On this week’s show we are joined by Lifecycle Software’s Kelvin Chaffer to talk about his own career from developer apprentice to CEO, and how they have built a business around developing new talent.Transcript (Auto generated so treat with a little caution…)Matt: Hello and welcome to episode 274 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Kelvin Chaffer.Chris: Welcome back everybody, another episode of WB40 and we’re here again with you bringing you the news and… Opinions that are so, well, no, Matt’s, Matt’s turning his nose up. We do bring you news. We bring you news each week of what we’ve been doing, the various opinions we have, the things that have wound us up.It is news, Matt. It’s news to some people, just because it’s not news to the whole world. It’s news to the ladies and gentlemen. Okay, fair enough. Yeah, I mean, not news news, I’m not bloody Peter Sissons, for goodness sake. But, , yeah, and so here we are again, and I’m very glad to be here. In fact, I’m very glad indeed, it’s been a busy old week.What have you been up to, Matt?Matt: Well, we had the second week of lots of off site activity at work, and I ran a whole day of it on Wednesday, which I really enjoyed. You know, presenting for half an hour is hard work. Being able to coordinate the whole day is exhausting. But it went very well. And there were some experiments that we did, which seemed to come off, which is good.And lots of people built new connections, which was one of the aims of the whole thing. And I think when you’re working in this hybrid way, being able to make space for people to come together and then not really have anything to do so that they can just talk to one another. is a, um, well it’s a strategy and it’s the one that I adopted and it seemed to work, which is good., and then at the weekend to, , well it was actually just a complete fluke of the timing of it, but, uh, I had a long weekend. And I went to visit a friend who lives in Prague in the Czech Republic. And, , had a wonderful… Long weekend, and, , we ate well, and we went to watch a fantastic game of football, , at, Sparta Prague, which was good., although sadly I remembered then the sight of Watford’s terrible 4 0 defeat. Uh, against Sparta in our one European outing back in 1984. , but, you know, I let it go. That’s good.Chris: It’s a long time to be, long time to be burdened by that.Matt: Well, no, I’m also still, there are many things I’m burdened by in football and most of them relate to about that era, it has to be said., and, , the, I don’t know, the thing with Prague is really, If you say to somebody, particularly if you’re a bloke, you say to somebody, I’m going to Prague at the weekend, then the immediate response is almost like a Pavlovian response is, is it a stag do? And there are a lot of stag do’s that obviously go on in Prague.There are some particularly unpleasant. things coming back on the plane on the way back on Sunday. But if you manage to avoid all the stag do’s, Prague is the most wonderful city. And I think that it’s, yeah, well worth the trip. We had some fantastic food, both at a little brewery which had a restaurant on it one lunchtime, and then, , went to a Mexican place in the center of the city.It’s, it’s very cosmopolitan, very chic, thoroughly enjoyed it. So, , that was good. And then came back, had a day working at home today, and then we’re back into the maelstrom of, you know. The day to day and then trying to avoid watching the politics on the telly for fear of getting really wound up by it.So, um, yeah, that’s the week. How about you? How has your week been?Chris: , pretty COVID stricken actually for some of it, but I, I’ve hard to know quite how that happened because I don’t think I think I might even tell the last week my daughter had tested positive for COVID and I’d been a bit ill, but then I was better.And then I had, I’ve had this a few times, but I’ve never had this kind of revenge of COVID thing where it comes back and whacks you over the back of the head for a few days, you know, when you think it’s gone. So I was in London on Wednesday. I was at a tech UK event called building the smartest state, which was actually really interesting and very well worth going.And I thoroughly enjoyed myself. I felt a bit, , bit wheezy, but not. Not, but not out of breath actually, just when I was walking, you know, if I, if I was on my own route to the tube section or something and, and, and, you know, walking faster, I think that is a bit more hard work than I’m used to. And over the weekend I essentially was, was, was flat out.So yeah, I mean, last week was a bit, bit of a write off, but, Wednesday was super. And as long as I didn’t give everybody, COVID and, It was one of those weeks where, you know, quite a lot happened and then, and in some ways not much happened. And we had an announcement at work where we’ve had some investment in our company.So GMI is now owned by another business. So that’s quite interesting because it opens up new opportunities. And, so, you know, watch this space to see what happens there. And yeah, all good fun. What can I say? It’s a, it’s a, it’s a roller coaster.Matt: Absolutely. And this new investment, , You’ve got people who are investors rather than it being an acquisition or, , like buy another company.Chris: It’s an acquisition, , essentially by a, , investment group. So, uh, sort of build, build a group kind of people. It’s quite small, you know, in that sense, not, not a, not a kind of black rock. It’s not BlackRock, so yeah, in terms of my last, , employment. , so yeah, it’s, , it’s quite interesting, quite an intriguing, uh, setup remains to be seen.Matt: Excellent. Look forward to hearing what happens. Joining us this week, uh, CEO of Lifecycle Software, Kelvin Chaffer. , Kelvin, how’s your week been?Kelvin: I didn’t go to Prague, so, , clearly wasn’t as exciting as that. , , we had lots of customer visits and it’s been discussed in lots of new use cases for an event management system that we’ve been building for one of our, , one of our MP& Os, one of our customers, which has been really interesting., and then at the weekend, I watched the Ryder Cup and watched the, the Europeans smash the, , the Americans, which was, was amazing. And in Newbury, we had some crazy, , it’s hard to explain, it was like a giant puppet walking through the town in a procession, who was called Mo, and he was like a refugee., and, yeah, it was like 45 minutes of this huge 12 foot puppet thing walking through and, , music and, and lots of other stuff going on. Tell the story of his time since he’d arrived. It was very interesting. Although a little bit weirdMatt: Yeah, sounds it sounds it. , I’m not the thing. You’d usually see in Newbury High Street one would imagineKelvin: Not normallyMatt: Yeah, actually, I’m I’m not a big golf fan But I did the people I was with at the weekend were and so the the golf There was some instant with a hat.I didn’t really catch any more than that, but there was some controversy Which was hatChris: based and um… It’s going to be really difficult. It’s going to be a long story. Okay,Matt: alright.Kelvin: IChris: won’t dig into it. Let’s not do it. I occasionally wait for my delirium to check out the scores. I was very pleased to see them win.Matt: It all seemed very rowdy as well. But we were watching it on the TV for a bit and it’s… Because you’ve got like dozens of people all playing at the same time. I don’t know if watching golf on the TV is usually like this. But it just seemed to be like shot after shot after shot after shot. It was like an edited highlights thing.But in real time it was… It was quite surreal and I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on, but, um, yeah, all good. And, , obviously yet another good argument for Europe, I’d say, which is good. Anyway, , we are going to be talking on themes of apprenticeship and developing careersI should probably crack on.So this week, , a theme we’ve touched on in the past a few times, but usually actually from the perspective of people. services to, to, to others. , this week, I think it’s a bit more of a personal story in many ways, , about the idea of, of building careers and attracting people into the tech industry and the telecoms industry and the idea of apprenticeships.Now, before we get into the, the kind of your career story, which I think is, is Fascinating, Kelvin. , it’d be probably helpful just to set the scene a little bit. So you’re the CEO of a company called Lifecycle Software. Just tell us a little bit about what it is that Lifecycle do.Kelvin: So Lifecycle Software are a company that offer BSS.And have done for the last 30 years. No one knows what BSS is, which is, which is always good. But effectively, we look after the billing and customer management of, of telecoms operators. We started primarily with a fixed line. W. R. C. P. S. And some other acronyms that again, I’m sure people weren’t aware of, but more recently we’ve moved into the mobile space.And in the last 10 years, focus has been on another acronym, which is N. V. N. O. S. Which are basically the likes of gift gas, smarty plus net mobile companies like that. They don’t necessarily have their own network, but they piggyback on on someone else’s. And we effectively right will be you. All the software that allows them to run their business.So that includes customer relationship management, the self care, so the piece which you log onto and check your own bill. We actually do the billing. So we create the invoice, which then in turn takes a payment from your bank account so that you keep receiving service. All the reporting that allows our customer to to understand their network.And. Over the last sort of five years again, we’ve had like a huge focus on automation and trying to make the systems as light touch as possible. So 99. 