This show is sponsored by Dr. Dane Here and Access Consciousness. You can find out more about the brilliant work they do all around the world at Dr. Dane, D-A-I-N, here, H-E-E-R, dot com, as well as accessconsciousness.com. This is the Dare to Dream podcast, which has been nominated for two People's Choice Podcast Awards and a Webby Award. Dare to Dream is ranked in the top 50 best podcasts in USA in self-improvement on Apple podcasts and also ranks in the top podcasts in several other countries. Today's show features a guest coming back for some very compelling conversation. Do you want to go to the edge of the earth? My guest today is Whitley Strieber. Whitley offers compelling and startling accounts of his experience meeting non-human intelligence that he calls the visitors and his ongoing inspiring story of his desire to understand and form a relationship with them. Strieber's tale is listenable and mind-shattering. Whitley Strieber is widely known for his best-selling account of his own close encounter, Communion, a true story, and has produced television specials based on this information, including confirmation for NBC. He is also the author of vampire novels and is the new host of an ongoing radio program, Dreamland, founded by Art and Ramona Bell. His website, the world's most popular site featuring topics at the edge of science and culture is unknowncountry.com. This is Debbie Daschinger, Dare to Dream, and I'm welcoming Whitley Strieber to the Dare to Dream podcast. It's amazing to have you here again. Well, thanks for having me back. Yeah. And, you know, before we started, we were having a little conversation and, you know, when I spoke with you, which must be eight years ago now, because the show has been around for over 13 years. My entire headset around this subject of the visitors, and I love that you call them that, is so different and so changed. This is a really relevant subject. My sense for myself, and you can weigh in on this if it's so for other people too, that's something big shifted for me and it went from like a cool conversation to like a knowingness that this is fact. And like a hunger actually for me to have this conversation to talk more about the visitors and the possibilities. And what do you know about this have the visitors said they cranking it up that they're making us more aware and interested in this connection and information. I think we're cranking it up. I think that has changed enormously and it's changing faster and faster. But you know, it goes back a very long time. It's not just a recent arrival of aliens. This is something that is deeply integrated into the human experience, going back a long time. And if you look at the history of the, the gin and the very folk of Northern Europe, the gin of the Middle East and all over the world, there are these beings and entities and if you look deeply enough into the stories, you find that they are the stories, the of alien contact that we have now are very similar to the stories of contact with these, these entities in the past it's just that we thought of them differently then, because we didn't have any idea that there could be other planets the first we just began to discover really discover the universe in the 20th century and the late 19th century so for all of that time we didn't really know where we were and we certainly didn't think of others as being on other planets. Now we think of that and so we place them there. Previously we always place them as part of our own world. But it is intensifying. Now, along with everything else I mean if you look at yourself, the way you were five years ago and the way you were now, you're a different, entirely different human being having entirely different human experience. And it's much more intense and much more complex and much even with COVID even with being isolated in the world. It is as we are now it is much more much richer with experience and interaction and knowledge, all of that. And this is changing too with it. We're becoming more knowledgeable. We're just now becoming aware of the fact that this isn't just a story of aliens from another planet landing in spaceships and looking us over. This is a much bigger and more human story, because there's there are the dead are often seen with these visitors so what does that mean. All of this is happening now and it, and I think that, you know people talk about disclosure that's not the right word. The right word is discovery. It's discovery. This is a time of discovery. I love the way you say that that's so powerful. I want to do two things before we keep deep diving because I can feel the possibilities here, and I just want to get people up to date. The first thing I want to cover briefly is when you first wrote communion back in the 80s, which that book had so much impact. I felt like you and I read that book I was so terrified and fascinated all at once. But at that time, it was a very fear based experience you would just coming into it just discovering what it happened to you, but you as well in all these forms so very far. So I wouldn't based on all the work I've read that you've written recently ever describe you any longer as fear based I actually say quite the opposite. How would you typify yourself in relation to the visitors.  That's going to definitely be fear based. No question whatsoever about that. But, you know, after I realized that they were real, which was about six weeks of struggling with this and I eventually thought to my found out I won't go through the whole struggle except to say that first I thought I was going crazy. I thought I had been the victim of some kind of bizarre twisted crime that where I'd been loaded up with LSD or something. And then I thought I might have had alien contact but then there was a dead friend involved so that was sort of a table that for a long time. In any case, once I realized that whatever the heck had happened, they were real. I thought to myself, Whitley, what are you going to do with this? Are you going to be afraid of this? Or are you not? And the answer was I was going to be afraid of it and I was going to continue to be afraid of it. But I was still going to try to do my best with it. And that was why I started going out in the woods in the middle of the night alone to see if this action demonstrating my receptiveness would lead to some kind of further contact even though I thought to myself they could, I mean, they could be predators. They could, God knows what they might be and might do. But obviously our Air Force or whatever can do a thing about them and so I'm going to be absolutely alone with them. And that was hard. That was hard. That was brave. Well, you know, I'm too curious not to be brave. Unfortunately, that's what my wife Anna used to say.  I've been knocked out all my life. I'm I'm a I'm a very curious person and my curiosity will always overcome my fear. And maybe they even knew that. Anyway, it did start a relationship. And that relationship goes on to this day. And no, it's not fear based anymore at all. And in the sense that I understand a lot about them and my relationship with them. They have pretty well accepted me. I no longer live in in in the state of of ignorance about the dead, the dead are real. That does go continue on the difference between us and the visitors in regard to the dead is very simple. We have a veil, or it's really more or less a wall between the living and the dead. They do not have that. So in their world, and in their reality, the living and the dead are all part of the same continuum. There's no break. And when you get to know them and get to become involved with them, that happens to you, you become that way too. And so, you know, I'm still in touch with with and my wife who died in 2015. After she died, we wrote a book together called After Life Revolution, and she still works with me all the time. And that I mean, we're we consider ourselves to souls who are presently down to one body. That's why I wear both rings. So, why do you think that the dead are compelled to commune with the visitors or vice versa? What is that wavelength or vibration or understanding between them? They're simply on the same plane.  They're not. They're just part of consciousness, just the same as we are. They may be very different, but consciousness is immensely complex. Look, the universe is unimaginably huge. And so consciousness is too. And I don't think that they're, I think that they're simply part of it. And just like us.  What are you diving into right now? What can you talk about that is really perking you up and you work in your life? What is new? New right now? Well, of course, I have a new world out the book, but that's that's out now and I have just published and just in the finish of in the process of publishing a new book called Jesus a new vision, which takes all that I have learned about all of this and it reconceives the meaning of the life of Jesus. And not as an alien or anything like that. But it, it takes a new look at things like the Shroud of Turin, which was debunked in 1988 and said it was just a medieval forgery. It isn't. And there's been lots of scientific work done since 1988 that conclusively proves what happened, which is that the body in that tomb transformed into some into a very intense non physical state, leaving the image of on the shroud behind. In other words, the resurrection was real, only his message was then distorted. And the reason is this, the Roman Empire for the first 100 years after his death, he was very, very little known only just a tiny number of people. But then the Roman Empire began to fail. And it didn't fail. The way we think of decadence and so forth. A type of climate change started in 150 AD, the sun began to get cooler. And it caused drought over the whole Mediterranean basin and in other parts of the world to began to get sick because they were not they were hungry so much. And their immune systems began to collapse. And they are become compromised. They started to have plagues and pandemics is this beginning to sound a little familiar. Incredibly so yes. And then out in Central Asia, the Huns, their world dried up to and they began to take their horses and move west into the lands of the Hungarians, and they were pressed west into the lands of the Germans and the Germans began to invade the Roman Empire so now you got it. Climate change, pandemics and wholesale uncontrolled immigration. It's a picture of our world now. They did not have the knowledge that we do. They thought their gods were doing it. And they became incredibly angry and began to abandon their gods because their gods were not helping them. And so they are Constantine the Emperor Constantine in the 300s decided, if I'm going to save my empire, it has to have a God that people believe in. And he chose Jesus of Nazareth, because of the way the Christian community had survived all of these pandemics, because they were so tightly knit. And he transformed that into a Roman it transformed Jesus the teacher into a Roman God called Christ. But I went behind that back to Jesus the teacher and back to this extraordinary man who could literally rise out of his grave and turn into a being of light. How did he do it? Why did he do it? Why did he keep it secret? I mean, if you think, wouldn't he have gone back to Jerusalem in that state and just completely he would have taken over the whole Roman Empire in six months. But instead, he hid himself very carefully. I know why he did that. I understand the whole life. And that's what Jesus and new vision is about. That's incredible. How much research did you have to immerse yourself in in order to write this book and