The Exponential Age Series Part 2: Why Apple May Have Finally Nailed Mixed Reality

28:25It's not a visual experience to it, but to me, that very much is the metaverse being here now. The metaverse doesn't have to be the visual component. It's just one of the components. And so there's a lot we can unpack with that, but I think that's important to state, is that there's a world in which the glasses that are shipping next quarter are metaverse glasses. Right. No, it's super intriguing how our experience of baseline reality, so to speak, is being augmented by progressively augmented. And like you say, these glasses that are going to essentially talk to you feel another step along that road.

29:07With your more sociological hat on, what does it do if millions of people, billions of people, eventually, if mixed reality does have that iPhone moment? To me, it feels the implications are just mind bending because essentially then you're in a world where people can customize physical reality, step out into their own physical realities. You'll have kind of, you know, communities and tribes online of that kind of put their own skin on, on actual reality. And the London that I walk out into can be a totally different London to the one, you know, my next door neighbor walks out into all kinds of really strange implications.

29:48They're right. Socially, Yeah, absolutely. I think that the way I think about it at a high level is these things are going to inject our perceptual systems with maximum agency in any moment, at any time, in any place. and so what does that mean for us to like interact with each other and with the world i i think but i mean the thing that i and this is back to the whole medium energy thing like i think it's so important for us to be thinking about okay maximum agency is great our perceptual systems having information injected into them to have agency is interesting but how do we do it in a way that doesn't erode our humanity.

30:37And, you know, you mentioned this idea of like, we all have our own skin on the world. I think that's true. I think it'll be, I think that'll happen in a good way mostly, because I think people do really like to gravitate towards tribes. And I think you will see large groups having a shared reality, but I don't think it's going to be overly fragmented. Because if you think about, you know, just evolution and how humans evolve, right? the more you're out of context with your other tribes or the real world, the, your likelihood of survival and like your fitness functions being maximized. If you're kind of in your own little reality are going to diminish.

31:16I think, yes, there's going to be a period where it's going to happen a lot, but I think over, I think eventually we're going to realize that that isn't the right thing and the healthy thing. It's kind of like, you know, everyone knows to not pull your phone out in the, in the, in the theater. now. It's just an unspoken truth that just everyone has adopted. It's kind of a weird example, but I think that's going to be something that applies with glasses and the ability to put skins in the world too. There's going to be these unspoken truths, these sort of principles that most people end up subscribing to about how to interact with the virtual world and the real world and then both at the same time.

31:55Yeah, I think we'll see. We'll have to see the evolution of a whole load of new kind of norms exactly and behaviors, just like you say, you know, keep your phone off in the theater and all that stuff. But it's going to get sort of exponentially stranger than that as this technology progresses. So yeah, as you said, let's talk about meta, the meta this time. When you launched Medium Energy, Facebook had just become meta, you know, this pivot to the metaverse, everyone was talking about it. But we've talked a tiny bit about, you know, the meta technology and why maybe the experience is not as good as the experience you're getting with the Apple Vision Pro.

32:35You know, I think, yeah, that's the vibe I get from most people. before we get into meta and ai i mean do you see meta then and apple as sort of fundamentally at war for the for this future for the future of mixed reality and the metaverse as we're talking about it here i think short term no long term likely You know, short term, the people who are Apple fanatics and love to use Apple and are Apple creators, they're not Facebook fanatics too, right? It's just a very different type of user, very different use case they're going after, you know, social versus productivity. But then there are these interesting threads where they do intersect and do compete.

33:35Like for example, I think the best use case for the Apple is going to be the, um, the, the, the, the live events, the live sports experiences. So they acquired a company called NextVR puts you front, you know, in the, in the front row court side of NBA games or sports games or concerts. And Meta also went off and tried to build their, a similar version of that. I think it's also NBA, if I'm not mistaken. And, and yeah, I mean, it's really about, I think it's going to be really be about what people, I mean, I think privacy is going to be a big part of this and trust. Yeah. I think that's, I think that's probably where the battle is won and lost and, and also just like coolness.

