Transcript of How to Create a Meaningful Life in the Age of AI: Jennifer Aaker

We are a fun family, and that is what fun families do. And I would hear these stories about regret, but also the sheer exuberance of a life well lived. So I wanted to share with you a few of the regrets or wishes that many people did mention in those last days that my mom would share with us.

One is authenticity. People often wish that they had been more true to themselves, not live the life that others maybe wanted for them. The second is boldness. They wished that they had taken bolder risks, they’d moved more, they’d take bigger risks, that they weren’t so focused on the status quo or doing what was potentially predicted. They wished they moved more, shifted more, and reached more. And the third is love. They wished that they had the chance to say I love you one more time.

And I always thought it was really interesting, because it wasn’t always like, you know, the partner or the kid or the parent. It was often like one person who you hadn’t seen in a long time, but, you know, maybe there was a falling out or maybe not, and you just didn’t stay connected. And that’s what people often thought about in those last days. So another reason to be honored to be here at this reunion is just this ability for you to be able to stay reconnected to all these people that documented, they populated, that defined your life.

Living Better Through AI

So when I’m asking this idea of can AI help us die better, what I’m really asking is this idea, can AI let us live better? And so what I wanted to do here with you today is ask some questions. One question that I want to pose is this idea of what would it mean to have AI in your lives create more beauty, more authenticity and truth, more boldness and love in our lives? And what if AI’s real power isn’t really speed, productivity, actually encouraging cost reduction, but actually helping us live in a very different way without those regrets? What would that look like?

I teach a class that Peter mentioned, AI for human well-being, and Fei-Fei Li, who is a professor of computer science, and I started teaching it in 2017. We taught it for three years. It ended on the first day that COVID happened. And so our last day, final presentations, people were presenting, and that was the first day that a Stanford student got actually COVID. And the class itself was a very hybrid-oriented class, half engineers, half business school students. And the idea was if you could start to understand what is actually human well-being, when and why did we get it wrong, might we actually design technology in ways that are really different, that might mitigate negative unintended consequences, might maximize the chance that human elevation could actually happen. What would that look like?

One of the students, we asked them always, you know, why do you take the class? And not one of them said that they were taking it for the technical abilities, but they really wanted to understand what does it mean to be human? One wrote, “I’m taking the class to better understand what is meaning, what is life, and what creates a meaningful life.” They got an A.

The Three Pillars of Meaningful Life

And so as we unpack this idea of what is a meaningful, beautiful life, what I’ll talk about drawing on these three or four different classes is this idea of authenticity, of living in a way that’s aligned with who you are and who you’re becoming. It’s this idea of not just presence, but a boldness in your presence, and this idea of living courageously, especially in times of volatility and uncertainty, which we’re all feeling in the day-to-day now, maybe more than ever, because of, you know, more macro-level factors that we’ve ever sort of experienced, at least in my living life, and connection. And I’ll define that as love and seeing others, serving others, and being seen in return.

Understanding Authenticity

So first I want to start with authenticity, and you might ask yourself, authenticity is, you know, perhaps an overused word, I would agree, right now, but why is it being overused? There’s a lot of different reasons. Human verification is something that actually, are you actually the human that you sort of pretend to be? That is actually something that’s becoming a bigger thing, but it’s deeper than that. It’s this idea of who you are in life and how aligned you feel.

Now it’s very hard to actually go be authentic, we found in our research, but it’s actually easy to feel it. So although it is very hard to understand what actually authenticity means in any concrete way, we know it when we feel it. Like this moment even feels more authentic. So the question is, how do we do that, and how do we leverage technology in order to live in a way that does feel authentic, given all of our demands and responsibilities?

Death Doula Insights

And what I want to contend is, we need to go back to death in order to understand how to answer that question. I became a death doula, fun fact, two years ago, and so a lot of this was your role, the death doula, like a birth doula, is to actually be present and support in moments of crossing over. And so I’ve been honored enough in the last two years to be able to help, not necessarily always in the actual transition, but in helping those who are holding the hand of someone who actually is crossing over. So if you die or plan to die any day, I am your person.

