PJ Ellis (00:38)

So today's guest, ladies and gentlemen, episode insert number here of Whitting Grit podcast is Chris Mier, an AI expert, mate, a social entrepreneur, an educator, dare I say.

How are you, mate?

Chris Meah (00:52)

Not too bad, yeah. Went on a run this morning, so trying to keep up my new year habits. So feeling tired but fresh at the same time.

PJ Ellis (00:58)

Okay.

Andy (00:59)

So.

PJ Ellis (01:01)

Right. So we're going to

lean into all things AI, school of code, advising leaders. Tell us a little bit more about who is Chris, what you're up to, mate, what you've been up to, what are you going to do?

Chris Meah (01:14)

Yeah, where do you me to start? You want to start at the beginning or just go?

PJ Ellis (01:17)

1970s,

well, you're probably in eighties, aren't you? When were born in the nineties? Nineteen.

Chris Meah (01:20)

1970, listen, can

you start complimenting me at 1970? I won't give you the year, but yeah, yeah, I was born in the 80s, almost 90s. yeah, yeah. So, well, yeah, I've been around AI for a while. My background was AI. I turned up at university, actually.

PJ Ellis (01:29)

Yeah. Okay. Okay. Well, don't start. Don't get that far back. Let's go. School of code. Yeah. You've been around AI for a while, haven't you?

Chris Meah (01:45)

I think I applied for maths and business or English Lit or something like that. I always say I obviously didn't care because I can't even remember what the course was. But I saw Artificial Intelligence and I just watched I, Robot with Will Smith and what a great film. I thought I'm a little bit like Will Smith. This was before the Oscars slap obviously so he was still respectable in those days. So I switched to AI and never looked back really.

Loved it. ⁓ Couldn't think of anything better to have studied. ⁓ And was pretty convinced that it was obviously gonna be important. But something made me just a little bit tentative about what it meant for society. I just didn't think society was ready for the impacts of AI. And we'll probably get into those. ⁓

But yeah, I don't think much has changed since 15 years ago or whenever it was that I started. And so I took a bit of time, finished my bachelor's, went to do a master's and a PhD all at the University of Birmingham.

So you can see how lazy I am, just stick in a place and can't move out. And then really found that I saw a cliff edge of automation coming for most people's jobs. Now I thought...

how can we solve that problem in the short term? And for me, jobs were gonna get more technical in nature. Even if you're not a programmer, you're gonna have to understand more about technology and actually adapt to that technology mindset, which is constant learning, always something, always a new problem to solve. There's loads of stuff in technology that just translates really well across life. So I started the School of Code to just see, who can we help transition

into that world. know, because there's lots of people who are at risk of automation in my eyes or unemployed or just wanted a career change. And so I started School of Code really as a social experiment to see, you know, some people say nobody can code. You're born a programmer or you're not, and that's it. And some people say, well, no, anyone can code. know, and for me was like, well, let's just try, let's just try, let's see, let's run an experiment. So took a bunch of people, random people,

everyone from a sheep shearer to a doctor and a lawyer and ⁓

you know, a swimmer, return to work mom, school leaver, baker, coffee shop owner, know, loads of different types of people coming together. Took them through 16 weeks of really intensive training and managed to get 95 % of them into the industry, into jobs. And so from there, it just sort of snowballed and did it again. Did it again. So it was all completely free for people because obviously the aim was to help them. And my hypothesis was, you know, if there is this skills gap that everyone talks about,

and you produce people of value, then companies are willing to pay. And we know that from recruitment, right? Because I've never, listen, I know a lot of nice recruiters, but I've never met a company that loves paying recruiters, but they do because people are really valuable to them. And if you find the right person, it's worth it. So that model, yeah, has sort of scaled for the last decade, just helping more and more people. ⁓ And so I always wanted to get back to AI probably for the last

five years, I really wanted to like, you know, bring that chapter to a close and, but it helped a lot of people hopefully. yeah, it was a great experience and loved doing it. And now I'm back to AI really. So playing with AI all day. ⁓ I explain it a little bit more in depth to my wife, just so it doesn't sound like I'm unemployed, but yeah, basically I just play with AI all day and it's great, loving it at the moment.

Andy (05:55)

So a couple of questions for me, Christopher May. So just so we get all our listeners on the same level playing fields. Can you just simply as you can tell us what is AI and what isn't AI?

Chris Meah (06:06)

Short answer, no. I can't simply put that. Because AI is just a load of different things. for me, the pursuit of AI is how do you get intelligence ⁓ into a computer? How do you make a computer do things intelligently? And the gold standard for me is how do you replicate the human brain, the most intelligent thing we know in a computer? But people have loads of definitions and there's loads of different ways of trying to achieve that as well.

So, ⁓ yeah, it just depends who you talk to. The modern, like the last five years, whatever it is, three years have exploded because of things like ChatGPT, which is these large language models. ⁓ And they're amazing in their own right, because what we seem to have cracked is how to create fluent...

in human language systems, like machines that can just speak like any human could speak. all, for years and years and years in AI, we thought that was the pinnacle of really where you could aim for. And it turns out it isn't. It was actually slightly easier than we thought it was going to be. You just needed a lot more compute power and a lot more data. But yeah, that's really taken everyone by storm, but it is one slice of, for me, what intelligence is. It's a great communication layer.

AI stops today in that the LLM, the large language model, is what we have.

as the main source of intelligence. It transforms what we know because it's the most accessible revolution in history, isn't it? The digital revolution left a load of people behind because you had to know how to navigate websites, you had to know how to navigate apps, had to, you know, there's loads of things you had to know how to do to get the most out of that technology. Well, now you just need language. If you can talk, sometimes even if you can't talk, because we can map people's brainwaves and now we're at, I think we're at 50 % accuracy level.

now at reading people's minds with technology. So if you think of a word, it's like a 50-50 chance that it gets the right word. even if you can't speak, this technology is going to be able to help you just unlock a world of opportunity. That's incredible, but there's still so much more to do and so much further to go because ⁓ there's massive flaws in this technology as well. And it's not a, you know, it'll fix everything and it's game over. But at the same time, it's progressing.

very quickly and so it's an exciting time to think about it and play with it and study it.

