Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Jeremy Bailenson, Founder of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab

Episode Date: February 21, 2018

Jeremy Bailenson is the founding director of Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and a professor at Stanford University.Jeremy studies the psychology of Virtual Reality (VR), in particular how virtual experiences lead to changes in perceptions of self and others.When I was up at his lab, he ran me through a fear-inducing protocol that completely hijacked my thinking brain. Right up my alley!In this conversation we discuss Jeremy’s path – why he was almost too early to VR over 20 years ago - and how he dealt with early rejection because of it.Jeremy shares how he prevailed to run a lab at Stanford that is leading the way for technological advancements in virtual reality.He is also the co-founder of STRIVR, a company that has integrated virtual reality into the way sports teams train their players.This is a thought provoking discussion – Jeremy was able to see the future before many of his peers and was able to do the work to carve that path.For those that are intrigued by the applications of VR, check out his new book, Experience on Demand: What Virtual Reality Is, How It Works, and What It Can Do._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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give that to the rest of the Pac-12? And I'd never gotten that response. And there's such fulfillment out of building something that somebody wants to use. All right, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am Michael Gervais, and by training, I'm a sport and performance psychologist. And the idea behind these conversations is to learn from people who are on the path of mastery to better understand what's driving them. What are they searching for? What are they most hungry to experience and understand in their life? And why are they working so ridiculously hard to become the very best or their very best? And in these conversations, we're trying to sort out their psychological framework. We're trying to understand the mental skills that they've used to also build and refine their craft. Finding Mastery is brought to you by LinkedIn Sales Solutions. In any high-performing

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seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Now, this week's conversation is with Dr. Jeremy Balanson. He's the founder and director of Stanford University's Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He's also a professor at the university. And Jeremy studied psychology, studies psychology of virtual reality, also known as VR. And in particular, how VR experiences lead to changes in perceptions of oneself and perceptions of others. And when we can change those perceptions, we begin to start down the path of change for oneself, for growth, if you will. When I was up at his lab, he ran me through a fear-inducing

protocol that completely hijacked my thinking brain. It was right up my alley. It was great. And in this conversation, we talk with Jeremy about his path and how he was almost too early to VR over the past 20 years and what it's like to deal with early rejection because of being early on the path. We discuss how he overcame that rejection or those rejections and initially prevailed to be able to start up the lab at Stanford. And this is like one of the places that's leading the way for technology advancements in VR. So this is, I'm jacked to be able to share this conversation with you. He has switched on, he's on it. He's also the co-founder of Stryver, which is a company that's integrated VR into sports teams and their players as well. So this is a thought provoking discussion because Jeremy,

he was able to see the future before many of his peers were. And so we talk about the cost and the excitement about that and how he was able to stay the course and to carve his own path. And for those intrigued in the applications of VR, you'll probably want to check out his book, his new book. It's called Experience on Demand, What Virtual Reality is, how it works, and what it can do. So with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with Jeremy Balanson. Jeremy, how you doing? I'm doing great. How are you, Mike? Yeah, I'm excited to get into the weeds with you about virtual reality and your path into it.

And you are at the epicenter, I think think if I have this right, you're at the epicenter of the industry that is becoming what it is. Is that fair to say? So I've been studying virtual reality for about 20 years since the first VR demo I did was in 1994 on the Embarcadero in San Francisco. It was called Dactyl Nightmare. I didn't start actually studying it until the late 90s, 1999. And so I've been doing this for a while. And what's fun for me and why it's great that I get to talk to you is that right now other people care. And yeah, I don't know if I'm in the center of it, but I'm certainly trying to ride that wave as this amazing consumer revolution is happening.

Okay. So you say you're not at the center. You've been doing it for 20 years. When, just for me for context, when did the industry begin? The famous seminal paper that most attribute to the beginning of this idea from VR is in the 1960s written by a guy named Ivan Sutherland, who you may know. into a world, and that's where the concept begins. The term virtual reality is coined by a guy named Jaron Lanier, who's also in Berkeley. In about the late 70s, early 80s, he coins the term, and he's credited a lot with doing some of the initial work. But, you know, immersive virtual reality as a technology has been around, you know, since the late 80s, early 90s, and in various forms, and even before that, depending on how you count it. And professors have been studying VR for quite some time. So the inaugural, the first issue of Presence, which is kind of the landmark academic journal, comes out in 1992. And there are, you know are dozens of scholars featured in that journal who have

been studying it for quite some time. And that's by 1992. Okay. And then when did, this is just context before we get into how you got into it, is when did you fire up the lab, your lab at Stanford? So I started my lab at Stanford in 2003, but I worked at a lab at UC Santa Barbara under my mentor, Jim Blaskovich. I moved there in 1999. So when I first started really getting my hands dirty, you know, working on the hardware, learning the programming, doing actual work in VR was in 1999 at UC Santa Barbara. Okay. And then, so let's, let's go back. Like let's start in reverse order almost. So you're at, or at Santa Barbara, UC Santa Barbara.

Yep. And were you a grad student or had you completed your studies? So I was a postdoc. So my PhD was at Northwestern and it was in cognitive science where I was running experiments on humans and trying to make mathematical models to understand how people reason, how they form categories, how they think. In 1999, I was kind of- What does that mean? That you like mathematical models about how people think? So this is the essence of cognitive science. It's you run experiments on humans and you figure out the visual system looks at that. I'm pointing to a bottle and we know that it's a bottle as opposed to a bowl. How does the brain know that it's a bottle, not a bowl?

How does somebody understand things like logic? And so the way cognitive psychologists do this, they run experiments to really try to hone down the processes that occur when people think. And then you do programming to try to model that using computers. And this has kind of been the essence of how – there's two reasons to do that. One is you learn more about the brain by figuring out how to build the computational models. But then if you want to have good artificial intelligence, the best way to do that is by modeling the brain. So it goes both ways. But it turns out that I wasn't very good at that. There was a lot of people doing that who were better than me at the time.

And I was a little disillusioned in 1999 just being in a very saturated field and being surrounded by people that frankly were better than I was. At the time, I'd read a novel called Neuromancer, written by William Gibson. What's it called? Neuromancer. Never read it. Neuromancer, written by Gibson in the late 1970s, science fiction novel, dystopian, dark, brilliant, really an amazing piece of work where Gibson coins the term cyberspace that we all use now. But more importantly, for me, he projects this world of virtual reality and avatars where people are spending time online and what the possibilities are for society, for social interaction, for learning and training. It's really kind of the Bible of really pushing out what could be in VR. And I reread this book in 1999,

because I'd read it in high school. And in high school, I didn't quite get it. It's a bit of a challenging read. But in 1999, something really clicked. And I decided to leave my field of cognitive psychology. And I was lucky enough to find a postdoc. A postdoc is after you get a PhD, but you're not ready to be a professor. You go somewhere and just do research. I got a postdoc at UC Santa Barbara under the great Jim Blazkowicz. And I can tell you the story about how I got the job. It's actually, in some ways, a circuitous series of events that were accidents. Oh, I love it.

