Vivienne Ming on Understanding the Impact of Courage & Fear Using AI | B-Well Together | Salesforce

Well, good morning. So happy that you're starting your week out with us here on Be well Together. We've seen some pretty fantastic things over the last 15 weeks. Lots of great stuff on health, on well being, and on the use of AI for good. And today we actually have yet another Trailblade trailblazer in AI driven research. It is my great pleasure to introduce theoretical neuroscientist Dr. Vivian Ming. She is an entrepreneur, she's an author, she's a mother of two. She's also the co founder of Socos Labs with her wife, Dr. Norma Ming. And SOCO Labs is dedicated to solving some of the world's most pressing issues. So, you know, no big deal. She sits on a number of boards and companies including Start out and End gender. And in her free time, this is what she does in her free time. She designs AI systems to help treat her son's diabetes, to predict manic episodes in bipolar sufferers, and to reunite orphan refugees with extended family members. So, wow. And it's really amazing to have her here with us today. We're going to explore the future of human potential using AI and ways to practice courage in your life. So, Dr. Ming, welcome to Be well Together.

Absolutely. So great to be here. I've had some fun on stages at Dreamforce. This is virtually as fun as that.

Fantastic. Well, a few less characters running around, but we're going to get that figured out before Virtual Dreamforce.

I assume Bob will show up here at some point.

At some point, yes. He shows up with me every morning. So what would you like us to think about today?

