Born To be Transmedium, Episode 2, Vortextual Explorations with Chris, R. Bretminster & Ed Lantz

Context is I'm doing these different— I call them a playcast instead of a podcast because I want to have a good time and I want to play. And because my Togetherland project, I'm kind of naming at the moment as a conscious living play. So this idea of it's a play, like the drama, or the birth of tragedy, I guess, is— I just heard, I was listening to an interview, someone was talking about Nietzsche and his book, The Birth of Tragedy. But that really means the human drama and the Greek, like where that came from. It doesn't mean like just a tragedy.

Got it.

So I want to— I like this idea of playing. And then of course, the word casting, like casting a production or casting a movie or casting a spell. And since I like words, it all came together and I was like, yeah, I want to do a playcast compared to a podcast. And the other context is that the word metta, M-E-T-T-A, is a Pali or Sanskrit word that means unconditional love or loving kindness or benevolence.

Yes.

Yeah. So I like the idea of assembling and inquiring and having conversations with the type of futurist that is coming from a heart-based feeling and really has the types of intentions and energy of— so we're not just kind of, I always say, like a corporate futurist or a Silicon Valley futurist. Like, it's a different kind of personality and a different kind of archetype and activist and artivist that I want to have in these conversations as these meta-futurists. And Chris and I, we've started a A specific Playcast series called Born to Be Transmedium. So for my Togetherland project, I've, for myself, said I want to be a transmedium production compared to only transmedia, just because we're so used to hearing the word transmedia and thinking internet technology and blogs and social media. And I was thinking, because I'm into whole systems and co-creation, Mm-hmm. That like consciousness obviously is a medium. But when I looked up the word medium, it's like the materials we use, you know, or the way you go about doing things. So because I've been into self-organization and governance and all these different sectors, I was like, well, these are all actually mediums really, if I want to extend the word, you know, medium to a broader understanding. So I want to go across all these mediums, not just traditional media. And then I didn't even know the word media is really plural for the word medium. So that's why it's even called transmedia. I didn't even like know grammatically that that was the actual case. So we're here as a group to be about that. Yeah, it's like media. We're talking about transmedium production, which is why it's so important really to hear from you and all of the things you've been doing and your perspectives, because you're one of the few people in my space I know who would be considered to me a transmedium producer, you know, and really have a lot of expertise and background. So I'm super— Chris, I know, Chris, I'll let you introduce yourself or say whatever you like, but I'm super happy to be here and to learn from you, Ed, and to hear about your beginnings as well as what you would envision going forward.

Rock and roll.

Well, thank you guys for the opportunity.

Yeah, I'll just quickly introduce myself. So I'm Chris DeMaso. I Work for the Octalysis Group. We're the number one gamification consultancy in the world. And I've got kind of like 3 pillars moving through my life that kind of like define my professional life and kind of the conversations that I like to have right now. And those are consciousness. So I've always been into consciousness and what it means to understand the nature of this reality and manipulate it for selfish gain or try transcend it for, you know, holographic gain, quote unquote, um, and, and what that means basically, and, and how did you do it practically? Like, how can we embed transformation into our systems? And, um, and, uh, the other, other ones are storytelling. So I went to film school. I've always been into films and storytelling and story structure and kind of dissecting them as a system, and but also the power and transformative ability of stories. to shape culture and then, and to facilitate experiences. And then gamification, I've always wanted to design video games. And so my 10-year-old self finally found a career where I could actually apply that, but to doing things that matter, so to speak, as though video games don't matter. But yeah, to help facilitate, you know, behavior change. Which can be good or bad. It's like value neutral. But I want to facilitate a better world. And so I want to like kind of leverage these 3 things in any of the work I do. So.

Excellent. Excellent. Well, I think we're very aligned, which is great.

Yeah.

And certainly as much as you guys want to learn about me, I'm also interested in learning more about you. You know, because what's interesting here is a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about for really, I mean, Kate and myself, my partner Kate, for decades, you know, it's starting to go mainstream and will ultimately be co-opted by big brands who have—

Right.

Bottom line interests and will, you know, maybe use the transformative media as a buzzword.

You know, sell more Nikes.

What it means, right? And then, and then you lose the depth. At the same time, all of us content creators and like that, I mean, we clearly haven't been organized enough to raise the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to build out, you know, I want to change the world kind of scale dream, right? And that's what it takes. It takes that big money. So So, you know, in my mind, you know, I've really been working hard to, you know, show success, show success, show profitability, show all the things, you know, that these bigger companies want to see, and then have them come forth and say, well, wow, what you're doing is working. Can we help you grow that? Rather than saying, oh, that's cool, we're going to do it over here and we don't need you, or, you know, come work for us as a mid-level manager kind of a thing, right? So yeah, it's— but I'll tell you, it's not easy being that entrepreneur. It's quite a hot seat to sit in and, you know, you end up having— it requires different neural wiring really. And so I'm an artist, engineer, developer, you know. producer, director, you know, like, okay, so I can span those worlds, which makes me a generalist, right? But then it's very easy for someone with more deeper expertise in any of those areas to come along and say, oh, we don't need that guy, he's just, you know. But it's just the vision, I'm holding the vision, you know, and it's like, anyway, if you want, I have a presentation I gave a while back last year, actually it's older than that, but I've been adding to it, you know, and I could just sort of run through that and it might be at least a guide, you know, for, you know, having the conversation that you guys want to have.

Yeah, I say go for it.

And I see that you're recording. Awesome.

Always recording. Everything's being recorded.

PowerPoint is saving my auto recovery file, so see here.

Oh no, not tech issues! How how abnormal?

You know, yeah, no comment. I'm so used to it. You know, it's like wrangling and harnessing. You know, the the tech, a little magic dust. You know, like some affirmations, whatever takes. You know.

And where are you at? Are you out in California? Yeah? Are you in LA?

Yes, we're located in downtown Las Vegas.

Oh, Vegas.

And Las Vegas, LA, downtown Los Angeles. I was just typing Las Vegas. The brain works like that. But yeah, so we've been here for— I've been here for like 12 years, I think, or something. 10, 11, 12 years, put up a dome on a studio lot. And we, you know, but I've been doing domes for a long time. Here, I'll get into this. Okay. So, and this is a particular project called Digital Ecstasy that I developed. Well, gee, it was probably 12 years ago or no, 2009. When is that?

Yeah.

But this really actually came out of the founding of Vortex Immersion, our company, in 2007. This is an idea that's been kicking around. I've been working and refining. But just even defining what is transformative or transformational entertainment, what is that? When you start showing specific examples, everyone disagrees. It's an interesting topic for me. I love this stuff. And so anyway, what I thought I'd do is just talk a little about myself, where I'm coming from, so you understand the mix of perspectives that make up where I'm coming from. So I was actually born and raised in Hollywood, Florida. And Kate says the stork dropped me in the wrong location. But it probably worked out good for me because I would have been a maniac with all— you know, we're very isolated down in Florida. You know, we didn't get to meet all these thought leaders and people who I read their books, you know. But I did. I got, you know, the crystal radio here. I think, I don't know, what was I like 5 years old or something? And I was reading popular science magazines and just voracious appetite for understanding how the universe works. I did Kirlian photography, presented that as a science fair project in high school. We had fingertip auras of people kissing and marijuana intoxication and alcohol intoxication, and my teacher wondered how we got those. Anyway, so again, it's funny because it got me way into the whole concept of Biofields, or— and it's like, why can't we image our emotions, you know, and how they constrict our— you know, like, because I get angry, I feel my, you know, throat constricting. And, and how we manage our— the energy in our body is very interesting to me. And I always thought if we could provide that as a biofeedback to people and they saw how they're handling their body, we could learn to improve, you know, how we manage our energy. So, but then, you know, I realized Kirlian photography was kind of difficult as a diagnostic tool. There's so many variables and all. You know, I actually— a spiritualist church sent me on a lecture tour around the country, New York, Manhattan, and oh gosh, all over the place, Seattle and Tacoma and LA. Lecturing on Kirlian photography. I think I was like 19 or 20 years old, something like that back then. And we, my partner at the time, played cosmic relaxing music and we did fingertip auras both before and after the healing music, you know, to compare them. And that was very cool. So, but, you know, my technical mind trying to understand things. So I went into electrical engineering. Which I'd already— I was already coding, I was already designing circuits and digital circuits and all that sort of thing. So my head was already into the space. So when I got into the master's program, I already took all the grad courses for undergrad credit. So I had to sort of pivot a little bit out of computer engineering and all that. And something new for me was quantum physics and electromagnetics. And it really opened my eyes to sort of like pull back the curtain and see what's happening under the hood, how the universe works. And of course, I'm still scratching my head over that. And one of the— my master's thesis was intended to be what I called the SABER, Scanning Air Ionization Biopotential Electrode. Which very simply is a way to measure the voltage distribution on the skin using a scanning ultraviolet laser beam that ionizes a path of air so you can get biopotential maps of the body rather than just fixed electrodes, right? But I realized that was actually quite a large project. I would have to start experimenting on dogs and shaving them and putting them in vacuum chambers filled, doped with the low ionization potential toxic gases, and the dog would have to have a face mask and everything. And I'm like, this is my professor. I— this whole experiment, I took a microwave oven that I rescued from a dumpster and got it working and fed the 1,000 watts of microwave energy into my own waveguide and then excited a plasma and created vacuum ultraviolet light out of a lithium niobate crystal window. And then my professor was like, get out of here, you know, like, here, just finish your thesis and get out of here. You're taking up too much of my lab. So that was my vacuum ultraviolet, high-intensity vacuum ultraviolet generation was my thesis. But then I went to work for a company called Harris Corporation in Melbourne, Florida as an aerospace engineer. And ended up doing optical signal processing using photonics to do computing, which was really quite fun and interesting work. After, you know, 7 years of that, I realized, oh, you know, I started getting other, you know, clearances and things, and it's all SCI, secret compartmentalized information. And as I started to realize what it was I was working on in the bigger picture, I also realized that this isn't really what I was born to do. You know, I want to bring smiles to people's faces, not remove them. You know, so, right. So I ended up, and I had a bit of a transformative experience. My wife of 12 years left me. She said, you've changed. You've become, you know, you used to be this cool, you know, musician hippie freak dude. Now you're like, You know, this straight engineer, you know, who can't even, you know, smoke a doobie because you have security clearances. And, you know, so she left with her heavy metal guitarist. And I ended up with a girlfriend who, gosh, she took me to Orlando to this nightclub. And this is, gosh, I guess sort of getting towards late '80s. And it was acid house music. And it was all decked out with all this lighting equipment and immersive sound and all that. I'm like, oh my God, this is so cool. And she's like, this is what you should be doing.

