Dean Stokes Interview

[00:00:05] Welcome to the Digitize Fully Charged Podcast. I'm your host, Pam Currie. I'm joined as ever by my colleague, Niall Ridgway. Today's episode is a conversation with Dean Stokes, one of our good friends from the edtech world. We're going to hear all about Dean's journey from Google to Adobe into Lego building with his brother. So let's dive in. Dean.

[00:00:35] Welcome. Nice to see you, Dean Stokes. How are you doing? Yeah, I'm doing really well, thanks. And great to see you both. I'm glad to see that you're doing well as well. Feels like it's been a while since we've properly caught up. So thanks for having me. It has. It has. And thank you so much for agreeing to join us. We've been kind of blown away by everyone that's just said yes to chatting with us. Because we're like, well, people don't really know us that well, but we've really appreciated the people that have just been like, yeah, I'd love to come and chat.

[00:01:05] Yeah, definitely. So I thank you. Having a podcast is just a good excuse to have random chats with people, right? And Ben and I did it a while ago and found that it's the same thing. Just most people will be really up for it and just say yes. And you just meet a whole bunch of amazing people and get to maybe catch up with people you haven't spoken to in a while. So yeah, I always want to repay the favour that people have done me in the past as well. Yeah. So you and Ben, Ben Rouse, as in Mouse. Yes. You just spoke to Ben last week, right? Yes. Yeah.

[00:01:39] So Dean, we'd love to hear a bit about you as a little, a little Dean, a little kid. Dean, what were you like as a wee boy? What were you like in your younger days at school? Like, were you a packed luncher? Were you a school luncher? Were you the popular guy? What were you like to tell us about school, boy, Dean?

[00:01:59] No surprises that I don't think that. I don't think I was the popular guy. I was not in the popular crowd, though. I think in secondary school, I kind of was a bit of a shapeshifter, you know, like I would just, there wasn't one group that I was super attached to all the time. I was the person that, I guess, a bit of a people pleaser, right? I would just bounce between groups and kind of know everyone in some way. And I guess that helped keep me out of trouble. I think it probably also helped that I was tall.

[00:02:25] Yeah. Yeah. What was it like when I was younger? It's really strange because I feel like I'm not very good at remembering specific memories of being a kid. I don't know what it's like for you guys. There are like obviously a few that stand out. Yeah. But at school, in primary school growing up, I was super shy. Yeah, I would go to my grandparents' house and bury my head in the sofa so I didn't have to look at them, let alone talk to them.

[00:02:50] Like just the thought of speaking out loud, just even publicly in that small space, just with family was, I just remember being terrifying. And my parents would be like, oh, at home, you know, you're chatty. Like, why don't you chat to other people or whatever? And I just, I never really knew why, I don't think. And in secondary school, part of what led me down the road that I'm down now, I guess, is that I got into technical theatre.

[00:03:17] That's what started kind of the road into then being on stage. Packed lunch though every day. And if ever I could figure out how to make a bit of money to stick in the vending machines. There's no vending machines in schools these days. So you had a bit of a kind of entrepreneurial spirit, even as a school kid.

[00:03:39] I guess so, yeah. I mean, I wasn't the kid that was like selling sweets on the playground or anything, but I, particularly later in secondary school, I would be doing like random jobs for people online and stuff. And I've always thinking for technology, yeah, like making websites or helping people figure things out. I went on holiday. So a friend of mine was going to Florida with his parents. I'd never been before. I'd never even been on a plane before. I think I was 16, maybe 17 at that point.

[00:04:08] And somehow, I don't know how I got in contact with this guy, but he basically had this e-commerce site. And I needed some spending money to go on this holiday with my friend, like to be able to afford it with his parents. And I think I charged this guy like 700 quid or something to, it took me weeks and weeks and weeks of work, updating images and things on the website and like product descriptions and stuff. I couldn't even tell you what, what the website was now. I can't remember. I just know that I did that. Can't even remember what he was selling.

[00:04:37] I think it was electrical stuff. Right. But I couldn't tell you like what the site was or who that guy was or how I got in touch with him. But he did pay me in the end. And yeah, so I had some spending money when we went to Florida. That's brilliant. Yeah. 700 quid as well in your 17, 18 is incredible as well. Yeah. I just, I don't know. I feel like maybe we'll talk about where my career headed and stuff, I guess.

[00:05:05] But now working for myself again, there's just something, I'm just drawn to it and I don't know why. And I can't stop myself being drawn to it. It's always something in the back of my mind where I feel like, oh, I want to come up with a new idea or try something different. And I go down little rabbit holes, like learning a bit about technology. So I really consider myself a kind of generalist across a lot of areas rather than just a specialist, a really deep specialist in one. Yeah. And that is what has always appealed to me, I think.

