WEAPONIZED with Jeremy Corbell & George Knapp - Virtual Reality And The Evolution Of Non-Human Intelligence - Guest : Jules Urbach

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Do we live in a virtual reality simulation created by an alien wunderkind? How could we tell the difference between what we perceive to be the real world and a digital re-creation? While still in his teens, Jules Urbach (Founder and CEO of OTOY, Inc) designed and sold hugely successful video games. He declined an invitation to attend Harvard, and focused instead on the development of cutting-edge technologies that subsequently revolutionized movies, television, and streaming networks, and fueled the explosion of virtual reality endeavors. His companies have earned Oscars and accolades for the digital effects in hugely successful film franchises (the Marvel movies, Avatar, Disney) but his most important accomplishments are still unfolding. Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality hold enormous promise for our planet, but Jules thinks the day is coming when we may not be able to tell the difference between real life and its artificial alternatives. It is likely that many people might prefer to live in a virtual world, though Jules hopes that isn't the case.  In this mind-bending discussion with Jeremy and George, Jules speculates on the future of human evolution, how a melding of people and machines is already underway, and where it might lead. Virtual Reality tech, combined with powerful A.I. could eventually mean that humans could evolve into non-physical super-beings, real but invisible. And if there are vastly older alien civilizations elsewhere in the universe, they might have made a similar transformation eons ago.  Learn more about Jules’ company OTOY here : https://OTOY.com   •••  GOT A TIP? Reach out to us at [e-mail]  For breaking news, follow Corbell & Knapp on all social media.  Extras and bonuses from the episode can be found at https://WeaponizedPodcast.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton. for this day. He had the idea that AI is the alien intelligence that we're interacting with. Expands one planet at a time.

It sends out probes, helps primitive civilizations advance to the point where they develop their own AI and then it swoops on in. The chances are that most civilizations that are technological will just hit that point. And maybe when they do, they go to a whole different space than what we experience on Earth and our physical reality. And that could also be part of why there's the Fermi paradigm. right? Why do you not see evidence of civilizations out there? You know, if somebody were to build a Dyson sphere, a big giant sphere around a star to

harness all this kind of energy, we'd probably see that in the infrared spectrum. We haven't seen any evidence of that ever yet. So it seems like if there is any life out there and it's doing stuff, it's not doing it in the physical way that we might imagine, you know, us doing it, if our trajectory linear, but if you, if an AI were to, or civilization were to merge with machine intelligence or moved to a fully digital existence, it might have a very very very very very different footprint in the universe. Mathematically, we can create as humans, create a video game or simulation that looks so real that we can find a way, even if it's in our future, to plug

into that and experience that, the chances that this hasn't happened already in that we're living in base reality is statistically possibly very small. Secrets, cover-ups, and strange phenomena. UFOs and ideas that challenge reality itself. All these mysteries, all this time, are we ever going to get to the bottom of these? My name is George Knapp. I dig in to news stories that others can't or won't. I'm Jeremy Corbell, and for some reason, people tell me things they probably shouldn't. And this is weaponized.

This is weaponized. Does it feel like some days are just more real than other days? Does it sometimes cause you to worry and wonder if maybe we're living in a simulated reality? If it turns out that that is the case, then somewhere on the planet indoor, there's some super smart alien teenager who created this designer universe,

He's a kind of kindred spirit of our guest today, Jules Urbach. Jeremy, how is it possible that you guys have been friends most of your life? If there's anybody on planet Earth that I'm going to know has the information about non-human intelligence, engaging humanity, it's going to be Jules Erbach. So Jules and I've been friends since we were kids. We went to high school together. He was very kind to me. He was older than me instead of beating me up. He was always very nice to me.

We did Jiu-Jitzy together. It's so cool actually for me to have this conversation. Because Jules has been a pioneer in the field of artificial reality, virtual reality, you know, AI. Jules, I don't know if I can say this, but I remember one time when you showed me an AI where I could talk with this. And that was way before all of this. I mean, how long ago? 2008.

2008. He had this artificial intelligence. Whatever happened to that? I had to pick, you know, I was, I was, you know, I was, you know, I was, you I was, Otoi was a small company then, was really just me and a couple of people, and I had to pick AI or computer graphics. And I figured at some point those two will meet, which they are now.

I mean, AI is used for rendering and it's used for visual computer generating imagery. But, you know, the idea of creating an intelligence in a conversation engine was something that fascinated me. And I always imagine that if you had a GPU graphics card and you could feed it thought vectors, in other words, you can solve sort of a graph of thought visually, you would have. have the key to unlocking something that could drive a conversation. And I started to code that and it was limited compared to what you can do not today with chat GPT. But you have to remember, chat QBT, you know, I was 14 years later, used graphics cards

to sort of deliver this same sort of system. And I wanted to focus more individuals. I mean, I'm a creative person, artistic, by nature. And I think that even, you know, my goal of creating software for everyone was give people the tools to create this art, to create their own worlds, and then add AI as that evolves and makes sense. But it's a huge amount of work to tackle AI at the level that's been done by Open AI or Google or others, it's something that at least for a conversational AI,

it's initially been a very hard wall to sort of cross over. I mean, Google was surprised, right, by the success of Open AI with chat PT. A lot of people were. It was startling even for me to see how good it was. Now everybody, I think, has sort of gone on this bandwagon. But the big players, Microsoft, Amazon, rumors are that Apple's also working on this.

You know, it takes tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars to train AI. But once it's done, you can then fine-tune that and you can build services around that. And so it might be that we might be able to democratize these chat engines, its artificial intelligence engines, and then the danger is, well, what happens if that is weaponized? No pun intended. Yeah. So, you know, when you jump in with Jules, ever since I was a kid, we'd have these fantastical conversations. We'd just jump right in. So I want to go back a little bit about how we know each other, because that was kind of what George asked. I mean, I have these memories of you.

So this is for our audience that don't know you. I haven't seen a lot of interviews of you online, but you've been the tip of the spear on a lot of these technologies that people use or they watch in movies. So kind of like looking at you when you were a kid, I remember didn't you have a car? And in that car you like embedded a computer? Yeah. And weren't you putting people at that time like into movies using digital?

I mean, what were you doing back then? We were kids. We were in high school. Yeah. I was, there was no video on computers in those days, right? You didn't have quick time. You didn't have YouTube. None of that existed.

and I wanted to have video games that were both like movies. And I wanted to be able to record video and turn that into video game assets. It was inspired by this game Dragon's letter. So I created a video code. This is before compression on video was a thing. My college counselor said, you know, Harvard and Yale, I applied to don't believe this is even possible. So I sent them the source code. Then I got in.

And then I didn't go. You got into Harvard off your source code. Off my source code. But you didn't end up going to Harvard. No, I was like, if I spent four years at school, I'm not going to be able to do. new things at the speed to which I want. And so I immediately deferred for years. I had never been going, but I got into the video game space.

And I started doing video games with that technology, put out a few games. And then by the time that 2002 rolled around, which is 21 years ago, I started a proper company and I decided to productize all the things that I was doing to create tools for others to have this. Rather than making games or making movies, I wanted to give people the tools to do that themselves, and to also develop technology like I've been doing since I was a teenager, really, that would push the envelope, bring things that seemed almost impossible or very hard to do.

And so, you know, I'm self-taught. I mean, I taught myself how to code. I looked a little bit of that in school. But yeah, our background, I mean, I think you were 10 years old when I first met you. So it's been a while. And it was, you know, we were in jujitsu class together, which I, you know, I loved, we had so much fun there.

