The Road to Nowhere: Designing the Future of Human Interaction | NOWHERE, Jon Morris | PI Apparel

There are no more updates from me, but I am happy to invite our next guest to the stage to get us started this morning. I've been practicing his name since I got here, which wasn't that long ago, but still, because I keep wanting to say Chuck Norris, but it's not Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris is not here, everyone, but we have something just as exciting for you. So welcome to the stage, John Morris, CEO of Nowhere.

I'll take Chuck anytime. Yah! Okay, I'll take Chuck Norris anytime, y'all, anytime. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Thanks. It's great to be here and see all the innovation that's happening out in the lobby and the showcases. It's really mind-blowing what's happening out there. I'm gonna take you a little bit on a journey this morning of how I got to be the CEO of Nowhere. Best title of my life, I think. And it all started in Berea, Kentucky. I'm from a small town in Kentucky, and I was always obsessed with creating experiences, from stuffed animal weddings to haunted houses. And that led me to a career in the theater, where I was a clown at Cirque du Soleil in one of their first immersive experiences. I was a performer in Forza Bruta. Anybody seen Forza Bruta here in New York? All right, we got one. Excellent. OK, a couple. Good. Thank you. Thank you. And I toured that show around the world. And all of this work in my career in theater really happened at the hybrid of the audience and the performer relationship, and how can we get into these immersive spaces and these interactive magical experiences with people at its core. And while in Forza Bruta, I was looking at how I could take that wonder and awe of theater and move it beyond the walls of theater into unexpected places. And that's when I started to imagine— let's see if this thing is working. There we go. A company called the Windmill Factory, which would, for the last 13 years, create installations, performances, and events Everything from Nine Inch Nails festival tours to designing massive shows for Metric, Fantogram, the Louvre, all the way to brand experiences for AWS, Google, and really at the core, trying to manufacture sublime experiences that have the power to change viewpoints and the way you see the world. And at the core of all those experiences are humans. You know, how do we bring humans together, um, and how do we get them to be interacting with each other? I'll talk about a couple of them just to give context of what these experiences were like. This is the Infinite Hotel. This is a feature film made live with a, uh, a theatrical audience. So it's a paid theatrical audience. They come in and they actually become the extras of the film. And there's a one-take camera that travels through the entire experience. And then at the end of the night, it becomes a feature film that's loaded to the internet. And people can watch the story from a different perspective and see another angle. Rite Passage— this is an interactive theater, futuristic art museum, modern dance piece. I think that's a pretty appropriate description. It's a pretty genre-bending piece that we did for the HP Panorama Lab. But you see, as all these experiences, they're really multilayered. They're always involving people and the interaction of people. And then play. How can we get people together to start to play? That's our natural form of the most happy we can be. And then that has the possibility of transforming us into an awe experience where we can shift our perspective on the life. So let's think about, you know, that was the last 13 years of my life, and it's hard to now think back to what was happening in 2019 after everything we've been through. But you can imagine thinking back at that time, the experience economy, it was exploding. Meow Wolf, massive festival activations, museums of XYZ and the other, projection-mapped installations, and really everybody talking about brand experience within that. Because consumers are more likely to purchase a product if they participate— participated in a brand experience. And also there's stats on Gen Z and younger generations really wanting to spend money on experiences rather than material goods. And so looking back at this time, you know, in 2019, we were working on an experience for the launch of a nonprofit called The New Public. And this nonprofit aimed to bring together top platform engineers from Silicon Valley and top city planners and architects that are designing our public spaces and try to mix those metaphors and see what we can learn to create healthier digital spaces online. So we created this 48-hour epic launch experience that traveled through multiple venues in San Francisco to really try to get these people together, talking, learning from each other to see if we could shape a healthier digital future. Then this happened. Global isolation driving us all onto these platforms that were starting to create massive social divides, mistrust in the news and others, mental health issues, and a destabilization of democracy. Positive thing is that it hyperdrove us into the future with new technology, innovative technology, accelerated behavior change, and entering us into brave new worlds. The metaverse. It's been a dream for a while. How many people have read Snow Crash? All right, we got some. Great. I saw that Neil Stevenson's starting his own metaverse, which is really exciting, recently. So the promise of the metaverse, it's been all the rage, all the excitement over the last years. But at the current moment, this imagination of being anywhere with anyone now is a very exciting prospect, both commercially and for experiences and connecting with humans from all over the globe, thinking of— my small town experience in Kentucky, how can I get to go to the Met, get to go to the ballet, get to go to a Nine Inch Nails concert, which would never tour through Kentucky, and have that experience of interacting with people? And so if you think now, that feels like a super far off future, but it's really exciting because it's infinite space. It's an infinite space that we can play in, that we can interact in, and that we can create in. And so with this excitement of the possibility of that, you know, there's a real problem that's happening right now, which is most of the people there look like this. You guys wanna hang out with these people? Yeah, I don't wanna have a beer with these people tonight. Hey, you guys wanna get together and have a beer with these guys tonight? No, I don't think so. So this is like 75% of human interaction, is nonverbal. It's body language. It's communication. It's Chuck Norris, you know. And how can we establish real connection, real human connection with avatars, with their semblances, where we don't know if it's an adult or a child we're talking to, where anonymity creates negative behaviors? How many people have experienced negative behaviors in a video game or a metaverse platform with an avatar? A couple of you out there. A friend of mine was telling me a story the other day. Andrew McMahon, this pop star that we work with, he plays poker with his friends in VR. And these people came into his room and were putting cigarettes out on their face. And so