Well, you know, I have had the chance to do some pretty kooky things in my life, so much so that my staff records me every now and then ranting and throws it on YouTube, which apparently is entertaining for exactly nobody. But we keep doing it. But I thought I'd talk about courage because I have no idea. I mean, we talk so much about it certainly in the business world. Every month or so, I do a little sort of anthropological tour of LinkedIn. I see all these posts from people talking about courage and in fact, once I was asked to give a big keyNote talk to 30,000 people, which is its own weird kind of irony, depending on whether you're Lexical Stickler or not. I'm supposed to get up in front of 30,000 people and talk about courage. Normally this is used in experiments to actually trigger people's fear response. The idea that you'd have to give a public talk, but there's clearly something wrong with my Brain. And so it's not that big a deal for me. But the big deal for me was I just. I had nothing to say. I get to do a lot of different research, as you alluded to. I get to look at brains, and I get to look at companies, build companies myself, and conducted scientific research. It's been a wonderful life, a busy one. But I'm not certain anything my work on artificial intelligence and brains has something to say about courage. But then I thought about someone who was even busier than myself. Long ago, when I was at UC Berkeley as a researcher, I had a joint appointment. So I was working at this place called the Redwood center for Theoretical Neuroscience, where we do really fancy, fancy machine learning and brains. And it was all very cool. Very lazy, too, because we're just working on computers instead of doing actual biology. But I also had an office over in the School of Education because I have always been really passionate about education. I have a very unusual background, and my wife was a professor at the school at the time, and we were doing a collaborative research, you know, mixing a little of my machine learning in her education. So I had this office, and several times a day, every single day, there would be this flash in the hallway outside the door of my office. Once in the morning, and then in the afternoon, and then late afternoon, just like every day, this person would run past the door of my office, which is very strange behavior for anyone over, let's say, eight. I can imagine my daughter running past anywhere. But this person wasn't 8. This person was a professor in the School of Education. And several times a day, she would literally run down the hallway past all of the offices of the full professors who would someday be voting on her tenure. And she'd run from her office down to her lab, which is at the other end of the hallway, which is a bit of a strange behavior, you might imagine. And I was just curious, you know, is she a total kook? She was so nice, and I really loved her research. So I just wanted to know, you know, this person that was a friend of mine and a friend of my wife's, why she did it. And she said, well, you know, I was done in my office and I wanted to be in my lab, and it would take longer to walk. In other words, she didn't care who saw her running. She wasn't doing it because there was an emergency. There aren't really emergencies in education research, not in this sense. She did it because she cared so much about her research. She didn't care what it looked like to anyone else, which was pretty funny. Every now and then, you know, I have my own students and I say, listen, however smart you think you are, that is not the unique predictor of success in science. Just so you understand who your competition is, this woman who does not earn some huge Silicon Valley salary, literally runs down the hallway to get to her lab because that's how much she cares. And I bet she does it late at night as well. I just am not there to watch her. So she was this amazing person that just embodies a total commitment. Later, a few years after we first met, she had borrowed these little gloves of mine that you can use on a touchscreen because she was really cold and she wanted to work when she was cold and she needed to be able to touch the screen of her computer while she was working. She's just sort of totally invested in everything that was her work. There was no split between work and home. But she also, she loved her daughters. I mean, whenever we visited them, had dinner like, this is someone that was totally invested in them as well. Later, she ended up having to just work from home all the time. Had nothing to do with COVID And in fact, she earned tenure about four months before she died of pancreatic cancer. So the reason she was wearing the gloves and working from home was she was dying and she knew it. But she cared about something more than a job. What she cared about was that her research had an impact on the world. What she cared about was that her daughters knew that this was important, that there was something bigger than whether you felt, well, that was important. I feel a little emotional. That felt important to show them. So she passed away and she knew she was going to, and she kept working all the way to the end anyways. And the faculty gave her tenure even though they knew they weren't going to have a professor, you know, day after day with them. They did it because she did something amazing. But the most amazing thing I think about what she did was what she role modeled. She knew she had limited time with her children and she loved them. She didn't spend that time playing or doing frivolous things. She spent that time showing them with her actions that something was bigger than her. Something was going to take more than a lifetime to complete. In fact, in the psychological research, this is the definition of a purpose or more wonky construct, strength of purpose. It is something that's bigger than you, something that takes more than a lifetime to complete. And in fact, I always love the metaphor. It's an old saying which is the world gets better when old men plant trees. They're never going to rest under its shade. They're never going to experience for themselves the benefit of that tree, but they do it anyways. And what's fascinating about my friend and about those old men, and there's some actual examples. This guy in India who's literally planting a line of trees in front of an advancing desert. Neither the trees nor the desert will ever truly be a part of his life, but he's doing it anyways because someday it will be a part of someone's life. And what's fascinating is it sounds insane, right? It's all sacrifice. It's all giving with no obvious receiving. But it turns out people have studied purpose, people have studied life meaningfulness and it paints a really interesting picture. People that have a stronger sense of life meaningfulness and purpose. Imagine everything you'd want to be true about you when you're 65. Okay? Some things that maybe are a little selfish. Greater wealth and greater income, a better job, more education. But other things as well. Insulin sensitivity, central body mass. How many friends do you have? How much do you volunteer outside the home? Subjective well being. What psychologists call happiness. Here's probably my favorite metric of long term life outcomes. Your walking speed at age 65. And I can go on like dozens of different variables. All of them are more likely to be positive. And people that have a strong sense of purpose, does it matter what the purpose is? That's a complex story. But I can say this also from the research. It is something you get to build, something you construct. There's no one purpose that's just sitting out