Audrey Tang: No worries. I was meaning to try Together Mode with you that would look something like this picture, which would be us sitting together in an auditorium or something looking into a mirror.

David Eisner: Really?

Audrey Tang: That’s a new thing.

David Eisner: That’s a shame. I would love to…

Audrey Tang: That’s fine. We can try it later.

David Eisner: I would love to see that.

Audrey Tang: It’s designed by a friend of a friend, Jaron Lanier, with whose office I’m also co-founding this radical exchange. They keep tagging me on Twitter, asking me to try it. I have yet to… Never mind. Sorry, I digress. Let’s get back to the topic.

David Eisner: Are you able to share your screen to show what it would look like?

Audrey Tang: No, because I’m not the host of this meeting, but that’s fine.

David Eisner: Am I able to make you a host?

Audrey Tang: That’s fine, that’s fine. You can read about it in the write up that I got those screenshots from, because you ask in the email how to make people feel more together, more connected over this two-dimensional glass.

Audrey Tang: Together Mode is just one of the newer innovations designed for that. I thought it would be on-topic, but it’s fine. It is just introducing an idea. [laughs]

David Eisner: That’s fascinating.

Vicki Veenker: Minister Tang, I just want to say hello. I am Vicki Veenker. I am in Palo Alto, California, so David and I are remote to one another as well, but I thank you for introducing us to Together Mode.

Vicki Veenker: I will try to check that out after this call, because I have been drafting, as David mentioned, an online dialog guide for our purposes, so I’m glad to know about it. It’s a pleasure to meet you.

David Eisner: I’d love for Vicki and I to pepper you with questions, but…

Audrey Tang: Sure, go ahead. Go ahead.

David Eisner: Is there something that you’re hoping we will cover and get to during this discussion?

Audrey Tang: There’s the Together Mode, that’s one. [laughs] Then, the other one that I would like to introduce a little bit is the idea of a controller-free virtual reality device that’s very light that could be worn for hours and hours, like four hours or something.

Audrey Tang: That also comes with a 5G chip. It’s called XRSpace Manova. I’m not saying that this is the only vendor that delivers that, but because this is the one that I actually tried, [laughs] I would also paste the link simply here.

Audrey Tang: The idea, very simply put, is that because it comes in with a cam, you can use this VR device as a cam to scan your surrounding. Once you did, that’s 3D-modeled, and it becomes a virtual space that you can gather in.

Audrey Tang: For example, if you have a shared office water cooler auditorium, something that people are already having a affect, that is to say people already feels comfortable in it. Even if they are at home, if you scan that place and make that your virtual meeting place, as well as their colleagues as avatars that looks not cartoonish, but rather resembling the actual persons.

Audrey Tang: People can just wear this VR device and then use hand gestures, like the HoloLens gestures, to engage in clapping and shaking hands, hugging, and other social gestures. That really also helps the mood to make sure that people do not get isolated in their feelings.

Audrey Tang: I mentioned this because, because previously, when people think about VR, people think about something that’s heavy, that could be worn maybe for professional creatives for half an hour at most, or an hour if you have a especially strong body and mind. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This one is really light, and it could be worn for hours and hours without the eyes or the head getting sore. These are the only two co-presence inspirations that I would like to share. Otherwise, please feel free to start asking questions.

David Eisner: I’m so fascinated by that. Does it require each of the participants to have special software?

Audrey Tang: No, not at all, because it’s like a all-in-one device. It comes with its own software. Also, it runs the GeckoView, I think, the Firefox browser in it, and so you can build your own experiences that are projected in that virtual space using regular web technology.

David Eisner: One of the biggest challenges that we have is that we include in our dialogs a lot of people that are somewhere between Luddites and inexperienced.

Audrey Tang: Exactly, exactly. That’s why controller-free is so important, because it doesn’t require any setup whatsoever. It’s very similar to the Teams experience, where you just click a link, and then the rest is software.

Audrey Tang: The device here is designed so that you don’t have to install an app. There really is no app store. It’s just when you’re in, you’re in the Central Park, and you just go somewhere, you can invite people, and so on.

David Eisner: All you need is regular WiFi?

Audrey Tang: All you need is regular WiFi and the device, that’s it.

David Eisner: Wow, that’s so interesting. Let’s say that our team thought about doing that for a dialog. How much practice do you think the team would need to do ahead of time?

Audrey Tang: Maybe half an hour.

David Eisner: Vicki, that would be so interesting for us to try out as a team, wouldn’t it, before we looked at doing it as a dialog supporter.

