EP 339 – Is the Metaverse Already Here – Are We Ready for It? – Aaron McDonald – Founder and CEO of Futureverse

Read the best-effort transcript below (This technology is still not as good as they say it is…):

Michael Waitze 0:06
Okay, let’s do this thing. Hi. This is Michael waitze, and welcome back to the Asia Tech Podcast. We are joined today by Aaron McDonald, the Founder and the CEO of Futureverse. Aaron, thank you so much for coming on the show. I have to say, this is the thanks, man. No, it’s great to have you here. And I have to say this is the first time where I am out backgrounded and maybe even out microphone. I didn’t anticipate the Unreal Engine stuff in the background. But kudos to you, man. I love it. How are you doing? By the way,

Aaron McDonald 0:33
yeah, I’m really good. Well, you did say green screen helps? Yeah, I just had to get the team to, like, put together something a little bit special.

Michael Waitze 0:40
I like a guy who cares. I love a guy who cares. Okay, before we get into the main part of this conversation, it’s moving. I love it. Why don’t you give me a little bit of your background for some context? Well, watch your head, man,

Aaron McDonald 0:57
yeah. So I have a background that started 20 something years ago, maybe 25 now, it’s a little bit longer than I’d like to admit. In technology, I started as an engineer in telecommunications, I guess if you could call engineering digging trenches and laying cables, yeah, and then kind of just jumped from there into other engineering roles, and eventually ended up in kind of senior network roles in both fixed telecommunications, so IP and data and then mobile. After that, I jumped from there into product which I loved, building, developing, managing products, from there into the marketing side of the business, and then jumped out of that into corporate venture, and then eventually away, made my way into my own startup, and kind of did that almost think 1010, or 11 years ago now, oh my god. And then started venture building from around 2016 and and kind of had a wild ride since then.

Michael Waitze 2:12
What’s caused the what’s caused the ride to be so wild?

Aaron McDonald 2:15
It’s just been like a very full on. What is it? Almost eight, eight and a half years now, with, you know, going from nothing essentially, to portfolio of 50 or so companies, deep tech, in multiple domains, and then going through the process of rolling a bunch of those up to create future verse. And then future verse going on to kind of do some amazing, incredible things. And you know that whole time has been super fast paced. I’ve got to work with incredible talent, incredible brands, incredible celebrities. So it’s just been completely unimaginable when I started this, you know, 25 years ago, digging ditches,

Michael Waitze 3:06
digging digits. Can I ask you this, what do you think makes a great founder, right? If you’ve been involved in 50 companies, roll a whole bunch of stuff up. You must have been, like you said, working with some pretty insanely incredible people. But what makes somebody who’s a founder, a great founder. What do you think

Aaron McDonald 3:24
I might steal a little bit here from the founder of Nvidia? And he was asked a question, you know, if you had your time again, would you do a startup, and what would it be? And it was like, I just wouldn’t do it, you know, like, if I’d known the pain and anguish and shame and humiliation and stress and all the things you go through being a founder, then I wouldn’t do it. And so the outcome of that, I think, is resilience would be like a very important factor, because you just don’t know what’s going to get thrown at you. And I’d say the ability to look past what people say and markets say and investors say and believe in your product, mixed with the ability to see when you’re wrong. Yes, this hugely dichotomous feature of good founders, where they can understand the line between the termination and vision and grit and actually, I need to make a change.

Michael Waitze 4:42
Oh, how do you help your team understand? Because this is something that I was thinking about, actually, today and yesterday, right? How do you get your team to understand this idea that no individual day is fatal, you know, like, let’s say, let’s say, early on you have like, three clients or three customers. Course, that you’re working with, and all three of them just say, Never mind. And you wake up one day and you’re like, now, what do I do? But you feel like, like you said, like, it’s okay. You feel like you can manage through the process. But you’ve got 15 other people working with you that are just going, like, what do I tell my husband? Kind of thing. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. And

