taking your strongest position off of the table, then you're not going to get it. i think we ended up with a plan that didn't cover everybody. it covers many. and as i say didn't really think about prescription drugs are not as many people having coverage. >> host: bill press, great to talk to you. try to get back to you on that. >> host: nice talking to you. ..

>> those were terrifying steps. hello, everyone. hello. thank you for being here. that is great. i have never got a chance to do this and to be at a bookstore and a book event. >> join the club. >> this is your first time? >> i've been to bookstore events but this is the first like this. >> how about now? is this better? >> you know, as the world

becomes virtual which is, of course, a big subject of peter's book it is so interesting that we are starting to do things like this a bit in virtual reality and it is always so interesting to compare what happens in the real world what is increasing the happening out in virtual worlds. this is a trip. >> just last week i did a reading and q&a in virtual reality in a multiuser environment called rec room and i was holding a microphone and if i was not holding the microphone people were not able to hear my voice coming out of the speakers that were built into the virtual environment. what i held in real life was just a controller, a hand controller, i would use in any other way but by pressing the button i was gripping the object that was economy so was able to

pick it up and then there was the microphone and then it activated the pa system that is encoded into this room so for me it was just like i was here holding a hand up to my face and people were sitting there each one of you would've been sitting or standing at home with a headset and you had been looking at a stage for something that was cartoonish but still looks a little like me with a mic talking. the question and answers were just like -- it was remarkable. >> how many of you have tried avr headset yet? just about everybody. how many of you have done that one of the pc ones like the hdc five? >> we are in the motherland.

yeah, you have probably got an idea -- the fun question is and maybe it is more for me how many of you have done that in a social setting that is using one of those devices spoken to another human being in a virtual world? that is cool. >> numbers keep going down. >> peter's book 12 on the question of what will happen to us and what the world will be like and more as it relates to the experience of presence, of course, future presence and presence is used not only as this expression for making you feel present in another space or world by having your eyes and ears folded in a good way but for completely and believing you're there and there is this idea of presence which very much relates to my own work about making us feel like we are

together in a space. that's a big piece of this. >> absolutely. a shortened term or short version of telepresence which is something that may be a bit more widely known in larger technological circles in anything from working remotely in telepresence but it emerged recently and has been studied academically for 25 years or more under the term of presence but he began to become a fixed more explicitly to vr with the rebirth of the technology. there were other works used in the '90s when this first got our attention from a consumer perspective and people talked about the conversion moment is that being the thing where your brain clicked into believing in the virtual world that presence came back into vogue and there was always something beautiful

about that phrase to me because it wasn't about tricking you but about you are in one place and you are now in another. >> as you said when i was a kid i got the journal which was mit -- right? there was a journal -- when did it start? >> ninety-two. >> so 92 your crazy people writing a journal about this word and it was called presence. what would you say is different now and everyone is replete with for now about this the our thing since it's something that crazy people in silicon valley have been doing for 30 years now? >> longer, when you go back to the military and academic labs in the late 60s the first time someone tried to put a headmounted display in front of someone's face and a lot of credence is given to the advent

of the smart phone because all of a sudden you have these manufacturers reasons to make displays that were high-quality but still small and ongoing miniaturization of hardware so that technical side all of the things that weren't fast enough or too big to do in the '90s became not just cheaper and accessible but he could pack them into a small package. there were some labs throughout the 2000's because they were finding open source solutions to bring these things together and then what changed everything was latching on to the world of video games and that got people's attention. in 2012 that was the first time anyone heard the phrase oculist risk which is at the time was a ski mask and strap attached to a

bunch of duct tape and cheap magnifying lenses and it did not start there but that certainly made a lot of people's ears perk up. >> indeed one of the gods of video gaming at least my perspective as a developer, john carmack, famously he was the guy that worked on the -- john carmack videogame to wrote something or saw palmer's gadget and sent a copy and he said it sounds like it's pretty good but palmer put the thing, the only version of his duct tape masterpiece, in a box and mailed it to china or [inaudible] because of the got of gaming was blessing him with been interested. >> he famously had one of the people that was responsible for games like doom and things that

revolutionize the video game world because it allowed for a three-dimensional experience and he takes his headset in 2012 to the same game show he's been going to for years and years and showed a few people and word got out quickly that i wasn't able to see it that year and the next year when back there was a company that formed around the idea of the oculist and that is when i saw it. >> how many people were oculist when you got the demo of it? >> it was just me and, at the time, the ceo. at the company there were probably 15 or fewer people. >> amazing. >> the first five or six of them and tragically one has passed away since then but yeah, the first five or six or seven of them were responsible for in that single year bring this thing out to a generation of kick starter, early adopters. >> yeah, my own work having been

