BoF VOICES 2024 | Day 2 Session 3: Technology and Innovation

[Music] good afternoon welcome back to bof voices 2024 coming to you live from Oxfordshire here in the beautiful

English Countryside we've never had weather this good in nine years it's beautiful out there this is session

three where we examine how new technologies and Innovations are shaping the world around us creating business opportunities and helping us to solve

some of the industry's greatest problems welcome to all of you watching online in more than 100 countries around the world as always we want you to be part of the

voices experience too take a minute and introduce yourself in the chat window and tell us where you are joining from today to share your feedback questions

and photos please use the hashtag bof voices so let's get started for several years now here at BF

voices we have been tracking the rapid developments in generative artificial intelligence and what this means for both our industry and The Wider world

it's been two years since Mo gaat stood on this stage to warn us about AI just a few days before chat GPT was launched

last year we learned more about the risks that a AI poses but also some of the opportunities it is helping to create to refresh our mem memories let's

take a quick look back and look at what we've learned so far a billion times smarter than humans 1 billion with a B billion times smarter

than humans is basically a if you want a loose analogy it's a compar a comparison between the um um intelligence of Einstein and the intelligence of a FL

and we are the fly AI will make us more efficient AI will make us code faster we'll help find cures to cancer we'll increase GDP and these things are actually all

true but of course lurking behind those stories are a set of symptoms and this is what the Press normally writes about creating deep fakes weakening democracy enabling a widescale fraud and crime

taking our jobs in IP perpetuating bias again all true but what it masks are the fundamental incentives which is the race to increase AI capabilities think magic

powers and deploy them as fast as possible for market dominance Ai and predictive algorithms can tell you who's the right person to talk to today what they might like when they come to the

store helps you prepare that experience to be more relevant and when we do this we see a huge impact on the sales every time you apply Ai and machine learning

to any process or operation you have it generally tends to have at least 30% Improvement no matter what you're doing it's super super fast the returns are going to be so much better because

you're going to have the GPT and a much more educated model you know and and you're running a business you only have a finite time uh to be creative and if

this is really uh affording us more options then we're going to produce better results this year we've wanted to go deeper into how Ai and other

Technologies are addressing some of the challenges and problems that we raised earlier from Fashion's waste problem to issues with product Discovery to

conclude this session we'll have a very special experiential Moment On music as medicine with the multimedia artist Rosie Chan and the neuroscientist and

Longevity expert Dr tamson Lewis but first we have lined up a remarkable conversation to jolt you out of your post lunch

Mala we've all read the headlines this year Scarlet Johansson sued open AI because the world's most famous AI

company issued a chat GPT update which used an imitation of her voice this is an example of AI gone bad when someone's

unique likeness creativity and identity are copied without their consent but what if the AI is used with the permission of the actors involved to

help them create something that couldn't be made without AI indeed one of ai's most mindblowing applications is its

ability to create lifelike content mimicking the faces voices and mannerisms of real people content that

is increasingly indistinguishable from the real thing our next speakers believe that we can build virtual world and identities while centering questions of

ethics and individual autonomy Tom Graham is the co-founder and CEO of metaphysic a generative AI platform using proprietary tools to create hyper

realistic Hollywood grade content joining him for this conversation is a longtime friend and supporter of bof Jefferson hack the co-founder of days

media please welcome Tom Graham and Jefferson hack thank you thanks Imran hi everyone it's great

to be here again um so look I met Tom about four years ago and his video on it was a Tom Cruz deep fake and it was

exploding across the internet and I wanted to find out about the technology like how is this possible that somebody can create something that looks so real

we can't distinguish between the real or the virtual I wanted to know what was behind the technology so I met Tom and actually what was really surprising to

me was how interesting more interesting he was than the technology um he was such a smart thinker on AI he had so many incredible plans and Ambitions for

what he was going to build and now four years on he's really realized a hell of a lot of that so I wanted to ask you Tom

give me give us an update on what is metaphysic what do you do and we're we're going to see some amazing clips of what he does but I just wanted to hear from you first to set it up what is it that you work on what's your speciality

perfect so um at metaphysic what we do is kind of build the technology and software to scale photorealistic AI generated content to everyone on Earth but that's you know that's a pretty big

thing um so today uh and over the last four years since those viral kind of deep fake Tom Cruz Clips on Tik Tok we've really focused on Hollywood um and stuff in the music space but the areas

where people pay like a relatively large amount of money for content and so replacing VFX um music production music videos things like that is where we found um a lot of application for

creating photorealistic AI generated humans and Human Performance um in partnership with the actual artists themselves so they're kind of using it as a tool to maybe change their performance edit their performance

things like that that's amazing we're going to watch a clip of it in a second of some of your work but you know for us for me obviously the writer strike which you know brought Hollywood production

globally to a standstill um was very important in challenging um the the the fact that AI could be and will likely

take away a lot of jobs um the actors the extras the writers that were involved in that strike were really saying we're not going to be replaced by Ai and we want our contracts to stipulate that

um but you're talking about a very different kind of use of AI right you're talking about augmenting human performance with AI um so the most recent example of that is the daging of

Tom Hanks and Robin Wright Pen for this movie here which is directed by Robert zenx so can you introduce the concept of how you worked with AI in an augment to

augment their performance explain what that means yeah absolutely so for this movie here which is in cinemas now um Bob zy he had this idea where um he

would play out time over a set space and in this space families they grow and they grow old and Tom Hanks and Robin Wright play one of the couples in this

family um so we see them young 20-year-old kids going all the way through to being kind of 90 years old where the film ends um and it's it's

amazing to watch the performers there on set um kind of trying to inhabit their younger selves or their older elves but what we could do with AI and what you'll see is we could run it live real time so

we're doing kind of Head and Shoulder swaps where on the screen they're acting and they can see like in the mirror their younger selves and that's actually quite a a strange Human Experience

really um generally like there's a lot of emotion that comes with that and once they get used to it um it's incredibly good for like fine-tuning your performance and um it turns out you have to do different things with your face to

try to kind of act like a 20-year-old if you happen to be 67 um so that kind of live real time element was really revolutionary in helping generate the performance um and

that's something that's really new and Cutting Edge should we look at it yes um so what we're going to see here um from the movie here and you'll notice Tom Hanks and Robin Wright uh younger

versions of themselves and so that's all AI generated on top of their performance so if we roll the clip like could to meet Margaret nice to meet you Margaret

nice to meet you Mr Young time sure does fly doesn't it sure does right here is where we want to

be you know if you like you could spend the rest of the night here I could spend the rest of my life

here it's getting a little panned by critics um the the effects are great um I thought it's a fantastic film an amazing story um and it's based on a a

postmodern graphic novel by Richard Maguire um which is seminal called here and so just visually um it's really something to behold

it could have been done in VFX right they could have Robert could have deaged Tom Hanks using all kinds of other tools

but why was it important to use Ai and realtime AI you talked a bit about that in your introduction but explain that a bit more because it's really about capturing emotion in a way that is

deeper and more authentic to the performance right actually um that kind of realism where it kind of Blends into reality we're kind of processing processing it like it's real rather than

kind of kind of consuming the artifice of it being fake and just dealing with that like in the Irishman or other daging and digital human things that we've seen um so you can't get there

with traditional CGI 3D modeling VFX and so this AI technology when it comes to creating content is a step function change in capability but also

dramatically more efficient so what used to take um hours and hours and hours to render per frame from 3D models we are doing live real time um kind of from a