Aaron McDonald 5:16
sometimes you don’t even feel like you can Yeah, you know, like, those moments happen where you do doubt yourself, and you have to be able to, kind of have the fortitude to push back past that in your own mind, and then, like you said, try and inspire other people. I think it’s really important to have two things, one, co founders who are different to you, yeah, in lots of ways, except for those, like traits of resilience and determination, so that they can give you a different perspective. But they know you know that they’re on the same journey with you, your co founders who are just as motivated as you are, can push past those because they’ll bring a perspective to the table that maybe you’re doubting yourself on or or that you haven’t seen Yeah, And, and the other thing is kind of people outside who aren’t part of your day to day, but just love you, yeah? Because those two things give you the self, self belief to go and kind of give the pep talk, yeah? And I think it’s important in that to like, be as real as possible. You can’t always share everything, and there’s lots of reasons why that can’t be the case all the time, but get people back to the reason why they joined, you know, and the bigger picture of the thing you’re trying to change, and that’s really important too. You can’t do this without being in something which is driven by something more than pure success or financial reward. Yeah, you have to be doing something that has an outcome that’s going to make a change that people believe in, right? Because that’s the thing that gets you past those moments. Yeah, and also, but we know we’re doing the right thing, yeah? And God, if this doesn’t work out, at least we tried to make the change.

Michael Waitze 7:36
Yeah. And it’s a really good point, actually. And this is something that’s hard to articulate, but I think you’ve actually done it really well when things aren’t going well, or when things aren’t fitting into plan, you can always go, You know what? Maybe this is not like if you’re adding another product, or maybe adding another division or adding something else, and you’re like, does this fit into the thing we’ve always wanted to change, or doesn’t it? Because maybe it doesn’t, and maybe that’s why it’s not working. I mean, you remember on the prep call, I said to you know, hardworking people can be good at anything, but to really be great at something, you have to care about it. And maybe you’re introducing something that you don’t really care about. And you’re like, we should stop doing that, yeah, because we just don’t care. And that that’s hard to articulate to people, I think,

Aaron McDonald 8:15
yeah, don’t be a founder if you’re not doing something you absolutely care about. Yeah, and, you’re right, there is this, let’s call it trick, that if the mission stays the same, yeah, the product can change, for sure. And if you believe in the mission and you find a different way to get there, you’re still succeeding. I like that.

Michael Waitze 8:44
I think I’m going to use that quote. If the mission stays the same, the product can change. It’s really insightful. And actually very tight. It’s super tight, right? Because if you can explain that to somebody, if they can get that, I think you win. So talk to me about future verse, like, what is it at scale and what is it meant to be changing. It’s a great segue. Yeah, great

Aaron McDonald 9:03
segue there. So futureverse is a media tech company, and the thing we’re trying to do is to make the next version of the internet different in a couple of ways. And people call this the metaverse, yeah, it’s a pretty loaded term. And people ask me, like, here’s some framing that might help you understand how we see the metaverse. People ask me, when’s it coming? And my response to that is, it’s already here. Yeah, you know, the average humans going to spend 4546 years of their life looking at a screen, the idea that there’s like this digital economy over here that exists that’s different to the other economy, or digital society, that’s different to the. Into the other society is just a fantasy. They’re so tightly intertwined and getting more and more so. So we kind of are in the metaverse, but there’s a couple of other things that layer on top of that, and it really comes down to users and communities owning the data and content on the internet, and in a world where that internet is more immersive, where D plays a bigger role, it’s providing the tools and technology to enable that user ownership. If we achieve that, then the internet should be a better place, and it should be a fairer place, and we shouldn’t be forced down a path where giant corporations control everything.

Michael Waitze 10:49
So one of the questions that I always want to talk to people about this is this concept of self, sovereign ID. And I am not an expert on this at all, but I really wanted to talk to you about this, because if the idea is that people are going to be spent 45 are going to be spending 45 years in front of a screen, I have this. I have this philosophy. Sorry, just work with me on this for a second, right? I have this philosophy that like, and I’m going to put it in deep, heavy air quotes, right? But like in the real world, I can’t drive a car without a license, which gets issued to me by a government. I pay taxes, that I have a tax ID, I have a social security number, like all these things identify me, and I kind of understand this idea of anonymity, right? Because if I I’m just going to pick a company, right? But if I live in Ghana, but I’m a killer programmer, why are you paying me 40 cents on the dollar, right? When, if I was just like, born in Tennessee, I’d be making 250 grand a year living in Silicon Valley. But you feel like you can pay me $45,000 just because I’m in gone. I’m just picking a country. Yeah, yeah. So I can see why anonymity would work in that case. But on the other hand, you can’t just like, walk into somebody’s house anywhere in the world and steal their stuff and not identify yourself. Do you know what I mean? So there’s this push and pull about, like, anonymity versus identity, and I think it has to mirror what we do in the real world at some level. What do you think?

