Step into the Metaverse Podcast: EP01 - Understanding the Metaverse Economy with Jamie Burke

Foreign.

And welcome to Step in the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Vermenhom 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 have turned the most remarkable interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer alone. In this interview I interview Jamie Burke, Founder and CEO of Outlier Ventures and the author of the foreword of my book. Outlive Ventures is one of the most important incubators and accelerators in the Web three space and Jamie and I had a fascinating conversation about the open Metaverse, something which Jamie is very vocal about. We discussed the economics of the Metaverse, including Metaverse Finance, or Metafy as he calls it, as well as the role of crypto and how brands can step into the Metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

So my first question is, what is the Metaverse according to you?

Yeah, so you can look at it a number of different ways. So I always say the first thing, the Metaverse is kind of like a contact language between culture or the creative industries, finance and tech, to be able to agree upon a future that they do or they don't want. Right. And of course, like these three kind of groups of people broadly often struggle to kind of communicate. And I think the Metaverse, with its kind of grounding in science fiction and everything else and that kind of popularization of it, it gives everybody a general sense of the point when the digital and the physical kind of become blurred. Now I, unlike maybe a lot of people, you don't get too hung up on when that happens or exactly what technologies have to be ubiquitous. I actually think it's important that we think of the Metaverse as a process that's happening now. So we are experiencing the metaverse emerge and it doesn't require VR to be affordable by everybody. It doesn't require AR to be AR glasses to be on everyone's heads. Although of course both of those things make it more immersive. It's really just this point where we begin to stop to distinguish between the physical and the digital worlds, or like our virtual life and our physical Lives, which I think is safe to say is already here and obviously really accelerated by Covid. But the other thing that I think is critical and is disappointingly missed by a lot of people is understanding the Metaverse as an economy, as an economic system. So a lot of people kind of just think about it as this experience. It's a game, it's a virtual world, it's a shopping experience, maybe it's like a new form of work. But ultimately all of that is a form of economy. And that economy, I believe long term becomes the meta economy, effectively subordinates nation states and fiat based economies because it is universal, it's 247 and hopefully it's permissionless. And I think the reason why it's important we think of it as an economic system is because it then raises questions about how inclusive is it, who can participate in it, who can participate in its gdp, its economic growth, its employment, who can't. And that I think then leads us into conversations around the direction that we want it to go. Is it this permissionless system, permissionless economy, which I believe is enabled by crypto. I haven't seen anything else that could enable that to function in that way. Maybe it's going to show up in five, 10 years, but I think the closest thing we've got is crypto, despite its imperfections. Or the alternative is something much more permissioned, where there is some kind of collaboration between big tech and governments and potentially CBDC central backed digital currencies. I think both of those could exist in parallel. I'm hoping the permissionless one wins out. But ultimately we can see with Facebook meta they very clearly understand the Metaverse has to be more than Facebook. But that could just mean Facebook and Amazon. Right. It doesn't have to mean something else. And so for me that's the danger. So the kind of final point I'd say on my definition of the Metaverse is that it is a process and that can be a process of capture and control, like the dystopia that was imagined in Ready Player One, but by a corporation that is trying to seek monopoly or domination on this economic system. Or it could be a process of opening up, a blossoming of this permissionless free market.

Yeah. If you talk about the opening up the free market, is that also what you think is required to create not only an economy, but to create a rich and vibrant economy?

Yeah. So I think it can't be just be a free market. You know, we've seen with big tech that free market fundamentalism of like the Silicon Valley Libertarian variety leads to dystopias, you know, so where, you know, the only defense actually is regulators coming in and trying to limit control or whatever. So I think one of the interesting things about a blockchain enabled metaverse is that actually you get a combination of things. So on the one hand, this kind of tokenize everything means that you end up with these free markets and this more free economic flow, less friction, it allows for anything that's valuable to tokenized, to be financialized and to be traded and potentially borrowed and lent against. So you know, if it's an NFT or it's a currency, these things can be borrowed and lent against permissionlessly in crypto through defi. But the other important thing is that it actually also allows for a form of collectivism. So through things like daos, you can have ad hoc collectives kind of collectively own stuff, or collectively pool capital to buy stuff, or to trade stuff, or to build stuff. And so it sounds a bit utopic, but if you think about the fundamental tension in modern society, it's been free market fundamentalism or socialism and potentially blockchains can, I would say not solve for that, but begin to harmonize it, where you can have free markets, but you can also allow for a form of collectivism within that. But collectivism is fluid, right? So I can join a dao, I can leave a dao, I could join multiple daos, they might overlap, they might be purpose specific, they might be for public good, they might be for a commercial endeavor. And so actually I think a lot of the institutions that we've relied upon for economic activity, fiat based money, central banks, banks, corporations I think begin to dissolve. Where it goes I have no idea. But it feels like you can begin to resolve this idea. You don't need a big state to allow for collectivism. You can kind of have a small state and allow for incredibly rich and powerful collectivism.

