AI時代の仕事で成功と喜びを見つける――「バーチャルアシスタントの父」Kevin Surace との対談

Welcome to the Pulse of AI. I'm Jason Stoughton, and on this episode of the Pulse of AI podcast, I am joined by Kevin Seraes. Known as the father of the virtual assistant and the holder of 95 patents, Kevin has been at the forefront of technology for decades. But Kevin's work is not simply about inventing or predicting the future. It is about helping people operate successfully inside of it. Kevin began asking the question, why do some people remain creative, adaptable, energized, and effective during rapid change, while others become overwhelmed by it? That question became the foundation for his recent book, The Joy Success Cycle. Its central premise is simple. Joy is not the reward for success. It is the mechanism that makes success possible. I hope you enjoyed the conversation. Let's get to it. Well, welcome to the show.

Absolutely. I'm glad to be here. In fact, I'm joyful to be here, Jason. That's great. That's great. I'm excited to have you. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Tell us about your background. And importantly, sort of what was the evolution that led you to write this book? And then tell us a little bit about the book. Yeah, great question. My background is a tech background, right? I've been in tech for 40 years or so, not to date me, but for a long time. since basically literally the PC era and Excel and everything that came after that, right, saw it all. And then I was fortunate enough to get involved in AI. I'm both a coder and a hardware designer as a background. And so I invented the AI virtual assistant, late 1990s, General Magic, that ultimately got licensed to Apple and Amazon and everybody else who was making assistants. like Siri and Alexa and such.

So I've been fortunate enough to be in the applied AI space, if you will, not building models, but using whatever we've got, hidden Markov models at the time. Today, obviously, we have Transformers and a variety of improving Gen AI every few weeks now, which has been fabulous. It's unbelievable. Best time to be alive. But one of the things that people kept asking me is, why are you so positive? Why do you keep inventing? Why do you have 95 patents? And in digging into that, I said, well, it looks like I treat everything in life and all my tasks and everything I work on, all the problems we're solving differently than other people do. And so what I do is I put joy before success, not after. And we've all been taught once you're successful, you know that term, you'll be happy, you'll be joyful, you'll have money, you'll have, no, no, no. Once you're joyful at everything you do, you will reach the peak of your success. You will reach the peak of your success. And then people said, well, you've got to write a book because I've been given this. I do 40 keynotes a year. I've been given this as a keynote for a long time among my AI keynotes.

And people said, we've got to write a book so that we have a method to take away. And the big reason to write the book was people more and more over the last two or three years have said, oh, AI is sucking the joy out of my life. I go, is there something wrong with you? Get a life. But they're serious. Like that is the opposite of where I am, probably the opposite of where you are, Jason, I know. And yet to them, this thing has come along. It's going to take their job. It's going to take their husband's job or whatever. It's sucking the joy out of everything. And what I realized is AI isn't sucking the joy out of everything. Let me hold up the book, by the way, for those who are on the video podcast here. You can see Amazon, Barnes & Noble, everywhere else you can get it. It's actually taking the joyless work. And I'll give you an example, Jason. You've done, I don't know, three or four or 500 of these podcasts. If you started early enough, long enough ago, you were the summarizer. You were the transcriber.

You literally had to do that work. Okay, today, at the end of this, we're on Riverside. We're recording on Riverside. In a little bit of a time, it will not only transcribe it, it will automatically give you the summaries that you need for social media. It'll break up clips for me. Yeah, that's the thing. You can then wait and take that. It'll break up the clips for social media. It does all this. None of that was joyful work. That was required work. The joyful work was doing these interviews. The joyless tasks is what AI is doing. AI, I don't want to interview an AI. You don't want to interview an AI. But you do certain, I mean, one time for interest's sake. But for certain, you want to do as many of these as you can. And by AI taking those paths away from you, you get to do more of these. This is brilliant. It is the most brilliant time. So we cover that in the book. We say, look, AI is going to take your joyless work and stop worrying about it. Stop worrying about it. And I'll give you one more example because everyone does it.

Everyone does PowerPoints. They've had to for 25 years. Nobody likes it, but they do it. But they've done it so long that they think it's their job. Well, you know, I have to take this thing and I'm going to have to present next week. and I spent the week doing a PowerPoint. Okay, you spent the week probably aligning fonts, looking for pictures, doing all those things, getting the colors right, getting the corporate logo, all the stuff you've got to do, right? I mean, 60 slides can take you a week. Okay, it takes me an hour now. I have Claude Design. Here's what I want to say. Here's how I'm going to say it. Go write it for me. And I know I can use Copilot, which gives me a different outcome. I can use Nobogelum, which gives me a different outcome. I can use Manus, which gives me a different outcome. All of these, I happen to like Claude Design right now. But the bottom line is it took all that joyless stuff away from me. So I knew what I was going to present in a keynote in an hour. And then it would take me two or three days to hone every slide so it looked professional.

Now I know what I want to do in an hour. I send the task off to Claude Design, including if I'm missing some stats or something to go look them up. I'll come back in a couple hours and it's done. In the meantime, I'm doing emails. I'm doing other stuff. This is brilliant. So if people understand focusing on the joy in your work, the joy in the tasks. By the way, another one is stop complaining. It's the number one rule in the book. So the rule in the book is you get one complaint a day. One complaint a day. So tomorrow when you get up, Jason, I want you to do this. Promise me you'll try. You get up in the morning, count all the internal and external complaints you have. Most will be internal yourself. You get out of bed, your knees hurt. This happens, that happens, the breakfast sucks, the coffee's cold, whatever. Okay, you're going to have 100 complaints or 80 complaints or 50 complaints in a day. Okay, whatever it is. The next day, one complaint a day. because every time you complain, you're taking your positive quotient,

basically the positiveness of your mind, you're taking it down into the gutter. And finally, you're in the Grand Canyon, you have to dig yourself out. And most people are digging themselves out all day from their own doing. And when you stop doing it and you realize you control it, all of a sudden you're at your peak performance and you're ready to be the most successful you can be every single day. It is a game changer. So that second day when you get up and you go, I worked out hard yesterday. My knees hurt. You used up the one. You're done. And now you work all day trying to avoid another complaint. You know, I completely, I buy into that. You know, I think you always have to find, you know, joy is a choice. Happiness is a choice. It's, you know, it's the way it is, right? You can look at life, you know, glass half empty, half full. Jason, I look at firing people with joy. Let me tell you why. I will tell you why.

First of all, they know it's not working by the time it's time. I know it's not working by the time it's time. When we finally sit down, well, they're going to be sad that, you know, they may not have a paycheck for a while, whatever the case is. Ultimately, three months from now, they're going to be happier because they're going to find a better match for them, and the company is going to be happier, and I'm going to be happier. Everybody wins. I know it sucks for a month or two. If you're capable, there's plenty of jobs out there. United States, right? I can't tell you about China or India or something else, but United States. So I enter into it with joy. Not giddy joy, right? But just say, you know, here's the thing, right? Everybody's going to come out on the other side, and you're going to be much happier in a new job that is a better match for your skills. You are going to be happier. And they look at me, and they don't believe me, and they call me in two months. They say, you were right. Thank you. I needed to get out of there. It wasn't working for me. Yep. It wasn't working for any of us, right? Yeah. So I go down the line. Yeah. No, I mean, you know, it's interesting. You know, your book's at a good time. You know, we've been talking about, you know, one of the things, you've been in AI a long time.

I've been in AI a long time. And if you look at AI, I'm an AI optimist, and, you know, I know you are as well. Very much. You know, the theory has always been, right? And there's this world of negative PR, the complaints that you're talking about, the negative AI PR. I know. They should live by that. It's ongoing. I call it job destruction porn, right, where it just gets clicked. People click on it. Why is my job going to go? So it's just these high- No one wants to read that things are going to get better. Right. That doesn't generate clicks. They read, read about the job you're going to lose next week. Right. Click. Read about how AI broke out of containment is going to kill everyone. It's going to launch nuclear weapons. It's going to click, click, click. So, I mean, if you're at the New York Times, this is your job is to get people to read every story. I get that. But you have to, as a reader, you have to know that. Yep. You have to know that. But here's one of the questions I have for you.

Is that, and I've thought a lot about it, so I just want to know your thing. So, you know, the theory is, like you're talking about, over time, AI is going to take this drudgery work away from you, right? It's, you know, that's what's going to happen, right? It's going to – Joyless work. Joyless work. You know, drudgery, joyless, you know, these things that sort of drain you. The things that – the actual jobs that if you really think about the tasks, not the jobs, the tasks within your job, the tasks within, you know, what you think of as your job, it's going to take those away. And those are the ones that get made fun of on things like The Office and shows and movies, right? The things where you sit there and you're just in a cubicle all the time. I now have to count the paperclips. I now have to count the paperclips. But when you do that, right, what I'm assuming from just listening to you, and this is the kind of way it has to happen, you have to sort of reinvent yourself, right? You have to go through and find your purpose within this newly emerging, evolving organization that we live in.

Yes. So how do you see that happening? Great. You know, we talk about that in the book because one of the core premises is for you to have any joy in any of your tasks, you have to have a sense of purpose. Like you can't go in whatever work is mindlessly and go, well, I guess I'm kidding, right? I guess I have to count the paperclips again. There's no sense of purpose in that. Why am I even doing this? Who cares, right? And so you have to have a sense of purpose. You have to find your sense of purpose. Now, for some people, that'll change. By the way, for some people, it changes by the week, by the month. Sometimes it's family. Sometimes it's religion. Sometimes it's making money. Sometimes it's inventing, right? It could be anything, right? Sure. It could be that you're a host of a podcast. That's the sense of purpose. It's like I'm going to entertain people and learn and share ideas, et cetera. So you have to find your sense of purpose. And for some people, that may change. And I'll give you some examples. To say that no jobs are going to be impacted would be wrong, and I don't want people to understand that.

But I can guarantee you, as far as I can see out, overall, in the U.S., I'm going to cordon that off, and I will tell you why in a moment. In the U.S., there will be more demand for more people than there ever have been, and there are less of them available to work. 18 million in the next few years are retiring and 13 million are coming in. That's a 5 million person gap that's not going to change. We don't have enough everything. We don't have construction workers to build the AI data centers, right? I mean, we don't have anything, right? We don't have enough of anything. Now, look, people say, I can't get a job. I can't get a job. You may not be able to get the job that you want, I get that, but you go down the street of any street in America, and every restaurant has a help wanted sign. I'm not trying to be mean. Every restaurant has a help wanted sign. Why? Can't get enough workers. Why do you close early? Can't get enough workers. Can't get out of there. There not enough humans in the United States to do the jobs that there are And that going to get worse Why is it going to get worse One people are retiring faster than they come in because of the birth rate The second reason is we not importing people like we used to

for whatever political reasons those are. And the third reason is that our companies are becoming more productive. And when you become more productive, you drive down the cost of goods and services and you drive up the demand. And I'll give you an example. If I were a startup in Silicon Valley trying to overturn the insurance industry, if, Jason, you and I wanted to start that, and for all I know there's ten of them, right, but if that's what I wanted to do, I'd say, huh, a good-sized insurance company has 50,000 workers, mostly processing claims, mostly, and they've got people selling, and they've got, you know. Now, if I could reduce the cost of that towards zero and use agentic, fully agentic claim processing, right, with AI checks against fraud and all the other things, I may be able to take 90% of the non-payment costs out of insurance. And I may be able to do that with just more people.

Or more. With just a few people. Now, that could be five people, ten people in an office with 10,000 agents doing all the work. Now, what happens? Well, at first, you have no business. Nobody's ever heard of you. You're Joe's AI insurance company. But over some period of years, you start taking everyone's business. And now you have a $10 billion insurance business. A $10 billion insurance business needs you to hire an awful lot of people, as it turns out, because you've got salespeople, you've got customer support, You know, you've got all kinds of things that we're, you know, real people have to be. So when you drive down, and by the way, it expands the number of people who can afford your insurance, who could afford any kind of insurance like that, whatever it was, right? Because you've driven down the cost of goods and services. So this has always happened. Automation has been driving down the cost of goods and services since we started automating at GM. 1961, the first GM robot. 61. Without robots at GM, a car would be $300,000 today.

But they can make one for $25,000. Why? Yeah. A lot of robotics. A lot of robotics. And without the robotics, they wouldn't employ anyone because no one would buy a car. Well, a great example is radiology, right? You know, 15 years ago, Hinton said, oh, radiologists are going to be done by 2025. That's right. And what happened was, as you brought that, as AI could read the radiology screens better, it allowed for a drop in prices, an increase in demand, right? That's right. It allowed radiologists to do more. More people became served, so you could look for more cancer. You could look for more stuff. And now radiologists have never been in higher demand, and they make more money than they did ever. That's right. Because we drove the cost of the service down just enough so that more doctors are sending more patients to get radiology, to get X-rayed or whatever. It is fascinating. So there are some, you know, look, frontier, tier one customer support probably at some risk.

We're not going to have as many tier ones. We may end up having more tier twos and tier threes because we'll drive down the cost of goods and services. There will be more people to service. Software QA, an area that I've been involved in, AI can write scripts now. Yeah. Sorry, it writes scripts at some companies better than others, but it writes them. And the industry employed, you know, two to three million people writing scripts or doing manual testing, mostly in India. That task, I'm not saying QA jobs, so that task as part of the QA effort is going away or gone. and to some people that was their entire job. They should look for a different job. That task is going away. I can't change it. So there are a few, but there's only a handful of things that I see going away, while there's others that are just growing. We also went through this in finance. 1989, Excel shows up. Everyone in finance, virtually everyone was doing one thing, pencil and ledger book.

rows and rows and rows of people at every corporation in America. Rows of thousands of people. All of them went away. We employ more people in finance today than we did then, working on the strategy of how do we deploy our money, are we getting the best ROI from our money, et cetera, et cetera. So everybody got up-leveled to something that humans do better rather than just the counting points. You know, that's right. That's an interesting thing. I mean, we could go job by job, right, industry by industry where that's happening. In finance, you can see, you know, you used to be able to hire recent MBAs and they'd read 10Ks, right? And they'd be able to read three 10Ks a month. And they're difficult and they're laborious. AI does that now. AI does every 10K. So there's more coverage of companies. More companies are getting investment. You know, more people are, you know, so we could do that. But here's a challenge, right? And I deal with a lot of CEOs of companies who are going through AI transformation, right? And, you know, they're trying to become, you know, everybody uses the term AI first, right?

But it's more around being AI centered, right? AI forward at this point, right? AI first companies are going to be more like the insurance company you're talking about. It starts with three people and they start it and reimagine the business from scratch and, you know, they go out. But with the agentic world that we live in, right, one of the realities of it is for it to work, for the workflows to work, for, you know, this swarm of agents within an organization to be able to collaborate and orchestrate and make things happen. Employees have to do that. That's where it comes from, right? When you're trying to create workflows in marketing or finance or the supply chain, it's the employees that have to happen within the organization, right? They have to be a part of this transformation. Yeah, but the agent is like an employee. It is an employee, and it takes a part of your – You have 10 new employees or whatever it is. Yes. So there's really two challenges – well, there's more, but there's really two sort of core challenges that, you know, sort of C-suite leaders face today, right, when they're trying to do an AI-forward, AI-centered company.

And they're doing it really bad. They're doing it really poorly. Is understand how AI can really take tasks, not jobs, right? Really understand where it fits in with this organization. And secondly, communicating that effectively to the employees. So what we've talked about so far in this podcast is an individual, hey, you have to really figure out yourself. You have to do this. But company CEOs and team leaders really have to go to the employees and say, hey, we need to reimagine our business. We don't want to automate a job, a full job, because that will never happen. because what agents do is they take pieces of what you do every day, right, and they make you more productive. So, you know, instead of replacing me as a podcaster, and when I'm wearing my podcaster app, they replace the editing, the summarization, and stuff like that. That's what a good agent does, right, and allows me to do what I'm doing right now, right? But that takes explaining to employees throughout the organization.

What are your recommendations for that? Well, look, so employees have to be part of the solution, and we've all read the stats that more than 30% of employees are sabotaging agents and AI in a variety of ways, right? When I say AI first, when I say AI first, what I mean is every employee should first go to AI and leverage AI to do their tasks. Don't go to Word. You go to, if it's Copilot, if it's Claude, if it's Gemini. I don't care what model, right? But you go, I'm an AI first person. And it's not about just the company. It's like, that's what I do first. I go to AI first. So, for example, when I do a spreadsheet now, I actually don't go to Excel. I go to Claude, Gemini, chat, whatever, and I say, create a spreadsheet that for this audience, and here's the data and here's the charts and graphs.

Why? Because the UI to Excel, which is huge, even I, you know, because I use it, but I don't use it like a finance person, even I cannot remember every formula and I've got to go find it. And I want these things to be read, but only if this happens. How do I do that? Forget it. I just tell a system to do that. I tell AI to do it. It does it for me. It does it automatically for me. This is brilliant, right? This is the way it should work. That's what's supposed to happen. So everyone can be AI first, and then that accelerates your job. It makes your job much more joyful. Like everything is good. But here's the problem with that. Let me push back on that. You and I, and this is what's happening, right? You and I do that because it makes us more productive for our core business. So this is part of what I do in life, podcasting. It's not my whole business.

But this is a business that I run as a solo side gig, solo entrepreneur on this. Right, right, right. So I have only upside on automating myself. I have only positivity and joy that comes out when I take that test. If I was a podcaster in a large podcasting organization, if you will, right? Yeah. And I didn't have trust in my company. I didn't have communication from my CEO. And my CEO comes out and says, hey, we're going to become an AI first, AI deployed company. We're going through AI transformation. the lack of communication and lack of trust that if I make myself more productive, I get to keep my job as opposed to I'm going to use AI more and more and more, and eventually I'm going to walk out the door. Here's my answer to that. First of all, no one is going to willingly eliminate their job.

And so you as a boss need to know that, right? Yep. And if that's what you intend to do, you better pull them in and have a different conversation. but most people aren't trying to do that. I mean, those aren't the layoffs I'm seeing is the truth, right? The data does not show that. The data shows this, and I've seen it over and over again. I think you're seeing the same, which is this. There are people getting laid off. You know which ones they are? People who are on AI first. The people who aren't using AI. The people who are pushing back. You never lay off the robot overlord, ever. And so when you go, and I'll give you an example. You go to a coding team today. Most coding teams are using cloud code today. but you could use others, but nonetheless, they're that or curse or whatever. But there are people who push back. Well, it's not that good for firmware. Well, it doesn't work with Rust as well. Well, it doesn't. They get laid off. Why? I don't need them. Because the people who are using AI are now 10x more productive. In fact, my most productive coders in my companies, they may have six or eight agents.

actually each one working on a particular feature or bug or something in parallel, and they become literally the agent overlord, right? And by the way, the coordination of that and the thoughtfulness of that, like I need that person. That person is never going anywhere. There's another person on the other side of the room, and yeah, I used it once, and the thing didn't compile, and then I went and found this open source thing, and that worked a little better, and get out. Just sorry. How can I as a boss have room for you? I don't have room for you. with all due respect. It's the old IBM saying that AI is not going to replace people. People using AI are going to replace people. That's right. My strong recommendation is use AI first. Use it for everything and make sure your boss knows that you are an AI first person. You are going to stay forever because even when they go out to hire new hires or people out of college, the first thing they're getting asked is, tell me about your experience with AI. You get these kids go, well, at my university, I was told we were not

to use it, so I was very careful. I used it a little bit. Yeah, get out. The next one comes in and says, yeah, I'll be honest with you. I got straight A's and everything, because I used it for everything. Plus, I used these other models you've never heard of. Plus, I did this other thing, and I wrote three agents, and they said, you're hired. That's who I want, because that's the future of the workplace. Yeah. It's also interesting, one thing we haven't touched on, and it's where I come back to time and time again, because this conversation that we're having has been going on for 20 years, right? 25 years, you know, everywhere you go, oh, you work in AI and you're leading a keynote speaking, you're leading a group, and it's like, it's gonna eliminate jobs, what about accountants? What about, you know, radiologists? But you know what gets lost in the discussion and what gets lost in sort of the AI optimism is that so I graduated college in 93 right You young Just before Netscape on public right So when I was in college, I mean, as you know, you know the time frame.

Yeah, you're using the Internet for a little bit of this. There's some kind of research. It was college. There's no interface. You know, people. There's no real Internet until 95. Exactly. You know, and so when you would go in or when I would go in at that time and all my cohorts and you talk to, you know, professional career counselors and you talk to leading business people and, you know, somebody would introduce you to the senior people in your network and you sit down. Right. CEO or a real senior, you know, man or woman. Right. What? Right. What should I do? What are the jobs in the future? Not one. Not one. I never heard it once. Hey, there's going to be this thing called an internet, and what's going to happen is there are going to be all these jobs from cloud architect, software as a service, you know, blah, blah, blah. There's going to be a thing called podcasting, and there's going to be a thing called social media that's going to be based on all this because of instant communication. Nobody said that, you know. And so one of the things that gets lost in this is that we talk about AI and how it's going to impact current jobs, right,

how it's going to impact this specific job. But we don't talk about the millions of jobs that I don't know what they're going to be. And people say, well, what are they going to be? I'm like, I don't know. But nobody knew in 93 either. That's right. Nobody. That's right. You couldn't have imagined what we're doing right now. We've already created several hundred thousand jobs. There was a recent survey that found at least 354,000 known jobs with the title AI in them that didn't exist two years ago and just came up in the last two years. And that includes things like AI ethicists, like what are the ethics around what you're doing with AI at work and how it impacts people. And then you've got, you know, like the Joy Success Cycle is a way to work in the AI world. How does that impact me? What do I do? How do I? So, you know, it's changing more people's lives in the AI world than it did before the AI world. But these ideas didn't even exist. And so you're right. Millions of jobs are going to be created. Many of them we can't imagine what they are.

And now I think the following. Remember, what AI does to a lot of our tasks is it drives the general cost of doing some of these things towards zero, right? So the cost of creating a blog post went from $1,500 four years ago to zero today. I don't know, $10, whatever, right? The cost of creating a full-length feature film will go from $100 million, and within 10 years it will be $100, right, if you want to do it yourself, right? And today it's a few thousand dollars of tokens, and it might be $10,000 of tokens, but it's not $100 million of tokens, right? So we can see what's happening here. Now what's going to happen there? all of a sudden, instead of there being, I don't know, a few hundred filmmakers that matter in the United States, there may be, I don't know, 10 million filmmakers all putting their stuff on YouTube because everyone can make a film for $1,000 that looks like, $100 that looks like Hollywood.

And so all these people that had a story to tell but could never get accepted by Universal or Paramount or Sony will be telling their story. This is unbelievable. Look, it's not that long ago we didn't have influencers. And then all of a sudden, everyone can be an influencer. Why? Because it costs $100. How many podcasts are out there? 45 million, I think, I recently read. 45 million. Why? For 200 bucks, I'm in the business. I'm in the business. Look at me. I got basically free software, both of us. We have microphones that cost like 100 bucks. And 20 years ago, even 10 years ago, to have the reach that you have today meant you probably had a national syndicated radio program. You know how many people had those? Like four. Four people. And there was a gateway. You know, it gets back to one of my, you know, a lot of kids going to college, my oldest friends are going to college, and one of them is in the Iowa's, you know, Writers College, right, which is a very prestigious college, right?

And I read a lot of books. And, you know, so you get in there, And those are the people that then get book deals and all this other kind of stuff, and they write about things. But you miss millions of stories that are more relevant because people don't know how to write. They know how to talk. And so pretty soon, you know, you're going to have people who have just the most amazing stories, right, where they live in Senegal, and they went to X, and they did this. Right. And all they have to do is talk into a microphone, and it turns it into a story. No question. Right. No question. We're at a point of human flourishing. You know, it's also interesting because one of the things that people don't really talk about is we act as if, and I know this is really controversial, but we act as if office white-collar jobs are the norm. But they're really only the norm over the last 100 years, 150 years, right? Right. And they kind of suck, you know?

I mean, in reality, if you look at – if you can make the same amount of money being a landscape designer as you could, A, sit behind a desk 500 hours a week investment banker, that would be a good tradeoff for a lot of people. You can make that as a plumber right now in Silicon Valley. Trust me. Oh, my gosh. It's like $400 to get the plumber to come in the next hour because the thing's overflowing. It's $400 to show up. And you add that up, you go, he's doing okay. The first blog post I ever wrote when I started this part, because I wrote a book on AI and transformation in 2013, and I started promoting it. And my first blog post was, AI is going to replace your doctor before it replaces your plumber. And it's still true. It's still true today. Yeah, it's still true. It's absolutely true. I go in and talk to my doctor, and I'm like, are we both just looking at CHATCPT right now for this diagnosis? because, you know, I know I am, and it's doing more right stuff.

And he knows you are. And by the way, before that, we used Google. And before that, we used an encyclopedia. I mean, all of this technology is getting better and easier and faster to use. We talk about I'm also a musician, and I've got some awards back here for film and Broadway, right? Yeah. And in the musician community, Suno has been a hot button for a couple of years. It wasn't a hot bun three years ago when it sucked. But the better it got, the more painful it got for many musicians. And what I realized, this is really fascinating because we see it throughout AI, and I think you'll use this. What I realized is people start to get jealous of AI when it gets really good. When it sucked, nobody was jealous of it. And jealousy is the thief of joy. And that's when you start yelling, it's unfair. I can't believe this stuff. And it stole everything everyone wrote. And then I say, hang on, hang on. it's just another tool. It advanced the state of the art and what we can do in music. It made it faster for everybody.

And you do not have to use it. That's the cool thing. You can still write music with a pencil. Now, no one's going to pay you to write music with a pencil. However, you can do it. The guy next to you who's using AI is going to be done in an hour. You'll be done in four months. So, yeah, it's up to you. And the creativity. I mean, that's what rap music was. It was sampling. That's what EDM music is today, right? EDM. It's a million different samples of different, you know, people's beats, and it's playing together and creating something different. And nobody's writing any notes there. Right. Nobody's writing notes. They don't even read music. They have to read music. You don't have to read it. So it's fascinating. You know, I've spent a fair bit of time over the last couple of years on cybersecurity, given AI. It's something we didn't talk about. We should for a second because everybody's really worried about, oh, AI and cybersecurity. It's breaking the network and breaking into this and breaking into that. Do you know what AI is being used for most of the time right now from a cybersecurity standpoint is to create phishing emails and perfectly spoofed sites so that it can steal your MFA,

auth app, passkey, authorization, or other. That's what it does. And it's not thwarting the underlying encryption or access to the network. It's thwarting the human who is stupid enough to say, yes, it's me. Because they go, it looks like me. It must be me. And so we worked on, which is on fire now. That's called a token ring, actually. That is a hardware biometric device, and it takes your fingerprint. And what it does is you register this when you log on to your application the first time. You get that registered. After that, no one gets in without your fingerprint being within three feet of the computer logging in and tied to the domain and in numerical order from last time you log in, that is 867 is 868, it's 869, et cetera. So all of a sudden, no matter what AI throws at you from a phishing or spoofing or anything else, none of it works. You can't fool the human because there's nothing for the human to give to anyone on the other,

to someone in Russia. There's no screen. There's nothing. It's really fascinating. And so this biometric stuff is now authorizing agents because if you have agents that have a gateway and have a gate that says, I need to ask the CFO to write this check, an agent on the CFO's desktop could authorize the other agent and will. But if you have biometrics, nothing can happen. Like if I have my fingerprint, nothing happens without the fingerprint. That's interesting. You know, the biosecurity is a very interesting thing, right? Because even today, right, even with AI, and the reason it's becoming more dangerous, let's say just before AI, 90% of successful cyber attacks were people calling up and saying, hey, Kevin, you know, the IT guy, I lost, this is Jason, I can't get my computer, I lost my, it was still human engineering, right? By the way, they're still doing that. It is still very common. Very common.

Don't even need AI to help me. And they've gotten more bold. And the social engineering, hey, this is Kevin. I'm an employee. Here's my social security. Blah, blah, blah. I got a new phone. IT says, okay, we'll authorize the new phone. But see, when you have a dedicated device that can't have any apps on it or anything, the only way you get one is from IT. That's pretty cool. Yeah, it locks. Where do you get one of those? Are you like an experimental test case on that? Oh, no, no, no. No, these are in the hundreds of thousands. Banks use them. They're using them for employees, health care. Individuals, you can buy them at tokencore.com, and they come in like 10 different formats. There's this format. There's a bunch of formats, right? And people using them, individuals using them to protect their bank accounts, and also their cyber security, their cyber, sorry, cyber coin, their cyber things like Coinbase and stuff like that, right, cyber accounts. And no one's getting in. No fingerprint, no in. That's so cool. I like that.

So let me ask you this. Back on this joy thing, because I love the joy thing. I love trying to find joy in life, right? You know, and I like your take on, you know, and we've dealt with, you know, how's A.I. going to change jobs? How's he going to do this? But how do you, I mean, do you get into this in the book? And if not, do you have thoughts on it? And if not, why not? how can people use AI to find joy, right? To, you know, as opposed to just not grumbling about the tasks that are going away, but to really, I mean, help them try to find, I mean, you know, AI is an interactive type thing. You can go through and say, what am I good at? What should I be good at? I mean, how? It's a great question. So, for instance, if you do not know what your purpose is, you literally start reading a book, you go, what's my sense of purpose? If you're using chat, great. Ask chat. I'm unable to find my sense of purpose, but I'm sure I have one.

Here's my background. Here's this. Here's that. Give me some ideas. Help lead me down a pathway where I can find a sense of purpose. Again, for some people, literally it's religion. Literally it's their family. Maybe it's their children. Maybe it's their husband or wife, right? I mean, some people, it's just finding the next date. Literally, they're single. Maybe they're not single. Whatever. right no judgment here i mean everybody's got their their their own thing for lots and lots of people there's no question it's that they want to make enough money to have financial freedom you hear that a lot when you really dig into it that's my second purpose i'm going to make you know five million dollars to retire on or a hundred million whatever the numbers i don't care and so great now you got something to work towards now you've got a reason you're doing these things and then we talk about joy killers because there things that bring you joy Joy creators joy boosters and then there joy killers Some joy killers you have to bless out of your life Let me give you an example Bless out of your life I like that right there Aunt Betty You don like Aunt Betty You never liked Aunt Betty

Aunt Betty, and sorry for the Aunt Bettys out there. Every time she goes, well, I don't have a mess, and I don't like the government, and my life sucks, and my life, and you know, So this is just not healthy for me. Like it's making all the joy out of my life. I didn't ask for Aunt Betty to be in my life. And so I recommend in the book, literally, buy her a copy of the book and say, listen, first thing, I hope you run your life this way because then you might be a positive influencer. But for now, it's not healthy for me. And so I hope to see you again someday. But right now I'm going to bless you out of my life for a little while. I wish you the best. Nothing negative. And I give people permission to bless lots of things out of their life. And another one is the job, right? So people come to me all the time. Well, in fact, I just talked to a group a couple weeks ago. Well, and this wasn't a corporate setting. It was a different setting. Well, I hate this new boss that we got. Hate's a strong word. You really hate him. Well, okay, maybe not. Okay, tell me about it.

Well, he's got all these new ideas, and he's trying to execute them too quickly, and he blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, you only get a couple choices. Let me tell you what they are. First of all, are you complaining? I'm complaining. All my coworkers are, oh, great. All you're doing is punching holes in the boat. You guys should be rowing across the river together. You're taking your orange stuff, punching holes in the boat, and trying to sink the boat. Because that's all that can come of that. First of all, you're never going to get promoted doing that. Second of all, no one wants to hear it. No one wants to be around Debbie Downer or Miss Complainer or Mr. Complainer or whatever. Nobody. So stop it. And so there's only two choices. One, either find the joy in all of this new stuff that you're learning. It's making us go so fast. Wow, I think it's pretty cool. Why don't you figure out where there's joy in that? Because if you could go faster, maybe you can leverage AI more. Maybe you could do something else more. It's really interesting. And this person has brought a whole new idea to this group. I realize it's different, but it's new.

And so embrace that with curiosity. With curiosity. The second thing you can do is quit. but you can't do anything in between. Either you embrace what's going on and find the joy in it or get the hell out of the place, right? Because it's unhealthy for you to go in and say, I hate my job, I hate my boss. That doesn't work. Find a way to like it or get the hell out. Those are your choices. And when you start, when you read, now when I tell you it's obvious, but when you read in the book, then people say, you gave me permission to make a choice. And I control that choice. And so for this person, I gave them permission to look at their boss in a whole different way and stop complaining. And they stopped complaining and started looking at the things that were handing to them. And then they realized the boss was under pressure to turn some things around. And, you know, they opened their eyes to the whole thing because now their brain was more of a science supports this, right, to accept the fact that this is a different pathway, but it's not right or wrong. It's just different. And, you know, it changed their life.

The book changed their life. You know, it's interesting because, you know, as we're kind of going through this, and correct me if I'm wrong, which I might be, you have a different message that you're using AI as a platform. You know, it's more of a spark for the conversation, for the broader conversation. Yep. That's not AI specific. You could have written the book 10 years ago or whatever, longer ago, 20 years ago, prior to sort of, you know, the explosion of Gen. AI and, you know, the popularization of it. And you could have used something else for that. It's a broader message around finding joy. It is. You know. But especially important in the era of AI. It's more important just because people are, you know, 51% of Americans are frustrated with AI and they're afraid of AI. More than 50%. It's like, what? Yeah. Get a hold of yourself.

So if they can find the joy again in what they're doing, they can find their sense of purpose. They can remain curious. You and I are curious about AI. Every day, models change. This changes. I've got to go try it. The IQ gets higher on the things. I mean, it's great, right? Yeah. And so the more you stay on that side of the entire equation, the more joy you find, the more you realize it's taking joyless tasks. And life is so much better. Like, it's better. It's better. But it's interesting when you say that, you know, part of just sort of the core truth in life, I think. And you and I have spent, well, I've spent almost my entire career, and I think you have as well, sort of in this sort of Silicon Valley environment, right? Yeah, absolutely. And in order to, and one of the things I love about Silicon Valley, right, one of the things that attracts me to sort of, and I use Silicon Valley writ large, right, Not just geographic, even though I'm geographic like you are. But, you know, this idea, is this a whole group of people that are large that embrace change, that are driving change, that want change, that see the positivity in change?

But over years, and it isn't just, you know, with AI, every change, you know, what you realize is when you're out talking to customers and clients and individuals, people don't operate in a change environment very well, right? And so sort of their natural responses, negativity, fight, you know, sort of push back, right? Like, you know, I'm against change. Right. Change is dangerous. Change is dangerous. Change is scary. But if you're curious, you love change. And curiosity wins because curiosity, which many of us lose after university, We go, well, I've already learned all there is to learn. When you're curious, you're learning every day. I'm learning about AI. I'm learning about new ways to do things. So when I get change, I go, wow, this is something I can learn. By the way, I can learn if that change was good or worked or didn't work. It's all learning. If you never have change, there's nothing to learn.

Nothing to learn. I love that. I absolutely love that. Well, listen, before we go here, I could talk all day on this. I'd love to have you back on as you go with your book. One more time, you can get on Amazon. You can get it at Barnes & Noble. Barnes & Noble. You can get the AI version on Barnes & Noble. So, because I'm an AI person, right? Right. I didn't read the book. I did write the book. But I didn't read the book for the audio book. I had AI, a model of my voice, do the book for me. The Forward is by Goldie Hawn. 11 Labs, yes. Yeah, I love that. The Forward is by Goldie Hawn. and Goldie's voice is on there. All of them were generated by AI. Amazon doesn't allow AI read books. Really? But Barnes & Noble does. Wow. And some other places do. So, yeah, so they wouldn't let me put it on Amazon. But everybody else, it's everywhere else. Did you get Goldie Hawn's permission or did she just? I did, of course. She wrote the foreword, so I had a permission.

All right. So I had all the links and all that. I was like, hey, that may be a copyright infringement there if you didn't. there's some question whether you can copyright your voice, actually. There's, you know, this is because copyrights weren't written that way, right? I mean, in fact, copyright offers have been very clear, you know, like you can't copyright a human trait. That's not the purpose of the copyright, right? It's a big problem, you know, and these Hollywood studios have been digitizing, you know, people's bodies. You know, Lucas went in. I love where Lucas lives in Marin. And, you know, he's been digitizing. He digitized Tom Hanks' entire body like 20 years ago. Tom Hanks says, I think one day you're going to use this, and I'm just going to be an actor that exists forever, right? Of course. I'll always be in the show. Tom Hanks has negotiated his own deal, whatever that deal is. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Some people negotiate their own deal. But it is very difficult under today's laws to protect, you know, the way you sound or the way you look, et cetera.

So these are tricky things, and we're not going to solve it in this podcast. It's a, you know, USPTO issue. But, yes, I have all the releases and everything. But the point is that I don't know why someone would sit in a studio basically for a week to read a 200-page book because you keep correcting yourself. You have to go back and get rid of the ums and all these things. And then I also speak too fast, so I have to slow way down for reading an audio book so that people can absorb it. And so I was able to build my clone and then slow it down by 10% and then just run it because AI does that. And it's no one can tell except my wife. She says, I can tell it's a little bit slower than you are. And, you know, the intonation is about right. But no one else can tell. Everyone else is that sounds exactly like Kevin. Sounds like he read it. But could you imagine if I, here I'm this AI person, I wrote this book, and then I go, well, I also read it.

I didn't use AI to read the book. So I kind of had to do that. But it's a great experiment, and 11 Labs is great. The models, I think the models are the best in the business right now. I love it. I use it for a whole different thing that I do on this training for executives and leadership patients and stuff. And here's the great thing. You can change that training today without getting in front of a video camera again. Just right there. It sinks the lips, does everything. You know, but that gets back to what we were talking about. One of the amazing things is it opens up to the masses, right? It's like YouTube. You know, I find YouTube and the creators on there absolutely amazing. And then there was TikTok that came out. Was it going to kill YouTube? Maybe. But, you know, there's a whole group of creators on there that start doing this kind of stuff. And, you know, pretty soon it won't even be weird to have AI help you write your book because it's still your ideas. It's this back and forth that you're doing. We didn't, like I didn't because I started writing the book over two years ago.

So AI wouldn't have been ready to do so. But by the time it went through three editors, editors definitely ran it through AI, got ideas, cleaned up sentences. I mean, there was this kind of cycle that, you know, and it's like in the music business. Oh, nobody, no real artist is going to use AI. Okay, talk to any producer and I'm in the studio, et cetera. Everyone in the studio is using AI. And every songwriter is using it because, you know, you get stuck. You go, now we used to use a thesaurus. Well, what rhymes with Jason? No, I just go, I have this line, something, something, Jason. Give me ten other lines that meet me. Boom, right? I go, great, I'm done with that verse. Of course, people are using it. Get over yourselves. And they're using it to, like, they go in and go, I need a new bass line for this. The bass player didn't show up. It'll write it. It'll give it to me. I'll pop, I'll literally, I'll take that stem and pop into the logic program or approach it. I'm done. Come on. The bass player didn't show up. It's okay. I'll make the base.

I don't even have to play it out. It's the world we live in. You can't put genies back in a bottle. No. We've never been able to do it. We're never going to be able to do it. I love your message. You know, I think this book, you know, for even people that are listening, you know, that are AI scientists that are, you know, in my audience and definitely the CEOs who are trying to, you know, get through AI transformation that, you know, I think this would be a fantastic book for them, whether, you know, it's about work or just trying to find joy in life. Right. I love it. Yep. Yep. I agree. And I will tell you, I've talked to so many people that it literally changed their life. And a lot of these people are AI people, too. But whatever, it's like, wow, this is a whole new way for me to look at how I work. You know, I think it's sort of a last point on that. For the AI people, I think that there's a lot of people in the AI community, and both you and I are in it, that are getting really sort of emotionally and mentally beat down as if what AI is trying to do is,

and everybody's working to destroy the world, when the message really is, no, there's going to be this human flourishing that comes out of this. We're trying to stop you from the drudgery of the drudgery parts of your job. And that's the dream. Nobody's trying to eliminate everybody's work and make the world this dystopian hell. No. That's not what people are doing. And that's not what's going to happen. People need to talk about the more positive parts of AI. It's going to be fantastic. That's not what's going to happen. Just be on the right side of AI. Just be on the right side of that. You're going to do great. Embrace it. Partner with it. Absolutely. And use it. So anyway, Kevin, I appreciate you coming on. I've really enjoyed the conversation. I want to have you back on soon. Yeah, love to. Much more to talk about. Good luck with the book. Thank you.