Tech Brew Ride Home - (SPC CST) - The Metaverse! With @janineyorio

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

All things metaverse! Why is it on everybody's lips at the moment? When will it arrive? Is it already (kinda) here? With @janineyorio from Republic.co. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Are you still on your vacation? No, I'm back. Oh, okay, okay.

Back in the saddle. Did you, my wife sent me that. Did you tweet or Instagram that today? Which? That picture of where you were hanging out recently. Yeah, with Joe. That was from last week. That was in Yucca Valley.

I'll actually, I will pin it to this. I never really. talk about my love life on the Twitterverse, but it seemed to hit a nerve. I don't know if it's like, you know, the humanizing aspect or just because, you know, Joe's such a babe. I won't read between the two lines there, but let me find it here. Oh, there it is. It was a nice Airbnb, too. Oh, my God. It was a gorgeous Airbnb. If you go through the commentary or conversation that's happening there, you'll be able to see kind of the Airbnb that we used for that. So, you know, can I say something?

Of course. This is neither here nor there, but I just had a thing today where I was trying to get in touch with somebody for like two weeks. And this is a somebody that is important enough to have people and the people were giving me a runaround. And it was clear they were giving me a run around and they were being vague about it. And so to the point where I reached out to this person directly. And I was like, are your people giving me the runaround or what's going on? And this person said, yeah, dude, I'm fucked. Like, I'll get to you when I can get to you.

And the reason that I'm pointing this out is because sometimes people just need to check out. And also, I thought it was important because I said back to this person, your people are doing their job because they kept me on the hook without like, you know. So I just appreciated that. It was like, listen, this person needs a break and they'll get to you. And, you know, so I just feel like, especially now in the summer, that's worth noting that sometimes people aren't available. This happened, yes. So I was, I mean, I was probably more available than I should have been in some respects.

I just, you know, I can't turn off. But on the other hand, for the most part, I was trying to not be doing all the things that I normally do. you know, consuming the fire hose of information and everything that's going on. So I had a really, really great time. It was relatively relaxing. Joe and I are actually, this is a personal note, moving in together in September. And so, you know, combining lives is a big move. And, you know, we just had lots of things to talk about, about that. Just think about things that I haven't done before before I've moved in with someone. And so it just felt like, we needed that break and that separation, I think, just to get, you know, to look eye to eye and be like,

okay, we're doing this right. And so, yeah, but man, it was, it was totally unrelated. And I clearly am feeling uncomfortable. All of a sudden, as I'm warming up, it was very hot. It was, I was, it was fun. I was driving around in Joe's Tesla. And, of course, less than I got into some flame war with a troll talking about full self-driving, but get to that later. And I was just watching, like, because, you know, it was in like Palm Springs for the second half. the temperature go from like 109 to like 110 to like 112 all the way up to 117 within a span of like an hour. I was like this is this is the future and this is going to be it's going to be rough, you know, but I guess when we're living in the metaverse and we have air conditioning it, it won't be so bad.

But that's going to be later on. That's later on. Oh, I was going to say that's a transition immediate. No, no. So actually I have several things. So first run of show and also let me let me do the intro and then we'll get started. So, so hello, hello, welcome everybody. I am back from my little mini vacation.

It is Wednesday, August 4th, 2021. We are, I mean, we've been past the halfway point for this year for a while, but we are already in August. I just, I can't believe it. This is the TechMeme Ride Home Experience, where Brian and I go deep into a bunch of tech conversations and topics that we're finding interesting or are happening. We're trying to get a little context to see what's going on. And today, I think, will be a pretty big one.

I'm excited about this. We've got Janine, who is already here in the space, but she's going to be joining us to talk a lot about the metaverse and Republic Realm and what's happening there. But before we get to that, Brian, you, and by the way, guys, let's see, we are recording and let's see if you guys have questions. I don't know. We'll figure it out.

We'll work it out. But we're going to kind of keep a shit. I just realized I just started recording. That's fine. FYI. FI. Okay. I got it.

We'll figure it out. I hope. And by the way, if you see Kevin Rushman in there, he's my cousin. You don't have to bring him up. If he raises his hand, you can bring him up at some point. But anyway, go on. Okay. Cool.

Yeah, I just, you know, well, obviously, we haven't talked. We were off last week. So that's new. I don't think we've taken a break in a little while. There's been so many things, as usual, going on. But there are a few that came up, I think, in yesterday and today's shows that I just kind of wanted to get too quickly. Following up on the last time we did one of these spaces, the last time when we talked to Ross from Zoom, we did talk a bit about what Josh, the then CEO of Product Hunt had

announced, which was Hyper. And I believe it was two days ago, they just announced that their head of product is now becoming the new CEO. So within, I think it's eight months, perhaps, Product Hunt has a new CEO, and so we're going to see where Ashley wants to take that platform, but I thought that was just an interesting kind of one-to move. Clearly, if you're watching that space closely, clearly that this was sort of planned and this is like their big move, and so there's, I don't know, I'm watching that space pretty intently. But I wanted to quickly jump to several things that you talked about because I feel like you'd asked several questions. One of the questions that I want to know if you actually get some responses to this was about

the whole buy now pay later phenomenon right because we've had a number of raises we've had some acquisitions and like i feel like there's something here but i just like to speculate and kind of make shit up because my brain sees so many things but what have you heard first give us a little background well oh yeah so um i said um today and and maybe all this week that there there are certain things that i'm surprised about the the resilience of them in terms of uh investment interest in the Metaverse is one, but we're going to get to that later. The grocery delivery space, I'm surprised at how I thought that was filled. Go puff, yes. Several of them.

Go puff, please let me try you out. I want to try you out. But then, buy now, pay later, because we had, what was it, Monday, I'm bringing up my notes, a square bought a buy now pay later. later thing for $29 billion. Yeah. There are so many. What's a moment, right? Like how much was what's up?

21 billion or something? Or 18, I think it was 18. Okay. But yeah, I mean, pretty penny. And so, but one of the things about that is, is that I said either it was today or yesterday, forgive me for not knowing these things. But I said that I could have done five or six interesting raises about this space. So this is like the grocery delivery space, I was like, well, wait, isn't this already filled?

Haven't people like a firm or after pay, which is who's square bought? Haven't they solved this problem? Why is this such an interesting thing? And by the way, so the tweets can stop. Yes, Ben Thompson wrote about it today. And I read the article right after I published. And so can I go into that just for a second? I'll just a second, real quick. Go for it. Yep. Because I mentioned that we use it for my e-commerce

company because a firm got integrated with Shopify. And so if you understand the way merchant accounts work and taking credit cards for payment and things like that, you pay basically three point something percent for every credit card thing. So if you buy for my company a $100 item, I have to give $3 and usually like 30 cents for the credit cards if you buy from Visa or American Express is a little more, whatever. And so essentially

what the Affirm thing does is take 6%. So double that. Now, I don't know if that's all of these by now pay later things do it the same way. And also, I don't know if this

the integration I use is through Shopify, so I don't know if that's a little different or whatever. But what I learned from Ben Thompson's piece is that that's basically it. They just basically doubled the fee, and most of the fees made in the credit card business are from the merchant. They're not from the consumer. Right. Right. And so you always think, oh, well, the credit card companies make all their money because if you only pay the minimum balance and they get to, you know, charge you a 24% APR or whatever the hell they do, that's not really it. The real money is essentially in that 3% fee. And so essentially the buy now pay later thing just doubled that. So that's a good

business. And then according to Ben Thompson, it's also because we can't play millennials anymore because now it's Gen Z. But the young folks love this. Love the idea that you can pay in installments. So if you put that in the notes, Chris, or in the link, if you can find that piece that basically explained it to me, I think. Okay, I've got two, I guess, so there's that one. I'm going to do my thing where I'm pinning tweets. I actually, I talked to Danny, who's the product manager on Twitter spaces, and I'm like, I just need a better way, like a hopper or some buffer where I can put the links that I want to share.