And as I was doing the death doula training, one of the first stories I was told actually through my mom is, this is not the exact correct accurate story, but this is the way I remember it. It had a huge impact on me. So, Zae Zeus was a woman. She heard that if you die, the divine comes to you and asks you a question, and she wanted to know what this question was. So she managed to die and then come back to life, and her friends came around her and said, did you get asked the question? And she said, yes, I did. I wish it was how much I learned, but it wasn’t. And they said, well, what was it? And she said, I wish it was how much did I accomplish, but it wasn’t. She said it was “Zae Zeus. Why weren’t you more Zae Zeus?”

And I think this is such a profound point about this idea of understanding what is success in life, how might you think of it, at a moment. here, right now, where you all find yourselves, what is your metric of success? Have you been able to be more Eric or Patty or Tan? Like, have you been able to be more of that since you left here? This question of authenticity suggests that if you think about ways that allow

PROFESSOR JENNIFER AAKER: you to live in alignment with the things that are truest to you, it allows you to think in very different ways. I love this quote, which is, “At any moment, you have a choice to make that either leads you closer to your spirit or further away from it.” One of our TAs, Avi, he said in a talk here at Stanford, he’s like, “I don’t know if it’s change lives, change organizations, change the world, but maybe the best way to do it is to change the moment.” And so, in this moment, you have this choice of how to show up and to be more Brent or whoever you find yourself to be.

Now, the question is, back to AI, how do we think about technology at this moment of time that allows you to be more you? And part of this is about knowing your own story.

Teaching “Humor: Serious Business” in the Age of AI

So, I’ve been in a ridiculously lucky place to have been able to teach another class, “Humor: Serious Business,” for the last 10 years with Naomi Bagdonas. Everyone say, “Hi, Naomi!” Hi, Naomi! And Connor Diemen-Yeoman, who, it’s just been a joy. Like, I am constantly, constantly amazed that we get this job, that we get to teach what we hope to teach, that we get to be more Jennifer. We get to integrate in research in ways that hopefully connect with students that feel authentic. It’s just, it’s such an honor, this field. Anyway, “Humor: Serious Business” is one of those classes that I feel lucky enough to teach every day.

Here is the teaching team, right here, and we’ve got Malika and Caden and John, who are teaching team members. What’s happened, not just in my “Lead Power of Story” class, in our “New Type of Leader” class, but in this “Humor: Serious Business” class, someone on the teaching team will go, “Well, I’ll just create a custom bot for every homework assignment.” So, we have started shifting.

Flipping the Ratio: From 80-20 to 20-80

Now, if you think that, as a teacher, you spend 80% of your time giving the same sort of feedback you did last year, even if the class is quite strong, it’s still very similar feedback, 20% of your content is truly elevated, or it’s new to you. And the question becomes, how do you shift that so that the teaching team members and the students have the flip ratio, so that we’re doing 80% more elevated work, because we’re here to connect with our students, not to do the same sort of thing. And so, how do you shift from 80-20 to 20-80, and how does that affect the teaching team, and how does that affect the students?

So, in this case, we got John, and we have Connor, and they go create custom bots, and now the students have the opportunity to, well, first of all, we ask them first, you know, like, “How many of you are using AI to help assessments?” Like, shockingly, I’m sure that 15% were lying. There’s just no way that that is not 100%. And then, when you say, “Okay, well, why are you using AI to help,” you know, a lot of it is ideation. A lot of it is helping, or coaching, or thinking of these technology tools in ways that augment, don’t necessarily eliminate cognitive thinking. Now, we can debate this a lot, but at least from a self-report and word cloud perspective, there’s a lot of ideation that comes along with this.

