Kevin Surace Talks About AI and Maintaining Productivity

Hi, I'm Kevin Serrace, and we are about to have the most productive conversation ever with Mike Vardy.

Welcome to A Productive Conversation. I'm Mike Vardy, and in today's episode, I'm excited to chat with Kevin Surese. He is a real powerhouse from the Silicon Valley, a serial entrepreneur and CEO who's been named Entrepreneur of the Year. He's also been called one of the top innovators of the decade. We dive into his productive practices. The idea of what he believes helps him balance the myriad of roles that he's had, whether he's a night owl or an early riser, and you might be surprised to hear his answer to that. And also we dive into AI, which is an area that he does definitely has specialization in. Let's not waste any more time. Let's get right into it. Here's my conversation with Kevin Serrace. Enjoy. Kevin, thanks so much for taking the time to join me today on the program. Really appreciate you being here.

Yeah, happy to be here.

So right out of the gate, for those that are unfamiliar with you and your work, because you've done a lot of stuff, like a lot a lot, and you've been particularly productive, I would, I would argue that we, when it comes to, and I talk about this a lot, the idea of productivity and productiveness, which is productiveness of being, like the state of being productive. You're in that state of productiveness on an ongoing basis. So for, for the benefit of those that don't know you, that are listening right now, can you share a little bit about your background? And we're going to dive into some of the stuff around AI and energy and motivation and balance, but just to give them a little bit off the top.

Well, I'll start with this because it usually summarizes it all. I have 94 worldwide patents. I just applied for a 90 fif. A lot of those are in the AI field. Some of them are in totally unrelated fields, like building materials. But if you've ever used, you know, Siri or Alexa or anything like that, that's all based on technology that was developed by me and my teams over, over some years. So I've been active certainly in the AI space, but also in several other spaces. I invented QuietRock soundproof drywall, for example, that's used in most apartments and condominiums and townhomes today and nicer hotels because you don't want to hear your neighborhood. So, you know, the key to being productive. There's two keys to being productive, I think in the one Is. Is number one, pick an actual pain point that someone has and do something about that. I see all the time people say, oh, I was so productive today. You know, I, I thought about this envelope being pink instead of yellow. I'm going, nobody cares. So you can be as productive as you want, but if no one in the world cares about it, I. I'm not. I'm not sure that's. That that's going to be seen in the future, even by yourself, as being the most productive you could have been. Right. So productivity is often measured not just by ourselves, but by those outside of us. Could be our boss, could be our spouse, could be our kids, could be a sibling, could be something else. And they're looking at it through their eyes. Right? Right. And then number two is something I call, which I'm working on this book. God knows if I'll ever finish it. Talk about productivity is joy equals success. And I would tell you, you can't be successful if you're not productive, and you can't be productive if you're not joyful.

Right.

And once I say it, you go, well, of course not. You know, when I'm really. When I wake up and I'm depressed, I don't get anything done. That's exactly right. So the way you get to this number of patents and this many inventions and this much impact on society, to the extent I've had any little bit of impact, is you get up every morning and say, job one. Job one is joy. I have got to find joy in today. And, and I know that there are things everyone listening to this program has to do today that are going to suck. I got to terminate this worker, and they've been my friend. Okay, I get that. But there's joy in doing it. Not because you're terminating someone, but there's joy in saying, this is a terrible thing. I got to get off my plate. And by getting it off my plate, I get to check that box. And I've moved one rung up the ladder of the 20 rungs I have to do today. And that brings you success, which brings you more joy, which brings you more success, which brings you more joy. The most joyful people. And that means you might have to force yourself to get there. The most joyful people will have the most success. Period, Full stop.

It's interesting, as we dive into the idea of you're saying checking off boxes, do you think there's a danger in the quantification of productivity as opposed to the qualification of it? I feel that there's an imbalance in a lot of ways. What you're talking about is kind of like the, to me, it sounds like it's, it's the, the beginning of balance, like the idea of quality matters. But do you find, and I'd love to hear your thoughts on, you know, whether that's something that you've discovered recently or if it's something that you've seen that's permeating over, over the years of, of, of the work that you've done. This idea of like, I'm going to check off this many boxes because that equals productivity as opposed to checking off the right boxes.

