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

Srini Rao

Kevin, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Kevin Surace

So happy to be here.

Srini Rao

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 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?

Kevin Surace

Great question. Actually, so I wasn't into sports and I was a good student, but not totally interested in everything I was learning, but I was a bandie 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. Um, and for us in, in my senior year, we were the national championship marching band, uh, national champions used to be in Florida, uh, in April. And so, uh, that was a great way to, to go out with a bang.

Srini Rao

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

Kevin Surace

I didn't tell me about it.

Srini Rao

I was a band geek as well. I played the tuba for nine years. Yeah. 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 P.E. credits. So.

Kevin Surace

Oh, fabulous. Maybe Suza phone occasionally.

Kevin Surace

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

Srini Rao

Yeah, but you know the thing about the percussionist 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 play the tuba would be at the bottom of that list.

Kevin Surace

Oh, yeah, but, but in the long run, I think the two of players are the most successful. Yeah. There is something about, um, you know, even by the way, there's stratifications even within percussion because you start on bass drum and, um, 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. And this is true even today and the snare line that is true. That, that, those are the coolest cats, right? And.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

We just had a high school marching band reunion, uh, which, which I have helped to organize for the last 30 years or so. And every five years we have a reunion. Um, we had about 450 people come back in March, um, from, you know, who graduated over a 50 year timeframe. And, uh, it was fantastic. And still that front snare line as it's marching up the hell, you know, with the sunglasses on it just this past May, pretty darn cool.

Srini Rao

Where'd you go to high school at?

Kevin Surace

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

Srini Rao

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. Uh, so I, 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.

Kevin Surace

They do.

Kevin Surace

Yeah, all of them. Uh, true. Uh, you know, it's, it's funny. Nobody ever asked something like this, but, but you're on to, you're onto a good thread here because you go, you know, what happened in high school that led you to do, which is in college that led you to go build all these companies and technologies and patents and all that. So look, I had, um, for, first of all, marching band itself is a team sport. Most sports are team sport, but it's truly a team sport, typically with a hundred to 200 people. Right. That's.

That's big. That, that, and, you know, if you fail to live up to the level of your neighbor, you know, as you're on that field competing, um, then you could cause the band to have 0.1, 0.2, 0.5, but 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. Cause it's competitive marching band. Right. It's true with drum corps as well. Um, same thing.

So, so first of all, you leave your 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, uh, I don't know, seven plus, eight plus billion people on earth. Um, you know, there are opportunities every day to win a little something. And that maybe you grew a plant and you're having, looking at flowers out the window, right? Maybe it's some flowers that you were, 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 says, and the last thing is I off. I also had a great, I had two great instructors. The, the, uh, marching band, uh, director, uh, Bruce Burritt, uh, was just a fabulous, fabulous.

Kevin Surace

instructor and surely about winning. There was no, you know, there's no question, right? We're here to win and we're gonna do the best we can to do that. The second was a gentleman named Nick Barada. 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. 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're just kids. You look by then you're 16, 17, 18. Um, you can take it, 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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 is 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I mean, I remember I had 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 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.

Kevin Surace

Better to hear what you need to hear. And, and you know, you might as well get used to that early in life. Oh, 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. Okay. But you lost, give it back. This is a bad thing. So.

So there's great value learning at an early age, what it feels like to come out and win. You're not gonna win every time on what it feels like. And I do think that we do see these sometimes cadres of people, right, of a certain age that really, really don't understand the difference. And they show up and go, well, I just, everything's win, everything's good, everything's, no, this is really hard stuff, right? This is...

And if you're going to go start a company, that's hard. And, um, you know, number one rule of entrepreneurship is be ready to lose and get up the next day and try to win again. Cause you're going to lose. Not everybody's Mark Zuckerberg and won the first time, uh, or kept winning to a trillion dollar plus $2 trillion, 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 you an entrepreneur. I've got another pain point to solve and I'm going to solve it a different way. Let's go.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So there are two questions that come from this. I, when we're talking about winning and losing, one is around sort of the things you learned 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 Hall 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 10th grade. Like I drove my family insane.

with how much I practice because a tuba is not very pleasant to listen to, especially when you start. Yeah. It was, I mean, to the point where I literally 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 six PM. But that 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 an Indian family,

Kevin Surace

No, it's a lot of tuba every night.

