Perspective Agents in the Autonomous Age with Chris Perry

In this episode we delve into the transformative impact of AI on humanity and society with Chris Perry, Chief Innovation Officer and Chair at Weber Shandwick Futures. His new book, "Perspective Agents," challenges traditional views of news media and information gathering, focusing on the emergence of AI and its potential to reshape our knowledge sources.  He sees perspective as the primary innovation of our times. And he takes us through Taylor Swift as a powerful research case study. 

We discuss AI's role in human creativity, exploring its capacity to redefine expertise and truth.  We speak about breaking echo chambers, using tools like Blackbird.ai and Notebook LM, and chat about how and why AI is reshaping workplaces and businesses. Join us as we navigate the complex landscape of news media, societal shifts, and the future of human identity in a world of AI. 

Chris’ book ‘Perspective Agents’ is available here
Chris’ ‘Perspective Agents’ Substack

Tools mentioned: Blackbird AI, Notebook LM

The Future of You podcast investigates and analyses all the ways emerging technologies are going to affect our identity. Join futurist Tracey Follows as she explores our changing identity in a digital world.

Tracey's book ‘The Future of You: Can Your Identity Survive 21st Century Technology?' available in the UK (https://bit.ly/44ObTha) and US (https://bit.ly/3OlDxgk)

The Future of You was named Best Technology Podcast at the Independent Podcast Awards 2023.

The Future of You podcast homepage https://www.futuremade.group/the-future-of-you

Find Tracey at https://www.futuremade.group/abouttracey

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:19

Welcome to the Future View, where we explore the profound implications of technology on our identities and humanity. I'm your host, as ever, Tracy Follows, and I'm thrilled to have with me today Chris Perry. Now Chris is a leading voice at the intersection of media, business and society. For the past few years, he's been working on a groundbreaking book that delves into the big questions surrounding AI. Not so much the efficiency gains and productivity boosts, but the deeper implications for what it means to be human in this rapidly evolving technological landscape. As Chief Innovation Officer and Chair of Weber Shandwick Futures, Chris has been helping Fortune 100 companies and major nonprofits navigate the uncharted waters of AI. He's found that many organizations are still grappling with the basics, trying to understand how to harness the powers of these new technologies rather than truly exploring the human benefits and creative potential. But Chris is on a mission to change all that. He believes we're at a pivotal moment where AI is poised to fundamentally reshape not just our work, but the very fabric of our society. At the heart of his concept is perspective agents, a source that historically would have taken human form, but now is really in the form of AI-powered software that can help us to see the world in new and unexpected ways, drawing on diverse sources to provide a more holistic understanding of the complex issues around us. It's a fascinating idea, one that has implications for what we have come to think of as traditional notions of expertise and truth telling. And there's more to be said about that today and also in the book Perspective Agents. And of course, all the details for getting that will be in the show notes. So join me as we dive deep into the future of society, humanity, identity, and everything else in a world of perspective agents.

SPEAKER_01 2:21

I love that the conversations that we have in private, we might be taking at least some of what we talk about public.

SPEAKER_00 2:34

So, Chris, why don't you give a little bit of an introduction to yourself, about where you are right now, what you're doing, and tell us a little bit about perspective agents.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Yeah, sure. So right now I'm in uh Sao Paulo, Brazil. I'm here uh this week talking about AI, the intersection of AI in business and society. A number of meetings, a number of presentations, talking a little bit about the book. And that reflects the work that I've been doing for the last couple of years, which is to try to think about a pretty big question, which is, you know, is kind of AI eats the world or eats software, whatever Silicon Valley framing you want to put around it. The big question is what comes out the other side. And it's not just efficiency and productivity, and I guess the the money game or an economics game. I I'm way more curious about what it what it means to be human in this world, personally, you know, collectively, within groups like work, and more broadly, um, what it means for you know society and the structures that keep us together. So that's what I think about. That's really what got me started on the book. The book was about a five-year project, and that coincides with work that I do in my day job, which is leading innovation in what we call futures at Weber Shamwick, which is a media lab and a think tank, and now an accelerator to help companies think about the implications of AI in a I guess a business and a reputation context.

SPEAKER_00 4:04

And typically, what kind of level of knowledge do your clients have about AI? What would be their framing? How do they think about it? And are indeed they using it in their everyday roles?

