Meet the Lindens 2022 オーバーウルフとフィリップ・リンデン

司会進行はSaffia Widdershins、 ゲストは、Philip Lindenと、OberWolf Linden（Brad Oberwager）です。

今回は「Meet the Lindens（リンデンの紹介）」です。 今回は2人の重要なリンデンを紹介します。

（まず一人目は）Philip Lindenです。 second lifeの親会社であるLinden Labを設立しました。 もちろんこれは、オープンエンド¹⁾のインターネットに接続された仮想世界です。 （彼は）このメタバースの先駆者であり、その基盤を構築しました。 そして、このツールによって、人々は自分のアバター、自分の環境、自分のsecond lifeを創り出すことができるのです。

（二人目です。）この（Second Lifeの）誕生日会では、OberWolf Lindenが参加しています。 Linden Labの会長であるBrad Oberwagerは、テクノロジーや消費者向け企業でキャリアを積んできた人物です。 現在、彼は2つの公開会社、Asure Software（NASDAQ：ASUR）とBetter World（NASDAQ：BWACU）の役員を務めています。 彼は、彼が設立した2つの会社、JyveとSundiaの会長であり、TEGSCO（別名AutoReturn）の役員でもあります。 彼は2018年にペプシコ（英語: PepsiCo, Inc.）に買収されたBare Snacksを所有していました。

そうBare Snacksです。 それはリンゴチップスやココナッツチップスを作っている会社です。 Bare Snacksのポイントは、リンゴだけのように、単一成分のスナック菓子であること。 私たちは、油脂や悪いものを一切使わない方法を考えた。 そのために400ヤードのオーブンを開発しました。 そのオーブンは揚げたような味にすることができ、サクサクで素晴らしいものでした。 これは楽しい会社でした。 この会社はペプシの下でまだ続いているようですが。 ペプシはオーガニックでないものに変え、より安価に作ることができる製品に変えてしまったのです。 しかし、それはまだすべての空港やスターバックス、セーフウェイ²⁾などにあります。 自分が心血を注いだものが、たとえ自分のものでなくとも成功するのを見るのは、いつも嬉しいものです。

25,000人のCEOからなる世界的な組織であるYpoインターナショナルの副会長も務めています。 そうですね……フィリップが証明してくれるように 会社の最高経営責任者というのは、どちらかというと孤独なものです。 ことが起こるたびに、孤独な仕事です。 仲間意識が芽生えるので、とても楽しいし、次に は、自分の悪いところを克服するためにエネルギーを注ぐことができる素晴らしいものである。 しかし、物事がうまくいかないとき、恐怖を感じるとき、そして、うーんという瞬間があるとき、それは を疑ったときに頼れる人は、実はそれほど多くはないのです。 を、投資家がいて、彼らが役員で、あなたがいる。 を共有したいとは思わない。 を持たない若いCEOを支援するために、この組織が生まれました。 ることができない若いCEOを支援するために、この組織が生まれ、他の若いCEOと集まって 自分の内面を見つめ、すべての答えを持っているわけではないと言うことを学ぶことができます。 このような小さなグループに入ると、誰もが他の人たちのために最善を尽くしたいと思うようになります。

だから、その団体に恩返しがしたくて、リーダーシップをとることにしたんです。 西海岸、それからあれやこれやと運営し、国際理事会にも参加しました。 で、親しい友人もできましたし、実際、副会長になり、さらにYPOの全会長にもなりました。 YPOの会長はランディ・ウォーターフィールドで、彼と私はとても親しかったし、彼は私がリンデンを所有している人物でもあります。 のオーナーでもあるので、YPOを通じて友達になったんです。 そして、リンデンに関わる機会が訪れたとき、彼と私は、パートナーとして協力し合ったんです。

それではフィリップ、まずお聞きしたいのは 住民や彼らがセカンドライフで作ったもので、最も刺激的だったことは何ですか？

Philip Linden：最もエキサイティングだったことは何ですか？と聞かれたら、私はアートについてと答えます。 行ったことのあるシムや、見たことのある場所で、最も注目すべきもの、そして、そのようなものです。 セカンドライフが成長するにつれて、とてもすばらしかったことのひとつは、人々が一緒に働き、協力し合っていたことだと思うんです。 人々が一緒に仕事をし、コラボレーションし、お互いに挑戦し合うことで、アートワークがエスカレートしていったのです。 私は今でもセカンドライフについてそのように思っています。 私が最も素晴らしいと思う瞬間は、ある芸術作品の中に入って、その作品に没頭し、圧倒されるような瞬間です。 でも、特に今、世界は……テクノロジーと世界が直面しているすべての問題に直面しているんだ。 私がセカンドライフで最も好きなことは、それがどのように残っているかということです。 そして、人々が集まってコミュニティを形成し、コミュニケーションをとることができるという点で、希望の兆しのようなものであり続けていることです。 人々が集まり、コミュニティを形成し、市民的な生産性をもって、お互いにコミュニケーションをとることができるという点です。 セカンドライフを見ると、100万人の人たちが仲良く暮らしているのがわかります。 セカンドライフでは、100万人の人々が仲良く暮らしています。 現実の世界では好きになれないような人と出会って、その人を好きになったり、アバターとしてでも恋に落ちたり。 それが今一番うれしいことです。 私たちがどれだけそれを必要としているか、そしてどうしたらセカンドライフの素晴らしいアイデアを取り入れることができるかを考えることがどれだけ重要なことか。 セカンドライフから素晴らしいアイデアを取り出して、できるだけ広く世の中に送り出す方法を見つけることがいかに重要なことでしょうか。

OberwolfがLinden Labに参加してから1年以上経ちましたね。 セカンドライフに多くの時間を 割くことができましたか？ あなたはとても忙しい毎日を送っているようですが。

OberWolf Linden： そうですね。たぶん必要以上に多くはないですが。 でもまず第一にセカンドライフで過ごす時間が非常に多いです。 というのは、24時間それについて考えているからです。 リンデンで過ごす時間は、他の仕事全部を合わせた時間の100倍以上です。 だから、セカンドライフのことを常に考えていることであり、入居者とその家族がよりよい生活を送れるよう、資源を提供するためにできることはすべてやっています。 でも、もっと具体的な答えは、「いいえ」です。 それ以外の答えがないんです。 誕生日に少し時間を割いて、ゴルフやサーフィンなど、自分の好きなことを見つけてみてはどうだろう。 ゴルフとかサーフィンとか。 ゴルフとセカンドライフを楽しむことができたら、それはとてもいい経験になるだろうね。

フィリップはリデンラボの前に、革新的なインターネットビデオ会議製品のプレビューを作成しましたね。 インターネットビデオ会議の革新的な製品を開発し、後にリアルネットワークスに買収されました。 その後、セカンドライフでは分散作業やコンピューティングに関するいくつかのプロジェクトに携わりました。 2013年にはハイ・フィデリティを共同設立し、バーチャルワールドの世界に再突入しました。 次世代共有型バーチャルリアリティの未来を探求する会社です。

バーチャルリアリティ、いい質問ですね。 あなたが言った「ハイ・フィデリティ」の話に戻りますが、私が常に仕事を続け、プログラミングをし、テクノロジーに関わり続けているのは、世界中の知らない人たちが、可能な限りリアルな方法でオンラインでコミュニケーションできるようにしたいという熱い思いがあるからです。 私が最初にやったことは、あなたが言ったように、自由な視点で、できるだけリアルな方法でオンライン・コミュニケーションをすることでした。 1995年のビデオ会議です。インターネットをご存知の方なら、1995年にはまだビデオ会議というものはあまりありませんでしたから、かなり初期の過激なアイデアだったのです。 世界の反対側にいる人たちの小さな小さな白黒のビデオを見ることができたのは感動的でした。 その後、セカンドライフが登場し、私たちはボールを大きく前進させたのです。 ハイフィデリティの基礎となるチップの話が面白かったんです。 Coffee and powerというのがあって、これがまた面白くて、10人くらいでジャイロという小さなチップを買ったんです。 これがまた面白い。 このチップは、親指と人差し指で挟むことができる小さなチップで、私がやっていたのはこれです。 オシロスコープで見てみると、回転させると電圧が変化するのがわかります。 そのチップを見ただけで、オキュラスが実現することがわかりました。 その小さなチップは、誰かがヘッドマウントディスプレイを作ることができることを意味しているのだと思いました。 その時、私はこのことについて間違っていたと思います。 そのチップはVRやバーチャルワールドが非常に早く大きな一歩を踏み出すことを意味し、 今日ここで見ているアバターは、私たちのように自然に動くことができ、互いにコミュニケーションをとることができるようになるでしょう。 それで、ヘッドマウントディスプレイが変化することに賭けて、ハイフィデリティを始めたのです。 信じられないことですが ハイフィデリティを始めた時から 10年近く経った今 それらのデバイスはまだ世界をそれほど 変えていません。 特に人々が互いにコミュニケーションするためにはまだ効果的ではありません。 それは私がとても情熱を持っていたことであり、それが私をこの世界に引き入れた理由でもあります。 そして、そのおかげで今があるわけですが、それはとても難しい問題です。 （現時点では）人をつなげることができないんです。

