The Exchanges

Q right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens and many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right? They're not in the three to third dimension. They feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, They stopped playing their game after five hours and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse. And I, 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. Um, a lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a, a flat window into a three-dimensional world. And so, if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. Um, but now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face. And it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse in order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian tec…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse.”

Q right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens and many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right? They're not in the three to third dimension. They feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, They stopped playing their game after five hours and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse. And I, 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. Um, a lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a, a flat window into a three-dimensional world. And so, if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. Um, but now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face. And it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse in order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian tec…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR, uh, in order to build the metaverse.”

Q didn't expect. I think one example that I've heard you give is that electricity was obvious to be applied to light, but electricity then generating electric guitars, less obvious. So are there perhaps less obvious things that you've been exposed to or that you've started to think through maybe even for a future book in terms of some of these technologies being applied in ways that we might not expect?

A That's a, that's a great question. Uh, so I may have to think about it for a second. You know, um, so for example, one of the, the, one of the two main projects that my team worked on at Magic Leap is called Baby Goats. And it simply populated your environment with baby goats that would run around. They would jump up on the furniture and, um, And kind of interact socially, but it wasn't a game game. It wasn't like you're not trying to score 10,000 goat points and kill the goat boss. It just, it was just an ambient kind of experience of these, these creatures running around. Um, and so it had to do all those things I mentioned. I mean, the, the, the goats had to know where the furniture was and they had to know, well, okay, I can jump one meter In the air, so I can, I can't jump directly to the top of the bookcase, but I could jump to the table, and then from there I could jump to the bookcase. So the furniture would be placed, you know, by the level designer, and the possible paths that where the animal could move would be so pre-programmed, and so the, the animal's just making a decision to follow a certain pre-programmed path. Uh, and, and there, you can use some AI there too, uh, you know, if you want. In the AR version of this, you have no way of knowing what every person's living room is going to look like, you know. Um, and so you can't have any pre-programmed map of the …

AI assessment note: “one of the two main projects that my team worked on at Magic Leap is called Baby Goats.”

Q Yeah, I think so too. I think another design decision that you made with Lamina One, which seems to be not adjacent to the things that you, you just discussed, is also to make the chain carbon neutral. Can you speak to why that design decision was made?

A I mean, we started talking about this, Lamina One, just a few months after I published a novel, Termination Shock, which is all about global climate change. So it would seem weird for me to publish that novel and then a few months later announce a, Uh, a chain project that's going to be putting carbon into the atmosphere. Now, there's a, again, for people who are not crypto dorks, I should explain that old school Bitcoin uses, um, a system, underlying system called proof of work. Which relies on solving complicated math problems that inevitably consume a lot of energy, and so it is terrible from, ah, an energy standpoint or from a carbon footprint standpoint. Newer chains, by and large, are going to a completely different system called proof of stake, which is orders of magnitude more efficient. So on a modern chain, it uses proof of stake. Ah, if you're using this for, ah, kind of, Routine transactions. The carbon footprint really is no worse than what you're already doing anyway. If you drive your car around, or turn on your air conditioner, or, you know, take a plane flight. In proof-of-stake systems, which Lamina-one will be, it's, it's not that bad, but it doesn't matter. You're still At some level responsible for putting some carbon into the atmosphere. So, um, the, um, what we're gonna do is, um, Is design the system, and this is one of these things that you, you have th…

AI assessment note: “it would seem weird for me to publish that novel and then announce”

Q on this topic because it's something that interests you. It's, it's certainly an area of opportunity. As I mentioned, we'll be doing a separate episode on it, but given that you've dived so deeply into this arena, what would you say are some of the most exciting, maybe more optimistic things that you've learnt, or maybe certain companies that you're seeing attack this problem that you think are really exciting?

A I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California, uh, founded by a friend of mine named Casey Hanmer, who's a physics PhD who was, uh, in space, working in space, you know, JPL and that kind of thing, but decided to address this, this issue, and they are developing a system for using photovoltaics to extract carbon From the atmosphere and, and turn them into synthetic fuels. Net zero carbon exchange because, you know, you're, you're pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, you're selling fuel, which gets burned in an airplane engine or whatever, and puts the carbon back in. But, uh, still a big improvement on sucking it out of the ground and adding, adding new carbon. You know, we've all gotten kind of conditioned to Think that anytime you're using energy, it's bad, and you should, you should feel bad, and you should curtail your use of energy. That's only true, really, if it's energy produced by burning fossil fuels. Energy from renewable sources, and particularly photovoltaics, you know, isn't hurting anyone, and the cost of Making photovoltaics is, is coming down. It's come down a lot already, and it's still going down. So, so I think where we end up is in a situation where, um, we're using energy from those kinds of sources to, um, to get carbon out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere. For me, that's an optimistic trend that I…

