The Need for Unique Identifiers in the Metaverse with Benjamin Bertram Goldman - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP30

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Riemenam 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 Benjamin Bertram Goldman. Benjamin is a producer, filmmaker and media entrepreneur featured in the New York Times, cnn, Wired, among others. He has been writing and producing content about the metaverse for over 10 years, with a particular focus on the intersection of the Metaverse and virtual production. During the interview we talked about avatars and identity in the Metaverse and how people inter with avatars. We talked about how to deal with imposter avatars and some of the ethical challenges of the Metaverse. We also discussed the role of NFTs in creating a rich and vibrant Metaverse economy. Enjoy the conversation.

Maybe you can share a bit about your background and how you are involved in the Metaverse.

So yeah, like I'm primarily creative, professional creative leader and you know, I used to work in TV and film and so that's really where my background is. But the way that I got into the metaverse, I mean there is like, there is like an exact moment, like I've always been into science fiction for a very long time and of course I read not just Snow Crash, but also Neuromancer and you know, a bunch a lot of Metaverse style fiction. My favorite is Permutation City, which uses the word autoverse. But my interest in the metaverse professionally didn't begin until 2008 when I saw I was at an NAB convention in Vegas and there was somebody on stage and it was the first time I'd ever heard the word metaverse spoken in public, like a nonfiction context. But they were talking about the state of VR and where things are going. And I remember very vividly, like I was just kind of entranced by it. And I ended up writing a short story of science fiction called Make Believe and submitted it around. And then it wasn't until a few years ago I Started seeing, like, it really gaining steam. And at some point I realized like, this was actually happening. And so I kind of dove right into it. Like, I had already been convinced of the implications. And that's why I wrote a short story. The short story was about, you know, these things inevitably going from goggles to glasses to lenses, to replacing the human eye. Right. Like, that's the trajectory. I firmly believe that we might, in our lifetime see that happen.

Right.

So the implications are pretty, pretty staggering. So when I saw it starting to enter the mainstream, I dove in. I went back to school to study virtual production in Unreal Engine and was in three separate programs for that and started creating Metaverse content. So two years ago, I launched a show called Game Night, which is about the evolution of video games into the Metaverse. I started writing about it and just creating a lot of art. And that's really my lane into it is through the artistic. But I also, like, I work in design, and the company I currently work at is called Ethic. Right? And so, like, those are both, like, huge interests of mine. And so I really, in the past year or so, started to apply that lens to the Metaverse as well and started writing about that. And at this point, you know, like, in. For a while, I was like the crazy person, like, talking about this. And then, you know, Mark Zuckerberg gets up on stage and announces, you know, that it's now meta. And ever since then, like, things have just gone completely bonkers. Like, there's a lot. I mean, there's not that many people that were writing that were talking about this two years ago, you know, and so, so like, now there's just a lot of different, you know, I'm involved in a bunch of different projects. And I'm also a co founder of a Metaverse company called Metaverse tv.

Okay, that's cool. So this Metaverse tv, is it. How should I see that? Or you can't share much about it.

I can share some of it. Like, basically we're. We aim to be the first television network of the Metaverse. Right. Like, I firmly believe that virtual production is not just using game technology to create content. It's. It's fundamentally a new medium. Right. It's very much like. Like television. When television came into existence, it was a new medium and you had. And you have to adapt storytelling to the medium. You can't just bring over something that you show in film and put it on tv. You have to actually rethink the way you're selling telling stories. And the same is True. With the Metaverse, like, a good example of this is, like, if I could tell you, you have never seen an avatar perform live in front of an audience, and if you have, it's been the past year, right? And the reason is because the technology didn't yet exist to allow people to control in real time a 3D avatar and perform in front of a crowd, right? But that's changing now. The ability for somebody to control a 3D avatar, to stage an entire production where people are inside of a virtual space, that's not just a new filmmaking technique, that's fundamentally a new medium. And so there's going to be a lot of innovation and problem solving that has to happen in this space. But bigger picture, the goal of Metaverse TV is we, me and my and the team that I work with, which is essentially a loose creative collective of artists and filmmakers and comedians and actors, we believe that we can beat Mark Zuckerberg to the Metaverse and we can help define it culturally. Because for a very simple reason, if you want to build the Metaverse, you're talking about a massive technological undertaking, right? I mean, how do you do that? But if you create content, creating content, media is always a more efficient way towards gaining that mind share. So we believe that we can gain the mind share on the Metaverse before a lot of the big players.

