November 15, 2021 • 41 mins
The gang talks VR, the metaverse and the first part of Facebook's Meta conference.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
What they sing my books, your grandmother, all of your
grandmother's wow, Garrison, my grandmother's dad. So that they're still
facebooking in the grave, I mean, thank god. No. I
(00:26):
think my grandparents briefly got introduced to my Space before
being too sick to use the internet anymore. They were
on a O L for a while though. Oh, that's
that's quaint. Yeah, they were on a L for a while. Um,
you know, it's uh, it's what I don't often say.
Thank goodness for louis body demandship. But at least it
stopped them from from knowing the horrors that were to
(00:50):
come in the digital age. They got they got right
off the bus before things got terrible. Yeah, that is
so friends, Romans, countrymen. How do you feel about meta,
which is totally what we're all gonna be calling Facebook
for now on for forever. My main thought, honestly is
(01:11):
that like the word meta, the past like two years,
the word meta has been ruined, both like pop culture
thinking it's smart and then ship like this, now that
a once useful concept has now been obliterated and we
can't use it, you can't be meta, and and the
fact that Facebook is attempting to use this as the
name of their company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't had
(01:32):
a conversation on even footing in his entire adult life,
Like everyone is trying to get someone out of him
every time he talks to anybody, so nobody would say, like,
you know, Mark met is a terrible name for a company.
But anyway, they did that, and they had a big
event about two weeks ago where they got up and
talked for an hour and twenty minutes about the future
of the Internet and what Facebook's vision of the metaverse
(01:54):
was going to be, all this all this very fun stuff. Okay,
so here's the thing. It's a bad idea, and normally,
like bad tech ideas are a diamond, dozen't and we
don't cover them on our show because this is a
show it could happen here about collapse, things falling apart
and the future and what's going to come next. But
in this case, talking about meta is actually really worthwhile
because meta is one example of how the people who
(02:17):
are kind of in control, or at least in control
of the significant amount of the world that we live in,
particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be
locked into. See the future. I think the thing that
like makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse
is an article from Wired by Matthew Galt, who's a
buddy of mine. He's a great journalist. UM. And it's
titled Billionaires c VR is a Way to Avoid Radical
(02:39):
Social Change. Um And that title does kind of get
to the get to the nut of it. But the
quotes in this thing are fucking wild. So before we
get into Mark Zuckerberg and his vision of the future
of the Internet and of humanity, UM, I want to
read some quotes from John Carmack. UM. So, John Carmack
is the guy he made Doom right, Like you had
(03:00):
overstate the the impact John Carmack had on gaming, Like
he invented the first like first effectively the first popular
first person shooter. He was the CTO of Oculus for
a while. UM. And he's very familiar with like three
D digital spaces. Yes, and he's he's very bullish on VR. UM.
And he gave a quote, well, not gave a code.
He talked to Joe Rogan during an interview in and
(03:23):
he said this, some people read this the wrong way
and react in correctly to it. The promise of VR
is to make the world you wanted. It is not
possible on earth to give everyone all that they would want.
Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island. People react
negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation.
You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically.
You can deliver a lot more value to a lot
(03:43):
of people in the digital in the virtual sense UM.
And that's one of those things that you can see
how a guy like John Carmack, who was again a
smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a
number of important things, could could convince himself this is true.
This is absurd, and I think what we see in
Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd.
(04:04):
One of the reasons that it's absurd is that UM,
like everything else, the people who are building the metaverse
have done, like what they've done to the Internet. The
Internet before Facebook and Twitter, in these like these behemoths,
UM used to be weird. In decentralized and primarily not
for profit UM. There was there was a period of
(04:25):
time in which like the idea that you would actually
make money off the Internet, like really out of like
content or whatever, was just silly because it was this
it was impossible to monetize. It was this weird, wild
like creative nonsense pile um. And you can only kind
of make money around the edges of it, but the
core of it was just just far too strange and
uncontrollable um, too wild and free um. And that's not
(04:47):
the Internet anymore because of the people. Because in large
part of the people who are trying to build these
metaverses and the idea that they would allow poor people
to have the same kind of resources as rich people
in the metaverse there, they can't let that happen. They're
not the kind of people who would let that happen.
They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing if
it becomes real. We ever have like an all encompassing metaverse,
(05:09):
every every moment of it, and everything you do in it,
everything you have in it is going to cost you money,
probably with some kind of bullshit subscription plus to adding on,
you know, like randomized cashes and other like you know,
lootbox type mechanics. Selling gambling the children is the business
model of the future. By the future, I mean it's
been happening. Yeah, it's the business model they want. For now,
(05:31):
I will state I think some sort of persistent virtual
reality thing will probably happen in some way someday. I
don't think any of these people. Part of why my
thesis of this is none of these people are capable
of making it. It's because they look at this the
same way like shitty app developer shitty like game developers
for Facebook look at gaming where it's like everything should
(05:52):
cost money, you should be able to pay to win,
and it's like, well, nobody likes that, Like nobody nobody
likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful.
And it is one of the games that comes up
a lot when people talk about the metaverse is Minecraft
and what made Minecraft hugely successful. And while you can
kind of plausibly see like, oh, this has elements of
a metaverse where you're everybody's building these gigantic, persistent things
(06:15):
that you can interact with and that you can make
these incredible and people made like works of art in Minecraft,
they did it for free, and they did it because
like nothing costs money. Really in Minecraft, if I'm not mistaken,
like you can make anything with nothing just by the game,
and then you have the game and you can build
whatever you want. Your equity is effort right, like yeah, yeah,
(06:35):
and it's like you know, like what are my friends
like learned computer science? So he could like, okay, create circuits, right,
he like he built a like functioning computer in this game.
It's like you can you can like it's it's like
it's pretty, it's pretty. Yeah, if you're gonna tell me
sometime in the future, virtual reality in the Internet is
going to get like so good and so pervasive that
(06:56):
eventually people will bootstrap together some kind of metaverse. Yeah,
maybe like that that could happen if it comes from
like a cyber like punk aspect for like emphasis on
the punk. Then so I can see this being a thing.
But the way tech companies are talking about this, that's
not how people use the Internet currently, specifically, like the
mainstream people. There's no way. Yeah, and there's there's a
(07:17):
few more like one of the things that Matt brings
up in this article is like VR is a way
to avoid radical social change. Um is uh like kind
of the one of the reasons why he's number one,
and I think where we should all be kind of
critical about how realistic it is is kind of the
present state of Virtual Reality, which is about one point
seven percent of Steam users have a VR headset, Steam
(07:38):
being kind of the largest app to try to monitor
like how many people are using VR right Like it's
kind of your best it's figuring out the biggest it's
the biggest PC gaming. UM headsets. Sales of VR headsets
did go up about thirty during the pandemic UM, but
that was kind of alongside of surge in video game sales.
VR headsets were already We're already boosting, and the pandemic
(08:01):
definitely it empercised that because it's like, Hey, I'm stuck
at my house. What can I do? Well, I'll buy
like a two oculus so I can you know, walk
around and fight Ninja's in my living room. And VR
is like real, Like VR is cool, Like it's I
have a VR headset for years. It can do. One
of the things that um I talked talking about, like
(08:22):
what it takes for technology, new technology to like go viral,
to become like endemic. It has some of that, which
is that as soon as you put one of these on,
most people, unless you're one of the people that it
makes sick. Most people if you put them put them
on and you show them the right thing, they're like, oh,
this is actually way cooler than I thought it was
going to be. Yeah. Absolutely, Um, So that is like
I'm not I'm not like has I'm not poo pooing
(08:44):
the entire idea of VR. Um. And there's there's there's
been some successes on like Half Life Alex sold about
two million copies, which is huge for VR, but like
also nothing for a video game Like that's like for
a big for a fucking Half Life game. That ship,
which just it just shows is that it's still like fractional,
which I don't think any of these people are kind
of missing. Um, but it is kind of point to
(09:07):
again the degree to which this technology would have to
leap up for anything like what Facebook where we're about
to talk like it for that to actually be popular.
There's a difference between developing VR gaming and developing this
metaverse concept which goes way beyond VR gaming. Yeah yeah, um,
but I so what I find what I find so
(09:28):
like doomed about this isn't the technology, even though I
think it's important to acknowledge there's a long way to
go just in terms of like how heavy it is,
how much space you need how not fully immersive it is,
you know it's yeah, trying to remove lighthouses, making it
more mobile. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of
stuff that control schemes are still kind of jank, like, yeah,
(09:49):
there's a lot to be done, but all of that's
I mean, think about the first iPhone, right, it was
like a fucking brick compared to the ship. Today, all
of that gets better, and all the first of your
headset compared to the ocul is too, it's like a
massive improvement and basically every way. I don't think when
people criticize this stuff by pointing out like how primitive
VR is today, I don't think that means anything. Um,
(10:10):
it is like worth noting, you know, it's current level
of adoption. But it's not people compare this to like
three D TVs and stuff. It's not that three D
tv s were immediately obviously from the beginning, nothing but
a but a grift um, because there's nobody wanted what
three really wanted, what three D TVs had. Like VR,
people do want what VR does, and eventually the tech
will get there. What's bullshit is the idea. And this
(10:33):
is why I think this article by Galt is so
good the idea that VR is going to allow the
poor and downtrodden of the world to have a slice
of the good life. And this is something Karmak is
particularly bullish about. Quote not everyone can have a mansion,
Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things
we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality. Now
the simulation is not as good as the real thing.