Andy (08:46)

Yeah,

I mean, it's certainly a big topic. You know, it's a big topic, isn't it, at the moment? And I'm just curious, having set up the School of Code to address these skill gaps and upskill and re-skill people, which was a fantastic thing to do. Again, where we are today, do you think AI is giving people more cause to be optimistic or pessimistic about the future?

Chris Meah (09:08)

However you want to take it. mean, if you want to be optimistic, this is the best time to have ever been alive in history. Do you know what mean? Like on every level, but especially with AI, like the excitement there, the amount of change that we're going to be able to go through, but also enact. You've never been able to do it. If you can use AI properly, you are in the top 1 % of humans that have ever existed in terms of productivity, in terms of what you could

If Einstein was alive today, he'd have done a lot more. We have a massive amount of opportunity that's only going to increase, but at the same time, everything is the old phrase of there's no such thing as solutions, there's only trade-offs. It's going to be really good in some ways, and those good things might actually have really bad sides to them or bad consequences or just trickle-down effects somewhere that we didn't intend.

As you can tell, I never answer one question straight. So, you know, it depends is my standard answer. ⁓

PJ Ellis (10:11)

I think that's fair, isn't it? I mean, I can only imagine what AI looked like 15 years ago when you started out, know, exponential growth. I would have thought, you know, day in, day out, things are coming to the market, different products, different ways of, I mean, I cannot believe that there's a 50-50 chance of you using AI to know what I'm thinking. That is just bizarre, Yeah, yeah.

Chris Meah (10:33)

Yeah, I think you have to be hooked up to a brain scanner, but still,

I mean, you look at some companies, I mean, it depends how far out you want to go because, you know, there's AI today that you can open now and use, and that's amazing. But there's also things people are working on for the future, you know, Neuralink, where you're going to have a chip in your brain. We'll just think about what that might unlock, but also the dangers that might come from that. So you might have something that can read your brain in real time. You can communicate with all systems.

PJ Ellis (10:51)

Yep.

Chris Meah (11:03)

you know, much faster than you could ever type. It's just...

unbelievable the amount of things that you could do with that technology, but also, mean, me thinking just of the risks now, massive cyber security risk. It's not somebody hacking your emails. It's somebody hacking your brain. So it's slightly different, isn't it? So, ⁓ you know, all of these things need thinking through ideally for me ahead of time. ⁓ And that's one of the things that I've always been passionate about, just getting people to think and wrestle with these things, because you don't want it decided for you. know, society, some of

PJ Ellis (11:37)

Mm.

Chris Meah (11:39)

these

questions are as old as time, AI doesn't change much in that respect. It's the same political discussions. It's like, you want more freedom or do you want more security or do you want, know, the same discussions about how we live our lives are just accentuated by AI. Cause when you get to the level of an algorithm, you have to really clearly define what you want.

Andy (12:02)

Hmm.

Chris Meah (12:02)

We

don't have to do that as humans. We're good with vague statements and shared value systems and whatever. But when you get to dealing with AI or computers, you really have to articulate it. And that forces us as humans to really question and discuss because we've never had to think about it before. And it's amazing how much clarity you get when you just have to write down what you think. You're like, ⁓ actually, yeah, I don't think that at all. I've been tricking myself there. I don't really understand why I think that. The exciting bit for me about AI is it will

PJ Ellis (12:26)

Yeah, interesting.

Chris Meah (12:32)

teaches much more about ourselves just in the pursuit of it. And you can even see that with these large language models. ⁓ You know, like a really stupid example. I don't know if this is a good example or not, but you know, in a large language model, you basically have a next word predictor, right? But it's not just predicting the next...

most possible word, right? Because that's just a little gibberish in the end, right? Like you're not, there's nothing there. So what it actually has is what's called a system prompt. It has a load of training as well to help it. But the bit that I want to talk about today in this example is maybe a system prompt.

which says you are a helpful assistant. Okay, so you're not predicting any old word, you're predicting the words that an assistant would predict. And so rather than just be, I could show you a model now, which is not trained in that way, it's called a base model, where it just predicts the next word, and all it will do, if you say what's the capital of France, it will say Paris.

probably, but then it will try and remember where it's seen Paris before and it will probably say, is lovely this time of year, says Edward376 on holidays.com or whatever, because that's what it's been trained on.

If you say, you're a helpful assistant, now it's trying to predict what a helpful assistant would predict. And so it's gonna, if you give it examples of how an assistant reacts and how an assistant will respond, will predict it in a much better way. It's a long way of saying, that's really interesting to reflect on because like your self-talk is your system prompt. So whatever you tell yourself is basically how you're gonna be.

bringing things into the world, right? If you say I'm not very good at this, you're not gonna be very good. If you sound really good at this, you're more likely to be good at it. perception is reality a lot of the time. yeah, just even little silly things like that. It's just really nice, I think, to have the opportunity to have it reflected back at you as a species. I think that's exciting.

Andy (14:19)

I

There's something I struggle with. I really appreciate your view on this. In terms of, I think can all see that the opportunity that this can create and it's how you prompt and set up the models and there was an issue with, I'll say how I pronounce it right, Grok recently about some of the imaging that that can produce. So how do we balance the opportunity here and it's a great opportunity as you articulated before with the fact that this technology

is in the hands of a few very large global companies and their shareholders and owners who aren't elected but are influencing the way of the world.

Chris Meah (15:22)

Yeah, it's completely, I mean, one side of the coin is you've got a handful of people with all the power basically, isn't it? Because I mean, if you have the technology that can create anything, solve any problem, know, everyone relies on, I mean, you've got all the power. So that's definitely one version of, ⁓ you know, you can imagine this. We've had this for many years though.

