Realm, a mixed reality NFT: an interview with the founders

the valuart podcast three one welcome back to the valuart podcast eddie izzy and mark here uh we're into like no month month six week six feels like month six we're into week six now the podcast um i'm not going to spend too much time in this introduction because we've got a really great conversation coming up that we'll uh we'll get into in a moment um how's it going is what's going on in your world have you how's the stoner cat how's uh reggie stoner cat's doing great reggie's doing great he's our favorite cat still um never letting go of him do you have other cats no no no no i had to keep my my hands are tied so i can't go cat shopping but um reggie you know still with me yeah what a week it's been like last week when we were having our podcast the largest crypto hack happens in i know we got off the podcast and i was like how did we not cover this but it was kind of happening when we were recording so tell me about it what happened so the poly network attack where over 600 million worth of crypto was drained yeah can you believe that like that's insane it really is insane like for me the bodily attack seemed insane but now that's like water to me like this is vodka that was water um first of all i'm happy that it wasn't it wasn't uh matics uh that was hacked because i was like when people were talking about i was like oh it's polygon like coin yeah token or whatever i was like oh i hate absolutely what happens but it wasn't that that was confusing for like 10 minutes and then um but then yeah the hacker was giving back the the assets that were scrolling why what the i know i know so yes it's uh not polygon it's a poly network so thankfully your investment hasn't been touched by that yeah but um so the poly network already advised i mean i don't think they had to like advise but like the finance smart chain ethereum and and the poly block chains they they were aware of it so they did kind of like block the funds in time but i think it was more a matter of slow missed you know saying that they had the ip and fingerprints but 600 million holy in a funny turn of events i've just read that they've actually asked the hacker to become their chief security advisor is this a film is this a hollywood film seriously yeah i've just read that on um admittedly on cnbc but apparently yeah he's holding back 200 million until everybody is ready and the poly network have promised the hacker a half million bounty for the restoration of user funds and offered a chief security adviser role but in the real world this guy gets arrested and then imprisoned his life like or her life like whoever it so i know and this this is wild like um a project like uh a platform i found out about last week that i shared with you guys was amunify.com where they actually offer bounties right if you find out some um you know bugs or anything yeah in your codes yeah so this is becoming a thing like if you go on their website you can see there's like bounties that are worth like millions and uh definitely insane but like you mentioned this is definitely something that we're gonna be seeing more often in the next few months and they're saying that this can actually lead to innovation and having a more um you know safe space in 12 months from here but i can't wait to see like this person identified and like do a a formal um onboarding in this company that's that's crazy how did you join yeah i just i stole a bunch of so they had to they had to hire me so it's cool though i think i think if it ends up being if it ends up being ultimately positive that's great but it was for a moment there it was scary touch and go yeah like i i was definitely scared for you know it makes you think uh about your other investments like am i going to wake up tomorrow morning yeah and be hacked but i guess that's the risk you're willing to take when when you do invest so you know but definitely it's a wake-up call for right better security protocols in in the months to come so yeah curious to see where that goes any other news you want to touch on before we just jump right into the conversation with uh with matt and jobin jobonne yeah well um definitely this week we've seen cardano as a key protagonist i'm excited i know last week and they released their alone so up update alone sir alonzo yeah alonzo and that's the smart contract update right exactly that's a smart contract update thanks to which you know they can actually they've been known as the competitor of ethereum yeah yeah for a long time and i think this is going to really put them in the place to like definitely compete and who knows maybe surpass them would you say it's still a time to buy or is it kind of like since it's already you you believe that it's gonna hit four dollars right i think it's gonna hit four dollars in the next two weeks so do you think now's the time to buy and and then or do you think you should wait if there's not gonna be any resistance or i think that it's gonna crash afterwards it's gonna crash um but definitely like if you wanna buy right now it's still like i guess it's still two dollars now i would definitely buy do you know anything about the alonzo update in the smart contracts like what kinds of uh is it comparable to ethereum oracle or ethereum smart contracts is it the same exact thing will be a smart contract it will operate work in the same way the theory of it's the the 12th or the 11th of september so alonso has phases and there's going to be a final phase at the beginning of september september 10th 11th which will i think it'd be another hard fought which will make it completely viable for smart contracts to operate and then people will start building adapts and was there anything else from last week that we were supposed to catch up on or is there anything else you want to mention before we uh we hop into the uh the full conversation with everybody so but other than that i mean i'm right i'm definitely excited to hop on to our yeah yeah yeah me too so to uh give everybody some context for the upcoming for for this uh today's episode and our guests i'll i'll break it down for you real fast we're gonna have two guests on today matt and joe bond from realm my understanding of realm is they're creating a metaverse of microverses giving their users the ability to basically create their own little spaces within the microverse that they can move through via these portals and you have total flexibility and control over what your space looks like a space to say for example a valuart had a micro verse within realm we might have a little gallery where you can go and see our nfts where you can go and see spike on display you can move through the space and and socialize and there's also a game component of it which is they're breeding virtual pets and you sort of capture them i don't know if you actually capture the pets or if you buy the pets i don't know how it works it's all really new and it hasn't really launched yet but as far as i know breeding pets like actually infinity is is part of is one component of a realm and we're going to be talking to these guys today about how this came to be what inspired them some of the complications within this decentralized metaverse uh and the the developments of this area or this realm for lack of better words uh so i'm excited to talk to them and um i think it's going to be a nice conversation so let's let's bring them on cool all right so let's just do a brief introduction and then we'll formally kick things off so welcome matt and joe bond to the podcast uh we're excited to talk to you guys um mark's been sharing some stuff about realm with us and it seems like a great project so i can't wait to get into it with you um we were just talking about this a moment ago but tell us where you're at because you guys are not together right now right you're in separate locations so where are you at now um i'm in the north of england sort of on the edge of the yorkshire dales um currently sort of connecting to you not um via an antenna that sort of beams down to a local sort of mobile power um station yeah so we don't really uh hopefully the internet will hold up well yeah okay hopefully yeah i'm in bristol uk in the in the southwest uk nice very nice nice we uh we had some quite a bit of focus on uh a bristol-based artist these first couple launches of our podcast uh on our backseat yeah is that do you have any this is a bit of a tangent i guess but do you have any uh personal uh association with the with the brand no no no no i know some of the they're looking at that kind of circle but never never banks himself oh cool that's that's cool okay so um well guys let's just start with something let's just start with something simple introduce us to realm introduce us to the project you're working on and tell us a little bit about how you guys met each other and uh and what you're what you're doing with realm yeah um so jeremy and me uh sort of we've known each other for i don't know quite a long time maybe like 12 13 years uh we previously set up a business which was we made like an internal positioning system um we used to lose each other and like friends at kind of concerts and stuff like this so we you know figured out how to position people and then connect them with spaces and sort of give them information about kind of what was happening in the space where their friends were and then sort of stretched it to kind of like having drinks and things like this delivered to where you were um we eventually like uh sold that