(10:53):
If you are rich and you have your own home
theater or mansion or in private island, good for you,
You're probably not the people who are going to benefit
the most. Most of the people in the world lived
in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose
if to be if they had unlimited resources. Incredibly deranged. Yeah,
it's out of its mind because that's not how VR works.
Like I have Like I can put on my headset
and load up like a nice forest, and it's not
(11:16):
it's not the feeling of being in a ford like, No,
that's not that's not how our senses work. So until
we can hack our own brains into feeling things we
don't actually feel, then it's not a thing. And we're
nowhere close to that level of technology, even just to
the degree that he's talking about, Like, yeah, you could.
You if you don't have a big home theater, you
could just like put it on and have a huge TV.
And which is a thing that VR can do now,
(11:38):
Like it's not good. It's like Garrison, you come over
to three times a week and we watch movies with
all of our friends in my living room. Like the
good thing about it, Like it's nice to have a
large screen. I have a big TV, but like your friends,
you're watching them react, like you're eating food together. You're
doing all this stuff that will never really be possible
(12:00):
in VR. I have a lot of respect for John Karmen.
He made Doom right, Like that's a third of my childhood. Um,
he's out of his mind now if he thinks that
that's like what people want, what poor people want, Like
you've been rich for too long, sir, you don't understand
human beings a particular type of escape. Like using VR
as that type of escapism is totally wrong because like
(12:20):
DR can be escapism, but it's not going to trick
you into thinking you're living in a mansion. That's not
that's not how VR works because you're walking around a
tiny room in your house and you can't feel anything.
You can like walk through cupboards, which is a great
way to play VR games is you can just like
hack it by walking into stuff. And they're working on
so the The article notes that Elon Musk is working
(12:40):
in a brain machine interface called neval Link. Yeah, and
who knows what I will say, that's a little bit
like the how how realistic all of those dreams are
um is questionable? That said, something like what they're claiming
it is will eventually be figured out. I will, and
it should. It'll probably probably should be destroyed. It probably
(13:02):
should be destroyed. Not put the chip in your brain.
Valve is really bullish on that technology. Gabe Newell is
the guy we have half life for. Like he and
he and John Karmack. If there's a mount rushmore of
like gamer dudes, it's they make. They make one of
the they make one of the better headsets. Yeah. Again,
(13:22):
like we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who I
do not think as a visionary. Both Karmak and Newell
are visionaries. Doesn't mean they're right, because visionaries are wrong
all of the fucking time. It's part of their job.
But they're both really, really fucking bullish on this. Newell
is a big believer in like the promise of kind
of what the neural link, the brain interface technology and
VR uh. He told I GY were way closer to
(13:44):
the matrix than people realize, which I don't think is
the case. UM. And Newell is the person who I've
just talked about like how smart he is. He is
even more out of his mind than John Karmack on
this ship UM. In an interview with New Zealand's one
News UM, he talked about his vision of the near future,
which is a world in which brains and computers interface
(14:05):
and computers can make changes to the human brain. He
called the human body a meat peripheral Jesus Christ. So
this is lost his mind. This is the This is
the thing about like VR and like the metaverse in
generals is over like emphasizing that we basically just live
in the meat space, and the meat space exists just
(14:28):
to make content for the online which is so and
the online space is the actual real space and we
just have to operate inside our meat space to make
content for that. This is like the way technology has
been progressing, the way tech companies have been wanting things
to go and it's the most dystopian thing that's going
to give so many people like disassociate of mental disorders
because it's not horrible. For like, I'm going to be
super interested to see people of my generation, including myself,
(14:51):
like how we developed mentally the next you know, twenty
years based on how kind of fake our lives have
been because of how much we exist and so allies
within this like false network. It's gonna be interesting to watch.
I I used to be really optimistic about aspects of VR.
I actually, when I was in mosle I filmed not
that like other people did this before I did, but
(15:13):
I was kind of one of the early people filming
like a a VR documentary of some combat of like
the Battle of mosle Um, aspects of which were aired
as A three sixty and a bunch of different like
TV networks UM, and I had this belief that, like, yeah, VR,
because the visual aspect of VR is so good, you know,
(15:34):
you know, even at that point SEEN was already so good.
I disbelieve it, like, well, if you could, because the
first time I ever went into a war zone, it
was such an affecting experience and I thought like, oh
my god, if you could somehow carve out this moment
of experience and like transmitted to other people. Maybe that
would mean something, Maybe it would like have an impact
on people. I do think it is possible in the
(15:54):
long Yeah, yeah, I think maybe we'll like we'll see.
The question is like, can you ever horror give a
sh if if you feel like horror games? The level
of like anxiety and some degrees trauma of playing like
a really well made horror VR game is incredibly intense
um and that's something that'd be done very well. So
I feel like that type of like surreal experience like
a war zone could actually be carried over to some
(16:16):
degree in VR to like change people's minds on like, hey,
maybe war is not good. Yeah, I mean that's that's
the dream. I don't know how much I still believe that,
but reading people like Gabe Newell and how they talk
about this technology makes me lose some hope. All the
headsets in here's another thing game Newell said in that
(16:36):
view Garrison, after calling the human body and meat peripheral.
You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes
were created by this low cost bidder that didn't care
about failure rates in r m as and if it
got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively,
which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it's
not at all reflective of consumer preferences of the human eye.
(16:59):
What then, no like funck like like they there is
some aspects of trans humanism that I like. I like
to change like body parts at will with like my mind,
but this type of stuff actually want to throw all technology.
I support the idea of Like it would be great
(17:20):
if when people lose their eyes completely from like shrapnel
or whatever, some sort of like degenerative disease, we can
just pop new eyes in there. Absolutely we start cloning eyes.
I think that's a great thing. But eyes are amazing,
Like it's the most the most impressive camera ever, We're
nowhere close to replicating the abilities of it. Is not
(17:42):
a low cost bitter. It is like they're imperfect, like
everything that that is part of the human body. But
like the break down said that he can't monetize it
the same way, right, That's that's his problem. He's also
talking about like, well they break down. It's like, motherfucker,
have you used a computer? You're Gabe Newell, life know
you've used a computer, like you want to talk about
breaking every computer I've ever owned. I've used Steam before, Like, yeah, Steam, motherfucker.
(18:08):
I like, I would rather have my eyes and I'm
wearing glasses right now. Go sucking egg. And it goes
on because he can't stop ship talking like reality he
(18:29):
talks about like in the in the virtual world he
wants to build, the real world will seem flat, colorless,
blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create
in people's brains. Um And, I want you to keep
that in mind, my, my, my dear friends and colleagues
as we leap now into the Facebook live stream. First
of all, I think would it be worth like explaining
(18:49):
to and we we we've danced around what the metaversees,
but for people who are totally unfamiliarly, do you think
it would be worth giving a general explanation? Will that
be covered in the Facebook thing that's kind of covered
in the because because this is Facebook building it. But
I think we should You're probably right that we should
give a little bit of context about like where they
got this idea, because again, Mark Zuckerberg has never had
an original thought. It's not um And And gave Newell
(19:12):
and and um, John Carmack have had original thoughts in
their life, but this is not an original thought from
any of them, all of them, everyone anywhere who talks
about the metaverse um is whether or not they know it.
A fan of Neil Stevenson, who wrote who wrote a
book called snow Crash, where the point was that in
the future, the world is a dystopian, corporatized nightmare. And
(19:32):
because things are, in part because things are so bad
and incredibly highly like advertised and monetized persistent internet called
the metaverse that exists all around us and it's totally immersive,
has come to dominate everyday life. Um, and it's a
bad thing. Like snow Crash is a story of like,
wouldn't this future be horrible? Yeah, it's not like, Hey,
(19:54):
this is a cool thing, but these tech guys read
this and are like, oh, yeah, that seems like fun.
But you could do that. Neil stephen Sen, who was
yet another person I respect, made one crucial flaw, which
is he gave the hero in his book a katana.
And because the hero of his book, um, everyone was like,
wouldn't this be rad if this were the future? Let's
make this be the entire future. It's a real tragh.
(20:16):
You need to abolish katanas, like we would save so
many lives. Honestly, you could probably make a strong case
that the Katana has a huge chunk of the cultural
weight that it has because if Neil Stevenson, um, he's
a big part of that, right, you know, You've got
a lot of movies and stuff too. But yeah, but
like the katanas punk kind of melding. Yeah, and it's
it's a it's a it's a very I mean, it's
(20:36):
it's a bit dated now, but it's still like a
good book to read. Like there's a bunch of silly
stuff like that. It's replicating a lot of other cyberpunk art,
some better, some worse. Yes, every worst cough cough Ready
Player one, yeah, and every like every not every cyberpunk
sense because there's people like Corey doctor O who do
some really cool shit. Um, but most cyberpunk senses to
(20:57):
some extent um borrowed for from Neil Stevenson's work. And
Facebook's entire idea is based on this. And so the
idea is that it is a persistent, fully immersive digital
world that interacts with the real world. So you can
be in VR hanging out with friends from around the
world in like a fake living room and then like
call someone and see like a video of them in
the real world. Is they're like walking to a concert
(21:19):
or whatever, and like talk to them and like make plans.