You you used to set up a company and in order for that company to run you'd have to hire a load of people Let's say we set up a factory. You've got to hire a load of people to to run the factory hire people to manage them You've got to hire people to lay the roads down. You've got to hire people to deliver You've got you know, it's just like people involved all the way around isn't it? So, you know trickle down economics or whatever you want to say But you know, there's there's a broad base of people that benefit from that enterprise with with technology and

a laptop and an internet connection and you can basically absolve yourself of a lot of that constraint. So that's why even before AI, you saw, I think WhatsApp sold for a billion with like 50 people, Instagram the same. These small teams years ago selling for billions and billions and billions was just a new idea really in terms of what was possible.

for business. AI sort of just supercharges that really because

if the promise is kept, there probably will be no need to hire people for a lot of the things that you traditionally would have hired people for. So in some ways, those companies just have immense power that's never been seen before. But at the same time, so you say, okay, so we don't want a handful of people having all of that. So the counteract to that is to open source stuff. And the counteract to that is, well, we don't want it closed behind three doors.

and they dictate everything. We want it in the hands of everyone. But then there are also risks there, right? Because now you're not at the behest of those three people, you're at the behest of absolutely anyone who has access to a computer. And we all know there are people that will do really good things and people that will do really bad things. There's people that will make mistakes. So there is no right or wrong answer here. ⁓

as with everything in life, my philosophy is usually like, you are wrong, no matter what you think you're wrong, the infinite universe is too complex to be absolutely right about something, but all we can do is share perspectives and navigate forwards and try be less wrong together. If you bring a different perspective, I'll understand, even if it doesn't change my mind, I'll understand that other point of view a little bit better, and it's a more well-rounded ⁓ position. So yeah, I'd say,

There's a danger of a handful of people dictating everything, for sure, but there's also dangers in putting it in the hands of everyone. For example, you've just said about the Grok situation. So in the hands of a few people, it's actually quite easy to regulate that because we can put...

legislation in place or fines or whatever. Now they might build those fines into the business model as tech usually does or companies usually do. But you there are ways to try and encourage that behaviour to stop if that's not what we want in society. If it's open source the genius out of the bottle because what are you going to do? Like you can't go into everyone's house and check what they're doing with these models and the truth is you're always going to have a balance of those two. Like you're not going to be able to lock this stuff down. ⁓

So there is always going to be an open source element. So yeah, I think there's dangers and opportunities from all sides really.

Andy (19:08)

Who's the most likely James Bond villain out of all the tech companies do you reckon?

Chris Meah (19:14)

Most likely James Bond villain. It's gotta be Zuckerberg, isn't it? Come on. But I mean, I've got nothing against him, I don't think he's been a net, I don't think his creations have been a net positive on society, so.

PJ Ellis (19:19)

They all look like her.

when you're talking to businesses

as AI becomes more accessible and ingrained into business operations, what human skills are becoming more valuable, mate, would you say?

Chris Meah (19:39)

Yeah, well, so, prompt engineering, I mean, when, chat CPT first came out, that was the buzzword of like, this is going to be the new direction. And I said at the time, ⁓ and I'm, I'm pretty stubborn. So I haven't really changed my mind, even though I might have, should have. But I said at the time, that I just, that's not a longterm thing because as this stuff gets better,

Right? Like if it's read the whole of the internet and it's managed to have a fluent language, how hard do think it's going to be to read all of your prompts and be able to prompt for you? Do you know what I mean? Like you just blurt out some random words and it rewrites that into the perfect prompt and then prompt itself. So prompt engineering for me, isn't, isn't something I'm interested in. I'm not saying it's not useful. There's plenty of people that go and teach that and use that. I'm more interested in the underpinnings of like, well,

what would even be a good way to think about this stuff? I don't want to teach you here's the top 10 prompt tricks.

I want to teach you how these systems work so you can almost empathize with what's going on and from a fundamental level and then you're just more comfortable. It's like if my car breaks down and there's smoke coming out of it, I'm like, my God, panicking. Call a real man, call my dad and something's going on. Whereas if he just opens the hood and he says, okay, well, chill out. Here's where the oil goes, here's where the water goes. Then my anxiety has just gone a little bit because I know it's not going to blow up. I probably just need to put oil in. Same thing with these systems for me.

get people comfortable with them, knowing what they can do, what they can't do, and from there they can go and explore the top 10 prompts but with much more confidence. But they probably don't even need to because they've got this intuition about how this stuff works. So I tend to try and look at some of the things that aren't going to change, know, famous Bezos quote, like, focus on the things that aren't going to change. And I think that's probably, you know, in an age of dramatic change, especially

that we're going to be going through as well. I think there's something to be said for just take a step back. What's not gonna change here? Let's focus on those things a little bit more.

Andy (21:50)

⁓ I I spend a lot of my time talking to businesses about business transformation and kind of change. And I think what won't change is that people generally don't like change. So I guess a question for you as an expert here, Chris, is if we're talking to a CEO or CIO of a big business who wants to invest in AI capabilities, and it suggests that not many of those projects are currently delivering the benefits that we're hoped for.

How would you encourage them to improve the AI adoption amongst the teams and people? What would they need to do?

Chris Meah (22:26)

Yeah, I'd say, well...

A couple of things, I'd say give everyone that understanding so a lot of the anxiety goes out of the way. Now that can be done in like 90 minutes. It's not like a big, you don't need a PhD, you don't need a degree, you don't need a long course. You can go through that in 90 minutes and really have people have an intuition about what these things are so that they're going in clear-eyed. Right, they're not gonna know every detail, but they've got that intuition. The second thing I'd say is you have to be honest with people because the biggest anxiety for them will be

well, this is gonna take my job. And you're not gonna have any amount of adoption at all. If people think that, like it's gonna get sabotaged.

Right, like you could have the best AI in the world, doing the best job in the world, and it will be misused, sabotaged, whatever, if people think it's a threat. So the first thing you gotta do is be really clear, and what I say to people is, I'm not gonna write that policy for you, like, you know, my opinion is irrelevant here, but what you need to do is be really clear about what happens, because you want people to be encouraged to experiment, and if anything, like, automate themselves out of a job, but you need to tell them what's next. Are you gonna help?

redeploy them is that a great thing you're going to celebrate and you're going to retrain them and find a space for them because to be honest you know job descriptions are 10 % of what a job is you know like it's 90 % is just the glue that holds all the tasks together like you've you've got the culture you've got the relationships you know you're so much more than that task you're really valuable to us as a person we're going to redeploy you so so experiment away so that that takes anxiety out even if they're going to lose their jobs okay if we

make people redundant, here's the package we're gonna have. We're gonna retrain you over six months and we're gonna help you. So all of a sudden, if you make it clear for people, because people aren't stupid, they understand what the risks are, they understand this is the way the world's going sometimes, there's not a lot they can do about it, but if you show them what the path looks like, they can go in clear-eyed. I've found if you just get that policy, again, I'm not telling companies what to do there. You do what you can feasibly do as a company, what you think is right,

but be honest with people and you'll find the adoption shoots up ⁓ because again that anxiety is taken away. yeah, and I think that's what a lot of the resistance to change is really, because people go through plenty of change in their lives. It's not like they're overt. I think people are really, change that they're anxious about is trouble, but change in general, mean, most people welcome it in certain phases of their life, so yeah.

