Something You Should Know - How to Sleep Much Better & The Ways Virtual Reality Will Change Your Life

Episode Date: April 19, 2018

Of course you know better than to talk on your phone while driving – but you should also tell other people in the car to stay off their phones as well. This episode starts with a discussion on why passenger’s phone conversation can be trouble for the driver. (http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2010/05/half-heard-phone-conversations-reduce-performance)  How well do you sleep? Before you answer you should know that you may not HAVE the answer. So many people sleep so poorly, they don’t even know what good sleep is – or feels like. For some real insight into how people sleep and how we can all sleep better, listen as I speak with sleep medicine specialist Chris Winter, M.D., author of the book The Sleep Solution: Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It (https://amzn.to/2JVEHMd)  Anyone who spends time on Facebook knows that feeling of, “Why does everyone else’s life seem so wonderful compared to mine?” There is now research that proves this happens to everyone who goes on Facebook and that actually people’s lives aren’t any better than yours – it just looks that way. Listen and I’ll explain. (http://www.uh.edu/news-events/stories/2015/April/040415FaceookStudy)  Do you know much about virtual reality? You are about to. Peter Rubin, senior editor at Wired magazine knows a lot about it. In fact he is the author of a new book on the topic called Future Presence: How Virtual Reality is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy and the Limits of Ordinary Life (https://amzn.to/2HeLUFD). Peter joins me to explore some of the fascinating and fun parts of virtual reality and also some of the concerns about how it will impact how we humans live our lives.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, it's not just drivers who shouldn't talk on their cell phones, neither should passengers. I'll explain why. And the answers to important questions about how you sleep. Like should you go to bed even if you're not tired? You ask yourself the question, do I feel sleepy? If the answer is no, then don't try. It's like going to a restaurant at noon and the waitress says, what would you like? You're like, I'm not hungry. Well, why did you come into my restaurant? Well, it's lunchtime. It doesn't make any sense.

Also, there's a really good reason why everyone on Facebook seems to be living a much better life than you. And virtual reality. It looks like fun, but there are concerns. Your memory of something that happens in virtual reality is treated by your brain exactly the same way that a real life memory would be. It's not the same as a memory of something you once watched on television. It's a memory of really having done something. All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know is all about.

And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about Ted Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done Ted Talks. Well, you see, Ted Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new Ted Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily.

And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Something You should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. I'm sure you have your pet peeves. I know I have mine.

Fortunately, it's a pretty small list, but right near the top of the list of pet peeves is people who talk on their cell phone when they're driving. And I guess it's a pet peeve of mine because I have the experience phones, when I was on my flip phone driving my car, before the laws were passed and before there was much concern about this, I was talking on my phone and I went right through a red light, right in front of a police station. Now, fortunately, the police weren't looking and fortunately nobody was coming, so nothing happened and nobody got hurt. But ever since then, I've refused to talk on my cell phone while I'm driving. But now there is a new concern. Not only is talking on a cell phone when driving a big distraction, it turns out that driving in a car while your passengers are talking on a cell phone is also very distracting.

A study at Cornell University showed that when you hear what's called half a log, that is only half of the conversation, it reduces your cognitive function. You see, when someone else in the car is talking on their cell phone, it's almost impossible to tune it out. So your brain frantically tries to make sense of that conversation without being able to hear the other side. The researchers point out that when we overhear a conversation normally, we actively try to predict how the conversation will go. And when you only hear one side of the conversation, your brain has to work harder to do what is pretty much impossible. So with less of your brain available to focus on your driving, you're more at risk for an accident.

That's a good reason for everyone, not just you the driver, but for everyone to not talk on their phones in the car. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you've heard statistics now and then about how many people have trouble sleeping, that lack of sleep is an epidemic, that sleep patterns amongst young people cause poor performance in school.

So I think it's safe to say that statistically, we have a sleep problem. But what's more important is, how do you sleep? Do you wish you slept better? Do you wish you felt more rested and less tired during the day? And what can you do to improve your sleep? Here to discuss that is Dr. Chris Winter. He is a double board certified and internationally recognized sleep medicine specialist.

