Ep 134 | Our Terrifying Future in the Metaverse | Matthew Ball | The Glenn Beck Podcast

At Burger King, when it comes to value, you make the rules.

Introducing the you rules of value.

And you rule number one: you choose food you actually want.

With seven tasty options, you can have it your way.

Try the $5 duo or $7 trio from BK Classics to Fan Faves.

Choose your deal.

Price and participation vary.

U.S.

only, no substitutions, restrictions apply.

For thousands of years, humans have worked to make the

unimaginable

imaginable and possible.

First, people dreamt about flying like the birds, then flying to the moon, or speaking to somebody on the other side of the house, the next room, and then the world.

We made it happen.

Where is the next frontier?

Well, our world is becoming increasingly more digital.

The great explorers of our time perhaps are not scaling Mount Everest or plunging to the bottom of the ocean.

They're navigating the invisible world of ones and zeros.

We live in a world of total connection now, total networking, total communication, total information.

We are shifting from Web 2.0 to the Internet of Persons.

to web 3.0, the Internet of Things.

Maybe you don't know what that is, but you will soon.

There's been a word that's also been popping up that people don't really know what it is.

Metaverse.

Facebook even rebranded itself as Meta.

Mark Zuckerberg said recently that within the next decade, the metaverse will reach billions of people, host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce, and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

What does that mean?

What is the metaverse?

Today's guest has the answers,

and I think this is information we all need to know.

Today on the podcast, The Metaverse with Matthew Ball.

Okay, I know it doesn't really look like it, but I've actually lost weight.

I've lost like 15 pounds.

Doesn't, I mean, that's like taking a...

handful of dirt off of Mount Everest, I know.

But one of the ways I've been doing it to get around my sweet tooth is Built Bar.

Built bar is a fantastic protein bar, and I didn't think I'd ever say that.

I mean, I resisted.

My wife's been eating Bilt Bars for a while, and I resisted because protein bars don't sound good to me.

Candy bars, yes, but a candy bar with 130 calories, four grams of net carbs, 17 grams of protein?

No.

And then you hear made with 100% real chocolate.

Amazing flavors that you're going to love.

Mint brownie is my favorite.

The new puffs are out.

If you haven't tried a puff yet, oh my gosh, they're good.

It is the first protein-infused marshmallow bar, all covered in chocolate.

My favorite is the banana.

They're just great.

Built.com, your sweet tooth without all of the extra LBs.

It's built.com.

Use the promo code Beck15, 15% off your first order.

Beck15, built.com.

If you can explain the metaverse to like a five-year-old,

what is it?

It's a great question.

The easiest way to think about it is to say that it's the internet, but in 3D.

Were you a five-year-old, you would think that the internet is full of videos and high-resolution images, and yet the older generations know that the internet was not always even pictorial.

It started primarily text-based.

Right now we're in the live video and image era.

The metaverse presumes that this next phase will be three-dimensional.

And will you have to wear like VR goggles?

Is it Ready Player 1?

Ready Player 1 is a misleading example because it is focused primarily on what you might think of as a fantasy game.

That the metaverse is about dressing up as Luke Skywalker, fighting the Iron Giant while you entertain a virtual slide.

The only way in which we access the metaverse in Ready Player One or what is called the Oasis is through virtual reality goggles.

In truth, most usage of the metaverse, much like the internet today, will be enterprise, it will be productivity, it will be government and industry.

And in all likelihood, the most frequently used devices will be those we already have, a smartphone or a personal computer.

But that does not mean they won't be the best and most fun way to do it.

So what is the difference between the metaverse then as you're describing it?

It sounds kind of like Amazon.

I can get my videos on Amazon.

I can buy things on Amazon.

It's kind of a one place I go if I want dish towels or the latest movie

or the latest music.

What's the difference?

Well, so the difference here would be for the first and foremost, we're primarily talking about virtual only objects.

And we're talking about interaction in what you would think of as a parallel plane of existence.

When you're streaming a video, you're consuming it in the real world.

When you're purchasing shoes, you're receiving them in the real world.

Amazon is a utility.

WhatsApp is a utility for your real life.

The metaverse is more focused around a parallel virtual existence.

That's why people talk about the idea that you won't use your iPad for labor in the real world.

You will actually perform said labor in a virtual one.

That's entirely unlike Amazon today.

So you lost me a bit on the you're buying shoes for the real world, and in the metaverse, it's virtual shoes.

For I guess my virtual feet.

I don't

this is where this becomes confusing to me because I see people buying digital property.