34:25Apple knows how to make this stuff cool and fashionable and interesting and desirable. I don't think best Facebook or meta can do that. Now, what I am seeing the meta ethos change a little bit, and I think they're starting to wake up to that fact that they're not and haven't been desirable. And it starts with Mark Zuckerberg, right? He, up until recently, he hadn't really been someone that people look at and say, oh, I want to be like that guy. Like he was viewed as, Mark, no offense if you're listening, not that I know the guy, but, you know, he was a robot. And people couldn't empathize with him or really listen to what he said and believe what he said.

35:08But now he's going on podcasts and being more himself. Now he's going out and talking about the mission in different ways. It's not the metaverse anymore. It's this fusion of the physical and the digital. He's going on stage at MetaConnect and wearing a t-shirt and not being overly scripted. He's becoming a bit more likable. and so it's it i think a lot of it might be a brand war um and like a culture war and like a fashion war uh over time and you look at meta they have that ray-bans partnership and so maybe that's where they kind of can compete and be cool um and and go after apple's cool factor and so yes overall it is a war it's gonna be a war for developers at the end of the day um And it's also going to be a war between open source, open and closed systems, right?

35:56You look at what Meta is doing with AI, all chips on open source.

36:04I think they're changing their tune too on the VR front. With Apple, it's just closed ecosystem. You're going to build the way we want you to build. You're going to go through our app store. So that's the chink in Apple's armor. It's really interesting. So overall, I'm just kind of throwing out these little battlefronts that are going to be worth monitoring. Yeah, I mean, I find it really interesting. One of the fundamental differences, it seems to me, is that Apple is focused primarily on the kind of single player experience. The infinite display, as you say, essentially projecting a screen into the environment around us.

36:41Whereas Meta came out hard initially with the social experience grounded in their foundations as a social company. But it's so much harder to nail that social experience and create an environment where people really feel that they're having meaningful in-person interactions with friends. And, you know, I mean, that's the real dream of the metaverse. This feeling, to me anyway, this feeling of in-person presence with others inside a virtual world. It's just super hard to nail it. We're going to take another quick break to hear a word from our partners. We'll be right back with more of the day's top analysis on the Real Vision Daily Briefing.

37:27Let's get into AI, because as I said right at the top of the show, I mean, some of your most powerful thinking is on the way. AI and the metaverse, as we're describing it currently, intersect. And you see that emerging really powerfully at meta. I mean, they just did a series of product launches weaving their large language model, their AI, their equivalent of GPT-4, essentially, through their product line, led by these AI-fueled virtual companions, little buddies that will chat to you, that strangely enough are kind of backed by and have the face of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg and all the rest of it.

38:14So you're going to be able to talk to these celebrities. That's going to be fueled by AI. They're not playing themselves, if that makes sense. They're playing other characters. So it's a little confusing. What do you think Meta is doing there? And talk to us then about your broader vision of the role AI plays in all of this and how it intersects with the metaverse. Yeah, I think Meta is just experimenting, right? They're kind of learning as they go. Mark even says this in some podcasts. They're kind of stumbling upon things. Even he was surprised by how awesome the experience was of AI and the Ray-Bans glasses and how maybe that's the thing.

38:57And the whole visual element is secondary and complementary to it all. I think that's probably where Meta currently has the advantage over most is that they are the one company. They aren't the best for spatial computing. They aren't the best for AI, but they have really good versions of both. And so the merging of those two things is going to be really, really important. And I mean, will Apple catch up most likely? We'll see. They haven't, I mean, history hasn't really indicated that with what Siri has been, but I think they eventually will. But the reason why I think the AI plus spatial battlefront is the most important one is that, yes, AI is going to be an incredible companion to us.

39:41But then how do we become a good companion in return? How do we become relevant and kind of, you know, hit the ball back and forth, if you will, with AI? And so right now we just use these Xbox. That's not really, really powerful interface at all. and over the fullness of time, AI is going to be producing just a deluge of information and insights and ideas and new products. It's going to be helping us think about and discover things deep in the oceans, in space, right? These are all pretty abstract places for us. And so how are we going to intuit, understand what AI is coming up with and understanding?