So, the question is, how do we take all of our content, our book, our decks, our final projects, our homework, you name it, all of our cases, and then create, you know, our custom bot for the class?

Signature Stories and One-on-One Connections

And so, if you think about what that looks like, you know, you’re starting to share your, what we call signature stories. In fact, students are right up here at CEMEX. If anyone wants to come on May 27th, you can, you can sit here. And it’s the best six hours of my life, honestly, each year. These are one-minute signature stories that students share that are meaningful stories that are laced with levity.

And so, they work with this bot in a way that allows them to iterate, such that we’ve been able to take our extra time and meet with 100% of our 80 students. So, we’ve met with, like, over 25 hours of one-on-one time at Coupa with our students because of the ability to sort of shift our time. And then, we’ll go deeper on what they did on their own with AI, and then we’ll be able to finesse it.

So, what’s so exciting about this is that not only that, but our bot now is used by people not in the class, you know, because they’re starting to use it. So, the education is opening up. Not only that, but there is this ability for the teaching team to feel more elevated, more personally connected with the students. So, it’s this idea of really not just opening up, but also shifting our energy.

Another quote that I love is this idea that “We have to give more energy to what’s true to you and give less energy for what is not true to you.”

Creating Leadership Handbooks with AI

The other thing we do in the class is we have, this is brand new, by the way, we have what we call a leadership handbook. So, the students get a prompt. And so, Connor created this GPT Pro prompt to use deep research. By the way, if anyone wants this, I’ll give you the deck. Just, we’ll figure it out. Or, you can just email me and I’ll get it to you. But, there’s a pretty sophisticated prompt. The students get that, and then they start creating their own leadership handbook that allows them to better understand what is authentic to them.

So, one example is my leadership handbook is here. I’ve got my bio with a little bit of levity. We’ve got my values, words that are important to me. We’ve got my guiding principles, my humor style. If you go to humorseriously.com, you have a style and it talks about how does humor show up for you. And then, there’s all the sources that where this deep research mind. And then, once you get that back, you obviously say “That’s not authentic to me,” or “That was my past self, not my current self,” and then you edit it. And that exercise is interesting in its own right.

Learning from World-Class Leaders

Not only that, but the students actually get to know all of the guests. Last week, we had Adam Silver from the NBA, Deb Cupp, president of Microsoft, Bob Sternfels, who Peter saw, CEO of McKinsey, and Wyman Howard, the former head of the Navy SEALs. Those were the four people in the class. You can’t imagine the ability and the thirst for the students to get to know these leaders. And so, then they do their own homework and they develop their own leadership handbooks of how they think these leaders lead, and so they know them more.

Patty Poppe, the remarkable CEO of PG&E, came in, what was it, like two weeks ago, to talk about leading with love. What does that look like? And she has this great story, I’m not going to cold call you, but where she doesn’t walk around with an entourage. When she started becoming a CEO of PG&E, people were like, “Where are your people? Where are your people?” And she’s like, “You are my people. You are, we are together.” And these small little signature stories illuminate what does it mean to lead with love, one of her guiding principles.

The students now know the leaders in such intimate ways. If anyone wants to open up the class and have that content and start playing around with the bots here, we have an invitation to do so. You can also, all of our material is something that we hope can open up a little bit and democratize a lot of the bespoke learning here in ways that can be elevating more generally.

Authenticity Makes Us Unpredictable in the Best Way

So in a world increasingly shaped by systems that predict and optimize and calculate, this idea of authenticity makes us unpredictable in the best way. How do we use technology, in fact, to be able to enhance what is true to us?

Understanding True Boldness

All right, boldness. What’s really important about boldness is to understand it’s not about being courageous. It’s really just about being open to change. There’s a strong misperception that it’s this idea of being perfect and strong all of the time, but in fact, having the conviction to manifest that authentic version of yourself in the world in which you want to inhabit is, in fact, what is bold.

