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Pinaki Kathiari & Chris Lee challenge traditional best practices in the workplace
Pinaki Kathiari (00:00)
welcome back to Between the Seasons, the mini series from Why Does It Feel So Wrong To Be Human At Work. I'm Pinaki and... ⁓
Chris is out with the flu today. So filling in is my co-producer, Bree.
Bree Bartos (00:09)
Hi everyone.
Pinaki Kathiari (00:11)
And we have a special guest today, Nazmul Islam, a marketing communication consultant that we work closely with at Local Wisdom. And he's also the producer behind the YouTube channel, History Meets Finance. Welcome, Nazmul.
Nazmul (00:23)
Hi, it's good to be here.
Pinaki Kathiari (00:25)
on. Fun fact, Nazmul and I met in Toronto last year. It was at Comm's reboot with Jenny Fields and Contact Monkey. And by the way, speaking of Toronto, we'll be in Toronto again this year at the IABC World Conference 2026. I'll be speaking with a few other fun co-speakers, so hope you join us. But anyway, met Nazmul in Toronto.
learned about Nazmul, learned about his podcast, which we'll talk about history meets finance. And I really enjoyed the content. I listened to an episode on the East India Trading Company and the House of Orange. And he just posted one on John Jacob Astor, which I thought was fascinating because it's all about how to follow the money. And one of the reasons that connected with me is all the Why Does It Feel So Wrong to be Human at Work episodes.
We want to look at it from all aspects and also understand why and how we got here. So there's a historical aspect that I've been always kind of bringing into the podcast. so it was seeing what I do and seeing what Nazmul does is just like two different ballgames. So I was really fascinated by his history, research and the way he goes there. So for today's conversation, we're talking about research and how it actually gets done, how the process evolves over time.
the role that AI has started to play within the last few years. So yeah, thank you again, Nazmul, for joining this conversation. Can you give us just a quick background in your marketing and communications consulting and also the history meets finance and how you got there?
Nazmul (02:03)
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in communications for about 13 years now since I graduated from college. ⁓ And I've been working with some really pretty interesting companies ⁓ focusing on internal and employee communications. And then I decided to kind of go out on my own and start my own consultancy. And I've been doing that for the last couple of years. And I've had the pleasure of working with you guys, with a couple of different clients. So I'm really enjoying my work. It gives me a lot of flexibility. I get to focus on the projects that I really enjoy.
in communications, then it keeps me kind of like engaged and sharp in this kind of specific sector. But also it allows me the time to focus on a passion project, which like you mentioned is ⁓ my YouTube channel called History Meets Finance. And it kind of started off as a fun little side project that I was doing on the weekends during my work. Like I actually started this channel about like four or five years ago, to be honest.
And at that time it was focusing on things like productivity and like financial tips and stuff like that. And it was just like my way of like, dipping my toes into the world of content creation and seeing what works. and then it's very interesting because I was doing that and I realized that, you know, first of all, I'm not an expert. I'm not a financial advisor or anything like that. or a productivity guru or anything like that. So.
I started like veering a bit more and branching out to other areas. And then I explored one video, which was about, you know, the history of money and how we, how we think about money today and how it came to be. And then that started getting a lot more traction than my usual videos. And then I realized that the history and the finance subset is something that first of all, I'm interested in, and it also resonated with the audience. So I kind of took that and I ran with it. And here we are a couple of years later.
and I'm really enjoying it. I like doing my consolacy work and my condensation work at the same time.
Pinaki Kathiari (03:55)
Yeah. And congratulations to all of your like success in this. I love the story of like how perseverance gets you here because when we first met, I think it was slightly about a year ago or maybe just a little bit less. You're at like 90,000 subscribers. I think we talked like six months ago or something like that. You just broke a hundred thousand. And now looking at your channel at this date of recording, you're at 129. Is that a thousand?
Nazmul (04:23)
Break, yeah.
Pinaki Kathiari (04:24)
So congratulations, I see the plaque behind you too. Yeah, exactly, it's hidden. should be like, she signed some lights on it or something like that. But congratulations, sir.
