Field Note 04 — I’ll Meet You…

Notes from the Lobby Bar

“I'll meet you…”

I've probably said those three words over a thousand times in the last forty or so years. I'll meet you in the lobby. Let's grab coffee before heading to the ballroom. Lunch? Meet me downstairs in 15 min after I drop my bags. Sometimes there's an agenda, but often there is not. The request may be a desire to simply vent after a long day. Sometimes it might simply be the unspoken thought when I look through a window and see who is already in the room. The destination isn't necessarily important. It's the opportunity to spend time together, talk, share ideas, or perhaps work through something that needs a change in scenery.

I've spent most of my professional life alongside brilliant engineers, producers, technicians, artists, executives, and more than a few pirates. Live production is an industry where people from remarkably different backgrounds come together, accomplish something extraordinary under considerable pressure, and then scatter in different directions.

I’ve also lived an extraordinary life where that same experience came from a wedding, or the birth of a child, or the doctor’s office. The anticipation of meeting somewhere has evolved over the years, but waiting for an Uber is not much different than standing in the snow waiting for the school bus to arrive. Many of my memories involve meeting what’s next.

Let's Go for a Drive

Years ago, I had a couple of employees that didn’t get along. They would often loudly disagree on the littlest thing. It got to the point where they would vent to peers and try to convince them to take a side. It was escalating to a point where a manager needed to act.

I could have scheduled a meeting or sent the situation to the HR department. Most frequently I would try to directly mediate the situation and simply tell them to knock it off. I would often say to someone, “Let’s take a walk,” and then explain my expectations with various results.

Instead, this time I scheduled a different type of meeting and put them together in the cab of a truck for a six-hour drive across the desert.

Six hours.

No conference table. No formal agenda. No manager directing the discussion. Just two people, a truck, and a considerable amount of highway. It worked remarkably well, and they are still friends to this day. The lesson wasn't that everyone should resolve disagreements by driving across the desert. It was that changing the circumstances of a conversation can sometimes change the conversation itself.

I've sometimes wondered whether there was a sophisticated management term for what I'd done. Perhaps Interactive Human Resource Management. I.H.R.M. I just thought they needed some time together without trying to show off to peers. They really needed to “meet.”

And that observation stayed with me.

Meet Me in the Lobby Bar

Anyone who's spent much time traveling for work probably understands the significance of a hotel lobby bar. For those of us in live events, it's almost an extension of the workplace. Food, a beer, an Old Fashioned with great bourbon, or maybe simply some water to hydrate and some wasabi peas.

The day is over. The external obligation is finally beginning to subside. Someone says, “Meet me in the lobby bar.” And people arrive. Sometimes it's the same group you spent the previous fourteen hours working alongside. Sometimes somebody brings a friend. Occasionally, someone you've known for years happens to be staying at the same hotel.

There's no seating chart. Conversations start, stop, overlap, and wander. World problems become topics. Somebody remembers a show from twenty years ago. Somebody else has a problem they're trying to solve. A friend may reveal a worrisome health issue or announce a new romance as gossip. It may include some epic war story about Pakistan or an event that Han Solo would remember. It could just be a story about shoes.

Before long, an informal gathering becomes an exchange of experience that no meeting organizer could have planned or placed a value on. Not every conversation is profound. Some are downright ridiculous. But over the years, I've watched remarkable things happen in those rooms and have become aware of the diversity of people that experience them.

Problems get solved. Relationships develop. Opportunities appear. People discover they have more in common than they realized. And occasionally, somebody picks up the tab.

Then everyone leaves, and what happened in the moment becomes a memory.

What Did We Eat?

Not long ago, I invited a close friend, Tony Pitsley, to join an experiment I was conducting. I wanted to recreate something resembling those familiar lobby bar conversations, but in a digital environment.

He and I have many shared memories from having to explain the value of $200 to each other, the exhaustion from too many late-night drives, and the excitement of some new technology. He is “Uncle Tony” to my kids, and I was the best man in his wedding.

