Narratives
Narratives
127: John Manoochehri - Towards the Spatial Web
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127: John Manoochehri - Towards the Spatial Web

In this episode we are joined by John Manoocheri and Shawnee Foster to discuss the spatial web, the future of the Metaverse, the state of architecture, the nature of art and a whole lot more. You can find John and Shawnee's work at https://treasury.space/

Transcript:
William Jarvis 0:05

Hey folks, welcome to narratives. narratives is a podcast exploring the ways in which the world is better than in the past, the ways that is worse in the past, or it's a better, more definite vision of the future. I'm your host, William Jarvis. And I want to thank you for taking the time out of your day to listen to this episode. I hope you enjoy it. You can find show notes, transcripts and videos at narratives podcast.com.

Will Jarvis 0:38

Well, John Shawnee, how are you guys doing today? Very good. Thank you. Awesome, awesome. Do you mind giving a brief bio in some of the big ideas you're interested in.

John Manoocheri 0:48

So my background is in architecture, environmental science. Basically, I've been running a company called last meet for the last few years, which is focused on essentially integrating modern consumption patterns, essentially, service based consumption, ie delivery based consumption into buildings basically, like I think, if you want to make these services more efficient, so you're essentially to design them into the business model and the architectural, like spatial plan and design and experience of modern living. So rather than car parking, you have access to car sharing, rather than, you know, endless closets full of clothes, you don't use you have to structured clothing, rental and returns and stuff like that business is taking too long to really expand. But it's based on kind of architectural and sustainable design expertise. And that kind of led to like expertise and like, like computational design basically, is if you want to celebrate this, you got to kind of compute it. And that gave the background for Treasury which I'll which I'll share with you in just one second. Maybe Shawn, you can introduce yourself.

Shawnee Foster 1:56

Yeah, so my background is more kind of in digital marketing, I was working in the E commerce space doing some fashion. Then I went, you know, out on my own and did some freelancing, did some kind of b2b Software as a Service and consulting, were like Salesforce consulting firms. So I did that for about two years. And then now I'm, I'm working with Treasury, me and John connected over Twitter of all places. And now I'm Director of Sales and Marketing and Treasury.

Will Jarvis 2:29

That's great. All the best things come from Twitter, I found at least Nbd people.

John Manoocheri 2:35

So quick, background Treasury mean, basically, I started a podcast, I started podcasts about essentially spatial technology, right how, broadly speaking, computational design and competition, communist competition architecture and computational design, with the broad relevance of those things. And, and then as that was progressing, Epic Games, which makes unreal NGO, which is a increasingly powerful design tool for the spatial design domain, so I'm sponsoring it. And then I kind of think it was thinking broader and broader, right, what conversations is spatial computational design part of, and I just basically was speaking to a guy called Matt ball, right, who's become a very prominent, kind of reliable commentator on the so called Metaverse about how that's going to work, right? So if you want to build a Metaverse, which in our language, just deeply pragmatic, is like any digital spatial environment, you want to build such a thing quickly and populated quickly grabbed a license, lots of digital social models. I said, Well, that's pretty obvious. And I was like, you know, how's that go? And he's like, What do you mean? Well, you can't make these things, right. They're very hard to make. And a lot of the designs that you might want to use are actually owned by people. I mean, you know, real estate is owned monuments people want in their games or experiences are usually owned, and what he processed I might be a little bit theatrical underplaying his insight, but essentially, broadly speaking, people in the metaverse are unaware of the need to licensing content and not I want to explain that cludes Matt, he said he would invest in it. And I was like, well, that, then therefore, maybe someone should create it if it's not already in existence, a way to get licensed spatial content into Metaverse type things. So then I started asking a bunch of my colleagues and friends in like very senior architecture offices, people, I've worked with people that have gone on my podcast people. I'm interested in working with what you think about the idea of all licensing your unused designs, basically into Metaverse applications. And everyone was like, Well, this is great. We've been thinking about that for years. We don't have to do it. You know. So we set up a bunch of fundraising around in roughly October or November of November of last year, when three months had raised a A fair amount of money on a very good valuation from very good investors. Some of that's not public, and we're not ready to make it public yet, but it's been an extremely accelerated ride into like the heart of architectural design technology since then. So that's the background. I'm happy to say before we actually do babbling, but some of the background, I

Will Jarvis 5:24

love that. I love it. I want to dive in a little bit first, you've got an interesting background. So you were an architect originally, is that correct?

John Manoocheri 5:33

Well, okay, so strictly speaking, I have a number of like, like professional like competencies, or, or disciplines that I I've worked on I've my bachelor's degree is in ancient languages, and Indian Studies from Oxford University, I have some training classical music. I have, you know, a lot of training experience and architect, you know, vinyl science and post professional diploma and a lot of experience in architecture. And in the middle there, I could have picked up mythology stuff, and then built a bunch of like competition skills kind of added themselves in the middle there in various ways, almost by you know, it, but almost inevitably, but So those four or five things are areas where I would say I have like definable skills and professional experience from which I work, basically.