Yeah, so you almost get like a free market of collectivism. It's a bit of a contradiction, something.

Like that, something like that. I'm still wrestling with like exactly what I'm saying here, but it feels like there's something there. Right.

So definitely I find it very interesting what you said. It's sort of, you create sort of a third way capitalism, socialism, and you can, maybe we can create some kind of a third way in the middle, which is very interesting. So we've already talked about it a little bit, but what are some of the key characteristics of an open metaverse? You already mentioned permissionless. And how can we sort of bake these into the metaverse.

Yeah, So I mean there's like decentralization, openness versus closeness is never exact and it's multi layered. So you could be open with your source code, but very closed in terms of the payment rail or currency that's used in the system. You could have a open developer market, but you could be very closed in terms of the transferability of assets in and out of your verse. Right. So again, for me, I'm sure you already agree, like the metaverse is singular. There's not lots of metaverses, there's verses, games, virtual worlds or whatever in the metaverse. I mean, I would argue you have to be plugged into something bigger than yourself to be part of the metaverse. As I said, I kind of fear there's probably two versions of that, permissioned and unpermissioned. I think there's lots of different ways to look at openness versus closed. But again, for me the most important one is in economic terms because if you look at the problem with the web today, platforms are closed, right? So whether it's a monopolistic and by design create moats to lock users in, make it very difficult for them to leave and to extract as much value from them as possible for shareholders. And to the point whereby you could argue that for example, a social media platform like Facebook has become antisocial, ironically in how it engages with its users, unfortunately, civil society. Right. But if you look at that, I mean it's pretty much true in every other context, right? So gaming platform like Fortnite, you could have invested years of time, like thousands of dollars, you might have amassed huge wealth in there or you know, proportionately huge wealth for you as a person, especially if you're a young adult. But it's trapped there, it's a sunk cost. Right. So you can't exit that economy and take any of that with you. You're trapped by design. And so if you think about that, the digital wealth in that platform, just like in social media, if you're a social media influencer or like where you have influence, you're locked in, you're trapped. The digital value that you've created is non transferable and therefore it is not recognized by today's financial system. So you can't go to a bank and say either I'm an influencer, I'm a social media influencer, can I get a loan? They'll say, well, how regular is your employment? Well, it's not, I'm not employed, I'm self employed. Well, it's a regular, we can't lend, but I have lots of influence, sorry, I'll be a gamer and say I've got loads of very valuable skin. Or my account, my Fortnite account has got all this stuff in it. Can you give me a short term loan or a mortgage? I'll say no. I mean, they wouldn't even do that with crypto by the way. So you are financially excluded. So if you think about all the digital wealth today that is just not recognized by the existing financial system in any way, then it's safe to say that you're financially excluded. Which if you think about the scale of that problem in gaming, I mean it's billions and billions of dollars, it's whole generations whose maybe primary wealth is. Digital is just not recognized as collateral. Which is again why I think being an open economic system where you have property rights so you own the digital thing yourself, you can freely transfer and exit that platform game.

So interoperability is key, you would say Economic interoperability.

