Neal Stephenson on the Future of the Metaverse

we absolutely do not need AR and VR in order to build the metaverse [Music] we've heard the term meta medical that term is actually 30 years old originally coined by Neil Stevenson in his book snow crash fast forward to 2022 and numerous companies are now building towards their version of the metaverse including Neil himself working on lamina 1 a blockchain company oriented around creators and while the present metaverse doesn't perfectly mimic what Steven said had envisioned we had to bring him in to discuss the design decisions he's making but also the evolving intersection between the metaverse and gaming the involvement of AR and VR the evolving role of Ip artificial intelligence and of course we had to ask him where he gets all of his ideas from I hope you enjoy this episode the content here is for informational purposes only should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund for more details bca16d.com disclosures [Music] hey Neil welcome to the podcast it's great to be here thanks for inviting me well it's really great to have you and I'm excited to talk about the metaverse probably the topic you're sick of talking about at this point you certainly have heard of it you coined it around three decades 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 will be of course crediting Francois Chalet who said that but what's your take on that any immediate reactions to that 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 the Center for Science and the imagination at Arizona State University I was on a Channel years ago with Michael Crowe 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 road map 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 their strategy there's a huge amount of energy and mind share that gets burned on just trying to keep everybody straight on you know with the same 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 a magnetic field that organizes all of the iron filings you know so they're kind of named in the same direction of course there's some songs fiction novels where that's not going to happen because they're set in a very distant future or they you know they just don't uh they're just not applicable there's other ones that that seem to have that effect in some cases and uh and so that so as a result of that conversation um uh we actually set up a project to create a science fiction Anthology called hieroglyph that was came out in I think 2013 2014 that was meant to consist of stories that would that might have that kind of value or that utility to them yeah because I think a lot of people look to non-fiction for insight into reality but I think often we forget that we're storytelling creatures and that people within an organization I like that you use this idea of a magnet in order to get a line there there almost needs to be a degree of emotion there to really foresee some sort of future and I think what's been fascinating about many of your books is that they've stood the test of time if you use snow crash as an example three decades ago many of the things that you predicted within that novel have come to come to be whereas many companies because you brought up the idea that it's really hard to align people within companies they struggle to set a Mission or vision for a couple years that people can get behind so I think that long-standing alignment is really really interesting and I think one one analogous thing that we're seeing in the industry is this idea of the metaverse and many people are using this term I think there's a degree of disalignment in terms of what the hell that actually means I mean to give a couple examples are we in the metaverse as we're 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 Tick Tock am I in the metaverse and so as someone who 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 in general 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 and so 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 for it metaverse says plural and um so my my colleague 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 whereas if somebody he 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 other um by moving around in a single unitary space right there's a degree of interoperability right between one and another I'm curious to hear your perspective on that though because I guess your point is that we haven't made it to the metaverse yet but many of the on-ramps you could say now whether it's gaming or social or degrees of immersion that we have online don't really have these connections right so so many of them are disparate from one another and so do you think that 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 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 so the 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 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 because of the the revenue that that does 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 person could go from one to the other it may take some years to to really come together but 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 I'm curious to know though if you think the incentives are aligned for that future to be the future that we move towards because if you think about it from the let's say the game developer side some of those game developers may have incentives to not want to interoperate right to keep their users within their game and not move to another game and then you can also look at it from the consumer perspective that perhaps consumers or The Gamers themselves some of them may really want this interoperability but 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 web3 or some of these Open Standards and so what's your take on that uh there's a kind of people talking past each other uh 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 modeling right so the game developer mentality for their position may be like this I'm a game developer I spent my whole career developing an advanced skill set that I'm very proud of is very important to me and building unified experiences for people to to play in um and every aspect of the art Direction the sound design game play the back story 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 wanting to bring extraneous uh things into my game it's bad on two levels and one is just on an engineering level she even suggests 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 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 maybe a little bit like a Ren Faire you know you go to a Renaissance Fair agreeing to step into a medieval world for a few hours because you dig that you like being in that environment and it's just it's not acceptable to um uh to uh have kind of modern distractions in that environment on the other hand there's other games that are that are popular extremely popular which I've already mentioned you know fortnite um Minecraft and so on those games are creative mashups by Design so you can go into fortnite and you can see a four-person team that consists of Iron Man and John Wick and Obi-Wan Kenobi and the Silver Surfer and they're all running around playing together and um