Blockchain, Brands and the Future of Consumer Experience and Access with Naimul Huq

Episode Notes:

When something is super intelligent, can we even reason with it? Can we even tell it what to do? Can we understand it at all?

In this episode, I sit down with Naimul Huq, former SVP of Operations at Vayner3 and now CEO of Dr. Studio to dig into these questions about AI, and the tech evolution from the first iteration of social media to where we’re headed next.

With a wealth of experience spanning over 15 years in digital culture, marketing analytics, and consumer insights, he has become a sought-after translator, bridging the realms of brands, blockchain, and the metaverse. In our conversation, Naimul and I delve into our respective immigrant journeys from Bangladesh, his upbringing in the American Midwest, his diverse career in healthcare innovation and political data science, and his strategic insights into exponential technologies like AI, VR, and blockchain.

In this episode we cover:

00:26 - How it’s like to keep up and stay ahead with emerging technology
01:49 - How his cultural, spiritual, and family tradition influenced his life and career choices
11:15 - What it took to shift from Med School to Web 3
15:18 - His experience with helping traditional businesses (health insurance companies) leverage the use of technology
19:43 - How the narrative of big data started to emerge and statisticians started learning computer science
23:50 - What Web3 really means and the evolution of the Internet
29:25 - The potential of where we’re going vs. where we are today
34:49 - The possibility of AI being smarter than humans and the risk that comes along with it
43:00 - (Rapid fire questions with Naimul) Why it’s important to build your credit score as early as possible, why you need to set aside time to meditate, and how a 49-inch monitor helps him get his life together
45:00 - What’s next for web3 and what are the possibilities when technology becomes more available for more people?
51:00 - Who’s up next for Naimul? .

If any of these topics excite you, then join us as we delve into the fascinating world of emerging technologies and its impact on our lives!

What are your thoughts on Naimul's perspective on where we’re headed, how we’ll experience and use technology?

Referenced on the Episode:

Groundswell by Charlene Li

XKCD Comics

Mo Gawdat and his books

Steven Bartlett's podcast episode with Mo Gawdat

Slo Mo: A Podcast with Mo Gawdat

Who’s Up Next: Steven Bartlett

Guest Bio: Naimul Huq

Naimul Huq, formerly served as the SVP and Head of Operations for Vayner3, an innovation consultancy founded by Gary Vaynerchuk, and now the CEO of Doctor Studios a digital content studio that helps doctors grow their personal brands, and the EVP of Innovation at /prompt.

Naimul was born down the road in Lexington and started his career in Louisville. A TEDx speaker, analyst, and blockchain believer, he specializes in Web3 strategies, NFTs, crypto, data, analytics, AI and digital marketing. He’s an award-winning strategic consultant for Fortune 500 companies, startups, B2B and B2C organizations. He has worked on Federal elections, global non-profits, and the world's most innovative brands. Before all that he was a Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Naimul lives in New York City.

