Reema Moussa  0:00  
From the Internet Law and Policy Foundry, this is the Tech Policy Grind podcast. Every week, our fellows chat with leaders in the technology and internet law and policy space on recent developments and exciting topics such as privacy, internet governance, cybersecurity, tech legislation, and more. I'm your host, Reema Moussa, and I'm a member of the fourth cohort of Foundry Fellows. The Foundry is a collaborative organization for law and policy professionals who are passionate about disruptive innovation.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  0:44  
Hi, my name is Dyllan Brown-Bramble and I am part of the fourth class of Foundry Fellows. This is a recording of our Metaverse 101 Live Webinar, where I was joined by Joel Scharlat, Director of Operations for the Cyber Bytes Foundation and co founder of XR Village, Cali Schroeder, Global Privacy Counsel at EPIC, and Chris Riley, Senior Fellow at R Street to discuss the basic who, what, when, where, why and how the Metaverse. This webinar was the first in the series of Metaverse events, we're having an anticipation for the Third Annual Policy Hackathon, which will take place virtually from October 14th to 16th, and will be all about the Metaverse. Applications to participate in this Hackathon are open and will be open until September 23rd. We're also hosting a student recent graduate Writing Competition, which will be accepting entries until September 16. You can find more information about our Hackathon and writing competition on our website at www.ILPfoundry.us. We hope you'll participate and that you enjoy this discussion. 

All right, everyone. Welcome. Welcome. Welcome to Metaverse 101, the Foundry's first event in our Metaverse series. Just for a little background for those watching. The Foundry is a collaborative organization for internet law and policy professionals who are passionate about disruptive innovation. Fellows are early career policy innovators such as myself, I like to think I'm an innovator, passionate about technology and responsible for planning, execution and substance of all of our Foundry initiatives. This event is the first in a series leading up to our Hackathon, which will be taking place on October 14 to 16 where we will ideate things about the Metaverse. This Hackathon will be our third one. Applications to participate opened about a week ago and will be open until September 23rd. In addition to the Hackathon, we are also hosting hosting a writing competition where you can win a prize of up to $1,500. I mean, I will drop a link to our website where you can find more information about both of those, and I hope you will all join. But with that all being said I can jump in and get started. Let me introduce our three panelists. First, we have Joel Scharlat, who is the Director of Operations for the Cyber Bytes Foundation, the CEO of IVEA Consulting and one of the co-founders of the XR Village. Then we have Chris Riley, I want to point out you know, but I don't know if the orientation is the same for viewers. We have Chris Riley, who's a Senior Fellow at R Street. And we have Calli Schroeder, who's Global Privacy Counsel for EPIC, which is the Electronic Privacy Information Center. So the thing that brought us all together today is the Metaverse if you have a computer if you're on the internet, if you're on Twitter, you've seen the word Metaverse over and over again, and you may or may not know what it means. I think sometimes the people writing about it don't necessarily know what it means, but I will leave that shade for another time. So I think the first question is just the softball. What is the metaverse when we're talking about the metaverse? What are we talking about?

Joel Scharlat  3:37  
Sure. You want me to go first? So and actually I thank you. So I really appreciate the opportunity to be here. This question, I love this question. Because I'm, I have a very different answer than most people. You know, everyone will throw out that hey, the term Metaverse was coined by Neil Stevenson. And yes, it was right. And you can go back into into science fiction and sort of read about what what other people thought it was. A gentleman by the name of John Smart in about the 2007 timeframe, wrote a paper or wrote a document called The Metaverse Roadmap. This was right around the time that I was writing my master's thesis, which we can talk about here in a little bit, but in it, he defines the Metaverse and, and I have yet to find another definition that actually works really well. The problem is its from 2007, nobody I don't I don't know did the internet exist in 2007? Probably not right? Like so, so I don't know that anybody can really find it or sort of looks for it. And I'm not going to give his definition but but I challenge each and every one of you to to go back and look at it and because again, in I haven't found anything that really defines it any better. I mean, they were defining augmented reality, virtual reality, mirror worlds, you know, and all the different things. It's a quadrant. I'm really just defined to try to paraphrase it, you know, it's a place that always exists, is always on, lives in perpetuity, and you can enter and experience it, you know, at any time. And so I'm gonna leave that there and it's kind of a very sort of nondescript and sort of, hopefully not non committal answer. But that's my, John Smart "Metaverse Roadmap", I challenge you to go back and look it up.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  5:35  
Love that love that. Chris? What is the Metaverse?

Chris Riley  5:38  
So I will say just as you could define the internet by talking about the cables, the connectivity, the servers, the software that runs on it, or you could define it by how people use it and how people experience it. I prefer to define the Metaverse by that latter category. So what is the Metaverse as I use that term has nothing to do with crypto or web three. It has a lot to do with XR and VR. And the reason why is that it isn't it is a future where we can replicate copies of real world lived offline experiences, through technology and through platforms. I compare it a lot to recorded music where once to hear live music, you had to go to a studio Hall and hear symphony performing. And now I can play anything from anywhere over these little earbuds and it's not the same, but it's a reproduction that offers a ton of value. And in that I see the possibility for the metaverse to offer a reproductions of the bar at the top of the Ritz Carlton in Hong Kong 150 stories up in the air without having to fly across the world. Or risk persecution.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  6:49  
Love these answers. It makes it feel so wondrous. Calli, what is the metaphor? Take us home. 

Calli Schroeder  6:57  
"Take us home" makes it sound like I've got the answer. I do not. But one of the one of the more interesting ways I saw it described was in a Wired article that was talking about for any conversation, replacing your head the word Metaverse with the word cyberspace and see how that fits. And I think that's an interesting way of thinking about it. Because broadly, you absolutely can say the Metaverse is you know, it has to do with XR technology. It has to do with the way we interact with a at least partially digital environment. But in general, I think it has much more to do with the way that we interact with different technologies that are making the structure than with the technology itself or a specific kind of technology. And I think the the level of immersion that is supposed to be intentional in that and the level of ubiquity that's supposed to be intentional in that defines what the metaverse is a little bit more than a specific type of technology, particularly as technology keeps evolving. And with it, the Metaverse keeps evolving.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  8:02  
I love these answers. It feels like I'm in the midst of three technological poets, I think the reason that the concept is so inescapable for people is like they, they don't understand what it is from, like sensory perspective, right? Like, I have someone who loves prop comedy, I have my little Oculus to the side, so I can pull it out. And like once you experience that you have an idea. You're like, okay, I have a frame of reference me whether you're thinking, playing in Horizon World or playing Pokemon Go! or have whatever your experience is, but I think people really want to get a sense of like, what does it look like? What does it feel like? So I think that's my next question. Like, if you had to describe the Metaverse as a sensory experience, what would you relay? With the understanding that all your answers just like your answers to "what the Metavers is" can be very different. And there's not necessarily a wrong answer, but just to give people that, "I can feel the Metaverse" sense. I will throw this to Chris first. We're gonna spin the order around.