And I've got a ton of questions on that.

And we'll get into that later.

But

I don't understand.

I'm working now virtually.

That's like working from home.

But am I

a separate, I mean, I'm the same person, but I'm in this three-dimensional world that doesn't exist?

So it really is worth probing each of these.

So first and foremost, there are tens of millions of dollars being transacted for virtual real estate.

You will not find me a believer or an investor in such access.

Right.

Okay.

That is not actually a class or even a premise that I really agree with.

It strikes me as overly skewomorphic where you say that anything non-real's goal should be to, in exactitude, replicate the real.

There's no scarcity in virtual real estate.

There's no purpose.

I don't need to walk down the street in the internet to talk to you.

I just email you or call you.

And so I don't really think that there's much merit there.

Some people disagree, but I won't defend them because I don't believe in it.

What do you think of non-fungible tokens then?

Which is something in the physical world that you would own in the digital world?

Well, so we can actually separate that question into two different elements.

First, NFTs or non-fungible tokens do not require any physical property.

You can have an NFT that is exclusively tied to a digital product, but of course, if you wanted to present that digital product in the real world, you could do so.

That's when you buy digital artwork and you can use that to put it up in your home.

But it doesn't require anything physical.

The second way to think about NFTs is more a question of ownership rights.

And that is based on the premise that when you purchase something in the real world, what happens?

You take possession of it.

We recognize that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

The challenge with everything virtual is you cannot take possession of anything.

What typically happens is that Amazon server or Microsoft Server basically checks a mark that says Glenn has this.

But the possession is maintained by that server.

That's where you have questions where it can be deleted, it can be altered.

So in other words, this is like when, it's like if you go to Amazon and you buy a movie, all of a sudden, a few years later, it could be gone because they don't hold the rights.

I was really renting it from them.

I never bought and owned the movie, right?

Yes.

And there's a very funny example where Amazon overnight actually deleted copies of 1984 of all things from Kindle users because it turned out they had exactly what you mentioned.

It's not that they don't have the right to license it to you in perpetuity.

It turned out they didn't have the right to sell it in the first place.

And so they took it back.

And so you're exactly right.

So the problem with that is were you to take anything and store it on your computer, well then you have the problem of you've taken data possession, but the entire world can disagree that you have it.

And so the way that NFTs work is they say the only way to ensure that Glenn has possession of his thing is to build a system where everyone is simultaneously acknowledging it.

And that doesn't mean you have sole possession, but you kind of have the collective agreement for it.

Some people believe that that's unnecessary.

But the belief is that it bestows possession.

So is this kind of like a virtual copyright?

Yes, and that's what we're seeing, precisely.

And

so that makes sense.

That makes sense.

I mean, you know, China doesn't respect our copyrights and our patents, et cetera, et cetera.

Harry Potter's out just under a different name.

So that's kind of like the internet where if people don't agree that's yours, it's good luck with that.

But there is a group that you would actually purchase and then you'd be registered as that's mine.

Correct.

Now there's a challenge, which is we talk about the blockchain as trustless technology.

And that's because you don't need to trust that the counterparty will agree.

They can't modify the data.

Right.

That's where where you say that you have faith in the system.

The challenge is advocates of the technology like to say the blockchain doesn't lie, but of course one can lie to the blockchain and one can ignore it altogether.

If I issued you rights to my company on the blockchain, it doesn't mean I might never send you the money, and it doesn't mean that China or another foreign state might disregard my ownership claim.

And so it's a problem of you have a specific system, much like we have a legal system in the United States.

But if you and I have a contract, it doesn't mean I can't violate the contract.

It just means that we have an agreed upon structure for potentially legal remedies.

Okay, so here's the problem we have with that.

Because right now,

we don't really have governance on the internet.

And that's where it gets a little dicey.

You have these huge contracts and everybody just is like, I read it.

I agree.

They've never read that thing.

and those terms can change those conditions can change there are rules on what you can and can't say etc etc but they're not applied consistently

it's bizarre so do we need internet police

I wouldn't say that we need internet police but we can certainly say that precedent case law, the way in which governments evaluate, regulate, to determine the rights of an individual corporation, and indeed the rights to the user, are woefully outdated.

I don't think we need a digital police force, but it's clear that today's regulatory environment does not mesh with the importance of the digital avenues.

Correct.

I will tell you, in the private sector, we see some really important change.

And this is technical, but I do think it's important because it legitimizes the metaverse as a forum, as a milieu.

Epic Games, which is the maker of Fortnite, the most revenue-generative game in the the world.

Also the Unreal Engine, which many in the audience may know, but is essentially a system for physics for all things virtual.

Disney uses it to film The Mandalorian.

They use it to operate their theme park rides in Disneyland.

Our government uses it too, don't they?

For military simulations, extensively, yes.

What Epic has done is they modified what's called an end-user licensing agreement, or EULA.

And it provides two different modifications.

One is when you license it, they enshrine in contract that you have an indefinite license to that version, which means they might change it with an update from 4.3 to 4.31 or 4.3 to 4.4,

but if you opt into the alteration, the upgrade, they can change the service of the licensing agreement, but you in perpetuity have right to the one that you signed for.

The second thing that they've done is they've said that in the event of a contract dispute, say Epic alleges that you've violated their terms of service, or you've just stopped sending them the money that they're owed, they have rewritten their agreement so that they require an injunction from the courts to shut down your service.

And the argument there would be, if you have digital landlords, and we see this with Apple, whom at the flip of a coin can say, I'm going to delete your app, I'm going to shut down your business.

Then you have what would effectively be a landlord who can lock you out at any point if just because they dislike you.

Believe me, I know this road.

You don't have to plow this field for sure.

Yeah.

And so

this is not an argument that a platform should relinquish its moral and ethical rights

to their organization, but what they are saying is the importance of all things digital and virtual mean that we need the legal systems, voters, and judicial process at large, or rather, democratic processes at large to determine that.

Which brings us back to the Forber point, which is Epic can shift it to the courts, but the courts don't yet have a good system for actually managing that duty.

Okay, because that needs to be done.

Companies are wiped out if they base their business on Facebook or Apple and they can decide, and that wouldn't happen in the real world.

If you were renting space at a mall, I mean, unless you were, you know, I don't know, drinking people's blood in your store, you're not going to just come in and kick them out and close the store.

In fact, even if it were, I'm drinking children's blood, the police would be called.

There would be a system.

You couldn't just say, you know what?

You said something yesterday and I don't like it.

You were closing your store.

I got a contract, man.

You can't just do that.

I'd at least get a hearing before you could do that.

Yes.

So that is...

Yes, that's quite right.

Is that coming

to

before the metaverse gets here?

Is that something that people are moving to?

Because that's really good news.

Some are, some aren't.

Epic and Microsoft, as examples, are very firmly shifting towards this.

Microsoft released a 14-point memorandum two weeks ago last week from the president and vice chairman Brad Smith where he outlined their policy commitments and this was partly and it was dedicated to the Department of Justice to explain the ways in which they expect to be treated and evaluated for their Activision Blizzard example.

But this is where we come to user or rather voter agency.

We have a number of companies that are being very forthright in saying we're going to relinquish our power and give trust to the legal systems and our users and our partners.

And then there are other companies who don't provide that.

I can't tell you which will win out.

What I can say is we should not solely rely on the competitive maneuvering of these companies.

We should ask legislators to also mandate some of them.

Right now, there is a full-scale assault on truth and your right to speak it.

Look what's happening in Canada.

Look what's happening to Joe Rogan from YouTube to Spotify,

The theft of our ability to speak

is going away quickly.

The left is waging a war on free speech with the help of big tech and the U.S.

government.

There are some companies that still believe in our Constitution.

And if you are with a big company that is fighting against these things, get out when you can.

Here's a great way to get out of the big mobile companies.

Partner now with Patriot Mobile.

They're America's only christian conservative cell phone provider and i don't want you to join just because of that i want you to join they have the same exact covers because everybody's on the same towers you're going to save in some cases as much as half of what you're paying right now every month

and you'll have great customer service mind-blowing customer service patriot mobile they also

don't give any of their money to the left and to Planned Parenthood like Verizon does.

What they do is they are supporting operations, and I mean, not only with their money, but they physically go out.

These people are amazing and they are fighting for the First Amendment, all of the amendments.

Plans to fit any budget, 100% U.S.-based customer support team.

What else do you need?

Great service from good people.

Patriot Mobile.

Go to patriotmobile.com/slash Beck right now, or call 972-Patriot.

PatriotMobile.com slash Beck.

We made mistakes on the internet with Google.

It was such a great service.

And even though some of us were saying,

they're mining for information for AI.

That's why it's free.

They want everything

about you.

We gave it away because it was so great.

And now we don't have control of our information.

And they have more information on each of us.

There's

a digital twin of all of us now.

They know more about us than most likely we know about ourselves.

What are the mistakes?

That was a huge mistake.

We should be able to own that information.