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Ep 05: Blockchain, Brands and the Future of Consumer Experience and Access with Naimul Huq
[00:00:00] Naimul: Thanks for having me Ariba. It was so great meeting you the other day and I'm excited to be here. Looking forward to that conversation. Yeah. Same
[00:00:05] Ariba: here. I feel like when we were doing our prep chat, it felt like that was the magic of the podcast and there was like moments where I'm like, Oh, I want to save this because this conversation is already so, so magical.
[00:00:16] Naimul: That's when you know it's going to be good. Yeah.
[00:00:19] Ariba: So, how are you doing today?
[00:00:21] Naimul: I'm energized. I feel like we're in the most transformative era of human history. in terms of just the like speed of transformation, there is so much going on all the time and I think it's because we've never been more connected.
[00:00:36] There's never been more. Capacity in terms of our efficiency and productivity and output. and that is also super overwhelming. There's just a lot of stuff to keep up with. And as someone who has sort of made it their career to be a couple of steps ahead of clients and understanding emerging technology.
[00:00:55] it's never been quite at this pace. So you have to like hone in on the things that are, in your wheelhouse and that you can, understand and then be selective about what you're digging into and learning. and I'm constantly seeking that balance because everything seems really interesting right now.
[00:01:11] Ariba: I totally understand that tension between like wanting to focus, but also realizing there's just so much right now happening that you want to learn it all that you want to know what's happening.
[00:01:22]
[00:01:22] Can you tell us your origin story?
[00:01:25] Naimul: It really started when my parents immigrated to the United States.
[00:01:28] and my dad came first, he grew up in Bangladesh, called Dhaka, which is in a city the capital of Bangladesh. And my. Dad came to America and, was Looking for a better life and, came in the early eighties. I think in the vein of wanting to, live up to, his family ideals, but also like seek out a stable job that had, infinite security because there was so much uncertainty from the place he was coming from.
[00:01:51] Previously, he went for like a tenure track faculty position and become a professor. And so like, He was smart. My dad, my grandfather was a professor and there were a lot of academics in the family. And there's this like theme of education, I think in our culture, that it is the only thing that nobody can take away from you.
[00:02:11] And so much else, your home, your land, your like money, your wealth, everything has been removed from like security that you can always keep your education. So, um, What did he become a professor in? So he studied operations management, I think is ironic, that like I somehow ended up there cause I never took his class.
[00:02:28] and we didn't really talk about it. Well, he may have lived it. He was like, he's a very regimented guy. He has his routine. he's like process improvement. He's very efficient, high yields. And I think like the manufacturing operation. Like knowledge that he has is like seeped its way into how he parented in some ways.
[00:02:46] so we grew up in many ways, like a very academic oriented life. but he was doing his PhD at university of Kentucky. And I was born there in the late eighties in Lexington. And, and then I think my brother who had immigrated with my mom, when they got, the visa sponsorship from the university,
[00:03:04] my mom's brother started here. Like one of the first places when they came over was like to stay with my uncle up in the Bronx and like a pretty crappy situation.
[00:03:12] He was driving taxi cab. And so. I carry that with me, but growing up in Nebraska, it's a pretty homogenous monoculture.
[00:03:20] there weren't a lot of other Bangladeshi people around. My parents, I think, found all of them and made sure that they invited them over. My mom's a great cook. And so she loved to throw parties or dowts, as we call them, people who look like me, who talk like me, who, they could relate to not related to you, you know, not related to me.
[00:03:35] And there was like, I felt like I had, you know, an ability to stay in touch with my culture, you know, either through, those events or, or going to the mosque or, being able to, Be at home with my family and hear them, speaking the language of the country that they came from and, eat the food and, live the culture.
[00:03:53] So I start there at the very beginning because it's very foundational. and it's something that, shaped who I am and what I'm interested in. immediately I felt like I'm a Nebraskan, I'm just this kid who's like going to school here with all the other kids and I'm just one of the kids in the school, even though I might eat different things at home and worship differently or, have like.
[00:04:12] A different philosophical framework or spiritual framework, that is like my guidance in life. and I can find conflict is that in those things as I grow older, but not something that like prevents me from engaging with others and empathizing with other people. I was, a very social person outgoing.
[00:04:29] I love to like do public speaking. And I understood, I think at an early, early age, like the power of communication and it's something that like my father reinforces, like someone who lectures on a regular basis.
[00:04:40] So I like, I harbored a certain, you know, ideal around that. Super ambitious in high school applied to all the Ivy leagues did the Moorhead cane. Cause it was a full ride to an amazing school in North Carolina, Chapel Hill, first public university carried on that, like belief in public institutions.
[00:04:56] and I was pre med cause like. I think growing up, like my parents were like, doctor, lawyer, engineer, you have three choices, pick them , or be all of them at once if you can. I loved science. I did like science Olympiad, science, , fair chemistry field day in the Midwest. And so like I oriented myself to chemistry, but I also like. Wanted to study English literature. Cause my friends told me like, you're good at writing. You like seem to be like super into this critical thinking stuff. Why don't you like also study creative writing and, and English. And so I did that too.
[00:05:28] Ariba: Really early on, you were already multidisciplinary.
[00:05:32] Naimul: Yeah. My house was like my background, right? Like there's a lot of books in my house always. And I would see my dad like get up very early in the morning and like read. Books, read scholarly texts. I used to read a ton and then there was like something in me. I think I got it from my dad where like, if I learned something, I had to teach it to somebody else. So I learned to like take that and then just walk around and talk. And it's like reinforced in my cultural and spiritual and family tradition that like, there are two types of people in this world, people who, pursue money and are never satisfied or people who pursue knowledge and are never satisfied.
[00:06:06] And I always want to be the latter because it's something that no one can take away from you and it tends to have more impact and value and ultimately can help you get the other thing too. if you are, effective at applying it. So the journey to the MCAT the Princeton review and Kaplan recourses and things like that was just like kind of fraught because I was like, am I just like trying to make my parents happy, which I want to do doing it.
[00:06:28] Right. And I think you, like you had a similar experience too, right?
[00:06:30] Ariba: I did? I did. I relate to so many aspects of what you're sharing. I think I actually did want to go to med school and did want like science and all of that.
[00:06:40] it's interesting to hear you talk about your appreciation for literature, because I didn't have that. when we first met and I realized, and I asked you like, Hey, are you Bengali? I asked that made you say that, we're grounded in so much poetry.