right now, these online experiences are quite unremarkable. We have the promise of gaming. Where we play and adventure, but we're stuck in these cartoon avatars. We have video chat where we ran to during the pandemic because we crave human connection. Zoom exploded, but Zoom fatigue. We're stuck in video boxes, in Brady Bunch format where we don't have any agency to move around. And we have big-time social, which has created a lot of massive super collective, but we're stuck in an infinite chat or a scroll. And at the core of all this, in all my work, in my life, people always make the experience because we're the most interesting things on the planet. I mean, to us, quite ego-driven, but how can we bring those people to the metaverse? So we started thinking, how can we create a presence engine? How can we combine gaming, video chat, and big social to really create a spatial platform that allows humans to be together with each other where they can read, write, and own their own experiences face-to-face with each other. And so when the New Public got canceled and that immersive event in San Francisco was, was no longer possible, we started looking into how could we do that digitally. And we conceived of a place called Nowhere. Which is an online browser-based metaverse. It's one click to drop in, and it's really designed to have these beautiful environments that really feel like you're in a place, that really identify you and lock you in a place with spatial audio. So you can walk up to somebody and you can talk to them, and then you can walk over to somebody else and have a different conversation. You can hear what's happening in the room. Performers can amplify, and then their audio goes further in the range, but they can still hear where the audience is and where the laughter is coming from. From or where the question's coming from. Like, I can see all of you guys here. So you'll see various environments here and different activities. And it really is being used for so many things right now, from community gatherings to conferences to concerts. And really, at its core, I think Mike Snyder nailed it when he said Fortnite Zoom and Clubhouse. Or Ashley Morris— I swear, no relation— this New York comedy club comedian who really speaks about feeling human in this space, feeling the audience as her favorite online venue. And really then what we're getting to is within these spaces, we're no longer looking at user-generated content, which has been Web2. It's been, you know, create a video, load it to TikTok, load it to YouTube. Watch it passively. We're going to be moving to player-generated experiences, where a creator like Ashley can go online, and she can perform a comedy show for a global audience and have that experience be captured on the blockchain and sell that, where creators and artists can build these communities with experiences and deepen and excite human connection, and where brands can come in and help support these experiences and really delight the players with physical goods that have actual utility, both physical and digital. Here's a few examples of some things that have happened on the platform since we've launched it. This is— any French Québécois folks in here? All right, we got one. What's le fuck? Le fuck. The SIEL. It's the SIEL in French, just so you know. So the SIEL, this fuck-off music conference, it's a 40-band music festival throughout the metaverse sponsored by SiriusXM and Dose. It was a multi-stage, multi-environment festival. It really did feel like a festival. You're popping around, you're meeting new humans, and you're seeing live bands perform within a browser-based drop-in metaverse. Brazilian Immersive Fashion Week hosted all of their networking, their AMA sessions. They're putting up all the different fashion apparel in frames that you could click and purchase. New York Comedy Club, they do recurring shows in Nowhere where they have a metaverse ticket in Manhattan, and then they have a— sorry, they have a club show in Manhattan for $30, and then they have a metaverse ticket, and then the comics drop into Nowhere afterwards, giving people from anywhere in the world access to the green room at New York Comedy Club. [SPEAKING CHINESE] So these new forms of hybrid experiences are starting to emerge. And I think this is really exciting with the technology you guys are building and where that can push to browser-based, really quick drop-in experiences that have previously been localized. And now we can have access to them anywhere in the world. And what this is going to create, we predict, is a hyper-speed of culture. You know, think about when you move to a city and you have many, many different interactions with people, your brain expands, you become more aware, you have more, more connection to the world and everything around you. And you think about that, what that is going to happen within the metaverse when you have these experiences that were previously localized, now they're on a global scale. And so bringing people together, you can start to advance culture and really hyperspeed career connections, networking, innovation, and commerce. And my prediction is that this is gonna explode the experience economy even more, you know, and thinking about this future version of the metaverse where we get into brain implants and we really be able to see, you know, teleport someone in right here next to us and then change this whole environment to be a volcano or a cenotes in Mexico. That's all awesome. It's gonna happen. But in the meantime, Experiences are going to drive the metaverse, and creating experiences that really bring people together. We have a big launch coming up this fall that I wanted to tell you about. It's The Middle. It's going to be the first time we're opening up a public middle entertainment district in Nowhere with several different live entertainment partners and these portals that you can jump in for entertainment to various experiences, and then 24/7 artist gallery worlds and artist worlds where an artist a music artist or a visual artist will create an entire environment that's like their new 3D website, how they engage with their merchandise, how they engage with their digital content of their music videos, their concert snippets that they can sell as NFTs. And really just building to a world where I think all of this innovation that you guys are doing and that the metaverse push, and where live creators like myself have come into the space because of this global trigger of the pandemic, it's such an exciting time to really be pushing innovation and to really try to get to a place where these technologies can actually bring people closer together and not push us further apart and allow us to really play and really create awe-inspiring experiences that have the power to deepen and excite human connection. So my question is, as you guys are working on your innovation, what experiences can you think about that will drive people to have closer experiences with brands, to have closer experiences with the person that they are? And I think about AR technology as the future of all this, where we're able to place anything on us, whether it be a digital layer of fabric, or a real layer fabric and how those two are going to integrate and be combining together. Thanks so much.