Samiur Rahman: AI Expert & Co-Founder of Heyday

In this episode Charlotte Saulny, President & COO of Coaching.com, is our guest host who chats with Samiur Rahman, the visionary CEO and co-founder of Heyday. 

Rahman discusses his mission to harness artificial intelligence (AI) to bolster the coaching profession, allowing coaches to maximize their impact by concentrating on their unique strengths. 

Rahman recounts his transition from early days at a startup to his current pioneering work in AI, spotlighting the significant potential AI holds in streamlining administrative tasks and enhancing the efficacy of coaching sessions.

The discussion ventures into the symbiosis of human expertise and AI efficiency, portraying AI as a tool that complements rather than replaces the irreplaceable value of personal interaction in coaching. 

Rahman passionately advocates for AI's role in freeing coaches from time-consuming tasks, thus enabling a deeper focus on client interaction and personalized coaching strategies. 

This conversation unveils the intricate balance between leveraging technology to augment the coaching process and preserving the essential human element that defines coaching's core value.

Through the lens of Rahman's journey and insights, the episode provides a compelling exploration of the future of coaching in an AI-enhanced world, offering both coaches and clients a glimpse into the possibilities of more focused, efficient, and impactful coaching experiences.

Transcript

(interview blurb)

Samiur: In this current instance, we’re focusing on helping coaches focus on their superpower, but the long-term goal for Heyday is to be something that helps everyone across knowledge-heavy workflows, work, focus more on their superpowers.

(intro)

Charlotte: Hi, I’m Charlotte Saulny, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. I am taking over from Alex Pascal for the next few weeks and I am delighted to be your guest host. My guest today is an expert in AI. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Heyday and he’s been building artificial intelligence designed to help coaches do what they do best — coach. So welcome to Samiur Rahman.

(Interview)

Charlotte: Samiur, I’m so happy that you’re here with me today.

Samiur: Thank you for having me.

Charlotte: Of course, of course. Now, as I’m sure you know, we always kick off these podcast episodes talking a little bit around what we are drinking today. So I’m just curious, what is in your cup today?

Samiur: So I’ll show the cup and then also show the bottle. So, I’m a big fan of High West, which is a Utah, like near Salt Lake based — Park City, actually more close to Park City, Utah-based distillery of bourbons, primarily, and then some ryes and this was a special one that my co-founder, Sam, they were doing — they happened to be in Utah for — Salt Lake, near Park City for, it was more of an engagement, surprise engagement party for a friend, and, Sam, knowing that I love High West, was able to snag a pretty limited edition bottle for me. So I don’t know if y’all were able to grab this bottle. We made it a little hard.

Charlotte: You did make it a little difficult, but because I am a coach by trade and I do believe in matching and mirroring whomever I’m talking with, I did try to have something in my mug that would be of some sort of similar matching and so I will say to you, cheers. 

Samiur: Cheers. Would you care to share what is the spike in your potential mug?

Charlotte: Let us say it is a whiskey that my son brought back for me who’s a big whiskey drinker. It was sitting in the front of my bar this morning. So I just put a little —

Samiur: Grabbed it.

Charlotte: — and away we go. So this is going to be a good conversation. 

Samiur: Yeah. Actually, my current executive coach for about two years, and we typically meet at a bar at 7 p.m. Instead of like doing coaching sessions ahead of time, we do it after the work day. It’s awesome that she’s so flexible about that because I find that I’m more pliable or more likely to be open with all the things that are frustrating me if it’s over a drink at the end of the day.

Charlotte: Hey, I absolutely understand that. And I am so excited to dive in to talk to you because I know you have this incredible technology background and you now are really focused on the development of AI in the coaching space. But before we get there, I’m super curious, how did you get into coaching? Like you say you have a coach, like how did you become exposed to the profession in the first instance? 