[00:05:34] And when, but the world around you is kind of geared towards telling you that you have to do one thing. Really well. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that's changed a lot over time, but I've always felt that pressure, I guess. It's really funny because we've had this conversation with quite a few people. And actually, I think a lot of us really relate to that where, I don't know, maybe because you've been in education, because you've been teachers, that's one thing you do.

[00:06:02] But I think when you've got that kind of like technical piece as well, where you're happy to dabble with e-commerce websites and you're happy to sort of create stuff. You do. Yeah. You do end up being a kind of generalist and jack of all trades. Like wording's changed as well. Like you always used to, well, growing up anyway, people used to say, what do you want to be when you're older? As in there's one job and you have to stick to that. But now people change every couple of years.

[00:06:28] You switch it up, you change up your speciality, whatever is new coming up. It's the gig economy now, right? Totally. And there's loads of data about like how people will have like three and four jobs, three and four income sources. And that's just going to be the way of it. And so, yeah. I just remembered something else I used to do, not for money, but probably when I was like 13 or something.

[00:06:54] Do you remember back then when I was about 13, forums was such a big thing online. There was like a forum for everything. And so I used to, there's a website called Game Freaks 365. And there's a guy that I met online that was running this website called Kyle. And I just started helping him moderate these forums, his forums. And then we like added a store to it and people were earning points. And they like earned free games because he was sent review copies of games and stuff. Yeah.

[00:07:21] We're in another forum for Rollercoaster Tycoon, which was my absolute favorite game back in the day. And making people like signatures for their posts. Remember, there would always be someone on the forum that would make images for you as a signature. I used to do that kind of thing. And that was nerdy day. I loved a bit of Rollercoaster Tycoon as well. And Zoo Tycoon. Yes. And then just releasing the lions into everyone. But when you're saying about moderator, you know how everybody's wanting to be moderators for Twitch

[00:07:48] and wanting to be moderators for like TikTok calls. That's going on to people's CVs now. It's an actual thing that you can list as this is something that I do is I've been a moderator for this famous streamer. So yeah, you can add it to your CV. Yeah, that's crazy. I've never thought of that. Actually, maybe I should put that. Yeah. Dean Prink's 365 moderator. I'll put that on my CV next time. See if anybody remembers. When I was 13. Like... Yeah. It's like...

[00:08:23] So Dean, tell us a wee bit. Like, I mean, lots of people will know you from your role at Google over the last sort of how many years? Tell us actually. Because I'm not really sure. How many years was I at Google? Yeah. Yeah. Five years. Five years. And it was about a year ago that I left. I left in December 2023. Tell us about that. And I was there for just over five years. Because that was amazing. That's a big move. That's a bold move, that Dean Stokes. Leaving Google. Yeah. I think...

[00:08:52] You know, I could have stayed there. I was super happy there. The team's amazing. Like, it's obviously a great place to work. You're well looked after. Yeah. Every company has good and bad points. There's pros and cons everywhere. But... Sure. You know, you can't knock what you get. You know, the deal that you get is pretty good. Yeah. But I think that I would rather leave somewhere on a high than grow to feel like I'm stagnating or come to resent it.

[00:09:21] Yeah. Even though life would be easy. Yeah. You know, like, it would be an easy life just to stay there and say, yeah, you know what? I'm happy in this job. And I can kind of do it. Like, maybe it's losing a little bit of the challenge over time. And I'm kind of... I want to be stretched to do something different. And perhaps that something different isn't just in the same realm as I am right now. Sure. And so when a new opportunity came along, I thought, yeah, why don't I go and give that a go?

[00:09:49] You know, it's not an easy decision just to say, yeah, I'm going to leave this really safe place that I've been for like five years with people that I know. And I know the product inside out. Yeah. But it just felt... It kind of spoke to me internally, I guess, because there's always... In the back of my mind, there's always like, oh, what could... What's the next thing that I could be doing? And in some way, I guess I'd been able to put that to sleep a bit and it was kind of creeping back up again. So when a new opportunity came along, I just thought, well, yeah, why don't I give that a go?

[00:10:20] Yeah. And the new opportunity you're speaking about was your move to Adobe. Yeah. So I joined the Adobe team. They have this product called Adobe Express. Yeah. It's basically Adobe's Canva. I can say that now that I don't work there. And that's how we describe it as well, to be honest. And then all of our kind of learning activities on Digitize that are creative, we're like, use Adobe Express or Canva. And it's like, yeah, same.

[00:10:47] I think honestly, like they're very, very similar products in many ways. And I think partly it depends what kind of ecosystem you want to be in and just what you've used. And there are some things in Canva that aren't in Adobe Express and vice versa as well. They'd seen lots of success with that in education in the US and wanted to kind of build what they were doing in the UK. There was already a small team working on it. And so I went there to lead that team in January 20, 24 January this year.

