Hello, my name is Jamie Lemke, I'm a senior research fellow and associate director of academic and student programs at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. I'm here with my colleague, friend and former professor, Chris Coyne. Chris Coyne is a professor of economics and the director of graduate studies at George Mason University. He is also the associate director of the FA Hayek program for advanced study in philosophy, politics, and economics at the Mercatus Center. His most recent book is Doing Bad by Doing Good, Why Humanitarian Action Fails. Chris is here to talk with me a little bit about Austrian economics today, so thank you for coming in Chris. Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. Maybe you can just start by telling us a little bit about what Austrian economics is. Well, Austrian economics, as a school of thought, refers to the tradition that really began in the late 1870s, and it's traced back to Karl Manger, who published his book Principles of Economics in 1871. And Manger was one of three founders of what today we call the marginal revolution, which was a paradigm shift in economics, where economists moved from focusing on the labor theory of value to subjective value and the role that that played in individual decision making. And then from Manger, you have Eugen Bombavrik and Frederick von Wieser, who followed him and then up to Mises Hayek and more modern-day Austrians like Israel Kursner, Murray Rothbard, and Ludwig Lochman. Can you say a little bit more about that transition from a labor theory of value and more objective conception to the subjective? Well, prior to the marginal revolution, the standard kind of consensus around how economists or political economists viewed value was that the value of a good or service was dependent on the amount of effort or labor that went into either producing or securing that good or service. And what Manger emphasized, as well as the other two founders of the marginal revolution, but especially Manger, was that value was not some objective function or inherent in the good or service itself, but rather was dependent on the value attributed to it by other individuals. That is, it was in the mind of the actor. And so if you think about it, you or I or someone else might invest significant amounts of labor, resources, and effort in producing something. But less consumers, that is, other individuals value it highly, regardless of how much we invest, they will not purchase it or be willing to exchange a high amount of goods or resources to secure that good or service. And that's really what, in a fundamental sense, what it was all about. Subjectivism and what some people like Kersner call radical subjectivism or radical ignorance later on, which is related to that, is a hallmark of the Austrian school. One of the issues where the Austrian school really came to prominence was in the 1920s and the 1930s, the debate over the ability of people to be able to calculate and make economic decisions in the absence of a price system, a market system. Can you talk a little bit about the Austrian school's role in those debates? What today we call the economic calculation debate really started in the early 1900s. And the debate was a purely technical one. That is, a pure debate over economic theory. And on the one side is the name of the debate implies there was the socialist who wanted to nationalize the means of production. That is, in its original form, they wanted, the argument was that they wanted to completely eradicate private property and the unit of exchange, so money. And the argument was that in doing so, they could rationally plan economic activity such that you would either equal or outproduce what capitalism could produce. Capitalism, of course, being defined as the private ownership over the means of production. So the socialists argued that they could either equal production or outproduce, in terms of material wealth, what capitalism could do. But also at the same time overcome a variety of the ills of capitalism, so things like inequality, unemployment, business cycles, and so on and down the line. What Mises, and then Hayek came in and argued is that absent private property rights over the means of production, you would not be able to have exchange because you can't exchange things you don't own. Absent exchange ratios, which emerge out of exchange, by exchange ratios I mean prices, there is no way for economic actors to gauge the relative value of alternative resource uses. In other words, there is no way for economic actors to gauge the opportunity cost of using resources in one line of activity as compared to another line of activity, all of which are technologically feasible. So Mises, for instance, one of the things he said to paraphrase him is that planners wouldn't know if they should use platinum to make railroad tracks or to use it in jewelry, for instance. The reason we know how to use it is because producers of railroad tracks know it's too expensive to be used in that line of production, and the reason they know that is because of the price of it. Those prices are traced back to exchange, and so that's really the core of the debate. It ties directly back into that initial insight about subjectivism that Manker makes in the Marginal Revolution. So you have what might seem like a relatively abstract or theoretical exercise, this conversation about the origins of value, subjective or objective, that turns out to have these massive rural world stakes because you're talking about these grand social experiments in places like the Soviet Union. That's right, and so really what this all comes down to at its very core is really the wealth and poverty of nations. That is what allows a society or prevents members of a society from figuring out how to best use scarce resources to produce goods and services that they and other consumers value. That's really what, in some sense, what economics is about, but also what economic development in the broadest sense is about. And so this debate, which again many people simply kind of think of as a history of thought episode, which it was, and it's important on purely those grounds. But it also has a lot of relevance, real world relevance as you pointed out even today.


Hey, welcome to above life channel. Hi, this is Bridget All right, so today I'm gonna record a Sunday morning coffee episode for you with you Cheers. Yeah, I know it's early. It's so I have been doing this thing lately where I wake up in the morning early to go outside and see the sunrise and it's similar every day because of the kind of the landscape in front of me my trees and things and it's out in the front yard and It's just beautiful and today the clouds over here.  It's it's a very simple sky Today and it's just it's peaceful It's peaceful. So I will share it with you after this as long. I mean it changes so quickly That's the cool thing about the sky that I love. I love clouds and cloud pictures You know that if you watch me on Instagram, I do post quite a few cloud pics It changes so quickly the element of air really helps with swift Change doesn't it? Mm-hmm Yeah So a little bit of an update on this Sunday morning coffee with Bridget episode We're in July here as I'm recording this and yesterday on Saturday We just had our Celebration for my mother-in-law who made her transition in June this year into the afterlife and the family Just the real close family had a picnic and it was maybe I don't know 12 15 15 people I'm not even sure how many less than 20 and It was just so nice like I haven't been to a funeral or memorial service in years thankfully and I can't remember the last one. I've been to actually it's been a long time and It was outside at the cemetery and it was warm real warm and For the actual service kind of part the formal part and it was just very at first I was very I had a lot of Overwhelming the empath empathy place in the heart space and then I kind of moved into a Well, I looked I heard very clearly Trees the trees the trees and so if you've been following my work at all on fairy grasshopper Channel my YouTube channel, you know that I work with tree wisdom or a Celtic tree oracle the o-one and That's all about tree wisdom and so I looked at the trees and I just breathed in and I looked at the sky She breathed in and just really kind of centered myself in my my body now I was not Panicky because of the dead people. Let me be really clear the dead people Being in the cemetery. That's not the problem It was all the grief and mourning the sadness the mixed feelings the multitude of emotions the whole range of emotions as you would expect at a funeral That was felt there it would kind of come in like waves almost and It wasn't like waves like in the water. It actually felt like Sunwaves like you know when it's really really hot outside It almost feels like the heat kind of comes to you in waves like if you're moving or walking There's like pockets where it's not quite so bad and all of a sudden it kind of comes at you kind of in a wave Like that that's how it felt the air like the energy just felt like that kind of an air like a heavy hot air and And So yeah, so it was a living people the emotions of the living that were far more anxiety-provoking than the peace of the dead Interesting this man So I've thought about a lot of topics for whoops Sorry about that. I thought about a lot of topics today For our conversation for Sunday morning coffee, I have a lot I always get so much inspiration from sessions from channeling and I Would I Would like to talk I would like to talk about the privacy of death Or perhaps a better way to describe that would be the intimacy intimacy of death So we're gonna talk about death, but not in a morbid depressing sense. Okay We're gonna talk about it like how Where I live in Minnesota in the Midwest we have season changes So in the fall here come end of September early October the trees that you see behind me not the evergreens, of course They're always evergreen. That's the name, but the other trees that you see behind me They will turn Their leaves will turn color and then they will drop their leaves so they will die the leaves will die and They will fall off the tree They will decay and leave the tree and fall to the earth and become this mulch and compost and be accepted and received into the earth at some point and The trees are not dead They are dormant They go quiet they go within they resource their energy They conserve their energy and they resource it from within themselves when they need it as they need it We can learn a lot from trees So this is the death and rebirth cycle very obviously through nature So we get our cues from nature if we pay attention if we would actually listen or look to The natural structures of things like with