Chris Riley  8:59  
I have two quick things on this. The first is I to use my recorded music analogy from earlier, the technology that we have today is with no offense intended, a basic starting point of what's envisioned for the future of this right. It is the gramophone equivalent of how we are capturing these immersive environments compared to what I think will come about in the future. From a personal experience. My my first experience here was was pre-Oculus days, I went to a VR simulator pop up near me in Walnut Creek, California. And I put on my little headset and it it visualizes you going up this elevator, and I was just standing on the carpet in the middle of a room. But the elevator door opened and it was just out into space, hundreds of feet up and there was a board in front of you. And you were supposed to walk out on that board and you saw the board extending out into space. And they put a physical board on the carpet and told me to step up on it and walk forward. And my god it was scary. Let me tell you. There is even with this rudimentary technology that we have The experience is striking and compelling and and very deeply sensory. But in some sense it's it's a it's a linear extension right from text we went to video and now we are at something beyond that.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  10:19  
Calli you want to jump in? I see you reaching for the mouse slowly.

Calli Schroeder  10:24  
Very, very smooth move I had there. Yeah, my I'll absolutely confess that I am probably the person on this panel that has the least experience in the actual metaverse. I do a lot of research on it. But I'm I'm kind of famously Luddite in my technology usage. And I, I tend to steer clear of most technology, particularly in my home, but I do try different tech sometimes. So my limited experience in the metaverse has this, it seems to me that it always has some degree of taking real life sensory experiences and imposing some level of digital reality onto that. And it can be fully immersive. And it can be something that's much more mixed like a Pokemon Go! go type thing or something along those lines, but it is trying to impose on your physical senses the impression that something that is digitally generated is a real thing that you're experiencing. Some of the things that I've seen are extremely effective at doing that it really does feel like you are in partially digitally generated world. Some of them are less successful. I've I've done one or two that I did not think were very effective. But I think that's also fairly reflective of any technology that's growing and developing and trying new things. So there's there's a range from what I've seen, but I imagine that that Joel has seen much more of that particularly in your work in the XR Village.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  12:06  
Throw it over to Joel.

Joel Scharlat  12:07  
Yeah, I appreciate that. And you know, Chris, I actually really appreciate what you were saying. And I'm going to take a guess and say you're at Stanford at the lab with or maybe if your - oh no? Okay, well, I know Stanford and that Jeremy Bailenson does a lot of that kind of stuff. But for me, it's, it's a little different for me, like I was a military aviator. We've kind of been in VR for a while. Right? Like, I mean, if you really kind of think about it, I probably have a fair amount of hours in a simulator that just replicates the real thing. And as you start to dig into it, what I really liked about Chris's comments are, and by the way, I don't use the word real world, right? Like, it's either the virtual or physical world, because at that point, when you're inside of a virtual environment, or a virtual world, what's not real about it, right? Like, I mean, what's whatever, you could get very sort of existential here and start talking about, well, what's real and, and whatnot. And the, the example I use there is, you know, if everybody sees the color blue differently, but is your blue, not real and mine is? Right, like so how do you sort of take that and, and extend that, and that's the way I sort of see it, because if you believe it's real, it's real. I mean, the thing about AR and VR, XR, in general, is it's a very personal experience. You know, some can argue that AR, you're, you're kind of sharing that with the rest of the world. But really, with VR, 100% it's a very personal experience. It's about where you are, what you're doing and how you're perceiving the world. So for me, without totally dating myself, I think my first VR experience was probably the year 1999 in a flight simulator. Right? But since then, you know, I mean, Dyllan, you and I were talking just last night, I picked up like six Varjo headsets that were donated to the foundation. And then I was kind of thinking the first time I put on a Varjo, and if you haven't put on a Varjo headset, this is not an endorsement of Varjo by any means. But holy smokes I mean, they've got a really good headset, so much so that last year at I/ITSEC, you know, they invited me to the booth and put me into a flight simulator of all things. That was nothing like the flight simulator I used in the military. I mean, it was super realistic, very, very real. But really cool in that, you know, Varjo can do what's called pass through, I could see my hands in a virtual environment, right. And at that point, now really what's real, right? There's my actual hands in a virtual, you know, in a computer generated world. So, to sort of sum that up, I would just say, look, it's a very personal experience. I think everything inside of that environment is real. Okay, if you believe it, it's real. But therein lies that's how we get to some other issues though as well, right, and we can talk about those later. But yeah, that's how I'll leave it.

Chris Riley  15:05  
Can I riff on those? I really liked them. And Calli's point made me want to call out the difference in sort of use cases and purposes for this immersive technology between creating fantastical worlds that are not possible in the physical space. I love doing my little lightsaber, judo, or do whatever it is in the Star Wars thing. And then and then recreating copies of the physical world, like the bar that I mentioned earlier, or, or hosting meetings. So and even that itself forks in the sort of possibility and use case tree between things that we could do, but we choose not to, to reduce jet fuel and contributions to climate change. So we instead do our virtual offsites with better and better immersion. Or training and simulators like flight simulators and surgery simulators and so forth. So there are a lot of these different use cases. And I think it's important to understand, depending on who you're talking to the Metaverse could be all of them. It could be specifically the sort of artificial worlds, which I think is what a lot of companies seek to define and focus it as because that's where their their business models are centered, and so forth. But I like to think about the collective set in conversations like this.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  16:15  
Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think the use cases are so varied, too. We were we were researching for this event and the Hackathon. We ran into all these Metaverse Universities that are into implementing the Metaverse into they're teaching. I was reading articles about therapy techniques, whether it's exposure therapy or therapy for post traumatic stress disorder, having great success using Metaverse technology. So this, I think it like people use the comparison between the internet as 2D and the metaverse is like the 3D internet, but there seems to be as many possibilities for the Metaverse as there is with the internet. And we're just starting to, I guess, get level one of those possibilities figured out. But I think you guys will touch on something that the ways that you touched the metaverse in your work. I know Joel mentioned a paper. Calli, shout out. I know you and Suchi just published a paper about privacy and XR I think a few days ago, I would love to hear about how all of you interact with the Metaverse in your work in your personal capacities and like what that looks like. Joel I will let you start since you XR Village. 