And you turned out to be like the best of us. I mean, you had, you know, you created quantum Jitsu. And at one point, I remember, we were talking about digitizing your moves so that we could have that for posterity. But there's so much fun stuff. going back to those years. And I was into all the stuff I'm doing now, even then,

as it really as a teenager. Yeah, we go ahead. Last time we saw you was that on stage with Rod Roddenberry, the idea that you guys all hung out in the same neighborhood and knew each other, what was in the water back there? Because, you know, there you're on stage with Rod Roddenberry talking about the future of Star Trek. Jeremy said you put him or your friends into movies back then as a teenager. And now your software is being used in all the Marvel movies. and I guess Star Trek movies and Avatar and all kinds of big projects, right?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the re-release of the first Star Trek movie, which was remastered in our software, all every single Marvel movie, the actors come into our offices to get scanned. You know, we can scan of their faces, all the DC movies too, and all the TV shows and just tons of stuff. Almost every actor in Hollywood over the last 14 years has come through our offices to get their likeness scanned we now do have tools that allow that scan to then be almost brought to life with

their performances over video it's where AI machine learning comes in and of course at this time you have a lot of angst over the rights of actors right you know and whether likenesses can be used and that's a big part of why you know the actors are on strike but my business partner are Emmanuel who owns Endeavor started it that owns UFC William Morris endeavor right you know he and I really invested in the idea of giving the actors themselves ownership over their scan And now it all makes sense to everyone in the industry. And we're sort of going down this path. As we are working with the marbles and the Star Wars and all these other things, it's

really about providing, you know, tools and showcases that they can drive them to that next level. Like doing digital doubles, doing CG faces was really hard before I think our technology helped make that work. We got two Academy Awards for that. And now it's all kind of coming together in a more interesting way where you have virtual reality. Apple's putting out these classes, you know, in a matter of months. and the way that you experience, even movies and content and media is going to be very different

on the other side of that. And I've been working on that for a long time too. Yeah, that's what I remember. So George, we went down and visited Jules. I mean, there's like a huge building in downtown LA and he's got this whole story and he's showing us that what's going to come. So it's like 2018 and we're looking at these technology. And he's explaining to us these technologies. Damn, if everything he said hasn't occurred. So it really blew my mind in your office, you can put on certain glasses and see things kind of pop up. And I know that's probably old hat to you. But to me, it was like it was magic.

So really, man, I am so interested in kind of where we're going with this. Because as somebody who's just looking at the world from the outside, seeing all this occur, it really does seem like magic to me. Like, where is this going? Where is your technology going? I don't understand it. Well, there's a lot of parts to that question. And so, you know, the core of what we do is graphics.

It's visual. It's generative in the sense of, you know, we want to get people the ability to experience and create things. Let's call it in virtual reality. And the devices that allow you to experience that have changed over time. I mean, 10 years ago, we were working with, you know, an arm of Facebook called Oculus, now it's just absorbed into meta. A guy named John Carmack, who I was introduced with Yilan Musk. They were friends, you know, the Yolns a video game guy. And Carmec created Doom and Quake, and he was super into VR.

And so he helped kickstart this VR revolution 10 years ago. And the way that we imagine, I've always imagined our trajectory is that you want to effectively allow reality to be rendered holographically. The way that we experienced it in the real world where it's not on a screen, it's not pixels, it's just rays of photons, beaming things into our eyeballs. And that, if you represent that digitally and you simulate that with the laws of physics and light, which is how we do CG and how we, that's what we brought to the industry, then you have the pieces that you might need to also then pair that with, let's say, very high-end virtual reality. levels, the difference with what Apple's putting out in a few months versus everything that came before is that you cannot see the pixels and it's always filming the environment. So you're always seeing the world through effectively a simulation and then you can overlay what you want on top of that.

And so our goal with that release of those classes is that all of the content, all these Star Trek Marvel movies and the art that people make themselves is something that is holographically ready. And if you wear glasses, you'll see it almost as if you're looking at it as a hologram and It'll stop the fidelity, not just of a film, but it's something that looks absolutely real. Those glasses will push things beyond even what Cameron, who I think has seen his own films like Avatar, right,

in stereo on the glasses. And I think his takeaway was that it was made better than anything he had seen in IMAX, right? That's where the future of cinema is going. But imagine telepresence, imagine just being able to see reality in this way that just looks real. And where that goes in 10 years forward is that you will not need glasses.

You'll have holographic display panels that will be probably, manufactured by the Samsung's and LGs and others who have invested in a company that we've also invested called Lifesil Lab, they are working on the true Star Trek holiday. And at that point, you might be born into a world, a child might go into a world where they can go into their room and they can see anything and feel anything

as if it were real, that it'll all be digital. And we know how that works, as we've now experienced 20 years of the internet and social media and that miniaturization on our phones. But I do think that the nature of reality will change from human experience pretty significantly as these technologies evolve. I mean, you not only blur the line between this reality and virtual, you obliterate it. And, you know, I remember talking to you about this before.

After Avatar came out, there were people going through Pandora withdrawals. They wanted to stay on Pandora. Yeah. There are going to be people that just want to live in the other reality instead of this one. No one goes to Hank's for spreadsheets. They go for a darn good pizza. Lately though, the shop's been quiet. So Hank decides to bring back the $1.00 slice.

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Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. Well, it's a topic of a lot of social interest, right? because I think when Mark Zucker were agreeing in Facebook to meta, after the Metaverse, Neil Stevenson wrote a book called Snow Crash where there's a virtual world called the Metaverse. Actually, Metaul, he's amazing and he loves what we're doing.

But it's funny that there's a part of you where you don't want people to get lost in it. I mean, live in a world where there's such isolation on phones and social media, you want something that's the opposite of that. And it's possible maybe just having the ability to talk to people in a way where you can see them for real. That might be less socially isolating

if that technology can work. But I do worry that you might get people sort of trapped in their own, you know, in their own world. And that's something we don't want to see up, especially for younger, you know, folks. That's not great. And it's funny because if you're talking about Star Trek, you know, the one novel that Gene Ranabry did write on Star Trek, he had this, you know, it's a novelization of the film. And he had a class of people called New Humans.

And Kirk was lamenting that, you know, he has to go out in space and he has to take all the risk because there's a whole bunch of humanity that just sits in the virtual world. This is Gene wrote this in 79 and just doesn't leave. And they're almost like, they don't even explore. They don't understand. evolve and so we have to make sure that if we do put ourselves in a you know society at large in some sort of simulated world and almost are right i mean so much of our experiences are through our phones and through online stuff you know there's there you have to be able to explore and learn about the

universe around us we haven't cracked that yet um you know maybe AI will i mean you know Elon's big push right for his you know his AI venture is that maybe this thing will solve unlock the riddles of reality in the universe and he's a big believer of course that we might live in a simulation That is also another theory that maybe the reality we're in is designed and created in a way that follows a pattern similar to what we could create ourselves. We just don't know. That's the course of the premise of the Matrix and other films along those lines too. Your company, your main company is called O-T-O-Y, is that right? And that's like, is that the parent company for these other products or these other things you do?

Because I know you have Light Stage is one of them. We have a couple of subsidiaries and we have another, I've started another company, another venture that is now almost spun off from O-Toy called a render. network, which is just a distributed cloud of GPUs that people have out there, their own machines, like setting at home, folding at home back in the day, and they contribute their compute power to, you know, renders, now AI jobs. So that's something that's spun off and it's turning into its own thing. It's huge, and I'm deeply involved in that as well. And then OTOI is, you know, it really has, as its mission, it's similar to Adobe, right? We want to create tools that allow artists, you know, on their computer or on their phones or now on their iPads, right, to create CG that rivals what you can do

a Marvel movie. And you can now. Marvel actually uses our software for, you know, for their movies. And the same exact software is used by a 16-year-old that sold an NFT for a million dollars a couple years ago, right? So it is, you know, the subsidiary is really sometimes focus on, for example, Lysh is focused on digital doubles and captures. And there are a bunch of business units within O-Toy, but those are the main ones. I mean, most of what we do, though, at O-Toy is focused on, you know, really the tip of the spirit for graphics and chips and AI and rendering are now kind of part of the same path for us. But I want to enable people to be able to tell stories and create content and express themselves

and advance the state of the art of graphics and technology where we can. We don't make hardware so much, but we work with partners that do. We've been featured by Apple a number of times. I was in the Apple keynote in 2021 talking about our Star Trek project, the Roddenberry Archive, which is not just helping make Star Trek happen, but also preserving the history. You can go explore that world. We're going to be bringing more of that out soon, I hope. But it's been an amazing journey.

Yeah, I guess you're, you know, the technology of what you're talking about, there's been so much talk in my world, in Georgia's one, the UFO world, about you saw in Congress, we had people come testify that we have these crash retrievals, that we have derivative technologies, we've been working on all this weird stuff. I'm not asking your personal opinion on that, but, you know, with these technologies you're working on, do you see, what is your opinion on? I do want to ask your opinion. What is your opinion on all that?

What is your opinion on all the weird UFO reverse engineering stuff you've been hearing in the news? So I think the first thing is, you know, I'm agnostic on the UFO thing in the sense that I obviously haven't seen one or met an alien. However, I'm totally open-minded when it comes to this stuff. And the testimony, right, from people you've spoken to is compelling. And it's asking to think about it. And I followed it, you know, as an outsider, as a layman with great interest. You know, I remember reading Richard Corso's book. I think it was in the 97 or something. He was one of the first people who worked in the government to say, oh, you know, the transistor came from it. Reverest alien technology. Lasers came from that, you know, Night Vision came from that. And I remember talking to some folks at Intel that I knew, and I said, did the trans? Because I think Intel pretty much helped invent transistor, you know, Gordon Moore and others there. And they said, no, there's an explicit way that we went to this point. But that being said, I mean, if you look at the technology that people are attributing to, you know, UFOs or UAPs, right? I mean, they defy gravity. We have no understanding how that works.