AI assessment note: “I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California”

Q used to, right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens. And many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right, they're not in the third dimension, they feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, they stopped playing their game after five hours, and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse, and I've 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. A lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a flat window into a three-dimensional world. So if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. But now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face, and it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse, In order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian technology, and yet t…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse”

Q kind of the early stages of fintech, and we've talked about crypto. You've now written a book, Termination Shock, about carbon removal and What's going on with climate change, and so I know this is a broad question, but where do you get these ideas from? Where do you actually synthesize the seeds of these books when they're so far before what many other people come to see in reality?

A A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology that's being described. So in the case of Snow Crash, that emerged from a project I had been working on for a couple years previously in computer graphics, where I was writing code, a lot of code. Um, I was trying to push hardware to do things it wasn't quite ready to do yet. Um, and it got me thinking about, um, About the future of that, you know, three D graphics as a medium and having that kind of direct involvement sort of helps in two ways. One is just give you some ideas, but also it helps because you're, um, you're exposed to some of the specifics of how the system works. And so that produces ideas for, for plot devices, let's say in the case of, um, Termination shock. We've got someone who's launching sulfur into the stratosphere to do geoengineering. If you sit down and actually kind of run the numbers on what it would take to do that, you know, it's a, it's kind of an interesting engineering problem unto itself. And by, um, By, by thinking through some of the, the engineering details, um, you, you can come up with, with ideas, um, that, uh, uh, that if you were just kind of freestyling might not occur to you.

AI assessment note: “A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology”

Q used to, right? Staring at our phones, staring at screens. And many people, even though they're not truly immersed, right, they're not in the third dimension, they feel quite immersed still. They feel like, you know, they stopped playing their game after five hours, and they feel like they've truly been in another world. So what are your thoughts on the level of immersion required for this quote unquote metaverse?

A We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse, and I've 30 years ago when I wrote the book, I had a different view of it, and so I assumed that it would be all about goggles. A lot has changed since then, and we've all learned a lot. Doom came out the year after Snow Crash was published, and it's kind of almost hard to remember a time when there weren't games like Doom, meaning games where your screen is a flat window into a three-dimensional world. So if you had described Doom to me, you know, in 1992, said, well, you're, okay, you're looking at a flat panel screen in front of you on a monitor, but you're seeing a three-D world through it, and you're running around in that world. I'm not sure if I would have understood it or believed that that could ever really work very well. But now, you know, fast forward 30 years, the day-to-day world that we're living in is one in which Billions of people routinely access three-dimensional spaces through rectangles on two-dimensional screens, uh, be they, you know, the screen of a laptop, you know, or a phone that you're holding up in front of your face, and it works really well. And one of the, the really weird aspects of it is the primitive control scheme. So most people are using, like, the WASDE keys on their keyboard plus a mouse, In order to navigate these worlds. Keyboards are a Victorian technology, and yet t…

AI assessment note: “We absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse”

Q do you think AI will Interoperate with IP, if that makes sense. How will these AIs generate a bunch of objects, maybe even generate games themselves eventually? And then who owns those things? Obviously the AI is trained on many different data sets. So do the people who supplied that data own the eventual creation from the AI, or have you started to think about how, how that might work?

A My other co-founder at Lamina One, Peter, Investments has actually been thinking a lot about this. It went deep down the rabbit hole of mid-journey and all that last month, and, and very quickly when you're thinking about applying those kinds of systems to build, um, experiences that might make money, you're up against an ethical question. For exactly the reason you said, which is that, um, these AIs are harvesting work from, um, millions of people. And, um, you know, you might ask Dali to make a painting of a dog in the style of, and that's fine. But when you do the same thing and you specify a living artist, then you, you can be sure that the system is going around and ingesting Data from, um, uh, from everything that artist has ever created, and then doing a mashup, um, to produce a result. And so why shouldn't, I mean, if you're just screwing around, it's one thing. In the terms of service of DALI, I don't know about the other programs, but they're, they're pretty conscious of this, and they're, they're trying to prevent people from just, um, monetizing the crap out of it. In cases where it does get monetized, why shouldn't the, the artists who contribute, um, get a cut? We've been talking to, um, Shrapnel, which is a, it's a game that's being put out by a company in Seattle called Neon Machine. And, um, it's a blockchain web three kind of game, uh, from the ground up. And,…

AI assessment note: “In cases where it does get monetized, why shouldn't the, the artists who contribute, um, get a cut?”

