Transcriber: Tina Yang Reviewer: Denise RQ
I'm here to talk about a way that I think everyone here
can enhance and increase the value of all of their conversations.
And I think it's really easy.
It's a simple concept that I've come to call the discussion group.
And so, to get started, I want to start with a small story.
It starts with me and a friend in a bar,
just up at The Loop, and we were talking about baseball.
St.Louis Cardinals, it's a good team.
But he'd spent six weeks in Kazakhstan on a archaeological dig,
but we were talking about baseball,
and that's a little disappointing to me
because I wanted to know about his trip to Kazakhstan.
And we are in social setting,
and we are with other friends, and they are all here with us.
And I think baseball is a conversation like other ones
that people can join in together, and we can all relate to,
people can learn a lot about each other
with this really casual conversation that's easy to join in.
So I called that conversation 'typical conversation.'
And I think that's pretty much what everyone here does,
let's say, 100% of the time,
- and this can be anything: weather, headline news,
what happened at work, what happened in class, celebrity gossip.
And there's no problem with that, actually.
And that's not what was frustrating me.
It was the time, how was I going to get
this information about Kazakhstan
out of my friend, with a limited time?
I mean, I'm in college, he's in college.
We both have schedules, this is our weekend,
and other people want our time, too.
And so, I needed a time to have this discussion,
and have a goal of this discussion.
So I'm here to find another topic,
and I'm going to call it 'intentional conversation.'
So this conversation is directed and specifically aimed at,
maybe learning about Kazakhstan.
And so as I talk more about intentional conversation,
I want to give another small story.
And this goes back to Italy in the 15th century, let's say.
And there is a family in Florence, the Medici family,
and they are widely recognized for bringing on the Renaissance era:
art, everything, out of the medieval times.
They were really, really powerful.
They dominated in business, and they dominated in politics,
they even had the largest ban in Europe at the time.
But one thing that people don't really know what they did
that helped them [be] so powerful was
that they'd invite people from all around,
ministers, farmers, businessmen, merchants,
and they would ask them:
"What is going on in your area of expertise?"
Like, "What can we learn from you tonight?"
and taking in all these inputs from all these people
who knew about their subjects,
they were able to learn a lot
about what was actually important in their society.
And knowing all this information,
they were able to direct their policy towards good decisions
that would keep them in power,
and but also, you know, bring on a Renaissance era of art.
I think that this concept, 'intentional conversation,'
even today, can be super powerful.
And how I came about to this topic was actually really interesting,
and I did it here at Wash. U., with a student group called
The Washington University Tech Entrepreneurs,
WUTE as it is commonly referred to.
And what WUTE does is it tries to get students to think
about building things,
computer apps, or maybe hardware, it doesn't really matter.
And, we are really small, maybe like 15, 20 people.
And a [format of mean] that we would have a couple of years ago
was have some people over to just random [unclear] in campus
and invite someone from the community
to come in and talk about something related to technology.
So the format was they would talk for five to ten minutes
about what they are doing: "This is our app, and we are trying
to help make it easier for people to find stuff in stores."
And then for the next 10 to 15 minutes, the group would give feedback.
Maybe it was from their experiences,
maybe it was from other services that they used, that they liked,
but it was this really good back and forth.
And not just about this product, or what this person was building,
we learned a lot about that sector, that part of the industry;
We really learned a lot.
A friend and I, we said: "Hey, this is a really cool format,
but why are we just doing it for technology?
We can do it for everything.
And so, Parker and I decided: "Let's just have a few friends over,
try this thing out, and give it one simple rule:
invite someone you think is interesting
and could talk about anything you want for five to ten minutes,
and we'll just see how it goes.
And it actually worked great!
We did this about a year ago; and we started doing it
every Wednesday night and so, once a week, and it's carried on.
And I learned fascinating things in it.
I think my favorite one is about a friend who took a trip to Panama.
And [when] he came back, he was like:
"This is so weird,
but the entire supply chain of grocery foods is all linked back
to the Panama canal and who runs it.
And I just kind of noticing this,
and I decided to do some research, and I think this is a cool topic.
Another really cool one talked about the legal implications of storing DNA,
unlike digital devices, I mean,
when we sequence DNA, it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to do that.
And think about if a lot of people,
thousands of people have their DNA sequenced.
There are a lot of legal implications that have not even come up yet.
And the problem is going to be huge in the next 10, 20 years.
So I would learn all these things from the discussion group,
and it really started to stick.
