Programming Throwdown - 136: Metaverse with Daniel Liebeskind

Episode Date: June 14, 2022

136: Metaverse with Daniel LiebeskindDecentralizing the future can often lead to missing out on genuine human communication. Daniel Liebeskind, Cofounder and CEO of Topia, talks about how they’re working to avoid that pitfall while building the foundation of a better online experience. Whether its his lessons from Burning Man, keeping the human spirit alive in today’s technological frontier, or how Topia fits in the future, Daniel has something for listeners.00:01:34 Introduction00:02:15 Daniel and early programming experience00:07:51 How coding felt like sorcery00:09:35 Skill trees00:16:10 Second Life00:19:56 Enhancing versus replacing real life experiences00:26:28 A decentralized Metaverse00:29:54 Web 2 versus Web 3 00:34:15 /r/place00:44:16 Why boom cycles are important for tech00:46:03 Topia for consumers00:52:47 Topia as a company00:55:50 Opportunities at Topia00:58:00 Topia.io01:03:50 FarewellsResources mentioned in this episode:Daniel Liebeskind, Cofounder and CEO of Topia:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dliebeskind/Website: https://medium.com/@dliebeskindTwitter: https://twitter.com/dliebeskindTopia:Website: https://topia.io/topia/careersLinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/topia-io/If you’ve enjoyed this episode, you can listen to more on Programming Throwdown’s website: https://www.programmingthrowdown.com/Reach out to us via email: [e-mail] can also follow Programming Throwdown on Facebook | Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Player.FM Join the discussion on our DiscordHelp support Programming Throwdown through our Patreon ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Welcome everyone to another episode of Programming Throwdown. Hard to believe we're on 136. I think I say that every time now. Yeah, the time continues to fly. The direction of time is an arrow. No, no, okay, sorry. Time flies like a banana or something, or is that fruit flies like a banana? That's, okay, you're over my head now. All right, well, welcome. we're here on a what i think is going to be a really awesome episode talk about i guess you know sometimes we we see those

list of buzzwords and a lot of times they just wash over us you don't know necessarily what they mean but we have someone who has made it their current mission to tackle what is the metaverse and to build out a part of that and to just, you know, be immersed in it. So I think they're going to help us on our journey of going from metaverse as a, as a buzzword, and something that I think I've read in a couple science fiction books into, you know, bringing it down to earth. And what does it mean today? And what does it mean to be sort of like working in the metaverse? And where are we at in that journey to this cultural idea, I guess? Okay, that was a lot. That was a big setup.

All right, I think I'm going to introduce the co-founder and CEO of Topia. Daniel, welcome to the show, Daniel. Hey, thanks for having me. I'm pretty fired up to be here. All right. Well, I did have a pretty big setup, so we've got a lot to cover. But before then, I mean, tradition is we kind of always start with people's, you know, kind of like story, their origin story, right? Every good superhero always has to not. We are going to sort of, you know, kind of how you got into tech. Like, where did being interested in this crazy world of tech start for you? And it could be like, first time you had a computer or learned programming or just like,

what is a memory for you that you feel is like, oh yeah, that's when I kind of got bit by this bug? Yeah, I was a gamer as long as I can remember, from as young as I can recall really doing anything. I had a computer. I was playing games. My parents encouraged me when I was younger,, I was playing games, my parents encouraged me when I was younger, when I was very young to play things like Math Blaster and games like that,

you know, to really date myself. But you know, I also started experimenting with programming languages like QBasic really early on and actually trying to build my own video games, even when I was like, seven, eight years old, I think. And I did that with a friend. And that was sort of the origin of my deep appreciation for computing and for the ability to be a sourcer and actually conjure something from scratch if you have some technical capabilities. And then in high school, I took programming classes. I built some RPGs in Java. I was also building websites for myself and for others. And dabbling with entrepreneurship, I had a slew of failed startups when I was in my youth.

And kind of bringing those two passions together. I was also, I played some sports and did outdoorsy things, but you know, my real passion was, uh, was games. And in particular, I got pretty deep into MMOs, uh, Star Wars galaxies, EverQuest before that. And those kinds of experiences, you know, you were kind of coming together real time with other people across the internet. I did that with some of my friends from high school, Galaxies in particular, we played pretty religiously, but also with strangers and forming clans. Clans was a big thing in sort of the 90s and early 2000s when I was doing a lot of this. And the idea of building community online with other real humans and then interacting synchronously was just kind of mind-blowing. So I know we're going to get into the metaverse, but that for me is actually the origin of my

interest in this idea of the evolution of the internet into something that's more synchronous. And I remember even when I was really young, telling my parents about the kinds of things I was doing online where I was building businesses in Star Wars galaxies and I had a clan and a whole community and they were they thought I was you know uh either onto something and this is going to be an amazing outcome for my life or I was going down a spirally pit and they had no idea really what to do I would say that's everybody's current conversation whenever someone brings up cryptocurrency you either know something or you're crazy absolutely all right well that was that was awesome wow you kind of did my job for me you like really set that all up and and got it going uh do you remember what your first computer was some people do and some people don't

wow that's a good question i don't actually recall what it was no no no no that's all right some people have this like really big attachment like to the specifics of of their computer i think that it also at some point kind of shifted into what do you call like a white box pc and it was like i don't know it's just like a pc i don't know yeah i'm definitely in that other camp i still have my commodore 64 it doesn't work but i just can't throw it out it's just it's sitting in a closet and I don't have the heart to put it to pasture. But yeah, I mean, the age you described, you know, when MMOs first started being a thing, not only could you play a game, you could play a game online. And not only was it like, oh, I'm just going to shoot my friends. And this is hilarious because multiplayer is, and Quake is awesome.

But, you know, actually like go on adventures together and story build together and you know just get immersed into this was a a crazy time even even today i think i've never played eve online but i'm like envious of the people that just have this like deep ingrained passion i like read the after after battle reports and i'm just like this sounds so exciting and i watch a youtube video getting started i'm like i don I don't know. But yeah, that whole thing is, I could totally see what you're describing about how like formative that is and getting involved and going down that path. So that's really awesome. Yeah, I've tried to EVE, I tried to start EVE a couple times, start my life. And each time I just couldn't quite get over the learning curve of it.