[00:06:53] And I was like, Oh my God, that's so true. When I think about that conversation that we had and the conversation we're having right now, it's so interesting because I didn't really grow up around that. so similar in terms of like, once you immigrate here, please be a scientist, a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer.
[00:07:09] And I think, For me, it was, my dad abandoned us when I was like 11 years old. So then quickly I had to get a job under the table. I worked at a local VHS store, for anyone who's listening that doesn't know what a VHS is, please look it up.
[00:07:24] So having that I think there was more pressure, whether it's spoken pressure on or unspoken pressure or really just a combination of it where it was like, okay, I need to make my family proud, but not only proud, I need to prove that us abandoning.
[00:07:39] Everything that was familiar and all of our family in Bangladesh was worth it. And at that time, my mom became a single mom of two daughters. I had a job since I was, 11 or 12 years old and I became a second parent to my sister, you know, so that completely changed our dynamic. So I went to Brooklyn Tech High School, which meant like I was already pursuing science, a specialized science degree. And then by then I also had a speech pathologist because I'm half deaf. And so by the time I Went into undergrad, I was, majoring in biomechanical engineering, and I think that I had moments where I was like, do I want to be a doctor or do I want to be like a scientist and an engineer creating the next innovations in biomedicine?
[00:08:17] And I think there was a point where I don't know who made the decision. Was it ingrained in me, around me, because I was already a pre med? And I think if you're a pre med, you're kind of around that culture that values medicine as a career more than anything else. And I think in hindsight, I wish I had taken some like business classes, just expose myself to other facets. So while I was in med school, I was in the lab all the time. I did research in orthopedic, surgery cardiothoracic surgery and cancer therapy. I was killing it. In the lab, I had a really hard time in class, and I think it was because I was more of a scientist, more of a question asker, and digging into the unknowns, and that's more of the mindset of an engineer.
[00:09:00] Naimul: This is what I was talking about. Like, it's, You have a drive to like unlock things that trigger your curiosity. it's very similar. I was great in the lab. I loved lab. My wife is a scientist too.
[00:09:10] She's a pediatrician and she like hated lab. She's, she's like very good at being focused and, memorizing huge amounts of material. And like, it's good for her. We need people like that. Like that's essential. I don't. And she's also very sweet and good with kids.
[00:09:24] So like, she has that personality, but there is something that, is able to tap into that, like, I get bored, like 30 pages into, a chapter about the myelin sheath around the. Neuron, like whatever it is, like, you know, I'm like, I want to do this in practice. Like, she told me, like, I loved anatomy physiology because it felt practical, but there was something about it that like, I relate, you know, it's when it's theory, I loved having the facts, like there are certain facts that I'll remember from science class that I will carry forward to this day because they were practical applications. And so it's very easy to, for me to become distracted from stuff when it doesn't have a practical application.
[00:09:58] how did you go
[00:09:59] Ariba: from that realization to web three?
[00:10:02] Naimul: Being driven by curiosity, one of the most.
[00:10:05] Essential tools in my life has been the internet. And so like from a very early age, when, America got online, I begged my dad, we need to have a dial up connection. can we please connect this thing to the rest of the world? We're in Omaha. I don't know what else is going on out there.
[00:10:19] we'd have like The global newspaper subscription or anything like that. So that was like my access to the world. And then I started doing debate. It was great. Like research tool. I learned about research tools. I was a 17 year old with a LexisNexis login. So like I was doing a lot of research from an early age and then the internet became very obvious to me as this thing that lets you meet other people and learn about other things.
[00:10:40] and eventually became this place that you could create. and went to college, UNC was like one of the first schools actually that Mark Zuckerberg put on the list after the Ivy leagues. He like went down the U S news and world's reports list of public schools and UNC is up there. So he, I was able to get access with my email very early, like my senior year of high school.
[00:10:58] And so social media was just something that I had been on for a long time, and was blogging since the age of 16 on, a site that my friend had coded and, he, he had the Apple computer and so it was just like a little bit more advanced than everyone. And now he's the software engineer for the New York times and lives in New York.
[00:11:14] And, so like There's these amazing like convergences and divergences that have been in life that, I keep recognizing like the same signals over and over again. And in this case, it was like world is going to happen virtually on this mechanism.
[00:11:27] You should learn as much as you can about it, and you should use it effectively through the practice of using it. You'll satisfy your curiosity, but you'll also, inadvertently create a career for yourself. So the first job I had out of school was like, Should I do science and healthcare?
[00:11:39] Should I do business and like learn about business? What about the business of healthcare? I worked at the innovation center at Humana, which was the health insurance company and the remit of this group was like use population health, techniques To, change people's behaviors towards more healthy wellness oriented practices.
[00:11:55] it was losing weight. It was remembering to take your medicine. And we were doing things with like the MIT media lab. And it was very fun, like games for health going in and like putting Bluetooth enabled pedometers on kids so that they could like compete with each other their district against other schools.
[00:12:10] the first day. My boss, I'll never forget this. Like his name is Greg Matthews. He was like a mentor of mine for a long time. he asked me, when I first got there, he's like, what do you know about social media? I was like, well, you know, I'm a digital native. this is my life. all of what's happening in the world.
[00:12:24] All my friends are on it. We were the first like payer in the health insurance industry to like launch a Twitter channel and like answer customer service complaints and come up with a policy around that. And it just led me down this rabbit hole. We met with these social listening experts who are calculating, how much reach, social media content could get and.
[00:12:42] They were doing this, analytics stuff that seemed very fascinating too. And so I realized that this was another inflection point in my life that I had to pursue this. I moved to Austin, Texas. I joined an agency called WCG. it was about 80 people at the time and they were fixated on the healthcare industry.
[00:12:57] They work with pharma companies, emerging biotechs. and they had this analytics practice that was doing really cutting edge. Social listening and, analytics of search and other domains of the internet. Which was so new
[00:13:08] Ariba: at that time, especially for the
[00:13:10] Naimul: industry that Twitter had come out a few years ago, and it was being used as like your status updates, we were also saying that, like, doctors were talking to patients on this channel, and people were like, sharing personal opinions. And this was an era when, like, Healthcare companies, they're super risk averse. They're like, how do I put the black box ISI on a social media advertisement, which was a new thing.
[00:13:32] and so we realized that like, if you have a deep understanding of this stuff and you bring in data scientists and you bring in analytics and you, you give them an understanding that like, Hey, you used to do stuff by focus groups and you used to analyze. Um, responses from, you know, surveys and polls and things like that.
