Understanding Metaverse/Web 3.0...

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[00:00:22] Tahitian Noni. Visit ATR Health at alchemicaltechrevolution.com and click on the shop here tab for more details. Web3 is sort of the goal of many in the decentralization ecosystem or one of the major goals. Web3

[00:01:34] from this notion or understanding that the Web2 world or the internet world, the internet protocols, the Web1 world, the Web1 protocols and the same for Web2 have served the world incredibly well, have transformed society over a couple of decades but we have really kind of outgrown that

[00:01:55] technology. We are certain actors understand how to wield that technology in a way that is no longer healthy for people and for societies. Entities like Facebook and Twitter and Google and LinkedIn, they're not bad people. They're trying to do good work but they are treating

[00:02:21] people as products. So their approach is essentially exploitative and the exploitation comes as more of an external negative externality rather than their actual goal. So these businesses because there was no native identity construct created an identity construct

[00:02:45] to serve their business models and turned us into a product via collecting personal information, communications etc. and then enhanced the value of that product and enhanced the ability for them to sell that product more and more. So by addicting us to their systems they keep us

[00:03:10] sellable more and more and by adding lots of data to their profiles of us they increase the value of their product. And so the Web3 world makes use of decentralized identity to essentially take back control for the user to enable us to establish our own blockchain based

[00:03:35] self-sovereign identities. Uport is one example on a theorem of that construct. Three boxes of technology closely associated with Uport that serves as a personal data locker to enable people to essentially encrypt their information and share it in situations they

[00:03:56] designate so granularly and intentionally. And so if you combine this user-centric approach to interacting on the web with the fact that we're creating lots of protocol based open platforms, Ujo in the music industry, health industry, supply chain many others.

[00:04:17] We have these network business models where lots of different actors people and companies can essentially inhabit different roles on these platforms. Usually a token is involved to embody the business logic on these platforms and we can all without the benefit of a single

[00:04:35] intermediary or a single corporation controlling that situation we can all cooperate effectively and emerge products and services that we all essentially own and all benefit from. So that's the decentralized vision of the web 3.0 world.

[00:04:53] Do you believe that web 3.0 will be as big as the internet in the 90s? Yeah, I think it'll be a lot bigger because the size of the market the internet market for internet

[00:05:01] 1.0 was quite small relatively speaking in the 90s. In terms of how it's going to look like and I've been experimenting with it for a while now and for those you're not familiar with internet 3.0 it's this concept of the next platform that matters is going to be

[00:05:18] AR or VR based and the best investments in history are always platform based. Meaning you own the road and you can charge the cars or the tollbooths. Okay so think about it this way Airbnb is a platform okay for hotels they don't own any

[00:05:34] hotels but they own this platform. Same thing with Facebook they're a platform for social media they don't make any social media content themselves but they own the platform. Last example is Uber. Uber obviously is a taxi platform they don't own any taxis but

[00:05:50] they own the platform and so when it comes to web 3.0 the next platform that matters is probably going to be something that's AR being augmented reality or virtual reality based and we don't know what it's going to look like yet. We have no idea I watched Mark Zuckerberg's

[00:06:09] an hour or an hour and a half long speech on this and the bottom line message I got from his entire speech was if you use Oculus which they bought it's going to look something like that.

[00:06:22] We don't know yet we don't know yet but it's going to be kind of like World of Warcraft circa 2005 when you could walk around the world in the game and talk to people all over

[00:06:32] the world and that's something I'm looking to incorporate my MBA program with three technologies in AR. I've got a long way to go I have no idea how it's going to look like but it's

[00:06:42] something exciting and I talk about it because that way it puts pressure on me in a good way to actually get it done yeah. And so all these big tech companies they know that AR

[00:06:53] and VR is going to matter as a platform longer term and so that's why Microsoft bought the HoloLens product that's also why Google invested 500 million dollars in an AR company in Florida called Magic Leap and that's why Facebook bought Oculus and that's why Sony created their VR

[00:07:12] product which is now just more than five years old. Even Nintendo's getting into it with their cardboard-based Nintendo, I think they're called Devices right where you put a little piece of cardboard in front of the the switch screen with goggles it looks like VR

[00:07:26] with Mario whatever it's cool. Everybody knows it's coming nobody knows what it's going to look like yet and you know the CEO and founder of Nvidia has been saying we are a meta play meaning we're an internet 3.0 investment company because you're gonna need a lot of