Andy (24:51)

Mm.

PJ Ellis (25:08)

Well, certainly the kids that were, say kids, shouldn't, that's clumsy language, but this pod was born out of our sort of fear, that's the right word, about the future of our kids going into the workplace and life in general. I suppose it won't be too much of a change for them anyway, because they've been born into this sort of world of AI and tools. Sorry.

Andy (25:15)

Thank you.

Chris Meah (25:21)

Mmm.

Yeah, well I was going to

say, School of Code started in schools, right, because I was finishing my PhD. I loved teaching kids, so I was going into schools, teaching them tech in a day. Primary schools, obviously, secondary schools, I've tried a few of them, Jesus, yeah, good luck. Primary school, you know, the kids are still cute. They all pay attention, it's great. So, ⁓ so.

Andy (25:43)

Thank

Chris Meah (25:50)

In that, I just thought, well, this is great. These kids are really getting a lot from these sessions, but the kids will be fine. They're adaptable. We don't even know what we're training them for anyway. This is part of the problem with the education system is it has to take a punt at a point in time about what the world's gonna look like, and that's always gonna be wrong. Always. If you try and get really specific about that, it's incredibly wrong. Even if you're aiming for today, you've gotta train them, and then it's already wrong because

I'm gonna be trying till tomorrow. So I just thought, well.

Much better use of my time with School of Code is actually what about the people that are going to have the rug pulled from under them? The people that thought they were going to have a 20 year, 30 year career in some different areas and it's just gone. And they've got no time to adapt. They haven't been brought up in that mindset. They feel anxious about technology. So that's why I sort of switched to focus on adults. Because School of Code was a terrible name for it anyway because I used to say on the first day, it's nothing like school and code is the least valuable thing

PJ Ellis (26:36)

Yeah.

Chris Meah (26:55)

you're going to take away from this course. Code was the example that you could learn. For me, the School of Code was really about teaching you about learning adaptability, collaboration, problem solving, all of those things. But...

as much as you would love that focus in a course, if you don't teach them a hard skill, they're not gonna get employed at the end. Employers, as much as employers say, hire anyone with the right attitude and the right motivation, yeah, yeah, sure, but then you're gonna give them an entrance test of like, can you code this thing or can you do this thing? So for me, the example of them learning really quickly something really hard in 16 weeks was code, but all of the mindset stuff was the...

the fundamental basis for School of Cobra. That's what it was about, helping people ⁓ thrive in uncertainty. That's what we said then. So yeah, do think kids, listen, I think there's a load of things we should be doing with the education system differently, but I actually think the lifelong learning aspect is the biggest lack. That's the biggest gap. Most people are not set up.

to be understanding that they are on a lifelong journey of active learning. ⁓ And so I think that they both need to be tackled and we give a lot of ⁓ time to one and not the other, think.

Andy (28:16)

What would you, in terms of the lifelong learning Chris, because I totally agree with you, what would you like to see around that then that our kids learn or businesses learn or graduates learn? What are the key things?

Chris Meah (28:28)

Well in terms of lifelong learning I think the The way I used to try and articulate this to people at the School of Code was Really what I'm trying to do here is teach you the last course you'll ever need because really a lot of it is about resourcefulness It's about confidence, you know people say People say confidence is just doing things a load of times and then you get confident and but how'd you get confident at?

doing something new. know, like something you've never, like a situation you never anticipated, how are you confident in that? You can only be confident if you've been in loads of situations you didn't anticipate, thought you were going to fail, thrown in at the deep end and you, nobody died. You swam, you learned and you got back out. So really I think a lot more resilience, like as a skill, like being embraced.

And I think a lot of the narrative that I hear these days is actually the opposite of that. It's like, well, we don't, because we're compassionate as a society, we don't want people to go through hardship. We don't want people to go through challenge. That's obviously true. But what you don't want is a sterile environment bringing up kids or for people to live in because that's literally the worst environment for a human being to adapt to. Firstly, because the real world isn't like that. So you're just not prepared. But secondly,

We need challenge, we need to be pushed, we need to learn. There's certain inherent things that the human body is built for and that have served us really well. So I'd say a lot of it is about environment and embracing that fact that it's not about sending you on a course, it's about changing that mindset so you are empowered. We live in a time where information access isn't a problem. Like 100 years ago, was whoever could, or maybe

But it was whoever could get to the library that had the advantage because all the knowledge was in the library and you only had a certain amount of books, right? So The bottleneck was how much time can I spend in the library and how many books can I read? That bottleneck doesn't exist. That is not the bottleneck anymore. it's now about how resourceful can you be? discerning can you be? How can you navigate just this deluge of information that we're under? So focusing on those things ⁓ and critical thinking

me is the key skill there because if you've got too much information to take on you need to be able to critically think your way through it to find your own perspective rather than just soaking up what you know the person next to you has said and taking it as gospel. mean halfway through these answers I forget what the question was so you've got to ram me but yeah.

PJ Ellis (31:08)

critical thinking. Doesn't matter mate, that's why we're quiet mate, we don't need to ask you any questions, we'll be finished in a minute.

PJ Ellis (31:20)

So I'm just jumping in. If you're enjoying these conversations, well, we are bringing those to life at Witton Grid live at Millennium Point in Birmingham on the 30th of January, 2026. real talk, life lessons, even a moment to breathe, proper takeaways you can use straight away. Get your tickets It's going to be a good one, Bab. Right, let's get back to the conversation.