95 percent of the events that are happening in the system are fully automated, uh, triggering all workflows and making sure that the customers are receiving the right information about where they are in their.Allowance, uh, at any given time. And because of all that automation, our MVNOs, can sort of be a bit leaner. so a good example is, uh, Smarty who, uh, piggyback on the three network. They’ve got a subscriber to employee ratio of 13, 750 to one, which is similar to the likes of Netflix. So yeah, effectively they can do more with less.Matt: , in that little market, it’s obvious actually when you think about it, but it’s something of a surprise that actually these mobile virtual operators are not only they’re piggybacking on the networks, but from the sounds of it, many of them are also using similar software as well.So actually it’s a presumably then actually the way they differentiate is in terms of price and brand.Kelvin: Yeah, exactly. Exactly that. So I mean, there’s a bit of a race to the bottom. Currently more data for less. MV& Os really need to be able to differentiate themselves. And actually one of the things that, uh, our mission statement is, is to try and allow any, anyone to become an MV& O.So if, if you’ve got a brand or a A customer base already, you could potentially sell mobile services to add to whatever it is that you’re currently doing.Matt: Chris, do you think we should branch into mobile operations? WhatChris: do you reckon? WB40 MVNO? Yeah. I reckon we could do that. I reckon, I don’t know what our, what our specialismMatt: would be.What would be Dolphin based? No, anyway, let’s move away from that idea. It’s probably how I’ve asked, not the first time. You’ve been there for, for quite some time, this 30 year old software company. You’ve been there for most of that time because you started there as an apprentice. Back in some years ago now, 20 something years ago.Kelvin: Yeah. So I started in 1999. I think I came in as a as a placement student. So I did a, a sandwich course as part of, as part of my university at, uh, at Bournemouth. Um, and I had to do a year in industry. So I came in, did a year, got chucked in the deep, deep end somewhat. We were a bit smaller and, yeah, a bit smaller at the time. So I came in and did software development. Software development initially, and my 1st project was working on the Y2K project and trying to fix, uh, all the bugs that were going to happen. I’ll see, as we moved into the new year, I did, well, what I did at the time was rewrite all lots and lots of SQL statements to make it work with the new date time to turn it to a four digit year, extremely interesting stuff.Chris: Ah, but somebody’s got to do it. It’s quite a handy time to be at that age because everybody needed. Willing hands to pull horrible old, uh, shell, you know, shell scripts and sesquicycle code and whatever it might be apart and, and just check them and, and get, and, you know, just make them into a 40 edit dates or do some windowing or something.It was quite a handy time to be at that, part of your career, really. Cause you know, I, I guess, yeah, it’s quite tedious work, but you’ll learn a fair bit fromKelvin: it. Yeah. So, I mean, that was the first time. I’d done any sort of SQL, really. I mean, I obviously got some training as part of, as part of the placement, but my fingers were certainly crossed, come midnight that, nothing was going to fall over and the world wasn’t going to, and, but again, a great first experience, to do some real software development for.Real customers, as opposed to coming in and, and just sort of doing background tasks. again, a good, it felt good to do something that was needed and necessary.Matt: And then you finished your degree and then you got taken off full time?Kelvin: Yeah, so one of the things that Lifecycle did then and still, still do now is they basically sponsored me to go back to the university for the final year.Um, they, they basically paid for my board for that final year on the proviso that I returned at the end of my course. and I obviously get some some. Good grades is part of that. but again, I mean, that’s, that sponsorship, was good for both of us. It was good because they were bringing back someone who they trained for the year and, and was well aware of the systems, and it was obviously good for me because I knew that I was going to finish university, walk straight into a job and didn’t have to worry about all that come the end of, come the end of my course.So again, convenient on both sides.Matt: Absolutely. And then, so since then, in the years that have passed, you’ve basically, you’ve gone up through a development initially path in terms of becoming a more senior developer and then into development management.Kelvin: Yeah. So I mean, over the years, I’ve been a bit of Jack of all trades, I suppose.So I did start in software development. but I was given the freedom to sort of move into all the different areas, professional services, managed services, et cetera. Business analysis and helped spec out lots of new requirements for different customers. I did testing and validated that whatever was being written was, was set for purpose before it was being released.I did release management back in the day where you had to care a bit more about all the DLs and all the other stuff that needed to be packaged up before it was stuck onto a, uh, onto a server. service management. So again, very customer facing, and support the customers with any billing or, or customer action that they might, might have needed to do.and then sort of the sales side of things as well, really. So demos to systems going on, on customer sites and showing them what we could do, try and close whatever deal it might’ve been at the time. So, I’m going to guess I was okay at all of them, but probably far from brilliant at any of them.Matt: Is there any part of the the business that you haven’t been involved in?Kelvin: until recently I had nothing to do with any of the marketing side of things but in the CEO role, I’ve, had, some direction in that, I’d say some direction it’s typically, uh, being ignored. We did some rebranding recently, and, I was most certainly ignored for, for all of that.But, and rightfully ignored because what came out was extremely fresh and, and different and showed the direction that we wanted to go as a company. So I can’t complain at that.Chris: Yeah, there comes to a point where, you know, we’ll get to a certain age where you’re almost certainly going to be wrong. And therefore, whatever you say should be, we should do the opposite.Right. And that’s it. And that sort of thing. I think that’s, that’s a fair point. and I’m interested though, in terms of CEO, being CEO. When you’re developing, you know, you have a singular focus often, although you know, I can see you’ve done lots of different things and you’ve had a, you’ve had your eye on, or the other needsthere’s, there’s a, there’s a real focus on quality, which should be when you’re a developer, there’s a lot of things, competing for every penny in a business. When you, when you get to that CEO level where you’re, you know, are we going to spend money on improving our test strategy? Are we going to spend money on improving our software development process?Are we going to buy this tool? Have you found that shift in terms of, or even just the perspective that you, that you didn’t have, you know, 10 years ago?Kelvin: Yeah, I mean, I did. So I was, I did head up the R& D department for, for a number of years. And obviously my focus then was on roadmap and technology and making sure that we’re doing cool stuff all the time.We always, always talking about the right things and, and, and making sure we were talking to the customer about those right things. And wanting all the budget to talk about all those right things at the time. yeah, moving into CEO at the start of, the year. again, it’s sort of, it’s been a real learning experience.It’s really sort of opened my eyes to some of the challenges of, of other people. Of some of the other departments. I always had a good understanding of, where development was involved. So professional services and all the configuration side of things, and managed service and understanding how the customers were using it and could understand where budget might be needed there.But from a, a sales marketing and some of the other areas of the business, again, it’s, it’s, it’s completely fresh and new and I’ve had lots of. conversations where I’ve been asking lots of probably silly questions to better understand the what’s and why’s regarding that.Matt: That’s an interesting one because I mean when I’ve changed jobs and changed organization you’ve got a period, in many cases which I’ve strung out probably far too long, but where you’ve got kind of a license to be able to Ask silly questions because you’re naive to the organization.That’s slightly different when you’ve been there for so long and covered off so many different parts of it. That must have been quite challenging for you actually being able to be, needing to ask for clarification on things where maybe, I don’t know, did you think that you knew everything around it before you went into the role?Kelvin: Did I think I knew everything? There’s a saying in there about the more you know. The more you need to know or something along those lines, but that’s certainly, certainly been the case as I found out more, the more I’ve realized I don’t know stuff, but at the same time, I mean, it’s something that I always sort of try and.Drive into, uh, into the guys that are working for, for us is to be curious and don’t be afraid to ask questions because if you’re going to understand and if you’re going to understand it and make your own suggestions off the back of it, then you shouldn’t be afraid to ask questions. That’s, that’s where you, you are going to, grow professionally and personally, I think.Matt: Are there any parts of the, the organization or are there parts of your experience and before that you are finding difficult to let go of in? Your