Speaker 1: From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
Speaker 1: riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
Speaker 1: learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
Speaker 1: My name is Matt, my name is Noel. They called
Speaker 1: the Ben. We're joined as always with our super producer
Speaker 1: set the Shadow Johnson. Most importantly, you are you. You
Speaker 1: are here, and that makes this the stuff they don't
Speaker 1: want you to know. How's my how's my prop? Comedy game?
Speaker 1: Mon I'm not convinced that you are you Ben. You
Speaker 1: can be anyone you want to be. Well, we're vast,
Speaker 1: we contain multitudes, uh, for anyone who sees this on video,
Speaker 1: I am rocking one of my favorite mask. This is
Speaker 1: an aviat are that I use to do completely non
Speaker 1: sketchy things, and today we're talking about something that people,
Speaker 1: uh will tell you is completely non sketchy. But for
Speaker 1: the purposes of today's episode, let me take off this
Speaker 1: mask real ques before we move on. Are those blinks
Speaker 1: one to one with your actual blinks or are they
Speaker 1: just on a set loop? I have to know for now,
Speaker 1: I have these on a set loop. If if we
Speaker 1: could describe the mask for the people are listening. This
Speaker 1: is a this is a neat thing I found uh
Speaker 1: a while back. It's a led mask that allows you
Speaker 1: to uh program any number of different symbols. Le's see
Speaker 1: what else I get here. Yeah, it allows you to
Speaker 1: put in like now I've moved from just blinking eyes
Speaker 1: to one big creepy I that is also sleepy. So
Speaker 1: let me take this off and let's let's do the show.
Speaker 1: It's okay, guys, it's me. I'm still here. Yeah, literally
Speaker 1: tensing mask or something, or like one of those squid
Speaker 1: game masks. Yes, and it's not a super comfortable fit.
Speaker 1: You can see the lines from where the mask was
Speaker 1: on my face. Fashion. Just as a reminder and as
Speaker 1: a framing for this episode, we are all talking to
Speaker 1: each other via our computers, and we are looking at
Speaker 1: video representations of one another, and we are not in
Speaker 1: the same place and not no no physical presence here,
Speaker 1: and our producer is in the Pacific Northwest. T have
Speaker 1: one of those filters on that makes it look like
Speaker 1: I've got really high cheekbones. Uh, this isn't actually me, guys. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm actually just good looking. Oh no, don't beat yourself up. Well, look,
Speaker 1: we're living in a digital world now, and if you
Speaker 1: saw the title of today's episode, you probably heard the
Speaker 1: shiniest new term that's been thrown around Silicon Valley. The metaverse,
Speaker 1: not to be confused with the multiverse of various spiritual
Speaker 1: belief systems and most recently of the Marvel universe. The
Speaker 1: metaverse is the next step in humanities evolution online. You
Speaker 1: will also here it referred to as web three point oh.
Speaker 1: Another antecedent would be the Internet of Things, where all
Speaker 1: all your devices were connected in a larger online agglomeration.
Speaker 1: But very recently, everybody's favorite social media boogeyman, Facebook came
Speaker 1: into the news with a very strange announcement. The company
Speaker 1: is changing its name. It's becoming part of something bigger.
Speaker 1: It's calling itself meta and it is a big proponent
Speaker 1: of this metaverse idea. It's evangelizing for it. But the
Speaker 1: question is what is it exactly? Why should we care
Speaker 1: and should you be afraid of what is certainly about
Speaker 1: to happen? You know? And the announcement came that Facebook
Speaker 1: was going to rebrand. I was really hoping they were
Speaker 1: gonna go with some version of sweet Baby Rays. You know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's weird that Mark hasn't bought that yet. Also, it's
Speaker 1: hilarious to me that a PR company spent millions of
Speaker 1: dollars trying to get Congress to call him Mark instead
Speaker 1: of Mr Zuckerberg swinging a miss. I wonder how much
Speaker 1: I wonder. I wonder what the budget of that backyard
Speaker 1: barbecue video of his was, like, Like he probably spent
Speaker 1: millions just to make it look kind of boring and
Speaker 1: banal and like a regular backyard. What price can you
Speaker 1: put on wholesomeness? You know? Uh? Also it's a shame
Speaker 1: because they clearly could have gone for a little bit
Speaker 1: of humor and rebranded to face. But I don't think
Speaker 1: that's gonna happen. But I but they didn't. They didn't
Speaker 1: answer by email. So here are the facts. We're talking
Speaker 1: about the metaverse. Uh, we have to we have to
Speaker 1: kind of dissect the term because like any corporate initiative,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be a lot of new fangled terminology, a
Speaker 1: lot of slick buzzwords. It's ted talk style, it's pop science.
Speaker 1: You want to get people excited, and you don't want
Speaker 1: them to have to ask too many questions, let me
Speaker 1: fix my account like here, thank you, I'm rocking a
Speaker 1: full of like lyle love at duck hair to you
Speaker 1: this morning, and that Matt to reciprocate for that compliment,
Speaker 1: your avatar always looks awesome. Just to just to clarify
Speaker 1: terms real quick, I mean a video fact similar, even
Speaker 1: if it is exactly you, is still an avatar, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1: Avatar is just a representation of you. So it depends
Speaker 1: on what you would consider a representation. If you wanted
Speaker 1: to go hardline with the definition, then any time you
Speaker 1: are not sickly in the same room with someone talking
Speaker 1: to them, you are communicating with their avatar. You could
Speaker 1: even say this about a phone call, because what you're
Speaker 1: hearing is a reproduction of someone's voice conveyed to you
Speaker 1: through another medium. So there's there's an audio avatar as well.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact, while you're listening to this podcast,
Speaker 1: you are hearing three avatars. You are hearing our voices
Speaker 1: translated through several different platforms and mediums to get inside
Speaker 1: your ears. You know, it's interesting. One of the other
Speaker 1: definitions of avatar comes from Hinduism and refers to a
Speaker 1: manifestation of a deity or released soul in bodily form
Speaker 1: on Earth, which obviously is you know how what plays
Speaker 1: into that cartoon series, The Avatar The Last Airbender. But
Speaker 1: in our nation, that's not that. It's just kind of
Speaker 1: like a high uh spiritual kind of definition of of
Speaker 1: what we're talking about. You know, obviously it makes sense
Speaker 1: that they would have grabbed that term and sort of
Speaker 1: retrofittedive for the digital age. There's also some deep roots
Speaker 1: in gnosticism here, the idea of a life lived to
Speaker 1: stride two realities, one of which is uh inherently flawed,
Speaker 1: but which one shout out. Shout out to all my
Speaker 1: fellow gnosticism nerds. We can start a little more recently,
Speaker 1: when we're defining the metaverse. There is a guy I've
Speaker 1: talked about before on the show. I'm a big, big
Speaker 1: fan of the author, Neil Stevenson. Neil Stevenson wrote, has
Speaker 1: written so many great things, and you know, shout out
Speaker 1: an athem, shout out you know, seven eves. Uh, specifically,
Speaker 1: shout out snow Crash. Here. If you've played the game Cyberpunk,
Speaker 1: then you are accidentally already intimately familiar with the plot
Speaker 1: of snow Crash. This also is going to be familiar
Speaker 1: to fans of role playing games tabletop games like At
Speaker 1: a Run, which is an amazing experience. In snow Crash,
Speaker 1: where the term metaverse was first coined in English, it
Speaker 1: describes a the metaverse is a three D immersive virtual
Speaker 1: world that is populated by avatars of actual people of
Speaker 1: meat bags. And it is a separate virtual universe, but
Speaker 1: it has real world effects. The real world exists, but
Speaker 1: it's going to hell in a handbasket. Private corporations have
Speaker 1: taken over all of the rules traditionally held by states,
Speaker 1: creating what we would in this age call a kind
Speaker 1: of anarcho capitalism. For example, the CIA in this book,
Speaker 1: this is not a big spoiler, they have merged with
Speaker 1: the Library of Congress to form a for profit entity
Speaker 1: with all the powers of the Congressional Library and all
Speaker 1: the powers of the CIA, called the C. I C
Speaker 1: read the book, check it out, not to get too
Speaker 1: LaVar Burton reading Rainbow about it, but uh, but it's
Speaker 1: worth your time. And of course people in this story.
Speaker 1: People still eat, they still sleep, they defecate, they reproduce,
Speaker 1: they do all their people things. But they spend a
Speaker 1: ton of time in this online world, and in this
Speaker 1: novel in snow Crash, that virtual reality system is mainstream,
Speaker 1: It's normalized. I was thinking about this, like in that book,
Speaker 1: it would be weird not to be on the metaverse.
Speaker 1: And if that sounds crazy, just imagine how weird it
Speaker 1: would be if you talk to someone today and they
Speaker 1: didn't have a phone. Right. A phone is not a
Speaker 1: human right. It's not something that everyone is assigned at
Speaker 1: birth yet, but it is incredibly rare and most densely
Speaker 1: populated parts of the world for someone not to have
Speaker 1: a mobile device. Yes, Ben, you're absolutely correct. I would
Speaker 1: just expand it a little bit more too. Internet access
Speaker 1: and we've we've talked about this over the course of
Speaker 1: our show of you know, there are places in the
Speaker 1: world where Internet access is still not possible, but they
Speaker 1: are private corporations attempting to make it accessible to everyone
Speaker 1: on the planet. But I do think existing in this
Speaker 1: real world without having access to the Internet as it
Speaker 1: exists now, is that weird thing because so many parts
Speaker 1: of our lives are connected to the Internet itself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we're going to get into some quick statistics of that.
