An Interview with Max Horwich

0:00 Luke F. Walton All right. And welcome back to Music 101. I am joined here with my dear friend Max, and we're going to take a little bit of a detour this week and also do this video podcast, which we're pretty excited about because it's our first one, to talk about music.

0:13 Luke F. Walton virtual reality 3d rendering and kind of the evolution of what a performance is evolution of video and just kind of talk about like the future of music in a lot of different mediums and how it might like relate to like the actual making of music too so super loose conversation but max is an awesome guy and i i figure you guys would have fun maybe just being a fly on the wall as we talk like we do every single week so welcome max

0:41 Max Horwich Thank you. It's good to be here.

0:44 Luke F. Walton yeah man um do you want to give a little maybe short background about yourself where you're living where your life is like um kind of that kind of stuff yeah

0:53 Max Horwich So I am based in Brooklyn right now. I've been here for a little over a decade. I do sort of a bunch of different stuff, kind of like various intersection,

1:04 Luke F. Walton you do

1:04 Max Horwich music, tech and education, basically. And like various permutations of those things um i like sort of come from music and i've been playing for most of my life and i got my own projects and dj and all that bullshit um then i also um like i do a lot of web stuff and a lot of design stuff um

1:31 Max Horwich I've been teaching a lot lately mostly with like sort of early education younger kids doing like an after-school program teaching kids how to make video games right now which is like

1:45 Luke F. Walton Cool. Yeah.

1:46 Max Horwich it's like weird kids kids are like kids are always weird but like ever like everyone is like kind of insane right now and kids are already insane

1:59 Luke F. Walton Sure.

1:59 Max Horwich so they're like extra special insane so that's like a fun energy to vibe off of um but yeah i've got um like scoob and i sort of got hooked up uh i guess it was like a year and a little almost a year and a half ago now it was like right around when master monsters came out you um and

2:21 Max Horwich Yes. sam who uh you know is sort of the head of the the label that's putting out your stuff um like sent me your record said check this out i think i want to work with this dude um i listened to it like i think four times that night or something like that like watch

2:43 Luke F. Walton Amazing.

2:43 Max Horwich the video twice

2:43 Luke F. Walton That's so nuts.

2:44 Max Horwich uh the next day i'm just like just get me on a just get me in on this like i love this i don't i don't know how i can help but i need to be involved um and we've sort of been working together since then i've done some like kind of designy shit i like put together a website um Right.

3:05 Luke F. Walton right scooby

3:06 Max Horwich Animated Scooby

3:06 Luke F. Walton -doober.da pizza scooby

3:08 Max Horwich -Doo da

3:08 Luke F. Walton -doober.da

3:08 Max Horwich -Doo pizza.

3:08 Luke F. Walton pizza that was that was max's idea by the way just got to give him give him props there it's

3:13 Max Horwich They're slept on.

3:15 Luke F. Walton classic they are man

3:17 Max Horwich And, you know, animated the artwork and Spotify canvases and this and that sort of thing. And about, God, when did we start working on this Live from the Void?

3:30 Luke F. Walton That was about a year ago. Yeah, it's been most of this year,

3:35 Max Horwich right? yeah like i guess it was last winter that we were sort of starting to like storyboard it out and then you know it was like kind of through the summer we were developing shooting and developing it um and

3:48 Max Horwich Mm-hmm. now it's this thing that exists um and we you know we've we've put out um like what this one song from it which i guess is sort of what we're talking

3:58 Max Horwich Yeah. about today um i'm i'm like so stoked about how it's turned out um it's it's been an insanely fun project to work on

4:11 Luke F. Walton And to give the listeners like a little bit of insight into what this is, this is like a 3D rendered world where you're seeing a live concert.

