What if I told you that the man who invented virtual reality thinks AI might be making us less human? But the same guy who jammed with Richard Feynman believes technology should expand our consciousness, not replace it. But here's what most people get wrong. They think VR and AI are basically the same thing, both artificial, both digital, both changing reality. But Jaron Lanier sees them as opposite forces. VR expands what's possible for human consciousness. It literally changes the way that you imagine, create and how your brain works when you inhabit different worlds.

And classic VR, where you're not seeing the real world anymore, is being able to change your own body in interesting ways. That's an amazing sensation, and I think it has an indirect effect on your cognition, which is really profound. There's one thing that might still shock people that they haven't seen yet.

And here's the most uncomfortable truth that Silicon Valley doesn't want you to hear. When you interact with an AI lover, an AI therapist, an AI girlfriend, you're not interacting with some neutral technology. You're interacting with a company whose interests or override yours. Today, journal VR pioneer, Microsoft scientist, musician, and one of the most brilliant and contrarian thinkers I've ever spoken with. Goes deep into consciousness, creativity, and the future of what's going to happen to your very brain itself. Let's go.

Today I'm sitting down to talk with one of my favorite thinkers, Jerome Lanier. VR pioneer, author, musician, bon vivant. I think the only thing he's missing is a high school diploma. Is that right?

Yeah, I guess that's true. Yeah.

Well, by the end of today's conversation, you won't think about our actual reality the same way ever again. Jeron, long before you became known as the father of virtual reality, you spent time jamming with Richard Feynman at Caltech. Feynman, as you know, experimented with sensory deprivation tanks and used his own body as a laboratory to probe physics. Watching him do that, what did you learn about sensation and feedback? And how has that shaped your vision for virtual worlds that replicate reality through purely artificial sensors and sensory input?

I cherish that I had this connection with Feynman, but it was a peculiar one. I wasn't officially a student, nor a lot of times people come to me and ask things about his life, but I actually don't know a lot of the details. I haven't read all the bios, and I don't really know the public Feynman that well. The story for me was pretty simple. My first girlfriend was somebody I met in New Mexico. Where I grew up and her parents were separated, she was there. I've chased her back to la. It turns out her dad was the head of the Caltech physics department.

I was a bright kid and I just ended up kind of informally around there and had a chance to spend time with him and then. And I did play some music with him, if you mean by jamming. Cause he was actually a kind of a cool, eccentric percussionist. Yeah. And then much later he invited me to be the only male, the only non hippie girl person to ACcompany him on LSD experiments. Where I was told my job was to keep him from falling off a cliff in Big Sur, which I succeeded at. But I think he enjoyed having all the hippie girls around more than me. And not that anything happened, but I'm just saying there was a certain aesthetic exploration maybe.

Okay, so. So that's me in Feynman. I don't feel like I learned a lot about the Sensorum and such from him. That wasn't the particular thing with him. But I have been fascinated by it, obviously. And I did have many other people to learn about it from. I have always been fascinated by this very peculiar state, which is the human condition, where we are physical. Our only connection to the world is through imperfect senses, through these physical exchanges of information that follow the same conservation laws as everything else.

And in a sense we're kind of remotely and imperfectly connected to our world. And yet there's this other sense in which we have this inexplicable sensation of really being here and being in it and being sort of real in a sense, beyond just a bunch of particles. I'm totally fascinated by that. One of my old phrases from a publication was consciousness is the only thing that isn't reduced if it's an illusion. The mere possibility of illusion is the thing, you know. And so this weird state that we're in, which to me I have to turn to metaphysics to talk about, is absolutely fascinating to me. And it has been since I was little. And it's definitely part of what led me into the whole virtual reality thing of experimenting, replacing all of the sensory channels and the interactive channels with synthetic ones and seeing what happens, which we did.

So obviously you pioneered virtual reality decades before it really became mainstream. And we're going to get into, you know, some of the tough questions that I have for you as the father, by the way, who's the mother? Who's the mother of VR?