Kevin Surace is a Silicon Valley innovator, serial entrepreneur, CEO, TV personality and EDUTAINER. Kevin has been featured by Businessweek, Time, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, FOX News, and has keynoted hundreds of events, from INC5000 to TED to the US Congress.
He was INC Magazines’ Entrepreneur of the Year, a CNBC top Innovator of the Decade, World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, Chair of Silicon Valley Forum, Planet Forward Innovator of the Year nominee, featured for 5 years on TechTV’s Silicon Spin, and inducted into RIT’s Innovation Hall of Fame. While he has a technical background with 93 worldwide patents, he is known as a highly dynamic speaker who is a true entertainer.
He has led pioneering work on the first cellular data smartphone (AirCommunicator), the first plastic multichip semiconductor packages, the first human-like AI virtual assistant (Portico), soundproof drywall, high R-value windows, AI-driven building management technology, Generative AI for QA, supply-chain multivariate auctions, and the window/energy retrofits of the Empire State Building and NY Stock Exchange.
What you will learn
- How Kevin Surace helped invent the first human-like AI virtual assistant—and how that work led to Siri and Alexa.
- Why digital twins are about to become your always-on productivity partners (and yes, they can attend Zoom calls for you).
- How AI is already replacing entire jobs in software testing—and what roles are truly safe from automation.
- Why AI is shaking up creative industries like music, writing, and filmmaking—and how you can still stand out.
- What the future of work looks like when humanoid robots, voice clones, and AI editors become part of daily life.
Transcript
Jeff Bullas
00:00:04 – 00:00:54
Hi and welcome to the Jeff Bullas Show. Today I have with me, Kevin Surace. Now Kevin is a Silicon Valley innovator, serial entrepreneur, CEO, TV personality and EDUTAINER. Kevin has been featured by Businessweek, Time, Fortune, Forbes, CNN, ABC, MSNBC, FOX News, and has keynoted hundreds of events, from INC5000 to TED to the US Congress.
He was INC Magazines’ Entrepreneur of the Year, a CNBC top Innovator of the Decade, World Economic Forum Tech Pioneer, Chair of Silicon Valley Forum, Planet Forward Innovator of the Year nominee, featured for 5 years on TechTV’s Silicon Spin, and inducted into RIT’s Innovation Hall of Fame. While he has a technical background with 93 worldwide patents, he is known as a highly dynamic speaker who is a true entertainer.
He has led pioneering work on the first cellular data smartphone (AirCommunicator), the first plastic multichip semiconductor packages, the first human-like AI virtual assistant (Portico), soundproof drywall, high R-value windows, AI-driven building management technology, Generative AI for QA, supply-chain multivariate auctions, and the window/energy retrofits of the Empire State Building and NY Stock Exchange. He is also an accomplished music director, conductor, Broadway and streaming producer, and percussionist.
Kevin Surace
00:00:55 – 00:01:02
There’s so much more to do and there’s only, as far as I know, one life to do it right now, right? So there’s always more to do. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:01:03 – 00:01:29
exactly. So, and that’s, yeah. And we’re in the world of AI now, which is, uh, helping us do more things with less. But, and, uh, we actually had a little fun play with what your interactive digital twin before we got on the call, which is quite amazing. And what I’m gonna do now is I’m gonna take the question that you asked it, what is the most interesting story that would inspire our readers and listeners?
Kevin Surace
00:01:29 – 00:02:01
Oh, there are, there are so many stories, you know, from, from, from any career that we, we probably all have. Look, I, I, I think, um, look, if I’m, if I’m an entrepreneur, I can’t know everything, but, but, um, but I can know. that if I’m not breaking the laws of physics, I should be able to accomplish something given time and money, OK? And so I think large language models are an example of that. Once we had deep learning, someone could imagine training something on a trillion phrases and imagine.
Kevin Surace
00:02:01 – 00:02:22
Um, doing what we’ve done with LLM, right? And, and, and, um, what kept you from doing that is time and money and horsepower and things like that, but it wasn’t technically impossible, right? We could, we could deep learn as deep as we wanted to. So I’ve, I’ve got great stories about that. I was, I was, uh, I, I, I, I sort of took a break from the AI world. I’m known as the father of the virtual assistant.
Kevin Surace
00:02:22 – 00:02:46
By the way, so, uh, Siri and Alexa and all that stuff, uh, came out of work, uh, it was done at General Magic in Silicon Valley for, uh, a product called Portico, and we had slews of patents on how one would, uh, build out a virtual assistant, and we did build virtual assistants and then everybody else copied it, which is great. Yeah, so here’s the next story story is, oh go ahead.
Jeff Bullas
00:02:46 – 00:02:53
So where did that come out of? So where were you, what were you doing when the virtual assistant, um, was developed? Were you?
Kevin Surace
00:02:53 – 00:03:31
I, I, I, I, I had the idea, well, so first of all, I love to solve real problems, and Silicon Valley is famous for solutions looking for a problem. But there are so many problems looking for a solution. You can just focus on those and, and in the Mid to late 90s, people who were just getting cell phones, but they were flip phones. OK? They were very simple things. They were just getting PCs on their desk for the last, you know, handful of years. There was just the start of the internet, 1995 onward. We’re just getting email, we’re just getting digital calendars. All that’s happening at once, but I’m driving in my car and have no access to anything.
Kevin Surace
00:03:31 – 00:04:09
Anything. I have headphones I can put on or earphones or something with my cell phone and that’s about it. But I can’t get anything from it. I can only talk to humans or I could talk, I could call Jeff and Jeff would talk to me. That’s it. So, I had an idea for a virtual assistant. The virtual assistant would uh uh take your calls first, uh, schedule people that you know onto your calendar, uh, um, read your email, uh, and execute things like an agent on your behalf, right? Including getting stock quotes and giving you warnings on things, all kinds of things, right? So we built the first.
Kevin Surace
00:04:09 – 00:04:31
Uh, uh, virtual assistants, AI virtual assistants, and you could talk to them. You could talk to her. Her name was Mary, just like you would talk to Siri today, better actually. And, um, and it was a heavy lift. We spent about 100 million developing uh uh Portico and my talk and Magic Talk and the OnStar virtual advisor for General Motors. Um, and we built all of those. We had
Kevin Surace
00:04:31 – 00:04:52
3 million, 4 million users on the platform at the time. And then it all dissipated into other things and eventually, as I said, Apple had to license that technology and so did Amazon and so did Google, and so did everybody else. But we were trying to solve the problem of, I’m driving in my car and I still need access to my information, and I have this phone, but it doesn’t give me anything. There’s no screen on it yet. There’s just
Kevin Surace
00:04:53 – 00:05:17
Phone numbers, right? So that’s what we solved. We solved it with voice because you couldn’t look away from the road, but you could talk and you could listen and she would tell you what you wanted to know. And she was, you know, went beyond the Siri because she acted as an agent in certain areas. So the, the whole concept of software agents or, or AI agents was also developed the general magic even before we developed the personal assistant. So a lot of technology came out of there.
Jeff Bullas
00:05:18 – 00:05:23
So tell us about General Magic Moore. Was that, um, is that a business you started? um It
Kevin Surace
00:05:23 – 00:06:12
wasn’t started, started by Mark Perat and a slew of others from, uh, from Apple. They spun it, kind of spun it out of Apple and built this company and, uh, it was worth, uh, billions of dollars at, at, at one time it was a public company, uh, very famous in the mid-90s for just a technology powerhouse and uh they developed really the first kind of PDE. what we used to call them these pads, which is an iPad today, but they developed the first versions of those, developed the first virtual assistants, developed agents, developed a language called Telescript, which is very similar to Java. Uh, technology powerhouse, hundreds of employees, uh, you know, not a ton of revenue, long after I left, they eventually sold off the patents and it went away, sadly. But, but, but while I was there, it was a thriving thing.