Like that's the idea, right. Um. So this video, this
face it opens with you know, you've got your your
little introduction in music and stuff, and then we see
Mark Zuckerberg looking like a fucking gollum um. Yeah. And
and the first thing that I really noticed about this
is that he talks about how we're all going to
(21:40):
do this together, meaning invent the technologies and use cases
that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile. Um. And
when he says all of us, this is not an
internal Facebook video, This is a video. The meta video
is heavily angled towards developers UM and investors UM and
it's been viewed by a lot of people, like twelve
million to date. But he's talking out like a big
(22:01):
part of what he's saying is that like the technology
for all of the stuff that we've rendered, because most
of what's rendered in this isn't game footage so to speak,
like it's not a game or whatever. It's here's how
it might look if the technology has ever invented. Like nothing,
nothing is like an engine or anything close to it.
It's all it's all speculative. What's interesting about this to
me is that he's he is saying we're going to
(22:22):
build this together and and sort of acknowledging that like
Facebook does not have the capacity to make this thing
they've dreamed about, but Facebook is going to own it.
So he's a lot of like, this is him tacitly
admitting I want to take your surplus value to make
a metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at
my own discretion, which is cool, it's great, And it's
(22:43):
also like I think, you know, I think if if
you want a sign of where this is actually going
and like the actual creativity behind this. Like okay, again,
everything in that video is a mock up, right. It
looks like dogshit. It's so ugly, it's hideous. It looks
like a fucking Connect game or like a fucking we game,
which is fine first, but I don't want to live there,
(23:05):
Like it's always weird in cartoony. Um. Yeah, so he
talks about and kind of laying out why he thinks
this is the future. Zuckerberry talks about how text used
to be the basis of everything online, but now like
photos and videos dominate, and that's a yeah, as that
change happened from like text to video to photos to videos.
The next change, he kind of frames it like the
(23:27):
the the the obvious next evolution is to what he
calls an embodied Internet, where you're part of the experience,
and that's the metaverse, which again that if you don't
I think that part has some true I agree. I
don't think he's entirely wrong there. Obviously that's not his idea.
Um oh, running out of time, Okay, thank you for
(23:48):
telling about the host and it's unlimited minutes. Great, thanks zoom.
Um speaking of metaverses, um, so, like, yeah, I'm gonna
I'm gonna flop onto a share screen and I'm gonna
show you guys a section from this from this video
think about computers or phones today. Now, since we're doing
(24:09):
this remotely today, I figured let's make this special. So
we've put together something that I think is really going
to give you a feeling for what this future could
be like. We believe the Metaverse will be the successor
to the mobile Internet. We'll be able to feel present,
like we're right there with people, no matter how far
(24:30):
apart we actually are. Okay, so I'm pausing it here
because I want you to watch this. The room that
Mark Zuckerbergin is in, he's not in the metaverse yet,
he's in like a house. I think it's supposed to
be his house. It is clearly not a place human
beings with it has been set dressed. Um. One of
the ways you can tell is that all of the
books in picture frames on the bookcase are like the
same flat tones because they're not meant to stand out there,
(24:53):
meant to blend in and very telling Lee this is
what's interesting to me. As soon as he steps into
the frame where he's going to announce this, the thing
that is directly next to his head is the only
thing that's not like the same kind of baige as everything.
It's a bottle of barbecue sauce that's being used as
the book ind to a bunch of books now Meta.
Immediately after this, like people joked about it online and
(25:14):
Meta started tweeting about it and like trying to make
like jokes about oh, Mark just loves his you know,
his his barbecue so much, like they tried to turn
it into a meme because they think it's humanizing and
and and kind of one aspect of the meme they
were putting together is that like, oh, he just forgot
to you know, he just he's he's so into barbecue
that he leaves his saucer. That was put there on
(25:34):
someone's orders, Like that was it was to create me.
We're seeing we're seeing marvel dis as well. They're releasing
promotional images specifically designed to be turned into memes, and
it doesn't work because it's so obvious, like because we'd
be like, you know, yeah, we're not going to use
this because it's it's a it's a dogshit horrible like
horrible cinematography, bad colors. It's not a fun meme. But
(25:55):
people did fall for the Mark Zuckerberg thing, uh like
oh look at the barbecue thoughts. But yeah, that was
intention to create like a viral thing to trip. Yeah, anyway,
I'm gonna let Mark continue here. After I made my
little point. When I send my parents a video of
my kids, they're gonna feel like they're right in the
moment with us, not peering through a little window. When
(26:15):
you play a game with your friends, you'll feel like
you're right there together in a different world, not just
on your computer by yourself. And when you're in a
meeting in the metaverse, it'll feel like you're right in
the room together, making eye contact, having a shared sense
of space, and not just looking at a grid of faces.
So that's important because a big aspect of what he's
(26:37):
trying to sell here, why he's he's trying to convince
people that this is a real thing, is that it's
a bumb for loneliness. Right. Um, he is, he is,
and he's one of people who's responsible for for pushing
our society to such an atomized and isolated direction. Facebook
propaganda has isolated huge numbers of people from their families,
it's um. And of course then there's just the aspect
(26:57):
of it that is the lockdown, which has isolated people
a number of a lot of which ties back to
disinformation spread on Facebook. But like, um, he's he's he's
selling this, you know as a this will make you
less lonely, will make you feel like you're all together. Um,
and it's it's He's specifically says at one point. This
isn't about spending more time on screens. It's about making
the time we spend on screens already better, um, which
(27:21):
is horseshit because as the Facebook papers make clear, Facebook
has repeatedly refused to do things that would have reduced
the harm of their platform because it would have reduced
the traffic that they've got. And I think those are
the kind of decisions you can Yeah, I mean, and still, like,
technologically we're still not there, like when when when you're
in VR you even if you're interacting with other like
three D like personas of people specifically, like vr chat
(27:43):
was very popular among like furries, and I think they
are Honestly the best example of what the metaverse could
actually be is how furries use vr chat. Um. But
even still that is very different, um than standing in
a room with someone in a first suit, right, Like
it's it's totally it's it's totally different. And metaverses and
this type of thing, I don't think we'll actually solve alienation.
(28:04):
I don't think. No, it's because you're not actually touching anyone,
like it's it's not if you're not there's still that
that that digital fog between you and everything else. Do
I think there's some elements of it that could be developed,
specifically using a R that would make things a little
bit cool. Yeah, uh, but it's not going to solve
alienation as a concept. In fact, it could actually make
(28:24):
it worse. It could make it worse. Like again, there's
some use cases for I don't know, people who have
like a l S. Maybe you could develop some sort
of rig that would allow them to interact like yeah,
more with with people around them, and like that could
be useful for those people. But like, it is not
a societal answer to loneliness. And I think one thing
that makes that clear is you look at their vision
of home spaces. So this is kind of the center
(28:44):
of the of the metaverse they want to build, is
everybody has their little digital home um that you can
set up and you can design to your liking, and
you can buy things like n f t s to
decorate it. This becomes a big part of the pitch
that like n f t s are going to be
in it, and like that way you know that they
have at one point, like somebody buys like an autographed
poster for a metaverse concert that's an n f T
(29:05):
and they get to put it in their room and
know that it's the only one of those posters or something,
which is the dumbest thing I can imagine. Um, maybe
it'll work. I don't know. I I don't really see
how that's any different from an n f T being
revolutionary case than like, you know, being able to buy
something in a fucking video game. No, it's it's the
(29:26):
way people already hate to do. Yeah, it's it's just
skins or whatever, bullshit cosmetic stuff. I want to number.
One of the things that's entertaining about this is how
bad a lot of the act is for all the
(29:46):
money and time they have. Like Mark Zuckerberg is a
ship presenter, and and this bit where he tries to
explain why the home space is so cool? Um, and
it shows you like their home spaces. It starts about
four thirty on the video of pople at home. When
I watch is just a perfect, perfect encapsulation of like
how inhuman this this world they want to build really
feels what even when they try to present it in
(30:08):
its best face? Okay, Mark, Hey, what's going on? Who
We're floating in space? Made this place? That's awesome, right,
It's from the creator I met in l Ah. This
place is amazing that you of course it's me. You know,
I had to do the robot man. I thought I
was supposed to be the robot. Whoa, I knew you
(30:33):
were bluffing. Where is Naomi? Let's call her Naomi? Hey,
should we deal you in? Sorry I'm running late, but
you've got to see what we're checking out. There's an
artist going around Soho hiding a r pieces for people
to find. Really street art, that's cool. So I wanted
(30:57):
to stop here because this is also part of like
what it's this perfect It's like n f T culture
and all this ship, like the street art they show.