PJ Ellis (31:46)

That critical thinking mate, Can you come round to mine tomorrow morning and sit with us for breakfast please, because some of those statements around you know, try and be less wrong together, you know we need this space, this landscape for kids to learn and actually be resilient.

Chris Meah (31:57)

Mmm.

PJ Ellis (32:03)

I mean, I can say this, I might have to edit it out, but me and the wife were talking quite emotionally last night about how our 10 year old daughter's having a lot of overwhelming her life and Kelly embraces it very motherly and we're wrapping her in a cotton ball. But actually the dad, the gooser, he's looking at it and going, hang on a second, now she needs that challenge, she needs that learn in life. You talk about these...

Chris Meah (32:14)

Mmm.

PJ Ellis (32:31)

kids being adaptable and actually you want to get involved with people that have had the rug to pull from underneath their, you know, thing. Do you think though on the flip side that we should be having more conversations earlier? So that 10 year old now that's overwhelmed actually, we should be talking to her about how she consumes this information because there's no bottleneck. Surely we could be saying setting them up for success, how to get that confidence around how to explore.

and then more importantly, what sort of tools and information she should be consuming. Would you agree with that?

Chris Meah (33:02)

so I think nobody's going to love her more than you and your wife. Literally nobody. Where do you want her experience in hardship first?

at home where people love her and care for her or outside where nobody gives a shit? Do you know what mean? Which one do you want her experience in hardship in? It sounds weird, but you want her experience in hardship with you and you want to be putting in boundaries and doing all this because you don't want the first time for somebody to go through something with people that don't care about her, which is the rest of the world in general, right? I'm not saying the world's a nasty place, but they don't care like you do. So I think it's not necessary.

for me about ⁓ trying to make life hard. But if you read any books about Olympic performers, they've always had ⁓ hardship in their life, every time, no matter what.

Some of it engineered, so there was an Olympic swimmer whose dad stepped on his goggles before a race one day, you know, not telling the kid on purpose. So he had to swim without goggles and just deal with that, right? Like he can't get in a flap. He can't be emotional because he's got to go swim. And, you know, years later admitted it was, you know, on purpose. And then the guy was looking back for his life and he was like...

There was something like that every week. You know what mean? That's all I remember. But actually there was always something, and the dad was training him. Like I'm not saying you need to run social experiments on your kids, and not everyone wants to be an Olympic athlete, but there's something in that, this safe space for hardship. And that's what we used to say, I'm bringing it back to School of Code too much, but in School of Code they turned up on day one.

PJ Ellis (34:20)

Ha

Yeah.

Chris Meah (34:44)

And we said, look, why are kids better learners than you?

Firstly, they've got a brain advantage, right? There's neurotransmitters, there's acetylcholine, they're stuck raining down in their brain that makes them soak stuff up better, their brains are better built for it. But put that aside, why else? And it's almost fundamentally attitude, and it's because, you know, a kid, my little boy, will shove stuff up his nose and taste it, and then figure out what it was, right? He's not bothered about looking silly, he's not bothered about, you know, he's got no worry

about saying the right thing or looking intelligent. He's just like, let me try that. Nah, wasn't good, you know, and moves on. And so we tried to get them to embrace, look, this is your soft play area. You're gonna make all your mistakes here.

because when you go out, there probably are more consequences for your mistakes in the real world. Here, there's none. You make them all here. And so just gave people that license to just try, ask, test. Because again, it's not always gonna be a safe environment for people. There are gonna be real consequences later. So you'd rather build up your scars somewhere where you can recover really easily. There's a Japanese, I won't pronounce it right,

and it's kintsukuroi or something like that. But basically there's these bowls that are broken and they repair them with gold.

Andy (36:08)

Yes.

Chris Meah (36:09)

And so

what we used to say is, you know, that's our philosophy here. Like those breaks, those, those mistakes are repaired with gold. And we want you at the end of this to be solid gold. want you to have made so many mistakes that it's basically just all gold now. And that's the value of these 16 weeks, right? It's the soft play area. It's, it's the place to try stuff. So I think childhood, you know, is very sanitized now because for a lot of reasons,

that but you know in we have less kids I'm one of seven kids so you know my parents love us but

probably that love is spread quite thinly across seven, right? So it's just a fact, right? Whereas now we have less and less kids, we have one or two. They are the focus of your entire being, right? Now that's a different dynamic. And so we're obviously more careful about what those kids are doing. And I think that does have some downstream effects. Whereas if we try and remember, even when we were growing up,

mean, you to a different generation to me, obviously, but yeah, when we were growing up, ⁓ you just had more probably danger in your life. And there's a load of reasons for that. Again, we're bombarded with bad news now. So every piece of bad news, it's not like that. I don't think there's more crime or less crime. I don't know the stats really, but it definitely feels less safe.

PJ Ellis (37:13)

of

Chris Meah (37:33)

Right, because we're just bombarded with bad news. I don't know the actual stats, it was probably really bad back then, you if you tried to do some stuff, but the perception that people had dictated the reality and that's, we're so susceptible to information and the perception. And people think of themselves as like information processing machines, like you hear a piece of information and you can deal with it, whatever. It's much more like your sand and information's water and any piece of information that touches you like changes you in some way.

Right, it just runs down even if you don't believe it even if you it's just changing though your brain processes it and adapts to it in some way and I think you know this is this is the type of stuff that I would want not necessarily taught but like explored in school help people understand how their brain works right if I install a dishwasher and And the dishes aren't clean. It's not the dish was his fault if I didn't read the manual

But there is no manual for your human brain. I went through 25, 27 years of education. Nobody ever talked to me about how my brain learns, ever, not once. And so that's what we did at School of Code. I've got a learning platform called Learn2 coming out, which is basically trying to automate that process for people. Because again, we talked about that tagline. ⁓

AI to make people more human, not lesser beings, right? Because we can try and automate stuff.

for the sake of it, or we can try and say, how can AI really help me be more human? And for me, if you could automate your brain growing, that's like a good automation. Do you know what If you can automate the adoption of knowledge and you can go and learn anything, that for me is a positive use. But like I say, that was never discussed in 25 years of education. And if you just sit down and tell people how their brain works, everything, again, it's looking under the hood.

and there's less anxiety, ⁓ I'm reacting like that because of this, maybe I just need to go for a walk and that will reset my state. Maybe I need a cold shower because it's like turning the computer off and on again. You know, it just resets your state. you know, like dogs have a physical reaction where they just shake. Like if they get anxiety, they just shake and then they're fine again. We don't do that. You know, we need a way of like just dispersing the energy.