Aaron McDonald 12:13
Yeah, no, I think, and, like, back to my earlier point that there isn’t a really a distinction in my mind between the real world and the internet, like, if we took the internet out of the real world today, society would collapse, sure. And so you’re right, in a sense, those two two things have to be able to be interoperable. Yeah. We actually worked with the government down here in New Zealand to put in place a digital identity trust framework that was signed off by cabinet, which provides a way for sovereign identity, or decentralized digital identity, to exist as part of the identity system that powers things like passports or driver’s license. And so those two things aren’t incompatible, and you can actually get the best of both worlds in some scenarios where if you need to validate some credentials about who you are, what your age is, health conditions, whatever it is, you can do that in a way that provides the other side of that coin with the information they Need and the ability to verify that it’s you without giving them everything about you. And like the really good, common example of this is I go to buy some alcohol at a store, yep. And I have to be over a certain age to do that in New Zealand, it’s 18, yep. And in order to prove that, I have to hand across my driver’s license, for example, and I’m giving the store guy lots of information they don’t need exactly part of that Yep. And so with these digital systems, we can make those proofs or those claims without having to give all the information. And I think that’s the ideal scenario for anonymity, is allow me to prove the things you need to know without giving you everything else about

Michael Waitze 14:31
me. Okay, so this is where stuff gets really interesting. I mean, there’s a concept of a zero knowledge proof, which I’m sure you understand way better than I do, but, but you did mention earlier, this idea of controlling your own data and also controlling your own content, right? So this is something that I believe in, actually very, very strongly, right? And you’re right. If I don’t, if I’m 20, if I’m 18 years old, I’m in New Zealand, I want to buy some alcohol. All you need to know is I’m 18. You don’t need to know where I live. You don’t need to know what my birthday is. You don’t even know. So you don’t need to know anything about me. All you need to know is that I’m 18 now, I should be able to parse out all of this information to you digitally. This is why I wanted to talk about self sovereign identity, because I really want people to get a sense for what this means. But can I ask you this, are you guys building the tools as well, or do tools exist that you just incorporate into the stuff that you use so that you know, and I always use your mother as the example of maybe the person who’s not so technologically savvy, but so your mom can also do it right, because this idea of all you need to know is I’m 18 requires me, at some level, to kind of know that that’s the case. So how do you ensure that? Like, I don’t know, what do we have now? 3 billion people in the world connected to the internet, yeah, and it’s growing every day, but there’s still four. Let’s just say half the planet doesn’t know how to do all that stuff, and even half of the people that are connected wouldn’t know how to do it. How do you make it so easy and seamless for people that in a digital ID environment they can do that?

Aaron McDonald 15:58
Yeah, so let me tackle in a couple of ways. Thank you. Mentioned zero knowledge proofs, and people might not know what those are, and I kind of racked my brain over time to figure out a way to explain it to everyday people. So I’ll give that a go. So a zero knowledge proof is a way to prove something to someone or to a system without them having the information directly that was used to prove it. Yeah. And like a simple example, like we talked about earlier, I can prove I’m over 18 without giving you my my date of birth. Yep. How they work is kind of like a maze. So I can prove to you that I can go, I can find my way through a maze without ever showing you how I got through the maze. Yeah, because I can go in the indoor and I can go out the outdoor. So, you know, absolutely categorically, I know my way through the ways, right? But you have no idea how I did that, and that’s kind of how zero knowledge proofs work. And so we can use that technology to give this really good balance of, you know, privacy, along with being able to do the things society needs to validate me and my credentials. How do we make that very complex thing, um, accessible to everyday people? Yeah. I think if we look at future verse like the number one thing in our strategy, three points in our strategy, and the first, very first thing is make the technology invisible, right? Every great product feels like magic, and that’s one of the biggest problems that has been in the space of this technology, is that everyone has focused very much on protocols and economics and incentives and all these kinds of things, and hasn’t really stepped back and said, What’s the ideal user journey for my grandma? And so that is part of the technology that futureverse builds. We make technology that makes that journey of using this technology feel like magic. Can I say