[00:13:50] And you had very small sample sizes and you had the like layer of human interaction between you and that, that opinion that's biased data. Instead, look at all of this, like freely offered opinion online about you, about your products, about your competitors, people just like volunteering, like I hated this.
[00:14:09] Thing, or I love this thing, I wish it had this extra feature. that was like a huge light bulb moment for companies when they were able to get over. Charlene Lee wrote in this book called Groundswell Thinking back in like 2009, that, you know, the Sony C C M O saw these reviews of his products on Amazon and was like, how do we stop this?
[00:14:26] And it was like you, that was, that was the point where like, you don't Right. You don't stop it. There is no stopping and it's a groundswell. Yeah. you can learn from it. Yeah. Transform your business and, and give. Customers, what they really want, if you pay attention to it and you really understand it.
[00:14:38] And so that's when like the narrative of big data started to emerge and statisticians started learning computer science. and so just got really deep in this. I stayed there for a long time and I've basically been studying the internet for 15 years. And so in the last couple of years, crypto emerge, I was on Reddit every single day for like six hours.
[00:14:56] And know, I read the Bitcoin white paper when it came out. It didn't quite make sense to me. There was a period when, Bitcoin was 50 cents and I didn't have any investor mentality, but I was an experimentalist. I was around this stuff from, you know, from a long time ago, 2016, like bought Ethereum. because Coinbase came out and they had an easy to use app, and just stayed alongside it, but just kept going deeper and deeper, deeper in the social research.
[00:15:20] I joined precision strategies after a stint at like a legacy PR firm, really focused on like consumer, spaces called Libby Taylor. And then I went to precision, which was. Founded by President Obama's former campaign managers. they're based in DC. They were looking for a data and analytics lead.
[00:15:34] and this is 2019 and that's probably like the deepest I ever got into social analytics where we got to the point where we're like, let's see if we can find the origins of disinformation about the election, about vaccines. all these like really pressing issues and then learned a lot of like real hardcore data analytics where people were doing modeling to say we have all this data we can triangulate about consumer behavior.
[00:15:56] Can we use that to have more effective paid media to reach people, to send them text messages, all those kinds of things. I did that and I realized like I've reached a point where. The like masters of data science that I'm hiring out of Ivy league schools are just going to always be much better at mining this data.
[00:16:12] And now they're really good at translating it and telling you the story behind it, which was sort of where I specialized. I need to, see what else is out there this was, the end of 2020, when the election was over and the NFT narrative was reemerging. I was like, this is exactly what I was looking for.
[00:16:28] What I've been waiting for. It's like ownership on the internet of these cultural memes makes the most sense to me. And so I really went down this rabbit hole with NFTs to understand. How is this going to transform identity, the idea of, owning objects and owning, intellectual property of being a member of a community and having the signal that somebody else is a member of your tribe based on the profile picture that they've selected, being able to trace all of that interaction on chain, put value provenance, https: otter.
[00:16:58] ai Understanding that at a really deep level and, through, just investing and participating in that space, had a chance to meet Gary Vaynerchuk five minutes into the conversation with him, he's like, I'm starting this thing called Vayner NFT. you know, we need folks like you.
[00:17:15] And so, had that conversation, wasn't even really thinking about. leaving this very cool, visible place that had just won the election. realize at the same time, like I need to keep moving forward, right? This is the next iteration of the internet. And if I'm going to stay ahead, I can't just keep going deeper and deeper.
[00:17:33] I actually, at this point need to be a generalist. I need to get more senior. I need to spend more time managing people, developing them, letting them be the experts. So, uh, made the pivot and, and join what's now Vayner three, in 2022 in March of last year. What
[00:17:47] Ariba: a story. I mean, what's how incredible, like starting out in Nebraska and now in New York, all threaded through curiosity and always being open to hopping into what's the next thing, right?
[00:18:00] Not just because of. Something is trending, but really from a space of curiosity and feeling energized by that curiosity. I know you just talked about getting into Ethereum really early and then understanding the role that digital collectibles and, like a decentralized internet can have.
[00:18:17] this is probably a perfect moment to pause and like, maybe just define what is web three to you, especially as someone who, as you called it, you're a digital
[00:18:24] Naimul: native. One of the things that I've learned is the definitions are, fluid and they constantly need reevaluation as you're onboarding more and more people because of the nature of these platforms, they will redefine what it is to.
[00:18:43] Exist on the internet, right? They will create the experiences. So I remember when web 2. 0 was, being defined and people were coining that term, they said, because you have cell phones now and you have, data plans and you have, these great cameras you can upload and create the experience.
[00:18:57] So it's now it's gone from read to read, right. Right. And, and I think, you know, nowadays people add own. To read, write, own to say web three allows for ownership of the blockchain. to me, that's like a dated reference. That's like a 2021 definition that was very helpful in explaining how the blockchain incorporates with existing structures of the internet, but the internet is super multifaceted, right?
[00:19:19] It's not just that web three is the blockchain. But Web3 is still dependent on having servers and, you know, standard HTTP protocols, like being able to use social media, social networks, the like algorithms that serve you content. It's still an essential part of Web3. None of that has gone away. We keep adding new technologies to it that maybe make those things obsolete.
[00:19:41] Make them more efficient or add new features. So blockchain added a really important new feature, a truly censorship resistant technology that allows you to interact with other people all over the world and also attribute digital scarcity and value to assets. But. It has changed since then, because we have the advent of virtual reality.
[00:20:03] We have these amazing 3D immersive games and platforms now that are, almost photorealistic. you also have this, incredible boom of Artificial intelligence, which frankly has been around since the fifties, like 1958 or something, you know, there's different dates of like when the first artificial intelligence like terminology was coined, but it has gone through boom and bust cycles since that time.
[00:20:26] And we're in a boom cycle right now that I think has put us past. the likelihood that there's going to be another bus cycle. I think it's, you know, either asymptotically just like reaching a level of, you know, human value, that will just continue in depth and, like application, or if, there's new models that emerge in the next couple of years or the next couple of months, even it could go exponential and really like become super intelligent.
[00:20:50] So. You can't ignore that because that's fundamental technology. That's something that is all over the internet. People are using it every day. It's the fastest growing consumer technology product in history. that has changed my definition of web three and the way that I and everybody at Vayner three talks about it is web three is a more immersive, personalized and ownable internet.
