Primer: Jonathan Glick has firsthand experience in helping firms in their digital transformation in the Web 2.0 era. He is now doing the same in the Web 3.0 era. In this episode of the Zima Red Podcast, he shares with Andrew his background and the fascinating stuff he has done in his life.
Origins
Majored in political science
Originally from Vancouver, Canada. Came to New York in 1992/1993
Wanted to be involved in politics but realized that his friends in politics were miserable
Went to media as his friends in media were all having a good time
"I wanted to do something involved in politics, and quickly discovered that all my friends in politics were miserable. And all my friends in media were having a really good time." - Jonathan Glick
Friend working in an alternative music magazine invited him to run his AOL chat group and message board
Learned about the online community, programming, and various stuff
Ended up getting hired by New York Times to build their AOL stuff. Persuaded them to build their website as well
Became the head of product development and technology for New York Times for 8 years
Joined the Gerson Lehrman Group, an expert network firm
Helping Firms In Their Digital Transformation
Was a huge leap
His bosses were attached to the existing New York Times. Changing it to an internet native form was very daunting for them
People are attached to old forms and this has a big effect on people's design choices
Examples:
In the early days, the interface for a newspaper/magazine website would be a news stand
In the Metaverse today, there would be chairs in convention centers/conference rooms
"[Referencing sitting down for a conference in the Metaverse] But people are very attached. Entrepreneurs are attached. Investors are attached to the traditional notion of a conference room or a convention center and so they project those things forward into the new technology, and it'll take a while for them to be revealed as pointless." - Jonathan Glick
What He Is Doing Today
Working with big media companies and IP holders on how to conceptualize their IP assets in the Metaverse
An executive producer of new projects that will result in new kinds of NFT collections, games, and blockchain-based experiences
How Did He First Learned About Cryptocurrencies
Knew about Bitcoin early on but was not interested in it
Ethereum was a lightning bolt, an amazing life-changing invention
Realized that when Web 2.0 firms manage to make itself the centre of a network, they become very difficult to be dislodged
Ethereum's design principle of being collectively owned was extremely attractive to him. Its open source nature allows innovation to flourish
Will Centralization Win?
His Thoughts
Open to both optimistic and pessimistic possibilities
However, economies of scale tend to make the large larger
Large players will engineer themselves unfair advantages when regulation arrives
Combating Centralization
Our biggest weakness is our dependency on centralized social networks
Have to develop decentralized alternatives
On NFTs And The Metaverse
NFTs and URLs
NFTs remind him of URLs in the early days of the internet
Some URLs turned out to be very valuable
What we perceive as valuable is contextual. As technology evolves, we will end up finding other use cases to be more important
Today, URLs are used for more than just branding. There are apps and dynamic URLs and it seems obvious that URLs wouldn't be that important, but back then, they were
In terms of the Metaverse, he thinks that there will be a federation of virtual worlds and that goods and identity elements will pass between them
NFTs And Marketing
Possible to reach out to people by sending a virtual object directly to their wallets
Will end up being widely exploited and abused
Are NFTs Needed For The Metaverse To Come To Fruition?
Can have a Metaverse without crypto/NFTs
It would need a shared directory of all participating virtual worlds/spaces
Most likely, as long as the blockchain is efficient, robust, and scalable, people would defer to something that already exists and works
Is A Truly Immersive Experience Required?
His dream is to have a 3D holographic experience
Other smart people think that augmented reality is just as or more important than VR
He's not an expert and is excited to observe what happens
Thoughts On Play-to-earn
It's the beginning of a whole new economic system
Tasks that people do in these games might make them more valuable as they learn new skill sets
"Yes, play-to-earn is very likely the future of Metaverse employment, but that it is likely to be more like employment and less like games over time." - Jonathan Glick
Thinks that developers will gravitate towards rewarding players for non-arbitrary tasks/achievements over time
Shift from players creating value in the context of the game to creating value for other people (e.g. learning how to code, design, etc.)
Roblox is giving people the tools to become designers and developers of games. People learn how to market and manage their own game world. Gain exportable skills that can be used in other contexts
Thoughts On DAOs
This is the single thing he is most excited about
People can come together, pool time, resources, work on a project, and benefit from their success. It is a quantum leap in the history of capitalism
Impressed with the progress that has been made in DAOs
An investor in Syndicate DAO, which enables on-chain investment clubs for any purpose
META ETF
An ETF is a mutual fund that is traded on a stock exchange
Has put together a Metaverse-themed ETF with Matthew Ball
Worked with an entrepreneurial ETF provider called Roundhill
Roundhill approached Matthew Ball after reading his essays on the Metaverse
Constituents In The META ETF
Can learn more at their home site as to the actual process and methodology used to construct it
Matt determined 7 categories/pillars that are needed to enable the Metaverse:
Hardware
Compute
Networking
Virtual Platforms
Interchange Standards
Payments
Content, Assets, and Identity Services
Identify the companies within each category
Created an economic model of the future Metaverse, with each category having its own weight
Assessed whether the companies within those categories are a pure play (only dedicated to this theme) or a partial player
For example, Facebook has a large investment in the Metaverse (Oculus and related content). However, that's just a small part of what Facebook does; the majority of what Facebook does is not directly connected to the Metaverse. Hence, it has a lower weight in the index
Assembled a council of 7 experts to make these decisions
Readjustments In The Constituents
Every quarter, the council gets back together and reviews every single company in the database and makes adjustments
More focused on what weight should each category have instead of optimizing for investment returns
Technology That Needs To Be Present To Enable The Metaverse
All these technologies and capabilities are needed for the Metaverse
What is underappreciated is the Compute category. Need several generations in chip design, network architecture, and in provisioning to reach the level of vividness and interaction that is required to create a lifelike experience
The Hardware Category
By hardware, they meant the devices which users use to experience the Metaverse (e.g. headsets, phones, gloves, accelerometers)
Breakthroughs happening in hardware everyday
The Compute Category
Challenging technological problems
Fears centralized hosting more than other issues (e.g. centralized identity, centralized security)
If he has an unlimited budget for Compute, he would want to create a token economy for Compute to ensure that dormant devices are dynamically resourced and allocated based on needs and paid for
Hard to get people to prioritize decentralization when hosting is cheap and convenient on centralized platforms
Biggest Threats To The Metaverse
Serious technological hurdles to create vivid, massively multi-user persistent spaces
Likely that big tech will come up with a version of the Metaverse first
However, he doesn't see that as a threat. The actual Metaverse will have a greater array of activities, excitement, and entertainment such that people will flock to it
Why Did NFTs Enter The Collectibles, Gaming, And Art Markets First?
It is a reflection of the taste of the crypto demographic
People in crypto tend to engage in all 3 activities
"That's the stuff we like. So, you know, a lot of what exists exists because of who the buyers are." - Jonathan Glick
Thoughts He Want To Share
Thankful to Andrew. First learned about NFTs through the Zima Red podcast
Grand 5-10 Year Vision
Working with film and video game companies. Will take 5-10 years for them to come into being
Wrote about the future of media with a group of people from Dark Star DAO
Wrote an essay on IP. NFTs will unbundle IPs and break it into little pieces that everybody gets to hold and touch
This unbundling is going to enable people to remix them in powerful ways that their creators did not envision
"I think we're going to enter a world where, where content becomes unbundled, and then recreated, repackaged, remixed and reintegrated. So that the next MCU, if you want to use the example, will be one where user created stories become canonical." - Jonathan Glick
Favourite Video Game
Twitter. Met so many brilliant people who have become really close friends through Twitter
"Just writing a simple thing like, hey, I'm thinking this, can somebody help me find someone else is thinking this? And they can and they do and my God, what a revolution in human social behavior." - Jonathan Glick
Single Favourite NFT
Loves Mirror, the decentralized publishing platform
Owns a bunch of Mirror NFTs
Have created a bunch of Mirror NFTs with Dark Star DAO
His Mirror NFTs are his proudest NFT possessions
Most Controversial Thought On The Metaverse
Enthusiasts like himself should be more open about the potential risks and problems of people spending a lot of time in imaginary worlds
Should internalize these questions and think hard about them
If You Could Improve One Thing In The Metaverse
Want people to have a greater sense of history of these ideas
These are not new ideas. People have been talking about simulated realities since the 1960s
People have been designing the frameworks for the Metaverse for a very long time
The Metaverse In 3 Years
Convergence of the virtual worlds (e.g. Decentraland, Somnium Space) with the gaming paradigms (e.g. Zed Run, Axie Infinity)
Games will have more open world creative capacity and virtual worlds will have more gaming elements
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