business to a tech billionaire i had like a large property portfolio and then yeah we've been sort of working on separate things for maybe a year or so and then we started um we were playing around in like decentral land and other metaverses and we were just kind of a little bit underwhelmed with sort of where they were at um i guess the user experience was like pretty poor it's quite difficult a lot of people were sort of stuck with this meta mask like hurdle really um and obviously then there's the whole difference is that everyone's kind of on mobile phones um that's where most the traffic was coming from so it's like can you create a metaverse that would sort of run really well on a phone um use some of the phones sort of native technologies like augmented reality to sort of bridge the gap between what's digital and what's kind of real um and yeah and then we tried to sort of uh analyze what a metaverse would look like and none of us could agree and then we sort of came up with the concept of of realms which was essentially your own sort of virtual space and their kind of disparate spaces they might be stylistically completely different um but you have a lot of control maybe there's gravity in in your realm there isn't in someone else's maybe one's underwater somebody else's space is in space and you know things like that and that's kind of how we've uh arrived where we are now that's okay so that's a lot to unpack and i have several questions already but do you either of you guys have a background in development or was it more of like business um growing business like when you met and you had this idea for this place this geo placement yeah was that yeah i've i've had a um i've had a technical background for some time um bridging kind of um it was more like web development initially um and then obviously we moved into applications um like native applications a lot and then i kind of have gradually just moved more into um management really over the years okay so what was the that conversation like in the beginning to approach something like uh ar vr and and did you have any experience previously with building apps for ar yeah we had actually done some quite cool um so obviously we were locating people in spaces um and you know that was a product we were kind of launching we had like 2d maps and then we started developing it into having a 3d map and like looking around you and we were kind of we never we never made a commercial product out of it but we had the plan to you know sell virtual advertising and all this and it was quite honestly in line with what we're doing now but um more linked to the physical world around you and now we've got rid of all those constraints of hardware and you know buildings etc now we can literally just kind of run wild with it which is awesome um so was the original conversation about that led to realm was it about making a business or was it just about exploring this new avenue of uh or taking what you guys did before and exploring what you could do with it in the metaverse um i mean i guess like our previous company was six years we were working there and there was a bunch of staff and then you know we sold it it was a pretty decent exit made a bunch of money i set up some other startups afterwards and we were building kind of an out of home like smart machine that made lots of different types of water uh every year on highland spring whatever you wanted and then the uk got shut down completely so i was like really quite burnt by anything in like the physical world um and it was kind of like when we were looking at nfts overall it just felt sort of wrong so we're apparently at the peak of like artistic creation or this digital art which is programmable that can do all these different things and the the level of a creativity and the way people were sort of consuming or or discovering it was still ebay two decades ago tiny little windows you know basically renders still renders or videos um you know of these scenes that these artists are creating and it just felt like we surely were missing a point here like surely we can like just hop in and be much more experiential and you know maybe explore these in different ways um yeah so like that's kind of like how we approached it and i think like we played games quite a lot so it's sort of i don't know there's this cross between our fashion social networks all kind of intermingling into kind of hopefully what will be a sort of a casual gameplay where some people explore some people create spaces and other people sort of probably just have loads of really expensive art and show it off well so before we actually started recording uh joe bond had mentioned um how important the plate to earn and kind of giving everybody the same opportunity to put in the time to earn is for your platforms could you talk a little bit about that and about like the the reasoning or the philosophy behind that rather than it being like sp specifically about the marketplace and the assets and yeah the speculation i mean fundamentally it comes from if you're going to create a digital universe try and solve the problems that we've you know we've got in this reality so um you know everything's owned by basically 0.01 of the people on the planet so can you one distribute a bunch of the tokens so 25 of the tokens the currency or the principal currency for the metaverse um will go out to people that just build realms or who spend time inside like exploring visiting new places um you know checking out new things um so that's kind of i guess one method of of transferring one both control and also economic ownership in in the metaverse and then i suppose the next thing is kind of land um so we do have we are selling some land but it's really in um like a principal metropolis area it's just like a first place you go into um that's just to try and give it a semi-normal user experience it helps with discover ability to find certain places um but then essentially once you get to like these sort of shop front type stores um it's a and it's kind of built as like a radial city so you have like the center and then you have ring one ring two and they sort of interconnect um and yeah once you get to any of these shops on these rings as such you'll basically just hop through portals into realms so we're enabling on each of those rings 50 of the portals will be paid for essentially sponsored ads a bit like you would get on google where people pay into the system and the top f you know ads are clearly adverts but then you get organic you know content that sits underneath which is basically people who may have just made their own realm for free never paid to have a slot but it gets a lot of engagement inside so and that can change quite frequently so it might be for instance that somebody makes a realm and puts on a really good exhibition and is showing a bunch of like awesome artwork and then what we'll do is we'll pull that up into essentially like a prime location um in in this kind of digital sort of real estate um and and drive even more footfall into it so i think maybe it'll be helpful to to step back and go a little bit higher level and tell us about how you guys pictured your realm and your your metaverse in the beginning like when you had that first conversation about and maybe it's even just like a stylistic conversation that you had how did that the way that you've executed realm come to be and what was that conversation like what did you what didn't you like about the central land or what did you like and what inspired you well i guess that was sort of the point right so we've got our co-founder by the way milan um is uh he's a gaming developer like he's a he's a you know young guy and he's an incredible developer um and so he's had a large part in the game's side of you know development but um we were all discussing it and we couldn't agree on what the ideal metaverse should look like and that's that's kind of the point of the microverse concept is that everybody can have completely their own world and aesthetic and rules and you know features and everything so you know i mean for my part i'm you know i'm quite sci-fi focused i love that kind of aesthetic so that would be my my realm um and you know everyone's is different and that's the idea that ultimately we want to empower people to create their vision of the metaverse i'm making um like a concept which is kind of quite out there so basically you come through a portal into essentially a white space a little bit like you would see in the matrix where they pull in all the like weapons um so you're like inside this white space you kind of all you've got is the pool behind you but you can't leave and then so then as you move forwards basically what occurs you need headphones for it really um you're basically we're using like uh the 3d game engine so as you step we just do these ever so slight contrasting like waving ripples that go out like this and then we see the reflections of the ripples and essentially you're navigating through this maze type sound and then if you think about the sh the space is like three-dimensional so you can go up or down and as you progress through we sort of take you down and start to bring in different um you know channels of the sound so we start to add in the bass and then if you move to the left you'll hear more of one channel than another um and we sort of take you through this uh exploration in this essentially like white void space and then we've got like uh if you i don't really want to give that away but there's