Breaking Banks
Hosted By Brett King, Jason Henrichs, & JP Nicols
The #1 global fintech radio show and podcast. Every week we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services; from Incumbents to unicorns, and from the latest cutting edge technology to the people who are using it to help to create a more innovative, inclusive and healthy financial future.

https://provoke.fm/show/breaking-banks/

This week on the futurist my passion for 3d and real-time 3d as a media type across the board is what fuels all of this including the applications modalities all the experiences that we’re going to see in a shared metaverse where we’re together present together potentially in a solitary experience interacting with things if you’re doing training for example in a virtual reality headset but more often than not doing something collaboratively and in real time synchronously together at the same time and this is the potential of this technology.

welcome back to the futurist myself and rob terscheck hi rob hi yeah we we’re going to get into the metaverse today which is is going to be tremendously exciting um to do that we are inviting on the show a good friend of uh robs a connection of of mine um he’s a metaverse og old guy goes way back uh started as an entrepreneur and investor in the space you know he’s he’s the co-creator of the vrml uh protocol and uh gitf uh head of uh uh xr um and um you know the e-commerce space unity previously he’s an author in the the he calls it the pre-apocalyptic space he’s also a musician and uh he’s just joined laminar one which is a metaverse virtual world startup with of course none other than neil stevenson who we hope to have on the show in the coming weeks tony parisi welcome to the futurists oh thanks for having me gents great to see you robert hi tony the clinton brett great to see you good to meet you yeah so tony uh as as brett mentioned a second ago the metaverse is sort of the big topic of the day um one thing we’ve noticed is that in the last month or two as the crypto world has collapsed and prices have plummeted and projects are failing all over the place a lot of web 3 companies are pivoting to metaverse now because metaverse seems like it’s a little bit more adorable than idea which is sort of funny because two years ago uh you know it was a bit of a joke uh the term when it was first introduced you know by when when zuckerberg came out and uh mark zuckerberg facebook came out and started to talk a lot about the metaverse and his pivot toward the metaverse it kind of smelled of desperation at the time like people were thinking wait a minute you know is it really the facebook brand so toxic that you need to change the name of your company to meta platforms or is there a real strategic intent here um now it’s important i think to recognize that facebook’s not the only company in this space there’s more than a thousand companies that are currently developing metaverse technologies or full-on virtual worlds that we’ll call metaverse one thing that’s interesting about this subject though is that while there’s a lot of hoopla around metaverse in the context of web 3 and decentralized tech i think it’s really important for people who are listening to understand that there’s a second trend and the metaverse exists at the intersection of two really really big trends certainly web 3 that’s one that gets a lot of attention and broadly speaking web3 is a decentralized architecture for the web it’s meant to replace existing web infrastructure which happens to be highly centralized particularly the app layer on top of the web network um is so it’s the idea of using the blockchain to decentralize internet technology so that web 3 approach has gotten a lot of hoopla and a lot of hype and there’s been a tremendous amount of investor activity and speculation and so forth particularly since 2018 but there’s another trend there’s a second trend and funny enough this one is overlooked and nobody’s talking about it and i find it so astounding that this subject hasn’t come up to the forefront because it’s way bigger than web 3. and let me offer this just as a parenthetical uh in case people are listening i’m not sure what i’m referring to if you take all of cryptocurrency including bitcoin and ethereum and all of the 17 000 other cryptocurrencies and all the web 3d stuff and all the other blockchain projects and put them together the total market capitalization of all of that activity is less than the share price of apple it’s less than the market cap of apple so one stock is bigger than all of that web free stuff it’s not to say it’s not going to be big in the future of course it will be there’s a tremendous amount of developer activity there right now but the point is that it’s at an early stage but the other trend that i’m talking about the second trend the one that’s overlooked is way bigger today and the trend i’m talking about is real time 3d real time 3d is massive it’s bigger than the metaverse it’s bigger than games there are three billion people how does it test the autopilot it’s uh yeah obviously it’s exactly right spatial computing and mapping and bringing things to iot after 10 years of investment in iot we now have sensors all over the place you know embedded in the networks and buildings and industrial processes those network those sensors throw off a lot of real-time data and that could be rendered as 3d not necessarily for entertainment or for social media but more for industrial uses so there’s a second special component yeah yeah that’s right there’s uh this idea of an industrial metaverse if you will or industrial what they call digital twins where we build uh high fidelity simulations or high fidelity replicas using real-time data the key point here that 3d itself is not new the 3d technology has been around for many many years as certainly tony’s going to tell us about he drafted some of the original protocols for vrml way back in 1993. amazing 30 years ago so 3d itself is not necessarily new but what is new and what’s growing fast is real time 3d so with that as kind of a rolling preamble tony tell us a little bit about real-time 3d and the significance of it yeah so i mean it’s great that you’re uh you’re launching into this this way robert because what personally got me excited about doing any of this starting back in around 1993 was my excitement about 3d graphics and i was working on some early real-time 3d graphics for data visualization in a scientific computing company back in the boston area before i moved out to san francisco with my new wife to make our way in the wild west and you know see what was going on with the internet um i met this fella named mark pesci and we were both new englanders we already knew each other from new england but we reconnected out here in san francisco and he’s showing me this 3d graphics in real time on a uh an ibm ibm like an intel 386 chip and whatever it was you know as a pc clone whatever that was at the time and spinning around a chessboard or something i was like yeah i love that 3d graphics and and you know i’m really into coding it and mark said yeah let’s put this on the internet and i turned him and said like in neuromancer do you mean or snow crash i’d read these cyber punk novels of that were published in the early 90s right and he said yeah exactly like that almost patting me on the head because he’d already drunk all the silicon valley kool-aid and been living here a few years before me and that’s just how you roll out here in the the west coast it’s like no idea is too absurd and too crazy so i said and i was kind of telecommuting from this this job that i was mentally disengaging from anyway and i just got my first apartment in sf and i said why not so i started prototyping code to do this and i was working on the 3d graphics part and a little compiler that would load files in that had the model data