[00:11:18] But about four months in, decided that actually, I think I want to go and do my own thing. And so I left there in kind of April, May time this year. And yeah, set up my own business. Amazing. Amazing. So tell us about that. What is it you've been up to since then? Yeah, it might be easy to say, what haven't I been up to? Yeah, I know. Because you've been doing loads of stuff, haven't you? Yeah. Like I said, I really like doing a lot of things.

[00:11:47] I think I find it really hard to pin down and just say, yeah, this is the one thing that I'm doing. But I've done a real mix from training other people how to deliver great training or great workshops, be a better public speaker, deliver more impactful presentations, all the way through to doing some kind of project management work, a bit of end user training and content creation that other people would then go and deliver as well.

[00:12:14] One of the biggest projects that I've worked on for the last six months or so is called AI Works, which is a research project that Google is running. Not the Google for Education team, actually, but just kind of big Google. And they wanted to look at how generative AI is actually going to save people time in reality across different sectors. And so they worked across small and medium business. They worked with a trade union and in the education sector. So I kind of managed the education part of that project, liaising with the trust that

[00:12:43] we were working with, building out all the content and delivering it as well and bringing other people in as needed to support. And I've also done some kind of one-to-one coaching with people. I've helped a local cafe with their website. I see a Lego shop as well. Were you doing something with Lego? Yeah, that's your brother's shop, isn't it? It's all your brothers. Yeah. So my brother has a business. This is what I mean. I think the entrepreneur thing just runs in our blood. I think we're all just drawn to wanting to do our own thing, I guess.

[00:13:13] So he runs a retail business buying and selling Lego. So mostly secondhand Lego. It comes in, it processes it. And there's a website called Bricklink, which is like a Lego marketplace. It's owned by Lego now. He has a million parts in stock on that site as well as his own website and now has a physical store as well. And in fact, I've just about recovered today because we just spent three days last week doing live streams on an app called Whatnot, which is like a live selling app.

[00:13:43] A bit like QVC. A bit like QVC. Exactly that. We joked, though I think it wasn't really a joke. That's what we wanted to be like when we're on that stream is it should feel... You know, you want it to be engaging. We looked at a lot of the content on there and people on there are really nice and they're great. It's a lot of people with their phone putting the minifigure in front of the camera. And we kind of wanted to bring that together, but with us being on screen as well. So that's what we did for a few days. And yeah, it went super well, but was also really tiring. But another string to the bow.

[00:14:12] I can now say that I've been like an online auctioneer because it's all like quick auction. I've never heard of that. I'm going to look into that. What's it called? Whatnot? Whatnot. Yeah, they've been big in the US, I think, for a little while. And they focus on... Funko Pops are really big on there, but it's Funko Pops, trading cards, Lego, you know, collectibles. I think they're just starting to do gold bullion stores and things like that. It's that kind of product. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:14:41] The kind of product they sell on HMV now. Yeah. Do you know, I was in HMV the other day. Have you been in an HMV recently? Yeah, it doesn't feel like a record store anymore, does it? No. But the amount of vinyl they've got is incredible. Yeah, that's true. That's true. I could not believe it. Like, I really... But to get to the vinyl, you've got to walk past rows and rows of games and Funko Pops and everything else. It's really interesting, isn't it?

[00:15:10] Because it feels like it's probably because technology has proliferated so much that now you have to purposely switch off. Whereas before it was almost a choice to plug in. Actually, now we're always plugged in and tuned into technology. So now I want to do something that is more analog, that's physical in my hands. And it feels like that generation is self-selecting to do that more. What's your analog thing, Dean? So, like, for me, it's notebooks.

[00:15:38] Like, I love a paper notebook. And I know it's a bit of a kind of waste of my time because I just fill them with notes and probably never look at them again. Yeah. But you can't read them either. Heads up. Yeah. But it's good just to write. Because I do the same. I always have a notepad on my desk here. And I would say I maybe look back at 1% of what I've written when I need to. But the rest of it is more like it's just more memorable if I've written it in that moment.

[00:16:07] Especially even versus typing it. And I love typing stuff and having it in documents and stuff. But there's something that makes it stick. What's my analog thing? I think I'm guilty of most of the things that I do being on technology. Recently, I've been building some Lego. Yeah. I thought you might say Lego. Yeah. But otherwise. Oh, my analog thing. Actually, I love theme parks and roller coasters. And so we'll always try and do the old trip here and there to a theme park.

[00:16:36] And I find that when I'm in those places, I'm not looking at my phone. And there's always something in the back of my mind saying, oh, I should probably turn this into content. But I just really like being in the moment and just enjoying, you know, just having a good time. Right. And not having to think about, oh, what emails and stuff are coming in. There's enough there that is keeping my mind stimulated. That is not meaning that I don't then go and switch to, you know, scrolling on LinkedIn or Blue Sky or whatever.

