Danfung Dennis has an ambitious vision for the potential of virtual reality, and it’s one of the most radical ones that I’ve come across. He believes that VR can be used as a tool to cultivate compassion through having an embodied experience of witnessing suffering within VR. He says that the process of witnessing suffering can be used as a type of advanced Buddhist mind training to focus your attention, contemplate on your visceral reactions, and grow compassion through taking action. These brief VR experiences have the potential to impact day-to-day consumer decisions that people make, which can taken collectively could radically change the world.
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I know that this is possible is because I had one of the most powerful reactions I’ve ever had from watching Condition One’s Fierce Compassion / Operation Aspen VR experience. This live-action, cinéma vérité VR experience shows animal rights activists breaking into a factory farm to perform an open rescue and document the horrendous living conditions of Chicken in cages. It’s a guided tour of the many untreated heath ailments and barbaric conditions that are common in these types of industrial-scale factory farms. Having a direct embodied experience and bearing witness to this suffering had such a powerful impact on me that I vowed to never purchase anything other than cage-free Chicken eggs.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJAdENJS-d4
Condition One has also been producing guided meditations that are designed to be watched after experiencing some of their other animal rights experiences. Factory Farm is the most graphic and intense experience I’ve ever had in VR in that it shows the slaughter of two pigs as they go through a factory farm in Mexico. After witnessing this horrific scene in VR, I can why Paul McCartney once said, “If slaughterhouses had glass walls, everyone would be vegetarian.”
Condition One has also been tackling larger issues like global warming in VR> They produced the Melting Ice companion VR piece to An Inconvenient Sequel, which is a follow-up film to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The An Inconvenient Sequel film lays out all of the latest science as told through the personal narrative of Al Gore, and the VR experience doesn’t attempt to delve into that much depth of the science. Dennis pulled back a lot of the narrative and story elements and just focused on trying to create an embodied experience of transporting you to locations of melting ice as large chunks fall off the side of cliffs, the cracking sound of steady dripping, but also entire rivers of melting glaciers cutting through sheets of ice.
One of the challenges with complex topics like global warming is that it’s very difficult to provide a singular embodied experience in VR that tells the entire story of the systemic causes of global warming. Standing on melting ice that’s disappearing at an accelerated pace due to global warming is as good of a experience as any, but it’s still difficult to tell that entire story within the confines of VR. So rather than convey the science of it all, Dennis decided to take a more contemplative and Zen approach of creating an sparse experience with limited narration in order to cultivate a direct experience with the sounds and visuals of a rapidly changing part of the planet.
Dennis believes that VR has the potential to be tool that can inspire humans to cultivate compassion by taking actions that relieve suffering. He’s interested in creating VR experiences that allow us to witness the suffering in the world, and that ultimately help us to expand our sphere of compassion beyond just our immediate friends, family, and pets to eventually include all sentient beings and the planet earth. These embodied virtual reality experiences stick with us in a deeper way, and become a part of our memories as we are making decisions of either continuing to participate in a system of violence or choosing more sustainable and ethical options that cultivate compassion and takes into consideration the impact on the next seven generations.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. So on today's episode, I'm going to be talking about what I think is maybe one of the most radical ideas that I've come across in virtual reality. And it's this. You could have an embodied experience within virtual reality that changes you so much that it actually changes the types of decisions that you make day to day. And in aggregate, those decisions change the world. I think that is the crux of some of the biggest challenges that we face as a civilization, is that some of these actually amount to just small decisions that we make every day. And if that you can connect the dots between the big picture and your individual actions, then you can change the world. And that's what Danfeng Dennis is doing with Condition 1. And I say this because it actually happened to me at Sundance this year. There was an experience where I was taking on a virtual tour of a factory farm that showed the suffering of chickens in cages. And after I had this experience, it actually changed my consumer habits of deciding what types of eggs I bought at the grocery store. And so on today's episode, we're going to be covering this concept of using virtual reality as a tool to cultivate compassion and to witness suffering, and that through that witnessing of suffering, you're able to expand your sphere of compassion to include more and more beings, more and more animals, as well as the Earth. And we'll be talking about the challenges of trying to cover a complex topic like global warming, where it's actually very difficult to give somebody a singular embodied experience of global warming, which is part of the challenge of how do you tell the story of something that is so complex and how do you get it into somebody's body so that they can take action and turn their empathy into compassionate acts. So, we'll be covering all of that on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you and the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Danfeng happened at Park City, Utah during Sundance Film Festival. That was happening from January 19th to 29th, 2017. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:56.972] Danfung Dennis: I'm Dan Fung-Dennis. I'm the CEO and founder of Condition One. We've been premiering two films. The first is Melting Ice. It's a nine-minute experience in which you travel with Vice President Al Gore to the ice caps of Greenland, and you experience firsthand the devastating consequences of our warming climate, watching massive ice calve off of the glaciers and crash into the rivers below. these torrents of brown glacial melt rushing by in front of you and even standing on a small little tiny iceberg as it's rocking and crumbling and melting and you really get this visceral sense that this beautiful frozen landscape is disappearing and vanishing before your eyes.
