Deepcasting in an AI World

I want to talk about this idea, this increasing hunger for the human in this world, particularly an AI world. And I want to introduce a new word, "deepcasting," that I think will help us get there. 

Right now, I'm speaking into a microphone, and these microphones
go through sophisticated technologies amplifying what I'm saying. We think of that as broadcasting. We do that in live spaces. We also do it asynchronously through many platforms that we have. And when we think of broadcasting, we think of, you know, say iconic figures like Martin Luther King Jr. speaking on the National Mall: "I have a dream," and all these people are lined up and they can all hear it. But if you go a little farther back, right, his predecessor -- one of his heroes -- was Gandhi. And Gandhi would speak to hundreds of thousands of people altogether, and they didn't have sophisticated technologies like that. So how was it getting amplified? 

You go even farther back, say someone like the Buddha is sitting there with a 100,000 monks -- how is that being relayed? Or you even look at some successors of Dr. King. Mandela by his own admission was actually not a great speaker; and yet, he was able to touch millions of folks. Last night at dinner, we were talking about Mother Teresa. One of my friends, was checking in to his flight. And this woman -- a short woman, I think 4-foot-11 -- was walking down the stairs, walking down the escalator actually, and all of a sudden, this hush falls all over the entire terminal. Even the person checking in, my friend who's going who's boarding a flight pushes her chair back, stands up in reverence, not just for this one person's contribution, but for this co-creative field of emergence. 

Gandhi's successor was a guy named Vinoba Bhave. And Vinoba coined this word. He says this is not broadcasting, this is deepcasting. There was once a reporter with Vinoba and he was asking him all these questions, and he says, "Look, hold that thought," and he says, "Your tape recorder can record my words but what about my silence?" 

What he's saying is that you to create music we know how to capture the notes but without the silence in between the notes you actually don't have a symphony. And so how do you learn to honor all of that in its totality? 

So if broadcast uses these fiber optic cables to get information to our minds, it is deepcasting that uses the web of consciousness -- heart-to-heart-to-heart -- that allows us to relay presence to each one of our hearts. 

We live in a world of absence, though. So we can talk about presence but we look all around and we're very, very absent. We used to have a slow culture where we played sports, and then all of a sudden, it's like fast you watch sports and now you're watching multiple things on a screen together. And now you're just gambling in between about what's going to happen even at halftime, right? And so you can go down this list of like, okay, we used to write handwritten letters and then we went to emails and then we went to text and now it's like all automated. And AI actually threatens to accelerate and amplify this status quo. 

So you've probably seen some of these headlines. But, you know, if I text my mom who's still alive, these AI machines learn how she responds to me, and then when she passes away, I can still text my mom. I can even get voice memos in her voice. You say, good or bad? I don't know. But definitely weird, right?

So, I mean, a few months ago, you had this new service in the UK for 25 pounds a month. You don't have time for your mom, or your dad or your grandparents, and this AI agent will call them and have a conversation. Good or bad, I don't know. But weird, right? 

And you go a little farther. Last month in the Wall Street Journal, Mark Zuckerberg says, "Hey, we live in a lonely generation. I've got a grand vision for the future. We're going to put hundreds of billions behind it." And what's his grand vision? Here's the headline: "Most of your friends will be AI." 

I think the big challenge here -- the big course correction we need to make -- is that we are mistaking performance for presence. 

I was in Austria for one of my friend's conferences. I was having breakfast and a stranger comes and sits in front of me, and he says, "My son came up to me and said, "Dad, my teacher was absent today." 

She says, "Oh, what do you mean? Your teacher didn't show up?" 

He says, "No, my teacher was my teacher's body was present, but the mind was absent." 

And so we got to talking and we said how do you move from, not just
absence to presence, but presence to regeneration?

And this is where if my absence meets your absence ... the strength of that connection very low. But if my presence meets your presence, we actually start to regenerate something very profound. And so the questions we have to ask ourselves is how do we cultivate this inner transformation to move from absence -- the static agitated mind -- to much more presence? And what are the architectures the systemic solutions that encourage this kind of presence? [What are] the systemic architectures of regeneration?

My wife and I went on a walking pilgrimage many years ago, and we ate whatever food was offered and slept wherever place was offered. Mind-bending. And paradigm shifting, you can say. And certainly heart-opening. 

One of the photos that you see over there in the center is a simple, humble farmer. He saw us and he says, "Hey, you I would love to invite you to my house. Do you have a place to stay?" 

We said, "No." 

He says, "Would you come to my hut?" 

And we said, "Sure." You know, it's not like we have a plan B, right? 

And he said, "But I have to tell you, I don't have running water or electricity. Would you still come?"

And we said, "Oh, we would be honored."

We have this incredible night; he invites all the villagers and then as we are leaving the next morning, he comes up to me and he says, "I don't have much to offer, but I grew these by hand and I want to give you one tomato."