4:20 Luke F. Walton with like quotation marks around live because everything is performed live to tape but there's a series of me plus bravo bugs who's an incredible drummer and then we all played the green screen and then gave it to max and then max built this world that we inhabit um and it is it feels like i'm in like an n64 game but the most futuristic version of it and i i love it so much

4:43 Max Horwich um is an absolute joy to work on um and not really something I ever quite done before because I'm not sure anyone's ever really done anything quite like it before it's like it you know there are like definitely points of reference that land but I don't really like I've never really seen this combination of like composite parts sort of all put together quite this way before

5:15 Max Horwich um yeah it was i mean it sort of grew out of this idea that like you know at at some point there's gonna be like you we were just sort of talking about how like you've never really like there's never been a Scoobert Doobert concert yet at

5:31 Max Horwich Yeah, no, least not yet um and no this is sort of a it sort of grew out of this way to like well we want sort of to build a kind of a taste of what that would and will look like when that is you know actualized when you're you

5:47 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

5:48 Max Horwich know actually out there on stages around the road or whatever um and it's been a really fascinating project to sort of try to envision that with because it's you know we started working on this together like you know in the middle of lockdown and it's just grown and grown and grown since then and like it's really you

6:12 Max Horwich I'm still kind of blown away by how much it snowballed over the course of just one year.

6:17 Luke F. Walton oh totally totally i mean and this this video snowballed too which was fun because like kind of the original concept a lot of ways was it was a lot more static it was like there were going to be a bunch of tv screens and there were going to be a bunch of me and bravo on these tv screens and it was going to be in a virtual space that was about it but then it's turned into this thing

6:37 Max Horwich yeah it it sort of grew from there as a way to like because we wanted to sort of you know one of the things that we as we were first testing it out we would like watch back some basic stuff like on our phones because that's where everyone's watching everything now apparently and be like none of this

6:58 Max Horwich none Yeah, right. of this reads like you're this big and like the tvs are this big and it's just like it doesn't It just doesn't scan. So we need

7:09 Max Horwich Yeah. something that like feels more dynamic, but that is still using the same compa like, you know, it's still just a wide shot of you playing bass and then a wide shot of you playing playing guitar and then Bravo in his room and you know, however many others. Um,

7:29 Max Horwich Yes. but what else can we do with this? And like, how can we turn this into something that's like, um, you know, dynamic and engaging and like, you know, we'll, we'll still look interesting even on a screen this big, but also like.

7:49 Max Horwich dessert you know that stands on its own enough to like you can throw it on the projector and that's gonna be a rewarding experience too and

7:58 Luke F. Walton Yes, exactly. We wanted that short form and long form thing of you can scale it up, you can scale it down, it's still going to be satisfying.

8:07 Max Horwich what we ended up doing with that was So I mentioned earlier that I've been doing a lot of like sort of video game stuff and like teaching and this and that. One of the things that I've been using a lot is this game engine called Unity, which is one of those things like if you're not sort of in, it's one of those things that you.

8:31 Max Horwich oh most people i'm gonna say probably haven't heard of i don't really know i'm not most people so i have no real perspective um but then it's once you sort of know what it is and you start looking for it it's like everywhere like you'll see the little made with unity at the beginning of like

8:52 Max Horwich many many many many games it's sort of just the one of the industry standard default like 2d or 3d rendering engines and you can design interactivity and do it and there's a lot of coding but there's also just sort of you know drag-and-drop shit in and like there's sort of a built-in asset store where you can download 3d models of whatever or

9:20 Max Horwich you know particle systems that will make it look like the room is on fire or you

9:26 Luke F. Walton Yeah.

9:26 Max Horwich know whatever um and it's fucking amazing it's a i think it's free if you make less than like a quarter million dollars off of your game so like it's so cool um and it's sort of been more and more like people have sort of been

9:48 Max Horwich getting more and more into using it for filmmaking lately like over the last handful

9:52 Luke F. Walton Mm

9:53 Max Horwich of years

9:53 Luke F. Walton -hmm.