where did you go for the research? A lot of research, an immense amount of research and, frankly, you know, I work with my wife who's on the other side and she's got a lot of good ideas and she can really send me in great directions. So what would happen would be I would get these ideas, and then I would dig deep into the data, especially into the ancient sources, and I would find a corroboration and I would build it. It reads like a detective story because in a way that's what it is. So it was a lot of research, but the book's got a big bibliography. I, I went back into a lot of the old, the old church fathers and church and I understood came to understand the mysterious gospel of Mary and Thomas which were found in Nag Hammadi in 1947. And so that was what I did and it just was, it was an enormous undertaking and it was, it was so extraordinary and so exciting and it took for me it changed my whole experience of life because I understand something that is I don't think has ever really been understood in this way before. Okay, next book for me. I've just finished a new world recently so I look forward to that. I have to tell you I'm a book writing coach. I run a group called Visible Visionary so it's for very spiritual folks who have a book inside of them helping them to get it out it's a beautiful live membership. And you have written Whitley over 40 books. Yes, which isn't like tremendous. It's enormous. What compels you to keep writing how do you come up with new material. How do you stay so inspired. How do you go after every book. How do you even feel like you're such a great storyteller. I know that's a lot of questions but I'm, I'm also curious. I'm, I, I love reading and writing and I am, and I'm driven. I'm just, I'm a very driven human being. I, you know, I get up at nine in the morning. And when I'm working on a book I could easily work until nine the next morning. I have to be very careful about that because I'll exhaust myself and then spend two days unable to work. So I'm very careful to make sure I go to bed. I meditate a lot. I'd meditated one in the afternoon at 11 at night and at three in the morning every day. And this is powerful stuff because especially the one at three in the morning is filled with inspiration. That's what in one yoga system of yoga it's called Brahma Mahirtha time. And that means the time of in looking and the time of discovery. It's an incredibly creative period but you have to be in the right state in order to get what the universe has to give you at that time, and to recognize it. But so that's there. But, but mainly, I'm just driven human being I you know the these books, the fiction, I would write fiction and I write a lot of fiction I've got so many novels I haven't published it's ridiculous, because I sort of don't have room for a schedule. I told my son that after I kicked the bucket he can spend the next five years publishing my novels nobody'll even know I'm dead. In any case, any case there's novels and I would write a novel to sort of clear my head. But the nonfiction has always been the most important thing since I wrote war day back in the 80s with Jim Kineck and my friend. But once the visitors came into my life. I became incredibly driven, because they're important and understanding their presence here is important. Our future depends on the degree to which we understand them and can build a relationship with them that is useful to us. It can be very useful, very useful. Well we have to be careful though because you know they're like us their predators to. I mean, they're not going to eat you and me, but they have a very predatory quality to them. But then again, look at the animals we've domesticated which ones are closest to us the dogs and the cats fellow predators. And I have the same kind of relationship with the visitors their predators we're I'm a predator and we get it.  But maybe there's somebody who better watch out I don't know I haven't found him yet. In your book a new world, which I loved it opened me up to some ideas I had not heard before. And that was really important. One of the concepts you talk about it are these extraterrestrial stick figures that are seen and documented on film so I then went to your website unknown country calm. So I could watch what you had set up and documented there. Have you yourself seen the stick figures. No, I have not. I have seen basically four types of entity, the tall blonde beings. The little gray ones, and these dark blue ones that I call cobalt because that's what they were called in the Middle Ages in Germany when they were found seen in minds. And indeed when they came to our cabin. They would come up from underground. And I've seen human beings that were connected with this more than once that are on the other side of the of the of the of the of the of the fence between us and the visitors. There's a lot of human human beings who are there also. And I think they live among us. Some of them anyway. I've heard that often and I've never known how that manifests that there are extra terrestrials who live amongst us and I've always wondered what does that look like and are they cognizant that they are visitors. Well, and give you an idea of what that is. There was a an editor at William Morrow and company who published communion back in 1987, called Bruce Lee, it's not the Bruce Lee it's another Bruce Lee obviously. He had been an intelligence officer and he was now an editor and doing editing military books for Morrow. And he and after commute just right after communion had been published he and his wife went into a bookstore in Manhattan. And he thought he would take a look and see if the book was moving at all because it's just been out a few days and they had a big stake in it. And to his amazement he was looking at the book he saw these two people, short people in overcoats and hats with hats pulled down over their eyes, reading the book in the aisle and turning the pages and laughing at it. And they were turning the pages so fast. And he thought, what could that I've never seen anything like that they're so fast and they were laughing and you could hear him saying I got this wrong and so forth and laughing about. And then suddenly they stopped and one of them looked up at him, and he saw these big black eyes. And he was scared, he had the willies out of him. And he said to his wife, there's two aliens reading over there reading Whitley streamers book. We have to leave. And they left the store. But the two people, these whatever they were came out behind him, behind them and walked off down the street. And here's where I'm getting back to your original question. They looked the same walking down the street as they did in the store and nobody noticed them. So yeah, I'm sure they do live among us. That's fascinating I never considered that that they could possibly be cloaked to some people or look similar that people wouldn't even be they didn't look similar at all to him. But is the point that maybe to other people. I wonder what other people what other people saw if anything. They may not have seen the thing, or they may have just looked right past them and just, you know, just assumed they were people walking the street, because what was actually there was impossible therefore they couldn't see it. It's like, wasn't there a story of when the Beagle Darwin ship arrived at an island somewhere. The natives couldn't see it because they were so that I've never tracked that story down it may be not true. But I have read the same, very much so. Several times yes and it is it is a real story that they showed up in the island and because the natives had no concept and reference point for a ship. They literally could not see the ship, but at some point, some of the people the men on the ship got off into the little boats to come ashore that they could see. And so it took a while for them to understand assimilate inside of them what the concept of ship was, and then they see it, which is a fascinating allegory to what you're talking about. Listen, I want to just go back to something that we did I don't feel like we really finished which was the thing about writing. Yeah, and I do have a message for your writing students. It's this have joy, when you write. And when you read, read, read, read. Every time you sit down to read, or you sit down to write, anticipate entering a state of wonder, and let that happen, because it always will. If you don't take your fears and your fear of the blank page and all that are the my writing is no good and all of that with you. And just live in wonder. What comes out might be the next great book and it might be just something for you. But if you did it in a state of wonder you did it well. I can curse so much. Thank you for that it's very inspiring because I found often with students that in the beginning or even in the middle of the process this doubt will come up. Well anyone like this do I have anything worth saying is this even coming out well. And yeah I really step in at that point because I think self editing is the worst thing we can do in a creative process, rather than be in the flow of. Coming from you I think that's very meaningful. Well I'm very obsessive to talk to talk about editing. I, it's not unusual for me to rewrite a manuscript 50 times. So, that's there to. That's right. There's a life force beyond the first draft. That's for sure. Yeah, oh yeah the first drafts. The first drafts just enough just a sketch. It's not a fairly long sketch but it's a sketch and then you, you get into it. And, and then you're constantly thinking. Oh my God did I see that. Wait a minute, if you're writing a novel wasn't he a, wasn't she a man in chapter 14. I better look back and see what I'm doing here. So, you talk about, and I thought this is really interesting that often if people have had a traumatic childhood or upbringing, they could be more susceptible to connecting with extraterrestrials. Yes, that's right. I would constitute by the way for that. And, and I'm really curious why if you know why or what it is about that vibration that makes us more open to that connection, and even how the visitors know that or can sense that shattered expectations.  They expect an orderly life. And when that is suddenly shattered that there is a crack in reality left in that child psyche, and the visitors see that and they can come through it. They can come through that crack and they, they will in some cases do that. Other cases no but some cases they will do it. And it depends on the individual and who they are and, and what they are like inside the visitors go for people who are generally rather gentle people. I mean, if they're going to be manhandling and taking into these little ships and stuff.  