 This is the Rex cohort doing our monthly check-in call for October of 2018. I will start by reading a poem by Mary Oliver titled The Journey. One day you finally knew what you had to do and began through the voices around you. Though the voices around you kept shouting their bad advice. Though the whole house began to tremble and you felt the old tug at your ankles. Mend my life, each voice cried, but you didn't stop. You knew what you had to do, though the wind pried with its stiff fingers at the very foundations. Though their melancholy was terrible, it was already late enough in a wild night and the road full of fallen branches and stones. But little by little, as you left their voice behind, the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds and there was a new voice, which you slowly recognized as your own, that kept you company as you strode deeper and deeper into the world, determined to do the only thing you could do, determined to save the only life that you could save. So I think these are sort of sobering times and maybe that's kind of a sobering poem for sobering times. How about that? It reminds me of volume three of Lord of the Rings where they're going toward Mount Doom and they're really, you know, they're having a hard time. And I forget whether it's Frodo or Sam sees like one star in the sky and that one star kind of just reignites trust or hope. Something more permanent out there than all the stuff. I think that's something we've had. I know, I know, than all the dust and crap that's happening on the ground. I was reading an article this morning off of a really interesting mailing list about Brazil and about why the new far right guy who's very likely to win is winning. Like what happened? And it turns out that the far left broke trust over and over and over and over again, just like shattered it. So everybody's like, no, screw you guys. We don't want to hear you anymore. We're going to go with this tough guy who's going to go shoot all the criminals. But it's, you know, just more evidence of the kind of chaos that's happening in different places and that's probably going to get worse. Yeah, there was a really extensive article I read in The Atlantic. I've written by someone I think from Poland. We've seen this before. Oh my God, was that a good article? Has anyone else heard of this article? Sounds familiar. I'm going to see if I can find it. Is that the one about McConnell playing such a crucial role? Oh, I think that is the one. Yeah. Well, it was written by an insider who's like who's a central European insider and those all these people. Now, detailed how country after country is going for, you know, the internal elites and nationalism. And like, it's a very familiar story. And it's one of the articles I read a while ago was pointing out that Trump is very much a European national. He looks like a European central European sort of leader. Is this, is this the article, The Suffocation of Democracy by Christopher Browning? No, but that sounds like a good article. Oh, really good. This is also a New York review of books. So it's a different one, but I'll place it into our Zoom chat here. This one, the one I just pasted is excellent and it is about Mitch McConnell. And it basically, God, it basically says McConnell. This is a quote from the article. McConnell is the grave digger of American democracy. I found it a warning from Europe. The worst is yet to come polarization conspiracy theories attacks on the free precedent of session with loyalty. Recent events in our state power pattern Europeans know all too well. There we go. What's the title of the article? A warning from Europe. The worst is yet to come. I'm going to send it to you guys in a minute. Thanks. Thanks. So partly I've been thinking like, okay, what, what do we do? What do I do? And I guess we've had some, some Rex calls about this, like, oh, you know, what's, what's the thing to do now with Mika and others. But that's, that's high on my, on my mind these days. It's like, all right. So many of these things are happening. What, what, how do we actually sort of buckle down and get some of this done in a productive way? You found it. Yeah. Oh, thank you very much. Beautiful. So let's, let's, let's leave the, leave the gloomies behind for a moment and just do a brief check in and see where we are in the world of things like this. Anybody want to lead? Yeah, I know. Mark, you want to head into it like what kind of stuff you're interested in these days? Sure. Well, I mean, you know, what one thread is about, you know, what kind of supporting, what, how can we support dialogue or discussion or argumentation. And I'm, I'm more and more disillusioned about the prospects for that. Particularly, you know, through various kind of studies finding that, for example, the more you understand the rules of logic, the more it's actually more likely that your bias increases with that. There's not, there's recent article on what's called my side bias. And, you know, which basically kind of implies that people like, well, the whole framing thing, the question is how do you frame things and how does framing happen in a non-rational or more than a rational way. Anyway, that's kind of one thread. Another thread kind of in my life is that kind of the about actually maybe it's more like 15 years ago. I kind of, I was involved in Buddhist meditation practice and still am actually, but I was involved with the organization founded by, you know, one of the people and a few months ago they ended up on the front page of the New York Times as they're now part of the Me Too movement. And, you know, and this is happening across lots of Buddhist organizations around the world where, you know, just about every teacher you can think of is on some level sexually abusive or taking advantage of power and so on. So, you know, it's not, of course, exclusive to Buddhism, but it just shows how power seems to just, I mean, there's just this kind of universal quality to it where people get attracted because of the power. They start exerting power, then that goes into sexual power and so on. So that's been, so even though I'm not in the organization percent of lots of people in it, it was a meltdown happening through that. So that's another kind of theme going on. Those are two great things. I remember, I remember once long ago I went to the Kripalu Institute, which is like a yoga ashram up in Ryan Beck, New York, and that whole kind of crystal zone of Western New York, or Eastern New York rather Western Mass. And many years later, Guru Dev, the guy who was like their founding guru and whatever, whatever was booked and put away for a bunch of abuses, you know, the whole place almost melted down. They're still around. They had to heal after all that. But yeah, there is something about