laptop in some instances and you can think about that that GPU is generating 100 frames a second of what would take hours and hours per frame and that's a good indication of kind of some of the

cost and efficiency and were there any headaches along the way what were some of the challenges yeah so you move into a different Paradigm with AI um and certainly something we'll talk about

later in terms of the importance of your data um and collecting that today you go from creating a model of something where you're kind of doing that from an artist perspective getting it right and then

you manipulate it to you're collecting a data set and you're training an AI model with that data set but it is a [ __ ] in [ __ ] out kind of problem if you don't have the data if you don't have a good

scan or good data from Tom Hanks from 1980 which obviously we didn't we have limited data it's very difficult to make that AI model accurately represent this thing called you know what we're going

for is like perfect likeness which is you know you can get to did Tom Hanks give you personal archive as well of himself yes I for your data there is uh

some license material from previous movies there's like big and Splash Brothers um and then I think there were some home videos but even even most people today they just don't have a huge collection and so if you go all the way

back to 1980 there's not much and what was their reaction like when they first saw the younger version of themselves this is really interesting um so when you're presented with your younger self

um it's very confusing and then you realize that it's it's doing the thing that you're doing it's like a mirror and so um most of the time people at some

point cry in that first session nearly universally people start giving their younger selves advice they start talking to them it's it's thousands of hours of

therapy built into um into a small thing um though at my wedding a year ago we had my wife and I um a deep fake station and all of the could come up and have

fabulous our faces on them IM next year B deep F station I've got hours of this footage still to still to walk through and see what people do um that's funny

um Eminem is another artist that you worked with um where you again were creating um his his likeness where you DED him for a music video for his um for

Houdini his latest music video can we see a clip of that and or actually why don't you set it up and then we'll clip of it for um his latest album the kind

of uh single from that Houdini the music video is kind of a battle between Slim Shady from 20 years ago and M&M today um and they morph together in the end to

create a hybrid a new monster um and that process is really difficult because um daging anybody with their performance uh is quite an effort when it comes to

the data and the manipulation of a model but the magic is really in Marshall's performance no one else can be slim shady and when he sits in that seat and he's being Slim Shady it is incredible

and you couldn't recreate that with AI and so we're talking about changing the visual elements using that as a tool the idea of generating that performance of Slim Shady from scratch with AI we're

many years away from that today okay yeah so let's have a look at the clip it's got a problem check this out back [Music]

again back break it down sometimes I wonder what the old me say what can see the way [ __ ] is

today he probably say everything is G what's my what's my I left a jump and so that's that's obviously

really fun um a little bit of a followup uh to this one uh the next clip that we'll see um also from Eminem uh at the VMA award so that that won the VMA um

for the music video for the work that we did and then at the actual ceremony he did the opening performance and we did a live realtime version of Slim Shady on

stage next to him kind of like the Tupac hologram in a sense um which was also done by members of the metaphysic team um about 12 years ago now um and so

you'll see um young version on stage with Marshall um the interesting thing about this is it's the first time that kind of generative AI has been used in a live broadcast so it's not just the

camera capturing the young performer with the face on top going through the machine putting the face on top um it's also going out through the broadcast system and live National Television um

which is quite a technical feat we're talking about things which used to take hours and days to render now moving into this live real-time Paradigm we'll have a look at it and we'll talk a little bit more about it

sometimes I wonder [Applause] [Music] [Music] what it's

uncanny yeah the so it's it's projection mapped onto a young performer right yes so he's where explain deconstruct it for

us yes absolutely so um in this case of a live realtime version we're using a performer who has kind of a right um height um we went through a bunch and somewh good facial match but too tall

and so there you see the the likeness is not as great coming through as Marshall on top of Marshall but um it's still very very good and so the camera um is going to capture the footage we're going

to use the GPU to do a uh facial recognition on the um standin and then map the um AI version of Slim Shady's face on top and then it just goes

straight back out um to the production system fantastic any hiccups along the way yes I think that the hardest thing um yeah uh I mean what's the

potentiality for fuckups with technology everybody knows here there's like the movie industry and there's the music industry anything in the music industry the potential for fuckups is

tremendous um so that's um uh a Movable Feast of of reacting quickly to changing circumstance um but uh the technolog is actually very very

robust and our production systems are robust which is a lot of development work and so that lets you do that um adaptation and that's where you can get those kind of results where it's very very difficult to bring all of that

together and sometimes build the software you guys saw maybe um all of the Slim Shady doubles in the background we had to quickly build software to not recognize all of those faces cuz it was

overloading GPU of trying to recognize 50 faces so things like that and how is it working with with Eminem with Marshall how into it did he get very

very into it um if there's someone who is um the most hardworking downto Earth conscientious artist that I have seen it's Marshall

just um really working on his craft uh perfecting the lyrics the song the performance everything um amazing did it make him cry when he saw his younger self for the first time um no uh I think

he was I think that he was in character as Slim Shady at the time um and he's there in that moment so yeah he's robust to

anything proof yeah yeah how fast do you think AI is moving and what does that mean for the creative Industries yeah it is moving very very fast um when we started metaphysic we thought it would

take 10 years to do X it took one10 that time I think that's a reasonable discount any idea that anybody here has about how fast something will be it'll be 10 times faster so I think that it's

reasonable to say that we'll be making entire movies with AI background foreground everything like that still using actors and performers still directors and artists curating and choosing what they want but it will all

the visuals will be AI probably within a couple of years um and that then flows to all pixels all content um that people

look at on screens so um whether anybody likes it or not we're going to replace the camera with a new format of generating imagery um it will give

people more creative control and freedom but we have to as people as an industry as Society find ways to safeguard humans humans likeness our rights our

performance um and privilege you know Human Performance which is always today infinitely better than anything AI generated but those lines are be beginning to become blurred Robert Zen said something really

interesting where he kind of made an analogy to the music industry and he said that you know when technology came along to be able to mimic any instrument the sound of any instrument it didn't

mean that composers or musicians went out of work right just new genres got invented and he cites techno as a new genre and he believes that AI for film

will in be like techno was for music do you agree with that point of view yeah I think so I think that we will have um a proliferation of better quality content

content that is more relevant to smaller audiences so more of us will be able to create Hollywood quality content um and uh that will flow all the way down to I

think um we will take you know our memories and our kids first birthday parties and graduations and we'll be able to take the data from The Real World and move it through systems that generates like a movie immersive

experience Like a Star Trek Hol deck experience of that for audiences of one you know for for small units for families that's the kind of promise of the computational speed and efficiency

where we can be doing this on our mobile phones in a few years um that this kind of Technology delivers so much more personalized content new ways to engage audiences to bring audiences and their

data and their likeness into content um it's going to happen very very quickly but the Blurred Lines you were talking about earlier is really around copyright right and ownership and privacy and I think that you know there's so many

music artists at the moment and all kinds of artists at the moment that are concerned about their own data being scraped by large language models so I think you know Brands

working with open AI systems with large with systems that take are basically scraping the internet and other people's intellectual property um to put out something that is really just a sort of

mashup or a mimic of of things that already exist that will probably only get worse right there's only going to be more of that over time um so what are you what are you what are the watch outs

for you between well-crafted content that's ethical and stuff that's just churned out by technology how how do we know how to navigate that as Brands and

as as creators I think that beyond the technology um we all have to focus on the idea that no one should be creating a realistic version of someone's likeness their voice um their

performance without that person's direct informed consent and consent continuous consent um that you know I used to be a lawyer focused on human rights and Technology it seems fundamental it seems

so obvious um but it is not necessarily The Stance of many tech companies who are just doing the research pushing the limits trying to do new things and so uh it's the job of people who are

commissioning content and making content to really take care for how likeness is created which rights whose rights are impacted there um and also the data as

you alluded to that goes into training those models do you have the right to use that data to train the model that is then generating the AI output so for instance today in um big Studio movies

we can't use lots of stable diffusion outputs because those big foundational models are trained on data that is scraped from all over the internet without permission um all of these models you see here is trained from data

only with permission so that's kind of permissible that makes sense um so those new kind of Frontiers are things that we have to be responsible for because um you know we have a front line of deciding Tom S to interrupt you because

we're running out of time and we can talk about this for a much much longer period of time but we have one more clip to show which I think is really really fascinating so it's in another

