Planetary Regeneration Podcast | Episode 7: Dan Mapes
This blog is a transcription of the seventh episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, hosted by Regen Network’s Chief Regeneration Officer, Gregory Landua.
In this episode, Gregory interviews Dan Mapes, founder of CyberLabs and VERSES. Listen on Soundcloud, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify; or read the transcription below.
Gregory: Hello and welcome to the Planetary Regeneration Podcast. I’m your host Gregory Landua.
In this episode of the Planetary Regeneration Podcast, I’m interviewing my friend Dan Mapes. Dan is an entrepreneur and has been working in the technology industry for over 20 years. He’s really a brilliant, articulate guy with a big heart. He’s what I would refer to generally as an intelligent techno-optimist. My listeners may recognize I’m oftentimes, even though I’m in the technology industry, I’m techno-skeptical. The way that Dan articulates certain ideas such as the need to evolve an autonomic nervous system for our planet and the role that that plays in the planetary regeneration, I think is very compelling and really important to consider. I hope you have a fun time with this interview. Dan and I had a great time. I had to run to go be with family but I think we could have kept talking for another couple of hours. Hope you all enjoy this one as much as I did. Thanks so much, Dan, for taking the time to chat.
Dan: Yes, happy to talk to you again.
Gregory: Last time I saw you, we were in Aspen. It was a little more than a year ago and a lot has happened.
Dan: A lot has happened. We were there really around the planet health and the climate issues. Obviously, a lot that has happened has not been great. It’s amazing. With all of the work, with all of the people all over the world working against climate problems, we’re not looking at that. It’s really frustrating.
Gregory: Right. I have a sense that that coordination issue is something you think a lot about, and is at the heart of your work for many years, but also particularly with VERSES project.
Dan: It’s absolutely true. It’s a bit funny. I was joking with my friends. The reason they’re putting up is because I have not been able to be articulate enough on why they shouldn’t do it. You have to take personal responsibility at some level. You know what I mean? This is our planet. Greta coming around to speak to the congress and everything — it’s just wonderful. We did feel that technology can be an aid. We developed this project called VERSES. You can go check it out at VERSES.io. Really, it’s a new coordination protocol that links artificial intelligence together with the Internet of things. It gives a better planetary management tool. Our bodies, well, I’m talking to you right now. I’m kind of forming words in my brain but I don’t actually think in words. I think in deeper kinds of images, feelings, and emotions and things like that. Then, I convert them into English or Chinese or Spanish or whatever language I’m talking in. I use my neocortex and other parts of my brain to deal with all of that, but actually, a lot of my brain is doing something else completely. It’s maintaining the health of my body right now. If I get up and walk up a set of stairs, I don’t have to go, “Um, that’s 25 stairs. I probably should raise my heartbeat by 10 beats per minute.” I don’t have to do that. I allow my nervous system to figure all that out. It’s like an internal AI we have to maintain the homeostasis and just keep us healthy. We breathe more. We get more oxygen in. The heart beats faster. Oxygen gets to the cells and we burn more oxygen when the muscles are worked to run or climb stairs or anything like that. We want to do the same thing with the planet. We want to create the nervous system for the planet that is observing the planet and the planet’s health, and alerting us when there is a problem and maybe even automatically doing some fixing things so that we collectively address it. We built this new protocol. It sounds crazy but when you really hear the logic of it, it makes sense. In 1994, Tim Berners-Lee released the World Wide Web protocols. We type an HTTP every day without thinking much about it. It’s just the way that we transfer information around the Internet. We use HTML to code our documents and the HTTP to connect them and move them around. What does HTTP actually translate into? It translates into a hypertext transfer protocol. It’s about transferring text across the network. We want to be looking at the Amazon. We want to be getting measurements from IoT devices on the ocean to understand temperature warming. We want it to actually work the way our body works. If I cut myself, the white blood cells are sent there. I mean I don’t have them. My brain does the sending. I don’t know where it sends them. It sends the white blood cells to repair the body. If we can’t measure it, we can’t manage it. To have a measuring system for the entire planet — first at the sensory level and then at the software level — really becomes critical. Sending those messages around all over the world in the form of a geospatial look at our planet in 3D where we can zoom in and out, that’s way beyond hypertext transfer protocol. We had to create a hyperspace transaction protocol, which allows interactions in space which is what we’re doing all the time. Why didn’t Tim do that originally? Because in 1994, computers were really slow and the network was really slow. The only thing we could really deal with was text and then later some images. You might remember the first websites. The images on the websites had to be really postage stamps because they would take so long to load. Now, we’re watching Netflix on our smartphones. The network speeds have really increased. Because they’ve increased, they’ve also gotten graphic chips into these things for gaming. Now we actually deal with geospatial information. The number one mapping company in the world is ESRI, E-S-R-I. They are 50% of the GIS business in the world. They provide maps, detailed maps, around resource management, forestry, the health of the Amazon. They are the map experts from satellites to groundwork. They are masters. We partnered with them and we built this HSTP so that you now can zoom in on any part of the world and bring intelligence to it, and maybe management decision making. Then, we partnered with MIT. MIT is working on something really strange. I’ve been arguing for a long time that we’re happy to let you cut down a tree in the Amazon. We just want the price of the tree to be correct. It may be that that tree is worth a million dollars when you calculate its oxygen producing capability over the next 50 or 200 years. [inaudible 00:08:10]. The wood is only worth maybe 50 thousand dollars so nobody’s going to cut down a tree. We need a better accounting system for our resources. We’re working with a really great team at MIT and Santa Fe Institute on linking what we’re doing to a global ecological accounting system. At that point, if a company wants to do something which is ecologically damaging, then they pay. They pay the price for it. It’s like a tax or like any license fee on anything. This is one way of getting at it because this top-down model we have of trying to invest in large-scale climate projects isn’t really cutting it. What we need is — how did the World Wide Web get built? It’s millions of people worldwide working decentralized. Nobody’s telling them what to do. They’re just writing a new blog about the Amazon or they’re loading pictures up on Facebook and talking about it. What we really want is, I think, what we have up on these websites. They’ve got more than a billion websites now and nobody has to check in. You just make a website. We want climate projects like that. We want a billion climate projects. We want them coming from the bottom up. VERSES is really a good tool to help in that. It can crowdfund. It can provide designs. It can provide online assistance. In this way, we might be able to release in the next decade to get an explosion of local, bottom-up climate change projects.
[00:10:00]
Dan: This is one way we maybe get to. You’re really deep into it at Regen. This is how we have to get there, I think, rather than with only the top-down model.
Gregory: Yes, I couldn’t agree more with pretty much everything you’re saying. There’s a couple of different ways the conversation could go at this stage. One thing we could do is talk more about — I have a set of questions because we’ve been working on something very similar — I think some similarities, some differences.