ケニアで産科看護師のトレーニングに使われているプロジェクトを見せてもらいましたが、驚くべきことです。 そのプロジェクトでは、携帯電話を使ってバーチャルリアリティを実現し、携帯電話を装着して、その中を体験するのです。 ヘッドマウントディスプレイには、特定の縦型用途があります。 先日……もし私に、セカンドライフが成功したもので、かつ、あなたが知っているような垂直方向のものを尋ねたら VRゴーグルは、ある時点から、その方向へ向かうと思います。

それは、あなたが言うように、世界中の教師と生徒がVRやバーチャルワールドに集まることです。 しかし、私はそれが実現すると思いますし、今日あなたがおっしゃったような医療シミュレーションのようなものがあります。 本当に期待できますね。

あなたはラボの仕事に情熱を持っているわけですが、何がきっかけでセカンドライフを始めたのでしょうか？

まず最初に、フィリップと私は10年以上の付き合いなので、セカンドライフのことはかなり前から知っていました。 フィリップと私は3ブロック離れたところに住んでいて 定期的に会っていてとても親しい友人なんです。 （そのため）フィリップ・ローズデールの伝説と神話の一部なっても、フィリップを身近な存在に感じることができたのです。

フィリップと私は毎年一緒にバーニングマン³⁾に行くのです。 7年くらい前から一緒にドライブしてその時間を過ごしています。 フィリップはリンデンの株主ではありましたが、今のように積極的に会社の一員となることはありませんでしたし、 以前は投資家がいて会社を経営していました。 投資会社はリンデンを売りたがっていました。 しかし、リンデンは非常に興味深い会社です。 セカンドライフをこれほどまでに素晴らしく、最先端のものにしているのは、 フィリップが何年も前に下した決断であり、セカンドライフを際立たせているものです。 私の情熱がどこから来たのか、そのことをお話ししましょう。

人々に物を作る機会を与えると何が起こるか見てみましょう。 すると彼らは友達になり、これらの素晴らしいものを作ることになったのです。 最もシンプルな方法で物事を作り、商売を行うことができる技術であり、基礎なのです。 社会と商業の関係を考えてみると、社会は商業を可能にすることで、私たちを結びつけているのです。 物事を生産し、販売することができ、それによって世界全体がより良くなるのです。 そうすると、クリエイターたちは物を作り、お金が動くようになります。 そしてお金が動くと、誰かがリンデンドルを買って、そのリンデンドルで何かを買う。 クリエーターは リンデンドルを手に入れたら、そのリンデンドルを不換紙幣（法定通貨）に換えたいと考えるかもしれません。 ドル札や銀行口座に入れ、コーヒーを買うことができるようにすると、このように非常に興味深いことが起こります。 本来それはマネー・トランスミッション（個人間送金）と呼ばれるもので、規制されています。 これは世界の多くの地域でも規制されています。 そこでリンデンは、セカンドライフをサポートするために、実際にライセンスされた法的監査付きのティリアを時間をかけてそれを作り上げました。 本来はクリエイターがシステムからお金を持ち出すことはできません。 州によって、政府によって、さまざまな規制があることです。

例えば、リンデンラボを買おうとすると、セカンドライフはゲームや仮想世界や技術を理解している人、 ティリアは金融や規制や監査を理解している人でないと難しい。 そのため、多くの取引は失敗に終わりました。 この状況を打開するために、私たちはこの取引に参加しました。 私は1年間、毎年違う取引に耳を傾けていましたが、毎年その取引は崩壊していきました。 そして、もしこれがダメになったら、僕が買うよと冗談交じりに言ったんだ。 フィリップから電話があって、「この会社はつぶれそうだ」と言われた。 私は役員の一人を知っていたので、彼（ランディ）に電話をして、フィリップを紹介したのです。 彼ら（リンデン？）は「私たちはとにかく売りたいんだ」と言われ、 私は「じゃあ、今すぐ買ったらどうだろう」と言ったのですが、（実は）そんなお金はありませんでした。 このランディという人はフィンテック⁴⁾に詳しくて、誰よりも金融に詳しく、自分の銀行やいろいろなものを持っています。 そして、私は彼に、これは今までで最高のものになるだろう、最高に楽しいものになるだろうと語りました。 彼（ランディ）は「わかった」と言い、資金面を解決してくれた。 そうしたら、彼（リンデン？）はOKしてくれたんだ。 これが本当の話なんだ、素晴らしいよ。

買収から1年半が経ちましたが、いかがですか？ 以前と同じような興奮を味わっていますか？

私は半分しか答えられないので、私の見解ではどうなっているかしか答えられませんが、本当の疑問は何なのか、ということです。 会社を買うとき、より多くの価値を創造する方法はいくつかあります。 というのも、価値の種類はこれだけではありませんが、ここでは金銭的な価値についてお話しします。 しかし、一般的には、収入を増やして経費を同じにすることもできますし、収入を減らして経費を減らすこともできます。 または、収入と支出を増やして、その差額が横ばいよりも大きくなることを期待することもできます。この3つ目が、実は最も難しいのですが、最も難しいことですが、最も興味深いことでもあります。 最も難しいことですが、最も興味深いことでもあります。 セカンドライフに力を入れれば入れるほど、より多くの人々の関心を集め、物事がうまくいくのです。メタバースを運営し、バーチャルワールドを運営し、特にセカンドライフを運営することは、決して安価なことではありません。 そのため、AWSに移行するようなことをすれば、非常に大きな助けとなりますし、私たちもそのようなことを検討しています。 新しい技術や住民のために世界をより良くする新しい方法を検討しているのです。 それは、ある種の金銭的な見返りと等価でなければなりません。 欲深いからではなく、廃業しないためです。 モバイルアプリを作る場合、ただ指を鳴らしてモバイルアプリを作るのではありません。 何百万ドルもかかることもあります。 ビジネス面では、5年先でも構いませんが、ある程度は見通しを立てなければなりません。 5年先かもしれませんが、それなりの見返りがなければなりません。 リンデンの所有という点では、住居に投資したときに 住人が幸せになり、私のCFOもそうです。 物事に投資するとき、私たちはあまり損をしませんが、少しの間だけお金を失います。 しかし、最終的には住人がその価値を理解し、私たちが多くの時間を費やしていること、そして社内の方針はこうです。 私たちの目標は、2ドルの価値を1ドルにすることです。なぜなら、その2ドルの価値を作るのに、90セントしかかからないからです。 2ドルの価値は90セントで構築できる。 90セントを費やしても、2ドル分の価値を提供し、1ドルを請求すれば、私たちは幸せになれます。 この話を聞いて、私はこう思いました。

リンデンホームズのプロジェクトと、ベリサリア島、そしてベリサリア大陸の住民のみなさんがベリサリア大陸に押し寄せた様子をご紹介します。 新しいテーマが発表されると、住民が殺到して大喜びするんです。 サブコミュニティが作られ、官僚委員会が人々にパスポートを発行し、人魚のコロニーができ、人々が集会する乗馬コースができました。プレミアム会員になると、このような家を建てることができるんです。

