Listener Favorites: Kevin Surace | How AI Will Impact the Future of Humanity, Creativity, and Work

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I think what we're finding and what I predicted a long time ago from my work back in the 90s in AI and I've been working in applied AI since then, is that AI is going to impact the tasks that we do and the jobs we do today. That does not mean there won't be jobs in the future. It means they're going to be different jobs. Now. I'm going to give you some very clear examples to be obvious too, okay? In the 70s all of a sudden on everybody's desk appeared an electronic calculator. And that scared people and it made people pretty happy. It democratized math. Now everybody could do math right Simple. And it did something else. It meant that instead of me taking a half an hour to do this long division problem, I no longer had to even know long division. I could just type it in there and I got that. Or a square root or even calculus. That did not end all the jobs that need math. It just meant that the basic tasks at the bottom of the math rung adding and subtracting and multiplying, all that are now done for us. And if you're in school and you never learned to do long division in third, fourth or fifth grade anymore, it wouldn't harm you in life because you will never do it anyway.

I'm Srini Rao and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast where you get a window into the stories and insights of the most innovative and creative minds who've movements built thriving businesses, written best selling books and created insanely interesting art. For more, check out our 500 episode archive at unmistakablecreative.com. Kevin welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

So happy to be here.

Yeah, it is my pleasure to have you here. I heard about you through way of your publicist and I know that you have done a lot of work on something that is at the forefront of all of our minds, which is the Role of AI and you know, how it's going to impact not just the future of work, but our lives in general. But before we get into all of that, I wanted to start by asking you, what social group were you a part of in high school and what impact did that end up having on what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Great, great question, actually. So I wasn't into sports and I was a good student, but not, not totally interested in everything I was learning. But I was a bandy. And so I was in marching band and orchestra and all of those things. I'm a percussionist, a drummer, and all of my friends were in band. That was, you know, that, that was our social group. That's what we did. And for us in, in my senior year, we were the national championship marching band. National championships used to be in Florida in April. And so that was a great way to, to, to go out with a bank.

Well, you know that we have that in common, right?

I didn't tell me about.

I was a band geek as well. I played the tuba for nine years.

Oh, fabulous. Maybe sousaphone occasionally.

Yeah. Well, it's funny because I didn't like marching band, but the reason I did it was because it was the way to get my PE credits, so.

Oh, that's funny. Okay. Well, that's a reason. Yeah.

But you know, the thing about the, the, the percussionists in general, like if you were to rank the coolness of people in a band, I would say that the percussionist, the drum line would be at the top of the list. And people who played the tuba would be at the bottom of that list.

Oh, that. Yeah. But, but, but in the long run, I think the tuba players are the most successful. Yeah. There is something about, you know, even, by the way, the stratifications even within percussion, because you start on bass drum and no matter how good you are, you kind of start there and you know, learn the ropes. And then maybe you go to Tom's or cymbals or whatever, and eventually if you're very good, you make it to the snare line.

Yeah.

And this is true even today. And the snare line. That is true. Those are the coolest cats. Right? And we just had a high school marching band reunion which, which I have helped to organize for the last 30 years or so. And every five years we have a reunion. We had about 450 people come back in March from, you know, who graduated over a 50 year time frame. And it was fantastic. And still that front snare line as it's marching up the hill, you know, with the sunglasses on it just this past May. Pretty darn cool.

Where, where did you go to high.

School At Upstate New York? West Genesee, outside of Syracuse, in Camillus, New York.

Okay. Yeah. I was the beneficiary of about a year in Texas where they have world class music programs and the beneficiary of an incredible music teacher. So I wonder for you, like the habits and other things that you picked up from being in marching band, how many of those impact your life today and how.

Yeah, all of them true. You know, it's funny, nobody ever asked something like this, but, but, but you're on a, you're onto a good thread here because you go, you know what happened in high school that led you to do what you did in college, that led you to go build all these companies and technologies and patents and all that. So look, I had. First of all, marching band itself is a team sport. Most sports are a team sport, but it's truly a team sport, typically with a hundred to two hundred people. Right? That's, that's big. And, and, and, and, and you know, if you fail to live up to the level of your neighbor, you know, as you're on that field competing, then you could cause the band to have 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, whatever it is, less score, and you lose. It only takes a few people to lose a show, right. To whoever you're competing against because it's competitive marching. Right? It's true with drum corps as well. Same thing. So, so first of all, you leave, you learn teamwork. And it isn't just about you, but also, you know, the band is only as good as you are, if that makes sense. Right? So, boy, there's a high bar and it's really high because there's always better players than you. So you're always working hard, you're always. And you take it seriously. You do want to win. Another one is you want to win. Okay? So I know there's been this cycle of winning isn't everything. And you know, just playing is great. And no, actually winning is really good. Not just in marching band, but in life. Right? Winning is good, losing is bad. It just is. And, and you know, with, with, I don't know, seven plus eight plus billion people on earth, you know, there are opportunities every day to win a little something and that maybe you grew a plant and you're. I'm looking at flowers out the window, right? Maybe it's some flowers that you maybe it's something in your garden. Maybe it's business. Maybe you're an entrepreneur. Maybe you started a business. Right. Maybe you won an account today. Right? Wins are great, losers really suck. And it just is. And, and, and I think it's okay to admit that, that it isn't just always about being in the game. It's great to be in the game, but it's better to win it. Just that and the last thing is I off. I also had a great, I had two great instructors. The, the marching band director, Bruce Burrett was just a fabulous, fabulous instructor. And, and surely about winning, there was no, you know, there's no question, right? We're here to win and we're gonna, we're gonna do the best we can to do that. The second was a gentleman named Nick Barrata. Nick, still writing music today. Just an outstanding music writer, but he also was our percussion head of percussion and percussion instructor. And it didn't matter how good you played, it could be better. Yeah. Didn't matter how much you practiced. You should have practiced more. And I know some people are going to say, oh, that's too hard. You just kid. You look, by then you're 16, 17, 18, you could take it.

Yeah.

You know, and so, and so never would, would he look maybe ever would he look and go, that was absolutely perfect. I wouldn't do a thing. No, it was almost perfect. Now, if you work on these three things for the next week, you'll take it up another level. And don't forget, Tiger woods, you know, had and still has a coach. Now the coach, you know, his trainer can't play better than he does, but he sees things that Tiger can't. And, and this is true with all golfers, it's true with baseball, but it doesn't matter, right? You, you need those people who can say, that's great. You're not paying me to tell you that you're the best in the world. You are the best in the world. Now let's see how you get better because there's people coming up behind you. So I think that's great. Those are great lessons for 15 to 18 year olds.

Yeah, I mean, I, I remember, like, I had a, a mentor who was a real hard ass on me. And like, you know, at the time, I hated him. And then I realized that he was preparing me for much bigger stakes situations. And the, the conclusion I drew from that is like, it's, it's nice to hear what you want to hear. It's better to hear what you need.