And he is author of the book, The Sleep Solution, Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It. Welcome, Doctor. Thank you so much, Mike, for having me. It's a pleasure to be on your podcast. So people talk a lot about sleep and how tired they are and how they don't sleep very well and how they have trouble falling asleep, but what specifically are the big

sleep problems that people have? I think the big sleep problems we have in this country, you can divide really into two categories. Problem number one is an individual who does not feel that they either sleep or probably more appropriately does not feel that he or she sleeps well. They have difficulty initiating sleep. They have difficulty initiating sleep. They have difficulty maintaining their sleep at night. And this can be an older individual, an adult. It can be a young person. I was just talking to an 11-year-old girl who their parents are like, my God, we cannot get her to fall asleep before midnight. So that's sort of one flavor of sleep problem. The other flavor is I cannot stay awake to save my life. I am falling asleep during meetings. I'm getting written up by my boss.

I am a schoolteacher that if I'm not busy, I will fall asleep when my kids are reading their essays or we're doing, you know, kind of that kind of work. If we're showing a video in class, I'll nod off. And my supervisor or principal thinks very negatively of that. So those are sort of the two broad categories. Cannot, you know, doesn't feel like they sleep adequately or enough or well, and then cannot stay awake. All they want to do is sleep.

Is the person who can't stay awake someone who also says, but I slept fine, or is that still the person who says, I don't sleep very well, and then during the day I can't stay awake? That's a fantastic question. It's interesting because you would think it could be both. Much more often than not, the person who cannot stay awake during the day generally feels like they slept pretty well last night. In fact, if you look at the average sleep apnea patient,

they often have no idea why they're in my clinic. Because my first question, when I introduced myself to a patient, I was like, hey, I'm Chris. How can I help you today? I don't really know. My wife or my doctor wanted me to come here today. Oh, really? What's going on?

I don't know. I think I'm a good sleeper, Doc. In fact, I could lie down right here on your office floor and you could see your next patient. I could easily go to sleep. Like they almost see that as being I'm an all-star sleeper. I can sleep on gravel. I can sleep when there are gunshots-star sleeper. I can sleep on gravel. I can sleep when there are gunshots going off around me. I can sleep during an Aerosmith concert.

They feel like, doesn't that mean I'm a really good sleeper? What it means is that you're highly driven to sleep because you're not getting it in some other part of your life. For the individual who says that they don't sleep, what's really interesting is they often will tell you things like, I haven't slept in six years, any more than an hour or two at night. And when you start asking them about signs of being excessively sleepy, they don't have them.

So generally speaking, when you're not sleeping, you should be sleepy. When you're not drinking fluids, you should be thirsty. When you're not eating food, you should be hungry. For a lot of insomnia patients who are not, quote unquote, not sleeping, they don't show any signs of sleepiness during the day. So that's when you have to start understanding that for a lot of people who, quote unquote, can't sleep, you know, there's an article recently, why 50 million Americans can't sleep. They sleep. They just don't perceive the fact that they sleep particularly well,

and that's where you start getting into trouble, because what they're relaying to their doctor is not truly what's happening in the bedroom. When people say they have trouble falling asleep, why? Is it because their mind is racing? Is it because they're thinking about something? Is it possible that everything in your world is perfect and your sleep environment is perfect and you're feeling tired? Shouldn't everybody be able to sleep or is there some other medical thing going on? For the most part, everybody does sleep. So that's one thing that we have to get very clear with our patients is that, look, you've got a problem. You wouldn't be in my clinic if you didn't. But the problem is not your inability to sleep, meaning that if you and I sit

in these chairs long enough or you and I sit here and talk in this radio interview long enough, I know nothing about you, but the two of us are eventually going to fall asleep. There's not a damn thing we can do to stop it. It's going to happen. Now, you're going to ask me, when is that going to happen? I can't answer that question. But it's kind of like eating. I've certainly seen people who go out to lunch and they're like, what are you going to eat? It's not that hungry. I'm just going to wear a Diet Coke and sit here and talk. So they're going to skip the meal. Why? Well, they've eaten lunch every day at that time for years. Why are they skipping the meal? Who knows? Who cares?