Incredible use of realtime AI by you and it was at a TED Talk um for this incredible Chinese artist called saua Chong um can you introduce it quickly

absolutely so you're going to see live real-time voice translation um sa Chang the artist he only speaks Chinese we trained a model on him speaking Chinese but we got it to come out so that it's

live translating him speaking English so let's have a look Tai is incredible Tai's language is Mandarin many of us do not speak

Mandarin but Tai agreed to do a wild experiment for this talk we collaborated with another Ted speaker Tom Graham and his team at metaphysic who built an AI

model to make Tai's translator's voice sound just like Tai speaking just like

he is speaking in English so s is in our sound booth now s hello hi everyone okay so it's great to see you

now let's hear you sounding as if you were TI my name is Ty is TA Guang okay nothing can nothing's going

to go wrong here nothing's going to go wrong the stage is yours thank [Music] you more than 1,000 years

ago when Chinese Alchemists were developing elixir of immortality one recipe caused an explosion they named their Discovery

fire medicine the Chinese word for gunpowder

wow but there's no language data set for him that is him speaking English so how did you create that that was really surprising so it's only trained on him

speaking Chinese but it comes out as you would imagine him speaking English but there's no there's no reference material and his wife afterwards is like this is amazing my husband couldn't speak

English and now he can speak um uh but you you notice that we're not doing the brains of it um that's his translator translating in real time so it's going from that kind of 25-year-old woman's

voice um in English into his voice uh but the the thing there is live real time um so it's happening with like a 300 millisecond delay and the audience

it's weird for a few seconds and then they just melt into it it's just the the kind of a medium is not important the message is privileged um that's the power of this kind of stuff that looks

and sounds like the real world we process it like reality thank you so much Tom it's fascinating and it's been a real pleasure to have you here at BF voices and have you share your work with

us thanks for having me thank you that was amazing next time I want to do some deep fake stations and live translations

so one of the 10 themes in the state of fashion 2025 is called Discovery reinvented it explores how new technologies are connecting Shoppers

with the products they want even when they don't know exactly what they want our next speaker is here to show you what that process will look like a

veteran of the retail and startup worlds Julie Bornstein has been reimagining e-commerce through the course of her career at Nordstrom Sephora Urban

Outfitters stit fix and the yes which she sold to Pinterest in 2018 this year Julie revealed that she

has been working on her next big idea Daydream AI is an AI is a fashion shopping platform working to optimize

online product Discovery the company raised a whopping $50 million seed round LED by index Ventures and Forerunner

Ventures and has been operating in stealth mode until today Julie is giving our voices Community an exclusive first

look at day dream and how it plans to use generative AI machine learning and computer vision Technologies to offer customers new ways to discover fashion

products please join me in welcoming Julie Bornstein it's a pleasure to be here and I'm such an admirer of what Imran and the BF team have built they uh were

startup at one point and now they're the leader in the industry which is what all we startups aim for um so I'm here to talk about um Daydream which is an AI um

enabled shopping platform and uh before I do that I thought I would of go back to the beginning um cute 70s less cute

80s um but um I have been obsessed with shopping and with fashion my whole life um when I was little I wanted to be Gloria Vanderbilt um I wasn't such a

good Sketcher so I sort of went the business route um but I always say that I've started thinking about search and shopping since I was probably a

12-year-old and I would get 17 magazine find the hot new item and then go to theall trying to find it unfortunately I lived in Syracuse New York where it took about 6 to 12 months for anything cool

to hit the malls but uh lots of time to spend in the malls because it was a very boring snowy place um fast forward to many years uh later I was sitting in San

Francisco when Amazon launched and I remember some of you may also remember this but I remember where I was sitting when someone said check this out you can buy books online and literally from that moment my sort of brain exploded with

all the Poss possibilities of what you could do with the internet and shopping and I've been basically working on it ever since and my career Journey has been a little bit of a mirror to

technology development over the past 20 years so um I started um my e-commerce career at Nordstrom and I Dan Nordstrom I was living in Seattle Dan Nordstrom

announced that they were going to be building nordstrom.com and he didn't really know what to do with me but there were no one who were really experts at e-commerce at that time and so I he

finally hired me and he said all right Julie it's all about personalization and I looked around and we didn't have most of the brands willing to sell to us online this was still the very early

days uh we didn't have a way to take photos of the samples and write the copy we didn't even have basic search so I thought not quite sure we're there yet

but I understand the vision and uh you know many years later he's an investor in Daydream now so hopefully he'll get his uh vision of what personalization can become um I then went to Urban

Outfitters um and it was really fun to work on the brand side for a little while and during that time just to date that um the sort of hot platform was

Myspace so you know we were very early we had it was like pre-mobile pre- uh smartphone so we were trying to send messages on the little phones and

figuring out how to monetize uh Myspace and then um I ended up going over to join Sephora and for the next eight years uh the world changed a lot and so

um at Sephora we had the chance to really start to think about this two-way relationship so before when you had a website you had no idea what was going on with the consumer and then for the

first time there were now these channels to hear back from the consumer so what we saw was that a lot of people on Facebook were you know asking questions what should I you know what kind of product is good for this what should I

do there and we realized that before we could even get to answer those questions uh the consumers were sort of answering for each other so we realized we really wanted to build a a conversational platform on Sephora and so on

sephora.com we have Beauty talk now which was sort of the start of that we also were one of the first to have a mobile app and a mobile site and we had the fortune of being owned by lvmh who

was very supportive of all of our investment in the digital space and so that made it really fun and then the other thing that we did was we launched Beauty Insider which became kind of the

standard for um loyalty programs and we had a lot of fun doing that and also gave us the ability to see our customers cross channel so you could walk into the store you could buy something you could

actually look up what color you bought last time and you know we thought this was such a cool use case um and it took off obviously um while I was at Sephora I met the founder of Stitch fix a woman

named Katrina Lake who was thinking about how do you help people find what they're looking for um and her model was five items in a box and you ship it to the customer um but she had a very big

data science team she had hired a guy who had built some of the early algorithms at um Netflix and so uh it was really fun to work there and be part

of this fast Growth Company we grew to about a billion dollars in five years um and we had the chance to learn a lot about how algorithms can actually give

realtime recommendations for product um then I decided I was ready to go out on my own and I really wanted to focus on a more fashioned customer and I started a company called the yes and the yes was

really a fashion recommendation engine that in its sort of early days was pre all of the sort of current geni and so we had to build our own understanding of

an image that took about two years we were working with Google Cloud to do so um and so many of the things that are now quite easy to do were a lot harder

