The Father of AI Assistant on Why Joy Comes Before Success - Kevin Surace

0:0050% of the people in the US anyway believe that AI is bad, it's dangerous. They're wrong. If you're not using AI five times an hour, you are behind your competition. Today's guest is Kevin Surace, The Father of the Virtual Assistant, an AI pioneer with 95 worldwide patents, and author of The Joy Success Cycle. How did you end up becoming Portico was the first fully AI assistant. She would answer your phone and book people on your calendar and things we can't even do today.

0:23And ended up resulting in And those got licensed ultimately to Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, anyone who really wanted to do voice assistants. Software developers' jobs will change a lot. So what do you think the developer's evolution should be? We've seen this before, but most level languages now for 30 or 40 years. And now we're going to the highest level language, which is just the way we speak. And if we're articulate enough and have a good enough specification, it'll write all of that all the way down to machine code for us.

0:49In talking to so many developers, at first the developer says, "All of my joy came from writing code, and I love writing code." You never really loved writing code. What you got the most joy from is delivering that feature or that bug fix. Nobody cares how you got there. And in fact, if you can get there without writing a line of code, even better. So what can developers do to You have to be an absolute expert on using Claude and agents, period. This is the best time to be alive in technology ever. You've been all doing AI, more technical stuff, and you finally wrote a book not about technology. It's called Joy Success Cycle.

1:17The core of the book says that joy doesn't come after success, it comes before. Joy in everything you do will lead to more success. This is a very critical breakthrough in understanding, and stop worrying about those things which you can't impact. Hey, quick pause. My goal with Tech Lead Journal is simple. Learn from the best in tech so we can all grow together. If this resonates with you, hit subscribe to follow the channel. It's the biggest way for you to support the show and help us keep bringing great guests and insights to you. Thanks for being here, and let's get back to it. Hello everyone.

2:03Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today I have with me Kevin Surace. He's known as the father of AI Assistant. So we'll talk a little bit more about that. But not only that, Kevin is also publishing his book, his first book, if I'm not mistaken, Thank you so much for your time. Thanks, Henry, for having me. Right. Kevin, let's start from this title of yours, Father of AI Assistant, right? I can see also behind you there's this, you know, picture about Portico. I think if I'm not mistaken, that's kind of like the first generation of AI assistant.

2:40So maybe let's start from there. Let's tell a story about how did you end up becoming like the Father of AI Assistant. Yeah, that is right. Portico was Portico was the first fully AI assistant that you could argue with and interact with and interrupt. And she would answer your phone and book people on your calendar and things we can't even do today. We did that work at a company called General Magic. General Magic was a spin-off out of Apple and developed three major breakthroughs.

3:07First was somewhat the And the second was a language could create AI agents, and we did. So we had agent-- We had the whole idea of agents came out of General Magic that long ago in the late '90s. And the third was this idea of an assistant that you could talk to over the phone. And the importance of that at the time was that people had just gotten cell phones, not smartphones yet, like Motorola flip phones. And they had just gotten the internet, but the internet was something you had basically at your desk at work, and you didn't have access to your calendar and your contacts and every stock quotes, whatever, while you were in the car or pretty much anywhere else, device. But we could get you access to all of that via talking to a virtual assistant.

3:58So that's what we did. And we ended up having about three and a half million people on the system at the time. So it was successful and fun and, you know, a big development project. I think one of the fun things for your audience is there's no such thing as the cloud then. So you built your own data center, which we did. We had to build our own data center, and it was a voice and data center because you had to take voice coming in, and you had to have voice going out, and you had to process it in between. So we did all of that.

4:26And it was a great team, great effort, and ended up resulting in, oh, you know, more than a dozen US patents, several dozen worldwide patents. And those got licensed ultimately to Apple, Microsoft, Google and others, pretty much, and Amazon. Anyone who really wanted to do voice assistants. Lastly, one of the big things that came out of that is something called post-training. Post-training is something we do all the time now with AI, with Gen AI models. And post-training is where you have literally rooms of people looking at how the model reacted and seeing if it's correct or not, and then putting in corrections into sort of its background programming, if you will, or background prompting. And we were the first people to do that. We invented it.

5:14It was the subject of a patent also. And we had linguists listening They didn't know who was saying it, but they were listening to that and making corrections in the model so that it would be more accurate each time someone interacted with it. So lots of breakthroughs there that team and the work we did. Wow, so, so many patents. If I'm not mistaken, you have 90 over patents. 95. I think you mentioned a coup- 95. Okay, yeah, some of those And it-- I think it's really to, you know, invent their own AI assistant, you know, it's kind of like having the license from yours.

5:53So I think that's… Yeah, and more than that, even when patents expire, you are building on all of the work that was done in the past. This is true with all technology, right? You're building on the work of the past. Patents eventually expire, and there were some of these patents got extended for a variety of reasons. But most of those patents are probably expired by now. They've hit the 20-plus year mark. And-- but still, when you look at the architecture of systems, you find a lot of what we did in terms of how do you human, what should that look like, how should they respond, what's the range of responses. You know, all of that early work had to be done. And, po- the, you know, the idea of post-training, that wasn't obvious.