Dan: It’s going to be totally collaborative here in the next six months [crosstalk]
Gregory: I shutter of thinking about too deep of a partnership with ESRI. I love them and they can be so hard to work with sometimes.
Dan: They’ve actually been great.
Gregory: That is fantastic.
Dan: They have all the resources.
Gregory: They are undoubtedly the industry leader in GIS. We can talk a little bit about: what is the intersection between Regen Network and VERSES? Where are our collaboration points that are mutually exciting? We could talk about that. With this podcast, I like to get into a little bit of the deeper “why.” I think you did a really brilliant job at outlining the functional, how the planetary nervous system is creating itself through us as humans sort of as Teilhard de Chardin noosphere. I love the analogy of the autonomic nervous system. I think that that’s brilliant. Clearly, there’s some deeper questions that start to arise. We can see what the analogy of autonomic nervous system — sometimes our nervous systems go haywire. Sometimes our immune systems can go haywire. Some of the devil’s advocate questions that come up that I think are really great to dispense with quickly so that then we can move on to the deeper collaborative “how” and the grassroots, open-source “let’s get some shit done” mix to all of this. The questions that arise for me are: what are the checks and balances? What do we need to learn from the way that living systems create automatic functions and the risk of that? What are the risks of creating a planetary, digitized, autonomic nervous system, if any? I think some of our listeners who are techno-skeptical may have images of Skynet and Terminator. What are your thoughts about that?
Dan: It’s totally similar to the thermostat in your house. [inaudible 00:13:17] 72 degrees. If you set the thermostat, you don’t really have to go and be putting logs in the fire or doing all this stuff all the time. We know enough about the health of the planet that we can set the thermostats collectively in a way that leads to health. The real issue is — can we do it any worse than we’re currently doing it? I think we have a president in the White House who’s cutting the EPA and firing scientists. I mean, come on. Anybody contributing, I celebrate. Everybody bring you’re A game — we’ve got a problem here on the planet. This is an emergency room problem, not a long-term, “think things” strategy problem.
Gregory: Yes, I couldn’t agree more. One of my friends oftentimes says, “If you stab your mother with a knife, it’s not good enough to take it halfway out.” You have to take it all the way out and go to the emergency room right now. You don’t have time to be like, “Oh, it was an accident. I tripped.” Whatever the circumstances of how it happened, you act now, swiftly. I agree with that. I was having this conversation and I was pointing out that I identified four major paradigms or approaches for addressing the climate crisis, the first being top-down policy. I think that in some way, the climate movement right now, the youth climate movement and what Greta’s doing is sort of saying, “Hey everybody. We have democratic institutions. Let’s pressure them into take the appropriate action to generate top-down policy change. We need to do this now.” Okay, great. You can’t argue with that. That’s number one. It’s problematic in certain ways. Because, as you noted, it doesn’t unleash the grassroots agency of billions of people to take action and be creative.
Dan: That is part of it.
Gregory: Then, number two is opt-out. It’s sort of like, create a permaculture farm, join an ecovillage. Don’t buy anything from anybody who’s doing anything that’s questionably detrimental to ecosystems or the biosphere.
Dan: We support those people too.
Gregory: Exactly, but also unlikely to result in the kind of transformation that’s needed in the timeframe that is needed.
Dan: That’s correct, but at least they’re no longer contributing to the problem.
Gregory: Number three is this spiritual paradigmatic transformation of consciousness, which is sort of hundredth monkey.
Dan: Hugely important.
Gregory: We need to get to this place where people will operating from a paradigm in which it’s so blatantly obvious that this zero-sum game bullshit leading to degradation of the very life-giving foundation of our civilization is just seems silly and nobody will do it because we’re just more enlightened than that.
Dan: I would say the percentage of people that are awakening to this issue is higher today than it was 20 years ago. No doubt about it. We are way too cautious than during Silent Spring back in 1957 when nobody was aware. It’s grown.
Gregory: It created a watershed. EPA was created out that movement. That’s really important.
Dan: I think there’s advances on that front as well, and education is part of it. Part of it is the spread of mindfulness, meditation and all kinds of things. Absolutely. It’s global. You even see indigenous tribal leaders and the members in the Amazon really speaking up, getting a voice, and using technology, sharing their vision with the world. There are things happening at that level as well, where it’s an awakening, I would say on a planetary basis. We still got over 50% but it’s growing.
Gregory: Yes, exactly. The last — which I think as you’re noting and I definitely agree with — this is a “all hands on deck” situation. They are not mutually exclusive. The last paradigm that I’ve identified is, I think, what some people mistakenly refer to as a market approach. I think a market is part of it. Markets are part of it. I’m struggling to name it exactly, but it’s more like re-engineering the rules of the game. That shows up through financial instruments or it shows up through the technological infrastructure that people connect. We can refer to it as a market approach for now, but I have the sense that there’s something deeper than that.
Dan: It really is a change in the way that we’re operating with our economies.
Gregory: Yes. It is addressing the fundamental economic relationships, the flow of information.
Dan: It’s the triple bottom line idea. It’s just like profits first and everything else be damned. Of course, the planet’s going to get ruined.
Gregory: I oftentimes think of it and I’m curious how this resonates with you. In a way, it’s more about defining what profit means.
Dan: I completely agree, of course. Absolutely, you’ve got to test our planetary accounting.
[crosstalk]
Dan: You want to pollute this river? If you have a million dollars, be my guest. You’ve got to pay. Really quick, you watch as behavior changes really fast. With all the talking, there’s nothing. If you actually put an accounting to it, cool, there’s a tax for that.
[00:20:00]
Gregory: To me, three’s two major questions here that we face every day at Regen Network because I think we’re working in parallel and slowly converging ark versus in Regen Network.
Dan: I agree, yes.
Gregory: There are two challenges that I see. One is technological which I actually think is not as big of a challenge really. We have all the tools to do what we need to do in terms of this planetary nervous system, come planetary accounting system, come planetary knowledge infrastructure. What the bigger challenge is, is the buy-in from a critical mass of the market that leads to appropriately pricing the environmental good, service and functions.
Dan: That’s part of it. I think there’s another thing, another category that we don’t have and that nobody’s really ever imagined could be possible. That would be an empowerment category where towns and villages and tribes and whatever, suddenly have access to. There used to be a really lovely catalogue called the Whole Earth Catalogue.
Gregory: Yes, I remember the Whole Earth Catalogue.