I liked having it,
the people who attended it really, really loved it,
and it became a kind of really small cult following
because it was five to ten people that would attend.
And so, it was actually really interesting going into...
This fall I wanted to continue it, We're a lot of people graduating.
And inviting new people was sometimes hard
because it was like, "What am I supposed to talk about?",
or "Do you have people that go to this already?
This seems like a secret society almost, why should I contribute to this?"
And to one of my friends I said:
"Look, you interned in your city in real estate,
it's the most intensive real estate market in the country.
- and there's some families that dominated, too,
and it's moved about in a way that's passed down from generations,
and difficult to enter -
so I said: "Talk about that, you know a lot about it,
and we might be able to learn a lot about it,"
and this friend of mine who came in, just fell in love with it.
She said: "This is really cool.
I think this could be a really interesting way to converse."
And so, one way that I... the story I often tell to convince people
to attend or just maybe an example of what I've learned from this is...
it's called the Clock of the Long Now.
It's really interesting.
This guy, one day in the 80s, Danny Hillis said:
"I want to make a clock that every year ticks once,
and every hundred years the century hand moves over one,
and every millennium it's going to have a cuckoo clock or something, or a chime.
And let's have this clock run for 10,000 years.
It's going to last for really, really long time.
And I want to teach people what time is,
in the same way that people look at satellite imagery
and look at how the environments changed over time.
I want time to be something that people really think about.
But there's a big problem there, I want to build a clock,
and I don't really know how to make one that's going to last for 10,000 years.
I don't know what the best mechanism is going to be.
I don't know where I should put it. We're going to be the really problems."
And it's actually, a really fascinating topic.
It's being built in a mountain in Nevada and western Texas, actually.
And one of the biggest problems that they started to realized was people.
What would people know in 10,000 years? What will people be capable of doing?
Will they be more advanced? Will they be maybe less advanced?
We need to make a clock that can handle all of these cases.
And what if people become so spread out or populated?
We don't want something
that they are going to just have to interfere with.
So they actually picked these really remote areas.
But thinking about that design process,
that could make a really good discussion group topic.
I'm in digital engineering,
I don't know much about mechanical engineering,
or some people even thought
how the day and night temperatures changed
[and how that] could work for a good clock.
So maybe someone from mechanical or chemical engineering
could come into play
in regarding how we could build such a mechanism.
Or maybe, we want to talk about where to put this clock.
And I think a good friend of mine who travels like crazy
- he's done 8 cross country road trips
and would make him a really good person to bring to that.
He could say: "Oh, there's nothing in Nevada; I've driven Route 50,
it's the most remote highway in the whole country.
There are five towns across 300 miles.
So you have to get gas at every single stop."
So I think someone like him could really help
on the completely different part on this clock and designing it,
and really add to that discussion.
And one final person, I think, would be
someone maybe from a social or a political science background.
They could talk about what are the social implications of this clock,
or what about policy on how this clock is built, managed, and maintained.
And this is a topic that I often share
when I'm introducing the discussion group
and trying to get people to come, and attend, and bring
their entirely different and unique experiences and ideas.
And we design the Discussion Group
so that there are unique people from unique backgrounds.
And when these experiences combine, new insights come together,
as to, you know, what is the importance of this,
or really some new problems that we can think of regarding this.
So I think what I'd like to ask all of you here today is
to consider making your own discussion group.
This was something that I think I spent 30 minutes a week, planning,
making sure people would show up.
And I had to kick people out of door after two hours,
because I needed to go back and do homework,
and the discussion group was really fun.
And I think that without taking the time to give these conversations brought about,
I never would've run into it.
I would've been back on the typical conversation:
course, weather, and headline news.
Maybe gossip, but I don't like that.
But the point is, having brought this discussion group into my life,
I've really gained... so many people ask me:
"How do you know this about the Panama canal, that's so random?"
And I'm like: "I've never been to Panama,
my really good friend told me all about it,
and it was so interesting that I kept reading about,
and I really like it.
I mean, in some way it's a way to impress people,
but maybe it could work really well in a job interview,
or just to... there are a lot of reasons.
But the point is I think that without taking the time to do that,
a lot of people are just going to stay
on the trajectory of this typical conversation and dialogue.
And I'd like to see people try this system out,
try making these conversations intentional with goals,
and it doesn't have to be really formal.
It can be really informal as ours were.
And I think there's so much to gain out of it,
and enumerating those options and what can be gained
is so difficult because it's really infinite.
So, thank you.
(Applause)