The Wolf Of All Streets - Why Writer Neal Stephenson & Bitcoin OG Peter Vessenes Are Building A Blockchain For Metaverses

Episode Date: June 26, 2022

Today we’re joined by legendary futurist Neal Stephenson and crypto pioneer Peter Vessenes - the team behind the new Lamina1 blockchain. Neal (Chairman) conceived the idea of the metaverse 30 years ago in his book Snow Crash and Peter (CEO) is the founder of The Bitcoin Foundation. Together they’re building the first ever carbon-negative blockchain. We got together to discuss how todays metaverse is different from the idea 30 years ago, monetizing the space, what all of this means for the creator economy, and what to expect moving forward. JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER 📩 https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSOR ►► Vauld is a Smart Investing Crypto Platform which allows the user to invest without any stress! With Vauld, you can earn free passive income in crypto. Vauld lets you earn the highest interest rates in the crypto industry - 12.68% on stablecoins and 6.7% on BTC and ETH.. Sign up below and get a 40% kickback on trading fees, 5% commission on interest payouts and 5% commission on loan interest. Vauld’s ‘Buy the Dip’ function automatically purchases specific cryptocurrencies for you when the price dips below a pre-set level. It’s awesome! Sign up here: http://thewolfofallstreets.info/vauld EPISODE LINKS Neal Stephenson: https://twitter.com/nealstephenson Peter Vessenes: https://twitter.com/vessenes Production & Marketing Team: https://penname.co/ FOLLOW SCOTT MELKER • Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker • Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/wolfofallstreets • Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io • Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe • Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/3FASB2c

It's one of the things about being an engineer or a hacker that's good is, you know, you have more control over your digital world. And like, kind of to Neil's point, what do you want to do? What do you want to do with that? And as more of the world's digital, that like superpower grows. So if your listeners are thinking, should I learn to code? Should I learn to do this? Yeah, you should. Like, you'll just, you'll get that like, as more and more of our life is digital, you'll get more and more control over that part of your life if you have these technical abilities. And, yeah, I don't know. Yeah, but, you know, I'm in the camp of, you know, go into the metaverse or into a video

game, let's say, have some fun there, spend some time there, and then go do something else, you know, for a while. Do that whole outside thing. Like, the ocean's really great. I really like the ocean, actually. Yeah. This podcast is sponsored by Vauld. Please stay tuned for more information on this amazing company later in the episode.

Neil Stevenson conceived the idea of the metaverse 30 years ago in his book Snow Crash. And Peter Vecenas was the founder of the Bitcoin Foundation. These two mammoths have come together to create something spectacular, a blockchain specifically built for the metaverse of the future. When you conceived the idea of the metaverse 30 years ago, was the current iteration what you had in mind? The big difference is that what made 3D graphics cheap was games.

And I just didn't see that coming 30 years ago. I thought it would be more like television, but instead games happened. And so Doom came along just a few years after Snow Crash, kind of the, I don't know if it was the first, but we think of it as the beginning of the world of three-dimensional games. And the generations of games that have come in its wake are what drove the cost of graphics hardware down to a level where anyone almost can access this kind of environment. It's interesting that we're still really doing it in two dimensions, largely. We are, but I don't think that distinction is as important as I used to think.

I mean, at the time of writing the book, it was all like, oh, we'll have goggles and we'll be in a three-dimensional world, which is true, and that's happening. I've worked at a company that makes those kinds of headsets. What has happened, which is super interesting, is that we've all learned how to navigate three-dimensional spaces by looking through a flat 2D window on a screen. And we're running around these spaces. Billions of people are playing video games using, like, the WASD keys on a keyboard and a mouse. And it sounds incredibly awkward. Like, how could that possibly work as a 3D interface? But the reality is that this is what people are doing. Why didn't you foresee WASD and mice in your book?

It's a steampunk kind of concept. It is, though. I mean, you're in 3D. The graphics are incredible. You would think that there would be some better way to manipulate what's happening on this thing. And instead, it's the arrow buttons. Early 1900s interface. Yeah, it's an early 1900s.