and mark was writing the network code and these were all based actually on really open source world wide web libraries but for me the excitement was hey this is the next computer interface we can use this to render anything i was thinking about it for creative media and advertising possible industrial use cases like you were talking about i don’t know designing cars walking through buildings um helping doctors with you know operations i mean that’s not my you know that doesn’t excite me that much it’s great obviously it’s an amazing use case but i wouldn’t build that personally but the technology to be able to do that amazing less so for gaming i mean i’m not a gamer i’m all as i was mentioning i’m a musician or you were mentioning brett um so you know when i play video games it’s like rock band or vr it’s like beat saber if you have a vr headset i mean these are great i’m not a hardcore gamer which is a deep dark secret so i you know considering i worked at unity for six years for example but they hired me now for fast forwarding exactly because i was in all these other areas you know information visualization digital twin and what we were seeing was the rise of real-time 3d for non-game use cases 25 plus years later and for those who are listening to any oculus headsets and all this it was a big boom around that of 2016. and for the people who are listening if you’re not familiar with unity technologies and unity software that’s the leading provider of real-time 3d technology other technologies and use around the world they have presence in 45 cities around the world and unity is powering about 70 of the games on your mobile phone right now so it’s a widely adopted 3d technology so you can consider it a kind of platform although they don’t present it that way uh so tony what were you focused on there though you were focused on kind of extending outside of uh traditional platforms like screen again gaming compute game devices and computers into xtar right yeah yeah so the thing was there was this boom on with uh consumer virtual reality which had gone through a lot of twists and turns when we go back into the way back there was an attempt to do this in the late 80s and early 90s that was way too early tech was not cheap enough there were all kinds of you know usability human factors issues i think i met you somewhere in that period of time yeah just post that bust of vr consumer vr in the back when we called it cyber arts remember cyber cyber us so you know these things again they go in waves this is like decades and decades of waves of trying to make this technology work same with tablet computing we can go down the list of of the ai things like this right remember that big headset you would wear that came out like this and you could see like a flying pterodactyl you were trying to climb up a pyramid and it was all wire framed out yeah underground you’re talking i don’t know if it was the vpl i don’t think so you’re talking about a different one right but vpl was jarrod lanier’s headset yeah so you know refugees from that wave were part of the whole thing we got together when we started with vrml but anyway coming back to recent past um i met the i knew some folks on the management team at unity already and then around 2016 they approached me and said everyone’s using our engine you know what you’re using to build games for mobile console whatever they’re using it now to build experiences for the oculus or for the microsoft hololens so these virtual reality mixed reality headsets um creators needed easy tools to make the content and arguably unity is one of the easier platforms for building this stuff but creating 3d is pretty intensive you know it’s a new set of skills it requires modeling animation programming a combination of skills of team and teams that can work on this stuff together and unity provided a relatively easy way to get going on that and free to start and an expensive cost of ownership if you were paying for commercial licenses so a lot of vr creators started using the company’s tools but the company did not know how to service them as creators didn’t have the right set of product features maybe the right business models that cost you know structures um and then creators in the automotive industry were starting to use it and the licensing was just not you know appropriate for them versus game developers so the company found themselves in this enviable position where everyone was using their tech to build things for virtual and mixed reality um and you know hammer nail situation but they really only know how to service the game industry so they hired me to oversee the expansion into a few of these other industries and initially it was film media and entertainment automotive eventually uh creative media and advertising which is where i spent most of my focus for the almost six years i was there so started sort of broadly looking at all these industries quickly found my lane that i was really into which is i moved over to our advertising team because unity also has a big in-game mobile ad network and started pushing the boundaries on what you could do with 3d and augmented reality in ad units you would see on a mobile phone and that’s where i spent most of my time until the last year or so where i really started looking at what we were doing with e-commerce how people were uni using unity’s technologies to create interesting e-commerce applications that i could spin a product around in 3d maybe use augmented reality to see how it looked in my house or on my face if it was a pair of sunglasses or an accessory or on my body with clothing and there’s a lot going on there we’ve seen you know with snap and instagram and these try ons and try out situations in ar there’s a lot of interest in that or shopify has got a 3d um set of apps now so you can shop in 3d spin a product around so that was really exciting to me so for me it’s advertising creative media ecommerce kind of traditionally web use cases it turns out and where 3d can add the most value to those so you know it’s an interesting thing tops i love robert well it’s an interesting topic right you know it’s easy for people when they think about 3d they think of a game because that’s how most of us see it like i said there’s 3.1 billion people playing games so that’s how most of us think of 3d i’m a gamer but what most of us don’t think about is what we do on the web and what we do on the web is we do a lot of search we do a lot of reading watching video we do a lot of shopping and um if you look at say amazon’s interface i’m always astounded that amazon has been so lame or so conservative in terms of updating their interfaces it hasn’t changed much in 20 years uh when are we going to start to have shopping that’s like shopping in the real world ready like you know like when he’s in the store yeah i mean that is a great topic i mean we’re seeing some people trying to do kind of what we’d call uh in the business skeuomorphic versions of virtual malls you know trying to make things look like a physical mall it’s not clear to me that’s the right approach to take to doing this but there’s something there in terms of making the shopping experience more engaging and immersive people i don’t remember who first said this but someone observed rightly i think that amazon solves for buying but not shopping like that experience is good it makes buying efficient but it takes all of the fun out of shopping and there’s the marketing world it sucks right now like yeah amazon marketplace is a little bit of trivia for you guys do you know do you get guys know where the the title the mall comes from no well you know it used to be that you’d go and see a single shop right or a single convenience store store but then you could see the mole at the mall oh my god yeah that’s true it’s true is it true yeah i love it see them all i believe you so yeah i think