Using the Metaverse to Heal Others with Christian Ulstrup - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP16

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Rimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society.

This podcast is part of my new.

Book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse. The investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview I interviewed Christian Ulstrup. Christian is the CEO and co founder of Virgils, which focuses on building bridges back to reality by helping parents and kids get control of family screen time. With his work he aims to help psychiatrists understand virtual reality and coach them how to use these digital tools for the benefits of patients. During the interview we discussed the mental health issues related to the Metaverse and how it will change people's behavior. We covered how virtual reality can help people with mental issues and what ethical issues we can expect in the Metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

So maybe can you share a bit about what your background is and how you are involved in the Metaverse?

Yeah, absolutely. So my name is Christian Ahlstrup. I'm the co founder and CEO of Virgil's. @ Virgil's we are helping therapists, counselors, clinic clinical psychologists, social workers meet sort of the next generation where they're at in virtual spaces. All HIPAA compliant, accessible from any device. My co founder and I, we have a combined decade of experience in medical, device and healthcare technology development. So we had previously built FDA cleared AI software for radiologists, also for gastroenterologists, and then my co founder had worked with ICU physicians and then we decided to found Virgil's in January of this year to tackle a problem that's really personal for both of us. So we recently turned 30 and when we were growing up we had sort of our own struggles as teenagers and we self medicated with video games and the Internet and this is really something that's all too common with Gen Z. And so now with everything going online in 2020, 2021, we think there's a great opportunity to flip the traditional paradigm where clients have been expected to meet therapists. Where they are, which you can imagine for kids and teens is Pretty inaccessible, very unengaging. Your parents ask you to share your deepest, darkest secrets with some stranger who's a couple of decades older, in an argyle sweater in some environment. Right. It's kind of you want to run screaming in the opposite direction or do what we did, which is, you know, you reach for a game controller or, you know, a phone or a screen or something like that. And so now, with the mental health crisis in the US and around the world really accelerating and acutely impacting the next generation, we think that there's a great opportunity to transform these same media, which have often been used to isolate or to self medicate, into tools for healing and connection. And so we're currently in a pilot program. We have 42 licensed therapists across the United States using our technology to connect with existing clients. So far, the feedback has been incredibly strong. And although we think that, you know, therapy in the metaverse, mental health in the metaverse is something that will eventually be accessible and valuable to everyone, um, for right now, we're very focused on really helping therapists meet the needs of, in particular, neurodivergent kids and teens, so, who have been diagnosed with adhd, who are autistic, who have severe social.

Anxiety. Wow. That's very important work. And I think it has a lot of potential to use games, or virtual reality, for that matter, to help people with. With all kinds of disorders. I think, if I said it correctly, it's great to see that you're working on that, especially also, because I think all the conversations I've heard is, yes, the Metaverse has a lot of potential, but also also had a lot of downside dangers to that. And I think that that's also very related to your work.

Then. It is. It's a really interesting question because I think you can sort of see like, an inflection point that would compound depending on, you know, certain architectural decisions and sort of like, which direction history goes in. Like, you have these sort of pivot point moments, right? And I think that, you know, we have sort of a contrarian position about this and that we're extremely optimistic and we think a lot of good things will happen. I think the very understandable, kind of skeptical, dystopian view is that we end up becoming like VR fentanyl slaves in the Metaverse, where it's like, you know, you're just kind of plugged into the matrix. You have centralized corporations that are completely, you know, it's just a few millimeters away from having, like, a brain interface where they're controlling all the content that you consume and selling you ads, or selling your attention rather to advertisers, and people spend all their time in there, kind of a ready player one situation. And you know, you have, you have. Now this is starting to come into the zeitgeist with Mark Andresen, his firm, they have this new meme around reality, privilege and everything else. And I think there might be some of that. But I actually am quite optimistic that a lot of the trends that we've seen over the past 20 years will strangely be reversed. And so extrapolating a lot of the downsides of what's happened with the Internet over the last 20 years, I think it's possible that in the metaverse, if you think of it as what lies at the intersection of spatial computing and public blockchain technology, which is really the way that I think about it, I think the future is quite bright. And I think the reason why is. And then a lot of this comes from what we've observed with our own work, is there's something very, very special about interacting with other people in a third or a fourth dimension. And in fact, this was something that one of our advisors pointed us to very early on. There's a great little philosophical booklet called into the Swarm. It's a MIT Press book that we read. And the author basically makes the point that, you know, if you look at the etymology of the word respect, it means literally to look back at, like to look back at someone. And that necessitates distance. And there's a major mismatch between the media that we've been using to connect with digitally over the last 20 years and sort of what we were wired, how we were wired to interact in three or four dimensional space, you know, intersubjectively between humans. And it's quite possible that when one of the default modes is synchronous interaction in, you know, using spatial computing, AR VR, that it might be entirely possible that you could have not just decent, but empathetic interactions between strangers on the Internet. And so I'm quite optimistic about this. That's really what we've observed with our work so far in hosting small groups in these virtual spaces, especially where people have a degree of protection over their identities, they can sort of decide how anonymous they want to be. And there's also some research, I think, that was done at Facebook maybe four, three or four years ago that actually did show that in a spatial computing environment, participants are more compassionate or more empathetic towards one another. So for that reason, you know, if you think about in 2020, you know, you have people just being nasty to each other on Twitter, you know, that doesn't have to be the only way that we interact with one another on the web. And, you know, I'm quite excited about the possibilities in that regard. So I think there's more opportunity for connection rather than disconnection. Everything's become atomized. All media is broken down to its sort of smallest pieces and parts. And I almost think you have this opportunity to reassemble things into holes that are greater than the sum of their parts in these spatial computing environments, especially in a social.

