Seamless Communal Events in the Metaverse with Doug Jacobson - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP17

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Reimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society. This podcast is part of my new book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse, the investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview I interviewed Doug Jacobson. Doug is the co founder of Big Rock Creative, an XR company producing large scale events in VR. Big Rock's first large project, BRC VR, created a fully immersive Burning man festival in Social VR starting in 2020. He has a background in the film industry and he is a lover of technology and new ways of storytelling. He has spending time in VR shooting 3D videos, Building Worlds, and guiding new users through alternative realities in digital space for many years. During the interview we discussed Burning man and later Doc showed me around in the virtual playa. We discussed the future of massive interactive live events, digital real estate in the Metaverse and the ethical challenges of it. Enjoy the conversation.

Thanks so much to talk to for sharing your time with me to talk about the Metaverse. I'm very curious about this conversation. I was very much looking forward to it because I've heard a lot. Although I've never been to Burning Man, I've heard a lot about the festival itself. Quite a few people that I talked to in the past weeks mentioned, you know, the virtual reality version of Burning man and how amazing it was and how fantastic it was. So yeah, I'm very curious to this conversation, but maybe you can start a bit sharing with your background of who you are and how you are involved in this field.

My background is filming, went to USC Film School here in Los Angeles and I have a cinema background and I've made documentaries and films and I fell into the Metaverse a couple years ago and I started shooting in 180 and 360 format. Then I got an Oculus Go and then Covid started hitting and then I I went through my birthday party in virtual reality because we're never going to be able to see each other again and I chose Alt Space. I was going to VRChat. I was going to all these other ones and I just picked alt space because I like the vibe. And then a friend of mine had a old Burning man world. He had like an old shitty version, but kind of fun. And we uploaded it as a test and it worked. And Burning man got canceled the week after. And then we're like, let's keep working on this. And All Space, it turns out has Alex Kipman is a burner and they play alchemist. Is Burning Man. Burning Man. All space was purchased by in front Microsoft at Burning Man. So there's this weird connection to Burning Man. Um, I did not know about when I picked alt space. It was completely random. So I'm always looking through the lens of cinema storytelling. And I'm a, you know, tech nerd. You know, we're in California, so I'm a Mac nerd. Know a lot about Apple. And now I'm working on Microsoft products. So now I know a lot about Microsoft and Athena. And I, I've been going to burning man since 1998. I in fact made a Burning man documentary. I've shot burning man. For 16 years. My business partner has been a community organizer at Burning Man. So we know the topic cold. We knew all the little, the little nuances for doing Burning man in virtual reality. And what we're experts in is bringing community into a virtual space. That's what we did here. And this is a super difficult event to do it. I don't know if you know this, but burning man has 10 principles that govern the event. A philosophy. And these are radical inclusion, gifting society, decommodification, which is a tough one for people. Radical self reliance. You got a pack. You got to bring your own water and your own food. Radical self expression, communal effort, civic responsibility. Leave no trace. Leaving no trace. Not the act of having left no trace, but continuously leaving no trace. Civic responsibility, participation and immediacy. Meaning it's got to be immediately meaningful. And These are all 10 principles which we had to do in a virtual space which is taking this real life principles. And these are not all. These aren't laws or commandments. These are like they have tension. Like radical self reliance and communal effort are intention with each other. So they're all in counterpoint tensions. Decommodification means, you know, not have commercial sponsorships, not have transactions. So we have a non commercial space where there's no marketing. When you go to Burning man, there's no sponsored by Coke, there's no vendors, there's no T shirt sales, there's none. And you're supposed to cover up corporate logos and, and when you go in there and you were in that world of no marketing, it has a profound effect on you because you're like, oh my God, this is so great. I don't need money. It's a gifting society. And there's no like corporate marketing coming at me. And then when you leave, you feel like, oh, there's that Burger King sign. I now I'm back in that. And so because of that, burners are extraordinarily difficult to market to. They're resistant to marketing inherently. So it's a challenging thing. And so Athena and I feel that these 10 principles of burning man actually fit into responsibility for a virtual world, for a metaverse. I know that Matthew Ball has a seven attributes of a virtual space and they kind of line up to these 10 principles. So as Athena and I think about like, what would we do with our own platform? What would we do with our own little corner of the multiverse? Or metaverse? We start calling it a multiverse instead of metaverse. Yeah. Which we're switching a little bit because of the Zuck. I'll circle back to the Zuck, you know. So we feel that the 10 principles of burning man actually are a nice philosophy to run a platform. We don't think that we've been touring platforms like crazy because we want to thinking about doing our own platform and we want to see what's out there. We've got like 20 or 30 of them and very few of them even have thinking about responsibility, interoperability or philosophy. They're just kind of like, I don't know, we're trying to do corporate meetups or we're trying to do music concerts, but they're just not thinking bigger than that. In a way I find that it's interesting and you know, maybe it's not time to think bigger. They're trying to survive. So anyway, that's, that's a little bit about Burning Man. Well, I need to set up the 10 principles because that sort of hovers over, you know, us doing this Burning man event. And why you asked in one of your questions is, you know, Burning Man a metaverse already? And I would say the event of Burning man is like a metaverse. Like it's an empty playa and the users bring all this art and it's user generated content. So you have this empty space and all these little groups. You have the Mad Max looking people, you have the bunny people. And so there's all these little multiverses, you know, all these little nodes all on the same playa, we call it. So it does have an interconnected metaverse feeling.

