Imteaz and Pete Roxburgh discuss the importance of developing meaningful relationships in personal and professional contexts in this podcast. Pete, a life coach, emphasizes the importance of genuinely investing in your clients and colleagues to achieve the best outcomes.
To build a meaningful relationship, one must share information and feedback. Pete stresses that this goes beyond simply sharing work-related information but also includes personal information that helps build trust and a deeper connection.
Imteaz shares that the friends he admires the most are willing to give honest feedback and help him improve. He emphasizes that flattery is not helpful and values quality advice over empty compliments.
Both Imteaz and Pete stress the importance of following through on commitments. Pete quotes Zig Ziglar: “You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.” Imteaz adds that committing to something and not following through is worse than not committing at all.
To Pete, the essence of a meaningful relationship is not necessarily friendship, but instead operating beyond a transactional level. He emphasizes finding meaning in life and focusing on the big picture. Stephen Covey’s advice to “start with the end in mind” resonates with Pete and Imteaz.
Ultimately, building a meaningful relationship takes work. Pete encourages people to reach out to him on his website, petecoach.com, to learn more about his approach to life coaching and building meaningful relationships.
Building a meaningful relationship takes trust, honesty, and follow-through. One can make deep and meaningful personal and professional connections by sharing information, providing honest feedback, and committing to follow through.
Connect with Pete Roxburgh on LinkedIn and visit his website to learn more about his work.
Imteaz: Hi, everyone, and welcome to Applied Intelligence. I’m Imti, as our major host.
Imteaz: Today, I have the pleasure of interviewing someone I’ve been working with for quite some time now, I think just over six months. His name is Pete Roxberg; he’s my coach. So
Imteaz: Pete is a personal development and startup coach, working in the field for many, many years. And today we’re gonna have a wonderful conversation about the importance f having a coach in your development. And… what they can unlock for you. So Pete, welcome to the show.
[Pete]: Well, thanks for having me. Great to see you again in Tiazans. Welcome everyone else.
Imteaz: So let’s get into who Pete is and how he got to being a coach. I think becoming a coach is an interesting journey given you don’t necessarily wake up or go to school thinking that you’re going to end up being a professional coach. How did you end up here?
[Pete]: You’re completely right. It is a journey because, you know, when we first met, I gave you the story. And everyone has their story, which is just really an extended elevator pitch. And I don’t know. Maybe we want to go a little bit more into the non-pretty fine version, the actual journey today. Sound good?
[Pete]: Okay, well, you know, you’d said to me previously, what if I broke it, my journey into five chunks, five chapters, if you like, which got me thinking because of course, there’s lots of ways to do it. Chapter one, two, three, four, five, for example. But I really looked at it and thought more about the emotional state that I was in.
[Pete]: It’s probably quite a nice way to look at your life. for anyone. Mine started with this kind of strange mix of anxiety and adventure. As a kid, I was a Peter Pan character. And yeah, I was living in a fantasy world a lot of the time, and I think maybe quite a few of us are. But that kind of swings and roundabouts because it made school very difficult at times. I was also very small. I was like the smallest kid in the go
[Pete]: class. And I was vegetarian in the like 70s and 80s, which was kind of a bit freaky at the time. And I didn’t like sports. It wasn’t the greatest time in school but got through it mostly by just selling things, hustling, surviving. And I think there’s probably a lot of people that have that of sentiment of surviving school. What about ourself?
Imteaz: To me, school, from a primary school point of view, I went to four different primary schools because my parents and I, you know, we moved around a lot in my younger years. And then, which, you know, meant that every, you know, so often, I would have to learn the skills of making new friends and working out how I was going to fit into the new social clique. In high school, however, I went to one high school.
Imteaz:Which you know, I had to work very hard to get into it was a government It was a selective school for boys, but it was a public school which had to do an entrance exam to get into that school I would say Equipped me in a lot of ways to Really learn how to learn and appreciate learning So, you know every kid goes through bullying, everything goes through social issues and whatnot.
Imteaz: ut overall, my high school experience was very positive in terms of forming who I am today. You have the challenges that everyone has, but the teachers that I had really understood what education was meant to be for.
Imteaz: Right. So my most influential teacher, it was in the 11th; she was my English teacher in the 11th and 12th grades.
Imteaz: And she would typically start the lesson by saying, okay,the first half of the lesson will focus on how you answer the questions in the HSC, so you actually do well and get the marks you need to get into the university course that you wanna get into.
Imteaz: The second half of the lesson will actually learn how to learn and how to critically think. And how to critically analyze the text, how to understand, you know, what a power play is when we’re studying like Shakespeare,et cetera.
Imteaz: Um, and that level of critical thinking is now what I do on a daily basis and has certainly set me apart from, you know, a lot of my peers in terms of critically analyzing situations or, you know, business opportunities, et cetera. So, you know, I loved my schooling time. And I think.
Imteaz: The fact that we don’t necessarily teach logic rhetoric anymore in the school curriculum.
Imteaz: And it’s all about answering tests and exams and route learning stuff and regurgitating stuff is not producing the level of. Level of problem-solving that we need to really maximize what the future entails, given all of the technology that’s coming.
[Pete]: I think you’re absolutely spot on because it’s that thing that in today’s world, probably two of the most important things, being able to communicate, in fact that’s always been the case, and being able to problem solve.
[Pete]: So actually, those are two skills that every kid should have.
[Pete]: Yeah. Okay. So chapter two, leave school. And in the UK it’s a little bit different to the US and other places so you can leave at kind of 15 16 years old. I left school,
[Pete]: I’ve gone off the rails, I’ve passed some exams, I failed English, which of course is a… I got
[Pete]: same as failing. Yeah, yeah, it’s a D which is the same as failing because only a C or above counted.
[Pete]: It’s a kind of shock, and we also relocated across the country as a family.
[Pete]: The family then imploded, and it was kind of a rough time, but for me, probably that whole era started by being marked with a lot of despair. I was in a very bad place for a few years then, and it’s kind of slowly… filtered out, but those early years, really bad because everything just seemed pointless, and I was just consumed by kind of darkness.
[Pete]: But kind of the very end of teens, maybe 20 years old or something, there was a little turning point, and that turning point was I was introduced to this kind of world, fantasy world if you like, but in this fantasy world were all these characters that were superheroes, and of course Zig Ziglar, Jim Rowan, Tony Robbins and all these characters were bigger than life, and they were saying you can just do whatever you want to do.
[Pete]: The choice is yours is you can choose to have mediocrity or you can choose to be anything and I was in a bad place, but these people spoke to me, resonated and that was a turning point, a slow turning point, not a rapid pivot, more of a kind of decade long shift.
[Pete]: But I just consumed everything that I could from those people because it was sensible, it was reasoned and it offered something else. It was the promised land and a way out of where my head was. That’s really chapter two.
Imteaz: I’m like, when people speak of, you know, turning points, I always try to understand what was that particular moment. What was the situation that first got you there?
Imteaz: I’ll give you an example. Like I’ve worked for the same company coming up to 15 years, and for the interview, I was actually running late, and I missed the turn onto the street. Um, with the interview was happening, and I don’t like being late.
Imteaz: And I had already gone through so many interviews, um, that I was like, ah, stuff that I’ll just go home. Uh, it’s a group interview anyway. They won’t miss me.
Imteaz: Um, and then the HR lady, uh, she gave me a call as I was driving off. I was like, you know, two, three minutes away. Um, she gave me a call, and she asked me, you know, where are you? And I’m like, uh, I missed the turn.
Imteaz: I’m just driving down Victoria Road. She’s like, oh, I know where you are. Just take a U-turn.
Imteaz: When you see the McDonald’s, take a left, and you’ll be at the office. So had she not called me on that day, I was going home, and I wouldn’t have had the job that I’ve had for the last 15 years. So.
[Pete]: Yeah, sometimes you get those tiny points that you can identify.
Imteaz: Yeah. So do you think there was like one, it doesn’t necessarily have to be one thing that inspired you to go down this path, but was there something that like just clicked when you discovered all of this content that really changed your mind?
[Pete]: Well, it’s funny because I can probably, probably because we know what our memory is like, especially when it’s a long time ago, but I can probably remember the moment.
[Pete]: And one of the things I did, which was probably quite,
[Pete]: I don’t know, rash at the time, was I got married when I was 20—divorced a couple of years later. Neither of us were ready for it. It was just like… But my father-in-law at the time, he gave me this tape. And you know the kind where you get the pencil in there to wind it up, that kind of tape, because of course, a lot of people. In fact, it’s one of those things. If you know what a pencil and a cassette are for, you’re old.
[Pete]: But he gave me this tape. I can’t remember who was on it. I think it could have been Zig
[Pete]: Ziglar or someone quite similar. So it was very motivational. And it was really about putting the work in, and you have to just keep at it and at it and at it. And you can have anything if you want. And that was probably that moment because it was just a completely different world. Putting it in the cassette player in the car, which
[Pete]: I think at the time was like about £150 for the escort. Yeah, probably is now. It’s probably worth
[Pete]: And so, yeah, and actually, through that journey, we have a couple of things.
[Pete]: So I then remember going to some conference in Brighton and seeing some of these speakers in the flesh and feeling the energy in the room.
[Pete]: And to me, it didn’t matter what people thought, because of course, a lot of people think that a lot of this stuff is like a cult.
[Pete]: But the thing is, It’s positive emotions and people feeling better, living better lives. And yes, sometimes they dream about things they might not get, but so do all the people going by the lottery tickets every week. So I’d rather be happy.
In a recent video transcript, Brian Davis, a busy father and full-time professional, chats with Imteaz about his experiences with generative AI and personalized learning. Davis explains that he is fascinated with the idea of having a tool to make life easier. He uses chat GPT, a generative AI tool, every day. He describes it as his new little assistant.
Davis explains that he initially started using chat GPT to understand better how it worked. He did not intend to incorporate it into the technology he was building. He wanted to take what he was already doing in his job or at home and improve it. For instance, if a task takes him two hours to complete, he wants to know if he can complete it within 10 minutes with chat GPT.
Over time, Davis found that personalized learning was the key to his success. He loves skill stacking, learning something new, and applying it to something else. For example, when his daughter struggled with chemistry, he used chat GPT to teach her the concepts she was working with. He found that it was a way to personalize her learning and help her understand the images in a way that was meaningful to her.
Davis also discusses the challenges of managing high-performing, difficult employees. He explains that he has had many experiences with these types of individuals in the past. He approaches them with a different mindset, recognizing their unique motivation and drive. He focuses on protecting their space to live in their creative genius and blocking requests that are coming in, so they can be hyper-focused on their work.
Ultimately, Davis believes that the future of productivity lies in personalized learning and AI. He explains, “Finding worthy problems or things you’re passionate about is key. It’s important to use the skills you’re learning and what you’re doing already, not to take away from the time you already have.”
Davis’s approach to productivity reminds us that we can use AI tools and personalized learning to make our lives easier and achieve our goals. By focusing on what we’re passionate about and learning new skills that we can apply to other areas of our lives, we can be more productive and efficient in our daily lives.
Imteaz: Hi everyone, welcome to Applied Intelligence. Today, I have a dear friend, Brian Davis, joining me. Brian’s currently the Director of Technology at LSU. He joins me from sunny Louisiana. I’ve actually only known Brian for a couple of days. We met last year when he was running StartupBus USA, which is something we share in common. I love for
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: startups, I love for competitions, I love for helping people. build solutions. So we’re gonna have a fascinating conversation. I’m really looking forward to it. Welcome to the show, Brian.