Speaker 1: It's important because we're looking at a hierarchy of requirements
Speaker 1: for you to exist online and for you to exist
Speaker 1: in the metaverse. First access to electricity, uh, Second access
Speaker 1: to materials and gear. Third access to time, which is
Speaker 1: a huge resource people don't talk about as often as
Speaker 1: they should. UH. And fourth inclination. But inclination, as we know,
Speaker 1: can be manufactured by bad faith actors. We we spend
Speaker 1: some time off air today talking about how hilarious targeted
Speaker 1: ad algorithms are, and those are meant to build that
Speaker 1: fourth requirement. Those are meant to build inclination. And our
Speaker 1: producers set the Shadow was talking to us about uh
Speaker 1: some some just ridiculous ads. But check out our Big
Speaker 1: Data episode to to learn the absurdity of that situation.
Speaker 1: You'll you'll see the metaverse referenced in many other works
Speaker 1: of science fiction, not always using that name, of course,
Speaker 1: and you know Stevenson coined the term. But he was
Speaker 1: talking about something that people, not just sci fi authors,
Speaker 1: have wondered about for a long long time, right, A
Speaker 1: separate reality, one that can be altered in ways that
Speaker 1: are not possible in the analog world. UH. A great
Speaker 1: example of another sci fi series that references this is
Speaker 1: the book Ready Player one and its sequel which the
Speaker 1: uh like a ton of the important events in that
Speaker 1: story take place in this online world. In fact, one
Speaker 1: of the characters, uh an Avatar almost in the in
Speaker 1: the Hindu sense, is themselves entirely located in that stories
Speaker 1: version of the metaverse. And then, of course Matt had
Speaker 1: to have this in there for you man. One extreme version,
Speaker 1: an extremely unfriendly dystopian version of the metaverse, occurs in
Speaker 1: the Matrix, and I would say a metaphorical representation of it, well,
Speaker 1: I would you know, I was thinking. I was thinking
Speaker 1: about this because in the Matrix spoiler alert, you are
Speaker 1: being warned three to one spoilers. In the Matrix, the Metaverse,
Speaker 1: their analog has assumed the role of the primary reality,
Speaker 1: and the entirety of the franchise in a very brilliant way,
Speaker 1: is about discovering this other reality that has existed all
Speaker 1: along and has been subsumed by this digital realm. So
Speaker 1: back to our reality as it stands today. In October,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg, you know him, you know him. I don't
Speaker 1: know if i'd say to love him, but Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: said that he is super on board with the Metaverse.
Speaker 1: He doubled down. He said I'm going to invest billions
Speaker 1: in this effort, probably you know, even more than he
Speaker 1: did in that sweet baby raise bit uh. And to
Speaker 1: signal his sincerity here, he renamed his company Meta. This
Speaker 1: was funny, and this is also instructive for us, uh
Speaker 1: and for the critics of Facebook, the critics of the
Speaker 1: metaverse entire because we're talking about like this is the
Speaker 1: first example of considering consequences the importance of doing so.
Speaker 1: Meta was already a thing, you know what I mean, Like,
Speaker 1: they were already multiple companies named Meta. You know, nold
Speaker 1: not to put you on the spot, but you have
Speaker 1: a DJ alias Meta's. You know. I was waiting to
Speaker 1: I was waiting to roll it out, man, I was
Speaker 1: really gonna make a big splash, a big debut. It
Speaker 1: was Meta's actually, and it was more of my electronic
Speaker 1: kind of persona. Um. But man, Zuck, Zuck you, you know, Zuck,
Speaker 1: you for taking this dream away from me. Well you
Speaker 1: still got it. We'll see who's left standing, and my
Speaker 1: money's on you. So the the thing here is that
Speaker 1: Facebook not only didn't consider that other people exist and
Speaker 1: have other companies exist and have created companies called Meta,
Speaker 1: they also were sort of indemnified from the consequences, right,
Speaker 1: They like and magine being powerful enough that you could
Speaker 1: say we're going to start a train company and we're
Speaker 1: gonna call it Toyota, and then someone says, well, Toyota
Speaker 1: already exists and it is a vehicle company, and you say,
Speaker 1: fiddle d d We'll just buy them. That's that's the
Speaker 1: reality Facebook lives in, and I think that's an important
Speaker 1: point to acknowledge. You have to remember, everybody lives in
Speaker 1: their own sort of individuated reality, and those realities are
Speaker 1: very different. So you could argue in a way that
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg and his peers, which there are very few,
Speaker 1: are already existing in a new reality, in a kind
Speaker 1: of metaverse. And there's a ton of slick branding, you know,
Speaker 1: pop science stuff that you'll see out there. There are
Speaker 1: a lot of weird corporate terms. But the takeaways this,
Speaker 1: if everything goes how Facebook and Microsoft and other large
Speaker 1: companies wanted to go, there is a virtual version of you,
Speaker 1: either already out there or on the way. We're gonna
Speaker 1: get to why that's spooky in a bit. But let's
Speaker 1: let's pump the brakes. It's important to pump the brakes
Speaker 1: when we talk about these kind of things, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: as you know, I personally am often hesitant to explore
Speaker 1: ongoing events like we've been just behind the scenes, folks.
Speaker 1: We've been planning an episode on Iran for years now.
Speaker 1: We just we just you know, we're doing the same
Speaker 1: with Ukraine, with Kazakhstan. When you're talking about things in
Speaker 1: situ and media arrests as they are occurring, you have
Speaker 1: to realize that for now, predicting the future is an
Speaker 1: imperfect science. DARPA wants that to change, and they're making
Speaker 1: scary headway in that regard and predictive analytics are a
Speaker 1: huge thing. But the modern metaverse is a conversation, has
Speaker 1: a lot of scary stuff, It has a lot of
Speaker 1: misleading stuff, and it has a lot of like good
Speaker 1: faith arguments for why this will be a net benefit
Speaker 1: for humanity. But this is where we pumped the brakes
Speaker 1: for the first time. If you're listening to this, you
Speaker 1: know that we we love gaming of video games, tabletop games,
Speaker 1: you name it, card games, of course, shout at MTG.
Speaker 1: But if you're a gamer like us, you might hear
Speaker 1: about the idea of the metaverse. However, defined and you
Speaker 1: might say, hold on, I've already seen a metaverse. I've
Speaker 1: seen multiple metaverses. Bro I've seen Second Life, I've seen
Speaker 1: the sims. I play Minecraft, you know, I I've played
Speaker 1: any number of RPGs like sky rim Or, Red Dead, Redemption,
Speaker 1: Ghost of Sushima. I'm just I'm naming ones we've talked
Speaker 1: about off air that we've played, so like, what's the
Speaker 1: big deal, It's already out there. It feels a little
Speaker 1: mad to me. But that's the same thing I said
Speaker 1: when my friend Matt Riddle told me what Twitter was.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, no one, I'll ever that's silly,
Speaker 1: that doesn't make any sense, no one. That's too few
Speaker 1: characters to really communicate an idea properly. But he explained it. No,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be about, you know, having kind of like
Speaker 1: a view into the daily lives of celebrities and of
Speaker 1: untouchable people, and that's going to be the selling point.
Speaker 1: And he was right. He usually is. He's the guy
Speaker 1: that also told me COVID was gonna explode. I would
Speaker 1: be very interested to get his take on this. But
Speaker 1: to me, I remember from when I was like, oh, teenager,
Speaker 1: early preteen, that I had you know everyone. I think
Speaker 1: we all had those friends, um who had the Internet
Speaker 1: first or had like the best you know, had laser
Speaker 1: disc player, had like the in sixty four or whatever
Speaker 1: that I had a friend who's had early early Internet
Speaker 1: and they had this thing. It was called the Palace
Speaker 1: and it was essentially these chat rooms where you would
Speaker 1: have a bad kind of cut out you know, jpeg
Speaker 1: avatar that you could make, and it was all these
Speaker 1: people populated in these big spaces with flat two D backgrounds.
Speaker 1: It was called the Palace. I've really thought about it
Speaker 1: ever since, but this had to have been in the nineties. Um,
Speaker 1: so the concept is super ununique. What is unique is
Speaker 1: that it is like you know, like you said, been
Speaker 1: Internet three point oh, which means that this is a
Speaker 1: way of literally stepping into the Internet. So when you're
Speaker 1: occupying the space, it allows you to do all the
Speaker 1: things you would normally do on the Internet, but much
Speaker 1: more experientially, um, you know, potentially. I don't know if
Speaker 1: you've tried this to you guys, but on those oculuses,
Speaker 1: you can, uh, you can travel to Google Map locations
Speaker 1: just by like you know, using a voice command and
Speaker 1: it will place you there and you can walk around there.
Speaker 1: So in theory, what this offers, if we want to
Speaker 1: think like you know, cool features, is that you could,
Speaker 1: like time, you know, teleport to other places and like
Speaker 1: be there and walk around. The more robust it gets
Speaker 1: and the more elaborate these scans of these places get.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're in a place where this stuff is happening
Speaker 1: in real time and you can literally teleport to a
Speaker 1: facsimile or you know, some avatar of a real place
Speaker 1: and interact with other people. That's interesting to me. But
Speaker 1: is it going to be this big, massive thing that
Speaker 1: everyone seems to be, you know, placing their bets on,
Speaker 1: especially Zuckerberg. I don't know, but there's obviously a motive
Speaker 1: for going all into the degree that he's going all in,
Speaker 1: and I have a feeling it's not benevolence and you know,
Speaker 1: thoughtfulness for the human race, right if you if you
Speaker 1: want true control over a population, you want to control access,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, Like you don't want to
Speaker 1: buy a room in the house, you want to buy
Speaker 1: the door, and that's where you charge people. Uh this
Speaker 1: there there are these antecedents, um, but we have to
Speaker 1: we have to be honest here. Most people have not
Speaker 1: played Minecraft. When I say most people, I mean most
Speaker 1: of the almost eight billion people in the world have
Speaker 1: not played Minecraft. How many know what it is? Probably
Speaker 1: a lot, but most people haven't played, you know, a
Speaker 1: specific video game. It would be really rare and I'd
Speaker 1: be interested to see what the world's most popular video
Speaker 1: game is like a number of players over time. But
Speaker 1: we can say something like Neil Stevenson's Metaverse is very
Speaker 1: much on the way. Uh We mentioned statistics earlier, so
Speaker 1: let's let's kick this one. As of January one, uh
Speaker 1: I was able to find that four point six six
Speaker 1: billion people are active on the Internet, and that's the
Speaker 1: number that's recent enough that we could say it holds
Speaker 1: like it's probably the same today. It's it's probably actually
Speaker 1: grown a little bit. But as of this time last year,
Speaker 1: because we're recording this in January two, that four point
Speaker 1: six six billion people, it works out to about fifty
Speaker 1: nine point five percent of humanity. So more than half
Speaker 1: of the global population is active online today right now.