They just skip lunch and move on with their life. People do not think that way with their sleep. It's a very different thing when you get in bed at 11 o'clock and you're usually somebody who falls asleep pretty quickly, but tonight you're not because you're upset about something or just for whatever reason you don't sleep. Most people don't shrug it off if they have this kind of sleep problem. So number one, everybody sleeps. Number two, we don't have to turn our mind off to fall asleep.

My mind's going crazy all the time. This idea that I need to shut my mind off in order to sleep is not real. It's a myth. But for a lot of people, they just feel like that. Well, I need to take this pill. I need to drink this alcohol because I've got a mind that won't shut off, which is preventing me from sleeping. I tell people all the time, go with it. Sit there and think about stuff. What are you going to do for your wife's anniversary? What is your ideal dream vacation? Go ahead and think about stuff. There's no reason for you to try to

not to. So when people start to really struggle with their sleep, what you start to hear a lot of is fear, where you are fearful that you're not going to sleep. When you start to fear going to sleep and you're dreading going to sleep, you've had insomnia for 10 years, you've been stuck on Ambien for a decade. It's a real thing, whether you acknowledge it or not. And it colors the way we feel about our sleep. So that's why it's important to really understand that nobody listening to this interview is in danger of not sleeping volitionally. Let's talk about the rituals, the practices, the sleep hygiene that makes the most sense for people who are not having a good night's sleep. What should they be doing differently to improve their odds? Sure. Number one, get up at the same time every day. Do not give yourself

this license to sleep in on the weekends or take naps during the day because you didn't sleep well the night before. So it's very important to pick a wake time, set it in stone. You do not get to stay in bed beyond that time, no matter what happens at night, even if you're up all night. Number two, your bedtime should be not when you go to sleep. It should be the earliest you're allowed to try. So if you have your wake-up time at seven and your bedtime is midnight, that's seven hours, that's fine. That doesn't mean you go to sleep at midnight. It means you're not allowed to fall asleep on the couch at nine o'clock. And when midnight rolls around, you ask yourself the question, do I feel

sleepy? And the answer is no, not at all. I know if I go get in that bed, I'm not going to fall asleep. Then don't try. It's like going to a restaurant at noon and the waitress says, what would you like? And you're like, I'm not hungry. Oh, why did you come into my restaurant? Well, it's lunchtime. But that doesn't make any sense. And that's where that fear aspect comes. Like, you go to bed, it's like people have described your bed like a train station. I don't want to miss the train if it comes. So it's important for people to kind of understand that. And then really watch out for prolonged napping, sleeping in on the weekends, because these are the things that often perpetuate the problem. I slept poorly last night, so I took a three-hour nap after work.

Now I'm going to bed at 11 o'clock. I can't fall asleep because I just woke up three hours ago, and the cycle kind of builds on itself. We're talking about sleep, and my guest is Dr. Chris Winter. He is a sleep medicine specialist, and his book is The Sleep Solution, Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It. Here's something interesting. 71% of people say they need life insurance, but only 59% have coverage. That means at least 12% of people have put it off for one reason or another. Maybe it's too time-consuming or confusing or you just don't know where to start. Well, you can start at Policy Genius.

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why put it off? Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

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Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolph Buntwine, wherever podcasts are available. So, Doctor, let's talk about the bedroom, your sleep environment. What should that be like? What should be in that room? What should not be in that room? How should the room be set up? Talk about that. It should be dark. It should be quiet. It should be cold. It should be pleasing. It should be a place you're excited to come to, like the bed's comfortable, the sheets feel good. There's been a lot written about sleep divorces lately. And while I certainly support the idea that if your partner is affecting your sleep negatively, you should do something about it. I think there's a lot of things you can do before

you decide to go sleep in the guest bedroom, but you definitely want to make sure that, hey, your partner snores really loudly at night and it's affecting the quality of your sleep. Let's try to figure out a way to get that problem solved in your partner. You got a dog that moves all through the night. Listen, love dog to death. Maybe a dog would be better served sleeping in his own crate. Maybe you're distressing his sleep as well too. So to me, that environment should be something you're excited to go to. And in terms of cell phones, TVs, laptops, playing endless reruns of Friends right in front of your face, they really shouldn't be going. It should be a dark, quiet environment. Save all that stuff