there waiting for you. But instead it's very clear that people can go in. It could be a spiritual purpose, it could, as it is with me, be a very grounded one. But there's something bigger and more important than you. And here's the great paradox of it all. You have to do it for the purpose. All of those wonderful things that we find as we research the life outcomes of thousands and thousands of people say you have to truly make a sacrifice to reap any of these benefits. So for me, what I like to say is that sacrifice is purpose and purpose is sacrifice. At least if it's done for something bigger than you. You mentioned Jodi, on introducing me that I worked on this project to reunite orphan refugees. And the story has a humorous start. More than 20 years ago, I got my start in machine learning doing this crazy project sponsored by the CIA. So a little morally gray. And we were doing Real time lie detection off of raw video. So literally what we're looking at one another right now, you can imagine throwing this analysis in real time on the screen and actually figuring out whether someone's lying or whether they're happy or sad. Humorously enough, that lab, my first undergraduate lab, actually spun off and got bought by Apple. So your iPhone is doing all of this now? It's fun to look at the iPhone and all the free stuff that's on it and think I remember when that was my undergraduate honors thesis 20 years ago. But after that I started my first company. So I'd left academia full time and my wife and I co started a company in education. Nobody wanted to fund education back then. No one would touch it. So instead we start experimenting. How do we show off that this really cool AI built actually does something? So we made the dream product of every aspiring entrepreneur a game called Sexy Face that would get you laid. The idea was we'd show you a set of faces that we pulled off of Flickr and Facebook and everywhere else we could grab faces. Because in my defense, it was years and years ago and no one was thinking about whether it was right or wrong. And you'd select the faces you thought was sexy and that damn thing would figure it out. So if you have something for Southeast Asian mutton chops in the sense of omwe, it would actually figure it out. As long as you didn't have a foot fetish, I guess. Although as it turns out, I looked into whether there are foot image databases for foot fetishists. There are. I can't unsee that. It's a horror story. But we built this thing and we were able to demo it. And here was our pitch for free. We'll let you come in and find everyone you think is Sexy and for $5 we'll find everyone who thinks you're sexy. But it was all a scam. Once you played one round of it, a Trojan a scam. It would confess it's just a mind reading game. Come up with any face category and we can guess what it is. So the getting laid thing was just our hook. You'd show up and you'd select some faces, Happy Chinese female. And it would figure it out without having to tell us it was really cool. And it was really just meant to be a demo to show some of these venture capitalists that our system actually worked. And wouldn't it be Amazing, as one VC said, if we could read students minds? No, AI cannot read your mind. But a lot of VCs are not nearly as smart as they think they are. And so a line like that gets you somewhere. So along the way, though, we got to build something amazing. In training this system and having people show up and make their silly choices, our system actually learned not just about faces, but about how we perceive faces. And how we perceive faces turns out to be deeply, fundamentally part of how we experience the world. So the truth is, this ridiculous sexy face system was actually meant to find orphan refugees. At the time we were doing this again, years and years ago, there was this book, and this book had a million photographs in it, A picture of every orphan refugees in a camp somewhere in the world. And if you're living in Damascus and you haven't heard from your sister's family in Aleppo in months, and you fear the worst, you go to a camp in Jordan and you start leafing through the book and you cross your fingers that you'll find somebody. And we thought if we could take our technology and maybe make a little iPad system and you could select the face and choose. You know what? My niece looks a little bit more like this kid and a little bit more like this one, maybe it could work just as well as our silly little thing that found sexy people. And sure enough, we did a trial and we found that, you know, if your niece was in a camp somewhere in about three to five minutes, you found her. I got to build once the first AI to treat diabetes, and I got to do it for my own son. But this thing is something I think I might be as proud of as that whatever happens, my son will probably have a wonderful life. But these kids, I can't imagine anything worse. So we built this amazing thing. We could save lives and transform. And then I got cold feet. It was my first startup. No one wanted to fund education. We were running out of money. I didn't know how we were going to make our own next rent payment. And so we said our apologize and we pulled out of the project. And it is the single biggest mistake I have ever made in my professional life. Professional, even though we weren't being paid, even though it was completely a philanthropic project, I came back just months later and we rebuilt the whole system when we were ready to go. But the moment had passed, and I've regretted that ever since. I shouldn't have cared whether I could make my rent or not. If we built this and released it, people would be alive. And there is a project called Refugees United, which has saved thousands and thousands of lives doing exactly what we're trying to do. But we could have helped and it shouldn't have mattered the cost. I would have paid. And so I learned from that. And I've never made that mistake again. Everything I've done in the latter part of my career, and I've had the chance to do amazing things working on my son's diabetes, I built a system that could predict manic episodes and bipolar sufferers just using their mobile phone so we could warn them ahead of time, before they were oncoming. I have been able to build AI driven economic models to measure what we call the tax on being different and to look at the power of representation. The more women, the more black people in leadership roles in companies, the smaller the wage gap gets because it tells everyone that their hard work will actually pay off. And we've gotten to do all of this and so much more because what I told myself was that it's not about me and it's not about my happiness, it's about whether I'm serving my purpose. And what's amazing is that insane idea of I don't care whether my companies make money, I don't care whether my projects will ever actually work, just that they might make a difference has been the deciding factor of the last 20 years of my life. Except for that one moment with sexy face. And I've never made that same mistake. And I've led the most amazing life. A life that has been able to transform so many others, whether it's diabetes and bipolar, or hiring or building systems to measure the impact of social media on people's long term life outcomes, or dozens of other projects that my little mad science incubator has been able to participate in. So what is courage? If I've never studied it directly, what does all of these experiences and this research actually tell me? Well, it tells me you should be a little skeptical about whatever self important smart person tells you on a camera or on a stage. But it also tells me that courage.

