Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Do you want to know the biggestmistake people have when
it comes to AI or AI tools?
I invited Silicon valley legend,Kevin cereus onto the show today.
He's the guy to helpactually pioneer Siri.
Alexa and a whole bunchof other virtual agent
type software like that.
He holds a 94 patents.
What he's doing with AI isincredible in terms of productivity.
(00:23):
He breaks down how he's themost productive ever, and
the way that he does things.
But what he says is most ofus are just playing around.
We're just playing aroundwith all this stuff, but
here's a real shocker.
He actually claims thatsuccess, massive success.
Doesn't just come fromthe technology at all.
It actually comes fromfinding joy in everything
that you do every single day.
(00:44):
All the way, as far as likefiring people, if you got to
do that, there is joy in that.
So he breaks down the balance ofjoy and technology and how you
can be the most productive, themost effective and the most joyful
throughout the whole process.
So let's get into it with Kevin.
All right, Kevin, we're doing this.
I appreciate you taking the time Idon't know how you have the time but
(01:06):
uh Probably get that all the time.
You're kind of accomplished inin the number of patents He said
94 patents mainly in technologyAI you've been what in the ground
floor with things like Siri andAlexa and one star like Before
AI and all this stuff reallytook off or, you know, this kind
of smart, intelligent software.
(01:29):
Um, how do you have the time?
Hmm.
Well, uh, it's, it'svery interesting.
I, I, I meet a lot of peoplenow who are really trying
to focus on monotasking anddoing one thing at a time.
I actually multitask quite well.
Now I'm not going to do emails inthe middle of A podcast, right?
Cause I got to be focused onthis, but generally, uh, look,
(01:49):
there's only so many hours inthe day and, um, uh, regardless
of what Elan says, that he canget by on three hours of sleep
or whatever, actually, you justdon't think well on three hours
of sleep after a while, right?
And humans need.
Pick your poison seven or eighthours of sleep to actually function
well and have good brain health.
And so you've got tohave good brain health.
You've got to sleep, but thenyou've got to make your working
(02:10):
hours, whatever those are, ifit's four hours a day, if it's
eight hours a day, if it's 12hours a day, they have to be
incredibly productive, right?
I get 350 emails a day.
By the end of the day,they have to be gone.
That's my filing system, right?
They have to be cleared out.
I have no choice.
And so, you know, if you thinkabout that, each one can't get a
minute or there's not enough time,each one's got to have seconds
(02:31):
and you have to know what theresponse is and you have to be
quick, you have to use the tools.
I mean, there's no question AI,certainly LLMs, uh, transformers,
et cetera, chat, GPT, GPT, four.
Oh, Gemini, uh, co pilot has mademe immensely more productive.
And, and I don't play with them.
I use them.
I use every tool at my disposal.
(02:51):
You know what?
Just like, um, why would Ido math when I have Excel?
Like I, I have a tool here.
It does that.
Could I do long division of my head?
Yes.
Why would I want to, youknow, let's, let's use
the tools that are given.
And so I look, youcan't get the time back.
You got to use everyhour and every minute.
To, to its fullest.
(03:12):
And, and I, um, that is what I do.
So I'm sort of just onabsolute monger and I'm
multitasking three things.
And my poor wife, she'll comein and say, Hey, Kevin, I
need to ask you something.
No, I'm not quite like that,but you know, it's like, ah,
I
how, yeah,
there were eight things and Idon't know where they are anymore.
Where do I restart?
Right.
And, um, so that's, what's hardon people around you is like the
(03:33):
interruptions are, are challenging.
yes, they are.
you're going to do a lot in life.
You're going to have to multitaskor you will never get them done.
That is a good point because youhear the, the, yeah, the, the
sayings of like multitasking.
It doesn't work.
It's not good for you.
Not getting full attention,whatever it might be.
But yeah, look at folks likeElon, obviously you guys operate
differently, but, um, and I wouldlove to get into that in a little
(03:56):
bit too, but the fact that.
Yeah, it's time.
It's, it's pure time andyou're not getting that back.
You need to expand time and nowwe're living in this age with tools,
That's right.
Well, Elon and I probably operate,um, similarly in many, in many ways.
I've, I've met a lot, uh, many timesand we've had great conversations.
Look, I don't necessarily agreewith everything he's doing, and that
(04:17):
may be politically and other thingsand the way he's running Twitter,
and I might do that differently.
But that said, he isa heavy multitasker.
And, uh, and he is a multitaskeracross multiple fields, as you know.
And, um, he does one thing thatI do, which is I am not afraid to
learn a new field regardless of age.
So I don't have to be a rocketscientist today, but if I was
(04:39):
hired to go in and run a team,a new team to get a rocket to
Pluto, I'm making it up, right?
I go, okay, well.
Let's, let's learn thephysics around this, right?
I don't have to build everypart of an engine myself, but
I can understand the physics,uh, literally in weeks.
I can understand the basicphysics of how this works.
I can understand what peoplehave done in the past.
(05:00):
I can understand that toget to Pluto, I need an
ion engine or something.
I need to, I need to get a lotcloser to the speed of light than
we're, than we have been, right?
Because I don't want totake 28 years to get there.
That's not, not completely useful.
And, um, and then, you know,it's just math and don't
break the laws of physics.
So when I approached, um, youknow, I have patents in AI.