This is clearly them trying to be like, here's one
of these cool use cases for how the metaverse is
going to interact with and influence the real world. Like
this artist pastes this art on a wall that when
you look at it in the metaverse, or when you
you film it and you send a video to people
(31:17):
in the metaverse, it becomes this big three D thing
and it it just looks like ship. It's just a
bunch of like squiggly lines and stuff like it's not
like there's good graffiti especially in San Francisco, there's incredible
fucking graffiti. Um, this is just like nonsense. It looks
like it looks like a fucking n f T. Like
it's just this this kind of shitty. It was obviously
designed by a computer, not an actual person. Yeah, and
(31:39):
there's nothing like it doesn't say anything. There's nothing cool
about it. Um and they haven't again because Mark Zuckerberg
can't conceive of art. There's nothing about this that like
makes me think, oh what a need futuristic thing, which
was like, oh cool, I can see squiggly lines in
person and on my phone, I mean the big metaverse
and like a R and VR is like you know,
(31:59):
making depth within actually making two D space appear to
be three D space. This still looks too D like
it doesn't. It's not it's not tricking my brain in
any way whatsoever. Especially with the concept of like filming
it on your phone. We have the technology now like
that's not that's not the metaverse. That's just filming it
already on your little box, as said, And we have
the technology to do like that a R thing with
(32:20):
fucking um like with your Pokemon go did that like
five years ago and it's not what people want. Um, well,
Pokemon long time, but the closest we ever got to
world peace and it was the CIA. Still Pokemon goes
like the closest we ever got to like the metaverse,
like realistically, but people don't want People don't want to
(32:42):
like take photos of crappy street art that then becomes
three D but still isn't like it is. It is
incredibly grim that most of like the case uses for
metaverse stuff. The only thing they can imagine it being
is like fucking meetings. This is like the biggest think
that they show. He's like, oh, we can make virtual meetings.
(33:03):
They've tried that. The video that we just played. They're
all in like this spaceship and everybody's three D Like
one person it looks like kind of a hologram of
their real bodies. Some people are just like three D
rendered cartoons of themselves. One person is a big robot,
and they're all like floating in zero G and playing
card sitting at a table playing virtual cards, and there's
like a bed in the background, but like you can't
go in the bed because it's not a fake. It's
(33:24):
a fake and you're not floating in zero G, because
there will never be able to trick you into thinking
you're sitting in a in a in your chair in
a room with some ship on your face. You're you're
fucking Carl Havoc and trying to pretend that you're like
having a good time playing cards with your friends. It's like, yeah,
if I could have a space station house where my
friends and I could float around and play cards, that
(33:44):
would be sick. But you're not promising that. Are you
doing that? Um? I mean, like there is there is
games that simulate zero G. They don't trick you. They
make you nauseous. Sometimes it can be fun, but like
it's I'm not going to be in the same way
that eating her why in baby woodrow seeds can be fun. Um. Yeah.
So he goes on to talk about the avatars that
(34:07):
you'll have, which are basically he describes them as pro
profile pictures, but much richer because they're live, which I
find unsettling and part by thinking about what will happen
when people die to their digital avatars. But whatever. Um.
At this point he goes on to talking about how
people he thinks people are going to actually use these avatars,
and it's um, it's very unhinged one for hanging out,
(34:28):
and maybe it's a fantasy one for gaming. You're gonna
have a wardrobe of virtual clothes for different occasions, designed
by different creators and from different apps of experiences. So
one of the things he's talking about that is exciting
is that, like, you'll be able to have a different
avatar for uh, like work, if you're in a work
meeting or like hanging out with your friends. Um, And
(34:51):
to me, that says, like, oh, so now I'm gonna
be expected to like maintain and keep up an avatar
for like my job and like dress that fucking thing,
and then I'll have to switch to hang out with people.
And like why why does that? What does that provide me?
Being able to like sit in a room as an
avatar that I don't currently have, like through zoom? Like why? Why?
(35:12):
Is in what world? Is that something people want? The
only only good use case for this is Furries. This
is the only way it worked because they that has
almost like a true representation of their own body. What
what's this is gonna do for regularly, for like people
who are not Furries, is it'll probade people a lot
of weird like dysmorphia yea. Or if you're or if
(35:34):
your trends and you make a female avatar assuming like
you know, for me, if I was to make like
an avatar that's more feminine, that can be fun for me. Um,
But for a lot of people, these weird like digital
versions of themselves will probably they're just like Uncanny Valley
and it will probably make you feel weird. Yeah. Um.
And he's he's so focused on like this as a
(35:56):
way for people to work together while being remote, which
says a lot like It's seventh, like like about a
half minute after this point or a minute or so
after this point, he brags that your home space can
even have your own personal office where you work, which
is within the metaverse, within the metaverse, which is really
bleak to me. Just like digitally ruin your eyes. You
(36:18):
can goggles that long, your eyes get rude because it's
blasting light into your and it's it's also just like
I like sitting with a laptop, and I have a laptop,
and I have a second screen for my laptop, and
I sit at my comfortable living room table and I
write and browse the internet and research and stuff, and yeah,
every now and then like I hunch over too much
(36:40):
in my back gets a little bit sore, but like
it's not. It's it's pretty comfortable and I can get
up and move and do stuff in the house, putting
a bunch of ship on me and sitting still and
like being unable to perceive the world around me and
locked into this uncomfortable digital desk because it's later on.
Whenever they do there's this mix of you can see
the videos of the technology as it actually exists, and
(37:02):
they're aspirational and the aspirational version it's like you're in
this gorgeous three dimensional office that looks so you're playing basketball,
both in real life and in the hologram, which it
first of all just impossible, like you're never going to do,
never ever going to happen, just physically impossible. When you
see the clips of like what because they do have
aspects of this built, When you see the clips of
like the workspaces they have built, it's like, oh, of
(37:24):
my screen is the Microsoft word app or excel Um
as it or or Outlook as it currently exists, and
it is like the edges of this little VR office.
So all I'm looking at is I'm seeing a full
eye version of like whatever apps I'm used you can, yeah,
you can. You can get a airheadset, you can download
virtual desktop, you can bring your desktop into your v
(37:46):
into your VR space. It's not useful, Like it's like
it's it's novel for the first twenty minutes and then
you get bored of it because you realized that you
can actually see your keyboard, so you can't type of fact.
There's a great joke about this in the last season Community.
You take the best example of the metaverse where he's
like because like the big part of like Epic Games
version of the metaverse is like interacting with like brands
(38:08):
and all your apps within a three three D digital space,
which is what the dean does in Community, has like
run to his email, which, yeah, like this is a
great example of why this technology is never going to
actually catch on for regular people because that's not how
they use the Internet. That you don't want to traverse
a three D digital space to get to your email.
That's that's asinine. Yeah, And it's there's aspects of it
(38:31):
that are asinine, and there's aspects of it that are
just thus just impossible. So like a big thing that
he's hitting on with this is interoperability, which is like
you want to be able to trans travel between different apps,
between different programs that different people have made, and you
want to be able to take like whatever items you buy,
whatever n f t s you have with you. Um,
And he's talking about like this will work in games.
(38:51):
This is a thing that like you've seen people talk
about with like the promise of n f t s
for gaming, Like you could get an item that like
is yours so they can't nerve it or or whatever,
and like it will travel for you from game to game.
There's a developer I follow on on Twitter. He made
the game Audios, which is about like a guy who
disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit.
It's a it's a cool games. He's a good developer,
(39:13):
doc something or other. He wrote a huge article about
like why none of this n f t's can't work
for gaming. Um. That also hits on like why what
Zuckerberg saying is impossible, which is that like, so you're
saying that everyone who makes a game has to has
to build in like a way to handle every single
item that you could possibly get in the metaverse and
everything that you're having, Like it's it's an unthinkable challenge.
(39:37):
Um it's and and like why and what if a
game shuts down? Right, Like are you saying they have
to continue operating the game forever and updating it forever,
even once it's no longer profitable, so that you can
keep using your eye Like no, it's just it's it's
functionally impossible. Um, but it's It's what's interesting to me
is he's talking about all this. He has to know
this is impossible when he does. There's all these scenes,
(39:59):
like you said, where people playing basketball, and like one
of them is in the real world and one of
them is in VR, but they're both playing in a
real world. And so the person with a with a
virtual ball, and it's like number one, how is the
person the real world? How do they feel that ball?
He assistant vague shit about like haptic feedback, which doesn't
work that way. Maybe there's a way if you're wearing
like a glove, that it could trick you into believing
(40:20):
you were hitting a ball or something, um like like
and not everyone's wearing headsets, like we're just we'll get
to that in part two the headset question. Um, but
what what What's interesting is that like a huge amount
of the coolest stuff, the stuff that you can be like, well,
that would be neat. Yeah. If I could fucking if
I could fucking play pool with my friend in Germany
(40:41):
and it would feel like we were both in the
same room, um, even though only one of us is
standing around a real pool table. Yeah, that would be
an amazing feat of technology. It's never gonna happen, um,
certainly not in any kind of reasonable time frame. Mark
knows that all that is going to happen. It most
is like a digital conference suite that like is damages
people's eyes and brains. Um. And he knows that, but
(41:04):
he's angry that Zoom beat him to the to the
punch when the pandemic hit. Um, And this is his
Like that's kind of one of the sinister things about it. Um.
There's other sinister ship, which we'll talk about in part two.
But you know what, guys, it's time to end part one.
This is enough for part one. Well, we'll talk more
about we'll talk about what's really frightening about a lot
(41:24):
of what Marks trying to build in part two, but
for right now, I want to talk about ending the
episode which I guess I just did Goodbye. It Could
Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
(41:45):
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here,
updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources.
Thanks for listening.