Samiur: Yeah, great question. So about, now, seven, eight years ago, I was one of the early hires at a startup, that actually moved down to the Bay Area for that was like ten years ago, and then I started taking over a part of it, the machine learning AI part of the — we were hiring and expanding and so I became manager of a small team of like three or four people and it was the first time I was managing anyone and so I had the wherewithal to know that I probably wouldn’t be great at it immediately, didn’t know how bad I was going to be, but I did ask my boss who’s the CTO of the company, “Hey, I probably should get some sort of help. What do you know of?” and he’s like, “Oh, yeah, we worked with a company for executive coaching for a few of our execs and they also have executive management coaching practice too so let’s get you set up with that.” So I spent three months in kind of boot camp of management coaching, which was super helpful. Loved my coach, he was so helpful in me just like getting used to the practice of not being a high performance individual contributor and switching to being more of a manager. That was definitely — it’s a lifelong struggle, I would say, in some ways. Then, over time, I didn’t have a coach as I was starting my first company, but we suddenly went into a pandemic mode when I was like running a company of nine, ten people and had to manage from Zoom. And, at that time, I was like I don’t know how to do this, I really should — I’ve been thinking about that executive coach for a long time, just felt like really needed help at that point, and so that was the second time I got started. And then, since then, I now have a second coach, executive coach, that isn’t that first one but I’ve basically seen the value over the years to the point where I’m like, if I’m working on difficult things where I’m leading many people, there’s no reason to not have a coach.

Charlotte: Absolutely. Oh, I love that. So, you were to share with me the biggest aha you had in that first coaching experience in terms of learning how to become a better manager of people and making that transition from sort of very talented individual contributor to manager of others. Was there something that sticks out for you that your coach was able to help you with during your coaching?

Samiur: This sounds so obvious, it’s the kind of thing that I’ll say it and be like, “Yeah, of course, everyone should know that. How did you not know that?” I think this became far more clarifying in the actual concrete instances, examples of the issues. So, one of the things is just like, it still sticks to me is don’t assume anything about the intentions of someone if they’re screwing up or they’re doing something that you didn’t expect them to do. There could be many reasons behind this, especially if you’re working with high-integrity people that almost everyone is coming at it with good faith so you can also just tease apart what they were thinking without it becoming this defensive butting heads situation. And it’s sounds so obvious, right? Like, obviously, that’s true, but in the instances, it’s like it’s really hard to remember that sometimes, especially when you’re getting started. And that’s probably one of those that’s like, “Oh, that just seems so obvious,” but I remember in the first three months of me being a manager, I was managing someone who was basically at the same level as me before I got promoted so there was definitely some sort of either in my head or in their head or in both of our heads, some sort of dynamic that I was working through and I was probably making a lot more assumptions than I should have. Just like working through that with my coach in the actual concrete example of it was super helpful.

Charlotte: So, that reminds me of a question that one of my coaches asked me, which is what is a more generous explanation for X, Y, and Z and really sort of forcing us to think or forcing me to think about whether there was an alternative reason why someone could have shown up that way. 

Samiur: Exactly.

Charlotte: Yeah, absolutely, I hear that. Well, thank you for sharing that. And, as I mentioned earlier, I am so excited to speak to you because AI is such a hot topic right now across the board. I mean, everyone’s talking about AI and what it can do for you and for your business. And, of course, you are interested in AI as it relates to helping the coaching community and I actually did a little bit of digging and looked at your LinkedIn profile just to learn a little bit about you, Samiur, and I love the tagline on your LinkedIn, which is “Building AI to help coaches focus more time on their superpower: making their clients more awesome.”

Samiur: Yeah. 

Charlotte: And I love that. So excited to talk to you because I know AI is such a big thing but also, I think, people in the coaching community are talking so much about it. So, share with us, you’ve got an incredible tech background, you’re doing AI for coaches, talk to us a little bit about your journey and where you are now.