Will Jarvis 6:29

Gotcha. And I'll circle back to that. But I'm curious. What does the future look like in terms of the metaverse? You know, Mark talks of Zuckerberg talks about it a lot, you know, will we be spending more time in virtual worlds in the future? You know, how much of that shift do you expect to happen? And over what timescale do you think will be spinning significant amounts of time within three worlds within the metaverse versus kind of in reality, quote, unquote, reality, if that makes sense? Well,

John Manoocheri 6:56

yeah, so So looking kind of careful here, because we're already spending 100% of our time in a 3d world just happens to be the real one, right? So we're very immersed in a world, right, which is 3d. And that's kind of part of the the subtlety here. I mean, the way that we set it up, we have written a framework paper on this white paper, which kind of sets apart the whole technical environment of Treasury and helps clarify what we think people mean by the metaverse, right. And the best way to get into that is to kind of go back to you know, whenever it was late 90s, when the you know, the phrase cyberspace was unfolding. And people said, actually, quite some of the things to the premise of your question, which is, you know, when will be when Will Will we be in cyberspace? When will we do things in cyberspace. And really, what happened was that cyberspace never became a thing that we went to, it just came to us. And rather than becoming one holistic phenomenon, or experience just became a piece of everything we do, right cyberspace that was obviously the internet. And rather than the internet being a place you log on to, there's just a little piece of internet and everything, right. And so what we believe in our you know, our sort of we go to the spatial web thesis is that there is a convergence of technologies of spatial technologies onto the internet enabled economy and society. And essentially, there's gonna be a infrastructural spatial layer on everything, but as internet as it were. And all of that will be what people currently think the metaverse is, but it won't be a place to go because it'll just be there. Right? I mean, that's the quick version of it is that the metadata is gonna be a place that you go to, it'll be something in almost everything that we do, and it'll be so embedded, we won't Gnosis. So that's the list of broad thesis. I mean, there's lots of nuances there, which I can share with you let me know if I should just just carry on give you give you more of that, or if you want to follow up on that question.

Will Jarvis 8:56

Yeah. What does that mean? You know, we've talked about the spatial reality. Does that look more like augmented reality at some level where you know, you'll be walking around, you'll you'll see, like, you know, objects will pop into view. And this will be kind of just integrated in everyday life, kind of like, have you described, the internet has kind of permeated everything in the sense that, you know, I'm on the internet much more than I would like to believe it's not just right here with you and I, the three of us are talking. It's also when I walk outside and walk my dog, I'm listening to Spotify. It's kind of constant in some sense.

John Manoocheri 9:29

So with respect, I think the question is somewhat framed in a somewhat shallow way. And I think in terms of the history of not just technology that is recrimination, we can kind of unpack and have a much richer way of addressing that. Right. I think there is a naive concept, right, that has come into general acceptance of the point that's not really taken. It's not even observed to be the case in how we view the world, that there is a very Clear, there is a bright line between what is objective and what is subjective. And in respect of in respect of this issue, right, you know, how we perceive the world? That is problematic, right? And it's actually very easy to problematize that, right? So if I can ask you a question, if somebody looks at a block of print, right on a wall, and they are illiterate, what are they experiencing? There? Right? Well, they're clearly not having any information transfer. It's just time it's just checked. Right? Right. So when you look at a block of information on the wall, what is happening in distinction? Because clearly, there's some information unfolding that if that information is about the environment you're in, let's say there's a description of a painting, right? To what extent are we interacting with the physical world in an objective sense? or to what extent are we interacting with an information layer on top of the world? Alright, what I'm getting at here is that since the beginning of time, we have had a variable level of emissivity in the world around us, depending on a variety of interface dynamics information, like saying, like you turn the lights in the room, right? That is different environment than the one with the lights on. Right. But physically, it's the same thing. The information transfer is very different, the experience and the and the cognitive and framing of it is very different. And so it's not difficult to say that it's just not true, that we aren't creating layers of meaning and emotion in the world around us without any technical overlay. Right. So I think what we've done right in our spatial web thesis, to really clear this stuff out and say, Look, you want to just understand and put it in a truly historical context. And like, you know, neurobiological cognitive context, what's happening with the metaverse, you need to separate these two things out from the conversation of what you were describing, you know, where we're going to end up in terms of these, you know, these virtual realities, what are called technical emissivity and narrative emissivity, right. And so if you go back to the time of cave painting, so whatever it is 100,000 years ago, what was going on with the painting on the walls? Right, they clearly had meaning, right? And presumably, they were relatively important, right? They had some power. And one might say that meaning or that power is a is a kind of emissivity. And I would like I like to imagine that these were the equivalent of the movies, right? I mean, maybe that's absurd, but just follow me here. Because it makes it clearer. People could sit there with a flyer fire flickering, and tell stories or just have you know, take drugs or whatever they would do, and have an immersive experience now, narratively, right this is why they follow me this Imagine let's assume that that was the equivalent of a movie with a massive payoff and plot and just incredibly gripping scene.