um there’s something there and i i’m really i want to see how this plays out because in a digital environment i think a lot of the shopping could be serendipitous it might not be were you thoughtfully saying i’m going to go into a 3d world in order to shop maybe the content comes to you i mean none of the we just have no idea how this is all going to play out and we won’t know just the way we i don’t think could have predicted say uber or pick any of your favorite companies that vaporized some industry or two robert um you know we don’t know what digital technology can do to transcend time and space when we have a new set of 3d tools that are at our disposal right so again my passion for 3d and real-time 3d as a media type across the board is what fuels all of this including the applications modalities all the experiences that we’re going to see in a shared metaverse where we’re together present together potentially in a solitary experience interacting with things if you’re doing training for example in a virtual reality headset but more often than not doing something collaboratively and in real time synchronously together at the same time and this is the potential of this technology so yeah sorry tony you talk about vr but of course the other element is augmented reality um you know do you separate the metaverse into a virtual world and then when you talk about augmented reality it’s sort of a mixed reality world or is is the med is versions of the metaverse going to be both you know virtual vr and ar based i i’d say more of the latter i have a very expansionist view of these things again if you if you look at it from my lens it’s always about real-time 3d being the enabling technology for all of these use cases and all of these use cases have to include being connected and together in real time because our lives are inextricably tied in with the digital now so there is no distinction to me and also because i’m a software person um what matters is the content and the application layers that enable this um are you know going to be natively 3d and using all the newest real-time 3d technology let’s click sensing the real world and integrating it for ar or whether you go into a completely artificial place to escape for whatever reason for entertainment or for training or learning it doesn’t matter from my point of view and all these experiences can be connected and potentially experienced in both modes or multiple modes go ahead robert let’s let’s click on that idea this you you talked about uh the the the need for standards uh and the ability the ability to write natively and so i think a lot of folks might not realize might not be aware that the apps that they use on their phone right now are captive to an ecosystem uh particularly if you’re using an iphone if you’re using an apple iphone and that’s not an open ecosystem that is an ecosystem that is controlled top to bottom by apple they exert tremendous amounts of control including rejecting apps from developers that might be perfectly reasonable apps you know they’re not like offensive or pornographic or something just something apple doesn’t want you to publish and they can do that um you know in the developer community this is a lively topic but outside of that most folks have no idea they think they’re actually you know on the world wide web when they’re using an app but they’re not they’re in a contained ecosystem so for the people who are listening who might not be technically savvy uh tell us a little bit about your work with html5 what’s that’s about um the idea of you know liberty from an app store and maybe the idea that standards can free us uh from centralization or from domination by these big internet platforms oh what a topic and as an avid and slavish fan to all apple products i find myself in a really interesting position because in my opinion they’re the best and they all work together and as a consumer thereof it’s fabulous as a developer myself or a creator i can it can be frustrating as you said there are arbitrary gatekeepers who may just decide for one reason or another that i am not allowed to publish a certain experience um that is unfortunate it’s i guess the cost of all of the convenience and safety that may come with a platform like that and or you know the tithe that large companies like apple decide they’re just going to extract from the economies that they serve it’s not you know however well for whatever reason you know for whatever reason i was going to say vague but that’s a little bit like you know well no it’s more than a tithe which is 10 apple takes a whopping 30 oh and by the way facebook came out recently to talk about their metaverse fees for stuff that people create they’re going to take 48 percent wow yeah these are not going to fly i hope we’re all right exactly terrible economics for developers terrible economics for developers so i think we’ll probably get to a little bit of the web 3 part of this conversation in a minute but before we just jump off the precipice on that stuff robert i think yeah the the open web always it was born of this promise that anyone could publish i mean if you just go back to what made the web work it was a few things it was i all i needed was a text editor i write a little text create a few tags and then someone gave me a really cheap web server you know easy to access and isp stuff the economics of this was so easy that mom pop anyone you want to publish your recipes you want to slap up a simple store the cost of doing that the activate activation energy you do it was small the tools were basically free or really inexpensive and hell if i liked the web page i could even you know view source and copy paste so the sharing and remixing was amazing we need to get back to that and for the men and that’s like circa 1996 to 1998 right and then we have this third crash and after the crash what emerges are these centralized platforms not overnight but gradually right by the way we opted into them right we as users yeah we chose that we chose that right but interestingly and ironically they are all built on the back of open standards like html5 all of that content is coming from that it’s not coming from using one company’s set of tools it never would have scaled up which i think we’re going to get to when we talk about where the metaverse needs to go this never would have scaled up without some basic simple tools and those open standards and interoperable pieces of technology and you wrote the book on on 3d coding for html5 i did i wrote a couple of books on webgl which is 3d rendering technology for in your browser um it’s a bit long in the tooth now i mean i love it i’m a big fan of the tech and it was a great way to unleash a lot of 3d creation that anybody could experience inside an html5 capable browser but now we’re getting to a place where we need probably need some upgrade in the tech beyond what we have in uh you know browsers today and in webgl but it’s given a lot of folks on the web training wheels for creating 3d content which is great and i think we’ll be able to start seeing uh an influx of professional 3d creators and or you know sort of prosumer 3d creators who use these other tools blenders game engines like unity starting to get comfortable publishing for the web as well as we move into this open metaverse i i’m really interested before we get a break rob i’m really interested in how this might develop operating systems right particularly with the head mana displays you know iar glasses you know a lot of people talk about the fact that in with ar glasses you’ll be able to project your laptop you know on onto your field of view using you know like a laptop screen but then um you know as you’ve sort of rightly pointed out well you don’t have to use that sort of proxy design template because you’ve now got this virtual space you can work with so you you could do that quite