The same is true for me in Dwarf Fortress. But that's another topic for another time. I had the same experience with Eve, but I did sink a ton of time in a Dwarf Fortress. Probably an embarrassing amount of time into Dwarf Fortress. Yeah, it's really hard now that they've decided to add hour counters to all of the gaming things and tell you how many hours you've played. don't appreciate this all right cool so so yeah so you started programming at a young age and you talked about you know kind of doing stuff in cube basic i feel like that's a story uh similar for me i remember having a programming calculator in high school and like

programming just dumb little games to you know occupy my time but like you said you kind of equated it to sorcery i mean i think it's it's funny because people outside of uh computers and programming view it that way but i think even inside you're right like it still feels that way sometimes that like you can just program some simple rules or even just an algorithm you think is supposed to work. And you're like, wait, that didn't work or it didn't do what I was supposed to. Oh, it's smarter than me or it's not as smart. It's crazy sometimes how you think it takes on a life of its own. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's part of the motivation as I got older.

I did a little bit of a detour. I went into finance. We can talk about that. I was at Lehman Brothers. I was an investor in VC. And then I went back into programming. And the reason really is I missed being able to create things and conjure things. And really, when you're a programmer, But, you know, you have the ability once you're technical to actually just manifest whatever it is that you can imagine. And your imagination is really the only limiter. And to me, that is just an incredible thing that that's possible in the world. That's actually a great point. So yeah, to dive in that one second. So you went into finance and obviously into VC, you're no longer there. I feel like that's a world that I know a few people who have left finance and come to just the broader programming world. But I mean, do you have any just kind of like words of wisdom or observations about the difference of sort of being a tech person or programming inside of finance for sound or is it overdone? It's really just the same thing.

Well, I actually was not a programmer inside of finance. I completely left programming, essentially. I mean, I was still a wizard at Excel macros and that sort of stuff. But I was a traditional investment banker for Lehman and then Barclays once Lehman went under. And then in my VC role, I was an investor. I was not really doing programming. Again, I was doing a lot of little interesting hacks with Excel and basically building applications within my role, but that wasn't actually what I was supposed to be doing. And I really did that because I love creating things, but I want to understand how businesses work and how accounting works and, you know, be a little bit more full stack.

I actually look at my own life as a video game, right? Like an RPG, right? And so you have different skill trees and you can gain experience and level up these different skills and specialize in things. And so, you know, I've kind of been on a quest, on many quests throughout my life to just gain as many of these skills as possible so that I could be, you know, sort of like a multidisciplinary entrepreneur and creator and sourcer and whatever, you know, whatever you want to call it. Oh, interesting. So you were there though,

right around the financial collapse then? I mean, do you have any horror stories about that? That is off topic, but... Yeah, I was at I was at Lehman, uh, as it collapsed, essentially. I was actually an intern, um, to be fair. And they gave, you know, the writing was on the wall that summer. It was during the, you know, Bear Stearns went under, um, and everybody was panicking. So normally they gave like 98% of interns full-time offers in my In my year, they gave like 15%, something like that. And I was fortunate enough to get a full-time offer. But then when I went back to school, Lehman collapsed. And I was like, all right, I'm going to move to China and become a Shaoling monk.

That was actually my plan. And then Barclays acquired some of the employees, including me. And so I went and did that there. And I was a healthcare... I started as a healthcare investment banker. When I went into VC, I was focused on healthcare software as a service. And then I left that in 2013 to just be like, all right, I'm just going to go back to pure full-time building.

I went to a coding bootcamp called Hack Reactor and learned a lot of the modern frameworks like JavaScript, Node, a lot of Java. It was very JavaScript-based coding bootcamp. And then from there, I just, basically for the next decade, I just built things. And I had a dev shop. I had my first, what is now referred to

as the Metaverse platform in 2015. It was called Body and it was a way for fitness instructors to teach live interactive classes, create their own branded fitness studios, build community around it, and I traveled the world. I was a digital nomad. I lived in communities in Bali and Thailand, and I lived in San Francisco, New York, LA. And yeah, that's kind of my history. Wow. That is quite an epic journey, I guess. So you really were serious about the life as an RPG, I guess. Absolutely. All right, cool. So I mean, all mean, I think we have a feel for like, well, maybe not a feel, but we at least have had a glimpse of getting there. So what led you to kind of, you started talking about building kind of like digital worlds, about the metaverse and getting encounters with this. What was the genesis of your current endeavor? So, you know, again, kind of like that RPG, I've been building towards this for many, many years, including in 2015 with the startup that was using very similar technology.

So, you know, I think it's a combination of a few things, but it's this idea that the internet is going to evolve from something that was asynchronous, like email. You write something, and then sometime later, somebody writes back. Even a Facebook wall is asynchronous. And evolve more towards the kinds of experiences and community and connection that we've had with MMOs for decades now. And I've had a lot of conviction around that. And I've actually, in that journey, have been told that that's not true by people that you would respect and be like, okay, that person actually really knows. It was a very unpopular opinion in 2015-ish timeframe, where people thought that the real

leverage of the internet was going to be to become more asynchronous, right? And if you think about things like TikTok, for example, that is true, right? There is a lot of leverage in sort of async social platform like TikTok. But the reality is that there's an opportunity for the internet to be something that is more connective, that more closely emulates how we connect in real life. And so it just felt to me like, why do people not see that this is an inevitability? We already have it in MMOs. Clearly, this is going to be something that's going to be used for productivity, for remote work, for remote community and fun.

