 Welcome to this temple of wisdom, this oasis from the sometimes crazy world that we find ourselves in. A place to think, a place to write, where you can do things like join the Marcel Proust reading group, which just completed its first volume of what's the book called, Membrance of Things Past. And they're going to work their way through all the other volumes, so you're welcome to join the Proust group. We have things like that happening. We have a cinema lit, which is a film festival that happens every Friday evening. We ask each of you to think about becoming a member of Mechanics Institute. We're in good times right now. Our membership is at a 15-year high. We have exciting events happening every week, like this one with Jaren and Kim. Next week we have Joyce Carol Oates coming here, which we're really excited about. Before, let me move on to the introductions. It's my pleasure to introduce Kim Mykutler and Jaren Lanier-Kims, an operating partner at Initialized Capital, which is a venture fund. And before that, she was a technology and financial journalist at the Wall Street Journal at Tech Crunch in Bloomberg. She's worked on moderating events at Mechanics before. Last year she did a terrific event, and so we're really pleased to have her back. She's very thoughtful in her writing about the Bay Area and how we live with technology here. So some of you, I'm sure, have heard of Jaren Lanier as a person who coined the term or popularized the term virtual reality. You may have read on the back of this book Dave Eggers talking about the book as perhaps surprisingly for a book about the birth of virtual reality. This is a deeply human, highly personal, and beautifully told story. He recommends this book, among others. You may have come across Jaren's writing in his previous two books, Who Owns the Future or You Are Not a Gadget, or you may have run across him when he won his peace prize at the German Book Trade or maybe in the hallways of Microsoft where he's an interdisciplinary scientist, or maybe you've seen him play one of his music compositions in Berkeley. Tonight we may hear something from him as well. I think Mechanics Institute is a good place for Jaren. After all, he's a mechanic, and not just in the sense that he enjoys working with machines, but he's a mechanic in the sense that Walt Whitman imagined a mechanic, that is someone who's a maker, that is what distinguishes us as humans is that we create. Jaren's someone who's really exploring this and is writing and what he does, just how we as humans make things and what that means for us in our future. I just wanted to say, Jaren, welcome home to Mechanics. We're really pleased to have you here amongst your brethren. I encourage you all to read the dawn of new everything, encounters with virtual reality and reality, and he pulls back the curtains on a wonderful, sometimes scary, and deeply human journey through life in the life we are creating, a journey that makes you wonder yourself about your own life. So Jaren, welcome again, Kim. Thank you for coming, and please join me in welcoming them. Can I make one quick correction? I just changed my title. I'm no longer an interdisciplinary scientist. I'm the Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Prime Unifying Scientist, officially, which is Octopus. Octopus. So I'm now Microsoft's Octopus, which is the tentacles. But just to be very clear, I do have a life there. When I'm out as a public intellectual, I speak strictly for myself, and you will get no hints about Microsoft policy from this. This is very different from the Microsoft thing. So I don't know if I've ever interviewed someone who's written their own autobiography, and I was just curious to start off in the process of writing this book and retracing your childhood and some of the early years in Silicon Valley, what were some of the biggest realizations you made about yourself in this process? Oh, yeah. Well, I hadn't ever imagined I'd write a memoir. I think a few things converged for me that were very much about the cycle of life and death. My father passed away, and then my wife was battling cancer, and most of this book was actually written overnight, waiting for results at UCSF over in Mount Zion. So it was very much trying to think about, most basically, what's this all been about? I was just trying to cut as deep as I could and try to get a sense of where we're at. Because the Silicon Valley mindset is a little bit more like building towers than trying to cut deep, and it just seemed like a moment to do that. So that's kind of what I was going through. As far as whether I discovered things, I'm not entirely sure. I think one of the things I try to explore in the book is just how unreliable memory is. I found a couple of cases where I can prove my memory is wrong. Like what? What did you? Oh, well, it's sort of silly, but there's a point where I have a distinct memory of moving four people to tell these stories. I don't even know how to begin. I grew up without a lot of money, let's say. And at one point, I was really desperate for a job, and I got a job being an assistant to a midwife for indigent farm workers along the border. I grew up in southern New Mexico. And so one time, we had a birthless baby, but because of legal circumstances, we didn't want—the dad was arrested, the mom was institutionalized, we didn't want the baby to go into the system. So I ended up having this baby with me, and I was bottle-feeding this baby in the math department, and it was just a bizarre situation. I was 14 in this math colloquium with this baby. So that gets out of jail and gives me a car, which was this massive event in my life. Without a car, having no car was like having no connectivity back then. You couldn't do anything. But the car had been shot up when he was arrested for moving drugs across the border, so it was stuck in the Rio Grande. And the Rio Grande has as much water as a bathtub most of the year along there, so I had to pull it out, and it had all these bullet holes. He said, oh, they're not so bad. He put bumper stickers over the bullet holes, and it had rotted out, so there wasn't a backseat. I was making a living with a goat dairy business. I made cheese and milk. Anyway, so I said, that's fine. There's no seat in the back, and it's open. I'll just kind of make a platform to move goats around, because I need that, too. But then the thing is, after that, I have this distinct memory of four people riding in the car as if there were a backseat in that car. And the only reason I remember it is this stupid joke, because it was me and a weird hippie guy in the front, and then two gay physicists in the back. When you used to go into the border of Arizona, this very stern officer would stop you with the mirror glasses like in a Hitchcock movie, and he would say, any fruits or nuts? And I was like, yeah, there's nothing. But anyway, I'm sure that that event happened, and I'm sure there were four people, but I can't construct how the people in the back could have been sitting on anything. And so I have no way to tie this together. And so the thing is, an autobiography is my necessity, at least as much an act of invention as it is of discovery, right? And so I'm certain that some of this is invention, but I can't really know exactly which is which. But I think what it is, it's a process of trying to just decide who you are once you've gone through enough of your life that it's really time to figure it out. So that's what the process is really about. So early on in the book you talk about, some of the thinkers or influencers, like Stuart Brand and the whole Earth Catalog, or Norweiner and Cybernetics, and some of the thinking that kind of married or fused, kind of the counterculture and the early