Mm-hmm.

You know, and being a little dosed in the club, actually, I was like, oh my God, you know, and I started having like memories of why I was, you know, went into engineering and this is a healing thing. I need to get back into that. So I quit my job, went to work in a planetarium in Cocoa, Florida, the Astronaut Memorial Planetarium, took a huge cut in pay, you know, but I was writing code to make the sun and the moon go. And we built— we tore down the old theater, built this beautiful facility, the biggest planetarium in Florida at the time and the most advanced in the world, as they say, hybrid planetarium with a star projector, but also video projection and a full dome video projection.

Wow.

which at the time was pretty rudimentary stuff. So after 5 years of that, I ended up going to work for a planetarium manufacturer who was a traditional company, very traditional company, helped bring them into the digital age, figured out how to edge blend multiple video projectors on a dome to create immersive experiences that were, you know, just sitting in the domes, I was like, oh my God, if we could map pixels to this thing, it like the dome fills your field of view. This could be really powerful, you know. So we figured out how to do that, took some courses from a company called Evans& Sutherland, which ended up merging with Spitz, who I worked for. And they were building simulator systems, you know, military simulators. And I'm like, wow, this is the tech that we need to bring into, you know, the planetarium sim. But I was always interested in mainstream arts and entertainment applications of immersive media. So after 8 years at Spitz, I went to work. Well, my first entrepreneurial venture, I guess I was mid-40s or something, and launched the Harmony Channel, which was intended to be— well, it was one of the first VOD networks to launch on Comcast. We never got an investor. I kept it going for almost a year. We rolled out in 14 million homes in 65 markets across the country. And, you know, basically ran out of money and was like, oh my God, you know, like, we got to cut this off. We can't— it was $50K a month just to provide the content, you know. So anyway, so then I'm like, well, the domes are really where I'm at. And so what Harmony Channel was a way to connect with the artists and get their work out there in this space called visual music, right?

Wow.

And so I'll talk a little more about that. But So then I founded Vortex Immersion Media in 2007. And that was now, okay, let's bring the artists into the immersive media venues and we'll build domes and make shows and domes will pop up all over the world. So we had— this is our studio dome, which we recently took down. It was on the studio lot for 10 years on Los Angeles Center Studios, right downtown LA. And it was just so many incredible artists came through there. My partner, Cade, has a nonprofit called the Center for Conscious Creativity. And she started producing some of the more, you know, cutting-edge kind of things like she got a $50,000 grant to do an immersive ballet, which people who were ballet aficionados were blown away. They're like, oh my God, this is been going to ballet for 40 years and this is the first time I've seen something new like this. So it really clicked with the artists and content developers and we did EDM parties and panels and symposiums and journeys through the mind and all that sort of thing. So quite cool, learned a lot, and now really focusing back into the permanent brick-and-mortar venues. But on the nonprofit and spiritual side, I was ordained as an interfaith minister in 2000, which through the School of Sacred Ministries in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, which was modeled after the New York Interfaith School that was teaching. And basically, they just had I wasn't interested in being a minister. I just wanted to audit the courses, you know. But they were like, no, you need to, you know, after a few of the courses, they brought in a spiritual leader from all the different faiths. So we had like a Baha'i teacher come in and teach us about that path, and a rabbi and a priest, and, you know, like all the different faiths we got to learn about, and, you know, earth religions, which of course I was already kind of into. A lot of that. But, and, you know, being a hand drummer, djembe, you know, and going to Rainbow Gatherings, you know, hundreds of people around a fire, you know, drumming all night long with dancers. And, you know, it's just I started to realize how transformative that kind of thing is. And that was pre-Burning Man. Then when Burning Man started happening, '96, I went to my first burn. And I'm like, oh my God, this is that, this is that energy, radically free self-expression and, and love and acceptance. And you're not trying to, you know, make a deal and sell things. It's more about, you know, a gift economy. And I love that. And how can we bring this into urban areas, you know, into the masses? Because most people are never going to go to the playa, you know, or never going to go out in the woods and bang on a drum around a fire circle or whatever. But that energy of that, the essence of that, is something that people need, you know. And I do think religions have served that purpose over the years. But if you look at the statistics, younger people are calling themselves nones, I think they're called. When they ask for your religious affiliation, they say none.

None.

None. And it's like, oh, well, you know, and that's a growth, huge growing, it's like 27% now, I think, or whatever in that age group, or maybe more now. So, but anyway, you know, and I, and my engineering background sort of got me into, you know, like I spoke at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences about the future of media. And of course, with the nonprofits, you know, got— been continuing to be very involved like that. So anyway, that's a little about my background. And feel free to jump in at any point. I'm not seeing all you guys on the screen here, but I just— I'll just keep going.

I wanted to say before you go is I just wanted to acknowledge you for your journey and thank you for doing the work that you do. And not just the work that you do, but the work is clearly like an extension of You like working yourself out. Like, for, for many of us who are on this path, like, it's kind of like this battle between the heart and the mind, like what the heart wants and what the mind thinks they need. And it's obvious to me, like, you kind of went back and like you were talking about being in aerospace, and then you're like, is this really me? But this is like giving me a sense of purpose. My mind can go to work on this. And then someone comes into your life or leaves your life and says like, this isn't you, right? Which is like you living out that, but my heart is not there. And your heart leads you in a different direction, which is potentially risky. But now I'm just so inspired by your journey because it sounds like you found a way to integrate those and perhaps find community. It seems like you're part of a lot of communities. And I think for a lot of us, um, smart, heart-centered people who who, who are on, like I said, on this path of awakening, the awakening of humanity. This is— that is our story, right? Is a battle between those 2 things. And to the degree that we can find each other and be in community, we can find and we can help facilitate our own, our own journey towards purpose and wholeness and, and all that. And so you are— the work you've done is awesome, but I just— the feeling, just the essence of your journey is really inspiring. And I hope that other people feel that in the same way that I have felt that, because I'm on that journey myself, is I'm constantly like, yeah, I'm working for these big corporate clients, and yet this is where my heart is, like the kinds of conversations like this. And is the money gonna follow me or am I gonna be a starving artist? There's that dichotomy, right? How do you navigate that? Because we're living in a world where, as you say, big money is needed to implement these things, but we're also headed towards a world where money as we know it's not gonna exist.

Yeah.

in the same way. And yet we have to play the game, but we're playing the game for a different reason. And so, yeah, I just wanted to acknowledge you for that before we move on.

And, you know, it has been, I mean, I think, you know, my strategy until the point where I broke out as an entrepreneur was to choose professional position, a salaried position that puts me where I need to be and what I need to learn in order to move the next step through this bigger vision. And the bigger vision actually is interesting. It came to me as a 15-year-old. I wrote a sci-fi story about—

Get out of here! I wrote a sci-fi story when I was 15 as well.

You know, it's like you get these downloads, and when you're young, you know, exactly right-eyed, and you don't know if it's a download or not.

You're just like, I'm just imagining this. I'm not projecting onto you, but that was my— that was my feeling. I only recently realized that those were downloads. They were just coming via this dreamlike symbolic world of storytelling that, you know, I didn't understand. I was like, oh, I guess I got to make this movie, when I realized it's actually just like in the— you know, maybe it's the morphogenetic field, or I'm seeing the future, time doesn't exist, or whatever it is, right? the collective unconscious, however you want to describe it. Yeah.

