The Glenn Beck Program - Ep 134 ｜ Our Terrifying Future in the Metaverse ｜ Matthew Ball ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

00:00:00.000 For thousands of years, humans have worked to make the unimaginable imaginable and possible.

00:00:09.300 First, people dreamt about flying like the birds, then flying to the moon,

00:00:14.180 or speaking to somebody on the other side of the house, the next room, and then the world.

00:00:21.240 We made it happen.

00:00:23.360 Where is the next frontier?

00:00:25.760 Well, our world is becoming increasingly more digital.

00:00:29.080 The great explorers of our time perhaps are not scaling Mount Everest or plunging to the bottom of the ocean.

00:00:35.120 They're navigating the invisible world of ones and zeros.

00:00:38.940 We live in a world of total connection now, total networking, total communication, total information.

00:00:47.640 We are shifting from Web 2.0 to the Internet of Persons to Web 3.0, the Internet of Things.

00:00:57.240 Maybe you don't know what that is, but you will soon.

00:01:01.260 There's been a word that's also been popping up that people don't really know what it is.

00:01:06.080 Metaverse.

00:01:07.040 Facebook even rebranded itself as Meta.

00:01:11.060 Mark Zuckerberg said recently that within the next decade, the Metaverse will reach billions of people,

00:01:16.640 host hundreds of billions of dollars of digital commerce,

00:01:19.660 and support jobs for millions of creators and developers.

00:01:24.740 What does that mean?

00:01:26.720 What is the Metaverse?

00:01:29.780 Today's guest has the answers, and I think this is information we all need to know.

00:01:35.720 Today on the podcast, The Metaverse with Matthew Ball.

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00:03:04.240 If you can explain the metaverse to, like, a five-year-old, what is it?

00:03:14.360 It's a great question.

00:03:16.100 The easiest way to think about it is to say that it's the internet but in 3D.

00:03:22.400 Were you a five-year-old, you would think that the internet is full of videos and high-resolution

00:03:28.740 images, and yet the older generations know that the internet was not always even pictorial.

00:03:34.340 It started primarily text-based.

00:03:36.440 Right.

00:03:36.700 Right now, we're in the live video and image era.

00:03:39.560 The metaverse presumes that this next phase will be three-dimensional.

00:03:43.040 And will you have to wear, like, VR goggles?

00:03:47.780 Is it Ready Player One?

00:03:52.920 Ready Player One is a misleading example because it is focused primarily on what you might think

00:03:58.140 of as a fantasy game.

00:04:00.020 That the metaverse is about dressing up as Luke Skywalker, fighting the Iron Giant while

00:04:05.600 you entertain a virtual slot.

00:04:08.460 The only way in which we access the metaverse in Ready Player One, or what is called the

00:04:14.600 Oasis, is through virtual reality goggles.

00:04:18.000 In truth, most usage of the metaverse, much like the internet today, will be enterprise.

00:04:24.400 It will be productivity.

00:04:25.740 It will be government and industry.

00:04:28.360 And in all likelihood, the most frequently used devices will be those we already have,

00:04:32.980 a smartphone or a personal computer.

00:04:34.900 But that does not mean they won't be the best and most fun way to do it.

00:04:39.140 So, what is the difference between the metaverse, then, as you're describing it?

00:04:44.420 It sounds kind of like Amazon.

00:04:47.120 I can get my videos on Amazon.

00:04:49.040 I can buy things on Amazon.

00:04:50.800 It's kind of a one place I go if I want dish towels or the latest movie.

00:04:57.740 Or the latest music.

00:04:59.380 What's the difference?

00:05:00.380 Well, so the difference here would be, first and foremost, we're primarily talking about

00:05:06.340 virtual-only objects.

00:05:08.720 And we're talking about interaction and what you would think of as a parallel plane of existence.

00:05:13.680 When you're streaming a video, you're consuming it in the real world.

00:05:18.040 When you're purchasing shoes, you're receiving them in the real world.

00:05:22.680 Amazon is a utility.

00:05:25.020 WhatsApp is a utility for your real life.

00:05:27.500 The metaverse is more focused around a parallel virtual existence.

00:05:31.620 That's why people talk about the idea that you won't use your iPad for labor in the real world.

00:05:37.380 You will actually perform said labor in a virtual one.

00:05:40.940 That's entirely on the like Amazon today.

00:05:42.800 So you lost me a bit on the, you're buying shoes for the real world and in the metaverse, it's virtual shoes for, I guess, my virtual feet.

00:05:55.000 I don't, this is where this becomes confusing to me because I see people buying digital property.

00:06:02.500 And I've got a ton of questions on that and we'll get into that later.

00:06:06.880 But what, what, I don't understand.

00:06:11.000 I'm working now virtually.

00:06:13.400 That's like working from home.

00:06:16.340 But am I, I'm a separate, I mean, I'm the same person, but I'm in this three-dimensional world that doesn't exist.

00:06:24.160 So it really is worth probing each of these.

00:06:30.000 So first and foremost, there are tens of millions of dollars being transacted for virtual real estate.

00:06:36.980 You will not find me a believer or an investor in said assets.

00:06:41.400 Right.

00:06:41.780 Okay.

00:06:42.520 That is, that is not actually a class or even a premise that I really agree with.

00:06:47.460 It strikes me as overly skeuomorphic where you say that anything non-real's goal should be to inexactitude replicate the real.

00:06:56.760 Right.

00:06:56.800 There's no scarcity in virtual real estate.

00:06:58.980 There's no purpose.

00:07:00.180 Right.

00:07:00.560 I don't need to walk down the street in the internet to talk to you.

00:07:05.460 I just email you or call you.

00:07:07.360 Right.

00:07:07.920 And so I don't really think that there's much merit there.

00:07:11.000 Some people disagree, but I won't defend them because I don't believe in it.

00:07:14.200 What do you think of non-fungible tokens then?

00:07:17.460 Which is something in the physical world that you would own in the digital world?

00:07:22.360 Well, so we can actually separate that question into two different elements.

