Why We Must Be More Human in the Metaverse with Vincent Hunt - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP11

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 Vincent Hunt. Vincent is an American entrepreneur and senior experience architect with over two decades of experience in the digital domain. His work weaves experience, design, web3 and the rapidly emerging ideas, concepts and technologies collectively known as the Metaverse to deliver moments of truth across multiple realities for visionary brands. Vincent envisions a future where brands and the experiences they deliver will live across multiple realities, blurring the lines between the physical and the virtual world. During the interview, we discussed how companies can build loyalty with icommerce and the steps brands need to take if they want to enter the Metaverse. We also covered how the Metaverse will change education or marketing, and how the Metaverse will change the future of work. Enjoy the conversation.

Maybe to kick it off, can you share a bit about how you are involved with building the Metaverse?

Yeah. So me personally, like the Metaverse in its concept actually started way back in. And when I say way back, it seems like so long ago, Right. But it was like in 2003 when I was introduced to a platform called Second Life, right? So for me, I've always been in the digital space. I actually, I've been in the space for 25 years. I actually started my very first company about 25 years ago in web and digital. And so when Second Life came, and if you can remember, around that time, 2003, we were also being introduced to social media, right? Twitter was starting to get a lot of traction, Facebook was in the mix. You had all these moving parts. But for me, Second Life was like this whole new paradigm where now all of a sudden we're going from web sites to web places, right? And so long story short, and that I actually created a business in world and was doing commerce in world, you know, leveraging lending dollars and all this cool stuff so fast Forward till today. So I continue my career, of course, in the digital space, doing a lot of design as it pertains to, like, web Design, immersive design, VR, AR, all these things. And now all of a sudden, the conversation around the metaverse springs back up and I'm like, okay, now it's time, right? And so for me, it's a matter of really doubling down on my belief system as it pertains to where we're going, as pertains to this next iteration of the web, which is the metaverse. Instead of, of course, websites, we're going to web places, more ambient web, where now the web is all around you all the time, and of course, all the other nuances that come with the metaverse. The metaverse is pretty tricky, and it's really, really complex because I don't look at it linear, I look at it dimensionally. And there's different layers to the metaverse, Right? This is the metaverse. This is a piece of it. Right. So we've always been here, but then it does traverse into different layers, deeper immersion, so on and so forth. So my involvement is really all around exploring and thinking about how we're creating experiences where the experience architecture intersects with what's now being like the metaverse. Right. So there's a lot of things that I'm working on, a lot of different projects and stuff. So that's where I kind of sit.

Okay. And can you describe the metaverse in.

One sentence, what it means for you in one sentence? That's going to be tough here. Let me see if I can do it. I mean, quite simply, the metaverse is the next evolutionary step of the web. Yeah, that's the easiest way to kind of define it, the next evolutionary step of the web as we know it. Right. Because from there it gets a lot more complex.

Well, why does it get more complex from there on?

It gets more complex because, again, there's a lot of moving parts. Right. When you think about the metaverse being persistent, one. Right. Every web experience that we've had up until this point, there's a start and end to it. It's like you go to a website, you come out of the website, the metaverse is persistent, and it's all things. Right? It's not one thing. So, for instance, if we think about it from the context, I think the best analogy to use is like an avatar. If I have an avatar that's living in one platform, there should be the ability for that avatar to traverse to other platforms. Right? So the ability to have that kind of bridge in between platforms, that's part of it, right? Again, that in itself is complex. When you start thinking about, you know, immersive worlds as a whole, I think my biggest piece of it is because a lot of my work, and this is. You're probably one of only 12, in fact, you're one of 13 people who is about to hear kind of like where I'm going when I start thinking about metahumans, AI, machine learning, the culmination of those three. And when you start thinking about. And this is going to be a little deep and weird, when you start thinking about the idea of immortality, right. It's very, very interesting. So for me, as an experienced designer, what greater experience could you create than the preservation of ideas and life that are embodied inside of people through these technologies, AKA metaverse, right. So I think a lot of people have their different segments, their different pieces that they're interested in. That's my piece. And that's why it gets complicated, because there's so many different pieces. Web3. Web3 is part of it, right? NFTs, that's part of it. When you think about VR, that's part of it. AR that's part of it. XR, that's part of it. Like all these different parts all coming together, right? So that's why it gets complex. And I don't think there's one easy way to describe it. Every definition that I've ever seen that's meaningful is like a whole thesis. It's not like, you know what I'm saying, It's not like two or three lines, is it? It's like a whole white paper on what it could be. The best definitions that I've seen, right? So that's why it gets more complex.