And, you know, the challenge to me is when you get these big visions, it's like, oh my God, I'm seeing the transformation of humankind and the evolution of consciousness and all that. And it's like, oh, what's my role in that specifically? Yeah.

Right.

I can't make all that happen, you know. But then you look at people like Elon Musk, you know, when big vision meets big money and come together, and it's like, Wow, you know, rocket ships to Mars, colonies on Mars, and tunnels and all the stuff he's doing, asteroid mining. I'm like, oh my God, this can happen, you know.

Right.

And one person, not that Elon Musk is responsible for all that, but he certainly helped catalyze it and has held the space, right? So, yeah, sometimes I feel like an Elon Musk with no money, you know, because it's like you get the big ideas, it's like, okay, how do we, you know, make this real? But we have been very fortunate. When I founded Vortex, we hit a nerve, especially with big brands. What happened is we founded the company in 2007. Oh, you know what I forgot to mention was the story I wrote when I was 15 was about a performer in the future who these performers project their consciousness onto these big domes. and take audiences on these journeys through projecting their mind. And so Vortex is founded to, okay, we're going to do it now. We're going to make this happen. We founded in 2017. We started pitching a virtual reality nightclub concept with a dome and interactive spaces and all kinds of avatars and a metaverse meets the real verse and all that. But in 2018, the economy kind of tanked. And raising capital was almost impossible. And we're like, well, let's, um, where can we make money? And my partner at the time, Matt Fannin, he was more the marketing guy and he built the websites and all. And I came in with the tech expertise and the vision. And he was a bit visionary as well. You know, he was seeing the future of entertainment, right? So what actually made money was these pop-up domes. We do these domes for big brands. We've done lots and lots of these. I have never sat down to count, but up to 200-foot diameter dome with 3,500, 4,000 people. This was downtown LA at the Coliseum, which was for the founder of Minecraft. We joke, 3,000, 4,000 of his closest friends. And, you know, some big-name DJs, Chad Lich Gambino, Donald Glover.

Love him, you know, love his work.

Yeah.

And, you know, so this— we realized we could build these venues and do an event over the weekend or for a week or whatever. We've done like Comic-Con and South by and 4 Super Bowls and all like that. And create incredible experiences, which is exactly what the brands wanted, right? So I got to work with global brand managers of Fortune 500 companies and help them write stories and journeys and all that sort of thing. But all the while, it's like, when are we gonna make these permanent? Like, to put up a 200-foot diameter dome for a weekend is insane. It's a million-dollar party, you know? Why don't we just put it somewhere we can leave it up and keep bringing in artists and making new shows and selling tickets to sustain and all like that? We're finally moving in that direction and Mesmerica is one of the recent projects that I'll show you a little more about. I see these dome theatres as really immersive visualisation environments that can be used in a variety of ways. It's group immersive. It's like more along the lines of, in fact, the work I did for Paul Allen with the Holodome. It's like a group immersive environment. You don't have to put on a headset and isolate yourself. You don't have to wear AR glasses, which, you know, are cool and give you additional capabilities, but you can actually walk into an immersive environment and have an incredible experience without gadgets, gizmos, goggles, gloves, or whatever like that, right? So, you know, these theaters are all over the world already. You know, the work we did in the mid-'90s to bring the domes into digital, now there's digital domes and themed entertainment and giant screen cinemas. IMAX has a laser dome. These are all over the world now, you know, which has created a bit of a platform. Right. So how are we doing on time? Because I just want to be respectful.

And we're not, we're not, we're not on much of a time limit. So if you're comfortable, I'm comfortable. I'm enjoying the presentation and hearing your story through the, through, through the presentation. And I did owe Chris's compliments to you as well.

Excellent. So I'm going to go ahead and I'll just continue on with this presentation and I might skip through some of it, but this is actually our sizzle reel for the company and it gives you an idea of some of the events that we've done in the past. So let me know how the sound is. Sometimes you have to turn the sound down a little bit for this to work well, but here we go.

I'm not hearing any sound.

I'm hearing it. It's a— you are?

Sorry. So anyway, 2 frames per second, but I think you get the idea.

Yeah, I've got some— I've got some questions. I've got some questions.

Like here, get off this slide. There we go.

Yeah. I've got some questions. Could you answer at a high level and then we'll come back either later or another time just so it doesn't get too deep? The first creative thing that came to my mind is, have you done— first of all, can you do something where the ground also has effects? Like, you know, the floor, like, so you feel like you're walking in air or space or like completely immersive in that sense?

Absolutely. There's 2 things you can do to get it more immersive. If it's a stand-up event, you can absolutely project on the floor. If it's very crowded though, yeah, you know, then all the shadows get cast. You can do LED floors, right? That's another possibility. If it's a sit-down experience, you can tilt the dome. And so the front of the dome comes down to your knees, right?

Mm-hmm.

So you get that immersive journey experience And you can see that's what they're doing in the MSG Sphere, $1.7 billion project in Vegas going up now, opening in 2003. That's quite common.

Yeah.

And you can see here, this is a slight tilt to this dome. This is an LED dome like that. So, you know, as a theater designer, often find myself trying different ways to get people more immersed.

Right.

Have you—

but that—

yeah, go ahead.

Have you done something like tunnels where you go through a journey physically where you walk through like, you know, like a tunnel in a sense? So you're always moving and it's not just, you know, laying down or whatnot?

Yeah, absolutely. What the domeplexes that we're designing, and I'll give you a teaser on that, are intended to be sit down, stand up, and walk through immersive environments. And that's why we have multiple domes. So the walkthrough is like the digital diorama experience where you're walking through these different worlds and maybe there's a projected sky overhead or maybe not, you know, and with movable walls and things. The idea is to make it like a movie theater where you can plug and play Immersive Van Gogh or whatever shows, you know.

Right.

Right? And then the sit-down is the theater with the tilted dome. And then the stand-up is like the after-party dome where it's like a dance party or whatever.

Yeah. And what else came up for me is one time I was sitting in the park several years ago and a friend said something to me joking around, which was quite just a witty thing to say, but it was quite revealing and kind of monumental in my own eccentric way. So I was playing the guitar and I don't play the guitar very well. So I was kind of like doing like my futurist talk, like, to really bad, like, music. And he looked at me and he said, rock and roll is wasted on you. He's like, you are meant to, like, do this. And I was like, yeah, like, that's my personality. I was like, you just nailed it in a statement of this ironic sort of statement that because I can't play and I love rock and roll, but it's just like, if anything, that would be the coolest moniker ever. Like, rock and roll is wasted on me. So The reason I'm sharing that is like, for me, like corporate to me and all that is wasted on you. Like we need to unleash Ed Lance. Like I don't, I hope, I pray that you get the funding or we all come up with it and we all work because I actually don't want the big brands to get you, Ed. I mean, and I'm speaking half tongue-in-cheek and I don't really mean to be an asshole to those brands and I'm not like completely anti you know, business, or I'm not like completely anti-capitalism and all that. But in my heart, I'm like, I hope you don't end up working with those people. I hope someone or something comes along that gives you the creative authority and the space. So it's like, it's not for— like, I understand what you've done here and it looks like a good time, but you haven't even barely touched the tip of the iceberg of the social impact side of it. of the social transformation side of it on the way that you would, I think, most, you know, in your heart of hearts want to do. And like—

Absolutely. And that has been a recurring theme, you know, 10 years of the corporate events. And I was like, I do not want to schlep another dome out to a festival or whatever, you know, for, you know, to fly a logo around, right? Like, that's not me. And I know that. So about 3 years ago, I had a split with my partner who did want to keep doing that. And I'm like, no, let's go back to what we originally planned. And that's to build these venues in cities and towns where people can gather, whatever you want to call it, creative placemaking and journeying and have a commercial component to it enough to sustain it, right?

Yeah.

So that is— and, but, you know, What we were never able to do, which is the big challenge as an entrepreneur, is we kept trying to bootstrap and build a, you know, a nest egg of enough money that we could then launch a venue because these are expensive endeavors.

Yeah.

It's not like writing a few lines of code and putting it out there. It's like, oh my God, it's brick and mortar, you know, it's like expensive and the tech and it's like, it's very easily into multi-millions of dollars. And so we never really had enough resources to bootstrap into an operating ticketed venue theater other than our little dome on the studio lot, which wasn't a very good location for ticketed. We did some ticketed events there. So, so I decided I need to raise money and do this right and just forget all the corporate stuff. Now let's go for the heart. And that was, like I said, about 3 years ago. I incentivized a whole team of people. I took a president title and brought in a CEO. I had COO, I had a whole team to do this.

Yeah.

And they were all heart-aligned. We did find a backer and they signed an agreement to do a merger, actually, which would bring in $25 million in the first year and $150 million in the second year to build the dream. It wasn't exactly what I had planned. It started to go a little bit askew. They're like, well, this could be the Coca-Cola Dome. And I'm like, that's not what we discussed, you know, it wasn't right. And the pandemic hit.

Right.