differently you know in a 3d operating system but um yeah we’re still we’re still thinking you know um in in some limited terms i guess about that potential it’s interesting it’s true i mean this part of the conversation has mostly been about the foundational elements that are necessary to create these experiences and to get them to run on various devices so that everybody can get access to them nobody wants to build a metaverse that only works in one device i think maybe maybe mark zuckerberg does i don’t know um but uh but thanks tony for taking this on that quick tour 30 years of 3d development and open standards and so forth um let’s take a break now and then when we come back we’ll talk about how all of this sets the stage for an open metaverse versus a closed metaverse you’re listening to the futurists i’m rob terzik my co-host is brett king and our guest this week is tony parisi he’s a metaverse og in the sense that he’s one of the very earliest pioneers of this technology a lot of folks don’t realize it but this is not the first time in the history we’ve been talking about meta verses the topic keeps coming up once again and again and we’re going to get deeper into it after the break so hank and ty we’ll see you just a second welcome to breaking banks the number one global fintech radio show and podcast i’m brett king and i’m jason henricks every week since 2013 we explored the personalities startups innovators and industry players driving disruption in financial services from incumbents to unicorns and from cutting edge technology to the people using it to help create a more innovative inclusive and healthy financial future i’m jp nichols and this is breaking banks

hey there welcome back you’re listening to the futurists i’m rob chersek with my co-host brett king and our guest this week is tony parisi tony’s going to talk to us all about the metaverse topic that we seem to have been hearing an awful lot about in recent months and just to put it in perspective i’ve seen research now from bernstein jp morgan citibank and other big financial institutions and all that research has one common refrain it’s not a question of if they’re going to build a metaverse it’s a question of when it’s a certainty that 3d immersive interfaces in spatial computing are coming because already on the tech roadmap every major tech company is invested into this every hardware company’s invested in it and for those who are interested the size and scope of this opportunity is absolutely massive i just read research yesterday that says that in china and the u.s each of those two markets alone could account for 8 to 13 trillion dollars of the economic activity so it’s a great big juicy target no surprise then that everybody in the tech industry is racing after it as fast as they can tony give me your perspective on what’s happening with the mataverse right now i love those numbers so yeah adjusting for inflation i don’t know how much that’s really going to be worth in the next decade but that’s a different podcast isn’t it hey guys um great to be back look um yeah it’s big all of this technology is getting cheaper by the minute in terms of real-time 3d graphics in everybody’s hands super computer power in our pockets all getting connected up through faster networks all getting driven by so many forces in the economy and in society and in the world in general to get us to a place a few years down the line where our primary interface to information is going to be spatial and experienced through either vr or augmented mixed reality headsets are still on flat screens but predominantly with 3d interaction and that’s exciting and so the questions are you know how big i mean those numbers could be off by an order of magnitude either way and still be incredible i think um but how how does that get built that’s what’s interesting scale a lot of folks don’t realize that this phone is already capable of a lot more than they realize just this thing on the back of the phone i’m holding up an apple iphone the newest version of the iphone max three cameras what are the three cameras for tell us about spatial computing well you got one that’s just doing your rgb and you get two for depth right so this is the thing and with that depth you actually can create a scanned version of a room or a space you’re pointing at so yeah so these newer generations of iphones can effectively capture the entire world okay so when i’m taking a photograph of the grand canyon is it actually scanning depth in that shot as well is it like mapping it or when i take a picture of my house am i am i sort of secretly mapping it for for apple well i don’t think so because i think you actually have to opt into all that you tell me robert because um i haven’t actually done that on the newer iphones but they’re apple’s pretty good about security so i don’t think you’re doing anything like room scanning without you know opting in for that so but when you do those cameras are all turned on um or maybe that depth information stored but cannot be shared with anybody else we’d have to go check terms of service honestly i don’t know on that one but you know if anybody’s guarding your privacy on that stuff apple does the best at all that okay but the takeaway there is that your phone that’s they’re really good at that stuff okay but the takeaway there is your phone whether it’s app or samsung or any other hardware it already has three cameras uh and that means it’s already capable of a spatial computing experience and inside the phone there’s also the capability of rendering that i think a lot of folks don’t realize that because i think we have to like wait until there’s a headset that we can wear and so then you hear whenever you bring that up people go google glass didn’t work it’s not going to work and i think this is just all the wrong way to think about this opportunity because it’s all backward looking it’s all like focused on the past for sure hardware gets cheaper faster and better every single year but clearly apple’s approach i can’t speak to other companies but clearly apple’s approach is that the headset whenever it arrives is going to be a peripheral to the smartphone because that’s their stronghold that’s their money maker that’s what they’re going to reinforce and they’ve already shown us with apple watch and airpods that they’re quite capable of selling accessories that are fashion devices making them cool enough for mass market consumption and building a robust business there people don’t realize how big that business is airpods is about a 25 billion dollar business for apple right now and um and and they uh they’re doing something similar with watches you know apple now sells more apple watches than all of switzerland uh in terms of revenue and and that is an enormous achievement in just about five years when when apple first came out with the watch that would have been a ridiculous statement to make wouldn’t it right there oh people laughs i remember yeah yeah john claude bva who’s one of the heads of lmvh he supervises the watches for them including like tag heuer and other great brands for that fashion level he came out he was openly dismissive he said oh this is terrible it looks like it was done by a third year design student who didn’t pass his course he was very very dismissive of it and in the first year the numbers weren’t very good because the first generation of hardware is always kind of disappointing what people don’t realize is by year three apple was second only to rolex by year four apple surpassed rolex in terms of revenue on watches and by year five apple outstalled all of switzerland in terms of watches they’ve absolutely crushed the watch industry but now today apple is considered to be the world’s largest seller of jewelry get this because they sell watches and ear pods so they sell these accessories that we wear like jewelry they don’t