9:53 Max Horwich um i think that um i'm blanking on his name and i should probably just google it but who's the guy who directed district nine by neil blomkamp yeah that guy um they gave him and his uh studio like a copy of the software and said just like just fucking make us something with this just like do like a proof of concept to like

10:16 Max Horwich see that this can be a tool for filmmaking um and they delivered this um sort of three-part sci-fi series called adam that i really recommend checking out if you haven't seen it's really fucking cool um just like spooky robot wizards in the future dystopian crazy beautiful it's it's awesome it's like super cool um but it's something that like you know they they

10:45 Max Horwich sort of they're talking them in the process of talking about it after they made it they're like this is like if we wanted to redo this is so much easier than just like filmmaking for so many reasons like

10:59 Max Horwich Yeah. if you know we shot this whole scene with like the sun at like 5 p.m and then we decided that like we didn't like the way the lens flare looked

11:10 Max Horwich in like these shots so we just moved the sun in the sky to around noon and then just reprinted the whole scene and then it looked great and like that's just you can just fucking do that like if so we

11:23 Max Horwich crazy wanted to do like a christmas version of this we could just like drop a santa hat onto like the little prefab of all the robots and then reprint it like that and it would take 20 minutes plus however long it takes to render

11:36 Max Horwich part of what i i love about the way this turned out is because it does have this like sort of insane futuristic like what the fuck am i even looking at kind of like like it looks i don't know it it has this quality of being this big blockbuster production but it's still got that like indie scrappiness to it

12:03 Max Horwich Totally. um and it's got this sort of like looseness and like all of the i don't know i i mean i think you know i think i like spent maybe like 40 bucks on assets or something like that like to get the green screen to work i bought like a plug-in for that and i was like this is easier than trying to write the code myself um

12:25 Max Horwich Totally. but like other than that this is all just like you know i fucking found a free pack of like 3d models of old tvs and it's like well shit here's

12:39 Max Horwich Mm-hmm. like a whole concept for a thing now and then like you know go through and go through the stock video website and grab a bunch of weird stuff and then like but if you throw sort of enough of it all together

12:58 Max Horwich Like, all of the sort of individual components are like kind of weird and absurd and ridiculous on their own, but sort of all like in consort together they form this kind of bigger than any bigger than the sum of its parts kind of idea. um

13:22 Luke F. Walton Totally.

13:22 Max Horwich that i think like really i don't know it it fits the vibe of like the Scoobert Doobert project

13:30 Luke F. Walton 100%. That's exactly what I'm going for with just from the music on up. And it's so cool to see like this visual representation. And it also makes me think of things like, do you remember when like newspapers were just ported to the internet and it was basically like they just basically have a scan of the newspaper with like image mapped links?

13:48 Luke F. Walton it was terrible it was like no user interface whatsoever it was like we're just going to take this physical medium and put it into this format and i feel like that's the that's the go-to with like vr or 3d rendered stuff for concerts it's like we're going to take what it feels like to sit at the concert and we're going to put it on your headset and i like that this has been like a reimagining even through the lens of absurdism um in the same way that i'm trying to do with the music where it's like hey you don't have to just

14:16 Luke F. Walton Just take the physical and just print it onto the digital.

14:25 Max Horwich I did a lot of work with VR when I was like in grad school. and sort of like right in 2017 right when it was sort of getting the last like right at the peak of the last hype cycle

14:38 Max Horwich Mm and -hmm. now we're sort of like coming out of the trowel of disillusionment and i think it's kind of coming back and like you know i guess facebook's like really trying to double down on it now you know circle back on that because that's a whole conversation um but as

14:57 Max Horwich you know as i've seen more and more like what people are doing with it with music um and especially when it's like a live concert thing it's just it doesn't really work because like if you're trying to get the like like the verisimilitude or whatever the word is where it's like we're just trying to get it like as close to the experience of actually just like being in the space like it's always going to fail

15:26 Max Horwich because you're not Mm in -hmm. the space and like the more you're trying to make it feel like you are the more you're feeling the more you feel the gap between like what they want you to feel which is like what it was like to be in a room with all those people and what you actually feel which is like i'm sitting alone at home on my couch

15:48 Max Horwich And quick aside, I feel the same way with spatial audio. Totally. Like the more that you're trying to make it be like, oh, the guitar is over there or whatever. It's like, I feel like you're missing the point of like, hey, this is a technological revolution.

16:01 Max Horwich Use it for what it is rather than trying to like replicate actually teleporting. I don't know. Mixed emotions there.