Okay, I want to get to that. And I want to go to this little nuance that you just shared is that I realized I wasn't very good. Now, that's a little bit of an exaggeration. I'm sure you were just fine, but you weren't something that you wanted to be. What, what, what was that like? Because, and I'll tell you why I'm interested in that is because so many people either lie to themselves, they don't get to the truth. They think that it's going to work out well, but they, because they're missing the signals that, you know, this is maybe not what it's going to be, but you also had this craving, it sounds like to go the distance in something and you didn't think it was going to be cognitive science.

Yeah. Yeah. Uh, if you think about what virtual reality is, we use perceptual stimuli to really create an illusion. And that appealed to me, this idea that you could fake consciousness. So with cognitive science, we're trying to get to this true conscious entity that you can rebuild in computers or trying to understand how brains actually work. And my opinion at the time was, A, that I was medium. I was not a great programmer. I was fine. And B, there was just so many other people I was not a great programmer. I was fine. And B, there was just so many other people that were just passionate about that. I wasn't as passionate to me, this idea of let's not spend time chasing the dragon on true consciousness, but let's see what happens in a world where you can actually fake it and build these avatars and virtual scenes that create

this illusion of reality. That to me really grabbed me. Okay. And then did I miss the thought that you didn't have the arc, that you didn't think that you're going to have the arc in cognitive sciences that maybe you wanted professionally? I thought there was no way. So if you would have asked me in 1999, Jeremy, are you going to be a professor in cognitive science? I would have said, I don't even want to do that. It was not, it just wasn't for me because to be a professor that's successful, you've got to wake up thinking about what you want to do. You've got to go to bed thinking about it. It's got to be what you're, you know, when you're cutting your eggs, that's

what you're thinking about. And I was surrounded by people that you could tell that talking about cog sci made them ecstatic and happy. And I didn't have that itch. When did you realize that? Was that halfway through your PhD, the first semester towards the end when you're doing your dissertation? When did you figure out that CogSci was not the thing for you that you wanted to itch? So for me, I graduated from Michigan and I was 21 years old. And this is undergrad? Undergrad at the University of Michigan and I loved it. It was amazing.

I learned some stuff but I didn't really find that thing when I was an undergrad. So I went to grad school immediately to get my PhD and I had this amazing and troubling episode where after I was accepted at Northwestern, the chair of the department there, after I interviewed, he actually did something that almost never happens. He called me up and he said, Jeremy, once we've given an offer, we can't retract it, but we don't think that you should come. Come on. Are you kidding me? No, I don't tell the story that often. You're a good interviewer. You're pulling it out of me. Because during the interview process, it was very clear that I didn't have that passion. He knew he say he knew he could see something he could see something and he didn't say it rudely he said jeremy this is probably not for you given you know what we learned about you during the interview this probably isn't the field for you jesus so okay you you don't know this but i measure success by how many times my hair stands up science of awe

right and so uh yeah goosebumps you're giving it to me right now because those moments are so freaking important yeah right and then so did you say fuck i don't i'm trying to make it kid friendly here but did you did you say like screw you dude or what did you do there so what i decided to do was uh i was going to go to grad school because i didn't really know what else to do at that point my life i hadn't really found it. So how did you take that information? So the chair of the department, I won't say his name. He also is one of the sweetest, most brilliant people out there. So he was one of the few people that could say it to me. And I didn't get angry because he's just an amazing human being and it just made me want to work harder. Okay. So you took that information in and you didn't get pissed off about it. You said,

okay, well, I'm going to feel this in some kind of way, but I'm going to use it to work hard. Yeah. I mean, grad school is, it's a grind, you know, you're working 18, you know, sometimes 18 hours a day, but typically 12 hours a day, you're doing it six, seven days a week. And for me, and we're really getting at the crux of this is I was working really hard and I was publishing a lot of work, but I was doing it. It was a job and it wasn't my passion. And in 1999, when I read this book, I figured I could take these tools that I've learned in grad school and I could do something that I actually want to do. Brilliant. I mean, brilliant. The insight that you've got to

think about solving problems while you're cutting your eggs. Like that's real. And, and do you know that just by being around people that are fully switched on or did you come to learn that once you found VR and this idea of creating? So I saw that in my colleagues in grad school about CogSci. I didn't have it. The second I started doing VR, that's what I had. That's what's up. And how old were you at that time? 26, 26. Yeah. And so do you imagine just looking, you know, with some hindsight in your life, if you were 36, you could do the same thing. 46, could you do the same thing? I don't think I can work 90 hours a week anymore at 44 who I am right now. So I was, I was working 90 hours a week. It was a time in

my life where I was just, you know, playing hard and working hard and not sleeping much. Okay. Well, damn good that you loved it. Okay. So then you make that switch, you get sucked in. There was a draft. You wanted to get, you wanted to understand it, or do you want to be great? So I want a job at this point. I'm going to be honest with you. I just got a PhD and just didn't know what I was going to do with it. And at the time I had some options. I was writing screenplays. I've written three novels and three screenplays. Sorry. I've written two novels and three screenplays, none of which have been sold, but I still wrote them. So I had an illusion I could be a writer. I was doing some

market research to pay the bills in my fifth year of grad school, some stats for marketing firms. And then I had this academic career of going to VR. And at that time, I didn't really know it was going to win until I really got deep into VR. And we can tell a little bit more about that. Okay. Did you have, so a mentor of mine made a comment in passing once he's a business, very successful business person. And he said, Mike, early on in your career, ride a bunch of horses and then, you know, keep your pulse on, on the horses. There's going to be one or two that take off. Right. And he said, but the first, the first kind of group of horses that you pull together here to ride, make sure you enjoy all of them that if one of them took off, you'd love it. So I just had that model in my head. Is that

kind of what you're doing? I had this moment where my writing partner, Kevin Soles, he's my high school buddy. He and I had finally come close to selling one of our screenplays. And I'm sitting across the table from an exec at a production house. And she's basically saying, okay, we think we're going to buy this. But it turns out when you write a screenplay, you don't just sell the screenplay. It's an iterative process. You're, you're constantly there. And I, during that meeting, like an hour earlier, I'd gotten the offer from Stanford. I was down in Los Angeles and, uh, and, and she, and she, she learned this and she, and she said, well, Jeremy, given that you're going to be a professor at Stanford, how are you going to do the writing process with us? And,

and I, and I said to her, well, maybe, you know, I can put off going to Stanford for a year and I could work on this screenplay. I said, are you crazy? You want to be a writer instead of going to Stanford and be a professor? What's wrong with you? And it was, you know, I, I couldn't even say it with conviction because, but it was, you know, we'd worked so hard on these screenplays. I really wanted to, to, to see it through, but at some point you have to get off one of the horses. That's right. Yeah, you can't ride them all.