To hear better, to hear what you need to hear. And, and you know, you might as well get used to that early in life. Look, look, I've seen a lot of people that came out of this a time when and my kids were in this, you know, where they'd go and they'd play sports and, and everybody got a trophy, you know. But you lost. Yeah, but I got this thing. But you lost. Give it back. This is a bad thing. So, so there is a great, you know, great value learning at an early age. You know what it feels like, you know, to come out and win. You're not going to win every time. And what feels like. And I do think that we, you know, we do see these sometimes cadres of, of people, right, of a certain age that really, really don't understand the difference. And you know, they show up and go, well, I, you know, I'm, I, I just, everything's win, everything's good, everything's. No, this is really hard stuff. Right? This is. And if you're gonna go start a company, that's hard. And you know, number one rule of entrepreneurship is be ready to lose and get up the next day and try to win it, because you're going to lose. Not everybody's Mark Zuckerberg and won the first time or kept winning to a trillion dollar plus two trillion dollars. You know, market cap that is a rarity. Most entrepreneurs, you know, lose and it might be a small loss, it might be a loss of a company, it might be you ran out of money, whatever it is, and you get up the next day and go, that's what makes me an entrepreneur. I've got another pain point to solve and I'm going to solve it a different way. Let's go.

Yeah. So there are two questions that come from this. I, we're talking about winning and losing. One is around sort of the things you learn about practice and discipline. Because for me that was the most invaluable lesson. And I was really fortunate that, you know, I had almost a self fulfilling prophecy, like a Pygmalion effect almost because the band director was like, you're going to make whole state band. The day I picked up the instrument. And that lit a fire under my ass from the time I was in seventh grade till the time I was in tenth grade. Like, I drove my family insane with how much I practiced. Because a tuba is not very pleasant.

To listen to, especially a lot of tuba every night.

Yeah, it was, I mean, to the point where I literally, I would wake up at six in the morning because we live in an apartment and I would sit in my parents minivan and I would practice and I would stay until right 6pm but that like, part of me wonders where that came from. And of course it helped to have a, you know, a band director who kind of saw something in me I couldn't see in myself. But I also know that the way that I was raised, like being raised in Indian family, intrinsic motivation is kind of drilled into you at a pretty early age where they're like, nobody's going to give you any like, you know, kudos for getting good grades. It's just what they expect. Like they only question it when you get bad ones. But you know, so that there's that. But then you mentioned this idea of winning and you know, like I had a guest here recently, that woman named Jennifer Wallace, who wrote a book called Never Enough when the Achievement Mindset Becomes Toxic and what we Can Do about it. Because we have a lot of young people today who are feeling pressured to a point where you have a school district like Palo Alto, which is full of upper middle class kids that has one of the highest suicide rates in the country. And so like I agree with you in that, you know, people need to learn how to lose. But where do we draw a line between learning how to lose and these kids feeling like, you know, their entire life is dependent on this one moment?

Well, that, that's exactly right. So I, you know, I, I, I got to be the commencement speaker at one of the Palo Alto high schools. There are two, and I don't know, seven kids that year stood in front of a train. Right. And you know, that is unbelievable. So, you know, a lot of these kids were raised when they were in kindergarten and told, you're going to Stanford, you're going to Stanford, you're going to Stanford. And what happened is it got embedded in them that that is how they're going to measure their life. That is the measurement of life. Well, of course that's not. Now we're both sitting here going, that isn't the measurement of anything. It's, I don't know, if you go to Stanford, you go to someplace else. You know, if you were driven and you're smart and you're a critical thinker, you're going to go as far as you want to go regardless of, of, of any college you went to. And obviously some of the, some, some of the, you know, most richest people actually in, in the world never went to college at all. They were so smart they just couldn't stand college and they just kept plowing out whatever it is they wanted to do, right? So it turns out that that's a really bad thing to put in a kid's hat. So, you know, one of the things my, my parents and my instructors, they didn't say it's the end of your life if you don't win in the band competition, right? It's just there's winners and losers and we're going to cry, you know, together if you lost. And we're going to celebrate if you win and, and if you lost. We're going to learn from that and go on. It's not the end of your life. But these kids, when you start them that young and you say stamp and then they don't get in. And they are so. Because not everyone can get in, right? And they are so despondent and so depressed, they can't go on like they li. They feel they've let everyone in their life down and life isn't worth living. And this is just so wrong. I tried to give a, you know, heartfelt, thoughtful speech about this that, you know, none of that matters. It just doesn't matter. It doesn't matter where you go to college. You're going to be who you're going to be. Right? And, but, but some of that came from parental pressure and it's bad. And, and I, you know, we do worry about that for sure. And I'm also in the Bay Area, so I've known a lot of families that's happened.

Well, I think there's one other part of this conversation I feel like has been really kind of pervasive in the guests that I've talked to lately. And that's the role of privilege and context in some of these narratives.

Well, for sure. So look, there's, there's all kinds of privilege. This is being talked about in Hollywood, right. Also, you know that, that these young stars are starring in a movie and they go, well, that they came from privilege because their parents were Hollywood stars. Well, that's true. You know, there's no question. And yes, you got into Stanford because of a legacy, right? And we know that good portions of a Stanford class or a Harvard class or whatever are, you know, legacy admissions, meaning your parents went there and they donated and, and, and, and, and, and you know.

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Can I just let it go?

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I think the best thing I would say is what my dad used to say to me all the time because, you know, in those days, we didn't know about that, but we knew about other things. Oh, look, Johnny, he got to go to blah, blah, blah. And I didn't. And my dad would just say very simply, well, I didn't say life was fair. Life isn't fair. Right. But you could still make of it what you want. So there is no question that there is privilege for certain families. And I didn't grow up in a, in that kind of family of privilege. Right? Like, like, you know, like we're talking about here. And I had to go out and, you know, make my way and do the best I could and be humble about it and try to learn from everyone and continue to learn to do today. And there's no question there's some kids, they're, you know, born into privilege and end up, you know, where they end up. And they, they had a heck of a leg up. Now that said, eventually they're going to have to perform right like anyone else. And there are swaths of them that will perform and outperform and be amazing. And there are others that show up and go, this is work. That's what you want me to do. And I will say, I see, I see this often where, you know, certain people show up and, and I say, okay, great, well, today we need you to work on this. You know, that wasn't in the job description. Okay, I'm not asking you to do anything illegal. I'm paying you. I actually need you to do this work over here today. Well, I, you know, I didn't really sign up for that. I don't know what you do with that. Right. I mean, I, I appreciate that, but. But, you know, dude, it's your first job. You know, calm down, fall in line. It's all going to work out because we all got to work together, right? This is teamwork. So.

Yeah.

You know, in my day when I first started, people would ask me to do all kinds of things that weren't in the job description. And I only had one answer. Yes, yes, sir or yes, ma'. Am. That's what I said. Why they were paying me. Right. Unless it's illegal if they asked me to clean the toilets. Well, I guess that's my job today. Right? That's, by the way, an entrepreneur. Do startups. You will clean a toilet, I guarantee.

Well, have you ever seen the movie Son of a Woman with Alino? Do you remember where Chris o' Donnell goes to his house to, to house sit him for the weekend and he's like, pack my bags, we're going to New York. And they get to the airport and he looks at him, he's like, what are you, some kind of chicken who sticks to job description only.

Right, right, exactly. Who sticks to the job description only. You know, I always try to put in job description when we're hiring people, you know, sort of a line that says, or anything else, you know, within reason that the company asks you to do because I, you know, I just don't want to. Well, you didn't write that in there. I can't think of everything we're going to need a year from now. Right. We just want team players and ever, ever, we're all in it together and we're all trying to build something that's going to solve a pain point for someone. Right.

Well, I mean, especially in a startup environment. Right. Like your, your roles are changing constantly. Things are changing constantly. You have to just adapt. Like I realized the three things that I look for from people were. One, the biggest thing I looked for was somebody who was self directed, meaning that I didn't have to tell them what to do. They could figure it out on their own and come and tell me what they did.