We're careful. We're careful with lions and tigers to for the same reason. But that's one thing. And another thing is, I think, and this is just the theory of mine. This is not, I know, I'm not speaking from authority at all, but from observation this, you see a group of them together a group of people together all of whom have had post encounters. There's something very laid back about them they're not, they're not like you don't find people who are really in the super intense state, politically, or, you know, like a far left or far right. It's not many in that state, some now, but not many. And the bulk of them are sort of, you know, they're sort of like me. I mean, they're just, I'm just not interested in that stuff. I mean, I try to be because I have a radio show and all my, my radio show people are interested but I'm very mild mannered I haven't lost my temper since I was 12. Wow. Probably then, it's been long before then even. But, and they, so they look for people who whose DNA makes them mild mannered and easy to handle. I also think they look for a type of DNA that's kind of clean and I'll tell you what I mean by that. They concentrate on Australia, the United States, South America's Africa, and Canada, but not so much Europe, and not so much like China, and, and the Middle East, and it's interesting that the places they are most prevalent are places where it has not there's not been a lot of secular violence, like wars and things and so we know now that DNA contains echoes from your, in other words, a child's DNA if that child's father was in a terrible battle. That's in that child somewhere. I mean it's not a word, it's, but it's in there. And they seem to be interested in people who don't have that. I say a theory. But, you know, if you're in Australia, a lot of people in Australia, or Canada or the United States and South America and Africa were never in big wars. There were no, you know, there were some of course in all of those places, but the great majority of the people in those areas were not exposed to gigantic warfare like they were in Europe and Russia and China, where there were millions of people slaughtered wholesale in a tremendously high level of trauma through the whole area for generations. It's just not like that in these other areas and this is where they seem to the visitor seem to be looking for people. Does that mean that you yourself had a difficult upbringing. I had a pretty good upbringing I had a difficult time I'll tell you something happened to me in. I think it was in 1952 I'm pretty sure it was. And I was taken out to a class for an enhanced learning class at an air base at Randolph Air Force Base I think in San Antonio, and it proved to be extremely traumatic. I got involved the use of a skinner box and, you know, putting a little boy and closing them up in a box like that is, I mean, it scares me even just saying it now. And it was so traumatic that I didn't even remember it for a long time and the memory came back to me in the late 90s and it became very disturbing. About five years ago, my oldest and best friend, and I were talking and I brought this up with him and he said oh yeah, they recruited me to only my parents wouldn't let me go in I was he was nine I'm two years younger. And he said they wouldn't let me go in because it involved the use of a skinner box which is this enhanced learning box, and they didn't think that was going to be a healthy thing to do. So I know it happened. And it cracked the cosmic egg for me. That was the trauma that let the visitors into my life. Amazing. You also talk about that the visitors may be attracted to you because you have a glow, and not like the big city lights kind of glow. Oh yeah, that's right. Well that's another thing. Yeah, there's two other things in fact. One of my uncles, Edward Streber was involved in the Roswell incident at right field he was one of the ones who handled the debris when it was brought from Roswell. And anyone in a family that was that where they they involved anyone people in the military who were involved with UFOs. Very often, end up with the visitors like these young pilots will go out there and they'll they they're told to observe these craft and sometimes to make aggressive moves towards them and so forth.  And that's sort of so that part of it happened. And now. And then there was the thing with the, the trauma. And what was the other thing you asked about the glow the that's oh yeah that's right. Okay, well, early on, I had some periods where I was able to kind of communicate with them telepathically and mentally and to talk to them. And it was, it was very obvious it wasn't like imagination at all. I haven't been able to do it in years because you know unless there are someone on the other side the phone is not going to get answered right. So, I had one night when Annie and I could actually talk to them and we were both asking them questions and I was repeating the answers out loud it was quite amazing and I asked one of my first questions was why did you come here. And the answer was we saw a glow. And I thought of a glow of cities, etc. But later I found out different. After any passed away. I was at a conference in Nashville with William Henry and his wife Claire holding a conference. And I was there. And a woman came up to me and said Mr. Strieber, I just had the strangest thing happen. And by this time, a half dozen people had had and talking to them and so forth that was all it's all in afterlife revolution but it. So I wasn't too surprised when she said, I heard and say in my ear. Tell Whitley I can see him when he's in the chair.  And then, and what I do is something called the sensing exercise where you take your attention.   And they can see it glow and then I remembered that glow comment from all those years before and I thought, that's it. They saw me sitting in there out there doing the sensing exercise every night at 11.  Let's see what he's up to. And that's probably the way it started. So I do it now. After, after that event. I began to get waked up at three in the morning to do it again.  This is not going to end I'm going to be like this is my life now. But this thing, the thing is the three o'clock is the time of inspiration as I said earlier. And it's so wonderful because my all of these books these these books, afterlife, New World and Jesus, new vision have all come from this level of inspiration that happens then. And so it's extremely productive for me creatively. I do the sensing exercise. And after it during that, often the ideas begin to flow from another higher place. So all I can say more about that the sensing exercise and what yeah place. Well it's really very simple. I learned it in the Gertjieff Foundation. George Gertjieff was a Armenian philosopher and teacher. He was born during the czarist period and left Russia during the Revolution, ended up in France, and founded an institute called the Institute for the harmonious development of man outside of Paris. And then got trapped in World War two and so he seemed everywhere he went a war started but that you know it was a very tumultuous time but anyway he had a group of followers and people listening to his teachings. Madame Jean de Saltzman and her husband, white Russian Emma Grace and a man, another Russian called P. D. Spensky who wrote a book about him called in search of the miraculous. Eventually in the late 40s he founded he created a foundation in Paris and then London and New York. And I joined the New York Foundation in 1970 and I did because it's about waking up. The theory is we are asleep. And we don't know it we're living lives our lives mechanically and the way you wake up is you learn to divide your attention between your thoughts and you start with your body. And you know the body is a great tool because it's fixed and physical and you can divide your attention between their thoughts in your body and you're sure you're doing it you're not wandering off in some meditative fugue. I started doing it in 1970 and I've been doing it ever since. And it's one of the main reasons the visitors noticed me because they do see that as a glowing. They see the nervous system glow. Amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And people can go on my website, unknown country.com to find out more about it. You can just go in there and put sensing exercise in the search engine and you'll get stuff. Okay. Excellent. I know that at one point, this implant that is inside of you, you were interested in having it removed and then you have long ago. And so, assuming the implant is still with you, let me know, has the capabilities of the implants inside of you expanded or changed over time. Oh, gosh, yes. I didn't know how to use the implant for years. But once Annie passed away. Then there was somebody who was there on the other side. Her. And it's used to, to communicate between us primarily between the two of us. Let me tell you something I learned about it. It's absolutely fascinating. There was a doctor who's worked on this stuff for a long time. And he's worked on implants and stuff. Not Dr. Roger Lear, but this is just recent. This is about a year ago. And he wanted to, he said, well, I'd like to take a look at it. And I said, well, fine. And he's, I said, I'm not, I want to have it taken out. And he said, well, then let's get a cat scan. And we'll take a look at it. And I said, fine, I can get a cat can get a cat scan. It's not hard. Tell my doctor I have assisted my year. You know, he can feel the lump himself.  So two days before that, there's a knock on the door at four o'clock in the morning. I just finished meditating. And now you'd think you wouldn't answer the door at that time, but this knock was a type of knock I've heard before. And I knew it was them. And I'm not going to no way. Am I going to ignore that? Because I don't see them often. And I do like it when I do. I want to see them more. It's wonderful to have physical experiences with them. They're very brief generally. I opened the door. And it was not the visitors. It was two men. It didn't concern me because immediately as soon as I saw the one standing in the doorway, I recognized him instantly. I don't I had known him for years, and they came in. And they proceeded to explain the implant to me. And they explained how it worked, how it created it drew. When I was thinking it would draw concepts from deep in my mind that hadn't come to the front of my mind yet, and enable me to use those concepts it was a tool of inspiration really, and ideas, and then he said the one of the one that did the most he said, it was invented by a man named Constantine raw dive. And I thought okay, that's interesting I'm going to Google that as soon as these guys leave for sure. And I, they, after they asked me, they said they had come, because they did not want the implant to be removed, and they said that this doctor does want to have it removed and he's going to try to convince you of that. And so it's still here because of that meeting there was no way after that obviously I'm the doctor lost. In any case, I Googled the name, and I was looking at then I thought, oh my gosh, I don't need to Google this I know this name. Not, he pronounced it wrong it's Constantine rod of a. The, and he was a Constantine rod of a was a was one of the pioneers of something called electro electronic voice communication phenomenon EVP. And he communicated with the world of the dead using electronic devices. And, you know, I was amazed I thought, my God, how could this be and I was talking to friends about it, including friends who are who know about EVP. And I was talking to one friend who done a documentary about EVP and you a great deal about it. And he said, Well, you know, Whitley, that's odd because I have the same slit in my eye and I see words going through it I've never I've often wondered what that was. And of course, he was an expert on Constantine rod of a. So it was built by someone on the other side a scientist on the other side designed it to facilitate communications between the two sides. I know you talk about the words that go by in your eyes. And what is that for can you actually grasp some of it. No, no, what it does is, at least, this is how they explained it to me. It pulls thoughts up subliminal thoughts up and turns them into words that I can see, but they move too fast so they don't become completely conscious because if they did become completely conscious, then it wouldn't work. Then I would start fixating on them. But it's like, it's like having, having a very brilliant friend, supporting you by giving