[00:21:10] And each one of those technologies that I described is relatable to one of those terms that immersive aspect is. Apple has released what is now like probably one of the most transformational human interfaces for computation and just being able to have like a really robust, high resolution, augmented reality layer.
[00:21:30] There's the personalized aspect of it, which is. I can, reasonably produce thousands of customized tweets that speak to an individual and their, you know, experiences with me based on, how I trained my model to do it in AI Carvana, a couple of like weeks ago, put out 1. 3 million different ad variations based on.
[00:21:51] What people had bought from their platform previously, and they had a 3D model of your car. They said, Hey, John, you came in last May when it was super sunny, and it was Martin Luther King Day. Right? Like there's all these things that they like layered into it that were just algorithmic. They were able to churn that stuff out programmatically because the AI empowered them to, to do it at scale.
[00:22:13] And so you, these ideas that we've had for a long time, they're like, things need to be personalized to the individual. You need to do a volume output actually at our company. We call it the Vayner volume model. It's this like methodology of doing social content where you try as many things as you can and see what works and then put paid media behind it.
[00:22:31] Right. Which is very different from where I was before, which was like, let me do. Three months of research and then come back to you with like the perfect plan. And like that works sometimes, but I find that actually this works way better because the algorithm is so much better than the analyst's ability to tell the story, the algorithm will just define.
[00:22:48] For you, what it is that people like based on all of those little interactions are making with it, all the likes and pauses and thumb stopping and all that. So that's the, immersive part has changed a lot. And then the ownable is the blockchain thing, right? You have NFTs, you have now loyalty cards.
[00:23:04] that are, tied to, blockchain based identity. They collect your points. Those points are fungible. You can transfer them, you can spend them. you can trade them with other people. there's, the ability to own a page in a way that like it's not stored on a centralized server. Like, you know, some, it's not registered with GoDaddy.
[00:23:22] It's not hosted, or using technology from, a company that is publicly traded on the stock exchange. You know, it's, it's something that millions of people can be a part of all of these like technologies and protocols allow for, you know, a, real decentralization of systems.
[00:23:37] And we're in a transitory period where that we're in the period where you're still going to be reliant on. Amazon cloud services and Google search engine and like your WordPress, you know, infrastructure and other things like that. people are building alternatives, regularly and it's going to affect everything from like the technology to the intellectual property, to how people think about, what their internet experience is.
[00:23:58] And like a lot of that isn't going to be defined by me or you, it's going to be defined by. your son is going to be defined by, the like next generation who are like going to sleep. Like, you know, I saw a video yesterday where there was a little kid who like was sleeping and he was doing this with his hand, he was making swiping gestures as if he had a tablet in his hand.
[00:24:16] I was like, this is just. Like innate behavior, because it's designed to be like accessible to anyone, but at a fundamental level at like a reptilian brain level, this technology, these user experiences make sense to us. that means that, they have immediate, like immediate staying power with people.
[00:24:32] When the next generation comes up, like they won't remember cassette tapes or VHS, like that'll just be some relic, you know, like finding a sword in the ground or something. and for them, like, of course, all digital media is instantly accessible at my fingertips. how did you live otherwise?
[00:24:49] and what does that like the ease of access and that that abundance? What does that mean for the next generation? Like we don't know right? It could be really really great. It could be terrible It could be so overwhelming that like the human mind can't grapple with the amount of data that's out there and we'll have to find a way to navigate that like humans are resilient.
[00:25:06] We figure things out
[00:25:06] Ariba: I think like what you just shared about the evolution of the internet all the iterations that might, come after today, going more and more towards what could be owned, what could be more immersive and then personalized. I feel like what I'm hearing a lot is it's amazing in terms of like the aspirations of where we can go, you know, and what is the art of the possible?
[00:25:26] Where do you think we are today? we don't have full adoption and I'm not entirely sure we need full adoption on all the things. When you think about aspirationally where we have the potential to go, how would you compare that to where we are today?
[00:25:40] Naimul: I have to say, like, I don't know where we're going to go. The potential of where we're going to go is it's one of two places in my mind. It's either a utopian place where human need is eliminated. And there's so much efficiency and automation that we can just turn all of our attention to art and culture and helping, people never be in poverty again and eliminating disease and solving agriculture and fixing climate change being kind to one another and like elevating ourselves spiritually and then exploring the cosmos like that's the Star Trek future, right?
[00:26:13] Where, you know, you go at the prime directive and everyone just lives by that. On the other hand, like what's probably more likely is that humans use these technologies to destroy each other and hurt each other. I was looking at a podcast the other day and they were talking about it in the context of Oppenheimer and how he needed to finish that terrible device because.
[00:26:33] Someone else was going to do it first if he didn't. And by having that thing and by having other people have that thing, you can make the argument that like everyone having it has actually led to no nuclear weapon because we're in a stalemate, like there's no, no nuclear escalation. There's only been the risk of it because everyone's a stalemate.
[00:26:49] Mutually assured destruction is like a guarantee that like, okay, we won't escalate further. That may happen with AI, but I think there's. Such a pace of progression and such a potential for exponential advancement of this tech that it's hard to like, you know, how destructive a bomb is and it's measured in like a specific number and it has its own scale and you can compare that.
[00:27:12] And then you can understand like, can it reach me yet? No, not yet. Oh, eventually it will. over the period of decades, negotiate yourself out of the risk of that happening. It still exists as a risk, obviously, but, it's something that's, is manageable in a human timescale. I think that AI operates outside of a human timescale because it's fundamentally not human, even though it's human created.
[00:27:32] if it does become self healing, self replicating, it can exfiltrate itself from systems. If it becomes something that, goes beyond their existing models where it's consumed all of the data that we have to offer it. And then it starts learning on other things that like we haven't imagined before.
[00:27:48] The other part of this that just is very unknown is the question of like. If something is super intelligent, can we even reason with it? Can we even like tell it what to do? Can we understand it at all? Like the analogy that I've heard is like right now, GPT 4, the latest model that, you know, OpenAI has put out is something that with the information it has can achieve a IQ score on a test of about 155 and Einstein was 160 and going.