these positions of power. There's probably also kind of a, what's it called, the recency effect here where because Me Too is big and we're seeing a lot of people in the spotlight of Me Too, we're noticing a lot more of this is going on. I'm not sure the frequency is up or anything like that. This is just always, I think it's always been going on at some proportion. And I think also maybe it's not completely rampant everywhere. I mean, it's really easy. And I think this is happening on the far right in the alt right. When Donald Trump says it's really hard to be a boy in America these days, you know, and everybody who's trying to make a dent in these issues does a face palm. It's easy to feel like, you know, anybody could fall from any accusation at any moment and the flimsiest of actions might lead to an accusation, et cetera, et cetera. So interesting how this is unrolling as we speak. Yeah. And I guess a third kind of theme is, I mean, I've been involved in tech for a long time in this kind of perhaps in retrospect, kind of overly naively optimistic way. Although, well, so one aspect of this that, you know, people like Buckminster Fuller would say, you can't change how people are so we're going to work on the technology side, because we can work with that. And, you know, and that applies. There's many people that that's a common thought and, you know, I think that's fatally flawed because I think as we're seeing now it's not just that. Well, I think what we're seeing is the feedback from the technology side to the human side and especially recently like looking at Facebook and Google and YouTube and so on where, you know, where we're seeing that the monetized selling of our fragmentary attention is actually directly affecting our own capacity to act sanely and wisely. And so it's not just so technology, you can't separate technology from the business model driving it, and it's certainly not value neutral. And that doesn't bode well for our capacity to meet challenges because, you know, there's this ongoing question of how the hell can 40% of Americans not believe in, you know, anthropogenic climate change and how is that possible. But it seems to be true and it's not just in the US. So, so that's kind of on one level disillusioning on the other hand it raises the question of how can we work more directly on kind of human system, you know, like angle angle bar talk to a tool system in the human system. And so anyway, that's kind of another ongoing theme and in fact that's kind of, you know, I'm trying to identify what I'm most concerned about it's kind of that intersection of technology society and sanity and how those things work together. I like that. It's interesting in so many dimensions. Partly, one of the things that jumps up at me is that I think I think many people stick to positions that seem illogical, mostly because of membership and identity is that is that renouncing that position would probably be an ostracism from a group that believes in those things or that has held hold to those things as a position. And there's there's now kind of because because these battles have surged so much into the foreground. Some some of the stuff used to just be background politics but now it's like this this is sort of how people are identifying and how groups are connected. And it's happening in churches is happening in lots of places where there used to be other discussions going on. So people are really reluctant to run out and like blow up their entire friends network and how they, you know, all their friends, you know, all the people are connected to in order to change these things. So they're in that sense. And what you were saying earlier about how sometimes facts of the presentation of facts just strengthens beliefs. So one of the things I wind up seeing is how do we build bridges to new places of seeing or new places of thinking, because for people who feel under siege or under threat, and like abandoning any part of a particular set of beliefs, means loss of membership in community and friendship and everything else. How do we create stepping stones through what looks like a horrible river to a place of better life together with others. I don't know. But these these kinds of changes don't happen easily. And and different places in the world are getting more and more rigid and using more and more fear sort of pumping up the volume on fear. I made the mistake of finishing watching the documentary Icarus, which is about blood doping and bicycling and in which a mid range bicyclist who realizes he's never going to be the next top cyclist decides, What the hell? Why don't I contact the best Russian doping guy and see if he'll help me. And then I can document the whole thing. And then I can document the whole thing. So amazingly, this guy who's like this Russian doping expert who also happens to run the Russian anti doping agency says, Sure, I'll help you. And then like about everything that's been going on, like it's been doping for years. It goes all the way up to Putin, etc. So I finished watching Icarus, but then I also watched Active Measures, a new documentary about basically nonlinear warfare and all the other stuff that's going on. And everything goes back to Putin. And it talks about how Trump Tower was a perfect place for money laundering from Russia and this and that all kinds of crazy stuff. And at the end of it, I was a little shaken because I'm like, All right, all right, gotta do some deep breathing because if so much of this is going on. How do we work our way past it? How do we build those little stones across the river? Sorry to riff on and on about this. But I think I think, Mark, you're tapping into some very, very strong things that are going on. So I just wanted to this is Jermay, can you hear me? Yes, you're just great. You're coming in five by five. Well, that's nice because I'm here in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Sweet. And this is actually on my lunch break. Oh my God. And I realize that the timing worked out to basically give you all a holla. A holla. You can't pass bread through Zoom, but... The conference is on the future of agriculture, primarily around livestock stuff. And I'm giving the closing keynote. So I have to find the right balance between scaring them and inspiring them. Zoom, Zoom, but it's all going to be okay. Yes, but it's been fascinating. I basically, we had a speaker yesterday who was the... I guess we can put it at the Brazilian Sean Hannity. Wow. Yeah. He's a print guy instead of a TV guy. But you may know that Bolasaro came close to outright winning the first round election and almost certainly going to win the second round. By 2%, he would have been declared winner already, yeah. Right. He got 43, but his closest opponent got 29, something like that. So it's really unlikely that anyone else is going to win. And he is my best describer as a combination of Trump and Duterte. Yes. And he's a charming guy. Likes the finger guns apparently. And this speaker yesterday was essentially going to talk about how wonderful it is that this guy is going to favor the producers over the parasites and is going to de-leftify the government and purge the leftists from the government. It was fascinating. Yeah, I've never been so close to such intense evil. Oh, and you've been in Kazakhstan. That's true, but I never got really close to them. I mean, I was sitting in the front row, so he was like maybe 25 feet away. Oh. That's very intense. Like the timing of your being in Brazil is crazy. I know, I know. I asked to do some tweets about it yesterday. I have met some interesting people and I do need to move on from this body. I saw that the timing was good. I wanted to poke in and say hello to everybody. You know, the mobile version of the mic. You're breaking up now. Oh, yeah, okay. See you other folks. Can you hear me again? Yes, you were breaking up just a little bit there at the end. I was checking to see the other screens to just see who else was here. But I wanted to say hi since I know I haven't been in a couple of months. It's just been crazy busy. But, you know, the future waits for no one. And I didn't realize you were still in Brazil because I've watched your travels a bit. And I think I'll see you next Thursday at the institute. You will. Talking to a Brazilian company, no less. Bing. All right, folks, I will let you get on with your conversation. I just wanted to say hello. Thank you. And that I will check in again more regularly once things have died down a bit. Happy trails and break a leg. Give him hell. Okay. Ciao. Ciao. That was really great to be checked in. That was great. Yeah, that was like bizarrely perfect timing. Can I just say how strange and wonderful that was? Yeah. Yeah, there's a so John Oliver did a whole segment on Bolsonaro and his finger guns and everything else. And it's crazy land. It's it's absolutely fascinating what's happening there. There were last year there were 62,000 murders in Brazil. That's a lot. Yeah, I know. Susan, by the way, sent me a note that she's has to teach something right now, but she's going to join us at about 40 minutes in. So Susan will come and join the conversation at some point. Mark, thank you for for the things you put in the conversation because like, that's that's I share a lot of your concerns and interests in that nexus of, you know, did we, did we take tech too lightly or too naively? And how does this stuff all play together? Oh, were you going to jump in? Okay. Todd, Todd, do you want to check in? Yeah, this is the the autumn of action for me. I have a lot of things that I've initiated. I'll post some links here in a minute. In response to that question of, you know, what do we do when these times are so dark and chaotic. I think with some intentionality and some just instinct. I decided I just need to throw a bunch of stuff against the wall this fall. And that feels good because my energy level is high. I've not felt overwhelmed except for fleeting moments and I spent some time at NASA on the East Coast last week. With one of my clients that's working through deep collaboration, body based skills with them. And that was just is just encouraging for for as much as we hear about dysfunction and organizations and dysfunction and government to these people were all thrilled to be working there. And they were all thrilled to be learning how to work with difference, whether they were engineers or finance people and and they let me just walk around and explore buildings where I shouldn't be. So that that was a fun little bonus too. Did you say body based skills? Body based skills, yes. So learning learning conceptually what is needed in order to meet another or meet or show up in a group and then doing active skills with your body to train yourself. So that those behaviors become more lodged. So you're actually asking engineers and finance people to get up and do strange things together, which there's resistance at first, and then it reaches a point where they just love it. They, they love that they're moving around the room and they're doing things that they're have full permission to do and it everyone else is doing it. It's it's it's quite transformational. Really cool. Love it. I just put a link to the leadership training program which starts the week after next that I'm doing with Marty Spiegelman who she jumped on the design from trust call. Didn't she? Yes. Yeah, I'm so happy to see that I watched some video. And then I am co hosting. I'm leading a retreat next weekend to to test some of the material I've been working on. And then I'll send one more here. That's great. Wow. And then throughout this month I've been doing interviews with folks about consciousness. Called the Oneness World Summit. And those will all be released next month. On 11 11. So what's it called? Chopsticks Day. No parallel day. There's a name for 11 11. Chopsticks Day. I've heard that one before. Yeah. Very cool. Do you want to? Is there is there any part of these events that we can help you think through or reflect on? Just as prep because you've got a lot on your plate here. There's a lot coming up. It's cool to see. Is there any part of this that we can help you ponder? Let Bo check in and then come back to me. And I'm sure I have something that I'm chewing on. Cool. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Senior McFarlane, would you like to jump in for a little bit? Yeah. I'm going to put something in the chat. I went to this conference this weekend. Because Dave Gray had tickets to it, and then he couldn't make it. So he contacted me on, like, Thursday or something about it. Wow. It was a weird, very weird, very interesting. The thermodynamics. Of emotion symposium. We integrated stuff. Like there's this guy, this about he Adrian, the Jean, construct a law. Have any of you heard about that? The constructal theory. I've heard of that. Yeah. I suspect you have, right, Jerry? I'd have to look it up to remember it, but it's in my brain. Construct a law. Everything involves to facilitate flow. Right. Very good, Jerry. Very good. I think there's other guy who's like a dog trainer. And he, so he uses dogs to look at emotion and everything. So I'm going to tell you, I was in a conference where I was completely, you know, not, I was not there in the knowledge. You know, I didn't know anything. Which actually was pretty fun because. So I just reserve judgment and listen, listen, listen, listen. It was a small one at that Kennedy school. Jerry, you know, the Kennedy school. That was not important to know this, but, um, Kennedy school is a beautiful bungalow school that was built to be a bungalow school. So there's no second floor. And it's just, it's really nicely, oh, it's really beautiful as a courtyard in the center. Anyways. And so it's really well preserved too. So it's fun to be in a school where you can like drink alcohol. By the way, you're just like, yeah, I don't know. There's something about that. That's true. And they have two, you know, four nice bars in that place. They do. Yeah. Yeah. The Kennedy school is one of the things that made April on me look at each other and go. Hmm. Hmm. Where else do we find things like this? We need to maybe move here. Yeah. So, um, I made it always was Friday, Saturday, Sunday and mid Sunday morning. And then I just got, I was felt sick and I went home and I've been basically for the last Sunday, Monday, Tuesday I just stayed in bed. Hmm. Um, I cannot say as yet whether I'm really like what happened in the conference. I can't say that I agreed with it. I can't say. I, and I don't know, you know, whether I'll read more of the books that they referenced. I don't even know if I'll do that. Hmm. Were there, were there any nuggets, any little shiny pieces that smelled interesting, separate from the larger sort of framing and theory and all that? Were there little pieces where you're like, Oh, that's interesting. Well, the guy that ran at this, William Wilhelm guy, uh, Larson, he was, he was very good. And, um, he was very good. And, uh, I would say that it was really great to be in a conference that actually concerned itself with human emotion and not some sort of behavioral psychology way. Hmm. Um, and, uh, I'd say it was very, as far as, uh, emotionally, uh, sensitive and, um, insightful. I do believe it was. So, uh, I'm sort of shocked that it was. Um, we did this constellation stuff where you work out family emotions. So it was, it really was expert in that. Have you, um, they do horse constellation therapy. Oh my God. Yeah. So are you guys aware of constellation therapy? So correct me if I'm wrong Bo, but as far as I know, uh, you take one person who's the client of the particular moment you're going to do it. They think about their system, like who's connected, like who are they having issues with, et cetera. So they write down the names of the different roles on different sheets of paper. And they, and they fold them up so nobody can tell what the role is when you hand them to the people in the group. And then you ask the people to just sort of hold, hold the role without seeing it and go stand in the room in some way. Stand, stand somewhere relative to the client person that this is about. And it turns out that unconsciously or through other energies, the people end up standing like facing away or directly, whatever, the people end up reflecting the dynamics that are in question. Like it's, it's like a terror reading that works or something like that. They didn't do the pieces of paper. They told the people what the role was. So that was very explicit. So they knew, okay. Yeah. But, but apparently it's uncanny how these things happen. And I've heard you can do this with horses. And in fact that horses have insane sensitivity. Like, like horses are finally, finally attuned to emotion, to a whole bunch of other things. And so, so you let the horses wander around in the pen relative to the client. And that, and that seems to work as well. Got me. Okay. Well, that really doesn't make any sense. All right. So, okay. Then there's this dog trainer guy who was who wrote all these books about that. And he uses dogs as what he likes about dogs is that they're very sort of pure heart is what he would call them. So he uses them as an analog to understanding human emotions. And actually I got to say the system is pretty elegant and pretty explanatory. Which I was a little shocked at. Because when I was, if you look at like the people in this conference, you're like, you know, what the hell? I mean, you're reading this like thermodynamics and human emotions. Really? Okay. And then there's a, the guy who ran the conference is a tracker. Like a guy that goes out and tracks people down, right? You know, like because of the footsteps and stuff, that kind of tracking. So this has got to be the weirdest conference I've ever been to, ever. And it was also so very Portland. I mean, at least half the people there were Portland. Yeah. Which means that everyone is incredibly civil, sensitive, nice. It was just nice to be with people like that. Okay. What we were talking about. I'm trying to make the leap of understanding the connection with dogs. Well, since dogs have co-evolved with us. And in fact, there was this theory which was really neat. You know, Jerry, you and I were thinking about finding a civilization. And what they were thinking about was maybe dogs being our co-hunters. Maybe that's actually what enabled us to have a connection with dogs. I mean, you know, you know, maybe that's actually what enabled us to have livestock is essentially when you have a dog who heard sheep run, you've taken the hunting instinct and subverted it to do that. So they posited that dogs might have been the founding of civilization because animal husbandry, for example. Anyway, so dogs are pure heart. They're not, they don't get, their heads don't get in the way of what they're doing. So, and since they co-evolve this and they said horses aren't like that. Horses are different. So that they use that to say, to do an analog to emotion. And then it's all about, so actually the system has some elegance to it that I thought, I'm going to look into that a little more. I don't know if I just answered your question, Todd, but frankly, I was mused and the whole time I was just sitting there okay, you know. What's interesting to me about things like family constellations is that partly they seem to work and partly they seem to talk to people in a completely different channel from the logical channel of here's what the science is telling us about climate change or whatever, right? And partly we've talked a bunch in Rex about storytelling and the role of stories and narratives and all that. And some of these experiences are ways to break through to people's understandings. And so I find that really interesting because in these settings or when you're doing an exercise where everybody's doing something weird, but they don't mind because everybody else in the room is doing the weird thing, you break through to some different place of being with each other. And Todd, I don't know if this is all useful for the work you and Marty are going to do. It's probably similar to some of the exercises that Marty would put people through. But you know getting... was really good at... you project your emotions on a group of people. You mean that no matter whether the horses of the human being