So I already kind of had that in. In high school, and I sort of thought of my role in the future was going to be doing something like that. And I think I took, you know, one of those tests where they kind of predicted what career would be good for you, and it said I should be a minister, you know.
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Yeah.
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And actually, for that matter, when I was baptized in Ireland when I was. Shortly after I was born, my. My saintly aunt said, this child, he will be a bishop.
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So I love this. And I. And I do know about this connection that you had with this gentleman when you were young by, you know, reading about you. And it's. It's really interesting that you connected to his beliefs that were not limited, that you really got into what I call, like the discovery zone.
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Yeah.
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And you were open to just discover and uncover and let things be revealed to you, which I think most people are not. They're a little bit locked in and boxed in. But. But, Tim, one of the things I find interesting with you is that you could have taken that way of thinking to a lot of places, maybe the entertainment business or maybe into movie writing. Why did you think you took it into the area of technology and the work that you started to do at an early age?
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Necessity. Like a lot of people, my life unfolded not through choices, but by serendipity. I was on my path to possibly becoming a therapist or something like that, doing this work that I'd learned with George Simon as a career. But I decided I didn't want to do that because I wanted to find some other way to make money. And my wife of the time, now my ex wife, who also did this work, had a client who was a computer programmer who got asked to write a manual. And I said, oh, I can help you with that. I'm a writer. I'm a good writer.
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Yes.
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And that just led me into tech. And I fell in love with the technology and it was a way to make a living that felt divorced from my internal life. I didn't have to kind of, you know. And it was also that, I mean, a lot of the lessons applied. I mean, I was good at what I did with technical writing partly because I'd built this skill in pattern matching and recognition of connections.
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Can I ask you, Tim, about something that sometimes when somebody is a pioneer and they're into new territory, some folks get intimidated at first by what they don't know, you know, if Carol Dweck from Stanford talks about the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset, but obviously you had a growth mindset where you were out there exploring in the area of technology. Where do you get that type of fascination from? You think it's innate, or was that learned behavior that you decided, I'm going.
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To try to figure this out again, My own. My internal experience of it was not that I had some big, oh, yeah, I want to do something big in technology. It was simply I was feeling my way. You know, we were having our first child, and I was like, I got to make a living. And, you know, this opportunity presented itself. As a technical writer, it was very difficult for me. I was, you know, I didn't know anything. The first time I went in with this guy to work on one of these computer manuals, the first one I did, I actually just helped him from behind the scenes. Then we went in together and applied for a job, a consulting job at Digital Equipment Corporation. We made up this story that you put a programmer and a writer together, and it's a better thing. And, you know. But I literally went to one of my first meetings with an engineer. And afterwards I went back and I said to Peter, I said, peter, were they pulling my leg? Because they were just talking in gibberish. There were all these words I didn't understand. And it took me a lot. Of course, I read a ton. Reading is sort of one of my superpowers. And eventually, all the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle started to fall into place, but it took about a year. It was sort of.
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Which I find very interesting. And then the other thing is, you basically bet on yourself because you started a company with very little money. Later on, then you get a loan from your mother. Tell us about that. Betting on yourself, the loan from your mother, and deciding to go forward in building what you had in your heart.
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I read once that entrepreneurs don't think of themselves as risk takers, and I certainly never did. I just thought, this makes sense as the next step, you know, and sometimes that is. There's this great quote that I love from Lao Tzu in the Witter Binner translation. He says, let life ripen and then fall. Will is not the way at all. You listen and things come to you, and when they do, you do your best with them and you feel your way. And there's this sort of exploratory kind of approach. And in those early days, it was just like, okay, I've done this consulting business I had a partner originally, this guy who brought me in, who was the programmer. He never did learn to write, and I did learn to program, and I learned the technology and we eventually parted ways. But then it was just like, hey, I have this thing, I'm going to keep going. And my goal was simply to do interesting work. My. My original business model for the company, my plan, it was called Interesting Work for Interesting People. And I just, I hired people I liked and we found things that we thought we would do, you know, that we could do, that would turn into something. And some of them were abortive, but they planted seeds. For example, we were a tech writing consulting company. But early on I decided, hey, we want to get products. But the first product we worked on was not really a technology product. It was because I wanted to test the water in my home because I had the, you know, the new baby. And. And I got this lab report back and I go, I can't understand this. They didn't give me any information. I go, we could have a little, you know, water testing business that would actually have explanations of what this report actually means. But that led me down the path of a kind of, like, notion of publishing. And then later on, when our consulting business hit a tough spell, I thought, well, let's turn some of this stuff into books and we can just sell them.