How technically immersive is that, but zero I mean in any in any in any respects is the very, very lowest possible limit of technical emissivity, nothing is being attached to your body, you know, the technical technological engagement, the you know, the, the amount of training you might require is essentially zero. But let's assume culturally, the narrative emissivity is extreme. Now, if you take those two axes, what we call the axes of emissivity, what happens is that you can actually map you can see it like a trend line, trend lines or evolutionary lines or emissivity across almost all human phenomena. And what you discover is that if you want to use the word matters as a kind of as a way of describing a way, a way, some some idea that we discovered a new realm within this devotee is definitely wrong. Right? Because from cave paintings to, you know, you know, drawings in a in a, in a book, to novels to movies, narrative emissivity has been growing the idea that we are escaping from the world when we read them not pathetically misguided, we obviously do we do what's called escapism, right? So the idea that somehow just a VR goggles set is like some breakthrough or some horrible new new idea of escapism is obviously wrong, right? We do holily isolating things we go we have we go we listened to kg in the bath listening ears with with smelly candles Is that is that narcissistic, you know, solipsistic hiding from the world. I mean, why is that more so than putting into your goggles and making technical emissivities? So red herring, right. And that's one of the reason why Facebook is failing. Because if you go into horizon worlds, right, their main platform so Oculus is the is the sort of operational platform for VR. And horizon was their own environment that they that they are using the Oculus technical platform to kind of promulgate so that is the alternative to social media or whatever the case is. The narrative emissivity of that is fucking lane, right. It's just non existent this anti anti immersive it's like who are these people? What am I doing this is pathetic want to go. And so if you don't understand that distinction the emissivity has been, you know, the nature of the human cognitive experience since the beginning of time since the beginning of the of anything that looks like a nonhuman mind, you won't have anything to say usefully about the metaphysics. Oh, we shouldn't wear, you know, VR goggles, because Oh, that's so solipsistic, or, which is wrong, because we've been reading novels for years. Or it's so you know, shit. Yeah. Because it's shit because there's no narrative, right? So when you when you understand that, like the nature of technical narrative in a city, what it reinforces the general idea that we're having, we're going to have this distributed layer of spatial technology, the spatial web, as we call it, with very different dynamics of narrative and technical emissivity, but it's going to be very profound. I'll give you example, the breakthrough, right, the given example that we have, and we've absorbed without thinking about it, of spatial tech, and the beginning of the metaverse is the universality of mapping, digital mapping, right, because a digital map, the way it's working right now is no one makes mapping products, they basically license a small piece of a mapping product infrastructural quality mapping product and put it in their app, or whatever it may be. Almost everything has some mapping piece in it. And it's infrastructure technology that is embedded to the bro small fee that goes from tons and tons of products was building mapping shit and more as Google Map box, this is very feasible to build that stuff. And then distributed as infrastructure. There's a small piece of map and it now maps like digital maps, a very poor reloadable technical emissivity, you know, you're manipulating some form factor to interpret a Mac. But here's the thing, it is narratively immersive, the way we use it, because you're in it, you're in a virtual space, right, as a virtual entity just happen to your your pin. Right? What's happening is that, you know, if you just open them up, and your honor, the narrative is innocent innocent emissivity is almost zero. If you tell me awesome, I have to tell you where to get where you're going or need to go, that suddenly emissivities a bit more, I got to turn left here and you can't forget to turn left, you got to be immersive and immerse enough narratively, to follow the story of your journey. Right. And here's the thing, imagine that you're trying to get hospital because he was having a baby or you know, you've broken your leg or whatever it is. But narrative, MSF is something extremely high, incredibly high. It's a top narrative and your life. How the fuck do I get to hospital? Technically emissivities still low. Right. So the point is, there's a direct through line from if you follow the way I've presented it and totally anachronistic terms. cave painting is movies, where the technical emissivity is essentially zero. But now as emissivity is high to Google Maps, where if you use it for emergency navigation purposes, it's narratively extremely rich, and technically, just a little bit above a cave painting, right. So that is the correct way to see the metal. So it's not to get lost in Oh, well, one of these technically immersive things not working for us or working for snipe, because that's just somebody with money, shilling it at you by my platform engaged in my platform. So so it should be in this new, technically immersive thing. Fucking cares doesn't make a difference doesn't matter, right? It's just somebody's saying things to you. What we need to decide as a society is if we have new, technically technical immersion arenas. And so VR is one of those AR is another of those. Firstly, are they useful to us in any way? So if they're useful to us, one of the conventional most profound ways that human beings generate and engage with value is new narratives. What does it mean for us? Pocomoke? Goes new narrative, right? How can we go, it's very interesting, because Pokemon Go is a good example of technically immersive stuff that is technically immersive to have a little beast running around, you know, in a kind of photo real representation in a geolocate, you know, in a in a real environment that you are where you are, and you can interact with it spatially that is quite profound, very profound, technically. And it's quite profound, like, you know, as a sort of experience, technically, by means that it's magical pigment AR is magically technologies, hyper technology that everyone now has. And when you experience it, it's pretty cool. But narratively, what they've created is an interesting game, right? That's the breakthrough. That's the parallel breakthrough in this technology. And so I'd say, I'm going to avoid the red herring and saying, Are we are we not going to go down the road of like, you know, deep immersion in VR type meta versus these highly encapsulated technical environments? Because, obviously, we know sorry, the writing's on the wall, for matter. The narratives are shifts. What I mean by narratives, is the sense of meaning making that they offer and never know what's going to interact with them. So that's needs to needs to be corrected. So the question needs to be, are we do we have form factors that can generate narratives? And the answer is yes. Now if you ask me that question.

Will Jarvis 19:53

What are those four factors look like? If that makes sense?

John Manoocheri 19:57

I think that it's rare. Literally straightforward, right? And this is the history of like, technology as hardware as devices is pretty good at this as the if the form factors aren't very integrated to our biomechanics, and our general like interaction dynamics, they probably won't take off, right. And so what you see in the world of devices is things that are just very easy to use, right? They're very, very simple in their form, very simple in their, in their interfaces and affordances. Because they map to our biome mechanics. And it wasn't biomechanics. I mean, like, the whole, the whole totality of like, biological interaction dynamics. And so the biomechanics of a VR headsets are disastrous for all sorts of reasons, even if you make it ergonomic. I mean, it just isn't how we see the world, right? And so what I would say is that form factors that have an augmentative, or a facilitative, or it doesn't have some other way, integrated nature, are likely to be the ones that succeed. Now, I'm not an expert in this stuff. But I have spent time looking at what what form factors succeed and how they persist. And they're ones that are very native to our, you know, our sort of genetically given and frozen biomechanics. And so I don't think it's a surprise that what Apple seems to be launching what is committing a lot of money to is not something like the Oculus headset, which is incredibly antagonistic toward biomechanics. And what is a pipeline? It's a kind of mean, like social dynamics occasioned by our biology as well, like, can you see another person with your eyes, we talked to them, right. And the idea that you have a screen on your VR set with your eyes in it is a horrifying, simulacrum of that electric don't think will work, like I signalling, and otherwise body signaling and like no precise muscle dynamics, signaling, probably high to avoid it. So if you encumber the face, the as a biomechanical dimension of human interaction, human social engagement is probably a bit broken. So there's all sorts of reasons why, you know, full on headset, as I like to work on Apple's approach, which appears to be some kind of glasses set seems to be way more likely to take off now. Your Google Glass was in that space, right? I think there's all sorts of reasons why that didn't work. One of the main reasons why I didn't think it was going to work is basically lethal. They were just bits of sharp metal that had no edge to them popping out. And I think all those things will be worked out at some point. But the key point is that I think that form factors that integrate with a biomechanics are likely to be the ones that kick off. And given that what we're talking about as a spatial medium, is Premera. Primarily, it's primarily the visual domain that needs to be fed in some way. So it has to be something that engages with the visual medium, there's all sorts of ways technically that you can do that. They're all a bit dodgy, which is why we ended up endlessly fiddling with these fully immersive, like, micro screens, like VR headsets, sounds was part of the one thing that is very good about the Oculus headset is the way that they fixed or evolved Spatial Sound, we've looked at ways of projecting sound around the ears and so on. But yeah, I think for now, right, since the the technical prognostication of the of the sort that involves, you know, we'll get your contact lenses or retinal implants, I despise that I think that's evil. I think pragmatically, we're going to have some kind of glasses thing. And probably that kind of technology array, we're gradually integrated into advisors and styles of clothing that we don't yet know, that will make it more integrated. Right, something like that.