Nice. Sounds very interesting indeed, because I think I agree with you that using volumetric video and digital video, I think you have so many more possibilities. That has tremendous opportunities.

Yeah, it's tremendous opportunity and it has disruptive implications for the entertainment industry. I mean, in a very simple way, to frame it is like for the first time, it moves production towards software. Right. Production happens inside of software, can be iterated on. You think of a studio model, right? What is it, something like Warner Brothers? You have a lot. You have a bunch of sets, you have props, you have all these different assets at the ready, and that's what a studio does. It provides efficient filmmaking at scale. Well, you can recreate all of those paradigms inside of a virtual world. You can build sets, you can build props, you can create camera setups. And then one day, you can open that to a live studio audience.

Yeah, sounds really cool and very promising. I wish you all the luck with that.

Thank you.

So if we dive into the Metaverse, the question that I have, and it's a question that I've asked everyone, so far, I've received 91 different answers. What is the Metaverse according to you?

So the simple definition of Metaverse according To me, the simplest definition is it's a network of virtual worlds. Right. And the reason I like that is because it's one. It's simple, but it also hints at, like, a few of the things that's going on with the metaverse. Like, the metaverse is a confluence of technology, some that don't exist and some that do exist. Virtual worlds is one of the technologies that do exist. The network layer on top of it does not yet exist. That's what everyone's trying to work on towards, like, interoperable metaverses. But that's the basic definition, the definition that I like. Well, there's a few. But, like, one that I like is that it's very much a Manhattan Project for the age of video games. It's something that has enormous. It could be used for mass good. It also has enormously destructive potential as well. And so. So one of the things that motivates me is that I just try to get people talking about what the implications are for the players in all of this.

Yeah. And so I think one of the key components in the metaverse is identity and reputation, because, you know, your avatar, whether it's a dinosaur or a digital copy of yourself, moves around the various spaces. How important is identity and reputation to you? For the metaverse, identity is.

I mean, it's key. So I look at it primarily through the lens of avatars. Right. Avatars are how we refer to these virtual identities. It's just kind of like the lingo that's been established in avatars. There's an enormous body of research on the way that people interact with avatars and the effects that those have on the human being. And basically, an avatar serves as a conduit that allows for feelings and experiences to pass between the real world and the virtual world. And so the avatar is a key component. I don't think that you can really have a metaverse without virtual identities, because you can't have virtual worlds without virtual identities. Now, we don't know, like, for example, how virtual identities will work. Some companies, like Facebook, will very likely want to kind of lock down your identity and make sure that people can only have one identity. I think that's a. That'd be a bad outcome, because one of the fundamental appeals of the metaverse is that people can explore alternate identities, that they can express themselves in ways that they wouldn't feel comfortable in the real world. And so the second that somebody is telling you you can only have one identity, you have to ask the question, who has the power to tell Me how many identities I can have?

Yeah, good point. But then again, if you have like five different identities, how do you take your reputation? How do I know that I can trust you?

There's a great thinker and writer and virtual worlds designer named Raf Koster. He designed the virtual worlds for Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies and he talks about this a lot. They've solved this problem with MMOs, right? People don't necessarily know who you are in an mmo, but they build cohesive virtual societies. And the reason, the way that they accomplish that is that when you get people to invest in their virtual identity, right, they start accumulating assets, money connections, like a social network, right? That inherently makes people invested in adhering to the rules of the world and making sure that they're not doing anything that could compromise their position in that world, right? So you don't necessarily need real world identity in order to get people invested in taking the world seriously and not devolving into the worst kind of human behavior. You just need to onboard people so that way they're investing and they feel invested as soon as possible. And that's something that Raf Koster says in a game developer conference talk in 2017, is that you need to get players invested in a virtual world as soon as possible. Because once they are, then a lot of those problems, not all of them, certainly not all of them, but a lot of them will go away for majority of players.

But then again, in a digital world, I can easily make a copy of you and act as if I am you and I can talk like you because I can mimic your voice. But how can we use identity to prevent that from happening?

