- Rob Cavanagh eval
- “You’re really a nerd, aren’t you?”
- nodded enthusiastically
- Rob didn’t know how deep the rabbit hole goes
- With this speech today, we’ll go a little bit deeper
- Last night, gave the most remarkable speech I’ve ever given
- Contents were not remarkable – short introduction to me – but everything else was
- It happened on the beach in front of a sunset that never ended
- 9 log benches on the sand, each one seating about 5 people
- Benches were nearly full and some people were standing
- I stood in front of these 45-50 people, shared my name, what I did for work, and a few of my hobbies
- Well, actually, not all of them were people
- Some of them were human girls that looked like they were ripped straight out of Japanese animation
- More exotic attendees too
- walking talking onion
- a humanoid wearing some sort of futuristic military suit that made it impossible to determine their species
- a girl with a tail
- humanoid foxes
- a 15-foot tall wooden puppet
- some who just looked like regular, maybe slightly cartoonish people
- I appeared as a large red octopus man wearing a suit
- When I told the crowd where I lived, a few of them piped up to say they lived near me
- I pointed at the one I heard from the front row and said, “Seattle?”
- He said he actually lived in Spokane.
- I heard someone else deeper in the crowd say they missed Washington
- You’ve probably put together at this point that this didn’t happen on any of the beaches around Seattle, in Washington, or on Earth
- This speech was delivered in virtual reality using an application called VRChat
- It’s a virtual place where people can go to be social
- You can do a lot more than just talk to people
- example: I wasted time before the event started by playing some mini golf on a virtual mini-golf course
- I described it to you as a real situation and a real place partly to hook you for the rest of this speech
- but partly because it does feel very real
- In real life, we meet a person and make some a snap judgment of them based on the way they talk, the way they dress, how much care is put into their hair…
- After talking to them, those judgments can change and the “meaning” we first ascribed to their appearance melts away
- In that same way, after a few minutes talking to the 15-foot tall wooden puppet, the aesthetics are no longer novel or significant
- What matters is that he’s patient and deliberate in what he says
- he likes to play video games
- he seems to have difficulty in large groups
- but he’s come out of his comfort zone and is doing amazingly well
- The empathy that gets you from point A to point B is real
- You might still think to yourself that it isn’t real, and of course in some sense that’s objectively true
- In all the senses that matter though, I don’t think it is
- The anxieties I have around being social were definitely present
- and they were definitely real
- We went around the room doing introductions
- I watched as the person next to me on the bench went up to give their introduction
- I felt my heart beating faster
- the familiar heat rising to the surface of my face
- the same feeling I would feel if this were happening in “actual reality”
- something deep within my physiology, telling me this harmless social setting is actually some sort of predator hunting me down
- I walked up to the front
- I felt my eyes darting around, unable to hold eye contact with anyone else in the room
- and that’s plenty “real” enough for me