40:24I think it has to be very visual. I think it has to be experiential. And I think that it's the only way we're going to be able to remain in the loop with AI. And so I use a quote in the article. It's like, when AI comes up with an answer or an idea, it's like, don't tell me, show me. And so the ability to be hands-free walking around and just see the plan come to life or see the hotel I'm going to go to, see the interior of the place I want to design, And that's all going to be necessary in order for us to even utilize AI in the most powerful way. I think this is such a powerful idea, you know, and it just runs so deep.

41:06Because everyone now is in this space where they're super excited to be, you know, essentially talking to chat GPT, asking it questions, getting text results back. And they're like, hey, I'm communing with AI. This is amazing. And it is amazing. But what you're saying taps so powerfully into this deep sense that I feel of AI as a kind of emerging alien way of seeing the world that's going to discern things about the world that just are completely, essentially, from our point of view, unhinged or incomprehensible, but deeply true, deeply actionable. And it has to essentially find a way of translating that into language we can understand.

41:52And if I understand you correctly, what you're saying is, look, you know, right now you've got chat GPT, you know, you're batting text back and forth. But we'll head to a world where AI builds virtual worlds of its own that we can step into or build new objects inside virtual worlds that we're already in, whatever it is, to help us understand what it is it wants to tell us. Is that right? Yeah, exactly right. I mean. Exactly right. My favorite example is I always tie it back to education. And most people my age and beyond probably watch the show in school called The Magic School Bus. I think it was like Miss Frizzy and you get in the little bus and you fly through the human body.

42:37You fly into space. You fly into the volcano. I'm just like, okay, guess what? Now we can be in that magic school bus. And what does that mean for so many things? Not just education, but healthcare and space exploration. The list goes on and on. Right. What does it mean when AI can build a virtual model of a heart to tell surgeons something particular about this heart or a virtual model of the brain or a virtual model of this engine we're trying to develop to show us exactly, as you say, what it is that it's discovered? And I think the idea that we're going to enter into that kind of symbiotic relationship with machine intelligence is just deeply, deeply exciting.

43:22And it's not an idea I've seen articulated quite in that way anywhere else. In that case, do you - I just can't believe that we're alive to see all this stuff happen. I currently have goosebumps on my arms. And in the Apple essay, I tell a story that when I first saw a really good experience, I cried. And like, because we get to live through this moment. that's such a unique and powerful and special thing. And so whenever I'm in the dumps and, you know, blue or sad about something, that's, that's one of the main things I tell myself to remind me, like, Hey, look at the moment we're all living in.

43:56This is a pretty special time. Right. I mean, I just so feel the same way. And, and, and at its heart, that is what fuels this content series, the exponential age, you know, which, which is this week, but, you know, runs more broadly across Real Vision. Just this deep sense of wonder and amazement at what we are watching unfold and what we're about to watch unfold. Just the incredible moment that we're alive at. And of course, the opportunity, the fascination in it and the opportunity latent in it. And we can talk in just a second. But not everyone's excited about us, right? That's the problem.

44:32No, no. A lot of people, it's very polarizing. There's people like us who are giddy beyond belief. and you have other people who are just writhing with fear. Yeah, I mean, exactly, exactly. And I mean, well, okay, one example, and then we can get a little deeper into this. I mean, you have Demis Hassabis today of DeepMind, of course, Google DeepMinder, and he's an incredible AI genius, I think it's fair to say, saying the risks posed by AI need to be taken as seriously as the risks posed by climate change. What is your take? And I know we could come back for a whole other conversation on this, but what is your take on that kind of AI concern, in some quarters AI doomerism and the calls for regulation and all the rest of it?

45:21What do you think of all that? i guess before i dive into i'll say that you know yes i'm a techno optimist but i'm not ignorant to the risks and some of the things that are happening negative i mean just my own relationship with my phone is one that i loathe in many ways so i think the way i like to think about it and this ties to the whole theme of medium energy which is you know threading the needle or walking the line of paradox, right? Two things can be true at the same time, but how you weigh those truths is what matters most. And so towards that effort of weighing two truths, I mean, I think the real risk here is this notion of the precautionary principle.

46:07This is something that Marc Andreessen talks about in his recent techno-optimist manifesto. And the precautionary principle is this idea that, you know, right now, humanity and governments are really taking the path of it's better to be safe than sorry. If you think about most of human history, right, with technology, we were pretty good at realizing a lot of the pros of fire or the pros of a hammer outweighed the cons of the hammer being a weapon or fire burning a village versus cooking food, And we were able to navigate that because I think it was pretty intuitive how the good outweighed the bad.