Right? Great, Great question. So I used to have a guy that I worked with for many years. He was my CFO and COO. His name's James McCormick. And James used to say, I'd say so. And so is working so hard. He goes, well, you know, there's working hard and then there's working smart. And the people who work smart actually achieved much more. That was measurable long term. Now, the people who worked hard, boy, they were putting in 28 hours a day. I know there's only 24 hours, but they were putting in 28 anyway. And boy, did they have a whole list of things that they got done. But maybe 80% of them weren't important or didn't matter. It didn't move the business forward, Didn't. So that's when I said, when we opened the conversation, I said, you know, you have to go solve actual pain points in your life, in your business, for your customers, whatever it is, right? So if I'm solving something that I think is really interesting, but I don't have a customer out there who cares, I, I might see myself as productive for the entire day, but they, you actually achieve nothing, right? If you were measuring yourself on the business, right? So, so I'll give you an example. You're doing this podcast, okay? If, if you did eight of these podcasts today, which would be an intense, immense, hard thing to do, you probably you, in fact, you could say that was truly a productive day because my job is to put out podcasts, and I did it, and I hope they were all great and I chose my guests well, etc. Etc. But, but if you sat around for the entire day pondering when you might someday do, do another podcast, you know, at the end of the day, you actually didn't achieve anything. You know, you strategized a bit. But, but, but you're going to ultimately have to do something, right? Ultimately, in this world, we make things that we. We might make things that are physical, we might make things that are virtual, we might. But, but there's an output, there's an outcome, there's productivity. And, and productivity, in fact, is measured by output. Right? The gross national product is output of your people, period. It's, it's not how much there, your people contemplated how much they were thinking. Now we realize there, there are times that you have to strategize. So I'm going to go write a book. I'm going to have to take take some time to strategize about what the first three chapters are, let's say. Right. And, and so that might be strategy, might be part of what's required to ultimately get that book out or, or some other thing out. Right. So I don't, I don't want listeners to, to listen to this and go, oh, he doesn't understand. You know, I've got to work on this deep math problem. And yes, of course, there are people doing AI algorithms today, for example, that are a thousand times smarter than I am. And they're in the deepest labs that, whether it's Google or, or Facebook or Apple or whatever, and they're down in the algorithm itself, not the applied AI, which we'll talk about in a minute, but down in. And they may have to just sit there and work out some new math, I don't know, for months, and it doesn't work half the time. And finally they get through it. That's a, That's a very specific job. And their job is to fail a lot until they finally succeed with the right formula, the right algorithm that finally works. Right. And so I'm not, I, I don't want to take anything away from the brilliance that happens there. But most people in most lives and most of the people listening to this podcast, they actually have to produce something every day. And that's going to be seen in the eyes of the beholder, not just in yourself.

Right. And that goes back to your earlier discussion about, like, what people see, the lenses of productivity that we're all looking through. Right. But interestingly, what I find. And you balance multiple roles, so I do the same. Like, I host this podcast, but I'm also a writer. I also make videos, I teach. It's funny, there are times and I've struggled with this, and I've gotten better at it, is the propensity of me to go, okay, you know what? I will do three podcasts because I want to get ahead. I want to get ahead to have like three, let's say three months worth ready. Like, that way I can focus on the bigger things, but in some instances it's not necessary to get that far ahead. And what I'm actually doing. And I've done this before and I know I'm not alone, I'm sure listeners out there, I'm actually delaying the thing I should be doing while getting ahead on those other three. So it's, it's tricky. Yeah. So, so how, how do you, how have you, do you catch yourself doing that? I mean, especially when you're balancing multiple roles. And how do you pull yourself out of that?

