The shocking truth about the carnivore diet that you need to know Now let's be clear. I have nothing against a carnivore diet as an Elimination diet in fact some of my patients use it on a short-term basis to break a cycle of gut inflammation and leaky gut and And it does support their gut help because it removes all lectin-containing compounds from the diet and Let's be clear Plants do not want you to eat them even so-called Friendly plants that appear on the plant paradox diet But in some people their gut is so damaged that even the defense compounds of Simple plants like romaine lettuce or broccoli is enough to cause damage to people's health I'll give you a famous example that I've talked about before Years ago, we got a Nutribullet blender and my wife decided to make a kale smoothie. Why not? Kale's great for you She blended the kale smoothie and I drank it on the way to work and About an hour later.  Well, I can tolerate kale which is bitter which has a lot of Plant defense compounds more bitter more better when I eat it whole or cooked and it's digested slowly, but when we take rock ale and Pulverize it all of a sudden all of those potentially mischievous Compounds we're hitting my gut wall and my gut said holy cow We got to get rid of this stuff and Quite frankly. I haven't had a kale smoothie since Some of my patients are so sensitive to These plant compounds that I have them with irritable bowel or leaky gut Nuke their vegetables cook them forever pressure cook them to destroy these compounds But even that and some people is not enough and we've seen success fly Eliminating all of these compounds. In fact, I've written before that a lot of these diets like the Adkins diet like the Drinking man's diet, which was a very low carbohydrate diet basically eliminated these plant compounds and that's one of the reasons they work for so many people so Maybe I was the father of the carnivore diet of some people have accused me But before we say well if plants are so bad for you all of us should be eating a carnivore diet not so fast First of all, there's absolutely zero evidence of long-living people eating a carnivore diet a Society that follows a carnivore diet does not exist and One would think with so much experimentation With food around the world for millennia If a carnivore diet was as good as its proponents say it is for long-term health Surely we should have been able to find a society that has long-term great health on a carnivore diet and that Simply does not exist. In fact looking at areas of the world that have extreme longevity the blue zones and other zones that I've talked about in my book all Of these areas have one thing in common and no, it's not that they eat beans and rice or grains Sorry, that's absolutely not true All of these areas in general eat a very low Animal protein diet and as I've written about in all my books That's what appears to be the major driver of this longevity Now the other thing if you're going to embark on a carnivore diet Let's be careful about our food choices that are available by eating animal products first of all There is a sugar molecule in beef lamb and pork called new five g see That sugar molecule is distinctly different from the sugar molecule that lines the blood vessels of chicken fish and us We have an Antibody that can be developed when we're exposed to new five GC containing foods That we will attack our own blood vessels with that antibody So we don't want an autoimmune attack on our blood vessels and there is Considerable experimental evidence that one of the reasons that red meat Promotes heart disease is actually from this molecule new five GC Prompting an autoimmune attack on our blood vessels. The other thing that's concerning is that tumor cells Can use new five GC to hide from our immune system to Cloak of themselves Now here's the deal you and I do not produce new five GC So they only place a tumor cell could get new five GC Is for you to eat it in beef lamb or pork and that's why there is an Association now just remember association does not mean causation, but there is an association association between red meat eating and Cancer particularly colon cancer and even breast cancer so our species became Completely different one of the reasons we think is because of this new five AC mutation Okay, so you're not going to eat beef lamb and pork that's pretty easy Oli chicken instead that has new five AC. Well, not so fast first of all Most commercially available chicken is incredibly high in the lectins and antibiotics Now wait a minute Lectins I thought lectins were in plants and that's true lectins are primarily in plant foods Well, you've heard the phrase you are what you eat But more importantly you are what the thing you're eating eight so if you feed chickens Lectin containing foods like corn and soybeans, which is what most chicken feed is made of the lectins in those corn and soybeans will become part of the chicken meat and It's always amazing to me when I have people with tough autoimmune diseases that we take away their organic free-range chicken and Their autoimmune disease finally abates and it's because those organic free-range chickens were being fed organic Corn and soybeans So what can you do try to find? pastured chickens, but even that is Troublesome as you know, we've had Farmer Dan from lectinlightchicken.com on this podcast and Farmer Dan from Texas has Perfected lectin free chickens using lectin free Feed in his pastured chickens and I'm a huge fan of his why else well even though it is technically illegal Now to give antibiotics to chickens. There's a catch chickens can be kept in a warehouse with a hundred thousand chickens And they're not in cages. They actually hold themselves up by being crammed in there Legally, you can keep those chickens in that warehouse As long as you open a door to the outside for five minutes every 24 hours And the chicken has in theory the ability to go outside and that actually is the definition of free-range chicken the law which was passed in 2007 Actually allows you to feed chickens regular grain not organic If you if the price of organic food goes twice as high as regular You can switch the chickens to regular food and still label it organic because you meant well Now even though you it is illegal to feed chickens antibiotics if the veterinarian Who of course is paid for by the chicken company thinks that one of those chickens in a hundred thousand chickens is sick You're allowed to give the entire flock antibiotics to treat that one sick chicken in fact looking at chickens who have Supposedly never been given antibiotics in some studies 60% of those chickens have antibiotics in their flesh even though it's illegal to give them antibiotics certified as antibiotic-free There are interesting studies showing that urinary tract infections in women can be directly traced to contaminated chicken meat Antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria and chicken can lead to food-borne illness Almost once a month. We hear of a chicken related food-borne illness About one in six Salmonella infections and one in three campylobacter infections are due to antibiotic-resistant strains of those bacteria in the chicken you're eating Watch be very careful when it says no antibiotics labeled That is not your assurance that these chickens have not been given antibiotics Look for pasture-aged chicken. Know your farmer. Ask your farmer at the farmers market What do you feed your chickens? The correct answer is nothing They go out in the fields and eat bugs and grass, which is what they're supposed to do Okay. Well, what about eggs that could be a potential for the carnivore diet Well, if you're going to do that again look for pasture-raised or at least omega-3 eggs Empyroferably look for omega-3 eggs that have been fed algae. There are a number on the market But the deal with eggs in my humble opinion is Eggs should be a vehicle to get olive oil into your mouth and interestingly enough eat primarily the yolks That's where all the good stuff is and look for the really bright intensely orange colored yolks That's a guarantee Pretty much that those chickens have been outside eating bugs Give the whites to your dog. Your dog will love you for it Interestingly enough about two and a half eggs a day meet all the protein requirements for your needs How about fish? Please eat wild fish only Preferably smaller fish like sardines like mullet The best seafoods that you can get wild caught salmon Alaska salmon by law has to be wild caught If you see the words organic salmon run the other way They didn't follow the salmon around in the ocean to see if they were eating organically those are farm-raised salmon that have been fed organic corn and soy beans, so just because it says organic or Nordic salmon or Scottish organic salmon or Canadian salmon run the other way. That's not what you're looking for Try to stay away from larger fish The people that I see with high mercury levels in their urine or their blood in my practice are Dentist or sushi eaters These are not your friends swordfish tilefish Rupert has high levels of mercury and try to avoid these things and Naturally if you're having fish and chips or fried calamari That's not part of the carnivore diet. Sorry about that Okay, so why do people get good results with the carnivore diet? Well, it's because you're eliminating lectins But all of my carnivore diet patients when we look at their inflammatory markers Over time their inflammatory markers markers of vessel flexibility begin to get worse and worse so short-term to fix a problem with an affront of Plant compounds against your gut. I've got nothing wrong with that But long-term I can tell you in my patient population It looks like a recipe for disaster and again if this was such a good idea We should be able to find a society with Incredibly long-lived healthy people who have adopted a carnivore diet. I'm sorry They just can't be found Finally just remember as in general and I agree with dr. Walter Longo with this The less animal protein that you can get The better and when I asked my patients to reduce animal protein I see dramatic Reductions in a blood marker called insulin like growth factor and As a general rule the lower your insulin like growth factor the longer you live the longer you live Well and quite frankly the less chance of cancer developing. So why not go after that? so The is a carnivore diet a great idea Well as the ultimate elimination diet I have nothing wrong with a carnivore diet in the short term but once you fix the underlying problem and You know how to do that if you've been watching this podcast Once you fix that problem It's time to wean yourself from the carnivore diet And if you're going to do the carnivore diet Please try to think about Small fish try to think about shellfish like clams like scallops like oysters like mussels and Small fish like sardines. That's the safest way to practice a carnivore diet. I Think you're gonna love this one Fun fact the amount of lithium in your local water may have a Positive benefit on your brain health through the years


