Duncan Trussell Family Hour - SURVIOS

Episode Date: June 20, 2014

Tech wizard's Nathan Burba and James Illif blow Duncan's mind with their amazing virtual holodeck! ...

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Starting point is 00:08:52 Thanks to all of you who have been using our Amazon portal. When you go to amazon.com and thanks to all of you who bought all of our new Ron Regi t-shirts, holy shit, those things went like hotcakes. You guys detected that there is a metaphysical sigil in these things that will ward off the evil eye, which means that the jealous gaze of those around you who only want you to fall into pits of mediocrity will be averted by the powerful symbols on this shirt. And there's many of them. We've got the Hamza, the Enneagram, there's angels in there.
Starting point is 00:09:25 Go check it out by going to DuncanTrussell.com to the shop. And of course, you never have to do any of this crap. Skip past the advertisements, jump past the advertisements for our sponsors or for the t-shirts or for whatever it is that I'm plugging for Amazon. Just get right into the podcast because to me, that's the biggest rush of all of this is that you guys are actually listening to my raspy lesbian voice and that will never cease to amaze me. And after my recent experience at the Servios VR lab, I'm starting to think this entire
Starting point is 00:10:02 universe that I am existing inside of may actually be some super advanced alien simulation. I met Nathan Berbo, one of the co-founders of the Servios VR labs at a virtual reality party that I recently attended. And they had some amazing demos there. The one that blew my mind the most was this, you put on the rift, you put on headphones and suddenly you're in some kind of, I don't know, studio. There's a guy smoking a cigarette, playing piano, and you feel like you're there. It's video.
Starting point is 00:10:35 It's not animated and it is incredibly realistic. You can look around whatever this weird New York art loft is and you feel like you're in a room with a guy that's a very, very intense thing because your body is reacting to it in the same way you would react if you were alone in a New York loft with a guy playing piano and smoking a cigarette. Your nipples get hard, you start crying, your lower lip trembles, and you get goosebumps all over your body. Nathan invited me to come down to Servios and try out what he called a holodeck.
Starting point is 00:11:14 When I heard him say that, I was a little pessimistic. I honestly didn't believe that the technology had gotten where it is. So my expectations were pretty low when I went there. But as it turns out, when Nathan Burbos said that Servios has a holodeck, he meant that they actually have a holodeck. Not a holodeck like what you would see on the Starship Enterprise, but an actual holodeck, which is they have a backpack that you put on, the newest version of the Oculus Rift, headphones, some kind of Dr. Sue style antenna thing that you wear on your head, and a razor
Starting point is 00:12:00 Hydra, which is a kind of, I don't want to call it a joystick, but it's these two wands that you hold in your hands. And when all the gear is on, and they flip the switch, then you are transported into another dimension. And it is mind blowing. You are suddenly no longer in Culver City, but are standing in some kind of Ukrainian shooting range, gazing out at weird wind set, swept mountains and tables filled with weapons that you shoot, not in the current way that you shoot weapons in most video games, which
Starting point is 00:12:39 is by, you know, squeezing the trigger on the Xbox controller, but by actually holding the razor Hydra controls in the exact way that you would hold whatever weapon that you're picking up. If you have a bow and arrow, you pick up the bow and arrow and reach behind you to pull the arrow out of a Quiver on your back. You've got two pistols and holsters at your waist, which you can reach down and pull out and it looks so good. It looks amazing.
Starting point is 00:13:09 Your body has these, your mind has these strange moments when you look down at your arms and suddenly you have a tan, or when you look down at your body and it's a different body than the one that you've grown accustomed to over your entire lifetime. The other weird thing about it is that your body quickly just adapts to the fact that, oh, I guess this is the new dimension that I live in, some kind of Ukrainian shooting range. That's the other weird thing. Our poor minds immediately just accept the fact that this virtual reality that you found
Starting point is 00:13:43 yourself is real, really amazing stuff. This is not even consumer based yet and it is already incredibly advanced. I can't imagine what things are going to look like five years from now, but I will say that thanks to Servios, I now know that Ray Kurzweil is right. The singularity truly is upon us and the subjective universe that you have grown accustomed to is about to experience an upgrade unlike anything that has ever happened in the course of our species. I can't think of a moment in history when this level of change happened at the speed
Starting point is 00:14:33 with which it's currently happening. It's scary, it is exciting, it's mind bending, and these guys are at the very forefront of whatever this, I don't know, pilgrimage that our species is taking into the metaverse. So please open your third eyes, send out as much love as you possibly can to the co-founders of Servios, James, Illith, and Nathan Burba. You can check out Servios by going to Servios.com. Okay, Nathan, James, welcome to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Podcast. Thank you so much for blowing my mind today.
Starting point is 00:15:49 You guys have a company that has created a digital holodeck, that's what you call it, right? Servios is a holodeck, basically. Really, yeah, I mean, that's one of the best ways to think about it. You feel like you're somewhere else, and you kind of walk onto it and walk off of it. So yeah, it's kind of like a holodeck, actually, it used to be called Project Holodeck back while we were at USC. That's Nathan talking, you guys, and that's James.
Starting point is 00:16:12 Yeah, this is Nathan. Hey, what's up? It's James. So, yeah, it's always been sort of like a holodeck kind of thing. That's like the original vision for it, is trying to imagine what's the best user experience you could ever have, and your mind instantly jumps to the holodeck or the matrix, like the perfect simulation. And so that's kind of how our brains started.
Starting point is 00:16:33 When did this start? Well, we were doing stuff like this way back in 2011 or earlier at the Mixed Reality Lab, which is... So this was pre-Rift, pre-Oculus Rift. Yeah, that's right. So we actually, we worked with Palmer Lucky for... And Palmer Lucky's the creator of Oculus. Yeah, he's the founder of Oculus, and we were doing some VR projects there.
Starting point is 00:16:54 I was working on like a VR, sort of, not really a game, but it was more like an experience where you explore like an alternative planet, this kind of stuff. But we were using some crazy gear, and Nate was working on some connect research at the time, and I know you were like doing like a paper. Yeah, working on a paper and a few games and using the connect, using all sorts of different peripherals basically. And James and I met at the Mixed Reality Lab, along with Palmer, we were all kind of there doing different things.
Starting point is 00:17:18 And the crazy fun thing was like, he was making some crazy cool head-mounted displays, and we were all using motion capture stages, like giant mocap stages you'd use in like a movie kind of thing. Yeah. And imagine putting on like a motion capture suit, and then putting on some like military grade VR gear, and then you're, you have like perfect avatar embodiment, you can see everything, you're like moving around, you can run around like a 40 foot by 40 foot space. Wow.