And if we choose to let you have it, we can sell it to you.

What are the things that we should be thinking about now in the metaverse that will protect the rights of the individual and not give away the store?

So it's a great question, and I want to use this to explain part of what people consider to be Web3.

That's another term that has doubtlessly been seen, but is ill-understood.

And that's the Internet of Things.

Right?

No, Web3 refers to, in broad terms, a more decentralized, but most importantly, user-centric

today,

the platforms or what we also call aggregators Google aggregates the web Apple aggregates applications Amazon aggregates e-commerce have what many believe to be too much power that was a result of a voluntary exchange of exactly what you just mentioned yeah data for free services There's nothing wrong with making that exchange overall, but what we found out is the exchange was perhaps not just in the sense that we provided too much unknowingly and received too few rights in exchange, and by and large have concentrated power almost to an unregulated or impossible to regulate extent.

So, wait, wait, wait, before you go on that, you just said we need legislation, and I've talked to the people, I mean, they are living in the stone age.

And the problem that I see, by the time you get legislation through those guys,

it's all changed already.

How would you keep up with this?

The reason why the largest companies on Earth are rushing towards the metaverse before it is here is because we have all become smarter about the pace and magnitude of platform shifts.

The thing that is encouraging more in the EU than in the United States is

regulatory eyes are also starting to move.

They're realizing, yes, we missed the ball over the past 15 years and we're going to try to clean it up now.

But I will tell you, I'm inspired at least by the extent to which the UK regulatory authority and the EU is starting to look forward as well.

The fact that Facebook is concerned about their future, the fact that Microsoft is saying the metaverse is here tells you that there is change that's likely to occur and that provides an outsized opportunity for legislation to affect that.

But the question of how do we know what to do

is a hard one.

And I think you're right to be skeptical that governments are going to make the right decisions in a timely fashion.

Yeah, they have.

I mean, these people, I mean, you know, some of them have been in office since 1954.

They have barely any concept of what real life is like today, let alone,

you know, the metaverse.

I'm really,

I think

Ray Kurzweil, I've done several interviews with him, and I find him the most fascinating and the scariest man alive

because he doesn't seem to, he seems to gloss over a lot of ethical questions.

And the questions coming our way are enormous, things that we would never think we would have to define or think about.

And as I look at this, I there's nobody stopping.

It doesn't seem like there's anyone stopping and saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

If let's just say for gaming, we've got the VR goggles on and our kids are all in VR goggles, the data that is being collected with goggles is far more than anything else that can be collected on the internet, if I'm not mistaken.

They will watch your eyes.

And I love these people who are like, yeah, do not stand in line.

I'll scan my eye.

That's you.

That is everything about you.

Am I wrong?

No.

and in fact, before we move into potential remedies, I'd love to terrify you a little bit further

if you'll indulge me.

Okay.

When you take a look at what's happening with today's smartphones, we all recall 2013, 2015, when digital assistants started listening ambiently.

We've kind of let that go.

But what's in new iPhones is something called UWB, ultra-wide band.

An ultra-wide band sends out 500 million radar pulses per every two seconds.

And it does that to understand

with enormous precision everything around you.

Oh my god.

This is the difference between Bluetooth that knows you're vaguely near your door or NFC that knows you're vaguely near a terminal, but down to exactly where your keys are in the couch.

And it's used for intent.

Intent in the sense of

Bluetooth doesn't really know which side of a locked door you're on.

If you're going up to your house, you want the Bluetooth to open the door, but if you're walking by the inside of your door, you don't want it to open when you're walking by.

UWB allows you to understand context.

VR goggles also have...

Hang on just a second.

I have to, before you get to that, I just have to tell you, I'm spooked by the little vacuum that knows my house in sending up information about where everything is in my house.

This is much worse.

Well, no, your Roomba only knows vaguely what the like 1D plane is.

Right.

It doesn't understand everything else.

Now, UWB has some utility in VR, which is now you can wear a VR glass and not have to worry about whether you're going to stumble into something because it can give you an overlay.

Think of Tony Stark and Iron Man.

He can see everything that's in front of him.

Right.

VR goggles also have...

exterior cameras so that you can be inside the VR headset.

It's tracking your eyes, but you can use your hands in front of the device and it can track it.

Well, what does that mean?

It means these devices now see your living room.

They might see your tax return on the table.

Your partner or even child might walk by in a towel or less.

And that is being internalized in one way, shape, or form.

Now you can firewall what goes up, what doesn't.