Isn'T something you just have. Courage isn't something you just get because you're a good person or because you have the right genetics. Courage is something you practice and you have to practice it a lot because if you don't practice it, that moment will come where every smart thing points one way and the right thing points in another direction. And if you haven't been practicing, you won't be ready. What's amazing is courage isn't just something you can practice. Courage is something you get to share. It's so much easier to see the right thing when your life is not pointing in the other direction, in fact, I would say courage is what happens when everything you want is down one path and everything you know is right is down the other. And sometimes what you want is billions. It's fame. It is something no one could say no to, but you have to anyways. And we are in short supply of that kind of courage right now today. But it's amazing to know that you can give it away, that you can actually make an impact on people's lives. I'll end here to say there was actually just a paper today looking at the world right now, particularly in context of things like mask wearing, in context of inclusion, Black Lives Matter and trans inclusivity and so much other. That is. In fact, it's the allies. It is people standing up and doing the right thing when it would cost them nothing to do the wrong thing. And they're visible and their peers see them. And that is one of the single biggest drivers of change along with representation. In fact, it's role modeling all the way through. So if you really want an amazing life, I've had one. I hope it continues for a long time. But if you truly want an amazing life, then give it to someone else.

Thank you.

I think that's all I have to say.

Well, that's a lot. Good morning to you, too. That's amazing. Okay, so I have a question for you, and then I really want to make sure that we get Billy Lewis, who has joined us today. He's the president of our global outforce organization. I'm interested in him being able to ask a question, too. But I want to go back to what you were saying about purpose and the courage behind that purpose. And I'm curious, in the work that you've done, you've done really big things. You've dreamed big. You've had big courage. And I can see how that can fuel bigger purpose, and bigger purpose can fuel more courage. And I'm curious from, you know, from where you stand. If you think the size of that goal or the size of that purpose, you know, is relative to that. That feeling of having, you know, a wonderful, happy life. If my. If my purpose is to keep a happy home and, you know, grow a phenomenal garden, is that big enough? Is, you know, or is that not. Because I think that there's. There's. What you're doing is you are a superhero, and I'm, you know. But not everyone maybe feels in this environment that they can be a superhero. So I'd just like to hear you pontificate a little Bit on the size of purpose.