[00:28:14] from GPT four back to 3. 5, it was actually a 10 X increase in intelligence. if it goes 10 X from here, it's a 1600 IQ. Like what is, what even is that? It's going to have emotions that we can't interpret, right? Because you know, we won't even know, like, what is someone who is 10 times smarter than the smartest human feeling, does it feel and like, what, how does it make its decisions?
[00:28:35] Ariba: And how do we even talk with it? And how
[00:28:37] Naimul: do we even engage with it? And so like, there's, there's that risk and, and some AI experts will tell you, like, It's actually a small risk because we don't have enough computation power to achieve that. and others will say that, yeah, the like progress of AI it's, it's like two X Moore's law or something like that.
[00:28:52] And so it'll outstrip our ability to like put smaller transistors into chips or make, you know, more advanced GPUs or whatever. But they're saying that cause we don't know either, right? Like we don't know what, what will happen if we 10X the computation, we throw this thing.
[00:29:05] And I think that there are, there are companies that are trying to do that today. Like I read recently that GPT 4 was trained on the equivalent of like 10, 000 NVIDIA GPUs. And like recently ByteDance, a company that owns TikTok, which already has amazing AI. That has created the most effective content algorithm ever seen in history And has like incredible computer vision has like purchased the equivalent of a hundred thousand of those nvidia gpus So like, okay, maybe they'll make the most large language model that the world has ever seen Like what is that going to do?
[00:29:33] Is that going to be the 10x? Is that going to be 100x? what is that going to mean for google like in other companies like we're going to see a disruption to I think White collar work that like has never been seen before, which is like in the scale of human progress, white collar work, knowledge work is like a relatively new thing.
[00:29:49] so we've never seen like a epoch of disruption the way that like agriculture saw a huge disruption with a tractor and, Textile side disruption and with the cotton gin and things like that. Like we're going to see it like something that it's just hard to predict. So where we're going, like I'm optimistic about human beings being able to use their kindness and understanding of each other to a certain extent, to be able to solve for these things, but like, there's a lot of reasons why, like, we're less kind and understanding of each other than before.
[00:30:19] social media has a lot to do with that. and I think that like, we have some challenges, so. I tend to lean towards the alarmists a little bit, , because in order to solve some of the big problems, we do need consensus. We need agreement. We need people to come together. I think that something that's not talked about enough is how our vision of web three has.
[00:30:41] Ownership is a core aspect and I think blockchain is something that can be used to help solve some of the AI problems because you with the blockchain could use that immutable ledger to control what of your own data you're training an AI algorithm on, right? A model could, you know, be only allowed to accept certain inputs that you dictate, you have more control over your own data, smart contract.
[00:31:05] Ariba: Opting into opting into your data being utilized to
[00:31:08] Naimul: train and so it's like the other side of it. I was at Coinbase at a state of crypto conference yesterday. And at the end of the day, there was a panel with the head of AI from Brookings Institute and Fred Wilson. If you see ventures and the head of Han ventures, and they all got together and they were saying there is a Wow.
[00:31:25] There's a model for the dystopian future of AI, and it's being played out in Shenzhen right now in China. There's use of this data to essentially formulate a social credit score for every single person that lives there. And those credit scores could be used to deny you loans, to deny you government jobs, to keep you out of schools if you are a dissenter, if you don't support in the right way, and reward people who are supportive of a regime.
[00:31:48] that kind of future is like... It's very oppressive and their data is being enrolled in
[00:31:54] Ariba: AI at scale. Absolutely scary to see that at scale.
[00:31:58] Naimul: And what a scale, you know, massive population that exists there. Like they have more training data than any other country except for India. And so there's a willingness to use it in that way that actually benefits the algorithm, it makes the, the model stronger to have that level of input because . we're not, we're going to disregard individual privacy and these other concerns that exist in other, other countries. and so those models can become much more sophisticated predicting human behavior at making decisions on behalf of humans and who knows, like what systems will be allowed to be put under control of those.
[00:32:32] Of those models. that I think like the human error is when we say like, I'm tired of pressing this like safety button. I'm just going to let the machine do it. And some dumb error like that, which is inconsiderate of other people is like the risk that we like, we empowered AI through our own decision making to do something stupid.
[00:32:50] That's why it almost doesn't matter think years in the future, like, is there going to be a killer robot or something? I know. I don't think so. I don't think we're going to get to the terminator phase. There's not going to be a Skynet like way, way before that. It's going to be a bad actor who says like, I can use this to take an advantage over, you know, this neighboring country.
[00:33:08] And I'm going to try this thing and oops. set humanity back hundreds of years. we got to like return to ourselves and like, think about what's important and think about like what motivates us and what allows us to survive as a species. And if we can like eliminate some of the ego, I think that we have a better chance of surviving.
[00:33:27] Ariba: I hope so. I hope we are able to do that. I I hear what you're saying in terms of like. Knowing the potential of these emerging technologies, whether it's AI or any other ones right now, I think like there is always someone who's going to think about how do I use it for my advantage?
[00:33:41] And that advantage is not always in the best interest of others, right? And so we are going to see. Misuses, it's a matter of, asking the right questions right now to get ahead of some of those misuses to understand, like, not that we can prevent all of the misuses. It's more about how do we get ahead of it so we can prepare and be more preventative
[00:34:01] Naimul: possible.
[00:34:01] That's the Oppenheimer question, right? Like, can we create a more powerful AI that allows us to have defense against the bad actors who are going to use AI against us? There's a question of national defense. There's a question of personal defense. from a personal standpoint, I'm spending all of my free time.
[00:34:16] I have these bags under my eyes because I'm staying up late practicing on AI. I'm just trying things out. I'm learning how to code better. I'm learning how to implement these technologies into my workflow. I'm evaluating these technologies on behalf of clients, on behalf of our other businesses, because if you're looking at the next evolution Of the workforce, there's going to be a schism between those who can have more productivity and output because they are AI enabled, versus those who are doing the same jobs and have never touched these technologies and are therefore not as efficient. there's this point where we're reaching very quickly where like a lot of this feels like magic, you know, it feels like extremely powerful changes and how we do our day to day work.
[00:34:55] some of the barriers that you may have faced previously, like I tend to overthink, part of my nature is like, I want to understand everything from every angle possible, but I have so many decisions to make in the day that like, I can't. Prevent myself from making a decision because I want to look at it from every angle.
[00:35:10] Sometimes the AI helps get me going. Cause I'm like, okay, well, if I have sent you to look at like 10 different things, you've already looked at them for me and to some extent, like I didn't really need to do that, but I feel more comfortable now knowing that like the system has evaluated those things and I can move forward with my decision, write my script, do whatever it is that I need to do.
[00:35:29] In order to keep moving. And I think that there's like the fluid version of myself that is just a much more effective version, compared to the one that, is hung up about perfection or other things
[00:35:41] Ariba: I'm curious, you know, it sounds like in your day to day, you're doing a lot of learning, you're doing a lot of immersive learning and bringing that back, whether it's for clients or Vayner or yourself, what is your, favorite part of what you do right now?
[00:35:54] Naimul: I think it's just talking to clients. there is a certain joy in. Getting to be the first person to explain something really important to something else to someone else. I'm... Gifted and having clients that are asking me to explain this stuff to them. So I get to go and, you know, reinforce my knowledge, around those things, find better ways to explain them over time. but I would say that, like, there's an XKCD comic that talks about this, that like, you know, every day there's 10, 000 people who learn a fact that's like very commonplace Instead of approaching that with Oh man, I can't believe I have to explain this again to somebody else. Like you should approach that with joy because like that is, that's an opportunity to like change somebody's life. Right. And improve it and help them, you know, navigate the world more effectively.
[00:36:37] And so I get a lot of personal joy out of that aspect of my work, whether it's like helping, you know, folks on my team, peers. My leaders understand things better, or it's my clients. I really enjoy that aspect and it motivates me to like keep learning and keep enriching myself so that I can be better at that.
[00:36:54] Ariba: I relate so much to that. Like I love learning and then being able to understand like what's the version of it that feels relevant or make someone else connect to that aspect of it. And then doing it over and over again. I feel like when you explain that I can.
[00:37:08] I can see what you've maybe absorbed from your father as he was an academic and teacher. okay. So we're going to do a rapid fire round. So the first one is, are you an introvert or an extrovert? What helps you stay curious? What's one thing that you're deeply grateful for right now?
[00:37:25] If you could go back and give your 18 year old self one piece of advice,
[00:37:29] Naimul: what would it be?
[00:37:38] That's something that I feel like financial fight, like having some foundation.
[00:37:45] Ariba: what is something you've been doing recently to nurture your mental
[00:37:48] Naimul: health? lots of meditation, headspace app. I really got into it cause my wife is healthcare worker had access, like free access to it during the pandemic.
[00:37:56] and I just continued on that cause, found a lot of benefit from it.
[00:37:59] Ariba: What's something you couldn't. Live without or do without in your career. It could be anything, whether it's a routine, a person, a service or an object.
[00:38:08] Naimul: I have this like 49 inch monitor that has like all the things that are going on in my life on it at one place.
[00:38:16] And, and it's just something that like, if it was gone, when I, the days that I have to like work remotely and another. Location and just stare at my laptop screen. I'm just like, I feel like I'm really missing out on all the screens that are behind it. So I could do without all the tabs. If I could have a better system of managing that I've tried.
[00:38:32] having a big screen, man, like huge boost to your productivity. Highly recommend
[00:38:36] Ariba: 49. Okay. I have no idea how many inches mine is right now, but it is definitely bigger than what I had before and it definitely did. Definitely. If it's not 49, I guess it's not enough.
[00:38:48] Naimul: If you
[00:38:48] Ariba: weren't in the role that you are in right now, what else would you be doing?
[00:38:52] Naimul: I asked myself this a lot. Because there is so much change in my field that I have to keep reconsidering, like, what I'm doing and what service I'm offering and how I'm useful. I think I probably would end up in medicine. Like I think that if this hadn't caught my attention, I would have just kept going down that path and maybe I would have been very satisfied with that.
[00:39:11] I did spend a lot of time in hospital shadowing doctors. Like there's so much depth to medicine and what I found in moving to New York is I have a lot of friends who they're former doctors and now they're in tech. Right. And they took all the talent they had in like being hard workers and learning things rapidly and like synthesizing lots of information and going through those decision algorithms to produce really good tech.
[00:39:35] so I feel like it's either science or tech for
[00:39:37] Ariba: me. I can totally see that too. Cause I feel like you did the health from insurance side and then you did the analytics and then from here. Understanding more of the entire ecosystem. You can like kind of pull that together. I know we talked about your definition and more of what sounds like Vayner's definition of, Web3.
[00:39:57] What do you think is up next for us as we think about the evolution of
[00:40:01] Naimul: Web3? Hopefully a bull run. the thing that I heard yesterday, just being around a lot of traditional finance, banks, hedge funds, the fact that we are like in the midst of a real conversation about regulation and a significant influx of potential capital in the ETFs that are emerging, just like orders of magnitude, like the, you know, one of the biggest gold ETFs is like, 230 billion.
[00:40:26] Like, you know, the biggest Bitcoin you tip, I think it was like 10 billion, something like that. Like there's a lot of growth potential right now of like the 500 trillion of. Capital that are that's available in the world. Like crypto maybe represents 1 trillion and a lot of that is held in institutions right now.
[00:40:43] So that long, long tail of like access to capital. I think crypto has enormous potential to, you know, once it's managed properly, breach into every corner of the world and the technology of the blockchain will get elevated along with that. So we'll see, you know, continued innovation and web three and builders are still building, you know, they raised the capital in 2021.
[00:41:05] They've just been heads down. Right. So like the. You know, the next Amazon, the next Google, the next, you know, Twitter versions, of social networking to e commerce to, other digital, experiences that we want to have are, are coming out now and establishing themselves. And so in the next couple of years, I think we see.
[00:41:22] the biggest growth in the internet, the biggest growth in access, you know, emerging broadband everywhere, just having, more and more and more people in high speed internet connections, learning and developing, and I also think that the field becomes like very level. Because like, whether you're, a kid, in a village in Bangladesh or you're Boston at Harvard, like you have the same access to learning, right?
[00:41:45] You can get all of MIT's open courseware. you can access an AI chat bot in Khan Academy that is going to be a bespoke tutor for you to help you solve problems and learn the things you need to do. And like, there are a lot of hungry people out there. Who want to learn and they want access and they have more access now than ever before.
[00:42:04] So I think these AI chat tools, the access to information has never been greater. And then just fundamentally, I think that we see a new era of computing interfaces and it's the natural language era of computing interfaces that we have point and click and mouses and touchscreens and that changed a lot of things.
