Reflection on Dune 2

Ryan Purvis: Hello, and welcome to the Digital Workspace Works podcast. I'm Ryan Purvis, your host, supported by our producer, Heather Bicknell. In this series, you'll hear stories and opinions from experts in the field, stories from the front lines, the problems they face and how they solve them, the areas they're focused on from technology, people, and processes to the approaches they took that will help you to get to the scripts for the Digital Workspace inner workings.

Heather Bicknell: I am doing well. How you doing?

Ryan Purvis: Yeah. Good. Thanks. Good. Good. It's been a very long time.

Heather Bicknell: I know it's been quite a while. I don't even remember the last time. Could be over a month. Probably.

Ryan Purvis: I think, actually it was the, you were going to go watch Dune. That was the last time we spoke and we ended up watching Dune that same weekend and then I was keen to catch up with you and we just didn't, we haven't had a call since then.

Heather Bicknell: Well, I'd love to do that now. Anyway, whatever bits of it I can remember.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, what were your thoughts?

Heather Bicknell: I thought it was, I thought it was amazing. really, really well executed. I think there's a lot to pull off in the second half of the Dune book.

And I don't know what you've probably seen, like the David Lynch version or like kind of other attempts at interpreting it. So, that was like the older Dune movie, Kaya McLaughlin of Twin Peaks fame, but, yeah, I thought. Trying to remember, you know, visually really stunning, the stuff they did with the, lighting on Giedi Prime was really cool. Kind of like the black and white filming of the Harkonnens, and yeah, loved it.

What'd you think?

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, I thought it was brilliant. My wife and I watched it. So firstly, I rewatched the first one before I watched that one because I watched it in the morning. We watched it at night. And I think that was an important thing to do. We watched it that Saturday night and we took us about an hour to just to come down from the high of such a well done.

And watched it in IMAX. So we had the whole thing correct, which I think is really imprtant with the worms and stuff. I thought the interesting thing off because I watched the morning and then I watched the evening. So I was kind of in the mood. The guy who played, what's his name now? What's the name of the main actor? the character?

Heather Bicknell: Paul?

Ryan Purvis: Paul? Yeah.

Heather Bicknell: Timothée Chalamet?

Ryan Purvis: Yeah. So when I, watched it the first time ages ago, I thought he played really badly. And then when I watched it in the morning, I was like, Oh, it's okay. I guess he was okay. But then when I watched it that night, and he pulled off, especially at the end of the G's. No, this was actually the best, guy that could have found because he really encapsulated so many things from the books

so well. So yeah, just generally I thought it was brilliant. I think they, you know, as much as they use a lot of CGI and all the rest of it, there wasn't a lot of CGI. I mean, you couldn't tell all the time. And it wasn't to the point that it took away from the story. So I think if you had to nail it, they nailed it.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, I think there were like a couple sacrifices that were made in terms of there wasn't like a timeline skip Aaliyah wasn't born for like the Emperor scene some of those things that I think I'm excited to see what they do with Dune Messiah because it sounds like they're working on a third movie to cover that book. So looking forward to probably unpacking some of the stuff that, is from the first book, but just, it's too much information.

I did, ask some of my friends who hadn't read Dune, kind of their impressions. And I think that it is probably harder to follow some of it if, you're not already familiar with the universe, but.

Ryan Purvis: yeah, yes and no. I think, I mean, my wife hasn't read any of the books and she didn't even watch. I think she might've watched the first movie or bits of it, but she seemed to know what was going on.

So I think they've managed to capture the essence. In fact, if you read the books, I found the books very difficult to read just in the style of writing. And it's very, it's kind of like Lord of the Rings just goes on and on and it gets confusing. And if you don't read it every day, then the characters kind of mink, you know, you kind of lose track of who's who and all that stuff.

That's why I think the movies have actually hit the mark really well because they've managed to capture a lot of things and get it clearer for the average consumer. And I mean the cinema was full. We really struggled to get in. So I think they had a good I mean people probably watched it because it's Dune. But you could have waited a week or two and it would have been a Netflix. But people wanted to see it on IMAX.

So I think that was the other important thing that they got, right? I mean those worm scenes worm running scenes were great. And we actually, when I booked the seats, because it was so full, I actually had like a second row from the front, which was the only bad thing about the whole movies, like my neck got sore from looking up at the screen.

But we were so close to the screen with the noise that actually it felt really real.