Joel Scharlat  17:12  
Yeah. Yeah. So the XR Village is it's a great, so the XR Village is actually a it's something I've been wanting to do for a while. We didn't just start it. And we didn't start it until just recently, really probably about less than six months ago. And we spent quite a bit of time both both Kenan and I just kind of getting ready for DEF CON and trying to do our sort of our mini launch, if you will. So it's it's a we're just starting out. The vision is there. We're still sort of filling in the blanks, if you will, you know. But But even with that said, you know, here at the at Cyber Bytes Foundation, we've got two XR labs, right. So for us, yes, it says Cyber Bytes, but really, it's all about emerging technologies. And so I've got a bunch of great XR technology in the facility, we actually have some work with NIST building natural authentication methods for AR. So and all of that is the sort of in me really kind of pushing the topic of security in XR. I've got an Infinadeck so if you've seen the movie Ready Player One, when Wade gets on and does his little warm up, run, right, like I have that exact treadmill sitting in my facility. And the point of why we have all of this is really to help people is for them to experience it. Come in, how do you like what ideas do you have? And you know, Calli, I'll tell you, I'm kind of right there with you. I we've had the treadmill for over a year, I can't tell you I've taken a step on it. And people always kind of look at me like, "Wait, are you the XR guy?" And I'm like, "Yeah, I don't need to get on it." Right. Like I've seen it work. I don't need to experience I know how to walk. Right. But I mean, the cool part is, is that it's there. We get people into it so that they can experience it. Because once that happens, then, you know, like Dyllan to your point. I mean, then the innovation happens, right? Because then particularly if you sort of prep the conversation, because we get a lot of national security folks in here. So think DHS, think FBI, secret service, DOD. And we'll we'll typically try to prep the conversation with them, you know, or at least find out kind of what they're most interested in, have that conversation with them and then put them into XR. Right? So for me, I don't I don't interact with it much except to sort of help people understand how they can use it. And then as the world has caught up to wanting to start to have the privacy and security conversation, then I start to engage a little bit more. Because that's really where my background and my interest lies. Not so much in the "Hey, I'm gonna get into XR and just go spend, you know, 12 hours watching movies or you know, playing Beat sabre." I haven't tried the Jedi one though, so I'm gonna have to try the Jedi one. You know, but yeah, it's a little weird, but I don't I don't do a whole lot in in XR.

Before I move on, I want to make sure we're keeping the audience up to speed. Just Joel, would you mind define what is AR? What is VR? What does MR. What is XR? And yeah, people just drop your questions in the Q&A at the end, I have some time for questions, but I want to make sure that the definitions are straight, so everyone can follow.

Sure. Well, well, cool. So we know that I always like going first because I get to define it right. So and then everybody else can either agree or disagree. The way I look at it XR is the blanket term. Okay, if you are really curious as to what X stands for, you can join one of two groups that can be extended, or it can be X as a variable for AR, VR, or MR. If you go with virtual reality is kind of the easiest one to explain. You put on a headset, it occludes the rest of the world means you can't see anything just like that. Once you put that on, you can't see the physical world, which means the only thing you're going to see and experience is what the developers want you to see and experience. And so it can be fantastical as Chris was saying, it could be very realistic, like a mirror world, either way it's been, it's a digital representation of something. And that's all you're really going to see. When you get to augmented reality and mixed reality, they're very closely related. AR you can see the outside world, okay, so you're gonna have some sort of see through glass or you're gonna hold up your phone, do something along those lines. But at the end of the day, you're overlaying digital information on top of the physical world. The best example I can give, there's, for anybody who drives a really cool fancy car that has a heads up display. And right, you can see your speed, you can see directions onto it, some of them are even fancy enough to put arrows on those streets. And you know, here's your turn, that's AR, so that's augmented reality. When you get to mixed reality, it's augmented reality, meaning I can see the physical world I'm overlaying digital information on top of it, but now I can interact with it. And so if you've had a HoloLens on for example, right, like I can put it's, it's, I always I love this example. I brought a HoloLens home one day, put it on, and of course, you know, my wife's, like, what are you doing? Because I'm, you know, I'm using my hands to manipulate all sorts of things. And what I was doing is I put a digital dinosaur in my kitchen. So don't tell my wife, it's still there. But there's a digital dinosaur in my kitchen. And my son put the glasses on, it was like, "Whoa, check it out." And he's doing the same thing. He's you can change its size, you can move it around, and whatever. And because he's got hand tracking, so it knows where I'm pinching and do it. It's really cool. You look ridiculous doing it, but it's actually pretty cool. So, so I'll drop those as sort of the definitions. And then if anybody wants to add or subtract, I don't own those definitions. So no harm no foul.

Any objections to those definitions? Calli?

Calli Schroeder  23:14  
No objections. Although I have come across one secret third option for the XR one, which is where the X stands for cross reality as a blanket term. But I don't think that one's as common. So that would be the really like niche group to join.

And Calli, since you're speaking would you like to tell us how you interact with the Metaverse and we'd love to hear about the article that you and Suchi wrote.