Vicki Veenker: Yeah, now I think it’d be important for us to feel confident and model confidence with it first. I was clicking over to the links because somehow the camera was not working, Minister Tang. I haven’t seen, were you holding up the device or…?

Audrey Tang: The camera’s not working, as in you cannot see me?

Vicki Veenker: Exactly. I was at first, and then it has gone away, so now, when you speak…Ah, now I can see you.

David Eisner: Now I can see you. Can you still see, Minister?

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I can see you just fine.

David Eisner: Terrific. I don’t think Minister Tang was holding up the device, unless I didn’t see it, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, unless I have a really stable arm, but no.

Vicki Veenker: Sorry to be so…I’m on the Luddite crowd here. What does the device actually look like?

Audrey Tang: You mean the XRSpace device?

Vicki Veenker: Yes.

Audrey Tang: It looks like this. I’m pasting you the link here. You can scroll down to see how it actually looks.

Vicki Veenker: Ah, OK. I don’t know if we’re cool enough for this, David? [laughs]

David Eisner: I know, but…

Audrey Tang: It’s something that you can wear in a park without getting people calling the police. [laughs] Looks like a fashion device.

David Eisner: Right.

Vicki Veenker: That’s amazing. Did you help develop this, or how did this…?

Audrey Tang: This is a company staffed and founded by the maker, Peter Chou, of the Vive virtual reality device, and HTC Vive being the first actual industrial use virtual reality device. Then Peter discovered that most people who use HTC Vive are creatives. That is to say people who sculpt in virtual reality, people who do industrial design, definitely not Luddites. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: This is like a MacPro, [laughs] a professional device that ordinary people wouldn’t even consider using. You enter this with purpose, like you want to make something, and then you enter the virtual reality. That’s Vive’s segment and that’s fine.

Audrey Tang: He saw that instead of going the route of Oculus or the later headsets that try to blend some social with some professional use cases, why don’t we just make one that’s purely social, that has social by default, that doesn’t care at all about making sculptures or industrial designs in the space. It’s purely for social reality.

Audrey Tang: It comes with the design decision to do away with that controller, to share your familiar surrounding and your own avatar, and so on. This is basically a social-first design that doesn’t come with any app ecosystem for makers or for CAD or whatever.

Audrey Tang: It is a design so that people don’t have a very peak of the learning curve. You can just very slowly like a slow slope to explore more of the world.

Vicki Veenker: Wow. If David and I were to each put this on, each we had our device, and we wanted to shake hands…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I try it. You can just click the other person and then shake hand. Then you will be shaking hands in no time.

Vicki Veenker: I’m sorry to interrupt. I didn’t mean to.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

Vicki Veenker: I still can’t see you, the camera. David, can you see?

David Eisner: Yes, I can.

Vicki Veenker: I don’t know what’s going on. When it goes to you, I can see you, but otherwise, I just get a peek.

Audrey Tang: OK.

David Eisner: Are you getting a…It’s weird, I think Vicki gets a T when I see you. You’re seeing a T now.

Vicki Veenker: Well, it’s now at the bottom. Maybe, is the video pinned? Is there a way to…

Audrey Tang: Yeah, there is a mode change. You can click my avatar and then select to pin me, I think. There’s three dots next to my name, and then you can adjust the screen and pin me. If you see Audrey Tang, guest, and you click the three dots next to it, there should be a pin option.

Vicki Veenker: I think that’s not the issue. There’s a camera issue or some kind of reception issue or something. I have pinned you, and it still looks like a black screen with a T in the middle.

Audrey Tang: OK, wow, but David can see me?

David Eisner: I can see you. Minister Tang, will you go back? I think Vicki said she could see you when I couldn’t. Turn your video off for a second.

Audrey Tang: OK, just a second. What about now?

David Eisner: I can see you. It looks like from a different camera. That’s right, I just switched camera.

David Eisner: That’s interesting.

Audrey Tang: Still not for Vicki.

Vicki Veenker: No.

Audrey Tang: Vicki is joining through an app or a web browser?

Vicki Veenker: A web browser.

Audrey Tang: Is it Firefox or Chrome?

Vicki Veenker: Chrome.

Audrey Tang: OK. Maybe it’s a browser issue. I really don’t know what’s happening.

Vicki Veenker: Well, I apologize.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

Vicki Veenker: I’m fascinated to hear your story about the development of the purely social app from the ones who were the creatives initially. I have to confess one other thing, David, I think, that in my pre-convergence life, I’m a patent attorney in Silicon Valley for decades now.

