Lia DiBello

[00:04:15] Sean: Lia, welcome to What Got You There. How are you doing today? 

[00:04:19] Lia: Good. How are you? 

Lia’s Mindset

[00:04:20] Sean: I’m doing really well. And I just want to dive right into this. I know you love rapid iteration and accelerated learning. So I am really intrigued. Is there a mindset of yours that if you could just pass on to anyone early in their career, just starting off, you think would just have considerable positive benefits for them throughout the rest of their career?

[00:04:39] Lia: I guess. Assume that you are always missing something, that whatever you’re looking at, whatever you’ve concluded that you’ve missed something and that you should start looking for it.

[00:04:54] Sean: Why that mindset? Why did that get so ingrained in you and why have you found the value in that?

[00:05:00] Lia: Because it’s always led me to a better idea and if you can get comfortable with that, it could yet it can actually be a lot fun.

[00:05:08] Sean: Oh, well, Lia you’re hitting on one of those, like the uncomfortable nature of that, right? Is that something you’re born with or can you train that up?

[00:05:15] Lia: I don’t know. I do know for a fact that you can train it up because that’s what we do and that’s why we game-ify accelerated learning. The way we do it is we game-ify that exploration and that iterative trial. And I think it’s part of our DNA. If you look at children and how children play, when nobody’s watching them, they try things, they fail, they try it again. And they’re very attracted to novelty. 

That’s why games are fun because things that you think will work, don’t work and you get to try again. And it’s the basis of humor, the unexpected. It’s what, even for children, even for babies, it’s what’s funny, something that you didn’t expect. And if you can get that back and always look for that unexpected and be comfortable with it, it makes learning fun and it makes you a more adaptive human being.

[00:06:20] Sean: You mentioned children, I’m wondering, is there a recurring theme that even started when you were a younger child that has just been consistent throughout your life?

[00:06:30] Lia: You know, I tell this story and people don’t believe me, but my first memory is actually sitting on a blanket in front of my house. I wasn’t walking or talking yet. And I remember watching cars go by on the street, they’re just blurry objects. And I remember thinking, looking at the car parked in the driveway of our house and thinking that the car, the blurry objects going by were somehow the same and different from the car in our driveway that we get into.

And I remember thinking so hard about that and trying to figure it out. I was probably three or four months old and I became obsessed with that idea for a long time and I’ll never forget it. At that age, you don’t even have object permanence, right? You’re not even capable of seeing a car that’s moving and a car that’s not moving aren’t the same thing. And yet I was obsessed with some tangential similarity and trying to reconcile it in my mind. So I do think that that was the seed to everything that I do.

Constructing Simulations

[00:07:50] Sean: What’s the narrative been like in your head throughout your whole life? I’m just wondering, like, such an experience like that. It seems kind of obviously uncommon and most people haven’t experienced that. Do you feel like you’ve been experiencing and seeing the world slightly differently than most?

[00:08:08] Lia: Yes and no. I mean, I think we all are constructing a simulation of the world in our heads. We all live in a simulation of our own construction. If I’m different from other people, I’m curious about the simulations in other people’s heads. And I’m curious about how we co-construct simulations that we share. To the extent that we have a culture of practice between us, we share a co-constructed shared understanding. It’s really a shared simulation in our heads of the world.

[00:08:52] Sean: For you, I’m just intrigued. You mentioned curiosity there. I’m wondering when your curiosity was fully peeked. What was that initiation point where you really started down the path doing what you’ve been doing now for decades?

[00:08:55] Lia: I’ve probably been doing what I’ve been doing since I was 19. I don’t think I’ve ever really done anything else. I never had another job. Even when I had other jobs, like when I was in school, I made it into what I do now. So for example when I was in school in Boston, I worked as a contractor, as a troubleshooter. I would be sent out to figure out what went wrong in a company, like why something had happened. 

For example, there was a problem at a bank where a pension fund had gone missing. They couldn’t find the money and I was sent to figure out what had happened to it, like with a detective. And the way I figured it out was I said, what were people thinking? I didn’t believe anyone stole the money. I believed people had the wrong idea of where the money should go and they systematically deposited it in the wrong place for decades. 

Mental Models

And that’s exactly what had happened. So even then, I was trying to figure out what was the operating mental model and how did it get passed down to generations of workers that led to the disappearance of that entire pension fund? And what had happened was people mistook the name of the company for a similar company and all the money was in another company’s vault.

[00:10:54] Sean: So what’s been the key theme? If you were just distilling it down, that’s tied everything you’ve done together, is it about understanding those mental models and how people construct the world and then how you can understand that in a business perspective to add more value?

[00:11:10] Lia: Yes. And then in terms of expertise, how those mental models become refined and intuitive. How people understand domains in a more intuitive and first principles way.

[00:11:29] Sean: How do you define mental models?

[00:11:31] Lia: It’s a framework with which you use, that you assimilate to your situation, and it’s a way of clarifying reality for yourself. Like an expert physicist experiences the physical world very differently than we do. No, my partner, my domestic partner, he looks at a bridge and sees the differential equation and he says, oh, that’s a button at the back. And it looks like a bridge to me, you know, concrete, brick, whatever, but he sees the differential equation that was used to determine its shape and stress and how it was constructed.

[00:11:53] Sean: I’m wondering how you see the world then? You mentioned that the physicist sees the bridge differently. What do you see so differently?

[00:12:26] Lia: Well it depends, in business I see the organizing forces that are at play and how the value is created… I see businesses as a triad. The supply side, which is the operations, the market, which rationalizes the business’s existence. Like why are we here? You know? And the capital strategy is the heart. So, for example, there’s no market for buggy whips or for horse-drawn carriages anymore. So that business doesn’t exist because there’s no market for it. So there’s no reason to have an operational structure for it anymore. 

So anytime that there’s no market for something, the business tends to go away. Anytime there’s a market for something, an operational structure will emerge to respond to that market. And then there’s a capital structure, which is somewhat independent of both of those things, which is determined by the larger economy. So right now with stimulus funding and our new administration, the availability of capital to do interesting things, has a wider, larger structure that a smart CEO will use to raise money or not, to run their business. 