Dan: The subtitle of the Whole Earth Catalogue was “access to tools.” What they did was, they did like moving reviews or whatever, of every tool on the planet and how it could be used for sustainability and other kinds of things. Where do we get it and at what cost? This is a beautiful catalogue of advanced tools. They still do some of that work. Kevin Kelly at Wired still puts up a kind of an access to tools in the spirit of the Whole Earth Catalogue. What I want to do, and what VERSES can do, is unleash the combination of crowdfunding and crowdsourcing at the climate level. If we could do that, it would be incredible. I think in 2017, there was this new idea of ICOs. They weren’t very well figured out. A lot of them were bad. Some of them were great. Within the span of 12 months, 60 billion dollars was raised for all bunch of blockchain projects all over the planet. It was remarkable. It was one of the biggest [unintelligible 00:22:48]. There was more money being spent by just average people to launch things than all the VCs combined.
Gregory: Yes, it’s amazing. Imagine that pointed at the climate.
Dan: There you go. That’s all I’m saying. The SCC came down and said, “That stuff is no good.” Their grandmothers are losing their money. I think we’ll find a mechanism and we’re working with lawyers on this where we can unleash proper global crowdfunding for climate projects. We protect it with boards of advisers and things like that. The problem that the SCC had with ICOs is three people would just write the whitepaper and say, “Hey, we’re going to build this thing.” They get 20 million dollars and they just go like, “Well, we got the 20 million. Why bother to build the thing?” It was a kind of a scam. If we properly define the governance models around these ICOs and observe them, then I think we could really see that same application that we saw with the ICOs, but around climate because everybody cares. They just feel totally frustrated and disempowered. “What can I do?” is overwhelming, so then they just put it out of their minds and go to work. We give them easy mechanism, “Look, you can crowdfund. There is a town if you’re in Kenya or a town in Alabama that wants to put in a solar array. It’s 300 thousand dollars. We’re going to tokenize the thing and crowdfund just like we did with ICOs. Now, we’re going to create a global power company. Anybody that owns the tokens owns the power company. Then, suddenly you might have billions of dollars pouring in to build microgrids all over the planet and the locals connect with who built them and run them. We paid for them in tokens and you get this new token power economy that’s totally clean and sustainable. There is a lot to unpack there but I want to just give you that sense that all I’m really trying to communicate is, “Hey, you saw some interesting behavior in 2017 around the ICO model. Let’s harness that and aim it at the climate.” There’s a lot of details in there, legal work and other kinds of things, and government structure, but those are solvable. Let’s capture that behavior. That’s what I’m trying to say.
Gregory: Yes. What I’m hearing is that you’re identifying that there’s blatant desire, demand even, for action and participation and investment. There’s a lot of citizens of the world that are happy to chip in 5 bux or 500 bux or 5000 bux into a variety of different projects, especially if they have a stake in the success.
Dan: If anything, you can run it just like Kickstarter. Kickstarter is amazing. They put it on Kickstarter and had luck. We’re really trying to build this thing. It’s really cool. Even the virtual reality company, Achilles, started on Kickstarter. He went on there and said, “Look, I figured out a way to make virtual reality pair of goggles for under a thousand dollars. They were 10 thousand dollars pretty much at this time. I can make one for 500 bux. If you’ll give me money now, I’ll ship you guys the first ones for 300 dollars, at half price. Then I’ll sell them for 600 later.” Then he went to get 15 thousand dollars to get all the parts together to build it. Everybody went, “What? Virtual reality goggles for 300, 400 dollars?” He raised 2.5 million on Kickstarter. Then he went on and got himself a proper building, a proper team, and they started to build these things. Some venture capitalists [unintelligible 00:26:49] There was a lot of interest. He raised 2.5 million on Kickstarter. That indicates that there is a market for this. “We’ll give you another 20 million.” Then, “Oh, wow. Now we can build better and get better real engineers and more RND.” The thing grew. Then, somebody said that Mark Zuckerberg one day about a year or so in, said, “Hey, there’s a kid down the street here making these virtual reality goggles. You want to go and take a look at it?” Curiosity, he’s a tech guy. “Yes, let’s go see.” He went over and Mark puts the [unintelligible 00:27:20] goggles on and it’s like Ready Player One. It’s a beautiful 3D world. Mark just sees friends going to night clubs to hear the best DJ play and whatever. He’s going like, “Oh my god. No more of them will ever come to Facebook again once they get to this.” He bought the company for 2 billion dollars before they even got the product out practically. I’m just saying we’ve got to unleash that kind of stuff because without that original 250 thousand dollars which became 2.5, he would never have started the company. It was too weird of an idea. He had to go to other nerds out there that saw what he saw and give them 300 dollars each rather than to a VC saying, “Hey, I need 10 million dollars or 2 million dollars.” They would go, “No, no. You can’t make virtual reality goggles like that.” [inaudible 00:28:14] On the website, it’s crowdfunding. On the other side is crowdsourcing. Local people go like, “Here’s our biggest climate issue in our town or in our area. We’ve got a polluted river. We’ve got this plant upstream that’s making paper and dumping it into the river” or “We’ve got to use diesel generators to make our power” or whatever it is. They are pretty nose up on like a climate Kickstarter. Here is our project that we want to get funded. Then, people all over the world can go, “I’m into that.” Crowdfunded. Then, because of tokenization, which is weird new thing but a really critical part of all this, the tokens work two ways. One: by buying the tokens, they give the people the money so it’s not just a donation. They’re giving something almost like stock in it.
Gregory: They give some sort of unique digital identifier of their participation.
Dan: Yes, that could go up in value over time as more people use it.
Gregory: Maybe tradable [crosstalk]
Dan: It might even be a very good investment. I think if we do two things: one, we lower the barrier to actually contributing so crowdsourcing the problems so I can look on there and go, “I like that.” You know, I was down in Brazil last year in Florianópolis and they want to build a microgrid. I mean, I’ve got friends there. [unintelligible 00:29:48] Invest. That’s one level. Lower the ease of supporting the climate projects all over the planet so we get the billion projects.
[00:30:00]
Dan: Secondly then, I’m not just giving them money. They are actually giving me tokens. This little thing called bitcoin started 10 years ago. It went from zero market cap. Today, it’s nearly 200 billion in market cap. If I had bought a bitcoin when it was 10 cents, if I had bought 10 bitcoins at 10 cents for a dollar — because it was 10 cents at the time — that would be worth 100 thousand dollars today. Cryptocurrencies are very interesting. If you build a service that more people want to use, over time the value of the token rises. That’s a new form of stock investing in a way. If you’re building a global power company, let’s say, that’s microgrids that are spreading all over the planet. People are investing in them and they are being built. We’ve partnered with solar panel companies, and other kinds of things to put them together on these erector set kits. They get shipped right to the job site, and build cameras on them, and everybody’s helping. The local people build them and everything. It’s an awesome project. That’s amazing. You know what I mean? You really got something really extraordinary at that point. People all over the world can go like, “Okay, we need this for our building” and they can download it. Then, we’re co-investors with them. We co-own the power company in a way because we provided them money for the microgrid. Then as the user base grows, then the token value grows so we’re getting our money back. Even if we just break even, it’s awesome because we’re contributing like crazy. I think we’d do it even at a donation level if the [unintelligible 00:31:50] were low and we could see specifically where our money’s flowing. Tracking everything, tracking the money flows, is really critical. It’s another thing blockchains do well. They have an immutable record of what’s happening. It’s an open account right there. We could have an open record so if the money transfers to whatever, you see it all.