[00:07:42] processors or graphics chips to power this sort of thing. AMD same thing because they bought ATI which is a graphics company used to be Canadian. Yeah. Blockchains are incredibly popular nowadays but what is a blockchain? How do they work? What problems do they solve

[00:07:58] and how can they be used? Like the name indicates, a blockchain is a chain of blocks that contains information. This technique was originally described in 1991 by a group of researchers and was originally intended to timestamp digital documents so that it's not

[00:08:15] possible to backdate them or to tamper with them almost like a notary. However it went by mostly unused until it was adapted by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 to create the digital cryptocurrency Bitcoin. Now a blockchain is a distributed ledger that is completely open to anyone.

[00:08:36] They have an interesting property once some data has been recorded inside the blockchain it becomes very difficult to change it. So how does that work? Well let's take a closer look

[00:08:48] at a block. Each block contains some data, the hash of the block and the hash of the previous block. The data that is stored inside the block depends on the type of blockchain. The Bitcoin blockchain

[00:09:01] for example stores the details about a transaction in here such as the sender, receiver and the amount of coins. A block also has a hash. You can compare a hash to a fingerprint.

[00:09:15] It identifies a block and all of its contents and it's always unique just as a fingerprint. Once a block is created its hash is being calculated. Changing something inside the block will cause the hash to change so in other words hashes are very useful when you want

[00:09:34] to detect changes to blocks. If the fingerprint of a block changes it no longer is the same block. The third element inside each block is the hash of the previous block and this effectively creates a chain of blocks and it's this technique that makes a blockchain so secure.

[00:09:53] Let's take an example. Here we have a chain of three blocks. As you can see each block has a hash and the hash of the previous block. So block number three points to block number two

[00:10:06] and number two points to number one. Now the first block is a bit special. It cannot point to previous blocks because well it's the first one. We call this block the Genesis block.

[00:10:19] Now let's say that you tamper with the second block. This causes the hash of the block to change as well. In turn that will make block three and all following blocks invalid because they no longer store a valid hash of the previous block. So changing a single block

[00:10:37] will make all following blocks invalid. But using hashes is not enough to prevent tampering. Computers these days are very fast and can calculate hundreds of thousands of hashes per second. You could effectively tamper with a block and recalculate all the hashes of other

[00:10:55] blocks to make your blockchain valid again. So to mitigate this blockchains have something that is called proof of work. It's a mechanism that slows down the creation of new blocks. In Bitcoin's case it takes about 10 minutes to calculate the required proof of work

[00:11:13] and add a new block to the chain. This mechanism makes it very hard to tamper with the blocks because if you tamper with one block you'll need to recalculate the proof of work for all the following blocks. So the security of a blockchain comes from

[00:11:29] its creative use of hashing and the proof of work mechanism. But there is one more way that blockchains secure themselves and that is by being distributed. Instead of using a central entity to manage the chain, blockchains use a peer-to-peer network and everyone is allowed

[00:11:46] to join. When someone joins this network he gets a full copy of the blockchain. The node can use this to verify that everything is still in order. Now let's see what happens when someone creates a new block. That block is sent to everyone on

[00:12:03] the network. Each node then verifies the block to make sure that it hasn't been tampered with and if everything checks out each node adds this block to their own blockchain. All the nodes in this network create consensus. They agree about what blocks are valid and which aren't.

[00:12:22] Blocks that are tampered with will be rejected by other nodes in the network. So to successfully tamper with a blockchain you'll need to tamper with all the blocks on the chain, redo the proof of work for each block and take control of more than 50% of

[00:12:37] the peer-to-peer network. Only then will your tampered block become accepted by everyone else. So this is almost impossible to do. Blockchains are also constantly evolving. One of the most recent developments is the creation of smart contracts. These contracts are simple programs

[00:12:56] that are stored on the blockchain and can be used to automatically exchange coins based on certain conditions. More on smart contracts in a later video. The creation of blockchain technology peaked a lot of people's interest. Soon others realized

[00:13:12] that this technology could be used for other things like storing metal core records, creating a digital notary or even collecting taxes. So now you know what a blockchain is, how it works on a basic level and what problems it solves. Have you ever heard of Kickstarter? It's where

[00:13:29] when you have an idea but you don't have the money, you basically make a page and show off your idea in hopes that other people donate to your project. For example I might have