Will Jarvis 23:40

That makes sense. That makes sense. I want to dig in a little bit and double click on what you guys are working on at Treasury. Can you talk a little bit about that and what you're building and and what you're excited about?

John Manoocheri 23:53

Yeah, so. So I kind of set up a little bit the basic idea that that people that are building digital spatial environments would want to kind of shuffle away from the word Metaverse need digital spatial assets. And what I mean by that is not just any old 3d stuff, is things that are building scale and above and where the key value proposition of the object is its spatial characteristics. Now, one of the very weird things about the world of, of design in general actually in particularly in the specialty areas like 3d design is that there is very poor scientific distinction between things, architecture, scale things, building scale things, nothing else. So one of the reasons why the profession is struggling find it very hard to explain what they do that's different from anyone elses just making stuff. And truth is what architecture we're doing, okay. It's primarily doing is they are engineering, right? Let me give you the formal definition that the profession doesn't really bother with because it's been too lazy. The engineering spatial configuration, right? Spatial configuration is a very specific property that has many sort of sub dimensions and can be described actually, mathematically. So you can write down what's called a circulation diagram to describe how you get around the building. And different circulation diagrams, amazingly, end up with different functions. If you have a circulation diagram that takes you around the perimeter is measure rooms, like in some way, in a kind of like a, like a, like a circular shape around a central room, right around a building, etc. If the circulation diagram only lets you get to the central room, by going through each of the rooms in the kind of perimeter, and then finally, exiting the last room in that little, you know, sneaking loop into the center, that will be called a processional configuration. Right? It's very different just walking into the central room from any room, right. And so what you discover and architects know this, but actually formalize this is one thing to accomplish design is formalizing is that that's one example of spatial configuration. Another example is basically, like how tall the windows are in a room, right? That defines all sorts of things about the room, right? How much you can see outside, which people can see in, were not sure how much light comes in, but where the light goes, and what light goes at what time of day, right? So light is not a piece of special configuration, but it's very profound in in defining how spaces are experiencing. So the point is, is that, in in defining architects correctly, what you discover is that as everything in the real world gets an analog in some digital world, the spatial layer of digital stuff, rather than just any old 3d objects, I believe needs a special character. Because the way that spatial objects are deployed in the in digital or virtual worlds are very different from how objects are deployed, right? When I say objects and things that are that are sub spatial about things that people can manipulate, basically, the size smaller than their body space, things generally speak to things that are larger than their body, and tends to be the case that the font is larger than your what it's significantly larger than your body, it will be something that anchors experience many people at once, right? Unless you're sitting on your own space on your own, right, you may have a thing of your like a cat, or a ball, or a sofa, or a chair or a computer. And you can be perfectly happy on your own with that thing. Right. But once it gets to spatial domain, right, which I mean, essentially buildings down above, or rooms down above, but kind of basically building scale. It don't exchange, you don't sit there with it on your own. Right. And so this is kind of a deeper reason why actually, people haven't really thought this stuff through and why there is this massive gap in the market and people that it's to supply digital spatial assets to people that are creating or building digital spatial environments that don't know the needle as assets. But they do need them do one of the reasons why they didn't know they need them is because actually most of the test or development of any virtual environment, people can go to kind of have been fixated on the on the affordances and the environment and the kind of the scale of what an individual can do, because we haven't had the computer power to create in a very dynamic way. And the second life is kind of interesting. But it's not the same as a massively multiplayer role playing game where there's enormous numbers of interaction dynamics and agents and things like that computational power, particularly synchronous interaction between many agents with many different kinds of interactions and very rich environments as long as possible. Now that's possible, we actually have to think about the environments because just haven't experienced this just for a person in a digital environment and then just not thinking about the space now we have to think properly in spatial terms. And and so that's one of the reasons why this is a good thing. Because when thinking about the girl was a marketplace was really stuff. Well, it was was done buildings in a marketplace of three stuff that you'll put orcs and sofas and cat and you know, digital computers. And it's definitely isn't the case, the software stack. The competency, the science side is all different, right? And that's where I think we have an opportunity, which is basically this is all a background. So technically what we're doing. Treasury is a what we call a licensing toolset to ensure that people that have created worthwhile digital spatial assets, environments, themes can put their identity on them and define their relationship to them as owners or part creators or whatever. A syndication pipeline, right, I'll explain what syndication is in one second, but basically, it's like a kind of technical broker. And if we're lucky enough to get big enough, an ecosystem around that. So it's helping creators of owners of digital spatial assets like buildings and places and imagine the environments put immutably associate their identity with those things. A syndication pipeline, which is basically what's sitting underneath marketplaces is a market space. So anyone that has an environment where these things can be bought or traded or presented can get them through tracks at Treasury syndication system, an ecosystem ideally have all sorts of partners, software partners, data partners, legal partners, creative partners around that, to make it good And the point of it is to in our, you know, sort of corporate language to to elevate creators and enable builders for digital spatial environments and creative digital spatial assets. And it might sound like it's just a microbrewery. The big idea, right, the bigger idea of what it's just as facilitating with distribution is actually to do to help evolve the conversation that we sort of started, which is what is all this for? Right? What are we really doing? What kind of emissivity are we seeking? Right? If we have any contribution here, that's beyond just the technical, it is making sure that a massive, massive hyperbolic increase in distribution of, of high definition, well protected digital spatial assets contributes to, for example, massively more efficient and benign and sustainable and socially inclusive urban environments, which I think it's definitely possible. It's what I've been working on for a long time. But also just like thinking through what emissivity is, right? What you know, like, for example, one of the use cases for these kinds of things is health. Right? We did we go through, you know, run renaissance and you know, the meaning the application of psychedelic drugs and for people who are resistant to actually taking drugs, that their gateway your the extent to which they will be happy to engage as psychedelic spiritual experiences, which is one of the most profound contributions that all of this immersive stuff is going to contribute, this newly immersive stuff is going to contribute. So rethink the pattern of what we call an infrastructural layer for asset licensing and distribution. And then, you know, all sorts of you know, the two way relationships between creators and builders, is a great infrastructural contribution, what that leads to what we would like it to lead to, is, you know, what we'd like to take all this stuff, and we're lucky enough to, you know, do not fuck up straight away, basically.