like sort of like easter eggs in there where you actually get to see like bits of color and then eventually you'll find your way out um but you navigate through sound um so yeah you can do really interesting things like that with uh inside a game engine which is kind of um i think they're quite experiential to be honest and uh i've only read a little bit about how you guys are approaching this but giving people giving users the ability to create like that have no technical background or no development skills what what is that how do you approach that with artificial intelligence it sounds like is a major component of it but how do you imagine that manifesting in the future like what kinds of assets can be created or what kinds of flexibility is there uh at least in the next like few years a few years is a long time i mean so yeah a lot let's take it from the start i guess so where we are right now we're working with like artists who already have very well developed kind of ip like really amazing um worlds basically we can take those 3d assets um crunch them through a pipeline and make them playable spaces right so you know we've done it with kid 8 we've been speaking to some other we're doing it with a couple of other big artists and um yeah you can literally explore inside the artwork which is obviously sort of the vision we had when looking at the flat you know open sea listings etc we wanted to kind of jump into these worlds um then we're going to go on a very templated approach for for completely non-technical users so you basically select you know a type of gallery a type of space anything you want select where it is select a few colors and you pretty much regenerate the realm for you um so that's like the you know the most uh user-friendly way and then ultimately it will be a grid system with a load of kind of uh smart objects we call them so you can pull in kind of functionality just drag and drop you know an audio feed or your all your nfts appear very easily etc um video whatever and and you can kind of just build up a realm like that and then yeah i mean we've got loads of ideas about where this can go in the long run so but is there still some sense of cohesion in terms of the assets and the style across the the whole metaverse even within the microverses not necessarily honestly i mean that we right now obviously our our asset set and our kind of art style is fairly like minimalist low poly style which um which is sort of developing as we go um but ultimately i mean people could we want people to even be able to bring all their own assets in um and then obviously to monetize those assets for other users if they like them right so if i if i create you know a really cool building or or a block a building block and then everybody loves it and obviously that will be available for everyone to use so i think that's i mean we really do want to make this a user generated metaverse um in terms of everything like stylistically as well and do you guys envision like in the future becoming the metaverse or because there's a lot of conversation now saying what's going to be the metaverse or ah metaverse right so being a metaverse so part of like an ecosystem or becoming truly the metaverse that holds it all i think we have a couple of thoughts one is like it's about interoperability so if somebody say has i don't know a virtual character or something like this can they easily import it into our metaverse and could you then take that asset and sort of run into a different metaverse um and we definitely think that that's fundamental and there's you know if you look at say animoka brands or someone like that they're kind of invested in maybe eight metaverses um and that from a sort of a licensing perspective they're certainly trying to unify those metaverses together approaching brands and saying hey look partner with us and we can put you into eight spaces there's definitely some technical issues there and i would say like you probably won't ever really have um like a web-based metaverse like decentralized be able to sort of um you know operate and utilize some of the kind of higher fidelity models that you might see in a native application um so that's one issue i guess the other thing that we think about is kind of like um what we would call metaverse 1.0 or at least these decentral land etc they're quite like centralized in many ways that you go to decentraland.org and then your kind of your gateway into it is from that point um so we're kind of we've got experience building out like mobile sdks and web-based sdks so we would look to sort of um enable like a brand or a person to have their own metaverse or their realm sorry and and then be able to sort of embed that on their website embed that inside their mobile application so then there's different gateways into this metaverse um and i think it's probably inevitable that you know at some point because there's links out of these metaverses and we don't really want to take the approach of say epic or probably even facebook which is to sort of centralize the metaverse have them all own it keep all the value inside their wallet garden you know like we probably have to be quite open and realistically i think with these decentralized metaverses we'll be in a better position to battle companies which are making centralized versions if we all club together and um and enable people to sort of you know smoothly move between these different virtual spaces yeah awesome definitely in terms of like rendering as well um i would say that server-side rendering will become much more important in terms of like you could run you know looking at stadia and all these other services you know we should ultimately everything will be rendered in 4k and stream to a web browser or in any device and that's a few years away but it's going to be great absolutely so i love what matt said about clubbing together and one of the things about obviously facebooking everyone's talking about facebook in the media and their vision for it and are you in do you speak with the other decentralized meta versus is there our channels open because i think that very soon you are going to have to club together to take them on i know you'll be better positioned to take them on but you are going to need that togetherness aren't you is that something further down the road or is it something that you're actively pursuing already yeah we're definitely talking to lots of projects already um so you know ranging from projects that have characters um that are looking to sort of maybe add more utility to them create games have a 3d virtual space perhaps they're more of a 2d ip um definitely having conversations with you know like animoka and some of these other like um metaverse investors and and founders yeah it's um i think i think it it has to occur that way really um the problem you always have though is interoperability it's kind of like the main issue that you look at with royalties for instance in the nft space is that open seas royalties are not the same as some other platforms so it's kind of like that's annoying um you kind of the the future where basically someone sells something and you know in perpetuity they get paid the royalty and the license is upheld um is a great idea it's just like actually manifesting it's probably a little bit tougher um but yeah i think probably because these metaverses are quite early we'll see a lot of that occur what are some of the industries that have that have been the most eager to get into building in to the metaverse like what what are some of the verticals that you see are are clicking and what are some that are like have a lot of potential but are slow to move um [Music] i mean honestly i think they all are so like you have kind of high level artists that i know are building virtual spaces um and and you know it's kind of it's quite difficult because for them it's they're struggling with the same issues we are how do you make this thing work um you know and they have to put all this effort into sort of making it work on different devices and stuff like that and that's kind of not an ideal like thing for an artist to be doing like having to like figure out the plumbing and the you know the techie side of it it's kind of they should be doing the creative aspect um on the kind of broad business side of things you know with large large huge fashion brands um having conversations with like holding companies who own some of the largest fashion brands um trying to do kind of quasi digital physical things or experiential stuff where maybe the product's free um but it it's kind of uh you know they want a branded pair of jeans that's targeting you know 13 year olds who could never be exposed to that brand because they can't afford like the bottom end of the product which might be 200 buck handbag or something like that um so yeah there's there's those spaces and 100 musicians um there's like it will happen um the musicians are kind of i mean there's all sorts of stuff that you can do so we've built out um these things called nf ticks which are nft tickets that sit on polygon we mint them they're free they can have a piece of art attached to them they have like a virtual access token so they can get you into a realm or a virtual space at a given time that could be regular times so it might be a membership for instance um if you think about all these sort of ten thousand procedurally generated sort of pieces of art these clubs um you know having one of those nfts could act as um as essentially that token um