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So, you know, if we were to fast forward, if we look at Tim's life now, you are doing so much in the area of education and classes, writing books, teaching people, educating, and continuing to go forward as a pioneer of what's next. So for my audience, there's some questions that I asked some people what they would like to ask you. So this would be one of the questions. When did you see AI coming?
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There's really two points where I thought about. I wrote a book in 2016, came out in 2017, called WTF, what's the Future and why it's up to Us. And in it was a lot about AI.
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But tell us about that for a minute because I did do some research on that. I think that's very important for everybody to get this book because it's kind of a playbook on what is taking place and what is going to take place. Give us the title of the book again.
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It's wtf, which obviously means what it means.
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Yeah, I thought that was very creative. I thought that was very creative.
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Little aside here, I gave a talk for President Obama at this conference the White House organized just before he left office. It was the Frontiers Conference. And they wanted me to do the keynote on AI and I wanted to call it wtf. And I had to get through White House Communications and I said it stands for what's the Future. Yes, but in my book, I really played off the it means what's the future? And it does mean what you think it means. You know, we look at the economy around us, we look at the future and we say wtf, you know. Yeah, exactly. And there's a WTF of astonishment like, this is amazing. And there's a WTF of dismay. Are they really going to screw us like that? And the book is really about the promise of technology and the peril of technology and why human choices about how we're going to deploy it are absolutely central to thinking about the future.
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Okay, so everybody get that book by Tim O'Reilly. It's going to help you. And I'm ordering the book today because I want to learn, learn, learn. And no, no, no. So with AI, I like your answer. Like it was in the air. People were talking, saying things. What did you think your role was going to be at the very beginning?
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There's a couple of different threads in the AI story. First of all, AI has been around a long time in a lot of ways. Companies like Google have been doing various forms of AI for long before ChatGPT. You know, I mean, self driving cars, for example. That's the AI. And the notion that I. One of the notions I explored in my book is this idea that you give an AI instructions and it goes and it goes off to do what you tell it. And in some sense I make the case that in some sense our corporations are slow AIs. That term actually comes from science fiction writer Charlie Strauss or maybe Cory Doctorow. I'm not sure which of them originated. But our companies are artificial and they kind of have a mind of their own. I remember hearing a story from Doug rushkoff about a CEO of Fortune 500 company who was trying to improve its practices and was just in tears. The market won't let me. And that really stuck with me. The market is in some sense a rogue AI. So I had that kind of notion of this sort of force that we have created that we don't fully control. And I use the image in the book of a lot of these technologies are like the genie. And all the stories of genies from Arabian mythology are of, you get three wishes and you better get your wishes right, because all kinds of mayhem happens because you didn't think through the consequences of what you wish for. And Tech is a lot like that. But then there's a more local thing. This thing that started happening with ChatGPT and the transformer architecture, it's called. We don't need to go into that. But just think about ChatGPT, which most people are familiar with chatbots. So before ChatGPT, Google released a technology, it was called BERT, and they gave it out to the world as open source and they published this paper. And I said, oh, my God, Google just gave away their secret sauce and it's turned out to be that way now again, it doesn't mean that Google's not going to survive this transition, but they created something incredibly powerful. And much like IBM before this. This goes back to my sense of pattern recognition, people. This is ancient history now, but people forget that IBM created this personal computer architecture, and they said, oh, this is not that important. We'll give it out to the world because we have to compete in this little tiny market over here. And they gave way. They literally published the specs and they made it possible so that anybody could build them. And then they didn't realize.
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But this is very interesting, what you're saying, because it is history. And I didn't know about this until I knew I was going to interview you about. Is it open source versus closed source?
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Yeah, that's part of it. But we don't need to go into all that. I think the big lesson is the importance of learning from the past. You know, we have a collective experience. You know, just like, I guess, you know, you're a therapist, so you know that people are shaped by their life experiences, and we as a culture are shaped by our life experiences, you know, our collective life experiences. And if you repress those memories, I guess that's what's happening right now. Of course we're trying to do that in the U.S. you know, whereas if you, if you inquire into them, it can unlock all kinds of wisdom.