16:11 Max Horwich Yeah, I think that's exactly it. It's like this. You know, it's trying to try to apply like the sort of the language of an old medium to a new medium and it like it's

16:26 Max Horwich Mm-hmm what you do for a while, but eventually. yeah like one one of the sort of points of reference that we got a lot when when i was studying this stuff a lot was um like the period of time between like when the you know the luminary brothers like train pulls into the station it's like this is the first you know there is a moving image projected on a wall and that's fucking crazy and just like the shock value of that alone is enough and then it was like what a quarter century before they

17:00 Max Horwich the western the train robbery or whatever the fuck it was called um where they sort of like you know they started it's like oh wait we can like cut between multiple cameras going at once And we

17:15 Max Horwich Hmm. can show a close-up on someone's face, and if we show what it looks like outside the building first, then we show inside the building, and then people understand where we are, and this sort

17:27 Max Horwich Yeah. of like the language of this new medium sort of starts to emerge. And the point that we're at right now is sort of the point between... basically between the two terrain movies we're like you

17:40 Max Horwich Cool. know we've got the tech we've got the technology down and it's just no one's figured out what the fuck to do with it yet so we're still just like pointing cameras at this stage and acting out a play Um.

17:53 Max Horwich exactly and and there's that there's that sense of like exclusivity too which i think is fascinating to be in a medium again where it's like not everybody's got a headset where early on not everybody had access to go to a movie theater and i think that's that's an interesting wrinkle here right is it's like we've been so used to democratize technological change that's like hey there's youtube now it's like oh my god like i readily accessible hey you have phones now you have youtube we're gone

18:19 Max Horwich God, we're gone. We got Vine. We're going to perfect content creation by the masses. And this VR thing feels still like super arm's reach. That's why I'm so excited that we're doing it because we have zero dollars and we're making something that most people think is inaccessible with zero dollars. And I think that's kind of cool.

18:38 Max Horwich Yeah, no, totally. And that's like really, I don't know, I think there's a lot of value in that. And like, you know, there's like kind of, you know, there's like the Google. little cardboard or daydream or i guess called the daydream now

18:51 Max Horwich Mm where -hmm. you like put your phone in and it's like you know it's okay it's fine um you can like kind of you can experience like most of the basic stuff on there and some some of it's pretty good and most of it isn't but like you know it's sort of a first entry point um but like i don't know another big part of it for me is just to like

19:15 Max Horwich you know to just to experience any of the content like no matter how good or whatever it is like you need to strap a computer to your face and block out everything that

19:27 Max Horwich Yeah. is happening around you and that's like a huge fucking buy-in for a piece of media um especially if they were used to like again just looking down at our phones like almost reflexively you just sort of look at it when between thoughts And then there is like just an infinite and endless stream of content. Like you consume media without even realizing you're doing it.

19:54 Max Horwich And so to then be put into this position where you have to be so proactive about it, it's like you as

20:02 Max Horwich Good point. a person making something for this medium, you need to really fucking deliver. Because otherwise, because a lot of the time people are experiencing this for the first time and like you need to come at them with like you need fucking firework and you need a wow factor or else they're going to say like yeah I tried VR it was whatever.

20:27 Max Horwich Um, and I think that, you know, I don't know if we like, I like to think we delivered that I haven't like watched it in the headset yet, but that's sort of, you know, that's the project for the, that's our next iteration, you know?

20:42 Max Horwich exactly exactly well i think that's a beautiful thing about what we're trying to do here is we're trying to like do two things at once and i think that we're like going to accomplish both goals of

20:54 Max Horwich this is a flattened 2d experience with a virtual camera and so essentially what what you're doing is you're flying around the perspective around the room so that somebody can snap in looking at the bass player you know sorry i'm calling it weird third person but they can watch me playing bass and then zoom over watch me singing zoom over watch me playing guitar who's a guitar whatever and then go see bravo so it's like it's this moving kinetic where you're

21:20 Max Horwich taking the eye and it just happens that I'm doing pods on recording engineering and mixing right now

21:27 Max Horwich which and i keep using the like the the sense of being a filmmaker where you're pointing the audience in one direction or the other and trying to like make a complex thing more tangible when you're going to drop them in the room with the vr that's going to be such a fascinating change of experience and i think that it's going to be actually more positive we've gotten some reps with it in the 2d space like these youtube videos and then go into the 3d space i think that'll be really

21:53 Max Horwich really positive and I'm excited for that kind of rollout and I hope people enjoy that too.

