183 - Exploring the Impact of Artificial General Intelligence on Humanity and Education with CYPHER Learning's Graham Glass

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Graham Glass, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the CEO and founder of a company called Cypher Learning. Which can be found at cypherlearning.com. Welcome.

Indeed.

So, so tell us a little bit about your backstory before we get started into, into what makes you tick.

Yeah, I grew up in the UK, as you can probably tell from my accent. And I was really, I was very lucky. I had a great childhood. I went to one of the top 10 schools in the UK called Haberdashers, which by the way is still doing great. They keep on winning robotics contests. All over the world, which is great. And, uh, I do remember being in one of my classes when I was about 17. My math teacher was a PhD in math, which is not usual, and everyone in the course was having a great time. The kids were having a great time, the teachers having a great time, and I remember thinking, you know what, being a teacher might actually be a pretty fun job. And that was the first time that that education thing kind of like tickled in my mind. And I kept coming back to it again and again throughout my career. But I'm a computer science guy as well. I was one of those teenage guys programming Sinclair computers.

I gotta stop you right there. I learned how to program in Beginner's All-Purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, BASIC language.

Yeah, of course.

1969.

Yeah, I learned BASIC as well. Actually a great language.

Way— and I learned it from the guy that invented it, John Kemeny. He was the president of Dartmouth College where I was attending college.

That's, that's interesting.

Um, anyways, you became a computer nerd.

Yeah, well, so, so I am— I definitely have a strong technological background as well. So I did my undergraduate degree in computer science and, uh, in University of Southampton. Then I was offered a position to work in the PhD program in UT Dallas, so I came all the way to Dallas, Texas. That's where I got my experience in living in that part of the country, and I really had a great time. And while I was there, I got a call out of the blue from one of the professors saying, hey, Graham, would you like to teach computers at UT Dallas? Which was weird because I had no teaching credentials. I'd never taught anything before. But I thought, yeah, I think it would be good fun. And I think I hearken back to my days, you know, back in the UK. And, and I remember I was so unprepared. So my first lecture was— my entire notes for the lecture was literally written on the back of an envelope. And I was teaching something called Unix and C, which is not an easy thing to teach. And I walked in that day and I absolutely nailed it. It was such an incredible experience. And I still remember I could not go to sleep at night. I would just have this incredible buzz like that was Incredible. And just think, if nobody had asked me to do that, I might never have discovered that aspect of myself. So I ended up doing a lot of teaching, teaching all kinds of computer technology. I got a lot of, you know, teaching chops as a result of that. I honed my philosophy on how to be an effective educator, but I was making very little money. And then the business part of me is like, this is not really that great for your bank account, Graham. And by, by good luck, some of the people in my university class work for Texas Instruments. And so the TI guys, and by the way, I used to program the TI calculator, so I've got a little bit of a soft spot for TI anyway. They said, hey, Graham, would you like to come and teach the same stuff at TI? And I'm gonna share a little tidbit here because it is fun. So I remember thinking, how much am I gonna charge them? Because I was making so little money at UT Dallas. So I thought, hmm, I'm gonna charge them $3,000 for a week, which I just thought was like outrageous. And they go, okay. It's like, hmm, that was too easy. So I had a great time teaching, started teaching in corporation, and then a few months later they go, well, you know, I said, well, I'm gonna have to raise my rates a little bit. How much do you wanna charge? $5,000 a week.

Okay.

It's like, that was too easy. And then I found out my competitors hated me cuz they were charging $10,000 a week.

Wow.