Starting point is 00:17:42 Crazy, like awesome experience. But, you know, it's super expensive. Yes. You know, I don't know how many millions of dollars go under these types of things, but it's a lot. It's super difficult to set up, too. I mean, you know, hours of work just to get into virtual reality for a minute or two, to see some tech demo that is just the graphically, you know, something coming out of the early
Starting point is 00:17:58 90s. That's what it used to be like. That's what VR used to be. Yeah. So, okay, I got it. So, if you just wanted a few seconds of the thing you just gave me, it's hours of set up, and then it's incredibly expensive. And it's like, that's why I only like, you know, top researchers in their fields and
Starting point is 00:18:12 like the military were like using these things. Right. So, you'd have to be like a lucky research assistant, I guess, to like run into it, you know. And if the hardware changes all the time and people can't, it can't sit still, your medium can't sit still, then artists can't work on the medium to actually create something that you'd want to be in. So, with the hardware constantly in flux and everything costing a lot of money, no one
Starting point is 00:18:30 can really create anything for virtual reality. Yeah, there's no actual like really great experiences yet. The idea of a VR game didn't even exist yet. Right. So, you guys were before, this was when it was still a fantasy for most people. This is like where most people just thought, full on, more man. It might happen one day, but it's probably not going to happen. Like the year like 2010, like 2011 kind of, that's sort of how it felt, yeah.
Starting point is 00:18:54 But you all were compelled to start building this stuff. Yeah. Right. It's because it turned out components were super cheap compared to, like you can get like a really amazing immersive experience from like off the shelf hardware. Right. Just like put it together in such a way so you got like magnetic tracking and you got like optical tracking and you end up just like, like in the beginning it was sort of
Starting point is 00:19:14 like a Frankenstein monster for us because we put together some crazy gear to get it just to work. Yeah. And this was, yeah, James Palmer and I hanging out at IEEE VR in March 2012. We all kind of together came up with the idea for a holodeck. We said, you know, we really looked at what was out there, what was possible. We said, okay, the screens are here, you know, the lenses on kind of the head mounted display side, the tracking on the connect, you know, instead of, you could have one or two connects
Starting point is 00:19:37 instead of a giant mocap stage. We realized that consumer hardware was moving to that point. And so we kind of all got together and just were spitballing ideas for a holodeck. I think we wound up getting stuck in like some like limo with some like some famous researchers or something. Because we got like swept up in like this demonstration of some like telebusiness, you know, it's like a glass wall telepresence for business. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:19:59 That's what it was. There's some interesting crazy stuff out there. But there's like all these like researchers crammed the car and they're all talking about like quantum physics and like whatever it is that they talk about. And we're just like just like stuck in the back. I'm just saying they're like, I like making video games. Yeah. But yeah, now VR games is the shit.
Starting point is 00:20:18 And it's pretty awesome. There's some great stuff. Well, yeah. I mean, this is the this is I'm sure this is I'm stammering right now because my brain is still recuperating from the this game that I just experienced you guys. This was a million times more intense than what I expected. Just to describe it. Well, actually, why don't you guys describe what I just did because I'm sure you're going
Starting point is 00:20:43 to be able to give much more detail than I'm just going to sound like somebody in a freak out tent. We love hearing your account of it for sure. I'm not crazy. No, it's it's sort of how it goes because I mean, you'll be able to describe it like subjectively and kind of how you felt. Yeah. From a text standpoint, basically what it was, it's like a 20 minute demo 15, 20 minutes.
Starting point is 00:21:02 You go in, you you you wear a VR headset, you see your vision is completely surrounded. You feel like you're actually present. And then you have trackers on your hands and you're in your body so you can move around anywhere you want. You could turn. You could you could duck dodge. You can even lay down if you want an AMS sniper rifle. It's pretty much whatever you want to do.
Starting point is 00:21:17 But you guys, you're you're standing all of a sudden you're in basically a tech lab surrounded by computer technicians and virtual reality wizards. You guys are you guys are basically are with this dimensions version of Merlin or something. So you're in some kind of futuristic alchemist lab whiteboards everywhere. Yeah. And then all of a sudden you put this the the rift on and now you're in a shooting range somewhere in the Ukraine. I don't know.
Starting point is 00:21:53 Some barren. It's like some like fortress and like the mountains of Nepal or something. Yeah. It's like knowing and you're you're you know you you're basically at the top of a mountain and a gun range. You're you're basically in Putin's backyard. Yeah. That's what he has.
Starting point is 00:22:08 Vladimir Putin's a wet dream or something. You're relaxing after whatever you've been doing. This is essentially where you go to unwind. This simulates being Vladimir Putin and you're shooting you're just shooting targets and there's there's several tables. The tables have these different weapons on them. You're using what's called a razor hydra which is handheld sort of joystick but it's not really a joystick because it's just sensing the movement of your hands and you're using
Starting point is 00:22:40 a trigger to pick things up and so suddenly you're just there. Your brain your poor weak human brain very manipulatable brain very doesn't your brain is just like yeah I guess well we're in a shooting range in Russia all right fine and then you start shooting guns and it's it's not a hundred percent realistic and since there's no weight and I don't know how you would you can't simulate weight but who would want to anyway. I mean you want to feel like Arnold Schwarzenegger if Arnold can pick up something that weighs a hundred pounds and fire it consistently you know you should be able to do that in
Starting point is 00:23:14 a video game. It's a fantasy. It makes you feel like a badass. Well yeah like you're so strong that picking up a shotgun doesn't it feels like it doesn't feel like anything. The other there's an interesting problem you run into when you're in this virtual space which is that when you put an item down you want to let go of the controls themselves because your brain thinks that you're actually holding the items.
Starting point is 00:23:35 Well yeah there's that's like there's some extra effects of like the cause of like it's cognitive dissonance in a way where your your brains kind of like might be fighting a little bit with the illusion and so you get caught up in like okay should I be pulling this trigger to let go to grab something or should I like let go of this in order to drop something. Yeah and then so you're just kind of like you know your brain fires for a second and then it's like we've had some people accidentally throw a controller because they're like throwing the axe or something. Yeah yeah it's important that the system has ergonomics that are basically they don't have
Starting point is 00:24:08 any abstractions so if you grab something like you would in real life it should feel like grabbing something in the game and the more you have to learn the difference between those two eventually with a regular controller and regular video games it's not eventually but before this you press a button and your character animation does something and that's a huge abstraction. So the idea here is remove as many abstractions as possible and then when you you say I'm just going to grab this I'm going to do the typical motion I do for grabbing something you grab something in the game and it's just intuitive.