Samiur: Thank you for all the, I guess, plaudits. I don’t know, I’ve spent a lot of time in machine learning and AI. It’s the kind of thing that when I started my career off, I was working at Amazon 13 years ago and I was proposing that we automate something with machine learning that our VP was like, “What is machine learning?” So it’s kind of been fun to see the evolution of, hey, like a VP of one of the best tech companies in the world doesn’t know this concept of machine learning or AI to the point where literally everyone’s talking about it across everywhere. So it’s kind of cool to see that evolution. I’ll say the reason why I was drawn to working on machine learning or AI was I had an engineering background but I also have like a math and stats background, so I found what it was very fascinating, just like, hey, how can we use math and engineering to kind of approximate what a human might do or even potentially do something better than a human might do. But the other side of it for me was I have ADHD, not like — and ADHD is such a loaded term, right? It can mean so many different things. But the way mine manifests is that I can spend a ton of time on anything that I’m super interested in and I can go deep and work for hours on something and love picking apart something challenging, but then something that would take a normal person five minutes to do might take me like a week to do, like weird stuff where like I have — and so I think I’m personally motivated to also be like, well, how can I not do as much of the things that should take just five minutes as possible so I can spend as much time on the things that are super interesting, where you might notice this come up is in the tagline that you just said, it’s like a lifelong passion for me, for both selfishly for myself but also to help other people, focus more of their time on the things that make them uniquely humanly creatively like them, and so the superpower. So, in this current instance, we’re focusing on helping coaches focus on their superpower but the long-term goal for Heyday is to be something that helps everyone across knowledge-heavy workflows focus more on their superpower. So, if you’re an interviewer, let’s say — you’re a coach, it’s a little bit different but let’s say you’re like a professional interviewer. The thing that you’re amazing at is having conversations where you draw out insights, but the things that are peripheral to that job that are very important is like publishing it, tuning up those notes, and getting the website ready and blah, blah. There’s so much other stuff that has to happen to make that valuable that isn’t necessarily your superpower that I think can be automated with AI so that you can spend more time on the things that are human. So, my journey, I started at Amazon, like I said, worked pretty early on on some machine learning stuff at Amazon but realized big company bureaucracy wasn’t really for me and so I moved down to the Bay Area about 10 years ago to work in a startup where I actually met my co-founder, Sam, who I’ve been working with for nine years across three different companies. I’ve always been just driven to use machine learning and AI to create productivity, knowledge, tools, which is, like I said, something that I’m super passionate about. And so I have worked on products to help people search all their information in a more intelligent way. Now, using Heyday to leverage all their research, all their client calls, all their notes, all their conversations over email or wherever it is, to both serve their clients better in the case of coaches, but also leverage that to accelerate sharing of content about all the things that they learned about. Long story short, coaching made a lot of sense because what we’re trying to do, in some ways, is be a thought partner for all knowledge workers eventually, starting with being a thought partner for coaches who are sort of like thought partners for everyone else. It was a really interesting way to learn how to do that well.

Charlotte: Oh, I love that parallel, be a thought partner for a coach so they can help be a better thought partner for their clients. That’s awesome. 

Samiur: Yeah.

Charlotte: So I’m curious, when you think about all the different things AI can do, and I mean, in the spirit of transparency, I’ve only started to dive into it recently, and mind blown, like mind blown about not just the kind of content it can create but the spreadsheets and the organization. I mean, it can do so many different things. It’s incredible. But I’m curious, from your perspective, when you think about two or three very specific things that AI can do to help a coach, what would you say? What are some of the things that come up? 

Samiur: Well, I’m obviously biased because I built a product to do those things so I’m going to try to avoid just those things. So I’ll start with the thing that we do, because that’s obviously going to come straight to mind. So coaches are, like I said, I think, in our tagline, the superpower of coaches is to have insightful conversations with clients and then use that to help that client come to a realization, come to some sort of progress that they wouldn’t have potentially without this push-pull conversation, but there’s so much other stuff for that coach to do that effectively and also to help the client. So, one of them is like a lot of coaches will have 10 to 15 clients they’re meeting with on a very regular basis and I think it’s really hard for a coach to remember all the contexts of all those clients in a way that’s like they start a session and they know exactly what that client was dealing with last week. Typically, and I love my coach but before they started using Heyday, I would say first 10 or 15 minutes was like a lot of contextualizing the thing that the client was struggling with or the client, what is most top of mind for the client right now, because, understandably, for a coach, there’s so many people that you’re keeping track of. 

Charlotte: Absolutely.

Samiur: And one of the things that an AI thing could do is keep track of everything that’s happening with all your clients, including all the conversations you’re having and then prep you ahead of the next call in a way that’s like, “Hey, here’s what they’ve been working on. Here’s the, based on your recent conversations, here are their current high level focus areas and then here are actionable things that you talked about that you might want to check back,” and so having someone that just like does the sort of collation and bringing it back to you so that you are always prepped for the calls with your clients not only saves you time but also saves the client time during that conversation and makes it feel like you’re always on top of remembering what needs to be remembered for the client. The other thing is, coaches need to grow their business or grow their brand and they have this amazing tap of knowledge because they’re spending time with 10 to 15 probably pretty awesome people that their clients are, they’re having these insightful conversations trying to help those clients, so it’s like a deep well of interesting stuff that they can use to share learnings, content that can grow their brand, grow their business. But what we found is it’s tough for coaches immediately translate those things, like, “Oh, I can write about that,” and so what if they’re less, I don’t know if you’ve played around with some of these like AI tools where you can just like, “Write me a post about impostor syndrome,” and it will write something, it just sounds super generic, but what if there was something that can be based on your conversations with your clients that can help you extract, both suggests, like, “Oh, you were talking about co-founder conflict with two of your clients last week, and then based on that, maybe you should write about that.” There was some, you helped them through this and maybe here’s a pattern that you can write about that would be interesting to your audience and then grow your brand. So AI can sort of sit and observe your genius and then help leverage it in different ways. 

Charlotte: Oh, I love that. Sit and observe your genius. 

Samiur: Yeah. Like a lot of people will talk about, “Oh, my God, it can do so many things. It’s amazing.” I’m like, yeah, I can, but whenever you get to the point where it’s your area of expertise, like the AI is rarely going to be good enough for you, so, generally speaking, I find that it’s most useful as like an ancillary augmenting exercise where either it can get you to like an 80 percent good enough draft that you then perfect, or you have it just do automatically things that you’re okay being 80 percent good. So like notes that come back to you. They don’t need to be perfect, they just need to have, especially most people’s notes are terrible and so it’s okay if those notes are just 80 percent good enough because all it has to do is get you back to that right mindset, that right place in your brain that you remember what your client was talking about, right?

Charlotte: Yeah. 

Samiur: So, how can AI automate some of these places where 80 percent is good enough and you don’t have to spend time?

Charlotte: Oh, I love that. Well, and I think I’m so appreciative of what you’ve said around being a tool to help you re-contextualize your client’s situation so when you come back together, you’re not like, “Wait, what?”

Samiur: Yeah. 

Charlotte: And you’re right, inevitably, when you have 15, 20, 30 clients, I mean, things start melding together so I love the notion of being able to have a tool that can sort of help you get back in more quickly. And I also think, and this comes from the perspective of having run a coaching practice for a long, long time with multiple coaches but there’s something about the level of professionalism which occurs when your coaches are prepped, and I know well enough to know that not all of them have taken the time to do said prep and so having a tool that really easily enables them to sort of read something, look at something and immediately get back in there is massively important to the overall professionalism that is conveyed as they are coaching people. So even just from that perspective, like a brand or perception perspective, I think it’s so massively important. What do you think some of the potential risks or pitfalls of AI are in coaching? Do you have a thought process or belief around how it can be misused within the coaching world?

Samiur: That’s a good question. I think — I’m very techno optimist, mostly. I would say most of my AI risks are a lot about automating away entire jobs that honestly can be automated away and it’s the jobs that didn’t have human creativity to begin with, in my opinion, and if we were a better society, we would be leveraging those humans in a better way and I would love to have societal governmental support to help folks through that transition. An example is like the truck driving industry is just going to get automated. 

Charlotte: Yeah.

Samiur: It’s going to happen and that’s 5 percent of jobs in the US. And so, what are we going to do? From the government level, there’s all this like AI risk stuff around, I don’t know, existential risk and I’m like that’s not the issue. The issue is we’re going to have massive economic upheaval for folks who have been doing the equivalent of like the mining job but like the modern day version of that, and what are we going to do to support them as we transition to a different sort of economy? If anything, baristas are more likely to keep their jobs and there are many other jobs that are just going to get automated away. Baristas, because they’re human and their job is literally to be human, baristas, bartenders, that’s safe. So, backing up, coaching, in general, is a pretty safe industry in terms of AI just because the type of conversations that I have with my executive coach and where we have to go deep and kind of navigate some places that I wouldn’t necessarily even know what questions to ask to even navigate, I just can’t see, with this current generation of AI, no matter how capable it is, that’s not getting automated away. Now, the risk could be around folks who are trying to offer like you don’t need $500 an hour coaching, you can get AI coaching and it’ll be just good enough, or if like some of those coaches who did used to charge $500 an hour or $1,000 an hour or whatever start to automate away the parts of their coaching that made them worth that much, like if they were like, “I’m gonna be lazy and I’m not gonna do the work as much,” I would say, generally speaking, they’re probably going to be able to do a lot more coaching with a lower quality so that might be a risk, where it’s like, imagine, instead of just like letting the AI be the note taker and helping you prep, but it also started being the thing that drove all the questions you asked and all that stuff and it became this rote system that almost everyone started using, that’s going to be a problem, where you’re sort of like, you’re letting it take over the human part too. We’ll get stuck at a level of intelligence, because what this generation of AI really is, it just learns from what humans have done. And so it can only be so good because it learns from how humans, the data that we’ve seen of humans interacting. And so if we stop innovating, then we’re just going to get stuck.

Charlotte: That makes sense. And I think it’s sort of reassuring to hear, because I think that certainly several of the coaches that I’ve spoken to in our community, there’s a wide range of responses to AI. You get people that are extremely excited about the possibility of it, there’s people that are worried about sort of the impact on the coaching profession and whether or not this is going to get in the way of the growth of the profession, and there’s obviously ethical concerns in terms of privacy potentially or things like that. 

Samiur: Curious, like what you’ve seen in terms of concerns around growth of the profession, like people saying about like, “Hey, this is gonna get in the way of coaching growing as a profession.” 

Charlotte: Yeah, sure. Well, I think that there is concern that as things become more automated, the ability for a coach to make a living coaching could decrease. If people can access coaching through an automated way and if it’s, to your point earlier, good enough, why would people opt to pay the $400 or $500 an hour for a coach if a sort of a virtual, for lack of better word, chatbot or coachbot can do a good enough job? So I think there is, and I would agree with you, I think it’s hard to replace the human. I mean, I feel the deliciousness and the power of coaching is so much in that human interaction and the ability to be present with another human being. However, I do think that there is a little bit of concern around whether everyone will understand that that is the power of coaching and that organizations might be inclined to use a cheaper coachbot version to deliver coaching within organizations versus the human. So I think there’s a little bit of concern around that. Yeah. 

Samiur: I mean, on the flip side, that’s a reasonable concern to have. On the flip side, though, whatever version of automated coaching does come out, it will be dramatically cheaper, because it’s just software. 

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Samiur: And there are billions of people, literally 99 percent of people on the planet cannot afford coding. 

Charlotte: Absolutely. 

Samiur: And so if they can access some version of coaching that’s cheap enough for them to access, let’s say like all of South Asia, people in all of Africa, it’s like very — or even just like people early in their careers, how are they going to spend $500 an hour to get some version of coaching? I think maybe that’s like me looking at it from the consumer of the industry, being like that’s awesome, we can like scale the learnings to so many other people in a way that’s like somewhat good enough that was not possible before. On the other hand —

Charlotte: Better than nothing.

Samiur: Better than nothing, exactly. On the other hand, I just literally can’t see, the folks who are paying $500 an hour think it’s worth $500 an hour, right? They’re not just doing this for no reason and there’s nothing AI wise that I think would be worth $500 an hour. At least for me, you know what I mean? And if I could afford it, why wouldn’t I get the better, actual human version of it? So I’m sort of skeptical that it will actually replace current budget for coaching. I could see my experience how large companies buy coaching, they’re probably like seeing it as like they don’t really maybe know the ROI and it’s hard to define the ROI and so they might be like, “You know what, we need to cut budgets and so let’s go.” But I think where that’s going to happen is sort of like those orgs who were probably going to cut budget anyway. 

Charlotte: Sure.

Samiur: Maybe that’s a naive way to think about it. But it’s like they’re not really thinking about how to empower their employees as much as being like, “Ugh, this is a nice perk but we’re gonna take it away.”

Charlotte: Yeah, I think that’s a very fair call out. And I think, to your point, so many people can’t afford to pay for a coach and so to have something which might be helpful to them in terms of challenging their thought process or asking them questions that they can reflect on could be of significant value. And I mean, certainly when I think about an organization and we think about coaching, and I think we can all agree that coaching is such a powerful medium for change or for growth and for development, but I do think that different coaching for different people in different ways is appropriate so to think about how they can be used together, I think is really helpful. And it’s interesting, I read an article the other day and I’m curious to hear your thoughts on this but it was talking about the extent to which you invest in HI, human intelligence, versus AI, artificial intelligence, and I thought that’s interesting that someone is making a distinction between those two, I’m not sure that there is but I’m curious to hear your thoughts on that.

Samiur: I will have to read this article, but, immediately, it flips what my manager used to call, this is unfair, probably, this article, but he used to call a thing called something flipped the Bozo bit, which is immediately instead of being default, “Oh, that’s interesting, let’s investigate,” there’s a different mode that I sometimes will default to, which is like, “I am skeptical by default of what this says,” and there’s just some weird, intuitive thing that my brain will do, just like, “That sounds like someone who doesn’t really know too much about the topic that they’re talking about.” I don’t know if that’s fair but I’ve never heard this term, human intelligence, before, and so anytime someone is talking about something in the world of AI and productivity and I haven’t heard the term before, I’m like, “Hmm.”

Charlotte: Sure, sure. Well, it’s interesting because in hearing your shares, actually, you have been talking about AI in the context of helping HI. Like if you’re trying to help someone to unlock their genius and their brilliance —

Samiur: Yeah, or make more time for it, rather.

Charlotte: Or make more time for it, it’s not a fair comparison, because one is actually, in this instance, designed to sort of drive the other, not detract from the other. 

Samiur: I will say in many industries though, a lot of junior employees will start by doing things, even if they’ve studied or built up some sort of academic expertise, they’ll start out by doing something that you’re just sort of my assistant even if you’re starting out as you’ve got an MBA and you’re going to go into management consulting, there’s some of these hierarchical places where the human intelligence, let’s say, is not being leveraged because there’s some sort of ramp-up period where basically you’re treated as an intelligent assistant. And so there, that job could probably be automated with AI. The problem is, what you need is a feeder pipeline of people who are going to be the strategist on top anyway. Do you just start to automate away all the new grads and then, ten years from now, you won’t have the people who are setting the strategies? I don’t know, I think a lot of orgs have to think about this and a lot of professions have to think about this where you could automate away some of the lower tier, but then you’re going to lose the pipeline of people who are learning how to be the people coming up with the new strategies when things change in the world and everything.

Charlotte: Absolutely.

Samiur: I don’t know. Short — you could easily see some short-term bias from organizations being like, “Well, we can reduce the cost by hiring — just using AI instead of,” so maybe there is something to this invest in human intelligence. Now I’m coming around to being like, “Huh.”

Charlotte: You’re coming around to the other side of it.

Samiur: Well, if you’re talking about it as younger folks who are learning how to be good and someone who pushes the boundaries of craft in their area, then you do have to invest in those people because they have to learn.

Charlotte: They have to learn, absolutely. They have to learn. So, when you think about Heyday and all the incredible things that you’re working on, what is the toughest nut that you are trying to crack right now?

Samiur: This is going to sound really boring, it’s like what most businesses will say, maybe a lot of businesses will say is the toughest nut, we built a product that is beloved by our users. We, metrics wise, we have 45 percent of our users go from trial and turn into paying users. We’ve not had a single person cancel their subscription as a coach yet. However, all that said, we still are not bringing in coaches at a rate that’s like, oh my God, every coach has found out about Heyday and they’re signing up. The tough nut to crack is like how do we get in front of coaching? How do we make sure every coach, every executive coach, knows about Heyday? We have not cracked that nut. How do we make sure that when executive coaches, all executive coaches know about Heyday, that they’re not scared of it, like we’ve educated them the right way, where they’re not scared that their clients are going to be like not cool with recording their calls and all that stuff, like there’s a lot of mini concerns along the way so that they’re willing to give it a try? Those are the two big nuts that I think we’re trying to crack right now.

Charlotte: Okay, so I have one other question for you. I mean, I have many but I’m mindful of your time. What is one question that you wished that someone would ask you on a podcast they have not yet asked you?

