YouSaid · the spoken record

Herman Narula

lines on the record: 37
first: 2022-02-07
most recent: 2022-02-07
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, I think we've been teasing a little bit with the technology in the last few days and will be over the next few weeks. We're going to be going much further in our ambitions on the metaverse. We're redirecting a lot of our content towards taking the Morpheus technology that can support thousands of people together and doing more events and experiences with them and have more announcements on that very, very soon. We're also doubling down on our work in defense and in government, having now reached a point where we're actually in active use, which is amazing. And on a personal level, with all of these topics being so interesting, last year, as I think many of us did with lockdown, I took on a new hubby, which was writing. And later this year, hopefully to launch a book called Virtual Society, which is about a lot of these issues. And maybe it can add a bit to the conversation. And yes, I did just steal your time to plug my book a bit.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I'd like to see the metaverse have communities that are sovereign, that are voting, that are making decisions for themselves. What I'm sick of is completely closed platforms. I'd like to see platforms with user equity. I think that's the answer. I don't think it's just government regulation, although more is needed. I don't think it's just curtailing monopolies, although I think more is needed. I think it's that we all participate. We have to get out of the habit of being just consumers of these services and start to be citizens of these services. That is what will really get us to a much more resilient society that can take advantage of these things. And yeah, it's on companies like mine to create opportunities for that to happen. And as you can imagine, that's absolutely top of mind.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A huge opportunities too. But huge opportunities too. I don't want to lose sight of the fact that for most people, this will mean a chance to earn more money in new ways, a chance to be creative at an earlier age and to engage in socialize in ways that would have otherwise been impossible, and open up a lot of possibilities. Let's not forget the internet isn't all bad. It wasn't all bad. And the metaverse doesn't have to follow and make the same mistakes as before. Having this type of gloomy conversation should hopefully inspire people to want a different outcome. That, I think, is really, really important.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Society. It doesn't mean all companies are bad. It doesn't mean technology is bad. It doesn't mean government has to own everything. But it does mean we need a new conversation about how to strike a balance between these forces.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Again, I think that we could be doing a lot better, but right now as a society, we're operating with our hands tied behind our back because let's take Britain, for example. We're dealing with primarily a few foreign companies whose platforms we are dependent upon for everyday life. We have very little influence on how they operate and run, and they have very little incentive to protect us from the very same harms that you're describing. So what I'd like to see is a lot more equity, a lot more ownership between governments and societies in these platforms that they're so dependent on. If that were the case, then we would have far more power to implement rules and to protect ourselves. That's what happens in other parts of the world. They take far more control over the technology that they know is so critical for their safety and security. This model of pseudo-government companies that span the globe and basically have less accountability even than ancient empires in terms of how they operate. This can't go on. This is the largest problem plaguing.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People ask us why we do government work, why there's a whole division of our company that does defense, why so many people, Adam Probable, work on these problems? It's because we think it's really important. We really do. I mean, if we don't do this, if people don't support this, we might end up in a very different situation when it comes to how these technologies are used. I think companies in technology like to pretend they're neutral, that they can work equally in all countries and under all value systems and somehow be this completely blank slate. I don't think that's reasonable. I think technology companies, society increasingly have to be values first. They have to decide what they stand for and what they don't, what kind of work they want to do, what kind of work they don't want to do. So you're right. I think businesses that build this infrastructure absolutely on the front line of what will be this next wave of progress and problems.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. People are spending more and more time here, young people are spending more and more time here. And we can't afford to just ignore the impact that has on the way we think and the way we live. We can't close our eyes to it and shut it off. And we have to accept that everybody is going to increasingly see this as a battleground to both communicate their point of view and to subvert what other people are doing. This is, as I say, an extension of our society, an extension of the good and an extension of the bad.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yes, and I can tell you how. And one of the first ways, one of the best things about all of this stuff is that for the first time, ordinary people, we're going to get to be able to make money inside the virtual experiences that frankly recreate the value for anyway. Trading objects, interacting, doing new kinds of jobs. Wherever there's a mobile phone, there's going to be an opportunity to do a job in a virtual space that could be creative, that could even give somebody an opportunity to change their circumstances no matter where they live. The unfortunate side effect of that is now a lot of commerce is going to be happening inside these virtual spaces. They're suddenly very important. And disrupting them starts to involve disrupting.