it's fine it's it's uh no one has a problem with that because it's just part of the vibe of those kinds of games um and that vibe that kind of mashup Vibe is explicitly what's described in the book snow crash as you know how the the metaverse kind of looks there is a future for interoperability in the context of those mashup style games um and that it's out of those kinds of games that we'll begin to see interoperability that doesn't mean that it's going to be mandatory or the you know every game somehow is going to be compelled to allow extraneous garbage into their finely tuned beautiful worlds and indeed as you pointed out the people who love those games and play those games would hate that you know I I play a lot of valheim myself and it's a beautifully designed game that's a coherent world and it would be extremely irritating for somebody to show up you know in that world with a blaster and start you know vaporizing uh me and my my Viking buddy so I think we can have both um and that um uh you know a lot of the the controversy that has uh that we've been seeing the last you know year or so on social media you know arises from kind of this friction between the the sort of almost ideological commitment to crypto and interoperability that you see on the part of crypto Bros clashing with with designers who uh who who think it's stupid on an engineering level and kind of an Abomination on a aesthetic level yeah I think I think it's really important that you're bringing up the engineering side of this because it's not just how we want these worlds to look but also how they align with our engineering capabilities and of course one way that these games are advancing is through augmented and virtual reality or at least some of them are venturing into these new worlds I'd love to hear your take on the importance of that whether these metaverses do need to be in quote unquote 3D or whether actually many of them can survive and continue to thrive in the two-dimensional world that many people are participating in because that really is the world that many of us are used to right staring at our phone staring at screens and many people even though they're not truly immersed right they're not in the three Third Dimension they feel quite immersed still they feel like you know that they stop 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 we absolutely do not need AR and VR 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 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 3D world through it 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 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 the human brain is so adaptable that even you know as clumsy as that is and as as Antiquated as that is um wasde is a perfectly uh useful way of navigating around in 3D spaces I'm going to talk about VR AR is a whole different thing but let me just talk about VR for a sec you know early VR just because of the limitations on processing power and so on had high latency and and other um kind of quality issues and uh it was I think pretty widely believed even as recently as Maybe 10 years ago that as latency got reduced as the quality of the experience improved that we'd see a decrease in the tendency of users to get motion sickness um and I think that there was a decrease but it didn't go to zero it went to maybe the last I've heard is like maybe five ten percent state-of-the-art quality VR are going to experience some uh some symptoms and in fact I was playing a 2d video game just the other day where my friends and I turned on a new feature and we all had to stop because we were getting we were getting motion sickness so imagine if you were trying to popularize television in the 1950s and he said we've got these great programs we've got I Love Lucy we've got the Ed Sullivan Show you know entertainment for the whole family uh five to ten percent of you are going to end up throwing up into a waste basket you know after half an hour of watching this um well that that's a really high bar to commercial acceptance of entertainment technology for AR it's just a different thing I mean by its nature when you're in an AR experience it is or it should be somehow tied to the environment you're sitting in because if it's not it's just VR it's just kind of bad VR you know one of the most fascinating things I ever did was working trying to make content at Magic leap where everything that we built had to um be aware of in some sense the what was in the physical environment and be reactive to it um so of an incredible thing to work on but because of that is I think it's kind of different from what most people talk about when they talk about the metaverse I think so too but I also wonder with both of these there's there's significant engineering challenges obviously they're different right VR introduces this idea of motion sickness which I would definitely be part of that five to ten percent that that 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 ten percent 0.001 of people get sick while using a headset are people really wanting to be that immersed uh if we can solve those engineering challenges for me uh 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 it's kind of hard to predict because as we're talking about these engineering challenges it is hard to imagine how we can layer on community or social um prompts or how you actually engage with those people because to your point right now if you go into VR it is mostly an individual experience and I think humans are naturally very social creatures I want to ask you a question about uh you can apply this to AR to VR or even something like a zoom call but something that I've noticed is that as people create these new Virtual Worlds many different sorts of those Virtual Worlds what they tend to do is apply the physical world and digitize it so let me give you a couple examples so if people want to create some sort of social engagement structure for work they like create a digital happy hour which is just a bunch of people in rectangles on on a zoom screen uh similarly if they want to create real estate within quote unquote the metaverse or some sort of gaming engine it looks a lot like a house in real life even though maybe you don't need a roof there's no rain there's no snow right well it depends what's coded into that world but something that is important to note is that these digital worlds don't have or don't need to have the same structures as the physical world and so do you think there's something that people are missing maybe in terms of the Wonder the opportunity the ability to actually go without the constraint of the physical worlds to to get rid of gravity to get rid of how large that world is right like a lack of scarcity so do you have any thoughts there because something that I found very interesting about snow crash was that it was this vast digital world but there were certain things there were like I think there was a limit on height that people could be but mostly there was not the same level of restriction as we have in the physical world yeah I mean it's going to vary from experience to experience I do think that almost any plausible