Second Life's Philip Rosedale: "Metaverse millionaires"

The Times Tech Podcast

Will Morley

Business, Unknown, Technology

4.9 • 654 Ratings

🗓️ 22 April 2022

⏱️ 49 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Sunday Times’ tech correspondent Danny Fortson brings on Philip Rosedale, founder of Second Life, to talk about why he has returned as an advisor and investing the virtual world years after having left (4:30), how many people are on Second Life today (10:05), the $650m Second Life economy (12:05), digital goods millionaires (14:20), the dangers of an ad-driven model (16:40), how you govern a metaverse with 1 billion people (24:40), moderating (28:30), the future of the metaverse (36:00), whether Mark Zuckerberg can pull it off (40:40), and the concept of race in virtual worlds (43:30).

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Yeah. Technology. What is it all about? In the real world, we know where the ads are. They're in squares, right? Windows, billboards. They're on magazines, right? But we know those squares are advertisements. Even when we browse the web, right? We pretty much know where the ads are. Imagine a metaverse environment where you're walking around fully, you know, embedded
0:23.0	in 3D, but you don't know where the ads are. Think how good AIs are going to get at modifying
0:30.9	the room you're in to sell you something in a way that you don't notice.
0:52.3	Hello and welcome to Danny in the Valley, your weekly dispatch from behind the scenes and inside the minds of the top people in tech.
0:54.9	I'm your host, Danny Fortin, coming to you all the way from sunny slash rainy, Oakland.
1:02.0	And this week we have one of my new favorites back on the program.
1:06.1	Philip Rosedale is here.
1:07.7	Now, Philip was first on the show back in September, and if you don't recall,
1:11.7	he is the founder of Lyndon Lab, the creator of Second Life, the OG Metaverse, before the
1:19.1	Metaverse. This virtual world has been going on for more than 20 years. And I had him on because,
1:24.3	of course, Mark Zuckerberg had made a big to-do about his plans to build the
1:27.7	metaverse it was the next iteration of the web we were all going to live life online via
1:32.6	avatars et cetera et cetera and philip of course had been doing this longer than pretty much anyone
1:39.0	because as i said second life goes back to 1999 and it still has today a million people using it.
1:46.3	Very, very dedicated kind of core community of people on it.
1:50.3	Now, he left the board in 2013.
1:52.3	He started high fidelity, which is a spatial audio startup.
1:55.7	And he's just very thoughtful with his views on this whole Metaverse concept. And these reviews are really hard
2:03.1	won through years and years of creating and overseeing Second Life, watching it grow,
2:08.8	watching it, you know, the stumbling blocks it hit, what worked, what didn't, et cetera.
2:13.4	A couple things have happened since we had Philip on in September.
2:17.7	One is this year he returned to Second Life.
	...

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