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So beyond our broader metaverse ambitions in technology, we have a subsidiary called Improbable Defense, and that works closely with the UK government in helping them to recreate simulations of the real world. Really big, complex models of whole nations and cities in order to help answer questions that can help keep us safe. So how we plan different courses of action, how we understand how our infrastructure might be disrupted, and how we might respond.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We aren't like, you know, I think taking an action that disrupts the real world or alters a real world system requires a lot of thought and a lot of ability to simulate and understand the unexpected consequences of that, both to protect yourself and to react. I see a future where a great deal of conflict is continually being modeled, simulated, and conducted in these types of systems. And a great deal of intelligence gathering is about building the best models. It seems already that, for example, the Chinese government is doing a lot of this stuff. from reports that have come out.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's much worse than that. I'm sad to say. One of my colleagues and close friend, Joe Robinson, put out an editorial, I think, in the telegraph in the last couple of days, which talks a bit about this. But we're really in a new phase of global warfare. Conflict between major powers now doesn't happen in the open anymore. It happens continuously. And we're all part of that battlefield. It happens in cyber attacks. It happens in combinations of military action that are combined with degrading infrastructure and things like traffic even and beyond. Russia and China are masters of this type of warfare, for example. And you can see this sort of hybrid action happening all the time. Right now, without the kind of work that we do and what other companies do, there aren't even ways of seeing this happen. You can't even really understand that a city or a nation is being disrupted in an effective way. So the first thing that these metaverse-like experiences do is they let us build models of the real world so that we can even understand what's happening. The second thing they let us do is think about how to respond.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There definitely are technical challenges. Now, if I can be a little self-indulgent for a moment, I feel we solve them. We're the only company on the planet that can do thousands of people together talking naturally, interacting together. There's lots of content out there now. Encourage people to check it out. But if we can do it and we're at that point, I think the experiences can now start to be built, which could take advantage of those things. And I think it's about inspiring creatives, content creators, et cetera. So, I mean, if someone's listening to this who is an amazing creative and wants to experiment with this type of stuff, I wish they'd reach out both to us and to other people in the industry.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just in competing with existing large centralized businesses. The Metaverse provides quite a lot of opportunity to do some things better. What might virtual shopping be like in that context? What might making and creating and watching and consuming Hollywood style content be like in that context? So to me, it's those three key areas right now. In terms of how soon this stuff is always very deceptive, the conditions can be ripe for disruption, but the fuse is not ignited until a single product or single experience pops up, which quickly catalyzes all of that change. I think we're already sitting on the gunpowder for some pretty big changes in the way that we operate. We're just waiting for the right products and the right services.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I think the first major change that's already happening is the virtual goods revolution. A lot of scorn has been thrown on NFTs that are just JPEGs, but the basic idea is sound, the idea of ownable, tradable objects that are real. So I think a lot of brands, a lot of entertainers, a lot of musicians, a lot of people who create web content like podcasts or other pieces are going to find that they now have a new revenue stream. They can create virtual goods that users want to own and potentially use inside metaverses and experiences. So that's number one. Number two, I think that this is going to become the best way for a community to interact both with each other and potentially with celebrities. Imagine a football club like Tara San German or Arsenal. Imagine some of the golden oldies of those clubs hanging out with thousands of fans while they watch a game together. How cool would that be? That level of engagement is going to create fierce brand loyalty and a real sense of participation. I think the final place where I would get people to get excited is actually”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is an interesting notion. I think often a false choice is placed between centralization and decentralization. Centralization isn't always a bad thing. The historian Nal Ferguson talks a lot about how networks in history generally end up with central nodes because it's convenient and more efficient from the perspective of how we would interact with certain services. And he talks about how, in a sense, the internet inevitably became centralized. What's missing is auditability and trustability. Now, there's nothing wrong with trusting a central service if you can check when that service is misbehaving or build a competing service if you want to. And I think there are ways of architecting platforms whereby for efficiency reasons, there can be companies that run core central services, but they run in such a way that the community can migrate to other services. That is possible. And that's really the real promise of crypto and web3. Can it help us build infrastructure that is auditable? Admittedly, again, technology today.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we build the technology and plumbing to support other companies create experiences like that. But where we do build a metaverse or a world, yeah, I would push to want to do exactly that. I don't see why it would be so hard. I look at the world of Web3 and crypto, and I know it has a lot of flaws and problems. And again, as a technologist, I can see that it's very early. But one thing that really doesn't...”