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Someone we haven't counted for.
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You.
Greeting Westworld fans and the Westworld curious.
I was at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and I saw something I can't forget.
Now it's not a foldable screen phone or a TV set or that Big pork meat product from impossible.
It was actually a dinner hosted by HBO for a fictional company called Incite.
Which will be featured on season three of Westworld.
And it definitely looked like something to me.
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Between this dinner and an interview I had with Jeffrey Wright who plays Bernard on the show I'm stoked about season three.
So here's what I want to do.
I want to talk about insight how they compare to delis.
I want to share with you what happened at this dinner.
And something Jeffrey Wright told me.
And last because I was a theater major, I want to talk about how this was basically an elaborate performance art piece.
Critical Silicon Valley and our socio economic dependence on data.
Hey, let's start off by acknowledging that this was 100% marketing, HBO teamed up with a creative agency giant spoon to put on this dinner that whetted our appetites both figuratively and literally ahead of Season Three of Westworld.
It kind of felt like a murder mystery And we were the mystery.
So here's what I learnt about Insight.
So Insight is a five year old company.
It's based in Los Angeles.
It does have other satellite offices around the world.
It was started by two guys in a garage.
It's a data integration and data analysis company.
And if you haven't seen it yet, there's actually a trailer for insight that HBO has launched including a full website.
You go to insight inc.com.
Insights is different.
We're not Silicon Valley vaporware.
We're we have unprecedented.
That computing capabilities, analyzing data for life's most unsolvable problems.
We can protect our climate and we can find you a career.
You can be excited about.
The possibilities are limitless within sight, the only choice you will have to make So let's talk about debtless first insight Dells, of course with the company and season 2, insights can be the company's season 3.
Delos it looks like choose your own adventure.
right you know if I'm in Westworld, I can choose what host interact with what to do those hosts what adventure to go on and all that insight is all about choosing the path for us.
Right there is a very different dichotomy.
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So I did get to talk to Jeffrey Wright, as I mentioned before, and here's what he says about season three, which I think kinda ties into inside a little bit.
Season Three in some ways is about exploring a new park.
And that's the world outside of Westworld.
So in some ways those characters the hosts, become guests.
It's viewing the show the characters the narrative Through another [UNKNOWN] reflective facets of the story.
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Let's think about season 1 where we're the guest, we're coming into the park at the host of the host.
Season 2, the host, well, they're escaping, they're finding their freedom.
And at season 3, the host become the guest in the real world.
Okay, so if the host are the guest in the real world, then who are the host Is it in sight?
And what's gonna happen to a Dallas group of real mechanical, once they're in the world world?
Is it gonna be them versus inside or them versus the humans versus inside or all the above?
I don't know.
So apparently this whole event had a 600 Page script very long.
The dinner is at the Nomad which is inside the MGM casino.
And as I'm approaching the door, there's a giant blue sign that says incite.
And before it can even get in line.
A woman comes up to me wearing an incite name tag and says, Hey, Patrick, good to see you.
How was your flight?
I don't know who this person is.
So as soon as I entered the restaurant, like I said before, it's decorated like a library.
I'm greeted with a glass of champagne and I meet a man named Anthony.
Now, Anthony's gonna be kinda my guide, or host, for the evening, and what I like about Anthony is he always has this optimistic tone.
To everything I asked him and when he answers is in a very optimistic tone, even if it's something more serious.
So the idea of insight is if we give them a little bit of data, they can make choices for us.
So we'll have to have anxiety and worry about making a decision.
We don't have to worry about who we're going to sit next to.
We don't have to worry about the Buddha order.
We don't have to worry about the conversation.
Incite has handled all of that.
So I was seated at our table, it was Joan and myself.
And a smattering of other people, including Mr. Mobile as well as the LinkedIn influencer, and her awesomeness with green hair, Goldie Chan.
And that's where dinner started to get interesting.
Because the first thing you know is each of us has a personalized menu.
At our setting, and what was on my menu was different than was on Jones and was different than the lady named Jane sit next to me and golian art.
So as we're being seated, Jane, who's seated next to me raises her hand and gets Anthony our host attention, and she points out the fact that she came with her husband to this dinner.
And her husband was being seated at another table and she asked if she could move and sit with him.
Anthony said that insight has figured out through a series of algorithms that he would be best suited if you say that our table for the dinner and that she'd actually have a better time that she was seated next to her husband.
Now I think most of us thought this was some sort of like Mary joke and didn't think anything of it, but later this will come back Too well.