00:07:26.440 First, NFTs or non-fungible tokens do not require any physical property.

00:07:32.360 You can have an NFT that is exclusively tied to a digital product.

00:07:36.600 But of course, if you wanted to present that digital product in the real world, you could do so.

00:07:40.920 That's when you buy digital artwork and you can use that to put it up in your home.

00:07:45.080 But it doesn't require anything physical.

00:07:48.820 The second way to think about NFTs is more a question of ownership rights.

00:07:54.620 And that is based on the premise that when you purchase something in the real world, what happens?

00:08:00.800 You take possession of it.

00:08:02.240 We recognize that possession is nine-tenths of the law.

00:08:04.940 The challenge with everything virtual is you cannot take possession of anything.

00:08:10.660 What typically happens is that Amazon server or Microsoft server basically checks a mark that says Glenn has this.

00:08:17.960 But the possession is maintained by that server.

00:08:21.180 That's where you have questions where it can be deleted.

00:08:24.080 It can be altered.

00:08:25.500 So in other words, this is like when it's like if you go to Amazon and you buy a movie, all of a sudden, a few years later, it can be gone because they don't hold the rights.

00:08:35.040 I was really renting it from them.

00:08:37.060 I never bought and owned the movie.

00:08:39.300 Right?

00:08:39.740 Yes.

00:08:41.300 And there's a very funny example where Amazon overnight actually deleted copies of 1984 of all things from Kindle users because it turned out they had exactly what you mentioned.

00:08:53.000 It's not that they don't have the right to license it to you in perpetuity.

00:08:56.900 It turned out they didn't have the right to sell it in the first place.

00:09:00.580 And so they took it back.

00:09:02.040 And so you're exactly right.

00:09:03.780 Right.

00:09:03.920 So the problem with that is were you to take anything and store it on your computer, well, then you have the problem of you've taken data possession, but the entire world can disagree that you have it.

00:09:16.040 And so the way that NFTs work is they say the only way to ensure that Glenn has possession of his thing is to build a system where everyone is simultaneously acknowledging it.

00:09:27.640 And that doesn't mean you have sole possession, but you kind of have the collective agreement for it.

00:09:34.520 Some people believe that that's unnecessary.

00:09:36.720 Right.

00:09:36.880 So it's just that it bestows possession.

00:09:39.020 So is this kind of like a virtual copyright?

00:09:45.400 Yes.

00:09:45.820 And that's what we're seeing precisely.

00:09:47.780 Okay.

00:09:48.040 And so that makes sense.

00:09:50.060 That makes sense.

00:09:50.720 I mean, you know, China doesn't respect our copyrights and our patents, et cetera, et cetera.

00:09:55.360 You're the Harry Potter's out just under a different name.

00:09:58.620 So that's kind of like the Internet where if people don't agree that's yours, it's good luck with that.

00:10:05.020 But there is a group that you would actually purchase and then you'd be registered as that's mine.

00:10:13.300 Correct.

00:10:13.740 Now, there's a challenge, which is we talk about the blockchain as trustless technology.

00:10:20.740 Technology, and that's because you don't need to trust that the counterparty will agree they can't modify the data.

00:10:28.800 Right.

00:10:29.400 That's where you say that you have faith in the system.

00:10:32.000 The challenge is advocates of the technology like to say the blockchain doesn't lie.

00:10:37.760 But of course, one can lie to the blockchain and one can ignore it altogether.

00:10:41.800 If I issued you rights to my company on the blockchain, it doesn't mean I might never send you the money.

00:10:50.120 And it doesn't mean that China or another foreign state might disregard my ownership claim.

00:10:56.300 And so it's a problem of you have a specific system, much like we have a legal system in the United States.

00:11:00.960 But if you and I have a contract, it doesn't mean I can't violate the contract.

00:11:05.140 It just means that we have an agreed upon structure for potentially legal remedies.

00:11:09.780 Okay, so here's the problem we have with that.

00:11:12.440 Because right now, we don't really have governance on the internet.

00:11:20.640 And that's where it gets a little dicey.

00:11:23.700 You have these huge contracts that everybody just says, I read it, I agree.

00:11:27.860 They never read that thing.

00:11:30.200 And those terms can change.

00:11:32.400 Those conditions can change.

00:11:34.140 There are rules on what you can and can't say, et cetera, et cetera.

00:11:37.480 But they're not applied consistently.

00:11:41.660 It's bizarre.

00:11:43.280 So do we need internet police?

00:11:47.160 I wouldn't say that we need internet police.

00:11:50.040 But we can certainly say that precedent case law, the way in which governments evaluate, regulate to determine the rights of an individual corporation, and indeed the rights to the user, are woefully outdated.

00:12:03.100 I don't think we need a digital police force.

00:12:05.380 But it's clear that today's regulatory environment does not mesh with the importance of the digital avenues.

00:12:11.840 I will tell you, in the private sector, we see some really important change.

00:12:17.980 And this is technical, but I do think it's important because it legitimizes the metaverse as a forum, as a milieu.

00:12:23.980 Epic Games, which is the maker of Fortnite, the most revenue-generated gaming in the world, also the Unreal Engine, which many in the audience may know, but is essentially a system for physics for all things virtual.

00:12:38.460 Disney uses it to film The Mandalorian.

00:12:41.000 They use it to operate their theme park rides in Disneyland as well.

00:12:44.380 Our government uses it too, don't they?

00:12:47.040 For military simulations extensively, yes.

00:12:49.140 What Epic has done is they modified what's called an End User Licensing Agreement, or EULA, and it provides two different modifications.

00:12:59.720 One is when you license it, they enshrine and contract that you have an indefinite license to that version, which means they might change it with an update from 4.3 to 4.31 or 4.3 to 4.4.

00:13:13.480 But if you opt into the alteration, the upgrade, they can change the service of the licensing agreement, but you in perpetuity have right to the one that you signed for.