Speaker 1: And of that more than half of the population, the
Speaker 1: vast majority, around nine plus percent, are going online via
Speaker 1: mobile devices. The future of internet access is something that
Speaker 1: you take with you. It's not something that you travel to. Right,
Speaker 1: we're bringing the mountain to you. To steal an old phrase,
Speaker 1: and this means that one of those first problems is
Speaker 1: already being addressed. The when I talked about the hierarchy
Speaker 1: of requirements. One, you need electricity. Now with a mobile device,
Speaker 1: you can go to a source of electricity and charge
Speaker 1: your phone, right, So you're no longer beholden to sitting
Speaker 1: next to a power source. But secondly, the gear is
Speaker 1: becoming normalized. And gear is when we where we see
Speaker 1: a lot of technology flop or a lot of these
Speaker 1: initiatives kind of fall flat. So before we all start
Speaker 1: to freak out about the nature of reality and like,
Speaker 1: let's really going on, man, we have to acknowledge these basics. One,
Speaker 1: technology moves so quickly, and it is in a feedback loop. Right.
Speaker 1: The breakthroughs and the innovations of these fields and related
Speaker 1: technologies are creating more breakthroughs and innovations, which create more
Speaker 1: breakthroughs and innovations, which go on and on and on
Speaker 1: until the House of cards falls and the nukes begin
Speaker 1: to fly. Two. Technology has so many false starts. Uh,
Speaker 1: this is a little bit of a war story for us.
Speaker 1: But you guys remember three D television because I do,
Speaker 1: But I mean it was an absolute nothing. First of all,
Speaker 1: it's a dumb idea. It doesn't mean it's not immersive enough,
Speaker 1: not taking it far enough, like if you're in a
Speaker 1: theater and your whole field of view is occupied by
Speaker 1: the screen. That makes sense. But also I just think
Speaker 1: three D is a dumb gimmick anyway, and who cares.
Speaker 1: But what an oculus rift does. It takes that to
Speaker 1: the next level and makes it much more versatile, and
Speaker 1: it's all everything is designed with that in mind, and
Speaker 1: it can also incorporate two D things into it, and
Speaker 1: it doesn't hurt your brain um much. I mean I
Speaker 1: find them pretty comfortable and I don't really get eye
Speaker 1: fatigue with them. To you, you guys have used them
Speaker 1: more than me. Yes, yes, I I do. You get
Speaker 1: eye fatigue with it. But the good thing is it
Speaker 1: only has a two and a half hour long battery life,
Speaker 1: so you know you can only get eye strain too
Speaker 1: a certain extent until you've got to charge the baby up. Um.
Speaker 1: I'm just to this point, Ben, I want to go back.
Speaker 1: Did you guys have a Sega genesis? Yes, that was
Speaker 1: my system that was I was always a second guy.
Speaker 1: I had a Nintendo in ne s and then I
Speaker 1: was Sega all the way until I got into PlayStation.
Speaker 1: But I never had like an n sixty four any
Speaker 1: of those next gen Let's let's stay in Sega Genesis
Speaker 1: time in Sega wanted to bring out virtual reality glasses
Speaker 1: in the same way that PlayStation has brought about their
Speaker 1: virtual their VR tech, and Stendo did something as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the the Virtual Boy came out two years later. In
Speaker 1: so that you're talking about two major corporations attempted to
Speaker 1: bring virtual reality into the world. Uh, and just you
Speaker 1: know that was clearly a false start because Sega Genesis
Speaker 1: never got a VR system because it just didn't work
Speaker 1: out at the time. Well, it's because of the gear.
Speaker 1: That's another that's another part of it. Like you could
Speaker 1: even say, like Neo g O was a great game system,
Speaker 1: not VR, but it was a great game system. However,
Speaker 1: it was more expensive than other consoles. And this is like,
Speaker 1: this is why I think I love your pointing this
Speaker 1: out because it is indicative of a larger trend. Powerful
Speaker 1: forces want this to happen and are going to keep
Speaker 1: trying to make it happen. Until it occurs. Shout out
Speaker 1: to everybody who just had that mental gift pop up.
Speaker 1: I can't remember what film it is where they're like,
Speaker 1: stop trying to make blah blah blah happen. It's not
Speaker 1: gonna happen. Is the word that they're trying to make happen.
Speaker 1: And I think it was mean Girls, or it might
Speaker 1: have been clueless. Sometimes conflate those two in my mind
Speaker 1: for some reason. Well, I am down to watch a
Speaker 1: mash up called clueless Mean Girls. I think that would
Speaker 1: be arolicing good time. It's also apparently a Mean Girls
Speaker 1: the musical, which I have found deliver following surprising, but
Speaker 1: it's apparently quite good. Oh, I can't wait. So the
Speaker 1: the the interesting thing here is that in the cases
Speaker 1: we're talking about, Matt, what you're talking about with those
Speaker 1: early attempts at VR and gaming, and what we're talking
Speaker 1: about with those attempts at three D TV, one of
Speaker 1: the primary reasons both of those things flopped technological capabilities
Speaker 1: aside is because it required people to get new gear,
Speaker 1: and that's going to be very important. It had to
Speaker 1: buy in right, and it had to buy in on
Speaker 1: a specific non multifunctional thing, the brilliant thing about smartphones
Speaker 1: and love them or hate them. One thing the creators
Speaker 1: of smartphones did very well is they made the technology
Speaker 1: multi functional. You know, now you're not now you're not
Speaker 1: dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars on this thing
Speaker 1: that will let you play some games or this thing
Speaker 1: that will make you know, uh, your favorite celebrities pop
Speaker 1: a little closer to your face if you're standing at
Speaker 1: the exact right spot in the right distance, uh, or
Speaker 1: you know, make phone calls right what, we don't use
Speaker 1: them for that, And I know I would pay my
Speaker 1: I would pay my phone company and extra twenty a
Speaker 1: month to say that the phone line was down. But man,
Speaker 1: you've got that those companies doing that making a multi
Speaker 1: functional piece of hardware, right. And then you've got other
Speaker 1: companies that are not related who will basically pay you
Speaker 1: to take their phone in a way because they have
Speaker 1: these leasing situations where are you buy a uh what
Speaker 1: a subscription with them essentially right to have service. And
Speaker 1: then your phone is not eight hundred dollars or anymore,
Speaker 1: it's only sixty seven nine every month, yeah, for like
Speaker 1: you know, until you pay the phone off or but
Speaker 1: then sometimes if you pay long enough, they'll roll it
Speaker 1: over into the next new model and you don't even
Speaker 1: have to pay off the other one. You can even
Speaker 1: just send it back and then they either I don't
Speaker 1: know how they want to what do what they do
Speaker 1: with all those kind of refurbished them and resell them
Speaker 1: my mages, but because they do have to have an
Speaker 1: intact screen or whatever, but I'm I'm actually due for one.
Speaker 1: But it is interesting the way they keep you in
Speaker 1: the ecosystem, and it requires cooperation between the service provider
Speaker 1: and the manufacturer, right, Yeah, And that's what we're talking about. Ultimately,
Speaker 1: we're talking about team ups, possibly one of the largest
Speaker 1: corporate team ups that has ever occurred. I do want
Speaker 1: to point out that I recently got a new phone.
Speaker 1: I ran my other one into the ground, and I
Speaker 1: think everybody should keep a close eye on your phone
Speaker 1: bill because these jokers tried to charge me thirty dollars
Speaker 1: the phone company, and I didn't get the pay as
Speaker 1: you go kind of model. I didn't like amortize the
Speaker 1: cost over you know, two years or whatever. I just
Speaker 1: bought a phone with cash because I'm cartoonishly paranoid, and
Speaker 1: then they still charged me thirty dollars for me buying
Speaker 1: a phone, which doesn't make sense. I'm gonna call him
Speaker 1: after this anyway. The point is, uh, right now, there's
Speaker 1: no universally accepted definition of a real world metaverse. And
Speaker 1: that's not because people are trying to keep it a secret.
Speaker 1: It's because this thing that everybody is talking about does
Speaker 1: not yet exist. So where where does that leave us? Well,
Speaker 1: it means that venture capitalists, the forward thinkers of the world,
Speaker 1: the Silicon Valley pooh bahs, are all in a gold rush.
Speaker 1: They are clamoring to be the authority here, to be
Speaker 1: the one who tells you what the metaverse is, what
Speaker 1: it's going to be, and why you should either love
Speaker 1: it and adore it or be terrified and run from it.
Speaker 1: And they want to do what you're talking about. Then
Speaker 1: they want to build the platform on which the entire
Speaker 1: thing is built. Because it doesn't exist yet, it's essentially
Speaker 1: another Internet, like it's not like this, this is this
Speaker 1: is a whole another set of servers and infrastructure that
Speaker 1: will exist to serve this one purpose. And then I
Speaker 1: guess you'd access the Internet Internet through this like other Internet.
Speaker 1: If I'm not mistaken, you're absolutely on point there. I
Speaker 1: Another example I would think of is imagine, before moving pictures,
Speaker 1: before film, the majority of visual media was still right.
Speaker 1: It was either gonna be unless you were watching the
Speaker 1: show live on stage. You were looking at a photograph,
Speaker 1: a wood cut, a portrait, sculpture, things that didn't move.
Speaker 1: This is like the move from still photo to video
Speaker 1: to moving pictures. That's what's happening. It's more of the same.
