Lifeloggers

[00:00:16] Speaker A: We've heard about this, this thing called lifelogging. Do you know what lifelogging is?

[00:00:27] Speaker B: A lot of people are saying this data is the new oil.

[00:00:29] Speaker D: This is the It's a fundamental change that's coming.

[00:00:34] Speaker E: It's going to revolutionize healthcare. It's going to revolutionize education. This will happen.

[00:00:40] Speaker C: And it's happening very, very fast.

[00:00:52] Speaker F: We all have these perceptions of who we are and what's going on and, you know, oh, how much work did I do last week? Or how much have I driven? You know, we have these like, oh, well, I watched maybe 3 hours of TV last week. But we actually have tools and devices to tell us exactly what those numbers really are, exactly how we've lived in the world. And if we know those things, then we can start to have a better, clear picture of who we are. And if we have a clear picture

[00:01:17] Speaker F: of who we are, we can say, well, is that the person I really want to be?

[00:01:29] Speaker G: Lifelogging is the gathering of all the information and the storage of it and the management of it. And then quantified self is sort of then how we actually use that information to make meaningful decisions as people, whether we want to share information or whether we want to look back on some of our lifestyle factors and habits.

[00:01:53] Speaker F: I'll just grab just one.

[00:01:55] Speaker H: This is volume 16. It's from 2006. I was living in New York City, so it says New York in here. And I pretty much log everything, so it's a lot of my life just completely documented. And I specifically date everything, so I know what I was doing on any particular day for the last 10, 15 years of my life.

[00:02:21] Speaker H: There's this whole movement, the Quantified Self movement, that's sprung up here in the Bay Area. But it's a little bit different from what I do because Quantified Self is all about the numbers. So where this is all about, you know, the visuals and the experience and, you know, were they smiling or were you here or there, it's— Quantified Self is about, you know, what time did you wake up, how much did you eat, you know, how much did you exercise and so

[00:02:46] Speaker H: forth. So they're looking at tracking different metrics.

[00:02:49] Speaker C: Mm-hmm.

[00:02:50] Speaker H: And so I call this more so the qualified, you know, it's qualitative tracking instead of quantitative tracking.

[00:02:58] Speaker I: The log itself may or may not be— have any value at all, but it's—

[00:03:04] Speaker C: because it is just the record.

[00:03:09] Speaker I: Now you have to look at what that record can be used for. You know, you log something and then if you can quantify that, some aspect of that, then using that in a kind of measured way then allows you to Perform better.

[00:03:27] Speaker F: Quantified self as a whole, the community, you know, all the meetups across the world that started in San Francisco with Gary Wolf and Kevin Kelly, both editors for Wired magazine, and they were looking for what's these next thing that's really going to revolutionize the way we live our lives. So they had a meetup in 2008, just small group of people, and that slowly grew to more and more people, and then. I don't know if you got to meet Steve Dean. He's in New York. He

[00:03:52] Speaker F: was there in San Francisco. He said, this stuff is really interesting.

[00:03:54] Speaker J: Let me do it.

[00:03:55] Speaker F: Can I do a meetup on this same thing in New York? They started having one there, and it's just like, okay, well, San Francisco, New York, super great hubs for innovation, technology. And then slowly you started seeing little ones pop up all over the place.

[00:04:12] Speaker A: Well, I think people in Lebanon are the ones that need lifelogging the most. People do not walk here. Everyone takes their car. And no one bikes, and no one exercises. So it's a very small community that actually is healthy. So I think that if they have this device that tells them that for your weight you're supposed to be walking 10,000 steps more, it would actually push them to go out

[00:04:38] Speaker A: there, to start walking, to— I don't know, to get healthier and fitter. Because it is a very big problem that we're facing now. With all this technology available, I don't see myself anymore entering manually all of the information or typing them on an Excel sheet. But I'm very much into these devices that you wear and that you forget and that wirelessly send the information to your computer. So like the Fitbit, like the FuelBand, like all of these high-tech

[00:05:03] Speaker A: devices. So at the end of the day, you open your computer and you're like, wow, I walked this much today, this week I did this much, I burned this many calories. So you don't think about it, but you know, and it's there.

[00:05:14] Speaker C: We are talking about the future welfare society. What is our welfare system actually creating? All these billions we are spending on health and healthcare in this society, for example Sweden, does it really result in health among people? What

[00:05:41] Speaker C: can motivate these people to At least move a little. Take a walk. Take a longer walk from the bus stop or something like that. Small, small, small changes. And you have to do it very, very easy for them.