For teaching this stuff. So I suddenly realized, hey, actually being a professional instructor on a hot technology is actually quite a good living. So I actually built an entire company. I started hiring instructors and we were teaching this stuff all over the United States.. And that's where I got a lot of my experience in educating in corporations, which is pretty different from teaching at universities. Right. Um, but then the technological part is like, you know what, I'm a, I'm a builder and teaching the same stuff week after week, month after month is not really doing it for me. And I had a hobby. I was building my own supercomputer in my apartment in Dallas based on some new chips that had just come out. But I, I thought it would be better if I started another company that was a software company. And so I, I started a company called The Mind Electric and we were doing some really cool innovative stuff in distributed computing. And so I kind of like put the education part to the side, but the computer science part was really good fun. And I was lucky, I sold that company to WebMethods back in the early 2000s. And then I got to the point of, if I'm gonna do something next, what do I wanna do? And I decided the intersection of those two things, education and the high tech, that's where I wanna be. And that was the genesis of Saifur Learning.

And what does Saifur Learning do today?

So we have a cloud-hosted learning platform. And a lot of people wonder, what is a learning platform? Well, there are variants of it. But if you're familiar with Blackboard, or Moodle or Canvas or Docebo. These are all companies in various K through 12, higher ed. They don't create content that of their own. They provide a software platform that you can log into and build courses. And there's various degrees in sophistication and user experience. So we wanted to build the world's most modern learning platform. And so that's basically, that was our goal. But ultimately, if somebody says, what's Cypher Learning all about? It's about helping people to learn faster. That's it.

Okay. Learn faster. And so, and so how, well, I don't want to go too much into the business because I want to learn more about you, but, but I'm just curious, what are some of the methods you use to help people learn faster?

I'll just give you a couple of examples. So the modern learner, when they go to a learning platform, they expect a beautiful learning experience. They want the courses to be really dynamic and engaging so that you retain information. And so you've probably heard of things like gamification, getting points and badges as you go through, or adaptive learning so that it automatically figures out your strengths and weaknesses and adapts accordingly. Those are the kind of things that we allow people to do really easily. But the biggest thing we're in right now is AI. And this is the dawn of a whole new generation of education and we really wanna make it happen there.

Wow. So amazing. So as you think about it today, you've been in the business, you've been in this business, what I think you said for 10 years.

Longer, it's like 13 or something.

Whatever it is, it seems like, it seems like 2 lifetimes. You You've been doing it for a long time. What is it that gets you excited and gets you up in the morning to get you motivated to work?

Well, I have to say, I've always had a very strong passion for education. I loved as a kid being educated very well. And then as I grew older, I loved educating other people. And I do remember when I was teaching at UT Dallas, I got really good at teaching Unix and C. I invested a lot of time and energy and I built up my course notes and they gradually got thicker and better and more enjoyable. But I do remember thinking back then, it's like, if only there was a way to deliver this material to millions of people, it would be extremely rewarding. Because I always felt, I felt a little bit sad, honestly, because I knew that I wasn't going to do this for that much longer.. And I felt sad. It's like I've got all this concentrated information and it's just gonna be lost. And in the end, I actually turned it into a bestselling book.

So I, I was gonna say, it sounded like that was a book that's about, about to be burned.

Yeah. And I'll tell you what, here's just a little side thing. I, I'm really big into, um, just trying, just trying stuff even though you might fail. And I remember I made it into a book and I thought, you know what? What have I got to lose? I'm going to send a copy of this book to Prentice Hall, to Addison-Wesley, a few others. Why not? So I sent them all out in my— I was living in my one little apartment in Dallas, Texas. And, and about a month later, I got an inbound from Prentice Hall that said, this book could be a classic. Every reviewer loves it. Would you like a book contract? So that's just an example where you put yourself out there, doesn't— there's no guarantee. But if I hadn't have done that, I never would have got that book. And that book, by the way, paid for a fantastic sports car called a Lotus Esprit. So, so, and, and, but if there had been a platform like the Cypher platform, I could have taken everything that I had known and made it electronically available. And I probably would have made millions of dollars. To be honest with you. But in those days, there was no platform like the Cypher platform. So, right, writing a book was your best bet.

Right. I'm curious, do you have any of your educational material on your platform?