you suggestions as you write, but the suggestions really come from deep inside you. And it just works phenomenally well. You can't, you can't read it much at all. Sometimes I once when I asked it one time, who are you, I would and it's suddenly it slowed down and just as clear as a bell that came slowly across the screen. It's me and you know this is this we started out talking about aliens but what are we really talking about. We're talking about a higher level of consciousness and a new kind of mankind, a kind of mankind where we're just like the visitors. We don't have a barrier between the living and the dead that's gone. And suddenly we are a whole species for the first time. We're not separated by fear of death, which has been separating us for all of our history. All of our religions, all of our gods, all of our wars, all of that comes down to this fear. And when that fear is gone, a new humanity emerges. And that's where we're going. Yeah, you said something in your book, a new world that just completely changed me, which is the idea. Are you talking about the soul, the deads, the others, these entities for communion and our betterment. You also said that some of those we looked to on the other side that we may pray to ask for help our God, our God, our guardians, our angels, that there's also the visitors who are here to assist us and I never thought of that as part of my team before. I thought that was riveting. Yeah, because we do have teams. I mean, I, I certainly have a team I have a I have a guardian angel. But I'm very nervous about meeting that guardian angel because I'm given the guardian angel level workout for sure, not just not just in my adult life and I was a, I get as a kid I lived very dangerously we were, we were a bunch of, we just, you know, we were let go and we were in the summers in the morning and basically expected to be dressed and and clean for dinner at six o'clock. And if you weren't there on time in that state, it was assumed that you were dead. And if you weren't dead then oh dear, you were in trouble, but there was no supervision during the day at all. And we just went while of course we just did all kinds of crazy things. And now here's another story about guardian angels. And now we're driving along the highway on the way to the country house one time and there was coming from a friend's house and it was a T in the highway where one highway entered another. You were just approaching the highway that would lead us to the country house when the car suddenly stopped and it was a beautiful brand new Volvo and in those days they were built like clock like watches. They may still be for all I know but I can't afford Volvo's anymore so it's not my world.  We sat there we, I said Annie I don't know what to do it stopped just stopped. All of a sudden it starts up again. So we go on off to the country house and we forgot about nothing is wrong with the car I never took it in or anything because it all kept working. About a year later we're at the Chautauqua Institute in upstate New York. And we went to spend a day at a place called the Lily Dale assembly which is one of the places in my heart, which is the headquarters the summer headquarters of the socialist church of America, and all the little houses in it are owned by psychics, and you can go in there and you can go and see a psychic and you know pay $25 or whatever the charge. So we went to a psychic called the keen. I forgot this first name I'm sorry, it might come back to me and it might not. Anyway, Gregory keen, and I'm sitting there. And he suddenly says, and it's a good psychic readings a good psychic. He suddenly says do you remember the time your car stopped on the highway. And I'm stunned because you know good psychic is one thing, but that's a different whole different kettle of fish right. I hadn't mentioned it to him I haven't even thought about it in a year. And I said well yes I do.  Oh, my God. Wow. I was flabbergasted. So I considered that a pretty damn good psychic greeting I thought Gregory keen is good at what he did. Now, two days later, our son shows up at Chautauqua to hang out with us for his. He's a teenager so his objective is to hang out for with us for as little time as he possibly can, which was a few days and in the case. We're talking we're riding in the car and near the institution. I'm telling him this story. And I said, and you know, I had to believe him that I have a guardian angel because as soon as he could not have known that the car stopped. And so I'm now I've accepted it. I have a guardian angel. You know what happened. Car stopped with your son with my son in it at that moment. confirmation. Exactly. And then it started up again. So if you get into a lot of scrapes and trouble. When you pass over. Don't be surprised if there's someone who says, thank the Lord your back. That was a hard job. Yeah, exactly. Oh, wow, that's very powerful. I like the fact that the signs are so obvious. There's no second guessing it's a really clear. Yep, I'm here. Yep, that was me. So very powerful. And I think the last thing regarding your implant is, you've said that today you use the implant for research. What kind of research, how do you employ the implant? Oh, you're easy. You just have to think about what you need. Or just think that you need something new. And it pops up into your life, not necessarily into your mind, but it'll be in a, a book will show up or someone will say something it's just wonderful in that respect. It's a synchronicity generator of other things. I just wish everybody had these. I'm not I only I know of only two people who haven't the other guy has no idea how to use it that doesn't really work for him. But mine works great. And I just use it all the time. I, it's my, it's my main, it's my primary research tool. Right, it sounds like a beacon, where you put it out and what you need. You just put it out there and something comes back. It's, it's a greatest gift any, anyone could ever have it. I'm so grateful for it. And as I say, hint hint to the visitors I think, and to whoever the dead. We could a lot of us could use this. I'm not alone in that respect. I was thrilled to hear you talk about in your books the use of shamanic drumming shamanism which is something I'm really into. How many times have you used or been involved where shamanic drumming was a part of an experience and to what a place just twice. When I was at the cabin, our old cabin in upstate New York where all this stuff happened. We were drumming and dancing with some friends a guy who really knew something about drumming he was a fabulous drummer. All of a sudden, these meteors, little meteors began to shooting across and just above our heads.  They were meteors at 15 feet. And, you know, so we were drumming and dancing and going on and these meteors were going past it was very cool. And it was one. And then the second one was at a private family gathering gathering on the Lakota Sue reservation in the summer of 2019. A very profound type of spiritual gathering that's that's that's not the, the Sue people do not make this gap type of gathering public. It was an enormous privilege and an honor to be invited. And at that gathering I experienced what I consider to this day to be the most powerful single. If you will religious meditative shamanic experience of my life, and the UFO showed up. We all saw it it was there for a couple of over an hour. And every once in a while it would pop out a couple of little flashes of light, and eventually it disappeared and then showed up again at a medicine lodge. And, you know, these people are very they're, they have very powerful spirits and they have suffered and are suffering now, immeasurably. I have boundless respect for them and their life journey. And the visitors do to they like them a lot the like they like the Indians. And the Native Americans, the Indians don't the Indians don't have resistance I think they have. No, they don't at all. You know believe that this exists know like it's a knowing it's not even a belief. And I think that is ancient with them to know integrated into their culture from time immemorial. And, you know, a lot of you talk a lot of the medicine people and they'll scoff at you when you talk about aliens. But that's not because they don't believe it's because they think you're, you're, you're crazy because you don't understand what you're seeing. You don't understand what they are. There's one world here, and we're all part of it. And that's how they see this. They see these entities as being part of reality just in the same way we are. Absolutely. Well, if we're, if there really is no such thing as an earthling, and we actually all are hybrids, and we're all essentially from another planet. And that we've got that truly in our DNA, then there there is no such thing as that separation. Right, we're all universal beings. We belong to the earth. We are who this planet, everything. We are her children. And, in fact, our planet earth is being is so foot short, she's pregnant with us that's why there's so many of us, and it's getting polluted her waters are are going to break soon. We're going to be poured out into the real world, screaming and crying like it or not. Dead or alive. As they used to teach kids when I was a little boy how to swim, throw you in the water and say sink or swim.  My mother learned to swim that way. I learned it a country at a country club but that was the old way of teaching. And that's the way nature teaches. We will be. We're going to go through that on planet earth. And afterwards, there will be a great difference in us and the difference will be this. We will not be in our mother unconscious of her presence. We will not be in her and be before her as her children, not within her as her as her babies. Oh, well, I, I don't look forward to what that might take to get there, but I look forward to being there. It's noisy. Yeah, that's for sure. And it's going to be noisy and difficult. I mean, none of us remember going down the birth canal for a reason. It's a hard journey. But in a new world, something I found very fascinating is an experience that you have Whitley where you are literally suddenly plunged into five parallel lifetimes. All at once. Yeah, you are peacefully aware of all of them simultaneously. So what happened how were you concurrently able to be aware of each lifetime. I don't know. It happened. It's very unexpected. I was asleep and I woke up and there were all these lights outside the window and it was raining cats and dogs and the wind was blowing in off the ocean I lived near the ocean. And yet these lights were just as still as they could be right there in this in the sky. And I thought, well, that's them. It's the visitors because there's no other way that could be there's no no helicopter could be doing that. And there was no sound anyway. And so I after I, you know, I looked at it, I, I might, I'm not remembering offhand if I if Annie saw them to she might have waked her up. In any case, I looked at him a few times for sure. And then I couldn't sleep. So I got up to go into the living room and the whole apartment was reconfigured. It wasn't the same place. And it was not only that there was all kinds of weird stuff in it. It wasn't, it wasn't my apartment. It was something different. And the next thing I knew I was living five lives at the same time in five different lives. Or maybe five different versions of the same life. And it was a, it was pretty shocking and absolutely fascinating. And I was very disoriented, because I turned around to go back in the bedroom the bedroom door was gone and stuff like that. I mean, it was just a, it was a remarkable experience. And that was the way the people who I've been with ever since announced themselves that was the first night they were here. And over here was two nights ago. So they've been coming to me for a long time. One thing about when you get involved with the visitors, there's two things you learn very quickly. One is, if you say yes to something, that's bad. That's forever. You're going to ever decide that, well, I'm tired of this now. It's, you make a life commitment to anything that you do with them. There's no, otherwise what they will, like you were talking. No, no, they won't do anything. They won't do anything.  