yeah so like you know for these kind of things one of the reasons you might want to put an event on in the metaverse is that you can sort of put 50 000 tickets in 50 000 wallets which show up on lazy.com and now it's kind of steve aoki's new album that's coming out or something along these lines do you see that taking over a bigger part of artists revenue than a traditional tour or like doing a regular event a real life event well yeah because artists i mean we worked a lot with in the music space in the past and you know artists make a lot of money from the live events um the label really clears up on the other stuff and i mean at least we've we've been in this kind of unfortunate scenario for i mean in the uk we've pretty much had all live events shut for all of 18 months so i mean you know i know lots of musicians who are kind of hurting um so i think they want ways to connect with fans um maybe you know what you see is like these gateway experiences where it's kind of really low cost to get in there or they're quasi-social so you go with a couple of friends you hang out you catch some music in there you play some games i mean we've kind of seen the the beta of this with fortnite um and i guess the thing with the phone is so like we're working on some interesting stuff like inverting augmented reality so we placed you physically inside there not just as your avatar but like you inside the virtual world taking selfies of virtual objects with maybe like the artist being an avatar behind you so yeah like you can you can play around yeah you can play around with this stuff and i i mean if the glasses come out then i i don't know like it's it's a whole nother ball game which which uh the glasses you're talking about tell me tell me more like that's in like ar glasses i mean i feel is it the um yeah great ones the ray ban collab the facebook page is very bad do you see that yeah practically i think it's useful because i think we've seen like iterations of this that have just failed in the past because it still is technically impractical or the hardware's not there but do you think well yeah i mean it's it's half impractical half super creepy right like you've got the the possibility of like you know annotating the real world everyone you come into contact with facebook you know knows who knows who and you know it's it it's pretty creepy actually though and i think from a fashion perspective it's really interesting like what if we all wearing sort of green screen clothing and we have digital clothing on you know i mean it's like it's kind of interesting like the i don't know i think it's good it's yeah it's gonna be really really intriguing with the green screen clothing i was gonna say at least at that point maybe tracking will be good enough that you don't have to wear like a morph suit you could wear whatever you normally would wear and replace it on top of that yeah of course i think the thing is though you know with virtual reality is kind of where some of the like guys have gone into the metaverse and i get that i just think there's like always like an order of magnitude maybe two orders of magnitude less people willing to like strap the phone closer to their like face and fully feel locked away um so like i guess that's kind of why we're semi-focused on augmented reality is i feel like it's an underappreciated technology um if used in the right kind of spaces and at the right time and maybe not all the time it can um it can be pretty interesting and does that provide any additional complications for you guys in keeping the like things decentralized when you're buying a hardware from like facebook essentially to it's a they have so much control over how that hardware functions and how what you can do with it like does that does that mean you ultimately have to go with your own proprietary hardware at some point or doesn't matter um no so what i mean like what are broadly our approach right we're using godo which is an open source game engine we're not using any like big centralized um service providers really and um it would be the same with that which so we'd use openvr and open ar open xr although all the open forum formats that should be compatible with any any uh hardware manufacturer that's sort of the idea anyway we would never build specifically for facebook or epic or anyone got it yeah that makes sense i i'm not familiar with like the open ar vr uh world or protocol so um yeah but that makes sense yeah they're very kids growing yeah yeah what's the uh it's always gonna be the battle just like yeah these big burmese like you have all the control but i mean you know you can do things as well you could still go through all of their kind of processes and their app stores um as long as you enable the user to say own some land or um you know earn some of the token so they have like economic like control and ownership inside there and i feel like that's at least a step towards it if anything nfts have shown us that the market's like willing to accept a little bit more kind of centralized sort of services like openc etc for a bit better user experience say for instance i mean we've been seeing quite a lot of copyright takedowns on opencv yeah it's also we've been having conversations about that the last couple weeks and it's it is such a strange area to to talk about because like nobody really knows and nobody has a lot of like a good solution about how to i was picturing like being in a microverse earlier today and watching a film with my friends and wondering like what if there was like content id in my microverse just on top of everything else and i couldn't share that film with a friend because they didn't have access to it is that something that could happen in the future well that's part of why we're using godo i guess like it's no um it's certainly not as easy as as it might have been to use like a centralized engine but it literally there isn't no organization whatsoever behind it that could that could censor anything and i mean yeah we're very pro um community moderation and um don't intend to like have any kind of editorial control really on what people are doing apart you know right with a few exceptions but we do want communities don't get eddie started on copyright we'll be here all day all right yeah i don't wanna i don't wanna keep harping it's a good question though in all fairness because it's like you know it's gonna be massive at some point they're going to say hey like what are you guys doing and they'll try and shut you down or suit you um and then you just dissolve all your corporate entities and you say who you're suing um yeah yeah but yeah i wonder if like the the sort of like the quite legit funds right behind open c now means that they're a bit more amenable to these takedowns i don't know yeah yeah but you then you have like the the poly polygon punks issue like they they left ovc and just went to another platform and continued doing their thing so like those i think that will keep happening and those platforms will keep popping up uh yeah yeah yeah it's a it's a it's an area of conversation i definitely like to spend some time in but um we've talked enough about it i think on this podcast um i'm curious what you guys we'll start with joe bond how you imagine this integrating into your everyday once we've gotten past the hurdles and the awkwardness like the the teenage adolescent phase of of the microverse of the metaverse like what does it look like is it as ready player one as i picture it or is it a bit more practical and less uh hollywood i had to be fair i still do um i love the book and and the and the movies you know obviously um it's been a big inspiration and i do i hope it's that glossy honestly but we're a little aware of that but now i think um in the actually in the first like phases obviously i mean we actually still have a lot of old virtual worlds like still running you know like second life you know it's all quite weird now you know but they've been around for a long time and i and i think this met like we we tend to think of this as like the start of the metaverse but actually it's it's the start of the crypto most verses but it's not you know it's not a new concept whatsoever and then i think for now i i see it a lot of people will grind and really put their identity into it you know but i think actually you know things like events things like um experiences are probably going to be more mainstream like you know i'll enter the metaphors for a specific purpose to see something to see you know music art culture whatever to socialize but i i think like until yeah i think it's going to be more events driven or or like i agree how how long do you think it's going to take oh sorry mark no no you go you get first no i was just gonna ask um you mentioned it's gonna become mainstream right um working in virtual events um you know i i face this on a daily basis kind of like prejudice towards the metaverse uh when you think it's gonna become like more mainstream that people are going to accept it more i mean i think there's there's ux issues to overcome you know there's devices there's wallets there's all this stuff you know we've mentioned um and but you know i mean you've got some really big people you know it's like richie horton dead mouse of building stuff you know well they're like if you have big enough people building cool enough experiences then it's gonna yeah it's gonna spread right yeah i think it's also part of like an older generation just sort of dying out because the kids that are playing