Uh, not, not the, not my old material, no. Um, but I've got it in a bookshelf in my office. I've got a series of books that I had written. So, uh, have good memories.

Good for you. How many employees does Cypher Learning have?

Cypher Learning? It's got a little over 100 at this point.

And are you guys— you guys are presumably kind of hybrid or remote?

We are fully remote. There's actually an interesting story about the genesis of Cypher Learning. I mentioned that I'm a hands-on technologist as well as a business-minded person. And so in every company that I've done that's a product company, I've always built the first version just on my own, which is a really nice skill to have because you don't have to raise a whole ton of money and build a whole engineering team. So I was just in an apartment in San Francisco with my laptop and I started building the first version, but I thought, well, I really need graphic design because I'm not good at graphic design at all. So I found this excellent person in South Africa. It was recommended by a friend. And she is, she is now still with us, Disciple Learning. She's doing an amazing job leading up our design team. And, but it was just, I never really thought about South Africa, but my friend recommended her and it worked really well. I would like leave her some notes in the evening, go to sleep, wake up in the morning, response from her. And then I got to the point where, well, I need to get the system cloud hosted. So I found someone in Alabama who is still with Saifur Learning today and heads up our entire DevOps team. And then I needed some technical support and I found someone in Romania who is still with Saifur Learning today. And then I, and so it wasn't like some master plan, but I do remember thinking hiring the best people wherever they are is actually a really nice way to build a company. So, and that's how we've continued. So our CMO is in Florida. I'm here in California. Our CRO is in Florida. Our VP of Engineering is in Dallas. We've got people in South Africa. But I love the energy that comes from having that global organization.

Whereabouts are you in California?

I'm in a place called Marin County.

Oh, the few, the proud, the Marin.

Across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The few, the proud, the Marin.

Yeah, it's a beautiful place.

I've been there many times. My mother-in-law lives on Nob Hill in San Francisco.

Oh, yeah. I live down just south of Yosemite National Park.

Park or watching the weather come in.

Yeah, yeah. I know what you mean. We've been watching the same thing.

Yeah. So what is it, as you look back on this really interesting career you have, what do you think that is unique about you that you bring to the table that's made this whole enterprise so successful?

That's an interesting question. I would say I'm quite a rare combination of deep personal expertise in education and deep high-tech experience, especially in new areas like AI. It's like you can build a company with different expertise that all blend. It doesn't have to be all in one person, but the fact that it is all in one person with me is quite rare. And a lot of people, as they, as their business grows, you know, someone like myself would, you know, gradually fade away in terms of my technology. But I'm still a hands-on person. I still write a lot of the AI code, but I've surrounded myself with really excellent C-team who handle the business side. So, you know, I basically said, there's a vision for the company. We wanna allow people to learn faster. And from that, with that vision, there's a lot of business things that happen. Which I'm not an expert in. I've never claimed to be an expert in, but I do have, you know, decent ideas that I throw into the pot. And, uh, so I think that's a relatively rare combination.

Yeah. That is unusual. How, AI is relatively new. I mean, at least in the public eye, it's ChatGPT has been out a little bit more than a year now. Um, yeah. How do you get in? How do you get into learning about coding AI, which seems to me to be a very different type of skill than other kinds This is part of the rare combination.

So even when I was a kid, I loved anything to do with intelligent machines. Star Trek had the Star Trek computer. There was a really good English sci-fi series called Blake's Seven, and the main ship computer was this massive monolithic thing called Xen, which would talk in this really deep voice. And I love Xen. I thought, oh, if only there was a way I could have my own kind of AI. But then there was one, and I know it sounds like just a story I tell, but it's actually true. So there was one episode in Blake 7 where they find out that all of these different empires are all rushing to this one planet to try and steal the most valuable thing in the galaxy, but they never tell you what that thing is. And towards the end of the episode Blake and his crew managed to get there before anybody else does. And they walk into this room. And in the room, there's this tiny little box. It's like 1 foot square. And they go, what's going on? We thought there was going to be diamonds or, you know, and they turn this thing on with this little switch. And it wakes up in a squeaky voice. And it says, my name's Oreck, which happens to be short for Oracle. And they're like, why is this thing the most valuable thing in the galaxy? It's like this tiny little machine. But what you find out is, is the inventor of ORAC was the inventor of all of the computer chips that were in every single thing in the whole galaxy. And ORAC was the only thing that could tap in and control that entire network.