Hello and welcome to the session. In this session we discussed the following question which says in the given figure AB is the chord of a circle with center O and AB is produced to C such that BC is equal to OB. Also CO is joined and produced to meet the circle in D if angle ACD is equal to Y degree and angle AOD is equal to X degree proves that X is equal to 3Y. First we shall recall some facts which says that angles opposite to equal size of a triangle are equal. In a triangle the exterior angle is equal to the sum of the interior opposite angles. This is the key idea for this question. Now we move on to the solution. This is the figure given to us. We are given AB is the chord of the circle then BC is equal to OB. CO is joined and produced to meet the circle in point D and we are given angle ACG is equal to Y degrees and angle AOD is equal to X degrees and we need to prove X is equal to 3Y. Consider the triangle OBC in this we are given OB is equal to BC so this means that angle BOC is equal to angle BCO. Now since angle BCO is equal to Y degrees so both these angles would be equal to Y degrees and the reason for this is that the angles opposite equal sides in a triangle are equal. Now in triangle OBC the sides OB and BC are equal so the opposite angles would also be equal. Now for triangle OBC angle OBA is the exterior angle and we know that inner triangle exterior angle is equal to the sum of the interior opposite angles so angle OBA would be equal to the sum of interior opposite angles that is angle BOC plus angle BCO. Now angle BOC and BCO are each equal to Y degrees so this would be equal to Y degree plus Y degree equal to 2Y degree. So we have now got angle OBA equal to 2Y degree. Next we consider the triangle OBA in this we have OA is equal to OB as they are the radar of the circle so this means that the angles opposite these two equal sides would also be equal that is angle OBA is equal to angle OAB. Now that we have got OBA as 2Y degrees so we get OBA equal to OAB equal to 2Y degrees. Next we have for triangle AOC angle AOD is the exterior angle and so this would be equal to the sum of the interior opposite angles of the triangle AOC. So angle AOD is equal to angle OAC plus angle OCA. Now we are given that angle OCA is Y degrees and angle OAC or you can say OAB is equal to 2Y degree so this is equal to 2Y degree plus Y degree equal to 3Y degree. Now we were given that angle AOD is equal to X degrees so we have X degrees is equal to 3Y degrees so this means that X is equal to 3Y. We were supposed to prove this so hence proved this complete C session hope you have understood the solution for this question.


I'm Cameron Tonkenweis and this is the Service Design Show and this is episode number 198. Today we welcome Cameron Tonkenweis on the show. As a highly respected educator Cameron has been shaping the service design field for over the last 20 years. And today he says it's time to stop. It's time to stop eroding expert services for the sake of lowering costs and increasing revenue. Why? Because the desire to replace human knowledge and expertise with yet another chatbot is just unsustainable. It's doing more harm than good for customers and businesses in the long run. So what's the alternative? Well Cameron makes a case that we need to start rebuilding supportive services and the economies around them. Don't worry, we'll get into details of what expert and supportive services mean later in the conversation. For now you just need to know that supportive services recognize and value the wisdom that's embedded in lived experiences. There's just one small problem. Our clients aren't asking us to rebuild supportive services as we just said. Clients mainly ask us to do the exact opposite. All the human elements are being removed from our services and they are being increasingly automated and digitized. Of course with the hopes to increase efficiency and gain short term benefits. So how do we break this cycle? We need to show that there is an alternative future and that it's a better one for all of us. What that alternative future is and how do we communicate it in a compelling way? That's what we're about to find out because in the upcoming chat Cameron goes in depth into what exactly expert services are being eroded and what the painful consequences are of this development. How we can bring back the appreciation for lived experiences into service delivery and show that it pays off and which tools we have at our disposal to give our clients the confidence to move into this direction. During the conversation Cameron shared a great story about how a bank suddenly realized that it's not just in the business of storing our money but also needs to be in the business of helping people relocate as you'll hear this surprising insight at the bank was triggered by an unfortunate disaster. The big question is whether we can also unlock these insights proactively. It is very practical yet thought provoking story and I think that you'll enjoy it. So let's turn the volume up a bit give our full attention to Cameron talking wise and I'll catch you at the end for the closing reflections. My name is Mark Fontaine and you are listening to the services I show. Welcome to the show Cameron. Hi Mark. Nice to have you on. You've been on my list for quite a while. That's exciting thanks I'm honored to be chatting to you today. It's a great podcast I think very necessary. I think our community needs more chat, more critique, more conversation, more maturing. That's what we're trying to contribute here and that's what we're going to try to do here as well today in our conversation. Cameron for the people who don't know who you are and your career has been ever evolving. Could you give us an insight into where you are today? What are you doing? I'm currently speaking to you from Sydney Australia which is Gadigal land, the land of the Gadigal language group, the indigenous population who never ceded this land always will always be always is always will be Aboriginal land. I am currently the professor of design studies at the University of Technology Sydney. I've had the great privilege of being in North America teaching at two institutions sort of five years ago for 10 years. I was at Parsons in New York City and I was at Carnegie Mellon University before that but I've always been an academic. I worked for a sort of independent think tank called Eco Design Foundation in the 1990s but ever since then I've been in formally university employment but a lot of the work that I do is service design research and we don't do that academically we do that in an applied manner so I do somewhat practice as a service designer when we're doing research projects. Carnegie Mellon, Parsons, classic schools for service design for sure. Cameron you have a long history with service design and the other question that we always ask here is do you know the first time you sort of learned about service design do you have a memory I have a distinct memory of coming across Birgit Marga's kind of little pamphlet book on service design that she had produced while teaching at Clone International School of Design. I was looking for service design. I was doing a lot of work in sustainable design and the work at that time this was early 2000s really 2000, 2001, 2003. A lot of the work at that time was trying to think about how do you dematerialize society how do you reduce materials intensity how do you make sure our lifestyles are less heavy with less churn and so a lot of people were talking about how you do serviceization how you shift to service economies and as someone speaking from design I was interested in design based change towards those service economies in the name of sustainability but service design wasn't really a thing at that time and then I or not a thing I was aware of and then I remember coming across Birgit's booklet and thinking ah it is a thing it's it's a thing that people are starting to to think and talk about. I went to a John Thacker conference in 2003 a Doors of Perception event in Delhi in India and I met the two people who were setting up live work in the United Kingdom and they said oh yeah you know service design they'd come out of the interaction institute in Navraya and they were now founding a service design firm so they and engine were beginning to create UK based service design so then I thought oh this really is a thing now and that's two decades ago can you imagine yeah that's why this beard is gray now thanks thanks for sharing it's always nice to get a little bit of origin story Cameron to get to know you as a person next to the professional a little bit better we've got five questions for you to reply to as quickly and briefly as possible are you ready yep all right finish this sentence the thing that always makes me smile is oddly stand-up comedy I I am a bit of an addict for a good stand-up comic uh Stuart Lee in particular with these kind of anti-capitalist rants a lot of them get cancelled I think quite deservedly so it's always a bit of a worry but I find in a weird way it's it's sort of anthropology it's its observation and I do think that you can learn a lot about the nature of social relations between people so it's not only just like actually making me laugh but I actually find it always quite intriguing and and and worth considering as a kind of research source I think Edward de Bono mentioned that humor is one of the most important or an important ingredient in creativity absolutely absolutely yeah yeah there has to be and that enjoyment is not just visceral it it's the enjoyment of discovering new things it's the enjoyment of suddenly seeing a connection that was playful and sometimes that connection makes you laugh and then sometimes that connection is a piece of insight