Michael Waitze 18:27
this? It’s so funny, because at the beginning of this conversation, you said, as part of your background, you were focusing on IP, and two thoughts in my brain occurred at the same time. I’m like, he doesn’t mean intellectual property. He means Internet Protocol, doesn’t he? He must mean that. And it’s funny because I always use this as the example. I like the way you’re smiling, but I always use this as the example of of technology that is magic, right? Like, my mom knows how to send an email, but has no idea what TCPIP is, right? And never needed to know, right? And that’s the idea. And SMTP,

Aaron McDonald 18:57
yeah, no idea all the stuff that email work makes it makes it magic. And I kind of say, like, same, same, similar example, you know, Netflix, yeah, it’s extremely complex behind the scenes. There’s, like, dedicated data center infrastructure and networking equipment and caching equipment, sophisticated applications, but I can just press a button and watch whatever I want exactly. And so that’s the kind of experience we have to be able to deliver to make these systems scale.

Michael Waitze 19:33
Okay, what are the other two things that you’re focused on? Because you said one is making the technology invisible. What’s the what are the other two for future? Verse, yeah.

Aaron McDonald 19:41
So the second thing is to demonstrate the open Metaverse in action, because people have talked about this idea of interoperability of portable content, particularly. Particularly in a gaming context, because a lot of these ideas come out of gaming, yep, and we’ve never seen it anywhere. For the billions of dollars that are being spent on this idea, there isn’t anywhere you can go to and see this at scale and so, and that’s because there are some hard technical problems that, until we started solving them, weren’t solved. But also there hasn’t been like a hero to bring that to life. And that’s one of the reasons why we partnered up with Ernie Klein, who wrote Ready Player One, because this is the thing in people’s minds that typifies or exemplifies the metaverse and pop culture. You can watch that movie and you can get a sense of what the internet could be. And so we want to bring that to life and demonstrate how this stuff works. Yeah. And then the third bit is to address your earlier point. How do you get these, you know, 3 billion odd and growing people to engage with this, what can seem like unnecessary technology in their minds, maybe. And that is to do that through what we call play and learn. Make it fun. Make it a game. People are playing something, doing something that’s fun, and in that process, they’re learning why it’s important for you to own your identity in a digital world, it’s important to protect your data and be careful about where it’s used and who has it. And start with the fun, and then learn through that fun.

Michael Waitze 21:46
Yeah? So I’m pretty confident you’ll never have to teach my daughter why that’s important, but you may have to teach her grandfather kind of thing, right? And I hate to say this, but I think something like 22 million people in the US who voted in the previous election just died because of their age, right? Those are people that are just gone. It’s not a nice topic, but you understand the point that, like, yeah, it’s like 7% of the US population is just gone, right? So that happens over time. Sorry. Go ahead to your point, though,

Aaron McDonald 22:22
I think there are plenty of younger people who do understand this. Yeah, there are also, equally plenty that don’t fair enough, and we’re at this precipice, I think, in the history of humanity, where, if we were at this fork in the road, where if we don’t take the option of self sovereignty online, yeah, we won’t even have the chance to think about it in the future, because, because the mind control machine on the other side of the fight will be so strong, yeah, that you can’t escape it, agreed, you won’t even occur to you to think about that.

Michael Waitze 23:01
So, so this is, this is why I talk about this all the time, right? In other words, in the and I hate to say this right, because I agree with you, at some level. I think what we talk about as this sort of technologically advanced, immersive world is going to, by definition, just merge, like we could say, like there was the there was the regular world and then the electricity world, right? Because not electricity wasn’t everywhere, but those two things merged, electricity is everywhere. It’s ubiquitous. No one even thinks about it anymore. You just, like, turn on a light, yeah? And I do think that what futureverse is building or imagining is the same thing. It’s just going to be there. But,

Aaron McDonald 23:38
and this is something got the black mirror version and the version we’re trying to build, yeah,

Michael Waitze 23:43
yeah, but, but the version you’re trying to build, I believe, and this is why I’m asking you all these questions, right? Because I’m so interested in this, is that if you and I are having a conversation at a bar, right? And we’re just talking about some sport we love, I don’t care rugby, it doesn’t matter to me, right? We’re just talking about it. Blah, blah, blah, some unknown person, or some not real person, some fake thing, cannot just come over and interrupt our thing, or 75 of them can’t come over and do it. That doesn’t exist in the non technology world, but in the online world, it does. Those are bots, right? And those things should not be legal, and you should have to identify yourself before you say anything, so that I know who I’m dealing with, again, in a zero knowledge way, just verify that you’re a real person. And to get that ID, you actually have to be born or whatever way it gets verified. But you’re right, because if it turns into the Black Mirror part of the world, most of the people won’t understand and will never have an opportunity to to identify themselves and to differentiate their identity from somebody’s fake identity, and then it’s game over.