Gregory: Let’s dig in there a little bit. My understanding of VERSES is it is compatible with blockchain, but not blockchain. Meaning, your protocol can interoperate with many different blockchain protocols. Can you tell me a little bit about what the relationship between VERSES as like a name space and any given blockchain that people may be choosing to use as their immutable ledger? What’s the relationship there?
Dan: Absolutely. If you look at any computer, software, program, you basically have three levels to it. You’ve got the interface level that a human sees. That’s the front end of it. You’ve got the actual logic — hit this button, do this, save this, whatever. That’s the logic layer of the program. Calculate this, whatever it is. Then, you’ve got the data layer where you can store the results of what the program just did or hold up prior results and work on them more. It’s like a spreadsheet or anything. As we move through time, those three tiers change over time. In the 1980s the big breakthrough was a graphical user interface. When that came out, we had, instead of typing ”move to trash,” you actually would just pull it down to a little trashcan. Then it was [unintelligible 00:33:55] as well and then we got this graphical user interfaces. That was our interface. Then logically, it was Word and Excel and programs like that. Our data layer was our hard drive. We thought this was amazing because computers up until that time were really large-scale expensive things that companies own. You didn’t have a personal computer. Once you got a personal computer, now you can have it on your desk, and you’ve got compute power that only companies had prior to that. That was Steve Jobs’ and Steve Wozniak’s initial vision. It was like, “We’re going to unleash a revolution by giving everybody a computer.” Of course, this is a computer. I mean, this is not a phone. Phone’s like 5% of this thing. That’s the three tiers. You’ve got your interface tier. You’ve got your logic tier, and then you’ve got your data tier. Then, in the 1990s, we got the World Wide Web. All three tiers changed. The interface became a browser. The logic became a website. The data became the web server. Each time we think, “This is it. Wow, this is amazing. We not have only personal computers. We not only have email, and programs and everything, but now we have the World Wide Web. This is amazing. We can shop at Amazon, we’ve got Yahoo. We can google things up. We’ve got Wikipedia. This is pretty cool.” Everybody just thinks, “This is it. This is the way it’s going to be.” This means we made it. This is [unintelligible 00:35:28]. This is as good as it gets. Then Steve Jobs walks in one day and goes like, “I have this idea here. We can make a little tiny computer that you carry around in your purse or in your pocket. It’s got these new things on it called apps and you just touch the screen.” We’ve got a new interface. We’ve got a new logic layer, apps. We’ve got a new data layer, cloud. What’s cool is we still use the other layers. We’re still going to surf the web. We might go shop on Amazon or we might prefer to shop on Amazon on our laptop, so we’re on the web. Or we might still write a Word doc and then attach it to an email and send it to one of our friends writing a book or something. We still use all the tiers but 80% of our time is in the new tier. Now, these tiers change about every 15 years. Why? Because of the exponential market of technology — Moore’s Law, network speeds increase, chips speed increase — and we can do more. Since the iPhone was launched, that was in 2007, so it was about 12 years. Prior to that, we did the web, I think, in ’94. That was kind of 13 years. That was a big jump. The introduction of the personal computer was in 1980, so it’s about 14 years. The internet itself was created in 1969, so that was another 10, 12 years or so. We’re due for a change. Speeds double every 18 months or 12 months. Network speed’s so fast that we can get Netflix on our phones. We’re ready for a new three-set stack. What’s the new interface? What did Apple just announce and what’s all the excitement about? Augmented reality glasses. Virtual reality goggles. I mean, what is it about that? Oh, we have binocular vision developed over 500 million years since the Cambrian explosion. These are really valuable. We can build a three-dimensional world by just offsetting. These are 2D cameras but they offset by five degrees so we can build the whole world in 3D in our minds. Then, that’s the interface. We should have an interface for each offset by five degrees so that we can see everything in 3D because that’s the way we function and make decisions. We create pattern recognition so we’re really good at working in 3D space. The only 3D space that we could do up until now was inside a computer game but that was a dedicated game. [inaudible 00:38:15] computer because of the graphics chips. You’re moving characters around in a three-dimensional space without having to redraw it all the time. That became really easy over the last few years because it’s exponential. As you know, normal growth is one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. The exponential growth is one, two, four, eight, 16, 32, 64. When it goes around, it’s called going around “the knee.” When it goes around the knee, you’re starting to get a massive amount of change in short periods of time. That’s where we are right now. Now, we can take all that experience we have in computer gaming, all the experience we have in architecture and building our buildings all in 3D. All of our cars are designed in 3D. We can take all of that and all the special effects. The movies are all in 3D. We can now take all of that and bring it online. We couldn’t do it up until this moment. It really begins next year as this network speed continues to increase. We’ve kind of reached that threshold. You need a new protocol at that point to handle all of that new data. That’s the new three steps. The new interface is three dimensional. You can still see it on the 2D screens just like you play a 3D game in 2D, but if you’ve got glasses — wow — it’s fully in 3D. Augmented reality and virtual reality. Augmented reality is that you put a pair of glasses on and you still see the world, but now you can see things in the world. A holographic character could talk to you. In virtual reality, you put the goggles on and you don’t see the physical world anymore. You’re in an alternate world. It might be a Harvard school or you might be on the surface of Mars.
[00:40:00]
Dan: Those two assistants are coming on stream right now while we’re having this conversation. It’s one of the fastest-growing parts of the market. That’s the new interface tier and then the new logic tier. Obviously all three tiers change the same. They never stay the previous one. Then the logic tier moves from apps to smart contracts with artificial intelligence. AI really becomes an important part. You just open any Google thing and look at the news around tech. AI is number one. If you start off with the old original software created back in the 40s when they were trying to crack the enigma code in England, I mean, that was basically mathematics. Can you solve this problem for me? Of course, the computer could solve it way faster than a whole team of mathematicians. It was actually thousands of problems simultaneously. That logic tier, when you look at it, Alan Turing in 1946 went, “Oh, my gosh. These computers are going to equal human intelligence at some point in the future.” At the dawn, when they were just doing math, Alan Turing — we call it the Turing test — Alan Turing sitting there and he’s going, “Oh my god. This is an artificial brain.”
Gregory: The concept of Turing completeness is essentially that it would be possible if there was enough — arguably possible — if there was enough computing power behind it that the smart contract for instance, reaches an intelligent level. Is that an accurate way of restating something?