Absolutely. I mean, it's, you know, it's hard to find. You don't always get people like that, that are self motivated and self directed and see the problem themselves, go and solve it. And then on your weekly meeting come in and say, oh, by the way, I did these three other things. I know you didn't ask me they needed done and go, yeah, now I.

Remember the other word was, it was navigating ambiguity. It was like a big one. Especially because to your point, we don't know what we're going to be working on a year from now.

Look, critical thinking, all of this gets back to critical thinking, right? So this is something we don't teach in college, we don't teach in high school. It's a real problem because people need real critical thinking and critical thinking. And I see this problem all the time in all of my companies. My goodness, we've run into this problem. It could be a market problem, a sales problem, a technical problem. And, and, and I go to the team and say, what do you think we should do? And they just look at me like it's deer in headlights. And I go, okay, why don't you critically think about the problem? And it's still deer in headlights. Sometimes I go, okay, well here's what I would do. They go, how did you think of that? I said, well, we had to do something, we had to move forward. And I said, you know what, unless I'm bringing the laws of physics, what are the ways we can begin to either learn more about this problem or solve the problem? Right. And standing still isn't one of them. And that's one of the things I think in any company, but certainly, you know, smaller companies and startups and these sorts of things. Standing still is one of the worst things you can do. Because when you're moving forward, even if you find out you moved in reverse, you can quickly correct, right? You're learning at all of those, but you're not learning anything standing still.

Yeah.

And you know, I see coders all the time that are excellent coders but aren't, aren't, aren't as strong critical thinkers as I'd like. And a day goes by and they've stared at the screen, literally staring at the screen because they got kind of, you know, writer's block, which a writer gets often. Right. And we see this in novelists. It, you know, for a month, not a word gets written. They just, they can't get there, can't think it through. This happens with coders. And my view is write something, anything, just start down some logical path and see where it leads you. Maybe it's in the Wrong place. Maybe it's in the right place, but at least you're learning. But standing there staring at it, not learning. Yeah, Right. And if it's a problem, then get to the crux of the problem, go to the whiteboard and say, what could cause this problem? Where are the parts of the code we need to look at? Right. Yeah.

I mean, I've had people who will come and ask me, like, a hundred questions about starting a podcast. And like, you know, 10 minutes into it, I'm like, okay, this is utterly pointless. I'm like, you're basically speculating. And I think I wrote this one in books. Like, speculation has never been the catalyst for turning ideas into reality. I'm like, even if you go do something wrong, the metaphor I always use is like, it's like standing in two different spots in the same room. The moment you take one step, the view changes. You're going to see something you couldn't see before.

That's right. That's exactly right. That's a really good way to say it. Right. And I think that's what people need to do, and that's what I mean by critical thinking. Maybe I need to look at this from a different angle. Maybe I need to go somewhere else. Maybe I need to ask people. But forward. Move it. Just keep moving. Just do something. Right? Do something. Do an experiment, something. Don't stop. And because stopping, it's. It's over. Like, nothing's happening. Right. There's no forward movement. So, yeah, never during headlights.

Well, speaking of moving forward, talk to me about the trajectory from, you know, high school band geek to. Well, I. You didn't say you were a band geek. I said that. So I apologize if you don't identify.

That's okay. It's. I clearly was.

Okay, so from, you know, high school percussionist, you know, slash band geek to what you've ended up doing today, give me the. The Reader's Digest version, and then we'll get into what I really want to get into.

Sure, sure, sure, sure. So. So I came out of college, came. Came to the West Coast Silicon Valley and started working for a very large company. And I learned an awful lot about working for a large company, both what I liked and what I didn't like. Right. There were resources. There was ability to sell. There were technology resources. There's so much I could do, there's so much I couldn't get done because there's a lot of red tape because it's a big company and they're worried about breaking something. Right. So very good learning experience. Then I went to a sort of middle sized company that had hundreds of people but not thousands. And from that I learned, wow, it's a little harder to sell and there's not as many technical resources and gotta do a lot more yourself. Like you just gotta be scrappy and more creative. And then I went from that to a 12 person company and then you really did everything yourself. Like, oh, there's no accounting. Okay, well I guess I better learn accounting, right? The toilets are overflowing, I better fix. And you just go down the line, right. So you learn about that. And it wasn't until after those three experiences that I started my first company at 29. So I learned a lot from that. So I am not a big proponent. I know a lot of people do it and a lot of people are very successful. I'm not a big proponent of, I've just gone out of college and I'm starting my first company. You've never been in a company. Like how do you know how they run? Well, I learned in school. No you didn't. Trust me, go, go be in them. And you find out what it, what all of the gives and takes and puts are between the team members, right? All the politics that happens between team members. You know, some people are there for different reasons, some people are there for paychecks, some people are there for a title, some people are there because they just want to sell more, whatever it is, right. And you need to sort of really learn that and embed it and understand it. And by the time you work your way to, you know, a smaller company and then maybe have worked in a startup for a while now, you've got all of the underpinnings and you've learned on someone else's dime. You also also, you know, hopefully gave them great value, but you learned on someone else's dime what it is to run a company. Now when you go start a company, you actually know what it is to run a company, what all of the problems may be, what happens, you know, now you start to think about what happens when I can't payroll, Right. Cause that's what happens in these startups.

Yeah.

So you know, and look, talk about creative, right? You start to learn about marketing and learn about sales and I don't mean book learn, I mean you're really doing SEM and SEO in any. Right. And so, and so you want to learn all that before you go start your own company so that you have a higher chance of success. Yeah.

It's funny that you, you say that because, like, I went to business school and I remember right after I got a business school, a couple years later, I was like, okay, now I started a business, I'd worked a few companies and I was like, business school doesn't teach you shit about how to run a business. It teaches you how to be an employee in somebody else's. And I realized, I was like, that's because Naval Ravikant said it. Well, he's like, you know, when you put yourself in real world situations, there are all these idiosyncrasies that express themselves that don't come out in like a simulation or a case study. And to your point, like, I had a mentor named Greg and he said, look, he's like, if you want to build a startup, he's like, go work at Google first. You drastically increase your probability of success by doing that.

That's absolutely right. Frankly, go work anywhere, you know, just do something. Right. But certainly Google, great. Another startup, great. Just anywhere you can go to learn and have feet on the ground and really understand. And in the meantime, while you're there, you can start to work on what are the pain points you want to solve. So many startups, I mean, people come to me, I'm, I'm, I'm on many boards and I'm an advisor to a lot of companies and so many people come to me and say, I've got this great idea. This is, this is the solution I have. I said, well, but where's the problem? I, I get you've got a solution, but it's looking for a problem. It's like, you know, we're both on microphones right now because we're on a podcast probably it has black foam on it. And you know, someone comes to you and say, look, I've, I've invented green foam for microphones, so really? Well, I'm making it up. Right. But really. And what's the problem that we're solving? Well, some people like green better than black. Okay. That's not a problem, that's not a pain point. Right. So you got to find real, and I mean real pain points. And if you don't find real pain points, there is not going to be a big market. Not only do you have to find real pain points, you're going to find real pain points with people who have money to spend. Yep. So you can find a real pain point. You know, for example, in East Palo Alto is, housing's too expensive in East Palo Alto. That's a real pain point. You know, Unfortunately, a lot of those people don't have the kind of money to spend. And that's the fundamental problem. And you can no longer build housing in California for less than, I don't know, you know, $300 a square foot or whatever it is. So you're not, you're probably not going to sell. Government can go solve that. You're probably not going to solve that as a business. So you, you've also got to look at things where there's an opportunity to sell someone something who has money to pay you. Does that make sense?