And then what are you attracted to in your writing? This is going to teach me a little bit about kind of your center. You know, the writing is about – even my writing was a bit out there. So my VR, up until we get to the present and the consumer revolution in industry has grounded me. My academic research takes you to strange places. You see yourself as a woman in a mirror. You travel to the future and see the environment decimated. You grow a third arm.

I've always been into pretty intense science fiction type journeys. Okay. All right. Cool. All right. So let's go back to your, you're at UC Santa Barbara. Jim Blazkowicz, who's my brilliant mentor. I interviewed, so my research at Northwestern doing CogSci, a lot of it was about spatial reasoning and

navigation. I interviewed for a job at UCSB to do using VR to study how the visual system works in terms of navigation. I interviewed for that job. When you say navigation, it's like, what does that mean? The technical term is wayfinding. So how do people choose routes? How do they walk around a room? Really kind of low level perceptual. How does the body, the eyes, the vestibular system work? So VR is a neat tool because you can show people things that imply movement and you can understand how the brain works in that sense. So you're looking for structure or electrical activity? Typically behavior because electrical activity while you're wearing the helmet is really hard to do. Okay. Because of the so much movement. Because there's so much movement. Okay. All right. So you're actually having people wear

the glasses or whatever they're called. Are they called goggles at that point? Sure. Sure. Yeah. Okay. The head set up and then watching how they're navigating a space. Exactly. And then you're looking, what are the behaviors that you're looking for? So this is what they were doing. I applied for a job to get this and I didn't get it. So I went on an interview, spent two days there among people that, you know, they study the way the eyes work and they're really into the visual cortex. And that wasn't my particular expertise. So I didn't get the job. But while I was interviewing, we went to a group dinner and Jim Blazkowicz, who was a social

psychologist, he and I just hit it off. And I got this phone call a few days later or a few weeks later. And it was from Jim saying, I've got bad news and good news. You didn't get your job, but I think you can come work with me and we could do things to understand the human condition. And I said, okay, that sounds good. And I just drastically switched fields. I went from cognitive science to Jim runs a social psychology lab and went to more learning about people as opposed to brains. And I just made a decision. It was just – I have a flashbulb memory of sitting in my living room in Chicago, getting the call from Jim.

Oh, I didn't get the job? Oh, you're going to give me one? Oh, I didn't get the job. Oh, you're going to give me one? Yeah, sure. I'll take it. Love it. Okay. So then that lasted how long? Four years. Because most postdocs last a year or two. So I went to UCSB and learned how to do the programming and the hardware and to run different types of experiments. And I was getting these job interviews at universities based on my academic vita, my resume, which was I have lots of publications at this point, but they're all in the older stuff, the traditional cognitive science that I was doing. So I'd get to these interviews.

Remember, this is 2000. So you were attracting the wrong dates at that point. Yeah, yeah. Imagine you show up at University of Florida and I present this research on social interaction about how avatars are going to change behavior and they're going to be used for training. And this was in 1999. They look at you like you have a third head, right? And so I was year after year going on these interviews and coming away feeling like I'm good on paper because my record would get me the interview and then I'd give this job talk and I wouldn't get jobs. So it was year after year.

I could list 15 universities that I interviewed at and didn't get jobs at. Were you ahead of your time? Is that a fair statement to say? I was, yeah, have to be patient in this world and the right time emerged. I, yes, I was early. I was early. That's okay. And then how did you deal with that rejection? And Dr. Albert Bandura, a colleague potentially of yours, would you call him a colleague? I had the pleasure of serving on some committees with him and on some dissertations he and I never published together, but just being around him was spectacular. Fantastic. And he has this insight about to pursue potential, you have to get really good at rejection. And so there's a lot, and he, and he just lists all of them, the massive

contributors and disruptor disruptors in different fields, Henry Ford, you know, Einstein, whatever, whatever, whatever they had so much rejection early, but they stayed with it. And so I'd love for you to just pull on that thread a little bit. And how did you, if you could pick one story, one rejection that you had, because you've shared two or three of them already, how did you internalize or externalize or make sense or explain to yourself when the answer was no or not yet? Well, I think it goes back to your horses example. Remember when I'm doing my postdoc, I'm in Santa Barbara and I am, I'm working 60 to 70 hour weeks. And then every weekend I'm either going to LA or Kevin, my writing partner's coming up to Santa

Barbara and we're spending 20 hours over the weekend writing screenplays. So when I'd get rejected by academia, then I would say, it's okay. I'm going to be a screenwriter. And then I'd get rejected by Hollywood and we wouldn't sell a screenplay. That's okay, I'm going to be a professor. So having the horses psychologically allowed me to at least save face for a little while. Right. Okay. So you didn't attach your ego because you were multifaceted, multidimensional as a human. So you're like, oh, well, that's just part of me.

So it's not like it's this most awful experience. Okay. So that was how you would front load the ability to take a shot. And then when you took that shot and it didn't work out, it's like, okay, well, I've got, I've got way more options. Beautiful. Okay. Finding mastery is brought to you by Momentous. When it comes to high performance, whether you're leading a team, raising a family, pushing physical limits, or simply trying to be better today than you were yesterday, what you put in your body matters. And that's why I trust Momentous. From the moment I sat down with Jeff Byers, their co-founder and CEO, I could tell this was not your average supplement company. And I was immediately drawn to their mission, helping people achieve performance for life. And to do that, they developed what they call the Momentus Standard.

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at FelixGray.com for 20% off. So now you're at Stanford. Okay. What was week one? Week one like at Stanford. So week one. Day one. Day one. Can you go back to day one? So yeah, I can go back to day one. They teach this at Stanford. It's called the imposter effect. That's right. Which is – Of course. They have a course. You are going to feel like you don't deserve to be there.