Yeah. So you have to be able to transfer that asset out of that platform where you may have won it, bought it, created it. You need to be able to freely sell it at market value in an open market. That's the first thing. The second thing is then you should be able to borrow and lend against it as collateral. And so this is the cool thing about DEFI and why I think the big thing that's going to be happening in DEFI over the next decade, but certainly short to midterm, is what we call metafi. So it's like digital value in the metaverse that can become collateral in defi. And I don't know how familiar you are with DeFi but in effect as long as there are other people that value this thing, then you can do it. I can put that as collateral. I might have to over collateralize a loan, but I can put it as collateral. I can get a loan. The rates and terms of that are set by the market, not a bank. I can take out that loan, I can do whatever the hell I want with it and then I can pay back that loan or not. I could default. There's two benefits to that. The first one is obviously the societal benefit of financial inclusion. The second one is it's a more functioning financial system where you could say that the current financial system is dysfunctional for large percentage of the population. But more importantly, this transferability and the idea of digital value being able to be bought and sold freely in open markets will allow for a huge amount of Economic and GDP growth. Right. Because what is the value of something that I can't sell or transfer outside of a single platform? Marginal. What is something that I can freely an asset I can freely trade with any other asset. Significant. So the best example is Axies AX Infinity. It's by no means the perfect game. I think it's a proto Platon game. But the cool thing about it is that it's already begin to give us some data as to the premium people will place on a transferable digital asset versus a non transferable one. So an asset that has property rights versus one that doesn't. When we did our Open Metaverse OS paper in January, there was some brief very small data sets which said people will spend 10 times more in a blockchain based game than a non blockchain based game. And everyone kind of poo pooed it and said ah, yeah, but the sample size is so small you can't compare that to AAA game. You can't compare it to Fortnite, which was fair, but now Axies generates more revenue in its secondary market than any game on the planet.

Crazy.

From a player base of like 3 million versus whatever Fortnites is worth. So I think it's pretty reasonable to say now that people will pay more for something they transfer that is plugged into this matter economy than something that is just locked in a game. So massive for global gdp. But then also just good business sense, right? If you want to charge more for something, make it transferable because people will pay you more for it and you'll make more money with with a platform that's plugged into this Metro economy than trying to keep users locked in and churn them. It's just good business.

That makes total sense to me. But then one thing that is very important I think when you have such an open economy is identity and reputation. And your identity needs to be immutable or at least verifiable. Same applies for your reputation. How do you see this happening and how can we build this in the metaverse?

So I'm really glad you asked that because this is probably the most important thing for me in the context. It's like the most important primitive actually for an open source. So actually we've been very involved, committed with SSI in the context of Web3. But now of course the Open Metaverse there are actually two projects that are now live. One actually announces something today which is pretty cool. So we actually worked with a project called Sovereign S O V R I N I know them, yeah, several years ago who actually had a permissioned version of ssi. They were working with Hyperledger Indy, but it needed, it was highly permissioned. So you effectively had like 12 at that point. It was 12 nodes. It was a public good and they would effectively secure the network. Now, A, that's very centralized, B it's not very secure. And three, well, who are the nodes and where are they and how prone are they to capture or anything else from a political sense? So we worked with them to try to tokenize that in order that there was a cost to attack the network, just like there was a cost to attack Bitcoin and. But because they were in the US a lot of the nodes that they were working with were in the US A lot of lawyers got very rich and no token happened. So actually we worked with the community to fork that because the good thing is it was open source, which is again, the thing that I love about crypto is you don't need to get it right the first time. And so that was forked. And there was a project called Checked CHEQD that came from the community was going to take that code base and create a tokenized protocol specifically for SSI and verifiable claims, which of course like go hand in hand, but based upon these Web3 standards, C3 standards. Now actually they ended up making significant improvements to the code base. So it actually doesn't look a lot like Sovereign anymore now. But they are about to go live with. I think it's mainnet, it might even be this month. There's also a project, but they're kind of like general purpose SSI protocol. So you know, they're not necessarily thinking about Metaverse use cases, but I believe, you know, it will be applied. There is then a project called Crucible, Crucible Network by a guy called Ryan Gill. They're actually about to announce today something called Open metadao. Not the crappy one that Matthew Ball launched, but like an actual one that's been set up in a foundation set up in Zoog several months ago with some of the major crypto protocols already behind it. And they've been working specifically on universal SSI identity in the Metaverse. So initially it's cross gaming engine. So obviously the duopoly of gaming engine. But then linked to that is the idea that you have this transferable identity or identities. Because of course in the metaverse we might have multiple. Some might be linked, some might not be linked. But importantly associated to that identity are vaults and those vaults are in game items, good skins and Again, transferable, but then also able to be turned into collateral, like I mentioned. And one of the cool things is that you can actually create derivatives. So let's say platform A fortnight doesn't want to do NFTs. I think they will, I think they'll be permissioned, but let's say they don't. Well, actually you could create a derivative of a in world item and you can create an NFT associated to that in world item that you can trade and borrow and lend against that is effectively secured through some kind of escrow. So, you know, you kind of lock up a bit of ETH associated to that thing. You can trade it outside of the platform anonymously, so they can't deplatform you for breaking T's and C's, but effectively you could then redeem that in game with somebody. So you could say, okay, I default, like whatever it is, I've got to drop the item, I'm going to come up to you in world and lose the item, or I'm going to transfer it to you if I can in game. But the financial traction happens kind of outside of the gaming platform. Their goal is to work with gaming platforms. But I think the cool thing is you could create derivatives.

