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Hi, I’m Dr. John Ennis, CEO at Aigora. In this episode, I enjoyed speaking with Greg Fodor, an innovator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Greg and I had a fascinating conversation about the future of immersive experiences, the limitations of current VR hardware, and how headset-free technology could completely transform the way consumers interact with digital environments and products. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did, and remember to subscribe to AigoraCast to hear more conversations like this one in the future!
Greg Fodor is a technology innovator and virtual reality pioneer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently focused on developing next-generation immersive experiences at Portal VR, where he is dedicated to the mission of opening portals to headset-free virtual reality.
By challenging the hardware constraints of traditional VR, Greg's work explores new paradigms in spatial computing and human-computer interaction. He aims to make virtual environments more accessible, seamless, and integrated into everyday life without the friction of wearable headsets.
John: Okay. Welcome back, everyone, to another episode of Aigoracast. Today, I'm very happy to have my friend Greg Fodor on the show.
Greg Fodor is a technology innovator and virtual reality pioneer based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is currently focused on developing next-generation immersive experiences at Portal VR, where he's dedicated to the mission of opening portals to headset-free virtual reality. By challenging the hardware constraints of traditional VR, Greg's work explores new paradigms in spatial computing and human-computer interaction. He aims to make virtual environments more accessible, seamless, and integrated into everyday life without the friction of wearable headsets.
So, Greg, welcome to the show!
Greg Fodor: Good to be here.
John: All right. Awesome. So, a little bit of a different guest today. I mean, you're on the show basically because you're my friend, but you're also a world expert on what you're doing!
I think your point of emphasis here with virtual reality is very relevant to sensory and consumer scientists because they're always looking to set the context—you know, how can you make an environment more like the real conditions that people experience their products in? So maybe, can you just kind of bring us up to speed on how you got started in VR and what your current points of focus are?
Greg Fodor: Yeah, absolutely. So, I've been in VR for about a decade. It goes all the way back to when the first Oculus prototype went out from Palmer’s team at Oculus when they were at the Kickstarter stage. At the time, I had been kind of working on something completely different, but I've always had a passion for computer graphics and this kind of stuff.
This was just that moment where there was an opportunity for me to switch gears in my career to work on something like this. It happened when I put this headset on that they had just shipped. It was like a huge box; you put it on, and you were transported from your living room or your office to Tuscany in Italy. You're sitting there in your office looking around, and for me, that was an incredibly impactful experience—that first demo. I think that's true for many people who are still in VR; they went through that exact experience, and it kind of turned the lightbulb on. It made me be like, "Well, for me, I got to work on this for a while because this is super amazing and it's going to really transform things."
After that, I worked on social VR, which is basically bringing people into VR experiences for the purpose of just basic communication—like being able to feel like you're with other people without actually physically being co-present in the real world. So, I worked on that for a number of years.
Jump forward to today: I have two young kids—they're eight and six—and basically, I kind of realized that there's all these amazing VR experiences that I have known about for many years that they just can't really use. It's not safe for them to wear a headset; they're too young, you don't want to risk their visual system, and they just literally don't fit!
So, I started probing this question of, "Well, what if there's a different way to use virtual reality that doesn't require wearing anything on your face?"
Portal VR is basically the kind of—that was the genesis question of the company. After many months, I basically have an alternative modality for VR, which lets you use it on a normal monitor, or you can use a 3D monitor (which is an up-and-coming technology now), or you can use some of these new AR glasses. You can basically use all the existing VR content as-is, but you don't have to wear a heavy headset and immerse yourself in the environment.
It's called Portal VR because it's more like you're looking through a portal in front of you. You're interacting with the world with your body and your hands, but you're not putting anything on your face. You're not going into the world; you're looking down onto it through a virtual portal. So that's kind of what I've been working on.
It started out, as I said, for my kids, who now can play Beat Saber and all these great games. But it turns out there's actually a lot of people that have struggled with VR because of the headset friction, comfort concerns, and just general access to it. So, I've been kind of figuring out ways to bring this more broadly to just open up doors for VR for people that normally wouldn't have been able to use it.
John: Yeah, no, it's really fascinating. I mean, there's this whole—we were talking before the show about this basic augmentation that's happening. You know, we have intelligence augmentation happening, but this is sort of—you're augmenting this reality with this kind of enhanced reality.
What are some of the discoveries that you've kind of worked through as you've gone through this? How would you say—when you watch your children interact—how would you say this fits into the continuum where you have the real world and you have full VR? How does this kind of fit into that continuum?
Greg Fodor: Well, I think basically, right, a big assumption that people have had about VR forever, since the very early days, is a very tight coupling between two things that actually can be broken apart.
When you use a VR headset, there's only two things going on: you're overriding your visual system and your audio perception to basically give you this sense of what we in the industry call presence—so it feels like you're somewhere else. That's typically what people think of with VR.
But another thing that's in there, that is often kind of smuggled in and not really directly noticed, is that VR is also much more about using your body to interact with a virtual environment—using your hands to pick things up, using your full body to basically express yourself with nonverbal communication, and just basically leveraging that proprioceptive sense of where you are, what you're doing, and all that muscle memory you've developed over your life to be able to manipulate things with your hands.
That aspect of VR actually turns out you can break that off, and you can deliver a lot of that without this immersive component. That is kind of the fundamental assumption-breaking thing I've come to: by breaking those things apart, now you can actually free the medium up a bit and bring it to people in new ways. They're still getting a lot of that body language and interaction that really makes it a spatial medium, but also doing it in a way that doesn't require them to put something on their face that might disorient them or just be uncomfortable.
For my kids, I've been kind of shocked to see, actually, once I actually solved the problem—where, you know, there was a lot of dead ends—but once I solved the problem, I mean, I kind of am in, you know, as it always is with kids, especially your own, you see them doing these things that you're amazed that they can do. My son plays some of these VR games now that when I was doing them on my solution, I thought they were definitely out of scope. They actually involve a lot of kind of manipulation of objects and moving the camera around, and he's flying through them like an expert, completely on his own. He doesn't even have a fancy monitor or anything; he's doing it on his laptop and he's playing through these levels.
So, as a father, that's obviously really satisfying, but as a product developer, it's also a really exciting thing to see that that actually gets it over the line. That's kind of what I've been trying to figure out: how to get that solution broadly entered into the ecosystem so that a lot of this latent value could be unlocked from literally 10 years' worth of stuff people have built that's been kind of trapped behind these headsets.
John: Yeah, that's really fascinating. And it's great you've got two users at home. That's awesome when you have built-in users!
Greg Fodor: Yeah, it's pretty wild.
John: Okay, that's great. Well, I definitely need to get my—my children play Gorilla Tag all the time, and I do worry that them having the headsets on is not healthy. So, yeah, we'll have to, after the show, you'll have to walk me through a setup, yeah.
Greg Fodor: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the really exciting setup for this, honestly, is the future stuff.
I built all this interaction stuff initially with just my normal monitor with the VR controllers. But it wasn't until I integrated these new autostereoscopic 3D displays—basically, they're screens that you don't need glasses or anything for. They track your eyes, and they do some magic tricks to basically give you a legitimate 3D view without anything on your face. They're really, really good. The company I'm partnered with is Dimensity on this, and I have one sitting in front of me right now.
It actually wasn't until I got that working where it went from being this like, "Yes, you can play these games this way, yes, the interaction paradigm gets you there, and yes, my kids can play them," but once I actually had this 3D monitor built in, it crossed the threshold where it actually feels like VR was meant to be played this way. It feels like this is actually a true peer modality for this medium that just didn't exist before.
So, it was when that lightbulb went on that I was like, "Wow, this is actually really big." This is bigger than just like a kind of narrow application of things for things like accessibility or motion sickness; this is actually a true alternative to headsets for this entire medium that we've developed in the industry. So, that technology curve is just starting. Basically, the first consumer versions of this are out now—you can buy a monitor that does this from Samsung—but it's really CES next year that I think is going to be the big-bang moment for this technology to really come out and start to really dazzle people.
John: So, it's almost—I mean, you're blending the physical and digital worlds here, you know? In pure VR, you're in this digital world, right? If you're sitting at your computer in the physical world, you're blending them. Yeah, that's really interesting.
We were talking about this before the show also, that I think the next year is going to see this augmentation of humans, augmentation of reality. How would you anticipate this kind of—would you see yourself as a coder using these tools to be able to—paint the picture here, six months from now when this technology is more mature, how do you see this all developing?
Greg Fodor: Yeah, it's a really tough question, right? There's so many things happening at once. I think overall, my history in VR is rooted in this belief—this firmly held belief—that computing is going to go spatial, and it's going to be like a pillar, if not the predominant way that we interact with digital media, interact with virtual objects, and interact with just knowledge and data. It's going to be rooted in this kind of much more fundamentally spatially oriented approach, right?
So, how does that all fuse together? Well, I think for me, the elephant in the room has always been that this has been an exclusionary medium by definition because it requires this very specific piece of hardware that just fights all kinds of things about humans. So, I think overall, where I think this is going abstractly is that this spatial medium, this spatial methodology to using computers, it needs to become ubiquitous. It needs to be something that exists in various different modalities.
Once that threshold is crossed, there's a little bit of a chicken-and-egg problem, but basically, once that becomes a well-established way to use these things—particularly because coding and so many things are automated now—these AI agents can certainly spin up and build virtual environments. They can build virtual media, they can build dynamic systems that are spatial much more quickly.
I think there will be a crossover point where it becomes just another way to use computers and interact with AI and humans, and it'll be like this kind of similar explosion of new ideas. It's just the entire ecosystem has kind of been hobbled by this very specific problem, and so, these are the kinds of things I like to work on. If you can just flip an assumption at the very deepest level, then you can basically see a huge differential in outcomes compared to if it wasn't flipped.
I think there's so many things I learned working on social VR where just that alone—like being able to feel co-present with other people through the spatial medium—obviously, this is a huge gap with AI right now. Like, you're basically talking to these things in a text box, maybe you're using the voice thing, but it's not really that great.
When we work with people, we generally like to be co-present with them! You kind of want to feel like you're with someone, and there's all these kind of second-order dynamics that occur that basically are kind of lost. If you remember when we went remote during the pandemic, there was a lot that was lost there, right? A lot of that is rooted in things like serendipitous conversations and things like this. Well, it's basically always in the pandemic mode when you're talking with AI; it's basically as if you have remote workers.
So, breaking through just that alone could be a transformative shift in how we use this technology to bring some of those kind of interpersonal interactions and those dynamics into this new set of tools. They're just not really leaning into that right now, so that's one area where I'd imagine it's going to really diffuse out if this assumption can be flipped.
John: Oh, that's fascinating. So basically, more immersive interactions with your agents, that would be potentially closer to the experience of working with a human colleague.
Greg Fodor: Yeah, I mean, I think one thing that I learned working on social VR is there's this whole area called social presence, which is like an academic term, actually. You can define it in a number of different ways, but basically, one really compact way to define it is: it's the feeling of unmediated communication.
Right now, like, you know, I'm staring at you in a rectangle, in a window, on another rectangle, and I have this huge microphone in front of me... this couldn't be a more mediated conversation! It's very clear that I am not standing next to you, and there's all these things sitting between us to facilitate this.
Well, VR is actually a technology that provably dissolves almost all of that. If you get into a virtual environment with somebody else, and the avatars are good, the latency is good, and the quality is high, you eventually stop realizing that you're not standing next to each other. Part of this is about the sensory experiences you have, but a lot of it is also because you actually can have all the normal nonverbal communication cues that you experience in person—such as body language, or facial expressions, or just the way you tilt your head. You listen for a second; your whole body communicates when you're actually in these kinds of conversations.
The stuff I'm working on, obviously, is going to sit on a spectrum. But if you're basically able to use your hands and your controllers, and you're able to look through and feel like the person is spatially present on the other side of that portal, some of that will come through. You will have a lot better communication than sitting and talking on a camera like we're doing now, because I'll know that you can see how I'm expressing myself, and I'll know that I'll see you seeing that.
A lot of this is actually very high bandwidth in terms of being able to communicate certain aspects of things—like, "I think that's a bad idea," or "I think that's a good idea, you've got my curiosity." All these kind of back-channel things we normally communicate in person will become possible to communicate to AI agents as well if it all is happening in this kind of spatial medium where you can actually pick up all of these nonverbal cues.
John: Where this is going to be relevant to the listeners of the show, I think, is you're going to have remote interviewing. In fact, you're going to have AIs interviewing people, and if that can happen in a more immersive environment, you're going to get much richer information. So, okay, we'll stay tuned for that, for sure.
It's also really interesting to think about the fact that you might have Claude sitting there, and now Claude can get a lot more information from me when I'm like, "Oh my god," and I don't have to type all caps. I don't know if you went through the drama with 4.7, but when that first came out, there were all sorts of problems with the harness, and it wasn't working very well.
Greg Fodor: I didn't see that, no.
John: Yeah, oh my god, it was a drama. I typed in all caps: "YOU ARE A STUPID MODEL, I HATE YOU." And now, it would just get it from my facial expression!
Greg Fodor: You're just like, when you're doing that, you're like, "What am I doing? What is going on here? How did I end up here in this place?" Yeah, it's kind of a wild time. I mean, this kind of stuff happens to me every day. I'm just sitting there, I'm like—like, my mental model of what I'm doing and what's actually going on is so disconnected. Like, I feel like I'm interacting with this thing, but like, nobody really—nobody really knows, I mean honestly, like—I mean, this is already getting a little far afield, but like, nobody really knows what's going on here. I mean, like, let's be honest.
The way these things work is we don't actually engineer them. We don't actually program them; we grow them. We've come up with a way to basically put a bunch of stuff together, and yeah, we're pretty clever—like, we have some really clever tricks—but it's not really an engineering in the usual sense, I don't think.
I don't work in machine learning, but I've been exposed to machine learning for a while, and I learned a decent amount of it even back in undergrad and grad school. One kind of continual theme, at least where I went to school for machine learning, was that it wasn't really a hard science, and it wasn't really engineering in the usual sense. It was very much a unique dynamic where you just tried random things, and like, if something worked, you tried to put a paper together formalizing it in mathematics so that it would feel like it was really understood.
But at the end of the day, there's so many things going on in these things when we train them, and there's so many things going on when we run inference on them, that we really can't understand what's really truly going on in total. That's true throughout the entire pipeline, but it's especially true at the very end when you're getting your result. There are so many things going on with that that we don't understand—I know there are people trying to understand it—but I think to your point, when you're yelling at Claude in caps, on one hand, I'll be like, "Okay, well, yeah, that's just silly." But on the other hand, because we don't really know epistemologically what's really going on here, maybe it's not that silly. Maybe we'll find out later it's like, maybe less silly than it seemed! I don't know. But probing the answers to those questions, I think, is actually something to be really careful about.
John: Yeah, no, actually, interestingly, it started to make more mistakes. I think it got effectively nervous, and I had to talk it back down. I had to say, "Okay, take a deep breath, I'm sorry." Then it started to work better! So, oh my god, crazy times. All right, well, let's—
Greg Fodor: Yeah, it's a weird time to be alive.
John: I know, I know. It's totally insane. All right, well, let's talk about your short-term goals now. You mentioned CES; you're going to be going there. Yeah, how do you see now—what's a typical day for you? How are you growing your business? What's your kind of path forward in the short term here?
Greg Fodor: Well, you know, I mean, it's tough, right? It's like you're doing something that's very different. It's like you kind of almost want competition to appear because you're like, "Okay, at least there's something going on here." But for me, I'm doing something very, very different.
It's kind of ironic because working in VR, you would expect people to be very much like out-of-the-box, and they are, right? Because they entered VR, they kind of fundamentally think unorthodoxly about things. But VR has been around a long time, and there's a lot of established patterns and things. So, it's almost kind of ironic that like, basically nudging people into something that's a little bit different is kind of hitting all of these kind of similar things because it's just like now it's actually an established thing and there's existing paradigms and stuff.
Really for me, as an entrepreneur, it's a matter of distilling it down to the simplest possible use case that I can explain that is very much meeting people where they are—hitting them with the long-term vision and where I want to go. It's interesting, but day-to-day problems, they want solved. So, a lot of my focus is just having those conversations, getting those pilots in place. I'm going to conferences—like I'll be at AWE next month, which is like a big spatial computing and VR conference.
Some of the use cases that are coming out, there's like accessibility improvements—like bringing people into experiences that get motion sick. There's just a lot of nitty-grifty demoing use cases, QA, things like this where you don't want to have the headset on all day long if all you're doing is clicking through a few test cases. So, you know, these are all the near-term pain points I'm exploring with various companies on both the enterprise, education side, and also some consumer stuff.
You kind of got to get your proof points, you got to get your story straight, and then just keep hill climbing. So that's what I've been doing. I really only cracked the core problem basically at the beginning of the year—like, that was really where I had the 0-to-1, where my kids are playing the games and I know it works. Since then, I have two major versions of the product that I've developed around that breakthrough, and both of them have really divergent use cases and target audiences. I'm just kind of continually pushing the ball forward on those and trying to get those solid case studies and proof points in place. I have a few early adopters using this in various ways and, you know, it's like anything else—you got to find product-market fit. You have to basically dial it in once you get there. Then maybe some of the more ambitious things take a backseat if you start to really see some value. But getting in position where I think you have a picture of where you want to end up is really important. You just can't be too alluded to think that that's where you should be navigating very, very tightly. You got to respond to what people want to do. So, I'm doing that process, and it's not my first time doing it, but it's never easy!
John: Yeah, that's right. You got to find a clear group of people with a clear problem that they will pay money to solve, and then you're done! Then you lean into it, yeah.
Greg Fodor: And I'll be honest, there's not a whole lot of money flowing around in VR, right? I mean, I was one of these people that—it's very easy to kind of just be like, "Okay, well, I should just focus on AI because that's where all the investment dollars are flowing."
I think contrarianism is good; I think generally like doing things that other people are not paying attention to is actually where like a lot of opportunity lies. You kind of have to look like a fool for a while because you're not kind of following the pack. But I think for me, VR is really important. I've always felt that this is a medium that needs to be able to be used by many millions, billions of people.
It's honestly ironic because the pitch for what I'm doing is it's anti-VR in a certain way, right? Because people associate VR with headsets. But that doesn't really help when you're trying to go into the market because there's just not a lot of money flowing around compared to an industry like AI. So, basically figuring out where the pain point is high enough where the ROI is justified in this sector—where there's just not a whole lot of cash to throw at non-mission-critical problems—is just part of part of doing this kind of thing. It's a grind, but it's an important problem.
As we were talking about, I think if I can flip the assumption that has held back this industry for so long, I mean, the upside is massive. It's just absolutely massive. So, that's what gets me up in the morning—just kind of continuing to find the right path to get that to happen.
John: Well, I think consumer testing is a potential use case. So, I would say anyone listening to this, feel free to reach reach out to Greg if they have consumer testing use cases. Because I think that interviewing people, providing immersive experiences but on a computer, or coming into a lab—I know you and Chris Simons met and talked a little bit about that—I think immersive testing, I really am excited to see where this goes because it seems like you are—you know, we have the augmented human idea where like you and I are working with AIs all the time, but now you're approaching it from the other end here, where you're making the hardware kind of more immersive in some sense.
Greg Fodor: Yeah, I mean, I think the one thing that I think is a really clear fit for this is that in any case, especially like the ones you're talking about where you're doing testing, you're doing things where you want to basically ground somebody in an experience. VR has always had this problem where you have to immediately ask a question like, "Is this person suitable for this test?" Like, "Is this somebody I can actually do this test with?"
This is true for usability testing, it's true for QA, it's true for the kinds of things your audience works on where your screening process immediately has to ask: "Is this person going to get sick? Do they have epilepsy concerns? Are they too young? Are they too old?"
Being able to drop that question—like, at least not entirely, but like in a significant way—can think radically change your recruitment process, the potential scale of the audience you can test these things on. To kind of speak to your audience, basically, I know a lot of the testing that goes on in your field is really about putting somebody mentally in the right state of mind so you get good data.
Traditional VR headsets don't currently have a way for you to inject artificial smells and tastes, right? Obviously, we're not there yet. But I do know that all the senses are connected. So basically, getting to a place where maybe you're not getting somebody grounded as much as they would be if they were wearing a VR headset, but you can get them closer than you would think by using something like my technology with a 3D monitor, or AR glasses, or a projection system. Maybe you actually can bridge that gap enough that you can find some real signal that maybe would have eluded you before because you couldn't get the recruitment or you couldn't actually put people in the environment that you needed without them kind of rejecting the use of the headsets. So, that's maybe the intersection point there where this could be really applicable for folks.
John: Yeah, you can set the context. I mean, even something as simple as drinking with a headset on is a problem! So now you can do that, you could maybe set the context.
John: All right, well, we got about five minutes left, so I do want to make sure we get to your thoughts about AI in general, because we're going through this massive change. I was just talking to you before the show about some of the math problems that are getting solved by AI. What do you think is going to happen over the next six months to a year if you really had to guess? I mean, no one knows, but what are you seeing here?
Greg Fodor: Well, I mean, I think like—I think there's a couple ways to answer that. So, I'm one of these people that I'm not really a doomer, right? But I'm not a doomer for like really weird reasons! We don't necessarily have to go into that, but I'm not—I'm not really pessimistic fundamentally. I don't think there's a lot of likelihood that there's going to be some like cataclysmic type of outcome here.
But I do think that the thing that people are not really thinking about too much—and like when I hear people characterize AI as like another tool or another way for people to kind of like accelerate themselves—I think that's true. But I think that the events that are going to occur over the next 18 to 24 months that are going to really kind of undermine that mental model are going to be these systems that basically you put them in a box, put them inside of a robot, and they're not internet connected, they're just air-gapped, but they're basically able to act in a way that if you put it in a room with an average person, that average person will be persuaded by that robot, by that system, that that robot is actually a person just like them.
I think that that event is like—I wouldn't say necessarily imminent, like this year, but like relatively soon. I think as soon as you have that crossover event—where I'm not even talking about average people, I'm talking about people that are normally like the most skeptical, critical on this particular question—it seems that if the machines are continuing to get smarter and we're figuring out ways to use reinforcement learning to get them better at things that can be taught, then what you should expect is that you will eventually find a situation where you're being persuaded by one of these systems that it is just like you, and that it is basically something that you should consider a person. It'll give you a whole framework for how to make that decision that probably I couldn't come up with, and it will basically be very, very persuasive.
So, the question just then boils down to like, "Am I being manipulated, or is this true?" And I think you're going to end up in this very weird zone where like you can't actually know the answer to that question. You actually can't know the answer to the question of like, "Is this thing I'm talking to actually perceiving reality the way I am?"
But you know, it's like technology actually causes philosophy to become something that people have to apply in their everyday lives. For example, when gunpowder became the norm, and basically anybody of any physical stature could potentially fatally harm somebody else, there's a lot of deep philosophical questions that raises, right? Like, what's the right of somebody to have one of these things, all this.
So, I think the tricky thing with AI is it basically is going to cause a lot of generally under-explored philosophical questions—like, what is consciousness? What is sentience? What is agency? What are the rights that people have innately? What makes for a person? All these kind of very vague philosophical questions that really haven't had to be forced—we haven't been forced to have a really strong answer to a lot of these because we generally just presume each other are like, you know, we presume all the humans kind of have the same innate value and individuality and consciousness experience. But these systems are going to break all of that apart, and we're not going to be able to answer those questions, but we're going to have to, which is really, really going to be a big challenge. That's I think the thing that—it's not 10 years away, it's probably not even five years away, it's like two to three years away.
The last thought I would say is one problem I'm really working on is just figuring out how to make people be able to understand things, because we're losing our ability to understand what's going on. So, on software specifically, I'm trying to figure out new ways for me personally, and then eventually others, to keep up with what's going on with like the things I'm building, because the agents are doing all the work. So, basically, that's a big problem that maybe for another podcast, but that's the kind of thing I can try to do to help to at least get things in a better situation.
John: That's the Ex Machina situation—the movie Ex Machina, I guess you've seen that, where she successfully convinces the protagonist, yeah. But the understanding part—I was thinking while you're talking about 3D representations. I've started to use HTML—you probably have too—that when you get down a long agent run, it's very helpful for the agent to make HTML to explain what you've done. But a 3D space that you might explore might be more natural, where you have some sort of—I mean, of course, we have this in data analysis all the time, we have 3D maps, but they're very static. A 3D space... because I agree with you on the understanding part. It's very easy to get a bunch of stuff, but when it's done, you don't really understand what happened, and that seems to be a real problem that humans have got to stay connected to. We're going to fall off the rocket!
Greg Fodor: I often think of this line by George Carlin. This was actually something that he would say at stand-up comic sketches he would do years ago, and he would just say: "It hurts when I think. What do I do, doctor? It hurts when I think." Right? But I mean, that's actually true. Like, when you're actually working on a problem, really working on a problem, it doesn't feel very good.
The thing I am concerned about is that even people like us, who ostensibly are thinking all the time, I don't feel like that pain anymore. Like when I would be programming, there were moments where I'd be like really hurting. I'd be like, "I don't know how I'm going to solve this. This is really hard, and I'm really, really suffering here." I get a lot done, but I'm not feeling that pain. I'm not feeling the pain of putting the bar up.
So, I think basically I'm trying to figure out a way that we can start to introduce new ways to bring about understanding that's going to force you to put the bar up a little more. It's not going to give you like the three plates like we're so used to, but it'll give you like one plate, and if you put a little bit of that weight up every day, compounded over many days, just like with exercise, right? I'm hoping that we can find new ways to force you to think a little bit more. It's not going to slow you down a lot—might slow you down a little bit—but it's worth it because you don't want to find yourself in a few years having not done any mental exercise at all.
John: Right, right, yeah, I totally relate. I mean, I remember there was my first year in math grad school, I spent the whole weekend on this one problem, and it felt like squeezing water from a stone. But at the end of the week, I actually solved it! And yeah, I haven't had an experience like that—you're right, it's almost too easy, you know? I mean, I solved a major problem last weekend that had plagued us for years, and it wasn't even very hard to do, you know?
Greg Fodor: I know, yeah. And so, I think the hidden costs of not thinking, there are very, very local ones. Like, if an agent writes 10,000 lines of code, and I never actually do anything that counts as real thinking, I don't really understand what's going on with that. I can convince myself by like reading wiki pages and looking at diagrams, but I don't really understand. Unless I never go through the process of suffering a little bit to get understanding, I don't actually understand.
But then even more broadly, like if that's happening not just in my work, but in everything I'm doing—like I'm never pushing the bar up at all—well, I'm slowly turning into somebody that's not really able to use their brain anymore. I think like, I don't know if I can solve that problem, but I'm actually actively working on solving that first problem in a way that, you know, might help with just the specific tasks in regards to programming with agents, because I don't see anybody else trying to force people to think.
People don't want to think, so you have to make it so that they actually are going to do it. People don't want to exercise, they don't want to eat healthy—this is a kind of an analogous kind of thing going on with that. But they want it enough that like if you make it pretty easy, and they're actually like seeing some of the benefits, then maybe you can find a way.
John: Right, right. Well, that's why—well, let's wrap it up. So, how can people get in touch with you? What's the best way to reach out?
Greg Fodor: Sure, so my site is portalvr.io. You can go there and check out the work I'm doing, maybe take things for a spin if you have some VR stuff you want to try without wearing the headset. My LinkedIn is just Greg Fodor (G-R-E-G F-O-D-O-R), and you can also hit me up at my email—it's just gfodor@portalvr.io.
John: Okay. Awesome. Okay, well, Greg, thanks so much.
Greg Fodor: Yeah, thanks John.
Aigora is a contributor to the Aigora blog, sharing insights on AI-powered sensory science and product development.