You know, it's a contraption they built during the Steam Age, you know, for typing memos in offices. But that is our way of interfacing with 3D. And because of, it sounds like it couldn't work, but because of just the development of interfaces over time and just the flexibility of the human brain to take in new interfaces and get good at things, it has ended up being a perfectly serviceable way to run around in 3D worlds. That makes sense. And obviously, the two of you were clearly early adopters to technology, which is probably why you've come together and are working so well together. But when you founded the Bitcoin Foundation, you somehow saw that this was not just some experiment or a joke extremely early. Talk about the early days of Bitcoin and why you did that.

Yeah, you know, well, I remember I got into Bitcoin in 2010. And around early 2011, I started thinking, like, this is really good. I was like, I really like this. And I thought, but I was worried, actually, that it wouldn't survive. And I was largely worried about it because it was, like such quirky such quirky people in the early days and of course I'm talking like pre-pre-pre-history so you know your listeners viewers will have some names in mind when I say them those guys are like all the um people that made it kind of there's like a group before that were just like wild so um so when i um so i was like what do we need like what does the industry need i thought um legitimacy kind of was like the first thing so so when i that was that was where my head was at so i thought well maybe if a venture capitalist

invested in a bitcoin company that would give bitcoin some legitimacy. And so I did that. I hunted down Tim Draper. I gave him his first Bitcoin. He wrote a check and anchored CoinLab's first seed round. That was really big news. So by early 2012, we announced that. And that kind of worked. It was like, oh.

You did Tim a pretty big favor, in retrospect. Tim's done great, Tim's done great. Yeah, a brilliant investor, obviously. And then shortly after that, kind of on that legitimacy kick I was like, what, you know, how do we get all the people in the world who are now like getting interested in this, something, what they need. So, and at the same time,

all of the people working on Bitcoin, like the core devs just like worked out of their basements, you know, they were doing it full time. Gavin had just taken over from Satoshi earlier that year, and Satoshi had sort of like gone into the heavens, not to be heard from again. And so I thought, well, like I told Gavin, like, let me get you a job.

Let me make a little structure around you. Like, the core devs were starting to become the place that they had to solve, like, political problems. They had to talk to journalists. They had to talk to governments. And I was like, maybe some other people could do some of that. But in all of that, like, I won't say that I had any idea. I mean, it's obvious because it's like how I talk about it with friends is like I said I believe but I didn't really believe like I can tell you that because I once bought a hamburger for six bitcoins.

Not as bad as pizza for ten thousand. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I've definitely you know had some moments where it's like you know you know I just had no idea all of this would come about. Yeah. I mean, without people buying hamburgers for six Bitcoin, then we wouldn't be where we are now. Yeah.

I mean, it had to be proven. There's two sides to that, you know? Yeah. And it's, you know, it's interesting you say that because I've also given away like hundreds and hundreds of Bitcoins in my life. I don't mind that as much. Most people that you give them to lose them. So I mind that as much. Most people that you give them to lose them, so I mind that.

Every time the price goes up, they'll call, they'll be like, so, I'm like, hi, haven't heard from you in five years, I pretty much know what this conversation's about. Remind me about that private community. Yeah, you're like, it's gone, it's gone. Maybe Satoshi's in the metaverse. That would be amazing, that would be amazing.

So I think maybe one other difference, obviously, is the way that the metaverse that you conceived was monetized versus obviously now having this sort of more decentralized and creator economy surrounding it. So can you talk about why you guys are building what you are building and tell everyone what you are building at the moment. So it's kind of implicit in the metaverse as described in Snow Crash that there's got to be an economy there that pays for all of this. It's not talked about in a lot of detail, but it is described as being a kind of decentralized system. There's not like the Metaverse Corporation, you know, the Weyland-Yutani of the metaverse that squats on top of everything and through which all payments pass. So it was shortly after that that I was kind of hanging around with some cypherpunks and people who cared about crypto in the Bay Area. And there was a moment in the 90s when suddenly they were all talking about money

and payments. Until then, the emphasis had tended to be more on just privacy and that kind of thing. But then they kind of twigged to the whole money thing. And this is obviously pre-Bitcoin, pre-blockchain. But some of that, I think, finds its way into the diamond age my next book after snow crash which talks about the whole plot of that book revolves around the fact that you can't figure out who people are because of this decentralized system of paying creators and if if you could figure that out, if you knew who was who, the entire plot of the book would collapse.