21:57 Max Horwich Yeah, same. And I think it'll be interesting to see sort of how it translates to that space because it is to

22:04 Max Horwich Yeah. an extent designed for that. And like there is sort of the way the space is arranged is it's really like you are in a room and there is stuff going on all around you and the camera sort of tells you where to look at any given time. um but

22:20 Max Horwich Yes. like one of the things that they're really still sort of in from what i have seen of you know from what relatively little i've seen of the medium so far like one of the things that i think they're still kind of trying to figure out in vr is like how to do that because you can't like you can't do a tracking shot really you can't like Cuts between shots look kind of awkward.

22:49 Max Horwich and they can make you vomit have Exactly. you have you experienced that so i i did um it was fascinating i did a thing with my work where yes i have a job too we went and of course like after having been apart forever they decided team building we're going to go to a vr

23:05 Max Horwich gaming area so we all put on the headsets and we're all doing it together it was amazing watching people it's particularly older people for some reason i don't understand why this would have any factor with age but they were dropping like flies like ready to vomit after after like the slightest little juju of a spaceship you know like the feelings of like gravity shifting under you It's interesting.

23:31 Max Horwich There's like a physical. One of my professors dropped this theory on me that I really, really like, and I haven't like seen it corroborated anywhere else, but I just sort of repeat it as fact because I think it's awesome, is that like one of the reasons that that happens is, or one of the reasons they think that happens is like when your field of vision is moving, but you feel that your body is not moving.

23:53 Max Horwich It basically tells your brain just immediately goes, something is very, very, very wrong. I can only assume that I've been poisoned.

24:05 Max Horwich Whoa, Like, cool. I I love it. must I love have like it. eaten a bad mushroom or like that meat in the back of the fridge, something, something is fucked, but I need to get whatever did this to me out of my system immediately.

24:22 Max Horwich Amazing. I I like that a lot. I like that a lot. It reads like, you Great know, theory.

24:28 Max Horwich I don't know if Yeah, it's like totally. correct, but I accept it as fact. um one quick anecdote because on the the thing of poison we there was one of the one of the games was like a virtual escape room and so you had to like make potions to be able to like like generate powers to get out of the escape room one of the potions makes made you translucent like you looked down your hands and you could see through them and stuff like that and i go i can walk through walls and the escape room guy got so mad he's like no you can't no you can't

25:00 Max Horwich Yeah, Ha with ha ha ha ha! the tone in his voice, like certainly someone actually thought they could walk through walls just plowed right into one.

25:09 Max Horwich Yeah, it

25:10 Luke F. Walton it's funny it tricks your head it's good stuff and it's fun it's fun to see like where the intersections are with music because like the same thing with spatial audio to me these like 3d rendered spaces um it's like more it's easier for me to picture somebody having like footsteps walking behind me with spatial audio than like a guitar like going around my head that's kind of it just feels like

25:34 Max Horwich just it Right. There might be, there will be musical uses for this technology.

25:43 Luke F. Walton I'm doing some of it in this Koan record, this next year's record, but it's not like, oh, the drums are going here. Yeah, listen to that first track, Think About It. Think about it.

25:54 Luke F. Walton um listen to the beginning i do some stuff it's like more like sound effects i have like little chimes and things that kind of go behind your head and it goes and then the whole band hits in and then it's like a normal stereo field um like

26:08 Max Horwich i like pink floyd already kind of got it like of like you use the effects and things like that to draw your attention over your head and into the stage and into the space and then it goes all around you but like i was talking to derek ali who mixes for kendrick lamar about it because i was so i was so interested about hip-hop and the like use of spatial audio he's like all it is is it gives me like another dimension to

26:33 Luke F. Walton create separation from a vocal and i was like there you go that you're using it right yeah

26:39 Max Horwich yeah like day and if like that's that's all you need at the and like at some point i'm sure you know someone is going to come along you know i i mean you know i think there there are certain artists

26:57 Max Horwich sort of especially kind of like at the fringes of electronic music doing the like