Kevin Surace
00:06:12 – 00:06:18
But we did get to develop the very first virtual assistants and that’s um that, you know, that’s a game changer today.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:19 – 00:06:20
And what year was that?
Kevin Surace
00:06:21 – 00:06:25
From uh 96 to 99 or so. Right.
Jeff Bullas
00:06:26 – 00:06:43
Yeah, very cool. I, I do remember I got one of my first Motorola flip phones, um, well actually just Motorola, I think it was, and I had it installed in my car. I was actually able to call home by voice back in the early 90s. And I thought, wow, this is, this is fascinating.
Kevin Surace
00:06:44 – 00:07:07
Yeah, what they had is they had a little A bit of voice recognition in the phone itself, and it would recognize very few things, but you could train it on like 10 things you want to do like call home, and it would do that and then call home. So not quite a virtual assistant, but at least it would do something. And the virtual assistant was based on the network, as you might imagine, it wasn’t in the phone. So, uh, we just didn’t have the horsepower on the phone at the time,
Jeff Bullas
00:07:09 – 00:07:13
so. Let’s wind back, you did an engineering degree originally.
Kevin Surace
00:07:13 – 00:07:13
OK.
Jeff Bullas
00:07:14 – 00:07:58
So was there, I’m, I’m always curious about what, you know, What called you, in other words, was there, you know, I’m really interested in engineering, I’m good at math, I’m good at physics, because quite often, you know, a lot of people go and get a, do a degree and they take a job because they’ve got to put food on the table. So for me, what, What was your bliss or your calling? Joseph Campbell called, follow your bliss, that’s your only purpose in life. There’s no grand calling from God, um, and bliss is a word that’s not tossed around very often these days. Purpose is used a lot. So what was the motivation for you, or was there to actually do an engine degree, or mum and dad said you need to go and do something useful with your life and get a degree.
Kevin Surace
00:07:58 – 00:08:23
Look, if I had my druthers, I would have gone to school for, uh, uh, for music or acting or something. I wanted to be both on Broadway and, uh, and also I’m a percussionist and drummer, and so I wanted to pursue that. My dad smartly said, I don’t think so. Not under my watch. But, but my, but my father also worked for General Electric, and, um, in audio electronics at the time, they were the number one purveyor.
Kevin Surace
00:08:23 – 00:08:47
of audio electronics, which in that day was clock radios and boomboxes and stereos and all that stuff, right? So you go back to the 70s and into the 80s, they were the top brand in the United States, and a huge business, right? And um and over time, Japan came in and other brands came in, eventually it faded, right? But at that time, it was big. And so um I got to play with all this cool stuff before anyone else did. I was
Kevin Surace
00:08:47 – 00:09:12
Very interested in electronics. And then I really did a lot of reading and I was actually good at fixing electronics. So I would fix the neighbors’ televisions and radios and washers and dry. It didn’t matter, right? I could fix it. I understood it. I could read a schematic. I understood what was going on. So he said, look, you, you, you can go do all the music you want, but go to school for engineering because no matter what happens, you’ll have a job. He was, he was right. And
Kevin Surace
00:09:12 – 00:10:03
I, uh, uh, I went to RIT, Rochester Institute of Technology, got essentially a double degree, WET degree, and, uh, and then went to Silicon Valley after that and built a career in Silicon Valley starting in semiconductors, and then software and software systems and, uh, worked on the very first, uh, smart cellular phones long before there was one from Apple and got to work on the first virtual assistants, got to work on some Clean tech stuff, uh, retrofitted the Empire State Building, got to do all kinds of AI along the way, still working on AI projects, applied AI, some cybersecurity. I’ve been very, very fortunate, very fortunate to, to, to continue to invent, uh, uh, in a variety of fields that will, uh, help humanity in some way. I ended up with 94 worldwide patents so far, but just filed another one.
Jeff Bullas
00:10:04 – 00:10:08
That’s a. OK, so what’s, what’s the latest pattern you’ve filed?
Kevin Surace
00:10:09 – 00:10:48
Um, it is on AI, uh, it, it’s an artificially intelligent system that is quite complex. It takes, uh, multiple transformers and multiple kinds of models to understand how an application should work, an enterprise application. So we’re not talking about websites that people here might be more familiar with, but large enterprise applications of which You know, a large insurance company would have 5 or 10,000 of, to be clear, right? I think most people don’t know that, you know, you ask people how many applications uh JPMorgan Chase have, and it’s about 15,000 applications that they manage on a regular basis.
Kevin Surace
00:10:48 – 00:11:25
15,000 all in the network, right? So they have to test those and they have to update them and they have to upgrade them, and they have to fix the stack, and they have to, uh uh you know, enforce cybersecurity stuff, etc. etc. and they change features and so um They have to test these all the time and there are about 2.5 to 3 million people around the world who are either manual testers or for er for technology like that, or they are um uh writing test scripts to automate those tests. It’s about 3, we call it 3 million people, $120 billion of spend.
Kevin Surace
00:11:26 – 00:11:44
And we have been working on AI for a dozen years that replaces those people. Now, AI is not gonna replace a lot of people in a lot of careers, but there are some it’s going to because it’s repetitive, and it can be modeled in AI really well, and software QA is one of those. So we’ve invented AI.
Kevin Surace
00:11:45 – 00:12:30
That, uh, that really eliminates all that headcount. I’m sorry if you’re listening to this and you’re one of those headcounts. Um, please upskill yourself and go do something else. Uh, but, but, but that is automatable with AI and in fact AI can find uh more than 10 times the bugs of humans, not a surprise, uh, and more than 10 times faster. That’s not a, it’s not a shock. And by the way, if we were trying, we’re gonna talk about AI a little bit, if we were talking about um. Customer support tier one, you know, that someone offshored to Vietnam or wherever it is, you know, that is at high risk of being replaced by AI because we’ve got virtual assistants. We’ve got chatbots they could be trained instantly on the FAQs and at least first tier.
Kevin Surace
00:12:30 – 00:13:12
Uh, the, the data are clear, you know, that’s a task that’s not gonna happen. So most jobs, like in the US, most jobs in the US aren’t going anywhere because we have um uh a declining number of people coming into the workforce and an increasing number of people leaving the workforce, retiring, and so we’ve got a labor shortage for most jobs and so I’m not worried about that in the US, but For tasks that US companies shed offshore years ago to drive the hourly rate down from $15 an hour to $1 an hour. That $1 an hour can now be 10 cents an hour. And every company is gonna take the 10 cents an hour, you know, what’s behind door number 3, 10 cents an hour. So everybody’s gonna do it.
Kevin Surace
00:13:13 – 00:13:32
So for certain things that we shed offshore, those are the first that are going to be uh replaced by AI jobs in the US, I don’t see almost any being replaced fully by AI. I think they’re gonna be augmented. You’re going to expand your brain, expand, expand your mind. We’re gonna have 100 Jeffs instead of one Jeff, but you’re still in control.