Victor Chang, in his book Extreme Revenue Growth, says that he was like, basically he has these five foundations of extreme revenue growth. And one of them is, you know, the first thing is a problem that people have. And he said, the second is a problem that people have that they're willing to pay to solve. Like, that it matters enough because there are a lot of people problems that people have like, that they're not willing to pay to solve, that they're not enough of a pain in the ass that they're willing to spend money. Because, like, I learned this the, you know, the hard way because, you know, unmistakable creative literally started out as a project that I was working on during business school after I graduated because I didn't have a job and constantly trying to morph it into a business. Whereas I have this second business that I started, which right from the get go, I was very clear, like, basically was, I'm going to show you how to use this tool called MEM to basically reduce information overload. Like. Like, I had a clear model. And I knew from the get go it was like, this is the problem that I'm solving and these are the people that I'm solving it for. So it was like, really different in terms of the way I approached it. But I also had, you know, 10 years of experience, like, doing everything wrong.

Right, Right. No. And that experience informed you on how to do this, right? I mean, that's the thing, right? And so there is just, you know, you can't beat experience. And I love business school and it's great. But do not think that you know everything about building and running a business and making a profit from business school.

You probably, I would say, you know, absolutely nothing from business school.

I was being nice.

Yeah. But I'm not.

So no need to be nice.

Let's not pull punches here. I mean, let's face it. Most MBA, most MBAs, like, wouldn't know a damn thing about how to run a business. At least the ones I went to school with.

No, no, I, I think that's right. And in fact, look, I think if you go to get your MBA and an MBA is a really good thing that might be more valuable in a larger company that drives, you know, drives their execs and, and upward mobility through, you know, an MBA is one of the things they look for. Right. And so. Got it. You know, check the box. Totally get it. Very good. But if you're going to get your MBA to learn how to start a company, probably not the right place to go. You want to learn how to start a company? Go work for Google, go work for Facebook, probably go work for some other startups that are already relatively established and figure out what those 20 people are doing. All 20 or 15 or 18 or whatever it is. Right. So. And learn each of their jobs just a little. Because when you start a company, you're going to do each of their jobs. You with your unmistakable creative, you know, you are in charge of your website, you're in charge of your marketing, you're in charge of SEO S, CM you're in charge of social media, you're in charge of booking people, you're turns out. And the finances. It turns out you have to do everything because that's what we do. You had to know enough about everything. Even if the company got big and you hired people, you will be a better boss to them because you did some of that task before.

Well, it's so funny you say that, right? Because when we talk about delegation, I think this will make a perfect segue into AI Like I always tell people, okay, if you don't know how to do something yourself and you try to delegated to somebody else and they do a shit job, then who is that on? It's on you. And I realized this is the same thing with communicating with AI it's like you sound like a moron. No wonder you're not getting the output. So with that in mind, let's start talking about not just the future of work, but like from this, this TEDx talks of yours, I got the sense that this is really about the future of humanity. And so you posed this question, you said that we become known by the things we're doing. Even though this is a job and we're really only doing it to pay the bills, for the most part, that's why we're forced to do this kind of work. So somehow we become known by it. But what happens when it goes away? What happens if humans are obsolete in the next 50 years for the Kinds of jobs that we've always done. And what does that mean for us? I mean, that has profound implications from, for everything from how we educate to how we work and all of that. So take it from there.

Oh, my goodness. So many things to talk about. Well, look, that talk, that particular TED talk that you watched, let's see. Must have been given about years ago, right? So it's quite a ways ago from. Or nine years ago, maybe 2014, 24, maybe 2013. So it could even be 10 years ago. Eight, nine, 10 years ago. Right. So what, what's interesting is, you know, AI has continued to move along as it has for 70 years. It doesn't always move fast. I know that people now using chat are feeling, wow, this really happened fast. It was a long, long way to chat, okay? And we've been making strides every year towards it. And now we've got a great language model, which is what that is. Look, I, I think what we're finding and what I predicted a long time ago from my work back in the 90s in AI and I've been working in applied AI since then, is that AI is going to impact the tasks that we do and the jobs we do today. It does not mean there won't be jobs in the future. It means they're going to be different jobs. Now, I'm going to give you some very, very clear examples to be obvious to you, okay? In the 70s, you know, all of a sudden on everybody's desk appeared an electronic calculator. And that scared people. And it made people pretty happy. It democratized math. Now everybody could do math, right? Simple. And it did something else. It me. It meant that instead of me taking a half an hour to do this long division problem, I no longer had to even know long division. I could just type it in there. And I got that. Or a square root or even calculus if I wanted to on some calculator. So that was freaky. And then 10, 15 years later, we had the advent of the spreadsheet. And the spreadsheet, you know, profoundly change counting. Okay? So math in terms of math models and democratizing the ability to do math has been solved for over 30 years. And all of us use spreadsheets and the equivalent of calculators wherever they are today, online, whatever, right? So that did not end all the jobs that need math. It just meant that the basic tasks at the bottom of the math rung, adding and subtracting and multiplying, all that are now done for us. And if, if, if you're in School and you never learned to do long division in third, fourth or fifth grade anymore. It wouldn't harm you in life because you will never do it anyway. It's a task you don't actually need to know how to do. I know we still teach our kids that they actually don't need to know how to do it. They'll never do it ever. And you and I haven't done it in years. And we don't need to because we have spreadsheet.

Yeah, I mean, we don't need to speaking about that. Yeah. Like I don't know damn thing from my high school math classes.

Now here's the funny thing. You know, today there are more people working in accounting in the United States than there probably have ever been working in accounting before. Even though we have the advent of the spreadsheet now. Why is that? Well, what we did is we made accounting departments, you know, easily an order of magnitude more productive than they were before. Maybe two or three orders are made. Just the spreadsheet. All those people sitting at desks or cubes adding and subtracting and multiplying. It's a, you know, in ledger books, which is what we used to use, that all went online and you know, went to spreadsheets. Anyway, it went on to computer and, and then all of that started getting into, you know, really sophisticated accounting systems that could deal with this and take in inputs and taking sales automatically, et cetera, et cetera. What that did is it made the accounting environment so productive that it lowered the cost, the overhead, the overhead cost of producing the goods and services which drove the company's top line larger, bottom line larger, which grew the company. And you cannot grow a company say you can't double the size of the company without doubling the output from accounting. Except now to double the output from the accounting. I don't necessarily need to double the number of people certainly that I had in 1973 or 1983. Right. I don't need to do that. You know, I had 50 people in accounting. I, I didn't have that. But now I have more than 50 people in accounting because the company's that much larger because we could be so productive and so quick. So productivity drives GDP and drives job growth. It really and grows and, and, and drives the, the size of the company. And, and, and frankly, you know, higher GDP does mean ultimately higher standard of living. There's some lag in that. I know. But.

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Did I talk too much? Can't I just let it go? I wish I would stop.

Thank you so much.