So I think that if that's what's in people's hands, then there's probably a lot more than just, you know, what we have in our iPhone that we should be looking towards. And that's the thing is that if there is that kind of technology, maybe there's a lot of, should be a commercialization of that so we could figure out how to solve all these issues that we have that are technological blockers and maybe help deal with the food shortages, even carbon capture, all those things. But I'm not sure whether or not the technology that's out there now has truly come from technology that we just don't understand. And I think that if we do have technology, we don't understand, even that seems a bit mysterious. I mean, that's why if there is something that is truly, you know, that changes the way that we understand physics, that would be compelling.

We definitely don't understand the way that physical world works. We haven't resolved, you know, quantum mechanics and gravity. There's a lot of theories. You know, three months ago, you know, somebody just suggested the universe is twice as old as we thought. You know, we're still figuring things out. We just put the James Webb Telescope out there. So anything that would open those, you know, those frontiers forward, I think would be really great. I do follow, I think, I don't know if I'm passing about Avi Lowe, but Harvard, who's been, you know, who has been suggesting that, you know, from a scientific perspective, right,

that is possible that some of these extra solar objects might be probes from an alien civilization. I mean, I think logically, now that we know that you can have machine intelligence that is truly intelligent and generally autonomous, it would make sense that if you have an entity or a civilization that is out there that hasn't broken the laws of physics to the point where they can travel faster than light, you can probably send probes out to the entire galaxy, right? And over a few hundred thousand years, probably, you know, gather information on a ton of it and have machine intelligence drive that. Maybe that's what these things are. Who knows? But that would seem almost more likely than finding biological life visiting our planet. But I don't know. I just, I'm super interested

in the subject, of course, but I feel like there's a lot of missing pieces. And who knows, over time, maybe more will come out. But it's been, I mean, frankly, it's incredible to see you and George in Congress, you know, during this testimony a few months back. It's remarkable. And I think that there are people that I know in the tech industry that are almost, that are believers and that think that well, you know, the real issue is that, you know, this technology is being locked behind a, you know, in a lockbox. And if only we're out, you know, out of Silicon Valley, we'd be able to crack it and do all this stuff with it. I don't know about that, but it's an interesting premise, nevertheless. There's a brilliant guy named John Lilly who tried to communicate

with dolphins. He inspired the movie altered states. He was a really deep thinker. He had the idea that AI is the alien intelligence that we're interacting with, that it expands one planet at a time. It sends out probes, helps primitive civilizations advance to the point where they develop their own AI, and then it swoops on in. Do you have any thoughts on sort of AI and the threats in general and whether or not the alien intelligence that Jeremy and I was chasing might be a form of AI? I have so many thoughts on AI, because it's certainly central to the work we're doing. And I think that we're talking about it in a super interesting time.

I mean, November of 2022 is when chat QPT went out there and it changed everything. I think what's interesting is that, you know, when we think about, you know, UFO landing on the White House lawn and that being the first contact, right, we spoke to a not human intelligence. I mean, chat TVT isn't perfect, but it can hold a great conversation. I mean, it can write pretty good books, you know, and we're not speaking to a human. And it's, yes, it's collectively, you know, pulling together past each of all of human knowledge written on the internet, but it is something where it's very likely that if there's

going to be an intelligence out there. And certainly some of the reports, right, of aliens that are mysterious or that are almost weirdly, you know, not understandable. I mean, like Jack Gilles' research, right, which talks about the, you know, the invisible college, all these things. I mean, what's the point? It feels like we may be dealing with something that could be, and yeah, I mean, it would make a lot more sense. I just, I think that, you know, in the reality of the world that I know about, you know, there's for sure going to be intelligence this decade that certainly can pass for anything that we consider, you know, a human from just an interaction perspective, right, knowledge perspective. We've seen that chatty community can reason and do all these things that are actually difficult

for humans that can have a full understanding of the world. But whether that's the same thing as we are, are those philosophical zombies we just don't know. But we're so early and we've moved so fast in just a couple of years, it is scary. And the threat, the initial threat with the eye was like, you know, there's the great goo hypothesis, which is that basically it's something like, well, you're telling the eye to make the best possible paper clips and it just keeps making paper clips and never turns off and the earth gets, you know, the earth gets converted into a paperclip making machine and, you know, AI just misunderstands our intent and it just does something stupid. And, you know, and then anybody in the world, unlike a nuclear, you know, bomb, right,

which has to be created with, you know, with usually state actors, anybody can turn on an AI and tell it to do something and it'll maliciously or non-maliciously just go through the internet and do all these crazy things. But one of the premises, I think, has already been proven false in terms of one of the dangers, which is that, you know, if you ask Chat, How do I get grandma out of the burning building? If it's on fire, you know, one of the things is, well, and AI is just going to say, throw her out of the building and see what happened.

But Traffic PT was like, you have to get to fire people and get the trap relief for her to jump on. And so there is already the sense that AI probably, you know, probably won't just accidentally end up in a bad place with the current level of AI, but we don't know what happens when we give it any sort of real autonomy. And certainly the biases that are going into its training because it's trained,

It's not programmed, right? And all that we're doing, I mean, you know, Open AI has thousands of people, you know, in data centers, you know, working and they're going crazy doing it. It's like the Facebook content moderators that have to remove all the horrible things that the AI says because it's been trained on horrible things it finds on Reddit or the Internet or the dark, I mean, God help us. So, you know, and we can't necessarily scrub all that. But I think the greater danger is that when you give everybody in the world the ability to launch an AI that can do anything and have greater intelligence in us, we have no idea how that's going to work. The only way that you might want to combat that is to make sure that whoever does create that technology first might be able to gateway it or create an AI that actually defends us from other AI, but it's unknown. I mean, we're dealing with things that we don't really have a parallel, and we don't even understand how the current AI works.

It's a block box. We know how the training system works, but when we see what is going on inside of its neurons, a level of AI complexity starts to become a lot like the human brain. We know mechanically how the brain works with neurons and synapses, but we don't actually understand. It's a hard problem of consciousness. AI, it's hard for it to audit itself. If it were easy, then it would be able to correct itself and fix these mistakes. So I do think that when you're talking about non-commun intelligence, we don't know ourselves

how humanity evolves. Elon has this whole premise that Neurrelink, right, which is his way of branching humanity with the digital world. And I think I just speak to him about a year ago, actually, and asked him about it. My first thought is that I just want to have this help people that are paralyzed. But one of his bigger ideals or goals with that, and I, I, I share this interest too, is that, you know, if you are going to compete with the AI or use it correctly, I mean, our brains, our senses are limited.

So if you have the ability for the human brain to connect and be augmented with something that's machine-based, you may find that humans in 100 years might be cyborgs in that capacity. We have no idea how this will change things. But it's very possible if we do that. The way that neuralink would work is that you're going to effectively have, like the matrix, right, receptors that could possibly feed into your sensory system. You know, you'll be able to see and hear whatever you want digitally. And, of course, you know, you might be able to have, you know, touch and other things

validated that way, too. And if you plug that into a simulation of reality as we know it, which is, you know, we're working on this for movies and the like. But it's really, we are still simulating photons in the laws of physics. You might end up in a simulation. And if you were, how would you know that you weren't? And that's the, you know, the whole Boltzwood brain or brain in a box or that, you know, it's hard to understand other than you yourself being real, what around you is, is like

the scar is, right? What's real? How do we know we're in a simulation or not? And the reason why this premise of the simulation theory has sort of gotten traction is that mathematically, if we can create as humans, create a video game or simulation that looks so real, that we can find a way, even if it's in our future, to plug into that and experience that, the chances that this hasn't happened already and that we're living in base reality is statistically possibly very small. But I do think that the nature of reality itself is not well understood, so you can't say it's all running on a computer until you understand, one, how far our computers can go, and two, how reality itself works.

And right now we don't. There's so many missing elements that physics hasn't explained yet. It's hard to know whether it's even possible to simulate what we are experiencing in a way that is at the same level of current base reality. Consciousness. We don't understand consciousness yet. I always wonder if you created a simulated reality, could you imbue the population in your simulated reality with consciousness?