Like they may sell stock, they may use debt, whatever that would be, or your capital strategy for getting funding to run a business. But when the market is sparse, you have to be very smart about capital and operations. So I see businesses as being those three forces and I see expertise in businesses being able to manipulate that game board very well. I’m a fourth generation entrepreneur and… 

[00:14:44] Sean: Double click on the confidence that comes with that.

[00:14:50] Lia: I did grow up with grandparents who were very, very successful. And I grew up with…  we didn’t have a normal family where the parents go to work and they come home and they do kid things with the kids. I mean, I worked as a manager in my father’s business from the time I was 14 and we always talked about more. And when I visited my grandparents, I went to work. I mean, there was no bold line between business and other stuff. It’s just what you thought about and talked about. It was part of life. It was fun.

[00:15:40] Sean: Is that one of the keys though? Like you added there at the end, but it was fun. I’m just wondering… 

[00:15:46] Lia: Yeah. I think it was fun because what I learned from my extended family is business… I don’t think anybody in my family that was very successful, was ever good at working for somebody else. They were all entrepreneurs and they had a process of confidence in doing that and failing at it. I mean, some of my relatives were spectacular failures and got up and did it again and said, well, that was interesting, you know? I mean, they didn’t particularly mind that part of it. It’s all part of figuring that out.

Cognitive Agility

[00:16:32] Sean: Yeah. That element of curiosity, what can you learn from this particular thing? You brought up a few of those mindsets that seem to be really foundational. I’m just wondering, what’s the difference between let’s just call it like a novice versus people that can just rapidly accelerate their learning. Are there fundamental mindsets that those accelerated learners just have to have?

[00:16:55] Lia: I’ve had a lot of debates and practice with other people. I believe accelerated learning, the capability for it, which is cognitive agility is in our DNA. And I believe that the stuff that we’re trying to do with our technology future, which is game-ify accelerated learning, and accelerating learning through gamification. Actually the reason it works is because it taps into our primitive DNA. I don’t think human beings have biologically evolved in 170,000 years. 

And the reason that we survived all these extinction events, because we inherently learn from threatening events, you know, we learn from trial and error and through manipulating our environment and seeing what works. And I think having the chance to do that in a safe way and going in with the idea that we’re not going to get fired, we’re not gonna, you know, break anything important is the way that we all can develop cognitive agility.

[00:18:10] Sean: Just so I make sure the listeners are clear. How do you define cognitive agility?

[00:18:15] Lia: The ability to change your mental model when what you tried is clearly not a fit and you feel comfortable. And you instantly pivot to try and you learn, you let the environment teach you that what you’re doing is not going to work and you just try something else. You flex. We all have it when we slip and fall on the ice, we don’t get up and walk the same way and break the other hip. Right? I mean, think about yourself as an athlete, right? We all have that capability to flex when something is not working. If we can do that with everything, that’s cognitive agility.

[00:19:04] Sean: Oh, that’s fantastic. Well, you bring up athletics, I’m wondering, have you seen, because you’ve just worked with thousands and thousands of people who are cognitively agile or have cognitive agility, have you seen people transfer expertise across multiple domains? And if so is someone who conquers one domain or achieves expertise in that, are they more likely to be able to transfer it over to another?

[00:19:29] Lia: It’s hard to say. Certainly business people tend to be agile in business in general, but they may have disastrous personal lives, but it’s hard to say why. It might be because the people that they’re with are… I mean, what does it mean to be agile in your personal life? It might be, you know, making people put up with that. I think people who are incredibly talented in business are not necessarily long. In other words, there’s a price to being that successful and that agile, you may not have. One of my clients told me recently he’s very, very entrepreneurial, very ambitious.

We’re building an incredible application of our technology for him. It’s a whole new business model that’s never been done before. And he said, “I told my daughter when she wanted me to babysit my grandson, I can’t have an ordinary life. I can’t do that grandpa thing, you know, I need like 10 minutes maybe. And then I gotta go back to work.” I mean, they are like that, very intellectually curious, very driven. They really need to do their thing all the time.

[00:21:00] Sean: Do you see the people who achieved the most success with that, they’ve come to grips with that, right? Like I have to imagine a lot of people listening to this, are like, wow. The grandfather basically being like, Hey grandchild, not going to do this right now. I’m focused on business. So I’m just wondering, if they come to grips with this…  I’m thinking about this when I was talking to William Green, he’s studied some of the greatest investors of all time, and all the successes he uncovered, one of the commonalities actually is divorce rates are incredibly high in that. And so I’m wondering, if they’re just like, you know what, this is who I am. Actually, my greatest passion in life is my business. If those people you see, like that accelerated trajectory, just go up even faster.

[00:21:42] Lia: Yeah, I think you have to. I don’t have children and I think that I knew just from looking at my grandparents who probably shouldn’t have had children that, or it’s not that they shouldn’t have had children because if they didn’t, I wouldn’t exist. They needed to be more. I did very well having you know, parents and grandparents who were not normal grandparents. I liked it, but not every child can kind of get to that.

[00:22:22] Sean: No, I appreciate that. I think it’s helpful to understand the context there. 

[00:22:26] Lia: Yeah. I think I was the only one who visited my paternal grandparents every summer because I was the only one that could deal with it. And I might’ve been the only one of my brothers and sisters that was welcome. They may have said, you know, keep the other ones, take them to the amusement park, you know, just send the one that wants to hang out with us and our friends at business. 

I mean, it could be, when you’re a grandparent, you don’t have to pretend to be there, right? So I think that if you know your life, that you have to be honest with yourself and my mentor in graduate school, I know she really struggled with it. She believed that if you’re truly, truly ambitious, you probably should just admit it and not necessarily be a mother.

[00:23:26] Sean: How foundational was it for you to have a mentor?

[00:23:30] Lia: It was pretty important. I mean, I was one of the very first women in my field and I’m probably the only one still in my exact subfield, which is the cognitive science of expertise in business. And having two strong role models who were not necessarily supportive, but, you know, in the sense of being nurturing, but who did their work and survived was probably very important. Plus my grandmothers, you know, were born in the 1800s and we’re very strong, went to college and were successful in their own right. That was very important to see.

WTRI

[00:24:16] Sean: I’m thinking about all the lessons you’ve taken from the mentors. You mentioned this a minute ago of some of the things that you’re building, your companies are building some of the technologies. I would love for you just to add a little bit of context around specifically what you guys do. And then I actually want to dive into some of the exact details on that. So I would love it if you kind of lay out a framework for some of the things that you are actually building.