6:38We were the first people to do it. Cause people would look and say, "Huh, it doesn't always respond right. Well, we have to do better in pre-training. We have to do better in pre-training." I go, stop. Why don't we just listen to what people say? I mean, it was a crazy idea one day. Why don't we listen to what What do you mean? Well, we'll build an interface so that our linguists, without coding, can just go in and say, "No, the right… This is what it said, and the right answer would be this." And you keep training it and putting weights on those new answers.

7:06And it turns out that was a know it was brilliant at the time. We're just trying to fix the thing, right? And today that is a stalwart and also in AI assistance. And, you know, people like Scale AI and others have tens of thousands of people doing post-training, right? We had seven, I think. It wasn't that many, but they were busy all the time. Remind me again which year is that? 1998, 1999, just before 2000, yeah. And I think these days people associate these kind of assistance with, you know, GenAI, right, LLM model, right?

7:44Sure. So back then, what was the AI technology that actually you leverage on? Yeah, great question. We used hidden Markov models, so we didn't have an LLM. And that is a very traditional type of AI model that does learn and it can learn every time something happens. And so you had a combination of itself learning and getting better and in terms of responses post-training to make sure that we could tell the system that even though it thought the appropriate, you know, response.

8:18And again, that even with Gen AI, that's what we're doing because you have all this pre-training of a trillion or more tokens or trillion or more phrases. And yet still it gets some It-- we say hallucinates. We never called, Mary was her name, the first AI assistant. We never thought she hallucinated. She-- You know, we never used that term. We just said that that wasn't the, the right response, you know? So, you know, you always have to have these breakthroughs at the beginning. And obviously, I've been part of this all the way along. I run an AI company today, so I'm still very busy in AI and, you know.

8:59But the frontier models have gone down a path because of, one, the work that Google did in 2012 to, you know, put out in the public how you build a deep learning model, basically very deep. And then by 2017, they published a seminal paper on the transformer. And once you had that, you could build LLMs. That is almost ten years ago now, right? So we've had ten years of advances on the transformer and it's still giving us paybacks. I mean, these models are getting getting better because of post-training.

9:32They're also getting better So they've got, you know, You've got, now basically these models are being coded by the model itself to improve itself. I think, you know, a lot of people never thought we would get there. And I would say, in this space from a coding perspective, we weren't there till early 2026 when Claude finally had a release that literally could build an entire application. If you remember a couple years ago, yeah, we were all using coding tools, and they were a little bit of a help.

10:09About as much of a help as me, you know, searching for some open source code. But then this breakthrough happened that was like, oh, I can get up and leave, and six hours later it wrote the entire application front-end, back-end, and it works. Once you got to that level of competency, it changed the game. And it changed it psychologically, where we've had programmers going, you know, for two years on LLMs, "Oh, they'll never get rid of me 'cause I'm still doing eighty or ninety percent of the work," to, And, all-- certainly all of my coders that work for me, all my developers, they don't even look at the code anymore.

10:48They, it… Because this Claude will write code so fast. And it's written so many lines that, you know, you say, "I need to build this, and here's the ins and here's the out, here's the API." It goes and does it, you run it, and it works. There's 2,500 lines of code in there. You're not gonna look at them. You're not gonna try to You just ship it. You know, you gotta test it and ship it. And so, so I think that's really know, who thought that their reason for living was to write lines of code. And maybe that's not gonna be the case anymore 'cause the people at the frontier of this are not writing any code at all, the code. Yeah.

11:31I think putting aside coding, you know, I think I can also see in the past one year, you know, all these AI chatbot, you know, the, for example, ChatGPT, Gemini, you know, even Claude itself, right? I think they are quite good in terms of replying, you know, answering, brainstorming together with you, coming up with solutions, right? I think less hallucination, at least from my experience. Yeah, that's right. But I think it's quite fascinating how, yeah, quite fascinating how this, you know, AI goes. But before then, also you were involved in these two so-called revolutionary AI assistant as well back then, So, I think maybe people might have forgotten about those technologies simply because of the current AI chatbot.

12:11But tell us also these breakthrough that you went when you work on Alexa and Siri. I think Alexa back then when it was, you know, first time, you know, revealed, it was like quite fascinating. I didn't work directly on them. They licensed our technology What I can tell you is that they leveraging the sort of the models that we put forth. This is before LLMs, right? So they were all based on what we called traditional speech recognition, that did use hidden Markov models. A lot of those came from a company called Nuance. And so those kind of became the best models in the industry until LLMs came along.

12:53And they used a variety of kept getting better at text-to-speech. Early on, our text-to-speech, was that is conversion of -- say, email, read my email, right -- was very crude. In fact, it was often based on by humans in a studio and putting them all back together, and writing the algorithms to put them all back together. Because without that, they sounded very mechanical. And you'll remember, a lot of those mechanical things. "Hi, this is the train.

13:27It is leaving for the next station." And go, take, what? Can't you just record that? You know, this is terrible. So now it's really perfect because we can build models on an actual human voice. And as you know, we can build voice in a matter of minutes. But that technology didn't exist. And so, you had to concatenate all these things and, or record real human voices and, you know, put them back together. And a lot of people did that. We did that.