And they had put about $650K into us under LOI in prep for the merger and killed the deal. You know, but I tell you, we've had a lot of success and I'll show you the more transformative stuff we're doing. I should get into, but you guys get this. You know, the domes are sort of like the out-of-home, a tour bus through VR for groups of people or whatever, whereas at home, headset can provide that. You know, this is one of the facilities that we've been working on. you know, a 1,200-seat seating deck, an elevator stage. You know, the idea is to create magic, and this is like a digital Cirque du Soleil kind of a thing. But because you don't need 40, you know, staff and talent to run it, a lot of the show is in the pixels, right? It's visual effects. It's already pre- or real-time 3D, but it's pushed into pixels, right? So, you know, we're trying to call in these bigger facilities. Oh yeah, well, this is a little teaser pre-render for this facility. And, you know, the reason for the 3 domes— can you hear me okay over the sound?

Yeah, you can turn it down a little bit because the music's less important than the visual and your voice.

So, uh, the reason for the 3 domes— and then, uh, there's a 4th dome there, that's our, uh, existing, uh, dome on the studio lot, and this is, uh, right next door— and we were pitching this, uh, is, uh, you have this sit-down, you have the stand-up. Believe it or not, this— the 2nd biggest dome has the same capacity as the sit-down dome. It's a stand-up dome. Here you can see, uh, The concept of having a service area under the seating deck with the elevator stage.

Right.

So the basic principle is, unlike a theater where everything drops down from above, we're pushing everything up from the bottom up into the theater, including performers, talent, and all like that. So that's the basic, uh, you know, for the sit-down theater. So, you know, this is, this is a, it's a big dream. You know, and then you start combining it with things like gesture recognition, tracking, you start to create— this is an example, this is not my work, it's an example of spatial augmented reality, how you can create projected environments that are interactive. It's fun stuff and it works and you can make attractions out of it. Oh, awesome.

That's what I'm talking about.

Yeah, so this is more of a walkthrough than, you know, the theater experience. It's more like the multiple rooms that have projection, this sort of thing. Of course, this is happening now. You see the whole immersive projected digital spaces, starting with Altair and Lumiere, I think it's called, or Paros, and 3 companies doing immersive Van Gogh experiences. But this is just the canvas that's being projected onto, right? So this is all what's possible. And if you combine that with opt-in sharing of your personal affinities, you know, that you control.

Mm-hmm.

So, so, and that you actually contribute to. Now, there can be some very interesting AI-type matchmaking. So, so this is how people can connect. So the whole digital ecstasy concept is to actually replace pharmaceuticals. And so what we've done is we've studied why people use alcohol or MDMA or whatever. Like, what is it? What's the payoff, right? And how can we evoke those similar brain states through digital experiences? And so that's where we're getting into, I think, you know, how to use these spaces in a way that not just, oh, wow, that was a cool experience, but Oh my God, I connected with people and lasting relationships and moving into different states of consciousness. That's really where this can go.

Yeah, I need this. I need this. Everyone talks about the overview effect. I'm like, are you kidding me? That's like nothing compared to the interview effect or the whatever you want to call it. Like, we can, we can create all of this without going into space. Like, it's not that it's not cool to go into space, but like, that's just like a tip of the iceberg, seeing the Earth from afar. This is, this is excellent.

And the sit-down experience is like your orientation into the headspace, right? So you have this incredible experience, and then you move from the sit-down dome into the stand-up or walkthrough or whatever, or maybe the walkthrough is your pre-show. And, you know, so now what you have is an experience where it can be ticketed, which means you can sustain it. But, you know, using some of the new tech, and we're always trying to figure out, okay, how do NFTs and all this fit into this, you know, decentralized? But the basic concept is that you can work your way up to have additional powers and abilities in these spaces, these digital spaces, not through paying money, but through giving back, right, into the system and that you build, just like gamers, gaming, gamified, right?

I have like so many things I want to say. Yeah, so I guess at the risk of sounding ignorant, or it's more like, I get these downloads or like kind of like pings to talk, and then it's usually like someone already has a piece of it. But so I will say that, imagine you're talking about this isn't economically feasible because it's like millions of dollars. You have to get somebody to back it, and eventually once money gets into a system, it gets too large. They start— you have to— the short-term incentives of money-making always eventually sway a system to go towards more advertising or things that are proven, quote unquote, to make the most money. So imagine you just set all that aside and you're designing a society from the ground up that creates its own internal economy using cryptocurrency or some kind of decentralized economy. So that's your basis. You've got this society based in wholeness that all the systems have been engineered by heart-centered entrepreneurs like yourself that have a lot of specialty in these systems. This is something that Bret, I know, is working on, right? Some version of that or people we know is working on. So imagine a system where you have a dome like this that's in the center of your town, your town that's created from the ground up from wholeness. And people go to this place like it's a church or some kind of like temple, I'll call it. They go, they have these experiences that are engineered by technology. It's not just the dome, it's not just the gamified experience, but there's also like haptic ways of connecting with heart frequency, having this connection with each other, whatever it is, it's facilitating this connection. All these people are getting in touch with their higher selves or whatever in a non-religious— in a non—

Yeah, it's secular.

Not non-structured, but yeah, it's secular. It's, it's, it's— they're realizing they have direct access. They're learning.

They're not excluding anybody based on—

Nobody's excluded. Exactly. If you live in the town or you're near the town or you pay to get into the town, whatever, you get access in some way, right? And there's a whole system around that. With storytelling, what I really want to do is embed it in people's subconscious that this is something that they don't actually even need the technology for. The technology is just a fun way to play with it, and it's a bridge for many people to say, okay, I'm using the technology as a proxy for increasing consciousness, right? So, so once they— it's fine. People can be on different levels of that journey. Some people need, quote unquote, just like they need alcohol or ecstasy or whatever to get into that state, they need your device, your dome, right? Eventually they realize they don't need that, and that's built into the curriculum, so to speak, of how people are taught and brought in and onboarded and the scaffolding phase. Like I said, I was bursting at the seams to talk about this stuff.

So, no, and then, and I'm totally on board with it, and I am coming in with some slice of that, right? And you guys and others have—

yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, the challenge is how do you put it all together pitch it, get it funded, blah, blah, blah, right? Uh, it's so— it's been quite a journey.

So all the people who go through this experience are now activated, quote unquote, nodes in the network. What— how many people go in, they have a transcendental experience, they realize, wait, I've always wanted to be a gardener, and I always thought that that wasn't going to make me any money, but now I know to follow my hearts and I'm going to do it. So now the landscaping around your dome is like from a heart-centered, like genius-level place. with somebody who's like connected to that and then the places around it. So what I'm saying is you build something like this, right? And it's not just this dome, but it's some kind of central point. And then it magnetizes other people building around it in this beautiful way. And I'm not pitching this as like I'm a waiter in a, in a, in a cafe and I'm like, here's my script, you should do it. It's more like this is what's happening. And I feel like this is a structure of the way it will evolve. And it's not up to us to do it. The more we think it's up to us, the more we get in our own way. And so I have to do this all the time, right? Because I'm like having these downloads about gamification, how it's going to integrate with these systems. And I'm like, well, because I have the download, it's my job to do it. But eventually, then I realized, oh wait, someone's already been doing it for like however many years, they just didn't realize they were part of this large self-organizing system.

But you know, if you try to glue those people together with a corporate structure, that's also very challenging, you know, and everybody has their own brand and their own, you know, they want to be autonomous and independent. And, you know, some of the most creative, you know, conscious creatives or whatever are very independent people.

Yeah.

It's been like, how do we get everybody like focused on, you know, making real, you know, and so, you know, what's cool about the Domes is that it's just a place for people to go to gather. And that's powerful.

Yeah. Yeah.

And what happens is all the different inventions and technologies and experiences can now start to focus and plug into that. So, it becomes the focal point for an outpouring of like a huge plethora of different modalities and technologies and art and science and all of that. You know, it's like you— but you need that catalyzing focus to bring people together and, you know, how to structure that. Is, you know, is still something that, like, I'm not happy with the corporate structure, you know, shareholders, blah, blah, blah. And it's like, okay, well, how do we do this differently that's more decentralized and more inclusive and that allows people to come and interface? Because in the end, you kind of do need some, you know, to enforce, in a sense, enforce a direction.

Yeah.

You know, and then it's like, oh God, so then I'm, You know, I have to be a CEO. It's not really like, how can this be done differently? And I'm still, that's a very open question in my mind. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's very interesting. It'll be very interesting looking back 10 years from now to see what COVID, what, why COVID for Ed? I mean, first of all, on one hand, you've got, you've already done the proof of concept. Like you, you're way beyond most people that I know in the innovative space. Like you have the proof of concept. If you keep going, you will find someone to come along like you had that almost before COVID There's this, for me, there's no, I mean, I hope it's somebody who's aligned and doesn't try to, again, because the money thing does, if you're, to me, Hollywood and LA is very dangerous. There's a lot of phoniness in my opinion.

Oh yeah.

