 So, welcome everyone to the Science Circle. My name is Bergon Betts. My real name is Matthew Burr, Matt Burr. The Science Circle is a grant-funded non-profit organization based out of the Netherlands. So I want to, you know, advise everyone to be on your best behavior, don't grief us or spam us or whatever. We want to be well-behaved for grant purposes and so forth. The Science Circle is organized for the purpose of developing virtual world platforms or education. And one of the things we do is present these, well, really weekly presentations on scientific topics and once a month I host a panel discussion, usually trying to assemble a panel of two or three experts on a topic to discuss a topic. You can find, so as a consequence, these sessions are recorded and uploaded to the Science Circle website and also to YouTube. So this will be recorded, so please do not enable your microphone. Myself and Pathfinder are the only people who will be using voice. But feel free to comment or ask questions in nearby chat with text and we will do our best to keep track of that and respond to you. Let me, I will post a link to the Science Circle YouTube channel if you're curious to look at our past events and scientific discussions. Some of you may be interested to know this past month, of course, we have done a number of sessions related to COVID-19. So I think you might want to go and review some of our previous presentations with regard to the virus. So with that sort of housekeeping out of the way, I'd like to introduce our guest today. He probably doesn't need too much introduction, Pathfinder Lester, who has been holding office hours here in Second Life recently, which I want to recommend everyone attend. And today we wanted to take advantage, well, actually, while I'm thinking of it, I did also want to welcome newcomers to this. I think this particular event today is attracting some new people to the Science Circle who may not be familiar with or maybe this is your first time here. So welcome and we hope you'll come back from time to time to see what's going on here. And one of the things we wanted to do today is take advantage of Pathfinder in Second Life with his expertise regarding virtual world platforms and just the internet in general. And also considering that many people now have to interact socially or do work online, I kind of wanted to give him an opportunity to just kind of talk about that. What are his strategies that he wants to talk about regarding how to use the internet and use virtual platforms in the context of the quarantine or the lockdown. So Pathfinder, with that said, why don't you make some, please feel free to jump in, make some introductory remarks, let us know kind of what's on your mind initially today to talk about. Thank you for that introduction. Yeah, I think it's interesting. I'm having a little technical issue. It doesn't hear me again. Do you hear me, sir? Do you hear me, Berrigan? Check. Uh-oh. It doesn't hear me. Does he see chat? Do you hear me? Here we go. No, Pathfinder, I do not hear you. I see your white dot, but I don't see voice. Okay. The sound waves coming out. Everyone here, let's see. Everyone here hears me, but you don't hear me. Yeah, that's super weird. Let me check. Maybe I, let me check to see if I have any kind of a settings issue. Mm-hmm. I think in the, let's see. What I'm going to do is I know everyone can hear me in the audience here. Oh, I'll do something fun. Looks like, I'll do something fun. Be quick to go. I'm going to wait and see. Give him a moment. I'll just keep talking. This is, I have not had an issue with voice in a long time. Check one. I'm not quite sure. Oh, hang on. Have you tried turning it on and off again? Have you tried turning it on and off again? Yep, I got it. I fixed it. Okay. Carry on. All right. Again, I appreciate your patience. No, no, no worries at all. Let me, let me fix something on my end here real quick. Save this. Yeah, thank you. Well, you know, it's, the show must go on. Right. Yeah, first of all, just, it's great to see so many people here. And I, I think I ran around and I added, I did have, you know, added people as friends. I always like to stay connected with people as friends. And if I didn't hit you, please add me as a friend. If you would like to do that, you know, whenever you want to do that right now. If you want, if I, if I, if you don't want to be my friend, that's fine. I just like being, I like the friends connection because it's all about presence. Right. And that's where I kind of want to start today thinking about what to talk about. And it's, how many of you here has noticed like when you're logging in, it's like, oh, my goodness, all these people who are on my friends list. I haven't seen them in ages. And they're there. They're alive. Right. It's like, it's like Dr. Seuss, like Horton hears a who it's like, we are here. We are here. You know, you suddenly, they pop the voices pop out and everyone's every single day. I know the queue. Yeah, we can only hope people are alive and that it's a lot of people. It's, it's, it's crazy times, hard times. And, but I think it's just wonderful to see when people log on just that, oh, these people are suddenly, I noticed them and people are reaching out to each other. It's, it's, it's really amazing to see the, the connections that are being made as people are coming back into these online environments. And I think, like, in particular in Second Life here. So I think that's, this is sort of an initial thought. I think it's just, be aware, be aware of, of people popping up. And if you see someone pop up, just reach out to them because I have had so much joy in my life. This the past couple of weeks, just people suddenly reaching out to me and like, oh my God, how are you doing? I just had, you know, today already three people I haven't heard from in on any platform for, for a good year or so. And all of a sudden they're pinging me in Second Life. So spend some time when you log in and you see all those names fly by just go like, hey, how are you doing? You know, because in every situation, no one said like, oh, I'm busy. I can't talk now. You know, it's always like, oh my God, yes, hi. Or, you know, oh, let's schedule some time to get together. So it's so true. You know, I also noticed in the destination guide, for example, that there's an event for people returning back to Second Life, you know, a shopping event, which I think is just an indication of how many either new people or returning people are coming back to Second Life. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it's, and while you were gone, well, you weren't really gone, my friend. We were listening to everything you were saying and we will forgive you for, you know, for mild cursing that you were making. But it was just, it was just like, it's like, you know, someone with the microphone on and they don't know it's off. I mean, they don't know what's on. Like, damn it, damn it. And we were, we were, we all forgive you and we all, because we've all been there. I wasn't even aware I was cursing. Like, damn it, damn it, damn it. That's fine. Very, very mild. But anyway, the, we were talking about, I don't even know how the topic started. I was just sort of, you know, feeling, just speaking because I was hoping that you would hear me just speaking, you know, with the microphone. And we were talking about, you know, something about where we were, where we were living and somebody brought up Nantucket and I was like, yeah, I used to spend summers in Nantucket because my uncle lived there. And I was telling a wonderful story about when I was a kid. I was like eight years old. I was eight or 10. My brother was a few years younger. And my uncle Albert, we were on Nantucket Island and he said, hey guys, get in the car. He's beat up Jeep and get in the car and we're going to go visit a friend and I think you'll like him. And we go there and we get to this house and the front door is stuck and I hear somebody inside going, come around the back. The door is jammed, you know, it's not working. It's this little house, you know, near the beach. And we go around the back and the door opens and it's Fred Rogers. Holy moly. Yeah, his family has or had, maybe they still have. Small, small little house on Nantucket Island on the beach and he came out. I was just I was just amazed. And and like while you were talking to there's a story on it. Let's see. Yeah, I can see you trying to res an image there. Yeah, there it is. There we go. There we go. So that's I'm the it's slowly popping in. Yeah. 1973. I was seven years old. I was born in 67. I was seven years old. No, 67. One, two, three. That is fantastic. And that's my little brother. I'm the one wearing the, the, the, those striped pants. That was all the rage in the 70s, early 70s. Right. And that's the beach behind the, the oceans behind him. And, and just thinking about also these, you know, everyone's coming online. We haven't seen people in a long time. And there's a reason I just read this. We're, we're, we're see, we're reconnecting with people. We haven't seen in a long time sometimes. And there's an interesting thing that happens with memory. It's like, we forget the details about who we're, maybe like what we talked about with these people or, or what the situation was where we met them. But the one thing we never, ever forget about interactions with people is, is how they make us feel. You never forget that. And I don't remember what we talked about after he came out that door. I don't remember at all what we even did. I don't even remember that picture being taken. You know, I remember going there, but as soon as he came out that door, I don't remember anything about that, but I remember how he made me feel. It was just, it was amazing. It was just the nicest, kindest feeling I can imagine. And, and, and I think as we're reconnecting with all these people coming back into our lives, I think it's just wonderful how, and I'm experiencing that too. It's like, I don't remember what we were talking about. I can't even remember what, what was the context of this meeting, but I just have this really good feeling about you and I feel good. So I think that's just a very special opportunity we all have here with these. Yeah, that's right. You know, that looks like an old style Polaroid picture, which is also interesting. Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was. I found the physical photo and I, I was able. Yeah. It's a state of the art, instant photography in the day. Yeah. Well, let me, so, you know, as I mentioned, our topic today is really to kind of explore how we can take advantage of the internet and virtual platforms during this time. Are there, you know, are there any platforms that you're particularly excited about that you want to recommend or, or maybe warns away from or anything like that? Kind of what's on your mind? What's hot right now as far as this goes? I know that some people are, for example, everyone is using Zoom, but I think there's some concerns that Zoom can be hacked and there are concerns about TikTok, for example, that the Chinese are spying on TikTok and things like that. So kind of given kind of in that context or that sort of, you know, what are your thoughts about the use of virtual platforms for quarantine? That's a good question. I think the reality of the situation here, because this is a very special context, right? This isn't just the context of a lot of people are using tools and what's where good tools for this or that. The context here is everyone has been pushed into the deep end of the pool of online communication. Literally, like we've been pushed, thrown into the deep end of the pool. There's no option. There's no option. It's not like, yeah, you should figure this out. All you students, no, just go home. No, go home. You can't stay here. We're not saying you should. We're just saying go. Same with businesses. Same with families. Yeah, that Easter family thing? No, you're not going to do it. You can't. It's not you shouldn't. It's you can't. So people have been pushed into the deep end of the pool and the water that everyone's swimming in is online communities, online computer mediated communication, online communication. And I feel like, yeah, it feels like people are being pretty creative about it. You know, like I like what Jimmy Fallon has been doing to operate his show with all of his guests remotely. And who's the guy from Green Day? Billy Joe has been doing a bunch of really clever music covers that he posts. And even just today, the Beatles did a live stream on YouTube, a sing-along of the Yellow Submarine movie, you know, that had 70,000 viewers. There's a lot of