metaverse that I can think of there's going to have to be some understanding around the size of avatars just doesn't make sense and it doesn't work if you've got some avatars that are a hundred thousand times bigger than than others people will break that rule and and you know come up with experiences where where that rule doesn't apply but if it's too far outside the bounds of a kind of unified experience and nobody knows what to expect nobody understands what's going on um then I think uh you're gonna see um a rapid fall off of of Interest you're going to see spaces that are uh appealing to um pretty small number of enthusiasts um but are less interesting or might even be actively off-putting to um to the mass audience I mean Tim O'Reilly has said that a good way to think of the metaverse is that it's a Communications medium any Communications medium is trying to reach the broadest possible audience you know that's why that's why TV is the way it is you know that's why movies are the way they are the things that you're talking about like um buildings that are realistic and have roofs and ceilings you're you're totally right that we don't need those things you know in in the metaverse but it is what people are used to and makes people feel comfortable to be in a space uh where there's a roof over their heads you know there's some like you know evolutionary psychologists who proposed that um early humans evolved in a savannah environment so it's it's got open space open grassland where you can see for a long way but it's got trees uh they're not densely packed together but there's sporadic trees that you can go and you'd be in the shade or climb up to get away from predators that's an environment that we tend to reproduce in our built environment I think people are comforted by Shelter by the feeling of privacy that you get when there's some walls around you there's a roof over your head so we're going to see those forms recapitulated in um metaverse experiences that are geared towards drawing in a mass audience but clearly there's no there's no limit on what you could build what you could imagine um if you're uh if you're just trying to follow your own personal aesthetic or appeal to a uh kind of a smaller like cult following you have spoken to this idea of trying to attract the masses which I think is true to some degree with consumer applications of gaming AR VR but as you mentioned you've worked at Magic 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 you know what I say that magically very early was that I didn't just want to be a guru you know Naval gazing futurist but I wanted to build something and looked around for a little bit you know what was going on inside the company and decided that probably the most beautiful place for me to apply what I know would be in content creation and and so there were uh a number of projects there and presumably still are they're aimed at you know specific industrial commercial type applications just like you said 99 of my time was was spent building um applications that were aimed at just so 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 a final entertainment product you've got a you're building a and experience in a game engine we use both unity and unreal at different points 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 that the system recognizes through Machine Vision and kind of creates in the world so there's a a loop that's running all the time where the cameras on the device are scanning these cameras and other sensors on the device are scanning the environment and trying to figure out what's what like okay there's a flat thing down there it's probably the floor um there's a flat thing over there it's probably a wall uh there's a window there's a door and you know building up from that you can make these systems more and more um more and more sophisticated and capable of recognizing more objects but each one has to lead or should lead to a mesh an asset being put into the level that your AIS or whatever are navigating around in so that kind of base layer of functionality is to a large extent built into the operating system of that device building on top of that we had to kind of create our own stack that started with engineering and sort of worked its way up to um to creative uh to creative elements a lot of the work that you did towards the those creative Endeavors for your project how could you see those being applied to maybe some more commercial projects I'm just trying to get the wheel spinning in terms of many people believing that these Technologies are going to be applied to gaming which is certainly true and you know maybe even they they might have a qualm with that idea with a lot of this technology only being applied to this idea of gaming but I think there's a lot of potential as we see with many Technologies for them to be applied in several ways and ways that even the original creators 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 guitar is 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 that's a that's a great question uh some may have to think about it for a second um you know um so for example one of the the one of the two main projects that my team worked on and magically if it's called baby goats and it's 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 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 um the the possible paths that where the animal could move would be so pre-programmed and so the the animals 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 room or or plan it's all got to be ai's kind of by hatching their own plans uh on their own you just push the code out into the world and hope it works typically you see emergent behaviors that you might not have expected and we're seeing this a lot with Dolly and um mid-journey and other AI based image programs where um uh you know those those things produce some images that are probably what the designers were revisioning or imagining but there's also just crazy results that come out of these things that no one ever could have predicted in the metaverse I think um we're going to see virtual environments that are populated and brought to life by um by AI in some cases it's going to be so what you might think which is non-player characters that walk around and you know deliver the mail or whatever but I think we're also going to see whole other uh categories of AI is being um being put to work to create um experiences that have a kind of realistic texture about them and that that make the environment seem convincing uh to the to the user I'm glad you brought up AI because it is such an important theme at least within the Zeitgeist currently and another important theme as it relates to the metaverse is the idea of Ip who owns a particular object we talked about interoperability before right can you move that between different engines how 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 that might work my other co-founder at lamina one Peter vesnest has actually been thinking a lot about this he 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 millions of people and you know you might ask Dolly to make up 