Duncan Trussell Family Hour - SURVIOS
Episode Date: June 20, 2014Tech wizard's Nathan Burba and James Illif blow Duncan's mind with their amazing virtual holodeck! ...
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And after my recent experience at the Servios VR lab, I'm starting to think this entire
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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