Anyways, maybe they'll get there. One thing that I just saw, and we're going to go into this little thing a little bit, because I think it's actually, it is significant for two reasons. One is that consumer behavior is changing when it comes to money. Credit cards are bad, credit cards are evil, just like Facebook is evil and social media is evil. And so they're looking for better ways of kind of, I think, kicking negative habits. And so what is interesting about Affirm, actually, if you go to the link that I just pinned, they are talking about something that, like the Affirm advantage is adaptive checkout.

Now, this is their messaging to businesses. Now, here's why this is important. Because every time, and this is, you know, when software eats the world and the internet takes over all communication and kind of, you know, digital interactions, everything can become personalized. So if I go to a shop and I take out my credit card and I pay, everyone pays the same thing. Everyone gets the same rate. Everyone has the same payment terms, right?

But with a firm, from what I'm reading anyways, is that if there is a purchase price that is, you'll say, high or too high for me, a firm basically calculates based on what it knows about the user who has shown up on the site through whatever kind of tracking magic it uses to provide me a personalized, payment plan in the moment that is targeted at my budget and how much I can afford. So it's actually, on the one hand, empowering to consumers who want to buy things. And it's also better for the business because it's going to increase conversion because now you're doing variable type pricing, just like Uber does, to the customer.

When we talk about fintech, this is what we mean. In two ways, which is number one, it's smarter in terms of like it's not just a one-size, fits all thing. And also, by the way, what I learned from that Ben Thompson thing is that if you do it in these like six week long things, it's not technically a loan. So for various SEC reasons, it's not like a credit card loan and things like that. But then number two, what you said is extremely important. A lot of fintech is just making it simpler to buy. Okay. So as dumb as this is, if you can convert. big.

Like friction is... If you can make it 5% easier for a sale to go through. And we're talking about shopping cart abandonment. We're talking about like, you know, how many steps through checkout. So things like Gumroad, I talked about today. And like that's what FinTech is, is just making it easier to buy. I mean, it's like a U.S. layer on money, you know, in finance. And bringing all the machinery that,

was foisted at our brains and our human connections and relationships over the last decade to our commercial interactions. That's what's happening. And that's why this is so important and such a big deal is that once you move into the digital world, you remove all of the assumptions that were the foundational structures upon which so many other businesses have been built and now can't move. This is like the perfect example of the innovator's dilemma. Like you've built the structure that works and to move away from it means busting your business, whereas the job to be done actually can't be reconsidered because you're far too invested in the way things actually already function. But that's also the APIization that FinTech does where it doesn't, okay, I'm going to

use my company again, which I'm not going to name because I never mentioned my company. But it's a it's a $288 average product in terms of the, the, the order total. So that's a big product. So the day that we can be like, instead of having to pay $288 or $300 up front, you can split that into four payments. Well, I've wanted to do that for years. And what happened one day is we're on Shopify and they're just like, hey, you want to do this? Check a box. Click a box. And you can do this. And I didn't have to, I didn't have to do a thing. And now we're approaching 10% of our order totals are through that. There you go. So you asked the question, right?

And I think we have your answer. You ask the question, what's the deal with all these buy now pay leader things? And it's this. It's this variable pricing, personalized finance, get people to convert. And why is Apple doing this? Because they need to expand the size of their marketplace. They need to expand the number of consumers who can afford partial and fractional ownership of Apple devices to get them into the services ecosystem. So Apple doesn't care when they get your money, as long as they eventually get your money.

And that's how the Apple Loop works. And so for any other tech company or just company in general that doesn't move in this direction that starts to take your money as soon as you have purchased intent, no matter how much of that money it is, they're going to get blown away. They're going to miss the opportunity. Now, one thing I did tweet yesterday was, why do this through a firm? why can't Apple do this themselves? And then I was even cheekily saying, like, will Apple buy a firm?

But I can't remember what a firm's market cap is. I looked it up yesterday. It's like $40, $50 billion or something. But Apple could afford that. But Apple could also still do these things by themselves, except for the fact that they don't. Even the Apple card is with Goldman Sachs. So I don't know.

You know, there's now, and I'm not going to speak out of turn, so to speak. Now that I'm working at a fintech personally, you know, I'm much more aware of regulations and regulatory behavior and things like that. And so I'm sure Apple has an interest in maintaining a certain paywall around the types of businesses that it gets into, especially from an international perspective. And so if it acquires a firm, it may not actually be able to operate in other countries where maybe a firm doesn't have the licenses or doesn't operate and so forth. So there may be an element to that where just in terms of either the business maturity or

the business footprint, you know, requires that they not, that they not do that. So, okay, I didn't want, I don't want to, like, you know, like, have too much of a lead in, but I think, I think we get the story now. Okay. The other thing that I wanted to mention quickly, and this is, I suppose, because I have a personal, you know, kind of connection to this is, is that superhuman just raised $75 million. They're not even launched. This seems a little bit absurd. I've got to say that I am pretty disappointed with the cadence of their releases and the ambition of their releases. you know, if I were to wildly speculate, I would say that it's a poorly run company

that, you know, essentially figured out, you know, they could bring keyboard shortcuts, you know, in a slightly paired down interface to Gmail. Tread carefully. There was a whole brouhaha a couple hours ago. I know. Like, I'm still, you know,

I'm not exactly holding, but like I'm, I have spent a lot of money on superhuman and I probably will. And the reason is this, that when I confront or find issues or have challenges, I can email someone and I get a response. Now, I've never emailed. I don't even know what the email address would be for Gmail support,

but it just doesn't feel like you, I don't know, I even have Google One. I don't know that I'm able to get any kind of support whatsoever with Gmail. It's like, take and I leave it. It's a service, right? God, no. But I get, I get like a response from superhuman in like, you know, two to three hours. And that meaningfully means that I can keep moving, you know, at the cadence that I need to. And so overall, that, like, just as a concierge service is worth it.

So I don't know about the money thing. They talked a lot about all sorts of new bloat and adding features and stuff like that in their blog post. Can I ask you real quick? You're saying you're disappointed at their cadence. What does that mean that they're not evolving the product fast enough? They're not opening it up to as many people. There's still something. What did they say?

Like 650,000 people on their wait list or something? There are 450,000? I can't remember what I said. I mean, their user base is incredibly, incredibly valuable. Because these are people who are, one, willing and able to. spend 30 bucks a month. And those are individuals. Like, they don't even have, like, I think they might have teams or like the Enterprise Edition or whatever, but like they don't really have, they haven't really gone into productivity. They don't have a task manager. I actually interviewed at Superhuman

for a design role way way back when. And it wasn't the right fit at the time. But, you know, we, we had talked a lot about the different directions that they could go in. I mean, it's, it's obvious that you're just going to replace all the functionality of outlook because that's going to be, I guess, like your target audience, you know, where you can actually make made headwinds. I mean, yes, Gmail, fine, but people are used to free, so not a big deal. But people who are in the corporate office more likely could spend a little bit money on productivity. But everything that happened last year, you know, they just really stayed stuck within the email paradigm. And I just felt like, I don't know, there could be more productivity, more calendaring, stuff like that.

Slow. They're being slow. So slow. So slow. So slow. You know, I use it every day. So, okay. I will say, you know, there are some technical issues from a caching perspective.

That's one of the ways that it actually achieves speed. So in every device that I install superhuman, it downloads 20 gigabytes of email so it can search it quickly. And it's kind of like, stuff like that is just a little bit more annoying. And, you know, now that I, you know, work at Republic, I have a Gmail account that I use. And some of the features, you know, auto-complete, auto-suggestion, the smart compose, that stuff is It's nice to see that stuff. So I hope superhuman gets there, but it was interesting anyways, you know? Yeah.