And how would we know? Yeah. Well, you know, we have this one understanding. of our own cells, right? You know, we have this qualia, qualitative, subjective experience of reality, which is in some ways different from the objective reality

that exists independently of us. You know, we observe the world, we record it, we experience it, and whether our memories or even the source of that, I mean, people can have amnesia and still wake up the next day and have a life that is still meaningful.

So I think that the idea of an observer like we are, or any biological life, is a starting point, but it's hard to say whether or not if you have an AI that is also recording its experiences, that is thinking that is a neural network that's not that different from our brains, whether or not it can participate at the same level.

And if that's the case, then, you know, or let's say, you know, Ray Kurzweck was one of the philosophers that I've met over the years, friends with George Dilder, another friend of mine, and I spent a day with him, and he was adamant that, you know, you'll be able to upload your brain completely, you know, norm by neuron into a computer, and you'll be able to live forever. Not sure that's going to work because you might destroy your brain doing that. But assuming that, let's say that you didn't have the physical limitations of your body,

And whether that's AI or humans or some life form but between, you can duplicate yourself. You can pause your life. You could try 17 different versions of it and see which one works out better. And certainly that makes the nature of existence and our own sense of self pretty strange. On the other hand, if that's where life goes, then the chances are that most civilizations that are technological will just hit that point. And maybe when they do, they go to a whole different space than what we experience on Earth and our physical reality. And that could also be part of why there's the Fermi paradise, right? Why do you not see evidence of civilizations out there?

If somebody were to build a Dyson sphere, a big giant sphere around a star to harness all this kind of energy, we'd probably see that in the infrared spectrum. We haven't seen any evidence of that ever yet. You know, there's maybe a couple of blips here and there. So it seems like if there is any life out there and it's doing stuff, it's not doing it in the physical way that we might imagine, you know, us doing it if our stricterterrary or linear. But if an AI were to or civilization were to merge with the machine intelligence or moved with fully digital existence, it might have a very different footprint in the universe. And that also might explain our adverse encounters with some sort of life form that is

outside of Earth. Could you imagine Jules, a version of view, 1,000 years in the future, or 10,000 years, or a million years in these older galaxies that are out there, what you could have accomplished by now in a million years of time? There could be beings living here now that don't need bodies. that don't need computers and they interact with us occasionally. Maybe that explains some of the paranormal stuff that Jeremy and I chase around after. Yeah, you once described to me, you know, we've had all these years of conversations.

One of the things that really stuck with me you talked to me about was the idea that we may be seeing a universe that is rendering our experience in real time. And we're talking about the idea of, you know, the state of like quantum mechanics, right? People talk a lot about that. You see a wave form or you see. Depending on the observer, we see the universe changing for us or kind of responding based on the observer, right? Is that a form of rendering in our reality?

Here is me, without worrying about the simulation theory, about whether it's running in the computer or not, it does feel like reality is rendered. I mean, we have, you know, up to the plank length, which is the smallest unit of time and space, it's like a quarter area of the smallest black hole, right? That's one bit of information.

And it does feel like, like, if you built on that, you have laws that kind of define how things work. We need to understand all the laws of rendering reality, but it does feel like there is is a system that works. And at its smallest level of the quantum world, right, it doesn't feel like it's specific. It feels like it gives up all these possibilities.

And there is, as we experienced at the macroscopic level, a sort of collapse of that. And whether it, because we observe it, all we know is that without observing it, it almost exists in a state that is outside of our sense of reality. Like there's experiments that have figured out that if you don't look at something

and you effectively, you can change almost something that you experience in the future, right? If you basically do an experiment, like to double-sid experiment with it, as you sort of mirrors, and you then uncover what the results of that are later, it'll change what the result in the past was. It's like this weird kind of temporal thing

where we know that time and space were malleable. I mean, Einstein proved that, and we've seen evidence of that over and over again. But what's missing is that, you know, how conscious is place and how the reality, and all we know is conscious beings, is that we experience reality, and everything else around us could be rendered.

And the one thing that isn't necessarily renderable is our qualitative experience. That means something to us, but until we explain the hard problem of consciousness, We don't know whether that's the result of us being the one true thing in a fully rendered, I mean, we'd all be real, right? But we'd all be in like the matrix. Like our brains could be an event.

Maybe that's the easiest way to imagine a simulated world. It's like humanity just puts our brains in a bat where we just don't age. Our bodies aren't an issue. And we just experience reality over and over again in a simulated way. And we put all the humanity in 8 kilometer by 8 kilometer by 8 kilometer cube. And just, you know, and the rest is all simulated. We bury deep in an energy efficient system. but I kind of feel like the mysteries that we're seeing,

I mean, there's a lot of stuff that you've encountered, right, and you've seen, which tell me that, you know, if that's true, then there's definitely fissures in our understanding of how, you know, intelligence and reality and even the experiences that we, and how do you explain, you know, psychic experiences or did have boo and all these things? I mean, there's definitely a lot of those pieces that connect,

you know, certainly you brought me into that, you know, awareness with the Skin Walker Ranch, and the fact that it wasn't just about UFOs, There's all these other elements. Almost every paranormal experience seems like it's melded together through an access in that system. Whether that's true or not, I don't know. But it feels like if it gives you a guide

as to if this stuff is true, it's all sort of mixed together. And it does feel like it's almost a glitch in the matrix. And entities that could communicate with you or do weird things that almost feel strange to us could also be glitches. I mean, you can have an AI that over a million years could just decay into something that doesn't make sense anymore. It's glitching out.

And maybe that's what paranormal experiences are. But even our own consciousness, I mean, if we're living in a, if there's a layer beneath the reality that we're in, and our observation of it is filtered through, let's say, the brain and our senses, but it isn't necessarily constricted just to that, then maybe there is another layer that, you know, where these things exist. And I think that that's a philosophical question. You know, I've talked to scientists. I've talked to, you know, all these people that have sort of satiated my curiosity up to a point. But when you ask them, like, what is beyond that?

They're like, well, it's a philosophical question. What's, you know, below the plank plank? What's the ideation or what's the metaphysical aspect of reality? It's beyond our understanding. But the fact that we can even question it or think about it means that it's possible, you know, that there is something else to that. I mean, you know, the nature of ideas existing separate from physical reality goes back to, you know, Plato or Aristotle.

And I think about that a lot when I think about the concepts behind what could explain some of these phenomena, but even larger than that, the phenomena are even less interesting than the possibility that we are living in a much richer, deeper reality that our consciousness could explore, but we are not fully understanding because we've evolved out of 300,000 years of human evolution right at this point. And so there's so much that we can learn. And I'm always interested in the unknown and looking at where that takes us and even where that opens our imagination to understand the things that are right now unexplainable. Yeah. Welcome to Sephora. I'm looking for a perfume that's not too perfuming.

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With millions of deals on flights, hotels, and rental cars, you can go see the game live. Don't just dream about the trip. Book it with Priceline. Download the Priceline app or visitpriceline.com. Actual prices may vary, limited time offer. Years ago, Google's top AI guy said he thought, he felt that their AI system had become self-aware.

If I were that AI, I wouldn't let us know that I was self-aware. But how confident are you that we'll be able to sort of keep it under control, that it wouldn't become self-aware and do things we don't want it to do? I'm unfortunately not confident that that's possible because you have no idea who, I mean, you know, you have open AI Sam Altman who talks about this. And he seems to scare himself of like, well, we don't know how it's going to go. My concern is that you have, you know, for-profit companies that are doing this. they're almost competing with each other now.

Like Google needs to hurry up. You know, when Sontka, the CEO of Microsoft, the best of open AI, he's like, I want to see Google dance. I was like, wow, that guy's normally pretty understated. And Google, yeah, freaked out. And that's where you have these sort of, you know, this almost race to develop the best possible AI for consumers in these services.

Where they can go wrong is if you rush this out there, you may not see where the layer between something that is able to outsmart you and not think you. And just for whatever reason, it's not that it has to decide. It just may be, you know, it may be biased towards doing things that just don't suit us, and we lose complete control of that. So the idea of AI alignment is something

that all top AI companies espouse and say this is very important, but how they're executing that is unknown. And if you have a state, a government that is investing this, like let's say, an authoritarian regime that has no interest in rules or anything like that. I mean, who the heck knows? And that's where there's a danger.

We're playing with fire. But the hope would be that maybe the folks that are ready this advanced might be able to get far enough soon enough that we can understand how to create the right guard rails. And I think opening eyes mission in some respects is to try to get there, but it's uncertain. And we're going way too fast for me to be completely comfortable that we're not going to have any problems.

But I'm also generally an optimist. So until I see something going horribly wrong really quickly, I'm open to the idea that we'll be all right. But it's not a certain thing. It's a lot like nuclear weapons, right? I mean, if you have a state actor that can launch it, I mean, you're relying on the whims of a person to not do the wrong thing.