new role?Kelvin: yeah, . So r and d again, I, I owned that department for, for many years. again, always drove the roadmap, all the processes, around, uh, continuing integration and continual, deployment and all that sort of stuff, and wanting to be very agile and fresh and, and modern all the time.And I still, I still like that feeling of creating something and releasing something and having, having people use it and knowing how many people are using it and seeing all the stats around how they’ve been using it. so I can still see all that information, but I don’t get, I don’t necessarily get the same level of achievement because ultimately it’s not been me writing or controlling.I think controlling is probably the wrong word, but it’s not been me writing and releasing that code, which, which is making the difference.Chris: I don’t know that. I think, I think that’s a perfectly reasonable thing to go from the kind of role you’ve done to, to be the CEO. There’s a, sometimes it, it, it feels like in order to be the CEO, you have to essentially, especially in a business that you’ve been in for a while, that you have to do what the last person did, which Is never the way to do it because that last person had their own strengths and their own background.And I think in a technology company, it’s really, it can be really helpful for the person who see a CEO to be kind of still have a sense of ownership of the, of the, of the technology up to a point. mean, you can get all, we get a bit Elon Musk on it and a bit, , where they think they know what’s going on, but obviously don’t.but. Yeah, I mean I think that’s a, it’s a perfectly reasonable position to be in, to say actually this is, this is the way I do it, this is the way it’s going, it’s going to be. You just have to be, as you, you know, as you say, you know, you can, if you just, loom over everything with a shadow that, means that nobody else can, can do their thing, then that’s where it becomes , a bit more negative.Kelvin: Yeah, I mean, that’s certainly been one of the learnings, I think, is staying out of the weeds, as it were, letting people get on with it, allowing them to have the level of accountability without poking my nose in too often and too far, as it were.Matt: So, with that incredible sort of… Traversing of the organization that you’ve done over the last 20 something yearsWhere does that make you? Where does that put you now in terms of your thoughts about how you bring new people into the industry and into your organization as well? And although the you know, the market is both Chris and I know from our own Roles the market is slow in many ways at the moment, but to find good talent to come into organizations people with good skills experience and The The curiosity, I think, actually, more than anything else, to get those people in is as hard as it ever has been.So, where, where, where are you now, in terms of what, how, both how you want to go about it, but also kind of, I guess, what, what’s the division you want to paint for people who might want to come into the, the IT and particularly the telecoms industry? So,Kelvin: I mean, we’re still pushing an apprentice graduate scheme and placement scheme.So we’re dealing with undergraduates and graduates as well as having apprentices being on boarded. we, uh, we, we line up with the, uh, the calendar year, I suppose, from, from a university perspective and bring on. look to bring on for at least four, new graduates every year. And that, that way we have, a rolling, sausage factory.It’s probably completely the wrong terminology for it.But we always have, new graduates coming on. And again, we’re, we’re still doing the. The sponsorship piece, so they come in, we train them up, we take them through internal training programs, mentorships, get them writing code, quickly. I mean, 1 of the things we try to do is get them doing a change and get that released to 1 of our user acceptance environments within their, within their 1st day, and make sure that we’ve got the facilities and tooling to, to enable that.But we, we take them all through all the training again at the end of the year. we offer them the sponsorship and if, if they want it, great. They go back to university for their final year and then they join us at the end of that. and if they don’t want it, then, we find out why. If there’s something that wasn’t quite right for the year, or whether they’ve got, they’ve changed their mind on telecoms, which can sometimes happen and technology, and they’re looking at something else, but that has over, well, 23 years for me, but over the last 23 years, we’ve put 100, 100 or so people through this, this scheme, I think about 20, 22 percent of the organization currently have come in via that, via that means, The retention rate is being is being fantastic.so we’ve got great, great staff retention because people come in, they know what they’re they’re going to get. They, Even with the stuff that’s been happening with COVID and the change to the hybrid working and stuff like that, we’ve, we’ve maintained what, what our retention rate was before. and yeah, I mean, all over the organization, our head of R& D now, again, came out of Oxford, I think, as a placement, one of the guys heading up the managed service team, also.Came through the placement program. We’ve got a couple of very good BAs and solution designers that again have spent years, looking at the different customers that we’ve dealt with to understand the industry and be able to add extremely. good consultancy to any new customers, who also came through that, through that scheme.so again, I mean, that’s, that’s kept working for us. Um, obviously there’s times where we need to employ more experience. and, that’s been more challenging than I think the actual, continual integration of, of graduates as it were.Chris: That’s really interesting because I certainly in. In the organizations that I’ve known and worked with at the moment and people I know.They’ve either, they’ve let graduates or apprentices go because almost they’ve had to concentrate solely on, on getting the business done and their experienced people haven’t got the time to spend with the graduates. which is like, this is, it’s a terrible position for to be in, to have to let an apprentice go or something, you know, halfway through their, their, their course.And so how do you think that that’s, how do you think you’ve achieved that in terms of being able to allocate enough time to, to graduates coming through? I mean, some of whom, you know, have obviously coded, but, but it was different between, you know, writing code in a, in a academic setting and, and committing something to production in a, in a business that’s going to be used.How do you, how do you think you’ve managed that to the point where it’s actually easier than hiring from the market generally?Kelvin: Continually learning. I suppose we’ve got lots of documentation about our processes and those processes are there to help people develop and ensure that the right thing is being committed to our code repositories. So when people are sort of fresh in, there is some level of pair programming happening initially, but you know, All the code is going through code review anyway.So if if 1 of the grads is writing something, it will go into code review. 1 of the more senior developers, or not another developer will review that code, validate it’s doing what the ticket says it should be doing or whatever the feature is being asked for is, and if it’s if it’s not If it’s not ticking the right boxes from our definition of done, it’s sent back with what needs to happen in order to get a commit.So having that feedback loop, again, is quite a nice way of, of. People learning more. So again, initially they, that, that piece of code might go back three or four times whilst they’re learning, the notation and the best way of doing it. And the fact that they need to write unit tests and they all need to pass and all that sort of stuff.Whereas weeks later. They know everything that needs to be done in order to, to get it committed. It’s going through the code review process very quickly. And once, once you’re there again, you’ve got the foundations to be able to move on to more complex data structures and, and development activity. I think we’ve, I mean, the R& D piece and bringing people in as programmers is where it’s certainly where we’ve had the most success that’s given people the foundations are supposed to move around the rest of the business because they’ve learned the right processes in that area.They’ve learned a bit about telecoms, and then they’ve been able to potentially move into a BA role or a managed service role or Sales role or whatever and use the experience from that first month or more To add value in those other roles as well.Matt: It’s really interesting because you’re a relatively small organization in you know the hierarchy of software organizations and If you’re small and if you don’t have a brand, it’s really hard to be able to get people to be able to come to you. And it’s interesting you’re saying about finding actually a later stage career recruitment harder.It doesn’t, you know, that, that that’s, that’s one of the challenges for people who are running, you know, working with in a smaller space. But it’s a really interesting thing to be doing this kind of apprenticeship work at a sustain the business scale and it almost being an intrinsic part of your, your model.When you do have people coming in from outside later on, it is one thing to find them. Is it?I got so many people having come up through the ranks, it sometimes can get a little bit culty or family ish in, in, in weird ways. You know what I mean? It’s like, this is the way that it is here. Have you found it hard to get people to be able to join at later stages of career because of that kind of DNA that’s coming up through, through graduates?Kelvin: I don’t think so. I mean, we’ve still