Will Jarvis 31:48

I love that. I love that. I've got a question about progress. And I've got a question about progress and architecture, and what you're building at Treasury. There's a great one of my favorite conspiracy theories is that it's called Winter Portaria. And it asked this question, why has all art gotten ugly over time? And, you know, it's got is this like, conspiracy of the elites or something? What's going on? And I like conspiracies, because oftentimes, most of the time conspiracies are not true. But the conspiracy question can be quite illustrative. So you know, JFK, the, you know, the idea of the mob killed him. The mob didn't kill JFK. But it does give you this sense that well, the Bob had a lot of influence in politics at that time, a lot more than what we have now. So I guess my question here is, as a novice, as someone who is not art inclined, or architecture client at all, I seem to notice that over time, it almost seems like architecture has gotten uglier over time, and a very robust way. It seems like we used to build beautiful things. And now we don't, it's all it seems to be quite inhuman most of the time. Is that a fair point? Am I off base there? Is there something going on

John Manoocheri 33:01

Shani? Shawnee, I invite you to jump onto the land, please.

Shawnee Foster 33:07

But personally, I mean, I obviously don't have as much of a background in architecture as John does. But I personally find those things to be a, I guess, a very online take. And something that I also, you know, when you see them online, you subscribe to it, because they show you, you know, they show you one picture of a beautiful thing that was built in, you know, 18 or whatever. And then they show you another thing that's like it, it's like one is like this huge government funded, you know, like, churches are probably not church, obviously, but a government funded like hospital or something where there was a reason for them to put the time and money and effort into making it look good. And ones like a post office in Utah, like, and so when you're, when you're creating those, you know, putting those two things together, of course, it looks like we're not creating beautiful things anymore. But I also think that we have to understand that a, it really just depends on the reason why we're creating something. And if you walk around, and especially in bigger cities, you could tell that there are still some really, really interesting pieces of architecture that have been built recently. It's just I think, you know, people as people say, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And if you're looking for beauty, and you're looking for interesting contributions that are more recent than then you will see it. And so that's kind of kind of where I sit on that question. I personally, don't I like I said, I used to kind of buy into it more when it was just something that you see online where we used to do this, and now it's now it's this, but I have been trying to like spend more time and effort, you know, especially since joining treasury, noticing architecture and looking into you know, what we're doing today, and I think there are really a ton of very interesting things being built. Also on the same note, I think, you know, there is I saw this thing where it was like, oh, like, where's today's Mozart or whatever, and I think we do have to put some thought into how mediums change over time. And the type of person that has the, like passion and ability to create something, as you know, we get the technology progresses, they might just choose to create something in a different medium. And, you know, on the probably where that comes from is just how you grew up and what foundation you have is on like a neurological level, you know, when you're growing up, and you know, way back that or whatever, you know, it was, oh, all I have to do day in and day out is like paint or write novels or real play piano. But now we just have so many different mediums that people can, you know, express their creativity through. And so I think taking one medium and saying, Oh, we don't do that anymore. Okay, well, you can't just compare medium to medium when you know, our entire culture and things that we're interested in technological progress. And all of that kind of just changes how people interact with art and beauty. Great, John.

John Manoocheri 36:01

So, yeah, I mean, it's a tricky one. I mean, I will give you a sort of three bites of this, right? I'll give you an argument from cognition, as I call it, argument from naturalism and some reflections on power, right? I mean, the argument I think is actually most useful here is the argument for current condition and and so, the way to approach this is by asking yourself, what is beauty right, if you decompose beauty right, essentially, it has a couple of characteristics, which which immediately when you expose them, makes you realize what a subtle and slightly sneaky concept is. So we say what is beauty? Right? We can define at least two characteristics, right? This aspirational? Right, and it is somewhat hard to obtain or attain. Right. And so I think you probably could go deeper into human condition, Arkansas, well, why is why is it those things? Why is it desirable? And why is it unattainable? What was it represented? Some people level, whatever genetic argument make up some shit that the point is that that is happening, it is represented. And I will say that, at many previous points in human history, a certain a certain aesthetic, right? has been aspirational, in part because it's unattainable. It's desirable. But it's not beautiful. Just because it's desirable, is beautiful, because it's desirable. And it's somewhat unattainable, right? And so, what happens is that as society becomes more and more mechanized, and more and more things are possible, and more and more people become beautiful, and more and more buildings, beautiful buildings become possible. I think what happens is that the human psyche ends up shifting its target for what is beautiful in the sense that it is attractive in some way, at least in some way and unobtainable. Right. And so we are getting this highly contorted psychic findings and what is beautiful because things that historically may have been attractive and unattainable, and that will try to unattainable. And I'll tell you, you see how this works, right? It's something that's attractive and very attainable. Immediate is not very beautiful, right? If something's just standard becomes boring, even unattractive. So you realize that there's hidden into that partial definition of beauty, the seeds of perversity, if we get ourselves in a situation where things that historically been beautiful, are so standard, they become undesirable, we end up in a situation where we end up eroding an aesthetic characteristic of what is desirable, simply to get things that are under unattainable, right. And so we may end up in a situation where we have beautiful things that are extremely unaesthetic. Right? If you look at the Balenciaga collection that came out recently, it's fucking hideous, but apparently is beautiful. Right? Right, because it's unattainable. And it's desirable for all sorts of complex reason. Right? So that argument is an argument I would say from cognition, which is that if you study how cognition generally perceives and appreciate beauty as at least these two things, for me, that is desirable and attainable, you can see that my very nature of the ontology of these things, we're going to end up in a situation if we can create more beautiful things, they will shift our definition of beauty to things that ultimately might be unaesthetic. Right? So it's a very different argument than one that presented because what it doesn't do is get into this, which is the argument from naturalism, which is one that all the fucking very online people use, and basically all the mid wit, like thinkers that call themselves trads, or, you know, kind of aesthetic theorists because there isn't argument right? And there was a seed of truth and an argument that there is something objective about beauty, right? So you have to you have to get to but you have to leave aside for a second because I don't I'm not trying to push you to organize together. The argument from cognition about how we get to unaesthetic beauty. I think there's all sorts of reasons why I'd like to do that as a seed of truth in the idea that there's something objective in the beautiful. I think there's a reason why we might move away from that, let's separate the argument from cognition, it can do with power, or it can be could be to do with it could be to do with industrialization, it can deal with all sorts of things. All right. And I think that, you know, you can create a simplistic and as a mostly wrong, we're not entirely wrong argument for why we ended up with unaesthetic beautiful things, we see my point, because we'd get bored, and we just keep trying to stop and training people set up fashions, right. So should the argument is not very well developed. But there's some seed of truth to it. And the reason why I say that argument to you want to share it and present it in an outline form is because I didn't assess you probably something in it. I do think the symmetry, for example, is one of things we'll go back to. So what I think is persistent in this argument for beauty from naturalism, is that we will end up back in certain mechanical reproduction systems that we call beauty. I think symmetry is an example of beauty that persists in all things right, even the Balenciaga collection has a remarkable amount of symmetry in it, right? So the reason I'm saying that is partly just because they're dealing with zip Scruton there that's worth investigating. But also this because if you have the argument from naturalism for beauty and architecture, or Metaverse objects, what you actually are revealing is the fact that you have lost the power. That's what I said, after an argument in condition with naturalism, I would have reflections on power, because the argument about beautiful naturalism isn't that somebody took over the power and made things ugly. But what you're revealing by saying that is you don't have that power. Right, right. And so the way I would pump this conversation is who deserves the power to say, what is beautiful? That definitely isn't fucking people with trads in that Twitter handle, all right. And so and so what I would say is, I don't is a whole other kettle of fish, I don't think democratically determining in some beauty, some some beauty in some kind of like, you know, Tally system will define Well, what beauty is, but I would say that we cannot address this carefully without seeing how power dynamics are playing underneath. And the reason why I'm pretty negative about the argument from naturalism is because I think it's quite stupid, as most of the people who deploy it are actually saying something else. They are essentially saying, I and people like me want the power back and think we once had, right. And so in Treasury's case, thankfully, we don't have to have these conversations, right. What we want to do is to essentially say these things are useful, right? And it may or may not be beautiful to have useful things in the things that are useful in the in the metaverse individual spatial environs, may or may not be inherently beautiful, right? Not every building was useful is beautiful, right? Not every space that is psychologically effective is inherent, beautiful is all sorts of things that go beyond beauty, per se. You want to focus on beauty, and focus on beauty, rather than one of the great things about the internet and digital technology, which I adore, is that people can create the world that they want to create. No, it's no, it's preventing you if you I have to think that most like architectural modernism is incredibly beautiful for all sorts of reasons. Right? That includes some like brutalism, but not all brutalism. And I don't bother saying that, because you end up stuck in these pathetic conversations that aren't well founded. I'm like, Well, I'm gonna go look at those I like or design the bull's eye like, and the same is true for the metaverse and digital environments. Right. So that is the actual answer, you will you don't need to ask the question, because no one's gonna get to control it.

Will Jarvis 43:40

That's great. That's great. I really like that. It's interesting, though, because you highlighted something I haven't thought about very much, it seems like art is very much about power. At some level, at the end of the day.