which is the moment at which you go aha so yeah but I do find myself oddly distracted by stand-up comedy I have to say all right uh question number two let's see if we can pick up the pace the most important quality in a friend is reliability just always being there I think it's it's very important that no matter their circumstances or your circumstances they they are present and they show up and they they give time so and I think we look for that reliability in things and not only in people and it's not always there all right the book that has impacted my life is Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain Elaine Scarry is an English literary professor I call her a kind of philosopher of literature the final chapter in the book is about a kind of philosophy of why we make things artifact creation and the way it's about seeing pain in other people but wanting that pain to be gone and the frustration of not being able to do anything to make it sort of drives us into creating artifacts that can help and it's just a really beautiful book it's a life-changing book fascinating um well added to the show notes for sure um question number four is what is your hidden talent my hidden talent is pissing people off um I I I don't think I'm doing it but I am definitely doing it so I have a capacity to unintentionally alienate people and it's very problematic because it really gets in the way of the sorts of things that I'm trying to convince them to do so it's not really a skill if you've been pissed off by our conversation today you'll you'll get a time I'm sorry to everyone I'm pissed off I'm very sorry I promise you it's not intentional all right and the fifth and final question Cameron is the world our world needs more service designers is a really cliched answer but I think people who understand social relations and understand ways of creating social relations between people which is how I define service design I think we need that right now there are a lot of people who've given up on sociality on institutions on organizations we we need people who understand how to create new types of social relations right creating new types of social relationships Cameron when I was reading through the notes you shared with me um prior to our chat now the thing that came up for me was that we need to think and act in service design beyond just services can you explain that a little bit more I think if you just said to somebody what is the service section of the economy what are service jobs they have a very particular understanding of what that is and I think a lot of service designers their bread and butter is designing that type of service um as I said just then I think services can better be understood as ways in which strangers collaborate ways in which people who don't know each other are helped to help each other um and it's not just the provision of service to a customer but it's the customer participating in the creation of of value between two people and I think service designers have a lot to bring to how our societies do that stranger collaboration whether it's a cooperative uh whether it's a formal organization or an informal organization whether it's government um whether it's ways in which uh people can be welcoming of immigrants and difference ways in which people can begin to change their lifestyles ways in which people can actually begin to modify their the values that they they think they live by um and I think that is actually what service designers can service design can sculpt can help create and uh how would you describe the current notion or perspective on service design apparently we're not there yet where you imagine a hope wish we would be so where are we today I think we are too much of a service industry I think we wait for clients to come with problems that we solve I think we are not entrepreneurial enough I think we are competitive agencies who are trying to win work uh and then do one-off projects hopefully get the client back again but um I just cannot see enough collaboration I cannot see enough alliances I cannot see enough people creating opportunities for change and creating opportunities for service designing and not only for themselves but for others so I think we need to start to become much more of a collective force for moving societies toward more equitable and sustainable futures uh and much less people just waiting for the perfect client to walk through the door who is um who is we and when you say we need to be a more collective force who do you foresee being there uh so I'm referring to the community of practice that are designers um which would stretch from strategic designers uh through to product designers and include service designers I think part of my concern is that a lot of service design has been yoked into and under digital design uh and it's become a kind of subset of that um and so yeah that we is an appeal to people to be more assertive about what different service design can make and to begin to ally with other people who are committed to that project of creating new social relations fostering new opportunities for people to begin to collaborate as strangers so I'm appealing to a we that I think could exist uh doesn't quite exist at the moment it's often more in activist and not-for-profit space uh than it is in agency-based service design how would you imagine this to look like like in the ideal scenario if you could sort of shape and craft our world our community what will we have that we don't have right now I think it would be something this is a terrible analogy but it's sort of a go-to I think it would be something like um doctors without borders or engineers without borders uh and I don't mean it in the sense that the projects exist in the global south and these are opportunities for the global north to to suddenly do a small bit of ethical give back I mean it merely in the sense that it's an alliance of people who use service design skills and expertise and insights to find opportunities for change and to begin to lead that change um who are not as I said waiting for clients to create the opportunities for them to do the work but are actually going and initiating projects so um I am I would want an alliance of service designers who are committed to bringing about uh these kinds of changes uh in their own societies across different societies uh not necessarily you know in in um less privileged circumstances but actually sort of deprivileging their own societies and committing to that so it's halfway between a community of practice and a political organization um and it's definitely something that would have a you know a strong ethical mission yeah you mentioned the word activist I think that resonates with me and uh when you use words like alliance that really strongly resonates with me um yeah and taking a short sidestep uh from this one of the things you um shared with me is that you feel that the service design community is vastly undereducated I see you smiling and I it's a provocative uh statement so I would love to go into that can you share your thoughts so there's there's a kind of just a very straight pragmatic reading of it which is that a large percentage of people who call themselves service designers or have service designers their job title do not have a design education um and have possibly only done a short course in a type of what I would call UX version of service design and you mean with formal education like the classical yeah yeah yeah if you survey the population you'd find that um I think possibly even a majority have not actually done a let's say a degree in service design if they have done a degree in service design it's almost entirely postgraduate degrees uh and then so you're now a smaller population if you kind of took this and said okay well this many have only done short courses and this many have actually had uh formal training um of those half of them have probably pivoted from some other degree marketing or business or um coming from anthropology uh the number of people who are doing postgraduate service design but have done undergraduate design and are now service designers is a really small minority of uh service designers out there now that's not a good measure I don't think um it's the only one so that's why I said that's the first pragmatic measure is just to say I think service designs are undereducated formally in that way but I think that's not necessarily the case I think people who are self-taught people have done a short course people who are well experienced I mean not that they are undereducated not because they're lacking formal qualifications but because I don't see a community of practice engaged in ongoing professional development in a really rich and critical way I do not see service design being a community of practice that celebrates critique that celebrates analysis of failure that is wanting to learn and wanting to share there are bits and pieces people tell stories on podcasts there's a conference served as and then the the ISDN conferences and there are bits and pieces obviously there is some but I think given what I think is the importance of service design I just don't believe there's enough that there needs to be a lot more both formal and informal maturing of the practice have you do you have any guesses or assumptions why that could be because like we said at the start it's not like it's a new community it's a new field but then again we're into this over two decades so apparently something's going on yeah no no so this obviously is the case that there is there's long a lot of demand and it arose you know as a profession because it was needed but the economy a kind of you know to use academic jargon the neoliberal economy of the last 40 years has only needed a very particular type of service and so people have been designing services that delight customers and are more efficient for the provider on the edges they're more inclusive they are not what Shoshana Zuboff called the support economy they are not rich services in the main they are not rich services delivered by people to people that enable people to to develop whole new practices shift the nature of their businesses reorient their lifestyles I think we could be seeing a lot more of that type of service design and that requires I think a lot more sophistication as a service designer what kind of sophistication I think you need to understand a lot about