One of the many things that became suspicious about sweet Jane.
Jane bets was renamed as gambling on the future.
And in one way, they were totally right.
I mean, I had such a blast talking to people at my table getting to know them.
It was a kind of a weird way to get to know someone but it was A lot of fun.
I also had fun with all the food I had because again, was things that I would not normally order for myself or things, some things I've never had before my life and they were delicious and that was fun.
But then, well, Barbara Quinlan came back out to give a keynote as is appropriate at CES She was saying that big tech companies are profiting off your data.
And what are we getting in return?
She has said that 67% of the people gathered in the restaurant or the room said they felt stressed about making everyday decisions.
And that nine out of 10 of us were anxious about the future, probably from that RSVP form we filled out and the idea behind Insight is that if we gave insight our data that they can make the best choices for us.
It's not just dinner, not just making friends.
And so what they did is they did a case study on one of the person in our room where we thought one and her name was Liz, and they went through lives his entire life from basically the end of high school and college.
Through where she is now as an adult, getting married her kids being born.
At one point they flashed up an email.
And it showed that Liz was being offered a job at another university in Arizona, and that a similar position was not available at the university in Ohio that she worked at That would mean she'd have to move and we're sitting there like this can't be like how would they have figured this out?
Yeah, maybe they figured out how to play right maybe figure it out I, I worked at Starbucks years ago, but how would they know this woman's like path like that?
And that's where it was kinda creepy but also really funny and kind of ridiculous all the same time after the keynote we are all handled but looks like a bill for the tenor on the bottom of the bill, it actually has our initials and mine has pH on it on the back it has three like eyes are the three lines like season three Westworld and this actually says Westworld on it.
On the inside, it says inside so as opposed to bill.
What I got here is well, it's passing.
So just like inside did that case study unless I was telling you about, here's what they have on me.
So it has my name, the date of birth by occupation it has when I'm gonna die on it, my life expectancy so I can expect to live So I'm 74 years old, 10 months and 19 days.
Boy, and also has a little advice for me saying tech looms larger in your life than theater these days.
Bring your knowledge of the stage into your current role, and you'll be surprised, by what new insights you get to achieve.
So it's like an elaborate fortune cookie except it's telling me what I'm gonna die.
Actually what this reminds me of is at the bottom of this it says #Vegasworld.
So it says if we paid money to go to this world that does corporate keynote events, and we're enjoying that and I did actually, but it kinda reminds me of minority report when they're going through all the rooms and the guy's remembering his moment of being in front of A board of directors and people are cheering him on it.
It reminded me of that a little bit.
So as we're leaving a couple things, first of all, Jane, well her husband actually came out and says, and flagged it out and said, "Honey, it's time to go." And she left.
Turns out, Jane wasn't an actor.
She was a poet.
I don't know if she had a microphone on her.
I know some other people were saying they were trying to take apart that lamp to see if there's a microphone in it I don't think anyone at our table was that suspicious of the other reason that you might have an actor there was, she could facilitate the conversation.
She could keep it moving.
She'd know all of our backgrounds in one sense if this had nothing to do with Westwood, and there was like a dinner club where you could just pay a little bit of money and Tell them a little bit about yourself and they could pair you up like this.
That would be a great way to meet some people.
I guess it's also called a cruise ship though.
The reason I can't stop thinking about this dinner is there was a part of this that was an elaborate performance art piece that was a commentary both on Silicon Valley and the way we will give away our data in our society.
I don't think the point is dinner was necessarily creep us out.
I think part of it was to creep us out.
But I don't think the goal was, the fact I think in a weird way, they did exactly what they set out to do.
So, insight figured out date on me.
I had a delicious meal.
I didn't have to pick.
I got to meet some new friends I didn't have to think about I had great conversation.
I didn't have to work on that.
So in that sense, insight works.
But as my palate Joan pointed out in her story, Silicon Valley companies do far worse things than inside data, at least at this dinner.
And also in season three, we don't know it inside the US.
So perhaps they will do some truly horrible things.
These real companies that are not inside really make money from our data.
In a way we're being imprisoned by the sizzle and the promise and claims that these companies make to us.
While using our own data and monetizing it against us, and it doesn't stop there, then that data gets leaked and other companies get to do the same.
I'm not sure exactly how evil insight is.
If they were like Dellas or if they're like other commies that actually exist in our world today, but I have to say, I am really excited about Season three of Westworld.
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