[00:17:05] Are you on Blue Sky now? I am. You've done it. I've left Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing the same. We've not actually left Twitter though. Do you think we should just leave it? I'm still posting. Yeah. We should probably just leave. It's hard, isn't it? Because when you're running a business, you're constantly thinking about how can I make sure I'm in front of the people that I need to be in front of. And I kind of went back and forth on it. And I don't begrudge anyone staying there.

[00:17:29] For me, it was more like a mental health thing of the more I look at this and I'm forced to look at it if I'm going and post on it, the worse I'm feeling about it and the world. And the world, yes. It's just easier to self-select out. And maybe there's some ignorance in that. Maybe that's the wrong thing to do. And actually, I should face up to the fact that there are lots of people that are willing to write that stuff online and obviously believe it enough to put it out there.

[00:17:55] But I've just found that the balance of good versus bad on that platform had just tipped just over to the wrong kind of scale, I guess, the wrong ratio. And that's what led me to say, yeah, I still squat on my username. But otherwise, yeah, I'm on Blue Sky and YouTube and LinkedIn and Instagram and threads. Yes, I'm not very good at socials though. I really, really try. And I always fall off the wagon.

[00:18:24] Yeah, peaks and troughs, isn't it? Yes. I could go like a week of posting photos and everything and then two weeks go by and I've done nothing. And I'm like, I need to get back, need to put stuff out there again. To be honest, that's part of the reason we started this podcast because we thought, well, do you know what? All we'll have to do is speak to people and we'll get lots of social clips from it. Yeah. But even just the editing, you've got to sit through and like find the clips. And yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing what you clip out of this. Maybe it'll be me just going back to the floor to put my light back.

[00:18:55] That's funny. So, Dean, can we talk about AI a wee bit? Yeah. Because that research project you've been doing, what is the, I think, what is the general feeling in the education sector, like out in schools? And what kind of reaction are you getting? Positive, to be honest.

[00:19:20] That's maybe partly because the teachers that we, it's not just teachers either, actually. It's all education staff, but they did have to self-select to be in the program. You know, they needed to kind of opt in. And so it's probably partly that. But we really encourage people who don't feel confident with technology and really don't know what generative AI is or how it works to take part. Because we wanted to get an idea of how will this help people, whether you've already used it or if you haven't.

[00:19:47] And so there was a real mixture of kind of levels of ability and experience, I guess. But yeah, broadly positive. I think one of the things we focused on in that project was helping people at least initially understand how the technology works. Because I still see now that some people will just go to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever and just ask a question.

[00:20:10] And whilst that's fine and you might get an answer and Gemini, for example, might go and even cite a source from search. That really isn't the best use of the technology. Like we should be thinking about how to use generative AI to help us to support creation that we're doing or, you know, take some of the administrative burden off of repetitive tasks. So that's really been the main focus of this project.

[00:20:36] And so I think when people realize like, oh, it's really just a, this is really oversimplifying it. So I don't want a bunch of people to listen and be like, well, no, he's wrong. This isn't really how it works. But it's effectively a prediction engine, right? It's really generative AI is just predicting the next token in a sequence, whether that's letters or the next pixel or whatever it might be. And yes, like algorithms are tuned and there's more to it than that. But if you need to teach a layman how the technology works, I think that's the way to explain it.

[00:21:05] And so we used an activity where we basically played blankety blank. And so we were trying to teach people about the limitations of Gen AI and talking about bias and how bias shows up in outputs, as well as the need to fact check. And what's the other word that I'm looking for? It will come back to me. But bias is a big one, right?

[00:21:28] So what we did was basically said, okay, well, imagine that all of you in this room, you are the training data, right? It's only been trained on you. And so we gave them a sentence. The first one was something like a teacher walked into the noisy blank. And in an educational setting, or I think it might have said a colleague walked into the noisy blank. In an educational setting, what's the first word that comes to your mind? School. School. Classroom. Classroom. Yeah, exactly.

[00:21:56] So what we tried to do was basically let them see that because it's only been trained on the 30 of you in this room, obviously classroom is going to be the most likely word that you would choose for that blank. And that is how bias shows up. That's how generative AI can perpetuate stereotypes, for example. And so checking the output is really important. So we found that once people had kind of grasped that, I think it really helped them understand, okay, where can I really make use of this?

[00:22:25] And then they start to realize like, oh, actually, yeah, when I need to draft that letter and I'm just staring at a blank page and thinking, where do I start? Yeah, this is a really good way to save time. And understanding that just putting an extra minute or two into writing a really good prompt is going to get you a way better output than just rushing something. And so, yeah, I think broadly it's been very positive. You know, no one has come to me outright and said, oh, no, I hate this. I don't know why we're even thinking about using this technology.