the nature of social interactions beyond just things like cognitive biases and behavioral nudges you need to understand different ways in which people have collaborated over history different cultures of collaboration you need to understand a lot about cultural difference different rituals different roles people play I think you know if you kind of just ran through the history of 20th century anthropology and sociology you'd find 20 or 30 concepts that I would hope every service designer knows and yet I'm constantly frustrated that they don't so even ones that are directly relevant emotional labor ideas of the presentation of the self from kind of Irving Goffman ideas of different types of everyday communism from Dave Graber I just think there there is so many different models of social interactions that are beyond cognitive science that service designers need to be familiar with and drawing on for inspiration whenever they come across a project is it because these models or frameworks I'm curious why they haven't been popularized yet as like if they would be useful and helpful in the day-to-day practice of service design if they would lead to better I don't know commercial results people would have adopted them by now I'm going to assume they would and so I think that's exactly the issue that they they don't look profitable according to a current mode of doing business which is about increasing price and lowering cost and generally trying to move things into cheaper and cheaper labor and the cheapest labor source is outsourcing to the customer themselves so you get the customer to do half the service and you call it freedom of choice you know you get to choose and you put all the liability for the choice onto them and they have to pay the privilege of doing it so you know at one point it was called time theft that kind of unsourcing to your to your customers and definitely people have embraced the version of choice they get but I think that's starting to be exhausted I think that value proposition is exhausting and I think the kind of push around chatbots and artificial intelligence right now is is the last effort to come up with the high price low cost version of service that is not actually paying skilled people to support customers so yes we are moving into eroding services in that sense and that is mainly driven like you said by our profit or revenue a profit perspective commercial perspective that's as long as there are businesses that's probably going to be the case um so do we have the ability and if so how do we change that bottom up because we are not yet in the positions where we lead the organizations we're not yet calling the shots on the level necessary to change this what's your take on this so I think two things that the first is I am confident in the analysis that that this is not a sustainable business strategy that if you just look at eroding trust and customer satisfaction people are not feeling like they are getting what they deserve from this setup and that frustration you can see bubbling everywhere from conspiracy theorists to doubting experts to hating banks and governments and airlines and everybody I just feel at the moment it's a really tricky situation in which if you actually realistically accepted how many people don't like the services they have to pay for because they have no choice we should actually be very close to revolution but but when we're not so I'm very confident that the current business model in which the support economy that I'm talking about is not viable and that's why service designers haven't had to educate themselves to into a mature practice to lead that change I'm pretty sure those conditions are changing now that I think they're coming to the end so I think it's important that service designers begin to as they say in North America where they play ice hockey possibly in Scandinavia as well you know you've got to play to where the puck will be you don't play to where the puck is now I suppose it's a football analogy as well you need to move to the open space and it's a risk and it's a risk in which people need to have alliances in which they support each other in trying to make those transitions and really pushing clients so if clients are not yet prepared to realize that customers are dissatisfied with the chatbot version of their service we need we the smart set of service designers need to begin to refuse to do that work and we need to critique that work publicly and we need to take some risks we need to take some risks I think you should be asking service design academics to lead that because we are somewhat protected from the market and and we're in a position to be critical but I think things are changing and people need to be pushed it's not changing fast enough and service designers can see it whenever they have to compromise on a service design because it doesn't fit an existing business model which is unsustainable so I'm feeling like there are options they're not easy options they're political options they're risks I think a lot of us are in a very privileged position to be able to take risks whenever I say this lots of people say well you know junior designers can't possibly say no because they'll lose their job and it's kind of like I'm not talking junior designers I'm talking to design leads I'm talking to principles of companies service design agencies I'm talking to the thought leaders in this space and I'm talking to the educators who can provide some backup as well I think it was Wayne Gretzky by the way who came up with a hockey puck story if we dive into that a little bit more I have the privilege to host a community an alliance of service design professionals who do work in-house inside organizations they have the opportunity to shape the future of their organizations if we would have a chat with you and sit down and think about okay so where is the fuck heading to and if I say to my boss you know what I don't think we should do this work they will ask me for an alternative so let's talk a little bit about what does the alternative look like from my perspective the alternative looks like a lot more people-based mid-level experts doing what is called in social work case work but they have people who they are responsible for helping make decisions so the example that I use is just recent experience I've had doing some work with banks around scamming so presuming your country as well and around the world levels of scamming are just going through the roof they are being aided and abetted by artificial intelligence on both the analysis and delivery side and it's very clear that banks for example who are already not well trusted are falling behind in this so people are experiencing a situation in which the model of it's all up to you you do your research you make a choice somebody comes to you with an investment opportunity that sounds too good nevertheless this is a rare opportunity you should take it and then you take it lose your money people are desperately looking for in financial services trusted support you can get that trusted support if you're a high wealth you can get a personal banker you can get financial advisors this is a really expensive service everybody else gets nothing and just gets put into this risky situation it's not dissimilar in health it's not dissimilar in education where are you going to study service design we give you here's the website it's all promotional material you work it out there it's very difficult to get as a junior a coach who can help you find the right course for you to do so we don't have good models of all these different versions of expert service that are somebody well trained who has the time to talk to you and do case by case it's a really expensive business model so obviously people aren't going to be able to afford to pay for it up front so it'll have to have some kind of equity purchase or paying up over time or hopefully not the model of I'm being paid by somebody else to give you this advice and therefore I'm going to sell you what they're selling that's how we got into this in the first place so we need some other model of what this mid-range expert service is and we have examples of it you know with things like social work financial counseling as opposed to financial advice sometimes you know in America when you go to university you're immediately assigned an advisor and those advisors give you personal advice about which subjects to take during your college degree and that happens that's a whole profession in America there is a profession of student advisors they don't occur in my country I'm not sure if they don't occur in yours but again it's a particular type of service provision and it's a very old knowledge based version of the care economy so that's what I'm sort of talking about very abstractly I think I can find particular examples in energy services in bank services that's what I think we need to be heading towards interesting I can imagine that as we're listening to this and we're in the peak of the AI hype cycle one might stand up and say you know what all this knowledge all this expertise is or very soon will be baked into things like AI so we don't like we should eliminate the human from the equation because of the biases because of the like limited amount of knowledge a single person can contain I'm sure you have some thoughts on this as well I have no faith in artificial intelligence whatsoever but I think just in terms of the the the service proposition artificial intelligence is a patent-based system with a generative capacity so that means that it is always going to be synthesizing existing patterns and therefore proposing them to you and your situation we are nowhere near actual comprehension of individual contexts even today if you were to ask a question of some generative next word predicting service you have to be a very skilled prompter to try and architect it and in fact you have to be so skilled in asking the question you probably know what a good answer is it's very difficult to be someone who generally doesn't know the answer and ask a question and then get the correct answer so it's just a long way from being able to actually understand personal circumstances individual cases or actually using biases productively so you know doctors will have a very particular bias towards certain types of therapy and you understand that as you get to know your doctor and you know that sometimes they