But I use this to explain the enormity through which data is going to be recognized, sensed, and utilized for good, but also the ways in which it presents enormous harms.

I just read

just the other day that they are now talking about prosecuting doctors in California, possibly taking their license away, if they don't advocate for the vaccine, if they don't tell everybody who comes through their door that you have to have the vaccine.

That's crazy.

That is crazy.

What is wrong with us?

I got COVID recently,

and

my doctor for years, who I really respect, is like, Glenn, I'll lose my license if I don't say go get a vaccine.

So I went and got another doctor.

I got a doctor who has been telling people from the beginning.

He's done two years of research on this now.

on that you can boost your immune system.

And he was offering all of these different things that you could go and then take a handful of pills.

You know, you could just go to the vitamin store and this store and that store and then just take them several times a day.

He developed this into one pill,

and it's called Zstack.

I want you to go to zstack.com.

It has all of the things that you need to be able to

boost your immune system.

You take it every day.

I take it every day.

Zstacklife.com/slash Beck.

Zstacklife.com/slash Beck.

Use the promo code Beck and save on your first order.

You know, my son,

without getting into details, had a problem online with somebody,

a predator, and we had to bring the FBI in to it.

And it was terrifying.

But

what was not equally, but pretty terrifying in a different way, was when they said, Can we have the device he was on?

Sure.

It records everything.

Your conversations, who you're online with, what's happening.

It records everything.

And just that, people don't know.

But the idea that this is mapping everything, it knows where everything is, that's an enormous amount of

invasion of privacy.

And in the wrong hands.

I mean, we're getting to a place, and and correct me if I'm wrong, but we're getting to a place to where,

do you have free will?

Because it's going to anticipate you so much.

And if you're in the virtual world, you're already seeing it in the world we're living in.

It's putting up the ads of things it knows you're looking for.

So

it anticipates you now.

It's listening to you now.

Where does free will go?

Well, I want to use this as an important.

You're laughing.

Is this just a really ridiculous, stupid question?

Or?

No, no.

It's more because I started this last segue by saying I was going to terrify you, and now I have the next step that I might bury for a few minutes before terrifying further.

That's why I'm laughing.

The most important thing is I want to provide some modifiers first.

Number one is your iPhone is not using UWB perpetually.

It has to be provided with authority, which is to say you have to opt in.

It's not something that's running like Siri is at all time.

That does, however, raise the challenge of what you meant, just mentioned with the unfortunate story of your son, which is malcontents.

I've been a large critic of the way in which Apple is using its control over the iPhone, which by the way, 90% of American teenagers have, 75% of those under 50 do, and two-thirds of all Americans have.

This is extraordinary reach.

They have used that, partly under the auspices of privacy protection, to impart pretty demonstrable financial harm on their competitors.

We saw this with Facebook who said Apple's policy change will suck 10 billion out of revenue this year alone.

However,

they have worked very hard, potentially to their benefit and potentially in excess of their actual obligations, to severely gate the ability for any application developer to use things and, more importantly, require very clean, reiterated prompts for whenever these things are used.

It does not mean it's foolproof, but it's quite good.

Right.

I know Apple is the best of everybody.

I mean, everybody's, we've got problems.

They're the best at privacy.

That doesn't make them superheroes.

It just means they're trying, at least.

But none of this stuff.

I mean, all of it now bothers me.

10 years ago, none of this stuff would have bothered me because I wouldn't have seen the collusion between governments and

you know, they weren't helping China build surveillance on people.

So I don't necessarily trust anybody with this kind of access to us.

Do you know what I mean?

Yes.

And let me give you a good example of part of the regulatory challenges that we face or the antiquated case law.

that needs to be overhauled.

And I'm going to simplify this a lot.

So I'm sure there's going to be a lawyer who says, you know, we've reduced five things into one point.

But we need wires because courts determine, or sorry, you need

a court order to place a wire into your home.

Yes.

Why?

Because there's a belief that you need for the sanctity of your own existence privacy.

And that I can listen to you walking down the street, but when you go at home, you have to have privacy.

We have things like the Fifth Amendment because we believe that it would be unjust to invade your mind, to force you to explain yourself.

Not just you have the right not to self-incriminate, but you have the right to your own mind.

Right.

It's a panopticon, and that's cruel and unusual punishment.

Yes.

The challenge is, of course, that as a result, if you have an iPhone with a passcode, the courts cannot compel you to give up your passcode.

However, and keep in mind, your iPhone is the closest analog to a home phone, which courts needed to provide, get an order for.

You don't have a right to your body in the same way.