And then it doesn't really matter whether it's virtual or physical.

No, in the sense that we feel that Burning man was sort of a metaverse in a physical way. I look at Burning man as a holodeck, you know, in a Star Trek way. You know, you sort of have like, when you think of them back to cinema, when you think of a dream sequence, you know, they're walking on a white, dusty dream like playa, and they come across a weird figure in the dust. That's Burning Man. It's actually recreating that in real life, like a real life holodeck of weird shit spilling on. So in a way, it's an immersive dream for me. And that's what got me addicted to it. It was such an immersive dream. And then making virtual version of that. They had to bring in that immersive dream and that feeling of going on adventures with your friends, because that's what. Ultimately what we found is that people want to go on adventures with their friends and they want to see cool stuff. Come over here, I want to show you this, this cool thing and have an interactability thing. They don't necessarily want to get into a 15 hour video game. They just. They may want to go, you look at this thing and you pull this line and a thing comes up over here and, you know, it's an interactive piece of art and share the experience.

So what is the Metaverse, according to you?

Well, I would say, and back to what I just said, the metaverse is an interoperable, interconnected universe of digital worlds to me.

So you already explained how did you manage sort of to move Burning Men into Metaverse? So did it happen? So it happened for the first time in 2020. Did it also happen this year? Yeah. And did you change things? What kind of lessons did you learn from the first one to the next one?

Well, the first thing we wanted to do was 2.0, everything. We literally threw out the whole playa and started from scratch. To make it even better quality, we redid all the worlds. We felt that the graphic quality, you know, we felt that a spit and finish could be a lot better. And then we also spent more time onboarding people, spent more time making the tools that we gave out a toolkit that had everything you need to build a camp, tents, RVs, DJ equipment, whatever. And you can make your own camp, you know, in Unity, and then upload it to altspace. So we spent a lot more energy getting people the tools to do that. We spent a lot more time being available for people to ask us anything. And we spent more time curating the experience. What we learned was we accidentally doubled our event hours. Like 3500 hours of events for the week. Like an insane amount of events. And we were like, yeah, we're really killing it. And then we realized that was a bad thing because there was too many events for the focus of the people. So we were spreading too many people out for too many events. And we realized this was a too much sometimes. So we took the reins and started to really curate, started to make an eventsville where people could see the latest events coming up, make it easy for them to find. We sort of made it as analog as possible, and we sort of really focused on that. And the people who were building worlds were better at it. So the worlds were more theatrical, there were more storylines. You're not just going in the world sometimes, you're going on a story through multiple things. And so everybody really up their game. And we included all these zone worlds, which were moments in time, so people would send us assets. Sometimes a high poly piece of art, and this big play is so huge with so much art and stuff on it that we have to have stuff be kind of low poly for it. And so if somebody sent us this beautiful piece of art that was 300,000 polygons, we couldn't fit it on this, apply it. So we decided to start making scenes. And I started creating these, like, moments in time. Like, one of the zones is. You know, in my mind it was. It's like three in the morning, you know, you're stumbling around, you're drunk, you're in the back of the city somewhere. It's cold, it's dusty. There's this weird art out there. And you come across a great bar with a bunch of people, and you're far from your camp, so you go into the bar to hang out. And that's like a scene I made. And one is like, it's dawn. And you're in this psychedelic kind of somewhere and there's all this weird art around. So I started creating these moments in time that were scenes, and we called them zones that incorporated multiple art projects together. Because last year, the first year we had one art, someone would put up their art project and you go in and it'd be this one piece of art out in the middle of nowhere. Okay, then you go somewhere else. So we had more worlds, but they were just. So we started collecting them and making bigger scenes out of them. So anyway, that's the long answer to.