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, it's a hard question to answer because I tend to work with column Fortune 100, you know, type firms as well as you know, major nonprofits. If we think about, again, the essence of your question, when you say AI, AI has been around for a super long time. So when we meet with, for example, clients in the financial services field or healthcare, you know, they've been running their businesses and running RD and running different parts of their organizations with the support of AI for a long time. I think the kind of the aha moment um, really a couple of years ago, is this you know generative AI thing. And when once you start getting into something that is kind of working in quotes behind the scenes through algorithms that help, you know, make sense of things, help to explore, help to do research, help to deliver content, you know, to the right person at the right time, so to speak, it takes on a very different nature when these things start to take on a human essence. So one of the things that again I've been thinking about that we could get into in the discussion is I think we passed the Turing test, you know, for believability in computers resembling, again, human equivalents. I'm curious about you know the Turing test for judgment. Because you can replicate, you know, people you know all day, but there's a lot of judgment that I've seen not really being thought through, and that comes back to your question. Where are companies right now? I think they're still very, very early in the generative AI game, and I'm not sure they're asking the right questions as they're embarking on the journey. More about technology and technology procurement, not about what does this technology mean to the organization and what are the frankly the human benefits that this is going to deliver, not just the economic benefits.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Yeah, I think this speaks in part to the uh the question everybody's trying to answer, which is is AI hype or is this reality? Is this going to be the new reality? And obviously, AI, in whatever way you frame it at the moment, obviously, particularly generative AI, there's a little bit of doomerism around, um negativity, um, companies sort of saying, well, we can't really see, I mean, even the economic benefits, we can't even see any of the benefits at the minute, because it's been five minutes. Um, you know, this idea of having a longer term perspective and thinking about, you know, what it substitutes, what it doesn't, what it retrieves, all these sorts of things. I don't think there are many people thinking about that in a profound way. It's very much a sort of productivity and sort of performance way, because we're used to seeing sort of digital as performance rather than, you know, necessarily brand building from scratch anyway. And certainly sort of in human flourishing, the sort of the internet and everything that's happening digitally and with AI seems to be in opposition in most conversations to everything that's going on, which is around, you know, how do we retrieve human flourishing and prosperity and the pursuit of happiness? So you in your book, I think, try to think about and put forward theories about treating those two together. Is that right? Is that fair?

SPEAKER_01 7:26

So let's maybe break it break it down a bit more. Let's be honest. Um, writing about AI and thinking about AI, I think the last thing you want to do is put your thinking into a form factor that's a book.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

So quaint.

SPEAKER_01 7:39

Well, it's quaint, and um and it's not easy to update. So I've done some experimenting around the book, creating agents, playing around with notebook LM, creating podcasts like the Great Podcast you published a couple weeks ago. But the thinking has evolved a bit just based on kind of where the zeitgeist has been around AI discussions over the last year and time that I've spent with clients. You can think about the psychology around AI maybe through two polls. On one poll, it's the efficiency thing. And the word that I tend to talk to clients about is reduction. How can we make work faster? How can we make work cheaper? How can we create variations that are way more cost effective than if we had to do it without AI? So one poll is reduction. The other poll is destruction. And destruction is at this point maybe a little bit more theoretical in that there's going to be job loss, there could be meaning loss, there could be clearly some you know impacts on, you know, call it the national security front. These things tend to have an existential vibe, and I think it's good that we're asking the hard questions around AI that frankly we weren't asking at the onset of social media now, what, roughly, you know, 10, 15 years ago. But in the middle is where I'm pretty excited, and there's a lot of opportunity, which is construction. Right? So there's clearly a lot of problems that have been perpetuated by technology and more, you know, for some time now. The question is, can AI and can generative AI give us the ability to create new things that kind of sit in between, well, yeah, we can do stuff more efficiently, and maybe these things could, you know, take us into a dark place. But again, around any major innovation moment or renaissance moment like we're having right now, there is enormous potential for creativity. So you could think about close to the work that we do, what should media look like with AI? What should influential networks look like? What is cultural resiliency look like? How do we think about things that have never been thought before that create completely new businesses using again the power of these things and the understanding and the judgment that comes with actually being in the game with these things? And again, I just want to again come back to the question that kind of triggered this, which is where are clients? And I would say that our clients are a little lost, and I'm not sure they even know some of the starter questions to ask because of the narratives out there that tend to go to you know functionality or kind of existential dread. We're not getting to where it's interesting, which is in the creation, you know, part of the business, or at least what I kind of get into.

SPEAKER_00 10:23

I completely agree with that. I think I've been saying for a while it's not about productivity, it's about creativity. But of course, then not everybody wants to be creative or can think creatively, and they do need a little bit of you know a start on that because people need frameworks to be creative within. So one of the things the book does really well. In fact, before we get onto that, give us the definition. What is a perspective agent?

SPEAKER_01 10:45

A perspective agent is a source that helps you see the world in ways you couldn't otherwise. And so there's a bit of a you know revisionist view. You know, what is a historical perspective agent? I mean, Tracy, it's people like you. I guess people like me, journalists, authors, research teams, doctors, politicians. It's historically been a human form, and we've historically done a lot of the hard work to try to make sense of things, to help people either learn new things or think about buying new things or making the right decisions about things. And increasingly, I think that responsibility is going to be balanced by software. You know, AIs that can help us see things, explore things, figure things out, solve things. And so the notion of what's a perspective agent kind of fits into some of the bigger questions around kind of this human machine dance that we're going to be in the middle of for the foreseeable future.

SPEAKER_00 11:46

It's interesting that idea of exploration and explorers, because I agree with you. I think of perspective agents, as you say, explorers, but are we getting into a world partly because people think of AI as productivity, not creativity, that they're treating AI as sort of expertise or expert rather than explorative. There's so many people I know suggest that actually the reason they would want to use any kind of AI is because they want the answer, they want the right answer, they want the objective answer, they want the and this is where a lot of this negativity around hallucinations with AI comes in as well, or why can't it get this right? And how dare it sort of make up something? Well, humans make things up, it's imperfect information and it's all and it's called culture and trends and interesting stuff like that. So are we in a shift from explorer to expert, or is this what you're trying to pull us back from and sort of try to get us to reframe and and think more, I don't know, abundantly and creatively about what perspective agents are in an automation world?

SPEAKER_01 12:45

Yeah, it's uh it's a great question. And again, you know, words matter. And again, coming up with a new term or phrase like perspective agents is fraught, in part because it's new, and you know, without a conversation like this, again, there's a lot of meaning that's lost. This is not about search. The whole first third of the book is how much trouble we get into when we don't have the right perspective, when we use outdated frameworks, if we use outdated models, if we use outdated tools, and we use teams to guide decisions, in some cases in very high-stakes situations, if we're out of sync with the reality, bad things happen. So, again, in the book, I talk about things like COVID. Like, did we get clear direction on COVID? Did we get clear direction on the financial crises that we go through? Do we have a sense of what's going on in the more, I guess, current view with elections and polls and using again, in quotes, traditional media to try to make sense of what's going on? The world's moved on, right? But I think a lot of leadership frameworks and leadership orientation is not. So now coming to your question, if we use these capabilities to enhance our perspective, that requires lots of different sources that either get plugged into our brains or get plugged into an agent, a piece of software, to maybe get a sense of how to square up diverse points of view around difficult topics. It's not saying who's going to win the election and a Google-like object gives us the definitive answer. We have to use different inputs and different frameworks to gauge what, again, the likelihood of an outcome is going to be. And again, we are dealing with such enormous and complex issues today that getting an answer coming out the other side is probably not the right way of thinking about where AI can help us out.

SPEAKER_00 14:53

I think that's what lots of people are hoping for, though. Or it's not lots of some people. I mean, just in terms of you say about language, just in terms of the language they use around it, you know, give me the objective answer as if this is going to be the route. Obviously, you're doing you're talking about it in a completely different way.

SPEAKER_01 15:11

Yeah, but but again, going back to the comment on, you know, in between reduction and destruction, there's creation. Maybe there will be completely new form factors that can at least help do a lot of that perspective gathering and filtering for us. And probably the most maybe relevant example of that right now is perplexity. It's a it's a completely different way of exploring stuff that we're trying to figure out. It resembles Google in its UX, but it doesn't resemble Google in how you use it. So what's interesting about perplexity and models like it is you don't necessarily have to know the question that you're trying to ask. It can help interpret what you're trying to get at, not only through what it how it responds, but also additional prompts that it puts in front of you to go deeper into something. My sense is there will be even more pure play forms of column perspective-based media, but they haven't really been built yet. And I think there's some pretty interesting opportunity to explore something like that in a whole portfolio of tools that can help us make sense of what's happening and ideally find some coherence on issues that if you're in your echo chambers, you're never gonna get that broader perspective that you're gonna need to protect yourself, your families, people you care about, because some of this filter bubbling stuff I think is gonna have some pretty, pretty dark consequences before we get to better ways of seeing the world.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

It's interesting because I often sort of ask a question or probe something of um ChatGPT, and then I get Claude to rewrite it, given I tell Claude that this is what open AI have produced, and I'm sure you can do better. It's an adversarial thing, isn't it? And then you can go to perplexity and kind of using all the different sources if you know how to prompt them in different ways, and I'm I'm no expert, I'm just experimenting the same as a lot of other people. I think you do get some really great perspectives, if you like. So it's knowing how to use the suite of tools that are emerging and not just trying to look for the answer. But you mentioned about the information landscape. Can we talk a little bit about that? You've just noted that it's pretty dark. Where do you think we are in terms of there being a breakdown in consensus official narratives and now an emergent sort of networked tribal resonance, rather, consensus of information and truth-telling or truthiness, if you like? What's your perspective on where we are and will we come through the other side? And if we do, well, how how do we get there?

SPEAKER_01 17:55

Yeah, wow, it's that so this is a big question. I I again the first thing that came to mind is some of the influences behind the book. Clearly, the way Marshall McLuhan thought about again media ecology, you know, comes to mind. Obviously, Norbert Wiener with the whole notion of cybernetics, we've been in a very linear, I would say, stage in information processing for the last century. A lot of the you know, media figures that still are in positions of power and responsibility, they still in many ways rely on a linear progression of agenda, editorial calendar, reporting, pump it out, and then kind of have the social on the edges.

SPEAKER_00 18:41

I think we rather disparagingly call it boom of truth, don't we?

SPEAKER_01 18:44

Yeah, so again, I that's not how the world works. Here's though the the hard truth, and again, I I cover this in the book. What we're going through right now, it has new uh dimensions to it, but it's following historical cycles. Every time there is a major technological breakthrough, the social effects are very significant. Strangely, you just hear echoes or see echoes when you look at you know post-history after the printing press, you know, post-industrialization. When big paradigm-changing technologies drop, it tends to lead to a lot of discord, a lot of soul searching, a lot of breakdown in identity, and again, invoking again, you know, Marshall McLuhan, right? When identities challenge, people fight. And so we're in the middle, and have been in the middle of an information war for some time. I think we're starting to see the extremes of that. And so I do think that breakdown equals conflict, and then the other side of conflict will resort, and we will have new creative capabilities and creative human flourishing, and life will go on, but we're going through a fairly rough stretch where a lot doesn't make sense.

SPEAKER_00 20:07

Do you think that's just in the West, Chris? Or do you think it's globally?

SPEAKER_01 20:11

Yeah, so it that so that's a great question. So a friend of mine, again, who I talk about in the book, uh, his name is Mark Stallman. He runs a group called the Center for the Study of Digital Life. He tends to think about this, and again, he's someone in his group or a group of people that are very well read in terms of philosophy, history, with a very global view. And again, the time that I've spent with the center and with the teams in the center suggests that the narrative that we're consumed by is a Western narrative, and kind of the Western construct is breaking down. In the East, again, they have a different view than we do in the West. They are retrieving the classics, classic teachings, ancient history to make sure that, and I'm really talking about China right now, but we have to remember where we came from. And we have to respect that people that have gone through maybe similar challenges have thought deeply about the same human and social challenges that we're going through right now. I think us in the West, we're just so consumed and so mediated by digital technologies that maybe we've lost sight of some of the classics that really set the foundations for, again, Western civilization. Where their theory becomes very interesting is in between the East and the West, there's digital. So a digital ideology or philosophy is not the same as Eastern philosophy or Western philosophy, and digital proposes a threat to both without understanding again the contours of what digital looks like today, what digital might look like in the future and what it means for maintaining a coherent society. And again, a territory, just to be explicit about that, is imagine let's say back the napkin five years out, the metaverse, despite again, you know, current convention, it's flourishing. That virtual worlds are a place that people emigrate to, not in a dissimilar way to how we went to new countries to find a better life. Who governs that? Is it corporations? Is there a manifest destiny amongst you know column states? Who sets the rules? Who creates the economic models? Like there's a whole new world being built right now that very few of us have visibility into, that has very significant geopolitical implications to them. And that's just another again dimension I touch on in the book that again is just about making sure that our eyes are wide open to what's happening today and what's happening going forward. So we're not surprised, we're better prepared and ideally we shape these worlds in a way that benefit us versus harm us.

SPEAKER_00 23:11

Yeah it's very interesting because another alternative option around that could be completely self-sovereign territories. I mean people are trying it with seasteading and things like that. Libertarian sort of philosophy is obviously driving that. I mean how successful they are at scale goodness only knows, perhaps they're not even possible. But yeah, that's another another possible model and this is it. I think people are experimenting with this. It's like whenever I go and talk to companies or boards or whatever about DAOs, decentralized autonomous organisations, I think they're again just fascinating experiments in governance because they're just so different to where we've been sort of particularly post-Second World War, but let's say the postwar Western societies where it's very hierarchical organised command and control media all these sorts of things and like people like yeah but who's in charge? But who's in charge as well depends on the governance tokens and how those are distributed and how much engagement oh well there aren't any case studies on it are there so I don't think we need to spend any time on that. I think we do need to spend time on it because it's an interesting experiment. We spent a bit more time observing it and noticing what we're noticing then I'm sure it could actually be very very insightful about what possibilities there are to come. But again we're in that area where unless you've created this innovation and we've got some sort of use case slash best practice, you know all these phrases don't really seem to me to be that that applicable and relevant as we go forward but they are the lexicon and is the grammar of our culture that people are kind of stuck in now organizationally.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

Yeah so uh you're kind of hitting on a point that I think is super important to maybe dig into you know a bit more. So I I've been at the intersection of call it uh technology uh communications and and and call it public understanding for 30 years you know given where I've worked and some of the stuff that I've done. Historically we you know we've called that digital and so the innovations that you know we thought about and ultimately built some pretty big businesses around were things like social intelligence. You should really understand again how people are interacting through social media to understand where opinion is, where opportunities and risks are then we built a massive social media business just helping companies understand how do you engage in social media you know pre-ad-driven algorithms. So this was early this was like 2013 2015 when we got into that and without belaboring the story we've kind of scaffolded on call them new communications interfaces. All we've been doing though is essentially putting layers on top of what is essentially old systems or call them industrial systems and governance models that virtually all the Fortune 500 companies and governments of all kinds still run on. So to me we could talk all day about AI but I wrote the book because I think the most important innovation we should be focusing on right now is perspective because if we can't see what's happening it doesn't matter how genius the tools are or how powerful the models are if we don't know how to use them then the value coming from them will flop. The second if you then click down one more we have to change organizing structures to reflect the way the world works today versus the way companies and organizations work today. So while again you know Fortune 100 or global 500 companies will never be a decentralized crypto run organization they can use again inspiration from people thinking about organizations in completely different ways to at least move with more intention into a place where the relatability you know better matches the reality and right now again like there are still you know some companies that still don't know how to communicate effectively through social media. And that's a tw that's a 20 year two decade situation and they still think that this is about information transmission using traditional forms not interacting and engagement and almost using again this cybernetic orientation to continually improve and be better at serving a public need or serving up public goods. So the whole organizational element of this is pretty fascinating and um I think AI is going to apply extreme pressure on these industrial models just because there will be too much competition, too much velocity, too many surprises for boards to assume that it's business as usual and we'll continue to run things the way we always have.

SPEAKER_00 28:11

Yeah because that's going to be happening at a fascinating time in in which Gen A are going to be sort of onboarding into the workplace. And again there's a lot of disrespect paid towards generational research but I'm a big fan of it I think if you do it properly and you understand the actual outputs of it it's incredibly valuable. But this generation would be completely peer-to-peer so then they're going to enter a workforce which is just a complete anathemat or they won't enter that workforce and they'll just create their own working communities or new types of roles or something.

SPEAKER_01 28:42

Well it's it's already it's already happening right and again I I'm not saying that this is a good thing but the whole creator economy is based outside the confines of institutional order right and just one other thing that I think is is kind of interesting you know as you bring up you know jet generational differences I see it inside of the companies that we consult with today. We're talking about generative AI and I I would say if there is a single term I would use to describe generative AI in the workplace it's cautious extreme extremely cautious if we want to use if we want to use you know two words but there's an interesting I think oversight in that in you you could apply this to uh you know universities as well I'm sorry but bands aren't going to work AI plagiarism detection is not going to work like the these institutional controls over what's essentially the you know current version of the internet is is nuts. It's in our phones it's in our software it's in our search it's everywhere and we're saying because there's this idea of a chat GPT that's going to plagiarize things for us that that that that's what governs our our thinking. So there's a phenomenon I don't know if you've heard of this it's what B Y O AI bring your own AI to work fortune ran a poll I forget who uh you know who actually did the poll that there's upwards of 70% of employees said that they use generative AI at work without approved systems without governance models without guidelines and frankly without development so the point that you made about well you've got a certain generation of leaders that are running things in a certain way an employee populace that's just saying fuck it I'm just going to do it anyway like think about the missed opportunities and think about risk with that. And that's just one tiny tiny example of a you know a complete incoherence in some cases in the workforce around who I want to work with because they understand me, they share my values and this is a place where I want to be because I feel like I can grow and prosper. I think there needs to be more study into that to really understand you know at a deeper level what's really happening and how you can meet in the middle.

SPEAKER_00 31:20

I was just thinking I was just thinking the same let's do that let's do that project. Let's do that really you've got a brilliant very very early in the book I didn't know about this guy Donald D. Hoffman this is just brilliant this bit so Hoffman used computer speech to explain his ideas. He introduced a groundbreaking idea the interface theory of perception his papers argue that perceptions direct behaviour towards survival and reproduction not truth I mean maybe you can um just expand on that I mean it's brilliantly explained in the book but it made me think of again this is um between maybe a post war sort of organizational way of thinking which is like a correspondence theory of truth like this is the truth because I can point to something that happened in the real world that it corresponds to even though actually the only way you can see that in the real world is through media which we don't so it's still a perspective agent and towards a coherent theory of truth and as we were just talking about these new emergent generations who will enter the workforce in a sort of peer-to-peer or a kind of we don't do it like that mentality. You know, they'll have a sort of consensus model of truth very much like he sort of espousing can you talk to us a little bit about that and also around some of the tools and and companies or organizations or platforms that you might be using to navigate through where we are now with this like Blackbird that you and I've uh had a chat about before yeah this this is like a series of podcast question that you just pose but let's dig into a bit so again let's use you know generations or generational differences as a way of kind of coming at what Hoffman's talking about.

SPEAKER_01 33:04

When there is control, when there's institutional frameworks when there's limits to information I can tell you the truth if I'm in a position of responsibility. I'm going to tell you what the truth is and there's not a ton of corroboration and again if you look at the Gallup polls you know going back to the you know 70s we believed it like we believed in our public officials we believed in the media we believed in corporations we believed in our teachers we believed in our doctors. If you look at where the Gallup poll was then and where it is now it's I think pretty much all of them except for the military and I'd have to refresh my browser to see where the polls are today. With the exception of the military they're all at all time lows. So this idea of institutions being truth tellers I I think if you just look at the downward progress we probably need to spend less time on debating like what media outlet's right or what expert is right because the name of the game now is corroboration. So you aren't going to tell me the truth I'm gonna corroborate the truth based on the people who I trust the networks that I'm a part of and the tools at my disposal to get to what I want to know. And it could be as simple as what restaurant should I go to you know this weekend. If I trust in New York or say Chicago Chicago magazine or Grub Street like that's a good start but I'm not gonna just say oh well I'm gonna go there because you know my lifestyle magazine of choice rated them high. I'm gonna talk to my friends I'm gonna dig around and I'm gonna make a choice based on again what I'm most comfortable with. So the best place to you get let's say I don't know name your dish is going to come from me in my tribe it's not going to come from someone telling me some one individual telling me so you then take that all the way through to COVID right who the hell did we believe during COVID? Well it turns out many of us just to get like a baseline sense of what was going on used a dashboard from Johns Hopkins that aggregated data to help us make sense of what's going on, how prolific the spread was in certain communities. We used a data aggregation tool as a complement to what health officials and public officials were telling us and ultimately you got a pretty wacky mix of a a bundle if you will of ways of thinking about COVID and lockdowns and should you send your kid to school and wear a mask and all that. That brings us to the Hoffman theory right if we are unbundled from an institutional information order we do have certain communities that we're a part of to try to make sense of what's going on the best ideas within those communities are going to win and it's based on according to Hoffman evolution it's not based on logic it's based on emotion. Right? And that might be a good thing except for you've got grifters and power players and profiteers that know how to game communities and unfortunately a lot of the best ideas are total bullshit. And so the question is are there other tools and other networks to be created to balance out the filtering and some of the performative and incentive models in social media in media today with not only again new technology but different models around that that have the right incentives behind it. Because at the end of the day we're gonna choose what we believe in not necessarily choose the truth and we could talk about religion we could talk about politics we could talk about certain social movements. If you really want to get into the facts some of the facts are very very hard to justify we're gonna follow what we believe in and my sense is Hoffman was onto something with his interface theory of perception. I think it's a super interesting theory I'm surprised more people don't talk about it because it's it's essentially what cultures are running on right now.

SPEAKER_00 37:27

Yeah I think it was fascinating explanation like of the underpinning shift now what about some of these tools then?

SPEAKER_01 37:36

Yeah so so I don't think there's any one tool and I think it's important to clarify that because I think there is a certain belief going back to your question about like where are companies and leaders generally speaking on AI I think there's this view that there's a silver bullet mentality that one thing is going to be the call it the go-to source like BBC verify you know yeah no again I I would I would look at Google as probably the um you know the metaphor here that Google became again kind of the front door or or or or the you know kind of interface into like all the world's knowledge right I don't know if that's the case when you get into AI because if you start to break apart like how the AIs work, they're clearly based on a very powerful base call them the LLMs there's clearly a bunch of agent tools that can help us pinpoint areas where we could be smarter or more expansive in our explorations or more creative that borrow and and pull from the data from the LLMs. And then the top layer which hasn't really come yet is kind of what happens when you start combining these different agents into maybe new verticals of knowledge. So I don't think they're necessarily following it but I think Harvey is a pretty fascinating example. I don't know if you're familiar with Harvey it's essentially a you know call it a a vertical AI for law in the legal profession. And so I think you're gonna start to see very different instances of you've got call them the big one at the bottom or big ones because to date there's not really any MOTS with those. You've got all these agents in the middle so again the way I try to describe your clients is if on a mobile phone there was an app for that there will be agents for everything. That's not sustainable because like we don't we don't do well with abundant choice. So my sense is that they're gonna roll up into maybe some uh verticals and then maybe it then comes around and there's some AGI thing that ultimately just go to one place and ask it anything it'll solve all your problems but I think that's still fairly speculative. So when we talk about tools it's really hard to say well this one tool is awesome or that one tool is awesome but I'll let's talk about a couple awesome tools right so if we want to move from understanding how information travels in what public intelligence looks like historically we would have looked at opinion polls we would have looked at media reports we would have done focus groups we would have done ethnographies we would be doing a whole lot of things that were very human trying to understand how a message created versus a message received worked right the world doesn't work that way we're all a part of one big global network of humans and technologies and it's basically a huge hive mind. So how do you see what's going on in the hive? Blackbird is one of these AI companies that doesn't look at intelligence through the lens of PowerPoints and paper reports. You look at what's happening through network crafts. And there's a particular focus on narratives because again we're influenced by stories way more than data or academic stuff or these kinds of things so following the stories is a really good proxy for understanding what's going on stories today are in conflict. So when we look at network maps whether it's from Blackbird or other intelligence providers in almost every case there's a for and against if I say blue you say red if I say white you say black like and it's on every issue. So understanding not only territories that are important to a decision to your brand to a policy understanding how people are framing stories around that and competing using again the Hoffman model regardless if it's true or not what ideas have gained traction in these networks how big and expansive are these networks talking about certain stories and then where's the crossover? Because once things start to cross over that's when social change for good or bad starts to happen and Blackbird gives you a lens into that and I think that's the way that we have to see we have to see the world through networks we cannot see the world through papers and expert models and some of the things that literally trillions of dollars of economic value goes into today we have to redeploy that in more tools that help us see the world for what it is not what we think it is. And it's all based on data it's not based on subjective opinion and I think using subjective opinion is where we get into a lot of trouble in in terms of making decisions. The other one that we should talk about because I know you're a fan is notebook LM oh yeah so you're talking about two completely different um I would say territories Blackbird is more of a it's a B2B service but you can still get some pretty interesting intelligence not through network graphs but through interaction with an AI by using notebook LM in clever ways. So for example let's say I'm an undecided voter in the United States and the election is next week I am not an undecided voter but believe it or not you could if you had the agency to do it you could pull 50 different articles today on the trending topics coming out of the polityching over the weekend throw them into notebook LM Notebook LM will will give you a briefing book that is a synthesis of all the varied you know poll polarized and ideological coverage you can get a QA you can get a fact sheet you can create a podcast Most importantly, you can start to ask the information questions like strip all opinion and all bullshit out of this coverage and tell me how both parties are coming at issues that matter to me, like abortion or racial equality, and just tell me the facts that are coming through this. Right there, you've got a perspective agent, if you will, that also is real time. So this idea that, oh, well, you can't trust, you know, ChatGPT or Gemini or name your LLM because they have a certain cutoff date that's six months ago. In the case of Notebook LM, you can augment that by just plowing information into this and then interacting with this, not just being a passive receiver of information. So those are just a couple, like a couple of many things. We have a portfolio model, but ultimately, I think, again, coming back to this Turing test comment I made earlier, none of this shit matters unless it enhances our judgment. And right now, the media in information world, if anything, is destroying judgment with all kinds of psychological effects to this. Is there a way of not just relying on AIs, but relying on how AIs and, you know, I would say pioneering thinkers are creating maybe more signal using these things versus more noise? And again, there's a lot of noise out there and there's a lot of crap being, you know, pushed into the public square that's the internet. But I think there are ways of finding signal through some new technologies that are coming out.

SPEAKER_00 45:45

Yeah, that's fascinating. Fascinating way to explain all that. I was going to ask you actually before you started talking about notebook when you were talking about the output from Blackbird, what happens when you take that to a client? Because it's not an easy answer, is it? Well, it's not an answer. Again, it's like sense-making. And you've got the different networks and there's polar opposite opinions, and then as you say, there's a bit of a crossover. So what are they actually looking for? What do they do with it if they're smart?

SPEAKER_01 46:13

So again, that this gets back to perspective being the most important innovation. So when we talk to our clients, our clients again have kind of a linear mode of thinking about a problem. What's the problem? What's the remedy? What's the message? What's the strategy? What's the creative? What's the output go? This process misses a huge critical territory, which is can you sense what's happening before you strategize? Because if you move from issue to strategy, you're relying on instinct, you're relying on precedent, you're relying on old frameworks, you're relying on da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da. And so who is it that was talking in our in our human effect group the other night about military strategy in the OODA loop? And you have to observe and orient before you act, and it's a massive gap in a lot of public strategy work that uh that I see done inside of corporations. And now, again, the stakes are so high that if you miscalculate where the marketplace is, it's a material to earnings, it's material to businesses, it's material to employees, it's like the materiality around a lack of perspective is now showing up on balance sheets, which is a really, really big deal. So this isn't just about a new Blackbird or a new notebook LM or a new tool. It has to be put into a model that reflects the problems that have to be solved. And again, as I wrote about in the first two chapters of the book, the ability to effectively observe the marketplace and be better at what you do is it's in a way, it's becoming a crisis.

SPEAKER_00 48:10

Well, you talk at the end of the book about agents of well-being, not having them or not being cognizant of well-being, not knowing how to nurture it, quite the environment for human well-being, all of that, that is a disaster. That is existential. And obviously, you talk about the sort of Epicureans, about the importance of companionship, autonomy, or sense of freedom, and maybe some sort of meaning or direction in life. How do we instill it in recipients of perspective agents so that they can absorb or utilise perspective agents on the right ones in the right way? How do we do that with clients? But actually, how do we do it in society? How do we think about doing that with young people who have got a very different, as we've just discussed earlier, a different value system? Can we re-engage them with some of the things that are important sort of classically going back, back in life rather than just in the future?

SPEAKER_01 49:02

Study Taylor Swift.

SPEAKER_00 49:04

She's a cult.

SPEAKER_01 49:05

No, no, no. No, Tracy, this is super important. Study Taylor Swift. Don't study her lyrics, don't study her storytelling, don't study her grievances, don't study her past relationships. Why why is it that you can go, and I went to one of her shows. It's the Super Bowl every day for her fans. Everywhere she goes, it's a Super Bowl. It's the biggest day of, in some cases, their lives. The energy in that place is unlike anything I've ever seen anywhere else, including a World Cup final and some of the biggest sporting events. The energy in this place is different because it's positive, it's joyous, it is unapologetic, and there is a connection there with again the bands. And we're talking like the band trading, like there were a bunch of kids that were probably five or under at the show, grandmothers there. Like, what's going on there? And I don't give a shit if you're a fan or not, or if you're buying into kind of the right-leaning orientation that she's a poor embodiment of what a woman should be, and all and we've studied this. Just look at the worlds that she's built and her team is built, and it's based on obviously genius art, but social bonding, if you really study her work deeply, that's what it's all about. And it permeates into everything that she and her team does. So I'm not saying everyone should be a Swift fan, although it seems like most people are. I'm just reacting to your question that I could say, well, you know, study uh, you know, name that great brand or study this. No, study the biggest story over the last couple of years, and it's the Eras tour. And it's it's fucking nuts. It's nuts.

SPEAKER_00 51:05

How gendered is that though?

SPEAKER_01 51:07

So I you wouldn't believe I would say it was probably 70, 30 female, male, but the guys in the house were just as excited and happy to be there. So, and again, there's a whole you know dad's phenomenon around around this. And um it was one of the best bonding moments I ever had with my daughter. She invited me, she got two tickets and said, Dad, you want to go to Dublin with me? I said, Are you kidding me? Of course I will. We had a blast. So the the the connections aren't just you know fan-to-artest, it's fan-to-fan, it's within families. It's kind of the antithesis of the political bullshit. Where in a lot of households, in a lot of markets around the world, politics has become conflict. People are fighting, people are losing relationships with parents, with siblings, with friends. This flips it on its head. This is a bonding agent, this isn't a destructive element. And again, that's why, again, like to me, one of the things you got to look at to answer your question is that, and I'm sure there are other examples to look at. We study all kinds of different phenomena, and um, one that we studied was anything that has uh emotional connection to it is territory for culture wars. Anything. So it makes sense that one of the most emotive figures is Taylor Swift and the Travis Kelsey thing and the affiliation with the NFL, and does she embody you know, you know, proper women's values? Is she a government psyop? We studied this Taylor Swift undercurrent, again, using Blackbird data, looking at it over time. Tracy, it's orchestrated. You can see the entire orchestration from coming out on Instagram and saying, get out to vote in a couple state elections through to Taylor Swift as a SIOP that dropped on Fox and had not just Wright, but everyone like erupting into response. 20% of Americans think that she is a government agent, and that was before she endorsed Harris. And remember, she endorsed Harris because of some deep fake you know, drops and Trump, you know, pushing it. And so this stuff is really, really complex. And again, coming back to perspective, I I again I I'm looking at this not only through like here's the um kind of the bonding agent that's Taylor Swift, but also like what does the culture war look like around Taylor Swift? And they're both orchestrated. The bonding agent just didn't happen by happenstance, it happened through genius, marketing, public engagement, feedback loops on what on what resonates with her with her um followers, reaching out with high-touch moments that are Instagrammable and all these things. It's orchestrated. But it's orchestrated based on my personal experience with very, very good outcomes. The orchestration and the undercurrent, the culture warring, I'm not sure what that gets you that's positive, other than maybe less attention on an endorsement. And maybe again a threat to others that may come out that were going to come after you too. So the key thing is realize if you want to have a clear view on things, that there's very little in the world these days that doesn't have an orchestrative element to it. Whether it's the algorithms, people gaming the algorithms, or people gaming other people, because it's so easy to do it when you have emotionally charged anything in the world, whether it's a pop star or you know, a candidate that you hate or or or love.

SPEAKER_00 55:08

I think people are finding that, the people that understand that to some degree are finding it quite demoralizing. Like it does have an emotional effect on you of I mean in the extreme, you can't believe in anything, to sort of, well, I have to have several different views and talking points dependent on which cohort I might be communicating to. It's a much more complex communication space, obviously, but I think there is something that's quite even though that is the reality, to feel that you're being propagandized to or it's being orchestrated to that degree, it can feel on the on its worst days, it can feel a little demoralizing.

SPEAKER_01 55:45

Yeah, yeah, but but I I I think again going um I mean propaganda is not a new thing. I think what's different is um anyone can participate in it now. You're just not on the receiving end, you can be on the the for and against, and people do have that agency, and they're deploying that agency, and if that's a good thing or a bad thing, you probably know more about this than anyone given your study of you know people and identity. And I don't know, I think I think it it's just different, and we have to understand the differences being in a digital paradigm versus being in an industrial paradigm, and we're still super early. It's super early.

SPEAKER_00 56:24

Chris, I could talk to you all day. Um, I've asked you hardly anything I was supposed to ask you, and I've asked you a load of other things that anything I had on my paper, like I'm like, oh no, that'll have to be round two. So just as we close up then, what is the one thing I haven't asked you that I should have asked you?

SPEAKER_01 56:41

I mean, there's just so much ground to cover. I think the one thing, and I'm just gonna say it one more time perspective is the you know primary innovation. It's not a corporate thing, it's a personal thing. You and I uh have been around, you know, for quite some time. I think we've both been pretty successful uh in what we want to do professionally and what we could do going forward. You and I, as again, test cases, we're either gonna flourish or we're or we're going to face a super harsh reality. That the way that we see the world and the way that we um do what we do within the next two years is gonna be it'll be in a completely different form with very different models of thought. And that applies to everybody. And I see a lot of people sitting on the sidelines. You said is uh I I forget the exact way you framed it, but is AI a bubble or is it a fad? It's not a bubble and it's not a fad. It's one of the greatest paradigm-changing agents in human history. The speed at which this is being deployed, the speed it's it's integrating into our lives is extraordinary. I still don't feel we know the psychological effects of AI through algorithms on us. And um, we can't sit on the sidelines. You have to engage in discussions like the discussions we're having, even if it's around the dinner table with you know with your friends and family. You have to use the tools just to understand them. You don't have to use them, you can opt out. It doesn't mean that you're not gonna be affected by them, right? And I think we all have to think about impact in work in a different way because I think the workplace is gonna change radically in the next few years. And so this idea of perspective, it doesn't really fit um column containers that are prioritized in our own lives, let alone in in corporate settings. I've never had someone say, hey, here's an RFP for perspective, right? But my God, is it important? And I wrote the book in part because I'm just I'm I would say glass half full, so excited about what we can build and what we create. And I'm terrified that I think the models and those that use the models are gonna leave a lot of people behind. And if we leave a lot of people behind, then you get into some of the stuff I was hedging on with conflict. People don't sit easily when their livelihoods and their identities and their ways of life are challenged. And I think there's gonna be a lot of challenge unless we move very quickly into builder mode. And I don't just mean build for build sake, but build things that make us better, more connected, more positive, some of the things that we were talking about towards the end of the discussion.

SPEAKER_00 59:38

Yeah, because I think we should have a prepper mindset for AI. You know, what you're gonna put in your toolkit, what's the equivalent of your, you know, your sleeping bag, your your your water, your walk to water. This would be a part of my prepper mindset, my prepper toolkit for the future. Obviously, we've got listeners all over the world, US, UK, prospective agents, where can people get it? Or more of your writing? Because I know you do sort of still write on these topics, obviously, um, in Substack and probably somewhere else. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:08

Yeah, so easiest place is Amazon. And again, whether you like it or not, leave a comment. I just again like the this gets into pretty um important and deep territory. Again, have having more interaction around the stuff would be good. Same goes for the Substack, prospective agents uh on Substack is essentially serialized kind of updates to the book, given again, the stuff moves pretty quickly. So those would be the two places to check stuff out. And you can get in touch with me anytime if you want to jam on stuff. As you know, Tracy, you and I jam on stuff.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:44

We do. I'll put everything in the show notes. Definitely a recommended read and everything else you have to say on this subject. I look forward to seeing you soon. Thanks so much.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:52

Yeah, great chatting.

SPEAKER_00 1:00:59

Thank you for listening to The Future of You hosted by me, Tracy Follows. Be sure to check out the show notes for more info about the topics we covered today. If you enjoyed this episode, please like and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you know someone who would love this episode, please share it with them. For more on the future of identity in a digital world, visit futuremade.group slash the future of you. To explore the future of everything else, head over to futuremade.group. The Future of View podcast is produced by Big Tent Media.