Context. Yeah, that's very interesting because it sort of makes sense because if you see someone, whether that's in virtual reality, like with avatar, but at least you see someone and you are generally people are more respected to one another than in virtual world, where you don't see someone that is just text and.

2D. Yeah, exactly. And it's. There's. I think it's Baudrillard maybe, but there's this idea of simulation and Somalia crow, which is, you know, the idea of a. I believe it's pronounced like Somalia crumb. But it's like this symbol, this representation of something that becomes more real than what it represents. And a lot of what you see with digital Media today through 2D interfaces are exactly that, where it's not so much about the person behind the Instagram post, but really sort of it's like the. Whatever media is presented through that channel takes on a life of its own. Whereas I think you get a little bit more alignment in a spatial computing environment. It's almost like you get the advantage of presence and a three dimensional interface to interact with people, but you also neutralize a lot of the drawbacks. And so one of the things that we found, and I would love to see some kind of clinical research on this, this is just a growing hunch that I have because I've spent hundreds of hours, had hundreds of meetings, you know, our first institutional customer, I had never seen their face. We met 100% in VR before we closed them. Same thing with there are a bunch of investors that we have who I've never seen face to face. But I think that there's something about the medium where it neutralizes unconscious bias and allows people who otherwise would not necessarily be having those kind of charitable, synchronous, embodied interactions to do it. And so it can be connective in ways that we've never seen before. So it allows you to get the advantages of presence and embodiment without the drawbacks of unconscious bias of some people feeling unsafe. Sort of those things that, you know, can be a disadvantage in sort of reality.

Itself. Yeah. So I'm curious to hear, and it's a question I ask everyone that I talk to, what is your perspective of the metaverse? How do you see the.

Metaverse? Yeah, so the way I would define it, and I think this is, you know, unfortunately, it's become like a little bit of a buzzword. But when I think about, you know, the metaverse, it's what lies at the intersection of a number of different enabling technologies, but in particular spatial computing. So VR, AR and sort of public blockchain technology. You could argue that even if it's not on a public blockchain, it still is. You know, it's a pocket of the metaverse in some regard where you have like a corporate owned thing, you know, is this is sort of a, like a, whether it's open or closed, like a dialectic going back to, you know, ready player one and whatnot. But I think sort of the most interesting stuff will happen in the metaverse at the intersection of those two technologies in.

Particular. Yeah. And so how do you think that the metaverse will change people's.