seem like jewelry tells us that’s interesting oh robert there goes another industry yeah another vaporization getting vaporized again yeah if you don’t if you don’t have your diamonds in your earpods then yeah oh my goodness but you can do an augmented reality experience on your phone right now you’re from the last three generations of fun perfectly capable of this so talk to us a little bit about what’s available today i mean pokemon go is a great example of you know conditioning hundreds of millions of people to the idea that you can actually play a game in space around you yeah of course and so as we’ve already kind of touched on the phone can be used to scan to capture an environment but it could also just be as those cameras and this technology we already have in our pockets can also be just used to track so you’re moving the phone around and it has a sense of what’s going on in the environment and then you can use that tracking to overlay digital information so for example i could point my phone in my living room and see how a piece of furniture looks in that living room if i’m shopping for it and we’ve seen plenty of demonstrations of that now ikea has an app that does that uh shopify enabled stores can do this uh unity’s been doing some stuff but we were doing it with advertising you can try on your

makeup with youtube all these things enabled by either the front or back facing camera on your phone and a little bit of computer vision software technology so there’s an ai component to this too i mean this is all powered by machine learning that drives these computer vision algorithms and so yeah when they think of people think about the metaverse they’re often thinking about yeah there’s pure immersion in this artificial world but so many of these use cases are going to be happening with this mixed reality or augmented reality of the type that we’re talking about already super exciting we’ve talked about about the phone but but bear mind you before the pandemic already some of the big fashion labels were experimenting with smart mirrors which effectively were just a big smartphone in a dressing room but in the smart mirror you could try on a garment in the store and then click touch the mirror like a touch screen right right to select different colors of that garment which is a really cool idea right so it’s like i don’t want to try on six of the same item i have this one this is a size that fits me now show it to me in green you know show it to me in blue and you can do that uh i think that’s kind of magical for people and this is the essence of marketing in the digital era is it’s like a magic trick you know you amaze people with this and there’s a huge amazement or magic element i think in ar when it works well absolutely okay so so those are some of the use cases we’re talking about devices that we’re kind of extending out of like the apple domain which we’re all fanboys of so we’ll talk about that all day long um but i think we should probably get to this notion then of open and closed ecosystems and open and closed metaverses um everybody thinks they know what those things are but let’s talk a little bit about that so that people really understand what’s at stake here uh what happens when a developer or community are locked into a single platform there’s a high switching cost it makes it hard for them to migrate out to another platform you’re kind of existing at the whim of that platform owner if you have a active group on facebook right now you know exactly what i’m talking about you’re trying to figure out how to migrate that group off of that platform so tell me about the race to build closed ecosystems or lamina one’s mission to build an open ecosystem or just one other example maybe you’re an avid twitter user like myself and you’re worried about the company’s direction and leadership in the near future and thinking about that investment you’ve made in that user base right um but understood yeah i mean we’ve talked a little bit about the potential creator frustration of having gatekeepers say what you can publish and not if we’d been in the world of web one web one would have not taken off if there were those kind of gatekeepers back then if we’re old enough to remember there were those original proprietary information services that were walled gardens aol prodigy compuserve they gave us the dial-up access they gave us the cd-rom with the software and they gave us that interface to actually you know publish and communicate and that got a lot of people online but the web did not explode to global scale until it was completely opened up and i think we’re going to see the same thing as we get to the next stage of the metaverse what we’re seeing now in these proprietary closed systems that are notable in the metaverse and pick your favorite example fortnite uh where it’s not just a game but it’s a community and you know sandbox creation system and a community platform roblox would be another one um these are the prototype proof points for an open metaverse where anybody can publish content like that obviously this is production intensive some of these things are going to have budgetary restrictions and whatnot but i think what we’re going to see is an opening up and a creator-driven system open to all more like what second life was doing 20 years ago if anyone remembers that virtual world second life though they weren’t open they had very flexible tools it was very inexpensive and people they were very it was a very good platform for self-expression and commerce they had a working economy in there i still want to get linden dollars linden dollars right they pioneered a lot of this stuff also inspired phil it was also inspired by snow crash by the way and then you know my work and mark’s work before him um and i think it’s i don’t think it’s visually necessarily going to be like that and the features will be different but the idea is that anybody can get their own zone space plot of land whatever you want to call it build a community with free and open tools and anybody can join that if the people who built that want them to be there will allow them to be there and it’s not going to be some platform provider telling them that it’s appropriate or not to have that oh you know you want to build some zone in the metaverse to train people on how to do ninja sword fighting oh we don’t like that because it’s like i don’t know it’s not child safe i’m just making a random example up but yeah nobody should be the judge at that uh you know within the confines of the law and uh you know other aspects that they’re beyond the scope of this discussion but certainly no platform provider should be just deciding what is appropriate there and limiting people’s ability to create and publish although we live in a time where even twitter is deciding what’s appropriate to publish on their platform and so you know this is a very live issue uh with respect to the metaverse it’s not just writing a statement or you know a tweet you’re talking about building stuff and where one thing that that second life absolutely got right and i think some of the current metaverses are not getting right is that they allowed people freedom total freedom to create whatever they thought was appropriate um you know it’s some people’s idea of a libertarian paradise because if you want to go around looking like a giant plush toy you can do that you can do that that’s available to you if you want that um whereas you’ve seen we’ve all seen other meta verses today that give you these kind of avatars that are kind of prescriptive in the sense you can pick your skin tone and your hairstyle but you can’t turn yourself into a giant plush bunny rabbit if that’s what you wanted to do and why not it’s a different world why aren’t we trying on different personas after all you know why should we have to be slavishly recreating the world that exists in the virtual uh so that’s one aspect of freedom yeah but there’s a second aspect of freedom which is that if i create something in a world i’d like to have the ability to bring that with me if i go to a different world right whether assets uh yeah if you create if you create space i understand buying real estate you know in a platform may require certain elements where you you know you you are locked into a certain environment but your avatar your characteristics your your virtual clothes your tools your artwork executive stuff that you make so here’s an interesting question uh is your metaverse one that allows you to own stuff what is the concept of ownership and i think it’s gonna become a very lively discussion because right now there isn’t any um people say these nice things about it some