Brian Davis: Yeah, thank you, Imteaz. I’m super excited to be here. I definitely appreciate the invite.
Imteaz: So this is a question I love to ask. I typically ask this in interviews, so I’m going to put you on the spot.
Brian Davis: Okay.
Imteaz: What’s your story and how did you get to where you are? And to give you more context, the question I typically ask in an interview is, if you had to write an autobiography for yourself and it only had five chapters, what would the chapter titles of each one of those chapters be?
Brian Davis: Okay, yeah, that’s a great question. Let’s see. I think the chapter one would be achievement. So like I said, I’m from Louisiana, born and raised, a little city in North Louisiana, and there sports is a very huge thing. Everyone plays sports to pass the time, and it’s serious business there. I grew up as an athlete and I love competing. So I was involved in track and field and love running summer track. And with that, I got a chance to travel all over the country and meet some amazing people and do some pretty cool things. And at one point I was nationally ranked, believe it or not, in my event. And yeah, loved basketball and football and got a lot of awards and recognition. doing those kinds of things. And on an academic side as well, I was almost a straight-A student, got great grades, and wanted to be the best in whatever it is that I was involved in, and always had people pushing me along the way. And so, and had a lot of support for my family. The neighborhood that we grew up in wasn’t the greatest neighborhood in the world, and I was always the little… the nerdy skinny kid and my older brother, he was always pushing me to be tough. My dad was just always present and he was the one that kind of showed me the impact that your presence can have on someone. You don’t have to say a whole lot of words, but just being there meant a lot. And my mom was my biggest cheerleader. And she was the one that would tell me, I can do anything. She was always there for me and no matter where I was, it could have been a crowd of hundreds of people in a stadium somewhere. I can always hear her screaming for me over anyone else. And so she really helped develop in me this delusional optimism that I can do anything, which served me very well as a kid. And I would say coming into my senior year or so, Um, that, I don’t know if that optimism necessarily worn off that, that was always there, but I suddenly became more aware of where I was in the world and aware of how, how I fared against others. And for whatever reason, I, you know, I started comparing myself to, you know, a lot of different people and I noticed, um, a lot of the kids as we grew up in puberty hit and all of a sudden they’re 15 years old with a full goatee and like rippling muscles and that just wasn’t me. But still was able to compete but got in, started to get into my head a little bit and you know doubting myself and had a couple of run ins with different adults and coaches who you know would scream at you and almost belittle you a little bit. I didn’t really, that’s not really my style. I didn’t really resonate with that. And so. As I graduated high school, kind of left that achievement phase and I’ll say the second chapter would be pursuit. I found myself in the search of something. At the time I didn’t really necessarily know what it was. I had questions about faith and about God and I started wanting to know more. I found myself just being interested in and concerned about, you know, starting a family and what I even, you know, be good enough to, you know, to be a good dad or be a good husband and all those different things. And I also started on the academic side, started to figure out pretty quickly what it is that I wanted to do. And I started pursuing that. So I remember the very one of the very first, the first video game console we had was the old the old school. Nintendo and I remember playing Super Mario Brothers and I was like yeah that’s it I want to make video games and so I started on this quest to say okay well if you want to make video games like what do you have to study in order to do that so I figured out it was computer programming okay well I want to be a programmer because I want to make games and you know I got into to LSU and Um, programming was, was really hard for me. It, it wasn’t something that I, um, took to right away. Logic always came easy. Math came easy, but for some reason, the syntax of a language was, that was just a foreign concept to me. I didn’t understand that computers really weren’t as smart as I thought they were. Right. Like it will only do what you tell it to do and nothing else. And so I struggled quite a bit. And so I found myself. Um. I felt at least behind from a lot of other kids, right? So a lot of kids were in these computer science class at LSU and they’ve taken classes in their high schools and this was my first time ever doing anything like that. So it was a lot of, you know, trying to get up to speed and trying to prove to myself that I can do this. And so, yeah, so after college started my, Yeah, I got married. We got my wife and I got married right after school. No jobs. I wouldn’t recommend doing that. But we started our young family and I started my career right after that. And it was almost like I arrived. And so as I started going through my career, started learning and I would say maybe chapter three would probably be. revelation. And I say revelation in the sense that I started to realize how things really work. Like I started to realize what it meant to have a family and to lead a family. Finally I started to realize what it was like in the in the quote-unquote real world to be a professional developer. I started Um, realizing that, you know, I was a little bit more capable than, uh, than I thought I was. Um, I realized that I had a lot of insecurities. There were things about myself that I realized that I didn’t like and, um, that I wouldn’t dare admit. And, um, yeah. And just, just in general, there’s a lot of things that I started understanding. It was almost like when Dorothy and the Wizard of Oz and she peeks open that curtain and she realizes, you know, how things really are, that that’s kind of how I felt. Um. So yeah, I feel like I’m still at the tail end of Revelation. Like I feel like there’s still a lot of things that I’m realizing about myself and the world. And I’ll say the last two chapters are still unwritten. So we’ll see what those happen to look like.
Imteaz: Super cool. I like the chapter of Revelation and realizing insecurities that you have. And once you realize the insecurities you have, you also realize that the majority of humanity is in the same boat.
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: Everyone’s got insecurities. I’ve met the most confident, overconfident, crazy people that know how to speak to anybody in a room, but then you talk to them one to one. And then they tell you all the insecurities that you have. And you’re like, hang on, your external facade will say, is completely different to what I pictured
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: you to be. But then you realize everyone’s got their own demons. Everyone’s got things that they’re concerned and scared and worried about. At the end of the day, only human to be like that, right? So, you know, we have a common humanity. And sometimes I think the grass is always greener on the other side when you think, you know, that person has this.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: I don’t have that. But at the end of the day, it’s all puts and takes.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: You got to work with what you got
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and realize that the majority of us, specifically, if we’re fortunate to live in the West at this time, we have a pretty good make it, we’ve got to make do with all the opportunities that we’ve been given thus far.
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: I also liked how you broke down achievement versus pursuit and the importance of upbringing and the importance of family. And similar to you, I actually got married straight out of college
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: as well. And we started our family young and it’s tough.
Brian Davis: Mm.
Imteaz: And there’s a lot of growing up and a lot of maturing that you kind of have to do when you leave home. Will leave all of this stuff and there’s no book or no like… training manual that kind of prepares you for that
Brian Davis: Absolutely,
Imteaz: stuff.
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: You make so many mistakes.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: And if it doesn’t kill you, it makes you stronger. So
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: like, I remember one of my funniest memories is when I got my first place, I moved out of home when I was 20 years old,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and I didn’t know that you had to call the electricity company to get the power connected.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: So this was on a Friday afternoon in Melbourne. Melbourne is like a 12-hour drive away from Sydney, which is where I grew up. So about an hour flight. Anyway, so I get the keys to this place on a Friday afternoon and I check, I get into the apartment and I realize there’s no power. So I call the power company and they’re like, oh, we need two business days’ notice to
Brian Davis: Uh.
Imteaz: send somebody. We’ll see on Wednesday. So I went to the supermarket. I had to go buy some candles. Thankfully,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: there was gas in the place so I could cook some stuff.
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: But I had five days of cold showers and no electricity. And I was
Brian Davis: Oh yeah.
Imteaz: trying to do that. So it didn’t kill me. It was character-building.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: But it’s a funny memory. But it goes to show you like… nothing really prepares you for life, you kind of have to go through the things that you have to go through. And as long as you have that grit about you, you can kind of pursue and do anything you want to do.
Brian Davis: Absolutely. It’s one of those things too where, just like you said, like no one teaches you these things, right? Like you, and you have this, at least for me, like I just, I had this unrealistic understanding of the world and what it took to survive. And we just found out things as we went. And, you know, we dealt with different things. And just like you mentioned, simple things like… getting your electricity turned on. Like no one talks about that, right? And there’s a lot of things that we did, again, just mistakes that we made and growing up, you know, just as a young family that we just, it just happened on the fly. And to everyone else, it seemed like, at least to, you know, your parents and that generation, it’s like, oh yeah, it’s obvious. And the whole time I’m thinking, well, why didn’t you tell me these obvious things, right? So, but it was. It was interesting, but it was a challenge and a lot of fun learning as you went.
Imteaz: Um, one of the things I think about, and I’d love to get your perspective on this, um, is experience for kids. You have four kids,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: which is a huge congratulations. I don’t
Brian Davis: Ha
Imteaz: know how
Brian Davis: ha
Imteaz: you do it.
Brian Davis: ha!
Imteaz: And you look at someone with four kids. Let me tell you. Um, but one of the things I think about is, you know, with the way the world is changing, I have a 10-year-old and, um, you know, she’s got. versus the childhood I had, she’s got a lot more than what I had when I was 10 years old. But how do you prepare your kids for the future that is coming? How do you prepare your kids to obviously be lifelong learners, but how do you kind of teach them grit when they don’t didn’t necessarily or don’t have to struggle as hard as we did or maybe our parents did before us and our grandparents before us? They’re interesting. see how do you kind of discern or not teach but at least give the perspective to your kids that you know the rosy colored glasses that they may have or how everything is so easy now
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: what isn’t going to be the case when they’re on their own
Brian Davis: Yeah, that’s a great question. I feel like we are still figuring it out. So we’ve been, you know, being, we’ve been parents for 17 years now. I can’t believe it. My oldest daughter just had a birthday Sunday. And my wife and I, we talk about this all the time. Like we feel like in the beginning, we tried to give the girls a lot of what we didn’t have. And so, and then I think a lot of it too was, probably went overboard, right? Because we were subconsciously or maybe even consciously trying to undo some of the things that we experienced or protect them from some of the pitfalls that we fell into just growing up. And I feel like now we’re making a course correction to try to bring a little bit more balance there where we allow them to experience some. hurt and disappointment, you know, a little bit more because I feel like that’s very useful for growing up and like you said, building grit and helping them understand that life isn’t fair all the time and that’s okay. So some of it for us is, again, allowing them to fail, allowing them to make mistakes, you know, within reason. I talk to them a lot. We talk to them a lot about meeting. new people opening themselves up to the different cultures and so they can understand, at least here in the United States, I feel like we have this view of the world that’s very unrealistic. It’s our view of the world from the United States. It’s almost like the rest of the world is like the US, but that’s not the case. And so… trying to get them exposed to other people and other cultures that have a different worldview. And I think that helps a lot too. And one of the things that we always try to lean into with them is values of faith and just good family values in general. Like I feel like those things will never go out of style and they’ll help you no matter what age you’re in. you know, being kind to people and, you know, sharing and, um, genuinely having concern for other folks and, um, you know, that kind of thing. So we definitely try to lean into the basics, the world that’s, that’ll be here 10 years from now, it’s going to be, it’s already changing so fast and there’s no way for us to, it’s hard for us to predict what that’s going to look like. Um, so a lot of those core values, we definitely try to, um, hone in on and develop in them. Cause I just, I feel like that that’s going to serve them no matter what.
Imteaz: One of the things I I’m trying to install in my daughter is financial responsibility.
Brian Davis: Hmm.
Imteaz: She’s 10 years old but
Brian Davis: Oh, absolutely.