I also have patentsin soundproof drywall.
(05:20):
People go, you madesoundproof drywall.
You invented some drywall.
I did and higher valuewindows and a bunch of other
things and auctions and.
How did you do that?
Well, there was a realproblem and a real pain point.
The pain point was people could hearthrough walls in hotels and motels,
and they could hear through wallsin apartments and in condos and in
townhomes, and that should be fixed.
(05:40):
How can we fix that?
So I did a lot of researchon what had worked and what
hadn't worked, and virtuallynothing practically had worked.
And then, uh, I stumbled upon someways to convert Acoustic energy and
vibrational energy to heat energy.
Um, that's used for bridges andit's used for disc drives and it's
used for all kinds of other things.
(06:01):
I go, could I apply this conceptto a wall and then it's just
physics, it's just math, and thenyou learn the math and you realize
that nobody else has ever done thisbefore and there's no patents in
the field and so, okay, you inventsoundproof drywall and it turns
out it works and nobody thinks itworks because they go, well, it
weighs the same as regular drywall.
Yes, but it works.
Well, and then I had people say,well, you got these lab reports.
(06:24):
You must've paid off the lab.
Well, we paid the lab becausethey don't work for free.
Well, see, they took money.
Well, come on.
So these are nationally accreditedlabs that you go to, by the way, to.
To prove that, you know,you're reducing sound and we
built walls that could reducesound by more than 20 DB going
from one side to the other.
I'm super proud of that, that work.
And today that's a multibillion dollar product line.
(06:45):
It goes in every hotel and moteland condo and town home, and
nobody would build without that.
Right.
Uh, so, so, uh, um, so, youknow, solve real problems, uh,
and you have to, your mind hasto be open to see the problems.
and open to solve the problem.
So I think in that way,you'll find a lot of people
(07:06):
like Ilan and others.
I think Bill Gates was thisway, certainly Steve Jobs.
Find a real problem thatpeople are willing to pay for
and then attempt to become arelative expert in that field.
You don't have to be the expert,but you're going to have to be
a relative expert in that field.
And Not be afraid of that polymaththing, you know, they use the term.
Oh polymath He knows so manythings about so many fields.
(07:27):
Well, I just took the time to golearn it I you know, I can read
every patent in the field inprobably, you know, three weeks.
So just go read them
what's your approach then?
Because so folks listening, youknow, and, and they might be
having excuses of age or time orwhatever, don't know the tools,
the tech as well as Kevin does,you know, what's your approach
(07:47):
to those folks or what would you
tell them?
look, I think people who saywell i'm just too old to learn
anything new Someone's goingto yell at me for saying this.
Probably you're too lazy to learnanything new or you don't want to
learn anything new and that's okay.
Like I'm not beating that up.
I think a lot would beat it upand say, wow, you know, but if
that's the life you want, great.
I mean, there are many peoplewho say, look, the life I
(08:10):
want is to go play golf.
God bless.
I like, I have nojudgment on that, right?
It's just not my thing.
My thing is to continuously learn.
I read technology stuff, right?
Voraciously, even to justkeep up in the AI field.
I can't keep up.
There's too much, too manypublications every single day
that I cannot read all of them.
Many of them are at such a technicaldepth that I would have to spend two
(08:33):
days to really dig into that, but Idon't have two days for one paper.
I have to get a summary of it.
I have to understand what they did.
I don't need to understandall of the math.
I need to understand someone elsedoes understand all that math,
and then I need to move the nextthing and say, Okay, I understand
now that this is available tome and I can apply it right.
You can learn practicallyany field you want.
Now, I have a degree inengineering that helped me, right?
(08:54):
So I was all my brain was alreadythinking about physics and
electrons and computer science andcoding and like from a young age.
So I mean, I think if youbut if I had a degree in
business, what would I do?
I'd say great.
There are all kinds of businessmodels, business methods,
marketing methods, marketingtools, sales tools that I could
learn throughout my life andget better at every single one.
(09:16):
So still there's value in learning.
You might not jumpand learn physics.
That might be a bigjump, but that's okay.
There's other things you can learnthat are applicable to every field.
it's probably based off of yourfoundation, whatever understanding
you already have or interest.
Yeah.
Oh, or interest.
Right.
That's right.
But lifelong learning,it's a, it's a good thing.
It didn't stop whenyou went to college.
It didn't stop when youwent to high school.
(09:37):
Um, it shouldn't stop, butI honor those who say not
for me, not my lifestyle.
Fine.
They're probably notlistening to your show.
That's probably
not your audience, right?
Your audience says, I guess Ihave to be a lifelong learner.
Yes, you do.
And, and, and as much as youknow, here's the interesting
thing, even like CEOs, right?
Well, I know so much about marketingbecause in my last company, great.
(10:00):
But every six months there arenew tools and changes in the way
we market in the algorithms thatare promoting or not promoting
your, your posts, et cetera.
I mean, look, if this was.
20 something years ago, the ideaof building entire companies
around social media marketingonline was on no such thing.
You, you'd still run newspaperads and TV ads or something.
(10:22):
And today you wouldn'tbother with that at all.
That's a, probably a waste of money.
And instead you're workingthe algorithms of Facebook or
Instagram or, or Tik TOK or, orLinkedIn, if it's a business,
the business sale, right?
Right.
And those are the tools you use.