And that imposter effect, that day one, you walk up the stairs and to the right, there is the building where Albert Bandura, the founder of social learning theory sits and Philip Zimbardo, the Stanford prison experience genius is there. And that day you shake hands with two people who have won the Nobel Prize. And that's your, that's your day one. And here you are this, you know, I'm 30 years old, and I'm with this VR guy. And, you know, I published a bit, but for me, it took no exaggeration. I've been at Stanford for 13 years, 14 years now, and it took me, I would say a decade to get over that. So I actually finally feel like I'm almost as good as most of my colleagues. And it took me, uh, it took me a decade to get there. And how do you work through it? It's a real, so this imposter syndrome gets people twisted. Yeah. And so the little thought just to decode this a little bit is like,

when are they going to find out that I don't have what it takes? Somebody made a mistake. They're going to realize I'm not smart. I'm not talented. I'm not good enough to swim with these amazing specimens. And that gets people stuck from even trying. And then if they're actually in the pool or the arena, then what ends up taking place is they tighten up and are so anxious that it reduces the capacity for them to grow. So how did you work through it? I think the answer to that is I just worked. To me, I still don't feel like I'm... So my mentor, my faculty mentor at Stanford, when I got to Stanford, the guy that fought to get me there

and the guy that acted officially as my mentor, his name was Clifford Ness. He passed away a few years back. It was a tragedy. Cliff, in any room he walked into was the smartest guy in that room. And, and I'm not trying to be self-deprecating. I'm just not that smart. And, and the way that I was going to work through this was to work. And, you know, I was single at the time. I'm now married with two kids, but, you know, I was getting in the office before anyone else and I was leaving, you know, after they were gone. And, and it was a simple formula. And over time it just, it adds up, you know, when you come to Stanford to get tenure, some schools say you need to have 30 papers. You need to have 50 papers to get tenure over seven years. Stanford says,

we just want to look at your top three and those three papers need to change the world. And so that's the standard they set. I love it. And my route towards finding those three were to just publish 10 a year and hope that a couple of them just made an impact. So you went volume. I went quality and quantity, let's say. I threw grenades. Okay. All right.

So then how long does it take you to pull the resources together to create the lab? Which thank you for giving me an experience and a tour whenever that was back when. Like phenomenal experience. And I want to talk about that a little bit. But how did you pull the resources together to build a world-class lab of virtual reality? So had you been to the lab between 2003 and 2010, the experience would have been just as good when you were inside the helmet, but the lab itself was a room with duct tape and wires sitting everywhere. So my startup package

at Stanford was just north of a hundred thousand dollars. I had just enough for me to buy, you know, the bare bones equipment. And, um, uh, that was enough to get me started. And then, look, the nice thing about being at Stanford, it's just such a privilege and a treat. I mean, you're there for a year, and somebody just comes and offers to give you money. And I don't say it's, I say that frivolously, but it's, it's, it's true. It's just because it's such an amazing place. You're in the valley, people see the work you're doing. It's a, it's not as hard to fundraise as it would be in other places. And I'm thankful for that. And, uh, you know, I, you know, early on we had good success with the national science foundation. Uh, but just even

companies that say, we care about this and give you some money and it's, it's, it helps. Brilliant. Okay. So, and just for visual, the lab. Oh, sorry. Uh, the, so yeah, so you saw the lab, you came in 2010. And what happened in 2010 is when I got tenure, Stanford said, you know what, we believe in this VR, let's do it right. And we spent a year every Wednesday morning for two hours, a room of 10 people, architects, my VR company, WorldViz, that was doing the hardware at the time, the AV people, the plumbers, two hours every Wednesday to design this lab that you got to see. And it took a year just to plan the space. So it was just brutal. Brilliant. With all the haptic sensations and the feedback loops that are in place so that when you put on your the vr goggles it feels

i know like what part of my brain knows that this is a simulation but then the part of the brain that is responsible for adjustments to what is perceived to be real is hijacked that's the way it felt to me like part of me was literally hijacked and there's this one simulation you're you obviously know it was you put me on a plank and then you drop the floor. And then I mean, what was the depth perception when you dropped the floor and I was walking on that plank? So the way this works is you put on the goggles and we have a 3D model of the room that looks just like the physical room. So most people think they're seeing see-through video. But in essence, it's a 3D model.

Then what we do is we drop a hole in the floor that's 10 meters deep. It's about three stories high, right? Did I do my math right? Yes. Yeah, we're good. Yeah, good. It's about three stories high. And there's a rickety plank that crosses over this chasm the same way if you remember Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, and you've just got to cross that plank. We've also got haptic feedback where the floor shakes. It actually displaces your feet. We've got spatialized sound with 24 speakers that can move sound differentially so that when a sound happens of a creek of wood, it comes from the right spot. So we've got virtual sight, virtual touch, and virtual sound. And then you've got to cross over this plank.

And you were brave. All right. So you were braver than most. But my hips dropped and I was like, oh, snap. Like I'm in it. It's, you know, I save a life probably once every week or two for somebody. When they step off of that plank, they, you know, we make it so that we model gravity and they actually fall down and people crumble to the floor.

Some people sprint because they panic and I catch them for going to the wall. It's intense. Yeah, it's really intense. Okay. All right. Good, good stuff. Now, take us to where VR, what you're excited about VR. And maybe before we go there, can you give us a little bit of brain science about how it's working? Because I think that'll set up the conversation about where it's going. So since the last time you and I talked brain science, which was about two years ago up in Seattle, we've actually done some good studies. So I just published, when I say me, my team of brilliant colleagues, I was one of the authors on a group paper. So I was one of many. And to be honest, they had a bigger role a group paper. So I was one of many. And to be

honest, they had a bigger role than I did. But we published for 20 years, I've been trying to publish a paper in the journal Science, which is our best journal and a great scholar, Thackeray Brown, and Anthony Wagner, who's his advisor. We published a paper in Science that looked at when you experience an event in VR inside the MRI, what are the brain patterns that occur when you learn spatial navigation and spatial reasoning inside VR? And this project took us years. We finally got it published. And what we demonstrated is that the hippocampal activity that occurs

when you are experiencing an event in immersive VR is exactly what you would expect from a, let me be clear, is the word exactly there. I want to take that word back is because in general, we should be careful with our adjectives as we discuss science. The pattern that occurs in the brain, when you experience a virtual reality event is similar to what you'd expect to one that occurs in the real world. And the hippocampus, which can you describe, you know, it's memory and coordination. Yeah. So it's not, uh, it's, I'm simplifying it. It's actually the loop that connects the hippocampus to the cortex. So it's, uh, it's called the

medial temporal, uh, loop and there's, it's, it's much more nuanced in the way I'm describing it. I'm not a scientist. Yeah, no, no, no. Yeah. That. Okay. So then the loop between the thinking, uh, the thinking part of the brain, if you will, and the movement part of the brain, is that too much of a simplification? I think that's, that's fine. I think that's fine. Across the motor strip. Yep. Yeah. Okay. And, and the neat thing is we've never been able to do this in humans before, because you can't experience something in the magnet, but VR allows you to actually have what,

you know, psychologists would call an experience. Okay. So this is, this is, this is the part that's great because then, okay, let's go to imagery for a minute. Close your eyes and you imagine something that's taking place. And it's that thing that can get your heart rate to pump within just a couple of seconds. Right. Okay. So that for me is a visceral experience of training one's brain mind emotional center and body yep right because when we do that mental imagery we're actually we think at least that we're going to actually group grease a groove right so whatever that means to have pattern recognition to have motor motor neuron activation right so the technical like the premotor cortex exactly okay so so and and i'm

saying all this like i know what i'm talking about like the brightest minds in this space are still saying i think yeah sure i think this is what is okay so that being said when you close your eyes you get a visceral experience is it's as if you're actually in it now we've we intuitively know that yep okay and now you've created a technology that you can manipulate what's actually what somebody is actually seeing and experiencing. Is that a fair statement? I don't love the word manipulate, but I, I, everything you're saying is accurate. So I, the, the, when we think about imagery, when you're imagining an experience, sometimes you can nail it, but it's hard to do

imagery correct. That's right. Because the drunk monkey of our mind wanders. And it thinks about my back. It thinks about groceries. It thinks about, am I doing it right? And it's hard to stay focused. There's that aspect, but then let's pretend you're an athlete in a slump. You can't visualize success. Let's pretend you're a patient with a horrible affliction that hurts your limbs. You can't visualize moving them. Because it's hard to recover it. It's hard to – is that the thought? So one of the studies I want to talk about, we just published – my grad student, Andrea Stevenson-Wan, she just published a paper in a journal called Pain Medicine.

And it was about children with chronic regional pain syndrome. That's this horrible CRPS. It's this horrible affliction where you have an affected limb and you can't move the limb. What Andrea did is she put these patients, these kids, so the way to treat this, the way to try to alleviate the pain is you force them to move the affected limb. So it's nature's catch-22. You're in pain, but the way to reduce the pain is by putting yourself in more pain to move the limb. So she created a VR simulation where the kid looks down from the first person perspective, sees herself avatar, and we put a gain factor on movement. So imagine that you have to move

your right leg and you can move it 10 degrees and that's all you can do because you're in such agony. You can only move your leg 10 degrees. In VR, we move it 20 degrees. So we give you an exaggerated sense of what Albert Bandura would call self-efficacy, the belief that you can do it. Okay. But she's not actually, the physical leg is not moving at all? It depends on how bad the kids have it. So some kids can't move their legs at all. And the way we solve that is we swap arms and legs. We have them move their physical arm, and that moves the virtual leg. So they get agency

and they get to visualize the leg moving, but they don't do the agony. For some kids actually can move at 10 degrees. Then they move the physical leg 10 degrees. But you're seeing it 20. Ah, I love it. Okay. So then that's creating a whole neural pattern

that's different. It's no different than what we've done in swimming for a long time is, well, not a long time, but we'll tie, we'll connect a swimmer into a harness and pull them faster than they actually go. So then the brain says, oh my God, I can do that. Yeah. Okay. And there's other sports that are doing stuff as well. Okay. I love this because this is hijacking the brain in a whole new way. And you didn't like manipulation because – It's just a loaded term.

It feels nasty, like you're going to trick somebody or something. In general, when we fast forward to my industry work, we're going to talk about a lot of people are worried about VR is so real. Is there potential for advertisers to – so there's this kind of – I'm not seeing it that way. Yeah, I know you're not. You not seeing it that way yeah you're seeing it as an experimentalist yeah right manipulating stimuli yeah exactly okay all right all right so okay so god this is fun because now i think this is part of the challenge in the field is that you could literally go anywhere yeah and then so it feels to me i don don't know, 2012-ish, that it's like, God, this is amazing.

Really? Like, is it too early? Like, you know, like, how do we really, like, what is happening? And are we ready? And so now it's like, okay, are we late? You know, did we miss something? So a lot happens because there's these pseudoscience claims, not around your industry, but pseudoscience claims around something. Figure out whatever, fill in the blanks about whatever.

And one of the things that drives me crazy is they said it can, something, a pill or mechanism can solve anything from irritable bowel syndrome all the way up to high performance. Like it can do 50 things at once or it can make an impact across 50 things. Is that some of the plague that VR is running into or what? Let me say it more cleanly. What are the plagues of VR right now? Look, in my opinion, VR is moving at the right speed. So I know that there's people are worried that it's not in every living room. This is a powerful medium. It should be moved slowly. I like the fact that it's going

business to business first, before we go to consumers. I don't think it should be in every living room just yet. So to me, I'm really happy with the fact that there is, you got to remember, so when, when we talk about this, my lab's role, you talked about being at the center. I don't know for the center, but, uh, my lab's role in this consumer revolution, it B it begins in March, 2014, Zuckerberg comes to my lab and he puts on our $40,000 helmet that is like five pounds and hurts your neck. And we give him VR demos for like half an hour, two weeks later, he buys this little company called Oculus that no one's ever heard of for $2.3 billion. And then at that point, the race is on. And that's, I've been, you know, I haven't, I haven't been sleeping so well since then, because there's just so much to do and what opportunities to think about. But you got to remember that the helmet that he wore was

$40,000. And it was, if it broke down, it would take three weeks to get it fixed. We now have affordable, comfortable, plentiful VR hardware. And to me, that's just life-changing. I mean, we can do so many things now that we couldn't do. I'm less worried about is VR in every living room, and I'm much more delighted that I've got a lot of hardware and tools to do the fun things that I've always wanted. Brilliant. Okay. So what I'd like to do is I think this is a good kind of segue into the company that you spun off.

Okay. Okay. And unless there's other really important stuff to get to around the science. Yeah. I feel like we got the very basics. Okay. So let's talk about the company that you spun up. And then I want to go to more about you and get into your philosophy and how you approach life. Okay. So let's talk about this class called virtual people since 2003. It's a class about what is VR? What's the engineering behind VR? What are the applications? And what's the brain science behind VR? It's kind of a four part class.

And Derek took it in 2005. And after class, he said, Jeremy, can we can we use VR to train athletes at the time he was the kicker on the Stanford team on the Stanford football team. And I said, Derek, it's a great idea, but hardware is not ready for it. Come back in a decade. And he did. He came back in 2014 and he got his master's degree in my lab while simultaneously a coach, an assistant coach on the Stanford football team. And his thesis was, can we use VR to train athletes? And he, part of the genius of Derek was he was able to convince Coach Shaw to give us five minutes of practice time on Mondays. And what we did is in 2014, the ability to capture what's called spherical video, which

is a video you can look around and it's a way to get photorealistic VR. The hardware to capture that was really – it was heavy and dense. It didn't work so well. It was very bulky. So coach allowed us to have five minutes of practice time on Monday. We'd have the defense simulate about 10 plays from the team that we're going to play that Saturday. Then my team would go back to the lab. We'd feverishly put all this stuff together and create the 10 plays that the quarterbacks could then use.

