EB-3: Ego - Transcript - Part 2

[32:16.01]🗡️ vish: It's super complicated and it kind of brings us to like, okay, well, what if we could just train our own foundation model around characters and models, right? Which is one day what we hope to do. It's very expensive, but I think there's a huge amount of potential in building something custom for this idea of role-playing and feeling like you're having realistic conversations and also seeing NPCs do realistic things with their lives and with their routines. So there is an opportunity there, which I think at some point we'll take, and as a company that would give us a pretty decent moat.

[32:21.782]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[32:46.167]🗡️ vish: That's after we erase a little bit more. Yeah.

[32:47.118]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, right on. It's funny because I just wrote a newsletter and the newsletter that's going out tomorrow is on Brett Taylor's startup called Sierra, which is making customer service bots. I did some research on them and he's describing what they do and he says, at this point, we have seven LLMs working together. The last piece is a reviewer piece.

[33:04.076]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[33:12.81]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[33:12.878]🐱 Peggy: Yeah.

[33:15.166]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: which kind of reviews whether the rest of the LLMs did their job and kind of like decides whether or not, to put the output out or not, right? So I was like, this starts to sound like very kind of, like similar in a sense that you have, you need the stack of LLM calls that, one on top of the other in order to actually like do anything real. Yeah.

[33:19.874]🗡️ vish: Ha ha

[33:24.138]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[33:38.026]🐱 Peggy: And if anything breaks, the whole system breaks. And so.

[33:38.174]🗡️ vish: Yeah, it breaks and you run into latency issues. There's a huge number of problems with that approach, but, you know, it's where we are currently.

[33:43.658]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.

[33:48.774]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, I mean, I think like, you know, at some point, the product will start to work, right? And when that, you know, you know it's gonna happen. You don't know when exactly, but you can see the pieces are starting to come together, right? So, you know, at some point it's gonna happen. So, just to give me a sense, like, when someone is your expectation that when someone goes into the game world, you know,

[34:00.534]🗡️ vish: Mm-hmm.

[34:07.394]🐱 Peggy: Mm-hmm.

[34:18.186]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: In some sense, it sounds very similar to bootstrapping a two-sided marketplace. Because when you bootstrap a two-sided marketplace, often at the very beginning, you don't have enough goods in there in order to attract the buyers. So what Airbnb did, for example, is they went into Craigslist and they imported all of these existing apartments into the marketplace so that buyers who came in,

[34:25.294]🗡️ vish: Correct.

[34:34.19]🗡️ vish: Correct.

[34:45.29]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: would actually see, oh, there's a lot of apartments that I can choose from. So in that sense, now you have this kind of two-sided marketplace for communication where you have the humans coming in, and then they start off not having anyone to talk to. And you have this problem of bootstrapping from zero. And so is that something that you think fundamentally the AIs are there to help you just get to that bootstrap? And then the expectation is that,

[34:45.548]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[35:04.097]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[35:13.846]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: As time goes by, the number of NPC or AI interactions decreases as the number of human interactions increase. Is that the kind of thought process that you have?

[35:26.398]🗡️ vish: I'm not so sure about that. So there's a piece of it that's absolutely accurate that I think initially when you see a giant empty open world, you're like, okay, this is like every other Sorrow of the Craft game. I should just go gather wood and build a shelter and hopefully get my friends to come join. The presence of AI NPCs doing it as well makes it fun, makes it feel like it's less lonely. But it's more than that. I think what we're really interested in is how AI NPCs can add dynamism and unpredictability to your gameplay experience.
That's what we're interested in. I think that's what's gonna draw people in because all of a sudden now you have something that looks like Minecraft and plays like Minecraft or Valheim or Roblox, but there's this complete unpredictability in the form of these agents that are also playing the game, that aren't necessarily humans and aren't very predictable in how they decide to act or communicate with you, which we think is interesting. But we've also understood that the way games and 3D spaces gain audiences is by providing not just novelty, but also...
entertainment value for streamers. Most games these days get discovered because a streamer goes, look at this crazy thing that happened in this game, can you believe it? Oh, and then they, you know, put a little YouTube profile picture with a, you know, like that. And then they go, can't believe this AI just told me to like, you know, do something horrible. That's the kind of thing we're hoping to organically happen in the game. So streamers get motivated to stream themselves playing this weird game and then audiences go, huh, I kind of want to see what happens when I show up.

[36:42.582]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[36:52.85]🗡️ vish: And they have this like fun, delightful experience with an AI and PC, which we can never predict. And then they continue playing the game and bringing their friends in, and then sort of kicking it off from there. That's our hope and expectation. The beauty of it is that you don't, at that point, you don't actually have to innovate on the gameplay mechanics. We kind of know already what people like to do in 3D spaces, which is chop down trees and build shelter and defend against simple monsters at nighttime. We know that gameplay loop is pretty eternal. We also know that people enjoy simulation games, whether it's the Sims or Animal Crossing.
They like this idea of being in a space and sharing a space, but not just with humans, but also with NPCs. We know that they like to converse with other NPCs. The one thing we've heard consistently from people who play Animal Crossing was like, man, I wish I could say more than just their scripted lines, right? Which we know is not possible with larger language models. They can say more than just their scripted lines. Now imagine talking to them and building relationships with them, going out and adventuring with them. Suddenly, the whole space of things you can do in the game.

[37:41.136]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right.

[37:50.194]🗡️ vish: expands infinitely while still keeping the core gameplay loop simple and approachable.

[37:52.746]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Well, I used to be a huge Dungeons and Dragons fan. And one of the things that always struck me of playing the online RPG versus the RPG when you have a gaming session with friends is that in the online RPGs, like for example, many of the Japanese ones, the JRPGs, a lot of the game mechanic is about killing something. It's about killing a monster or whatever.

[37:59.505]🐱 Peggy: Ha ha ha.

[38:20.518]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: While in the gaming RPG, like when you're playing with friends, you could be like, oh, you know what, I'm going to try and rule this place by persuading everyone, etc. You can have a different kind of mechanic there. And that was very hard to achieve online. You couldn't make the game mechanic in Elden Ring like, hey, I have to persuade the villagers to depose the king.

[38:20.756]🗡️ vish: Mm-hmm.

[38:47.922]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: rather than, you know, and so I find it fascinating because you can imagine a game mechanic where it's no longer the point to just get the highest hit points and, you know, the highest, the best sword because you could have some guy in there who just goes in and persuades all the villagers to go kill the dragon and he just sits back and he's just like, you know what, I'm just gonna chill. You know.

[38:49.62]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[39:01.483]🐱 Peggy: Mm-hmm.

[39:09.53]🗡️ vish: Yeah. So there are some games doing this, right? There was a really awesome game that came out recently called Suck Up, and it's by this, I think it's an SF based company, and it's the first sort of successful large language model game that I've seen. And in the game, you play a vampire who navigates like a 3D suburban town. And your goal is to convince each one of the residents to let you into their house so you can suck their blood. It's very fun. It's very quirky, but the residents themselves have their own specific personalities as a

[39:22.723]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.

[39:34.195]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Ha ha.

[39:39.022]🗡️ vish: There's a really sweet grandma, there's a Bitcoin dude who's like super into Bitcoin maximization, whatever. And they all have like really fun personalities, obviously all powered by language models. And you have to convince them over a series of conversations where you talk in natural language to have them let you in. Which was really fun. You should look it up, it's really cool.

[39:54.39]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I'm gonna, this is hilarious. Yeah. Yeah, I'm gonna, you know, once in a while, I drop some tweets that scare like Elisa Yudovsky just for fun, you know, just for fun. I just enjoy like scaring the bejesus out of him. So this is definitely gonna be one of those. I've gotta be like, hey, look at this. Yeah.

[40:00.532]🐱 Peggy: Yeah.

[40:07.807]🗡️ vish: Haha

[40:16.998]🗡️ vish: Yeah, no, the game is awesome. I just think it shows that LLMs are finally here, you know, for gaming especially. It can be fun. And we're very excited about how that's going to play out in sort of what we're building, which is, you know, first it's just AI and PCs talking to one another, then it's you talking to them, then it's you having some sort of relationship mechanic with them. When I say relationship, I don't mean like just dating them, but also, you know, making them like you, making them enjoy hanging out with you and making them also come with you on adventures.
And suddenly the single player experience becomes as good as a multiplayer experience, which is something that I think is the biggest problem with online, um, you know, survival craft games right now, which is the game that pretty much everyone plays. Right. So.

[40:55.974]🐱 Peggy: Yeah, we also interviewed, did a user research interview with an 11 year old very recently who loves playing Animal Crossing. And we were like, Oh, like, you know, what, what do you think if we like made Animal Crossing with AI villagers? And he was like, so interested in that he was like, hey, like, if I if I had that, like, I would be mayor, and I would like, go on a smear campaign and like, convince like all the villagers that, you know, they hate each other or something like that.

[41:01.932]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[41:12.128]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[41:24.074]🗡️ vish: Oh no, he wanted to kick out some villagers he didn't like, and he's like, I wanna be able to do that. There's certain villagers that just don't like. And we're like, yes, you can do that. Yes, you can.

[41:26.446]🐱 Peggy: I mean, I'm a very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,

[41:32.79]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I distinctly remember Animal Crossing got me through COVID. So...

[41:33.184]🐱 Peggy: Yeah.

[41:38.874]🗡️ vish: Oh yeah, yeah. For all of us, that was a very important game. To visit one another's islands, right?

[41:43.695]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: God, you're like, everything is so cute and nice and organized.

[41:49.634]🗡️ vish: Yeah, yeah, and then the whole world is on fire in real life.

[41:51.51]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, I remember celebrating birthdays and I think a Christmas on Animal Crossing because it's real time, right? So I remember that. What happens, how do game companies, how game company is going to view this, right? Because Nintendo, for example, is very sensitive about like how they're control of the characters, right? Control of like the types of interactions that the characters are allowed to do.

[42:00.255]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[42:01.006]🐱 Peggy: Thank you.

[42:18.231]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[42:21.315]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: And that was, you know, how do they transition into this new world? Like what happens now?

[42:22.231]🗡️ vish: Mm-hmm.

[42:30.35]🗡️ vish: I don't think they do. This is like movie studios, right? They're kind of stuck in an older world, which is a very legitimate world of, we built these amazing characters, handcrafted them. They are our IP. They have their own writers and personalities, and there are certain ways you can use them, and that's about it. But the reality is that people want to just remix and recreate, right? So people do fan art, people engage in fan fiction. We want to empower the latter experience.

[42:39.263]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[42:58.97]🗡️ vish: I don't think Disney or Nintendo is ever going to be okay with their characters in a roleplay format. I mean, we already see it in VRChat, but they don't want to be participants in that. They want to have tight control over how they can actually appear. But people have imaginations, and our entire mission is to allow people to enact their imaginations in real life and in 3D. So I don't think they're going to stick to very tightly controlled narratives and tightly controlled...
experiences and how you interface with those characters is also going to be controlled through their platforms and through their games. What we're thinking about and what we want to build is something that is parallel, adjacent to that, where it's user-generated imagination and experiences, more akin to fan fiction. But at some point we expect people to create the next big IP on our platform that is completely new, right? That's what we expect at some point.

[43:52.946]🐱 Peggy: Yeah, I feel like this is like a history of like open source versus closed source or walled garden versus like, you know, these crazy spaces that outside of, you know, the theme parks that

[43:56.951]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[44:04.242]🗡️ vish: Yeah, which is why the uncensored stuff is so important to us because we don't we don't want to put limits on people's imagination Or how they want to express themselves and their characters and what they want to do with their characters, right? this is all make-believe like We we want to make sure that People don't feel constrained. They can they can make a really evil horrible character, you know if they want to Uh and talk to them Um, so yeah

[44:27.204]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: So let's say when you guys are looking at launch, like kind of what's the kind of timeline that you're looking at?

[44:35.914]🗡️ vish: Yeah. So obviously we're very ambitious, and what we're building is going to take quite a bit of time for us to get to this vision of Sword Art Online. That's our final vision. So what we're doing is pretty simple and humble. We're just going to allow anyone in about two weeks to use our browser tool to create and summon any 3D character and have them talk to one another. And I already have a sample of this up on my Twitch stream, twitch.tv slash town world. In my stream, I have Draco talk to Shrek, Shrek talk to Big Bird.

[44:57.504]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah.

[45:02.641]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[45:04.53]🗡️ vish: and other random anime characters. That's the start. After that, we're gonna launch the ability for users to then show up as an avatar, kind of like me, and actually engage in conversation with these characters one-to-one as well. And then we're gonna launch the ability for you to script interactions, very simple interactions. And then we're gonna launch the game, which is now you have an overworld where you have to like kind of survive and build shelter and summon these characters to come and help you. And then we're gonna go from there step-by-step. We just, we wanna think very, very large and act very, very small.

[45:14.266]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Okay.

[45:32.918]🗡️ vish: The first thing we want to do is we think people want to see their characters in 3D and have more immersive interactions with them. We want to prove that hypothesis. If that's true, then we kind of go up the ladder.

[45:41.542]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right on. So let's say once you launch, would you be monitoring? You obviously monitor usage, how many minutes people are online, et cetera. What are the metrics that you would watch for? What are the things that you would monitor to see whether or not this is successful, or this needs work, et cetera? What would you look at?

[46:08.754]🗡️ vish: Yeah, I mean, you have your classic, like, you know, if you were to think of like a PM, which I hope you don't have to, you would look at a classic metrics like, oh, like 30 days later, how many people have been retained, all that stuff. But what I really am curious about is for the people who spend, let's say in the first week, three to four hours, maybe five hours using our tool, do they do they wind up spending hundreds of hours later on? Right. I'm not super interested in people who just go, oh, this is a fun little novelty. Let me try it out. You get a big use of Spike early on, and then they kind of disappear after a while.
What I'm really curious about is for those who keep coming back to the tool to see what kind of crazy characters they can mix and match together, do they, one, end up streaming it and sharing with friends? And two, do they end up spending a lot of time over 30 to 40 days still using the browser tool? And what do they tell us that they want? Right? For that cohort of users, I want to serve them. And I want to see that. I want to see the number of hours they spend summoning characters and conversing and changing conversation topics increase.

[47:03.242]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[47:05.898]🗡️ vish: And I want to see them share that with their friends. Be like, dude, you're not going to believe what Deep Stake Shrek told Mean Big Bird. They were talking about crazy conspiracies. Look at that. I want to see that.

[47:13.926]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right, right, right on, right on. So it's really about intensity of interest in a subgroup, right? You need to see this kind of spike in interest. It's not just the amount, but the intensity of interest, right? That's what you're looking for.

[47:32.658]🗡️ vish: Yeah, exactly. We're not looking for like, you know, dows and mouths at this point. I'd be happy with just five users who use it every single day. Like, I'd be so happy. I'd be like talking to them, I'd be like, what else do you want? What else do you want? What more can I, you know, ship for you that's going to make this more fun? Like, that's what I really care about.

[47:40.651]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[47:48.674]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right. You know, Mark Zuckerberg has often talked about social as primarily a moderation product. Right. He often talks as social as, you know, social, anyone can do social, but social is primarily a product of moderation and about how to arrange user interactions in such a way that you get these positive interactions that keep them coming back. Right. How would you view that in the context of your platform?

[48:17.308]🗡️ vish: Mm.

[48:19.042]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: I mean, would you have a moderator? Like many discourse have like a bunch of mods there. Would it be like that? Would you have a moderator in world kind of watching the interactions? Would you like, what would you be concerned about? What would you take a look at? So that's my.

[48:35.79]🗡️ vish: So my first concern is that I want to keep the platform safe for kids. If you want to have like a specific instance or a server where there's like 16 plus, 18 plus, that's totally fine. But I find that I want this to be a really fun and like kind of lightweight space to just do silly things. Will there be people who have strange and maybe negative interactions with one another? For sure. That's going to exist with any social product. I want to be sure that's pretty accurately educated and kind of like...

[48:52.406]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[49:05.61]🗡️ vish: separated from, you know, minors and younger people accessing it. I think that's baseline. I think that's reasonable. Beyond that, if you're an adult using it, I don't want there to be any limitations beyond whatever legal ones of how you use the platform and what you do in the world. Because if our goal is to enable people to make their imaginations come to life, not everyone's imagination is, you know, PG-13 or, you know, fully, I guess like, what's the word, like just fully...
Just like normal, like I want weird, weird emergent stuff to happen, right? And when you try to just only control for positive interactions, you miss out on the fantastical worlds people can create from what possibly could be darker and more negative things. Because I mean, some of the greatest fiction works of all time are terrifying. You know, they're horror, like they're, you know, absolutely entertaining in spite of the fact that they're, you know, deal with really heavy themes. And I want that to be possible. That said, obviously like,

[49:35.017]🐱 Peggy: I don't know.

[49:41.294]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[50:04.69]🗡️ vish: whatever people use for public access, if they're not age verified, should be safe for kids. That's the first thing. But beyond that, if you're an adult user of the platform, I want to see what kind of crazy things you create, what kind of crazy characters you bring in, and what kind of absolutely unhinged things they say, because that's entertaining and that's fun.

[50:23.99]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Right on, right on, right on.

[50:29.198]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: You know, how would that work in terms of being synonymous, right? Like you don't know who the person is on the other side, you know, how does that work?

[50:43.11]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, so because you're not very sure if the other person is an adult or a kid or how would you as the admin of the site, how do you kind of like do this? Like actually do this?

[50:43.493]🗡️ vish: How does it work for human users if someone's pseudonymous?

[50:59.638]🐱 Peggy: We will probably start out with whatever we can do, which is have age verification, birthday verification. I think it would be something very simple. I think that does kind of become a bigger question later on. I don't know if Vish, you have any thoughts on this?

[51:08.696]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[51:19.31]🗡️ vish: I think it's a pretty unsolved problem. Parents need to be knowing what their kids are doing online. Like there's certain reasons why parents don't allow people, allow their kids to communicate on Roblox because they don't know who's on the other side, which is a very reasonable concern. We're gonna ship with these parent control tools when we eventually have the game, because that's important. I want my little cousins to feel safe on the platform. But at the same time, if you're an adult and you tell us you're an adult and you wanna do crazy things, you should be allowed to do that, because it's fun. It's like, you know, like,
There was a whole moral panic about GTA when I was growing up and I played a ton of GTA when I was a teenager even before I was allowed supposed to be playing GTA and it was fine, right? um, and I think like There's a nuance to it where like you want people to have fun, but also not uh, you know Go too far in like potentially victimizing other people. It's a hard line to cross. I don't think anyone's really figured out how to like actively Verify a person's age without like, you know compromising their privacy So you need to have a certain level of user trustability that they're going to tell you

[52:12.438]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: All right.

[52:18.519]🗡️ vish: and their parents are going to know that they're using this. I think that's the best you can hope for now.

[52:22.902]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: No, I totally get that because I often say like, you know, we should just fast forward moral panics by like 10 or 20 years. So we should just be like, we should just have the neural link moral panic now, and then look back and say like, hey, you know what, it was so much easier when we just had VR and iPads, right? Like, because now you're hooking up directly into the neurons. Oh, you know, right. So

[52:37.157]🗡️ vish: Yeah, let's do that.

[52:42.876]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[52:47.242]🗡️ vish: Yeah, no, I still remember all the headlines, you know, when I was a teenager about like, oh, games are causing all these violence. I mean, like violence and horrible things have existed since the dawn of mankind. It's like these things, these horrible people exist. The best you can do is to control the amount of damage they can do. But at the same time, you need to let people feel like they can enact their imagination. It's a safe place for you to just like let it all out, you know, like sometimes we all need a Grand Theft Auto session where...
We do crazy things, I get a five star Wander rating, it's just fun.

[53:18.852]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Speaking of which, would you say that, do you think there's going to be differences in usage in Asia, in the US, and in Europe? Do you think different populations have different characteristics of usage? Do you expect that? What's your sense?

[53:37.774]🗡️ vish: I don't know. I mean everybody universally loved games like Grand Theft Auto and kind of did the same things, but in Asia you've had games like MapleStory and like more social MMOs be more successful versus I think in the West you saw more like, you know, questing and rating based MMOs be more successful So it's kind of hard to tell. I mean Minecraft and Roblox are pretty universal games, right? So is Valheim So the only way we can really know is if you know, we see

[53:53.228]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[53:56.703]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[54:05.214]🗡️ vish: our Asian audience is behaving in a different way. I mean, it's, I can kind of make some estimations because I actually grew up in Singapore and I grew up in sort of that Asian realm, even though now I live in, my physical body lives in San Francisco, but it's hard to tell. It's really hard to tell.

[54:19.274]🐱 Peggy: I think like anime is like kind of one of those things that we're super popular in Asia specifically but now it's like kind of popular globally. Yeah, so I think like, I feel like more and more like today it's like everything is kind of converging at some point. There are like some differences within the region but I guess again we don't really know until we know.

[54:28.091]🗡️ vish: Universal, yeah.

[54:43.106]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Which brings me to another point. So Peggy, you're using more anime kind of avatar, and Vish, you're using kind of more of a 3D kind of structured avatar. I'm using almost kind of a meta-human life is more photorealistic. Like what are the challenges and differences between like modeling those and, what are the major differences that you see in usage and challenges in modeling them, et cetera?

[54:50.259]🐱 Peggy: Mm-hmm.

[55:12.638]🐱 Peggy: Yeah, so usually the more, so your avatar is actually like the most complicated, the MetaHuman, because Unreal like basically did a bunch of like 3D scans and 3D reconstructions of like thousands of people, maybe even hundreds of thousands of people. And
collected videos of them, images from them from every 360 degree angle, and then basically did a bunch of full reconstructions of the human body. They ensured diversity, they ensured basically also very nuanced movements of how each individual muscle moves in your face to create the super high quality blend shapes and all of that. And there is a big, or I would say like a
a big, not really sure like what amount of people, but there is a large amount of people who really do like this style. But then there's also like, obviously, like, like you said, like people who really like anime, which is a lot easier to make. Like my avatar is, is a little bit more simpler, but it's still pretty expressive. And you can you can still like, you know, pretend like you're a character in an anime and then vicious avatar somewhere in the middle. Obviously.

[56:27.116]🗡️ vish: Yeah.
Well, I mean, I think I would like to post below to answer this question. So, post, what do you think? Uh, like what's the. Yeah, man. Uh, yeah, I love this, bro. This is fucking sick.

[56:33.194]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: hahahaha

[56:38.446]🐱 Peggy: Yeah.

[56:40.714]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Gosh, so Vish just switched in the middle. So he's got a Post Malone.