Imteaz: But like, you know, she’s used to Grandparents and you know extended families that Enormously spoils or anything that she wants right
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: so And I don’t want to be a no-dad like
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: no to everything so we got her um, it’s called busy kid and there’s lots of other versions of this
Brian Davis: Okay.
Imteaz: but It’s basically like a debit card. You deposit your, their pocket money in there.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: And then, you know, anytime we go out to shopping or for a coffee or whatever,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: you know, buy something it’s kind of like, okay, you’ve saved up your pocket money, use your money, right? Like you have a debit card, you can go, you can do it. You can buy whatever you want, manage your own money. It’s not my job.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: But that. Ever since we started doing that, she’s just become a bit more conscious of, you know, dollars and cents and the impact that has on her bank balance,
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: not just my bank balance. So, you know, I think we have a lot of these tech tools
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: out there to help people along or to help children along. And I think financial literacy specifically is not something that is well taught at school, if taught
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: at all, when they decide to do finance. So yeah, we’re trying to instill that as well.
Brian Davis: Yeah,
Imteaz: Anyway,
Brian Davis: that’s a great idea. Yeah.
Imteaz: let’s pivot to StartupBus. Tell me, let’s talk about StartupBus. What is StartupBus and how’d you get involved?
Brian Davis: Yeah, so Startup Bus is a usually an annual competition. And the best way I can describe it is it is our hackathon, our entrepreneurial bootcamp, a little bit of shark tank, and it all happens on a bus. And what happens is typically there are, there’s a selection process and. developers and UX designers and project managers or just general technologists and entrepreneurs, they apply to be a part of a competition where essentially what you’re tasked to do is come up with an idea and create a working prototype, working software in three days. And usually you are grouped together with complete strangers. And like last year’s competition, that’s the last time we had it in 2022, we had, I believe, five buses, different parts of the US, and there was a bus coming from Mexico. And folks came in from all over to join one of those buses. And what happens is teams are formed and you pitch for your idea to get selected and you try to form teams and then you… You have the next three days where you’re traveling across the US to the whole city and you’re literally that very little internet connection. And, you know, there’s so many challenges along the way. It’s hot, you’re hungry and all these kind of things. And you’re trying to get a product done. It’s the first six months or so. Think of, you know, building a startup. A lot of that is simulated on the bus. And then what happens after that, you get into your host sitting, you have two days for a competition where you’re pitching in front of other Startup Bus alum like yourself, or there may be VCs there who are interested in looking to fund the business, and then there’s a winner declared. And I tell you, for me at least, it was one of the best things I’ve ever done professionally and personally. But yeah, we’ll get into that, but I’ll stop right there.
Imteaz: No, for me, it’s obviously the competition. And I did it back in 2014
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: when I had been a career corporate person for six plus years and I thought I knew it all. And I did start up Boss in Australia, the first competition when it happened in Australia back in 2014. And then… It, you know, like in neuroplasticity, um, on neuroscience, they talk about rewiring your brain
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: in those three days. My brain was rewired completely
Brian Davis: Yeah. Yep.
Imteaz: because you learn that you can make decisions very fast
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and if you are put in a high pressure environment to do those decisions, to make decisions that actually matter,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: you’ll break. process all of this stuff.
Brian Davis: Yep.
Imteaz: And it’s not for everyone, not everyone can, you know, adrenaline for three days straight,
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: or four or five days straight, straight or two, three hours of sleep. But once you go through that process, you can effectively supercharge your decision making process
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: for anything and everything. So that’s part one. Part two, one of the… most fascinating things about this for me has been the community
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: around startup. Um, in the sense that, you know, most of the people that are involved are volunteers
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and they’re doing out of the kindness of their hearts. And you know, anytime I’ve rung up anyone from the community to help me with something, it’s always been yes. And this is what you should all. So, you know, from, it’s just, Firstly, they’re just crazy people to begin with.
Brian Davis: Yep.
Imteaz: Everybody who, you know, they go through the neuroplasticity rewiring of their brain, and most people are super kind and helpful. But then it’s also this amazing group of people that actually wanna make a change.
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: So it’s, yeah, and anybody who’s gone through this competition, and I highly recommend, anyone who’s done any form of technical work from a death point of view.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and involved in anything to do with digital or technology must go through this process, because if you don’t go through this process, you will be just another one of those, uh, just another developer, just
Brian Davis: Yep.
Imteaz: another UX designer, just another one of those people, um, that doesn’t necessarily understand how quickly and efficiently you can actually build product and actually solve problems. And then also be part of a really cool. community as well.
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: But tell me, oh sorry, go ahead.
Brian Davis: I wanted to say, just like your experience earlier, you’re talking, we’re very similar in that regard too. My past, my working career was all corporate America. It was 100% Fortune 500 companies. So I went on the bus in 2018 and a friend of mine, she got her way on the bus and she’s not technical at all. So a good friend of our family, Nodula Thompson, she’s awesome. She’s a great friend, she’s a serial entrepreneur. And she got on the bus and she got her invite and she told me about it. She said, hey Brian, I think this is gonna be great. And I was told I can invite somebody and here’s my invite, you should apply. I’m like, okay. So I look it up and I see everything they’re gonna be doing and you know, you probably gonna make apps and all this kind of stuff. And… business and a product in three days and immediately I was just like intimidated. I’m like, I don’t know if I can do anything like that. And I know I can build software, but I don’t know if I can do anything in three days. And I’ve never done anything outside of my company. Like I’ve never built a product that was public facing or anything like that. And to me, that’s a whole different animal. And so I get in and the folks that were doing the interviews, I let them know, look, I do know how to code. I don’t, at the time I knew nothing about React. I knew nothing about Angular. I knew nothing about those types of technologies. You know, can I still apply and I wanna try. So got on the bus and so long story short, I get on the bus, I get part of a team. One of the members of our team at the time was one of the principal engineers over at Tesla. And I’m just like, what in the world? Like, how do you find these people? And so, yeah, so I get on the bus, and there’s no way I’m going to learn. We chose Angular for our product, for our language, our framework. There’s no way I’m going to learn Angular in a couple of hours to be effective. So like, OK, how can I be effective with this particular competition? So I was like, well, again, I know I can serve, right? So I know enough about software development where I can help our engineers. Name was Harvey. I can help. RV, you know, talk through some things or get him what he needs. And, um, I can help our, the person that’s going to be doing our pitch. I can help them, um, perfect what they’re doing and, and all that kind of thing. I can be a runner, I can be a project manager, like all, all those things. And just like you said, Imteaz, I was, I was shocked at how quickly you can really build things. And because my. Again, going back even to school, when I was in computer science there, our programming language was C. And when you were, it was time to do an assignment at school, it was a blank blue screen and just white text. Like you just started from scratch and you just started cranking out code. But in my mind, I could not conceptualize how you can actually build a legitimate product from scratch. And I found out that, I mean, nobody’s really doing this from scratch, right? Like… I found out what Twilio was and how a lot of the messaging platforms back in the day, the underpinnings of that a lot of times was the Twilio technology. It was just repackaged and white labeled and sold somewhere else. I learned about all these different APIs and these frameworks were there and these different tricks of the trade. I had to suppress my corporate need to make sure that everything had to be perfect in a certain way before you can ship. And I understood that good enough is okay, you know, a lot of times. And it, I still, I was just blown away that at the end of it, we were able to make something, not it seemed like it worked, like it actually worked. And I was just, my mind was just blown. And my, and it’s like you say, like your brain was rewired into, into what’s possible and I came away with that, with a brand new confidence, it was. It wasn’t necessarily, I’ve never been like the greatest coder in the world. I’ve been pretty good. Um, but I came away with the confidence knowing that I may not, I can’t guarantee you that I’m going to be the best in the world or I’ll get this in a week. I do know that given the right amount of time, I can do anything. And so I started leaning, leaning into that, you know, a little bit more. Um, and. As a result, I’ve always wanted to do things on my own and have my own company and build products for clients. Really it was fear that kept me from doing that. After the startup bus, I told myself, because I always had people come up to me and they knew that I coded. They were always, hey, Brian, I have this app idea and could you help out? And they’re always declining. So I said, okay. The next time someone comes to me with an idea. and I think it’s interesting, I’m going to tell them yes. And I have no idea how I’m going to do it, but I know that I can figure it out. And so, yeah, so that’s what happened. So a couple of years later, someone approached me about an idea that they had and I said yes, and I’m actually finishing up that product right now. So, and I’ve never, maybe I would have done it, but maybe it would take me another 10 years to get ready to, or feel like I’m ready to do it, but. But yeah, Startup Bus really turbo charged that for me and gave me the confidence. Like saying, just rewired my brain to think a little bit differently on how to get things done.
Imteaz: Which is a great segue to the next question, which is about, you know, how do highly technical people such as yourself transition into leadership positions, right? Because it sounds like, you know, out of startup bus, it wasn’t just learning hacks or just learning how, you know, the internet is basically a giant pivot table with multiple API calls, just, you know, leveraging data from different sources. It’s also learning that, you know. solving problems is probably the thing that we get paid for, rather than just understand the technology. So, how have you made that transition and what advice would you give to highly technical people to become leaders within their space?
Brian Davis: Yeah, so I would say, so I’ve seen developers become leaders a couple of different ways. I’ll tell you the first way I’ve seen it’s, in my opinion, it’s a little unhealthy. I’ve seen developers as they progress in their career, because they’re really good at what they do, their leadership automatically assumes that the next role for them, the next level for them is leadership. that’s not necessarily the case. Because you’re a great developer, it does not mean that you are a great leader. There are two completely different skill sets. So I think that’s one tip for any leaders that are involved. Definitely consider a different approach when you’re looking for leadership in your dev groups. For those developers who are looking to become leaders. I think, especially in the dev space, I do think it’s critical for you to be excellent at what you do. One, you need to understand what your team is going through. Not that you need to tell them how to do it, but you need to be able to empathize with them. You need to be able to help them see some of the blind spots that maybe that they don’t know they have. So being excellent at what you do, I think is critical especially for these highly technical roles. And a lot of times, to be honest, the folks that are really good at their jobs in a technical standpoint, they a lot of times don’t respect leadership that don’t understand them, that can’t speak their language, right? So it’s kind of dual purpose there. And then the last thing I would say is, if you do want to become a leader and you are in that technical role, I think you have to lean into serving. service has to be paramount to what it is that you’re doing. For me, I had this idea of serving as whenever a problem came up or whenever my team was struggling with something, my idea of serving was to put on my Superman cape, jump in and solve the problem for them, right? And I was thinking that I was removing roadblocks for them. And once it was done, they could continue with their work. And I pat myself on the back, say, great job, leader, and kind of move on. And I remember my director at the time, his name is Mark. I still talk to Mark today. We talk about ideas and get his advice on different things. He told me, he said, hey, Brian, you are holding your team back. What do you mean, holding my team back? He said, yeah, you are robbing them the ability to learn. That really hit me because I never want to be the reason why someone isn’t progressing or someone isn’t getting better. He told me, he said, well, how did you get good at what you’re doing? How did you learn? There were problems that you had to solve and no one did them for you and you had to struggle a little bit and then that’s how you learned. He said that, could you do a better job? at what they’re doing? Probably. Would it be easier? You know, probably, because you know the system more than they do. That doesn’t mean that you’re smarter than they are. You have more domain knowledge. And your role is to set the parameters, make sure they don’t fall off the cliff, but allow them to make mistakes. And then you have to be comfortable with solutions that you may not necessarily 100% agree with. If it does the job, then it’s probably okay and let it go and kind of let them make their own path. So, but yeah, that was one of the things that I had to learn. And it wasn’t until I, and when he said that to Imteaz, I realized that I created this codependency that I never intended. And I found myself barely taking any PTO because I felt like my team needed me. Or if I did take PTO, I was constantly getting calls and. That was a sign to me that I wasn’t doing a great job of being a leader. Like I was creating, um, I was creating, I was creating dependents instead of autonomous developers who could make their own decisions and had the confidence to go out there and, you know, make mistakes and learn. And so that was, that was something that I had to, to learn, you know, early on.