27:03 Max Horwich Yeah. real you know object or fucking whoever like that you know i want to see what people like that do with this tech but if it's just like we're You know, we're remastering the Beatles albums of fucking again, but this time they're mixed for this. Like, that's not,

27:23 Max Horwich yeah like, exactly that sounded good in mono. We don't need to keep building especially

27:25 Max Horwich the wheel, you know? the ones before 1968 it's like come on guys Right. yeah i know it's like even i feel like beatle stereo is a perfect example of like this it sounds like the band didn't have input because they didn't In a lot of these where it's like a sergeant peppers, but in stereo it's like this is ridiculous. This is

27:49 Max Horwich it's goofy it's like it's like why did you put the guitar over there like like i don't know just these weird things like that didn't need to go there

27:56 Max Horwich and the dude who mixed him the first time around was like you know he's a knight now because those mixes sounded so good that like the queen decided that this brought glory to the nation and you know just like he got all those eqs just right so it all sounds good coming out of one speaker Like we're not you know

28:21 Luke F. Walton And you would EQ it differently if you were mixing it in stereo. You just would. Like the primary thing of stereo is the exact same thing that Derek Ali was saying about spatial audio. It's creating room.

28:37 Max Horwich you can create room through stereo you can create room through 360 stereo it's like it's not the like here comes the comes the helicopter over your head it's like that can be cool in the right context but like

28:55 Luke F. Walton there's a different way of being artistic and like if you apply that old to that new it like it's the same thing i think that we keep getting at there's like a certain it's like uncanny valley doesn't quite get it it's something else of like this there's that newspaper on the internet sense

29:10 Max Horwich Right.

29:11 Luke F. Walton of humor maybe

29:11 Max Horwich Yeah. There must be a term for that because it's a concept that I like think about a lot and then I think we've sort of been trying to like. you know dance around um like

29:24 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

29:25 Max Horwich as we've approached this um which

29:28 Luke F. Walton Mm-hmm.

29:29 Max Horwich is like i don't know it just kind of feels like a waste of technology or like uh some

29:35 Luke F. Walton Yep.

29:36 Max Horwich sort of i don't know it it's thinking in the right i don't know it's like

29:47 Luke F. Walton you use the word actualized about the live show i think it's the same word it's like not fully actualized it's like it's like hey like the the fish can come out of the water because it has legs now but it like can't stay there it has to go back to the water to breathe you know it's like it's like that it's like that evolution of things where it's like hey you don't have to keep going back to the water to breathe you can let this thing be its own thing

30:12 Max Horwich Right, exactly. um and i think a lot of that is just like it's you know it's just about sort of developing those conventions and finding that story to tell um and like what you know what figure out something to figure out something to say and something to show people that is

30:34 Max Horwich worth that buy-in of like the computer on your face that like gets hot the longer you wear it and like makes you feel sick if Yeah it moves too much like

30:45 Max Horwich I know one of the things and forgive me if I've I may have gone on this spiel with you before because it's it's kind of one of my spiels but I definitely haven't gone on it on this podcast so it's all good like I think a lot about a VR sort of interim I think about it alongside like when the printing press first became a thing um and

31:12 Max Horwich Wow. like like the 1500s or whenever though you know um and for the most this giant leap forward in communications technology and for the most part you know books back it was like this fucking big and it was like wrapped in you know leather and the pages weren't bound and it was like insanely cumbersome

31:39 Max Horwich and preventively expensive for like 99.9 percent of earth's population um but it was all sort of propagated to tell this one story you know like everyone just wanted to tell this like the bible is this one story that we came up with or that whoever came up with that sort of it's got

32:02 Max Horwich all of our history and all of our moral code and all of this is just everything that society thinks is important in one story so we have this one like the big the greatest story ever told we have it all in one place we're gonna make it work it's worth that is worth the buy-in so like you know i mean Is somebody going to come up with the Bible in VR? And if so, is it available for both Oculus and Vive?