[00:24:38] Lia: Okay. Well my company WTRI, workplace technologies research was kind of a spinoff of the workplace technologies research labs, which I had at Sydney University graduate school. And I also was doing research when I was teaching it in UCLA, which is how I got to California. I’m at heart a scientist. I think that in my heart and soul, that’s who I am, but I also realized that to get the data that I needed, I really needed to be in business because I believe that if you’re going to look at cognition as it’s happening, you really need to go where I’m thinking is occurring and having a consequence. 

And there’s no place like that other than businesses and where economic activity is happening very fast and having a consequence. Plus I obviously understand business, so it was easy for me to do that. And you can just get so much data there. So from the very beginning, I was interested in business. And then in the eighties, when I was still in graduate school my mentor, Dr. Sylvia Scribner, who was interested in how cognition shapes culture, or how culture shapes cognition became interested in how local culture, like the place you work, shapes your cognition. She became very interested with the influx of technology, which was changing workplaces rapidly and dramatically. 

She was interested in how that could change the picture. Again, I was much more technically sophisticated than she was in her opinion. I had a job at IBM cognitive sciences labs. So I said, I’ll do it. You know, I’ll go in and look at how technology is changing cognition. And that became my job for her. And then I realized when I was doing that, that she kind of looked at how cognition changed by the time you’re an adult. I don’t think she really had conceived of how cognition then keeps changing throughout your life. So she looked at cross-cultural work, how people were different from different cultures, how people who are not literate, you know, literally who don’t write things down. 

They had extraordinary memories because they had to keep everything in their heads. And she’s famous for these dairy studies, in which people who have to fill crates of dairy orders without writing anything down, develop extraordinary geometric mathematical abilities because they get paid for speed and for limiting the number of crates. So they had this incredible ability to mentally simulate objects and space and fit the most amount, the smallest mass specs oh, better than PhDs in math. So she looked at that. What I looked at was how technology extended cognition. How people added to their cognitive space with technology and meshed with enterprise technologies like ERP systems, cycle based maintenance systems.

And instead of being displaced by them were empowered by them if they were deployed properly, that was what my dissertation was about. But also how their own mental models and their own levels of expertise and understanding of their own domains have changed by them in stage “life manner”. So we won’t get into too much depth there. It gets kind of squirrelly, but I did publish that work while I was still in school and she died while I was still in school. And I took over some of her research while I was finishing my dissertation. That was a real growth experience, stepping up probably being a manager. My father’s business prepared me for that.

I said, the work is important, it has to get done. I don’t care if I’m the student, I’m doing it. And fortunately for me the president of the graduate school said, you know, okay, he supported me. So when I did finish my degree, I got a lot of teaching offers, but I also had started a project in New York city transit for my dissertation. I did my research in the air brake shop. I helped them implement an ERP system and I worked with the frontline workers in the air brake shop. Many of them didn’t have high school education. And I got them through gamification to understand how to integrate their tribal knowledge of iron casting air brakes with modern supply chain technologies.

And it was very interesting work because I studied how it changed their concepts of time, item and quantity. Literally like when I post tested them, they had a whole different conception of how time works. It starts in the future and moves backwards. So instead of getting all this stuff, they need to make something like an adjusting case,they wouldn’t do it that way anymore. They would think about the future goal and get stuff only as they needed it. And it saves the property a lot of money, but more important for me as a cognitive scientist, they were unable to think about it the old way. And they had no memory of thinking about it the way they used to do it.

And I would show them videos of themselves interviewing with me and how they used to do their work. And they’d say, no, we never would’ve done that. That’s a stupid way to do it. I don’t know what I was thinking. The old way of thinking was gone. So that really got me started on maybe we can not only elevate expertise, but we can replace maladaptive mental models with new ones through reorganizations within occasion. So I moved out to California, I started teaching, I got a call from the head of New York city transit and he said, you know how you did this project with the air brake maintainers in Coney Island, and I said, yes. And they pulled me out of class. It was amazing. 

Some person came down to the quad and got me, of course, you know, the head of New York city transit is not used to waiting. So I was summoned. And it was a big deal. All the California secretaries were all upset, they thought maybe somebody in my family died. And he just wanted to talk to me. So he said, do you remember that? I said, yes, of course, I remember. What’s up? He said, well, it’s a profit center for the whole Northeast. These guys are cranking out air brakes for all the trains, including Amtrak. Wondering if you could do it again. I said, well, what are we talking about?

He said, ah, 3000 people, you know, the whole surface transit, all the surface transit. He said the federal transit administration wants us to implement cycle based scheduled maintenance enterprise technology. We’ve tried it twice. The workers threw the computers into the Hudson river. We need your help. I said theoretically, it should work. So let’s give it a shot. So for about a year and a half, I flew back and forth between the two counties and did it. It was the first six. I mean, I hired 40 people, but the point is that it was the first successful implementation cycle based schedule maintenance in the history of public transportation at the time.

[00:33:51] Sean: How old were you at the time of that? 

[00:33:54] Lia: How old was I? 

[00:33:55] Sean: Yeah, I’m just curious. 

[00:33:57] Lia: I was in my early thirties.

[00:33:59] Sean: Yeah. It’s just impressive. I just didn’t know if you were in your early twenties at that stage or how many years experience

[00:34:05] Lia: Sort of yeah. No, I had no previous experience. I just figured, well, you know, as I said, I have no children. It’s only me if I fail, so what? Let’s give it a shot.

[00:34:16] Sean: Did you actually have any, I don’t call major failures? The project was overall a success, but did you actually have any failures throughout that time? Because it seems like you’ve done a pretty good job. Not, not having these massive blow ups throughout your career.

[00:34:31] Lia: No, we had failures. I mean they’re mostly I would say controlled explosions. I mean we’ve had some really bad partnerships. You know, we’ve tried so we’ve had nothing devastating. In other words, we sell our platform through partners around the world and sometimes those partnerships don’t work out. And there’s no question that people have tried to steal my technology many times. We’ve tried to help them just to see what would happen and it’s never worked out and sometimes it’s gotten ugly.

The Future View Platform

[00:35:28] Sean: Can you just describe what the platform is?