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They are living now. That means we want our companies to be more productive and produce more on a worldwide basis. However, we now have a macro trend. The macro trend is birth rates have gone down for 30 or 40 years and that means there's less kids graduating high school today than there were 20 and 30 years ago and less kids graduating college. Therefore, there's less people to hire. And it's not going to end. There's no end in sight. Right? There's no insight for that. So that means there will always be more jobs than there are people. So if you want to double the size of your company today, the only way to do it is make everybody twice as productive as they are, right? Because you can't hire more people. It's very, very hard. If you're hiring someone, you've hired them away from some other company, right? There's just there's more jobs than there are people. So when you think about it that way, you go, well, now I need to solve for language too, because I solved for math and it made us all more productive. But I've never been able to solve for language. So finally we have language models. Now. They're like math models. Of course they're actually built on math models underneath it. That's a neural net and it's all math. But nevertheless, I'm language models. And this is amazing because now I can take, you know, all of my marketing, blog posts and advertising, and even writing a website or whatever and just ask, you know, chat, GPT or bard or like, model to generate it for me or generate some ideas for me. And once it does, I can just edit them. So now I take a three hour blog post and it takes me, you know, 15 minutes to edit it. That is unbelievable. That's, you know, 12 times more productive than I was without it. So that means I am amplifying my brain power, right? I've got 12 brains in that task. I used to have one, Now I have 12. It's like having 12 people and they, and together they could all do this stuff so much quicker, right? This is a game changer. That's a game changer. But because we're seeing improved productivity, we're not seeing a lack of job opportunity, we're seeing some tasks go away. So a blog post writer, you know, might not be writing as many blog posts as they did, but they might be overseeing as an editor, the writing of 10 times more blog posts than they did. If that makes sense.

Yeah, it does. I mean, so, like, let me, let me kind of, you know, give you my thoughts on this one. I, you know, I alluded to this earlier. You know what you and I were talking before we hit record that I had written this book called the Artificially Intelligent Creative. And what it made me realize was that one, the purpose here wasn't to necessarily replace humans, but to leverage AI to complement your abilities, not replace them.

Where.

That's where your, your creativity comes in. I'll give you a more concrete example about what you're talking about. So I have this note taking app called MEM, and unlike ChatGPT, it has literally every single podcast transcript I've ever had, every book note. We're talking like tens of thousands of notes, right? And, you know, on top of it, they have now a chat layer. And the crazy thing is I've been doing a new version of our course and, you know, like, we just, you know, I had, I literally had this thing based on the thousands of notes that are inside of here, many of which are written in my own words, by the way. I was like, okay, take these notes from this, you know, set that are tagged with this specific label and generate an outline for this course module. And then I was like, okay, great, give me all the talking points for this module. And then, you know, I was just finishing up today. I was like, okay, go through each of these modules. Give me an implementation exercise for my students. And to have thought of that stuff on my own would have taken so long. But, and this is something I think that, you know, I had mentioned to you before we hit record, was that the way. The realization that I finally came to was that Adam Smith and in the wealth of nations had said, division of labor maximizes your output. But to your point earlier, labor is expensive. It's prohibitively expensive. And it's always been one of those things that was only accessible to people with really deep pockets or to large organizations. And in a lot of ways, I think AI is this tremendous equalizer where it basically enables division of labor at scale. But on the flip side of that, I've actually seen articles with where economists are talking about the fact that this also could aggregate, aggravate, you know, our inequality problems. So talk to me about the implications of AI from an overall sort of economic standpoint for society at large. And then let's talk about it in context of what it means for how we educate. Because I remember you mentioned the calculator and remember Sam Altman doing an interview on CBS where he had actually said, look, when the calculator came out, it meant that the way that we taught math was going to have to change. And he said that AI actually could be a fantastic tool for Socratic method learning, which I'm realizing it is because it's forcing me to go a lot deeper into my own knowledge, because I don't just take the first answer I get from the output. But that's because of the way I think.

Yeah, well, you're a critical thinker. Not everybody is. Here's what I would say. We. I'm on the board of trustees at Rochester Institute of Technology, and we, at a recent board meeting, we were really debating this, and we had a number of professors come in and with a variety of opinions. And the opinions were basically, look, these kids are using ChatGPT to write their papers. And the variety, the bell curve of concern around that was all the way from it's the end of teaching as we know it, we're dead. Who isn't this amazing? I'm going to teach ChatGPT because that's one of the tools that they're going to have to use in the future. Right? I happen to think on the right side of that, all the way to the right is the correct one. Like this tool is here to Stay. Like the calculator was here to stay. Okay, so now it's time to change our teaching methods to embed the calculator. The calculator doesn't go away. It becomes a core part of your life. Spreadsheets didn't go away because you told someone they can't use them in the classroom. It's a core part of your life. Right? And, and, and so, you know, when we first got computers, even typewriters, and then after that computers where we could type, we sent an awful lot of teachers that said, no, I want to see you write in longhand. Right? Right. Literally write out your paper. Now I really can't write anymore. And the reason I haven't written in years, I could print a little bit. Right. But I, I'm using computers as you are, as most of us are. Right. If we have to write longhand, it's, it, it's not going to look very pretty because we just don't do it all the time. And, and, and it turns out no one wants us to do it. Like there's no need in the. I mean, maybe if you're in a desert with only a pencil, right? But other than that, you probably, you know, probably not writing beautiful prose with a pen because we have tools that help us do that right now. Like we don't do long division anymore. And the same is true with chat, GPT and other, any other large language models. These models are here to stay. Image generation is here to stay. Right mid journey, et cetera. Stable diffusion, dolly. These are here to stay. These are now tools that are, will be on everybody's desktop one way or another. Just like Photoshop became on many people's desktop, you know, certainly in the, in the art community. Right. And so did Illustrator and things like that. So we need to start teaching. The use of critical thinking is important because when it spits out something, you go, huh, does this reflect my thoughts? Does it reflect it the way I want? Is it what I want to say? I know I said write it in the style of Shakespeare. Is that really the style I want there? There's all kinds of real, you know, critical thinking that goes around that, right. You don't just take it and shove it out there often because it's not really perfect, that's not really good. And there's also inconsistencies and errors. And, you know, these models learn from fiction and fact. It's got everything buried in there. But we've got to teach kids to use these and we got to teach people to Use them because these tools are now here and they're gonna.

Yeah.

Look, example, we all do PowerPoints or keynotes or whatever, and I give 40, 50, 60 keynotes a year on AI and have been for a decade or more. And, and now I'm as busy as ever as you can imagine, mostly corporate events and such. But, but I, but I will tell you, I used to have all of my graphics, a lot of my graphics done by a graphic artist or someone who's an artist who can draw, etc. And there'd be some back and forth for several weeks, but I'd get some really nice things. Well, you know, now I can have Dolly or Mid Journey or someone just draw stuff for me. Right? They're like lots of. And, and, and it's not about saving the money. I don't care about the little bit of money that it costs to have someone draw something or a few hundred dollars to, you know, to get illustrations and things like that. The difference is this. I have it in one minute.

Yeah.

And I have eight, eight of them. And if I don't like those eight, it'll generate another eight for me. And so within two or three minutes, I have exactly what I want. I put it in there, I've moved on. It is a time savings. It's not about the money. It's a time savings. Right. So if you are an illustrator, me, I had better become the master of these tools and not just illustrating and however I used to illustrate. Right. I'm going to have to become the master of these tools, be great prompt engineering. I might even feed it some of my illustrations, give it an idea of a style. I might do things like that. But, but to think that you and your customers aren't going to use the tools would be ridiculous. Just like I expect a photographer to never use Photoshop. Really? What? When? In 1973. I mean, the thing's been around for 40 years. I'm thinking they're using a. Yeah, well.