What they sing my books, your grandmother, all of your
grandmother's wow, Garrison, my grandmother's dad. So that they're still
facebooking in the grave, I mean, thank god. No. I
(00:26):
think my grandparents briefly got introduced to my Space before
being too sick to use the internet anymore. They were
on a O L for a while though. Oh, that's
that's quaint. Yeah, they were on a L for a while. Um,
you know, it's uh, it's what I don't often say.
Thank goodness for louis body demandship. But at least it
stopped them from from knowing the horrors that were to
(00:50):
come in the digital age. They got they got right
off the bus before things got terrible. Yeah, that is
so friends, Romans, countrymen. How do you feel about meta,
which is totally what we're all gonna be calling Facebook
for now on for forever. My main thought, honestly is
(01:11):
that like the word meta, the past like two years,
the word meta has been ruined, both like pop culture
thinking it's smart and then ship like this, now that
a once useful concept has now been obliterated and we
can't use it, you can't be meta, and and the
fact that Facebook is attempting to use this as the
name of their company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't had
(01:32):
a conversation on even footing in his entire adult life,
Like everyone is trying to get someone out of him
every time he talks to anybody, so nobody would say, like,
you know, Mark met is a terrible name for a company.
But anyway, they did that, and they had a big
event about two weeks ago where they got up and
talked for an hour and twenty minutes about the future
of the Internet and what Facebook's vision of the metaverse
(01:54):
was going to be, all this all this very fun stuff. Okay,
so here's the thing. It's a bad idea, and normally,
like bad tech ideas are a diamond, dozen't and we
don't cover them on our show because this is a
show it could happen here about collapse, things falling apart
and the future and what's going to come next. But
in this case, talking about meta is actually really worthwhile
because meta is one example of how the people who
(02:17):
are kind of in control, or at least in control
of the significant amount of the world that we live in,
particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be
locked into. See the future. I think the thing that
like makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse
is an article from Wired by Matthew Galt, who's a
buddy of mine. He's a great journalist. UM. And it's
titled Billionaires c VR is a Way to Avoid Radical
(02:39):
Social Change. Um And that title does kind of get
to the get to the nut of it. But the
quotes in this thing are fucking wild. So before we
get into Mark Zuckerberg and his vision of the future
of the Internet and of humanity, UM, I want to
read some quotes from John Carmack. UM. So, John Carmack
is the guy he made Doom right, Like you had
(03:00):
overstate the the impact John Carmack had on gaming, Like
he invented the first like first effectively the first popular
first person shooter. He was the CTO of Oculus for
a while. UM. And he's very familiar with like three
D digital spaces. Yes, and he's he's very bullish on VR. UM.
And he gave a quote, well, not gave a code.
He talked to Joe Rogan during an interview in and
(03:23):
he said this, some people read this the wrong way
and react in correctly to it. The promise of VR
is to make the world you wanted. It is not
possible on earth to give everyone all that they would want.
Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island. People react
negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation.
You have to make decisions about where things go. Economically.
You can deliver a lot more value to a lot
(03:43):
of people in the digital in the virtual sense UM.
And that's one of those things that you can see
how a guy like John Carmack, who was again a
smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a
number of important things, could could convince himself this is true.
This is absurd, and I think what we see in
Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd.
(04:04):
One of the reasons that it's absurd is that UM,
like everything else, the people who are building the metaverse
have done, like what they've done to the Internet. The
Internet before Facebook and Twitter, in these like these behemoths,
UM used to be weird. In decentralized and primarily not
for profit UM. There was there was a period of
(04:25):
time in which like the idea that you would actually
make money off the Internet, like really out of like
content or whatever, was just silly because it was this
it was impossible to monetize. It was this weird, wild
like creative nonsense pile um. And you can only kind
of make money around the edges of it, but the
core of it was just just far too strange and
uncontrollable um, too wild and free um. And that's not
(04:47):
the Internet anymore because of the people. Because in large
part of the people who are trying to build these
metaverses and the idea that they would allow poor people
to have the same kind of resources as rich people
in the metaverse there, they can't let that happen. They're
not the kind of people who would let that happen.
They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing if
it becomes real. We ever have like an all encompassing metaverse,
(05:09):
every every moment of it, and everything you do in it,
everything you have in it is going to cost you money,
probably with some kind of bullshit subscription plus to adding on,
you know, like randomized cashes and other like you know,
lootbox type mechanics. Selling gambling the children is the business
model of the future. By the future, I mean it's
been happening. Yeah, it's the business model they want. For now,
(05:31):
I will state I think some sort of persistent virtual
reality thing will probably happen in some way someday. I
don't think any of these people. Part of why my
thesis of this is none of these people are capable
of making it. It's because they look at this the
same way like shitty app developer shitty like game developers
for Facebook look at gaming where it's like everything should
(05:52):
cost money, you should be able to pay to win,
and it's like, well, nobody likes that, Like nobody nobody
likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful.
And it is one of the games that comes up
a lot when people talk about the metaverse is Minecraft
and what made Minecraft hugely successful. And while you can
kind of plausibly see like, oh, this has elements of
a metaverse where you're everybody's building these gigantic, persistent things
(06:15):
that you can interact with and that you can make
these incredible and people made like works of art in Minecraft,
they did it for free, and they did it because
like nothing costs money. Really in Minecraft, if I'm not mistaken,
like you can make anything with nothing just by the game,
and then you have the game and you can build
whatever you want. Your equity is effort right, like yeah, yeah,
(06:35):
and it's like you know, like what are my friends
like learned computer science? So he could like, okay, create circuits, right,
he like he built a like functioning computer in this game.
It's like you can you can like it's it's like
it's pretty, it's pretty. Yeah, if you're gonna tell me
sometime in the future, virtual reality in the Internet is
going to get like so good and so pervasive that
(06:56):
eventually people will bootstrap together some kind of metaverse. Yeah,
maybe like that that could happen if it comes from
like a cyber like punk aspect for like emphasis on
the punk. Then so I can see this being a thing.
But the way tech companies are talking about this, that's
not how people use the Internet currently, specifically, like the
mainstream people. There's no way. Yeah, and there's there's a
(07:17):
few more like one of the things that Matt brings
up in this article is like VR is a way
to avoid radical social change. Um is uh like kind
of the one of the reasons why he's number one,
and I think where we should all be kind of
critical about how realistic it is is kind of the
present state of Virtual Reality, which is about one point
seven percent of Steam users have a VR headset, Steam
(07:38):
being kind of the largest app to try to monitor
like how many people are using VR right Like it's
kind of your best it's figuring out the biggest it's
the biggest PC gaming. UM headsets. Sales of VR headsets
did go up about thirty during the pandemic UM, but
that was kind of alongside of surge in video game sales.
VR headsets were already We're already boosting, and the pandemic
(08:01):
definitely it empercised that because it's like, Hey, I'm stuck
at my house. What can I do? Well, I'll buy
like a two oculus so I can you know, walk
around and fight Ninja's in my living room. And VR
is like real, Like VR is cool, Like it's I
have a VR headset for years. It can do. One
of the things that um I talked talking about, like
(08:22):
what it takes for technology, new technology to like go viral,
to become like endemic. It has some of that, which
is that as soon as you put one of these on,
most people, unless you're one of the people that it
makes sick. Most people if you put them put them
on and you show them the right thing, they're like, oh,
this is actually way cooler than I thought it was
going to be. Yeah. Absolutely, Um, So that is like
I'm not I'm not like has I'm not poo pooing
(08:44):
the entire idea of VR. Um. And there's there's there's
been some successes on like Half Life Alex sold about
two million copies, which is huge for VR, but like
also nothing for a video game Like that's like for
a big for a fucking Half Life game. That ship,
which just it just shows is that it's still like fractional,
which I don't think any of these people are kind
of missing. Um, but it is kind of point to
(09:07):
again the degree to which this technology would have to
leap up for anything like what Facebook where we're about
to talk like it for that to actually be popular.
There's a difference between developing VR gaming and developing this
metaverse concept which goes way beyond VR gaming. Yeah yeah, um,
but I so what I find what I find so
(09:28):
like doomed about this isn't the technology, even though I
think it's important to acknowledge there's a long way to
go just in terms of like how heavy it is,
how much space you need how not fully immersive it is,
you know it's yeah, trying to remove lighthouses, making it
more mobile. Yeah, there's a lot, there's a lot of
stuff that control schemes are still kind of jank, like, yeah,
(09:49):
there's a lot to be done, but all of that's
I mean, think about the first iPhone, right, it was
like a fucking brick compared to the ship. Today, all
of that gets better, and all the first of your
headset compared to the ocul is too, it's like a
massive improvement and basically every way. I don't think when
people criticize this stuff by pointing out like how primitive
VR is today, I don't think that means anything. Um,
(10:10):
it is like worth noting, you know, it's current level
of adoption. But it's not people compare this to like
three D TVs and stuff. It's not that three D
tv s were immediately obviously from the beginning, nothing but
a but a grift um, because there's nobody wanted what
three really wanted, what three D TVs had. Like VR,
people do want what VR does, and eventually the tech
will get there. What's bullshit is the idea. And this
(10:33):
is why I think this article by Galt is so
good the idea that VR is going to allow the
poor and downtrodden of the world to have a slice
of the good life. And this is something Karmak is
particularly bullish about. Quote not everyone can have a mansion,
Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things
we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality. Now
the simulation is not as good as the real thing.