Vicki Veenker: I’m fascinated to hear that evolution in use case that you just described. It makes very good sense to me.

David Eisner: Yeah, it’s really, really interesting. Minister Tang, are you familiar, is there some place that is ahead of the rest of us in having data around how people’s brains react to the difference between looking at people on a screen versus looking at people in-person? How to best simulate eye-to-eye contact?

David Eisner: The biggest challenge that we’ve got is the concept of building trust. What are the kinds of changes that you need to make in dialog in order to have what we normally think of as chemistry?

David Eisner: My sense is that, I’ve now been doing online for a good…I’ve been doing it for years, but I’ve been only-online for the last four months. My experience is that the discussions can be very intense.

David Eisner: They can be very meaningful, as intense and meaningful as in-person, but there’s a piece of the affect, the emotional connection and sense of chemistry that’s a little bit harder to do online. Are there smaller or bigger tricks to being able to have online discussions that are more affective?

Audrey Tang: Yes, a few things. The familiar surroundings, that is the main one. I tried at least to show Together Mode, and then the XRSpace Manova. These are the two-dimensional and three-dimensional equivalent of getting people into a familiar surroundings.

Audrey Tang: Then, if you need to do breakouts, or if you need to do open space technology, there also has to be a way for people to very easily move in a spatial space, so to speak. If all of the ideas of sharing papers and so on doesn’t work nearly as well as trying it out…

Audrey Tang: Since Vicki cannot see me anyway, there’s also this, like just foregoing face altogether. I just pasted you a link which, Vicki, if you have a headset, please feel free to click. If you don’t have a headset, you can still click, but it wouldn’t work as well.

Audrey Tang: If you click that, that’s my personal space in high fidelity. That’s another technology. If you log in, you will find me near the pools, near the one with this piano and swimming pool on a corner of the map.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, I see you. Hi. Welcome to my space.

David Eisner: Do I need to turn off any speakers or mics? Is anyone getting feedback, because I’ve got the two things going?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. You can, of course. I will mute myself there. You will only hear from the team’s conversation now. You can see me as a muted red circle. Feel free to use your arrow keys, like up, down, left, right, to walk.

David Eisner: I just made a mistake. I’m going…

David Eisner: It says High Fidelity can’t access my devices.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. This is just an exercise in just looking at the map and navigating.

David Eisner: Oh, I see.

Audrey Tang: Vicki is in or not?

Vicki Veenker: I don’t have headphones on, so am I messing things up by…?

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine.

Vicki Veenker: If I hit “Allow High Fidelity to hear you…”

Audrey Tang: Yeah.

Vicki Veenker: OK.

Audrey Tang: Then you will be in the central square thing.

Vicki Veenker: Ah, I’m in the square? [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Hey, yeah. You can walk around. You can press the up, down, left, right keys. That’s right, that’s right, yeah. You’re in the couch area. You can sit on the couch, and you can turn toward me so that I can see that you’re talking to me if you turn a little bit to the…

Audrey Tang: I will just sit to the table across you, and then you can see the positioning. The whole point, and David, is, I think, catching up. He’s behind you. [laughs] This very simple, like two-dimensional map-ish view, of course, you can customize, upload your own space, overhead photos, or whatever into this dialog space.

Audrey Tang: The thing is that it does sound attenuation. That is to say, it simulates how the sound would travel really well in this space. That also makes sure that people can break out spontaneously in groups, lead the discussions, and make sure that multiple people can fill this room without getting a cacophony or the host having to mute everyone.

Audrey Tang: The space by itself is a cue of how the sound attenuation works. I have found that if people have already known each other, and can just customize their avatars so that people can understand who is who, that is, by itself, necessary, of course, because you want to know who is speaking.

Audrey Tang: Otherwise, just the sound itself is a good enough cue, plus the environmental surroundings to make immersive experiences work. We talk about VR. We talk about Together Mode, but this is with no face and with no eye contact, relying entirely on the auditory spectrum.

Audrey Tang: That is actually more immersive because if you have eyes but do not make eye contact, it’s actually distracting. This is the third experience that I share with you. All the three technologies are, of course, backed by teams that spent years studying the attraction and distraction in human contact.

David Eisner: This is so interesting. For some reason, my browser settings are preventing me from jumping in, but I was following that.

Audrey Tang: You can also use your mouse to drag along the map. If Vicki can…Yes, exactly, exactly. You’re doing fine. Just click the place you want to go, drag the mouse a little bit, and you will slowly walk there.