Behavior? I think in part because this is what we're focused on. I'm very excited about the potential for interpersonal connection in ways that were not really possible before. And so I think socializing, I think there's just going to be new modes of socializing, of developing, like real relationships that can happen in the metaverse that are quite difficult to bootstrap, I would say, elsewhere. And so, for example, like, you know, you have a lot of people meeting online during the pandemic. I've made a bunch of friends. I never thought I would have said this. You know, my fiance kind of laughs at me, but I, you know, a few months into the pandemic said, oh, you know, I'm starting to make Internet friends. Like I was meeting people on Twitter. Right. Which was sounded. I never would have thought I would. I would say that I think with the metaverse, you know, having that spatial computing component, it's a significantly more accessible medium for people who find it maybe a little bit more difficult to connect with strangers through something like Twitter. It's just, it's more accessible. There's a feeling of connection. So it'll impact, I think, the way that we socialize and we meet new people. I think something else that's very exciting is there's going to be an explosion in creativity Unlike, I think, anything we've ever seen before. And part of the reason why is this is, I think, one of the first technologies that is pretty much accessible to anybody out the gate. What I mean by that is if you're working with a computer or a phone, you know, phones are a little bit more accessible because we're kind of used to tapping things and pinching and zooming. You can sort of manipulate objects and images and things like that. You know, with keyboards, obviously you have to learn to type, you have to learn how to use a mouse. It's somewhat restricted. But when you have a headset and you have controllers or, you know, in the future you have just glasses or you have a headset and it's, you know, you're moving your hands around, hand tracking everything else. Like, all of us were born with a body and we know how to operate in the world to a certain extent using sort of that body. And so, you know, digital content creation, or content creation in general, has in the past really been restricted to people who could harness those tools of media. Whether it's a typewriter or, you know, actually writing longhand or, you know, able to take photographs or sculpt or maybe sculpting is not a great example or like programming, you know, whatever else is able to use these different technologies. But I think that with the spatial medium, because it is so intuitive, you're just going to have a significantly larger number of people who can now create pretty fantastic digital media by manipulating objects, moving things around. If you've seen like, you know, tilt brush or it's another one called like drop sketch, there are all these different tools. Rec Room, I think is an amazing example of this where you have people creating these worlds just by moving shapes and objects around and things like that. And then, you know, being able to do that, then there's some kind of economy that emerges from that that didn't really exist before, where people are going to be able to create digital content who before just weren't really able.

To. I completely agree that we'll most likely see a very creative period coming up in the next decade or so. So, related to your work, how do you think that virtual reality and augmented reality can help people heal their minds? If it be, that's a great.

Question. So I think when it comes to mental health, there are a few different threads to pull on. I think one, the first two areas of classification worth teasing apart are like solo experiences versus social synchronous experiences. There's a really awesome application called triple, where I Think they've done a good job. It's direct to consumer mindfulness meditation application in VR that I think is sort of a glimpse of what this could look like from a solo perspective. But if you imagine you have experiences that are tailored to your needs, whether it's for meditation or coaching or sort of whatever it is that's related to mental health, you start glomming on biofeedback sensors for measuring heart rate variability and things like that. I think that's where that becomes quite exciting. I think that could be very useful for solo use, really taking as somebody who's benefited from tremendously for meditation, taking those kind of practices to the next level and making them very accessible and very effective for folks. And then, you know, where we're focused on and where we're really excited about is in those synchronous interpersonal experiences. And if, you know, you look at the practice of psychotherapy, that's always done, you know, with at least two people, we're actually very focused on groups. And I think that some of the characteristics we talked about earlier when it comes to identity protection, you know, degrees of pseudonymity, neutralizing bias, those will allow people to connect in groups in particular, who could not previously. There's also what we like to talk about sort of the long term, I think, when it comes to group therapy and VR, is you could think of virtual reality as the ultimate storytelling medium. And a lot of the work that's done by licensed behavioral health professionals is in helping clients make meaning out of their own sort of life story in the journey that they've been on, and then create sort of a path forward in the future that fits into a coherent narrative. And so I think there are ways that you can leverage the medium with tools that are very engaging. Obviously, you can incorporate elements of play. You can bring in media for very specifically, something like exposure therapy. So that's something that's been a clinically validated use case for virtual reality for a little while. And then ultimately, where we see this going is it might be possible to reframe, you know, sort of the counseling process or the therapy process entirely as something that's more like an invitation to embark on, you know, like a hero's journey or something like that, where it's a yes, and where it's a clinically validated intervention or a medium for that, but also because it affords you all of these other features and advantages, especially when it comes to play, when it comes to tuning the environment to the client or the client's group's needs to plugging it into some kind of overarching narrative. These are things that are impossible or at least prohibitively expensive to do in reality itself. You can then do that in VR and actually reframe therapy as a whole to something that is not only accessible, but I think satisfies a lot of perennial needs. You think about, you know, that this is sort of the purpose of like ritual. This is, you know, sort of, you know, the hero's journey. Sort of you gain some insight about yourself and each other and come back. That's a lot more palatable than, you know, the sort of the person in the argyle sweater who's going to do the talking method. Right, for a few hours, which is great. And it works. It works, I think, for a lot of people. But this will just unlock new ways of doing things that have never been possible before and do it at a much lower cost than you ever, ever was, sort of possible through any other.

Media. Yeah, that makes sense. And so if we take it a little bit broader and look at coaching more in general, how do you think that the metaverse could change that? How it could change the practice of.

Coaching? So coaching in particular as like a something that's like non clinical or do you mean coaching and therapy.

Or. Yeah, so coaching of, you know, mentoring people or coaching, you know, people to move forward more in the supportive way does not necessarily mean the clinical version as well, but more in how can we, how can we help people on their journey in whether it's a startup or journey of life? You know, maybe mentoring should be a better word.