Q kind of the early stages of fintech, and we've talked about crypto. You've now written a book, Termination Shock, about carbon removal and What's going on with climate change, and so I know this is a broad question, but where do you get these ideas from? Where do you actually synthesize the seeds of these books when they're so far before what many other people come to see in reality?

A A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology that's being described. So in the case of Snow Crash, that emerged from a project I had been working on for a couple years previously in computer graphics, where I was writing code, a lot of code. Um, I was trying to push hardware to do things it wasn't quite ready to do yet. Um, and it got me thinking about, um, About the future of that, you know, three D graphics as a medium and having that kind of direct involvement sort of helps in two ways. One is just give you some ideas, but also it helps because you're, um, you're exposed to some of the specifics of how the system works. And so that produces ideas for, for plot devices, let's say in the case of, um, Termination shock. We've got someone who's launching sulfur into the stratosphere to do geoengineering. If you sit down and actually kind of run the numbers on what it would take to do that, you know, it's a, it's kind of an interesting engineering problem unto itself. And by, um, By, by thinking through some of the, the engineering details, um, you, you can come up with, with ideas, um, that, uh, uh, that if you were just kind of freestyling might not occur to you.

AI assessment note: “A lot of times it's because I've got some contact with With the actual technology”

Q on this topic because it's something that interests you. It's, it's certainly an area of opportunity. As I mentioned, we'll be doing a separate episode on it, but given that you've dived so deeply into this arena, what would you say are some of the most exciting, maybe more optimistic things that you've learnt, or maybe certain companies that you're seeing attack this problem that you think are really exciting?

A I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California, uh, founded by a friend of mine named Casey Hanmer, who's a physics PhD who was, uh, in space, working in space, you know, JPL and that kind of thing, but decided to address this, this issue, and they are developing a system for using photovoltaics to extract carbon From the atmosphere and, and turn them into synthetic fuels. Net zero carbon exchange because, you know, you're, you're pulling carbon out of the atmosphere, you're selling fuel, which gets burned in an airplane engine or whatever, and puts the carbon back in. But, uh, still a big improvement on sucking it out of the ground and adding, adding new carbon. You know, we've all gotten kind of conditioned to Think that anytime you're using energy, it's bad, and you should, you should feel bad, and you should curtail your use of energy. That's only true, really, if it's energy produced by burning fossil fuels. Energy from renewable sources, and particularly photovoltaics, you know, isn't hurting anyone, and the cost of Making photovoltaics is, is coming down. It's come down a lot already, and it's still going down. So, so I think where we end up is in a situation where, um, we're using energy from those kinds of sources to, um, to get carbon out of the atmosphere and keep it out of the atmosphere. For me, that's an optimistic trend that I…

AI assessment note: “I'm, uh, excited by Terraform Industries, which is a company in Southern California”

Q some of them may actually want those developers to focus on advancing that centralized game that they love so much, and so I'm curious to know how you think about that, and also I'm sure you've seen some of the pushback even within the gaming community around this idea of interoperability and the integration of Web three or some of these open standards, and so what's your take on that?

A Uh, there's a kind of People talking past each other, a phenomenon where you've got game developers interacting with crypto bros on social media, and they don't always get along. Let's put it, that's, that's putting it mildly, right? So the game developer mentality, um, for their position may be like this. I'm a game developer. I've spent my whole career Developing an advanced skill set that I'm very proud of, is very important to me, and building unified experiences, uh, for people to, to play in. Um, and every aspect of the art direction, the sound design, gameplay, the backstory, the programming, the engineering, it's all just exquisitely tuned in to deliver a particular kind of experience. Um, And, um, so when somebody shows up, you know, uh, wanting to bring extraneous, uh, things into my game, it's bad on two levels. And, uh, one is just that on an engineering level, to even suggest that kind of shows Total ignorance of how games actually work. So it's kind of in the not even wrong category of bad ideas. And the other objection is aesthetic. Um, so it's just kind of an abomination to think of, you know, bringing a lightsaber Into Assassin's Creed or, you know, something like that. And it's an insult to, um, to game developers. Um, and it's reasonable for them to feel insulted by those suggestions. Games like that may be a little bit like a Ren Faire. You know, you go to a…

AI assessment note: “wanting to bring extraneous, things into my game, it's bad on two levels”

Q And you, you just wrote Termination Shocked. You've written tons of books. I'm curious to know from the perspective of twenty-twenty-two, what are some of the clues that you're looking at? What are some of the themes that you're noticing about today that you think might be really important clues about, let's say, the next 30 years?

