Sex & Business, Artificial Intelligence and Shifting Humanity

Thanks. My pleasure.

Sure. My name is Bobbi, and I'm a multipotentialite, someone who just gets themselves involved in a multitude of projects. I'm tech by day and Imagine Ideation by night, which is a connector, rethinking-human-interactions type of consulting work. I'm a writer. I'm involved in Human Impact Lab. I just do a bunch of things that hopefully move the world forward in a better way.

It sounds a bit cliche, but it's really about impact. What I'm looking to do is things that go a bit beyond just helping people, things that actually have the chance to change paradigms, or change the way that systems operate, or influence major decision making.

That's the ultimate goal, and I work on that incrementally. But the idea is to do things that make the world a better place.

Yes, exactly. I'm just trying to hit it on all fronts.

Sure. During the day I work for a tech company, and their main business is getting more research out of universities and out into the world, where it can have a greater impact. Big technology, not just apps or anything like that.

My business is about how we can connect people better. A lot of people go to events or conferences and leave wanting more. They didn't really get to the people they wanted to get to. A lot of the content at conferences, for the most part, is content you can get anywhere. It's available out there. So people are really going more for the relationships.

And at a lot of these types of events, not everybody's a natural networker. Not everybody knows how to find the right people in the room and build relationships that actually lead to something meaningful afterwards. And second, there are general introductions and connections through people: facilitating those people who need some help, or who just have an offering. How can we connect better with people? That's a big part of the business there.

Then my book, Sex & Business. You might not think that these two words necessarily go together, but they actually really do. The book is my reaction to the #MeToo movement. I'm calling into question how people form identity, the usefulness or not of these identities, and how they impede or impact how we react to certain things, like the #MeToo movement and feminist movements and all these kinds of things.

There's also how people approach sex, not as intercourse, but all of the other benefits that come from sexual energy. They can actually positively impact your business or your career if you can channel these energies: flow triggers, things like that. I think people are trying to cut the whole sex and relationship thing right out of the workplace, which is impossible, because you cannot fight biology. Better to leverage the positive side of things. So there's a lot of discussion about power relations and all that kind of stuff, which I think is quite paradigm shifting.

Because sex is, as Foucault talks about: whoever controls the conversation has the power over the topic. Sex is both taboo and yet talked about in everything: all music, every video, every movie. It's everywhere. So this is a very interesting dichotomy.

And when topics like the #MeToo movement come into play, or anything else that really matters, people tend to take a binary point of view, which I think is the wrong approach to almost everything. There's a concept called gray thinking: you can have conflicting opinions. I can think two opposite opinions about the same thing, and that doesn't mean that I don't stand for something. I would argue that it's nearly impossible to fully have a binary point of view on anything. But I think people grab onto that because it attaches to identity. That's pretty interesting to me.

And then there's also Human Impact Lab. We're in the middle of transitioning what we're going to do with it. It originally started as a climate awareness type of group, but we'd like to transition into doing more meaningful, practical projects. The criterion is that we will basically help businesses or ideas move forward so long as they have some type of positive impact on the world, on humans or what have you. So the scope is pretty broad right now, but we want to take more action on furthering different ideas and concepts. So that's how all of that is manifesting right now.

All of it. We organize events, so we can do the whole turnkey, start-to-finish thing. But we don't just set up a venue, bring food and sell tickets, and that's that. It's a much more involved process.

The events that we like to participate in are ones where you're bringing in a lot of different stakeholders. Usually the content is a bit more meaty, maybe of an academic nature, or just something a little more substantial. We sit down with our partners and work out quite in advance what it is that they want to achieve with the event. So it's really thought through. You come up with the outcomes that you really want to have. How will we achieve those? How are we going to measure that? And then how do you tell this story throughout? Everything needs to be woven in: the catering, the venue, the content. Everything that people are seeing and doing needs to tell the same story.

So this is very much about the experience, and the transformation. The idea is that if people are coming, they're going to be transformed. And I don't mean in a religious way. I mean they've come to learn and experience, and even just by osmosis, by being in the environment, they are absorbing the messaging. They are learning something. That's the idea, from start to finish. But we also consult with people. We help facilitate introductions, host smaller meetings. Sometimes the meetings are small: we're just helping people whiteboard ideas, things like that.