like roblox and and fortnight they're it's just normal they're just like this is life what do you mean yeah yeah exactly yeah there was a futurist kathy hako that you know was mentioning that her her 12 year old practically designs virtual clothing and earns thousand thousands a month and i was like whoa like sometimes i wish i was a kid at this in these times yeah it's exciting it's also it's it's one of those things that like you i think we saw it with with some of the social networks as they started like i think people had resistance to like facebook and stuff and then eventually your mom is on there and she's talking all her nonsense and it's like it will take time and they'll adapt and then it'll be normal yeah i mean the question is the kids have already moved along yeah yeah exactly they're on to something else they're back to like the regular analog world and they're over it at that point yeah so matt tell us about your ideal your version uh mark i think maybe you had a question i just wanted to go back to the the play play to earn model and how you see the events driving the the uptake more and i've just been looking at play to earn in general and obviously famously i think it's like 60 of the acts of infinity player pool is from the philippines and we look at the play to earn i don't know what you'll be able to earn on realm but we look at it through the prism of like the uk and american earnings where yeah okay you can earn some but it's pocket money but if you step out of europe and out of america these are like if you can earn 500 a thousand dollars a month on tax on infinity that's more than the average national salary of like 150 countries in the world and so i guess first of all like how easy is it going to be to build your own realm or to get playing and to get earning and playing and earning and then yeah maybe the future lies outside of of europe and then some other on to gui uh poorer countries of the world yeah for sure um so a couple of questions yes i mean we've we're pretty focused on asia as a a region korea especially in fact south korea is like incredibly developed when it comes to metaverse they have like a product called zepato there over 100 million like users built by their version of google uh mobile first metaverse does a lot of this bridging of like augmented reality um emojis and bringing you into the universe we're not quite bringing you into the metaverse but via your emoji um subtraction in that region is definitely better anywhere that's got like really um low income i mean yeah for sure i think the thing with axi is the it's really just people grinding in the east and then westerners buying these axes you know a thousand bucks to get three axes let's say to stop start off um playing and then essentially you play the game and then that money just shifts over to the east we it's kind of cool but it doesn't really i don't know we're not like a huge fan of that model we prefer it to be that basically as you explore the realm metaverse you would discover like as an algorithm which essentially says how many realm tokens you'll discover based on how much time and how many realms you visit um and essentially what we're trying to do is balance where we would bring income in so that may come from transactions that are occurring inside the realm metaverse because we bought brands inside there and then i suppose like one of the things that we've thought about with building is like at the beginning like i don't know maybe like people build some space because i know personally from the business perspective where we have quite a lot of interest from brands that want like a turnkey solution like hey can we have our shop that looks kind of like this does this and it's a bit like maybe like one of the ways this build to earn thing would work is that we would essentially just cut the community directly into that sort of uh economy so now we're just saying hey you're going to basically build this out for these people and in return they're going to be paying you like ten thousand dollars worth of realm another thing that we can do because each of the realms of erc-1155s is that say you just made some space i don't know it might be cool it might be really crap but people just go there because it's ridiculous um you know and then someone comes along they're like oh you have loads of people visit your realm or i like this and then they can just buy that realm off you instantly they can just make an offer and you can just transfer it the ownership on the on the blockchain um but yeah at the beginning i guess like there's still the easiest way that you would get these tokens is just spending time inside there and exploring um you know all facebook and any social application does is monetize your engagement um so rule one is like if you're engaging reward the individual a percentage of of the money that you're basically able to generate from that engagement well who's looking for engagement brands are looking for engagement they want to be where people are okay so now we talk to the brands and then we cut them in on that deal flow um you know and then then there's other layers to that like we say you know more advanced people may just build buildings like you know all these kids who building roblox are probably more than good enough are you guys giving your users space to to have dedicated ad space within their micro verses is that a thing is it gonna like proliferate the the actual architecture yeah we're making smart objects that uh that will basically operate as advertisements yeah if you chose to put them up you get the money yeah so you're not you're not actually doing the contact with the brands directly you're just it's sort of like how google ads work on your on your website like you just give the space this is the space for you and then you you determine what ads are run and what's appropriate uh we've got a couple of models so like obviously when when we talk about our brand collaborations we actually want to build them a you know an actual realm a world for the brand and then they can kind of use it um as a kind of extension of their of their brand identity right but um we have actually spoken to a few really interesting uh projects working on uh digital ad networks crypto ad networks basically um but there's a few challenges around getting you know the traditional kind of um traditional way that uh online adverts are served into the metaverse yeah yeah and then obviously also tracking it's gotta be a lot harder too because what is an impression in that case i guess just being within a certain proximity to the ad or it's kind of actually really good it's really easy to track yes oh really okay yeah because if you think if you imagine like a shooting game here like fortnight you ultimately know where the person's pointing yeah so where the viewpoint is so it's like you can do things that way because you can't eye track on a web page so that i guess this is essentially eye tracking you can see what they're looking at and okay yeah it's interesting wow but um yeah you can go a step further as well an advert might not be what you're conceptualizing as an advert okay like it's a digital world so anything can be an advert right i'm just thinking more of like they i'm thinking like i'm picturing they live and like how there are just these billboards that you're kind of seeing all the time and they're they're dynamic and they're changing but yeah i understand but now imagine you're wearing um like a jacket a digital jacket that's released by artifact inside there and you paid for that but the smart contract basically enables you because you're wearing it and someone sees it and they're like oh that's dope and then now they click through and they buy that jacket and now you get 10 of the cut because you're a walking billboard so now that's the kind of advertising that we're working on that's why yeah okay that's cool yeah i would love to get a cut of the stuff that i wear and support that would be awesome yeah and and i guess it's like it goes a step further it's like if the ad model is hey here's an object that you can put or turn into anything into an advert then you know the platform takes a small cut but like you know the majority of that money that's your realm so you know if you want your realm to be full of adverts then you can maybe people will be turned off by that though um you know see how it goes maybe an advert is just like another realm that's got an event going on that's just like a cool ass thing to go to so you're like hey check this out um yeah right can you explain to me because i don't have a lot of understanding of this but my um my digital assets the stuff that i have in realm or or that i purchase in realm and brought into realm that where do they where did they live and what happened are they at risk of ever disappearing like it because it's not just it's not centralized right like so if you guys were to fold those things are still available to me off off on other in my wallet like how does that work can you explain it yeah they're available in your wallet obviously they are nfts they are um i mean this is always the question they write with these materials like the interoperability of assets is pretty much non-existent but we will be you know there will be copies um on ipfs of of um essentially files and like a load of metadata um we're going to be expanding this over time honestly it's a difficult thing to you know to doing every 3d format all the time to ipfs like it just um so you know we're kind