00:13:24.300 The second thing that they've done is they've said that in the event of a contract dispute, say Epic alleges that you've violated their terms of service, or you've just stopped sending them the money that they're owed.

00:13:40.900 They have rewritten their agreement so that they require an injunction from the courts to shut down your service.

00:13:48.620 And the argument there would be, if you have digital landlords, and we see this with Apple, whom at the flip of a coin can say, I'm going to delete your app, I'm going to shut down your business, then you have what would effectively be a landlord who can lock you out at any point, if just because they dislike you.

00:14:10.140 Believe me, I know this road.

00:14:11.400 You don't have to plow this field very much.

00:14:14.420 Yeah.

00:14:14.560 And so this is not an argument that a platform should relinquish its moral and ethical rights to their organization.

00:14:25.200 But what they are saying is the importance of all things digital and virtual mean that we need the legal systems, voters, and judicial process at large, or rather, democratic processes at large to determine that.

00:14:39.240 Which brings us back to the former point, which is Epic can shift it to the courts, but the courts don't yet have a good system for actually managing that duty.

00:14:47.700 Okay.

00:14:48.220 Because that needs to be done.

00:14:50.500 Companies are wiped out.

00:14:51.880 If they base their business on, you know, Facebook or, or Apple, and they can decide, and that wouldn't happen in the real world.

00:15:00.020 If you were renting space at a mall, I mean, unless you were, you know, I don't know, drinking people's blood in your store, you're not going to just come in and kick them out and close the store.

00:15:11.640 In fact, even if it were, I'm drinking children's blood, the police would be called, there would be a system.

00:15:20.020 You couldn't just say, you know what?

00:15:22.520 You said something yesterday and I don't like it.

00:15:24.820 You were closing your store.

00:15:26.120 I got a contract, man.

00:15:28.000 You can't just do that.

00:15:29.360 I'd at least get a hearing before you could do that. 0.78

00:15:32.680 So that is, is that coming to, before the metaverse gets here?

00:15:42.360 Is that, is that something that people are moving to?

00:15:44.980 Cause that's really good news.

00:15:47.780 Some are, some aren't.

00:15:50.220 Epic and Microsoft as examples are very firmly shifting towards this.

00:15:55.260 Microsoft released a 14 point memorandum two weeks ago, last week from the president and vice chairman, Brad Smith, where he outlined their policy commitments.

00:16:04.920 And this was partly, and it was dedicated to the department of justice to explain the ways in which they expect to be treated and evaluated for their Activision blizzard example.

00:16:14.160 But this is where we come to user or rather voter agency.

00:16:19.400 We have a number of companies that are being very forthright in saying, we're going to relinquish our power and give trust to the legal systems and our users and our partners.

00:16:29.740 And then there are other companies who don't provide that.

00:16:32.940 I can't tell you which will win out.

00:16:35.440 What I can say is we should not solely rely on the competitive maneuvering of these companies.

00:16:40.700 We should ask legislators to also mandate some of them.

00:16:44.200 Right now, there is a full scale assault on truth and your right to speak it.

00:16:52.060 Look what's happening in Canada.

00:16:54.540 Look what's happening to Joe Rogan from YouTube to Spotify.

00:16:58.700 The theft, the theft of our ability to speak is going away quickly.

00:17:06.940 The left is waging a war on free speech with the help of big tech and the U.S. government.

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00:18:32.240 We made mistakes on the Internet with Google.

00:18:37.320 It was such a great service.

00:18:39.620 And even though some of us were saying, they're mining for information for AI.

00:18:47.020 That's why it's free.

00:18:48.560 They want everything about you.

00:18:53.380 We gave it away because it was so great.

00:18:56.020 And now we don't have control of our information.

00:18:59.360 And they have more information on each of us.

00:19:01.740 There's a digital twin of all of us now.

00:19:05.520 They know more about us than most likely we know about ourselves.

00:19:11.940 What are the mistakes?

00:19:13.100 That was a huge mistake.

00:19:14.240 We should be able to own that information.

00:19:16.720 And if we choose to let you have it, we can sell it to you.

00:19:21.720 What are the things that we should be thinking about now in the metaverse that will protect

00:19:27.740 the rights of the individual and not give away the store?

00:19:34.000 So it's a great question.

00:19:36.800 And I want to use this to explain part of what people consider to be Web 3.

00:19:41.540 That's another term that has doubtlessly been seen, but is ill understood.

00:19:45.900 And that's the Internet of Things, right?

00:19:49.460 No, Web 3 refers to, in broad terms, a more decentralized, but most importantly, user-centric

00:19:56.380 Internet.

00:19:57.120 Okay, all right.

00:19:57.580 Today, the platforms or what we also call aggregators, Google aggregates the web, Apple aggregates

00:20:05.300 applications, Amazon aggregates e-commerce, have what many believe to be too much power.

00:20:12.300 That was a result of a voluntary exchange of exactly what you just mentioned, data for

00:20:19.220 free services.

00:20:20.740 There's nothing wrong with making that exchange overall.

00:20:23.860 But what we found out is the exchange was perhaps not just in the sense that we provided

00:20:29.560 too much unknowingly and receive too few rights in exchange and by and large have concentrated

00:20:37.580 power almost to an unregulated or impossible to regulate.

00:20:41.360 Yes.

00:20:42.840 So wait, wait, wait, before you go on from that, you just said we need legislation.

00:20:47.460 And I've talked to the people.

00:20:48.840 I mean, they are living in the Stone Age.

00:20:51.360 And the problem that I see, by the time you get legislation through those guys, it's all

00:20:58.220 changed already.

00:20:59.600 How would you keep up with this?

00:21:01.680 The reason why the largest companies on earth are rushing towards the metaverse before is

00:21:08.500 here is because we have all become smarter about the pace and magnitude of platform shifts.

00:21:14.540 The thing that is encouraging more in the EU than in the United States is regulatory eyes

00:21:21.280 are also starting to move.

00:21:22.520 They're realizing, yes, we missed the ball over the past 15 years and we're going to try

00:21:26.560 to clean it up now.