[00:13:38] an idea for a book that explains cryptocurrency ideas and concepts. Well, I'd create a page and say that I have a goal of getting $1,000 in donations. In turn for people donating, I'll give out a book to everyone who donates at least $10. So I run the campaign and it

[00:13:53] takes around a week and I come up with $1,300 in donations. Kickstarter will hold that money for me and since I reached my goal of $1,000 it'll give me all of the money that has been donated. However, if I didn't reach the $1,000 goal because for example my grandma didn't donate

[00:14:08] or something, then I wouldn't get anything and all of that money would be returned to the people that donated it. A smart contract is exactly like this. It's a piece of code that does something if something else happens. A lot of people call it if this then that.

[00:14:22] The most common smart contracts are written on the Ethereum network using something called Solidity. So let's go over some examples of purposes of smart contracts. You could write a piece of code that says, if you give me 5 Ethereum in turn I will give you 20 basic

[00:14:35] attention tokens. If you have at least 100,000 subscribers by the end of the year, 20 Ethereum will be added to your account. And if the temperature is over 95 degrees for more than 4 days in a row this year, Farmer John's account will receive $100,000 as crop insurance.

[00:14:51] Now it would be really easy to write a smart contract where people could donate Ethereum to a certain address. And then if that contract address reached a certain point, maybe say 500

[00:15:01] Ethereum, then we could give each donor a portion of an online work, such as an artistic NFT or access to read an online book or even join a community. The purposes of smart contracts are

[00:15:12] endless. But when it comes to smart contracts there are two main things that you need to know that makes them beneficial to everyone. 1. They are immutable. This means they cannot change.

[00:15:22] So you remember how I said some people call them if this then that? It's because most smart contracts do something when they get triggered. They are basically just code on the blockchain that gets

[00:15:31] ran. And once it's on the blockchain, it can never be changed. Now the downside of this, you might be thinking, is that if there is a bug or the code is inefficient, it will be a

[00:15:40] bug and it will be inefficient forever. However if you wanted to, you could just create a new smart contract and tell people not to use the old one. In fact this happens very often.

[00:15:49] The second thing you need to know is that they are distributed. This means there's no discrepancies. You can't hire a lawyer and be like, that wasn't our agreement. These smart contracts are an agreement between a few parties online that can be automatically executed if certain

[00:16:03] conditions are met. Smart contracts are a piece of code designed to remove human error and issues. In fact you couldn't hire a lawyer even if you wanted to. The code is on a bunch of

[00:16:13] computers around the world. In fact anyone if they wanted to could see your smart contract and how you participated with it. So now we have financial agreements that nobody can argue, because they are code, they don't change, and everybody has access to them.

[00:16:27] Now you might not understand what the power of technology like this is, but to help you get the hang of it let's go over some examples. 1. A flash loan. What if I told you that you could borrow 10 million dollars

[00:16:38] with no money down? Well on the Ethereum network you absolutely can, but only if you write a smart contract that pays it back in the exact same minute that it is borrowed. That's right, you can borrow millions of dollars to do something for you on the

[00:16:51] Ethereum network if you know how to code it. So here's the catch, all of the money must be paid back. So you may be wondering, why would we want to do this? Well imagine you

[00:16:59] could buy some Dogecoin for 50 cents on Coinbase and then sell it for 55 cents on Gemini. You could theoretically borrow 10 million dollars and buy a whole bunch of Dogecoin on Coinbase and then sell it to Gemini, and then pay back the original loan of 10 million dollars

[00:17:14] with some interest. This is called a flash loan, and some guy made 360,000 dollars in a few minutes. By creating one of these, that did pretty much the example that I just described. Here's the kicker, the smart contract can check itself. It can run a simulation

[00:17:29] of what you programmed, and it can see if what you told it to do would actually be able to pay back the lender after it does the code. And if it can do that, if it can immediately pay

[00:17:38] back the lender, it runs the code and you can borrow those funds to do whatever you want to do. You could never do this with traditional finance, but you can on the blockchain.

[00:17:46] Next up we have number two, which is insurance. Did you know you can create an entire insurance company with just a few smart contracts? We would just write something simple like this, if Farmer John gives us 2000 dollars, and if it is more than 95 degrees for four days in

[00:18:00] a row in Missouri, pay Farmer John 10,000 dollars. So this is basically insurance. Farmer John can be sure that if his crops die from a heatwave, the smart contract will know that it happened due to temperature changes and pay him out his 100,000 dollar insurance.

[00:18:15] Now you might be asking, how the heck does a smart contract, a piece of code, know what the temperature in Missouri is? Well, with the help of something called oracles. So oracles are helpful tools to any smart contract. Essentially, they are a trusted

[00:18:29] source that gives real world information to anything on the blockchain that requests it. Now oracles can get confusing, so we'll leave those for another video. You just need to know they send real world data to a smart contract. Now another question you might be wondering is

[00:18:41] where does the initial 100,000 dollars come from? Well, you'd have to imagine that investors who wanted to start that insurance company would have to pool their money together to be able to front it. In fact, they would have to lock it up in that smart contract

[00:18:54] whenever Farmer John buys it. They cannot do anything with those funds until the end of the summer, because at that moment the smart contract owns that money. Then at the end of the summer, if the insurance has not been paid out to Farmer John, the initial investment of

[00:19:07] 100,000 dollars plus Farmer John's 2,000 dollar premium get paid back to the investors. Now insurance could be and probably is going to be a very profitable use of smart contracts. Number three, we have token switching. So when it comes to smart contracts,

[00:19:22] one of the most useful things that you can do is create a pool of money with two different tokens. You write smart contracts to allow traders to switch out one token for another token,

[00:19:32] and as one increases in volume, you increase the price of the other token. This way you keep steady value in the pool. This is roughly how a decentralized exchange works, and if you're curious what that is, you can check out our recent video on something called Uniswap.

[00:19:45] That video explains it beautifully. You can write a smart contract that says if you give me 20 apples, I'll give you 30 coconuts. Except the apples and coconuts are Ethereum and basic attention token. So a smart contract can allow you to switch tokens.

[00:19:59] Token switching opens up a whole new world for day traders or investors that want to get into a specific coin that isn't currently on a major exchange like Coinbase. Instead, they could buy a coin that is available and then use the decentralized exchange to swap those tokens.

[00:20:14] And lastly, our last example of a useful reason to have a smart contract is to buy a house. So if you haven't already, you should watch our videos on NFTs because you need to understand

[00:20:25] their purpose to get this example. So imagine you took the house or apartment that you're living in, and you took the deed and put it on the blockchain. It's not owned by you anymore, or the bank. In fact, it's owned by whoever has the deed on the blockchain.

[00:20:38] There might be a day where we can use a smart contract to buy and sell a house. Instead of going through the usual process that takes weeks, advertising the house, securing the funding, using escrow, getting insurance, and the dreaded closing.

[00:20:51] You could just send an offer right on the blockchain, and within minutes, the other person can accept or deny. If they accept, you immediately own the new deed, but the other person immediately has your payment. Now this would be very useful for anyone wanting to get

[00:21:03] into the real estate market but are stopped by the high fees, or even banks who want to have a higher profit margin on their mortgages. Imagine if you could buy and sell a house

[00:21:12] as quickly and easily as you can buy and sell a stock. With blockchain, that would be possible. Non-fungible means that something cannot be exchanged for another item because it is unique. For instance, one piece of art is not equal to another. Both have unique properties.

[00:21:29] Fungible items on the other hand can be exchanged for one another. For instance, one dollar or bitcoin is always equal to another. Okay but what is an NFT? NFTs are tokens that live on a blockchain and represent ownership

[00:21:42] of unique items. Why is that helpful? Well tracking who owns a digital file is tricky because it can be copied and distributed effortlessly. So how can you prove who's the original owner when everyone has an identical copy of the file?

[00:21:56] NFTs solve this problem. Imagine that you made a piece of digital art, essentially a JPEG on your computer. You can create or mint an NFT out of this. The NFT that represents your art contains a bit of information about it,

[00:22:10] such as a unique fingerprint of the file, a token name and a symbol. This token is then stored onto a blockchain and you, the artist, become the owner. Now you can sell that token by creating a transaction on the blockchain. The blockchain makes sure that

[00:22:26] this information can never be tampered with. It also allows you to track who is the current owner of a token and for how much it has been sold in the past. It's important to note that the artwork itself is not stored within the NFT or the blockchain.

[00:22:39] Only its attributes such as the fingerprint or hash of the file, a token name and symbol, and optionally a link to a file hosted on IPFS. Now here's where NFTs become weird. When you buy an NFT that represents artwork,

[00:22:54] you don't get a physical copy of it. Heck, most of the time everyone can download a copy for free. The NFT only represents ownership and that is recorded in a blockchain so nobody can tamper with it. Some say that NFTs give you digital bragging rights.

[00:23:10] To make it even weirder, while the token owner owns the original artwork, the creator of the NFT retains the copyright and the reproduction rights. So an artist can sell his original artwork as an NFT but he can still sell prints. Now aside from digital art, NFTs

[00:23:27] can also be used to sell concert tickets, domain names, rare in-game items, real estate and basically anything that is unique and needs proof of ownership. For example, the founder of Twitter sold his first tweet as an NFT. Anyone can see that tweet on his profile but now only

[00:23:45] one person can own it and that person paid over 2.9 million dollars for it. I could even make an NFT out of this video. You could then buy it and be the owner of this video even though

[00:23:56] it is free to watch for everyone. Now why are some NFTs worth millions? Well their worth is determined by what people are willing to pay for it. If I'm willing to pay 100 dollars for a particular NFT then it's worth 100 dollars. Prices are driven by demand so be careful,

[00:24:12] an expensive NFT becomes worthless if nobody wants to buy it. Okay one more thing before we end, how do they work technically? NFTs are essentially smart contracts that live on a blockchain. In this case the contract stores the unique properties of the item and keeps track of current

[00:24:29] and previous owners. An NFT can even be programmed to give royalties to the creator every time it exchanges hands. Building on digital platforms has always been difficult because of the amount of coding involved with smart contracts or simply just to create a

[00:24:44] digital asset, not to mention the bugs that come with that. Enter into the Metaverse, the latest decentralized platform for digital assets and digital identities. Anyone can create digital assets on Metaverse also known as the Metaverse Smart Token, MST, as well as non-fungible

[00:25:00] tokens, Metaverse Identifiable Token, MIT which represents something unique like baseball cards, artwork or music. When creating or transferring these digital assets you need to have your own avatar which is a digital identity on the Metaverse. Everything in the Metaverse can

[00:25:15] be created with the platform's native token entropy, ETP and no coding is required. The underlying framework is developed using Substrate and to ensure the security of all the transactions on this decentralized ledger, Metaverse introduces one of the first POW plus

[00:25:31] POS hybrid consensus algorithm, proof of work to dictate block authoring and grandpa finality to provide deterministic finality. Thus the system will not only be able to mitigate the 51% attack, it will also provide a uniform distribution of mining reward to the stakeholders

[00:25:47] and investors. Metaverse is also an interoperable platform allowing anyone to build smart contracts and deploy them on the platform using the Metaverse virtual machine, MVM and tools like Metamask, Remix and Truffle. With much lower transaction fees, Metaverse becomes the

[00:26:03] perfect place to easily build and seamlessly integrate dApps onto the platform. What are you waiting for? Enter into the Metaverse and join the new reality. Facebook is planning to rebrand itself with a new name to focus on the Metaverse. South Korean millennials and Gen Z are

[00:26:24] also gathering in virtual alternative worlds. The term Metaverse is fast becoming a buzzword in tech and business, but do you know what it means? Here's Reuters Elizabeth Howcroft. The word Metaverse is quite a broad term, but generally it refers to online spaces that allow

[00:26:47] people to interact in a more immersive way than a traditional website. This could be through the use of virtual reality, so wearing a VR headset, but people also use the term Metaverse to refer to virtual environments where you have an avatar, a little cartoon person representing

[00:27:02] yourself and you can walk around and interact with other people's avatars like in a video game. Fans of the Metaverse see it as the next stage in the development of the internet. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in July that Facebook will transition from being a social media

[00:27:20] company to a Metaverse company in the next five years. They've already invested heavily in developing virtual and augmented reality headsets and glasses, and will reportedly create 10,000 jobs in the European Union to bring their Metaverse plans to life.

