Name: Facebook's Odd "Metaverse" Move
Uploaded: 2021-11-10T18:22:45.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Facebook's Odd "Metaverse" Move' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-10. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Facebook's Odd "Metaverse" Move' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2021-11-10. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- Let's talk about the Metaverse,
'cause I'm really fascinated by this decision of Facebook
to change the name of Facebook to Meta,
and to the Metaverse,
which I think people are just gonna,
they're gonna realize that this is a crazy idea,
that you're gonna give your life
to some sort of augmented or virtual reality world
that's created by a guy who's involved in this company
whose algorithms are sowing the seeds of distrust and hate.
But now we're gonna fucking let him take over
what you see and feel,
because you're gonna have a new company,
and this new company's gonna be virtually reality-based,
where he's literally,
he reenacted a scene from Black Mirror.
- Yeah.
- Which is unironically.
- I know, and you know what makes me a little sad?
I think that it's gonna happen.
- You think it's gonna happen?
- Yeah, I think that you and I are of a different generation,
dude, I think there are a lot of kids who are growing up
in Fortnite world,
and spend a lot,
and I think the pandemic really accelerated this.
There are a lot of people who lived online
for the entire pandemic,
and so for people like me and for people like my parents,
not seeing other humans for a long time
was actually quite painful and terrible.
Like we actually did want to get out
and be with the community and see friends
and do that sort of stuff.
What if you spend your entire life,
from the time you're a little kid interacting with screens,
what if those screens are getting increasingly sophisticated
so that they are interacting with you
in ways that humans would?
What if you get to be whatever,
we're a society, we're just talking about this,
where you get to be whatever you want to be.
What if there's a world where you actually can be
and everybody sees you the way you want to be seen?
Would you rather live there where you're like rich
and good looking and everybody likes you,
or would you rather live in the real world
where you're disconnected from all of that
and you end up with like Ready Player One world?
I think--
- It's gonna happen.
- It is.
- No, it's as long as it can become indistinguishable
from reality, which it will be able to be.
It's gonna take time,
whether it's five years or 10 years.
If you go back and look at Pong,
which was the first game that I ever saw
when I was a child,
it's ridiculous.
It's like a white ball that bounces across
and you have a straight line--
- Two paddles, yep.
- That's a paddle.
And it's the dumbest game
that you could never convince a child to play today.
They'd be like,
"Get the fuck out of here with that stupid game."
I can go play fucking Halo, right?
But back then when I was a child,
that was a big deal.
If you extrapolate,
if you could just go in the future from now,
what they're available,
what they have available now
with these insane video graphics,
the Unreal Engine,
and then move yourself 20 years in the future,
yeah, it's gonna be indistinguishable.
- And the AI is getting better and better
in terms of being able to imitate human behavior,
in terms of being able to innovate on its own.
- And haptic feedback suits
and all these different things,
and all these video games that they have
that emulate sports.
They're getting so close.
When you watch these basketball games
and the UFC has a game,
when you watch the players,
the fighters move around,
like, God, it's so close.
It's not quite there,
but they're getting better and better
with each iteration.
And it's just a matter of time.
- And what I wonder is
if we are innovating ourselves,
when it comes to this stuff,
if we're innovating ourselves out of existence
as a civilization.
- But don't you think that's probably
where this goes no matter what?
- No, I think then the barbarians come to the gate.
I think that's what happens.
- Really?
- Because the real world still exists.
So if you innovate an entire generation of people,
and let's just take this
on the most baseline demographic level.
None of them get married,
none of them have babies.
- In two generations the same kind of matter.
You're gonna have a good time in the virtual reality,
and then there are gonna be no babies
to carry this on,
and the only people on earth are gonna be
religious Jews, religious Catholics,
and religious Muslims,
and that's it.
- The vulnerability lies in the power grid,
'cause the power grid is so vulnerable,
that if someone just detonated the power grid,
all this stuff stops,
and then you have no life.
Your life is completely,
you've invested it completely
in this augmented world,
this virtual world.
But this virtual world,
all you have to do is pull the plug,
and it's out,
and it's out for millions of people.
It's like the equivalent of dropping
a nuclear bomb on a culture.
Like if you really all live inside
of a computer system,
some sort of a--
- VR, yeah, it's virtual reality, yeah.
No, that's right.
And what I fear is that
when you do that to a civilization,
it's basically the equivalent
of you bring in a wild animal,
and you put it in a cage for a long time,
and now you can't release it back in the wild,
right, it's gonna get eaten.
- What happens to you as a civilization?
What happens if you've taken
an entire generation of people,
told them that their entire life exists online,
they don't have to interact with other humans,
they don't have to interact in human ways
with other humans,
and then there's like an entire other earth out there
that isn't doing any of this.
- Right.
- China's not doing this.
- No.
- China's banning it.
- They're stopping, yeah.
- China's banning it.
China's saying you're not allowed
to go online certain days of the week
if you're a kid, right?
We're gonna ban the kind of stuff that you can see.
So in the long run,
which civilization is gonna be more durable?
The one that actually understands
the vulnerabilities of human nature,
or the one that says,
we're gonna use those vulnerabilities
to make you feel subjectively happier?
It's, I think,
I'm amazed at the level of conditioning.
Like, here's what killed me
about the pandemic, honestly.
Like, what killed me?
The level of conditioning that it took
in order to rejigger how people think was so low.
It shocked the hell out of me.
It really shocked me.
I was talking to my business partner,
Jeremy Boring, about this,
and early on in the pandemic,
he was like, people aren't gonna stand for this.
Like, when they'd shut everything,
and it's like, three months from now,
people are gonna be losing their minds.
They're gonna be out on the streets protesting
to get rid of the masks,
and they're gonna be out at ball games again.
I was like, that's not right.
I think it'll take a year.
We're like a year and a half in,
and half the country's still like,
well, you know, what if this just continues?
Like, all right, I guess.
Like, the amount of dependency that was bred
by people saying, just go back to your house.
And people be, like, human beings are really adaptable.
And this is something that Brett Weinstein
and Heather Hayden talk about, right?
That's our superpower.
We're super duper adaptable.
- Yeah.
- So, we're super adaptable.
- To our own detriment.
- Sometimes to our own detriment.
So, if we change our social circumstances radically
in a way that's unhealthy for us,
and we are now interacting with technologies
that were built to take advantage of our lizard brain,
then what happens when there are people
who are just not engaging in the same,
they're not playing in the same game that we are, right?
We're essentially drugging ourselves.
Robert Nozick is the libertarian philosopher.
He talks at one point
about what he calls the experience machine.
It's the thought experiment.
And the experience machine is basically VR.
He's writing this in early 1960s.
He says, "What if there was a machine
where you could plug into it,
you'd feel the illusion of choice,
you'd feel as though your choices
had some sort of significance,
and it would give you the dopamine hit
that you get in regular life.
Would you plug into it or would you not?"
- Right.
- And his theory was you wouldn't plug into it
because you still want to feel like your life
has real world consequences.
But what if everybody is in,
everybody you know is in that experience machine?
Then you're the one who gets left out
if you're not in the experience machine.
- What is real world?
I mean, that's what the problem is.
That analogy was created before the sophistication
of computer systems has reached the point now
where you can look at it 20 years from now
and you kind of get an understanding
of where it's going to be.
When you're dealing with what's possible now,
I don't think you're going to be able
to stop people from doing it
because I think it's going to be
so overwhelmingly addictive.
You look at how many people are just addicted
when you're looking at their Instagram.
- Yep.
- It's so simple.
- TikTok.
- It's nothing.
I mean, it's nothing.
The dopamine hit you get off this little phone.
It's minimal.
But people are completely all in on it.
- Yep.
And I think that what that's going to,
I do wonder if there's going to be,
and I wonder what you think about this,
if there's going to be a bifurcation
in the same way there's been a bifurcation
about so many issues
between the people at the top of sort of the elite spectrum
and the rest of the population
where the people at the elite spectrum
are making the metaverse,
but their kids aren't actually in the metaverse.
- Right.
Like Steve Jobs didn't let his kid use an iPad.
- Exactly.
Like I'm on the internet.
My kids are seven, five, and one.
They're not allowed to,
we don't have the TV on in our house.
My kids don't watch TV.
My kids don't get internet access until like 18.
Like that is not a thing I want.
- 18?
- They can be out of my house
and they can get internet.
- They're going to rebel.
They're going to do drugs.
They're going to be in the street.
The kids are going to turn tricks.
It's going to be a real problem.
- That's a pretty wild ride you took me on there, Joe.
That's really upsetting.
- That's what I do.
- Yeah.
- Sorry.
- We went straight from my kids
aren't watching Cocomelon to,
they're turning tricks in the streets of Florida.
- Turning tricks is such a great term.
It's such a, it sounds so cute for what it actually is.
- Yeah.
- You know, it's a terrible thing,
but it sounds like cute.
Oh, they're turning tricks.
Like if you didn't understand English,
you'd be like, oh, they're the magicians?
- You know, like, no, no, no, no.
- Of a sword.
- Yeah.
- But yeah, no, I mean, we're going to limit,
but I think that that's one of the stories,
if we're talking about the elite kind of
versus everybody else gap.
- Maybe.
- Everything that gets created is-
- If they're that concerned about their children.
- Basically everything, right?
- Yeah.
- I mean like people promulgating technologies
and value systems they don't actually live in.
- Right.
- And then everybody who is watching is like,
I will do that.
- Right.
- And then those people themselves don't do it.
- Watch the entire episode for free only on Spotify.