And a lot of spiritual talk, but then you get in the boardroom and they say, oh, we don't really care about that. Now it's a business deal. Like when they get in the, that was my experience because I had a tech-related project. So the VC people, They talked about like unity and all that, but then when we got into the room, they were like, well, that's for outside the room. Now that we're talking business, we want to own 50% of your company and blah, blah, blah. So, but you will find some. I mean, to me, there's no question because you have the goods. Like, this is—

Yeah.

I mean, I'm excited because I don't like VR. I don't like the idea. I feel it's quite— I'm worried about VR. Like, everyone's sitting around with these glasses on. Like really isolated, even if they're in a building together. So for me, this is much more interactive. Like it's augmentation to me. It's like, it's just way more exciting to me than the thought of just putting on a VR 8 hours a day. Like I could live in a dome for 8 hours a day and be connected to people like physically. I can bump into them. I could, we can be talking while we're seeing things. Like you could, obviously you can turn, like tone down the immersiveness. Every half an hour. So, people are more needing to talk to each other. And then, I mean, you could just create amazing experiences. So, I'm super excited. And then, the other part of the COVID thing for you, Ed, as you have seen in the Awaken Dream Synergy group, and I'm sure in other spaces, there's the equal level of innovation coming with self-organization, with new corporate entities and how people share resources. So, For me, it's no— I mean, if I try to look positively on your experience and thinking about divine timing, I would think like it's going to give you the opportunity to actually launch this in a way that is going to be more aligned than you ever could have imagined, even though it feels painful and it feels like it's not happening. I still feel like, because there are new models, like, I mean, I'm working on some of them. I know the people in the Wake and Dream Synergy are. There's all different vehicles and ways decentralization is reinventing things, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So I kind of feel, I mean, I feel excited. I feel I was envisioning my Togetherland project, but I only do my part. Like, I'm a generalist and I only have one job with Togetherland, which is to catalyze the concept of it, like, and the framework of it, not to create the domes or the permaculture or the aquaponics. Like, I don't know how to do any of that. I'm tiny compared to the people that are the artists. So. So I'm excited to know. I mean, I've known about you through Awaken Dream Synergy, but this is now the first time I've gotten to see your history and everything. So sure, sure.

So I'm going to go fast through some of these because there's some other bits I want to just get to before we wrap here. You know, because really the idea, just what you said, the idea here is to There will be money people coming along, whether it's decentralized or what. The idea is to model— I call it laying down the codes— to model how to use these spaces and all this cool tech for good, just in general, you know, to elevate human consciousness and in very innovative ways that hasn't even been done yet, you know. If you can show making money doing that, then when the masses come in and say, oh, I want to copy that, I want to do that too. Well, here's how it works. You've got to get a conscious artist and, and, you know, it needs to be somebody you can't, you know, copycat it without— or please copycat it, really. It's like, yes, here, let me show you how, you know, let me help you because Once you lay the codes down, everybody wants in and they're going to try to repeat your success. So the idea is to have success doing what we want, right? So anyway, this whole kind of a wrap on digital pharmacology, the idea of creating these sentient interactive multisensory environments, digital mediated human connection. But also going deeper and more like a consciousness, evoking unique brain states. That's really the key here to me is you can talk to someone about unity consciousness or cosmic consciousness till you're blue in the face. And if they haven't had the experience, it's like trying to describe what does an apple taste like when there's nothing similar to it that you can relate to. It's like impossible. So the idea here is to not just talk philosophically about this stuff. In fact, wouldn't bother me to not hardly talk about it at all, or just talk in very generalized secular terms. The idea is to evoke those experiences, evoke those brain states in people where they go, oh my God, what was that? And then of course, as you guys have been mentioning, you have to have now the curriculum, if you will, or the structure around that where people can go deeper and spin off into pods and all that sort of thing, right? So we have this mapped out, but a lot of this is the philosophical of transformative media. What I want to get to is to show you the actual. And this is Mesmerica, is our latest show. It's James Hood is the artist. He plays the hang drum and he had an album years ago that I loved called Mood Swings. with Chrissie Hynde from The Pretenders, and they did a song from Jon Anderson from Yes, and it was like, oh wow, that's so cool. Well, you know, he wanted to create immersive experiences, and Kate and I came in to help him out, and we workshopped the show in our dome theater. And I can show you briefly a ditty here.

I want this experience to Inspire you into taking a journey with me inside your mind, to engage your senses with this miraculous alchemy of sound and light. This is a show for the right-hand brain. There's no logic, there's no analysis. It's all about fantasy and imagination and the impossible. Our minds have got into the habit of thinking that we have to be thinking all the time. I don't think that's true. I think that not thinking is very powerful.

Mesmerica is an hour-long, fully immersive show that is a combination of James Hood's music along with artists and their works of art, animation, from all over the world. Mesmerica uses the power of immersive media that fills your field vision to evoke unique brain states. So in particular, he's using the power of the format to evoke positive brain states like happiness. The concept behind Ms. America is to bring a sense of well-being to the audience. It's playful, it's awe-inspiring, it creates a sense of wonder. Well, the show is unique because it's multidimensional. So you have the imagery that goes on over your head in the dome, then you also have James' performance on stage. You don't really see a lot of live shows that do that.

It's kind of one or the other.

It's quite a unique show, and James is quite a unique performer. We love his vibe.

We love what he brings to the table.

So working with James is particularly interesting because He is an incredible collaborator, and the music is really sort of my script of what images to use and when and how and how fast to make them and what transitions to use. So when you come in and see this show, it really will transport you into hopefully something really, really cool that you've never seen before.

I'm basically— I would like people to feel happier than when they came in and to realize that that came from within them and their own awareness purged them of some bad mood or some stress, and they feel just a little bit lighter and a little bit maybe inspired by what you can do with your own awareness.

And this is our very first show that we're premiering at the San Diego Planetarium, and it sold out. First show sold out, so we added a second show which also sold out in just 2 and a half days. Yeah, it was phenomenal.

Unreal. Something I've never seen before.

I recommend it because you would feel more happy and more relaxed.

I feel so elevated and I feel so light right now. I feel happy.

It was beyond words. It was amazing.

I've never seen anything like it before in my life. My favorite part was the way that the visuals came at you. It just, it surprised your brain. You never knew what to expect. It was almost like overwhelming. The way it would make you feel.

It almost became an out-of-body experience. It was absolutely amazing. Everybody should come check this out.

Really great.

I love how they played the— I think it's a habidrum—

and all of that in the light suit that the guy was wearing.

That was a pretty cool show.

I didn't realize the hour was over.

Yeah, I was like, wait, it's done? Oh no.

You really have to see it rather than talk about it, but we hope everyone that's intrigued or interested will get an opportunity to have that experience. Oh, Over the next year, we're going to tour and take this to planetariums and domes all over the world.

And in a lot of ways, the audience are the star of the show because it's their awareness that we're trying to, we're trying to play with and to try and scoop them up and take them on a journey inside their own minds.

Oops. Yeah, so this show was very successful up to the pandemic, grossed about $10 million and running in about 30, 33 domes across the country and Canada. And what's interesting about it, so we're just scratching the surface here with this, and it's very clear to us That, you know, we're calling it a journey through your own mind. Most of the imagery is abstract, which is like a Rorschach test, right, where you project meaning onto what you're seeing. So people, everybody has a different experience. People have come out crying or saying, oh my God, I saw my dead grandfather, whatever. Or my autistic child, I've never seen them sit still for so long. You know, but really, it is a journey through your own mind, because your mind is projecting onto everything you're seeing the meaning. So there's something special that we're just scratching the surface here with this show. And again, you know, this is, this is kind of like what I was saying, you know, lay down the code, show it working, show that it makes money, and then let others come in and take it further than we ever will. You know, like that.

Yeah, that's, that's beautiful. I'm really happy that this is, this is where you're at in the, in your journey.

Yeah, so, you know, it's like proof of concept. Got it. Um, all right, uh, how do we, how do we build it? You know, how do we get it done and do it right, like you said, without getting swayed off the path by, you know, the 7 deadly sins, so to speak, you know, which we're all subject to, right? It's like somebody starts waving money in your face. I mean, that's what happened with the deal that I had mentioned.

Sure.

A great deal on— well, it looked— what it was is I had incentivized this whole team to come help. They worked so hard for so long and they were all like at wit's end. And incomes, you know, okay, well, yeah, we'll write you checks, we'll pay your salaries, just merge with us and we'll— and I couldn't say no, you know, because it was like I made these— it was like work, everybody worked so hard. And it's like, Ed, you can't say no to this. Like, okay, well, let's just— okay, it is what it is, you know, let it, you know. But the pandemic is so funny because we were frustrated because we weren't getting the domes up fast enough. And well, let's get it going on. And now We had this venue we were about to open in June in New Jersey, and it was starting to happen. And God forbid it happened. You know, if we had a dome up and the pandemic hit, then we'd have to be sitting on all these assets, all this property, hemorrhaging cash, no way to make money. You know, it's like, oh, maybe it kind of worked out for the best. You know, so yeah, coming out of the pandemic, we're really interested to see where this can go. And there's so many different strands to this. This is what I call the Virtual Sanctuary. It's more of a digital spa. Oh, this is the Mood Zones that we launched on Harmony Channel and Comcast. 7 mood zones, each with visual musical journeys, right, to evoke different brain states, essentially. So, you know, it's the kind of thing I won't play this, but let me get past that.