[00:35:33] Lia: Okay. So what the platform is, is that we’ve actually gotten quite a bit of National Science Foundation and NASA funding to figure out why, what we do works. What is it that happens that accelerates learning and what’s our deployment model for technology that extends people’s cognitive capability? So we’ve cracked that code and we’ve actually published work about it. And we think that what’s going on is that people have a particular idea of how things work.

Let’s take a business person, they have a sort of theory of how to be successful and they apply it to a situation and it’s inappropriate for the time like the world has changed and that isn’t going to work. And so an example that I like to use is one of my grandfathers was a very successful manufacturing mogul, and he was successful after world war II because he was very good at getting lots of material. He really managed the supply side very well. 

He had everything you need to be successful at making a lot of stuff. Nowadays, that would be too expensive. Now you’re better off not having a lot of stuff in inventory and paying taxes on that and paying for inventory, building storage, et cetera. But after world war II, when there wasn’t anything, having it meant that you won the game. He couldn’t adjust to the just in time model when it became popular. Fortunately, he was old by then. He had a lot of money. He didn’t need to adjust but his company didn’t survive. 

So he thought that having as much inventory as possible was always going to be the way to win. What I’ve learned through the years is that people need the ability to iteratively try their mental model, no matter what it is and find out what’s not working about it because it’s probably only 10% of their working mental model that’s inappropriate, that’s causing them to fail. And the reason that most incredibly successful and incredibly agile people are the way they are is because they’ve had the opportunity to fail catastrophically or have control of explosions, a series of them and refine their model to fit almost any situation. 

So we’ve decoded that you probably need about 60 decision cycles to get to that point. And yeah, we created a platform where for any large problem, we give you the degrees of freedom to have 60 decision cycles in any direction no matter what your entry point into the problem is to figure out where the holes are in the model.

[00:38:59] Sean: So, with these digital platforms, it would almost be like a video game, right? Like a company could come in and they could play out these games, these simulations, where they could quickly learn how their models are flawed, correct?

[00:39:09] Lia: Yeah. Yes. So it would be a model of your business. So one of the big areas that we work in a lot is mining. So if you go on our website the Future View Platform, you’ll see a fly over of a huge line, and that would be one of our customer’s minds. And using LIDAR and engineering wireframes we can make their mining operation. And with our platform, we can actually attach all through APIs. We can put in all of the enterprise technologies that they want to try and using engineering wireframes, we can make the mind out to how they plan it to be in 2030. 

And we can say, okay, before you spend $1.2 billion, let’s see if that’s going to work. It never does, by the way. Okay. What they think is going to work, but they get to enter it and iteratively try all the stuff in compressed time that they think will work. And they say, oh, I see what you mean. Like the road is too far from the port. You know, just in fuel alone, we added so much to the lifting cost to the goal that we’re never going to make any money.  They get to see all that in 3D. 

So our platforms just for mining alone are for problems that are too big to think about any other way, except 3D. And then you can attach all of those technologies that you need to explore. That’s what the platform does. It’s very powerful. It has a huge backend. You can, and we’ve worked with insurance companies, mining, manufacturing, and you can visually see and log in and walk around and experience what would happen when your plan hits the road? Rubber hits the road. 

[00:41:21] Sean: First off, that is just so freaking cool. I obviously love that. I just love what you guys have been able to build and something that reminds me of how this conversation started is you saying you need these 60 decision cycles and it never works out the way they thought it was going to, but back to your mindset in the beginning, right?

Like there’s always something you don’t know. I’m assuming a lot of these moguls who come in, arrogance is probably extremely high. What is it like when they finally start playing with this and realize what their arrogance thought was going to be correct, they realize that there’s flaws there?

[00:41:58] Lia: You know, at the beginning they think they’re going to be the one in my whole career…  

[00:42:05] Sean: Still hasn’t been one?

[00:42:07] Lia: … that’s gonna nail it the first time. And then they start playing and it’s like we’re not even there. They’re in the zone and it’s like they’re in the Zen of exploring the world. And they’re one with the problem.

[00:42:33] Sean: Is that almost a metric when someone can fully immerse themselves into the problem? I’m just wondering if you kind of see a difference? Like the people who do the best with this are fully immersed and the people whose businesses long-term don’t do that well, they have difficulty getting that deep into it.

[00:42:55] Lia: I think that’s kind of up to us. I think that’s the one thing that the people who have tried to steal from us that they haven’t been able to. Which is, it’s all in the way we designed the product. We’ve gotten really good at designing the world, so it sucks people in and we haven’t really had somebody who doesn’t once they’re in there. 

We’ve even put EEGs on people while they’re playing our games and we get total brain engagement and we’ve put EEGs on people who play a normal educational game and there’s not total brain engagement. So there’s something that we’ve learned through the years where we’ve learned to design the world. Remember what I said in the beginning where we really live in our own heads, we construct a simulation in our own minds? That’s what we enable people to do, except that we’re controlling what they construct.

[00:43:57] Sean: Any chance you’ve published any of the research around the EEGs?

[00:44:00] Lia: Not yet.

[00:44:02] Sean: You don’t publish enough. Obviously you’re building all these massive businesses.

[00:44:07] Lia: I mean, everybody says that including Gary Klein. But no, I have not published that. I think we published a paper for a client. But yeah, what we look for on the EEG is the motor cortex, the right brain, lots of alpha waves, then we know that the world is working for that. And it’s more on us. It’s more, the world has enough to it. And what we’re trying to do is, you know, when you’re going about your life, you have so much history and so much past that’s operating to help you decide what to focus on. And you’re always learning.

You’re always assimilating your past to whatever happens. Like right now you’re assimilating your past in the situation and trying to apprehend what I’m saying in terms of that. What we do with a virtual world is we control a little bit of that process. Because we focus the attention of your adaptive unconscious, the way we want it to go. So our virtual worlds actually have a lot less going on than the real world, but your brain doesn’t experience it that way. 

It experiences that as a rich entire world, just like a movie, just like a great movie, right? A great movie feels like everything at the time, but it’s actually compared to the real world, just very minimal. And that’s the illusion that we want to create. And then we’ve got up and then we can manipulate them to make those 60 decision cycles the way we want to get them to a new level of thinking that’s better for them.