for the daytime. Put your phone in the kitchen. Have it charging out there, not right next to your ear. There's been a lot of talk about the blue light from devices and that that screws up your sleep. Fact or fiction? True. Totally, totally fact. So that blue light is important. Right now, during the day, we want to get a lot of it. It's really important not only for our wakefulness during the day, but also for our sleep at night. So we really want to set up that very big difference between working during the day, lots of light, either full spectrum light or light with blue-green in it. And then after dinner, much dimmer light, more romantic kind of Barry White situation with the blue-green light kind of taken out of the equation. I live in Virginia. We lose

power all the time. It's really difficult to stay up late at night when the power's gone out. Even if you have a generator and it's running a couple lamps or you're running around with a little headlamp on your forehead, it's hard to stay awake. Or camping is a great example of that. If I'm going to go to sleep, it's like 9, 15 in the evening. So light really affects our sleep negatively, as does temperature. So we really want to try to create a cooler environment when we go to bed at night. Sometimes I'll feel sleepy, like it's time to go to bed, like I'm falling asleep watching TV,

and then I get in bed and I can't sleep. So once again, we use the term we're not allowed to use in this clinic, which is can't sleep. Oh, you can sleep, you're just not sleeping when you get in your bed. So what's going on there? So for a lot of people, they're sitting there watching their movie or their episode of Game of Thrones or whatever, and they're falling asleep. Why? What is their intention or their goal at many people, the goal is, I've got to sleep or I'm going to have a stroke. Or I've got to sleep or I'm going to be so tired tomorrow, it'll be just a disaster. And so now the goal has gone from not trying to sleep to trying very hard to sleep. So the key is, hey, that happens to people all the time.

But they'll tell me things like, I'm really sleepy at 9 o'clock, but if I don't fall asleep then and wait till 11, which is my bedtime, I can't fall asleep. Well, then stay up, you know, but lose that fear, lose that anxiety. You know, there's a lot of research that show that just simply lying in bed and resting, close your eyes, relax your body, meditate, you know, doing that does a lot of what sleep does. So, again, no fear. Just you control what you can control. You can't control when you go to sleep at night. A batter cannot control when they hit home run, but they can control their practice times. They can control their conditioning, their meal times, their whatever.

You control what you can control when you fall asleep with something outside of your control. So let it go. A lot of people say, you know, I only need four hours of sleep. Are there people that really only need four hours of sleep or is that biologically baloney? What people are saying when they say that is I can thrive, or I feel like I can thrive, or people are telling me within my medical school, I can thrive only four hours of sleep a night. So there are certainly people who will be called short sleepers. But generally speaking, averaging only four hours of sleep every 24 year alive would be an inadequate amount. And there's a lot of researchers who are a lot smarter than I am have done this research. But there are genetics

that allow people to do much better on less sleep than others. I'm probably one of those people. I did very well in medical school, not because I'm smart, because lack of sleep is not that big a deal to me. I could get a couple hours of sleep and be fine the next day. Now, am I really biologically fine? No. And with every year that passes of somebody getting three or four hours of sleep and falling asleep in church and during the Yankees game, they're probably harming their health.

So one thing I always tell people, particularly a little bit older individuals or my older athletes, is, hey, look, just because you can do it doesn't mean you should. So, yeah, I can stay up all night and do fine the next day. I remember one time my wife was giving me a hard time about starting a project and I had to finish it. So I said, you know what, I'll just go ahead and put all the rest of this hardwood floor down all through the night. So I did. I stayed up all night and went to clinic the next day. I did okay. I probably yawned a few times during my clinic interviews, but it wasn't that big a deal. But is that a good long-term plan for my health as a 30- old, as a 40 year old, et cetera? No, it's not. So anybody who's telling you that they're thriving on three hours of sleep

and it's perfectly fine for their health, they're lying to you and lying to themselves. Don't you think when people say things like, you know, alcohol doesn't bother my sleep, caffeine, I can drink coffee right up till bedtime. Uh. I can sleep for three hours and be fine. That I can be on my cell phone and fall asleep right away. A lot of that is self-delusion. It just doesn't work that way. Perception of sleep and reality of sleep are two different things. You're exactly right.