13:59You know, Siri did that for the longest time. Alexa did that. That's what everybody did. And we had laid out the process to do that. So everybody, you know, licensed, those two big systems licensed that technology. And today, you know, everybody's you will. And, but still many of the kind of human interface issues that we had to deal with are still used today. Right. So you mentioned about, you know, software developers, you know, their job these days will change a lot, right?

14:31So, no more writing the code, that's for sure. Even reading the code probably is kind of like a very tough job these days because of the amount of code that AI can produce. Yeah, it's too much. Yeah, so what do you think the right, maybe from your point of view? So we've seen this before, but very few developers alive today remember it. And so let me take you back to the '50s and '60s. Well, in the '50s and '60s there That's how you coded a computer. It was literal ones and zeros.

15:04Lit-- And you had a table, and if you wanted to do this particular thing, it was one, one, zero, zero, one, zero, one, some other way, right? So we started with machine code. And later, I wanna say it was late '50s or sometime in the '60s, and it may have been IBM, developed an idea of assembler. And Assembly would be still an that language would convert itself, basically compile into machine code. Okay, great. All of a sudden, I didn't have to worry about the one, one, zero, one, one, zero. I could say, move this register from here to there, and it would, right?

15:47And it would just put that This wasn't a very English-friendly language, and it wasn't a high-level language. It was a very low-level language, but it works, and it's very succinct, and it's very much tied to essentially, processor, actual command on the processor. Okay, fine. So by the '60s we had that. And then later in the '60s people started using the two first high-level languages, one business and one math, Fort-- it was COBOL and Fortran. And that's the first time, in essence, in English, I could do something.

16:19So early coders were coding in a because we had a higher level language called Assembly. And then Assembly basically went became these higher level languages. And of course, by the '70s and '80s, we had very high-level languages that are really thoughtful, that are in English in essence, right? So we have seen developers move to higher and higher level languages where the language is producing, you know, thousands of lines of machine code for us.

16:52We're not writing those Now we've progressed one more language of natural language. So if I can describe it at this level, it'll write it in Python, which actually is compiling down to Assembly, which ultimately kind of converts to machine code. And we don't see any of those layers. So my point is, we've given up seeing a variety of layers of computer programming over the years. Most people just have forgotten that because we've been in high-level languages now for thirty or forty years. And now we're going to the highest level language, which is just the way we speak.

17:27And if we're articulate enough and have a good enough specification, it'll write all of that all the way down to machine code for us, right? Based on sixty years of effort, right? And here's what I would portend. Here's what I would say, in At first, the developer has sadness and says, "All of my joy comes from or came from writing code, and I love writing that you never really loved writing code. And by the way, you could No one will pay you for it, but you can write all you want at home. Actually, what you got the most joy from is delivering that feature or that bug fix or whatever. And notice the person you were delivering that to, internal in a company or an external customer or whatever, never cared how you got there.

18:26What they cared about is did or was it even speedier? So they wanted speed and quality. Speed and quality. Nobody cares how you got there. And in fact, if you can get there without writing a line of code, even better. Like, to your customer, even better. And so people have to wake up delivery of the output. And I see developers now with essentially a screen of, you know, eight agents, and each one is kicking off some feature know, etc. And they're just the robot overlord. They're coordinating all of that. They're getting it back.

19:04They're doing some unit testing. They're integrating it. Someone else probably will do full feature testing or full functional testing, etc. And then they're shipping it. And I watch people now, including in my companies, someone says, "Boy, at 11 o'clock in the morning, we got a customer that really needs this feature, and I, you know, I don't know how many weeks And at one o'clock after lunch, you know, the guy comes out or the gal comes out and says, "You know, during lunch I ran this agent, and it did it for… And here it is.

19:33Here's the feature. You know, it's done. It's not fully tested yet, but it's done." That brings, trust me, so much joy to everyone involved in that chain of process there, right? Lastly, if this was two years gonna all lose their jobs. We don't need them anymore, okay? That turns out to not be the case. Ignoring some companies who've laid off and said it's all about AI, and it isn't, that's a longer story. Let me tell you why it's not the case. Everyone I know is so excited about going so much faster to get rid of and reduce their feature backlog and their bug thousands, right? And now they're starting to deliver those faster. They don't wanna slow down again And these devs know their product, so no one is cutting headcount that matters. They really aren't.

20:29And so this just turned into, wow, I can deliver all of this so much faster. That's what it turned into, and that's really important. Yeah, so I think this narrative of, you know, we don't need software engineers anymore, those frontier model companies the past, I don't know, one year or so. That kind of like creates a lot of impact like layoffs, people are worried, juniors cannot get jobs as well. I've been hearing it a lot, right? So I think I understand about the moving to the higher language, especially now people just use prompt.

21:02But the agentic behavior is something that seems, you know, kind of like really potentially can replace developers because they can do this looping and keep on building things until it can even turn out into applications. So what do you think these agentic behaviors, should it be something that we worry about or should it be something that naturally… No. Because the people running the agentic behavior are developers, right? You don't want your business manager doing that.