Aaron McDonald 24:50
It’s incredibly hard problem to solve, yeah, because even if everyone had a digital identity that they. Could use online. There’s still no way to tell that there isn’t a bot behind that. And actually, even a step further, if you think that maybe we’ll have these digital twins agents that act on our behalf, right? How do you distinguish between my, you know, authorized representative, who happens to be a bot, and me, my digital twin, and so that’s like, kind of an interesting problem. And there’s like an even further down the track, or not that far down the track problem, which is, you know, look at what Musk is doing with neuralink. The definition of what is human going to change? Yeah, that’s true. And there’s all this, like, scary stuff approaching super fast. You know what? We’re not talking decades and decades here. Nope, you’re talking within our lifetimes and and so that’s why this moment is super, super, super important that we get and establish a foothold in this idea of personal agency and community ownership of the internet.

Michael Waitze 26:20
Yeah, I agree. Um, are there other I want to talk I want to spend a little bit more time talking about interoperability, because I feel like there are a ton of disincentives for this to happen. Um, some of which are financial, some of which are political right, and some of which are just like control oriented. But how do you kind of shoehorn this into a place where, right? Because here’s the thing, and gaming is maybe a great example of this, right? Like, if I buy something inside a game, I make an in game purchase, and I love that thing. Whatever it is, it’s a car or a power up or an outfit that I like. Historically, it’s been really hard to then take that and move it into another game. And part of the reason why it was economic, like that other game just didn’t want me to not buy things in their game. That’s one but second of all, you’re right, the technological challenges just behind enabling that were super hard. Can you talk a little bit about some of those things as well, just so the listeners can get a better understanding about, like, why it’s not happening then why it’s so

Aaron McDonald 27:21
hard? Yeah. So let’s address why it was hard. When you built games, typically, what you would do is you’d build the content. Let’s take an avatar inside of that game for the game. So what type of game was it? Single Player versus multiplayer, for example, for the platform? Was it mobile? Was it PC? Was it console? Was it Web? For the engine, so it was Unreal Engine, or was it unity and for the esthetic of that game, like, what did the things look like? Were they kind of like shiny, realistic, or they cartoonish? So each one of those is a thing which then has to be compatible with something someone else built that might not have chosen those same choices. You get this kind of combanatronic problem where it becomes n times n harder for it, for the thing you make to go into every other thing, because all of those things have to adjust. And so people then say, Okay, well, we’ve got these, like, universal standards, VRMs and stuff like that, and they’re a good idea in practice, it’s not as simple as people imagine. And then you add on top of that, like, I made this t shirt for my avatar, but your avatar might be a giant, so how does it like, fit on your giant, yeah, oh, then I’ve got to go and make a giant sized one. And so I’ve got to do that for every kind of Avatar that exists. And then you’ve got that layer of interoperability. So these are quite hard problems, and what we did is like, maybe look at things from a different perspective, which was, instead of trying to figure out how to make a file that could work everywhere, right, we tried, we figured out how to make a data standard for assets that could be interpreted everywhere. And so we built this thing called UBF, universal blueprint framework interesting and allows you to create an asset that can then be interpreted inside an engine like Unreal or unity, and so you can have the exact same thing appear in. In multiple places. In fact, I could be in my Unreal Engine app, in a first person shooter, and put a hat on, and it would instantly appear in another unity MMO, because the data changes. There’s no file change, so I don’t have to re render that thing. I don’t have to send it anywhere. And now the metaverse of content lives at the data layer as a protocol, as opposed to files, which is what everyone else has traditionally done, yeah. So that’s how we solve it. There’s some other neat things on top of that, wearables generator that automatically scales things like T shirts to different body sizes. So quite complex, deep tech problems that we’ve we’ve got good solutions for the economic one is like another layer of problem, and I have two answers to that. My belief is that once consumers experience open they will demand it because you want to do it. You just said it’d be nice to be able to do this. So if given a choice between genuinely owning something that is portable, yep, and not. Then consumers are going to choose genuinely owning something that’s portable, because they invest time emotional capital, real capital in in getting these things inside of these games and experiences. And they never truly owe them, and so that will drive people to that outcome, and that has been the case for almost every paradigm change in technology, oh, in consumers get some magic they didn’t have before, and if you don’t deliver it, you’re dead.