underpinnings of the technology industry. And at that time, personal computing was potentially viewed as a tool of personal liberation. And then here we are several decades later, and you become more of a critic of the industry. And so I'm wondering how you take that narrative, or what are the moments in time at which it turns from this liberating tool to this other system. Well, yeah. I've been thinking a lot about that lately, because I think one thing I didn't put in the book is the sense of regret I have, because I was kind of in a position where I could have steered it a little bit more than I did at some crucial points, like in the early 90s. And now I'm kind of regretting it. But there was almost like this force field of shared belief among some of my friends. So it's really hard to buck up against that, and I kind of wish I had been tougher about it. But the way I remember it, oh, God. How long do you have? We have only a few minutes. How long do you have? Oh, my God. All right, so part of it. So the idea of a digital network was first expressed to the best of my knowledge in a profoundly dystopian way that was completely prophetic and describes our present moment. And this was in 1907 by Ann Forster in, do you guys know? The machine stops. The machine stops, right? The machine what? The machine stops. How many of you have read the machine stops? All right, go read the machine stops for God's sakes. So, I mean, just do it. So the machine stops is written, I think, in 1907. That's close. I might have that off. Five or seven. Five or seven. So it's a novella, a short novel. And Ann Forster is the guy who wrote all these sort of novels that turned into kind of opulent, Marchante Ivory movies like Room of the View. But he also wrote this thing, which was, turn off the phone. Okay. All right, no, it's all right. No, it's all right, it's all right. And so getting control of that thing is more for you than for me, believe me. You'll be happier the more you're in charge of it. So should it take all this time? This is going to be the whole thing. I mean, it's an interesting question. I'm personally interested in this question. Okay, okay. So I'll do this as fast as I can. There'd been a science fiction literature starting in the 19th century that was like utopian and everything will be these amazing flying cars and all that kind of stuff. And that was people like H.G. Wells. And then Forster was like, screw these people. I'm going to show what it'll really be like. And he did this really dystopian thing. I mean, everybody is glued to their screens. They're worried about what other people think. They're worried about all these like sort of stupid abstract little like information quests that don't mean anything. They're riddled with weird systemic bugs and nothing ever quite works, but they're really stuck in this thing. And there are a few details like they'll have these hexagonal screens because there had been no screen. I mean, this was entirely invented and which suggests that they were a little like bees. And in tectastopian literature, you'll see bees come up. But anyway, at the end, the machine breaks. It stops. So the internet breaks down. And it's this horrible catastrophe and all these people die. And it was like, wait, how did you let yourselves get so hooked up to this thing in the first place? And they crawl out of their cubicles in there. And they're like the sun, the sun. So it ends in this with this Russoian kind of a thing of like rediscovering nature, which I also don't think is quite the solution, but I mean, I love nature. I think this idea of that opposition doesn't get us anywhere. But anyway, the machine stops is the prototype for all dystopian science fiction about information systems. The plot line is the same one that we did in Minority Report. It's the same one in the Matrix movies and on and on and on. It's the ER, the ER dystopia for information. It's totally accurate. I mean, it's like he completely nailed it. It's exactly what happened. So that was the start. And then the first practical or sort of semi-practical utopian who was actually building something was Ted Nelson who invented the first digital network architecture in the 60s at Harvard. And his thing was really different from what we have today. The number number one idea for him was two-way links. There would always be attribution and there would always be payment. It would be integrated with an economy. And that came out of his parents being Hollywood people who survived through union activity that got people paid even when they weren't stars, which people died to get. It was like a huge victory for the labor movement. And then shortly after that, that was in 1960 and into the 60s, things really changed. And so like in the early 80s, there was this very different feeling that came about, which was kind of like very anti-money. And this was people like Richard Stallman who's like, no software has to be free. And I used to know him and if you ever want to read about that, my first look. This is happening as it's like Reagan era 80s and then venture capital takes off in the early 1980s in the Bay Area. And so you'd have to have money and you'd have open source and it's like... Sorry, I was talking for so long. No, no, no. You should talk too. I'm interested. Unlike Stephen Hawking, I don't have to calculate every word, so I will tend to go on and on. It's bad. Yeah. All right. So what happened was starting in the 80s and especially in the early 90s when the web started, we had these dual ideologies that were not compatible with each other. So just as you were saying. So on the one hand, people loved like Steve Jobs. They loved the idea that the Silicon Valley entrepreneur could dent the universe and had this Nietzschean force of will to change reality. That was like this article of faith. And we loved, loved, loved it. But on the other hand, there was this incredible hippie thing. This was before the, this was before the Libertarian wave. This was like, we hate therapists. We hate... And how can you believe two weird things at once? Like things that just don't connect. Isn't that the test of a first rate intelligence? Well, in this case, we flunked the test because there's precisely one formula that resolves the conflict, which is the advertising business model. So what happened is we decided that advertising would be the universal business plan of the information era, which meant that the whole society would become based on behavior modification and craziness and we'd enter the dark times we've entered into. Is there, are there a couple like key decision points in time? Like go back in a time machine to like 1999 or whatever. I can tell you exactly where we screwed up. Okay. Where did we all screw up? Tim, so this is a little geeky. I don't, I mean, this is the Bay Area, so it's probably okay to geek out, but I'm a little concerned that some people might be like, no, I was reading an autobiography. Where are you get? Is it, do you mind if I... All right. I really liked Tim Berners-Lee, but he mega fucked up. So what happened was he, he said this whole thing, this Ted Nelson idea that you have back links, everything's a two-way link, so you know where things come from and they're time stamped and all this stuff. Forget that. All you have to do is link to something one way then you can use it and accumulate it. There's no attribution, no time stamp. You never know where anything came from. Nobody gets paid. Do you talk about traffic or what? No, I talk about the linkage. Yeah. So in HTML, you just link to something and it doesn't know it's being linked to. All right. Now the thing is you can't build a working web without the back link. And so this brings us, so just having only one-way