Speaker 1: So if you liked the stuff that was before, if
Speaker 1: you liked you know, like a text based interface like
Speaker 1: Twitter or a still picture based interface like Instagram, which
Speaker 1: is changing now because they want everybody to watch short videos,
Speaker 1: then if you like that, bully for you, because you're
Speaker 1: getting even more of it. If you hated it, if
Speaker 1: you had problems with what exists now, then you know
Speaker 1: you're gonna hate this other stuff too. Uh for our
Speaker 1: purposes today. Uh, there's a great, I don't know, a
Speaker 1: pretty solid definition that I found in a thing called
Speaker 1: the Metaverse Primer written by a guy named Matthew Ball.
Speaker 1: Matthew Ball is full disclosure a venture capitalist, which I know,
Speaker 1: I know it's going to turn some people off. So
Speaker 1: it's you know, is this like, are we reading A
Speaker 1: review of Henhouse is written by a fox that's up
Speaker 1: to you. Uh here's here's his definition though, and just
Speaker 1: to give you a heads up, folks, he describes this
Speaker 1: in utopian, pretty innocuous terms. The metaverse is an expansive
Speaker 1: network of persistent, real time rendered three D worlds. Oh, Matt, Matt,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, soft note, Um, you're so great with voices.
Speaker 1: Could you make this guy like a little bit more
Speaker 1: evil slash ominous, not not level ten villains like? Maybe
Speaker 1: give him give him a six? Okay? Real time three
Speaker 1: D worlds and simulations that support continuity of identity, objects, history, payments,
Speaker 1: and entitlements, and can be experienced synchronously by an effectively
Speaker 1: unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presents. Wow,
Speaker 1: wonderful six. I don't know, man, you might have been
Speaker 1: pushing into seven terrets right there at the end, with
Speaker 1: the kind of moment that you don't don't want to
Speaker 1: see a seven, don't want, don't don't handle a seven.
Speaker 1: So right, it isn't And it's just for a little, um,
Speaker 1: a little like a flip side context from somebody who's
Speaker 1: more of an Internet he person, this guy, Mark pettit
Speaker 1: Um who works for Epic Games is the company that
Speaker 1: oversees Unreal Engine, which is like a three D Everyone
Speaker 1: knows that like Unreal Engine is the three D creation
Speaker 1: platform of choice for CG generation, for film and for
Speaker 1: video games and all that. And I E E E right,
Speaker 1: isn't that how we say it? I think someone I
Speaker 1: TRIPLI that's what it is. Somebody yep, someone wrote in
Speaker 1: and so that's how you say it. I prefer I
Speaker 1: um annie who Mark Pettitt, When asked what is the metaverse,
Speaker 1: he says, it's a hard question for me. It's the
Speaker 1: evolution of the Internet. Is the fabric for our personal
Speaker 1: and professionalizes with the Internet right now, you keep on
Speaker 1: scrolling through video. We believe that the metaverse will bring
Speaker 1: you uh into the era of interactive content, where you
Speaker 1: have agency over the content and you can control it,
Speaker 1: You can interact with it. You can ultimately immerse yourself
Speaker 1: into the content and not just look at it through
Speaker 1: a small window. The foundation is real time three D media,
Speaker 1: whether those elements that got integrated into your existing environment
Speaker 1: through augmented reality, or you immerse yourself with a virtual
Speaker 1: reality headset into the content. All of that, it's a
Speaker 1: consequence of the content being three D and interactive. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: and that makes that makes sense too. I mr, hey,
Speaker 1: Dr Vankman earned all right, we'll leave them. Well, he's
Speaker 1: very into the metaverse, seth. Let us know if I
Speaker 1: need to move him, if he's buried to lot. He
Speaker 1: seems like he's having a good time. Can I add
Speaker 1: just really cool before wait wait wait wait wait wait.
Speaker 1: If you are listening to this in podcast form, please
Speaker 1: go to YouTube right now you will see Ben's cat
Speaker 1: Dr Vankman with pause on his shoulder. And it is
Speaker 1: the cutest thing that I've seen. Like it's also staring
Speaker 1: daggers at the camera right now, like he said, don't yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you just wanted to add. That quote comes from a
Speaker 1: discussion on I E. Spectrum Um about does the metaverse
Speaker 1: need to be open in terms of neutral not owned
Speaker 1: by a giant megalithic evil corporation, you know, or a
Speaker 1: non evil corporation. Like the idea is this is a
Speaker 1: thing we're ability from scratch. We have things in place
Speaker 1: that make the Internet open. It's it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: everyone gets access to the same Internet. There's no you know,
Speaker 1: magic premium internet, you know, and there there were things
Speaker 1: that were coming down the pike that were maybe going
Speaker 1: to change that, but I don't believe they happened, um
Speaker 1: to my understanding. Yeah, that's that's another That's another great debate.
Speaker 1: And when I say great, I don't mean great is
Speaker 1: in like awesome. I mean something that has immense significance. Yeah?
Speaker 1: Who will again? Who will control the door? Who gets
Speaker 1: to enter this new reality? Is this as slick and
Speaker 1: fun and cool and progressive as the proponents and the
Speaker 1: proselytizers want us to believe, not really say the critics. Instead,
Speaker 1: they argue, this metaverse has the potential to add very
Speaker 1: high octane fuel to the same problems humanity has always encountered,
Speaker 1: only this time you won't be able to unplug. What
Speaker 1: are we talking about? Should you fear the metaverse? We'll
Speaker 1: dive in after word from our sponsors. Here's where it
Speaker 1: gets crazy. Also, we we don't know who those sponsors
Speaker 1: spots are, so how hilarious if it will be something
Speaker 1: for the metaverse. The number one concern that you're gonna
Speaker 1: hear a lot in popular media is not so much
Speaker 1: the metaverse itself, but it's the creators of the metaverse.
Speaker 1: Facebook Facebook ruined stuff. That's not a conspiracy theory. It's
Speaker 1: true Facebook ruined stuff. Um. Many of those anti metaverse
Speaker 1: critics are specifically concerned because of Facebook's involvement. It's the
Speaker 1: same company that provably knowingly did dirt with Cambridge Analytic.
Speaker 1: Check out that check out that episode. It is the
Speaker 1: same company that bought out the Oculus VR system in
Speaker 1: its early days. This is a long term play. This
Speaker 1: is not Mark just waking up, you know what I mean? Uh,
Speaker 1: although I like to imagine him waking up in like
Speaker 1: a filthy room with a match a stained mattress on
Speaker 1: the floor and just bottles of half empty Sweet Baby
Speaker 1: Days like weird like Rabbit Ears TV with static on
Speaker 1: it on the floor, you know. And of course he's
Speaker 1: in a tank top and and he says, uh, he says,
Speaker 1: we're gonna We're gonna do the metaverse. I'll announce it today. No,
Speaker 1: he's been thinking about this for a while and people
Speaker 1: that he pays to be smarter than him, which is
Speaker 1: not an insult to him. He's a very smart guy.
Speaker 1: But people he pays to be smarter than him have
Speaker 1: also co signed this, and they're making a huge financial
Speaker 1: push toward it Oculus. The purchase of Oculus is evident there. Uh.
Speaker 1: And that was one of the things that turned me
Speaker 1: off when Matt, when you and I were talking about Oculus,
Speaker 1: because you got one first, and I remember I got
Speaker 1: the box and I had done no research. I was
Speaker 1: flying blind and I saw Facebook branded on there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You asked me about it, and I was like, oh, no,
Speaker 1: they own it. It's theirs, you know. It was it
Speaker 1: was about logging in. You're like, do I need to
Speaker 1: create an Oculus accounts? Like, no, bro, it's it's Facebook. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I made another burner Facebook accounts. That's how I
Speaker 1: got on it this morning. But this is also the
Speaker 1: same company that controversially builds ghost profiles of people who
Speaker 1: never started a Facebook account. They're playing the Kevin Bacon
Speaker 1: connection game that you know. Uh. State Surveillance also plays.
Speaker 1: What do we mean by ghost profile? Well, let's say
Speaker 1: our pal set the shadow does not have a Facebook profile.
Speaker 1: Not only does he not have one, now he never
Speaker 1: started one, but he knows Matt, and he knows Nol
Speaker 1: and he knows Ben and those folks all have some
Speaker 1: kind of presence on there, and they have unknowingly granted
Speaker 1: this company access to other pieces of their online information.
Speaker 1: So Facebook can very easily say these three guys have
Speaker 1: texted this person, or they have spoken with this person
Speaker 1: through some way, they've emailed them, etcetera. And they'll aggregate
Speaker 1: enough information that they can build a profile such that
Speaker 1: if set the Shadow has a change of heart and
Speaker 1: he creates a Facebook profile, it'll already be waiting. He
Speaker 1: won't have to build the car, He'll just have to
Speaker 1: hop in. Everything is already set up. As a matter
Speaker 1: of fact, his first three suggested friends are going to
Speaker 1: be noll than Matt and someone like me. And they
Speaker 1: also have his avatar pre built because we posted pictures
Speaker 1: of Seth the Shadow Facebook profile. And if it's a
Speaker 1: new account, he won't have the same control over privacy
Speaker 1: that older accounts did. Like if you ever go to
Speaker 1: Facebook profiles and you notice you can't request someone as
Speaker 1: a friend or something like that, then it's because they
Speaker 1: were smart enough to opt out of some of the
Speaker 1: things that Facebook would later turn into prerequisites or mandates
Speaker 1: for a profile. So all the same people don't trust Facebook.
Speaker 1: Makes sense, there are good reasons not to trust it. Uh,
Speaker 1: It is like to smoke meats he's just like us,
Speaker 1: not to trust. Look at look into his weirdly enlarged eyes.
Speaker 1: They didn't always look like that. I'm no shade anybody
Speaker 1: getting a little work done. But I felt like it
Speaker 1: was just like the guy kind of mutated into something
Speaker 1: else over time, Like he used to be a scrappy
Speaker 1: college kid, and now he's like his neck is longer
Speaker 1: or something like, something about his whole vibe has changed.