So, yeah, that's quite cool.

That's the elephant in the room, right? You can talk about whatever you want about the open metaverse until you solve for identity. It's like irrelevant because ultimately you're always reliant upon an intermediary to identify yourself and verify something about you. A credential.

Yeah, no, the identity is very close to my heart. We've been working on it for a couple of years before my current project. So it's a very difficult problem to solve. We already talked about how crypto is important in the metaverse, but obviously There are over 13,000 cryptos at the moment. How do you see those coming together?

Yeah. So again, when I talk about the importance of crypto, I really am talking about it in aggregate as an economic system. So for me it's less about, is it eth, is it bitcoin, is it something else? It doesn't need dogecoin or whatever. It's more that there is the ability to create either digital commodities or digital currencies. And I think there is a difference. Like to what extent is ether commodity or currency? And maybe it's both, but I think in pure form it's actually a commodity because it's the thing you need to use the network in that value chain. But the cool thing is I was on a podcast with Raoul Pal recently. I'll send you a link just because it was an hour long and it wasn't really an interview, it's just him and I chatting. But it was one of the best chats I'd had because obviously he has this macroeconomics perspective, which I don't. I'm not an economist, not a sociologist, I'm not much actually. Just trying to figure this all out. Just a guy trying to figure it all out. So one of the cool things about this is if you compare it to say the fiat economic system, like a fiat currency or the fiat system, is that there isn't much deviation or experimentation. It is what it is and it either fails. Turkey right now is probably the lira's in a lot of trouble. It perhaps is too big to fail, but is problematic. Like the US dollar. I mean, it's just so indebted now. Inflation is just so high. Where's that going to go? They don't have any other lever than interest rates and that's already going to negative territory, right? So it's like, what's the experiment there? Like where's the deviation? There is not right. We're just kind of trapped in this thing and the only way out of it is growth. And this is why we're now trapped into this fossil based growth engine, because it's like, well, shit, China can't stop building coal factories because it needs coal plants, because its factories need energy, because they're shutting down every week. And anyway, so it's like growth at all costs. Without growth, the whole thing collapses. So in crypto, it's not that any one experiment is better or worse than that necessarily, but it's that we've got tens of thousands now, what I believe will be millions of digital economies all playing like this socioeconomic game, real time, in an open way, in a measurable way where you can be objective about is it functioning or not functioning. And so it's kind of like monkeys with a typewriter, I think just by sheer statistics, like one monkey is going to write Shakespeare. And so that system just feels much more resilient and again, just by statistics, much more likely to find a sustainable economic system. And maybe it's not like generalizable or universal, maybe it's going to be very specific, maybe there's going to be lots of very specific, highly optimal digital economies for particular things. But in aggregate it feels like it's more likely to deliver better results than the current experimentation.

That's actually very interesting. I hadn't thought about it because I've always been saying that I don't see a market, global market for 10,000 of cryptocurrencies because we also don't have tens of thousands fiat currencies. But if you see it from the way you explain now, you can have a million cryptocurrencies, they can be very, very niche. And if this mini cryptocurrency has built the perfect social economy, then it could grow and then it can slowly take over and it can flourish. And that's actually really, really interesting. I didn't look at it from that perspective because you have basically unlimited amounts of opportunities to build something that's better.

Yeah, and the interesting thing is, so we work with a lot of projects to design and birth. I don't even like calling cryptocurrencies to be honest. You like crypto economies, right? And the golden rule is, if you look at there's an increased sophistication around what's called token engineering. I mean, sometimes it's all bullshit. Not all bullshit, sometimes a lot of it's bullshit, but like the principles are engineering principles which are like, you know, if you're building a bridge, you're optimizing for it to not fall down. Like there's a specific optimization function. Like you can't build a bridge in a plane. Like you're either building a bridge or a plane. Like they're optimizing for two different things. And so golden rule of token design is you actually want a token should be solving for a simple game, like some kind of distributed system that needs to be coordinated and for a specific outcome. And like the more things it's trying to optimize for, actually the more complexity, the more likely it is to fail at one or all of those things. So this has been one of the problems with blockchains to date is they're so generalizable they don't work. Right. Because you can't possibly solve for everything in every use case optimally. Like you're either optimizing security, throughput costs or like, you know, the trilemma. So in theory, what you'll have are millions, billions of highly optimized coordination games that are being played out that kind of aggregate up and increasingly those games are going to be played out by agents, not people. Right. So again, this is one of the big failings at the moment is most things require people to do things. Actually what will end up happening is you'll end up with this kind of agent based system where my agent, your agent, this Device's agent will just negotiate with one another and navigate this fluid system invisibly. And sometimes that will fail and sometimes it will work. But again, when agents have economic autonomy and aeas, autonomous economic agents, when there's a cost to them getting something wrong and a reward for them getting something right, it becomes, you know, very easy to, or easier to kind of have these systems that optimize one another. That said, again, you can't be too utopic about it because if you look at the financial system at the moment, you could argue most of that's run by algorithms and sometimes you have flash crashes and all kinds of weird shit. Right? So, but I think one of the things that is preserved again is this idea that if in a way you can always exit a system, right? You can always exit in a way that I can't currently. Now I'm sat in the uk. I mean, I would have to move to Switzerland or you know, somewhere else to like exit this system, like physically move. And very difficult for me to move my wealth, energy or attention. Attention I think is as important as other asset. And in this fluid world I can exit and enter these economies much more freely, much more frictionlessly. And I think long term, I always say maybe to close off, for me it's exit fiat, enter the metaverse. I don't think the fiat system holds up in the metaverse. So what does that mean? Is it like a revolution where we're all out in the streets, armed and just fighting it out? Maybe in some places, but I suspect it's going to be much more transitionary. So we're already seeing the mayor of Miami take some taxes, some of the funds, and buy some bitcoin as a treasury instrument to hedge against inflation. And he's going to give a dividend to the citizens. Right. And I think the New York mayor has just said he's taking his payment in bitcoin and I'm sure he's going to be making me push. So I think what's going to happen is governments are going to start taxing. Well, they're not going to. They are taxing capital gains and income derived from crypto. They will eventually take that payment in crypto itself that will end up in the treasury and initially they'll sell it and eventually they'll start holding it and it will kind of become like a gold backed fiat system. Right. I think it will be by stealth and I think gradually major economies will transition into crypto backed hybrid rather than just inflationary money printing.

Fascinating thoughts of how Basically, you take the opposite approach of looking at how crypto can infiltrate the government simply because it's just a better solution, which is fascinating. I have also a question on. With Web 2.0, we've seen all the dangers and we've seen all the problems, but in general with the Internet there are a lot of problems. I think in 2025 the cybercrime is $10 trillion damage per year or so. This is only going to grow, of course, in the metaverse. How can we go about that and how should we fight against it?

Yeah, well, so I think this is another just very practical argument as to why you would want to be more decentralized. So, you know, if there is a central honey pot of data or money or whatever else, it will be hacked, you cannot secure it. Doesn't matter what you say about cloud infrastructure or if you can hack the CIA and everything else, you can sure shit hack, you know, Facebook or like they just got hacked, 250 million user accounts, biggest hack ever. Because it's centralized, there's just no way around it, right? You can't secure it. And the thing is that's increasingly where centralization and these big troves of user data have previously been seen as an asset. They're now becoming a liability. With gdpr, I think, is it unlimited fines based upon the size of the hack and something else. So this could be multi billion and every IT director in every company is probably shitting their pants right now because because they know they can't secure it, it's becoming a massive liability and their ability to secure it will effectively get priced into share price. So big problem. So the idea is with things like SSI where effectively you're kind of breaking down the data onto like a wallet by wallet basis, almost a user by user basis, you can hack a user's wallet, but you can't hack the system, you can't hack Bitcoin. You can only hack, probably through user error, a particular Bitcoin wallet. And so the cost of doing that is prohibitively high to the rewards, unless that one wallet has huge amount of money in. Of course there are smart contract exploits and everything else because people are innovating quicker than the technology can allow. But that's just a case of hardening. And again, because it's all open source, just like Linux.

But I can also, you know, just like in the real world, I can create a deep fake of you. I can even easier can create a deep fake of your digital human, which is probably not easy, of the real you and then as the digital fake, Jamie, I'll explore the metaverse and make promises for how to deal with that.