[00:06:07] Speaker F: A really, really smart guy started thinking about this back in the early 2000s. And I started doing it, and it was perfectly fine. I would just walk and work. And sometimes I feel like it helps me actually focus. So when I have to do some very consistent writing, or I have to really think about something, and I want to focus, I just put on my headphones, put on some music, and just

[00:06:33] Speaker F: kind of just go at it. The display stopped working, so I can't track— which is what I used to do, is I used to track exactly how much I was walking, and then estimating how much energy I was expending while I was walking. I think when it broke, I was up to 750 miles that I'd walked over like 2 years or 2 and a half years. So this used to be like an actual treadmill, and then this is a desk from IKEA that I got, and I just kind of sawed off the little posts

[00:06:58] Speaker F: on the treadmill where the display was and then mounted it right here, and it's good to go.

[00:07:07] Speaker H: So I'm a lifelong lifelogger.

[00:07:16] Speaker A: Hello. Hi. We are from Sweden, documentary filmers. We were supposed to meet Steve Mann.

[00:07:23] Speaker J: Oh.

[00:07:24] Speaker K: Different kinds of vibrations. So it's a completely different type of sound.

[00:07:31] Speaker A: Hi.

[00:07:31] Speaker F: How are you?

[00:07:33] Speaker K: So this is the, I guess, wearable computer or iTap. Like many of my inventions, this idea came to me in a dream, and I had a dream that I was experiencing the world as a computer, and I call this existential technology or becoming something. Existential epistemology, or learn by being.

[00:08:02] Speaker K: We learn by being. One example that I use to explain this to people is the idea of using inches and feet. When you measure in inches, it's the width of a person's thumb, or you measure a horse in hands. You're using your own body as a ruler. That's what I call existemology. You're learning— it's an epistemological framework from being, learned by being.

[00:08:29] Speaker K: So you become the ruler. When you are a ruler, you understand measurement in a much deeper and more profound way. You know, in many ways, not only have we become cyborgs, but we're required to be cyborgs. We're required to have technological prostheses mediate our interaction with the world around us. And in some sense, we've forgotten nature.

[00:08:50] Speaker I: We've forgotten how to grow our own food, and we've forgotten, you know, what natural Each of us has an amount of stress that we can handle on a daily basis, and you can use that stress up by being sick, by being tired, by eating toxic food, by drinking a lot of alcohol, and all of a sudden you've used up all of your resilience and you haven't done anything. This quantifying stuff that I do, or lifelogging,

[00:09:16] Speaker I: it gives me more mental power. Like, I've raised my IQ, raised my memory, But it also, at the same time, lets me like get by on much less sleep, and it lets me get like— I just don't need excessive exercise like a lot of people think they need. The idea of being bulletproof is that you feel like you're in that state of just amazing performance where things are just easy for you. So what we've just done is we've extracted the

[00:09:41] Speaker I: right amounts of oils from the coffee. We're just going to use Kerrygold, so we're going to take About that much butter instead of cream. And there's something else we're gonna add that gives you the better flavor. And this is called MCT oil. It gives you a ton of brain energy. So I'm just gonna add a dash of this. Now I'll pour a little bit into here just so you can

[00:10:06] Speaker I: sort of see for the camera what it does. If you had only this for breakfast, the effect is you're full for about 8 hours. You can go from, you know, 7 AM till 2 PM with no snacks, no meals, and no energy dip. 'Cause the— your body is like, oh, I finally got the healthy fat I needed. SingleScore combines reaction times in 2 early responses. Scores are personal IQ. 100 is your own average performance. What's the delay between when it turns green and when I press

[00:10:32] Speaker I: a button? The variability per day of that is going to tell you a lot about how my performance is. When CBS News was here, we ran a test. I did one day when I was not taking Provigil, a smart drug, and another day when I was taking Provigil. And we ran a similar test to the one you just saw. And here's the results. My simple reaction time was 3% faster with less mistakes. But look at this, the predictability

[00:10:57] Speaker I: was 30% more predictable. So that's pretty amazing. So I was much more consistent when I was taking the smart drug.

[00:11:06] Speaker L: One of the big misconceptions is that our users are hardcore runners or fitness enthusiasts, and really they're much more like regular people that are just trying to get off the couch You know, they've tried personal trainers and crash diets and expensive gym memberships and all these things, and yet, you know, these little apps on the phone can keep them motivated and keep them sticking to their workout routines over time. For somebody like Runkeeper, you

[00:11:31] Speaker L: know, we're less about building sensors ourselves and more about making sense of all the data that's collected, knowing that over time there's going to be more and more health information that's being tracked by more and more people all over the world.