Speaker 1: I think I think he's been replaced by some sort
Speaker 1: of weird alien clone. That's my theory. No, he's an avatar.
Speaker 1: There we go. There's also only Zool. Yeah, yes, whenever
Speaker 1: you know, I don't want to clown people on physical
Speaker 1: appearance or whatever, because everybody has their own story that
Speaker 1: they're living through. But whenever you see someone who is
Speaker 1: very wealthy in their appearance seems to change revolve over time.
Speaker 1: You don't beat yourself up, don't be like, hey, why
Speaker 1: is this guy a billionaire and in good shape? It's
Speaker 1: because they have a team of people they have hired
Speaker 1: two make their body that way, not necessarily through surgery,
Speaker 1: but you know, like like the Marvel universe, does you
Speaker 1: know you have a dietitian? You have a nutritionist. You
Speaker 1: have a physical trainer, and they're each specialist in that field.
Speaker 1: So that is an advantage that they have. They are
Speaker 1: not doing all that work on their own. How do
Speaker 1: they make your face more oblong? I don't understand that, bro,
Speaker 1: what what? What's the workout for that? It's called a
Speaker 1: face whisperer? Uh. They just whisper at your face. It's
Speaker 1: from the same guy in Japan who invented the lickable
Speaker 1: uh computer screen. So we're just gonna accept that way
Speaker 1: and yes, and our way out of it. So yeah,
Speaker 1: Facebook has it does have a terrible track record. Whether
Speaker 1: you're a fan of it or whether you hate it,
Speaker 1: it does have a record of pushing boundaries and then
Speaker 1: bending laws and then later Paulina like, oh hey, what's
Speaker 1: a big deal? Call gross? What's a big deal? Uh?
Speaker 1: And that's it acts as though it was not aware
Speaker 1: of the problems it was creating or exacerbating. And is
Speaker 1: that a good faith argument? I wouldn't say, probably not,
Speaker 1: but that's that's just my opinion. I mean, Ben, you
Speaker 1: talk about all the people that are smarter than zuckerbir
Speaker 1: that he pays to be smarter than you. Don't have
Speaker 1: a company like that, an organization like that where they
Speaker 1: don't know pretty much every in and out of the
Speaker 1: stuff they're doing, and the and the ripples that they're making. Uh.
Speaker 1: Sometimes I think they just make the decision to keep
Speaker 1: doing it and exploiting it because it probably means more
Speaker 1: traffic for them. And then they're like, we'll deal with
Speaker 1: this when it comes to a head. And then they
Speaker 1: do sort of or make a sort of blanket pr
Speaker 1: you know, um acknowledgement of said problem. And then well,
Speaker 1: of course a million percent. But I'm just saying, like,
Speaker 1: what what came of that? I just felt like he
Speaker 1: was bulletproof in those in those proceedings, you know, and
Speaker 1: they make some good points. They ask him something along
Speaker 1: the lines of like, would you please tell us what
Speaker 1: hotel you date out last night? He declined to do that, um,
Speaker 1: And then he said, could you please tell me the
Speaker 1: names of the last five people that you text message?
Speaker 1: He goes, no, I would not like to do that
Speaker 1: in this form. He's like, well, I think you see
Speaker 1: the the issue that I'm driving. I forget what, um
Speaker 1: what lawmaker was questioning him in that, But that's kind
Speaker 1: of what we're talking about here. It's I do as
Speaker 1: I say, not as I do. Yeah, I I just
Speaker 1: really quickly, guys, I want to send everyone over to YouTube.
Speaker 1: Check out Vice News System Error. It's a video called
Speaker 1: why you should be Worried about Facebook's Metaverse. It's a
Speaker 1: fairly short video, but it really goes into detail these
Speaker 1: things we're speaking on right now, the reasons why Facebook
Speaker 1: may not be the best company to lead us all
Speaker 1: into the metaverse. And it really gives you the reasons
Speaker 1: that we're we're outlining right now. Yeah, yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: important to be aware of these reasons, and we don't
Speaker 1: want to be unfair to Facebook. That's not necessarily a
Speaker 1: hit piece. But these things are all true, they have
Speaker 1: been proven and there in several cases they're not necessarily illegal. Why.
Speaker 1: It's not because they're shiny examples of nobility and proper
Speaker 1: morals or ethics. It's because Facebook and the things that
Speaker 1: Facebook does are too big and too new in many
Speaker 1: cases to be regulated by existing systems. You can't write
Speaker 1: laws for things you don't understand. Uh despite you know,
Speaker 1: despite the careers of many politicians. Uh So, these criticisms
Speaker 1: of Facebook, they are valid, but they run the risk
Speaker 1: of missing a much bigger picture. And even Facebook is
Speaker 1: upfront about this, weirdly upfront about it. UH. They see
Speaker 1: the metaverse as something bigger than Facebook. They call it
Speaker 1: an embodied Internet quote unquote, and they think it encompasses
Speaker 1: more than just a Facebook avatar. It's an agglomeration of
Speaker 1: multiple entities. One of the best examples of this for
Speaker 1: analogy is the global trade system. You've heard a lot
Speaker 1: about it, UH during the pandemic. No one government built it,
Speaker 1: No one private entity built it. Multiple governments, multiple corporations,
Speaker 1: and some private powerful individuals created parts of it, and
Speaker 1: then those parts connected and they form what we call
Speaker 1: the global supply chain. No one entity is in charge
Speaker 1: of the global supply chain. There are a ton of stakeholders.
Speaker 1: They often have contradictory goals. But the thing itself, the
Speaker 1: entire thing, exists. It is an entity, and it is
Speaker 1: an entity bigger than any of its one contributors. And
Speaker 1: that's what Facebook sees the this idea of a metaverse,
Speaker 1: as they see it as like there is a Facebook land,
Speaker 1: there is a Twitter land. There is like your local
Speaker 1: government land. You know. You can go to the UH
Speaker 1: to the Fulton County Public Library, part of the metaverse
Speaker 1: and you can sit there on your oculus and you
Speaker 1: can read uh limbs or something like that. But this, uh,
Speaker 1: the difference I would argue with Facebook is that they
Speaker 1: don't want to be just uh land that you visit.
Speaker 1: They want to be the owner of your avatar. So
Speaker 1: it's your Facebook avatar traveling to the Fulton County Public Library.
Speaker 1: It's your Facebook avatar that is waiting a virtual line
Speaker 1: at the d m V, which is still gonna happen.
Speaker 1: It's hilarious. You'll be in your living room, but you're
Speaker 1: still gonna like lose several hours trying to navigate the
Speaker 1: virtual d MV. Sure I have a question. I mean,
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be Facebook. They could do it,
Speaker 1: take a big swing at it, and then if somebody
Speaker 1: else comes along and does a better job, then that's
Speaker 1: gonna be the one that people grab a tate towards.
Speaker 1: I don't see this as an all or nothing approach.
Speaker 1: It's building a new thing. Like there's already this thing
Speaker 1: called decentral land that is like a kind of a
Speaker 1: crypto um uh you know metaverse kind of space where
Speaker 1: people buy parcels of land, you know, um that are
Speaker 1: n f T s. Essentially there's non fungible tokens that
Speaker 1: we all love so dearly. Um, And it raised a
Speaker 1: whole lot of money. And it is like kind of
Speaker 1: this community. It's got like a shopping district. It looks
Speaker 1: like a Harzuku kind of vibe, you know, like Japan. Um.
Speaker 1: It's got all of these different kind of areas and
Speaker 1: it is kind of picking up a lot of steam
Speaker 1: and it you know, there's a lot of in world
Speaker 1: purchase opportunities and people can display their n f t
Speaker 1: s and galleries and all of that stuff. And it
Speaker 1: raised quite a bit of money. But my thing is like, yeah, Facebook,
Speaker 1: sure that this is what they're going after, but it
Speaker 1: doesn't mean that is the metaverse if it doesn't take off,
Speaker 1: like somebody else can still do it if it doesn't
Speaker 1: exist yet. Right, yes, yeah, the odds are staff against
Speaker 1: that newcomer though. Uh, just like politics, being an incumbent
Speaker 1: gives you an edge. Right, So Facebook already has as
Speaker 1: we've proven, Facebook has been building the infrastructure of this
Speaker 1: for some time. Uh, don't ever confuse a public announcement
Speaker 1: with a new development, right, they're just going public. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but but here's another danger, like beyond Facebook. You make
Speaker 1: a great point. It doesn't have to be Facebook. It
Speaker 1: could be something else. It could potentially be the five
Speaker 1: of us on the show today, US three and Seth
Speaker 1: and you're listening at home. We could team up and
Speaker 1: we could just make a new thin, you know, and
Speaker 1: you know, we'll just call it um a snow crash
Speaker 1: and somehow won't get sued. And then we could be
Speaker 1: the people who owned the door, who owned that avatar.
Speaker 1: But that's probably I don't know. It's like the odds
Speaker 1: are stacked against anybody who is not Facebook in a
Speaker 1: in a real way. But the bigger threat, other than,
Speaker 1: you know, whatever you might think about Facebook's rap sheet
Speaker 1: and its track record, the bigger threat is that real life,
Speaker 1: real life, non metaverse life is going to continue. It
Speaker 1: has to for now, but it may become increasingly ancillery,
Speaker 1: increasingly like um, increasingly supplemental. Like people may be popping
Speaker 1: out of this virtual system just so they can eat,
Speaker 1: you know, they'll drink their soilent or their huel or whatever.
Speaker 1: They'll have a quick poop and then they'll be plugged
Speaker 1: back in. Actually, no, now that I think about it, No, No,
Speaker 1: we know humanity too well. You need to assume that
Speaker 1: when you meet people in the Veta verse in real life,
Speaker 1: they might be pooping. Yeah. Well, I feel like that
Speaker 1: the future of this is going to evolve into chairs
Speaker 1: that have a built in toilet so you don't ever
Speaker 1: have to get up and uh some kind of drip
Speaker 1: you know solution, so you really can just kind of,
Speaker 1: you know, keep going. And the thing is that taken
Speaker 1: to the extreme, taking away taken to the extreme, you
Speaker 1: can see how kind of creepy and scary this stuff
Speaker 1: could be. We also know about like what do they
Speaker 1: call ben the um. I mentioned this all the time
Speaker 1: and I can never remember what they're called. There's a
Speaker 1: subset of Japanese kind of gamer shut ins Hikiko Mori.