Starting point is 00:24:33 Here's an example of that I was complaining because my girlfriend did much better than me in the goddamn zombie game and then my complaint was that I didn't know you could do a wheel but the point is it's like no of course you can because it's real life you can do whatever you can do in real life there so it's not a question of like does the game have the ability to do this it's like can you do it in as a human what can you do what are your strengths you know how coordinated are you it's really that's the second part of this game after you train with bow and arrow you reach behind you to pull out the arrow and you shoot all these strange targets the next part of the game is it sort of fades
Starting point is 00:25:21 out and now you're in some kind of post apocalyptic zombie holocaust land and these zombies are wandering towards you you have the same tables of weapons but now you've got to use them to fight the zombies and it's it's I'm God I'm so sorry to be vulgar in this way but it's like this is a really vulgar description of something that is so high-tech and incredible I feel no it's aesthetic using this description but if you've ever used a flashlight which I'm sure all of you guys have used you the the the pathetic sad thing is how easily your body is tricked so that your body is after you've you've done it your body's like oh yeah you have that feeling of like wow I just had sex for it tricks your body into thinking like this thing that your DNA is
Starting point is 00:26:18 desperately trying to do it every second well there is you know there is teledildonics that's the we'll get to that we'll get to that because clearly that's what everyone's thinking that's like future like Blade Runner shit going on yeah that's gonna happen but you in the same way what happens when you're in a sort of crisis situation in VR space it's fight or flight basically you're activating your body's fight or flight and you're there and you're realizing these zombies are coming at me and I there's not really you know I have a small space that I need to protect and I'm not going there I'm about to die let me and then what happens is like a caged animal you fight your way through it and then a bunch of your friends you know looking at you in real life
Starting point is 00:26:53 you're going what the hell is he doing he's running around his living room you're somewhere l you're legitimately somewhere else your body it's almost like being in a dream it really is it is like being in a dream and and it's it's amazing how how the the brain can't of course it couldn't tell the difference because there's never been a chance for it to adapt to this kind of technology because this technology's never existed it's really it's a technology but it's a combination of things it's blocking it's blocking out everything else from an audio standpoint from a video standpoint it's giving correct body tracking you can basically you add everything up yeah you craft the perfect experience exactly a lot that goes into it so the other component of this that
Starting point is 00:27:33 is is really intense is that upon removing the device there is a period of disequilibrium where your mind can't accept it's like it's harder for your mind to accept coming out of the thing than it is to accept going into the thing like in the thing the disorientation is less than when you remove it and suddenly you're back in the normal world and your brain doesn't like it yeah it's like what's going on yeah it wants to go back it's more colorful over there it's you know if there's something about it that's like your mind is more drawn into these virtual realities than it is into the reality that we inhabit maybe that's why it's kind of like you know crew waves thing and it's kind of like a post like mind fuck disorientation where you just kind of like you
Starting point is 00:28:22 know something just happened and you've never had that happen before that's it and you're just like okay now I'm gonna have to like real like rewire rethink a little bit on the unconscious level to like get back to where I was at and just and that's just you may not experience that as as greatly as you did the first time ever again well interesting because that's the first time's always like that because your brook because this is it for the you know this is like you know there was a first time that someone saw a TV set or there was a first time that someone was able to illuminate a room without having an ignition device yeah I imagine those are times where the mind just some other deeper thing is happening like what you say yeah because it's the implications of the thing are
Starting point is 00:29:07 also quite unnerving but the the um it feels like I'm trying to think of a way to describe it and I can't it's it like what it's a cruel it creates a kind of it shakes up your reality a little bit because you are suddenly when you realize that your mind will fall prey to such incredible hypnosis instantaneously without any kind of rebellion against it it makes you ask yourself what about this one that we're in right now yeah like what is this thing that we're in why this is a blindfold of sorts isn't it like we're wrapped around we're sort of cocooned in phenomena our minds are like putting that information together in a way that creates reality but this human body is a kind of VR goggles for infinite space isn't it you're understanding it yeah with the same exact you
Starting point is 00:29:58 know every time especially you take a drug it's the same thing I mean you're changing how you perceive and basically you're changing your reality and so yeah really playing with realities and you can stretch it and pull it and you can kind of modify it's very malleable and so you can never really know what the objective perspective is it's always right subjective no matter what that's kind of the existential problem that's being presented by virtual reality it's not just giving it's not a pastime or a diversion it's literally a crack in the subjective universe we've all grown accustomed to and have resigned ourselves to the idea that this is pretty much it man like you might be able to warp your universe around you based on I won the lottery or you
Starting point is 00:30:42 know I don't know I got breast implants died my hair or yeah those things pale in comparison actually just going into a different reality right but you see this is the thing though every single human on this planet up until now is assuming that this thing that we're in right now it's going to stay pretty much like this I mean it might become incinerated or it might like some global catastrophe could happen that degrades or destructs are the current scene that we're inhabiting but no one's prepared for the this this idea that like guess what the first half of your life where you couldn't go into alternate universes that were indistinguishable from this universe that was basically like before you were born it's a that level of shift that is going to
Starting point is 00:31:27 happen right to our species and you guys are at the forefront of it don't you feel a little bit of trepidation over the over what you're up to here well yeah I mean it's it's a little bit like the pre-internet generation like you talk to people who you know a good amount of their life was before the internet existed like I won't name any ages but you know for a lot of people are you know our parents are a little bit beyond our parents generation and you talk to them and they'll watch TV because that's been around for a while but the internet just doesn't it's almost like they're disconnected in a way and I know Nate you're talking about this a little while ago you just it's interesting thought because they're just somewhat disconnected from the rest of society because they
Starting point is 00:32:01 don't really totally get right into the new like form of communication we have right and there's some disconnect there so in a similar sense there's going to be kind of like a pre-VR you know generation of people right we're kind of like all of us are probably kind of like on the tail like the cusp of that but we're you know stuff's happening and we'll probably adapt but there's going to be people who are doing you know it's like kids right now have you know a baby's born you have an iPad and yeah like and that's how they think magazines work right so you know same kind of thing here it's just kind of keep changing yeah people I mean are connected you know the information age is basically the big first big revolution in reality where people's live change
Starting point is 00:32:37 where it'll change where they're excuse me where their lives change where they're connected all the time and basically that really changes how they perceive things but the thing with that is they can unplug anytime they can just look left look right there's real people around them they're not constantly watching a movie they're not constantly doing these things yeah it's kind of a subjective way of splitting your reality and you know magazines did this before and film and TV but with this what we do is we you block everything out it almost is almost like a kind of a Zen meditation thing and really you're yeah and the focus is really a crucial part of it once you're there you're not here anymore you're there right you're legitimately there and it's
Starting point is 00:33:14 it's something that's completely different it's instead of just toying with your reality now it's just I mean wholesale modification right yes it's yes exactly it's it's an alternate reality for sure it's like the you know there's that that great there I love the Bible I don't care if it's really the Bible is fucking cool like the form of mythology it's amazing I'm actually and then some stupid Twitter fight with an atheist who's like mad because I was on the Pete home show and said that Christianity is like a loving revolutionary and he's really he's like you're right there's nothing good about it it's all shit well people I mean the problem is it's the people there's a lot of people who don't have the right perspective they can't put it in a perspective it's all they know