Pontificating, pompous pontificating is a particular. I wanted to keep the alliteration going, but it lost me. But I am a professional pompous narrative. So it's interesting because I had two things to say in response to that, which kind of go in different directions. One is just what the research says, which is, you know, career as admirable it is, is not a purpose. And to say it's just about you, what you do with that career, how that career takes you through your life, that very much could be a purpose. And in fact, I think one of the things we've been able to do, I'm sure everyone's become familiar with the idea of contract tracing and we've been able to do this with a bunch of really big companies in some of our crazy mad science experiments is long before coronavirus was part of our regular vernacular of this planet. Contract tracing inside companies to map out the real social network of a company. And what we found is companies in which individuals felt they could express their purpose, were more productive. And that productivity was largely emerged because often people helped others be more successful. So that seemed to be the biggest mediator of some of the, let's say community level or company level benefits of purpose is if it's not about you, then helping another team or helping another person on your own team is just as valuable as doing it yourself. And suddenly you see productivity boosts. It doesn't mean companies need to change and recognize you shouldn't just be promoting people because they're the loudest person in the room. Recognize the value of collaborative leadership, of cross team support, these sorts of things. But so that sort of pushes in the direction of it has to be big, but it only has to be big in the sense that it's bigger than you. And it turns out, you know, that doesn't mean that it's gigantic. You know, even planting a tree, as silly as that metaphor may seem on the surface, is genuinely about something that's bigger than you. I don't mean the tree, but the fact that it will take so long to grow into something, the fact that you are passing it forward. But here's the other side of it, which is I do get to work on some big projects and some occasional little ones, and it's a privilege to be able to do that. But it started pretty modestly, about as modestly as it can start because my life started, my professional life started with homelessness. I flunked out of university. I ended up living in My car for several years. It was not fun. It was. It was really lonely. And when I finally got back a hold of my life, it took me years to climb back out of the hole. I mean, I pretty thoroughly ruined my life. So for me, the first steps of something that's bigger than me was just realizing everyone I was supposed to be, everything that I'd been told when I was younger, that I was supposed to win a Nobel Prize, that I was supposed to be this amazing person, or frankly, that I was supposed to be a boy, none of that mattered. It wasn't about me, it wasn't about my happiness. All of that had led me down the wrong path. I mean, as wrong a path as I could have ended up on. And so I just did small things. You know, could I get a job at a convenience store so I could pay my own rent? And once I confessed to my parents and not have to live at home with them, could I be honest with everyone in my life and say, listen, I found out I'm not this person you thought that I was. And again, it's paradoxical. But the amazing thing is I suddenly somehow find myself back at school five years later. I did my whole undergrad in a single year. And I got perfect grades in every class, the same school I flunked out of. And then I did as well as anyone's ever done and I got to go and do my PhDs, the places I chose. It was crazy. I've never had success like that in my life. So if my life sounds somehow outside the norm, just unachievable on some level, understand that it started with a decision. I'm going to be incredibly blunt. A night in 1995, living in my car, deciding not to kill myself and instead take the, if you might see it this way, very selfless act of admitting what a failure I was to the few remaining people in my life that cared. It started really small and I built that practice of going out and every step of the way learning I could actually do the thing that I didn't think I could do and I could do it better. It wasn't just magically overnight I am going to do all this amazing stuff. It was a long road back from the self inflicted disaster. So small steps, it doesn't have to be. I'm going to cure cancer. For it to be a purpose that moves you forward, it just has to be something for which you are willing to make a sacrifice. And maybe sometimes some of us find this in a moment in our lives where even a tiny sacrifice is a huge one. It leaves you feeling exposed. And that's your first starting point. That's your practice. And then maybe people that love you can help give you some courage. You can take next steps and go back to school, aspire to start a company when you've never done it before. No VC wants to give you any money. Each one of those is a small step.

For that moment in my Life.

I put 20 years into getting where I am. I don't go for a lot of big, splashy celebrity in my work. I just believe that what we do is meaningful. And the way that I understand that it's meaningful is that I'm willing to give away all of my money to do it.

You are fabulous. You are really fabulous. What a wonderful, wonderful mission that you're on. And I adore your clarity. And it's really refreshing to hear. Thank you so much for being with us. I do hope you'll come back and join us. And Billy, since we are at the half hour, I'm going to ask that you come back and join us again on another edition of Be well Together and come back and get some good questions in. So for that, for our time, that's all we have for today. But I really want to thank our amazing guest, Dr. Vivian Ming. And I really look forward to seeing all of you back here again tomorrow. So be happy and be well. Bye. Bye.