Speaker 1: That's the one um there. There's a really um if
Speaker 1: you're familiar with the music artist music artists and like
Speaker 1: a grandpapa uh on a tricks point never he's got
Speaker 1: a music video that has a lot of footage or
Speaker 1: stills um of of these individuals, and it's it's really disturbing.
Speaker 1: There's like, you know, che I mean that sounds like
Speaker 1: I'm making a joke about nerds, but there's like cheeto dust,
Speaker 1: you know, between the keys of the keyboard and like
Speaker 1: just like trash everywhere, and it's like this really kind
Speaker 1: of squalor kind of situation. That's what happens when you're
Speaker 1: jacked in all the time and you don't take care
Speaker 1: of like life stuff and like business, You're gonna become
Speaker 1: atrophied and malnourished. And there are people that could get
Speaker 1: addicted to this experience and feel like they need anything else.
Speaker 1: And then we're gonna like, you know, the neighbors are
Speaker 1: gonna smell a funny smell, like the cops are gonna
Speaker 1: show up, and there's gonna be a body all atrophied,
Speaker 1: like in seven with a you know VR helmets trapped
Speaker 1: on definitely needs some kind of in VR like warning
Speaker 1: it's time to jack off. Oh sorry, it's kind of sorry.
Speaker 1: Keep it, keep it up, keeping up. That's part of
Speaker 1: the next story. Actually, we haven't got to the jack
Speaker 1: off the metaverse jack off story, I know, but it's
Speaker 1: just so funny. It's time, it's time, it's time off.
Speaker 1: There we go yes, yes, uh to jack. So this
Speaker 1: is this is important because we now have bigger questions
Speaker 1: about every Everything we're mentioning leads to something else. That's
Speaker 1: that's the problem. This is a byzantine situation. It's complex
Speaker 1: to Gordian not. And if you recall the solution to
Speaker 1: the Gordian Knot in the old old story, uh yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not right. It's not. It's not to untangle, it's
Speaker 1: not it's too cut the thing and lose the rope
Speaker 1: to solve the problem. It's burning the village to save
Speaker 1: the village. And that is where we're getting to. I
Speaker 1: always think of that Jeff Goldblum line from Jurassic Park.
Speaker 1: You spent so much time wondering if you could, you
Speaker 1: never stop to think if you should. And I do
Speaker 1: propose that people. If if you're not familiar with the
Speaker 1: story of the Gordian Knot, it's it's a quick read.
Speaker 1: Just check it out, um, and and imagine how this
Speaker 1: might apply here in We're gonna pause for word from
Speaker 1: our sponsor. We're gonna return, and we're gonna talk about
Speaker 1: some of the things that even the critics aren't really
Speaker 1: mentioning as often as they should. And we're back. So
Speaker 1: we said, the idea of real life becomes potentially more
Speaker 1: and more supplemental to the stuff you really want to do,
Speaker 1: to the place where your mind really lives. You're going
Speaker 1: to like, Um, there's a thing that happens with a
Speaker 1: lot of people in the game Tetris. If you play
Speaker 1: Tetris for a long time, you start to your brain
Speaker 1: starts to keep playing it. Right. And I don't know
Speaker 1: if this guy has ever happened to you, guys, or
Speaker 1: anybody listening, But when you're really into a game like Tetris,
Speaker 1: you will. If you play for a number of hours
Speaker 1: over the course of several days, then you'll find your
Speaker 1: mind just sort of gaming out the concept of Tetris.
Speaker 1: When you're idle, you know what I mean. You close
Speaker 1: your eyes, you're falling asleep, and and all of a sudden,
Speaker 1: your last waking thought is I'm waiting for that one
Speaker 1: long block so I can get a Tetris. Uh that
Speaker 1: that just speaks to how efficient and beautifully designed the
Speaker 1: game is. But that same thing will happen here, can
Speaker 1: I say? Really, I've been playing a lot of Tetris lately,
Speaker 1: and I learned to think it's a game changer. You
Speaker 1: can reserve a piece in the newer versions where you can,
Speaker 1: like you say, you got a piece queued up, you
Speaker 1: can put that and save it and then recall it later.
Speaker 1: That's a it's a game changing addition, um, literally, but god,
Speaker 1: I let you're right, there's so few things have changed
Speaker 1: about that game because it's so elegantly designed that it
Speaker 1: just like stands the test of time. Well, this, so,
Speaker 1: this is what I want to bring up, and I
Speaker 1: think it's related here, guys, the concept that I have
Speaker 1: a ton of work to do for my job. I
Speaker 1: have even more work I need to do here in
Speaker 1: my house for my life. The only thing I want
Speaker 1: to do when I've completed the time I need to
Speaker 1: spend on work is to go into one of these
Speaker 1: virtual worlds like Minecraft and build some stuff. And I
Speaker 1: already have that inside me, you know. And I'm in
Speaker 1: my late thirties, and I'm just imagining the younger generation
Speaker 1: that's coming along, that's had cell phones the entire time
Speaker 1: they've been growing up, you know, these interactive screens that
Speaker 1: they can hang out with and do all kinds of
Speaker 1: endless things on. I'm imagining those minds interacting with whatever
Speaker 1: this metaverse truly becomes, right the the final version, um,
Speaker 1: and just what you're talking about, there been the like
Speaker 1: pull of that because of the overwhelming nature of sometimes
Speaker 1: life and often life, and I I I'm I'm horrified
Speaker 1: that seriously that kids and just you know, once they
Speaker 1: become adults, will spend most of their time inside that space.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, this is part of it. Okay, So this
Speaker 1: is why I really want to get to. This is
Speaker 1: what I hope fellow conspiracy realists. I hope that when
Speaker 1: you were in conversations about this, whether you're talking to
Speaker 1: us about this episode, whether you're talking to your friends,
Speaker 1: your loved ones, whether you're talking to strangers in the
Speaker 1: metaverse about the metaverse, why not. I I hope you
Speaker 1: bring this point to the forefront. This is a new
Speaker 1: horizon of inequality. That's why mentioning the hierarchy of requirements
Speaker 1: not to thrive in this new reality, to simply exist
Speaker 1: in it, That's why I'm mentioning those requirements is so important.
Speaker 1: What happens when the bulk of your activity takes place online?
Speaker 1: You work online, you work remotely. That's what we call
Speaker 1: it now. How long before people just call it working? Uh?
Speaker 1: You know, your friendships are with people you have never met,
Speaker 1: but you know everything about them, You feel very close.
Speaker 1: This happens with gaming all the time. There's a reason
Speaker 1: that there's such a trope or a meme about having
Speaker 1: a friends say there will be right back, and they're
Speaker 1: logging off and you never hear about them again, and
Speaker 1: it can be very sad and poignant. What happens with
Speaker 1: your romantic endeavors, right, what you you meet the person
Speaker 1: that you are convinced is the love of your life.
Speaker 1: You think they're somewhere in Malaysia, but you're not sure
Speaker 1: because you will only hang out in you know, the
Speaker 1: Facebook chat room. Uh. And this also another game changer
Speaker 1: up there with reserving a peace and Tetris will be
Speaker 1: normalized haptic feedback gear, which, of course that's cool to me.
Speaker 1: Whose for sex, of course it is cool to you
Speaker 1: now the haptic feedback Yes, of course you can porn
Speaker 1: arize just about anything, but the haptic feedback stuff is fascinating.
Speaker 1: Um for the implications like in you know, people with disabilities,
Speaker 1: for example, there's they're even like developing technology where you
Speaker 1: can literally do stuff with your mind. Man, right, like
Speaker 1: the guy who tweeted using the powers brain, which we
Speaker 1: talked about in earlier Strange News segment. Yeah, this and
Speaker 1: I'm glad you brought this up for for the potent
Speaker 1: child to combat able is um. This could be a
Speaker 1: profound development. Right now, people who could not travel to
Speaker 1: a place, or could not interact with the world in
Speaker 1: a way they wanted to, they may well be able to.
Speaker 1: There There is to be clear enormous potential here. But
Speaker 1: the potential is for good and is for evil. What
Speaker 1: happens in this world to the people who don't have
Speaker 1: access to this shining new realm. What happens to the
Speaker 1: currently fort or so of the people on the planet
Speaker 1: who don't have Internet access. What happens to the people
Speaker 1: left behind? No one's really talking about that in corporate boardrooms.
Speaker 1: They're talking about how excited they are, And they're excited, uh,
Speaker 1: once you get past all the pr terms for the
Speaker 1: profit potential, because that's what corporations are built to do.
Speaker 1: They're not built to worry about who gets left behind
Speaker 1: in the wake. Maybe the people that get left behind
Speaker 1: are ultimately the real winners because they get like, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole park to themselves, you know, and like and
Speaker 1: everyone else is jacked into the VR and then they're
Speaker 1: in their weird, smelly apartments and these people that like
Speaker 1: decided not to opt in or outside breathing fresh air.
Speaker 1: This also assumes we're not in a dystopian hellscape, which
Speaker 1: this will certainly help with. That's kind of what Ready
Speaker 1: Player one is all about, right, Like the the world
Speaker 1: has become unlivable, Therefore the only way to truly kind
Speaker 1: of experience joy is in this metaverse. Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Speaker 1: And and also let me just point out again, I
Speaker 1: feel like I say this on a regular basis these days.
