 Welcome to the depression to expression podcast. We're talking about mental health and technology. If you're interested in virtual reality, augmented reality, this is the podcast for you. If you're just interested in where technology is going in the future, please stay tuned. This fascinates me. This makes me so excited to read and get up in the morning to see what's coming as far as technology. Now listen, if you were born in, let's say, 1422, okay? And your son or daughter asked, Hey mom, what's the year gonna be like when I'm 62? First of all, you'd be like, listen, you're not gonna make it to 62. You're probably gonna get the plague. But, but you'd say, hey, if you make it till then, the world's pretty much going to be the exact same as it is now. Okay. Now, if I was raising kids or you're raising kids and they asked, hey, what's the world gonna be like when I'm 62? Well, first of all, you're gonna be like, okay, you're definitely most likely going to make it until 62. And I have no idea what technology and the world will be like. You think to 1990, my friends, 1990? Remember what cell phones looked like back then? What was virtual reality in the 90s? Right? You saw the etch-a sketches. And we're thinking we can predict what it's going to be like 60 years from now. Elon Musk working on Neuralink, we have augmented reality. Already our phones are extensions of ourselves and our thoughts, right? All technology is going to do in the future is get more in tune with our biology and our mental states. This is what this podcast episode is all about. I'm sitting down with my friend Mateo who's the founder of Grove, a peer support platform in virtual reality. He has a story of why he created this in the first place, why virtual reality is so key for peer support rather than simply texting or being on the phone. My friends, if you haven't tried virtual reality, in Toronto there's a bunch of workshops you can go to in these different events where you can try virtual reality. I have my own headset and it is something unbelievably scary. You know, we go on in this podcast about the future is going to be like the matrix, man. There's going to be people who are plugged in and people who are unplugged. You're going to have to make the decision of where you want to be and what you want to do as far as this tech goes. It's going to be a very interesting future. We live in the coolest time. It is just unbelievable to be alive today. I thank those in the past who have made my life possible and this world possible with the infrastructure we have, the technology we have, the environment we have. Jeez, there's a million things to complain about but there's a million and one to be grateful for my friends. Without more ranting, here is my friend Mateo, co-founder of Grove and we're talking about technology and mental health. But real quick first, as you know, there are no ads. There's no sponsors on these videos but if you don't want to support me and you want some awesome merch, I'm running some contests on Instagram right now for people to win their own journals which I've created, Official Depression to Expression merch and also t-shirts. The official human shirts which you should check out at shop.depressiontoexpression.com. Get yourself some awesome swag, stuff that you would actually wear. I wanted to create merch that I wasn't embarrassed to wear. I don't want to go on the streets and have a shirt that says mental health advocate. That's cringey as hell but you can be the judge of the merch when you see it. Shop.depressiontoexpression.com. Everything you buy you're automatically brought into our online community where we use the app Discord and of course you get a shout out and I post your picture on my Instagram and YouTube so you get a few thousand people looking at your face. If that seems cool, please support me and what I do and I thank you so much for your ears. I hope you learn a lot through this podcast episode. I sure did. Here we go in 3, 2, 1, take care babies. Mateo, Valis, how are you my friend? I'm doing great. Excited to be here. Thank you so much for coming and hello audience if you're listening. Welcome, if you're watching, welcome to the depression to expression podcast. Very special guest. How did we get acquainted? I think it was the beauty of technology. I think it was, was it through Instagram? I think so. I think I found you on YouTube and then from there I messaged you on Instagram. Right. See, it's such conflicting, conflicting thoughts when it comes to technology brings people together but can rip us apart at the same time depending on how you use it. Let's talk about what you're, you know, maybe a bit of your story, how you got into working for this, actually founding this company called growth. You're, you're integrating mental health support with virtual reality. My friends, that's what we want to talk about today is going to be a really fun conversation. Tell us a bit about yourself, Mateo. What's up? Yeah, for sure. So, and I guess to your point of, of technology, how it is this balance of tearing us apart, but other, at other times bring us closer. I definitely want to come back to that conversation later. For sure. But on the company Grove, basically what that is, is it's support groups in virtual reality. So think of like AA is the most common support group that's kind of known out there. Basically this would allow people to do it in virtual reality instead of in real life. And the reason we came up with that was because I guess three years ago now, just over three years ago, my brother and I, we had a good friend pass away. We knew him from college and he was a twin actually. And we also were good friends with his twin. And so when our friend passed away, obviously it was very hard for the twin and everybody was there for him, his friends, his family, everybody was, was there to support him. But nobody could really understand what that was like to go through that. Nobody had none of us had really lost a sibling or anything like that, let alone a twin. So he was kind of on his own for a while. He said he didn't really get a lot of help out of us being there for him because we just couldn't relate. He eventually actually found out that there is a national organization in the U.S. called Twinless Twin Support Group. And it's all just people who have lost a twin coming together and supporting each other and just kind of being in that shared experience and understanding each other. The problem is it's a very niche issue. It doesn't happen to a lot of people. It's very rare. So they can't meet very often. They meet like in the Southeast, they meet in Florida once every three months or something like that. Our buddy lives in Atlanta. So even if he can make the quarterly meeting, or even if there is a quarterly meeting, he has to fly all the way down there and sometimes he can't make that. So my brother and I basically, he, my brother is Dominic. He makes virtual reality experiences. And he thought that maybe we could use virtual reality to help our friend meet with other Twinless twins more often. Basically about preserving the in-person feel through virtual reality, but allowing you to meet whenever you want, wherever you want. You don't need to be in-person because it is using the Internet. So that's kind of how we came up with the idea, but we found out a bunch of other ways, a bunch of other groups that can benefit from it too, like AA, because now you can remain anonymous, stuff like that. Right. Of course, it doesn't even need to be like, let's say any kind of support group or online gathering. You think of like people who use World of Warcraft. It's the game, but it's also like you hear from people who use it. You create these guilds and you have this online community that is so amazing and people establish these real connections. For people who haven't used VR, because I have a headset here and I absolutely love it. How immersive does it actually feel when you're in there and talking to someone in a support group kind of scenario? It feels impressively immersive. I think when you look at a video or a screenshot or something like that, you look at it and you're like, it looks cartoony. I doubt it feels that real. I doubt it's really that immersive. But once you get in there, once you put the headset on, your brain kind of just gets used to it and kind of just is like, yeah, that's what the person looks like. If I met you up with you in virtual reality within five minutes, Scott was always like a little stick guy who couldn't really move his arms that much. That's just who Scott is. And so you kind of get used to it pretty quickly and you'll even see it. You'll see people high-fiving and handshaking in VR and obviously you can't really feel it, but people kind of still bring those things that you do in the everyday world into VR. And yeah, you just be amazed with how quickly your brain just accepts it. It is interesting because you did a preview for Grove on Instagram, and you watched talking about what it is and you started a Kickstarter. And I checked that, let the audience know how much money have you raised to finish this app? Yeah, so luckily in November we did successfully finish a Kickstarter. We raised a little over $16,000, which is enough to get us through development and finally publish the app in about a month or two here actually. So we're really excited. So launch is coming up and we'll start to be able to actually get some users in there. So it's an app because I use VR using like Steam and stuff like that. Okay. Is this with like Google Cardboard? How does this work? Is it through your phone? So initially it would just be on the Oculus headsets. Those are the ones by Facebook. So what headset do you have? It's the Samsung Odyssey. Okay. That's not one of the ones you put the phone in, is it? It's not. No. Okay. So yeah, so that's the problem. There are a lot of headsets out there right now and we have a limited team at the moment. We chose to go with Oculus headsets. They're kind of the most widely used one out there right now. Is the Oculus one where you put the phone in? No, it's not. So that's the standalone headset. They have three different models. So there's the Go, the Rift and the Quest are kind of the three different models that they have there. All at varying levels of immersiveness, if you will. Okay. But these are fairly the most popular ones. If people had a VR headset, these are the ones that they most likely have. Because I know the one I have isn't that popular. I've met that has that one actually. Exactly. It was on sale. It's like one of the cheaper ones. But I think what you're saying is you went with the masses. So as many people who have it already can join in and use that. Okay. Got it. So yeah, it'd be like anybody who