links, first of all, it's a lot easier because maintaining two-way links is a huge pain in the butt. Yeah. But a lot of stuff in computing is so what, you know? But anyway, it was like... I'm having a hard time visualizing it. Like what would a two-way link, what would that experience of surfing the web look like? I'll tell you about it because we rely on it now. Let me get to... This will be clear in a second. So that was episode one, one-way links on the web. That was the first mistake. The second mistake, and we complained about it a bit, like I remember when he presented the thing or like it only has one-way links, what's wrong with this? But everybody says, oh, let's just be lazy for God's sake. This will spread faster. It'll be what we'd call today more viral. It's easier. I should have screamed my head off. So should a lot of people. A lot of people feel regret for that moment. That was a mega fucked up right there. Right. Oh, I'm sorry. I shouldn't... This is streaming. I don't know what my language should be. I'm sorry if I'm violating. I feel like somewhere there's like a parent with their eight-year-old say, this is computer scientists who will tell you about these things and like, oh my God. So I'm sorry about that. This is how we talk though, you know? So then the second thing that happened involved Al Gore. So he kind of did invent the internet, just to be clear about this. He never claimed he did, but it's true. Not in a technical sense, but in the sense that there were all these different... Nobody was ever going to get together and have a unified global network. It wasn't going to happen. And he basically got some government money thrown at it to try to get everybody to become interoperable. And that was the internet. Before that, there were packet switch networks. Was that when he was vice president? Or what year was that? This was before he was vice president. He was a senator from Tennessee. Okay. And the Gore bill was funded by the United States to bribe people into becoming interoperable, because otherwise they just weren't going to get their act together. And that was the internet. Gore did that. He did it like... But the thing is, there's this question, what is the minimum requirement to have something you're going to call an internet? Like for instance, does it have memberships? Is there some representation of people? There has to be representation of the computers. You have to have numbers that talk about the computers because otherwise it won't work. But does it know about people? Is there any information storage for people in it at all? Does it have any persistence of memory? Do you provide that? Do you provide a linking system? And we made, and by we, I mean all of us, everybody in the loop did this thing that I really regret. And I remember having a feeling like, you know how sometimes you're going along with something and everybody seems to want it and you're like, okay. But then you realize in the pit of your stomach, wait a second, this is stupid. But yeah, okay, we'll go, we'll drink that stuff. And then the next morning you're like, what was I thinking? So I had one of those feelings about this. So what we did is we said we're not into big government. So we're going to leave, we're going to do only the absolute most minimal thing to have an internet. And then all of the necessary functions that everybody can foresee that will also have to be universal will leave to industry, will leave to entrepreneurs. So what we did is we set up a requirement to create new giant data monopolies and monopolies. At that moment we created Google and Facebook, even though they didn't exist yet. At that moment we said, okay, there are going to be these giant commercial monopolies for basic functions. So two-way links, if you send a message to somebody in Facebook, they know who sent it. Two-way link. Google had to, well let's talk about Google first. Because we didn't have two-way links, the whole thing was this giant mysterious fur ball like me, like you couldn't tell anything about what was going on. So Google had to crawl over the whole thing and build up, after the fact, the two-way links that we didn't build in. So they made billions of dollars to make up for this missing thing. Similarly, we didn't represent people. Facebook makes billions of dollars from adding that. All the giant monopolies that make tons of money. So what kind of entity would have, in an alternate parallel universe to the one that's right now, what does the provider of that look like? Is it a consortium? Yeah, I think we should have, and I want to be very clear, this thing would not have been perfect, but I think we should have created some entity, just like we were forced to create entities for just things like domain names, right? There should have been an entity that did the two-way links and did personal representation and just did all the basic functions. And those entities could have been semi-public with private consortium. I don't know what it would have been. I'm sure it would have been, there would have been some corruption in it and some imperfection, and we'd be complaining about it now, but not as bad. I mean, I think it would have been better, and we really screwed that one up. And I could go on and on about other mistakes we made, but those are the two, the really big ones. So throughout the book, you also talk about the history of virtual reality, and you have these 52 definitions in the book of what VR is. And there's some other ones that I liked. I think that one definition that you said was like, virtual reality is a medium that could convey dreaming. You also said it's the technology of noticing experience itself. Can you talk a little bit about how you came up with those? Oh, just in talks like this over the years, just thinking of things to say. The experience one is very core to me, because we're very used to technologies that kind of subtly give the message that you're the same as a machine, that everything's just mechanism in the world. So for instance, if you talk to your speaker and you're talking to Alexa or Cortana or Siri or something, it's sort of like there's this equivalence, like you're becoming a little like a machine in order to be understood because the stuff isn't that good and it's becoming a little like a person. Isn't it cute? It's like another person. But it also kind of degrades you in a way as you're elevating it, or the two things are inseparable and impossible to tease apart. Virtual reality to me has the opposite effect, like you're in virtual reality and if it's an interesting good system, which a lot of them still aren't, the good ones, you can not only change everything about the outer environment, but you can change yourself. You can turn into a huge spider or something. You can change your body plan. You can change the logic of how the world works. And there's a very interesting thing about that. You're changing all this stuff about circumstance. Your brain is experiencing this altered world that it's acting in as if it's real, but there's something constant there. There's this little angelic point, and that's you, that remains in the core of it while everything else changes. And that's you. That's this mysterious consciousness thing that we kind of pretend doesn't exist. But there's like something there. You feel it in VR. How do you feel about the state of the field, you know, 2018? A VR? Yeah, how far it's progressed, or is it not progressing, or where is it for you? Do you feel... I have kind of mixed feelings about it. And I have to be careful here, because this is... I'm totally in the middle of the commercial side of it right now, so I can't speak as an outsider or as a disinterested third party. I can't, you know. And I'm sure I'm totally biased about a bunch of stuff. I feel the... There are a few things that the VR industry is doing wrong that we've already done experiments with, and we know how to do better. Like such as? One thing is we're trying to sell VR content as if it were game console content, which is as this big chunk of this developed thing that was expensive to develop, that we want people to pay a fair amount for. And VR has a different rhythm to it. Like you can sit on the couch and space out and sit there kind of with your controller for 40 hours on whatever game it is. With VR, you can't do it for a long time. You get tired. It's a very different thing. And the one experiment that I'm aware of that has created a monster amount of interesting content very quickly was Second Life, which I was also involved with. And any Second Life people here? All right. So work at it or use it? All right, cool. So the thing about Second Life that was interesting is it has a very fine-grained commercial layer, which means that somebody can sell just nothing but a texture, and somebody else can incorporate it. But it does... The contributions of people who just do simple things aren't forgotten. They still make a little bit of money from something that's a conglomeration that is then sold, which was Ted Nelson's original idea in 1960. And so what that is, it sort of instantly created this giant burning man-like thing. And in fact, burning man, to a degree, was influenced by it and became a Second Life-like thing. They kind of grew up aesthetically together. So I feel like we're doing these coarse-grained stores when we should be doing fine-grained stores. There are little players doing fine-grained, but the big players are all committed to coarse-grained, which doesn't work. And we have not seen great results in any of the VR stores. There are a few bright points, but it's not great overall. How do you feel Facebook is doing as a steward of Oculus? Any Oculus people here? Really? No, no, I mean you work there. No, no, no, buy them. Buy VR. Spend all your money on VR, please. Do it. But no, once again, I'm in a little bit of a spot here, because in that particular thing, I do Microsoft stuff. On the other hand, we have a lot of overlap with them, and I worked on the Minecraft for Oculus, for instance, which is cool. I think they have a lot to learn about a commercial model that will really reach people on scale. Yeah, I would say it's been hard to invest, because everyone's just waiting for the distribution to exist for applications to then have developers. Yeah, see, people don't remember the way we got to the market for game consoles that we have now, as we started off with these really simple 8-bit things that people could write just as individuals. That's what I used to do in the early 80s. And we can't, like you can't say, okay, you have to have this giant team and make a decision to invest in this huge thing, and people spend all this money on it. You can't bootstrap an entirely new medium like that. You have to have... I'm criticizing Facebook that way. It's not like we're doing any better. We're doing the same thing. And there are some bright spots, but just overall, I think most people would think that the Oculus Store and the Steam Store and so forth would have a little bit more happening by now. And people just need really simple stuff to get their feet wet. Pokemon Go is a great example. Super simple, controlled level of investment. It just gives people something they can do at their own pace. And that level is the right thing for right now. Yeah. So, I want to talk a little bit about... I mean, I think the first place you moved in the Bay Area was like Santa Cruz, was that correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. What year was that? 80? What about the Silicon Valley of the early 1980s? Because you've got a lot of really interesting stories in there of different figures and people from that period. Yeah. Well, it was... One thing about it is it was kind of scummy and disgusting. It really was like you'd drive down El Camino and Menlo Park and there'd be like strip clubs and wine-os. It was not a fancy place yet. There were little pockets, but it was kind of a scummy place. And we didn't feel like we ran the world. Like the feeling in the hacker world was more like we're these insurgents. We don't know if we'll get anywhere. There's this implacable giant called IBM. It was very... It's very nascent. What's funny is the HBO show Silicon Valley shows a culture from the Silicon Valley of the 80s even though it's supposedly current, but just the characters in it are actually a little bit more true to the older Silicon Valley. Yeah, I mean there's a lot of stuff in there from that period that... I mean it sounds familiar from this... I grew up in the Bay Area in the 1980s. I grew up in Silicon Valley in the 1980s. But you know, like LSD gatherings, like sex part, that stuff, that culture is still... It's different now, though. It's really different now because the element now is this sort of extreme sense of elitism and power. And there used to be people who were kind of elite and powerful. All like Steve Jobs or something, but there wasn't this general... That was sort of like the weird thing. It's like, oh, that guy wears weird hats like weirdly, elitely powerful. It was just like a few people had this weird attribute, but it wasn't like this universal paradigm. So the old culture of weird parties and stuff seems to have turned... There's even some elite thing about keeping chickens now. I don't know if that's real. I don't know if that's true. People have kept chickens here for like a decade. People have been homesteading here for years. But the thing about it that's different is this idea of the elite chicken. The elite chicken. The status chicken. And that's where things get really stupid. We might have had chickens in the old days. I'm not saying. But we did not have status chickens. So it's like the loopy culture, but then more income inequality, more wealth inequality put together. Yeah, it's like some... What we have now is like this cross between Woodstock and Wall Street or something. It's like this very strange... It's this version of what used to be an alternative culture mixed with this super stressed-out, status-oriented, we're going to own the world kind of culture. And that's different. Yeah. There was also other stuff that was in the book. You mentioned that there was a rent-a-mom trope in the early 1980s. And I was like, people... I mean, that feels like a lot of the startups in the last, I don't know, five years, too. Doesn't it? Yeah, it does. But I didn't realize that that was also going... Or that you perceive that as also going on like three years ago. Yeah. Well, there was this weird way that back then we were trying to live in the future. People would walk around with little notebooks in little cases on their belt and stuff to simulate what it would be like to realize someday that you could carry around. And we tried to sort of simulate the future. And one of the things... There was this weird myth going around that I never found any truth to, but maybe it did exist, that there was this thing called rent-a-mom where you could, you know, like this hapless hacker who can't deal with anything. And you rent this person who would come and be your mom and listen to your problems and help you with dressing and laundry and stuff. And everybody was like, we need to find rent-a-mom. We really need rent-a-mom. And it did actually... A lot of the gig economy is kind of rent-a-mom in a way. Yeah. But at the same time you also talked about... You talked about... There was a lot of references to women throughout the book. From the very beginning with you losing your mom as a child to then ending up in the Bay Area in the 80s and then the rent-a-mom start up. And then you also mentioned that there was also a small number of unofficial, but super social, super powered women that actually connected all these companies together but were never talked about in the media. Yeah, they're missing from the histories. We called them the Grand Networking Females. And some of them were still around, and I can tell you some of their names. Coco Khan was one, and Linda Stone was another, and Linda Jacobson was another, and Margaret Minsky Marvin Stotter was another. And these were people who just connected people and created companies and introduced people and then hoped to get some kind of a consulting gig and often didn't. But a lot of Silicon Valley was invented by these people. I mean, an extraordinary number. My company, the first VR company wouldn't have existed without them, but I can also tell you about so many others that specifically came about through them, including Google, but I can't tell the story in detail, but they were... And I feel like a lot of what happened with social networking was in a way a subconscious attempt to finally usurp the Grand Networking Females, like the guys will finally have their own network. That's kind of how it felt at the time, maybe even earlier with Myspace or something. But yeah, there was this role, and there's something terribly sad that it's not properly recorded. I tried to capture a little bit of it in the book, but I don't know enough to really get it. As someone who grew up with it, it's a very familiar narrative, which is you work with these companies and then there are men who are in the magazine covers, but there's a lot of women who are basically making the whole... Marie Spengler was another one. She had an enormous influence. Yeah, boy. So those are some of the names of people who should be as famous as somebody like Jobs, in my opinion. Can you talk a little bit about... So I want to talk a little bit about... There is a little bit of a reference of someone who is involved in VR and how gamer culture evolved. In the same way that you pointed out these couple of significant moments and the design of the internet, are there particular moments like gamer culture and evolution of troll culture that were significant? Yeah. So this is another complex issue. I'll try to... Just to say the most important things as briefly as possible, I'm convinced by extensive research that gaming in itself doesn't bring out the worst in people, but forums for gamers do, which are two different things, separable but currently not separated. The forums problem came to everybody as a shock, going way back. When I first got into it, we had a few sort of early forms of social networking where you could sort of post things. Other people could post things like Usenet. Some of you might remember that. It's still around. And we discovered this amazing thing, once again, with apology to the poor parent who has her eight-year-old tuning into this, but you'd suddenly feel almost like this demonic force inside you and you turn into an asshole and get into some weird flame. You become sadistic towards some random person. It was a new phenomenon because it just came up so quickly and so shockingly. I think I understand it. I'm not sure. I have a theory about it. What's your theory? The theory I have is that people have a... I call it the lone pack switch. There's some species that can function either in social structures or by themselves and the most famous in our popular culture is the wolf. You can have a lone wolf or you can have wolves in a pack. They behave differently. There are a few things that are really different. One is that if you're in a pack, your relationship with other members becomes more important than your relationship to nature. You have to pay attention to the politics and the power structure even more than to where the water is or where the prey is. It's a weird thing. This social cognition overwhelms individual cognition whereas the lone wolf really has to perceive nature. It's a different way of being... I think people are like that. I think we have the switch. In order for civilization to survive, we have to keep the switch in the lone setting as much as possible for many reasons. This becomes this whole long story, but everybody has to be an individual in order for a market to make sense because otherwise it just becomes tainted and turns into a failed market and the same thing for elections and a democracy. For everything, people have to be individuals but also just to be decent or to be scientists or artists, you have to perceive the world as it is, not the social structure. To perceive that climate change is real, outside of your immediate social structure, at reality, and you can't when it's in the PAC setting. The PAC setting has its place and I think there are appropriate places for it, but I think what happens is when you're in a setting with other people on one of these abstract forms of any design, you tend to go into PAC setting because you're no longer dealing with the real world directly. You're dealing with this purely social thing and I think the antidote to it is there's some real world stake that you're working towards that's something other than a global competition for popularity or mind games. Once again, I might be biased because of the Microsoft thing, but of the big social networks, the one with the fewest assholes is LinkedIn by all accounts and all measures so far as I can tell. Why? Because the people on there are worried about their careers and they have something real other than the mind games with each other to worry about. Anything real that people can pay attention to, some connection to reality outside of the abstraction of that little social thing, as long as there's an alternative, most people will choose it and you won't have this extreme horror that comes out. In one of your more recent talks you've raised as concerned, I share this clamoring for these companies to do something about hate speech or hate language. But at the same time, you are relying on a single unaccountable corporate entity to unilaterally make a decision over what speech is allowed versus is not allowed in a democratic society. What in your mind is the right way of threading that needle? Especially because they don't seem to want to give up transparency or control. Well, yet another complicated question. The internet is hard, man. I know. Well, look, the people, no matter what weird alphabet companies there are, we're not going to make death obsolete soon. And so the people who currently are in charge will die and new people will take their place. And what we've seen from history is that when there's a center of power established, it's typically inherited by people who are less sympathetic than the original people. So you might start with Bolsheviks, who you might not like, but they're better than Stalinists. And so the thing is, the natural course of events is that the power centers created by companies like Google and Facebook will be inherited by some equivalent of... So the thing is, the way to create a legacy is not to consolidate power, but exactly the opposite. Because otherwise your legacy will, in fact, be determined by horrible people who will seize it. So until you grasp that, you cannot create a positive legacy and you will not be thought of well. And that's the message I've been trying to get across. Now as far as specifically what do you do, I do have some thoughts about that. And the basic thing I think we need to do is change the business plan. Because of that problem I mentioned where advertising was the only solution for being capitalistic and socialistic at the same time. Everything's free except with advertising. That creates an entire system based on manipulation. And what started as advertising turns into continuous behavior modification of a very high order because the... Enable Skinner Box. Yeah, I mean, in fact, one of the sad things is that Skinner Boxism is essentially the practically universal application of machine learning at this point. There are exceptions to understand scientific data, but they're almost token. And so, if we want to get out of this incredibly stupid mess where everything's about manipulation and lying and the whole world's getting dark and crazy, we have to change the business plan by which we get basic things. So there's a really obvious way to do it. Start paying for Facebook when you make something that's valuable on it. Like, you have to re-monetize it. How would you create the catalytic movement that then compiles Facebook to offer, even offer a paid lane? It doesn't seem like they would just do that on their own because that would too be too profound a structural change for them to undertake. Yeah. My feeling is that the change has to come from a bunch of directions at once, and I will stakeholders to realize that they've kind of screwed themselves over because this business model doesn't allow them to diversify. They can diversify cost centers, but not profit centers because everything has to be consumed into this data grabbing from manipulation. No matter how many alphabet companies you make, you're still 90% manipulation and spying. It's really stupid. You need to consolidate if you're a big company to be robust. The companies that don't rely on this stuff, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, are diversified. The ones that do can't diversify. That's the corporate argument. Then there's the legal argument, which in the event that the EU has any headspace at all after all its crises, they really get it and they'll push it. Then there's just the plain sense economics argument that math works out better. I'm convinced Facebook will make more money under this regime, and they should. They'll deserve it. They'll earn it. And I could go on. And then also just, people have to get this. They have to realize how stupid the system is that what's called a free service in your world. I think more and more people are getting it. So the last question before we go to music. One thing that's surprising, you've got a lot of key stories about pretty iconic, counter-cultural figures like Timothy Leary and then there's this kind of hilarious story about Richard Feynman in the book. But you yourself have never partaken of marijuana or LSD or any like... No, I never have. I've just had the intuition it's not for me. I'm very proud of that. I've never had alcohol or marijuana and I've never had a social media account. Yeah. Not that I'm judging anyone else but I would say keep the alcohol and marijuana marijuana. Ditch the social media account. He says over Facebook Live. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, thank you so much. I'm wondering if... do we have time for questions from the audience? Yeah. Yeah, you should tell a Feynman story. I think we were going to do music and then questions and don't worry, the music is going to be good and it'll be short. So you don't have to worry. I know like, oh my god, the music would help. It'll be all right. But which Feynman story? The Hot Tub and Big Sur. Oh, the Hot Tub one. Okay. Yeah. Okay, so I have this other weird life of talking to physicists about computation stuff and I'd known Feynman from when I was little for a lot, that's a whole other story. But anyway towards the end of his life he was diagnosed with cancer and he had a huge tumor taken out of a leg and he knew his time was limited and he had this, he'd never tried LSD and he had this idea that he wanted to try it and he had this particular vision of being with a bunch of hippie girls at Hot Tubs above the pounding waves of Big Sur on a cliff. Is it S-L-N or...? It wasn't S-L-N, no. There were actually other places. These weren't natural springs, they were Hot Tubs. Yeah, Big Sur has all kinds of weird hippie stuff in it. Or at least it did. So this came about and then he's thinking I don't want to fall off the cliff I need somebody I can trust who won't take LSD. Oh, oh! That weird virtuality guy, Jaren, he'll do it. So he asked me to be a spotter to keep him from falling off. So I'm there kind of like, okay, he's on the cliff and so there's Feynman with a bunch of of hippie women and he had a really good time. It was really fun talking to him when he was on LSD. When he lost math he was like really delighted. The machine doesn't work anymore. We're trying to do some math and he couldn't do it. He had this kind of delight in watching that process. Because basically generally he could always do math, you know? So this was like a really completely novel experience for him. And he was just a super sweet, super generous, amazing guy, good drummer too. And obviously rather stunningly had his act together in physics and also in teaching physics like just an amazing, amazing figure. I was actually thinking about him today because of Stephen Hawking passing. So yeah, so yeah, two people who were sort of more generous with young students who came along than I could. I find that I don't have it in me to be quite as generous with young people as I want to be because I just like I kind of lose attention. I just have too many other things to worry about. And also Hawking, they always had that time. They never got bored dealing with inseparable young people like me. Pretty impressive. Yeah. Do you want to play music? Do you want to hear him play music? I was just playing with this this morning and I thought in a way it's supposed to be a little of a lot of times if I bring music out to something like this I try to do something that's kind of upbeat and rhythmic but I'm going to do something a little more kind of slow, partially memory for Stephen Hawking, I think. What is the answer? Oh, this is a vertical bass flit and then this is a foot powered truity box. So do we have time for a few questions now? Questions? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. From your social media account? I was just curious are there any particular decentralized web technologies that you're particularly excited about that could perhaps fix some of the problems of the current web such as, you know, the theory of platform blockchain solid by Tim Berners-Lee or any others that you're aware of. Well, you know more about blockchain than I do, I'm sure because you're actually working. I mean, I think there's an interesting potential there but I don't, you know, like I still think governance like one of the biggest problems is governance and trying to figure out how to properly govern a system like that and who should have voice and how these systems evolve, right? And so like, you know, with Ethereum and Bitcoin you have two kind of divergent systems of governance that produces different outcomes. For example, in Bitcoin a lot of, like attention within the developer ecosystem is centered on the core protocol whereas in Ethereum it's more on the applications above the core protocol layer and then there are new tokens that are coming out after that that have even other different governance mechanisms but I think they're all very interesting. I'm also like having been here for a long not like having lived here for most of their life, I just have always just a wariness I think that with every wave technology, these are tools that essentially amplify human nature and so anything like good potential is always mirrored by potential for abuse and so it's not like once a new thing takes off it will bring a whole host of consequences with it that we can't possibly fathom right now. Yeah, but. So I'm interested in economics because I'm interested in changing the economics and so as a result of that I've spent a long time with economists and the hot topic has been blockchain and cryptocurrencies everybody's interested in and so I have looked into it a bit and the first thing that strikes me is every time I look into a particular blockchain it's formally structured as a Ponzi scheme and then the next question is why? Are investors really that stupid everywhere? The history of markets would indicate that the answer is yes. But the thing is in the past you could have Ponzi schemes that weren't really fully Ponzi schemes something would happen like a tulip craze actually would improve technology for tulips and cultivation. An example that I need is people bring up tulip mania in Netherlands but when people don't realize literally around the same time tulip mania reflected a period in Dutch history in which Amsterdam created the world's first working stock exchange and the Dutch East Indies Company was one of the very first companies to ever raise capital in an equity based format by selling shares and so you had this mania that also paralleled the development of the basic financial infrastructure that is now ubiquitous in common place throughout the modern world. But the thing is so in my view the tulip craze doesn't deserve quite the degree of disparagement that it usually gets and the same thing is probably true for the Dutch con boom perhaps from the turn of the century I'm not sure about that one but the thing is we have to ask what is this blockchain and cryptocurrency craze leaving us hoping and the problem with it is that it's there has to be one of them at least it's not a Ponzi scheme left standing and it can look like a Ponzi scheme to motivate people but it has to somehow at the end of the day not be one in order for us to create something out of this craze that we can use later. I think there's interesting like we recently participated in looking at decentralized exchange that's based on the Xerox protocol and so you can actually trade cryptocurrency assets without ever handing over custody to them to a centralized entity which then makes them obviously there's security advantages for that centralized exchanges generally have often been hacked and so like that's an interesting like an exchange as a first entry point towards other types of things. The tulip craze was a craze but the money itself could be regulated it allowed there to be Keynesians in the future so that you could have some kind of fiscal policy and you could make the money itself not the tulip craze and that's the thing we haven't achieved that with cryptocurrencies the thing is in its core the money itself is the tulip and that's the also we have to talk about the green problem with it that using computational inefficiency as a governing principle yeah so that's what yeah that was the proof of work other proof of stake versus other systems that don't require the same level of energy the same level yeah I kind of feel like we should put the servers on the moon that's what I've been thinking because I think anyway we're going to have a whole program on currency and bitcoin in the future so save the questions for then new question here very intriguing talk thank you question is if you were the CEO what companies how would you which company would you be the CEO of and how would you modify their business plan and what effect would this have on our current way of life thank you okay I'll leave off Sacha that's the Microsoft he's the Microsoft CEO who I think is cool actually and so I would let's see I could just go through them Facebook so easy we're going to start you're going to start paying on a sliding scale if you're genuinely destitute you still get it free otherwise you start paying we're going to call it peak internet when people started paying for TV with Netflix and HBO TV got really good and we call it peak TV we're going to do the same thing with the internet we're going to tell people you're going to start paying for peak internet what peak internet means is two things one is we guarantee that you're not going to be manipulated you're not going to see stuff that's downstream from Russian bots or some bullshit and we also are going to pay you when you're poster valuable when you do things that other people use and we think a significant number of you are going to make a living from this and this is a better, more dignified option than basic income and we're going to grow and become a more diversified company too so I'd make this transition to a monetized Facebook I'd do it globally I would gradually shut down the advertising business and commit to know advertising revenue after 15 years or something and declare it to be something that was an experiment that turns out to destroy civilization and should be banned and ask the world governments to ban it so that no competitor comes along make a deal with each country saying we'll stop doing it if you don't let anybody else do it and the EU would love it I'd do something similar with Google and search but especially with Google and YouTube and Twitter do this to Twitter it suddenly will make money consistently it'll be great for Twitter they'll be so much happier over there and that's it right there that's the direction and yeah and I'd also start an equity and profit sharing model with Uber drivers and other gig economy people and I'd have them all buying into a long term fund that will create retirements for them in the event that their country doesn't do it and I'd make all the companies more profitable and richer as a result we're all talking about decentralization I figured I would say something but is there another way to make money on the decentralized web hosting your own private internet in your neighborhood or something like that and dig new wires maybe behavior modification and addiction are the only ideas that have ever been proposed and certainly the only ones tested that doesn't prove that there aren't others but there's nothing else on the table that I've ever heard proposed or expressed that's even slightly credible there might be I mean I can't prove it doesn't exist it just hasn't ever been articulated and people have been trying for many years to amplify to amplify a point you made Warren Buffett said that if you can invest in a business invest in a business any idiot could run because sooner or later an idiot will run it so is it possible to create a way of running business or government that won't be corrupted by power and won't be or incompetence won't come to incompetence in time well you know people haven't been on this earth for that long and people with any degree of technology base worth talking about have really not been around that long and we have a very very limited experimental base to work with to understand what might work there has never been a democracy that's lasted particularly long there have been some republics that lasted longer than we have to my knowledge there's never been a multicultural democracy that's lasted for very long so we're in giant experiment territory the key is to survive long enough to get experimental results and to keep on trying to make sure we know more so I think the key right now is to have a diversity of attempts and we've instead been codifying the whole world around this stupid model which we can already see isn't working which has got to be the worst thing possible I think the answer will have something to do with a little bit about what's worked at least somewhat in the US of a balance of power and multiple layers of structure that balance each other so that the government isn't itself the