Yeah, I'm looking forward to seeing it because I guess from the picture that you have behind you, you get a bit of an idea of you have this large open virtual desert, I guess, and you just walk around from art scene to art scene.

That's right. This is an accurate representation of the actual city of Burning Man. It's laid out exactly the same. And you walk into an art project and you might see a portal there and then you can portal into the high res version or the experience of that art project. So the playa is almost like a map that you use to go to other experiences.

Yeah, I understand that. That makes sense. That worked well for people to explore and experience the different artist stations.

Yeah, people like to just go and fly around and see. And then we also put portals of our favorite ones and made it easier so they didn't have to walk around. But people would often go on a little playa walk with their friends and go out and experience and find little Easter eggs and things like that. So they went on walks with their friends and stuff. Yeah.

Which of course is possible.

Which I think when we go back to Burning man, everyone's going to bring those flight tools, even though we don't have. Yeah. Next year. Because Burning man is happening in T22, supposedly. So we're going to move our event later and then we're going to go out to the Burning man and capture a lot of things that'll scan. Capture a lot of it and then replay it some of it later. Because we, we don't want to compete with Burning Man. We want to be the, you know, later than Burning Man. So that, you know, Labor Day in America is one of the busiest travel days of the year.

Yeah.

And remove Covid from that. You know, everyone's going to travel. They're not going to be at home. We learned that people don't want to be at home on their headset during a national holiday.

No, no. But it is cool that you're just, you know, you. It's not a sort of a one off event, but you're creating this ongoing virtual version of Burning Man. Maybe more people can also explore it because you don't have to travel through the States. You can just visit from wherever you are.

That's right. You know, its survival will depend on its ability to sell tickets or get benefactors and, you know, still grow should it survive, it needs to stand on its own two legs. And should it find its sea legs, you could see that in five years, it will eclipse the real event as its own independent art event, with its own aesthetic and its own style. As it grows, you know, like, we kept everything pretty on the main play of pretty realistic. Like, you know, we didn't have floating sky ships and stuff yet, but as we grow further, you can see we'll probably have cloud camps and stuff. You know, it'll probably grow in a more fantastical direction. But we're. We're starting very realistic.

Nice. So, and what kind of lessons did you learn from this experience? You know, that everyone who is building and was involved in the Metaverse should know.

You know, one of the lessons we learned was onboarding. We spent a lot of time onboarding into these platforms. They're not easy for people to get into. All space is not easy. VRChat is worse. WebExr is not there yet. So there were a lot of gauntlets to get into this. And we had to spend a lot of energy making sure people zoom calls for people to come and ask us questions. And then we also know that our crowd are not gamers. They don't care about graphic quality. A lot of people think that the best graphic quality equals the best platform. And we've seen a lot of platforms go in that direction. We don't think that way. I mean, I think Roblox and Minecraft and Rec Room prove that it doesn't matter. It's about experience. It's about the connection, not the resolution of the graphics. Although we try to get our graphics up. We wanted to make everything for the Oculus 2. We wanted to make it as accessible as possible and not have a PC VR experience. I don't think anybody, anybody who was coming to Burning man, very few of them are going to have a PC VR. And so really focused on. These are people who want to come in because they want to see their friends, not because they want to go play a cool graphic thing. So we really realized who our users were, and they were always burner, curious people who weren't even gone to Burning man yet, like you, who wanted to see what it was, experience the culture. And so there's an opportunity there to expand that culture and other cultures like it in a virtual space.

So, of course, basically what you organize is in a massive live interactive event. And there are of course, more people, platforms organizing that. You know, you have Fortnite with the various concerts, Yanni Grande, Travis Scott, the other Platforms as well. What do you think is the future of this type of events in the metaverse?

