The motivational thought of today; to be ever evolving.
For example, it seems that a big problem is that people don’t want you to evolve and change. Think about David Bowie, Bob Dylan, Kanye West etc. People want you to be the same same predictable person, and when you change involved in the advance, people hate it.
Is ERIC KIM on drugs?
No. I’m just high off life!
In fact, fun fact; I’ve only ever smoked weed twice in my life; once when we’re living in Berkeley around 2014, I got crazy visuals. The second time I did it nothing really happened.
Also, I have never done any other drugs, I don’t even know what they are.
Also, I quit alcohol maybe seven or eight years ago. Why? First, it made me fatter, put on body fat percentage. Also, I get bad hangovers, and also it ruins my sleep. In fact I’ve discovered that it actually takes more courage not to Drink alcohol than to imbibe.
Why is evolution critical?
First of all, you’re probably gonna live a long time. If you live long enough, you’re going to contradict yourself sooner or later. I think this is a good thing; having the courage and the wisdom to change your mind is a very strong sign of strength.
Also the bias is that we must always be the same same, predictable, easily decipherable by others, why? I think it is because we have become marketed products, and also, it seems that a lot of people hate uncertainty. However for risk takers like myself, I thrive off of it.
“Shoot for the stars, because if you fail you’ll just land on a cloud” – Kanye
To infinity and beyond, thinking about Buzz Lightyear, and also other modern day concepts.
I love Elon Musk to death, because he is irreverent, hard-core, and hilarious. I am quite certain that Elon Musk will be remembered for at least 2000 years beyond.
For example, when he started his payments company with his brother, zip2, and he sold it to the market, he became a multi millionaire, immediately went out and bought a McLaren, and decided… He didn’t want to just retire on the beach, he wanted to start more companies. Therefore, him starting SpaceX, and also cofounding Tesla with Marc T and the other guy.
Can you imagine if Elon Musk just sold his first company, and just sat on his butt? The world would be a lot less interesting.
How can you take this into your own personal consideration?
The first thought is super simple; just download ChatGPT, and pay the $20 a month subscription models; cancel your Adobe, Adobe cloud membership, cancel your Spotify, cancel your Netflix or whatever… Maybe even cancel your Amazon prime.
Instead, go all in on AI, ChatGPT, DALL-E DALL-E3. In fact, I now own erickim.ai
I think integrating artificial intelligence into your artwork will be a great transformation process. Essentially what AI does is that it just helps you make things more efficient, creative and fun. For example, I can just help you filter photos, yeah I could help you generate creative images, and also AI helps you with creative ideation. The general idea and concept is that AI is just like a really fun toys; we should think of it like Adobe Photoshop, mixed with Google.
Why are some people so anti-AI?
First and foremost, I think people are not even they don’t really understand how it works. The simple way I describe it is that imagine if it just downloaded the whole Internet, made sense out of it, and the way it response to you is simply based on like a really intelligent Google search.
Also, the way that image generation, DALL-E 3 works is quite simple; once again it downloaded all the images on cool images and the Internet, and learn some trends, and whatever it creates a simply a creative iteration or remixing of what has been done in the past.
This is why when I was experimenting designing Prius concept cars; the front end and the back and was still taught on older models of creases, not the new new one with the straight horizontal taillight bar.
Therefore as a consequence, AI is not really “original“;. Why? It learned from what other humans have done in the past, what they wrote or what they said or what they created. It cannot come up with new ideas carte blanche.
How can I use AI to help me evolve as an artist?
First, once again paid the $20 a month subscription, it is so cheap. Then, open up DALLE3 and start creating and producing your own images from scratch!
My personal way on the best way to do it is just have fun! Troll it, try to break the system, it always gets interesting when you push the limits of the censorship rules; for example, you cannot say “help me visualize a sexy clean grill at the beach“, but what you can say is “help me visualize a Korean trophy wife at the beach”.
