 I keep saying you know like we were born too late really to explore the earth and we're too early to explore space but we're just at the right time to explore our brains and our minds and VR is an amazing tool for that. Boom what's up everyone welcome to Simulation I'm your host Alan Sakyan. We are on site at Consciousness Hacking's Awaken Future Summit. We are now speaking to Sarah Hashkis. Hello. Hi. Thank you so much for coming on the show really appreciate it. I love the word simulation so. Nice okay well then we're gonna have a great conversation especially at the end. Sarah is the co-founder of Radix Motion and they're merging our realities with VR and I just got I just tried their product called Mu and it was so cool and embodied messenger platform. I was just basically in a state of we have a video to embed here where I was being mirrored my position in a virtual environment was being mirrored by an avatar that was I was constantly dancing with it and mirroring with it but then there was all of this you can describe this really well but all of this cool pieces sparkle motion we'll get to this okay Sarah who are you what do you represent? Who represent? I guess I represent a set of memes that you know I've been lucky enough to collect and or so some like get rid of others filter right filtered set of memes around neuroscience I come from a cognitive neuroscience and a lot of movement I've done martial arts my whole life it's a really really big part of helping me and being who I am and having all this like self-confidence to try really strange things and combining these these two loves of like movement and technology and brains I sort of came into VR as the most amazing medium to create my own realities and be the god of my own world right? When I first took off Mu your your program I was just like what am I doing back here I was just playing god in this world like yeah yeah okay okay so teach us about the cognitive science and martial arts background. So I guess cognitive science I did a master's program Donders University I was actually researching psychedelics and that's I published a paper around the predictive coding framework explaining what psychedelics does to your brain if anybody's into any type of brain hacking or meditation any type of practice around this brain I highly recommend reading a little bit about predictive coding predictive coding can you teach us about that? Yeah so predictive coding looks at your brain as a prediction machine that it doesn't have any access to the outside world your brain right you don't know what's out there the only information your brain is getting is coming from your sensory inputs your eyes your ears but what is actually happening according to predictive coding is that this source of information coming from your senses is getting combined with your previous knowledge right and that's sort of the key part and what makes it sort of different from other theories is that understanding this combination so even when you're looking let's say at a cat you're not just seeing that cat you're seeing all the cats that you've ever seen before including all the emotional experiences you've had with all of the cats you've seen before they're all combining into your sense of perception at that moment so you're this whole being in the now thing when we talk about this or being present might be reducing the previous knowledge that you have of cats in order to just be present with your sensory information that's currently happening so there's again this constant balance between these two sources of information and you can play with this in any type of practice with meditation you can start playing with again probably being present more and reducing your priors and your previous knowledge or you could do the opposite right you could do the type of loving kindness meditation that goes into maybe these loving memories that you have and expands them and who we creates them and helps strengthen these pathways in your brain so there's various types of things you can do once you start understanding this framework and a lot of info in this framework goes around this minimal self how are we actually one being there's 80 billion neurons in there more billions of cells going on and yet we form a type of agent and the theory is that it's based on statistical correlation of these signals so once signals get statistically correlated the best explanation your brain can come up with is like oh it's coming from a one one thing this one thing and this is where the sense of self sort of comes from and you can really play with it have you ever tried the rubber hand experiment teach me what's the rubber right so i put a rubber hand on top of your hand let's say let's i can we can try it it won't really work but let's say we do something like this right this is a rubber hand and i touch you at the same time that i'm touching my hand right that feels really weird already yeah so it feels super weird and what happens is your brain starts believing that my hand is your hand because oh i remember this video when they had it with the little divider yeah yeah i remember so this is one way a very simple way to show how plastic your sense of self is if i can transplant a fake rubber hand and you think it's yours right and with virtual reality we can start playing with that so much we have you know another experience we built where you have tentacles instead of arms we're working on having like a tail so i can start really playing with a sense of bodily self that you have and let you be something else i totally really started to feel like i was not living in this world when i put the headset on and i was playing in your world that you designed so i hope it was a nice world it was a very fun world yeah it was a very fun world and okay so part of the reasons you maybe you felt you might not even notice these things because they're pretty subtle but your movements were correlated to the visuals so we're again creating the statistical correlation for your brain which makes it feel like it's you and the visuals there are 10 000 little particles that sparkle and move and change color so it's very visually beautiful and with a lot a lot of data coming into your brain um and also the music was correlated i don't know if you did you notice that the music was sort of changing as you sped up a little bit exactly so when you move the beat changes based on your movement so once again you're feeling that even the music becomes part of you okay okay so even okay pre preview let's let's um okay so i'm totally with you on the on the cognitive science you um you you called this again the predictive coding sometimes predictive processing or beijing brain there's a lot of different brain okay so yeah because we love talking about the the lineage of ancestors before us that have provided the insight that we have when we're born and then of course in the immediate indoctrination into all of the words that we use to describe civilization so that we have this cohesive language where we can say chair yeah okay yeah yeah and then this is and then so being able to then do something like identify a something else completely novel like can i bring myself so in the present moment that i forget all of the chairs in the past yeah and that i look at the chair and i'm like wow and then you really think about your what what yeah you think about the wood you think about the cloth and what no what isn't what is this even right be so yeah damn that's really raw yeah yeah yeah in present yeah without any yeah so stuff like that so then usually sometimes people can only get there maybe if they spend that really long time in vr really long time meditation a really deep psychedelic experience but if you can train yourself to always have that all mentality you can probably also maybe live healthier and more you can definitely be younger from the brain perspective um you can definitely create this plasticity and childlike behavior this these are this is basically what differentiates as we grow older we get more of these boxes because we learn more right and a lot of the times this learning is reducing our entropy it's reducing our entropic state in the brain um and children if we want to be like children again and keep learning then we should we can actually um trick our brain into being young again in many ways damn and vr does that really well vr yeah that definitely has the capability to do that whoa yeah that's so interesting okay okay so all right but now um the martial art side of things okay so teach us about that um teach your martial arts okay so where's your center yeah so martial arts is all about maximizing the amount of force you can create in the outside world right um and i'm not a very big human uh but if you learn how to take all of this body connected to the ground and create very accurate vectors this direction that direction um you can create a lot of force in the world uh and that's very empowering if you can do we mean like a huh like type you know do we mean like a you know yeah yeah punch break elbow whatever whatever you want right taking um the hard parts of my body against somebody's soft parts um this is oh wow the heart okay what are the hard parts of our body i like how you said you find the center and you ground that and then move it in a vector yeah okay but what are the hard ends yeah soft the hard parts of your body usually this would be one of the hardest parts your your heel right the bone of your heel is very hard elbows edges are very hard um some people's heads here very hard depending and again we're all we are different bodies but uh yeah basically any any bone that's wide and has structural integrity is the hard parts of your body knows not so much and what were you what were you learning this for um i was learning this because it was fun and empowering and gave me an amazing set of tools to feel i have the ability to say no you know something that a lot of women unfortunately don't have the privilege to be exposed to at a young age a ability to set boundaries and this is my world um and it it gave me a lot from a very young age and i'm very grateful for my dad and for my martial arts teacher um to give me these these set of tools in a very safe and playful way right and the very non-judgmental way because i was not coordinated i was very you know falling over myself most of the time uh but i stuck to it because it gave me so much and because it gave me um or so my teacher was very amazing he was a teacher or so and the wider you know word of being a teacher and he was probably the first person ever that told me don't listen to everything i tell you test test that's great um you know i i come from this long tradition this is what i was told this is what i think is correct but test yeah these things that i did these tools that i give you and that's probably the reason why i chose to follow him versus other teachers that were trying to indoctrinate me from a very young age which is what most education does to you do this because we told you to um which didn't sit well with me versus test it for yourself for yourself you be the scientist uh what works maybe this won't work for your body type right yeah certain tools may work really well for certain people but exposure to those tools that you call equality of exposure to tools is so so important to see and then people will play and find what brings the meaning that type of thing um so then okay now where was this third piece to the puzzle this desire to uh get into virtual reality computer science programming unity etc yeah honestly it was just the most practical tool um that i found to scale scale things around body knowledge scale things around uh hacking the brain like i said i was doing research into psychedelics but it's still extremely regulated um i was in the Netherlands so it's you know more not illegal there but it's still very hard to do any type of research you can't really do any business around this versus virtual reality um that is accessible um and i so i decided to pivot into that and start creating my own worlds with that yeah the missing part whoa okay so then what was the um what was the quick bit in psychedelics before because that has a lot to do with yeah awaken futures and also what you're working on to yeah so again my my research into psychedelics was taking this predictive coding framework that we've talked about and looking at all the research that was done in psychedelics um and trying to fit some type of model around um what psychedelics does to your brain come up right what scientists do come up with a predictable um a hypothesis that's testable and then hoping to test it with data so i think i got to two thirds of that i had a model i had a predictable theory but i never managed to get access to the actual data so if there's phd students out there that want to test my theory uh please do um and the basic theory that um i'm suggesting is when you look at the receptors that are getting activated they're called the five ht2a receptors right that psychedelics activate this is the classical psychedelics i'm not talking about ketamine or mdma those are total different different stories but things like psilocybin lsd 2cb those type of of classes of drugs they're activating the five ht2a receptor when we look at where that receptor is sitting within these neural circuits that we have we see that it's sitting according to the predictive coding framework on the top down on the priors so on these memories of what a chair is on the model that you've previously created and it's making them hyper sensitive so they're being activated at lower thresholds okay what what does that basically mean is that if usually when you think of a chair um this top down framework is very wide um it's a conglomerate of many of these different memories all come together in this very inaccurate top down model psychedelics is lowering the threshold and creating competing models so you might get various different types of chairs that are much more accurate and much more precise based on specific different memories that you've had or different experiences um and that's really changing the whole balance in your brain so now you're starting to think in much more narrow and detailed predictions um and none of these predictions is really enough to turn off all the information that's coming from your senses right that this whole predictive coding model means that information coming from your senses is constantly coming up versus these top down predictions that are trying to turn it off actually and only what isn't explained gets moved on into higher and higher brain areas so basically uh your brain is a little bit in a state of overwhelmed prediction error it's in the state of overwhelming surprise when you're on psychedelics which probably anybody who's tried might agree with right pretty obvious you're like whoa so much so maybe it's that this chair maybe looks like a chair icon now uh and the door and carpet look like carpet icons and door icons because it just i'm not don't care so much to distinguish between things now now in your usual state in my usual state exactly and then i maybe i maybe double click deeper when i'm in a psychedelic exactly all right where did this why is this metal shape this way who designed it this way where did it come from why is the carpet looks like this the chair a nice metaphor i like giving people is that our perception is a lot like building sand castles right the sand is the incoming information that's constantly coming into us and we have buckets we put out these buckets on top of the sand and we build castles this is our reality and psychedelic basically takes these big buckets turns them into smaller buckets which lets you build a more detailed model of your reality right of your sandcastle of your sandcastle yeah but they're smaller buckets and there's all this sand so you have to start like changing things or you're going to get overwhelmed that's like the waterfall that happens yeah yeah right so interesting and then your brain comes up with all these mechanisms to deal with this overwhelming flow of sand um in order to not not get overwhelmed it starts rerouting this information and that's what we see when we start looking into the research uh in neuroscience when we're looking at brain scans and e g scans we're starting to see other areas of your brain uh activating and um taking over other parts of the brain that usually don't deal with this type of information so your visual input might start actually taking over what you're hearing and you get all these synesthetic effects right um the music might change and your your visual also will change uh so this is one of the reasons um so that was basically the theory and yeah anybody wants to test it out yeah it definitely hits Sarah up yeah for sure just read the paper it's your your email is your first name dot last name at the company site uh my first yep exactly okay cool um and it's um uh radix motion motion dot com yeah okay so first name dot last name at radix motion dot com um okay because maybe it can be yeah maybe some people can help move this yeah i would love this to be i came up with a very specific this is what your brainwork should look like if the theory is correct like if you test because we should be able to see this difference that happens between the top down and bottom up um but i never managed to get the data so yeah so then this combination between that martial arts the psychedelics and now the virtual reality how did you end up being like okay i'm gonna self teach myself unity i have these ideas that i want to build tell us about that journey um i finished my my master's program and my professor was like so you're very creative and they're like yeah don't worry i'm not staying in university for now um it's university is very slow i needed to open the first virtual reality lab right they had an oculus sitting in a box but for them virtual reality was still like three screens because this is how they've done research for the last 10 years and moving things forward is uh requires a lot of bureaucracy and is very slow um and i wanted to just take all this knowledge that i gained and just start playing with it yeah play playing is the most fun we can have and um and unity honestly is one of the best tools out there um to start playing with your ideas and um for a year me and my co-founder we just had this project every two weeks we would make a new prototype wow and there it's that's still out there under virtual bites if anybody it's all open source you can download all the packages that we've made things from just having wings and flying flying by flapping your hands right um and two things like um having uh gravity change and creating a gravity simulator to try to teach you gravity to having like fractals move with your movements any type of crazy idea we can come up with we just like let's try it how does it feel why don't you just give us a quick um teach us a quick bit about um what exactly is happening when you're when you're wearing uh one of the like a virtual reality headset plus you're holding what are these called the controllers when you're holding the controllers as well and what you what you're like if you're in the game that you built where you're flying um how are there how is the sensing happening to where I go down what first of all let's start there how is the sensing happening so these the there's different types of headsets and different types of hardware but basically um there are motion sensors uh they're both gyroscopes that give you rotation and um there's cameras or there's again two different types of systems one of them shoots infrared at your your controllers and then reads them back to sort of know where their position is and the other is the opposite your controllers are sending out um infrared light and they're getting picked up by the sensors and the sensors are on the headset nope the sensors only on the very newest there's a new new headset that's coming out at the end of the month so that will have the sensors on your headset currently they're still connected to your computer or to the edges of the room yeah the edges to the room so you have to set up right now at least one sensing unit or multiple how many two so you have to sense two well you could do ones a bit low in quality but and that's and that's how the and then the it's infer and it's infrared yeah for detecting and the gyroscopes yeah infrared and gyroscopes okay now teach us about in unity where you go okay then if the controller goes down in the 3d space right then beat the wings in the game and go up right so um there's a lot of uh sort of preset packages depending on the hardware that you're using that let you read this motion control right they let you get the position and then you can start looking at things like speed acceleration uh and based on that you write these algorithms that connect to an animation right i can bring in an uh that's also what's nice about unity is that you can bring in these animations that other people i'm not an artist my co-founder is a great 3d artist but i can't build any anything that looks good you can import but you can import a lot of them these things are for free and if not they're very cheap like for a few dollars i could just get an animation of wings um but i could decide if i'm activating it right based on these um movements that i'm picking up um and this you do through code um so yeah you just go tuk tuk tuk uh all right if if the vector of your velocity uh on the y axis is equal to something then move the wings with some type of linear algebra um how much you're moving a thing yeah there's a lot of linear algebra and and matrixes i studied physics before cognitive neuroscience i wasn't too afraid of that excellent so that's this is where i wanted to get into the weeds a little bit and you just did that which is excellent and um unity's free as well to learn yeah unit is a free um it's free to learn until you're like a big company so even though we got a little bit of funding it's we can still use it so to practice this is this is a great practice is a great um um field to do things like be the first and be the first to do something in kind of like being the first on the moon or on mars etc i keep saying you know like we were born too late really to explore the earth and we're too early to explore space but we're just at the right time to explore our brains and our minds and vr is an amazing tool for that so yeah way to put it wow i love that okay all right all right um okay so let's let's wander now into um you're building out basically every two weeks you're building on a new that was yeah that's that's great yeah that's great way to you know to build up skills okay then the moment came where you're like okay let's do so there were of course a few pivoting points but i was at a movement retreat um exactly a year ago or yep and we were doing all these movement exercises and the teacher there um shira yazi she's called she's based in the bay um she gives so much visual input on how to move like and that was so impactful uh and i really realized like we are this is the power we are i can give you these visualizations um and help you move better and give you these feedback loops so we started pivoting more and more towards like movement experiences things that we can connect your visuals with your movements um and we started out with trying to make healthy movement breaks for the workplace so convince you know workplaces to have a VR station and get workers to dance for five minutes a day that's a great idea it's a great idea but me and my co-founder aren't b2b people yeah so we tried and this and doing this sale it's a long sale cycle you know and we part of it was we really realized that to get people to move the social incentive is really important yeah so as part of what we were building there was um a part where you would dance and your friend would receive your dance and could dance with you they could follow your movements they could touch you know your hands and you could do a dance together um and people really love that versus the exercises that we were creating that still required a lot it's very hard to teach people in VR without another person actually being there right you tell a person pick up your hand do you know how many variations you're gonna get people are gonna go this this this this even if you put we put like an animation in front of them a 3d to do the thing with them they were not doing the movements we wanted them to do um so we sort of decided for now to shelve that even though i still think it's a great idea but it requires so much more research and to take the things that were working very well and were very fun which was the this is an element of dancing together um and make it something that is just accessible every work doesn't need to be just a b2b thing you're like yeah people want to bring it to the workplace great and and do these dancing things um and and mostly it's really important to us to offer um an alternative to all the violent uh games out there and you know like i do martial arts i violence is a game i play yeah uh but i think there should be other alternatives um and and we are what i'm mostly seeing is a lot a lot of shooter games a lot of violent games and there's so much more we can be doing with this technology so that's a big part of what's important for us a lot of awareness expansion that's so possible with this technology okay so then how about um was mu the first thing that you guys decided that you want me was the first thing we managed to get funding for okay that's a big thing because the moment we can get funded for we could um add more people on the team and actually build it out to the level of our product versus our prototypes that we were playing with before okay so so now then um so the team's a couple people then yeah it's couple people on the team and then now let's go ahead and drop into mu so okay let's let's start talking about mu and we'll have these visuals embedded as we discuss but now first of all let's talk about how the vision for the idea as well as what exactly um you hope that people take away from the experience yeah so we had a prototype before we got some funding but the moment we got some money uh we invited the most talented people we knew of some of which we were just following on twitter yeah one of them is called Isaac Cohen Cabebo uh we literally bugged him like yeah and he's seen one of our prototypes before so he was really actually excited to work with us and um we brought them this team um Chris Beasley is another person that's very she has an embodied realities podcast and has done a lot a lot of research into how to create non-addictive healthy technology so we brought her on too um we have a musician Nico uh and another I'm just mentioning everyone otherwise they'll shoot me at Lee another amazing engineer that uh created a lot of very embodied and um emotional experiences and VR too and my co-founder Matt so we brought them on for a two-day hackathon like guys this is our prototype but you know you have so much talent how can we get your input what do we want to build together who wants to do what um discussing like possibilities what can we do with the scope of money that we had because you know we are so care about our workers we don't want to like they're not slaves and what part of um part of my want like trying to make a company is hard it's like not something I thought I would do in my life but um trying to create a company that the motivation from you is to try to create a different type of culture where people aren't slaves that where they can bring their true creativity and true passion and I think that would create a much better product and are so much better feedback loop into their lives um I don't want them to feel like they they have to do something because of the money this is personally for me like a mission um I think we we follow a similar paradigm and I think if more people around the world followed that paradigm of ideas going through them and having a family mentality with the with the global village in general um yeah I think we would get a lot further together yeah I think we'd have a lot less issues around burnout and depression and yeah um creative ideas welcomed at the table that's that's a huge yeah so so that's basically what we did um for again we didn't have a lot of money so we had like two days or we could like brainstorm and this and that and what is people sort of unique talents um along with these constrictions constrictions can be a great tool for creativity actually there's yeah books on that totally um and then we started building um and you did a hackathon that's a constriction yeah two days and then and then we started building separately was communicating and a lot of github nightmare right like hearing code basis is pretty difficult um and then when Isaac had a bit of a prototype we actually went he lives uh in an amazing um house like in the forest somewhere so we did another uh three day hackathon at his place um adapting and changing and learning um his his system and um sort of bringing it all together and I mean we're still developing and bug fixing but that was the process and then and then okay so then what were is what were the discussions around the vision what did you want to achieve with this yes so we wanted to achieve I have three points from this VR system head and two hands I wanted to achieve something that is both visually um stunning the wow effect yeah and has an emotional connection that you see and you're like you feel something it moves you um and that that then you can send it right this is sort of the back end the server side um that we we built out to be able to share these things for me having just um a lot of you know it can be used also as a creation tool you're just there creating your memes and you get them to your cell phone it's really cool use this instead of bitmoji you have your own bitmojis that you made it's super cool but for me I really wanted the the emotional connection to be there when you receive one of these things I wanted you to be able to like touch it I want you to be able to record um your family's movements like my dad lives really far away he doesn't have a year but he's coming to visit me next week I'm gonna record his hug and then it's mine you know he can be in the other side of the world asleep but if I really miss him I can go in there and like receive his hug or one of my partners like me that it's really funny dance for me and if I'm sad I go in there I can really experience it much more than like a video or 2d thing because I can I can touch it I can interact with it um and it tricks my brain to feeling that he's there with me for a little bit so that's sort of what we were whoa yeah so there's so much here yeah yeah so so the way that um there's such interesting ways to do things like potentially capture uh in like both mind files of people as well as like doing volumetric captures of people and then doing things like um in 3d space throwing it on and hanging out with your mom or your dad that may have even passed yeah um that you could yeah that you can do things like um like you said just when you're in a state that you want to engage with something that you find to be um that calming or your tranquil whatever it may be that can take you potentially out of a depressorings anxious state yeah there's so much interesting potentials with this um also okay within mu you said that you wanted something that was that used the the the head and the two arms that was visually stunning um that was emotionally uh yeah yeah the um captivating and also that was shareable and I like I like those things together and actually within the game immediately when I had do you call it mu the part the the characters that yourself is at a reflection of you what do you call that that avatar yeah me we call the the whole thing okay so so yeah yeah so this this reflection their future friend puppet self this this this immediate um mirroring that you get of yourself is very powerful yeah first of all it it gives you that that even though you guys created it I still feel like a creator yeah that was a very important huge part yeah and so and and it's in the the learning curve is so little because all I have to do is move for there to be the instant feedback of I'm creating that's really powerful yeah and okay and so then and so then it worked yeah you're like do you want to uh we worked we worked really hard so I'm very glad to discuss your experience good good and and also um you know as you guys need we can help with you know doing that b2b thing that you yeah we we we have we like helping people that we believe in so so it's it for you guys to actually be able to um you know to take this off with these powerful testimonials or these powerful um uh also just larger organizations that believe in you that want their potentially employees to be using it this kind of stuff so okay then uh not only is there that first emotional connection and it's as simple as movement to make it move but then you have what did you call the the particle 10 000 yeah we have a particle system that's a simulation right it's actually being real-time simulated based on your movements so and that's super cool because the moment you explode the velocity of your movements affects these particles changes their color they expand further away um so all these very crazy physics simulations um that are connected to your movements um that's my simulation yeah yeah yeah okay so the so you call so you call this like a is this like a particle suit it's kind of like a that's a good word we could call it a particle suit I'm all for it let's call it a particle we're kind of like another layer there's an extra layer you have an avatar skin layer and on top of this layer you have your particle layer cool so there's a particle layer on top of the avatar layer and then that particle layer is if if you're still it's still it's but it still has tiny a little bit of randomness and there's a lot of parameters we can play with the user can play with there's a whole right dashboard okay so then that dashboard was also very cool so not only are you you start it kind of like a fire yeah so we have so that's another thing we really brainstormed around a lot what do we start with we have very few um like we couldn't we would love to give people a hundred different templates or 10 different templates uh although choice overload is a real problem yeah so we didn't we actually didn't want to choice overload people but we wanted what were the two or three basic filters that we could give people to start out with uh and after a lot of discussion and I think like again Chris Beasley was very impactful on her um understanding of embodiment and we really focused on these different body sensations that we have and we went with explosive and peaceful as the two first sort of filters that you have that's great in which your movements and the sound and the visuals are very very different um but potentially we would love to keep building more and more of these different types of filters that let you explore and communicate your sadness your happiness um various you know different types of emotional states but the simple ones really explode which we did with a fire avatar and peaceful which is like blue colors and rainbow rainbowy blue yes yes yes okay so that's yeah so more in in future is to add different um ways to sense uh to to to have the person's state that they're in and the way they're expressing themselves uh changed the music changed the visuals of the particle suit etc um within the uh the this is I find this part to be really cool um yes you found a way to make it so that the more that I exploded the faster that I moved the more the particle layer just just yeah explodes and then when I move my hand back it kind of like comes back and it's that part's so cool that you can create with motion like that and then of course there were the parts where I you know where I came in really close to the to the face you were very brave a lot of people don't do that really that was very a lot of people are like oh this is you were just like immediately what oh I want to get so close I was looking at eyes yeah yeah so this is a big issue we keep talking about it what are we doing with these eyes currently it doesn't it's just one mesh with particles because I eyes are somewhat so important that I almost don't really know how to do them well right and I don't want to give people a cop out or a thing that doesn't represent eyes like human eyes are so impactful for us that I feel if I can't give them well I might as well not give them in some ways um I agree with what you just said something cool could be maybe the earth or you know me you know but not potentially in a like having a planet or maybe yeah potentially that's a cool idea could be yeah yeah having different so we're playing with like different different types of sparks that come from your eyes or something like that um like the full globe the full earth so no like white like yeah just the full globe yeah we could try we could try that just great idea just what gets people's awareness expanded the most like I look at the eyes and I see the earth that's a great idea I love it actually um the things are also with eyes is the eye movement right and that is very hard to give I mean impossible to give accurately um for now for now until yeah we're getting the next next generation we're going to have um um sensors that will tell us where people are looking at um but I think that the slight danger and that is um eyes that are just staring at you right they feel somewhat uncomfortable but then creating false blinks which is what for instance the facebook thing um we are avatars do they just blink whenever they want to and then when you're actually sort of taking your own selfies and your avatars are blinking your brain goes a bit crazy and your eyes start blinking because you see your mirrored self blink but you're not blinking and again this predict predictive coding thing says oh two different senses are giving me different information that can't be we need to we need to get these senses together so your brain you either break break that immersiveness or your brain actually starts blinking I start blinking so you need to make it the real so that so we need to make it yes so generally the philosophy of what we're building is we use the real data or we don't use it at all we don't give people false feedback uh we take the real data and we expand we augment the feedback on it but we don't fill in the gaps with noise that's I don't want to give brains false knowledge basically and you'll kick people out of the experience like you said that and it doesn't feel as real and your whole thing is that you want yeah yeah now now within the um the dashboard I really like the dashboard a lot so so so when I like there's a couple things happening here you know I hit record so I'm starting to do the social aspect to this where I'm recording it so I can be waving hi I can be giving a hug I can be going crazy whatever and then I'm sending that out to myself and sending it to other people they can save it etc go relive it in the moment but I'm also doing things like starting with this fire which I really like and then um that that's like a gradient from something like yellow to orange to red or something like that and then then there's the dashboard which is both doing things like changing the colors of the particle layer to something like rainbow which was so fun to play with a rainbow I love that as well but then there's also the uh what is it the size of the particles right the size of the particles there's the size of the whole avatar which I'm not sure you played with but you can turn yourself into a god like a giant sculpture of 10 meters that you're now interacting with and uh and scale for brains as are so it's very impactful if something's big you're immediately small it turns you back into your child self more so there's a lot of play you can do in that and there's also a these noise functions that we can put on your skin that turn you into a very abstract blobby or jerky so I don't think you even get lots of different types of parameters that you can explore basically yeah yeah actually I saw at the very beginning you had in the loading uh you had what people sometimes referenced to as uh like non-symbolic geometry happening because then my brain when I saw your basically what was a massive rainbow of like of stuff that I couldn't say was something I was like that's cool because now I'm not labeling things immediately and so that that was powerful so if you can yeah also do things in the experience like turn it's strange because you for the mirror effect for me to still feel like that avatar is like me the mirror uh for it to have a head arms a body I'm like yeah that's cool because but then if it turns into something that doesn't necessarily look like a human then maybe I what is it then maybe um but we want to give people the choice that choice to you can turn so you can turn off your avatar and just stay with the particles and then you can expand the particles and then you're just in a cloud of particles that you're right it's not the does the connections there run in some ways deeper and stranger of this is still giving you feedback it's still moving but it's not a human anymore you can become one of the things and this is me and my co-founder we just love doing we just put only the particles and that's it we're like 10 000 fireflies and we're just dancing in there turning our low level brain into 10 000 fireflies um and if that's not you know it's really the closest psychedelic experience with like no drugs and false and then what are you guys thinking now like what are the next steps for you you know how do you actually sustain a company like this so how do you guys make money all this stuff so first of all we need to be out there right we're trying to get our prototype out first into test users and then onto the VR stores so people can download them and really building a community that wants to start exploring and communicating with each other and this new form of communication it is um it's a new language we don't want to be the ones building it alone we want people to build this so we can communicate with each other in these very new and strange ways so that's basically what we're our focus is like getting out there get people to start playing with it and then what are the major stores the steam steam and oculus and oculus store yeah or so looking into robin who is their selecturing here so he's having some type of platform for VR for transformational uses so cool um okay that might be it and then and then do people pay like 10 bucks or 15 bucks so we want this to be free as a messenger platform especially at the first stage that it's in now um we want just we want people to have access to it and just gain users for now users um later on we're thinking of right having a type of gifting economy in there so if you know your friend really likes football or baseball you can have these virtual items that you can literally throw at your friend right and they can receive and they become part of their like a toy chest of items that they can digitally um uh play with and move with things that again are sort of movement based or if we build specific avatars for instance we're I'm really trying to get a tail that works so maybe micro transactions um for very specific filters and avatars that people might want to explore and we're still looking into avatar into avenues of um connecting with um musicians and creators and dancers that might want to use this as a platform for their creation so right if you're you want to make a music video that's interactive and people can actually dance with you um wouldn't it be really really cool um to do that and so we're just we're trying to contact these types of artists and musicians that might want to um do this in our platform. Yeah the social side of the platform is huge it's cool that you guys are launching it off for free um now where is the future of all of this technology heading the cognitive science side of this the movement side of it the psychedelic side the VR side where are all these things converging where do you see it going um I see it going into letting people be strange finally like letting go of a lot of these social constricting norms that most of us grew up with and letting them connect on deeper levels of what is the weird inside of you like so much of social media is disastrous to our well-being and to our feeling of empowerment because we're forced into looking cute and perfect all the time um right in this whole like selfie I need to be happy and can only show happiness I can only show my cute side and I would really like this to be the platform that releases us from this that lets us be particles that lets us be fire that lets us be weird jaggedy pain you know like let us understand each other on that level um that's what I would hope for this to become that was so cool sarah yeah I'm all about that I'm all about weirdness eccentricity idiosyncrasies being unleashed I'm all about that the tabooness that culture has created that is inhibiting people's creative expressions is nonsense yeah and it's harmful actually in the social media culture that we have right now yeah sometimes occasionally you know I'll post a photo of myself like you know like that and I'll just be like I'll be like that's right because I don't subscribe to that yeah and it's because it's and it can entice other people to want to take um you know post photos themselves and very weird they're looking yeah exactly um yeah there's a good amount of people are starting to do it and I I love that aspect to it um if if we could use VR to unleash ourselves fully in our most weird ways uh that's a that's a great and share that that's that's a great way to shatter some of those taboos um okay let's ask you a couple of the questions that we ask on the way out of the show the first one is are we in a simulation hmm so my best estimate would be yes however I think it's a type of physics based simulation and we are the algae consciousness is a manufactured algae and a very large scale simulation that has nothing to do with us this is my my perspective unpack that a little more for us okay um so quantum mechanics right this it's if I were to design a system that's doesn't that's trying to minimize the amount of data being used guess what I would only make that system get actual points in space and time if you check that correct that's basically what quantum anything everything we know about quantum mechanics is telling us that um we have these wave functions statistical wave functions that don't actually collapse into a decision until they're being checked um which for me is a very strong indication that this is a simulation um and again a simulation on the lower levels of quantum mechanics now the fact that this simulation somehow got life right entropy managed to take this energy from the sun and heat and molecules were created I think this is yeah this is the algae that was magically created in in the simulation and um so I don't think we are the important part of the universe let's put it this way I don't think this was a simulation that was created for our brains or something like that but I think some simulation theories are into that um what is the point then points there's many points the points is what you choose to do with this a lot of time you have um if it's not me for us is the point of who for of the simulation itself sure sure whatever created you know there was such a large amounts of energy and going into whatever was created that like I I'm not going to delude myself that I have the ability to understand sure sure the rendering is fascinating exactly yeah that's fascinating and when you do things with VR and start to create simulations of VR you're starting to realize like okay the math this is yeah yeah okay how about the second question is what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world so can I be morbid for you didn't do whatever my brain like the first thing that comes out is death right and tell us why um it's the first one is the great equator of life right um we're all gonna die it's the it's an ending and there's something the final the finality of it I see is very beautiful it's almost like a mathematical um singularity right we're all gonna get to it this black hole and for some reason my brain thinks that that's beautiful weird I like that a lot too yeah I think I'm curious to quickly hear your perspective on this some some of us say that the finality of life that we are going to die the the that this is finite that that is what gives us meaning to do things in the 80 year period that we have here otherwise what would what are your thoughts about that um I think as long as you can keep your brain young which some people stop doing that when they're 20 then it doesn't have to be there there doesn't have to be that limitation so I wouldn't say that's the motivating force for me I think it could as long as there's novelty in the universe and my brain stays young and doesn't put these giant buckets and thinks oh I've seen everything I know everything then you would find ways to go on forever and that loops us all the way to what you said is yeah yeah yeah at the very beginning yeah the sand and and also looks psychedelics correct yeah yeah yeah the smaller bucket to make the it was it was some good stuff I this episode has been great Sarah I really I really appreciate you coming on the show this has been super fun yeah and huge and also a huge shout out to what you've been building um radix radix radix motion radix motion can be found at radixmotion.com radixmotion.com also check out the other links below in the bio to Sarah as well check her workout and also shout out to everyone for tuning in we greatly appreciate we'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below in the episode let us know your thoughts with your and share your thoughts also with your friends your co-workers families online on social media about what it's like merging our realities with VR go and start talking about it more and try it and try it yeah yeah actually yeah get out to the VR and AR centers that are near you as much as you can or even the the the the like best buys like people place like that sometimes have yeah yeah a lot of a co-hacking like hacking hacker spaces have them if you don't want them even like yeah just reaching out to people nearby yeah and just being like who has one like let me get to use one as soon as possible I totally agree with that be be the gods yeah be the designers it's it's crazy how cool that part is about it also check out the links in the bio to consciousness hacking into simulations support the artists entrepreneurs and organizations around the world that you believe in and lastly go and build the future manifest your dreams into the world thank you everyone for tuning in and we will see you soon peace