Jeff Bullas
00:13:33 – 00:14:21
Yeah. So let’s, let’s sleep into digital twins and uh also artificial um AI people. Yeah, because, uh, you know, if you have a look at some of the sites that are helping influencers, for example, they are, uh, you know, there’s some people like are using something like Heygen or Doi to actually create a digital twin of themselves um and also, To create other influences, and there are actual AI influences already out there that have got 10 million followers. So what you can do is you can, you can actually not only interact as, you know, your picture, your voice, um, interactive digital twin having a conversation on top of that going, well I’m going to create an influencer that specializes in fashion, even though I’m doing, you know,
Jeff Bullas
00:14:22 – 00:14:59
I’m doing cooking. I’m gonna send, yeah, so where do you see that all going? Because I’m sort of seeing, for me, I, I believe that we’re gonna have two versions of ourselves to keep it simple, and one we’re gonna have the one that lives in the digital space working for us. Then there’s gonna be the one that comes down to the physical. Um, I love the word digital, uh, which the combination. So where do we see, where do you see that going, um, and do you think everyone will have a digital twin eventually living in the cyberspace while you actually have the time to have a coffee, have a glass of wine and have good conversations with friends and family and colleagues? Look,
Kevin Surace
00:15:00 – 00:15:33
look, all we all want to do is be more productive and if we’re given, you know, um, let’s call it 16 hours a day, we can be awake and work at some level, right? Um. Uh, it’d be great if I had 2 of me because that’s 32 hours a day. Even if the second one isn’t as efficient, maybe it’s 26 hours a day, right? And so on. So maybe I need 10 of them, and I already have a digital twin, as you know, we interacted with my digital twin earlier and it’s fully interactive and you can ask me questions. You can go to my website and talk to me. So it’s on my website, kevinrace.com, and you
Kevin Surace
00:15:33 – 00:15:52
Do that and just talk to Kevin. Kevin is trained on the real Kevin. So you’re, you are hearing things the way I would say that, which is absolutely fascinating. Yes, we’re all going to do that. We’re all going to have agents. We all want to be more productive. We all have limited hours. No one that I know, except some retired people say, oh.
Kevin Surace
00:15:52 – 00:16:24
I just have nothing to do. There’s, you know, there’s, I, I just have free hours all the time. None of us have free hours all the time. I have a list right. Here’s my list that I keep a pad of, right? I am at least 8 things behind and I’ve got to get done on that list. And as I check them off, I’ll be very joyful. But as they’re not checked off, I’m not as joyful as I wish I was. So, so, um, I need more hours, and there aren’t more hours. So if there’s more of me that can do some of these tasks, um, by the way, my digital twin can join any Zoom meeting. Any Zoom meeting as me and interact with me.
Jeff Bullas
00:16:25 – 00:17:19
Right. Yeah, it’s, look, we’re entering territory which basically is a huge social experiment. In fact, it’s a we’re conducting a huge human experiment at the moment. Social media was a step into that experiment. So, um. And we don’t know what we don’t know. So we’re rapidly going to the future was both exciting. It’s maybe the best time to be living ever because, uh, we can be more productive. But, um, on the other hand, being productive is one thing, but being human is another. And I think the question that we are asking of the machine is, because it can do things like, you know, create images. It can write books, it can, uh, do lots of creative things. Uh, Nick Cave, a famous Australian musician, is worried about the, uh, the ability of the machine to replace him.
Jeff Bullas
00:17:20 – 00:17:47
And then there’s a struggle of the artist who actually creates something, whether it’s a writer trying to put a book together of stories, connection, insights. So where do you see the role of AI and creativity moving forward? Because there’s there’s two sides, it’s number one, it’s AI’s already here and helping us be more creative. On the other hand, it could, could it possibly, Take away human creativity, Steal.
Kevin Surace
00:17:48 – 00:18:36
So let’s look at some of these things that you brought up. So, so music, I use Suno, there’s, there’s two big music generators out there. Suno’s great. Um, I, uh, create, uh, a lot of, of songs, but for very specific purposes using Suno. Uh, I am also a real musician. Um, I am not known as a songwriter. But I am now empowered to create songs alongside the AI, right? I’ve created the concept, I’ve created the subject, I’ve tuned it, I’ve changed some things, I’ve changed the way, but I, even though I do, I don’t have to any longer know how to write music or play piano. Yeah. And I’m empowered to write songs. That scares a songwriter who sits at a piano and says, I have worked 30,000 hours.
Kevin Surace
00:18:37 – 00:19:17
On my craft, and you haven’t worked 5 minutes. This isn’t fair. Well, first of all, life isn’t fair. Everybody get used to it. Life isn’t fair. It’s never been fair. Second of all, we’ve been through this before and I’m gonna give you an example. In the late 1980s. People working in finance or have their ledger books open with pencils and they’re working away. And one day someone comes to the office and says, look at this, I’ve got it on my, my desktop PC, my brand new desktop PC from IBM. It’s, um, it’s called a spreadsheet. Exactly. And it does all this for us. What do you mean? You mean it does math? Yeah, does math perfectly. Does math better than humans.
Kevin Surace
00:19:17 – 00:19:52
As we sit here today, if you didn’t use a spreadsheet, you could not work in any finance department anywhere in the world, because humans don’t do math anymore. There’s a machine that has done math now for 40 years. It’s not an arguable 30+ years, 35 years. That’s not arguable, that’s unknowable. And we eventually gave up doing math. The, the last time even anyone listening to this podcast did long division. You know, with a pencil or in their head, was to do it for some 4th or 5th grader to teach them and then they’ll never do it again. So we don’t do long division anymore. That’s not a skill.
Jeff Bullas
00:19:52 – 00:19:59
Well, I’ve, I’ve forgotten how to do long division. I remember I actually looked, but if you ask me the long division now, I would not be able to do it.
Kevin Surace
00:20:00 – 00:20:35
And here’s the thing, Jeff, I mean, some people say, oh, that’s terrible that you don’t know how to do it. You don’t need to know how to do it. There’s a machine that does this. OK, so now we, anyone can create music. OK. What’s happening? We got millions and millions and millions of AI songs already generated. Most of them are junk. Some of them sound really great. And at some point, someone is going to have a hit with one. I don’t know how it’ll get there. I don’t know who’s gonna promote it. I don’t, whatever. It’s going to happen. OK, that, I’m gonna tell you what happens to humans in that, but just follow me along.
Kevin Surace
00:20:36 – 00:21:16
This is true with illustrations. It’s true with photography. So, I have a great photographer who, who does do my, uh, who has done my headshots and he’s fabulous. But then I took a variety of headshots that I’ve had, and I went to a headshot generator and said, generate 250 new headshots based on what you learned from these 10 headshots. Boom. Now, out of the 250, I’d say. 10 or 20 weren’t really usable. They didn’t really look like, uh they look like me, but I could tell. And then most of the rest were indistinguishable for me and it looked fabulous and I’m in different places and different poses with my head in different places and I’m wearing different things and I go, OK.
Kevin Surace
00:21:17 – 00:21:54
I did not have to go back to a photographer to shoot 250 of these things. I didn’t go anywhere. I pushed a button, and I think it cost $50. That was worth my $50 right? I generated illustrations for my keynote talks. I do about 40 keynotes a year, and they’re all generated by AI today. 100%. I used to go to an illustrator. I’m sorry, I don’t go to him or her anymore, but I, and it’s not about the money. It’s the fact that I have them in a minute and I can move on with my life. I’m more productive. So, what happens to say, the musicians who are very scared of AI? Well, first of all, musicians who are scared of the synthesizer.
Kevin Surace
00:21:54 – 00:22:09
Then they were scared of something called main stage. Then they were scared before all of that, they were scared of the record player, because all of a sudden you could listen to a musician at home, you have to listen to a musician. They were scared of CDs, they were scared of tapes, they were scared of 8 tracks.