Starting point is 00:34:00 yeah if you take the Bible along with other forms of mythology like I don't know Batman or something you kind of realize we have this long history of writing really cool stuff really cool stories that really mean something to us and if you take in the right perspective the Bible is really neat the wrong perspective and it's uh you know it's dangerous religion is another form of VR it's a kind of yeah objective lens you can put on your consciousness and transform the universe based on a very specific symbol structure yeah right but but um in in the book in the book of Genesis there's this there's a verse that's always confused me uh or used to confuse me but the verse is that God made man in his image in his image and uh that's a really interesting thing
Starting point is 00:34:44 it's almost like a like haunting in a way it's like what does that mean man is man is derivative of God man can never be you know but to me it means to me it means man aspires to be God because God is the original creator it's a pretty it's pretty deep shit and uh aspires to be God or has the same motivation to create has the same impulse to want to create universes so that if we're all these kinds of weird little fragmentations duplicates 3d printouts which we are i mean your dna is just constantly you know xeroxing yourself into this dimension again and again and again and in the same way your dna has been passed down from the beginning of time if what i'm saying is with you guys have multiple layers of the reality i'm saying that you guys are trying to create
Starting point is 00:35:29 other universes you have this input so the universe big bang we don't know what happened it blasts out all this matter that you know it cools down the matter begins to congeal coalesce now we have planets the planets spin around for hundreds of millions of years and they what do they do they somehow a little pink and brown and yellow droplets of meat come rising up out of it it's the universe looking back on itself it's the universe being somewhat self-aware and uh consciousness is something that's like i said it's very malleable and what we're able to do is realize that's one form of consciousness and you can go any different direction with i mean how can the universe look at itself that's different than the way it looks at itself now right well by
Starting point is 00:36:08 telescoping inward by making more and more dimensions within itself it's it's going into itself if you saw the movie the 13th floor i'm pretty sure it's 13th floor this is the most highbrow explanation of this is the 13th exactly that's all it it just happens to be like pretending exactly to that but anyway i won't spoil the movie i haven't actually seen it it's just the you're basically a guy who's feels like he's in reality and then there's like a machine that you can go into and visit it like like basically a historical reality and then he discovers like his reality is actually like a simulation of a future damn yeah everything sounds awesome i know i'm like is that good it's like i think it was in like the 90s yeah i remember when it came out well but but that so that's the
Starting point is 00:36:51 so this thing right now uh is you know you're shooting zombies but obviously 10 years from now you're in some kind of beautiful forest communicating with a holographic representation of someone in your family who's deceased and then and then you know 20 years from now it gets to the point where existing in this dimension that we're in right now is something that only environmentalists radicals fundamentalists people who are poor and can't afford the technology it'll be considered like the whole goddamn thing is going to seem like some kind of slum well it's it's um i'll tell you that's a very dystopian picture you're here painting how could it not be though what's the other way that it goes it's like it i think there's well i think it'd be
Starting point is 00:37:37 a very fulfilling the what entertainment kind of device and the one thing you can forget is that reality is super immersive there's a lot to do it's super fun once you go to the beach or you know going parasailing or like that stuff you know that's going to be a once you leave once you leave reality yeah once you leave reality for a little while uh you'll realize how cool reality is and you'll be like hey man i'm going back into reality it's awesome i'm gonna go do this thing with you know what i'm gonna go have sex right i'm gonna do something that's legitimate i've got an idea let's go out into our filthy muddy streets in palestine where if we walk in the wrong direction we get shot by an israeli who's carousels in here but how it's not like that people aren't going to
Starting point is 00:38:18 be like let's enjoy reality again a huge portion of the population is going to be like hey reality fuck you you made it so i can't fly time travel teleport you made my body look a certain way that i don't like hell no it's like when you see uh you know i don't know if you've ever seen baby turtles come crawling out of the sand and go into the ocean i'm sure there's a few turtles who are like i'm staying in the sand i like the beach i'm not going to go in that vast infinite ocean that we're meant to swim into right in the same way it's like people are going to be like those turtles they're just going to go swimming out into the multiverse and vanish into nothingness and only spend their time in this crazy reality to wash themselves eat some pizza throw back some mountain
Starting point is 00:39:01 dew and then go back to being some warlord and alphacentory i think i think by the time culture gets that fast online world you'd be creating sounds fascinating yeah i think it'll be i mean people of that era that'll be perfectly normal that'd be a acceptable way of living i think they'll be fine with it i think it's weird it's weird to us because i mean you know it's fun being a futurist it's fun saying oh the stuff that that's going to happen in 50 years is super exciting and i'm someone who should be existing in the future but then you go 500 years and you go you get scared you go wait a minute you get alienated these are not people from my time this is weird to me and everyone has that point where they say to themselves okay breaking point i went too far
Starting point is 00:39:36 exactly well yeah i'm sure that if you like telecat you know that's a telecaterpillar it's like you know if you go far enough in this metamorphosis you're going to turn into that fucking thing the caterpillar would be like i don't want to be that thing i like being a green pathetic non-flying thing and i'm a non-flying beautiful thing and in the same way it's there's a there's a built-in resistance to all technological advancements and that resistance seems to have its root or nucleus in fear of change people don't want to change they don't want they they're they're terrified of death which represents the ultimate change they're terrified of psychedelics which is another form of change they're terrified of disaster divorce they're terrified of being
Starting point is 00:40:26 a whatever they've it's all changed that people are afraid of and what you guys are working on it represents another form of change but a change that a lot of futurists have predicted and have not only predicted but also think that is what we're here for on this planet which is to grow this technology so that we can actually continue the endless unfolding of the multiverse well and unfolding of the human mind too and of consciousness and i think human beings have always dabbled in in messing with consciousness whether it's through their habits or through drugs or whatever it is you know backwards through time so this is really just the next step of that this is very fundamentally human in fact i i feel sometimes more fundamentally human when i'm in virtual
Starting point is 00:41:14 reality than i do when i'm in real life in real life you're sitting at a desk everything is very clerical you're kind of crunching numbers all day and your legs and the whole body hurts because you're not getting enough exercise and all the the very basic mammalian things you're supposed to be doing that's civilization but you take the things you're really supposed to do which is run and jump and hunt and and you take those things and you kind of compartmentalize them and well i'm going to go to the gym for 30 minutes a day and and and do this little thing and i think virtual reality could be like rushing into battle with like two broadswords and just fighting doing what what men should be doing and women you know doing what what people are doing whatever you want
Starting point is 00:41:50 we're evolved for you know tens of thousands of years to do these things and i feel like virtual reality gives us the opportunity to actually feel human once in a while and that's a really important thing to be personal because like 99 percent of people don't have that extreme like sense of discovery like right like the people who are like exploring the western world or wherever it is you know the people who are exploring space for the first time or even fear and danger i mean actually going on an advent how do you go on an adventure today i could fly across the world and go to mcdonald's and have a police officer say sorry sir you're not allowed to stand there i mean there's how many places do you have anymore where you can have a real adventure i mean you could go spelunking
Starting point is 00:42:25 and and shit and like you know the middle of brazil or something i don't know but there's plenty of exotic things you could do but you can go spelunking in the middle of brazil but here's the the and the you know it's weird that when you start talking about this technology you find yourself having to actually defend it in a certain way because many people they look at this as the manifestation of the antichrist or the sort of crystallization that's exactly what it is oh dammit but it it you have discovered us well they do think it's the crystallization of demonic forces that are using technology to rise through the the planet yeah they think that it's the because it's like wait they think technology is the deceiver the great deceiver oh so it's it's
Starting point is 00:43:08 sort of like okay like what is the devil one if he's deceiving you what's his whole plan well you're not talking about the death he just wants to throw a party well he he wants people to the the idea is like here i'll give you the diabolic version of it and then the mind what i think it is but if you if you want to look at the what's the opposite of diabolic like angelic heavenly beautiful parabolic that's a mathematical that's what somebody who builds virtual reality says parabolic i don't know my parabolical scheme i mean your scheme will go up and then go down that actually that's a hilarious line for a villain in a movie because all villain a real villain would know he's gonna lose because he's