in virtual worlds all my life with second life i was not doing, i was not working on virtual reality at the time but the chips that are in our phone, as you said, came out there were capable of tracking the motion of our heads and i got one of these trips and hooked it up because i'm electronic sky and that is my background and i got bored with a chip on it and i turned my fingers on it and watching the trace go up and down and i could tell it was so accurate and so fast and so accurate that i was like, oh my god, these are what the vr not have wanted as far back as i can remember. i called my team over and said we are shutting this team down

and giving our investors money back and were going into vr. >> yeah, it all came together in 2012. someone like me who grew up reading stories that imagined, not just cyberspace but virtual-reality, and movies that is terrible as they were captured my imagination like johnny demonic, the movies of 18 years, i was captivated not just by how ridiculously palio futurist at those early headsets in those early suits helical they look from the outside but the rendition of what happened inside the headset i was completely swept away and despite that and despite the fact that in the '90s there were some rudimentary experiences to have i never ever tried it. my eyes didn't go into a headset and until 2013 and i felt like

that 15, 16 -year-old me all of a sudden would like right and not only that but this feels real and doesn't feel like sci-fi and went back to work and i said you are probably the believe me but the art is coming in they were like yeah, right, this is why and this is wired and we were very wrong so no, no, i think this is it and at the time it was based on video games but very quickly my excitement about what the technology was doing was shifted focus and escapism in game -based entertainment was completely supplanted by the idea that when you were in their someone else the emotional tenor of the experience changed irrevocably and that not only

was what you were doing vivid just like anything else was vivid and immersive based on solid vr technology but by virtue of sharing that the two of you my next experience the exact same thing but you are left with this incredible lasting memory of having done it with another person. anything you do in the are as a lot of you have done this may well know your memory of having done it isn't putting on a headset and sitting in a room. it's doing what you are doing in there and it turns out that your brain accesses the memories the same way it accesses real-life memories. it takes longer to access a memory that you've done in vr than trying to identify something you've seen in the photograph because it's buried in a different place and it's deeper. you leave with this incredible

memory of an experience and it is a shared experience so even game companies at this point, i think, have organized. it's hard to find even a game that is you buy yourself. >> let's unpack that. there are couple of great things and you have written about a bunch of them here. >> i can vouch, i see on the line and checkmarks and is that an angry face? what is that about? [laughter] >> the memory palace you write about memory and i think that that is something that i thought a lot about, too. this idea that we store our memories best their presented spatially. >> absolutely. >> that is what is fascinating about this vr. our ability to recollect things

is markedly improved by remembering them in the context of a familiar place. what is more familiar than putting this headset on and being in a space. we will lay out our screens around us, read our e-mail on the walls and doing that will improve our memory of things. it is fascinating. >> certainly, if anyone has ever read or heard from a person who is a competitive memory champion and i think england for did years ago but the trick to memorizing a deck of cards is every card you unpack and give it a different image. rather than trying to member the order of the cards you remember a series of events which is much easier people to do. add to that this thing called

embodiment that is the thing that i described when i did this reading in vr, a lot of the lightweight headsets things that are driven by phones and standalone devices if you are in a 365-degree video you are a disembodied camera. look around but if you look down you can't see anything. in the social world, like you built, and games and narrative experiences if you look down and see a body and just like i did you have your hands and you can use your hands you are not mediated your in there and doing the things and so we've always used these metaphors of control when we interact with digital worlds embodiment

your memory becomes that much stronger. then a whole lot of other things that we can get into because it's tricks you can play on the psyche. >> what about the space between us that you've written so much about. when he communicate in vr and, you know, i remember i remember jared cats -- >> i'm sorry, of what? >> of cats. it was a headset that was being used to study cats by presenting them with simple lines in images

in the 50s. >> that is the most -- >> yeah, but you know we use to debate how many bits a second are moving between us right now and that is the thing. what do you think is working and not working in terms of face-to-face medication in vr? >> i will say this to start out with not only to lack the technical knowledge to talk about it in bits but i think even if i did i would have skirted a wide berth around it. i'm a culture writer and i'm not a tech writer so what became fascinating about vr was a plastic experience and i can know what goes into it. like you said, you're an engineer and physics and all these other things so you made an incredible career out of