Did you ever have a chance to work with any, like, neuropsychiatric and brainwave people that would come in and measure, like, brainwaves or anything?

Yeah, you know, there's a fellow from Intheon who's interested. There's a neuroscientist at UCLA we've been talking to for years, Dr. Robert Bilder. But, you know, it's like, it never got to be enough of a priority that we put $30,000 in cash into, like, setting it all up and doing, you know, and publishing and everything.

Mm-hmm.

I so want to do that. And to me, this is what's, you know, there's different aspects to this consciousness and neuroscience is a really important aspect to everything that we're doing. And I want to understand what's happening in the brain when they watch these shows. Because I know what's happening in my brain, and it's not something that you get from television or film. It's like the storyteller's palette has now been expanded, being able to create a sense of awe, you know, being able to create, to evoke these other more sublime kind of emotions, you know, that there's something really, really special here. You get it in VR to an extent. As you guys know, I'm sure, you know, I'll never forget Nani Di Lapiña's experience of Syria. I put on the headset and I'm standing on a street in Afghanistan and kids playing and then kaboom, a bomb goes off and everybody's screaming and I ripped the headset off, you know, I'm like, oh my God. Yeah. What's happening to my brain, you know? And I really, you could cause PTSD in these environments, you know, if you're not careful. Um, so, uh, anyway, uh, that's, um—

Before I forget, sorry to interrupt you, I just wanted to say that I've been working with some really amazing people, um, in the neurofeedback space.

Yes.

Um, and they not just have technology that's ahead of everyone else, like taking, like, you know, clinic-level technology and putting it in a home set, So there's that. And then, but they're also like, you know, deeply in the consciousness space. They know that technology is only ever a proxy for consciousness and they have that sort of energetic philosophic posture. And so I worked with them to add gamification to their app journey and also storytelling, a story that's like into an interstellar journey of planets, but it's really abstract symbols. And these symbols are in words, at least the script that we wrote, And those words, you know, they get deep in your mind. The headset's doing the heavy lifting. Really, your brain's doing the heavy lifting, but, but, and heart and whatnot. But the, you know, the words are there to just inspire you to go into these like inner journey spaces. But if that's something you're interested in, I would be happy to connect you just to—

Absolutely. In fact, the clinical applications, you know, are, could be thought of as maybe the lower hanging fruit there.

Right. You know, that's why they're in the space, right? Because it's like, oh yeah, if we can prove that this affects some kind of mental disorders, like, that's big business, right? That's the entire healthcare industry is propped up on like mental disorders, basically, you know, and they're just body disorders, right?

Yeah, there's 2 applications we've looked at there. One is hyperbaric, uh, chambers where people have to lay for 90 minutes in a glass tube with nothing to do and project an immersive environment around them and take them on a journey. The other is infusions, you know, where a lot of people getting, I don't, you know, all kinds of different infusions these days, ketamine and stuff, right, take them on a journey as well. So I think, you know, that sort of application is very robust. And—

Yeah.

Yeah. And so really, I'm Quite interested in both. Most of my work has been put more into the group immersive. Yeah, some of the things that we're doing definitely can spin off. Like, we're talking to one company that has a VR headset in a flotation tank, right?

Oh, wow. Yeah.

Charging $100 for a 1-hour experience. And so that business model kind of can work, you know, to where it starts to make business sense. And Again, you know, the only— you know, somebody once told me, if you want to be a billionaire, help a billion people, right?

Mm-hmm.

And it's like, okay, if you're making the money doing the good work, that's the only way you can get out there in a big way to really have an effect on the masses and evolution of consciousness. And so in my mind, everybody gets to go. This is not about, you know, A clique of cultural creatives, you know, doing cool stuff. And no, you know, I want, you know, people in the heartland, you know, who voted for Trump, you know, to come in and experience this stuff. I mean, that's what's going to move, really move the needle for evolution of consciousness.

So I was curious about, this is something that's been on my mind a lot as a person who always wanted to be a filmmaker. Like, I always wanted to be a Steven Spielberg type. I'm like, all right, I'm gonna get my chance. Okay, no, I'm gonna go on the sidetrack. Okay, all right, I'm gonna try it again. No, I'm gonna go on this other sidetrack. And then it's like, all right, no, the movie industry is like basically crumbling. And, and so, so, you know, movie theaters like have a major problem right now. Public exhibition of art has a major problem because it used to be a gate, a way you could only have certain experiences. Now some people could argue that you still can only have certain experiences in a theater. The group, like being in a group that's like laughing. You're muted, by the way. Oh, I'm not sure if you're—

No, I'm talking to my sweetie. Yeah, yeah. On another call here.

Yeah, yeah. So, so, so I always thought that basically movie theaters have had a UX problem. Like going to a theater is a very high friction action that is not rewarding because people the theaters were built under this mindset of, yeah, well, we've got the thing that you, you can only get here, and they never trans— they never changed, and basically they just slowly, slowly declined. But I do think that public exhibition of art is kind of intrinsic to our nature as humans, you know, ever since we were like telling stories around the campfire, um, that this is important. And so I was curious about, since you're on kind of the insider You're an insider and an outsider at the same time. I'm curious what your experience has been and where you think the trend is going of these theaters.

Yeah. Well, you know, the interesting thing is that by all appearances, the entire entertainment industry is moving in our direction. When I say our direction, I mean, Yeah. Deeper, more meaningful experiences, new storytelling modalities, more immersive. It's all moving in this direction. We're out there on the leading edge. And that's why I say laying down the codes could— if we could get funding to do this more transformative media and these venues as we envision it, it could steer the whole future development of the technology and everything and the storytelling and everything. in this direction, you know, uh, you know, but the other side of it is going to be we're going to have horror experiences that give people PTSD, you know, it's like we're not careful, you know, and even, even show in beautiful movies, you know, The Matrix and Star Wars, there's a lot of shooting in those films.

Yeah.

And, you know, a friend just pitched me a show the other day, the opening scene is a hand with a gun, you know.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm like, you know, I know where you're trying to go. And there's ways to go there without taking it to that extreme. Because it's going to be magnified times 10 when people have this experience in an immersive format. And you don't, you know, and like horror experiences, you know, literally can rewire people's brains in a negative way, you know. So we have to be very careful. I think there's going to be a whole ethical thing. There's already, you know, People being, you know, sexually harassed in VR, collective VR, you know, MMOs and stuff like that.

Right.

It's just gonna— because if you can recreate reality and trick someone's brain to think something's real, there's so many traumatic things a person could see or feel or experience in the world that you can now reproduce those experiences, you know, synthetically and mess people up.

Yeah, this is why I, um, personally feel a lot of urgency, even though I know— and I said earlier, like, it's all good, it's unfolding, this is happening, it's not my job, I'm just part of the ride of it, right? But I— but when I connect to that story of we only have so much time to do it, you know, the time is running out, there's a— there's Moore's Law is like moving us towards like photorealistic reproduction of reality to the point where you won't be able to tell the difference. And the fear that I have is that we will not handle our own inner selves and we will project, we will project a world of, you know, that we're currently living in, just like social media has done. It has exacerbated the inequalities and the systems that disempower us because we just embed them into the technology that we create unknowingly. And so why I feel urgency and why I want to have these conversations and I want to get, you know, this message out to as many people as I can is because if we get there, if our technology outpaces our ability to awaken, which I don't think is actually possible, but if it did, then we could create our own reality that is like a prison basically to ourselves. So—

If you can't envision it, then how are you going to create it, right? And then so to me, the storytelling is that that inspiration, you know, that shows people what can be, you know.

Right.

And then all these different cool technologies, the spiritual technologies or whatever, you know, I mean, that's taking from religion, you know.

Right.

Look at the cathedrals of old, huge immersive spaces, right, with beautiful stained glass, pure colors, saturated colors, and literature and song and art and the whole thing, ritual. You know, there's a lot of— you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater here. You know, religions have served a purpose, although, you know, a lot have been co-opted and twisted and all like that, of course, right? But let's hold on to the technologies and use them for good, you know.

Right. Yeah, I agree with you. I don't think it's about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'm As a person, so my, my stepdad is a priest, or was a priest, and my dad was almost a priest, and I am secular, right? So I'm technically Christian, but, but I, I feel like there's too much disempowerment in the ideology of the way that I learned about it, you know, unless you go back to the source of like, what were the actual words that were being spoken? What's the energy of the original people talking about Christianity? Sure, I'm totally down with that. But interpretations, you know, change the energy flow. So when we talk about like cathedrals or temples, you know, religious spaces, they always have some kind of facilitator, right? Someone who's like, I have access to the infinite and I will share it with you. The problem, quote unquote, is when that person starts to feel like they need to be there in order for other people to access their own infinite connection. And those people start believing it as well. And then it becomes codified, it becomes the rules and whatnot. And so the opportunity we have is to continually say that message and know everybody, everybody gets access. This is equal opportunity.