[00:42:19] But now we can realistically have like the Iron Man experience and say, like, model this thing for me. And it will come back with a model, right? And that is going to change the way that people interact with the world in general. and it, it's possible now. So I think that like all the spatial computing stuff is finally like realizable in a way that like Google glass was way before it's time because like you couldn't talk to it properly, but now you can and it's only going to get better in the next couple of months.
[00:42:48] we should see a huge shift in how people just work with machines.
[00:42:53] Ariba: I was doing another episode with Alex Harady, who's the co founder of Anima and he was talking about that too. He was talking about how he's created like a digital pet. that you can access and interact with through augmented reality and is trained on AI.
[00:43:07] And he was saying how like the next iteration of that is really being able to communicate with this, new age Tamagotchi, if you will, and ask it to create things, you know, using generative AI, and you would see what it creates through your augmented reality. Like, whether you're using.
[00:43:23] A lens or your camera. So exciting times, exciting times. what's next for you? what's your next big project or what are you currently working on that you're
[00:43:32] Naimul: really excited about? Just trying to build this future. I mean, the thing that like makes all of this happen is adoption.
[00:43:38] And right now it's a little opaque. It took a long time for me to explain some of this stuff, when it gets easier and it's intuitive and it's accessible to as many people as possible. That's when we see those real transformative leaps because the demand is there. we're talking about like cutting edge tech right now.
[00:43:54] Some of it is very expensive. Some of it is even like expensive to build on or builds, from zero. And so what I'm focused on is just like. We have all these amazing brand relationships. We work with PepsiCo and Kraft Heinz and, Coinbase and all these companies that are, they reach billions of people and they are extremely motivated to solve the problem of.
[00:44:16] The cost of acquisition of a customer being higher than ever before. So they want to have meaningful relationships with customers. All my clients, like they're personally motivated to like have deeper relationships with their customers. and this is what drives them and they want to leverage these technologies to do that.
[00:44:30] And so that's one method. of reaching millions of people, creators of every type will use these technologies to monetize, to create their own businesses, to like reach the audience that they've never been able to reach before. I think that it's going to change the dynamics of the workforce in general because Someone who like only needs to make 30, 40, 000 a year and loves gardening can like make gardening videos and earn an income from that and like just get to live there, you know, passion, and have all the tools they need to do it without having to even learn a lot of them from scratch.
[00:45:01] So it changes. It's like, I think a lot of things are going to shift in terms of what we value, what's important. and so. My job right now is keeping up with that, trying to understand what direction we're going in and how to bring it to life. because I think generally it's a very good thing.
[00:45:15] Ariba: That's awesome. Sounds like you'll be doing a lot of learning and then facilitating and guiding your clients towards those directions. Who would you refer to as up next? Who is someone we should all be watching and learning
[00:45:26] Naimul: from right now? the person who's come on to my, Radar in the biggest way recently is, Mogadot, who's the former chief business officer at Google X.
[00:45:34] two years ago, he did a podcast with Stephen Bartlett the Diver CEO podcast. was one of the dragons on the European, like Shark Tank version show, and, founded social chain, Hugely successful entrepreneur friends with Gary, like he came to VCon really fascinating conversation.
[00:45:50] so he actually continuously references Mogadatas, like his favorite podcast episode and even like brought it up when he came to VCon. there's been like an emerging attention that I've paid to this guy. Cause in 2018, I think he wrote this book called scary, smart, has like an amazing life story, highly recommend going and listening to the podcast and like getting deep into it.
[00:46:08] But, he was, working with the people who are at the forefront of establishing what machine learning was. which is the foundation of artificial intelligence and the machines that he saw learned so fast that he realized this is a big threat to humanity, bigger than climate change. And I need to spend a lot of my focus and time helping people understand that.
[00:46:26] And so he's like doing a reissuance of his book. But at the same time, he also like reoriented himself. his son, catastrophically died from a common medical procedure at the age of 21. And he wrote a book called the happiness equation, which I think was very popular in helping people understand that like you can make incremental moves in your life to increase your happiness.
[00:46:46] From like a very like algorithmic point of view, cause he's an engineer and he looks at things in terms of equations. and then he, I think has gotten in touch with something that is really near and dear to my heart, which is, just the idea of detachment and the ability to live a more rich and deeper life, not being held up by your expectations.
[00:47:02] and so he Sufi principle of dying before you die. ultimately, like this is a framework for life and it's that, By removing our attachment to the outcome and recognizing that, we are all, subject to higher powers and forces that are out of our control, we can be more deeply immersed in experiencing the things that are in our life, and I think that, like, his arrival at that conclusion when he is as smart as he is, just like genius level intelligence, also recognizing what we need to do around AI, Definitely worth like looking into reading.
[00:47:32] He's got a podcast called slow mo. He talks to experts in deep thinking and happiness and meditation. it's really a joy. So, yeah, if I had to recommend one individual, it's that, that one and, yeah, I like Steven Bartlett too, a lot.
[00:47:45] Ariba: I just Googled him really quick and sounds pretty incredible.
[00:47:48] I feel like I definitely want to read that book. Um, where can people go to learn more about you, connect with you or support your work?
[00:47:56] Naimul: I usually point people at Twitter. You can actually get there namul. com. N A I M U L. com. Uh, we'll reroute there.
[00:48:02] I'm on all the social medias. most of the time I can get my first name cause I jump on that pretty quickly. yeah, you can find me there. and I tend to post stuff, on my public social channels, about what I'm doing, where I'm speaking, what I'm writing, all that kind of stuff.
[00:48:14] Well, Neymel,
[00:48:15] Ariba: thank you so much for making the time for this conversation. I think this was really, really interesting in the sense, like, I feel like I've written down so many notes on things I need to go dig, dig up and learn more about, which is, which is great. and I think a lot of our listeners are going to get a sense of, connectivity.
[00:48:32] I hope some of the listeners for this podcast are Bengali, as I'm Bengali. And so I think it's really dope to have another Bangladeshi speaker here. So thanks for joining and thanks for sharing your point of view and, your really
[00:48:46] Naimul: awesome origins. Well, I'm honored that you asked me to come and join you on this.
[00:48:50] I think what you're doing here is really great. I think this is exactly the kind of platform that we need, having, you know, emerging perspectives and diverse perspectives and this very important wave of technology, evolution, communications, marketing, like it's essential.
[00:49:07] So, thanks for doing what you do, more than anything. And, I appreciate you having me on. It was fun.
[00:49:11] Ariba: Thanks. Let's build this future together.

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