And then the next book was Cryptonomicon, which goes even further into everything about digital currency. So, I think it's implicit and eventually kind of explicit in my writing that the way this stuff works is through some kind of system that enables creators of value in this world to get rewarded when they succeed at doing something. And that it happens in a way that doesn't pass through a centralized payment authority. So fast forward to 30 years after Snow Crash, it seems like the chain and cryptocurrency has kind of matured to the point now where it's possible for us to actually build a system that will enable us to found a metaverse based on that way of transferring value.

Excuse me. Yeah, Neil was just saying, well, he was talking about the history of tech catching up with this idea that we're going to have this more anonymous decentralized payment systems. You know, when you look at the existing metaverse companies, they have a business model, and that business model is largely around monopolies of some sort. So they're largely walled garden solutions. And we haven't been using any companies' names in public when we talk about the metaverse. But, you know, in my mind is this question, like, do we want, essentially, do we want the metaverse to be just like, let's call it like the social media explosion? And that, to me, the answer is like, absolutely not.

I call that the Zuckerverse. You don't have to say it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. So like what does one do if one wishes to make creative content and live off that today? Like you take a lot of photos, you prepare a certain lifestyle, there's a bunch of services. Some of those you can just sell photos of yourself depending on how attractive you are. Many of them you then have to go hustle. And essentially like all the things you might do

as a creator on Instagram or really whatever platform, they benefit the platform like 100 times what they benefit you. And it's actually why I think TikTok got so big is they reshifted economics a little bit towards creators. Very slightly, but not. Very slightly, yeah, exactly. So we're like, at least I feel like, this is not the world I would prefer for my children.

And to Neil's point, it's not like, it's a lot worse than the world he he imagined even in these early early days so so we have a chance um so neil and i co-founded a new blockchain called lamina one it's a layer one chain purpose built for the metaverse it's basically like the rails for the open metaverse and i think one of the opportunities we have is to to change the creator economics on that. So for me, if we get that done, I'm happy. It may be we're aiming to have really good dev tooling to make beautiful 3D experiences. We're aiming for all this other stuff.

But for me, if there's a place where you have a more fair creator economy that has a weight of gravity to it, that'll be great. What I find unique about what you just described is that we have quite a few layer ones, but it seems, anecdotally, that each one is trying to capture the newest trend at all times. Yeah. But built for DeFi, and then all of a sudden, NFTs are huge. Here's our NFT aspects. We're building all these DApps. Oh, the metaverse is huge.

Yes. And it seems like everybody is trying to do everything. I haven't really heard of an L1 that says, this is specifically what we're going to do, this is our focus, and sort of puts on the blinders to the rest of it to some degree in a positive way. Thank you. Yeah, I mean,

it's such a big job. I don't know if you want to... The advantage of, as you point out, when people create new L1s, it's because there's a specific engineering problem they want to solve, they want to hit some aspect of the market.

So it just seems reasonable that if what you want to do is solve certain specific engineering problems that are intrinsic to building a metaverse, that this is how you do it. You figure out what those targets are that you want to hit. You raise money. You hire the engineers to do it. And you roll out a chain that's going to be serviceable for people who want to work in the metaverse. That's where we are now.

I mean, one thing that you just made me think of, so thank you. You're welcome. I think because we're talking about early days of Bitcoin and then we're talking about all these new layer ones. Most of those layer ones, I would say, is kind of what Neil's saying too, have a technical motivation behind building them. Not all of them, but most of them. They want to add some new tech innovation. And I think because blockchains are so technically complicated, mostly it's engineers who get these ideas. Engineers, cryptographers.

We're going to build this cool new thing. Bitcoin had that, but also it had this really strong social element right from the beginning, which was like, you know, Satoshi called it striking a blow for freedom in the Bitcoin paper. Like he wanted a world where central bankers weren't in control, where banks weren't in control. And so there were a ton of community members early days that um weren't technical at all but they they like liked this idea they they felt like the world's not how we want it to be um and i think one of the things interesting on the nft boom of the last couple years is that like arts oriented creators have had a path into crypto they're like oh yeah i want this the chains that have made a good place

for them have done really really well um but i don't but i think most of those chains are chasing market if that that's exactly what i'm saying yeah so i hope this will be better in that it's going to be like we're very consciously starting out with our strategy as that community as a whole. So if the world moves on from metaverse in a couple years, we'll be like the boring chain that has all the metaverse people, but... I don't think the world's even moved into the metaverse yet, so I don't think we have to worry about it.