Taking a pill, right? You associate the pill with the drug.

Right.

And that's what I love about, you know, like we have some artists who've come to us with musicals, for instance. I'm like, oh my God, this can be incredible. And it's moving from, you know, the domes have been seen as cosmological cinema. David McComb coined that term. And it's like, yeah, we can, and, you know, real time now, right? Where you grab a joystick and fly through a model of the known universe and, you know, all that.

Right.

It's very cool. And, you know, powers of 10 and all that sort of thing. However, I think what we're doing is more like phenomenological cinema. And if you think about like a Zen master trying to teach a student, yeah, you know, well, you know, meditate on your breath for 7 years.

Right.

It's like, well, can we like speed that up a little bit? Like, what's missing here? Yeah, what's missing is the ability to transmit an ineffable state of consciousness, right, that can only be experienced and trying to trick people to have that experience, right? Well, I think, you know, this immersive media can supercharge mindfulness states, cosmic consciousness kind of states, or whatever you want to call it, you know, where you have these epiphanies and awakenings and see the world through different eyes. And there's a plethora of applications, but all having to do with getting people to essentially enter the mind of the performer or artist or guru, whatever you want to call it.

Sure.

to see the world through their eyes or experience the world in their way. And that will accelerate, you know, this evolution of consciousness more than anything you could write words on paper or books or even stories, you know, because a story is being told through someone's behavioral, outwardly behavioral expressions, right?

Right.

I guess novels, you know, go into the mind of the protagonist quite a bit. But you know that, but that sort of thing where now you're not just using words, you're actually able to trigger those brain states. And right, as a storyteller, that's a powerful tool.

I think it all works in concert. Sorry, I don't mean to be bogarting the conversation, by the way, Bret, if you have questions.

I'm happy to have the energy and where it's going now.

You guys are awesome, by the way. I'm really enjoying the conversation. I didn't realize we were so aligned.

Yeah, my thought was also, Ed, not only do they probably hyper-catalyze experiences, not having to, like you say, take 40 years of asking, who am I? Or breathing, but they also, it's a culture to me. Like if we have an immersive civilization, an immersive culture, not only do you have the aha moment quicker, but you don't have to like go back out.

Right.

let's say, like, into the dualistic jungle of the world that starts then just reinforcing all the stuff that is counterproductive to that naturally enlightened state. So, like, if that village, like you were saying, Chris, you know, if that's the center, like, it's— I love it because I'm here in England. So everything was built around a church. I mean, nothing is more— I mean, I know in America we came from there. So it's evident if you start looking around, but I mean, Yeah. I'm now in the home of every town has the church at the center. So I'm just the idea of having that cathedral of immersion at the center and then it would so easily like, you know, bleed out really.

It's an exponential technology.

Yeah, it's not only that moment, but it's just, it's for me, it's, I mean, the holodeck, for me, it's living. Like there is no, There is no line for me between real or unreal to me. Like, or like, I mean, it's clearly fascinating, Ed, when you say, you know, we know the brain can't tell the difference and we have to be conscious about the realness of the experience being created, but it's still no different than the realness that we're creating now with the technologies we have now, like called governments and and 2D cinema and school systems, these are all like kind of technologies in a way that—

Yeah, hallucinations, we all share in.

Yeah, that create the realness of our realness. So I'm quite interested in going into the novelty, you know, of spirit-motivated technology. Like, I'm not too worried about leaving the real behind and being stuck in the more real or the unreal. It's like, I want to go into the mystery of of our creativity to me is only enhanced by these technologies. It gives us—

Yeah.

You know, the philosopher David Chalmers, he coined the term the hard problem of consciousness, right?

Yeah, which is an illusion to me. But that's— yeah, go. Where are you going with this one? I'm curious.

Well, he came out with some statements about virtual reality. And he said virtual reality is real reality.

Right.

It's not a fake reality, it is reality, and we need to think of it like that.

Yeah, it's a version of reality, really, rather than an alternative.

One of the other things I'm into is my background in quantum physics.

Yeah, yeah, right.

Insights into consciousness, and I've been talking to IONS and lots of people in this field about using quantum information, signal processing, and different techniques to really get to the bottom of what's going on. Because there's all kinds of philosophies, but it's like the rubber meets the road when you actually start collecting data that like surprises you. And then, you know, start— you have something to chew on, you know. The problem has been that we We haven't characterized these non-local effects. That's another whole topic.

Yeah, that's exciting. Because for me, Ed, what you're talking about, I said to Chris in a prior episode, we've done 2 conversations like this. So Chris and I only knew each other through some various messaging, and then we've done 2 of these shows together to actually get to know each other. So we have a running, running this thing, Born to Be Transmedium, this running conversation, which you've entered into. So, you know, Ed, I always say a truly unified theory of everything, and I'm speaking from the Zen and quantum mechanics kind of perspective. If you had a unified theory of everything, that would include something, nothing, and anything because it's everything, right? Everything includes nothing. So a truly unified theory of everything can only be that if it includes social social, the mixing of the art and the scientific method. It's not just a particle accelerator and telescopes and microscopes that can help us understand the fundamental nature. If we don't have Togetherland and storytelling and immersive media, we need those tools as much as we need an fMRI. We need these tools. These are the more holistic laboratory to me. You know, the merging of the social, because those are all false dichotomies anyway. You know, the scientific method is amazing because it's a beautiful thing. It's like, have an idea, test it, observe what happens, and then like reiterate it. You know, science is full of dogma. Scientists are full of dogma. But the scientific process and method is amazing. It doesn't have a dog in the fight. It doesn't care about the outcome. It's a process. process, the scientific method.

Quest for truth.

It's a quest for truth just as much as any art or religious path is. So that's, to me, the fog we're coming out of with the Enlightenment, where reductionism and materialism, we've mistaken the map for the territory because it was so successful in providing creature comforts and these technologies. So you can't, again, throw the baby out with the bathwater. Reductionism and materialism has provided amazing things in our history, but it's also time, as Donald Hoffman, the scientist, says, to let go of some of these things, like spacetime being fundamental, like materialism being our primary understanding of what our experience is about, which gets into the consciousness and the ions. So I'm super excited that you had that quantum mechanics background and now the immersive media, because the only way we can investigate the fundamental nature of reality is a combination of all these things.

That's right.

For me, there's a way bigger story, like what you're doing. I know it has like It's media. And again, you like, we can have theaters, but for me, your time is coming because you're so far ahead of your time that like what you're doing is, is so in service, applicable to the evolution of humanity that it's like, it's just way more than a new kind of movie or something. Those are all awesome side effects, like new storytelling, but like— What you're describing, what I can now hear is in your heart and what I know is on your mind, like, this is like, it could only happen now in the next decade. Like the level of mixing information with Eastern wisdom, with quantum mechanics, like that's the cutting edge. What some people, especially at the non-dual conference in the IANDS, if anyone's going to be able to get over the hump of it's only materialism or it's only spirit, It's something consciousness is not even an object, by the way. So it's hard to— that's why we're talking about phenomenological. Like you said, we have to concentrate on the phenomenological because otherwise it's a nonverbal unity. Consciousness is a nonverbal experience.

Having a foot in both worlds, right? So I have friends who are scientists and quantum physicists and then friends who are shaman, you know, and mystics. and love to bring those together and create bridges of understanding between them. Because I, you know, as I'm sure you guys would agree, that phenomenology, looking within, is a valid observational domain for study. And the Buddhists have been doing it forever, you know, but in the East, but in the West here, you know, it's all the focus is all outwards. And to me, you know, like I can measure the weight of this object to 10 decimal points, right? And I can put it down and come back the next day and it's still there. This is the low-hanging fruit, you know, easy stuff to study, you know. The mind, now that's tricky. And when you start looking within, it's like there's other dimensional planes and like, what the hell is that? How could that be? You know?

Mm-hmm.

How could consciousness survive the death experience? How could that be, you know, from what we know of the physical world? But when you start looking at quantum physics, you realize, oh my God, every atom can hold an infinite amount of information. Or as David Deutsch from quantum computing would say, every atom is entangled with an infinite number of universes, you know.

Right.

And a small number of atoms has vast computational capacity. A 1,000-qubit quantum computer is super powerful, right? And atoms can exchange information instantaneously across any distances as if those points were the same point in space because they share a wave equation or whatever. So it gets very interesting. Like, you know, I hesitate to call the universe a vast quantum computer.

Mm-hmm.

But there's something like that's going on. I'm pretty sure of it.

Sure.