[00:27:38] We shouldn't really have to physically be together to feel present or collaborate or brainstorm. And Facebook is certainly not alone. Other investors and companies are getting excited about being a part of the next big thing. The term Metaverse is popular in Silicon Valley,

[00:27:57] with Microsoft also talking about converging the digital and physical worlds. Because of the global health crisis over the past 18 months more people have been working from home and going to school remotely, spending a lot more time online and missing out

[00:28:11] on human interaction. At the moment we connect with people who aren't physically near us by going to websites such as social media platforms or using messaging apps and video calls. But now some people think there's more demand for online spaces where people's interactions

[00:28:26] can be more multi-dimensional and lifelike, allowing people to immerse themselves in digital content rather than simply viewing it. There is also a specific type of Metaverse which uses blockchain technology, the same technology that's behind Bitcoin. One of such blockchain-based virtual worlds is

[00:28:46] Decentraland. In there users can buy digital assets such as clothes and even land using cryptocurrencies. Fashion companies are noticing the trend, experimenting with making virtual clothing which people's avatars can wear in metaverse environments. While the Metaverse offers a new space for people to socialise, trade,

[00:29:10] game and even attend music concerts, right now it's still no comparison to the real world. So you might have seen science fiction films that are set in fully-fledged metaverses or alternate digital worlds that are almost indistinguishable from real physical life,

[00:29:28] but that's still the stuff of fiction. At the moment most virtual spaces I've seen look more like the inside of video games than real life.

[00:30:06] People in the metaverse. How do you have such cool hair? How do these people have really cool hair like that? Oh, you're speaking to someone with very cool hair. Who is that guys? Oh true. Hey it's me. Hi.

[00:30:24] Oh we got watches. I've just dropped into a business networking event. Hi there. Is there a portal I need to jump into? It just looks so sturdy. What made you buy the quest and like try this out? What got you interested in VR?

[00:30:40] At first I thought it was going to be kind of gimmicky. I was like who wants like, I heard that the metaverse announcement by Mark Zuckerberg and I was like

[00:30:45] that's silly. Who wants to do that? And then I got one just to see and I was like this is like super cool. Like I see the value in this. I'm just going to take the headset off. So having visited a few different social platforms

[00:31:02] in the metaverse, you know it struck me that this is going to be one of the most compelling aspects of virtual reality. Not just for me personally gaming is fun, immersive video is fun,

[00:31:16] but social interactions is if I owned one of these would be what would what I'd want to continue returning for. To meet the people that I have friended in places like Allspace VR or in VR chat or in Horizon venues.

[00:31:31] I gotta go back to work but y'all are cool. I'm gonna add y'all's friends in here. Sounds good. I'll see you all here in the future. But under an undercurrent of all of this is definitely an issue with policing behavior

[00:31:44] going on as a woman felt kind of awkward. I was definitely a minority among what is a mostly male population of avatars in most of these spaces. And what tends to happen

[00:31:58] in a couple of locations is you get noticed more. So for example when I went to Facebook's Horizon venues platform, I had a lot of male avatars just kind of suddenly zoom over to me

[00:32:10] just by virtue of the fact that I was an anomaly being female. And it did feel very uncomfortable. And in another platform I had a guy just trying to follow me around and myself and another woman who were there actually had to try and mute and block him.

[00:32:26] So there are tools that we have in these platforms to essentially protect ourselves to stop unwanted behavior. And I think policing behavior if it gets worse is going to be really really difficult for these companies to do. It's computationally intensive. It's going to be

[00:32:47] expensive. It's going to require a lot of manual work to hear what people are saying, to watch what they're doing and to do it at scale. But the problems that Facebook has been dealing with in the last few years with issues like hate speech and misinformation,

[00:33:03] it cannot run away from that. Mark Zuckerberg is not going to be able to run away from those difficulties in the metaverse because they're going to just come back to haunt him. We wondered, just because we can make an NFT of anyone or anything,

[00:33:29] will anybody actually want it? I say this in a humbling way. Why would someone want to purchase my NFT? I mean, what is the value? Just explain it to me. Well, think of NFTs again as memorabilia.

[00:33:43] You are now enabling everyone to create moments and the market will determine what those moments are valued at. Perhaps you can create a JPEG of yourself in the middle of one of the best interviews. A made history and that NFT will have a value somebody might be interested.

[00:34:00] Weeks later, my 3D avatar now lives in a virtual space. I'm Laurie Siegel and I'm about to be turned into a 3D avatar and then I'm going to be turned into an NFT. Welcome to the future of

[00:34:13] the internet. And whether or not there's a market for her or it, there is a home. It's called the metaverse and it's being referred to as the future of the internet. If the current version of the web is two-dimensional, think of the metaverse as three-dimensional.

[00:34:29] Kathy Hackle is a VP at Avatar Dimension, the company that owns this studio. Can you explain what the metaverse is? I think about it in the convergence of the physical and the digital,

[00:34:40] right? So to put it in today's terms, right now we have kind of a physical persona that we are in the real world and then we have this digital persona that we're on LinkedIn or

[00:34:50] Instagram or TikTok, right? So in some ways it's kind of like converging those two. It's in some ways the next iteration of computing and the next iteration of the internet. And it's already here. Two of the most popular games where people are spending more time are

[00:35:06] Fortnite, a multiplayer online game and Roblox, which allows users to build their own Lego-like worlds. But the idea of the metaverse goes beyond gaming. Fortnite just added features that let players socialize with one another. These types of platforms allow users to do things

[00:35:24] they do in the real world. They attend concerts, hang out with friends and increasingly they spend money. The way I explain it to people is back in the day, like my brother and his friends

[00:35:35] would save money to buy Air Jordans, right? Nowadays my kids who are all under 10, actually whenever they have a special occasion, they actually ask me to buy them Robux, which is a digital currency inside Roblox, right? And they use it to buy avatar skins and you know,

[00:35:53] the way they look in game to them is almost as important as the way they look in real life. Like they'll meet there. It's kind of like the new social network when they're in those games

[00:36:03] and they see their friends, they talk about the avatars and the skins they're wearing. It's a spike that was fueled in part by global events. According to a report by video retailer Game, gamers around the world have logged more than 10 million cumulative years

[00:36:18] playing Fortnite. Roblox reported its users spending 9.7 billion hours on the game in the first quarter of 2021. That's up 98% from the same time in 2020. What do you think the catalyst was? The pandemic. Why? Because we're all thrust into our computers and living at home and

[00:36:39] working on Zoom and all these things like that physical life that we had a little bit more of. We were all thrown into this virtual world and it kind of accelerated everything. More people attended events in the virtual world. During the pandemic,

[00:36:53] rapper Travis Scott played a concert in Fortnite. 27 million people participated. It's this world of infinite possibilities, right? Because right now the physical world is finite. There's only so much of Earth, right? It's a lot, but there's only so much

[00:37:08] of Earth. But in these virtual spaces you can literally build your own worlds. The result is a modern day land grab Upper East Side, Fifth Avenue for real estate in the digital

[00:37:23] world. So this is like as startup as we get. We visited Upland, one of several virtual platforms selling digital real estate. We arrived in Silicon Valley next to a dentist's office, but soon learned this thousand square feet of physical real estate was responsible for all of

[00:37:42] the virtual real estate in San Francisco and many other cities. Okay, hey everyone, international globally all hands meeting today. Longtime entrepreneur Dirk Luth, who's from Germany, is now building out a world that looks similar to a game, which makes sense

[00:37:59] because it was inspired by one. Take me to the moment you came up with the concept for Upland. One night we saw our kids always playing the board game Monopoly. You said wouldn't it be cool to take the whole world and put that on the blockchain and

[00:38:15] and bring that together somehow. So there was this Netflix series, it's called Stranger Things, where you know there's a parallel world. I mean it's a little bit with monsters and stuff, but it looks really like like the real world. So basically we're about to start talking about

[00:38:28] a company that was inspired by Stranger Things and Monopoly. Yeah. That's almost terrifying. I'm gonna zoom into Fresno. But instead of buying land on a board game or in the real world, Upland allows users to purchase the NFTs for digital versions of real world real estate.

[00:38:46] And unlike other virtual worlds that rely on cryptocurrency, Upland allows users to pay with a credit card so there's a lower barrier to entry. So this is about really trading virtual properties but it's all based on real world

[00:38:59] addresses. None of which by the way we should be clear you guys actually own in the real world. Yeah exactly you know we're taking the real world addresses and then put them onto onto the blockchain. I think we're right now the largest you know real world metaverse.

[00:39:11] So should we enter the metaverse? Let's do it. Okay so okay let's go to New York, I guess Manhattan right? What's available? There's not a lot of available you have to search for it. I was thinking since we're 60 minutes plus so maybe we could look at our

[00:39:26] headquarters for 60 minutes. So let's look up CBS broadcasts. That's the green one. So that means it's for sale. It's for sale but it's purchased. It has someone owns it so the player is called MJC3337 okay and he sells it for equivalent of three thousand dollars.

[00:39:47] Okay so let's see the street view. So technically we could buy back CBS for three thousand dollars and now we can still buy it right? They better move fast because it seems like prices

[00:40:00] are going up. It is time for us to adopt a new company brand to encompass everything that we do. I am proud to announce our company is now Meta. Hi there peasant! Here at Facebook we've been working on an exciting project that'll change how you live your life,

[00:40:20] the metaverse. It'll be a fully immersive virtual and augmented reality that enriches you by completely taking over your mind in life. Now the metaverse isn't what you think, it's better than you can think. So let me explain what the metaverse is and all the benefits it'll

[00:40:35] give you. But first have you ever thought instead of living a productive life with meaning I'd like to live an unproductive pretend life with pretend meaning? The metaverse takes you there. I think this could be very positive for our society and economy. Positive indeed Mark.

[00:40:55] Up until now if you've liked how Facebook has controlled your online experience with our algorithms that have proven to be harmful, addictive and divisive then you'll love handing Facebook control of your entire life. Have you ever watched the matrix and wondered

[00:41:10] how the bad guys get those people into the pods and plugged into the matrix in the first place? Well your question will be answered as you're plugging yourself into the metaverse. Why would you want to dedicate your life to building success for yourself

[00:41:24] when you could sacrifice your life and help build success for a giant company that you trust with dangerous business practices? Privacy and safety need to be built into the metaverse from day one. That's right Mark, but some Facebook skeptics have had concerns about our privacy

[00:41:39] violations but we're proud to say we've solved all those concerns with the metaverse as it completely eliminates privacy. Sit back and just imagine what it'll be like to never have to use your imagination again as the metaverse does all your imagining for you.

[00:41:56] With regular Facebook, the product we sell is you but wouldn't you like to go from just being a product to being enslaved? The metaverse is your answer. With the metaverse you'll never have to worry about censorship again because plugging in frees your mind

[00:42:14] to be controlled into eliminating all thoughts that are not approved by our propaganda quality control team. Have my mind controlled by someone who's regularly subpoenaed to testify before the Senate because of dangerous and dishonest business practices?

[00:42:29] Yes please. We're a company that focuses on connecting people. Of course we are! That's why we're trying to convince you to go from having human connection in your life to having the illusion of human connection in the metaverse. We literally don't care about people. Sometimes

[00:42:44] life can be challenging and uncomfortable but the metaverse gives you the courage to avoid those challenging things by taking the easy way out. You become a much stronger source of profit for us by avoiding things that are hard. Did you know you're not one of society's

[00:42:59] elites? So why would you want to bother living your own garbage life when you can plug into the metaverse and be manipulated into believing that you're someone important? Talk about a high-class lifestyle. If elite billionaires that regularly get in trouble

[00:43:13] for putting profits ahead of people are offering you to live your life on their product but they themselves just build the product rather than living their lives on it then you know it's in

[00:43:25] your best interest to be on their product unless you're crazy. One of the most boring aspects of life is life. That's why we created the metaverse to help you escape life pretending

[00:43:37] to live life is way better than living life. Who wants to work hard and go through the struggles of trying to have a good life when you could just easily have the life of your dreams without

[00:43:46] having to work for it? Kind of like how what's way more satisfying than earning a first place trophy is buying a first place trophy. If you spend all your time and energy building your life in the metaverse instead of the actual world you live in then you'll be

[00:43:59] completely dependent on Facebook and therefore you'll have the luxury of being controlled by us. And doesn't that seem both better and safer than being in control of your own life? It's like communism with technology. But now we have a new North Star to help bring the metaverse

[00:44:14] to life. And it'll be at the expense of your life but don't worry because unlike heroin where you have to live with the consequences of a life-destroying addiction in the metaverse you'll be completely unaware of the life-destroying consequences of this addiction.

[00:44:29] Spending your money to build up your world in the metaverse it's kind of like building a mansion on someone else's property. You might not own it but at least you paid for it. Now I know you

[00:44:39] can't wait to get on but the metaverse isn't available quite yet. You'll need to stay tuned for updates as to when you can jump into the quicksand with us because once you're on you

[00:44:49] won't need to build a happy successful life when the metaverse lets you think you're building a happy successful life.

[00:45:35] And click on the shop here tab for more details.