Right now, we cannot meet physically. One might think that this impacts the business, and it does to a certain extent. But we're noticing there's still quite a lot that can be done. I'm actually surprised at how well I am still able to make friends and make connections digitally, get to know people and feel like, wow, that thing that needs to happen face to face is somehow happening virtually. I think that's really interesting. Maybe it has to do with the fact that people are a little less guarded. They're at home, maybe they have their pajamas on, people are seeing their kids, their cats and whatever. Maybe that is allowing the connection to happen despite not being [in the same room].

I'm a huge proponent of face to face. Anybody I can have a meeting with, I don't want to have a phone call. It's the worst. I really want to be in front of someone. I really want to get close. And there's actually neuroscience that scientifically proves that when you and I are sitting beside each other, super engaged and talking, our brains literally start to sync. So of course you miss that virtually.

I feel it when I have a really great connection, meeting someone. And this feeling is what drives me to help people do better networking and have better events. Because to me, this is like magic. Nothing gets my blood pumping and the chemicals flowing better than [that]. So if you can amplify that and maximize and optimize it, then this is what we should be doing.

I have a few opinions about that. The events industry itself will definitely change. It will change because now that everybody's been forced online, there are systems set up. Once people realize, oh, we can run this event or do certain things online, where they probably wouldn't have thought of that before, it's getting embedded. People are getting used to it. People are doing it. They're ironing out some of the kinks. And this will go on through the next year or so, for sure up until there's a vaccine and this is really sorted out. This will go on like this for a while.

Having said that, there will still be in-person events in the future. There are certain events that are a really hard ticket to get, and people fly from all over the world to go to them, so they can get rather costly. So I think some of those bigger events will do a hybrid: they'll have an in-person version [and an online version]. I also think, and hope, that Zoom or other companies are trying to come up with a better product that will facilitate that.

As for massive shifts: I completely think that there will be no massive shift in people. The way events will do this hybrid thing is just because they've now found a new revenue stream, and they've been forced to put it into operation. So why not continue and make money off it later?

But I don't think that there's going to be any major shift in how humanity operates. After two to three years, once the market bounces back and everybody's got back to normal, people will forget about these two, three months hanging out at home, for the most part. This is not enough to effect change. There are some people who are suffering. Frontline workers are seeing things on a daily basis that they can never unsee. But for most people in the Western world: what am I doing? I'm just hanging out at home. I'm not seeing any tragedy. It's pretty hard to effect massive change in people's mindsets, in how they think about the environment or the economy, when all I had to do was hang out at home for two, three months. It's just not enough.

So my prediction is that after two to three years, this will just be a blip: oh yeah, remember when that was weird? And then they will continue on with their capitalist endeavors, and we will have both full smog in China and no changes in recycling practices. That's my prediction.

I'd love to say, oh man, everything's going to [change], we're going to be better people, and we're going to start addressing mental health better because of all of this. I know we won't. It's going to take a lot more than that.

On an individual level, people can make their change, and there's no doubt that there's the hunger to do that. If you take a look at the transformation economy and how much money and time people put into it, there's definitely a desire to do that.

But systematically, and habitually, you've got to really have something hit you hard as a society to make a massive change in a quick way. Things happen incrementally over time. Think about it: there was no such thing as recycling 20, 30, 35 years ago. To effect a massive change for an entire society or country or nation, or whatever you want to call your collective, you really have to have something that hits you hard.

It's the irony of it all. Maybe it's a bit controversial to say, but you don't want to wish for tragedy, and at the same time, that's what it's going to take to effect change. It's like with kids: if you keep saving them from their faults, they never really learn from the pain.

For Human Impact Lab: it started out as environmental and climate change focused, and they had a ticker going on their website, counting down to a particular time when, I don't know, it's going to be too late or something like that. This was before my time. Then the leadership ended up working on different projects, and now I've joined up with one of the original founders, Paul, and we're going to try to take it to the next level by, like I said, taking on different projects that have some kind of impact. We're super excited about the direction it's going to go.

When you think about a circular economy, that feeds into environmental aspects as well, and it also connects to more local supply chains and things like that. So that could be interesting. If we could figure out a decent model for how that could be implemented in a rather quick way, then a toolkit can be built, and other places can replicate it, hopefully.

We need to run these two infrastructures at the same time. People can't necessarily always afford it: there's a reason why not everybody shops organic. It's more expensive, and it's more expensive because of labor laws in certain countries. So that's going to be a hurdle to overcome in different kinds of ways. Then there's sustainable farming, which is both a health concern and an environmental concern. So figuring out how to adjust that, because meat production is one of, if not the biggest, contributors to greenhouse gas or carbon emissions. So that's an issue too. It all connects there.

But the AI thing, that's super interesting. I work for a tech company, and I'd say a good three quarters of the tech companies that we've recently started have an AI component to them. Although AI is not as real a thing as people think it is in their imaginations. It's still really at the machine learning, deep learning stages. The way that people who don't have a tech background envision AI isn't really where it's at. I don't think people need to be too concerned about robots taking over the world any time soon. Especially because, like you said, AI is machine learning, and AI is only as good as how we train it.

There's a woman I know who has a chatbot company in California, and they've done a pretty massive study of how people treat chatbots. All the communication that you have with a chatbot teaches the chatbot, right? As we use it, it learns. The problem is that most of the time we are abusing chatbots. We are abusing Siri. The sheer amount of abuse that we display to our digital counterparts, I guess you could call them, is a disturbing reflection of humanity, in fact.

We'd like to think that we are civilized, respectable, nice people, but the data doesn't show that. So that's a bit of a concern, just with normal daily behaviors, never mind trying to teach humor and other types of things to machine learning. There are a lot of parts of the human that will be very difficult to train.

You're right. If you even just look at Google searches: anything that gets programmed is programmed from a biased point of view. For the longest time, the people doing the programming were white Christian males, and those systems got set up to reflect that. When I say doctor, you think white man. When you say nurse, you think white woman. And teacher, all these, because it's all about connections, right? They have to keep making all these words connect to one another in the way that they think people think, so that when you type in something, you get back the results that you're looking for.

And it's the same for everything. The way that all the data gets input and the way that things get programmed are from a biased point of view. It's not from malice, that's just how it is. And this will shift now: there's a lot of programming getting done in China, or in India, and it's the same thing. They will have their biases that get put into the system, and it will all reflect.

So it's true that whatever you're brought up with, your belief systems, shows up. Data is not neutral. There is no neutral machine learning. They can try their best, and having diverse teams helps tremendously, if you can get that from the beginning. But a lot of the systems are already built with the bias. So there's really no such thing as neutral anyway.

That's a tough one. If you just look at the United Nations: this is supposed to be a group of nations coming together to try to agree on certain things, but getting any type of declaration ratified is hard, because different people have different perspectives on what they think are good and bad things, right and wrong, the things to do and not to do.

So what will happen is that the people who have power or money will end up being the creators of the system. There's also this thing: it's the victors who write history. So it will be those systems that get built with those beliefs in them, because those were the people who had the access and the money to do it. They won't reflect all humans at all times. And I'm not even sure that that would be a good idea anyway.

Maybe I am both an idealist and a bit of a, I don't know what to call it. I do believe in constructivism, where we are creating our own systems. Nothing is really set. But at the same time, I think we're under the illusion that we are a civilized society. Really, what keeps us glued together and acting appropriately is religion and law. If we didn't have those two systems set up, it would just revert back to chaos, very anarchic. You could just look throughout history: whenever those two things break down, people just start getting violent and going crazy. So it's in us.

I think if we can come to terms with that, and admit it when we're creating these types of systems, then we can be more careful about trying to build systems that reflect some type of morality and ethics, in the hope that you can program that in. How do you program the animal in us? But maybe we can program in some higher moral, ethical ground. It would need to be super intentional, because if they don't do that, and they just make a reflection of us without admitting all of our downfalls, then what you will get is a very nasty world. I think human beings aren't all that nice all the time, unfortunately.

Another big question. It's a bit of a conundrum. If one believes in democracy in its best form, which actually is nowhere implemented, so democracy in an ideal version doesn't exist, but if it could, it would be better to be able to survey more people for input into those types of decisions.

Unfortunately, there aren't enough people who spend enough time educating themselves on all the aspects of what it would take to build an ethical and really great system of AI, or a singularity, or what have you. So you cannot actually rely on the general public, or the masses, to make good decisions on that. Not because they're bad, but just because not everybody has enough information to make an informed decision. I would say that's the problem with democracy as a whole: people who vote don't actually make informed decisions, for the most part.

So what ends up happening is that the people who do have the money and the knowledge are ultimately the ones who end up making those decisions. Again, it boils down to who's got the power to do it and who has the education to do it. That's how it'll go.

I don't know who those people will ultimately be, but you have to be in this sphere. It can't be someone who doesn't understand deep learning and machine learning and data and computer science and how all of these things really work. And I am not that person either. I can't claim that. I absorb a lot of information, but I can't program myself. So I wouldn't be one who could make an informed decision. I can give opinions like, yes, please make them moral. But beyond that, how does one do that? I have no idea. So it's those people who will ultimately [decide]. There's no other way. You can't ask people how to do things that they don't know how to do.

Well, it'll sound a bit elitist, but I do think that you need a mix of backgrounds: people who think about ethics, people who think about philosophy, people who are well read. You don't necessarily have to have a PhD, but people who understand and think about humanity. You have to be interested in forwarding humanity and be in that sphere. If you want, call them field philosophers: not classical philosophers, but people who philosophize and think about these big things.

So big thinkers, plus the people who can actually execute. You need people who have grand visions and can collaborate and envision together what a world could be like, and not everybody can do that. And then you also need groups of people who can actually execute on that. When you are having those types of discussions with people, then you know what can and can't be done.

As far as people who are just funding the project, they should have no decision-making unless they are in one of these two groups. It shouldn't be anybody political, unless they volunteer into one of these two groups. It needs to be visionaries and experts, a mix from everywhere. It doesn't really matter what country or what religion you're from, if you fall into those two camps. I can't think of anybody else who would be able to do that well.

You have to have a humanities point of view, an understanding of all the different sociological, anthropological, policy and cultural [aspects]. You have to be able to think about all of these things, all the impacts. I don't know what you could call this group. I have no idea how you would fix the criteria, but yeah, big thinkers, basically.

That is the title, yeah.

Yeah. As I mentioned earlier, it started out as my reaction to the #MeToo movement. There's real sexual violence and sexual harassment happening on one side of things, which is super important to address. People need to speak up. People need to be prosecuted. All of this is extremely important.

At the same time, there's other stuff over here that bumps up against it, so it looks like it, but it's not it. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Biology is not going anywhere. People will still meet and like each other. We spend a lot of time at work and with business colleagues, so that's going to happen. I don't think it's the role of the workplace to write policy against that.

I take issue with some of the reactions that happened because of it, because some people started to get scared: okay, I don't want to have a meeting alone with a woman, because what if something gets said and misinterpreted, and then I get in trouble and I'm fired. So now there's a third party present in a meeting. If you and I are going on a business trip, we're not supposed to sit beside each other on the airplane. We can't go for dinner because of whatever.

I'm adamantly against all of that, because for me, this impedes my relationship building. I need to be able to go for dinner or for drinks, or travel with people. I don't want to be impeded by any of that. I'm an adult. I can make my own decisions. If somebody is flirting with me and I don't like it, I have no problem fixing that situation. I've never encountered any situation that I couldn't deal with effectively.

At the same time, when you are flirting, when you are talking with people, there's something nice that happens. If there's a bit of an attraction, then that's an energy that you can channel. I think that's a lost opportunity. There's something called sexual transmutation, where you can take all of that sexual energy and channel it into being more creative and having more energy and motivation. Like I said, it's a flow trigger: you can get that report written and blasted out quicker than before. There are lots of neurochemicals that can get ignited, from just flirting all the way to having sex. Different types of neurochemicals get firing in the brain, and that's a really beautiful thing. I don't think that people should avoid that. It can help you build your business. It can help you be more creative.

I'm also talking about different types of groups. When I talk about feminism, I bring in all the infighting within feminism, just to draw people to the point that it's not necessarily about men versus women, this gender versus that gender. Within feminism, there's plenty of fighting going on. They don't all agree on what's important and the thing to do either.

And with men too: I've had hundreds of conversations with guys, and there's plenty of competition and fighting among males as well. There are a lot of males who struggle with their identity, especially these days: if I'm not the breadwinner anymore, what does that mean for my masculinity? If I can't be aggressive and I can't be assertive, then I don't know what it means to be a man anymore. So they've got their own stuff. It's not a solid group of men and a solid group of women fighting for power.

And then I talk about power as well. A lot of the dynamics there are about controlling the conversation, and how sex has become more academic in the conversation than anything else. That's why there's a lot of talk about different identities and pronouns and things like that. It's controlled in a very academic way. And yet Pornhub is the number one visited website in the world. The sheer amount of money that gets spent on sex is indicative of the level of importance. And yet somehow we're trying to get that out of the workplace, out of business. I don't see how that's even possible.

I'm talking a lot about negotiation, and how that has gone down historically between men and women. And I encourage women: listen, if you want to be a feminine woman and wear a skirt and flirt and whatever, then do that. And if you want to be the woman who wears a suit and acts like a man, do that. It really boils down to choice: do what you want to do. As long as we're all making adult decisions and dealing with things in a rational way, I think most of those issues will be solved.

I also think that power is not owned by men. Men just happened to grab it. It's there for everyone to take. There's this self-talk: society tells women, oh, you're not confident, and therefore they start acting not confident. I've had people come up to me: oh, Bobbi, that's easy for you to say, you're confident, I'm not. Well, you're not because you say you're not, and it has nothing to do with your gender and everything to do with your personality. That's your mindset. You can blame your gender, but if I am and you're not, then that just destroys the whole gender thing right there.

Then people say: okay, but you're tall and you're blonde, so it's easy for you. I'm like, hey, no, because there are still some stereotypes about blonde people. Which I don't care about. People can think that, go right ahead. As soon as you talk to me, you're going to figure out I'm not that stupid.

There's someone for everyone. Everybody loves all kinds of people, so there's always going to be someone who desires you. Don't worry about that. I know a lot of people who maybe aren't what a magazine would consider the beauty standard. But I see them and I just think that they are so incredibly gorgeous, and they have a personality that you just love them. So it really has very little to do with these false standards of beauty that different types of industries portray. It's more about the people.

So ultimately it's a get-real kind of slap in the face. I'm criticizing women, I'm criticizing men, I'm telling women they're great, I'm telling men they're great. Here are all the great things, and let's just get over ourselves. All of this while still taking the issues over here seriously: the real lawbreakers, that's different, I'm not talking about that kind of stuff. And the gray thinking: I can think two things at once. Nothing's binary. Your identity can be flexible. Don't let it restrict you. Stuff like that. So that's basically what the book's about.

I hope that a whole bunch of people like it and a whole bunch of people hate it, because there are going to be a lot of people who really like a lot of the things I'm saying [and a lot who don't]. And that's okay, because I'm not a PhD. I'm not a sexologist. I have an opinion, and I hope that it sparks conversation.

If nothing else, it would just change the narrative of the conversation right now, because I don't want people to be walking on eggshells anymore. Let's step back to pre-COVID: if we're in the same room and you touch my arm, or you say something about what I'm wearing, are you going to get in trouble? I just want all of that to be: okay, get over it already. If you want to compliment me, go right ahead. If you don't, that's okay too. If you ask me out, I can say no, it's okay, and then we can continue on. We don't need to make a thing out of everything. There are bigger fish to fry.

Well, I'm not using the word abuse, but there's definitely been a power shift as far as controlling the narrative. I consider it to be three camps of people.

There are the women and men who are talking about the issues that are really salient, really real: sexual harassment, sexual violence. All of this is a real thing. Then there are the people in the middle who are misinterpreting or overblowing certain things: oh my God, he put his hand on my knee and I didn't know what to do. When you could have just dealt with that, and it might not turn into anything. And if that guy happens to ask out every woman he has a meeting with, then yeah, the guy's got a problem, but

It could be. Or maybe he's got an issue himself. He feels lonely, he feels something that you don't know about, and maybe he's not going about dealing with his issues in the right way, but that doesn't make him a criminal, you know what I mean? So there's some stuff in the middle that's a little bit messy. I'm not saying that there's a silver bullet fix to this, but I feel like those situations are not at the same level. They could probably be dealt with better one on one, locally, and you don't need to ruin each other's lives and make a big public thing about it necessarily.

And then, unfortunately, there's another third. These aren't exact numbers, but there's another section of, I would say, women who are playing the card when they shouldn't, when they've misinterpreted a situation, such as: I have a male colleague, he got the raise and I didn't. He got it because he's a man, and I didn't get it because I'm a woman. When in fact she could just be incompetent. That is a possibility. And then they play the card when they don't know for sure that that's really the issue. Or they know it's not that, but they're playing the card anyway, because it's powerful. And it's that group of people who actually ruin it for the people over here who are really trying to do real things. So I'm talking about all of that.

Men do their own side of the abuse, which is abusing their power for the purpose of achieving sex. And there are also women now using this power as a way to do whatever. There's some of that going on. I wouldn't say there's a lot of it, but there's too much of it, I guess you could say. And again, people are just a bit scared and on eggshells. I think if we just talk out some of this stuff a little better, then we can get more clarity.

Yeah, exactly. It's how we're approaching this.

Well, it's at the editor right now. The goal is soon.

That's a good question. I guess it would be the capitalist point of view. What I see as a problem with Western society right now is that everybody thinks they're entitled to be super successful and have lots of money, and that everyone has the ability and the opportunity to do that. Which actually leads to a lot of frustration and stress.

We were raised with this ideal on the plate. My generation was raised to think: you have all the opportunities in the world, you can do anything you want, et cetera, et cetera. When in fact, globally, that's just not possible. And it's also unlikely, because if everybody could have all this money and have whatever you define as success, it's just not how humanity seems to work. Everyone can't be on this level. It seems like we operate vertically. When you think about even the animal kingdom, or how we classified plants and all of our biology, it's all very much a vertical classification.

So despite the fact that everyone wants to believe that we can all be all of this, I'm not so sure that's achievable, or even a good idea. Then you leave people unsatisfied with a simple life. If someone just wants to do this, they're made to feel like that's not okay, because you're not achieving your maximum potential, and you could do all of this.

I think the same thing happens in religion. There's everything from someone who almost never participates in the religion, all the way up to the most pious, your Sufis or your monks. And you should always be striving towards the ultimate top, enlightenment, and if you're not, you're somehow a bad Christian or a bad Muslim or whatever. So there's this weird shaming thing, where it's like: can we not just find a way to be okay with where we're at?

So I fault capitalism, ultimately. Although there's really no other financial paradigm that I could think of that would work well for all of humanity. We've tried socialism, but I think there's too much greed in humans to actually achieve that in any kind of idealistic way. There's no utopia, and I'm wondering if people could get okay with that.

And social media also doesn't help, with all of these types of stories and posts. It's either a big bragging session of here's all the great stuff I do, or it's a dumping ground where people are telling everybody everything about their depression and everything. I'm not sure that that's such a good thing.

So I don't have a solid answer for your question, but capitalism isn't working. In the long run, it's just going to keep causing problems. So a financial paradigm shift definitely needs to happen. And I think, by nature, the environmental paradigm will shift along with that, because those two things are super connected. We're overpopulated in most areas. There's too much of a difference in equity: very rich, very poor, lots of poor people. There's really no reason for it, other than people just wanting to keep their money. So that's a big question. I would start with capitalism. That would be the first thing to start with.

And socially, I hope that this social media stuff is a phase. I don't think social media in its current state is very helpful to society. I would love to see that change, and that's something that could immediately happen. It's relatively new, so it could potentially disappear just as quickly. But the way that it's formed right now, I think it's really detrimental to people. I don't know. What's your thought on that?

Well, okay, everything, but social media in particular.

Yeah. We wouldn't be talking right now if it wasn't for social media. It's just that human beings tend to, well, I wish they used things more for good than for evil, so to [speak].

Yup. Totally agree. Over the last, I'd say, five years, I've seen a lot of what's called impact investing. Investors are changing their minds on the types of things that they're investing in, where it's not just about the return anymore. And I see social innovation and social entrepreneurship growing a lot. So that's definitely good news, and this is why I'm involved in those types of projects, because that's the kind of thing that I want to move forward.

I want to have been instrumental in bringing forth some technologies that change the world. I don't necessarily need to get into any books, or have any kind of permanent monuments or anything like that. Well, that's not true. But I would like people to look back and say: you know what, if I never met Bobbi, this never would have happened. And I would like a lot of people to be able to say: if I never met her, I would never have been able to do that.

So that's the type of [impact]. Just among people, not anywhere permanent, but among people. I would like people to be able to say that.

Thank you.