nancy johnson and lynn, watch oral histories, sunday at 10:00 a.m. eastern on american history tv on c-span3. >> wired magazine senior editor peter ruben the author of the book about virtual reality and affect on entertainment and human relationships. he talked about the future of this technology at a bookstore in california. this is an hour. >> those were terrifying steps. [laughter] >> hi, everyone, hello. thank you so much for being here >> this is great. i've never gotten a chance to do this, to be at a bookstore to book event. >> join the club, man. >> your first time in?

>> like this time, yes. >> you're probably right. [inaudible conversations] >> could be this one. >> that one. >> which one? [inaudible conversations] >> aha. >> how about now? is that all better? no? there you go. >> you know, as the world becomes virtual which is, of course, the very -- well, the big subject of peter's book that's so breasting that we are starting to do things like this a bit in virtual reality and it is alwaysso so interesting to compare what happens, you know, in the real world to what is increasingly happening now in virtual world so that's just a trip as well. >> that's true. just last week i did a reading in q&a in virtual relatey in

multiuser environment called rec room and i was holding a microphone and if i wasn't holding the microphone people wouldn't have been able to hear my voice coming out of the speakers that were built into this b virtual environment. what i was holding in real life was just a controller, a hand controller that i would use in any other way but pressing a button i was gripping the object that was in front of me, able to pick it up, then the mic that activated the pa system that had been code i intoed this room so for me it was just like i was sitting here holding a hand up to my face, people who were sitting there each one of you would have been sitting or standing at home wherever you were with the head set on you all would have been looking at a stage where something that was cartoonish but still looks like me was up there with a mic talking and the question and answers were just like questions and answers, it was remarkable.

>> how many of you guys tried, youan know, a vr head set yet? just about everybody. how many of you have done one of the pc ones like the oculit rift? we are in the mother land. so, yeah, you probably got an idea. the final question is -- and this maybe more for me or well both of us, how many of you have done that in a social setting, using devices spoken to another human being in a virtual world? that's cool. >> i'm glad to see some. >> peter's book dwells on the question when you say really of what is going to happen to us and what the world is going to be like more as it relates to

the experience of presence, of course, future presence, presence is used not only as this expression for making you feel present in another space, another world by having your eyes and your ears i guess fooled in a good way and the idea that relates to my own that's aa space and big piece of this. >> it's a shortened term or a shortened version of telepresence which is something that maybe more widely known in larger technological circles, anything from working remotely but it emerged recently and studied academically for 25 years s or more under the term

preps but it really began to become affixed more explicitly to vr with the current kind of rebirth of the technology, there were a lot of words that were used in the 90's when this first kind of got our attention from a consumer perspective, people talked about the conversion moment as that being where your brain clicked in believing the virtual world but presence kind of came back into vogue and there was always something kind of beautiful about that phrase to me because it really, it wasn't about tricking you, it was more just about you are in one place and now you're in another place. >> as you were saying when i was a kid i actually got the presence journal which you mentioned which is mit, right, there was a journal, when did it start? >> '92. >> so '92 you had the crazy people writing a journal about this word and that it was called presence. can you believe that, you know? so what would you say it's different now, right, everybody

says, you know, as starting point, what is different now about the vr thing since it's been somethingng that crazy people, crazy people in silicon valley have been doing for like, you know, 30 years now? >> longer,in i mean, when you go back to the military and academic labs, you're looking at the late 60's as first time someone tried to put a head-mounted display in someone's face. a lot of credence is given to the advent of the smartphone because all of a sudden you had all of theth manufacturers that found a reason to make displays that were high quality but still small and you had ongoing miniaturization of hardware so on the technical side all of a sudden things that were too big to do in the 90's became not just cheaper and accessible but you can pack them in small package and there were some labs