Imteaz: That transition you make in your career from being like an individual contributor to like a team lead is a daunting one, especially if you’re one of those people that, I would say, you know, if you’re a perfectionist, but if you hold a very high standard
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: of your own work and you don’t see that being translated by the people that necessarily report to you,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: it’s very hard not to, you know, get your fingers into the weeds of like… you know, make sure that everything is perfect. I had to learn that myself. Like, you know, I was double, triple checking my team’s work all the time and,
Brian Davis: Mm.
Imteaz: you know, basically micromanaging everything. And yeah, they didn’t necessarily take responsibility because I was meddling in everything and then, you know, hunted their growth.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: And then I had to learn and I, you know, similar to yourself, I was overworking myself,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: not, you know, instead of. letting the team manage the work and me manage, you know, a strategy and,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and business objectives. I was working way too hard and not necessarily doing my job properly.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: And I was doing my team instead. So taking that setback, being okay with most things being at 80 to 90% and
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: not always at 100% is such a hard transition to make
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: when own up succeeding or achieving very high marks at school or very high quality of work as an individual contributor. And then you come to being a manager and you’re like, Oh, I have to be okay with 85% of that, even though, you know, he’s trying his best, he’s doing this thing, but not to my standard, but like, I can’t lose my life and lose my time
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: by, by perfecting other people’s work. So
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: it’s a hard transition. You got to do it.
Brian Davis: Yeah, absolutely. And again, it’s, I feel like too, it’s, it’s one of those things where we’re taught in school, one thing. And then again, you get into the real world and you have this revelation that just things don’t work that way. And like you said,
Imteaz: No.
Brian Davis: sometimes 80% or 85% is amazing. And, but you know, 80% in school is, is not. So like you’re, it’s,
Imteaz: Yeah.
Brian Davis: it’s weird how that, how that works. And Um, it’s, that’s almost, it’s almost like you go through the education process and then you have to wake yourself up and, and teach yourself and you have to learn a, like a brand new way of doing things. And that, that was definitely interesting for me.
Imteaz: Have you ever had to manage, it’s called an abhorrent genius, somebody who’s like ultra smart at what they do, but they’re a complete a-hole.
Brian Davis: Yes.
Imteaz: Tell me about that because I’m sure everyone goes through that at some point in their career. I’ll share your story too. But tell me about what it’s like managing a high performing. Crazy person.
Brian Davis: Yeah, it’s, so what I found with, and I know exactly what you’re just saying, with those, I feel like for me the approach is a lot different. If I have someone who is high performing and they may be a little rough around the edges personality wise, my thing with them is I do want to understand what their motivation is and why they do what they do. what it is that they’re doing. A lot of times it’s, they enjoy being on top, if that makes sense. Like they enjoy being the 0.01% of technologists out there that, that are involved in what they’re doing. And that, that’s definitely admirable for them. A lot of times it’s, honestly, it’s protecting them. And it’s some, it’s not anything that you necessarily that you say, but it’s trying your best to make sure that they have the space to live in their creative genius. That’s what I mean by protecting. It’s blocking the requests that are coming in and trying to make sure that they can be heads down and they can be hyper-focused on what it is that they’re doing. Sometimes it’s just sitting and letting them vent about frustrations that they have because… A lot of people don’t understand their world and they don’t understand what it’s like to be them and they don’t understand the level of genius that they’re putting into their work. And so sometimes it’s acknowledging, like truly acknowledging the work that they’re doing. It’s getting involved and, hey, show me, I want to see this code, like show me what it is that you’re doing so that you can really understand and appreciate that. And they need to know. that you know that they’re amazing, right? So that’s what I found with dealing with those. And, you know, so yeah, I’ll let you go ahead and tell your story.
Imteaz: Yeah, similar kind of thing. I had the pleasure of working with someone like that who, from an output point of view, was delivering the work of 10 people hands down.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: Right? The next 10 people that were working would not provide the same level of output as this person, but I could not put this person in a room with anyone else. Right? So
Brian Davis: Yep.
Imteaz: I could manage him and protect him
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: and shield him. and kind of do the interpersonal work on his behalf.
Brian Davis: Right.
Imteaz: But putting him in an audience, he would just literally tell everyone else that they were stupid and they had no idea what they were doing. And his idea was the best idea. Unfortunately, every time he opened his mouth, it was the best idea.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: But it’s just the interpersonal skills weren’t there. And there’s only so much coaching, feedback, blah that you can give to someone. For some of these people, it’s just a little bit too much, right? So if you do get that blessing of managing someone, I call it a blessing because
Brian Davis: Absolutely,
Imteaz: I actually like working
Brian Davis: absolutely.
Imteaz: with people at that caliber. But yeah, you just gotta completely change your management style and work with them and work for them
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: in some capacity. rather than just try and make them fit into your generic like middle manager or, you know, individual contributor type archetype from an employee. But yeah, super interesting
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: and super fun.
Brian Davis: Empty is quick question. Have you, have you ever, I’m not sure if you’re into sports or basketball, have you ever seen the Netflix series, The Last Dance?
Imteaz: Yeah, I’ve watched, I want to say I’ve watched the first half of the series, but yes, tell me.
Brian Davis: Okay, so second, towards the second half of that series, they get into Dennis Rodman. And if you’re familiar with Dennis Rodman, he’s this super eclectic character and he has this wild lifestyle, but just excellent at rebounding, defense, and one of the people that truly gives you everything that he has. And the coach of the Chicago Bulls, you know, Phil Jackson, he talked about that. And I remember when he came in, you know, Michael Jordan was, you know, to me, the greatest player that has ever lived. He was against, you know, getting Robin on board and, you know, he was just, you know, so different and the way Phil Jackson managed him, you know, cared for him was completely different than everyone else. Like he gave him his space and he let him be himself. And. long story short, once Dennis realized that Coach Jackson was going to let him be himself, he gave everything that he had to the team to win. And if he wasn’t there, there’s no way they would have won those championships. So yeah, to me, those types of developers, technologists, they remind me a lot of Dennis Rodman. They are excellent at what they do. It might be different than the rest of the team. but extremely valuable and you definitely have to let them be themselves. And like you said, don’t, don’t try to change them.
Imteaz: Very cool. So talking about hyper productive, hyper smart people, what’s your kind of process for learning new things and applying them in what you do?
Brian Davis: Yeah. So, yeah, so for me, I have the tendency of if I’m trying to learn something new, I want to consume as much content as I can in the beginning. And I, my friends are probably tired of hearing me say this, but I always talk about learning Spanish. I took, started in 2020 learning Spanish and I’ve always had this goal to be able to speak. And one of those things, you know, you putting the attention to it. And at the time, I just, I consumed as much content as I could. There’s so much out there and there’s the good, the bad, and there’s things that don’t work and things that work for you, but I wanna consume it all. From that, I usually can start recognizing the patterns of what truth looks like. So there’s one school of thought that says that, Oh, you don’t ever need to pick up a grammar book and you just need to immerse yourself in the language. And there’s others that say, no, before you say a word, you need to know all of the grammatical structures and the truth is somewhere in between that. And so usually I start recognizing what the patterns really are and I kind of hyper focus on that. And then I start trying to understand what resonates with me. So what ways of learning are really aligned with my energy and so I can make it seem like it’s effortless. And so for me, so once I get that and kind of realize the patterns there, after that I am setting a goal. I am time boxing myself. I wanna make sure I’m hyper specific once I feel like I’ve found the content. For me, I found this platform, it’s called baseline.com. You can get on and talk to native speakers and you can have, it’s all one-on-one sessions and you can either do classes of grammar or you can have conversations. And for me, I didn’t realize the thing that I needed was the conversational, you know, part. So for me, I needed a little bit of structure. So I signed up for classes. I time-boxed myself based on the budget that I had. I was like, all right, I’m going to give. I have two months to get this done. So what do I need to do? And then I’m researching if I have two months and my goal is to be able to have a 30 minute conversation with a native speaker, how like, how much time do I need to put into this in order to get this to work? And so then I figured out I needed two hours a day. And so after that, it was eliminating everything else in my life other than my family and my job, you know, business. and really putting the time in to do that. And so anyway, I did that six weeks later, I was able to accomplish my goal and I was able to have a 30 minute conversation with someone completely in Spanish. It was the weirdest thing in the world because it was, of course, you know it’s possible. There are people that speak all kinds of languages, but it’s because you’re not doing it, it’s like, man, I wonder what, is this possible for me? What is it going to be like for me? So actually living that was, was fantastic. And so, um, so once I got out of that, usually when I’m out of that time box, that hyper-focused period of time, I usually like to set, you know, micro habits that I can sustain, you know, for, um, you know, for forever. Right. So now for me, it’s consuming 30 minutes of Spanish, you know, every day. And, and I’m constantly listening to podcasts or learning different things. And so now. I just do most of it in Spanish. And so that way I can continue the things that I like doing and continue learning things. But at the same time, I’m continuing my Spanish as well. So anytime I get a chance to have a conversation with somebody, I usually raise my hand to do that. Cause I just, I just, I love it. So, but yeah, that’s
Imteaz: That’s
Brian Davis: a little
Imteaz: amazing.
Brian Davis: bit how I learned.
Imteaz: No, but you know, the question, a lot of people that I come into interact with, especially from corporate and when they have like startup aspirations and ideas and they’re like, oh, it’s too hard.
Brian Davis: Mmm.
Imteaz: I can’t do it or blah, blah. And I’m like, how much do you really want it?
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: Right. And you know, what you’ve kind of just demonstrated is you really wanted to learn Spanish
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: and you really wanted to get it done. And you did.
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: So a lot of the time people would say that they want to get fifth,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: they want weight, they want to do this, they want to do that, but they’re not focused. They just say things, because it’s the right thing to say rather than dedicating the time and energy to achieving those goals. Incredible,
Brian Davis: Yep, absolutely.
Imteaz: very cool. So this leads me to… you know, the, the raging topic of our times right now, which is generative AI, and all the craziness that’s surrounding generative AI. How are you looking at gen AI? And, you know, what are some of the applications that you’re thinking about in terms of your day to day now?