あなたがおっしゃったように、彼らは多くの価値を得ているのです。金銭的な価値もありますが、それ以外に社会的な価値もあるんです。これは完璧な例で、私たちはお金を稼がず、お金を失うことになります。しかし、多くの善意と積極的な交流が生まれ、やがてそれが解消されるのです。そうすれば、住民の皆さんは、過去に比べれば、より多くそれを目にすることができたのではないでしょうか。そして、私たちは今後、住民の体験をより良いものにするために、さまざまな種類のサービスを提供する予定です。プレミアム会員には、より多くのものを提供する予定です。また、より高い品質のプレミアムサービスを提供する予定です。というのも、プレミアムが9.99ドルであれば、さらに多くのものを提供できるからです。プレミアム会員が9.99ドルの場合、税金の関係で価格を上げなければなりませんがプレミアムが9.99で、それを運用するのに8.99かかるとすると、15を提供したいのですが、それができないので、その方法としてそして、その8.99ドル、つまり9ドルの追加料金を本当に評価してくれる人たちに、それを提供する機会があるのです。18ヶ月分の価値を提供する方法がないのです。というのも、今は1ヶ月18ドルの価値を提供する方法がないからです。本当に住民にもっと価値を提供するためのものなのです。 私は利他的であると思われようとしているのではないことを理解していますが、もしそうだとしたら、その利他的であることは、私たちがその価値を提供するために必要不可欠なのです。 プレミアムが9.99で、それを運用するのに8.99かかるとすると、15分の1の価値を提供したいのですが、それができないので、その方法として そして、その8.99ドル、つまり9ドルの追加料金を本当に評価してくれる人たちに、それを提供する機会があるのです。18ヶ月分の価値を提供する方法がないのです。というのも、今は1ヶ月18ドルの価値を提供する方法がないからです。本当に住民にもっと価値を提供するためのものなのです。 私は利他的であると思われようとしているのではないことを心に留めておいてください。 しかし、私たちは常に、より多くの価値を提供し、提供した価値に対してより少ない料金で済むような、スイートスポットを見つける方法を見つけようとしているのです。 そして、私以外の社内の誰と話しても、それが私たちの会社でのやり方だと言ってくれるでしょう。

フィリップ 何か言いたいことはある？

ブラッドが言ったように、それはとても素晴らしいことだと思います。セカンドライフは常に魔法のようなもので、後発の資本主義が持つ多くのルールを破ってきた。それはつまり、人々が望むことをセカンドライフでやり続けるという、絶え間ない挑戦であり、楽しみであり、インスピレーションなのです。それは素晴らしい挑戦で、人々は多くのことを望んでいる。 ブラッドがある時期にやってきて、2週間目か3週間目か、あるいはそれ以降のことだったかは覚えていないけれど、彼はこう言ったんだ。彼はこう言ったんだ……素晴らしい、星がいっぱいだ。何度か会議に出て、その話の複雑さを知ったんだ。ブラッドは実際にそれが好きなんです。彼はとても頭がいいんです。というのも、彼はとても頭が良くて、挑戦することが大好きで、複雑なことを考えるのが好きなんです。 クレイジーだとは思っていたけど、こんなにクレイジーだとは思わなかったよ。

メタバースについて少し話をしましょう。 というのも、今メタバースへの関心が非常に高まっているからです お二人はメタバースの新しい形に興味をお持ちのようですが セカンドライフは、仮想世界やメタバースへの新たな関心の波にどう対応しているのでしょうか？ セカンドライフは、仮想世界やメタバースに対する新しい関心にどのように応えているのでしょうか。 セカンドライフの考え方は、あのマーク・ザッカーバーグの考え方とどう違うのでしょうか？

メタバースという言葉は、1992年に書かれたスノウ・クラッシュから生まれました。 ここで話したように、妻のイヴェットが私の誕生日に買ってきてくれたんです。 そして、「これは、あなたがいつも話しているようなSFよ」と言ったんです。 その頃、私はもうすっかり、バーチャル・ワールドを作るというアイデアに、完全に取り憑かれていたからです。

32:06 the the the at this sudden moment you know 2000 to 2000 you know 2020 to 2022 32:13 we've got this resurgence of interest in metaverse it's really come from three things in my opinion um one is 32:20 obviously covid and the idea that we'd all have to spend more time inside and 32:25 less time doing social things than we historically did and then i think the other one was facebook kind of throwing 32:32 this giant weird hail mary and claiming that they created known the entire name and space 32:38 and then i think the third one is all the kind of chitter chat around crypto and web 3 and 32:44 stuff which you know by the way you know whether you're talking about nfts or as brad was talking about earlier about 32:50 like you know basically creating a fluid economy many of the ideas that have driven the kind of 32:57 some of the the way people think about crypto today are things that were richly explored uh and or you know done or 33:03 deployed in second life from the very beginning so yeah it's all kind of come back together i do think though i 33:09 guess one thing i'd open with and then you know toss it to brad that the concept of the metaverse 33:17 from second life was that of enabling people to make things 33:24 together in a single space which was very much my inspiration and that for example you needed a you needed an 33:30 economy for that but you didn't need an economy because you wanted to speculate on a coin going up you needed an economy 33:38 because people needed to be able to barter they needed to be able to engage in trade and those people were typically 33:44 not in the same country so there was no venmo or something that they could use right so out of practicality and out of 33:50 the desire to enable people to come together and make things we had to build all that stuff i would note that a lot 33:58 of the enthusiasm around the metaverse today unfortunately is in that different direction of 34:04 exploiting and surveilling people so that you can sell them things 34:09 which is a very different sort of an idea than second life is based on so my hope is that 34:15 we my hope is that second life can serve both for itself and you know perhaps for the industry more broadly as this 34:22 example of what the metaverse could be or maybe one of the things that it could 34:28 be uh with the hope that we all kind of go more in that direction but i do worry 34:34 that the resurgence of interest in the term is different from second life in its 34:39 focus on this idea of you know finding yet more ways to sort of 34:45 exploit people and extract money from them for you know small transactions or or or 34:51 advertisements or whatever yes 34:57 right right 35:04 when you asked the question and you said uh it was very interesting the thoughts that popped into my head when you said 35:10 um given all this new stuff what's been the impact on second life and interestingly the answer is none 35:16 um none impact um second life is uh is its own place and whether mark 35:24 zuckerberg tries to usurp the usage of the word 35:29 metaverse or not um the residents in second life go on 35:34 and continue to to live that part of their lives there so 35:42 in that sense it's it's been interesting to watch now on the other hand we all are reading 35:48 about it constantly and so what it's doing is i think from from our 35:54 perspective is it's leading us to think very carefully about what we're 36:00 investing in when it comes to investing in different parts of second life and um 36:05 to phillips point how do we withstand the 36:12 onslaught if you will of all these other worlds that are being built um with either a cryptocurrency or an 36:19 advertising model which will then be able to offer experiences um for free 36:27 that in our world need to be covered but that business model is critical so 36:34 philip hinted at it when he was talking about the dangers of surveillance and modification 36:41 as it becomes more specific if you look at other worlds 36:47 other virtual worlds as competitors if your competitor can offer what you can offer for free and you 36:55 have to charge that's a concerning position to be in but we're going to stick to our guns on 37:02 this one and we're not going to subject ourselves to the temptation of 37:09 direct advertising or of advertising what i think we're going to do and how it's going to impact us as a company and 37:16 the residents what we're going to do is we're going to continue to focus on experiences 37:22 and bringing experiences and um 37:27 social groups that have already been formed and see how we can bring them into second life and create 37:36 a more rich experience for current and perhaps use that model as a way to bring in new 37:43 residents we we come the team and when i say we i mean the whole company um and i i'm 37:50 certainly i'm not using the royal we it's really not me we have a thing called tusult the office of second life 37:56 um and just to just to tell you how interesting the business is so the office of second life is not one person 38:03 it's four people and that's who runs second life so there's lots of checks and balances and there's no ceo of 38:08 second life um and so you know it really is run by the residents and by uh 38:16 the company the the the four people who make up the office of second life and what i think that they are really 38:23 leaning into is how do we bring from the outside world from outside the 38:28 world perhaps these very rich experiences in because there are things that we can't 38:35 build currently no resident can currently build that perhaps we can build um with our own resources and i 38:42 think that's what and and the interest in the metaverse to try to bring this full circle 38:48 um uh philip can talk for 90 minutes straight um i do talk for 90 minutes 38:53 straight accidentally so i'm sorry but um the thing that the interest he has good ideas um the thing that the 39:00 interest in the metaverse has done is it's gotten everybody else thinking about it and that is allowing us to pick 39:07 and choose which companies we want to potentially work with in terms 39:13 of building experiences and what i mean by that is i will make something up so i don't pick 39:20 pick on something that may or may not be coming but let's say there's a there's a 39:27 uh singer named alligator um you know that singer may want their 39:34 music um to get around and that's why they go to radio stations and they do interviews 39:39 well they may we may want to bring that singer into second life 39:44 not to do a concert but perhaps to have a conversation um we may bring that in 39:50 as a um as a as a music video but what we want to do is we want to do 39:57 it in terms of bringing more experiences to the residents 40:03 if for example alligator wanted to 40:08 buy something in second life that would be up to alligator like we can't stop someone from buying land we 40:15 don't we don't go out and market our land we're not decent land in that way so it's it's a tight rope we have to 40:21 figure out how to bring more and more experiences but three years ago alligator wasn't thinking about the metaverse and now 40:28 alligator is thinking about the metaverse and that's going to bring that's going to give us the opportunities to bring more experiences 40:34 to the residents right yes i i was going to say that