of continuously going to be improving how how that happens but yeah your assets are yours do you have any i don't know if you guys have have been in touch with anybody in developing the ips ipfs uh protocol like how how community driven is that like how much input or influence do you have over that and like how does that work in terms of um yeah designing it yeah i haven't actually reached out to them we've spoken to some other people like swarm and um a few other kind of projects yeah stack us yeah doing distributed sessions they they're those were super interesting actually they basically just got a massive aws account and they're using it in such a way that aws don't know who's doing what so it's like sort of it's decentralized in a really strange way it's really interesting it's all on aws but it's decentralized but is it can you qualify as decentralized if it's on aws like i don't know it was a really interesting concept um but yeah basically you know yeah um it's kind of it's essentially lots of people have different um have uh signed up to the service and then they host each other's work across multiple different servers um on aws yeah why what's the benefit using aws then like why not just do build something like build your own it's just nice it's just an unparalleled yeah unparalleled amount of power and and you know reach there really like that's the problem with pure ipfs services like so we're when you experience the game we're not running everything by querying ipfs because that's just like it's just not going to work it's too slow yeah so so yeah we are like running off our own servers but everything's cloned over to ipfs so that's that's kind of how it works um but i think again like as as decentralized storage servers everything it's a very fast moving space and you know within a couple of years we probably will viably be able to run entire you know real-time multi-player off offered yeah definitely wow so you've done a little bit of sustainability uh minded development i guess so i read a little bit about what you're doing with that so how how do you guys feel about the impact that the blockchain and like ethereum and bitcoin have had on on the environment and and what are you doing to to diminish that or to be where aware of that well i feel like kind of there was a bad rap really it's like oh bitcoin and ethereum are terrible for the environment and they didn't really calculate the fact that like the whole financial system has all these buildings and you know then there's all these people and the you know these people spend eight hours a day let's say doing actually finance let's be realistic it's more like half their day um they said they spend half their day like you know doing finance stuff there's a huge like carbon issue there um but ultimately like we don't like the idea of it being inefficient so we do pretty much all the processing on polygon it's like nine thousand times more efficient than um the eflair one um you know it's to the point where it it's basically negligible so we in the medivis we try to make sort of like um part of the economy or the mechanics be sustainable so there's this concept that if you plant digital trees inside like the the metaverse will send some funds to um to eating reforestation and they'll then plant like physical trees um and then the trees are like part of the economy in the you have these like real me's characters which is sort of like these 3d living nfts which is sort of your companion that you sort of like explore the metaverse with and you know they need to be fed and where do they get the food from you know it comes from plants and trees um so it's sort of like built into this like mechanism where you want to feed your pet and you know that kind of comes back into some of this play to earn where by like you know you explore you earn a few tokens and you maybe need to go and buy some fruit of somebody that planted loads of trees and ultimately this money goes out to sort of you know sustainability initiatives um and yeah at the beginning it will be going to eden reforestation um and we'll track all of the funds that get sent to them on chain via a partner called broccoli that's with a k and then yeah and then so for other realms we'll be looking to kind of do other similar things so like partner with plasticbank.com and do those guys where they'll just remove a plastic bottle from sort of the beach side it's like you know half a cent apart um so yeah i mean it just kind of people don't really want to deal with that problem they'd like to sort of pay for it and not think about it so it's kind of like why not build it into a game mechanic make it kind of fun allow people to sort of gamify this overall thing reward them for doing it um yeah and you know see let's try and at least make it sustainable um like carbon neutral if not carbon negative awesome that's really awesome i think it's great especially this early on that you're already thinking about that is great um we talked a little bit about this before we started recording but what has it been like for you guys since launch since the launch pool launch and and pre like that how how busy are you what are you doing like how how big is your team what are your days like could i add a question to that as well just because i followed yeah on telegram and i remember maybe a month ago you know telegram was pretty quiet now it's just off the chain and it's it's it's pretty insane people love the the sustainability they love the trees they love the pet side of it and they're obsessed by the tokenomics like how adding to what eddie asked how do you how are you managing the community's expectations with building the realm that you envision as well and like is there a fraction of friction between how you envision it and how the community envisage it i guess like you know it's kind of the by design of the product that we're sort of lucky in that it's sort of you get to build what you want you know inside there the hardest thing is keeping up with the expectations they they always want everything like immediately and it's like i don't know you know we scaled our team to nearly 20 engineers now um well by the time we've hired the next three guys which kind of we're speaking to we'll be at 20 engineers it's been like a very fast growth um but you still have all these different issues like making it run the way you want it to run and and things like this and then it's kind of like time zones it's really hard you know you've got people in asia you've got people in australia you've got people in the states people in europe and it's like you know delivering a good service there and and trying to answer all those questions um it's it's certainly it you could see it as friction or you can use it you can you can flip it and use it as kind of a as a tool which is more like hey so you're the the key and engaged people who want to sort of you know hear early days to build this new metaverse how would you like like it to be what do you want to come out first what's most important to you and then they basically tell you and it's like okay cool so we've kind of got it aligned like this how do you feel about that and then it becomes more of a two-way conversation um which i think we're starting to get better right now um uh yeah whereas before it was just like head down just like build build build like worry like you know we're close to launch um we're looking to do a land sale the tokens have come out i think around the second of september um and then to go into a land sale in this metropolis pretty shortly afterwards maybe around the 5th of september run that till the end to then open up the like metaverse on sort of first of october that's kind of the plan as a as um which was sort of aligned with right now is the land sale uh accessible to those who bought the launch pool token or for the the you're talking for the wrong any holders if i'm taken it's accessible yeah it's actually like a lottery basically are we still on time yeah for sure yeah you are but yeah i mean as matt said it's been super you know but you can see this community as essentially like free focus groups if you really use it right i mean it's it's interesting because yeah expectations in reality are always difficult with any product but you know in my previous you know my like web 2 world would actually pay for for this kind of um input from the public so you know but you're you're building a product that is supposed to be like you build that enough for the community to take and then do their own thing with right so do you do you also maintain any responsibility around what they do with that and is that on you guys like do you do you feel like you should be stepping in and saying like actually we don't we don't agree with that or whatever happens is it's out of our hands it's called the badlands and it's basically like unranked like micro versus realms that we're who we have no no control over you like shadow shadow band micro versions you know the best um the best answer to this and to be honest like um is is copied thinking is from a library lbry um you know they control the application themselves but they can't control which is what's uploaded in the background so they can essentially hide stuff and not like you know allow a kid to find some content which might be sort of you know not not worthy of that child um but at the same time because it goes on to a blockchain you know it's kind of there you can't you can't just be like oh what we're going to do is we're just going to delete