Vicki Veenker: The thing I can’t do is zoom in or out. Is that possible?

Audrey Tang: You use your two fingers if you are on a Mac to swipe up or down. You can have an overview of the whole space, or you can zoom into the people who are near you.

Vicki Veenker: I am not a Mac, but I do have a touchscreen. It’s a little bumpy, but it did do it. Now, I can see more. Ah, yeah, got it.

Audrey Tang: Oh, yeah, you’re navigating just fine.

David Eisner: So interesting. The idea is that if you’re not able to have actual eye contact, being in that kind of auditory environment where you’re still working with people’s avatars, that that can feel more holistic?

Audrey Tang: Yes.

David Eisner: That’s so interesting.

Audrey Tang: If you have earphones, then it simulates like if you’re talking toward my right, I will hear from my right. If you are talking behind my back, literally, I will hear you talking behind my back.

David Eisner: Wow.

Audrey Tang: If you’re talking at a distance, it attenuates, like fades away, as if we’re keeping a distance.

David Eisner: That’s fascinating technology.

Vicki Veenker: There. I just turned around, so now I’m looking at you, [laughs] I think.

David Eisner: That’s really interesting. Is there a best practice as far as how long a meeting or an interaction can be where people are still feeling connected, or is that just a matter of how good the facilitation is, how you take breaks, and so forth?

Audrey Tang: Usually, we try to keep, just like in real life, a healthy, one-hour, at most two-hour, length to the sessions for bio breaks, of course, but also so that people can spend some time to think over what just happened in the group. People do need time alone, but I found that one hour to two hour to be optimum.

David Eisner: How do you encourage finding real…There’s a lot of organizations now that are doing things like they send bottles…In the United States, anyhow, they’ll send a kit of wines, so that people can do a wine tasting. They’ll be seeing each other in a virtual environment, but they’ll be physically experiencing something.

David Eisner: Is that just a little bit of fun or is there a deeper way that people are able to connect when you do that kind of thing?

Audrey Tang: It all depends on whether this is the main attraction of the event or it is just an ambiance. As the ambiance, that works really well. You can order the same flavor of pizza together. You can share a wine or beer together and so on.

Audrey Tang: I think the focus need to be on the common co-creation, not on the food or beer itself. It’s just making sure that we have something common to talk about. This is also why the High Fidelity thing I just show you is important.

Audrey Tang: I just said the pool area, the couch area, and things like that, making sure that, in our brain, there is an orientation of where we are. That is the anchoring effect that is so important. If you make the wine tasting the main event, that probably will not work.

Audrey Tang: Just like in face-to-face meetings, I would quickly comment on the food, the surroundings, or the weather, but I will not spend more than one minute talking about the weather. That would be a distraction.

David Eisner: Makes a lot of sense. Vicki, any thoughts or questions? I’m particularly interested in whether there’s pieces of what you and Jen researched that you want to either go deeper on or validate any of those practices that we’re looking at.

Vicki Veenker: Sure. I was busy, David. You weren’t able to go, but I was busy going the piano room.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Vicki Veenker: And other places in the garden in the virtual setting. I guess I’m right now, I feel like I’m going back and forth between two worlds. The world I was just experiencing, the virtual world that we were in there, I couldn’t see people. I can hear the voice, and it is nice it’s behind me and whatever.

Vicki Veenker: I’m thinking, for our dialogs, I’m more interested in some of the questions like you’ve been asking, David. To the extent we’re confined for the moment, anyway, to these flat screens and our separate rooms, we’ve been trying to discern how to compensate for the loss of the rest of our body language. People have talked about, “Do I look into the camera, or do I look at your face?”

Vicki Veenker: I listened to a psychologist describe recently to a group of mediators that, even though looking into the camera may feel like I’m looking at your eyes, and the simulation, she said, “I’d rather see myself reflected on your face if you’re looking at me. I don’t want you not actually looking at me.” I wonder how you weigh in on that.

Audrey Tang: At this very moment, I’m mounting the camera on the top of my screen, and I’m scaling the teams window very small, so that both of your faces are at the very top of my screen.

Audrey Tang: When I look into your eyes, I’m also looking into the camera. That’s the standard thing that I do, that I don’t have to make this choice. Also, I think I’m mounting the camera so that it’s slightly above my eye level, but not too high, so that you have an illusion of at eye level with me, regardless of my height.