40:42 second life has really been the only long-term successful virtual 40:49 world what would you see as important to that 40:54 i mean you know they've they've come they've gone blue mars 40:59 um the one that was all little bubbles that was on facebook i can't remember 41:06 its name even um and sony home they've all gone 41:13 what would you see is important to second life's sustainability is it the residence is it 41:21 the creators who are residents is it something else 41:27 well it's certainly first of all it's fundamentally the orientation toward enabling the 41:33 the creation of content together like we talked about earlier but you know i think the funny observation 41:38 is that when when when second life started and we 41:43 began to grow quickly um and and therefore lots of people saw us and tried it out and you know it had been in 41:50 world there was a kind of a very common thing which was to say hey 41:55 you know this second life it's cool it's showing us all the ideas but what's really broken is you know x and 42:02 and and and often they would say and the reason of this the reason for this thing not 42:07 being right is because those people at linden lab are hackers they're not experienced 42:13 designers they don't know how to build like ui you know and why why as soon as 42:19 serious uh product designers get wind of this you know they're gonna fix all these things 42:24 and everybody in the world is gonna be using a competitor to second life and then 42:30 over the next and of course that was kind of painful sometimes i mean people would you know sort of send me emails to that extent 42:36 you know saying you guys are brutish hackers who know nothing of elegant interface design and you know 42:42 i'd be like well you kind of do have a point there you know the the original 10 of us or so we're we're very much you 42:47 know working in the plumbing layer of enabling a virtual world right we 42:53 weren't it is it is a very fair it's a very fair critique uh and still fair today i think that we 43:00 were enabling the you know low-level systems moderation uh physics economy you know 43:06 all these things that we had to kind of get turned on for for this whole thing to work but what happened in the years 43:13 after you know we kind of got famous and people were levying these these observations was that 43:20 a half a billion dollars or so in venture capital was spent on as you 43:25 just alluded to sofia you know like numerous competitors to second life and 43:30 none of them succeeded as you said um and in fact today as we know 43:36 all of the social uh product usage that's driving a lot of 43:43 the you know this is a big opportunity you know 20 million people saw travis scott uh you 43:49 know in fortnight a lot of that is talking about the behavior of seven to 43:54 fourteen year old kids you know which is my minecraft roblox and fortnite um 44:00 as you said and i'm so proud of this i think second life is still 44:06 you know the largest place for grown-up human beings to come together and 44:11 experience an online social experience um you know there are new things like vr chat that are awesome and fascinating 44:17 um but you know there's still there's nothing that has anywhere near the uh 44:23 you know hundreds of millions or billions of people in you know daily that we have to get to for the metaverse 44:30 to take on the kind of value that say facebook expects it it will it will need to for their hail mary pass to land 44:37 there so um it was interesting that all of that experimentation 44:42 didn't kind of fix these what seems to be so obvious you know 44:48 design problems so the one observation i would simply have is that there is a magical kind of 44:54 mystery to uh how to get grown-ups into 45:00 online spaces in large numbers and it continues to be a difficult problem by the way 45:05 covid and facebook and even the hmd uh didn't fix those problems um they they 45:12 didn't you know make it feasible you know to get billions of people into virtual 45:18 worlds not yet and i think that we are still the the best thinkers and experimenters 45:24 around how to do that and there are still a lot of 45:30 uh technical and uh governance and you know uh management 45:35 you know hurdles to get over to to actually see that happen and uh i think 45:41 it will happen we're gonna see well secondly i've seen a lot of growth uh in the last few years and i think we're 45:47 going to continue to see a lot of growth overall but it is going to be a a longer 45:53 less obvious road than what um you know some of the kind of pundits and facebook would would have you think 46:00 [Music] what are the things that worry you most

46:06 uh what steps are you taking to ensure that second life remains the better metaphors 46:18 yeah so you know kind of tying it into phillips previous answer 46:26 i'm i'm betting that well over a billion dollars has been invested in 46:33 competing if you will virtual world um that then have leaned into 46:39 financial models and business models that that are not good for 46:44 the whole world in general virtual second life has paid out 46:49 over a billion dollars over its life right and that's it that's a very big 46:55 that's a that's a fairly significant difference in statistic right so um 47:00 certainly road locks are starting to pay out creators and there are other there are other fringe companies but really second life 47:07 has paid out a tremendous amount of money to creators and so if there's a risk 47:13 it's that some of these other worlds that are based on advertising 47:20 um are able to entice 47:26 our creators away and then the experience might 47:32 reduce the primary experience is social in second life and so that wouldn't change but 47:38 we are we as the owners of the company do have to 47:44 be on the lookout for competitive situations 47:49 because it's a fragile world and if half the creators leave there 47:56 there would be a problem if if a quarter of the if the quarter of the residents go to another 48:02 virtual world that's that's not going to be good for for second life so 48:07 the flip side of that is the hope that as 48:13 people get involved in other virtual worlds they will come to recognize that second life 48:19 is the best one to commit to 48:24 um i don't see in the short term a situation where you're going to spend equal time 48:30 in six virtual worlds um and so 48:35 hopefully that gets out we don't market second life we don't advertise on google 48:42 uh anymore we are just building the best thing that we can build 48:49 and hopefully we i think that the more residents that 48:54 come in the richer the experience the more engagement the happier the residents are 49:00 which by the way are our our objectives in the company is um 49:06 uh more residents um more engaged residents 49:11 um happy residents and happy lindens we call the employees 49:16 lindens and happy lindens and those are our four um pillars and so um that we talk about in company 49:23 meetings and things like that so i hope that it works out is is really it's a lot more hope than despair but i do you 49:30 you asked a specific question competition offering what we offer for 49:35 free um with advertising is it's an existential risk that um 49:42 that we hope to uh that we hope to to combat with just a great and more rich 49:48 experience i'd give a kind of a maybe a more philosophical 49:54 answer which is that the very fact that second life has this unusual quality that its design its its 50:03 its implementation of different features and capabilities has been directly in support of people creating things in the 50:10 world and you know in some cases making money from them um 50:15 second life is so unusual in that almost every sort of feature or aspect of it as a as 50:23 a system and as a piece of software is to enable things to be created you know as brad 50:29 said and you know obviously people have made made things in second life for many many 50:35 different reasons one of those sometimes for some of the people has been to make money and like brad said you know people have made at 50:42 this point a billion dollars in second life which is just a re it's just really a large amount of money for for a 50:48 phenomena that's still relatively young um and what goes along with that is that 50:54 there is this unbelievable right there's a couple of billion objects that are on the ground as i always like to say in 51:00 second life you know at any moment and any change that we make to second life 51:05 runs the risk of breaking some of that content and so one 51:11 of the things that i see as being this interesting philosophical and kind of 51:16 strategic problem that second life has is that we've made something which is full of all these rich features which 51:23 are then used together in very very sophisticated ways to make money for some people or to make art or to make 51:28 content or to make places for their friends you know if we make changes to that system say to 51:35 respond to emerging technology you know like the head mounted display or heavier use of voice or 51:42 anything whatever we can't do that without you know risking 51:47 um uh affecting the ability for the this existing immense amount of people and 51:55 objects to kind of keep working so i think we have an unusual uh it's an it's unusually difficult to 52:02 change second life and i don't think that's necessarily a bad thing you know like it like people talk about democracy 52:08 being useful to some extent because it moves slowly you know it kind of keeps terrible things from happening overly 52:14 quickly you know it's one of the many benefits of democracy i think like brad said the four people that run 52:21 that serve as the you know the executive team of second life the strategies that we've made this this dependency on 52:28 literally billions of dollars of content that people have built means that we can't be as agile in 52:34 responding to you know new technology um as everybody else and i think that is a 52:41 problem that is not a sometimes people say well you know that's just because you're using this or that programming 52:46 language nonsense it's a problem that is intrinsic to the idea of creating a 52:52 living world in which people can build things and then keeping that running okay 52:58 while still having our eyes open and like brad said you know if if facebook manages to do something that has a 53:04 material number of people in it then we have to look at that and say as brad said you know if if there's a 53:11 a cr you know if people are gradually migrating into that new space we are we will all lose together you know we have 53:18 to somehow adapt to that so i i think that's the uh 53:23 not an easy problem but if you ask you know what do you worry about you know there it is you know that the very 53:28 success of second life has made it um very very difficult to change 53:34 yeah yeah i've seen some of the things that happen when 53:40 slight adjustments are made and there's just no realization that they 53:46 actually underpin a whole different 53:51 area of the grid and suddenly people are screaming because something doesn't work anymore 53:58 there are many wonderful stories of his from history of bugs that we had right where we just had something broken like 54:05 a a triangle turned backwards on a box or something and then people would start using that bug to 54:11 make something like see-through you know bones i remember the one where you could see inside avatars and they had skeletons and stuff you could you'd 54:18 literally put content inside the avatar but then i don't even remember what the trick was there was a trick where you could basically make the avatar 54:23 transparent and see its guts and then that was a bug and then we fixed that bug and nobody could see that nobody 54:29 could see through the you know skeleton avatars anymore so there are just so many things like that 54:34 in here that um i've grown more and more respectful of i suppose over these last 20 years

54:43 eight now we've mentioned a little about talia and i 54:48 would like to add a little more and say what what does 54:53 the community need to know about tilia and how that helps second life grow 55:01 and this is the question that i really am interested in 55:06 is it in a way a cryptocurrency also not traded in the way that 55:12 blockchain cryptos are 55:18 so let me answer those two questions so 55:24 second life can't operate without tilia not because of a technical 55:30 relationship but because the fact that when you 55:36 just like if you use paypal when you move money from one individual to another 55:41 um that is that is regulated and you must rely on a company 55:48 that is constantly audited um to make sure that it happens 55:53 um in a way that is commensurate with the laws and regulations of the country you're working in 56:00 right that's a very important thing just to know that um 56:05 you know the system works uh the system is checked out a lot um 56:11 you know never say never on things but we spend a lot of time making that system very 56:16 robust the second question was is it a cryptocurrency and i guess 56:24 philip would be better to answer that in the sense that by definition a cryptocurrency 56:31 is on the blockchain but if you take that away from the definition then i would say 56:37 sure you can you could call it a cryptocurrency it was certainly the first in that way it just doesn't sit on 56:44 a blockchain the difference is and there's a very important difference 56:50 is that the linden dollar is a closed system that has two open 56:58 ends on it meaning you can take 57:03 let's call it we call it fiat so you can take fiat currency which is a dollar or a euro 57:09 and you can turn it into a linden dollar and you can take a linden dollar and you can turn it into fiat that's true and in 57:17 that sense it's open but the actual trading of it and the 57:22 value is kept inside of second life why is that important 57:28 in all these other versions where they are actual cryptocurrencies 57:35 that cryptocurrency as you pointed out can trade on coinbase 57:42 and we believe that that is a real problem and because once you're creating a world 57:49 where the currency to make the world work becomes a vehicle for you to profit just 57:57 off of the fact that you own some of it the whole economy breaks down if you own 58:03 a hundred dollars worth of linden dollars and tomorrow it's worth 105 and the next day it's worth 120. that sounds 58:09 good for you but you don't spend the money and if the linden dollar if the if the 58:15 value is crashing 10 a day you don't accept the money so it actually it may 58:21 sound good but it actually ruins the economy um and so we've really we've really put 58:26 a hard no on turning the linden dollar into cryptocurrency but i think phillip probably has a a little different take 58:33 on it mine's probably too no i mean that's great let me expand on that when we started so the thing that's so 58:38 fascinating as i said earlier about second life is a cryptocurrency so i think in many ways second the linden dollar uh 58:45 you know has very similar uh is a very interesting cousin of cryptocurrencies because it is um 58:52 you know it's its own currency so it's like a coin in that sense right it is it it is traded um 59:00 openly uh you know against other currencies you know against the dollar and oh and by the way uh against the 59:06 bitcoin as well i'll come back to that but um the the difference with the linden 59:12 dollar was that we prom so when people talk about money 59:18 an overly simplified way to talk about money but nevertheless useful is that it it serves two purposes which are very 59:25 very different the first purpose is as a means of trade 59:30 so the whole point of money right is that you don't want to carry your pigs and your 59:36 you know uh bushels of wheat to the market when you need a light bulb 59:41 um you know that's very inconvenient because the market you're going to might not need pigs at that moment right the 59:48 place that sells light bulbs so that's the meaning of that's the use of money to enable trade basically so money is a 59:55 you know almost a social contract that enables specialization and trade that's that's thing number one about money 1:00:01 number two is as a store of value meaning if i sell a million dollar house 1:00:07 i can get a million dollars of money then i can hide that in a vault or something and then at some point later i 1:00:14 can get it out again and buy another house worth a million dollars that's the idea of a store of value okay so there's 1:00:20 means of trade and store value as brad was saying the excitement around crypto has been on 1:00:26 the store of value side because people have said oh my god what if we made this scarce number of bitcoins that 1:00:32 could never be changed because it was simulated on many many people's computers blah blah 1:00:38 then you'd get this very interesting store value thing going on where people would uh you know could sort of park 1:00:45 money in bitcoins and see if they go up but as brad said that direct the store 1:00:50 value use case where the currency is going up in value means that it's useless as a means of trade because only 1:00:56 a fool would buy gasoline or milk or something with a currency that is going 1:01:01 up 10 a month or something you know it would be dumb what you want to do instead is you know use a currency 1:01:07 that's not going up on day one when we started second life i wanted to distribute resources fairly amongst 1:01:14 people because of course people were going to be building in this vast space together right and we sat down and said 1:01:20 now how are we going to fairly parcel out the compute resources the prims the the land whatever right and so 1:01:28 we immediately said well we'll just we just need to build some kind of a digital currency that will 1:01:33 enable that and so that from day one was what we had to do and because of that we 1:01:39 had this concern which brad alluded to that was we were like wait a second if we do this in a way where the price of the currency goes up 1:01:47 on the open market we'll completely screw ourselves we nobody will be able to use it to buy and sell stuff for 1:01:52 their avatars and so we can't do that and so we had to devise a monetary policy as they call it 1:01:59 which would which would hopefully keep the price of the linen dollar from going up and that is exactly 1:02:06 what we did and that began a kind of a a a grand experiment you know which has 1:02:12 been going on for 20 years successfully 19 i guess we say this year or this very 1:02:17 week um you know we we had to design something that would allow people to 1:02:23 uh trust the stability of the currency while embracing some of the other ideas that 1:02:29 were exciting about cryptocurrency so we we we did this radical thing where we didn't have a scarce number of linden 1:02:35 dollars we actually did increase the number in circulation over time and that enabled people to use it as a quote you 1:02:41 know normal uh currency that they could use for trade and we succeeded in doing that which was 1:02:48 so super cool and tilia in part is as brad described a result of all of the 1:02:55 legal and regulatory work we had to do and work around fraud and work around consumer protection all these things we 1:03:00 had to do to actually deliver on that idea of you can have a virtual currency that you 1:03:07 can use to buy and sell stuff in the world but then you can purchase it with dollars and then you can trade it back 1:03:12 out to euros and it all just works and so we had to do a ton of work as a 1:03:17 business to make that work and now we've made that into 1:03:22 a subsidiary of the company that can sell that capability to 1:03:27 other companies as well as providing it for second life 1:03:34 how's that going the um are other companies interested in using 1:03:40 tilia sorry are the 1:03:45 other companies did you say are other companies yes yes because yeah i think they can 1:03:53 so because what tilia built is so robust 1:03:58 other virtual worlds who want to enable creators 1:04:05 to make money are 1:04:10 using tilia as their financial rails we call them the 1:04:16 literally like train tracks um moving money you call it rails and so moving money from one 1:04:22 person the other they are using our financial rails they're very happy with it and 1:04:29 it's really good because we um we think it's 1:04:34 we think it's good for the business the linden business which is good for everyone second life 1:04:41 residents me um other uh employees um and uh and it's also very exciting you 1:04:47 asked you know some of the things that i'm excited about it's also very exciting it's it's so new and it's so 1:04:54 uh you know just no one's really thought about this in that way um to me it's as equally 1:05:01 exciting as crypto it just has a longer um uh it has it has more opportunity and less 1:05:08 damage um but it's but creating currencies for virtual worlds is very exciting and i and i do think it's a 1:05:15 real it's a real um reason why second life is so successful and i'm always in 1:05:20 awe that philip came up with this uh way back when before anyone was even 1:05:26 thinking about it so um some of the some of the some of the really well known folks and then there's 1:05:32 there's other components of tilia that are really powerful that we're helping um other gaming engines 1:05:39 and things like that great i was thinking over the years you've 1:05:44 tried um sorry hang on i'm going to cough god 1:05:51 sorry about that i was thinking over the years you've 1:05:57 actually tried various ways of balancing the economy 1:06:03 and there's i think back in the early days there was something called prim tax 1:06:09 and then there's been the cost of land the use of marketplace fees from 1:06:16 creators for marketplace there's been quite a lot of experiments 1:06:22 haven't there over the years balancing the economy 1:06:27 there certainly have you mentioned prim taxes i think that's great that's a great example of how 1:06:34 complicated all this stuff is and perhaps even how early we still are in the emergence of the metaverse 1:06:39 um the the thing we did at the very beginning that there was the funny uh tax revolt around 1:06:47 was that what i wanted to do was make it so that the um the the fees associated with having con 1:06:55 like with having like a piece of land and then having stuff on that land on that parcel were as closely as possible 1:07:02 related to the actual use of the server computer that you were on right so for example if you had a 1:07:09 light uh if you had a light on the property that that costs everybody something 1:07:15 because of the computations associated with that and the rendering right um if you you know if you had big 1:07:22 textures you know all these ideas and so at the beginning because i was trying to make it as again 1:07:28 as fair as possible so people you know were fairly out we were fairly allocating the resources relative to 1:07:34 people's investment or whatever um we had these uh we had this tax system that was very very complex so you 1:07:42 know you'd move a you'd move a lamp across your room and your taxes would change and your taxes were levied like 1:07:48 weekly and so there was this very well deserved you know tax revolt where of course in true second lifestyle 1:07:55 everybody realized oh my gosh this looks like the tea party or something and we're gonna have this tax you know 1:08:00 revolt it was fantastic and um uh yeah yeah that was an example of 1:08:06 where i i would defend that i was actually trying to do the right thing because as 1:08:11 a resident today sometimes you might be frustrated you know because your your neighbor has too many people over at 1:08:17 their party right and then nobody can come to your parcel that that's kind of an outgrowth of the 1:08:22 way we changed things uh after that tax report because we couldn't just charge everybody kind of 1:08:29 instantaneously what the servers were using we're ahead of our time though you know that's basically how you buy 1:08:35 services from amazon today for example for you know compute services you know you you pay for what you use 1:08:42 and i i actually think you know the the better way in some sense and maybe the not the future way for second life but 1:08:48 you know the the way things will ultimately have to get is that when you build virtual worlds you know you you're 1:08:54 kind of paying for the resources you consume so yes that was a that's a great historic example 1:09:00 along with many of weird and wonderful things that we tried and changed and learned from i guess the other big 1:09:05 picture there is just a lot of work you know it's a lot of work and ten years later we're still uh 1:09:11 grappling with uh with that problem right unfortunately servers 1:09:16 cost money and building the technology and maintaining cost money but with what philip did back then and 1:09:24 tried to do now it's easier to do with aws if the 1:09:29 cost of a server exactly matched the value that was extracted by 1:09:36 using that server this would be quite easy the tension of course is that there's 1:09:42 some parts of second life that cost a lot in terms of using server power so they 1:09:47 cost us a lot of money but they don't provide particularly incredible value so 1:09:53 charging a whole bunch for something that doesn't have value to a resident it's not going to work long 1:10:00 term and so what we are trying to do to avoid but but then again the business 1:10:06 model of taxation either through land um charges or through a marketplace 1:10:13 that pro that is a very good business model um because it's a lot better than than accepting advertising to manipulate 1:10:20 the situation and to survive people um so 1:10:25 so we have to constantly guide through that tension um switching over to aws a let us do a lot more 1:10:32 services to folks and made the experience a lot richer in terms of your ability to handle spikes 1:10:39 and it also is allowing us to look at more detail in terms of server usage and so we're 1:10:45 probably going to come out again with products that only create more value than they cost we will probably be 1:10:51 coming out with quote-unquote more expensive land but that gives people a lot more value 1:10:59 if they want it no one's going to be forced into it but we will offer things 1:11:04 that can handle a lot more computing power that will cost us a lot more money and then if the resident wants to do it 1:11:10 if uh if a group of residents want to do it if uh if um if it's for a short period of time 1:11:16 we're going to try to solve all those problems to give to give that 1:11:22 optionality to the residents an important note and i actually asked the team at this week 1:11:28 it's funny so if you look at the apple store 1:11:33 and you're a creator apple takes the first 30 cents of every dollar 1:11:39 if you look at if you look at roblox and you buy something through the apple 1:11:45 store apple takes the first 30 cents roblox takes the next 35 cents and so in general in the marketplace a 1:11:53 creator makes somewhere between 25 1:12:00 35 in that you know 30 call and 70 that's the market 1:12:06 in second life we charge none person to person um residential resident we charge 10 1:12:14 on the marketplace in total and you can spend an awful lot of time in second life and spend no money 1:12:20 and so i i asked the team i said do our residents 1:12:25 know how good a deal that is versus the rest of the world and 1:12:31 and the answer was yes but don't try to change it and i i love the answer right like okay so here 1:12:38 we are we're we're anywhere from uh a third to 70 percent cheap less expensive 1:12:45 um and really we charge the way we look at it we basically charge one percent right because not a lot of transactions are on 1:12:51 the marketplace um we effectively charge one percent of all transactions um to 1:12:57 the residents and we're compared against 30 to 70. so we're 70x cheaper than roblox and what i want is i 1:13:04 want them the creators of roblox to be like wow that's a lot better i should be building 1:13:10 stuff in second life um and maybe roblox is a bad example given their age range 1:13:16 but but so you ask that that's a tension that we're gonna we're just gonna be very careful about solving as our costs 1:13:23 go up or if our costs go up how do we solve that problem um the good news is 1:13:28 i'm really happy when i find out that you know 90 to 99 1:13:34 of the dollars um spent in world are uh 1:13:39 you know we're charging a percentage one percent now we do charge to accept the 1:13:46 linden dollar to come in and we have to charge for the linden dollar to get turned into cash on the way out because 1:13:52 that costs us specific money like we have to pay credit card fees and things like that but in general 1:13:58 um that's the way that's what those taxes like you we have to pay for the servers 1:14:04 somehow um so that's that's um does it there's another little story 1:14:11 about economics that relates to what we talked about earlier which is this difference between supporting 1:14:17 communities that live together and create things together in a virtual world which is second life versus 1:14:23 like selling people things with a virtual world kind of being the latest end point for the suckers to come 1:14:30 and you know buy waste money on stuff right um fees on transactions are in a very 1:14:36 interesting and complicated way very related to that as brad was touching on if you are selling um you know concert 1:14:43 t-shirts for a music event or something in a virtual world and people come in and they basically are buying from the 1:14:51 famous artists that had the concert a t-shirt that's 20 bucks right when you buy that twenty dollar t-shirt 1:14:57 if um if you spend that twenty dollars and say two two or three dollars of that 20 goes 1:15:04 to like the credit card processor who cares the the giant company that made 1:15:10 the t-shirt or you know the band or whatever gets 18 and who cares you know you paid a couple of 1:15:16 bucks in fees right it's like brad's talking about this with these uh like like on the apple store it's 30 percent 1:15:22 and on steam it's something like that right it's like 30 percent for you know things people sell on there but now 1:15:29 let's consider a very much more second life like situation and here's here here here goes that 1:15:35 brad and i live next to each other in uh in linden homes in second life okay 1:15:42 we're both creative but in different ways um we start with twenty dollars okay 1:15:48 i go i go over on day one on monday and brad um sings me a song he's an amazing 1:15:55 singer you didn't know this and he sings me a song and i give him the twenty dollars and he takes the 1:16:01 twenty dollars the next day on tuesday brad needs a 1:16:06 he wants to uh he wants his uh kid to take a math class and see so he 1:16:12 goes over to his friend philip who's the avatar next door who he knows to have a lot of experience with math and he asked 1:16:18 philip teach a math lesson to his kids for an hour for which phillip charges 1:16:23 you guessed it twenty dollars brad then gives the twenty dollars back to philip and we're basically kind of back at 1:16:29 square one the next day i want another song and i go to brad and i give him the 20 back 1:16:34 and then the next day he wants another math class and so he comes back over in this way the 20 circulates between us 1:16:41 indefinitely right so we can have a community inside of course you can imagine what i'm trying to say here there could be a 1:16:46 hundred people involved in that which is typically referred to as a circular economy nowadays um and that twenty 1:16:53 dollars sort of circulates around very quickly and because we can give it to each other freely in the world we can 1:17:00 basically all just get by basically sharing things with each other all using that 20 except you know what i'm gonna say 1:17:07 what if what if the first time i paid brad for the song he only got 18. 1:17:13 then the next day when he because two went to mastercard and then the next day he comes back i only get sixteen 1:17:19 because two master card and then the third day and you can see by about the end of the week we're done 1:17:25 neither of us has any more money we're poor we don't have any linden dollars to trade with 1:17:30 so this is a i hope entertaining example of how one of the examples of how economies 1:17:37 are really important and enabling them is sensitive to the kind of situation that you're trying to create and in 1:17:43 particular if you're trying to create a community that's self-supporting where people are trading with each other you 1:17:49 need to have the option of having either very low fees or zero as we do 1:17:54 if you are enabling a pass-through economy where you're mostly just advertising things to people and then 1:18:01 selling it to them the fees really don't matter because the the water of the economy if you will is 1:18:07 just kind of flowing one way and then exiting out again it's not moving around internally i don't know if that's fun to 1:18:13 listen to but it's an example of how deeply we think about this stuff and you know how and it's also an example of 1:18:19 how um the uh high fees based economies won't work they'll just die because there's not an 1:18:25 ability to do that internal trade you just run out of money very quickly i will add one thing i'm not sure philip 1:18:32 realized you do know philip that in your example you were working for a song

1:18:38 [Laughter] exactly very cool that's great 1:18:45 now i you may have wondered why i've 1:18:50 um added a rather large crop to the stage 1:18:57 and his name is hugh and 1:19:03 he was actually something i bought as a unique item 1:19:10 as a fantasy fare auction and i thought it was good illustration 1:19:16 of the recent phenomenon phenomenon of 1:19:21 non-fungible tokens unique digital goods that can be owned 1:19:29 because i certainly own you and it's just the artist of me who have 1:19:35 copies of him um yeah 1:19:41 he's got a unique id and 1:19:47 he wasn't cheap but he was hugely cheaper than what people are paying for nfts outside second life 1:19:56 do you think there's a future for nfts especially well you know perhaps in the second life 1:20:04 you know nfts and just as you say and i'm right-clicking on mr troll right now and 1:20:10 so i can i can tell us all various secret facts about this troll for example he was created by beck janus 1:20:18 and of course he is currently owned safiya by you um he's part of a uh uh he's played part 1:20:25 of a group second life birthday and as you said he has a specific name he's not for sale 1:20:31 and but if you were for sale the next owner would be able to modify and copy him 1:20:39 these properties this metadata associated with digital objects has been one of the key 1:20:45 features that we built into second life from the very beginning and in my opinion and i think most everybody 1:20:51 would agree with me this is one of the things that has made second life so successful is the ability that we have 1:20:57 to right click on things and see what their properties are and if they're for sale and of course 1:21:03 that has risen its head again in modern times with the name nft or non-fungible token but it's 1:21:11 exactly the same thing so basically every atom in second life 1:21:16 every primitive has this same data on it and scent is is essentially an nft in 1:21:21 modern parlance of course second life is a lot easier because the this data doesn't it doesn't 1:21:28 cost money to uh move these objects around that was what we just touched on before again if 1:21:33 brad and i were passing this troll back and forth as our means of uh 1:21:39 of paying each other for things and there was a forty dollar fee each time we moved the troll back and forth which 1:21:45 is what happens if you use a blockchain today um you know we wouldn't we wouldn't be able to do that very 1:21:50 successfully uh you know as a means of getting by um but yeah the the basic 1:21:56 concept of having um digital information that is 1:22:01 it uh immovable and attached to each of the digital assets in the world 1:22:08 is one of the things that made second life successful and so you know of course we find it utterly unsurprising 1:22:15 that you know the world has gotten so excited about nfts now so if you're if you're asking though safiya about you 1:22:21 know should we put nfts um in the blockchain sense or something 1:22:26 into second life um well we certainly could i mean i dare say somebody has probably written a 1:22:32 script this very day i would were we on text chat here i i bet you 1:22:37 anything that there would be probably multiple people that would call in if you will right now and say yeah i've 1:22:43 already written a script in lsl that basically loads nfts from openc and visualizes them in world i i'm going to 1:22:49 just wave my hands and say i'm i will bet you just about anything that such a thing already exists in second life but 1:22:56 um yeah i mean i think nfts are a natural kind of conjunction with second life as to the company kind of 1:23:02 fundamentally supporting them well i mean it we we've we've already sort of done even better with with with the 1:23:08 system that we have now i think philosophically people would say but but um that's not decentralized fully 1:23:16 in the sense that linden lab um is still the kind of data store you 1:23:22 know for those uh for those nfts if you will for the prims i would retort with well there are pros 1:23:29 and cons to not having any uh intermediary in which to place 1:23:34 uh trust or to ask to do things and of course anyone who is an artist in second 1:23:40 life will tell you that there is you know great complexity around uh completely decentralized marketplaces 1:23:47 because in many cases they allow the theft of intellectual property as effectively as they allow trading and 1:23:53 everything else and so um i think that you know that's one of the reasons that nfts have been such a 1:23:59 one of the many reasons that they've been such a oh what would you say you know a hot spot for public debate around this stuff 1:24:06 but the best of the nft is what's already in uh 1:24:11 every single object in second life and so i'm pretty i'm pretty happy about that 1:24:18 including a basic cube exactly it all starts with a 1:24:24 twist and a plywood cube at that you know by the way i mean the other thing that you 1:24:29 can't see over the history of second life you can only you can only see the final version that we're sitting in here on stage 1:24:34 is just i think one of the most amazing things to get to watch as a human being ever was the the increase in the quality 1:24:42 and the remarkableness you know in the in the artistic detail and stuff of what people were building in second life it 1:24:48 was so fun like i had to trust that that was going to happen and we we would have these like game designers and stuff who 1:24:54 would come in in the like earliest months the second life and they'd be like it's just a gigantic 1:25:00 squalor of plywood cubes it's horrible you know some of them with colors this is just awful you know 1:25:06 and i would just say just wait just hold on just hold your breath hold your breath and and 1:25:12 everybody i don't believe it you know this is terrible you've got a bunch of you know increasingly weird rotated you 1:25:17 know twisted plywood cubes here and we waited and we waited and we waited and sure enough you know that kind of 1:25:22 exponential curve of creativity started and you know the rest is history so that was 1:25:29 pretty fun to watch

1:25:34 i was going to ask about something in a non-technical 1:25:40 way which is um what i think is sometimes called 1:25:46 technical debt that's when a project is created 1:25:51 developed launched and still has holes in it there are several examples in second 1:25:59 life one example i was given was animesh for example we have some awesome 1:26:05 creatures horses dragons and so on but something like curtains that can be 1:26:11 opened and closed which is something that residents would love 1:26:16 can't be easily done at the moment it would need to fix are you going to have do you have 1:26:23 will you have a policy of looking back at these development holes and projects 1:26:31 one one statement is i think i i think that our very own mojo and grumpety are going to take this 1:26:38 topic on more richly in a couple of days or so which is awesome 1:26:43 at these events the uh one thing i would say though is that 1:26:48 that concept of technical debt is very closely related to what we touched on earlier what i touched on as the concern 1:26:55 that the world has such a rich set of capabilities which is what's required to create content and then once you have 1:27:01 that you can't it's very difficult to change those fundamental features and capabilities so that idea of technical debt which is 1:27:08 more traditionally just the when you started working on something a long time ago you end up with a lot of lines of 1:27:14 code that are then later on difficult to change or work on is kind of like 1:27:19 multiplied in a system like second life and few others by this fact that every single one of 1:27:25 those capabilities is used to build things that are then present in the world and so you've got to be extraordinarily careful about making 1:27:32 changes to the system so i would defend that in addition to the commentary and worth you know very worthy conversation 1:27:38 about technical debt that we'll hear uh soon from the team i would even add to 1:27:44 that that you've got this additional problem that it is multiplied by having to keep all this content working

1:27:51 right where would you like to see 1:27:58 second life go in the future you know where would you like it to be in five years time 1:28:04 probably you know dancing on the remains of other virtual worlds that have failed to take 1:28:11 off but or am i being too harsh there 1:28:18 well i'd i'd wrap up by going you know going all the way back to the beginning and saying that 1:28:23 second life has been such a i i think not just for me but for others 1:28:28 has been such an inspiration during such a hard time um you know 1:28:34 on so many levels but i would say that one of them is this idea that you can use 1:28:39 communication technology to bring people together that's what we've done here and 1:28:45 the only thing that i'd like to see is for it to be something that more people can 1:28:50 experience because you know the ability of second life to get people who 1:28:56 [Music] as i said before you know say in the real world might not have liked each other or might have had different 1:29:01 politics or something to come together and find common ground and get to like each 1:29:08 other i mean that's something that the world really needs right now so i hope 1:29:13 i would wish that whether it is changes to second life or even other 1:29:21 companies or products in in the industry or these ecosystems following our lead 1:29:27 i think that i would like to see virtual worlds used more for that kind of togetherness to 1:29:34 bring people together and get them uh get them closer to each other without needing to be face to face 1:29:44 what about you one of the many things that i 1:29:51 admire and love about virtual world second life in particular is how 1:29:57 incredibly equalizing they are across so many 1:30:04 um features of human beings uh out there 1:30:10 so um in second life unless you choose to disclose it 1:30:16 we really don't know who you are we don't know your gender your race your religion 1:30:23 right and there's a beauty to that that 1:30:28 you know i do know that sometimes i come back to commerce a lot but again we we do have to pay for the 1:30:35 servers but there's a beauty so 80 of our top 1:30:41 earners are women yeah 1:30:46 that is a beautiful thing as an example it's a beautiful thing in itself but it's a beautiful thing as an example for 1:30:52 the rest of the world when everyone is equal 1:30:57 those that have the best offering work the hardest work the smartest 1:31:03 whatever it is can provide for themselves in ways that in the physical world 1:31:09 it's just not possible there just is not the same opportunity in the physical world 1:31:15 for people to increase their particularly monetary but increase 1:31:24 their social economic status as easy as it is to do 1:31:30 in the virtual world so you ask five years for many of the same 1:31:36 reasons i think that if personally lyndon personally me 1:31:43 lyndon and all the lindens second life and all the residents if we can be part 1:31:50 of something that really i really believe can make the world a better place 1:31:56 that's a really valiant purpose and mission 1:32:04 yes and i think it's possible and i think it's and i think it's i think it's likely 1:32:10 in a lot of ways my my optimism 1:32:15 is very high on this example of 1:32:21 building equality around the globe and i think that that's a very powerful 1:32:29 vision and i think it's an extension of philip's vision it is not coming from me um and so if i can actualize half of the 1:32:37 things that philip thought in his head over the past 19 years and that tussell 1:32:44 is working on right now if i can make half those things realities 1:32:50 i'll feel very good about where we are in five years 1:32:56 that's terrific i'm going to ask a question 1:33:03 um on a lighter note which is what's the craziest most 1:33:10 bizarre thing you've seen or done in second life 1:33:20 that's my answer i just want to laugh all right good grief that's like one of those 1:33:25 questions people would ask me and i like people would say i love there was a question people as this what 1:33:31 surprised you about second life and i looked and i'd be like are you really asking me that like 1:33:36 i intentionally built something designed to be very surprising you know what i mean like almost everything that was the 1:33:42 whole darn point of it you know but um so crazy would be the same thing my gosh 1:33:48 i'm looking back on 20 years of experiences i don't know i don't even know where i i don't even know where i'd get started 1:33:54 i i i always retell because it's just it's just a crowd pleaser but it's you know one of them 1:34:00 well i'll retell this because i'm so old and i and i remember second life at the very beginning um 1:34:06 oh gosh i'm trying to think if i pick a different one but you know when we when we first opened the world and 1:34:12 the people were coming in at the very beginning this is just after lindenworld and when second life actually started i think so 1:34:19 this is in the summer like natoma um and we had a little tiny like it looked like 1:34:26 one of those corrals where you break horses or whatever you know it was like a small circular what paddock or 1:34:32 what you'd call it and the new p new people would show up right there and the the people that were 1:34:39 in the world already would sit on the edge of that fence and the new people would show up and 1:34:45 then they'd say you know hello welcome to the second life you know and so that was like the original welcome area experience but there was 1:34:51 this one of the things that broke us out kind of into the public eye was was this guy who 1:34:58 turned himself into a real uh you know legit area 51 alien now bear 1:35:05 in mind this is right at the beginning so we didn't have um the feature set was quite different and 1:35:11 one of the things that was key to this guy's experiences experience that he created was that you could apply forces 1:35:17 to an avatar at a distance with a script now as we all know you can't do that anymore 1:35:22 but that was uh doable back then and so what he would do is he would hover over 1:35:29 this welcome area where people were showing up and of course with a third-person camera people didn't 1:35:35 usually look uh straight up right you know when they were coming in and he would turn on the classic 1:35:43 you know cow lifting uh ale and he was in a he was in a you know disc alien spaceship and he'd turn on 1:35:50 the beam would come down once in a while on one of these new people and then to the to the shock of the people sitting 1:35:55 around by on the fence the the the hapless new resident would be lifted up 1:36:01 through the beam into the alien spaceship and then he would shut the door they could see him driving and but by 1:36:07 the way this is you didn't have chairs so they'd basically be rattling around in this spaceship they weren't actually 1:36:13 sitting and he would drive off with the person like what are where am i 1:36:19 what's going on so he would abduct them this alien would abduct you and then he would drive off 1:36:24 to like the weirdest place he could find and then he would open the door and just drop you out of the spaceship into it 1:36:30 and take off never never having said anything and this happened to somebody and they i 1:36:36 think it was wired magazine or it was some big news and basically the article the story was i was abducted by aliens 1:36:42 in the virtual world of second life and that was one of the things that um really put us on the map in the start 1:36:48 and so that story i'd never get tired of retelling that because i i think i saw it happen or i sat there and waited for 1:36:54 the guy and was just like that is ridiculous ridiculous and presumably hundreds of people then 1:37:01 rushed in to try and get abducted and it was probably hundreds or low 1:37:06 thousands at that point it was it was quite a bit uh uh yeah it was it was a while ago 1:37:15 yeah so i hope it's a bit early 1:37:20 um but are you looking forward to seeing things at the birthday 1:37:28 absolutely i know it just opened now and i think we're uh yeah i'm looking forward to wandering 1:37:34 around and and seeing it it's always it's always fun to see these celebrations happen in second life and it's pretty 1:37:40 exciting i can't believe it's 19 years and my gosh tomorrow next year it'll be 20 that's just 1:37:45 yeah my goodness my goodness what that says about my gray hair yeah yeah 1:37:51 i can't see any at the moment it all seems fairly red to me yeah i've dyed it i've i've kept 1:37:57 coloring it um on my avatar i kept it really nice 1:38:03 ready color all these years well 1:38:08 brad and philip thank you both very much 1:38:13 for giving sparing so much of your time to talk to me today it's been 1:38:19 wonderful pleasure to be here this has been great 1:38:25 absolutely thank you so much