32:39 Luke F. Walton well that that that brings us to the that brings us to the the zuckerberg elephant in the room is like he he thinks he's about to that's like i really think that that's what that keynote was throwing down the gauntlet was hey facebook's gonna deliver

32:54 Luke F. Walton the story or the place that is going to take this technology from from like you know that valley despair that fringe early adopter kind of fun novelty and turn it into something that you're willing to do eight hours a day five days a week

33:10 Max Horwich Which, like, I mean, to say nothing of, like, whether or not it's, like... good for you as an individual or us as a society to spend eight hours a day if i you know like

33:25 Max Horwich That's a separate podcast entirely. that that shit makes your brain i've spent some time in vr and that shit makes my brain feel weird um

33:35 Max Horwich After two hours, you kind of feel like jet lag. yeah totally There's like kind of an element of like you like you traveled or something. I don't know. It's kind of yeah,

33:42 Max Horwich there I know. there's like warnings in the you know you've bought an oculus quest like a year and change ago and there's a lot of stuff in the literature that they send you it's like do not wear this for more than 30 minutes at a time like

33:54 Max Horwich Whoa, be really? sure to Oh, take breaks I've totally broken that. oh i mean same but it's like I mean, I assume that's like, you know, their lawyers made them put that in or whatever. But yeah, like you gotta, you gotta take some breaks or you feel fucking weird. But yeah, I mean, like, I don't know. I do, to be honest, I haven't like.

34:20 Max Horwich really been paying that close attention to all the like facebook meta news because like every time i see So it's

34:28 Luke F. Walton much of it is secret anyway.

34:30 Max Horwich all just like this fucking asshole again like i don't know man like i've you know what is it i signed up for i'm 35 um my school got added to facebook

34:46 Max Horwich I started college in 2004 and I remember the summer before college like going over my high school best one of my best friends in high school and being like yo check out this website that I just found it's called the Facebook. like there's only like a handful of

35:03 Luke F. Walton man

35:03 Max Horwich schools fucking

35:03 Luke F. Walton you had the the in it you had the the in it dang you're og man i

35:09 Max Horwich g so so

35:10 Luke F. Walton i didn't even know about the the until i watched the movie sorry continue

35:14 Max Horwich my my buddy was like going to u chicago and he's like i signed up for this profile it's like u chicago is on here and there's like you know nine other sort of u chicago tier schools that are on there

35:26 Max Horwich and then like my college was added like two you know he like showed me around I was like oh check out like I don't know this this cute girl likes modest mouse or whatever it's like oh fun whatever um and then like you know two or three weeks later they added the college that I was about to go to so I like I signed up for an account and like met a made a handful of friends like before I went to school and that was nice and then like

35:54 Max Horwich You know, over the course of my first year of college, they added it like, I don't know, most of the rest of the schools. And then when I was like a junior, they added high school. And then when I was a little bit after school, they opened it up to everyone and then my mom was on it. And, you know, it's sort of like

36:14 Max Horwich Yep. for a while it was like growing sort of slowly and tastefully. And then at a certain point, it just sort of wasn't anymore. Like, you know, by the time, you know, 2016, 12 years later, they are, you know, swaying the events of global politics. Um, which is like not really something they set out to do, I don't think.

36:46 Luke F. Walton I don't think so. I really think that that's an unintended consequence of growth in a lot of ways, but just because it's unintended doesn't mean that you're not responsible. But all

36:55 Max Horwich low battery flashing

36:56 Luke F. Walton thing on the recorder right so i think i think that means we gotta kind of wrap it up We'll talk we'll talk more about facebook meta the metaverse all that kind of stuff because it's fascinating

37:06 Max Horwich well one thing that i was sort of just getting around to saying was um like Yeah

37:11 Max Horwich i have at this point so i was 18 and i'm 35 now i've been on facebook for just under half my life

37:20 Max Horwich um and there is an absurd amount of data that they like you can download all your shit from facebook like you can if you like go around the back and you know dig through their api a little bit like you can download everything they know about you and everything you've ever posted and it's like

37:40 Max Horwich fucking a lot like they have a lot of data points about me um but the amazing thing is you can also see like everyone who is paying to advertise to you and i looked through my list and it's mostly like there's a lot of like

37:59 Max Horwich car dealerships in st louis like i have never been to st louis and i am not interested in buying a car and with all of the fucking data in the fucking world like that's still the best they got you know like

38:15 Max Horwich Oh yeah.