This already happens if like you are in a. Like, for example, like the NFT space is blowing up right now, right? There's a thousand different discord channels, tens of thousands. Who knows? If you're in any one of these, the first thing you have to do is disable your direct messages because you get spammed with people who are trying to imitate an NFT project website, imitate one of the project founders trying to get people to send cryptocurrency to them. So I'm not saying that you don't need unique identifiers, right? And that's one of the things that a wallet solves for automatically, right? If I can see what the history of transactions are for this person, then it gives you a pretty decent picture of the truth. So I'm not saying that everyone should be a blank slate, just like, you know, a character in 3D environment, like where you can't go any deeper than that. But I'm saying that there's no need to necessarily tie that to a real world identity. All of the reputation, you know, signposts should be embedded in how we construct these virtual identities. But you don't necessarily need to tie those to the real world. So I think they're, in my mind, they're almost like two separate issues in a way.

Yeah. If we look at it from a consumer perspective, how do you think that brands can enter the metaverse? You know, how. What do they need to do to become successful with immersive commerce?

Yeah, you know, it's like the thing that I would recommend is that everybody start building game development competencies in house. Right. You know, like, for example, design was one of those things where it used to be outsourced to agencies all the time. Right. And then it became so big and so important to companies in the digital age, they had to bring design in house. The technology that's needed to create games has very much lived in isolation from the rest of the business world for a very long time. But that is ultimately the tools that are going to be used to create the metaverse. So I think if companies are serious, if brands are serious about getting into this space, what they need to start doing is building those competencies in house. And, you know, that's something that I had to do as a filmmaker who was convinced that this was going to change the course of entertainment history. You know, when I, when I had that moment of realization, there was nothing I could do except to go back to school to study this stuff. And it's, it's kind of alien, but it's like alien technology in a way, but it's essential. And yeah, so that's, you know, I think that's like one of the first things that I'd recommend to brands.

So if you don't have game design capabilities in house, how can you then actually step into the metaverse?

So this is, I advise companies on quite a bit. There's a few different companies where I serve as a metaverse advisor for some companies. One way to think about the metaverse that I like to tell people is think of it as a place, if you're opening up in a new country, what are some of the considerations? Say you want to open a store in a new country, you're going to look at how safe is the neighborhood, what's the foot traffic like, what are the demographics like of the people in that area? Right. What are the Other businesses that are opened up in an area that are drawing foot traffic. Right. And who I'm competing with. And these are the exact same considerations that you have to have when you're thinking about extending your business into a virtual world or the metaverse one day. Right. You have to think, okay, which virtual world do I want to set up shop in? Who are the people that are there? What is the foot traffic? Like, you know, what's the crime rate? Like, how much of the activity in that world is. Are just scams or, you know, every business is going to be different. But where I tell people to start most of the time is the metaverse, ultimately is a project of translating the real world to the virtual world. And so the best way to think of it is as a place and you can apply. And once you do that, you can start applying a lot of the same, you know, paradigms that you would apply to a business in the real world. And you just have to translate that over into a virtual world.

Yeah, that makes sense. And so how does that work then, for enterprises, you know, who want to do change, you know, collaboration, change, future of work? What role will digital twins play in the metaverse? In the enterprise metaverse?

Yeah, it's an interesting question, right? Like, to me, it gets at this question of, like, will there be multiple metaverses? I think there will. You know, digital twins, it's kind of like, I don't necessarily know if I want to speak too much to it. I, like, I'm very familiar with the concept. It's also been around for a bit of time, but it's not something that I've dwelt on too much. Like, for example, Nvidia is working on a metaverse. Microsoft's working on a bunch of Metaverse style plays. I think a lot of these companies right now, they're just kind of using a metaverse as an umbrella term to house, like, any sort of new immersive technology that they're developing. And so whether or not it's actually a metaverse or whether it's just a new immersive platform, like, you know, to me, it's a little bit unclear these days, and it's not something that, like, I feel too qualified to speak to.

Okay, no worries. And then maybe the next question I have is also not for you then, but what role do you think governments can play in the metaverse? And then how should they deal with the metaverse?

Governments is one that I think of quite a bit.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, yeah. It's just the enterprise specific stuff that, like, I don't know, you know, because it's like a lot of these companies have competing motivations and. But for governments, there's a few things that they need to consider. And again, like, I'm going to lean on research that's been done. There's this wonderful virtual worlds economist named Edward Castronova, who wrote a great book called Exodus to Virtual Worlds and a number of others. And he says in his books that virtual. He speaks to a virtual world. This is before Metaverse took on. But virtual worlds will one day pose a threat to governments, right? Because virtual worlds, they ultimately like. As more economic activity moves into these worlds, if governments don't respond fast enough, it's going to start looking like a decline in GDP in the real world. The other thing is that it'll start to really obfuscate ideas such as, like nationality, right? If you have a bunch of people own virtual real estate and virtual property and their communities are in a site of a virtual world and all of their fun and all their work and whatever is happening inside of these virtual worlds, how long is going to take before they start to identify more with that world than they do with the real world? So there's a few implications for governments as well. Like, for example, governments will probably have to respond by prioritizing, fund more and the economy start thinking about how can we improve the user experience of interacting with government to be more fun, to be more engaging. The other thing is, you know, there are some questions, and I don't necessarily take a sight on it, but, you know, in the early days of radio, government played a very big role in allocating, like, what can be broadcast. They reserved space for public broadcasting, you know, for like NPR and then eventually public television. They created things like was the Fairness Doctrine where you had to have equal coverage of certain political issues to present. And so I think that there is a question whether or not government wants to intervene in the Metaverse in order to ensure some basic human rights. My view on it is that while a virtual world is not the real world, the line between the two is almost meaningless. And maybe it's a matter of degree, but not necessarily a matter of kind. If I create a character in the side of a virtual world and I start investing years of time into that character, and I start acquiring assets and building a network, so I started identifying with them. I believe that that character should have certain fundamental rights in the same way that we have rights in the real world. And so I do think that, like, if we start to See that there are large centralized entities who are, you know, building metaverse economies that are just ballooning in size and scope, and they're trampling on things like human rights, or even just the rights of avatars, the rights of players. Like, I think that there's a good argument to make that the government should step in.

It's an interesting one to see if you know, what kind of rights should avatars have. I run a podcast between two bots. It's called we cover Ethical AI. And my co host, he always says, we need data. Rights are the new human rights almost. And this would sort of take that a step further, where you have avatar rights that we should have.

I believe it'll take it a step further. I also believe that it'll start a new age of interest in these concepts. Because if you think about it in terms of the web that we have today, the digital landscape we have today, these questions are all very abstract, right? I ask you, what do you own on Facebook? Most people have no clue. Like, I don't know. I don't know what I own. Do I own my pictures? Do I own, like, my content, my profile, right? It's very abstract. But the second that you trans. But, like, this also speaks to one of the fundamental advantages of the metaverse is that the second you translate this into a virtual world, these ideas that were once abstract become suddenly very concrete, right? If I have an avatar and I own a house and I have items and clothing, right? Those might be very similar concepts digitally to what you experience today, but the way that a user experiences them is very, very different, right? And so people will. I believe that people will start taking this way more seriously. And there's good evidence of this, right? Like, why is it that NFTs were the things that made a lot of the blockchain movement blow up in terms of the mainstream, right? It's because the closer that we get to, like, concrete use cases, you know, the more we start to apply, like, art and visuals and graphics to a lot of these abstract concepts underpinning the blockchain or web 3, suddenly they become real in people's minds. So when somebody says to me, for example, like, I don't get NFTs, like, why would I buy, like, a pair of digital sneakers? I say, like, well, you may not want to buy a pair of digital sneakers, but if a virtual world is programmed, that suddenly recognizes NFTs, right? Suddenly it makes a whole lot more sense. You buy digital sneakers because inside this virtual world, that means your character can wear sneakers. Right. You buy digital art because now you can hang it up inside of your virtual home. So a lot of the ideas underpinning the Web3 movement are abstract until you think of them through the lens of the Metaverse. And I think that same trend is also why digital rights will take on new meaning in the age of the Metaverse. Because it's abstract today, but in the Metaverse, it'll be very, very concrete and in a very real way.

So, related to that, and you already mentioned it, how will NFTs change the game for the entertainment industry for artists?

I can tell you, like, certain use cases. But yeah, so NFTs, at a very basic level, it cuts out the middleman in the middleman in art and entertainment. And specifically, the middleman has always played a very, very significant and often constricting role. And so the moment that you remove those things, it opens and you can create that connection just between the artist and the audience. It opens up an enormous world of possibilities. For example, like you can imagine a Twitch streamer selling merchandise through his virtual, you know, through, like, if he's doing a virtual production, you know, where he's controlling an avatar, and maybe he has like a digital set and he has like, I don't know, an ax that he uses to whack enemies with, you know, or like guests on a show with that axe could be merchandised directly and then sold to the audience. So you start to see how things like even something like merchandising, which has been one of the main ways to monetize cultural assets, could suddenly be completely transformed. So I think it's too early to say exactly what the extent of it will be, but clearly NFTs have come along and solved a very critical problem, which is, how do you denote ownership? Digital ownership? I think that's one of the biggest. That was one of the biggest pieces of the Metaverse puzzle that needed to be solved. And now that it has been solved, I think that it'll go in a million different directions and affect a million different professionals and industries.

Yeah. And how then, how important is user generated content for the Metaverse? Whether this is written content or images.

Or video or games, I think it's essential. You cannot have an economy unless you have user generated content, unless you have people contributing. And so there is no metaverse without user generated content. Even this is something that even, like Fortnite, which isn't even a virtual world, really technically understands. Right. Like, one of the first things they do is they opened up the creator platform. So that way people could start creating content. It's one of the key steps. And the reason for that is probably, you know, buried in the definition of a virtual world itself. Right, Virtual world, there isn't one single definition, but the commonly agreed upon characteristics is that it's persistent, meaning that it continues to exist in past time even when people aren't logged in. It's shared, multiple people can be in it, and it's under the influence of avatars. Right. And so again, this gets back to the avatars, but avatars are the vehicle through which users can influence the world. That could mean user generated content, it could mean simply participating in the economy. But you can't have a metaverse unless you have users influencing the world. Otherwise it's just a big gallery.

Yeah, but then from a user generated content perspective, the metaverse is of course a lot of visual. How do you think that written content can sustain in the metaverse then?

I'm sorry, Mr. How do I think what kind of content?

Written articles, books, how do you think that they will change because of the metaverse?

Yeah, that's an interesting question. The way that I see it is that one of the ways I talk about it is that there will be certain experiences that translate over to the metaverse, like very well. Right. Certain experiences that don't work necessarily in today's Internet that suddenly will work in the metaverse. Right? So for example, why is Facebook becoming meta? I think that they're smart enough to realize that virtual worlds, gaming the metaverse, it ultimately represents the biggest threat to social media because it makes much more sense, right? Like we have no human frame of reference for social media. Like there's no evolutionarily speaking, we don't know, like, we don't know what a like is or a post or a comment or a tweet. Right? But when you're in the metaverse, something like social interaction makes a lot more intuitive sense. You're standing face to face with other players or other avatars. Right? So there will be certain things that translate over and then certain things won't. So writing will be one of those things where I don't think there's going to be a massive experiential difference. Right. You know, you, maybe you open up a book in the metaverse and it consumes your screen, but I don't think that there's going to be any grand innovations in how we read, for example. But certainly other kinds of user generated content, like you said, anything visual, anything that benefits from presence or immersion, such as school, socializing, play, even Work, certain kinds of work, those will translate over into the metaverse a lot more easily. You know, again, and this is why I get back to that point. Like, it really helps to think of it first as a place. Right. Because, you know, when a new country is founded, it doesn't necessarily change. You know, how people are reading books. It's kind of like the experience around it that people have to work with. How do you set up a government? How do you set up an economy? What are the laws? You know.

Yeah. So related to that, and how do we ensure a rich and vibrant metaverse economy?

I think one of the keys is that it's open. And the other key, I think, is that it respects the rights of avatars. And I think, like, those are the only ones that matter to my opinion. Like, sure. Like, there's. Okay. So one of the things I spoke about recently at the Beyond Games conference is that, is that the metaverse will ultimately give humanity a chance to create new worlds that are informed by our most modern understandings of how to create a rich, fair, and fun society. Right. When you think about the real world, we are burdened by a lot of legacy systems and legacy ways of thinking that really inhibit our ability to affect change. Right. If you want to pass a law to change some aspect of the economy, make it more fair, you have to do decades of grinding work to build public consensus to, you know, influence politicians to create these campaigns. Well, in the Metaverse, you can optimize those things as quickly as you optimize software code. Right. And so it does present an opportunity for us to take a step back and think, like, how do we want to create a fair society? Right. Like, what is our most modern understanding of how this can work? And so I think, like, ultimately, the best way to ensure that the metaverse advances the human experience is that we have to start doing work now to build essentially a movement. We have to find thinkers and public Personas, and we need to spark rich debate and build a movement of people that recognize the metaverse as that level of an opportunity. Because my biggest fear is that most people are going to just kind of roll their eyes. Think of it as it's either a crypto scam or it's Mark Zuckerberg's, you know, play thing. But. And they're going to miss the bigger opportunity, which is that we do have this chance to rethink a lot of the fundamentals of our reality.

Yeah, I completely agree with that. That's also what I'm trying to portray in the book. To show this message, we have a clean slate.

Yeah.

And we can completely rewrite how the Internet works, how we want to interact with each other, how we create communities, how we govern communities. And that's something that we should really embrace as a society, because you only get that chance once. And if we screw up, then we end up with a dystopian version of Snow Crash.

Yeah, exactly. I completely agree. It's. To me, it's the single biggest motivating force in my life is the belief that the metaverse ultimately represents an opportunity. And, you know, but this is, again, this is why I call them a hand project of the age of video games, because just as it could be used for those things, you could also imagine, you know, if you wanted to conceive of a better tool for mass surveillance and manipulation of people. Like, you could not think of a better tool in the metaverse. Right. You can literally play with how people are experiencing reality. Right. You are creating worlds that have, like, physics of reality to them. You could alter the physics of a reality to suit some purpose. Right. Whether it's a government, you know, totalitarian government, or whether it's just a totalitarian minded corporation, it could be extraordinarily dangerous in the wrong hands. You know, I mean, think about, like today, like if you're on, if you go onto Twitter, it doesn't take you long to engage before someone starts cursing at you, trolling you. Right. You don't have to do much before you actually get an audience of trolls that are actually trying to interfere with your life. Now imagine if somebody has invested, you know, years into a character that they identify really deeply with. They have all their friends inside of a virtual world, and then suddenly trolls or somebody changes the rules and they lose that, or there's a glitch and they lose all that. Right. Like, you can just start to imagine, like things could go really bad really quickly if we're not.

Yeah, that already happened. I'm not sure if you read the story about the Australian artist who has the Instagram handle Metaverse. And like a day after Zuckerberg, her entire 10 year old identity disappeared because Meta had deleted it.

Yeah, I know it well because I have the Metaverse and TikTok and Reddit and the Internet in a domain.

Nice.

Yeah.

So, yeah, from that perspective then, how does the future of the metaverse look like, according to you?

To me, I think like the most interesting thing that we're going to see right now is culture. Like right now you have this plumbing of decentralized finance the blockchain that has been established and matured. And I think, like, that's fascinating and that's important because that gets the machine running, right? But I think what we're about to see right now is the first wave of, like, mass culture migrating into this, right? And I think, like, that's going to be quite explosive. It's going to be very disturbing to a lot of people. It's going to be, you know, but like. Like things always are, right? Like video. When video games first came out, there was panic about video game violence. Right. Video games were very countercultural in that sense. But I think that what we're going to see soon is the first wave of culture. And one of the things I'm most excited about in terms of the metaverse is what it's going to do to level the playing field between artist and engineer. But I don't know if that's what you're asking. Are you asking what do I think the metaverse is going to look like in 5 years, 10 years?

Just your generic idea about the future of the metaverse, where this is heading in the protest or the smallest perspective, whatever you think is important.

I think that if we truly find ourselves as a civilization heading down a path towards the metaverse, I think that we can expect our ideas of reality and identity to be challenged in a way that they never have in history. And I think where it's all going is that we will start to see worlds where people. People consider as more of their home than the real world. And I think that as these worlds start to develop and as if the metaverse actually comes into existence and it thrives like this, we come full circle the way I said in the beginning. Like, I do believe we're going to see eventually goggles and glasses and then lenses, and then within our lifetimes, we'll see people replacing their eyeballs with bionic eyes. Like, I believe that that is. I truly believe that that's the trajectory that the metaverse sets us on now. Like, I don't necessarily think that it's going to be dystopian or that's going to happen overnight, could be decades long trajectory to get to an actual metaverse. But I think that people cannot underestimate how significant of a moment will be in human history if we actually transition into a metaverse faring civilization. Like, we will not be able to think of identity in the same way. We'll not be able to think of, like, the real world will have to conform to the metaverse if we think that the mobile Internet changed the world. I think people simply can't imagine what the metaverse is going to do.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that's we are really at the start of a very fascinating era.

I don't know how much time you have, but the history of virtual worlds is extraordinarily fascinating. And it's also the most well documented and well researched part of this entire thing. Right? Video games across web 3, across everything, right? They've existed since the late 80s. We know a lot about how humans interact with these worlds and how real and how they perceive them as real. We also know about a lot of the dangers. So, for example, when I read that Horizon, Facebook's new virtual world, that they had a groping problem on day one, I thought I literally just gave a talk about this. The first landmark piece of virtual worlds literature was a piece published in the Village Voice called the Rape in Cyberspace in 1993. It was published by Julian Dibble, and I recommend you read it 1000%. It's completely essential reading. But we know a lot about the dangers, we know a lot about the opportunities. All of my ideas, they're not just being born in a vacuum. It's because, you know, I know what it's like to own virtual land. Because me and my brother spent two years playing Ultima Online when we were teenagers, and we spent six months trying to get a house in Ultima Online. When we got it, it was one of the most exhilarating experiences I've ever had with technology. To this day, I don't think that there's ever been an experience with technology that has surpassed that moment when we finally got a house in Ultima Online. So we know a lot about what the experience is going to be like. Sure, there's things we don't know. How the economy will work when these worlds are interoperable, how will interoperability work? But in terms of the human experience, there's an enormous amount that we already know. And so people have no excuse to feign ignorance when some of the worst things come true. Because, you know, like in the game world, I think this was in a TV show. So now more people heard about this. But like, there's a term called time to penis, right? Which is how long does it take between the time you provide users with user generated content tools to the time that it takes for them to create something explicit, right? And it's like a few minutes, a few hours at most, right? So, like, the reason I bring it up is just like, we know how people will are going to interact in these. We know like what a lot of the implications are. And so if there's one thing, it would be to encourage your readers to research, to read some of the literature on virtual worlds or to include some of that yourself. But a lot of answers are already there and just to like, provide like a little bit of context as to why that is. Like, you understand when virtual worlds came into existence in the late 80s, they solved an enormous problem for researchers, which was that they provided a simulation with willing human participants that dialed in for years, months or years at a time. Right. And you could tweak the variables and also monitor inside those worlds in real time. And this was something that had never existed. So everything from psychologists to linguists to anthropologists to theologists have all dived in and published incredibly compelling research into this space. And Ralph Coster, the guy who I mentioned earlier, he gave a talk in the Game Developers Conference and he said he was once brought in by Mark Zuckerberg shortly after the Oculus acquisition and he was interviewing for a job there. And he gets to the final interview with Mark Zuckerberg, and Mark says to him, spent all this time like asking you questions like, what's one of your questions for me? And the first thing Raf says is, what do you think are the ethical implications of mass social virtual worlds? And what Mark said to him was, what implications? Right. And so like, to me, that's scary because, like, we know that there's implications. Like another thing that Raf said in that same talk was there is not a single large scale commercial virtual world that does not have both the FBI and the suicide hotline on speed dial. Because you can imagine the kinds of people that are most enticed to dial into these worlds. They're people that maybe live in a part of the country that's not very exciting, or they maybe they live in households that are not very engaging or rich or healthy. Right. Maybe like their real world just is kind of shitty, to be honest. Right. And so when they start to invest in these virtual worlds and they start to develop these, like, rich emotional connections, these become their connections, these become their real world. And so, like, we cannot treat that lightly like people, you know, and so that's why I always point to people, to the history of virtual worlds, because there's a lot of answers there. There's a lot of things to be excited about, but there's also a lot of things in that history that are very, very scary. If you start to extrapolate it to a metaverse.

Yeah, no, I think that's a very good point. But yeah, thank you so much, Benjamin, for your time and input. I really appreciate it.

Great. Thank you so much, Mark.

All right, thank you. Bye. Bye.

And that wraps up the conversation with Benjamin Bertram Goldman. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is the need for unique identifiers in the metaverse, and that we should do whatever it takes to avoid that one person or one company can control our metaverse identity. I completely agree with that, which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss at length how identity will change in the metaverse and what we should do to ensure that we don't end up in a dark, dystopian future. 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.