will say well look the general feeling is that this drug does this but I've known you for a while now and I've seen your way your body's reacted to other things and I think we should stay away from that one I think we should go with this one I think we can use this combination that is not something we are going to get from artificial intelligence despite fantasies about general artificial intelligence anytime soon and I think never is actually the answer I'm trying to imagine like we live in a service economy service dominant logic says that everything is a service even in your bicycle is a service the the examples that you are describing I'm curious to which extent they are sort of the edge cases versus the commonality like do how how prevalent are these expert case lab services am I yeah it's a great question it's a great question and I have an odd answer which is a lot of work that I've been doing in a university context which is therefore looking for progressive social change based projects has identified that often somebody who might have very particular technical skills ends up finding themselves in a quite complex social situation so if you are the cable guy who comes into a house to connect somebody's internet up you're one of the few people who crosses the threshold into a private dwelling and we know that those people will often see evidence of domestic violence or partner abuse or neglect or something else so all of a sudden you have this desire I have this desire to make sure that everybody who crosses the threshold who's invited into a house to do a technical service also has a social work degree or understand something about service design and social relations and understand how to do referral at that point it's not that they need to know at all it's just that they need to know enough to recognize and it's the same as I was saying with the bank a bank just looks after your money and tries to get you to borrow money and tries to get you to spend money as long as you can make enough money but banks these days say they're also in the business of financial well-being and if they're in the business of financial well-being suddenly they need to be offering you tailored life advice if they say you need to be saving a lot of money for your family and you happen to come from a sexual orientation in which that's not in the future I'm not sure the artificial intelligence is going to pick that up or how it's going to pick that up without some political worrying situation whereas you know the capacity for somebody to know you and have that kind of expertise it's a low level social expertise and it's piggybacking on other types of service provision so it's true that even a bicycle is a service in a kind of service dominant logic way but it's also true that your bicycle service maintainer can also see that you're in some financial trouble or see that you are wondering which service design subject to take at university and know that they can begin to refer in that way so it's that type of expertise that I'm talking about yeah and uh correctly if I'm wrong but I think what what's at the heart of this is that organizations are sort of re-evaluating the place that they are taking up in our society so where they used to could be pretty isolated and pretty independent now and like I said financial well-being like that's a completely different objective for a bank versus keeping your money safe and when you shift your objectives and your goals and your mission as an organization it could be to save the planet I don't know what Patagonia's exact mission is but you know they're they're selling clothes but they're trying to achieve something else when that happens you have to adapt and then you probably also have to think differently about what you're offering something like that I give you a quick example I just told you I'm in Sydney there's a lot of wild weather this summer there's a lot of flooding going on so lots of people are now finding their insurance premiums going up it's proving to be unaffordable they're suddenly uninsured I was talking to banks and banks realized that they're not actually collecting the data to work out who has insurance on their houses they check when you finance and they don't check in the subsequent years so all of a sudden they were like oh my goodness these people they might get flooded and then they can't repair their house because there's no insurance and then we own they owe us money for something that no longer exists we need to call them up and have a conversation with them about insurance or moving like suddenly that they live in an area that's been rezoned a flood zone and we need to tell them they need to move and the bank was sitting there saying we don't know how to have that conversation how how do we possibly call up somebody and say now there's a strange conversation for your bank to be having but no one else is having it with you the local government's not having it with you the federal government's not having it with you the insurers aren't having it with you because they're just running away so where the last one left standing we need to tell you you need to move out of your house like we need to help you to move now so all of a sudden you're a bank offering a mortgage and you're now in the relocation services business because of climate change and it was amazing to see them realise that whatever value proposition they're working to at the moment that is literally going out the window and it's not a matter of corporate social responsibility it's not about looking good looking green it's not about any of that it's literally like we do actually value our customers because they have an asset and and now we have to tell them to manage their asset how do you have that conversation they said I said well you need service designers they didn't have any local service designers they only had digital designers no one knew how to have this conversation I love this example and we could sort of copy paste it on so many industries you mentioned now we need service designers can you help us make that translation so how do you go from as a bank we need to help our customers move because they are an asset or they own an asset to hey the realisation we need service design to actually get this done I mean in that particular case that lesson came from their just most committed branch managers and stories of how they handled the flood so in that case I was sitting in a room in head office as they were listening to somebody in a regional branch talking about lifting computers up onto desks so that the flood didn't destroy the IT and wrapping up safety deposit boxes so that somebody's heirloomed items from their their family history weren't going to go moldy and when they saw that somebody was proactively doing the service there was nothing in their job description there was no it never said in their job description oh and by the way when a flood comes move the computers and bag the the safety deposit boxes and it was at that point that they thought oh actually we could help these people we could design a guide we could have tools we could have training sessions we could have internal learning on how to begin to do this and that's what we think of as service design we train our frontline service workers to be aware of financial abuse when somebody comes with somebody else and they have a disability and the carrier is there and the carrier takes the money so they do this training and it's called service and all of a sudden they were that was the moment in which they were like right okay so we actually need to design people training resources touch points we need to think about how to actually help people do this so it's suddenly because they saw their own service workers doing it they saw it as service and they saw it as the service that can be designed and I'm going to assume that relationship or the role of frontline workers will also be completely different so they're already working in a service industry but I don't I'm not sure if they all have a service mindset no in that case though you what what caused the difference was the people in the head office seeing frontline service workers offering so much more service than was being asked of them by their official job description and it kind of shamed them it shamed them to think we we deliberately didn't tell you to do this because we'd have to pay you so much more if you did do all this but they were doing it anyway because they love their local community and it's an emergency and everybody pulls together but it made a huge difference for them to see absolutely that frontline service workers do so much value creation that is just not evident to the people who are supposedly designing value propositions of the bank in this new form of relationship between service designers or service design professionals and people delivering the actual service how do we if like when we don't have a crisis or we it's not being asked for what are ways we who are listening to this conversation could accelerate the adoption of this way of being working thinking so I mean the one thing is just to make sure you're doing frontline observations not of customers but of service workers that you shadow service workers and you see all that service that they are already doing in an undesigned way and the design job is just simply to make it easier for them and then to make the other half of the design job is communicating it back to head office so that it gets valued I think the other is is to do rich scenario living lab type work it's it's we have a tradition of speculative critical design I'm very critical of it because it tends to be a kind of play thing it tends to be an aesthetic object tends to be a bunch of bad jokes by very privileged people about apocalyptic futures it's now necessary that we do very rich simulation of emergencies in the same way that every airline does with every airline steward who is hired you know being woken up at all hours to go and go through the emergency routines on a plane until it's automatic that's what you need to be doing with a bank about a flood that's what you need to be doing with a real estate agent about a fire that's what you need to be doing with a installer of internet about physical abuse in partners you need to be running those scenarios and and really helping people understand how they're going to respond in that situation so it's like an applied theater job at an enormous scale to anticipate the kind of conditions we're going to be living in in the coming coming decades interesting and fascinating I can totally see the importance of this and I'm seeing hopeful examples of organizations moving this way already and like you said it takes courage to adopt this way of being working earning your money accepting that you on the short term might earn less in the long term you'll still be alive as an organization I think that's what at stake I mean sorry mark another just to interrupt I mean another way to think about this this is research and this is particularly university partnered research so every service design agency should be having a really significant chunk of their people and time working with universities on coming scenarios not just again waiting for clients but investing in professional development in maturing their practice by working with the people who have the capacity to think about these things to think about where the puck will be even if it's calamitous and to create rich situations in which people can learn from it so I do wish that many more service design firms of every size had formal partnerships and that you know the way to resource it is government funding for research with partner with service so there is a there is a possibility there it's more possible in the EU than it is where I am I'm not sure how possible it is in the US though a lot of universities have large endowments so you would have thought it was possible but I just think there should be a lot richer partnership between service design and service design research it really makes me think if I go back to my personal situation right now and the community of service design professionals that I have the privilege to be part of like this is starting to create critical mass I'm starting to feel that you don't need a thousand people to start a movement like 50 100 people can already make a huge impact and lead by example yeah so I haven't considered partnering with universities or education but that might be a great avenue to explore and I feel that the people members of this community of the circle are eager for this knowledge they like they joined this community this alliance to their practice to push the entire field forward yeah excellent and look if your first part of call is listening to this podcast and and not being pissed off as I said at the beginning but actually thinking okay maybe I am really happy to chat to anybody about this it's not a consultancy I don't charge any money I get paid by my university to profess that's the job of a professor so I'm I'm here to talk to people about these possibilities because it's where I think our society is both going and needs to go so if anybody wants to start to flesh out what this might look like I'm happy to help them flesh it out I don't necessarily have to be the researcher on it you can find local partners but I'm really happy to chat to people about this thank you for inspiring me this already gets my mind buzzing on this morning where we are and recording this if you could leave us with one practical takeaway what do you hope people if there's one thing listening to this conversation what do you hope we take away from it it's a strange thing I want people to recognize just some of the the own frustrations they have I think if you're a professional service designer you tend to think I know how to do things I know how to work out banks I know how to work out insurance I know how to work out renewable energy and even then even if if you're that type of person you will still have these moments at which you think oh this is this is a bit beyond me this is a bit risky you've made mistakes in in some of the decisions you've made I want you to remember those moments and not just think that's embarrassing I won't tell anyone but actually admit that it would be great if there was a service that could help you even you you in your professional privilege so just remember those moments you'll see them in customers you'll see them in companies you'll see them in communities but remember them in yourself and think we could have a support economy we could have a situation in which businesses exist governments exist agencies exist to to help people make decisions and to make the right decision for them and not to have to outsource that to their own limited knowledge or some bad chatbot so I want people to just remember that frustration which I'm hoping I certainly have and I think everybody else has so just remember that next time you're designing and don't just design a service that's cheap and delightful design one that's actually moving towards support you mentioned that you're open to connecting so when listeners want to reach out or learn more about your work what are some good ways to do that I am only on the platform I don't enjoy LinkedIn I have deserted where I used to piss a lot of people off on Twitter because it's now run by somebody who really pisses me off so I'm only on LinkedIn just hit me up there I'm on there too much still and and I'll always follow up so yeah just just go there we'll make sure to add those links there you have some great articles published or I think it's medium right where you publish your articles half on medium half on LinkedIn I'm trying to find I'm wondering if I should stick it on something else I don't know Cameron Tonkenweiss.com might still be available Cameron thanks for coming on sharing and pushing the boundaries and the pushing the bar setting the bar higher for the work that we do saying no more often and offering a more interesting and helpful alternative to the work that we do so I've really enjoyed it so thanks thanks again for coming on it's a real privilege Mark thank you so much I'm excited to have been number 198 it was a real bit of an aspiration to kind of get here and so thank you so much thanks thanks again okay Cameron knows how to shake things up and do it from a place of gratitude and optimism what I'll remember from our conversation is that we should not wait for permission to build better services don't expect anyone to ask you to do so you have the power and the responsibility to push your organization forward so meter source that shines a light on a brighter future if you've enjoyed today's conversation you can do me a big favor click the like button on this video if you haven't done so already not for the youtube algorithm but for me to let me know whether or not we're on the right track by discussing topics like this finally before we part ways please take a moment to reflect and celebrate that by joining us today you've directed your attention towards learning and growing as a professional so from everyone who you are going to impact through your work thank you for taking the time and making the commitment my name is Mark Fontijn and I look forward to having you with us again for a new conversation on the service design show take care and see you soon


Our next speaker is a Susan Blackmore. She's going to talk about fighting the fakers and the failing. What's really interesting about Ms. Blackmore is she was a parapsychologist for a number of years. I think the only parapsychologist who is speaking at TAM, I know for sure this year, but now as a psychologist she researches memes, consciousness, and anomalous experiences. So her haiku is this. Now I am conscious. I used to be unconscious. I like this better. Please welcome Susan Blackmore. Thank you. I don't know. Do I really like it better? Sometimes I lie in bed at night and think, I just go to sleep. Oh, it's just too painful being conscious. Do you ever think that way? It's quite agonizing being conscious, isn't it? Now, do you know who this is? Shuri Blair. Shuri Blair?  Here's a clue. Aren't they lovely? But the point is, what is she wearing? Pretty, isn't it? Nice attractive thing. Sort of natural. Doesn't it make you feel kind of warm and pleasant to look at that lovely woodland scene? And how about this? She's got one on two. So, don't you think if two of the world's most powerful and influential women are wearing this thing, perhaps you should consider wearing one, too. It's called the bioelectric shield. Well, I wonder whether you would benefit from it. So let's try a little quiz. Are you ready for a quiz? Yes. Okay, what I wanted you to do is I'm going to ask you four questions and I want you to answer either yes or no, okay? Truthfully, I want the true answers, all right? So here we go with this quiz. Right, first of all, do you work around computers, electrical equipment? I need my glasses, I'm so old. Fluorescent lighting or in an office or a school environment or around sources of electrical energy and radiation? Yes. Well done. Are you impacted by other people's energy stress or moods? Do you experience low energy, irritability or stress? Does travelling tire you? Yes. Well done. Well, if you answered yes to even one of those questions, you could benefit from a bioelectric shield. You see, yes, good, you're getting the hang of this. See, it will protect you from all that nasty electromagnetic radiation which weakens you and makes you feel stressed and puts you down and so on. It will shield you from all those other horrible people who are kind of emitting nasty vibes that get to you. And it will strengthen you physically, muscles, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. You can't resist, can you? Well, imagine I'm going back a while because it's a long time since I did this sort of stuff. I should perhaps confide in you, although some of you probably know, that I gave up all this stuff quite a long time ago. I'd had enough of it. I couldn't stand it anymore. And they kept inviting me to town and I kept saying, no, I don't do that stuff anymore. No, you're going to leave me alone. But after more than a decade, I kind of plucked up the courage to go back to thinking about these things. And here I am. But it kind of... Thank you. It brings it all back. It brings back the day in 1999 when I was sitting on a plane and the only newspaper available was The Daily Mail, which is not my normal favourite reading, and there was this picture of Cherie Blair. And I was incensed. And I guess you need something to drive you, don't you, to do the hard work. And this is one of the reasons I chose this example, just one example of the many things that I did over all those years, because you need some kind of motivation to make you do the hard work involved in really finding out. It could be true, you know. Couldn't it? I mean, it could be true that specially-aligned crystals hanging around your neck all day could balance the energies of your body in such a way as to protect you. It doesn't sound very likely or very plausible, but we shouldn't just say, can't be, you know? So we have to investigate. And to find out the truth about it, and that's what I decided to do. So I wanted to do some experiments. Now, the interesting thing about the bioelectric shield, as opposed to some other claims, is basically these are straightforward testable claims, which is, you know, really helps. If it says it strengthens you physically, well, you can measure muscle strength, whether you get stronger or weaker. If it says it protects you from the bad effects of phones, you measure those effects. And so you've got a good starting point. But it also is particularly susceptible, as you can imagine, to all kinds of expectation effects and placebo effects. So if I hang something around your neck and tell you you're going to feel better, however skeptical you are, it may have some kind of effect. So obviously you need some kind of a double-blind test. So the bioelectric shield lends itself pretty well to a standard double-blind experimental design. That means you've got to have some real bioelectric shields with real crystals and real balancing and all that, and some sham or placebo or copy empty bioelectric shields that are indistinguishable from the outside. That's quite a tall order. But I was lucky. I got in touch with the UK distributor. Now we're going back to almost the beginnings of, you know, email not being very efficient and not being much of an internet and so on. Web, I mean. So this was all kind of to begin with letters and ringing up people. I found the UK distributor and he put me in touch, his name's David Chambers. He put me in touch with the manufacturers. Charles Brown, who invented the bioelectric shield and his wife Virginia, who runs the company. After long twing and froing, they said they really wanted their marvelous product to be tested and they would provide me with six real and six sham bioelectric shields. Right. So now I've got to design the experiment. What I wanted to be sure about was that they couldn't cheat and I couldn't cheat because it's got to go both ways. You know how many people say in response to Randy's million dollar challenge, well, he'd never let you know I could be psychic and he'd just cheat and pretend I wasn't. You know, they do that and I didn't want that to happen to me and I wanted it to be genuinely fair and open and equal. So the way we did it in the end was we asked them to send us the six real and six sham bioelectric shields numbered with some random numbering system that we would not know and they would keep the record of which of these one to 12 were real and which were sham. Meanwhile, we, back in Bristol in my lab, would get 12 volunteers, all women in the university and we would assign six of them to wear the real thing and six of them to wear the sham and we would letter them, A, B, C, D, E up to 12 letters and keep a record of those secretly in the lab and then we would invite them to come and they were willing to fly all the way over from the States to Bristol and to come and bring the piece of paper with the numbers on and at that point we would show them the results and we would open both the lists and match them all up. It's got good design, off we go. So what we did was we had these 12 participants and first of all we got them in for a practice and we measured their strength with a hand dynamometer so kind of, you know, you have to go like this several times and you can measure your physical strength. We gave them a mood scale to measure alertness, happiness and calmness which were three of the things that the bioelectric shield is supposed to help and we gave them an alternative therapies questionnaire which measured how much they believe in the effects of alternative therapies of various kinds. Then for two weeks we measured all of these things regularly and then we, you have to remember the bioelectric shield takes 24 hours to balance to your personal energy fields. So we got it balanced, gave them 24 hours, again 48 hours. We gave plenty of time for it to balance to their energy fields. Then we had the baseline measure and then for the experimental time it was between five and eight weeks it was very difficult to get fit all the tests in hence the varying length of time in which they wore either the wheel thing or the sham and they didn't know which was which and we didn't know which was which. My assistant did it in such a way that I gave them the shields he knew the letters I didn't and I gave them the shields so it was truly double-blind. Then the day arrived. Virginia flew over, came from the airport, came to the lab and I was really like we've got to be absolutely accurate here. You know we won't have any kind of random magician kind of tricks going on you know what they're going to play on me I've got to be really really careful we've got to be absolutely sure about the time when we open the list and everything and in comes this lovely charming lady oh hello hello do you want my list do you want my list here? No no no take it away take it away sit over there and she was just so nice and friendly and all my kind of fears about magic and trickery and I thought she's just really she really believes this stuff so the first thing that we did was to give all the data in fact these are separated for wheel and sham but what we showed them was data like this but without the numbers on and asked them Mrs. Virginia and David from England to on the basis of these data we gave them all the data for each subject with the letters on to choose which they thought were the people who had the real shield because if the bioelectric shield does what it's supposed to do then they ought to be able to pick out pretty reliably which people are wearing the shield the real shield and which are wearing the fake shield the statistics work such that if they got six right obviously it would be highly significant if they got five right it would still be statistically significant if they got four or fewer it would not be so it was really exciting they chose there are the 12 lots of data laid out let them have as long as they wanted to look at the data there was a hand strength and you know all these different bits of data for each subject they poured over it and they definitely definitely these six are the real and these six are the fake and we opened the envelopes we compared the numbers cross check let them cross check put them on and they got four right it was kind of frustrating because that's a little bit more than the three that you would expect purely by chance but it's not significant so ok so we proceed after that we could then go and analyze the data properly which is what we did and you can see here just an example where we can compare the data for the real people the people who had the real shield on the left with the people who had the placebo on the right and you can see just by eye that it's not very convincing I won't show you all the data it's probably sufficient to say that none of the differences that we found were significant and they were kind of strange I mean if you look at this lot the shield is supposed to increase alertness, happiness and calmness it appears from this that it decreases alertness it doesn't do anything to happiness and it does increase calmness a little bit but not very much but all these differences are very small and in fact you would expect alertness and calmness to be negatively correlated because they're sort of related to measures of arousal anyway so what next well when they looked at this data we took them off for lunch in the university not very glorious canteen and we sat there and talked about it and they talked to each other and they looked pretty down they looked kind of like sort of reminded me of the man who was abducted by aliens and has an implant in his mouth and I showed him that it was actually dental amalgam and he was really quite low for a while and then anyway they were a bit like that they were kind of like we should have got more right and then they started to realize what had happened you see subject B hadn't been wearing it long enough you see there are some people but it doesn't 24 hours isn't enough it can take a whole week even two weeks for some people to balance to their energy and obviously that one was one of those because you could tell by the way the data went that she was one of those people and what about this person well that person began with a very high alertness in the first place so of course that isn't fair test because it wouldn't work and by the time we'd finished lunch they were very very happy indeed with all the data so they said some people blocked the shields energy some people needed longer but the real clincher was that they said and this came later when she'd gone back to America she said that she'd gone to the factory where they make these things and the man who puts in the crystals puts them in with positive intent from his heart and the trouble is that he's so used to doing this in this positive environment with this positive energy that when he was asked to make shamans he couldn't really do it because he's still giving out the positive energy so that the shamans really were kind of working even though they didn't have any crystals in them they still had the effect it made my life a little bit difficult but there was another claim that I wanted to test and this was the effect on mobile phones because at this time we're now talking 2000 there was beginning to be a big scare about the effect on mobile phones more and more people were getting mobile phones and it was said that they make you weaker they make you stressed they make you tired and you need something to protect you from this bad effect so here we have another classic testable claim very reasonable thing that you can test so we did experiments in which with these experiments we had 40 subjects these were not such long term experiments as the previous ones didn't do them over weeks and weeks we did them over a much shorter period but again half the people had shamans made this time with definite negative intent for the shamans and positive intent for the real ones