And so if you're using a thumbprint or facial scan to open your iPhone, the police can compel you to use that or they can find other means because it's not providing you to give what's in your head.

And so we have this weird situation where

governments and police agencies don't have an interest in taking away their ability to access your de facto mind.

And yet none of us would say that to the extent in which using a rotary phone was an invasion of your mind, an iPhone is terrifying.

And so courts are stuck with this idea of how do we modernize those requirements for court order and bring that to a phone.

And then on top of that, of course, we have the ability for the FBI on occasion to actually get into your phone and sometimes with the support of an operating system.

You would think, and this is what is scary to me,

you would think that anyone that is engaging in this stuff

would be on the forefront of ethics.

They would be the ones that would be having these big meetings with the greatest minds to say, what are we tampering with here?

What are we doing?

And is this even right to do this?

I mean, when you talk about the VR goggles, correct me if I'm wrong, again, I know enough to be dangerous.

That gives so much information that

it's almost to the point of

what you dream about,

isn't it?

It's not hard to imagine how we would get close on occasion.

I don't want to be so conclusive, but yes, the underlying point of your concern is totally valid.

Okay, so but that is that's an absolute invasion of my privacy.

And, you know, I said to Ray at one point, you know, you're building this giant AI that can predict what I'm going to do.

But if I'm a competitor of Google and you're watching everything I'm doing,

why wouldn't Google just put me out of business?

Because they'd know in advent, this guy's going to come up with a better algorithm than we have, you know, or whatever.

And his response was, well, we just won't do that.

That's not reassuring.

I think he's being charitable.

Look, the technologies required to provide, to perform such an activity really do elude us for the foreseeable future.

And

invasion

to be able to the technology to invade that deeply

to understand correct.

Okay.

What I would say, I would also modify the term invasion because this is where we get to practical, legal, and political concerns.

Invasion is a challenging word because in the instance where I say that you're tracking my retina and I'm using ultra-wide band to scan my home, that's an opt-in experience that has obvious utility.

The problem with the last 15 years was insufficient understanding.

We talk about numeracy,

literacy through numbers and financials as being one of the primary problems of the electorate.

We're literate, but we're not numerate.

We also don't have much understanding of data and what we're giving up.

It's not that I'm being invaded.

Facebook didn't break into my oculus and just start scanning the house.

I allowed them to do so.

Right, Right, but you didn't.

But we don't understand

to what end and how.

And this is the challenge between the companies that, you know, the classic phrase, move fast and break things.

It's one thing to do that with operating systems.

It's another thing to do that with personal data.

AquaFax lost 157 million Americans' entire financial record, social security, and address, and they paid a fine equivalent to less than half of their cash balance from a single year.

That's inadequate punitive measures.

That's inadequate protection.

And it's a general ethos of, well, if a problem happens, we'll clean it up.

You seem to be,

unlike many people who know this,

you seem to have good balance on it.

You know, technology is technology.

It's how we use technology that determines.

And you seem to be cut from that cloth.

You warn about some things and you're excited about others.

Do I have you right on that?

Yes, and I would put it this way.

Every year, every platform from PC to mobile to the metaverse means that more of society moves online.

Whenever more of society moves online, we naturally encounter more societal problems.

Harassment, misinformation, abuse,

platform power and platform regulation, those aren't new problems.

They're fundamental problems that are newly expressed in technology.

The challenge has been

we were probably lax from a political standpoint, or assuredly, and we were passive from a voter and user perspective.

And therefore, inevitable societal problems manifest even worse than we feared.

But that's a tech enablement, not a tech-created thing.

So that's a very good explanation.

I am a

father of a daughter who had several strokes when she was born.

So she has cerebral palsy.

And it's just, it's broken pathways.

You know,

she just thinks differently because it takes her longer to get to where it's supposed to go.

And

I was really encouraged when I saw Elon Musk's Neuralink

because that could help jump those broken pathways.

And I am simultaneously terrified.

of the Neuralink because I know what he wants to do with it.

This is the first stop, but I know where he wants to get.

And

I mean, that, you know,

that's frightening to be able to

actually be online because that's a two-way street.

So.

I'm glad you brought this up because this is what I was laughing about earlier when I said I would terrify you further, which is brain-to-computer interfaces or PCIs.

Right.

There were serious issues here.

I want to enumerate for the audience how far we are from the dystopic fears.

First of all, Neuralink is particularly contested in the scientific community and by former employees.

And so we should be cognizant of that as a topic and an investment.

But just know that of the many competing projects, it is perhaps the most controversial for having misled.

However, others are investing.

Facebook had a BCI division.

They've cut it down.

What's a BCI?

What it would...

A brain-to-computer interface.

Okay.

And there are three different types of BCIs.

Non-invasive, think of Professor X in the X-Men wearing a helmet with electrodes on his skull.

You have semi-invasive, which might be, you know, you can think a little bit like a cochlear implant, except potentially subdermal.

And then you have invasive, which is where you're threading usually something an eighth the width of a strand of hair into your brain.

Tests that Facebook sponsored with the University of San Diego was able to successfully use that to write with thought at roughly 15 words per minute.

That compares to the average human doing 62 to 75,

but I would say that that's pretty good.

One quarter.

I remember waiting an hour for the internet to give me a picture.

You know, that's a great call.

Right.

And so, look, when we're talking about making one quarter of the speed with very active, you don't think beer.

The bci user has to think b

e

e e and so we're very far from the point in which you'd think

okay here's what i'm going to do your minority report or i'm going to produce a new technology to fell google we're very very far from that but we should be simultaneously aware of the fact that those are happening neuralink which is elon's company that you mentioned

has provided videos though again many dispute it of a monkey playing pong using a BCI interface.

Aaron Powell, why is that disputed?

Oh, this is where I say that the many people who are involved in it say it was hacked.

There's allegations of Therano-style manipulation and all the rest of it.

Wow.

The University of San Diego has very much vetted the Facebook example that I provided, and they're not the only ones to have similar results.

My point is, we're very primitive, but you would still say it's magic by any normal

judge.

judge and it's i mean

you know i lived with aol so i remember what what the internet was like and it hasn't been that long i mean maybe if you're 20 it seems like an eternity but you know i'm i'm in my 50s It wasn't too long ago where none of this stuff could be done.

And I remember my father, before he died, he was about 80.

And he said, Clenn, I remember when I was growing up, we never thought we could even go to the moon.

It just didn't even occur to us.

That was total sci-fi.

So it, in today's world, it is right around the corner.

And I happen to agree with

Stephen Hawking, properly understood, that the end of Homo sapien is around the corner.

I don't know when.

But when we do have that connection, you won't be able to keep up?

You'll be like the Amish.

You'll have to live someplace because you're basically in a buggy and we can't have you on the freeways.

Okay, just please live over there because you're going to screw everything up, right?

There are ways in which that seems laughable, and yet, you know, we've seen that older generation, septogenarians, octogenarians do struggle to keep up.

And certainly when we start to get to cyborg implants, which is what we're talking about as a realistic premise, you're right.

The U.S.

military has been doing tests for quite some time that shows that implantable devices which inject a shock to your brainstem

can for a short period of time very significantly increase response and shooting accuracy.

This is the type of thing that seems terrifying.

Why would we ever do that?

But of course, we're asking these brave men and women to fight on our behalf.

Many of them would say, I worry about the damage of shocking my spinal system, but less than I do of a poor response time.

And so you naturally come into the question of: do you end up with literal super soldiers whom are injected not just with extra adrenaline on demand, but with implantables to provide shocks?

You can certainly imagine a future in which some of us do feel impossible to keep up.

I mean, I feel like.

I feel like they must have felt in the 1930s.

We're a scientific community now.

Science can change everything, yada, yada, yada.

And then parts of the world used it in terrifying ways.

And it was all due to arrogance on that.

Do you feel kind of the same way that this thing could go...

You don't know how it's going to go.

And we seem to be trying to...

Super soldiers.

We seem to be trying to do many of the things that were done back then that they just didn't have the technology to do, but we do now.

I think that's quite apt.

Are we better people now?

I mean, China, we're in a race against China.

Have we learned from the past on what we can and can't or should and shouldn't do?

The answer is in some ways yes, in some ways no.

And yet, of course, we're struggling with altogether novel problems, which is politicians may be more informed over the last 15 years of the failures of tech regulation, and yet few would say that the political system is anything other than much worse.

And so we might find out that we are smarter, we're just less capable.

That's an entirely realistic outcome.

I like to remind people that

regulatory inaction or governmental

mistakes on a new frontier, tech frontier, is actually a relatively novel phenomenon.

Throughout the 20th century, rail, telecommunications, energy, water, metals, or steel rather, the U.S.

government was actually pretty far ahead.

Many people are unfamiliar with the Internet Engineering Task Force.

This was started by the Department of Defense in 1985 or 1986.

It still exists today, but outside of DOD, and it stewards the open standards and technologies of the Internet.