We'd bring it back to the football office. We set up a little VR lab there. And what the quarterbacks would do, we weren't teaching them how to kick or throw. We were teaching them to feel as if they were present inside of a play pre-snap. So when the quarterback looks at the line of scrimmage, looks back and forth, quarterback has to A, recognize the defense, and then B, make a decision about keeping the play, changing the play at the line of scrimmage looks back and forth. Quarterback has to a recognize the defense and then be, make a decision about keeping the play, changing the play at the line of scrimmage or moving a blocker to pick up a blitz. And that's how it began. It was simply a tool to allow quarterbacks to get extra mental repetitions so that they could, you know, relive plays, do mental rehearsal

visualization. And it was about decision-making. Can I recognize a pattern and make a decision? And then that's the thesis. So, uh, fast forward, uh, coach after three weeks, it's working so well. He makes it mandatory for the players. Kevin Hogan, the quarterback at the time, uh, will be the first to say that that helped him to have his best games of his career and a season. Those are his words, not ours. We try not to take credit for, for, for our player success. Um, and then Derek graduates January 2nd and forms a company called Stryver January 3rd. Uh, as many Stanford students do, they graduate and they form a startup. And, uh, in the first year, I think we signed six NFL teams for multi-year contracts, about more than 10 college teams. It's now being used in basketball for visualization purposes. For example, Andre Drummond, who has a hard time

shooting free throws successfully, is using this to watch himself in the third person, visualize success by shooting free throws. And there's a nice article on ESPN about that. The Washington Wizards are doing a similar type of application. There's some baseball teams that are using it. There's a lot of teams. The fun thing is when you approach a new team or a new sport and you show someone this tool, everybody sees a new way that they can use it. So it's, it's what's, what's been super fun for me is go walking into a room with a coach or team of coaches and, uh, you know, me having an idea about how it can be used and then walking out of there with our new idea of just to completely go back to the drawing board and rethink it. So it's been fun. Very cool. And then how does non-athletes or non-performers, executive folks or people at home or students, how can other folks pay attention or use the technology?

So what we learned early on was the tools that makes drivers succeed for athletes, which is be in a high arousing situation. You were just talking about how it was making your heartbeat quickly when you're in there, put someone in context, it's arousing, it feels real, force them to relive a situation. And you know, how do we learn? We learn by making mistakes. So why do we have flight simulators in late 1920s? It's because planes are expensive and lives are even more expensive. So let's learn while we can make mistakes without getting hurt. And so it turns out this method, this tool, if you are an employee at a large retailer, so we're working with one of the largest retailers in the world to help their employees make better

decisions. This can be someone at the deli counter. Is that knife out of place? Is there a line of four people? Have I looked at person number five? Everything about a quarterback, quickly scanning a field, recognizing a pattern. It applies to you and your job too. And then how can people, can they purchase a product off the shelf yet? Or is there not there yet? You can buy off the shelf. So one of my roles in industry, I'm on the advisory board for Samsung. We make the Samsung gear, which you slide your phone in and it works. My lab is currently funded by Google. Google's got a product called Cardboard. Both of those are kind of cheap alternatives where you can slide your phone into. Those are great because you can look around. They don't allow you to walk around. So if you want to walk around, in my opinion, if you really want the feel of, I'm in VR,

you got to, so when we installed the system for the Dallas Cowboys, Jason Garrett, it was really important to him that his players not just look around, but actually take their three-step drop in a way where they're going through every physical motion that they would during the play because he wanted them to actually associate the imagery with the body movement. And I agree with him. When you do VR and you get to walk, it's really special. Yeah, it is special. Okay. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth.

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activities? So we are pretty active on Twitter. It's at Stanford VR, and that's a way that you can follow up on our research. And sometimes we are looking for people to be in studies or to do demonstrations. That's one way to do it. I've got a book that's coming out and it's called Experience on Demand. And it's about what's the world like when you can have any experience at the touch of a button. And then what was, I forgot the title of your first book. Infinite Reality. That's it. Yeah.

Yeah. Infinite Reality. So that came out in 2011 and it's a book about. And you wrote that with your mentor? My mentor, Jim Blazkowicz, he was the first author. I was a delighted to be a coauthor of Jim's and it's, you know, I still use it as a textbook in my classes and it's, it's certainly people that read it, they still seem to like it. Okay, good. Okay. So if I switch gears just a little bit about you, okay. So this is like really close to, um, trying to understand what you're hungry for, what you're craving and how you organize your activities and thinking patterns. Okay.

What is it like when you are most alive? How do you describe that? I don't know how to answer that. Re-ask me. Think of it. Yeah. Okay. So let me come at it. When you are your very best, what are the words that you'd use to describe that sensation, those sensations or those emotions? You know, so people that see me when I'm arguably at my best, uh, I S I'm, I'm typically a quiet and mellow person, but, uh, when I'm on fire, uh, I'm speaking quickly, I'm running around pacing kind of frothing. Uh, so when I get in the zone, probably the, the way others describe me, there's an intensity to it. And then, so it's on fire with some intensity. Does that seem close to what you just said? When I'm at my best.

When you're at your best. Yeah. So some people are, you know, there's a reason why I've never picked up a golf club. And it's because any sport where, you know, getting more fired up doesn't help is not for me. And then around whom or what triggers that experience for you? You know, so my lab, when people come to my lab and they, and they see all this amazing VR and then they say, well, who builds this? And I say, Oh, 18 year old Stanford kids. They're the ones that are doing all the real work. So, you know, I've just cherished, you know, I, and I don't say this to be self-deprecating. What I. My strategy at Stanford is I surround myself with people smarter than me and I get out of their way. Okay.

And then how do you prime yourself to get into that fire intensity space? Diet Mountain Dew. Seriously? Yeah. That's classic. Okay. And then when you're off, when you're not in that space, how do you bring it back? Yeah.

So this is – I used to be able to work nights and now I work long days and I'm home. I've got two kids and I spend a couple hours with my girls and I'm unable to actually do – I wake up at the crack of dawn now. But I'm unable to actually do real work at night and I read airport novels, meaning these kind of very quick read thrillers. I watch shows on TV. For me, that's how I – and I just turn off. I literally can't actually function and think even approximately the way I am during the day when I have my shutdown period at night. And then how much sleep are you getting? About six hours a night.