00:21:27.600 But I will tell you, I'm inspired at least by the extent to which the UK regulatory authority

00:21:32.700 and the EU is starting to look forward as well.

00:21:36.340 The fact that Facebook is concerned about their future, the fact that Microsoft is saying the

00:21:41.080 metaverse is here tells you that there is change that's likely to occur and that provides

00:21:46.560 an outsized opportunity for legislation to affect that.

00:21:50.620 But the question of how do we know what to do is a hard one.

00:21:55.340 And I think you're right to be skeptical that governments are going to make the right

00:22:00.240 decisions in a timely fashion.

00:22:01.880 Yeah, they have.

00:22:02.520 I mean, these people, I mean, you know, some have been in office since 1954 and they have

00:22:07.440 barely any concept of what real life is like today, let alone, you know, the metaverse.

00:22:14.520 I think Ray Kurzweil, I've done several interviews with him and I find him the most fascinating

00:22:26.420 and the scariest man alive because he doesn't seem to, he seems to gloss over a lot of ethical

00:22:36.700 questions and the questions coming our way are enormous, things that we would never think

00:22:42.660 we would have to define or think about.

00:22:48.680 And as I look at this, there's nobody stopping, it doesn't seem like there's anyone stopping

00:22:55.440 and saying, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

00:22:57.920 If let's just say for gaming, we've got the VR goggles on and our kids are all in VR goggles.

00:23:05.760 The data that is being collected with goggles is far more than anything else that can be

00:23:12.920 collected on the internet, if I'm not mistaken.

00:23:15.720 They can, they will watch your eyes.

00:23:18.520 And I love these people who are like, yeah, do not stand in line.

00:23:21.400 I'll scan my eye.

00:23:22.700 See, that's you.

00:23:24.860 That is everything about you.

00:23:27.480 Am I wrong?

00:23:29.360 No.

00:23:29.900 And in fact, before we move into potential remedies, I'd love to terrify you a little bit further.

00:23:34.980 Oh boy.

00:23:35.380 If you'll indulge me.

00:23:36.420 Okay.

00:23:37.240 When you take a look at what's happening with today's smartphones, we all recall 2013, 2015,

00:23:44.020 when digital assistants started listening ambiently.

00:23:46.980 Yep.

00:23:47.720 We've kind of let that go.

00:23:49.240 But what's in new iPhones is something called UWB, ultra wide band.

00:23:55.720 An ultra wide band sends out 500 million radar pulses per every two seconds.

00:24:03.200 What?

00:24:03.800 And it does that to understand with enormous precision everything around you.

00:24:10.300 Oh my God.

00:24:10.860 This is the difference between Bluetooth that knows you're vaguely near your door or NFC that

00:24:16.000 knows you're vaguely near a terminal, but down to exactly where your keys are in the

00:24:21.080 couch.

00:24:21.680 And it's used for intent, intent in the sense of Bluetooth doesn't really know which side

00:24:28.620 of a locked door you're on.

00:24:30.840 If you're going up to your house, you want the Bluetooth to open the door.

00:24:34.940 But if you're walking by the inside of your door, you don't want it to open when you're

00:24:38.640 walking by.

00:24:39.160 Right.

00:24:39.960 UWB allows you to understand context.

00:24:43.380 VR goggles also have.

00:24:46.500 I have to tell you, hang on just a second.

00:24:47.900 I have to, before you go ahead, I just have to tell you, I'm spooked by the little vacuum

00:24:52.200 that knows my house and it's in sending up information about where everything is in my house.

00:24:56.800 This is much worse.

00:24:58.040 Well, no, your Roomba only knows vaguely what the, like, 1D plane is.

00:25:03.980 Right.

00:25:04.680 It doesn't understand everything else.

00:25:07.340 Now, UWB has some utility in VR, which is now you can wear a VR glass and not have to

00:25:12.640 worry about whether you're going to stumble into something because it can give you an overlay.

00:25:16.680 Think of Tony Stark in Iron Man.

00:25:18.460 He can see everything that's in front of him.

00:25:20.520 Right.

00:25:20.740 VR goggles also have exterior cameras so that you can be inside the VR headset.

00:25:28.560 It's tracking your eyes, but you can use your hands in front of the device and it can track

00:25:32.660 it.

00:25:33.020 Well, what does that mean?

00:25:33.880 It means these devices now see your living room.

00:25:36.540 They might see your tax return on the table.

00:25:40.260 Your partner or even child might walk by in a towel or less.

00:25:45.520 And that is being internalized in one way, shape, or form.

00:25:48.600 Now, you can firewall what goes up, what doesn't.

00:25:51.820 But I use this to explain the enormity through which data is going to be recognized, sensed,

00:25:58.660 and utilized for good, but also the ways in which it presents enormous arms.

00:26:04.200 I just read just the other day that they are now talking about prosecuting doctors in California,

00:26:13.700 possibly taking their license away.

00:26:15.400 If they don't advocate for the vaccine, if they don't tell everybody who comes through

00:26:22.100 their door that you have to have the vaccine, that's crazy.

00:26:25.220 That is crazy.

00:26:26.040 What is wrong with us?

00:26:27.500 I got COVID recently and my doctor for years who I really respect, like Glenn, I'll lose

00:26:35.300 my license if I don't say go get a vaccine.

00:26:39.440 So I went and got another doctor.

00:26:41.340 I got a doctor who has been telling people from the beginning, he's done two years of

00:26:46.980 research on this now, on that you can boost your immune system.

00:26:51.900 And he was offering all of these different things that you could go and then take a handful

00:26:56.220 of pills.

00:26:57.640 You know, you could just go to the vitamin store and this store and that store and then

00:27:02.180 just take them several times a day.

00:27:03.980 He developed this into one pill and it's called Z-Stack.

00:27:09.580 I want you to go to Z-Stack.com.

00:27:12.520 It has all of the things that you need to be able to boost your immune system.

00:27:18.560 You take it every day.

00:27:19.680 I take it every day.