Kevin Surace
00:22:09 – 00:22:57
Um, and, and, and in each uh uh point along the way, we found new models. And then, by the way, very scared of online and online sharing, right? And, and all of that. And so where are we today with music? Here’s where we are today. Taylor Swift did $2 billion last year. That’s more than any single musician, not only is done in a year, it’s basically more than any musician ever made in, in, in a career. And she was able to do that $2 billion not selling records. Showing up live. And so what I think AI does is it dilutes the amount of stuff out there just like there’s 45 million podcasters now, some number like that worldwide. It’s an incredible number, right? Of which, I don’t know, 5, 10,000 matter, right? And there’s nothing wrong with it, it’s just
Kevin Surace
00:22:57 – 00:23:41
You can get into the podcasting business for $200. So everybody does. Everybody’s a podcaster, but some are really better than others. And, and, and so what’s gonna happen is, yeah, there’ll be some AI songs and this and that, but in the end, I think it promotes the fact that the human to human experience is gonna be even more unique. Because the, the market’s flooded with AI songs, but now, here’s an actual Taylor Swift song with actual Taylor Swift performing it, and we will spend $2 billion to go see Taylor Swift actually perform and that performance, of course, is magical. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a Broadway show. It’s crazy. So that’s, I, I think the data are already here, that that’s the case. And look, podcasting, look, there is, you know, if you’re Mr. Beast.
Kevin Surace
00:23:42 – 00:24:23
I’m not sure Mr. Beast would have gotten a radio program in the old days, would have been able to get on a network. However, he can make $100 million. Doing what you’re doing. And maybe you’re making more than he is. I don’t know. But the point is he’s, he, he was able to rise to the top because of his talent and the, you know, the, the show and the, the aspects of it. So this is fascinating. We are democratizing access to so much and there’ll be winners and losers in that. But, but, but overall, in a lot of these areas, I think we’re going to appreciate. When real humans do it the old style human way, and that’ll become the rare thing that you really want to pay for.
Jeff Bullas
00:24:25 – 00:24:50
Yeah. And, um, I think that’s what we’ve got to double down on is basically the unique things that make us human and machine can’t do, and then lean into that to, you know, like good conversations, uh. Essentially we also challenged in the past, like, but that basically artists were challenged by, you know, the camera because the camera could suddenly crack capture a landscape and take photos of people. And in fact,
Kevin Surace
00:24:50 – 00:25:21
you’re a water painter, you go, Oh no, who’s gonna want me when you’ve got a perfect you know, a perfect picture? which turns out a watercolor water painting is very different or or canvas or whatever oil is very different than a photo. And, and there’s room for both. By the way, photos are still worth a lot, you know, beautiful photos, but it’s nothing like, you know, painted on canvas with oil from a real artist that, uh, maybe made zero prints. You got the original. What’s that worth? A lot more than any photograph. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:25:22 – 00:25:40
Exactly. So let’s lean into uh. Not necessarily what jobs are challenged, what jobs are going to be safe moving forward as AI challenges both the creative industry, the knowledge industry, for example. I, I can think of a few, but interested in your thoughts in terms of what jobs are safe going forward.
Kevin Surace
00:25:41 – 00:26:14
Yeah, the most safe jobs are plumber, HVAC repair, electrician. Right. Yeah, depends on complicated, hard trades, hard to do with AI, not impossible to do with humanoid robots, but very hard and very expensive, and that’s because, um, every, for example, every home plumbing is different than the next home, every single one, every single one is different. And the, and, and, and AI is quite good at learning how to do something repetitively.
Kevin Surace
00:26:14 – 00:26:53
Um, that is pretty much the same. So I, we can now have a robot learn how to make coffee with a particular coffee maker really, really well. Throw a different coffee maker in there. I, I have no idea what button to push. No, there’s there’s no sense to it. But then it can learn that over the course of days, how to make coffee in the second coffee maker. So if you threw a robot plumber into a home, You’re hosed. It has no idea how to do anything with anything because everything is in a different place. Doesn’t know if the plumbing clog is, is in the pipe below the sink or is 16 ft further down at a junction under a toilet. It has no idea. Doesn’t even know where to start.
Kevin Surace
00:26:53 – 00:27:23
Right. So, I don’t see robots doing that work. And um I look, I know you can do the numbers, right? Plumbers in Silicon Valley right now, if you want to wait 6 weeks, not a problem. But if you want someone right now because the thing’s backed up, it’s $350 for the hour. OK? $350 for the hour. And they’re working 12-hour days, but they’re not every hour is, you know, under contract and, but anyway, do the math. What’s the plumber making? 600 to $700,000 a year?
Kevin Surace
00:27:24 – 00:27:51
Why would I want to be a coder? to make that money turning screws on pipes, right, and putting new pipes in and unclogging saints, and this, this just isn’t that hard. It’s yucky sometimes. Got to get in the toilet and clean it up, but whatever. It’s 700k a year, everybody’s going, Why should I do anything else? I should go do that. Why is it that way? There is, there, there’s a huge shortage on these trades cause we sent everyone to college and said, go get your coding degree.
Kevin Surace
00:27:51 – 00:28:16
And now entry level coding opportunities have fallen dramatically. And, and, and, and, and now the kids coming into college are not filling the coding classes where for 25-30 years they were filled and now the CS degrees people going, yeah, I don’t know, but the, you know, AI is doing a great job and if you work with the coding assistants at all and some of the people out there probably have the
Kevin Surace
00:28:17 – 00:28:41
I mean, Claude, the new loud that just came out this week is pretty amazing, uh, is what people are showing me, um, and Devon also. But, but we’re talking about completing a large percentage of the, the, the sort of coding problems that you have in seconds. And, and so now you want very senior people and very senior architects telling this machine exactly what to do, so they get the exact code that they want.
Kevin Surace
00:28:41 – 00:29:06
an entry level person completely useless. They, you know, they don’t have architecture experience. They don’t have experience with the product. They code far, uh, uh, slower than the machine codes right now. Uh, so I, I, I, where, how are we ever gonna get there’s no entry level jobs. No one wants entry level people. It’s a serious issue. I, I can’t solve it, but it’s a serious issue. So I, I wouldn’t go into that field. I would say, uh, trades, truthfully, yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:29:06 – 00:29:33
and that was my for me you can’t get anytime. In the future that I can foresee a robot being able to do a tradie job is It’s, it’s complicated like we can’t even get a car. Well we’ve got cars starting to do auto driving like Waymo and and Elon’s promising it and has done for a while, but the reality is that trade, traders could end up earning hundreds and hundreds of dollars an hour, do you think?
Kevin Surace
00:29:33 – 00:30:20
Uh, they already are. That’s, that’s the funny thing. You’re already paying that for the trades today. You know, I, I get to speak to all these different trade associations too, right? So I, I spoke uh last year to, uh, the association that fixes, you know, uh, a hotel, restaurant, food equipment that’s back there and cooks, right? Big ovens and a big sous vides if you know what those are, big water baths, right, temperature control and all that. Look, when you’ve got A corporate event tonight and you got to serve 500 lobster tails. You’re sous viing those all day. They’re at a very specific temperature. You pull them out, you put them in something to sear them and you get them right out there, right? That’s just how it’s done. If the sous vide is down, there are no lobster tails tonight. You’re not serving.