Well, I think the first bum rush, the first rush is going to be music events. That's where everyone's obsessed with right now. They're trying to get into. You're going to have the best concert experience for people because that's the only thing that will bring people in, is that their favorite band is playing and then they'll go through anything to get to them. But we think that once we get past that, they're going to come in for community in a sense, that they're going to want to go hang out with their friends and go to concerts with their friends. So over here, we're keeping our eye on how can we do a great concert but bring that community together at the same time. I don't think if I was going to a Fortnite concert, it wasn't about being with my friends. It was about seeing the fantastical, over the top, mega world going on. And I think that we haven't evolved to the thought process of how can I make my friends be with me while I experience this as much as experience this alone? And also in a 2D, in a solo experience, in a way. So I think the future will be people that want to come back and also gives people access to their favorite celebrities or musicians. We did a red carpet premiere in VR and we had Daisy Ridley and Jennifer Hudson there, and they were in avatars walking around and they had a great time. And, you know, when you have a celebrity in there, you know, they could interact with fans and they could just be like, okay, I'm done, and they're still home. The deal is an opportunity to interact with your fans better. There's so many things coming at us from weird things. You know, it's a wild west. It's like museums, interactive documentaries, live stage shows. You know, we just have all this stuff sort of coming at us and we're. It's like, the sky's the limit right now. Like, there's so many things to be explored that doing a cool music concert. I mean, I think the future is going to be volumetric concerts with the band where there are holograms in front of you and you're walking around them and. And that's something I'd like to do, but I think there's so much more. What is the future of cinema in this? You know, what is the future of storytelling and immersive cinema? You know, I think there's a lot more exciting stuff to go for, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, that makes total sense. I'm very much involved. This is. Well, not sure if you see my profile, but I'm digitalized myself as well. I have an avatar, I have a hologram. I try to give my talks in virtual reality, but I think it's cool and I practice what I preach, you know. So I think it's an interesting storyline and I agree the possibilities are endless. Whatever you can come up with, your imagination is possible. So related to that, how do you think that virtual reality will change the entertainment industry in the next five to 10 years?

I'm already seeing a lot of actors and stage plays happening in virtual reality in brcvr, but also the under presents and all these kind of people that are doing live stage shows. So I think there'll be a version of Broadway in VR where there are live actors performing live and the sets are changing, the songs are real. So I think that that's going to be a huge VR Broadway is coming. I think obviously music events are going there, corporate events are going there. And then I think that for TV shows and media, it's going to be an adjunct. It's going to be like, come visit the set, come walk around Star Trek or something like that. But then the stories will start moving over there too. There used to be this interactive play called Bobby's Bar Mitzvah. And you go to the bar mitzvah and you're at this bar mitzvah and you're really there and there's drama going on at the bar mitzvah and you're sort of in it. Well, that's perfect for VR. It's absolutely perfect for VR. So I think that there's an opportunity to create this immersive theater, virtual reality cinema. And then once you add AI to the holograms, you can walk around the corner, see Brad Pitt as a character arguing with someone else. You can walk around the corner, he could look at you and say, hold on a second, and then turn back and finish the conversation. And that could be all AI driven. So now you're going to have Brad Pitt be there as part of your story as you're walking around. So this is.

It's very cool that you say that because all those things you just mentioned are exactly what we sort of are trying to develop for a new startup we're building. Because that's so cool what you can do. The possibilities are like literally endless. Once it's all digital, you can walk around and you can spatial audio, you can stand behind an actor. And then you combine immersive commerce and you can buy that shirt that he or she is wearing and your avatar is wearing it as well. Just. Yeah, the possibilities are literally brain.

Right. Like, we did a music video with Pitbull, so all these people came into this spaceship we had, and then Pitbull and his dancers materialized and he was bigger than life right there. And he's doing the whole song and it really felt like he was standing there, you know, and at the end of the song, he vanished and all that. But it was like a live music video in VR and it was so effective. I could see there's going to be so much more of that stuff.

Yeah, the possibilities are absolutely endless. And yeah, whatever you can come up with your imagination that is possible in entertainment.