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 Dolly I don't know about the other programs but you know they're they're pretty conscious of this and they're they're trying to prevent people from just monetizing the crap out of it in cases where it does get monetized why shouldn't the the artists who contribute um uh 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 free kind of game uh from the ground up and um so they've been doing some interesting work in the field of smart contracts um that are structured in such a way as to track the provenance of a given game object um and uh and create what what Jaren Lanier would call a value chain uh which is you know uh a bunch of people one way or another contribute their time and effort to making a thing and if that thing ends up making money generating Revenue then um how do you um how do you reward them in the motion picture business they have this lovely term called a waterfall which is in a in a contract for a a movie uh when Revenue starts to happen um it Cascades down and and gets diverted off to different people and there's a whole structure in place for this so how do you is there a way to and that's all that all works but it's notoriously slow and cumbersome so is there a way to replace all of that machinery to create a waterfall that basically just works through smart contracts um and just automatically distributes a revenue stream among people who contributed to a uh to a particular project in in varying proportions and that is actually not a bad fit for crypto going to a ton of detail about it but crypto's got smart contracts that just can route money to wallets the kind of the whole point of a blockchain is that you can announce that you know at a particular moment this transaction happened and everyone on that chain agrees that this is true in the classical application of blockchain you're just sending money to people but uh in an IP Centric implementation you could say um you know I Neil wrote a book on such and such date with a a magic sword in it and um here's what the magic sword kind of looks like you know maybe copy paste some text you know it's about yay long and it's sharp on one Edge and so that's an assertion that a Creator could make that that they had um created this idea at a certain time but it's a hell of a long way from being a game asset that can actually be used to create an experience and so as such it's not capable of generating any Revenue somebody could come along and uh and then link off of that stub asset if you will and say okay I'm going to make an implementation of this idea I'm going to credit Neil for having the idea in the first place but I'm going to add something on top of what he's already posted on the chain and it's it's uh some assets that turn this into a uh something you could drag into an unreal or a Unity level and then somebody else could come along and say okay I'm gonna I'm gonna buy that from the asset store but it's still a long way from working in my gain because I need to set up blueprints or whatever I need to change the art direction of it so it it fits with my game I need to do some programming I need to change the sound effects you know whatever but it's still all part of the value chain that starts with the original asset and so um what the people at shrapnel are working on is some templates for smart contracts that would sort of ease the process of of creating these chains and organizing them in such a way that the the waterfall of Revenue would happen if any of it ever actually managed to make any money and I think maybe if people are listening they might think that the description that you just gave sounds very far away but actually it reminds me of something I saw this morning on Twitter one of the other AI engines you know there's Dali there's mid-journey as you said another one is called stable diffusion and I saw this thread this morning of a bunch of redditors who basically were doing were using like clip art or very very simple drawings you just imagine like a circle and we'll actually throw this up on the screen for people who end up watching this on video and then they were using stable diffusion to basically take those and turn them into assets that looked like they were from a game like really crisp really really high definition images of these these creatures or whatever you might call them these participants in a game potentially and so this is the future right is is using these different engines to upgrade prior people's contributions and I think you're right that you need to somehow articulate that value chain because we're used to items in our homes like imagine the imagine the physical equivalent if you had like a basketball and you you said I have this this machine that turns this basketball into a car that would be wild right but you actually can do some of this stuff in the digital world with some of the tools that are advancing but you do need to know the value chain as you said who created what and how did that lead to the next creation which led to the next creation and so on so you also want a feedback loop that runs in the opposite direction so uh somebody might come along in my example and create an implementation of of my sword idea that I just hated you know either they did maybe they just did a really shitty job of it or maybe they're just a troll um who is deliberately trying to be offensive um and so um uh in that event I should have some kind of right of approval I have to have that you can imagine situations like if I created let's say an avatar that was that looked childlike it would be fine for somebody to take that and use it in a children's experience but in certain other kinds of experiences that we can all imagine sadly it could be a very bad abuse of the uh of my of my creative work let's say and so uh if I've created such an avatar I need to have the ability to say you can't use my work in this thing that you're building and because it's too much work to examine every possible site where something like that might be used you then you need to to go go up one level and uh you know have kind of rating systems let's say uh or you know so third-party evaluators that look at sites look at experiences and to say I don't think you want your your IP to appear on this particular site or to be used in this in the way it's being used that's actually fascinating to imagine because you do see the parallel of this with 2D work right uh a lot of these AIS are are being trained on the whole of the internet right but then even prior to the ai's existing you had many photographers as an example who in some cases were very protective over their work and had ownership of it and could determine where they wanted it or where they didn't want it and then you also had these the emergence of things like unsplash where you had creators who said actually I'm okay with this being utilized by anyone anywhere and you'll probably see the same phenomena happen with what we're talking about but in the case where people didn't want their work utilized in in places that they hadn't approved of there were these third parties I mean they're sites that actually go out there and scrape the internet to find images that are owned by people that have copyrighted them and then they go back to those individuals and say hey did you know that your work is being used on X Y and Z places they're a little bit like extortionists in some ways because they they basically like hold the people who use them incorrectly accountable but it's fascinating to imagine that some similar other approach will be needed in this world of AI as well and there's there's many other examples I mean I picked one that's kind of disturbing but but there's just routine get you know let's say that um that I create a piece of visual out and sell it to somebody in the expectation they're going to hang it on their wall of their virtual home or their real home um or just display it if you know for their friends and and family then what if they turn around and use it as the logo for you know a new brand of basketball shoe they're using it in a way that I didn't anticipate when we set up the original deal and it's all over the world and uh maybe I should get paid for that or or maybe I should have the ability to say I don't want my my art used in that particular way um so um there's a whole world of Ip rights and um licenses and so on right now is not being handled At All by the way nft marketplaces are are currently set up and I think the next wave of nfts is going to begin to feature some of these improvements or I think they're improvements some some people some people are going to hate this well actually I like that you brought up that you think their improvements other people may not think so and I think technology is often viewed that way right that some people believe it's very utopian some people believe it's dystopian there's probably a huge Spectrum where any given individual technology can actually be applied across the Spectrum in positive and negative ways and I think actually even using your books as an example snow crash is more more of a crudely rendered dystopian metaverse if we're going to use that term another one of your books bit world has a more utopian Vibe you could say it's more organic more communal more people building towards something more consensus based I'm curious to hear from you and feel free to Loop in your new project lamina one how do you think about building technology so that it is leaning more utopian or maybe utopian's not the right word here but how do you how do you design technology so that it can be used for good or is it just a reality that humans will use all Technologies for good and evil and that's just something that we can't avoid I think that is pretty much a reality and um you know people are endlessly creative in both good and bad ways um and how they use things you know snow crash is absolutely a dystopian novel um it's also kind of making fun of dystopian novel tropes in a lot of ways it's both the dystopian novel and a parody of dystopian novels the technologies that are shown in it with some exceptions um don't really have any bias for bad or good like the the metaverse is um a lot of what we see in the metaverse in the book is kind of uh garish and and crude um but um that's just what we happen to see it's also shown in the book that uh Hiro has got a beautiful home in the metaverse kind of Japanese style home that is um exquisitely rendered and and you know it's a it's a fine work of art and in the character of ink has also got a a beautiful home of his own so another example would be Earth so there's a application called Earth in snow crash that you know has a lot in common with Google Earth it'd be silly to say that because Earth was described in a dystopian novel that it's an inherently dark or dystopian kind of application um when we look at Google Earth today you know uh I think the vast majority of uh its applications and overlays and stuff are uh are for interesting creative purposes and um you know there's a few ways in which it can be abused um but um but we see we see Google kind of I think managing it fairly well in the sense that you know they they go out of the way to blur out faces and so on and and try to um uh prevent um kind of darker or less less constructive uses of the technology you know there there's not like built-in um biases towards bad or good but um I do think that um that that one really important bias technological bias that that is kind of baked in to current social media is um is has to do with the revenue model I I don't think that this was like evil people coming up with an evil scheme I think to just Engineers saying okay let's let's give people more of what they react to so so as we all know as I think we all understand now social media platforms um tend to have built-in feedback loops that feed people more and more emotionally powerful content regardless of you know whether that is constructive and the reason that they have to do that is because that was their revenue model I think now that we've learned that that um you know maybe we can avoid recreating that in the next wave of of metaverse development um by by thinking about how these experiences uh are are going to make money well I'm hoping is that we'll end up with a revenue model that's more obvious and transparent do you think that people will opt into that Revenue model and I asked this because I think you're right that social can be can be hindered by its Revenue model by its nature I mean just the fact I'm sure you've heard the saying if you're not paying for a product you are the product right and so I think maybe the awareness of that phenomena will increase over time and maybe some people will opt into other Revenue models but there's a reason it works and you know if we use social as an example many people gravitate towards these large social platforms because that's where you can have a platform that's where you can reach so many people and the math is for the most 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 base model it's a really tough thing to turn around um just because um it's 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 Commerce is the wheels of Commerce are turning underneath that experience but in other cases it's um 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 prison who I think has done the most useful thinking about this um has been Jaren 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 there's 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 pretty amazing that people are willing to to do this the idea that jiren's working on is one in which you would join up with a bunch of other people with like-minded you know some similar interests through collective bargaining essentially sell your data to a social media company there's ideas out there but but fighting free is fighting the the draw and the power of free stuff is incredibly difficult yes I think we can all empathize with that I can't tell you the number of times I've gotten an email that something was free and I've wasted my time on it and the thing that I got for you is something I never even wanted so yes for things that you do want connection Community Etc that you get through these applications it's no wonder that that is a very very tough phenomena to adjust so many people that brings us to your new company lamina Juan so you are actually participating in trying to build the infrastructure that may change some of these Dynamics so from your website it says 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 laminawan and why you've made some of those really really concrete design decisions like building on the blockchain so I mean I think I've already hinted a lot of this in the earlier parts of this interview 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 it can be built using new code new technology in other cases it could just be a clone of an existing a fork of an existing chain or a combination of both 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 uh is is going to be a 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 both work and they're so good for different things um to the extent that crypto is useful in the metaverse um there's there's different layers to it uh and the money is just the most basic layer so having tokens that act as money and that you can uh send back and forth between people used to pay for things is kind of the the most basic uh functionality that you can have in a chain smart contracts then are sort of built on top of that and there's various knobs that you can turn to optimize a chain to to carry out specific functions we think that for some of the reasons that I was mentioning having to do with how content creators can get paid to build experiences that there's an opportunity to make a new layer one chain that that works for them and that's integrated with the the tool sets that they are in the habit of using so that they don't have to go out and become crypto experts and learn all kinds of new capabilities just in order to do their jobs making things good for those people for those experienced creators is the key to having a successful metaverse because nobody's going to go and use the metaverse unless there are experiences there that they enjoy having people who know how to make those experiences right now by and large work in the game industry and they're good at using game engines and the tool chains that feed assets into those game engines if we can find ways to um integrate the the financial infrastructure that they need to get paid into the tool change that they're already using uh then we'd like to think that that'll bring in um content creators make them happy create experiences in the metaverse uh that lots of people enjoy having and are willing to to pay for so that's kind of the that's kind of the plan in a nutshell that makes sense to me and I think you know whether you're in the metaverse or otherwise every company out there is trying to attract top talent and yes so if you can if you can acquiesce them towards your ecosystem then you likely will win but when it comes to the incentives to drive creators to participate using laminawan or otherwise how do you think about that because many of these ecosystems will for example say oh we'll give creators this percent cut in order to develop Within 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 laminawan or the gaming engines that you mentioned how do those all kind of interplay together is laminaw one almost like a transparent layer under these existing engines or or can you share a little bit more about how that might work 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 is 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 yes your wallet gets wiped Etc we're certainly fans of making it easy and and uh accessible without having to learn a bunch of new stuff I think it would be a mistake to have it be so transparent and so invisible that people don't even know what's what's happening that's you know uh there needs to be um you know that needs to be very Frank and and obvious and upfront to creators um and I I don't think that creators would accept anything other than that because again this is how they're going to get paid this is how they're going to make money and so it needs to be uh it used to be out there where they can see it how are you forging these Partnerships with the gaming engines as well because I assume that if these creators are building on top of existing ecosystems and you're building a protocol that in theory interoperates with them how are you actually building those relationships or are these gaming engines super open to integrating with laminar one I'm less familiar whether these apis are already open but yeah tell me a little bit more about that yeah so I mean the two big ones are unity and unreal and you know people make plugins uh for those all the time that um I think unreal is available Source it's not open source that's got a particularly legal meaning but but you can download the source and compile from Source anytime you want which means you can add whatever you want and um uh in in the kind of less familiar with with unity but they've all got scripting capabilities and in ways that you can add on to the the engine so um the you know at the moment um most of the big players in the uh the game industry are uh are being avoidant of crypto and and blockchain um and um there's there's different reasons for that um you know um having to do with um um you know they may perceive a risk to their brand um or they may they may see that um just the the there could be a lot of headaches administratively um trying to change their business model to one in which you know lots of real money was being handled by their their customers um so at the moment um they're taking a hands-off approach and in some cases it's pretty it's you know it's pretty in your face like Minecraft uh you know made a pretty strong statement just a couple weeks ago about um not wanting to have crypto stuff going on in their their platform um so um um but at some level I think you know when you talk to uh people in the game industry whether it's individual developers or people working in in larger companies um uh I think there's uh an awareness um that this is coming uh and that it could be an important thing uh for their businesses and their their companies in the future if it could just be sort of if we can get past the early kind of wild west era you know and the kind of initial uh sort of keying issues and uh out of the Prototype stage if you will you know and and uh in into a a place that just feels more uh more stable and also once you start to partner with some of them if you are able to attract that Talent the best creators then it'll become potentially inevitable for the others to want to partner and open up to that ecosystem because they will be following the talent yeah it could be I mean you know it's like I said I think that people will happily continue using fiat currency and traditional payment schemes for a long time because you know they work from where I sit I just think that there are some specific things that we could do with a new chain um that uh that could be valuable for people in this space 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 well the the big one is I think the the notion of value chains a win into some detail about that before so it 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 skin for me and 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 and you know in some other country to you know make sure that uh everything's properly squared away again kind of 20th century or 19th century economy it was okay to for if you're a large company you just put up with that burden of paperwork but you know on an internet economy where there's constant transactions happening all over the place you want something that's a little more fluid um yeah I think uh cryptocurrency can can definitely provide that likewise um you know I I describe 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 movies and handling the the revenues from those then that's a manageable situation and it works you know I mean lots of people are not happy with how it works but it totally works people are making money movies are getting made but creating complicated experiences in a virtual world um is not going to be like that um it's it's not all stove piped into specific you know big budget projects it's assets going every which way and appearing in different places um and so trying to track all of that and make make it work as a business using conventional Hollywood legal and accounting procedures just doesn't sound realistic to me it won't work doing it with a new chain that's optimized to handle those kinds of transactions I think seems like a reasonable idea yeah I think so too I think another design decision that you've 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 I mean we started talking about this laminate 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 uh 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 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 an energy standpoint 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 if you're using this for uh kind of routine transactions the carbon footprint really is no worse than so 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 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 going to do is um is design the system and this is one of these things that you you have the power to do if you do a layer one chain as opposed to piggybacking on somebody else's chain the the system is going to be designed in such a way that in order to participate to operate a node you need to demonstrate that you've acquired you've bought a certain number of carbon credits um from a legitimate company and that's a whole topic unto itself because there's a lot of different companies out there pushing a lot of different carbon credit schemes and um some are more legit than others so there's actually multiple ratings agencies now that all they do is look at these systems and try to figure out which ones are good so that you know it it gets a little complicated on that level but we're going to do that because it's the right thing to do and um and we're we're pursuing more far out sort of uh ideas related to carbon sequestration that are too early to to talk about but it's on a separate organizational track from lamina one because it's still kind of in the Gonzo probably won't work phase we're actually doing an episode on carbon removal so very interested in this space and glad that you're pursuing it as well I want to dovetail this into the final section which I would be remiss not to ask you about which is just how you think about the future and we talked earlier about this idea of the metaverse being coined 30 years ago just to put that into perspective that's actually before I was born and so I I I'm very impressed as I read snow crash just to even get my mind around this idea that you were able to come up with these terms but more than that to imagine a future where we are immersed I mean this is like when we had dial up internet or even before that right and so that's impressive but you've also done this across a myriad of your books right so so you've been involved in 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 of these books when they're so far before what many other people come to see in reality 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 3D 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 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 a sulfur into the the stratosphere um 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 I want to ask you about one particular example because I found it fascinating I've been lucky enough to work remotely for I think around seven years now um so I felt like I was before my time now many people are doing this one of my favorite quotes that I found in snow crash uh is hero basically saying that um a particular video game job was managed by the nepanese which means that all the programmers have to wear white t-shirts and show up at eight in the morning and sit in cubicles and go to meetings and I just reflected on that and I thought again this was written in the early 90s as something that was not the focus of the book at all but another one of these hints towards where the world was going so using that as an example like where did that inspiration come from what did you notice at that time when you were writing snow crash that maybe many other people did not see 70s 80s was a period of time during which um so the Japanese economic miracle happened um so in the the oil shock of 1974 suddenly people started buying smaller cars they started in the Japanese car industry just went through the roof and became really valuable and so people became kind of uh fascinated by their management approach um and so you know you see these these documentaries about the factory workers showing up at a certain time and doing calisthenics you know before they um before they went to work so that was on people's minds you know in the the 70s and the 80s um in my particular case because of the project that I described to you um I ended up working alone from home for a couple of years I mean I was a writer to begin with but but also just the the coding project that I was working on was um just me alone doing all of it um and so um and it was also the I I wasn't the only person kind of operating in that mode because this was still the era of kind of the loan hacker who could um uh single-handedly produce you know a gigantic uh system that actually worked but you could see that that era was coming to an end we're heading in a Direction Where in the individual loan hacker uh won't be able to to keep up with with large organizations pretty soon and so for me from a storytelling point of view that gives me a few elements that uh it's just immediately obvious to me at that point that this is a really powerful combination of of elements that I can use to define my character so he can be one of the lone genius hacker who's really good at that um he specifically sees himself in contrast to the kind of regimented style of a certain kind of workplace uh which wouldn't ever work for him um and yet he knows at some level that uh this is all going to change and that he's he's headed for the scrap heap of of History so he is on his business card hero identifies himself as the last of the freelance hackers you know he's the last of this breed and these are all very romantic ideas they're tropes from literature and storytelling that are known to be effective and um not original to me but but so combining them in that particular way made it possible I think to um uh to to do kind of a new Twist on an old story your answer was was more complex than I was expecting but also that even though the book was written in the 90s you were looking decades before that at themes that had emerged leading up to that and so I'm curious It's been in the 80s It Was Written in like 89 but published in the 90s is that right yeah I mean I started working on it in 88 89 wrote it in 1990-ish um and it takes a while for the book to go through the whole pipeline so 92 I think is when it finally came out but it's very much a work of the late 80s and you you just wrote termination shocked you've written tons of books I'm curious to know from the perspective of 2022. 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 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 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 Ann Applebaum who's written the 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 and I met when we were helping Jonathan rauk launch his book The the constitution of knowledge which is also about 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 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 carbon and um I know I know a lot about that at the moment um if I do say so myself that and geoengineering um so um I mean I kind of rolled directly from a book about geoengineering into thinking a lot about uh carbon capture and sequestration um so that's an area where I think the science fiction writer mind can get a little more attraction because you can think about it on engineering and science level yeah I think the the topic of carbon removal is is really fascinating and I want to ask you one or two questions about that but something that I've reflected on as I thought through all the books that you've written about and also just this genre of Science Fiction is I wonder whether science fiction becomes reality much more quickly due to the exponential nature of Technology as in overtime where if you were to take a book from the 90s the evolution of that or aspects of that entering our reality maybe took a couple decades and whether because again are the technologies that we engage with tend to be exponential in nature and also the number of people engaging with those Technologies tend to come online in an exponential way as well whether that timeline is decreased do you have any thoughts around that whether whether that might be true I think it's not just as decreased but then it's swapped around and so now science fiction is trailing behind like things are happening faster than science fiction can really anticipate them at least in kind of digital when you're talking about big engineering rockets and spaceships and that kind of thing science fiction is still way ahead of of reality just because it takes longer to implement those ideas but trying to stay ahead of developments in Internet uh online any of that is kind of a hopeless task and a lot of Science Fiction writers besides me have uh have talked about the the fact that no matter how much they try to stay on top of current trends and be creative and try to think ahead that by the time they can actually write a book and get it published everything they've written has already happened I I wonder when the first AI written book will Top the New York Times bestseller list I I wouldn't be surprised if if that happens within my lifetime certainly but returning back to the idea of carbon removal let's just close out on this topic because it's something that interests you it's certainly an area of opportunity as I mentioned we'll be doing a separate episode on it but given that you've dive so deeply into this Arena what would you say are some of the most exciting maybe more optimistic things that you've learned or maybe certain companies that you're seeing attack this problem that you think are really exciting I'm uh excited by terraform Industries which is a company in Southern California uh surrounded by a friend of mine named Casey Hanmer who's a physics PhD who was 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 uh 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 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 um you know isn't hurting anyone and the cost of making photovoltaics is is coming down just 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 hope will continue I hope it doesn't come to a billionaire having to operate unilaterally and release a bunch of sulfur into the atmosphere which is the premise of termination shock I mean I suspect that that will happen um I suspect it'll be done by a some country not not by a uh a lone billionaire blown billionaire makes for a better novel country is a more realistic possibility but when you look at the threat posed by you know so-called wet bulb disasters where the temperature and humidity becomes so high that humans cannot survive we could see very large fatality numbers um in certain parts of the world so why wouldn't why wouldn't such a country want to put some sulfur into the stratosphere to cool things down you know it's a tourniquette it's it's like it's the emergency thing that you do on your way to the emergency room to to get to to get a real cure and the real cure is is going to be carbon removal yeah it doesn't it doesn't solve the problem until you remove the carbon from the atmosphere well Neil I want to say thank you for taking so much time throughout this interview I think you've inspired a bunch of people with your work but also I think it's extremely important to note that you are a builder in this space you have been for many years whether it was at Blue origin magic leap now with lamina one and I think many people are excited to see what lamina one brings to the space whether it really can build a better ecosystem for creators whether we can use some of these design decisions to make a more interoperable more fair more equitable ecosystem for the people participating within it so yeah I just want to say thank you again for taking the time here well it's been my pleasure I really enjoyed the interview and you know thanks for thanks for being so well prepared and uh asking good questions yeah I can only hope that maybe one day we get to play with your goat AR application is that ever appearing in in the world yeah uh it ended up getting kind of turned into demo code for for magic leap so it's real value for the company was to provide a sample app basically and some documentation that other developers could could use to make their own applications but um I don't see why you couldn't have them running around in a virtual space well hopefully we'll get to experience that one day thanks again Neil [Music] thanks for listening to the a16z podcast if you like this episode don't forget to subscribe here on YouTube to get our exclusive video content we'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: a16z

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Id: 60u9L5-YO9Q

Length: 88min 47sec (5327 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 22 2022