to do um we ended up having the Good Fortune of being acquired by Pinterest and uh all of us went over from the yes team to Pinterest where we spent a year some are still there uh learning the

pros and cons of big Tech um and actually really seeing why there is such an opportunity for startups um so um we uh the next thing um that I want to talk

about is Daydream and what we're actually doing now um but before I do that I want to sort of mention um the problem that we're trying to solve I think the world today this is this is a

slide that James Vincent um showed us and we loved it because it just kind of speaks to the world today and you know we all know that the problem is really

information overload we are the amount of input that human brains are getting every second of every day is something that our species have never experienced

and so in shopping the way that that really translates is that it's you know far more um too many pages too many products we all have 10 tabs open

you have 20 Pages for your results and you feel like you need to just keep going because maybe the perfect product is on that next page because it's kind of random how they're ordered um and then very high card abandonment um and

so and we saw in the McKenzie report a reference to this as one of the the problem spaces um and so at Daydream the way that we are thinking about solving

this problem is um basically creating what's in essence chat GPT for shopping so if you think about it if you have the ability to ask anything you want you

don't have to worry about what the retailer or brand call something or what their taxonomy is but you can just ask I need this for that reason uh we have the

ability to help you and so ultimately our goal is to build a personal stylist for everyone but in the meantime we are very focused on this initial use case

around search conversational search and so um there's basically four components to what we're building the first is the

largest catalog of branded fashion so we are working with Partners from Brands to retailers department stores and if you're not already working with us uh

Lisa green is here she's my co-founder and definitely see her um and uh the the the key for us is if we're going to make a great shopping experience that's well

personalized it has to have every product in the world and so we don't want the non-branded world we want the Branded world so um we are already signed up with lots of

Partners from Gucci uh to H&M and everyone in between and so we're really excited about having this huge assortment and also having a huge amount of data tied to that assortment because

we're augmenting all of the product data that the sites have with the additional information we have the second piece is we're rebuilding search so that it really leverages both it's called hybrid

search and it leverages both the text and the image and all the data that's inside the image about the product and then the third piece is we are working with this large language model construct

there are a number of them we're working with opena at the moment eii at the moment and um we basically are augmenting that model with current fashion information so we're working

with a set of stylists who are helping train and we are working with current trends that are sort of relevant and important at this moment in time and then the last piece is that we are

learning from the customer's experience what she is doing or he is doing and then we are basically getting smarter over time so that each person's experience is very unique and different

to them based on their preferences on brand size Fit price and all of those things so um I'm going to show you a

quick demo I'm already over time um but I want to just sort of caveat this with this is our very V1 uh we're still in beta right now we're planning to launch

next spring and so it will change between now and then but this gives you a sense of the kinds of things that you'll be able to do on Daydream let's

roll so you can chat basically with the agent with that which is Daydream we're going to click write a prompt for me because often times you need to train

someone how General they can be so this question was I'm looking for shearling coat or jacket that's in light gray or color white and it's good for layering in the winter so then I get a series of

results that are all brands and sort of styles and price points that fit my um request my daughters who's 21 looks very different um and I find a jacket that I

like and one of the things we know is that images are worth so much and so we have the ability to Pivot once you find a product you like and here I'm choosing this image and then I'm saying I like

this color show me more like this and so I'm getting more white furry jackets that also are relevant to me and um that

sort of resets the ability to um search and that image use has been really helpful um as you're trying to describe what it is you want the next chat that

we have is I was invited this is real I was invited to a Gala that was 20s the theme was 20's vintage and I was like what is 20's vintage I don't even know so I I'm going to a gallon they say I'm

supposed to wear something 1920s vintage what does that even mean and so um I chat that in um and

what you can see is on the left I actually get a description of what this means and it helps give me some guidance around you know Fringe sequence beating uh here's what the dresses look like but

then I also get all the product that match that description and so what I'm able to do is go through look at the product I'm hitting save so that I'm sort of starting to create a collection

around uh 1920s vintage um and as I'm saving these I'm sort of thinking I'm going to go back I might even want to ask my friend Lisa who I'm going to this

party with what she thinks so I basically save another one um and then I get to my collection that I created I saved five dresses um and I can either

continue chatting I can ask for more like these things or I can share this which I do with a friend on the next search uh we are

starting with an image so my husband sent me an Instagram a screenshot of Instagram of a shirt that he liked which was a little dicey but I was like okay

so I uh I put it in and I got the closest matches to this in the sort of catalog of millions of products and I want something a slight variation of this and he wants long sleeves so he was

kind of like I want a stripe long sleeve shirt so I can basically click on the item and just use this sort of mix of copy and image to say I want this but in

long sleeves then I get a variety of striped shirts some that look more and some that look a little less like it and I actually find one that both he and I

will be okay with um and so um then I click out and I buy it directly on the site um of either the brand or the retailer the last thing I wanted to show

is over here in the corner as this is all happening my style passport is keeping track of the brands that I've liked and the things that I've saved and over time more things like size and

style preferences and so the goal is that each person has their own form of daydream so that's the product um and I will just

end thank you we are we have a a whole team of people that are working away on building sort of additional capabilities and it's

been really fun it's an incredible team um and um we are incredibly excited what I would say is that uh this is an interesting moment in time if you look

at sort of retail over the years um you go back to medieval time and it was really the Advent of currency that enabled sort of the open air markets that were first in

the middle you know in the sort of um very long time ago medieval times then you sort of Go Fast Forward a long time and you get the big uh department stores

that really come out of this change in transportation and the ability to actually move products around um at scale and then sort of the start of this

Century uh the internet obviously changed our ability to buy online um and that just obviously Unearthed sort of this whole new way of shopping and it's now anywhere between 30 and 50%

of most retailers and Brands businesses um and I really believe that what's happening with Gen will be the next big wave there will be lots of interesting

consumer applications that sit on top of AI and uh we're excited to have you be part of it um last uh thing is we are at Daydream

do daydreaming um come sign up for the weit list and we'd love you to try it out thank you that was pretty cool yeah

um one of the threads that has been running through this year's program is Fashions waste and over production problem which boils down to a few

factors the first is excess inventory Brands often produce way more than they can sell resulting in wasted resources and financial losses then there are long

lead times the traditional Supply chains which our industry depends on are slow and inflexible making it difficult to respond to changing Trends and perhaps

most importantly there is environmental impact overproduction contributes to pollution textile waste and unsustainable practices something that

we've heard a lot about so far at voices this year our next two talks will challenge will tackle this challenge which we must face up to if we want to lessen the

industry's impact first up is Lawrence Lenahan the founder and chairman of residence companies a venture company enabling demand manufacturing at scale

residence aims to eliminate waste reduce environmental impact and unlock new levels of creativity and efficiency for fashion brands Lawrence is here to

underscore the urgency and the scale of the problem he is trying to solve and to show us how he plans to do it please welcome Lawrence

Lenahan thank you and uh Imran thank you very much for putting waste after music movies merchandising and excitement so

yes waste um and I'll start with a really bad pun um uh the is saying a crisis is a

terrible thing to waste um and we're in a crisis right now and the crisis is waste and right now you're I can I can

feel the the inner groaning of oh another sustainability presentation this morning the McKenzie report talked about how there's almost this fatigue how it's becoming less and less important and I

will touch it because we are in a crisis and yes it's an environmental crisis by the way I also think that you know just experience is like when people begin to stop focusing on something or dismiss

something it's actually when it becomes really important you have to go through this big kind of hype phase but it's only half the story and that's the really that's the really important part

that we have to address and so when we think of this we think of you know wasted material water these the how many how many landfill pictures have we seen

um you know energy but we don't think of this storing it inventory we don't think of the time of lost opportunity that we miss