That there are informational processes happening in the quantum foam, which looks random, but something's going on in there. And maybe consciousness are bounded informational entities, kind of like a software app that can, you know, a software app can go from my phone through the air, through a fiber into someone else's phone and light up and activate, right? It's not about— you're not going to learn about that software app through looking at voltages on the integrated circuit pins, you know, you have to understand the code, right? And when you look within, in the mind, that is the domain, informational domain of coding that, you know, of, you know, and you can't understand the universe without, right, integrating that in. But, but, you know, that, so to me, and then you look at all the challenges in the world, it's like, well, you know, and when I was young, I was like, oh, I have, you know, gifts, you know, like I could tinker, inventor, like maybe I could save the whales or, you know, and then I started thinking, it's like, oh my God, what's most needed is a shift of consciousness. You know, look at the Moore's Law curve of technology and the power that puts it at our fingertips. Where's the Moore's Law curve for wisdom to be able to use that tech wisely? That's what we most need right now.

Right.

Our rooms are digital temples of transformation, right? Designed not to tell people what to think, designed to create the conditions under which people could go into these deep contemplative states. And whatever comes through for them is for them. You know, it's not— I'm not going to tell somebody what they should experience, right?

Yeah. Well, we're going to have to get together for another installment at some point because Chris and I are also in the midst of our conversations because we're literally using it as a a medium or form to get to know each other. We're also like actively co-creating in a sense or exploring how can we work together? Like what's the frontier of the new narratives? And I know my mind starts to get creative just thinking about all that you're doing, Ed. And I mean, I even have on my Togetherland website, my plot, it says, think of Moore's Law of Consciousness and the model.

Yeah.

If you add Moore's Law of Consciousness, if you look at that through consciousness and the Maharishi effect, there's a small group of people could obviously catalyze a massive, a massive big deal. So I'm quite interested in that. And I think also at some point we could explore calling in some of our friends and our networks. I almost think of the idea of a letter of intention. Like, what if, you know, I'll use your example because it's like fresh in my mind. Like, what if The guy who did Mesoamerica and Chrissy Hine and a bunch of people in your network all said like, if someone shows up with 60 acres, because I have 55 acres potentially in New Mexico for my first Togetherland. So Togetherland is an immersive planetary scale, like interactive narrative that allows us to live. And it's like a non-dual for non-duality. It's like, how do I, my goal is like, how do I make, like you're saying, non-duality an experience that people can have compared to only, but I want them to reach that though. I do want to like lead the horse to water. but I can't make it drink. But what are the most necessary and sufficient conditions that might provoke and evoke that new understanding, I would say? And then live from that understanding, because it's not enough to just have it. I've done that for 40 years. I was asking myself, and then I finally realized, whoa, I need to also live from this knowing, not just say I understand everything is interconnected and I'm not really a human. I'm eternal, infinite, aware. I need to live from that, from that.

That's the challenge, isn't it? I mean, it's not easy. And, and, you know, I want an app that, that reminds me to breathe deep, or, Ed, before you send that text, I see your heart rate is up and you're upset, you know. We should, we should, we should talk about another app I'm working on. It's, you know, uh, it's the conscious use of technology to support us and to help us to grow. And, yeah, and, you know, I think, you know, we've seen the dark side of all those tools. Yeah, you know, how— and, you know, so it's okay. We don't want, you know, the government to control us, or we don't want Facebook to control us. But how can we maybe use these tools in a way that, you know, so it's a tricky thing.

I mean, I believe in us. Meaning the larger group of people, whether that's 200 people, 200 million, I don't know the number, I don't care. But I believe in us as like evolution itself, like evolutionary agents. I believe in us to be able— it's interesting to me because I don't think the answer personally is in creating policies for the ethical use of technology. That's the old paradigm to me way.

It can't be top-down. Top-down disempowers people.

Of enforcing. It's like we're going to dictate and enforce because we're scared, and rightfully so in a sense. We're scared of the potential of this technology. So we're going to dictate and enforce morality and ethics. And no matter how hard we try, and it could work for like a couple years, but for me, it will always crumble because the only way we're going to regulate the use of AI and immersive, like you're saying, brain state technology is through the doing of it. And the most important thing, therefore, Ed, like you're saying, is the shift in awareness and knowing. Because when you're closer and closer to your own divinity, I'll say, so not like outward, to your own divinity, it's the word syntony I use that Barbara Marks Harvard passed along. You have inner right knowing. It doesn't mean you don't make mistakes. Everyone's going to make quote-unquote mistakes. But as a collective, if we're coming from the heart, if we're coming from what they call second-tier consciousness in Spiral Dynamics, as we come from that, we kind of have an inner sense of ethics and morals. And that is the only thing to me that can actually take us to the promised land of using this technology right, because everything else is like— Not seeking the kingdom of heaven within. Everything else is some authority enforcing morals. And as nice as that sounds, and like your animal self and your human self and our programmed self wants some institution or, you know, authority figure to tell us how to be moral, I feel like that's never going to work. I mean, sometimes it has to play itself out. But I believe in us though. I believe in you, Ed. Well, that's interesting. Like, I I would trust you, Ed and Chris, like, to bring AI to the world. Again, it doesn't mean it wouldn't be perfect. And who wants to live in fear anyway, as well? Like, you know, at some point you got to go for it, even as a species. Like, sometimes you got to roll the dice, like, in a way, to me. Like, people are already suffering, right? Like, there's a lot of people— we're very lucky. We're 3 white, middle-aged white guys. Like, you know, like, we're, we're quite lucky, all things considered. And I don't even have normal, like, income or anything. But like, we're, we're lucky. There's a lot of people already suffering. So the argument that we're going to blow ourselves up or become enslaved to AI, I'm like, have you seen the state of the world? Because that's the best case scenario. Like, right? Yeah. Sorry, that was a rant. But I just—

Fascinating.

Bottom line was I believe in you.

I probably should get going here. Gotta eat lunch in the next 10 minutes and jump on another call.

Yeah, right on.

But I so appreciate you guys. This has really been fun. You know, I think that people who share this kind of a vision need to hold hands now and work together. You know, we're all very independent. We want to do our own thing and all that. But you look at how corporations catalyze the power of groups of people with a common focus. You know, and that's the rules-based model that you referred to, right? But, you know, how can we have that same kind of catalyzing effect through voluntary, through decentralized systems and all like this?

Right.

Fascinating to me.

We're getting there.

Yeah, I'm sort of sitting back going, hmm, okay, what's working here? What isn't?

Yeah, right.

And there's like, you know, around the whole NFT thing is fascinating. The DAO or Lao that's been discussed is fascinating. You know, there needs to be some legal stability around it, I suppose, you know, and all of that. But yeah, so I'm just very open-minded and curious, and I'm eager to work with others. So thank you for reaching out to me. And I look forward to connecting with your tribe and you know, exploring possibilities. You know, my focus is getting, you know, something going on with these venues, both in the metaverse and the real world, you know, and bring those worlds together.

Yeah.

But creating a platform where people can plug into that's totally extensible and, you know, that can be customized for other, you know, applications or whatever. I just want to see it used for good. And that's my only criteria is don't go to the dark side with this stuff. Because you could, you can, and, and, you know, especially when you start combining AI where that's generating the experience with biometrics that's watching it, how you react to the experience, and adjusting, adapting the experience to achieve different target brain states. I mean, you know, you could have addictive potential with this sort of thing as well.

I think, I think that's why, I think, Ed, that's why the new models are not just open source either or just corporate. They transcend and include. So for me, Ed, as long as you're alive, you're the source creator to me of Vortex Immersion with a couple of your friends and your partner. I don't want a so open source license that Google and Monsanto can come along and basically use your creation in a way that you can no longer steward. I wouldn't say control, but there's a reason for me that evolution and God said Ed is the one to bring this. Just like there's a reason that Bret is stewarding Togetherland and Chris is stewarding his prod. There's— this is important stuff. So I feel very strongly that that's one of the key points is to have this— people be able to co-steward their domains and they're part of that coming together that you said. Like when we come together, you don't lose your Authorship, but you also learn to share it more, so to say, and expand with other people. And then when you trust more, they might become an actual full steward of, or potentially of something that you have given birth to. But there's a hybrid mix that's coming that is not just open source only and not just corporate proprietary only. And it's on the way as sure as your work is on the way, you know, and as sure as AI is on the way, there's the people like my wife. who are social systems designers and organize new organizational frameworks. And we talk to lawyers and, and all that. So as you would, as we all assume, all of it's, you know, like a new enlightenment. Everything is burgeoning and flourishing at the same time. So, um, Chris, I'll give you— Ed, thank you so much for giving us your presentation and for taking us through it. Chris, if you can hang out one more minute, I'll just give Chris a chance to sign off and with his final word there.

Oh yeah, yeah. I was gonna— I was just gonna say, uh, we should talk because I might have an idea for a client that, that you would, you would like. So, um, that could be really something pretty awesome. Um, so, uh, but maybe not. I'm also like, the thing with future, future casting, like seeing trends in the future, is that sometimes they're yours and sometimes they're not yours. And trying to disidentify with it is one of my edge cases. So. I will just say it's been so wonderful to meet you, and I can't wait to be in conversation. And, uh, yeah, I can't wait to see what you create because you are a powerful creator, my friend.

And vice versa, right back at you guys. I can't wait to learn more about all of your projects. Thank you.

All right, have an awesome day, guys, out there on the West Coast. There, nighttime for me. Take care.