00:27:20.620 Z-Stack life dot com slash Beck.

00:27:23.680 Z-Stack life dot com slash Beck.

00:27:26.660 Use the promo code Beck and save on your first order.

00:27:29.980 You know, my son, without getting into details, had a problem online with somebody, a predator

00:27:40.940 and we had to bring the FBI in to it and it was terrifying.

00:27:47.740 But what was not equally, but pretty terrifying in a different way was when they said, can we

00:27:55.280 have the device he was on?

00:27:56.420 Sure.

00:27:58.100 It records everything.

00:28:00.820 Your conversations, who you're online with, what's happening.

00:28:04.960 It records everything.

00:28:08.380 And just that people don't know.

00:28:11.360 But the idea that this is mapping everything, it knows where everything is.

00:28:17.720 Because that's an enormous amount of invasion of privacy and in the wrong hands.

00:28:28.160 I mean, we're getting to a place and correct me if I'm wrong, but we're getting to a place

00:28:32.840 to where.

00:28:35.000 Do you have free will?

00:28:36.560 Well, because it's going to anticipate you so much.

00:28:41.440 And if you're in the virtual world, you're already seeing it in the world we're living

00:28:45.100 in.

00:28:45.660 It's putting up the ads of things it knows you're looking for.

00:28:50.640 So it anticipates you now.

00:28:54.360 It's listening to you now.

00:28:56.460 Where does free will go?

00:28:58.100 Well, I want to use this as an important.

00:29:02.980 You're laughing. 1.00

00:29:03.920 Is this just a really ridiculous, stupid question or? 1.00

00:29:07.060 No, no. 1.00

00:29:07.720 It's more because I started this last segue by saying I was going to terrify you.

00:29:11.840 And now I have the next step that I might bury for a few minutes before terrifying further.

00:29:16.700 That's why I'm laughing.

00:29:17.820 All right.

00:29:17.940 The most important thing is I want to provide some modifiers first.

00:29:22.500 Number one is your iPhone is not using UWB perpetually.

00:29:27.000 It has to be provided with authority, which is to say you have to opt in.

00:29:32.480 It's not something that's running like Siri is at all time.

00:29:35.880 That does, however, raise the challenge of what you meant, just mentioned with the unfortunate

00:29:40.700 story of your son, which is malcontents.

00:29:42.540 I've been a large critic of the way in which Apple is using its control over the iPhone,

00:29:48.360 which, by the way, 90 percent of American teenagers have, 75 percent of those under 50

00:29:53.520 do, and two thirds of all Americans have.

00:29:56.140 This is extraordinary reach.

00:29:58.260 They have used that partly under the auspices of privacy protection to impart pretty demonstrable

00:30:05.120 financial harm on their competitors.

00:30:06.520 We saw this with Facebook, who said Apple's policy change will suck 10 billion out of revenue

00:30:11.580 this year alone.

00:30:12.540 However, they have worked very hard, potentially to their benefit and potentially in excess of

00:30:19.040 their actual obligations, to severely gate the ability for any application developer

00:30:26.120 to use things and, more importantly, require very clean, reiterated prompts for whenever

00:30:33.680 these things are used.

00:30:35.280 So I don't mean it's foolproof, but it's quite good.

00:30:37.320 Right.

00:30:37.400 I know Apple is the best of everybody.

00:30:40.320 I mean, everybody's got problems.

00:30:42.820 They're the best at privacy.

00:30:45.180 That doesn't make them superheroes.

00:30:46.680 It just means they're trying, at least.

00:30:50.060 But none of this stuff, I mean, all of it now bothers me.

00:30:53.820 Ten years ago, none of this stuff would have bothered me because I wouldn't have seen the

00:30:58.400 collusion between governments and, you know, they weren't helping China build surveillance

00:31:06.320 on people.

00:31:07.900 So I don't necessarily trust anybody with this kind of access to us.

00:31:13.200 Do you know what I mean?

00:31:14.400 Yes.

00:31:15.540 And let me give you a good example of part of the regulatory challenges that we face or

00:31:20.220 the antiquated case law that needs to be overhauled.

00:31:24.580 And I'm going to simplify this a lot.

00:31:26.200 So I'm sure there's going to be a lawyer who says, you know, we've reduced five things into

00:31:30.260 one point.

00:31:31.100 But we need wires because courts determine or sorry, you need a court order to place a wire

00:31:39.600 into your home.

00:31:40.520 Yes.

00:31:40.820 Why?

00:31:41.680 Because there's a belief that you need for the sanctity of your own existence, privacy,

00:31:47.980 and that I can listen to you walking down the street.

00:31:50.240 But when you go at home, you have to have privacy.

00:31:53.300 We have things like the Fifth Amendment because we believe that it would be unjust to invade

00:31:59.240 your mind, to force you to explain yourself, not just you'd have the right not to self-incriminate,

00:32:05.720 but you have the right to your own mind.

00:32:07.220 Right.

00:32:07.320 It's a panopticon and that's cruel and unusual punishment.

00:32:13.460 Yes.

00:32:14.340 The challenge is, of course, that as a result, if you have an iPhone with a passcode, the

00:32:21.420 courts cannot compel you to give up your passcode.

00:32:24.840 However, and keep in mind, your iPhone is the closest analog to a home phone, which courts

00:32:31.220 need to provide, get an order for, you don't have a right to your body in the same way.

00:32:36.840 And so if you're using a thumbprint or facial scan to open your iPhone, the police can compel

00:32:43.460 you to use that or they can find other means because it's not providing you to give what's

00:32:48.880 in your head.

00:32:50.160 And so we have this weird situation where governments and police agencies don't have

00:32:57.820 an interest in taking away their ability to access your de facto mind.

00:33:01.980 And yet none of us would say that to the extent in which using a rotary phone was an invasion

00:33:07.440 of your mind, an iPhone is terrifying.

00:33:10.580 And so courts are stuck with this idea of how do we modernize those requirements for

00:33:15.900 court order and bring that to a phone?

00:33:18.600 And then on top of that, of course, we have the ability for the FBI on occasion to actually

00:33:22.260 get into your phone and sometimes with the support of a operating system.

00:33:27.440 You would think, and this is what is scary to me, you would think that anyone that is engaging

00:33:34.000 in this stuff is, would be on the forefront of ethics.

00:33:41.720 They would be the ones that would be having these big meetings with the greatest minds to

00:33:46.860 say, what are we tampering with here?

00:33:49.620 What are we doing?

00:33:51.260 And is this even right to do this?

00:33:53.440 I mean, when you talk about the VR goggles, if I'm, correct me if I'm wrong, again, I know

00:33:57.960 enough to be dangerous, that gives so much information that it's almost to the point of what you dream

00:34:09.260 about, isn't it?

00:34:12.540 It's not hard to imagine how we would get close on occasion.

00:34:15.900 I don't want to be so conclusive, but yes, the underlying point of your concern is totally

00:34:20.760 valid.

00:34:21.240 Okay.

00:34:21.480 So, but that is, that's an absolute invasion of my privacy.

00:34:25.420 And, you know, I, I said to Ray one point, you know, you're building this, this giant

00:34:31.360 AI that can predict what I'm going to do.

00:34:34.760 But if I'm a competitor of Google and you're watching everything I'm doing, why wouldn't

00:34:41.040 Google just put me out of business?

00:34:43.520 Cause they'd know in event, this guy's going to come up with a better algorithm than we

00:34:47.400 have, you know, or whatever.

00:34:48.920 And his response was, well, we just won't do that.

00:34:52.280 That's not reassuring.

00:34:53.700 I think he's being charitable.

00:34:56.380 Look, the technology is required to provide, to perform such an activity really do elude

00:35:02.060 us for the foreseeable future.

00:35:05.340 And invasion is a challenging-

00:35:07.520 You mean to be able to, the technology to invade that deeply?

00:35:11.700 To understand, correct.

00:35:13.480 Okay.

00:35:14.140 What I would say, I would also modify the term invasion because this is where we get to 1.00

00:35:18.200 practical, legal, and political concerns.

00:35:21.980 Invasion is a challenging word because in the instance where I say that you're tracking

00:35:26.120 my retina and I'm using ultra-wideband to scan my home, that's an opt-in experience that

00:35:31.860 has obvious utility.

00:35:33.240 The problem with the last 15 years was insufficient understanding.

00:35:37.780 We talk about numeracy, literacy through numbers and financials as being one of the primary

00:35:43.560 problems of the electorate.

00:35:44.800 We're literate, but we're not numerate.

00:35:46.980 We also don't have much understanding of data and what we're giving up.

00:35:51.760 It's not that I'm being invaded.

00:35:53.800 Facebook didn't break into my Oculus and just start scanning the house.

00:35:58.160 I allowed them to do so.

00:35:59.900 Right, but you didn't-

00:36:00.540 Well, we don't understand what to what end and how.

00:36:04.860 And this is the challenge between the companies that, you know, the classic phrase, move fast

00:36:09.260 and break things.

00:36:10.420 It's one thing to do that with operating systems.

00:36:12.500 It's another thing to do that with personal data.

00:36:15.960 Equifax lost 157 million Americans' entire financial record, social security, and address.

00:36:22.180 And they pay to find equivalent to less than half of their cash balance from a single year.

00:36:27.640 That's inadequate punitive measures.

00:36:30.540 That's inadequate protection.

00:36:32.140 And it's a general ethos of, well, if a problem happens, we'll clean it up.

00:36:36.340 You seem to be, unlike many people who know this, you seem to have good balance on it.

00:36:44.780 You know, technology is technology.

00:36:46.540 It's how we use technology that determines.

00:36:49.560 And you seem to be cut from that cloth.

00:36:53.040 You warn about some things and you're excited about others.

00:36:55.540 Do I have you right on that?

00:36:57.600 Yes, and I would put it this way.

00:37:00.020 Every year, every platform from PC to mobile to the metaverse means that more of society moves online.

00:37:08.320 Whenever more of society moves online, we naturally encounter more societal problems.

00:37:13.140 Harassment, misinformation, abuse, platform power and platform regulation.

00:37:19.320 Those aren't new problems.

00:37:20.520 They're fundamental problems that are newly expressed in technology.

00:37:24.580 The challenge has been we were probably lax from a political standpoint or assuredly.

00:37:30.300 And we were passive from a voter and user perspective.

00:37:34.740 And therefore, inevitable societal problems manifest even worse than we feared.

00:37:40.460 But that's a tech enablement, not a tech created thing.

00:37:45.280 So that's a very good explanation.

00:37:48.620 I am a I'm a father of a daughter who had several strokes when she was born.

00:37:53.840 So she has cerebral palsy and it's just it's broken pathways.

00:37:58.940 You know, it's it.

00:38:00.400 She just thinks differently because it takes her longer to get to where it's supposed to go.

00:38:05.280 Um, and, uh, I was really encouraged, uh, when I saw Elon Musk's Neuralink, um, because that could help jump those broken pathways.

00:38:19.380 And I am simultaneously terrified of the Neuralink because I know what he wants to do with it.

00:38:28.100 This is the first stop, but I know where he wants to get.

00:38:31.620 And, uh, I mean, that, you know, uh, that, that's, that's frightening to be able to actually be online because that's a two-way street.

00:38:45.460 So I'm glad you brought this up because this is what I was laughing about earlier when I said I would terrify you further, which is brain to computer interfaces or BCIs.

00:38:55.020 Right.

00:38:55.120 There were serious issues here.

00:38:57.580 I want to enumerate for the audience how far we are from the dystopic fears.

00:39:03.160 First of all, Neuralink is particularly contested in the scientific community and by former employees.

00:39:08.200 And so we should be cognizant of that as a topic and an investment.

00:39:12.060 But just know that of the many competing projects, it is perhaps the most controversial for having misled.

00:39:19.060 However, others are investing.