And even non-gamers are going to be able to interact with each other in the way that gamers do right now through multiplayer. And so as part of that conviction, I also have lived in many different communities. I've seen organizers of events and artists and creators, musicians, yoga instructors really struggle to build a global audience and build a global community and bring people together and do digital marketing and those sorts of things. So I was always very passionate about trying to create a platform to help and empower creators. And then I guess the sort of like last piece of it is the

idea of creating something where you can bring your community to a platform across the entire internet. And so when we talk about metaverse, it's kind of the intersection of the real-time internet and Web3. And I've been a decentralized backend or database person since 2012 I invested in Bitcoin. I was an Ethereum developer in 2017. So I've kind of dabbled in these technologies as well. And I essentially smashed all of my interests and passions together into one unified platform, which is Topia. And my plan originally was to build this over the 2020s and basically make it so that the whole world could collaboratively create social experiences in virtual worlds and then bring community together. And I was planning on doing it in the 2020s. I had a VR platform I was building for this. I had a Bitcoin lightning game, browser-based game that I was building, and then the pandemic hit. And I realized I didn't have a

decade to build this thing that people actually needed it right now. And things like Burning Man, which we co-hosted in 2020, and then again in 2021, they needed a way to do this online in a way that still felt like Burning Man. And so I basically threw out everything I was doing, started from scratch and launched the, we had our first public event three weeks after the first line of code. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Oh, wow. So Metaverse, as I hear you describe it in telling this, different than I think maybe, I want to say everyone, but that's not true. Not everyone. But I remember when Second Life launched and everyone was like, oh, this is going to be the thing. This is the future. This is the thing. And one of the differences between how I view Second Life, which for people who don't know, was like a 3D video game where you had an avatar and you could move around in a world that was not our world, but a different world. But one of the things that is different from how here, I hear you describing what you're saying now versus like what second life was, is it is even kind of in the name. Second life is like an alternate life. You're living out some alternate, I'm going to say fantasy, but not,

you're not supposed to be who you are. You're supposed to be pretending to be someone else. And talked about a role-playing game, a game, right? Even if there's no traditional kind of maybe game elements to it, it was still meant to be that kind of not who you are. The way you're describing what you're saying, like a place to host something like Burning Man, well, I guess there's maybe some caveats in there as well. But like, you know, it's more you to connect with, like real life, but on the internet, right? Like something that you would do building a community. I hear you talk about it in terms that sound more like a replacement for something you would do in physical real person, rather than a video game. Am I sort of hearing that like, delineation correctly? Do you feel like there's

a difference between those two? Yeah, I think you're hitting the nail on the head in many ways. And Second Life, I have a lot of respect for the creator of Second Life, Philip Rosedale, is a friend of mine, John Zanowski, who was the CFO for a period. He's actually our CFO. And so we have deep roots into what they created. And it's kind of the OG of this industry and of what we're doing in many ways. I think for us, it's less about focus on the avatar, as you said, and more on human connection. That's one of our principles when we think about building product. For us, it's about human connection, accessibility, and creating safer spaces and consent built into the product itself.

And so for us, the idea of real human connection, you need to actually see other humans and be able to look them in the eyes, right? That's part of how we evolved to actually authentically connect with one another. And so for us, we actually kind of abstract away the avatar. There are these cute little, we call them topis, and they're androgynous.

They're essentially genderless. You can select a different color and you just walk around the world, but they're basically an embodiment of yourself, right? But it's not the focal point. The focal point in Topia is the other actual humans. And the reason that we did that is, again, you know, human connection is not, we don't think about avatar to avatar connection, but instead about the ability to actually use things like

WebRTC, which is web real-time communication, to connect with other humans and see them as though you would in real life. So that's something that's important for us. You said we're trying to replace real life, and I know you didn't mean it directly that way, but I just want to point out that our mission is not to replace real life. We co-hosted Virtual Burning Man for the last two years, but in-person Burning Man is something that I've gone to for the last, I guess, until it was paused for pandemic, I went six years in a row. And I love in-person, I love real life. But Burning Man, as an example, 70,000 people a year can go. And it's very expensive. It's actually mostly San Francisco

people or wealthy tech people that are able to access that community. And the idea of it should be accessible by millions of people all over the world, regardless of socioeconomic background. And so what we're trying to do is not replace real life, but instead enhance access to these communities and create hybrid experiences and communities that can exist in person and online. And frankly, you know, can exist online within Topia, but also can use other platforms using shared backends like blockchains to, you know, bring the community across every platform

that exists and truly have a really flexible and scalable community ecosystem. Okay, interesting. Yeah, so fair call out on replacement. So I guess, yeah, this part about can replace versus does replace. So I feel that there's, like you mentioned, that I'm going to do this and not need to meet in real life. Maybe for some people or maybe for some things that's true. But I feel like this, like you're kind of mentioning, is almost an augmentation of what you do. So this isn't a replacement for that stuff, but a way to kind of complement it. So like you mentioned, when cost or pandemic or some barrier prevents you from being able to go somewhere, that doesn't mean you can't have the

same or a similar depth of experience online. Is that a better rephrasing of it, I guess? Yeah, I think that's fair. It's also not just a barrier, but if you get together with your whole community once a quarter, it's very expensive. People have to fly in. With something like Topia, you can do that quarterly get-together in person, but you can also get together every week or every day, right? Or have a persistent open community space that's kind of like the town hall where people can just come whenever they want. All right. So I think I'm getting a picture,

but what we've talked about so far in your vision of sort of the metaverse as you're building it out is people are meeting, I don't want to say like for a cause or for a reason like it sounds like targeted right like i go here for like this community or this thing but when i hear it described in the broader broader description or we think of like we mentioned sci-fi so uh i guess there was a movie as well but the book ready player one or we can go even further back to like snow crash and okay we're gonna get off on a sci-fi tangent. But like, if you go back, people wanted and went to kind of like the metaverse, the persistent online thing, for no reason in particular, but maybe for entertainment or just as part of an everyday thing. And so do you feel

like there's a difference between metaverse as a, like, I'm going for a reason a a need driven need is too strong a desire to do a specific thing versus just like a place to just go do you feel like there's a difference there it's like a transition do you have any thoughts about that yeah you know it's interesting when you bring up ready player one i actually look at ready player one as a very dystopian outcome where people no longer get together in person. Everything is conducted online. I don't think that's what we should be shooting for here. I think that would be a misfire in some ways. And so I don't know the answer to whether it's going to be purpose-driven usage or whether it's just going to be a place that you go all the time. I think it's

probably a hybrid of both, right? Where there are going to be specific purposes, kind of like how we do Zoom meetings right now. Those are all very specific, right? You don't like casually go into a Zoom hangout and just mess around in there, right? They're meetings. They're very intentional. So there are definitely cases like that. And in things like Topia, there are conferences, there are events. Somebody brings a thousand people in to celebrate their IPO together. Those are all very event-driven. And so you definitely have that now and you will for sure have that in the future. We also are seeing a lot of persistent spaces that are just kind of community hangouts. And you get off work, you go in and see who else

is there. You're hanging out and kind of relaxing, kind of like when you're in university and you go down to the common area and just see who else is there. So you kind of see that more casual, persistent hangout as well. And I think both of those will definitely exist. And it'll depend on the person. It'll depend on what you're using it for. One of the interesting things is that we see a lot of, especially during the pandemic, we saw a lot of remote work, but not as much remote play. And that's where things start getting kind of interesting.

Remote work, everybody knows, obviously, that's going to be a thing. It already is. And we have a lot of productivity tools like Slack and Asana and whatnot that really enhance our ability to work remotely. But what we've really missed from that is if you're going to be remote and work remotely, you kind of need to be able to have remote community and remote play and remote hangout, like go to the bar, right? When you're done with work for happy hour, that is an experience that has been really challenging online historically. And those are the kinds of things

that we're trying to make accessible. Interesting. So again, okay, a lot there to unpack, I guess. But I mean, one of the things that I hear is the different communities and different kinds of things are happening in your mind. How does that work from like, is this one giant instance? Oh, we talked about, you know, kind of like in the past gaming, right?

There's, you know, might have a server for, you know, server A and server B and server C. And you can be on one server and everything's persistent and consistent in that server, but completely disconnected from the next server, which is in contrast, like we talked about EVE Online, where everything happens on roughly like one homogenous set of servers and everyone's in the same world. For where you're at or where you think you're going, do you think this is something where people go to a partition and things and sets of rules and societal norms exist in like one partition different from a different partition? Or is this something that like, no, actually, like it's all open and like it's smooth transition between them? I think that this is a phenomenal question. And this is one of the big questions

in the industry right now, right? You have platforms like Facebook that just changed their name to meta. They're trying to be the one metaverse to rule them all, right? And everything would take place in the one instance of the metaverse. And that's kind of the vision of Ready Player One, right? There's the Oasis. Everything happens in the Oasis. There's one platform that is the entire metaverse. I think the reality of what is going to happen here is going to be more like the vision of Web3,

which is a decentralized metaverse where there are many different instances. This would be the best outcome for people, for humanity, is to actually have many different options and to have them all interface with each other, right? To create standards where you can bring a community from platform to platform, and maybe each platform offers you different things. It's a little bit like asking, in my mind, is there going to be one video game that everybody's going to play, right? Is there going to be one MMO that has every single player in it, right? Or is there going to be one social platform that everybody uses and no other ones? We haven't actually seen that happen with really anything in tech. So it would be shocking to me if that's what happens

with the metaverse as it's being envisioned. And frankly, all the focus on Web3, and again, that being shared backends, decentralized databases, being able to bring your community, your assets, your experiences that you're creating from platform to platform. I don't see how one platform or one company could just dominate an ecosystem like that. Okay. All right. I was actually going to ask, but I was missing the connection to sort of Web3, which I guess we should do a definition for as well, but we could do that maybe in a second.

But the sort of connection into Web3, but now I hear what you're saying. So if the world became one video game then traditionally the architecture would end up being that some company or whatever some entity would control all of the assets the back end whatever and the client and so i guess like and what you're saying to this is not exactly what you said but in my head it's sort of coming that maybe what ends up happening is if you want to have this persistent world where people are moving through, there may be many ways of interfacing with it, maybe a VR way, maybe a 2D web browser way, maybe a variety of ways, but they share some sort of persistence in the backend. And maybe there's some specifics to the way you're accessing

it in the client, but maybe there's a lot of jointly owned things behind the scenes. Am I sort of getting why the tie-in to decentralized is something you've repeated? Yes, that's exactly right. It's the idea of interoperability between different front ends, different clients, different applications, but having one unified backend. And what's interesting is, so I think there's a much higher likelihood that we have one unified backend than one unified frontend, right? Or one option for the frontend. And even on the backend, though, you know, we see a lot of different options.

Ethereum is not the only game in town. And, you know, it has the largest community. It has, you know, some legs under it and a lot of development, but it has a lot of issues as well. And what I think is going to happen is that there's going to be a few different options for backend architecture. Each of these is a standard that allows us to, on the front end, build integrations into these different backends. And then you can bring this backend information between clients. And it actually means that anybody can spin up their own client. And so I think that what's more likely than one client dominating the entire thing is actually a client engine, right? Think of like what Unity is for game development. We're likely going to see metaverse ecosystem

engines that allow you to just spin up your own front end and tie into this back end standard and customize it to be whatever you want. So then people can choose whether they want to bring their community that lives in this back public back end to your front end application based on whatever your specifications and specialization is. I was going to ask you to help us define Web3, but actually I think you might've just done it in sort of a way. It's like this as a broader vision. I mean, you kind of described it for a specific purpose, but I mean, is there anything else like, I mean, I guess you said you'd been in this space or whatever that you would tack on that kind of goes towards the vision of, of like why people use it

as a term distinct from, I guess, web two, like the current web we largely know today. Honestly, I think the, the difference between web two and web three is web two was all centralized. Every company, every application that you go to has a centralized database, a centralized backend. So you go to Facebook or something, and they have a walled garden. They own all of the information. If you're a creator and you're using any of these platforms, you need to go create within each platform very separately, right?

They don't have a unified standard. And so as a creator, it's actually very challenging. And that's why you don't see that many people that have a huge presence across many different platforms. So the idea of Web3, and this is maybe getting too into the weeds on it, but the idea of Web3 is actually very creator oriented. It's very community oriented. It means that you can create once in a public database that is not controlled by any one company. And blockchain really, all it is, is a way for the world to collaboratively have truthiness of that public database, right? Because no one entity controls it. There needs to be a consensus mechanism for everybody to arrive at the same

conclusion about what's true, what transactions actually occurred in this public database. And the Web3 evolution is really just the shift from everything being centralized within walled gardens for each application towards something that is a shared database called, you know, using blockchain consensus methodology. Then there to be infinite number of front ends that can all share the same backend information. And as a creator, that means you can go to this backend and you can create once. And then it's up to the applications to figure out how to make your creations or your communities useful within their context, within their ecosystems.

And you have a lot of choice as a creator. So in the long term, it's very likely that these are going to succeed because all the creators, if there's enough application, enough utility, and enough value being generated, then all the creators are going to choose that if they can, because, you know, there's way more leverage. And so even Topia, you know, we consider ourselves a Web3 utility. We didn't tokenize our real estate. We're not selling NFTs or anything like that. But if you have a community in a public database, if you have an NFT collection, for example, you can actually use Topia to provide superpowers to your community. You can gate access to worlds.

You can enable collaborative gallery creation. And so we think of ourselves as a utility layer rather than as an origination layer. And there's going to be a lot of utility layers. That's kind of the point. So when you were talking about that, I guess, in the power of the community, I always have this assumption that powerful tools need to be complicated. Like, I don't know. It's not correct.

Like, I know it's not correct, but it's like this bias, maybe as a software engineer, right? If there's a hard problem, I need to build a good tool, a good algorithm. I need to read some papers, like whatever it is, right? To get my brain going and solve it. Okay, this is probably a blindside. Anyways, but then, you know, I was playing yesterday with my kids Minecraft, which we were talking about something. They were explaining to me how Minecraft works, right? And I mentioned to them,

I've been playing Minecraft since before you were born. I understand what Minecraft, Jason and I have been playing, played Minecraft together probably, I don't know, more than a decade ago. And like when it was really early and- To be fair, our kids are way better than we are at it, so. Oh yeah, shut up.

Don't talk about that. They have a better time. But what I realized, I mean, it's much more complicated today than back then. But even this simple tool, like just a world of voxels and a couple different types and taking some down and building some up, people build like insane things from relatively basic one. And then I was also you were talking and it's not exactly web 3 obviously but i if you haven't seen it but probably most people have seen it but if you hadn't seen it for april fools i guess reddit did like are the place i don't know if you guys saw this but basically this giant canvas of blocks you could place a rate limited like one block on this giant shared canvas of some color and yet if you watch

the time lapse of various communities like going in and making their users go in and click one block to one color at their you know threshold of their you know changes per second uh and then they're too small so they band with another community and they go in there and other people can overwrite their colors anyways if you've not seen, go check out the like recap videos. But one of these things that you're highlighting reminds me like this is a relatively simple thing, right? Like go in and you can make a color. But the shared context that got built around it, not only in like looking at the images

at any time slice and saying, I recognize what this is and what that is, but not what this other thing is. Or just how the communities banded together and say, this is good and that is bad. There's no consensus, but the consensus of the canvas itself, right? There's this representation. Obviously, it's Reddit. So Reddit owned all of that and made their own choices and whatever. But what they allowed people to do in the communities within Reddit to express themselves in the way that they thought was best, whether it was text or an image or a pattern or a, you know, where, where on the canvas they wanted to be, where they thought they could be.

It's just like fascinating, like experiment, relatively short lived. It's Reddit. So big asterisk, if you're sensitive, you know, going and reading what all happened there but like whatever um i realize like what you're saying maybe it isn't that people need you know some big when we talk about those mmos right it's like very expensive to build the video game engine in the world the creator has to be the company as well as the engine as well as like it's all monolithic right and then you can go experience this world and do freedom things in it but like ultimately it's very controlled and what you're describing is not only the decentralization of the back end itself like you know everybody can kind of do their own thing and it's consensus own but as well as utilities

and pieces of the pipe and pieces of the puzzle getting conglomerated together in different ways and really distributing not that it's not a game but distributing the use of it as well like everybody participates in this creation and derives their own economics from it yeah that's that's very fascinating i i love that you just said the phrase shared context um that's one of the things that just jumped out at me because uh that is so important to the online experience or really to any community experience, right? A community really is a group of people that have a common interest. And when you come together for a community event, you have a shared context, right? You have a space that you're coming together in and you have a purpose, right? And so that actually is one of the missions of

something like Topia is to make it really, really easy. Like you also were talking about having it be simple and not overly complicated. Our mission has been to make it incredibly easy to create a space, to create a shared context, and then bring a community together in that space. And when you think about it from a Web3 standpoint, you may have this community that exists, everybody that owns a particular NFT, which is basically just an entry in a database or a ticket. You can think of it like a ticket, right?

And everybody that's part of that community then wants to be able to come together within a shared context, within a shared experience. And experiences are really important, shared experiences, because they're the foundation of memories, right? When you have a memory with somebody and to strengthen the bonds between individuals, you know, you really need to actually form memories with other people, which then you can reflect back on, but they serve as a foundation. And within a community, you know, your community is really only as strong as the bonds between individuals, which is based on shared memories, which are created from shared context and actually coming together. And so that is the foundation of the belief that led to a platform like Topia.

And it's frankly where I think a lot of this online metaverse is going, is creating these shared contexts, making it really easy for people to change the context, right? In Topia, you can very easily flip the scene. We call them scenes, but? In Tobii, you can very easily flip the scene. We call them scenes, but basically the entire world. You might be at Burning Man and then boom, now you're at like a happy hour or now you're at a music festival. You can go through a journey with your community and change context. And that's kind of a superpower. We talked earlier about replacing the real world.

It's not about that. It's about doing things that are not even possible in real life, right? Being able to switch the entire shared context with a snap of the finger is not something you can do in real life. And in fact, if you're with a community in real life and you're at an event and you're like, let's all go to the after hours bar, you lose like 50% of people in that transition. Online, you don't have to lose anybody. Oh, that's Yeah, that's interesting. You talked about about music, and I'll bring in something we haven't talked about yet. But that gets brought in this conversation too. But I'm not a big, I don't enjoy music at the way some people do. But I have been to a few concerts, and they're very noisy and messy but but you are right though like the shared

context of being in like a place with x thousand i don't know hundreds whatever whatever the venue might be but sharing that we're in the same place and in the same time and in the same smells and sights and this particular instance of the singer performing who hopefully is not like lip-syncing but like actually performing you know is unique in some subtle ways right and that experience is very different than sitting at my computer and turning on you know whatever it is spotify google me whatever anyway there are many ways now like and listening to an album right the two are i guess like at some description and text the same like you listened to this song by this performer but like in practice as a human they're actually incredibly different experiences and the it jogged my memory of the other like obviously big player in quote

unquote metaverse that we hear we've not talked about but has been trying to experiment with the context of many things but uh you know i guess concerts is the one that i think is most interesting because it's disconnected from the rest is fort, right? And so Fortnite has been putting on concerts and having people go and, you know, partake in the concert in a video game that's essentially about killing all the people around you. And yet they're doing this thing that's like, completely not related to that, yet somehow works. I've not gone to one myself. but again, reading them, watching the videos afterwards, it's fascinating. Absolutely. And we've actually had many concerts in Topia as well.

One of the really interesting things is that in the metaverse, from what I've seen, it's not the mind-blowing part of it is not actually being in front of the stage like you're in the music. That's better in person, frankly, you know, feeling the bass flowing through you and, you know, the technology in person. Yeah. But, but what's, what's crazy is it's the in-between it's walking from stage to stage, which again, in real life you can do. Um, but that's where a lot of the social interaction happens. It's away from the stage. It's in the paths between stages or on the outskirts where people are messing around and having serendipity and running into each other. And, you know, one of the challenges of Fortnite is, again, it's avatars, right? So serendipity is challenging

because you see an avatar, it's nameless, it's faceless. People can troll you still because you're hiding behind, you know, a cartoon and a username. Whereas in something like Topia, which you're seeing other humans, you have crazy serendipity moments where you, in the in-between stages, you see somebody that you know. And you know that you know them because you can see them. And that kind of experience, that's what happened at Burning Man. That's what happens at music festivals in platforms like Topia. And it's pretty wild. And again, you can do that in person, but you can't do it every week. I mean, some people go to concerts every week. But it's very easy to just jump in for 10 minutes to a music experience and just try it out and go

mess around and have a social experience and then leave. It doesn't really cost you much in terms of time or energy or ticket costs. And so those kinds of things in the metaverse are going to be really interesting. But it's also just very much the beginning. So I actually think when we think about the, I think you asked before, you know, what is the future of the metaverse? The reality is, you know, we're in very early innings of this thing. It's like the early nineties of the, uh, the old internet. And we don't really know exactly where this is going, but the idea of the synchronous internet, this evolution, really the metaverse, when people talk about the metaverse, my definition is that it's

two different things. Both are an evolution of the internet. One is towards shared backends, like we were talking about. The other is towards real-time interaction and experiences like MMOs, right? And the two together are the metaverse. And in the long term, they become a unified energy, right? A unified evolution. And this is going to play out over 15, 20 years before we get the kind of impact that the current internet with cloud computing, as an example, has from the first internet. I guess the last thing I would even just say on this is there's a lot of hype and speculation around the metaverse and Web3 and crypto. And again, it's a little bit like the early 90s when we had the dot-com boom, right? And then a massive implosion. But those kinds of boom cycles and bubbles and then implosions are actually really important

for technology because during the dot-com bubble, we actually had a huge amount of infrastructure get created. Fiber optic cable got laid everywhere. And then you wound up after the bust with a massive oversupply of capacity, which led to the cloud computing revolution where you had all of the supply and some brilliant person was like, why don't we decentralize access to our excess supply and charge people just based on usage and stream it over the internet? And the cloud computing revolution begins. And so we'll have probably similar kinds of boom, busts, infrastructure builds, and then oversupply and some revolution that happens in 10 years based on this. Yeah, I think that is a great point.

I think like having a bust or a burst of a bubble doesn't mean things have failed quite yet. And actually, not just like that infrastructure bill, but also the hard times really winnowing down to like the people who kind of have the right formula. Like you need the explosion of diversity in order to get those crazy ideas. And then when you get this like downward force selection pressure like the good ones will survive in the back okay anyways that's a great observation but we're we okay so we're getting through most of this what i want to do though is like we've talked a lot about concepts and even you know sort of topia as a concept like

what today you mentioned a few things like going between concert stages or even having like a, you know, access on to things that exist outside of Topia stuff like NFTs as a gallery or whatever, like what today is Topia as a, if I go to it, like what, what is it like, what is, what is it based on? How are you guys accomplishing that? And then, you know, we'll sort of transition a little, a little that way. Yeah. So Topia, really, it's about making it really simple to create these shared contexts for your community. So all you have to do is upload PNGs. First of all, we have a whole marketplace.

We have a lot of templates. There's a ton of free content. So you can create an entire world very easily and then customize it. And it's basically endlessly, very, very deeply customizable. There's no one style of Topia. It's not like Minecraft where everything looks like the voxel-based blocks. It can look like anything you want. And so we have a lot of different examples of worlds that look like you're inside of a jungle,

or look like a 2D pencil sketch office or, you know, really there's anything in between, right? It's just uploading PNGs. And then you can embed all sorts of content inside of each asset, make them interactable. You can embed YouTube, Twitch Live, or I guess live streaming with Twitch or YouTube. You can actually embed entire websites, tools, games, multiplayer games. And people use that to do things like scavenger hunts. You can do all sorts of interactive, almost borderline MMO kind of endeavors and interactions that lead to shared memories and experiences between people. So those are the kinds of tools that we're building. And we have a huge range of use cases with Intopia. So as I mentioned, we kind of launched with Burning Man in many ways,

but people have had weddings, they have birthday parties. We had Asana when they IPO, they brought a thousand people together inside of Utopia World. And the CEO is doing it all hands, like speaking out and broadcasting to the entire world. But in Utopia, you can have a thousand people in a world and you click and move around. It's browser-based. It's very simple to move. Again, we tried to make it really accessible so my 95-year-old grandfather could have his birthday party in Topia. But you click and you move around and you're connecting with WebRTC over audio and video to the people that are closest to you. So people call this proximity chat or spatial chat.

It's basically these customizable game worlds that are browser-based and then spatial chat. It's basically these customizable game worlds that are browser-based and then spatial chat where you click and move around and connect with people that are close to you. You can also broadcast to the entire world. So you can put a podium where whoever steps up to it is broadcasting. There's a lot of different features and functionality, but people have used it for bringing the thousand people together to celebrate. We've had a lot of conferences. We have panels where a comic book launched on Topia and somebody made a completely immersive comic book walkthrough. So you can basically embed products, content, books, comics, really anything you want.

And think about it almost like a website, right? So every company, every project has its own website. But when you go like a website, right? So every company, every project has its own website. But when you go to a website, you're by yourself. And it's often the directory of content. And you're kind of consuming this by yourself in directory form, not really spatial, not really that immersive. You can think about Topia Worlds as basically an enhancement. Instead of just that website, you can have a spatial world that's immersive, where you move around, go on a journey through the content, and you do it with other people. And it's persistent. So you don't have to like have a

scheduled Zoom meeting for people to be able to connect and come experience something. It can just be there, it can be the community space, it can co-create it with your community, and then it can exist after whatever the event even was is over. And people can use it as that town square. And that's what we've been doing for the last two years. We've also built everything. So one of the big differences between Topia and really any other metaverse platform right now is that all of our technology is, or the foundation of it is peer-to-peer

WebRTC. So when you're in a Topia world, I guess for most metaverse platforms, I'm not sure about Zencastr, but I'm assuming it's the same concept. Anytime we're talking, our audio and video is actually going through a server, right? So there's a server, either an SFU or MCU units or what they're called. And the server is getting the stream. It's doing a bunch of processing. It's taking the streams, it's putting them into one unified stream and then sending it back to you. With Topia, we are creating tunnels between anybody that you're connecting to between your devices. And so all the audio and video is not going through a server. That means that we can't transcribe. We can't record and transcribe everything that's being said,

whereas every other platform pretty much can. It also means for us that we have unlimited scalability, essentially unlimited scalability for very cheap. So it's very privacy oriented. It's very scalable, but it's very hard to do. And so we've spent the last two years doing that. And, you know, I've, I've been working on those technologies for the last seven years. And so, you know, it's, it's something that's very exciting for us. To be fair, we actually have a hybrid system. So you can do peer to peer or SFU,

and you can switch between the two. And our broadcast, for example, is using SFU. Our peer-to-peer is how most people are interacting throughout the world and very privacy-oriented. We also have realized... We've been building since the beginning. The origin of Topia, in many ways, was to allow any organization, company, brand to create their entire own metaverse ecosystem. And so we've recently started making that available as well, is Topia as basically a backend architecture and engine where you can spin up

your own metaverse ecosystem. And so for anybody that's interested in that, you can contact us as well. Awesome. I think that a lot of this stuff you said makes sense. And it's very refreshing to hear someone like be upfront about the trade-offs of, yeah, you know, there's a lot of great things there, but you know, there's advantages and disadvantages. And so, I mean, it sounds, it sounds really interesting. People, okay, maybe we'll transition here at the end into

talking about Topia as a company. I mean, tell us about like, I mean, obviously we kind of got a glimpse of what you're building or taste. I mean, people should go check it out. There's only so much you can do in a podcast. I mean, I've watched the videos. So when you're talking, I mean, I'm envisioning what you talked about in the videos, but definitely go check out the videos, try it out. But like, tell us about Topia as a company. Are you guys hiring? What's it like to work there? Do you guys do fully remote? Are you all in one place? How does that work? Yeah, we're remote. We do have some concentration in LA, which is where I am. Our culture is... We're a company that's making it so that you can basically have community and remote play. We're very oriented around that, right? And our values are around accessibility,

human connection, safety and consent. A lot of us, probably half the team has been to Burning Man many times. And so, you know, we, you know, I would say that's kind of the vibe of it. We think of ourselves as kind of like a, everybody at Topia is really good at what they do, right? We're almost like special forces team that way.

And also very cross-disciplinary. But we don't hire anybody that is not really fired up about what we do. And we use a term called ikigai, which is a Japanese concept. It's really, it's the intersection in our context, the intersection of things that give you a lot of energy and that you are technically really good at and that drive impact. And we try for anybody that we're bringing on to figure out what is their Ikigai and is Topia and is the role that they would be having within Topia, you know, is that within their Ikigai? And Ikigai is an

amazing concept for individuals within a company. It's actually amazing concept for the company within the world. And so it's one of the ways that we think about things. But we use Topia as a remote team to have happy hours. We do stand-ups in there a couple of times a week. We do all hands. We have lots of different events and a lot of fun together through that. We also, you know, as a remote team, we get together once a quarter in person. We just did that for the first time in Denver and went to Meow Wolf, which is like an in-person experiential installation. If you guys haven't experienced it, it's pretty cool. Oh, wait, I think I read about this recently.

Yeah, it's great. Okay. All right. I'm going to check this out. Is this the same one they built in Las Vegas with the grocery store that all has crazy food in it? Exactly. And that's in Area 15 in Las Vegas. And Area 15 is basically like a shopping mall where every vendor is an experience provider. And so one of those experiences in Vegas is Meow Wolf.

In Denver, it's a standalone installation. There's also one in Santa Fe. I think those are all the Meow Wolves, but it's kind of like a video game in real life is what it's- Yeah, I saw some video very briefly from, that's like Omega Mart or something. That's crazy.

I'm like, it's on my list. I gotta go check this out. Definitely, yeah. It's got some like fallout vibes if you played fallout yeah okay all right we'll get off topic got off topic sorry um but okay so so i mean topia are you guys so you mentioned hiring people who are super passionate and know what they're doing i mean are you guys looking to hire do you guys do internships how does that how does that work yeah we would love uh we would love some college interns.

That's one of our initiatives right now. We are hiring across the company as well. We're likely doing fundraising towards the end of the summer. We have a lot of track time right now with our engine, as we're calling it, our sort of like metaverse engine. And that's been really, really exciting for us because we're seeing companies now being able to create their own metaverse ecosystems and be able to configure them. So one of the things for me has been creator empowerment, but also just deep customization of the experience. I want the internet of the real-time internet to have lots

and lots of different experiences. And that means not just worlds that look differently, but actually different interfaces, different user experiences, different experience types. And so that's, since the beginning, been part of our mission. It's now starting to connect, which is really exciting. And it means that we're going to be, you know, we are hiring right now, but we're going to be hiring a lot of additional people towards the end of the year. And so, you know, even if something's not listed on our career site, if people are really, anybody that's really passionate about this space should reach out to us because it's more important to me. I'd rather hire somebody that's really passionate about what we're doing that has a little bit less experience, or maybe where they're experienced a little bit more nebulous, right? But it's relevant to what

we're doing and where we're going. So we've hired... Actually, most of the people we've hired so far have been referrals or people reaching out to us. We have done less of the us reaching out or doing general solicitations or even posting on our career site. And one of the reasons is that we find that people that are referred by people already at Topia or people we trust and our allies or people that are aggressively pursuing us are more likely to get what we're doing, be really passionate about what we're doing, and be joining Topia because they believe in our mission and our vision and our values. Awesome. And then for

the rest of the listeners, if they go to the website today, is there something for them to check out? What would you recommend as dipping your toes in the water? Yeah, you can go to topia.io and you can create a world for free. You can use it for free forever. You can bring up to 25 people at a time for free and you can customize the world. You can put all sorts of YouTube embeds, Twitch embeds. You can embed your website. You can also, for those that are interested, you can actually embed Topia within your platform as well. And we have a lot of folks doing that within your website, within your platform. You do have to contact us and ask us for permission to do that.

We have to whitelist you. But there's a lot of ways to try this out, to embed it within your own workflow, within your own community, and to do that right now. This has been really great. I feel like it's been an awesome exploration. I think we've touched on a whole bunch, a little like, maybe a little shallow, but we covered a lot of ground and that's really great. I feel like it's been an awesome exploration. I think we've touched on a whole bunch, maybe a little shallow, but we covered a lot of ground and that's really awesome.

And I think this, as you said, is a space that's maturing and growing. And I feel like it's very early, so it's a bit hard sometimes to picture the trajectory, but I feel like you're kind of saying, you never know, but it feels like there's a lot of potential here. It feels like something that's been missing, something that would be awesome to have. We don't exactly know the right form yet. I mean, I'm glad to hear that there are people out there really tackling to make that more concrete. And so I'm really excited.

I think this has been a great discussion. Yeah, me too. And I think what I would encourage people to think about is just like the social platforms and becoming an influencer, those that figured that out early had a huge advantage. And I think with the metaverse, it's a similar kind of thing. Just dipping your toes in, starting to become familiar. Then as this whole thing evolves, you have some context. You have some base understanding of what's going on. You've tried a few of the different platforms. And so you don't have to wait five years to try out the metaverse. It's here right now. And it's going to be beneficial to you, your company, your career to start messing

around with these technologies. Yeah, I feel today those influencers get a bad rap, but I kind of in line a bit with what you're saying. I don't think so. I think it's just early adopters or people who figured it out and are helping others figure it out, right? Either for their own personal gain or for helping companies connect to people or be it what you may. I mean, maybe some are more ill-intended than others, but I mean, for the most part, I just

view this as like you're saying, these are people who got on, tried to understand. And if you ever listened to a YouTube YouTuber, I guess, or like someone talk about the craft itself, the inside baseball, it's so much experimentation and trying stuff and frustration. It's not that they just like go up there and do, I mean, there's a lot of work behind it. And so I think you're right. I feel, you know, if the metaverse really becomes this like platform as a whole in various forms, the people who are early adopters are going to have a huge leg up in understanding what's been tried and what works and what doesn't work and not repeating those mistakes or

repeating them before everyone's watching, I guess. Absolutely. And there is some overlap with influencers. We actually, within Topia, we call them confluencers. So within Topia, the influencer is a confluencer. And in nature, a confluence is where multiple rivers come together and become one. In a social context, a digital context, a confluencer is an entity that brings people together to become a community. And so empowering organizers, like everybody has those friends that are really good at just bringing people together. They're kind of like the unsung heroes of every community, of every group of friends. And what we sought to do is to empower those kinds of people to create

the space, bring people together and earn from doing that. And so we actually pay out a percentage of our revenue to confluencers, to what we call our confluencer ecosystem. And essentially, we're kind of like taxing companies and paying out the people that are organizing, bringing people together. they're essentially co-creating this platform and co-creating the metaverse with us. So, you know, look out for confluencers. There's an opportunity to become a confluencer right now, right? And the skills of being a confluencer and an influencer, there are some overlap,

but, you know, it's really all about creating space and bringing people together to be, to authentically connect with each other rather than carefully crafting content that fits a persona and then broadcasting that. So it's a little bit different, but there is some overlap. I feel Jason's gig is normally the discussion of economics. I feel like you have a fair amount of thoughts here about the economics of how your platform will work and other stuff, but we're running short on time. But I think that's really interesting

to hear someone speak about, not like you mentioned, like how are you, people who are bringing the audience should reap a reward. I mean, I think that's a very insightful way to sort of build the business. Yeah, it just aligns with

what we're trying to do in the long-term here. And frankly, just with the people that are creating a lot of value in this real-time internet, it's one of the challenges that anybody that has played multiplayer games, especially before things with incredible matchmaking like Fortnite and Call of Duty, if you recall, when you were in a multiplayer game

and you had to sit in the waiting lobby for like five minutes as the matchmaking engine is trying to find other people to synchronously connect you with so you can play the game. That's true of the metaverse also, right? Bringing people together synchronously is kind of challenging and will continue to be challenging. So for us, we recognize that and reward those that are really gifted at bringing people together synchronously within a shared context. Awesome. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I feel like this has been really awesome and I've enjoyed this conversation. I know I've learned some stuff. I have a bunch to go think about now. So I was always encouraging to have a discussion with someone and leave feeling like, wow, this is really exciting. They've shared their excitement with me. And so, you know, I really appreciate

that. And to everyone listening, I thank you for joining us for another podcast. And we'll see you next time. Music by Eric Barndoller. music by eric barn dollar programming throwdown is distributed under a creative commons attribution share alike 2.0 license you're free to share copy distribute transmit the work to remix adapt the work but you must provide an attribution to Patrick and I, and share a like in time.