And some of the brouhaha that happened a couple hours ago kind of is along those lines where people are like, what's up with this? But whatever. It's polarizing. Okay. The last thing I want to bring up was the Alexa powered soap dispenser because I had a great tweet about it. Oh, I know what it was. I don't know if I'm going to be able to find this. Well, anyways, it was what I say.

Just because you can doesn't mean you should. I think that's what I said. I'm going to search for it just because let's see if I can find the tweet. People seem to respond positively. Yep. Yep. It almost went viral. I don't know.

I have like mini viral pops. They're sort of like, you know, they're little fizzles. It's sort of like a, you know, sparkly water kind of like, you know, pop. But anyways. So that was the tweet. Just because you can, doesn't mean you should. And you actually had a really, I thought, you know, good discussion of this where you referenced, uh, Ben Evans.

Benedict Evans, formerly of Andrews and Horowitz, when he first wrote about, or I would say first, but wrote about voice assistants in that whole world back in 2018. And this is intentional. I'm going to read this part, and you'll understand why in a second. So this is Benedict Evans writing about voice assistants back in 2018. And this is what you brought up in reference to the Amazon smart soap dispenser, which of course you can talk to and it tells you jokes or whatever. here's what he said. Many of the things that a connection or, I'm sorry, many of the things that get a connection or become, quote, smart in some way will seem silly to us. Just as many things that got electrified would seem silly to our grandparents. Tell them that you have a button to adjust

the mirrors in your car or a machine to chop vegetables and they'd think you were soft in the head. But that's how the deployment of the technology happened and how it will happen again. The technology will be there and will become very, very cheap. So it will slide unnoticed into our lives. On the other hand, many things that people did think might get electrified did not, and many of the ideas that did work were not adopted in a uniform way. Most people in the UK have an electric kettle, but that's not true in the USA. And most people in Japan have a rice cooker, but this in turn isn't true in the UK. Anyone who's baked a few times has bought an electric whisk for $20, but not many people use electric carving knives. The smart home or connected home or internet

of things, choose your term, will probably look much the same. Electrical components became cheap commodities that let people experiment with all sorts of ideas. Today, the smartphone supply chain is a firehose of cheap commodity components that, again, let people experiment with all sorts of ideas for smart things. Some will work, some won't, but our children will take the ones that do work for granted. And this leads us directly into the Metaverse. Why? Because everything that we think we should do is not going to turn out the way we think it will or yes so one of the things I think that would be useful for our conversation and now I'd love to have Jeannie come up and introduce herself and tell us a little bit about

how she got to Republic and what she's doing now and she's a little bit like me she's sort of like chameleon like does a bunch of things but you know when when I was reading your analysis on or thinking about this analysis of a soap dispenser that has a voice assistant built into it you know instantly you kind of think wow that's dumb and yet you know in some respects the fact that we wave our hands kind of under a faucet to like turn it on and whatnot, you know, if you want to use your voice, like, what's the big difference? You know, it becomes so cheap and so available that you just put these sensors in and everything has the ability to listen to you and to interpret your commands. In a similar way, the Metaverse feels like we have, you know, as one of my,

I sort of tweeted out about, you know, questions do people have about the Metaverse? And one of them was why, why don't enough people in Silicon Valley read the dystopic, you know, portrayals of the Metaverse? And I think, you know, many of us have. I certainly have. But part of the problem is that we either assume that it's going to be dystopic because that was a great way to sell books before or that it's going to look just like Fortnite or Roblox or things like that. Whereas I think it's going to be both far more subtle is not the word and Germain's not the word, but kind of like plain, kind of ordinary. Like it's just going to see, like it's already in a way if, and I don't watch very many sports, but the way in which for example they sub in ads, right? onto billboards or whatever so that what people are seeing in the stands, if you go to the stands, versus what people see at home via television are a different set of ads because they're

able to use augmented reality. Well, to me, that is an extension of the metaverse already. It's not exactly a metaverse perhaps in the way that, you know, it's being defined and maybe we should get into some terms, but it will happen very, very slowly and then very, very fast. And it's important, I think, for us to look at the things that call themselves or self-describe themselves as the metaverse as possibly being an expression of the metaverse. But that the metaverse itself, I think, contains a larger set of normative and, I don't know, modifications of the reality that we kind of exist in today. And we're all going to be feeling, you know, pieces of the elephant. But this elephant is going to be one of the largest elephants that any of us have

ever tried to sort of figure out. And so therefore, none of us is going to have a perfectly, I think, you know, specific explanation of it. I have, I have a ton of thoughts, but Janine, yes, please, please. Please. Save us for myself. Do you want me to put you guys out of your misery? I don't know if I could cut you off at soap dispensers that are voice activated or calling me a chameleon. I prefer butterflies if I have to use a metaphor. But are you like the, are you in the shape of a, what are they, it's not the worm. It's the caterpillar. The caterpillar. In the Chrysalis. I'm in the Chrysler phase.

Anyway, I'm Janine Yorio. I'm actually Chris's colleague. I work at Republic. And I manage Republic Realm, which is Republic's metaverse investment and development platform and company. In a previous life, I started a fintech called compound that I built and sold to Republic. So as Chris said, I've done a few different things throughout the course of my career. And I'm thrilled to be here with you today. On the topic of voice activated soap dispensers. It's funny. I actually deleted a tweet about this. I used to tweet about just like really mundane things. And I said, I think that show it, the world can see that we're nearing the end of days when we're using so much technology just to pump a little sort of soap on

our hands. And it's definitely one of the reasons why people in the emerging world that don't even have access to clean water really hate on Americans because this is how we choose to deploy technology, which clearly has higher and better uses if we put our minds to it. On the, On the broader topic of the Metaverse today, it's like, what's it going to look like? I don't think you have to really think that hard. Watch a child interact with the Metaverse. It's already here. I have two children.

They're eight and 10 years old. They spend a lot more time than I care to admit playing Minecraft and Roblox. 100%. 100%. And the way they do it, so my son will have discord open so that he can be talking to his friends while he's playing Minecraft and he's got YouTube going on in the background. And it is a truly immersive experience. and that's what the metaverse is. It's not this new thing that's going to hit us like a ton of bricks.

It's already here. And people, you know how when technology evolves? Oftentimes people have to make homemade janky solutions because the all-encompassing solution doesn't yet exist. That's what the metaverse is. It's got sound. It's got movement. It's interactive.

It's social. And it's a departure from the way we all interact with the internet today for the most part. Because websites are 2D and the metaverse is 3D. And that's the primary difference. And so the fact that you are completely immersed, you can't really do much else when you're in the Metaverse, the way you can kind of surf the web and talk on the phone or surf the web and walk down the street, it does become that much more of an all-encompassing experience. So I think that's what the Metaverse looks like. I think it's already here. I just don't think we have that elegant solution that's tied up with a bow, the one that Mark Zuckerberg is talking about building, the one that all the excitement is about.