Brian Davis: Yeah, so I am fascinated with the idea of having a tool to just make life easier. Um, whether it’s work, whether it’s at home, I’ve been so fascinated empty. It’s with, uh, with talk about like chat GPT. I use it just about every single day. Like I think of it as my new little assistant. I tell my people, yeah, it’s my new best friend. And there’s so many different applications out there. Like honestly, it’s, sometimes it’s overwhelming the possibilities. And so for me, at least when I have so many different options in my mind, it can definitely just like freeze you. And so I started out using it just because I wanted to understand It had nothing to do with building systems or building products or incorporating it into the technology that I was building or anything like that initially. Initially it was how can I take what I’m already doing either in my job or at home and make it better? So for instance, if it takes me two hours to do a task and I can do it within 10 minutes with Chad GPT, then yeah, let’s do that and let me figure out how to how to use it for that. Quick story, my oldest daughter, she was a junior last year. She started taking chemistry. Throughout her entire career, she’s been a AB student and she has made good grades in school pretty easily for her. One day I was working and kind of finishing up, she came home, she’s like, hey, dad, you know, I gotta tell you something. She was like, what? I got a D in chemistry. Okay, got a D in chemistry. So again, that’s odd. She’s made A’s and B’s for forever. So I’m asking a bunch of questions, trying to understand what is this that she’s not getting. And so she seems like, at least when we’re talking, she seems like she has a good understanding of concepts in general and things like that. And I’m like, okay. And I started digging into a little bit more of what her process was for studying. And I found out that she did not know how to study. So what she was doing with What she would do with all her classes was the day before, she just kind of review everything. It’s like, all right, close the book up, roll in the class and make an A on a test. So I was like, well, you can’t really do that with chemistry, right? Like you have to like study and that kind of thing. Anyway, she was on like a spring break and we had like a week. I said, look, this is what we’ll do. We’ll take this next week. I’ll show you how to study and why we wanna do it that way. And I’m gonna show you how to use chat GPT. I know y’all. keep hearing me talk about this and you’re probably tired of hearing me talk about it, but you’re going to learn. So start up an account and let’s get going. So I opened it up and I was like, all right, chat GPT, you are an expert in high school chemistry and I need you to teach me about XYZ topic, whatever she was learning. And it kind of broke it down for her. She was like, okay, well, that’s pretty cool. I was like, all right. So now chat GPT. I need you to create for me a three question quiz. I’m gonna answer the questions. Tell me that I’m right or wrong in the character and personality of, and then I named this character from My Hero Academia. It’s an anime that she likes. And it did, and she got a big kick out of it. And she took my computers, okay. She started asking questions and, you know, kind of based on some of the things that she was learning. And over the next week, she… started studying alongside of chat GPT asking it to break down concepts for Explain things different ways and she did that over the next set like month or so and then Every test that she had there after she made a she made an a on every test on every quiz And she finished the semester She had a final on her an a on our final exam and she finished the class would it be a couple of points away from It was to her, it was mind blowing. To me, it was mind blowing. And so for me, finding worthy problems or like things that you’re passionate about, like I’m passionate about my kids. So how can I use this to help them out? And so I was already a believer anyway, but finding something that was important to me and really using that there. It motivated me and opened my mind up to other possibilities about things. And so now I’m looking for different ways to incorporate it in other areas of my personal life and then also with work as well.
Imteaz: That’s amazing. Like in terms of personalized learning, um, you know, each kid, each person learns very, very differently. And, um, you know, we don’t have enough teachers in this world to give one-on-one service to
Brian Davis: Mm hmm.
Imteaz: each and every student we have. Right.
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: So having this as a supplemental aid in terms of the learning journey
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: is insanely powerful. All
Brian Davis: Absolutely.
Imteaz: right. Like this. personalizing down to, you know, what are your gaps,
Brian Davis: Mm-hmm.
Imteaz: right? Which is a very efficient way of learning any topic, I guess. Very
Brian Davis: Yeah.
Imteaz: cool. Okay, so on a personal front, Brian, what are like some productivity hacks that you use in your life to make your life easier? As a busy dad and as a busy professional, I’m sure you’ve got many.
Brian Davis: Yeah, so kind of go back to my previous example. I love skill stacking. So usually if I’m learning something, it’s not something that I’m gonna use. It’s a one-off thing. It’s something that I’m gonna apply later on to something else that I’m learning. Like for instance, before my daughter came to me about her issue with chemistry, I was already learning about Chad GPT and understanding how it worked and understanding more about prompt engineering. And, and for me, it’s a way to apply that to other things in my, in my life. Like for instance, I told you, you know, learning Spanish and I want to keep that up though, the skill that I learned with learning Spanish, I use that same skill now for other things, I’m consuming Spanish content to, to learn other things. And so. For me, it’s important because like you mentioned, my time is compressed. I don’t have a ton of time. I have a large family and a full-time job and an app that I’m building. And so those are the things that I like to do. So if I can find a way to use the skills that I’m learning and what I’m doing already, if I can find a way to not take away from. the time that I have already. Those are the kind of things that I’m that I usually kind of look to do and that’s what helps me to you know stay productive and also to stay available to my to my family and work and things like that.
Imteaz: Cool. Brian, it’s been an absolute pleasure chatting to you today. How can people reach out to you? They wanna learn more about you and all the crazy things that you get up to.
Brian Davis: Yeah, so I’m not on TikTok and Instagram a whole lot. So probably the best way to get in contact with me is through LinkedIn. So just look for Brian Davis on LinkedIn. You will see a nice AI-generated picture of me smiling big and bright. I’m definitely not hard to find.
Imteaz: Again, it was a pleasure chatting to you today, Brian. Thank you so much and we’ll speak again soon.
Brian Davis: Thank you so much, Emtis. I appreciate it.
In a recent podcast, Imteaz speaks with Kaustav Bhattacharya, an AI and data science leader with over 20 years of experience, about the potential for generative AI to assist with and accelerate learning, particularly for neurodiverse populations. Kaustav emphasizes the importance of keeping up with the rapid pace of AI and data science change and the need for lifelong learning.
One of the challenges with generative AI is the potential for bias in training data sets. Kaustav acknowledges this issue and emphasizes the need for caution. However, he also believes that generative AI has significant potential to assist with learning, particularly for neurodiverse populations. For example, using platforms like ChatGPT to complete homework and assignments can accelerate education and research.
Kaustav also emphasizes the importance of cultural nuance in personalized experiences, particularly in areas like healthcare, where the impact of bias can be significant. He recommends the book “The Culture Map” by Erin Meyer, which provides a deep appreciation of global cultures and can be a helpful tool in creating culturally nuanced, less biased AI algorithms in the future.
The conversation also touches on personalized consumer experiences based on their data profiles. Kaustav emphasizes the need to consider cultural nuance when building customized experiences, particularly in areas like healthcare.
Throughout the podcast, Kaustav emphasizes the importance of lifelong learning and the need to keep up with the rapid pace of AI and data science change. He recommends keeping an open mind, staying curious, reaching out to experts, and reading widely.
In conclusion, the potential for generative AI to assist with learning, particularly for neurodiverse populations, is significant. However, the issue of bias in training data sets must be carefully considered and addressed. Cultural nuance is also an essential factor to consider when building personalized experiences. As Kaustav emphasizes, staying curious and learning is essential to keep up with the rapid pace of AI and data science change.
Imteaz: Hi everyone, welcome to Applied Intelligence. I’m Imtiaz Ahmed, your host. On Applied Intelligence, we go through some of my contacts and friends in terms of the artificial intelligence in the tech industry, and we learn from them and see all the things that they have to bring to your development and growth. So today, on my first episode actually, I have a dear friend, Kostav Bhattacharya. Kostav’s currently the CTO at Invica, part of the Havas Group. And I’ve had the pleasure of previously working with Kostab previously in my career back at Racket, and it’s wonderful to have him today. So welcome Kostab.
Kaustav: Thanks, Imteaz, it’s wonderful to be here. Thanks for inviting me to your inaugural episode.
Imteaz: Yeah, so, you know, we’re gonna learn as we go. This is the first time I’m actually hosting a podcast I’ve actually been on quite a few podcasts myself. I’ve never actually hosted one before so be easy on me anything else
Kaustav: No worries, let’s go with the flow.
Imteaz: Very cool. So in terms of getting to know you and for the audience to get to know who you are, what’s your story and how did you kind of get to where you are today?
Kaustav: Sure, so if you cast your mind back to the early 80s and a seven-year-old child sitting in front of a very early 8-bit microcomputer called the BBC Micro, that’s how I started my life in the career I’m in today. The real story is, back when I was seven… An uncle was coming to visit my family in the UK, here in London where I’m based. And that uncle was about to join his master’s programme in computer science. And coincidentally, the week that he was arriving in the UK, we invited him to stay with us for two weeks before he moved up to his university here, get acclimatised to the lovely British weather. He was coming from India to the UK so it was probably quite a shock for his system with the weather over here. Coincidentally in that first week he was with us my dad decided to buy me my first computer and it was one of these early 8-bit micros where you switch it on and it goes beep and a blank screen appears with a cursor flashing and that’s it. You kind of got to flick through the manual and figure it out. So I knew nothing about this stuff, but my uncle happened to be here. He’d never heard of a BBC microcomputer before, but he flicked through the manual. Within a couple of days, he figured out how to program in a language called BBC Basic, and he actually programmed Space Invaders for me in a couple of days. And you know what? That blew me away. And ultimately for me, that uncle was my role model when I was seven. and it set my entire future career from the age of seven onwards. It inspired me to get into software development. It led me down the path of launching in my early teenage years an online, well it wasn’t even online, it was a magazine, it was a computer magazine, an enthusiast magazine that we launched on We used to have these things called 3.5-inch floppy disks that you’d stick into your computer and you’d store and save data to and transfer between desktops and laptops. And I created this magazine.
Imteaz: Just on three and a half inch floppy disk. My daughter thought I 3D printed the save icon when I showed her a floppy disk. No context of what physical storage is anymore.
Kaustav: Exactly. So, you know, it led me to launching that magazine on floppy disk format, and then later on, it became an online website in the early days of the web, and so on and so forth. And it led me into my first career out of university in software development. And so, you know, for me, it’s so important to have role models early on in your career. and that’s the kind of thing I like to do with my kids as well. I encourage with my friends and my family if they have young children to really just set them up for life with really strong role models because it worked for me and hopefully it works for others. I think you know once I got into my career I followed quite a traditional path in software development. Although my background is in artificial intelligence and computer science academically back back in the late 90s, early 2000s, the AI scene wasn’t really anywhere. And so I went into web dev in the good old days in the wild west of the web and loved it. Went onto mobile development, continued the web development and progressed in that trajectory. And I think at some point along that road, I felt like I was reaching a technical glass ceiling in… in the type of work that I was doing and the seniority and the change that I could affect. And so that led me to look more broadly around how do I become a more rounded technologist. And that encouraged me to pursue training and softer skills, MBA like training and learn about things like corporate finance, about change management, about team motivation, team building. and all of those things that actually make up a much more holistic whole person and not just be a really good software developer. And for me that was learning a toolbox, you know, various tricks in the toolbox that can help me drive a conversation or drive a strong negotiation and convince a client that they should be going down a certain path, learning the art of presentation and standing on stage and having a conversation, the kind of conversation that we’re having right now. right now. And so you know that was a pivotal point in my career. And I guess the two other areas that are really important to me is as a technologist it’s so important to continue to learn. You know lifelong learning has been a mantra for me and will continue to be till the day I retire and probably beyond. And you know without learning and staying at the forefront and not just reading about it, but actually being a user of it, learning it and figuring out how it works. If I didn’t do that, I couldn’t be honest with myself and I couldn’t command the respect of the teams that I manage as well. And that sort of leads me to the final point about where I’ve got to in my career, which is the whole notion of the art of the possible and not getting bogged down in dogma. I’m a very big advocate of testing and learning. just because something has been done in a certain way for years or decades doesn’t necessarily mean you have to continue doing it that way. I know there’s the old phrase, don’t fix it if it ain’t broke, but there’s so much new technology coming on board every single month, every single year, every single week now. We’ve seen that happening with generative AI that I think is really important to continue to be experimental and figure out the art of the possible on a continual basis.