it off the blockchain you know that fundamentally just doesn't work um so you just you know i think the way we thought about it is community moderation uh you know flagging things hey like this is kind of a pretty like maybe this is an 18 plus kind of realm you know and then we sort of filter things out that way and if it's completely like um new and no one's sort of seen it then we can kind of uh we can sort of i guess like limit its sort of viewership until someone's gone there and sort of not kind of you know flagged it at all very interesting i think that's going to be something that you have to constantly discuss internally and then also with the community as well but i don't how scalable is that though because you guys have seen a lot of growth already in the last month or so and i can imagine that that's just going to get bigger and bigger and you're going to need to have regional like community leaders and yeah is that already happening yeah i mean there's probably like 12 people who helped with community overall and then we would maybe i think to be honest when it comes to like you'll probably employ people at the beginning and we'll pay them so that we can set down like some solid like protocols about like how we rank these spaces in creating realms like it's really important um that they get tagged in certain ways so like discoverability overall in nfts has been really hard you know it's kind of basically the collection at the top of open sea or whatever and and you know the rest is just like you know trolls and troves of stuff um so so trying to kind of tag things and organize the information in a in a better way and then we've built a social graph over the top so it's like who you're following who'd you go and run and explore around these realms with etc and then we can start to use that information to show you content that maybe you know your friend likes which may be relevant to you well it's just the 3d version of a social network yeah you have to use the social graph as a sorting mechanism right well so the the token launches september you said and then whether what are you guys expecting september to look like for you and like what are some of the more exciting um items for us to keep an eye out for around that time or is it just a token drop yeah so we're launching a an augmented reality app basically where you can kind of like get your first taste of the realm application and you can see the sort of metropolis in augmented reality and um kind of interact with that to go through to your to take part in the land sale um so that's kind of our main release for september um and then we're just going to be building out all our collaborations etc getting ready for like letting people into the realms proper okay is there any correlation or do you expect any correlation between land sale and in realm and like decentraland or like the sandbox like is that does that ultimately like equalize uh in terms of value and and cost um i think it's an interesting one like obviously because we're descent land has a fixed number of plots we um okay we we we do have a fixed number like we're building this metropolis right to give some structure to what's effectively infinite um and so that's an interesting mechanic right and we and we we're going to see how that plays out but yeah i guess it will be similar in the end cool so i have one i have one question left i think and it kind of relates to this you mentioned that this is like a social it's very much a social thing uh if we think about it that way but it's as it becomes more and more integrated with our lives like so closely integrated especially if we're wearing glasses one day and things are appearing in our field of view how important do you think it is to to be to be able to design your identity within that or to be true to your identity in real life or does that is there any implication in like deciding like what gender you are or what culture you come from within the metaverse versus who you actually are in real life does that is that something you guys talk about or think about when you're designing assets for this and when you're talking when you're talking with your team about building these things out yeah i mean you would it would raise a really important point about kind of inclusivity and um you know disabled avatars or whatever like um you know a number of a number of things to be considered there but i don't personally think in an from an ethical standpoint you have to represent yourself you have a duty to represent yourself in the metaverse as you are in real life personally yes you people will create themselves however they want really um i don't think i mean yeah it's in a really interesting point but i don't think you have to you know retain your gender retain anything about your physical appearance like that because ultimately that doesn't even define who you are right so you can create yeah but but you know when you then go to kind of solicit in person communicate or like physical interactions that could that's where things get a bit strange i guess but yeah i'm more concerned about the metaverse kind of just becoming overtly addictive and people being kind of stuck and spending like huge amounts of time inside there and centralized organizations extracting massive amounts of financial value from that engagement that that's that's the only thing that like i'm like you need to arm the pirates here and you need to ensure that basically decentralized services like this exist which are on par and you know it's not always about the highest resolution graphics and things like this like we've seen a lot of like games and services which you know in fact probably more so like you know the most valuable nfts happen to be just like crappy little like 16-bit voxels and stuff like this yeah so it's like i don't know like maybe maybe people would detach this this point where it goes really like unreal engine 5 and maybe you're stuck in these vr worlds and i'm just a bit like um you know some central organization owns that which we you know they take all the money out and you know the real world's still destroyed i'm like that that's a warning story you know we kind of we we shouldn't do that we should figure out ways to yeah people to make money out of the metaverse and then sort of leave and go and hang out with people in real life and stuff yeah yeah but it's also you're talking about it or thinking about it from the perspective that it is a divide there is a real life and a metaverse but do you think at some point it'll just blur into this one hyper reality experience i could definitely see that there's like a physical layer over you know the majority of most cities that we go to in maybe the next within a year of like these glasses coming out and becoming mainstream i expect that there's nowhere that you go in san francisco london paris rome that's not fully augmented you know and it will essentially be who which uh which software layer that sits on those devices and is connecting those individuals to that that that space whichever one is the largest is the one that kind of wins um and that will be one network and there'll maybe be a network which is sort of fully immersive like vr um and i see probably those two things existing maybe there'll be some competition for a while uh and you know as what usually happens is sort of one dominates you know i'm pretty sure facebook's looking to try and dominate those spaces definitely yeah i listened to uh zuckerberg's conversation with the verge cast on the verge cast the other day and it was just like this guy he's he just wants it all he wants everything yeah yeah i think i've got two thoughts on that like i i think once so like i've employed one of my good friends um a really good architect um and he's now building stuff for us right in in the in a virtual world so basically the more commerce starts to take part like it and impact people's lives and people are actually like working in the metaverse or whatever then obviously that's going to pull things in there a lot more um and then obviously to matt's point like we were talking a lot about geotagged nfts like hasn't really taken off that much but you know imagine like in a bay draw up in central london like you know thousands of people go there to see it like everyone else is sort of confused as to why they're there right but but you know you could actually see see a geotagged kind of event from you know that would obviously it's going to happen and everything will be augmented at some point yeah yeah and i think it like creates a lot of opportunities also for new jobs right um like me personally i started working in the metaverse at the beginning of the pandemic and if it like if it weren't for the metaverse i don't know i would probably still be looking for a job at this point in events so i i could not imagine like at the moment not doing virtual events to be honest like that's just like my world right now yeah yeah and awesome yeah i think you know it breaks those divides and those divides have been catalyzed by kind of lockdowns global lockdowns you know it's not you know there's no country that's really escaped this kind of um new process of dealing with stuff so yeah you know like maybe we move five ten years closer how much do you attribute like covid to the exponential growth or like the rapid growth we've seen in this space in the last year would it have been a little slower or was this inevitable everyone was at home i mean i know personally i spend all my time on device on my phone now my my phone time's gone through the roof so kind of my you know this is and the social experience has been like almost 100 percent digitized um so it's just chat through some form of social app or talking to semi strangers on twitter you know it's basically what it is nowadays or it has been until the summer maybe coveted was actually designed by facebook just to get more people using their products god knows joke about it scary but true i'm just thinking about what matthew said about the his his worry about the long-term future of the mayor versus addiction and seeing how everyone's addicted to their phones it's almost that it's inevitable it's almost inevitable that we will be addicted to it just as we are addicted to our phones now but yeah i mean i also see kind of like compared to social media right now and other platforms that you're more passive right i think that you can become though like and have like some real bonds because right now for example instagram i see myself just like scrolling scrolling and really being passive yeah yeah and if i'm gonna spend my time and be addicted to something i mean it's worth like at least getting something positive out of it which i think but of course you have to find like we mentioned balance it's always tricky thing always yeah cool well i'm i think i've i've covered yeah pretty much everything i'm really excited for what you guys are doing and i i would love to get involved in the in the the token drop and maybe buy some land in rome that would be sick um so i'll keep an eye out for that would you what did you do around the world we get to ask the questions now that's a great question so i don't i mean my what am i allowed to build what can i feel i don't know like if it was totally up to me i've i don't know that's a great question you turn it into a movie set and yeah maybe a virtual production space but then how feasible is that even uh i don't know i was writing a a short a sci-fi short a couple months ago about like an idea of so i use google keep to keep track of all my ideas which i think is great because it's really it's right there you just drop your id and it doesn't have to be fully fleshed out and it's like my my google keep is so random it's like weird things with practical things but i was like what if this could be a museum like that you could actually walk through and like interact with the ideas like i would like to build something like that like there's a there's a character for a film over here just kind of standing there like an npc waiting to be interacted with or like there's a device that i imagined building one day over here like that would be sick to have a gallery or a museum of of all my ideas that i can physically move through so maybe that's something i'll try to do in the future yeah really cool yeah yeah it's kind of like a neural network i i guess sometimes that's partially why we decided to make a metropolis because we were like you just have all these disparate little realms connected by portals it's like how do you organize this information and like enable people to sort of discover it um so yeah we're trying to do that and we'll see how it works i probably don't imagine that we'll get to an optimum solution any time soon yeah i can imagine user experience is a is an easy conversation for you guys to be having in the back and then behind the scenes like that navigating this has got to be you're you're in a lot of ways reinventing ui right yeah yeah i know it's super challenging obviously um huge interconnected web and how how do you allow people to move around it easily you'd have like a nun six years building maps [Laughter] like navigation but then we were also like we kind of gone back to that in a way we're like people probably need to sort of see it in a normal way we're playing around with like an ar map which is kind of explorable between these different constellations in the metaverse and stuff we'll see how that goes it's probably not that feasible um or it'll work really well for the beginning and then as it gets too clustered it'll be like completely useless yeah i can't wait to try it out and i hope we get a chance to like really move around in the space and then have you guys back to talk about it maybe i think i'll probably try to join the telegram community too that'll be great yeah i already joined earlier nice nice twitter telegram everywhere thank you well matt jovan thank you for joining us uh it was a pleasure um i hope we get to keep in touch and talk to you guys again in the future and good luck with everything the rest of this year it's you guys had a lot going on and so i wish you the most success awesome thank you very much and eddie okay you guys in september thank you yeah yeah we will cheers guys bye bye good night so that's awesome that was great yeah really fun wow oh man i wish i had a chance to actually explore realm before doing this because we've had a bit more context but obviously that's a that's challenging at the moment no i i honestly like read all the medium pages that i think mark you shared this weekend i actually understood even better like also actually infinity thanks to that video that like 20 minute video there that is awesome that video by the time i wrote all those medium articles by the way that's why as well you can't you can't explore realm yet but um that their community is um it's grown i think they've got sixteen seventeen thousand twitter followers they had about a thousand things it's really it's their the community is getting very into it they've got i'm curious do you think i should sell my stoner cat we went from last week where you were like i'm not gonna give up my baby so now we were talking about giving up your stoner cat for realm real estate i mean i was just thinking like i have to like start like since we finish our podcast now i'm gonna have to start convincing my boyfriend to buy some land in rome so it's not that i can't do it on my own it's just that um i'm kind of like considered the the person that's kind of like addicted to like kind of jumping onto the projects and i'm like he's like we're rationals like he's like is he stuck that's good that's a good balance though i think that's important i know that team's important and they've got a good team they've and they've been you know they've known each other for a long time they're doing it slowly they seem to be doing it in the right way they the team seems to be growing their i don't know it's it's always difficult to know but as projects go to be in early it seems like a good one so what do you what excited you about like how did you get in touch with them in the first place and what excited you about the their their approach to this and they offered me they were looking for some writers i just applied for an advert on upwork and it turned out to be them um and just researching the posts the the the team well obviously the metaverse augmented reality the platform it kind of runs along the central land or an accident it kind of incorporates some of those things and i think it incorporates the the popularity of those things so i think it's going to hook onto the zeitgeist of that and it could be the platform that explodes because of that um i i personally loved like when they mentioned previously kind of like you're walking around with your jacket and looking at that jacket and i want to buy it and then you're going to get the percentage so imagine like in the future um like all these influencers right on on instagram and other platforms in the virtual space like that's going to be completely revolutionized yeah in the physical space too because if you're talking about ar glasses and you have the same ability like with like an nfc chip or something to be like oh that jacket i can see that that comes from this store and it's this brand then i could quickly buy that and you could still maybe get a cut of it for for wearing it in the real life in real in the real world that would be really cool i i don't think like it's an opportunity only for like the macro influencers but also the micro influencers right um finally like i don't know instead of like being constrained by all these algorithms right trying to grow their pages but yeah i mean this could be but i wonder how you how you uh so you have instagram influencers have to use hashtag ad or i think youtube as well like you have to let people know when you're advertising to them but like if you choose to put on a jacket in the morning is that jacket then you have to decide what is the intention you're wearing the jacket with it because i want to get a cut of this or do i just like this jacket and i want to be warm today so that's my intention i guess like i want to wear the jacket and just hope somebody likes it so i earned money like yeah yeah i've got a closet for advertising clothing and i've got a closet for my personal yeah yeah [Music] that seems like a good place to end it this week uh i'm glad that we had those guys on i hope that we can have them on again in the future mark if you can pull that off later i feel like the longer things the the more things progress the less likely they are to be accessible to us but who knows maybe we'll see and maybe we'll have one of those spaces in there microverse that uh gets a lot of attention and attraction and we can have our next podcast episode within the value art microverse who knows definitely cool all right guys well it's been great i look forward to catching up again next week and i'll see you then see you then ciao