Srini Rao

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 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?

Kevin Surace

Yeah.

Kevin Surace

Well, uh, that that's exactly right. So I, you know, I, I got to be the, um, commencement speaker at one of the Palo Alto high schools. There are two and, um, it, I don't know, seven kids that you're stood in front of a train, right? And, um, you know, that is unbelievable. So, you know, a lot of these kids, um, 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 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 if you know, if you are driven, and you're smart, and you're a critical thinker, you're going to go as far as you want to go regardless.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Kevin Surace

of any college you went to and obviously some of the most richest people actually in the world never went to college at all. They were so smart they just couldn't stay in college and they just kept plowing out whatever it is they wanted to do. So it turns out that that's a really bad thing to put in a kid's head. So one of the things 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, and then they don't get in. And they are so, cause not everyone can get in right. And, and they are so despondent and so depressed. They can't go on.

Like they live, they feel they've let everyone in their life down and life isn't worth living, and this is just so wrong. And 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, 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 to.

Srini Rao

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

Kevin Surace

Well, for sure. So look, there's, there's all kinds of privilege. This is being talked about in Hollywood, right? Oh, also, you know, the, that these young stars are starring in a movie and they go, well, that they came from privilege because their parents were Hollywood stars. Yeah. 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 you know, 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 there Oh look Johnny he got to go to 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 can 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 to 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 had a heck of a leg up

Now that's bad. 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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 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, 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

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

I only had one answer. Yes. Yes, sir. Yes, ma'am. That's what I said. Why they were paying me right unless it's illegal. They asked me to clean the toilets. Well, I guess that's my job today. Right? That's by the way, be an entrepreneur, do startups, you will clean a toilet. I guarantee

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Well, have you ever seen the movie Son of a Woman with Al Pacino? Do you remember where Chris O'Donnell goes to his house 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 me he's like, What are you some kind of chicken shit who sticks to job description only?

Kevin Surace

Mm-hmm. Yes, of course.

Kevin Surace

Right, right. Exactly. Who sticks to the job description only. You know, I always try to put in job description when I'm 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?

Srini Rao

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, I realized the three things that I looked for for, from people were it 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.

Kevin Surace

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 that 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 but they needed to be done and go great, you know, keep more of that.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, I remember the other one was it was navigating ambiguity. It was like a big one, especially because you looked to your point. We don't know what we're going to be working on a year from now.

Kevin Surace

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. Um, 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. They go, my, 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 he just look at me like it's deer in headlights.

Srini Rao

No.

Kevin Surace

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 bring 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

Uh, 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 things, but you're not learning anything standing still and you know, I see coders all the time that are excellent coders, but 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

because they got kind of in a writer's block, which a writer gets often. Right. And we see this in novelists. It takes, 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, 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. Right.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

And if it's a problem and 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?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, I, I had people who will come and ask me quite 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 on 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.

Kevin Surace

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 movement, just keep moving. Just do something. Right. Do something. Do an experiment. Something. Don't stop. And because stopping it's over. Like nothing's happening. Right. There's no forward movement. So never deer in headlights.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah. 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 as that. 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.

Kevin Surace

It's okay. It's I clearly was

Kevin Surace

Sure, sure, sure. So I came out of college, 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, and 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?

Very good learning experience. Then I went to a sort of middle size company that hundreds of people, but not thousands of people. And from that I learned, wow, it's a little harder to sell and there's not as many technical resources and got to do a lot more yourself. Like you just got to 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? Uh, the toilets are overflowing. I better fix them. And you just go down the line. Right. So you learn about that.

And it wasn't till 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 gotten 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?