Audrey Tang: In virtual reality, in like Peter’s previous work in Vive, I talked to primary schoolers, secondary schoolers in a virtual reality interview. I deliberately scaled my avatar, which was 3D-scanned, to the same height as they are, just so that we can maintain the same eye level. They would not be restrained by their physical height, which is, of course, shorter than me. That also helps a lot.

Audrey Tang: I think just everybody at eye level, that works really well. You don’t have to invest in teleprompter or anything like that. Rather, just mount your cam slightly above the screen, and move every window above.

David Eisner: I’m doing that right now. I love that idea of making the window smaller and putting it up by the camera, because it does feel like I’m accomplishing both looking toward the camera and looking at you.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Vicki Veenker: It’s interesting, because I’ve often thought that people we are now meeting virtually this way will walk into a room, and people will be taller or shorter than we expect them to be, [laughs] because we have no idea.

Vicki Veenker: I love the preschooler example because I first learned about that, getting eye-to-eye with the children, when I actually worked for women’s professional soccer. What I noticed those players did when their fans would come, they would get down on a knee so they could take a picture eye-to-eye or sign an autograph eye-to-eye.

Vicki Veenker: It was just so brilliant, and it made the children just light up. I really do believe strongly in what you’re saying.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right.

David Eisner: I’ve actually noticed that I actually forgo…I’m a very big guy, almost 300 pounds, and I’m well over six feet. When I’m in meetings in person, that tends to give me some advantage in terms of leadership and in terms of…It’s a very interesting feeling to entirely lose that advantage in all of these virtual meetings.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. I am almost six feet, and so I think we can make ourselves larger or smaller just by getting into the camera range or out of the camera range. [laughs] It has an equalizing effect.

Audrey Tang: If you want people to feel smaller, you can also arrange for two persons to share half of the screen, or making sure that people sit a little bit farther away from the camera, so I will appear, I guess, more humble.

Audrey Tang: When it’s my turn to speak, I can just move my…This is a rotating wheelchair, perfect for VR. I will just move a little bit toward the camera when it’s my turn to speak to assert the podium, basically. That’s another easy way to do this.

David Eisner: That is fascinating.

Vicki Veenker: I’ve thought a lot about that because one of the things we make every effort to do is to give all of the…We bring people of differing viewpoints and positions to this table to have these difficult discussions. We want to make sure they feel like it’s an equal playing field.

Vicki Veenker: In some ways, bringing this online is an advantage, as long as we don’t have some people like this and some people like this.

Vicki Veenker: I’m wondering, David, how we could gently help them get there.

David Eisner: I’ve been thinking about this. We’re saving a lot of money on traveling and meetings. I’m wondering if we shouldn’t be sending people their camera setups, so that everybody sets a camera on a desk or a table, and we tell them how far to sit from the camera and where it should be.

David Eisner: The way everybody interacts with their laptop is really different. I’m able to elevate my laptop because I use a wireless keyboard. I know that I like where the camera is, like this, but not everybody can do that.

David Eisner: Some people have their laptop camera actually at the base, like right next to the keyboard so their hands…

Audrey Tang: I’m actually using this brick. I put this wooden brick beneath my MacBook, then I know it would be at eye level.

David Eisner: That makes a lot of sense. The idea of sending people tools, cameras are very cheap. They’re like $30, $40. Sending them a little camera and a stand, and ask them to put it at a certain height would be one way to answer your question of…

Vicki Veenker: I think another thing that we need to bear in mind are software tools that we may be unwittingly using. Like you may have noticed, David, that my camera is different today than it has been for the three or four months we’ve been talking.

Vicki Veenker: That’s because I was in Zoom or somewhere looking at the settings. I was looking for something else, and I noticed there was the wide view or the original view. I was like, “Why am I on,” whatever it was? I put it back to original, and there’s a different…

Vicki Veenker: I was wondering why I was always closer than other people. I think that was part of it. I didn’t know I’d done it. We have to have some sort of standardization, I think, of settings to make the other pieces work.

David Eisner: Another possibility for getting that done, since we have so many folks that actually can’t manage the settings on their own computers, would be to bring a professional in at the beginning of a dialog and see if people are willing to let them set their settings for whatever technology we’re using, whether it’s Teams or Zoom.

Vicki Veenker: One thing I’m actually doing for a different meeting I’m convening is I asked each party to do a short pre-session with me so that we can get everybody tuned up, so that when they come together, they’re on equal footing.

Vicki Veenker: We could do the same with Convergent. Have just a short, initial meet and greet. Make sure everybody’s tuned up into whatever specs we want. It could be a nice introductory, low-pressure session, and then start formally later.