(10:53):
If you are rich and you have your own home
theater or mansion or in private island, good for you,
You're probably not the people who are going to benefit
the most. Most of the people in the world lived
in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose
if to be if they had unlimited resources. Incredibly deranged. Yeah,
it's out of its mind because that's not how VR works.
Like I have Like I can put on my headset
and load up like a nice forest, and it's not
(11:16):
it's not the feeling of being in a ford like, No,
that's not that's not how our senses work. So until
we can hack our own brains into feeling things we
don't actually feel, then it's not a thing. And we're
nowhere close to that level of technology, even just to
the degree that he's talking about, Like, yeah, you could.
You if you don't have a big home theater, you
could just like put it on and have a huge TV.
And which is a thing that VR can do now,
(11:38):
Like it's not good. It's like Garrison, you come over
to three times a week and we watch movies with
all of our friends in my living room. Like the
good thing about it, Like it's nice to have a
large screen. I have a big TV, but like your friends,
you're watching them react, like you're eating food together. You're
doing all this stuff that will never really be possible
(12:00):
in VR. I have a lot of respect for John Karmen.
He made Doom right, Like that's a third of my childhood. Um,
he's out of his mind now if he thinks that
that's like what people want, what poor people want, Like
you've been rich for too long, sir, you don't understand
human beings a particular type of escape. Like using VR
as that type of escapism is totally wrong because like
(12:20):
DR can be escapism, but it's not going to trick
you into thinking you're living in a mansion. That's not
that's not how VR works because you're walking around a
tiny room in your house and you can't feel anything.
You can like walk through cupboards, which is a great
way to play VR games is you can just like
hack it by walking into stuff. And they're working on
so the The article notes that Elon Musk is working
(12:40):
in a brain machine interface called neval Link. Yeah, and
who knows what I will say, that's a little bit
like the how how realistic all of those dreams are
um is questionable? That said, something like what they're claiming
it is will eventually be figured out. I will, and
it should. It'll probably probably should be destroyed. It probably
(13:02):
should be destroyed. Not put the chip in your brain.
Valve is really bullish on that technology. Gabe Newell is
the guy we have half life for. Like he and
he and John Karmack. If there's a mount rushmore of
like gamer dudes, it's they make. They make one of
the they make one of the better headsets. Yeah. Again,
(13:22):
like we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who I
do not think as a visionary. Both Karmak and Newell
are visionaries. Doesn't mean they're right, because visionaries are wrong
all of the fucking time. It's part of their job.
But they're both really, really fucking bullish on this. Newell
is a big believer in like the promise of kind
of what the neural link, the brain interface technology and
VR uh. He told I GY were way closer to
(13:44):
the matrix than people realize, which I don't think is
the case. UM. And Newell is the person who I've
just talked about like how smart he is. He is
even more out of his mind than John Karmack on
this ship UM. In an interview with New Zealand's one
News UM, he talked about his vision of the near future,
which is a world in which brains and computers interface
(14:05):
and computers can make changes to the human brain. He
called the human body a meat peripheral Jesus Christ. So
this is lost his mind. This is the This is
the thing about like VR and like the metaverse in
generals is over like emphasizing that we basically just live
in the meat space, and the meat space exists just
(14:28):
to make content for the online which is so and
the online space is the actual real space and we
just have to operate inside our meat space to make
content for that. This is like the way technology has
been progressing, the way tech companies have been wanting things
to go and it's the most dystopian thing that's going
to give so many people like disassociate of mental disorders
because it's not horrible. For like, I'm going to be
super interested to see people of my generation, including myself,
(14:51):
like how we developed mentally the next you know, twenty
years based on how kind of fake our lives have
been because of how much we exist and so allies
within this like false network. It's gonna be interesting to watch.
I I used to be really optimistic about aspects of VR.
I actually, when I was in mosle I filmed not
that like other people did this before I did, but
(15:13):
I was kind of one of the early people filming
like a a VR documentary of some combat of like
the Battle of mosle Um, aspects of which were aired
as A three sixty and a bunch of different like
TV networks UM, and I had this belief that, like, yeah, VR,
because the visual aspect of VR is so good, you know,
(15:34):
you know, even at that point SEEN was already so good.
I disbelieve it, like, well, if you could, because the
first time I ever went into a war zone, it
was such an affecting experience and I thought like, oh
my god, if you could somehow carve out this moment
of experience and like transmitted to other people. Maybe that
would mean something, Maybe it would like have an impact
on people. I do think it is possible in the
(15:54):
long Yeah, yeah, I think maybe we'll like we'll see.
The question is like, can you ever horror give a
sh if if you feel like horror games? The level
of like anxiety and some degrees trauma of playing like
a really well made horror VR game is incredibly intense
um and that's something that'd be done very well. So
I feel like that type of like surreal experience like
a war zone could actually be carried over to some
(16:16):
degree in VR to like change people's minds on like, hey,
maybe war is not good. Yeah, I mean that's that's
the dream. I don't know how much I still believe that,
but reading people like Gabe Newell and how they talk
about this technology makes me lose some hope. All the
headsets in here's another thing game Newell said in that
(16:36):
view Garrison, after calling the human body and meat peripheral.
You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes
were created by this low cost bidder that didn't care
about failure rates in r m as and if it
got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively,
which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it's
not at all reflective of consumer preferences of the human eye.
(16:59):
What then, no like funck like like they there is
some aspects of trans humanism that I like. I like
to change like body parts at will with like my mind,
but this type of stuff actually want to throw all technology.
I support the idea of Like it would be great
(17:20):
if when people lose their eyes completely from like shrapnel
or whatever, some sort of like degenerative disease, we can
just pop new eyes in there. Absolutely we start cloning eyes.
I think that's a great thing. But eyes are amazing,
Like it's the most the most impressive camera ever, We're
nowhere close to replicating the abilities of it. Is not
(17:42):
a low cost bitter. It is like they're imperfect, like
everything that that is part of the human body. But
like the break down said that he can't monetize it
the same way, right, That's that's his problem. He's also
talking about like, well they break down. It's like, motherfucker,
have you used a computer? You're Gabe Newell, life know
you've used a computer, like you want to talk about
breaking every computer I've ever owned. I've used Steam before, Like, yeah, Steam, motherfucker.
(18:08):
I like, I would rather have my eyes and I'm
wearing glasses right now. Go sucking egg. And it goes
on because he can't stop ship talking like reality he
(18:29):
talks about like in the in the virtual world he
wants to build, the real world will seem flat, colorless,
blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create
in people's brains. Um And, I want you to keep
that in mind, my, my, my dear friends and colleagues
as we leap now into the Facebook live stream. First
of all, I think would it be worth like explaining
(18:49):
to and we we we've danced around what the metaversees,
but for people who are totally unfamiliarly, do you think
it would be worth giving a general explanation? Will that
be covered in the Facebook thing that's kind of covered
in the because because this is Facebook building it. But
I think we should You're probably right that we should
give a little bit of context about like where they
got this idea, because again, Mark Zuckerberg has never had
an original thought. It's not um And And gave Newell
(19:12):
and and um, John Carmack have had original thoughts in
their life, but this is not an original thought from
any of them, all of them, everyone anywhere who talks
about the metaverse um is whether or not they know it.
A fan of Neil Stevenson, who wrote who wrote a
book called snow Crash, where the point was that in
the future, the world is a dystopian, corporatized nightmare. And
(19:32):
because things are, in part because things are so bad
and incredibly highly like advertised and monetized persistent internet called
the metaverse that exists all around us and it's totally immersive,
has come to dominate everyday life. Um, and it's a
bad thing. Like snow Crash is a story of like,
wouldn't this future be horrible? Yeah, it's not like, Hey,
(19:54):
this is a cool thing, but these tech guys read
this and are like, oh, yeah, that seems like fun.
But you could do that. Neil stephen Sen, who was
yet another person I respect, made one crucial flaw, which
is he gave the hero in his book a katana.
And because the hero of his book, um, everyone was like,
wouldn't this be rad if this were the future? Let's
make this be the entire future. It's a real tragh.
(20:16):
You need to abolish katanas, like we would save so
many lives. Honestly, you could probably make a strong case
that the Katana has a huge chunk of the cultural
weight that it has because if Neil Stevenson, um, he's
a big part of that, right, you know, You've got
a lot of movies and stuff too. But yeah, but
like the katanas punk kind of melding. Yeah, and it's
it's a it's a it's a very I mean, it's
(20:36):
it's a bit dated now, but it's still like a
good book to read. Like there's a bunch of silly
stuff like that. It's replicating a lot of other cyberpunk art,
some better, some worse. Yes, every worst cough cough Ready
Player one, yeah, and every like every not every cyberpunk
sense because there's people like Corey doctor O who do
some really cool shit. Um, but most cyberpunk senses to
(20:57):
some extent um borrowed for from Neil Stevenson's work. And
Facebook's entire idea is based on this. And so the
idea is that it is a persistent, fully immersive digital
world that interacts with the real world. So you can
be in VR hanging out with friends from around the
world in like a fake living room and then like
call someone and see like a video of them in
the real world. Is they're like walking to a concert
(21:19):
or whatever, and like talk to them and like make plans.