to understand anything it's really useful for projecting it out into the theater of life. It's almost a little bit like you know how they discovered the Van Allen radiation belts around the earth and it turns out that like the earth throws out force way further than you think it does and when you see an image of what they discovered patterns of magnetism and interactions and then you bring in like solar winds and all that there's this drama playing out at these levels of radiation way further out in space than you think it's kind of like humans are like that and we're busy throwing out all sorts of different kinds of energy some of which we're kind of aware of because we're trying to convince somebody of something some of which we're completely oblivious to because it's family history that's stuck in us and is trying to figure out where it is and the constellation work is almost like a way of putting like iron filings and a magnet on it so you can sort of see where the energy is hey Susan we have had the most unpredictable conversation so far like who the hell knew who the hell knew we were going to get where we've gone but hey it's Rex that's what we do that's what you do so Jamai dropped in he's in São Paulo Brazil at a conference about the future of agriculture the capstone speaker and he's going to try to not doom them too much but tell them where to go except he's in the middle of the Brazilian election with Bolsonaro you know the far right guy about to be like made president and so we talked about that for a while and then Bo our mutual friend Dave Gray gave Bo a ticket to a conference he couldn't attend here in Portland called the thermodynamics of emotion and there was a bunch of interesting stuff happening there including family constellation therapy and the role of dogs and a bunch of other things that Bo was like right yeah exactly it was like the weirdest conference he's ever been to so we've just been through a bunch of that trying to figure out how does it fit where does it take us etc sounds wonderful is there anything sort of a direct see on your radar or schedule that you'd like to check in on because we were sort of doing the round of check ins well I can check in on the talk that I mentioned that I didn't do last week last time which I just got through giving and on working with bots and the role of conversation and I don't want to go through it all here but it got an extraordinary response positive to my like people were coming out of the woodwork and saying it's time to talk about these things so I find it ironic that linguistics is now back in and I said well yes actually it never should have gone out I'm not going to complain that's great that's awesome bots are poking their heads up in lots of different places yeah we're doing a we're putting together a thing I'm working with media X at Stanford to put together and you heard it here first except it hasn't been announced yet the visiting bots program sweet so yeah it's yes and yeah so I've been deep into bot world and I think I'm astonished I mean I didn't know that there were just robotics I didn't know there were 267 companies in the San Francisco Bay Area robotics companies just in the Bay Area and are you talking here robotics companies or bot and chatter bot I'm talking about chatter bots bots iron bots blue bots red bots so the whole thing and actually I think what I'm proposing in particular would actually apply to would be an interesting architecture conversational architecture for our interactions with with other types of AI beings and avatars and also AI assistants have you read any Ian Banks why do I know that name he's a science fiction author who invents it's the culture series and I read only one of them I think the first of the culture series novels and apparently as you keep going deeper it gets more and more interesting and a lot of this is about spacecraft he gives spacecraft really funky names and then creates these pots but there's like an intelligence in the culture that inhabits these vessels and that can hide itself and that does a bunch of different things and just it's an interesting thought exercise and what happens when machines get really intelligent so it might help you play with some of the bot futures ideas yes Ian Banks yep Ian Banks I'll put them in the chat I keep staying away from science fiction because it's a whole world I think tasting it every now and then really helps I got into it when I was in eighth grade it's about the time people do sort of right after you've done volcanoes and dinosaurs here here's the culture series anyone else with thoughts on bots well I think that we need to think about collaborating with them well so I've had this what I'm about to say has shown up in conversation three or four times in the last couple of days it sort of goes through explaining AlphaGo and AlphaGo Zero and then talking about freestyle chess so AlphaGo is the Google's go playing game that was trained on historic go games the way you train neural networks okay fine and it beats LeasyDoll and we sort of watched that happen AlphaGo Zero wasn't given any historic games it was only given the rules of go which are very simple until go play yourself for a while until you get good at this and in 48 hours AlphaGo Zero was better than AlphaGo 5, 6 days it got better than everything and everyone and go scholars are studying the moves that it began to invent so it managed to break through some ceiling of capacity of even what we thought go moves should be like could be like we're done because if you know go there's a whole culture of what move is probably going to get played next and in fact in I recommend watching the documentary AlphaGo it's on Netflix and they're in game two move 37 is totally counterintuitive and this doesn't show up in the documentary but I heard that the guy who is sort of playing the stones for AlphaGo at first is about to put his stone down where he thinks that AlphaGo is going to play and it's like no no it's in a different place and that was kind of creativity and innovation on AlphaGo side then after Kasparov loses to Deep Blue years ago he in a whole bunch of others go like you know what we're going to go deep into this tech thing so they invent something that's called freestyle chess that has a bunch of other names as well but basically you form up teams and you're allowed to use any technology you want and as many humans as you want and those teams compete in a game of chess and it turns out that humans matched with software are better than just software yeah well there's another book out I don't know if you keep up I don't always HBR I mean Harvard Business School Press a couple guys now called humans and plus with a plus sign machines which I just read this week and it's of course right in the space where I'm thinking but I'm thinking that one reason why it might work so if I'm right tell me if I'm taking the right lesson here so I mean there's sort of basically there's the machine learning of learning to play go and there's the rule based version of playing go and we tend to think that the rule based stuff is sort of waning and that machine learning is everything now I don't know that's not the lesson I'm I got but is that true so interesting so AlphaGo Zero is still machine learning neural network style it's just that it wasn't fed the data of a whole bunch of historic games it created its own history by playing itself but the learning was still done it was not a rule based system oh it built the rules yes so it basically absorbed how to play go by playing go against itself as opposed to what you and I know as expert systems and you know the old fashioned AI where you actually build you know explicit rules etc so it was not it's not one of those at all okay so what might my what I'd like to know I may I will go watch it and see if I can learn anything but is whether or not I think the thing about conversation that I was trying to make is that the structure of the conversation it's not like and it's not like grammar rules it's like it emerges out of the interaction between and among people and it's the structure of the interaction that I'm interested in and how that emerges over time and what kinds of building blocks we have many of which are meta reflexive on the interaction right so so I can see that how how how that could work I mean it must be sensitive to the emergent structure out of the interaction one question I would do I would do a quick Google search to see if anybody is doing research using TensorFlow which is Google's open source neural network engine and bots like if somebody's crossed those two things together like they're probably doing something interesting and you had me thinking partly because I'm stimulated by AlphaGo Zero like is it possible that bots could find a simpler way to answer questions that humans pose to them and could find shortcuts to establishing trust with humans if they could understand that those might be the goals of an interaction might the bots find their way to very different ways of establishing trust and solving problems you know that's um yeah I mean I think of course I think everything's emergent everything is emergent but you know it's interesting to look at the trust as an outcome and I think that there has been a sensitivity I think some of this happens because it doesn't work in um in um call center calls there people have been trained differently because it didn't work very well people got angry now I just get angry at the bot um yes I think I think I think it is this sort of back and forth in the timing of it not exact but you know what I mean there's a signal and you respond to the signal mm-hmm yes I think so I mean tensor flow and bots yeah it kind of oscillates over time yeah yeah and also we have you know we have human history with some of this technology from we used to use bank tellers to go withdraw and deposit money and cash checks and all that kind of stuff and then money walls you know ATMs took over uh and then you know when you call who answers and how does that work also the call center was invaded by technology in hundreds of different ways that are super interesting we've got a couple of recs members who are really big on that uh be Greg and Kelly who really understand that side of it I think I think actually I wish they were on this call because um this that's territory they would be really interested in have you talked with them this is the consortium for service innovation folks on in recs oh yes not for a while not deeply but I keep thinking I should go back you know pink Kelly and say hi or something and um I think there's a super interesting conversation for you to have with that group uh because they must be looking at bots and I think the perspective you're bringing into the whole thing is is unique I think that I think the they would they would I mean it's only been you know how you know these things and then they only then you then they occurred to you as if you didn't know them yeah um and so one of those is thinking that um since I'm a big believer in the co-creation of value in use that um conversations are the place where a lot of value is created and so they would they would certainly have insight and then they wouldn't anyway contextual chatbots with tensor flow uh yeah it's it's all it's all over there there's a chatbot magazine um fascinating yeah exactly yeah I mean now while I was asked today what was I thinking about this for just for human machine interaction and I said no I think I think if if we're successful in making the digital work more visible more transparent uh in virtue of interacting with them differently and they're being differently architected um then then I think we have another route to holding ourselves accountable and our machines accountable and so if the same principles can apply if the conversational architecture could be used in in tensor flow and chatbots that would be interesting um I don't see anything in the in the quick google search I'll have to look again that was just sort of a stab in the dark I don't know I don't know of anything like that no but that's that's that's really useful because that's going to open up the whole question and oh god so I started my whole my whole talk today with a picture of rabbit a place that said warning rabbit holes uh huh did you use like a cover of watershed down no I should have I just went and borrowed a borrowed a picture okay of uh uh yeah and then you know then a rabbit going down a hole and then a rabbit coming out of a hole and all of that then it was interesting that the guy who was the CEO of cognizant said afterwards he said I can't you know this is just I can't tell you how timely this is he said I've been trying to hire linguists and I can't find them wow he said I could die or a hundred of them he said because it's the interaction you could become the linguist employment office you could just like connect up to the ones you know and say dudes hello you know why I have it I don't have it I'm not part of the linguists community any longer um we should work our networks and and cross over into some group of linguists who are like oh we love language but nobody wants to hire us we know how to do this the people who know how to do this are there's a bunch of them in England mm-hmm because they were chomsky eyed there used to be a bunch of people who did like this kind of stuff at the University of Waterloo um I don't know if that still exists but well there are also the there's all of the sociology ethnomethodology work and conversation analysis mm-hmm which also started in the 60s everything started in the 60s we're just getting old now and it's coming back yeah partly what you're saying makes me think of how much transparency and how much data is useful or needed and I'll give you two extremes one extreme is I just heard about an app that I installed on my iPad but I haven't used yet the app is called moody it basically needs a 10 second sample of your voice of you saying something and it will feedback what your emotions are and a little bit about your personality profile oh no yes 10 seconds 10 second clip of audio um and I have no idea how accurate or whatever I think it's I have no idea whether I think this personality research and all of that stuff is I totally agree and I'm positing moody as one extreme here yes right and the other extreme is I publish my brain openly online you can infer a whole ton about me and my beliefs and what I think because it's all right there now there's no API to the brain nobody's done this but imagine as a thought experiment that I was interacting with a bot that had full access to published brain might it find ways well it could probably easily find ways of manipulating what I think by understanding what I value and all that but might it actually find sort of honest, truthful trustworthy ways of giving me complete shortcuts to things that I need solved might my publishing a lot about how I think and what I believe be very useful in problem solving or whatever it is we're describing here because I've uploaded more of me than most people have yes I was at Fujitsu's Expo yesterday of all things and there was one guy there who had written an API mashup tool which of course maybe you could use that to mash up your brain definitely sorry I'm monopolizing you anybody else with thoughts on bots? well one thing that there's the whole idea of mental models and I know that Demis, Hassan is in the deep mind group I've been doing stuff just with their TensorFlow now based technologies and so on and that also has a lot to do with the question of modeling a person so a bot would want to model you in order to do the kind of stuff you're talking about Jerry like make Jerry plus plus be bot assisted in terms of using his brain and developing a model derived from that and then of course there's a model for self-awareness which is also kind of interesting in terms of how the mental model stuff could you use that though to infer the mental model that the bot has well that's it oh that's what they're doing the question is would that develop more self-awareness for the bot because when the bot has some model of itself as well as some model of you and because you know that's how conversations happen you know you're talking developing my model maybe I might feedback you then also you know I'm positioning myself relative to you based on my model of what you're I thought about that work for years I didn't like it because it wasn't social enough in its assumptions which part well the models that got built that were the representations of the models that got done was sort of very scientific and very very it was recognized that the model the mental model was very partial but not as partial as it actually is I think in because you can go into a conversation and go for so long without understanding each other and say even on simple things like pronoun reference you know you you think that the he or the she was referring to was used to refer to particular individual and you I heard that I just did this this morning I was saying something about and I thought they were talking about me so silly and they were talking about somebody else and I thought well that's not true of me that's not you know I was like and I said that's not who they were talking about because you had a model of yourself well yeah but I think those models are partial I think they take the context to be filled out to be filled out it's one of the reasons that we can that language in particular for instance is very efficient is that that things can be used to refer to many different things and many different contexts that's what makes it work but downside is there's not a one-to-one match so I was so sometimes the models to me were were excessively complete I mean they were often used for you know things like you know how does electricity really work I still need to know how that works I'm sure I don't have the right one because I just tried to program my my mate too which is controlling the automatic turn on the generator and you can't get it right oh no we were up in Bellingham recently after a trip to Seattle and there's an electricity museum in Bellingham which is very very good like I was shocked and there was a whole hahaha didn't realize I said that and they had a whole area with early radios and TVs and like lots of you know lots of sets lots of stuff but then there was a lot of background they went right back to you know the early flag semaphore systems and signaling and then right on through they also had a demo area with some Tesla coils and kind of explanations of what's happening and really really nice well done yeah yeah well yes electricity the models we have the mental models that we have of electricity are seldom true one that I was favorite was a German guy who was doing this for early days at IRL and he'd figured out that you know a good metaphor for amperage was on a bicycle chain that there's it's not electricity but it needs to be you know it's pulled or pushed it's pulled by the thing you plug in by the amount of amperage which is the amount of power that it's pushing and he began to start to get a different model of what's going on a different feel for it I'm forgetting who it was somebody somebody famous used to think of everything in terms of gears and cogs and that was that was kind of his mental model process for a lot of things but it gave him a lot of explanatory power and I'm wondering what were Nikola Tesla's mental models because Tesla had a better intuitive grasp of electricity and radiation and all these the electromagnetic spectrum than pretty much any modern human has I think he understood it more deeply than most people do today I don't know that he ever articulated them etc but for example he invents out of whole cloth the electrical grid as we use it today everything from power stations to high voltage transmission to the substations to the plug in the wall he invents that and pretty much it works out of the shoots the way he designs it it's sort of like Mozart composing whole symphonies first pass I blame mental models for his ability to do that he somehow got somewhere where he could picture well or faithfully what was actually happening behind the scenes a lot of what we're talking about with stories and narratives is also this mental model stuff and there's people like Shane Parish at Farnham Street and Black Rock Valio and a bunch of others who are busy working their way through kind of more analytic mental models but they're making big collections of mental models which I'm collecting over in my brain I put a link a little earlier here to useful frameworks but a lot of those mental models are good for statistical mail kind of things and they're not good for social intuitive kind of things yeah yeah well yeah that's because our mental models of how those things work aren't sufficiently human or social I would say we know a lot about being human now but we don't know as much about being social yeah we know it but we don't behave as if we know it all too true any any other thoughts on oh well one more thought on that oh please the idea that you put something out there to presumably I mean Tesla did lots of drawings and writing and all kinds of things he externalized what he was thinking or understanding and often you put it out there and you go well that's not what I meant and then you draw something else and you revise it and so on and so forth but it was also what was interesting at the early days of IRL was we had a lot of attention to to teaching math and science which you know and the mental models and the sort of mind bugs that people had as John C. Brown would refer to him as and all of that trying to understand how to do that but someone who was in the school of education down at Irvine wrote a dissertation on how it is that people saw those story problems which mathematical story problems those have been around since Egyptian times I mean we've been trying to figure out how to get people to do this forever so and but what he studied people who were professionals who used a lot of math and there were about four strategies that people used one was using those formulas that were taught one was which very few people did but the people who the people who got the most right answers of the people who drew pictures my grandmothers at this station and the trains over here and the blah blah you know but they had to build the context for the story so a lot of what's going on also not just the social interaction stuff but a lot of it is we indexed to the context very thickly and the more we do that the less transferable knowledge is so for a while I had this well knowledge idea was that if you get corn from native corn seeds and you try to plant them here they're not going to grow and so what happens when you tame it is that you get to know more and more about the context and what context it's in and then we elaborately construct a field and elaborately construct all the amount of water it needs and the fertilizer it needs and the sunshine it needs and everything else it's seed to that particular context and Lord knows we've been able to produce great deal more food but I think that's one of the things that we fail to understand is how much we need to externalize the context how much we're depending on the context that our understanding is even when we're not having a conversation and even when we're not mentally having a conversation with ourselves but we're putting something out there writing, art you know that's how design happens you put something out here oh my god no no no no the wrong color of paint and it would be lovely if we could elaborate elaborate on these scaffolds that help us think and externalize and converse if we had more variety and more memory of them I'll settle for just awareness that that's how it works but yes there are many many many ways and all of those disciplines they have ways of doing it that's true Bo, Mark, any thoughts on this? we've gone over the hour so I figure we should wrap the call pretty soon but does this spark anything for you guys? well I think this notion of ourselves being anticipatory systems so it was like that whole question of how do I know what I'm going to say before I say it and how do I know that I didn't quite say this right I didn't quite so I have some tacit model in some vague sense of what I want to say and then I go for it and so in terms of bots I think what we want is similar kind of anticipatory you're using most of context what context am I in, what is important for me today and therefore what are the important bits and pieces for someone go ahead I was just going to say yes, yes and and I think I'm getting kind of annoyed with all the attention that gets paid to emotion and how much that has to do with everything I mean certainly we have emotions and we have emotion and that's relevant but what you're just replying to is even more important it's like I don't anticipate what a chatbot is going to say and it's not just because I don't know the answer to the question that I'm asking I just have no model of how it's going to get there isn't part of a chatbot's design to emulate human discourse and therefore it's going to greet you first and then it's going to repeat what you said last and then isn't there a predictable rhythm to that isn't that part of the design from the earliest chatbots some of them because they're trying to emulate the sort of the model that they're trying to emulate is not how it actually works as well there's a discharge between what they think is happening and what's actually happening because we try to make it all neat and clean things aren't quite that clean I remember going out and trying to fix the fence out here and I had to have two vise grips and a wrench and everything else and I was in tears because I couldn't make it work and so I went back to you know back to Brian and I said Brian I just can't do this and he came out he had the same thing the vise grips fell off you know he couldn't get the wrench to stick in this position that he wanted it to stick in and he just kept going until he got it to work and I said oh I see yeah yes he's good no it's not good I mean look my books are all organized you know by color you could be organized by color it looks really people do it yeah there was a bookstore in San Francisco that used to organize their books by color it was really pretty it is hard to find unless you know what color you're looking for but a lot of people do know the color of the title that they're looking for yes I know most of the colors of the books tell me a book I'll tell you what color it is kind of funny isn't it the alternate index method mental energy except that I think it's automatic you're taking a snapshot of the context exactly any closing thoughts on anybody from anybody on what we've covered whether it's Bolsonaro and Brazil about to take Brazil down the tubes or anything else you're cool well thank you very much this has been a completely interesting check-in I really appreciate it Susan thanks for joining us fresh from your talk I think it all worked really well thanks everyone worked out just fine