right to the point that’s exactly it and this is a key point about what uh what tony’s working on now uh this this idea that if you want to take it with you then the metaverses have to be interoperable now that term is cumbersome what we mean by that is that um software that’s written for one platform works on another platform and it’s why um you know the lack of interoperability is why sometimes you can’t get a playstation game on the xbox for instance because those worlds are not necessarily interoperable uh there’s a lot of geeky stuff it has a lot to do with standards a lot to do with the stuff we’re talking about before the break the net result though is it imposes constraints on users it’s going to shrink community it’s going to shrink free speech and it’s going to impose a real burden on people that want to switch out of one platform and go to another because you’re kind of locked in and that’s by design platform like that versus android today right you got it and it’s you know if you want to put an android app on apple you got to port the thing over non non-trivial task there right and you got to submit it to the apple store and so forth so tony talk to us a little bit about lamina one and this vision of an open interoperable standards-based uh blockchain that enables the transactions that i described that you can port stuff from one world to another so lamina one is a new venture i just joined up as the chief strategy officer recently it was founded by peter vicennis who is a blockchain uh pioneer uh founder of the first bitcoin the bitcoin foundation one of the first organizations dedicated to you know education and evangelism around these new blockchain technologies and uh something of a cryptographic technology expert which i am not in fact i break into a cold sweat when i think about those kind of cryptography algorithms that are required to power uh currency and and nfts so thankfully there’s other people around to do that and neil stevenson the author who wrote snow crap the originator of the woman the imaginator of the word metaverse exactly brett not but but check this out in snow crash which was published in 1992 neil predicted a future internet where we were interfacing with it using virtual reality hardware so fair guess that was that was cool and inspired so many of us to do our spatial computing work but he also predicted a future where late stage capitalism was showing signs of decline and there was a rise of these sort of a narco-feudalist structures to take its place and cryptocurrency all in that one novel and he continued the cryptocurrency thread through diamond age the next novel um and cryptonomicon which uh in no small way inspired bitcoin and you’re the original crypto gangs that built this stuff a decade ago now so this is fascinating we’re kind of living in neil’s world so imagine my delight when i first finally met him in person recently well over zoomed because that’s our lives right now um and we talked it was a 30 minute conversation that ended up being a 90 minute conversation it was thrilling and by the end we concluded that we just we kind of have a moral imperative right now to build an open metaverse there is so much at stake when we see what happened in web 2 and the consolidation of platform power we believe that it’s on us to create a set of initial conditions and inner interoperable pieces to do what we can to foster the creation of an open metaverse and we’ve touched on the whys of the open metaverse more creator choice or consumer choice more abilities for the creators to actually get paid fairly again you mentioned the take rate on some of these platforms robert’s absurd right now up to 50 percent in some of these systems that’s not going to fly and robert you know my background on this as a musician i started looking at web 3 as a musician a year ago thinking okay i have a new music project i’m a nobody in that industry how am i going to publish this am i going to do all this work pay them my own money to make an album which i’m doing now and then go pay more money so i can get discovered on spotify all to make three thousand dollars for a million streams no way so i started working with a lot of music creators and getting to know them and their single nft drops they’re making what they would make on millions of streams and and if they can connect with a few thousand fans they can actually make a living now so so neil’s big uh one of his big things is let’s make sure creators get paid i couldn’t agree more and then there’s one final element to this besides being able to scale up and provide the most choice which is that we want this to be carbon negative which is a tall ask so we’re not i mean yeah crypto’s got its handful hands full just to get to carbon neutral and while you know and we’re just getting started as lamina so i can’t describe the whole strategy for that but we’re putting a stake in the ground and saying as people are operating nodes in this network they are actually there’s carbon carbon credit stuff happening so that we are at least starting to participate in carbon credit economies and we’ll go beyond that over time to even more aggressive techniques but you know i’m not an expert on how these technologies work so it wouldn’t be it wouldn’t be suitable for me to go into the details on this and maybe this is something that if you haven’t but for the benefit of the listeners the big issue with both bitcoin and ethereum has been the absolutely grotesque computational cost of operating a consensus network on a blockchain and for those who don’t know what that works algorithms yes yeah for those who don’t know what that means what proof-of-work means is that each computer on the network has to run the exact same computational problem and arrive at the exact same conclusion in order to attain consensus you have to do that if you want a decentralized system otherwise in a centralized system it’s easy you run the computation once that’s it that’s the record but if you want to decentralize then all the machines have to do the same works that there’s thousands of machines it’s thousands of times more computational energy it’s going to be consumed which is why bitcoin is currently consuming as much energy as the country of denmark which is kind of obscene uh for a currency that nobody actually uses to buy anything so that’s a fair criticism now that’s not an accident people say oh that’s a bug in the code no it’s not in a decentralized world that’s by design that’s that’s security uh the way vitalik buterin puts it uh you can optimize for two of three things but you can’t get all three you can have security scalability and decentralization so if you want decentralization you’re gonna give up some scalability now today there’s a lot of new thinking on this subject because now we’re in you know third and fourth generation blockchains where people are starting to say actually we probably can get closer to all three of those things and also this notion of like absolute decentralization is a little bit of a religious war and then secondly you know this this