But we already can see what it looks like. So I just want to add, or I guess I clarify two things, because Matthew Ball has, you know, he's sort of like the canonical, you know, suits there about this topic. He's been writing about it for some time. I just pinned a link to his primer. Two things that I think seem to come up pretty regularly around the metaverse. And I think are important. And they're related to the internet as it exists today, but there are also modifications. One is the persistence. And so, you know, it never, it never stops. It keeps going. It's sort of like Bernie man. You know, it's like, you kind of like can go to sleep, but the party like continues on, for those of you have been. And then the other thing is that, you know, it's, it's, it's live, it's happening real time. And so it's just as though you're in the real world, except obviously everything is sort of fabricated out of a digital substrate. So you're interacting with things and there's persistence and, you know, you can sort of log out of the metaverse, but it doesn't stop. And so I guess like, how does that compare with, you know,

like when you play Roblox games, I feel like they're, I mean, they are persistent. They kind of keep going, you can kind of like log off and maybe you'll never go back and sometimes you will. And I guess maybe what I'm trying to get at is both presence but also placefulness, the sense that there are destinations and there are locations. And, you know, the reason why I was excited to bring you on and to help us think through this is one, because of your background in real real estate and, you know, obviously also the other work that you're doing with virtual real estate and what's happening there. And how important is that for one, understanding the opportunity and two, understanding who's going to possibly own these things. And three, when it comes to this real

estate, how interoperable are these things going to be? Yeah, we'll start there. That's like 19 questions right there. I'm sorry. Brian will tell you that this is going to ask just one. You're like, you're like that guy at the conference that asks the question that takes 10 minutes to ask for a yes, no answer. But my, so I, before I was working in fintech, I actually was in real estate development. I was the head of real estate development at standard hotels. And I worked for a creative genius named Andre Belaz, who was genius at placemaking. And placemaking isn't just about architecture. You can't just build something and expect it to come to life. You have to have the right people. You have to program it with events. It has to be in the right neighborhood. Things have to be

happening there as well. And he really taught me that there is so much more to placemaking because you see it. People come along and try to dupe a cool hotel and you'll walk into it and it just doesn't have the right vibe. and there's this thing that you can't put your finger on and you know that it's fake and you know that it's not where you want to be because all of those pieces are missing. And all of those same lessons can be applied to the Metaverse. It's about content. It's about design. It's about publicity. It's about making sure that influencers are there, but also the right crowd is there. It's making sure that you do it over and over again, but it also doesn't become so formulaic that people expect, you know, that they know exactly what they're going to find. It's about kind of like what Studio 54

taught us back in the 70s and 80s about curating the right crowd and making sure that it's always interesting and always a little surprising. So like all of those same lessons apply to the metaverse. And I think that's why when people go to the metaverse platforms that exist today, they're disappointed because it's not it's not yet firing on all cylinders. We haven't had those really talented placemakers step in and figure out how to turn this kind of boring gamer driven environment into something that really feels alive and compelling for adults who have come to expect that richness of experience. So that's part of why I'm so excited about this, is I think that a lot of what I have learned in my past life is directly applicable to what's happening in the metaverse and what

will happen in the coming years. Can I, let me, let me reframe a little bit. I feel like a lot of people think that the metaverse is sort of all about gaming, which I'm going to follow up on that in a second or it's like VR or something like that. But in your, it sounds like in your vision of it, it's, that's too reductive, right? I think that the meta, like, let me think of an analogy. The metaverse is to gaming, what the internet is to shopping or porn, right? Like, yes, it's important and it's probably going to be a big revenue driver and a big source of what pushes the sector forward. But like the internet, it really does appeal very broadly and people will sort themselves

differently and find their tribes in different places. And if you're a gamer, you'll be drawn to the gaming platforms. And if you're a shopper, you'll be drawn to the shopping platforms. And if you're looking for love, you'll be drawn to the platforms that are about making personal connections. So I don't think it's just about gaming. It's just gaming

is kind of the industry that is rolled out of. Let me put this in a different way. Because I have said on the show before that Snow Crash is the book that has burned more money for Silicon Valley than any other book. But, you know,

this idea, maybe people would be more familiar with Ready Player 1, where this idea that you jack in and you put VR on. Or the Matrix. Or the Matrix or whatever. Right. So,

if you were pitching a fund to me that was going to only invest in metaverse stuff. What would your pitch be beyond the idea that, oh, you can, you know, you can interact with your friends, of course, but also you can play these games? Like, what is the other there there that is beyond IRL that the metaverse theoretically, and maybe we don't know the answer to this, but theoretically would solve?

product discovery, you know, the same way that you and I, because it's just generationally programmed this way, we find out about things on the 2D internet, we Google them, we read about them, we find them on Amazon, you can do the same thing in the Metaverse, but instead of finding it by search terms or pictures, you're finding it like as you actually do things in the metaverse. You might happen upon a cool pair of shoes or an idea for a vacation. So product discovery is one. I think there's educational and, you know, the idea of attending, like, like conferences and events, even mental health and wellness type events where it's about people communicating with other people in a slightly anonymous environment where you can ask questions

and do things through an avatar and not have to reveal your true identity. There are certainly things that you can do professionally like meetings in the Metaverse. I don't think anybody's totally cracked that code yet, but I can already see, you know, Chris and I work on different coast, but we work together if we can meet in the metaverse and it wasn't stupid, I think it would actually be really useful. Like, seeing people's hand gestures or being able to read social cues that they're ready to walk out of the room would be a really nice thing to be able to do. You can't do that on Zoom. So I think as there are lots of different ways that it becomes valuable. I don't think we know them all today, but I think for sure retailers and consumer products are going

to find a lot of utility there. And then the whole. meeting and event space, concerts, that kind of thing, for sure. Did you listen to Casey Newton's interview with Zuckerberg? I just penned the tweet to it, but I'm curious if you got a chance to listen to that. Me, I have not. Okay. And the reason why I bring it up, and by the way, that's totally fine, is because of the way in which Zuckerberg, one, lays out his vision for the Metaverse and two talks about how,

you know, he wants people in the future to think about Facebook as the Metaverse company, which I think has so many interesting ramifications. In terms of a zig and a zag and in the way that he definitely kind of, you know, it's like tricky dick, like Nixon kind of thing where it's like just nothing really sticks because he's sort of skating to on the one hand like where the puck is going, but based on where everyone else has already decided to go and, you know, then take credit for it. Sorry, too much pontificating. My question was really about how he seems to be thinking about the metiverse as being a place

for work. and especially either in the remote era or, you know, obviously with the investment in Oculus or the fact that, and I think this is part of the question that I have for you, especially as, you know, someone who is thinking about investing in real estate in the metaverse, is to what degree does the Metaverse need to become that place where you are spending, you know, most of your screen time engaged in this kind of, you know, three-dimensional, immersive environment, and then you sort of, I don't know why you come back to the real world, because the real world in physics become a lot less interesting.

But does it have to be a place where you're serving many of those functions that you just described in order for it to become a commercially viable context? Or can it just be a place for young kids to hang out in after school and parents blow off some steam in Fortnite or blow some stuff up and then other architects or whatever come in and do a little bit of work? How multivariant does the set of experiences that the multiverse has to support need to be there in order for it to become? something of a pop culture phenomenon, given what you said about the design of placefulness or of spaces. Well, first of all, you just coined a new word. I don't know if you noticed that. You called it a multiverse, which I think is interesting. We should start tweeting that. That was a good one. But I think it's going to be like social media. For some people, social media is a completely addictive drug that subsumes their entire life and they can't go a minute without seeing how many

likes they're getting or what their follower count is at. And for other people, you know, and maybe it's age and generational, they log on once every few weeks and they're completely content with that level of interaction. I don't I don't think it's one size fits all. I think that's true of all technology. For some people, it is a solution to all of their problems. And for other people, it's just like sprinkles on the cupcake. So I don't think it has to be everything for everybody in order for there to be validation that this is absolutely the direction things are headed in. On the topic of Mark Zuckerberg and why he made the announcement, it kind of vaguely reminded me of when overstock.com decided to become a crypto company. You know, it felt a little bit like

Like he was piling on to a trend. And I wonder if that was because maybe the Facebook demographic is starting to age out. And he's getting bored with the prospects of just riffing on Instagram and Facebook and is looking for a new challenge, which I fully respect. But it did feel a little bit like he's kind of coming late to the game. I don't think that in any way changes or dilutes how strongly I feel that this is where things are headed. But for Mark Zuckerberg, who's usually at the four of things, it did feel like it was an announcement, it was maybe two or three months. later than you would have expected it to be if it wanted to come across as really authentic. Well, or, you know, God forbid anybody, any CEO of a major company is like, don't look at this

over here, look at this over here, because... Exactly. Right, that's what I was suggesting, right? Don't look at quarterly earnings. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly.

Well, that Facebook doesn't have to worry about that, but maybe there's something else that we're not yet seeing. Well, no, but he did, like, in the earnings call, he did warn people that the Apple ad tracking stuff is going to kick in. And that will both cause ads to become more expensive and for revenue, I think, to go down. Right. So the quality of tracking. So that's one of the questions that I want to get to, which is once you're in the Metaverse, I presume, you know, I don't know how much Web3 stuff is happening to preserve privacy and so on and so forth, but that everything is actually going to be tracked. And from an advertising perspective, you know, you mentioned product discovery, it feels like

that is definitely going to be one of the elements of this. And given where we are- Can I interrupt, Chris, because this is 100% what I wanted to ask. Go, go, go. So Zuckerberg in the interview with Casey Newton is describing the Metaverse as the next platform beyond the mobile web, right? But the web functions, maybe not as much as it did or maybe it never really did, as something that nobody owns all of it, right? It's based on open standards. People can own pieces of it. And even in the Metaverse, the whole idea of the Metaverse, even going to Snowcras.

is you can own real estate in the Metaverse. But what I'm curious about Janine is if we're moving towards the Metaverse, are the ideas of it being built on open standards that everyone can play? I feel like Zuckerberg in that interview made a lot of hand-waving towards that. He talked about it. Yes, but is this a thing where everybody is rushing to build their own wall gardens and call it the Metaverse? Or what do you think about that? Well, I think that's why there's been such a gold rush in the Metaverse recently, and that's because of the addition to a blockchain

to it and this whole concept of decentralization because of that fear. And, you know, Facebook is not a decentralized company by any stretch. What gives people some comfort is a bit of this hope that there will be interoperability. There isn't like unilateral control over the technology. Somebody can't yank the keys from it and decide to shut it down tomorrow. In theory, all of those decisions have to be made by the decentralized governance body. And that gives people comfort and more, more of a feeling of security that allows them to invest ever larger amounts of money. And I think, you know, when you hear about a company like Facebook kind of owning the platform and owning the technology, it is outside the ethos of the entire crypto ecosystem. It's not

clear to me today, honestly, whether the metaverse is going to be all about crypto. My Republic realm is very focused on the crypto aspect of things, not exclusively, but for the most part, that is where we are placing most of our bets today. But I'm not convinced that it will be exclusively a crypto-based metaverse and that the crypto aspect is what really is going to make the metaverse sing. But I think given where the market is, people are more skeptical of platforms like Facebook or even Fortnite, where there is this idea that you could buy something there and you can never get it out, or you can, you run the risk that that game falls out of favor and the assets that you've built up there become worthless because people stop playing Fortnite. There's no way to

move those assets into a different game. Chris, forgive me one more. Yeah, yeah. And I'm going to, I'm going to go a little bit here because I'm going to put on the history hat. But people, people that I've read my book know that, like, I made the point super, super strong that, like, everyone thought that the information super highway was a thing. Bill Gates and the cable companies were going to make, you know, interactive TV and broadband and stuff. All of that was going to happen, but they were going to control it. They were going to, they were going to go into these partnerships together. And it was going to happen after the year 2000, which, by the way, they were right about that's when broadband and all that stuff came around. The thing that they missed was that something came along before they were ready to hand deliver. this vision to consumers called the web that was just good enough, right? And that's what they didn't see in 1993, 1993, 1994, is that the web, as dumb as it was, as probably not ready for prime time for normal consumers as it was, was good enough for people to adopt it, is, when you talk about things like Fortnite and things like that,

like if we've got Zuckerberg and people like that saying how great the Metaverse is going to be, is this just another example of where, by the way, the metaverse is probably already happening in various corners of the world. That's just good enough for the people that are already into it. And we don't have to make these great pronouncements of how great it's going to be because it'll get there and it's already getting there for certain people. You know, there is a platform. Of course, the name escapes me in Korea that's really large and very widely adopted.

That is a metaverse. And of course, I can't think of the name. trying to Google it while you were talking. But even, and I'm using, I'm using Fortnite. That's a gaming. I'm thinking of Roblox. That's a gaming thing. But these ideas that like, where it's like, well, it has to be completely immersive and completely, you know, convincing and things like that, whereas people can run around and do their dumb little dances on Fortnite and that's enough for right now.

Like, it's sort of that idea that you don't have to wait for technology to be perfect. it can be good enough for it to be adopted and then get traction even before it's ready. I definitely agree with that. I can't think of any really good examples of how that is the case, but I definitely agree with the phenomenon generally. Well, one of the things that I thought was really interesting about Zuckerberg's comments, and this sounds like a change in his attitude, and by the way, I want to like, kind of, you know, as an aside, point out that prior to the Metaverse, he was talking to. about social audio. Like that was his big jam. And I feel like he's already realized that,

you know, I mean, grants, we're doing social audio to some degree now, you know, Clubhouse is not as big as a competitor as maybe he thought. And so that was sort of like the pivot towards the metaverse. I'm not quite sure what was going on there. But one of the things he did talk about was about economic opportunity and about the ability for people to contribute or to build in this space. And so, Brian, like I hear what you're saying in terms of things being, they don't need to be perfect or this immaculate conception or presentation for it to attract a large number of people to get excited about it. However, basic things, and I think Roblox is actually a really good example of this, as well as Minecraft, you know, considering how primitive

those things look relative to the amazing kind of like 4K, 8K games, you know, World Warcraft and stuff like that. Kids like have no problem having fun and a good time in that, largely I would say because of the ability for them to manipulate the environment, to build things for each other, to co-create with each other, in the way that the web allowed us to do that too. Right. Like, I mean, I remember, to date myself, I had like a homepage on AOL. But, you know, like, similar with MySpace, there was a degree to which you could modify and manipulate the environment for self-expression. But it wasn't as full featured as setting up, you know, an FTP server where you could put an HTML file and own the entire experience. So my question actually to sort of change or tweak the direction of what you're asking, Brian, is what is the good enough level of construction or manipulation or creation or co-creation that needs to be available and how interoperable or portable does it need to be in order to start creating a type of virtuous cycle where a bunch of these multiverses start to maybe interoperate or move together?

For example, if I create a skin in Minecraft or a castle that's amazing, and my friend, who's a Roblox player and who I know through Roblox wants to buy it, is there some either cross-multiverse currency that allows that exchange to happen? Is there a format or a structure? I mean, we're mostly talking about polygons. So it's like, can I move that structure from one place and from an NFT perspective, kind of burn it in the Minecraft land so that it shows up in the Roblox land as the one and only. castle that I have created. And so you're moving these artificially scarce objects

around that are being created by essentially the players of this space. And that creates a whole new set of opportunities and ways of playing that doesn't really, or at least is starting to reduce on kind of like the open web. Well, you cannot, you cannot move things between Fortnite and Minecraft today. But that is why people get so excited about the concept of NFTs. So the whole point of an NFT is that you can declare yourself the owner, prove it in a way that everybody agrees is in fact the truth, and move that asset around between different places. You can show it on open sea, but you can also put it in a gallery into Central Land and you can take it with you to, you can own an Axi and play Axi Infinity with it and nobody debates that it's yours and you can

move it around and show it off in different places. And so that is yet another reason why there is so much capital flooding into the space today is because the whole concept of an NFT has eliminated some of that friction and made it so that we don't just have to sell things on eBay and figure out like a janky way of passing ownership between Fortnite skins across different platforms. The NFT model actually allows you to do it and there's infrastructure already in place for you to do it. Yeah, but I mean there's still multiple blockchains though so I worry about that too where it's like well you know but go on. I I'm sorry, interrupted.

No, and then the concept of the photoreal rendering, you made the point that Minecraft and Roblox look very primitive. And again, it's interesting. I think it's, I do look what children are doing today because I think it's a very good indicator of what's going to happen in the future. But I will say what eight-year-olds want to spend their time doing is not the same as what 18 or 28-year-olds want to spend their time doing. And my daughter specifically, who's completely addicted to Roblox,

has said to me, point-blank, she actually prefers the games where the rendering is blocked. and pixelated. She doesn't like the photo real games. And that is intentional. First of all, it renders faster. So as you move around and walk around, the buildings appear much faster in the games that have less. It works on cheap devices

that a lot of kids have, too. Yeah, and they prefer, I think, mentally the idea of building cubes that are stackable is much easier for a child to grasp. Now, I don't know, again, my point is, I don't know if that works for a 28-year-old. You know, when I look at Minecraft, I think, wow, that looks like a mess.

But I am also not a 28-year-old who grew up and spent my 10 formative childhood years playing in Minecraft. So the world might look different to a person that was groomed with those visual cues than it would be for somebody like me who was raised looking at catalogs that had photographs on them. Yeah, but also, I mean, listen, I'm old enough to remember playing multiplayer games that were purely text-based. So, like, you know, these concepts don't have to, they don't have to live and die by the fidelity of the graphics. Again, this idea that it has to be immersive. You don't have to have Ready Player 1 where it's just like, I'm completely lost in the world for the metaverse to be meaningful to people.

Chris, I just sent you the link. Are you aware of Axi Infinity just as an aside? Right. I don't know if this is the one that Janine was talking about. I have not yet read Packy's, I guess, tear down of this. Yeah, and I haven't mentioned it on the show, but it is fascinating. I pinned the tweet. So if you guys want to go check it out.

But my understanding, actually, okay, this is, I'm sorry, this is a little bit of a non-sequitur to some degree. But it is getting to, I think, I don't know if I'd call it like a thesis, but a question. Because of the way in which social media is participatory, you know, one of the things that has always guided my thinking about social design and creating technology for people is what I think of as generativity. In other words, the ability for individuals to contribute to or change or modify not just like aspects of the game, but like the rules of the game itself, or to fork the game and create an entirely new set of experiences based on either different primitives or different assumptions. And the way or the place where you see that the most and with the most richness and vibrancy, I would say, is in the open source world. And so this Axi infinity concept, again, I'm not going to try to speak out of turn, but I will. reference one thing that I experienced last night very randomly, which is that Pablo Stanley, who's this amazing, great designer, he runs something called Blush. He started out, I want to say

maybe two years ago or something, building first, I think, sketch plugins and then Figma plugins that allow you to kind of auto-generate different characters kind of on the fly. Now, you can imagine that this is applied to sort of concepts like cyberpunks and things like that, that of course have NAT values. Well, he just did the same thing. And I'm going to have to find this tweet. in a second where he generated 10,000 unique animated gifts using one of these same concepts or the same kind of substitution JavaScript frameworks that work inside of these vector-based design programs and minted them on OpenC. So he just created 10,000 of these new creatures that are infinitely reconfigurable and they're all for sale. And I calculate, I don't know if he just

just like minted like a billion dollars worth of new NFTs. But this Axi Infinity thing feels very, very similar and very related because you are creating this kind of connection to these artificially scarce characters or creatures. And then they become their own kind of currency due to their uniqueness on the blockchain or expressed as an NFT. And then that allows you within these, the metaverses or the multiverses to exchange things of different value between these different contexts. So I'll find a link to and I'll share it.

But that, to me, at least, was my read or sort of like high-level impression of what Axi Infinity is doing. Yeah, Republic Realm were really, really excited about Axi Infinity. We started hearing about it actually on Twitter and Discord back in March and April, and that's when we started averaging in and buying Axis, which Axis are based on Pokemon. So there's these, like, cute little cartoons, and they mate with each other. Chris, you would like that part. Sorry. And when they mate, they have traits and some of the traits are more rare.

So you can breed them. And as you breed them, you get, you know, a brood. And if you're lucky, you get a rare one. And then the rare one can be bred. And you have this whole economy based on. You're right. The whole mating thing, you know, in that sense. Yeah.

And so that is the crux of Axi Infinity. And what's been interesting and why it's been getting so much press is because people have figured out you get paid when you buy and sell axes in the native currency of Axi Infinity. and then that currency is you can trade it for dollars or whatever your fiat currency of choices. And so people in the Philippines where the cost of living is relatively low have figured out how to make wage playing Axi infinity. And so call centers are now filled with gamers playing Axi infinity and breeding axes. And it's actually been like a really positive story. And now you have companies setting up scholarship funds to educate the gamers on how to play so that people can go and play axi and make a living wage, breeding Pokemon's and a call set. And it all, I mean, if you want to talk about dystopian, that really is starting to sound weird, but it's interesting.

And I think there are things we can learn from that about play to earn and about, you know, where culture takes shape and where the metaverse is going to start. And, you know, we all thought it was going to be to Centralland or Second Life's Second Coming. And instead it's this, you know, relaunch of Pokemon with a slightly different spin. And it's happening in the Philippines. Well, and not to be too gross about it. But the thing that blew people's hair back was according to, and I've only got Packy's info on this, but like in April, Axie did about $670,000 in revenue. In May it did $3 million in revenue.

In June, it did $12.2 million in revenue. And then in July, it did over $100 million in revenue. So in three months from $670,000 in revenue to over $100 million, that's quite a graph. That's a anyway, I know that's gross. And their token that it's up about 400% in the past month. It's up 7,000% since January of the year. Wow. Which token is this?

It's AXS. Okay. Wow. Yeah. So like one thing that I want to add into this, and I'm sorry, this is like, you know, my mind kind of goes around a bunch of different things. But I was listening to the daily podcast, I believe, yesterday. And it was yesterday or two days ago.

Anyways, it was talking about the problem. with the labor shortage in the U.S. And there are a couple interesting pressures that I think are worth bringing up. And Brian, you kind of alluded to it in a way. You know, first, at least in the U.S., you know, people are getting unemployment, 600 bucks a week. It's a good amount of money. Maybe it's, you know, a little bit less than or more than what they were making

previously when they, you know, had a regular job. And those regular jobs were mostly, you know, shit. And people don't want to go back to them. You know, they were getting, you know, burns from like the oil in, like, the kitchen. And, you know, like the guests treat them like shit and all this stuff. They're like, why would I go back to that when the government is giving me all this free money? And now, you know, Brian, as you just alluded to, you know, there are these call centers in the Philippines, you know, with tens of thousands of people who are probably, you know, essentially trying to weed out the terrible stuff on social media. Give Ginny credit for that.

Ginny and said that. Yes. I'm sorry. Okay. Well, happy to give Ginny credit for that. And as a result, we have all this surplus human capital that is like largely underutilized, providing, you know, support, you know, queries for people whose iPhones, you know, got flush down the toilet. or something, and they're finding that they're able to make more money through these virtual online digital economies.

And so, one, I think that's a really kind of interesting moment now where the pandemic gives everyone this opportunity to kind of like stop, slow down, take a break from whatever rat race they were on and find something else to do. And there are these huge platforms that are coming out that are giving people a whole new economic way to participate and to make a reasonable amount of money that wasn't available before. And the third thing that I'll add to this. And Janine, I don't know if you have followed this. And I've sort of only caught the high level of this.

And Brian has been talking about this on the show a little bit. It's just what is going on with China and how they're cracking down on, one, the technology platforms. But two, recently they've just introduced a number of laws forbidding, especially young people, from spending too much time playing video games on a weekly or daily basis. I'm not sure what it is. I think it's like two hours a week or something like that. And you can get really in trouble. You can lose access to the metaverse, basically, or to China's version of the metaverse. if you get caught playing down or playing too much stuff.

So I guess I'm just trying to think about how those things all come together. Well, we, I actually work really closely with our Shanghai-based team. And I know, and I honestly hadn't heard about the video gaming crackdown. I know that they've been shutting down companies, but I hadn't heard that they were trying to limit individual users time spent. But people in China are just as excited about the metaverse as they are everywhere else. And metaverse fever has taken over China. And despite the capital restrictions there, wealthy Chinese are looking to move money out of China and invest in Metaverse plays.

So I don't really have more color on it than that, but I think the appeal is broad. It's not limited to American or Western taste or access to really strong Wi-Fi. Everybody wants to interact with the Internet this way and play to earn games and be a part of a community. And there's just a lot of different reasons why it's so compelling. You see this with all these NFT projects, too. Like, I don't know if you guys have heard of BoredApe Yacht Club. It's kind of like actually, except it's not inaction. You buy it and you hold it, but they created this idea of a community,

and they made a bathroom where you can graffiti on the wall of the bathroom. That's literally the hook. And because of that, people perceive there to be this sense of belonging that you have when you own a Bored Ape, and it's honestly blown up the Internet. now your board ape can have a dog and your board ape can buy a boat and um none of it really makes any sense in the abstract but i think the pandemic made us all want to connect to people in in ways and and we've had to do it virtually and and because of that because of nfts because of all these things and the confluence of these things happening at the same time you have these like kind of strange

phenomenons that are like board apes are trading for 30 and 50 thousand dollars for for what is effectively a j-pig of a of a cartoon gorilla so um none of it makes sense if you think about it, but in the abstract, when you think about it anthropologically, it's actually really interesting and you can see why it's happening now. Can I give you one more devil's advocate because that's kind of what we're poking at a little bit here. Even when we say, ha ha, Mark Zuckerberg is talking about the metaverse because probably next quarter, you know, Apple's iOS stuff is going to cut into their ad revenue and things like that. But I've...

been around long enough to be like every time people say, oh, yeah, the mobile web, it's going to happen, it's going to happen, it never happens, and it does. Or video on the web. It's never going to happen. It's never going to happen. Or it's happening. It's happening. It never happens. And then YouTube and Netflix come along. And then everyone is like, oh, yeah, that was always going to happen. There was an article that I almost did this week about how VR is like the fail sun. Do you know that term? the rich kid that never has to actually make good because the parents are always making excuse for it. But the thing that I would say is that for all of these technological advances, it's kind of always waiting for the thing that will trigger it happening. for the mobile web you needed

Wi-Fi and ubiquitous better broadband in terms of digital networks. For web video, you needed broadband as well. So, Janine, do you think that there is some sort of technological breakthrough, be it a gadget, be it something that

we're still waiting on before the metaverse will become completely obvious, like things like the mobile web or web video, have been over 20 years. I'm much more skeptical about how important VR is to the metaverse, but I'm not going to say that I'm an expert there. I think some of that might be generational. But you have watched people get excited about VR for a decade now,

and it's always been, like, what was your, you called it a fail son? It's like always almost there. The rich kid that can never, like, oh, he's going to come good someday, just give him another chance. It's going to be amazing. I think if we can figure out how to make a VR headset that looks like the Google Glass, then there's a chance to become more widespread. But as long as you have to strap like a 1980s-era cell phone to your face,

and now I was reading a story today that they're causing rashes, the latest Oculus release, like it causes some sort of skin rash on your face. Like the technology, the thing itself is just too cumbersome. Facebook is an SDD. That's all we need to know. basically. I don't know that you need to have, you know, with a 3D experience. Remember when 3D TV was a thing? For like five minutes. Perfect. Perfect example. Exactly. And even movies, like IMAX movies where you have to wear the glasses, like a movie is just as good without it popping off the screen. I can enjoy the movie just as much. Now, maybe people said that about black and white films before color, but I actually think this is different. I don't think I need it to be 3D for me to lose myself in the story or or spend hours on the internet scrolling. So I don't think the 3D component is that critical.

And that's kind of the point that I was making is that I remember in like 2001 when my brother got a phone where he could look up the baseball scores on his phone. I was like, why do I need that? I can just go to my computer or my desktop. But it took a thing like the iPhone and, you know, ubiquitous 3G, ubiquitous Wi-Fi for it to be like, oh, right, duh. And so that's what I'm wondering is that, and this is just a gut thing, is that. while I believe that the metaverts, and this comes back to even my idea that maybe it'll be just good enough before it becomes ubiquitous, but I'm just, I feel like there's still some shoe to drop, whether it be a gadget, whether it be a technology or something, before the metaverse is really ready for prime time. Well, and I'm trying to think of, like, in the past, what have been the impetus for different, like, technology adoptions, and it's oftentimes, like, things that are very base, right? Like, I made the joke earlier about porn, but isn't it? And I wasn't there at the very beginning of the internet, but people were, I'll say that that is what drove the internet forward.

It might be something like sports or gambling. You know, if we figure out how to make spectator sports, like I can see a situation where you're watching a basketball game and you can kind of hover over it and fly around it in the metaverse type thing as opposed to watching it in 2D, that could be kind of cool. Kind of the way that NFTs are suddenly what people are saying might be the killer usage for blockchain. You know, it's actually, you actually kind of sort of need it as opposed to all of the other crypto applications, which are very tenuous at best.

So I don't know. Maybe it's sports. Maybe it's, I don't know. I actually don't know what, I don't know if it's a device. I don't know if it's more of a technology enhancement or it's just some sort of content that actually feels better and works better in a 3D environment. I don't know. That's what I think is so exciting about this space. And every day we're learning something new and the ingenuity of the human mind becomes really clear when you're at the outset of an industry like this. The culture of the industry is taking shape. And we're going to see amazing things. things. I just don't know what they are yet today. You know, just to like, I guess, drop in here one more thought. It feels like, and I think I'll go back to like one of my earlier points. And I think we would sort of like, you know, regressing back to saying it will be something that's just germane. That's something just, you know, kind of basic about it and yet draws you in. It pulls you in. And when I think back to the early days of social media, it wasn't, and I think maybe the metaverse is going to be a little bit more about that feeling of belonging.

And I know that Zuckerberg used, like, presence as one of the core distinguishing experiences of it. You know, you talked about porn being kind of like the thing that led, you know, people to kind of, like, use the internet because suddenly you had an explosion of, well, I mean, it took a while for there to be an explosion of content like that that was available. But it was much easier to access than, you know, your sort of smutty neighborhood magazine store or, you know, HBO late at night or, you know, whatever it was. And in a similar way, I do.

think that people are craving like real presence, the ability to occupy space with somebody else in silence and have a sense that they're also there. And from what I understand, there's a lot of young people who are, you know, behaving in that way right now. You know, they're going into the metaverse to be around people, but not to necessarily interact with other people. We've been talking a lot about the first person experience and the rendering and the graphics and all that. And I feel like it's actually much more primitive. And that's going to be the thing that drives people in because I can imagine a student you know or like myself like sitting in a classroom you know in high school tell me where can people find out more about what

you're doing what type of stuff should people you know reach out to you about what kind of things are you interested in and chatting about there's placefulness through presence will be what I guess flips that next generation you are you know over into a regular user reach out to me if you're a designer or developer that maybe maybe that's what's going to go projects or you're a company that's trying to figure out how to get into the metaverse. You know it sounds exciting, but you don't really know what to do about it. I mean, in any respects.

We can help you think through different strategies. I did notice, you know, there was one folks or one person that, that amazing. Awesome. I'll also add Remy. Remy actually had a question before also. Oh, Remy had a good question actually about who's going to write the rules. This is a whole part of the Zuckerberg conversation, but Remy, you want to say hi?

Hi. So mine is a, I, you know, I guess a more pointed question. I've actually been thinking about it since you mentioned this at the beginning, Janine. How do you feel the metaverse has changed how your kids interact with people? Oh, good one. How does it, how do I feel, how they interact with me? Is that the question?

Probably in general, right? Yeah, in general. Like people in general, but I, if you have experienced, like, if it's changed how they interact with you, I think that also applies. Honestly, I think it's terrible. I mean, they become like, they become like, like, what happens when you take a crack pipe away from the crack pipe? They, like, spit and scream. It's so addictive. I don't think it's necessarily a good thing.

I don't think their brains are, I see how addicted I am to my phone. And they'll be very quick to point out, you know, mom, you're just as addicted to your phone. And my retort is always, well, but my brain is already fully formed and you're still going. Right, mine can't get screwed up anymore. Yeah, or whatever. The damage is already done here. But I don't think it's great, but I don't think I can fight it. I tried to fight it, especially at the beginning of the pandemic.

You know, this year's been weird where every kid in America has been forced. We didn't allow technology in our life. We were anti-technology. And then school went online. How do you, you can't release a child who is, you know, 11 years old or 10 years old and make sure that they're only doing schoolwork once you give them a laptop. And so pandemic, I know when I was a kid, like, rewrote the rules. I think it's actually- Yeah, I know when I was a kid, we didn't have, like, internet.

And I didn't have access to the internet until, like, middle or high school. And now, like, every kid in America, like, the New York City public school system went around and, like, installed internet in people's homes so that their kids could get online. So we've, we've, like, we've helped this trend along. And I'm not sure it's necessarily a positive one. But I think it's already, the wheels are already in motion. And I don't, I think the, what's the, what's that metaphor about Pandora's box? The box has already been opened.

So, um, I think, I think they will learn to moderate. I hope they will. But what I see happening to their brains and the level of addiction and how no real world toy or book or even human interaction can really compete with the sensory stimulation they get playing in the metaverse. And that's the scary ready player one version. have this in mature. Yeah. A bit of a follow-up. Well, if you don't mind me, ask you, like, what generation are you a part of?

What generation am I a part of? I guess I'm an aging out millennial slash gen X. What are you? I'm Gen Z. Like, I'm on the older side of Gen Z. And how much do you weigh? I'm currently like, one. I'm just like while we're asking, revealing personal questions, I just figure I might as well do the asking as well.

Yeah. In the Metaverse, I don't want anything, so there. The reason I asked was like, do you remember when I guess when we were relatively kids in the internet? There was a lot of discussion about like parental controls. What do you think that looks like for the Metaverse? I mean, my son can code. He can use a computer better than I can. any kind of parental control.

He can... It's more like child control on the parent. All you're doing is just making their job more fun. I don't know. It's a puzzle to figure out. Tomorrow's program or so, you know, I guess if your kid is dumb, it's easier. You're basically just giving them a game to play before the game, essentially. Yeah, exactly.

And then they really do like, they're like, nah, nah, look what I did. And then they're like, I earned this. exactly i think something more like biometric you know measurement where it's like we've seen these eyeballs for two hours today it's time to shut off the device you know something that they really can't just hack but i've kind of given up honestly can i um can i make a comment real quick and then chris if you want to wrap just as a as another parent and as a proud card carrying member of gen x um where where uh when we were kids, it was understood that our parents didn't understand computers, so it was completely on us.

That's kind of why I loved the internet and computers, because it was something that I could do that they had no idea what the fuck I was doing, right? But at the same time, I've had playdates where my seven-year-old sits there next to another seven-year-old on their iPod playing Minecraft next to each other. Yep. And they're just sitting there on their iPads. but at the same time this is the point that I want to make is it is a generational thing where it's like

some of the best memories that I had coming up as a kid was playing PC games and Nintendo games and things like that together but at the same time the thing that I'm trying to do with my kids is it's like if it's creative

then I'm into it right so that where if it is a if if they're if if they're playing with their cousins in michigan on minecraft and they're cooperatively building a castle or something like that like i feel like then i know that this is i know how maybe this will piss people off but like they could be sitting there together playing legos and making a castle right so if it's creative the way that i as a parent am trying to think about it is then that is that's expressive, that's creativity, that is also cooperative, that is also social. You know what I mean?

So I get more pissed when they sit there and they watch, because they will watch YouTube for six hours straight, someone else playing Minecraft. Yeah, that's the lowest form. That I can't, I can't stand that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I agree. But you, I mean, it's a, I don't know, sorry, you guys are the parents. You guys can talk about it. But I, sometimes I think about, like, remember when we were kids, the amount of, and I don't know if boys were the same, but I would spend hours talking on the phone. 100%. That's what I was going to say. Like, we watched sports, you know? Back when we had a nice landline. We watched movies. Didn't you watch like WWF? I mean, there's nothing worse and more mindless than that. I mean, I watched Boomerang. So it was like Tom and Jerry.

Yeah. So I think the critiques of the dumb things children do to pass the time, that's one of those conversations that's been happening for a really long time. This is just our new thing to be like, all these kids. Yeah, exactly. You kids in your pinball, that pinballs, you know, destroy your mind, right? Or when they invented the top. Yeah. Well, this is really fun, guys. Thank you. This is great. Thank you so much for coming. this is another great episode. You know, I always learn a lot.

I always talk too much, and I appreciate everyone who sticks around and indulges me in that. I will try to cut myself off a little more. No, no, wait, wait, Chris, hold on. I've got a, I've got a topper for you. And this is maybe just for you and me personally. Okay. Because I offline said to you, don't ask people three questions at once or whatever. So I feel like, I feel like I'm saying it's trying to be.

She's like, you're that guy that makes a 10-minute comment before he gets to his question. Exactly, exactly. Well, but I do that too. I ramble on. But here's, since we're talking about like, modern life and society, like, so you were on vacation last week, and you know what I realized? And I thought about this in the shower right before we were doing this. I missed talking to you last week. Oh, oh. Like, seriously, because you were out of, like, I'm used to you and I. And you and I have never, no, we did meet in person. We did. We did. We met. Yeah. Right, right. Just once. But like, I keep to you. Brian, prediction, you're going to miss talking to me next week. There you go. But my point is, is that think of this is what modern life is and maybe not for everybody. But Chris and I do a podcast once a week.

I talk to Chris more than my brother. You know what I mean? We invented our own metaverse. We are in the metaverse right now, Brian. Exactly. Yeah. Totally. You are.

I, you know, so I will say one thing. And I appreciate Brian. I appreciate you saying that. I feel very similarly. One of the things that I once was told is that you're supposed to work with a therapist long enough until you essentially, this is going to sound wrong, but ingest that therapist's way of thinking into your own brain. So that when you are coming up upon the things that you're struggling with, you can hear your therapist kind of in your mind. And then that's when you've realized that you no longer need to see that therapist anymore. Like when I realized that was mind-blowing.

And so in a way, what I think is so great about our, you know, banter, our interaction is there's probably no. nobody, you know, including your brother, although I haven't met your brother, that will replace me in terms of this, you know, sort of soliloquacious. I just invented another word. You know, sort of like rambling on and on and sort of connects things and sort of like you're like, oh, right, that, oh, that thing. And then so I occupy that space for you in a very specific, I'm a very specific program that exists in your metaverse brain. That's true. It's useful for me to come in and kind of, you know, defragment every now and then and then, you know, put things in the right place and then I leave. And then, you know, we come back. And so. The answer is get yourself a podcast and get yourself a Chris because it's very useful. It's therapeutic, you might say.

Well, amazing. Thank you, everybody, for showing up for our therapy session. We will be back here next week for roughly probably about the same amount of time. No idea we're going to talk about. So if you guys have requests, let me know. Maybe I'll be a little less caffeinated next time, but we'll see. Anyways, this was the tech meme ride home experience. Thank you, Janine.

And for everyone else who joined us today. Thanks, guys. Bye.