Trends we miss directions we don't think of the money that's tied up that we waste when we put it in that landfill and the creativity that we

waste because of this and this is this this is the crisis that we're that we're facing and the only solution is if we look at this together as as as one as

one thing because the solution is to address them both at the same time and so yes we only need to do one thing to eliminate environmental and

economic waste but first some math okay what this is this means necessary so I'm GNA get

very mathy on this we focus a lot about sustainability and we focus on profitability but we don't talk about sustainability and profitability and

so we forget you know we talked about somebody mentioned earlier um one of the other sessions about the companies that have gone out of business these sustainable companies well they didn't

go out of business because they're sustainable they went out of business they're not profitable they went out of business because they didn't have something that people wanted to buy so this is we have to make things that people want to buy so they you have to

have a sustainable business by definition to be sustainable as a business you need to be be profitable but it's also coming that you've got to be profitable the only way

you can be profitable is if you're sustainable that's really important and so what's going to happen is that this is they that means that these are necessary one is mutually necessary for

the other or they are mutually necessary to exist and that's a really really important thing to make so what we're solving for is not sustainable we're not solving for profitable we're solving for sustainable

and profitable so how do you do it lots of equations I have one more um supply has to equal demand so we make everything on

demand simple easy solution I'm done thank you Imran no I'm kidding what is this it's a factory It's actually an inventory

making machine and this worked great for a long long long time proded the Industrial Revolution

was based on this how do you how do you how do you make lots of lots of things by the way I'm going to talk about clothing and how clothing is really really hard to make things but this

makes inventory and this worked fine because we lived in an environment where we were able to basically I don't

you know life wasn't moving very fast we were kind of able able to predict the future because we Define the future right you had big media working

with big Brands working with big retailers saying this is going to be the future and so you could kind of Chase along so you didn't have this problem you didn't have people just okay now we'll make things faster and faster and

faster but now people started making things faster and faster and faster and so you know where are we right now well 3 hours away 240 years ago this thing

was in invented and it's probably the second most important element of the Industrial Revolution is the power loom actually when you call

people who hate technology Lites this is where Lite started but that power loom you took a straight line and you drew it 240 years later you end

there this is the optimization of industry in this of our industry right because why because Supply almost but not equal to there's

my last there's my last sign almost but not equals demand so how do they do it well they obviously do it in lots of really really bad ways and bad

ways that are that are that are damaging the you know the planet um this is not going to be a a a Sheen uh roast but in the end what you're seeing here is this is

this is what you're taking you're taking every single thing out of the system that you need to do you don't have to worry about intellectual property rights you don't have to worry about residual waste you don't have to worry about

worker conditions you don't have to worry about the impact you're making on the planet you just optimize for price and this is what you get and by the way I mean the you know the statistic I

think under business of fashion had the U uh uh uh 53% of Sheen consumers are environmentally

conscious 100% are delusional um but but how can this how can this exist because we don't we don't you know we don't understand that well this part of this is that you know there's a we talk about sustainability people aren't

willing to pay the premium well you know what's really happening here it's not so much the premium sustainability it's the discount

it's this this this this this concept of the brown discount of we we'll be okay if you if you give us something cheaper that's really bad we'll be okay and

we'll kind of look the other way well in the end that's got end so new Industrial in new Industrial reol

ution built on learning so you you know as I saying with the movies and and everything else about AI this is the this is what seems like the most unsexy

part about AI it's actually the sexiest part about AI it's not the part that anybody hears the conversation we ought to be having about AI right now is how do we change the entire infrastructure

of every single thing we do yes it's great for you know for the for the visual for the front-end stuff no it will not replace

creativity I've had a word processor for 30 years and I have not made my first novel yet that's what it is for the creative process and it will be it'll help with

some of the merchandising things like that but the real thing is what's coming next and so why you know first of what's the problem we have to solve to be able to make this industry different what do

we have to solve make everything on demand well making clothing is really really hard by the way creative aspect this is actually generated by 3D or by

3D by by AI if I did this on Mid Journey it would look like you the equivalent of stick figures but somebody with Talent using AI actually create something which I think is pretty interesting but what

is this these are lots of you know probably 30 40 pattern pieces in that shirt all mathematically described how they connect two-dimensional pieces two

dimensional medium right right cloth then we're going to cut that up we're going to sew it together and we're going to make a three-dimensional product which we're now going to fit on top of another

three-dimensional shape a human body which by the way every single year gets more and more varied across this globe and this is you know this is this

is really hard to do so how do you do this what you do is you actually fix kind of production processes you make minimums you say okay we're going to do this and we're going to make it in a

long in a long run now long runs take planning long runs take time and this is why we have this industry which has taken this which which now you know has this where sometimes you have really

really big runs that take 18 months from kind of the creation to actually coming to Market if you're 18 months away how can you be possibly be right in a world

where everything is changing so much where we don't know what's happening we don't see what's happening that's the challenge that is that that that we're

that we're facing so this is not so easy to do on this on a on a on an individual garment basis so this is where AI comes

in AI is really good for solving incredibly complex problems because in the end you know we think about fashion people talk about

slow fashion we don't live in a slow World wouldn't it be great if we just consumed less well we don't we're humans we've never done this yes we have to be more responsible we have to actually

focus on not only consumption but what happens to what we consume you want to not create waste stop stop buying plastic that's going to change a lot

more than just consumption so I have the right conversations about what we're doing but what we're able to do now is now create these long runs Industrial Systems where you're actually taking

you're actually making something that only exists on demand you're saying how you know this is impossible well no it's not I mean we're doing it I mean think other people will do it this is where the real Innovation comes in fact if you

want to look for an investment theme you know it's actually I would argue I've been I've been um it's the 10th company I founded I've been a venture capitalist

my firm was a seed investor in Pinterest um I was the first investor in Shopify um we've seen a lot of of of things and

made money in these kind of companies that change things when they weren't obvious they came when times were changing when industries were changing this is what we're facing right now this is actually we look at it we think of

like the bad Economic Times we think of the you know the the turmoil but this is where this is where actually really amazing things happen so from an AI perspective the story you're hearing on the surface is going to be the thing

that just kind of I don't think really it it'll it'll be there it'll be in in you know certainly touch all of our lives but what really will touch is this infrastructure is how do we change

every bit of Enterprise technology all software that runs corporations every single day will look different the company's making will look different you'll see these systems and so this is

the exciting thing of what we're seeing we're just really right in the beginning of this um of this whole process and so now if you have something where you are now making

things one at a time what happens you're not you're you're changing the focus you can't first off you can't you have to to do things in real time so now you have to be distributed so now actually

clothing begins to be made maybe where it's bought creating jobs think about tariff environments where now you have that dist you know that distribution where people need to create jobs because AI is taking apart

jobs think about all these things that that need to happen you need to connect your entire manufacturing infrastructure together in this real-time Network sounds hard well guess what cell phone

industry did it telephone industry did it the internet is is this real-time Network connecting different things together and with the complexity of solving that how do you make things go

well the way we do it actually we make long runs on a peace level basis we'll make different garments different brands all together at the same time organizing these long runs on pieces could never