We've probably got a little time. Yeah, I mean, to your point, it seems like people were trying to solve, and I love all these layer ones. It's not enough. There's amazing stuff out there. They're trying to solve the trilemma. We need to be faster or we need to be cheaper or whatever those

are. And most of the solutions then for creators have become clunky. In the early days of NFTs on Ethereum, you could mint an NFT and sell it for $20 and gas fees were low enough to do that. Then all of a sudden they became popular and your gas fee was 10 times as much as what you were selling and it became

effectively impossible to do. I i believe in a multi-chain world and i don't think that any one of them is going to dominate everything and i think they were all conceived with the idea of winning of winning everything so that's that's fundamental to our history like you know the foundation really had that angle up front for bitcoin was like mac like, Bitcoin maximalism, it's called. We were gonna be the place. So bad competitors needed to be snuffed out, was like the early philosophy. I switched. That's still the philosophy of Bitcoin maximalism.

For many, yeah, it is. But I've switched and I think, kind of like you, you know, you get kind of religious about a chain and it could be like, and a lot of people here probably have a religion for themselves. I've been around long enough, I've been like, oh, I'm post religious, it could be like, and a lot of people here probably have a religion for themselves. I've been around long enough, I've been like, oh, I'm post-religious, and I'm like,

oh my God, I love this. And then I'm like, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. But yeah, I believe in this like much more open, connected, multi-chain future, definitely. Yeah, I think interoperability is really gonna be the problem that needs to be solved at the end of the day. Guys, I have a serious question for you. How much interest are you earning in your bank account?

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and 5% commission on loan interest. Guys, sign up right now at thewolfofallstreets.info slash VAULD. That's V-A-U-L-D. Do it now, seriously. So you're creating this chain. Obviously, you have a more short-term vision of what can be built on it. Give me the craziest 10-year, 20-year, what the metaverse could possibly look like.

You did it 30 years ago, and here we are. 30 years now is like we do dog years, right? So it's 1,000 years down the road relative. So, I mean, I'm happy to take a stab at it but one of the things that you learn when you're in the science fiction writing game is sometimes you you may nail something and get a reputation for predicting things but most of the time you don't and most of the time what actually happens it's called fiction what is he is he talking about? Well, I gave you an example before, right, which is the WASDE keyboard. The way we navigate 3D environments in the real world is through Steampunk keyboards.

So all I'm saying- That will change. That's not like a C-minus on predictions. That's like an A-plus on predictions. All I'm saying is that- 99 instead of 100. So all I'm saying is that what people actually do with technology is usually more interesting than anything that anybody can predict. So my favorite example is electric guitars. So when electricity became a thing, it was

popularized by Thomas Edison, we knew there'd be light bulbs and electric washing machines and electric motors, but I don't think anybody saw the electric guitar coming and they certainly didn't see the impact that that instrument and the styles of music that emerged around that instrument would have on the popular culture of the world. But it's been an enormous, you know, cultural determinant. So I think that the right way for us to tackle this is as follows, which is once we get this thing going, I want to build some stuff there. It's what in the game industry we'd call first-party content. It's where the company builds a thing.

But what we really have to do is create an environment where third-party people can do whatever the hell they want. And a lot of it's going to be crazy and a lot of it's going to fail, but a lot of it's going to succeed and it's going to succeed in ways that nobody could predict or see coming. We're going to see electric guitars emerging in this environment. So we need to do both of those things, in my opinion. And so we're trying to structure this venture in such a way that it's kind of well capitalized enough that we can build some of those first party ideas that I think are cool. But at the same time, we want to find ways to help lots of third party creators build what they want to build and make electric guitars. I love that analogy. You want to unlock the creativity of the entire world instead of pretending that you're going

to come up with that one thing. Right. Yeah. If we build open tooling for like permissionless crazy shit, then we did good. I think I'm not the futurist that mr stevenson is yeah but some of that future is rubbed off um i think it seems pretty clear to me people are going to spend more time like uh presenting their digital life over the next 10 years you know people do this a lot like you know,

what is your Insta feed like, all this. So I see some of that as people have more, like a really simple thing I would expect in the next five to 10 years. Zooms might happen in like a 3D environment with localized audio. So, you know, probably you're going to then care what your virtual room looks like a lot, actually.

So I would expect a lot of that to happen where people are just starting to think, okay, this is an extension of who I am, of my brand, of how I present, and be putting more time and energy in there. That's one thing that I will be interested to see, and I would like that myself. Basically, your avatar can be who you dreamed that you would be. Yeah, I mean, the six-pack will be obvious. Oh, I'm going to be super ripped at this. myself like i'd like that basically your avatar can be who you dreamed that you would yeah i mean like the six pack will be obvious oh i'm gonna be super ripped in the metaverse i have a sad feeling that most people will just be a worse version of themselves in the metaverse but maybe

that's a bit of pessimism but do you think that we get to a full ready player one reality where you you know wally the movie right where you're you're plugged in all the time you're in your chair you're never maybe you uh unplug to eat and use the restroom but otherwise you actually your dominant life is in the metaverse you know it's funny as we've been starting to talk to people about this um so there are some people we talk to that that's the future almost that they want even i would say sure and i mean they out. Especially, like, some of them are, if you're younger, like, this is really broad strokes, but the younger ones seem to feel like...

That would be okay? Fuck yeah, let's do this. Yeah, it's a disillusionment with what's happening. It would just be better for them. Maybe, yeah. I think that sounds awful. Yeah, I really like it. Yeah, yeah. think that sounds awful. I actually like very sensitive to too much visual input myself. So

like I would like, I actually, I would imagine before I'm done working, I'll have some sort of passive visual layer that's tied directly to the digital, like kind of like Neil worked at magically, magically has these AR glasses, they're Leap 10, you know, or something. I would imagine, I wouldn't mind that. But what I'm gonna want there. Iron Man, you know? Well, what I'm gonna want there is like not the Ready Player One ad scape.

I'm gonna want like really subtle things that help me kind of, you've been talking too long. You've got your next meeting. Yeah, exactly. DANNY HERMESOHN- Yeah, or make things go away. The Magic League 2 has selective darkening, right? So we were just having this conversation the other day about certain popular messaging platforms and the

visual noise that can just drive some of us crazy. It's really interesting. The ads on the side are gone, but you can focus on them. Yeah, the little animations and all that stuff. It's like, okay. Or just lobby TVs. Yeah, lobby TVs would be a great thing. I'd wear those glasses today if it could cut out.

I think you could even make the argument that our existence now versus certainly when you wrote that book in 1992 is a bit of a metaverse. Our iPhones, we do everything on this device. You can live your life staring quite right at it. So maybe one of the major iterations of the metaverse becomes what you described, which is a way to actually interact with your environment in a more digital way. Or we get, I mean, it's one of the things about being an engineer or a hacker that's good is, you know, you have more control over your digital world and like kind of to Neil's point what do you want to do with that?

And as more of the world's digital, that like superpower grows. So if your listeners are thinking, should I learn to code? Should I learn to do with that? And as more of the world's digital, that superpower grows. So if your listeners are thinking, should I learn to code? Should I learn to do this? Yeah, you should. You'll get that, as more and more of our life is digital, you'll get more and more control

over that part of your life if you have these technical abilities. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I'm in the camp of go into the metaverse or into a video game, let's say. have some fun there, spend some time there, and then go do something else for a while. Do that whole outside thing. Like the ocean is really great.

I really like the ocean, actually. Yeah, and so, but people are going to find their own ways to use it for sure. Neil has an essay put out years ago just about how humans really seem to prefer these mediated interfaces. So I think the hook is like he's at Disneyland, which is this totally artificial environment, and then he saw somebody filming. Yeah, this was in the days of camcorders. This is pre-iPhone. So you're walking down this street crowded with people in Disneyland, which is a completely synthetic fake environment.

And there's this guy walking along ahead of me. He's holding a camcorder up above his head, and he's craning his neck to look up at the little screen. So he's, like like experiencing this fake environment through this tiny little, you know, playing card sized screen of his camcorder. Well, now at concerts, you're. Yeah. I mean, but like call me old. We used to go places and actually watch what was happening.

Yeah, you had a lighter. You burned your thumb. That's right. Really hot. Can you guys solve that on the blockchain, please? Burn my thumb. But I guess the point of that is like people are going to do whatever they want and a lot of people want to

do this. But I do think that that is now the norm. I think the majority of people who experience something are doing it through the screen on their phone to capture a memory that they'll never look at. That's what gets me is

you never go back and look at those photos yeah and you know in those people's so let me let me just be devil's advocate for a second say like whoever was that dude with the camcorder probably was thinking of his loved ones were like i'm going to film this yeah you know uh i could kids to remember this amazing day that they're having. That's right. My role in the family is to record these events, and, you know, I'm going to have a stack of videotapes, you know. It's probably still sitting there.

I mean, I'm 45 years old. My parents had one of the early camcorders. It looked like they were out shooting a feature film. And we do occasionally... But we do occasionally pull them out and digitize. But the problem is those were actually important events in our lives. You can't go back and look at March 12th, 2018. It's just a random day that you decided to take it out.

I'm kind of infamous in our family for whipping out the phone in like a stressful moment and doing docu-content being like, so what's happening right now? So I have like a series of videos of my family, wife and kids being like, fuck you, turn that off. Yeah. But that's the real. No, it's really good. I actually realized in my metaverse,

I want like a room with all those videos up. And that's where you send your kids to time out. The hall of fame of family arguments. There's so many. No, they're not even, they're just like, they actually are worth recording. You know, we have these moments that are really bad or really good. But that's the problem.

Even talking about sort of, I'm going to create my perfect avatar and my perfect environment. It's not the real story necessarily, it's the story that we're putting forward and I think that that's one of the biggest problems. So actually the real moment when things were bad is a much more impactful and true representation of what was what was happening. And you said gaming, you know, we'll go play the game and then you'll go back, the ocean's really nice. Is gaming still really the core purpose do you think of this moving forward or what else do you see potentially being built i would say that uh i would maybe frame it just in a little

different way which is to say that uh people who make games are kind of we're going to see them as the pioneers of a whole new way of interacting with one another and with imaginary situations. And right now, it's all kind of in this narrowly defined category called video games. the people who make those games and who make the systems that make those games, the engines and the tool chains, have all gotten incredibly good at certain skill sets that can be used to create engaging experiences. And those are the people who are going to be needed to make any kind of metaverse that people are going to want to spend time in because they know how to do it now I think that a lot of what's going to get built there is probably going to be very game like

because why not right you know but I think that you know we're seeing now that game engine technology is beginning to expand beyond the confines of that industry, and it's now responsible for a lot of what we see on movies and TV. Yeah, it's so realistic. We have kind of like game companies are eating the world. I mean, Andreessen just announced their first game fund. Yeah, if you think of Unreal, Unity to some extent, but Unreal, it's like, it's actually the thing for arts and culture fashion all that i mean cgi and movies is so realistic and that's effectively from yeah i mean basically basically

the the the motion picture industry and the game industry are competing for the same talent the people who know how to make stuff in those worlds and um game industry makes a lot more money it does oh yeah it's way bigger. Yeah. Oh, sure, sure. It's been bigger for a long time. But the point is that there's this pool of talent of people who know how to do that. And there's a market for that talent.

So I think that the Metaverse, at least in its first iterations, is going to be built on game engines by game people. Yeah, I think that the metaverse, at least in its first iterations, is going to be built on game engines by game people. Yeah, I think that makes sense. I mean, I remember when COVID hit, how much of an innovation, even though we weren't using it in the same way, FaceTime and Skype, to be able to connect with people that weren't there. I would love to see a world where people who are bedridden or sick can go visit the pyramids that they never got to in their life. And actually feel, not just go look at pictures of it, but live in a world where they feel like they were able to have these experiences. Those were some really compelling early VR experiences. Like Valve put out, you can go to Mars. They've got all these photos from the Mars rover and you can go.