John Manoocheri 43:51

I've said the debating would be very much about power. And what really is actually about I think is much more subtle than that. You know, because I think if you really wanted to find beauty, you got to go to how cognition works, how reproducing objects, but a beautiful leads to, you know, a kind of fulfilling prophecy of anesthetic, beautiful things. I would I would say that there, you probably can excavate some kind of objectivity around. Let's see, you know, starting with, let's say symmetry, probably other things, too. I don't think the golden mean is example of that. But I do think symmetry is is an example of it. That sort of seeds, a certain kind of thing. But I wouldn't take that very far. I would say that there's certain commonalities there. I think the key the key question is, is that if you really want to ask because this is why I said, argue as much as an argument from from condition, and then reflections on power, is that any theory on power is about power itself. You see, I didn't fall for the trap. So if you're getting into the conversation with us about like, well, if I was to take that bait, I will position myself in a power debate. I have no interest in writing the best way to engage in that conversation to say that there are multipolar universes or a plural universe is out there. One of the many, many great benefits of the internet, in particular spatial digital environments is that we don't have to have this monopole universe, which is what answers that question that doesn't need to be answered that question. Right? Right. And I'm very happy to sidestep it with that very specific caveat. If you talk about beauty in terms of power, you'll end up trying to position yourself in some dynamic around a specific kind of power. I don't need to try she doesn't want to, I think the great beauty of the internet, is it diffuses many of those kinds of conversations, just speak with people you want. If you do no harm, lovely, wonderful, what a what a what a great universe, we live in where plurality exists.

Will Jarvis 45:41

And we can, yes, yes. And we don't have to worry about these questions as much, which is very nice, very nice. I'm curious, I

John Manoocheri 45:51

would say, just completely undercut by a little bits, I do think that people have a lot of power. Right? So this is a pretty straightforward, you know, response, people who already have a lot of power should be more aesthetic, or should be more discursive about their aesthetic choices, right on Facebook puts such hideous facial environments to launch metta in Paris, in France or in Spain? Well, totally right, they get punished for that. If they said, we have made an aesthetic choice, so and so forth, that would be interesting. That will be I think, very, very, very beautiful. And it'd be very, very, very generative, and very meaningful. And we would love to participate in that, like, what are the beautiful spaces we know they want to create, but then it becomes about power itself. Right? I mean, what are the reasons why we know Facebook has too much power is because of this issue, the aesthetic choices they're making are inflicted on fucking billions of people. So you can invert the thing and say, Okay, let's start with the power, right? And say, is the power well distributed? Does that lead to a good outcome in terms of beauty? Well, almost like not given diverse perspectives, but also, certainly not because of, definitely not, because if people with the power have no taste, then we're guaranteed to have bad poor spatial aesthetics.

Will Jarvis 47:11

And wait up in a tough spot, we appear to have landed at the end of the day here. I'm curious, I want to run all the way back to the beginning. And I asked you about your your professional career and how you got here. I do think it's interesting, you know, you're clearly a super talented person, both of you are. But you know, you've worked in architecture, you're not working on physical buildings anymore, you're working in the digital world? Is it your sense that it has, and most people have, like, escaped onto the internet, at some level, our built environment does not seem to change as much as it used to, you know, pre 1970 not clear exactly what happened there? Is it your sense that it has gotten harder to change things in the real world? And that's why, you know, so much of our narrow cone of progress has been focused on, you know, bits not atoms, or is something else going on? It's just higher leverage to work in digital spaces, if that makes sense?

John Manoocheri 48:09

Well, so I had to look unreal, but it's in the last minute still exists, right? And I want that to accelerate. And the key thing is that, I mean, definitely one reason why I'm working on this is because, I mean, technology is, it's not just inherently a faster thing, or, you know, just a fast moving thing than that than the built world is that it is exhibiting exponential and synergistic properties where we might that is that there are exponential properties of individual technologies as they get better and better and better. Let's say for example, you know, energy efficiency of compute, or, you know, cost of memory, all these things are kind of like, you know, they're they're specific domains that have exponential like, returns. But then if you have a synergistic property, when they start combining, you have this like, you know, explosion of potential. So there are all sorts of reasons, just technically, about this moment, not necessarily inherently, but about this moment about technology, because they're, obviously technology can also plateau, that it is moving forward very quickly, what it would say is that, to get deeper into the question about what happened at someone's whatever, I do think the built environment is inherently slowly, right. I mean, there's lots of reasons for it. One of the obvious reasons, right, it's just heavy and big stuff, right? Making buildings. Fixing buildings is just as different from sitting and fiddling with code, right? If a if a piece of a building falls off, right, the plumbing of building falls off, you can't, you know, boot up VS code, perhaps batching it sitting at your computer with a nice fast internet connection, you've got to, you know, ring somebody who with the right tools, and if they come with the wrong tools, they gotta go back again, the phone line is broken, that you know, you can't even read them, like the real world has these constraints. But actually, that's not very interested. That's not the real reason why the built environment changes slowly the real, one real reason why the built environment changes slowly. Is very fast and no one talks about this, which is that in any other domain other than the built environment, right But the iteration cycle of improvement or of testing, and the cost of that iteration cycle is low in the competition domain, it's almost zero, right? One of the reasons why there's so much explosion and why there's so much acceleration is because to improve things is increasing and to invent new things, and increasingly, zero marginal cost exercise, right? So you have zero marginal cost technology, and you kind of get to effectively zero marginal cost capital, which is kind of where venture capital sits in the capital stack, almost zero marginal cost in the total cost of capital, then you have zero marginal cost innovation, basically, right? There's some technical domain that is never in, it's not possible in the case in the spatial domain, not just because it's hard, as I described, but because it's massively risky. There is no way to innovate with a city without immediately killing lots of people, right? There is a nonzero cost innovation, the innovation cycle in the spatial environment, right? So it isn't just that it's inherently slow, is that it's massively risky, if you cannot unpack and unpack and real people in their lives for minutes, or there's no testing place where you can test an energy system and the size of the city, right, you can't test a waste management system the size of a city, you can't you know, and so what that means is, when you implement something, you, you kind of have to commit to it working first time, which is why nuclear power plants take 20 years to develop, right? Even in Finland, of all places. One of the reasons why you get power is not the panacea people think it is because it just takes so long to implement, because you cannot put it into a fast innovation cycle. So that is the deeper issue, right? Technology move forward fast food, we're having a moment where it will converging. And this is exponential dynamics. The built world is slow, because it's fucking lumpy and heavy and annoying. It doesn't does, you know, the way I say it's space does not scale, speed to space, you can't find a way to make it more space and heavily more efficient, just annoying. But then the real issue is that the innovation cycle for the real world cannot be put into a kind of zero cost loop. Every every version of innovation in the real world is expensive in in human terms. All right. So that comes back to the kind of the institutional dynamic around these things, which is what happened in 70s? Well, you know, I do think institutional environments in which you know, spatial phenomena, evolve have changed, right? So there's less commitment to infrastructure investment, infrastructure development infrastructure as a point of national pride, or civic pride. I don't think that's a problem. But it also do think that world just gets full up. Right? I mean, the infrastructure explosion in the post war period was the first and only an ever like, infrastructure exposure for a modern society. Right? They never were, you know, like, you know, cars for everybody, or roads for everybody and sit till that, right. So it's not just that we got bored of it, but we did it once. And kind of know, all that stuff is in the way, right? The the infrastructural inertia, and institutional inertia things we've done at that scale, that's part of this innovation. So I promise, you just can't get rid of the stuff that's there to try new things, right. You can't strip away all the cars and go, we'll just try Hyperloop for a few years. That's the one good back to cars, right. And so it's not just like the size shifting institutional framing from like, a more sort of left wing or state centric infrastructure investment model to market centric and technical and kind of entrepreneurial and innovation types is just that the stuff we create an infrastructure is there and we can't get rid of it. For better or for worse, what I would say is that this and this is to close the loop. Why competition design is interesting is that is the way in which you can, you could fix that issue of not being able to run innovation iterations at scale, right is getting to be the case that we can run modeling at city scale, certainly a building scale, using computers very effectively. You right now, right? It's one of my heroes, as well Clifton harness two sides of the comfortable test at five years ago, and really is very simple, right? He isn't trying to create like super automated, like floorplan generators, or thing and all that it just says, look, I can optimize some variables for you, as a real estate developer, how many parking spaces go into this slot? What kinds of units can fit into that slot without wasting too much space? Like very defined question. So it's not an all singing all dancing AI to generate buildings. It's a very specific problem solving tool that grows its capabilities. But it's very pragmatic. And that is the track we're on. We are using computers to solve more and more and more of the problems that we have and don't understand very well and can't innovate with or iterate or test or explore without computers. And that is a good thing to see. It's not quite the same as generative design, but it is at scale problem solving. And so there's a long winded way of saying, I think there are good, real good where there was the objective reasons why it's very hard to innovate in the built environment. And computers are starting to help them one thing I would also say right and this is one final commentary on this because I don't want to avoid this and that slightly too technical framing, right, from what you told me before the podcast started, you might get this. There's one other phenomenon in innovation and evolution developed environment that is very, very problematic. And definitely things should change. But people aren't really focusing on it. And it's consolidation of ownership of land. Right, right. I mean, there is a phenomenon that has happened through history to the extent that no one ever thinks about it, it's basically the massive distortion that sits at the heart of conventional economics both left and right, that whoever's there first somehow seems to own all the land. Right. And that's bad. And this is very bad, right? Because if there isn't enough incentive, for the tenants, as it were, horrific language of the land of the city, to to be rewarded for a change, because the people that own the land already have everything they want, which is pretty much the case for most of the modern cities of the world, then things are going to change faster, right? So the incentive structure associated with land ownership, for accelerating change is a whole different thing that the risk cycle of your built environment or whatever it may be, that is giant, probably, I don't want to ignore that. Because I do think it's probably the biggest political problem of any era, including ours. For some reason, it just isn't taking that seriously think that you're taking it seriously. What I would say is that the correct approach in it in my view, is not to demonize the owners because that was never what they own it and and the power structures are in our ensuring that land ownership premise is to demonstrate, but it is not efficient for them in any way to do that. It's not just a justice argument. It's an efficiency argument, efficiency of capital, persons who have value of rich do whatever they claim that they're seeking, as landowners. And that's a lot of conversation.

Will Jarvis 56:52

That's very wise, it seems very important to focus on efficiency and not like, you know, Justice reasons, when you're when you're pursuing these these ends. This is this is very good advice. John shotty. I've really enjoyed this conversation. I've learned a time today. Where can people find you? Where should we send them if they're interested in Treasury?

John Manoocheri 57:12

So Treasury dot space, right, is the website that we are launching in the near future? And all the relevant things will be linked on there? Yeah, I mean, that's the main thing. I mean, we have an office in San Francisco and will be visible, you know, we haven't you know, sort of weekly events in our office there will be visible, upcoming new tech, you know, tech week. And gradually, we're coming out of stealth, doing more and more kind of demos of the of the technology stack, the you know, registry system for assets, the discovery system for assets showing we've got a bunch of tools that we're developing. So people are curious, go to the website, and and click and connect in some way.

Will Jarvis 57:56

Awesome. I'll put the link down the show notes. Thanks, folks. Thanks well. Special thanks to our sponsor, Bismarck analysis for the support. Bismarck analysis creates the Bismarck brief, a newsletter about intelligence grade analysis of key industries, organizations, and live players. You can subscribe to Bismarck brief and brief dot Bismarck analysis.com. Thanks for listening. We'll be back next week with a new episode of narratives. Special thanks to Donovan Dorrance, our audio editor. You can check out documents work and music at Donovan dorrance.com

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

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Narratives
Narratives
Narratives is a project exploring the ways in which the world is better than it has been, the ways that it is worse, and the paths toward making a better, more definite future.
Narratives is hosted by Will Jarvis. For more information, and more episodes, visit www.narrativespodcast.com