Here. But yeah, I think education even sort of more broadly, I mean that's a, that's a very compelling, compelling bucket of use cases, I think, for VR. I mean, we often learn by seeing and then doing. I mean, YouTube is almost, you know, sort of a preview of this. Like no matter what it, like what sort of obscure part of your boiler or something in your home or, you know, you can, you can learn how to do anything just by watching people do it in a YouTube video. I think in the metaverse you can sort of take that to the next level where you can have sort of, you know, pre recorded sessions that you can sort of play back, you know, sort of at your leisure. You can actually move around the space to see, you know, how people interact. I mean, this is something with our platform that we're looking into is how can we record the sessions and put it into a library for training and sort of, you know, future use by therapists who are Learning how to use it, where they can actually play back sessions and, you know, see how something was done, notice little things. So, yeah, I mean, I think from a coaching perspective in general, being able to show people something and then give them the power to return to it, to see things literally from different angles, I think those will just take coaching and education more broadly to the next level. And then too, there's just the nature of the medium is not so much in ar, but in VR, your attention is completely captured. And I think that's one thing about the medium that is not sort of well understood quite yet is I think Facebook or whatever, meta is like starting to incorporate some, you know, there's some notifications that can pop up while you're having an experience, but it's much, much easier to keep people fully engaged and attentive in a fully controlled virtual space than it is, you know, trying to keep them somewhat attentive over zoom when they have a million different things they can be distracted by. I think that is really like having that focus be maintained for long periods of time when you're trying to learn something and trying to practice it, that makes just a night and day difference in terms of speed of learning, in terms of, you know, retention of information. And I think that it's something that's kind of native to the.

Medium. Yeah, that's great to see. I guess the fact that you have a news area is your full attention that makes a different environment, which is quite cool. But then again, that also brings some challenges. What kind of mental or general health issues do you see that the metaverse will cause in the years to.

Come? The thing is, if you have a product, you're doing something in virtual reality, I mean, this is a completely new medium. It is the ultimate show, don't tell kind of thing. And especially most of the folks who we're working with at this point are therapists. Doctors are traditionally quite conservative for good reasons. Therapists are especially conservative. Technology has not traditionally been a part of their practice. And so I personally made the switch about four months ago at this point to taking over 90% of my meetings in virtual reality in our platform and, you know, setting with pyramids in Egypt or forest or whatever. And I just tell people to meet me there and we hop in from, you know, I'm in my headset. Most people join from like a desktop device or something. I was extremely nervous actually, because I was like, am I just going to totally zap my energy levels or, you know, what's going to happen here when I'm spending this much time in the headset. And I actually found the opposite to be true, which was quite surprising that my energy levels were significantly higher than they were over zoom. And so, you know, I think it's not too far fetched to argue that we're kind of already in the metaverse. You know, it's not this discontinuous thing. It's actually been this thing that's, you know, how much time do people spend in front of screens and then in front of screens that are, you know, streaming information from over the Internet, it's, you know, for better or for worse, it's like most hours of the day. Right. And so I found that with being able to be in VR in those spatial environments, it's a lot less exhausting than being in this sort of. It's actually, you know, it's quite awkward if you really think about this versus, like a normal interaction. You have this postage stamp size thing that you're trying to focus in on. It's literally impossible to make eye contact. You know, there's no spatial audio, so it's hard to sense who's saying what. You're kind of stuck in uncanny valley because everything's like a little bit off. You know, it's sort of, you know, delays and micro expressions and things like that. And then one of the things actually was really interesting that we noticed is in VR or in a, in a spatial experience, you can talk to somebody at an angle or you have more of a sense of kind of movement. And that's a much more natural way to interact with people. I mean, I literally go on walks and talks, you know, with like, prospects. I'm like, you know, let's go for a walk and talk in the woods or something, or, you know, stand in front of a slideshow and we kind of page through and, you know, we can kind of hear each other, right? Like to your left or to your right. That feels way better than this face to face thing, which I have a hunch that there's something kind of reptilian where you're like, this is like an adversarial position to be in. Right. Like, if you were like this in real life, it'd be very weird. It'd be very weird. It'd be sort of a very awkward way to speak to somebody. So all that is to say is I think there's a lot of room for improvement over existing digital, Internet connected media. And, you know, of course you don't know what you don't know, but in General, there's not a lot that I'm worried about. I'm actually very.

Optimistic. Yeah, it's great to hear that it actually brings you more energy when taking meetings in VR. But what kind of ethical challenges or dangers do you see that the metaverse could also bring up so much mental issues, but more societal.