A Yeah. Well, to me, the two most important Things that are carbon and, um, and the polarization of, of society, um, and, and the way that polarization is being fostered and kind of weaponized by, by bad actors who, who benefit, you know, from that, that polarization. And, you know, so those are both things that we've talked about during this interview. Um, the, um, and as I said before, like, I kind of don't know what the answer is on polarization. I mean, there's a lot of people thinking about this and writing about it now and writing some really good stuff. Um, I was just talking the other day to Anne Applebaum, who's written a book called The Twilight of Democracy, uh, that's on these themes. Um, uh, really great book describing her personal experience with Growing polarization. Um, and, uh, and we met, Anne and I met when we were helping Jonathan Rauch launch his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, which is also about all this. So there's all kinds of really smart, uh, very well-informed people thinking about this and writing great stuff about it. But, you know, I think what's missing is, um, a solution. Um, like, like at the end of the day, when you ask these people, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to fix it? Um, no one's got a silver bullet or anything close to it. I am thinking a lot about the other problem I mentioned, the equally big problem of, of carb…

AI assessment note: “to me, the two most important Things that are carbon and, um, and the polarization”

Q some of them may actually want those developers to focus on advancing that centralized game that they love so much, and so I'm curious to know how you think about that, and also I'm sure you've seen some of the pushback even within the gaming community around this idea of interoperability and the integration of Web three or some of these open standards, and so what's your take on that?

A Uh, there's a kind of People talking past each other, a phenomenon where you've got game developers interacting with crypto bros on social media, and they don't always get along. Let's put it, that's, that's putting it mildly, right? So the game developer mentality, um, for their position may be like this. I'm a game developer. I've spent my whole career Developing an advanced skill set that I'm very proud of, is very important to me, and building unified experiences, uh, for people to, to play in. Um, and every aspect of the art direction, the sound design, gameplay, the backstory, the programming, the engineering, it's all just exquisitely tuned in to deliver a particular kind of experience. Um, And, um, so when somebody shows up, you know, uh, wanting to bring extraneous, uh, things into my game, it's bad on two levels. And, uh, one is just that on an engineering level, to even suggest that kind of shows Total ignorance of how games actually work. So it's kind of in the not even wrong category of bad ideas. And the other objection is aesthetic. Um, so it's just kind of an abomination to think of, you know, bringing a lightsaber Into Assassin's Creed or, you know, something like that. And it's an insult to, um, to game developers. Um, and it's reasonable for them to feel insulted by those suggestions. Games like that may be a little bit like a Ren Faire. You know, you go to a…

AI assessment note: “one is just that on an engineering level... And the other objection is aesthetic.”

Q ago, so we will definitely be diving into that. But before we do, I wanted to get your take on a tweet that I saw recently. I actually saw it last week, and the tweet says, Science fiction novelist is the highest impact position in the tech industry. And we'll be, of course, crediting Francois Chalet, who said that, but what's your take on that? Any immediate reactions to that?

A It's an interesting take, and I think there might be something to it. I've been talking about this for a while, particularly with, um, the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University. I was on a panel years ago with Michael Crow, who's the president of Arizona State, and he's, he was kind of getting onto this theme. We were talking about The fact that in some cases, not all, but some cases, a science fiction novel can serve as a kind of template or a roadmap to organize the activities of a company or an open source group that's more effective than typical corporate communication strategies. So if you look at a big company where there's a lot of different engineering teams and creative teams trying to coordinate There's strategy. There's a huge amount of energy and mindshare that gets burned on just trying to keep everybody straight on, you know, with the same, uh, unifying vision, working toward the same plan, and typically that takes the form of, you know, PowerPoint decks and endless meetings and discussions. It seems that in some cases it's possible for a science fiction novel to kind of replace all of that. If everyone reads the book, everyone kind of gets it The actual kind of like, um, a magnetic field that organizes all of the iron filings, you know, so they're kind of aimed in the same direction. Of course, there's some science fiction novels wher…

AI assessment note: “a science fiction novel can serve as a kind of template or a roadmap”

Q will change? I know we're going to get into your company, Lamina One. And I know there's other efforts by, by parties in, quote unquote, the metaverse space. I think there was a consortium of 37 companies recently that came together to discuss this. But to get back to the question, do you see this changing? Because this has not been the precedent in the last, you know, couple decades.