[00:03:44.509] Kent Bye: Yeah, I saw both the Inconvenient sequel and then I saw Melting Ice. And so I felt like I got an overview of what is happening in the context and everything. And then when I put into Melting Ice, if I had watched that independently, just on its own, I don't necessarily know if I would have gotten it as much as I got it after seeing the film. So I'm just curious to hear your thoughts in terms of this type of experience, if it's meant to be shown beforehand, afterwards,
[00:04:12.905] Danfung Dennis: It is meant to be a companion piece to the Inconvenient sequel, but really it's a very different experience. The feature film goes into the science, the overwhelming evidence that climate change is happening, and it's happening quicker than any of the predictions. Whereas our piece, we approached it very differently in that we knew that the science would be covered so we had the freedom to just bring you there and put you as much as possible into Al Gore's perspective and see this world through his decades of experience of covering this important issue And so the idea was to create a meditative experience, a quiet, reflective space in Greenland on the ice in which you could just be there and feel this ice crumbling, melting, dripping, and move with it as it flowed from Greenland down into these moulins, these giant cavernous holes in which this blue water rushes into and it goes thousands of feet down and then comes out at the bottom. at the terminus and these huge massive pieces of ice breaking off and drifting off into the ocean where they collapse into even smaller pieces of ice and all the way to Florida where this rising sea levels are impacting communities already. And so it's meant to inspire or invoke some quiet reflection in which you think about this issue not as an abstract science issue of carbon parts per million or degrees centigrade or Fahrenheit rise and more of what is happening to our Earth. What does this change look like and what does it feel like and how am I participating in it? And each and one of us are part of this economic system. We're all producing carbon emissions from all of our activities and it hopefully will make you look inward and see if there are actions that you can take in your own life. to act, to reduce your own carbon emissions and try to become an environmental steward. So it's a very different approach than the feature film and one that I think takes people deeper in the story in a visceral way.
[00:06:33.586] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think one of the challenges with a piece like this is that I have no idea what normal looks like in these areas, right? So I don't know if this is just turning into summer, this is just a normal part that happens every year. So in the film, Inconvenient Sequel, Al Gore is talking to these scientists looking at the changing level of the glacier relative to many hundreds of years or maybe even millennia of history. and the dimension of time and things changing over time. And there's a film called Chasing Ice, which tried to show that, and the filmmakers of that were actually involved with Chasing Coral, which is a very similar dilemma that they were trying to show the bleaching effects of how quickly it's happening and how the coral reefs are dying. That they needed the time dimension to really show that and so I'm curious like because you're just kind of thrown into this iceberg Out of context. It's like to me that was what was going to my mind. It was like, okay, this is beautiful I've never been here, but I can't necessarily connect the dots to say okay.
[00:07:30.370] Danfung Dennis: This is because of global warming I think that's part of the problem of tackling this immense issue is is that it's happening at such a scale that it's hard for us as humans to perceive it on a one-on-one basis. I mean, we're having extreme weather events and you can be caught up in that. You can notice that the summers are warmer and maybe the winters are colder or things aren't changing. But to really grasp the scale of this, no one can really comprehend that. And so it's a challenge to really convey the urgency of it. And the consequences are so grave that this is really a moral issue. about our responsibility to future generations. It's really, we're okay, you know, for the next 10, 20 years we'll be okay, but it's really the children and the grandchildren that come after us that they're going to be left in a very different planet. One that potentially is facing extreme drought, extreme refugee crisis, and instability and conflict. If there really are a hundred million people in coastal cities that will have to move rapidly, that could cause a complete collapse. And so it's hard to convey that magnitude of an issue when it's not happening right in front of us. It's something in the future. It's something that we're getting the warning signs and they're loud and clear. but to convey it on a personal level of just how grave this threat is, is a real challenge. And I think VR is a way to make it personal, to make it something that is right there before you're facing those extreme weather climes, before you're having to run out of your house from a forest fire. These warnings we can bring from the front lines, areas of the earth that are facing the most extreme, impacts before it comes to us, just to give us a precursor of this is what the world is going to look like. So it is something that I think can put you there and have a direct experience of this collapsing space. And we did experiment with infographics, with lines that showed the height of the ice in the glacier. And you can see from the moraines the ice has retreated significantly. But it took away from that contemplative experience in which you're just left to think and to feel. And it was drifting more towards the science, which we knew was going to be covered very extensively in the feature film. So we even actually stripped down a lot of the narration as well, which is another way to convey that information. And we found it was stronger to just have these landscapes and really push the audio. and really heighten the experience by listening to the ice. And I had no idea that this landscape was so acoustic. It's constantly moving and changing and shifting and cracking and melting. And there's even these Rice Krispie sounds of snapping and crackling that was so surprising. And it feels like the earth is changing rapidly. And so even without the context of the science, if you haven't seen the feature film, you still come away with this feeling of This is a changing landscape, and maybe I don't know exactly the carbon and the number of degrees centigrade, but obviously something is happening here. This is a powerful force, and I felt it first when I was in Greenland standing next to this brown river where the glacial melt was streaming down the landscape in a river about two miles wide. filled with silt and it narrowed in to this chasm was maybe 30 feet wide and the force of that water being funneled through this rock chasm was deafening and you could feel a vibration of this churning and roiling pass through you and as I was standing there just felt that The power of nature is so much greater than all of us, us little humans. And when this gets to a point where it's irreversible, and some say we've already come to this point where the damage is now, we're in mitigation mode. But the force of nature is immense. And we won't be able to just get out of this through engineering seawalls. We have to respect the earth. We have to realize that we have to live in harmony with it and it is something that we have to protect and conserve because we only have this one earth. It's our one home for all of us.
[00:12:22.760] Kent Bye: Yeah, the experience that I saw this year that I think was probably the most significant that came out was Google Earth VR. And I had this direct experience of the overview effect of being able to go to the earth and see the boundaryless existence of it. And you know, I only had a first person perspective of it, or I would look at an abstracted map of it, but I was never able to just stand on a street and fly up like a drone or a helicopter might be able to and to be able to just see the unity of the earth and The phrase common grounds took a whole new meaning that we all live on this earth as our common ground and that there's some connection between place and memory that we have and that there's something that's really special and unique about how VR is able to take you to these places. And I think it was a really canny insight to not have too much people in the way. But there's a little bit of a dilemma, which is that I've watched the film first and I saw Al Gore talk to the scientists and he's going out and he's getting an explanation as to the meaning behind what is happening. And I think that layer of meaning is really important. And that, I think that you're on to something very important, which is that voiceover doesn't really work in VR. I just think it breaks presence because this omniscient voice coming in, it's keeping you from actually being present. So allowing you to be really present there. So I noticed you had a scene where Al Gore was walking in and the scientist was pointing a thing, but then I was thinking, you know, this is actually probably be a better scene in 2D. There's not much. That's really adding and, you know, but I appreciate that it was live, but I find that, um, some of the guided tour approaches of people being there live on camera, giving a direct transmission of what's happening in the context. I know you've, you've experimented that as well, but with this piece with melting ice, I'm curious to hear your thoughts about like, as a standalone piece without any additional context, is there a way to tell that story?
[00:14:10.149] Danfung Dennis: Yeah. And I agree, narration is not a technique in VR that is very effective. It's where we're at right now while we explore this medium, and it is a way to convey information. And we tried our best to make it the least intrusive by recording it with in-ear binaural microphones, so small mics that sit in the ear canal. It took a little while to convince Al Gore to do this but he was up for it and it gives you a resonant sound of his voice in your head because it's using the shape of your ears and the sides of your head and a left and right channel. to make it sound less like this voice is coming from the space around you or a place in this space, but originating from in between your two ears. And this, I think, gave it a quality of you're listening to his thoughts. And there's just one scene where he's standing next to this blue river on the glacier, and he's not saying anything to the camera, but you hear his voice. And so you start to step into his head. And for the rest of the film, you don't see him, but you do still hear his voice. So it was a trying to transition from here's Al Gore with the scientists doing the science to here's something a little quieter. Maybe this is what he's thinking and then now he's gone and now just a few sparse phrases from him but the rest is mostly sound of the ice. So really was careful and judicious in how much narration we use and really just as a way of a thread to get you into a quiet place. And the scenes are very long. They're 45 seconds or longer. And some of them are just dripping ice in an ice cave. And there's not a lot, maybe a little bit of water lapping up against you. And there's time to reflect. And the beauty pulls you in. It's a stunning landscape. But as you think about this landscape and how it's disappearing and it's this temporary transient place that will soon be entirely gone, the scientists up there were taking bets on not if, but when all of this ice would be gone in the summer. And it was just 10, 15 years before all of this beautiful, majestic natural landscape will be gone. And so I think there is this time to reflect inward, to think about this issue from a very different point where so often our media, it's this shouting match of points of view and it's very hard to bridge and we're so divided right now. It's hard to cross this bridge and say, can you see it from this perspective? And so VR, I think, is very effective in that instead of these shouting matches that they have on television of trying to convince someone of someone else's point of view, it's saying, come in. I'm inviting you into this place. And I'm not going to bombard you with thoughts. Just be here and see for yourself and decide for yourself if this is something that is really happening. So I think it's a different approach and it's very much needed at this point. It's so critical and so urgent that we need other forms and other mediums and other techniques and ideas. The problems are so complex that the approaches have to be just as innovative. They need a way to break through. So we're evolving how we tell stories in this medium, but starting to come at it from a place of, instead of giving you just an overwhelming experience and maybe feeling despair at this phenomenon that's just so much greater than ourselves and how can I as one person even contribute, to something that is internal, where I am choosing to do something, I am choosing to be a steward, to be someone that cares about the future generations. And it will take all of us, every single one of us, to act individually to solve this problem. And so I think it will take a mass medium, a new mass medium, and I believe it's VR, that will help solve these problems.
[00:18:11.040] Kent Bye: Yeah, in watching an Inconvenient sequel, you know, there's a lot of science, there's a lot of things that are activating your brain and trying to give enough evidence, and more of a abstracted way, because it's, like you said, it's difficult to really show, you know, the approach that the Inconvenient sequel took. One thing that they are doing is that they're focusing on Al Gore as a human, as a person, as his story, his relation to this topic, and There's sort of that thread, so that level of storytelling that that has, I think makes it an effective way of actually receiving some of the science. And then, you know, I don't necessarily think the strength of VR is to go in and do more science. I think it's actually more about cultivating a sense of embodied presence. Even if you can't have your body there, it's almost like you already have to have a sense of the meaning behind what's happening. like Melting Ice, a VR experience, is not going to change any minds. But once you know the reality of it, I feel like it's a thing for people to go in and start to cultivate this sense of compassion and empathy for the Earth and to really become present to the reality of it and to have a physical, virtualized experience of global warming in this experience so that then they can take that out into the world.
[00:19:21.468] Danfung Dennis: And you're hitting right on some of the themes that I've been thinking about for a long time, and that is using VR as a tool to cultivate compassion and to promote this feeling of unity, that we're all here together, we're all facing this together, and we are on this one Earth, and we are this one species, 7.8 million other species on this planet, and we have a responsibility for all of us to work together and to collaborate to find solutions to this. And so I think VR has this incredible potential to cultivate and I think that's an important word is cultivating is something where you have a feeling inside of you and you're able to grow that feeling. And I approach this from a perspective of mental training, that we can actually become more focused, we can have higher levels of concentration, we can operate at peak performance levels, and we have states of consciousness that we can access to really push ourselves forward in our creative and our intelligent and our spiritual forms as well, in which we We start to think, we start to act in ways that reflect our evolving nature as a human species. And so VR is a tool to cultivate compassion. I think is really what I'm interested in using it for in the future. in that if it really is effective, and we know it is, to invoke empathy for another. We know that's very, very effective in VR. But I think compassion is actually the next level of it. And to define it, empathy being resonating in the feeling of someone else. And if they're in pain, you're feeling their pain. And compassion actually being a feeling or motivation to relieve that pain. and wanting to reduce that suffering and not just feeling it. So it's a very action-oriented, motivated, and kind approach to the other. And science in neuroscience has revealed that we have these distinct neural sets that are associated with in and out of this in-group that I'm in, my tribe, my family, my community, maybe my nation. than everybody else, and we've been evolutionarily wired for this. And at this point in time, it's no longer useful for us. It is what divides us, it's what polarizes us, and it's how we're able to say, you're different from me, and thus, you should not have the same consideration. And this division, I think, is where it lies the crux of solving some of these global problems, whether it's climate change or factory farming or animal rights, human rights, and finding this point where the most need and the most pain and the most suffering exists, and bringing people to that place, letting them be in the presence of suffering, to feel that empathy for another, and then to train to cultivate compassion to relieve that suffering. So this brings in ancient techniques from Tibetan Buddhism of mind training. For thousands of years they've practiced these mental trainings, practices, in which you focus your attention, you contemplate on very distinct feelings that you're having, and grow them to be more compassionate, to be kinder, and ultimately you become happier. So really it's win-win all around if you become a better person, you feel happier, you feel you have more purpose and meaning in life, and you're helping others. And so it's taking the most advanced VR technology that we've developed, combining it with these ancient spiritual traditions to try to solve the most complex issues that we're facing.
[00:23:32.880] Kent Bye: Yeah, and just did an interview with Eric Darnell of Baobab Studios. And one of the things that, you know, we had a discussion last year where we were talking about this tension between empathy and interactivity. And, you know, we really saw it as, you know, in conflict with each other. You know, either you're receiving or you're exerting out your agency in some way. And I think in the context of a VR experience, I think there's a long way before we go before we're able to really find that great blend. But in the context of what you're talking about here is that that empathy plus that agency is that compassion. It's like that empathy in action is compassion and so I feel like what you're doing in terms of just trying to cultivate that sense of presence is really important because you know one of the most chilling parts of the Inconvenient sequel was hearing the quotes from Donald Trump who's been denying the reality of global climate change and the whole thrust of this documentary is about trying to come to some sort of global agreement that came at this Paris World Climate Summit and the fact that there's threats to just completely pull out of our obligations of that
[00:24:38.170] Danfung Dennis: Makes it really a lot more urgent for people to be like, okay How do I take action but not out of a place of fear and reaction but of a place of deep presence and purpose Or anger, you know, I think that's an easy one to harness because it comes so naturally but that ends up always being a destructive force and so I think all of this is trying to put people into a place an internal place in which they can recognize what state they're in and you do need to find a calm state to start to have that inward reflection. So that first step is becoming calm. So we've done a couple of these guided mindfulness meditations in which they just bring you in and calm you in a beautiful space and really just take you out of the buzz and the energy of the world around us. And once you're in that calm state, you can start to practice these different techniques in which you can either focus your mind and be aware of all the sensations and all the experiences and see what arises. And right now I think there's a lot of fear out there, a lot of fear that is arising. There's such instability, there's such unpredictability with this new administration that we don't know what we're going into. It seems like we're entering a new era in which we don't know what's going to happen and the consequences are extremely grave. And so I think being able to work through our individual internal states to be able to reach a higher state so that we can be the best that we can be is the starting point. The starting point is ourselves and that if we are able to recognize that fear that is within each of us and when that arises you can see that fear and you can be with it and not respond to it, not react to it in a normal way in which you may act out or retreat but instead hold it there and continue to act in a compassionate way in one that is in accordance with your values and that is courage. Courage is not the lack of fear, it is the ability to move through it, to move past it. So I think there's this opportunity to cultivate courage, to train people to actually overcome their fears, to push past them and to do the right thing. So I think there are these states of mind that you can enter that allow you to see yourself as you are, as this human animal that has all of these emotions and biochemical events happening through us, but choose which ones we harness and choose which ones we may discard instead of just operating at this go, go, go level and reactive level in which fear and anger can really take over.
[00:27:28.776] Kent Bye: Yeah, and your other piece that you have here is titled Fierce Compassion and I had a chance to watch it and it was really deeply moving for me. I mean, it really stuck with me and really powerful. And I think a theme that I see in both documentaries here at Sundance and as well as this piece is trying to show what is not seen. So if it's out of sight, it's out of mind. So how can we give people an opportunity to see what's actually happening so that they can put it into their body and then potentially take action? So maybe you could talk a little bit about this piece and what it is.
[00:28:05.097] Danfung Dennis: Sure, Fierce Compassion is a 26-minute VR experience in which you follow activists from direct action everywhere as they enter a chicken factory farm. It's an egg-laying facility in California. They go in in the middle of the night, they've planned this operation extensively, and they're entering these premises without permission. And they're going in to document the conditions of these farms, which are saying that they're cage-free, which is banned in California, and that they're cage-free, which is the part of the labeling that they can charge more prices for. And as we went in, there was just this overwhelming stench coming out of these ventilation fans, and they just hit you. So we can't capture that in VR, but you do, as you slide the door of this facility open, this heavy door, unlocked, slides open, you get the first glimpse inside of this place. And it's really just hell on earth. you walk in and it's just cages stacked on top of each other 10 feet into the air and in each one of these cages there's 10 or more chickens packed in there and it's complete dark so the only lighting is headlamps And these birds are in such a state of stress, of disease. They are in incredible different states. Many dead ones, many that are dying, many that all their feathers are gone. All of them have been mutilated. Their beaks have all been cut off to prevent them pecking each other to death because it's so stressful in there. And I really, I just had to go into work mode. and just focus on operating the camera and moving and getting the shots. But my cinematographer, he froze up. He turned white. He just really couldn't operate. And I just had to tell him, you know, you got to get out of the shot. So I sort of pull him back and he sort of got going again. It took him a little while, but these places are just hellish. They're nightmarish. and the size of them is just immense. And we did this long tracking shot right after the activists rescue an injured hen. And that's their secondary objective besides documenting the conditions. So they see a hen in distress, they feel it's their responsibility to provide a medical attention and rescue and take it out to a vet. It's called an open rescue. They pull birds out of the cage and we did a tracking shot as they pulled that bird out as they carried it through this facility. And it takes almost four minutes to walk through this one aisle and just cage after cage after cage going by, all of them filled with birds. The sound is just deafening cacophony of wings flapping beating against the cages and it's just very disturbing it's not graphic but very disturbing and you see the intense confinement and with VR in stereo you can really just feel the size of the cage and how tiny they are and how packed they are And you really get a sense of just how big this place is. There are just sheds after sheds after sheds. We open with a drone shot that shows just how many there are. And it looks like Auschwitz. It is just a highly efficient facility to exploit animals. And the eggs that are coming out of there, many of them are covered in blood. They're just washed off and put into a box that says cage-free. And so there's blatant lying going on to the consumer. And no one wants to abuse animals. No one wants to be cruel to animals. Yet unknowingly, we're all participating in this system. The action of picking up an egg from a grocery store, that action ripples through the supply chain and ends up with a living, conscious, sentient intelligent being confined in a cage. And with 300 million of these birds in the U.S. alone, that's one bird for every human being. And they only last 12 months before they have to start the cycle again. And the level of exploitation, there is just no limit to it. And it's completely hidden. They grind small chicks alive, the male chicks that have no use laying eggs in these metal grinders. They then burn the beaks off with hot razor blades, which is the equivalent of cutting our own finger nails off. And then the disease is just rampant. And a normal chicken will lay 15 to 20 eggs in a year. In these factories, they're forced to lay over 300. So their bodies are just spent. All the calcium has been pulled out. They can barely stand. and the final cycle is this and they're kept in complete darkness until this final cycle they blast these lights on they starve them and they cycle the lights in a way that just get one more push of eggs out of their body before they're killed and they're asphyxiated they suffocate to death when they fill the sheds with foam to kill them when they're no longer productive And they never see daylight. They've never been outside. Their whole existence is in one of these cages. And it exists because it's hidden. It's purposely hidden from the public. People don't have any idea what happens inside these factory farms. And so really it's this moral obligation that we have. To try to end this suffering this immense pain that's happening in the animal agricultural industry and so VR is just so effective in being able to create a portal in which you can step into and Experience this for yourself. It's one thing to come out of this place and say hey this exists there's a nightmare hell on earth place and I saw this and here's some pictures and It just doesn't come through until you've been there and VR can do that
[00:34:08.976] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had no idea. And so when I watched it, it just broke my heart. You know, there's a lot of things you're just talking about that's not in the VR experience. You know, they just show, show the suffering that's happening. you know, and getting a guided tour of it. And, you know, I, I went to the grocery store, I had I eat eggs, and I went out of my way to make sure that I got cage free eggs, because there's a chilling graphic at the end that says, you know, 95% of the chickens and egg production is based out of these, you know, cages. And it was I was just shocked that this could have been going on. So long and for me not to have seen anything or heard anything about it. You know, there's something about this experience that's exciting because it's like a heist, but it's a heist that's for fierce compassion, like you're saying, in that these heart-centered activists are trying to point out all the different medical conditions that are untreated in these chickens and they will do a rescue, but they are just showing you. And I think one of the most effective and powerful things is that the narration is happening in the moment, live. It's happening in the scene. And that four minute tracking shot, you know, there's issues with camera movement and motion sickness, but you know, I shut my eyes when I know the camera movement is going to be too extreme, but I wanted to really experience that full scope of the depth of that shot of just going down that aisle. And it was just, it was chilling, you know, because it's something that you can't get in a 2D film.
[00:35:54.863] Danfung Dennis: Yeah. And I think this is all sort of in line with this idea of cultivating compassion and we're all going to face suffering in our lives. We're going to lose family members, we're going to lose friends, and those are those opportunities, as painful as they are, they are the opportunities in which we grow, in which we learn to become better and kinder. And so if we have the ability to put people into positions where there is suffering, and it can be animal, it can be human, it can be environmental, and give people the skills and the training to be able to respond to it. And the initial reaction is to flee. You always feel that when you're in a difficult situation. It is to turn and run. It is just a natural response. But again, if you're able to see that arise, that natural fear that arises, and see it as it's arising, you can catch it and say, well, I'll just be with it. And you can respond in a different way, in a way that says, I do want to relieve this pain. I'm not going to hide from it. I'm going to go towards it, and I'm going to see what I can do to help. So I think VR has this amazing potential to put us into these worlds of suffering and allow us to practice compassion, to stay with it, to be with it, to have that courage to witness it. And I believe that internal reflection that stays with you once that headset comes off and that compassion, that quality of mind stays with you into the rest of your life. And so these short experiences, 10, 15 minutes, I think have the potential to change people's lives and to change the world. If they linger with you and people say this, they stay with you. These spaces, they're very different than seeing an image, seeing a video on a screen. They embed into your memory as if you were actually there. And so when you recall that when you're in the grocery store at that moment of decision, where you can participate in a system of violence or you can practice compassion, that memory comes back and you say, well, I want to be that better person. I will make that decision. I'll make that action that has consequences. All our actions have consequences. And so it is a training. It's a training program that I think is so desperately needed to face these immense, and again, the numbers are staggering. 50 billion land animals are slaughtered for food. 1,000 billion sea animals are slaughtered. It's incomprehensible. Each single one of them is a conscious sentient being that feels pain, that wants to be free from it. yet we can do anything we want to them. They're outside of our sphere of compassion. And both Einstein and the Dalai Lama advocated this idea as really our purpose in life and our ultimate potential is to expand this sphere of compassion to include all beings, all humans, all animals, and all of nature. And right now that sphere has a very distinct event horizon. On the inside of it, is humans and our companion animals, cats and dogs. Dogs are right at that edge. They're our family members, they're our best friends, and we love them. Right on the other side are pigs, many cases more intelligent than dogs, just as social, and yet we can mutilate them, we can torture them, we can slaughter them, have anything we want to do to them just because they taste good. And that's not a moral argument to say, it tastes good. to pay someone to cut the tails off to burn them, to skin them, to boil them alive. These are all these aspects that we will regard as torture. And I feel we're still in this almost medieval point in our evolution in which, yes, we've ended slavery. We've had big advances in women's rights and gender rights. But for the animals, we are in a barbaric time. We are killing and slaughtering at a scale that is incomprehensible. And VR, the potential of it, and I think the opportunity here is that it will open a door into these places. And it will show people what is happening right around us. These farms are around us. You can catch glimpses of these animals in the transport trucks on the highway. But other than that, it's hidden. It is illegal in six states to film agricultural activities. The industry is so powerful that it can blatantly violate our First Amendment rights and put people in prison for filming, not even on the premises. And so the industry is so powerful, they know that. And it's been said before, Paul McCartney, if slaughterhouses had glass walls, we would all be vegetarian. And it's true. If we knew what was happening in there, we do not want to be cruel people, cruel humans. But with this veil that covers these factory farms, the abuse is limitless.
[00:41:01.087] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that I had the direct experience of that, of actually going through that experience and then being in the grocery store and making that decision. So I know that that's true. I think one of the other things that you're doing that's really interesting is that after you go through this really intense experience, you have this like drone shot through this Aspen forest, and it's just a guided meditation to help you decompress for a lot of really intense and heavy things that we're talking about. I mean, as people are listening to this podcast, I may want to go reference some of these meditative experience because it's heavy. It's a lot. And we're talking about things that are out of sight, out of mind. And you know, the thing that comes to mind is just the Native American indigenous practice of how they have a relationship to the earth and to animals. And it becomes more of a sacrifice and a prayer where there's reverence. And I just wonder if there's a way for people who may not be willing to completely abandon eating meat, if there's a way that meat can be harvested ethically in a way that contains that prayer-like ethics and integrity.
[00:42:02.847] Danfung Dennis: And it's hard to see when, you know, we're wrapped in Western culture and norms. But before humans domesticated animals and we were hunters and gatherers and native tribes, we had a very different worldview in that the human view was just one. There was the bird view. there was the deer view there was every animal had their own perspective and they had their own world and we were just one of many and there was this understanding that they experienced the world as well and we had an experience and we could maybe imagine what their experience is not the same as ours but they're aware they're conscious and that changed once we start domesticating animals and we started raising them and slaughtering them. And I think there was this shift in, they're here for us. They were put here for us, for us to eat. And we can do anything we want to them. But that's not how it always was. And I think there is something about going back to a time where there was a more harmonious view of the earth and its inhabitants and that they should be all treated with equal consideration. And Native Americans, every action was guided by this principle of how will this impact seven generations to come? Will I be leaving this place in a way that it will survive for the people to come and the animals to come? And we've lost that completely. We're in this instantaneous mode of just satisfaction and consumption. and it's destroying the earth, it's destroying, I think, ourselves, our health, you know, the cancer that we're getting is being linked to red meat consumption. The World Health Organization has declared that and we're finding that a lot of these modern diseases is from processed meat consumption. And it's clear that to divest from the industries that are hurting us, that are hurting the animals, that are hurting the planet, is the first step, is to say, I will not participate. And this is not a new idea. It's the same idea that Martin Luther King said, and we will not ride these buses. If this is part of this system, we will not participate in it. So it means divesting from fossil fuel energy companies, from animal agriculture companies, and investing in solutions that are good for the environment and good for the animals and good for us. And there's plenty of substitutes. A lot of these tech startups that are developing meat substitutes that are getting really good. Bacon, burgers, meatballs, they're getting very, very close to the meat flavor, the texture, the look. and I think it's just a matter of time before we transition to clean energy and to ethical meat that's derived from plant sources. So the solutions are there in which we just need to be able to transition to. There's of course massive resistance from companies for you to change your lifestyle and to change the way you act but that is our power as in right now we have that power to choose not to give our money to them in which they turn around and use to extract oil or to abuse animals. And so I think it is important to remember that we do have these individual decisions every single day that we can make to be more compassionate, to live in an ethical way. But we need models for that. We need teachers for that. And again, I think VR comes right at this moment where we need it so badly. We need an ability to train ourselves to understand these problems and understand them in an embodied way and to be able to act in a responsible and ethical way. And again it comes from within, it comes from personal quiet contemplation and reflection. of who you want to be, what you stand for, and what your purpose is. And I think VR will be able this way, and we're starting to develop this concept of compassion training, a skills program in which you can increase your own skills. You can go through these difficult experiences, but come out and have the ability to calm yourself, to bring yourself back down, and make a decision based on your values. And again, not out of fear or anger or revulsion, they may still be there, but you choose to harness the better qualities of our human species.
[00:46:34.041] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what am I able to enable?
[00:46:42.195] Danfung Dennis: I believe it has the potential to relieve all suffering. I think it is a tool for us to improve ourselves and get out of this dark time that we're in, and to evolve into a more moral species, in one that we respect all other human beings, all other species, and the environment around us. And it will allow us to Cultivate this feeling of unity that we are all in this together We are all passing through this life and we will pass out of it and we will go back to that same source so I think there is this Tremendous potential to cultivate compassion to relieve the suffering of others Anything else left and said you'd like to say I love your podcast and enjoy the rest of the festival Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thank you for having me
[00:47:39.935] Kent Bye: So, that was Dan Fong Dennis, he's the founder of Condition One, which was showing a couple of experiences at Sundance this year, including Melting Ice, as well as Fierce Compassion, also known as Operation Aspen. So, I have a number of different takeaways about this interview, is that first of all, This is actually a really radical concept that you could use virtual reality technologies in order to witness suffering. And through the process of witnessing suffering, you're actually cultivating the tools that is required to be able to actually do it with empathy. And through that empathy, eventually transform it into compassionate acts. So that every single small decision that you make each day, you have a decision as to whether or not you're going to participate in a system of violence or to act out of compassion. Now this whole concept of our sphere of compassion is really interesting if you think about where the boundaries of that is. It's usually around the people that you know and are around you as well as your familiars, your animals and your pets. But once you go beyond that sphere of compassion into animals that may be in a factory farm or even the earth and how we relate to the earth, I think that collectively as an entire civilization, our sphere of compassion, somehow doesn't manage to fully encompass the earth all the times. And I think that's part of the big reason why the environment ends up being an externality to the economy, where we just are taking everything that we can, but it's not necessarily being done in a sustainable fashion. One of the things that Dan Fung is talking about here in this interview is this indigenous concept of looking forward seven generations of everything that you decide and are doing now, is it sustainable for seven generations down the road? And if we look at a lot of things that we're doing collectively as a civilization, I don't think we can necessarily answer that in the affirmative. There's a lot of really unsustainable practices that we're doing day to day. And I think that our decision point comes down as consumers is when we're in the grocery store and we're buying that food or we're buying whatever product that is being produced, there's a whole amount of unseen things that are going into that price. And I think that the power of virtual reality is it has the power to be able to connect those dots and to show you all those many hidden things that go into that. I think this is a lifelong project on so many different dimensions of our society because so much of our connection to our food and connection to our products and where the minerals come from on the earth, it's just something that's not really all that transparent. It's hard to actually figure out. And it's also really difficult to know whether or not that whole chain was done in an ethical fashion. And because it is so difficult to draw those connections, then, you know, it's so overwhelming. And I think that collectively we just tend to not worry about it too much if we can't see it. But I think that's the power of VR is that you have these experiences and it starts to expand your sphere of compassion, both for the earth, as well as issues around animal rights. I think I would challenge anybody who really wants to go down this journey is to download the app for Condition One and to watch the Apparition Aspen experience that we talk about in this podcast. And there's also an even more intense experience called Factory Farm that has a lot more graphic content. There's something about watching some of this content in an embodied fashion, in a virtual reality experience. Even if you're just moving around your head, that's giving you a lot more of a sense of embodiment than just watching it on a 2D screen, which is so easy to get disconnected from the sense of place, but also the larger context of what you're watching. There's something about the virtual reality medium that takes you to that place and just demands you to cultivate a sense of presence there and to really bear witness to some of these scenes that are unfolding. And some of these scenes are absolutely horrific. And I can totally empathize with the conclusions that Dan Fung is coming to in terms of this sentiment that Paul McCartney said, which is essentially that if slaughterhouses had glass houses, then everybody would be a vegetarian. And so I was just also really struck by this dilemma that complex topics like global warming are actually very difficult to reduce down to a singular embodied experience. It's so difficult to actually tell the story of global warming. I think that the Inconvenient sequel as a film does a great job, and it does it through the perspective of telling the story of global warming through the personal narrative of Al Gore. And in terms of trying to translate that same story within a virtual reality medium, I think that Danfeng is actually really insightful in not trying to replicate that. I think the 2D medium does a great job of that. But there's something different that VR can do. And it's to give you that embodied experience of sitting on that iceberg as it's melting and just listening to the melting ice. It gives you a different visceral feel of the earth as it is melting through a lot of the actions that are coming from our carbon emissions. And that level of the story of knowing that, that layer of meaning of what it means to be in that place, I think was informed so much more from me actually knowing the backstory of watching that film of an inconvenient sequel. I don't think that I would have had nearly as an in-depth of an experience without having that. So it just tells me that the strength of the virtual reality medium as a storytelling medium is to give people that direct embodied experience so they can form their own connection, this sort of synthetic direct experience with the earth. For all the people who can't find the means to actually travel to some of these places, but to actually document what's happening and the changes. And I think that Dan Fung is on to some really specific insights about some of the strengths of the medium of virtual reality, because he said that they actually dialed back a lot of the narrative and a lot of the voiceover. These disembodied voices can add some context to what you're looking at, but if it's disembodied in a way, it can actually break presence. One of the things that Dan Fung is really doing in a lot of his experiences is actually having someone there on camera giving you a guided tour and talking about things that are happening in real time on the screen. And I think that type of live Cine Verite narration, almost like you're on a guided tour, is so much more powerful than recording something and then trying to record a voiceover afterwards. Something in the delivery of just being completely present and authentic in the moment, and also just having all the room tone. It just adds to the whole immersion of these types of experiences. And so I think it's a vast and really inspiring vision of what VR could do, which is to eliminate all suffering. As we go into these VR experiences, we can expand our own sphere of compassion, and that we can bear witness to the suffering of the world. And it can be done in a way that is very contemplative. The approach that Condition One is taking is that they're doing this really interesting approach to turn it into this Buddhist mind training of just being able to focus your attention and contemplate on your own distinct feelings that are coming up and to allow yourself to grow the compassion to be kinder and to ultimately become happier. You know, there's a lot of intense things that were talked about both on this podcast and a lot of these experiences that are on Condition One that are not easy. They're not for the faint of heart. But I think this practice of bearing witness to suffering to grow your compassion is one that sticks with you once you commit to it. So if you're open for that type of growth and to go on that journey, then I think that Dan Feng and his vision is right on. I think it's actually something that the earth really needs in so many different ways. If we can just tell the story of what's happening on the earth and connect it down to some of the individual actions that we can take day to day. I think that virtual reality as a medium can actually do that and live into that. Then I think it can really grow into this vision that Dan Feng has, which is to be used as a tool to cultivate compassion and to make decisions that minimize suffering in the world. So, that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do tell your friends, spread the word, and become a donor. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So, go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