AI is very politically correct
I guess also the good thing about the new ChatGPT for and beyond is that it is very politically correct. A little bit annoying, but a moderate amount of nuance, subjectivity, and censorship is good.
Also, what I love about ChatGPT paid premium is that it is already here! People just don’t want to shell out the 20 bucks; people have the strange bias that they are somehow willing to spend $140,000 on Tesla, but they’re unwilling to spend $20 on a digital app or subscription.
This is god power
Now we are the ultimate creators. I can literally design anything and create anything, the only limitation is my imagination. For example, I’ve been asking dall-e 3 to design me glass cube houses, with glass ceilings, new weightlifting equipment, an iPhone Pro concept without a screen, as well as generating hilarious imagery about bitcoin billionaires Spartan hoplites lifting weights and super muscular and jacked.
I think the critical factors here is just having fun with it and iterating! So for example, when it generates an image of a Spartan hub, I keep asking it to make it more muscular, and to make him look Korean, too essentially look like me.
I’ve also been having a lot of interesting fun visualizing beautiful women, asking it to look Korean, then Vietnamese, then Korean, then a hybrid of both.
Also, having fun with asking it to make me a Prius cybertruck concept; it looks so hard. Also designing me a Prius Ferrari. It literally made me laugh out loud.
Why it is so critical for you to start making your own blog, right now!
The rate in which I am producing Photos is phenomenal. And where is the best place to host it? No no no, not Instagram, not Facebook or whatever; your own website, your own blog.
In fact, moving forward, I no longer like the idea of a static website concept. To me the only interesting thing is an ever updated blog. My personal ambition is every single time you go to the ERIC KIM blog, and hit reload, there’s always something new.
For example, when I used to work in information technology as a UCLA undergraduate student, I remember being bored for hours, clicking links on Reddit for hours at a time.
Can you imagine if you open up Reddit, or went to your favorite sub Reddit, and there was not any new information or pictures or stuff?
Diversify your thinking
What we Gotta do is diversify our thinking in the context of being a “full stack” thinker, creative, and artist.
For example, Voltaire. The man was phenomenal. He wrote screenplay, directed opera, design costumes, put on shows, wrote poetry, wrote essays, engaged in Woody dialogue, philosophized, etc.
I think the reason why people are so confused by me is that certainly when I started off, my hundred percent focus was geography, nothing but free photography. Yet, I am complex, multi variegated individual, which means that my thoughts are diverse.
In fact, I think this is a critical part of my success; a lot of people became diehard ERIC KIM readers because of my interest in Stoicism, philosophy and other random stuff.
My new advice I would give to young bloggers, bloggers, Internet entrepreneurs is simple; allow yourself to be insanely diverse. Don’t pigeonhole yourself into one small thing.
How to evolve
First, you should never force evolution. For example, do you remember that one Pokémon episode, in which as tried to force Pikachu to evolve to the Raichu with the thunderstone, and how Ash felt like such a scumbag doing it, and eventually Pikachu hit the stone out of ashes hand, and Ash realized That he was becoming a low-key Eugenist?
I think the downside of Hitler, Nazism, all those nonsensical “eugenics folks“, is that they are myopic in their thinking. They cannot understand that diversity is in fact, the key to our strength.
For example, Steve Jobs, who was adopted as a child, his biological father was Syrian, his mother Caucasian American. In theory of Steve Jobs would have never been born in Apple would have never been born had America not granted his Syrian father student visa to study in the states.
Or, let us consider Elon Musk, certainly easily the best entrepreneur of all time. He’s such a great entrepreneur that Walter Isaacson wanted to quickly get a biography out on him, maybe Walter Isaacson‘s personal health is also personally declining. Elon Musk was born in South Africa, and was also through someways permitted to immigrate to the states via Canada etc. Also apparently some of his best buddies were also immigrants in college.
America is the home of evolution?