understanding the left brain and right brain part of this. i only have one and i don't remember which side of the brain it is. when i think about what we're doing now if were to be approximating this in virtual reality the only things we would really have in their being tracked would be our heads and hands and so we would be doing this and what i would see is you have your hand to your chin and you would be nodding your head. that would come through. your facial expressions for the most part would be approximated and neutral or based on the sound of your voice that might be given emotion in our bodies would be extrapolated. based on where your hands were in your body and the placement of your arms and maybe the rest of your body and some platforms say the lake, that is too much. you would have a torso and hand or two so head and arms and hands. right now we're dealing with

what we can muster the ability to render but what is remarkable is how many gaps your brain fills in. that's a good example. there are some early orientation demos that manufactures have said we put on their headsets for the first time in your standing in front of a mere and what you are changes. it could be a red balloon or a skeleton but no matter what it is if you are turning your head and tilting it and your reflection is doing that you will see yourself in a featureless balloon or in a skull and you'll see yourself in a metal son icon. it does not take much for me to see you in this assemblage apart because your voice is coming through and your mannerisms are

coming through. what you do with your hands when you're listening and the way you nod if i only knew you in vr and we were having this conversation and then we sat somewhere and were talking that would be like, of course, this feels natural. i feel like we spent time together before because the nonverbal comes through. >> you should relate the story of the people that you got a chance to meet after they had met when they first started to know each other in the rec room. >> great idea. i will do that. one of the -- is not the most ambitious multiuser but a popular one called rec room and when i first started connecting with people in there is a journalist and not just a someone who is terrible at playing paintball but i met someone who said you know what? couple people in my friend group

one will go visit the other and i said as a reporter that is exactly the thing i like to hear and so i spent a little time with these people in vr and the thing that struck me about them then it was the comfort they had with one another. these are embodied avatars so there was one moment i remember so strongly that we were hanging out in a neutral environment and it's a game room people can sit around and play cards were said around and there's a stage when you can play charades and there are these tools that you can use in there. i was talking to a guy in his name is ben and while i talked to him his friend, a woman named priscilla, she was taking post-it notes and writing on the post-it note with a pen in vr and sticking it to his avatar one at a time. should walk up to him and put another post-it note on him.

as time went on she had made a bikini out of these post-it notes and stuck it on this guy just. it wasn't just the shape of the post-it notes but what she had drawn of them was a bikini top. this very casual intimacy was already part of their relationship. it struck me immediately. fast forward a few weeks later and ben had driven from his home in cincinnati to alabama to visit priscilla. they had spent a few days together by the time i connected with them on the skype video call and there were two things about that that are still with me. when you do skype video call or face time with someone you are never looking at each other. if they're trying to look at you then they're looking at a camera lens and if they look at what they see of you than your eyes are always doing this. there is no actual connection.

something is lost in the mediation. not only was that happening between me on one end and ben and priscilla on the other but they were sitting according to the decorum of the real world and people who cannot spent much physical time together. there was an tiny bit of awkwardness that i could not see and i didn't know if it was because they were feeling out the early stages in the relationship or if they had regressed back to the social code of being effectively strangers but it really set into relief for me what is enabled in vr and since then i've learned that partially it was because they weren't necessarily the match they thought they might be an impact, priscilla ended up

marrying someone else met in the world and that is covered in the chapter in the book but we did an excerpt of the adaptation of the chapter in the april issue of wired and we made a much more about the wedding that that happened. it's the fast forward to this other relationship. if you have read that piece in the magazine then the book chapter is a prequel. if you have not read the magazine piece and read the book then you will get a nice coda at the end. it really is the thing that is true still from that very first time i saw this arise is that the casual intimacy is the kind that you don't get getting to know someone in any other space. we don't get to know someone in a chat room or a text message

chain on a dating app and you don't get to get it in real life. this is a third track of interpersonal relations that is opened up. >> the motion of the body is such an intriguing thing. were seeing it now as you watch for the bus but there were studies done by the sweetest researcher people in black more suits and put little dots in the darkness on their bodies and have them sit in chairs and be still and film them with the camera so we watched the camera playback was nothing but the tiny dots on their joints. then he would allow the people to move and if the person in the frame with someone you knew or in particular, your spouse, only later did these tests then your body would know within a fraction of a second and you can all imagine it that it was

someone you knew or loved and you're close to any saw them moving is a bunch of dots on the screen you can know like a cartoon that it was them and there's so much to be said about that. in second life here is the thing. in second life my before we communicated with text for the most part. there have been documentary films done about people meeting and falling love and i got to meet some of these people like the first time they met or near thereabouts in the real world and i did always find it fascinating that they seem to know complete the sentences just by the text. this leads to the question of is there some magic elixir your or some magic force which goes between us when we communicating that we are captures or were we making it up all along?