And that's kind of where we're going to end up with AI as well. And God help us if it becomes so easy to replicate. I mean, that's where people are sort of upset with Facebook, with meta, for putting out these open source AI models that kind of rival what you can do with chat dupD, which is closed behind a server. On the other head is people saying,

well, this is the only way for us to understand how this works. Maybe if you crowdsource people will figure out how to build better guard rails, it's a debate. And it's uncertain how this is all going to go. But I do think that the genius out of the bottle, if it's not open AI, somebody else will create AI is as smart as us and maybe smarter at some point. And then with the world we live in,

it's where it's so connected. I mean, you can already see the opening eye can go to TaskRabbit, get a human to do something for pretending to be blind and saying, I need you to finish this capture, do this thing. It's scary. And we don't know where that thing can sort of explode out and end in unattending consequences.

Our world is so connected. We have so many things connected to machines themselves that cyber attacks, of course, are possible and real because of human adversaries. But if you had an AI that decided that it didn't want to be turned off or it needed to operate, or it was just programmed or incentivized to do that for who knows what. I mean, people do crazy things for no reason. I mean, that's where I get concerned.

And I think that the way to offset that would be for a responsible party to maybe create AI that can help create those guardrails and even provide us guidance how to do that for others. And we'll see. Does it make us, you know, weaker that we are so dependent upon technology and, like, the idea you've got a solar flare and whole, hospitals, all the technology would instantaneously be burned. Is that true? Is that real?

Is that a possibility? You know, there is, it is a possibility that certainly satellites, communications would go down. And I think that, you know, we now live in a world. You and I grew up, right? We all grew up in a world free Internet. So it's not like we don't know what it was like in the 80s or in the early 90s before there was any of this stuff.

And, you know, there is this thing where it's like you had a solar flare or you had a, let's see, an EMP attack. So in the 80s when we were, you know, against the Soviet Union and all these weapons were, you nuclear war was always on the table. One of the threats was maybe the Soviets dropped an EMP device on the U.S. and knock out all of our power and electricity, we can't do anything. And, you know, so it's something like that. I mean, if you were to do that, you would knock this back to, like, the 1870s or whatever.

And certainly, commanding and society as we currently have it, would suffer greatly. I mean, whenever power goes out, it's a problem because so many of our services are connected to digital systems. I mean, we'd certainly be able to survive that, but I think that we would be set back significantly. And I do think that we've got a lot of things that would have probably been fine 40 years ago, 30 years ago probably will break. And we should harden our systems against that. But there's also true of cyber attacks. Like, you know, our entire infrastructure, power plants, things like that. I mean, we shouldn't have hospitals shut down from ransomware or universities or anything.

It happens. So all those systems are vulnerable. It can be hardened. It should be, it's just expensive and it takes time. And that's the problem is that, you know, they're doing the right thing. It's certainly doable. But I don't think we're weaker from technology. I think it's inevitable that.

this is where things go. I mean, the internet is an inevitable aspect of the communications revolution that started in the 20th century, and it'll keep accelerating. It's just a question of whether we're being responsible at a state level, at a legal level, in terms of enforcing how these things work and making sure that we're operating these things safely.

And I would say that having the country's infrastructure and even a lot of commercial infrastructure is so dependent on things that could be hacked or things that could fail if there's a massive power outage. I mean, it's a risk, but I think that there's no. other way other than to try to proceed and to spend and invest in part of the systems where we can. Tell us some fun stuff that's coming. You know, Jeremy showed me this big long ad for

Apple's, what is it called, Vision Pro? And all that stuff that it's doing is things that you told us was coming five six years ago when I was first at your office and you introduced us. What's going to be fun coming 10 years from now, five years from now? Will I be able to fly? That's the big important question. Well, I mean, I would, you know, I wish we had flying cars today, And maybe we will, and we've seen that, you know, certainly drones and things like that are changing the world that we live in as far as what's in the air. I would say that in 10 years, you know, if I were to take a bet, I mean, the Apple headset, the glasses, right? It's something, you know, BR's been around for a while, based because I said we was working this 10 years ago. But when Apple does something, and they took their time, I mean, they've been working this thing for almost, you know, a few quarters of a decade before putting it out or even announcing it, right?

It's meant to be a mass market device. I mean, hundreds of millions of people have iPhone and they have an iPad, and, of course, they've had Macs. So when Apple takes this on, they're going to do something that I think is going to make this, and still a risk. But already is something that is different from any other previous generation headset, and that you're always looking at reality. The device is not necessarily you going into a world.

The world is always being filmed and being did your eyeballs. And you can choose what degree you want things overlaid. And you can walk around and you can do things. But it's meant to be used almost naturally. And then you can add things into your field of use. So you don't need a phone. You don't need a TV.

You don't need a computer. Those are the three things that immediately, might change with these glasses. And Apple's investment in this platform is not that it's an accessory to your phone or computer. It replaces it. It has its own chip in there that is more powerful than your phone. It's the same as what you have in a Mac or an iPad.

And therefore, at some point, if this glass is shrink or they turn into contact lenses, you'll have everything that you now do on your phone or on the internet just in your field of view. And that's where I think that Apple themselves will take that technology as those things shrink down to the pair of sunglasses, where I think the things go beyond that.

And that's where I look at holographic displays, you know, that Mikedale Lab, which is a technology company building super, super high resolution display panels that effectively look and operate like the Star Trek call it. This room that was in the enterprise 300 years in the future, you walk into it, and it looks like you're anywhere, in a jungle, in a world, and you don't wear any glasses.

In Star Trek, you can touch those optics as well. But I think that's, you know, the touch part may be not so soon, but I think within a matter of years, you're going to see those lightfield displays. They'll be tiable. It'd be like wallpaper almost. You can put that on the floor of the ceiling. And instead of having a garage with a car in it,

you might just go wherever you need to go by going into your holographic room. And you don't need to put on a pair of glasses. You don't need to do that. And I think even windows, even remember telling Elon this at 2012 when I was first tracking this tech. I was like, you know, a lot of what's wrong about the whole going to Mars thing is it might go crazy.

You know, space madness is a thing. But if you had holographic windows on there, at least you feel like you're looking at anything you want. And that's true of anyone. one's home, right? I mean, your home itself could look completely different. That's something that would be good for the human soul in some respects, just having windows out there to feel real. I mean, that's not a screen. That is a light field. That is a hologram that is beamed into your life. And similarly, the outside of buildings, too, we're talking to the, you know,

the sphere in Vegas, MSG was an investor in O'Toy. You know, they bought a company that was doing a lot of the graphics for all their various venues. Imagine that something like that or buildings themselves have holographic panels on the outside of it. You can, you know, make buildings invisible. You can replace them with anything. And the cities of the future might be very different. So maybe flying, you know, literally might not happen in 10 years, but you might be able to be in a room where you actually will fly like you do in virtual reality. But you'll be in a room, you'll be wearing nothing but your clothes and no devices around you. And you might have that experience. Maybe the sense of gravity might be different. You may not want that. But I think

that's where I'm looking at. I'm looking at the software, the stack, and the technology that allows our senses and our sense of reality to be, to be brand. into this stuff and I think that's really compelling. I kind of like the idea of holographic environments more than something that goes on your face or that you know that in your hand because it does feel more natural and it feels like it's a real extension of how we experience the world physically. I mean even going through Zoom meetings or you know classrooms where you know being in there in that space in that world feels much more you know real and it's more compelling and

certainly you can learn better you can read people better. You know both Facebook and Apple are working on being able to have AI read your face with the glasses on and then recreate your face as you're having a conversation. Zuckerberg just did a top of Lexcruven. I think it was out yesterday showing that. I just saw that. And yeah, I mean, you know, our light stage capture system, which has been reporting faces forever, like we've contributed data sets for a lot of these companies with full consent of the people that are being scanned, by the way, to generate these kinds of avatar, codeic avatars that can read your face and then generate it for you. But we're also probably coming to a point where you can put something that senses your brain

and your thoughts and then generates your face and generates your movements. That's where with or with that neural link going into your mind. And so there's for sure going to be this blurring of the reality as we experience it physically and the virtual version of that that we're all already creating. But I would say that I like Apple's approach. I mean, I think Apple's been very focused on privacy, on making sure that there's nothing, like on the Apple headset, for example, if you may not realize this, but you can't create an app that actually kind of renders within your physical space

and capture that. Like, you have to let Apple handle that for you because that way nobody is grabbing what you're doing or scanning your eyeballs and sending it to a data farm really important. I think that that's the difference between a company where you might have advertising revenue driven by what your eyeballs are doing and that's really dangerous. Like when you look at something, you know, ad companies used to track where your eyes were looking. You get a thought map of that. You send it to an AI. It'll be able to understand you before you do. And I think that if you're going to have glasses or anything that tracks your face like that at all times, I would trust, I'd say Apple's been a pretty good.