The person who says, look, I can drink my caffeine, my alcohol, I can smoke my cigarettes right up to when I go to bed and I sleep just fine. I had one guy tell me, I can drink a whole pot of coffee right before I go to bed, I sleep just fine. Again, what are we measuring it against? And do you believe that if you got rid of all those things, nothing would change? So for some people, their sleep's been so bad for so long, sleep changes slowly. It's like rust on a car. It's not like a heart attack. So the idea that, you know, that these things aren't affecting your sleep in a negative way is simply not true. Or people who go so far as to say, I sleep better with alcohol. You know, I'm doing this live chat on Twitter and somebody says, I only sleep with

booze in my system. A, not true. You can stop the booze, you're going to sleep. B, alcohol suppresses deep sleep. All the sleep that we like that makes us feel good is suppressed by alcohol. So what is alcohol doing? It's creating sedation, not sleep. And there are really two different things. If you don't believe me, ask Michael Jackson. The poor guy was sedated to death. He wasn't getting sleep. He was getting unconsciousness. And that's what a lot of people seek. So we can always improve the quality of your sleep when you get rid of these things. If you see patients like I do, they always come back and say, man, I did not believe you, but I've really cut these things

out of my life and I feel so much better. It always happens. Well, that's a really good point you just made, is when people say, you know, I can be on my computer right till bedtime in my bed, or I can drink a pot of coffee and still sleep fine. And as you point out, as compared to what? You don't even know at this point what a good night's sleep is because you've been sleeping like this for so long. You have no reference point. Exactly. It's like asking me what

it's like to be tall. I'm 5'8", maybe, you know, and I would say to you, I love being short. I love flying on airplanes because I'm short. If I fall down, it's not that big a deal. You know, it doesn't seem to be. In fact, now, give me a magic pill that makes me tall, like 6'2 for a month. I bet I would probably never want to go back. People take me more seriously now. My wife doesn't have to look down on me when she's wearing heels. Like, it's probably awesome, but I've got no, I've always been short, you know? So to me, it's like the norm. I'm short it was kind of big years. Like, there you go. But maybe if those things change, I would have a completely different perspective. But I always tell people, like my narcolepsy patients are tragically sleepy.

They've been sleepy all their lives. They can tell you when they're better. They have absolutely no ability to tell you they're normal because they don't know what normal is. And that's what I think the big takeaway here is in what you're saying, is that you may think you sleep fine, but you may not really know what fine is. And that's what I think the big takeaway here is in what you're saying is that you may think you sleep fine, but you may not really know what fine is and that you may be able to sleep a whole lot better by doing some of the things you're talking about. My guest has been Dr. Chris Winter. His book is The Sleep Solution, Why Your Sleep is Broken and How to Fix It. There's a link to his

book in the show notes. And thanks for being here, Doctor. I appreciate your time. Hey, I really appreciate your time, too. Thank you so much. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast

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I think of that as mostly a fairly new technology that pretty much has applications in entertainment and not much else. But on closer examination, it looks as if virtual reality is likely to become a bigger part of our lives and likely pretty soon. Imagine, for example, that if you had virtual friends, people who are not real but seem to be real,

and you get close to them, well then maybe you don't need to get close to real human friends. Seems like that could be a problem. Peter Rubin, who is a senior editor at Wired Magazine and an expert on this topic, has come out with a new book called Future Presence, how virtual reality is changing human connection, intimacy, and the limits of ordinary life. Hi, Peter. Welcome. Thanks so much for having me, Michael. So, can you define virtual reality? What is it? What isn't it?

And just so we can focus in on this. Yeah, I mean, at its absolute basic level, virtual reality involves presenting a person's eyes with a display that gives them the illusion that they are actually inside that artificial world. I mean, we're very used to looking at screens, but when you put the screens in front of someone's eyes so that they block out everything else, and then you create the illusion of an all-encompassing space so that wherever the person turns their head, they're looking at a different part of the virtual world, then all of a sudden you have the building blocks for what is virtual reality. So the idea is that you are immersing yourself in a different reality that works kind of like your reality in that you look over there and you see something else and you look over there and it feels like, because it's involving all your senses or many of your senses, that feels like you're in this other reality.