>> i really do think there is something special about what happens in an embodied virtual environment. it is because i think it is a happy medium between the anonymity of the internet as we have all known it and the constraints and hesitations of real life. unbridled anonymity is incredible and that is what the internet was built on. could be anyone we want and have a conversation and because there is time to type and consider your answers were able to the person you really want to present to this world for these people. you are effectively curating yourself. we all like to think that we are presenting the best version of herself but you have that happening and then what is also happening is because everyone is

what they are your behind the screens disclosure comes fast. if you feel comfortable with these people is easy to spill your guts but then you meet them in real life and you realize that you would not know their dots. you are not know their blackouts so you would know them. you don't know their mannerisms. then in real life when you meet someone when you get about them immediately is there rhythms but what you don't get is the true personality because that could be nurse or being on your best behavior or social niceties or whatever it is. it is highly likely that a person is just not disclosing and it's hard to be portable when you meet someone in real life and give them we really are. at the same time if you take the time to get to know someone in real life that leads to, as well

no, incredible connections. so, in between these two panels you have this entirely other cadence of relationship. there's a degree of anonymity and you can choose your name and make your avatar look the way you wanted to because you're talking because your gestures articulated it is almost impossible to really cover you are. you can think you're presenting the vessel for your essence will come out because of having real-time interactions with these people. because of that degree of anonymity you have you might feel more confident than you would in the real world. you have a little bit of feeling emboldened and you have the real you and you have nonverbal medications and mannerisms and when you put that together what that means is you are winding this path between the two extremes that allows for

vulnerability and disclosure and intimacy that is suitable for people who might have anxieties going into that thing from the beginning. a lot of people i've spoken to who love these all the user vr experiences a lot of them attribute it to the fact that they have difficulty finding these connections in real life. there's nothing artificial about it. it's not going into a chat room and constructing of version of yourself but the comfort level and -- no one knows and no one will judge you because you are here and they are there but the rest of your brain is letting these things rise. >> it is fascinating that despite, as you say, the body motion and the boys being conveyed immediately to somebody else it is amazing how virtual environs can create this, i think of it as an indirection or, a bit of a t-zone that

allows you to be more present or engaged. when i start working on second life it was in 1999 at that time i went to [inaudible] for the first time. also struck by what in odd experience it was in that you felt very, very disarmed and willing to interact with people and so i was so curious back then as to why the social contract of an environment seems to cause me to engage and vr in virtual worlds is the same thing all over again and for me it was one of the things that makes me undying curious and optimistic about continuing the journey. something next to talk about let me say this, facebook in the last week has been a amazing and great material for journalist

worldwide. it's been incredible and of course we all been collectively worried about or even condemning technology as this destroyer that would simplify or stupefy us or bring us farther away from each other but what say you of vr? despite the fact that it is very technology focused for sure is it another great destroyer like facebook? >> it certainly can be and that is exactly where we are. there are every good site has a bad side and everything that makes immersion better and everything that makes intimacy stronger also has a terrifying dark timeline and i will give you an example. the things we don't have yet if you and i were in br together unless we were developers and have these add-on models in her head site is our eyes would not

detract. everything from a sloping to a wink to you looking over my shoulder to us looking at the audience that would be simulated based on where our heads have turned but if i turn my head we cannot keep eye contact because at some point my eyes would slide over in my avatars had to look straight ahead. coming as early as later this year we will see the first headsets that have i tracking built into them. it's amazing for a lot of different reasons. it is good for fatigue and a means you can look around and select things more easily than moving your head around. means it's easier to render competent environments because you only have to devote all the horsepower to where exactly your phobia are looking. but if your eyes are being tracked then all of a sudden your headset could be a collection device for the data that every advertiser has waited decades to be able to get. where you look, how long you look, after that, when facial expressions based on muscular

contractions and how you respond when he saw the stuff. so, something that is incredible for nonverbal communications incredible for intimacy also has a terrifying misapplication of it. similarly, casual intimacy that i talk about is born of physical proximity and personal space is real in vr and can also be used to traumatize someone effectively. every experience we have had with toxic behavior on the internet yelling at someone in multiplayer video games, sending them images, sending them to hateful things about themselves, someone walks up to you and sticks their hands out or just says something in your ear it is so much more visceral than anything we have had come to us via screen or even audio before.