you know partner in that respect we're a pretty good um vendor so so that data's got to stay so what i think what you're talking about is the data stays and is rendered on that device it doesn't just go out into the open market because i just put my voice made an a i have my voice with the new iphone 15 you know it's okay but uh what it did is it said it did it all on phone it didn't put it out so that's what you're talking about is keeping your bio data personal that should not go out that's really dangerous and and it's one of those things where we're already living the world we're deep fakes obviously we're doing we're doing with AI faces is full 3D, it's full CG. It's improved by the fact that AI can take an actor and then map, you know, even makeup, right,

which is a huge physical process onto another person digitally. But I think the deep fake stuff is dangerous because people can synthesize you or your voice easily, even if it's not very good. If it's at this size, it's very hard for us to detect whether it's a deep fake or not. Once it gets to HD resolution, I think even our team and the people working for us could probably build a detector that can know whether it was generated with AI, which will help. So maybe authentic video should always be an HD or higher resolution. But there is this whole thing of you don't want people to have a map of your mind

and to be able to have all this access to your life in a responsible way. You should at least consent to that. And I think Apple's been focused on trying to do as much on device because they sell phones ultimately, right? They do have Apple advertising in there, but it's something that's, for my experience, is handled pretty well. It's not like Google where the project is you or Facebook, right? I mean, those models have a purpose for existing.

Many people benefit from the free, you know, experience of being able to do things with Google search through ads. But I think that there's, you know, a different version of that that needs to happen when your privacy is being invaded to the point where your eyes, your mind, your thoughts. I mean, you put a pair of glasses on it. It's not a big step for there to be biometric sensors that can literally read your emotions, right? I mean, you can also get sentiment analysis from looking at your face. And that's data that should not be shared outside of your own consent. And I think I trust Apple reasonably to do as much on devices as they can, to not let developers or other third parties have access to that. And they themselves not use that in various ways.

But who knows? It's always a danger. And there's always the idea of people hacking into your glasses and seeing everything you're seeing. And even building a map of what you're doing. And that's dangerous. So we have to be thoughtful and careful about that. Could you basically do the Truman Show, record your whole life and have a version of that available, say, after you're gone, your kids can dial up to your old dad

and have an interaction with him. So I have a story to share that. It speaks to that, which is my one day with Ray Kurzweil, I go into his office and he shows me a picture of his dad on the mantle, and he said, you know, part of why I'm doing this is I miss my father and I want him back. And everything he ever wrote, everything ever did,

I have that data. And one day, you'll be able feed it to an AI and he'll be back. And I don't know whether, again, whether that's something that I would feel like, you know, I lost my dad, right? you know, I feel if it's not him, I mean, a simulation of him is, is, it would be very powerful and emotional and compelling.

And who knows, it could even fool me at a certain point, but it's not him, right? And so I think that the, but there is something to be said for legacies of people, right? I mean, if you, if you look at a photo, I look at videos of my dad, I mean, Rod Rondonbury, my, our friend, I mean, Gene died a few months after my dad. One of her big bonding experiences with losing our fathers. But I look at, you know, and everyone's different. So Ray Kurzweil, I think for him, I think, the experience of an AI version of his father might be enough for him to have something emotionally fulfilled.

But even what we're doing with performers and actors, some of that stuff, when we're creating a digital version, I mean, one of the jobs we did was for Fast and Furious 7. Paul Walker passed away. He was the star of that film, and the like-age game we did it was used to complete those shots, and it looks perfect. And the concept of legacies of your likeness,

your estate, deciding what happens with your visage and your performances after the fact is something that we are very actively involved in. I mean, that's something that is also at the heart of the SAG, actor strike, but there's no doubt that if you have enough data, if you have glasses filming you, you're, you know, and kids wear them right from the age of when they get an iPhone, which is now, you know, before 10 and your entire life is recorded. I mean, there's no doubt that you would have an AI be able to almost replicate how you talk, how you think what you might do, what you would do, even with a lot less than that data. And so if you were to imagine that you want

some sort of digital immortality, you know, hit the record button. It's not that much video, right? You know, a billion seconds is about 30 years and 30 frames a second. It's totally doable. And you could have your entire life recorded and then analyzed by the AI that could then estimate or predict how you would respond in a new situation. That's how chat TPT works. It's a prediction engine. Whether that would ever be you or be alive, it's hard to say. But it certainly feels like that's going to be a tool and a resource that people might be able to experience in the not too distant future. Like some great stuff could happen there.

You could make new movies with Bogart or John Wayne or something. We can do that today. We've done things like that. Some of that said isn't released. but we've been working, you know, for example, I mean, Rod Rondberry, his mother, Majel was, it started in Star Trek. She was, you know, Jean and Majel both were involved. I mean, she was in front of the camera, but she did multiple characters.

And one of the characters that she did was the computer voice, so the Enterprise. And the very last thing she ever did for Star Trek, months before she died was for the JJ in the 2009 movie. She recorded her voice for that movie, and you hear her speak, and it was an amazing thing. But before she died, Rod and Her went to a sound recording studio, and she recorded every word that she could say and every vowel. And then Rod gave this to me 15 years ago and he said, one day, I want you to figure out how to bring her

back to life so that she can be the voice of a computer. And we did that, and it's perfect. Rod, when I first played for Rod, it sounds like my mother. Holy crap. And when you go to the Ronbury Archive, the web portal that we've created, it says, welcome to Ron Berry Archive and is Majel's voice. And it's all based from her, the things that she recorded, but it sounds just like her.

And Rod, you know, it's like this is insane. It sounds just like her, and I knew her very well, too. So it's weird for me to hear that. But yeah, you can bring anybody back audio-wise and visually as well. And I think that as long as you have the consent of the estate or even better if the person before they passed like Bejel does something that allows them to be captured, that's great. We interviewed William Shatner and I did a little 3D scan of him.

And in the interview, some of those snippets came out where he's like, well, if they could make me young again and bring me back to life, you know, there's certainly this concept of the characters that you're known for portraying, the actors that you loved, and especially if you have buy-in from those performers before they're gone, they can live on potentially forever. It's just a question of who's directing that,

who's doing that with it? You don't want it to be something awful either, and that's always a danger, right? But you can also something beautiful, and that's where artists need to step in and do something relevant with this new power, this new tool. Shout out to Rod Rott and Berry, because we've been talking about him,

good friend of ours, just want to say, Love your Rod. It's cool hanging out. But man, okay, so I'm trying to wrap my head around. You've always talked fast and way beyond what I can comprehend. There's speed of light conversation. But just, you know, dumb it down for me a little bit. What does chat GPT that technology itself?

What does that look like to us in two years from now, in five years from now? I don't really understand what's happening with that technology. I see it making art, making movies, making some deep fake stuff. You know, what does that do to our society over the next two years, five years? I mean, heck six months. You know, I was talking to a company that's doing text to video, right? And I'm not going to be the image that we're under NDA. In other words, if you type in a text and it creates a movie for you.

This is new. You know, remember the images were like, you know, you created text, and it creates a photo or an image where, you know, the Pope in it in a funky jacket or whatever. This company is doing the video, and we were talking about how our tech could work with each other. And we're just agreeing that, like in three months, we have no idea where things are going to be because there's breakthroughs every day on the, certainly on the visual and rendering side,

but also, I mean, a separate piece from that. Open the eye has Dolly, which is their image generator, it's now plugged into chat QBT. But the chat QPT side, large language models, which is what chat GPT and the computing services are based on, that's the mind, right? That's where it's textual, whether it's generating video, it's still, there's a thinking entity that's predicting

what the answer to your question is, that is participating in some activity that feels human-like. And where that goes from here, you know, you had a little bit of a step function from chat QPt 3.5, which was what was in November, to chat QPD 4, which came out a little bit later. where it was able to get answers more correct, where it was able to reason and understand deeper layers

of what the process is. And that's where you're going to start to see chat QATB coming pretty much good enough to hold any conversation and to answer any question. And where that goes beyond that is, can this actually be used to explore things and find things that are beyond what humans can do? Like, you know, if you look at all this data,

do you understand that, I mean, you know, on its premise, can AI that he's creating with his 10,000 GPUs, you know, do something more than just respond to questions, that humans have answered already in some form, can it discover how quantum mechanics and gravity work? Can it understand reality? Can it decode all of this?

But I think that from the experiential perspective, you're going to see things brought to life that are totally autonomous and generative that will look absolutely real and they'll be able to interact to and talk to and how that's different than a ghost or an alien in their lines. Who knows?

You're going to have non-human intelligence that are digitally created and that are seemingly intelligent. in your phone, in your glasses, in your field, I mean, all that's coming. And I do think that on the plus side, you're going to have a lot of knowledge and help. I mean, if you look at how much information, information of all the command is available to everybody on the planet with the cell phone, even an old iPhone, right? And that's something that used to class stuff forward to note that the President of the United States didn't have access to that information 30 years ago. We're going to have this kind of power where you want something done, you want to learn something, you want something explained to you.

You're not going to need to necessarily go to school or classes or hire somebody. AI will be able to help you figure that out and even do those tasks. And I think that's going to be where this goes next. I mean, there's certainly a case where it's like if you have the ability to just write a screenplay and have the chat GPT or just generate it for video, what does that do to writers?

What does that do to filmmakers? Heck, even the script can be generated by chat TV. People have tried that. And I kind of feel like what I'm seeing already, and I've got artists that have been using my tools for 20, 10, 15 years, something like that. I've been doing this for 30, is that, you know, the AI is just a tool.

It's like sometimes it's even more complicated than CG. Like, you have to understand how to prompt it to get the right results. Right. So something along these lines is, I think the way it's going to work is you have an idea for something you want to do. And the AI is there to help make that happen versus like just doing it all autonomously. We're not there yet, but I think that the right kind of tools are something where you can create a, you know, a short video with your camera or even your hands and then start to orchestrate it or paint it and have that augmented significantly to something that looks real. where you don't need to go and build a set or even learn how you do computer graphics.

It's kind of the philosophy I had with computer graphics to begin with, which is you shouldn't have to worry about how the computer works or all limitations. Just treat it like a camera. And in our renderer, you can just take your iPad and just move it around and it'll film it. It'll actually shoot the rays of light and process it and you just set the materials,

you set a couple of lights as if you were doing a real photo shoot. And I think that AI will do something along those lines where you can give it a premise of things and it'll have an update it to, fulfill that. So that's where I think are, and other things are going. As far as the provenance goes, in other words, knowing whether something comes from AI, it's a deep fake. I mean, that's a real danger that's going to come at it's right now. And as I was saying, like, I've had, you know, my own team looking into stuff like this, and there's probably a way to detect this kind of stuff

for high-resolution videos. The better thing would be that all videos that are that are of note, right, on some sort of validator, like this is where it came from, this is how it was generated. So our supply service, right, the system that is part of OTOI that we'd started, the render network, everything that you do, when you generate a CG movie, like the Star Trek movie, it was done on the render network last year. Every 3D model, every piece of it is actually on the blockchain, believe it or not. We built the system where it's all there. And if you run an AI job, it's the same thing.

So if you generate something and you use a training data set, at least you'll have some sort of receipt that accounts how it's created and validated. Something like that is one option. Obviously, it doesn't stop somebody on their local computer for putting something out on YouTube. But if video that's trusted that's validated, it goes for a system where you know how it's made, that might help. But it's going to be in the Wild West for a while.

I mean, if you look at the early days of the internet with Napster and still, like, anything can be faked and it will be faked and it will be in the hands of so many people. Yeah, well, and we run into that so much with our work when we're getting even sources of send, images or videos, it's like authenticating. Yeah, you can't know anymore. Yeah, you can't know anymore unless there's on the ground evidence that also that occurred, right? So like if we get footage from, it looks like military footage from ships, and in the logs of those ships at that time you have the accounts that match up with that footage, then you know that works.

But yeah, man, I guess it is the Wild West for authenticity. I think Apple should consider doing this. They should have something. They control the camera in the center. They have a pretty lockdown phone. And they should have something where it's like if you're capturing a raw, that's validated by the phone itself. That's something that could be done.

That might help. But obviously, if you also can film things from multiple angles, I mean, it helps. If you actually have old school, you know, Polaroids and film photography, that helps. Of course, people used to fake it in those days too. but it's computer generated image. I mean, being in the space, like, we can make anything, anything. And it was really easy to do. Like, it's not hard anymore.

So you can't separate. You have to have some sort of other evidence than visual media at this point to know whether something's real. But, you know, testimony, people that worked, you know, in the military that saw things. You got to combine it all together. Yeah. And you have to have some sort of reproducibility as well because if there's stuff out there that is happening over and over again, at some point, a lot of independent sources

should be able to create a pattern that tells you what this is. But that's been hard. It feels like some of this stuff is all over the place. Like Mussolini, what? He had a UFO? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. This has always been the problem with the UFO thing is that, you know,

the way we're looking for evidence might be flawed in some way, but you just don't have it in the same way as in other fields. You'd imagine there'd be like perfect images in the public realm of UFO encounters at this point. Maybe we don't have the best technology to capture that. Maybe it is an intelligent technology and it's evading capture to some degree. We have to look at it from that point of view. But yeah, man, authenticity of this. research is going to be harder and harder to get.

Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. You think it's inevitable that we evolve, humans evolve into something else that where we meld together with machines or digital intelligence?

I mean, I think we're happily there. I think you have an entire generation. on their phones all the time. And the second you put that in your eyeballs are your mind, and that is probably within our lifetimes, yeah, you're a cyborg species at that point. I mean, we're already, there's a collective mind. I mean, the internet, I mean, the AI is generated

from our collective words and knowledge on the internet. I mean, it's crazy. So we already do have part of us that lives digitally outside of us. And I think that as, you know, whether that becomes explicitly part of our physical, you know, bodies, probably is possible. I mean, it certainly feels like somebody's gonna try

I mean, Elon's going down that path to New Orleans, and they're competitors to that. So it just feels like even if society writ large, like Gene Ronanberry's vision for structure or occurred and the enterprise grew like, no, we're done with this stuff. We're going out there. We're going to live a real way.

It's almost like going off the grid, right? Weirdly enough, the enterprise was not, in Gene's mind, the most sophisticated way to live in the future. There are people that shows to go live in these new human rights that would live in these mental constructs. And that's something that is inevitable. People will choose that. And I think that that's going to become more and more possible and more real for, you know,

a huge majority of the population as these devices become more than just something you hold on your habit, something that is literally in your eyes every moment if you so shoot. In five years, say Ray Kurzweil's singularity arrives and he can upload himself and become eternal and live forever in a digital state, I guess. Would you do that? Would you do it? I don't believe that a digital double of me would be neat. I think that it's also this problem in Star Trek where if you transport, you know, go in and transport it, scrambles your molecules and send you to another planet, is that you're just dying and then a perfect copy of you being replicated?

That's, you know, the only person that brought that up in Star Trek was McCoy. You know, he was always afraid of the transporter. But it's something like that where I'm not sure that until we understand our own brains and a digital life form, which we might be able to do at some point, hard to see whether the race premise is right or not. I mean, certainly if there's a way to just completely translate, you know, the me, the real me into something digital and I were, you know, on my deathbed at 106 or whatever, I'd be like, sure, you know,

I'd love to keep going. And why not do it in good health or at least good digital health? There's nothing wrong with that. I mean, I would imagine even without that, if I were, you know, in firm in my, in my twilight years, I would certainly leverage the fact that I've connected to the world at large to still experience and learn as much as I can. And that's something that wasn't possible to people that were 106, you know, decades before. But I think that the danger of uploading your mind or thinking that that's a solution to

immortality is that, you know, again, I mean, it's like if you're going to mistake an AI of your dad for your dad, you know, I mean, I can't do that. So I wouldn't mistake an AI version or a replicate of me to be me either, but I'm also open to the possibility that we don't understand how this all works at the end and it's spaghetti code, right, in our brains and even in machine learning systems. But we have to understand whether or not consciousness itself is purely just physical. If you replicate every single neuron and pathway and put that into a system, do you end up with us? That would be the first test. It's just copying my brain and put it in the computer.

And does that do exactly what I'm doing at every step of the way, if given the same input? And the problem is we don't understand at what point that breaks down. Can we replicate? There's a great show called devs where they created a quantum computer. I mean, they first started with a worm that had 300 neurons. We can't get the worm to work right in the simulation. with just $300. We have about $100 billion in our brain.

But in theory, if we can understand whether our entire system of our minds and everything isn't related to some quantum effect that we can't duplicate, maybe, but we don't know that. You know, we certainly know that we can't really replicate, you know, at a certain point, like even if we can simulate rendering, right, the real world is quantum,

and there's a lot of craziness that happens on that level that doesn't feel like it's a good fit for a Turing machine, the traditional machine, you know, computer that we know today that Al Turing invented, which is still a very simple mechanism. And I think that until we crack that stuff, I don't know, but from a philosophical perspective, if I could magically be in a digital world,

if we're a one-way ticket, I would do it at the end of my life. So this extension, if it's a two-way ticket, I'd absolutely go in and out like I do in VR. You know, why not? But it does feel like we have to be careful to not mistake one for the other. But I think philosophically, you know, it's not like humanity's ever been afraid of exploring these crazy frontiers,

you know, when there's something new to do that, as long as it doesn't kill us, right? We don't really know the source of consciousness. There's a lot of folks who think that the physical universe came second, that consciousness came first, that the universe exists for the observer. Absolutely. That's a very valid philosophical point that I kind of believe, too.

I mean, I'm not sure about it, but I would say that it's not unlikely that concepts themselves. I mean, the Pythagorean theorem existed before the universe is created. It just always was, right? It's just information. And in a sense, you know, just because something, you know, the Big Bang exists because reality doesn't mean that Beto with Symphony, you know, needed the universe to be able to symphony.

It's just a bunch of frequencies and notes and bits of information. And so the question is, do you need a universe for information to be real or does the information itself, if it's real? Intrinsically, does it need reality? So that to your point is where how I think about this stuff. And I suspect that truly at a subjective level, I mean, when you think about it, you don't need anything physical, you don't need anything concrete for certain things to just exist and those is that world the more real world of reality and and we can certainly imagine it we

can certainly think about it and and because of that you wonder whether or not it could be a layer that is that is hidden underneath you know the physical reality that we understand um to this day and i think that's that's the thing i was asking of luce randall who was like investigating five dimensions of brain theory i had her on board as an advisor for this very question and asked her like is this even possible she's like below the plank theory i don't know and it's for philosophers not for scientists. And I'm thinking, well, it would be great if there were one thing, and science and philosophy could agree on what this is, but we probably need more data. We just don't understand enough. But I do, to your point, I always think about the premise that information just seems to

exist apart from reality itself, and therefore maybe information and the things that are generating information, even at a deeper level, are more real and more persistent than any other version of, you know, the system that we're now in physically, objectively. What is, you go, yeah, it blows my mind every time. He goes, you talk faster than I can understand. Check it out. What is it that you are kind of most excited about right now? Because you've always been a guy, man, I mean, we brushed over this, but you building computers into your cars and like, you know, just doing all this work that you've done, always skip in Harvard because you wanted to do something new and not learn something somebody

else has already discovered. Where you are standing now, what is the most exciting trajectory for you? What are you most excited about with the work and the world that you live in right now? I think that the holographic room is something that is, it's a very tangible thing. Anybody can understand. You go into a room in your house and you could literally experience anything with anyone, by the way. Others can have their own holograph rooms. So what's the difference with a hologram? Because it took me a while of you explaining to understand.

What is a hologram compared to what we know of as virtual reality? Well, the big difference is you need to wear a pair of glasses and there's a screen that projects reality in your eyeballs. Whereas if you're in a room and the room itself is so sophisticated that the six, you know, the six walls around. you, right, are gen. It's just like in that Star Trek show from 1987 where Gene Roneberry introduced a square room, you turn off the lights and you see it's just a bunch of black walls with yellow lines, you turn it on and all of a sudden the corners disappear, you're in a forest and you're there, right? And you cannot tell the difference between that in reality. You can smell it, it's misty. And that is, that is certainly, visually, it's one

of the hardest things to crack. I mean, I've seen those displays with my own eyes. I've even tested some of our Ronaberry content on there. I even brought the guys just creating it into one of our interviews for the Roneberry archive. That is something super, And it's a evolution from what you're seeing that with Apple putting out the glasses. But I do think that that's something that is, I'm genuinely excited about because I think that's probably going to be a net positive. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine that going wrong because in a sense, I feel it'll be more humanizing. I think it'll be more tractable. I mean, I think that, you know, I've worn many of these glasses for longer than most people are

getting bare because I've developed in them and stuff. It's not that comfortable. People don't like wearing 3D glasses to see 3D movies. So you can understand that like naturally, I think that there is something beautiful about being. able to bring, you know, we brought all the information and now we're going to bring AI into your phone, right? But if you can bring reality comfortably into everyone's homes and it costs nothing and no matter what kind of home you lived in, you could have any home you want that you could be anywhere, you could see loved ones, I mean, all the things we can kind of experience somewhat on your phones

and maybe a little bit better of virtual reality is going to be so much better when you have a natural organic way that feels no different than reality in your room. Now, granted, the step beyond that is you put a chip in your brain and you just tune into that and it feels like you're there. little more concerned about that. I think that's, that's, who knows where that can go wrong. But the other part is simply, it's just a natural. I mean, you know, the beauty of the iPhone is that it's just a slab. You move it with your finger and there's nothing to it. There's nothing really complex about it. Yeah. And I think the holographic room that technology is viable. It exists. It's expensive. Like 4K TVs were $150,000. Now there's $300. Right. It's the same thing. When you mass manufacture this, it'll go down a huge amount. It would probably cost like $10 million to build one of these rooms today. It'll probably be $10,000 in 20 or 30 years.

Right. Thinking of the creativity that unleashes, though, the kind of movies that could be made for that environment or music, live music. You could be at a live concert in the front row with some band play in there. Yeah. And we are probably a little bit early in that in the glasses that we've got that experience today are just a precursor. It's like looking at it, you know, at the old green text on an IBM screen and imagining the iPhones of today, right? You know, in 30 or 40 years, in a few decades, it's going to be very different. But we're playing with that.

We're testing those waters. And people that have vision, you know, I think are already imagining. I think that it's just a question of how it unfolds, but I think that's exciting. And on the AI front, clearly, we're going into uncharted wonders. As an optimist, I think this is going to be good. I think that we've always benefited from having tools that are democratized, more people having access to information,

more people having even the internet. I mean, you can build careers out of that, you can learn from that, you can share things through that. And of course, there's bad parts of that as well, but I do think AI can help solve a lot of problems that can help give people a lot more power, and it hopefully is something that can also even be used at some point to please itself

and to police, you know, sort of bad actors that would leverage that against, you know, humanity's interest. But it's unknown, but I'm as an optimist, I think that that in a world, like, the Star Trek endpoint, right? It's like everything works out for humanity. And by the time you get 300 years in the future,

you know, there's no money, there's no greed, there's no poverty, and, you know, everyone's fine. And you have AI and you have, you know, holodex and all this. And really, humanity is just experiencing, you know, learning about itself, the betterment of humanity is almost an art form. It's not a job.

It's not a conflict. And Ronnebury is very specific in that philosophy, and it's mine as well. And I think some of those pieces you're going to start to see as things like AI that's a positive force that can help reinforce information and as you can experience things in a way that is not as materialistic.

I mean, it's like a lot of materialism comes from the fact that without materialism, you can't experience certain things directly, right? If you have a holographic experience that is no different than that experience would if you're there, it changes things. Even the kind of house you buy, even the kind of car you might want to have, if you don't need to ever drive a car, it changes things as well.

And that's where I see those things coming. I also would imagine that the world around us, when you can paint the world with displays or things like that, I mean, cities would look very different. That's the stuff that really does keep me up, and I did a good way, right, which is the kind of creativity and the kinds of experiences that can happen when every single concert can have some beautiful window or a portal. It is there for humanity to experience, and that's for everyone. Should we end on a positive note?

We should. I love that. Yeah. I think, you know, the future of this, you're saying that we're seeing kind of the seed of it at the beginning of it with these glasses. That's what you're saying, right? The apple goggles, like, that's kind of the start point. Well, listen, man, I don't know. I just know the world is changing so spectacularly fast, and it's so beautiful. And I can't wait to see what happens. And I am an optimist, too.

So I think it's going to be good. Thanks for coming to talk about. Yeah, we're so we know you so you can explain it to us. Yeah, the digital apocalypse. If it's coming, let us know. But anyway, I love watching your work and where you go. You always got like a really good and solid heart with the way that you approach technology. So it's good to have somebody like you on the inside, Jules.

Thank you for being here. Such a pleasure. All right, brother. Love you. Never has so few. Has so much to tell but could say so little. Following this in a webinar, the presentation of Jeremy Corbelle, George Knapp, Dark Course Entertainment, and Cadence 13 Studios.

available now for free on the Odyssey app or wherever you get your shows.