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Government continually insists on regulating the internet from 10 years ago every time something new pops up. And we've all seen the parliamentary hearings and other discussions. There needs to be far more industry engagement and there needs to be a lot more collaboration and a lot more user ownership. I'd like to see platforms which are themselves democracies or themselves driving towards user decision making. Why can't we vote on what Facebook's rules are? I mean, there are billions of users. It would be a pretty large country if it were one.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When it comes to the metaverse, which is quite different from the advertising driven model of the internet. And that's the way we make money in games and virtual experiences is quite different. We make money through long-term engagement. What does that mean? Well, it means that in order to get someone to carry on playing a game, you have to give them real fulfillment. You have to actually give them a chance to have new and meaningful relationships with other people or to feel what psychologists call competence, autonomy, or relatedness. These are three fundamental areas of fulfillment that we know from a science called self-determination theory. You can't fake fulfillment. If you aren't providing somebody with genuine opportunities for growth, they're just not going to stick around over the long term. You end up losing and churning users. So that means that in order to make money in virtual experiences, you sort of have to do something that's fundamentally better for the user than just making them angry for a second or two. Now, of course, that can be subverted. Of course, that's not perfect, but it does create a slightly better context. In terms of are the regulations and rules in place good enough? Of course they're not.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's start with misinformation. I don't think misinformation is a magical unsolved problem. I think it's an intentionally unsolved problem. And here's my evidence for that. If you put up copyrighted material on YouTube or Facebook or Google, watch how fast it gets taken down. Watch how amazingly quickly that copyrighted material will be detected and removed. But if you put up vaccine misinformation or controversial topics which drive clicks but which aren't in and of themselves banned on some of these platforms though they should be, they seem to linger. And that's because the financial incentives to drive engagement through good or bad information regularly outweigh the benefit to the public of receiving the correct information. This is the proven decision making process these businesses seem to be going through and every day we see more revelations of that happening. So I don't think all companies are like that and I don't think we should tar all businesses and all entrepreneurs and all leadership businesses with that same viewpoint. That said there is some really good hope.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That human beings just can't be trusted. We're just bad people if we're left alone. We can see that's not true. Look at Wikipedia. Wikipedia has become a wonderful trusted source. It's not perfect. But we all use it every day. And that's open and that's free. And that's not full of terrible misinformation and nastiness. So, you know, I think we should accept that the monetization strategies of these open networks make them sort of the enemies of truth and the enemies of open discourse. The final point is equity and governance. It doesn't matter if something's free or even if you have good access to it. If you don't have a say, if you don't have the right to judge how that platform evolves and what its rules are, because you're ultimately the person bringing it power, then I think we're going backwards as society. So I very much believe that the metaverse needs to be entirely built around open standards that different companies can interoperate with. And that's achievable. It needs to be regulated in such a form that society can impose its democratic values on that network. And it needs to be out of the hands of any one mega company in controlling it. And if we fail to...”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, imagine you're a major brand, a major clothing brand, for example. Do you really want to build your entire digital business entirely dependent on one closed platform? How does that feel to your shareholders or to you or to your ability to work with customers? So we need to move to a world where the data and the users that make up the power of these networks are shared equitably between different businesses and regulated in a meaningful way. And that's very possible. These companies will continually try to convince us that somehow this is really hard to do. But yet there are so many platforms and infrastructural problems that they have solved themselves and that engineers today know how to solve in building open systems like this. The second poison is the idea of neutrality, that somehow an open forum is neutral and the content that gets posted there is a reflection of society as a whole. We know that's not true. I was quite disgusted to hear some of what was being put out, the idea that misinformation and negative behavior on Facebook is a signal.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I agree. I mean, you might expect me as a technologist to suddenly tell you that it's all well and good. Just replace Facebook with my company or some other company and it'll all be fine. I think you're absolutely right. The lessons we've learned is that doesn't cut it. I think there are sort of three poisons, if you will, that make it extremely challenging for us to create value in new spaces and that we need to remedy as a society. The first is the idea that just because something's free and widespread, that it's not a destructive monopoly. When platforms like Facebook reach a certain scale, they take away the ability for new businesses to form because those new businesses are wholly dependent upon Facebook for their user base. And one change in an algorithm or one change in a monetization strategy can sync the value of the companies that are dependent on them. Now, you might say, well, tough luck, that's Facebook one. Well, perhaps you might make the argument that initially platforms like Facebook are good, but after a while, they prevent new investment into new businesses, new experiences.