- [18:48]
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I'm believing that you're enjoying this podcast, the miracle mentality. And so the best way to help other people is to share it with a friend, a family member, or even a colleague. We work hard on getting the right types of guests that will make your life go from the mundane, the messy, the madness into the miracle mentality. Don't forget, your mindset is yours to set. So make sure and share this with someone else, and then tag me at Tim Story Official. That's Tim Story Official. Thank you for making this one of the most listened to and watched podcasts out there in the world. And guess What? Get ready for miracles to come your way. Okay. I love this. So, Tim, help us with this idea of how AI can, could make our lives better. So I'll give you an example. So I've been flying around the world like you since I was very, very young. So now if I go to check in somewhere, it's not the same. I want to see the lady at the counter or the man at the counter. And I go up there and if I'm carrying bags, I give them my bag, they gave me a ticket. Like the old fashioned days. That's not how it is. You know, everything is electronic. And for a creature of habit, in some ways, parts of my life that was hard for me to get used to. I usually needed a tutor from American Airlines or Delta to show me, like, what to do. So with the AI side, I do know a lot of people within a certain age range that see it as something that is frustrating, maybe intimidating. Why and how can AI make our lives better?
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Let's start with that experience that you have. There's a couple of stories about how AI writ large in the sense of technology and really this idea of optimization of processes and so on, which goes back a long way. It gets done badly. You go up there and they're just trying to save money. They're not trying to make a better experience for you. But as the technology advances and becomes more effective, they actually figure out how to start making things better. So I think, for example, coming back now from, from Ireland, you know, it used to be this huge problem.
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Yeah.
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You know, you'd be long lines and you'd be having to wait there for, you know, maybe an hour in a queue. And now I literally just walk up, it sees my face and they wave me through. Right.
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Amazing. And the first time that happened to me, I was just so blown away.
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Yeah.
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Because. Because I, I had the global entry. I'll go through that line. And then they just. As you say, there's your face. Welcome, welcome back home.
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Yeah. And so there's this fundamental question that we always have to be asking, is, is this technology being used for us or against us? And unfortunately, too often companies use technology against their customers. You know, Cory Doctorow, the science fiction writer, calls this inshittification. You know, you do wonderful things for your customers in order to attract them. And then once you've got them captured, you start to screw them bit by bit.
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A
No, no, I'm listening. And I think that that's part of the pushback with people because they have their data et Cetera.
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It's such short term thinking. Again, if you have a deep rooting in philosophy or psychology or religion, you start to think about, well, what actually makes the good life. And it is not making more and more money. It's actually connecting with people. It's improving other people's lives. Yes. I see all these people who are in this fevered rat race and they're missing the point. It's a great story I just actually rediscovered recently. I'd forgotten it. The Emperor Diocletian was the first Roman emperor ever to retire. You either died in the. You died in office, maybe you were killed in office, but that was how it ended. Exactly. This guy's like, no, I want to retire. And he was quite popular. And they kept asking him to come back. And the quote that I loved was he wrote in a letter to someone, if you could just see these cabbages that I have grown with my own hands, you would not ask me this. That's just like, yes, remembering what matters in life. You know, the guy had life six years left. And you know, because he did, it wasn't like he waited. You know, he took a 20 year retirement. He only lived another six years. But he knew that. And same thing with George Washington. That fabulous. You know, yes. Hamilton does such a great job on that of George Washington stepping down. And you know, and it was, I still remember reading this one book described King George of England. His response when he heard that George Washington, after, you know, they they've signed over, he expected him to be crowned king in America. And he just went back to his farm and King said, if he has done this thing, he is the greatest man the world has ever seen. This was sort of unthinkable and we don't have enough space for that in America. You know, all we.
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I love, I love, I love how you're thinking.
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I mean, the cult of efficiency and it's efficiency for whom? And this is why I say that the financial markets are this rogue AI that's running our society. And because we told it make money for shareholders and it basically does that regardless of other values. So that's why you go, okay, we've made the experience worse for people shopping or checking in at the airport. Now again, you can. Then people do fight back against that and we figure out how to make it better again. But I think that understanding how we've somewhat gone off the rails, I think is particularly important today because you're looking at this blowback in politics and society comes from the fact that we have made Bad choices. You know, after World War II, we went, Whoa, we're going to really try to optimize the economy for people. We're going to make sure that people have good jobs, they have housing, they have retirement. And we did all these things. But like everything, a system like that breaks down and it led to inflation. And then when they. Basically, the way they solved for inflation was to say, no, no, no, we're just going to have this. You know, we got our current neoliberal paradigm that also breaks down, and we haven't figured out what to replace it with yet. And we're having this big battle. You know, on one side it's authoritarianism, on the other side it's sort of popularism. And we haven't really figured out whether there is a new world to be built. And I think that this is where there are some interesting opportunities with AI. And I think that when people are saying AI can do more and more of the jobs, this could be a terrible thing. If we immiserate people, they have no meaning, they have no jobs, they have no work, and we just put them on the dole. Or we could say, this is a chance to build a new world. I mean, John Maynard Keynes, the famous economist, wrote about this in the 30s. He predicted when we wouldn't have to work. But there is a way to get there. Instead of just saying we're going to lay people off, you say, okay, we're going to reduce the working week. You know, we're going to figure out how to. How to spend time retraining people. But because we've said no, no, financial efficiency and shareholder value are the principal thing that we're optimizing for, that doesn't happen.
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A
I have a question for you. So I teach this message that says stay steady in unsteady times. Because as a therapist, I find that a lot of people do not feel steady. They don't feel like they have firm footing in the midst of unsteady times. Yeah, so when I talk to people about AI, and there's some companies that I even. I'm like a people advisor or like a life coach for their companies, it's in the AI space. And when I sit in some of these meetings and I hear some of the things that they're saying, it almost looks like water that's just flowing everywhere, and you just don't know exactly where it's going to go. And. And I think that some people that are looking for absolutes, they get a little nervous about that because they don't know where it's headed with your skill set that you've been developing over all these years. Give me one place you feel that you are supposed to be involved in AI now. Is it educating people through your books, through your courses? Is it coding? Is it creating? Is it all the above? Help me out. So I'm asking you as a person who maybe has not been to many cricket games, and maybe this is my second one, I'm asking you about a sport that I'm just learning about.
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B
If I wanted to give people practical advice, it would be to read the work of a guy named Ethan Moloch. He's a professor at Wharton. He wrote a book called CO Intelligence. And he has a very informed and hopeful view of how to approach AI as this learning experience, to figure it out. Because he says, look, there's ways that it works and there's ways it doesn't work. There's a jagged edge and you have to discover that for yourself. And so he's a really good guide. He's kind of like, for me, he's sort of the Obi Wan Kenobi of how to master this new force. So that would be my first piece of advice. But for me personally, yes, I'm working very hard to educate people, but mostly I do what I always do, which is try to tell a story that helps people see the world in some different ways. And so one of the things, for example, that I've been focused on is there's been a lot of chatter about AI is going to put all the programmers out of work. And I was just like, wait, hold on a minute. I don't buy that. And here's why I don't buy it. It's because I look back at history. I wrote a piece, this is the next stage of programming. It's going to change. It's not the end. So I organized this event, drew something like 15,000 people for this virtual event that was really about how this is going to change your job. Stop being afraid, here's how you embrace it. But, but I'm trying to develop a counter narrative. Another counter narrative that I'm working on is why this sort of winner takes all model where these companies are racing, we're going to take all your content and we're going to take all the stuff and we'll be the 1 AI platform. And I'm like, no, no, we actually need a world of cooperating AIs. And here's why. So again, I bring in history, I bring in philosophy, I bring in, you know, ideals. And I try to shape. So my goal is to try to shape how people think. One of the things I'm proudest of in my career is, is just when I would hear from an entrepreneur, they go, I had this idea. And then I decided against it because it didn't pass the Tim O'Reilly test.
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A
You know, Tim O'Reilly, I pick up something from you that is a little similar to me, and vice versa, is that I think motive is very important to you. Even in other types of jobs that I have, if a young guy comes up to me and he wants to be a Tim Story and speak around the world and write books, I'll say to him many times or her, what is your motive? What. What is your reason?
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B
Yeah.
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A
And I think that's very important to you as well. You would agree with that?
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B
Oh, totally.
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A
So with. With. With that being understood with AI, I think we are seeing many people with the wrong motives and the wrong intention. And tell me how that makes you respond or react.
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B
Well, I think when you say the wrong intention, that suggests that people who possibly suggest that people are actively trying to do harm. And I don't think it's like that. It's just that you have a bad story about what success looks like.
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A
I actually like that better. I 100% agree with you.