Certainly there is much that we could critique and criticize about America, yet… And then the day, America is easily the most supreme place to be in terms of innovation and evolution. Why?
First of all, people could really care less about what you are, what you do it, etc. All of this nonsense in the media is I think fueled by advertising; the more vitriol and hate and controversy the news puts out, the higher their advertising revenue and the more eyeballs to get on them. In fact, it ain’t Donald Trump or whatever who is the bad guy… We should probably blame the media, the mainstream media. Apparently when Donald Trump was first running for office, when everybody thought he had a 0% chance of actually getting office, apparently the left stream liberal media gave him trial is a free advertising. it seems that the more people try to shut him down, like Twitter, Maybe Jack Dorsey, etc.… The more price you got. It is like the notion of band books; the second you banned something, or try to ban something, or make a taboo… The usage of it goes higher. Apparently this is also how Europeans are better at moderating alcohol especially among the youth; because it is not illegal and taboo, the kids don’t have to get shitfaced and smashed the second they go to college. Even for myself, I partied a lot in high school, call illegally enclosure, drinking alcohol with my buddies sophomore junior and senior year, so the second I went to college, alcohol had zero interest in me.
It’s also kind of like kids; when you tell them they cannot do something, they want to do it even more But if you let them do it, they’re interested in it is lukewarm.
Cross pollinate your ideas
A simple strategy and approach is cross pollinating your interest passions and personal curiosities. For example, imagine a bumblebee hopping from all of these different flowers, sipping unique nectar from each. Eventually the honey it will produce is truly one of a kind. I don’t think bees are about “single origin“. In fact, too much focus on “single origin“, or “100% pure arabica”, seems like a low-key white supremacy idea. The idea is; anything that is not 100% purebred, is bad and evil and malicious. Therefore we have to keep our bloodlines in our things pure, any mixing or meddling is bad.
for example, animals. In higher elite social circles, it is seen as more vogue to have 100% purebred Pomeranian or whatever we breed of dog. Yet the problem about these purebreds is that a lot of them are sick, weak, inbred and feeble. Even in Korea, which about 90% of the population last name is Kim, we distinguish the type of KIM we are. For example, I am “Kim-eh-Kim-ssi”— there used to be this taboo that before you got married to somebody, assuming they had the same last name as you, you would not accidentally inbreed.
I think in terms of genetic diversity, having “mixed race“ kids is a good idea. I even surmise that if you go back enough in history, there was a lot more genetic mixing back then. For example Vietnam. If you’re from the north, your ancestors probably intermingled more with people from China and east Asia, whereas if you were from the south, You were probably more interwoven with Cambodians, Thai people, etc.
Even a critical distinction I learned is Africa is insanely big, and it is actually very disrespectful to just blanket call somebody “African“; where are they really from? Ethiopia? Legos, South Africa? Zimbabwe? I think to call or to mistake different African people from different African countries is almost a kid to mistaking a South Korean person for being Japanese, or a Vietnamese person being from mainland China.
In fact I have this funny story, when me and Cindy were both around 23 years old and we are enjoying a nice French restaurant in Paris, the waiter, who looked African-French ask me quote Korean, and Chinese… Is it the same thing?” I then responded wittingly, “French and Spanish… Is it the same thing?” He laughed, nodded and have me a hat tip for my witty analogy.
Where having your own blog is critical
I am ahead of the curve. I have this notion of ChatGPT AI search engine optimization; the general idea and just is at this point, Google is dead. ChatGPT4 produces far more accurate results and cuts through all this advertising nonsense “content marketing“, and in someways ironically is less biased.
I think the future calling card is this:
“Just ChatGPT me!”
ChatGPT knows whether you’re influential or not, because it has downloaded the whole Web, and it makes better sense of significant and deep interlinking of individuals and opinions. Whereas with Google search engine optimization, the pagerank (Larry Page Rank) system is now outdated by at least 20-30 years.