Heather Bicknell: Very immersive, I imagine, than you get the perception of looking out of the huge mirror.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, you get the whiplash from the worm. but yeah, that was good, I enjoyed it. I mean I'm waiting, I think the second one's just been released now on Netflix to watch it again.

Heather Bicknell: I think I told someone afterward that I would say it's definitely top 10 sci fi movies of all time. I would put it there.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, but it's a strange one because I wouldn't have said that about the first one.

I thought the first one was okay. And even when I watched it the second time, it was good, but it was still okay. But the second one really, and I suppose you got to look at it not as, two separate movies, but one movie continuously, it's just five hours long. If you do it that way.

Heather Bicknell: I can do that. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis: The other movie we just watched about movies, we're going to watch Civil War Friday night.

Heather Bicknell: What's that one about? I haven't heard of it.

Ryan Purvis: Oh, that's, an America. It's all about America going to war with itself. Texas and California.

Heather Bicknell: Civil war. I heard silver. No. Yeah. I want to watch.

Yeah. Civil war.

Ryan Purvis: Have you not watched it yet?

Heather Bicknell: No, no, no. Haven't. Okay. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis: I will say this to you that I think cinemagraphically it'll win a lot of awards. That I mean, it shocked us to the core.

Like we walked out speechless, like we just didn't know what to say. So I don't want to say more than that. I think you should give it a watch. Yeah.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, I guess that one's pretty recent. So, so spoilers, but, have you, have you seen his other movies like annihilation and trying to think of some of the other ones, there was, I think the one with like the bubble.

Ryan Purvis: Under the dome

Heather Bicknell: Yeahh, I think that was a TV series.

I don't think it was a man. Yeah, I don't, there was something like Natalie Port, anyway, I don't remember it enough to be interesting to talk about it, but like some other really big sci fi and this one's not, you know, sci fi, at least to my knowledge, but, really epic movies, I guess, from that director that I've enjoyed in the past.

Ryan Purvis: No, I don't normally look into that kind of stuff. So I mean, I knew nothing. So what happened was we were looking to watch a movie. And when Kirsten said, what do you want to watch? I said, Oh, you know, whatever was on and you went to the list, I was like, well, I don't know any of these movies and then I was like, Oh, Civil War that looks, that looked really good in the preview.

Let's go watch that. Cause I had this kind of, I don't know what I was thinking. I thought it was a, you know. Like a, a fictional period piece. Yeah. Like, Washington down or I don't know, something like that where the hero and this and that, whatever, but it wasn't that.

So more like a documentary. A scary documentary

Heather Bicknell: Yeah. I remember, I think I saw the preview of it, at Dune. So bookmark that one is an interesting one to look back on.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah.

Heather Bicknell: Good to know.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah. Other than that, not much is going on to be honest, a lot, a of work. So I mean, we could discuss, you sent me an article around using AI to make food, I think.

I think I saw.

Heather Bicknell: It was super apps for fast food employees. I haven't looked at it in a few weeks, but yeah, I thought that was an interesting one. There's some parent company that owns a few of 'em, like I think Taco Bell and KFC and I don't know some of the other chains. But, basically extending the latest technologies and AI into the hands of the frontline food service employee.

So I thought it was an interesting idea. There's some things that are a little bit more kind of pragmatic. And, oh, yeah, that would make sense. Things like, shift scheduling and, like time clocks, like all of that, you know, day to day management piece being put into one application. I guess, broadly, the term super apps is being used to describe, like, truly all in one application.

So kind of bringing lots of use cases together in one mobile experience. So an example is like WeChat in China, bringing together like payments and social, and I think lot of the ways that actually, WhatsApp is used outside of the U. S. We don't really use it here for that, but kind of that app that centralizes so many of your activities.

So the idea is to bring a similar experience, but for those fast food use cases. So that was interesting that some of it is a little bit, you know, when technology is a more ends up being a more complex solution, sometimes than just the analog version. So one example they gave was, wouldn't it be great if we use the generative AI to tell employees like cook times for different items.

And I was thinking if I was a fast food worker and I had to like ask some sort of, you know, device or look up on my phone versus having like a poster on the wall, you know, fast food, like you're making the same kind of items ad nauseum, right? So I would think that, you know, a poster is probably a more effective way to convey that information than asking AI.

Ryan Purvis: But, yeah, I mean, so we just did a trip, to the Maldives, and Sri Lanka. And it was interesting. In some respects, because one, there's many applications for AI in doing trips and travel. So your flight times, finding your routes, finding the hotel, all that kind of stuff. What was nice though, is that when we got the, so we had these discussions with the hotel, like when you're getting there and you're doing your preferences and all that kind of stuff before you get there for the chef to order their food that they're going to have for their guests.