And that's what's so great about. You were talking about your startup. You know, as we go through platforms and talk to people, it's really great how the best platforms know their lane and what they're going for and they sort of focus on target. Often platforms will say, well, we want you to come in and create something on our platform or a Burning man on our platform or something like that. And we're like, okay, well, we just create a bunch of worlds. How do we. Here, we'll give you a bunch of worlds. Oh, we can't take Unity files. Or we can't, you know, like, okay, well what do you want us to do? Like, use your stock conference room world as a what's going on? And that gets to your generated content question. Yeah, and I don't. I don't know if you've been to a lot of platforms lately, but. Okay, so we did Burning man. And the reason we could do Burning man on altspace was because we train people how to do UNITY and then upload to Altspace. And there's a unity uploader to Altspace also on VRChat. And these two platforms are from another era. They're from like 2015, 2014. And all the platforms I'm talking to now have no user uploaded, power user generated uploader. There's no Unity uploader. They're, oh, give us your world and we'll put it up, we'll convert it or use the, like horizon. Use the in world. We're not going to build this temple using horizons brick by brick in world thing. So I'm kind of concerned that, you know, people always ask us, like, if you were going to move burning in, where would you use it? Where would you move it? And I'm like, where can I move it? Because can move it to VR chat. But there's really not a lot of platforms that allow user generated content to be uploaded from power users. I get it. The casual user needs to build stuff inside the world and that's really great and it's necessary. But to do something bigger than that you're going to need an uploader from a game engine, you know, and that's a power user. And I can't think of another platform right now who has.

I think, you know, I know one who's in development at the moment and I actually spoke to them yesterday. It's called Dream D R E E M and from Privy Protocol. It's a brand new startup and they are actually doing that where you can upload your. They just create basically. They allow you to literally, basically create whatever environment you want. I think in Unity or even Unreal. Upload your avatars and you have your own environment. You can distribute it with NFTs and with MetaMask people can just access it. It's really cool stuff. That's. That's sort of the newest of the newest.

Yeah, I mean I think that that's, you know, adding NFT into, you know, I went to another platform here in LA and they're going all nft like everything you upload becomes minted as an NFT immediately. And you know, I've been bludgeoned with the NFT craze a lot. You know, there are people I know that frankly if they're getting involved in something, they're going for the big money thing and if it's a bad sign, it's. So I love NFTs and I think that NFTs could be the key for interoperability between metaverses. Definitely.

Yeah.

And I think there's a space for it. But the fervor of NFTs haven't gotten me as excited as some other people.

Yeah.

But I think they're going to be a great tool. Actually, I think I'm more excited about NFTs when the freaking fervor dies down and we actually get to work using it as a interoperable tool.

I think that's what it is for me. You know, selling JPEGs for 69 million that you don't even own to me doesn't do anything.

No. You know, once culture, what that does is it overhypes NFTs, makes it a fad and then so what culture does to things is it takes something cool, gets hyped, consumes it and then it becomes a joke.

It's the same thing that happened with Blockchain.

Blockchain same thing happens with. I mean you could go all the way back to the 60s. I remember seeing a McDonald's commercial where it's like prices are back like the 60s and it's like all wavy, trippy tie dye shirts and stuff. And I'm thinking, so you're taking acid culture from the 60s now and now it's just a comedy bit on a McDonald's commercial. Yeah, the whole 60s movement distilled it down to a tie dye shirt as a joke and then the prices are going to go back. So I was just thinking, you know, that's the kind of thing that culture will do if something gets too big. I think has the bell curve of. When I went to the AWE this year, the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, it was all Metaverse talk. There was really not a lot NFT talk as much it was there in the background. But I could imagine last year the AWE was all nft. This year it was all Metaverse interoperability, whatever's next. Yeah, that's what happened to Blockchain. And so I'm worried, but I'm be happier with NFT once that gets out of the way and we can start using it. Um, instead of being special that a platform is using NFTs by minting them all. And then there's the environmental issue, but instead of being happy that instead of being really cool that it's everything you upload is being minted as an nft, it'll just be whatever kind of like volumetric video right now it's really cool. If we had volumetric video in a couple years, it'll be like everybody has volumetric video.

Yeah.

Like this is not something that's going to be a differentiating element of a platform in three years. It's just now it sounds great.

Yeah, I like what you're saying and I totally agree. I think, you know, the concept of a non fungible token is very, very interesting. It has a lot of potential. The definition that an NFT has received now by the community as being something that you buy that is a JPEG you can sell or buy for a lot of money. That is not like what a non fungible token can do, if you understand what I'm trying to say. And that's the difference, I think.

Yeah, I'm excited because how are we going to get my T shirt I bought on my platform to be on my. Be on my avatar when I go to your platform.

Yeah. And that's what the NFTs can do.

That's what I'm excited about. More than a $69,000 JPEG or whatever, so. And I was watching Miami Art Basel go down and it was. It was just like NFT nightmare all over the place.

Yeah, yeah.

Who made money? Some people made some money. But I don't know, maybe I'm just grumpy about it now.

Well, no, it's an interesting perspective, especially if you. I can imagine from a Burning man perspective what you see happening at their own. It was a very small group, have a lot of influence and purchase all the NFTs. And I think I saw somewhere that 80% of the transaction is done by a couple of percent of the people. And you see the same thing happening now as well in the metaverse with real estate, where, you know, you have these real estate moguls almost, you know, buying up all the real estate in the various spaces Decentraland sandbox, and then probably rent it out to people who can we call them, you know, they become landlords. If you or me want to build a house in Decentraland, we have to pay rent on a piece of Decentraland, you know, that's owned by some kind of Metaverse mogul.

I don't know.

It's weird.

This is back to decommodification. You know, the whole push of NFTs has been capitalism and commerce and commodifying, commoditizing and making things special. And it's about money. And I think that that's not the coolest thing about NFTs. So, you know, focusing on the get money quick. I do want artists to make money, and I think it's a great way for them to do that. And any artist can do that. But it's just becoming another gold rush capitalized money, you know, thing. And so it sort of feels not as it lost its luster because it became just about money.

And while everyone is always saying, you know, it's not about money, it's not about money, it's not about. In the end, it is about money. The other day yesterday, speaker that was looking at a new Decentraland, a new. I think it's called Solus, I think. So they are. They have. They've raised 3.4 million from investors in the seed round and they're doing now their public sale. But for. In order to be able to be legible to buy their land, you have to stake, I think, $50,000 or so of the coin of the platform, it just doesn't make sense because you rule out 99% of people.

So, you know, and as Athena and I were like, hey, we want to go out and put our chips on the table for a platform, but we want to come from it, from a community building platform rather than a commercial real estate angle.

Like.

Like it's again, it feels like a speculative commercial real estate play to buy digital land. Whereas we're thinking like, how can we build community? How can we be part owner in multiple communities as far as like a burning man world or, you know, a health and wellness world? Called us an how can we help those people get in as communities and then have reoccurring events and then have people coming back because they want to be part of the community. They have the building tools rather than looking at it from how can we get rich people to buy digital land and sell digital goods? And so it's just the world we live in is so rich, people getting richer. Something about the whole thing that seems tone deaf to me. But it's just. I like the Decentraland guys and we did go on a tour of Decentraland and they're the cool guys and I love them. They're like, it's $5,000 for a plot of land. And we're just like, I think that. I think here's what's going to happen, okay? What's going to happen is all the multiverses are just going to be like WordPress. Anybody's going to open up any goddamn world using basic tools like WordPress. It's going to be a web XR link and you're just going to write up, go on the web and you're just going to go into Doug's world and it's going to be my own platform based on tools that are made like word. It's like WordPress. And so all this speculative stuff could crash out eventually.

Yeah, no, I think I just shared a link with you that's. That's dream that I was just talking about earlier. And they basically do what you just mentioned.

Is it run on the Oculus too?

At the moment, I think it's 2D because they have early stage. I think that they're launching soon. But I've seen an example where he just put my avatar. He just put in there different environments and. And you just, you know, walked around and you can literally create your own environment if you want that.

I love it. Besides the speculative land crap, I think that, you know, back to the Zug, I think that once we get to eye tracking, pupil dilation analysis, bio analysis, you know, oh, Doug really liked your ad. Doug's looking at the boobs of that avatar. Doug's, you know, whatever. That's when it gets a little creepy. And I think that that's the play that Zuckerberg is doing. Like Horizons. If you're in Horizons and somebody says, oh, that guy was mean to me, they're recording everything. So they just rewind the tape and play it right back. And you see what, what they did. And they're saying they're doing it for safety reasons, but I think that these worlds need a lot of analytics and a lot of information, but I don't think they need over the top advertising in your face, you know, towards a black mirror episode. And, you know, I'm concerned because I really just don't think. I really don't think we're able to not do it. We did it last time with the Internet. We already fucked it up with Facebook. I worked on a documentary called Selling Lies with Leslie Iworks about the misinformation in the 2016 election by the Macedonian teens. And I can sum it up this way. If Facebook had not been around, it would. None of that would have happened. It's only because of Facebook and their. And so the fact that Facebook is jumping into this world this way, possibly to run away from the troubles of Facebook, but also have no qualms about creepy ass tracking. And I mean, you know, like, trust me, I want to get off the Oculus platform as soon as I can because I think the next versions are going to start having all the eye tracking and the stuff they already have.

They check your hands and they check your room, they check your stuff inside your room and the people inside the room because you're on the camera, so on the phone, so they literally.