I would say that being in education right now, being at Stanford, is, in fact, bold in some ways. We aim to and try to do things in ways that are not just aligned with our overall mission, but are, in fact, unique to us. Now, boldness can be found in these big moments and also really small moments. I had a friend who’s since passed on, and he shared this story. When I was teaching the Power of Story class, I had these 10 stories that all the students come in. Raise your hands if you took a Power of Story class or the Humor class.

Okay, so you might remember this, but there was a set of 10 signature stories that leaders would come in, and Bill Nguyen was one, and the students would pick, like, I want to hear that story, that story, and so he shared this one story of, he went through a divorce, had been married for quite a while. It was in Paris, and it was the first moment that he saw a woman in a Parisian cafe, and he got up the nerve to try and talk to her. He asked her out. She said no, but it was still very bold.

The Challenge of Change

This idea of being open to transformation, open to change, open to trying new things is such an important thing in this moment of time. There’s research to show that this is harder to do than you think, so in one set of studies by my co-authors, they asked individuals how much change, how much have you changed in the last decade, and looking back, people said, I’ve changed so much. I’ve changed my personality, my values. Then, right after that, they said, how much will you change in the next decade, and immediately, people said, no, I won’t. I’ll be myself, my own authentic self, right after they said, change so much. Humans are not necessarily rational. Certainly, people don’t have this innate capability to easily imagine how much we have the ability to change in the future.

Even neurologically, when we imagine change, the neural structures associated with fear and fight and flight get activated, so humans are not necessarily built to really enjoy change. And so, the question is, how do we get over that? Now, the reality is, our research shows that people are able to change significantly.

13 Million Data Points: How We Change Over Time

In fact, in 13 million data points, my co-authors, Cassie Holmes and Sonja Lyubomirsky and I, wrote a computer algorithm program that combed the blogosphere for all mentions of “I feel” and “I am feeling.” And so, we did a semantic analysis that would basically grab the data of “I feel happy and excited, I’m at the Stanford reunion. I feel calm and peaceful” or “tired, and did a polo all nighter, where’s my coffee,” and “I feel blank.” Now, because blog-based data, which is the data source for this large-scale study, has ages associated with it, we could basically cut the data across age.

So, the way to read this slide is, we start out simple. Raise your hand if you have a 12-year-old, 14-year-old. Okay, when you say, how are you doing, they say, “fine,” yeah. Like, what’d you do today? “Nothing,” all day, you did nothing. It’s breathtaking. There’s not a large emotional lexicon associated with a 12 to 14-year-old. And then we fill up with angst. So, around 15 to 18, our teens start to feel very angsty, and this data was collected before COVID, so it’s gotten exacerbated. When they do feel happy, it’s equated to excitement, which is a very angsty form of happiness.

And then we have feelings of confinement around 18, 19, 20. They start to feel like they don’t know themselves. Others don’t see them, and they don’t have the ability to know where necessarily are they going. And then we leave those feelings behind to go conquer the world, 22, 23, 24. Now, money, power, status, and the ability to get those things tend to correlate with happiness. Before gradually trading that ambition for balance, and now they start at 30, so they’re going like, well, I overshot there, I haven’t worked out in 10 years. They started blogging about their bodies, because at 35, they’ve gone downhill dramatically without them knowing. I’m not saying you, you look fantastic.

But, and then they started blogging about their children, and they’re only as happy as their least happy child. And an evolving sense of connectedness for which they feel grateful, happy, calm, and blessed. And it’s not that people die at like 60, it’s just that sample sizes get really small, so don’t worry. And so the meaning of happiness, and how much we change, is dramatic. Every five or 10 years, we’re changing in such fundamental ways, that in fact, what actually lights us up, what brings us happiness, what’s actually correlated with deeper sense of happiness is shifting really dramatically.