throughout the kind of 2000's and early 2010's that were finding the open-source solutions toou putting these things together and then what changed everything was it kind of latching on to the world of video games and that got people's attention. in 2012 is when the first time people heard oculus rift, a ski mask strap attach today bunch of duct tape and magnifying lenses and it h didn't start there but that certainly made people's ears pirk up. >> john carmack wrote something -- saw palmer's gadget or heard about it and said -- >> sent a copy. >> right, he said sounds like

it's pretty good and palmer put the whole thing, the only version of duck tape master piece in a box an sent it in a mail to john because he was amazed that the god of gaming was blessing with, you know, being interested in this thing. >> john carmack was responsible for games like doom, revolutionized the video world because was 3 dimensional experience and takes the head set he had been going to for years and years and showed a few people this and word got out very quickly, i wasn't able to see it that year but the next year when i went back there was aa little company that formed around the idea of the oculus and that's when i saw it. >> how many people wereun oculus when you got the demo - it? >> when i was there it was just me and at the time the ceo, but in the company there were

probably 15 people maybe fewer. >> that's amazing. >> yeah. the first five or six of people, one has tragically passed away sinc then. >> enright. >> but yeah, first five or six or seven of them were kind of responsible for -- in that single year for bringing that thing out to a generation of kick-starter early adopters. >> yeah, my own work having been in virtual worlds all of my life,ll second life i was not doing -- i was not working on virtual reality or virtual worlds at that time but the chips that are in our phones as you said came out that were capable of tracking the motion of our heads and i got one of the little chips and hooked i up to scope and i'm electronics guy and that's my background i had a

board with the chip on it and i turned and my fingers watching the trace go up and down and i could tell it was so accurate, so fast and so accurate that i just like oh, my god, this is the thing that all of us vr nuts have wanted for far back as we can remember and i called my team over and i said, we are shutting this company down and we are giving investors their money back and going back to vr and that was 2012 so it was the same time. >> when we all came together and for someone like me who had grown up reading stories that imagined not just cyberspace but virtual reality and movies that as terrible as they were captured my naj in -- imaginati, i was captivated not just by how ridiculously kind of futuristic they seem now but early head

sets, how cool they looked from the outside and the rendition of what was happening in the head set i was completely swept away and despite that and despite the fact that in the 90's there were somein experiences people could have, i never ever tried it. i didn't -- like my eyes didn't go into head set until 2013 and so i felt like that 15, 16-year-old me was all of a sudden was like, all right, this feels real and i went back to work, you are probably not going to believe me because we heard the story before but v.r. is actually coming, they are like, yeah right, this is wired, we herralded and i was like, no, no i think this is it. at the time it was based on video games but very quickly my

excitement about what the technology was doing was shifted focus and the idea of escapism and game-base entertainment was supplanted by this idea that when you were in there with someone else the -- the emotional tenure of experience changed, that not only was what you were doing vivid, but by virtue of sharing that, the two of you might not experience the exact same thing but you both left with this kind of incredible lasting memory of having done it with another person and so anything you do in v.r. as a lot of you who have done this may well know, memory of having done it isn't putting

on a head set and sitting in a room, it's doing the thing that you were doing in there, right, and turns out that your brain actually accesses the memories the same way it accesses real-life memories, takes a little longer to access memory, something you've done in v.r. in trying to identify something that you have seen in photograph because it's buried in a different place and it's little deeper and so you leave with this kind of incredible memory of an experience and it's a shared experience and so even games' companies at this point have recognized that and it's veryen rare to -- even just a ge that is just you by yourself. >> you have written about a bunch of them here, i made a bunch of notes in the book myself as i read -- >> i can vouch, there's a lot f underline, i see angry face, what's that about? no.

[laughter] >> there's no angry face. >> the memory palace, you write about memory and i think that's something that i thought about a lot too, that this idea that we store our memories best when they are presented spacially, ability to recollect things and remembering them in context of familiar place and what's more familiar and what will become more familiar and putting head set and lay out our screens us, read our emails on theou walls and just doing thats going to improve our memory of things, that's fascinating. >> certainly, if anyone has ever read or heard from a person who actually is a competitive memory

champion, franklin ford did years ago,em the trick of memorizing card, every pacquiao unpack and give different image and you rather than trying to remember the order of the cards and what the cards were you're remembering a series of events which is easier to do, the elephant walked that way ander slipped on a mango and that becomes three of diamonds and king of hearts and when you add to that, this thing called embodiment and that's the thing that i was describing when i did this v.r., light-weight head sets, the things that are driven by phones and we will be in stand-alone devices very soon and if you're in a 360-degree video, you're a disembodied camera, you can look around but if you look down you don't see anything, but in the social world like the one you built and

in games and narrative experiences, if you look down and you see a body and just like i did you have your hands and you can use your hands, you're not -- this is not a immediated form of communication anymore, right, you're in there and you're doing the things and so we've always kind of used these metaphors of control when we ae interacting with digital worlds, keys,, buttons and thumb sticks, those are gone, so you're reaching out and you're grabbing things and you're handing things and you're contacting other people and so by virtue of that ngbodiment, the memory becomes that much stronger. and thendi a whole lot of other things and there are trick that is you can play on the psych are amazing. >> what aboutth this space that you've written so much about, when we communicate in v.r., you know, i remember that jared, i

saw him last night, i talked about this stuff and we were catching up and he told me that the first v.r. device was not damcles but there was a v.r. thing for cats. >> i'm sorry, what? >> cats. >> okay. >> itt was a -- it was like a head set that was being used to study cats by presenting them with simple lines and images and this is like in the 50's. >> that is maybe the most lanier i have ever heard. >> exactly, right. >> jared and i used to debate how many bits per second our move in between us right now and that's theo thing, like where s it? where do you think is working and not working in terms of face to face communication kind of in summary in v.r.? >> well, i say this to start out, not only do i lack the

technical knowledge to talk about it in bits but i think even if i did i would have skirted, i'm trying -- i'm a culture writer, i'm not a tech writer and became fascinated was holistic experience, i know what goes into f it, you know, like u saidt you're an engineer, physs and all these things, so you have made incredible career out of understanding both the left brain and the right-brain part of this and i only have one of those and i don't remember which side of my brain that is. [laughter] >> so when i think about what we are doing now if we were approximating this in virtual reality, the only things that we would really have in there being tracked would be our heads and hands and so you would be doing this, what i would see is you would have your hand to your chin andnd you would be nodding your head, that would come through so your facial

expression for the most part would be approximated, neutral or based on the sound of your voice and given some sort of emotion, our bodies would be extrapolated and based on where the hands were and our body, the placement of your arms and maybe even in rest of your body and some platforms say the legs, that's too much, you'd have a torso and hands or a torso head and arms and hands, so right now we are dealing with, you know, what we can muster, the ability to render but what's remarkable is how many gaps your brain fills in and as a very quick example of that, there's some early kind of orientation demos that head set manufacturers have made for when you put head sets and one of those you're standing in the mirror and what you are changes, it would be a red blown, it could -- balloon, or a

skeleton but no matter what it is if you're turning head, you will see yourself in a balloon, you will see yourself in a skull, you will see yourself in a metal sun icon. so it doesn't make much for me to see you in this assemblage of parts, what you do with your hands and the way you nod if i only knew you in v.r. and we were having this conversation and then we sat somewhere and we were talking i would be like, of course, this feels natural to me, i feel like we spent time together because the nonverbal stuff comes through. >> you should relate the story to people that you had chance to meet and perhaps dated when first starting to know each other i think in rec room.

>> that's a great idea, i will do that. so one of the -- it's not the most ambitious multiuser v.r. things out there but a popular one it's called rec room and when i first started connecting with people in there as a journalist not just to someone who was terrible at playing paint ball in there i met someone who said, you know what, a couple of people in my friend group, one is actually going to visit the other and i said, well, as a reporter that is exactly the kind of thing i like to hear and so i spent a little time with these two people in v.r. and the thing that struck me about them then was the comfort that they had with one another because, you know, these are embodied avitars, there was one moment where we were hanging out in neutral environment, it's kind of like a game room and people can sit around and play cards or just sit around and there's stage and you can play

charades and all the tools that you can use in there and i was talking to a guy and his name was ben and while i was talking to him his friend, a woman named priscila she was taking posted notes, writing on the posted note with a pen, this is in v.r. and sticking it to avitar one at a time and she walked up to him and putting posted note on it and as time went on she had made a bikini out of posted notes and stuck it o -- sorry, stuck it on this guy's chest and it wasn't just the shape of posted notes but what had drawn effectively bikini top and casual intimacy that was part of the relationship struck me immediately. fast-forward a few weeks later and ben had driven from his home in cincinnati to alabama to visit priscila and they spent a

few days together by the time i connected with them on a skype video call and two things about that are still kind of with me, one when you do skype video call or facetime with someone you're never looking at each other, if they are trying to look at you then they are looking at camera lens and if they're looking at what they see as you then you're eyeses are always they're always doing this. so there's no actual connection. so something is lost in that mediation. so not only was that happening between me on one end and ben priscila on the other but they were sitting according to the decorum of the real world and people who hadn't spent much physical time together so there was a tinny bit of awkwardness that i could see and i didn't know if that was because they were feeling out the early stages in their relationship or

if they had kind of regressed back to the social code of being effectivelyse strangers, but it- it really fit into relief for me what is enabled in v.r. and since then, i've -- i've learned that partially it was because they weren't necessarily the match that they thought it might be and priscila ended up marrying someone else that she met in the world and that's covered in the chapter in the book but we did an excerpt of this adaptation of the chapter in april issued of wired an we made much more of the wedding that then happened and fast-forward to this other relationship, so if you have read that piece in the magazine, then the book chapter is a

prequel, then you'll get a nice coda at the end. but it really is the thing that holds true still from that very first time i saw this arise is that the casual intimacy that you don't get getting to know someone in any other space, you don't get to know someone in a chat room or text message chain on a dating app and you certainly don't get it in real lifefe. and so there's thisy kind of third track of interpersonal relations that i find fantastic. >> you are seeing it now, there's been studies done, there was a famous swedish researcher that would people in black morph suits and would put dots in bodies and sit in chairs

initially still film with camera and what you would watch nothing but the tinny dots on their joints and then he would allow to people to move. if the person in the frame was someone that you knew or in particular like your spouse and they later did tests with skin response, your body would know within a fraction of a second, you know, imagine it that -- if it was someone you knew, loved or close to, when you saw the moving just as a bunch of dots on the screen you'd instantly know like a cartoon that it was them and there's so much to be said about that although in second life, here is the thing, life, my world before we communicated with text for the most part and there have been documentary films done about people meeting each other and falling in love and getting married in second life and another thing that i found fascinating was as you did, i got to meet some of these people like the first time they met or

near thereabouts in real world having known each other for some years and second life and i did always find fascinating that they seemed to know each other, be able to complete each other's sentences by then just from texts, so i guess this leads to the question is there some magic force which goes between us when we are communicating that v.r. captures or were we making it up all along? >> i think -- i really do think that there's something special about what happens kind of embodied virtual environment and it's because i think it's a happy medium between anonymity of the internet as we have all known it and kind of constraints and hesitations of real life. unbridled anonymity is incredible and we can choose any

onme we want and have a conversation and because there's time to type and consider your answers, you are able to be the person that you really want to present to this world or these people so you're effectively curating yourself, we would like to think that we are presenting the best version of ourselves but you have -- you have that happening and then what's also happening because everyone is where they are and you're just behind screens, disclosure comes very fast, fully anonymous, if you feelry comfortable with thee people it's kind of easy to spill your guts but then what happens if you meet with them in real life you realize that you wouldn't know their dots, right, you wouldn't know dots, black dots on, so you wouldn't know them, you don't know their marijuanaisms and in real life when you meet someone what you get about them immediately is their rhythms, but what you

don't get iss true personality because that couldou be being bt behavior, whatever it is it is highly likely that a person is is not disclosing, likely to be vulnerable and give them who you really are. in between the two polls you have this entirely other relationship, there's a degree of anonymity, you can choose your name and make avitar look the way you want to and because you're talking and gestures tabeing translated it's almost impossibleta to really cover who you are, you can think you're presenting the best self but it's you, essence will come out because you're having real-time

interactions with people. very quickly but because of that degree of anonymity that you have you might feel more confident than in real world, right, so you have a little bit of feeling emboldened and you have the real you and you have the nonverbal communications and the mannerisms and you put things together and what that means is you're lending this path between the two extremes that allows for vulnerability and disclosure and intimacy that's suitable for people who might have anxieties going into that thing from the beginning and so a lot of people that i've spoken to who love these multiuser v.r. experiences a lot attribute to the fact that they have difficult finding the connections in real life and it's not -- there's nothing artificial about it. it's not like going to chat room, it's really you but just that comfort level, little bit e'of rational brain that hasn't

clicked over to v.r. it's back here saying don't worry about it, don't worry about it, no one knows, no one will judge you because you are here and they are there but the rest of your brain is letting these things arise. >> and we can -- it's fascinating that -- that despite as you say the body motion and the voice being conveyed immediately to somebody else, it is amazing how virtual environments can create this, i always think of it as indirection,n, yeah, a bit of safety zone that allows you to be more sometimes more present, more engaging when i started working on second life it was in 1999 and at the time i went to birmingham and i was struck by what an odd experience was and felt disarmed and i was curious back then as to why the social contract of an environment

seemed to cause me to engage with people in a different way and, of course, v.r. in virtual worlds is same thing all over again and at least for me one of the things that makes me undyingly curious and optimistic about continuing the journey. you know, something next to talk about, though, let me say this, facebook, you know, the last week has been amazing, great material forin journalists worldwide, it's been incredible and, of course, we've all been collectively worrying about or even condemning technology as this destroyer that would simplify or bring us further away from each other but what say you of v.r. because, of course, despite the fact that it's very technology-focused for sure, is it another great destroyer like facebook? >> i mean, it certainly can be and that's exactly where we are

and there are -- every good side has a bad side, everything that makes intimate stronger, and i will give you an example, the thing that we don't have yet if you and i. >> in v.r. unless we had models our eyes wouldn't be tracked. everything from a slow blink to you looking over shoulder, to us looking at audience would be simulated as to where our heads turn. if i turn my head we couldn't keep eye contact because at one point my eyes would go over. that's amazing for a lot of different reasons, it's good for fatigue, it means that you can look around and select things for easily than moving your head around, it means it's easier to

render complicated environment because you only have to devote computing horse power to where exactly your phobia are looking, but if your eyes are being tracked, then all of a sudden your head set could be a collection device for the kind of data that every advertiser has waited decades to be able to get, where you look, how long you look at it and after that whenha facial expressions are mapped into v.r. based on muscular contraction or sensors or whatever, how you responded when you saw this stuff. so something that is incredible for nonverbal community cailings, that's that's incredible for intimacy also has terrifying application of it. similarly the casual intimacy, personal space is very real in v.r. and can also be used to

traumatize someone. every toxic behavior on the internet, yelling at someone in video games, sending them images, hateful things about themselves, someone walks up to you, sticks their hands out or just says something in their ear, it's so much more visceral than anything than we've had come to us by a screen or audio before, so now is the time that everyone who is building a platform like rec room and any others is reckoning with how do stop from happening all over again. 20, 30 years ago we prioritized growth and scale over everything including the user experience and that allowed these legacy companies that took forever and then looked behind them and were oh, my god, what have we done or

what have we not done, just last year instagram unveiled a new program to make comments nicer, is still grappling with the inability to stop hate speech and -- and hate speech directed not just skewing hate but at a person. everyone b is working is in v.r. has seen this movie before and no one wants sequel, what i feel positive about for every bad thing that can happen people have seen it coming or seen the potential for it to come and so whether that is building in user empowerment tools or whether that is recognizing the fact that we at some point and this was in internet early days but regulatory approach, cat-fishing on the internet is a terrible thing. cat-fishing in v.r., imagine the nigerian prince scam, right, but

someone pops up and says, hey, grandma it's me, looks like your grandson, just wants to make sure that he's got your bank account number right so he can wire you money and he's embodied and you're in there with him, he wouldn't break your confidence or trust but it's not him, right, so fraud, abuse, harassment, data and user data being misused. i mean, anything that we are grappling with right now is amplified a million times as something asin visceral. >> but there arevi positives as well? >> oh, yes. i bring this up to say -- [laughter] >> identifying them and warning of them i think is an important good. >> you can't get your phone out when you've got one of the wonderful things on your head. on so this is something -- the burning man story made me think of this too, it's that kind of summer camp thing, last day of

summer camp. everyone is like we are in this together and the real world doesn't intrude here and in the v.r., hopefully for much longer is the real world doesn't intrude not in i'm avoiding it way but in the beep, e-mail, direct message, twitter notification. they don't come in. >> indeed, you have a section in the book talking and meditation and some of the meditation apps, there are many meditation apps and small things -- teams building relaxation based on v.r. >> absolutely. one ability to add visualization to meditation practice in a way that's literal meditation, imagine breathing in and when you breathe out a bloom of crystals and as you're breathing

color changes and you see yourselfng settling in. we can see your heart beat with these devices, for example, so could walk up to someone else and meet them for the first time and see their heart beating i suppose if they we wanted to let -- >> i was going tod say that soundsou intrusive. but, yeah, you can in some cases hear breathing and so there's a chance not just for biometric monitoring but biometric feedback and you can use your own vital cues in whatever way you like to help yourself center and also you stripped the notifications away and put yourself in an environment if anyone who has ever tried to or maintained any sort of meditation practice and you say to yourself i'm going to sit for 20 minutes, 18 minutes later you're like finally, here it is. two minutes later.

so imagine spending 18 of those 20 minutes in the place you were trying to get to rather -- >> powerful. we should take some time for questions, i think. >> and we have a mic. >> the microphone here. >> give us something new to hit here if you haven't heard already. >> i want to encourage you to hold the mic up close to your mouth and ask your question preferably in the form of a question. [laughter] >> i want to ask a question and take advantage of this and then we will go back here but if you have a good arm you can throw a rock and hit the stanford business school, stanford medical school, what fields are going to be the most affected by virtual reality? >> all of those for starters. i mean, every field can be affected and certainly medicine is already being affected,

visualization which we were just talking about, you know, a few years ago there was pediatric surgeon in florida who needed to do a procedure on an infant, cardiac procedure and before the doctor went in, got a virtual reconstruction of the infant's heart, knew exactly where he needed to go, go in and attributed success after the fact to the ability that he had to kind of do a dry run in v.r. .. ..

they haven't done that well. but education and distance travel and marveling at a place you could never go, that in my opinion together with other people is what we use these 4. you put yourself in smart of the -- the smartest physicist and listen to a lecture from this person and ask questions, that is fantastic. how many would done one of

these crazy headsets to do that? a lot more than video games. we will see social experiences that are educational in nature. >> what else is happening on campus that is germane to the question is virtual human interaction lab, he can't experience on demand. students going to their own labs, investigating what the phenomenon of prisons means for social action meaning you can influence someone's behavior in good and bad ways, any variable you can change, we are very suggestible creatures. if you change someone in vr they are heavier than in real life, they will move more slowly.

you make someone shorter or taller they will act a different way out of the headset. who we are really matters. as strange as that is to say. what jeremy in his lab and many others are saying is what does it mean for things like antisocial behavior, for someone who sees the good in the art it is because of work like that being done to be sure we use this in the right way and to a noble. >> since vr is fake reality, how can the user be aware how far it is from reality were closer to reality or will it lose the connection immediately?

>> he will never know you are not using virtual reality. there is a phenomenon where people who use it for a long time fall asleep with it on and then wake up and there is disorientation but by and large you go into this consciously. we never lose our grip on reality. our rep jillian brain believes in the virtual surrounding and that enables all of the stuff we are talking about that i talk about in the book but the balance of your brain takes over in believing surroundings, you might be facing the wall, we are a long way thankfully from being able to dupe someone

as far as what they see and where they think they are. we are years away. there is a scenario in which that becomes possible, you get into the need for regulatory approach. and just like we do with identities on social media platforms is the authentication burden when the technology gets good enough, this all has to be done in good faith. you can't give someone a reality because you want them to have it and they don't know it is not. i don't know what those mechanisms are. philip night is light years ahead of thinking about it. >> interesting to know that whatreality, looking at

various defenses. was that jeremy? >> which was very productive for the quarterbacks. in medicine too it is being used for doctors doing various procedures. the behavior on the outside is improved and enhanced. that is pretty phenomenal when you think of the ramifications. >> in those cases even what we are talking about with meditation, therapeutic applications as well it is the

benefit of distilling the benefits of thousands of hours of trial and error into do it and reset. the football training technology you mentioned, a quarterback, regular football practice, you set up a play and get back in position, just there are many ways virtual reality changing our behavior in real life but the efficiency of simulation is what makes it an educational and training tool. >> two things we see in -- manifests in the ability to change people, we are more

creative for lightweight casual tools, and a lot more plastic. we can change our lives, our bodies, ourselves in ways that are profound and you see that when you experience that. >> i am a believer -- i was at a medicine conference a few weeks ago and loved what i saw but i will turn to the dark side a minute. professor phil's embargo from stanford talks about the fact that boys by the time they are undergrads have put in 10,000 hours into video gaming and an additional 10,000 hours into pornography. so his opinion is there may

come a time boys need affirmative action to get into college. isn't the world going to be much worse place from parents standpoint in terms of our kids being immersed in a virtual reality world? >> you have thought a lot about it. you first. >> okay. you talk about two things, video gaming and pornography. here is the thing. video games simplify the world, the relationship we have with another person is to shoot them. we keep track of simple scores, numbers to measure ourselves against others. videogames have immersed us in

a medium for generations. the are is not like that. the more rich, open into real virtual-reality environments are the more challenging they become as a way of engaging with others. i believe deeply from my time that in general second life was better for young men or anyone because when you walk into a bar, you are walking into a space with three different languages being spoken. people from 20 different countries in a room of 50 people. if you wanted to do business with those people as you often try to do in second life which has its own currency you had to create an effective working trust and relationship with a man that was challenging compared to your next-door neighbor. i would say the are in its most general sense, not in its maybe narcotic game like sense and

there will be examples of that but more broadly it is day today presented with environments that are the opposite of videogames in that they are typically very challenging to master and when you're pushed that way that is what we all want. that is my statement on video games. >> thank you for not using the term black mirror. with regards to the worry about vr pornography, there is a lot happening and of course it is being made. there is an internet rule about technology and it is rule 34. how will this make me able to have sex or watch people having sex. the evolution or devolution of the porn industry has been

predicated in large part on its value being degraded by piracy on the internet. things became available for free. people -- still trying to make money and things became more extreme as a way to stand out. a lot of what is being done about generation of boys with 10,000 hours of watching porn, watching porn that is intrinsically i would argue different from the magazine pages kids might have grown up looking at one decade or pictures online. what is happening is any desensitization that has happened with internet porn which again is mediated, there is a detachment so you couple the kind of ever intensifying and ratcheting up extremity of how they are portrayed and how

people are being treated in those things. when you are watching through a screen you are not implicated in it. when you put on a head set and looking at adult content. if you are not a participant, the illusion of participation, it changes considerably. two things have happened. the content being made, the pendulum has swung back the other way to a style pornography that almost seems quaint and in many cases feels more like a holistic act of sex or love between two or more people depending on what you are watching. in some cases with the are porn the very thing that was the theoretical underpinning that

has been written about in theoretical circles cropped out because it is about i contact and seeing somebody and somebody being close to you, people whispering in your ear, talking to you. sitting back and watching things happen to people. this other porn which turned the girlfriend experience insanely popular in vr circles, in some ways i have spoken to consumers about this. everyone is surprised what happened. you give them the ability to see anything they want. >> as we talked about with the other possibilities on the other end of the line is the

video and so fascinating new set of gradations is created for interaction between people having sex or simulated sex in the are and that will create something wonderful kind of exploration about who people are and who they want to be with and what constitutes adultery. >> i'm not saying every kid should have 10,000 hours of porn on their about before they go to college. what i am saying is often that falls to the parents but i would say what i seeing in the industry, making money from a technology for the first time in a long time is giving people intimacy rather than extremity and that is hard. >> right here in the center for the next question.

>> i have been reading a number of articles of research around how addictive mobile phones are and the apps on mobile phones and you alluded to some of that earlier but i would be interested to hear how the addictive tendencies are different or the same and how they should be approached. >> phones are sticky depending on how you treat them but the experience is sticky because apps once you using them. vr creators don't necessarily want you using them for that long if it leads to discomfort and right now in these early days, vr is something you can use for an hour or a couple hours and hard-core people we use it for two or three hours. most people won't use it for that long. we are talking to a large degree about a dip in did about experience.

by virtue of constraints of the technology you are not seeing those instincts by the creators of the experiences. it is something we need to contend with, just like the hammering into new technology. the idea we are spending too much time and our brains are being distracted, our brains are not distracted, that makes -- that makes this so meaningful. it will be a thing, thankfully it is not. >> it is orthogonal. the choice to use these addictive and well studied, more sobering properties of notifications is quite different from the vr. >> i want to thank peter and philip for being here. i hope we get a chance to sign

some books, but peter will be signing, ask him a question if you haven't bought a book, i encourage you to pick up a copy, it is covered in here. he will hang out if you have questions for him. it is a serious topic and an important topic and i can't thank these guys enough for the seriousness they have put to it. give them around of applause, peter ruben and philip rosedale. [applause] >> thanks so much. >> you can pick them up now. this is our first time together.

>> tonight on booktv discussions about authors in the publishing industry. we visit all points books to talk to adam bello about publishing political books. and paul coates, founder and director of black classic press and a look at the new museum of the bible in washington dc. that all begins at 8:00 pm eastern here on c-span2. >> saturday morning at 10:30 easton booktv is live at the mississippi book festival for their fourth annual literary lawn party at the state capital in jackson with discussions on race and identity, southern history, us politics and presidential leadership. authors include the author of loving, interracial intimacy in america and the threat to white supremacy. jack davis with his pulitzer prize-winning book the gulf, the making of an american see.

selena speaks to haley barbour, her book is a great revolt, inside the populist coalition reshaping american politics. author frank williams with lincoln as hero. join us live beginning at 10:30 easton for the mississippi book festival on booktv on c-span20. >> at the net roots nation conference in new orleans speakers included new york city mayor bill de blasio, housing and urban development secretary julian castro, ohio congressman tim ryan and congressional candidate alexandria ocasio-cortez who defeated incumbent representative joe crowley in the democratic primary. this part of the conference is 2 hours and 10 minutes. >> hello, looking good out there.