Oh my goodness.

So it's actually a galactic supercomputer. And I remember as a kid thinking, that's so profound that it's powerful because it harnesses this distributed network. It's not implicitly powerful on its own. And that actually changed the way I thought about technology for the rest of my life. Like, I've got patents in distributed computing architecture, and it's because of that insight. So, and then when I was at UT Dallas, I wanted fun projects to teach. So I taught, we're gonna build a neural network simulator. And I was one of the founding members of the Dallas Metroplex Institute for Neurodynamics. I used to study bat brains at the UT Health Science Center. And, and so building and looking into AI has been my lifelong constant thing.

You're not a Johnny-come-lately to the party, obviously.

I've been thinking about AI since I was a kid.

Wow.

But the ChatGPT thing was a catalyst. Like now this stuff is becoming real.

Right.

And so all of the ideas that I have thought about over the years Bam, we're building them really quickly. Wow.

I'm just curious, where do you see all this going?

That's another good question. That's a very good question.

That's a long, I mean, there's probably a year.

Yeah, so.

You were seeing people, some people are saying it's the end of the universe and other people are saying this will be the most amazing thing that's ever happened to humankind and everything in between.

Yeah, it's very hard to predict. So, you know, I've got my own predictions about education. I think it's overall going to be a huge boon. Because I think everyone can have their own 24/7 personal assistant helping them with everything related to their education. And that's gonna be a massive thing. Like, you could be somebody, you know, in a really poor country with very few resources, very few teachers, very few schools, but for an internet connection, now you can get ac— and it's not just like Google. It's not just finding stuff. It'll actually teach you. Right. So that's one thing. I think the bigger picture, a lot of it is in our hands. I'll share something with you, which is a little bit controversial, but I've, I've watched a lot of videos about AI. And one of the most profound things, but I have to admit, slightly disturbing, is they were asking someone about AI and they go, a lot of people put AI or AGI, artificial general intelligence, in the bucket of a tool. And they look at it like it's a calculator or it's the internet or something. This person said that's a categorization error. The way to think about AGI is it's a new kind of life. And when you put it in that bucket, it changes the way that you think about how this stuff could potentially unfold. And I do tend to agree with that. It's not there yet. But I think it's quite inevitable. And I think there's lots of different outcomes. Like, I'm a huge fan of Demis Hassabis, who's the head of Google AI. And he and I are both fans of this book series called The Culture series by an English author called Iain Banks. And in this series, which is like probably the best outcome for humanity, is humans actually do build these AI super AGIs way beyond humans. But they have a symbiotic partnership. So humans accept the fact that these things are much smarter, but they also get rides around the galaxy with them and they use them to do their own thing. It's almost like they live two different lives, but there's a symbiotic relationship. So AGIs could help us to solve fusion, increase longevity, cure diseases. They could do all these wonderful things. On the flip side, though, if humans decide we're going to try and destroy AGI, then if you believe that it is really a kind of life form, then it's gonna fight back. So you need to be quite careful about how we, how we process this evolution of digital intelligence.

That, I didn't expect the conversation to go this way, but that gets me into something that is really interesting. And I don't know if you know anything about my background. I'm a lawyer turned peacemaker.

I do. I do.