38:17 Luke F. Walton no i mean one of my buddies works in ad sales at google and he says the same thing he's like we know remarkably more than you think that we would know about you but have like way less actionable data about you than the conspiracy theorists would have you believe um one yeah sorry go on don't

38:34 Max Horwich I

38:34 Luke F. Walton want to cut you off

38:34 Max Horwich mean, the absolute vanguard of machine learning that we see is like. you buy a dishwasher from amazon and then everything on the internet tries to sell you another dishwasher for two years it's like the one thing you fucking know i don't need um so yeah there's like there's a really weird sort of double-edged sword of like yes the tech is uh very impressive and very intimidating

39:07 Max Horwich but um nobody knows what to fucking do with it still like it's you know in the right hands um all of that data would be fucking terrifying for you know this is like a lot you can do with that but it's just like it's a sword that's too big for anyone to lift so just sort of sitting there collecting rust um and

39:31 Max Horwich Yeah. we don't you know it's sort of it you know it's back to the issues back to spatial audio and vr again it's like we have these tools what we don't have is a use for them yet so

39:45 Max Horwich Yeah. like you know and hopefully what comes out of like i you know the the place where i learned how to do all this shit was like i went to a like an art school for computer people or computer school for artists or something like that and so it's all just like what can we do with this this creative like we don't you know it's all got like scary there's scary ass implications too

40:11 Max Horwich do all of it and like let's try to like not be bad actors about it but like it's out there like what can we do that's like fun and creative and different before like it's all before facebook owns it all like how do we sort of undermine some of that and like keep the scrappiness and keep the fun and the like magic about it

40:35 Luke F. Walton yeah which is like to kind of put a bow on this conversation because i know your battery is about to die um

40:41 Luke F. Walton i think it's so ironic and kind of beautiful that they're naming their company meta because we've like talked about the concept of meta modern the post post modern where it all loops back on itself where the absurd becomes the dominant art form and the like institutions that we've like established are fake come back around to be like reinvented and so it's like this

41:04 Luke F. Walton everything that we're talking about technology facebook all of this is like the best and worst of humanity all at the exact same time and all plastered in you know high 4k resolution for you to see you see everything good and everything bad and good and bad exists within every individual person and every individual technology and like i one of one of the one of the songs that i'm writing for this the koan one i think i think you liked it the keep calm atomic bomb

41:33 Luke F. Walton that'll come out next year but one of the lyrics in it is sort of Damocles above my nursery because it's like talking about like you have these nuclear bombs that are just they're just there there's mutually assured destruction that doesn't just mean like two nations it means like humanity and but I like the idea of like a rusted sort of Damocles

41:52 Max Horwich Yeah, I mean, what's funny, to bring it back again, the first VR headset ever designed was called the Sword of Damocles.

42:01 Max Horwich You're kidding no they um it's You're like kidding no me. you can look it up online it was like 1966 or some bullshit they called it that because it was you know it was like a 1960s computer it was the size of your fucking desk and they had to suspend it from the ceiling on a fucking chain and like the only thing it could show you was like a wire frame of a room But

42:26 Max Horwich oh my that was gosh like crazy that was like the first VR headset and they called it the seed dazzles.

42:31 Max Horwich crazy Yeah, this that's awesome well with

42:36 Luke F. Walton that that's our that's our first episode of void talk with max we'll

42:42 Max Horwich was fun much i think that was fun

42:44 Luke F. Walton do another we'll talk we'll talk more for these videos we gotta do this there's way more to talk about like who are we kidding

42:49 Max Horwich more to talk about here. This is very exciting. I'm stoked to keep this conversation going

42:55 Luke F. Walton Me too, me too. And as always, if you guys want to see more, go to scoobertdoobert.pizza. You can see the Void videos there. You can connect with the performer there. You can get all my links and keep this thing growing and hopefully in a beautiful and bizarre direction. We'll do that together.

43:14 Max Horwich Hell yeah.

43:16 Luke F. Walton Thanks a lot, Max. Really appreciate you.

43:17 Max Horwich Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure.