EP 403 - AI is being sold as a miracle productivity tool​, but is it actually killing our ability to think?

We revisit our conversation with AI expert, author​ and speaker​ David Birss who explores the hidden dangers of generative AI - from outsourcing imagination to the slow erosion of human originality.

We explore the myth of AI productivity​, unpacking why most companies are implementing AI the wrong way, why “adequacy” is replacing excellence, and how the obsession with productivity is leading to burnout rather than breakthroughs.

David explains his Sensible AI Manifesto, showing why businesses must use AI to augment skills, not automate talent.

From ChatGPT in the workplace to the risk of Gen Z losing brain power, this episode covers the biggest questions around AI:

• Is generative AI replacing excellence with adequacy?
• How can AI increase output without destroying originality?
• What are the real risks of AI for business, education, and society?
• Could AI be weaponised - and are governments already falling behind?

Essential listening​ if you’re searching for the truth about AI in business, creativity, and the future of work.

*For Apple Podcast chapters, access them from the menu in the bottom right corner of your player*

Spotify Video Chapters:

00:00 BWB with David Birss

00:43 Meet David - AI Expert and Innovator

01:41 The Sensible AI Manifesto: Origins and Purpose

03:24 AI in Business: Misconceptions and Realities

04:16 The Impact of AI on Productivity and Workload

10:17 The Future of AI: Risks and Ethical Considerations

17:29 AI in Warfare and Global Security

25:41 Training and Education: The UK vs. The US

34:10 The Importance of Effective AI Prompting

37:30 David's Multifaceted Career: Music, Comedy, and AI

43:11 Spotting Opportunities in Technology

44:03 Embracing AI and Art

44:47 Developing Effective AI Prompts

46:59 Challenges and Misconceptions in AI

49:05 Dealing with Change and Innovation

50:55 The Importance of Human Potential

59:04 Quickfire - Get To Know David

01:07:12 !Business or Bullshit Quiz!

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Is AI secretly making us all dumber?

Can a dyslexic ex stand up comedian and musical madman teach your company how to not get replaced by robots?

This week we revisit our chat with Dave Burs.

He built a manifesto to save your brain.

He can play 40 instruments, including one down a toilet.

That's absolutely true and claims most businesses are totally cocking up AI.

If you want to know the real dangers, the stupidest mistakes, and the weirdest stories from inside the AI revolution, stick around and get ready to rethink everything you know about tech.

Check it out.

I'm Andy Uri and today we're joined by David Burse.

David is a renowned author, speaker, advisor and educator in generative AI creativity and innovation.

A former advertising creative director for 20 years.

I always wanted to do that.

David.

David now spends his time stripping away the BS of generative AI to explain how it can really add value to individuals and business practices.

David's firm belief is that with the right approach, it's possible for generative AI to benefit customers, employees and businesses alike.

Highlights include over 760,000 students, taught 28,000 courses, shared six bestselling books, and the founder of the Sensible AI manifesto.

David, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you.

There we go.

I'm a David.

That's.

That's only my father that calls me David.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

What does everyone call you?

Dave.

Dave?

Yeah, you know, like the cool geography.

You feel more like a David though, with that sort of intro.

Yeah, Dave's a bit like what Dave?

You know, Dave doesn't know much, but he's lovely lad, you know.

I'll be David for today.

Yeah, yeah.

So tell me about what is Sensible AI Manifesto.

What is that?

Well, it came from a year of frustration talking to lots of business leaders around the world and I accidentally became an AI instructor.

It wasn't something I intended to do, but I accidentally became that because a course came out on LinkedIn.

Then lots of companies started contacting me to ask me about AI.

So then I spoke to these business leaders and I could see that their approach was wrong.

I could see that their approach was going to damage the business.

It was going to really piss off the talented people, people in their organizations, and they'll leave.

So you'll lose your talent because they're the ones who feel frustrated, constrained, not listened to.

So I could see that their approach was really wrong.

So I decided to take the stuff that I'd seen been done wrong and try to work out what's the best advice I can give businesses.

So I developed this over a few months and I sent it to really smart people who were AI thinkers and business leaders until I got something that I was really happy with.

And then on the 1st of January I released this and instantly got hundreds of people signing up to support the Sensible AI manifesto.

So yeah, that's one of the things I've done because I am really concerned about people, just employees in general being damaged by AI being implemented in the wrong way.

Because it seems as if that's what companies are trying to do.

And what is the way you think companies are trying to implement it?

It's the natural way that companies will try to do anything badly.

Badly.

Yes, you know, half hour, sticky plaster.

But where the business leaders are thinking, well hold on, we are rewarded and monetized based on our quarterly performance.

So what that does is it leads to short term thinking.

Short term thinking that is purely focused on productivity.

I think that productivity has become a terrible myth in recent years.

It's something that so many companies have been going after and I think, I think it's leading to problems.

And with AI, if you have a productivity first mindset and sadly the AI products that are out there are preaching about how they're amazing at productivity, that if that's the case, if that's what you're focused on, you're going to cause damage because you're focusing on the wrong thing.

So there was a study that came out last week or the week before which completely backs everything up, everything that I've been saying for the last year and a half.

It's always lovely when that happens, isn't it?

So this study from Upwork, and it says that 96% of C suite leaders expect AI to boost worker productivity, right?

96%, that's pretty much everyone.

The other 4%, I don't know, they went to the toilet at that point, Forgot to answer.

81% of global C suite leaders acknowledge that they have increased demands on their workers in the past year.

81% say that they are asking more from their employees.

So 77% of employees report that AI has increased their workload.

So AI has not been a productivity helper.

It's increased their workload.

71% of full time employees are burned out, 65% report struggling with their employers demands and one in three full time employees are saying that they're likely to quit their jobs in the next six months.

Yeah, they're shocking stats.

I'm always a little skeptical about stats because people love to fill in things like I'm burnt out, you know, poor me.

But let's assume that the message in there is correct.

So they're saying to their employees, right, I want you to use AI, and that's just increasing the amount they have to do, rather than I want you to get on with your job.

Or it's this misunderstanding that actually AI tools are going to let you do your work faster, you're going to get more done faster.

And this was exactly what happened.

When I started in the advertising industry in the early mid-90s, all the briefs that were coming in were from software companies and tech companies because the Internet was new and all of this tech stuff was happening and all the briefs pretty much said the same thing.

It's just like, hey, you can use our software so you can spend more time in the golf course.

And of course that's bullshit.

That is bullshit.

That's not what happened.

Because when people get more done faster, companies go, oh, you can get more done in that time.

Well, that other three hours you've saved every day, fill that up with more work.

Ah, I see what you mean.

But that would.

You're saying that let's deal with this productivity thing.

Cause I know they throw it around so much about how unproductive the British are and we were drinking too much tea or something.

I find it a bit of a bullshit too, because I'm like, how's this being measured?

Or, you know, I mean, I'm lost how they're working it out, for starters.

But from a productivity point of view, AI will increase productivity.

Not necessarily.

It depends what you're doing.

And what a lot of companies have conflated is automation.

And AI, right now, automation is when you're able to hand over to a computer and to get it to do stuff that humans would normally manually do.

Now that is something that, yeah, AI can be involved in some automation, but the majority of what we're looking at here isn't that.

And it's very difficult to execute automation.

Well, I mean.

Exactly.

And when you're doing that, what you're doing is you're doing a deal with the devil, where you're saying that I will accept adequacy.

Yeah.

And that's what you get.

And very often if we're looking at, then using AI and automation, that's what you're looking at, you're looking at adequacy, you are eliminating the chance of excellence.

But okay, simple use of AI that people are starting to do, you know, they're trying to write an email, they go on ChatGPT and say, help me write this email or, you know, that's increasing my productivity, isn't it?

Because you can take something.

I used it the other day helpfully.

We're trying to write something for the website and we were like, oh, just give me like 10 reasons why startup companies would want to do X.

And it's like, dah, dah, dah.

And we're like, well, I don't like that one and you should have that one.

But that sped up what me and Ross were sitting there doing.

We probably have spent an hour coming up with it and we did it in 10 minutes.

So that increased our productivity, didn't it?

I mean, we did other stuff but that job got done.

You know, it depends what you're doing and it depends what your standard for acceptability is.

So if it's something that, for example, responding to an email, most emails, adequacy is fine.

Yeah, so that's fine.

Most websites, frankly, you know, there you go.

So there's some things that, if your standard is low, if adequacy is sufficient, then yeah, it can help with that.

But if you're after excellence and I come from the creative industries and that's really very often what you're after.

As somebody who's.

Well, you don't survive without it.

Exactly.

Somebody who's a creative person, your judgment is so important, your ability to execute really well is important.

Ability to spot what a good idea is is important.

AI can't really help you very much with that kind of stuff.

It can help as part of the process, but it needs a lot of human intervention.

And what we're finding is that particularly AI being used for anything that's strategic or creative or requires some kind of anything more than rudimentary thinking.

AI doesn't necessarily speed it up, but it can help you get better results.

So it can actually increase the quality of your output, but it's not necessarily going to speed it up.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And there's a bit of which you can waste with it creatively, couldn't you.

You could sit and come up with something.

I think the bit that scares me is the way you start handing over brain.

You know, the easy example is, you know, when GPS and sat nav came in, you know, I still remember when I got a TomTom and I'd been driving in London, you know, since my teens and, you know, I knew London parts of it reasonably well.

And then, you know, my girlfriend gave me a TomTom and then I just found myself staring at all the time.

And I didn't know where everything was anymore.

And actually then it got nicked outside this building.

They smashed my window and took my Tom Tom.

And I remember writing a rap about it.

But I was like, I was happy actually after a few days.

Cause I was like, ah, I'm back to like driving, you know, and knowing where I am.

But that is that the way humans hand these tasks over to computers?

And you can see with AI, that definitely worries me.

If people come reliant on, they're like, okay, write me this thing.

And then they're like, oh, okay, what it says, you know, at the moment we're in a position where we've got knowledge so we can correct it.

But I wonder what happens when you go forward and it's suddenly, well, nobody knows anymore.

You just ask it and it pumps it out.

You know, that's a significant danger.

I mean, if we were to look at the effect that this can potentially have on the brain.

Because as much as I teach people how to get the most out of AI, I'm not an evangelist for it.

I'm very pragmatic.

And one of the areas I'm actually most concerned about is the impact it's going to have on humans.

Maybe humans have peaked now and the AI now is basically going to mean that we get weaker and weaker mentally.

It's that double effect, isn't it?

It gets cleverer and cleverer and we also get stupider and stupider, you know.

And also if we look at the fact that it's taking on more human attributes and what that can potentially leave humans for is actually more robotic work, that is screwed up.

Yeah, but if we look at different areas of neuroscience, so you get something cognitive pruning, it happens throughout your life.

But there's two or three main cognitive pruning events.

One of the main one really is during your teenage years.

Now this happens when parts of your brain that aren't being used very regularly, it's not seen as useful.

So your brain basically dissolves that part.

It prunes that away.

Oh my God.

So if this happens for teenagers, if they're just going to be outsourcing and they're not actually building those parts of their brains, the mental muscles for these parts of their brain, because they're just going to chatgpt to get answers for things and they're not engaging their brain, what's that going to do for them in the long term?

Then you've got this 10,000 hours thing.

It takes time to get good at something.

I'M a former musician and I know that my musician friends, some of them are dysfunctional in their obsession for how they learn their instruments, how many hours a day they spend, and that's fantastic.

But there's certain things, like business stuff, that we have to start getting good at.

You have to fail at at the beginning and then develop at that to get better at it.

Now, if you're not going to be failing because you're just going immediately to AI, and AI means that you don't have to fail.

It means that you're immediately adequate as you use it, because that's what it provides.

You've not gone through the same learning curve.

You've not built up your brain power, you've not developed the judgment.

It makes it much harder for you to retain those skills and to build those skills.

There's lots of issues that we're going to have both from people losing skills that they've previously had and not building up skills in the first place.

There's an easy example, the invention of the calculator.

My dad still works in the business.

He comes from an era pre calculator.

They had to learn to add up.

And they would be given a phone book and told to add it up.

And things like this, he can add up in his head.

He's a dyslexic, and he can still do it.

He can go down numbers and come to the bottom and write down the answer.

He's a computer, he's a calcul.

And what that gives an accountant is ability to see numbers.

So he can look at a spreadsheet.

So there's only a few people left in the business who can do it.

There's him, there's one other.

He just retired.

I'd have to think of anyone else is old enough because it's such a long time ago.

The calculator came in and he talks about when it came in and it was a big part of decision to buy this big thing and it could do two people's job.

And, you know, he can look at spreadsheets and.

Or look at.

And he'll go, that's wrong.

Or, you know, that doesn't.

This doesn't make sense.

And you're like, no, no, no, it's a spreadsheet.

And then you go check.

And it's like, oh, yeah, fuck it, I didn't add it up properly.

And missed number.

And that changed accounting because people don't really understand numbers anymore.

And he gets frustrated.

He's like, you guys can't actually read Numbers properly, you know, So, I mean, there's a simple skill that disappeared that gives him an ability to look through, you know, to truly understand how numbers are fitting together, whether the rest of us kind of rely.

So I agree that's a.

That's a real threat, I guess, to how we.

I mean, so therefore, turning it to the positive, how do you.

I mean, maybe ask a different question?

Okay, so that's one risk.

Is there another main risk that really bothers you about how we might adapt this?

You know, that we all become stupider?

But is there something else that sort of fundamentally would underpin concerns?

Well, it's the way that businesses are trying to do it.

When you focus on productivity, you're just trying to basically get people to outsource tasks to the AI, and that's not the way we should be looking at it.

The way we need to look at it is we're using AI to augment humans.

So it's.

How can we use this technology to make people capable of more than they were ever previously capable of?

Superpower, though.

Yeah, because that's what good technology is.

There was.

I think it was.

National Geographic did a story back in the early 70s.

I think it was 71.

And this was looking at the efficiency, the energy efficiency of different animals traveling the same distance.

So they measured worms and beetles and mice and horses and humans and birds.

How much energy do they expend?

Now?

Humans were halfway down the list.

We weren't doing that well at all.

We were just above the worms and the beetles, I think.

And by far the top animal was the condor.

It was the best, most efficient use of energy.

But then they thought, well, hold on.

Humans have got the capability to make inventions, so let's look at how much energy does it take for a human on a bicycle?

And at that point, humans then became the number one creature.

Oh, wow.

And this is what it's about.

When we are able to use tools to augment our own powers, to augment our own capabilities, technology then becomes part of us.

It helps us do more.

I mean, sorry, to be done with English.

Augment means sort of change, does it?

Or augment means build upon.

Build upon.

Okay, yeah, so it's amplifying, I guess.

Another word.

Okay, okay.

These.

These are great points.

I mean, while we're there, you know, are you.

The more I listen to the sort of existential threat of AI just to touch upon it, you know, the more I sort of went from, like, to like, oh, my God, this is like a proper 50.

50.

It's the end of humanity.

You know, where are you on that one?

Yeah, but not just for AI.

AI is part of it.

Yeah.

So it's the sort of coming together of all these various technologies, isn't it?

You know, once they started saying to me, well, look, if you've got, you know, hyper intelligence, way smarter than us, and then you've got a rogue actor and then you need to bring in a couple of other forms of sort of overlying encryption from quantum and stuff like this, then, you know, they can just decide, right, we're going to destroy humanity.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

I mean, there is a book, the Coming Wave by Mustafa Suleiman.

He was one of the founders of DeepMind.

And this book, you would think from somebody who's one of the founders of DeepMind would be sort of positive about AI.

Actually, he's looking at the whole thing and going, look, we've got real, real dangers here.

And he brings together AI with genetics and the ability now to actually manufacture genetic material.

And people are able to do that.

You're able to buy the equipment, they're able to sort of do it in laboratories.

And his concern is that the power that we have now, that's now almost in the hands of consumers.

It only takes one asshole with a crutch.

That's the bit I hadn't thought about because it's open everywhere.

The comparison is like, well, nuclear warfare is controlled by governments.

They're massive pieces of equipment.

It's not something.

But yeah, the moment it's open AI, then you just need the rogue actor.

So then when we look at what's happened with Ukraine and Russia, that how Ukraine managed to combat without having the budget and the big.

All the military infrastructure that Russia has is they brought in consumer electronics and they started using drones and weaponizing drones.

They were using AI to look at drone photographs to work out where the potential Russian sort of attacks were going to come from.

Were using AI to work out what strategies they needed to take against this.

So they've been using AI in that way and consumer electronics from the beginning as far as what I've read.

But now they're looking at drones that are operated by AI, so autonomous and controlled by AI.

I've got a problem with that.

Yeah.

Is it scary?

Yes.

I think that that's a line that we should never cross.

Yeah, yeah, don't.

We've.

We've crossed it apparently, because that's what the, the advocates are saying.

AI could change everything, but limit it to genetic research, medicine just put IT in boxes, but the genie's out the bottle, isn't it?

You know, sadly.

So basically you come to the conclusion.

Every sort of, you know, clever person who really understands AI seems to come to the conclusion we're F U C K ed very possibly, potentially.

You know, I mean, the whole thing is, it's just down to these bad actors at this point.

This is where governments should be trying to protect and they can't.

They just can't.

They move so slowly.

The UK completely dropped the ball on AI Rather, I believe, like everything else.

To be honest, it's quite sad where we've headed, but.

Yeah, so it seemed to just distribute the responsibility amongst different departments, rather than having, like, centralized expertise, which I think is absolutely necessary for AI I think we need to have.

It's something I spoke to people in government about, about 10 years ago when I could see we were having problems with social media.

And I spoke to an MP and said, is there an opportunity for us to create basically an organization, a sort of body that looks at the future and imagines all of the future possibilities, almost the multiverses that could potentially come from this moment?

What are the different risks, threats, opportunities here, and what can we do in government to amplify the opportunities and to mitigate the threats?

I think it's really important for us to be thinking about that as futurist.

Yeah, yeah, I'm quite into that too.

The times I've raised futurism, though, people will really be, like, shouted down, like, nobody predicts the future.

Everyone gets it wrong.

And I'm like, I don't know if that's entirely true.

I can still identify risks, can't you?

Yeah, well, I could think of, you know, films that predicted the future quite well.

Christ.

I was watching Knight Rider with my son and I'm like, oh, my God.

Like, there's loads of stuff in Knight Rider they got right.

As in, like, they're not saying it's set in the future, but you could build kit now.

Yeah, I mean, you could literally build kit.

It's an AI talking car, you know, it's got these super things that you could put in blasters and whatever.

Yeah.

But the most important thing is to have that red light at the front going.

That's the cool bit.

That's what everyone really wants.

Let's take it back to the business.

Okay?

So AI is massive, okay?

You have These concerns, you say businesses are going to use it to sort of augment what they do.

I mean, other than going to read your book.

I don't know which book you'd recommend on this.

I'm actually writing another book at the moment which is for kids.

Oh, nice.

AI for schools, basically.

And then I've been asked to write a book on the Sensible AI Manifesto.

My other books are all about creativity and innovation.

But if I sat down as a business and read your manifesto, I assume it's not that long.

If it's a manifesto, it's something.

It's one page on a website and then you can download a PDF booklet that goes into more depth and then I can offer training and that can.

Offer you the principles of how to approach it for your business.

Okay, that sounds like great advice.

And if you were going to sort of pick one of these things or something that you would say to someone about how to approach it, because, I mean, it sounds simple, but I don't, you know, I don't know how to.

I don't know how to approach that in my business particularly.

Is there, like one good bit of advice you could give out of that or something?

Well, there's.

There's seven pieces of advice on the Sensible AI Manifesto.

So the first one is to augment skills.

As I've said, that's what you should be aiming to do.

It's not just to reduce work, it's to augment humans.

Okay.

Forget about productivity.

Think about how to make superhumans or better humans, you know?

Yeah.

And then there's things like use data responsibly and that's like a naturally.

Anyone who's a lawyer or a data scientist or anyone will say that of course you have to do that.

So it's an important one we have to talk about.

Be ethical, because we don't really have the laws in place and you do not want to become a legal precedent.

So be ethical, follow your head and your heart and don't be a dickhead.

Because, I mean, that's what so much of business is about, is just don't be a dick, really, isn't it?

Then support your employees.

When it comes to support your employees, that's in several ways.

At the moment, employees are needing emotional support because they're worried about this technology and they don't know how the company is going to use it.

Then you've got the training support, then you've got the technical support.

So it's important that we look at all of these different kinds of support that we offer employees then I think it's important to assign AI leaders because I've seen companies trying to do AI, but they don't assign anyone, so nothing really happens.

So you need somebody who's actually going to be responsible for this because you need a back to pat and an arse to kick.

It's important that somebody's got responsibility.

Back to pat, ask to kick.

That would make a good T shirt.

One on each side.

Yeah, good, that's great.

With those seven.

And then the other ones are.

Keep learning, because this is changing all the time.

And then always add a human layer.

So whenever you've got response from an AI, you've not got your output properly yet, it has to then go through a human brain to make sure that it's accurate, to make sure that it's of sufficient quality, it's of the right tone, all of these things, so that you pass on something that you would be proud of, rather than just, you know, you can't use it as an excuse to say, well, ChatGPT did it.

Not my fault.

No, nobody's gonna let you off with that.

No, no.

And I couldn't agree more.

I mean, yeah, we have a CTO actually, and we just talk about it a lot and I think for us, you know, we have a lot of different systems because we do a lot of different things.

I mean, we really.

The softwares and the things we're using are incorporating AI into it.

So actually a lot of it's being done for us, really.

We could run around and try and come up with something, as you say, maybe confuse autom, but underneath it, it's like they're starting to add these AI tools.

So, you know, CCH has added it to this tax thing, but, yeah, we tested it, we were like, yeah, you know, it's not quite there yet or something.

You know, actually, I think, anyway.

But, you know, I think.

I think they're coming along.

I think.

I think they're going to be really helpful in that.

Doing tax returns is pretty complicated.

If a thing sort of pops up and says like, oh, hey, usually when people do this, there's this thing over here, or, you know, if we thought about this, you know, that's.

That's good.

As long as it's not like the paper clip from Microsoft years ago.

Do you remember, like, I think you're writing a letter.

No, I am.

No, fuck off.

I remember that, like being.

I mean, I guess that was an early AI or something.

Really, it was way ahead of its time.

Clippy.

Clippy.

Off?

Is that what he's called?

Yeah, way ahead of his time.

Did anybody like Clippy?

No, everyone hated Clippy.

I mean, you're doing business and you've got this kids cartoon coming up and.

Getting it wrong, you know, just like, I mean, word still fascinates me how everything just jumps around the whole time anyway.

Well, I think that's very wise and great that you've developed a sort of manifesto to try and I guess, stop, stop companies buggering up.

I mean, do you think we're well placed for it, you know, because everyone's going to be adopting it, but do you think we're going to be any better at it or worse than it?

No.

No.

Right.

So.

So looking at things from a trainer's point of view, I've been providing education for nearly 15 years and I do that all over the world now.

But I tried for years in the UK to make a living really as an educator, as a corporate trainer.

And over here there are lots of problems that we do not invest enough in training in our cultures, in our company's cultures.

We do not encourage expenditure on training.

The attitude to training is box ticking at best.

So the companies will get me in and they'll say, oh, how much for a full day's training?

Or whatever else.

I'll say, they go, oh, could you do like a one hour talk?

And they go, because then we can like, and it's cheaper.

So this real shit approach where they're not looking at it as, here's our teams, we have got humans here.

These humans are full of potential.

How can we unlock the potential of those humans?

That is not the way it is.

It's just like you do an aspect.

I mean, we're so up for training in terms of like, especially in a professional business, we're like, oh, you want to study that course, you want to do that thing.

But our problem is we sell time.

I mean, basically everyone thinks you sell products and stuff, but by the way, all we have is time and that's what we sell.

So when someone comes in to train, if it's a whole day, a people's attention spans too, you know, it depends what we're doing.

But we're like, yeah, that's a whole day of that entire department doing that thing.

But I mean, you're right if it's right in the long term, but there's so many subjects to train in, you know, we would.

So, you know, we would do a similar thing.

We do it, we no longer go out for training, we get we find an expert that we work with as well, who's the leading person in the country, and then we say, right, come and give us two hours on this, you know, maybe in a few months, give us two hours on that, because we can take anyway, you know.

Yeah, so I take your point, but is there not an aspect like that for businesses that are just.

We don't know how, you know, if we did a full day on you, then we like, you know, the employment, we turn the workforce off a month, a year or something like that.

And that, of course, is an issue that you can look at the flip side of that and go, well, how much time is wasted in meetings that are completely useless?

That's such a good point.

So if you were then to take that time that's wasted in meetings and put that into training, think of the difference that that was.

Would make.

There was an agency that I worked at years ago and I coded this is one before I can get ChatGPT to code anything for me now, but back in the day, and I coded this thing that you'd be able to tell who was in the room and what their annual salary was.

And it didn't bring that up on a board or anything, but from that, from the length of the meeting, you hit a button and it went go.

And then you could see the money, how much it actually cost the company.

Racking up.

Your billable rate started racking up and of course you'd very often there would be like senior people in the room who are there because, you know, politically they have to be there and just, oh, my goodness, as soon as that was visible.

I've always wanted to do that for clients, just as like to see how it changes my meetings.

You know, two of us in the meeting and we put our hourly rates and they see that and they just be like, shut up about your holiday.

Get to the bloody point.

I gotta go.

Jesus.

Jesus Christ.

Is it 600 quid?

You haven't answered a question.

You know, it'd be hilarious to watch that happen, you know, I mean, actually, when you really get down to it, because this is what people do, they try and break the time down, is, look, we sell time.

It's not a perfect art form.

You know, there's a lot of risk, it's very complicated.

You have a crack at it.

And so it is expensive, you know what I mean?

But you also need to have downtime and that for certainly from somebody who comes from the creative industries.

If I was to take a creative department that I was running and go, right, okay, you should be able to knock this out in two hours.

And then we're going to give you another job that, that's going to take you three hours to do.

Be an absolute nightmare.

I could never get a department to work like that.

And instead what it would be would be giving them a problem saying, all right, I'm going to give you over the next week putting this amount of time on it.

Because I know that it's important for them to just put stuff to their back brain and not think about it.

I would sometimes chuck my creatives out of the office.

If I went around and I saw them on Facebook and they would, I knew they were wasting their time and I'd say, what are you doing?

And say, oh, looking for inspiration.

Right, get your paper, get your pen and fuck off.

I don't want to see you until 4 o'.

Clock.

And at 4 o' clock you're going to come back with some interesting ideas.

And I'd throw them out the office and say, go someplace interesting, go to a park, go to a coffee shop, go to a record shop, go to a museum, go see a film if you want.

Whatever you do, your job though is to come back here at 4 o' clock with ideas.

And that's the value that I got from them that can't be measured in time because sometimes it will take you four minutes to crack a brief and get an idea and another time it'll take you days.

But that's the same, that's the same in our job.

I mean, to solve a tax problem.

Or people come in there, oh, simple problem, they just like, like cross borders, like five different layers, but exactly that.

So then they're like, well, I need to know in advance how much it's going to cost to solve my problem.

And I mean, we have the same problem because actually certainly tax is creative.

It's like I, I mean, you know, stop holding me to it.

I mean, going back to the training thing though, don't you feel a whole day's training is like, I mean, is that just my adhd?

I'm just like whole day training for.

Most people and for most trainers, I'd say that's an absolute nightmare.

I actually, I don't like to do full days training.

Okay.

So I would take people for maybe three hours.

I'll give them a little break in the day.

Oh, so it's more when they say to you, oh, can you chop it down to an hour?

And you're like, so for that it would be probably Wouldn't be training, but maybe be me running like a AI strategy workshop.

And I'll have the leadership and I'll do that and then I'll send them away to do something and bring them back and I kind of like.

We'll mix it up.

So I've been doing quite a bit of that for companies, mainly in the us.

Because in the US they do pay for training.

Yeah.

So you're saying the UK is shit at paying for training.

I can imagine that.

You know, and then.

So in the us, they like, they're well up for training their staff.

Are they?

Oh, yeah, I spent.

I spent a good couple of months last year just being in the US and training companies and working with them on workshops and stuff.

So.

Yeah, but over here it's just not that attitude.

It's so penny pinching.

Yeah.

But it's the same with professional advice in America.

They just see it as a cost to do in business.

It's compliance.

I don't.

I know, it's really expensive.

Don't fuck it up.

That's what they know, fucking up.

It's really expensive.

So get good advice, get it done.

They're great to deal with.

Da da da da da.

I mean, we should take humbrage or, you know, take respect from what America does because frankly, you know, they're so money focused and sort of.

They're the ultimate business people in a way.

They're all hustlers.

Yeah.

You know, and they're building.

They have pretty much built almost all of the greatest companies.

You know, when you sort of go down the list, it's like, oh, yeah, wow.

So I think we probably should pay.

Is there any other sort of, I guess, cultural problem here with our sort of attitude that you bump into?

You know, in the us they're very.

They don't really look beyond their own shores because, you know, they're a big country, they've got every landscape in the country.

You know, they've got 350 million or whatever it is people in the States.

Over here we've got a smaller country and I think there is a.

We're far more international minded in that way.

But I think we've lost a lot of our ambition.

I think we've lost a lot of our vision over here.

And I think when we look at Brexit, which, yes, I didn't agree with Brexit, I thought that the only way to deal with Brexit was to have somebody who had vision about how this country could be great again or whatever, you know, don't sound like Trump or anything, but, you know, but at least there was.

There was some opportunity to it, if you're gonna go down that.

And the opportunity has not been taken by anyone to say that, here's the country, we want to be the best at innovation.

We want to be whatever, put ourselves in the world map.

And I think instead, the UK is just becoming increasingly irrelevant on the world map.

I mean, you've written this manifesto, you train people in AI.

It sounds very helpful, what you do to try and get businesses to use it better.

I mean, is there anything else within that that is important to sort of raise about AI or things that you really think about a lot?

I think a lot of people get a really poor experience of AI.

So let's think about people who, the first time that they try AI, they'll do something like, let's ask AI, could you write me a poem about a sentient slipper?

And it will.

And they'll look at it and they'll go, that is amazing.

And I'll tell you why they think that is amazing.

It's because they are shit at writing poetry.

Now, what happens is that the AI, all its training data, it's basically trained on the Internet in a bunch of books.

And when we look at the Internet, 90% of the Internet is shit, 10% of it's all right, and 1% of it's amazing.

So when you do that and you average it all down, you get to something that's adequate.

Now, when you get this adequate poem out in just a matter of seconds, somebody whose adequacy, their level is way below adequacy, they're looking up at this going, whoa, that is great.

Then you get somebody who's actually a poet.

And I actually used to be.

I used to do poetry in Radio 4, and I know a bit about it.

And I look down at that and I go, that's shit.

It doesn't scan properly.

It's got really poor use of words I didn't know.

I ask it to write rats.

Yeah, they're okay, whatever.

They're not great.

But what.

So we've got this thing that it will naturally produce adequacy unless you get really good at prompting.

And when you get good at prompting, you can then say, this is what I'm aiming for.

This is what I think good is.

This is the information you need to get there.

And people don't understand that.

I'm not saying that AI is like a human, because it's not.

It's just an Algorithm, it's nothing more than a souped up version of text prediction on your phone.

That's really what it is.

It's a souped up version of that.

It's just working out what is the likelihood of the next word.

And therefore it gives you the most likely next word based on your input.

So it does this stuff that seems amazing to so many people, but if you learn to prompt properly, you can raise the standard of it.

And this is one of the things that I'm really interested in, is people understanding how to write a good prompt.

Because most of their prompts, they treat it like a search engine.