Michael Waitze 31:59
Yeah. I mean, look, there’s his There’s historical precedent for this, and very simple things that everybody understands. I mean, the Euro is the perfect example of this. Like, I don’t if I go from Italy to Germany, I can carry the same money. Like, that’s exact. That’s interoperability at scale, and very easy for people to explain. And nobody wants to go back to a system where you have to do FX just to go between France and Portugal. It just makes no sense, right? And

Aaron McDonald 32:24
then I think there are new economic models that you can build off top of that, like part of the identity system is that these digital things can now have identity, and you can do things like a passport type system. So you know, to come into my thing, there’s a small charge, and actually, that’s probably better for someone who’s great at making experiences, because there’s a lot of time and cost that goes into building an asset, yeah, and they don’t need that anymore. They can throw that away because someone can byo, and they pay a little tax on the way in, and, you know, everyone will be happy about that, and so they can monetize in different ways. And I think the last thing, probably the most important thing, is, you know, scarcity in these historically popular gaming experiences is driven by capital, yeah? Because it costs a lot of money. Make hundreds of million dollars, millions of dollars to make these things specialist people that are rare, and that’s getting a blissing by generative AI, yeah. And so if your game doesn’t make it in the past, well, we had to suck it up, because only you had a couple 100 million bucks to build that experience, yep. But if my AI can build your experience, I don’t need you exactly.

Michael Waitze 33:55
Yeah. And in this way, the world is getting to be a much more democracized and better place. It’s just like which direction it turns out, turns out, like, at the intersection right and you’re right. If we just keep going straight, we may have a problem. And I’m not making a political judgment by saying left or right, but like, at some point we’re gonna have to make a turn, and if we make the wrong turn, yeah, it’s very black nourish, and if we make the right turn, it’s just an amazing world where things are frictionless and seamless and much easier and also probably much safer. It seems to me. I want to ask you about standards, right? So you talked about UBF. How do you solve the kind of Betamax VCR problem, VHS problem? Do you know what I mean, whereas, like your whether it’s futureverse or any other company, right?

Aaron McDonald 34:42
Yeah, well, I think the first thing is make it a standard and make it an open standard, and that’s the process we’re on now. You’re part of the future verse roll up was a company called crucible. Um. Who produces the emergence interoperability? SDK, they’re a founding member of the open Metaverse standards body, cool. And so we kind of very big believers in taking the stuff and making it an open standard. I think that’s the first step. Think the second thing is momentum, right? So you have to, you know, even if your technology isn’t the best, if you get the best network effects, it doesn’t matter, fair enough. And so, you know, that’s why we’re partnering with these really big, well known, well loved franchises, sports teams, brands, to kind of get this stuff into the hands of everyday people as quickly as possible. And if you can do those two things, then I think you can kind of win. But the win we’re trying to make is not like win for us. Yeah, I get it like to win the race. And if someone takes our standard and the races like interoperability, yep. If someone else takes our standard and builds on top of it and they do a better job of it, we’ll use that.

Michael Waitze 36:08
Yeah, you’re happy, I get it, yeah, yeah. Because otherwise, if you weren’t happy about that, then you’re doing something wrong, right? You’re not representing actually, what you want to have accomplished. And you’re like, exactly, well, they did it, well, then screw them. You’re just like, great, at least somebody did it, because that’s a good outcome. Yeah, yeah. Um, do you want to give an example of a partnership that’s working and like, how it all fits in, and how all these small things that you’re working on tie together, if you don’t mind,