So it's funny you mentioned education because my dad retired from UC Riverside this year and I remember, like, I started, you know, kind of giving him, you know, like lessons in Chat GPT and all the work he hated doing, like writing recommendations, all that kind of stuff. He just started dumping it into Chat GPT. He even made me use AI to write his retirement speech that he had to give.

Oh my goodness, I love it.

But the, the thing that, you know, was interesting, you know, I told him, I was like, look, your students are going to use this anyways, so why not like, actually incorporate this. So first we did his curriculum using chat. Let's do this, dad. I'm like, why don't you give your students an exercise? Because he's a virologist. And I was like, why don't you create an exercise for your Intro to Biology class that teaches people how to utilize AI to potentially model cures for a virus? And that became part of the curriculum this year, which was really cool. But I think that to your point, like mentioning the speed here, like what I describe this at is creating at the speed of thought, which is really something we've never had before. It's like you can go from idea to execution and make serious progress in record time. I know this because I just finished recording the final module for my course, which is called Creating at the Speed of Thought, where I showed people, I was like, look, in 20 minutes, we've basically outlined a presentation on decision making. We have written a table of contents for a book on decision making, and we've written a blog post about decision making using notes that I already have inside of the knowledge base. And the more knowledge that you have inside this thing, the more effective it becomes. Which is really cool because it basically gives us sort of an infinite scalability that we've never had before when things are organized this way. But that takes us to sort of the, like, really interesting part of your talk where you say, you know, so the question the future isn't about the perfect job, good salary and benefits and job security and close to home and everything else. That's actually the wrong question. We're going to give our kids, go to school, learn something so that you get the perfect job. There won't be a perfect job. It's the wrong question. And I think Buck Fuller, Buckminster Fuller said it best that we should do away with the absolute specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. We keep inventing jobs because of the false idea that everybody has to be employed as some kind of drudgery. And then you go on to say that jobs aren't good, they were a necessary evil, and in fact they're a form of human bondage. We were enslaved and have been enslaved and continue to be enslaved by the fact that we have to get up, we have to go to work, we have to produce something, and we have to come home. That is like a landmine of a way to end a talk.

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Out.

Did I talk too much? Can I just let it go?

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Yeah, it is. It is. Well, no, I mean, Bucky Fuller said that. Right. And a long time ago. And I thought that was really profound because in that particular talk, one of the examples I gave is, is Joseph, who, you know, was, you know, somewhat the father of Jesus. Not the father, but you get the point. And, and, and all the way back in the Bible, it was Joseph the carpenter. I don't even know Joseph's last name. No one knows Joseph's last name because he was the carpenter. So. So all you know. But back at least 2,000 years, we've been looking at people and, and tying them to their work. And an example of, of that is, you know, you've been to parties recently, you've been to see people, whatever, and what do they say? Hey, yeah, what do you do? Really? What do I do? How about, who am I? How about what makes you up? What makes you tick? What makes it. No, what do you do? Now nobody's trying to be mean by saying that they're not trying to demean the rest of my life or your life. It's just that's how we started conversations for a few thousand years. What do you do, Joseph? Well, I'm a carpenter. Okay, then I guess we'll call you Joseph the carpenter. It's really fascinating. So when you look forward, you could say that we could get to a point where we start looking at work weeks that are not five days a week, but maybe they're four and maybe three and maybe there are two. There, there is work for humans to do. There are things for us to do. But we may not be as shackled to the work as we have and we really have been for thousands of years, which is I must go to work to earn a living, to put food on the table. And your work could, you know, a farmer could be growing your own food, whatever it is. Like I have to do the work or there's no or I can't eat. Right. Been that way since we've been hunter gatherers. I either hunt or I starve. That was it. You hunted, you gathered or you starved. There were no other choice. You couldn't survive. So, so that's all we've known for the history of humanity. It clearly is like that for other animals and other mammals and every other species on Earth. But, but now we're talking about a time when it might not be that way, that there will have to be some overall standard of living. That probably depends on the country. You may certainly be more than encouraged to, you know, two days of work or three or whatever it is. But it might be that we have a lot more free time, a lot more time to travel, a lot more time to be with our family and that the time that we spend on whatever the drudgery was is gone. And for sure the drudgery things are the first things that are going away. Right? Customers, I say going away, but morphing. Right. Customer support roles, certainly some, some, some sales roles of writing. A lot of these things that are, that are now going to be accommodated by large language models are going to make all of us a more productive society. But some of the tasks are going to be gone. And give me one example. I, I, I, one of my companies is called Fans and, and, and we have been using AI to find bugs in software automatically since the launch of that product back in 2017. And it's a generative AI product and it wasn't using transformer models or using different model set, but now it's also using transformer Models, very cool stuff. And basically, generally speaking, it can find bugs better, faster, more reliably than humans can. And so if you're a manual tester, you know, it would seem that that may be a task that we're not going to need as much of because AI has been doing that well for five years now. Most companies have yet to tap AI there because they're scared of it, they don't understand it, they don't trust it over their manual testers, et cetera. Then there's, then there's scripters. These are people who write test scripts, literally write code to test software and then maintain that code to test the software. Right. And there are, there, I don't know, there's got to be 2 million people who do that around the world. Some number like that, a lot of them in India. You know, India is a big place that was sort of. We in the US sort of outsource that. And, you know, if, if all you do is script and you're not really thinking about the quality of the application, but you're, you've forgotten that you're a quality engineer and instead you became a selenium scripter. It's a, it's a language that you, that, that, that, that job is probably not going to be around for a long time, right? So we could pick on a lot of these things that just aren't. Those tasks are not going to be what you're doing. You're gonna have to elevate yourself to be a robot overlord as opposed to doing these menial. Well, we will look back someday as menial tasks, right? Yeah.

Well, let me give you an example of sort of this. I think it's, you know, it speaks to the importance of, you know, developing your own knowledge and critical thinking as well as your own creativity. So I had a blog post, of course, like, I've been the beneficiary of thousands of interviews talking to people like you, right? And now suddenly all this knowledge is accessible. You know, in an AI language model, I can manipulate it, I can play with it. And I remember I was in, in ChatGPT one day and I was like, wait a minute, I've interviewed Jonah Berger and I read his book Contagious. So I was like, Chad, I was like, give me the seven principles of Contagious. I was like, okay, perfect. I was like, see this blog post? I'm like, I want you to revise it using these principles from his book Contagious that are designed to make a piece of content go viral and What I realized was that the reason I was able to think about it that way was one, I had to have read that book to have even had that thought in the first place. Two, I'd interviewed Joe. So that really kind of spoke to the value of actually continuing to learn and accumulate knowledge and combining your own imagination with the capabilities of some of these large language models, as opposed to just saying, hey, write this for me.

Yeah, that. That is exactly right. That, that's the thing. This whole prompt engineering thing, of which, you know, there's like a million jobs open right now for. Prompt engineering actually requires very smart people like you. You have to have read, you have to be up on what's going on, up on what the models can do and what they're. And how they're trained. You're exactly right. You know, so a real prompt engineer is, you know, is not someone who is not worldwide. That makes sense. Right.

Well, so it's funny because I wrote an article about this saying that, like, I, you know, I think it was like the emergence of prompt engineers in the age of generative AI. And I was like, look, prompt engineer is not going to be a job title. It's going to be a part of everybody's job title. Like, right now we call it a job title. But it's funny because, like, the way I come up with my best AI prompts is like, if I get out, this is one thing I figured out. If the output that I want isn't what I want it to be, and it takes three to five iterations, when I get done with those iterations, at the end of that conversation, I'll say, one, what should I have phrased the prompt like that the very first time so that you give me the right output to begin with? Like, that's what I always tell people is like, if you're not getting output, you want, then ask the AI how to. How to phrase it.