Imteaz: Very, very cool. Going back to the beginning of your story, I started my journey with a 386. I’m a little bit younger than you, Constance. I remember my dad at the time in Australia dumping $3,000 on a 386 back in the day, and I was just obsessed with it, right? Like, learning the basic prompts of just printing stuff, Word docs, et cetera. What was MS, no, it was called Word Perfect at the time, I think. It just takes you back to what computers used to be and what they are now. And then even in terms of how I found myself working in the e-commerce, digital marketing, and tech space now, it’s all happened because of happenstance and circumstance and being at the right place at the right time more than being technically qualified to do all of those things. So, you know, coming back to your point on lifelong learning. The ability to unlearn right now, I think is so pivotal and important because just because you’ve always done something in a particular way doesn’t mean that you have to continue that way. Like on your point about if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Yeah, lots of things work right now, but it’s not necessarily the most efficient way to do things anymore. And it’s not necessarily. the fastest way to do things anymore. So, especially with generative AI, especially when it comes to things like creative production, content production, any business process that has any form of static process attached to it. Even if you have a profitable business model now, it is an opportunity to… re-evaluate all of this stuff and see what you really want to focus on more than anything else. Which is a great segue to my first question to you, which is, what are the pivotal moments that you think in the last three to five years that have enabled generative AI to get where it is today?
Kaustav: Yeah, gosh, where do I start with this? It’s such an amazingly fast-moving area. I think the first thing to say is that I think, especially in the last year and a bit, the availability of generative AI tools in a democratized way has really changed the equation. Before this era, you had to have specialist knowledge. In fact, hell, you had to have a PhD in AI to figure out a lot of this stuff. And companies were paying crazy, silly money to hire these specialists who could help them figure out how to move forward with AI in general, and more recently with generative AI. But with the advent of platforms like StableDiffusion, Dali, Mid Journey, ChatGPT, a lot of this technology has been brought into the public domain through interfaces that are dead simple and easy for anybody and everybody to understand and use. So if you’re an artist or a part of an art collective and you wanted to use Dali or Mid Journey to generate AI-based imagery, you can do it literally through a Discord prompt or some other kind of interface and start to figure out the nuances of how these platforms work by adjusting your prompting. and getting different outputs and so on and learning the subtle art of prompt engineering as we call it today. So I think that’s been a really amazing enabler to get, I don’t know whether I’d call it the masses yet, but certainly a greater degree of the public mindset kind of focus towards the usage of these tools and what they can empower. I think the other area is kind of similar to this, is alongside the democratization of generative AI where anybody could use it, for developers as well, the software engineers who have been working in this domain for years, again, you needed a lot of specialist knowledge to make sense out of the software and build product and solutions with it. But now we’re starting to see The next level of abstraction where developers with non-specific generative AI experience. So take your typical web developer or full stack developer who knows front end really well or who knows back end software server side development really well. A lot of these people are now able to create tangible solutions out of generative AI libraries and modules. that they can stitch together and really hyper-accelerate their development. And in fact, using things like large language models, they’re now able to really accelerate and empower themselves to create solutions based on the back off of generative AI. I think, you know, those are two of the key areas that have really transformed the space in the last couple of years.
Imteaz: Let’s just dig deeper a little bit on developers specifically using generative AI. Can you give the audience a bit of background in terms of things like copilot and the efficiency that it’s unlocking for developers in terms of building out stuff much faster and having something to aid them to do that?
Kaustav: Yeah, so let’s talk about Copilot. And I think there’s a couple of other really exciting areas as well, other than that. But starting off with Copilot, so Copilot’s been quite revolutionary in the way developers are able to accelerate their path to completing a project or starting a project. Now, most developers use a integrated development environment or an IDE, which is their software, it’s the interface write code in. And many of these IDE’s have had the ability to complete a single line of code based upon what you’re typing. And that’s nothing particularly new. It’s been around for a while. But what Copilot has really allowed developers to do is not only complete a single line but actually complete entire blocks of code literally within seconds. And so using the training set that Copilot is feeding off of, it’s been fed with millions and millions of examples of similar code that other developers have done, as this has been sourced from various different places on the internet. And using this knowledge and training, the algorithm is able to figure out that maybe you’re trying to write a block of code that would validate the content of a form. and therefore not only give you the regular expression to check whether the email is in the right format but actually write the code for that entire form from the name to the email address to the address to the telephone number, etc., and just output that block of code for you. And then more broadly, as you start to build up a larger file of code or multiple files of code, Copilot can start to look across the interconnections and the association between code blocks and start to suggest ways of tying it together. I mean I’ve been playing around with it for a couple of weeks and I’ve really found it amazingly useful in my workflow and I’ve been using it as a way to get my own team excited about Copilot and starting to experiment and using it. And yes, there are some potential challenges around the ethics of how it’s been trained and are you potentially ripping off somebody else’s work, and whether it’s accurate or always right. I think all of that needs to be taken into account. And my advice to the developers I work with is don’t blindly take the output as production-ready code. use it as an accelerator to get you from 0 to 20% quickly, and then use your own knowledge and experience to properly analyze the code and tweak it as and when necessary. Never ever take generated suggested code from copilots or any type of code completion software, literally. I think the other area outside of copilot, that’s super interesting, is some of the emerging space, literally within the last couple of months, where libraries are coming out and orchestration platforms are coming out that are allowing software developers, not necessarily AI software developers, but just generalist software developers, to chain together different processes that trigger something that triggers another thing that triggers the final part of the journey in an autonomous way. So a really good example of that is a rapidly growing library called Langchain. We’ve been using Langchain where I work recently over the last couple of months to great effect and we can do some really amazing stuff now. Perhaps I can share one example of a project that we’re working on.
Imteaz: Yeah, let’s go.
Kaustav: We were trying to figure out… So, the industry has been talking about chatbots now for what seems like over a decade. And chatbots have been, to a greater or lesser extent, semi-successful, but quite often quite miserably bad. You often create a lot more frustration than good out of most chatbots. There’s a few exceptions to that. And… What we’re really looking at is not chat bots, but chat UX, so to speak. Whether it’s a bot interaction on WhatsApp or on a website, or whether it’s an FAQ or a knowledge base that you’re querying or a simple search, a free tech search, how could we make that better? And we started with our own knowledge base. So at Inviqa, we have our career progression framework. that’s publicly published as a URL. Anybody in the world can see how we do it. Privately within our sort of virtual firewall, we also have our developer tools and ways of working and processes. That’s kind of unique to us in the way we do things. And so we keep that within our private GitHub repository. And so I started thinking, right, wouldn’t it be amazing if a new starter who joined Invica could come along and after their onboarding, just go to a search page and just literally type in anything they want about career progression or the tools that we use or the processes that we use. So for example, as a rookie software developer, six months out of university, you’ve just joined Invica, you’re a couple of months into your role. and you’re loving it and now you’re starting to wonder, yeah so in my first 90 days my boss has set me some goals and objectives so how do I really double down on progressing my career and learning what I need to learn, asking the questions I need to ask, meeting the people I need to meet in order to progress and get that promotion next year. Imagine if you could type We’ve actually managed to do that. And what we’ve done is right now, because our career progression framework is public information, there’s nothing private or proprietary about it. We’ve trained OpenAI’s, well, we haven’t actually trained OpenAI. We’ve pointed and we’ve constrained OpenAI’s large language model on our career progression ladder. And we’ve discovered a couple of things which is really interesting. Firstly, one of the… challenges in the industry is what we call hallucination. Quite often these large language models will just make stuff up if it doesn’t know what the actual answer is. We’ve figured out a way of actually getting the LLM to say I don’t know as the answer if it doesn’t know. So as an example, you could ask the Q&A chatbot that we’ve created how do I progress from a junior developer to a senior developer. and it will give you a really clear answer. But then the next question you could ask is, how do I make pizza? The answer literally will be, I don’t know, because that’s got nothing to do with career progression, and it’s got nothing to do with our tools and our processes. Now, OpenAI’s large language model, ChatGPT, does know the answer to how do you make pizza, but we’ve figured out a way of constraining its scope to the subject matter that we’re focusing it on. So we’re starting to apply this proof of concept that we’ve built on multiple different scenarios for things like employee enablement, increasing the enjoyment and engagement of employees within a company, or applying it to potentially some of our clients’ data and figuring out how to help clients use large language models to sift through massive amounts of data and do useful things with it. So it might be figuring out financial projections for your company or analyzing your press releases and providing an interface for the for the press media to extract the right type of information about your company or your services or your products. And that’s a difficult thing because I think one of the things that companies are really worried about right now is privacy. And I think privacy is not a solved problem. And there are various solutions emerging. So having private large language models within your firewall. So there is a platform called GPT4ALL. And we’re building POCs with GPT4ALL right now. And it’s great because you’re literally running a large language model within the virtual firewall of your company. that it’s more secure than sending your private data and proprietary data up to the big God mind in the cloud. So it’s early days and it has issues and problems. It’s not as sophisticated as the larger large language models. It’s also quite resource intensive. So one of our developers had it up and running on his laptop and hey, guess what? It took nearly 30 seconds to get an answer to a question. I’m not surprised. Most of these large language models are running on huge server farms up in the cloud. So there’s a few problems to crack there, but the fact that you can do this even is pretty amazing.
Imteaz: And I think over time, this will improve. Like just coming back to the chatbots, you know, when a company has a customer service chatbot and that chatbot takes anything more than three seconds to respond, I get upset. I’m like, you’re a chatbot. Like you should be, you know, they try and pretend that, you know, it’s actually writing something by having the dot, dot, dots. But then when it takes too long, and then the handoff to a physical human takes even longer. you know, from a customer experience point of view, that’s not ideal. So if we can have specific LLMs for specific use cases that work instantaneously as, you know, current consumers want everything instantly, that’s gonna be an amazing customer experience. But also, you know, from an internal point of view, having like a career coach or having very specific use cases sitting inside of your own firewall. that answers those specific questions for internal use cases so quickly. That’s insane. Right.
Kaustav: Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, chat UX, as I like to call it, rather than chat bot, is a large part of the solution, which is, as you were saying, you know, some of the times we’re trying to simulate a real-life human interaction and those dots are bouncing up and down to give an impression that somebody is responding from the other end. And then when you do get the answer, you’re like, oh, it’s a bot. But I think when you look at the human-like qualities of the… structure of the English sentence that’s being returned by these large language models, they are damn good, right, in most cases. And I think that builds a greater level of trust, potentially, with the end user. I think, you know, ultimately, when I think back to, what was it, 2005 or 2006 when Amazon entered the sort of the cloud marketplace and launched AWS, and I was a super early adopter of AWS. I remember spinning up EC2 clusters in like 2006 or 2007. And you know back in those days most companies were like, oh holy shit we’re not going to put our stuff into the public cloud. You know like that’s never going to happen. And some industries stayed with that notion for a long long time. So financial services for example and other highly regulated areas and they had very good reasons for that. But now fast forward to 2023 and I would say 80 to 90 percent, even more probably, have most of the infrastructure in the public cloud and where necessary in virtual private clouds. So a bit like cloud hosting and the mind shift that happened with cloud hosting, I think we’ll see probably a similar thing playing out with generative AI. And we still got to figure this out, right? Legislation around the world under different jurisdictions are still being figured out. So it’s not just legislation but is something that’s a fast-moving space.
Imteaz: Very cool. I’ve got two questions and let’s see which one’s the better one to go with first. One is, for a non-technical or non-developer business professional, what’s the best way to get started in generative AI? What’s the best way to learn the proper or what’s the best way to get started in terms of what are the best prompts to use for specific use cases? And then the second question is more around the education space. and the impact that it’s going to have or is already having on primary, secondary, and further education fields, right? Like what is, how do we ensure kids and students learn properly and learn the how and not just the, learn the what and the how and learn that critical thinking that is so important, you know, for future careers, rather than just, you know, learn how to prompt the… properly in copy-paste answers. So, you know, I think those two questions are kind of related in terms of, if you’re in your teens right now at school, what do you do in this space? Versus if you’re, you know, well established in your career, how do you kind of have a reset and think about how do I apply all of this stuff to my day-to-day?
Kaustav: Yeah, for sure. I think from a sort of non-technical business perspective, there’s a lot of ways you could learn. I’ll just share with you what I’ve been observing and what I’ve been doing at the company I’m working for right now. And I think there’s no substitute from doing, from playing. And I think going back to what I said originally at the top of our conversation, A lot of the generative AI tools are so democratized, so easy to access. Some of them are still free. Some of them you need to put a credit card behind. But ultimately, anybody, literally anybody could start up a premium chat GPT account and start experimenting with prompt engineering and using it and figuring it out. And in fact, as a prime example of that, some of our internal departments are now putting it to good use. So in terms of our marketing department and in terms of our outreach program, we are using various forms of generative AI to do research for us, for example, to go and research a client or a topic. So for a client, for example, we have now automated the process of researching the three, the top three burning things that our potential target vertical industries might be worried about today or problems they’re trying to solve and then automate the association between those three topic areas to the people and the stakeholders that are concerned with those things and then extrapolate the specific name of the person and the contact details through That’s a thing that we’re doing right now with generative AI, and it’s incredibly powerful for non-technical business focused people to be able to do something like that. The other thing is, there’s a lot of really great learning material coming out from various leading institutions now. Whilst on the surface, some of them might sound a bit scary to non-technical people. I would really encourage people from like say, project management, client services, other type of departments, you know, product people to go and look at some of this really valuable material. One really great example of that is what Andrew Ung is doing now with Deep Learning, his company called Deep Learning. You can go to the website that he’s running called deeplearning.ai and there is a series of short courses that he’s launched around how to do prompt engineering really well. once you’ve mastered that, how do you start creating product using prompt engineering and beyond into various different subject areas. And Andrew’s courses I’ve personally found really accessible and whilst they are somewhat technical in nature, in fact some of the courses are very technical in nature, some of the earlier courses around prompt engineering and how do you create products and services out of it, you as a non-technical person, as a business could get a lot out of that. In fact, that’s what spurred a lot of our more business-focused departments to start experimenting and get savvy and more comfortable with this technology. So, yeah.
Imteaz: I think when you speak about Andrew Ng, this weekend I did exactly what you just said. I had a look over his deep learning courses, the introductory ones at least, and yeah, very accessible for a non-technical person to get started in this space.
Kaustav: Yeah, this is true. And there’s undoubtedly many, many more areas that you could draw inspiration from. But getting to your other question around the use of generative AI in education, I think, personally, this is a really passionate subject of mine. I’m a father of two young children. One is a teenager, one is a pre-teen, and they are both very aware of generative AI and platforms like ChatGPT. Their school is even more aware of it to the point that they’ve banned all access. And I believe if they were to even type in the URL, it just shuts the browser down. And I don’t think that’s unique to my children’s school. I think a lot of schools are doing that to first figure out themselves, the implication of this kind of technology and what it means. and how it could potentially be harnessed. And personally, I feel that platforms like ChatGPT that are used by, are already being used by children, teenagers, or even younger to complete homework and assignments is a real boon, just like it is for a software development expert, like a software engineer. It is a way to accelerate what you learn anyway in school, which is how to do research properly, how to cite the source of your research so that you’re not blatantly plagiarising. And I don’t see a problem with doing preliminary early-stage research to try and find an answer to an assignment question. If the student is taught that this is just a starter for 10, it’s a way to get you to an answer quicker, but then after you’ve got the answer, you still need to refer back to what you know and the subject matter that you’re particularly focusing on and then build around the answer. You can’t just copy and paste and by the way, you can’t you haven’t been able to just copy and paste anyway since education was a thing right? You
Imteaz: Yeah.
Kaustav: know if you’re writing your university thesis You’ll be failed if you just blatantly cut and paste from anywhere years and decades before chat GPT even existed. You need proper methodology to go and learn and research and store your notes and process and use that information to deploy your knowledge to the answer to the question that’s being asked. either an exam or an essay or a paper or a research piece, whatever it might be. So I think this is where schools are grasping with how chat GPT in particular and other similar technologies are already starting to affect education and we’ve all seen those memes going around on the internet where some parent or teacher has taken picture of an essay where it says, I’m sorry I’m only a large language model and I don’t have an opinion about this and the kid has literally copied
Imteaz: Yes. No, but like, I think back to my schooling, you know, when I was in primary school, in Carter was just, you know, basically starting out and before on Carter, we’d have to literally reference books, right. And then, you know, later on in high school Wikipedia launches and the teachers are like, Oh, don’t reference Wikipedia, because it’s all made up stuff. And now everyone looks at Wikipedia as one of the first things, what did they do at research, right? So I think it’s the natural evolution of information becoming way more accessible, way more targeted, way more nuanced to the specific use case that you’re looking for. It’s a matter of as educators, as people teaching other people, how do you leverage these tools appropriately and still learn to critically think about whatever problem you’re trying to solve. or whichever area that you’re specializing in, because ultimately the machines will only do what you tell them to do. Yes, they’re getting smart enough to kind of resolve and solve problems for themselves, but ultimately we need to take our own responsibility for our own learning. And I think that’s the biggest thing that we can teach to children, people, et cetera, in general, because otherwise, you know, if we rely on machines to do everything, they don’t necessarily have all of the interests that we want to maintain as humans.
Kaustav: I think the other area that’s super interesting is in the area of neurodiversity and education. There is such a broad spectrum whether you have dyslexia or dyspraxia or other form of neurodiversity. I think there’s huge potential for generative AI technology to really enable people with very diverse ways of thinking and learning to actually get over some of the blockers that they have in their learning. So, you know, using chat GPT, for example, to ask for an explanation in an alternative way from the perspective of a different character or person or job role or function or whatever it might be. And I think that’s a potential area of research that needs to be done to see how this can be really assistive to a neurodiverse population of students, for example.
Imteaz: building on that I went to Turkey recently and in one of the old Ottoman schools they’re called madrasas they had a statement on the wall that said here no bird will be taught how to swim and no fish will be taught how to fly so you know taking on your point about neurodiversity I think using generative AI within the education space to create bespoke learning agendas for people that have difficulties or very specific learning needs, you know, with constrained resources from a teacher point of view and the number of, you know, teachers to students. Using generative AI to customize learning plans for people that don’t have, you know, all the cognitive ability that their cohort might have would be an amazing use. of unlocking potential of people that don’t necessarily have
Kaustav: Special.
Imteaz: Or don’t necessarily get the amount of attention that they need from their teachers as well.
Kaustav: Yeah, totally agree. The potential is huge. There’s a lot of research to do.
Imteaz: Yeah, and I saw a TED talk by Sal Khan as well where he’s building, I can’t remember the name of it, but basically an AI tutor tailored towards your kids as well through Khan Academy. I think it’s called Khan Amigo. But similarly, you know, every child, every person has a different learning experience and journey. And I think we should leverage AI to kind of build that customized journey rather than just one size fits all, which is very expensive to do, but not anymore.
Kaustav: Yeah. Totally.
Imteaz: Okay, to tie all of this together. And one question that I love asking my friends and asking people, in general, is, you know, what do they read that really inspires them and motivates them from a book point of view? And specifically, what type of books or what book, in general, do you gift to your friends? And yeah, tell me.
Kaustav: Yeah, well I could talk about this for hours but I won’t. I’ll give you maybe one or two examples. So the first book that comes to mind and I very rarely read an entire book in one setting but I read this book in one setting because it captured me so much and I happened to be on an 11-hour flight which also helped in reading that entire book in one setting
Imteaz: Yeah.
Kaustav: But truly it was super interesting. So the book is called The Culture Map, decoding how people think, lead and get things done across cultures, by an author called Erin Mayer. I don’t know if you’ve heard of that book, but I found it fascinating. It’s a relatively recent book, I think it came out in 2016 roughly, and I read it I think back in 2018. And I just found it so inspirational. It helped me open my eyes to the amazing diversity. that culture is and the mindsets of people from different cultures and the way they think or don’t think, the way that words and body language come across the divide of different cultures and it inspired me and encouraged me to read the entire book in one setting because literally every page, every chapter I was reading, I was learning something new and I was having… aha moments and I was scribbling and writing down notes in the margins and folding the corners of the pages where I felt that I could use the knowledge from that book in my day-to-day work or even day-to-day life and I refer back to that book constantly even to this day, you know, five or six years later having read the book. I find that a fascinating book so I would highly recommend that to anybody and that’s got nothing much in particular to do with AI per se. But in a in a tangential way, it kind of does, because it shows that cultures are so diverse around the world. And the way a lot of the generative AI technology today is developing, and some of the precursor to generative AI has been developing over the years, has been steeped in a lot of bias in terms of the training data set. the people who have created it and their backgrounds. And even to this day, I read recently, we saw sort of 10 years back how certain image recognition algorithms couldn’t distinguish the difference between gorillas and people of a certain skin tone and background. And so they put a filter, a hard filter to stop Google Photos or Apple’s equivalent to tag those kind of pictures. Fast forward 10 years, according to a recent article that I read in the FT, they still haven’t solved that problem and some of those manual hard filters are still in place because they haven’t managed to weed out what is perhaps the unconscious bias that’s built into these algorithms. from that book’s perspective, getting a real deep appreciation of global cultures is so important and one of the many factors that goes into creating more culturally nuanced, less biased AI algorithms in the future. Yeah, so that’s one of the books that comes to mind. The other books that I’ve found inspirational recently are more to do, again actually surprisingly, with culture. memoirs of an author called Satnam Sanghera. He is a British journalist and author and has recently published a book called Empire Land and Empire Land is about the modern-day lasting effects of the British Empire on British society and before he released that book he published his own memoirs about his family and dealing with schizophrenia in his family and the typical story of a Punjabi family coming over from the Punjab to the UK and trying to deal with all of the nuances of society, of foreign land, racism and then on top of that dealing with schizophrenia and the family and so on. It was a fascinating read. And the other book I’m looking forward to by the same author, Satnam Sanghera, is I think imminently about to come out and again it’s around the theme of the effect of empire on the world and in particular British society but from the perspective of a child. There’s lots of literature out there that’s adult-friendly that talks about the effect of the British Empire or other empires through history. on current day culture, but there are very few books that are aimed at children and that’s a huge area that is often missed out of education completely, at least here in the UK, I can’t speak of any other country, but you know kids here learn about World War II, but they really, really learn about the immense sacrifices that African nations and Asian nations and India and other countries the Second World War effort. And there are a myriad other things I could talk about related to that. So those are some of the books that I’m fascinated by and really interested with recently.