Okay, maybe that makes total sense to me. So how do you think that organizations can benefit from the metaverse? And not so much just the metaverse, but also linked to the metaverse, where we have like I Commerce or immersive commerce, Digital fashion, digital product. How can brands benefit from this?

Oh, wow, brands. That's a huge one. I'm actually working with a couple of brands right now. One of the most major, matter of fact, I actually go to Atlanta, Georgia on the 1st of the month and we're talking about. Because Thurgood Marshall College Fund, which serves a lot of HBCUs all over the country in the United States, and they do a lot of programming in the space of entrepreneurship and innovation. So this is just one example where Thurgood Marshall now can extend its programming into the Metaverse where we start talking about taking what was once physical events now into VR and having more immersive events. So I'm super, super excited about that. That's one. And we start thinking about the Metaverse and education and brand. Right. Another way that I see brands using the Metaverse is again, building better connections with their consumers or the people, the loyal people that are connected to them. We start to see a little bit NFTs.

I think we're going to see more.

Of it NFTs in NFTs as brands start to realize, oh, wait a minute, so our biggest fans can actually buy NFTs, have deeper access to the things that we're doing. Web3 becomes the backbone of these things and we can extend deeper experiences. Yeah, absolutely right. So there's tons of implications as it pertains to brands. Brands who are not thinking about this are probably doing the wrong thing right now. It's kind of like not thinking about social media or the web in general. You know what I'm saying? It's really that big. And this isn't just hype. This is like again, I look at it as the next evolutionary step of what the web is now. Like it's moving into this. So the Metaverse is just a really, really cool name for again, this evolution of step that we're about to take.

And so what steps do brands need to take if they want to move into the metaverse?

They need to rethink everything. They need to rethink everything. Like even, like the solution providers that they use. Because here's the catch 22. Like, even with cause I have a company called Better Better, we do web design and brand identity. We had to spend six months of education for releases that we'll do at the very first part of next year. So for us, because we do brand identity, for instance, one of the. We call it the Metazian, our Metazician services or Metaverse transition services. How do you transition to the Metaverse? So now though, we offer brand identity design. Right now you'll purchase that as an nft. Right. So every brand that we do ends up as an nft. That's one piece, right. Another piece is when they come in for like a web design, we also start talking to them about digital twins of their meeting spaces in the real world, in world. So it's not only their website, it's also how they'll live in platforms like Spatial or Meta Space and things like that, or Metaverse and places like that. So for us, as a company, we had to embrace that. So you asked the question, what do brands need to do? Start looking at the. As it pertains to solution providers. It's not going to be your usual suspects anymore. You've got some people that were kind of like standing on the sidelines waiting for this moment that you may have to pick up and start thinking about how do we leverage their services to get us into the metaverse? Because they're there, right? They're thinking further than just the traditional companies that are still stuck saying, what is the metaverse? Right?

Yeah.

So there's a lot of smart people out there.

So would it also mean then embracing Generation Z and Alpha into getting to into the metaverse?

Without a doubt. Without a doubt. They got to start thinking longer tail because. And I think you just hit on something really, really interesting. Like the generations that are following our generations is kind of like already embedded in them, like through the games that they play. The fact that they were born into information is one thing, right? Like when you start to notice, like, little bitty kids pick up an iPad and use it easier than most adults just telling you something. Right. Brands need to start really thinking about, you know, what are the touch points, the true touch points, moving forward and what are those touch points going to look like. Right? Brands are going to have to do weird stuff like create games. It's going to be a really interesting thing moving forward because the way that they connect and the way that they interact with people is going to be fundamentally different moving forward.

Very exciting, though, to be honest. From an education perspective. How will the metaverse change education and what new opportunities will arise in this field?