source of entertainment is a good thing but anyway I think we really have a lot to learn I'm very much an empiricist on this when I answered that question something like that in the past I've done conversations with lots of tech workers who are interested in civic engagement and I don't know how people say a truism is that marriage is work or a truism is that a real founder relationship is like a marriage and it takes work but also I always stress that people's relationship to civic society is also like a marriage and takes work and if you disinvest in it not just in a financial sense not paying taxes or something like that if you disinvest in it from an attention and energy perspective your systems and public institutions will decay and what is happening right now is the continuation of 30 or 40 years of really broad based cultural civic disinvestment first a real quick observation both you and Bill Gates came out of New Mexico did you know that Bill Gates I don't think he grew up there he didn't grow up there he had Microsoft and Albuquerque for a little while that's just a quick observation and I think Feynman did wasn't he at Los Alamos at some point as a kid he was briefly at Los Alamos during the heyday of the Manhattan Project but what I really wanted to ask you was to go back to the original comment here which is about being makers you are not making anything show me what you're making with your hands it was a very interesting book review a couple of weeks ago the Times book review about this whole issue of disconnection from the machine and human being in terms of making things weaving for instance and I'm sorry coming off of cold here don't you think this has some repercussions somewhere in our lives well personally I've made a lot of stuff and I still am but I'll let that slide but yeah I think working with physicality is great I think it's a special I agree with you and I think the idea that doing computation doing computation without the physical side makes you misunderstand computation I was like when I had students in virtuality I made them grind their own lenses and build headsets themselves because I really believe this off the shelf thing and all you're doing is twiddling bits does not teach you anything it just puts you in a rut so I agree with you I've just built more than you think we have a question here we'll take two I have a question of a completely different kind partly because I'm technologically challenged I have a flip phone but you've written an autobiography or a memoir it was called both of those things at the beginning of our discussion and I wondered if there were models of autobiography or memoir that you had found particularly compelling that were of use to you in writing this book oh my god well there's a lot that I have found really moving it's hard to know exactly where to start Nabokov speak memory Edgar's story about his family is amazing well I think one of the things passed I went through a whole thing with that when I was a kid and I I don't know there's a lot I think it's a cool genre I like Keith Richards thing which is mostly just spoken and transcribed I thought that was really cool I liked oh I don't know I mean I don't even know where to begin I also have a hard time with this kind of question I just feel like my brain seizes up because I just have no idea how to even begin to talk about it I just don't even have a size clue question here hi I have a simple question so you defined VR as one of the ways to define VR as consciousness of experience but it's primarily situated through a human's consciousness and so my question is is there a VR experience out there that would allow for a different kind of consciousness and if not is there capability of developing something like that so you mentioned earlier the spider so could I experience the spider's consciousness through VR someday or now for that matter well we have to be careful here ultimately we have to remember that VR is a medium it's a flow of artifacts created by people and so I think it's possible for a painting or a book or a piece of music or a VR creation to potentially expand our sense of how things might be and have more of a feeling for what it might be like to be a spider but it's important to remember that we're not we can't do that in a technical sense because we don't have any consciousness meter we can stick into the spider so we can't it's a very important distinction to make one of my favorite little tropes from the origins of computing was garbage in garbage out that you can't create meaningful data out of nothing so for something which is fundamentally mysterious we cannot conjure answers we can do art and culture with VR but we cannot do some kind of magical technological transfer of experience to you from a place that we can't even measure it it's a subtle distinction but it's absolutely the most important thing to get about VR this will be our last question this idea that advertising or the ad driven model of supporting the internet is this perverse solution of the problem of capitalism and socialism do you write about that anywhere or have other talks that are recorded somewhere I'm really intrigued by this and I don't know that it's in this room yes quite a few I've written about it since the early 90's there's a whole bunch of essays about it from way back but the best known examples are a book called you're not a gadget an alternate economy is foreseen around this which is in a book called who owns the feature just from five to six years ago there's a little bit on it in this book the next book has a bit more on it the next book is going to be called 10 arguments for deleting your social media accounts right now in which case you'll have to find a different video streaming solution for these talks and the if you're into the nerdy economics of it there's a paper in this year's big econ conference on it that's called data as labor that you can look at yeah that's a really good paper there was also a cover story of the economist about it and there was a piece about it in the New York Times last week the sort of academic economic side of it is kind of purring along and learning more and more and it's non-trivial and there's a few other talks I don't know I never watch my talks online I'm doing a TED talk this year and they really make you do a good video they're very brutal about it so that one will probably be well produced and stuff I usually don't even try for that so those are stuff but you might want to look up the data as labor article it's very easy to find cool well thank you so much we'll be here after sign books much thanks to Dara Landier and Kim May Cutler for our inspiring talk if you want to find the book the machine stops or is it the machine ends machine stops you can find it in our library on the 2nd floor so come on down pick it up and read it also join us again for Joyce Carol Oates on Wednesday March 21st at 6.30 thank you for joining us can I tell a Joyce Carol Oates story? yes sure there's this thing in Berkeley where the Berkeley library now Berkeley is going to be issuing its own cryptocurrency but I don't know I'd love to hear that but anyway we do like these fundraisers with local writers at the Berkeley library but they would become so raucous that they got to the point where they wouldn't let the writers talk themselves so they'd have a third person speak for the writers so I was with her at this thing and they would have each of us stand up in turn and then this other person would just read what they think we would have said and then they forced you to stand down and you weren't allowed to talk at all and I was just thinking to myself oh my god like this would be like such a thing anyway that's my story come buy a book