David Eisner: That’s a really good best practice. I really like that, so that we’re not trying to help people in front of all their colleagues.

Audrey Tang: That’s right, a virtual greeting room, if you will.

Vicki Veenker: Yeah, I like that.

David Eisner: Oh, that’s a great idea. Right.

Vicki Veenker: Virtual greeting room, I’m writing that down. [laughs]

David Eisner: Likewise, in the middle of dialogs, if it looks like we’re having a challenge, we could ask someone to step into a virtual greet room and give them the tech support that they need without having to take the group’s time on it.

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

David Eisner: I love that idea. That’s a really smart idea. Are you finding that your time is becoming just increasingly valuable, and everybody’s trying to ask you everything, because all of a sudden, the world has gone online?

Audrey Tang: That’s right, which is why I ask everybody asking me this to agree to at least make a transcript and publish our conversations after 10 days of co-editing, because then people can very easily find previously answered questions in my open transcript platform.

Audrey Tang: That also ensures that the organizational knowledge is not lost when I transfer to another part of the government or things like that. People can just look up all my previous conversations. That’s something that’s worthwhile to do, as well, and nowadays, cheap enough with artificial intelligence recognizing English speech.

David Eisner: That’s a whole another thing I hadn’t thought about. You can manage for people speaking different languages and use the transcription service for that.

Audrey Tang: That’s exactly right. Even though we’re doing the recording now, we don’t usually publish the video unless we are specifically prepared to do a production.

Audrey Tang: Then the transcript people are far more comfortable publishing that, because they know they have a chance to go back and edit away the parts that they consider confidential, trade secret, or simply they share an anecdote of a friend who don’t clear this for publication.

Audrey Tang: There’s many settings like this. This going back to add a transcript also helps people to basically have an asynchronous time to go over other people’s arguments while they are busily thinking of what to say next.

Audrey Tang: I found that this to be a really two-phased learning. One is about the, as you say, nonverbal part of understanding people’s different positions. Then, when you’re later on reading the transcript, you will be seeing the common values, the shared values.

Audrey Tang: Having these to be on different time scale, the first one synchronously, the second on your own time scale, I have found this to be really, really helpful. Many people that I facilitated, after reading a transcript email me saying, “Minister, we don’t need another session. I now understand the other side’s point.”

David Eisner: That’s so interesting. We should, Vicki, think about the right way to do that. One of our challenges with recording our sessions is that, because people are so anxious, and we’re trying to get people to change their minds and to explore ideas they’re uncomfortable with, they really don’t like the idea of being…

David Eisner: It makes them extra anxious to be recorded saying things that they might be trying out.

Audrey Tang: Exactly.

David Eisner: Figuring out whether there’s a way to get them comfortable with trying things out and really understanding that the recording is for their benefit as opposed to for any other kind of use, I think is a worthwhile thing for us to see if we can get done.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. I think when people understand that the recording is just for the group, or even the recording is just between themselves and the group for X number of days, like 10 days, after which it’s only the transcript that’s kept, and the recording is shredded.

Audrey Tang: If you say this upfront, it actually builds a cabal feeling, where only people in the meeting knows what happened really in the meeting. Then we collectively publish a synthesized transcript that we want the world to see. That is also a team-building experience.

David Eisner: I’d love to figure out, Vicki, the right way to experiment with that. Right now, it’s a little anathema to us.

Vicki Veenker: Generally, although, out here in California, we experimented with a lot of things, and we did experiment with that. We had a guest speaker. We had many that were from California, but we had one that was not.

Vicki Veenker: When he joined us, I asked people in the room if we could – because he joined by video – if we could record it for people who had had to miss that session. That’s exactly what we did, Minister, is we kept it for a certain number of days.

Vicki Veenker: We published it internal to our group only, but some of the people who had been there could also go back and listen again to what this guest had said to try to internalize it more fully. It was very effective.

Vicki Veenker: I had not thought about making that a practice in other instances, but I do like the idea of sending the transcript to participants. We had done that. Because we didn’t want to stifle candor, we had not done all-day sessions, but we do take very detailed notes.

Vicki Veenker: Then we do circulate those internally. This, as people get more comfortable with Zoom, listening to you makes me think that easier way to do it would be the process.

Audrey Tang: There’s another way of going about that. I pasted you first my conversation moderated by Puja, with Yuval Noah Harari, the historian. There’s another example I just pasted you which is interesting, because it just says, “The group is called Denmark Delegation.”