Kevin Surace
00:30:20 – 00:30:53
So, these restaurants call the hotel restaurants, right, catering and all that, they call and say, look, we need someone here in 1 hour to fix this thing. And they go, well, we don’t have any one, you know, we’re out 6 weeks, 6 weeks. The, the sous vide is down. I have 500 people a night here. What am I gonna do? Right? And, and the reason they don’t have anyone is they can’t hire enough people. They get, the, the, the kids today didn’t come through any trades, they didn’t repair cars, they didn’t do that. So they come in and they go up to a sous vide, and they go, I have no concept.
Kevin Surace
00:30:54 – 00:31:15
Of how a sous vide works. Now, by the way, it’s a very, very, it’s, it’s a heating element to heat water to a certain temperature, and it’s a thermostat that, that goes to a small circuit board that turns on and off the heater. That’s all it is. There’s very little in there, and you get to set the temperature, right? So it’s very simple thermostat. So there’s only 3 or 4 things that can go wrong. And as long as you have the parts, you know how to fix it, but, but
Kevin Surace
00:31:16 – 00:31:57
But I, you know, people don’t know because they played video games and then went to college. They have no idea what a sous vide is, how it works, what a heating element is, uh, you know, how it runs on 220, how much current, they have no concept. I say current, I say voltage, I say wattage and I, I don’t know, all that stuff works. So no blame, right? It’s just oops, and so they have no idea. I, I, I was talking, I was doing something with a trade organization and They use lots of motors and solenoids and stuff in the repair of their things and, and people were coming in, they didn’t know the difference between an engine and a motor because the term can be used interchangeably and these are very different things, very different.
Kevin Surace
00:31:57 – 00:32:28
And I, maybe you do, we’re old enough to know how an engine works, you know, basically all the parts. Uh, I could probably take one apart and clean it up and put it back together. I wouldn’t want to, but I fundamentally know how it works. I know how motors work, brushless and, and brushed motors. And so, so we sort of know what these are. We know what the differences are. We know when it’s dead and seized up. We know how to replace it. They can’t find any kids who know it. They don’t know the difference. Like you can’t, where do you start? I, I’ve never seen a wrench before. So
Kevin Surace
00:32:29 – 00:32:52
I think there’s tremendous opportunity in the trades, and people are retiring faster they’re coming in, and I wouldn’t rush to, to, to do coding or content creation because AI is so good at content creation, right? So good. Um, if you’re in marketing, there was a time when you went to marketing, you say, well, what, what do you do? I write ads. Uh oh.
Kevin Surace
00:32:52 – 00:33:22
You can supervise the writing of ads now by AI, but you are not going to write ads, uh, you know, you, you are, you’re just, you’re not gonna write blog posts anymore. AI will write the blog post. You will edit it and clean it up, but it’ll write it to a formula. It’ll be formula. It’ll work to, it’ll be in your brand voice, and it’s very easy to set up AI to do that in like 2 minutes. And once you’ve got that, I, I can do my 52 blog posts for the year today. So, uh, no one’s gonna.
Kevin Surace
00:33:22 – 00:33:52
I tell this to, you know, uh, to, to universities, uh, who are struggling with AI. I say, listen, I want every kid coming out of university, uh, to be, uh, a wealth of AI knowledge. Well, what about writing? Shouldn’t they have learned writing skills? No, they need editing skills. They will never write again because no employer is gonna, two kids come in, right? No employer is gonna hire the wrong kid. Two kids come in. One says, I was told in college to never use AI, so don’t know much about it.
Kevin Surace
00:33:52 – 00:34:20
Uh, well, we want you to write, uh, to be the blog post writer here. Oh, OK, well, I, you know, I will think and stew and strategize and write them by hand. OK, thank you. The next one comes in and says, uh, yeah, I use uh GPT 40, I can write 50, I can write a year’s worth of blog posts today and edit them, and they’ll be in our brand voice and we’re done, and then you can give me another task tomorrow. Who do you hire? Who do you hire.
Kevin Surace
00:34:20 – 00:34:40
That the AI one. I don’t want, I don’t want anything to do with the people who have nothing to do with the AI. You got another problem. What’s gonna happen with age is a lot of the people who are at a certain age are going, oh, that’s AI thing. I don’t want to learn anything new. I’m, I’m making it up. I’m 58 years old. I’m not trying to be ageist here, but, uh, you know, you have a set of people that go, I don’t want to learn that new stuff. OK.
Kevin Surace
00:34:41 – 00:35:04
You better hope to hang on to your job because no one’s gonna hire you if you don’t know the I. It’d be like walking to an employer today and say, Hey, I don’t use the internet because it scares me and I don’t think it’s needed. OK, no job, no job. So AI is going to be like that within a year or 2 or 3. If you’re not using AI, you’re not gonna have a job even in your existing employer.
Jeff Bullas
00:35:05 – 00:35:34
Yeah. Yeah, it, it changed the whole game. So, uh, you know, the Luddites were the first to try and stop technology happening because they’re afraid of, uh, a whole textile industry became bigger and better and higher quality. So, but amongst all this is, um, and everyone’s got different opinions on this. What guard rails should be in place for AI, if any, and what, what do you think they should be?
Kevin Surace
00:35:35 – 00:36:08
Well, look, uh uh uh uh guardrails are a good thing on any technology. However, in a worldwide market where there’s open source and Chinese models, there are no guardrails. We’ve got them on our US companies, and I get that, and I’m glad. So most of the US models. Uh, have pretty stringent guardrails that do not allow you to interact with the thing about, uh, uh, pornography and, you know, whatever, right, all these different things or, or ask it if it loves you or all right, so they put a lot of guard rails on and they try to keep it from, from hallucinating.
Kevin Surace
00:36:08 – 00:36:50
Etc. etc. But then there’s open source models you can do anything you want with. And so people are generating, you, you know, images of presidents with no clothes on, you know why? Because you can. And by the way, I, the people go, oh my God, I can’t believe people are generating deep fake images stop. If you knew how to use Photoshop for the last 25 years, I could have put, I could have done that with any, anyone, right? I could have, it’s just I needed to know how to use Photoshop. Now, someone can do it without 10,000 hours of effort. They can do it with 1 minute of effort, right? They don’t have to train to do it. So it’s not that we didn’t have deep fakes, it, it’s not that we didn’t have deep fakes of interactive, you know, humans, but Holly.
Kevin Surace
00:36:50 – 00:37:15
did it with CGI and it was very expensive. It was $10 million to get Princess Leia to look like she’s still alive even though she had passed, right? But we take that for granted and we trust that Hollywood will not do it in, in a nefarious way. What scares us is not that the technology, we haven’t seen the technology for 25 years in a variety of forms, but now anyone in North Korea can use it.
Kevin Surace
00:37:15 – 00:38:02
And generate a fake uh Jeff and put you in a compromising position and you go, but that isn’t me and they go, well, prove it. I, I, I can’t. I know you know this is bad. So, so, um, we will be fine as humans. We have learned already for a very long time to not trust every image that we see because many, many images have been fake for 25 years and we’re kind of used to that. Now we’re gonna get used to the fact that audio or voice. I mean, I can do a voice print of me in a minute. So I have versions of me in my voice. Uh, and so, um, voice clones are super easy today, so you can’t trust what you hear and you can’t really trust what you see. Why? Well, because video clones are also easy.
Jeff Bullas
00:38:03 – 00:38:37
Mm no. Yeah, it’s, it’s really interesting is that there was a book just written by. Uh, the founder of LinkedIn. Yeah, super agency. Yeah. So what was really interesting about that for me was, uh, he said that we’ve got to put it out in the world and then see how it works, because we just don’t know how it’s going to work. And then is to actually, um, you know, for responsible nations, and that’s a big question, who’s a responsible nation these days. Um, so, and the bad actors are gonna do whatever they want with it. It doesn’t really matter.
Kevin Surace
00:38:37 – 00:39:00
You always have. That’s a, I mean, bad actors take the automobile, fill it with bombs, and run into a building, right? So we’ve lived with this. That’s what I’m saying, kids, it isn’t anything new. Oh, but AI is gonna kill us. Well, cars can kill us too in many, many ways, but we’ve learned to live with them and we learn, and this is true with AI. That’s, does that make sense? That’s sort of my like everybody like all yours.
Jeff Bullas
00:39:00 – 00:39:35
But it’s, yeah, like, so we’ve had Australia we’ve just implemented some rules for teenagers can’t use it till they’re 16, can’t use social media till they’re 16, right? Um, and uh I think there’s been a lot of discussion globally about the fact that the government did that, that’s seen as lack of freedom, freedom of whatever it is, right? Um, the reality is that with a car, we actually, you can’t drive a car until you’re 16 or 17. Um, you can’t drink alcohol in America until you’re 21. So I, I think there’s some common sense guard rails need to be put in place, don’t you think?
Kevin Surace
00:39:36 – 00:40:07
Look, um, protecting. Us from things that they may not be, uh, they’re gonna get mad at me if they’re listening, right? But they may not be sure enough to, to really understand the implications of, you know, when we were in high school, when you were in high school, we thought we were so mature and we were on top of the world, you know. And then you get in your twenties and you look back, you go, I was just a child. I had no idea, right? just had no idea. So I, I think there’s value in saying that certain things.
Kevin Surace
00:40:07 – 00:40:49
Uh, you just need to have more experience on Earth to be ready to handle the implications of it, and I think social media is one of them, so that’s not a bad thing. Um, I mean, there could be kid trusted networks and that would be different, but right now, these networks are open for everyone, and they’re open for abuse, and they’re open to put things in people’s heads that probably aren’t good, and they’re open to, you know, tremendous amounts of feedback loops to keep reinforcing could be the wrong thing, right? So, uh, social media, alcohol, driving, uh, could be, you know, handling firearms, all kinds of things have, have age limits, and they’re probably, it’s probably a good idea.
Jeff Bullas
00:40:49 – 00:41:28
Right. Yeah. Yeah, and this is the challenge that uh social media, I remember talking to a therapist about 1015 years ago, and he was talking about social media being this grand experiment, and it has, so, um. Uh, and for me, I have been in social media since 2008 and started a blog about it, and that’s where I sort of sort of started leaning in. And uh I’m still an optimist at social media, but there’s certainly downsides, and that’s, I suppose being aware is the first place to start in terms of how do we deal with a technology that is grown up. Right,
Kevin Surace
00:41:28 – 00:41:58
yeah, right. Well, I think um. Yeah, I think I’m not sure I would limit, you know, students and kids’ ability to interact with AI, but just know that. The AIA is out of the bag. There are thousands of models out there, big ones and small ones. Most have no guardrails, and there’s just no way to put the cat back in the bag. So great that we have rules and regulations for our largest companies, but that doesn’t change the fact that
Kevin Surace
00:41:59 – 00:42:35
Um, these models are gonna be used for good and bad. Look, already, I mean, for the last year in the ransomware world, uh, you know, there are LLMs that generate absolutely perfect phishing mails, phishing emails that you cannot tell we’re not human generated and randomized and they are targeted to you and they, they look at your background and they will generate, you know, 10,000 in a minute. Uh, and so all the training we do around, uh, fishing. And try to train people to recognize phishing emails. The AI generated ones, you’re not going to recognize and you are going to be fooled.
Kevin Surace
00:42:35 – 00:42:59
And, uh, and, you know, and so the, you know, the way we protect it against that in the future is, is what’s called next generation MFA because all the MFA is hacked today, also all of it. Uh, but NextGen MFA uses biometrics and so, um, uh, I’m working with a company called Token Ring that, that does that’s a biometric ring. And so it only works on your finger, it only works for your finger, it only works for you, and if you lose it, it doesn’t work for anyone else.
Kevin Surace
00:42:59 – 00:43:22
Um, that’s a way that you can be absolutely sure that I’m alive and I’m me, for example, on a Zoom call. It’s also a way that we can be sure that only you get into the applications in a corporation that you’re supposed to be in in the roles you’re supposed to be in. And, and now you don’t care about phishing emails because it doesn’t matter that you’ll, you’ll get to a screen eventually that says, you know, tap your ring.
Kevin Surace
00:43:22 – 00:44:06
And the guy goes, I, you know, the ransomware person goes, I don’t have one of these rings, and I certainly don’t have his ring. And so we’re done, right? We’re over. And so you start protecting all these access points with that kind of biometrics, and I think we, we can close down a lot, about 90% of ransomware comes in the front door, so we can close that down pretty, pretty handily. Um, so it look, but it, but overall, Best time to be alive. I mean, we’ve never had, uh, so much opportunity to use the hours in our day in a, in, in a better way. We’ve never had so much opportunity to have more joy in our life because there’ll be more time to get things done and maybe more free time perhaps. It’s, it’s fabulous. These tools are amazing, as if
Kevin Surace
00:44:07 – 00:44:17
We were in finance, like I said, in the late 80s and the Excel spreadsheet came around. Some people were scared and others go, this is manna from heaven. This is the best thing I’ve ever seen. Hm.
Jeff Bullas
00:44:18 – 00:44:29
So just to wrap it up here on AI, uh, two questions, um. Number one, what is the most exciting thing about AI personally for you right now?
Kevin Surace
00:44:31 – 00:45:04
Well, look, uh, LLMs are plateauing and I think that they will plateau, uh, for quite a while. This is what happens to all the models. You come out with a new model, let’s go, wow, and then just throwing more resources at it doesn’t really make it too much better. So I think we’re in that phase, but we have a long way to go with combinations of uh transformers and diffusion models for video. And to me, Creating, not just short form, but ultimately long form video content is a game changer, and it’s a game changer for this reason.
Kevin Surace
00:45:05 – 00:45:35
Everyone, maybe everyone, you know, maybe everyone worldwide fancies themselves as a filmmaker, fancies themselves. And I’ve been lucky enough to be a filmmaker. I’ve, I’ve got two films, one is Estella Scrooge. They’re both musicals, and, and, and, and the other one is 1660 Vine. It’s done very well. It’s on Amazon, it’s on Prime right now, Amazon Prime. So, um. What’s interesting is those were filmed with cameras and camera people and a crew of 100 people and in a very traditional way on location.
Kevin Surace
00:45:36 – 00:46:25
But now, I, you know, I’ve been working with a lot of this video generation technology. And I can generate people, objects, materials, backgrounds, wherever, into any scene or location that I want without a camera person, without um audio people. And I’m, I’m not trying to get rid of anyone’s jobs, right, right, but, and without actors. Now, here’s what’s interesting to me about that. You want to make a a a high quality, you know, Hollywood style movie today. Call it a million dollars a minute. It’s rough numbers. $120 million gets you 120 minutes, so a million dollars a minute. And yes, people can do some at 100 or $200,000 a minute, but that’s the number for a finished film, OK. What happens when I can start to generate.
Kevin Surace
00:46:26 – 00:47:01
The real films that I’ve written or had AI helped me write, whatever, and generate a 120 minute film for $120. Which is about within 5 years, that’s what we’ll be. Well, now, again, everyone will be a filmmaker, and most people will make junk. But today, to be a real filmmaker, what do I have to do? I have to go knock on Hollywood doors, and I have to get a distributor, and I have to get a major studio to back me, and I got to get someone to write a $120 million check. In 2030, I just sit down at my computer for maybe a week, maybe a few.
