Call Summary: Applied AI Consulting Strategy and Workforce Development Philosophy

Overview

Gary and Chaleb, a former Civics Unplugged mentee, reconnected to discuss Gary's pivot to Applied AI consulting, Chaleb's potential Bangkok business expansion, and their shared philosophy on democratizing technology education and responsible AI implementation in the workforce.

Key Topics Discussed

Chaleb's Current Situation and Business Plans

• Bangkok Location: Currently in Bangkok, Thailand, considering it as a potential relocation/stopping point
• Remote Work Status: Completely remote, continuing consulting work while traveling
• Iron Access Consulting Expansion: "I'm actually looking at, potentially haven't decided yet. Opening up a branch office and having like Bangkok have a branch office out here for as like the software development arm of Iron Access Consulting."
• Market Philosophy: On saturated markets: "There's the ones in between that are like it's saturated. But there's enough of the pie to go around for everybody."
• Cost Advantages: Recognizes Bangkok's advantages in labor costs and developer talent saturation

Gary's Applied AI Journey and Strategy

• Post-Billionaire Consulting: Had an "interesting educational experience" consulting for a billionaire for four months
• Tulsa Opportunity Collapse: Potential employer appeared to be inflating business numbers: "I think he feels like he has to exaggerate his like business numbers and stuff to stay relevant... a lot of people are insecure and want to be like scientist industrialist like Elon."
• Spiritual Redirection: Took the setback as "encouragement from God to just spend time reading the Bible" and finally got baptized
• Current Business Thesis: "AI going to be relevant for business success in the future? I answered obviously yes. So how can I, even if I don't become machine learning math wizard, but how do I apply the tools that people are creating, string them together into applications that corporations are happy to pay for."
• Service vs. SaaS Model: Starting with custom consulting solutions while figuring out SaaS over time
• Jollibee Opportunity: Currently working with a mentor who has relationship with Jollibee Corporation

AI Tools and Implementation Discussion

• Chaleb's Tool Experience: Has played with Clay (for enrichment) and N8N (for workflow automation)
• Meeting Workflow Example: Created workflow where AI notetaker joins meetings, creates snapshot, pulls out bullet points, to-dos, deadlines, and sends to Slack/Discord
• Documentation Critique: "They are a software company that in reality shouldn't be marketing themselves to... other engineers. There's a niche area right now where even small businesses have huge opportunities to benefit from setting up systems like this"
• Onboarding Problem: "They're not good at onboarding people that are not super technical"

Captioning Technology Experience

• Hearing Challenges: Chaleb uses various captioning solutions including CapTel phones and apps like InnoCaption
• Technology Limitations: "The AI is absolutely horrible at like... in a normal conversation... it falls behind. Especially if you start having like technical conversations."
• Human vs. AI Captioning: Human captioners often unavailable, forcing fallback to inferior AI captioning

Workforce Transformation Philosophy

• Two Types of Business Owners:
  1. Those seeing AI as "an aid and an asset for my company overall"
  2. Those seeing it as "the way that I can completely eliminate certain positions"
• Upskilling Responsibility: "Companies to me should feel that they have an obligation to upscale their workforce to match the demand"
• Alert Fatigue Example: Discussed EPIC medical system's alert fatigue problem as example of why human-in-the-loop design is essential
• Human Elements: "I don't believe in a human being completely out of the loop. Especially when we've already got systems within the medical space"

Education and Accessibility Vision

• Chaleb's School Concept: Still writing about and developing ideas for opening a school
• Open Universities Philosophy: "I love the concepts of like open universities... not everybody can necessarily attend a traditional brick and mortar institution"
• Curriculum Critique: Advocates eliminating "overly structured degree programs" and two years of "filler classes"
• Applied Learning: Believes math and other subjects should be taught within context of CS curriculum, not independently
• University of Austin Discussion: Critiqued their polarizing approach: "They tried so hard to be the counter... they got a lot more shock factor"

Political Commentary

• Mom Dummy (NYC Mayor): Gary's take: "These ideologies are basically like platforms... jetpacks for politicians"
• Ideological Flexibility: "When's the last time you heard of a socialist deregulator?"
• Trump Analysis: "He sort of reincarnated a meme of just making America vaguely better against a ruling elite"
• Jeffrey Epstein Connections: Pointed out contradictions in anti-elite messaging when campaign managers were emailing Epstein daily
• Industry Over Politics: "Politics is just something that you don't want to give your life to it, you want to use it"

Learning and Community Building

• Daily Spirit Experiment: Gary's accountability mechanism to stay on track
• Learning in Public: Gary planning to launch Substack after first consulting win: "I'm not just someone talking out of my ass"
• Avoiding Guru Trap: "My main qualm with a lot of these gurus is that they're making money mostly on their hype forces"
• DeepLearning.AI: Gary taking courses there as part of serious AI education
• Throwing Down the Ladder: Both committed to making AI accessible: "I want to compassionately figure out how to do that"

Key Quotes

• Gary on resilience: "If you're Christian, there's arguably eternal consequences to exiting early. So that's probably my biggest motivation."
• Gary on fellowship: "It's just so important in my view to for me at least to exhort my friends to be like there for my friends and just keep this like fellowship toward climbing our respective mountains going."
• Chaleb on democratization: "I've always been about democratizing the access to the knowledge"
• Chaleb on workforce hostile dynamics: "There's nothing more hostile than a business coming in and throwing down the gauntlet and saying, hey, we're gonna make you redundant. But before we do that, we need you to train up the replacement."
• Gary on skill application: "There's going to be a lot of jobs created that people can step into on their own of Applied AI Consulting"

Action Items / Takeaways

• Gary focusing on Applied AI consulting with corporations starting with Jollibee opportunity
• Both committed to making AI education accessible to non-engineers
• Chaleb considering Bangkok branch office for Iron Access Consulting
• Gary offered to introduce Chaleb to his pastor for trauma work when back in US
• Both planning deeper dives into AI platforms (Clay, N8N, etc.) in 2025
• Shared commitment to helping businesses understand human-AI collaboration rather than replacement

Strategic Alignment

The conversation revealed strong philosophical alignment between Gary and Chaleb on:

• Democratizing technology education
• Responsible AI implementation with human oversight
• Building practical, applied learning pathways
• Helping small businesses leverage AI effectively
• Creating opportunities for workforce transformation rather than elimination
• Maintaining authenticity while building in the AI space