So the brands that I'm working with right now that, that I own, you have better design company than we have. Future Not Academy. Future Not Academy is my vision or my iteration of what education may look like. Moving forward. Again, we don't know. We're all explorers right now. There are no experts. There's a bunch of exploration going on. So for us, Future not will be the very first Academy that's built 100% in XR. Right? And we'll be doing training around or development around, of course, future, what we call future finance, which is like crypto, defi, so on and so forth. We'll also be talking about what we call meta ethics, like what should we be thinking about as we move forward as human beings into the metaverse? So there's some curriculum and things that we're creating specifically for VR xr experiences that are fundamentally different than anything that we've done before, but it also creates a model and it. And for me, I think it should provoke educators to say, how can we educate in a more immersive kind of way? Instead of a field trip being something that we all go get on a big bus and go somewhere, what if it's a situation where we're already operating in virtual reality academies and a field trip is basically all of us going somewhere in virtual reality, engaging with each other, connecting, learning about different places. So I think that the technology is right, I think the timing is right for education to really start rethinking itself. Because you remember the big movement like MOOCs, massive online learning. I never believed in that because I still believe human beings like to get and connect with each other. And now when you start thinking about how this applies to the metaverse, being able to connect groups of people inside the metaverse, inside of VR, is a completely different experience that I think that we're all going to like, touch bases on. So education is definitely getting hit. Everything is going to get hit by this. In the circles that I run in, I say it's really negligent if you're not researching or if you're not thinking. So it's that kind of thing that I think about persistently. You know, how are we rethinking the things that we do now? And I think Covid was like, the whole Covid thing was kind of like a dawn into it. As crazy as Covid was and is, it really started pushing us to the edges of the technologies that we've already had, Right?

Yeah.

Now rethinking them, and now the conversation around the metaverse gets bigger and even gets more velocity.

Yeah. So if you say, you know, everything will get hit, I want to focus obviously on the field that you are involved in. And if I understood correctly, marketing is one field. How is marketing going to change? You know, we already talked about brands and branding, but how is the job of the marketeer going to change?

I think the job of the marketer is going to change in the sense that now they have to think more dimensionally than they do. Like right now, marketers, if you think about it, and the major platforms that we play in, I'm getting some power here. The major platforms that we play in, it's never been dimensional. Now all of a sudden it's going to be dimensional. Right. It's in the spaces, in the places that we live, work and play all the time. So if that becomes the case, we have to really rethink how we're creating Content, where that content lives, how people are accessing that content, the capabilities of that content. Because now content can have utility when you think about NFTs, right? So as marketers, we have a big job in front of us to really, really dip into our creative and really kind of figure out new ways and new paradigms to engage people, to enlighten them, to delight them and connect them to the brands that we serve. So for marketers, our job is cut out for us. It's going to be really, really huge in the sense that we really have to think about, you know, how we're creating content and where that content lives persistently.

You know, as a trained marketeer myself, you know, it will be exciting to see where this field is going from that perspective.

Yeah, for sure. Like NFTS was like a big explosion of like a super head rush all of a sudden. Like all of us touched it in some way, shape or form. But NFTs I think is going to take on a very, very different shape in the next six months to a year. It's going to be fundamentally different how we see NFT showing up. I think I did a post on Instagram one day around the Air Jordan brand, right? I'm just poking at them, right? I'm like one thing that happens a lot with like sneaker drops and this is just one example with sneaker drops you have people who want to get the brand new Jordans a sneaker. It drops, right? But they can't get it because it sells out quickly. I really see a day where there will be premium NFT sold to people where they will actually have access to the web three layer of Nike and they'll always get their sizes right. This is the new paradigms. When you start thinking about NFTs, the utility that's connected to it and how that actually impacts marketing and what we do as it pertains to like spreading.

Ideas and messages and therefore also brings loyalty and creates loyalty.

Huge loyalty, Huge loyalty. Because now all of a sudden human beings are interesting. We're kind of basic, right? If you give me a token that allows me to have access and it gives me a sense of exclusivity, I'm in, I'm in now, right? You've got me forever at that point. So I think where we're going to start seeing is greater wealth. The brands that do it, right are going to be able to create new channels of loyalty. Deeper, like, deeper immersion as it pertains to the people that actually do business with them on a regular basis. And I think that connection point is going to be profound.

Yeah, I couldn't agree more with you. So, but also in the real world, we have reputation, which is crucial as people navigate society. But how will reputation work in the metaverse? How do we ensure that you can take the reputation from one platform to another, which is not possible in web 2.0. So how will that work in web 3.0?

Yes. So reputation is a big deal. You know what the thing about it is, I think we've always been moving to a time where we all have to get more human. This is what I understood back in 2002, and this is why I love Second Life so much, because all of a sudden, it was no longer just Vince clicking on his keyboard, dropping like a tweet or just dropping a Facebook post, was it? It was Vince's avatar, full in all of his glory, standing in front of another avatar, having a real conversation in a real space. Your human skills got to go way up. Right. So the way these brands interact, it can no longer be like just the schedule, like content schedule. Right. I can remember going to Mercedes Benz island on the inside of Second Life and having a super dope experience with the team in Mercedes Benz doing a. What do you call it, a research, a test on a new model that was coming out. They were showing it inside a Second Life first. Right. And I was like, that's awesome. Right. But they had to be real people, they had to have real conversations, and they had to really, really connect with us in more meaningful kinds of ways. So the workload is going to increase. Right. EQ has to go through the roof. If you don't have good emotional intelligence moving into the metaverse, you're jacked. Right. I think it's people like Gary V that's been really, really, like, talking about empathy and all the stuff that we tend to forget when it's business as usual. That stuff is about to come to the forefront real, real big, and I'm excited about that. So as Reputation, you're going to have to be more authentic than you've ever been in the metaverse, because it's going to be a lot more transparent.

Yeah, that's a good one. That's a very good one. And so what are some of the other use cases that we can expect in the metaverse?

This is like, for. As a creative, you know, this, like, as a creative, we just got the reins taken off. What can't we do? I honestly, like, you really have to think about what can't we do. The question Isn't like what can we? It's the like what can't we? Because we can do virtually anything. When you start thinking about like VR, AR, like at forever Creative. At Forever Creative we create world anchor augmented reality experiences. We have a whole cartoon that's about to be living in the world around us. Right. Like we were never able to release cartoon. Imagine Pixar being all around you versus on the screen.

Yeah.

What if the movie is in a space in a place? Right. So now all of a sudden we're going to see some really, really interesting use cases. I think the creative is going to bubble to the top, which to me I think is huge and important. When you start thinking about like AI and machine learning, everybody gets weird. Like it's taking the jobs from the humans. This whole time I've been preaching if you're not building up your creative confidence and your creative intelligence, you might get screwed. Because at the end of the day that's all that's going to matter. Because everything else we have tools for that. Right. And those who can be creative enough to actually move those tools, to wield those tools powers in the earth, those are going to be the new leaders, the ones who have the creative capacity to blend these tools and these resources and these capabilities to do extraordinary things, things that we've never seen before. So I'm excited about that.

Yeah, yeah, I can imagine so. A couple of years ago I wrote an article about that because of AI taking most of our jobs, the next age is not called the. So we currently live in an information age. Then the next age would be the imagination age because it's all about what you can imagine. And I think that that's more and more coming true.

I love that I might go tweet that when I come off of social media lockdown. I've been on social media like now for 30 days. I usually say no social media in November, so. But yes, I agree with you man. I think that we are in the dawn of the imagination age. We saw like how huge gauntlets were like laid down with NFTs. Right. I'm not bullish right now in the NFT space as it pertains to like all these NFTs that are being created, being sold. Right. The value is very speculative to me. I think we're going to move to a space of utility. Yes, I love all the creative output that's happening. But events right now, today where we release the nft, I would not recommend that you buy that. I'm not sure how much value Unless it's deeply utilitarian. Right. If I created a deeply utilitarian nft. Yes. I'm talking about Vince, the designer. If I create something and I'll put it out there, you buy it today, I'm not sure what's going to happen to that a year from now. I'm just being honest. Right. Unless it has some deep utility. Right. It might be a pretty profile pick for now, but do not spend a whole bunch of money on it.

Yeah.

So for me I'm a little bit, I look at utility based NFTs, gaming utility, NFTs and things like that is what I look at. But how this like weaves into this idea of the imagination, right. We are going into a time where if your imagination is suffering, right, you're gonna find it real hard because everything else can be automated. I can create just about everything else using AI MI and machine learning.

So if everything's gonna get automated and it's all about the imagination, how will that change the future of work?

Oh, the future of work is drastic. I mean we're, we're headed towards one of the biggest like crunches ever. Like seriously, a lot of people are about to get displaced simply because one, a lot of the systems like, right, we're feeling it right now, we're feeling it right now. Coming off of the dawn of like coming out of COVID all the people that are like not going back to work, you think that that's like a temporary, that's not temporary. Like this is when they say the new norm. This stuff is about to get really, really interesting. I think that, you know, automation and machine learning, AI, all these tools, all these things that have always been our disposal now actually going like super like volatile now because things are like pumping up. It's going to change a lot. And I think people really need to start rethinking what work looks like for them. Right. And like for real rethink it and not kind of because kind of can actually get you stuck in the middle and you don't really want to get stuck in the middle. So I think we all need to rethink what work looks like moving forward.

And how will that impact in our cultures and you know, ethics and for people at work, you know, whoever, if everyone working remotely and being creative, how does that change that?

I would say on an arc of about 15 to 20 years, 10, 15, 20 years, you're going to see some radical changes, radical changes. And everybody won't go remote. I think we'll see true hybrids, like true Hybrids, not fake hybrids. Right now we got a lot of fake hybrids because people are still holding on to the old stuff and that's why they can't retain people and people ain't coming back to work. It's like the cycle, right? You see it all happening. And until leaders and I have a lot of conversation with leaders and I talk about they need to get serious about what their hybrid models look like. Right? People figured out they could stay at home and be just as productive. Them coming to sit in your cubicle seems like torture, right? It just does. So what are we going to do differently, right? So, man, 10, 15, 20 years from now, the game is going to change dramatically. It just is. We're on the beginning of something truly like huge, like Herculean huge. And people who aren't paying attention and really, really taking note, they're going to get caught in the shovel and it's going to be torture getting out. Like we saw when the web first came, remember, there was like the digital divide, then like social came. There was a little bit of pain, but not too much pain because everybody kind of slowly started like sheepling, like into that. This change is going to be so big, like the leap forward is going to be so big that the catch up will not be like it was from web to like social. It's not going to be like that. Right. It's going to be fundamentally different. So what we're going to see 10, 15, 20 years from now is going to be way, way different. Way different how? It's going to like, affect things, like from an ethical standpoint. And all these are the things that we research and we ponder and we think about. We don't know. I wish I could give you like a crystal ball and say, this is what's going to happen. I don't know because there's very, like, nuanced things that happen. I can remember back in like second life, I remember how EQ emotional intelligence was on a completely different level with the people that were inside that world, right? I was like, whoa. The level of mental bandwidth that you need to process all these conversations in real time, real fast and show up as authentic you takes a whole nother level of rigor, right?

Yeah.

Now along with that comes a whole bunch of stuff. Right? Now, all of a sudden, people can create what they want to create and express themselves the way they want to express themselves. The metaverse gives us this canvas of absolute, endless possibility of everything, both good and bad. So how we govern ourselves moving forward is going to be deeply Important. It just is.

And so, from a bad perspective, what are the dangers of the metaverse?

That's a deep one. I can give you a story, right. I can remember it was 2004, 2005, in Second Life, as a team Satori Spire, I had a whole studio in world called Satori Spire Studios. So Satori Spire Studios, we were really, really close knit team. People from all over the world working, building, creating brand and building buildings. Cool. It was cool stuff. And I remember getting a notification that there was an island where all the avatars were children and then there were adult avatars engaging with these children. Yes. So again, both was good. There's also bad. Right. We can create whatever we want to create. And if this is the fantasy for enough people to create enough critical mass and they create this experience in the metaverse, it will exist now, whether you agree with it or not agree with it. It's a little bit touchy for everybody, Right? So the way that we actually did a protest, it was crazy. We actually protested in the way that we did a protest is we had. We called up as many of our friends as we could in Second Life, and everybody teleported to the island at one time. And what that did is it crashed. The bandwidth crashed. It just brought everything to a halt. And then when everybody got booted out, we just did it again. We just did it persistently for like a day. So these kinds of things are coming. Right. When you start thinking about us being rather through our avatars or in these digital spaces, digital worlds, you're going to run into both sides the longer you immerse yourself. Right. That's just one story. There was many stories on the bad side. Right. But then there was. There were even more good stories on the good side of everything.

Awesome.

That was happening too. We're human beings and we're messy and weird, and this is where we're going. So I really believe whoever creates, I don't know if it's created yet or not, but the Meta Ethics Council, that really, really kind of dials into stuff like that, I don't know, that needs to super, super exist now. And really smart people need to be having really, really smart conversations around how does these things look, you know, moving forward without being authoritarian or policing too much, but at the exact same time creating at least some type of system of order of some kind so that we can all move together as human beings in a healthy fashion. So that's my take on it.

That's a nice final closing statement.

Absolutely. There needs to be more information, more smart people putting content out there and delivering insights for us. And I'm super, super excited about what you're doing.

Awesome.

And that wraps up the conversation with Vincent Hunt. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the conversation, it is that in the Metaverse, we need to become more human if we want to fully benefit from the immersive Internet. Human skills and empathy will become more important. And I completely agree. Which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I discuss the importance of human centric design in 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.