Sure, so I come at this and most tech I interact with from a privacy specific perspective because I'm a privacy attorney. So that's that's the area that I feel like I've got expertise in I am not a technologist and I am not a developer and so everything on the technical side is just me interacting with it through the lens of what does this technology do? What are the implications on privacy rights? Are those addressed in the law or in other ways? Are there better ways we should address them that sort of thing? So the paper that Suchi and I put together sushi by the way is Suchi Pahi, who is a brilliant attorney and also a very good friend was looking at XR technology taking it as the blanket term for AR/VR/MR and looking at what some of the privacy risks are, that are specific to XR or that are heightened by XR because one thing we came across is that there aren't necessarily privacy risks that exist in XR that don't exist anywhere else in a lot of cases, they already exist to some level or another in other places. But because XR is able to take so many impressions, and because XR is able to pick up on things like bystander data and because of the volume of data data it has, it's able to make fairly specific inferences, it kind of raises the risk level of already existing risks in some cases. So we put together some broad categories of risks that we saw: risk to bystanders who are picked up and XR technology, visually auditorially, or other ways; the type and volume of data that's collected, some of it is fairly sensitive data or can be used to make inferences that are fairly sensitive; ongoing accuracy and precision issues, so from that it could be one example that we had was if XR detects that you're moving in a way that indicates an injury, or you're moving a little slower, something along those lines, it may report that you are lacking some physical capabilities that way, which could be inaccurate, it could be a temporary injury that you very quickly heal from. But if inferences are made off that information, then those may still follow you even if the information wasn't right or wasn't permanent. And it's also very difficult if it's picked up a wrong impression somewhere to be able to go back and correct that information and make sure that any inferences made from it are corrected downstream. Or if it was, if the company that produced that XR was selling or sharing that information with other places, you may not be able to follow the path of all of that information and correct it and all of those other places as well. There's also the potential for misuse, that's always a risk with technology that picks up on a lot of things. And XR technology is often used in people's homes or at their workplaces. So unfortunately, it's another method through which people could could stalk one another or that domestic abusers could exert control. And then finally, we were looking at kind of special risks. So risks for already vulnerable categories of people, children, or people in the LGBTQ community or immigrants, people that are tracked more frequently. Those are really the risks that we came up with. And then from there, we were looking at current US law, not global, even though I'm the Global person, because there's way too many laws for us to look at globally. But we looked at the US legal regime, and we're trying to see whether XR technology is and the privacy risks that are inherent there are addressed in current US law. My conclusion is they are not. But my conclusion in a lot of cases is that current US laws do not adequately address developing technology and the privacy risks inherent there. So that was the big conclusion. It's a very long paper, it's 40 pages. We tried to condense it. And we wrote it over the course of two years. So it kept on expanding as the technology and the use cases were expanding. But yeah, that's that's kind of my interaction is from a very privacy focused perspective.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  28:04  
That's very interesting. And I may have to like push my headset off the table to make sure they're not watching. But I think a lot of people would argue your current US law doesn't cover privacy on the 2D Internet, so not surprised that that's the conclusion.

Reema Moussa  28:18  
We'll be right back. The Internet Law and Policy Foundry's 2022 Policy Hackathon is the Foundry's third Policy Hackathon happening this October 14 through 16. The Policy Hackathon is a three day event that brings together creative technical and policy professionals from around the world to tackle emerging and long standing problems related to the intersection of law, policy, and technology. The theme of this year's Hackathon is: Privacy, Trust and Safety in the Metaverse. Additionally, the Foundry is holding a writing competition, and a series of virtual events about all things Metaverse. For more information about the Hackathon, the writing competition, and other Hackathon related events you can visit the Foundry's website ILPfoundry.us, or our social media pages.

Unknown Speaker  29:24  
And Chris, tell us how you interact with the Metaverse in your day to day. 

Chris Riley  29:29  
I'm glad Calli went first because I think a lot of my directionality on this is similar. I'm principally a policy wonk. I work on internet governance and sort of actively engaged in this wave of coming regulations and legislative interventions that I think are necessary but at the same time are often fraught with error and mistake as well depending on which country which time which which political party is involved in and so forth. In the Metaverse context I've been focusing on the 2D Internet side, a lot on content regulation and content moderation, and I ran a multistakeholder project with R Street where we tried to get different stakeholders together to say, what exactly is the status quo? Like where are the opportunities to do more to moderate for online harm? How does this relate less remote? Like what are the boundaries of the laws we have today? Less even from the perspective of what should the law do, but more like, how do we fix the problem of making the internet better is a thing that has been motivated me for a long time. It's hard enough on the 2D internet, and it's gonna be harder as we as we move into this extended version of it. Emily Baker White has a great piece on Buzzfeed, of practical lived experiences of people who were experiencing things that feel very much like assault, as they engage online now that the contrary part of this is, you know, there's also experiments with safety boundaries where people can't get within a certain virtual distance of you. I really like this has not gotten a lot of news, but Facebook has an experiment called garbled voices, where by default, you only hear speaking from people who are connected with you in some way in this substrate. And you can like hit a button to temporarily ungarble somebody else to like, see if you want to actually listen to them or not. But there's, there's innovations in the technology that we can build to I think, make the future of this not suck and in fact, make it a really good environment for a lot of innovation and social interaction. So I come at it from largely the perspective of how do we shape the levers of governance and power around this? And in particular, what is the role of government in this space?

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  31:23  
That's really fascinating. I think especially the point about content moderation because I think the way with this third dimension of internet myths of the metaverse, there's a new dimension of what content is like, feasibly every movement you make, every head nod, every head turn, every blink, that the the VR headset or whatever captures is a new form of content that we didn't have to worry about on the 2D Internet. And so it's like, how do we moderate that we can barely keep up with content in the 2D Internet? How are we supposed to deal with that? And also, just to shout out some future events, we're going to do a trust and safety event where we'll dive a little bit deeper into some of those issues, as well as the privacy event. So stay tuned, everyone. And I think Joel, I'm gonna ask you what, what are some issues? I think Calli and Chris both talked about some of the issues that they see in the Metaverse from the perspective that they have in their work. What are some of the issues that you see from your perspective and the work that you do?

Joel Scharlat  32:13  
Yeah, I don't think they differ much from what's already been said. I mean, if we, you know, my background, and really how I kind of got started in this is when I was back on active duty, I wrote a master's thesis, while I was at the Naval Postgraduate School about how the how the how immersive environments could be used to conduct what the military calls Information Operations, right? So think about psychological operations, information, intelligence, gathering, those all kind of follow up underneath it. Because it turns out that because it's a very personal space, there's a lot of social psychological theory that can be used to, to manipulate the environment to further manipulate somebody. And then of course, you know, because it's IT, I can do things like man in the middle attacks, and all these sorts of things. So, you know, very, very different conversation when it's the military, and it's an offensive capability, potentially, but for every offense, there's a defense or should be a defense, right? And then that's where I sort of started to take a look at it from that point on and realize that, you know, look, if one I'm not the smartest guy in the room, so if I'm thinking about this, then so is somebody else. And so it really started my journey on how do I how do we protect users? Right, and, and I think the more and more I look at it, the longer I'm in this sort of environment, you know, it really becomes a little bit more of a privacy issue than, say, a security issue. Although there are also security issues, right, like we there's a paper out by I think, University of New Haven that they called it the joystick attack, where, you know, you get into VR, you set up your little, you know, your security fence, if you will, and the display is supposed to stop you right or, or open up or turn on the display, if you will. So you can see the camera view of what's around you till you don't go any farther. You're about to hit a, you know, I mean, we've all seen the funny videos that people you know, going into walls. It's funny until it's, you know, you, but even then it could be kind of funny. But you know, what happens if it's a staircase, right, like, well, they go in, and they show that they can actually get people to move around in an environment thinking they're still in a safe location, right? Extend that to AR. So if somebody's building an AR application to say help blind and low vision people across the street, right, maybe it's given them it's taking the camera, it's looking around, hey, look, there's a manhole and telling them okay, go around the open manhole. Well, what if somebody hacks into that, right? What if I change the location of that problem or that hazard right? Am I going to walk somebody into oncoming traffic? Right? Am I going to drop somebody down a hole, right? So, so there are still physical sort of security implement implications, but to Calli's point, and what Calli and Suchi were working on was, okay, there's this huge privacy thing, right? And the way I would describe it, is that the difference between web 2.0, if that's what you want to call him, web 3.0, is the fact that I'm now wearing the sensor on my head. Right? And, yes, it's a sensor that happens to have a display on, right. And, and so yes, I could use it as a display. But at the end of the day, in order for VR, or AR to work, you need data. I mean, that's the basis of AR and VR is is I need data needed about who I am, where I am, what I'm doing, where I'm looking, how fast am I walking, etc. And all that data gets translated into my environment, and how that data can then help me inside of that environment. And then so the last part I'll also say to is what I appreciate about both Chris's and Calli's comments is that it's not a no, it's a how do we make it better? Right? Because you're not going to stop technology. And there are some incredible use cases, you know, the blind app, or, you know, what we're doing right now, under a NIST grant with XRSI as a matter of fact, is how do we authenticate a user to a device, but I want to use just them. So I'm I am intentionally gathering gait, voice, biometric data that yes, can be used but there's such an upside to that, that we're willing to look at it. But then because we have the right players on the team, we're also going to look at how do we secure it? How do we collect only what we need? So I'll stop there.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  36:41  
I love that answer. And I think that that opens an important question. On one end, it's one of the issues on the metaverse, but what are some things that you're excited about on the Metaverse? Like, this is internet 3.0. And for all the problems that internet 2.0 has, you know, we couldn't be on this conversation right now if it wasn't for internet 2.0. We couldn't be writing articles or meeting our friends on Facebook or doing all these great things. So I hope that there are things about the Metaverse that excite you all, totally fine if they're not, but I'd love to hear some of the things that you're looking forward to with this technology or this world of technologies rather. 

Chris Riley  37:14  
I'll go first this time. And I wanted to add a quick thought on Joel's point that I meant to say earlier, Britain Heller has a really fantastic term for this, she wrote a paper where she fringes biometric psychogeography, which is about this collection of data about your biometrics, obviously, and the privacy risks that can spin out from unchecked unexamined use of that concerns. I am excited about this right, you can see that in some of what I've written. Some of that is that I'm a persistent optimist. Despite everything, I don't know why or how, but I'm rolling with it for as long as I can. Because I enjoy my days, I guess my work more that way. And I love this, this idea of being able to travel the world without having to leave your seat. I love the potential for equality that it can bring. And obviously there's lots of potential for abuse as well. But I mean, thinking about conversations in the modern world about about gender expression and identification issues, like you can to the extent that if we let if we build a future of the Metaverse where people can control their identity, and their experience in their existence, that means they can control their identity. And that is a really cool and really powerful thing, as well as where they go and how they show up and who they interact with and all that. So I think there is incredible potential. And it correlates with how much we give people agency and control and protection and safety in their environments and in their experiences with this, right. Like it all tracks to the touch points between the virtual world and the physical world. Greater touchpoints means greater opportunity and greater upside and greater risk that has to be balanced and mitigated at the same time.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  38:44  
Joal what are you excited about? And Calli, I'm coming for you I saw you do the little eye like "I'm not excited about anything." I'm going to get an answer from you. 

Unknown Speaker  38:56  
[Laughter]

Joel Scharlat  38:56  
I know actually I think I saw Calli go "Please don't call me please don't call me." I love everything. I love everything about XR. I mean, I I mean, I'm most excited to just see how the world changes, right? Like, I mean, yes, there are downsides. But the potential upsides are just incredible, right? I mean, and again, my perspective, I have my very unique perspective is very National Defense focus. Right. So I grew, I mean, I spent 20 years in the military. You know, that's, that's kind of where I focus on what I look at. That's my mentality. You know, we used to do things very archaically right. Like, one of my best examples is, you know, I flew helicopters. And in the Marine Corps, we love to build what are called sand caves. Okay, so all jokes aside about Marines playing in the, you know, in the sand, but we build terrain models. And so what it does is it helps us visualize, you know, where am I going to be flying? What's the mountain you know what does this mountain structure look like because I've basically recreat it in the dirt, you know, but we spend probably an entire day building this terrain model of where I'm gonna go flying. And it takes maybe two hours to brief the whole flight, it allows me to walk literally walk through, I can go, hey, here's where I'm supposed to be, here's what this is going to look like, etc. But for two hour brief, I spent 24 hours building it, and then I wipe it. And I start over, right, and I go fly my mission. The first and the other thing that I saw that I take forward to is we used to have this flight planning software, where I could actually get into a three dimensional view of that same kind of sand table. And that just blew my mind, right? Like that was just the coolest thing in the world. And now fast forward that what I hate to say is almost 20 years, right, but now I have a demo upstairs here in the facility where I can take my phone pointed at a map and an entire 3D city, that city pops up in 3D, right, it happens to be the the Port of Baltimore or the harbor, Baltimore Harbor, right? But I can go in there and I can actually look around at how tall the buildings are. Right? Like, what do they look like? Right? So from planning perspectives, and just from the ability to be able to, to see something before I do it, and whether that's the military that's medical or something else. That to me is huge, right? And now throw AI on top of it. We're gonna have, you know, AI digital assistants here that'll, you know, I'll call it in the next I don't know 5-10 years you're I think you're going to start to see you know, Clippy, remember Clippy Microsoft Clippy? Speaking for those of us old enough to remember.

Chris Riley  41:37  
That's your vision of the future Joel I have some questions. 

Unknown Speaker  41:41  
[Laughter]

Joel Scharlat  41:41  
Just a giant Clippy hanging out in your room with you.

Unknown Speaker  41:43  
[Laughter]

Joel Scharlat  41:43  
I mean, how cool would that be? Right? Like he's, I mean, flick them, you can be like to go away. But but you know, a digital assistant of some sort that's going to be able to pop up in any medium in any form. Right? And just know about you. Right? Because again, your awareness sensor in your head, right? And how much smarter can we be right? How much faster? How much more efficient can we be with all this? So other than the Clippy thing don't hold me to it. But that's that's my story. And I'm sticking to it so. And Calli, I've tried to buy you enough time to kind of 

Chris Riley  42:15  
But I think that you threw her off at the end. I think I saw a twitch there a twitch there with that like person in the room who *knows everything.* 

Calli Schroeder  42:21  
*Just the AI thing.* I was like, I don't want any I don't want *technology.* 

Chris Riley  42:25  
*Yeah.*

Calli Schroeder  42:25  
You got me. Yeah, I I obviously like I come down on things as as essentially a privacy curmudgeon, my automatic reflex is with every new technology I encountered to observe it with a sense of strong suspicions. So that's part of where I come from here. I even with that perspective, there is absolutely potential in XR technology for some some really cool things, I think there's really great potential for accessibility for a lot of people that are not able to participate in different kinds of professional or just world interactions as easily as other people, I think that could be a really great potential. We've seen some really, really cool training for surgeons, we've seen tests for architects and being able to test out new buildings and kind of see how they, how they would respond in real life scenarios. I think that there's also a lot of potential in like building new products and new designs and being able to test them in essentially a more sustainable way by being able to test them in virtual environments before having to build them and see whether there's a disaster. I think the sustainability aspect of that is really interesting as well. I do think that there's some really interesting tests for inclusion and for possibly being able to, as Chris mentioned, like, kind of test out different identities and be able to assert your identity in different ways. I can't help but look at those as also having risk because there are absolutely ways that testing out an identity if it's not done in a privacy protective way could follow you could out you could endanger you in different ways. But But potential is there for me it's always a balancing test of is the potential real or is it theoretical? And is the potential enough that it outweighs what how serious the risks are or how common or likely the risks are? I don't have an answer for that honestly. I am not at a we need to ban XR point there is other technology that I am that it should just be banned point. I'm not there with XR I think XR does have some really interesting potential, but I think it's going to be very interesting to see from both within industry whether they set guidelines and set parameters and use technology that automatically blurs or garbles or has these built in protections. If the industry is willing to do that and build carefully in this sense, I think there's some really great potential. And I think that there also probably should be some some legal requirements and protections there. Because, you know, we've seen in a lot of cases that people may start things with really good intentions or industries may start things with very good intentions, but there's always going to be someone that sees an opportunity to do something and if it's not legally blocked, then it becomes the Jeff Goldbloom. Your scientists were so busy thinking of what they could do that they didn't stop to think of if they should. So I just think there's potential and also risk.

Chris Riley  45:44  
I wanted to add, very briefly to that there's no static answer to that balance, right? Even if we were like, everything is great, the balance is in perfect place, we can't assume it'll stay that way. Right? So we need to build these like networks and communities and structures and discussions and be talking about this all the time with lots of different stakeholders and lots of Callis in the room in perpetuity. We need structural solutions that review that balance on an ongoing basis. And this is a place where I feel like I do have hope in the XR future. Particularly in contrast to AI where it's really hard to do that. And we know that it's important, but it's also really, really hard. Because there's so much money in so many trade secrets and so many things that go into the proprietary models and datasets and everything else that that make that a fundamentally hard challenge in AI that I hope is not as hard when we're talking just about XR, XR plus AI obviously its own universe, but I hope you don't mind me jumping in I wanted to add that to Calli's very important point about balance.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  46:40  
Always jump in, always add. I think I'm going to turn to some of the questions from the audience. They have a lot of great questions. And if you have more questions, please throw them in the Q&A. The first question I see it asks how the Metaverse is connected to Facebook. And I think the underlying question is who owns the Metaverse? You know, you hear about Facebook or Microsoft or all these companies that have their different versions, but who is the owner of the Metaverse?

Joel Scharlat  47:07  
Certainly not me.

Unknown Speaker  47:08  
[Laughter]

Joel Scharlat  47:08  
I don't own it. I man so I mean, what a great question. Because I think what it does is, is it it kind of highlights the you know, I don't know, I don't even know if I want to go down that route. I mean, like, Facebook, coining the, you know, changing their name to Meta, obviously a great marketing ploy. It's apparently and obviously working because everybody thinks, you know, like, Facebook owns the Metaverse. And, and of course, there's some very visceral reaction to that as well. But, you know, I mean, if you think about, like, who owns the internet? I mean, if you take that same analogy, right, nobody really does. I mean, it's an interconnected network of computers, is what the the internet is. And so if you think about it from that perspective, you know, nobody, nobody owns the Metaverse. And I don't know that I don't know that there's going to be one Metaverse to rule them all, either. I mean, I think where we eventually kind of get to is, we're gonna have to come up with interoperability standards, okay, we're in the, like, the VHS versus beta, if I can even make that analogy, right. But like, you know, what's going to win out? I mean, we're gonna have to have a set of standards where, you know, if you really want anything to take off my meta, my avatars got to work well in this environment, and that environment, right, I have to be able to port them. And so what that means is we get to, we get to those standards. Right now, there's a lot of standards bodies out there, so I'm not sure we're gonna get there anytime soon. But nobody owns it. I don't think anybody's ever gonna own it. And if they do, I don't think that's a good day for any of us.

Calli Schroeder  48:51  
Yeah I think conceptually, it's very hard to own a concept and I think meta, the Metaverse is much more of a concept and way of interacting with things than it is a unique individual space. As Joel said, I think that what we've seen developing so far seems to be kind of a bunch of individual siloed Metaverses like little Metaverse islands that are each being developed by different companies in different ways. I do think it's possible, I guess, if the companies choose to to make those different environments interoperable, I think that that it at least from many of the statements I've heard is a goal to be able to kind of transfer Metaverse assets from spot to spot. So I think if that happens, that's going to require some level of transparency between how these different Metaverses and how they operate. And so there there would need to be some sort of agreement framework principles built into that kind of interactive structure. So there could be I think, universal standards, but I don't know for sure whether it's even possible for there to be an owner of the Metaverse as a whole.

Chris Riley  50:04  
So just to add to what Joel and Calli have said, which of course I agree with, I am a huge believer in interoperability. I've been writing about that, in particular for a very long time. It's hard, very hard to achieve. I very much believe interoperability is the future, it will be smoother and easier, the more that it gets done voluntarily, rather than at government mandate, because but I think it will come one way or the other eventually. I like, I like to compare this to social media in the sense that when we first started having social media, nobody would ever have asked the question "who owns social media?" because obviously that question was nonsensical at the time, and it should be nonsensical about the metaverse, but it's not because that's not the way the internet is these days, right. But but in reality, nobody owns the Metaverse, right? We have to separate out the platforms and the content that's on those platforms. And we have platforms that have their own universes of content that are starting to build up a little bit. You've got the horizon worlds, when you've got what Roblox is doing. You've got what fortnight and Epic Games are doing, all of which are very rich and very separate content, environments and ecosystems, right? It could be over time, that one will grow more than another. I don't think we'll ever be at a place where there is one dominant Metaverse company or platform in the same way we don't really have one dominant social media like very least, you have the Facebook's the Twitter's and the Tik Toks that serve different audiences and have different kinds of things on them. You will always have different Roblox people and Fortnight people and Horizon Worlds-y type people in this future as well. But I too hope for interoperability to prevent there from being a close tie between these platforms and the content that builds on top of them, because then we will really get a rich, open playing field for innovation and experimentation.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  51:41  
Amazing. Another question we got is what opportunities exist in the Metaverse for disenfranchised persons? Those who cannot access these technologies because of cost, lack of exposure, etc? I think this question is getting at how will the Metaverse affect the digital divide issue?

Chris Riley  51:59  
Calli spoke to a lot of this earlier. So I'll reiterate to what she said which built on a little bit of what I said, but I will flag connectivity is still a problem. Right? Like people who are connected over smartphones and slow connectivity and maybe don't have power are not going to magically be able to catch up when suddenly they need much, much faster connectivity, and much much more powerful devices. So it's it's I don't know how much it's going to change that conversation. I would like to believe that at least once you get connectivity and devices, it can change it a fair bit. But that's that's not still the big connectivity gap.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  52:34  
So do you feel like the solution it's like an infrastructure investment, like just getting the devices when people say like what, I guess if you could fix it. You're President Chris Riley, with a Senate and House that agree with you on everything? What would you do?

Chris Riley  52:46  
There's a lot of opportunity in the US to address some forms of inequality of connectivity, access and opportunity through this because we have very good electricity and very good internet infrastructure. Similarly for other countries, but I when I think of equity and accessibility issues, I think of the the so called majority world, which is, you know, not us. And there I think it's not about getting devices out. It's not about getting content creation opportunities out except in certain urban pockets. It's about fundamental infrastructure.

Calli Schroeder  53:19  
Yeah, the global digital broadband issue is going to keep being an issue with Metaverse and then cost access and price accessibility is a huge thing as well. We've seen in some areas of the world that there's companies that will kind of take over building infrastructure in places but they do it in exchange for having a huge monopoly in that area so that other competitors can't come in. And then they're also able to, to price set and to control information that goes through those channels. And that's that's an additional problem that I think will very likely carry over to accessibility issues when it comes to access to the metaverse. I also think that there's the additional factor of there are certain industries where I think it's going to be more accessible than others. There's there's workplaces that I think will want their employees to use Metaverse technology and have access to testing things there. And so some people may have access through their work or through their employment. And then that goes into even deeper issues about who has the opportunity to get educated to the level where they're able to take those jobs and how do people get hired into those roles and what additional barriers are in place there? So I think it's it's not necessarily specific to the Metaverse, but it does kind of reveal some ongoing societal issues that we have about access and who who gets to access these new testing grounds?

Joel Scharlat  54:49  
And the only thing I'll add without making it too sort of dystopian I guess is that you know, the infrastructure is one hurdle. The devices are yet another right because They're very they're, they're, they're specific, right? Like, I mean, yes, I can do AR on my phone, but it's not the same experience as a Google Glass or Microsoft HoloLens. Well, Microsoft HoloLens right now it's $3,500. Right? Like, I mean, those Varjos that I just got are probably in the $6,000 range, right? Like, I mean, who, who can afford that? Okay, now I get a device in your hand. Let's say we fixed all that. Now, you still got a content issue, right? Like I mean, it's and and that I think, will solve itself over time. We're sort of in this chicken and egg time period where well, I don't have enough devices out there. Well, that's because I don't have content, I don't have content because there's no devices out there, right. And we're sort of playing this little, little flip flop game here. But that will solve itself over time. But then even if you work backwards, again, specialized hardware, and then we still have to get the infrastructure in place.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  55:52  
Those prices hurt my spirit, a little bit I'm not gonna lie. 

Unknown Speaker  55:55  
[Laughter]

Joel Scharlat  55:57  
Mine too.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  55:59  
The next question is how can the Metaverse help to improve with environmental and health issues that we're dealing with nowadays? So maybe the pandemic maybe global warming? Are there any predictions that you guys have on how the Metaverse can be used to counteract some of these?

Joel Scharlat  56:14  
And I'm gonna I just I'll jump in here first, because you know, the first thing I had a really good answer, and I'll tell you what that was, and then I'm gonna tell you why I want to what sort of concerns me is, I have a, I have an application in the facility right now, where you put on a pair of HoloLens, and I can see every wireless signal in the building, right? So really super cool, where I can see the strength of a Wi Fi of a cellphone signal, whatever that is, Bluetooth, I can see it. Now, if you take that and you just sort of go, hey, I can report pandemic levels, or I can report sickness levels and those kinds of things. So there's the potential there for that. Why I almost didn't want to answer that was because man, the the surveillance state of knowing who's sick and where and why, like, I will tell you right away, no, thank you. I will throw any headset away. I don't care how expensive it is that tries to do that. Right. Like, I don't need to be tracked to that level. You know, but but for those that well, I'm not, I don't I don't even want to be tracked to that level. Right. But that's the kind of the first thing I thought of is there are ways that you can start to do that. Now. Can you do it with a little more privacy in mind? Maybe. But again, I certainly won't be signing up for that study.