And I think you're the most annoying person they've ever known. So they get mad at me plenty, but, but here's the thing. If I turned it all off, I stopped, I started just sleeping all night, not meditating anymore. They would still be waiting. They would never stop waiting for me. And I would know that. And that's one of the main things that keeps me going, because they are willing to try. They are willing to, to be there, to be on the, on the case and to try to help me become a more conscious being, to help me find joy. They are there. They're not going to quit. So why in the world would I, to feel like there was a reason why they allowed you into that portal to experience five lifetime. Because it was, it was a preparation for learning about parallel universes and living in them. I've physically been into a parallel universe. I'm not going to talk about it much because it's too complicated. And we're nearly at the end of our time together, but I've actually done this. And then, in fact, I've, I've, I've really, you know, it's real. This stuff is all real. This world is, this is real. There are other universes. In fact, in the new world, I talk about a mirror universe. That is, that is, we are, we are together. We're, we're in the same space and they can cross back and forth over. And I've crossed over into the other universe. A couple times, two times physically. And it is an astonishing experience. It's breathtaking. And it's, it's not heaven.  But it's different from this. And that experience is absolutely delicious. Oh, I hope you'll write about it. I would love to read about that. Well, good, because I've been saying to them, I haven't got enough experience to write a book about it. Let me stay there for a week. Wow. And then I could write a fabulous book about this. Yes, please. But I don't know. They're, they. They have their own agenda. No, they, you have your own agenda. I have my agenda. And if it's not on my agenda, which I, I'm sure I created before I was even born physically. Yeah. I'm not going to do it, but I hope it is on my agenda. I hope so too. Cause that I'm extremely fascinated by all of that. You, I have two quotes I want to go through and just ask you about, because it's so beautiful. It's so beautiful. And the key, a true encounter in the quote is sin is about the denial of the right to thrive. Yes. Mic drop. That's so powerful. You learn this from your wise visitors. Yes. Spound on that a little bit. Okay. Sin is denial of the right to thrive. We have all of us a right. To have a right to have the kind of life that leads us in toward enlightenment and leads us toward greater consciousness. This is why we're here. And when that is denied to us by someone else's actions, that individual has added weight to them's their own soul.   And I'm a good teller of tall tales, of course.   In any case, we have this right, this intrinsic right.  They will not, you know, you can't deceive. But in order to really do this, to not just to, not just to avoid denying people the right to thrive, but to actually proactively participate in this process of finding out and understanding how to help others thrive in oneself too. You have to learn and understand very deeply what we call compassion. And that's hard because compassion is not necessarily giving a man on the street a dollar. Compassion is something much deeper than that. And understanding what you and those around you truly need and acting in such a way is that that you can, everything you can, everything you do is in the direction of helping that happen. I asked Annie about compassion after she was no longer physical. And I said, how do I, how are we to understand compassion? And she said, what I think is one of the most powerful things I've ever heard. She said, each of us is all we have. And when you think of the other person in that way, all of a sudden, even the most awful person, you can imagine acquires a humanity that you didn't even realize was there.  And you're not there to say, oh, it's too bad. I understand you were a murderer. You're there to help him find himself.  You see that? It's not necessarily all sweetness and light. Another thing she said, I asked her about enlightenment, and she said, enlightenment is what happens when there is nothing left of us but love. That's the aim of life. I'm not getting there and I would, I hope you do. And if you do, please call me. What about humility, Whitley? Well, that was the first lesson I got from the visitors. There's three things, love, compassion and humility. You can't love others and you can't be compassionate unless you start with a foundation of humility. And I was lording it over my brother about a year after the community experience and showing him the place that happened and the book was out and I was the big guy. He's 11 years younger and all of a sudden we were walking along in the woods and I heard this voice say, arrogance, I can do whatever I want to you. And I thought, that's my own inner voice telling me to quit lording it over my bro. But then we walked out into a clearing and there was a huge UFO up in the sky. I thought, oh no, it's really, it was not me. And I thought, now what's going to happen? So the next morning the bank calls and says, Mr. Strieber, we have checks for you drawn on an account that we no longer have at our bank. And I'm going to have to return these checks by this afternoon. I just wanted you to know that, and I said, wait a minute, back up. I have my only account in the world at your bank and you're telling me I have no account. He said, no, did you move to another bank? I said, no, I did not move to another bank. I have my account there. Those checks are good because I've got all my money is in that account. He said, well, we have no account here. I said, look, there's been a mistake. Look for the account. So he calls back later this afternoon. He said, you know, Mr. Strieber, we all remember you. It was a small town and small bank.  And I said, yes, that's correct. He said, there's no account. There's no sign of an account, but we're going to hold the checks overnight. I've gotten permission from management to do that. And we're going to look for your account in the in the backups systems, which were then a magnetic tape. This was back in the in the late 80s was different from now. And I stewed for a couple of days waiting to see and finally they found one backup copy of my account on these tapes. Everything else had been erased from the bank's records from top to bottom. And I set out on a quest to understand what humility really is after that, because I realized this is a serious lesson. And it was an essential lesson because unless I learned that I couldn't do the rest. Quote from you regarding the visitors, they are not our enemies, they are not our friends, they are teachers, they are challenging and they are rewarding. Yes, that's correct. What do you mean. Well, my life, I've been greatly rewarded by by being there by accepting them as teachers. And I think there are a lot of them dangerous to I mean, you know, there may be.  They might want to both dance together but the and it better be damn careful. You know, it's not the elephant doesn't want to dance it's just that the situation is such that you have to be really careful.  And you don't want to do that. They're like, they don't they accept things but they do not like gratitude. They do not. They, they, they're not interested in. I think they probably would like a dog a cat more than they would a dog let me put it that way. Interesting. So your website unknown country.com they can find your radio show your books your blog. Everything is there. Everything. Oh yeah, and there's a subscription area too. So if you want to subscribe and keep me keep me keep me fed please do it. Beautiful. And this is dare to dream. What are you next dare to dream. I want to find my wings and fly because I think it's possible. I have loved having you back on the show you are welcome anytime and if you do thanks Debbie book and you need a beta tester. I'm right here. Okay, great. Thank you so much. I loved it. It was such fun. And listeners, thank you for listening. Absolutely. I end this show today with a quote from Carl Sagan in the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves. Tune in next week to hear this weekly number one transformation conversation. My guest will be Steve Cuden he's an American screenwriter, director, lyricist, playwright and author, and Steve is best known for his work on the Broadway musical a billion dollar success called Jekyll and hide, as well as his writing for over 90 produced teleplays for familiar TV shows. Debbie dashinger myself I am a certified coach, and my expertise is visibility in media, I coach people to write a page Turner book. And if you're interested in being guided to write your book. We have openings right now go to Debbie dashinger calm slash visible visionaries and you can work with me live in a group setting. I've also got a company that takes books to a guaranteed international bestseller, and we get massive results. If you would like your free tips and tools, go to Debbie dashinger calm. That's d e b b i d a c h i n g r. com. Thanks again for tuning in and remember to turn all your dreams into your reality.


This is great to be here. And I think our plan is we're just going to talk a little bit about virtual reality and ADI. And virtual reality is all about storytelling. So Tony will talk a lot about that. And I'm going to tell a short story about how we were involved with virtual reality and how we got involved with ADI. So with that, so starting off, just virtual reality, I'm sure a lot of people know about virtual reality and augmented reality. But for a long time in science fiction, there was this idea of virtual reality as this place you could go to and interact with other people and experience whole new worlds and things. And so there were books about this. There were movies about this. And so it's been pretty pervasive. But for some reason, this hasn't really played out until now. There's been these long ideas about VR, but not a lot of actual reality about it. And it's been going on since the 90s. So here you see maybe since 1990, basically what the state of VR tech was. And you see things all the way on the left side that came out around 1990 when a VR headset cost $20,000. Not really something that most people would have. And they were talking about these applications. Like, well, maybe you could practice surgery inside of VR. Maybe you could redesign cities and have civil engineering happen inside of VR. But it didn't really catch on. And then in 1994, you had some Nintendo and Sega came out with their products. Never really caught on. In fact, the Nintendo product was the worst selling product Nintendo ever launched. Yet there had been all these ideas about VR. So what went wrong? And you see also here there was really nothing that happened between the late 90s and today. Very limited efforts. People felt like VR happened and it didn't