[00:22:54] But again, perhaps that's self-selecting. Do you still remember the first time, like the first conversation you had with an AI? Because I think my expectation was that it wasn't going to be that good. And I think that's probably why it had that exponential growth really quickly, wasn't it? It was like people didn't realize how good it was going to be. Like even now, I'm using it for generating code now, like bits of code.

[00:23:22] And at the back of my mind, I'm thinking, well, this isn't going to work because I'm not a coder. Like I'm a designer more than anything. I'm not a developer. But like seeing it work, you're like, whoa. The first thing we do is, I'm keen in a training session, you always want to get people doing something within the first couple of minutes. The worst thing is to do a 15 minute intro before they've done anything. So we tended to get them straight into using Gemini.

[00:23:50] I would give them this really basic prompt, which just says draft a letter to parents about. And again, they would fill in the blank. They might choose like school disco, upcoming school trip or something. And even that first one, usually the reaction, I think we got them to score out of 10. And it would always be around an eight on average, like from the sessions we did. And that always is interesting for me because I know that we're about to get a much better result for them once we've taught them a bit of a framework to write a prompt.

[00:24:19] But they're already blown away by what's in front of them, even though it's like super generic. It's really just left fill in the blank type things and the output that it's given them. But straight away, people start making that connection of, yeah, I can see how this is going to help me. This is going to save me that time on that admin. And I can actually be focused on the kids in front of me in the classroom. The reason I actually got into education rather than, you know, having to draft letters or do risk assessments for school trips.

[00:24:47] And that's like, that's really refreshing, isn't it? Because like you've done this, like we've all been there where we've been in the room with everyone sitting with their arms folded, not really up for this tech stuff that we're about to introduce to them. And like, it's a hard gig at times, isn't it?

[00:25:05] When you're dealing with, you know, a bunch of people who've had a hard day's teaching and the last thing they want is probably to listen to us trying to tell them about some shiny new product or app. And then, but like AI for me has done that. It's been like that wow moment comes so much more easily. Yes, I agree.

[00:25:27] I think that there is like the next bit though, which is that if you don't lean into it and understand how to write a good prompt, for example, then you're going to over time, I think it actually becomes disappointment. Maybe. So it's like anything that, you know, the training becomes really key and the training could be really simple. You know, we just taught people a four step framework. Dan Fitzpatrick, you're about to talk to him. He's got his prepare framework. Yeah.

[00:25:56] We felt that four steps is kind of short enough for everyone to get on board with. It doesn't feel like it's an overwhelming thing. And so it's just persona, which is tell it who you want it to play. Yeah. Task, which is the thing you want it to do. Context, the information it needs to do that thing for you. And then format. What do you want the output to look like at the end of it? Is it bullet points? Is it a paragraph of writing? CSV file. Yeah. Exactly. And so, and that has worked really well.

[00:26:27] Even then when you're working with people one-to-one, because we allow people to put one-to-one sessions as well. It has to be a constant reminder. You know, that needs to be written somewhere where you're looking at it to say, yeah, every time I write a prompt, I should be thinking about that. Even if I don't use all four steps, I should be thinking, you know, am I really giving it the information that it needs? I would add in a fifth, well, obviously your four-step program, but I would add in a fifth thing as well. And that would be to think about how to up-level what it's just created.

[00:26:54] So a lot of the time when we're doing the in-person sessions is we'll get people to create something. But then it's either putting something just like the word more and getting it to create more. Or export, show me this as an image, as a poem, as whatever. And just expanding on what it's created and just getting it to add in learning intentions, success criteria, that kind of thing. And just keep on asking for more on what it's created for the up-levels every single time. Yeah, I love that.

[00:27:22] For me, it's been the bit that everybody seems to enjoy as well. It's the human in the loop, right? Just reiterating the importance of the thing that you've been given first time isn't going to be the thing that you necessarily want to end up with. I think there's two ways to think about it. Like, you need to check the output so then you can follow up. Or even just go back and edit your original prompt. And if there is just one output that you want, just go and refine that prompt now because it's almost there. You don't necessarily need to go back and get it to rewrite. Just re-prompt it. Just refine.

[00:27:53] What I find kind of fascinating, right, is that the way I see most people tackling AI in education is as a productivity aid to help teachers, right? And there is this kind of paranoia that the system's got about assessment, and particularly in universities. But it's almost like a new literacy, this, isn't it?

[00:28:17] It's like, in some ways, when you think about the skills that we're trying to, like meta skills for future work, critical thinking, I can't think of a better way to teach critical thinking than to have a conversation with an AI and question it. And, you know, it's almost like, what do we do with the pupils? You know, like where, because I feel like we're all dealing with kind of educators and getting their, sort of getting them on board and getting their heads around it.

[00:28:46] But is there anyone who's kind of thinking about young people and what, you know, how we teach them to interact with an AI? Yeah, I, this is the existential question, I think, particularly in education. Dan is probably a better person to get into this than me. But yeah, I think it's crucially important that students are using technology full stop, you know, forget just generative AI.