Object Permanence

[00:46:03] Sean: Believe me I want to dive more into the brain and the adaptive unconscious. So don’t worry. Let’s put a placeholder there. I’m actually really intrigued about the 60 decision cycles. When you think of a decision cycle, I know you’re immersed in this stuff every single day. Decisions cycles, do they have certain time constraints? I’m just wondering what a decision cycle looks like.

[00:46:23] Lia: Decision cycle can be very minimal. It’s all about agency that the thing that’s wrong with a lot of online learning is it’s too passive. I don’t know if you have much of a background in psychology and cognitive science, but there were some studies done many years ago with kittens. And what they did was they took these little kittens…  cats have extraordinary object permanence. That’s what makes them good hunters. Like a human baby that’s sitting up, if you move a toy behind the couch, the baby doesn’t know that the toy is still there. It assumes that the toy is gone. Out of sight, out of mind. That’s why the expression comes up.

It’s like taking candy from a baby. When you take something from a baby and hide it, it doesn’t know that it’s not completely disappeared. You have to develop the capability to realize that because you’ve taken it, it’s still somewhere, that for us comes a little bit late in our development. That’s called object permanence. And I think in human beings, it’s pretty late, like six or eight months. In kittens because they’re hunters, cats are hunters, it comes very early, like within the first week or two of life. And that’s why cats are such superior hunters. They know almost from birth, that something that’s disappeared behind another object, they know to look behind that object.

So these experimenters wanted to see how it develops in kittens. And it actually develops in kittens the same way it develops in us but much faster. So they took these kittens that were very small and put them in these little chariots and they were pulled around life by their brothers and sisters. So their brothers and sisters ran around and played and their siblings were not running around playing. They were being pulled around by their brothers and sisters and watching what was happening, but not having any control over what happened. Those kittens did not develop object permanence.

That the only way you develop object permanence or learn as a kitten is to have agency manipulating the world and controlling it, doing things and seeing what will happen. We’re very similar. And a lot of learning does not acknowledge that, we have passive content. But we really only learn by manipulating, interacting with the content, doing something to it and seeing what will happen. It’s in our DNA, it’s in the most primitive part of our adaptive unconscious, which learns much faster than our conscious awareness, which is a much later evolutionary development.

[00:49:37] Sean: Yeah. Any idea on the efficiency there? How much quicker can you learn with that?

[00:49:42] Lia: According to Vagner our adaptive unconscious learns 200,000 times faster than our conscious awareness, and has much greater capacity.

[00:49:54] Sean: So, assuming this is our approach, let’s call it the practice, then Anders Ericsson, the 10,000 hours. Did that essentially get debunked there?

[00:50:05] Lia: No, the 10,000 hours, we just ignore that we do that in six hours.

[00:50:10] Sean: You said six hours, right?

[00:50:12] Lia: For a bounded domain, not you. You’re not going to become Hemingway in six hours, but you could become an agile manager in six hours, not chronologically, not all at once, but six hours of gameplay over a period of a couple of days.

[00:50:30] Sean: A big takeaway right away is anyone who wants to increase their learning ability, instead of spending a hundred passive hours, you’d rather have five hours of just extremely, fully immersed in intense practice. Correct? 

[00:50:45] Lia: Yeah. Think of some of the new, more effective learning modalities as fully immersive language. That’s all there is.

The Structure in Adaptive Unconscious

[00:50:55] Sean: I know you, you set a structure of around five different things when you’re creating these. And please tell me if I’m wrong in any of this, but the first is creating one of those non-negotiable goals throughout the practice. Another one is just minimal and we’re gonna dive into these, minimal or little to no instructions whatsoever. And then you obviously use stress and time compression often to the extreme degree.

And then there’s the opportunity where you were just talking about those many rapid cycles and then clear feedback. I just want to set those five steps and then I want to dive into some of these. So we obviously talk about how that 10,000 hours gets debunked and talk about rapid iteration. Let’s talk just a little bit more about that rapid iteration. So when you guys were first setting all this up, you really thought about that adaptive unconscious, and how to tap into that, to condense these learning cycles.

[00:51:47] Lia: You know, in the old days we were like everybody else, we wanted to have teaching moments, right? We wanted to do reflective abstraction and have people understand what they were learning. And then we realized it just slowed people down and we got it. We were in there wet, and then we backed off. So we even had to learn that the adaptive unconscious really needs to be let go. People really need to be set free from their conscious awareness in a way. And we really need to set them loose in a way.

[00:52:31] Sean: This makes me think I may be completely wrong. I don’t know. Are you at all familiar with the book, The Inner Game of Tennis by Tim Gallwey? 

[00:52:35] Lia: I’ve heard of it,but… 

[00:52:40] Sean: It sounds very similar. There’s this video, I don’t know. It was from 60 minutes, like 30 years ago where he teaches someone who’s never touched a tennis racket in about 20 minutes, the same thing, right? Like you gotta escape. You gotta let them kind of forget or not even tap into that. And it seems like a lot of the work that he does or writes about might be similar here. But I want to dive into some of those five things and the first one’s this non-negotiable goal, and I’m just wondering what is the importance of that and how do you define those non-negotiable goals?

[00:53:09] Lia: Well, this is a very layperson way to put it.

[00:53:13] Sean: Don’t worry. That works great for me. 

[00:53:16] Lia: Okay. The adaptive unconscious is all about survival and it’s very binary. It believes that you’re either going to survive or you’re not going to survive. It’s very primitive. And then everything you’re learning is going to help you adapt for survival. So remember we have not evolved in 170,000 years or we’re not moving up in the evolutionary chain biologically. As an organism, we just have learned to learn, right? And we’ve always been that way. 

We just have a culture now that gives us more to work with. But our adaptive unconscious, when we are wrong we see it as a potential extinction event or something that we can’t survive. I mean, think about how you feel when somebody insults you or you’re lost, and GPS is wrong. I mean, it causes a lot of anxiety and yet you’ve never died in any of those situations, but you still feel very threatened. That’s your adaptive unconscious. We overreact at the adaptive unconscious level to anything that is something that we’re not prepared for.

So we take advantage of that in a way. And we say that you do have the answer, you just have to try something else. So, we also make our virtual worlds or our games kind of fun and a little bit cute too because we don’t want to activate any part of the brain like the amygdala, which would shut down. You don’t want to create a panic response. But when you are just calibrated through some sort of lack of fit, you do experience it as anxiety provoking. I’m not going to survive in the end and your brain automatically starts looking for another solution. But always in terms of a goal. 

Now, if it’s random survival, things can get pretty chaotic. So when you give the person a goal, like in a game which is why sports is so much fun, right? Because the goal is clear, it gives you something to organize all your activity and all your learning around. And that makes the whole thing a lot more meaningful and a lot more fun. It’s the same in business. When we give people a non-negotiable goal, which could be a stock price, it could be a return on sales. It could be all kinds of things like that. It could be several things and they could be vertically integrated. 

So in one of our games, you have to be a servant leader and you get scored on your emotional behavior and the way you treat people, every decision you make. Every interaction you have, you get scored on how you did it, but you also get scored on every business decision you make in terms of return on sales and your profits. At the same time, every decision has two consequences, and you’re always got your eye on both those things. This is extremely powerful in modeling people’s behavior and people adapt to that right away.

[00:57:04] Sean: You mentioned not trying to upset the amygdala too much. I’m wondering then how do you balance the time compression and the stress elements to the extreme? What does that look like? 

[00:57:16] Lia: You give people a way to win and you give multiple worlds to them. The best games are ones where you can win and then go back and win again, even better. But, you can also lose. So people always play our games more than once and they understand why they lost,when they lost. And clear feedback is the key.

[00:57:53] Sean: Yeah. I’m wondering, have you guys come across anything around too much stress? Are there any second and third order consequences? If there’s an element of challenge. 

[00:58:02] Lia: Probably, but by now we know what to do.

[00:58:07] Sean: Yeah. I’m wondering just because you were kind of talking about that survival instinct, has any of your research uncovered ways that we could actually improve survival rates in life and death type scenarios?

[00:58:20] Lia: One of the anecdotal things we’ve heard is we’re developing an anxiety treatment product right now. And the reason we’re doing it is because a lot of people who’ve gone through our business games have reported that even though we weren’t trying to do this, people handle stress and anxiety better because of our games.

And we think it’s because of two things, virtual worlds in general have been shown to help people manage anxiety and stress because they get to practice stressful situations in a safe way. But people who worked with us have told us that being able to win at these games, which for them are difficult situations that impact their jobs, has shown them that they have the power to solve difficult parts.

And that if they had an application that showed them that they had the power to solve other difficult problems in their lives, they would really appreciate that. So we said, okay, we’ll try that. But I think that that’s a message from the marketplace that people want a way to game-ify and rehearse difficult problems in order to not only develop the skill, to overcome difficult situations, but show themselves that I do have the capability to learn how to do it.

[00:59:58] Sean: Any idea when that will be coming to the market?

[01:00:01] Lia: Well, we had to apply for a National Science Foundation grant to develop it. And we wanted that because we wanted to make sure that the funding to develop it was not mixed with Investor funding that we have for the platform, because we want the science to be pure. And we are in the final stages of due diligence for that grant.

[01:00:26] Sean: Cool. Yeah. I know, even like in your research, one of the things you showed is that the teams perform much better than individuals. One of the things is because of stress, fear, that anxiety that kind of comes out in individuals. And once they get over that hump, like you were talking about, this plays out in other parts of their life as well. I think we all know people who are just extremely handcuffed because of stress, fear, anxiety. So that’s just really exciting to hear about. Anything else along the lines of like mental health that you guys are just like early on too, or just starting to uncover?

[01:01:02] Lia: One of the things I’m excited about is that there is an opportunity with the platform to democratize it and celebrate fun. I think everybody has the capability to learn and to learn fast and to learn over and over again, difficult skills and to increase their cognitive agility. And I hope that if we are successful in scaling the platform, that it will be available to lots of people who want to do that. People are very anxious about being able to keep up at work.

Scaling The Future View Platform

[01:01:50] Sean: I wonder if, as a CEO, what do you think about the actual scaling of the platform?

[01:01:57] Lia: Well, we do have an investor, WTRI is a research company, we did spin off our platform into another company called Applied Cognitive Sciences Lab. And that company is just for the platform. And we did that a little over a year ago to attract investors because we realized no investor is going to invest in a research company. And no investor is going to invest in us as personalities. People want to work with us because we’re well-known but they will invest in the platform if it’s scalable. 

So we started playing around with that, talking about looking at things in a new way. Right. So we said, let’s see if we’re wrong about the way we’re doing things. Let’s see if putting the platform by itself would attract an investor. And we heard from people right away. And so we’re now in the final stages of due diligence with a couple investors and they probably invest by the end of the year and put more on the team and then they want to grow the company to be quite big.

Right And Left Hemisphere of The Brain

[01:03:14] Sean: Very exciting. It seems like you’ve got a lot going on which I know stimulates that intellectual curiosity, but I definitely want to dive back into the adaptive unconscious and something that you brought up a little while ago is just tapping really into that right hemisphere. And I would just love to think or hear about your thinking around the left and right hemisphere of the brain and what most people do not understand, but you’re becoming more tuned to… 

[01:03:42] Lia: I don’t know if there really is. You know, I had a brain scan when I was working at Harvard for Dr. Chris,way back in my youth. I actually read with my right brain and I don’t know why, maybe because I’m right-handed. And everybody who worked for her had to have a brain scan. It was just part of the job. We had to clean the toilet and get a brain scan, and make her coffee. What they are metaphors for is linear processing, spatial processing. And I do think that there are different ways that we process information and that in different people it’s done differently. And the idea is that and certainly the language that you speak as a mother tongue definitely also affects the shape of your brain and also whether or not you’re an athlete. I think athletes have very different brains than non-athletes.

[01:04:56] Sean: In which ways?

[01:04:57] Lia: Well, you have to have a lot more control over your body and your brain is probably not just in your head. Your whole neural system probably has memory to it. I don’t know what sports you play, but you probably have a more integrated nervous system.

[01:05:17] Sean: Yeah. I played lacrosse. So a lot of hand-eye coordination. I definitely know what you mean with the immersive full body feel on things.