It would be helpful to get, it's not necessarily an AI problem per se, but it is that question answer conversation with a guest coming with a personalized touch, but at scale, because if you had to have a person ask everybody for their preferences, it would be very difficult. And in the same token, if you just gave them a form to fill in, it'd also be very difficult because people get bored of forms, especially if you have to answer like a hundred and seventeen, question form.

So using some sort of conversational language model might be useful. Or at least, you know, tailoring it to be an experience to onboarding you into coming to the hotel over a period of, say, six weeks or four weeks or three weeks to say, well, you're coming to visit us every day. We're gonna ask you a question so you can answer it.

And every time you answer the question, you get a point. And that kind of thing. And then when you get there, you would have this tailored experience that now that could be generated using AI because you'll have some patents to reuse. But also for the chefs, they'll have their ordering sorted out to an extent.

And then also, you know, if you're using that information, like birth dates, wedding anniversaries, you know, like event preferences and that kind of stuff. You can also plan out all your events and stuff. That doesn't have to be distributed. It doesn't really have to be an AI solution because some of the stuff is just basic analytics.

Like how many people like water skiing? How many people like jumping out an airplane? How many people like fishing? You know, those are just simple. Analytics, but

I could see, possible things where you could use general AI to maybe write up a personalized message to every customer coming based on the information they provided, and that would be really cool.

Which, you know, usually when we go to a hotel, we're going, for an event. So there's always like a card saying, you know, welcome to this hotel. Hope you have a happy anniversary or great birthday or here's a birthday, you know, we've done a birthday cake for you, whatever it is. But I think, I hear your point around, if you're doing the same thing over and over again, you're not going to necessarily need AI to tell you it's going to take five minutes to make the chips.

What I enjoyed about this hotel we went to, we were there for eight days, and the buffet breakfast, so you could, there's a buffet restaurant, then a specialized restaurant. managed to not be boring every day for eight days, for breakfast and for dinner, which is quite a feat.

Because a lot of buffets will get boring after a while. Cause you kind of know that the stuff, the hamburgers are there, the steaks are there, whatever it is. There was still the same common things like, there were common salads that kind of stuff. But the desserts were always different.

The main, the hot meals were always different. And, you know, and then when I spoke to the chef about it, she's got like a 16 week menu plan and that's what she works to, but it's not, it kind of takes away that magic of, you know, for her, it's not unique because she's got a 16 week plan and that kind of covers the seasons and all the rest of it.

But now if you had that kind of generated menu based on all your clients coming out, their preferences on that kind of stuff, maybe that 16 week thing becomes a little bit more just in time. I don't know.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, no, that's, I think the applications for like personalization and guest experience could be really interesting.

It just makes me think I got a sales email yesterday that I could tell. I'm like, I'm pretty sure this is using. They use some AI to generate this copy for me. And what made me think of it is it's like. Did you ever get a sales email that's personalized, but like way too personalized and weird. They love to call out what, you know, university you went to.

That's like lay up. It's like, couldn't get your attention. Everyone really cares about where they went to college. And then they called out, an event that's happening in my city and, made some like. Oh, like I, you know, you go into this event, like heard, it's really cool. And the one that they called out is an event called, hash bash.

It is an event about celebrating, people who like to smoke marijuana. And they were, you know, sending me an email that was about like selling their sort of like pretty buttoned up sort of professional services. So I can only assume they didn't know what that event was, or they were just trying to be really provocative.

But I assume what happened was that they were using some AI to pull in kind of like personalization based on location, based on, you know, my LinkedIn profile. And it just happened that time wise, that event was happening in my city. But, if a human was generating that, you know, from scratch, they probably would not have, pulled that detail in there.

So I just thought it was, that's funny that, the AI personalization can, if there's no kind of human, oversight, can go a little bit, rogue sometimes.

Ryan Purvis: And I get these messages all the time on LinkedIn, you know, come and we'll use AI to automate your Lead generation activities, et cetera, et cetera.

And I mean, I use some of them for a while, but I've actually just defaulted to my favorite thing, which is phantoms. I've written a very short sentence to say to someone, look, and I do a search, like, for example, I've do one for for Valuu and one for Finxone. So Valuu is digital transformation.

