The [inaudible conversations] in an area located around Fourth Avenue from the union square to astor place from about the 1890s to the 1960s and at the time ithetime it housed 48 n the 90 years since then all but one of the stores has shuttered leaving it to be passed down to my t father who worked here for6 years and just retired recently age of 89 and unfortunately he he is very sik but hopefully this will always be kept in our family and thingu you all for being readers and writers into supporting the store. Tonight im excited to be hosting scientists classical musician and writer author of two International Best sellers who owns the future and you are not a gadget. Best sellers also add the strand, he was an early pioneer of Virtual Reality creating some of the first virtualreality products on the market in the 1980s. The new book dawn of new everything expounds upon this expectations for the Virtual Reality and its vast untapped potential. Joining him to discuss the potential is one of my favorite columnists maureen dowd whos been a contributor sends 1995 where she won a pulitzer prize. Please join me in welcoming jaraon and maureen to the stage thank you. [applause] for the room we use this and then this is for cspan. Something like that. I wrote in the times that jaraon is one of the most unusual people ive ever met, and ive met quite a few unusual people. Including our president. I asked hi him wouldnt you ratr have someone more technical interview you but i love about his books is that they are so alive and vivid and it really draws you in so i feel like you dont have to be an expert to really enjoy it. Ive interviewed him in the past couple of times and he is a hoarder as m. I. He has every Musical Instrument known to man in every square inch filled with the reall the really big floorstanding wood instruments. And a beautiful golden harp and piano is the oldest. Its not oldest the best. Is a 1929 hamlin for concerts that and its the best one. I mean its amazing. And an instrument called the serpent. I wrote a piece that was premiered earlier this year and it was the only bass instrument in the middle ages its hard to o play but its kind of wonderful. Aaron sorkin once wrote this line in a play music is what science does on a saturday nig night. Often times he starts his talks at playing one of his unusual instruments. Lets start that way. [inaudible] [laughter] [applause] what is that . You dont know what that is . [laughter] it is something usually from laos and Southeast Asia and i love it for many reasons. It is a good crowd pleaser i can take so it is effective but also arguably the oldest digital number so this is 16 similar objects so this is where it all started and actually theres a whole lineage that leads to the computer directly from this. These were traded across the silk road and the ancient greeks and romans knew them and made a giant version to a company the coliseum and it was so hard to operate they have to develop these planks that developed into the keyboardnt and piano after they were so big that they had trouble with them as they had to automate records on it and gradually turned into automation mechanisms. There was a piano who didnt play the same each time it had a little bit of randomness and the notion that you could have a piano that kind of made up its own mind to try to see if he could make it programmable that inspired another to make a programmable calculator which in the 20th century inspired another one named alan turing to formulas the general calculations of the computer and here we are safe with a thrown election. [laughter]it so it all started with this little thing. I think it is very good that we have the father of Virtual Reality at the moment the whole reality is up for grabs. I wanted to start with some personal questions because jaraon was born in new york city and then his parents fled the big city when he was one and jaraons life is as colorful as he is as you might imagine. They were running that we are not sure from what and you had a tragedy at a young age and i just wonder if you can tell us a little bit about your youth that you write about in the book. Sure. So, we are jewish, and for my parents generation, they were european. The story as you might imagine applies to my mother was a concentration camp survivor captured 13. My fathers family had been mostly wiped out. They are from ukraine. They made it here and they kind of like an interesting lif liven the 50s in new york. The my dad worked with Science Fiction so he wrote pieces in the back of fantastic and he said he came up with the rumor about alligators [inaudible] i dont really know for sure. This is something she told me when i was a kid and now that i have my own title in both trying to watch how frequently i went to her to gauge how often i was lied to if it is genetic. [laughter] so my doubts about some of the stories have increased slightly based on that research. My dad was kind of a sidekick on one of the earliest radio shows in one of the things he liked to do is make fun of weird pseudoscience to pretend to be into it. He was involved in one of the early flying saucer stuff and might have invented this but there might actually be alligators. Ive never gotten to the bottom of this and i feel like with questions involving new york, no one really does. I was born in 1960 and i think they have this feeling they wanted to run to get away they didnt want me to be around and by the way on a different topic, i have an 11yearold child now, a daughter and i am so haunted by this because my mothers family wai waited until it was o late to like how do you know and i dont have the answer, i really dont know. But they ran as far as they could to the most remote place they had to have a Good University so they ended up at the edge where they meet a. They settled there at that corner at as man his many others in the book. Thel short version is my mother died in a car accident when i was nine. She had just gotten her drivers morning and the after that i felt a profound