sacred geometry and oh I should mention by the way If you don't follow me on fairy grasshopper YouTube You need to if you're interested in an intuitive stuff and learning about intuition learning about psychic stuff learning about Messages from spirit learning about how to interpret your own intuition. You need to just be on fairy grasshopper channel Because a couple of times a week I do videos that would help you learn and support your process. Okay, so Sacred geometry is found in nature and I actually have some videos coming Probably in the next couple of weeks I'm not sure when they're gonna be scheduled to share But that I've recorded about sacred geometry about grids and what does that mean? But my point is is that is in nature if we look to nature for our structure We'd understand that there are cycles even if you live in the part of the world that doesn't have such dramatic Changing of the leaves on the trees and then they fall to the ground and they're done with this cycle Making room for the new For the next cycle, right? When I was in the cemetery yesterday, I was feeling the energy of the evergreens of a standing below one I have some pictures. I took up just looking up at the leaves and how gorgeous the leaves were such in perfect Alignment with each other balancing each other out on both sides of the stem coming down from the leaf and how It was just this beautiful structured organized pattern that provided a sanctuary for me and as I am there Having these energy energy these connections with nature, which was beautiful Later on in the day when we went to the party or the picnic, which was so relaxing and almost felt kind of like a 4th of July Families just hanging out. It was just a beautiful relaxing summer day. It was just so perfect so perfect and And it got me to thinking and I had some deep conversations with some of my my husband's family and One woman in particular. She's a teacher and we had some really deep conversations and We talked about death just a bit. She asked me about when my mother-in-law died and If I helped her to cross over and I thought ooh, this is a really great opportunity to talk about death and My understanding and perspective of it now granted. I don't remember my death specifically in any other lifetime So I can't really stay from a first-person point of view. I can say however from a psychic medium point of view I've seen it many times in many ways through many perspectives of The afterlife and people who have died I've seen them share it in different ways And as you will know if you watch above-life channel and you watch other channeling channels other psychics You know that the perception of a of someone else's death Even when you're tapping in and seeing it through their eyes or their shared experience They're sharing an experience from their perspective with you Even psychic mediums get different variations of they see different things because we have access to different experiences within ourselves That the afterlife spirit taps into that's why people get a little different information or perceive things in a different way It's not that one person's right and one person's wrong. It's that there are different views like right now. I'm looking out at the sky It's gorgeous here. It's covered by the house the Sun, but I'm looking and I see those puffy clouds that look like cotton candies and I Think it's beautiful, but I would say oh no this idol. There's no Sun No, no no on this day at this moment. There's no the Sun isn't directly here I can you know, it's not beaming through there's no shadow. There's there's some light reflected So I I can make the assumption that the Sun is there But I can't tell you what color it is how big it is if there's other clouds in front of it What colors it's making in front of the sky if it's warm and hot by where the Sun is out I can't tell you that why because my perception is here So interesting just like with our perception of death and dying So my response to that was no I didn't help her transition or crossover You can I mean I I know that there are people and services and things Death coaches or death doulas and things that can help people transition, but let me tell you something I have a very very I Have I didn't realize this so much until recently, but I have a strong opinion about death And I said to this teacher friend. I said I believe that death is private I believe it is intimate it is between that spirit and their creator and their understandings and their life and their ever life after ever after life and I just think it's it's just like it's just like birth It's between that soul the timing the timing is between that spirit and the universe and That to me is sacred and it's intimate and it's private And I just respect that I totally respect that so I know so I said no I did that help her crossover because she was in a Situation where she was in hospice as you know if you watched my fairy grass upper channel I talked about this a few weeks back in great detail about like feelings and emotions and my perspective about it, but The For her my mother-in-law was extremely strong very strong wills very strong woman Just somebody to be really admired athletic this tiny little body that was Basically her bones were like chalk inside of her body seriously her vertebrae's her back was unbelievable I don't know how the woman could even stand up but she did and she walked and she moved and She had had back surgery at one point in her 70s and they had to stop because it was too much They were going to keep going all the way up her back And then she had some heart stuff show up and it was too long of a surgery So they had to stop and they couldn't do it again. They said they couldn't do anymore and She then continued to live another what 15 14 13 13 another to at least 10 plus years, right? Never complained never complained strong woman dealt with a lot of a lot of pain in her body A lot of pain in her body, but girls strong man. She did not complain. It's so impressive like that's so not me I get like a hang nail and I'm like And so It took her body like 10 12 days after She went into an unresponsive state like kind of like a comatose state with medication to that was helping to ease her pain and discomfort if she had any at that time and then But she was not you weren't able to communicate with her or talk to her anything like that and So There was some interpretations by there were some interpretations that potentially she needed help to cross over and so I Nobody reached like nobody reached out to me or asked me if I would help do that Which was nice because I didn't have to make the decision about that But what I know about that is that the family is Who the assistance is for so when you enter a hospice care situation? It's really for the family more than the person it's like To support the family, right and As we know people grieve differently I've talked about this to people grieve differently talked about this on fairy grass upper channel and We can't really we shouldn't we shouldn't really put ourselves into a position to grieve comparison grief or to proxy grief for someone else or to I mean grief needs to be authentic it needs to be Have room to be in a pure state in space and it has to be allowed to be expressed Individualized right some people get angry. Yes, I mean there's all these stages. We know. Yes, we know the pamphlets Yes, we've heard the stages of dying.  Like I don't know people Now I've had cases and I'm thinking about this back in my early days as a psychic medium doing mediumship sessions where It felt as though there were spirits or souls that didn't fully cross over and in that case Yes, you could assist them to transition, but to assist somebody to die to leave their body It's not a psychic thing. It's a love thing. It's a love thing. It's about loving them It's about loving each other in their presence. It's about Allowing their physical body the beauty of the time it needs to let go and release But her physical body needed time more time But the relatives as you can imagine were upset by how long it was taking for her to die like oh my gosh Do we make the right choice to doing hospice? Do we oh my gosh, you know kind of a thing She's this strong that what you know kind of a thing and so why is it taking so long? This is horrible well Because that's how long it takes it takes as long as it takes that's Different people have different experiences And the observation of the death process it's not very private sometimes it can be very voyeur-like or observationist and Confusing and complicated and you want to be with the person because you don't want them to be alone And yet most times like when I was checking in on this death process for my mother-in-law and sharing with my husband I'm like she's not even in her body, honey. I'm like she's out of her body She's just stand in there outside her body watching everybody else watch her like it's like so weird to her and She's courted to her body because her body isn't isn't dead yet because the body is miraculous It is stronger than we think it is with stronger than we believe it is So if you need to hear that your body is stronger than you think it is your body is stronger than you maybe even believe it So I'm not kidding you. I'm not kidding you and so She was courted to her body. She her spirit was there. She's fine. She wasn't suffering there was no suffering she'd already chosen to be done to be outside the body but The process for the body just took longer than expected and she was patient But the other relatives were and we're having a hard time because there was this there's like this assumption that dying or death is suffering Or it's painful or it's and it can be the dying process within us now think about how we die to ourselves Slowly sometimes when we withhold from ourselves the truth of who we are when we deny ourselves any dreams Desires or ambitions we might have only deny the intimacy that we have with other people and sharing What we want or what we'd like or what our interests are instead we curtail that based upon what we perceive the other person needs or wants from us This is true in the death process as well We are not supporting the other person through their death We are supporting and we are creating an environment co-creating an environment for ourselves to mourn while they are living and prepare for their death That's what that process is like the hospice process feels like a preparation for death now I have been I have experienced the hospice process. It's been 13 years 14 years 13 I can't remember now how many years it's been oh no It hasn't been that long since my grandfather died and I was there I was in the hospice in the room in the hospice wing of the hospital and I was there when he died the moment He died