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. But even that takes critical thinking. Well, I think, like, great. How would I ask it and what direction do I want to sort of push it? Yeah, to me, what I want.

Well, I think having been somebody who has been a writer and haven't written books like that, you know, for your prompt engineering skills, being able to write well is like a massive advantage. Because I remember having this conversation, my cousin, it was when I was writing this artificially intelligent, creative book, and he said, dude, he's like, at the end of the day, you're still 50% of the equation. It all depends on human Input, right? Like you're the first thing that goes in there. And he's like, so if you sound like an idiot when you communicate with it, it's the old computer science metaphor. Garbage in, garbage out.

That's right. Look, I hear a great example is what's going on with WGA and SAG right now in Hollywood. Both of them are on strike, and one of the big, you know, strike issues as AI because they see it coming and they don't know how. How to deal with it. And of course, the. What the studios. Well, let me say what the WGA said, which is the Writers Guild is they said essentially they offered to the studios there will be no AI used to write any part of any episode, anything. Right, well, that's not going to work. You know, that says. That's like Universal music saying, we will never stream music. Okay, well, that's not going to work. Right. The technology's here. And if we've learned anything about technology is you don't get to stop the march of technology. It's here. So now you say, how do I make the best use of it? So if I'm the union, I would say, okay, we are. We. The union will be the only authorized, you know, the writers union will be the only authorized people to use AI within the studio environment. And we will manage it and, and, and we will edit it and, you know, and we will prompt it. Right. We will be the experts of that because we're writers. And, and the give for that will be, okay, you don't have to have eight writers in the writers room anymore. A little before. Now, that's going to be hard for a union to do that because what they want to do is take 8 to 12, not 8 to 4. But. But they're not going to get what they want on. There will never be AI used. So I think people have to come to the bargaining table and start to wreck. Just start with a basis. Technology is here. It will be used. So now who's going to monetize it? Who's going to get the benefits from it? How do we include the union members so that they are properly taken care of, whatever that is. Right? And they'll have to be some gives and puts and takes and all the things you do. And the same is true with sag. You know, the SAG says, I don't want, you know, you will never use an actor's likeness and just pay him for a day. Because the studio said, how about if you're on a movie set, we'll pay you for that day. And, and if we need you a little more and we can do it with AI, we, we have the right to use your likeness because, you know, we paid for it. And SAG rightly said, no, you can't pay the person 200 and use their likeness forever. So see, there, there's going to be a negotiation there. That, that's, that's going to work out. But you can't use AI. Can't be the right answer, because then what will happen is the studios are going to say, if you make it too expensive for me, I'm going to use AI, But I'm just going to generate people that never existed. Right. I don't need an actor anymore. I'll generate people that never existed. By the way, how Hollywood's been doing for a long time. Put them in the background, have them, you know, be a minor role, whatever, and that'll be that. And now no actor got anything. You didn't get one day. You got zero days. So people have to get to the table and realize, you know, realize the technologies here. Accept that and then find a way to work with it.

Yeah, it's funny because, like, I was in college when Napster came out and you know, like, for any person, I mean, I'm sure you and I probably close enough in age where you're like, finally, the bullshit of spending $13 on a CD to get one song. You know, I mean, to this day, my sister basically never lets me live it down that I made her waste her allowance. You know, I took her to the mall to Sam Goody. And this was when friends came out and basically she was like, are the Rembrandts any good? I was like, yeah, the whole album is amazing. Which was total. It was a lie. She was like, you're so full of. I'm never trusting you again when it comes to this. But yeah, like, we all rejoiced. I remember I literally went to Rasputin Records in Berkeley and I wrote down every single CD I'd ever thought about buying because I only wanted one song. And I went back and I downloaded them on Napster. And like, from what I'm hearing, this is the threat that Hollywood faces. Because I'll tell you, when I, you know, was talking to my friend Zach who runs a podcast called Optimize Yourself, you've been a guest here. I told him, I said, you know, like, one thing I realized was that I had these different ideas for, you know, movie and television related things. And I said, look, I thought back to the beginning of South Park. How did south park become popular? They uploaded that first episode to the Internet. And so I'd written this, you know, these series of, like, ridiculous stories of my friends, you know, at the roommates I live with growing up. And I was like, okay, generate a script for this. Like, give me the synopsis of the episode. And I told him. I was like, if I wanted to make this in Hollywood, first somebody would have to take a chance on me, and I'm a nobody as far as Hollywood's concerned. Two, I'd have to find actors, and then I have to pay. I was like. But then I realized I was like, there's one way around this animation. And then I was like, okay, well, if I don't need people, like, wait, I can actually synthesize the voices of all the characters. I can generate them using an image generator.

I was like, absolutely.

So literally, you know, the. Basically, like, we all, at this point in our hands, have the ability to create the equivalent of that pilot episode of South Park.

That is absolutely true. What's fascinating about that is a lot of these things that. That I show people that are created by AI and they go, oh, my goodness, I can't believe that you've got, you know, Tom Cruise doing that and saying this. I go, you know, Hollywood's had that ability for more than 20 years. It just used to cost millions of dollars for that effect, and now it costs zero. Yeah. So what we've done is democratize a lot of quite sophisticated effects that Hollywood could do with people and given them to the masses. That's both good and bad, right?

Totally.

And we're going to see an immense amount of content come out of that. And all these creative minds. You never had access to $100 million film buds. I do have access to 10 cents to go generate this image. So. So, you know, that's necessary. Here's the other thing. People are. Oh, there's all these deep fake. Now I see pictures of whatever, you know, the president in this place that he never was. I said, now, hey, yes, you can do that now with AI it's very easy. I could have done it with Photoshop for the last 30 years. So. So all you had to do is learn Photoshop, Right? This is. This is. So we're democratizing Photoshop now. People can make things without knowing Photoshop and just knowing how to type something. Yeah, okay. I don't know. It's both good and bad. Right. We're able to make music now. Have AI help us make music, especially you know, sort of film, sort of background music for films and things like that can now be fully AI generated. And there's no musician needed now. There hasn't been a musician needed for decades because we could synthesize it.

It.

So that ended decades ago, at least two decades ago. Now we don't even need someone who can write music. You can start to describe the mood and the style you want and the thing will write it. And you say, I needed exactly 3 hours or 3 minutes and 45 seconds. And it'll write that. And you'll go, hey, this is pretty good. I'm going to use it. And it's royalty free. There were no musicians involved. And so we've democratized the ability to write and create a variety of music. Now, I know that's not fair. You know, life isn't fair. Right? Life isn't fair. But, but, but it's going to be more fair for some. And it's going to, it's going to drive, you know, productivity to levels that we've never seen. But, but not a surprise. Look, if you're a harpist in the United States and what you do is play harp and all you want to do is play for a symphony, I don't know, there are 42 symphonies with harps anymore, right? So, so there might be 2,000 harpists, you know, that, you know, you chose a career that might be hard to find a job, right? You could teach, but it's gonna be hard because there's only the same with like, you know, lead oboe. There's, there's only 42 jobs of lead oboe. Trust me.

I know this because my dad talked me out of going to the USC School of Music for this exact reason. And I told my dad, I was like, yeah, like, looking back, I'm like, if I had chosen to be a professional tuba player, I wouldn't be looking at job boards every morning. I'd be looking at obituaries. Because you literally are waiting for somebody to die.

No, that, that, that, that's exactly right. And I, you know, I was, I was told not to be a drummer for, to make your career and make your life, right? So same thing, right? Go to school for engineering, go to school for something else. And if you want on the side, that's great. So it's, you know, it's really fascinating. And, and, and people do choose their careers, and there are certain careers one's choosing now that, that I hope you didn't choose for money, but you still might choose because you're like here's an example, right? You got 160,000 actors in the country and roughly there's jobs for, I'm going to call it 10 to 20,000. Right? Which is why the vast majority, 160,000, make less than $10,000 a year. Look, I, I'm sure they're great, I'm sure, you know, but it turns out supply and demand still works like as a basis. And even through all of this AI, what we're doing with generative AI and how that's going to change really everything in life still, supply and demand will be what it will. So you know, we have a huge demand for plumbers and the supply has dried up and there's no AI that can take a plumber's job. That's it. So, and, and, and there won't be for decades. It's just too hard. Every house is different and nobody wants, you know, to build a robot that does that. Forget it, right? You're gonna be crazy. So if you really wanted an absolute foolproof job for the next 30 years, become a plumber. I know, that's great. Yeah, good advice.

Well, so there are two, couple of things that, you know, I think about when I'm thinking about this, right. I feel like in a lot of ways all these creative capabilities also raises the bar for creatives to bring something really powerful like high, of high quality. Like your craft matters even more now than it ever did before and your imagination, your creativity. Because even, you know, one thing like I was, I did this animated short like using AI and I was using Adobe character and I kept getting stuck and I realized, I was like, oh, this is wildly inefficient to keep going to chat DPN and say, how do I do this? And I was like, you know what, do this. I'm like, give me a self paced 10 day curriculum on how to teach myself Adobe Character animate and oh, I love it. And then I was like, and then revise the curriculum and apply the principles from my friend Scott Young's book on accelerated learning. So that way I don't have to spend forever on this, you know, and that's the thing I realized was so valuable. But to me it really like I realized like this drastically raises the bar for people who do creative work.

Oh that, that's right. Because you've democratized the, the base level of creative so that anyone can do it. Right. It's like we democratize the ability to write blog posts almost any, right. So you don't have to be a blog post Expert. We've democratized the ability to just make pictures. You know, with Mid journey, just give me a photorealistic, you know, picture of blah, blah, blah, and there it is. And there's six of them. And you go, I could have never drawn that with all of the, you know, all of the, the. The training in the world. Because I don't have the skills, the skills to draw. I don't have the skills to draw a straight line in that particular working for that kind of art. I just don't have that. But I can describe what I want and I can envision what I want, and I can work the prompts to finally get what I want. But a machine drew it for me. That is amazing. So now the people whose craft it is, you're absolutely right. To really create those kinds of illustrations, they got to really up their game, Right. They're going to have to be world.

Yeah.

And that means there's, you know, a bunch of underlings probably not going to be a lot of money for. Just like in acting, we got 160,000 actors in the union. There's jobs for 10 to 20,000, but there's not money for 160,000. There just isn't. There never once. And. And there's just not 160,000 acting jobs. Like, there won't be, you know, 3 million artist jobs. Yeah, there might be 10,000, 20,000, but there's not going to be 3 million artist jobs or a million or whatever the number is. Right. Yeah.

I mean, when I was on the Cal Newport podcast, I just pulled this quote up. He said, you know, democratizing entertainment channels democratizes access to the tools, but it doesn't change the dynamics of winner takes all.

That's right. That's right. It doesn't change the fact that life isn't fair. It doesn't change the dynamics of winner takes all. And it doesn't change supply and demand. Right. It just moves the supply, demand around. But in the end, you know, acting, right. There's one Tom Cruise that gets 10 million a movie, plus or minus. Because there's only one Tom Cruise. There are 160,000 background actors. They make 200 a day. Why? Because there's 160,000 background actors and there's only so many roles. That's how it works. Supply and demand. So, boy, you really want to be in the place where there's lots of demand and no supply. And this kind of amplification of brain power for everybody is really going to make that topsy turvy and you got to be really thoughtful about, wow, where are places I can go to add value that almost no one else can add value? So that, you know, so that I get paid a lot. Right. So clearly when you look at the industry looking for absolute AI professionals, either AI algorithm or applied AI, Right. Applying it to specific fields, you know, those jobs are paying a lot right now, 500k to a million dollars a year. Why? There's very few people who have any experience in applying AI. And I mean more than handful, thousands, but not millions. And there are, I don't know, a million jobs open. Right.

So.

So that, that's a good place to be. The problem is you needed 10 years experience in AI to really, really understand the application of the variety of AI and ML algorithms. Right. Not all, just. Yeah. And not too many people have that. So demand is high and the supply is low. Good place to be.

Yeah.

Same with plumbing.

Yeah. I feel like I could talk to you about this all day. You know, this is like one of my favorite rabbit holes and something I've spent the better part of the last year really diving into, because this is the moment I have been waiting for. As somebody who had such a massive body of work, I was like, this is such a competitive advantage to a person who has a huge body of work.

Well, especially since you have converted that to text and then, you know, you're using that as, you know, as essentially a training base for like, for a large.

Well, think about it.

So that changes every year.

We put together this ebook with our lessons learned from Podcast desks. Three years ago, it used to take a month. Then I moved into mem. It took a. About a week. Then MEM added all these AI features. Now I can do it in probably half a day.

It's unbelievable, right? It's unbelievable. Yeah, no, it's. It's just the new world. And we've all been waiting for, you know, sort of all of this to happen. Certainly those of us who've been around and, and now we have large language models and we're just discovering what we can do with them. Gonna impact everything everyone does. And it's. And it's all good. I will say this, it isn't always accurate. You know, I mean, if you use Copilot for coding, you find out upwards of 70% of the time that code compile. It's problematic, but it gives you a good starting point, really good starting point, and that has value and it's making coders 55% more productive. That means, you know, that means you you can grow your company with the coders you have. You don't need to hire more because there are no more to hire, right? This is really good. This is really, really good. And I think we're to find that in all of these areas, it's making you, with what you want to do, so much more productive than you could have possibly it.

Well, I think that makes a beautiful end to our conversation. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our interviews at the unmistakable creative. What do you think it is? Living somebody or something Unmistakable.

Well, people are unmistakable in a variety of ways, right? We've got people who are amazingly curious, really at the top of curiosity and they're learning their whole life. And when you meet them, you go, you know that that's unmistakable. That's amazing, right? I think you and you're curious. I mean, you know, look at the things you're diving into because you're curious. You want to get something. There's a lot of people would stop and say, yeah, I know enough, right? But this is such a great place to learn. I think curiosity just, just almost always wins the day because if you're curious, you're going to find pain points, you're going to want to solve those pain points, you're going to be curious on how you can solve the pain points, be curious on how you get better, you're going to be curious on how you live better, you're going to be curious on, you know, how can I have better relationships? Curiosity wins the day.

Amazing. Well, I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your insights with those friends. Where can people find out more about you?

You know the best way, just type Kevin and space race. My last name S U R A C. You type speaker. After that I will come up on 25 speaker. You know, websites that, that book me all the time. I also have a LinkedIn obviously, so you can find me on LinkedIn and people really, really want to send me a message. I do answer my messages on LinkedIn.

All right. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

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