21:25You don't want someone in You want your developers doing that because they're responsible for the product and the quality of the product and how the product works and did it meet the specs and all that is on the developer's back. So again, what I see is no one that I know of is letting developers go. it would be laughable. And I know some big companies did it, and they checked the box, and they said it was because of AI. No one's really doing that.

21:52The-- I will tell you, the only developers that are getting let go are developers that say, "I'm not using AI. It's, I don't wanna use it. I don't agree with it. I think it's wrong. I think…" They're never gonna work again, right? I'm sorry, right? This technology's here. That's like saying, you know, "I we only code in Python." "Well, I refuse." "Okay, well then you don't I-- you know. So, I'm not worried about it. I'm not worried about… I'm not seeing it.

22:18Now the junior developer thing is an issue because what's happening is companies are not hiring as many. They're hiring some, as many right out of college, right? As they go, I really don't need this entry-level person because my staff here is now handling everything and faster. I don't have this backlog to do." It's not about, well, AI is better than the junior developers. Like I don't have this backlog The backlog's finally shrinking, right? Finally catching up. So I don't have a need for more people. That said, there's an overriding leaving the workforce over the next five years, and there's 13 million available to come in. So we are going to be at a workforce deficit, in the United States anyway, workforce deficit for the forever, future. And so we need AI to increase our productivity or else we won't have any company at all because there'll be no one to work.

23:18So I think overall it's gonna work out quite well. Right. So what can developers do to kind of like, yeah, I don't know, improve themselves, live in the current AI era, especially for those juniors, how they can survive in this… You have to be an absolute, absolute expert on using Claude and agents, period. And you got six, eight agents, running coding tasks for you. And that's your job. Your job is to coordinate these. Now there's a lot you have to know, right, because we always think of, "Oh, I'm gonna go build an application."

23:53application. What they're building is an additional feature that has to bolt in or a bug fix or something else. And that has to be well-described. The APIs have to be well specified, you know, the range of data inputs. So all of that has to be done and done thoughtfully. And you actually have to be a good developer to do that. Otherwise, you can't even read an API spec. You don't know what an OpenAPI spec is, right? You don't know what it is. But so you have to know what it is. You have to know how to use it in these specifications so that when the code is delivered that interfaces with that API, sense. So that's why I think it's still… This is a technical field that requires technical people, that know the process Agile, but understand that process.

24:47I think we're all moving from what was a two-week Agile process to more of a DevOps process, which is like one hour and very small things. I'm gonna just fix this one bug. We're gonna put it into a build. That build might become a release. And then we do that again another hour or two from now and everybody contributes, right? So I think we're gonna move I mean, we've been talking about DevOps for 20 years, 15 years, Gene Kim. But I think we're actually moving there. And so this is all good, and it's gonna be fast, and it's gonna be furious, and people are gonna get great joy from being faster and have happier customers of that product.

25:25I think currently you also are builds AI for testing, right? So tell us what kind of revolutionary thing that you're doing with testing. Yeah, so, Appvance is the name of the company. Appvance has a, a test It's alway- it's always been AI first. Obviously, there's, you know, LLMs, transformers all over the thing today. But for, since 2017, that technology pretty much by itself, you have to be a really a developer or a really good QA person to set it up.

25:57But once you've set it up and you told it what your business requirements are, it goes off, writes all the tests, writes the scripts, literally write, codes the scripts, runs the scripts, and it will do thousands of them, many more than you could ever think of. And people say, why do I wanna test 12,000 user flows through this application as an integrated functional test? Why don't I just do the 100 that matter? Because actually 12,000 matter, because your users are not going to go to just one state to check that particular outcome. They're gonna go to whatever states they get to. Hundreds, thousands of states maybe, right? And so you wanna test that way.

26:38And that's something called AI A long title, but it finds And so we've been doing that since 2017, and it's very, very good, and it's gotten better over the years. It's gotten easier to set up, right? It can also generate your test cases, and turn those directly into scripts and run those and, you know. So, for years we've got customers on this that the vast majority of their test scripts were written by a machine. They were not written by the humans.

27:13They did not have a team of They had a robot overlord of one or two people. So what's interesting is you'd this? This is a breakthrough. You mean AI finds all my bugs?" You know, it's kind of like the Mythos for every application. And the answer is yes, it does. But here's what you, here's what you have to know. A lot of people have ingrained culture, ingrained teams. They've got hundreds or thousands of people writing scripts. How do you tell them the machine How do you do that? 'Cause in this case, it really does. You need a manager, but you probably don't need people manual testing or any of that.

27:56You really don't. And so that's been the biggest challenge there. And the companies, huge companies, you know, Stellantis, the largest car company in the world, this is Liberty Mutual, and many other companies. Yet other companies, they go, "Oh, wow, that… What do you mean you found 282 bugs in our production system that we never found?" "Well, they're real. Here they are." "Well, I think we should think about this more." You know, it's very scary.