00:39:20.840 Facebook had a BCI division.

00:39:22.740 They've cut it down.

00:39:23.740 What's a BCI?

00:39:24.540 What it would, uh, brain to computer interface.

00:39:27.180 Okay.

00:39:28.000 And there are three different types of BCIs.

00:39:30.640 Non-invasive, think of Professor X in the X-Men wearing a helmet with electrodes on his skull.

00:39:36.540 You have semi-invasive, which might be, you know, you can think a little bit like a cochlear implant, except potentially subdermal.

00:39:44.300 And then you have invasive, which is where you're threading usually something an eighth the width of a strand of hair into your brain.

00:39:54.740 Tests that Facebook sponsored with the University of San Diego was able to successfully use that to write with thought at roughly 15 words per minute.

00:40:05.160 That compares to the average human doing 62 to 75, but I would say that that's pretty good at one quarter.

00:40:14.260 I remember waiting an hour for the internet to give me a picture, you know.

00:40:19.200 That's a great call.

00:40:20.400 Right.

00:40:20.660 And so, look, when we're talking about making one quarter of the speed with very active, you don't think beer.

00:40:29.260 The BCI user has to think B, B, E, E, E.

00:40:36.060 And so, we're very far from the point in which you'd think, okay, here's what I'm going to do, your minority report, I'm going to produce a new technology to fail Google.

00:40:48.020 We're very, very far from that.

00:40:50.200 But we should be simultaneously aware of the fact that those are happening.

00:40:54.160 Neuralink, which is Elon's company that you mentioned, has provided videos, though, again, many disputed, of a monkey playing Pong using a BCI interface.

00:41:04.260 Why is that disputed?

00:41:06.880 Oh, this is where I say that the many people who are involved in it say it was hacked.

00:41:11.900 There's allegations of Theranos-style manipulation and all the rest of it.

00:41:15.900 Wow.

00:41:16.660 The University of San Diego has very much vetted the Facebook example that I provided, and they're not the only ones to have similar results.

00:41:23.800 My point is we're very primitive, but you would still say it's magic by any normal judge.

00:41:30.380 And it's, I mean, you know, I lived with AOL.

00:41:33.640 Well, so I remember what the Internet was like, and it hasn't been that long.

00:41:39.200 I mean, maybe if you're 20, it seems like an eternity.

00:41:42.700 But, you know, I'm in my 50s.

00:41:46.220 It wasn't too long ago where none of this stuff could be done.

00:41:50.160 And I remember my father, before he died, he was about 80.

00:41:53.800 And he said, Glenn, I remember when I was growing up, we never thought we could even go to the moon.

00:42:00.320 It just didn't even occur to us.

00:42:02.340 That was total sci-fi.

00:42:03.640 So, in today's world, it is right around the corner.

00:42:09.040 And I happen to agree with Stephen Hawking, properly understood, that the end of Homo sapien is around the corner.

00:42:22.540 I don't know when, but when we do have that connection, you won't be able to keep up.

00:42:30.000 You'll be like the Amish. 1.00

00:42:32.160 You'll have to live someplace because you're basically in a buggy, and we can't have you on the freeways.

00:42:40.800 Okay?

00:42:41.160 Just please live over there because you're going to screw everything up.

00:42:45.020 Right?

00:42:46.280 There are ways in which that seems laughable.

00:42:48.540 And yet, you know, we've seen that older generations, septuagenarians, octuagenarians do struggle to keep up.

00:42:54.000 And certainly, when we start to get to cyborg implants, which is what we're talking about as a realistic premise, you're right.

00:43:02.020 The U.S. military has been doing tests for quite some time that shows that implantable devices which inject a shock to your brainstem can, for a short period of time, very significantly increase response and shooting accuracy.

00:43:18.420 This is the type of thing that seems terrifying.

00:43:20.580 Why would we ever do that?

00:43:21.760 But, of course, we're asking these brave men and women to fight on our behalf.

00:43:25.620 Many of them would say, I worry about the damage of shocking my spinal system, but less than I do of a poor response time.

00:43:33.780 And so, you naturally come into the question of, do you end up with literal super soldiers whom are injected not just with extra adrenaline on demand, but with implantables to provide shocks?

00:43:43.120 You can certainly imagine a future in which some of us do feel impossible to keep up.

00:43:49.040 Do you ever, I mean, I feel like, I feel like they must have felt in the 1930s, we're a scientific community now, science can change everything, yada, yada, yada.

00:44:04.600 And then parts of the world used it in terrifying ways.

00:44:10.080 And it was all due to arrogance on that.

00:44:13.780 Do you feel kind of the same way that this thing could go?

00:44:18.080 You don't know how it's going to go.

00:44:20.100 And we seem to be trying to, super soldiers, we seem to be trying to do many of the things that were done back then that they just didn't have the technology to do.

00:44:29.820 But we do now.

00:44:30.940 I think that's quite apt.

00:44:36.720 Are we better people now?

00:44:39.160 I mean, China, we're in a race against China. 0.99

00:44:42.600 Have we learned from the past on what we can and can't or should and shouldn't do?

00:44:49.940 The answer is in some ways yes, in some ways no.

00:44:52.940 And yet, of course, we're struggling with altogether novel problems, which is politicians may be more informed over the last 15 years of the failures of tech regulation.

00:45:03.180 And yet few would say that the political system is anything other than much worse.

00:45:07.360 And so we might find out that we are smarter.

00:45:09.220 We're just less capable.

00:45:10.040 That's an entirely realistic outcome.

00:45:12.900 I like to remind people that regulatory inaction or governmental mistakes on a new frontier, tech frontier, is actually a relatively novel phenomenon.

00:45:25.760 Throughout the 20th century, rail, telecommunications, energy, water, metals, or steel rather.

00:45:33.440 The U.S. government was actually pretty far ahead.

00:45:37.060 Many people are unfamiliar with the Internet Engineering Task Force.

00:45:41.160 This was started by the Department of Defense in 1985 or 1986.