A I do see it changing. There's not going to be one top-down big boss that says, here's how it's all going to work. It's going to be some ad hoc arrangements of people trying to work together. I think that the closest things that we currently can see to metaverse-like experiences are games like Fortnite, Roblox, Minecraft, where you've got a bunch of people running around in a space. They're all experiencing the same space at the same time. I mean, there might be shards, um, but, uh, but the idea is there that you're, you're going to a place and you're sharing it with other people. They've got huge user bases and, and, uh, because of the, the revenue that, that those generate and just the sheer amount of experience that those companies can rack up by running those operations from day to day, you know, they're kind of the leading candidates for coming together to build metaverse type. Experiences. And I know that they're all actively thinking about this and how to do it. And I suspect that they're talking to one another about how do we build a bridge from our game or our experience to your game so that a person could go from one to the other. Uh, it may take some years to, to really, uh, come together, but, um, but I think it will come together. And, um, you know, I'm Excited to, uh, to see it happen and maybe be part of it.

AI assessment note: “I do see it changing. There's not going to be one top-down big boss”

Q And I know you've talked about them to some level already, but what are those specifics? Are there a few things that you think just don't exist within the existing infrastructure that Lamina One is looking to fix?

A Well, the, the big one is, I think, the, the notion of value chains. I went into some detail about that before, so I won't rehash it, but, um, existing payment systems, um, can be really cumbersome. You know, if I hire someone in another country to make a skin for me in Roblox, you know, and, and pay them some money for that. Well, you know, does that mean I need to 10 99 them? Do I need to fill out, you know, paperwork in, You know, in some other country to, you know, make sure that, uh, everything's properly squared away. In a kind of 20th century or 19th century economy, it was okay to, for, you know, if you're a large company, you just put up with that burden of paperwork. But, you know, in an internet economy where there's constant transactions happening all over the place, you want something that's a little more fluid. Um, and I think, uh, crypto currency can, can definitely provide that. Likewise, um, You know, I, I described the way, uh, contracts work and waterfalls work in the entertainment industry. The Hollywood legal industry is something that you cannot believe until you've seen it. Uh, just the size of it and the number of people who, who work there and, um, the complexity of the structures that are created and managed. Um, And, um, just the number of minds that spend their days working on this, this stuff. So if all you're doing is punching out a few blockbuster…

AI assessment note: “the big one is, I think, the, the notion of value chains.”

Q And you, you just wrote Termination Shocked. You've written tons of books. I'm curious to know from the perspective of twenty-twenty-two, what are some of the clues that you're looking at? What are some of the themes that you're noticing about today that you think might be really important clues about, let's say, the next 30 years?

A Yeah. Well, to me, the two most important Things that are carbon and, um, and the polarization of, of society, um, and, and the way that polarization is being fostered and kind of weaponized by, by bad actors who, who benefit, you know, from that, that polarization. And, you know, so those are both things that we've talked about during this interview. Um, the, um, and as I said before, like, I kind of don't know what the answer is on polarization. I mean, there's a lot of people thinking about this and writing about it now and writing some really good stuff. Um, I was just talking the other day to Anne Applebaum, who's written a book called The Twilight of Democracy, uh, that's on these themes. Um, uh, really great book describing her personal experience with Growing polarization. Um, and, uh, and we met, Anne and I met when we were helping Jonathan Rauch launch his book, The Constitution of Knowledge, which is also about all this. So there's all kinds of really smart, uh, very well-informed people thinking about this and writing great stuff about it. But, you know, I think what's missing is, um, a solution. Um, like, like at the end of the day, when you ask these people, okay, what are we going to do? How are we going to fix it? Um, no one's got a silver bullet or anything close to it. I am thinking a lot about the other problem I mentioned, the equally big problem of, of carb…

AI assessment note: “the two most important Things that are carbon and, um, and the polarization of, of society”

Q recording this conversation? If there's an online auction, is that in the metaverse? If I'm staring at my phone for an hour intently watching TikTok, am I in the metaverse? And so as someone who I've coined the term, and I know not everyone will agree with your definition or your perspective, but I am curious to hear from you. What do you think of as the metaverse per se?

A In general, to, to address the specific things that you mentioned, um, I think anything that's being used a lot today, um, uh, probably is not very metaverse-like, because in general, when people talk about the metaverse, they're talking about the next thing that's coming along. If it exists today, that suggests that maybe it's a pre, largely a pre-metaverse thing, but there are some exceptions that we can talk about in certain kinds of games and other experiences, uh, that I think are kind of on-ramps. You know, one of my, one of the most basic ones is do we talk about the metaverse or metaverses, plural, and, um, so my, my colleague Uh, Tony Parisi has got seven rules of the metaverse, and rule number one is that there's only the metaverse. There's not a bunch of metaverses. So that, for me, is a strong indicator. If I see someone talking about our metaverse or a metaverse, yeah, I immediately begin to question whether they really got it. Uh, whereas if somebody talks about arts, the thing, what we're building in the metaverse, That gives me more of a warm feeling about what they're doing, and I think that's because a central idea of the metaverse, at least in the book, is that there is just one of them, and that doesn't mean that it's all kind of the same thing everywhere, far from it. It's a incredibly diverse range of experiences, but you can always get from one to the oth…

AI assessment note: “a central idea of the metaverse, at least in the book, is that there is just one”

Q gets sick. I get sick in cars all the time. And so what I want to understand from you though, is if we are able to solve these engineering challenges. So for example, if it becomes instead of five to 10% point, oh, oh, one percent of people will get sick while using a headset. Are people really wanting to be that immersed if we can solve those engineering challenges?

A For me, if it's a good VR experience, I like going into that level of immersion for half hour, 45 minutes, and having a really intense experience. Beyond that, just the experience of having this thing on my face, not being able to see my real environment, um, not being aware of what's going on, Being kind of socially isolated from the people around me adds up to, uh, something that for me is a, a relatively brief experience. Like I said, half hour, 45 minutes, kind of like you might sit down and watch an episode of a TV show, you know, then it's over and then you stop. For all day, you know, or for gaming binges that go on for hours and hours, I don't think it's for me

AI assessment note: “I like going into that level of immersion for half hour, 45 minutes”

Q And I know you've talked about them to some level already, but what are those specifics? Are there a few things that you think just don't exist within the existing infrastructure that Lamina One is looking to fix?

A Well, the, the big one is, I think, the, the notion of value chains. I went into some detail about that before, so I won't rehash it, but, um, existing payment systems, um, can be really cumbersome. You know, if I hire someone in another country to make a skin for me in Roblox, you know, and, and pay them some money for that. Well, you know, does that mean I need to 10 99 them? Do I need to fill out, you know, paperwork in, You know, in some other country to, you know, make sure that, uh, everything's properly squared away. In a kind of 20th century or 19th century economy, it was okay to, for, you know, if you're a large company, you just put up with that burden of paperwork. But, you know, in an internet economy where there's constant transactions happening all over the place, you want something that's a little more fluid. Um, and I think, uh, crypto currency can, can definitely provide that. Likewise, um, You know, I, I described the way, uh, contracts work and waterfalls work in the entertainment industry. The Hollywood legal industry is something that you cannot believe until you've seen it. Uh, just the size of it and the number of people who, who work there and, um, the complexity of the structures that are created and managed. Um, And, um, just the number of minds that spend their days working on this, this stuff. So if all you're doing is punching out a few blockbuster…

AI assessment note: “existing payment systems, um, can be really cumbersome.”

Q didn't expect. I think one example that I've heard you give is that electricity was obvious to be applied to light, but electricity then generating electric guitars, less obvious. So are there perhaps less obvious things that you've been exposed to or that you've started to think through maybe even for a future book in terms of some of these technologies being applied in ways that we might not expect?

A That's a, that's a great question. Uh, so I may have to think about it for a second. You know, um, so for example, one of the, the, one of the two main projects that my team worked on at Magic Leap is called Baby Goats. And it simply populated your environment with baby goats that would run around. They would jump up on the furniture and, um, And kind of interact socially, but it wasn't a game game. It wasn't like you're not trying to score 10,000 goat points and kill the goat boss. It just, it was just an ambient kind of experience of these, these creatures running around. Um, and so it had to do all those things I mentioned. I mean, the, the, the goats had to know where the furniture was and they had to know, well, okay, I can jump one meter In the air, so I can, I can't jump directly to the top of the bookcase, but I could jump to the table, and then from there I could jump to the bookcase. So the furniture would be placed, you know, by the level designer, and the possible paths that where the animal could move would be so pre-programmed, and so the, the animal's just making a decision to follow a certain pre-programmed path. Uh, and, and there, you can use some AI there too, uh, you know, if you want. In the AR version of this, you have no way of knowing what every person's living room is going to look like, you know. Um, and so you can't have any pre-programmed map of the …

AI assessment note: “one of the two main projects that my team worked on at Magic Leap is called Baby Goats”

Q Lamina One is a new attempt at the base layer for the open metaverse that privileges creators, technical and artistic, one that provides support, spatial computing, and a community to support those who are building the open metaverse. Can you share a little bit more about why you're choosing to build Lamina One And why you've made some of those really, really concrete design decisions like building on the blockchain?

A So, I mean, I think I've already hinted at a lot of this, you know, in the earlier parts of this interview. Um, so a lot of what I've been talking about is all kind of rolled up into laminate one. But I mean, for those who don't track crypto stuff, um, the, you know, a layer one blockchain just means a new blockchain. Uh, it can be built using new code, new technology. Uh, in other cases, it could just be a clone of an existing, a fork of an existing chain, uh, or a combination of both. Um, but the idea is that when you, if you use an existing chain and build your stuff on top of it, you're essentially going along for the ride with whoever sort of runs that, that chain. You, you don't have a say in, How it's organized and what engineering characteristics it has. But if you start your own layer one chain, you, you get to control that. You get to build in the features that you want for your particular application. Bitcoin was the first layer one chain. Ethereum came along later. It's a separate, it's a separate layer one chain, but it adds features that weren't present in Bitcoin. We think that, um, That kind of the next wave, ah, is, is going to be metaverse applications. We think that cryptocurrency and fiat currency, you know, in other words, old fashioned non-cryptocurrency, they're both going to be used in the metaverse just as they are in the real world. And because they bo…

AI assessment note: “if you start your own layer one chain, you, you get to control that.”

Q do you think AI will Interoperate with IP, if that makes sense. How will these AIs generate a bunch of objects, maybe even generate games themselves eventually? And then who owns those things? Obviously the AI is trained on many different data sets. So do the people who supplied that data own the eventual creation from the AI, or have you started to think about how, how that might work?

A My other co-founder at Lamina One, Peter, Investments has actually been thinking a lot about this. It went deep down the rabbit hole of mid-journey and all that last month, and, and very quickly when you're thinking about applying those kinds of systems to build, um, experiences that might make money, you're up against an ethical question. For exactly the reason you said, which is that, um, these AIs are harvesting work from, um, millions of people. And, um, you know, you might ask Dali to make a painting of a dog in the style of, and that's fine. But when you do the same thing and you specify a living artist, then you, you can be sure that the system is going around and ingesting Data from, um, uh, from everything that artist has ever created, and then doing a mashup, um, to produce a result. And so why shouldn't, I mean, if you're just screwing around, it's one thing. In the terms of service of DALI, I don't know about the other programs, but they're, they're pretty conscious of this, and they're, they're trying to prevent people from just, um, monetizing the crap out of it. In cases where it does get monetized, why shouldn't the, the artists who contribute, um, get a cut? We've been talking to, um, Shrapnel, which is a, it's a game that's being put out by a company in Seattle called Neon Machine. And, um, it's a blockchain web three kind of game, uh, from the ground up. And,…

AI assessment note: “In cases where it does get monetized, why shouldn't the, the artists who contribute, um, get a cut?”

Q part have okayed this idea where they are giving up certain privacy rights. They are giving up certain aspects of their information in order to not have to pay for things. So do you actually see that reversing as people, is it an awareness thing or how do you actually imagine a revenue model that you can get the masses to opt into that is not an ad based model?

A It's a really tough thing to turn around. Um, just because, um, It's the, the, the attraction of free stuff is so powerful. Um, there's kind of an analogous phenomenon in games, casual mobile games, where at a certain point it just became the expectation that games would be free. Sometimes that means you have to watch ads, which is a fairly, it's annoying, but it's a transparent kind of annoyance. You, you understand how the, the, the commerce is, the wheels of commerce are turning. Underneath that experience, but in other cases, it's, um, the, these games kind of become like slot machines where they're using kind of applied, you know, behavioral psychology to make people want to keep punching in their credit card number and spending money. The attraction of free stuff is incredibly powerful and can lead to, uh, all kinds of negative social effects. Um, And it's like, I wish I had an answer. Uh, the person who I think has done the most useful thinking about this, um, has been Jaron Lanier, and you know, we talk about this all the time. Um, he's got ideas for structures that would be analogous to labor unions, uh, where, um, You know, right now, the way social media works is this, is if a bunch of people all volunteered their time to build a car, and then the car company sold the car and made money off of it, um, you know, which is pretty, it's pretty amazing that people are wil…

AI assessment note: “he's got ideas for structures that would be analogous to labor unions”

Q part have okayed this idea where they are giving up certain privacy rights. They are giving up certain aspects of their information in order to not have to pay for things. So do you actually see that reversing as people, is it an awareness thing or how do you actually imagine a revenue model that you can get the masses to opt into that is not an ad based model?

A It's a really tough thing to turn around. Um, just because, um, It's the, the, the attraction of free stuff is so powerful. Um, there's kind of an analogous phenomenon in games, casual mobile games, where at a certain point it just became the expectation that games would be free. Sometimes that means you have to watch ads, which is a fairly, it's annoying, but it's a transparent kind of annoyance. You, you understand how the, the, the commerce is, the wheels of commerce are turning. Underneath that experience, but in other cases, it's, um, the, these games kind of become like slot machines where they're using kind of applied, you know, behavioral psychology to make people want to keep punching in their credit card number and spending money. The attraction of free stuff is incredibly powerful and can lead to, uh, all kinds of negative social effects. Um, And it's like, I wish I had an answer. Uh, the person who I think has done the most useful thinking about this, um, has been Jaron Lanier, and you know, we talk about this all the time. Um, he's got ideas for structures that would be analogous to labor unions, uh, where, um, You know, right now, the way social media works is this, is if a bunch of people all volunteered their time to build a car, and then the car company sold the car and made money off of it, um, you know, which is pretty, it's pretty amazing that people are wil…

AI assessment note: “he's got ideas for structures that would be analogous to labor unions”

Q Leap for quite some time, or you, you did work there. I think you were the chief futurist or something like that. A very cool title. What did you learn there? Because they seem to have pivoted now more towards commercial enterprise. What did you learn there about the potential applications outside of maybe the consumer lens and where some of these technologies can be applied to solve other problems?

A You know, what I say that magically very early was that I didn't just want to be a guru, you know, navel gazing. Futurist, but I wanted to build something and looked around for a little bit at what was going on inside the company and decided that probably the most useful place for me to apply what I know would be in content. Creation. And, and so there were a number of projects there, and presumably still are, that are aimed at, you know, specific industrial commercial type applications. Um, just like you said, 99% of my time was, was spent building, um, Applications that were aimed at just the general audience and meant to be, you know, entertaining fun in some way as opposed to the commercial industrial stuff. You do have to solve a lot of the same problems regardless of whether you're making a commercial product or an entertainment product. You've got a, you're building a, um, An experience in a game engine. Um, we use both Unity and Unreal at different points. Um, the For it to work, the game engine, the environment, the level has to be populated, not by, not just by imaginary, uh, entities that you drag into the scene, but by, um, stuff that's actually in the user's environment, uh, that the system recognizes through machine vision and kind of creates in the world. Um, so there's a, A loop that's running all the time where the cameras on the device are scanning. The camera…

AI assessment note: “99% of my time was, was spent building, um, Applications that were aimed at just the general audience”

Q Our metaverse or another metaverse. How does Lamina One layer into that? How aware is the creator, the end creator? How do they know whether they're using Lamina One or the gaming engines that you mentioned? How do those all kind of interplay together? Is Lamina One almost like a transparent layer under these existing engines? Or, or can you share a little bit more about how that might work?

A I'm not sure if I would say transparent because that suggests invisible. And so kind of to your point, people should know What they're using and why they're using it, uh, how they're getting paid. So, um, you know, anyone who is trying to make a buck, you know, and support themselves financially has got to be mindful of where the money's coming from and how the business, you know, operates. A lot of times the, the interfaces that you have to use in order to do anything at all with crypto, even pretty simple things, uh, are Hard to work with and confusing and almost, almost a little frightening because you're, you're sort of aware at some level that if you do it wrong, you know, you could lose money.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure if I would say transparent because that suggests invisible.”

Q Our metaverse or another metaverse. How does Lamina One layer into that? How aware is the creator, the end creator? How do they know whether they're using Lamina One or the gaming engines that you mentioned? How do those all kind of interplay together? Is Lamina One almost like a transparent layer under these existing engines? Or, or can you share a little bit more about how that might work?

A I'm not sure if I would say transparent because that suggests invisible. And so kind of to your point, people should know What they're using and why they're using it, uh, how they're getting paid. So, um, you know, anyone who is trying to make a buck, you know, and support themselves financially has got to be mindful of where the money's coming from and how the business, you know, operates. A lot of times the, the interfaces that you have to use in order to do anything at all with crypto, even pretty simple things, uh, are Hard to work with and confusing and almost, almost a little frightening because you're, you're sort of aware at some level that if you do it wrong, you know, you could lose money.

AI assessment note: “I'm not sure if I would say transparent because that suggests invisible.”