got, I’ve said, 22 percent of… Of people who’ve come in through that channel, so we’ve still got a lot of people that haven’t come in through that channel, who we’ve recruited, more naturally, I suppose, um. So, no, I don’t, I mean, I don’t think we, we’ve got that. I mean, LifeCycle is a real family friendly type organization.We, we, we’ve got our set of core values that we all, drive towards. we have, The right sort of sessions ongoing, between the teams. So daily stand ups as an organization, we’re having monthly all hands to make sure that everybody’s on the same, same page to look at where we’re going as an organization, as well as where we, where we’ve just been and what lessons we should have learned from all of that.mean, I think we’ve got the right sort of balance. well I hope we have.Matt: And for thinking with the, apprentices and the graduates, are they themselves generally, have they come from that background or have you got them mixed in? What are the sorts of skills that you’re looking for to become a pair or a mentor for somebody coming up?Kelvin: I said about people wanting to be curious and asking the right sort of questions. we’ve, we’ve got lots of people that want to help other people to learn. They like having people ask those sort of questions. I mean, internally, we’ve got our own sort of talent management to , help people move up through our own sort of career architecture.and mentoring and, and helping, helping. people to potentially succeed them in in their current role is is part of it’s part of all that.Chris: Are you expecting to grow more?You know, are you expecting to have any significant growth or are you, are you, are you, you see this MBNO thing, that’s a potential kind of market and revenue stream, which is outside your existing market, I guess. So, are those areas you’re looking to grow a business into? So, away from the core in that sense.Kelvin: I mean, so we’re, we’re very UK based currently, most of our MVMAs are based out of the UK, we have got some around Europe, but one of my focal points this year is to be, or to try and help us internationalize, so we built out our, our sales team to, to be asking the right, right sort of questions in different geographical regions to try and push our solutions.Into those regions. So, like, I mean, going back to us wanting to allow anyone to be an MP. And now we’re managing that in the UK currently, but there should be nothing stopping us managing in Europe or America or Australia or or. South Africa or or other regions like that. And that’s where I’m sort of trying to push us., and from a company growth that should come should we get those opportunities because if we move into those regions, we will certainly need to look at, building out teams in those regions to support that. And I’d love to use the same model in those regions as well. I mean, we have some, some guys run out of Portugal.and we do something similar with, with a graduate scheme there as well. So we know it works. so if we, if we can penetrate those, those other areas, then there’s nothing stopping us just keeping the sausage factory going.Matt: Thank you very much coming on the show this week, Kelvin. fascinating story in many ways. how is your week ahead lookingKelvin: bit more exciting than last week. we’ve, we’ve got some more customer meetings, which are extremely exciting. so I’m in London for the next couple of days. and I’m off to Portugal, the weekend, Lisbon for another customer visit, and then we’ve also got, a charity quiz that we’re running as a company.So, we are doing a charity quiz for, for Newbury Soup Kitchen to, uh, then, raise some money. ,Matt: thank you. Uh, Mr. Weston, week ahead.Chris: Well, I’m not coming to London this week. No, I’m, staying in the Midlands because Oh yeah. I’ve got, I’ve got stuff to do.And also to be fair, if I was to try to come to London, I’d get hampered by the, pa of state of the railways. I think there’s some overtime ban or somethingMatt: going on, and yeah. Strikes on Wednesday as well,Chris: in the middle of London, I think this week. So I’ve decided to, discretion is a better, better part of valor.And I’m, I’m staying up here, sequestered the way in the Midlands. I’ve got a lot of things going on. I’ve got some nice meetings with people I’ve not seen for a while. I’ve got a meeting about a company that deals in OS, Oh, do you know this OSINT stuff? This Open Source Intelligence? yeah, got a meeting with a company that deals in that.see what we can do with those guys. it’s going to be, it’s going to be a busy week. but all I can say is, you know. Let’s get through it because it’s, last week was uh, last week was tiring and I’m, I’m hoping to get through this week unscathed and well. How about you?Matt: I have a sort of sense of normality having had the, uh, the long period of, everybody being in offsite things in various places across the country.So it’s back to that thing, you know, that I go on a once in a while about how I’ve got some statements of work to write. I’ve got some statements of work to write. Oh yes. Woohoo. that’s, that’s great. I have got some work with a couple of colleagues looking at, we’re trying to be able to create , a little.simple checklist tool for being able to work out the state of a particular client engagement at any point. Sort of like those sorts of things you get with , I don’t know, project checklists and that kind of stuff. For just to, you know, how is it at the moment? Is it good? Is it bad? Are there areas you need to dig into or not?So that’s going to be quite interesting, trying to be able to distill everybody’s ideas into something that is simple. And useful and also doesn’t get mistaken as being some sort of management reporting, which is where this kind of technique often fails because everybody then doesn’t do it because they think it’s management reporting.So that’s going to be part of what I do. Other than that, , yeah, uh, I it Christmas yet? There have been mince pies bought in my house already. There’s been discussions about the Christmas party. It’s that sort of time of the year, isn’t it? You get into October and everybody’s mind immediately goes to, , the end of the year.It’s a weird thing, it’s the way it is. Anyway, , thank you very much again, Kelvin, for joining us. It’s been an absolute pleasure.Kelvin: Thank you Uh, 86 days till Christmas. Oh, thank you. See,Matt: 86, 86, and take a few for shopping days. and, Chris, you and I will be back maybe not Monday next week for recording, maybe a different day next week, I’m not sure.Or maybe not next week at all. Or maybe not next week at all. These things are very fluid, aren’t they? They are. So we might not be here next week, but we will definitely be here the week after. We’ve got some interesting new guests lined up. We’re I was actually having some conversations today about a show about culture, as requested by Mr.Chris King. I have found the person to be able to guide us through that thorny topic. And so we’ll be looking to be able to schedule that in the next few weeks, amongst other things. So, that’s it for this week. We might not be here next week, but we will be back the week after. And so until then, goodbye.Kelvin: Thank you for listening to WB 40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast.com, on Twitter @WB40Podcast, and an all good podcasting platform.

On this week’s show we are joined by Matt Webb to talk about his approach to invention with emerging technologies.You can subscribe to the AI Clock mailing list for updates and to find out about the upcoming Kickstarter here: https://aiclock.substack.comYou can find out more about Acts Not Facts, Matt’s new product invention studio here: https://www.actsnotfacts.comAnd you can find Interconnected, his blog since Feb 2000 and place for thinking in public about technology and design, here: https://interconnected.org/home/If you’d like to check out Christophe Weston, he can uncannily be found here.Photograph of one of Tim Hunkins marvellous contraptions at the Under the Pier Show in Southwold.This week’s show transcript (AI generated so treat with a little caution)Matt: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to episode 273 of WB40, the weekly podcast with me Matt Ballantine, Chris Weston and Matt Webb.Welcome back to the show. It is time again for more excitement, intrigue and telling you that we are not going to do things that we never intended to do in the first place. Christopher, how has your week been?Chris: Well, it’s been a good week, Matt. I have it’s been quite a nice week in many ways except for being sort of slightly ronered at the end of the weekend, [00:01:00] Friday, Saturday, feeling pretty rough.Didn’t test, but daughter tested and she got, she was positive. So, I’m hoping that , if I was, , positive for coronavirus or COVID, , on Thursday that I didn’t give it to the many people that I met at the, , CIO100 event. But there was a lot of talk of it. It’s been around, right? So, . I don’t feel like I’m a super spreader.Not this year. Anyway, the, , that was great. I mean, that event was really good. I have to say it’s been, you know, you’ve done this, , years ago, Matt, and I’ve done it more recently. , I really enjoyed. Seeing everybody at the event, meeting new people, lots going on, genuinely had a good time. And other than that, yeah, it’s just been a busy week with, with, with work stuff.And, , and then me playing with, , some AI tooling that, Made me speak French, which was a bit, a bit weird and, and, you know, really impressive in many, many ways, [00:02:00] but opens up a lot of questions about, about how much we trust the tech, really. So, uh, so yeah, it’s been a good one. Did you see that?Matt: I did. I did.And I found it very disturbing. , so this is some, I don’t know what we call these things anymore. I mean, it’s, it’s presumably using some sort of machine learning kind of thing going on underneath it. But it’s basically some videomanipulation tool that makes you look like you are speaking French in A passable French accent but still very much a Chris Weston from Tamworth accent. Your lips are moving in sync with the thing. You’ve got no idea what it is you’re saying because you don’t speak French and therefore you could have been declaring war on Macron for all you know.And I think this slippery slope started with allowing blurring of backgrounds and I said it at the time. that when you start to be able to allow people to be able to alter the reality in in the way in which we’re [00:03:00] interacting really dark and bad things might happen and you speaking you know more than passable french without a first clue about how you’re doing it is potentially badthingsChris: oh killer it’s not that’s that’s harsh anyway but i’ll also say you know you’re sounding a bit you’re sounding a bit puritan it’s a bit puritanical there’s like women women wear makeup To alter their appearance.We should ban that. Ban it completely. We don’t know what they really lookMatt: like underneath. Okay, now this is true, and I’ve been, I’ve just finished Alice Sherwood’s wonderful book, Authenticity. I’m seeing if I can get to, , lure Alice onto the podcast at some point to talk about it, because it’s a fabulous book about what is real and what isn’t.And, you know, one of the things she argues is that the idea of people impersonating others, or things impersonating others, is something that goes through… Evolution way before humans. There’s people, you know, mimicking and pretending.Chris: I mean, like,yeah, [00:04:00] I was just dying. I mean, he wasMatt: doing it way before he was doing it for many years as well.But I think there’s a, I don’t know, there’s just at what points do we start to get weirded out by this stuff to the point where you can’t actually trust anything, madcap conspiracy theorists that are already empowered enough with enough. craziness without then having Chris Weston speaks French to add to the, you know, it will be on there with Pizzagate and 5G coronavirus Bill Gates and Chris Weston speaking French.Now, this is the first sign of the beginning of the apocalypse or, or something. I don’t know, maybe I’m overreacting a bit. What was the technology that we’re using to be able to achieve this sleight of hand and.Chris: It was a thing called, it was a tool called Haygen. It’s out there, it’s out there in the world.I can, I’ll send you the link or something. I think it might have been a labs thing. But it was, you can pay to have it done. I didn’t pay. And I put it into the queue and then a week later it popped out with a video. It’s not [00:05:00] quick, but it’s probably quicker if you pay for it.Matt: Yeah, I’d imagine so. , yeah, I found it all very disturbing and we’ll put a link in the show notes to that video as well, because it is worth seeing., but it is, I think,Chris: I think it’s worth seeing if you know what I speak like already and you go, Oh my, that does sound like Chris speakingFrench.Matt: Yeah, quite bizarre. , so, so yes, and it sounds like the CIO 100 has seriously upped its game since I was either a judge or a competitor. , I see that they all got very glitzy.Lumps of presumably glass or perspex presented to them by television’s famous Gabby Roslin.Chris: Yes, indeed.Where I got a piece of cardboard through the post presented to me by nobody in particular, but awarded by you. Which, , you know, they’ve upped their game. Yeah, yeah, to be fair. I think, I think these are, I don’t think it’s marble or glass, I think it’s, , I think it’s samples of the asteroid Bennu that they made of it, so it’s thatglitzy.Matt: Wow, there’s a thing.[00:06:00] Joining us this week, , somebody who I’ve been trying to get onto the show, well I haven’t been trying to get onto the show, I’ve been wanting to get onto the show for ages, but I actually managed to get round to sorting it out only recently. Uh Matt Webb, how has your last seven days been?Matt W: Well, it’s been pretty busy. I’ve been, I’ve been flying to Hamburg to go and speak at a conference. , but I think just to connect to what you were just saying, we’ve also in the last week set up a secret family passphrase to use in the event of, uh, imposter scam. Deep fake video calls.Matt: Ah, so they, they say, well, what is the, uh, the third styling on the right?And they’ll, they’ll respond with, it is flying tonight. And then that will mean that you can show that it’s a, it’s a real thing.Matt W: Something like that. Well, I’m not gonna give you any hint. I know, obviously, which would kind of destroy the, the whole idea, destroy the purpose, but it’s, it feels true. There’s a, there, there’s a rising imposter scans., you can, you know, what was the one in Washington DC not long ago? You can train. Uh, deep fake audio of [00:07:00] 30 seconds of audio for less than a hundred bucks, and it is relatively common now just to kind of, you know, go and, uh, you get a phone call from, you know, what sounds like it’s one of your relatives, and they say, you know, I’ve been in a car accident, , they’ve, they’ve taken my phone, this is my one call, I need 5, 000 for bail, um, you’re gonna get a call in a minute from my lawyer who’s gonna help set this up, and it is common enough that the police know about it, and easy to do, and, you know, I know these kind of things have been happening for a while.But the, you know, the ease of it means it’s worth setting up, you know, passphrases or maybe, you know, one day we’ll have two factor authentication for humans or something.Matt: Yeah, yeah. That’s, that’s crazy, isn’t it? And I think there is, I mean, there’s this thing about, oh, we’ll put, some sort of watermark into everything that’s fake to say it’s fake.And so I can see one big glaring… Flooring that plan. It’s the only people who do it aren’t the ones you want to not, you know, it’s crazy. [00:08:00] But, , yeah, I think, well, there we go. Passphrases for the family. That’s the next project. It’s not disturbing at all, is it? No, no, no. I mean, usually it’s fairly miserable at the start of the show, but this has gone, you know, to another level.You know,Matt W: people,Chris: people beating their, , their… Beloved children about the head and neck with a spade because they’ve forgotten the password. It’s, it’s just pretty, I’m just, I’m pretty sad. It’s happened by the whole situation.Matt W: But also positively, went to Hamburg, spoke at a conference called NEXT, , where Accenture had a main, , Sponsors, but of a conference of ideas, , talking about playfully prototyping to find out how we might be interacting with AI.And that was a wonderfully positive experience. And I have totally forgotten how to travel, it turns out. Left for the airport late, forgot to take my noise cancelling headphones.Matt: You know. Didn’t have all your things neatly arranged so that when you got to the security, you could just pop them out one after one, put [00:09:00] them all back in again.Matt W: Forgotten how toMatt: do it. Took something over 100 millilitres. Yeah, I know, there’s so many. , yeah, I’m travelling at the weekend actually, I’m going to see some friends in Prague. And, I think I’ve sort of remembered how to do it all. But this isn’t a work one, this is a pleasure one. So it’s, even that is confusing.I don’t know, they seem to change the systems to… Anyway, that’s a good trail for what we are going to be talking about on this week’s show, your experiences in Hamburg there, so I think we should probably crack on.Unless you take into [00:10:00] account my beloved co host’s slight affliction with limericks, this is the second time on WB40 we have talked about limericks. In, in part, poetry. The last time, you may remember, was with the wonderful poet, Mr. G. And he’d been doing some work with the Open Data Institute, and we talked about poetry and data.And it was a wonderful conversation. This time around, we’re talking about poetry and generative AI and a, a playful experiment stroke product development that you’ve been working on for a while now, Matt. , what, what you’re doing.Matt W: I have on my shelf a small screen about four inches across, and every minute it tells me the time in the form of a rhyming couplet. So to give away what time we’re recording this right now, I’ll tell you what it says at this second. On bookshelf I stand, time shall not be missed, with [00:11:00] rhyme and rhythm, 7 to 54 p.m. persists. No, I didn’t say they were good poems. Just that there’s one every minute. Chris canMatt: relate to the not good poems, but that’s another story.Matt W: So the poem is… The poem’s generated by, well, originally by GPT 3 and then by Turbo, ChapGPT, , which… It’s a different kind of model, and maybe we can talk a little bit later about how the different models feel, because I’m tuning in a different way.And it’s a, it’s a physical device, it’s a clock, and I put it out as a very quick hack. On X or Twitter or whatever we call it nowadays, , at the beginning of the summer, , where it went viral, uh, was in the New York Times, in the Verge, it went, it went viral in newspapers in India, ended up in Private Eye, which matters quite a lot for me.Oh, wonderful. And so over the summer, I’ve been working on developing it as a hardware product. I’m going to be going to Kickstarter in a few weeks. And working with the [00:12:00] industrial designers an incredible studio called approach on what the you know, how to manufacture the thing how it’s gonna how it’s gonna look Yeah, it’s , it’s been an entertaining and entertaining.A few months with this thingMatt: and the the thing I really love about it is that an awful lot of what we’re seeing at the moment with , where exploration with particularly generative AI is happening is that it is, , being used as an approach to try to be able to drive efficiency and cost saving and the replacement of human endeavor with half arsed Software stuff and so devaluing humans along the way and what you’re doing is to be able to do something that nobody would ever Commission a poet to be able to write half arsed rhyming couplets every minute forever Because that would be insane and no poet want to do that well, I mean, maybe one would but but what you’re doing is it feels like it’s additive rather than Subtractive you’re [00:13:00] trying to be able to find ways in which , the technology and some of the hardware can be brought together to be able to do something fun and playful and, um, exploratory.Matt W: I do think that’s why people like it. So when people, , have been in contact with me about what, what they like about it, and it’s often people who aren’t, you know, technical or deep into AI, uh, one of the reasons they like it is it, it gives them a way in to talk about what generative AI can be used for., which isn’t in the form of AI is going to take our jobs or something very, very obscure. It can generate small amounts, a live copy that sounds a bit like being human. It’s like, right, now we understand that, right? It’s not going to take our jobs. It’s a bit like having an intern. , the poetry is kind of strange.It’s weirdly motivational sometimes. , it fibs. And all of these things, I think, help unpack something which is, you know, AI, a bit obscure. [00:14:00] A bit mysterious. Nobody really knows how it works. , and it gives a way in to have that conversation.Matt: When you and I first met, now this isn’t the first foray that you’ve made into creating things. This is, this is what you do, isn’t it? I mean, the idea of being able to help people come up with ideas and to be able to shape ideas. , we first met in my… Difficult Microsoft days, as I now refer to them. And, , you, at that time, had something else that had gone pretty viral, from what I remember, which was a thing called Little Printer.And Little Printer was a… little thermal printer but had been created in such a way that it was a bit anthropomorphic. It had a sort of outline of a face on it and, and feet and could be used as a target for all sorts of things. Essentially what it was was a very early Internet of Things device, it’s hard to actually realize that it’s only about a decade ago that very early Internet of Things things were happening, [00:15:00] how much that that world has developed.Um,Matt W: I mean, so that, you know, that was back then I co founded a Berg. And we’ve been working on, you know, connected hardware, sort of opening up the space. And I think, just the thing I want to say is that so many people at Berg were, you know, poured their talents and, , creative energy , and technical energy into Little Printer., so anything I can say about it is really just kind of, you know, what I took away from that. You know, experience of, you know, looking into connected hardware and then going through manufacturing, kind of, you know, what, what resulted from that. And it’s an incredible thing to realize that, you know, the physical world can kind of talk back to us.And how do we relate to that? And what does that kind of mean? , and I think this is part of, , you know, I’ve always been involved in what I’d call like product invention. You know, how do we open up, you know, new, new ideas or new [00:16:00] places for imagination? , and I think what Little Printer embodied and now…You know, the AI clock, the perm clock, whatever I end up calling it, is that One way of finding out those things is to roll your sleeves up, get your hands dirty, and just make things. And it’s not the only way of coming up with new ideas and starting these conversations. , but it’s, it’s my favourite way, and it’s the one I know how to do.So for example, with Little Printer, the, the thing that as a studio it led to for us, weirdly, is working with Nespresso. So this is way back when. , Nespresso machines, I don’t know whether you know now, , they have a button on them. That lets you order more capsules from the device itself. So it counts how many capsules it’s used, and you can purchase it through the device., and that was a, that was by Berg. That was prototyped with Berg. It used the same platform that Little Printer did, which is a very kind of esoteric, toy like product, but here it is kind of, you know, being used for commerce. [00:17:00] And now this is in their machines, and that’s kind of how you purchase capsules alongside, you know, phoning them up and using the store and using the app and device commerce was a kind of a new thing back then it sort of preceded amazon dash so this kind of playful weird thinking opens up other ways of operating and you know i think that’s a you know it’s an You know, it’s a fun strategy, I think, as well as a useful one.Matt: How easy do you think organisations, established organisations find it to be able to do this kind of approach? Because I think the other thing about with both of those examples, and I’m sure you’ve done more as well, but they weren’t a replacement. They weren’t a digitisation of the now. In both cases, what they did was that they found some elements of an emergent technology, Internet of Things, generative AI, and said, Let’s Create something that is [00:18:00] entirely new, not because it necessarily serves a, , a problem solving purpose.But what it does is it helps us to be able to explore the idea. And it’s, but it seems that most commercial organizations are so obsessed with it having to be a solution to a problem. But that, is that a hard approach for them?Matt W: I wonder whether this is to do with, where we are in the technology S curve as well.The last 10 years, let’s say, we’ve kind of known, you know, in organizations what technology can do. If somebody goes like, you know, we’re going to make an app or a website, you can loosely say, Budget this, it’s going to achieve this. These are the metrics we’re going to use for it. And this is how people are, you know, going to get promoted.This is what success looks like. And we sort of know that just intuitively, you know, engineers, designers, PMs, leadership, all the rest. Um, there are periods where we don’t know that. 10 years ago, we didn’t know that when, , when mobile was really taking off. Um, 15 years ago, we [00:19:00] didn’t know that. You know, at the beginning of digital, and I’d argue that we don’t know that again at, , this sort of dawn of generative AI, and the question is, what do we, what do we do with that?How do we, how do we kind of find our way through, uh, these kind of things? Because like the strategy that’s worked for the last 10 years when we’ve known technology is the thing we have to discover is user needs, and we figure that out by iterating and, you know, with With kind of, you know, making decks and two by twos and post it notes, which are all very good when we don’t know what the technology is capable of, I don’t think that, and we have to find, you know, other approaches instead, just to ramble on a little bit more about that one approach that I’ve really kind of found very attractive is out of meta research and they call it pathfinding and it’s a kind of a combination of, , prototyping and strategic recommendations. Which go hand in hand. So you’re not you don’t you don’t just make a prototype.You don’t just experiment. , what you have to do is you have to use, [00:20:00] design methods to make a recommendation to the organization and, you know, to build some conviction into we need to do more research here or we should build a product here or there’s an opportunity over here. And that’s why I try and frame the kind of product invention I do as fitting into pathfinding.and that’s, you know, I think that’s that that’s where we are. You know, we’re imagination bottlenecked at the moment. and so we need, you know, we need kind of approaches like that.Chris: There’s something to be said though, isn’t there, for having, if you’re inventing something, I think inventing is the right word in this context, that, that’s physical, that, you know, that you can, you can pick it up and put down as opposed to a piece of software that goes, that runs on your smartphone, which is.You know, that’s the easiest way into create anything and it has been for some time is to write some software, but actually making something, which is a thing that does something that I think that has a different effect on people.Matt W: It does. I think what it does is it, you know, you, [00:21:00] you just need to look at when you get a A few different people, different disciplines in the room together, talking about a deck or something on a whiteboard, the amount of misunderstandings, you know, people hear what they expect to hear.And when you put something tangible in front of them, which can work with software, but is very, very effective with physical things, suddenly you give something, give people something, which is beyond. what they expect. Beyond language really, it is, it is just a thing, right? And it insists. And suddenly people start being able to have a conversation which is beyond, uh, you know, they stop talking past each other.so I’m a big believer in artifacts when you want, you know, ideas to cross between engineering, design, marketing, leadership, product. And the rest, I mean, the, the problem I think with making artifacts, what, what makes it kind of difficult is how do you arrive at things which feel sufficiently new [00:22:00] and communicate.And that’s a whole different, you know, set of difficulties.Chris: There is something about, as you say, an object. And sometimes that is disappointing because it’s always going to be something somebody’s seen before or a derivative of or a bit like because that’s how objects are. We just can’t just magic new things up.And when we’re talking about things and sketching things out on a whiteboard or coming up with ideas, there’s lots of kind of possibilities hanging in the air. And they’re all in different people’s heads and not… Maybe not everybody sees each other’s possibilities, but when you bring an object in, a lot of those possibilities collapse into what could be done that’s like this, which is good in a way because it, as you say, it cuts through all that stuff, but also it kind of removes a bunch of things that could have happened if that object hadn’t arrived.[00:23:00]Matt W: I think it strips a lot of artifice away. It stops people kidding themselves that something might be possible that they’re imagining, which, you know, actually when you try and do it. The other thing it does is it opens up new possibilities. So one of the, you know, the parts of my practice is what I call software sketches, where I try and make…You know, if I can imagine an interaction, like, let’s say one of the things I’ve been working with recently is how could we interact with AI as if the AI is like a fake user, an NPC, right? So on a, on a whiteboard canvas, the AI would have its own cursor, you would see it move around, you know, it talks to you in chat.And, you know, I can imagine that, right? But when I start building it. What happens is it makes me feel very different, you know, certain things are very difficult to build. It’s like, Oh, okay, I need to do something that, , certain things surprise me and I’m like, Oh, okay, I could build that thing out a little bit more.And so that’s part of the process as well. I think there’s a, there’s a kind of a, a sort of a back and forth with the, [00:24:00] with the material. I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you what surprised me about the clock, if that’s okay, because one of the odd things is I’ve been, you know, sitting, you know, I think like, you know, everyone have a kind of a hybrid practice now, which means I’m sitting at home in my office with my little clock on the shelf, and it’s, you know, giving me a poem every, every minute, all day.So it’s in the corner of my eye. So I’m seeing a lot of poems generated by open AI. And that’s, you know, absorbing that. Sometimes, like I said, I use GPT three. And then I realized that actually it was, you know, 10th of the price to use chat GPT. So I’ll use that instead. So that was, you know, the kind of the surprise that wasn’t really a surprise is that the poems generated by chat GPT are rubbish compared to GPT three.GPT three has much better vocab, right? Like it doesn’t, it does much better poems. So that was kind of, you know, but I’m going to go with the, I’m going to go with the worst poems because there are, they’re, they’re [00:25:00] cheaper. Like, let’s just say that, which is like kind of, I don’t know what that says Literarypersuasions, but you know, practical, practical, practical, practical creativity. The second, the second thing, which surprised me was that it fibs, it makes up the time in order to make the rhyme work about one time in 15, probably, you know, just kind of, you know, the hallucination is, is real. And this is also great.Right. Because it means now I’ve got a way into very tangibly talk to people about the. The hallucination risk with generative AI. So that was, that was good. The thing that most surprised me is the poems that come out are motivational. They make me feel like, you know, there are poems that come out, which is, you know, you know, it’s such and such time go out and get things done.[00:26:00] Right. Or, , time is short. Let’s get up and like seize the day. I mean, there are, there are poems like that. I did not put that in the prompt. It is like hanging out with LinkedIn influencers as a tiny screen. And the question for me is like, where does that come from? It’s not in the prompt. It’s in the, it’s in the, the, the tuning given to the turbo model.This kind of enthusiasm, this kind of get up and go. The reason I kind of find it really intriguing is that do you remember years ago, Facebook did some, an unethical experiment in the newsfeed where they changed. The sentiment of what people saw. Do you remember this one? It was, yeah, they, they sort of like took a, took a group of people and they, they looked at the newsfeed and they selected the posts with the algorithm, ones that had a [00:27:00] negative sentiment and they took another group and everyone had a slightly more positive sentiment in the posts they saw from their friends in the newsfeed.And then they measured the sentiment of those people in those two groups afterwards. And they found that if you see more negative stuff, you become more negative. If you see more positive stuff, you become positive. Of course, right? Not okay for them to run that experiment, but like now we know chat GPT 100 million people were using that the end of February I don’t know how many people are using it every day now Like I’m not not sure anybody’s put for the figure but it’s a lot right and all of these people are exposed to the exact same kind of experiment that those people in the Facebook groups were which is we are being exposed to something which has a A viewpoint, which in that case is, you know, the case of chat GPT is positive and linked in influence and motivational and go and get it.And I’m not saying that’s a good thing or a bad thing, just that it’s something that [00:28:00] is worth saying out loud. And maybe, you know, maybe it’s fine that we all have a little tiny Sam Altman gently influencing the way we approach the world. Or maybe, actually, it would be better if we didn’t have that culturally, like, you know, that we had more time, you know, to purchase the kind of.Meditation or thinking about things, but it’s worth noting, I think, and that’s something which came out of, let’s be clear, a very, you know, quick 30 minute hack assembling parts already had, which there’s no other way I would have come to that, you know, point of view or realization or whatever you want to call it.Matt: That’s fascinating. And the, the idea that, , the culture that has gone into creating the training data that is then used to be able to power the machine, but then is tweaked and how those cultures feed on each other and how those cultures are [00:29:00] going to be very American, , you know, Western, but particularly American, very individualistic, is maybe that’s part of what’s coming through within that.It would be fascinating to understand what would happen if you were to say, have the French version. Obviously, Mr. Weston here would be able to help advise and give consulting skills for you on the French version. But if you were to create the same experiment, but if you were to do it so that it was a French poetry clock drawing from.the corpus of French, , data that has been used to be able to program a French generative AI, what would the sentiment be there? And actually you could try that for many different languages, that in itself would be a really interesting way of being able to start to be able to understand the way in which different cultures represent in online., and that becomes a, you know, out of that is this fascinating experiment into [00:30:00] understanding different perceptions, different, this also was inspired actually from a conversation I had earlier today with, wonderful thinker Mark Earls. And we were talking about some of the, the challenges of assuming that particularly things like behavioral science that, everybody thinks like.American undergraduates because that’s mostly the only time that any experiments have ever been done in behavioral science It’s done on students in america. So there’s a huge cultural bias around in all of that huge types coming back to that point about , the uh, the Having it as a as a machine. I mean I speak as somebody who on my desk in front of me here I’m surrounded with pieces of hardware that are designed to be able to enable me to interact with software in different ways is music kit.And they all are doing exactly the same thing in many ways But one has got big rubbery buttons and one of them’s got something that looks like a piano keyboard and one over there looks like a saxophone and various other things and and there’s something about the way in which Different hardware forms dramatically changes the way in which I interact with essentially the same [00:31:00] Pieces of software and just coming back to that idea of breaking away from just using a smartphone.Smartphones are wonderfully amazing things to be able to quickly be able to put software into the hands of many people very quickly, but there’s a huge amount of constraint, I think now built into the smartphones that we know how apps work and they all essentially work the same. So to try to be able to explore something like., generative AI, I think it would be extremely difficult within the constraints of the medium of the smartphone now, because, you know, apps is apps is apps, then there’s not a huge amount of variation in them. IMatt W: wonder if it would be possible to open up new ways of doing, I think it’s possible, right, you know, with social media and with, and with, the.You know, games, [00:32:00] especially different, different ways of different ways of doing things. I think there are, you know, the, it takes a long time to explore all the possibilities of a medium and maybe, maybe apps aren’t done yet. One of the examples I sort of come back to is like how long it took for the worldwide web itself to be like understood.You know, you kind of think the web was invented, what, in 1990. First commercial browser in 1994, then it took until 1998 to realize you could put a credit card number into a text field and press submit, and that was e commerce. You know, and then how many years did it take for SAS businesses to overtake boxed software businesses, like 10, maybe 15, like it was a long time.And I wonder whether the same is, you know, also true a little bit of apps. There’s a couple of other, you know, aside from AI, there’s a couple of other things that I sort of like look at as potential disruptions. I think one is the move to real time multiplayer. The, the [00:33:00] digital world is becoming a social one where we kind of, you know, using things, things like not, not just collaboration.Right. But like, and, and in games, but, you know, something where we can sense the presence of people around us that that’s happening. and the other thing is like you were saying with little bits of hardware, it’s becoming, you know. Ever easier for the internet to kind of break out of computers.And I know I’ve been kind of banging that drum for a good kind of 15 years, but I’m still a believer right in the vision of ubiquitous computing and being able to use our, you know, peripheral, perceptions, to interact with. Interact with technology. And I think between all of these things, we may, you know, there might be, there might be life in the old app yet.I thinkMatt: I’m, we had a guest on a couple of weeks ago, who, was talking about a platform called soundscape. Which was originally a Microsoft research project, which was looking at using spatial audio [00:34:00] initially to be able to help people with visual impairment, but actually more broadly than that, to be able to do kind of augmented reality in sound so that you could have spatial positioning of objects in the real world, laid upon the real world through headphones, through, you know, modern headphones.And one of the things we talked about in that conversation was how creating an entirely new pattern for interaction is really, really tricky. And if you look at what’s been going on with visual virtual reality, there are some conventions that Meta are starting to try to be able to put together of, you know, hand gestures so that you’re not using the controllers all the time.But still, where they’re getting to is essentially a WIMP interface, where you point on screen with your finger, or you point on a virtual screen. Because it’s so difficult to be able to get people to be able to put the effort into using new interaction patterns. If you look at the way in [00:35:00] which, getting rid of the, the button and using gestures alone on phones, I’d love to know how many people still have a virtual button on their screen because they haven’t got their heads around the ideas of the swiping from the left or swiping from the right or swiping up from the bottom or down from the top.And they just want to be able to stick with the, the patterns that they’ve got. So I think it, it’s not. It’s not that we can’t change interaction patterns on smartphones, but actually the effort to do it now is getting increasingly difficult. But moreover that it, it, it, it gives a whole load of preconceptions about what a thing is that if you want to explore something new, it gets, you’ve got a whole load of stuff to be able to overcome there to be able to make it not look like the thing that everybody’s used to.And therefore you’ve got to break over those kinds of UI pattern to be able to then get to a point where you can explore. Something which if you stick a E Ink screen on an Arduino and then start [00:36:00] having poems coming out every minute is a totally different prospect and is immediately obviously different.Matt W: No, I think you’re right. You need a kind of a point of disruption to get people to, to think about different interaction patterns because you’re changing the mode of interaction just for the sake of it, is not there. And maybe, you know, AI is our, is our way in. It’s actually interesting as well.Like how, why the clock was a kind of a 30 minute hack, because I think this is also relevant for our discussion about, opening things up. So I, I’ve had a kind of an, I love ink, you know, everyone. Everyone does a little bit, I think, because it’s not a kind of a glowing screen. It kind of takes on the light of the room.And I’ve had a word clock on my shelf for about three years. The Bartlett Connected Environments program put out some open code to make one on the kit. So I made one. I was building with a startup. I was helping out, prototyping some software about how we might do executive coaching, using generative AI over WhatsApp.You know, because basically [00:37:00] one of the things about AI means you can get much, much closer to the user. so this was like another project, you know, recently, and I was going, well, how do I prove when I’m, you know, making my WhatsApp thing work, my prototype, what’s my proof of concept that shows that actually I do have everything wired up, you know, I send a message.I want something to come back, which is almost like a proof of life in the AI. And for whatever reason, I decided it would send back the time and then for whatever reason, I decided it would make a poem. Out of that. Just in order to prove the thing works. And I, I think I’ve done that because I’d also made another software sketch recently about how, you know, you could have a little avatar in a Google Doc and it would tell you who had been there recently.But, you know, it would do that as poetry. And I think. Why was that? That was because I’d talked somebody from Iceland recently on one of my, on Office Hours calls and we’d been talking about Elves or Trolls or something. [00:38:00] Yeah,Matt: so,Matt W: so we were, we were talking about we, you know, because they can’t build roads somewhere because they’re already, yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely, rocks and all that kind of stuff, right?So all of this, you know, the, the elves and there’s a nice emoji of an elf, which means that got me into like being Able to do my software sketch easily, which is like a big part of it. So I had this kind of poem, and I came downstairs one morning, and I looked at my clock, and I looked at this demo, and I was like, why don’t I plug those things together?And I plugged the things together, and I couldn’t stop laughing for about 30 minutes watching this thing. And so I put it on Twitter. And that’s what happened. And, you know, maybe, like, I would, I would love to, you know, do a little shout out for the mailing list at some point, get some, get some folks on who are interested in this.Maybe we can put a link in, in the show notes later. But, what I found fascinating about this is that, like, the way these things work is these little Lego bricks that you do for different reasons, either to kind of, try and illustrate an interaction, [00:39:00] or try and learn a new skill. or because. You have to do it because it’ll make you laugh.I’m all just combining two other things and going, well, what will happen? and then you fill in some gaps and now you’ve got another Lego brick you can use in the future. And that’s what kind of carries the whole thing forward, I think. And like, I could say that one of the things that’s happened to technology in the last 10 years is that making those Lego bricks has got really complicated.You know, the iOS SDK is vast. It’s not possible for anyone to be able to do that. but one of the things about AI, because it’s reasonably early, and, you know, integrating with WhatsApp reasonably early, and it is just text, is we’re making Lego bricks that are the, the right size to be manipulated and combined.And that lets us break past, you know, the imagination bottleneck, which is where we are. You know, this is my favorite part of like, you know, the technology curve right this point where you can just get your hands dirty and make Lego bricks and combine things and that tells you [00:40:00] something new. And then, you know, you end up from that possibly with a new product.But if not. You know, you end up with just something very odd instead, and that’s also fun. But yeah, there’s, there’s that bit of the process, and then there’s kind of how do you make it useful in business, and that’s, that’s a different kind of art, I think.[00:41:00]Chris: So I’d best find out, Mr. Ballantine, since we’re running out of time, what are you doing nextMatt: week? In the week ahead, we have a series of events happening in London, which I’ve got much more active involvement in than I did in the ones in Manchester last week, so I’m running the whole day on Wednesday, which will be entertaining.And then a trip away, for pleasure, not for work, to the beautiful bohemian city of Prague for a long weekend, which will be very nice. Then back to, back to things again by the time we speak again next week, I guess.Chris: Hmm. And, how about you, Matt? What’s the, what’s life like for you this week? What have you got waiting for you?Matt W: I’ve got a fascinating project at the moment with a startup called PartyKit that does real [00:42:00] time multiplayer internet infrastructure where I am… It’s a brilliant title, this. Inventor in residence for a few months, with the idea that by making new things, it can give some direction to the platform. So I am looking at, how groups of people will use AI together.Chris: Very interesting. That’s certainly got, your work goes out there. It sounds like a lot of pressure being the inventor in residence. People keep knocking on your doors, asking what you’ve come up with today.Matt: That sounds fascinating. how about you, uh, Chris, what have you got in the week ahead?Chris: Oh, I’m down in that London again this week, various, things and.Yeah, and pretty much it, really. It’s that time of year, isn’t it, where everything sort of starts to really roll between now and Christmas, where we can actually get things done, get projects completed.Matt: Yeah, it’s two months now before December and everybody starts to get distractedby Christmas [00:43:00] and the break.Chris: All of that. Exactly.Matt: Fabulous. Well, we will be back again next week. thank you again, Matt, for joining us on the show this week. Much appreciated. Thanks for having me. It’s been delightful. And, we will be back same place, same time next week.[00:44:00]Matt W: Thank you for listening to WB40. You can find us on the internet at wb40podcast. com, on Twitter at WB40podcast, and on all good podcasting platforms.

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