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B
Yeah. So there's become this narrative where it's about the value you create for yourself. My friend Reid Hoffman, who is somebody I like quite a lot, he's founder of LinkedIn, but he wrote a book called Blitzscaling, which was about this idea that the way to win in technology is you have to basically just do this crazy race to the top. And he actually tells approvingly the story from. What was that movie anyway? I forget the name of the movie at this moment, but this guy says to his salespeople, first prize is a Cadillac. Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you're fired. Something like that. And the VC has become like that. And really about this race for the exit rather than like, for me, I wasn't trying to exit when I started my business. I was trying to build business, you know, and my outputs were not like, oh, wow, I'm going to become wealthy and retire. My outputs were, I'm going to make a living so I can feed my family. I'm going to have hundreds of people working for me who can feed their family. I'm going to do work in the world that matters. I'm going to have influence and shape this technology. And I used to Say people would ask me about investing. I go, I'm kind of not that great an investor because I don't really care about money. And I told the story of Sesame street episode I saw when My Kids were little, where the Cookie Monster is being asked to choose a prize at a game show. And it's like, behind door number one is a chateau in France. Behind door number two is a million dollars. Behind door number three is a cookie. You know, I go, for me, the cookie is somebody who wants to make a difference in this world and make it better. That should be our guiding star, that we leave the world around us a little better than we found it.
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A
Kate. Sam, let me go somewhere specific. And that has to do with people that are considered senior citizens, or some would call them seasoned citizens. And how AI could possibly make their lives better. Okay, so my mother is. Is 94 and a half. I told one of the gentlemen that works side by side with with me. I said, can we get her an iPad? And that would make the closer to her so she doesn't have to see the TVs from so far away, because sometimes she's straining and sometimes she can't hear as well. And so we're about to go do that within the next few days and try to make it as easy as possible. But I'm seeing my mother at 94 and a half, which is amazing. She's 94 and a half, and she is trying to find ways to make her life easier. Give me a way or ways that I can help people that are seasoned citizens.
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B
Well, I think the very first is that the interfaces of computers used to be pretty hard for seasoned citizens, so to speak. And even with something like an iPad. I have an aunt who's 94, 95, and we keep thinking, oh, she could handle an iPad or a Kindle, but she's doesn't want it and she can't do it. But when you could just talk to a device and not like you talk to Alexa, oh, you know, you're giving.
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A
Me some help here because I'm trying to push this on my mother like a salesperson. And she goes, well, what will I have to push?
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B
No, you don't have to push.
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A
She goes, I don't want to get confused.
- [36:00]
B
For the first time, we are really coming to the point where technology will be accessible to everyone. And I tell the history of technology this way. The history of computing at least, is of computers coming closer and closer to human language. The very first computers, you literally had to wire a circuit together and Then you were putting in this binary language. And then you remember the days of punch cards, and then you got to type on a typewriter, and then you had a screen with a typewriter. And then you got graphical user interfaces, and. And then you got the Web. And one of the things that was really interesting to me about the web was that instead of, you know, like, if you contrast, say, Microsoft Word with the web, Microsoft Word is this software with little bits of human language embedded in it in the form of menus and so on. Whereas the Web lets you build software. You embed little bits of software into human readable documents.
- [36:58]
A
Yeah.
- [36:59]
B
Now with AI, we're at this stage where you're embedding the software in the form of tools into the language. This is the revelation when they're talking about AI agents. What they mean is a tool that some kind of AI that you're talking with can then invoke on your behalf. And we're just in the early stages of this, but basically we are going to have an interface where your mother will say, be able to talk to a device and it will show her favorite show, or she'll be able to talk to it and ask questions. She could say, tell me a story. She could say, you know, call Tim. So, yes, I can make sure that he's okay because I'm his. Still his mother, and I have to look after him.
- [37:51]
A
Yeah. So those are the beautiful sides of it, because, as you know, with knowing some of your relatives that are aging and family members that have aged in the past or in the present, that even for their own safety and security, you're telling us that AI can really help solve some of these dilemmas that have been there for a long time.
- [38:19]
B
Yeah. And of course, this depends on our willingness to solve those kinds of problems. You know, it's one of the things that we see throughout our business economy where there's less and less tolerance and less and less investment available for people who want to solve small problems. Everybody wants to go put all their money on the big horse race where you can turn a small amount of money into a fortune. So we have this gambling economy. You know, it used to be you could get, you know, like, you could find a small niche and you could get investment for it. But really now, today, everybody just wants to bet on the main chance, and I think that's a mistake.
- [39:04]
A
Can I ask you two more questions? One of the questions is, what is a current project that you're working on that you could tell us about, that you're really excited about. And it's maybe something you have been studying for a while, but now you're really putting your focus on this project. What is something that you're currently working on?