Well, so, I mean, you look at like Twitter at the moment, I don't know if you've had this, but, like, I get impersonators all the time. I complain to Twitter. I asked Twitter to verify me with a tick. For some reason, they won't do it. I get no reply as to people impersonating me, trying to scam people out of money. I've had at least one account, probably had 5,000 people complain about it, and it's still there. So I don't know what's going on there. Now, the cool thing about SSI and NFTs and NFTs could effectively be used as things to verify an identity. Like, I have this, this, and this in my possession. Therefore, I am who I say I am. I am the owner of these things. But, like, by having that ssi, it means that you could create a deep fake of me. And let's assume that that begins to happen at scale. But if that thing, the bot behind it or whatever, can't verify itself or can't verify that that asset, the video recording of said person, then increasing, the system won't recognize it. And so at the moment, there is no way to verify that. Right. But again, being able to sign, you're like my wallet, my SSI wallet that's in my control, signs a video to say that I was the interviewee in that video, or not, or whoever is the creator of it, has to kind of put a thumbprint on it to say it was them that created it, and these are the people featured in it, and everyone has to sign it. That's how I see verification going forward. And I think, as you say, it's an increasing problem. Right. I mean, without that, digitalness means nothing. Actually, the authenticity and value of a digital thing is almost worthless. Just look at the music industry.

Yeah. So from that perspective, NFTs are absolutely key component of the metaverse.

Yeah. Because NFTs are the things that give property rights to digital things and allow for provenance of digital things. And without that, you don't value digital things. So I always say music now, the minute it became digital, where it could be copied and shared innumerable times, it became worthless. The only thing people will pay for is the experience of it. So for the price of an expresso, they want unlimited music streamed to them for free by Spotify. And the only way a musician is allowed to make money nowadays is by touring and Covid hits Sorry, you can't make any money anymore. So the whole creative class has been disenfranchised by the Internet. They've benefited from the reach that digital gives, but the value of digital assets is zero now with NFTs all of a sudden. And you know, remember despite all of that, people were still buying LPs, physical LPs. Why? Because they like to own things. They like to have a connection with music. They like the album cover, they like the fact that it was a one of 50 album cover. They like the social experience of having this thing and sharing it and playing it. So the behavior of music as a social thing, as a something you would collect and own, is still. People still want it. It's just not been possible in additional context. And now with NFTs, you can effectively have digital LPs again. I think it's actually going to restore many creative industries that have just been decimated by the web and it's going to restore those and restore the value of creative output. Creative asset.

Yeah. If I'm an organization outside the metaverse or outside, you know, the space, how should I step into the metaverse? How can I start as a retailer or as whatever company?

Yeah, well, I mean, I think the easiest one is you just look at the IP that you've got within your organization and then think about how that IP could be turned into, effectively digitized, but like turned into. I mean, the way that I look at. If you're Talking specifically about NFTs, NFTs are kind of like a. I call them like a social media without a platform. Right. So I can create this asset and I can create several of them and I can sell them directly to the purchaser, the fan or whatever through a platform. But then I maintain the relationship with that person off platform because if they're in the nft, I can drop them another nft. I can see whoever owns that NFT at any given moment. And so, you know, that NFT could be a ticket, it could be a wearable, it could be a limited edition digital print or all three of those things. By the way, like, the cool thing is it could be a wearable that gives you access in the metaverse to an event or whatever. So I think the starting point for any organization is to think about it in the context of how can I evolve my relationship with my customers off platform and what might that look like? And that's when it gets quite interesting because most brands and organizations are reliant upon other platforms, media platforms or anything else to have a relationship with their. Their user base in some way. So it's quite difficult to say in a generalized way, because I just think, like, Sony Music is going to engage very differently with the Metaverse than Salesforce. You know, they kind of have different relationships, different value chains, different touch points with that kind of user or consumer. But I kind of think the way to think about it is, you know, a world without platforms, in a way.

Yeah. You have so much knowledge in your head, I can probably ask questions for hours. Well, I'd like to thank you a lot for your input, Jamie. I appreciate it. Thank you so much and have a good day. Cheers. Thank you.

And that wraps up the conversation with Jamie Burke. If there's one thing that stands out from the conversation, it is how passionate Jamie is about the open Metaverse and how it could positively change society. I couldn't agree more, which is why my new book, To Step into the Metaverse, is meant as a blueprint for the open 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.