creativity being used to try to create a social life on the Internet. True. One interesting side effect of that is with, especially with comedians doing these like, hey, I'm going to film something at home, me doing something. You're realizing two things. One, wow, those makeup departments really do a lot of work on people. Holy cow, this person looks like me. They look like me when I wake up. And second of all, and I'm going to be gentle, but I'll be honest. Wow. They really need, their writers are really important because if they're just ad-libbing, they really need good material from their writer group. You know, because sometimes it's hit or miss. You know, it's like, yeah, you're talented, but man, yeah, your writers are awesome because now without them, I'm realizing that you're much more spotty. Yeah, I think comedians especially, comedians I think feed off the energy of a live audience. And so when they're just performing alone in their house, you know, they just have the same energy. Excellent point. Yeah, excellent point. Yeah, and that dynamic. I mean, that's what acting is, right? It's a relationship with your audience. And that's why it's real talent to do things like, you know, there's a difference between theater and motion pictures and especially with, you know, CG. Yeah. Look, you're talking to green screens. You're not even talking to people. You're talking to something that's going to be filled in later by a 3D modeler and animator, but it's hard. Yeah. And with educators too, there's this difficulty. So just get back to that thing though. Like, you know, so this is this high level thing that I think is important to remember is like, we've been pushed into the deep end of the pool. And when you're drowning, you grab it whatever is right there and that tool right now is Zoom. And the reason people are like, why is Zoom so popular? It's been around for nine years. Why aren't people using Skype? Why aren't people using Google Hangouts? Why aren't they using WebEx? It's because Zoom is the easiest teleconferencing app to get into. It was started nine years ago by a, here left, I think it was WebEx. Yeah, it was WebEx. They left one of the big teleconferencing, group conferencing companies. And they left because they said, this is just too hard. It's too hard for people to use these platforms. And it's like, they're always, you know, it's like, I'm going to leave and I'm going to just make something that is so super easy. You just click and boom, you're in. There's no other platform that does that. And it's interesting too, because the engineers at the time, they were like, yeah, we can build that, but you know, you're going to have to kind of play it loose and fast with security. You're going to have to do some kind of little things on the back end that maybe a little dicey dodgy with your security settings. And he's like, I don't care. We'll fix that later. What I want to do is make it super simple and fast forward to today. That's exactly what happened. People jumped in and now they're starting to realize, oh, there's some security things. And so now, you know, Zoom is, you know, has to really seriously think about patching some of that. I think Zoom is great for like family get-togethers. My family, we had a Zoom meeting for my brother's birthday. We all live all around the country. My family is pretty big. I think for things like that, Zoom is perfectly fine. I think the security issues mainly crop up in a business context where you're trying to do business meetings, where, you know, your company maybe might be attract, you know, some mischief. But I think for personal use, I think Zoom is perfectly fine. It seems to be. Well, you know, I mean, I don't know. I don't subscribe to the, I'm not important enough to be a target argument at all. I don't because I have a background in computer security and here's the thing, man. That used to be the case. It's like, oh, I'm just a little fish. No one's going to catch me. Well, guess what? Because people think of it in terms of a one-on-one hack. They think like, there's some dude in China sitting there with a hood on, like Mr. Robot, and he's zeroing in on you, right? But if you actually watch Mr. Robot, you suddenly realize like, wow, a lot of the tools they have are basically these big nets. Hackers have these tools that are nets that basically go like, I'm just going to click and run this one script. And it's just going to kind of like, I don't know, poke at the, you know, the router of everyone in this city and see if I can get in and see if I can find some vulnerabilities. So there is a stocking at scale. So it's like, yeah, I'm a small fish. No one will try to catch me directly. It's like, yeah, they won't because they'll catch you in a net. They'll catch you in a giant sieve net and they're picking up you and a hundred thousand other people who left your routers open a little bit. And if Zoom has some security flaw, you know, a zero-day exploit, no one knows about, they're going to find it and then they're suddenly going to be like, oh, they're going to wake up in the morning, somebody somewhere in China or wherever, they're going to wake up in the morning with a cup of coffee, go to their computer and see their script that ran and poked a million computers and they're going to see a list of a thousand machines that they compromised and they're just going to click a button and say like, yeah, just, you know, turn on the digital vacuum and hoover up any files that are sitting on that person's hard drive. The thing is, our digital identities are so exposed on our desktops. If you think about all the information someone could get when they sit in front of your computer and it's unlocked, what can they get to? That's what anyone in the world could get to at scale. Well, that's, yeah, that is alarming. To be honest, I had not really thought through about that. So that's fantastic information. I mean to scare you, Mike. I mean to scare you, Mike, because this is a scared straight situation here, just you should be. You know, no one, you know, you should be not scared. You should be aware of the risks the same way you were aware of the fact that you really should have locks on your doors. You should be, you know, using you know, some kind of security software. I'm not going to recommend anything specific, but there's plenty of solutions out there. Well, yeah, you know, we last year at one of our panel discussions, we did we did a whole session on internet security and kind of it's sort of the same thing that you do need to be, you need to be aware of it and you need you need to use the security tools that are available to you and sort of on each individual person to kind of take responsibility. Yeah, yeah. And someone mentioned to like router security. Yeah, that's the thing your router is what's exposed to the internet when someone, when you're surfing the internet, the IP address that you're exposing is the IP address of your router. So if you have like a router that maybe you haven't looked at in like a decade and it's just running old software, you know, might want to if it's if it's owned by our internet service provider, you know, you know, check with them to make sure everything is good and they may be like, Oh, shoot, you're right. That's an old one. We need to upgrade that. But can routers be anonymized the way IP addresses can be or randomized or something? No. So if you connect to any website, there's your IP address. Here's okay. Here's a good site. I like this website. It's called IP Lee IP. Just go there and basically when it says your IP address, what you see there is the IP address of your router and it will kind of poke at you a little bit and just say, like, you know, I can this is what I know about you. It's not it's not trying to break into anything, but it's just basically identifying what you make visible when you browse the IP addresses visible. If you go to it, if you connect to any service, you connect to zoom, you connect to anything your IP address is, you know, the IP address of your route. I don't want to go too far down that rabbit hole, but just, you know, but look at that, you know, look at that page and there's some good resources on there that maybe, you know, can help you. That sort of segues into another topic I wanted to get into, which was what kind of tools people should be aware of. I also want to mention, you mentioned Skype also and I recently had occasion to look into the history of Skype and because it did seem like it would have been a natural for this environment. But you know, Skype went through a weird history where because it was it was like a peer to peer platform. Oh, yeah. And after a while it was bought by eBay for like a billion dollars a month. And then it was sold to Microsoft. And since ever since Microsoft has had it's been sold to Microsoft, you know, it's been sold to Microsoft. It's been sold to Microsoft. It's been sold to Microsoft. It's been sold to Microsoft. And since ever since Microsoft has had it, it's kind of withered on the vine. Well, they, you know, it was a I'm not sure if it was an acquire higher situation where businesses acquire technology to also acquire to primarily acquire the engineers on the team. Sometimes that's what it is. Sometimes it's an acquire. We're going to use your technology and we're going to fire the situation. I can't remember. I don't either. Steven Zudify also mentions teams. Do you have any? Are you familiar with Microsoft? I have not used it, but every time I boot Windows, you know, the team launches. It's really noise the hell out of me. I had to rip it out of the operating system. It's it's their slack killer. They're trying to kill. So, so a lot of these tools do the same things, right? And I think okay, so let's see tools. Well, first of all, Skype is interesting because it was all about P2P. It was all about this peer to peer decentralized solution. You can't you can't kill it. You can't stop the voice, you know, it's amazing. And now, of course, it's totally centralized. It's that dream has completely disappeared. So it's a totally different product and it's all centralized. But it does it's it's it's it's does exactly what zoom does. It does, you know, teleconferencing is it does what Google Hangouts does. Yeah, same tool does what team speak does same thing. So with with but the in terms of like what's the best of breed you know again, zoom is super easy for conferencing. I think for security there's more or teeth to something like hangouts and Skype is still good. It's pretty secure if you trust yourself. Yeah, Skype is still pretty good. I mean, I still use it. Yeah, and I did. I was speaking with someone just the other day who she was saying that they use what is it called a Google not Hangouts but what's it called now team and no not teams. Somebody mentioned it here in the local chat or discord is another one. Yeah, so that's a different type of app, right? So let's switch gears here. So we're not talking about just video conferencing now. How do you do like group collaboration with different different conversation channels? How many here remember IRC meet how many people here remember IRC like the different channels, you know, and so Slack Slack is the big the big one in in terms of and I think the really outstanding platform for team to collaborate. It also has built into the ability to do video conferencing and voice chat but it's primarily a text based enterprise collaboration tool. The interesting thing is like Discord is the new Slack Discord does everything pretty much that Slack does but it's also gained a huge amount of traction among gamers. It was developed as a tool for people to run while they were playing multi user games online so that they could have conversations and text. They could also use voice very easily. Discord's business model is also completely opposite of Slack's in that Slack you pay Slack, the company you pay the company to have a server and the users come in for free Discord, the servers are free forever but the users can optionally pay money to basically like buff their accounts like if you want an animated if you want an animated GIF as your avatar and Discord you pay Discord a little so actually I see a lot of businesses using Slack. I see Discord being used by a lot of people for just online communities for anything but I'm actually actually even seeing sometimes some businesses oh you're speaking of Skype ringing sound I think I see Discord Discord and Slack are like two groups from the same kind of tree but I like Discord. I actually prefer Discord a little. I don't trust any kind of like Facebook for business stuff there we go and you're ringing there we go I don't