Aaron McDonald 36:32
yeah, I think a really good example that the audience could go and give a give a go now is the Reebok impact experience. So you could go to Reebok in depth.com, or find redox Reebok impact on Instagram and DM it, and one of our agents will talk you through creating a one of one digital Reebok Pump or Reebok Classic, your choice, from a memory in your Instagram, so you can turn a memory into a unique 3d digital wearable that then you can take into Roblox, for example, or one of our games and applications and experiences, and you can do that whole process, and my grandma’s done it. It’s grandma proof. I like it. Well, actually, my my mother, who’s my daughter’s grandmother, fair enough, grandmother has done it. It’s grandma proof, without knowing that you, you know, integrate you. You interacted with an AI agent, you created a web three smart wallet, you minted an NFT, like, none of that stuff is in your face, right? All from Instagram. That’s

Michael Waitze 37:54
super cool. That’s super cool. I always have this thought, right? I studied Japanese in college, and one of my earliest professors who was teaching us Japanese was also getting a PhD in etymology, right? So the study of words and word origins. And he would come into class some days, like, his hair would be a mess. He was really exhausted. And this idea of, like, where words came from he was, for lack of a better term. He was so deeply immersed in this world that coming out of it for him was hard, because everything to him now looked like part of his PhD thesis, of like, where did this word come from? Why does it mean that thing? Why do we conjugate this verb that way? Why is there English and Japanese, you know, all these things that he was thinking about, and I can’t help but think that, like, your team must spend so much time in Unreal Engine and in manufactured universes again, for lack of better terms, yeah, yeah, that sometimes when you come out, and I’m like, looking out a window right now to a bridge that’s in a bay with cars going past it. All of these things didn’t exist 100 years ago, right? And would have seemed fantastical if I had told you they were going to be there, and yet, there they are, running around like it’s just normal. Does it make you look at the physical world philosophically in a different way, when you’re spending so much time building virtual worlds that are starting to get closer and closer in detail and in feeling to the physical world in which you exist normally. Does that question make sense?

Aaron McDonald 39:37
Yeah, it makes sense, and it’s kind of a tussle I have in my head sometimes to imagine that they are separate things, right?

Michael Waitze 39:48
That’s my point. Sorry. Go ahead and

Aaron McDonald 39:51
I, I grew up in a rural community and a farming family, um. And I have a little plot of land which I can escape to, and I just like to go and pull weeds on the weekend, yeah, because it gives me the opportunity to step back from what you just described, yeah. And, you know, think about my existence in this, you know, very physical world where I’ve got dirt on my fingers and a thorn in my my palm, you know, right? So, yeah, I do. I do kind of, I wouldn’t say, struggle with it, but it’s always in the back of my mind that the decisions we make, um, exist inside of this bigger, more physical world, but at the same time that digital world is exerting so much pressure influence on this physical world around us, and the Two are intrinsically linked. You know, if you believe in climate change, for example, like the information around China, climate change and the narrative around climate change all exists in the digital world, and whatever outcomes of that information, war or information exchange are going to impact our planet one way or another, the literal air we breathe. And so for me, they are very indistinguishable things, yeah,

Michael Waitze 41:29
I just kind of want to leave people with that philosophical thought of like, over time, what is reality? Yeah,

Aaron McDonald 41:39
we could do a whole podcast on there. Yeah, I don’t want to go down that

Michael Waitze 41:42
rabbit hole, but I do want people to think about it, because that’s the kind of the genesis of the question that I asked you. It’s like, if you’re constantly immersing yourself in a digital world that you created, right? Like, all the stuff that was behind you and the Unreal Engine, automated video, stuff that you were playing before, like, it’s not real, real. But I mean, if you think about even just the development of Unreal Engine over the last, what 30 years and unity as well, we can give a shout out to both of them, right? Because they both do good work. They couldn’t have conceived how realistic things would look 30 years later, and now they’re probably looking at things and just going, maybe we should stop. Do you know what I mean in a philosophical way? And that’s the kind of thought I want to leave people with. It’s like, what are we creating? What should the outcome of that be? And the fact that companies like future verse exist, it’s like less of a company and more of a philosophy around what do we want the future of this merged online and offline world to look like? And we don’t want it to be dark. We want to be light. Yeah,

Aaron McDonald 42:44
I think that’s a good way for people to think about this. Is it’s not just some video game your kids play. Yeah, it’s actually the future of reality. Let’s

Michael Waitze 42:56
leave it with that. I really want to thank you for doing this, really. I mean, this has been awesome. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have. Aaron McDonald, the Founder and the CEO of Futureverse, yeah, you have to come back on. We have to have longer conversation about more stuff. If that’s okay with you?

Aaron McDonald 43:10
it’s great.