- [39:30]
B
A big part of it is trying to. At O'Reilly, we started out as a publishing company and then we built a conference business which we closed during the pandemic. And now we're largely an online learning platform. And a lot of our corporate customers ask us for verified skills. That is, they want to know my employees actually have the skills. And I am convinced that AI can do this much more interestingly because everybody wants to have tests. I go, no, professors don't hate tests. Students hate tests. Why are we doing that with a test when you can have an AI just do so much of the assessment? So I'm really pushing my team and working on this idea of how do we do AI native assessment and how do we do AI native tutoring so that instead of having kind of like a one size fits all curriculum, you basically have this experience of a knowledgeable tutor. And that means a whole bunch of things. It means being able to assess where somebody is and how do you get good at that quickly. So it's not like this long interview. You can just pick it up as you go.
- [40:48]
A
I really love this. I just want to tell you, Tim, that we're going to put up all that information of what you're doing at O'Reilly, because I find it fascinating and you're working with companies of all sizes. I just want people to know that it's not like you have to have 1700 employees in order for them to benefit from what you're doing. Is that correct?
- [41:11]
B
Our basic idea is to teach people how to use new technology. There's obviously a lot of ways you can learn as an end user. We tend to be focused much more on professionals. So whether you're a professional software developer or whether you're a professional business person of some other stripe marketer or whatever. So it's really business training. It's not really as much. Just like your mother wouldn't be going, oh, yeah, let me go get the O'Reilly courses.
- [41:42]
A
I love it. Okay, so I'm talking to Tim O'Reilly. Definitely get his book and we'll put all the information there. Wtf? Make sure and get that book. And so my last question has to do with just you at this stage of, of life.
- [42:02]
B
Yeah.
- [42:02]
A
You talked about the, the gentleman who was from Rome and that story.
- [42:09]
B
Yeah.
- [42:10]
A
Yes. And you know, you, you understand this idea of being Fully present, fully feeling fully alive at this stage of your life, not age, but this stage, do you feel like you are in a. A place of meaning, significance, and like. Good going, Tim. This is. This is a good place for you to be. I'm asking a pioneer who has given a lot of his life to help change people's lives and change the world. Like, tell me. And tell us where you're at with that.
- [42:50]
B
Yeah, well, first off, you do change as you get older, and it's certainly true that, you know, I'm still passionate about my work, but I was just telling my wife this morning as I was out working outdoors, and I go, you know, the end of the day, I have to say, I prefer working outdoors these days to, you know, being in the office.
- [43:17]
A
And just. So can I just say this? You're in one of the most beautiful parts of the world right now for those that have never been been there. And he has 20 acres and there's mountains and everything else around. You were telling your wife.
- [43:33]
B
Yeah, a lot of clearing for fire risk. And so I'm out there, you know, clearing out brush and burning it in the fall and winter, and I enjoy that. But I've always enjoyed that mix of physical work. I've worked from home for much of my life, a lot of the time, and that ability to work intensely for a couple of hours, then go out and work in the garden for an hour, and then come back in and get back into intellectual work. So I think a balanced life. It's really helpful to have access to nature and, of course, having something like a dog. We walk the dog morning and night, and she keeps us sane and makes sure that we don't get caught up too much in our work. Because guess what? You know, she's like, looking at us like, it's time for the walk, people. You know, what I walk is when I get fed.
- [44:30]
A
So I'll close with this. Tim, one of the things I loved about studying you for all these hours for this interview was you. You got a lot of life coming out of you. You. You're. You're very alive. Your energy abounds. You're flourishing, which is a biblical principle, Psalms 1, that if you walk in God, that your life will flourish, but you're flourishing. And I want to thank you for what you're doing in the space of technology, what you've done, how you continue to educate us that need to know. This is not something we can hide from. Like, go away, don't. We can't see you. We have to learn and get better and grow. And tell me one thing you enjoyed about this interview.
- [45:26]
B
Well, I enjoyed finding a kindred spirit.
- [45:33]
A
That was good enough for me. Tim O'Reilly all the information to follow him is right there on this podcast. And this is a man that has a miracle mentality. Keep following him, read his book, and let's get better. Thank you for sharing space with me on this episode of Miracle Mentality with Tim Storey. If today sparked your courage or helped you understand why you're created for success, I invite you to carry that miracle mentality forward. Visit me@timstory.com that story with an ey on the end. Until next time, walk by faith, embrace possibility, and create your own comeback story.