28:25It's, you know, this is one of those technologies that to the CIO, they love it, and the lower you get on the totem pole, the less they love it, the more it scares them, right? And so, look, I think that will pass, because in the end, technology always wins, just always wins. And unlike coding where you need employed millions of people doing simple manual testing across the world or simple scripting, writing Selenium scripts and things like that. Yeah, that's probably gone.

28:57You know, those tasks are not needed for almost ten years. But it takes, a long… Sometimes change takes a long time. Right. And does it do… what's the approach? Is it white box testing, black box testing, or is it a gray box thing? No, It is complete fun-- it's a large platform. It's functional, performance, security, mobile, web, API, etc. But true functional testing. So, you know, true at the UX and at the API, but usually at the UX, mimicking what you expect users to do and based on your business requirements and your data-driven outcomes, right?

29:38So if a user does this and this, they better get the number forty-seven out the other side kind of thing, right? And so it will create thousands of those flows for you based on, kind of heuristics based on what it thinks users are going to do, and based on what your business requirements say that must work, right? And that's what it does. And that is the ultimate test. Look, all I want in testing is one thing: visibility to the bugs. There will be bugs. There will be things that don't work the way I expect them to. I just want that visibility, and I can still decide to release it, right?

30:16But I need the visibility. And our testing QA tools never gave us very much visibility. They gave us, at best, about ten And then your users would find go round and they're very expensive to fix once the user finds them. So you wanna find them early. So, you know, the idea of leveraging AI to find all your bugs, you know, at the integration functional testing level. So this is way beyond unit testing. You've done your unit test. Now you put it all together. It's talking to twenty-two backend systems. What's the situation there look like? And, you know, the idea of using It's not a great use of human skills.

31:00It's something that AI can do, and in a few hours it will deliver, even on your production system, more bugs than you've ever found. But your users have found them, I can guarantee it. They didn't report them, but they ran into them, and they started over, or they did whatever, right? So yeah. I, you know, Appvance has been breakthrough after breakthrough, lots of patents. It's a great company, great team, and huge customers, so I can't complain.

31:26Just to clarify, is this based on LLM model as well or is this something different? Ah, some are-- Yeah, some is LLM and some is traditional AI and ML. It's kind of a mix of both for a lot of reasons. Some things the LLM or frontier model, some it isn't. But it's a mix of all of that and-- but frontier models are used where they are appropriate to use them for sure. And there-- And more and more of that is replacing some of the older ML as the frontier models get better at very specific tasks which they might not have been good at just a year ago. So yeah, hopefully people can also check it out. So sounds really cool, right?

32:06Being able to find bugs, you know, independently, automatically, right? And yeah, so hopefully, it- the software gets more quality. So let's maybe move on the next, Sure. You've been all doing AI, you know, more technical stuff, and you finally wrote a book not about technology. It's called Joy-Success Cycle. So tell us what's the background Yeah, for tho- for those the Joy-Success Cycle. Look… People have asked me for a long time, "Why do you have such high dopamine?

32:41Why are you always so joyful?" And so I began writing that down and writing down a method to be like that. And I'll tell you, the… So the core of the book says that joy doesn't come after success, it comes before. And if you have joy in everything you do, you're more likely to be successful. Joy in everything you do will lead to more success. This is a very critical breakthrough in understanding. And there's a whole chapter on the science that proves this out as well.

33:11So the Joy-Success Cycle lays out a method that allows you to look at every single task you do every single day and make it a joyful task, even if it's firing someone. How do I bring joy to this moment? And it turns out you can. You-- and we tell you how to do that. And it looks at, you know, human, natural human behavior. Natural human behavior is humans In fact, we complain about everything in life. We complain the moment we get up, all the way to when we go to bed, and the average person in the United States complains internally and externally about 100 times a day. 100.

33:52And every time you complain, you from success because you have to dig yourself out of this hole of complaints, basically, which we call the positive quotient. It goes to zero, and then you yourself on the way back. So one of the things we teach is the one-complaint-a-day rule. And so you, tomorrow, everybody on this show that's listening or watching, you will count up the number of complaints you have, and you're gonna find it's 60 or 100 or 110 or whatever. It's gonna shock you, whatever the number is. You have to keep honest track.

34:27And these are internal complaints, too. And then the next day, you start to work towards the one-complaint-a-day rule, where you can only have one. And I can guarantee you're gonna burn that one up first thing in the morning. You're gonna get out of bed and say, "Oh, my knees hurt," or, "The weather sucks," or something. And then, you know, you're gonna hear the buzzer in your head going, "Eh! You've used up your one You have no more." So it's a way of gamifying this and getting your brain to start thinking, "I gotta get out of complaint mode. That is never gonna help me."

35:00By the way, no one wants to hear me complain. No one. And it turns out very quickly you don't wanna hear yourself complain anymore. You think it's a total waste of energy, and it is. And so then you start working towards, I've gotta find joy in this moment. I've gotta-- it's raining out. I was gonna go on a bike ride, but that's okay. Instead, I'm going to get this other task done that I wasn't going to do for a while, and isn't that great? That's going to bring me joy. So you need to find the joy moment in everything rather than, "Oh, this is awful."