work. And so now what? But if you think about why it didn't work, it was really five major factors. It was super expensive. Most people couldn't afford it. It wasn't a consumer device. And in these experiences, people got motion sickness because there was so much latency in the devices. And the resolution wasn't there. So you end up with these really boxy environments you were in. It wasn't like reality at all. And then, of course, content was missing. We didn't have enough processing power to fuel this content. So you fast forward a little bit and you can imagine the tech industry took care of a lot of these. And so things like better processors and better display technologies came along. And so Oculus put them all together. And so we were an early investor in Oculus. We thought that the product they had made and the traction they'd gotten amongst developers to create this new wave of virtual reality was really important. And after Oculus, Oculus proved that the tech was ready. This VR dream that people had could actually work this time. And this whole industry emerged around it. And so now you have other headset manufacturers. You have other content makers. You have a lot of different things happening. Now, Oculus was a pretty important company. The question that follows is, could there be another really important company in VR, Hint, at AI? But when we think about important companies, we think you have to be doing something that the market wants. You have to really fill a huge void that's there. Like meet an important market need. You can't just create something that nobody wants and make a difference. So in addition to that, we try and think about, how are you going to be lasting? How are you not only going to create something that people want today, but how are you going to be around for 20 years so that you can make a huge difference? And so usually we think of these various ways that you'd establish yourself as a major player in the industry, network effects, technology, huge scale, having that be an advantage, or just brand. And so these are things we think about. Let's keep them in mind as we go through this. Going back to the things that were missing in the 90s, one major area that was still missing, even after Oculus, even after all these companies that came out in the last couple of years, was content. So if you think about content, in experiencing VR, you've got content that you need to have some place to consume that content, and you need some device to consume that content on. It's not so different from the web. You need a monitor. You need a website to go to. You need things on the website. And so if you break down content, you have computer graphics or computer-generated images, and you've got somehow live action. And within live action, you've got spherical, which is where you have cameras facing out, looking at the world. Almost as if they're projected on the surface, like a planetarium. And then you've got volumetric, which is something you're gonna, you could look at from all sides. And so if you ask yourself, where's the opportunity today? It's in volumetric. People have figured out how to have outward-facing cameras that sit together, not so hard. But having cameras facing in and actually capturing real content and real life to create real virtual reality, like virtual reality where you feel like you're actually there and experiencing things, that hasn't been done. Now, if you think of what goes into creating volumetric content, you've got a lot of different pieces. You've got talent, capture processing, and then destination and device. And for most of these, there's huge amounts of competition. You wouldn't wanna start a talent agency. You've already got many, many actors out there. That's a very competitive industry. Destination sites, they already exist. Devices, we talked about them. But in the middle is capturing what's happening in real life and processing that to put it into the environment. And so that's the hole that ADI fills. And we think that's a really important one. We think it's really defensible. ADI has technology that no one else has. It has a brand amongst filmmakers that's building that. It's gonna have more things that make it really special over time. And that's what helped us believe that, yes, this will be one of the really lasting companies in VR that makes a huge difference and that we wanna be involved with and help anyway we can. And so that's what led ADI to being our first virtual reality investment since Oculus. We were involved in the SEED and Series A round. So with that, that's the short story of how we thought about VR and how we got involved in ADI. And I wanna leave it to Tony to tell the full tale of ADI. What we're doing at ADI is making it possible for virtual reality to become more human. Virtual reality is an extremely promising medium for us to communicate and tell stories in an extremely compelling way. And as Scott's mentioned, there's lots of stages to the technology that's needed to make that possible. But since I'm here in a community of storytellers and people interested in story, I wanna focus on what is it that we bring to storytelling and what tools can we offer? So, yeah, as Scott's been saying, there is an industry emerging now. Virtual reality is sort of the early poster child of this with devices like the Oculus Rift that can put you inside a fully immersive world. But behind that is also coming augmented reality where we digitally augment the real world that we're in. And it's not just headsets, it's other forms of display, holographic projection devices and more broadly a trend where the internet and digital content will increasingly transition to something that is three dimensional and more like the experience of real life, part of this endless march of telling our stories as human beings. So, while it seems that this year in 2016, we're at an inflection point for the hardware display devices that alone is not enough to really catalyze this industry. And so that saying content is king is just as true here in VR and the other associated formats as it has been for past technology. But what type of content do you need in VR? Well, it's got to have certain qualities because the power and the magic of VR is that you can give viewers a real sense of presence in a different place. You're not just asking them to look at images, you're asking them to step inside a volume that has all of the dimensions of real life so that they can move forward, backs up and down, side to side, they can rotate across any axis.  Now, to create content that works in that environment, as Scott said, it has to be volumetric. It can't just be the illusion of three dimensions, it actually has to be digital content that has those dimensions, including the dimension of depth. And for the most compelling content, it must also have motion. We don't just wanna watch static things, we wanna tell moving stories. So where's all this volumetric content gonna come from? Gaming is gonna be the early mover. VR has come from the gaming industry and indeed a lot of genuinely three dimensional content already exists in gaming. Gamers are used to navigating and moving through 3D worlds. Indeed, we're already seeing a whole community of virtual reality game developers emerging really rapidly. But VR has so much potential beyond that and people want to tell more than just gaming stories. So this slide here shows some thumbnails from this year's Sundance Film Festival where dozens of storytellers have come together wanting to tell their stories in virtual reality. Some of those stories have been about fantasy worlds and they've used CG effectively to create these worlds and create three dimensional content. But a great and actually a majority of these content creators have wanted to tell human stories, right? That's no surprise to us, those are stories that we're all interested in. But until now they've really lacked the tools to do that because it turns out that making VR human is actually a really tough problem. What we would define as good human content for VR is content that is genuinely volumetric. It's able to move and it looks real and it moves in a natural way that we all expect humans to behave in. Otherwise it kind of messes with our head. So CG authoring of three dimensional content has some problems. It always runs into this issue called the uncanny valley. The more realistic you try to make the people move, look, the more creepy they actually end up. It's really weird and then you try to get them to move and they can't really move in all of the natural ways and it's really, really disconcerting. This example here is actually one of the best in class in the world. It's made by Nvidia and yet still there's something about this guy that's a little bit creepy. He doesn't have any hair. You know, no offense to bull people but that's a hard thing for them to do. It takes months of work by artists to author one of these. So it's not really very scalable either. Here's another example from the Polar Express which is a film made in CG. You can really see that the characters kind of bridge between cute and creepy but either way you can tell that it's not quite real.  And the same is going in VR filmmaking. So this film was shown at the Sundance Film Festival. It was made by Noni Della Penier and her company Implematic Group. She's known as the godmother of VR and is trying to tell a really human story about domestic violence and the impact this has on communities and yet you can kind of see here from the characters they're still kind of lacking the tools to make that really gritty human story feel like a real true story. The other approach that people try to solve this problem is using the spherical cameras that Scott talked about. The problem with that is that it's not really volumetric. So if you wanna watch that dancer perform from the side or see how he's doing his moves from behind, you can't. It's really just a two dimensional sphere. So it doesn't give you all the freedom to feel just as you would if you're in the street with a dancer. And that's where we come in, making virtual reality human. So our process is that we capture real human performances on a stage. We want to enable those performances to be translated into volumetric VR where the viewer has unlimited perspectives on it. We wanna do this in a way that's really practical. We don't just put a camera in every possible position that the viewer could be, it'd be way too many cameras and way, way too much data. So instead we capture it with a very sparse array of cameras and that's where a lot of our magical IP comes in in the way that we synthesize all of the infinite views and possibilities that lie in between that. Then the other side of the magic is taking that huge kind of array of imagery and compressing it enough so that people can send it, share it on devices and watch it. So we start out with a character shot on our stage and then we can transport that into a different environment like this gladiator here that you can see in a Coliseum. It could be a CG environment, it could be photographic. It's something that you can move around in any direction that you wish. And we can take people out of an empty space, an empty room and allow them to really be present with somebody else. And because of the genuinely three-dimensional nature of that performance, it's fascinating to watch people actually be transported into that other world to move around and explore. They feel a sense of emotional connection. They look back on it, not like something they watched but like something they did, something they actually experienced. So that's a real breakthrough in how we can tell and share human stories and how we can move people. And it's a really exciting time for our company because this has been a very deep technology development exercise but we're now at the point where we can take this and begin to use it to experiment with how we communicate, how we tell stories. Okay, I just wanna show a few seconds of the start of the video. So you get a sense of going back to content and how you move around. You have to keep showing people why you're here.  As the internet transitions to 3D, ATI brings you the best way to create and experience content in this new digital reality. Yeah, thanks. So I just wanted you to see how we record someone and then out of that comes something that looks very much like a video but you can move and rotate all around it. And I'm hoping if the Wi-Fi is working well enough out here, you'll be able to experience it yourself after this talk. So some of the applications we're beginning into apply this to. This is a California based rap artist called Chewy. We shot him in our studio and then we took his performance, transported it to Venus Beach where you can stand and watch like you're a front row member of the audience. We've also been trialing in cinematic applications. So here is a scene Mad Max inspired Wasteland without our technology that would be an empty wasteland but we enable volumetric human characters and acting to be a part of this medium. Another application in the fashion industry, we really excel at showing human skin, human hair, the most realistic 360 volumetric human. So it's a great way for people to really understand garments, how they look, how they fall, how they move, what's it like from the back. And something that's really exciting for all of us is capturing human memories and we're really looking forward to the time where more and more people are able to capture and share important events in their life and create a record of that that can be distributed across space to other people and through time. So this is a shot from a scene we took of a mother and her three month old baby. Nine months later, the mother returned to the studio and we captured her child at age one. Rhys is taking her first steps and it was really amazing to start documenting someone's life in this way but also to see the mother go back and re-experience and really feel like she did when she was the mother of her three month old baby. She could actually go into virtual reality and step back into the exact same position she was cradling her baby in her arms. And so it's a type of medium that will allow us to really give people emotional experiences and open up a whole new world of communication and storytelling that way. I just wanted to end actually flipping this over on the other side, so not just the content itself but thinking about how we author that content because that is the other side of democratizing the storytelling medium. So while actually a relatively narrow set of people can author high-end CG or write games, a lot of people make content using video cameras or using the cameras in their phone. And at ADAI what we do is we use off-the-shelf cameras. Right now we use quite small industrial cameras but the approach we're taking is something that can apply to high-end video cameras and also to the cameras that people will carry in their phones. So it's a really exciting future to think of virtual reality and not just as something for super tech, super geeks but for you and I to capture and share experiences with each other and connect across time and place in a really compelling way. Thank you. Thank you.


Nine steps to design a successful YouTube channel. Hey, are you looking to really do something with that YouTube channel? Are you looking to get subscribers and views and grow your channel? Well, you're in the right place because in this video, I'm gonna show you exactly what you need to do in nine simple steps and we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. If you're new to my channel, you gotta do something. What are you gonna do? You gotta subscribe. You gotta hit that button below there, that big subscribe button. And next to it, there's a bell. You gotta smash the bell. Why? Because it'll make you a VIP person. You wanna be that, right? You wanna join the Fisher family. And how are you VIP? Well, I will be able to notify you every single time I do a new video. Now, I've been selling online since 2009 and I've sold millions of dollars of both physical and digital products. And I gotta tell you, I picked up a few things along the way. As a matter of fact, products are listed on thousands of websites, including Walmart. So, on this channel, what I do is I help you start, run, and grow your online business. Now, if you've had issues with your YouTube channel and you've tried some things or you've had some problems, put those comments below. I wanna see what's going on and I wanna help you out. Also, at the end of this video, I'm gonna give you an e-commerce course valued at $97, absolutely free. All you have to do is click the link. Don't need a credit card or anything else. Okay, let's get started and let's work on that YouTube channel. Okay, let's be honest here. There are other videos on YouTube. Yep, there's other videos on YouTube. So, since there's other videos, and how many videos are there? I don't even know right now because they upload so much, but I can tell you this, there's an estimated 50 million content creators, people making videos.  Don't get discouraged by the fact that there's so many of them. If you do the right things, you're gonna do pretty well because I gotta tell you, the majority of them, including myself, didn't do the right things when they started out. So, let's check it out. So, the first thing we've gotta do is reach those viewers and the way we're gonna reach those viewers is we're gonna raise awareness of our brand. That's exactly what we need to do to build the channel and get subscribers and get views. Now, I know this is gonna sound a little intimidating in the beginning because of all those people out there creating videos, but most of them, like I said, they don't do it that well. So, by the time you're done with going through these nine steps I'm gonna give you in this video, you're gonna be probably far ahead of most people. You're probably far ahead of probably about 95% of the people that are creating content right now. So, we're gonna hit these three key points in this video. We're gonna talk about creating and optimizing your YouTube channel. We're also going to learn how to understand your audience and your competition using data. And we're gonna look at advertising on YouTube through YouTube ads and influencer marketing. Step one, make sense, you gotta create your YouTube channel for your business. Now, all you need to do to create a YouTube channel is you need to have a Gmail address and how much does that cost? It's free, okay?  That's the first thing you need to do. Number two is learn about your audience. Now, how are you gonna do that? Well, as soon as you set up your business account, Google's gonna give you access to a lot of data, okay? So, you can actually go in there, type in different terms and see what they're searching for, what they're looking for, what they're interested in. But you wanna learn as much about your audience as you possibly can. Now, once you've started your YouTube channel, you can actually go into the analytics for your subscribers and you can figure out more data about them so you can make videos that better match your audience that you're building. You're gonna wanna monitor the watch time and demographics of your audience so you can answer all the questions that they have and they wanna see videos on. Here's a few key components that you should be looking at. Where are your videos being viewed and when? What age are your viewers? What gender do your viewers most commonly identify as? Now, tracking your audience like this is really a win-win for you and them because if you know what they want, you can make the right videos, you'll get more views and if you're making the videos they want, they get what they want because they wanna watch videos about the subjects and about all the things they wanna learn about or be entertained about. Now, as you learn all of this information, if your assumptions are right, then of course, you wanna keep making videos in that direction and if they're a little bit off, you wanna kinda cater to what your audience actually wants so that you can get more views. Now, reading comments, hmm, not always fun because they don't always say good things about you but you can learn a lot from these comments so go into your comments on a regular basis, make sure you respond to every single comment and people will say, well, that's gonna take me so much time, it won't in the beginning, trust me, why? Because you won't have any, okay? The only way to really get comments is to ask for them like I'm doing right now, if you're enjoying this video, tell me what you liked about it, put something in the comment section, I know you're watching and I wanna hear what you want too and this also helps you identify your audience and helps you provide what they're looking for so you wanna read all the comments and you're gonna wanna respond to them, super important. You also wanna check out the YouTube community page it's an underrated space for finding out about your audience. It's located under the community tab on your profile and you can interact with your subscribers directly right there, you can see all their comments, you can post questions or you can create a poll to gain a deeper understanding of how your audience thinks. Number three is research or competition. You've surely got other people out there doing videos on the same subjects or the same niches that you do and since you do, you can look at their data which is already out there and help you build your channel by kinda figuring out what they're already doing. So another thing you can do is as you go into your competitor's channels, you can actually browse through and you can sort their videos by the most viewed. When you look at the most viewed, try to figure out what they're doing in those videos. What did they say, what information did they provide, what did they cover, what was the subject, all those things, what kind of thumbnail was on that particular video so that you can garner that information and use it for your channel. Now, here's something cool you can also do. You can, same way you did it with your videos as you looked at the comments, go into their comments, find out what their audience is saying, find out what their audience is asking for. In the beginning, you won't have very many comments so if you look at other comments on another channel, you can figure out what people are asking for and what they need and you can provide it on your channel. The other thing you can do is look at the keywords that your competitor is using in their title and in their description. If you do that, you can figure out some keywords that you could use in your videos to get more subscribers and views. You can also check to see if your competitors are putting ads on your videos. Now, there is a way to block them if you want to do that. That's up to you. Step number four is learn from your favorite channels. Now, these don't have to be competitors, but you know, you probably have some channels that you like to watch on YouTube. I would kind of pick those apart, figure out what they're doing, how are they dressed, what is the background, what is the flow, how long are their videos, what is it that keeps you interested? You can learn a lot from people that you are already watching. It doesn't have to be in the same niche. The one thing I'll tell you is you've got to be a little bit different. You remember in the beginning of this video, I rang this bell?  That was to remind you to hit that. If you haven't done that, by the way, you got to do that. Hit that subscribe and hit the notification. But I did that on purpose to be a little bit different, okay?  Don't do that. You've got to gain their attention. You've got to have a nice, clean background. You've got to look good. You've got to comb your hair. You've got to be ready. You've got to put on your makeup or whatever it is you do to look good. Make sure you're doing it in your videos so that people want to continue watching them. Number five is optimize your videos for SEO. And that's search engine optimization. Now, Google, which is YouTube, cannot bring back results, which are your videos unless you've optimized them. The best way to do that is through TubeBuddy and I'll put a link below that you can click. And TubeBuddy is free. It's awesome. It'll help you optimize your videos for free. If you use my link down there, you can actually save 30% on the pro version. The cool thing about TubeBuddy is you can type in a title and you can change a few words and it will give you a ranking or a score, if you will, on that title. And by changing just a couple words, you can drastically improve the search results of your videos. Now, make sure when you're making your title, you don't use clickbait. Just because TubeBuddy says, hey, this would be a great title, if that doesn't match your video, you don't want to do that. Because that can actually cause you more harm than anything else, because what YouTube does is they look at watch time. If you have a lot of people clicking through to your video, but when they get there, they don't watch the video, that means that they didn't get what they expected when they clicked. Now, the next thing I want to tell you is have good thumbnails. I didn't do this in the beginning. I didn't do it, okay, I'm doing it now. And it's helping a whole lot. But you gotta have really good, engaging thumbnails. Now, on the thumbnail itself, you can put words on there. The words on that thumbnail do not have to match what your title is. Now, your title is generally gonna be 60 to 70 characters. You don't wanna put that on the thumbnail. You just want two, three, maybe four words on your thumbnail, something that's gonna get their attention. If you check out these thumbnails here, they're really bright, they're colorful, they grab your attention. And this is what I'm talking about when we're talking about doing a thumbnail that actually works. Next up is write a compelling video description. Once again, I didn't do this, I didn't do this. We're doing it now, but that description means so much because it tells people so much more about that video. You can also add timestamps in there. In YouTube, it's really simple to do. You find something that's at, say, five minutes and six seconds. And if you type that next to the words in the description, five, colon, oh, six, it will actually automatically set up a link so that when that is published, people could click on that time and it will go to that spot in the video. In the description, if you're running short of ideas, you do have 5,000 characters you can put in there, but some things you could put in there are affiliate links. You could certainly do that. You could also add in their playlist of other videos that you have. You could also have links directly to other videos you have. Any of these things can help you fill up that description area and get you more traffic. The next thing you can do is you can add hashtags in your description. So if you put a hashtag in your description, what it's actually gonna do is it's gonna throw it at the top underneath the title of the video there so that people can see that hashtag. It also helps people locate your videos easier because some people are actually searching with hashtags now. Also, you can also add cards. You could add bumper ads. You could add watermarks to your videos. There's so many things you can do to enhance your video's quality. So let's talk about what these are first off. Cards are really like a transparent CTA that appears on your video. When people go to hover over it and click on it, it expands and it can take them to one of your other videos. Now bumper ads are something you could put in the beginning or the end of your videos to promote whatever you wanna promote. You could put watermarks on there too, which are customizable buttons that get people to subscribe that will only appear to those people who aren't subscribers. And lastly, in this section, you gotta ask viewers to subscribe. If you notice I did that in the beginning and I'm gonna do it again, if you haven't subscribed to this channel, go down there and click that button. But if you don't ask them to subscribe, they don't know to do it. The assumption is that everybody knows to subscribe to your channel, but they don't. Or even if they do know it, sometimes they forget. Number six, upload and schedule your videos. So you don't wanna randomly put videos out on YouTube. And I know I was guilty of this in the beginning, but what you wanna do is you wanna figure out what schedule that you wanna have and stick to it. Now what we do is every single day at 10 a.m., Pacific Standard Time, five days a week, a video goes up on my channel. So people know that it's there, there's a particular schedule, it's five days a week, so you don't have to do that. You could do one day a week or twice a month, whatever you wanna do, but make sure you have a schedule and you stick to it. People will treat your YouTube channel as a television station. They'll come back to it at the same time a day in many cases, or they will know that you always upload it, let's say 10 a.m. at 10 p.m. at night, they always go there to grab that video, and if it's not there, they're gonna look for another channel. They're gonna find somebody else to fill up that time. So you wanna make sure you're doing that. And also be professional about this.  I know that personally. But whatever it is you tell them, make sure you stick with it. Be professional about it. Don't say, well, this happened or this occurred. What you wanna do is upload your videos in advance and schedule them. That way, they're gonna be ready for the viewers when they come and they won't be disappointed. Number seven is you wanna optimize your channel to attract new subscribers. You wanna constantly be adding new subscribers. Now, the way you're gonna do that is several different areas. So let's go over those right now.  This is super important. You wanna have a keyword-rich bio and you wanna have as much information in there as you can possibly provide. You also wanna have a good picture in there that is set to the right size for YouTube. Don't just use any picture that doesn't really fit. I've seen that too many times on a banner and it obviously didn't fit, but the people put it in there anyhow. You also wanna have links to your website, your profile, all your social media, your contact information. That makes it seem more professional and you will get more subscribers and you'll get more contacts by doing that. Next thing, you wanna organize your videos into playlists. That's super important.  The other thing you can do is have a series video and I just did one of those, but have a series where it's two or three videos that explains one idea. That way you have the person going through the series watching each video. Now, the cool thing about this is when you create these playlists and they start watching it, the next video in the playlist will come up and that'll be the next video they'll see.  And number eight, try YouTube advertising. You can actually run ads to your videos or you can create videos just for ads. Now, I will tell you this, if you have a channel and you wanna build the channel and you wanna get more views, it's great to send traffic to that channel. There's nothing wrong with that.  If you do that, for the most part those little videos, those ones that are one or two minutes long, they don't get you enough watch time and you're just gonna drive down your watch time. So I would suggest you starting another channel if you have some short videos that are just gonna be run for ads. And number nine in our final one, try to work with an influencer. Contact somebody else on YouTube that has a similar niche, right? And say, hey, why don't we do a video together? Why don't we collaborate and do something together? Now, some of them will tell you no, but some of them will tell you yes. And if you do that, that's also gonna help them. And if we help each other, that's a win-win situation. Now, you wanna reach out and maybe just do this as a friendly gesture with these influencers. Most YouTubers can tell if it's a paid sponsorship now. You know, I have one channel I watch and I know in every single video he does that he's gonna have some type of product placement and he can't possibly like as many products as he promotes. So it becomes kind of old. And what I've done on those videos is although I like those videos, I'll skip through that ad part as soon as he's talking about a haircare product or whatever it is, a shirt or sunglasses, I know what's coming next. So I just skip through that section and the same thing will happen to you. So make sure these influencers are genuine and you're actually trying to help each other and reach the audience and give them what they want. As a bonus, I'll tell you, don't get stuck in a rut. Do things differently, change it up a little bit. Have a different background, have a different style. Make sure you wear a different shirt. I know somebody that did videos on YouTube and there's literally hundreds of videos and she has the same shirt on. Now, I would suggest not doing that, okay? Now, maybe there's a reason for it. Maybe it's her lucky shirt. I don't know, but one thing I'll tell you is when you're doing your dress and when you're doing your background and you're doing all these things, make sure it looks professional. Don't just put no thought into it. Grab your camera and start making videos. And I know a lot of people will tell you, just get started, just make a video, just grab your phone and do one. And while that's true and while that's better than not having any videos, setting up the scene with the right lighting and having the video viewable and the sound good, that's gonna make a big difference in your videos. Now, if you found something you like in this video, my gosh, you've got a comment on it. You gotta put it in the comment section below. If you're having problem building your channel or you need help, put that in the comment section below. I'd love to help you. Don't forget also to subscribe if you haven't done so and ring the bell, the notification bell down there. Smash that bell and turn on all notifications. So you become part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified before anybody else. As promised, there is a course below that you can get absolutely free. Don't need a credit card, don't need anything. Just click and learn. That's all you gotta do. It's a $97 value. You'll wanna grab that while that's available. Thank you so much for watching this video and I'll see you in the next one. Hey, thanks for watching my video. Don't forget to subscribe to my channel and click that little bell right here so you can be notified every time I do a new video. Also, click on one of those videos there. Keep watching on my channel.