Audrey Tang: There’s people with various affiliations. For example, Jonas Parello-Plesner is fine with publishing his name. Everybody else, pretty much, only consented to the Chatham House Rule, meaning I can quote them, but not their name.

Audrey Tang: They are all “Audience Member.” Oh, there is also Jacob, Flemming Rose, and Camilla. There’s also a few people who are not comfortable with publishing their name, and so they are Audience Member.

Audrey Tang: We do not even distinguish between Audience Member one, two, three. That’s another way of going about a mixed opt-in of the recording of the names and opting out, if you look at from a Chatham House Rule perspective.

Vicki Veenker: We did something very similar to that, because we did operate under Chatham House Rules exactly.

Vicki Veenker: Some of the notes that I got from my colleagues who took the notes had all the names, but I took the names out when I sent them around, in case somebody forwarded or somehow lost control of the copy.

Vicki Veenker: That’s because we met for many hours a day, for meeting, after meeting, after meeting. They knew who the speaker was by the context, and I didn’t have to write it down because I wasn’t going out to the world, necessarily.

Vicki Veenker: It was quite effective, but it was laborious to produce those. I think that the recording and transcription process is much less laborious.

Audrey Tang: Right, because you share the editing with everybody. People do not want to look half-witted. They will actually put in a lot of work in even making sure that the citation, the source material, the expansion of the acronyms and things like that are all making sure that it is resolvable by people with no background knowledge.

Vicki Veenker: That’s fabulous. That’s an excellent suggestion, and it would have saved us a lot of work and given people the chance, like you say, to make themselves clearer, to make themselves better understood by better word choice or acronym expansion. That’s terrific.

David Eisner: OK, no hindsight kicking. It’s all forward-looking. It’ll help us a lot.

Vicki Veenker: I mean that will be great when we do that next time. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

David Eisner: Minister, do you have a favorite…When things get overheated, we have people that really disagree with each other. Are there options that you’ve explored other than just taking a break, “Let’s take a 10-minute break”? Are there places to go or things to do online that offer a cool-down period or session?

Audrey Tang: My favorite is tea breaks, and literally making some tea. That really helps, but that may be that I am from Taiwan, and bubble tea is everywhere. We’ll just say, “Why don’t we have some bubble tea together?”

Audrey Tang: Literally, if you are in the same space, we just literally go to the nearby corner and bring back some bubble tea for everyone. If you are on the online setting, it’s easy enough to mix some tea.

Audrey Tang: If the mix is novel enough, like if I look at something that particularly is a personal attack or things like that, I found that if I mix two kinds of teabags together, which creates a new flavor, and then I drink it, it makes in my mind a connection into a pleasant, new feeling, a new memory, a positive affect.

Audrey Tang: That then, afterward, if I sleep enough that day, or if I take a five-minute break, my mind associate those unpleasant visual stimuli or auditory stimuli into a positive olfactory and taste stimuli.

Audrey Tang: Then it will, at the end, in the mind to be a positive experience. I will not get angry when I look at the same words or hear that same words again.

David Eisner: That makes a lot of sense. You know, Vicki, the rules that we were looking at? Something like 20 minutes on looking at a screen, 20 seconds looking at something 20 feet away.

David Eisner: The idea of, if things get hot, asking somebody to go take…We lost Vicki.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, we lost Vicki.

David Eisner: Asking somebody to go taste something or to go smell something new, that’s a really interesting thing to ask people to do during a break.

Audrey Tang: You can see the recording really helps now because Vicki will see the transcript afterward and can view the recording afterwards.

David Eisner: I’m admitting her back in.

Audrey Tang: Hello, Vicki.

Vicki Veenker: I don’t know where I went. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: Can you see me now or still no?

Vicki Veenker: I finally can see you, yes. Maybe I should have done that a long time ago. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s right, that’s right. That’s awesome.

David Eisner: Sometimes, going away is always the best thing, right?

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s a refresh.

Vicki Veenker: Making tea. I was listening with great interest to the tea-making story.

David Eisner: I love that idea, though, of instructing people, when we have to take a 5, 10-minute break, “Go taste something new. Go smell something new.”

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It really, really helps. Also, just to complete my sharing about the transcript-making, there’s an extreme case where not only Chatham House Rule, but people from the other side of the screen do not consent to recording.

Audrey Tang: Then, in which case, I will do a local recording. Local recording is easy, of course. If you’re on a Mac, you just use a QuickTime player to make a local recording while you are having the video conference.

Audrey Tang: So that people understand that you are making a recording, but it’s just from your side, only listening to what you said. You’re wearing headphones, so what they say will not be part of that recording.

Audrey Tang: What I will do is that, for each incoming question, I will first confirm the question. That is to say, to paraphrase your question, are you asking this and that? Then in the transcript, that will be the question that’s asked by the audience member.

Audrey Tang: Then I will follow with my answer. Throughout, there’s no recording from their side. They can speak very frankly and/or review any number of anecdotes and so on. I would always listen to them and finally say, “OK, from what I gather, this is what you want to ask.”

Audrey Tang: I make sure that, when I’m paraphrasing, I lift out any personally identifiable material from it. That’s the extreme case. I find almost everyone is comfortable with that.

David Eisner: That’s really interesting. I like that a lot. I know we’ve taken nearly an hour of your time. It’s been exceptionally valuable. We’re going to be on this journey.

David Eisner: If, once in a while, in a couple of months, three months, we have a couple more questions, or especially if we do the virtual reality experiments and experiences that we were talking about, is it OK if we reach back out?

Audrey Tang: Of course, of course. Let’s keep in touch. The final thing I’d like to share with you is this thing that really interesting noise canceling is the HyperX QuadCast. You were hearing from the air conditioner, which is still really loud.

Audrey Tang: Because this mic has a recording mode here that if I dial it here to only receive sound from the front, it just ignore anything on the back. It can also be dialed to interview mode, in which case it only gets from the front and back, but not to the side.

Audrey Tang: It’s really nice, and the final thing is that, if I mute myself…

Audrey Tang: Audrey…I can do so publicly, like a social gesture. You cannot miss the fact that I…

Audrey Tang: …muted myself, because there’s a lifesaver. It’s a social object that works pretty well in a multi-people recording device.

Audrey Tang: The automated transcription really only works if everybody have this kind of mic very close to them that can filter out the noise. This is what I’ve found to work the best in a group setting as well.

David Eisner: That’s terrific. That also will particularly useful to us when we find a member that has a noisy environment.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. People do not actually want the ambient noise to be exposed to the conversation anyway, but people often have a lot of difficulty if it’s software-controlled, like if you have to fiddle with some settings on your screen and things like that.

Audrey Tang: Even for people who mute themselves, some of them will just click the wrong button and close the cam instead of the mic and things like that. With this physical button, you cannot miss it.

Vicki Veenker: Unless you’re like me, and unfortunately, I’ve lost my video of you again. I don’t know what it is going on. [laughs]

Audrey Tang: That’s why there is a recording. [laughs]

David Eisner: I want to make sure before we sign off, since I’m hosting and I’m recording, I want to make sure that I actually capture the transcript. Does that happen automatically or do I need to do something?

Audrey Tang: If you capture the recording, I can make the transcript on my side. We have not confirmed the host setting for the Teams plugins, and we didn’t use Together Mode anyway. I’m not sure whether you will actually produce a transcript, but I can do so asynchronously, that is to say after the fact, and send it to you in a day or so.

David Eisner: I just want to make sure. With Zoom a couple of times, I was recording…

David Eisner: …I closed it and I didn’t capture it. How do I make sure I capture it?

Audrey Tang: My personal way of doing this is just to send it to another transcription service, so making a batch thing.

Audrey Tang: My preferred partner in that is CastingWords. I’ll just send a recording to CastingWords, who will prepare this either timestamped or not. In our case, it doesn’t have to be timestamped because we are not publishing the video. They will make a nice transcript.

Audrey Tang: There’s a lot of tools to take the CastingWords transcript, turn it into editable markdown, and then from the markdown publish it to the website called SayIT! That I’m happy to walk you through. Tomorrow, I will send you a link to the coediting permit.

David Eisner: I’m thinking I’m just going to send it to you. I’m worried about losing…How do I actually find it on my…either in Teams…

Audrey Tang: You mean the recording?

David Eisner: Yeah…

Audrey Tang: I think it will offer it down the link right after you close the conversation. It’s the same as Skype. You will see in the chatroom a link to a video.

David Eisner: That’s what I needed. Thank you very much. Minister, I’m so delighted to meet you. I’m thrilled. I’ve never met someone with your kind of expertise, and I love the suggestions that you gave us. Thank you very, very much.

Vicki Veenker: Yeah.

Audrey Tang: Thank you, and live long, prosper. Have a good local time.

David Eisner: [laughs] You, too. Thanks.

Vicki Veenker: You as well, thank you very much.

David Eisner: Be well. Bye.

Vicki Veenker: Bye-bye.