[00:29:12] There are still some that aren't even getting exposed to just day-to-day productivity tech that they're going to use in their life, in their work life, in their personal life when they leave school. And more than ever now, I really, I've never liked the term like digital natives because I think it miscells what it means. You're right, yeah. Yes, the students are digitally native in the sense that they've grown up in a world where they're surrounded by digital technology.

[00:29:40] They're not digitally native in the sense that they know how to use that tech innately for things that are going to be useful for their work life, right? What they're using it for is, you know, staying in contact with their friends, for example. Maybe they are being productive with it in their own way, but they're going to join companies that are working in very peculiar ways that are often 10 plus years behind the actual, you know, cutting edge. So, yeah, I think that it's crucial.

[00:30:10] I don't know what the answer is because I think you constantly come up against people that say, well, there's no research. How can we put this in front of kids? But that's a never ending argument, right? Because how do we possibly get any research if some people aren't brave enough to go and try it? And I understand the argument that, you know, we're messing with kids education. And how can you just go and chuck something in that you don't know is good? But isn't that how we do everything? Yeah. You know, like, isn't that just how stuff is invented?

[00:30:38] People probably said that about the printing press. Exactly. Can we be sure? Yeah. Yeah. The met classes that we've been in where the students are showing us an AI. Like I was in one recently and they're showing me, is it Suno or something like that? And it's basically music creation. And they've all got their own. They're doing this outside of school, but they've all got their own music that they're creating through AI. And I was like, I don't know anything about it. I'm not going to do it with you.

[00:31:08] But thank you for showing me. And they're showing us the different tools that are available to them. Right. Which is, for me, that's a healthy classroom environment, right? The teacher doesn't need to be the person that knows everything. If anything, one of the best ways to learn is to teach someone else something that you know. And so, yeah, I would always encourage that approach as well. You know, there are just many, many layers to this. And you can get into talking about how does this impact vulnerable pupils? Like it widens the attainment gap.

[00:31:38] You know, at the same time, though, it could make it smaller if everyone had enough access. You know, it could improve the gap, right? I think that's really fascinating, actually. Because when you think about some really complex digital skills, like data analysis, like getting really into trends and data and analyzing, you know, lots of data or coding.

[00:32:01] Like in some ways you could see AI as a kind of great democratizer in that sense, because it gives people access to those super advanced skills that you might previously have had to, you know, spend years of your life learning. And that's an interesting thing for me as well.

[00:32:20] There is something I've been pondering recently is, is there a risk that the more content that's created with AI, obviously the more generative AI just becomes trained on content it's created, which actually makes content it creates even more bland over time. And I don't know whether that is a thing or not, but it is an interesting thing to consider because I'm with you and I think that's true.

[00:32:49] And I think that what it does is democratizes for all these people that can't or that don't have those specific skills that are more like me, that are generalists basically, rather than like a deep specialist. In many ways, those deep specialists are going to become very important because someone does still need to develop the tech. They still need to know how it's working as well. And so, yeah, I think that's part of that democratization process though, potentially where everyone is able to do it to a point.

[00:33:17] And then those specialists become really important for, for building those tools perhaps. Yeah. It's a, it's an interesting discussion and I don't have any answers. No. I don't think I'm an expert in the area of the philosophy of it. And yeah. It's good to chat about it though. It's good to think about it. It's like, yeah. I don't know. Did either of you see Google's announcement recently about quantum computing? Mind blown.

[00:33:45] And so I think that this is, for me, that's the topic that people are ignoring right now. Yes. You know, we're still talking about generative AI, but quietly in the background, there are multiple companies working on quantum computing now. Yes. My mind can't really fathom what's possible once quantum computing is truly unlocked for everyone. Because what was it? It was, it did something in five minutes that would take the current fastest supercomputer. Yeah. Like thousands of years. Five trillion years or something. Yeah.

[00:34:14] That's, what's it called again? Is it called Willow or something? This quantum chip. I can't remember the name of it. Yeah. They've got this quantum chip that I think it's called something like Willow. But yeah, I, I mean, I was listening to something on that last night and I was like, I don't understand this. This is too much for me. Like at the moment, you know, like, and it was like someone was, was sort of arguing that this quantum chip kind of implies that, that, that there are, you know, multiple universities. And I'm like, how?

[00:34:44] I don't understand that. It's going too big. Yeah. It's going, it's going a bit too much, but yeah, the big announcement from Google, I think was it last week was about the agentive AI and that like the integration with other tools so that it performs tasks. That's, that's surely going to be a leap forward that will make it ubiquitous almost. It will make it. Oh, yeah. A hundred percent.