Kevin Surace
00:47:01 – 00:47:47
I create the film of my dreams and I stick it on YouTube and it goes viral, I get 10 millions of dollars from the views. That’s all. It’s uh the, the, the distribution’s already set up. I don’t go to the theater. I don’t go to any just distributor. YouTube. They pay me already. I don’t have to do anything. Is that a bad thing? Is it a good thing? It just is. So I am fascinated and excited with the opportunity to democratize storytelling. And today, the gate was Hollywood and only very few stories got told. We all know people who wrote script after script after script, and Hollywood never took their script. Well, now they can just go create their thing by themselves. Maybe it’s junk. So one of them will become, you know, a billion dollar hit. Yeah.
Jeff Bullas
00:47:49 – 00:48:14
The other thing interesting about that is just thinking about it is that Netflix is maybe one of the steps beyond Hollywood to actually give access to filmmakers a voice. So Netflix is that first step beyond the studio, isn’t it, because, but after that, what you’ve just talked about is for anyone to create a video that could turn up on, An alternate to Netflix or on Netflix. It really doesn’t matter.
Kevin Surace
00:48:14 – 00:48:57
Netflix used to be that, but then after the last year or so of condensing their team and laying off people, etc. their bar is now very high. They act like Hollywood and the studio, and, and, and by the way, their, their, their offices are in Hollywood, right? So they act like a regular Hollywood studio now and the gate is right there and you can’t get in. I mean, you, good luck. Yeah. So, where they were trying to bring on, you know, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of new things to their program, to their platform every year or even thousands, now they have to produce it, they have to develop it, they will, they might buy your story, but probably they’re only going to Sundance and buying the winners at Sundance. That’s it. They wanna goof.
Kevin Surace
00:48:57 – 00:49:35
Around with the rest of it. And then, you know, no blame. So even they’re going from generating, you know, hundreds of different kinds of new content a year down to like maybe 6, much smaller, or 8 or 10 or 12 because it got too expensive. Everybody, everybody was spending $20 billion a year and it turns out that that dog doesn’t hunt. Disney lost money, Netflix lost money, and then they all changed their tune and say, All right, let’s just do a few things and do those right. Starts to look like TV networks, by the way, you know, they’d have 6 new shows this year. That was it. And they put all their weight behind it, and 1 or 2 made it, the other ones didn’t, and the next season, you did it again. That’s starting to look like that.
Jeff Bullas
00:49:36 – 00:49:57
Yeah. That’s really great insight. OK, last question I ask is. Let’s go 10 years into the future. What does, what has, how has AI changed work and how has AI changed us as humans? A big question, but you know, I’d be interested in your thumbnail sketch of that big landscape.
Kevin Surace
00:49:57 – 00:50:38
There are a lot of tasks we do today we will no longer do. Again, I always look at the past and say, do we have a model for this? Excel is the perfect model. There are a lot of tasks we did before Excel that we never did after Excel showed up. Long division is an example. Ledger books is an example. Just went away. It didn’t mean that finance went away. It didn’t mean that finance people went away, but they came very strategic instead of tactical. So they were very tactical before that. 10 years later, they, they were strategic. We as humans in our jobs are gonna become much more strategic, much more the robot overlord, and much less actually doing the tasks. That’s #1. 2.
Kevin Surace
00:50:38 – 00:51:22
10 years we have humanoid robots, they’re in our life. They’re at our home, they’re in our work, uh, they are our physical agents or fidgeal actually, and um and we will rely on them, and we will train them to be either like us or to just be partners to us or whatever, we will call her Mary or Joe. Or Bill, whatever we name the things, right? And, um, and they’ll just be part of, part and parcel of this world. Um, I can take you through all the reasons why that is in 10 years, but, but there will be millions of these things of these humanoid robots here. Uh, it is the technology is flying along, and once we started doing reinforcement learning with them over the last year they started learning at a, at an accelerated rate.
Kevin Surace
00:51:22 – 00:51:49
So I’m very excited to have a robot that um, is, is here with me that does the dishes every night. I mean, my wife would like that. I would like that. It can cook if I, he or she can cook when we want it to. We will treat them as human. Did that work years ago with a virtual assistant. We learned that they treat these computer generated personas as human. So we will give them names and we’ll treat them as human, just like we do our pets in a way.
Kevin Surace
00:51:50 – 00:52:17
And that, that will be life and life will be better, not worse. It will be better not you, will, will some robots go crazy? Sure. Will some autonomous vehicles crash? Yes. Will some things happen? Yes. However, for 99.99% of us, it’s going to be a way better life than we have today, and, and it will be far more strategic and less tactical and probably have much more free time.
Jeff Bullas
00:52:18 – 00:52:36
I think you summed it up very, very well, and I’m very excited for the future. I’ve been in tech since ’84 and uh I’ve never seen anything like this. The world of AI is just opening up opportunities on so many levels. Um, both in work, play, entertainment, and list, you know,
Kevin Surace
00:52:37 – 00:53:17
but, but you could have said that to me in the year roughly, uh, you know, ’98, 99, 2000 when the internet was finally just taking off like crazy, you might have said, and you probably did then. I’ve never seen anything take off. Like this. There’s a billion people on this thing, and we’re all communicating and there’s these new social, this is unbelievable. I’ve never seen anything. Then the smartphones shut up. You go, I’ve never seen anything like this. Look at how fast this took off. All of a sudden we’re a billion of them worldwide in like a year and a half. So my only point is we’ve seen these technology things hit. This one’s faster because we’re building on smartphones and internet already. But
Kevin Surace
00:53:17 – 00:53:44
Um, we know what the future brings, and the future brings, I can’t live without a smartphone, I can’t live without the internet, I can’t live without a PC or Mac on my desk. These are things we can’t, we can live without a home phone. Completely, don’t need it. But we can’t live without, in fact, we can’t live without a television, but we can’t live without these other things. And so we will, I mean, we can’t live without AI going forward. That’s the message and it’s, yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:53:44 – 00:53:44
like I
Kevin Surace
00:53:44 – 00:53:45
said, very exciting.
Jeff Bullas
00:53:46 – 00:53:57
Very cool. One last question on a personal level. When you wake up in the morning. And you have all the money in the world, and maybe you do, um. What
Kevin Surace
00:53:59 – 00:54:00
has all the money in the world.
Jeff Bullas
00:54:03 – 00:54:07
What brings you deep joy every day when you wake up and excites you?
Kevin Surace
00:54:08 – 00:54:43
So, um, I’m working on a, a, a, a book called The Joy Success Cycle, and, and one of, uh, you know, sort of one of the credences in there. One of the things that you have to do is you wake up and, and you have to agree to have no more than one internal or external complaint a day. One. And, and Jeff, tomorrow if you Track all the number of complaints you have internal and external. Some you voice, some you know voice. It’s over 100. Humans just have over 100 a day. So now you have to train yourself to get to 1. So the first thing I do is say, I have nothing to complain about, I’m alive. The whole day is ahead of me.
Kevin Surace
00:54:43 – 00:55:22
I get to do whatever I want with that day. I’ve already made a list of the things I want to accomplish. I’m excited to accomplish them. I’m excited to see what the day brings. And I’m excited to move some technology or move my life or move something forward, just ever so slightly, just even an inch. Uh, I’m excited to read about the, the, the latest in AI. I have to read voraciously by the day. Um, I’m excited to do this podcast. I mean, that, that’s how I look at everything, right? So every single one of those things brings me joy because I find the joy in them. It is very different than the way most people look at it, and I call the book The Joy Success cycle.