Do you know what happens is everyone puts off the thing that they don't want to do or the hardest thing and keeps putting it off. We all do that because we go, oh, Look, I've got 10 things to do. Let me take off these nine. They're easy. Tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick. And then a bunch of emails come in and this and that. Before you know it, the day's over. You didn't get to number 10, so you're going to do it tomorrow. But tomorrow there's another nine things that are also easy. So you get to do those. And this is human nature, right? Human nature is put off the really hard stuff till later. But, but there is great value in doing the hard stuff up front because you absolutely want to get that box done. You want to do it while you've got the most energy to do it. You want to do it while there's still joy. When it's done, you have, you feel very successful, you know, because joy equals success and success equals joy. So, so, so I think there's great value, but I suffer from this. Everybody suffers from it. What do I do? I make a list. I have literally printed out to do lists. I print them out and it makes me hand write in the to do list the X, you know, three, four, five, ten things I have to do today. And they don't get crossed out until I finish them. And I have to do everything on the list before the day is ended. And so you will find if you have to write them down, and I know people have lists on their computer and this and that. They get lost if you write them down and stick it on your desk and you just go to the next one and you go to the next one, do them in order, close your email, get those done. They actually will get done in whatever order you put them in in the morning. And you might be smart enough in the morning to say, I Gotta do the hard thing first. Right?

Are you more of a morning person? You're more of a night owl?

Well, if I had my druthers, I'd work all night. But. But I'm married, so I don't that' of the choices to staying married. But. But look, I think, I think you can talk to most highly productive people and if they're allowed to be single for a week, they will find themselves getting up later and eventually drifting to. To, you know, to work till 1 or 2 or 3 or 4am and the reason is. You know what the reason is?

Sure, yeah. I'd love to hear it.

No meetings, no emails. Yeah, it's 1:00am there's no meetings and there's no emails and there's no voicemail and there's no texts. You actually get your work done. It is the most. I was just with a friend yesterday, we were talking about this. He's actually a music arranger, writer, and he is the most productive from about midnight till 4am because nobody bothers him. No texts, no emails, nothing comes in. There is no. There's nothing to bother you. I mean, an occasional bomb from Iran going into Israel that we shoot down, but other than that. Yeah, nothing. Nothing else. Nothing else to even pay attention to in the middle of the night.

Right.

So that is the most productive time. And I think people would love to do that. A lot of coders do that. That's why they come to work at like noon, because they were up till 3 or 4am coding. Why do they code in the middle of the night? Nobody's bothering them.

Yeah, same thing. Yeah.

So highly productive in the middle of the night.

You've got a lot of energy, Kevin. Like, I mean, you've done lots of talks and you, you know, energize and you educate audience. You're doing it right now. How do you maintain your own energy and focus? Like, what do you do that kind of keeps you at that level? Obviously you talk about the joy and success kind of, you know, the equation there. That's obviously going to be part of it. But are there any other things that you do.

You know Goldie Hawn? Everyone probably knows who Goldie Hawn is, the actress. Goldie is a friend and she told me once, she looked at me, she says, kevin, you and I are some of the only people I know that just were born with high dopamine. You just go, go, go, go, go. Right. And so, first of all, it helps to be born.

I wonder how Kurt Russell handles that. But anyways, continue.

Yeah. I don't know. Not well. He does his own thing. Kurt's a great guy, by the way. Makes great wine called Go G Wine. I love Kurt, I will tell you that. A couple of things. First of all, I do exercise every day. I'm Pilates, trx, a variety of things. So there's an hour a day that has to be exercise, and there' for that. I'm not here to, you know, necessarily promote exercise and longevity and all that's a whole different topic. But there's a reason for it, because otherwise we're sitting at a desk, all of us, and we're looking at a computer and we're having some meetings, and we're getting tired, and your body's getting tired. And, you know, you sit in the chair for 12 hours. You go to stand up, you can barely walk. And of course, because the human body wasn't meant to do that, Right? So. So we get standing desks, which are great. I'm sitting at mine right now, but this desk goes up and I'm using.

An uplift desk right now.

Yeah, it really, really works. Yeah, you just push the chair aside, you can stand and. And, and, and so there's that. So you got to think about, look, I've got to get up and I've got to keep my body moving, and I've got to find an hour a day for exercise to do something. Go lift weights, run on the treadmill. If you don't like to run, do Pilates, do reformer, do trx. For me, I have to take a class. Because if I don't take a class, I'll go. I've got more things on my list to do.

Yeah.