What is the broadcast value of that one tomato? Very little. 

What is the deepcast value? Twenty years later, I'm still remembering him.

Not just remembering him through my mind. I'm feeling it. My heart is holding him in my heart, and there is a profound value to that.

The scientists call it the effort heruristic. They think about effort. They took a poem, they showed it to one group on this side of the room, and they said, "okay, this took four hours." How much do you value it? They went to another another group and they said, "Actually, it took 18 hours." What do you think? Same poem. And guess what? The 18-hour folks said they valued it more, not just monetarily but also quality-wise. We care for the human, right? We know we care for the effort because we know that there's that human behind it. 

There's a parable of this guy on a boat. He's relaxing, and all of a sudden, he's sleeping taking a nap and all of a sudden this other boat comes and crashes into him. And initially he has this emotional response. He wants to know who it is and what's going on. Then he realizes it's just a stranded boat. No signal, no relationship. And in a way this is the danger of our AI world. There's nobody there on the other side. It's like the stranded kind of boat. Hollow. No signal. 

So we are entering this world at an accelerating speed and we are increasing our hunger for the human, and we have to bring that back into circulation. 

But we are too caught up in this convenience trap, right? So we look at these hikes, we look at these pilgrimages, we look at like people going through incredible journeys, and we say, "Hey, why are you hiking, man? I can take you to the destination with my helicopter!" 

And we start selling tickets. And we call we might even call that social entrepreneurship, right?  You're like, "Wow," but you're solving the wrong problem." 

And so what what happens if the path actually is the purpose? 

Thich Nhat Hanh was a Vietnamese monk and he was once in an audience and he shared this beautiful example. He holds up a piece of paper, and he says, "What do you see here?"

"Well, it's a piece of paper."

"Where does the paper come from?" 

Somebody says, "A tree." 

He says, "What does the tree need to survive?" 

"Water."

"Where does the water come from?"

And there was a little kid who hadn't studied all the science and says, "Well, water comes from the cloud."

And so he holds up the piece of paper and he says, "How many of you can see the cloud in this piece of paper?"

That's the question for us as we look at life in front of us, as we look at material things in front of us, as we look even at our consumption instinct, we have to say: What's behind the curtain here? Where's the human behind it? Where is the labor of love behind that human? Where is the consciousness and the presence behind that love? And can we feel that? Not just understand it intellectually, but can we feel it? And if we can feel it, how much do we honor it? And how do we regenerate that in our world today? 

This is a very pressing question, but we don't have much time to actually do this course correction because the dopamine culture is coming at us at hurtling speed. It took TV 68 years to reach a 100 million users to figure out the right relationship to TV. It took Netflix 10 years as you can see TikTok: 9 months, ChatGPT: 2, Facebook Threads: 5 days. What took TV 68 years is now 5 days to reach 100 million users, and we haven't really even thought of all the unintended consequences. 

So this is a time when those of us moved by love, moved by presence, need to activate a different narrative and different set of possibilities. But I have faith in nature. This is a photo of a murmuration. So those are thousands and thousands of birds that actually created this shape. What happened is the guy who took the photograph didn't even realize he was taking the photo. He took the photo, he goes home, downloads all his photos and he's, "Wow, did I get that?" 

So what happened is there was a predator and these starlings came together and said, "We need to respond to the situation."

They came together in this shape. No organizer, no McKinsey consultant, no HR department. and they came together in this shape and then the predator goes away and they're they dissolve. What is it that's binding all of them together? 

And I think this is the question that's facing all of humanity, particularly in the face of AI -- that how do we be hungry for the human? How do we choose presence? How do we practice deep casting? And how do we tune in to the frequency of love that binds us all together? 

As you can see, I've got a little heart pin here. This was first gifted to me by the women right outside the slums of the Gandhi Ashram. As my wife and I were leaving, we were very connected to them. They gave us this gift. It was handmade at that time with waste cloth. And they said, "We want to give this to you to give away, because we know you like to give."

And when you think about that, I've actually got each one of these. Don't look right now, but they're under each one of your seats. You'll all have one. But the thing about this is it's not just for you to wear. If somebody comes up to you and says, "Nice heart pin," you give it away to them. And what that does is: it's not from me. It's from somebody before me whom you don't know, and you will never see. And it's not for you. It's for you and I to hold in a sacred way with reverence and pass it on. And when we do that, we actually start to activate this murmuration of the heart. 

And so I'll end with this incredible quote by Howard Thurman, who was Dr. King's mentor. And he says, "Don't ask so much what the world needs. Go out and do what makes you come alive." Because what the world needs most is presence. What the world needs most are people who have come alive. Because if you come alive and I come alive together, we actually regenerate a field of emergence which births entirely new possibilities.

Thank you very much.