I could feel him start to leave like transition I felt him start to kind of slip out is how it felt and I was standing right next to the bed And I stood up and I went to him and I just Connected with his energy and I just held the space energetically and I just I got to witness it but I didn't create it or support it or Make it happen or assist him to transition No, I got to be part of it, which was a gift to me that was like A sweet spot and maybe that's why people are like I want to be with them I don't want them to die alone really It's I don't want to miss this beautiful opportunity to experience the energy of the grace that comes when a person leaves their body Because there it really is a cool. Let me just say For my experience it really is a cool experience to feel the energy as an empath. However that's not what people say and Understandably because you've been in this process right this slowly letting go or maybe you've been grieving a long time Because it's been up and down and up and down medically or up and down up and down with Alzheimer's that kind of a thing or both Maybe both like with us both You kind of been prepared for this you've kind of been wanting this kind of relief for them Anyway, but not wanting them to not be here But wanting them to have a quality of life etc etc right under totally understandable you've been in this Kind of a process right for some time I Want to say that however you perceive this and understand what death means for you. It is not an event Particularly or per se it is a it's kind of like this turning point I'll say because you can use the metaphor of death and understand that in many ways things die Like I said with the trees right the leaves died, but the tree didn't The tree lives on the tree is dormant within resourcing from within Using its energy conserving its energy within ourselves We choose to Release or change limited beliefs that we might have Structures that we may have created we release a relationship a marriage We release Our children out into the world Empty nesters i'm talking to you And in a way it's a death It's a grieving of a part of a time in our life or a term that we've served And it's over it's done That part is complete And yet we still continue the relationship, but in a new evolved way I still continue the relationship with the trees even though I don't have the leaves In a new evolved way during the time of the winter there's still message and and connection and Just like the spirit in the afterlife there is still message. There is still connection and Yesterday in particular with all the family around I could just feel so much just Sweetness about the energy a happiness About things about family about appreciating those around you and it was just so sweet A sweetness and it totally is reflected of the energy of the legacy of the spirit that is crossed over and so While death the moment of to me feels very private. It's like the super sacred thing It's very intimate And so if you're you're chosen you're invited into that moment Just hold it for what it is and witness that in and just be there with it and Let yourself be there with it, but do not say that It is because you don't want the person to be alone because the person is not By the time they're in that you're in a hospice situation a care situation and the person is comatose or in and out of consciousness There's no loneliness. There's no separation of themselves They're closer to their god creator sourced energy than they've ever been and to their loving afterlife family members Welcoming them connecting with them joining in their family of origin energy of wholeness that They are not the ones that are lonely.  I'm not saying I can do that. I'm not saying I'm good at that I don't know how to do that. I just do the best I can Day by day by day and that's all we can do as humans is allow ourselves that So when I talk about death Within ourselves, it's not literal what I'm talking about for you The perception is the things that you can release and clear and give yourself a fresh start today To be closer to your wholeness to your spirit to your heart to your empathic nature To you as you are Dying to the false illusions or false promises Or commitments that you've made in the past that do not serve you You're not a bad person when you release those things and let those old commitments die And those old versions of what you thought you needed to be and how you had to act and how you had to dress I used to feel like that too.  He tells my other Kids, don't you remember don't remember mom's beautiful long hair like he clearly loved I used to have really long hair I supposed to picture that Hard to imagine, isn't it? Yeah, we look so different when we were younger and that's okay. I love this now And I'm kind of compromised Like I have Long on one side longer and one side short on the other So I'm kind of balancing right next time I'm like shaving this side too And they're just having this floppy hair on the top right Die to old expectations just death death to old expectations death to old limited beliefs Death to the crappy self-sabotage thoughts that I have sometimes Death to my limited perceptions of what I can and cannot do. Hello, mr. Crow just flying by beautifully I hope oh, I don't think you can see that on camera gorgeous crow. Just went Not loudly just Taking up wingspan space. Love the crow medicine. Oh, that's good stuff. Oh, I should talk about that I should do a video on for a grasshopper and now I'm seeing The reflections of the sun coming through and I hope that I can get a picture for you. I better wrap this up so I get a picture to post on instagram for you today So sunday morning coffee Today we talked about death a bit and there are perceptions of death and understandings of my from my perspective understanding the intimacy of that moment The privacy of death I mean, it's really personal death is personal. That's probably the best way to describe it Whether we're working on using the term death to to talk about our releasing of our different stages of our understanding of who We are who we thought we were our disappointments our Our hardships our suffering our challenges our past experiences, whatever it is that we're letting die Or the actual physical understanding of the soul leaving the body and what that means And the spirit I can assure you let me just tell you spirit is not lonely They're closer. They are not separated the body feels more separated Because it has a distinct purpose and it's beautiful. It's honorable and beautiful body beautiful body and But the spirit is not lonely.  Thank you. I love connecting with you like this So I best to be getting on with my day. I got to do my ohms and my morning reading I'll probably be recording that version. It'll show up sometime next week or the week after I've been succinctly recording in Um videos for my card readings in the morning because I have some patterns that are showing up that are going to affect you potentially in the future because of my work as a medium and as a psychic Interesting stuff interesting stuff Thank you so much for being here. I hope I've inspired your spirit today Filled you with some hope perhaps giving you some things to think about for sure I'm certain of that and let's remember. This is your life now. Now. This is your life. This is yours This is yours So live it Just live it Thank you for being here


Welcome to Sequoia National Park! Welcome to the land of giants, one of the most beautiful national parks in Southern California and home to one of the largest and oldest tree species on our planet, the famous Sequoia trees. In today's adventure, we spend one day exploring Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. We will take you with us to show you the main attractions of the park and help you plan for your own adventure. We started our journey from LAX Airport where we picked up a rental car and started driving towards Three Rivers. Three Rivers is a town located less than six miles from the entrance of the park and it took us three and a half hours to get to Three Rivers from LAX Airport. We spent the night at Western Holiday Lodge Three Rivers because of its proximity to the entrance of the park. In the morning we left nice and early, grabbed coffee from a nearby gas station and started driving towards Sequoia National Park before the sunrise. We only had one day to spare and we wanted to make the most out of it. The road to the entrance of the park is very twisty with a lot of turns and can be a bit intimidating. Look at this road, so many switchbacks. Everybody that we saw on video said like oh I need dramamine. I'm not doing bad, you know what I mean but I just definitely like wow there is really a turn every 20 feet. As you enter the park you will spot the Ash Mountain entrance sign, a very unique and authentic National Park sign constructed in 1935 and featuring a carved Native American face made from blocks of Sequoia wood. Right by the entrance sign is a beautiful viewpoint overlooking Indian Head River. A great photo opportunity especially during fall season. There's a short walkable trail if you want to wander and get closer to the river. However we chose to drive forward and get to our next landmark in the park. Our first stop today is Tunnel Rock. This huge rock behind me usually would see people climbing up and taking some cool photos but it's under construction right now and it's not something that you can do. This landmark boulder marks a former roadway through a granite tunnel here in Sequoia National Park. Next we make our way up to Auto Log. As you are driving you will spot Moro Rock up in the distance. An isolated dome-shaped granite formation that we will also check out next. There are many viewpoints where you can pull over to take in the beauty of the landscape. Also keep an eye out for wildlife on the road as we came across a lot of deer on the way. So this is Auto Log. It fell in 1917 and back in the day cars were encouraged to actually drive up here for photographs. The tree is unstable now and now you can only walk out onto the edge. This is amazing. We were just walking on this huge tree. I still can't believe that these are actual trees. Right now we are going to check Moro Rock Trail. This is a must if you are visiting Sequoia National Park. It's a 0.4 mile hike with an elevation gain of 187 feet. This trail is kid-friendly. No pets are allowed and it's pretty much stairs the whole way up and it opens up to a beautiful view of the forest of the Sequoia National Park as well as some gorgeous peak. You can even spot Mount Whitney in the background. It's really beautiful. If you have the time make sure to check this trail up. For the short amount of climbing and the views that this hike offers it's absolutely worth it. Moro Rock Trail consists of 350 steps and can take between 45 minutes up to 60 minutes to get all the way up and down depending on how many stops you are making throughout the way to either take photos or to let other people pass by. And now that we wrapped up our hike it's time to check the famous tunnel log. This huge tree fell down back in 1937 in the middle of the road. The National Park Service decided to carve a hole in the middle of it to allow people to drive through and enjoy this beautiful landmark here in Sequoia National Park. The tunnel is eight feet tall and you absolutely must stop here if you are in the park. Our next stop is the natural wonder that attracts visitors from all over the world. We are checking out the largest tree in the world by volume ready let's go. General Sherman Tree Trail is a 0.9 mile easy hike that takes you to the world's largest tree by volume the famous General Sherman Tree. This tree was named after the American Civil War General William Sherman and it's estimated to be at least 2700 years old. The height of the tree is 275 feet that is 83.8 meters and the volume of the trunk is 1487 meter cube. The magnitude of this giant is unbelievable you have to be here to appreciate it.  From the same area we took another hike on the Congress Trail. This hike is three miles long and you can hike as much as you want before turning back. The air is so fresh and it's a great opportunity to familiarize yourself with the Sequoia trees and how resilient they are. It's crazy how big the roots are and this is not even a huge tree compared to the others in the park it's it's impressive I just can't comprehend how big these trees are. All right come check this one out but be very careful because there is a string of the bark that's about to fall this is amazing. The inside of the trunk is spacious enough that you can easily pitch a two people tent obviously this is not something that you can do in a national park but it just shows you how large these trees are it's unbelievable. My neck hurts from looking up all the time. It's crazy how this one is just standing there even though half of the tree is already burnt this is impressive. Despite all of its structural deficiencies it is still determined to stand tall. We're going to go to the General's Highway so that we can go to General Grant. We just left Sequoia National Park and we're driving through Sequoia National Forest to get to Kings Canyon it's starting to get a little bit cold here there are even patches of snow but the views are spectacular. Kings Canyon is a national park adjacent to Sequoia National Park and is famous for being home to the second largest tree in the world the gigantic General Grant tree. There is life here for a second we thought we're not going to find any food around here because it was just everything seemed to be crazy it's snowing here not snowing there is some snow but finally we found a gift shop happy to see that there is a place for us to grab some food use restrooms talk to someone look at these pine cones they're huge I don't think I've ever seen any that are this big oh they smell like the Sequoia trees we are about to check out the General Grant tree this is the second largest tree in Sequoia National Park and Kings Canyon although right now we are in Kings Canyon National Park and we've had a big dose of Sequoia today but you can never get enough get to the tree we are going to be on the Grant tree trail El sendero del arbol General Grant these things are still just they're huge but they all have like little fire pits and they're all burnt underneath from just lower fires that have just occurred every one of them though like they all are that way apparently there's a tree here it's it's not it's not the biggest tree in the world but um it's not small either and uh I'll show it to you in just a moment we got to get to the other end of this tunnel oh and then I'll be able to show you this tree it's forward fast forward fast forward fast forward fast forward fast forward seriously you're not going to leave the size of this tree though oh coming out of the tunnel and that was it we just walked through the tree it's crazy we can already see the sun peeking out between the trees as we're getting closer to the sunset so we're trying to find the viewpoint here where we can watch the sun going down that's going to be really exciting look the colors in front of me are so beautiful we only have like 10 minutes before it goes down I can't believe this this this is amazing this sunset is so very beautiful holy moly Alex that's one of the best sunsets I've seen if you enjoyed today's episode don't forget to give this video a thumbs up and consider subscribing to our channel we are trekking pals Habiba and Alex and we will see you very soon on a new adventure


Okay, hola everyone, my name is Cathy Rodriguez, and today I will be hosting a conversation with the amazing Abby Barcy. I've been working on a work of art computer for over a third of years in the other things that I did for Disney on a digital dream that became Google Earth, and I really met that in second-large, and recently the art crisis and experiences in a lot of multi-big companies like Microsoft for HoloLens, Amazon's Echo Friends, he most recently helped Apple in a serious way. He also helped to clarify the harms of art driving business models, and has shown how our right to privacy is often full of mental human rights. I find this, even the existing generations of the art system, very compelling, and please about its potential to open new forms of entertainment, art, storytelling, a new way for defending our rights online. But whenever I dig in this topic, I'm concerned to hear researchers talk so happy and enthusiastically about collecting more what is called egocentric data, as they call it, about users, about our attention, about our emotions, even through our inventory movements, and of course, inferences that can be drawn from all these data. So I have been concerned about how to make sure that these technologies get practiced right. I don't think that they should only be about whether inferences can be done accurately, but also should open a discussion about whether we should meet some of these correlations at all. So, thank you so much for making the time to join us today and share your knowledge with us. There are a few questions I will make today to you. So the first one is, there are several different acronyms that get used in this space. VR, XR, extended reality, or the general term XR. I'm just playing what XR means. Sure. Thanks for having me. You can hear me, right? Yes. Okay. Good. So XR is a term that folks in the industry came up with because a lot of the other terms were confusing. And we have a problem in this field with companies coming and taking the names that we all use. You may have seen that happen recently. So we used XR as a plate holder term to mean any reality, whether it's AR, VR, MR, and that's after having some of these things happen, like mixed reality used to be the whole continuum, but a certain company started using MR as their name. And even with XR, a certain other company has tried to call that extended reality. And to me, that doesn't mean anything. I don't know what extended reality is. So I'd just like to use the term XR, and if you want to be really clear about it, just think of it like RX for drugs, how you have the R and the Greek letter CHI or CHI. Just think of it as that in reverse. And that's what we call just the whole field. It doesn't matter. It's not going to be that popular, but it's what we call ourselves mostly. Okay. Let's put things gone. What's the state for privacy in XR system in the near future? Will people be in control of their life? Do you think so? I think in a short term, yes, but decreasingly so with this technology. So I hear a lot of people say, you know, who cares what some company knows about us? And they give away their personal information for free just for a little bit of convenience. And that's the norm. And I think it's because people don't see a lot of great alternatives. So privacy feels a little abstract, kind of like saving for retirement. But what matters is whether these companies can use our personal data to manipulate and maybe even control us. And I know it's hard to believe, and some people dismiss this as, you know, mind control raise. And, you know, we like to think we're irrational beyond such influence. But the truth is, this stuff never really worked that well in the past. So it's easy to say, oh, it just doesn't work. They're just making it up. But it's going to work really well in the future. And that's really what I'm here to talk about, because I've already worked on research like this. I've already worked in a space for 30 years. And I can see a clear trend of the profit motive and the potential for the technology coming together. And that's what I really want to talk about. So I want to be clear that one of the stuff I talk about doesn't exist today except in research. But as devices are rolled out that have things like eye tracking, this can be more and more common. But look back at just at the history of this. We know TV ads didn't really work that well. I mean, they did somewhat. You can imagine some of these ads being emotionally manipulative. They would play on our emotions and sensitivities. But how well did they really work? I mean, how many people really think drinking Pepsi makes them more likeable? Or buying Duracell batteries makes them feel more connected with their kids. That's what the commercial is selling us on. And people don't necessarily believe it. But on the other hand, if those commercials didn't work, they would probably be doing something else. So there's something to it. It does have an effect on us. And that's before personalization. And so once the system starts to know who we are really well, we're going to see a whole new level. You can kind of think of it as the advertisers are kind of like professional gamblers. They're betting on us. They're betting on behavior. And they don't control the cards, but they can make small bets. And over time, when we're in money and for companies that are like the house, the people that are the places where bets are being placed, they don't have to win every hand either. They just have to win over time. They have to win by percentage. We're going to do more and more extreme over time with personalization down to the individual level. Right now it's still bucketing, but we'll talk more about what happens when we get down to the individual. Thanks Abby. Continue with a question on privacy. There's a whole discussion of how we may feel and what we are adding to the rest of the team. And whether or not this really works yet. I know that several centers of thought that could