Embracing Transformation

There is people here, there are people here, if you all just close your eyes and think, oh my God, when I was here or in Littlefield, what was I like? I wanted to share a few of Naomi’s friends who are here, and these are all individuals who a few years ago, she went, I think, camping with. And these were all of the colleagues, and these are all the new beings. These new beings, since graduating here, new humans that actually created. So we all know, especially when we have kids, how quickly things change. The opportunity to be authentic and bold and loving is so short-lived, we have to embrace this moment.

How AI Can Help Us Be More Open to Change

So the question is, how can AI help with this? How can it help us be more open to change? One thing we do in our AI for Humanity, Solving the Unsolvable class, which is a class that was born from the class with Fei-Fei, but we’ll teach it in January. It’s really focused much more on this question of what can we boldly do that we thought previously might be unsolvable? So this is done with two dear friends in industry, and when I shared with them, as we were starting to prep this class for next January, what some of the biggest challenges that our previous students in the AI class said, you will see that those biggest unsolvable problems were all over the map. They came from this idea of hunger, inequality, education, learning. There’s opportunity to think about deforestation, climate. How do we actually tackle these societal problems? BGS here at Stanford is an incredible opportunity to start grappling with some of these societal problems, and the question is how can the students, because that’s what they’re facing, that’s what we’re thinking about, that’s how they’re trying to connect to these larger challenges.

The Evolution of AI: From Machine Learning to Generative Science

Now, as we start to see AI shift, we’ve seen that we’ve moved from machine learning, which is much more the era of data. Then we went to deep learning, looking much more at the era of neural networks. And then we started thinking about generative AI, which we’re all living in, in a very, as Peter said, text-heavy, image-heavy, video-heavy world that surrounds us. And then in our class, we think a lot about generative science. So how do you take scientific models that allow us to actually use those models rather than just large language models to predict where the breakthrough’s going to come in human well-being and society more generally?

So a couple of those examples, here at the Stanford Hospital, the medical center, there are faculty members who are doing really remarkable things with basically labs where they have AI that are working as lab, essentially in the lab, to identify and break through not just cancers, biomolecules, abilities to understand what are even rare diseases looking like, and then AI works with the individuals, the PhDs in the lab, to identify those breakthroughs.

Another example is Dr. James Evans at University of Chicago, who’ll use AI models to predict, again, like what I do, what a lot of us do, social science. models that predict human well-being, for example, and they’ll say, they’ll look at thousands upon thousands of research papers, something that would take me thousands and thousands of years, and they’ll look at conferences and unpublished papers and neglected spaces across different adjacent ideas in order to come up with hypotheses and then in time experiment and actually test those hypotheses, and he says that science and technology are the engine which drives human flourishing, and we need to flex our complete scientific and technological imagination to manage and lead it.

When we’re better at work, we’re bolder, so when we aim for boldness, there’s an ability to have breakthroughs that I think are really exciting. So many of them are happening here at Stanford. Again, if anyone wants to know a little bit more about what the hospital’s doing and what we’re doing across different domains, please let us know. So I invite you for this January class, if you want to participate,

even if it’s just to basically say what is one unsolvable problem you wish AI and our students could solve, this is just your name and a question about that, and I’m happy to keep you involved as we develop the course over the next six months. We would love to know what you want the students to work on, if only to spark more ideas of where unsolvable problems could live.

Connection: The Power of Love

All right, last is connection. This act of seeing others, making others feel valued, being seen in return, I use the terms love and connection in ways that are very interchangeable. Ultimately, connection is really about the act of approaching someone with love.

So I wanted to ask you all to close your eyes just for a few minutes. Now I’m going to ask you to take a deep breath in for five seconds or so, and then take a slow breath out, and let your body begin to settle. Now I want you to bring to mind as you’re breathing in again, someone who’s loved you deeply, picture them standing in front of you as you breathe out. See their eyes and their smile, breathe in, imagine the way they look at you, their face, how they look, and notice how you feel right now. In this moment, you feel seen and fully loved, and breathe out. As you start to breathe in one last time, I want you to recall a beautiful moment you shared with them. Let yourself linger there, and let it soften you. And as you breathe out, let that feeling live in your chest, and take that with you. And when you’re ready, open your eyes gently.