Starting point is 00:43:44 a villain naturally so it's like i'm just about to win and then i will die in my scheme i need smarter friends um the the uh the the so the the idea is there's a lot of different versions for what like in philosophy and religion and when you're coming up with some kind of symbol structure you do have the problem of evil in the world and you have the problem of uh what what symbol structure do i want to use to describe evil the fear the unknown the kind of thing over the hill that you're definitely afraid of the bump in the night yeah that that whole thing that's really what the no the or the or the what is how do we just what what do what do we describe in the same way that you guys had an impulse to build virtual reality some people have an impulse to go down
Starting point is 00:44:26 to the park yank a purse out of an old lady's hand break your arm and run away so that impulse you have to ask yourself but what is that impulse like where is that coming from and so all religions have different ways of describing delusion oh that you're talking about the what shopenhauer called the uh what is it the um the evil will right that's what you're talking about and is the evil will embodied in the human form or is it something that just exists as a kind of like potentiality in the universe and when certain beings emerge it moves through them and and and they sort of resonate with it so who the fuck knows but sounds about right i'll go with that one i mean to me it just seems like everything is an impulse but the impulse could either be based on creativity or
Starting point is 00:45:10 it could be based on destruction so depending on which one you gravitate towards that's the way you'll go but i don't think that means impulses are inherently negative so you know having an impulse to create something amazing like a technology i think that's based on you know creativity and an extension of what we want to what we imagine i i agree with you but some people see it as they they envision a world where in these little sort of like 3d printed geodesic domes humans strapped into these devices uh with um uh you know who knows like in the ultimate horror story version of this you like a clockwork orange version they're they're just in this room with hoverbots it with needles filled with hoverbots yeah sure why not drones why do we want hoverbots
Starting point is 00:46:01 because you know why don't we want hoverbots yeah i think it's drinking drinks i guess but why would they be i think you're talking about fear of alienation why would they be spiky i mean think about right you know everyone else because they inject you with drugs because you have the most frightening like thoughts about like these future entertainment venues i'm giving you the worst i don't think that'd be entertaining i'm giving you the worst version of it which is that the swarms of drones with needles that create because it's like when it's like the matrix i mean it's like looking at the stacks and stacks of you know uh people in the matrix yeah i mean if you're outside of that and you're looking at people who are inside i mean to the people inside they don't care
Starting point is 00:46:35 about that because it's once again it's on the outside uh so it's scary it's scary to feel alienated and to see that you know what you're doing if you have needles everywhere and you're in these domes you're essentially forsaking the aesthetics of real life to go into a better virtual world i will tell you this the the things that are built in the you know for the future the virtual reality systems and products and i can tell you this because i'm you know we're building one is that they will be aesthetically pleasing on the outside because the engine of commerce requires it right requires people to buy the damn thing and not be afraid of it to be able to love it and hold it and you know it's going to look like an ipad or something it's going to look like something
Starting point is 00:47:09 that's sleek and you you want one just by looking at it so i don't think that's going to be the case at all i think what happens with most technology is that a science fiction author writes about it initially they come up with the idea and they say oh this is the scariest thing in the world and it's going to you know it's going to be really weird and then and then a hundred years later when it actually comes out it's kind of nice and cuddly and everything has kind of been worked out and people are not afraid of it anymore so i don't i think virtual reality like anything else like that is going to be very nice and and friendly and there may be some people freaked out about it but it's going to have that glossy finish yeah it's like a it's like if if a steve job's designed
Starting point is 00:47:43 a heroin needle or something yeah you know it would that would be i would it would be so nice just to be like oh this is not all not all sci-fi you know writers or filmmakers paint the you know the negative side of it i mean if you look at star trek that's you know one of the franchises that always gave a very positive spin to future it's true and star trek essentially you know invented the concepts of like a touchscreen device that was really usable yeah and it constantly beeps and invented like the holodeck you know and invented like a bunch of other things that you know some of it looks really like a retro and old school because they have like things that are the size of a cell phone but it like folds open and you talk into it like what's
Starting point is 00:48:21 that thing called the communicator yeah the one that just kind of today but you know they were trying to project like what was essentially like a human utopia yeah i don't know about the other species they had some conflicts with other like other creatures but they understood that technology human beings angled to it it was a utopia for humans mostly yeah so you look at that and that's why it's such a great model for technological innovations because they you know a lot of scientists know star trek and they get inspired by that stuff it's really interesting yeah i you know i i think that it doesn't matter what form it takes i think it's a it's a this is an inevitability and that the majority of human beings when faced with the decision between existing within
Starting point is 00:49:03 this current reality that we're in or existing in an unlimited reality are going to want to spend at least a portion of their lives there but the truth is that people are going going to want to spend their entire lives there and that's where you run into one of these great ethical problems of the of the time period that we're in which is now we're talking about the existence of digital opium dens where humans who have abandoned the world to forsaken the world for this other place slowly shrivel away and i know that sounds dark but what's the difference between that and people currently opium so there's two types of ways that people get addicted to things chemically and then through their experiences basically and when you're getting addicted to something through
Starting point is 00:49:50 experience takes a while it's a long process and only certain people are prone to it it's a very different thing than actually getting chemically addicted to something so i see first of all i think society has already changed drastically i think civilization has created this alternate universe where you go eight to ten hours a day and you go to work and you sit down you're at a little computer and it's so different than what we used to do that i think with something that's completely experiential like what we're developing or virtual reality in general that you're going to have the same thing happen people are going to go into that and they're going to go man this is awesome and then they go out and they go back to the real world and they come there's kind of a nice
Starting point is 00:50:20 duality or you know between the two so i really see that as being i think it could be certainly a balance i'd much rather spend eight hours a day hanging out with my friends and my family and relaxing and then eight hours in virtual reality you know goofing around and playing and that's my entire day and then there's some creativity and thrown in there for the you know and that's sure i that's a much better life than coming in and crunching numbers and responding to emails all day yeah i'll take that in a heartbeat over what we have right now you know Doug stand up the commute you've ever heard it yeah yeah dog yeah he's got a great joke that goes um it's not addiction it's that some things are just better than life and and so so and and from that perspective
Starting point is 00:51:00 it's like the you know i know what you mean uh some people are going to be able to balance this out and i'm sorry that i keep going i just want to cover this one there's gonna be five percent of people two percent of people who get addicted to certain things and five percent there's going to be five percent of people have addictive personalities and something like that sure right so like take like this guy for example like this is when you know i remember when i went to the gf 2045 conference did you ever hear about that thing dimitri itch cough through it it's the transhumanist seminar where you gather together all these like did you guys know you went into the future for that we didn't know that sounds awesome this is conference in the future that i went to super cool no it was
Starting point is 00:51:44 it's uh it's this conference this you ever heard of dimitri itch cough the russian billionaire no so he's this billionaire who wants to uh create um uh actual immortality for humans and he is gathers together all these like super famous scientists geneticists like abry de gray is there and like people like that manhattan project for immortality kurzwa was there that so like he brings them all together and he also brings like people from various religions together too because he recognizes there's a metaphysical mystical component to this stuff and while you know i was there i was talking to uh a scientist who's working on and now you're hearing about darber doing neural prosthesis which is implanting memories using like some kind of chips that go into the um uh i don't remember