ever do that before in the history of humanity because you didn't have the systems that could deal with this kind of real-time complexity think about it you're can have an environment where we

try to fix the supply chain every day to run the same thing over and over again to now where we're shifting to the infrastructure is going to be dynamic it'll never be the same any single day

but it'll learn from everything that happened before every single day and so what happens is now you start seeing this map look different yeah this is

this this vision is not good for the entire world it's not good for particularly China but it is good for everywhere else where now you can have

you know jobs come to the US in in in in apparel manufacturing you can have jobs coming to Europe you can have jobs created in other parts of this area that never never existed

before and so you know here's some examples actually out of a factor there's a couple of interesting things um this is an idea of how do you make real-time labels and Tags by putting them in there our goal is never have

anything not colored in our in the role that we're producing in our you know in our Factory um uh there's a whole bunch of things that I won't go into in terms of what

else is in there but this is that problem you look okay let's print stuff on a roll that is the most that is incredibly complex um geometry in real-time systems where it's taking

different things based on different conditions to be able to be in filling those things and every day we're getting better and better because we're able to measure them on an individual basis this is really fascinating because over there what you're seeing is filling in all

that space to be able to make packaging for a brand who wanted to put their their prints on every on every single bag so

they're able to actually take the waste choose what they're filling and create it it's an amazing opportunity in terms of now from nothing that would have gone in a garbage can now be able to creating

utility and creating value when you're making things on demand you're making things one that means you know everything about that

one that is accountability when I can tell you how many milliliters of dye are in this jacket when I can tell you who made that that's where it has to go now also

I going to do that we going talk about circularity you know later on the presentation is now I can also tell you what to do with that and how to do that and be able to give the ability to

create these finally these circular systems why because you now know every single garment so there is this Golden Age it can happen it's coming in infrastructure and so you move from this

world we've lived in of economies a scale to now an economy of one we're now the world looks different so remember just think think of the numbers 30% of what we make as an

industry ends in a landfill now it's gone those dollars think of all the different things and how this industry is reshaped based on this and how everything this industry shapes now I'm

missing one really important thing on this if I create an environment where basically every brand has an industrial system at their

fingertips what's differentiation it's creativity this industry gets to go back

to where it started where's Talent where Brands can survive can Thrive can build in an environment where they can create things that they've never been able to

create before why because you take you make when you lose inventory you make the cost of creation zero the problem with the problem with creativity I mean everybody's a Creator

you know the things that you feel the most uncomfortable about are your best work and that's why it never sees the light of day if it cost

zero now it can by the way so what one person buys it you make one there's no mqs thousand people buy it great or

maybe you only want 37 to buy it so you stop but your choice you drive and how do you make then these Brands

sustainable and profitable driven by creativity and so it can be you know clothing walking in you know New York New York Fashion Week but I'm going to

talk about this story this is an indigenous um uh designer sold so probably Jamie Akuma

incredibly talented she sold more in her first day out delivering this

platform first actually first few hours than she did in any month of her existence her first weekend more than a year of sales why because she could finally make things she could go and

express things that she was terrified of which by the way people loved and so you think think about the opportunity that this gives and so this is why this new Industrial Revolution

why we this is this is where AI happens yes it's exciting and sexy all the other things but it's really it's really this and yes it will cause an enormous amount of change in this

industry but I'll tell you change is opportunity like I said this is when this is when great you know great companies are built in times of change but as an industry of a choice we can

drop an anchor and hopefully these Winds of Change will stop or we can put up a sale and I will tell you that anger ain't going

anywhere I don't know where that's going but I think we're going to be surprised how wonderful it can be so thank

[Applause] you if I asked you to name the three Rs of responsible fashion you'd probably

list resale rental maybe recycling many of us have engaged in one of these RS whether it's by selling a

secondhand bag or renting an occasion we item or buying something made with upcycled materials but then there's a fourth R that's less talked about and worth our

consideration Josephine Phillips is the founder of door-to-door clothing alterations and repairs app SoJO today she is here to make the business

and moral case for fashion repairs the fourth R and share how technology can broaden the impact please welcome Josephine Phillips to the voice of

State hello so 60 years ago my grandmother was in Freetown Sierra Leone and she bought this yellow dress it was petite it had stripes down it it had an

orange tie attached to the collar and she absolutely loved it it went on to become my grandfather's favorite dress of hers this was nothing to do with the design and it was entirely to do with

the fact that it was a couple of inches shorter than her other dresses meaning he got to see more of her legs 60 years after she bought this dress I was sitting with her in her room

in London and she gave this dress as a gift to me she entrusted me with its 60e long story and doing so she taught me an unshakable lesson about what it means to

truly value what we own but this dress wasn't a one-off this outfit from last Christmas it's also been there at a dinner at my uncle's house my sister's

21st birthday our summer barbecue the sier leonian women Society Winter Dance and it also was worn at my parents wedding 30 years ago which it was made

for as an ash in September my parents celebrated 30 years and she gave it as a gift to my mother who is now getting it tailored to fit her with SoJO my startup that is modernizing the clothing repair

and tailoring industry these are just two examples but my grandma's entire wardrobe is filled with clothes like this she's turning 95 in a matter of weeks and all her Cardigans and skirts

and trousers they're just littered throughout our family albums she knows how to care for her clothes but she's also not the only one when I talk about my grandma's dress all I hear from other people is stories about how their

grandmother was a seamstress or how their grandfather's jumper is their favorite it's been patched and repaired but they absolutely love it and it's really sentimental to them what I think is great about hearing stories from

everyone who can say something similar is that it means that actually a widespread culture of caring for our clothes is possible which is important

when so often it feels like it isn't but spoiler caring for our clothes is not our cultural norm looking after the things that we own is not how we've

been taught to think I grew up as part of the fast fashion generation which was all about overc consumption and Hyper disposability meaning I bought way too much and I threw it away without a

second thought do any of these sound familiar the dopamine hit from the checkout Now button and the your order has been delivered buying an outfit for one off event and then never wearing it

again doing a wardrobe clear out and feeling like it cleanses your mind as much as it cleanses your closet or taking a really big bag down to the charity shop and never think thinking about those clothes again this is how I

was taught to engage with my clothes and this is how we've all been taught to think but thinking like this as you hopefully know has an absolutely devastating cost but it's a side that we

in the nor Global North so rarely get to see the top from the Instagram post that I decided to take to a charity shop instead of rearing it maybe ended up as

one of the 15 million items arriving to the shores of Ghana each week or it could have ended up on the pile of clothes in the at k a desert that is now

so big it's viewable from space our fashion waste levels have reached 92 million metric tons annually and to explain that because big numbers are

sometimes hard to conceptualize if you took the entire population of Europe hundreds of millions of people you brought them all together you put them on on one massive weighing scale they still wouldn't be as heavy as the amount

of clothing waste we're producing each year and it's growing year on year and it's unsustainable so what can we do about it well my idea

for SoJO came about by my first experience with a tailor a local tailor I didn't know where to go who to go to how much it would be what quality it would be and when I went there my order

was written down on the back of a piece of paper maybe some of you can relate I couldn't believe it they told me to come back and I came back a week later hoping it would be ready but it wasn't they said come come back on the weekend I

came back on the weekend and it was ready great so I went to pay and they said no no no cash only and I didn't have any cash and I was just like this is mad um so I said I'll come back and

then I forgot and I didn't get order updates unlike deliverers or Ubers or Amazon orders there was no kind of automation or notifications so I actually didn't go back for a couple of months and when I did go to collect it I