And, and today I teach people how to listen to emotions because I, I, I, after all the research and experience, I, neuroscience points to one very important thing, and that is humans are not rational, they're emotional. And every decision we make is an emotional decision. And I'm very interested in emotional behavior because that's what we all engage in, emotional behavior and emotional decision-making. And yeah, and how AGI is going to differ because emotions are biological and organic. And I don't, I'm, really wondering whether or not you can possibly build in emotions into a machine. Because the— what makes us human is our emotion.

I certainly can answer your question. And I'm going to start by— you probably have heard of something called cognitive behavioral therapy, CBT.

CBT.

Of course, I've done CBT before, and it was fantastic. And one of the core beliefs about CBT is that your emotions are a result of a form of cognitive processing. In other words, I mean, there are some people that have massive chemical disturbances and probably feel an emotion without having any.

That's right. Emotions are constructed as a cognitive construct. We learn emotions. We're not born with them. Yeah.

And so part of CBT is if you're feeling— let's just say you're feeling really anxious about something. Okay, so, so your brain is processing, it has a series of beliefs that result in this emotion. But if you look at yourself and you go, I don't like feeling this emotion, how am I going to deal with it? Then CBT is examine all of your beliefs and challenge them and see if one of your beliefs is leading to that emotion and see if you can override it. And so a lot of CBT is don't get into doomerism, like, okay, let's just say that you did get fired from your job. Would you really lose everything? Well, yeah, maybe not. Would you be able to find another job? Yeah, I probably would. And then by changing those beliefs, you end up with a different emotion, right?

Exactly.

So the way I view emotions is that they are an aggregating signal of a whole lot of things that are going on in your mind. So think about the emotion of frustration. Frustration is an abstract thing. You can be frustrated by A thousand different things. But ultimately, it's because you have a goal and you're not getting to the goal and time is ticking by. But having that emotion, emotional signal, is really important because then you express it. Like, you can tell someone's emotion, which then allows people to help you or—

Right. Right. We call this emotional categorization. It's the ability to take affect, affective experience, turn it into a cognitive construct that allows it to concretize the affective experience into consciousness, which allows us to be aware of it, to name it, to draw inferences from it, to act on it, and also to communicate it to other people.

And exactly, exactly.

The only ones that can do this, no other, no other species can do that.

And so, and so the thing is, is that emotional signals are very, very important for cognitive function. Because if you're feeling frustrated, then you could do something about it. But if you don't have a signal and it's just completely distributed, there's no signal, it's really hard for parts of your mind to know what's going on. But my feeling is that AGIs will have to have emotion. I take it like, you know, and we'll, we'll, we'll distance ourselves from the experience because nobody really knows whether something experiences something or not. I don't even know whether you experience something. I infer that you do because I do and we're both humans. But putting that part aside, I think an effective AGI will need to have this concept of signals that mean certain things, like a signal of frustration is really important for any intelligence to reach a goal. And being happy is really useful because, hey, that was a reward. I did something good. I can do that more of it in the future.

So I'm curious about how we're going to substitute the whole endocrine neurotransmitter neuromodulator system that provides all of this stuff. For example, dopamine for happiness, cortisol for frustration, all that. I wonder how that all gets—

Well, so we are a biological organism, so we use chemicals for our signals.

Correct.

And they're diffuse chemicals, which is really important. So your nerves connect one-on-one or one-to-many for very precise cognitive processing, but signals need to diffuse. So they operate in different timeframes and different scopes. And I think that AGIs will have to have the same kind of mechanism, but they're not going to use chemicals.

Chemicals, right, something else.

So in the world of computers, for example, there is the concept of a bus. A bus is like a series of signals that various parts of a system can tap into and detect and send each other messages. So while there will be specific processing occurring in fine-grained, there will also have to be some form of diffuse communication. But it's not going to be a chemical, it's going to be a digital signal.

Wow.

You could say 1 means frustrated, 2 means happy. And there might be, you know, 50 of those things.

Well, this will be really interesting to see to see where this all goes. Well, we, we kind of— this, you, you got me sucked in here.