Nazmul (04:26)
Thank you.
Bree Bartos (04:28)
I see that YouTube play button.
Nazmul (04:29)
I
Yeah, consistency
was the name of the game, absolutely. Thank you.
Bree Bartos (04:40)
⁓ That actually brings up a question that I have, because it's something I struggle a lot with with passion projects is how do you at the start, know, when you're, how do you develop that consistency and continuously show up when you're feeling unmotivated or like you're a little extra tired that day and you don't have the pressure that comes with having to do it for work? Like that is something I struggle with a lot.
Pinaki Kathiari (04:40)
Yeah.
Nazmul (05:04)
Great.
Pinaki Kathiari (05:05)
Hmm.
Bree Bartos (05:07)
is there's no one making me do it. It's just something I want to do. So how did you develop that consistency and discipline at the start?
Nazmul (05:15)
I think when you're trying to achieve something, having a group that helps you with accountability is very important. So it's very hard to go it alone. So when I started taking my YouTube journey seriously, I joined this community, this kind of course. There's this YouTuber called Ali Abdaal. I'm not sure if you've heard of him. He's like a productivity person and very big YouTuber. has like 6 million subscribers or 5 million subscribers now.
So I joined his community and what that allowed me to do is two things. One, I spent a lot of money and I felt a lot of sting behind that. I was like, my God, I spent so much money. And then I also had an accountability group. So those two things, the monetary pressure and the accountability kept me going in terms of being consistent and putting up my videos. Those were a couple of external
Bree Bartos (06:02)
Mm-hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (06:04)
Hmm.
Nazmul (06:11)
pressures that I added to myself in a very purposeful way. And then the third piece was my own kind of internal aspiration of becoming more successful in YouTube. But with those three elements put together, I came up with a goal that no matter what happens for 18 months, I'm going to put out one video every single week. And I did do that for every single week. And once I hit that and I realized that, hey, it was very
Bree Bartos (06:32)
That's great.
Nazmul (06:37)
difficult at the beginning, it costed a lot of money, but I ended up doing it. And then once I hit that 18 month mark and I saw that, okay, it's slowly starting to get traction, it was much more easier to continue that momentum afterwards. ⁓ But yeah, having, it's like you said, Bree, when you have just yourself and it's a passion project,
Bree Bartos (06:50)
Mm-hmm.
Nazmul (06:58)
It is hard, like having that ⁓ motivation is hard and I recognize that in myself, which is why I created those couple of external factors to kind of push me ahead.
Bree Bartos (06:59)
Mm-hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (07:09)
That's awesome. I like ⁓ that you kind of created these external accountability factors and then this internal goal of like this 18 months. Several years ago, I met Jonathan Mann, what they call the song a day man. He's basically written a song a day since January 1st, 2009.
Bree Bartos (07:14)
Mm-hmm.
Nazmul (07:16)
in
Bree Bartos (07:32)
well.
Pinaki Kathiari (07:32)
So, and he's in the Guinness World Book of Records now because of that, but it just kind of creating this kind of like goal of one a day type of thing. And that stuff goes into other people that I know who's like, I'm going to go out running every day for exercise, things like that. So fantastic way to kind of go about setting yourself up for success there. ⁓ Yeah. Nazmul, when
Bree Bartos (07:39)
Mm-hmm.
Yes, thank you for sharing that.
Nazmul (07:51)
Yeah, absolutely.
Pinaki Kathiari (07:54)
pivoted to the history aspect of the content, what was the research process like and what is it like now? How has it changed?
Nazmul (08:03)
Yeah, it's actually quite a difference from how it was back then. So, towards the beginning, I would just randomly search for things that I was interested in, in the realm of history and finance, so anything I could find. because I was at the beginning of my journey, a lot of the larger chunkier subjects were still unexplored on my channel. So like, you know, families like the Rothschilds and the Rockefellers, those are like very obvious kind of
topics to pursue if you're looking at history and finance. So it was very easy to dig up materials on them and come up with an interesting story. Also, I've been working in communications my entire career and writing stories. That's something that I'm really interested in. So I took those two passions. I did my research and it was very easy for me to kind of put together scripts on a weekly basis.
you talk about like the specific research process, it was just me Googling stuff and trying to find valid sources and putting it together. That was, I would say like the first few months. And then once I became more serious about my channel, that became the second phase of the growth where I was like, okay, I need some help. So I decided to allocate a certain amount of money behind, you know, getting proper researchers.
to put together the research material for me. Though we didn't have chatGPT back then. I got a couple of researchers. Again, I couldn't afford really high quality researchers back then. So I got them on Fiverr and they did really good jobs with the research process. they gave me like a preliminary kind of like they scraped the internet and got me some really good data points about the topics that I would pursue.
Pinaki Kathiari (09:25)
No
Nazmul (09:46)
So that then translated into the script and I did that for a couple of months. And then it kind of went into a more serious route, like I think at the last like year plus. That's when I hired like a couple of journalists for my channel where they do actual deep dive research on the topics that I'm pursuing and they put together some really high quality research for me. So it's very similar to what I was doing before, but at a much more higher level.
Pinaki Kathiari (10:05)
Hmm.
Nazmul (10:11)
⁓ quality with much more investments. And then you asked about how AI plays a role right now. So once the research comes to me, I will usually feed it into Claude. I'm not a big chat GPT fan. like Claude better because they're better with it's better with ⁓ to copywriting from my perspective, at least. and then it'll give me like some interesting story points. ⁓ it'll show me trends in the research. I'll take that and then I'll feed that into my script writing process. And, ⁓
Pinaki Kathiari (10:27)
Hmm.
Nazmul (10:39)
That's how I come up with my scripts now. So a lot of it is relying on experts ⁓ and researching on what's already available on YouTube, doing my own research on Google and Notebook LLM is a great resource as well if you haven't tried it already. But yeah, I use good quality researchers to get me the material that I need for my channel.
Bree Bartos (10:44)
Mm-hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (10:52)
Hmm.
That's pretty awesome. We unpacked a lot of that. There was some really good stuff. I love the journey of like first yourself Googling to then getting some like freelancers, consultants to help, then kind of getting full on journalists to help. It's very the entrepreneurial story of like how do you start building like a successful like YouTube channel? And it's because same way I've like built all of these.
Nazmul (11:09)
Yes.
Pinaki Kathiari (11:27)
organizations that I have, just you start doing yourself, you start getting traction, then you start adding more and you start adding more. And it's a great way to think of entrepreneurism because it's like you can't grow by doing the same thing over and over again. Like you see growth, then you have to kind of like change up, then you see more growth, then you change. So it's kind of like always kind of getting to the next wave and stuff like that. So that's awesome.
Also it reminded me of the same process because like season one of what does it feel so wrong to be human at work? I was Googling a lot for like the research behind the history and things like that. And by season two, AI had come out. So was just like combination of using illicit AI to research research papers, Google notebook LM to like mine all of that information. And then some kind of combination of like GPT barred Claude to like
put it together, but then I'd take it through my own like process of like, what do I want to say and things like that. So it's also kind of good to hear that too, but I like how you have like real researchers behind it.
Nazmul (12:35)
Yeah, so like the channel is a pretty big operation. I've got a number of people behind it. So maybe I could tell you bit more about my team because that will help obviously, have researchers and script writers that help me with putting together the source material. So that's just what I say. Then you have the other aspect of what you actually see on screen, the music, the animations, and everything. So for that, I have a video editing team.
Pinaki Kathiari (13:00)
Hmm.
Nazmul (13:00)
⁓
And they helped me ⁓ match my script to the actual video editing kind of like process. So I'm actually not a very good video editor. I'm very good at like putting the story together and looking at it from a bird's eye view. But I have a fantastic editor. His name is John. He works with a bunch of other editors that he uses on his team. And they put together the videos for me. So...
I will usually have a script where it's gonna be like a few columns. Like the first column is gonna be what I say on screen. So that's my VO. Then I have like a note for my editor that shares, hey, over here, try to find a picture or a video clip that says, you know, X, Y, and Z.
Pinaki Kathiari (13:45)
Hmm.
Nazmul (13:46)
And then we have our editors put together animations and graphics that represent the story. And they obviously use music to put it all together. And then the third column of that entire process is my sources. So one of the reasons that
my viewers end up liking my channel is because I provide all my research ⁓ with my videos. So any kind of fact or claim that I make on the video usually has like a source attached to it. And then I'll use that source material to put together like a document where any viewer can go to the link and find.
Pinaki Kathiari (14:05)
Mm-hmm.
Bree Bartos (14:06)
Hmm.
Nazmul (14:21)
the source material for us and my editors make sure that those source numbers are plugged onto the video so it's easy to kind of understand what source has been used for which part of the video. So that's the overall process, like lots of teams coming together to put it together. I'm kind of like taking all the benefits from having this channel but it's a lot of hard work from a bunch of different people on my team.
Pinaki Kathiari (14:44)
Congratulations to you and your team, because that's full on production. I mean, the same process that any weekly channel that you would see streaming or on television is done, whatnot. I'll ask this kind of side question before we close out. And without going into anything really political or world or anything like that, one of the things that I found interesting in my earlier
Bree Bartos (14:49)
Mm-hmm.
Pinaki Kathiari (15:10)
in all of my research with like the why does it feel so wrong is that it just never painted a great picture of where we're going or anything like that. Like, wow, this is how we got here ⁓ type of scenario is what kind of arises in my mind and staying positive ⁓ became or started becoming a little bit tough for that. Have you faced that? And if so, how do you kind of manage that that feeling?
Nazmul (15:36)
Yeah, well, it's tough because it's hard to stay positive when you're, especially when you're covering historical financial topics, because one of the things that you'll see a lot is there are always like racial divides, there's religious divides, there's political beliefs and political leanings that divide, you know, the general population.
But if you look at the historical kind of way in which things have worked, it's usually the elite kind of upper class that tends to determine how society will perform and how governments will function. So, I mean, obviously, like all human beings have differences and they have like commonalities as well. But at the end of the day, my belief is
is that if you follow the money, which is like a tagline for my channel, you always see like the societal changes, cultural changes, the way in which government works. It points to the fact that the difference is not about which political side you lean on, but rather which economic class you belong to. ⁓ So recognizing that helps us to understand that we're more common than not because the people who are controlling
Pinaki Kathiari (16:45)
Hmm.
Nazmul (16:54)
you know, the economy and stuff. you know, we talk a lot about the 1%. That's like a minority. And, you know, it's, sometimes a distraction for us to think about all these things that divide us. But if you look at how we all work, the things that we face as a society, a lot of it kind of is more common than not. And it's not to do with, you know, some of the things that divide us. So just understanding that, I don't know if that
Pinaki Kathiari (17:18)
Hmm.
Nazmul (17:20)
keeps me hopeful, but it helps me understand the world a bit better. And the way that I cope with it is, I don't know, I just eat lots of chocolate, I guess.
Pinaki Kathiari (17:31)
Yes, and we'll do that together. And I think that's what I kind of took out of that statement is like, yeah, we're in this and the facts point to this, but we're in this together. at least we have each other, is a cool way because it would feel way worse if we were all alone and separated. So any which way we could do to keep ourselves connected to each other is a good thing, the way I see it.
Nazmul (17:33)
Thanks.
Yeah, absolutely.
100%.
Pinaki Kathiari (17:56)
So yeah,
last question. Well, what I really do appreciate is what you mentioned a little while ago about all of your sources are checked and they are available for anyone who wants to check where the information comes from because we're in a world of battling kind of miss and disinformation right now. So I think that is very appreciative and it really builds trust. And I think any...
content generating organization needs to come with that moving forward. And I'd love to make that a theme. But when you zoom out, what do you think people misunderstand most about research heavy or thinking heavy work today?
as opposed to the opposite of that where there's, I suppose, AI slop just coming out from everywhere.
Nazmul (18:44)
Yeah, it's a bit difficult to differentiate these days, isn't it? I guess it, I mean, the way that I would think about it is, first of all, like just understanding how research happens and how information gets presented to you. Just because you're seeing something online or something that's edited very, in a very interesting way, something that's very click-baity, something that's very emotional and appeals to you on a very
Pinaki Kathiari (18:48)
Mm-hmm.
Hmm.
Nazmul (19:11)
on a human level doesn't mean that it's right. Entertainment is not equal to information. So just understanding that there is a distinction there and doing your own research, making sure that you're more aware about how information comes to you, what are the motivations behind the people making the information that's available to you, and then doing your own due diligence. I think that's very important.
And the only way to do that is, you know, like read more, understand, you know, the world a bit better, look at history and how propaganda and politics help shape how people think about various things. And always keeping that in mind because yeah, like information can be presented in a very sexy way these days, especially with AI. you know, media literacy is something that I have a lot to say about, but it's something that
Pinaki Kathiari (19:58)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Nazmul (20:04)
you know, we need to think about as well and being more media literate is very important for all of us. But yeah, like just having that mindset of, you know, questioning everything, not always taking information that's presented to you at face value and doing your due diligence is very important. Even with my channel, like I do a lot of research and I put a lot of effort into putting information in the right context, but sometimes I've, you know,
thought about certain instances in history that have been proven wrong by the comments that I get. ⁓ And I'll learn something new. So it's very important to just keep people accountable, keep yourself accountable, and make sure that you're doing your due diligence. That's all I can say.
Pinaki Kathiari (20:34)
Hmm.
Yeah, because
that's the thing about history is there's a lot of it and everyone has a pretty much a different perspective about it based on, you know, the way you're looking at that particular thing. ⁓ That's right.
Nazmul (20:56)
Yeah, and history is always written by the victors, so that'll
always have a bias towards whoever is considered victorious in that specific instance. So understanding, like, are there different points of view, are there different perspectives is very important.
Pinaki Kathiari (21:02)
Yeah.
Absolutely. There's so much of that, like kind of getting into the history behind things where I was like, I realized that I had assumed this thing, but after like looking into it, reading it, researching it, it was actually this thing, which is kind of very eye-opening. And I implore anyone and everyone to do your research, ask questions, question what you've been told, and talk to people who might not agree with you.
Nazmul (21:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Pinaki Kathiari (21:38)
⁓ Don't run away from that because the objective is to really learn and understand as opposed to fight and hold a stance because things change all the time in this world. Yeah, any last words before we break out of here? ⁓ Bree yourself, any last words from yourself as well?
Bree Bartos (21:55)
No, I think that was
Nazmul (21:57)
yeah, was great being here and having a chat about research and content creation. It's always like an area of passion for mine. So yeah, I just want to say thank you for having me on and I really enjoyed it.
Pinaki Kathiari (22:09)
Absolutely. I have a lot to say about media literacy. So love to continue the conversation on that. for now, Nazmul, that's a whole other podcast. Right. So Nazmul, thank you so much for joining us today. We really appreciate the conversation and your look into research and how your very successful YouTube channel is going. And thank you all for listeners and watchers for tuning in to this week's Between the Seasons. If you enjoy the conversations, you know what to do.
Nazmul (22:13)
Yeah, that's a whole other podcast, I think.
course.
Pinaki Kathiari (22:37)
Follow us, like us, tell your friends about us, subscribe, you all that good stuff.
Bree Bartos (22:41)
Really quick, I just want to add now that you're done listening to this episode. Make sure you go over to Nazmul's YouTube account and follow History Meets Finance and give his latest episode a listen.
Nazmul (22:54)
Thank you.
Pinaki Kathiari (22:54)
Do yourself a favor.
We'll be back next week for a short and honest conversation about a human at work We'll be listening in and hearing some Reddit stories and reacting to them. So see you next time. Bye bye, everybody.