Samiur: Oh, that’s super interesting. I guess I’m going to default to something that probably is just like coming to mind because, I don’t know, I have a lot of interest outside of work, so sort of like —

Charlotte: You speak five languages, right? I saw your —

Samiur: Two fluently and three poorly.

Charlotte: Proficiently. Proficiently.

Samiur: Second-grade level three different languages and two that I would be comfortable writing in, you know what I mean? I think, one, I grew up like diplomat’s son until we moved to New York so I’ve lived all over the place, that’s why I know a bunch of different languages, but I think a question would be, and I think this is a fun question to ask a lot of people, is if you weren’t doing what you were doing today, and you had a lot of money, what would you do? If you didn’t have to make money, what would you do?

Charlotte: I love it.

Samiur: I’m actually curious what you would do before I answer mine, is I will ask you that question.

Charlotte: So, what would I do if I didn’t have to make money?

Samiur: Yeah, and you weren’t doing what you were doing right now. So, even if you love what you’re doing —

Charlotte: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Samiur: — you’re not allowed to use it.

Charlotte: Yeah, no, it’s a great question. I would be a psychiatrist.

Samiur: Yeah?

Charlotte: I think I would be. I think I would be. It’s funny, I’ve always thought of myself as a business leader of coaches, not a coach of business leaders, so I’m more of an adviser than I am a coach, if truth be told.

Samiur: Right.

Charlotte: But I have long been fascinated with the field of psychiatry and psychology and so I would probably, in some way, shape, or form, have that component. Or the other thing which I sort of envisioned for myself one day was to own a café called the Woodpecker that people could come and get coffee and warmth and just be greeted with love and kindness and the whole back of the café would be, you can tell I’ve given it maybe more thought than others, but the whole back of the café would be rooms for holistic health practitioners.

Samiur: Oh, awesome.

Charlotte: People could come and have a coffee and sit and work and be there and be just fully taken care of but they could also go to the back, whether it’s Reiki or massage or whatever, but a place of sort of warmth and healing and purpose. Yeah.

Samiur: Yeah, it’s like a spa for your mind.

Charlotte: It’s like a spa for your mind, yeah, and your wellbeing, yeah.

Samiur: Yeah, love it. That’s awesome. I would go there.

Charlotte: What about you?

Samiur: Mine is a little bit less generous to the world, I think. I’d say what — I love cooking and I love experimenting with food. What I would love to have is like a — it’s kind of similar to your café but on opposite end of the spectrum. Have like a small ten-person dining table restaurant where there’s no menu and, every night, I will make a feast for people who will join and they will be random strangers and I will hang out with them and I don’t need to make money from this but no one gets to pick the menu and, ideally, I’m pretty good at cooking so it should be good most of the time but it’s going to be a little experimental so you might get something that doesn’t work.

Charlotte: Oh, my gosh, I love that. Now, do you have a particular type of food that you love to cook? Are you a cooker or a baker, first of all?

Samiur: Definitely cooker. Cannot bake. Literally have no skill in baking.

Charlotte: Okay.

Samiur: I think part of it is baking requires preciseness.

Charlotte: Precision, yeah.

Samiur: Precision, and I am not that. I will way more change things on the fly, that’s what I love about cooking. I love barbecue and slow cooking in general. I love high heat fire cooking so like some combo of those. I like playing around with — so I have like a steam oven at home that I bought which makes it so that you can do precision steam — I don’t know if you’ve heard of sous vide? Sous vide is keep water at a certain temperature and you’ll submerge something in like a vacuum-sealed pack and you get it to, so it’s like that but like steam level and it’s — I’m also very, obviously being a tech person, I’m very interested in the hardware that enables cooking in certain ways, so I would probably play around with that. If I had all the money in the world and I was like, oh, I wanna like experiment with getting something cooked at this level of precision with this technique and then switching over to another thing. I don’t know. That stuff would be fun.

Charlotte: That’s great. That’s great. This has been so fabulous. Thank you so much for taking the time —

Samiur: Thank you. 

Charlotte: — to share your wisdom and expertise with us.

Samiur: Yeah, I mean, I feel like wisdom and expertise feels like an exaggeration but whatever level of help I’ve been, thank you for having me.

Charlotte: Not at all. It’s a pleasure. Thank you.