really trust Facebook that much for their enterprise tools I don't know this is personally I don't dig that but which then makes me which paints me as a hypocrite because I really like what the Oculus does I think Facebook's actually done a lot of great stuff with the Oculus their VR stuff one thing I will say for privacy if you are really like man I just want to have private text messaging and voice calls on my phone and have it on my desktop too like if you're dead serious about security you should be running Signal that's Signal that is a powerful encryption decentralized encryption based decentralized P2P system just thinking if you watch Mr. Robot and that's the tool that they use a lot you know and they're like how do they send those messages that like automatically self destruct and are super secure it's like Signal it's a real app and it's really really good for secure voice and very good thank you sorry for my interruptions there but I muted my audio there so that won't happen again that's fantastic so it seems to me that a lot of these tools can be used sort of synergistically you know so that you might want to be aware of creating maybe a suite of platforms and tools or applications you know because I think this situation may endure for quite a few more months so I think in time people will just sort of begin to collect various platforms and tools that really work best for them and you know this could you know if you extrapolate out it could be kind of transformative because it will be weird once we get kind of experience living this way it will seem weird to go back to normal life yeah and the you know that's interesting how do I say this the world has changed right and it's going to stay changed we can argue that we can debate that but I strongly feel that this is not going to if you look historically at any kind of grand change some event you know not just pandemics and things but any kind of big thing you know like world war two world war one depression all these things going back in time those are things that ended all of these things those things ended and the world never snapped back to the way it was before that was always like oh yeah remember and also things like you remember little things like yeah you know remember rubber tree plants and rubber that was made from rubber tree plants that was the way rubber existed decades decades you know and there were some scientists who were like you know we can make rubber out of petroleum it's like no we don't need that rubber tree plants and world war two happens all of a sudden people are like yeah we need a lot of rubber we need you know we need all the rubber we need more than all the rubber all the rubber tree plants are just we can't grow them fast enough it's not scalable and all of a sudden you know but yeah those scientists who are making you guys come over here you know show us how you can can you ramp this up oh yeah we can ramp up petroleum based rubber products just crank them out world war two ends did everyone go back to rubber tree plants no so you know that's dead dead in the water that whole industry died and the you know petroleum based rubber companies just became the norm during the war and afterwards it's just like yeah this is it the world has changed the war is over we don't need that much rubber as we did during the war for all the tires and rubber products for all the machines of war and the world the world just shifts and I think you know what's happening here is we've all been pushed into this this pool of online online interactions for everyone we're all house about we're all under house arrest that's what it is let's be honest this is house we're all under house arrest this is why we feel kind of guilty when we go outside I feel like I'm breaking the law that's what house arrest feels like I haven't been in house arrest it's crazy yeah it's you know it's a legal thing that says you can't leave and and what's going to happen is people are going to go back they're going to be like I can't well when the house arrest ends I'm looking forward to going back to the office and all this stuff and then they're going to go back to the office and be like yeah this feels good but wow that two hour commute every day I don't know if I want to do that anymore I was able to do a lot of stuff at home and you know it was kind of nice being with me maybe not every day except for me I want to be with my dog maybe I want to be you know you don't want to be home every day alone you know maybe you want to be alone from other people in physical process you know a similar example they're going to want to go back and here's let me complete that so they're going to go back and there's going to be a desire to to shift more things online and it will come from the just people with their businesses who say hey they'll realize the cost efficiencies it's like wow we actually were able to do a lot of work and we had you know all these people working remotely so yeah let's start hiring people working remotely because we know how to do this now it's going to come from also businesses are going to realize wow we really shouldn't do we really need to pay $65 per square foot space all those environments and they're also going to start realizing it's going to drive the way businesses think strategically because they're going to be hiring people on the whole like yeah we're going to pay for you to move out here and more and more people are going to go yeah no I got it pretty sweet here and I can work from home because I know I can do that during the great pandemic and you can fly me out there once a quarter but I'm not going to uproot myself good gig here working you know a kind of a similar example is ICE you know before refrigeration ICE was harvested like for example there was something I think called the Great Lakes Ice Company or something and in the winter they would harvest gigantic blocks of ice that were shipped all over the world the English when they were colonists in India would drink their gin and tonics with an ice cube that was sent to them from the Great Lakes in the United States shipped all the way to India for their gin and tonics they would like package sawdust and then refrigeration was developed and the ability to make ice in your freezer and then just completely obliterated that industry and that's just a reflection that the the advent of refrigeration and freezer technology just obliterated that technology and we never looked back yeah exactly and one thing I do want to say too about we're talking about gathering collections of tools that's the way to do it right no one just uses one tool all day long I use Slack and I use Zoom and I use Signal and I use a whole bunch of other tools and we all use virtual well not all of us but here I'm preaching to the choir here we all use virtual worlds but here's the thing here's a key thing that I'm seeing um so many of these collaborative technologies well any of these any modern collaborative technology technology like video conferencing and text chat they do a great job at keeping us connected but they don't give you a sense of being with someone else you don't get a sense of being with someone in a shared place and our brains are wired to want to be together in shared places so when you hear about Zoom fatigue this isn't fascinating there are all these different reasons for Zoom you can hear for Zoom fatigue just looking at too many eye making too much eye contact and so forth that I have my own personal higher level uh as high as I can think theory about this is uh you know when you log into something like a multi-user Zoom call you don't have a sense of togetherness because the conversation isn't happening anywhere it's happening on a screen with talking heads literally in boxes and you know your mind can't wrap around our minds can't wrap around this kind of distorted reality it's not what your mind is used to and so your mind kind of defaults into this confused state and it's trying to figure stuff out what happens when your mind is working hard to figure something out you get tired you get exhausted after too many of these video conferencing calls with too many people and the thing is a lot of people you're hearing it more and more now people are feeling tired and frustrated with Zoom fatigue and they don't understand why and I think at the highest level is because we're tired and we feel frustrated with using things like Zoom exclusively because our minds long for an online environment that more deeply speaks to our human nature we want to be part of a shared space we want to be shared space we want to be in an environment exploring places with people while we collaborate and work together so I think what's missing from this toolset are environments that offer a sense of place and that's why you're seeing people starting to come into environments like Second Life and they're going wow I just feel so much better in this environment and I just got out of a 20 person Zoom call and I'm exhausted but then I'm hanging out here with 20 people and for some reason I just feel good yeah let me kind of share my personal experience of that because I think it's maybe illustrative I don't know how many others here might share this but you know I live alone and with my cat and so I find that like if I'm going to watch Netflix or watch TV or watch YouTube or something like that often those experiences to me just make me feel alone they just emphasize how alone I am because I'm not watching it with anybody if I want to react to something I'm watching there's nobody there to react with so I tend to sort of put off that sort of thing until late at night like when I'm getting ready to go to bed and stuff like that when it doesn't really matter but the and then I also share the same sense that with Zoom or other chat technologies there is you do have that loss of a sense of place or loss of community it's more just kind of information transfer there is not much of a sense of community but I can spend hours in Second Life and if I have during the day if I have the choice of binge watching something on Netflix or hanging out in Second Life I'll just hang out in Second Life I can talk to people you have avatars that you're interacting with you see each other in the full totality of their body and you're in some kind of fantastical setting that you love and things like that that's why Second Life is addictive I think because you can just spend hours here feeling social and feeling a sense of community that the other platforms simply don't provide and the thing is we're at a period of time where everything is accelerated so people in an accelerated way jumped onto these different tools in the big one being Zoom and now in an accelerated way they're learning the limitations of those things so now it's two weeks ago you weren't seeing articles like I just saw someone posted a BBC article I just saw something in National Geographic about Zoom fatigue two weeks ago you weren't seeing those articles now they're popping up and I predict they're going to be everywhere the next thing that's going to happen what's lacking is this sense of place and people have already started pouring into SL I was talking with Abbey and he said something new user subscription rates are going up 20% 30% the stuff's increasing it's wonderful and it's just going to get faster it's going to get faster because people are going to realize they're going to be like what's an environment where I can have a sense of place you're already starting to see the thin edge of the wedge it's what is it animal crossing right I've played Animal Crossing with my kids and then you realize they're playing it not because they're entertaining their kids it's like I just want to play Animal Crossing I'm an adult I just feel like I need to be in this space I need to be in a place I'm playing Fortnite with my kids and the kids are like you're not playing it with me you just want to be in Fortnite what's going on dad that's right I've been in World of Warcraft and I think a lot of some other games like that people just hang out in them before I tried Second Life many many years ago I tried some of those first person shooter games or Call of Duty and so forth and World of Warcraft I found that I mostly just stood around in the town square chatting with people I was not really that interested in doing quests or leveling up or anything like that a social world by Second Life is perfect for me I hang out at crossroads in the all roads lead to Rome they're always places in these virtual games where it's like I used to play Lord of the Rings all the time I always hung out at the Prancing Pony it was also mentioned in local chat another nice thing about Second Life is that you can you have full control over how you view the world I don't know how many times I've been watching a movie at home and I reach for my mouse to try to rotate the camera to look around a corner or something like that I go oh yeah I got to mention this because we're talking about some tools here I think it's my favorite peripheral device I think of all time because it's the one that has lasted long it's built like a freaking tank the one that's on my desk here was literally one that was given to me by the company when I was working six I think so 14 years the thing still works like it's brand new it's the um and this is a tool that works in Second Life it's built we built support for it into Second Life and it actually works with things like Google Earth it is the 3D Space Mouse Space Mouse it's like a I think it's like let's check on Amazon how much is a space mouse going um the space mouse I think it's like oh it says it's listening for $100 I think there's like you can get it for cheaper I've seen them for cheaper you also can get used ones on ebay because the thing is you can't kill them and it's a little knobby thing that you basically went to fly cam and smoothly move your camera in 3D by just kind of moving this little knob thing and it is unbelievably awesome if you can find a used one for cheap on ebay I would you know it's built the support for it is built into the client built into the official client and Firestorm as well we built hooks for it into oh that was an open source and um and yes it's a physical peripheral but I have it on the left like I have my right hand and space mouse my left hand and it is just amazing for also like machinima filmers in second life because you can do these slow tracking shots the harder you push on the little knob the faster you move go up and down left and right and you know it's amazing for camera I don't have any shares in the company I don't have any financial you know for picture this hardware device but I just uh it's one of those things that's been like stuck it's the one thing the only thing I'm looking at my desk it's the oldest thing on my desk it's 14 years old and it is still on my desk everything else on my monitor my keyboard my mouse my computer it's all different but that one little sucker little space mouse is still there uh okay extremely cool I'm definitely gonna check that out you mentioned machinima that prompted a thought I was speaking with someone recently who created a build in second life for machinima and um and then their machinima was entered was accepted into the south by southwest film festival nice but then south by southwest was canceled because of the coronavirus like everything right and so I said well you know why doesn't south by southwest simply make all those films available on youtube or some you know or or netflix or something some platform where people can see the films and interestingly apparently um the uh the filmmakers are contractually bound to um for south by southwest to have exclusive rights to the films um and so basically there were there were contractual issues that prevented south by southwest from making those films available on another platform which is really I think a terrible outcome for the filmmakers I'm not quite sure I mean hopefully they can figure out some way to do that to get these films out there it would be it would be a real shame if this entire year was lost yeah and I was also promoting second life to south by southwest thinking well I mean uh like live bands could perform in second life I mean bands could perform live in second life and the the conference part of it could occur in second life um and then people were pushing back saying yeah but what about all the drinking and partying so I thought well south the restaurants in in Austin could um could provide um you know drink coupons something like that or or specs liquor specs liquor could provide uh you know liquor delivery or something like that of course people would end up just drinking at home but uh but that would be some some way to get creative about it some way to sort of creatively reproduce the experiences south by southwest at uh in a virtual world um but uh I have to say you know uh the cancellation of south by southwest was extremely controversial in Austin because it's a huge hit on the economy yeah and they did it very heavily they were like one of the first ones to go down um I think prompted in part because Facebook and Google both canceled their attendance at south by I think that was a huge factor yeah well that was that killed it yeah and one of the nails in a coffin yeah exactly and uh but now it's looking like it's looking like genius that they did that so yeah in retrospect um I know we're coming up on the hour I wanted to make sure I got two things in here first in the nearby chat here um that's a tweet I actually actually uh posted that today that's a link to a um a panel that I did with Evie and uh Robert Scoble and uh and Rubin Steiger uh because I've started uh Rubin and I and a whole cast of characters to work at linen lab to uh you know we're both there at the same time um we're we've um you know we're spinning up this this this collective and this company called billions of us that's why I have billions of us over my head but anyway it's a video that it's a round table panel that we did as part of the Laval virtual uh 2020 conference last week it's the largest and oldest VR virtual world conference that's been going on in Laval, France for the past 20 years literally 20 years they did it all virtually and they asked us to do a panel um and and um on um um uh the importance of of I put together a proposal the importance of I wanted to talk about the importance of sense of place the importance of emotional bandwidth and how important that is in terms of unlocking people's imagination so they can actually do work better you know learning working whatever there's a lot of organizations are trying to figure out it's not just individuals but whole organizations like how can we keep our team from from losing you know trust in each other and how can we make people just be more creative while they're you know because zoom calls you're not being creative when you're in a zoom call I'm sorry you're just not you know you're sort of listening to conversations and how do we collaborate and unlock creativity so there's a there's a video there that um might give give people some insights into some of the ideas around how platforms like Second Life are are um are really powerful and um and again Evie says some really amazing things on that panel fantastic and um and the other thing I'm just going to paste in here is this is something I wrote this is just a Google this is a Google doc because people are asking me more details like what is billions of us doing and what's the problem and I was talking to some educators who had no experience with virtual worlds and I wrote this for them and I realized I'm just going to start kind of spreading it around so that document is something that explains some of the stuff that I was talking about like why are people you know what's the what's wrong with how people are trying to work together and what are the limitations they're feeling and why and what is billions of us doing and basically you know we just are trying to um we just realized like the time this is a black swan event this is a time when all these virtual environments are just going to take off and thrive and and we think there's just so much um help that we can do just across the board in terms of helping people understand the importance of this like we're all evangelists for these platforms whatever our use of them as person over using them for personal enjoyment or we have businesses in these environments to think about the content creators in Second Life we're suddenly starting to get more business you know the more we can be better evangelists for all of this the more everyone will win the people who have a vested interest in the success of the platforms and the people who are feeling intensely dissatisfied and frustrated because they're under house arrest so there's just so much opportunity to prove the net quality of life for everyone so this document is just the beginning of some of my attempts to explain what I'm doing and I know everyone else is doing amazing stuff so if anyone else wants to reach out to me and tell me like what you're doing in terms of like your I'm just fascinated by what people are doing with their businesses in these environments their their organizations in the physical world how is your workplace dealing with this you know are you doing something really cool and amazing and let's just figure out how we can all collaborate because we're all in this together we're right here the 53 people here this is like you know we're the pioneers right we need to we need to help people because we're like the pioneers and all of a sudden we're looking over the horizon and then we see like these masses of people moving westward and it's like what the hell you know where we've been here we got to help these people build towns and cities and survive so so do it absolutely I'm really glad you mentioned emotional bandwidth I think that's a great phrase for everyone to keep in mind as we seek to be productive and to find community online cool so and I know there are a lot of demands on your time I'd love to continue the conversation but maybe this is maybe this is a good stopping point and I'm glad you got a chance to promote your billions of us initiative so and again it's just you know it's more than just a company we see it as this creative collective right you know because it's about collaborating it's like we want to find other people who are trying to bring people into these environments and and for me you know my role there is chief learning officer I chose that title because on my role I want to help teach people how they can best use these environments teach them how to develop their own best practices so that they can succeed in these environments and I know there's so many people around here that are doing the same thing and you know we're focusing on second life as this initial platform because we want to do something now we're going to be building our own stuff over time but we just this is the place we need to help get people in here because there's so many there's such a net positive right you know again the people coming in will benefit the people who are already here the businesses the educators in here you know they'll benefit everyone will benefit absolutely amen yeah I get excited about this stuff it's just awesome awesome yeah well thanks so much Pathfinder it was a real pleasure to have you here and I know that our our students really appreciate it and I want to thank everyone who attended I want to thank Chantal for really kind of setting up this interview a little bit of a different format from what we usually do but we really wanted to take advantage of having you know being able to speak with you today so and with that I guess I'll go ahead and gavel this session to a close and thanks everyone thank you everyone thank you everyone for coming this is awesome this is awesome I'm going to leave this up here I'll let it so anyone can take a copy if they want to copy that movie with um the recent movie of Fred Rudd who was the star I can't believe I'm blanking on his name it's um Tom Hanks I'm sorry I'm just tired I didn't sleep well last night um that was so spot on I have so much respect for Tom Hanks as an actor he was so amazing because I mean I watched you know I have much more experience watching Mr. Rogers as a kid being with him in person I met him a couple times after that and wasn't that I just thought that was amazing Tom Hanks I was like holy cow you just were Mr. Rogers haven't seen that movie and if you love Fred Rogers as a person and a human being and just what he his mark that he left on the world see the Tom Hanks movie I would highly recommend alright I'm going to head out but thank you thank you everyone and uh yeah if you see me as a friend again remember that's what we started the conversation with my idea of friends you know if you see me pop up or whatever you know not just me but any of your other friends say hello to everyone because we're all we're all in this together and uh it's only going to get more exciting in the next over the next few months I think right on John all right we'll have a great weekend you too and everybody take care wonderful to see you all thank you so much for coming out everybody I've blown away by how many people were here really amazing thank you all right take take care bye bye