35:26This is actually a positive. I can turn it into a positive. And it's not being stupid about it. It's like, it turns out that's what I do. I mean, I had to write it all Why is it that I can see all of these pain points out there and things to work on and ways to solve them? Why is it that I can do that, right? And it's because I've got an open mind, and I've got an open mind because I'm not complaining all the time. My mind is open and ready to, you know, ready to go solve the world's problems every minute of the day.

35:58That is a-- that's a great place to be, and that's where I want everyone to be. So the people who've… I've been giving, you know, I do about 40 keynotes a year, and so many of my keynotes have been the Joy-Success Cycle. And I have consistently gotten changed entire teams, it changed the work environment, it changed people. It, you know… And so, it was important-- It's an important book to publish. Lastly, the timing is right. Because the one thing I hear across the board, you know, something like fifty percent of the people in the US anyway, believe that AI is bad, it's dangerous, and they don't like AI data centers, right?

36:37Well, let me start out with this. They're wrong, right? And AI is not going away. So how do you find the joy? They say, it took all the joy out of my life. Okay, stop. AI didn't take the joy out of your life. You misconstrued what your sense of purpose was, and you misconstrued what was bringing you joy. You thought that was it because that's what you were doing. But now we've got to look at it in a new era where AI is going to take away a lot of the joyless tasks.

37:08And that's what you have to look at. When you really step back, really step back, fussing around for a day to fix three lines of code that you can't quite get the logic right on, we've all done this, any of you coders, you know. And you really, the whole day goes by and you go, "I got nothing done. I can't get this little teeny, you know, set of logic to work." It's a, it's an if-then else else else else or something. You know, it's one of these things, and the logic isn't working, and you, your mind isn't figuring it. You no longer spend time doing that. That is a waste.

37:39There is a machine that does that. And we should not spend our time add maximum value to anymore. You add no value to fixing that logic. A machine can fix that logic in one minute, literally a minute. As long as you can describe it, it will fix it. And so this is fascinating, right? So I can guarantee you you're gonna have more joy because of that, not less joy. And that's what we want. And so this Joy-Success Cycle hits at the right time and allows people to find their sense of purpose and where they can get joy.

38:10Even though the work they were them, they're doing more important work now, work that they really add value to, and that is very exciting. Yeah, so I think you said it, I think this is kind of the right time, because I think it happened if I- from my experience at least, right? It happened since the pandemic, right? Where when people started to feel more anxiety, you know, more sadness, right? Feeling kind of like depressed and then so many layoffs, then political situation, war and all that.

38:41Now AI coming, right? So obviously we are in kind of like, I don't know, like doom and gloom kind of a thing, and the news doesn't help as well. So I think maybe from your perspective, right? Because it seems like our positive emotion is kind of like eroding day by day, right? So how can we actually bring back our positive emotion regardless of what is happening in the world? Right. And I think The Joy-Success Cycle lays out a, you know, lays out a process to do that.

39:10And it's only 200 pages, so it's not a big read. It's an easy read. It's available on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. You can order it today. It comes out September 1st, so you can pre-order it. You know, there's a lot of pieces to this process. For example, we have a whole chapter on the joy killers and things that take away joy from your life. By the way, this could be a family member that you don't want in your life, you didn't ask to be in your life.

39:40Could be people at work. It could be work that you're doing. It could be a variety of things and how you either have to turn-- you either have to find joy in them or you have to get them out of your life, right? There are things in all of our lives that were never gonna bring you joy, and I'll give you an example. You're at the office, if you work in an office, you're at the office and every time you, you know, go to fill your thing with water, you know, Betty's there, and Betty's just complaining about every, "Oh, I hate the management.

40:09I hate this person. I hate that. I hate this." You know, buy Betty a copy of the book and bless her out of your life. You don't need to see Betty anymore. She's not gonna help you succeed at all. You know, all of this kind of about how bad management is. Really? Is that gonna change it somehow? No. You have two choices: to never or-- and just do your job and do a great job and get joy from it, or leave and get a job somewhere else where maybe you like the management better. You already have two choices.

40:40But the third choice of let me just complain about them doesn't allow you to attain your highest level of success ever. It brings you down. It brings them down. It brings everyone around you down. It pokes holes in the boat the river at the same time. It's just bad. And so that doesn't say that all management is good. It certainly isn't. It just says you complaining about it isn't the way to deal with it, right? The way to deal with it is to leave or to ignore it and do your job. I mean, tho- that's it.

41:09That's all there is. You know, so there's a… I'm picking on that one, but there are a hundred examples of these kinds of things, right, where this is the stuff that happens and it just takes you down. And once you're spiraling downward, you can't even think. You look at a blank page. You can't do your job. You waste all this time. You're not moving towards success. You're not looking at the next pain point out there and going, "Huh, I wonder if I can build a virtual assistant.

41:37I wonder if I can have AI find all the bugs in my software. I wonder if I can retrofit the Empire State Building with energy-efficient window." Like I'm thinking of those things because I'm not dwelling down in the gutter. I don't need to be down there. Let someone else be down there, right? And so, you know, joy breeds success, which gives you more joy, which gives you more success. You need to have joy every minute in every task in everything you do.

42:02Forget Betty at the water cooler, and my apologies to someone named Betty. I am not-- I just grabbed the name out of the air. It's not you. So, another thing that I think source of joy killer is actually So if you're always following the news. Yeah, doom scrolling. Don't doom scroll. What we deal with that a little bit and, actually we deal with it quite well is you're welcome to hear the news. I'm not telling you to never listen to the news and never…

42:32However, you have to stop worrying about those things which you can't impact. Spend no energy on it, right? So today you open the paper and you go, "Oh, there's a war and people are getting bombed, and people are getting…" Unless you're going to go there and solve it, or you're going to run for president or I don't know, right? You actually have no impact on that. You can note it. You're educated on it. You wanna be educated on world But it-- you can't worry about it.

43:02And it's the worrying about it that puts people in bed in a depressed state. I have met more people say, "Oh, I said, that, that's going on, away, and you can't have any impact on it. "But I just can't get out of bed." Okay. So it's having an impact on you where you're no longer going to be successful today. And if that's what you choose to do, I, you know, that is your life choice. It's not the choice I choose to make. I wanna be educated on it.

43:34I can't fix it. I don't have the power to fix it. I don't have the power to start wars or end wars. But I wanna be educated on it, but I can't get depressed about it because… So stop worrying about the things you can't fix. Do not spend any energy on the things you can't fix. And that doesn't have to be just a war. It could be something at work. It could be something in your family. It could be some religious thing. It could be a tree fell that you loved so much. "Oh my God, it's just-- it's ruined my life 'cause I love that tree."

44:01It ruined your… It's a tree. They all fall eventually, right? I'm-- I don't mean to be mean have any emotion over that. That isn't the place to sort of waste your time if you wanna be the most successful you can be. 'Cause every minute you spend crying about the tree is a minute that's not being-- that not moving you towards the, your maximum success. By the way, your maximum success family, could be religion, could be sports. I don't know what it is, right? So whatever, however you define success in your life. Lots of people define it as a certain monetary freedom. I get that, and then that's the most common, right? I wanna get to a point where I, you know, great, where I can retire early.

44:44I don't have to work. I, you know, whatever. Good. You define it the way you wanna define it. Every minute you spend doing something negative is a minute that doesn't move you towards that, and you will never get that time back. I spent three days just That's three days you can never get back, and you didn't impact the war. I spent three days protesting against this data center. Oh, okay. Well, the data center will get built somewhere. You won't have had an impact. It might not get built in your town, but it's gonna get built somewhere.

45:18I guarantee it. And that's three days you won't get back. Like you can't move towards your success. And, you know, everybody's got their own drive. Maybe their sense of purpose is to protest, in which case, all right, I guess you should go do that, right? But, you know, the book just tries to say if you wanna be the most successful, you have to push a lot of that stuff out of your life, 'cause you only get so many hours a day. And a lot of us spend those hours complaining, you know, bitching, moaning, arguing, all kinds of negative stuff. And then weeks go by and you go, "I didn't get to accomplish a thing."

45:52Of course you didn't. I could've told you that. You can't accomplish anything. You're down in the gutter. You know, don't do it. Anyway, obviously, 200 pages talks about this in great detail and gives a great method. People have bought it for their teams. We had draft versions that I used with teams. It's game-changing for teams. We've watched sales teams, you know, increase their productivity almost overnight by following this method. So it is coming at the right time where AI and other things have really impacted people's psyche. And we're gonna pull you out of that and move you forward and I hope make you rich with success, whatever that means. Yeah.

46:34I think it's a great advice, we can control, right? Obviously, if we cannot control, I think if we dwell on it, I Yeah. Yep. And I like the, I think I'd like You mentioned a few times about purpose. And there's this, you know, like one line in your book that I really like, like purpose as the foundation and curiosity as your stepping stone, right? So tell us about this concept because I think some people may not even know what's their purpose. They'll just live in the motion, right? Curiosity is your friend, right?

47:08I think, when we're curious, we learn. And when we learn, we find And when we learn more, we try to solve them. You know, the most successful people, I-- you know, Elon Musk, you can like him or dislike him, but he's a trillionaire. So give or take, maybe a little less now. But the point is he's curious all the time. He's curious about, "Huh, I wonder if I can make rockets way, way, way cheaper." Nobody ever bothered to really think about that. They just got the government contract and built it to the contract. And if the price went up, there was more margin, and then, you know, there's more money for everybody. That was good, more profit.

47:43So I think, you know, someone fantastic. And Elon, if nothing else, is curious. You know, can I build a car out of existing batteries where I don't have to make brand-new batteries? Can I build rockets cheaply? Can I provide internet by putting thousands of satellites up? Nobody's ever done that before. Is it even possible? Well, if you drive the launch cost down, it's possible. So staying curious is what keeps your mind open and allows you to learn your whole life.

48:14So many people, they leave school, and they go, well, I'm done learning now. Well that sucks. What are you gonna do? I mean, you know, I love learning every day. I read voraciously, and I-- you know, really information in our field, right? I need to know what's going on and who's doing it. It's hard to keep up with everything going on. But stay curious on everything learn throughout your life. Yeah. So definitely curiosity, Even if you cannot find your purpose now, I think maybe the curiosity will lead you to there, right?

48:48That's right. Yeah. So I think another thing that is quite kind of like fun in your book, one of the chapter is called The Joy of To-Do Lists. I think many people may not feel list. So us why this to-do list is powerful for your joy. Yeah, so I do to-do lists every day. I do them by hand. And to-do lists are great for a lot of reasons. One, it tells you what you gotta do today or the next day or whenever you've done it, if you've done it the night before, you did it in the morning.

49:19The other thing it does is it gives you small wins during the day. You get to literally cross something off or check it off when it's done. You go, "So I have to prepare for this podcast. Check." I go, "Win!" Small wins are great. You need small wins all during the day. And by the way, every time you check something off the list, it's a little dopamine hit, and it gives you more energy to keep going. And when you don't make a list, you're just wandering through the day just, you know, dealing with what comes, and that's just not as satisfying. So the other thing is writing a list with a pen is a great thing, and I write lists with pens. And I highly recommend doing that, pen or pencil. And it's much better than keeping lists on a computer, which I tend to never get to and never do. So write them every day.

50:06Do your to-do list. I don't get through my to-do list every day. Some things on that to-do list are a month kind of a thing. They're gonna take a lot longer. That's okay. But I know it's there. I see it every day. I work out a little bit to try to make progress. Yeah. So maybe you said that you have been in kind of like this joy, I don't know, like journey for many years. Maybe after writing your book or after spreading this in your keynotes, are there some inspiring stories that you can share with us, you know, about, you know, some people who have changed, used your methodology and really succeed?

50:38Yeah, you know, there was a-- this great sales reorganization that happened in a very big company that I came in and spoke to and spoke The Joy-Success Cycle. It was my keynote on that. They specifically asked me to come, because the mess they had was they had reorganized and everybody was mad. The salespeople didn't like the new groups they were in. They didn't like anything about anything. And all they were doing was moaning every single day rather than selling.

51:05And, you know, selling So if your attitude isn't And sure enough, after The Joy-Success Cycle, and I customized some things in my-- I customize my keynotes all the time. So for them, I said, "Let's say there was a reorganization," which I know there was, and I know it's very easy to be negative on all of this. "Oh, I liked my other team. Okay, let's look at the positives. First of all, you knew everything there was to know about your other team members. There was nothing new to learn.

51:35Here's a whole new group of twenty-eight people you don't know anything about that you can learn from. There's twenty-eight people that you can go and have a drink with or a coffee with or a tea with or whatever it is, or a lunch with, right? This is a whole new learning opportunity for you where you can open your mind, be curious about them and their experiences, and probably learn a whole new set of experiences, whole new set of skills, right? And when you look at it that way, all of a sudden this is, what a great opportunity, rather than, "I hate this, I wanna go back to my old group," which is what everybody said.

52:08"I hate it, I wanna go back to my old group." And the second thing is, when you come in with that kind of mindset, then what's great about it is that you go out to sell and you've got a great selling attitude 'Cause you're excited to be with this new group. You still love your old group, but you're excited to be with the new group. So that's an example of people who called me a few weeks later and said, you know, not everybody picked it up, but a long time and they're excited about it, and they stopped all the water cooler talk and it changed their entire attitude.

52:40Right. So Kevin, I think it's been a great things. Any things that you think, can be also shared by you, like before we wrap up to the last questions that I have? No, I think we covered a lot today. All right, so in that case, I'll It's called the three Just think of it like advice you wanna give to the listeners to wrap up. Well, the advice, we probably covered all of it. One, use AI all the time, period, full stop, done. That's at the leadership level, it's at the coding level, and it's everywhere else.

53:14If you're not using AI five times an hour, you are behind your competition. It's really important. And, you know, listen to that, right? It's really, critical. You know, the second thing is that AI isn't taking any joy away. You thought it was, but trust me, it isn't. Buy the book. It'll take you through a method that I guarantee you, you and your workers are gonna be far more joyful about. And lastly, this is the best time to be alive in technology ever.

53:41We are able to achieve and write more and produce more incredible output than we've ever been able to do in our lives. It's unbelievable. And so this isn't the worst time to be in tech. It's the best time to be in tech. And it's always how you look at it. And I know some people are gonna look at this and go, "Oh, you know, it's change. I don't like change. I don't…" Okay, this is the best time to ever be in this field. You could not have come at a better time. And so how lucky you are.

54:11Wow, I think it's quite inspiring, right? So I think the best time ever in the tech, if you always see it from the positive side, I think you can really feel that this is the really the best time ever in the technology world, right? Where things are kind of like right? Every day. So Kevin, if people love this out to you, find more about your resources, your books, is there a place they can find you? Yeah, my website is kevinsurace.com, and the book website is joysuccesscycle.com.

54:40Right. All right. Thank you so much for your time today. I hope people learn a thing or two about finding their joy, right? And hopefully that leads them to their success. So thanks again for the time today. Thanks for having me.