Speaker 1: Sesame credits started as an opt in system. What's what's
Speaker 1: going to happen when you have to have some avatar
Speaker 1: to exist in the rest of the world. Like you
Speaker 1: can't go to the d m V Like you're saying, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can't drive, well, cars will be driverless, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: like you can't get on the train because you have
Speaker 1: to be able to pay a train for a train ticket,
Speaker 1: and you can't buy the ticket without your avatar traveling
Speaker 1: to you know, the New York City Metro Transit Authority
Speaker 1: and subscribing to the train service. You can't just show
Speaker 1: up with cash. That is going to happen. People are
Speaker 1: going to be left behind and in their defense in
Speaker 1: the defense of the Ivory Tower, as usual, same as
Speaker 1: a devil was. Numerous academics have been raising red flags
Speaker 1: about this for a long, long, long, long long time,
Speaker 1: and they have been roundly ignored by private entities, the
Speaker 1: world's largest tech companies, Microsoft, Google, Apple, you name it.
Speaker 1: They're hurtling headlong into creating the metaverse. They're pouring money
Speaker 1: into it, and they are ignoring valid, serious concerns, and
Speaker 1: they are ignoring dangerous possibilities, like we can see again
Speaker 1: that clear potential for new type of inequality. The unplugged person. Right,
Speaker 1: they're at a disadvantage. They're like the non genetically modified
Speaker 1: protagonist of gatica spoiler alert. We can also see that
Speaker 1: people are going to I don't know. I read this
Speaker 1: great New York Times article that talks about it. Gives
Speaker 1: us a specific example of what we're talking about earlier,
Speaker 1: which is that this will likely accelerate the same negative
Speaker 1: traits of humanity that have followed the species like a
Speaker 1: shadow since the first day. Uh. The New York Times piece.
Speaker 1: I just pulled an excerpt from this. It's a retelling
Speaker 1: of an unpleasant experience using oculus. And to that's earlier point,
Speaker 1: you know, man, there there's some there's some great journalistic
Speaker 1: pieces of people just basically hanging out on an oculus.
Speaker 1: Uh And this New York Time species primarily about the
Speaker 1: future of harassment, because just as we know reproductive urges
Speaker 1: and sexual desires drive a lot of new technology, people
Speaker 1: are gonna as soon as someone invents a shiny new toy,
Speaker 1: someone else is going to find a way to be
Speaker 1: a jerk about it or to use it to be
Speaker 1: a horrible person. Well, here it is coinciding with a
Speaker 1: younger audience or younger users who are maybe going through
Speaker 1: puberty at the time, which you know, the biological process
Speaker 1: where a lot of those urges and thoughts and desires develop.
Speaker 1: And many of the people you'll encounter, as I have
Speaker 1: in attempting to use an oculus too and go just
Speaker 1: try out various games and things, there are just younger
Speaker 1: people in there and they're being gross often, and honestly,
Speaker 1: it made me just take the thing off, and I
Speaker 1: don't I didn't really want to be in a lot
Speaker 1: of the places that I could access, at least currently
Speaker 1: through my oculus because of that. Yeah. Yeah, And here's
Speaker 1: the exactly and here's the example. Uh um, New York Times.
Speaker 1: I want to introduce you to Chanelle Siggins. Chanelle Siggins
Speaker 1: is in her twenties at the time, and the story
Speaker 1: early twenties, and the quote goes Siggins recently strapped on
Speaker 1: Inoculous Quest Virtual reality, had set to play her favorite
Speaker 1: shooter game, Population One. I haven't played it here good Things.
Speaker 1: Once she turned on the game, she maneuvered her avatar
Speaker 1: into a virtual lobby in the immersive digital world, ak
Speaker 1: the metaverse, and waiting for the action to begin. As
Speaker 1: she waited, another player's avatar approached hers trigger, warning this
Speaker 1: little graphic. The stranger then simulated groping and ejaculating onto
Speaker 1: her avatar, said Siggins. She was shocked, and she asked
Speaker 1: the player whose avatar presented his mail to stop doing that,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean? And then, per Siggins, he
Speaker 1: shrugged as if to say, I don't know what to
Speaker 1: tell you. It's a metaverse. I'll do what I want,
Speaker 1: and he just walked away. That's just gonna That's gonna
Speaker 1: continue happening because people do grows stuff, especially when they
Speaker 1: feel that there are new consequences and they're not going
Speaker 1: to be consequences because the laws don't exist. The laws
Speaker 1: were built for an analog world and do not therefore
Speaker 1: have the scope now to fully comprehend and address the
Speaker 1: dangers of reality online. And to be very I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, reality and the metaverse kind of mirror one another.
Speaker 1: I mean you that could just as likely have happened,
Speaker 1: like in a subway station in New York City as
Speaker 1: as as in a you know, a digital thing with
Speaker 1: just as few consequences, potentially if there's no cops around
Speaker 1: to to, you know, catch the guy that did it. Um.
Speaker 1: So we know, things like that really do happen, and
Speaker 1: it's it's part of the gamble that you make when
Speaker 1: just going out into the world, Like weird creeps are
Speaker 1: out there and things can happen. I would imagine there
Speaker 1: are probably safeguards, you know, ideally in place for a
Speaker 1: larger metaverse kind of situation that would you know, allow
Speaker 1: you to maybe interact with certain people or like or whatever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like there will be some equivalent of blocking, surely, but
Speaker 1: we don't know how it will work out, because again,
Speaker 1: the thing that people are trying to sell you right
Speaker 1: now doesn't exist. The pieces are there, right but but
Speaker 1: picked it's like if you were going to buy a house,
Speaker 1: what you're seeing is a bunch of people standing in
Speaker 1: the yard saying this house is gonna be awesome. You
Speaker 1: should buy it. One we own the door, and two
Speaker 1: we haven't built it yet. Right, so we've just built
Speaker 1: the door. But we have all the we have all
Speaker 1: the stuff we need. We've met our hierarchy of requirements.
Speaker 1: There is allowed no. We have an f a Q
Speaker 1: and that's that. That counts. But also don't read the
Speaker 1: terms of services. We have, Yeah, and we have we
Speaker 1: have we have access to everything you've ever done. Been
Speaker 1: speaking of buying a house. I'm so sorry to keep
Speaker 1: going here. We haven't even talked about the the actual
Speaker 1: economy of the metaverse itself. And I mentioned the central
Speaker 1: land a little bit, which is sort of like a
Speaker 1: proto type for this, but where you can buy digital
Speaker 1: assets using a lot of this is gonna be based
Speaker 1: on around blockchain. That's exactly what I gonna bring up.
Speaker 1: The emergence of blockchain, the popularity of blockchain, and the hype,
Speaker 1: specifically the hype by venture capitalists and other corporations that
Speaker 1: are trying to say this is the new thing. This
Speaker 1: these crypto coins, this is the new thing. It's real,
Speaker 1: it's awesome, you're gonna love it. It's gonna work. Combining
Speaker 1: that with Facebook and the metaverse and the ability to
Speaker 1: control an entire economy and currency. Like, think about the
Speaker 1: power that the United States wields and has had in
Speaker 1: its power because it controls the US dollar and what
Speaker 1: that dollar is t To combine those two things, I mean,
Speaker 1: there is a real there's real danger there, I think
Speaker 1: in for the real world. Yeah, yeah, And there's again again,
Speaker 1: the the existing regimes, the existing legal structures have never
Speaker 1: had to think about this, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: And those things take a long time with a lot
Speaker 1: of false starts, just like with any other kind of innovation,
Speaker 1: they take a long time, a lot of false starts
Speaker 1: to get something right, and they're almost certainly not going
Speaker 1: to get it right by the time they need to do.
Speaker 1: So these these laws will be written after the fact,
Speaker 1: the equivalent of the of the people who will stop
Speaker 1: someone from assaulting some some other person in the metaverse.
Speaker 1: They're gonna come like years after they were needed. And
Speaker 1: and I love I want to go back to something
Speaker 1: you brought up, guys, So I just thought experiments. I
Speaker 1: know we're running along on this episode, but this stuff
Speaker 1: is very important. Let's say you are an Internet native,
Speaker 1: that's what you were describing earlier, Matt, someone who has
Speaker 1: grown up around screens, mobile screens, computer screens, television screens,
Speaker 1: you name it, anything but window screens really until window
Speaker 1: technology improves. Maybe you were born during the pandemic and
Speaker 1: as a result of that, especially for anybody who who
Speaker 1: had a kid in the past two years, your kid,
Speaker 1: the bulk of their interaction with the wider world has
Speaker 1: always been virtual. It is normal. They're growing up a
Speaker 1: stride to increasingly separate realities, virtual jobs, virtual friends, virtual vacations.
Speaker 1: Is that inherently bad? No, No, we're not ludites, were
Speaker 1: not anti technology, but we are asking important questions. What
Speaker 1: happens to those kids when the power goes out? What
Speaker 1: happens when the Internet goes down? What happens when a
Speaker 1: corona mass ejection blind sides part of the world and
Speaker 1: everybody who is, you know, dependent upon this new fabricated
Speaker 1: reality suddenly finds themselves outside what was then little stickman line,
Speaker 1: back to the basics, outside the matrix, tanktop, sweatpantcil A six. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but that's very nice, man, But but seriously, what what
Speaker 1: happens when there's another viral, viral infection or some kind
Speaker 1: of communical disease that becomes a pandemic and spreads the
Speaker 1: next one, the next ten. Uh, and it is way
Speaker 1: more dangerous to physically travel somewhere to do anything like
Speaker 1: like exactly what we already experienced. We already know a birthday,
Speaker 1: holiday celebration, a New Year's Eve party, concert, a comedy show,
Speaker 1: any of that. What happens when it's way more dangerous
Speaker 1: to do that than it is to go virtually to
Speaker 1: something like you know what that feels like? Man? You
Speaker 1: know that's when I'm saying we've only gone through one,
Speaker 1: and like, what if the air quality gets worse and
Speaker 1: worse and worse and it's physically dangerous to travel outside
Speaker 1: your door. I think those kind of dystopian predictions figure
Speaker 1: largely into the buy ind by these massive corporations. I
Speaker 1: think they're looking at the big picture and the future,
Speaker 1: which is pretty bleak potentially, right yep. And let's let's uh,
Speaker 1: let's add to the fire a little bit. We'll give
Speaker 1: a slight reassurance at the end of today's episode, but
Speaker 1: to add to the fire, and this is something that
Speaker 1: a lot of us in the audience today, we're waiting
Speaker 1: to hear what happens when neural implants come into the game.