PJ Ellis (39:51)

What's that called is it?

Andy (39:56)

You get taught to have little triggers, little movements in sport, especially that kind of just helps you get back in the moment. I think Dan Carter from the All Blacks famously just used to go and touch his socks just to get him to switch back on. So every time he was wandering around a bit, he'd touch his socks three times and that was it. It's blue thinking and red thinking, I think they call it.

Chris Meah (40:03)

Boom.

Hmm.

It's amazing how complex and how simple our brains are at the same time. Do you know what mean? Like all the complexity in the universe and yet something stupid and simple just helps it, helps you go.

Andy (40:28)

Yeah, but

I really enjoyed that conversation there, Chris. I hope we can keep as much of that in about the kids side. ⁓ I would be, I'd like to know, let's fast forward to a business environment, business leaders, you talk about how could business leaders provide that soft play area for their teams to learn because culturally a lot of businesses don't. We're so focused on profitability, effectiveness, efficiency.

Chris Meah (40:35)

Do it. Do it.

Andy (40:57)

Could CEOs be doing different? How could you take some of those lessons from the school of code to the school of business?

Chris Meah (41:04)

Yeah, it completely depends on the business. You'll be pleased to hear a common theme there. Completely depends on the business, right? Because if you are razor thin margins, all operational delivery.

very different to if you are research and development heavy and massive margins and you can give people three days off a week and it doesn't impact your bottom line very much. So I think it completely depends on the business but I think everywhere now, especially the pace of change that people are experiencing, should be trying to give, let's say 10 % of people's time back to just explore and learn.

10 % of your week, 10%, however you want to bunch it up, just go and explore and learn. And what I try and say to people is, the top-down model of strategy...

doesn't really work in a really complex, ever-changing environment. There are definitely things you see from the top perspective of a company, if we're looking at it as a hierarchy. Near the top of the company, you've got a broader perspective on a lot of different things, so you see different things, but you do not want to be implementing a strategy from there for the next five years. It's just probably not gonna work. At the same time,

You want that bottom up energy, people that are doing the job all day, every day, experimenting. There's so many tools, there's so many different ways they can think about using things, so much creativity to explore. What you want is that meet in the middle innovation. Right, this is what we think as an organization are the important parts. We're gonna give you guys this sandbox to play in. Right, here's how you play. Here's what you're not allowed to do. Don't put customer data into an LLM.

but here's a load of dummy data that replicates what customer. So you can get technical about exactly how people are doing it. But we want you to explore and experiment. When you learn something, come and present it. We'll do an all hands once a week or whatever. We'll pick someone to present.

And when something feels like an improvement, pitch it and let's see if we want to expand it. If you have a team of 50, you've got 50 experimenters with knowledge of your industry, knowledge of your customers, hands-on experience experimenting. That pace of innovation is amazing. But if you have constrained all of that and locked it down with your strategy, like your view of the world from today and where it's going to go, you've lost

Andy (43:25)

Mm.

Chris Meah (43:36)

a lot of the potential creativity and exploration. So I would say, you know, I try and phrase it as that meet in the middle innovation. Now it's really hard for people because ⁓ there's a million different AI tools, right? And like, how'd you keep up? So I try and tell people to either pick the tortoise or the hare. So the tortoise says, listen, I'm just going to pick chat GPT, ⁓ Claude, Gemini or Grock or whatever, right? Or another one. I'm just going to pick one and I'm just going to try.

stuff in there. Now you're the tortoise in that race because the hare is going to be looking at every new piece of technology that comes out, right? Like every week there's a thousand new AI apps that do very particular things.

The truth is, and this is a real generalization, but within six months, most of the capability that those specific apps have today will be in those four platforms. You see a very specific app today, in six months, ChatGPT will probably be able to do it, because they want to gain market share. They need to find ways to put these LLMs into practice.

So you have to ask, like if you can be the tortoise, and most of your business should be like tortoise in most things, then that's great. Like just play, but you know, with one tool, and maybe two.

Where you have to be the hare, and that's only where your competitive advantage is, right, so you've only got two or three places you can be a hare. What are the things that we just have to be at the forefront of? Like we have to get this right. Then play with as many tools as you like, but you can only do that in two or three places. And that evaluation and that clarity for your company, sometimes it's helpful anyway, because again, nothing changes, right? Just the clarity on these are our competitive advantage is quite useful for people. You know, if you're articulating it in the practical,

yeah,

it's not just words on the wall. We only want you really exploring the cutting edge tools in these areas. We want to be the quickest, we want to be the fastest, we want to be the most customer centric. Whatever that competitive advantage is. ⁓

then explore there, but everything else, ⁓ adopting that tortoise mentality and that stops a lot of the overwhelm. Because otherwise you are a hare in every direction and you're just too dizzy. I had to do that for the last year just to catch up and it's frazzling. It's frazzling, it's expensive, it's mostly a waste of time. You're much better taking a measured approach in terms of not all your eggs in all baskets.

Andy (46:15)

Yeah, you'd be pleased I saw an article in the Times at the weekend, there's an American law firm, I'm just looking them up, Ropes and Grey, who for their associates, 20 % of their working week is now given to playing with AI tools, experiments, ensuring the lessons and that counts as billable hours. And as an ex-lawyer, PJ, that's a big deal, right?

Chris Meah (46:29)

Hmm.

Look at this.

PJ Ellis (46:36)

Who the billion now?

Chris Meah (46:37)

Yeah,

Andy (46:39)

Okay.

Chris Meah (46:39)

yeah, exactly. Well, it's not a new thing as well. Google.

Google, I've had a Google day, can't remember what it's called now, but basically every employee gets a Google day once a week. They obviously hire really smart people, but the reason they hire really smart people is they want to give them a day a week to just go and do whatever. And out of those whatever experiments came Gmail, came Google Calendar, came Google Maps, like all of these products are out of that day a week, because obviously Google was just search. So it's like they didn't have to go into mail. Somebody experimented and said, hey, this is a good idea actually. And then they adopt it. So, you know, there's real precedence for this

even without AI. But what you have to do is try and get yourself into a business model that facilitates that. If you're in a business model, which is race to the bottom, it's really difficult to see a positive way to engage all of your people. If you can try and reimagine ⁓ your vision for your business as net positive in the future, know, if you had a magic wand, what would this business do?

and go towards there. Firstly, that's really clarifying for people, but secondly, it helps them make decisions. ⁓ You know, should I adopt this tool or not? Okay, does it help us get there? If not, then no. If yes, then yes.

PJ Ellis (47:54)

what excites you about the next five to 10 years, maybe the most?

Chris Meah (48:00)

Yeah, because I was in, I said this on LinkedIn, but I was in a ⁓ sauna.

and I was talking to a guy and he was like, you're in AI, when did you start? And I said, I think about 15 years ago, and he was like, no, it's only been around for three years, or five years. Most people just don't appreciate that. It depends how far back you want to trace it, but definitely, the date that I tend to use is 1956, was this thing called the Dartmouth Conference.

And it brought all the best minds in the world together to explore what they said was thinking machines. And out, well, out of that meeting, actually, the conclusion was we will have machines as good as humans at pretty much any cognitive task within a generation. Right. And so obviously that didn't happen, but the buzz and excitement that caused caused what we, what I call the first AI summer, you know, so just money raining down, talent pouring in.

like so much buzz and excitement. When the promises weren't met, it's not that they didn't make progress, but when they didn't get these machines as good at humans as every task, all of that dried up and you get the AI winter. AI becomes a dirty word. Researchers had to call it like informatics or cybernetics. They just had to rebrand because nobody was funding AI. Now we've been through two or three cycles of that since. And one thing I get asked a lot at the moment is are we in an AI

I mean, definitely, yeah, but everything's a bubble. I mean, everything is basically a shared figment of our imagination, right? So it's like, if we categorize it as a bubble, yeah, for sure, but will there be progress? Like every time there has been progress in AI, it has been a quantum leap, right? Like it does change the world and how it progresses. So what really excites me, there are people that think like AGI is around the corner and that's what we,

Andy (49:36)

Yeah.

Chris Meah (50:04)

you know, this general intelligence that can do anything. And I wouldn't like to say it's definitely not gonna happen, right? Because I've been basically imagining that day since I first came across AI, right? I've been convinced it's tomorrow for 15 years. know, the time, predictions are easy unless you get a timeline from someone and then it becomes hard, right? So I think we'll get there one day.

Andy (50:25)

Mm.

Chris Meah (50:30)

But what excites me in the meantime is how can we use this stuff to improve what we want to improve in the world? So there needs to be a good conversation about what are the things that we want to do and prioritize and what are our values and all of that sort of stuff. ⁓ And for me, some of the particular ⁓ applications that I've always been excited about, like self-driving cars, ⁓ I just...

cannot believe we are not there already and I can't wait until we get there. ⁓ It just transforms the world dramatically. Negligible deaths compared to 13 million a year or whatever it is. ⁓

Andy (51:11)

and

Chris Meah (51:13)

all the carnage, all the bad drivers that you see, it's just humans for me, were just like not made to drive. And I think in the future, our kids will look back and they'll see human driving the same way we see drink driving. I can't believe you're so irresponsible to drive, when a robot could have driven for you. I cannot believe you would. It's going to be that mentality shift, but we're not quite there yet. I think we will be in the next year or two. sounds like the legislation's

paved way. But with all of these things it's always ⁓ how do you compare the

self-driving car to the human driver, right? How many deaths is acceptable from a human driver versus a self-driving car? Because at the moment there's way too many like it's just ridiculous how bad humans are on average at driving It's also amazing how good they are in one way, know that we're not all crashing all the time But just there's so much there's so much that is preventable but

even if we cut the deaths down by 99%, is that 1 % acceptable when it's from a robot? It's almost easier to explain when it's like a human's bad decision or a human's bad judgment. Are they gonna be happy when they say, oh, it was just like the random algorithm took the wrong turn or whatever, sped up when it should have slowed down? So there's a real social...

Andy (52:23)

that.

PJ Ellis (52:25)

Yeah, yeah.

Chris Meah (52:38)

dilemma there that we have to talk through, which is are we willing to accept some of the benefits and change our perspectives in that way? But also you don't want to rush these things in, you know, before they're ready. And I think the biggest danger for me is that people deploy this stuff over confidently in areas that it has no business being deployed in, especially with like LLMs, large language models, you know, there's certain things that you should just not be doing with them right now.

And I think the halo effect, you the same reason celebrities endorse products, because somebody's good at football, we feel like they'd be really good at picking skin creams or financial advice or whatever, because we have that halo effect, right? It's really hard to negate that from chat GPT. If it knows more about you, if it knows more than you about everything, how could you ever argue with it, right? It's just like, obviously it's right. And that's almost, we have to take the opposite for it.

We have to take the opposite stance on it most of the time. We have to say, right, this was really useful as an agent to search the internet. It's basically the sentient internet, the internet brought to life, but I'm not gonna trust it because I don't trust the internet. I wouldn't take the average of what the internet says and do it.

PJ Ellis (53:54)

Yeah.

Andy (53:56)

Yeah, yeah. And

think like the taxis are starting to come. mean, there's plenty of them out in America, isn't there? think there's a pilot coming into London, I think, isn't there?

Chris Meah (54:05)

I think the law changes this year, I think they brought it forward that they're just allowed, they're going to be allowed to do self-driving by the end of the year. ⁓

Andy (54:12)

Yeah. And there's flying taxis

out in Dubai with Joby Aviation piloting. I think one of the biggest problems is that the insurance company is trying to work out who's liable for what. There's an issue that's been going on for years that debate.

Chris Meah (54:24)

Yeah,

I mean, it's a shame. how much

amount of power that society's yielded to finance and law is crazy when that is the bottleneck. The bottleneck should be, it good enough? And does it help people on average? And does it change the world in a better way? Not like, have we decided who to blame? But that's crazy. But I do think one option is the flying car has always, I think I did a presentation like 15 years ago actually saying flying automated vehicles will come before

cars because you know one of the biggest problems for automated vehicles is human drivers. Humans like traffic whereas if you can take it up

PJ Ellis (55:01)

Yep, less so.

Chris Meah (55:01)

You've just got free

rein, right? You can go anywhere. Yeah, that's one thing that really excites me. I think there's loads. You know, how we decide to use it for good, like a doctor in your pocket, 24-7, at your beck and call, completely focused on you and your health and your family's health, knows everything about you, your family history, every drug that's ever been discovered, you know, that is transformational. Everyone will...

That's the new addictive app, it? What's going on in my body? ⁓ And that's a good, that's much better than Facebook or Instagram or any of these things. things like that, but there are also, yeah, massive dangers. Like I said, ⁓ a couple of months ago now, you

PJ Ellis (55:30)

my, 100%.

Tell me about it.

Chris Meah (55:48)

chat GBT raising kids, I think is a real problem. I think it definitely is going to, whether people like to admit it or not. Plenty of people feel bad about putting their kids in front of Peppa Pig, but you have to, because we're busy and we've got stuff to do. But wouldn't it be better if it was interactive and teaching them? And that's so alluring.

that I think anyone would really do it. I gave the example in the TED talk of like, can have chat to PT on video mode and just say, only tell the next line of the story when my kid eats a bite of dinner. Solves a load of problems, but what are we sacrificing for that? Is that what we wanna do as a society? I'm not saying it is or it isn't, but we need to wrestle with it because we didn't wrestle with social media upfront. And I think that's.

Andy (56:21)

pizza.

Chris Meah (56:35)

just a net negative on most aspects of growing up. So I think we have a moral obligation to try and really wrestle with these things upfront and get a bit more philosophical about them rather than, know, let's just put our heads down and see where we get to. And I'm sure it'll work out in the end.

Andy (56:53)

So question for me, Chris, and this being brilliant conversation, by the way, could have gone for ages here. If the debate fears hopes for AI is a mirror, this is a Stephen Bartlett question, by the way, is a mirror reflecting humanity back at itself. What do think it's revealing about us as a human race right now?

Chris Meah (57:16)

What does the debate reveal about us?

Andy (57:20)

Yeah, and the fears and the hopes.

Chris Meah (57:23)

I think that debate in general is, I think, the moral obligation of the human species. Our moral obligation is share your perspective. The universe is too complex. So you have a moral obligation to share your perspective, not because you're right, but because you have something unique to share in that figuring out what the real world is. ⁓ And so you've got to share it with humility. You're like, well, this is what I see. It's not right. ⁓

for me is a really positive thing. The more debate that happens like that, the better. ⁓ But I think the tribal nature of these debates is really difficult to comprehend as a good thing.

Debate is maybe the wrong word. You want a discussion, you? What you don't want to be, I feel like there's a lawyer theme here, but you don't want to be lawyers in a courtroom, really positional, and you're obviously just going to argue. A lawyer, you do not want your lawyer in a courtroom saying, sort of see the other side's point, actually. They're just not going to do that, are they? They're going to say, everything they say is rubbish, everything I say is this. Here's the presented argument. I think we want a much more

generative conversation where we say well here's what I see here's what you see let's just flow those together and and see what comes out right and ⁓ I think that's one positive I'm hoping will happen more and more and feels like there's a hunger for it I think people are sick of the social media like trying to look good and say the right thing and I think people generally want real connection real conversation I think people miss that ⁓ and you know but it is

difficult and scary for people to do, especially in the internet age, where everything is always, you you say it and it's there forever. know, something we never had to deal with as kids. That's why I'd hate to grow up now with the social media, you know. There are so many stupid things that we did, even videoed, know, stupid things. Thank God there wasn't YouTube, do know what I mean? Because they'd just be up there and it's like, you know, you don't know what that's going to do. So I think, yeah, it shows us.

PJ Ellis (59:23)

Yeah. 100 % mate.

Yep.

Yeah, man.

Chris Meah (59:39)

you know, we have the capacity to explore and figure out some of the wildest things in the universe. But we need to fight against this sort of tribal nature and try and see ourselves as explorers together on a never-ending journey and see where we get to.

PJ Ellis (59:57)

And on that note, I think that takes us back weirdly to episode one of this pod where we start talking about how we as humans need to be kind and to nurture this AI and to wrestle with it at the start like we did with social media. So I love that. think if nothing else, this conversation for me has made me little bit more confident about the future to be fair, bring it on.

Chris Meah (1:00:11)

Mm-hmm.

PJ Ellis (1:00:20)

I need to get a hoverboard though mate. I want to be Marty McFly mate from Back to the Future. Simple as that mate. Forget these cars and these taxis and planes. Just give me a hoverboard. Paranoikies and off I go. And more Quantum Leap. Remember that? That was wicked. used to love that. come on mate. You've got the internet mate. Come on. Quantum Leap. Sam and what was the other guy? can't remember.

Chris Meah (1:00:34)

before my time before my time before my time listen guys don't don't lump me in with you before my time

PJ Ellis (1:00:43)

We always finish, mate, with a few takeaways because, you know, this is all about having conversations that you can put strange to your life. And there's some here, sound bites, that will be around my breakfast table tomorrow. I should have been a doctor, not a lawyer, because I can't read my writing, but bear with me. These are my favourites so far. Your sand.

Chris Meah (1:00:57)

You

PJ Ellis (1:01:01)

And information is water. Whatever you see, you'll hear will change you. We have a moral obligation to share our perspective with humility. Repair your mistakes with gold. You'll become solid gold potentially. Build up your scars in a place where you can recover. Break those proverbial goggles and let them swim. We are on a lifelong learning journey. Try and be less wrong together. And your self-talk is your system prompt. I absolutely love

Chris Mayer, I know you don't probably like this. I don't know whether that's true or not, but I'm going to call you Dr. Chris Mayer because I have been taught. I've been diagnosed. I have taken so much on board, mate. I'm so grateful for your time. Thank you so much for joining us on the Witton Griff podcast. Cheers. Legend.

Andy (1:01:43)

Cheers Chris.

Chris Meah (1:01:44)

No worries, pleasure. Yeah, all the best guys.