sense of isolation and it led me to aan fascination with the potential to connect to people, how do you do it. I can almost remember what it felt like remember when you go out at night andre the stars and they are just right there. You can see them, they are real but then when you learn up a bit about how the universe was put together it could take hundreds of thousands of years to get to that place. Thats how people felt to me if its a distance like stars. There were serious bullies whenen i was. The border used to be this open border. It was an amazing thing. You t would take a school bus across the river and you would be in mexico. Theres this whole crazy paranoia about the border that didnt exist. It was just a very sweet place just right across. The at as. Certain point they transferred me to the School System and when i was back, some of the kids in my school drowning killed the only chicana kid they used to refer to as anybody of mexican descent and it wasaw terrifying that was a terrifying environment to live in. After your mothers death, your house burned down and you lived with your father in a tent in a little plot of land he purchased in the new mexico desert and then he lets you draw the design of the house you would build together. Wheneo you are a parent and your daughter is the same age as you were then, would you let her design your house . [laughter] so we negotiated a compromise on this. Did you notice a new part of the house we are building there is an eye shaped window . I let her make a window that is the shape of her eye that way she could do part of the house but its not structurally critical. My father did with the design a house of 11 and we did build it and part of it collapsed about 30 years later so my advice is not to let an ebook i andy levd design a house even if they seem precocious. You might disagree and we can have a conversation about it thats my thought. You write about how you remember vividly the lights for the first time. You are hyper perceptive, hypersensitive and even your own wordsiv hyper romantic. How did this later develop into your becoming the father of Virtual Reality and do you think that you were drawn to the arts of escapism from the men each, so if you are titled with . I dont feel like it was escapism. What struck me about the garden of the rhythmic lights is that here is somebody from centuries earlier who created this thing that didntte represent reality. It was this active imagination. To me its like if other peoples heads are like distant stars you couldnt get it to come it was like this drives that somehow transient between the head. I just had this idea that somehow if you could really see what wasas and someone also said or they could see what is in yours it would be so astonishi astonishing. Serial art for the first time for me had a feeling like that but opened up peoples heads and exposed them and of course surrealism isnt the only genre that does not and ive actually gotten a little bit of flack from peoplely who think that its kind of tasteless so it is a funny conversation to have but i think artt is that. When i was a little older i got super excited by early experiments with Computer Graphics and the guy that invented them was Ivan Sutherland you can get into the weeds of the history but that is approximately true and he also made the first Virtual Reality headset in the late 60s and when there was this journal article i was in college in the 70s and there was this journal article about some of his word and i got so excited i ran out and just stopped strangers in the street and was holding up like look at this we are going to be able to share dreams and you have to understand that was before the internet so there was no way to just Contact People you didnt know. I wasnt a feasible plan so i just ran up to strangers with these Journal Articles and i was a badly behaved boy. Speaking of which and that 70s you found your way back to manhattan and lived in a purple penthouse just behind the dakota and you became part of an avantgarde music stand spending time with john cage and Laurie Anderson y. You might do at that time new york city amplified you] yourself, a giant mirror. As he walked down the street you madera eye contact and exchanged signals with thousands of people no longer such a big. Everyone is looking at their phones. What do you think of new york now . Is it over . When is the last time you were there . I think its still there. I cant say anything bad you wouldnt know more about than me because you are from here. Its less distinct from other places and less flavorful than it used to be with so many chain stores and that sort of thing. One thing i will say is when i was 17 and here forbu the first time i used it just haunt this place and hang out. The employees used to be really strange people. It used to be in augustine so i have fond memories of it. When you use to go to the used e apartment to bed for money. The avantgarde music journal was funded by them so they would periodically have to say the printer wants to bely paid. But thats how things go and i think that sort of thing still goes on today. Some in the audience will know who im talking about. There was a woman that had energy like i have never seen before. Im not sure what her age was, but she was elderly i would say she would be held life running around and she was this patron who a lot of people youve heard of depended on and she claimed to have this amazing house of stainless steel hanging from a mobile with the top inside. It sounded real and true at the time but if something were true like that i would have heard. It must be one of those things. I know this one restaurant if we would run into the alley and grab a block of cheese. In those days it was dangerous and kind of a scary place to. I love the way that he writes about women in this book. He goes off on a discourse and has a lot of insight you ended up with tarantula venom in the fridge. [laughter] there was a house in berkeley california built above a spring and there was a group