[00:35:12] If you think about the customer service experience you've had with companies over the years where they're trying to use chatbots. Yeah. I think you're now in an era where actually you might actually get a decent experience with a chatbot. Yeah. Whereas before Vodafone have always been awful at this. Every time I've had to try and speak to Vodafone, you get to their bot called Toby. Yeah. That was able to never answer a single question that I would put to it and would always end up with a person.

[00:35:39] And then I couldn't help them but think, well, what was the point? Yeah. The only point here was to stall my time before I got to a human, right? Whereas I think that with generative AI now, if you can give it the right training data, you might actually create something genuinely helpful for people. That means that, yeah, it is actually just quicker to go onto the chatbot than it is to be put through to a human straightaway potentially. Especially when these companies, the workforces aren't big enough.

[00:36:08] You don't want to be waiting in a phone queue and so on. And again, there's another philosophical conversation there about workforce and what that means to jobs of the future. But I think that, yeah, the whole agentic thing is really the most obvious use case, isn't it? Yeah. You know, if you think about Notebook.lm and you can just give it a bunch of sources and then ask it questions. What if you just surfaced that chat just to the end user in the front end and the back end was you just uploading sources?

[00:36:37] That's the democratization that you were talking about as well. Absolutely. Yeah, now anyone can just go and create that for their little small business. You know, there's only one person that's cutting hair, answering the phone, taking all the bookings and everything. Well, now they can just focus on the cutting hair part and then all the bookings and everything take care of themselves through the agents that are working for them. See, before we jump into the future, I've got a question for you, Dean. So I saw a thing, I read a blog post recently.

[00:37:00] It wasn't a study or anything, but saying about if you're polite to an AI in your prompt, that you will get a more genuine response. You will get more of a response as well from it. And it'll be more of a pleasure to kind of have the future conversations with that AI. Yeah. Are you a polite prompter or are you a bullet point? This is everything I need. Nah, he's polite. I know he's going to be polite. Yeah, yeah. I am polite because I've heard that as well.

[00:37:29] And I actually think my experience in using Gemini mostly actually is that, yeah, if you say please and thank you, you kind of encourages better responses. And it's really interesting because there's no reason it should. Yeah. But I guess it's something to do with the model, right? That everything it's been trained on probably see, it's been trained on probably lots of conversations. You know, if you think that a lot of the training data is probably on Reddit. Yeah.

[00:37:58] And people probably get better responses when they've been polite at the beginning of threads as well. So maybe it's just something relating to that. But yeah, I tend to be polite though. Also, I really want to use it to save time. And so it's just about being concise enough, I think, with the prompts. Because otherwise it just becomes too fluffy as well. And if you make a prompt that's too fluffy, you sometimes get an answer that's also fluffy back. You know? Yes.

[00:38:26] Because it's kind of a bit confused maybe about what the thing is that I want it to do versus just being super concise. We'll talk about it in the future. But I'm really interested in your kind of, you've mentioned a couple of times about, you know, presentations. What makes an effective presentation? Yeah. Can you talk about that for us a little bit? Because that's something you're, I mean, you are amazing at presenting. We've both seen you present.

[00:38:56] You can hear in this, in the way that you're talking today. Yeah. Yeah. So there's, there's something, that's a skill when you think about the little boy that was afraid to speak. Yeah. And the journey you've been on to get to where you are today. Like that's really interesting too. Yeah. One thing I didn't mention earlier is that I didn't go to university. I don't have a degree. I am part of the 93% Club. Have you heard of that? No. No.

[00:39:28] That had been to private schools. And so she started a club for the 93%. Love that. The stat is something like 93% have been to state schools, but the 7% make up like 60% plus of doctors and lawyers and so on. And so it's really interesting. Yeah. So I, I have no kind of formal education in that sense around the talking about presentations or computer science or anything like that. This is just what I've done over the years.

[00:39:57] And I've heard feedback over time where I've delivered presentations and people say, oh, that was really great. Like I really liked the way you deliver it, for example. Sure. And so I just, I guess I've finally given myself the confidence to help other people do the same because otherwise I'm wrapped up in thinking, oh no, I actually, I'm going to just focus on the one piece of negative feedback that I've had from, you know, every hundred that I, that I get that are good.

[00:40:27] Yeah. I think we'll do that. Yeah. And part of it is that I guess my mind, my brain tells me that most people are just being nice. That's the kind of excuse that I tell myself. Most people are just nice. And so obviously they're going to say nice things. And actually that one person that has been brave enough to give a real piece of feedback, I should listen to that.

[00:40:46] And so I always do give some weight to that feedback, but I think in the age of the internet, especially it's probably best that that doesn't come from comments and instead it comes from actual feedback of someone that was in a room with you. Yeah. So I try to kind of boil down the things that I have done over the years, because a lot of this, I think just comes subconsciously. Sure. It's, I've not necessarily sat down and thought, okay, to deliver a great presentation, I'm going to do these five things.