notion that like the only way to secure it is to like run this on every single note well there’s all kinds of experimentation going on with side chains the issues but also you know proven state consensus algorithms which are much more friendly on compute resources basically uh not negligible but you know much lower resource load nothing like the obscene amount that we’re talking about for bitcoin and that’s where the industry is today and i think that’s only just going to get better and again we’re taking that extra step further and saying can we devote some of the network resources to actually doing what we can you know some of that economy to eventually pull carbon out of the atmosphere but we’ll start with making sure people pollute less right let’s talk about the benefits for the users of the community uh so we’ve heard almost the same thing from decentraland from the people at injin the people that are creating sandbox and actually even you know facebook’s uh facebook horizon they’re saying open interoperable everybody can own the stuff they create you can own your own avatar is that true is that about the same are you doing something different so first of all lamina one’s not going to do all of this so what we’re creating is a blockchain designed from the ground up to handle what we consider to be unique needs for the spatial version of the metaverse i mean a lot of these web three people are saying metaverse right now but what they’re doing is trading bitmaps as nfts right there this was designed for very simple units for transactions and very simple assets and we’re seeing all kinds of shortcomings on performance scalability uh you know just transactions it’s not great transaction speed and throughput so if you think about this from first principles of we’re building virtual worlds that have a lot of people in them a lot of 3d content lots of objects rich environments that need to get rendered rendered potentially these virtual land systems where people want to say i’m building something and i’m going to let people put zones inside my world that you know all of these things need features that can work with performance and scalability and so we are building a blockchain to support that it’s forked off another blockchain called avalanche which is already proven to have high transaction throughput and all these proof-of-stake you know benefits we already talked about but we anticipate we’re going to have more functional requirements because again we’re going to build virtual worlds and a universe of them on the backs of a blockchain like that we’re also going to supply a handful of pieces of ecosystem technology to on you know tools basic starter tools to unlock this decentralized game services because it’s not just about the blockchain it’s about streaming the assets it’s about multiplayer messaging all these things you need to do in a real mmo or a game or metaverse environment virtual world environment and we’re not going to build all those pieces and we’re probably going to work with lots of industry partners and open standards groups to create the specs so that lots of people can build all these pieces together because no one is going to be able to build on this so if you’re interested and you’re listening and you’re you care a lot about this and you’re working on say open standards for the metaverse and tony’s a guy out of reach absolutely um before we get into some long visioning future stuff to wrap up the show i just want to ask you one one point in respect to your comments there is um you know obviously i get the application of blockchain in terms of digital asset infrastructure i i think that makes total sense having as digital assets can move from one virtual world to another the decentralized blockchain um you know uh to to record not only the ownership of that and and licensing around that but um you know have the portability i think is key but on the other side of it creating really compelling virtual worlds is going to take a ton of compute power you know you know advanced graphic cards maybe edge computing and so forth how can that be centralized isn’t by nature the computing demands of it going to require i mean decentralized it isn’t by nature the computing requirements of these virtual worlds going to require some centralization i mean that’s a fascinating topic you don’t really decentralize you know one gpu but you can create clusters of those and distribute rendering for example my friend jules erbach does that at otoy and he’s even got the render token to do that you can on the show yeah you’re gonna have them on the show or have you already for sure yeah it’s always great it’s a genius yeah decentralized rendering it’s such a brilliant idea and they’re all fully over subscribed like there’s a ton of interest it’s one of the great examples of decentralized platforms yeah no that’s not real time but that’s fine because you know what you’re doing is instead of a render farm that would take overnight to do this you distribute you know this is the way hollywood does a lot of this um you’re getting a distributed network of people sharing that load and so things will still happen faster and cheaper um and you can you know abstract these kind of ideas to distributed network computing i’m an advisor a company called croquet founded by david smith the guy who created virtus vr i don’t know if you remember david at all robert so he’s been in this same world for about 30 years as well and yeah and he’s got this system called croquet that’s basically a distributed network layer so you and i will see the same simulation and it’s got it working pretty well over the web so we’re going to see services like that com come up that just basically what it means brett is it’s not like every little have to have this running on their laptop necessarily or on their phone pieces will run on the phone like maybe the rendering will be located on your mobile device but there will be thousands of network operators offering compute resources offering system services all connected up so in theory it is decentralizable in practice you know we’re going to find out where the hard problems are going to be and we’re going to start solving them as an industry we don’t have all the answers yet but you know there is also many decades now there are many decades of experience on distributed simulation cloud rendering and all these other fundamental technologies so we’re not really starting from scratch it’s not theoretical white paper land we’re going to start bringing these to bear soon and then the other real thing and i’ll just finish this answer up not to be long-winded brett is that it’s not clear we have to have millions of people in one virtual world at a time which is what you know it’s there’s a hobgoblin that a lot of people on the virtual world side will trot out and say if it doesn’t scale to a million people in this world that i’m in it’s not you know a truly scalable solution but go to a concert you don’t interact with a million people you know you interact with three or four and then there’s a crowd around you that’s sort of this vague murmuring mess and then there’s the band on stage i mean i think that’s how virtual worlds are going to take shape as well or shopping or whatever you’re never going to see the million people at once so it’s just a bit of a bug bear in my my opinion so no i get it i think i think we’ve got the foundation for a lot of great distributed open technology to do 3d today great answer so tony you’ve talked a little bit uh in your blog which by the way if you haven’t looked at tony’s medium blog it’s tony parisi on medium he writes brilliantly about his views 30-year perspective on the metaverse you wrote about the third wave um and your point was hey folks this is not the first rodeo people been trying to solve these problems for a mighty long time tell us about what you have