Imteaz: Coming back to your point on the culture map and the impact and influence that it could have on generative AI, I think when I look into my crystal wall in the future, there’s an opportunity for creating highly personalized experiences for each and every consumer based on the data that they share back to big tech, right? So whether that’s… My Apple health data, my email data from Google, all of my business-related stuff from Microsoft, my health tracking stuff with Fitbit, my home, smart home stuff with Nest, etc. All of this builds an enormously rich data profile. and my travel history through Star Alliance and OneWorld and all of this stuff, right? It builds an incredibly rich profile of who I am as a person based on all of the data signals that I’ve left throughout all of these experiences. In terms of connecting all of those dots and personalizing marketing communications, personalizing government interactions that I have with government agencies, personalizing healthcare interactions that I have with the pharmacy that I go to or the doctor that I go to. How do you see all of that piecing together? And being
Kaustav: the
Imteaz: hyper-personalized based on my culture and the data that I’ve decided to share with said companies.
Kaustav: Yeah, I think it’s such an amazing question that, and you could write an entire documentary about that question in itself, but I think one of the watch-outs I have is when you look at some of the recent things that have come out in the news over the last 10 years, take medicine, for example, and the bias towards using male subjects as your primary subject to research. and the effect that had on, for example, pain control using analgesics or other types of pain control. Recent research in the last few years has shown actually that the painkillers that we have used over the counter or through prescription from your doctor actually work in very, very different ways on the male body and the female body and for decades and decades. hardly any research was done on pain control in female body. And I think that’s one example of inherent bias that’s built into data sets. Now take the medical example even further. So things like fitness data, we both come from a cultural background where diabetes, for example, is prevalent in some Asian cultures. And… it would be interesting to see how fitness data is used in a much more culturally nuanced way so that if the product has been predominantly created by an American team in Silicon Valley by certain people from a certain class and background and earning, cultural background, skin colour, religion and so on, are they creating those products with a more worldly view? and a more nuanced view on a diverse data set to train these solutions on. Because if they’re not, then we’ll just continue to perpetuate these unconscious biases and problems. So I think that’s where culture is such an important facet of the greater whole of these solutions that we’re talking about right now.
Imteaz: I saw a funny TikTok of a guy who was summarizing 2023 nutrition tips from TikTok. And he was basically going through different people giving different advice. So it started from being, you should be keto to you should be vegan to you should be, you should do intermittent fasting. And then, and he was basically trying each one of them. and towards the end of it, all he could literally eat was ice. So I think the nuance of, you know, what might work for a certain person based on their genetics, based on their cultural upbringing, based on the foods that they’ve eaten their entire life, could be, you know, further influenced by, you know, the data that’s available for them. So for example, you know, I personally think one of the reasons, and I’m sure there’s empirical data to prove what I’m going to say, but I’m sure that gluten as a thing being introduced to the subcontinent was more recent over the last 100 or so years through the British colonization. I think that’s something that wasn’t necessarily in the subcontinental diet prior to 100 years ago. And I think the overconsumption of gluten and sugar has probably prompted the… diabetes epidemic that’s happening across the subcontinent and people from the subcontinent that have gone on to live in Western countries right now. So I personally am trying to deal with my I have diabetes, young-onset diabetes. I’m trying to deal with that through trying to stay away from number one gluten as well as sugar. But if I followed all of the advice that comes from doctors… slash TikTok slash Google, then it would be more around, just control your sugar intake and don’t necessarily worry about everything else. But I found eating rice doesn’t impact my blood sugar as much as eating bread does at the same caloric intake as well.
Kaustav: Right.
Imteaz: So, having the advice tailored to cultural nuance using AI or using doctors that know what they’re doing and have that nuance available to them is super cool. I think as it becomes easier, it’s going to be better for health outcomes globally.
Kaustav: I totally agree. I think there’s a great potential with this technology to actually advise and direct people in the right direction rather than just blindly following memes or social media. And obviously, there’s no substitution to talking to a true expert, your physician or your general practitioner or a specialist around health matters. But the reality is, we all like to self-prescribe and self-diagnose. And that’s nothing new that’s been happening for decades. But the challenge that that poses is being magnified tenfold by the advent of things like generative AI and adjacent technologies that are seemingly turning us all into medical experts or experts in whatever field we care to be in. So yeah, I think that the potential is there. It needs to, you know, it’s multiple layers. of regulation, legislation, getting the biases out of the system as much as we can. And it’s about education, it’s about empowering people to know how to use these tools properly for the right purpose. And that’s very easy for us to sit here and debate it, but I’m sure it’s one hell of a hard problem to solve that will take many, many years to get right.
Imteaz: Very cool. Karstaf, this has been a wonderful chat. Before we wrap up, is there anything else you wanna share in terms of your story?
Kaustav: Um. Oh no, I wasn’t prepared for that question. Um, yeah, I mean, I guess… I guess the key thing is keep learning. It’s always stood me in good stead. And like I said before, I’m a lifelong learner and we all learn in different ways. But I think the key important thing is never stop learning. No matter what, no matter what profession you’re in, no matter what you do, whether it’s professional or it’s a physical job or it’s a knowledge economy job. whatever it may be that you’re doing as your career, maybe you’re running your own company and you’re an entrepreneur, never stop learning because the day you stop learning is the day that you get out-competed by the nearest person next to you who is learning when you’re not. And for me, that’s been a mantra all throughout my career.
Imteaz: super cool, and make the time to learn. Especially when people are so busy, when you prioritize the doing over learning all the time and you don’t take that time for yourself, it’s very hard to keep ahead.
Kaustav: Yep, for sure.
Imteaz: Kaustav
Imteaz: How can people reach out to you if they wanna learn more about you or learn more about AI, et cetera?
Kaustav: Yeah, for sure. So hit me up on LinkedIn, cost of Bhattacharya. And I’ll be happy to respond to people there. Or ping me on Twitter. Yes, I still do use Twitter. My Twitter ID is at Jupiter Orbit, and I’ll be happy to have an open or a DM conversation on there. Either way, yeah, reach out to me. I’d be happy to continue the conversation.
Imteaz: Super cool. So all of your book recommendations we’ll put in the show notes as well. Thank you so much for sharing your time, your knowledge, your experience with us today. And I look forward to catching up one day again when you’re over here in the US or I’m over in the UK.
Kaustav: Amazing MTLs, great catching up, and thanks for having me on your show. Speak soon
Imteaz joins the CPG Scoop from sunny Sydney and discusses his journey to his current role as Director of Performance Marketing at Reckitt. Imteaz gained broad experience covering sales, eCommerce, DTC, retail media, and more in 12 different roles over 14 years. He expands on how success follows when brands focus on things of higher order value, how celebrating failure is crucial in keeping pace with Accelerated Change, and what excites him most about eCommerce in 2023.
The world of technology is constantly evolving and advancing, and one of the most exciting developments in recent years has been the emergence of natural language processing (NLP) technology. NLP allows computers to understand and generate human language, making it a powerful tool for many applications.
One of the most promising examples of NLP technology is ChatGPT. ChatGPT uses advanced algorithms to understand and respond to human language in a natural and human-like way. This makes it a valuable tool for businesses, allowing them to automate customer service and provide quick and accurate answers to common questions.
ChatGPT can also be used in chatbots, improving the user experience and making interactions more natural and engaging. Virtual assistants can provide a more human-like conversational experience, making it easier for people to communicate with machines.
The potential uses for ChatGPT are endless, and as the technology continues to improve, we can expect to see even more exciting developments in the future. In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at ChatGPT and how it’s set to revolutionize the way we interact with machines.
What is ChatGPT?
At its core, ChatGPT is a significant language model trained by OpenAI. It uses advanced algorithms to understand and generate human language, making it a powerful tool for various applications. With ChatGPT, businesses can automate customer service, providing quick and accurate answers to common questions and reducing the workload on their human employees.
In addition, ChatGPT can be used in chatbots to improve the user experience and make interactions more natural and engaging. It can also be used in virtual assistants, providing a more human-like conversational experience. The potential uses for ChatGPT are endless, and as the technology continues to improve, we can expect to see even more exciting developments in the future.
How does ChatGPT work?
At a high level, ChatGPT uses advanced algorithms to understand and generate human language. It does this by analyzing large amounts of text data and learning the patterns and structures of human language. This allows it to understand and respond to human input in a natural and human-like way.
To use ChatGPT, you simply provide it with a prompt, and it will generate a response. For example, if you provide the prompt “What is the weather like today?” ChatGPT will generate a response like “It’s sunny and warm outside today.”
One of the critical features of ChatGPT is its ability to generate human-like responses. Unlike other language models, which often produce nonsensical or unrelated responses, ChatGPT can generate relevant and coherent responses. This is thanks to its advanced algorithms, which can understand the context and intent of the prompt and generate a response that is appropriate and natural.
What are the potential uses for ChatGPT? Some of the most promising applications include:
Automating customer service: ChatGPT can automate customer service, providing quick and accurate answers to common questions and reducing the workload on human employees. This allows businesses to provide faster and more efficient customer support, improving the overall customer experience.
Improving chatbots: ChatGPT can be used in chatbots to improve the user experience and make interactions more natural and engaging. By using ChatGPT, chatbots can understand and respond to user inputs in a more human-like way, making the overall experience more enjoyable for users.
Enhancing virtual assistants: ChatGPT can provide more human-like conversations with virtual assistants.
Had the pleasure of answering the below questions from the CPG Guys, full podcast link below.
1) Imteaz, would you walk us through your career progression at Reckitt from territory sales to your role today in performance marketing and highlight some of the pivotal points where you saw transformation starting to accelerate in the omnichannel world? 2) You mentioned that you were an early pioneer in the area of eCommerce, starting back in Australia 8 years ago. You probably have some strong opinions on how consumer goods organizations need to prepare themselves for this digital transformation. What are some of the key enablers you think companies should be leveraging to successfully accelerate this transformation? 3) On the CPG Guys, we have often said the DTC is a non-negotiable imperative fore scaled consumer brands. What are your thoughts on this and what were the capabilities that you needed to have in place to execute a successful DTC strategy? 4) How did you set about establishing digital marketing & workflow automation for DTC? And how did you go about recruiting talent for the BU? Was it in-house, outside, agency? What are the building blocks here? 5) In your new role in omnichannel performance marketing you seek to drive holistic success for infant nutrition. How do you align measurement principles in brick & mortar vs. eCommerce? What are your core operating principles in this respect? 6) Retail Media has become a considerable component of the marketing mix for consumer goods companies looking to win search. Is this a centralized activity at Reckitt or do the trade teams lead this charge? What are the guiding principles you use is investing against retail media? 7) 1st party data can enable a deeper relationship with your consumers. How does 1P data play into your performance marketing efforts at Reckitt and are you sourcing it from beyond your DTC channel? 8) Are there any emerging trends in digital & eCommerce beyond what we have discussed today that are of particular interest to you and that you recommend our audience follow? What intrigues you about them?