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the real world that would completely transform the way we deal with the difficult geopolitical challenges that we see right now. Just look at what's happening in Eastern Europe. Look at the worries and fears we have and the intense need to coordinate internationally, to prepare and to be able to think about those things. To give a slightly different example, the fashion industry, I'm amazed by how innovative the industry is becoming in thinking about how to think about their brands following people into virtual spaces. We could see a world where the majority of the amazing virtual goods we buy in order to”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“interacting, making connections, making friendships that wouldn't normally exist. And I think it's really important to highlight this. This is weird, even in this example, there's this weird fear people have. It's an understandable fear that virtual worlds will somehow take us away from the real world. To me, I think it's about forming connections that can then follow you into the real world. You know, those people you met at that festival, you might have become lifelong friends with. Well, why not make that possible in a digital space and then see those things move forward? So that's a small example, just large gatherings of people serendipitously casually interacting together, going a little bit bigger. Right now, when governments do joint exercises with thousands of soldiers, how do they do them? They go out into the real world and perform military exercises that can become geopolitically significant. They're big news and they cost billions of dollars. Imagine if whole nations could exercise vast portions of their military in realistic environments, in virtual spaces without ever doing anything.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So something we're actually doing right now, and I think it's a good example, and we're going to be doing more of it soon, is imagine the best music festival you've ever been to. So everybody, I think, has had that story of that one festival they went to as a kid where they made friends they never expected they would, where they serendipitously bumped into other people. I think for non-gamers, it might surprise you to learn that that sort of stuff isn't really possible and hasn't been possible in video games for a long time because generally these are very small rooms with very small numbers of people. So for example, things like the concepts that happened in Fortnite, amazing company Epic Games, but the concepts were more like music videos. The star wasn't really there and the individual people who were enjoying themselves were in small groups of 100. Now I think one of the first things that we're going to see, and we put out something with a K-pop star recently that sort of was a good experiment of this, is massive gatherings of people, thousands of strangers around the world who can talk naturally with their own voices in spaces, with celebrities who perhaps they might normally not be able to meet casually and”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we've worked on a variety of different things. You can model everything from coronavirus spreading to disaster relief to helping conventional military operations to other things, basically where pioneers in really putting together complicated models of models and allowing them to operate at really big scale and allowing users to be able to consider different actions inside those systems. So given how complex the real world has become, tools like this are really important not just for government, but also for companies in understanding how to make choices. So for instance, let's say you're thinking about bringing electric vehicles into a power grid. You need to model and understand that the power grid won't be overloaded by those same electric vehicles. Those are examples of things that we do.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. So recently we announced some work we're doing with the UK government, which is to help model indianations to support strategic decision making. To support that, we've had to invent new AI-based modeling techniques that can allow you to accurately represent all of the millions of people interacting inside traffic systems or all of the pieces that go into a telecommunications network. That's quite different from the sorts of techniques that normally go into making simple simulations for basic experiences. If we're going to be building metaverses that are really profoundly valuable and useful, we're going to need technology like that.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon have generally dealt with what are known as embarrassingly parallel problems. So these are problems like accessing websites or buying things online, where you can scale them just by adding more hardware and by scaling them horizontally. So for somebody who's not technical, the way I'd explain it is this. When you go to a bar and order a drink, as long as there are enough bartenders and the bar is long enough, everybody can get a drink because me getting a drink and you getting a drink don't necessarily have to conflict with one another. But building a metaverse is very different. Everything has to interact with everything else. So a lot of the techniques and technologies that have driven the growth of the internet over the last 10 years aren't necessarily that appropriate. And so what we're seeing is really that it requires a very discontinuous set of technology, new skills, new infrastructure. Probably new businesses and new companies that are going to come in and help make this stuff really successful.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Million messages per second. And even that isn't necessarily where I think you need to be to build really complex metaverses. So the hardest challenge is exchanging all that information and doing it requires us to overcome all sorts of bottlenecks. How do you decide what information you should go where dynamically? How do you optimize the bandwidth down to individual machines? How do you render all of that on stage and on screen? We've had to resort to a lot of machine learning techniques to effectively compress the information that gets sent down to players and to invent new rendering techniques. So it's a very complex full stack problem and one of the reasons why Stick and us nine years to get to this point as a business.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The best way to understand the value of a virtual space is through one metric. The amount of useful information being exchanged between all of the participants in the world. I call this operations per second. So I'll give you some examples. When you're in a party with a lot of people, when someone moves and everyone else can see it and everyone else reacts or interacts, that's a form of information exchange. And so we can measure this and compare this to existing worlds and games. So something like Yve Online has a lot of plares in it, but they can only interact in very simplistic ways because there's a very limited amount of messages that can be exchanged between all participants. A game like Fortnite can do something like 10,000 messages a second. And that allows for, say, 100 people to hang out. WhatsApp globally exchanges about a million messages a second to give you an idea of the sorts of kind of a rough comparator of scale. Some of the demos that I think hopefully we've been putting out there in the last few days are hitting numbers like 300, 350 million.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Affect the real world that affects our everyday lives are actually being shown to us for the first time inside virtual spaces. Perhaps we can even buy these virtual items, trade them, interact with them. As a final example, the stock market for a lot of people can feel like a game, can feel like a virtual space, but it's one whose actions and whose outcomes are extremely consequential within the real world. And in fact, one of my arguments is we've often had, before we even had technology, we had other realities to which we ascribe.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Two big changes really. The first is the decision we make as a society to start imbuing virtual experiences with more meaning. So a really good example to me is something like sport versus eve online. The World Cup is just a game, just like Yve Online. But who wins the World Cup matters a hell of a lot more than what happens at Yve Online? Because hundreds of millions of people, even billions of people around the world, you know, careers are made, lives are changed because that virtual world, that additional extension of our society has a much deeper connection with our day-to-day lives. I think Eve is an amazing experience. And very early, one of the very early games in that space. But like a lot of MMOs, it's a closed circle. What happens there only really matters there. It doesn't affect the rest of the world. It's not about the interoperability and exchange of value between the real world and the virtual one. What I see is more like Paris Fashion Week happening inside a virtual space where some of the hottest new ideas, designers, celebrities, and interactions that have”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Us, you know, no company in terms of reputation to be the place where we now interact in this new digital economy, where we now learn, where we now make and keep the most important relationships in our lives. And I hope that's not controversial to say, given the track record.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, honestly, I think I took a pretty dim view to it. I do think it was a bit of a marketing stunt. And I also think that in fact there didn't seem to be any announcements of any new products, technology, or experiences. The really hard problems in building a useful metaverse come in extending what's possible from today. Recently, I think in the last couple of days, we were more public about it. We announced that we're the first company able to support not 100, not 200, not a handful, but more than 10,000 people in the same space at the same time talking and interacting naturally. We've done this now with Live Players. It was interesting to see with Facebook's announcement that there didn't seem to be any real revelations around technology. But there's another darker edge to it as well. I think it would be a very poor outcome if a company like Facebook or any other singular business ended up running, owning, or operating something as important as the metaverse, as an extension of our society. I can think of no...”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Successor and fulfiller of some of the promises we had with social media and much more of an extension of our society as it exists today.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's about extending society and providing a third space where these things can happen and value can be exchanged. So to give you some tangible examples, the metaverse could be where politicians interact not just with a handful of journalists, but with thousands of their voters and their actual constituents in a much more human way, interacting and engaging and perhaps even discussing and solving problems. The metaverse could be and is, in fact, where governments could recreate whole cities and whole nations. This is work improbable is doing right now in helping to support decision making. It could also be a place where communities can come together and not only just interact with each other, but actually usefully solve problems together. Imagine, to use a slightly sort of softer edge, imagine your favorite football club, all of the fans globally meeting in a space, interacting together, engaging together in a way they never could in the physical world, using that even to vote or decide or make choices together as a community. So to me, it's much more a succession.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think this is a very abused them and it hasn't really received a good easy to understand definition that's useful to business people, to entrepreneurs, to users. And so I want to take a crack at perhaps providing one. I think we've had virtual worlds for a long time. The idea that you go into a video game or space and you interact with a 3D avatar, that's nothing new. And I don't think it's useful to define the metaverse as just a better version of that because we have that. We've had that for a long time. I think the metaverse is the next step, which is the idea that as a society, we start doing really useful things inside these other virtual spaces. We start extending important aspects about our society, our culture, our economy into virtual spaces. We begin leveraging them to bring together very large groups of people to actually create meaningful and valuable interactions. So for me, the metaverse is not about escapism, like video games.”
2022-02-07 · Intelligence Squared · Business Weekly: Into the Metaverse, with Herman Narula · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT