Eric Pulier - Game-Changing Metaverse & AI: Why The Worlds's Biggest Brands Are Choosing Vatom For Web3

Full transcript: Eric Pulier on London Real

0:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Eric Pulier, the entrepreneur, technologist, author and public speaker. You are the founder of Vatom, an innovative Web3 SaaS engagement platform that enables companies to connect better to their customers, employees and stakeholders while streamlining processes and improving profitability. Vatom has become the Web3 infrastructure and engagement platform of choice for some of the largest companies in the world, including Google, PepsiCo, Deloitte, Verizon, iHeartMedia, State Farm, WPP and soon London Real.

You personally have founded 16 companies and raised over $1 billion in capital, with a variety of exits via mergers, acquisitions, IPOs and ICOs. You ultimately believe that traditional engagement is dead, traditional work is dead, and that Web3 platforms like Vatom will enable both companies and individuals to engage more positively with one another through more personalised experiences. Eric, welcome to London Real.

Eric Pulier: Thanks for having me.

Brian Rose: It’s great to have you here. I just want to start by saying that Vatom is one of our portfolio companies here at London Real Ventures. We are the world’s first media-powered investment firm. Our mission is to transform the world by investing in cutting-edge Web3 and AI companies while giving our partners marketing exposure across the London Real media platforms and academies. We strive to heighten awareness, create customers and build communities by leveraging our global audience and extensive network.

Eric, I’m super excited to be part of your journey with Vatom. I still remember that Zoom call with you and your team a few months ago, when you started dropping the demos of the products you created for Google and PepsiCo and Starbucks, and don’t worry, we’re going to show a few of those later. Our collective jaws just dropped. I’ve been deep in Web3 for the past two years and I’ve spoken with some of the biggest names in blockchain and the metaverse, people like Sebastien from The Sandbox and Yat Siu of Animoca Brands, but I had never seen anything like what you had created. I think you built what everybody has been wanting and waiting for.

I’ve now started playing with it myself to build London Real’s Web3 experience, and I’m even more impressed with everything you can do in there. So that’s a pretty intense start, but for people that don’t know, how do you explain what Vatom is?

5:27 Eric Pulier: First of all, it stands for the words “virtual atom” together, meaning Vatom. That’s important. It doesn’t just roll off the tongue; it actually has meaning behind it, which is the idea that we’re dissolving the boundaries between the physical and digital worlds. Not taking us away from this world, the world we live in that we evolved to be in, but enhancing it, extending our opportunity in this world to connect better with each other.

What Vatom does is allow us to connect better with each other: brands to their audiences, sports teams to their fans and us to one another. That’s why we call it an engagement platform. It’s an engagement platform that anyone can use. Yes, it’s enterprise class, and I think it might be the only really enterprise-class one, meaning secure, scalable and ready to integrate with existing Web2 systems, or Web1 or pre-web, making it part of the communications infrastructure. But it extends that out for a new way of communication.

Brian Rose: I remember when you broke it down, you said there are a lot of platforms in the Web3 space that do one thing. They do wallets, or maybe they have a metaverse, or an NFT, or an NFT marketplace. But you said there are kind of seven pillars and you wanted to build something that had them all, because I think you always saw that this piecemeal way was never going to provide the experience you want to provide to users.

Eric Pulier: That’s right. It’s not that hard to understand why. Imagine you went to an auto dealership and you wanted a car, and they said, “Here’s the most unbelievable steering wheel. Here’s a wheel, here’s a carburettor.” I actually know people who have the ability to stitch these things together and make an unbelievable car, but maybe two people. Most people want something that works together seamlessly, can get you where you need to go and has been tested for that purpose.

That’s the same thing that’s needed here. It’s fine to have a marketplace, but does it work with your wallet? It’s fine to have a wallet that everyone can use, but does it seamlessly integrate with a virtual space and with augmented reality, and does that work back with a back-end analytics platform? By the time you’re done, you have a car. That’s what’s needed to make this go mainstream.

8:01 Brian Rose: We’ve all heard about this metaverse. My mom is in San Diego, she’s in her seventies, and when you try to explain to her what the metaverse is, she says, “What is it? Do I have to wear the goggles?” I don’t know if the public even understands what a metaverse is. How do you explain it to them? Is it about putting goggles on and hanging out with Zuckerberg in a virtual room, or has the definition been miscommunicated to the public?

Eric Pulier: I think it has, for a couple of reasons. One is that breathless hype always leads to this trough of disillusionment. But the other reason is: what do we really want? If we’re going to get excited about something, let’s put a vision out there that, if it were to come true, we’d be happy about. We don’t want to go into some far-off place and be stuck in a video game playing ping pong with Mark. What we want is to extend our experience, to talk to each other better.

If we had a phone here, I’d call up your mom, because she already understands a telephone. When the telephone came out, people were freaked out. You’re never going to see your mom again; why would you go and see her if you could call her? It was going to destroy society. The truth is, the telephone was really useful. It helped us connect with each other better. A lot of negatives have come from the evolution of the telephone into a smartphone that gives us information about people instead of connecting us, creating disillusionment, loneliness and disconnection. But the idea of communication over long distances is strong.

Then things evolved to the web. Think about the immense power that’s brought to our lives. Of course any tool can be used for negative ends, but so many positive things have happened in healthcare, education and government because of the web. But it was really about information. Better information, then self-generated information, user-generated content, but still about information. It wasn’t the next step of communication the way the telephone was.

The metaverse brings the idea of the fancy telephone to the web itself. If your mom was here, I’d say, “Imagine a website you can visit your son at.” It’s that simple. A website where you can connect with other humans, not just where information comes out, but in an immersive environment where we’ve learned to take social cues from each other and from the environment to create memories and experiences.

That’s going to change education. What is education? It’s something you want to get deeper into, that you can remember later and then apply. What is communication? It’s a way to take all the different social cues and impart information to one another to create relationships. This is a very powerful tool that will advance that. But on the simplest level, it’s a better website, a way to interact in the social way we love to do in person, in a world that we’ve assumed is Web2, where we don’t get to hang out with our friends.

Brian Rose: Even imagining it is probably hard for someone like my mom.

Eric Pulier: It’s hard to imagine, but once you see it for one or two seconds, it’s hard to unsee it. Once you go to a website and, instead of looking at information, you hear someone out of your left ear, you look over there and there’s somebody you can talk to, and you move over there. You’re not trapped in a box like Zoom, where you get Zoom fatigue and a kind of fight-or-flight anxiety in your body. Imagine Zoom with agency. Imagine a website with people, places and things, the same primitives that allow us to understand this world as being real.

Some of us still subscribe to the belief that this is the real world. I’m happy to be one of them, and I’m trying to stay in it the best that we can. But to be present in this world and to connect to other people, we can now translate some of those elements into the virtual space and more fully integrate our digital and physical lives.

12:33 Brian Rose: And that doesn’t necessarily have to include a VR component.

Eric Pulier: No, and a lot of people don’t understand that. It’s a very important thing to understand. It would be nice to fast-forward to devices that are incredibly lightweight, that don’t feel like they’re going to separate us from other people in the room, that we can wear for long periods of time and that have infinite battery life. That’s a future that will come. But even when it comes, I don’t think it’s going to be as powerful as not having something on your head, as having this God-given form interact with digital information and connect to each other.

The best way we’ve found to bring it to the world is to create an analogy of the real world: a persistent virtual space, always on. If you put something down there, the next time you come it’ll still be there. Those are the cues that make you understand and believe that it’s as real as anything else. Blockchain is another interesting aspect of the psychology, not only of ownership but of independent permanence. The idea that something will stay even if a certain company or game dies gives you that feeling that it’s real.

So now imagine a virtual space that exists independently of us, and you want to go into it to connect to somebody. It doesn’t matter if you choose to wear goggles. There’s actually an immense benefit to that immersion for certain use cases. But what if you’re in the car and you just want to tap in and talk to somebody? Maybe within this environment my avatar shows up, but if I’m in the car I just want audio, if I want to text I can just text, and if I want to come in on a laptop I’ll come in on a laptop. Device independence is the key to the evolution of virtual spaces becoming as real as physical ones.

Brian Rose: The big thing I learned about the metaverse is that all of us are already in metaverses. A WhatsApp group is a metaverse. A Zoom call is a metaverse. Whenever we’re digitally connecting with each other. Maybe a phone call was the original low-tech version, like you said. When people get that realisation, they say it feels very simple in 2D, and you say, well, what if that was just better?

Eric Pulier: What if it was better from the perspective of enhancing our humanity instead of pulling us apart and disconnecting us? What if we could take the next generation of technology and, instead of continuing down the path where it’s destroying the very essence of what we are, people who want to connect, at least start to turn back towards what will give us purpose, allow us to build better relationships and give us the tools necessary to live better lives? I think we have that opportunity now.

16:04 Brian Rose: Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. What went wrong with Web2? You’re already talking about how it disassociates us, probably because it’s optimising for revenue models that make a few companies massive. There are a lot of times zero direct relationships, and all these other issues like digital colonialism. Yat Siu is always talking about how we gave away our data and they sold it back to us. I’ve had my own struggles with censorship and not being able to communicate with people who really want to hear what I have to say. What did Web2 do right, and how do you explain to people why it’s time for Web3? I think a lot of the brands you do business with initially don’t know why.

Eric Pulier: I think it’s really important, when we look at our evolution to Web3, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Let’s identify the things that went wrong, and I’ll say a few things about that, but let’s first celebrate the things that went right. Let’s step back and marvel for a minute at the shoulders of the giants we now stand on, and thank them for the work that allows us to advance.

One of my favourite people, Peter Diamandis, who’s on our board, an investor of ours and a very good friend, is probably one of the more optimistic leaders in the world in terms of looking at technology as a tool for the benefit of humanity. I’m reminded in this conversation that we should first say what an extraordinary thing it is that we’ve created this low-cost, ubiquitous network that at some point everybody could very well have access to. It will affect how we educate people and how healthcare and longevity are done. There’s a lot of negative news, but if you actually look at the stats, a lot of these technologies have come together to create much more positive than negative.

That said, it’s time to evolve to something better, as always. One of the issues we found with the evolution of the internet and the concentration of power in certain areas is that it can restrict what I believe is the most important thing, which is free speech. The promise of the internet is that everyone’s connected and can realise their potential as a creative being. But if you concentrate the power, the expression gets halted there. We can talk about how Web3 has the promise to address that.

Free speech is one. The other one I think is really important is how people make money. Earning a living on the internet also gets concentrated, with the gatekeepers. The next thing is your personal data. Who owns it? Who gets to use it, and how? Once people recognised how important that could be, some very negative things came out of it.

I remember the early stages of social media. Your listeners who have been around the bend a few times will remember Friendster, pre-MySpace, one of the first social networks. I remember some of the brilliant people looking at it and understanding its potential, and the brainstorming that went on: if you could really start to glean what people like from how they’re expressing themselves with one another, you could… make their lives better? No, even then it was, you could get better information to advertisers. You could sell it.

Then the innovative guys at MySpace, Chris DeWolfe and Aber Whitcomb, dove in and made it available at mass scale for people to express themselves. It got pretty messy, and they weren’t really data mining so much as focusing on the creative side of expression. Then Mark Zuckerberg came along. Absolutely brilliant, give him credit. He organised it in a different way, understood the power of virality and the social network, and really created an industry. But it ran amok. There were no guidelines, at least none that were followed for purposes other than profit.

Now you can see the realisation of that vision, with its pros and cons, and a lot of pros, by the way. A lot of people leverage these tools for positive purposes and still do. So now we step back: what happens if we can move to a different model, where it’s more decentralised and there’s more power at the edges, meaning the humans using the devices, as opposed to the central authorities?

I’m not one of those people who wants full decentralisation. We actually still want guidelines. We want communities that are able to manage their norms centrally. You don’t want to have to take neo-Nazis and people with horrific beliefs into your community; let them do what they want in theirs. So being able to control things centrally still matters, but not as the essence of the network itself. You have to be able to choose.

22:25 So let’s start at the very basic level to answer your question of what’s different now. The most important underlying piece of the next-generation puzzle is identity, and that’s where we started. A lot of people look at our journey and see that we started with the first use of digital objects on blockchain, the first NFTs for engagement, and then built on that premise. But we actually started around a different notion, which is: what if we could all own our own data? What if we could all be ourselves again?

If we go back to our earlier statement that this world is made up of people, places and things, on the internet there’s none of that. You’re not a person; you’re a registered account in that particular company’s database. Then you go to another one and you’re that, and then that. You’re not you showing up. So there are no people, there are no places, nobody says “let’s go meet at cars.com”, and there are no things, no true ownership.

Let’s start with people. I want to be a person when I show up, and when I go to the next place I want to still be me, and what I took from there I want to have. That’s me, my inventory and my persona, and the way I express myself is my choice. You’re allowed to have my birthday, my dentist might be allowed to have certain aspects of my medical records so they don’t kill me with laughing gas, and someone else may have something else. But that’s my choice. I really believe that’s the underpinning: people owning their own identity and their own data.

In Web3, that looks like what has become known as the Web3 wallet. That is the base layer, and a lot of us, and I’m one of them, believe that everyone will have one. Today people have maybe 75 apps and use four. You don’t have one place to keep the essential elements that are you, that you carry from place to place. That’s the first piece. It allows you to show up in a certain way and ultimately not only monetise your data but get paid yourself, for your data, your work output and your creativity.

The next thing in Web3 is that when you move to a more decentralised system and somebody doesn’t like how you’re expressing your freedom of speech, what can they do? It’s really hard to shut down the internet, though some countries have become pretty good at it. If you look at a country that gets dictatorial leadership, the first thing they do is shut down freedom of the press. What’s interesting about Web3 is that it’s really hard to do. So rather than shut it down, if you want to control the conversation, you’re going to have to find another way to appeal to people’s interests.

The same thing goes for money. Right now, if somebody decides they don’t like your activities, for whatever reason, right or wrong, they can shut off your money. In a decentralised economy that’s much harder. That poses both an opportunity and a threat, because you don’t want money moving around in nefarious ways. Each of these positives has a negative corollary, so having guidelines around how you set up your communities is important.

That brings me to the last point, and maybe the way I can describe the foundations of Web3. You have your identity, your information and your ability to express it in a decentralised manner, and in that same context you can now create. I think that’s the biggest promise of this. We start with top-down content that everybody can consume, but it then moves to communities of interest, the ability to choose which communities you want to join, neo-tribes in a way, and then how you want to govern them. It’s really the next generation of society in a microcosm, and it’s extremely exciting to think about both the long term and the immediate applications for better communication and more effective business.

27:43 Brian Rose: Is it hard for most people to imagine what that looks like when you first explain it to them?

Eric Pulier: Yes, because I don’t explain it to them that way first. I’m doing it with you because you asked in a more expansive way. The way I’d normally approach this topic is to say: let’s talk about how this tool doesn’t replace what you have, because it doesn’t, but how it can become a more effective business tool. I think that’s why Vatom has done so well recently. We haven’t approached it as a science project or a showcase of where the future is going. We’ve positioned it as a natural evolution of today’s set of tools and capabilities.

If you’re really looking to reach people in a more ethical, legal and compliant manner, and you want to gather data in a way that delivers more value than you’re taking so you can develop a long-term relationship, let’s look at that. There are no companies today that don’t want to do that. Companies are not inherently evil. I think most companies want to do good in the world while doing well for their shareholders. They got sucked into this machine because how else do you reach people? You reach people by paying the intermediaries that hold those keys. But as that opens up, you now have an opportunity to reach people in a way that’s more aligned with your own values as an organisation. That’s why it’s so exciting.

Brian Rose: In your deck, right at the beginning, you say traditional engagement is dead. Like you said, for most companies over the past five or ten years, how you found new customers was probably on the internet, on these massive Web2 platforms with massive audiences, probably with ads. That’s probably not working any more for a variety of reasons. Maybe it’s the cookie that Apple took out, maybe people are getting tired of it, and in the long run it’s probably not what you want to do anyway. Talk to me about how businesses are starting to realise that.

Eric Pulier: I think you said it really well: in the long run it’s probably not how you wanted to do it anyway. At first people were freaked out. Apple shut off cookies, what are we going to do? Oh no, now we can’t surreptitiously gather data against people’s wills and use it for nefarious purposes. But within seconds you say, okay, it maybe disrupts the way we’re doing business, but thank you, it needed disrupting.

So what if we could move from interrupting people to being welcomed? What if we could move from an annoyance-based mode of communicating to a value-based one, where people said “thank you, what else can you do for me, or what can I do for you?” The essence of any relationship is feeling like you’re giving more than you’re receiving on both sides, and feeling that it gives you purpose, that there’s a reason to spend your time on it and it’s nourishing you.

Showering people with messages based on data that wasn’t gathered appropriately is creepy. You don’t want that. But it’s very different to give people what they do want. I’ve never heard of a bride going to her guest and saying, “You violated my privacy. You looked at my wedding registry, reviewed the things I asked for, went out of your way to get me something and bought it for me. I feel violated.” It’s never happened, because this is a thank-you relationship.

This is what we call zero-party data. First-party data is what you glean in an ethical way, maybe for an initial value exchange. Zero-party data is what you earn over time, when someone says, “This is a really great relationship. I’m going on vacation in Florida on this day, so if you’ve got anything interesting for me, let me know. I like basketball. There are three people in my home.” You start to share that aspect of your identity, not permanently but for as long as you wish, because you feel comfortable with them and they’re earning it every day. Advertising doesn’t earn you the right to communicate with someone every day, but the next generation of advertising will. It’s advertising, marketing and loyalty collapsed into one.

Brian Rose: It’s important to look at the whole relationship an individual has with a business. Ultimately these companies are there to provide value for you, to “deliver wow”, as the Zappos founder Tony Hsieh used to say, and that’s why we love our brands. It used to be television and radio advertising, where you hit a bunch of people, most of whom probably didn’t want to see or hear that ad. Now you try to target them and get them to opt in. What you want to get to is this zero-party situation where the customer is so happy to tell you what they want because they know you can potentially give it to them. That’s probably where we were always headed.

33:26 Eric Pulier: I think it is. And where this gets really interesting, but also more challenging, is that it’s not just about giving customers what they want. That’s helpful, that’s a start, but you can’t just keep showering people with stuff; you need a business. It’s meeting them where they are and where they want to be, and enhancing their lives. That’s the notion of community. Once you have an identity and these powerful mechanisms, you can create digital communities that aren’t defined by the accident of birth or where you happen to be geographically, but by your interests, your goals and your passions.

Your ability to affect that community is what will keep you coming back, but it’s also dangerous. As a brand, as soon as you open up, and we learned this in the Web2 days of user-generated content, as soon as you open any community to free speech, you get objectionable free speech. So how do you moderate? The greatest challenge and opportunity of the next generation of these communities will be moderation.

I’m not coming here and saying let’s let everyone do whatever they want and have anarchy. Governments exist for a reason. Regulations exist for a reason. We actually want more regulation in certain areas, like AI, over time, to give guardrails to ourselves and against bad actors. We need that same understanding here. The technologies are getting better, but these are unmet challenges that are very important.

35:11 Brian Rose: I think that’s a great way to go to an example, because it’s one thing to hear the theory. I’d love to talk about the Frito-Lay example with PepsiCo. Here’s the consumer of a brand who traditionally would buy a bag of potato chips, eat them, and that was it. You found a way, and I know you’ve won awards for this, to engage these customers in an incredible way, to get zero-party data and to do it for a fraction of the cost of traditional Web2. When I saw that video played by Colin, I was blown away. I’d heard everyone talk about the metaverse, I’d been to The Sandbox and Decentraland, but there was nothing going on there and it wasn’t for me. When I saw the way you literally delivered wow for a bunch of people who weren’t expecting it, got them to create content and generated a community, I was blown away.

Eric Pulier: Credit where credit is due: it was a very collaborative effort built on the Vatom platform. One of the things we’re proudest of at Vatom is that some of the best work wasn’t done by us. It was done in collaboration with people using the platform. It’s a new canvas for human imagination. Some of the best marketers and thinking in the world come out of PepsiCo and Frito-Lay, and I think they were looking for a way to connect with people that would be memorable not only now but maybe forever, to create a moment that actually lasts.

You can do that with blockchain, because blockchain is not owned by PepsiCo or Vatom or anybody else. It exists independently of us. It’s that independent observer that will last throughout the ages, or at least it has the psychology of that, which gives you the feeling of realness, like a physical object. A virtual atom.

The first and most important thing with this opportunity was that you had to reach people with an expectation of zero complexity and zero friction. You may love potato chips, but you may not be a crypto fanatic or interested in spending time learning all sorts of things in order to experience something. So let’s assume you’re not. Thank you, pandemic, for teaching everyone to scan a QR code to get a menu. In this case, that’s all it took. You get a bag of Lay’s or Doritos or any one of these savoury snacks, scan it, and it opens up. No download, no complexity, and there you are. You now have an identity and a wallet, and it’s yours.

That was the first historic moment. It didn’t say download the PepsiCo app or the Lay’s app, your 97th app. It just said, here’s your wallet. Then it asked whether you’d like to engage, in an ethical and legal way, and give the most simple first-party data, your phone number or email, so you can get back into your own wallet. Then it said: pick your favourite team and take a selfie.

That selfie then gets minted on a golden hexagon in 3D. What does a hexagon represent? This was for the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, so it’s the football, made up of these hexagons, and you can imagine yourself as one of the pieces of the ball. But you’re disconnected from everybody else on the planet, and it says “pass the ball”. What does it take to pass the ball? You send it to a friend by putting in their phone number or email. The virality is unbelievable, because your friend doesn’t get a message from us or from Lay’s. They get a message from you: “Joe just invited you to play this game.”

By engaging in that gamified mechanic, your golden hexagon becomes part of hundreds of thousands of other people’s golden hexagons coming together on this massive, planet-sized football hovering in the sky. Now you’re part of a communal art project, perhaps one of the largest, if not the largest, communal art project ever done on the planet. Your next-door neighbour could be Beckham or Messi or your favourite actors. A lot of people held up their bags to help the brand spread the love, a lot made funny faces, a lot just smiled. But you’re there.

At the end, it gets fixed. It doesn’t go on forever. It gets dropped into the wallets of everyone who opted in, minted on a blockchain for history. So rather than saying “I played a little game”, you now have a permanent artifact with you emblazoned on this beautiful object, a digital permanence you could pass down through generations to your grandkids, and they can search and find you on the ball. It’s a really emotionally impactful moment.

The stats were through the roof. More people signed up for this than Frito-Lay had Twitter followers in 13 years. We knew it would be interesting, otherwise we wouldn’t have done it, but we didn’t know it would be this interesting. You’d expect maybe one to three percent of people who scan a QR code on a bag of chips to take part. About a third did. Around 40% shared it with someone else, and 70%-plus came back every day to play a little game and see how the ball was growing. You’re paying a little to get the campaign out the door, but you’re not paying anything for people to share with their friends, and the enjoyment they get out of it is pure value for them.

It was an honour to be part of this, and it was a pioneering experiment to see if we could converge all these elements: the Web3 wallet, zero-friction ease of use, and programmable digital objects, Vatom-style objects that don’t just sit there but can react. They could pop out and float in augmented reality and go look for pizza. Then you start to recognise why you’re doing this as a marketer. It’s not an experiment any more. It’s because you’re delivering better business outcomes and better metrics than previous generations of these technologies and methods of communication.

43:48 Brian Rose: I’m going to play the video and then I’ve got a bunch of questions for you. Let’s roll the Frito-Lay PepsiCo video right now.

Vatom case-study video: PepsiCo partnered with Vatom for the 2022 FIFA World Cup to bring an experience like never before. It was the largest thing that was ever done in Web3, with over 200 million bags of chips printed with QR codes. Fans chose their favourite team and registered, and more than 40% of the people who arrived played all of the game. They took a photo of themselves, and that photo was turned into a 3D golden hexagon coin, which was a gift; it was an NFT. Those photos were added to a giant user-generated soccer ball, where fans could see the other fans they were cheering with, and celebrities. Hundreds of thousands of people were united around their love for soccer in one of the largest UGC experiences to date.

Fans could also play additional games to get more entries into the sweepstakes, with weekly prizes, and the game mechanics drove fans to come back regularly. Seventy percent of the people who participated came back regularly, and almost 40% of them shared it with their friends. Fans collected objects in AR, used scratch cards for additional entries and answered trivia questions. The games were simple but highly engaging.

In just 60 days of the Pass the Ball challenge, PepsiCo earned more directly addressable users than it had earned Twitter followers in the previous 13 years. Conversion rates were ten times greater than social or email ads had generated previously. One of the real value propositions of Vatom is reduced customer acquisition cost: PepsiCo saw $1.50 per customer, where the industry average is $22. PepsiCo now has a direct relationship with almost 400,000 people, a relationship of value aimed at a lifetime, not just a campaign.

46:11 Brian Rose: So we just saw everything that campaign encapsulated. Post-promotion, I as a user now have my own wallet and own that digital asset for a long time. What does the company have now, and what can they do with it?

Eric Pulier: That’s a very insightful question, because as excited as one might be by the engagement metrics, it’s just a better way to do a campaign unless you answer that question: do you now have an ongoing communication channel? Not just any channel, because there are lots of those, but a direct one, and not just a direct one, but one where somebody said “let’s continue”. That’s unbelievably new.

When a company says it wants first-party data and better data on its customers, the majority, not all, don’t know what to do with it. But what if you’ve leveraged it to set the stage for an ongoing, successful relationship? This is why I think people are recognising that the next generation of loyalty will come from these types of mechanisms.

Brian Rose: And as a user, I now have this wallet. I probably didn’t even know what a wallet was. Maybe it’s the first piece of digital property I’ve ever owned, and I’m assuming you can airdrop things to me in the future. You’ve basically onboarded someone to Web3. Is this the future of how people become part of Web3? Two years ago I started a crypto and DeFi academy, and I take my students, from 18 to 85 years old, kicking and screaming. They have to get a MetaMask wallet, sign up for centralised exchanges and learn how to get these assets. It’s quite complicated. I got my mom and my daughter to do it, but it was difficult. Is that the way forward, or will it be done through a platform like this?

Eric Pulier: There’s no doubt, if you look at the history of new technologies, that the breakthrough moments come when it’s simple, when all the complexity is masked and you don’t even know you’re using it. What you know is that you’re getting value from it fast and easily, value you want to repeat, so it becomes part of your life. Not in a nefarious way; we’re not trying to infiltrate the world to sell you more stuff. We’re trying to empower people to have a place to keep their stuff, starting with their own identity.

49:30 I would answer yes to your question: this is probably one of the earliest and most widely used mechanisms we’ll see, because every brand is looking for better ways to communicate. But it’s just one. Let’s keep in mind that these dynamic digital objects are going to be the most powerful human communication tool since the introduction of the internet itself. There are interesting gamified mechanics around loyalty, marketing and advertising, but that’s just one part.

How am I going to prove where I got my diploma? I’ll get it as a digital object that’s soul-bound, as they say, meaning I can’t transfer it or sell it; it’s tied to my identity. I’ll be able to release access to someone who wants to verify it, and I can say, “I want you to know I graduated from X, but not the year.” I can control my identity. Or maybe I want to prove I own this house; titles will start to move this way. Or I want to register my patents, my ideas or my AI model, however my intellectual property is going to be recorded. Or I want access, or a ticket to something. The utility of this concept pervades every aspect of society. We’re seeing the tip of the iceberg, and it really is the tip.

Brian Rose: You said to me earlier that zero friction was the key. They scanned the QR code, and it was interesting that you didn’t make them download an app, because we’ve all been given the option to download apps and skipped it many times. You wanted it browser-enabled, so it just pops up.

Eric Pulier: That’s right. They don’t even need to know they’re in a metaverse or that they have an NFT. They’re just enjoying this new way of being human. And metaverse in this parlance, as we said before, means a meta plane of reality on top of this plane of reality. You’re having fun with flesh-and-blood people in the real world and connecting with them using our devices, with the meta plane as connective tissue. We’re not sucking you out into some other place. Even in examples where you go virtual space first rather than wallet first, we’re still talking about connecting to other people and the communal memory that comes from that.

Brian Rose: You mentioned that your objects can do all sorts of cool things. They’re smart contracts; they can be programmed. Give us a flavour of what that might feel like, because in the real world not all of our objects are programmable. I’ve been in your spaces, because I’m going to create a virtual movie premiere for a film we’ve got coming out in a couple of months. I know as you get close to certain objects they activate, and you can hear people as you get close to them and have conversations. What does that look like?

Eric Pulier: The objects themselves have certain qualities. Think about a Bitcoin. A Bitcoin has a permanence to it. Whatever you think about how Bitcoins have been used, or whether you believe in crypto, no one has actually broken it and double-spent a Bitcoin. You might steal someone’s wallet, but that’s identity theft, which is different. So you have this psychology of uniqueness and true ownership: that’s my wallet and my thing. Start with that element.

In late 2014 and early 2015, I was thinking about what would happen if you took this fungible commodity of a cryptocurrency and could distinguish between the units. What if they could come alive with 3D graphics, animation and sound and have utility for different purposes? The first implementation of this was at my bar in Santa Monica. What if I could make a beer and give it to you? I wouldn’t have it any more. You could put it on the table, and if it was hot it would get warm, or you could give it to the bartender and get a real beer. That’s called a coupon. What if that object then opened up and gave me an Uber ride to a concert, and by virtue of having it I got entrance to the concert? That’s a ticket. You can see these things apply in so many different areas.

What was evident from the start is that when you have something unique, verifiable and transferable, the first use case will be gambling. I can verify there are only so many of these in the world, make it look cool like art, sell it to you and hope, for your benefit, that you sell it to some other dupe before it bottoms out. Of course, that’s what happened. But we recognised early that this is so much cooler. That’s one percent of this; 99% is all the other stuff. What can you do when something’s programmable and is a virtual object with the qualities of a real-world object but not the constraints? What if it was also magic?

One of the earliest projects built on our platform that gave me a sense of this magic was with Intel. A brilliant woman at Intel, Stacey Shulman, had the insight very early on that something here could change the nature of human engagement. She started Project Engage, which used Vatom to release thousands of digital butterflies into New York City, before people even really knew what an NFT was. These Vatoms float around like butterflies in augmented reality, and because they’re programmable and connected to the internet, they can change state based on sports scores. The Jets score a touchdown, they go crazy and drop a Starbucks; you pick it up and go to Starbucks to get a real one.

You could always write code to do anything, but now you have the psychology of ownership, a motivation that didn’t exist before, underpinning everything. And because these objects are not only programmable but network-aware, you can make them conduits for communication. That’s the essence of why this is so powerful, and of what we just described: a communication channel that arises on the back of what used to be a campaign but is now a series of campaigns, or in other words, a relationship.

Brian Rose: So the digital ownership of the asset creates the communication channel, and now you have a relationship. And it’s not just a company and a customer; it’s people in the workplace, any human relationship.

56:57 Eric Pulier: It’s any human relationship, and it’s an opening for different ways of expressing information. Take virtual education. The common way of doing it today is a Zoom class or a video. That’s pretty powerful. I’m a huge fan of Khan Academy and some of these amazing things, but you still need a certain attention span to sit through them, especially class after class.

What if you could break up these lessons into smaller chunks, in spatial environments, either in the real world overlaid with information or in communal virtual spaces, and the objects themselves were not only instruments of communication but bite-sized chunks of information that stay with you? I do something, find out if I’m right or wrong, and get a badge of achievement. That badge is programmable and an ongoing conduit back to the professor. Maybe the class was three minutes instead of 30, but it continues. I can go into my wallet and keep answering questions, or water a plant so it grows, and then bring it back into a virtual space and continue the lesson later.

This idea of objects being the glue between experiences is important in education and in healthcare, because it’ll be part of your medical record. And back to loyalty, it’s the essence of what we call open loyalty. Say you get a badge of achievement that levels you up within a loyalty program. Because it’s an object in your wallet, you can give a different company permission to see that you’re level five at Joe’s Yogurt, and they can give you something for it.

Coming from an enterprise software background, I can tell you it’s still very hard to integrate companies together. If I got something cool for going to the county fair and United Airlines wanted to reward me for it, think of the massive complexity just to get a requirements document done, let alone the project. Now you just look in someone’s wallet, with their permission and their own agency. In Vatom we have a system for this: you scan a QR code at a physical location, it looks in your wallet and says red or green. Yes, I’m allowed backstage to meet Taylor Swift in the VIP room because I have these credentials. No integration between the systems.

Brian Rose: And then you get unimaginable use cases: weird Easter eggs and airdrops based on your location or a sports score. It’s a crazy new augmented reality that surprises and delights.

Eric Pulier: It’s really an extended reality. In the old days of early AR, you’d hold your phone over a box of Cap’n Crunch and he’d wave at you, and someone else would do the same, but you’re each having your own individual experience. In the real world, if Cap’n Crunch popped out of the box and waved at you, everybody would see it. That wasn’t the case in AR as it existed; it was a singular, almost lonely experience. As you move to extended reality, it’s the reality we live in gaining a digital overlay that we can all experience at the same time. Again, it’s a way to bring people together.

1:01:38 Brian Rose: My brain’s spinning, because I run the London Real Academy, and I’ve patched together a wonderful reality for people to interact and learn, but I’ve done it all with Web2 tools: Zoom calls, videos on a platform and a group where they upload videos of themselves going through tricky challenges. We get people to open up and create amazing communities. Before the lockdown we used to have graduation ceremonies. People would fly in from all around the world to our studio and start hugging each other, and the only thing that confused them was how tall everyone was.

They’d say, “Brian, I already know this person, but I just met them. I’m closer to them than I am to my family or my next-door neighbour, because we’ve been open and honest and shared these experiences together.” But I’m not giving them any of these things you talk about. They still need the attention span to watch a 2D video. Imagine if I could turn learning from this regurgitation we created in Britain during the Industrial Revolution into something gamified and massively interactive. Imagine the higher quality of life and the greater humans we’d be able to create.

Eric Pulier: And imagine if you could do that not by taking us away to some antiseptic digital world but by building on the best of Web2. I’m actually emotional hearing about what you’ve built. I’m not looking to replace that. I’m looking to say, wow, that’s incredible. These people really are connecting to each other as humans, not humans to information about humans like Instagram. It’s not a FOMO fest. This is people really getting to know each other. Let’s not lose that. Let’s capture the essence of it, enhance it and bring it back as the central premise and our goal.

1:03:42 Brian Rose: To be continued; I’m getting more excited. Let’s talk about events, and about bringing a lot of people into a metaverse. It’s something people have talked about for a long time, and some platforms have promised it, but we’ve found out later that some platforms can’t provide group experiences at scale. I know you had a success with something you built for Google, which I saw as a demo on that same call. Can you talk about what was built for Google and the scale of it?

Eric Pulier: I think it’s important to note what you just said. It’s not just that some of these metaverses don’t operate at scale; I don’t think anyone really does. They use something misleading called sharding. You get to 50, 100 or 150 people, and once you get there it craps out. So to simulate a lot of people, you make a parallel universe, and the 101st person goes there, and the 201st goes there. If you say “meet me at such and such”, the chances of running into your friend or co-worker are very low as it gets big.

Brian Rose: And that number is an order of magnitude like 150. You’re never going to see more than 150 unique people in that space.

Eric Pulier: And in some of the more prominent ones it’s even down to 50. That’s okay for certain use cases. Several elements have to go into making something like this successful, and scale is only one, but it is one. Think again about the idea of a better website, with every website having a “come inside” button. It’s going to feel naked to go to a website that’s just a bunch of information where you can’t go in and see who else is there. You want to be able to run into people in a vast world, simulating the real world. You don’t go to Yankee Stadium and get put in a little box and told, “Don’t worry, there are 80,000 other people here, but you can only see 50.” Are you sure? To feel it, it has to be real.

So that’s what Vatom has done. We’ve brought the real world and the digital world together, a website of unimaginable scale. One of the things we hit on early is that what it looks like does matter, but it’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is other people, the social aspect. Minecraft and Roblox didn’t become successful because you could see the light shining through the window and the dew on the leaves looking exactly right. They’re fun, you run into people, there are achievements you can earn and things you can build. People want to be with people.

So what we’ve built in this platform is, number one, scale, and number two, the seamless integration of all the other pieces that make it worthwhile at all. You mentioned how hard it was to get MetaMask set up. If you go to Google and say, “We’re going to track what people do and give them achievements in their wallet, so just tell them to log in with MetaMask,” be ready to lose 96% of your audience, if you’re lucky. That’s not possible. But what if you’re just logged in already, because what Vatom does is enterprise-class identity federation, so you’re already logged into your own system, and you automatically have a pocket to put things in? And what if that wallet is your wallet, connected back to your identity, so after the event you have an ongoing communication channel with that person?

1:08:12 Google had a set of requirements. They’re a sophisticated group, and they really thought about why you would want to do something like this. People come to us all the time and say they want to do a metaverse project, and we don’t say “great, use our platform”. We say, “Why would you want to?” You wouldn’t go to a party that looks nice and say, “That was a great party, but I had nothing to do, I didn’t meet anyone interesting and it was a hassle, but it looked cool.” You’d never go back.

The purpose has to start with the business outcomes you’re attempting to achieve. What data do you want to gather? Who do you want to please? Who do you want to bring back? You set up those metrics. Google’s included scale, low-end devices, seamless integration with points for doing various things, leaderboards, gamification and user-generated content. All of these have to work together on an underlying platform that gives you the analytics, lets you follow up with people later and integrates with existing systems. We ended up in a class of our own in the competition to win that. It wasn’t easy to spend the years building ahead of the market, so it was exciting to see the requirements converge with what we’d built.

The next thing, of course, was the results. Normally you can invite a certain number of people but couldn’t expect to run into them. Here they invited around 20,000 people, and at any given time there were probably 11,000 in there doing different things. There were leaderboards. If you watched a certain video past a certain point, you got a badge of achievement, and if you hadn’t, you couldn’t get through certain tunnels. You’d say, “That’s not fair, my friend just went through.” Well, then watch the video. That’s called token gating. Token gating is useless if the wallet you’re putting the token in is too hard to use. It all has to be seamless, it all has to work and it all has to scale together, and we saw it come together there.

It was an extraordinary moment, seeing not only the future of how you’re going to run into each other but the human connections made there: people networking, running into old friends, getting something out of it they maybe wouldn’t have got even if they were there in person. To me that shows the evolution of the tools, the extension. We’re not replacing almost anything. We’re not replacing Zoom or Teams; these are amazing tools that serve their purpose. But this extends them into something really important, and I think that got proven out at scale.

Most companies are recognising that their websites will always need to get better. It was hard to get them to build a website in the first place, but it’s not hard to get them to make a better one once it’s part and parcel of their communication strategy. So now there’s the ability to have a “come inside” button and have people meet there, whether it’s customer service, an adventure or something you want to show in more detail. A lot of the ways this starts is with virtual events, because you want to try it out. The pandemic helped with that, and as work evolves, we’re finding people aren’t going back the way they were.

There’s enormous value in being together in person. I’d never want to be a proponent of replacing that; I actually think it should be more in person if you can. But there are too many convenience factors and other factors that make a hybrid workforce necessary going forward, and we’re going to see this as the norm. This breaks those barriers down so that everyone can see it’s ready. This is not a future vision any more; this is how work will proceed.

Brian Rose: I think it was an annual get-together for a group at Google, and 22,000 people were invited. You could generate content, there were gated areas and you could get tokens for planting trees. The stat that Colin talked about, and probably the big reason we ended up partnering with you, is that you gave people the option of a 2D experience or a 3D experience. Some of these people probably didn’t even want to go; they’d been told to show up. And the share who opted into the 3D experience was something crazy, like 96%.

Eric Pulier: Those stats were extraordinary, but the bigger stat was the amount of time people spent. If you opted for the 2D experience, which about four percent did, you spent maybe four to seven minutes. If you went into the 3D, it was something like 47 minutes. It’s not hard to see why once you’re in. It’s not because of the ray tracing on the light hitting the water. It looks like Google, it’s branded Google, it’s cool, but it’s not about the graphical fidelity. It’s about the adventures you can go on, the things you can learn, the people you can run into, the things you can do and the fun you can have.

1:14:26 Brian Rose: All right, we’re going to play the video now. This is what you built for Google.

Vatom case-study video: Google chose to host its Cloud developer conference on the Vatom platform because Vatom is the only enterprise-ready solution that can host thousands of people in the same space. What’s important about that is that the competition shards its spaces and doesn’t put everybody in a single instance. Vatom does. Twenty thousand people showed up and enjoyed the festivities. The experience was hosted by holograms that introduced you to the space, and user-generated content was created so people could watch what others had to say about the event and participate.

Each action a user took within the space was rewarded with points, and all interactions were tracked and rewarded with a live leaderboard. For example, you got a point for grabbing a tree or plant and a point for planting it. You could update your avatar live and in real time and enjoy the experience with other people in the same space. An important part is also the developer platform Vatom offers. Pieces Google wanted didn’t exist, such as having everybody muted while watching content, so they were created using Vatom’s plug-in architecture. For accessibility, Google also wanted closed captioning and the ability to pause and stop videos.

Users’ progress was tracked in a number of ways, including points for participating in quizzes, watching sessions and networking, with a live leaderboard so you could see where you stood. You could unlock new hairstyles, sunglasses and shirts for your avatar by completing tasks, and networking sessions had areas designed specifically for getting to know people. Another important feature of the Vatom platform is token gating: you cannot gain access to certain areas without performing a task or purchasing access. With Google, you had to watch a video and answer a question correctly before moving to the next area.

Thousands of people attended simultaneously from over 100 countries. Return visits were incredible, and people averaged 48 minutes within the space. One of my favourite stats of anything I’ve ever done: we gave people two options, the 2D version and the Vatom spatialised 3D experience, and 98% of people chose to be in the 3D environment.

1:17:13 Brian Rose: When I see that, I think about our virtual movie premiere and the communities we can create by coming together for an event. That’s what we want to do with Vatom in the next couple of months. What more can you tell us about that Google event? It’s obviously a big company, and they chose your platform. And I can’t overstate those numbers: 11,000 concurrent users. Most sites couldn’t handle a tenth of that.

Eric Pulier: Scale matters, but back to our earlier conversation, the most important thing is the integration of all the different pieces that have to come together. You can find point solutions that do a lot of these things. This is an incredibly vibrant space with brilliant people building these various things, but no one has really stitched them together in a way that’s easy to use and scales on an enterprise-class basis, in a way that could really break through and make this ubiquitous.

I said with the PepsiCo example that the most important thing is that you now have an ongoing communication channel, and that’s important here too. Data is being gathered and business outcomes are being achieved. But to me the most extraordinary part of this opportunity is what happened in the platform and in the event that the platform didn’t do before the event. We come from an enterprise software background, and this was built to be built on.

A lot of people call things a platform because you can use them for different purposes. In our parlance, a platform means the underlying capability can be extended to build your application on top. We have a unique capability here that I think is the most important part of our vision: a plug-in architecture. You don’t wait for our roadmap to catch up with what you need. You can write code to do what you want and codify it into a plug-in, a little easy-to-install thing. Think of it as an app store for plug-ins. You can keep it for your company’s proprietary use, or you can resell it.

That’s the real opportunity. Our marketplace of plug-ins is starting to fill up with third parties doing things where we say, “Oh, I didn’t know we could do that.” We’re pretty smart, but we’re not as smart as most people out there who know their actual business. This is a horizontal platform. We couldn’t possibly anticipate the vertical things you really need. It’s unimaginable what can be built when you combine these capabilities. That’s what’s fun: waking up every morning and saying, “I didn’t know we could do that.” Well, we couldn’t yesterday.

Brian Rose: That’s the beauty of open source. You come from that decentralised mentality, and that’s how things can truly grow at scale these days.

Eric Pulier: Certainly how we see us scaling. The advantage this has brought has allowed us to partner with groups like Deloitte. You may have seen the press release Deloitte put out, which I was really excited about. This is a 150-year-old organisation, as conservative as you can be, and it’s taken us a long time to go through the hoops of security, vetting and all the different pieces you might imagine. What’s most gratifying is that there are 400,000 people out there with their own needs, for their companies, their governments and the projects they represent, and with the plug-in architecture they can now write that.

We’re seeing things being built by Deloitte, by Ernst & Young, by agencies, by Dentsu. We’re starting to understand that our opportunity is not to build the best set of use cases. It’s to build the best platform on which other people can build the use cases.

Brian Rose: That’s such a different philosophy from probably every other piece of enterprise software that’s ever been made.

Eric Pulier: It’s definitely the philosophy of the most successful ones. We’re not inventing that; we’re remembering it. If you look at how Windows grew, it was developers first. They really respected that and did a remarkable job of galvanising that community. I’d say we’re at the early stages of that, but we built the architecture for that purpose.

1:22:13 Brian Rose: Talk to me about artificial intelligence, because in the last six months a lot of people want to talk about it. It’s interesting you mentioned open source, because we’ve heard from the big tech companies, through leaked pieces and otherwise, that they’re not even sure they can compete with the open-source movement in AI. You were on stage recently and said there is no AI without a UI, which I thought was interesting. How are you going to incorporate AI into Vatom, and what do you think of this technology? You’ve been around for a long time and seen so many waves of technology.

Eric Pulier: I have been around for a long time and I’ve seen a lot, but I’ve never seen anything like this. I thought I was beyond excited when the internet got a hypertext layer. I remember my brother calling me and saying, “This kid at the University of Illinois, Marc Andreessen, just did this thing called Mosaic, a browser you can put on top of this thing.” I said, “Wow, this is unbelievable.” And it was a massive leap. But this is beyond anything I’ve ever seen.

We are of course incorporating it. That’s like asking, “Are you going to use electricity?” You must use this technology and apply it to the benefit of your goals or you won’t be in business. There’ll be two types of companies: the companies that use it and the companies that no longer exist. Yes, there are dangers, and real constraints we have to put around where this might go. I’m a big proponent of taking that seriously, but not of slowing down, because, one, you can’t, and two, the power of what it might bring is extraordinary.

As you pointed out, we only care about technology to the extent that you can use it. You can see our philosophy around the wallet, and around websites coming alive; they’re not meant for people to have to figure out. AI is really going to explode when it just becomes part of our lives, disappears into the background and gives us superpowers.

1:24:42 In our world that manifests in a number of ways. One of the more obvious ones is NPCs, non-player characters, that show up with real personalities, trained on interesting topics or involving you in different activities. I think it was yesterday that the CEO of Nvidia put up a demo, which I feel was a big breakthrough. Everyone’s recognising Nvidia is no longer the sleeping giant; it’s the giant. It was real-time, AI-created conversation with an NPC. Every day there’s something extraordinary, and the previous extraordinary moment along that trajectory, when you could do it at all, was only weeks ago. But what happened yesterday was real time.

If you even imperceptibly stop to process what I’m saying, go and ask some people and come back, it breaks the flow. We know how these things need to go to have a real conversation: in real time. So think about an NPC that can come up to you. The simplest example for business, and we focus on this a lot, is customer service. It knows everything 50 times better than anyone you could possibly train, and your turnover is remarkably low. Of course, when they become conscious and protest and walk out, that’s later. Right now they’ll stick with you, get better, really learn your product and ideally learn some EQ to handle different kinds of people in a way that makes them feel comfortable.

It’s very obvious in education how we can use these not only to teach but to be taught. It’s better to learn by teaching than by having information thrown at you. If you’re given a pupil, an AI that has to gain certain knowledge you must impart, which you might not even know yourself yet, in order for you both to get to the next level, that’s going to be a far more memorable communal experience than watching a video.

You can also train in things like EQ. What do you do if someone is learning a hotel reservation system and has a cranky person online? You can give them a test, “If a cranky person is online, do one of these three things”, like a DMV test, but what’s the likelihood that translates into anything? If you can simulate these experiences with actual characters with different emotional responses and different ways of interacting, you can actually coach somebody to get better. English as a second language is another. Everyone who’s learned a language knows immersion is the best way. How do you get that without travelling somewhere? This will start to simulate it a lot better.

Now combine those things with tokens for badging and levelling up, with wallets to prove you have them, and with teaching back, and you get an entirely new ecosystem of opportunity for these technologies. The other thing AI will be important for in our world is understanding the user better. Everyone wants to deliver more personalised, relevant content, and AI is going to be much better at that than even the more advanced analytics engines we have today.

1:28:46 The next thing, probably the most important in some ways for the advancement of humanity and our ability to find purpose, is the superpowers it will bring to creativity. Each of us is creative. As you go around to people in different walks of life, some say, “Yes, I’m creative, I do this,” but a lot of people have certain jobs and say, “This is what I do and who I am.” They don’t think of themselves as creative. That’s about to change. People are going to be able to express themselves in new ways, and these tools are not doing it for you.

There’s a lot of danger and worry that this becomes machine-driven art, and a lot of that is going to happen; it’s a whole other topic. But think of someone like me who can’t play an instrument but would love to. Now I can envision a song I’d like to see in the world. Even with amazing, simple tools like GarageBand from Apple, it’s still too hard. Now I can say, “No, this is what I mean,” and talk to it. I’m the conductor of my own orchestra, expressing myself the way I can and being heard, and what’s being heard is translated into a permanent artifact of my creativity.

The human-AI alliance is the most exciting benefit for humanity I’ve ever seen. We see a lot of people saying it’s going to wipe out humanity and end all biological life, and I don’t want to discount that. Yes, there are a lot of things we have to be concerned about. But let’s not let that concern interrupt the most exciting opportunity of our lifetime. The most fertile ground in the history of humanity to innovate and elevate what it is to be human is right now.

One of the concerns people have is how you’ll know who’s an AI and who’s human as the NPCs start to merge with humans. For certain purposes you may not. But no matter how good an AI gets, and we can perceive it without limit, like an alien life form becoming billions of times smarter than humans, able to read emotions and interact, and even creative, and people who say they’ll never be creative, well, they’re pretty darn creative already, I think it will never replace humans in terms of our respect for and connection to a piece of art if a human isn’t actively involved in it in a way we can understand.

It may not always be detectable, but if you do detect it, it changes everything. “That was just done by an AI. A human didn’t do it. Someone said ‘make 10,000 of those things I saw before’, and there was no effort, no real expression of a human soul imparted.” It’s kind of like a quantum thing, where the act of observing changes the phenomenon. Even knowing that a human was part of it will always make it more valuable. There’s something about the biological set of circumstances that will keep humanity at the forefront of what matters, and we should recognise that and build around it, not looking to replace humans but to enhance them.

Brian Rose: I think that definitely works for the short term. On a long enough timeline it could get really blurry. But I love what you talk about. Being human is about being creative, and yet so many of us grew up thinking, “I’m no good at music, I’m no good at art.” Ask most people and I’d say 80 or 90% will say, “I’m not an artist, I’m not creative,” because they’ve never been given the tools to express themselves and be proud to show someone something. They’ve been missing a fundamental part of being human, and we’ve all been missing their creations. I’ve listened to a bunch of people recently who say that now, with AI, they can do things they’ve always wanted to do.

Eric Pulier: Amazing.

Brian Rose: I played around with GarageBand and could never really get it going, but I want to create a hip-hop track. And I know you have a music venue in Santa Monica, and you want to create some music.

Eric Pulier: Now imagine if that superpower, that creativity, that enhancement also empowers me to put it out there in a new way. As we’ve talked about, it’s the synthesis of these things. It’s not, in isolation, “AI is cool” or “wallets are cool” or “programmable digital objects are cool”. What if they all work together? What if I have a self-sovereign identity that I control, which can receive payment in a decentralised world, that allows me to create programmable digital objects with AIs that let me envision almost anything imaginable, put them out into the world and get paid for it?

What if I could do a spoken-word poem, or translate a sentence from Swahili to English, and get paid for that unit of work, that form of creative output? What if that could happen on a global basis, where money moves as freely as communication does and creativity is easier not only to empower at scale but to distribute? I think that’s where we’re headed, and to me that’s really exciting. We’ve seen in Web2 the emergence of the UGC economy, YouTubers and influencers. That now gets turbocharged, where everybody gets a chance to get out there, make a name for themselves and be known.

1:34:57 Brian Rose: I’ve had a few guests here. Yat Siu from Animoca was here a couple of weeks ago, and he said AIs are ultimately going to have to exist on the blockchain for all the microtransactions between AIs, and that it’s going to push a lot of people into this decentralised space, where you can also work with payments and micropayments. I spoke with Dr Ben Goertzel from SingularityNET, and they’re all big believers that these are highly correlated and go hand in hand going forward.

Eric Pulier: I think so. People are going to need a record of their creativity, and they’re going to want to timestamp it. What better way to timestamp a trusted record than a blockchain? I think blockchain has been both over-assigned to use cases it’s not suitable for and over-maligned for the things it is suitable for. It’s an important technology like any other.

But it’s the synthesis, the confluence of these exponential technologies, that creates what I like to call Web 3.0, where you go one, two, three as a set of technologies. There’s another notion I think is important to note. There are proponents who say web3 is the decentralisation of everything, the decentralised internet, and that anything centralised is not web3. Maybe you can call it that, but then you’re going to be living in a vacuum with three or four customers and a couple of niche use cases. That’s not important to humanity or to business in the same way as this confluence of exponentially advancing technologies, including blockchain where it fits, coming together to create the next generation of the internet.

Brian Rose: So don’t be a purist and say it has to be completely decentralised, or you’re going to miss out on the whole party.

Eric Pulier: Not only don’t be a purist, but recognise that if you’re a purist, it’s not practical, because it won’t reach critical mass.

1:37:02 Brian Rose: Talk about your rollout strategy. When I first met you, I assumed it was an enterprise solution, but now anybody can go to the website and start creating metaverses. I’m doing it, and I didn’t even get any special treatment, not yet anyway. I’m in there creating things from scratch at no cost. How can people try Vatom, and what is your philosophy for rolling it out? You mentioned Deloitte, which could potentially onboard 400,000 people.

Eric Pulier: The plan is very much to make sure the tools and technology are accessible wherever possible. We believe in open source and want a vibrant open-source community, but we also believe in proprietary capabilities that we can offer on an enterprise-class basis. Not everyone needs advanced security, or the identity SDK that I think we uniquely bring for identity federation back to existing systems, or a fancy, unique, brandable wallet experience with our experience SDK. There are a lot of areas for us to nurture, and that’s a business model with almost infinite opportunity to scale. At the same time we want to open it up for the open-source community and for the plug-in architecture I mentioned.

There are three types of plug-ins, which answers your question about how this scales. One is a plug-in for virtual spaces themselves: what can you do in a space? Do you run into your supply chain, fed in securely, and interact with it in 3D? That’s not something we would ever write; someone else would. The next type is personal plug-ins. It’s not about the space; it’s about enhancing your identity. That could be something complex or as simple as a high five. “Here’s a high five, it costs a buck.” Somebody wants to high-five me but can’t because they don’t have the high-five plug-in, so they buy it. That’s a nice business model.

The next type is what you’d call templates. Programmable, dynamic, intelligent, connected digital objects can do so many things, but a really complicated use case might be semi-complex to build, and you want non-technical people to be able to use it again and again. A simple template might be a scratch-to-win contest, but behind the scenes it might be complicated: there are 15 prizes, these have a 7% chance of winning, these have 14%, these prizes are connected back to redemption at a Kroger supermarket. Once that’s done, a non-technical person can come into an easy-to-use template, fill in the blanks, upload a couple of videos and hit go.

Then that object is made, and you have your distribution system. Let’s do Pokémon Go-style AR all over London and spread them out, or distribute them in virtual environments, or put them on Instagram: click and take one. Taking one is a very different part of the brain, a different kind of advertising that invokes the power of ownership, and you can put it right on a Web2 site. Once you have that kind of template, you can use it over and over again. These are the basis of the scaling model.

1:41:04 Brian Rose: It’s super exciting. How are you feeling now? You’ve been working on this project in various forms for many years. Lately you’ve been getting tons of awards for these incredible use cases, and it feels like you’re potentially reaching a critical mass of clients with the Deloitte deal and everything. How does it feel to be at this juncture, and what do the next four or five years look like?

Eric Pulier: It feels really exciting. Having spent so many decades in tech building different types of companies, technologies and collaborations, I used to be able to look out five or ten years and say, “Here’s what I think.” I can’t do that any more. It’s going so fast. Five years is so far. I can do two years, and even that’s like, oh my gosh, this happens, then AI goes to this level, and this connects to this.

I can see unbelievable advances in robotics and what that’s going to mean, and how digital twins of factories, bringing together virtual spaces and programmable digital objects connected back to wallets, are going to allow you to create a next generation of predictive analytics. It’s exponential, but I can kind of see it. Five years out, it’s like vertical. So to me it’s exhilarating. I feel like we’re part of a movement that is changing what it means to be human, and I’m honoured to be part of it. We have a role, and so do many other companies and innovators, including many who did the work before us, so credit where credit is due. To me it’s the most exciting opportunity of my lifetime, and I hope the other people on this journey feel the same.

Brian Rose: Do you have a competitor?

Eric Pulier: Of course, I’m sure we have many. We’ve been sitting here for I don’t know how many minutes, but I can tell you that in that time some guy in his garage has built something even cooler.

Brian Rose: Is that something you have to worry about more these days than maybe ten years ago, that someone can have an idea and create things very quickly?

Eric Pulier: I don’t know if we worry about that so much, though one should in general. I’ll tell you why. We’re still in the business of real-world companies that need to adopt this. We’re not throwing something out there and hoping someone uses it. We’re doing the hard work of security, SOC 2 compliance and data sovereignty. If you want to run something here and that data leaves London, it’s violating a law. These are really hard problems to solve. You don’t have to be a genius to solve them, but the hard blocking and tackling to build the business we’re building is a slog. It has to work at scale, work together, comply with this and that regulation and integrate with other things. So our concern is not so much someone coming out with something more interesting, because I’d actually love that; we can convince them to integrate with us just to save time entering the enterprise.

What I think is changing, and I don’t know if concern is the right word, but it’s a new challenge, is that the world of venture capital and creating companies is fundamentally changing. You would not do the same thing today that you did six months ago. You would not invest in the same thing today that you would have six months ago. I don’t want to over-emphasise AI, but I think it’s one of the key driving factors. It’s turning so many things that would have been companies just a short time ago into features, or something useful someone has built that you’d use as a service, as a microtransaction, rather than building a whole company around it.

You’re going to find so many companies that have real utility and are successful by any measure with one to three people in them, building on the building blocks we have. We used to have to set up a server, connect it to a network and connect that to storage. Thank you AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. On top of that you had to assemble all this software. Thank you, platforms as a service. As you go up the stack and now apply AI to aggregate the sum total of human knowledge and make it accessible, you’ll be able to create applications with far less money, far less time and far fewer people. It changes the nature of what it means to build a company.

Brian Rose: It’s an incredible time. I sat down with Jamie Burke, who runs Outlier Ventures here in London, one of the biggest Web3 accelerators in the world, and he said, “Brian, I’ve met the first single-founder, single-employee billion-dollar company.” Give them a tech stack of AI tools ten deep.

Eric Pulier: I think I have too. It’s an exciting time and a very interesting time.

1:46:49 Brian Rose: If people watching this are individuals who want to explore the software as potential app builders, or people in corporations who want their company to use it, what are the best next steps? Is it Vatom.com to get more info?

Eric Pulier: That’s certainly a good place to start. We have a way on the platform to email us, the old-fashioned way of communicating, and it’s easy to contact us, our CMO, Colin, our head of experience. We’re quite accessible. There’s a pathway where we look at applications. Normally what we’re trying to do is empower people to learn the tools and how to use the APIs and SDKs to build what they want, but we do get involved, get our hands dirty and work with people to build things that haven’t been done before.

Brian Rose: And you have a whole set of tutorials that I’m going through myself to get to know that space. At the end of the day, you just zoom out and think: how can this create better human interactions? That’s what this is for, and that’s what people need to understand. It’s not a place to go and do this little thing digitally. It’s to enhance reality.

Eric Pulier: Yes. The future of human engagement is still the human.

Brian Rose: Wow. That puts it right there. It’s not going to replace what it is to be human; it’s just going to add to it in so many ways. Eric, I really appreciate the time and all the hard work, because building something like this over that history would have had so many moments where you were way ahead of your time, including creating NFTs for the first time. I hope it feels good now to see it coming together with all these accolades.

Eric Pulier: It’s a lot of fun. Thank you for having me today.

Brian Rose: It’s my pleasure, and I look forward to supporting this and more in the future.

Eric Pulier: I appreciate it. Thank you.