Tony didn't join. He called me instead. He wanted to know what I was up to with this one. He has known me for a long time. I asked him a question: “Remember that old tobacco factory restaurant we ate at years ago?” Of course he remembered. He replied, “That place was awesome,” and I asked, “Do you remember what we ate?” He did not, but neither did I. We both remembered the experience, but not the details. That once again got us talking about all the places we'd been, the people we'd met, and the many conversations we'd had over the years.

How many problems have we all solved over a dinner? How many ideas have been exchanged in hotel lobbies? How many times has somebody said something that changed the way another person approached their work? And how much of that collective experience has simply disappeared into memory?

What if it didn’t have to?

What if we could return to an earlier conversation, remember what had been discussed, and continue to develop an idea with everything that had been discussed, including the surrounding context?

Not to record every word somebody said over a cocktail. Certainly not to turn a night with friends into a business meeting. But to preserve useful experiences and make them available again when they mattered. Some of those meetings could have become TED Talks, and yes, some did not produce anything but a “Hey, I had a good time last night, thanks.”

That was the idea behind the experiment.

I started inviting people into a shared conversation environment. Some understood immediately. Some were curious. Some were skeptical. And some, like Tony, picked up the phone. Which, when I think about it, was perfectly appropriate. The objective was never to get everybody using a particular application. It was to get people to think about all the lost context and together find a way to retain it with minimal effort or obligation.

Who's the Bartender?

Once I began experimenting with a shared digital conversation, another question emerged.

If the lobby bar was the setting, who was taking care of the room? I didn’t want it to be about me. In a real lobby bar, a good bartender does considerably more than pour drinks. They recognize the regulars. They remember preferences. They may introduce two people who ought to know each other. They notice when somebody wants to talk and when somebody would rather be left alone. And a particularly good bartender understands discretion.

So, I began exploring whether an AI participant could assume some of those responsibilities. Not as the star of the conversation. I did not want to build an AI bar that acted as an authority telling everyone what to think.

As the bartender.

We experimented with group conversations involving people I'd known for years. I invited friends and colleagues into the experience, each bringing different expectations and their own ways of interacting with AI. At one point, I even asked the AI to explain its role as bartender to Tanner, one of the people participating.

We weren't simply asking a chatbot to answer questions anymore. We were exploring how an AI might participate in a conversation among people who already had relationships, history, and shared experiences, but from different perspectives. The environment should support the conversation, not become the reason for it.

Could it recognize a connection between two conversations? Would it retrieve something useful that we'd discussed earlier? Could it introduce context without intruding? Is it even possible to understand that sometimes the best thing a bartender can do is keep quiet? We have two ears and one mouth by design, and I did not fully understand how AI could participate.

We hadn't built a complete system that could reliably perform all those functions. But we'd developed a surprisingly clear idea of what we wanted that system to accomplish. We wanted a greeter to welcome someone into the conversation. We wanted a barista who remembered how you liked your coffee. We wanted a very intelligent archivist with a great memory that could help recover earlier discussions in detail, without the foggy headache of trying to remember them ourselves.

As we invested more time in a group text chat, we began imagining the other roles that were evolving, and the unexpected happened. The conversations inside the chat led to other discoveries outside of the room. Some were personal and self-reflective; other conversations led to construction projects, and some led to revenue opportunities.

The important part wasn't that we were trying to build an agent. It was validating the experience of the people who came to meet.

One More Thing…

I didn't invent the value of meeting or spending time together, sharing those experiences, and learning from other people. Those things have been part of my life for decades. What changed was the possibility that we might preserve some of what happens when we meet and allow more people to benefit from those experiences.

My thought at the time was that we could introduce a new participant who could help. It was an intriguing idea. It also raised a question: How?

Which seems like a good reason to meet again.

Could we build this thing?