I'm here with Neil Degrasse Tyson renowned astrophysicist and
host of the popular Star talk.
So what is this all told us about the universe that we didn't already know.
It's opening a window to the universe that we didn't previously have access to.
No, it hasn't.
No, no, I could have watched that image on my monitor actually no disrespect to
Neil Degrasse Tyson but that sucked.
That's the metaverse I guess.
And you are going to participate in it regardless of what you want,
they're gonna force it on you.
Okay. Mark Zuckerberg and facebook and
everyone else, it's gonna be the N.
F. T. S of the next 20 years and you're gonna learn to love it or
at least participate and not love it at all.
That's the next wave.
They literally renamed the company,
I still call it facebook because they don't want me to and
I don't care what they want but they want you to think of it as better because
the metaverse is the next big thing and maybe for some things it will be.
But the parts that are gonna be good are going to have anything to do with
Mark Zuckerberg assuming he's still rich,
he'll buy the companies that make the good parts and probably ruin them.
But anyway, that's the state of it right now.
Really low rez like you know, first Nintendo wii quality graphics,
low polygon models and it's the future I guess.
I don't know Ramesh, I want to start with, you.
Can this be salvaged.
Yeah. Thank you, john Okay,
so first of all metaverse has a history in virtual reality conversations and
in cyberpunk literature, people who read William Gibson or NEal Stephenson,
there's this discussion, Yeah, there's this, there was a lot of like
poetics about entering this kind of world where you were sort of kind of,
it was it was this world of like it was kind of sensory over stimulation but
it was all displaced from physical reality.
So this is sort of like something that people in Silicon Valley are obsessed
with, their really into very sort of strange mythologies and taking things that
we read as fiction and kind of kind of getting so into it like this is how
they talk about ai that there my God, ai is going to be super conscious and
we're all screwed, never forgetting that they're building ai systems too,
screw everybody over right now in much more real world census.
So what the metaverse is is a different,
its proprietary online virtual reality worlds that are built by and for
corporations think the Truman show here where you enter into this world and
everything that's in that world is built upon surveilling you to capitalize upon
your data and your attention and it's an ecosystem for any other businesses or
any other organizations to basically be have to pay to play, right?
So I've had random companies, businesses, nonprofits reach out to me and
say, hey how do I make myself, you know, worth anything in this metaverse.
So people might look at these graphics and be like they're super dorky or whatever.
But remember, as you said, john, these are early stage graphics, they're gonna get
more and more advanced and we're not going to be wearing these dorky goggles.
It's going to be built upon brain machine interfaces which are increasingly
being emerging out of silicon Valley.
Think black mirror episodes here.
So why is this actually a real world issue?
And why are these companies like the wealthiest companies in the world so
obsessed with this?
Because they already have captured so much of our data and so much of our attention
and they have billions of people hooked on their products around the world.
So facebook, the company, whatever column meta if you want are are a company
that have hundreds of millions, if not over 1.7 or so billion,
approximately WhatsApp users multiple, you know, over a billion, couple few billion.
Excuse me.
Facebook users instagram users,
these are all different companies that are owned by the parent company.
So they've captured global markets and they've captured our data and now the idea
is reroute you to this virtual world where we can harvest your tension and
manipulate you because a big part of the business model is about behaviorism.
It's about manipulating your behavior and your psychology and your emotions and
your anxieties based on what you're presented based on data that's
being constantly captured and gathered about you And so
this is one of many things I'm trying to fight back against in my writing.
Yeah, this is scary stuff man.
I think it's a distraction, right?
Were paid less than a living wage.
There's multiple pandemics brewing, our planet's burning and we're like,
hey like can we have a better world?
Can you like invest in some tech technology and
innovation that makes things marginally better and they're like, no,
the best we can do is just let you pretend for like a little while about that.
It's not great.
I really can't wait, can't wait to sell my
labor in the metaverse to whoever claims land in the metaverse.
And then when I met a protest the meta government and
get arrested by the meta police and go to meta jail.
I don't think it's gonna be a fun time.
And I don't think giving us virtual reality is going to resolve our actual
reality, but I do think they're trying to distract so many people with all of
these fantastical things like look at outer space isn't the world amazing and
it's like we're not gonna ignore all of the other terrible things that you're
doing just because you give us cool stuff to look at.
Yeah, 100% to that end.
I saw this recently. We don't have a graphic for this.
But there's a new report upon his moto meta approved ads on facebook in kenya in
both Swahili and english that included explicit calls to rape and behead Kenyan
citizens along ethnic lines despite stating that they were taking election
security and stuff around elections and politics so much more seriously.
Yeah, no, I think they've got a lockdown on this whole politics thing,
bear in mind, by the way, going forward eventually, as Ramesh said,
it's going to look better than that,
but also it's not gonna be Mark Zuckerberg trying to get you in there.
It's going to be the people who are selling like trying to hock flat
belly tea right now.
It's, I'm not saying these specific people, but
it's going to be taylor swift trying to get you in or kim Kardashian people that
you look up to trust in respect, will be telling you about how cool it is because
Mark Zuckerberg gave them a digital palace or whatever they will be trying to get
you in and that is going to be way more persuasive when every celebrity and
influencer is being paid huge amounts of money to get you in there so
they can get your data, they get you to buy products that you see in there,
that's gonna be a whole nother issue, it's totally, you're totally on,
on point with that, it's the influencer model and it's the peer model and
it plays to people's sense of alienation and
just a lack of under meaning around what our lives are all about.
But I want everybody to recognize that the that the titans
of these tech companies also don't really know what they stand for.
Either they're either obsessed with going off to space or
they're obsessed with these sort of ai like fetish themes.
And I think it's because there's a general existential sense of meaninglessness and
alienation that's really part of this time and where technology has gone.
And you know, that's why I work on on issues all around the world, including in
the United States, where technology takes on a completely different identity.
One that supports our real lives are real movements and
our real values as people on a beautiful planet.