now is the time that everyone who is building a platform like high fidelity, rec room or any of the others is reckoning with how to be stop the end of the internet from happening all over again. twenty, 30 years ago we prioritize growth and scale over everything including user experience and allowed these legacy companies or new companies to become legacy companies that took forever and behind them were like oh my god, what have we done or not done? just last year instagram unveiled a new program to make the comments nicer and twitter is still grappling with the inability to stop the speech and hate speech directed, not just spewing hate, but at a percent. everyone was working in vr has seen this movie before. no one wants the sql. what i feel positive about is that for every bad thing that

can happen people have seen it coming or seeing the potential for it to come in so whether that is building in user empowerment tool or whether that is recognizing the fact that we, at some point, is an anathema and there may need to be regulatory approach. cat fishing on the internet is a terrible thing. cat fishing in vr, i mean, imagine in the nigerian prince scam. someone pops up and says grandma, it is me and it looks like your grandson and they just want to make sure you got your bank encumber rights we can wire money and he's embodied and you are embodied in your in there with him and he would not break your confidence or trust but it is not him. fraud, abuse, harassment, psychographic data and user data been misused anything that we

are grappling with right now is amplified a million times is something as visceral as -- spirit but there are positives about. >> yes, but i bring this up to say identifying them in warning of them is an important thing. >> you can't get your phone out when you got one of these wonderful things on your head. >> this is something, the burning man story, maybe think of this too. it's that summercamp thing. last day of summer camp was like were all this in this together in the world world doesn't interest you. in vr with the amazing things about it in the early days and hopefully for much longer is the real world does not intrude in not and avoiding way but in the e-mail, select direct message and twitter notification. they don't come in. >> indeed, your section about meditation and meditation apps

and small teambuilding things mindfulness meditation and relaxation that are based on br. >> absolutely. the two really magical things going on is the ability to have visualization to a meditation practice that is a literal visualization. imagine breathing in and when you breathe out a plume of crystals and when you pre- slow and is your calm the color changes and you see yourself settling in. >> you could walk up to someone else and meet them for the first time and see their heart beating, i suppose, if they wanted to let you. >> i was going to say that sounds intrusive and it would be ideally but there is -- you can, in some cases, here breathing and so there is a chance not just for biometric monitoring but the back so you can use your

own vital cues rendered visually in whatever way you like to help yourself center. also, strip the notifications away and put yourself in an environment of anyone has ever tried to or maintain any meditation practice and you say to yourself i will sit for 20 minutes 18 minutes later finally, here it is. two minutes later, it's over. imagine spending 18 of those 20 minutes in a place trying to get to other than to. >> we should take time for questions, i think. >> we have a microphone. >> the microphone is -- there goes. >> there's something new to head on here if you have not already. >> they are filming for book tvs i want to encourage you to hold the microphone up and ask your

question preferably in the form of a question. i want to take advantage of this by asking a question and if you have a good arm, you can throw iraq and hit the stanford medical field but what fields will be affected the most? >> [inaudible] can be affected. medicine is already being affected and visualization which we're talking about a few years ago there's a pediatric surgeon in florida who needed to do a procedure on an infant, cardiac procedure and for the doctor when in that a virtual reconstruction of the infant's heart and knew exactly where he needed to go to go in that time and he attributed his success after the fact to the ability they had to do a dry run in vr.

education. getting over the geographical constraints of bringing kids to landmarks in other countries and art resources. when we give these things to adults or anyone who uses vr in the early days, you and i talked about this, you will go in to a museum and you will say this is amazing and i'm close to this painting and then you look around you be by yourself and say what is next and then your hovering over this and you're saying it's amazing but what is next. that what next this goes away when other people are with you. you share the experience and that's what you go back to. >> the practical answer or a tactical one relative might to my own work is new games have been the poster child but yeah, they been the opening shot of vr and friendly, overall they are

not done that well. education and distance travel and marveling at something in a place where you can never go in the real world for you cannot easily get there that, in my opinion, together with other people is what we are first going to use that that's for. i put you in front of the smartest living physicist and that you listen to a lecture from this person and ask questions that is fantastic. how many people around the world with don one of these crazy headsets to come and do that? a lot. more so than video games. i think we will see social experiences that are educational in nature being the start of. >> one of the things happening on the stanford campus that is pertinent to the question is virtual human interaction lab run by jeremy who publishes a book in january and it is fantastic. jeremy and his students and people who gone on to their own labs have done this incredible work in investigating what the

phenomenon of presence means for social action, for lack of a better word. you can influence someone psychology and behavior and good in ways depending on any variable you can change in vr. if you change we are suggestible creatures. few changes some of weight in vr and make them heavier when they come out of the are they will move slowly. if you make someone shorter or taller in vr they will act a different way when they come out of the headset. we are in vr really matters. as strange as that is to say because in a lot of it we can be anyone we want to be or take the form of anyone we want to be. many labs are studying that what is this mean for things like antisocial behavior and prosocial behavior and for someone who sees the good in the

are it is largely because of work like that being done to ensure that we are using this in the right way and to ennoble our better angels. >> since vr is basically fake reality how can the user be aware of how far away from reality or how close it is for reality or will he lose that connection immediately and basically believe everybody se sees? >> as far as losing the connection you will never know you're not using virtual reality. there are there is a phenomenon where people use it for a very long time they fall asleep with don and then wake up and there's disorientation that happens but by and large you go into this conscious and you never lose her grip on reality. we are reptilian brain believes in the virtual surrounding and that is what enables us all of the stuff that were talking about now and i talk about in the book but you are also the

balance of your brain and it takes over as far as bleeding your surroundings but the rational brain is still like you are in delivering room. you might be facing -- you might be surprised when you're looking but when you take your headset off but were a long way from being able to dupe someone as far as what they see and where they think they are. we are years away. they are in a scenario that becomes possible and that is why i say you get into perhaps the need for regulatory approach. the need to authenticate and verify experiences just like we do with identities on social media platforms that is the authentication burden that we are going to be grappling with when the technology gets good enough because this all has to be done in good faith.

you can't give someone a reality because you want them to have it and you don't want them to know it's not real. i don't know what those mechanisms are. philip knight, he is light-years ahead thinking about a lot of the stuff. >> it is interesting to note that what you're suggesting is that behavior can be transformational outside of after being in virtual reality and coming outside. [inaudible] >> even an advisor to the company. >> that was very productive for the quarterback so i know in medicine, too, it is being used

for doctors doing various procedures as you suggest as this cardiac surgeon. the behavior on the outside and the reality is that it enhances in a pretty it's pretty phenomenal when we think of the ramifications. >> in both of those cases and even in what were talking about with meditation and therapeutic applications as well it's the benefit of distilling the benefits of thousands of hours of trial and error into do it, reset, do it, reset and that is the football training technology that you mentioned. a quarterback in a regular football practice he set up a play and you run it and everyone gets back into position and run the ball, step, count. it is just the quarterback and no one else as well. the quarterback runs a simulation 30 seconds, 15 seconds, again and again and again. the efficiency is transformative.

same goes for the surgeon. there are many ways in which virtual reality changes our behavior in real life but the efficiency of stimulation is in those cases what makes it a powerful educational training tool. >> [inaudible] we are all more creative when given the tools and easy access to lightweight casual tools, as we are in vr, and also discovered that we are more plastic and we can change our lives in ginger bodies and changers of the ways that are profound and we see that when you experiment with vr. >> i am a believer and -- i was at avr in medicine conference we could go and loved what i saw

but i will turn to the dark side one minute. professor some bardo from stanford talks about the boys by the time they are undergrads have typically put in 10000 hours into video gaming and an additional 10000 hours into pornography. >> chapter nine. >> so, his opinion is that there may come a time when boys need affirmative-action to get into college. isn't the world going to be much worse place from parents in point in terms of our kids being immersed in a virtual reality world? i'm sure you both a lot of about that [inaudible] [laughter]

>> you talked about two things, video gaming and pornography. i'll take video gaming. here's the thing. videogame simplify the world. the relationship we have with another person is to shoot them. we keep track of simple scores, numbers , too measure ourselves against others. videogames have immersed us in that medium and that simple find medium for generations. vr is not like that and in particular, the more rich open in real virtual reality environment are the more challenging they have become as a way of engaging with others. i believe deeply for my time with second life that in general second life was better for young men or for anyone because when you walk into a bar, so to speak or literally, you walk into space that has three different

languages being spoken. his people from 20 different countries and a room full of 50 people and if you want to do business with those people as you try to do in second life that you had to create an effective working trust and relationship with them and that was enormously challenging as compared to the next-door neighbor. i would say that br in its most general sense, not perhaps in the narcotic game -like sense, and i'm sure they will be examples of that but more broadly it is day today and we are presented with environments that are the opposite of their games in that they are typically very challenging and complex as a master. the up that way that is what we all want. that is my statement on video games. >> first off, thank you for not using the term black mirror. >> not yet. >> with regard to worry about the er pornography -- there's a lot that is happening and of

course, it is being made. there is an internet rule about technology and it is rule 34, how can i be made to have a sex or watch people having sex. the evolution or the devolution of the biography industry has been predicated in large part on its value being degraded by piracy on the internet. things became available for free. people started still trying to make money and things became more and more extreme as a way to stand out. a lot of the handwringing being done about the generation of boys the comes out with 10000 hours of watching pornography is watching me that is intrinsically different, i would argue, from the magazine pages the kids might have gone up

looking at a decade ago or pictures online. what is happening in vr is that any desensitization that is happened with internet pornography, which again is mediated, there's a detachment. you couple the ever intensifying, ever ratcheting up extremity of how it's been treated how people are being treated in those scenes. when you are watching through a screen you are not part of it or indicted in it or implicated in it. when you found a headset and you're looking at adult content you are there. what that means is you are if not a participant or the illusion of a participant but you're in the room that changes the calculus considerably. what amuses two things have happened. content being made -- the

pendulum has swung entirely the other way to a style of pornography that seems quaint. in many cases feels much more like holistic act of sex or love between two or more people to many of what you're watching. in some cases with vr biography the very thing that would be theoretical underpinning of pornography is the act of contrition is cropped out because it's about eye contact and seen somebody and it's about somebody being close to you and about people whispering in your ear and talking to you and it's about something that is happening between two people. it's not sitting back and watching things happen to people. this other kind of pornography which is termed the girlfriend experience has become insanely popular in vr circles.

in some ways and i've spoken to performers about this and consumers about this and everyone is surprised by what happened because you think that when you put someone in a headset and give them the ability to see her do anything they want the whole thing will be reenacted all over again but it's not. >> as you talked about, the other possibility is the person on the other end of the line is not in the video but there it real person. the fascinating new set of gradations is being created for interaction between living people having sex or simile did sex in vr. that will create a whole wonderful set of explorations about people are really want to be with and what constitutes adultery or whatever. it will be fascinating. >> i'm not saying that every

patient have 10000 hours of pornography under his belt before he goes college but what i'm saying is that often falls to the parent but i would say that what i am seeing in the industry is that making money from a technology for the first time in a very long time is giving people what vr enables. that is intimacy rather than extremity. that's a heartening thing. >> next question. >> i've been reading a number of articles and research around how addictive mobile phones are in the apps on mobile phones and i thank you alluded to some of that earlier but i would be interested to hear how you think the addictive tendency are either different or the same with vr and how they should be approached or regulated? >> phones are sticky for different reasons.

they are sticky depending on how you treat them, literally,. [laughter] but the expense is sticky because apps want you to use them. vr creators don't necessarily want you using them for that long if it leads to discomfort. right now in these early days vr something you can use for an hour or a couple hours and hard-core people will do it for two or three hours in the vast majority people will not use it for that long. we're talking about , too a large degree, it's about experience. just by virtue of the constraints of the technology right now you're not seeing those being indulged by the creators of the experiences. it is certainly something we will need to contend with and just like the handwringing over any new technology the idea that we're spending too much time our brains are being distracted -- right now our brains are not distracted and it's amazing. nothing interest on this which is what makes these interactions and experiences so meaningful.

it will be a thing but right now, thankfully, it is not a thing. >> it is different. the choice to use these rather addictive and happily well now studied so perhaps more sobering properties of particularly applications and notifications on phones is quite different than vr, again. it is interesting. >> i want to thank both peter for being here. we are over time and want to make sure that they get a chance to sign books and talk to you further. peter will be signing and you can come up and ask him a question and even if you're not but a book which i encourage you to pick up a copy because a lot of what they talked about in more is covered in here. let's -- if you have any questions, it is a serious topic an important topic and i can't think them enough for the seriousness they brought to you tonight. let's give a round of applause. [applause]

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