Chris Riley  57:28  
I would, I would really emphasize the mitigation opportunities, rather than the detection opportunities, just to put it into sort of a cybersecurity framework, right? Like the the the benefits of this for environmental and health concerns are less, in my mind, how can we understand what's going on with the environment? Or what's going on with disease? But rather, how can we make it easier for people to stay in a place where they can be safe, if they might be sick? How can we reduce the number of jet flights that are taken for in person conferences by making the experience of virtual participation richer, richer, right? We have learned so much over the past two and a half years of what we really don't need to get on a plane to do. We're going to learn a lot more when COVID-29 hits, sorry, but we're going to have more things like this. And we're going to lose even less of a gap. And just more and more things will reduce the need for climate change producing gas outputs and unnecessary health risks.

Calli Schroeder  58:21  
Yeah, one one interesting point there is that I think the difference in responses between both Joel and Chris point out the huge range of potential there is with XR in this space and potential both for good and for very risky applications. And I think that that's something we have to consider with when we look at all of these questions, I think it's absolutely fair to ask the question of whether XR can be helpful in the wake of dealing with health issues, addressing health issues in different ways, mitigating the effects of being stuck inside in a pandemic, that sort of thing? Or mitigating environmental effects versus how much power does it take to power the XR universe? And what does that do environmentally? I think that there's there's questions on both sides for all of those issues. You know, I'm grateful for some of the developments we've made digitally I work out of Colorado, my office is based in DC I literally wouldn't have my job if it were not possible for me to attend virtually all of these things that are happening around the world. I for now, Zoom's great set with Zoom, I'd love to not have to make an avatar of myself. But I think that it's it's fair to say that there's enormous potential for both good and very, very risky practices in all of these ways. So coming at the questions of things like health issues, or like environmental issues or like inclusivity and accessibility with the perspective that there is no unlimited good but also everything is not awful. and trying to make sure that you're striking a balance and keeping that in mind as you're developing things I think is incredibly important.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  1:00:06  
So we're nearing time. I'm going to ask one quick last question before we close out. I'll do like a lightning round, lightning round style question. What do you see for the future of the Metaverse? What are your metaverse predictions? We have three different people with different backgrounds who face the Metaverse in different ways. And I will not write these down and come back to in five years and say, "This is what you said." So don't think that that's gonna happen. But what is the Metaverse future look like from your perspective?

Joel Scharlat  1:00:37  
One word: Clippy.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  1:00:40  
Huge Clippy all over the room. Really excited and terrified, actually.

Joel Scharlat  1:00:47  
No, I mean, I think, huge upside. I appreciate everybody's opinion on this on this panel here. Because again, what it shows is it's not it's there's no "nos" here. It's all about how do we just how do we make sure that we allow the technology to advance but in a very safe, ethical, secure way? So I'm excited.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  1:01:14  
Chris, Calli what are your thoughts?

Calli Schroeder  1:01:19  
Yeah, for predictions for the future, I think that this, like many other technologies is not going to reverse. I think that it's going to keep developing and it's going to keep proliferating, and it's going to spread into even more industries. You know, when we think about the Metaverse, a lot of times people think just of entertainment. That's not where it is even right now. It is entertainment, but it is also developing into into healthcare and into schools and into workplaces. And it's spreading to a ton of different areas. I think it's going to continue to spread. And I think the the real question is how do we react to that spread? And do we act to make sure that it's spreading in a responsible, ethical and intentional way, rather than kind of letting it grow like mad and then trying to prune it back, which is very difficult to do from a privacy perspective. And I think from a technology perspective, as well, because once you know, there's a capability, it's very hard to just say, and we're never going to use it again.

Chris Riley  1:02:19  
So adding to both of those, which I think are both very, very good points. I will channel my deep inner optimist and say I think that cooler economic climate that we anticipate for the next few years, coupled with the increasing interest of government regulators, and the increasing awareness of the public, it took so so very long for there to be even the most minimal amount of public attention to privacy harms, this XR world is going to make that possibility of harm, I think, a lot more palpable. So I'm hoping that we'll have a lot more conversations like this. And like this idea about what how do we strike the right balance? And how do we get the right perspectives into shaping this technology as it grows, I think it absolutely will grow. And I think in five years, we will have more virtual experiences that let us do more interesting things. We're not going to be in "Ready Player One" we're not going to live a majority of our lives in a virtual lived environment, not even not even close. But I do hope for a slow but steady development of technology and a parallel slow but steady development of an understanding of what responsibility looks like in that space, both for the platforms and for the users of those environments.

Dyllan Brown-Bramble  1:03:23  
Amazing answers amazing panel. So with that, I'm going to close this out. Thank you so much to all our panelists, Joel, Chris, Calli. I really appreciate you taking the time. Chris and Calli, like double thank you for subbing in really last minute when an original panelist couldn't make it. I want to thank one of our partners, the Decentralized Future Council for helping us prepare this and the Metaverse Hackathon. A recording of this event will be available later today. Maybe tomorrow. Depends on how fast I am, on our YouTube page. To learn more about the Foundry, please visit our website or socials. Our website is ILPfoundry.us. Our next event will be Privacy in the Metaverse, which will be next Thursday, and will be hosted by a different Foundry Fellow. So please join us you can find information about that on our Eventbrite page. And as I mentioned before, this is the beginning of a series to prepare for our Hackathon, which will take place from October 14th to 16th. So please go to our website to learn more about that and our writing competition. And we hope you will join us for the rest of the events in the series and for the Hackathon. So with that, thank you all so much and have a great day. 

Chris Riley  1:04:24  
Thanks, Dylan. Thanks Calli. Thanks Joel. 

Joel Scharlat  1:04:26  
Alright thank you. Bye. 

Calli Schroeder  1:04:28  
Thanks, everyone.

Reema Moussa  1:04:28  
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Tech Policy Grind podcast. Be sure to check out the Foundry on LinkedIn and Twitter. And if you enjoyed this episode, leave us a review and give us a five star rating. It really helps out the show. If you're interested in supporting the show, reach out to us at foundrypodcasts@ILPfoundry.us. You can find our email in the show notes as well. You can see the full show notes and download the episode transcript for every episode on our website ILPfoundry.us/podcast. The Tech Policy Grind podcast comes out every Thursday. See you next time. The Tech Policy Grind podcast was created by the Fellows at the Internet Law and Policy Foundry. It's produced and edited by me Reema Moussa, with support from the incredible Foundry Fellows. Special thanks to Lama Mohammed, our Social Coordinator, and Allyson McReynolds our Accessibility Coordinator, for all their help with this episode.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai