The Future Right Now

this episode is sponsored by Nissan. Nissan asked me if I could talk about the future, and it was really exciting to get that opportunity and I'm happy to seize it now. I've talked a lot in recent episodes about stuff like the metaverse, uh, the concept of web three some people call it web three point oh, and the controversial subject of n f T S. And I've been

pretty critical of how things are going so far. But I thought this is a good opportunity for me to take a step back, try and take a more objective look, talk about what the premise is behind all of these semi related topics, and to get an idea of what could be. Because again we're going to talk about the future, We're also going to talk about how things are going right now and give some unfortunate examples of fumbling the bag, because that has happened. It tends to happen whenever there's

a massive transition in tech. So this is not me saying, hey, remember all that stuff I said that was critical of these technologies, forget it. This is saying, all right, there are problems right now, but what could we expect assuming we work out all the problems, what could be the future now? In order to do that, we're gonna have to talk about a lot of different cons ups. One of those a big important one is the blockchain, which

of course was made famous by cryptocurrency. One of the earliest descriptions of blockchain came out of a white paper written by someone who was going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto. So this was the same white paper that first introduced the concept of bitcoin. So what is a block chain? Well, as simply as I can put it, it is a shared ledger that is made up of blocks of transactions or other data. Transactions don't have to be you know, I spent as much money to buy

that thing. Transactions can be I sent a message to this other person but they are blocks of transactions that are arranged in a chain, with the earliest transactions at the far end or beginning of the chain, and the most recent transactions being in a block that's at the end of the chain. Each block along that chain depends in part upon the values of the blocks that came

before it. This is really important because it means you cannot make a change to an earlier block in the chain without affecting all the blocks that come after it. So I'll use an example. Let's say that I was one of the first folks in on bitcoin. I wasn't, or else i'd be a bazillionaire. But let's say that I was, and I get some bitcoin one way or another. We don't really have to go into cryptocurrency mining or crypto exchanges in this episode. And I use that bitcoin

to buy something like a pizza. And at the time, because bitcoin are worth practically nothing, it takes thousands of bitcoin for me to buy this pizza. And I'm so early in the bitcoin days that this transaction takes place, and say just the third block on the chain, which means within thirty minutes of bitcoin hitting the scene, I have been part of it. Now flash forward a few years.

All right, it's several years since my eventful pizza purchase with bitcoin, and I'm reflecting on how I spent I don't know, like fifty thousand bitcoin to buy a pizza, but now a single bitcoin is worth thousands of dollars. Back then, it was worth a fraction of a penny. So I'm sitting there thinking, Hey, if I had just held onto those bitcoin that I owned, I'd be so

dang wealthy. Now i'd be I'd be crazy rich. So maybe I want to be all sneaky and I want to go back and delete my pizza transaction that I did so many years ago so that I can repossess the money that I had spent. Well, that would mean I'd have to go into this public ledger and change block number three in the chain. And now there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of blocks that are after

number three. So the big problem, of course, is that block number four and every block after it depends in part on the value represented by block number three. So if I make a change in block three, it affects the whole chain after that. And because the chain is a ledger and this ledger is shared with everyone in the system. Everybody can see that the ledger has been changed, that someone has tried to alter it, so the system can then be corrected and my nefarious crypto heist will

be thwarted. So one thing that makes block chains useful is that they represent a trustworthy chain of custody. If the data in a system is in the form of a block chain, it is effectively immutable, unchangeable. This could be useful for all sorts of transactions. Imagine real estate deeds that are stored on a block chain. It would be clear who owned the rights to any particular estate. If the deed were to change hands, it would be

reflected in this ledger. You could avoid situations where you have multiple parties all claiming ownership of the same thing. Because the record of transactions would be viewable and unchangeable, you would know for sure who has ownership of it. Of course, there's still other things you have to worry about, like people tricking each other into giving up access to their digital wallets that's where digital assets live, like cryptocurrency,

for example. So while the blockchain itself is secure, that doesn't mean the system as a whole is secure. You've still got weak points that batties can target. This is why we hear about stuff like hackers stealing bitcoins and n f t s and stuff like that, because the hackers typically target either individual users or they target cryptocurrency exchanges,

but the chain itself remains steady. Okay, now I just mentioned n f t s, so let's really get into that because the way people have behaved around n f t s people and companies has given n f t S really bad name, So we're gonna talk about that too. N f T stands for non fungible token. Fungible means something that is interchangeable, Like if you have one of them, you can interchange it with any other one of those things and you walk away with the same value. Uh.

Here's a here's a simple example. Let's say that I buy a toy, but the toy doesn't work out of the box, so I take the malfunctioning toy back to where I bought it and exchange it for a new working one. The two toys are essentially identical, ignoring that one works in one doesn't, and so from the store's point of view, they're interchangeable as long as I have proof that I bought it from there, I can switch

it out. This is getting close to fungible. It's not quite because you couldn't just exchange your broken toy for a working toy with anybody, because they'd say, no, it's not the same thing. You just doesn't work. So it's not truly fungible. Uh. However, a dollar is fungible. So let's say that I've got a five dollar bill. I can swap my dingy, tattered five dollar bill at a bank for a crisp, new five dollar bill. In fact, banks do this all the time, where they will take

cruddy money out of circulation. It's a way of getting rid of dollars that are falling apart. So I bring my ratty five dollar bill into the bank and I exchange it for a nice, crisp five dollar bill. Even though my five dollars is ratty and the other ones crisp. There, they both represent the same value that are interchangeable. They are fungible. I can also switch that five dollar bill for five one dollar bills and that would be the

same thing. It remains fungible across all these variations. Now, let's say that I have a classic rare baseball card, and my baseball card a bit beat up. It's you know, it's in good condition, but it's not perfect. Well, I can't just take my good condition, rare baseball card and go exchange it for the same baseball card that's in mint condition, because the actual condition of the cards affects their value. The baseball cards are non fungible. They are

not interchangeable. Non fungible tokens are also not interchangeable. Uh, they represent something unique, or really, I should say they represent a unique instance of something. Essentially, an n f

T is a digital token that represents some other digital information. Now, a lot of n f t s that we've been hearing about involves stuff like digital art, where people are sometimes spending tens of thousands of dollars to acquire a digital token representing some form of image or maybe it's a tweet or what ever, and the token represents ownership. But what about beyond that? What does it mean beyond that?

Because I've often said n f t s are kind of like a digital receipt, that it's not the thing itself, it's the receipt showing you own the thing. So on its own, a digital token just means you own that instance of that digital asset. Nothing stops someone from minting multiple digital tokens for the same asset. They can do that, but this is kind of like someone creating a limited

edition item. If you've ever shopped around for limited edition stuff, you know a lot of them are numbered, right, You'll have a lot of limited edition items and each one will be individually numbered. So you might see that you have like number four hundred twenty eight out of a run of one thousand of whatever it is. Well, you happen to know that there are nine other instances of the same thing that you own, and each of those has a number from on to one thousand, excluding number

because that's the one you own. And n f T s can be the same way. Owning an n f T doesn't mean you are the sole owner of a piece of digital art. You are the sole owner of one instance of that digital art. And it gets a bit mind bindy right now. You can buy and sell n f T s and the transactions are on top of a block chain, So again, by referencing a blockchain, you can see when and how often an n f T changes hands. This also prevents someone from trying to sell the same n f T multiple times. N f

T s also confused people a lot. There was a lot of uncertainty about what an n f T actually allows you to do with the thing you purchased. I mean, sure, there's a record on a ledger that shows you are the person who owns that digital token, which in turn represents some digital asset. But what good does that do? What does that give you the right to do? Does that mean you have the right to start putting up

like T shirts featuring the artwork you bought? Right, maybe you bought n f T representing a piece of digital art, does that mean now you can merchandise that art? Or if you purchased an n f T representing digital audio, does that mean you can charge licensing fees for people playing that audio? Now? The answer to those questions is

not necessarily, and typically they fall into probably not. There are ways to include licensing rights and other i P rights in an n f T transaction, so that is possible, but it's not mandatory, it is not standard. A basic n f T transaction just represents a simple purchase of an instance, if I went out to a bookstore and I bought a copy of the book The Hobbit. That doesn't mean that I now own the publishing rights and other i P rights to the Hobbit. Right, I can't

sell Hobbit merchandise. I can't print copies of the Hobbit myself. I just own a copy of The Hobbit. And a basic n f T is like that. It's just a record of a transaction. But it is possible to include stuff like merchandizing rights in an n f T, and some n f T artists do this. They sell their n f t s and they include the rights so that whomever buys that n f T will actually have the right to produce merchandise featuring that art if they

so choose. Also, because n f t s exist on a blockchain, it is possible to build into n f T s a feature in which the person who originally minted that n f T in the first place will get a cut every single time that n f T is sold to someone else. So the artist creates an n f T to represent a digital piece of art. They sell that n f T to Person number one,

and they collect money from that transaction. Person one sells that n f T to person too, well, some money from that transaction still goes back to the creator, and if I minted an n f T representing this very episode and then sold that n f T to someone, I could potentially get a cut of every subsequent deal in which the n f T changed hands from that

point on out. If I so designed my n f T minting process that way, that's actually pretty cool because it represents a way for digital creators to receive long tail compensation for their work. Now, early on, n f T has got a really bad rap, and justifiably so, because there was just so much speculation around them. People were treating n f t s like they were commodities or stocks. Uh, there was no real concept of actual value.

The speculation just inflated everything. The hype was driving prices way up, which was really confounding some people and then exciting others, and it soured a lot of folks on the concept right away. Now we're going to take a break, but when we come back, I'll talk a little bit more about some of the issues with n f t s and then some of the ways that n f T s could be used in ways that I view

as positive. But first, let's take a quick break Okay, so before the break I talked about how hype and speculation really gave n f T s a black eye. But on top of that, you also had n f T scams to deal with. People were minting n f T s for properties they didn't actually own, which is fraud right, Like if you don't own something and you

sell it, you're you're being fraudulent. Uh. This is essentially the high tech equivalent of walking up to a tourist in New York and trying to sell them the Brooklyn Bridge. It's the same sort of thing. Uh. In other cases you had people selling valid n f T s, but they were using other methods to artificially pump up enthusiasm around on those n f t s, and a classic pump and dump scheme. That's just when you weren't to

inflate the value of something that you possess. Then you sell that stuff off when it's at the highest price you think it can get, and you get the heck out of dodge while the price comes back down to reality once people realize that the the perceived value of that thing is much higher than its actual value value. By the way, it gets super tricky to talk about because really, when it boils down to it, value is

whatever people are willing to pay for something. Right If they're not willing to pay for something, then the you would argue that someone is trying to price something above its value. But it's very fuzzy. It's not like it's a hard and fast number that you can point to. Now, on top of all that, you had a lot of big companies that were really getting into n f t s very quickly, sometimes without really considering why they were doing it. Yawned it being no more than say, a

cynical cash grab. That that's tricky, right like, And in some cases it probably wasn't a cynical cash grab, but that's how it came across, and people reacted very poorly to that. Even in cases where n f t s could arguably make sense, such as for in game assets for video games, there's been a huge backlash When you hear about games that are considering using n f t

s for in game purchases. You're a lot of gamers getting upset about that, and I think part of that is because of how n f t s have performed up to this point. But I also don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, depending on how it's handled. That's what is key, because it's absolutely and how it's handled. So let's talk about a way of using n f

T s in a video game that could potentially work. Now, a lot of video games out there offer up DLC, or downloadable content, and this is content that is supplementary to whatever the main core of the game is, and players have varying opinions about DLC. I think generally speaking, most folks think that an expansion to an original game can be absolutely fine unless they find out that that expansion was always in the game and the DLC was

just to unlock what was already there. That tends to take gamers off because what that tells gamers is, oh, you always had this content. What you did was you sold me an incomplete game, and I have to pay in order to get the complete game. That's kind of how the perspective goes from the gamer's side. If in fact, the DLC was always part of the core game and

you had to pay to unlock it. Now, if the DLC isn't more gameplay content, let's say it's just cosmetic features, such as a new character skin for the character you play in the game. I think most gamers are actually okay with that, because if they want the cosmetics stuff, they can purchase a skin that they like for their character or for their in game items or for whatever. And if they don't want it, they just don't buy

the stuff and they continue to play the game. And then you have DLC that includes in game features that change how the game plays to some extent. This has a much more shaky reputation among gamers because it can lead to players spending money in order to get an in game advantage, and gamers will often call this pay

to win, and generally speaking, it's looked down upon. If your DLC includes stuff like special weapons that you cannot get in any other way in the game, and those weapons give you an incredible advantage, that is frowned upon

in the gamer community generally speaking. But all right, let's say that you are a video game publisher and you've created a franchise of games, and there's a long history of these and they're all kind of connected together, at least thematically, and let's say you start offering cosmetic DLC in the form of n f t s for the latest title in your franchise. Now, if a player buys that cosmetic upgrade, they get an n f T, a

digital token representing their purchase. And this means that maybe in future games that you create in the series, that same player will still have access to that cosmetic upgrade only within the new game because they have the n f T that shows that they've purchased it. It's they don't have to buy it again, They've already got it and it can be applied to the new game. There's there's nothing, by the way set in stone that says this would ever be the way this would work, but

it's one potential way it could work. And also they could potentially even sell their n f T to someone else and sell the cosmetic asset to some other player. Let's say that it's a game franchise where they created a cool cosmetic three games back, but now they don't sell that cosmetic anymore. They don't they don't really that that game that's three games old isn't really heavily supported

by the publisher. You still have access to that cosmetic skin because you purchased it three games ago as an n f T, and it's supported in the most recent version of the game, but you can't buy that new cosmetic skin from the publisher. Well, because you have an n f T, you might be able to sell that n f T on a on a market in the game or even outside the game, to someone else who really wants that cosmetic Maybe you make money off of it. That's a possibility and one that I don't think is

necessarily bad. It could work, but it would have to be done well, and unfortunately, in the early days of n f T S things weren't done very well, and they have cast a pretty dark shadow on the concept in general. But let me present another possible use of n f T S. This is one that could potentially be transformational. Let's say that you are a developer, you're a programmer, and you write some really cool code, and

that code is useful. It could be adapted for lots of stuff, and traditionally it's pretty darn hard to ascribe credit two lines of code, particularly for projects in which you have a lot of different people programming code for that project. But if you could mint an n f T representing the code you created, now you have credit

for that code. Of course, for that to work, you would also need a system in place to verify that the person minting the n f T actually has ownership of the code itself, and it might not be the programmer. In fact, for really big projects, I imagine that this would be kind of the company behind that project. That would meant the n f T not the programmer themselves, unless we saw a massive change. But it still could be a big benefit in the programm or community if

it were deployed properly. There are a lot of qualifiers for this. So my point is n f t s aren't inherently bad, but the way that companies and people have been treating them hasn't really been that great, and so they have a bad reputation understandably so, I mean, I have been one of the people critical of the way n f t s have been handled so far, But I think n f t s will eventually settle

down at some point and potentially become really useful. It's just gonna take some time, and this often happens in tech. We see it happen in tech all the time. In fact, back in the nineties, we saw it happened with the dot com bubble, right we saw all these companies spring up, these web based companies. We saw crazy speculation which ultimately drove unsustainable business practices, and then the whole thing came

crashing down when the bubble burst. But after the crash it was an instant but after the crash there was recovery and slowly we established the web that we know today. I think n f T S could potentially be on a similar path as long as folks layoff the speculation, the crass cash grabs, and people are more alert to things like n f T scams. So not a ringing endorsement for n f T S, I understand, But I'm saying like the technology makes sense if it's properly used.

We just haven't seen very many cases of that as of yet. All right, now, let's switch gears from n f T S and talk about Web three. So the concept of Web three is one that sounds interesting and appealing on the surface. Uh. It's about a decentralized version of the web built on top of the blockchain. Data exchanges will be transactions which themselves will be part of

a public ledger. It will allow for direct communication without the use of an intermediary, so you can communicate with your friends without going through a platform like Facebook, or you can send someone money directly without it passing through a payment services app, that kind of thing. The argument here is that Web two point oh, which used to be defined as UH websites that had user generated content, they had dynamic elements in them, they were changeable, that

kind of thing. The way Web three views Web two is that it's an It's a web where massive companies like Meta and Google absolutely dominate the experience because these are the companies that gather user information to modify it, sell it off to advertisers, target those users with advertising, and so it's companies like Google and Meta that determine what you see when you're on the web. That that's why you see the ads that you see. It's why when you go to Facebook, it's why your your news

feed is the way it is. When you and a friend who might have very similar interests compare your news feeds, they could look totally different because of all the data that Meta is gathering and then using to determine what to feed you and win and how that's the concept Web three says about Web two, and that Web three will not be that you will not be going through these massive companies. They will not be the entities that dictate what your experiences and what you see. Now this

is all hypothetical. There are actually conflicting visions of what Web three point oh will be and how it will manifest. So we don't have a set in stone definition of Web three. But generally the idea is that these ledgers, these blockchains, which would i there be public, or they would be viewable by some designated group of entities. A blockchain does not have to be public, by the way, it does have to be viewable by all the parties that are part of the not a regulatory but oversight board.

You might say it has to be viewable by all those parties, but it doesn't have to be for everyone in the system. In fact, Meta was proposing a blockchain based currency that would have only been viewable by the partners of that project. That all fell apart. Moreover, all people would have equal access to Web three. There'd be no gatekeeping, so there'd be no censorship in the sense

of people being prevented from being on there. So Web three proponents are saying that platforms like Twitter and Facebook, which occasionally do ban people, would not have the authority to do that on Web three. So I'm sure that a lot of you have already seen some potential problems

with this vision. One is that while idealistically it's great that everyone has access and no one has denied, it can very clearly lead to situations in which bad actors use such a platform such a Web three philosophy to ramp up misinformation or disinformation campaigns, or hate speech harassment, that kind of thing. You can easily see where this

would be abused. Uh, and that is a big issue that would have to be worked out because, uh, it would just it would get too chaotic, and anyone who was from any kind of vulnerable population would be at very high risk of being abused in some way or multiple ways. Another Web three's features is that it gets away from those massive companies have been dominating the web so far, like I mentioned companies like Meta, Amazon, Google,

and so you wouldn't have the data intermediaries anymore. The idea being that if you're on Web three, you own your data. You can choose to share your data or sell your data, but it is your data, you have control of it, and theoretically, if you're able to put something up, you're able to take it down. That's easier said than done. More likely than not, you put something up and it stays up, because otherwise you have a

very fractured and unstable platform there. But the concept is that you have that ownership, it does not go through anyone else, and that is one of the big things that appeals to a lot of Web three point oh advocates. I've got more to say about Web three, including some other potential consequences, but before we get into all of that,

let's take a quick break. So before we went to break, I talked about how Web three one of the big selling points is that it is not beholden to these massive companies like Google and Amazon and Meta and that sort of thing. Some people have pointed out that the the fact that this quote unquote decentralized is only decentralized to a certain extent, like kind of gets into a George Orwell animal farm kind of thing, like, yeah, it's decentralized,

but some platforms are more decentralized than others. People have pointed out that the owners of the blockchain, that the the the exchange is not really owners, but the exchanges that exist that uh, that are facilitating these kinds of things. Will end up effectively taking a similar place to these massive companies. That really all you're doing is replacing the overlords for a new set of overlords. That's one of

the criticisms. Of course, these things don't really exist yet, so it's it's hard to say whether that criticism is merited. It's simply been raised. Another big downside is that currently blockchain transactions are typically pretty slow. For example, Well in order for a transaction to go through, it has to be verified first, and on the Bitcoin blockchain, a transaction on average takes about ten minutes to verify. This is closely related with the crypto mining process for Bitcoin, but

it's not the case across every blockchain. On on Ethereum, the average length of time actually varies widely, between fifteen seconds on the short end to verify a transaction up to five minutes on the long end of it. Uh. The amount of time it takes depends on lots of different factors, including network contolution, So the busier it is, the longer it's going to take for things to really complete.

A web three that's built on top of blockchain transactions is going to need to solve some serious scaling issues to allow for faster verification or else we would see the experience of using Web three platforms as being far too clunky and clumsy and slow for people to see it as being worthwhile. Um. Anytime you encounter any kind

of lag, people start to lose patients quickly. Like I'm sure you can all remember a time when accessing the Internet required more patients, right that you had to wait longer for a page to load, or for a video to buffer, or things of that nature. And then as connections improve and our access to those connections improve, we become used to being able to access things much more quickly, and if we ever encounter a situation where we can't

do that is in credibly frustrating. That's one of the downsides to Web three is that right now blockchain transactions are slow, and I think a lot of people would find it very off putting to have an online experience that requires that much waiting. Um. But that's not to say that these are problems that are unsurmountable. So we might find solutions to these problems, and Web three may

well be the future of the Web. I have my doubts, largely because I worry about some of the consequences of Web three, particularly when it comes to things like keeping a handle on hate speech. But that's not to say that by the time we actually start seeing real Web three factors emerging beyond just the theoretical and the pilot programs, maybe by then we'll have an approach to dealing with this sort of stuff. So it's it's too early to pass judgment. In other words, I have my concerns, but

that doesn't mean that those concerns won't be met. Right we might be able to address them, So I'm trying to keep an open mind. Now, let's talk about the metaverse. Okay. Generally speaking, a metaverse is a persistent online world in which you can do pretty much all the stuff you can do in the real world plus more. Or it's an it's an online series of touch points that can spill over into the real world if you're using something like augmented reality glasses. Now, there are examples of limited

metaverses today right now. One that's been around for ages is Second Life. That's a virtual world in which people can own virtual real estate, they can interact with one another.

At one time, there was this kind of general belief that businesses we're going to go all in on Second Life, and a few actually really did spend quite a bit of money to establish a presence in Second Life, building out a virtue will storefront, or virtual customer experiences, so Second Life users could visit these these companies presence in Second Life and then interact with the business in some

presumably meaningful way. You can do things like go to concerts in Second Life, or you could hold business meetings, or you know, just hang out with your friends. You could do all sorts of stuff, at least in theory, and Second Life got a lot of interest, but it wasn't able to sustain it, at least not on a wide scale. I mean, Second Life still exists, people still use it, but it never took off to become the

future of business, communications, socialization, the Internet. Like a lot of people were predicting that back in the early days of Second Life, it did not achieve that by any means. And some people will point to stuff like Roadblocks as

a type of metaverse. Roadblocks is an online game platform, and really the appeal of Roadblocks is that it lets users create and play games of all sorts within this online world, and those games can be really sophisticated, and they can have complicated rules and incentives for play, or they can be way more loosey goosey. It can turn into essentially like a giant game of Make believes, sort of the the sort of stuff you would encounter if you were to, uh watch kids play on a playground

and watch them makeup games on the fly. That can happen on Roadblocks as well. And Roadblocks has tools available for people to create stuff, and it serves as a place where those creations can then be experienced by other people. So it's a sort of unorganized metaverse in a way that is determined by its users. Uh. In a similar way, there are Minecraft servers that do something that's you know,

similar to what you find in Roadblocks. Uh. There are people who play Fortnite who have gone to call SERTs. Within Fortnite, there are folks who like to role play in a grand Theft Auto five server, turning it from a game that's all about committing crimes into simulacrum of society. It's just an online society. Maybe you play the part of a shopkeeper or a cop or something, or just a you know, an average citizen. There are role play service for that which blows my mind. But the metaverse

concept goes beyond these fairly narrow manifestations. You could you could point in these and say like this, this is almost more like a proto metaverse. Often the metaverse concept will incorporate technologies like mixed reality. That includes virtual reality. That's a system where a computer creates everything you see and interact with, and you use something like a headset in order to access it. And it also includes augmented reality.

This is where a computer system overlays digital information on top of your actual real world experience. So the classic example is a pair of a R glasses that will overlay information as you look at the world around you. So you look at a building and it lists out the businesses that are in that building. That's an example

of augmented reality. So imagine that you pop on a VR headset at home and you jump into a virtual environment and you meet up with your friends who similarly are there virtually, and you all spend time hanging out together and you maybe you play some games, maybe you shoot the breeze with each other, maybe you sing some karaoke, Maybe you decide to put on a virtual sketch show like you actually put on a play in this virtual environment,

with each person playing other characters. Really, the possibilities are only limited by whatever the platform can support, and even in cases where a platform can't natively support whatever it is you're trying to do, people tend to be creative enough to find ways to make it work by kind of jerry rigging a solution. We see this happen all the time. The g t A five role playing servers are a great example of that. It was not meant to be a role playing game, but people turned it

into that. That's the same sort of thing we should expect with the emergence of more robust beta versus. Maybe you'll use your VR headset so that you can virtually attend a huge concert. So imagine being able to go to an enormous venue with thousands of other people, but in reality you're at home, sitting in a air conditioned room, maybe standing in it if you want to be up

on your feet, depending on the band. Um. I used to think that this was a really goofy use of technology, but the more I think about it, the more it actually appeals to me. See, I'm not comfortable in large crowds, I I get a little agoraphobic. Um, if I'm not near the edge of the crowd, I start to feel very trapped and my anxiety starts to rank way high. I don't quite get to the point I can't function, but I am very uncomfortable and I rarely enjoy myself.

So I actively avoid big concerts for that reason. I do not go to them. I'll go to smaller ones, but I can't like big outdoor venues things like that. I just can't do them. However, if I could attend virtually where I'd be able to see the act and the audio that's being fed to me would be from a soundboard, so the audio is going to be great no matter where I am in virtual virtually in relation to the act, that would be a big appeal to me. Like,

I don't even know how I would handle that. From a programming standpoint, what I program it so that wherever I am virtually in relation to the stage, I get sound that reflects that. Like, if I'm further away, would it be quiet if I'm closer to the left side, would the left side speakers be louder to me than the right side? I don't know, I would probably just want to have the cleanest audio possible from the live performance.

That would be my own personal preference, but I don't know if that's how it would ever feed out anyway. To me, that is a little bit more exciting than just watching a flat video of a concert online, right being able to see a virtual representation of it, and in fact, like we have the technology where the act could be appearing as actual video representations as opposed to say a cartoonish avatar. Like I think of being able

to see the struts Um perform live. I've seen them perform lives several times, really really enjoy their live shows. I would much prefer to see them perform live as video. Then I don't know now that I think about it, if they were appearing as like Roadblock style characters, that has its own kind of charm too, But anyway, you would have lots of options, uh, And that that would mean that you would be able to kind of be there virtually in person and be able to see the

interactctions between the act and the crowd. To me, that's a big part of the fun of going to live events and seeing that interactivity or heck, imagine using VR to explore places that you would otherwise never be able to go to. Not just like other places around the world right now, you could go to places that no longer exist, like a virtual recreation of historic sites that have long since been demolished. Being able to explore those

would be amazing. Or maybe you could visit the Moon or Mars, or maybe a fantasy setting that never existed in the first place. All of these are possibilities in a metaverse. Meanwhile, you still have the opportunity to incorporate commerce into this experience. Companies could establish an existence in the metaverse, giving you the chance to interact virtually with products. You could purchase virtual replications of stuff so that you can use it in your in metaverse avatar. Like you

know Nike has made sneakers this way, virtual sneakers. I don't know that to me is gets a little silly, but then it might just not be for me that part. Or maybe you could actually order real goods and services through virtual storefronts to get a chance to see what something looks like in person or virtually in person, and then order it without having to seek out a store. This would be really useful for stores that don't have

a presence in your particular region. Right There's some stores I hear about that I would love to visit, but there aren't any close to me. So being able to do that virtually and being able to get like a good feel for what the product looks like within a virtual world that could be really useful. So that's something that has a lot of companies really excited right now. And it's also a place where we're seeing n f

t s come up in conversation. Again, so a n f T could represent a purchase of a digital item, giving you the use of that item as long as you possess the n f T or maybe you then decide to sell that on the market later on. You can do that in an n f T marketplace. You know, we just have to get through all the nonsense with n f t s right now that are giving the tech a bad name. And again, it will all depend on how it is deployed. It can still be deployed in a way that's just terrible, and n f T

s never live up to their potential. That's dependent upon us making systems where the n f T s makes sense. They're not a scam and they don't become just a speculative investment pump and dump. And because there's this general notion that Web three could be the future of the web and the metaverse could be the future of how people interact with each other online, there's a real rush

in these spaces to establish footholds there. And this is where we're seeing a lot of the stuff that's giving people a bad feeling about where things are going, because there's a lot of sloppy decisions that are being made on the way. So Meta slash Facebook has really pushed

for the metaverse. You know, they've famously sunk billions of dollars into it already, and the company's reputation is you know, tarnished, right, I mean, that's that's arguably one of the reasons why Facebook changed its name to Meta because Facebook has got a bit of a stigma against it, so naturally a lot of people are wary of any metaverse that is spearheaded by Meta. And I think what Meta and several other companies are hoping for is to be the first

to really establish a robust metaverse. Because if they can be the first to do it, and if they can prove they already have a large installed base of users interested in it, then they can attract all the other parties to join that particular metaverse. And by parties, i'm talking about like major companies and stuff. So if Meta can say, hey, we've got the metaverse platform and we already have three billion users be as they have accounts set Facebook, then that is a powerful selling point to

get other parties on board. I mean, it sends a message to a company that they can't afford to ignore this place where everybody is already, they need to be there. So my guess is that's really Meta's game plan to establish a metaverse that effectively becomes the default. It's kind of the anti web three because it would be as if Meta owned the web, assuming, of course, that the metaverse actually became the primary way that people interfaced online

with each other and with commerce. That's a big presumption, however, but assuming that that did happen, then that's kind of what Meta's goal is, just to be, you know, sort of the gatekeeper for the whole thing. So the anti web three. Meta is not the only company attempting to

do this. I've been calling them out a lot because they're the most high profile company but there are lots of companies that are involved in this, and then there are some companies that are more interested in building out things that could be a foundational element of a metaverse rather than building out the whole metaverse themselves. Meanwhile, this is still all under the assumption that this is the future that people want and that people will be eager

to interact with and able to interact with. So for all of that to happen, we're gonna need a lot of other things to fall into place. One is that, assuming the metaverse is going to require mixed reality hardware, that hardware has to be available and affordable. You probably also want it to be untethered. You know, you don't want to have to be connected or physically anchored to a computer in most of these cases. And for that to work, you need really good wireless connectivity solutions, and

you need a strong edge computing system. We're gonna need to take one more quick break. When we come back, I'll talk a bit about what edge computing is and why it's important. Okay, let's let's do a quick overview of what edge computing is. Uh, it's related to cloud computing. Right. With cloud computing, you have these networks that are doing computations, maybe they're doing data storage, maybe they're hosting apps, maybe

they are running processes. With edge computing, you locate computation and data storage systems as close to the end users as you can to cut down on latency and transfer speeds. So with edge computing, companies like Meta could use the computer systems that are at the edge near the end users to handle the bulk of computational work that would otherwise have to fall to the user's own hardware or

it would be in the cloud. If it's just in the cloud, then there's going to be a delay because of the distance between user and cloud, and you don't want to delay. If it's at the user, well, then that means that you have just put the burden on the user to have a computer powerful enough to process

whatever it is you're trying to do. So this is why a lot of earlier virtual reality systems were these tethered systems that required people to have a screaming fast gaming PC if they wanted to use the VR system, because all the hard work had to be done by

the local system. Edge computing a very strong edge computing network paired with very fast wireless data transfers would allow you to do the heavy lifting at the edge and then beam that to the user with very low latency, so that you don't have to have a massively powerful VR system locally. You can have a lightweight v OUR system that depends upon these edge computing networks. That's one of the key components that will be necessary to make a metaverse of this type a reality. And we definitely

have lots of examples of edge computing networks already. These are not, you know, hypothetical or futuristic things. They exist now. We're just gonna need a lot more of them. Now. There are a lot of other components that we will need to evolve for the metaverse to become a reality.

Intels Rajah Kaduri famously posted that he believed we are going to need one thousand times the computing power we currently have at our disposal in order to support a truly robust, persistent metaverse in the way that people are envisioning today. So we are talking about a future here, and because it's a future, it is uncertain. We don't really know how it will manifest or how many different kinds we're going to get. While Meta is absolutely determined to try and make it stamp the the one and

only Metaverse. We're likely to see a lot of different versions of this, some of which will be much more modest. Right. Many of them will probably be in the form of the games that we've been talking about, like Minecraft and Roadblocks and Fortnite. That we are going to see more

metaverse style concepts and features make their way into online games. Uh, and we might not immediately call those online games a metaverse in their own right, but rather say, these are games that incorporate philosophies that are things we associate with

a metaverse. But you know, it may very well be that the meta one that gets offered ends up being the largely the one and only now that it really is one and only, but that because of Meta's footprint, because it has access to so many users, assuming that it finds a way to make the hardware affordable, and it may very well be that Meta's plan is to make the hardware affordable by selling it below cost and then making up the money the long run once it's

able to um to generate revenue off the metaverse. Something that Mark Zuckerberg himself has said is years down the line. Maybe that's how it all involds. We just don't know yet. So will the metaverse really become how people interact online? Will Web three replace the system we have now where massive companies own most of the experience and determine what we see and what we don't see. I honestly don't know. It's certainly possible. Uh. There are people working very hard

to make that become a reality. But there are also a lot of people who are very skeptical of it and critical of it and concerned about it, who, while not necessarily actively working against this possibility, or at least raising questions that they're demanding answers to. Before we just embrace this as the future, I'm sure we're gonna see

a lot more controversy and missteps along the way. You know, reality is messy, and companies will often make terrible mistakes because they'll they'll have a vision of what they want to achieve and not have a full concept of what the consequences are of achieving that vision. But this is how technological revolutions happen. When you're in the middle of a technological revolution, you can't see the end of it.

You can't see how it will work out, how it will all settle down, or even if it will work out, or if it will just be a failed experiment. You can't tell when you're in it. It's only in hindsight that we recognize what works. When we talk about Web one and Web two. The reason we're even able to talk about that is because we were able to stick around long enough to see how the web changed from the early days to post two thousand four or so.

And I'm sure that the process of getting to this future is going to be very grad will so there will be milestones that we will pass that we won't recognize that we passed. It will only be in hindsight when we look back and say, oh, yes, when this product came out, that was the foundation for this critical component of the metaverse. But we won't be able to say that what it's happening, at least not in every case.

So if I had messages for all of you out there when it comes to things like Web three, the metaverse, and f t S all of that, it is all right to be enthusiastic. It's okay to be enthusiastic, It's

okay to be excited, use critical thinking, ask questions. Learn as much as you can before you start jumping into things, because if it's anything where it's going to require an investment, whether that's an investment of your money, of your resources, of your time, of your efforts, you should satisfy as much of your curiosity as you can that that investment will be worthwhile. It may not work out, but you should definitely be comfortable with the investment before you you

commit it. Uh. I think a lot of people fell into a trap where they were making investments without fully appreciating what they were investing in, and some of those people got burned for that, and that's what has led to this very critical view of these these basic concepts. And plus we can't get around the fact that we've got some big companies that have a shaky reputation that um at least publicly, that also lead to that. So this future, I'm not as down on it as I

used to be. I used to be really super critical of it, but I actually see how if deployed properly, it could be really really beneficial. But that's an if we have to push for the proper implementation in order for that reality to come to pass, that's it. For this episode. Hope you enjoyed learning about these topics and

their implications. A lot of people say this is definitely where we're headed, So it's good to educate ourselves as best we can so that we can make sure that the future we do create is the best one we can possibly make, and the only way to do that is by educating ourselves. If you have suggestions for topics I should cover on future episodes of tech Stuff, I welcome you to reach out and let me know. The

best way to do that is on Twitter. The handle for the show is text stuff H s W. Thank you again to Nissan for sponsoring this episode and giving me the opportunity to really dive in to this future concept. It is exciting. It is exciting both in the sense that there is incredible potential and that we have to be aware of possible drawbacks. To me, all of that is exciting. I hope it is to YouTube and I'll talk to you again really soon. Y. Text Stuff is

an I Heart Radio production. For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.