And how is that working? I'd like more, but I have a five-year-old and a two-year-old and I'm running a huge lab at Stanford and co-founded a company and just turning in a book. So it's a, there will be a time when I can expand that out. And, and look,

when I had kids, I decided no matter what that, you know, that 6am to 8am hour, I was going to be with the kids for that two hour chunk and dinner and bedtime and bath time. I'm going to be home for that. So I try to compress my days into that window so that I can be, you know, the one thing about having kids when you're older, I'm 44 with a five-year-old and a two-year-old is you realize how precious it is and what a good idea it is to spend time with

them. That's rad. Okay, cool. And then how do you articulate what you're most hungry for? What you're, why you're dedicating so much energy and effort to something? You know, for me, so we didn't talk much about what I do in the lab academically, but what I'm hungry for this consumer revolution of VR is out. And what's been frustrating to me is that it seems that people think that the home run use case for VR is video games, which tend to be violent, and movies. And, you know, I'm a huge fan of free speech, the Supreme Court has ruled that violent video games are free speech. And I, I support that fully 100%. But what what I try to do is, you know,

VR, which I think should be considered more of an experience than a media experience, it feels like it's happening. You know. What I'm trying to do is as this technology spreads like wildfire, can we come up with what I call pro-social uses, use cases that make you think about your race and gender in relation to other people that teach empathy, that help you reconsider our role on the planet, that train you to become better? I'm trying to buck the trend a little bit, which is the default, let's use VR for movies and video games. And that's what I'm trying to do right now, which is not to get rid of those because, again, I love the world of free speech and I'm delighted that people want to experiment and do different forms of art and entertainment, but I think there's better things out there. was one of the co-founders of Siri. And he talks about the importance in modern times to be a consumer of information, but also a producer and spend more time on the production side. VR has the opportunity to consume information through movies and video games, but also produce

experiences for learning. And so you're going to anchor on the same side that Adam is. Okay. Okay. I got some quick hits I want to run by you. When you make a mistake, public or private, doesn't matter to me, how do you explain that mistake to yourself? I talk it through with my family, my father, my mother, my wife. I try to rethink how I could do it better. But the first thing I do is damage control, right? Because the, the key for me is we all make mistakes. And for me, when I make mistakes, sometimes it's, you know, in front of a thousand people on stage, sometimes it's, you know, in live TV. And so for me, I'm thinking, geez, what did I do that could actually make people

also make mistakes given my mistake? So how do I control the damage? Okay. Not save face, but how do I – when you're – let's just take teaching for an example. When you're – I'm teaching a class right now. There's 200 Stanford students. When I say something wrong because we all do it, how do you rectify it? And for me, for an example, a class, I have a fact wrong. Well, you take feedback when someone says, hey, that was wrong. You do it. You know, how do you rectify it? And for me, for an example, class, like I have a fact

wrong. Well, you know, you, you, you take feedback when someone says, Hey, that was wrong. You take it and then you own it and you send an email to the class, which is guys, I was wrong. Here's the, here's the right thing. And just try to solve the problem. When, so you do an, you, you explain it, you take an internal accountability for the mistake. You're not, you don't tend to blame others. Well, I think we'd all like to say what you just said. I probably blame others more than I'd like to, but I aspire to what you just said. Okay.

And then when you make that mistake, is the scrutiny different as a Stanford professor when you get a fact wrong? Because I don't have the right control condition there yeah but it's the scrutiny is high it is i can tell you that yeah yeah therein lies why you need to have such a deep base of knowledge to be able to have a high fidelity and command of the art i mean the nice thing about being a vr guy right now is that a lot of people are coming to this anew but but I've been doing this.

Remember, my first VR experience was in 1994. I've been spending 80 hours a week on it since 99. So it's something that I've got a good base there. While we're there, what's the difference between VR, virtual reality, and AR, augmented reality? Virtual reality completely replaces the senses so you walk around the physical world and everything you see hear and sometimes touch if you have what's called haptics that's completely replaced by virtual stimuli so it's complete mental transportation you're in a utterly different place and you have uh what's called the word we use for this is presence

psychological presence it's you are completely bought into the illusion. Augmented reality allows most of the stimuli from the physical world to reach your senses. So you'll be wearing a pair of glasses that allows you to see. They're just plastic glasses. And in some small percentage of your visual field, you'll see digital stuff. And what that means experientially, you see the world just as it is, but there's an overlay where you get to see digital words or objects to help you understand a space. Pokemon Go. Pokemon Go. Yeah.

Okay. All right. And you're not interested or taking a deep dive in AR. You're staying strictly down the VR path. You know, I do advise some companies that do augmented reality because I do want to help them find their voice in the way that I was talking about earlier. Let's focus on the good stuff and to help them, you know, strive for things that I think are important. But generally, two answers to that. One is that, you know, the first time I did VR, it was, you know, as I said, in 94.

And it was so good experientially that it made me want to change my life and be, and to switch fields. You know, I've done a lot of AR and I still haven't had that same like, wow. Like even when I was using crappy 1994 VR, it was enough to make me think that this complete mental transportation, that's something special for me. I really want to understand and, and pursue this, this, this world in which people travel and it's, it's, it's just doing things you can do. Otherwise AR to me, it just doesn't grab me in that same way. Okay. Okay. Um, here's some quick hits back to those scale of one to 10. This is like a little live assessment, if you will, your ability to switch on. Eight. Your ability to switch off. One.

Your ability to manage internal distractions. Five. Okay. How about those distractions when it's dangerous? I try to stay away from danger work. I mean, there's a reason why I didn't become a surgeon. When I make a mistake in VR, you know, it's, you know, it's, it's embarrassing and we make mistakes, but nobody dies. Okay. How about when it's boring? Reflead. Yeah. What is your ability to lock in and focus when it's boring? Oh, one. Okay. And then when you feel pressure? Eight. And then during emotional risk?

Four. Okay. And then are you motivated more by external or internal rewards? I think I take into account external stuff. I mean, I'd love to say it's all coming from within, but I'm like Albert Bandura, vicarious reinforcement matters to me. And then if you were to score each one of those scales, external rewards, the level of importance? I would say five and five. I'd say, of course, I want to do what's right for me, but I enjoy – like look, when I showed David Shaw, the coach of Stanford, I've been doing VR for 20 years. And when I showed it to Shaw,

normally when people come to my lab, they say, oh, I can see how that's going to be good someday. I can see how that's going to... Shaw put it on his head. He looked at it for 30 seconds. He put it down and he said two things to me. He said, when can you put that in the football office and what can I do to get you not to give that to the rest of the Pac-12? That was... And I'd never gotten that response. And there's such fulfillment out of buildings, building something that somebody wants to use, you know, as a VR guy, I've been building stuff, this really weird abstract stuff and nobody will, you know, it was, it was interesting, but not useful. So this external people want to use that thing has been pretty motivating for me. Okay. Your fear of failure. Yeah. one one yeah fear of looking bad uh three four i mean i mean i'm not gonna say i'm not gonna say i don't have a vanity yeah like others but i i look bad every

day fear yeah you gotta you gotta play to win right you gotta you gotta be able to fear of feeling like you came up short in life zero okay fear of success zero one to ten on music the importance of music nine nine and a half the uh one of the problems one of these areas of improvement in my marriage is i just want music to be on in every room all the time and my wife doesn't and it's it's it's it's it's it's I I like music what kind of music metal metal like my favorite band is uh sabbath oh yeah yeah really old sabbath uh I do love dio sabbath too but there's nothing like oie Sabbath. Yeah. But I love Dio too. Dio. Yeah. One to 10, spirituality.

Six. Practicing spirituality. Zero. Science. One to 10. 10? No kidding. Breaking rules.

Zero, because I don't care about the rules. Like I don't weight the importance of break. I care about rules. I care about laws. But what do you mean by rule? Yeah. So like somebody says something and it's a rule, an accepted principle. I would say that's not very important to me.

So you don't care about breaking rules? I don't care about breaking rules. I don't care about breaking rules. I don't even think about – I mean I care about laws. Yeah. I don't want to go to jail. But you don't see the world with rules. I don't see the world as norms. So here's a nugget for you.

My high school yearbook, the caption under my picture was an Ozzy quote and it said, things that have shattered may not have mattered. Take another point of view. From a song called Believer from Ozzy's second solo album. So good. The material world. Okay. And then taking risk, one to 10.

Five. Five. Being self-critical. Five. How important are relationships to you? Seven. Having great habits. Two.

I wish it was an eight. You're a madman. I love it. I wish it was an eight. I wish it was an eight. You're a mad man. I wish it was an eight. I wish it was an eight. And then. No, look, I'm a striver here with all these athletes. Yeah, right. You see all of the different things that they do.

And they're perfect. They're eating right. And I work out and I bike and I surf. But I would love in my chaotic life right now with the business, the professorship, the family, I just can't. The regularity aspect is missing. Okay, perfect. And then how important is caffeine? It's important. Yeah.

It's important. Yeah. You like it. Yeah. Two in the morning, one after lunch. Do you do anything around mindfulness or meditation or anything to quiet your mind and get a deep focus going? I tried paced breathing once and I couldn't do it. That doesn't surprise me for you. I need it, but I'll get there.

I'll get there. My wife wants me to do yoga and I haven't gotten there yet, but I'll try. Where does pressure come from? Well, look, this is the tenure process at Stanford. I haven't gotten there yet, but I'll try. Where does pressure come from? Well, look, this is the tenure process at Stanford. It was designed to, you know, when you get tenure, it's a job for life. And the reason they stretch it out seven years is that it's, you know, they somehow, A, find people that just want to be working hard all the time. But then the culture of it, you know, some places you get tenure and you sit on your laurels and all of my colleagues are whatever drives them, it drives them even more after tenure. So it's just this collective culture of, nope, can't stop, can't stop.

So there is this culture at Stanford that's just, you know, you got to keep producing. Yeah. And so it comes from pressure comes from the culture or does it come from an internal sense that you need to think or do faster than you did before? I would say a lot of it comes from the culture. Okay. And then when I say the word love, what comes up? My wife. Yeah. And then what does love mean in the human experience? It's behind everything.

Is it? Yeah. I'm a California hippie, man. I think it all starts with being wonderful to other people. That's rule number one. And then how do you finish these two words, I am? Jeremy. And then Jeremy is? Jeremy. So is there a consciousness to it, or is there a physical form, or is there an after experience?

How do you go into those deeper parts of Jeremy? You know, what we're learning in this conversation is I need to start thinking about how to do some more habitual meditation. No, that's not what it is. No, because you've spent so much time thinking about the virtual realities that are possible and exploring that. I guess what I want to learn from you is what happens when we die? Just as an N of 1, your thought process on it. I am about 50, 50 believing we just become worms and then, or we, you just become worm food or there's something else out there. And I just don't know which it is. Yeah. Because the con the conversation of consciousness is starting to come

back in a pretty significant way. And so I think it's a really complicated rat hole in some respects. I mean, you got to remember that my PhD from 94 to 99 was trying to build consciousness or at least attempt to model consciousness in a tiny, tiny incremental way. And now what you've got with, you know, started by the folks at IBM Watson, this, this massive bottom up, deep learning, AI stuff, it's, you know, you know, our kids are going to see something pretty special. What do you hope the next generation gets right? So I don't play video games, I don't have a Facebook account, I hope that the social comes back to the media, meaning either the media allows for something like this face-to-face conversation or, but more importantly, I hope

that we just go back to going outside. Very cool. All right. Last kind of big banger for me is like, how do you think about articulate or even define mastery? In terms of my work, and I think that's the best way to think about it, it's about repetition. So I've done more self-reflection in this conversation than I do typically. And the way that I do my work has just been by grinding and to put in the time. And what we do with the athletes is that you give them the opportunity to relive moments over and over again, to try different things so that they can make mistakes and ultimately learned how to not make mistakes. And I just think this mastery, we really come at

it at repetition. VR allows for extra repetition. It feels real and arousing. You can make mistakes, but the brain treats it as real. And then how do you finish this? It all comes down to the details, implementation. See, I thought you were going to go there because I think a big component of mastery is the nuances, deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper into the nuances. I mean, look, there's a lot. When I say that Stryver has, we're working with seven NFL teams, you know, 15 college football teams, the other sports I talked about, the largest retailer in the world. The reason we're doing it is because we're getting the nuances right.

I mean, there's a lot of VR out there and you've seen a lot, but most of it just pisses you off. And it's one part innovation and nine parts just grinding on the details okay jeremy thank you thank you yeah man this like i'm i'm so stoked to see what you're contributing and you guys are definitely pushing the envelope and like it's a really exciting time i've been paying deep attention i love the ethos of what you guys have and the progression that you have and it's fun to see it at work well you have a gift for making your interviewees talk about things they might not otherwise. So congrats and thank you for it. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, for sure. And then, so where can people find you? My Twitter is at Stanford VR. Okay, perfect. And you can find me at Michael Gervais and that's on Twitter. And then on Instagram, it's at finding mastery. I want to thank everyone for paying attention, for following us. And then Jeremy, we've got a community that fired up organically. It's finding mastery.net forward slash community. Great.

And it's thousands of people that are supporting each other and challenging each other on the path of mastery. And so they're going to have questions for you. So I'll push some over and, you know, maybe we can have some fun at that way. Fun. Yeah, for sure. So I'll push them over and, you know, maybe we can have some fun at that way. Fun. Yeah, for sure. And thanks everyone for paying attention. Find us at iTunes, write a review, hit Jeremy up, follow his work for Stryver and also at

the Stanford lab. Is it called the Stanford VR lab? The Stanford Virtual Human Interaction Lab. There we go. All right, brother. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much for diving into another episode of Finding Mastery with us. Our team loves creating this podcast and sharing

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