And so you have to be a completelydifferent marketer today and use a
set of technology tools to monitorall those and give you a B test and
(10:44):
give you the results every morning.
It changed the ads.
And that's what we do.
Or if they're not ads, theirposts or their news articles
or their, their human intereststories, or however you're
going to market what you have
And, and staying up with thetimes in your domain and just
what data in really understandingwhat that is, synthesizing
and doing something about it.
or don't, or fallbehind in your field.
(11:06):
And that's okay.
So I'm done.
I want to golf the rest of my
life.
I want
to.
that's totally,
And you know, they're notlistening to your show, as I said.
So we have a, we have agreat audience here that
wants to hear this stuff.
So
Yeah.
And there's, there's somethingthat I've been, you know, it's
so fascinating because, youknow, I coach, I train, do some
fractional work on AI for a lotof businesses and it's great
(11:26):
summer tapped in, but I know thelarge majority of people have no
clue what's even possible with.
AI or technology right now,let alone what's coming in
the next handful of years.
And, you know, I want to get your,your perspective of this because
I've really found, I'm like, one ofthe things that excites me with this
time is like, I can be the bridge.
And I think all of us who aretapped in can be the bridge to
(11:49):
others who might not be listeningto the show or tapped in because
I genuinely think going into thefuture, there's articles published.
I was just reading one last night.
Um, from Financial Times, it was,it was about like the shrinking
population, but because of that,you know, the, the quality of life
and, and the value of things, it'sjust going to be like three X times
(12:10):
or more productivity required.
All these other things.
So I'm curious of your thoughts on
Yeah.
So people are always, youknow, I'm a keynote speaker.
I do, I don't know, 40 pluskeynotes a year, right.
All around the world.
A lot of them on AI and a lot ofthem on the choice success cycle.
So we'll talk aboutboth a little bit.
But in the AI world, um,I've been in the applied AI
world for about 25 years.
(12:30):
That means I am applyingthe best algorithms to real
problems that is different thandeveloping the best algorithms.
Uh, you know, I didn't developthe transformer, but I know how
to use the transformer varietyof ways that other people
probably haven't thought of.
Right.
So when you project out.
I can see where weare in five years.
We are going to havehumanoid robots.
These robots just in 20, in 2024started to learn on their own,
(12:51):
uh, using reinforcement learning.
We did not have that before wewere coding them with rules.
It was a rules basedtechnology today.
They can learn to brew coffee ontheir own because they sit there for
three days and spill the coffee allover the place, but eventually they
learn how to do it right and they.
And they build a neuralnet around that, right?
And so we can see that there willbe, of course, software agents
(13:12):
working for us, much agentic, aI much better than they have been
through, say, with, say, R. P.A. Robotic process automation.
We can see that we will want tointerface with our physical world.
So humanoid robotsMake complete sense.
The there are several companiesreally driving the cost of those
way down and again, trainingwith reinforcement learning.
(13:35):
So I can see we're on atrajectory for kind of 2030.
You might have a humanoid robotin your home, and we all want
someone actually who at leastCleans and does the laundry, right?
I mean, and so some peoplewould say, well, why does
it have to be humanoid?
Because we built ourhomes for humans.
They're not built forsome other kind of thing.
They're like to opena refrigerator door.
(13:55):
If you look at where thehandle is, you actually need
an arm and a hand to do so.
Without one.
It's, it's not, it's not possible.
You can't have some little roboton the floor, somehow open it.
You'd have to changeevery appliance, right?
Our ovens are at acertain, certain height.
Our stove is at a certain height.
So you need sort of a. Callit a five foot seven humanoid
robot that interfaces in yourkitchen and with your laundry.
(14:17):
And so that's going to happen.
And if I miss this by a yearor two, maybe it's not 2030
and maybe it's 2034, right?
Or maybe it's 2028.
That is an exciting thing, and somepeople are gonna be scared of it.
I am not scared.
I mean, I can't wait, right?
Do the tasks I don't want to do.
And this is what we'redoing already with.
GPT 4, ChatGPT, Copilot, it'swhat we're doing at work, right?
(14:40):
We're starting to offload thetasks that we're not good at.
And by doing so, thatis expanding our brain.
So, I use GPT 4.
0 for ideation.
All the time.
So I go, I have this problem.
I have three ideas about it.
Give me seven more.
Woom.
Not all of them are good, butall of them are interesting.
(15:01):
And some of them are go, Oh, Iwould have never thought of that.
I mean, I'm, I would havethought of it three days from
now when the project was over.
Right?
So all of a sudden I havea hundred brain power.
I can, I can multiply my brainby a hundred X. If I want to, I
can write 52 blog posts today.
Instead of writingthem over the year.
And I'm done with thattask for the year.
This is brilliant.
(15:22):
And with more people in the U Sanyway, retiring that are coming
into the, then are coming inthe workforce for us to double
the size of our revenue of ourcompanies, it used to be, we
just hire twice as many people.
Well, there aren'ttwice as many to hire.
So now we're going tohave to do it another way.
We all have to become probablytwice as productive over the next
five to 10 years as we've been.
(15:43):
And we already have measurementsshowing that we can at least
achieve that if not more.
So I think it's the mostexciting time to be alive.
It's the most excitingtime to be in technology.
it's the most excitingtime, arguably.