And it's not a search engine, it's a thinking engine.

So the thing to understand is that when we are briefing, because that's what we're doing, we write a prompt, we are briefing the AI on what to do.

We have to have as much information in there as we would give a human to do the same job.

So what's the background information they need?

We have to imagine that this is an intern that is really smart.

You want them on your team in a pub quiz because they have eaten an Internet and they've swallowed a library.

You want them there.

They've got so much knowledge, but still, they've just started in your organization right now.

They don't know anyone.

They don't know how you work, they don't know what your expectations are.

They don't know what you think good is.

They don't know the style you want it to be in.

So if we had that brand new super smart intern, what would we tell them as a brief?

What brief would we need to give them to do that job?

That's the information we need to give the AI.

And if we don't give that much information, you cannot expect the same results.

Yeah, that's great advice.

So how did you.

You've mentioned you did a lot of different things.

What instrument did you play?

I used to be known as Dave in this bag of weird shit.

So when I was a session musician, so I would go around studios in Glasgow and Ireland and I would basically have this big duffel bag and I'd unzip it and people would say, what's that?

And I'd go, it's a rabab.

It's a Middle Eastern violin.

And they go, what's that sound like?

Ning.

Ning.

Ning.

Okay, what's that?

It's an Ood, you know, So I had like world instruments that I'd play.

I had electronic instruments, I'd Built and then I played like blues.

I play like slide guitar and Hammond organ and harmonica and all sorts of stuff.

So I played a bit 40, 50 different instruments.

That's amazing.

And I was like, okay at lots of different instruments.

So people didn't get me in to be a virtuoso.

They got me in because I could do so much and I was really experimental.

So it was a recording studio I was working for at one point that the guys who owned the record label came down one day.

Cause there was a flat that the bands would stay in attached to the studio.

And it was this beautiful studio.

We had an old desk from Abbey Road and it was incredible.

And somebody was blasting guitar through it.

And I was picking it up in this microphone down the toilet bowl because I wanted this really harsh echo.

And the producer came down, saw what I was doing and went absolutely mental.

I bet though there's those times they were writing a song though, and they'd be like, I was just missing something.

I know this guy.

Scotland's only session stylophone player.

Oh my God, that's brilliant.

But you've done so many things.

You're a radio broadcaster, stand up comedian.

Did these all happen in order or all at the same time?

I'd done a lot of stuff at the same time.

So when I was creative director of one agency, the folk in the agency didn't know that every Friday I co hosted a breakfast show in Cambridgeshire.

No way.

So I would do this breakfast show where I would write poetry live on air.

People would phone in and I basically have like the space of a record or two records to write a poem for them.

You sound like a rapper.

That's not freestyling stuff, you know, that's how I like to write.

So it was big pressure stuff.

And then I'd jump on the train, go down and be creative director of an agency in London.

But so that was kind of doing things at the same time.

And then when I was a musician, I was a musician for a BBC theater show.

So there was a TV series that had gone on the Road.

And one night I was getting drunk with the writers of the show or the folks that wrote Rapsey Nesbit in Glasgow.

Great program.

No, it's not.

And I was getting drunk with them and I started making up these stupid songs and they were Drunk.

So their judgment was impaired.

And he said, you want to close the show with half an hour of stand up next week?

And my judgment was impaired.

And I said, yes.

And I woke up the next morning with a hangover and the sudden realization.

Half an hour.

That I had seven days to write half an hour of stand up, which is impossible.

Wow.

But I managed to do about 20 minutes the following week.

And yet it went down a storm.

The first gig I did and I went on tour with him, whereas doing the music.

And then I was closing the show with Stand Up.

You don't like Rafc Nesbit?

No.

No.

Never really was very popular down south.

So, you know, I. I don't.

I think it was on tv.

I've seen bits of it.

It was.

I mean, it was basically really hard to understand.

I mean, you know.

Yeah, Brits aren't bad at understanding the whole.

The whole accents everywhere.

Well, I mean, that was part of the stick, wasn't it?

It was.

You know, there is that thing in Glasgow.

Glasgow is a very separate thing.

City.

It's like sectarian, and that you're either vowels or consonants.

So you would get the Glaswegians who were on the vowel side.

Oh, yeah.

And then you get the ones that are in the consonant side.

And when you bring it together, you get English.

And it was sort of, you know, that's where I came from as a city.

Oh.

And it was the consonant one in rabc.

Nesdi.

Yes, he was the consonant one.

I am a fan, however, still game.

I don't know, you know, but again, Glaswegians are often like, yeah, I'm not sure about that program, but I'm like, I don't know if you ever watched it, but that is pretty funny.

Yeah.

Okay.

But these.

So where did this.

Where did you get into the AI?

You were sort of.

Where did this happen?

Well, because corporate ADHD always done.

You know, it's why I played so many instruments when I was a musician, because I'd go like, all right, I've picked up how to do the mandolin two weeks ago.

We've got all right at that.

What's next?

You know, and you.

You like that first of the learning curve, where you're like, you know, I'll get adequate.

Actually I'll get sort of half good at it.

And then it's like, oh, the next.

I would have to do the next 9,000 hours to get a bit better.

Yeah.

So bugger that.

I'll do a different instrument, you know.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So it was like that with my career as well.

So I got into advertising and I started as an art director and then I became a writer and then I became head of art at an agency and then I became head of writing at an agency, head of copy and then I became head of technology at another agency.

And I've always been flipping around from one to the other and it didn't do me any favors for a long time because I didn't go deep, as you're saying, skittering along the surface, mainly getting good enough at stuff.

But that actually came into play when I reached that creative director level and I knew everything, I had done everything and I could relate to everyone and that became really, really useful.

And that was able to, I was then able to open up opportunities.

And because I was always looking at the future, what is happening with technology, what are the opportunities?

I was able to see things that other people couldn't see.

And after years of being this jack of all trades, master of none, I then became the person that was able to spot the opportunities.

And I then got my value, you.

And I'm always looking at the new stuff to see what's happening.

And I'm an old guy, I'm in my 50s and that was your cue to say no.

And I'm still constantly playing with technology to see what can I do, how can I push this to its extremes, how can I find out how to use this better, how can I of play with this until it breaks?

And that's kind of what happened with AI.

So I had toyed with AI over the last few years.

Then when ChatGPT came out, I'd got a reputation for doing some stuff.

I'd been doing some art using AI to help me with my art.

I do lino cuts and wood cuts, so really old fashioned printing.

And I was using AI to help me create these linocuts and woodcuts.

And I created a series of them and I was starting to get attention for those.

And then ChatGPT came out and you.

Thought, I'll lower into a toilet bowl.

Yeah, my iPad, like 2 inches above the water.

And it became one of these things that you start to look online.

And I realized that what most people were saying was absolute bullshit as people were trying to explain how to use this technology.

And I realized that focusing on the technology wasn't necessarily the best way of doing it.

We have to understand humans.

And I brought all sorts of stuff from my understanding of neuroscience and psychology into this to work out how do we talk in the best way to AI and I developed this framework for being able to prompt in a really effective way.

And then because I'd done some courses for LinkedIn learning, I said to them, look, I've got an idea for a course on AI.

And they said, we'll take it.

And I created this course and it came out in March of last year and ended up becoming the most popular AI course on their platform.

And that was a complete surprise to me.

So they said, can we have some more?

So I made some more courses and last year my whole.

I'd never intended to become like somebody who's focused on AI.

That's amazing, man.

All the stuff you do.

Amazing.

You seem to be able to pick up things and.

Yeah, I mean, it makes you a polymath if you're not aware.

But.

But I think it's important not to become an expert.

I never want to be an expert.

And when people are sort of introducing me, oh, he's an expert on AI, like, no, no, I'm an amateur.

An amateur is somebody who does stuff because they love it and has fresh eyes.

I guess they get fresh eyes and they're curious and they're able to bring in lessons from other domains and other fields.

When you're an expert, you become myopic and you close down to the other opportunities that can feed into this.

So I'm very much, I am not an expert and I never want to be.

Yeah, that's interesting.

And actually it relates to, you know, when, you know, you get very clever people who are sort of, you know, polymaths and do all these different things.

Yeah.

I guess there's an aspect to them that they come into a new subject, they're super curious, they turn it upside down, they rip it apart, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then they move on.

You know, that's part of their process.

But the intelligence allows them to sort of learn about it and adapt to it at a faster rate than normal.

You know, and challenge it.

And I think that's an important thing.

When you're an expert, you're no longer challenging as much.

You're taking so many assumptions.

I don't have any assumptions.

Yeah.

And I'm willing to just, oh, I.

Hate it when people won't change their view.

When people sort of like, oh, well, the way it works.

Who knows the way it works, man?

You know, the way it did work or work once.

You know what I mean?

That's fascinating.

And do you, Is there a long term goal then out of this you've got like, okay, what I really want in life or you just things, things come along that you find curious and you get into them.

Yeah, just, I'm just constantly curious and I will go wherever my curiosity takes me.

And I'm still absolutely fascinated with the human brain.

That to me is the most important thing.

So how do we get the most out of humans?

So when I'm looking at AI, it's not how do we get most out of AI, it's how do we use AI to get the most out of people.

That is the real riches.

And that I think gives me quite a different approach to this from most people who are looking at AI.

And I think that putting AI in the hands of the CTO and saying that's your responsibility because it's tech is a huge mistake because CTOs are not focused on getting the most out of people.

And the problem is when we are then looking at, even the COO chief Operating officer, looking at AI is looking at productivity only.

And again, that is a mistake.

There's actually, there needs to be a new kind of role here in a company to understand how to bring AI in.

And there's going to be two ways of doing it.

One is actually using the tools and the other is the technology is going to be put into the products, as you're saying.

So some of the products you're already using are getting AI built into it.

So there's that side as well.

So there's two sides to it.

One is like using it as a tool by yourself and the other is it's just going to be built into tools you're already using.

And you know, is there something in your life that you've tried lots of different things?

Is there something you've really been really cocked up or really got wrong?

Yeah.

Oh, my whole.

I could look at my whole journey through the world of work as just cock up after cock up where I've, you know, I get bored of stuff and almost like self sabotage or, you know, I've been fired and all sorts of things.

I've been requested to move on, you know, it's fine.

But a lot of that is because I make the mistake of thinking that places want change.

So when they bring me in and they ask for change and then I start to try and do something, then they resist it.

And people hate change.

It's a problem for me because, you know, like, I mean, you know, I'm in a business of lawyers and accountants.

They're not necessarily going to be the biggest change makers.

And then like, I throw out ideas and stuff in WhatsApp groups or like, you know, and I've learned it really stresses people out a lot.

People misread it, too.

They think I'm demanding it immediately, which I never said.

I just said, but why don't we do this?

It got till the end of the week, for goodness.

Yeah, exactly.

Tuesday.

But, you know, and then, and then I, you know, for them, they also take it as a.

An insult that they.

I'm saying that they're doing their job badly.

Yes.

And I'm like, I'm not saying that either.

You know, I'm just saying, like, I mean, I guess I'm saying, can't we always improve things, you know, a lot?

You know, I'm just.

Yeah, I love change, you know, not actually, not necessarily.

Actually brilliant at changing.

If you say to me, oh, you now need to work in that way because you're giving me a set of rules, and I'm like, oh, I don't really like following rules.

You know what I mean?

But I know what you mean about change.

People find it very stressful.

You have to be very careful how you present it.

But there's a lot of people, they want to want change.

They don't want it, but they want to want it.

I would love to love that.

I would really like to like that.

But they don't actually really, you know, and I've had that a lot over the years, dealing with innovation.

And, you know, I see that now when I'm talking to companies about AI, because AI is a form of change within the.

The company, and there's lots of people who, they want to want it, but actually, is that going to change things?

Is it going to disrupt stuff too much?

It's taking me to an area that I don't completely understand.

So how have you learned to deal with it?

How do you present change then?

Or what's the key to doing it without getting chucked out the business?

Well, I think for AI at the moment, it's actually showing people what it's capable of.

Because, to be honest, I actually think that most prompts, that when people go online, they say, give me.

Give me some prompts.

And they find some prompts maybe in Forbes or something like that, and they go, oh, I'll keep those.

I'll note those down.

Most of those prompts are shit.

So it's when you understand what a good prompt can do, what it's capable of.

And I open people's eyes like that, they're like, holy shit.

I didn't realize it could do that it's going, yeah, because you have to put in the work up front to think about what you're asking to get everything together to write that good brief brief.

Then not only have you activated your own brain, but you're then going to activate the brain of the AI.

And that means that you're going to get so much more at the end.

So you write.

It's not lots of prompts.

You write one long prompt.

I show people how to write one good, really proper, robust prompt that's got really good stuff in it.

But I also show people how to have a conversation and that's another approach, is that you have a conversation.

So.

So for that I bring in Socratic questioning and things like that to show people how you can use Socratic name from Socrates.

Okay, so he came up with this questioning method that are different ways that you can question something to try and get to the truth of it.

So there's like, I can't tell you off the top of my head, but there's about seven different Socratic questions that you can get and how you can use that to have a conversation with AI.

So I show people that kind of stuff as well.

So I've got courses on my own website, daveburst.com nobody can spell my name, so nobody will find it.

You need to say it like, you need to say it like it sounds Biris.

Birst.

Actually can't even say it's.

No, it doesn't even work, does it?

It's got the vowels in there.

B, I, R, S, S. Yeah, that's weird.

Daveburst.com and I've got courses on there that show people how to implement AI into what they do in the most valuable way.

So how to find the opportunities in your own role that AI can be valuable for.

And there's another one on advanced prompting techniques, which is really.

I look into the nerdy stuff, the stuff that's come out of academic labs and some of my own techniques that I've developed to say, right, here's the nerdy stuff that will totally boost your.

I don't know, it feels very Gary Larson to me that this, like top flight, you know, PhD people just sitting in front of chat GPT saying, ask it that, you know, because, you know.

Some of this stuff is crazy, crazy stuff.

They found that actually being polite and being nice to the AI will get you better responses, but they also find, what the fuck, no, it really works.

Does that make it, you know, is it alive?

Do you know what I mean?

Please and thank yous.

Well, it has learned from all of this human interaction that it's got online and has discovered from that.

Clearly that politeness will get you better results.

So it's just learning to copy us.

So it's learning from human behavior because that's what it's finding in the web.

That's what we think.

But the AI is a black box.

We do not know how it works.

We have no idea.

Even the people who've created it have no idea how it's doing this stuff.

That's scary, but also, wow.

And they can't ask it how it's doing it.

No.

We're starting.

There's a company called Anthropic who I believe are starting to make inroads to actually work out what it's doing.

Jesus.

But I mean, the way even those things you've said really means that, yeah, if AI get the keys to the drones, we're buggered.

Do you know what I mean?

Because it could just decide.

Whatever.

There's something.

I don't know how true this is because there was some bullshit going around about how the American military had been doing experiments with AI, but the story that came out of this, so this may be bullshit, I don't know, was that they had done a test on it to say, AI, battlefield condition.

And they gave it a load of rules and said that you have to report back to the main headquarters as you're doing stuff.

Basically, what in this test, the AI did in this hypothetical scenario was the first thing it did was destroy the headquarters so that it had freedom to.

That is the story.

So that's the story, but I don't know how true that is.

But it's one of these things that we have to understand.

People died.

No, no.

This was this hypothetical scenario, but the.

I mean, it's smart.

Yeah, exactly.

So we have to understand that it can think about things in different ways, solve problems in ways that don't have human assumptions attached to them and don't necessarily value things in the same way that humans do.

Yes, that can be an issue.

I don't believe that the AI has the potential at the moment of becoming sentient.

I don't believe that it will.

I don't believe that it will become a sort of thinking beast that will battle against humans and try to destroy us.

I don't believe that because it's not been taught that.

And it's also.

It's different from humans.

Humans, we preserve ourselves, but AI and computers is more of a hive mind.

And if you think about how hive creatures work, it's different.

They're not responding in the same way, they don't work in the same way, they're not trying to be protective and territorial in the same way.

So I think that there is a lot of fear mongering.

It's not tribal, basically.

It's sort of like ants that it sort of adds together.

And now a quick word from our sponsor.

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We're pretty much on all of them.

Just search for wblondon just to finish up because we need to ask the question.

I mean you've named stuff anyway.

But what do you think is bullshit then in your industry?

I mean, I don't know which industry, but one of them.

Well, if I was to look at the training industry then, you know, I've already said what's bullshit within training, I mean, particularly in the uk, I think that the attitude to training, you need to see it as an investment and you're investing in this.

You want the best product, the best trainer, why would you want anything less?

And yeah, I think that the attitude to training is really, really weak.

But if we were to look at AI and what's bullshit, I think that the majority of AI products are trying to sell themselves as productivity tools in that sense and I actually think that the majority of them aren't and we need to just readjust our expectations and our understanding and the way that we use these products and understand that these tools are not going to fix this stuff for us.

We need humans to be part of this.

And I kind of liken the best way to do it as it's like a lasagna.

So you've got the sheets of silicon for the AI when you're trying to solve something and then you've got the layers of meat, you know, our brains getting involved.

So you get brain meat, meat in between.

And it's us working in collaboration with the AI is going to get us to more.

But people are thinking that if you automate it and you take out the meat and you just hand it over to the AI, which is we've got danger at the moment where we're looking at AI agents as a future.

So the agents basically means that they will be able to take on a bigger role that humans can do.

And basically plan their task and then execute it.

The problem is that you're taking out the meat layers and the meat layers are where the value is.

Yeah, I really agree.

Maybe it's also you're missing the Bechamel's corporate bullshit sauce has poured over everything and just fucks it all up.

You know, it's like, hey, this is working really well.

Have a bit of that.

Any top tips for entrepreneurs?

Yeah, you know, I sort of.

I had to think about this.

Let's see.

Probably you'll guess from my sort of general conversation today is that I think that humans are the most important thing.

So if you're an entrepreneur, just understand that the people that you take on are so important, that there's a lot of people who see, they see humans as work units, work units of equal value.

Do not see your staff like that.

Your employees are so, so incredible.

They hold so much potential.

So invest in them and use education to develop their skills and use AI to help augment those skills.

And I think that that is something I'm just more and more finding myself as I'm working with tech and people expecting me to just be this tech gobshite is that actually it's more and more that I'm seeing humans are the most important thing.

Okay, you've been absolutely brilliant, mate.

What an interesting conversation.

So we're going to get back down to the fun bit.

We're going to ask some simple questions where you should know the answer, hopefully.

Quick fire round dq, the music.

And what was your first job?

Farmhand.

I learned to drive in a combine harvester.

Wow.

Age of 14.

That's like when you're little.

That's like the ultimate machine, you know, it's so big.

I didn't even know we had any in these countries because our fields are so small.

They feel very American.

Brilliant.

And your worst job.

I think that that was working in a car showroom.

I was a marketing assistant in a car showroom.

And, well, I've got to say, working with a bunch of bell ends, it just wasn't my thing.

People who are very into sales are not always the best favorite subject at school.

Probably computing.

But the funny thing is that actually what I've made a living out of is words and art.

I hated my English teacher that I had at secondary school.

He was the most despicable human being I can.

I really.

He's one of these people.

Actually thinking about him still makes me angry.

And I'm in my 50s, for goodness sake.

I should be over that.

You're dyslexic, too, so that's gonna give you that disadvantage.

But it's funny, you do poetry stuff.

So many rappers and stuff are dyslexia, you know, it's a sort of misunderstanding.

My mum's always like, but, darling, you were so terrible at English at school, you know, why have you ended up.

You know, I don't know.

I think that's quite common sort of thing.

Yeah.

I think it's like, people who are a bit socially stunted make really good screenwriters because basically they're used to replaying in their heads the conversations they should have had.

Oh, wow, what a thought.

That's so fascinating.

What's your special skill?

Oh, I think it's learning new stuff.

I'm just.

My incessant curiosity.

I think that if there's any superpower, that's my superpower.

It's just I can become ridiculously interested in Victorian guttering.

You know, I could.

Or which microbes are active when you're.

When you've got yeast and bread.

You know, that kind of stuff.

I will be absolutely fascinated with that.

The thing I'm constantly battling with myself is not to go too far down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, but to pull myself back.

I was about to say.

I mean, I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia, you know.

Cause it's just exactly that.

You can get into these subjects, can't you?

But, yeah, I'm constantly devouring in some way through my eyes or through my ears.

Yeah.

And obviously through my mouth.

Too much.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

A vet.

Did you.

Yeah, yeah.

You love animals?

Farmhand.

Yeah, that was it.

And that was why I worked on the farm, was because I wanted to be a vet.

And then I realized it involved.

Involved hard work.

Yeah.

It's pretty tough and, you know, lots of really complicated words.

You know, I'm married to a doctor, and I realized so much of their job in medicine and in, you know, anatomy and all, you know, there's just so many words they had to learn.

It's like.

And I couldn't do biology as a result.

I sort of, in theory, found biology interesting, but I just stuck at the words, you know.

Yeah.

What did your parents want you to be?

Did they?

And is that what your dad is?

No, no.

But that was.

That's what they expected, that, you know.

They were very religious.

Yeah.

So they.

There was this expectation that I would be, you know, I guess.

You are a preacher.

I am, though.

That's the funny thing.

I just preach On a different gospel.

It's very true.

Go to karaoke song.

Oh, never put me in karaoke.

As somebody who was a musician, I was always playing the music.

I was barely listening to the words that the singer was.

Is good on.

But.

But pushed.

Yeah.

But.

But pushed to.

Might be my Johnny B. Goode, you know, it's just.

It's a song that I can.

I never get bored of.

Yeah.

Did you first Back to the Future had a lot to do with that song, probably.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What's your opinion on the office?

Dog business or bullshit?

It depends on the dog.

And your dog in the corner there is.

Is absolutely terrific.

That's perfect temperament for an office.

Yeah.

Yeah, he's good news.

Luckily, we don't have any rats down here, or it'll be a bloody nightmare.

Everyone's taken to a McClure meeting saying, oh, no, he's brilliant.

He's always really great.

And they were in the basement of this place in East London, and Romeo went in and he was just like, there's fucking.

There's rats.

There's stuff here, you know?

And it was a nightmare.

And they were like.

You said.

He was.

Oh, it was a really embarrassing situation.

But no, it's like.

Cause I was like, yeah, you've got rats or something in this building, you know?

And they were like.

And I was just like, okay, you don't.

And my dog's an asshole.

Whatever you want.

Whatever you want.

Have you.

Wait.

You said you'd been fired.

When were you fired?

I was fired by an agency in Scotland.

Now, I.

What happens in advertising is you work on a creative team.

So you're a writer or an art director.

Now I lost my writer.

So I'd been an art director, and I couldn't find a writer in Scotland.

So I'd been advised, maybe you become the writer and find an art director.

Because they knew I could write.

So there we go.

I thought, I'll do that.

So I got this guy in who was supposed to be this hotshot art director.

He'd won a bunch of awards, and the first day he started working with me, I realized I'd made a mistake.

So we got this brief, and he's like, dave, come up with an idea.

And I come up with an idea, and he goes, that's shit.

Come up with another one.

I'm like, oh, right.

So I said, give him another idea.

Really?

You think that's good enough?

He started putting me down like this.

Within a week, I could not come up with any ideas.

My brain had Frozen.

Yeah.

And it's one of these things.

It's amazing the way your brain works, particularly when you're coming up with stuff, because coming up with ideas, there's a level of risk to it, there's the risk of ridicule.

And that's one of the reasons why people don't tend to come up with ideas in business.

They don't want to be ridiculed.

They want people to think they're an idiot.

Now, what happens when somebody actually tells you you're an idiot?

A fucking idiot.

All day, as you're trying to come up with stuff, you just stop.

Your brain just.

Yeah, I know exactly what.

You're not doing that.

So he broke me.