Dangers? Yeah, I mean, there's the one. Everyone, I feel like, becomes top of mind, which is like the Ready Player one situation where you have your digital property and you have your life and like everything is sort of in this virtual space. Like that's where you live and that's where the things that you value are. That may happen to a certain extent. Of course, this is kind of already happening. I would argue, at least if things are on public blockchain ledgers, then you can have ownership, whereas right now it's mostly centralized corporate bodies, whether it's data or digital property or whatever else. I think that there's going to be a weird thing that happens that people don't quite see coming, which mitigates the risk of the Ready Player one scenario, which is there already is a huge, huge amount of value that's created in the Internet economy. And a lot of what's going on with public blockchain technologies, cryptocurrency projects, everything that's going on with daos right now, where it's largely just doesn't work, but people are trying different things and there are a lot of cycles of learning and there's a lot of talent and energy going into it. I think this infrastructure and these best practices that are emerging right now, basically, if you have an Internet connection in sort of, you know, this third decade of the 21st century, then you will be able to participate in this global economy, which was literally never possible before. You always had to deal with, you know, some degree of rent seeker, rent seeking behavior, middlemen. Whereas right now, if you're, you know, a kid in like the Democratic Republic of the Congo or something, you're living in a Turi province, but you have access to not even a high speed Internet connection, but some kind of nominal Internet connection. You're wired in a way that makes you very good at doing things with computers, programming, whatever else. You can make completely anonymous or pseudonymous contributions to a crypto project be rewarded with ownership that has some degree of value on the open market. Because all these things generally there's liquidity there. And you could perhaps not today, but I'm sure not too long, bring that back into your material, physical, local economy in ways that have Never been possible before. So that value that you create online, you can actually fully own it and then bring it back to material reality and invest in your local community. It's very optimistic. It's a little bit, perhaps even utopian or something, or whatever, a little bit naive. But I think that you'll have some people who are just incredibly hyper productive in the metaverse from an economic point standpoint, whether it's building software, it's building products, it's creating content, or it's in some sort of like sales type role, like interpersonal connections, you know, whatever it is. And then you'll be able to bring that value back into reality, invest in your community, you know, sort of physical.

Capital. Yeah, that would definitely be very cool. I'm very positive person generally and I really hope that this is what comes true. But yeah, we'll have to, obviously have to see in due.

Time. I think that there's a very, very interesting nascent conversation around pseudonymity and this potentially being a default mode that some folks are having. I mean, this was kind of the original vision for the Internet, which was you did have these sort of a different Internet identity online, unfortunately, because the advertising model is just so incredibly profitable. And that's what became the dominant business model over the last 20 years. Rather than that initial vision of you having almost like, almost like you would have different LLC or something, you could have different identities that you have online and have there be a safe distance between your offline, your online identity. Everything's been merged because, you know, advertisers want to sell you stuff like that. That's kind of where these things end up. But I think that pseudonymity, this idea that you can have one or more separate identities that are appropriate in terms of participating in a particular aspect of the Internet economy, the metaverse economy, you have a social circle that exists in the metaverse where you put on a different identity, you have your artist Persona or whatever it is. I think that pseudonymity becoming the default, the possibility of that becoming the default mode is worth more thinking and exploration. Because what the future looks like with that being a first principle is very, very, very different than what we've seen over the past 20 years. There's a guy, very interesting futurist thinker, this kind of comes out of the Silicon Valley, like libertarian wing called Balaji. I think his last name is pronounced Srinivasnon. And he sort of tweeted about this and talked about this pretty extensively. And he sort of kind of predicted that some of this migration, the question of why Would we ever migrate over to this different paradigm may come as centralized databases are increasingly under attack and you have these cloud bursts, if you've heard that term, where data comes running down and so there's now an incentive for you to. Yeah, it's quite interesting the his if you Google like Balaji Cloudburst, I think that's worth really digging into because I've thought about this a bunch and like, it just seems like this is going to happen. And so preparing for a society where you have a lot of downstream consequences of that and then the shift towards pseudonymity I think is really worth more.

Discussion. Yeah, I will definitely look into that. Cause I haven't heard of that. So I looked up on the Internet. Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Christian, for your time and input. I really appreciate it. You shared some very valuable insights from a different perspective, so I really appreciate that. Thank.

You. Cool. And that wraps up the conversation with Christian Ulstrup. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is how important the work is that Christian is doing. Health issues in the Metaverse will be real issues that we need to deal with, as unfortunately some people will get addicted to the.

Metaverse. I cover this all also in.

My new book, Step into the Metaverse, where I discuss the need for education to prevent such issues. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the.