Dan: Yes, I think that’s fair enough. One of the arguments was, “Yes, computers can play in chess but they can’t beat the grandmaster.” That’s too subtle. Of course, they beat the grandmaster in 1995, Deep Blue. Chess is kind of mathematics. That’s not really a good test to see whether they’re smart, although it happened. I can tell that. It can never get into the subtleties of the English languages. Really, you could always tell. How about if we have it play Jeopardy against the Jeopardy champion? In 2012, it beat the Jeopardy champion with really subtle slang. You know how these Jeopardy’s questions are. Fill in and watch it just beat the two top Jeopardy champions. Then it beat the game of Go recently. All that’s really pointing out is that intelligence stared out with: one plus one equals two. What’s the square root of 49? Seven. That’s what the early computer did. From there to here is 70 years, and it’s beating us at chess and it’s exponential. It means it’s going around the knee of the curve. It’s beating us at chess now, but it’s obviously on a growth like that. Our intelligence is growing let’s say, at 5% a year, 10% a year as a human species, as our science and everything advances. The AI is probably growing at 50% a year. At some point, you’ll get the lines crossing there. Ray Kurzweil, who’s the head of R&D at Google, is calculating that AIs will probably cross human intelligence in 2029 or 2039, somewhere in the 2030s-2040s.
Gregory: As an individual or collective?
Dan: Individual. Individual first and then collective second.
Gregory: What’s your take on this debate and argument between folks like Elon Musk who are like, “Hey everybody, this is alarming and scary and may foretell the end of humanity as we know it” and other people who are more optimistic like, “Hey, this is fantastic. These are great. This is a great opportunity for all of us to get smarter together.”
Dan: I obviously come down to the second half of that. Remember that Plato was concerned about reading. He thought that reading was a bad idea because it could lower our long-term memories.
Gregory: That’s true.
Dan: I’m just saying, but the tradeoff was worth it.
Gregory: It’s hard to know. I’ve been privileged to meet some human beings in my life who were at least raised in a non-literate context with lots of storytelling and lots of hands-on engagement with their world, loved and nurtured not in what we would think of as poverty but an intentional, mythopoetic richness that allowed their brains to fully actualize. Then, they learned to read later. It’s not necessarily either-or, but man, I am blown away.
Dan: I’ve learned a lot from books. I’m really grateful that we have reading. If I had to count on oral traditions to get all my knowledge [crosstalk]
Gregory: Yes. I’m not arguing that. I am making a point that there’s human potential [crosstalk] experienced. It’s amazing.
Dan: I’m not arguing that. What I’m really saying is the metaphysical question 100, 150 years ago was of god. Do you believe in god? Is there a god? The metaphysical question today is — is there evolution? Do you believe in evolution? Do you believe that your life, that this human body which now archeologists and paleontologists have figured out how it popped up here on the planet around 2,000 years or so ago. Before that, it can trace the fossil record all the way back to the Cambrian explosion 500 million years ago. It’s filling in pretty nicely. We see the tree of life pretty clearly. Now, is that a product of evolution? Yes, of course. We understand evolution. Charles Darwin wrote a wonderful book about it and we validated it over time. Evolution’s happened. We’re the chips in one of the branches of the tree, right now, of life? We’re the high-end state of evolution. My question is metaphysically: do you believe this is stopping us or is evolution still coming through our hands right now? I think it comes through our creations, in the way it works in the world and the way it works in all evolutionary activities. It tries to tempt things and one of them works and then it uses that pathway to go forward. There were many, many other inhabitant species other than us. Denisovans. Then, the Neanderthals were around. The combination of the human brain and body was just right. It was just [unintelligible 00:47:28]and we obviously flourished like mad. Now of course, that’s a problem. We’ve got to count on the evolution of our minds to solve the problem because we’re so good at exploiting every environmental niche on the planet. We’re actually nature destroying the planet.
Gregory: Yes, I mean, there’s a couple of different branches there in that conversation. We can get into evolutionary determinism or whatnot, but I’m actually interested in taking a step back to something I said earlier. If our creations, if the technology itself, starts to take on essentially the qualities of life — by that I mean it is evolutionary and it is evolving first with our support and then maybe on its own accord — then we have a relationship with that. Another premise here just to weave into this question as it’s a little complex. Premise: Charles Darwin never said “survival of the fittest.”
Dan: Yes, I agree.
Gregory: He said, “survival of the fit.” What he meant by that was — how well do organisms cooperate and fit into their environment?
Dan: He also said, “it’s not the strongest. It’s not the smartest. It’s not the fastest. It’s the ones that adapt to the changing circumstances.”
Gregory: Exactly. What does it look like in your mind’s eye, for humans as individuals and as a society to adapt to this new — we might say Cambrian Explosion — level of change that is being precipitated right now?
Dan: I think you captured something really important that a lot of people are missing. That is, this is very similar to 1500 and the explosion of ideas in the Renaissance. It was science, it was art, it was new ideas and religions, philosophy, writing, you name it. It was this beautiful flowering that happened. Honor the past, move into the future, respect the Greeks; respect that time got the great teachings from the past that brought them forward. Understandings about where we are in the world and heliocentric theory and the rest of it. It was really a beautiful moment. We’re just talking about the Renaissance.
[00:50:00]
Dan: Oh, my god. It’s kind of a second Garden of Eden almost. We’re at the [unintelligible 00:50:05] of another Renaissance, no doubt. I completely agree with you. If we’re doing it right, this is the next Renaissance and it will make the last one look like kindergarten. This is an explosion of ideas and qualities, breakthroughs in health and genetics, stem cell work, and CRISPR. It’s just unbelievable what’s pouring out aside from what’s happening in the information side. Of course, a lot of our ideas are now becoming information and information grows exponentially. That was Ray Kurzweil’s great insight in his wonderful book The Singularity Is Near. I really recommend it to everybody. He’s got a lot of great data in there. You can argue it’s the exponential economy that we’re stepping into. That’s a good name for it. An easier name for it is “superabundance” but superabundance that actually doesn’t damage the planet. That’s the game we’re playing right now. What happened, if you go back to 1400, before the Renaissance, life was tough in Europe.
Gregory: I think it’s important to also acknowledge that arguably, if you just look at the economic foundations of the Renaissance were essentially the “rape and pillage” of the new world and the death of millions and millions of indigenous people. That’s what fueled the economic prosperity that was the foundation for the Renaissance. I don’t say that to undermine what you’re saying, but I say it to insert that foundation of reality. Is that analogy going to be true in this transition right now? Do we have to somehow go through some sort of violent upheaval or metabolize some part of the world?
Dan: I don’t think so.
Gregory: Why not, Dan?