[00:41:14] It's just things that I've picked up over time. And so I've tried to unpick it and that's what I've tried to be sharing with people this year. One of the most simple is just a smile. And it sounds like the most ridiculous thing, but as I'm talking to you here, I'm kind of overdoing a smile. It doesn't look like that, I don't think. And it probably doesn't sound like it. But if I don't smile, my tone is going to change. And it's not because I'm any less interested in the conversation.

[00:41:40] It's just that that's just how physically your body and your voice seems to work, right? Yeah. And so I try to take complex ideas or things that people might find scary and make them more simple. Yeah, that's a really nice way to sum it up, actually. I think you're really good at that. Blankety blank, for example. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like laughing therapy. If you laugh, then you'll feel better in the long run.

[00:42:09] So if you smile whilst you're presenting. Have you ever tried that, by the way? No. Just like off the cuff on your own. Just start laughing. And you have done that. Just go for the laugh. I've done that. Yeah, it does work. Totally works. I'll go away and try that today. Laughter is the best medicine. There's a reason that that's a saying, for sure. Yep. Whereas my pals called me Giggles when I was at university because I just laughed all the time. Giggles. Well, that's your new nickname, Ridgway.

[00:42:39] I mean, I'm going to regret that. It sounds like the name of a character from Toy Story, doesn't it? It does, actually. If we squeeze you, you squeak and then you laugh. It's quite funny. Giggles. Giggles, Ridgway. I love it. The other thing that I think I've learned a lot from, there's a guy called Neil Malarkey, who about a year ago, we did this event at Google in Dublin. It was one of the last things I worked on called the Champion Symposium. We got a big number of the community to come along to Dublin.

[00:43:09] We brought in a lot of external speakers. One of them was Neil. Neil has been doing improv, which is basically just making stuff up on the spot on stage. Ideally, it's funny, but they're not trying to be funny. It just happens to be funny with what they're creating. Neil took that and has turned it into kind of a toolkit for helping people in work communicate better. And so after that, I actually have done some coaching with Neil, and I found that really helpful.

[00:43:39] And his book, In the Moment, is really good. It kind of lays out a framework for good communication. But tonight, I'm going to the Comedy Store Players, which is the improv group that he's in. And they're doing a show at Shakespeare's Globe. Oh, wow. And I'm always just blown away by what they're able to create on stage and how you come out of that show feeling better because you're full of endorphins from laughter. It's like a medicine. So is that the Globe in London on the Thames? Yeah. Yeah, cool.

[00:44:08] Oh, that's exciting. So we'll see. So, you know, I'm feeling good right now, but maybe by 9pm tonight, I'll be behind endorphins. You'll be amazing. Yeah. So, Dean, where can people find you? Oh, the best place to go, actually, is deanjstokes.co.uk. And it's basically just a link in bio of every social that I'm on. And I have a newsletter that I started writing when I did this called Detour Diaries.

[00:44:38] And so it goes into a bit more detail about, you know, building a business, tell some stories from my past, including how I won 20 grand in a Cadbury competition. That's a good one to read. Yeah. We should have dug into that. Go and tell us a bit about that. You need to tell us about that now. You can't just drop that. You've got one minute. We've got one minute. One minute. Go for it. I'm going to drop it in there and people can go and read about it on the newsletter. Okay. Okay, fine. Yeah.

[00:45:04] I didn't think about it at the time, but looking back now, what's clear to me is that there are many of these kinds of things that have had an impact on how I think and approach problems and challenges that I face now. And, you know, I still feel these kind of imposter feelings. I have days where, you know, I'm not this confident that this would be a real struggle and I have to push for it. Probably tomorrow I'll wake up and think, oh no, what did I say on that podcast?

[00:45:34] Like, I'm sure I've said something that I want edited out. And so I'm really constantly just working on being super present and trusting past Dean, I guess. Well, yeah. I mean, like at the end of the day, you got where you got to, didn't you? I mean, look at the things you've achieved and that's kind of like that. We all have that as well. Like I have that on a daily basis and I suppose you just have to think, well, when I did that, it worked out okay. So I'm still the same person.

[00:46:03] So if I just keep doing these kind of things, then it should be okay. Yeah. My mantra these days is if that thing feels scary, but I kind of feel like maybe I want to do it, it's just do it scared then. Yeah. Yeah. That's good advice. Yeah, like that's just do it scared. Good advice. Dean, thank you so much. I wish you the best of luck. You've taken a couple of really brave moves in the last 12 months. So yeah. Good luck. All the best. Thank you so much, guys.

[00:46:32] I really appreciate it. And thanks for having me. I can't wait to see this, to see all the other episodes as well. Thanks very much to Dean for that conversation. I think we could have chatted all day when it came down to that. Remember, we are digitized. We are digitized.com is our homepage web address. You can find out all about our courses, our AI products, our services.

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