the image of all of us sitting in our homes with headsets on or glasses on for 90% of our lives

because our virtual lives are more important than our real lives will keep me up at night.

Well, so, John, let me, let me hit you with one more thing because I think it's important.

I often hear this criticism of we're just going to sit at home like the characters of Wally strapped

to a device and do nothing. There's that funny Icelandic video where they say like,

don't visit Iceland in VR, come hike Iceland. We are TV species. The average American

is awake for 14.4 hours and that spans work, leisure and necessity. We watch an average of five

and a half hours of TV per day. The average American does. 75% of that is done alone. It's almost

all done sedentary just sitting there. Hollywood talks about TV as lean back entertainment as

though disengagement is good. When you factor out the fact that the average American spend six

and a half hours per day working, then the hour and a half you're commuting the 45 minutes you're

eating. We do nothing but TV and essentially nothing but TV alone. I personally think shifting

from TV to a more social, immersive, engaged environment is a positive thing, not a negative thing,

but that's separate from whether or not we should be going inside.

I'm John Favreau. Welcome to Offline.

Hey everyone, my guest today is Matthew Ball, author of the upcoming book The Metaverse

and how it will revolutionize everything. So I want to spend less time online. If you're listening

to this podcast, hopefully you do too. So when I saw that Facebook was rebranding to Meta

so that it can help build a Metaverse where we'd all spend 90% of our waking hours plugged into a

VR headset, I was not thrilled. Between the disinformation, the harassment, the dopamine addiction,

and the slow but steady destruction of global democracy, being online hasn't exactly been a

pleasant experience lately. Why would anyone want to spend even more time on the internet,

...