Dan: Sometimes it’s helpful to talk through analogies. In 1970, one of the largest organizations in the world was the US Post Office. If you put all the post offices together all over the world, [inaudible 00:52:27] Europe, China, and everywhere else, that was a massive, massive project all over the planet. Every town had a post office, trucks, mail moving all over the place, airlines. I mean, a lot of the airlines had started as mail carriers because they [inaudible 00:52:46] the contract. It’s a vast thing — billions of dollars, hundreds of thousands of people all over the planet. It’s an amazing, amazing thing. Then, some people at Stanford and UCLA and a few other places said, “We have this idea. If we had something like a network of networks, we’d call it the Internet. We could send messages over it for free anywhere in the world in real time.” They launched four computers in 1969 to test the idea. Obviously, that’s grown a little bit since then. I don’t know. We’ve maybe, probably got like 10 billion computers minimum today, fiber-optic cables all over the planet, satellites all over the planet. This Internet is the largest undertaking humanity’s ever undertaken by far. It makes NASA look like the high school science project. That’s a massive global undertaking that’s happened. This is hard to remember because we’re kind of like fishing in the ocean. We live and we’re like, “Oh yes, the Internet.” No, no, no. Historically, if you pull back and look at the lens of history, we started this with four computers in 1970. There’s no one incorporated. There’s no large corporations driving this. This is not Apple or Google. They are the products of the internet. The Internet is decentralized. Nobody’s in charge of it. It just grows. You can go buy a computer and plug into it today. You can build a website today. You don’t have to ask for any permission.
Gregory: You can lay some line and plug to [crosstalk] ISP.
Dan: You can make your hard drive available to other people to store information. It’s amazing. A lot of people don’t get the radicalness of that because the most important thing about the Renaissance wasn’t the “rape and pillage” of the new world. That was just a product of cultures coming into contact for the first time and having all the normal things that hadn’t happened in the previous five million years. They are Neanderthals. People just battle things out. That’s just the way it works. The most important part of the Renaissance was in 1450 they invented the printing press. In 1450 there were nine million people living in Europe. Nine million people. How many of those people read? There were no book stores. There were no schools in 1450. I mean, they didn’t go to school. You were a farmer or you were a soldier. If you’re a kid and you’re growing up, and you just start working at a farm or you join the army. There wasn’t a lot of options. There were no bookstores that you would go around the corner to buy a book. Books cost 50 thousand dollars or more. They were hand-done by scribes. If you’re a royal family, you might have a small library, but it took a scribe a year to three years to write a book and give it to you. In today’s terms, even at 30 thousand a year, that’s a 90 thousand book [inaudible 00:55:45] in three years. Books were pretty rare. The church had them. Royal families had them. There were no bookstores. People didn’t read. They were not literary. The printing press started in 1450 to make Bibles. By 1500, there were 20 million books in circulation in Europe and people were reading like crazy and learning to read. Literacy was growing rapidly and it created the foundation for scientific revolution and breakthroughs, even the compasses and everything that was needed to travel around the world. Fifty years ago, this time, there’s four computers that were fired up. The Internet began. Royals [unintelligible 00:56:32]. Fifty years ago today. Almost literally today. Probably. It was in 1969 so it’s been fifty years. Guess what’s coming again — another freaking Renaissance. Will we have tremendous dislocation and strangeness? Yes. We probably will. It takes a while to sort it out. Picasso had this great quote, remarkable. He had his blue period. Then he went into his cubist period or whatever the names of the periods were. He said, “When I was ending one phase of my art and feeling drawn into this next era or chapter,” he said, “the paintings in there were kind of ugly. It took me a while to figure out how to make them beautiful.” He says, “But now I’m an old man,” he said, “that those are my favorite paintings.” The crossover is so difficult and beautiful and strange and brings so much out of you, and we evolve a lot through that. As we create superabundance on the planet, because that’s what happened even in the Renaissance, as we have machines now, 3D printers, we’re going to be able to print a house in like 10 or 15 years. It’s just taking the turn out of the ground and converting it with various kinds of nanotechnology or whatever. You can build a beautiful home that would cost like two million dollars today, probably for 20 grand — maybe 200 thousand max — but certainly, way, way less.
When Gutenberg did the printing press [inaudible 00:58:15] dollars. When I put a book online, now that book is free. Millions of people can read the book for free, and a good point for me to plug my new book. I wrote a book called The Spatial Web about all this. By the way, you can get it on Kindle for 99 cents. It’s not a huge hammer. What that does is that I’m able to give millions of people my book for a dollar, or free at some point. What does that do? We used to spend — I don’t know — a lot of money on CDs. All of us who are into music, we calculated how much we have. We’d go buy like five CDs and we wanted another 50 of them, because there was such great music but we couldn’t afford it. Now, boom. Every song in the history of the world is on Spotify and Amazon and all these music services available for us at a pretty low subscription fee a month, of like 10 bux. What’s happening is digitization is lowering the cost of things. The next generation and the Greta generation and I would say the 15 to 30-year-olds right now are becoming less interested in buying new things than in having experiences. They’re really coming to that realization and part of it is ecological awareness. They realize that, “Hey, buying more stuff doesn’t really help the planet,” subconsciously maybe even. More than that, they’re starting to change their values. It’s not about surrounding yourself and keeping up with the Joneses and having a bigger house and a bigger car.
[01:00:00]
Dan: It’s really about becoming a bigger person. Travel and learning and meditating — I mean, meditation is huge right now — mindfulness and other kinds of things. I just wanted to say I think that there is that shift.
Gregory: That’s all great. My next question, and then I want to bridge back into the cooperation between Regen Network and VERSES.
Dan: Yes sure, great.
Gregory: My last question in this line is: if you were going to give advice to maybe someone in that 15 to 30 year age bracket or maybe even better to the parents of someone whose child has been just born — what advice would you give as far as what is it going to mean to be human and how do we prepare ourselves for being fit and cooperative? When I say fit, like actually fitting the world that is becoming.
Dan: I think the novel Neuromancer was written by William Gibson, and he has one of the greatest quotes. He goes, “The future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed.”
Gregory: Yes, that’s a great quote.