be used for this, to take maybe the best none of this, what is eye tracking technology and what are major privacy concerns in this space? Sure. It gets eye tracking in one second. One thing I need to explain I think is that right now ads are very interstitial. They show up on top of web pages. They show up between videos. And ads in the future are going to be a part of the world. It will be indistinguishable from the world. So it's what we might call experiential advertising. And the manipulations can also become very subtle and woven into the fabric of a reality. We won't even notice them. Mostly because we have to believe the reality that we're trying to manipulate that function very well if we're questioning the very nature of reality or questioning what's real or what's an ad or what's trying to manipulate this. It's sort of a level of intimacy that we need that requires some vulnerability. And we're really lacking the defences when it comes to that, especially when our personal emotional triggers become known to the system. The algorithms that can push the buttons are the ones that can get through our rational responses. And so we've talked a lot about this in social networks and that's one example of our problems being pushed and us engaged. But eye tracking, I think it's important to say has a lot of positive uses, right? It's not an evil technology that's just showing up to take over, but it can be negative ways. So some of the positive ways are to increase the performance of the devices or to help create operating systems of the future that know what we're trying to do and can help us actually accomplish our tasks. But because of the way our eyes work and a long article describing the details if you're really interested, but because of the way our eyes work, this becomes a window to our mind. Our eyes show what in the room are we thinking about? What do we notice? How do we feel about it? Are we excited about it? People dilation is an autonomic reflex that shows when we're excited about something. Having cameras capture that tells the reader that we feel excited about something. And basically, the combination of that with forward fixing cameras, like you'll see on the Ray-Ban glasses or on Facebook's Project ARIA or with their E4D collection, that captures what we're seeing in the world and then the eye tracking cameras capture where we're looking. The combination of that can tell the computer pretty much what we're thinking about relative to the world that we're in, not our abstract thoughts but our real ones. And so the danger is extremely high in this data. And I know most people understand how much, how important the state is and I don't think anybody really can knowingly consent to all the deeply personal insights that can be gleaned. Just having the ability to delete your recordings before they go into the cloud is not enough to guarantee the safety. It's also possible for this technology to learn how we feel about each other. Just think about the glances that people make at each other when they feel certain ways, positively or negatively. If a computer is watching those glances, a computer could learn pretty well how we feel about each other and build up that model without us ever even expressing our social network and who our friends are. So just to give you an example, we had one person that I put through eye tracking. We learned, I mean none of us realized this by working with the person for a year, but we learned that he looks at your mouth when you talk, not your eyes. Most people will look at your eyes, but he looks at your mouth, which might be the case of someone who's lip reading, but he wasn't hard of hearing. But it might have indicated is actually that he might have had some cognitive differences. He was maybe neurodiverse in terms of how he processed the speech. That's an insight he never had, and we learned it just by looking at his recordings. And I was very conscious when I was wearing eye tracking glasses of being careful. What I look at, don't make the wrong look or gesture because it's all going to get recorded. It has a very chilling effect on how we interact as well. It's going to be something that we all have in our devices. It'll be built into glasses. The first generation of Arab ants don't have them, but Project RA has already has it or looks at having it. And other devices will have eye tracking as well within the next one to two years, you'll see. The stream cannot hear you. With the paper I collaborated with Britton Heller, who's a very well-known human rights lawyer and author. And I think the idea was to cover the history of advertising and to show how it's going to be projected into the future. And one current thing to look at in that regard is Super Bowl ads, right? I know people. We probably all know people who only watch the Super Bowl for the ads because there's a lot of production quality, high value. And they tend to be more dramatic and more interesting, but they're not watching for the sports. They're not even tuning in for the sports at all. I think what we're looking at in the future is that the advertisement becomes so compelling and so much part of the world that we like it. The question is not do we hate it or is it bothers them. It's actually, maybe we like it too much and maybe it's actually affecting us a bit too much. And I think what we're going to be seeing with XR, especially more on the VR side of it than the AR side is, once the world can also be changed based on our personal graphs, the information that the companies collect about us, you could start to see the world tailored to match what we really want and need. And that sounds like maybe a good thing, but when it's used against this, it's not so good. So there's a few things about eye tracking that are important to understand.  You can't see the world and our brains just fill in this continuity of the vision. You can actually change the world while we blink. You can change the world while our eyes move around and you won't even notice that the world has been changed. It's been used in research for some really impressive results. One of them is called redirected walking You are literally walking in a circle but you perceive yourself walking in a straight line because the world keeps changing around you as you move. So now imagine that tied to product placement. So the elements of the world change every time we might blink or look around and engaging that and matching that to our attention and what we're interested in, the world can now be optimized to show us what the advertisers want us to see so that we will look at their constant and we will be more persuaded by it. I think more importantly, the eye tracking allows this experimentation to happen. What things catch our eye, what things make us emotional and so it will be different for everybody. This is where TV and Future X are advertising really diverge. The differences between us come super important. So for example, you may have one person whose hot button issue may be politically is abortion and they willing to vote for candidates entirely based on that one issue alone. By being able to push that button the advertisers and the system are going to be able to trigger somebody to be emotional for a period of time and they're not even going to be trying to advertise about that particular political topic. They may be trying to just get somebody worked up so that the next thing that they see may be something that they don't look at with this rational filter as they might. And all of a sudden you wind up seeing people like we see today saying, I'm against CRT but you ask what it means and we can't tell you. The buttons have been pushed emotionally and it's a mapping to what their sensitivities are and what their issues are. So how far can it go? It's unclear right now. It's only been tested in early phases. We've seen some examples of this being able to work. Definitely seen an example of eye tracking be able to show the emotional responses and being able to track what people are interested in. But the projects that are going on today are the data collection projects that will enable the experiences of the future. That's what we have to think about. All this stuff is happening with Ego 4D and Facebook and Project Area. It's all being collected so that some companies can learn what to do that they'll know what to do. And we have a little bit of time to respond to that before it's put into action. So now is I think the time to understand all the potentials of where it can go. How about the metaverse? Freehood got a lot of attention last week for remaining in itself with reference to this science fiction concept. What's your understanding of the metaverse? Also, Abby, Rody told me that the public cannot hear my questions. Do you mind repeating my questions for the audience at Twitch? No problems. So the question was, what is the metaverse? And this is a bit relative to Facebook. And so I guess the short answer means I'm running over a little bit, I guess. It means something different to every person. It's had at least three, five, seven major definitions over the last 30 years. And for some people it's about ready player, one like worlds, maybe just on tablets and phones right now. For other people it doesn't even need to be 3D or XR at all. They'll still call it the metaverse because it connects up IoT and mirror worlds like Google.  It's more about NFTs and DAO, things like that. So it really depends on who you ask. For me, I've been focused on AR. So the one definition that concerns me the most is when people start saying AR is the metaverse. I think AR is AR. AR is our way of interacting with the real world in the future. We can save that for another day. But the thing that Facebook and Met always needed to do that they hadn't done before, strangely enough, even though their social network is, they never really had people on the website. Think about it. You saw icons and videos and text and pictures, but the actual people were not in the website. The people were remote. So you only saw the artifacts of people. And so the thing that explains the most, I think, why is Facebook doing this, apart from everything we can say about all the trouble they've got themselves into and branding and all that, the real reason why the metaverse matters to Facebook is they need to get over this problem. Their entire premise is they're connecting people so they need people to actually begin the space together. And they haven't done that yet. So all this metaverse stuff is about really bringing people in. And when Zuckerberg talks about embodied internet, that's what he's really saying. But honestly, I don't think the future of work is having virtual meetings and boring conference rooms. I mean, that part of it seems to be crazy. What's the point? I mean, think about it. The future should be how to avoid having boring meetings in the first place, not just how to do them virtually. Okay, Abby, and I think that's our last question. What about the glasses? You have worked with Astrid for inventing wearable devices for augmented reality. How far has this gotten? What is likely to go next? And how will this impact our privacy rights? Yeah, so I'll try to go real fast on this one. So the glasses are in progress. It's a very difficult technical challenge to be able to make glasses want to wear, first of all. None of us really probably want to wear glasses, but we do what we have to. But take glasses that you would be willing to wear outdoors and social settings is incredibly difficult. Their faces are very sensitive real estate for putting anything. And even in the future, we may have contact lenses, but not everybody wants to wear contacts either. They do because they have to. So we have to be, these things have to add a lot of value. They have to be extremely good before people are willing to actually adopt them. The challenge with everybody wearing glasses and getting now with glasses that can simply record other people is there's a lot of privacy concerns with people being recorded without their permission in public. I think we need to really have a discussion about permissions framework in which people can actually say whether they want to be recorded or not out in public and in private. And of course there's important issues like we want to make sure that we capture wrongdoing what happened with George Floyd's murder. We don't want to regulate that out of the toolset that we have for combating authoritarian abuse. But we also want to make other people have the permission to be able to say I want to be private right now when they're not doing anything wrong. Eye tracking is going to be a huge thing as we said before. The combination of these cameras capturing all that are eye tracking means that companies that are building these devices if they want to can build a world and a map of all the people and a map of what we're all doing. And that has a chilling effect on how we behave. This is this is where privacy really impacts all of our human rights because the more we know we're being watched and the more we know we can be tripped up for anything we did wrong whether it's being canceled socially or whether it's being arrested for not stopping perfectly at the traffic light or a stop sign. All the things that represent how we engage with the world become under extreme scrutiny when we're recording everything and when we're recording each other all the time. And that's one of my biggest concerns, right? There's a reason we have the 3rd and 4th Amendment of the Constitution. I'm not a lawyer, but but you know at the time we had soldiers being quartered in people's houses and we said, oh, we don't want the government invading us but I think we need to also say we don't want big companies invading our privacy because it will kill our ability to be ourselves to have our freedom of thought to have our freedom of association and speech even. The privacy is the first line of defense to make sure that we can be ourselves truly. The classes are really starting to impact that and I think now it's time to set the policy to say what we can and can't do it. Thank you, Abby. This was very interesting. I think we are short of time right now. We need to go to the next panel but I don't know if we really have any other question. One question from the audience. If not, then we can move to the next panel. Thank you, Abby. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So no questions from the audience. We are ready for the next panel with Kurt when you're ready. Thank you everybody and let me invite our panelists up to the stage. We are fortunate to have a great panel with us today and we're going to talk about surveillance in XR in all forms of VR, AR, XR. As Abby said, what matter what you called is a generalized term. This has come a lot to the fore lately with the Facebook's adoption of the metaverse as the future envisioning a future in which people will be doing a lot of things in virtual reality and then we also have a possibility of a future with lots of AR where people will be wearing glasses that potentially have cameras, microphones that we'll see and interact with the world around them. And these create a lot of issues. We want to make sure that we go into a future in which we can take advantage of the cool features of these new technologies without giving up these fundamental rights to privacy, to pre-expression that we have existed in our current world. And a lot of these things are challenging, especially surveillance because in order to be part of a virtual world or to fully interact with a AR world, there's going to be a lot of data that is being collected, sent through centralized servers, transmitted and all for the people who are here in this room, information about what you're doing and saying is going to alt space and then coming and being distributed among all the other people here. And this is a cool meeting and talking about it, but also creates a lot of possibilities of surveillance. So, oh and I should introduce myself. My name is Kurt Opsall. I'm the Deputy Executive Director of General Counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and I've been working on our AR, VR, XR issues. And then let me turn it over to our panelists to do a quick introduction to themselves. So let's start with Danielle. Great. My name is Danielle Luffer. I'm a Policy Analyst Access Nose Office in Brussels in Belgium in Europe. Access Nose is a global human rights organization that works to protect the digital rights of people at risk all around the world. I mostly work on things that follow me on the level of artificial intelligence but I've still been doing some work on the AR, VR, XR and yeah, especially thinking about how this can be a huge frontier of some of the troubling things we're seeing today. Thank you. Kavya. Hello everyone. And I see in the space, the virtual space with you all over again. It's great to see that EFF is taking the step to really get into XR in the real world. I'm Kavya Roman. I'm the CEO and founder of XR SI. XR SI VR our mission is to help build safe and inclusive XR ecosystem. Used to say XR ecosystems but now XR ecosystem is one of the kinds with the metaverse which we will talk about of course again and in order to carry out this mission we identified a few focus areas such as inclusion so we have a dedicated coalition that focuses on those aspects. We have a medical XR console because these realities are autonomy at risk so medical XR console focuses on data protection and the privacy is a bit more for medical cases. Then we also have a trust for the media platform we conduct some immersive podcasts and we also are educating more and more journalists how to use these realities to trust them. And finally we have a child safety initiative very recently we helped contribute to both our reform and getting introduced to policy as the law making and policy globally to make sure that these new technologies are engaged so all of that and you know this is my passion I'm a profession I'm a security professional however XR just happens to be that brings up this I'm always here to listen to and share knowledge and that's all of you thank you Thank you Kavya Makayla would like to introduce for example can you hear me fine? Yes Thank you so much for the invitation it's an honor to be here and I'm so happy that we are discussing these very relevant topics I'm Mikayla Mantegna and I'm the avogamer and I wear mini hats the one that is most probably relevant for today is that Manafit at the Bergman Club Center in research and video game policy and particularly in something that I started to talk a lot and about this year which sounded like something from the from the future and it's always like everyone's games and mouth most of my work has been related to artificial intelligence ethics and intellectual property and one of my concerns about this is how these regulations interact is kind of enhanced total work well thank you so let's kick things off with a central question what are the issues what are the issues with XR are raising four surveillance which are different from go beyond the surveillance issues we have with traditional audio and video communications you'll be able to jump in yeah so as you know you always talk about issues in terms of and I think that is the term we should really anchor our conversation in because I mean there's a hands here how many of us really want to live in the reality where you're constantly watching and it's not just like some remote watching it is exactly what earlier Avivar was saying is by tracking your thoughts interact if you really want to think about and that's you know you say the best about optical it's kind of I don't know if you want to unpack that term and then definitely that's one particular issue to attract constantly and then there is data collection that's a data collection instead of video that all times to the point of being manipulated all times I don't know if we want to have that in our daily body jump in maybe jump in please there's a lot of issues I think we could just stay on the first turn for a couple of hours but I think you know coming at it from the perspective of my work a lot of the work that I do is around biometric surveillance would be campaigned to try to ban the use of biometric surveillance like facial recognition in publicly accessible spaces and at the moment you know that's law enforcement agencies just you know run retroactively on CCTV cameras but if you look at something like AR glasses you know in the future you're going to have the possibility where you will be able to run all parts of that you know facial identification to you're just walking in public space you can identify people to all sorts of crazy applications that in some cases are maybe pseudo-scientific like there's companies out there who say they can predict if someone is a criminal or a potential terrorist based on their face you know the length of their nose this is really stuff we don't want people to be doing in the human rights frameworks where you know established stuff and so without regulation or without being responsible the potential that opens up with having these cameras on everyone's faces run all sorts of crazy high ups is really frightening if I can champagne I think we'll I think we still have huge solve issues on social media and we are kind of working this into to these immersive words the other layer that they are going to collect a lot of data that's more intimate to us as Daniel was saying algorithms are at play they can create inferences and one of the things I I always allege about this is that those inferences are mostly secret to us so we can go around kind of invisible layers about us about what the algorithm think that we do and there's no way that this cannot be abused just if we think about the promise of social media and our images and our pictures and how it has been abused just by so many companies not the least clear view of the eye that started to take these huge information and selling back to law enforcement we think that we are going to have now devices that are really close to our body and as Abby was saying taking these kind of inferences of the things we are looking at and our policies because if you so at that conference I always have to say in Facebook I can't just say that but if you were in that they were talking about the future they were hinting about devices that are going to track our mental pathways just by how we think about moving our hands and that comes back to mental privacy and that one of the fundamental principles of criminal law is that you cannot be charged or you cannot be prosecuted for what you're thinking and there's no way that we can just believe the promises is not going to be abused particularly with we have these presidents so I think it's time to kind of get together and start putting some questions into these promises of this so presentation of kind of a dual-coded version of the world and also they are trying to sell so forceful version of reality we need to port the things of persons and the way that we are seeing the world because we were seeing the last conferences like are not creating a space where you can teach us and change your avatar and change your soul and adopt another skin they are trying to port reality into a virtual world which doesn't kind of make any sense to the concept of the metaverse should be so it's really time to talk about decentralization and not the least talking about decentralization because one of the things that for me is kind of really a big deal hey, interplay into this all these kind of things that we are seeing on automatic content moderation I'm going to be port into this very intimate creation of content as Abby was saying we are going to see real time creation of content thanks to generative artificial intelligence and that is going to be created by data that was previously from us without noticing so there is a lot of layers of these that are replicating the issues that we already see social media hey, Miquela a number of us people cannot hear you probably I'm sorry voice okay so a lot of real good issues raised there so we have the massive data collection especially biometric data collection to enable the conversation and also the potential inferences or secondary data derived from that inferences about what you are thinking what you are in favor of or opposed to what excites you what does not and these all create additional privacy issues that are harder to do in a more traditional video audio environment the issues we just discussed the panopticon this is a term derived from a prison design in which there would be a single go bird that would be able to view inside the cell and the notion was that therefore a single guard could be looking at you and this would inspire better behavior people they were being watched and this is one of the concerns that comes out with a extended reality environment where you are being watched in a way that you're not in a physical world so this brings us to the important question how do we move forward how do we keep the promise of this technology and take advantage of it without without creating an optical I can kick by saying that for me the centralization is key because one of the things that we should have for an accountable metaverse is different companies working on that and different people working on that and even governments working on that as well and have presence there because if we are we have seen this tension between centralization and decentralization and a company tries to be this kind of place that encompasses everything that is going to be so hard to take accountability for for me the key is accountability and decentralization so I want to zoom out a bit because you talk about we want to solve these issues and we did task ourselves solve these issues like back in 2018-19 and as soon as we began the first things that we encountered was what the F is XR so it brings us to first thing is are we speaking the same language we also heard the word mentioned by biometric data we heard inference we heard a lot of terminology being dropped by Abhi Parzid the one thing that we must do is first collaborate come together and then create consensus around taxonomy so one of the efforts that we kind of at XR and I'll take it as an example is biometrically inferred data and that's what we can potentially use that term to make better laws that take the data capture regulations or the privacy regulations beyond and BII which is a personal identifiable information so I think one of the major issue that we're going to confront is just like you know meta is not touting metaverse but has anybody taken the time to standardize it and that's kind of the active activity that XR is using with lots of stakeholders and partners is first we need to create consensus as to what exactly are we trying to address what does decentralization in terms of extended reality and what is it going to look like are we talking about creating virtual wars that will be based off of blockchain are we talking about self blockchain doesn't mean it's secure but what kind of implementation and standards are we going to adhere to so once we've created those standards then we need to go to the step two which is already the way again is understanding the context of the data because in certain context I would love to share my data and in some context I wouldn't so I do like to shop some companies who cater to me specific shopping and whatnot but in a certain context I don't want my medical data to be in the hands of developers to be using those inferences and then sharing it with some insurance provider at least in America you could potentially be denied coverage for issues that we may not even know that exists so I think there is like a process that we need to follow or to create consensus we understand the context of the data and then we kind of create these guardrails which is basically why are we coming together access now EFF XRSI and even meta like I would say without involving and engaging all of these companies it is impossible because they hold out of this data and they hold the rules of the game we can help them we can inform them what they should do in terms of like stuff governance because regulations will come in very late we need to educate them the third part is a lot of the people are talking about Facebook meta has anybody asked where the hell is Apple in all this we have not once heard about what is going on at Apple and I really would like to point out that black box needs to be unpacked because they can't just one day get on the stage and unleash all this incredibly sophisticated technology we are basically just sitting there and shouting at them just like they did with the CSAM stuff what I'm talking about is the you know they try to do the breaking the encryption in a way or scanning the client side scanning for child sexual content and stuff that is not acceptable so everybody kind of starts to demonize Facebook I'm saying we need to get together with all the stakeholders regulators everybody create consensus understand the context and then start to put the guardrails together not just regulation but self-governance and also have this sort of shared responsibility because people can give you choice like in creativity right now you have a lot of controls but you have to press the button to mute that harasser who is going to still come up to you and say horrible things we have to shift some of these responsibility and share it amongst us I would just add in that there is actually a huge amount that we can do with existing data protection regulation and data protection principles that we already have things around data minimization you see the same problem in the world of artificial intelligence doing square quotes where you know you hear things from companies like oh this is so sophisticated regulation can keep up and then regulation gets in the way of artificial intelligence and it's like data protection regulation X writes and artificial intelligence applications threaten them so that's why there's a conflict it's not regulation that's the problem it's some of these applications and you know I think if you look at basic minimization here's I think applying that the XR you know applying that to VR is key like there as Kavya said you know there's certain contexts in which I will want to give eye tracking data in which I will want to give you know quite intimate data because maybe I want that I want to you know have a really expression like an avatar that's full of expression in certain contexts that's what I wanted for that's it it's purpose limitation it's just for that purpose and if that's respected there's actually no issue so there's these basic well established principles out would solve a lot of these issues and companies are just not following me and I got with this rubbish that you know this is a completely new sphere regulation can't keep up and that is simply not true there are cases of course where we really do need to adapt to new developments but I think a lot of these baseline issues that we're encountering are really easy to solve with the tools that we've already got totally totally agree with you yeah absolutely I think in a way it is one of these good questions are interesting questions that have been addressed in other contexts and as a question of how to protect our privacy to new technologies which may be gathering more information or using it in different ways and trying to do that do that sensibly and at least my hope is that by giving people more control over their data how it is transferred more transparency so they have an understanding of what is agreeing to we can preserve privacy and civil liberties in an XR world very challenging one of them just looking at not participants who are maybe walking by that could be have their faces analyzed could have this technology applied to them and it's very difficult to go through a mechanism to get their consent or to have them even necessarily be aware that they are participating but it's a very important part of our society that you're able to walk out in the public sphere and you're used to a notion where people will see us but perhaps forget about us in a few minutes that you'll have a actual privacy off of ubiquitous AR glasses might change that paradigm so how do we address the privacy issues of bystanders great question and I think again I will go back to that same formula let's start with textology we said bystander we need to divide it further we need to divide it on what type of bystander situation is going on but one is their coexisting in a space as standard and you know especially for virtual reality users we share a same physical space or virtual space and we interact with each other to part that thought and about demoing so if somebody is just giving you a demo you know that's the actually applies in education field any of times people are just demoing to students researchers them in VR that I refer to that because we need to create a culture of you know virtual reality is a real experience for some people and the way you touch you know if somebody falls the way you touch I could really trigger like you know harassment PTSD there is this other cultural aspect of you know bystanders that we need to address and then there is the interruption it's about yesterday you know class 2 version 34 I believe the bystanders interruption and we've all seen this I don't know if you guys have seen this where would I just touch his kid and I think I just on my table but us too now gives you this while we know what space sense does it now allows you to view if somebody is interrupting in your guardian but have we thought about how it's operating what other data is being collected while you look around and what haven't been given the technical specifications and the details of what what that does to our and what protocols are being used so once we create the services and we move on to like okay how do we understand the context because actually in the AR glasses is going to matter the only way to address this is to have the contextualize AI which will tell us hey I want to be recorded in my living room that's okay AR glasses the limit I define in my room it shouldn't record when I'm in my bathroom and that is not possible unless we have contextualize AI so we need to give this data we need to create those type of understandings and basically a common understanding of what the look of the game and then those mechanisms need to exist and finally you know just like give away these privacy and by understanding the sense and privacy is respected I don't know what do you think Daniel were you going to talk just a quick thought to add to what you were saying because I think that the problems that we are describing are things that are already existence and there is not a different kind of argumentation because now we have cameras that can catch by standard but the thing is that now is a different scale of the information that we can take about them so think that the problems are already there and we have been working about this we should build on that because one of the things we are trying to address everything is something from new and something that I take from the Facebook conference and for me that's a risk because it kind of erase discussions that we have been having about how algorithms and how algorithms are processing content and I think we should start by taking the previous experience we have on privacy and surveillance and kind of adapting to this new magnitude and not forgetting that you already have a base to build on just I think for the question of privacy we talk about story and we published a blog today they made quite a big deal about the fact that they claimed their feedback and actually participated in a design job I think in May 2020 and gave them crystal clear feedback that they ignored completely ignored and to build on Michaela's point I think it's really important to point out that anything you can do with a pair of AR glasses you can do by pointing a camera on a smartphone at someone you can run a facial recognition if you have a level to the public you could run it on your phone or on the glasses but problem is that having cameras on the glasses having the ability to run you know these apps on the glasses there's a lot less friction there's a basic friction of like I point phone at you you see me pointing phone and that friction create the possibility intervention you know it both soft person from doing it and if they're brazen that on glasses where you're just looking at someone friction is gone and what we said to Facebook you reduce the friction on the user side by placing this capability in glasses you need to increase it in some other way you need to give a really annoying signal whether it's a loud noise, a lot horrible smell I don't care what it is but you need to somehow replace friction to give a reintroduce that possibility of the bystander to know that this is happening and potentially to intervene and I think as well like he had a fantastic talk about the the Ray-Bans who re-pointed out the idea that like our glasses have to have a front-facing sensor as I've pointed out that doesn't have to be a camera that can record the idea that these Ray-Bans stories are an essential step on the way to this nonsense we don't need us as to look exactly like in the Ray-Bans to record people that's not a thing we need to do unless you know you have some kind of sinister motive lies the panopticon in everyday life so I think it's a difficult challenge like I would never minimise how difficult that few of alerting bystanders is but I think Facebook Ray-Bans we can say that they've ignored you know like the problem completely off their shoulders that's an example and we'll do it for sure and Daniel I totally remember being on that panel and Baxter there was a discussion and I remember it being a very strong recommendation from multiple stakeholders that you really have to be careful about it but that's exactly what they did and instead of listening to the recommendation with a little tiny light no standards there on the light no red no nothing but a white light which basically actually gets a signal to a non-person like a nevelence sort of a signal and in many cases you could put a tape over it it won't be noble so yeah I mean it just goes to show that often times this sort of these are not heard and in which case we need some regulates some heavy hand that will say hey can't do this human beings surveil them on a daily basis I'm sorry but that that is an at least assumption because having a light to that I'm recording is not going to work for a lot of people and one of the things I'm seeing about the promises that are some reality is like to be certain and a person not only able to see and listen and also to access to the technology because it's going to be a huge gap I come from basically in Argentina and access to technology is so difficult and there's going to be a knowledge gap there's going to be an access gap and you don't want that because the thing about the smartphones and one thing that we already have like you can go to any site mostly with kind of devices that is going to matter but this is going to be really different in these kind of immersive environments that the hardware that you have to access means going to mother a lot and there is people that is going to be left out it's kind of for me it's like the internet of at least assumptions because always we have adaptive technologies to with this and how it is going to translate into the metaverse all right well we're almost out of time we started a little bit late so maybe go for a moment we had a couple of questions that came in one was how we put both of them out there so we can try and cover them at the same time one was how we address metadata privacy in the metaverse and the other was neurolink in the metaverse VR environment one of them very very interesting for the I don't know to talk about addressing the data part because we are currently working on this XR data classification working group it is a public working group if you a developer a company a civic organization can be a part of this working group to understand the context and the conversation because once we understand the context then we can start to apply the rule but I think that's one of the steps that I believe is really you know the early question others get to get can jump in just neurolink because I mean brings up the question of CI's computer interfaces and yeah just a big shout out to Ken Pai who's been some great episodes on this you know I think idea that like a headset could integrate BCIs and could be you know mining this incredibly deep information about you is extremely worrying but one thing that I was like to point out about this is you know more data deeper data deep better inferences it's not a simple you know you collect data and then you can know everything about a person there's a whole load of assumptions there's a whole load of content about how you construct you know this human emotion and what are all of these things and a lot of the theories that are being used in Silicon Valley and that are informing the technologies are very simplistic and they actually have a reductive of our human experience so I think it's really important not to see word and deeper a more intimate data we necessarily we make better inferences about people we can really get to a dangerous place where we're coming up with ideas and conceptions of what people are and using those to build worlds and form how people interact with them can really radically undermine very important things about us there's a quote that says that paraphrase the danger is not that reductive theories of human behavior are true but they become true and I think it's done badly could really be Yes actually when you talk about the valley this is one thing that I'm seeing is they are kind of telling everything like back in the days when the cigarette products were sold as entertainment you know whatever you know and now we're just a metaverse and then combined with brain computer combined with artificial end-up this is some monster making you better understand us otherwise cigarettes can kill you it took us only like X amount of years to understand this came to all right well we're sorry go ahead we're just a quick thought about mental inferences that circle back to the promise of cannot be abused and please have in mind clear view with that so thanks thanks everyone for coming or those walking on our live stream or in here virtually to our a bit please thanks to all of our panelists for joining us as we are trying to solve some of the issues XR VR the metaverse all of this will become more prominent and it's good to get in now to try and ask these questions look for answer and try and find a future that we would live in that incorporates these technologies but doesn't turn them to panopticon turn into a surveillance state looking into your mind you can take advantage it won't take advantage of you and that's the future we want you thanks everyone