They literally creepy. I have faith in Apple, kind of have faith in Microsoft, but Google and Facebook are not in the business of.

Yeah, I had something very interesting happening the other day. I have multiple email accounts, like everyone. And I asked for a new website that I built. For my new website that I built, I. There was a tracker going on. So I asked the provider, what's this tracking going on? And then I went like a half day later I went onto my YouTube which is connected to my other Gmail account. And before I watching a video, I saw an ad about that particular tracker. And that was like, wait, how does that work?

We do not have the ability to restrain ourselves from getting creepy here. So the fact that this Ar XR industry that I'm hanging out in is first of all made up of a lot of women, which is a good sign. And second of all, it's an older crowd and at this point everybody wants to work together and connect their metaverses and it's really great. But are we at like AOL copy serve level here or Friendster or MySpace? Where are we on the journey? Because we ended up at freaking Facebook. So I'm really worried that we won't have the. We just won't be able to hold ourselves back from being as creepy as hell.

Yeah, that's one of the reasons that I'm trying to do with my book is to write a story about how can we prevent that from happening.

That's why we were Talking about the 10 principles of burning Man. You know, we're trying to come up with some kind of underlying philosophy. It doesn't have to be this one some kind of guideposts to have some civic responsibility to not turn into a creepy data tracking but do enough tracking. So an event or knows what's going on but not so much that they need to know that. My eye grazed. There was an event in Sansar earlier this year was an Australian music festival, you know, if you know what I'm talking about.

No, no.

Did a big music festival but apparently the sponsors, they forced everybody through the sponsors ads to get anywhere and all this stuff, it went so over the top with the advertising without any class. They kind of pissed people off. And I just, just look at the inability to restrain themselves to doing some kind of classy marketing or some kind of nice, you know, we'll see your ad but we don't need to be like exit through the gift shop to get to every.

Yeah. And I think we have to be forced fed your ad, you know, the.

Ads and people get sick of it. So you know, I just, I hope your book helps. I just don't think we're going to have a lot of restraint in this area. But I'm happy that we're here at the early phase where it was Kumbaya. You know, we're like, we're talking about how great it is and all the things we could do and all the platforms that we just saw and this is probably the really great time to get into this and then, then it'll turn into creepy ad data tracking nightmare.

That's not the only problems, you know, because what about deep fakes, misinformation hacks, cameras, malware, phishing? How are we going to deal with that in The. In the metaverse.

Yeah. I mean, you can't believe your eyes or your ears. You know, that Anthony Bourdain doc came out and they used a voice analyzer.

To say it in this one.

So now they're just. All they can do is develop tools to try to spot deep fakes and deep audio. You know, Adobe still got that technology and I just, I just don't think that for sure. Older Americans, baby boomers in this country are not mentally equipped to deal with disinformation. No, a lot of people are not. But this older generation, deep fakes and, you know, they just can't. I'm hopeful that the younger generation will develop some kind of awareness that what they see is maybe not real, but we had. There was problems in all space. Not problems, there was some jokes. Somebody dressed their avatar for somebody else's avatar, but that's going to happen.

That's really problematic.

How do you stop stalkers? How do you stop the creepy stalking? You know, I don't know. I think that's going to be a problem. There's also, you know, harassment. I've been in the VR chat. Every time I go to VRChat, I get harassed directly. Kids will come up and start calling you names. Yeah, vrchat's got like 14 year old boys in it and the first thing they want to do is call you names. And just got a lot of young kids in it and they're, they have no filter, they're just, you know, whatever. So I think that we haven't had that problem. I think that if you put some barriers to entry for the trolls and have some community standards, that's all you can do. But I've been worried about deep fakes for a while and I kind of thought about that as being video 2D. I wasn't thinking about that in terms of the metaverse, if you know what I'm saying. I was thinking about that being some political candidate is doing some outrageous shit on a video that he didn't do. You know, I was thinking of it as a 2D problem, but you're right.

I think the 3dB problem can be much bigger because I can just create an avatar that looks like you and then I am you, and I can just move around and I can walk, I can enter Burning Man VR and I can start talking to people and then I can do all kinds of weird stuff and I think that's really scary.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, thanks. Yeah, I didn't quite go there. I was thinking of Zuckerberg. Scary But I wasn't thinking of Nefarious.

Just this morning, I saw a tweet from Philip Rosedale from Second Life, and he said. Which I thought was interesting as well. Yes, you have all these people who buy real estate at the moment, but then if you have a big chunk of real estate in Decentraland that I don't like, you, I buy a piece next to it and I put something really outrageous, I don't know, Nazi sign next to it or porn sign next to it, and then screw your land sale.

Yeah, I met Philip at the awe. He's also a, you know. Yeah, that's the thing, like, when you start looking at the Metaverse as a New York real estate, hometown real estate lens. I think it's a stupid myopic structure to force people into this sort of city colonized, sort of city planning, you know, model. It's ridiculous. It's like, why move to the burbs, Move your land? It's not real, folks. Like, it's like, why are you having to deal with bad neighbors? This is all a made up construct that you're forcing down people's throats because you want your fucking platform to be, you know, New York City grid layout, it's just like. It's so stupid. It's like an artificial problem that doesn't need to be there.

Yeah, yeah. It is a stupid thing if you think about it. Why on Earth, square pieces of land, what? We have infinite space. Right.

It's insane. That's why I'm just like, who's buying this land? Stupidest goddamn thing. We made this up. You know, put your land on the fucking boonies. It doesn't matter, you know, I mean, I know Philip looks to that lens because he made Second Life, which is a land with people, but he's looking at it from a real estate point of view. But for Burning man, you just teleport to someone's land and you don't need to worry about your next door neighbors because you're in your own land. If you want to make a world with your neighbors, you could, but you don't have to. It's so true, it's ridiculous.

I had an interview with, I think, the founder of Metaverse Group, who did the purchase of, I think, $3.4 million in Decentraland or South. But hearing this and thinking about this, that so doesn't make sense anymore because it's just. Why?

Why?

It's small thinking, it's not thinking big. It's thinking, like converting your world into the shitty Fucking grid world that you have out in the outer world. And who wants to be in that world? I don't know. But that's how people, investors think about real estate. They think about colonization. They're thinking through the lens of, we're going to take over your land and buy it.

Wow.

I don't want to participate in that. That's why I'm just like, y'. All.

Oh, yeah, right. To show. And luckily, I haven't bought any. Any real estate. Lantern.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it's.

Yeah, I think that this conversation about the responsibility of a metaverse, philosophically, it's not being talked about. And then that's a lead to some of these dystopian issues that we're talking about here, you know, and there's this conversation of, like, we're all going to escape to the meta. Like, ready Player one. We're going to escape to the metaverse because the outside world is going to be dystopian. We're going to create this thing in the end. I don't necessarily like that idea either. Like, well, how about we just have a great world outside and then we come in friends. I could be your friend. We can hang out all the time and party in VR. And you're in Australia, so I have friends all over the world that I only know as avatars. People on our team I have never met in real life, who've worked with us for a year are only avatars, and they're part of my extended social network. They're not my whole social network, but they are part of. And I consider them my friend. One of our teams in Israel, I've never met the guy, but he's great and see him in line and he's part of my social network. I consider him a friend and never met him. And so I think it'll just be an adjunct to my current social construct. It won't be leaving behind this world and buying land here and putting up a 7 11. What are they going to do? Are they going to start charging for electricity in the virtual world now? I mean, anyway, so I think that's. That's what it is. Like, please, let's not go down the road that we did with Facebook. Let's not have the Internet end up at fucking Facebook. Let's go down somewhere, like, where there's a fractured amount of all this different stuff so you don't have to land on a. One platform has so many people that it could mess with elections and screw with laws and, you know, let's just not go down the Zucker road again.

Yeah, completely agree with that. I think Zuckerberg is a is a threat to democracy all of all around the world.

Yeah, he doesn't even get it. Why am I a threat? I just put up this.

Yeah. All right, well thanks so much, Doug. I really, really appreciated it. I share many of your all of your ideas around, you know, how we should make this in a way that is beneficial to humanity and not beneficial.

To come on people. You're already off to a bad foot selling land to elitist rich people. I mean, what the fuck? We're already off to a bad start.

Yeah. Yeah, totally.

We can pull this out.

Yeah, totally.

And that wraps up the conversation with Doug Jacobson. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is the potential of the Metaverse to create unique experiences. When Doug showed me around the virtual Burning man after the interview, it was a unique experience, despite Doug and myself being the only one there. We also covered the 10 principles of burning man, which I used as an inspiration for the 10 principles of the Metaverse that I discuss in my new book, Step into the Metaverse. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform, so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the Metaverse.