And I won't prioritize exercise. You got it? You got to do that. That's number one. Number two, you have to get up and realize the minute you wake up. The alternative to waking up was really bad. It was death. Right. Because if you didn't wake up, you died. So here you wake up, whether the sun is shining or not, you have an entire day that you get to make your way exactly the way you want it to. Today, it's your day. Every day is your day. Yes, I know there's family and there's commitments and things, but every day is the day that you're going to make of it. And so if you take that first few moments and say, look at the joy of today, I'm not dead. I didn't pass away overnight. A lot of people do. I didn't do that. I'm here to live another day. And I'm going to make the best day of it I can, and I'm going to be productive, and I'm going to have a sense of purpose in this life and a sense of purpose for today. And so that when I end my day, I can look back and I may say I didn't get everything done that I wanted to do, but, boy, I did a lot today. And I moved society forward, or my company forward, or my family forward, or my life forward or whatever it is. And, boy, that's when, you know, joy starting in the morning equals success all the way at the end of the day.

All right, let's get into AI because we. Earlier you were talking about. We discussed this, the idea of not doing the hard things. Early comfort plays a lot of role in that, right? Like a huge role. Like, it's not comfortable. It's all, you know, there are a lot of people out there that are not comfortable with what's going on with AI. There's people that, you know, maybe listening to the show that are unsure of what the future holds, of what role will it take my job? How will it. How will I interact with it? You are incredibly well versed in this area. So this is your chance to say either run for the hills or it'll all be fine. Here's some things now. Again, I'm going to two opposite ends of the spectrum. So it's a lot more nuanced than that.

Obviously it is. And of course, it's going to impact different people in different ways. But let's start with this all Technology impacts many tasks and sometimes even jobs. Okay, you're podcasting. If this was 20 years ago, to do a show in your way any way you wanted to, with almost no oversight, you had to own a radio station or a network, literally own in a radio station you could probably buy or build for $5 million. Towers, transmitters, all of that, right? Today you can be a podcaster for, you know, a few hundred dollars. Pick your poison, right? With those headphones. Maybe it's $800, but, I mean, you get the.

These are the. By the way, you're right, because I worked in college radio for a while, and that was. That was the closest you could get after 10pm when they weren't really paying attention. And these are the very brand of headphones that I wore in college rated to kind of remind me of that. But you're absolutely right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. College radio. All our college radio stations, you could do.

Go.

You could go broadcast at 10, 11, 12 o'. Clock. And then nobody was paying attention. Just, you know, don't, don't swear. So it's super interesting, right? So by doing that, we democratized your, my and everybody's ability to go talk to millions of people if we want literally millions of people and not for millions of dollars. This is fabulous, right? This is fascinating. Arguably, that's taking jobs from someone or certainly changing tasks, right? We don't need as many quote, unquote professionals hired by radio stations. And I'm not sure, other than Howard Stern, many of them are going to get paid what they used to get paid. I don't know that's fair or not fair, but technology comes along. The wheel came along, right? The wheel came along. There were two guys in a town. They both carried things up the hill before the wheel. And the wheel comes along and one guy goes home and says that that's it, My wife, my job is over, my life is over. I have nothing to do. The wheel showed up and the other guy got a second wheel, built a cart and took everybody's stuff and doubled his business and took it all up the hill, right? So those who embrace technology always win. Give me another example. I'm in Finance. In 1989, Excel comes out. 2. Two sides of this story. Some people said, that's it. They will never need me doing ledger books with pencils. And that was true. And the other people said, I better really learn Excel so that I can do my ledger books in Excel. And Excel.

Yeah.

And, and, and, and, and of course, today you can't walk into a finance department and say, hey, I still use a pencil and ledger books because I don't use Excel. They wouldn't hire you now. Unhirable, right? So, so technology comes along, it changes the task. But we actually employ more people in finance today than we did then. Why? Well, because finance got way more productive and way more strategic because they didn't. They weren't down in the weeds with a pencil. So what's happening with AI? Let's start with marketing. Actually, let's start with podcasting. If this was seven years ago and you were doing a podcast, you or five years ago even, you would get this recording, and then what would you do? You would listen to it, and you'd take notes as you listen to it, and you'd work on a summary and you'd summarize it for your audience. And so you'd spend another couple hours writing a summary.

Absolutely.

Probably. Probably today you're going to feed this to an engine that goes speech to text, text to summary with a GPT or another transformer or an LLM. And you could have the summary, truly, in a few minutes of this, and it'll be everybody's good as you would. Am I right?

You are, absolutely. I actually have a template that what will happen is Otter Dot. AI goes to Otter. And then I take that and I take the summary and I go. And I have a. I've refined. And the thing is, Kevin, is I've refined it. So initially, and it was like, make me show notes, you know, and then let's. But now it's gotten to the point where I've, like, kind of refined it to the point where I'm getting the. The output that I really am looking.

For and putting in your voice.

Absolutely, absolutely. So, yes, it used to. It used to take me a lot more time to do it, and now it's, I'd say automated. Yeah. 15 of the time now, comparatively.

So that's interesting because there were podcasters that were doing so many podcasts, they hired people to do the summaries.

Yes.

And there was a summarizer that summarized until about a year ago when Everybody went to LLMs, transformers and everything else. And so the summary job went away, the summary task went away, but it made you, as a podcaster, so much more productive. You could technically do more podcasts. And that's actually the output that you're measured at. You were never measured by how many summaries you can do. You were measured by how many podcasts you can do.

Well, and Kevin, really quickly, it also allowed me to do things like read the books of the guests with more time. And so it freed up that time because I knew that, oh, well, the rest is going to take me less time. So it actually, the thing that only I could do, I got to do more of. And therefore it made everything better.

So you're more productive. If I'm in marketing today at any company, I had better be using GPT4 or Copilot or something similar, because. Or Gemini, whatever. Because if I'm not everyone else, all of my competitors are generating 10 times the content they used to generate. So I'll give you a quick example now. Let's say my job, amongst other things in marketing was to generate a blog post once a week. It might. I might set aside every Monday to generate my blog post. That's what I did. And I did 52 weeks of blog posts, and that's what I did. Right. And I had the other four Days. Okay. Today, if you know what you're doing, you will ask GPT4 or Gemini or co pilot. And based on these criteria, generate first 52 topics for blog posts for the year. Boom, boom, boom, Boom, boom. There's 52 topics. Now generate a blog post in my voice for each of the 52 topics. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. That's everything I just said is probably done in a matter of minutes. And now what I'm going to do is I'll go through and edit them. So I probably still spent a day. Except in that one day, all 52 blog posts for the year are done. I got back my year. And if you aren't doing that, your competitor is now. Did a job get eliminated? Not in that example that I gave you because I still have my marketing job. But if I as a marketing person used to hire out my blog post writing, that's over. I'm sorry. It's not that those people didn't do a good job. It's just I. I have a machine now. And okay, so I'm a keynote speaker. I do 40 plus keynotes a year, most on AI enjoy equal success and motivational speaker. And I go all around the world for this. And I used to have to have an illustrator to create some of the illustrations I needed because they were pretty complicated. They were more cap. More complicated than I could do. But Now I have Dolly 3 and I have mid journey and I have stable diffusion and I can generate all of this in a matter of minutes. That used to take weeks to go back and forth with an artist. Now I used to pay the artist $1,000. I now get it for a penny or 10 cents or something like that, but. But call it a million times more productive roughly than I was. And I also get it in a minute or two instead of a couple weeks of going back and forth. I don't know if it's as good. Sometimes it's better than I would have gotten. Sometimes it's more creative, sometimes it's less creative, sometimes not as good. I don't care. I'm done in a minute. I'm done in a minute. I am so much more productive doing that than going to the artist. So I'm sorry, that artist doesn't have that work to do anymore. Fair. Not working for me. He or she is not working for me. But I became more productive because of it. So you want to look at these tools and say how in my world, in my sphere of influence, in my work at work or work at home, or whatever. Can I become more productive by leveraging large language models and visual models? And I can tell you every bit of your job. You can. Let me give you one more.

Sure, sure, sure, sure.

Yeah. The obvious one is, what should I have for dinner tonight? I will give you.

Yeah, okay, go. I know where you're going.

I'm going to. Here's the one that people don't realize, right? I'm coming home or I'm about to see my spouse, whoever it is, okay? And I say literally to GPT4, I had a big argument with my spouse this morning. He or she was yelling at me that I, you know, haven't done enough of the dishes or whatever it is, right? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. What should I say tonight to save our marriage and improve our relationship? Trust me, the words that it gives you are way better than you would have ever come up with because you are going to get detached from your frontal lobe and say things that even a few words that you're going to regret later on and you're going to have to say you're sorry. You're going to have to unravel. It doesn't do that. It's like a psychiatrist next to you, and it puts the right sentences together. You could still make it your own and just deliver that. Trust me. Just do what it says. You'll be in great shape.

I actually had to use it for. I was asking it questions about a situation that I came across recently where I was. It was going around in my head. I've not used it for the. And I asked it a series of questions to come, like, what should I do here? What do you think I should do? And I think it was mainly because I couldn't talk to my therapist in that moment. Right. And it gave me exactly like. And I kept. The thing is, is it turned into. It's almost like again, having a conversation with a reasoned version of yourself. And the other thing is, I thought you were going to go here with this, but dinner plans and things like that. I was. I remember looking in the fridge and going, you know what I need? We have this. These vegetables are going to spoil. Like that. We're clone. Make me.

I have. These vegetables are going to spoil. Feed it. And it says, here's the rest. Here's the recipe.

Here's a simple. And again, the. The interesting thing. And I think this is important to note when you do that unfiltered, it's generally. Especially if it's. If you haven't used it, it'll be okay. It'll be okay. It won't be phenomenal because you haven't really trained it yet, but it will be okay. You can then decide, and I think this is an important distinction. I'd love to hear your thoughts. This is not an all or nothing approach. You can decide. I'm going to use it for this and I'm not going to use it for this. But if you don't use it at all, then you are in the most, maybe mundane situations like you talked about off the top. The part like, oh, you don't get to do everything that you want to do. You don't wait. If you can figure out elements of. I have these again. This, we need dinner. This is what we have. Make me a recipe. It's far faster than going Google me a chicken. You're not going to get what you want. And it is such a, it is such a game changer that if you ignore it, you know, then, yeah, you're right, you're going to be left in the dust in so many ways.

Yeah, that's right. You ignore at your own peril because everyone around you or many people around you, your competition or whatever are barreling forward and, and using it for everything. So I, I use, I, I have a GPT4 Pro subscription and probably you do. I use it for everything I can, including coming up with ideas. Like, in fact, if I was a podcaster, I'm not. I'm a guest on some. But, but if I were, I'd say, who are some guests I might want to have?

Yep.

What are some different topics that I might want to do that align with my topic? And what people don't realize is, as you said, you can keep refining this and refining it. You can go back. That's not fine enough. I'm thinking more in this, I'm thinking more in that. Give me some ideas specifically so you can have this conversation round and round and round, five, six, seven times. The other thing people don't realize is you could put in a 2,000 word prompt. It doesn't have to be five. People think, you know, they're going to get I want a recipe for dinner and they think that's the prompt. No, no, no, no, no. You haven't even begun. I would like a recipe for dinner based on these things in my fridge, but also something that maybe Ben Franklin would have liked because my favorite tastes are this kind of umami and this kind of thing, but I don't like it too salty. You can just drone on and on and the more information you give it, actually the better result you get.

And you can dictate that too. You don't have to type it in, you can dictate it. But so you're the darn thing. So you're, you're. It's funny because whenever I go into a conversation, I'm like, okay, I know I'm going to be able to talk to Kevin about this stuff. I generally ask GPT, I'm like, what are some of the things we could talk about? Now, we've touched on some, but not all. And I guess that is, that is a ringing endorsement for it because there are some stuff that I did not talk about that are listed here that I could look at and go, oh, well, let's talk about this. Because again, it's still, there's still a human element. There's that, there's that nuance and, and that won't get lost.

I'll give you an example. I was speaking to a group of food manufacturing experts. They build food manufacturing plants. And so one thing I said is just give me a list of ideas of something related to, you know, some particular food. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I go, okay, I think it was. I wanted ideas for blog posts about food manufacturing. And there were like 20 of them and I wouldn't use them all, but I might have used five or six of them. So you don't have to use all the ideas. So use it as an Idea 8 or an ID 8 or Idea Generator. The other thing, just funny, in that particular case, I. Someone was in the audience who runs the Tyson chicken nugget plants. So literally, I had it not only I asked GPT4 to generate the list of equipment in a chicken nugget plant for automated chicken nugget manufacturing, but then I fed that to Dall E3 and had it created visions of, you know, illustrations of what the chicken nugget plant might look like and how many trucks I could have and sort of all of those things. And so I presented this to the audience and then I called on the guy from Tyson. I said, is any of this right at all? And he goes, it's all correct. Yep, it's, it's, it's surprisingly, it surprisingly knows how to make a high volume chicken nugget plant. Now, what's funny, and to you, to your listeners here, that they need to know, actually, the darn thing only knows how to put together sentences. It doesn't actually know how to build a chicken nugget plant. It, it is read enough information somewhere on the web about how these things are built, where it knows how to put together sentences in the proper order. And that's all it's doing. Words into sentences, sentences next to each other phrases. Right. And that's how you get where sometimes it hallucinates, because it's mostly trying to fulfill its core mission, which is build a sentence in correct sentence structure based on other things I've read. And it does that. But it may have read fiction, which it has, and it may create something of fiction, including making up legal cases and making up deaths that didn't happen and making up. Just trying to build a sentence for you. So whenever you get anything back, you know, curate it, be thoughtful about it, have critical thinking about it. But it's going to change your life because you have this assistant that you're paying hardly $20 a month for, and you can use it for everything.

Kevin, you brought up a really good phrase there that I think maybe AI will actually help improve this critical thinking. It's become a bit of a lost because of how much of our attention is being kind of. We're in this war of attention, for lack of a better term, as opposed to time, which means critical thinking takes a bit of a beating. But with this, maybe we can reclaim and foster some of that again. What are your thoughts on that?

Right, different kind. Yeah, different kind of critical thinking.

Sure.

Instead of, let's say, thinking up the 10 topics that I want to write about, I'm saying now I'm going to say, come up with 10 topics for me and now or 20 and now I've got to pick the right 10 and I've got to make sure that they're right. And I have to be thoughtful and say, is this useful for my audience? Is it what I want to say? Will it be in my voice? So now you've got a lot of critical thinking around that instead of writer's block. And what's interesting is I find that large language models get past writer's block in a second. This is true for coders, is true for blog writers, is true for novel writers. I'm so I could put in my an entire chapter of my novel if I was writing a novel and say, I just don't know what comes in Chapter two. Give me some ideas. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Now, it didn't write the novel for you, but you go, oh, my goodness, Idea number four is brilliant. I'm going to go down that road and I'm going to tell you almost all the patents going forward are going to be partially written by something like a ChatGPT. They didn't create the core claims of the patent, but they gave you some ideas that you should include in there that you might not have had yourself. And as long as you came up with a core invention, that's not illegal, you didn't do anything illegal. You're asking for help from a computer system, basically. So everything you're doing, from patents to blog writing to podcasting to dinner to where should I go on vacation? Give me some ideas. By the way, here's 10 things I need to get done today. What order should I do them in?

Based on.

It'll give you an opinion. Based on.

Based on. I like, for example, you're a night owl. If you're a night owl. Based on the fact that I'm a night owl and it goes well based on this, the intensity level of these tasks, you should do them in this order.

Exactly. Yeah. It's brilliant.

Yeah.

Help me write a business plan for boom, boom, boom, boom, based on, you know, give it a lot right here. Here's my resume. It's three pages. Condense it to one boom, and it's better than you could have ever written it. This is. This is the most productive thing we have ever had on the history of the planet. More productive than the wheel.

Yeah. I think it's what they say the most. This. This innovation is the most recent innovation that comes well, and the most. The most recent innovation that even comes close is the Internet. Like, that even comes close.

And this is a thousand x the Internet.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Before we wrap up, Kevin, I just want to. I just want to ask because, I mean, again, you've. You've balanced a lot of roles. You've been involved in so many things. We've got a lot of innovators out there, people who either are listening to this that are like, I want to get going. And then honestly, there's people who listen to the show that are like, they are in the second phase of their lives. They've done. They're like, I'm retired, but I still have this yearning, this desire, this purpose to innovate, to build what is one key piece of advice or a couple maybe, that you can offer them to, that are trying to a number one, maybe improve how productive they are in the building of it, but also, like, just what. What they should look for if they want to start to head down that path.

Right. So. So first of all, the old, the new retirement is not the Old retirement. Yeah, the old retirement was sit down in front of the tv, watch sports in Gilligan's Island. Right. The new retirement doesn't seem to be that for a lot of people. And I know for some people it's going to be that they're going to relax, they're going to garden, great. I mean, do what's right for you. But I don't see me doing that because my brain is still active. There might be a day it isn't. But while my brain's active, I should use it. And interestingly enough, I think, you know, the truth is, at 60 something, you know so much more than you did at 20 something. Now some people say, oh, I had so much more energy then. Well, that is, you know, that is a, a facet of exercise and joy and how you treat your life and what Nutraceuticals, you're taking all the vitamins, whatever, right? I mean, so you can control that. I, I, I, I really don't want to hear from people who say, oh, I'm 65 and I just don't have the energy. I used to. Yes, you do. You can if you want to. If you've chosen not to, I can't, can't help you. Right? But if you want to listen to Peter Ortiz podcast a little bit and on longevity and you know he's going to live 126, right? So, so come on. Of course you can have the energy. And the second thing is, but you have tons more knowledge and tons more experience, and the experience you have is likely to lead you to great success. There are some huge companies, huge, that were founded when the founder was in his 50, in his or her 50s or 60s, that went on to become huge conglomerates. And you go, they founded it when they were 60. Why didn't they do it when they're 20? Well, they were working at big companies and they did, you know, they worked their way up and eventually they said, I've got this great idea, I'm going to go do it. But number one thing you've got to do as an entrepreneur, as an innovator, is don't create features that are looking for a problem. Don't create solutions looking for the problem. Look for the problem. You know, I invented soundproof drywall because I couldn't stand people in the hotel room next to me, you know, making noise at 3 o' clock in the morning. I, God knows what they were doing, but I couldn't take it. And so I said, hold it, there's got to be A better way. Let's invent soundproof drywall. Well, that's impossible. No, it isn't. I'm not breaking the laws of physics yet. So find a real problem. That's a real problem in your life. The second thing someone told me, also find a real problem that people with money will pay for.

Right?

It's easy to find problems of, let's say, poor people, they're starving. I get that. And that is a real problem. And I don't want to. I mean, I really want to honor that. You can't fix that problem, and there's no money for you in fixing it. Right. That's a government problem. So go find problems where people with money will exchange money to fix that problem. Right? Because that is where the business is, that's where the opportunity is, and that's where you're going to be successful.

Kevin, this has been a great conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know we could keep going, but. But, and maybe we'll. We'll. We'll revisit this conversation again. But in the meantime, where can people keep up with you and the work that you're doing?

Yeah, I have a website, kevinserrace.com, k e v I N S U r a c e.com, pretty easy to find it.

Thanks so much for joining me today for a productive conversation.

Thanks for having me.

Thanks to Kevin for joining me on the program today. You can check out our show Notes, which includes all the relevant links and all the other fun stuff@productivityist.com podcast534. If you want to support the show, wherever you get your podcasts, which will also have the show notes, you can subscribe to the show. That way you don't miss a single episode of what's to Come and can easily search through the archives. Just hit the subscribe button. That's one way to support the program. Another way to support the program is to check out the sponsors that were discussed during this conversation. You can go to productivityist.com podcastsponsors, click on any of the sponsor links, and that way they know that we sent you. And I also want to thank Soundstripe for the sound library and the music library. That's where a theme comes from. And if you want to check out what Soundstripe has to offer, just go to soundstripe.com and then if you want to get 10% off of a subscription, just use the code VARDY10 when you do. And that way you can reap the benefits of what Soundstripe has to offer as well. That's it for this episode. Thanks so much. I'll be back next week with another in our monthly series called Page M Talks with my good friend Patrick Roan. Until then, I'm Mike Vardy, reminding you to stop doing productive and start being productive. See you later.