Dan: Yes, it’s a great quote. The Dalai Lama is the Dalai Lama. He’s setting a mark out there. It’s people like that — whether they’re Nobel Prize winners or whether they’re great artists or whatever — they’re drawing the line out there for evolution to drive toward. Dalai Lama is running around the planet teaching compassion and how to handle anger and how to work together and how to live in community. I think obviously, these kinds of principles are the new principles. We’re being driven to them because it’s the only way that we’re going to survive. It’s how we got here originally. If the humans came onto the planet roughly 200-something thousand years ago, for 195 thousand years of that time we were hunter-gatherers. It’s only really been in the last five thousand years we invented agriculture. We discovered it maybe 8 or 10 thousand years ago, but it wasn’t widespread until four or five thousand years ago. Then this modern mass production capitalist society only really began in 1500, and it’s been really active in the last 200 years. In a way, you could argue that in the grand scope of our lives, these anomalies where we learn how to exploit the planet in various ways — one by growing things and the other by digging things out of the ground or making steel, oil or making gasoline and that kind of thing — that that phase may be passing. That was a short-term period that we went through until we evolved up out of it. One of the fun things I tell people is, “Just watch a bunch of Star Trek movies and look how we are.” There’s a Gene Roddenberry kind that shows the best of humanity, where we’re very open-hearted. We really don’t interfere with other people. You help where you can, and that kind of thing. I think Gene Roddenberry was a really great artist around that, drawing some lines into the future. This is what’s possible for humanity. Starships. We can be free of [unintelligible 01:03:39]. Nobody is going hungry in our society. Everybody’s getting taken care of. If you look at your human body, when you eat food, every cell in your body participates in your nutrition. We need a nervous system for that. That’s why we invented VERSES. You’ve got that. Now, with all these exponential technologies we have — like blockchains and like cryptocurrencies and like artificial intelligence and like virtual reality — with all these beautiful exponential technologies, finally, we’re being able to all work together and we direct them toward where we had that thermostats set at 72 degrees to even maybe 74 if we don’t want to heat up the house that much. Then, we’ve got an interesting new game we can play with each other here and we are historically. They’ve done these studies on humanity and we’re basically pretty altruistic. We’re actually really good people. We really like to work together for things. When you really pull back and look at it, we’re a bunch of really good, altruistic people governed by psychopaths. The altruistic people. There was a thing in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that said the middle class never understood the power of the moment when they could really change everything. Clearly, it’s everything we’ve been talking about — the points you brought up and the points I brought up — it’s this handshake between awakening, education, spiritual development, being more sensitive, being more compassionate, caring for the earth more, understanding the danger signs.
Signs are all over the world going, “Hey, there’s a billion less birds in North America right now than there were 50 years ago.” What? No. What? No, no, no. Bees are having hives collapse problems. Coral reefs are bleaching. The signs are there. If you went to see a doctor and you had all of these splotches all over your body [unintelligible 01:05:38]. You need to stop what you’re doing and let’s come down. Let’s get you on the proper nutrition and bring you back to health. The planet is definitely giving all those signs. I feel like this is that moment where we are awakening and we’re getting all these signs. Young people are getting it first because they’re going like, “Hey, you guys are out of here in 10 or 20 years. [unintelligible 01:06:07] The house is practically gutted, so wake up and help us to save this planet for us and our children. We’d like to have what you had.” I think that that voice is going to come from young people as they’re trying to see it. I think it’s extraordinary. People like you and I that are working in these areas, obviously, we’re part of the generation that’s causing the problem, but we’re voices in our generation that can speak about it as intelligently and as articulately as we can, trying to build things that might be helpful and then join our technologies together collaboratively so that we get to scale our capabilities. You know things I don’t know and I know things you don’t know. As we combine our tech, then suddenly it’s synergy. One plus one makes five.
Gregory: Yes, let’s make that arithmetic work out. I think this podcast is subscribed to by people who are at this intersection of technology and economics and the ecological imperative of our day. Most of us are proponents of and participants in the open-source movement. What does it look like to engage with VERSES as an open-source project? How can Regen Network and others be engaging with VERSES Foundation, VERSES Labs? What is ideal for you all to drive towards the potential that you’re seeing for this technology?
Dan: Yes, thanks Greg. Yes, absolutely. I’ve been fielding this project for a long time. I’ve been saying for a long time that until we can charge the right price for trees, we’ll keep getting [unintelligible 01:07:59]. Then, we got the toolkit to do that. That’s one of the driving forces behind VERSES. What we did is we recognized that the World Wide Web was really built on in so many ways. Nobody can own it. [inaudible 01:08:16] profit foundation. Anybody’s free to use them, HTTP and HTML. It’s open-source and they are evolving. They’ve got teams of people all around the world around them suggesting improvements and upgrades. It’s evolving. It’s an evolving system and it’s not owned by Apple or Google or Facebook or anybody like that. Therefore, I can see the web from my iPhone or my Android phone or my laptop or millions of other kinds of devices. Whereas at the app level, they are captured by the operating system of the phone so Apple apps run on Apple phones and IOS but they won’t run on an Android phone. I have to rewrite my code to run over there and find my developer. I’ve got a separate set over there and they don’t talk to each other. When we start putting on glasses, then I’m looking around the world. I can see only see some of the things because my glasses are only compatible with — no, no, no. It’s got to be an open source. We created the VERSES Foundation with the protocols in the foundation free to use for anybody in the world. Then, because we built the protocols, we know how to build tools to use them. You don’t have to use our tools. You can write your own tools. We said, “Hey, WordPress is a way easier way to make our early website than start with a raw HTML code.” We said, “Why don’t we build some tools to help people build applications on the protocol?”
Gregory: It’s sort of like the classic red hat model.
[01:10:00]
Dan: Yes, it’s red hat. It’s an open-source and then red hat says, “Hey if you want to run a cloud service of the football field size warehouse full of computers, that open source probably doesn’t have the support and other kinds of things around it that would be needed.” We’re the red hat so we take the open-source that’s free and we’ll build tools around it to help you manage five thousand computers if you’re a service center. We did exactly that. We created VERSES Labs and then we built tools. Then, we partnered with the ESRIs of the world, the unities of the world and the other really cool companies doing things in the world and anybody.
We have an open model. We work with every blockchain. We work with every AI. We work with every AR, VR device. We talked to all the IFTs. If you look at our board, we’ve got people from IoT. We’ve got people from AI. We’ve got people from the blockchain. We’ve got people from VR. We’ve got people from robotics. We’re partnering with the edge technology, not specifically, but in general, so that any edge technology works any other edge technology. That’s a handy tool. Now, it’s up to the developers of the world to figure out what to do with that cool tool. We’re not telling you what to do with it. Obviously, Regen could take that tool to do things with it. General Motors can use that tool and do things with it. Whoever uses the tool, what we have found is they tell it makes their companies more sustainable to be able to do more with less because that’s what tools do. That’s why we have a shovel. Digging by hand isn’t as good. The shovel gives you some [unintelligible 01:11:30] there.
The tool, even when it’s used by traditional companies, will actually make them more sustainable over time. We think it’s a pretty cool tool. Basically, VERSES Lab builds the tools and VERSES Foundation provides the protocols. In that way, they’re not owned and controlled by us because they need to be separate and in their own world surrounded by loving technologists that are trying to make it work better for everybody. That way we modeled it exactly after the original World Wide Web. Then, you get companies that would normally be competitive. Let’s say that I’ve got glasses from Apple over here and I’ve got glasses from Magic Leap over here and I’ve got glasses from Microsoft HoloLens over here. Now, with VERSES, they can all see the same thing.