Like that's the idea, right. Um. So this video, this
face it opens with you know, you've got your your
little introduction in music and stuff, and then we see
Mark Zuckerberg looking like a fucking gollum um. Yeah. And
and the first thing that I really noticed about this
is that he talks about how we're all going to
(21:40):
do this together, meaning invent the technologies and use cases
that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile. Um. And
when he says all of us, this is not an
internal Facebook video, This is a video. The meta video
is heavily angled towards developers UM and investors UM and
it's been viewed by a lot of people, like twelve
million to date. But he's talking out like a big
(22:01):
part of what he's saying is that like the technology
for all of the stuff that we've rendered, because most
of what's rendered in this isn't game footage so to speak,
like it's not a game or whatever. It's here's how
it might look if the technology has ever invented. Like nothing,
nothing is like an engine or anything close to it.
It's all it's all speculative. What's interesting about this to
me is that he's he is saying we're going to
(22:22):
build this together and and sort of acknowledging that like
Facebook does not have the capacity to make this thing
they've dreamed about, but Facebook is going to own it.
So he's a lot of like, this is him tacitly
admitting I want to take your surplus value to make
a metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at
my own discretion, which is cool, it's great, And it's
(22:43):
also like I think, you know, I think if if
you want a sign of where this is actually going
and like the actual creativity behind this. Like okay, again,
everything in that video is a mock up, right. It
looks like dogshit. It's so ugly, it's hideous. It looks
like a fucking Connect game or like a fucking we game,
which is fine first, but I don't want to live there,
(23:05):
Like it's always weird in cartoony. Um. Yeah, so he
talks about and kind of laying out why he thinks
this is the future. Zuckerberry talks about how text used
to be the basis of everything online, but now like
photos and videos dominate, and that's a yeah, as that
change happened from like text to video to photos to videos.
The next change, he kind of frames it like the
(23:27):
the the the obvious next evolution is to what he
calls an embodied Internet, where you're part of the experience,
and that's the metaverse, which again that if you don't
I think that part has some true I agree. I
don't think he's entirely wrong there. Obviously that's not his idea.
Um oh, running out of time, Okay, thank you for
(23:48):
telling about the host and it's unlimited minutes. Great, thanks zoom.
Um speaking of metaverses, um, so, like, yeah, I'm gonna
I'm gonna flop onto a share screen and I'm gonna
show you guys a section from this from this video
think about computers or phones today. Now, since we're doing
(24:09):
this remotely today, I figured let's make this special. So
we've put together something that I think is really going
to give you a feeling for what this future could
be like. We believe the Metaverse will be the successor
to the mobile Internet. We'll be able to feel present,
like we're right there with people, no matter how far
(24:30):
apart we actually are. Okay, so I'm pausing it here
because I want you to watch this. The room that
Mark Zuckerbergin is in, he's not in the metaverse yet,
he's in like a house. I think it's supposed to
be his house. It is clearly not a place human
beings with it has been set dressed. Um. One of
the ways you can tell is that all of the
books in picture frames on the bookcase are like the
same flat tones because they're not meant to stand out there,
(24:53):
meant to blend in and very telling Lee this is
what's interesting to me. As soon as he steps into
the frame where he's going to announce this, the thing
that is directly next to his head is the only
thing that's not like the same kind of baige as everything.
It's a bottle of barbecue sauce that's being used as
the book ind to a bunch of books now Meta.
Immediately after this, like people joked about it online and
(25:14):
Meta started tweeting about it and like trying to make
like jokes about oh, Mark just loves his you know,
his his barbecue so much, like they tried to turn
it into a meme because they think it's humanizing and
and and kind of one aspect of the meme they
were putting together is that like, oh, he just forgot
to you know, he just he's he's so into barbecue
that he leaves his saucer. That was put there on
(25:34):
someone's orders, Like that was it was to create me.
We're seeing we're seeing marvel dis as well. They're releasing
promotional images specifically designed to be turned into memes, and
it doesn't work because it's so obvious, like because we'd
be like, you know, yeah, we're not going to use
this because it's it's a it's a dogshit horrible like
horrible cinematography, bad colors. It's not a fun meme. But
(25:55):
people did fall for the Mark Zuckerberg thing, uh like
oh look at the barbecue thoughts. But yeah, that was
intention to create like a viral thing to trip. Yeah, anyway,
I'm gonna let Mark continue here. After I made my
little point. When I send my parents a video of
my kids, they're gonna feel like they're right in the
moment with us, not peering through a little window. When
(26:15):
you play a game with your friends, you'll feel like
you're right there together in a different world, not just
on your computer by yourself. And when you're in a
meeting in the metaverse, it'll feel like you're right in
the room together, making eye contact, having a shared sense
of space, and not just looking at a grid of faces.
So that's important because a big aspect of what he's
(26:37):
trying to sell here, why he's he's trying to convince
people that this is a real thing, is that it's
a bumb for loneliness. Right. Um, he is, he is,
and he's one of people who's responsible for for pushing
our society to such an atomized and isolated direction. Facebook
propaganda has isolated huge numbers of people from their families,
it's um. And of course then there's just the aspect
(26:57):
of it that is the lockdown, which has isolated people
a number of a lot of which ties back to
disinformation spread on Facebook. But like, um, he's he's he's
selling this, you know as a this will make you
less lonely, will make you feel like you're all together. Um,
and it's it's He's specifically says at one point. This
isn't about spending more time on screens. It's about making
the time we spend on screens already better, um, which
(27:21):
is horseshit because as the Facebook papers make clear, Facebook
has repeatedly refused to do things that would have reduced
the harm of their platform because it would have reduced
the traffic that they've got. And I think those are
the kind of decisions you can Yeah, I mean, and still, like,
technologically we're still not there, like when when when you're
in VR you even if you're interacting with other like
three D like personas of people specifically, like vr chat
(27:43):
was very popular among like furries, and I think they
are Honestly the best example of what the metaverse could
actually be is how furries use vr chat. Um. But
even still that is very different, um than standing in
a room with someone in a first suit, right, Like
it's it's totally it's it's totally different. And metaverses and
this type of thing, I don't think we'll actually solve alienation.
(28:04):
I don't think. No, it's because you're not actually touching anyone,
like it's it's not if you're not there's still that
that that digital fog between you and everything else. Do
I think there's some elements of it that could be developed,
specifically using a R that would make things a little
bit cool. Yeah, uh, but it's not going to solve
alienation as a concept. In fact, it could actually make
(28:24):
it worse. It could make it worse. Like again, there's
some use cases for I don't know, people who have
like a l S. Maybe you could develop some sort
of rig that would allow them to interact like yeah,
more with with people around them, and like that could
be useful for those people. But like, it is not
a societal answer to loneliness. And I think one thing
that makes that clear is you look at their vision
of home spaces. So this is kind of the center
(28:44):
of the of the metaverse they want to build, is
everybody has their little digital home um that you can
set up and you can design to your liking, and
you can buy things like n f t s to
decorate it. This becomes a big part of the pitch
that like n f t s are going to be
in it, and like that way you know that they
have at one point, like somebody buys like an autographed
poster for a metaverse concert that's an n f T
(29:05):
and they get to put it in their room and
know that it's the only one of those posters or something,
which is the dumbest thing I can imagine. Um, maybe
it'll work. I don't know. I I don't really see
how that's any different from an n f T being
revolutionary case than like, you know, being able to buy
something in a fucking video game. No, it's it's the
(29:26):
way people already hate to do. Yeah, it's it's just
skins or whatever, bullshit cosmetic stuff. I want to number.
One of the things that's entertaining about this is how
bad a lot of the act is for all the
(29:46):
money and time they have. Like Mark Zuckerberg is a
ship presenter, and and this bit where he tries to
explain why the home space is so cool? Um, and
it shows you like their home spaces. It starts about
four thirty on the video of pople at home. When
I watch is just a perfect, perfect encapsulation of like
how inhuman this this world they want to build really
feels what even when they try to present it in
(30:08):
its best face? Okay, Mark, Hey, what's going on? Who
We're floating in space? Made this place? That's awesome, right,
It's from the creator I met in l Ah. This
place is amazing that you of course it's me. You know,
I had to do the robot man. I thought I
was supposed to be the robot. Whoa, I knew you
(30:33):
were bluffing. Where is Naomi? Let's call her Naomi? Hey,
should we deal you in? Sorry I'm running late, but
you've got to see what we're checking out. There's an
artist going around Soho hiding a r pieces for people
to find. Really street art, that's cool. So I wanted
(30:57):
to stop here because this is also part of like
what it's this perfect It's like n f T culture
and all this ship, like the street art they show.
This is clearly them trying to be like, here's one
of these cool use cases for how the metaverse is
going to interact with and influence the real world. Like
this artist pastes this art on a wall that when
you look at it in the metaverse, or when you
you film it and you send a video to people
(31:17):
in the metaverse, it becomes this big three D thing
and it it just looks like ship. It's just a
bunch of like squiggly lines and stuff like it's not
like there's good graffiti especially in San Francisco, there's incredible
fucking graffiti. Um, this is just like nonsense. It looks
like it looks like a fucking n f T. Like
it's just this this kind of shitty. It was obviously
designed by a computer, not an actual person. Yeah, and
(31:39):
there's nothing like it doesn't say anything. There's nothing cool
about it. Um and they haven't again because Mark Zuckerberg
can't conceive of art. There's nothing about this that like
makes me think, oh what a need futuristic thing, which
was like, oh cool, I can see squiggly lines in
person and on my phone, I mean the big metaverse
and like a R and VR is like you know,
(31:59):
making depth within actually making two D space appear to
be three D space. This still looks too D like
it doesn't. It's not it's not tricking my brain in
any way whatsoever. Especially with the concept of like filming
it on your phone. We have the technology now like
that's not that's not the metaverse. That's just filming it
already on your little box, as said, And we have
the technology to do like that a R thing with
(32:20):
fucking um like with your Pokemon go did that like
five years ago and it's not what people want. Um, well,
Pokemon long time, but the closest we ever got to
world peace and it was the CIA. Still Pokemon goes
like the closest we ever got to like the metaverse,
like realistically, but people don't want People don't want to
(32:42):
like take photos of crappy street art that then becomes
three D but still isn't like it is. It is
incredibly grim that most of like the case uses for
metaverse stuff. The only thing they can imagine it being
is like fucking meetings. This is like the biggest think
that they show. He's like, oh, we can make virtual meetings.
(33:03):
They've tried that. The video that we just played. They're
all in like this spaceship and everybody's three D Like
one person it looks like kind of a hologram of
their real bodies. Some people are just like three D
rendered cartoons of themselves. One person is a big robot,
and they're all like floating in zero G and playing
card sitting at a table playing virtual cards, and there's
like a bed in the background, but like you can't
go in the bed because it's not a fake. It's
(33:24):
a fake and you're not floating in zero G, because
there will never be able to trick you into thinking
you're sitting in a in a in your chair in
a room with some ship on your face. You're you're
fucking Carl Havoc and trying to pretend that you're like
having a good time playing cards with your friends. It's like, yeah,
if I could have a space station house where my
friends and I could float around and play cards, that
(33:44):
would be sick. But you're not promising that. Are you
doing that? Um? I mean, like there is there is
games that simulate zero G. They don't trick you. They
make you nauseous. Sometimes it can be fun, but like
it's I'm not going to be in the same way
that eating her why in baby woodrow seeds can be fun. Um. Yeah.
So he goes on to talk about the avatars that
(34:07):
you'll have, which are basically he describes them as pro
profile pictures, but much richer because they're live, which I
find unsettling and part by thinking about what will happen
when people die to their digital avatars. But whatever. Um.
At this point he goes on to talking about how
people he thinks people are going to actually use these avatars,
and it's um, it's very unhinged one for hanging out,
(34:28):
and maybe it's a fantasy one for gaming. You're gonna
have a wardrobe of virtual clothes for different occasions, designed
by different creators and from different apps of experiences. So
one of the things he's talking about that is exciting
is that, like, you'll be able to have a different
avatar for uh, like work, if you're in a work
meeting or like hanging out with your friends. Um, And
(34:51):
to me, that says, like, oh, so now I'm gonna
be expected to like maintain and keep up an avatar
for like my job and like dress that fucking thing,
and then I'll have to switch to hang out with people.
And like why why does that? What does that provide me?
Being able to like sit in a room as an
avatar that I don't currently have, like through zoom? Like why? Why?
(35:12):
Is in what world? Is that something people want? The
only only good use case for this is Furries. This
is the only way it worked because they that has
almost like a true representation of their own body. What
what's this is gonna do for regularly, for like people
who are not Furries, is it'll probade people a lot
of weird like dysmorphia yea. Or if you're or if
(35:34):
your trends and you make a female avatar assuming like
you know, for me, if I was to make like
an avatar that's more feminine, that can be fun for me. Um,
But for a lot of people, these weird like digital
versions of themselves will probably they're just like Uncanny Valley
and it will probably make you feel weird. Yeah. Um.
And he's he's so focused on like this as a
(35:56):
way for people to work together while being remote, which
says a lot like It's seventh, like like about a
half minute after this point or a minute or so
after this point, he brags that your home space can
even have your own personal office where you work, which
is within the metaverse, within the metaverse, which is really
bleak to me. Just like digitally ruin your eyes. You
(36:18):
can goggles that long, your eyes get rude because it's
blasting light into your and it's it's also just like
I like sitting with a laptop, and I have a laptop,
and I have a second screen for my laptop, and
I sit at my comfortable living room table and I
write and browse the internet and research and stuff, and yeah,
every now and then like I hunch over too much
(36:40):
in my back gets a little bit sore, but like
it's not. It's it's pretty comfortable and I can get
up and move and do stuff in the house, putting
a bunch of ship on me and sitting still and
like being unable to perceive the world around me and
locked into this uncomfortable digital desk because it's later on.
Whenever they do there's this mix of you can see
the videos of the technology as it actually exists, and
(37:02):
they're aspirational and the aspirational version it's like you're in
this gorgeous three dimensional office that looks so you're playing basketball,
both in real life and in the hologram, which it
first of all just impossible, like you're never going to do,
never ever going to happen, just physically impossible. When you
see the clips of like what because they do have
aspects of this built, When you see the clips of
like the workspaces they have built, it's like, oh, of
(37:24):
my screen is the Microsoft word app or excel Um
as it or or Outlook as it currently exists, and
it is like the edges of this little VR office.
So all I'm looking at is I'm seeing a full
eye version of like whatever apps I'm used you can, yeah,
you can. You can get a airheadset, you can download
virtual desktop, you can bring your desktop into your v
(37:46):
into your VR space. It's not useful, Like it's like
it's it's novel for the first twenty minutes and then
you get bored of it because you realized that you
can actually see your keyboard, so you can't type of fact.
There's a great joke about this in the last season Community.
You take the best example of the metaverse where he's
like because like the big part of like Epic Games
version of the metaverse is like interacting with like brands
(38:08):
and all your apps within a three three D digital space,
which is what the dean does in Community, has like
run to his email, which, yeah, like this is a
great example of why this technology is never going to
actually catch on for regular people because that's not how
they use the Internet. That you don't want to traverse
a three D digital space to get to your email.
That's that's asinine. Yeah, And it's there's aspects of it
(38:31):
that are asinine, and there's aspects of it that are
just thus just impossible. So like a big thing that
he's hitting on with this is interoperability, which is like
you want to be able to trans travel between different apps,
between different programs that different people have made, and you
want to be able to take like whatever items you buy,
whatever n f t s you have with you. Um,
And he's talking about like this will work in games.
(38:51):
This is a thing that like you've seen people talk
about with like the promise of n f t s
for gaming, Like you could get an item that like
is yours so they can't nerve it or or whatever,
and like it will travel for you from game to game.
There's a developer I follow on on Twitter. He made
the game Audios, which is about like a guy who
disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit.
It's a it's a cool games. He's a good developer,
(39:13):
doc something or other. He wrote a huge article about
like why none of this n f t's can't work
for gaming. Um. That also hits on like why what
Zuckerberg saying is impossible, which is that like, so you're
saying that everyone who makes a game has to has
to build in like a way to handle every single
item that you could possibly get in the metaverse and
everything that you're having, Like it's it's an unthinkable challenge.
(39:37):
Um it's and and like why and what if a
game shuts down? Right, Like are you saying they have
to continue operating the game forever and updating it forever,
even once it's no longer profitable, so that you can
keep using your eye Like no, it's just it's it's
functionally impossible. Um, but it's It's what's interesting to me
is he's talking about all this. He has to know
this is impossible when he does. There's all these scenes,
(39:59):
like you said, where people playing basketball, and like one
of them is in the real world and one of
them is in VR, but they're both playing in a
real world. And so the person with a with a
virtual ball, and it's like number one, how is the
person the real world? How do they feel that ball?
He assistant vague shit about like haptic feedback, which doesn't
work that way. Maybe there's a way if you're wearing
like a glove, that it could trick you into believing
(40:20):
you were hitting a ball or something, um like like
and not everyone's wearing headsets, like we're just we'll get
to that in part two the headset question. Um, but
what what What's interesting is that like a huge amount
of the coolest stuff, the stuff that you can be like, well,
that would be neat. Yeah. If I could fucking if
I could fucking play pool with my friend in Germany
(40:41):
and it would feel like we were both in the
same room, um, even though only one of us is
standing around a real pool table. Yeah, that would be
an amazing feat of technology. It's never gonna happen, um,
certainly not in any kind of reasonable time frame. Mark
knows that all that is going to happen. It most
is like a digital conference suite that like is damages
people's eyes and brains. Um. And he knows that, but
(41:04):
he's angry that Zoom beat him to the to the
punch when the pandemic hit. Um, And this is his
Like that's kind of one of the sinister things about it. Um.
There's other sinister ship, which we'll talk about in part two.
But you know what, guys, it's time to end part one.
This is enough for part one. Well, we'll talk more
about we'll talk about what's really frightening about a lot
(41:24):
of what Marks trying to build in part two, but
for right now, I want to talk about ending the
episode which I guess I just did Goodbye. It Could
Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media. For
more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
zone media dot com, or check us out on the
(41:45):
I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here,
updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources.
Thanks for listening.
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Robert Evans
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James Stout
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