realized that I wanted to create SoJO to tackle this exact problem the digitization of an ageold industry I knew that if we wanted millions of people to repair their clothes we'd have to make it seamless and we'd have to

make it digital so I launch SoJO which essentially enables you to book any repair you need doing online and as Imran mentioned we started as an app

that was dubbed as the delivery for repairs connecting you to local tailor but we soon realized that going one person at a time was no mean feat especially in such a big industry so we started working with Brands to power

their repair services because we realized that brands should be the ones taking responsibility for the longevity of the clothes they create we have a few different bits of Technology the first

is a repair booking portal that is customizable so essentially it works like Wix but for repairs so a brand can pick their background imagery fonts colors and they can choose which items to have repairs on what repairs they

want to and then they can offer it to their customers it connects to our backend we collect it fulfill it and deliver it back to the customer what's important here is that we say that you can launch repair service for your

customers in a matter of of days not quarters we do the heavy lifting the second bit is where it gets more exciting this is our integrated repair solution essentially what this means is

we connect to order and customer history so that not only can customers just book repairs on the orders that they've bought previously from Brands but Brands can also unlock a whole host of key data

and product insights which can then feed back into different things and they can also use it as a lever to pull depending on business goals so for example if your goal is to reduce your return rate as a

brand you could offer free alterations for 14 days post purchase uh and that's because a lot of returns are due to clothing fit and so you can be incentivizing your customer in that way or for example if you are looking to

increase your pu for your loyalty members you could offer free repairs to them and help increase that customer experience but also the sco based data helps Brands understand their products

more when it comes to their durability and their longevity which Fabrics are engaging in early stage repairs what issues being created and how can they fix them how can they think about circular design and how can they think

about their durability when it comes to production and finishing techniques Etc not only that but the alterations element we're feeding back into our brand Partners so they can get more accurate sizing and measurements for

their customers so um more Accura for the customers so we also have instore technology I'm go back we also have instore technology that enables retailers system to book for customers

and ultimately all of this is now fueled by our operational Tech which is now no longer pens on paper and orders being written down haphazardly it is

essentially digitizing the whole process from arrival to triage to tailor fulfillment uh to delivery the customers can track where their orders are so in the brands and essentially it's allowing

us to optimize our our operations whether that be automated assignment to tailor or whether it is getting better pricing accuracy based off of time it takes to do things we're digitizing it

all and we're now also looking into how AI can feed into Hardware solutions that will ultimately aim to drive down the time it takes to do repairs and therefore also decrease cost and

therefore decrease cost um so to finish off essentially um oh yes no so I've spoken about the mission and I've spoken about

the technological element but I wanted to chat finally about what it means for to launch a repair service ultimately it's incredibly difficult to convince them of repair when their focus and

their goal is all about buy more buy now and buy new but I think how repair feeds into it is getting Brands to think Beyond next month's sales numbers and

instead think about the long game repair isn't about next quarter's growth it's about understanding next decade's growth by building a brand that can truly stand the test of time and that's all about

customer loyalty it's also important to note that Brands often think that launching repair will mean that it's suggesting that their clothes are bad quality but actually it's about understanding that clothes

much like people get tired and they need some TLC I don't know how many of you have gone to the spa here uh but it doesn't mean we're low quality if we're going to get some care um so yes

essentially after salale services are one of the biggest keys to unlocking customer lifetime value and loyalty and I say this to say that we have done tens of thousands of repairs in the first

couple of years of SoJO and the endless comments that we've got from customers about how meaningful it is as a process has been something that Brands absolutely need to tap into I mean imagine you've bought an an item from a

brand like a knitwear piece and it's got moth holes in and it was four years ago that you bought it how beautiful of an experience is it that you can go on their website book your moth hole repairs get it collected from your door

restored to as good as new and then return to you a week later wrapped in the Brand's packaging with a personalized note with them talking about how they truly care it is a key

that brands are not tapping into enough and I'm telling you it's not only the right thing to do it is also the smart thing so to finish off I do want to say

that clothing repair is something that we should all be a part of whether you are a brand that is selling hundreds of thousands of garments where you're not yet taking responsibility for the end of life and you're not telling your

customers how you can care for them or whether you're an individual who's put on a jumper and found that it has a hole in it we need a radical shift in our approach to clothing and we need it as

soon as possible so I would love it if you could join me in the repair Revolution thank you do you know that feeling when you hear a song that really moves you you

sometimes get like chills or you feel like you're transported into another time or space in your life well

the Science Now backs this up what's happening is that our lyic system is processing these emotions and control memory and when we listen to music it's

been shown that our lyic system lights up our bodies release endorphins and produce dopamine when we listen to our favorite

songs now music therapy has become a powerful tool in helping people cope with stress trauma chronic pain and

illness I've been really interested in this topic ever since my sister shazan who spoke here at bof voices in

2017 was struck down by a rare condition called Steven Johnson syndrome in 2019 it's a very severe Al allergic

reaction that causes trauma to the skin and for 6 weeks my sister was an intensive care in the Burn Unit some somewhere normally reserved for burn

victims because the layers of her skin were so damaged each time they removed her bandages all over her body she

experienced excruciating pain but the most unexpected thing was that while this was happening the hospital she was in in Canada brought in

a music therapist and she requested her favorite '90s orang B songs and the therapist played them on a guitar to help her through the

process it turns out music can also increase pain thresholds due to endorphin release and shazan has now recovered and she credits music therapy

among other things in part for helping her fight through the pain and Trauma of that disease our next speakers are here to help us understand the science behind

music therapy and give us a demonstration into how it works Rosie Chan is a multimedia artist

bridging genre bending music design dance and architecture she's the founder of Sonic Apothecary which links musical

Innovations with science and wellbeing she will be joined by Dr tamson Lewis a renowned longevity doctor

neuroscientist and advocate for human FLIR flourishing a former Elite GB athlete and 2014 Iron Man UK Triathlon

winner Dr Tam has overcome a traumatic brain injury and a long covid for an experience of music as medicine please welcome Rosie

Chan thank you Amon of course hi thank you very much so it's a real pleasure to be here um a little bit about Sonic Apothecary

think of it as your own personal musical pharmacy at the core it's essentially um a group of

beautiful minds and a collective of leaders in their field whether it be architecture or design electronic musicians different genres and industries coming together to share a

mutual passion of how music can help heal and using music as a vital therapeutic tool I'd

love to invite um Dr Tam up onto the stage now hello thanks time so nice to be here with you hello everyone so we're going

to talk a little bit about why music is so powerful as a therapeutic tool I've been fascinated we've known each other a number of years now we met in IA The Vortex that seems to bring people

together in different healing modalities and and we we sort of jelled over these holistic therapies right and the fact that you were playing such incredible concepts for us out there and I saw people weeping in the audience and

having all these different emotional experiences um I'd love to hear from you tell us about you know you've taught us a little bit about why you created Sonic Apothecary but give us give us the mood

behind the mission yeah um it's really interesting because because I think that for a lot of us who will have experienced this during the pandemic is

where it really started and a lot of our friends were suffering from isolation and loneliness and anxiety depression

and a lot of them were very ill and so I started sending them pieces of music to help them like in their environment and it was really interesting having these

responses from architects who are no longer able to go into their huge architectural Studios and just having this saying I feel really calm in my studio I feel like it's really

stimulating creativity and focus today I have a had a teething god daughter who um her mother was saying to me look at track three of this album look at what

it does to her when when when she's like sanding in a cot and then a friend of mine whose father was suffering from Parkinson's he she said this takes about 7 minutes but look what this track does

when I play it to him so all these incredible responses I was getting and I think through that I became obsessed and fascinated by what it was in the sound

and in the frequencies that were helping these people in during this time and so for me it's very important the research

and um and the science behind it and so I started working with Scientists neuroscientists um people in the medical

medical um sector to kind of understand and learn what it was that can actually how do we actually isolate something that can help someone with that anxiety

how we can help them get a better night's sleep and so I created an album called Sonic Apothecary and that really was the birth of where it started and we worked with the neuroscientist to

analyze all the different tracks and so they'd say this is really great for anxiety this is a great windown routine this would be great for you know XYZ and

through that um when I was looking at some of the graphs I said well this looks pretty bad it says 177% Melancholia I old word isn't it hands up who knows what Melancholia

is heard of it sounds like something from Shakespeare doesn't it okay go on and so I thought well and I said to them I said guys should I tweak this because it sounds you know there was peacefulness there was joy and I said