Gregory: Right. Just like with Chrome or Safari and the same being true with the blockchain, whether you’re running Ethereum or some side-chain of bitcoin or Cosmos or whatever it might be.
Dan: Just for clarity, that’s a real key point. Blockchains are obviously going to be an extraordinary thing in human history. They’re still young. They still have flaws, but they are evolving every year. We know Ethereum Two is coming, Lightning Networks and all kinds of things for bitcoin and other kinds of XRPs. We are all evolving and growing. By 2025, we’ll probably be reaching a pretty nice level of maturity. The problem is, if I’m a big organization — whether I’m a non-government organization or a government organization or a privately held company — this blockchain thing, it’s interesting but I want to experiment with it. What we did when we did our stack, we called it data layer. That’s just a data layer. You can have a mix of 10 different blockchains doing 10 different things. One for identity, one for land titles, but you can also still be pulling things from your cloud. The logic is just going, “Go find me that information. Get that data.” That data just happens to be on a blockchain so you can go and get it. You as a developer now can build without having to commit to one blockchain forever. You can just plug blockchains in. “Oh, this new thing just came out. Wow” or “IOS says it is a big breakthrough. Wow.” Use it.
Gregory: What programming language is VERSES predominantly written in?
Dan: The ways that you develop on it would be in normal Java, JavaSript, C. You’ve got a lot of tools because it’s like a middleware layer. You’re not actually coding on the blockchain. You’re up here coding your application which then uses blockchain technology or AR, VR, or not. You use whatever edge technologies you want. You can start simply like any normal MVP type of minimal viable product application. Then, you can grow the thing over time. That’s how we see the migration to blockchains, the migration to the AI, the migration to AR, VR, the migration of robotics and IoT devices. They go slowly every time. The developers will learn and the companies and organizations will try things. Then, “That’s working. Great. Let’s do more of that.” That’s the path that evolution always takes. What we’ve got will unleash some of those evolutionary forces. That’s what tools do. When a new protocol drops, new things can form. Before the World Wide Web protocol, you couldn’t make Amazon, Google, Yahoo, Facebook and all these things. Before the iPhone dropped, you couldn’t view Yelp, Uber, Airbnb and all these things.
Spatial protocols, as they communicate, they unlock things that we can’t even imagine, services that brilliant, young people in Senegal or in New Delhi or wherever are coming up with and sharing with the world. That’s the exciting part of it all. I’m making the protocols completely independent of us so nobody has to call us to use them. That unleashes any friction there and by us just making better and better tools, then hey if they’re better than anything else that’s available and at a fair price, then yes, use these tools. If you can make a better tool, please go ahead and make it. It will advance the whole game for everybody.
Gregory: Now, in relationship to your partnership with ESRI, is that between the Foundation or VERSES Lab? Are you building open-source protocol stuff or are you integrating VERSES into their proprietary [crosstalk]?
Dan: What we’ve noticed is if you’re trying to do what’s smart and safe, then use ESRI maps. If you’re trying to manage a forest, whether it’s a rainforest, whether it’s in Canada or whatever, you’re using ESRI maps. They are the best in the world. They’ve got all the data. We call them and we say, “Hey, we’ve got this new idea called the spatial web open standards. We can link now your RGIS software — which is really used by everybody — to blockchains and to AI, to smart contracts and all that. Not only do you get information about what’s in the world, but when this is merged to this, it can trigger smart contract or this payment or alert this person, or when this IoT device reaches a level that sends an alarm, or whatever it is. That’s a whole new level of capabilities. We work with ESRI to provide VERSES capabilities to the 350 thousand organizations worldwide that use ESRI software. That’s why we like to work with them because they already have, they’ve got offices in 80 countries, and they’re on the ground in every area with all the resource managers. Here’s a new tool to extend it. That’s why we work with them. It just makes sense. We’re doing the same thing with Unity. The 70% of all AR, VR is made inside the Unity Game Mansion, whether that’s for medical or educational applications. It’s not just for gaming. By making our stuff work well with that, then all the people that are building things in Unity suddenly have all these new capabilities — blockchains, cryptocurrencies, new kinds of AI — to apply in their normal gaming framework without Unity having to go through the pain of making all that happen. It’s an open source and it’s an independent open standard so it’s spreading around the world so your project would have the best chance of having impact. VR and AR [inaudible 01:18:16] are called empathy technologies. The reason they’re called empathy technologies is because we’re still used to looking at 3D so when we put a pair or goggles or glasses on, we feel it more deeply. We think by modeling planetary issues and writing simulations on what it could be like in 10 or 20 years if we follow this path versus this path. We can help educate, help wake people up. A lot of people, we’re like hunter-gatherers basically. 195 thousand to 200 thousand years, we’ve been hunter-gatherers. How long do hunter-gatherers think of? They generally think six months ahead because they’re not thinking five years up as they love hand in glove with their environment. They know winter’s coming so they can store stuff for that, but they’re not having to think three or five years up. It’s real time as a hunter-gatherer. Here we are now. We’re doing things that will have ecological impacts fifty years up from now by current actions. We’re giving not enough action at the water level to stop that because it’s hard for us to think long term. That’s where simulations and virtual reality and media are really coming handy.
Gregory: That’s an exciting, I think, proposition as the ability for people to connect in a visual experience that’s scientifically accurate as to the consequences of different directions.
Dan: That’s the point, right there. Of course, yes. Now we’ve got real data.
[01:20:00]
Dan: A lot of people have children. At some level, you’ve got to face your kids and be like, “Okay, we’re down. We’re working to clean this up.” You know what I mean?
Gregory: I’ve got to run, speaking of kids. I’ve got to go grab my kid from his day school. It’s been such a pleasure to chat, Dan, and I look forward to — I want to follow up and have a more in-depth conversation about how we can start leveraging VERSES and the work that we’re doing. Really grateful that you took the time and grateful for your work.
Dan: Of course, I appreciate what you guys are doing. It has been great. I would say the baby’s just been born and first one recently. It was designed to come to life in 2020 in terms of the maturity of it. I would say the first quarter of 2020 on, it’s coming nice and strongly with SDKs for other people to use and develop independently. Right now, we’re having to build everything in partnership with people but pretty soon we can just provide the tools to anybody and make them do whatever they want with them. Then, we’ll work with you guys personally and brainstorm up great applications together and then deploy them.
Gregory: Yes, fantastic. Whether we plug in post SDK launch or if there’s a way — I mean, we’re actively working on ecological data layers all the time. If there’s a way that we can do that, that is technical and creates more. I know it’s always challenging. Sometimes it’s not beneficial. Sometimes it is. We can dig into that and I think it’s like a backlog [crosstalk]
Dan: You and I have a commitment to find them, the best way through that, and we’ll do that. Thank you so much. Really nice. Really enjoyed it. Peace up.
Gregory: Cheers.