Research on Loving-Kindness Meditation

So when we do research studies, and we do that loving-kindness meditation, even just for one minute, and we’ll do that for like half of our subjects versus a signature strength. So we’ll have those individuals do the same meditation, but really focus on a signature strength. What we find is when we give these two conditions a set of questions, they dramatically shift their strong differences. These individuals say that they actually experience happiness as calm and contentment as peace, kind of like the 50-year-olds did in that green graph. These individuals define happiness much more as excitement, and they want to feel good, and pleasure is more important. These individuals are much more likely to do pro-social things. So there’s other researchers that watch what these individuals do. They’re more likely to give up a seat at a bus to someone else than this set of subjects. Kids that are trained on loving-kindness meditation are much more likely, about 23% more likely, to give away their stickers.

When love exists, grace follows. And so the question is, while AI cannot bridge all of our differences or heal our deepest wounds, it can help us to show up with more grace. This has implications, right? What if someone just sort of steals your lunch? You’re in the lunchroom, someone steals your lunch, where do you go? And you can kind of think about yourself moving from this idea of, I am furious, like leaving that note, to this idea of, I’m sensing a growth opportunity for both of us.

AI Tools for Thoughtful Connection

Personalized AI tools can help you show up thoughtfully. My AI assistant knows that I like to ask questions, like instead of, what do you do? What do you love to do? It knows that instead of saying, thank you for your ideas, I like to say, I love what you did, thank you. I never like to sign off with best. Best is quite literally the worst. There’s nothing like, I respect you, vaguely, that is captured in best. I see one of my sons, the one I love the best, back there, have I ever signed off with best? Do I ever sign off with anything but? Oh, I’ve got another one, let’s go. I like how you bookended it, that’s really beautiful.

Fun fact, not only is my family trained on always signing love, I remember Andy, my husband, he’s like, I’m always going to sign off with love, and I’m like, no. You can just do like heart, or like L. And so he’s like, okay, but text who? I’m like, mm-hmm. It got so bad that our kids started in high school, accidentally, because they weren’t thinking while they were texting, they would just send their friends, like, love you. And so it spreads, right? I mean, this is good stuff.

Living a Beautiful Life

This idea of what is love, at the end of the day, I’ll argue that so much of this is captured in this idea of living a beautiful life, one of authenticity, boldness, and connection.

I wanted to share another story. This is Safi Bakal, and he’s a friend of mine. During COVID, we decided to get together and do these weekly Zooms. He’s in Boston, and he wanted to talk about happiness, because he thought that was a lot of the research that we did. The research by Iris Moss and others shows that when you talk about happiness once a week, like what was your happy moment, you’ll actually get less happy, because you have higher expectations. It’s this very ironic effect. And he’s like, well, what do we do? And I said, well, let’s talk about what is a beautiful moment.

So beauty is often ascribed to a person, an object, an art piece, a thing, right? We often associate it with aesthetics. But in fact, you could think of it as a moment, an experience that you have. So I’d like you all to close your eyes one more time and just think back in the last week, what is a recent beautiful moment that you had?

Sharing Beautiful Moments

Does anyone have anything that came to mind you’d be willing to share? Raise your hand. Okay, we’ve got one volunteer. Is there someone over here? Oh, we’ve got one in the back. I wanted to. Thank you so much. Let’s see. Do we have? Yes, perfect. I think there was someone there. What’s your name? Hello. Oh, goodness. I should have raised my hand. Okay, my seven-year-old was having a complete… Wait, what’s her first name?

Hi, I’m Shobani.

Hi, Shobani. Class of 2010.

My seven-year-old… Woo-woo! Let’s go! Oh! My seven-year-old was having a complete meltdown. I have three, and she’s the one who likes to seek vengeance and try to raise the earth if anybody has ever tried to wrong her. So I had to take her out for a walk, and she was really, really, really having a whole time of it. And she and I just kind of walked around the block, and then she had this moment where she looked up at me. She’s this big. And she just paused, and I could tell she felt completely seen. That felt very important to me. It made me feel very, very happy.

Oh, I love it. I love it. First of all, when people share these beautiful moments… Hopefully we’ll have another volunteer in the back. They remember, it’s visually vivid. Like you remember probably what your daughter was wearing, like the moment, how you felt in that moment. Bill Hader was breaking in that moment. There was something very beautiful and real and authentic about it. And these moments are much more memorable. I’ll talk about that in a second and why that’s so from a neurological and a social psychological angle.

Is there another beautiful moment in the back? I saw someone over there. Thank you. And shout out your name and your year.

Ilana, also 2010. I guess we’re representing. I was yesterday, just my roommate from first year. We hadn’t seen each other in four years hugging. It was just the moment of hugging.

Oh, I love it. There was a new faculty member, David, when I asked him what’s a beautiful moment, he goes, I remember walking in the GSB, the faculty office buildings, and I walked in and I just saw my first colleague and we hugged and the awe that I felt in that moment. It was so simple. It was so innocuous. It might’ve felt mundane, but there’s a moment in electricity and authenticity. And again, the visual vividness, the sensorial touch oftentimes transforms very mundane moments into something that could in fact create awe.

Finding Awe in Beautiful Moments

Our research and Dacher Keltner’s and others’ research shows that when you feel awe, it’s when you feel small and the world feels big and you are in awe. But it’s often like when you go to Yosemite, it’s when you have a sunset, it’s something that’s, you know, a tornado’s coming at you. What’s powerful about beauty is that you can find a beautiful moment in the smallest of moments with your daughter, with your roommate, and I encourage you to just take these next two days and just

Write down what those beautiful moments were as you reconnect and start to think about what might it look like to actually create a journal of beautiful moments or find a friend here and on Sundays for the next year, just share a beautiful moment on a Sunday. You can just take a picture or you can go through your camera wheel. It’s so easy and you will feel closer to that individual.

We show in our research, this is work with Yu Ding, Su Qi Wong, as well as Louise Yu who’s a PhD student here, we put people through a month-long study and we’ll connect with them either every day or two or three times a week and we’ll either put people in a beautiful condition where you’re experiencing these beautiful moments and they’re sharing them back with us or happy moments. Now you think these are both very positively valiant moments, but they’re extremely different.

What we find over time and the effect increases substantially is that over time, these individuals not only increase in their everyday mindfulness and self-awareness, like I feel like I know myself more, but they also report 20% greater memory accuracy two months later of those moments. You know how memory slips and time fades and we don’t really remember what we did last week? These moments are an antidote to that flaw in the human conditioning and we have enriched perceptions because where, for example, happy moments are seen as positively valiant, beautiful moments are visually vivid, sensorially tagged, and so neurologically, we know where to go when we start to think of those moments.

Beauty isn’t about perfection. In fact, you could argue that beauty is the antidote to perfection. It’s about presence. It’s about the feeling of being deeply alive. In all of our studies, when we ask people, do you want to stay in that moment? People disproportionately say yes.

Making Love Visible

So the question is, how do we make love visible and how we live, lead, and connect? Sustainable human behavior is a class that I teach with Su Chi Wong and what we do in our class, it’s a compressed class in three weeks, is we have the students get in groups of four. It’s like two Stanford Door School students and two GSB students. So they don’t know each other. They’re in a little WhatsApp group and they share every day a beautiful moment with each other. It accelerates how close they are and the project they’re going to work on. So they go to the Stanford campus experiencing these beautiful moments.

And so we pull together that data set and they start to analyze it and you start to get at the sentiment of what they’re experiencing when they’re experiencing these beautiful moments. And beauty, by the way, is not always positive. Like there’s a lot of crying or hard discussions or challenging conversations. I’m not saying it’s Pollyanna. It is not. That’s the beauty about these beautiful moments is that you can have a beautiful moment out of a very hard conversation but you leave feeling somehow aligned.

Anyway, we’ll take all of that data and we’ll put it into Dolly and they start to create art and visual images of what is a beautiful experience. And then we’ll actually create the art and they’ll frame it and they’ll bring it home and I encourage you to think about what does this mean for you? What does this mean for you in this weekend? And how can you take a part of this research in these classes to create an ecosystem of beauty for yourself?

AI as a Tool for Connection: The Wildflower Case

A case that we did is called Wildflower. Seth Kumbar is the CEO of that, the same co-author as my semantic analysis We Feel Fine data set. In a network of over 70 Montessori micro schools that he creates, they use an AI powered machine vision to keep tabs on how young students learn and play and move around the classroom. So it’s a Montessori classroom and they’re very independent but what these sensors do is basically see when a child is alone or sedentary so as to allow the teachers to be aware that no one should slip through the cracks and to be able to be aware of unconscious biases impacting the way that these teachers interact with the children. So using AI to surface those patterns and help teachers connect and share love with everyone.

So the point here is that AI can’t teach us to love but it can express, it can allow us to operationalize love, express love in ways that are true to us more clearly and with more care. So even if AI can’t create beauty, it can train us all to see it and it can’t replace humanity but it can help us become more human.

I love this quote. I know your days are precious on this earth but what are you trying to be free of? The living, the miraculous task of it. Love is for the ones who love the work.

So we have a choice. AI can be banal or it can be beautiful. It can automate or it can amplify. It can flatten our humanity or it can help it flourish. It’s ours to choose.

A Final Story About Love and Human Connection

So to conclude, I wanted to share a last story about my mom. So through the process of crossing over, what we learn is that in those last moments when someone might seem anxious, it’s often good to actually play a song that they loved as a child. And so I’ve taken this to an extreme. Every person I meet, certainly all my friends and family member, I know all their favorite songs. It’s in a spreadsheet. We do the analysis. So if anyone dies, I got you as a DJ.

And one other thing that we learned is that the sense of sound is the last to go. So even if they’re in a coma, talking to them is actually quite productive. They can hear you at some level. And so when Marty, my second mom and my mom’s best friend, when she crossed over, my mom instructed us all. We have like a second family and then our family and we were all in the hospital. And we put our hands on Marty with these little sort of false gold. She has like go to Tahoe and like dig in rivers and find like, you know, fool’s gold there. So we had little fool’s gold and a heart on her.

And so we were all holding hands and she and my mom knew that Marty’s favorite song is “This Little Light of Mine.” And so we all started singing it. And how many of you know this song? Okay, so you know how it’s like, you know, this little light of mine, I’m going to let it shine. Now our family is tone deaf, so it was truly, truly bad. But it felt like she loved it because she crossed over smiling.

And this idea of knowing when AI is not too useful when your human presence, holding your hand, singing poorly, is in fact the antidote to technology that can go awry. When we have the choice to put down the phone, put down the technology, and just be and change that moment, that is the honor of being human.

Conclusion: Expanding What It Means to Be Human

So, I wanted to leave you in this incredible next weekend that you have with this idea of when you go into a room, see if you feel authentic. If you’re wondering whether to take a risk, take that risk, even when it feels uncertain. It will always be at least a good, funny story, which will then color your lives with like, I can’t believe I did that. Yeah, don’t blame me. I’m just saying, like, it’s on you. I’m just saying, like, go for it.

And this idea of love. It doesn’t necessarily need to be verbally expressed. You feel it when someone looks at you in your eyes and you feel seen unconditionally, known, and loved. So, if we use AI to deepen our authenticity, embolden our choices, and strengthen our connections, then we’ll expand what it means to be human.

Thank you so much. I love you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Really. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

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