starts a phone app typically launches on iPhone first. Right. Just because of what most people have. So we're going to do the same thing. But obviously we hope to eventually roll it out to other ones as well. Wow. And just so I can maybe explain this to people too, because as I said, I watched your video and you have, everyone has like an avatar in the support group and you're looking around. And just as you said, if you see, if you're watching a video of, of Grove and see what the environment was like. It's really hard to imagine that it would feel real. I totally get that. But once like you're in it. And it's full three 60. It just, your brain is fooled. That's the best way I can explain it. Like you're hearing different things. You're, you're in the virtual reality. You know that you're sitting at home in a chair, but like you trick your brain into thinking you're somewhere else. It's so intense. Yeah, it's awesome. And I think it's, it's just weird because we, in everyday life, we see things in 3d all around us. We hear things, all that, but we've become so accustomed to technology being like this 2d screen. That when you try to explain to somebody, a technology that is not a 2d screen. And it looks like real life. They like can't make that. It's hard to make that jump until you fully experience it. Right. Exactly. Which is a hard sell point too. To get people into Grove. It's like, trust me, it's amazing. But if there was like, I can imagine that at malls or stores where it's like, you can actually finally try VR. It doesn't matter what it is, but for people to experience the power of that, I think it's incredible. Why not support the idea of just like simple phone calls or there's plenty of forums for this kind of stuff via text and maybe, you know, cam to cam kind of things that we're doing here. Why did you choose the VR? Because it's a new technology too. Like the development can't be that easy for your brother. Yeah. So it is, it is new and mainly, so my brother actually is a pretty tremendous coder in virtual reality. I think he's probably one of the few people in Atlanta who's as good as he is. So luckily he has that covered pretty well. But the issue that we are running into is imagine making an iPhone app. If nobody really had iPhones, if a very small percentage of people had iPhones. So the user base is smaller, which is definitely an issue for now. But we're hoping as more and more things get developed for virtual reality, the percentage of people who own a headset will increase. But the reason we went for virtual reality instead of maybe like a desktop or phone based one is just that there were a lot of applications like that out there already. And while we think that those do have a good place, it kind of like, especially text based ones, you can access at any point you might be sitting in class or at work and you can kind of access those groups, which is great. However, they just severely lack the in person feel. Even I attended a couple of meetings in the rooms.com, which is sort of that desktop support group feel. And it seemed great. Like it looked like obviously there are people in there is helping people, but I'm not going to say that I felt like I was sitting with all of them. Like it didn't feel like I was really interacting with them. So we just really wanted to go for that more and that aligned well with my brother's skill set. But what I think you're not saying too is that this is an alternative. If people can't meet in person, like the example of your friend to fly to Florida every few months to meet people in person. That's not really an economical solution. So this can be for people who, you know, can't make it in person, but you're still saying that in person connection is still very important for healing and mental health. Yes. Yeah, exactly. And so hopefully there will be kind of like a tiered approach that somebody would be able to take. Let's say, again, a is easy to understand. So maybe somebody has an AA meeting that they go to in person, but then at work, maybe they're on like some text platform. If they, if they're struggling that day or something, but let's say they go on vacation, you know, they want to go on vacation with their family. So they can't attend their in person support group, but they also, the text only does so much for them. Something like this could be better where they feel like they're in an in person AA meeting, but they can still be on the go. They don't have to be at their home base or anything like that. That's so cool. You know, like the quote, the future is now it finally seems that way. Like I can't believe virtual realities here and 360 cameras are becoming so much more popular. Do you think the, the age of the screen is going to finally diminish in the coming years? Like I think it's going to be just more augmented reality. And the way we use technology is just going to be more involved and tuned in with our bodies. Like there, it's the phones, just an extension of our, of our body already. I think that it is just going to get closer and closer. Like Elon Musk with neuro link. Yup. Some scary stuff to be honest. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. I love that you brought this up because this is like, I mean, I could talk for hours about this stuff. I like huge tech nerd. I love, love, love what Elon's doing. I follow him closely. Okay. Yeah. I think the 20s. We are gearing up for a wild decade here. It just, it seems like everything, there's a lot of technology that has been in the works during the teams. And, but really hasn't gone mainstream, but is like, is really ready to just kind of explode. And that's like AI VR AR stuff like that. So I think the 20s is just going to be a rapid explosion of stuff like that, which will be really exciting to watch. Neuralink is interesting. I don't see that being huge in the 20s. Maybe in like the 30s, 40s and on, but I'm also very excited for when technology kind of jumps that gap into, instead of an extension of us being sort of possibly in us and what that looks like for society. Oh, 100% it's going to be a part of us. Like it already is in a sense, it's just kind of externalized. But you think of the relationship that we have with our devices and our phones and the technology we have voice thought, if the power went out, I would be so screwed. I would head for the Mennonites like right away. I'm like, how do you start a fire guys? I like airplay the game. If a zombie apocalypse came, you got to choose five of your friends or you got to choose five people, you know, and I'm not going to choose someone who's like in, in advertising. I choose like the engineer, I choose the construction worker. I choose the person down south who hunts maybe someone to gather some food. Do you think the dependency on technology is, is a bad thing today? What's your view on, you know, children and mental health and how we're bringing up kids and screen time and social media. These are the things that are brought up in a, in the negative light with, with tech. Yeah, it's, it's tough. There's, I mean, there's obviously a huge dependency on technology, but I want to say, and you kind of have to expand your view of what you consider technology, I guess. I think we've just always become more and more like that. And that's just kind of the evolution of society, at least in the realm of the world we live on. And I say expand your view of technology because you could say like the axe was a technological innovation. And then people relied on that to make log cabins and stuff like that. So if you take all that away and we're just left with sticks and stones, like even the humans of 500 years ago would be a little screwed. They weren't really know what to do. As far as growing up in today's society, it's always, again, this is something I kind of go back and forth in my mind because it's, it's easy for me to look back and go like, oh kids today, something, something, whatever, like they rely too much on phones and stuff like that. But I'm also like, it just feels kind of like, it's just too easy to just kind of judge them for it. It's hard to say if it's right or wrong. It feels wrong because it was different than how I was raised. But I don't necessarily know if that's bad or not. I think there are kind of like what you said, how technology can bring this together and tear us apart. There are some things that we're seeing now with, let's say Instagram, Facebook, stuff like that, the social media platforms that I think does cause people to live a more of a comparative lifestyle. They're constantly comparing to what other people are doing. I find myself doing that on Instagram a lot as well. And I think this is just something where, as technology kind of keeps improving and we keep designing these different ways for, let's say Instagram was, they were hoping to allow people to connect better. And I think it does. Like we became connected through Instagram. I think that was great. Yeah. However, then we start to find these like bad side effects of it. And that's just kind of like the trial and error of human life, I feel like where, let's say when we were trying to like learn how to build houses cheaper and more effectively, somebody put asbestos in the construction materials. And that was great until we realized long-term effects. Right. We get rid of it and we find different ways to do it, but it was like a needed mistake to be made, I guess. And now I think we're starting to realize that with social media. Right. And it's a lot of, it doesn't really relate to the asbestos problem, but with tech it's, it is trial and error. I love that trial and error of innovation, but with tech it's like a lot of the time it's just how you use it. I think with Grove and what you're doing, it's, it's so using technology for good. Like I honestly see that as such a positive. And right now on the spot, I can't think of a negative for it. It would be negative if the, our meeting was next door and you're like, I'm too lazy to go. I'm just going to put on the headset. Right. But for something like that, I think it's a fantastic idea and it's the tech's only going to get better and better for more immersive VR experiences. Right. Yeah. I don't know how far we are away from like holograms and being able to like project yourself in the seat. If you miss the meeting, right. Is what you can do now. Let's say if the AA meeting, you can't make it, but everyone else is there. You could put a, let me just think, couldn't you put like a 360 camera on a chair there for you. You put on the VR headset wherever you are and you are looking through that 360 camera at actually the live stream of the meeting. Yeah. So that is possible now. I actually, I don't know if you can live stream that just purely due to the amount of data that then has to be streamed. You know, you think of streaming on Netflix is a lot now make that whole thing 360 around you. It's just a lot of data. We're working our way towards that. Obviously like 5G is a huge step towards that. Yes, of course. But you definitely, I know obviously you can record it and then watch it back, but let's say you can stream it. There's definitely a way that you can do that. We would then have to, obviously that's further down the road for us. If we did something like that, because we'd have to set up actually live streams and cameras and stuff like that. But yeah, totally possible. That's it. It's amazing how much cheaper technology gets. I think that's the cool part for me. What I love seeing, if you think of tech like 10 years ago, I remember going into first year university, everyone's bringing like their new HP laptops. Everyone's got a laptop. MacBooks were out. They were like this thick and they still have the CD player, of course. And I come in with my gaming PC. It's like this big. I come in with my big monitors and it's just like, and it cost me a fortune. I had like a 200 gig hard drive. It cost me like 300 bucks. It's amazing how things get smaller and cheaper at the same time. Do you think with VR, it becoming more accessible? It'll just become way cheaper in the future so people can join Grove a little more easier? Yeah. I think it's there's kind of a two pronged. I think way that this will play out in the future is one, I think it'll definitely get cheaper and more powerful. So you'll be able to get a better experience for less than today, for less than the cost of today. But I think also, and some people might disagree, but I just feel like there's so much potential in this technology that right now it's being underutilized. It's really only being used for games. If you go on to the VR platform, you'll just find a bunch of games. And I mean, they're great. They're fun, but there's a lot more we can do with it. And I think it's equivalent to when the cell phone came out and it was used for calling and texting. And now we're starting to find out having a computer in your pocket is a lot more powerful than just calling and texting. And so Grove is kind of a step in that direction where it's a non-gaming use of VR. And I think you'll start to see that more and more. Maybe people even are attending work in VR or something like that. And as it becomes even like just more important and more ingrained in society, even if it isn't cheap necessarily, I think people would still get it because if you think of phones today, they're pretty expensive. But the cost of not having one or the cost of not having a car in a city that doesn't have a lot of public transportation, stuff like that, there's like necessary purchases almost. It's worth the cost. Well, especially if you weigh out the cost and actually do some math of, okay, I have to fly to Florida from Atlanta three times a year, like the headset, what is it, $400? So on Oculus, the cheapest one is the Go. It's like $150, $199. What, that's it? That's the lowest and one. I recommend the Quest is, we just got one of those. It just came out this year. Also on Oculus, that one is $400 or $500. That one's pretty good though. Still, does it do 4K, that one? I don't know about the screen resolution. I don't believe it does. Okay. Okay. Cause like the newer and better headsets, you can get headsets even like 8K resolution now, where it's like a pixel within a pixel within a pixel. It's absolutely ridiculous, the clarity. But again, excuse me, even for something so simple, it's just anyone who hasn't tried VR, come over to my place. I got a headset. You have to try it. I did the, it's called Star Trek Bridge Crew. It's a game where you're, where you're on the enterprise and you're like, you can be the captain, the engineer and you're on the bridge and you're in space and you're looking around and you're playing with other people around the world. You're saying hi and you really get into it. The captain's like Scott, full thrusters ahead. I'm like, yes captain. It was like the most unbelievable experience yet so soaked into it and you actually feel connected to the people, the technology. I can only see VR getting just massive in the future that, as you said, the 2D part is going to be in the past. I feel like, do you think we're going to laugh at these one day? Maybe once the cell phone is in, is in like implanted in us, then yeah, then we'll laugh like, oh, we used to have to hold it. It was like this whole thing. Exactly. We had this rectangle in our pocket and then it, the charge lasts to get to charge it every day. It was heavy. I totally agree with you. So, oh, go ahead. I was going to say, I said the same about VR headsets today too. It looks like the clout, like when you look back at cell phones, how they used to be like these big things that people kept in like a briefcase or a purse or something. Yeah. VR looks like almost exactly like that in that it's just like this giant thing that you strap to your face. And 100% eventually it's going to be like a slim little thing or glasses or whatever. And we're going to like tell our kids about like how it was like we thought it was the coolest thing ever. And we had to strap like an entire like two pound block to our face. But you know what's so cool about that is and scary. Okay. If you look back in, geez, 1800, 1700s, even like the 90s. Okay. They, I don't know actually if they laughed at a person with the cell phone, with the big cell phone. I don't think before they're like, oh man, they're going to be this big and they're going to have computers in our pockets. But now we're already laughing at the technology because we literally can't predict the future. We just know what's going to get better and better and better. We're like laughing at the technology of the present moment, even though we don't know, but know to some degree that it's going to get better. It's so interesting. It maybe that's a cause of anxiety for us where we're like, we literally don't know where the future is really going with tech. Yeah. I think that's kind of an interesting point you bring up that I never really thought about, but I think that's, I think that's very accurate that we do live in a time now where it's almost like when you hear people talk about investing in the stock market, they're like, listen, don't try to time the market for over a hundred years. It's done nothing but go up on average. So we know it's going to go up. It feels like now sort of electronics have been around long enough that we almost have the same mindset with them. We're like, listen, I don't know where it's going to go, but it's only going to get better. It's going to be smaller. It's going to get faster. And we're going to figure out a way to do things just more efficiently than we do today. Right. But I think that does cause some anxiety that it does just make the world seem like this. I don't like it's, I know it's not going to be the same tomorrow. How do I prepare for that? I don't really know. Exactly. It's like you think of just the funky hockey stick graphs of exponential growth right with tech, but if you're living in 1425 and your kids ask, well, what's the world going to be like when I'm 65? You're like pretty much the same as right now. Right. There's no cars coming in. There's no combustion engine right now. And it's just that predictability. If our kids ask, well, what's the world going to be like when you're 90? I'm like, am I going to have nanobots in me? Am I going to feel amazing when I'm 90? Am I going to have some bionic legs? Neural link? How is that going to work out? It's just, it's so cool to talk about, which is why I love having you on. But are there things that, that scare you about AI, VR, AR technology in the future? Yeah, I think, I mean, the main one that I'm concerned about is AI. I think it has, again, world changing promise. I don't know if, if done correctly, but there's, it's just, it's so up in the air on what that even, what that does to society. How does it work integrating AI into society? Do we think of them as, as like humans and they have all the same rights? So, or they still kind of like our tools to do work. Would they overthrow us? Like, and I'm not really a computer science coder. So I don't really get any say in the matter. I don't know what the people doing it. Right. Thinking about it and doing it right. And it's just hard to predict. You could say you, you code in there that like, no matter what an AI will never hurt a human or like, or something like that, but you also code in that they want the human's best interest at heart. Let's say that they have that. And the AI does some, whatever it does. It's just, it's thinking and it's like, well, you know, humans basically their happiness is an equation of like, pleasure minus pain. I can never take away all the pain. Unless they're dead. Right. Maybe that's the solution. Yeah. It's a crazy example, but I mean, it's the, the example of tech is already, already running our lives and these millions of calculations per second, whether you're driving a car, whether you're like the computerization of cars that we have now with ABS and GPS and, and automatic sensing and automatic parallel parking. But the classic scenario is like, say, AI is, you know, on a self driving car or train. And, you know, you have to turn left and hit the old lady or you turn right and hit the child. It's like, it's, so would it be a more logical equation when you have a human up to this, there's human error, but his error, what actually makes us human. It's a, such a fine line, I feel that, and then we have to argue who actually gets to make these decisions for us. Like is, is coding these things, is it up to the government? Is it up to the individuals? Is it up to the tech company? We've run into those problems with Facebook around content. Is Facebook supposed to rule what is considered hate speech and appropriate content? Same as YouTube and Google. It's so complicated. Yeah. Yeah. I just don't think, and it's funny watching the government try to, at least government in the US try to like figure out what to do because it's tough being like, being younger and somebody who feels like at least they have a good grasp on technology better than the average person. Watching these like 60 year old people in government who just like can't even fathom what a lot of this stuff means. Yeah. And they're trying to figure out how to regulate it. And it's just like, I mean, it's got to be so difficult just trying to figure out what to do because they, I mean, a lot of them when they were like, when they were born, they didn't even have phones. Yeah. And now I'm trying to figure out what to do about AI. Yes. What a jump. Yeah. Like the, that, that court session with Zuckerberg. Yeah. And he was just like speaking to all these senators in the US and they're like, well, how does Facebook even make money if you don't have to pay a subscription? Yeah. We, we sell ads, sir. Yeah. And that's, that's the conversation that I kind of look back on is, is just watching that whole hearing and you could just tell like, Zuckerberg is sitting there just like trying not to get frustrated. He's just like, like they just obviously just don't get it. I don't blame them. But, uh, yeah. Yeah. It's just a tough spot to be in. Exactly. That kind of brings me to a question for you though about Grove then is how do you, well, first of all, your Kickstarter has said it's going to be an ad free environment. So I guess right now, uh, It is the app costs money. I guess the second question is, or how do you make money? And the second one is, as far as what's allowed on the app and what's allowed from, you know, are there certain topics that won't be allowed in these support groups? What if someone has, um, you know, suicidal thoughts and expresses that in a virtual environment? Have you thought about these things? Yeah. So there's, there's definitely a lot of challenges in that space that we're trying to figure out as well. Um, so as far as costs, it's free. There's no ads. The app doesn't cost anything. We don't make any money at this point. We'll try to figure that out in the future. Wow. And that kind of goes into, I guess one. So I'm actually getting a new job soon. I'll still be working on Grove, but basically that's to get money so that we can kind of fund living while we make this thing. Um, but also there's kind of been this idea that I've been touring with lately of, uh, do you know, I've been thinking about how to find like these, how they like, they, they don't really think about what's good for them. They think about what is good for everybody else. Right. I kind of like, lately I've been thinking I want to make like a, I don't even know a brand, a company, something called hive mind. And basically it's just kind of like doing things that we think is good for the world and we'll figure out how to fund it else wise. But if we think the world needs it, we'll try to do it. Um, very cool. This would probably fall into that other, I have some other ideas that I'd like to throw into that too, but mental health is one of them. Right. Um, so we'll figure out how to make money down the road. But okay. And then as far as the, the content in which you share in the app, that's a, again, a pretty sticky. Um, how do you kind of get around that? How are you dealing with that right now before launch? It is. So yeah. So initially what's so a benefit of the fact that there aren't a lot of virtual reality headsets out there is that there won't be, there's no chance of like a million people from day one signing up to use our app. Um, which I think typically in technology, people are like, they want to just explode and just see exponential growth. Yeah. We understand that this is kind of a more difficult topic and we want to go slow. So if, if by day one we have one group and we're able to monitor it, we're able to join in, talk to the people who are using it. And we'll kind of, we're just kind of hoping to really take it slow at first and kind of work out those things as they come along. Um, we don't really want to limit too much what people have to say. We don't want them to feel like they ever have to watch themselves. We want everybody to be just themselves and be vulnerable and be honest in those meetings. Um, but if somebody does express. So we thought suicidal thoughts or, um, that they might try to hurt themselves or something like that. We do have some resources that we'll have listed in the app as well as on our website of just something to try to direct them to. Right. Um, and then also the communities will largely hopefully be self-monitored and that'll be tough making that culture where people are able to like report somebody. If, if somebody comes into troll or something like that, right, everybody would be able to report them. They could get kicked out. You can mute somebody else, stuff like that. Well, I think that again, you said, so not a million people will sign up day one. You never know. And sorry, I don't know why I'm blue right now. There's some weird lighting going on. Um, you said, yeah, not a million people will, will sign up right away, but I think it's great. As you said, trial and error of innovation, you see how people react to the app. You see what people like, what they don't like, what tweaks need to be made. I'm really excited to try it out. How I'm still not clear on how I use it. So I didn't even know Facebook had its own VR. What the heck have I been doing? So if I plugged my headset into my comp into the USB and HDMI, and then I can literally go on Facebook and use it through the web browser. Is that what it's not. So yeah, it's, it's the company's owned by Facebook, but it's kind of like its own entity in a way. So, um, so basically it's just Oculus headsets and Facebook is throwing a lot of money to them basically. Um, because if you, if you really look at it, people have asked us like, Oh, would you be open to, to selling the company one day? If a big tech company wanted to buy you and we were like, really the only people we see that would ever want to buy us is probably like Facebook because we feel like our mission is strongly aligned to Zuckerberg's. And when he started Facebook, it was to connect the world. And now VR came out and he realized like, Oh my God, this is, I can now connect the world in a much more personal way. Like they actually feel like they're together and ours is kind of in the same, in the same vein. So that's why Facebook now owns them because I think Facebook, eventually you'll see the revenue start to go down as people move away from that platform, which they kind of already are. Yeah. And they might move more towards a more connective in person feel like, um, VR and an Oculus. I can totally see that the 2d screen will be in the past. It's just like his mission was, yes, connecting people. And, you know, we always know the, the, we all know the, the relationship between connecting people and then the dopamine rush that we get a feeling connected and understood. And that, that happens on, on Facebook when you get a like, when you receive a comment, when you connect with someone. But VR, it's, as we said, it's just that much closer. We're getting closer to that connection. And I think if you're living far away from someone, the closer you can get to them with technology, the better, right? It's amazing when you're together, but when you're apart, the closer you can feel VR is filling that gap. And I think Grove is, um, any, anything else you want to talk about, uh, as far as the, the company, next steps, what's going on with you, how's life, what's living like in Atlanta? Yeah. Um, the company, not too much. I guess I'll briefly say, cause I know you, you were kind of wondering how you use it. Um, so because you don't have an Oculus headset, unfortunately you wouldn't be able to access it at this point. Okay. But if you did, if you did have an Oculus, all you would do is when you turn the headset on, you'd go to the store and next to all the other games would be Grove and just be right there in the store and you could click on it, download it, you get taken into like your home, which is a, uh, basically like a floating house in the sky. It's very relaxing. You're just like blue sky clouds around. Um, and you can look, look for groups and choose one to join. And then that's it. Then you're in, I saw on the video, like there's a campfire setting that you can be in, which is so cool. So that's another benefit is that you don't have to meet in like, I went to an AA meeting and basically it was just kind of a random sort of like house location that they just had rented out with like plastic lawn chairs and stuff like that. It was because they had to pay for a physical place. It was very cheap and not necessarily the best environment possible in VR. Sky is the limit. If you like, if you want to sit around a campfire that way you can kind of watch the flames while you talk, stuff like that. Maybe you want to meet under the northern lights, whatever you can do that. Right. If you want to actually meet in the house in the sky, you can create that too. I guess how many, how many scenarios do you have right now or environments? So we just have one right now because we're just trying to, we're trying to get the minimum platform done so we can put it out. Got it. We want to maybe make some sort of like log cabin in this, in a snowy mountain setting, something like that. I've been in some experiences where they did have like a snowy landscape with the northern lights above you and that was just like, and it was snowing and that was awesome. Me and my brothers kind of sat and they were like, this is really relaxing. This definitely needs to be an RF also. That's so cool. And talk about then since obviously it's not in everyone's budget and time and schedule to actually go start a support group up north, get a cabin. Right. And so it feels real, but also you're in that state of relaxation and openness. I think you're more likely to feel comfortable and share when people are in that relaxed state. So that's obviously a bonus of having all these different environments that you're suggesting. Man, even I tried VR for the first time last year and the first time I put on the headset, I'm like, this is the future. I got a headset like a week later. I played this horror game where you walk through this basement and I literally screamed and I threw off the headset. That's how real it gets everyone who's listening. I literally knew I was in a condo, knew I wasn't in a basement with these flying books everywhere around me, and I literally screamed like a girl and threw off the headset. So when I say it's real, it's virtual reality, but it seems like reality for sure. So I'm definitely excited to hear more about Grove when it's released. Everyone, all the links are in the description below for all Matteo's links, his Instagram, his Twitter, and then the Kickstarter as well just to watch that video about Grove. I think they'll get a kick out of it. And if you have an Oculus, try it out when it comes out. Any last words, my friend, before we say goodbye and we'll obviously do this again and hopefully meet in person sometime. And if not VR, then we'll meet in person. Perfect. Yeah, no other final words other than thank you for having me on. It was a pleasure to be here. Yeah, and I hope to be on later in the future. For sure. Good luck, man. And yeah, we'll talk soon. Awesome. Thanks, Scott. Of course.