[01:05:27] Lia: Yeah. So I’m sure you’ve seen those people who lose an arm and they’re able with their thoughts to manipulate a robotic arm across the room. That’s because they connect a sort of electronic sensor either to their armpit or to something in their head. Your brain is not just in your head, it’s your whole nervous system. And for some of us, it’s mostly in our heads because we’re not very athletic. 

And for some of us it is kind of more distributed. And I think that what we really want to do is get the whole brain to work. And I think one way to do that is to use 3D platforms and get away from only symbolic processing, like with two dimensional and linguistic forms of cognitive aids. I think using 3D platforms like ours we’re actually returning back to our DNA. We think with the aid of tools.

User Tool Activity System

[01:06:41] Sean: Can you talk more about that? Clearly you’ve done a lot of work on it in terms of our actual DNA. And you mentioned we haven’t really changed it for 170,000 years. I’m just wondering what you think about that because what’s just like such common knowledge to you, might not be to a lot of other people.

[01:06:57] Lia: I think essentially human beings are tool users. We don’t just use tools. We are tool users. The essence of us is that we’re tool users and we’re transformed by using tools. That’s the difference between us now and us in the caves, is the tools that we use, we have an iPhone, we have computers and we instantly pick up tools, use them and are changed by that.

My father’s in his nineties and he uses a smartphone. He doesn’t need to be taught how to do that. He just picks it up, explores it, figures it out. And that’s what human beings do. And what I look at whenever you ask me what I see that’s different from other people, whenever I see people interacting with their environment, I don’t see a person using a tool. I see the user tool activity system between that. And I think that what we’re always trying to do is engineer the activity system and that what tool makers and technologists are doing wrong is they try to make cool tools and technologies. And that’s not the way to go.

What they try to do is engineer the activity system between people and technologies. So whenever we make the technology, we start with users and we make it with the user. You never make something, and then go test it on users, that never works. It’s like making a mind, right? It’s like you don’t design a mine and then build it. You always build a virtual world first and have people go in and try it and see if they die underground, which they usually do. So the idea is that you’re always engineering, I guess mining is the same way, a user tool activity system. That’s what it is to me.

[01:09:05] Sean: None of that makes perfect sense. I appreciate you expanding on that. Is there anything else in terms of neuroscience, this might be like really early on, that’s just kind of like catching your attention and you’re starting to explore further?

[01:09:20] Lia: Well, I think that’s why we’re so attracted to making ourselves bionic. Like I want to get my lenses changed. I don’t have cataracts yet, but I want to fake that I do so I can get new lenses. I think that we’re much more comfortable with being bionic because we are user tool activity systems. My doctor said that it’s natural to get old.

And she’s sort of trying to get me to accept that eventually I’ll get old. I said, you know, most women before 1850 or 1900 died by the time they were 50, it’s not natural to get old. It’s natural to die. For it’s only recently that anybody has lived as long as we do. So I think that we’re kind of in new territory with living this long, being intelligent this long, et cetera. Did I answer your question?

[01:10:39] Sean: Yeah. Honestly, I was just really intrigued about what you’re thinking about, so you could have said anything.

[01:10:44] Lia: I guess I should clarify that. So we always thought that the brain gets to a certain point and then cells start dying. You know, your brain grows to a certain point and then the cells start dying off. I think it’s at age 20 or something. We now know that’s not true. We now know that you actually add cells to your brain, all your life, just like the rest of your body and that you’re replacing brain cells and neurons your whole life, as long as you keep your brain active. And nobody knew that, I think until the 1990s.

[01:11:25] Sean: Yeah. It’s pretty crazy to think about. Once when school’s done that, that was it. Your learning was done. You stayed in the same exact job. For me, I feel like that’s an extremely empowering understanding that we can continue to develop throughout our lives.

[01:11:41] Lia: Yeah. Nancy Pelosi who was one of the most powerful people in our country is 80. 70 years ago that person would be dead. And a man named Warren Buffett, who anytime you see Warren buffet in the news, you go, oh my God, what did he say? Should I sell my stock? You know, he’s 90 and he’s still somebody that we listen to and read his column every day and he’s 90 and nobody’s saying, oh my God, he’s too old to be doing this.

[01:12:20] Sean: Yeah. Him and his partner, Charlie Munger, I think Munger is 98. And Buffett’s like 96. And they were up there on stage for four hours, a month ago just talking.

[01:12:30] Lia:  And people are hanging on every word, what should we do? And this has never happened before. And I’ll tell you a funny story. My father is in his nineties but looks about maybe 65. You know, my family is very long lived. And even before people were long, his mother was over a hundred and four, et cetera. And he had counted on dying at a young age. 

I take him to the doctor and his doctor says, well, the only thing wrong with you is we’re going to replace your heart valve, simple operation. You’ll be in and out of a hospital in a couple of days. And he goes, no, no, no, we’re not going to replace my heart valve, and I’m not going to have heart surgery. And his doctor says, well, why not? He says, well, because I’m going to die. I’m too old. And this doctor says, well, what are you going to die of? Because we’re not seeing it.

And my father literally stared at him and said, well, I’m old. You don’t have diabetes. You don’t have a list of those things you look at about 67. He said, what do you know something we don’t know because we’re not seeing it?” So my father had surgery, but he was literally speechless. Like it never occurred to him that he could live another 15 years.

Compressing Learning Cycles

[01:14:16] Sean: Yeah, I love the place we’re at right now. It’s really remarkable. I know we’re going to round this out here in a few minutes. I am really intrigued though. You mentioned condensing those learning windows inbound domains.

[01:14:32] Lia: Well, okay. I should qualify that, the reason that the 60 cycles can compress learning is because your brain does not really have a sense of time. It has a sense of cyberspace. Think about yourself as a child. If you ever read the work of Catherine Nelson, she kind of proved that we’re not born with a sense of chronological time. We acquire that through language. Children only have a sense of now and not now. And you know, the past and the future for children are the same. 

So the idea of a timeline is learned, chronological time. The brain actually only has a sense of cycles and the adaptive unconscious definitely has no sense of a chronological timeline. So what we’re doing is we’re taking advantage of that and we’re saying, well, the reason people become experts is because they have more events that are examples, that they learned from, if we can compress the example into a shorter amount of time, so they don’t have to wait 10,000 hours, then maybe we can get the same effect. 