of people that started publishing a ms. Magazine into the most famous version was called mondo 2000. This group of roommates made this magazine and the woman that was the editor collected these substances and we had a problem with and i dont know why we had it but it became a problem. When you got divorced there was a weird incident with. He was a famous divorce lawyer. Wasnt there a fight about virtual sperm he was going to try a new legal theory if you failed to impregnate somebody who thought it was their last chance and she was certainly young enough you could be sued for failure to were Something Like that. But the interesting thing about it was that he was thrown in jail and disbarred if not a case related to me that Something Else. I almost wish it had gone through because the interesting thing is they say okay we are going to need your sperm samples and prove you could father a child in this lawsuit. So you are going to force me to give you a sperm sample in a delicate state telling me to do with my body and i suddenly felt like men dont ever experience what that feels like that im one of the few that got to experience what it feels like to tell you about your own body and i thought okay. I wish more could experience that. Thats what came out of it for me. Sometimes we are a little too cool and abstract but fundamentally its about the wht the state can come and control someones body and i felt very keenly sorr so i put the story e because it might help somebody else see what a bad idea that is. You talked about the social media as one modification and empire and said empathy becomes impossible and others have said that it will be seen as a passing or maybe we will have president zuckerberg. Who knows. On the chance i hope you are standing up here on that era. So, this is im actually writing another book about this but the short version is they wanted everything to be free but we also love steve jobs and bill gates if you want everything to be free the only answer is advertising so they were born as an advertiser but the problem is they get better and better and faster and faster so what started out as advertising turned into Continuous Monitoring and feedback and its easy to design those to be addictive and hire them out to manipulate people. Shawn admitted this the other day. The day after your piece was published i should note. Is he said they knew they were designing something addictive. The most tragic thing about it is since they require input from people they only work adding their own posts and videos and things. When people add positive minded construct of material, the social media gets routed to terrible purposes for the simple reason social media has to drive engagement of Everything Else and negative emotions drive it better than anything else, so a year after some positive training you have backlash could the arc of history and sets it back because the backlash is more powerful because the social media makes it so, so the arab spring turned into the reign of terror. Women trying to improve their status world, black wives matter turned into sort of a bizarre normalizing of fascism there is no reason for it to stop. Im worried about the need to movement that will turn into something we dont know the details of that all we can say is that will be worse than we expected because that is what happens. On a happier note you mention in the next book can we tell them th that cats and dogs. He has like four cats but he really loves. Its true we are a cat household and i mean theyve outgrown us. Hes worried one is a trump voter. She had been representing these kittens that showed up like why are there immigrants, everything was fine, they are eating with the cat food, really upset about it. Maureen kind of scooped mee up n this because theyd be the intro to my next book into going to have to come up with some other clever things. The cats out of the bag. The cat is out of the bag. You might know cats are especially Popular Online comic cat videos and all that. My theory is simple, we are watching our own independence go away and attacks remind us of what the thing we are losing is like because cat are you know, cats are not domesticated, they domesticated themselves and are still partially wild, they can live in the wild, they have this aloofness and that is what we are losing in ourselves as we lose these tools so we are watching ourselves go away. Ch i hope that fury is wrong. By the way one of our cats is not aloof. [laughter] they are hanging from the ceiling above the antique Musical Instruments. So you were friends with Timothy Leary and once had to help break him out of the initial institute. I noticed in the Financial Times the other day this whole piece about how a new generation of San Franciscos working in Silicon Valley believe that lsd makes them more creative but they are taking it in micro doses i guess, which is a funny thing coming full circle to your story about breaking them out. I have no problem if people want to experiment with micro dosages or something but there might be an audit definition. Says they took their cue from steve jobs and that it was one of the two or three most important things he did in his life. Im sureng he felt that becae it was important to him. I have never met tim but he started speaking about Virtual Reality and for the first time it became a big deal in public life and there was a wave of interest i guess it would have been in the 80s. He said this is the new electronic lsd. I started kind of criticizing him in some places we had little magazines so i wrote some pieces of saying it doesnt do anybody any good to try to Treat Technology as somehow applaudi w things that he said we should meet. I saidthth okay, great. I cant do his voice but i wish i could. He had sort of a gentle irishamerican voice. Im getting paid to do this workshop and i like the money that they really dont want to do it so i am hiring this guy is a professional Timothy Leary in person nader and im going to give him some of money and thend then i wont have