Yeah, and that illusion and that immersion really hinges on the idea that you are physically looking around. That's the key here. Video games have always used these sort of metaphors of controls where through buttons and sticks, you shift your viewpoint. That's not the case in virtual reality. In virtual reality, it is really all about being in a world that is not the world that your body is physically in, but it's the world that through your visual and sometimes

haptic feedback cues, you begin to believe that this is the world you're in. So on first glance, it looks like, well, that's kind of cool and it's kind of neat and it's kind of fun, but obviously there's more to it. It doesn't stop there. So what are the implications of all this? What does this mean? Where are we in the timeline of virtual reality? We're surprisingly far along in the timeline as far as absolute years go as a measurement, but we're really in the infancy of the technology. So just as a very quick overview, the very first head-mounted display was created in the late 1960s. And then in the late 1970s and 1980s, Air Force research and NASA research started creating these head-mounted displays that could give you an artificial world, some sort of computer-generated readout.

That kind of crossed over to the mainstream world in the late 1980s and early 1990s, thanks to a company called VPL Research. And this was co-founded by a guy named Jaron Lanier, who also was the first person to use the term virtual reality to refer to this sort of technology, this sort of phenomenon. That term had previously been used by Artaud, a French playwright, but he was just talking about the experience of going to the theater.

That's what he meant by virtual reality. But Jaron Lanier and the people at VPL said that VR was using this sort of head-mounted display to immerse you in a computer-generated virtual world. And as you may or may not remember, the excitement around the technology in the late 80s and early 1990s, through both VPL's research and a handful of science fiction novels, led to this sort of pop culture mini-explosion of VR. So you had movies like Lawnmower Man in 1992 and all these sort of cyberpunk movies. Keanu Reeves was in an adaptation of a William Gibson short story

called Johnny Mnemonic. And even episodes of shows like Murder, She Wrote and Mad About You featured virtual reality. Later, The Matrix can be said to kind of portray a world with virtual reality, even though it's kind of plugged into your brain directly and not something that you wear on your face. But after the mid-1990s, people realized that the technology just wasn't quite good enough or cheap enough to deliver the kind of experience that was being promised in our stories. And so it kind of dried up. And then what happened between then and the early 2010s is the evolution

of the smartphone. And what that did was created all of a sudden a pipeline by which we got smaller displays and smaller processors and smaller motion sensors. And thanks to the research being done at a couple of labs, the idea of putting this all together to create for the first time a cheap, effective, stable virtual reality headset came to be. And so Oculus was really the first company to do this, and it was founded by a kid who was, oh man, I want to say he was 21 at the time, a kid named Palmer Luckey. As we know now, Oculus ended up being purchased by Facebook for between $2 and $3 billion. And fast forward to today, and we have the first generation of powerful headsets. These came out in 2016. We have a

handful of mobile headsets that have been powered by smartphones, though now we are just about to see the first all-in-one standalone headsets that don't need a computer and don't need a phone. Everything is included on board the device. So it seems like things have advanced a lot, and certainly they've taken years and years to do so. But in reality, we're still constrained by a number of technological limitations that we're just beginning to overcome. That doesn't stop VR from being used in the medical community and in the architecture community and in the education world and certainly in the gaming and entertainment world. And so there are all these use cases that have already been explored and are already being tapped into. But what's just beginning to get tapped into now is that when you are in virtual reality, sharing that experience with other people, whether those people are computer generated or those people are real

people somewhere else, just like you would be coexisting with them on the internet, it unlocks a host of social dynamics that play out very differently in VR. Virtual reality is a, it can be an isolating phenomenon, but when you share it with someone else, it has all these incredible emotional effects. But other than just, you'd mentioned it's used in education, it's used in medicine. How? I think most people think of it as entertainment. How is it moving into other parts of the world? That's a great question. So certainly on the medical side, we have had surgeons who use virtual reality to look at a 3D reconstruction of an infant's heart before they need to do the actual procedure so they can see exactly where they're going to be going, exactly what it looks like, exactly what kind of problems they might be running into. In architecture and real estate,

