 So Apple just released the Apple Vision Pro, which looks like a modern, updated, sleeker version of the Oculus Rift. And the main difference is you can actually see through it, whereas the Oculus Rift was kind of closed off, so it looked like a helmet, and apparently was also very uncomfortable, whereas the Apple Vision Pro is marketed as one of the most comfortable headsets that you can buy. Even though the price is super expensive, but everything that was presented at the keynote ain't gonna lie, it looks cool. However, some of it is scary. I'm not gonna lie to you, some of it is scary as a sci-fi fan, observing some of the things that we're seeing happen right now, at this moment in history, with artificial intelligence, chat GPT, now virtual reality, augmented reality. It seems like things are getting out of hand very, very quickly, or at least the world that we knew is changing very, very, very quickly. So up until last year, I was Team Android, and rebelliously so, I swore I wouldn't get bullied into getting an iPhone simply because it was the phone of the cool kids. Nowadays, some women will refuse to text you back if your bubbles are green. It's bad. There is a supremacy that we're seeing coming out of the Team iPhone gang, and some of my fellow Android users at the time also shared that sense of rebellion, shared that sense of we're not going to go for the popular phone simply because everybody else likes it. A lot of people don't know it, but Samsung actually manufactures the screens for iPhones. I don't know if that's still the case, but for all my Team iPhone people, you might want to humble yourself. But nevertheless, I buckled, and I got the iPhone 14 primarily because of the camera. The iPhone 14 Pro had a really nice camera that I wanted to be able to use for my videography work. Also, I own stock in Apple, right? I got some stock, I think, a year or two ago, which because of the release of the Apple Vision Pro and the anticipation for the release, the stock is going up, so I'm pretty happy about that. In layman's terms, a fallacy and bargain is a deal with the devil, and the idea behind this is for most things that you receive that have a positive, there is some negative associated with it, and it's incumbent upon you to be aware of both positives and negatives as it relates to whatever thing that you're seeking. In this case, I think it's very, very clear that we have to have that conversation as it relates to technology. In Black Mirror, there are several episodes where it alludes to technology having advanced so far that augmented reality is now part of a contact lens. In addition to a contact lens and some probes on your brain or on the side of your face, you're now able to project whatever reality you want to see. It's ready player one, but even more intimate. When things get bad enough, when your life fails to be fulfilling, the human reaction is to escape, and with social media, video games, with movies, it gives us the opportunity to escape, and the better that this technology becomes, where we will be escaping to might become indistinguishable from reality. What are the consequences of a world where people care more about their virtual lives than their real lives? Their virtual friends and their real friends, their virtual relationships, more than their real relationships? I mean, we're already talking about the social skills that Gen Z lacks. How will these things worsen as people continuously spend more time in the virtual world than in the real world? When I was watching the keynote, a part that stood out to me was the bit where they talked about watching movies, and I immediately thought to myself, one of the most fun aspects of watching a movie is the communal aspect, watching a movie with somebody, watching a movie with a group, your family, but with a headset, with goggles, it's a one person experience. And I know as we've become more siloed alone, that this has been normalized, but I remember a time where sometimes we would play a one player game and switch out to see who could beat this level, okay, I beat this level, you beat the next level. Better than online gaming now where you're talking to strangers, you're being called nigga by 12 year old white boys in Oklahoma. And I don't know if we have taken a beat to actually recognize that it is actually strange. And as the technology improves, as the graphics improve, as the percentage of immersion improves, and as the real world worsens, the economy worsens, the job market worsens, it will literally become ready player one. And who knows if it might become the matrix. So I was having a conversation with a mentor of mine, and he owns a telecommunications company. And one of the very first conversations we have a while back, he talked to me about the upgrades that are being done to prepare the country's infrastructure for web three. Web three needs to support all the things that people are now doing on the internet from gaming to social media to streaming. And as these things become a bigger and bigger part of our lives, the infrastructure needs to be able to support it. Eventually every part of our city infrastructure might be built to support this growing immersive experience. So when we get to the point where the Apple Vision Pro is a contact lens, you can be walking and moving and doing anything that you need to do around your neighborhood, around the city and literally live in your own make believe world. You know, some Christian conspiracy theorists believe that at some point we'll have computer chips implanted into our hands as one of the signs of the end times. I would argue that that's already happened. I mean literally it's happened in some countries, but our phones, there are computer chips that are pretty much implanted in our hands. And as we become more physically integrated with technology, glasses, watch, cars, we will be more reliant on this technology more than ever before. And I don't know if that's a good thing. I mean think about how much information your phone knows about you. Your phone knows what you like. Sometimes you log into your social media site and it shows you ads of things that you thought about. That's not a mistake. Your phone has your fingerprint, your iris, your face. It knows your patterns, it has your search history. And the more that we become integrated in these different technologies, the more we become like androids. Yeah, there are 600,000 cell phone tower sites in the United States. They're everywhere on the sides of buildings, street lights, water tanks. But team 10 learned thousands of those towers violate federal rules that are supposed to keep workers safe. I think some of the social movements we've seen happen and the simultaneous rise of social media have been almost a soft sell for this new technological revolution. Because of social media, you can literally be anybody. You could create a whole new persona on YouTube, on Instagram, on Snapchat, on Facebook. Sometimes that persona doesn't even have to include your picture. It could be an emoji, an emoji, it could be an animal. And that, in my opinion, coincides perfectly with the gender dysphoria that we're seeing rise as well. People don't know if they're men, women, it's they's. And in a world where you can create your own reality, literally, this is step one. Because in the metaverse, in the Oculusverse, in the Appavision Proverse, you literally can be anybody. What will that mean for our future? What will that mean for the loneliness epidemic? When in-cell men or in-cell women no longer have to improve themselves to find a mate or to interact with another human being, they can just consume virtual pornography. And now when you pair that with AI, deep fakes, you can literally create the reality that you want to see. Whether or not that reality helps you. With the assistance of technology, now you can seal yourself in your own echo chamber and be fed advertisements that are catered and tailored to you to exploit you for anything that you do have to feed the corporate machine. I think we need to think about this as we see these new developments in technology, because at the end of the day, companies want to survive. Companies want to be innovative. They're not necessarily prioritizing the risks that are involved in their innovation. Do memories mean as much if now you can play it back at any time? How will social interactions look now? When instead of everybody pulling out their phones, now everybody's putting on their headset. So nobody's actually experiencing it because we're prioritizing re-experiencing it. I'm terrified, man. I don't know what this is going to look like moving into the future, especially as the material world continues to get worse. The real estate market is in the toilet. Now are we just going to buy virtual real estate, NFTs instead of real art, virtual concerts instead of actual concerts? And at the same time, anxieties that are all time high. You don't know if you're going to go to a movie theater and it could potentially turn into a mass shooting. So yeah, it seems like a better idea to stay home and watch the movie in my own personal movie theater in my eyes. Yeah. I'm terrified. If you want to see more of this, please click that like button. It helps tremendously. And share this to somebody you think would gain value from the message and hit that subscribe button as well. Peace out, y'all.