StarTalk: There Is No AI Really (It’s Just People) w/ Jaron Lanier (Transcript)
May 25, 2026 12:52 am May 25, 2026 12:52 am
Editor’s Note: In this special edition episode of StarTalk, host Neil deGrasse Tyson, co-host Gary O’Reilly, and comedian Negin Farsad sit down with computer scientist and “father of virtual reality” Jaron Lanier. Together, they explore the evolution of the internet, the societal impacts of social media addiction, and why we should view artificial intelligence as a human collaboration rather than an independent creature. The conversation dives deep into alternate tech business models, data dignity, and finding a constructive path forward for the future of technology.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Why do UFO sightings persist? Are at least some of them figments of our imagination, or are we missing something? In my latest book, Take Me to Your Leader , I actually explore what’s possible in this universe, given the universal laws of physics. If the aliens are out there, the laws of physics will dictate how they find us. I also narrated the audiobook, so I’m duly informed that the audiobook and the print version are available now wherever books are sold. This is StarTalk Special Edition, which means I got Gary O’Reilly, co-host here. Gary, how you doing, man?
GARY O’REILLY: I’m good, Neil. Over in London. London though, so slightly remote.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, only slightly. On the scale of the universe, you’re right next door. I also have with me Negin Farsad. Negin, welcome back to StarTalk.
NEGIN FARSAD: Hello, I’m so excited to be back.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: It’s been too long, I miss you.
NEGIN FARSAD: Absolutely. I have to say, you don’t look a day over the last time we talked about dark matter.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, now let me figure out how old I would need to be for that. You’re a comedian, you’re also a TED Fellow for social justice. That’s a thing?
NEGIN FARSAD: I mean, I do comedy that tries to save the world.
NEGIN FARSAD: And it’s worked, guys. That’s why we live in utopia.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Fake the Nation , that’s the coolest title ever.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And I’ll never soon forget the title of your book from a few years ago.
NEGIN FARSAD: How to Make White People Laugh . Yeah.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s best title ever.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah, so Gary, what have you researched for today? It’s got something to do with the internet and it’s going to mess up the world, something like that?
GARY O’REILLY: Oh yeah, let’s get the good stuff out. So is the internet too far gone in our lifetimes? The internet has changed from a novelty to a central influence in our lives, and now with the advent of AI, hawked as the potential doomsday for humankind. Well, is it? Isn’t it? Today we’re going to talk about whether that’s the case, how the internet influences our world, and how we can come together and fix it or not. So, Neil, if you will introduce our guest, and I think this is just the right person to discuss this topic.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, there’s a uniquely qualified person in the world to address those issues and more, and I’ve got him sitting right here. Jaron Lanier, dude.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Welcome to StarTalk.
JARON LANIER: Well, you know, I think you can speak a little lower than me, but that does not mean I will not attempt it.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, we don’t use the word polymath too freely today because there aren’t many folks, there’s so much specialization, but if I were to bring that into the 21st century, I would apply it to you. You’re a computer scientist, but interdisciplinary. What’s your title? Prime Unifying Scientist at Microsoft? That’s a title? Is that on your business card?
JARON LANIER: It actually is, yeah. Okay, it’s actually a joke. It’s Office of the Chief Technology Officer, Prime Unifying Scientist, so it spells out OCTOPUS. And there are several reasons for that. One is I used to study cephalopod cognition because it’s absolutely fascinating. But then there’s also that some accuse me of starting to look like one myself.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, that happens. That can happen.
JARON LANIER: That can happen. That can happen. And so between those two things, The Octopus, yes.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: I’m just impressed that that’s even a title that one can ascend to. Are you going to break the mold in your— can anyone become you in this? The answer is no, just say no.
JARON LANIER: Well, I will tell you one thing about my role. I have an agreement with them where I can speak my mind, including being encouraged to criticize the company itself, so long as I’m clear that I’m not speaking for Microsoft. And somehow they haven’t imploded. I think it actually— I would like to see more people with that role in the tech industry. Okay, so in that sense, I don’t want to be the last. I’m aware of one other maybe, who would be Vint Cerf over at Google, but I think we’re the only two. And we really desperately need more of us.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Because you know when someone has— you know where they’re clamming shut on what you really want them to say about what they’re doing. You know it in an interview, right?
JARON LANIER: Yeah, and in Silicon Valley, that’s like 90% of the time.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, yeah. So you’re considered the father of virtual reality, in part because you even coined the term?
JARON LANIER: Yeah, okay, look, I was young, all right? I think there’s—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: You’re responsible.
NEGIN FARSAD: Were you on drugs, maybe? Was there that involved?
JARON LANIER: I’ve never used drugs, and I blame virtual reality for that.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Oh, it’s served that role.
NEGIN FARSAD: You haven’t needed it, yeah.
JARON LANIER: Virtual reality has served that role. And I live in Santa Cruz, so I’m in violation of a number of local ordinances by not using drugs, but somehow it just hasn’t happened.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And you’ve got a book from a few years ago, 10 Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts .
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That was bold back then, and it’s probably even more significant today.
JARON LANIER: Well, you know, the thing about that book is that high schoolers are forced to read it. My own daughter was forced to read it. And so whenever I’m in an airport, there are all these high school kids who come up to me and say, “We were forced to read your book.” And all I can tell them is, “Well, you must have done something very bad. And I hope you learned your lesson.”
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s the only way to reply to that comment, for sure. So if you started virtual reality, what were you thinking behind it? Did you think that other people would be not content with their own reality and you have to create one for them?
JARON LANIER: Oh God, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Explicitly not. No, here’s my thought about it. There were two reasons to want to do virtual reality. One was for the extraordinary weird ways that I hope people will eventually start connecting with each other with it, and for interesting experiences in art. I still love all that. Not that the industry’s done much of that.
But the other reason is that, you know, we’re born into this world and we get so used to it that we don’t appreciate it. And when you have a vivid enough alternative for a moment, and then you come back to this, normal reality suddenly takes on the amazing qualities it always had, but you can sort of become inured to it. So like, you put on the goggles and then you take them off.
One of the things I used to love to do when VR was very new back in like the ’80s or something, I’d put a flower or a cool mineral in front of somebody without them knowing it while they had the headset on, and they’d take it off and they would look at this thing and it’s like they never saw one before, because in a way they hadn’t. And so as a palette freshener, as a point of comparison, it helps you appreciate reality. So to me, it is not an alternative to reality. It’s a way to appreciate reality by finally having a contrast, because it’s very hard to make a contrast to reality.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Okay, but what you think and how people actually use the product don’t necessarily have to comport. So anyone I know who uses virtual reality gets lost in it, and regular reality becomes less interesting to them because they’re on a hike, they’re on a space adventure, they’re—
NEGIN FARSAD: There’s no boundaries to where they can go.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: No boundaries, who they can meet, what social life they can conduct. And you yourself look like something out of Star Trek with your jacket here. It looks very future.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Did you pick that up in a virtual reality future and you’re trying to influence regular reality?
JARON LANIER: Yeah, you got it. That’s exactly what I knew.
NEGIN FARSAD: I have to say, can I also speak up for a subset of the population, which is people who put on a virtual reality headset and they immediately want to throw up because it gives them motion sickness?
JARON LANIER: I have two rants I have to give. Can you guys handle a rant? Let me do the rant you just inspired, and then I want to do the rant that you just inspired. For reasons that nobody knows, there’s some subsets in the population who are more vulnerable to nausea in VR.
JARON LANIER: And they’re almost universally female and almost universally not white.
NEGIN FARSAD: Now what? I wasn’t expecting that.
JARON LANIER: They’re mostly Asian, mostly East Asian. I’m not aware of any study on Iranians in particular, or Middle Eastern.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: And you’re Iranian? Yes. Okay.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. And so the thing is— let me try to explain to you how frustrating this is. The virtual reality industry in Silicon Valley spent— we don’t know quite how much, but based on figures that have been revealed, it’s in the hundreds of billions of dollars. And just for the sake of argument, let’s call it a quarter of a trillion dollars in developing VR in the last, I don’t know, 5 years or something.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s how much money it took to go to the moon, just to give you a context here.
JARON LANIER: Think about what you could do with that money. Okay, now, before we get to the question at hand, I want to point something out. Let’s say I showed you in the ’70s a computer, like a laptop, and here’s a screen and there’s a keyboard, and you would say, what would you want to do with this? Might you not think, I would edit a document on that. That might be better than a typewriter.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: That’s the limit of what I would have said.
JARON LANIER: But you would have said that. Definitely. Okay.
NEGIN FARSAD: I would have said, “Let’s make, like, boobies out of, like, zeros and ones in, like, a, you know, something like this.”
JARON LANIER: So your desire has been met. But let us just—
NEGIN FARSAD: I’m just saying, yeah. No, listen.
JARON LANIER: And you say men don’t listen.
JARON LANIER: We do. We do. All right. But I want to address this question of, like, would you be surprised if after, let’s say, a quarter of a trillion dollars of investment, there was no word processor on this thing? You would find that surprising?
JARON LANIER: Okay. Now, if I show you a VR headset and I say, “What would you want to do with this?” One of the first things you might say is, I’d like to be able to do 3D design work in it. Would you be surprised if after a quarter of a trillion dollars, there’s no decent, reliable, usable 3D design program with a VR headset? All right, I’m surprised. And that, but that’s exactly what happened.
Now we can go into why, but the thing is VR has been sort of a disaster because the companies that are doing it are absolutely trying to make it into whatever they already know how to sell. Apple wanted to make it into a big iPad or a movie theater. Meta wants to make it into a social network with evil qualities and so on. Nobody’s let VR be VR. Or there’s the gaming people who want it to be a game, which can work to a degree, but only for a narrow—
But let me get back to your question. I won’t name names here, but one of the very, very, very large tech companies spent many, many, many billions of dollars on a headset. And I talked to the person who was the head of that program, and they said to me, “You have to try the latest version. We have absolutely solved the nausea problem. We have absolutely solved it. All that stuff you said about nausea, it’s gone, it’s obsolete.” And I said, “Okay, okay, have you tested it on a broad population? Have you tested it on women? Have you tested it on Asian women?” “Well, why would we do that? It’s the same for everybody.” And I’m like, “Okay, have you read any papers? There are these academic—” “We don’t need to read papers. We’re way ahead of the academic world.”
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: We have a room of white men.
NEGIN FARSAD: Yes, we can speak to all the women.
JARON LANIER: “Do you have any female engineers on the team that is working on this?” “No, we have none.” And I’m like, okay, my friend, get ready. And so then the first review is from the Wall Street Journal. Asian female got sick. Ooh, now you can figure out which company it was.
But anyway, the thing is, nobody’s going to bother. Nobody’s obsessive out there to figure that out. But the thing is, this is a disaster. Like, there’s two disasters. There’s the moral and ethical disaster of hiring in such a narrow way that we make ourselves blind and we make our products narrow. And then there’s the disaster of not actually serving the people we’re supposed to serve, absurd by refusing to look at them.
And after you’ve heard all I just said, what I want to say— yeah, you might have some friends who are getting lost in VR, but VR as a whole has not found a popular audience at anything like the scale of, like, a normal computer or a phone or something. It ought to, but it’s not going to as long as we willfully blind ourselves. And there’s this idea that— well, there’s an old joke in business about, like, “Well, you lose money on every unit, but you make up for it in margin.” But that’s what we do in Silicon Valley. We say, “Well, maybe we’re doing stupid, but we’ll do it at such big scales that it’ll make up for it.” And it doesn’t work.
NEGIN FARSAD: The only friend that I have that really uses VR is literally to rewatch The Departed and then fall asleep. That’s like so far the only use I’ve seen of VR from out of my friends.
JARON LANIER: It makes them happy. Who are we to judge? All I’m saying is that the things you can do— you can turn yourself into an approximate 4-dimensional shape to develop 4-dimensional intuition. And you can merge bodies.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Which just to be clear, we live and think in 3 dimensions. And for me, one of the greatest challenges as a kid was I want to think in 4 dimensions. That would be just so cool to be able to do that.
JARON LANIER: Yeah. Well, I mean, someday— oh God, when I was probably 21 or something and we were starting the company, all the engineers at the first VR startup, and this would’ve been in ’81 or something, we made a pact among ourselves that if we ever had kids, which seemed impossibly remote and was never going to happen, we would raise them in little VR goggles, and then we would, while they were asleep, we would change up bigger ones as they grew up, so they’d grow up entirely, and the purpose would be that they’d grow up in 4 dimensions and be 4D natives.
JARON LANIER: That was the idea, and then they’d be the world’s best mathematicians. And so—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: This is the Truman Show, but as conceived by mathematicians.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Excuse me, by crazy mathematicians.
NEGIN FARSAD: But just that— during their sleep they would have—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Well, during the swap, you’d have to swap out the headset.
JARON LANIER: Presumably we’d feed them. I mean, given us, maybe not, but the idea is that they grow. And then— so when I told my daughter this when she was like 11 or something, she got really pissed. “I could have been the first kid in 4 dimensions. What’s wrong with you?” And I was like, okay, so just—
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: Yeah, okay, because I want to pivot to social media in just a minute. But let me try to summarize some of what you said, that VR has its uses, but in fact it has yet to have the— what they call the killer app, where everyone has to go to VR to see and experience this thing that everyone just has to do, rather than just see a movie in VR or play your video game in VR or these other things that are just a transposed experience as opposed to a completely new experience like your 4D child.
JARON LANIER: You currently can’t go into commercial VR and change into a different kind of animal or become a shared creature with other people. I make this kind of jewelry. I can’t design these shapes in VR, which is insane in 2026. It’s insane that I can’t do this in VR. So look, in a way, VR doesn’t exist yet. Like just the most basic apps— the hardware is getting there, but the software has not been born yet.
Social Media Addiction and the Dangers of VR
GARY O’REILLY: Something Jaron said about Meta and them thinking about developing VR as a social media tool. If I’ve got that wrong, please correct me. We’re looking at a company that, as we sit here in April 2026, has just been found liable in a lawsuit for social media addiction. That sounds so, so wrong, turning VR into something that has an addictive element to it. So I’d like Jaron’s thoughts on that, if at all possible.
JARON LANIER: Yeah, this was something all of us in the VR world warned about from the early days, that it could be turned into an addictive medium, definitely.
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: So you saw it coming?
JARON LANIER: Oh, everybody saw it coming. Okay. No, listen, all right, look, if you want to talk about seeing it coming— one of the very, very first books about computers ever, maybe the first one, was by Norbert Wiener, 1950, and it was called The Human Use of Human Computers. And it was essentially about how the most important thing about computers is how they could automate behaviorist algorithms to change people, to manipulate people, and that since they would eventually be networked— he has a thought experiment in there about people walking around with little radio-connected devices that would go to a central computer. So we’re three-quarters of a century ago, and how dangerous this would be. And he thinks of it as an extinction level event that we have to start foreseeing and avoiding. 1950. Okay, so everybody knew. Nobody can say they were— everybody knew.
And I’ve been writing warnings about this thing for— I don’t know, my first major thing about social media and how bad it could be was ’92. If anybody wants to look it up, it’s called “Agents of Alienation,” about how software agents could f * with you.
NEGIN FARSAD: Is the lawsuit going to fix any of this? Like Gary mentioned the lawsuit. What do you think of it?
JARON LANIER: I think we’re in a moment of great chaos where it’s very hard to predict, even harder than usual to predict things. So the outcome of upcoming elections both here and elsewhere will be important to what happens. Right now, the population in general is very uncomfortable with the tech in