DoD didn't just start the Internet with DARPA.

They also said we need a global body to steer and preserve its enduring role in the world.

It's really since 1995 and 2005 that everyone has just kind of let things go.

And so I'm hopeful that that is an aberration, not the pattern going forward.

But of course, we have very significant political impediments in front of us.

Let me switch gears to

quantum computing.

We didn't even think we could get as far as we have already already gotten.

Last I heard, we were at, I don't know, 54-bit.

Where are we now?

Do you know?

It depends on what

measure you want to use.

Okay.

But if this actually comes to fruition, if it can do,

all encryption will be gone.

And whoever wins the race to that

kind of rules the world, don't they?

This is where we're talking about a fundamental unlock that would be so profound that coming up with the answer would be futile.

Much like saying, if you and I went back to 1950 and said, what if someone came up with an inter-networking standard that could unite the world in milliseconds to transmit information, would someone rule the world?

We probably would have said yes if you described the internet.

And in fact, if you said, by the way, DARPA created it, you'd be like, okay, hegemony is over.

We have a new British Empire and it's American.

And so I don't want to speculate as to what happens when quantum computing comes.

It's more likely that we see what always happens, which is it makes available the next problem and problems that we didn't even know were possible.

And so we're talking about a daisy chain of creation.

What I will say is that whether that's a decade or 30 years from now,

People do seem oddly optimistic about quantum computing's achievability over that time horizon.

We tend to be wrong and over-optimistic, but given you and I are talking about century-long visions, perhaps we're not.

Anything that keeps you up at night that you haven't shared so far?

Because I'm going to be up all night?

Are you a generally optimistic guy for the future or pessimistic?

I'm generally optimistic because I find it

impractical to be otherwise in this sense, which is to say, I actually, let me take a step back.

We've never had a point in time in which seven of the 11 largest companies on earth are obsessed preemptively with the new tech wave.

Apple launching its biggest product in 15 years, the largest company, Microsoft, has a metaverse technology stack.

Facebook renamed itself.

Tencent is building what they call hyper-digital reality, 11th largest company on earth.

They're doing this because they've learned the lessons from the last three waves, mainframes, personal computing, and mobile, which is the world changes, the companies change, the standards change, the business models change.

They are rushing to the next thing because they know they might be made irrelevant.

That same thing gives me hope, which is that users, voters, governments, developers do have a role in that future.

We actually decide in aggregate, diffusely, stupidly perhaps, on who those companies will be.

To be pessimistic and cynical is to just throw your hands up and say any of these companies will win.

And that's not true.

Right.

But I am, I mean, I've noticed you said the word out a few times.

You're Canadian.

You see what's.

I am, yeah.

Yeah.

You see what?

I don't want to get into the politics of it, but

the

ability for the finance minister to know who gave,

who's in line in this daisy chain to shut people down that fast is a little frightening.

Perhaps, but let me use this on the flip side for optimism, not just on the powers that be, but about the transformative potential of technology.

We're talking about the finance minister.

Mark Carney led the Canadian National Bank.

Then he went on to run the Bank of England and became one of the most significant finance ministers or finance officials in all of the EU.

He comes from, I believe, a tiny town in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

He dog dog-sledded to school.

That's a remarkably unusual circumstance to ascend to the upper echelons of high finance.

I think he was the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs before he moved into government.

The transformative potential of immersive, high-fidelity education, which is delivered at no cost, which is to say you don't need a teacher, you don't need a facility, you want to dissect a cat, we don't even need one, and you can go into it magic school bus style, that is made available to every person on earth irrespective of their parents' wealth or the school board in which they attend is an incredibly inspiring idea for the further democratization of the resources we consider valuable a good education a good teacher health care and more that should produce extraordinary opportunity if you believe in the goodness of man at some fundamental level which some will debate then you can at least believe that the future is going to be led by more people who earned it from such obscure opportunities rather than the capricious finance minister who shuts something down because, you know, well, he doesn't like Glenn very much.

But time will tell.

Really great to talk to you.

Thank you, Matthew.

I appreciate it.

God bless.

Nice speaking with you.

Just a reminder: I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

Martha listens to her favorite band all the time.

In the car,

gym,

even sleeping.

So when they finally went on tour, Martha bundled her flight and hotel on Expedia to see them live.

She saved so much, she got a seat close enough to actually see and hear them.

Sort of.

You were made to scream from the front row.

We were made to quietly save you more.

Expedia, made to travel.

Savings vary and, subject to availability, flight inclusive packages are at all protected.