A few weeks ago, when I was trying to book my first guests and get episode one recorded and out the door already, I took the radical (?) step of writing a monologue. I figured if other people’s paths weren’t aligning with mine, I could just record the first episode myself. Reason dictated it might be easier to book guests on a show that I could actually link to in my cold-call email pitches.
Thankfully, a few hours into my frantic cycle of writing, recording, checking the elapsed time, repeat (“13 minutes? Too short for a first episode. Write more!”), word came in from Nanea Reeves’ camp that she was game for being the first guest on a brand-new podcast hosted by a complete stranger. Thank heavens. For one, you all were spared 25 minutes of nonstop me! More importantly, Nanea was an entirely awesome first guest, and the work she’s doing with her company, TRIPP, is fascinating. Listen to the episode here, or watch the video interview.
Now that we’ve got a few interviews taped and more booked, I had the thought to return to said monologue to see exactly what I thought Laying Groundwork for a New Show About The Metaverse might look like. Turns out some of it might just be good fodder for a blog post or two. So, here goes. I’ll leave the scripted and timestamped intro up top so you get that behind-the-curtain thrill of being there when it all got started ;-)
Welcome to the Meta-Averse podcast. My name is Noah Kravitz, and this is episode one, taping on Monday, February 21st, 2022.
Meta-Averse is my new podcast exploring the future of the Internet: Web 3, Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, NFTs, AR/VR/XR and what we’re calling The Metaverse. In fact, I’m calling it all The Metaverse right now, just to keep it simple. But we’ll get more into that as we go.
What, exactly, these names and acronyms will mean to our future is murky, at best. But venture capitalists pumped more than $30 Billion USD into the space last year, resulting in a total cryptocurrency market cap of over $3 Trillion USD. We’ve got celebrities in super bowl ads warning us to get on the crypto train lest we miss out. We’ve got athletes and musicians and influencers of all sorts giving investment advice on TikTok and The Gram. We’ve got mega-corporations pivoting and hiring and gearing up do business using technology that doesn’t yet exist. We’ve got digital art and NFT sneakers and plots of virtual real estate being bought and sold for millions of actual dollars. And we’ve got fraud, theft, and scams galore making headlines and resulting in billions of dollars of assets changing hands, going missing, and being seized by governments around the world.
Speaking of fraud and scams: Shout out to Molly White and her excellent website, web3isgoinggreat, for literally keeping a scoreboard tallying all (well, some, anyway) of the money lost to bad actors in this new world.
All of which means … well, nobody knows exactly what it means. But something big is happening. Theres more to it than dollar signs, but as the saying goes, if you want find the truth, follow the money. Venture capitalists are investing heavily, as I said a moment ago. They’re investing in the infrastructure, they’re investing in companies building things atop the infrastructure — games and experiences, digital goods and virtual real estate, crypto wallets and currency exchanges. Individuals are throwing money around, too - lots of money - investing in cryptocurrencies like BitCoin and DogeCoin, but also in NFTs (Non Fungible Tokens), some of which are tied to digital art and some of which are tied to community building and some of which are just old fashioned get rich quick schemes. And there are companies investing in all of this stuff, whether they hope to sell you a virtual beer at a digital bar in a place called Decentraland, or to sell you the tools you’ll need to create your own virtual bar one day.
Some of these companies are the same ones constantly touting their commitment to the environment and sustainability, despite the enormous amout of energy required to do basically anything on the blockchain right now, but that’s a deep dive for another day.
I know, I just threw a lot of information and a lot of unfamiliar terminology at you. Don’t worry, most of us don’t know what any of this really means, and even the ones who say they do also know that the ground is shifting beneath all of our feet with each passing minute. One of the funny things — and, one of the most fascinating things, at least to me — about all of this stuff is that everything we’re talking about, from the blockchain to virtual reality, has both been around longer than most of us realize and is way too immature, technology-wise, to actually do most of the things that come to mind when we hear words like The Metaverse. If you’re old enough to be thinking that this sounds a lot like the original y2k era, dot-com boom, you’re right. That was web 1, actually, if you’re keeping count.
Today, the Internet already connects huge swaths of humanity to one another. So we have some shared sense of what’s already been done, what might be possible, and how we think we want it to look and act. And, hopefully, what we don’t want it to look like. And we’re using the tech we have today - we’re up to Web 2.0 now, by the way - to promote, and invest, and create a huge hype cycle around the tech we think is coming to change everything.
So we’ve got a million voices hyping up and knocking down a million different ways to build the future, get rich doing it, and transcend our current understandings of money, art, government, and even what it means to own something. Not to mention the whole trend of replacing your social media headshots with a stylized cartoon ape, preferably a sleepy-eyed one smoking something hand-rolled. I’m here, along with a couple of friends behind the scenes, to try to make a little sense of it all along with you.
Meta-averse is going to explore as much of this web3 future stuff as we can. And most of the time we’re going to do it by way of talking to the people building, using, investing in, and critiquing and reporting on the space. Don’t worry, when you hit that subscribe button you’re not signing up for thirty minutes, twice a week, of me waxing poetic on crypto this and meta that. We’ve got some great guests lined up, and some great conversations to be had.
Meantime, I’ll throw a blog/newsletter post out here once a week or so. The written posts will aim to deliver a little more specificity — and a lot of links — on a particular topic.
Episode 2, ft Ala and Jake from Bittensor, drops on Tuesday 3/15. It’s all about building a community-owned marketplace on the blockchain. It’s also all about the future of AI. Hey, this stuff might get confusing at times, but it’s certainly not boring ;-)