[00:11:46] Speaker D: Um, here is the number of data points about my body, and my first value up here was 5, which is 5 times higher than normal. If you have just 4 times, it quintuples your chances of having a future heart attack. Because inflammation is what drives your body to lay plaque

[00:12:12] Speaker D: down in your arteries. And so that wasn't good. But then I kept taking these tests and now I'm up at 10. And then I'm up at 15. You know, I've graphed this and I went into my doctor and I said, something terrible is going on inside of me. We need to figure this out. And he said, well, how do you feel? Do you have a symptom? Do you feel bad? I said, no, I

[00:12:37] Speaker D: don't feel bad. I feel fine. He says, well, what are you bothering me with? You know, come back when you have a symptom. And this is the fundamental change that's coming. I'm doing preventive medicine, and they're treating you after it's too late to Roll back the changes.

[00:13:04] Speaker J: Self-hacking or quantified self, they're all helping us to answer a very important question, which is, how am I doing? Right? If you think about it, how am I doing is probably the second oldest question in history, right? The first one is, why am I here? Right? Then you look around and you figure, how am I doing? We live life in little projects, from losing 10 pounds this summer because you want to look good on the beach to running 10K To managing your migraines, getting pregnant. All those things are little projects for

[00:13:29] Speaker J: which we've got these performance indicators or a certain goal that we've got to find. But life is full of projects. Those were just goal-oriented. But we've got, you know, our kids are projects, our careers are projects, our love lives, dating, health, wellness. And because we live life in little projects, at any time in our individual lives and in our evolution of life, we'll have a number of different projects for which we will want to improve

[00:13:54] Speaker J: ourselves.

[00:13:55] Speaker H: Hi.

[00:13:55] Speaker A: Hi, I'm Amanda.

[00:13:58] Speaker I: Nice to meet you, Amanda.

[00:13:59] Speaker A: Nice to meet you too.

[00:14:03] Speaker I: Come on in, that's our door.

[00:14:04] Speaker F: Thank you.

[00:14:10] Speaker M: This is Sofia, and Sofia is Richard's and my daughter. Sofia was diagnosed with a rare genetic disease called Niemann-Pick disease type A, and she was actually one of 8 to 10 children in the world at any given time that had this condition. What we started doing with Sophia was actually trying to work and give— provide a high quality of life for her. We didn't know how long she had to live.

[00:14:36] Speaker M: There's no child at the time that had survived the condition, and there still has been no child that survived the condition that was diagnosed. So this is a book that I did. It's called a Narrative Scrapbook. Sofia wasn't improving, and I was just full of grief. So I started clipping magazines, and this just kind of came together, and this was really more about how I came to become a parent. Thinking

[00:15:02] Speaker M: about how to care for Sofia, we, you know, my approach was actually mind, body, spirit. So I looked at, you know, how can we optimize her physical care, how can we work, you know, emotionally with our family, with her, then spiritually. And the community started to self-organize around Sofia and our family. It just— we put a call out to our community, and then people started telling each other, and it just spread.

[00:15:27] Speaker M: There were no social networks like Facebook at the time. So these are part of her lifelog. All of this. These are the notes by the nurses, but then we had them also do the notes according to the way that we wanted them. This is actually showing the day she died right here. This is her last dose before she passed away. The documentation, being filmed, being photographed,

[00:15:54] Speaker M: helping to optimize her care, taking notes about Sophia, all of it contributed actually to them self-identifying as a member of the community.

[00:16:06] Speaker G: Thousands of years ago, people would have gathered around a campfire and told stories. To try and engage people. And then thereafter we had paintings depicting different scenes of people's lives. And after that then we had the printing press. And then after that we have television depicting— documentaries depicting people's lives. And it's elements of people's lives. And with lifelogging, it's going to be no different. Nobody, I

[00:16:31] Speaker G: would expect, is going to transmit their whole life. However, still we want to be able to transfer bits of our life. It's interesting because the most boring thing in the world to look at is someone else's lifelog images, but the most amazing thing to look at is your own lifelog images. We're all sort of egotistical animals in that we like reviewing things that we ourselves have done, and we want to then share it with the rest of the world. That's why Facebook is so popular and why Twitter is so popular, because

[00:16:57] Speaker G: we can share our thoughts and we can share our photos. So how much better is it going to be then with lifelogging when those photos are automatically captured?