and we took a baseline measure of the strength and then give the people the phone and you would expect them to get weaker because they held the phone and talked to the phone and listened to somebody talking for 10 minutes and they should get weaker and then do it again with the phone and with the shield and all randomised and here you can see the results doesn't quite fit what it's supposed to do so you've got the baseline unfortunately the groups were not equal on the baseline but it doesn't matter because you subtract from baseline so with the phone well they didn't get weaker actually with the phone so the middle one is with the phone for 10 minutes and then the last one there is with the phone and the shield and as you can see the real one made them quite a bit weaker and it was supposed to make them stronger oh dear the pyroelectric shield doesn't really seem to be doing what it's supposed to do so what was their reaction to the phone experiment well it was as follows now this comes rather later hang on a minute let me just I won't go backwards the phone experiment which we did and got the negative results we did several other experiments as well and we had them all published in a journal called alternative therapies and after that was done and we had shown them the paper they'd seen it all they'd agreed that it was an accurate description of the experiment and it was published and after that we got the following letters from them Dear Dr. Blackmore regarding the bioelectric shield study over the last several weeks you and I have determined that there was an email sent to you from our company that you never received in this email we informed you that the samples we gave you for your study had mixed up the real shields with the sham shields not knowing this you published your study and in return we were quite surprised to see the study published since that time another trial study done by an independent group of researchers used a heart rate variability test to judge the effectiveness of three devices that claimed to reduce the effects of electromagnetic radiation from cell phones this was published in alternative medicine September 2002 I was from Virginia and from the inventor Charles the shields were then returned when they were returned they were physically open to see if the coded numbers had been correctly assigned this revealed there had been a mistake in the numbering of some of the shields now note that alternative medicine sounds much like alternative therapies alternative therapies where we publish is a peer-reviewed journal not a great high impact journal to be sure but it's peer-reviewed it's a proper science journal alternative medicine is just a magazine and they wrote an article and it went in there so what can you do this is why I titled my talk fighting the fakers and failing I mean it's kind of a success in a way we did a decent experiment we designed it as well as we could we got the results we published them but it has very little effect and the people concerned have always got some way of coming back to it these are just the more results with a larger number of subjects in which you can clearly see that our phones are really nothing at all there was pardon that's the one you missed there were several like this we did several more experiments one thing that was quite interesting was that it's quite possible obviously people are buying these things and being happy with them and thinking that they really do make them relax and so on why presumably because they have some kind of placebo effect and if that's so you would expect a larger placebo effect in people who are score high on the alternative therapist questionnaire I mean the questions in there are things like do you use homeopathy, do you have you ever had acupuncture, do you believe in the effects of this, that and the other and so you would expect a correlation between the score on the alternative therapist questionnaire and the people who improved wearing the shield and the people who were regardless of whether it was real and placebo and that was the only significant result we got in the entire series of experiments was yes people with greater belief in the effectiveness of these things feel better whether they have the real or the sham the obvious conclusion from all these experiments is that you can hang anything around your neck if it's called a bioelectric shield and looks very pretty you can have balanced crystals and all of those kinds of amazing powers well I wrote to we do have trading laws in Britain which say you are not allowed to sell ineffective things and make false claims you know we're a civilized country you're not supposed to be able to say this thing will do all this, whatever so I wrote to the trading standards authority, a nice letter simple letter explaining what I've done closing the published paper and so on and I got back a very nice letter after a while saying Dear Dr. Blackmore further to Mr. Taylor's letter to you dated the 6th of April, this matter has been allocated to me for investigation as the nature of the inquiry is varied and complex it will take some time to investigate I will get back to you in due course and update you as to my progress what year is it now? well I did try and I didn't have the energy and enthusiasm to go on trying come the year 2000 I'd really had enough can I have a drink of water somebody please? or a drink of anything? whiskey will do gin and tonic would go down quite well at this point remembering all the miseries of it all ah yes and what is happening in the year 2013 which is where we've got to now are you feeling fatigued stressed or overloaded you can protect yourself with this innovative all natural all natural I mean it's a manufactured product we've made a metal I suppose metal is natural isn't it God made it all you can protect yourself and there's a chart at the bottom you see this chart it says you insist you in choosing a level of protection which matches your lifestyle and your AMF exposure so let's see what is available at the very bottom of the chart you can have level 1 of course this one's only for babies and children and pets yeah you get one for your cat but you could go up level 3 is the specially recommended one that's obviously the one I expect you can to get if you like go all the way up to level 4 I guess I don't need to say any more do I other than by the way don't go out and buy one how on earth did I get into all of this well some of you know it all started a very long time ago this is me back in 1970 when I had the most extraordinary out of body experience I've written about it extensively maybe some of you have read about it it started sitting down listening to some fantastic music I don't know Grateful Dead or Pink Floyd or something and I was sitting there late at night going down a tunnel of leaves towards a bright light at the end and then I came out of the bright light and flew around over Oxford it was honestly an extraordinary experience the term near death experience had not been invented then but if it had been I know that I went through all of those stages the out of body experience the extraordinary emotions the clarity, the vision the coming to a boundary the decision to return but also classic mystical features of changing the nature of self completely to the point of ultimately self disappearing or becoming one with everything classical mystical experience of oneness I had no idea what to do with that experience a gift out of somewhere I could not understand it in terms of 1970 physiology and psychology that I was studying so I could perfectly understand why and forgive myself understand myself all those years ago for thinking that it was a paranormal phenomenon and therefore deciding to devote my life to proving to all those closed minded scientists that they are wrong and there's more in the world than in your philosophy and all that kind of stuff and that's why I became a parapsychologist and I was wrong to try to find paranormal phenomena and ultimately concluding that they don't exist and along the way I had some fun and I had some depressing experiences one of the most depressing was discovering that a colleague of my friend of mine, Carl Sargent who was doing fantastic research on the Gansfeld getting really amazing significant results was actually manipulating the randomization procedure took me a long time to find out what was going on and then a depressing month of misery I was in trouble with the Parapsychological Association not him and I wouldn't publish until he would publish his side of the story and years and years later it was finally published but you can see meta-analyses with all these data in which do not ever reference the papers in which I explain what manipulation was done and why the results are invalid they go on claiming that there's evidence in Gansfeld I had fun with people being abducted by aliens I slept in haunted rooms well the aliens I told you about the amalgam here is the nice young man and his alien implant in the roof of his mouth I had all sorts of fun with that I slept in the haunted houses I investigated poltergeists I did all kinds of things I was always in trouble with the believers I would tell you when I was a believer I did not get hate mail from skeptics I was surprised when I became a skeptic I got plenty of hate mail from the true believers who know about spirits and nice things like that and good energies and the most fun thing, the only thing I've done recently was to investigate would you believe there are still people having physical seances with ectoplasm and all that stuff I mean we think of it as being an ancient Victorian pastime where you have a medium sitting in a cabinet and a physical phenomena coming out of the floor lifting tables well this is still alive and well in Bristol I was out of séance last year I just couldn't resist in the end going back they said they had to have some music to get in the right mood and we had ABBA while from the cabinet was that's better I've had enough I can't bear it I hope you can understand dear friends why I can't bear to do it anymore and I am so pleased to know that there are hundreds thousands of you out there not just James Randi but all these organisations who haven't lost heart like me who haven't lost their energy and enthusiasm for fighting the fakers good on you, keep fighting them and let me go home and give it up Susan Blackmore Susan Blackmore