They're actually limited for a bunch of reasons. But they are emotionally pretty compelling. you can go to the space station oh my god i tried that for two minutes and i was so ready to puke that i had to turn it off so i gotta i gotta get there the tech keeps getting better but yeah so yeah there's i think but do you think we can get to a point where you not only get sort of the visual of it, but the feeling? Oh, definitely. Like, in a lot of the researches, it's just about latency. So, you know, 90 frames a second

versus 120 frames a second is really different. Actually, the first VR I did was in the 90s in the Silicon Graphics Indigo machine using software Jaron Lanier made called Body Electric. It was like 15 frames a second with no textures and you were like you know. So but that's

you know like Abrash some of these guys figured out like okay if it's super high frame rate and super low latency then your brain is like this is real. It doesn't need it actually doesn't need to be realistically rendered. Your. It doesn't need, it actually doesn't need to be realistically rendered. Your brain, weirdly, doesn't care about that.

It just cares that it's like, and the reason you get nauseous is because, like, your brain thinks, like, you've been poisoned. Like, when you move and you see it a second later, it's like, oh, my God, get it out of your system. I didn't realize it was the latency that was the issue. Those are technical problems. Those get solved. Always.

They're largely solved in modern hardware, I would say. Yeah, I mean, it turns out there's others, too. So, like, everything you said is right, but there's, like, one of the things I picked up on kind of working at Magic Leap is that the stereoscopic system, which most of us equate with 3D vision, is for real, but there's a whole bunch of other cues that our eyes and brain,

you pick up on in much more subtle ways to assemble a 3D environment from visual input. And we know that because people with one eye still have three-dimensional... They can get around. Yeah, they can get around just fine. And a lot of it has to do with things like shaders, you know, how light refracts and reflects off of objects. subtle cues that the brain knows how to decode that aren't always covered just by having low latency and high resolution. But, you know, as time goes on, I think people are going to figure that stuff out, too. It's sort of the zero-one. Made it from zero to one.

Yeah. Let everybody run with it and like and again with kids like my kids watching them use vr or something i think you're we have neuroplastic brains especially when we're young and so they'll they they may well learn to ignore those or not my daughter is seven and does the fastest roller coasters in there and i have to put on the blinders and do the kiddie rides it's sort of the opposite of real life. I was dismissive sort of of Oculus and VR initially and I was mind blown the first time I put it on. I actually use it to exercise.

I box in the Oculus and I do all the sort of gaming. I find it actually incredible and can imagine a world where I don't have to wear this 10 pound helmet to do it. So I think the wearables are probably going to be a huge part of... That'll be a big deal. And there'll be a lot of just representing other parts of your digital life passively, like Neil's saying, on screen, 2D.

I don't think of this as just a VR, AR, XR kind of thing. But obviously it'll be a big part of it. Where are you guys in the process now? Where would you say? One to ten for the company, building the blockchain, developers, projects. We are super early. So we just closed our friends and family around like a week and a half ago. And we'll have a test slash beta net up this fall.

One of the things about this, as opposed to another kind of blockchain, is like there's all the content. So there's like we need a chain that has a certain support for spatial OS stuff. But then we also need stuff aimed at it and pointed at it. And so we'll have a series of announcements. Like we have some early partners and stuff that will be coming out this summer. But kind of like bridging the spatial and the crypto is definitely going to take some time. I would imagine. Yeah.

But my goal for us is that we all build it together. So like if your viewers are interested, discord.gg slash lamina1. Just come to our Discord. There's an immense amount of work to do. And I'm hoping we'll have, like, a bunch of touch points along the way that are exciting. So you have, like, a projected idea of when you would mainnet and sort of live. The goal is Q1 next year,

and what that even means, like, it will not be feature complete at mainnet. Of course. Yeah, but that's the goal. I think at this point we just want stuff that doesn't break. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're in the break everything and people lose money phase which is not the best so i i think everybody in this space people expect tomorrow yeah it's kind of a get rich quick get fast quick get cheap quick and this is more time this is the the shackleton pitch like long hours hard work

freezing to death um and if you that sounds good to you like you're our kind of builder and we'll we'll make something awesome well i absolutely love the approach and i'll be following very closely and i would love to have you guys back on when it does launch and see what you've built yeah thank you so much it's really an honor. Yeah. Thanks. Pleasure. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to this episode.

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