people can get walkthroughs of homes and apartments that haven't even been built yet. You take the architect's blueprints and you create kind of a 3D virtual world out of that. That's really simple to do. In education, you can take kids to virtual museums, to other countries, to the surface of Mars, where video footage captured by the Mars rover can be stitched together into a 360-degree 3D view. So things that we can't do physically as humans, we all of a sudden get the ability to do via virtual reality. But other than somewhat fringy and entertainment-y, is there a promise here? Is there something that this is going to transform? Or is this just something to keep in the closet when your friends come over and, you know, like your PlayStation and play? Well, there is one for

PlayStation. And so certainly it has that quality now, but that's only when you're looking at those very early kind of core uses like gaming and entertainment. When you open it up to social applications and you open it up for people to consume or experience art together or social experiences together, then you have this ability and certainly this potential to influence everything from people's social behavior to the relationships that they're forming to increasing the intimacy in a relationship. And so this is really where we're in the infancy. And this is really where you have consumers of virtual reality and the creators of these experiences who are just starting to play with these dynamics and just starting to see these sort of incredible stories coming out of this. So it's very easy to look at virtual reality and say, oh, well, this is a clunky looking headset. This is expensive.

I don't have a computer that can run this. It takes too much effort to get into it. But these headsets are shrinking. And what it takes to run them on is getting cheaper and easier to obtain. So we're fast heading towards a world in which these are something you can just slip on hand to someone else. And as the size and the form factor shrinks, you're looking at something that over the years begins to resemble a pair of sports sunglasses. And then it becomes something that's transparent. And then it becomes something that's more like a pair of glasses that everybody has the ability to wear all the time. And that doesn't mean that you're walking around immersed in a virtual world. It means that most of the time you are looking through these transparent glasses at the world as you know it. And then you can toggle between virtual reality if you're at

home or having a private moment, or you can use the flip side of virtual reality, which is called augmented or mixed reality, and you can overlay your real world with virtual objects. So that has everything from enterprise applications to just being able to see a tape measure on the wall when you don't have one. So there are all these different ways in which it can become enmeshed in our everyday lives. It would seem that there would be concerns that if you're living in a virtual reality, there's not much need to go out and experience the real world. And if you're, as I imagine, virtual reality is or will be in the adult porn business, that if you're having sex with your virtual mate, you don't really need a real one.

And there are other probably other concerns. Where do you fall on this? I mean, all of these concerns are A, valid, and B, a kind of integral part of any new technology coming around. You know, this happened with the printing press. This happened with televisions. This happened with computers and the internet. And it happened with smartphones. And it continues to happen with smartphones. I think the difference with virtual reality is that when you are truly putting it on to have this sort of what's called an occluded experience, meaning the real world is blocked out,

by nature, it's a short-term venture. That doesn't mean you can't go back to it again and again and again, but this isn't something that you physically can spend hours upon hours inside at the time. People who are binging a show or really wrapped up in a video game may be in there for two, three, four hours, but at that level, it's no different from a television in your house. The other question that you ask is a more interesting one, because it's certainly, as with any new technology, it has the ability to be abused on the consumer side, but also misused on the creator side. So we have seen what kind of havoc social media can wreak over the past couple of years, everything from user data and privacy to the ability for us to be emotionally manipulated by things that aren't real and we don't know that they're not real or true.

Those effects, those adverse effects can be amplified a thousandfold in virtual reality. And then you bring in things like harassment and toxic behavior, which is such an endemic problem on the Internet as we know it. When you are in virtual reality and you are kind of physically embodied in an avatar and you have another avatar walking up to you saying and doing the things that may have seemed disturbing but innocuous on Twitter or on Facebook or in a multiplayer video game, that becomes a much more viscerally disturbing, even traumatic experience because your personal space is being violated. Your memory of something that happens in virtual reality is treated by your brain exactly the same way that a real life memory would be. It's stored in the same part. It's accessed in the same way. It's not the same as a memory of something you once watched on television. It's a memory of really having done something.