And that’s what I was doing with my dissertation. I was compressing the cycles and getting the same effect. And what’s really interesting to me is that once I got the cycles the prior way of thinking was gone. Now that may not happen with somebody who’s more self-aware. I mean, these workers were not particularly interested in having self knowledge. I think that’s another thing that people develop or not. I actually don’t think I have a lot of self knowledge, honestly. But self knowledge is an acquisition.

But people don’t necessarily have to have it and don’t necessarily have it. But these workers, when I went back and interviewed them, they had no memory of ever thinking the way they used to. So not only were they more expert, but their novice state was missing, just erased. So another example that I used when I used to be a professor was I would write on the board to illustrate this. I would write on the board some phrases and I’d say to my students, look at the board and don’t read that and they couldn’t do it. So once you get to a certain stage of expertise, you can’t undo it.

[01:17:38] Sean: What do you think about this? Say it would be for something like a sport or even say you want to become a chef, how do you think all of this plays into that and which way are we approaching development in those that might be flawed?

[01:17:54] Lia: Well, sports are difficult because you have to have the physical equipment, right. To be good at a sport.

[01:18:03] Sean: Let’s assume that it’s chess.

[01:18:06] Lia: Chess is a better one, right? Chess is a better candidate because it’s a closed system, right? So it’s very similar to business. It’s a closed system with a set number of pieces and it’s what we would call bounded. So you can become good at it. My partner and I are very good at gambling. We win a lot of money, black Jack and a couple others, poker. 

The reason that we’re good at it is because gambling is a closed system, right? It’s 52 cards, a closed set of rules. And if you understand at the first principles level that it’s not about luck, it’s about the probabilities within that closed system, you can actually win a lot of money. But you have to be careful. You have to be very disciplined. It’s the same chess. Sports is a little bit more open-ended; you have to be strong enough. You have to be flexible enough, et cetera. 

[01:19:14] Sean: I know you’re out there in San Diego. Have you come across Ed Thorpe, the legendary investor who learned how to beat the blackjack table back in like the sixties or seventies? 

[01:19:20] Lia: I’ve heard of him.

[01:19:24] Sean: Yeah, I know he’s out there. 

[01:19:30] Lia: He uses a different method than we do. We use the variable bed method, which is a little bit more efficient. Yeah, but we came up with it ourselves. He counts cards more than we do. It is very labor-intensive. Ours is more like it’s sorta like flipping a coin. If you flip a coin 10 times, the chances of you getting heads, if you flip it, once you get heads, if you flip it again and you get heads, the chances of you getting heads, the third time is less, right. It was a pattern. It’s the same with blackjack. The more you get a bad hand, the more likely you’ll get a good hand after a series of bad hands because of the distribution of the cards in the deck. That makes sense. So eventually, you have to get a good hand, you don’t have to count the cards. You just have to get the probabilities and then you bet more on that. The one that you think is going to be a good hand and you bet low when it’s going to be a bad hand.

[01:20:46] Sean: Casinos have your picture up there. They know what it is… 

[01:20:51] Lia: We have gotten into some dicey situations, especially when we were explaining to other people at the table, why we were winning, then we got squirted out. But we don’t do that anymore.

Books Or Things That Lia Finds Fascinating

[01:21:00] Sean: Well, I’ve certainly wasted enough of your time here. I’m going to run this out with two. I know you’re just like a voracious curious person. Are there any books or different things you’ve come across over the years that really just peaked your interest, you thought were fascinating?

[01:21:20] Lia: Just about everything Gary Klein does. And I really enjoy it. Gary and I have known each other so long we don’t remember how we met, which is sad. I mean, we were trying to remember how we met, the last time we saw each other in person and neither of us could remember, but every time we have a conversation, we complete each other’s sentences and we don’t agree on everything, but we have great debates and I really enjoy everything he writes.

And probably because we don’t agree on everything. And I also really would recommend reading all of the great philosophers starting with Sera, Heidegger. They were all huge influences on me because they really showed me how people construct cognition. And it’s the start of really psychology and cognitive science and particularly Heidegger.

[01:22:29] Sean: Great. I’ve actually never dove into him. So I’ll have to know, so I’m wondering if you can do this long form conversation with someone dead or alive, who would you love to just have a deep dive sit down with?

[01:22:40] Lia: I would love to talk to Jean Piaget, the father of genetic epistemology and Lev Vygotsky. They were contemporaries and they both had a big influence on my work. Vygotsky died installing this crusher at an early age and his work was rediscovered in the eighties and translated by Norris Minick and dominates a lot of our math education. Now, although a lot of people don’t realize that. 

Piaget dominates a lot of early childhood education. But that wasn’t his main contribution. His main contribution was actually his understanding of neuroscience, the functional variants is what his contribution was and he didn’t know it at the time. He didn’t call it that. But if you do research on the functional variants and theory, it’s really a model of neuroscience. 

[01:23:57] Sean: Things I did not know. I love this.

[01:24:02] Lia: Yeah. And Vygotsky’s model of dialectical, the learning of scientific concepts through dialectical exploration, language and thought. His book was actually language and speech , as it was rewritten as language and speech is a good way to understand the development of expertise. Again, not his topic, but really that’s what he was really talking about. Looking through it from today’s lens and cognitive flexibility. 

[01:24:37] Sean: Okay. I’ll have to check that out.Lia, this has been so much fun. I appreciate diving into so much of your work. What you bring to fruition, everything like that. Where can we direct the listeners? Where can they stay up to date with everything that you’ve been doing and what you have going on? I know you have a lot going on. 

[01:24:56] Lia: Well, we have two websites, wtri.com is our research company. We’re still there. We’re still doing research. And our platform company is, Future View Platform and that’s where they can see what we’re doing with our technology and our partners and what they’re doing around the world with our technology. And those are the two main places. And obviously I post on LinkedIn a lot.

[01:25:27] Sean: Fantastic. Well, Lia DiBello I cannot thank you enough for joining us on What Got You There. 

[01:25:31] Lia: Well, thank you. Thank you for the conversation. I really had fun.

[01:25:38] Sean: You guys made it to the end of another episode of what got you there. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I really do appreciate you taking the time to listen all the way through. If you find value in this, the best way you can support the show is giving us a review, rating it, sharing it with your friends and also sharing on social media. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate it. Looking forward to you guys, listening to another episode.

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