Self-Tracking And Storytelling To Make Sense of Your World: William (Bill) Welser IV (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of William (Bill) Welser IV’s talk titled “Self-Tracking And Storytelling To Make Sense of Your World” at TEDxPaloAlto 2024 conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Common Question

There’s a three-word phrase that we all hear multiple times a day. It’s used in greeting, it’s used in passing, sometimes to be polite. “How are you?” Now oftentimes the answer will be, “Fine,” “Okay,” “Good.”

My common answer is, “I’m exhausted.” But it actually doesn’t matter how we answer, because I’m here to suggest that we don’t know. Now I’ve come equipped with an example. My clinician colleagues and I set about on an experiment, and as usual, I volunteered to be the guinea pig.

Data Collection

I’m an engineer, and I love data, and I’ve collected over one million discrete data points on myself over the past few years. Now the experiment was an eight-week trial of me sharing small snippets of spoken word story multiple times a day for those eight weeks. And at the end of that period, we wanted to see whether I would recognize myself in the bits and bytes and patterns and trends that resulted.

My colleagues went through all of that data, and they shared some really interesting things about me. Like, it turns out that if I work out earlier in the day, like before noon, I have a trail of 30-plus hours of negative mood. It gets better. If I work out after 5 p.m., I have a reverse tail, a tail that’s about 20 hours, so not quite as long, but 20 hours of very positive mood. So needless to say, I am a nighttime gym-goer.

Testing Self-Knowledge

My colleagues did me one-up on this. They actually put together objective statements, yes-no statements that I could answer based on all that data. And before I knew it, I was thrust into a crime series drama episode. I was stuck in a chair, I was covered in wires, I was hooked up to a polygraph machine. They wanted to see if I knew me.

At the end, I was excited, because the person administering the test said, “You passed!” And I was like, “Boom! I don’t lie.” My colleagues said, “Not so fast. You failed.” I was like, “Wait, what?” They’re like, “Some of the questions where you should have answered yes, you said no.”

The Impact of Context

I was like, “Okay, wait, wait, wait.” Well, it turns out that despite the fact that I had shared all this information about myself and I measure all these things about myself with these wearables, I had convinced myself of a reality that was actually in conflict with my real experiences. Why is that? Well, I would argue it is because we are surrounded by context. We are in this context-heavy world. We are swallowed by it.

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Types of Context

And what do I mean by context? Well, there’s this baseline of information around us that I call our measurable self. It’s those things that we can measure. So our steps, our heart rate, all that sort of stuff. And yeah, that’s interesting, but it’s also episodic. Our context is what defines us moment to moment. And there are actually two types. I break it into two types.

The first is my around me context, my social, my cultural, my environmental realities. I mean, for me, it’s that I’m a father of three. I’m a husband. I live in Austin, Texas. I have two dogs that demand two walks per day. I run a company. I run it remotely. And likely, you will see me with my head down in the driveway at least once a week as one of my two sons destroys me in basketball.

There’s also this next piece, which is the messy, messy part. It’s your in me context. It’s what happens up here. It’s your emotional. It’s your mental. It’s all those things that just make up who you are. It’s the fact that I believe anything, absolutely anything can be done. I’m an introvert, but force myself to be extroverted.

The Subconscious Context

But it gets more interesting because I can dive deeper. I can dive deeper into my subconscious, my belief structures, my expectations of the world, the expectations that I place on myself, my biases, both good and bad, both known and unknown. I like to think of the subconscious as not why do I drive a Toyota truck, but what makes me associate with the idea of driving a truck in the first place. Context is super powerful.

Give an example about that. I’m very fortunate I have access to world-class experts. I was interviewing a world-class GI expert, gastrointestinal surgeon, a few years ago. He said that when he performed the most intricate physiological solve for someone in the operating room, that is only 30 to 40% of the solution. The rest of it is the person’s context, that around them context and that in their mind context. You see, because if they found themselves there because of some environmental situation, let’s just say because they weren’t able to eat healthy, and they are walking out of the hospital back into a food desert, then all you’ve done is prolong and not solve. Context is super powerful.

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Tracking the What vs. the Why

So I’ve committed myself to learning a lot of the what of me, and I raised my hands earlier and showed all these wearables, I like test every wearable, and it’s not because I’m obsessive about it, but it’s because I like to see how different they are. And in my company, we spend a lot of time looking at how that might change for certain people what their reality is. But I’ve gone a step further.

Over the past few months, I’ve subjected myself to whole genome mapping, head-to-toe MRIs, CT scans, and oodles and oodles of blood tests. The one time they took 18 vials. I was like, “Whoa.” And this gave me 300 gigabytes worth of data.

I have no idea what to do with it. It’s 300 gigabytes worth of my what, but it doesn’t have anything to do with my why. It doesn’t tell me about why my blood sugar does certain things when it does, why I sleep well one night and not the other night, it doesn’t tell me my why. And the why is so important, right? Because the what is not what drives our decision-making, it’s the why. The what is not what drives how we operate in the world, it’s the why.

The Need for Better Decisions

And we really want to make better decisions. I mean, I’ve run a bunch of surveys over the course of my career, and the most recent one was of 1,000 people, demographically complete in the sense that it was across the U.S., it was representative of the population. Eighty-nine percent of adults said they wish they knew how to make better decisions. There’s a follow-up question, which said, “Making better decisions requires self-reflection.” Sixty-five percent of those people said they were probably not willing to be that vulnerable.

But we need to be able to make better decisions, because I would state right now that as we sit, decisions are being handed to us. We are pawns in other people’s games. We are not informed agents. When we go to the doctor, we’re moved around from here to there. Financial advisors do this, do that. We don’t come in at an even footing. I’m not saying we don’t need the experts. We absolutely need the experts, but we need to know our why as we walk into that room.

Uncovering the Why Through Storytelling

So how do we get to the why? I’m convinced, and I’ve bet my life on the fact, that it is via messy, unstructured, free association, no punctuation, run-on sentence storytelling. And I’m not talking once upon a time. I’m talking about, give me 60 seconds of your day yesterday, but just do that every day. Because once you do that every day, you establish these patterns and trends, these aspects of yourself that you wouldn’t otherwise understand.

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And yet, sometimes you’re going to uncover things that you wish would stay buried. So it’s a little scary, but you do need that why. So if I’m going to collect all this spoken word data, and I have 300 gigabytes of what? I mean, that’s a lot of data.

Using AI as a Tool for Self-Understanding

So I’m a zealot about artificial intelligence. It should be used for us, a tool for us, not on us, but for us. And this is a beautiful space for artificial intelligence to be used, to use algorithms to distill yourself down to what are my patterns and my trends, my behaviors, my expectations of myself, my expectations of the people around me. AI can be very useful in that space. We should not fear it when we have control of it.

And if I’m doing that, I no longer am a statistic. I am not a 77th percentile of men my age living in Austin, Texas, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m me. I’m me. And that’s where we should all be.

Democratizing Self-Understanding

And if we can do that, then just like Uber democratized transportation and Airbnb democratized home sharing and PayPal democratized finance, we would be democratizing ourselves because we would understand the why of our what. This is a big request. It’s a big ask. It’s a scary ask.

But I challenge each of you, the next time you are asked, “How are you doing?”, you need to pause, take a deep breath, lean in to the discomfort, become comfortable being uncomfortable, and think about your why. I promise you, if you were this deliberate about trying to understand yourself, you have a much higher chance of living a healthier, happier, more content life and being able to truly answer, “How are you?” Thank you.