To start a company because you canstart it with less people and you
can leverage, um, large languagemodels and multimodals to do some of
the work, a lot of the work for you.
(16:03):
You don't, I mean.
Look my presentations in keynotes.
I used to hire out an illustratorwho do these great illustrations
Now I just get that from amultimodal and it you know,
it draws for me It gives mesix or eight of these things.
I put them in I'm done like ina minute not two weeks I'm done
in a minute and it didn't costme fifteen hundred dollars.
It cost me a dollar
(16:25):
any style you want.
Yep,
any style you want
that's it.
And, and what you're talking about.
Yeah, it's awesome.
And I've done the whole 52 weeksof blog, pose, email, social.
It's so simple.
Once you get your headwrapped around the process.
Even in Riverside, we're onRiverside right now, which
is a podcasting platformfor those who don't know.
(16:46):
And, uh, Riverside automatically,as you know, we'll transcribe this.
To the two of us, and then itwill summarize it and it'll do
so in a matter of minutes, andit used to take you personally,
if you were doing it before theyhad that technology, to do it.
Hours, you know, hours and hoursand hours was the painful, you
know, and I got to summarize it.
Here's the point.
Maybe you take notes through it.
I don't do any, nobodydoes that anymore.
(17:07):
It just does this for us.
So what a, what agreat thing it took.
It lets you do what you wantto do better and took away that
sort of grunt work that, or youwere handing that off to someone.
We often handed it off
to,
you know, someone whoworked for the producer.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So it's, it's crazy.
I mean, it wasn't even that longago going to places like rev.
com to get everything done, youknow, you're like, I can get it
(17:28):
done and, uh, you know, get itback tomorrow or in a few hours.
I thought that was quick.
Well, I used to go to Upwork beforethat because you'd hand it off to
someone in like Uruguay who, whowould listen and try to summarize.
And you know, I, no, I have amachine that does it now for
free in a matter of minutes.
This is good.
So I'm sorry for the person Uruguaywho isn't doing that work anymore.
(17:49):
And we like Uruguay.
I'm not picking a Uruguay, but,
but, but it, you know, it's done.
So these are great tools.
Just like Excel is a great tool.
And the point here is it's theperson in Uruguay or elsewhere
is probably found something else.
And if they're staying upwith the technology and what's
possible opportunity wise.
That's why I keep thinking ofthis concept of being a bridge,
(18:11):
like communicate what's possibleto folks who will listen.
And hopefully that conspiresother ideas or people that
keep talking about it.
So then, you know, the folksthat might be out of work or a
little complacent, whatever itmight be, rally them up, you
know, like get, get behind this.
So we can actually boostall that productivity.
one of the things I sayto people, I think you'll
(18:32):
use this is stop playing.
So I'm doing keynote speeches.
How many people have used chat?
GBT, right?
Everybody raises their hand, right?
How many people have played with it?
Everybody raised their hand.
How many people have usedit for real work on a
consistent daily basis?
Like three hands go up.
We go.
Stop playing.
Just stop playing.
Pick some tasks and say,I'm going to do this with
this as my assistant.
(18:53):
I'm going to get it donewith this as my assistant.
Cause when you start doing realwork and you do that real work every
single day, you start to find realwork to do and expand your brain.
Otherwise you go, well, Iplayed with it and I tried
this, that didn't like it.
You know, we don'tplay with our tools.
We work with these toolsto get actual work done.
So go get actual tasks done.
(19:13):
Like let's write a blog post.
Let's write a blog post.
Okay.
What's it about?
What do I want it to be about?
Where can it get more information?
Well, there's someinformation on our website.
Great.
Tie it to your website, tie it toyour page, you know, et cetera.
So do real work.
Stop
Well, there you go.
That's the homework foranyone watching or listening.
Go do, do that blog post, writethat email, one of those two.
(19:34):
That's all
right.
By
the way.
You
use that to respond to an email,like you get an email from
a client or you get an emailand you go, I could respond.
I'm going to spend a half anhour stewing on this and it's
not going to be that good.
Literally take this, put it in thereand say, I need a response to that.
Keeps the customer happy,brings them back to me.
Uh, you know, it's in the voice ofme and you know, blah, blah, blah.
(19:56):
And you go, Oh, I couldn'thave written it that well.
It rhymed serious.
And then you may edit a fewwords or edit a few things.
You might take a sentence out,but still you go, I, I, I'm sorry.
I could not, I w I would havetaken me a week to think of that.
There's a, there's a mentalmodel that we train on a
buddy Brad Costanzo came upwith it, but it's a 10 80 10.
It's like you start with theidea or whatever that initial
(20:18):
prompt thing, whatever it is.
Chad, GBT or said AI LLM willdo the 80 percent heavy lift.
And then you're the,you're the human that takes
right.
That's right.
You see, it's still your look.
It's still your work.
That's the interesting thing.
You initiated it.
You read it, you editedit, and then you posted
it or sent it or whatever.
(20:39):
So it still reflectswhat you want to reflect.
But, like I like to say,unless you were, I was not,
I was not an English major.
Not an English major.
ChatGBT is an English major.
So I now have an Englishmajor helping me.
every moment of the day.
And so my English is much better.
My language is much better.
The, the fluidity, the meaning,you know, the, the emotion
(21:02):
that, that whatever I want tocome out, I want this one to be
much more emotional because Iwant to show it from the heart.
So an English major would knowhow to write that kind of prose.
Now I can write likean English major.
It's still me.
I've still, these are thewords I want to say, but I
couldn't have thought of them.
Without sitting therestewing for a week.
(21:24):
I'm not an English major, right?
So look at that's that'sanother way to look at it
I love it.
Yeah.
If you want to write likeHemingway, well, guess what?
Prompted to do such
Absolutely, rightlike Hemingway boom
done.
Well, all right.
So everybody stop playing,go do the, do the work
and just spend 10 minutes.
You'll, you'll figure it out.
Guaranteed.
(21:44):
And and the longer the promptthe larger the prompt the more
you give it the better, right?
Most of these can take in 2000words now, right huge huge prompts
So the more you tell it the moreyou give it including hey, I wrote
this blog post It's 800 words.
Rewrite it for me to get more views.
Boom.
And you go, Oh, that's waybetter than what I wrote, but
(22:05):
it's still what, what you wrotesent through an English majors
brain that cleaned it up.
And by the way, we usedto pay people to do that.
So I would always write a blogpost and then I'd send it out
to a blog post expert who wouldrewrite it and use prose that I
couldn't write in sentences andyou know, that I wouldn't have
thought of it's still my ideas.
But they were just really goodat writing it in a better way.
(22:27):
Now I have a machine thatdoes the same and that poor
person I know is out of work.
And I apologize for that.
Well, for now, you know, or maybe
Well, she's actually usingthe tools herself and selling.
You know, doing what she'sdoing now at a lower cost,
but doing more of them.
And you know, it all works out.
And that right there is the key.
You know, it's like she found ahack or not a hack, but just a
way to be more productive, give
(22:49):
more value.
That's
the point.
Yeah.
Love it.
Um, and not going to lie alot of the podcast here, like
the, the hooks that I'll putat the front or the intros of
these, guess what I'm doing.
I'm putting the transcriptioninto clod or chat GPT.
I have a whole template projecton what are the best books.
It gives me like 10 to choose from.
I pick one and thenmodify and make it my own.
(23:11):
It's
Yeah.
Well, you have to, why would you,as you know, there's some formulas
to use on say LinkedIn that thealgorithms right now are, are
they, they move to the top andthey give you more views, right?
I cannot easily writewithin that formulaic.
Thing, but I can tell chat or GPTfour to do it and they'll go, sure,
(23:32):
I'll take what you wrote and putit into that formula so that you
get the maximum number of views.
And when I use that, I actuallyget about four times the
number of views than if Idid it myself, even though.
My English isn't too bad.
It's just not as good as the Englishmajor that knows the formula.
So I shouldn't bother todo what I shouldn't do.
(23:53):
All
And, uh, we can keep goinginto the rabbit hole here.
Cause I'm like,
But there's more, there's moreto talk about in the joy success
cycle.
Absolutely.
And that's where I was going to pinit to is because everything that
you do, and this is where I think mytakeaway I was, I was learning about
you, Kevin, and knowing that thejoy of success is this piece of work
that you're working on currently.
(24:13):
Uh, maybe by the time someonefinds this, it's already out.
You should go get itwherever that will be.
Um,
Someday there'll be a book.
This will probably beout before that, but
yeah.
So the joy of success.
I mean, so Why joy?
What is it in your eyes?
But also I'm thinking, you know,in the context of your career,
and I know I haven't even coverednearly everything you've done, but
the patents to the, the differentcompanies you've been a part of
(24:36):
and technology and most fast movingplaces, you know, our industries.
How does joy wrap into all of that?
And
Well, look, there's plentyof books on happiness and how
to be happy and how to be,uh, that isn't this right.
What I've done is I've saidin order to be the most
successful you can be, You needto have joy at every moment.
(24:57):
So joy is intimatelytied to success.
And this really came out ofpeople asking me, why is that
you're so bubbly and joyful.
And, and, and, and by the way,why is it that you have 94 pens?
And why is it that you can findall these, all these pain points?
And why is it that your mindis open enough to see those?
I go, well, it turns outthey are tied together.
They're completely, and thejoy success cycle is the more
(25:19):
joy, the more success, theless joy, the less success.
And once you tie those togetherand you realize they're important,
you start to look at every momentof your day in a different way.
Now, the way we score that inthe book and we teach people
how to do this is what we callthe positive quotient, right?
So how many positivethoughts did you have?
And you keep adding points forthat and you want to stay at 10.
(25:42):
So great.
And anytime you have a negativethought or a complaint,
Internal or external complaint.
And humans love to complain.
So this is a very important thing.
You take the score away.
You take one point away, right?
So let's say you getup in the morning.
You go, Oh, my knees hurt.
Minus one.
You say you're starting within from the day, the start
Why?
(26:02):
Even if you start at five,let's say you start at neutral
or you start in the middle.
All of a sudden you're minus one.
Now you're at four less, lesschance of success that day.
Then you go and youget some breakfast.
You go, Oh, I'm out of cereal.
What an idiot I am.
Now you're at three and thenyou go, Oh, look at this.
They have to fire someone.
I hate that.
Okay.
Now you're at two.
Okay.
(26:23):
If you go tomorrow,here's, here's the goal for
your listeners tomorrow.
I want you to wake up and count.
The number of complaints ornegatives you have internal or
external throughout the day,the number of everything, every
single one, right in a normal day.
And remember, we're not talkingabout, you know, a death
in the family and cancer.
That's not what we mean here.
We mean your normal day, right?
(26:45):
So the normal day we have a list ofthings to do and things come at you
and some of them are new and someof them are surprises and some, you
know, whatever weather, whatever.
So a normal day, if you count them,you're going to find most most
Americans have over 100 complaints.
Yeah.
All day, eitherexternal or internal.
It's very easy to get there.
It's a few an hour.
All of a sudden you add upto over a hundred a day.
(27:06):
And at the end of that day,you go, I had no idea I
had 112 complaints a day.
No wonder I'm notmeeting all my goals.
And no wonder my mind isn't opento see some of these opportunities.
Well, because you're down in thegutter and you're trying to dig
yourself out of complaintville.
So
And once you're in complete,you know, too, like it
goes deeper, easier.
(27:26):
Right?
Like
well, you, you, yeah, you havethese joy killers and it just
keeps killing you and killingyou and killing you, right.
Just takes away and takesaway and takes away.
So, um, that's fear andit's stress and burnout.
And you get all those thingshappening because you're
down in this Terrible cyclethat took you into zero.
Now, what happens if you got up thenext morning, the following morning,
right, two days from now, and yousay, okay, Kevin said I have to
(27:49):
limit my complaints or negativesor whatever, right, to one a day.
You still get one, but onlyone, because I live by this.
I really try very hardto keep it at one.
So you get up.
Of course, you're not thinking yet.
You go, oh, oh, geez, myback hurts this morning.
that's your one.
That's your one.
(28:10):
Now, this is an exercise in mentalcontrol, is the whole point.
Because once you're counting,you go, I already used my one.
And I, and I blew it.
I gave it away on something stupid.
So, now I have noneleft for the entire day.
And so, All of my tasks.
So you look at your task list.
I like to make task listsometimes the night before,
often the night before.
I like to make a test.
(28:30):
They say, here's the 10things I have to do today.
And numbers, you know, number threeis fire bill, you know, whatever.
And because you dothat as leaders, right?
You know, there's many waysto look at firing bill.
Of course, most of us say,Oh, this is gonna be hard.
I don't want to do it.
The conversation is gonna suck.
He's gonna cry, you know, whatever.
I'm hurting his family.
I mean, yeah.
(28:51):
No, that's not theway to look at it.
I want you to take every taskand find the joy in that task.
Now, in some tasks, the only joyin the task is completing the task.
So an example might be, youknow, I don't know, I have to
sweep the floor and maybe there'sjust no joy in cleaning for you.
So some people get great joyfrom cleaning just because they
(29:12):
love to see the place clean.
But you can look at that task andsay, hey, the only joy in this
for me is completing the task.
And that's what I'mgoing to look at.
I can't wait to complete that taskto check something off my list.
Cause once you make lists andyou check things off, there's
great joy in checking things
off
Oh
yeah.
That physical action.
That is, it's a big deal.
It's a dopamine hit, right?
So, so here I got a fire bill.
(29:33):
And I like Bill and he's beenmy friend, but by the time
you get to letting someone go,usually it's because they're no
longer a match for your company.
And by the way, they might'vebeen a match three years ago.
They might've been phenomenal, butthey're no longer a match today.
And, um, and the fact is, isthey're not doing great work for
you and you're actually not beinggreat for them at this point.
(29:55):
It's cycled downward andit's not working right.
So here's the joy in that.
I know every time I've firedsomeone, every time I've had to
let someone go, sometimes it'slayoffs, it's whatever it is,
they are going to be better offbecause they're going to end up in
a better position with someone wholikes them more in a position that
works better for them and maybea company that has more money for
that project, whatever it is, right?
It's going to end up betterfor them and better for me or
(30:18):
else I would have kept them.
It's actually betterfor both people.
This is a good thing.
And when you look at All jobsas temporary, which people tend
not to do, but they need to.
And Reid Hoffman said this actually,so I'm stealing it from Reid.
Um, when you look at everyjob as a temporary place that
you go, you drop some goldennuggets, pick up some golden
nuggets, and then your time's up.
(30:39):
If you think that way from dayone, you know, you're only there
for a short period of time.
It could be a year or two orthree, if it's Silicon Valley.
On average, it'sthree or four years.
You don't, you know, that'sjust how the cycles go.
And then you're not shocked when theboss calls you in and says, well,
it's going to be a tough discussion.
You go, no, it isn't.
I've been planning forthis since day one.
I knew that my timehere was a limited time.
(31:01):
I've enjoyed thelimited time I've had.
I realized that today is the endingday of that and it's all good.
And now I get to go and do thesame thing in another company.
Drop some golden nuggets, pickup some different golden nuggets,
and my time there will end also.
It'll be three years, or five years,or two years, or whatever it is.
Um, so when you, when everybodylooks at it that way, there
(31:22):
is, this is a joyous occasion.
And I know people are goingto be laughing at me listening
to this, but the point of this
is
over here.
No,
it's,
yeah, he's crazy.
There's, the point of this is,You control every moment of your
day and how much joy it bringsyou every moment of the day.
And if you want to be the mostsuccessful you can be in whatever
(31:43):
that is, it could be monetarily,it could be just a title, it
could simply be your company,it could be with family, it
could be any, if you want to bethe most successful you can be.
Every moment of the day,you've got to find the joy in
that moment, the joy in thattask, the joy in, in being on
this podcast with you, right?
Every single thing.
And I have great joybeing on the podcast
with you.
Yeah.
(32:03):
Same.
I love having you here.
. Yeah.
So does that make sense?
So, so it is a mental exerciseand you have to, now that you tie
joy to success, you go, okay, ifI believe joy is absolutely drive
success and that cycle, you getsuccess, you get more joy, you get
more joy, you get more success.
And that cycle is tied together.
Then once you live that way.
It changes why you're doingeverything during the day, right?
(32:26):
So you look at everything with joy.
Hey, I found this great littlecable that brings me joy, right?
Every single thing you have to finda little modicum of joy and joy
moments all the way through the day.
Changes your life.
And I'm assuming through, and I,I could see how it could change.
It is just likeanything else negative.
You go down that negative spiral.
It is, at least, I believe youmight have the better answer.
(32:47):
Humans just aimed to.
Naturally go to negative.
Yeah, but so we're trainingourselves kind of an uphill
battle, but it's mental control,like you said, is it, that's
what this whole thing is.
No one else controls how you'regoing to look at this task.
So the task is to write a blog post.
I don't want to write ablog post about this thing.
I've written enough blog posts.
(33:07):
Well, that's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is, hey,I'm going to learn something new.
I may even use some new tools.
I'm going to edit it.
I'm going to try to beat my lastweek's speed of, you know, 12
minutes, whatever it is, right?
There's so many ways.
Look at this as joy and thencheck it off the list, right?
So that moment can bring you joyor it can bring you negative.
(33:29):
And people who are attheir job go, well.
You know, they're Eeyore.
Well, I got to do this task.
Okay.
Do you think they'reever going to make it?
What, whatever success means tothem, they're not going to have it.
Cause Eeyore doesn'tlead the company.
Eeyore doesn't go upto lead the group.
Eeyore doesn't lead anything.
(33:49):
Just sits there in thebasement going, well, I'm
going to complain today.
You know,
does spread though.
it's contagious.
you
contagious.
That's right.
So we want, I want youto rethink your life.
And say every moment I'mgoing to find the modicum
of joy in this moment.
And by the end of the day,I'm going to have 110 joyful
(34:10):
moments, tiny little ones,instead of 110 complaints.
And if I do that, I have abetter opportunity where my
mind is open for success.
My mind is open to seeother people's pain points
and how I might solve them.
My mind is open tolisten to other people's.
Concerns or challenges orheadaches or whatever it is, right?
My mind is open and I'm ableand willing to deal with all the
(34:34):
things that come at me becauseno matter what, I'm going to
look at everything with, youknow, those 110 points of
joy instead of 110 negatives.
Yes.
How are you tracking all of this?
Like, what's yourpersonal process here?
Yeah, I don't need to keeptrack of them anymore because
I, I, you know, I'm at apoint where in general I have.
Uh, one or zero complaints a day.
(34:55):
That's what I go for.
And, and look, it's easy forpeople to drag you into, you
know, it's sort of into that.
It's, it's, it's difficult for my,my, my wife, who is an amazing,
um, highly accomplished CEOherself, but, um, when, when we're
together and like something'sgone wrong, like we were on some
flights and the flights got.
Delayed by many hours and you hadto switch flights and then you got
(35:16):
put back in the back of the planeand sort of All these things happen
and and finally she's just angry atme because she goes why is it that
you can't see how terrible this is?
I don't know.
I got here.
Here's me.
I got an extra five hoursto work on my notebook.
This
is great This is fabulous.
This is the best thingthat's ever happened to me.
How dare you?
Yeah, I'm, I'm being a littlephysician, not that way, but,
(35:37):
but you know, the point is it canbe a little, for those who don't
understand the process and arenot trying to follow the process,
it can be a little nerve wrackingthat you're not wallowing in
the pain that they're wallowing.
I'll give you an example.
I recently spoke to avery large company, um,
the choice success cycle.
And, and one of the challengesthey were having is, um, is that
(35:58):
they had reorganized a lot of thegroups and all of these groups,
they didn't like the new groupsand some people got laid off and
they didn't like the new peoplethey were with and, and, and right.
And so everyone waswallowing in this negativity.
Well, I don't know why I got put inthis group and this really sucks.
And I know I'm, I'm notgoing to hit my numbers now.
And there's this company and ohmy God, you know, and the whole
(36:18):
thing was, everybody was at a zero.
Right.
And I came in andsaid, stop that crap.
Right?
If that's what you want to do,just get just leave, right?
I clearly this isn't foryou, but reorganizations
are part of corporations.
They're part of corporate history.
It always happens every fewyears for lots of reasons.
Okay, so what I want you to do isinstead of saying, but my buddies
are over there and I'm not partof that group, Here's a chance for
(36:41):
you to learn a whole new set ofpeople and a whole new set of skills
and go have a beer with differentpeople and learn their lives.
What a great opportunity for you toexpand your mind because you were
no longer expanding over there.
You knew that group.
Now you have to start overand learn all new people
and all new idiosyncrasiesand you all get to do this.
What a magical moment thiscompany has given you.
(37:02):
And a whole, I heard later that lotsof people took the joy success cycle
seriously and started living it.