46:52The challenge we're facing now is that with exponential tech, with AI, it's not as intuitive and it's not as easy to see how that good outweighs the bad. And that happened to us back in the 70s and 80s. The first moment where the precautionary principle really gripped us was all around nuclear energy. And we chose to be better, to be rather safe than sorry. And I think 30, 40, 50 years later, people are waking up and realizing, oh, man, that was silly. That was not the right path. This technology had so much power and so much good. So I think that there were elements of what we did with nuclear that were smart and there were certain cautions, precautions that we definitely need to take.

47:38But man, to throw water on the fire and douse it out completely and set us back 30, 40 years and to think about what could have and should have been and how much more prosperous certain people would be if we had nuclear energy, how geopolitically we wouldn't have the tensions we're having now in the world if we weren't so dependent upon all these other forms of energy. And so what does that mean in the world of AI? And so I guess the way I have to think about it is like the risk here is the precautionary principle. It's not do that again with AI. It's navigate it appropriately. I think the most important thing we can do, and we're doing it here, is just tell better stories and better educate people about how this tech really works and its limitations really are.

48:21and also show people amazing things that are happening to allow us to control this stuff and relegate it to a tool that works for us i mean i think there's a paper came out recently um that was a breakthrough and be able to actually diagnose these neural networks and like point two how decisions are being made once we can do that and we already have the rnd prove that we can, like all of this fear just, I think, starts to get pulled away. So we can start to monitor, you know, how conscious, if you will, or how overly intelligent, if that's the right word, AI is going to get in our disfavor, right?

49:03If AI is starting to do things and think things and plan things, we can start seeing it and monitor it. And so overall, I think it's all overblown. Obviously, as you can tell, I think that we just need to be able to better hold two things in our mind at the same time and then let the good outweigh the bad, because it's obvious that the good will outweigh the bad, in my opinion. Yeah. And I just I'm so interested in, for example, Stability AI and their mission essentially to open source, you know, AI for the people. I think there's something meaningful around addressing concerns of a sort of concentration of power and concentration of machine intelligence power inside a few organizations or inside a few hands.

49:45And it's just going to be super interesting to see how that front evolves and the mission of Stability AI and others evolves in the years ahead. Because I know that you're huge on this. And this is where our, you know, this is where our, I think, mindset overlaps most closely is that we're deeply interested in, yes, of course, the technologies and the technology trends driving all of this forward. but in their impact on their collision with human beings and what it means to be human. This technology in the end, or these technologies, it feels to me, are a deep challenge to our conception of ourselves and our conception of ordinary everyday life and the textures and the feelings of that, which is amazing, thrilling, but also scary.

50:38Is that where your head is at? And what do you do personally to sort of try to navigate through this wild period of change?

50:53I write. I write to learn and to stay on top of this stuff. I write, remind myself the power of flow states and the power of like tapping into creativity. Because I think people look at this stuff and, oh, you know, creativity is dead. And I just think when I see AI becoming creative in itself, me, just like in sports or something, You see your peers getting better at something like that should drive us to want to get better at that thing too, so we can stay relevant and better collaborate with AI. and in terms of the writing, I think what I mean by that beyond just the flow state side of things is that, and there's this quote by Ray Bradbury, I talk about it in my AI essay, which is this idea to be a good writer, be a good creator in general.

52:01When you sit the typewriter, thinking is the enemy, right? You need to just feel. and i think that's the age we're moving into right i think we need to all get way better at intuition way better at feeling i think everyone's thinking too much and trying too hard and over analyzing and you look at what happens whether it's on an individual basis or at you know societal scale just like the whole nuclear energy thing we thought way too hard and we thought our way into a tizzy of doom and then we created rules that squashed it um and we do that to ourselves as individuals. Like I do it to myself all the time.

52:41I overthink, um, you know, something I did at work, something I said on a date and it just creates anxiety. And so, um, I think the way that I think about survival in this age is being able to tap into our intuition, get better at feeling, and also just having really, really good practices for fully unplugging. I love to fly fish. Like fly fishing is my sanctuary. And as much as I love metaverse and AI and all these things, I love nothing more than the real world, the real world metaverse, which is standing in a river, casting a fly, also a flow state thing. Also a time you're not thinking, you're just feeling.