00:45:45.200 It still exists today, but outside of DOD.

00:45:48.080 And it stewards the open standards and technologies of the Internet.

00:45:52.640 DOD didn't just start the Internet with DARPA.

00:45:54.840 But they also said we need a global body to steer and preserve its enduring role in the world.

00:46:02.980 It's really since 1995 and 2005 that everyone has just kind of let things go.

00:46:10.320 And so I'm hopeful that that is an aberration, not the pattern going forward.

00:46:15.840 But, of course, we have very significant political impediments in front of us.

00:46:19.340 Let me switch gears to quantum computing.

00:46:26.960 We didn't even think we could get as far as we have already gotten.

00:46:30.540 Last I heard we were at, I don't know, 54-bit?

00:46:33.340 Where are we now?

00:46:34.860 Do you know?

00:46:35.740 It depends on what measure you want to use.

00:46:38.600 Okay.

00:46:38.800 But if this actually comes to fruition, if it can do, all encryption will be gone.

00:46:48.380 And whoever wins the race to that kind of rules the world, don't they?

00:46:55.240 This is where we're talking about a fundamental unlock that would be so profound that coming up with the answer would be futile.

00:47:06.400 Much like saying, if you and I went back to 1950 and said,

00:47:10.700 what if someone came up with an internetworking standard that could unite the world in milliseconds to transmit information?

00:47:17.860 Would someone rule the world?

00:47:19.200 We probably would have said yes if you described the Internet.

00:47:21.500 And, in fact, if you said, by the way, DARPA created it, you'd be like, okay, hegemony is over.

00:47:28.020 We have a new British empire and it's American. 0.61

00:47:30.880 And so I don't want to speculate as to what happens when quantum computing comes.

00:47:34.960 It's more likely that we see what always happens, which is it makes available the next problem and problems that we didn't even know were possible.

00:47:44.220 And so we're talking about a daisy chain of creation.

00:47:46.940 What I will say is that whether that's a decade or 30 years from now, people do seem oddly optimistic about quantum computing's achievability over that time horizon.

00:48:00.400 We tend to be wrong and over-optimistic, but given you and I are talking about century-long visions, perhaps we're not.

00:48:06.560 Anything that keeps you up at night that you haven't shared so far?

00:48:12.820 Because I'm going to be up all night.

00:48:16.780 Are you a generally optimistic guy for the future or pessimistic?

00:48:21.180 I'm generally optimistic because I find it impractical to be otherwise in this sense, which is to say, I actually, let me take a step back.

00:48:33.820 We've never had a point in time in which seven of the 11 largest companies on earth are obsessed preemptively with the new tech wave.

00:48:40.240 Apple launching its biggest product in 15 years, the largest company, Microsoft, has a metaverse technology stack.

00:48:46.740 Facebook renamed itself.

00:48:48.080 Tencent is building what they call hyper-digital reality, 11th largest company on earth.

00:48:52.920 They're doing this because they've learned the lessons from the last three waves, mainframes, personal computing, and mobile, which is the world changes.

00:49:02.220 The companies change.

00:49:03.360 The standards change.

00:49:04.500 The business models change.

00:49:05.720 They are rushing to the next thing because they know they might be made irrelevant.

00:49:10.660 That same thing gives me hope, which is that users, voters, governments, developers do have a role in that future.

00:49:19.560 We actually decide in aggregate, diffusely, stupidly perhaps, on who those companies will be.

00:49:25.840 To be pessimistic and cynical is to just throw your hands up and say any of these companies will win, and that's not true.

00:49:33.560 Right.

00:49:33.680 But I am, I mean, I've noticed you've said the word out a few times.

00:49:39.400 You're Canadian.

00:49:40.880 You see what's...

00:49:41.520 I am, yeah.

00:49:41.860 Yeah, you see what...

00:49:42.740 I don't want to get into the politics of it, but the ability for the finance minister to know who gave, who's in line in this daisy chain to shut people down that fast is a little frightening.

00:50:00.980 Perhaps, but let me use this on the flip side for optimism, not just on the powers that be, but about the transformative potential of technology.

00:50:10.040 We're talking about the finance minister.

00:50:11.880 Mark Carney led the Canadian National Bank.

00:50:15.400 Then he went on to run the Bank of England and became one of the most significant finance ministers or finance officials in all of the EU.

00:50:23.040 He comes from, I believe, a tiny town in the Northwest Territories of Canada.

00:50:29.100 He dog-sledded to school.

00:50:31.620 That's a remarkably unusual circumstance to ascend to the upper echelons of high finance.

00:50:37.500 I think he was the vice chairman of Goldman Sachs before he moved into government.

00:50:42.620 The transformative potential of immersive, high-fidelity education, which is delivered at no cost, which is to say, you don't need a teacher.

00:50:51.500 You don't need a facility.

00:50:52.540 You want to dissect a cat.

00:50:53.620 We don't even need one, and you can go into it magic school bus style, that is made available to every person on earth, irrespective of their parents' wealth or the school board in which they attend, is an incredibly inspiring idea for the further democratization of the resources we consider valuable, a good education, a good teacher, health care, and more.

00:51:14.060 However, that should produce extraordinary opportunity.

00:51:17.860 If you believe in the goodness of man at some fundamental level, which some will debate, then you can at least believe that the future is going to be led by more people who earned it from such obscure opportunities rather than the capricious finance minister who shuts something down because, you know, well, he doesn't like Glenn very much.

00:51:34.520 But time will tell.

00:51:36.460 Really great to talk to you.

00:51:37.920 Thank you, Matthew.

00:51:38.640 I appreciate it.

00:51:40.060 God bless.

00:51:40.920 Nice speaking with you.

00:51:44.060 Just a reminder.

00:51:48.980 I'd love you to rate and subscribe to the podcast and pass this on to a friend so it can be discovered by other people.

The Glenn Beck Program - February 19, 2022

Ep 134 ｜ Our Terrifying Future in the Metaverse ｜ Matthew Ball ｜ The Glenn Beck Podcast

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