17% sounds like a lot and they explained to me why it was like no more no less I was also composing the pieces in a kind of Flow State and there explaining to me why actually no more no less could

actually help you with your wind down routine and help you get a better night sleep but Tam maybe you can elaborate on the science behind that I can tell you a bit about Melancholia because it's super interesting because we often think we

listen to music when we're feeling a certain way we choose out certain music and Melancholia is the feeling of of sadness of of like an overwhelm of sadness of grief or experiences like

that or emotional experiences like that and what we know now from the science is that actually by listening to that type of music that enhances that emotion you're having an increased expression of

the original emotion that made you seek that music out and in that process of seeking and experiencing molia you are enhancing the processing of the emotion

it's a form of catharsis so most of you have probably heard about catharsis it's like getting it's a cleansing it's a getting it out and the more we know in Neuroscience in medicine now is that

emotional suppression depression actually causes disease and we're able to see this we're able to prove it now that traumatic States post-traumatic stress disorder depression anxiety we

can see that in the body It's associated with biomarkers of higher cortisol stress hormone levels in the blood it accelerates aging we develop little tags

on our DNA sort of epigenetic expression which accelerates the a aging process the good news is that a lot of that processes is reversible so why I came to with Melancholia is that it's the same

with um if you had a breakup or you had a horrible day if you listen to the music and you have this catharsis so you're cleansing yourself of this of whatever the emotions are then you can

move up and out and through and you're going to your physiology your cellular frequencies which increasingly we're able to measure is going to thank you for it so you don't hold on to this the

whole concept of the bodyke keeping the score is what we're moving to understanding now that it's not just this britishness of put up shut up

suppress it's Express it's feel and I love what you're doing and we saw this recently one of your concerts you you're encouraging people to feel not to just go oh that was nice you know the actual

frequencies and the way you play and the emotion you give and the different sounds that you blend are encouraging us to feel and we feel to

heal thanks Tom um but this is exactly why I have become so obsessed with I isolating what is it that you know and understanding the science I'm scratching the surface I love collaborating with

people like Tam um and even speaking to Architects and understanding how they're looking at the science behind how they're designing buildings now with the science of like phys physiological

States when we move and how facades of buildings affect our brains and so all this set me down a huge Rabbit Hole um and the need to kind of like learn more

and understand how we can distribute it um and as a musician as a composer you know it's it's a blessing to be able to have this skill and I think that once I recognize that there was a healing

aspect of it how do we isolate it and then apply it to a wider context and so it's been really rewarding to actually speak to people in the medical sector rehabilitation centers hospitals kids

with PTSD kids with autism and understand and also the demential society and how different kinds of music can apply to different different um mental stat

and that we can measure it we can put EG monitors which measure brain waves and we can see that when you listen to different types of music certain Brave ways in certain areas of the brain I know Imran talked a bit about the lyic

brain which is your emotional brain it's a it's an older part of your brain so again lighting that up helps you express feel emotions which have tangible effects on our physiology I go back to

cortisol again we're all full of cordal these days because we're on our phones our devices the blue light all triggers cortisol and I think what what you're doing here is we're able in fmri scans

so we put people in Scanners functional MRI scanners you can see different brain areas light up in response to different music it's similar and Akin to psychedelic therapy that everyone's talking about at the moment which is

probably the most exciting thing um I've seen as a psychiatrist in practicing medicine and the Psychedelic therapy is augmented by music it's completely

changed the whole experience so I love that we're able to we're able to prove that now and I love for you to tell us a little bit about these immersive soundscapes that you're going into and

and how potentially a Sonic Apothecary as a business is looking to move into creating experiences in busy places like shopping malls airports these healing

sanctuaries that we can check into sort of plug ourselves into the mains and boost our energy levels up or regenerate but have tangible effects on how we experience life yeah no it's really

great how we're able to do that because if we think about it we apply of course or music is so subjective what I might listen to might make Dr Tam totally

traumatic and so it's really important to kind of go through all these testing and clinical trials and understand what works in different environments and we kind of know like something in um the rehabilitation center or a kids's

hospital is going to be very different to um something on the other end of the spectrum like a wellness hotel or Hospitality or retail store and so it's actually really interesting to have these different musical prescriptions as

it were not just for the businesses or the environments but also for the employees and office spaces and Etc and

so and even in transition Transit trans transition areas and different zones um who wouldn't want that at an airport when you're standing around for two

hours on the floor eating Burger King or trying to avoid it yeah yeah so so that's really been um yeah my mission summize to bring all these different people together in different Industries and continue to have these dialogues

with different people in different Industries because if you think about it back in the day doctors were scientists and they were mathematicians and now it's become very separated and fragmented and so I feel like it's

really great to bring this Collective together and just continue to have these dialogues which I feel are so important to our mental well-being and just like um yeah and and really enable therapeutic experiences for people as

you said all the wide range of people from from children with aspar Spectrum or autism to people in you know in hospital as as Imran discussed at very

early on so I think it's incredible uh what you're doing and the fact that science is able to to prove it through brain waves through body chemstry through um through heart rate through

deeper sleep all of it and all of that from a longevity perspective which everyone's talking about now we all want to live well longer I mean this is a

remarkable integrative tool to allow us to enhance our cell frequency which enhances repair State regeneration like aging I just want to say is is is

failure of regeneration of repair and if we enhance or we change our frequency in a therapeutic sense here we are slowing down our rate of Aging we are reversing

our biological age and I think that's I think that's powerful and we've seen it in practice and we're seeing it in research with especially what you're getting to when with UCL and some of the

interesting research there yeah thanks um yeah I look forward to sharing more of with you in the near future and I guess this is now the mission is to to really

use um music and sound as a longevity and a wellness tool and so to close I

would love to illustrate um an example of harmonies and frequencies and I give you a little snippet of what I'm working

on and I'd love to invite you to just either close your eyes or relax into short piece I'm going to play um loosen your belts whatever you need to do just

allow the music to take you where you where you want go a few deep breaths always helps just moving from brain to heart to

lungs thank you so [Applause] much e

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[Applause] thank you Rosie Dr Tam to everyone

watching at home or at work or at school we'll be back tomorrow at 10:30 a.m.

London time with our Deep dive into Global culture and creativity thank you for tuning to bof voices 2024 and see you in the morning we'll be

back tomorrow bye [Applause] [Music]