Are We Safe in the Metaverse? Why Only TARTLE Can Help

Alexander McCaig (00:06):

Do you know, before anything happens for human beings in terms of understanding, you have to define things.

Jason Rigby (00:11):

Definitions.

Alexander McCaig (00:11):

So how is the gentleman here who wrote this, I already forget his name, but this is part two. How do you define Metaverse?

Jason Rigby (00:21):

Yeah. He says this, if you think-

Alexander McCaig (00:23):

Who's he?

Jason Rigby (00:24):

Outlier Ventures with-

Alexander McCaig (00:26):

Jamie Burke.

Jason Rigby (00:27):

Yeah, there we go.

Alexander McCaig (00:28):

Jamie Burke. My boy.

Jason Rigby (00:29):

I always think of Jamie as from Game of Thrones, because I'm re-watching Game of Thrones.

Alexander McCaig (00:35):

I absolutely love Game of Thrones.

Jason Rigby (00:36):

He says, "If we think of a metaverse as a far off destination, we will almost definitely sleepwalk into not addressing some fundamental design choices. However, if we believe it's important, we think of it not as a destination, but a journey or process. This is because," I like that he explains that because that sounds kind of generic.

"it's important to acknowledge that the beginning of the metaverse are already here. We are just experiencing it in 2D." So let's stop right there.

Alexander McCaig (00:58):

Yeah. Listen, that's what you and I were saying. Even if I put on goggles, or well he says, "If I'm looking at a graph of Bitcoin price going up and down, I'm already experiencing the metaverse."

Jason Rigby (01:12):

Right.

Alexander McCaig (01:13):

The smaller amount of essentially the technological fabric of what makes these decentralized things tick in the two dimensional format. He said that's the beginning. That's all.

Here's my problem with this definition. It's a page long. Do I go into Webster's dictionary and one word gets a whole page? If it has multiple meanings, sure, but what this tells me here is not even clearly defined yet.

Jason Rigby (01:42):

No, I think as we're going to Mars, if we put colonies on the moon, it's the same. It's a new reality for humanity.

I think that's what the metaverse is. I think it becomes the reality. I think what we view as the reality is this, and I don't want to get too philosophical but it doesn't matter what... People say, "no, no, this is real." Well, no, it's not. What's real? It doesn't matter.

Alexander McCaig (02:05):

So how would you and I define it? Metaverse is an individual human's choice on what they say is their reality.

Jason Rigby (02:14):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (02:15):

With full control over how to shape it. Something to that format. Look one sentence, done. What's the Metaverse? That's what it is.

Jason Rigby (02:24):

Yeah. And I like how he brings in the massively...

Alexander McCaig (02:27):

The MMORPG.

Jason Rigby (02:28):

Yeah. He brings that in and then he brings in social venues and experiences. So that's a combination of those, but he says this, "Each exists on a spectrum with several conflicting characteristics where the production of content is both by studios and independent creators." This is very important, "Value transfer is bidirectional from digital to physical and physical to digital,"

Alexander McCaig (02:46):

That's the important part.

Jason Rigby (02:48):

"where value is both transformed entirely or just represented and is both passively or actively consumed, much of this process is bottom up and driven by market forces and the general direction of technical innovation." So I want to stick with this physical to digital, because, to me, with the metaverse, that's where the line begins to blur.

Alexander McCaig (03:08):

Yeah. Correct.

Jason Rigby (03:09):

Because you're stupid to not think that people will have sex in the Metaverse.

Alexander McCaig (03:15):

Of course they're going to.

Jason Rigby (03:16):

And that's going to blur the physical to the digital.

Alexander McCaig (03:18):

Come on. No pun intended, there are porn websites where you can put on Oculus goggles.

Jason Rigby (03:26):

They're the number one sites that people go to.

Alexander McCaig (03:28):

If you want to see where technology is headed, you have to see how the porn industry defines it. They defined VHS. They defined LaserDisc. They defined Blu-ray. Then they defined online streaming. All you got to do is look at it.

Jason Rigby (03:44):

But, I mean, even if we look at that arena, I watched a documentary in Japan about the social... If you're from Japan, maybe you can correct me on this. Because I just watched the documentary on it.

But the social construct of them not... They even have places where you can go and pay to take like a 30 minute or an hour hug with somebody. Not sexual, just a hug. Because everything is becoming with anime and everything else, I mean, we make the joke, the "40 year old virgin" and all that stuff with the movie, I'm bringing about this because this is I think a controversial subject, so I think it's fun for us to talk about.

Alexander McCaig (04:23):

Go for it.

Jason Rigby (04:24):

But when you have people that-

Alexander McCaig (04:27):

Spend their whole world,

Jason Rigby (04:29):

... whole world online, it's much easier. If you're a 13 year old boy and you have access to have sex in the metaverse, you're going to do that. It's our evolutionary drive to procreate.

Alexander McCaig (04:40):

I think we asked. We might have asked this to a world leading psychologist about how does development work in the stance of when everything's experienced digitally? But they didn't have data on it yet.

Jason Rigby (05:00):

If they get good enough with whether it's an embedded link in your head or whatever it may be, if we can get it to the point to where it feels the same, people are going to go online. I mean, those are ethical issues that you have to face and all that stuff. But I always say this, at the end of the day, whatever's easier for us to experience dopamine hits, we're going to go in that direction.

Alexander McCaig (05:28):

Absolutely. If you got an online casino where we're in VR-

Jason Rigby (05:31):

Exactly.

Alexander McCaig (05:33):

... and I have an IV stuck in my arm, that's making me feel drunk. You know what I mean? While I got my goggles on, I'm slurring my words, trying to pull on a virtual slot machine.

Jason Rigby (05:42):

Well, I mean not to get too "woo whoo", but they have that little machine nowadays, where it... I think I was talking to you about it, where they can put different chemical compositions into water.

Alexander McCaig (05:52):

Yeah.

Jason Rigby (05:53):

And then they can make that water have like a caffeine, chemical composition in the water. You just set it down on it, it imprints the water with caffeine, and then when you taste it, you get a little buzzed. So, why could we not do that-

Alexander McCaig (06:09):

Why couldn't I just sit on a chair that does the whole thing while I got my goggles on?

Jason Rigby (06:10):

Yeah. It makes me feel drunk or stimulates the part of the brain where people can feel drunk.

Alexander McCaig (06:15):

Make me feel high, make me feel like I'm having a psychotropic trip. Anything like that.

Jason Rigby (06:19):

Yeah. Any of that stuff.

Alexander McCaig (06:22):

And I think that's where it's going to happen, but the physical to digital, digital to physical is an interesting aspect. And I think for a large majority of society we've been getting so lost in the digital.

And there's been very negative effects of that because people live their lives on Instagram. Their experience is 2D, but think about the negative psychological effects it has had.

Jason Rigby (06:44):

Well, not just psychological, but he explains it here. He says, "We also believe it will increasingly begin to interplay and be informed by top down government policy around data rights, privacy, antitrust, and most importantly financial legislation."

Alexander McCaig (06:57):

I think that's where it's going.

Jason Rigby (06:59):

Of course he says, "it's going to vary widely around the globe."

Alexander McCaig (07:03):

Yeah. Well, Jamie, that is if people don't choose to adopt the standard.

Jason Rigby (07:08):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (07:09):

If everyone has agreed to say that, "okay, we can give up some piece of paper, money to give me some sort of object", everybody can readily adopt Tartle. I can work and receive something in return that's tangible financial gain. I don't need the legislation to define for me what that is. I'm already taking my rights over something I naturally own. I don't need the top down approach. What's contradicting about this is the fact that he says the metaverse will have all these top down regulations, but you're saying the metaverse has to be user centric. Web 3.0 is all about the person writing to the internet, not the internet writing into them. Do you see what I'm saying?

Jason Rigby (07:44):

Yeah, and when he talks about the physical and digital, he talks about an economy and he says, Amazon is basically the hybrid of the two.