[00:17:06] Speaker N: I'm wondering if we can use the principles of comics to boil down lifelogs into meaningful segments.

[00:17:15] Speaker H: Right.

[00:17:16] Speaker N: So for example, if I was going to do a comic strip of just this, right, it'd be really pretty simple. It would be you and me face to face with a cameraman on the side. We might have a transition walking down the path, right, and then a new Park bench we're on. There might be another one that talks about, oh wow, a remembrance agent or lifelog, right? All you need to do is see those 5 panels

[00:17:42] Speaker N: to really spur your own native memory of what happened here.

[00:17:46] Speaker G: We consider the most advanced memory retrieval system in the world, it's the human brain, and it's evolved over millions of years. So that's why we need to engage with people in the memory science domain, because they're trying to understand Suppose you could remember everything from your life perfectly.

[00:18:06] Speaker E: So when I— when you say go paperless, it's not that you got rid of paper, but it's that anything you ever read, imagine you could go and do a search and get that instantly. How would that change your life?

[00:18:21] Speaker B: A lot of people are saying this data is the new oil. And by that it means it's so precious. If you know something like someone's zip code, certainly their Social Security number, a lot of publicly available data, you can find out where they live, how old they are, their gender, do they have kids. Even though I haven't given that data, the data is now available.

[00:18:42] Speaker H: Anything that goes on the internet is for everybody and for everybody's marketing research, which I don't want to be a part of.

[00:18:50] Speaker C: How can we trust all these companies, service providers that is providing you with these devices? You are sharing your data, but what about trust?

[00:19:07] Speaker B: Well, let's be clear, they're using our data. The Big Brother aspect of is data being used, the answer is sure, you know.

[00:19:14] Speaker N: If you go looking for a problem, you'll find it. Go through security at San Francisco with your phone out, with your camera on, right, with your video camera recording. See how long it takes before somebody says, you can't do that here, miss, right, or takes your camera.

[00:19:28] Speaker I: The question is still, some of this, when you start doing it, is it legal?

[00:19:33] Speaker K: So lifelogging is writing about your life in a logbook. Lifeblog is when you do that on the internet with conscious thought or effort typing. And a lifeblog is automatically done without conscious So lifelogging is probably the central theme, and also surveillance. You must have come across that as well, right? So surveillance is watching from above. So

[00:19:59] Speaker K: if we have a camera system looking down on us from above, that's called surveillance. And sur is a French word for from above. And veiller means to watch. And surveillance— sous means from below. Some people have referred to lifelogging as a form of surveillance. Surveillance is capturing of something from the perspective

[00:20:24] Speaker K: of the self.

[00:20:25] Speaker E: The property owner always has the right to tell you, you know, you can't do something on that property, within reason. So if you go into a coffee shop and the manager of the coffee shop doesn't want you You know, photographing in the coffee shop.

[00:20:39] Speaker M: Mm-hmm.

[00:20:39] Speaker E: You know, they're within their rights to say, you know, we can't— you know, you're not allowed to do that here. What they can't do though is if you've already been, you know, taping, filming, or taking photographs, they can't make you delete your images. They can't make you hand over, you know, your memory. They certainly can't take your equipment.

[00:21:01] Speaker N: I mean, all they can do We've evolved social norms, and people understand now when you get up in the middle of a meeting, right, to go take care of something.

[00:21:14] Speaker D: Science is about measuring and not taking anybody's statement of what's real. If you, if you look at the history of scientific revolutions, right, I mean, Galileo, Copernicus, right? They said, uh, I don't think things are the way everybody seems to think they are. I mean, Copernicus overthrew 1,500 years of,

[00:21:40] Speaker D: or even 2,000 years of established knowledge about how the solar system worked. He had a lot of courage.

[00:21:48] Speaker F: If you think about like the Gutenberg press allowed for this huge explosion of literacy and People were able to print books, and everyone can print a book now, you know. Now it's super easy. And then that same thing happened with the internet. Now you gave people a medium, they were able to create. And I think that same thing is happening with this self-tracking and lifelogging, is you're giving people a chance to create meaning for themselves. And that is hugely empowering.

[00:22:14] Speaker F: Like, you know, that's world-changing.

[00:22:17] Speaker G: Lifelogging is going to have a tremendous effect on everyone and on the whole it's going to be a massive beneficial effect too, I think, in helping us better understand what we do and to share those very special moments in life with friends and loved ones.

[00:22:32] Speaker H: Thank you.