[56:47.154]🗡️ vish: No, the beauty of what we did is that we have a universal rig, so we can be anything at all. I can switch on the fly to any character. I can be an alien. I could be this weird cyberpunk chick. What we did with Ego's iOS app is that we allowed you to switch between any character on the fly and be whoever you want to be. But the limitations to that is that, obviously, you trade off some potential face tracking quality and customization for the ability to switch on the fly. So I can even be Peggy. There we go.

[57:02.808]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[57:12.038]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Yeah, yeah, and oh my gosh, there's two Peggies now. There's two. Oh, gosh. I mean, that looks super fun. I mean, I can just imagine people just switching, like very rapidly switching during a game. You could make it like Fortnite, except instead of making up walls, you just switch characters.

[57:19.766]🗡️ vish: Hahaha

[57:20.322]🐱 Peggy: Thank you.

[57:33.952]🗡️ vish: Yeah.

[57:39.442]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: you wouldn't know who you're shooting because the guy switched. That would be so crazy. Yeah, that's really cool. That's really cool, pretty amazing. So in preparation for this part, I read through a bunch of research on avatars, avatar creation, etc. So there's a bunch of stuff about self-idealization and what people see themselves as, etc. And like...

[57:42.358]🗡️ vish: Yeah.
Huh.

[58:09.77]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: of people using avatars and the distance between the idealized self and the actual self, etc. What do you think is the non-entertainment aspects of this? How do you think... Sometimes when we... For gaming, for example, it started off as something entertaining, but then the profound aspects of it were after some time for Fortnite, for example,
people were at first shooting each other. And then for one generation of teens, it is now the primary social network, right? Fortnite is, and they're aging with the cohort, like all social networks, they're aging upwards with the cohort. And similarly for Roblox, Roblox became the primary social network for, at some point, like five to 10 year olds. And again, they're aging up with the cohort, right? So...

[58:50.324]🗡️ vish: Mm-hmm.

[58:56.637]🗡️ vish: Mm-hmm.

[59:03.91]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: What do you think is the more profound aspects of this kind of self-avatar creation where people are just gonna be doing this? What do you think might be some of the things that happen? I don't know.

[59:19.122]🗡️ vish: I think fundamentally, I don't think there's like one true self. I don't think that's a thing. I think people's representation of themselves kind of changes with time, with the amount of fiction they consume, right? With their influences, either in real life or in popular media. And it's a, it's a consistently changing amalgamation of all their influences and who they are in real life and what they look like in the mirror. And the ability to like switch skins and the ability to evolve.

[59:20.764]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: same.

[59:29.027]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm. All right.

[59:37.193]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[59:46.938]🗡️ vish: is super important and it's pretty hard to do today. I think the next sort of social network or the next social space is going to allow that changing of skins to happen on the fly, is going to be more focused on not representing your quote unquote true self, but how you feel at that point in time and in what context you want to feel a certain way. When I think about...

[01:00:03.806]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: Mm-hmm.

[01:00:13.41]🗡️ vish: the multiple different accounts that I have, or even most people, they have Finstas, they have like different manifestations of themselves on LinkedIn versus Instagram versus Snapchat. They're all still true. They're all still real representations, right? But you have to, you kind of tailor it for the platform. You don't really tailor it for the space that you're in. Right? So to have a space where all those manifestations give you true at the same time, I think is very compelling. And it's what we're pushing towards with Ego.

[01:00:39.286]👩‍🎤 Ate-A-Pi: It's funny because 8 has a LinkedIn account now where they require a true photo. So 8 does not have a photo on the LinkedIn account. So, and when you said like, yeah, so I'm like, I don't want to get 8 banned off the LinkedIn account. So I have not put in like...

[01:00:46.432]🐱 Peggy: Oh

[01:00:52.206]🗡️ vish: home.

[01:00:55.946]🗡️ vish: Interesting.

[01:01:02.678]🗡️ vish: Wow, I might get banned because my LinkedIn profile is literally this. So, yikes.