And next one is FinTech. And I'm reaching out to people based on that, in their LinkedIn title and it's a short message saying, Hey, I'd like to meet you. Discuss what we do with each platform. Here's my Calendly to book it. so, you know, it's not, personalized at all. I, you might say hi, first name, like, you know, hi Heather.

But, I find that when someone sends me a message exactly like that, that's being constructed to be a hook message and it's not, it drives me insane. And you know, you get a lot of messages. I mean, I get a couple of hundred at least a week and it's always the same thing and there was a point where I used to reply to all of them and say, no, thanks.

But now I just stopped.

Heather Bicknell: Oh, wow. How generous.

Ryan Purvis: Well, you just get, you know, it happens, some of them are not even that person that's actually an automation anyway. So. you say no, thanks. And then the next message is the follow up message. As if you hadn't read the first message, so, it's like, I say no, thank you.

And I reply going, well, you probably haven't read my other message. So I'm just putting this back at the top of your list. Like, well, I did read your message. That's why I said, no, thank you. So then you don't engage and then you get the third message, which is now another one saying you must be really busy.

But here is pick your options one, two or three to whether we should disengage, whatever, whatever. And I'm like, well, if that's how you're going to do your, sales and your lead generation, then no, thanks. Just not going to engage with you ever. And in fact, someone has tried to convince me at the moment to move away from LinkedIn to go to X.

And do all my stuff on X because he thinks it's X has got a much better engagement and, interactivity, I guess. Slowly posting more and more there.

Heather Bicknell: How are you finding it? I feel like I don't hear anyone at least for business, like business to business use cases, I feel like X has really fallen off.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, I don't know. So, the first problem I have is I untrained myself on X. So I deliberately taught myself, like I, delete Twitter and that I'm never going back on there. I'm only going to focus on LinkedIn, et cetera. And that's what I did for a long time. So natural thing is still to go back LinkedIn when I want to look for stuff, because I found Twitter just overwhelming. This is too much. So now, I'm trying to go back onto it, but I've turned off all my notifications, so I don't even see if someone's messaged me back or not. So I kind of check in once a day, once, twice a day to have a look at it, but.

Yeah, I don't know. I'm much more in a WhatsApp sort of thing where I know the people, I've got their phone numbers, we're talking. And even then I'm not following up. And so, so I don't know if any of these things actually work, if I'm honest. I think you've got to treat it like you treat, going for a walk.

You might go for a walk and you might see something of interest. So you might see something happen or you might go to WhatsApp and you might, in a group, it might see something of interest. You might go into X for a session, you might see something of interest. And what I don't want to get into is that I'm spending my whole life on social media.

So, you know, like I have a Facebook back on my phone. I'm going to delete that again because that's just a waste of time. And I'm kind of enjoying Instagram. To some extent, and the other thing that, that we might do actually, we might do the podcast is, instead of using Teams like we do now, and I use Zoom as well, is maybe use StreamYard and actually live stream these calls on X and YouTube and all that kind of stuff.

So that could be interesting. I don't know, I don't know what you think. All right.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, maybe a special special edition, but I think it's interesting thing to try. No pressure to, to respond to, people on a stream. I've never been on the other side of a stream, so it's kind of exciting.

Ryan Purvis: Yeah, I think it'd just be fun to. I mean, look, I think the biggest challenge and this is what I said to Christian when we were discussing it is that, you know, I don't, necessarily always have the ability to stay on every time slot to kind of always be every Tuesday at three o'clock. So it might be a situation where, you know, we just do a live stream and we do a live stream and you'll catch people all over the place and it'll just be completely, ad hoc and that'll just have to be fine.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah, interesting idea.

Ryan Purvis: It could be, yeah, I think it would just be fun to try it out.

Heather Bicknell: How close are we to like episode 200, I wonder?

Ryan Purvis: We 170 something, I think. Can you believe that?

Heather Bicknell: Well, it's been a few years.

Ryan Purvis: Well, we started in 2020, I think.

Heather Bicknell: Yeah. Yeah, I was recording these, yeah, it was before the pandemic.

I think we started talking about the podcast, which is wild. So much has changed. It is wild. Yeah.

Ryan Purvis: So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.

Heather Bicknell: That is true. That is true. well, unfortunately, I do need to hop, but, catch up more, later this week.

Ryan Purvis: So that's good. That's good. Have a good one.

Talk to you later. Bye.

Thank you for listening to today's episode. Heather Bicknell is our producer editor. Thank you, Heather, for your hard work on this episode, please subscribe to the series and rate us on iTunes at the Google Play Store.

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