But do you see a case for the concern that, you know, there's no reason to go visit London. I can visit London in my bedroom. There's no need to go make friends with real people. I've got virtual friends. I mean, is it the fear that it could go that far? Technologically, at some point, perhaps. Right now, that is not so much a concern because what we have in front of us, literally on our faces because of these headsets, is you have sights and you have sounds and you even have other people. What you don't have are these other things that create sense memories.

Smell, taste, the feel of the breeze on your skin. So while there's work being done to be able to synthesize those other senses and create that kind of all-immersive haptic feedback, right now it's still quite obviously sort of a simulation or a simulacrum. That doesn't mean that your brain can't believe to a certain degree that you are inside. That's the phenomenon that's known as presence. But we have a ways to go before the ability to have a completely one-to-one recreation of a virtual environment complete with smell, sound, and taste, that truly becomes,

I think, an ethical conversation that people need to have. But you said something a moment ago that I hadn't thought of but concerns me, and that is that if the brain looks at this as a real experience and stores it that way, you could really mess somebody up. You absolutely could. And that's one of these kind of demons that has been held at bay right now. But it's also a thing that makes you realize how important things like authentication and verification are. The internet was founded on a principle, at least to some degree, of anonymity. And that is philosophically a great thing. But when it's not people who are anonymized or verified, but experiences that can be verified or can be completely sort of fraudulent, then you realize what we're dealing with. The idea of hacking becomes that much more terrifying in virtual reality.

So there are all these sort of dark timeline outcomes to this, which is why these conversations are so important to have now, before these things are possible. Is there already pushback? Are there already people saying this is bad news? Oh, sure. Just like video games had their critics in the early days and continue to have their critics, people who insist that there's a link between people playing video

games with violence in them and then have a greater likelihood of becoming violent. And so, thankfully, there is a huge amount of research that began well before virtual reality became kind of a viable consumer technology and continues in labs like Stanford's Virtual Human Interaction Lab and the University of Barcelona. There are researchers who are really delving into the psychological effects that virtual reality and presence can have. So people really have already begun to explore not only the adverse effects of virtual reality, but the positive effects of virtual reality. So ideally that research becomes applied to the systems that are being built now to optimize the chances of us using this for good, rather than falling into a trap of bad actors and playing catch up.

But you said that we're pretty far down the timeline, or are we? I kind of got the sense that virtual reality is really very in the emerging state, that it isn't much yet compared to what it's likely to be. It is. You know, we're far along in the sense that the first headset was created five decades ago. But we're in the technological infancy of this, meaning that we have created headsets that deliver what we now consider to be an immersive experience. But as time goes by, we have seen the computers from the 1960s compared to the smartphones and even the desktop computers of today. So we know what kind of dizzying leaps things can make.

Well, to hear you describe this, it's really fascinating. And it's also a little troubling and scary as well. So, well, we'll see what happens. Peter Rubin's been my guest. His book is Future Presence, How Virtual Reality is Changing Human Connection, Intimacy, and the Limits of Ordinary Life. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Peter.

Thanks so much for having me on. So the average person spends about 40 minutes a day on Facebook, and more and more research is proving that doing so, spending time on Facebook, is really just bumming people out. Two recent studies showed that the more time on Facebook led to more depressive symptoms. It's not that Facebook itself is depressing.

It's that you cannot spend time on Facebook without comparing your own life to the lives of the people you're reading about. You literally cannot not make the comparison. The problem is that people generally post the very best about themselves. So you're comparing your entire life to what is essentially their highlight reel, the best parts of their life. And when you make that comparison, you always look worse. Because of Facebook, people display more about themselves and their lives than you would have ever known about them without Facebook. So it gives the impression that their entire life is nothing but joy and happiness.

It is not. It's a filtered and distorted view. And that is something you should know. Ratings and reviews are always helpful. In fact, they are essential. They are part of the lifeblood of the success of this podcast or any podcast. So it is greatly appreciated if you would take a moment to go to iTunes or Stitcher or TuneIn or wherever you listen to podcasts and leave a rating and review. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point

their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. We have seen, of course, every episode many times. We figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone.

So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him,

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