I mean, you could see this. All of this is happening right now. I mean, Amazon, yeah, we have big warehouses here in Albuquerque, they just built. That's physical.

Alexander McCaig (08:00):

It's monster.

Jason Rigby (08:01):

We have Amazon trucks running around delivering packages constantly. That's physical.

Alexander McCaig (08:05):

But Amazon's streaming video.

Jason Rigby (08:06):

But everything you purchased is digital. You go on, it's a digital economy.

Alexander McCaig (08:10):

Yeah. Everything transacted has digitally happened. There's no paper. Someone's not shoving dollar bills into their iPad to do the Amazon purchase.

Jason Rigby (08:19):

No, and Amazon doesn't have like a Costco where you come in, and you can shop physically. It's a virtual mall.

Alexander McCaig (08:24):

That's all it is.

Jason Rigby (08:25):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (08:27):

It's a path of least resistance. And we will find benefits as human beings to using this.

There will be areas where the metaverse will be so appropriate and there'll be other places where it's like, why are we doing it like that? But it takes time. And what I can tell you right now is it's still so young in the definition of what it is. Because, look how large this definition is, it takes over a whole page just to define something. It tells me that the thought hasn't been refined enough.

Jason Rigby (09:03):

Well, no, because I think we're in the beginning stages and the only thing they have, and he talks about this, he said, "It could be considered partially true, some game platforms are so big that they are closed micro-economies with their own currencies, which they control centrally in value systems, like experience point systems. In game items, Skins," so like NFTs guys," and marketplaces where significant amounts of the wealth are held and traded."

Alexander McCaig (09:25):

I remember, in the early days of Skins, you had to hit certain achievements in the game to unlock certain things.

Jason Rigby (09:36):

Yeah, exactly.

Alexander McCaig (09:38):

Now it got to the point is, do you have the money to pay for it?

So the game designers have gone from the fact that let's just sell the game for free and make the money off the NFTs. I remember I'm pretty damn good at Mario Kart. So I got the Golden Mario, the Golden Kart, Golden Kite, Golden Wheels, all that stuff, but that took me time to put that in there. There was a level of work to it. But now when you move that away and you say, why don't you just pay money to get what you want? It creates this new little micro-economy. The way people actually pay for this stuff, it's a new version of the Freemium, right?

Jason Rigby (10:14):

Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (10:14):

Here's all the free. And I think Candy Crush was a leader in this. You can play this new type of Bejeweled, but if you want to accelerate faster, for what reason I have no idea, you can pay into it. You're essentially paying a company to help stimulate your dopamine hits.

Jason Rigby (10:30):

Right. And then throwing ads in there. That was the old school way. He says this, "Defining characters of a true metaverse is that it needs its own economy and currencies native to it where value can be earned, spent, lent, borrowed, or invested interchangeably in both the physical or virtual sense, and most importantly, without the need for a government." So this is Tartle right here.

Alexander McCaig (10:51):

I can jive with that. You're talking about Tartle.

Jason Rigby (10:51):

Yeah.

Alexander McCaig (10:56):

Tartle, you call it a cryptocurrency, but on the back end we have an accounting ledger. That has to be there. We use that in a decentralized format to write to many chains in a Block-lattice structure, so that we can remove any sort of centralized authority in maintaining the value transfer.

Jason Rigby (11:12):

Right.

Alexander McCaig (11:13):

But that money that is earned is real US dollar that gets spent inside and outside of the system.

Jason Rigby (11:19):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (11:21):

But the fabric that allows the US dollar to work, is a decentralized Web 3.0 or 4.0 fabric.

Jason Rigby (11:26):

Yeah. And I think that creates the US dollar that Fiat currency brings it back to the physical.

Alexander McCaig (11:34):

It has to. You have to have a bridge back to reality.

Jason Rigby (11:38):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (11:39):

If your new metaverse thing does not have that bridge, it's not meta. Because the meta is the blending of both of these things. If it's not clear how they've come together, there's an issue.

Jason Rigby (11:49):

Yeah, and he gets into closed systems, like Oculus and Facebook. Facebook owns Oculus, and then there's all these decentralized ones. But he says this and I think this is important.

He talks about property and he talks about a closed economy and he says, "Whether they allow transferability of value outside their ecosystem, how that interacts with Fiat-based systems and to what extent they do or don't control the monetary and fiscal policy of the underlying economy itself. Furthermore, there is also another technical and philosophical distinction between visions and emergent actualities in metaverse, which could be described as a Lo-Fi to Hi-Fi. There are platforms that really push the technical boundaries of the experience through both software and hardware requirements, like Oculus, and those are designed for the lowest possible device and bandwidth cards for universal access." And that's where we take more of the Lo-Fi approach with Tartle.

Alexander McCaig (12:41):

We have to.

Jason Rigby (12:42):

Because we want everybody... I mean, there's going to be what? 9.5 Billion people before it tailors down, they said.

Alexander McCaig (12:48):

They're all going to be on.

Jason Rigby (12:49):

We need everyone on Tartle. Because that is humanity, in and of itself, bettering itself, moving to that network.

Alexander McCaig (12:57):

It takes so long to build out infrastructures to even manage someone that wants to be streaming live via Oculus, that requires a developed country's infrastructure. So you have to work with things that are developing. In those developing things, it has to be Lo-Fi.

Jason Rigby (13:12):

Well, like you said, transferability of value outside their ecosystems and that's something-

Alexander McCaig (13:17):

What's the biggest transfer value? I'm going to go on Tartle, this digital thing, create these new digital assets, essentially data packets which are all NFTs in themselves. I'm going to get paid for doing so. I'm going to own it. I'm going to share it. I get real money in return, which I have the ability to spend in the real world.

And then the person acquiring that digital asset can then go make business decisions, or do research, or what have you, that has real, tangible, physical benefits for society. I could not think of a more balanced, more perfect, and more beautiful application of a metaverse.

Jason Rigby (13:54):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (13:56):

It's not just because we run the company. Just from listening to how they're defining this and where they see holes, we fix those holes.

Jason Rigby (14:02):

Yeah, and he gets into this, this is very important. Because he says, "It is our belief and the thesis of this paper," So this is really important. He's coming off the bat in page three, "that with time, the one thing we don't answer is how long an Open Metaverse built on shared open source protocols, open infrastructure and a single unifying, yet open financial system will erode or eat and potentially replace closed platforms due to powerful network effects. Leaving the only remaining distinction between virtual worlds if they are Lo-Fi or Hi-Fi, the final point is important and something that we believe, we as an industry should always maintain in order to be as inclusive as possible and onboard as many people out of the old economy into the Open Metaverse." So that's what we're doing by taking that Lo-Fi approach and making it accessible to billions of people.

Alexander McCaig (14:48):

That can be easily understood.

Jason Rigby (14:50):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (14:50):

And you have to have a shitload of technology upfront to be able to adopt it.

Jason Rigby (14:54):

Yes.

Alexander McCaig (14:55):

That's the best way to do it. You have to meet people where they are.

Jason Rigby (15:00):

Yeah, constantly. So we've been talking about the Tartle Metaverse. If somebody wants to sign up for Tartle, how simple is it and how many seconds does it take?

Alexander McCaig (15:10):

You get your Lo-Fi phone, tablet, computer. I don't even care if you go in an internet cafe. You go to Tartle.co, T-A-R-T-L-E dot C-O. Loads super quick. Very simple. It doesn't need to be crazy. It doesn't have to have big moving videos and everything. All we want to do is get you very low friction to adopt a tool that financially empowers you. One that respects your human rights. And you go to Tartle.co and you're going to click on a button that says "Get Started". There's no confusion. It's right there in front of you. And you're going to sign up. In under a minute's time, you're going to be on your way to populating data assets that will create annuities for you far into the future. In this digital world where something of a digital technology has a real direct, fundamental, emancipating, empowering benefit for you here in your life at this moment.

Speaker 3 (16:00):

Thank you for listening to TartleCast with your hosts Alexander McCaig and Jason Rigby, where humanity steps into the future and the source data defines the path. What's your data worth?