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Kevin Surace

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, you know, hopefully gave them great value, but you learned.

on someone else's time 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, now you start to think about what happens when I can't make payroll, right? Because that's what happens in these startups. So, 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 SCM and SEO, 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.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's funny that you say that because I went to business school and I remember right after I got out of business school a couple of years later, I was like, okay, now I've started a business. I'd worked at 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 Ravi Khan said it well. He's like, you know, when you put yourself in the 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,

And he's like, do you want to build a startup? He's like, go work at Google first. You drastically increase your probability of success by doing that.

Kevin Surace

That is absolutely right. Yeah. 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 on many boards and an advisor to a lot of companies.

And so many people come to me and say, Hey, 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 got a solution, but it's looking for a problem. It's like, you know, we're both on microphones right now. Cause 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. I said, really? Well, I'm making it up. Right. But, 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 gotta 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 gotta find real pain points with people who have money to spend. So you can find a real pain point, for example, in East Palo Alto, housing's too expensive in East Palo Alto. That's a real pain point. 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 never you're probably not going to solve government can go solve that you're probably not going to solve that as a business. So 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? Right? Otherwise, you're still going to pain point

Srini Rao

Yeah, you know, it absolutely does. Because like, 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 problems that people have, you know, 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, you know, the hard way because

Kevin Surace

That's right.

Srini Rao

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 it 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 approach it, but I also had, you know, 10 years of experience, like, doing everything wrong.

Kevin Surace

Right, right, right. No, and that experience informed you on how to do this right. I mean, that, that's the thing. Right. And so, um, there is just, um, there, you know, you, 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 don't.

Srini Rao

I would say you know absolutely nothing from business school. Yeah, I'm not. So no need to be nice. Let's not pull punches here. I mean, let's face it. Most MBAs like wouldn't know a damn thing about how to run a business. At least the ones I went to school with.

Kevin Surace

I was being nice.

Kevin Surace

Um, yeah, no, I, I think that's right. And then in fact, look, I think if you go to get your MBA and, and MBAs is a really good thing that might be more valuable in a larger company that, um, drives, uh, you know, drives their execs and, uh, 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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, um, 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, um, you know,

You are in charge of your website. You're in charge of your marketing. You're in charge of SEO, SCM. 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. Cause 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.

Srini Rao

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 like, okay, if you don't know how to do something yourself, and you try to delegate it 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 text talks of yours.

I got the sense that this is really about the future of humanity. And so you pose 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.

Kevin Surace

Right.

Srini Rao

to how we work and then all of that. So take it from there.

Kevin Surace

Oh my goodness. So many things to talk about. Well, look, um, that talk, uh, that particular Ted talk, uh, that you watched, let's see, must've been given about eight years ago, right? So it's quite, quite a ways ago from, uh, 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'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 GPT are feeling wow. This really happened fast It was a long way to get to chat GPT. 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 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

Uh, 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, very clear examples. It'd be obvious to you. Okay. In the seventies, uh, 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 Um 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 calculators Right. So that was freaky and then 10 15 years later. We had the advent of the spreadsheet in the spreadsheet

You know profoundly changed accounting. 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

Kevin Surace

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, you 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 spreadsheets. I mean we don't need to.

Srini Rao

Yeah, I'm thinking about that. Yeah, like I don't know damn thing from my high school math classes.

Kevin Surace

Now now here's the funny thing You know today there are more people working in accounting in the United States and they 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 of magnitude 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 it went you know went to spreadsheets anyway it went on to computers and then all of that started to getting into you know, Really sophisticated accounting systems that could deal with this and taking inputs and taking sales automatically, etc Etc what that did is it made the accounting department 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. Let's 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 didn't have that, but now I have more than 50 people in accounting because the company is that much larger because we could be so productive and so quick, so productivity drives GDP and drives job growth.

It really grows and drives the size of the company and frankly, you know, higher GDP does mean ultimately higher standard of living. There's some lag in that. I know, but it's higher standard of 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 that is not going to end. There's no end in sight, right? There's no end in sight 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? Cause you can 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,

Kevin Surace

Well, now I need to sell for language too, because I solve 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 have 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 that So now I take a three-hour blog post and it takes me, you know 15 minutes to edit it That is Unblittance, 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 every 12 people and they and together they could all do this stuff so much quicker, right?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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 ten times more blog posts than they did if that makes sense

Srini Rao

Yeah, it does. So let me give you my thoughts on this. One, I alluded to this earlier, when you and I were talking before we hit record, that I'd 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 creativity comes in. I'll give you a more concrete example about what you're talking about.

I have this note taking up called mem and unlike chat tpt it has literally every single podcast transcript I've ever had every book note we're talking like tens of thousands of notes. 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.

Kevin Surace

Right.

Srini Rao

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 it 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 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 aggravate our inequality problem. So talk to me about the implications of AI from an overall 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 I 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.

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.

Kevin Surace

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, um, 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, um, these kids are using chat GPT to write their papers and the, 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 too. Isn't this amazing? I'm going to teach chat GPT because that's one of the tools that they're gonna have to use in the future, right? Now 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

A spreadsheet 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 so um, you know when we first got computers even typewriters and then after that computers what we could type We've done an awful lot of teachers. I 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. We have to write longhand. It's it's not going to look very pretty. Because we just don't do it all the time. 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're 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, right.

And the same is true with chat GPT and other any other large language models. These models are here to stay. Um, 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.

Kevin Surace

We need to start teaching the use of those. Now, 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'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 and it'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 we had teach people to use them because these tools are now here and they're gonna get better 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 now I'm as busy as ever as you can imagine

Um, mostly corporate events and such, but, but I will tell you, um, 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, et cetera. And there'd be some back and forth for several weeks. Um, 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'll like lots of it. 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 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, if it's me, I had better become the master of these tools.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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 at prompt engineering. I might even feed it some of my illustrations to 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 things been around for 40 years, I'm thinking they're using it.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Yeah, well, so it's funny you mentioned education because my dad retired from UC Riverside this year. And I remember, like, I'd started, you know, kind of giving him, you know, like lessons in chat GPT and all the shit 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. But the thing that, you know, was interesting, you know,

Kevin Surace

Oh my goodness, I love it.

Srini Rao

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. He was like, 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

Kevin Surace

Right, perfect.

Srini Rao

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 really interesting part of your talk where you say, so the question of 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 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 were 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

Kevin Surace

It is it is well No, I mean Bucky Fuller said that right in a long time ago and I thought that was really profound because in that particular talk one of the examples I gave is Joseph who you know was You know somewhat the father of Jesus not the father but you get the point 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 2000 years, we've been looking at people and, and tying them to their work. And, and, and an example of, of that is, you know, you've been to parties recently, you've been to see people, whatever. Uh, and what do they say? Hey, um, 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've started conversations for a few 1000 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 they're three and maybe they're two. 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 been. 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 be, you know, a farmer could be growing your own food, whatever it is, like I have to do the work or there's nothing or I can't eat, right? It's 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 was no other choice. You couldn't survive. 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 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 GDP of the country. You may certainly

Kevin Surace

Uh, uh, be more than encouraged to, you know, do 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, the first things that are going away, right? Customers say going away, but morphing, right? Customer support roles.

certainly some sales roles of writing, a lot of these things 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, one of my companies is called AppFance 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. It's 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, um, you know, it would seem 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, etc. Then there's then there's scripters. These are people who write Test scripts literally write code to test software Uh, and then maintain that code to test the software, right? And there are there's I don't know There's got to be two million people who do that around the world some number like that a lot of them in india is a big uh

place that was sort of, we in the U S sort of outsource that too. 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 script or it's a, it's a language that's used. That, um, 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 going to have to elevate yourself to be.

Kevin Surace

robot overlord as opposed to doing these menial tasks. Well, we will look back someday as menial tasks, right?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Well, let me give you an example of this. I think it speaks to the importance of developing your own knowledge and critical thinking, as well as your own creativity. So I had a blog post. And of course, I've been the beneficiary of thousands of interviews talking to people like you. And now suddenly all this knowledge is accessible in an AI language model. I can manipulate it. I can play with it. And I remember I was in chat GPD 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 Jonah Berger. 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 English models, as opposed to just saying, Hey, write this for me.

Kevin Surace

Uh, 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 prompting. Actually requires very smart people. Like you, you have to have read, you have to be up on what's going on. You have to be up on what the models can do and what they're on, how they're trained, uh, you're exactly right. You know, so, uh, a real prompt engineer is, you know, is not someone who is not worldly, if that makes sense. Right.

Srini Rao

Yeah. Well, so it's funny because I wrote an article about this saying that like, I, you know, I, 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,

Kevin Surace

Right. That's right.

Srini Rao

What should I have phrased the prompt like the very first time, so that you give me the right output to begin with? Like, that's what I always tell people, it's like, if you're not getting the output you want, then ask the AI how to phrase it.

Kevin Surace

You can. Yeah, no, that's exactly right. But even that takes critical thinking. Like, great, how would I ask it and in what direction do I want to sort of push it to give me what I want, right?

Srini Rao

Well, I think that...

Srini Rao

Yeah. 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 with 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 it's like, so if you sound like an idiot, when you communicate with it, it's the old, you know, computer science metaphor garbage in garbage out.

Kevin Surace

No, that's right. Look, I hear a great example is what's going on with a WGA and, and sag right now in Hollywood, both of them are on strike and one of the big, you know, strike issues is AI because, uh, they see it coming and they don't know how to, how to deal with it. And of course the, what the studios, uh, 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 of anything. Right? Well, that's not going to work. That says that that's like universal music saying we will never stream music. Okay. Well, that's not going to work. Right? The technology is here. And if we've learned anything about technology is you don't get to stop the march of technology, it's, 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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 we will edit it. And you know, when 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. It'll be four.

Now that's going to be hard for a union to do that. Cause what they want to do is take eight to 12, not eight to four, 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. It's 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?

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

so that they are properly taking 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, um, you know, you will never use, uh, an actor's likeness and just pay him for a day because the studios 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 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.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Srini Rao

Yeah, it's funny because like I was in college when Napster came out and you know, like for any person that I mean, I'm sure you and I probably close enough an 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 bullshit. So why?

She was like, you're so full of shit. 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 the name of 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, it was talking to my friend, uh, Zach, who runs a podcast called optimize yourself. You've been a guest here. Uh, I told him, I said, you know, like

One thing I realized was that I'd 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. I was like, 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 they lived with growing up. And I was like, okay, generate a script for this, like, give me the synopsis of the episode. And I told them, 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 paint. 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, 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.

Kevin Surace

Right, absolutely.

Kevin Surace

That is absolutely true. What's fascinating about that is a lot of these things that I show people That are created by AI I 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's just it used to cost millions of dollars for that effect and now it costs zero So what we've done is democratize a lot of the quite sophisticated effects

that Hollywood could do with people and given them to the masses. That's both good and bad, right? And we're gonna see an immense amount of content come out of that and all these creative minds that you never had access to a hundred million dollar film budget but they do have access to ten cents to go generate this image. So you know that's right. Here's the other thing people all there's all these deep fakes now I see pictures of whatever you know the president in this place that he never was I said

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Totally.

Srini Rao

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

Yes, you can do that now with AI. It's very easy, but I could have done it with Photoshop for the last 30 years. So, so all you had to do is learn Photoshop, right? Then this is, this is, so we're democratizing Photoshop. Now people can make things without knowing Photoshop and just knowing how to type something. Okay. I don't know. It's both good and bad, right? Um, we're able to make music now have AI help us make music. Uh, especially, um,

Srini Rao

I'm out.

Srini Rao 

Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

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 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 Three hours, you know three 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, um, but it's going to be more fair for some. And it's going to, it's going to drive, uh, um, you know, productivity to levels that we've never seen, but, um,

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 there might be 2000 harpists you know that you know you chose a career that might be hard to find a job in right you can teach but it's gonna be hard because there's only the same with like you know lead oboe there's only 42 jobs of lead oboe there are no more

Srini Rao 

Yeah, well, 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.

Kevin Surace 

Well, that's it. That no, that that's exactly right. And I, you know, I was, I was told not to be a drummer, for her 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 to do that on the side, that's great. So I it's, you know, it's really fascinating. And and people do choose their careers. And there are certain careers ones choosing now, that I hope you didn't choose for money, but you still might choose because you're like, here's an example, right, 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 of 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, um, even through all of this AI, uh, what we're doing with generative AI and how that's going to change really everything in life, um, it's 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 there won't be for decades. It's just too hard. It's too, every house is different and nobody wants, you know, to build a robot that does that. Forget it, right. You're going to be crazy. So if you really wanted an absolute foolproof job for the next 30 years, become a plumber, I know that's crazy, but good advice.

Srini Rao 

Yeah, yeah. Well, so there are a 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 power, like high of high quality like your craft matters even more than I'd ever did before in your imagination or creativity. Because even you know, one thing like I was, I did this animated short like using AI and I was using Adobe character animator and I kept getting stuck.

And I realized, this is wildly inefficient to keep going to a chat deepening 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 animator. And, 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.

Kevin Surace (01:04:03.71)

Oh, I love it!

Kevin Surace 

that's right, because you've democratized the base level of creative so that anyone can do it, right? It's like we democratize the ability to write blog posts to almost anyone, 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 photo realistic, you know, picture of 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

Srini Rao 

Yeah.

Kevin Surace 

You know all of the training in the world because they don't have the skills They don't have the skills to draw I don't have the skills to draw a straight line in that particular case 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 who's crafted is you're absolutely right to really Create those kinds of illustrations they got to really up their game, right? They're gonna have to be world class. And that means there's a bunch of underlings that probably not going to be a lot of money for just like in acting, we've 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 was. And, and again, there's just not 160,000 acting jobs. Like there won't be, you know, 3 million artists jobs. There might be 10,000.

Kevin Surace (01:05:51.99)

20,000, but there's not gonna be 3 million artist jobs or a million or whatever the number is, right?

Srini Rao (01:05:56.867)

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.

Kevin Surace 

Right. That's right. That's right. It doesn't change the fact that life is unfair. 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, he 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? Cause there's 160,000 background actors. I, and there's, there's only so many roles. It just, 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're going to have 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, um,

Srini Rao Mm-hmm.

Kevin Surace

you know, so 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 hand, I mean, more than handfuls, but 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 need a 10 years experience in AI to really, really understand the application of the variety of AI and ML algorithms, right? Cause not all just JetGBT and not too many people have that. So the demand is high and the supply is low. Good place to be. Same with plumbing.

Srini Rao

Yeah. I feel like I could talk to you about this whole 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 for a person who has a huge body of work.

Kevin Surace

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, um, or a large language model that changes.

Srini Rao 

Yeah, I mean, look, we'll think about it. So every year we put together this ebook with our lessons learned from podcast guests. Three years ago, it used to take a month. Then I moved into Mem. It took about a week. Then Mem added all these AI features. Now I can do it in probably half a day. Yeah.

Kevin Surace 

It's unbelievable, right? It's unbelievable. Yeah, no, it's, um, it's just a new world and we've all been waiting for, uh, you know, sort of all of this to happen. Certainly those of us who've been around it and, uh, and now we have large language models and we're just discovering what we can do with them. Uh, it's going to impact everything everyone does and it's all, and it's all good. I will say this, it isn't always accurate. You know what? I mean, if you use copilot for coding, you find out upwards of 70% of the time that code won't 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 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 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 been.

Srini Rao 

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 that makes somebody or something unmistakable?

Kevin Surace 

It is wow. 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'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 just because you're curious You want to get better at something? There's a lot of people would stop and say I know enough, right? But there this is such a great place to learn that I think curiosity Just just almost always wins the day because if you're curious, you're going to find pain points You're gonna want to solve those pain points You're gonna be curious on how you can solve the pain

point, you're gonna 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.

Srini Rao

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

Kevin Surace 

You know, I mean the best way just type Kevin and space race my last name as you are a CE you can take speaker after that I will come up on 25 speaker, you know, websites that book me all the time. I also have a LinkedIn, obviously. So you can find me on LinkedIn. And if people really, really want to send me a message, I do answer my messages on LinkedIn.

Srini Rao

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