Starting point is 00:52:35 which part of the brain yeah yeah but but so he was talking about the use of you know the usefulness of this is for people who are like have like actual neurological disorders and need help and of course i was being like so you could download how to play the piano into your brain or that kind of stuff and i remember him looking at me with this weird thing like i'm trying to like make it so blind people can see you know like i don't really know like all the entertainment shits gray but in the same way man these helmets this thing that you just had you guys could bring that to the children's hospital where kids are stuck in this fucking you know and they try to make the place beautiful but i'm saying people who are stuck in like really bad environments they can't get
Starting point is 00:53:18 out of this gives this ray of hope for them to be taken out of that i think entertainment gives hope to everyone and i think you know i i think people shouldn't downplay how important entertainment is how important hope and dreams are and you know really waiting for something you know new to come out and to do with other people and even if you're not you know making someone who's blind see is really is really an important thing but it's not any more important than you know uh doing things for people who already can see i mean i i think they're both important and sometimes i get annoyed with uh you know research money only being spent on kind of fixing problems instead of you know i want to fix existential problems yes like yeah like the fact that i can't walk through a mother
Starting point is 00:53:58 fucking wall and i'll never get to experience what it's like to fight a zombie except i just did when i was a kid if someone had told me you're gonna actually fight zombies in the future yeah i would have i would have been like i would have called my dad like there's a psychopath right now it's like dude in 10 to 15 years or whatever it's like you're gonna be fighting some zombies yeah that's interesting that would be quite a that would be a really really kind of it would be scarier i think hearing it in the past well right that's yeah and i think a lot of people when they hear about this stuff because i've yapped about it on my podcast more than a few times and i get a lot of responses from people who are excited about it but i inevitably get responses
Starting point is 00:54:42 from people who who consider this to be the the apocalypse and they think that what's happening here is like okay like imagine this right let's fast forward um let's fast forward things let's cut back to the or the Atari comes out or let's cut back to like the Commodore 64 and then watch technology grow out of the planet and what you will see is this kind of like uh first what it does is it produces the ability to connect enough people together to allow for like innovation to to to evolve itself you know it's using us to evolve it and you watch this thing and it's like okay it's in the you know now it's in our first it's like in our computers then suddenly it's in our pockets right yeah like it went from being on a desk and it managed to get right next to our
Starting point is 00:55:35 fucking cocks it jumped it jumped into our pockets right and now everyone's mad because google glass that's pissing people off it's not just because there's cameras on it they're spooked out by the fact that the mother fuckers climbing out of our pockets and getting into our heads right now it's climbed into our heads in the same way these headsets that you have it wants to get into us and like the way it's doing that is by kind of like hypnotizing us using this beautiful entertainment and the potentiality of it but in the process of that weirdly it's wrapping around it's becoming more and more coiled like when that face sucker wraps this little fun alien to face suckers you're comparing VR headsets to face suckers well yeah I know I'm saying that's what they look like now
Starting point is 00:56:21 but 20 years from now they don't look like I'll tell you something uh someone told me uh I can totally see that that that feeling that you're expressing it it's trying to climb into our brains well it's like it has a mind of its own but the uh I don't know I mean there's certainly a difference between AR and VR you know I'll just point out real quick with like google glass that's something that they want everyone to walk around with all the time right they want it to be a ubiquitous device that you're just always seeing everyone wearing one and it's like constant surveillance like it's like crowdsourced surveillance yes um and that's AR but with VR you know VR is something you do for a very short period of time and it gives you it's like a hundred percent of your focus is dedicated
Starting point is 00:56:56 to that right AR is like you do it all the time and maybe five percent of your focus is dedicated so basically with VR you just go in there you're 100 focused in there and it's just like boom boom boom you do like some cool experiences play some games and you know in like an hour hour and a half later you're you'll you'll stop it's like it's like a shorter it's a short form entertainment kind of thing and I like to and I like to talk about the um oh sorry uh oh yeah well I was I was just saying that basically because of that um it's just the effects are a little bit different it's not going to have as drastic of a transformation I don't think well I think and what Duncan's talking about is kind of the proliferation and invasion of technology into our lives and it
Starting point is 00:57:31 kind of is really making me think uh you know in particular I remember someone I think Richard Marks uh Richard Marks from Sony was telling me about something David Holt said David Holt's a brilliant guy CTO of Leap Motion and he was talking about how uh David has this theory that in the future um in the near future you'll have multiple forms of clothing like we currently do and you'll have one that's called digital and digital will just be clothing that literally just looks like digital circuits that you can actually wear yeah and it'll be this completely kind of homogenous extensible system and what I think what we're seeing like ravers would wear or something yeah yeah but who knows what it what it's does what you know what it's computing
Starting point is 00:58:03 and you add more to it and it can compute more and basically I guess like passively received information makes you invisible yeah it's an invisible what it what ability suit what it does so what what I'm realizing what what technology does I mean there's certain pieces of technology we work in a very specific medium where really it's technology that alters reality and if you look at everything from a computer monitor to a cell phone to something on your face I mean all these things you're looking at them all right because that's the primary mode of altering your reality and so what I see is that imagine these things they're just they're changeable they're they're matter that allows you to change the way you not only look at things but also
Starting point is 00:58:37 that changes itself basically yeah so you're talking about reality are you talking about objects that can essentially modify either themselves or the way you interpret what you're looking at and so it's it's a different thing than like you make a table that table is not really going to change unless you like chop it up and grind it down and build it into something else it just sits there right but when you get things that are interactive that are visually stimulating that you know can anything there's so much they're so inviting you know yeah like you want to go use it there yeah definitely yeah and think about life changes in other ways but technology changes life in a very specific way and in a way that we can control so you know things evolve things move
Starting point is 00:59:16 around there's erosion you know everything in the world kind of changes in in very set ways technology allows us to change them in completely different ways so if you want to wrap it if you want to talk about that that parasite that's crawling all over your body over time and eventually crawling up to your eyes and eventually will be implanted in your brain and it's kind of taking you over in parts what that what that parasite is is a reality changing parasite it's one that over time will actually start modifying reality in faster and faster ways kind of like that future drama episode with the well with von Neumann machines that eat things up and kind of multiply and get smaller and smaller and that's kind of the themselves because they're hyper intelligent
Starting point is 00:59:53 and they go floating around in space and exactly expanding and that's kind of the end result of it but with human beings it's it's you know we also have wants and needs and fantasies and what that allows us to do is really to to placate might be the wrong word but it allows us to I guess placate ourselves and really enjoy certain experiences but it also allows us to talk to each other in new fascinating ways I remember I don't know if it was Joe Rogan who said this but he said that someone had mentioned to him of course that you know because this is a ideas floating around that talking to each other is like a form of telepathy right and it is a new form of telepathy it's a new form of I create an experience that you're able to experience and it's a way of sharing
Starting point is 01:00:31 brain information basically right well yeah and of course that's the you know down the line that's it's not just sharing brain information I'm sure you've seen those MRI scans of people dreaming where they can pick images out of whatever their mind is generating and you you know I don't know if you saw the amazing it was just on Reddit yesterday that they mapped all neural functioning of what are those nematites those tiny little they basically work on the brains of nema I don't know if they're nematodes or nematites nema something's little slug things a tiny little brains in a very small amount of neurons the idea being if you can map those neurons and understand what a brain looks like as it's lighting up then maybe you could like eventually get to
Starting point is 01:01:13 mapping fundamentally they're not reproducing you know memories or consciousness but the so you know you can watch this little thing's brain work you can watch its neurons light up and it's very organic looking you're seeing a tiny little creature think and you watch this kind of interesting pulsation of light through its watching an electrical storm in a cloud that's it yeah so you take that apply it to a human mind being mapped and now you have this ability to like see the it's not going to be these goggles for a long man it's like obviously this moves into like contacts or something or some kind of tiny glasses well yeah and I think probably by the year 2035 we'll have like direct neural interfaces where you don't even be on contacts so that's
Starting point is 01:02:00 where you have to know a lot about the brain to get to that point but yeah but now when that happens now what you have is subscriptions to these very specific design or reality people are making so that it's like when you go to Central Park you can go and experience since the Central Park experience according to um you know I'm trying to think of some weird hacker name like Zerzen well they already got Zs and then they got Mohawks and shit yeah but like so suddenly when you you tune you tune into what frequency of life you want to experience so now Central Park is not just Central Park it's Central Park with the addition of all these um of whatever the artist or creator behind it wants to wants to make it so like a new environment and new like have like NPCs in there yeah because
Starting point is 01:02:45 I don't you are saying it's not that you go into this thing for a little while and then take it off it's that you put the thing on and you're constantly wearing it and you're always existing in whatever reality you want to exist that would be that would be the ultimate AR kind of experience it could be VR too it could be 100% VR yeah but yeah it's slightly different but I see what you're saying with the tracking I will you could just you could look around and and you'd have full positional tracking anywhere you want it's like those zombie games so the zombies pop up when you're wearing the glasses you could walk into your house and then it'll look like zombies are bursting through your windows and usually back to zombies but that's just the easiest example
Starting point is 01:03:21 I'll tell you why simple people know what zombies are makes sense and zombies work because they're very very very interactive and that's the most important thing actually the more interactive these systems are the more immersive they are and the more interactive they are usually that more the tire more tired you get doing them and the more kind of you know you go through the more quickly so I think what that means to James and I is that there is going to be you know like you're going to go into something for two hours and then you're going to be like wow that was that was super intense because the more intense you make it the more the more immersive it feels and the better you feel going into it so there's definitely a synergy between them yeah you're not going to
Starting point is 01:03:52 go into a virtual world for 10 hours just sit there and be like wow I'm somewhere else like that's fucking boring you're gonna what have you ever played world of warcraft yeah but I mean world of warcraft is considered pissing myself instead of getting up when I was addicted but you're doing but you're addicted to once again like fuck that I'd rather be I'd rather have something that is much more and I love world of warcraft but I want something that's much more immersive than world of warcraft where you feel like you're actually there like you know really visceral actions in moments where you're like you know you're just fighting or the world is very very like granular like you can reach your hand down and pick up some dirt from the ground and there's
Starting point is 01:04:25 dirt in your hand and you can drop it you can toss it you can just something like that right it's not even you know we're talking about very small granular things and something like world of warcraft just has enough systems to get you addicted yeah and you see that number going up and you're like I gotta play for another hour to it so the number goes up a little more and I mean you've this dream of having the ultimate raid and it's really gonna be really fun but you know I got all the guys together and there's always it's always gonna happen tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow tomorrow and that's uh you know kind of an addictive uh you know design for a gameplay cycle and honestly screw that like I want something that's super fun super intense and I do it for a few
Starting point is 01:04:56 hours and I got out of it I'm like damn that was fucking fun right you know you're not addicted to going on roller coasters or like a sport I think it's like I played basketball for a few hours it's the best thing you can do well that's the other that's the other cool thing about this is it's like you know if somehow world of warcraft actually involved realistically using weapons to fight oh my god so you'd have the addiction and the immersion factor combined you'd have the education factor which is that suddenly you would we everyone all these people who are like currently are like only good at moving a mouse around and pressing like the buttons on their keyboard and their muscles of atrophy and everything are they're becoming trained to become like like warriors
Starting point is 01:05:38 like if you're playing call of duty on this device that you just showed me and somehow you figure out a way to like have a weapon that matches the weight of a weapons that there's an actual correlation between the weapon and the weapon in the real world then at the end of a campaign of call of duty not only have you won this game but you're now a really good sniper and you have that's a that's a very good point basically when you start removing abstractions what that means is that when you get good at something in a game or a virtual world you're actually getting closer to being good at it kind of yeah it's like it's like playing rock band and then playing a real guitar i'm not saying you're gonna be good at playing a real guitar playing rock band but you're probably better at
Starting point is 01:06:14 playing a real guitar after that than you would pressing a button on a small controller yeah or or doing actually you have an understanding yeah you have a little more muscle memory so you're getting closer and closer muscle wise and body movement wise to the real thing and then you're right this is this is really training people and this is why when you were i i know in the beginning i was being sinister and everything i don't see this as a parasite i see i don't see it as a parasitic relationship i see it as a symbiosis because yeah what's happening is there's a an exchange happening between if you look at technology is another form of life you could see there's like a valuable exchange happening which is that we are bringing this thing into the universe
Starting point is 01:06:50 eventually ai will there will be like a sentient artificial intelligence that we created that we built we're we are creating this life and in exchange for us bringing this thing into the world being the sort of midwife of this new technological being that is poking its head into this dimension in exchange what it's giving us is the ability not only to exist in any time period that we want to or experience anything that we can think it's also going to teach us to do things in this dimension too that normally we would never know how to do it's allowing man to become god i mean i said you know man is created in gods and that i believe in god i really don't but um you know it's a great concept and the concept of man essentially becoming something that is all powerful that can create that
Starting point is 01:07:37 can do all these things technology is you're right it's kind of that symbiosis well and we're talking about really large timescale here oh yeah this is going to be next week coming out from servio so you can you open god but here's here's a here's a here's a really funny thing that was proposed that way here's a funny thing though what you just said is it's a pretty large timescale but what you didn't say is that's not going to happen right and there is an amazing thing when you pause for a moment and realize that it's like well even if it's a hundred years from now the idea that humans are going to be able to become experts at anything and train in situations that no one could ever train minus the danger so now you have this like what do you want to learn do you
Starting point is 01:08:22 want to learn like you want to become bruce lee level you can and that's a that's a really wild thing to consider and that's why if i was you guys i would feel if i were you guys subject is what that if i were you guys i would feel a weird sense of responsibility i would feel but you guys but it seems like you're you're like i just want to have fun man why are you like why are you creating painting this picture but really what you're doing is you're part of this region of humans who are constructing the techno messiah wow and here we are that's the that is the grand conclusion to that that's really interesting i did not see that coming yeah isn't it an odd thing and that's why when i was at that conference
Starting point is 01:09:12 what you realize and also the party where we talked yeah one thing that you take one thing that you feel is not just like it's not like you're at a convention a vacuum cleaner uh engineer convention i don't even know if those happen but if i was really really those conventions those conventions with vacuum cleaner guys are wild okay they are they're up all night no seriously i would just imagine that it would just be the hotel would just be raining vacuum cleaner engineers here just wanted to die to get out of the convention throwing themselves out of windows you you get what what the feeling was more there's a spiritual component to it there's a feeling that you guys all share which is that it's a weird sense of exhilaration or this combined feeling
Starting point is 01:10:00 that what you're making is one of the biggest things that's popped out of this planet since electricity you know there's an extra component to it this sense of like i imagine that oppenheimer fucking felt that way when they uh began to realize that the atomic bomber splitting the atom was an actual potentiality i imagine the feeling was like oh shit it's like it's you know i think the the best way to describe it is you know with um the things that are on the edge of reality that are cutting edge you know you're constantly uh you know i feel imagine there's a wall around you right and that wall hides the other things that we can uh you know experience or discover every now and then you chip away at that wall a little bit a little tiny bit of light shines
Starting point is 01:10:42 through and you kind of peek through oppenheimer when they split the atom it's like he like opened a door and he was like fuck there's like a lot yeah there's like way you know he was a lot more and that happens every now and then every now and then you know we're not really doing much the wall is kind of standing there and then every now and then a little piece of it breaks off and like fuck you know we just we just found this little part sorry for those paying attention and playing that at home don't curse but i don't know yeah there's a podcast we just discovered the Higgs bosons and now it's like okay yeah you might know the origins of the universe that one was like they were like they were tinkering with that for a while and then they i don't know the Higgs boson is
Starting point is 01:11:15 like or every once in a while the necromancer opens a portal that he can't shut oh yeah that's right that's right isn't like the story of it all that's all he's going to the necromancer yes yeah so maybe that's what this is you know some people say that this technology is an actual transmission coming from some uh super intelligent alien being and the way it communicates is not by flying shiny crafts down and like you know showing farmers uh high tech stuff but it's actually the way it communicates with us is by uh sort of teleporting in through us so the impulse to create this stuff that we think is just to make games is actually being possessed by a super intelligent higher consciousness that's using all humanity to transport itself onto this planet and it's probably doing it all over the
Starting point is 01:12:02 universe right now well this would be kind of like the transformers like they would come down like robots that's what i came here to learn okay well i don't know i mean whether it's without without or within i mean i don't think that matters that much so if you look at how life was created by you know kind of initial very simple proteins then it evolved from there i mean i don't think there's any really secret sauce that i think is just the way that life goes it gets more and more complex and i'll say this about things that we've discovered over the course of time a lot of discoveries that human beings make i think um electromagnetism is probably the biggest one that they're all they almost happen by accident or they're almost serendipitous with
Starting point is 01:12:35 how you put some of those pieces together and these aren't human things that we're discovering these are things about you know the universe and how it works so i think there's yeah and i it's definitely something that i don't there's no you know there's no this stuff isn't coming from without the stuff this is stuff that's always been here that we're putting together well and and all everyone's always had fantasies so there's all these things that are sort of like fulfillments of fantasies like why do we go to movies why do we read books why do we do all these things that are entertaining why do we look at art why do we experience all these different things um it's why do people have religion and envision a paradise it's because you have this
Starting point is 01:13:08 i think everyone has a fundamental longing to be someone else and be somewhere else yes and be anything and be wherever you want or imagine and fulfill your fantasy yeah and this is kind of like the ultimate step forward in that direction so now you have a technology that is actually able to give you that fulfillment it's yep it's the will to power people have the will you know you go need you i guess um the will you have the will to power and that's channeled through civilization you can't walk up to someone uh you know kill him take his uh his wife or girlfriend or whatever and kind of you know club him over the head start a war with people all the things that human beings did to kind of uh conquer each other and fulfill their kind of animal instincts you can't do anymore
Starting point is 01:13:46 so what happens is that gets channeled through typical civilization things you want to be good at your job and you want to go visit other places and you want to kind of do these other things and so everything you know when human beings started to become civilized and that neocortex starts to grow that's kind of what all these things have been channeled through so it's really the ultimate feeling to feel like you're going somewhere else because you can't you know kill each other right so or to kill something else honestly how many first person shooters how many virtual people have died over the years oh my god that's a great i mean holy shit right like one person one person yeah now we we play um we play payday two and i want to say we kill like 700 cops in one 30 minute
Starting point is 01:14:25 just paydays like you know left for dead is to zombies like paydays that with cops like you're just shooting there's four bastards too they're just trying to do their job but you know that's a great like once you know but then you got like the crazy electric dudes that flip out of nowhere like that's a cool number and when all games are in the cloud and that would be amazing to have some website you could go to that has the exact number of virtual people who died it's in the trillions it's trillions of virtual people that order a magnitude larger than that yeah yeah so much virtual death is happening out there and look at the need to kill from human beings i mean it's you know i don't want to point paint an aggressive picture oh yeah that's super i don't think that i
Starting point is 01:15:04 thought is one side of it for sure but it totally depends on what whatever the content is like you can have content where you're going in your you know you're fighting zombies or it's a horror game or it's like it's dark or it's just weird i mean there's gonna be plenty of that but you could also go in there and like have like a cute pet tiger or something or you could have like a little farm that you like you know there's it could be the whole spectrum of of any type of genre any type of game yeah well i'll say this it's not human beings don't like killing they like changing it's a very fundamental distinction people like to destroy as much as they like to create that's not like what a serial killer would say to an attack it it's not that i was killing
Starting point is 01:15:40 them i was changing no it's true what what kind of a radical change is when someone dies same as as a radical change when someone's born i mean what right you know having sex and killing someone being the two fundamental things that people seem to enjoy doing is two hugely radical changes right so really people once again like to play god they like to create they like to destroy they like to change things they'll change their reality so really that's what fantasy your video games all these things simulations movies well that would explain the corollary between you know geniuses and amazing scientists and the number of like crazy psychopaths are around the same really so you have you know it's because it's like the two fringes of like extended wow yeah
Starting point is 01:16:20 yeah standard deviations of like you know really hyper intelligent irrational to you know crazy psycho and whatever that's you can plot that on a range and you'll see people who are you know more really genius like the science of the world will be on one end and then like the crazy like um i don't know serial killers on the other side that's pretty much what it is it's so weird that those three people are sitting at this table to which one is rich i don't know i don't know you guys this is um what the work you're doing here is mind-blowing and it's i really am so honored that you let me uh take a look at this man it really has like it this is something that my mind is going to be thinking about for a long time um how can you do you guys go and demo this
Starting point is 01:17:07 stuff anywhere is there a way for people listening to get a chance to experience this um well we we're pretty much in like hardcore prototyping mode so our prototypes are changing a lot so we actually don't demo too often but um soon enough yes this will be a point where well we're going to be for us personally we're announcing a product in 2015 at some point 2015 so you'll be able to get this at fast buy all right well i don't know about that but you know there's it's it's all a process it's a product we're getting there all right yeah patience how can people connect with you um yeah well you can email us at uh info at servius.com we're on facebook as well we respond to we try to respond to everybody but there's just a lot of interesting stuff happening right now so
Starting point is 01:17:47 and there's vr conferences all over the place like vr la meetup sf vr meetup s v vr meetup there's all these different like los angeles silicon valley san francisco they all have come to california school's place in the world yeah well there's just vr's happening here that's kind of what's happening oh really is this considered to be a hotbed of vr it's kind of fun yeah well it's a lot of it i mean there's some there's stuff in the east coast too but um like mit's is great with their MIT media there's some stuff around boston uh and there's a lot of things i mean this is vr is really just global phenomenon the u.s.c. mixed reality lab's really big hub and there's just a lot of other hubs around here yeah well i'll have links to uh your site and any information you guys
Starting point is 01:18:23 want to get out there go to the comment section of this website thank you so much you totally blew my mind yeah thanks so much great next second yeah thanks for listening you guys this has been the dunkin trussell family hour podcast big thank you to nature box dot com and to warby parker dot com for sponsoring this show you can find those links in the comment section of this website see you guys around harry christina one and four car batteries this week and needs to be replaced let our professional parts people test your battery for free at o'reilly auto parts auto parts

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