53:24And so I guess that's my message to people is like, we just got to get better at feeling and then in feeling and being more intuitive. We can use that to be more creative in ways. And then that version of creativity is the way that we can best leverage AI. AI is going to do the thinking. AI is going to produce all kinds of options. And we got to into our way through those and feel out the right ones and then deploy them the right way. So I think that's a cool symbiosis between AI and humans is the thinking versus feeling the perfect peanut butter jelly of the two. It's a beautiful, inspiring message.

53:55And it just feels like at the heart of that is if we get better at understanding who we are and understanding ourselves, that's when we can truly leverage the power of these technologies. And this is where the name, and this is a great place to end on, I think, this is where the name Medium Energy, your newsletter name, comes from. Am I right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. It started as a music playlist, actually. It was a playlist I used to get into flow states. And it was songs that were not too mellow or too slow but also they were not too frenetic and too high energy but there were songs were right in that goldilocks zone right just enough energy to keep you focused and alert but also enough kind of slower beats to keep you relaxed and chilled out and so this this notion of creating a perfect and healthy tension between two opposite things that's i started to lock on oh that's medium energy that is i guess the definition i use it and how i use in this context is medium energy is a state of harmony between being human and technology and find that balance within both those things, um, between all the opposite things that are both true, but need to be held together.

55:07And, um, yeah, that's, that's the general mantra. I think it's a good mantra and mindset for, for the exponential age. I think it's a crucial, uh, just a deeply valuable framework for helping people out there navigate the exponential age. And I hope that the videos that we're doing this week on the exponential age and future videos in this series to do exactly that, help people achieve something of that balance of, look, yes, deep understanding of the technologies in play and how they work, how they're evolving, the big players in the space, the challenges, the threats, obviously the opportunities, all of that.

55:44and that kind of analytical part of our brain. And increasingly, we can be assisted by AI as we seek that understanding. But the other side of navigating the exponential age too, which is about who are we as human beings? What are our deepest values? When are we at our most creative? How do we navigate through this insane wave of change that's coming? Because only when we can center ourselves and when we can do that, can we successfully explore the other side of the equation, the understanding, the opportunity, and all the rest of it. And I really hope that these exponential age videos and that content series helps people deeply to do that.

56:26And that is why you are such a valuable guest and such a valuable voice in all this, Evan. So please come back and talk to us again. That was absolutely exciting. I would love to. This was fun. Very fun. to wrap up just tell people where they can find you and your work yeah yeah so it's a sub stack newsletter it's uh mediumenergy.io is the website there and then yeah on twitter i'm at evan helda on instagram i'm at the helda five and yeah i would love for people to subscribe if they like some of these ideas more to come for sure i'm gonna do some deep dives on some companies in the humanoid robotics space.

57:08Going to do some deeper dives into Bitcoin soon since we're sort of kind of getting a resurgence here. And yeah, I would love to work with you more and keep these conversations going. I'm going to also launch a podcast soon myself. Right. That kind of complements the newsletter. So keep your eyes peeled for that. Amazing. Yeah. And of course, yeah, it feels, we can all feel we're at the eve of a really interesting phase again when it comes to crypto. That could fuel another amazing conversation. But for now, thank you so much for bringing that yin and yang, that balance when it comes to the exponential age.

57:42Evan, we will keep navigating the exponential age here on Real Vision and we'll see you all really soon. Thanks.

58:06picture, which is the way all these technologies are interlinked. Because this is all about exponentiality, and humans can't think in exponential terms. How consequential do you want to say machine intelligence is? It's almost certainly as consequential as writing. How long did writing take to disseminate through the human population? You know, hundreds, thousands of years. And we're dealing with it now on a scale of months. But in this kind of world, you're compounding 100 % growth every year, and the numbers become astronomical. AI is going to spot patterns in the world that were just completely invisible to us.

58:41Even if you think that the AI and the robots are your demise, you might as well bloody invest in them and make some money out of it. If not, you're just going to be angry man shaking your fists at the clouds.

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