learned over the last 30 years and what you look forward to in the next 30 years what i’ve learned in the last 30 is definitely the the i’ll have to paraphrase what bill gates said and i think you know the quote um you accomplish a lot less than you think you you’re going to in a three-year time frame but what you can do in a decade is unbelievable and i’m just totally paraphrasing him here um these things tend to roll out and take a little longer than we think uh and in the case of real time 3d for the internet that has been a 30-year journey so far so we’re definitely jumping the gun uh i’ve also learned that there’s no solving for some folks who are going to have a manic defense against change that they’re you know the status quo is a real thing and i think you guys both know this really well um and you just need to compartmentalize it i’ve learned that there’s really no way to talk people out of it one day folks will wake up and see that new world that they were not seeing i’ll never get on facebook yes you know or the electric guitar is a fad that would be you know something my dad said he was a professional pianist you know you would say that in the 50s and 60s that’s funny yeah or no one will ever own a personal computer the ibm insects saying that right so but there’s just so how do you see this going never see that and you can’t yeah what excites you what excites you about the future what what inspires you to get up every morning and and you know you like like the rest of us as futurists we’re in a hurry to get to the future because of the promise it provides what what excites you about that future yeah we will definitely try no future before it’s time at this point we’ve learned that lesson it’s going to come when it comes here’s what excites me um well first of all before i start with that here’s what’s not scaring me we’re not going to build the matrix we’re not going to build ready player one people are fully freaked out that we’re going to be trapped in a world of uh quest devices and i don’t know our very bloodstream you know hooked into it or something it’s not going to go down that way and you know even even the folks who are building devices that are potentially or systems that are potentially addictive they don’t start that way i mean i think there’s very few people in the world that get up in the morning and say how can i make the world a shittier place you know what can i do to like perpetrate mass of you no so i mean clearly there are folks who don’t care you know what what happens in the wake of their actions but that’s a different story so i think in the balance what excites me is i’m very optimistic that this technology is going to a solve the things in front of us that we desperately need to solve for right now and i’d say in my personal order climate is number one and then two uh the erosion of trust in institutions worldwide needs to get restored somehow so i’m hoping that we have a new set of communication tools to start bridging that gap and we get out the other end of what’s clearly a geopolitical global crisis time um and i think these tools have the possibility to help with both of those in the near term then beyond that i don’t know where where we’ll be robert i don’t track where space tech’s going to be in 30 years but you know to me this is all on that long vision of preservation of knowledge uh distribution of information and facilitating communication as we become trans-human or space-faring or whatever that next thing is it feels like it may pop even in my our lifetimes even us being middle-aged at this point we’ll see um and so we have new tools for understanding we have new tools for communication so that is what gets me out of bed every day not not what i consider to be still something i’m on which is a holy crusade to prevent a closed metaverse i i think that’s something i’m vigilant about but what drives me is the future possibilities very cool i think sometimes people may not make the connection to those robotic systems when you talk about space it’s worth pointing out to people that most deep space exploration right now actually all of it is being done by robotic systems and we’re sending people humans up to the space soul inhabitants of mars robots at the moment that’s right and so you can think of those robotic systems as an extension of human consciousness off this planet and the way we’re going to deal with those robots is 3d simulations so there will be digital twins for all the systems the original 3d digital twin was developed by nasa for the voyager spacecraft that are you know circling around in saturn or wherever the heck they are in the solar system right they’re in the aortic cloud now dude they’re they’ve left the uh the heliosphere amazing but the way you monitor that system here on the ground is you’ve got a 3d model and that is a real time model that is rendered in 3d so that makes it a digital twin and it fits perfectly into what we’ve been describing this whole time there’s just a lot of use cases for this stuff yeah but bring it back to earth and a lot of these technologies and techniques can make our cities safer and smarter make us more energy efficient get us to a place maybe where we’re making less stuff and putting it in fewer boxes and putting it on fewer planes to ship around and these are all to the good as well and and so yeah it isn’t just about xr or distributed computing it’s also about robotics ai uh new generations of network and all that i mean it’s really hard to see that’s how those save the world i mean robots will see the world using 3d tech yeah absolutely well it’s been a fantastic show tony thank you um obviously we want to hear more about lamina one when the time is right hopefully we’ll get neal on as well but you know continue to keep us informed on that super exciting stuff and um definitely um the other thing i think is once apple does announce what they’re doing with their ar glasses it’d be it’d be great to have you back on maybe with robert scoble or someone like that talking about the implications of all of that so watch out for that but um yeah very keen to continue this conversation thanks for thanks for being on how can people find out more about what you’re doing and and more you know get in touch with you yeah so you can come to my medium blog at sign tony parisi on medium my twitter at sign aura deluxe a-u-r-a-d-e-l-u-x-e those are my main entry points in the metaverse right now uh this new company is called lamina1 l-a-m-i-n-a one that’s the number dot-com uh those that’s how you can find me and the greater metaverse fantastic well that’s it for another week of the futurist podcast this episode was produced by our us-based production team that includes elizabeth severance a producer audio engineer kevin hersham social media support from carlo navarra and sylvie johnson if you liked uh the futurist this week as with every week you know tweet us out post it on linkedin or whatever it is your your favorite social media uh platform is leave us a review on itunes podcaster google podcast facebook wherever it is that you listen to the show because that helps other people find the futurists and in turn that helps us build audience that helps us get sponsorship so we can continue to do this um even though robert and robin and i love this and we’d probably do it for free anyway you know there are some costs involved but um thanks for joining us on the futurist this week and rob and i will see you in the future future well that’s it for the futurists this week if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don’t forget to leave us a 5 review that really helps other people find the show and you can ping us anytime on instagram and twitter at futurist podcast for the folks that you’d like to see on the show or the questions you’d like us to ask thanks for joining and as always we’ll see you in the future