It’s been one heck of a year for Web3. In just a few months we went from everyone fleeing crypto to when the Silicon Valley Bank collapsed and everybody’s now fleeing the banks and going back to crypto. But amid all these rapid changes, the community has remained solid and hopeful for the industry’s future. Get ready as we hear some more things to look forward to this year and beyond in this Outer Edge LA panel hosted by Neil Strauss, a New York Times bestselling author and a blockchain enthusiast. He is joined onstage by some of the leaders in the intersection of Web3, the creative process, storytelling, the metaverse and more. Join in and get a glimpse of the future with Inder Phull of PIXELYNX, Steven Ilous of FEATURE, and metaverse advisor Marcie Jastrow.
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Next Gen Storytelling: AI, Gaming, and Ownership; with Moderator Neil Strauss and Friends | Outer Edge LA Panel
We have a great panel for you. This feature presents next-gen storytelling, AI gaming and ownership. This is going to be an absolute banger. Your moderator is none other than the illustrious Neil Strauss who is ten-time New York Times bestselling author and blockchain enthusiast. I would give him a follow on Instagram. Some of his posts have changed my life. Whether it was for the better or worse, we don't know. We love you, Neil. The panel's fantastic. We've got Inder Phull. He's the CEO and Cofounder of PIXELYNX. Also, Marcie Jastrow. She's a Metaverse advisor. We also have Steven Ilous, the CEO and Founder of FEATURE.
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Wearing that GM necklace says, “Kidnap me for my seed raise.” It's been a crazy year since the 2022 conference. We've gone through this roller coaster of a fucking year. It's been insane and it changes so quickly. We went with SBF and FTX where everyone's fleeing crypto because it's a scam to the Silicon Valley Bank collapse where everyone's fleeing banks because they're a scam and coming back to crypto. It’s holding steady like you all have and believing in Web3 as it goes through these incredible growing pains. It's amazing you're all here. We have an incredible panel of people who are going to teach you a lot about the future.
Get ready to take some notes and pay close attention because I want to introduce our panel. First of all, we've got Marcie Jastrow who worked at Technicolor. She worked on games like Call of Duty and everything great like Resident Evil, Grand Theft Auto and FIFA, to name a few. It’s exciting as some of you know, she was brought onto the Shiba Inu team to work on their metaverse.
Next is Steven Ilous. All of you have seen the film Steven has worked on. He's got a start working with the late great Stan Lee and has worked on the Matrix films, The Polar Express, Watchmen and many of the amazing shorts that he's directed. His company FEATURE is poised at the intersection of gaming, narrative content and Web3. We're going to talk about FEATURE in a bit.
We also have Inder Phull of PIXELYNX. It is a company of the cross-section of Web3 gaming and music that he formed with deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin. He partnered with Beatport and sold to Animoca Brands. Congratulations, Inder. A few questions and these are questions that I don't know the answers to so I'm excited for myself as well but we'll start with Marcie. One of the big questions is, how many people consider themselves gamers like Web 30 gaming?
Correct me if anything's wrong here but it seems like the existing non-Web3 metaverses are loosely defined as Minecraft, Roblox and Fortnite. Not to do a spoiler but Steven has a huge, super exciting announcement that's a game-changer that he's going to say later. I didn't oversell it but he wanted to do it softly. I just did it loudly. I apologize. Marcie, these games dominate the landscape. What will it take for Web3 virtual environments to get to that point or past it?
The way that I look at this, it's like any new technology that is nascent and we're still in the very early stages. If you look at products like Roblox or even Fortnite, they've got 15 or 18 years on us in building their community. When I look at building metaverses out and what Web3 looks like, it's about friction and figuring out how to hook up wallets. Some of the most technical people I know don't even know how to hook up a wallet. It takes seven hours for them to hook up a wallet. Education is 1, scalability is 2 and security is 3. Also, a community is a plus one.
If you want to go build a metaverse, don't do it thinking they will come. Do it with a community that backs you, wants it, thinks it's important and wants to socialize, monetize, interact and have amazing experiences there. Also, creators who want to create new things. Boats all rise together. Communities rise together and that's how I think this grows.
However, it's all up to you who are wanting to learn about what Web3 means and I believe that is the next stage. Web4 is probably the metaverse but first, let's learn and teach everybody how to connect wallets and peer-to-peer commerce and be able to transact at the same time without a middleman. That is key and decentralization.
Thanks, Marcie. Steven, this is a question for you. Do you want to mention the gaming thing because you're doing a first that bridges these worlds? Am I ruining it?
No. I was just catching up. As Web3 continues to adopt, we're excited about where these intellectual properties that come onto the blockchain and how they progress forward into broader audiences. At GDC, they're making the State of Unreal announcement where one of the first Web3 projects is integrating into Fortnite and that is part of their UEFN product where you'll be able to take Project Gossamer and use that within the builder experience within Fortnite. That's a huge announcement for the space as that product moves into a 400-million-user community. We're excited about that.
What was Epic Games' take on Web3, if they had one?
They'll be more announcements on that from their side. I'm sure they have a deeper perspective so I'll let them speak on that.
The other question I was going to ask is about the future of storytelling. As a storyteller myself, what's the future of storytelling in the Web3 environment?
The technology is wonderful. We talk about it a lot. However, from an audience perspective, they don't care. They want a new experience, something that engages them in where the puck has moved. We consume content in so many different ways. We're on Discord. We watch streaming content. We're texting people. How can we take that fragmented experience of our day-to-day lives and create something a little bit more cohesive or engaging in new dimensions?
At FEATURE, we focus on leveraging blockchain technology to unify that and create more stakes where your asset is in the show and maybe the physical product that you have customizes the experience to what you own. You can imagine a kid at home with their little stuffed animal but that stuffed animal is the lead character in their show. We're excited about that. Creating a more connected environment, not only across the community but across the relationship between the user and the content.
Moving on to Inder, we've talked about gaming and storytelling. Let's talk about music. Is anyone a musician here or anyone who liked to be a musician? There are few of you and this applies to other arts as well but combining Web3 and AI as well, what's the world of musicians or artists in the future going to look like?
It's largely the democratization of creativity that is what we're seeing. It's been interesting for artists up until this point. You can spend a lot of time making music but to then make a music video is out of your reach unless you have a label deal or some capital financing in some other way. What AI does is unlocks this opportunity for artists to think about their art more than just music.
They can potentially invest in video content and storytelling experiences and take it to a level where they can create these rich experiences much more effectively and quicker than was ever possible before because technology is democratizing that process so much. I'm excited for music to converge with film, gaming and AI being one of the key pillars that unlocks that.
Underneath this, Web3 is going to unlock the next business model for how the music industry operates. One where artists, fans, developers and platforms have a much more balanced relationship around how value is created. The combination of Web3 and AI is interesting. Web3 for me is a large portion of the business model changing and the dynamics of how everyone works together and AI is going to democratize creativity. It will unlock this next format of expression that we're all so excited about when we think about the metaverse as a broader concept.
Do you think we're going to get to a place where your audience is also your stakeholder in your music?
Yeah. We've done many things like this in the past with deadmau5. We launched a music video contest with his fans where 7,000 fans created content in the Unreal engine. We then spliced it together to form his music video. You can watch it. It's called When The Summer Dies on YouTube. It has over 1.5 million views and was made 100% by deadmau5’s fan base. You can imagine where the future of this goes. Artist-fan collaboration and co-creation are going to be interesting ways for artists to collaborate. It's already happening but this will speed that process up and unlock new business models and new ways for artists to distribute their content.
How many people have created NFTs or NFT collections? There are a lot of creators here. We're about halfway through. What I'm going to do is a speed round. I wrote a number of questions. We're going to get quick answers. Hopefully, things you can write down are either ideas you have or that can turn you onto new stuff or stuff you haven't tried yet but we'll start with a question. I want to take a week off, play with all the different AI tools out there and learn what's great. Does anyone have a favorite AI tool that you're excited about that's here or coming? Marcie?
My AI tool is going to be a very quick one but I want to jump off of what Inder said. I've been in the entertainment industry for many years. I've worked on every major feature film from Avatar to Life of Pi to working at Paramount Pictures to building this content. Also, watching artists who are building these beautiful visual effects get gated by these companies. Musicians and composers are constantly gated because these studios and the agencies all own this.
What Web3 gives us is truly peer-to-peer. Especially for music, it's amazing to be able to write a piece of music, throw it out to the world, have the world take it and digest it the way that they want to digest it and then be able to throw it back out. It's a reiteration process and a feedback process. What I think especially in the future of storytelling as well is that people who have been gated for 50 years of filmmaking are no longer gated.
Artists who have been creating this art have never gotten to own their masters. That is the single most important thing that needs to happen for more creativity to be unleashed. I'm a lover of research and I love to throw things into ChatGPT and see how it comes out. I then change it around a little bit. I'm not an artist so I'm not doing a lot of that but I like writing scripts. Maybe in ChatGPT, what does that look like? I like doing lots of research. For me ChatGPT is it.
How about you Steven?
ChatGPT is probably the front-runner. Midjourney v5 is novel in terms of its visual library. RunwayML is interesting in being able to convert imagery and apply those types of models. What I'm most excited about regarding all of those is that you can have the ability to build your models from your intellectual property. The big issue is that anything that you generate from artificial intelligence co-piloted or not is not copyrightable.
You end up in a situation where yes, you co-piloted. It helped you quickly iterate but you can't grow a business on that. However, you can grow a business by taking your intellectual property-building models specifically to that. You can imagine what a Disney Star Wars AI model would be for the community to come in and co-create experiences in the rails that they've established, which is exciting.
Inder?
There are quite a few but Altered State Machine is an interesting platform that is part of the Futureverse. It's an AI agent and you should check it out in a bit more detail. The idea is you can start to control these virtual characters and integrate a whole bunch of different AI mechanics into games and it's all on the chain.
It unlocks an interesting way to think about owning virtual individuals or AI agents and how they potentially can function within different game walls. It's a very new design space but check out Altered State Machine and how that's being used within the Futureverse ecosystem. It's probably the most cutting-edge application of AI in gaming that I've seen.
Here’s another question and I'm sure everyone has opinions on this as well. What mistake from 2022 can we learn from to ensure a great future for builders, creators and communities?
There are so many ways to answer the question but one thing that I'm obsessed with is language. We're thinking about how we use language more effectively to communicate what we're building. For a period, everyone got too obsessed with technology and buzzwords. There's a bridging experience to bring people from the old world to the new world. It is not so simple in terms of user interface or language. There are a number of factors that are going to be needed to take into account.
However, language is an interesting one. It’s how we communicate what the product is and what it does versus communicating its function and features. Getting absorbed in the tech has been one thing that a lot of people are coming back to and reassessing their use of language because ultimately, that's our most primal way of communicating before we add all the layers of complexity.
With the words metaverse and NFTs, I feel like the media took those words and then went crazy with them. Do we need new words for those?
When I left Technicolor after opening the Technicolor Experience Center working with HMD companies and trying to change workflows in the entertainment industry into game engine workflows, I left and went to a startup. I then decided to come back and everybody kept saying, “Why aren't you getting into this metaverse thing? This is right up your alley. You know how to do it.” I'm like, “I don't even know why we're calling it a metaverse. There are going to be multiple metaverses and multiple different extensions.”
What people underestimate is community. I do and have ideas together. The big mistake is we coined a phrase that I don't know is the right phrase. I call them verses honestly. It’s those little virtual places to go. I also think that you do need technology. We have to remember that technology isn't all there yet. The idea behind getting massive amounts of people in places is not going to be through an HMD. It's going to be through a computer and mobile. Most of the world is not going to be able to afford that stuff. You have to tap into the markets and the people whom you want to speak one-on-one with.
Steven, what about you?
From a mistaken perspective, if the community is paramount, then you cannot think of digital collectibles to use that word. NFTs are a very technical term. You have to think about these products not as consumer products. They're the first gateway into building your community and how you are ultimately thinking about your consumer's experience and ecosystem. A lot of companies have come into the space and I applaud them for being courageous enough to enter it, especially with the way that the press talks about our market in general from blockchain to crypto but they see the potential in what it does in the network effects of being able to build a community. The lesson ultimately there is that you should be looking at it as the first entryway into an ecosystem, not a consumer product.
I don’t know if you answered the question about mistakes you can learn from.
You got to start with the low-hanging fruit. What is that? That is community. If you look at people who have the same likes or the same ideas and who want to achieve the same things and you put them all together, then that's what changes things. That's what the biggest mistake was in 2022. There was no low-hanging fruit that anybody went after.
There are so many things to learn from 2022 but I'm going to bite my tongue on some of them. Let me ask you this question. What are the plans for the SHIB Metaverse? Is there anything you can share?
Our metaverse is very different from most metaverses. Our community is unbelievable. I had no idea what I was walking into. I didn't even know I was a SHIB holder. My son had bought it using my husband's Robinhood Wallet when the whole thing went down a couple of years ago. I wasn't paying attention to any of that. When I walked into this, I had to catch up and learn. It was a learning curve for me.
What is it? SHIB The Metaverse is eleven hubs all named after different parts of the community or things that we care about. We premiered the first alpha version at South By. It is photorealism. It’s photorealistic in the Unreal. We want to from the onset open our lands and get the people on the lands. One of the things about making sure you're building the right product is also going back to the community.
I'm not the creative director. The community is a creative director. We ask the community. We iterate. We go back and forth. “Is this what you want? Do you like this?” That's a very different way than the way other things are built. They build in black boxes and don't ask questions. That's why ours is a little different.
The magic of Web3 is that the community is not fans. They're integrated and equivalent. Let me ask you, Steven, for advice for people here who are building. How can someone broker relationships with big companies like Epic and the relationships you've made? How can someone build those relationships?
The beauty of having assets on the chain is that the decentralization of those assets allow for brand and companies to come in and license those things. At FEATURE, we’re sharing, not shilling. We've built the world's first licensing marketplace. It's fully Web3 native. If you have an asset at Bored Ape, World of Women or anything that had rights enabled in their actual contracts, you're able to list those items on our platform and have companies and brands come in and acquire those rights.
Coinbase licensed our product and we did the Degen Trilogy with Bored Ape Yacht Club where those characters were cast into a multimillion-dollar production. Those people got paid on the chain. That was the first expression of how a digital asset that was owned by a community member could find a way into those big brands and names and ultimately, provide value to them.
Inder, how do you partner with big public figures without them worrying about their reputation? How do you make them feel safe?
We've partnered with deadmau5 and Richie Hawtin, two of our cofounders but most musicians that we work with are visionary artists in their own rights. When you show them the potential of a new canvas, this new medium to express themselves, to connect with their fans in this way, most artists are excited about it.
They're looking for new ways to express themselves. What we're building at PIXELYNX is an example and we've gone live with our mobile app in the App Store. You can check that out. It's a good example of a new canvas where we're giving artists this place to share their content. Many artists are excited to test out and explore what this new world is about.
We got 30 seconds left of the speed round of questions. Making uncomfortable predictions of the future, years from now, we're at Outer Edge LA, which has rebranded itself nine more times into a new title, what are we talking about and is William Shatner still speaking here? Marcie?
We're streaming into different worlds and verses all over. It's not only sitting in real life. You can be anywhere you are in the world. As far as Shatner goes, I imagine he's volumetrically captured talking and talking about what the future is ten years from then.
Steven?
I agree with the digital doubles and virtual avatars. Shatner would be here in some holographic projection as Sony's already showing the capabilities of what their holographic displays look like.
Inder?
We probably won't be talking. We'll be communicating through some neural feedback and the conversation will be, “Are we living in a simulation?”
Thank you all for being here. Thank you for reading. We'll see you in the next years.
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We've reached the outer limit. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. Go to iTunes, rate us and say something cool. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole.
Important Links
- Neil Strauss
- Instagram – Neil Strauss
- PIXELYNX
- FEATURE
- Technicolor
- When The Summer Dies – YouTube
- ChatGPT
- Midjourney
- RunwayML
- Altered State Machine
- Futureverse
- Bored Ape
- World of Women
- iTunes – Edge of NFT Podcast
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