Kevin Surace
00:55:23 – 00:56:04
Because if you want to maximize your success, you are going to do so by having joy at every task and everything that comes at you during the day, rather than, oh. Oh, this is so hard. Oh, I’ve got to fire this person. Oh, I’ve got to clean the toilet. Oh, I’ve got to stop. There needs to be joy in every single one of those, no matter how bad it looks. It’s like, well, there’s just joy in completing this task. And I’ll be so happy to get it completed and and get all the negatives out of your mind and start focusing. And the more you keep your joy at a 10, from 0 to 10, we call it the positive quotient. The more success you will naturally have because your mind is open to see the problems and the solutions.
Jeff Bullas
00:56:04 – 00:56:08
I love it. So when’s the book out? When’s it scheduled to be out?
Kevin Surace
00:56:08 – 00:56:31
I will have great joy when I have an exact date on that, but, but basically I’m on the final draft now, which we’ve been, you know, drafting for a year. So, uh, sometime this year is the goal by the end of the year, and I’m excited to excited to just get it out. It’s short, it’s gonna be about 100 pages so that anyone can read it really quickly. I love short books. The publishers hate them, but I like them because.
Kevin Surace
00:56:31 – 00:56:55
I don’t have time for 500 pages. No one has time for a tone. Give me the, tell me what I need to do. Tell me why I need to do it. Give me one example, but not 50. You know these books that say, you know what you need to do? You need, I’m gonna make it up. You need to get health insurance. And then it goes on and gives you examples for 500 pages of people with and without health insurance. OK, I got it. Get health insurance. I’m done. I knew that in page one.
Jeff Bullas
00:56:55 – 00:57:05
I know, and the reality of reading a lot of books is like. This is the point, and here’s, you know, 25 case studies that I got it after case study number one.
Kevin Surace
00:57:05 – 00:57:35
Like sometimes I get it after no case study. I go, that’s a good point. Why, why give me any case studies at all, but you’re right, Jeff. This is how people write and they do it because the publishers say, well, we want proof after proof after proof after proof. I do not have time in my life to do that. I don’t want it, nor does anyone else. So I want to respect people’s time. and you respect people’s time by writing very short books. And if the publisher doesn’t like it, I’ll self-publish or I’ll publish through other some some other means, but I don’t want to put out a 500 page to, so I
Jeff Bullas
00:57:35 – 00:57:52
totally agree. In fact, they’ve told the, the publisher says you’ve got to write 300 pages. And so it’s padded out and the story’s already been told at the beginning of every chapter. It could have been, it should have been 100. In fact, we need very, very good editors now rather than actually writers.
Kevin Surace
00:57:53 – 00:58:25
I’ll, I’ll tell you my, yes, and by the way, Chachi, he’s a great editor. My, the publishers, uh, that we’ve talked to all said, well, 300 pages ideally, minimum 250. I said, I want it to be 100. It’s my book. Well, if you want us to publish it, we would never publish a 100-page book. Well, that’s unfortunate. Because you’re missing out on the huge market. The huge market is more books than 100 pages or less that I can kill in a few hours. That’s the market. And nobody, well, but we make our money, you know, you know, you don’t make money by printing more pages actually. Uh,
Jeff Bullas
00:58:26 – 00:58:29
it cost, it costs more money to produce the book. I mean,
Kevin Surace
00:58:29 – 00:58:49
it, well, I think somehow they think if it’s only 100 pages they. They can’t charge as much. No, actually, I don’t care. 1495 is 1495. I really don’t care. In fact, I’ll pay you more if it’s less pages. I really will. I’ll pay you more for less pages. Can you, can you, can you show me the 500 page, the 200 page, and the 100 page and charge me more the less pages, I’m gonna buy the less pages. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
00:58:50 – 00:59:10
distillation is basically. The art is for a book writer, I believe distillation is actually very, very important. In fact, one of the best skills you can bring to the table. And but I have one other question. With with AI and chat GBT and content creation, why has it taken you a year to write the book? Well,
Kevin Surace
00:59:13 – 00:59:23
I did use GPT 40 to help me rephrase, uh, chapters. So I would write a chapter.
Jeff Bullas
00:59:23 – 00:59:44
And I have a ghostwriter that I work with as well. And the reason is, is because I’m not an English major. I shouldn’t pretend I am, right? So whatever I write and I write all of this stuff, we got like 10 chapters. Uh, it’s actually gonna be 14 chapters in the end. Uh, I’ve got my 14 chapters. I really want a real editor and writer to re-look at that and reorganize and just get another set of eyes on it.
Jeff Bullas
00:59:44 – 01:00:23
Right? That is an English major, and that’s not me. And, and in the middle of that, I also want to submit a whole chapter to GBD 40 and say, how would you rewrite this? What are some salient points? Are there some points that aren’t coming out as strong? Are there some more, you know, so I take all of that into the sort of final account. Um, again, in the end, It’s my writing. In the end, they’re my ideas, right? I didn’t get the ideas from GPD 4, but, but, um, a writer, a ghostwriter, and, and, and, and an LLM can help you articulate what you’re trying to say in ways that might be more acceptable to more people. Yeah, because I’m not an English major.
Kevin Surace
01:00:23 – 01:00:33
Yeah. And also, despite AI and chatGBT and content creation, there is a certain artists struggle behind creating a book when it’s your story.
Jeff Bullas
01:00:34 – 01:00:56
I’ll tell you the one thing that I found is there, there are certain things that I do when I write that are, um, you can tell Kevin wrote that, you know, it’s the way Kevin would tell that joke or the way I would uh play it straight or whatever. And so I, I, um, I’m trying to put more of those in there. I want to make sure they’re in there because that’s kind of my voice. That’s how I would say it and
Jeff Bullas
01:00:57 – 01:01:23
You know, GBD 4 and editors tend to take that out and tend to make it a little more smooth, and I, and I’ve reverted some of that and said, I, I actually want this in the way that I would say it, which is uh very colloquial. It’s just off, it’s off the cuff, right? It’s extemporaneous and it sounds extemporaneous. It sounds like he wasn’t really thoughtful about it, but I got it and it’s kind of funny and it stuck with me. I think just be there cause if they were talking to me, that’s what they would have heard. Yeah.
Kevin Surace
01:01:23 – 01:01:26
In other words, they want to hear the story told by you. Yeah,
Jeff Bullas
01:01:27 – 01:01:37
yeah, yeah. When I do the audio book though, I’m not gonna read the whole book because I have my voice clone that reads it perfectly. So I have no need to actually sit in front of a mic anymore.
Kevin Surace
01:01:37 – 01:01:59
Exactly. Kevin, it’s been an absolute blast, buddy, and, uh, really enjoyed it and uh thank you for sharing your wisdom and insights and uh. Look, this will be out in about 2 weeks, um, thank you very much for your time and um look forward to reading the book, so drop me a line, send me a text or send me your robot or whatever it is, right, to tell me about that. My agent will call
Jeff Bullas
01:01:59 – 01:02:00
your agent.
Kevin Surace
01:02:01 – 01:02:05
My my AI agent will call my AR agent.
Jeff Bullas
01:02:05 – 01:02:08
That’s exactly right. That’s it. Thanks, Jeff. It was a pleasure.
Kevin Surace
01:02:08 – 01:02:11
All right, thank you very much. OK, bye.