I used to feel physically sick going into the office.

So within a month I was called up to the boss and he said, you're not doing your job.

And he fired me.

And this guy.

I then found out this guy had been telling lies about me as well.

Yeah, I bet.

So it was like, oh, shit.

He completely fucked that up for me.

The brilliant thing was I got fired on the Friday morning and I took my boxes of shit that I'd amassed in the agency, put them down in.

Reception and your bag of musicians.

I then got my father to come and collect me with this stuff.

And in the afternoon, I then immediately got an interview to another agency on the same day I'd been fired on the Friday morning.

What, and you looked at a CV or.

Sorry, you looked up some job adverts?

I phoned around.

I just picked up the phone, started phoning and the following Monday, I was in this agency working for the guy who's probably the best creative director in Scotland.

And I was working for him and for twice the money.

Wow, that's fantastic.

That had been the previous ends.

Well, and this guy had total faith in me and suddenly again, my ideas were released.

In a way, you should be thankful that he talked some shit about you because it got you fired.

Yeah.

It could have gone for months that.

You know what I mean, before you went, oh, I better leave and then I'll do my notice.

You're absolutely right.

It's the best.

Getting fired was the best thing.

It really was.

Almost always the worst things that happen to you are the best things that ever happened to you, you know?

Yeah.

Isn't that Chinese parable about, you know, somebody that.

That they're somebody in a farm and their.

And their horse dies or something, and the person's.

Other people say, oh, that's really unfortunate, Sable.

We'll see.

Yeah.

I was about to say, whatever you're going through in life, if you've gone through something awful, you know, give it time because there will be some, you know, it could end up being one of the best things that's happened to you, you know, and what'?

Work.

I work too much and I need to.

You got kids and.

Yeah, yep.

Yeah, yeah.

So I could really do with working a little bit less.

But fortunately I've got my nine year old daughter involved in my work last week because she's off in school holiday and we've filmed a course together where we're teaching kids how to use AI in a way that can amplify their education rather than help them cheat.

Yeah, so we've, we've filmed a course together.

This is great.

I'm absolutely delighted that my, my 9 year old's involved in the.

What is now the family business.

And now it's time for our lovely business or quiz.

You've got a paddle there.

Okay.

We're going to name some stuff.

You need to hold that paddle up and speak clearly whether it's business or bullshit and then we can have a, a little bit of a debate about it.

I think I've got a paddle just so I can generally smack you or something.

That's great.

I mean, we feel as if we should have a great big soft yellow ball.

Yeah, yeah.

That's interesting.

Across the street, I might add that.

Write that down, Dee.

Okay, so dq the music.

Are you ready?

We're gonna name some stuff.

You gotta say it's business or we're clear.

We're clear.

Okay, very good.

And we're off.

Well, I mean, it's a bit of an old hat now.

Silicon Round Rounder.

I mean, does it exist anymore?

I think it's a building site, basically.

Okay, well, I'd say that for anything, any country, any business, 90% of anything is shit.

So I would say that on the whole, it's probably bullshit.

Client lunches.

Oh, business.

Yeah.

I think that this is something that sadly has gone away.

This building relationships with your clients.

Everything these days because of procurement has just become so freaking cold where it's just, this is a business.

You know, when people use that term, oh, it's nothing personal, it's just business.

Everything's fucking personal.

Yeah.

So crude.

Give me that.

So absolutely, I think client lunches are really important and I work from home, so I don't get to do that.

And I, I think that phrase is an American phrase.

You know, it's not business, it's personal.

Because I think in their culture they do have a concept of removing morality as long as it's legal in terms of a sort of like how you make your money as long as you can get around legal.

Corporate law.

Exactly.

Leave your ethics at the door when you come in.

Yeah, just over there with the umbrella.

It's about making money.

And I don't.

I said, I mean, it's one thing I'm still proud about in this country is I'm like, that doesn't roll here.

Yeah.

It is not okay to screw me over if we've got a relationship.

You know what I mean?

You talk to me.

I think we're getting more of that.

I think we're getting more of the litigious, legalistic approach.

And I think that the procurement is making things a bit more difficult.

Certainly I've found in the last few.

Years, apparently lunch, the whole lunch culture is because taxes at 98% and it used to be deductible, so everyone used to buy each other lunch.

Oh, let's go for a nice lunch.

You know, because it's 98, the government's basically paying for it.

May as well get the deduction, you know.

And then entertainment stopped being deductible.

I don't know, whenever.

The 70s or something.

So the 80s.

So since then it's sort of been dying out.

So I was like, ah, okay.

Also, tax rates join.

Oh, are you aware of these R D tax credits?

You've been involved in these at all?

I think that from my perspective, I don't think enough people actually use them or know about them, but I don't know what the flaws are of them.

I think that the government should be encouraging innovation in some way.

Yeah, they've kind of buggered it all up, if I'm really honest.

Yeah, I mean, they were a grant operated by the tax system and it was quite good.

And then actually they started getting enough people using them end at the.

And then there were a load of people committing fraud.

I always struggle with this.

They're always like, oh, there's these fraudsters over there.

And it was like, oh, this is outrageous, we've got to get rid of it or whatever.

Or like, you know, and I'm like, surely when you design a system, you just need to accept that there's going to be 2% fraud or whatever.

Do you know what I mean?

There's always these assholes.

So, you know, you could design the system as well.

So what they've done is made the system more difficult, made it harder to Claim made it, you know, and that's just screwing the 98%.

So I'm just, I, you know, it's a bit of a shame what's going on.

They're saying, oh, it's really important.

But to be honest, at the moment, and the only good news that's happening at the moment is their, the revenue are losing in court.

They just lost a big case because they've just basically been trying to say nothing's R and D unless it's like, you know, change the world or something.

Which wasn't what it was about.

You know, it was about saying if you're trying to problem solve within your knowledge, you know, and you're expanding your knowledge and you can't get it out of chat, GBT or Google, then that's R and D. I don't know if.

It'D work for me.

This is interesting because I'd say that probably 50% of what I do is R and D because I'm experimenting and trying new stuff out.

But your problem is that they don't allow basically creative industries, social sciences and stuff.

So if it's creative, they don't allow.

Even teaching.

You can't really sort of put R and D down for that, probably.

Well, the other thing is, what is.

It's got to be for the benefit of your trade that you, you've either got to fail or sort of create something.

You know, you'd be an interesting one to look at.

I think teaching probably fits under social sciences though, or something like that.

Yeah, there's annoying ones like that.

Dress for success.

Yeah, he's got the bullshit out.

Yeah, I must have just jeans, T shirt kind of guy.

And you know, it's the way.

It's amazing to see that the richest business people, the most successful business people of our time, do not wear suits, shirts.

I cannot wear a shirt and tie.

I just, I feel so uncomfortable just doing this the whole time if I'm wearing a shirt and tie.

So.

But if you go and see your bank manager and he's in shorts and a T shirt, you know, and he's.

There's a limit where you're like, oh, that's a bit weird.

Weird.

You go and see your doctor and he's sort of wearing pants, you know, and a ripped T shirt or something.

I wouldn't feel so comfortable getting on a transatlantic flight if, you know, the, the sort of.

Yeah, they're all in jeans.

Yes.

Scruffy pilot scratching his balls as you're getting into the airplane.

No firefighters turning up you know, I mean, it's sort of a bit weird, isn't it?

You know, they knock at your door.

So I think, I think.

But maybe that's a different question.

That's the concept of a uniform, isn't it?

Yes, but the dress for success thing, there's a psychological thing that happens when people get into the clothes.

There's a lot of people, they'll wear something at the weekend, but when they're wanting to get into business mindset, they get into business clothes.

And yes, that works for some people.

It's not something that works for me or matters for me because I'm always at the periphery and always trying to challenge.

So the idea of getting into a mindset is the opposite of what I want to do.

It certainly helps.

I mean, certainly I go from douchebag idiot to like, you know, and you put a suit on and you look yourself in the mirror and you're like, oh, yeah, maybe like, I do a job or something.

Let's go to work.

So you're a normal, reasonable person when you get out of this, is this what you're saying?

Anything?