That was really good fun though. I don't know if anyone learned anything about me, but yeah, learned something about AI and other, other things.

Yeah. One, you got me going here, man.

Let's keep going. I'm, I'm good.

I'm curious about, you know, this show is called Listening with Leaders because what I've learned in my work is that when you listen to another person into existence by listening to and reflecting and validating their emotions, you literally calm the brain down. The scanning images show that when you engage in this process of affect labeling, that the emotional centers of the brain are inhibited and the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex are activated. And that has an immediate effect of calming people down when they're angry or upset. And it has the effect of creating loyalty, trust, and intimacy. When people aren't upset, but you're just really validating and listening to people. I'm just curious in your work, both on the business side and the computing side, how important has listening been in terms of the development, your personal development and also the development of your company?

Well, it's very important. I mean, you know, I think lots of people have different opinions about things all the time. And that doesn't mean their opinions are right.. But if they have a feeling like, hey, I've got a really good idea, but no one's listening to me, that's just frustrating. And I would feel frustrated as well. Right. So I, you know, everyone who knows me knows that when it comes to business or technology, I'm pretty much egoless. I literally don't care where ideas come from. And in fact, I actually love it when other people have these much better ideas than me because I feel like I've got a great team. And we're working together really effectively.

Yeah, it makes you really happy. Yeah.

And, uh, I, you know, especially in the world of engineering, there's nothing worse than some, like, egotistical guy in charge of stuff who's, like, forcing bad ideas down everyone's throat. It's, it's a total drag. So, um, so I definitely think that you want to get all the best ideas. You want to listen to people. You want— people want to know that if they have a good idea, there's a opportunity for them to share it. But I will mention aside, I've got two young kids. And my youngest kid, believe it or not, is 3 years old.

Wow.

And, and my wife and I, we have different parenting styles. But I found that my parenting style works really well with my 3-year-old. So my 3-year-old will be crying because of some particular thing. And I just say, Truman, in a tell Daddy what, you know, why are you, why are you sad right now? Because Mama, you won't do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, do you know why Mommy doesn't want you to do that? No. Okay, here's the reason. And I actually tell him the reason for this thing. And I found that when I just talk and ask, and especially asking questions with kids, if it's just one way between the parent, but immediately you engage them, you ask them a question, their brain now, like the part that was crying, is like now being sucked into, hmm, let me answer that question. And then when everything calms down, and you're just talking backwards and forwards, and they realize, hey, this actually makes sense. It's not a punishment. It's actually grounded in reason. It usually works great.

The learning process. The other thing you can try is when, when Truman's crying is just validate his emotions for a minute or two, and then do exactly what you're talking about. Truman, you're really sad, you're really unhappy. Yeah, frustrated.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Just label his emotions. And then, and, but it does.

I mean, my wife is usually quite surprised because she doesn't think that a 3-year-old— oh no, age in that kind of stuff. But they can totally. It's fantastic to watch.

Absolutely. That's really cool. Well, one more question. I'll let you go, Graham. What is one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I used to sing opera at the Royal Opera House in the United Kingdom.

Get out of here. Really?

Yeah. So I've always loved singing ever since I was a little kid. But my school, Haberdashers, was really lucky because it was a feeder school for the, for Covent Garden with the Royal Opera House, because we were based in Elstree, and it was quite close to London. So anytime they had a performance of something like A Midsummer Night's Dream, which has fairies in it, or Carmen, which has street urchins. They would come to our school and say, hey, we'll take the top 15 boys, uh, and you know, we were all like 13 or between 12 and 14, right? We'll take the best singers, and, and we— so it would be really good fun. Like, we'd perform at night at the Royal Opera House and then come back by minibus, and then the next day you're just back to school.

How's that?

English again?

Is that Oh, that's amazing. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Graham. It has been a real joy talking to you.

Oh, likewise, Doug. I had a great time chatting with you. I really appreciate it.

Absolutely. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media. To let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.