Speaker 1: Hands are going to be old school. You're going to
Speaker 1: be telling people to generations from now that you used
Speaker 1: to use your hands to type on a keyboard, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna be like, wow, that's so quaint. Because the
Speaker 1: the other goal of this when I talked about making
Speaker 1: it impossible to unplug, the other goal of this is
Speaker 1: to bring the metaverse physically inside you. Literally. That's that's
Speaker 1: what the La Musk of the world are planning to do,
Speaker 1: and that, again has enormous potential because technology is amoral.
Speaker 1: It's not immoral, it has no inherent good or bad. Uh,
Speaker 1: Like a gun itself is not a villain, and neither
Speaker 1: is fire or a wheel. But the people who are
Speaker 1: lighting the fires and shooting the guns and rolling the
Speaker 1: wheels that's historically the problem. So hey, Grandpa, you used
Speaker 1: your eyes to look at a screen to That blows
Speaker 1: my mind. That's going to be weird. I always think
Speaker 1: of that scene in Back to the Future too with
Speaker 1: Lil Elijah Wood where Marty McFly goes into the retro
Speaker 1: you know, eighties dinna ar or whatever and does his
Speaker 1: soul like you know video games shoot him up kind
Speaker 1: of thing and then flips the gun around. The kids
Speaker 1: goes you have to use your hands or something like that.
Speaker 1: I always thought that was very interesting and very appropriate
Speaker 1: to this kind of conversation. Okay, so now that we
Speaker 1: have scared the virtual pants out of everyone and we didn't, Yes,
Speaker 1: that's the next thing is the neural in pants? It's
Speaker 1: neural impants. Yes. Uh so uh, now we can hopefully
Speaker 1: put a bit of reassurance your way. We can put
Speaker 1: a bit of solve on this cognitive wound. There is
Speaker 1: a good chance there is a non zero chance that
Speaker 1: this current push is just gonna flop. It's just gonna
Speaker 1: fall flat. And it's honestly that's mainly because of the
Speaker 1: gear required. People will have to buy new stuff, right
Speaker 1: uh and until that purchasing becomes normalized or subsidized. Like
Speaker 1: our earlier point about the phone system in the US,
Speaker 1: it was a calculated move to get more people buying stuff,
Speaker 1: to enable them to buy things that they normally would
Speaker 1: not be able to afford and perhaps not inclined to
Speaker 1: buy into. But this that's video game companies historically take
Speaker 1: a loss on their consoles, which is the game exactly exactly,
Speaker 1: or the same way printer manufacturers take a loss on
Speaker 1: their printers because they know they're gonna get you on
Speaker 1: the hook for life with their ink. Just so, yes,
Speaker 1: this is an old tactic and it's very effective, and
Speaker 1: the strategy for deploying the metaverse and getting you inside
Speaker 1: that door, it's going to mimic the same steps in
Speaker 1: in a in what might be portrayed as a surprising way,
Speaker 1: but it's really not anyone who is acting like, oh
Speaker 1: whoa stopping. They are either they either don't know what
Speaker 1: they're talking about or they're purposely misleading you. But this
Speaker 1: so again, this current push may fail, but the important
Speaker 1: parts remember is not that the important parts remember is
Speaker 1: the current push is only the current push. If it
Speaker 1: does fail, it's not going to fail the way three
Speaker 1: D television failed. It's going to fail the way that
Speaker 1: early soda companies failed. There's still going to be people
Speaker 1: who want to be Coke, who want to be Pepsi,
Speaker 1: and they will exist. The metaverse is on the way.
Speaker 1: So at this point, you know, we have to say
Speaker 1: this episode, this concept is something we have to revisit
Speaker 1: because it is an ongoing event. It's unfolding, So the
Speaker 1: information we uncover this time next year maybe radically different
Speaker 1: and may indeed alter our collective opinion of this stuff.
Speaker 1: But but right now, Matt Knell, uh, what do you
Speaker 1: what do you guys think before we before we hand
Speaker 1: us off to our fellow conspiracy realist, I'm distracted because
Speaker 1: Dr Bankman is being adorable again on your screen. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like he's like a living scarf. I don't know, man,
Speaker 1: I feel the same way about it as I did
Speaker 1: about Twitter, but then I was totally proven wrong about that. Um,
Speaker 1: I think this is different because it's not. It is
Speaker 1: very similar stuff we've seen. It's just kind of an
Speaker 1: escalation of it, and it really does require a buy in.
Speaker 1: And we've seen, you know, attempts to get oculuses and
Speaker 1: all that stuff saturated and it hasn't happened. It's more
Speaker 1: like a novelty. Um. But you guys both have one,
Speaker 1: so you start to really feel that saturation when like
Speaker 1: everyone you know has the thing, and you know, we're
Speaker 1: friends with a certain type of folks that are maybe
Speaker 1: a little more tech savvy, and early adopters probably always
Speaker 1: think it's interesting the word adoption is used when it
Speaker 1: comes to technology. UM, so maybe we're a skewed a
Speaker 1: little bit, but I don't know. Um, you're right. I
Speaker 1: mean they Facebook owns Oculus, they own you know, they
Speaker 1: are now meta. They obviously know something that we sort
Speaker 1: of know, maybe some things that we don't. So I
Speaker 1: don't know. It's a pretty big, bold choice for a
Speaker 1: company of that size to make without having the data
Speaker 1: to back up that it's going to be a success. Yeah, guys,
Speaker 1: I know we're going extra long. I just had to
Speaker 1: express a few things really fast, and for this episode
Speaker 1: has filled me with existential dread. Unlike many other episodes
Speaker 1: that we've done, there have been a few such as
Speaker 1: coronal mass ejections. Um, I had to after researching and
Speaker 1: watching a bunch of stuff, I had to squeegee my
Speaker 1: mind a bit. I watched a YouTube video from Forgotten
Speaker 1: Shine Restoration where the person restores a cleaver but physically
Speaker 1: doesn't goes through all the processes, just to remind me
Speaker 1: that you can have physical, real world skills and achieve
Speaker 1: something awesome like that, Uh, just by learning how to
Speaker 1: do it in this plane and then actually physically doing it.
Speaker 1: Because I was just watching all the virtual stuff occurring,
Speaker 1: all the different achievements that are coming, and all the
Speaker 1: excitement about this other place. Um, it feels as though
Speaker 1: this is a not a distraction necessarily, but almost brave,
Speaker 1: new world level drug kind of thing that we're going
Speaker 1: to have available to us. It will be everywhere. Everyone
Speaker 1: can get it if you want it, and everybody's gonna
Speaker 1: want it because it's gonna be so bad out here
Speaker 1: in this space that we we have to go inside
Speaker 1: instead subscribe to Soma. Yes, brought to you by Illumination
Speaker 1: Global Unlimited, a subsidiary Facebook. Uh sorry, it's just really
Speaker 1: it's it's true, man, And and and also you know,
Speaker 1: we we have to wrap today's episode, but we haven't
Speaker 1: even talked about the hardwired physiological, cognitive limits of the
Speaker 1: human brain. Of the architecture. You're not build for this,
Speaker 1: No one is. No one is built to be plugged
Speaker 1: in all the time. Uh. You know, you spend like
Speaker 1: a third year life sleeping? Right? Is there sleep in
Speaker 1: the metaverse? Does it have to be? And I say
Speaker 1: this as a guy who's clearly anti sleep, and it
Speaker 1: has been for longer than people might expect. But but
Speaker 1: at this point, we want to hand the We want
Speaker 1: to hand the torch and to hand the keys to
Speaker 1: the door to you. What is your take on the metaverse? Folks? Uh,
Speaker 1: do you think it is? Do you agree with us
Speaker 1: that something like this is inevitable? Do you think it
Speaker 1: is overall in net positive? Do you think it is
Speaker 1: a good thing and bad thing? What? What do you
Speaker 1: see playing out? What are some things that you think
Speaker 1: people need to consider as we move into this brave
Speaker 1: new digital world. We'd love to hear your take. We
Speaker 1: try to be easy to find online. I do want
Speaker 1: to point out just went to Here's where it Gets
Speaker 1: Crazy our Facebook page. We were joking about this. We're like,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, that's right. At the end of this episode,
Speaker 1: we are still gonna shout out Facebook or Facebook page.
Speaker 1: Here's where it Gets Crazy is home to the largest
Speaker 1: concentration your fellow conspiracy realists, the best mods in the business,
Speaker 1: all volunteers their opinions of their own. So shout out
Speaker 1: to you all and uh. If you want to be
Speaker 1: part of that, all you have to do is answer,
Speaker 1: answer a question, name the host, give us a joke
Speaker 1: that makes us laugh hashtag no joke left behind. I'd
Speaker 1: like to especially shout out. Jane w just popped on
Speaker 1: and we'd asked the name the host. I thought you
Speaker 1: guys would appreciate this, Jane said, Beastie Boy, Ben Metallica,
Speaker 1: Matt Slip not sure how to spell Noel answer the record.
Speaker 1: Jane did spell it correctly. So there's a k N
Speaker 1: sound and you know, slipknot and I do often get
Speaker 1: people thinking my name is spelled k n O l L,
Speaker 1: like the grassy one, you know. But anyone out there,
Speaker 1: let's just put this to bed. It's n O E
Speaker 1: l okay. It's like Noel, but pronounced Noel. And you
Speaker 1: can also find us on Instagram. You can find us
Speaker 1: on Twitter. If you don't sip the social needs, especially
Speaker 1: after this episode, we get it. We totally get it.
Speaker 1: You could go analog and you can call us directly. Yes,
Speaker 1: please call me. I I will interact with you socially
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