And they changed the way theylooked at that reorg instead
of, Oh, this is terrible.
All my friends, they started tolook at it a different way and
say, wow, I'm going to find joyfulmoments all through this and realize
there's joy in the change, eventhough humans hate change, start to
(37:24):
enjoy change, start to love change.
can't stop it and things arechanging faster than ever and
with, with joy, I can imagine it.
I mean, not just imagining,but you've experienced, I'm
sure much more than most.
There's a chain event, you know,like it just, it's almost like these
forking
cycle.
That's
the cycle.
Joy, success, cycle.
(37:44):
You get some success.
And by the way, the success could beI completed the task, which brought
me joy, which then brought me moresuccess, which brought me joy.
You want to be, you're eitheron that cycle or you're on
the downward spiral, right?
The joy killers.
Do you really want to beon the joy killer cycle?
Do you want to be onthe joy success cycle?
I want to be on the joy successcycle because where's it lead?
To success.
Do that.
(38:05):
Whatever success is, again,it, It's not always I'm going
to be a billionaire, right?
It could be a lot of things.
it could be whatever you want,but and to kind of wrap this up,
you know, Kevin, I'm thinkingof, you said, stop playing
like that still stuck with me.
And I think so many peopleare in this play mode in
whatever part of their life.
If we're going to technologyand AI, it's probably studying.
(38:25):
It's learning.
It's reading.
It's watching a bunch ofYouTube videos and going
down the rabbit hole.
Great.
And what are you gonna do about it?
And it seems like that's, that'sa big takeaway is like, there's
a lot of people that are veryintellectual, you know, and
there's a lot of folks that arevery hyper motivated to, but if
you're stuck in this middle partof, uh, I've seen a meme going
(38:47):
around like midwits, essentiallythe, the folks that just, Have all
the information, the energy, butthey're not doing anything about
it, and they're just kind of stuck.
that's, that's right.
And, and, you know, Yoda sayingsand memes are, are, are the best
because Yoda was an alien of fewwords, but when it said them, I
don't know what, if it's a male orfemale, that thing, but whatever,
(39:08):
when it said them, it meant Ilike to quote Yoda, which is, do.
Not play,
right?
So do or don't play, right?
Uh, so it's all about doingsomething, not playing,
right?
Uh, so it's not do not play.
It's do, comma, not play,
do play.
(39:29):
That's, we're gonna endit right there, Kevin.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I love it, man.
This is so cool Well, tell uswhere folks should go follow you.
I know you have stuffeverywhere But, uh, you know,
home base for where theycan get the book eventually
Yeah.
Kevin's race.
com.
It's just my first name, last name.
com.
Uh, so easy to find myLinkedIn is on there.
A bunch of stuff in my keynotetalks, uh, is on there.
(39:52):
Some of the joy, successcycle stuff is on there.
When the book comes out,there'll be more about it there.
So, um, you canalways find me there.
Kevin's race.
com.
got to give you a shout outbecause like the, the Ted,
Ted talks and all that stuff.
I mean, you were 10 plus yearsago or something talking about AI
and all these things, essentiallywhat's happening right now.
I'm like, you are soahead of the curve.
(40:13):
I, it was 10 years ago.
I was, I, I, I gave, uh, uh,that was a TEDx talk actually.
I've done TED Talks and TEDxtalks, TEDx to Orange County,
and um, I think it was 2014and I gave that, and people are
going, what's he talking about?
He's crazy.
What, what?
That's our world.
I, I don't, it's AI thing.
But I had already been aroundit for enough years that I
could see where we were going.
(40:35):
You could see what washappening with neural nets.
Cause we got deepneural nets by 2012.
So we understood what might happen.
And in the end, you know, whenwe have transformers and LLMs and
all of that today, it is a result,as Sam Altman said, of, uh, of,
or it's a proof that neural netswork, deep neural nets work, deep
learning works, that's, that'sa proof that deep learning works
(40:56):
because I, we can now go outand learn a trillion phrases.
And build a, you know,a deep neural net.
Right.
And it works as deep as youwant, as big as you want.
I mean, you need 6 billion incompute power, but if you have
that, you can, you can buildthe world's most knowledgeable
thing in the English language.
Really fascinating.
man.
(41:16):
Yeah.
We need some nuclear power plants.
We need all theseother, you know, cooling
We're bringing them back.
We're bringing them back.
I look not, not to be political.
We should have never shut them down.
Right.
I mean, I mean, people talk aboutclimate change and this and that.
And what's interesting is so manypeople protested and especially
in the seventies and eightiesagainst nuclear power, because
they thought it was dangerous.
No, what that led to is more coalplants, which was far more dangerous
(41:39):
than nuclear power has ever been.
And we should have built, youknow, 500 nuclear power plants.
And we would never, we would nothave a climate change problem today.
But we met, we messed up,
we
did.
Hopefully that'll goback quicker than ever.
Uh, we'll see.
Yeah.
we're starting, we're
I'm excited.
Yeah.
Well, Kevin, I appreciate you.
We can keep going all day, Ifeel, but I'm going to go nerd
out with more of your keynotestoo, just to get more of you.
(42:00):
Oh, thank you.
Thank you.
Well, well, uh, thanks.
Thanks so much for having me.
Hopefully, uh, hopefully peoplelisten and share and get excited
about, uh, the joy, successcycle and AI and do not play.