330. Unlocking the Future with XR: A Dive into the Digital Realm with Alan Smithson

Alan Smithson:
Whenever you're feeling angry, upset, whatever, just think about what are you grateful for, because it's impossible to be grateful and hateful at the same time.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Hello and welcome to The Daily Helping with Dr. Richard Shuster, food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, tools to win at life. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. Whoever you are, wherever you're from, and whatever you do, this is the show that is going to help you become the best version of yourself. Each episode you will hear from some of the most amazing, talented, and successful people on the planet who followed their passions and strived to help others. Join our movement to get a million people each day to commit acts of kindness for others. Together, we're going to make the world a better place. Are you ready? Because it's time for your Daily Helping.

Thanks for tuning in to this episode of The Daily Helping Podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Richard. And I am so excited about today's guest, Alan Smithson. He is the co-founder of MetaVRse, Inc. And his life purpose is to inspire and educate people to think and act in a socially, economically, and environmentally responsible way.

Alan makes tools for professionals, including MetaVRse, a creation platform for the future of human communication, collaboration, commerce, and culture, which was featured in Forbes; TheMall, a 100 million square feet virtual retail and entertainment destination built on the MetaVRse Engine, featured in VentureBeat. He's an investor and partner in Your Director AI, Automatic Face Tracking Video Switcher. Man, this guy doesn't know tech at all, right? He's been named one of the Most Prominent Digital Futurists To Watch Out For in 2022, a Top Retail Influencer in '23. He's a proud father, business leader, TEDx speaker, podcast host. He co-invented the world's first touchscreen DJ system. He's done it all.

And his family, not to be outdone, his ten year old daughter, Abby, invented sandals that leave a heart shaped tan line on you called the Love Sandal. She's been featured in Inc. and won the Top 20 Under 20 at the age of ten. And, of course, not to be outdone, his wife and co-founder, Julie, also runs XR Women, the world's largest XR industry meetup for women.

Okay. This is going to be a fun one, Alan. Welcome to The Daily Helping. The tech geek inside of me is just buzzing right now. This is going to be great.

Alan Smithson:
Thank you so much, Dr. Richard, for having me. I am thrilled to be here. It's an honor and it's just super exciting, you know, getting to have a front row seat to the future of how we're going to build all of this technology and make sure that we do it in a way that doesn't kill us all.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I think that's what's so exciting because, you know, there's an article that comes out every other day referencing the Terminator franchise about how what we're building is going to blow us all up and enslave us. So, I'm glad that there is somebody on the forefront of this with ethics in mind in building things that actually help people.

And why I'm also grateful you're here because we've never done this kind of an episode. There's so much in the media right now about ChatGPT and the MetaVRse and some of these big companies like Meta, how many billions of dollars - I think they spent, like, $10 or 20 billion trying to build things out.

Alan Smithson:
It seems like a very, very small investment to build the next communication paradigm for humanity.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Is that wild, right? But these buzzwords are everywhere, AI, learning language models, metaverse, so, Alan, I'd love for you - well, you know what? I'm going to pause that. I would be remiss if I didn't do this first. So, one of the things that I always do, I do with everybody, is I want to hear your superhero origin story. So, how did you get put on this path? And then, I want to do metaverse, AI 101.

Alan Smithson:
I'll go way back to the beginning. I have a degree in molecular biology. But at school, I learned how to DJ. I happen to live with a couple of DJs in my second year of university and they taught me how to DJ. So, when I graduated, I got a job as a pharmaceutical rep, and I did that, but I was DJ-ing on nights and weekends just for fun. And I left that job and then I went on to build another company. We've had 11 companies over the course of the last 25 years.

But one of the companies that just kept doing really well was our DJ business, and I was making more money on the weekends. And so, we just like, "Okay. Let's just do that." And my kids were born and I wanted to spend more time with them, so I ended up DJ-ing for, like, 20 years while my kids grew up. So, it was kind of awesome because they would go to bed and I'd go to work. And so, in the morning, I'd get up and spend time with them and they didn't really know I was missing. So, it was kind of the perfect job for that.

And then, in 2010, I saw this technology that blew my mind. It was a giant see through DJ board. You can Google it, Emulator DJ. Anyway, I ended up acquiring 51 percent of the company and partnering with the guy who made the software. And we ended up building the world's first multi-touch application for the music industry, partnered with Microsoft, partnered with Google. We did all these amazing events around the world. You know, we had artists playing on it, like Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park, Armin van Buuren, we worked with Steve Aoki - I was in one of his music videos, so it was super cool - Infected Mushroom, all these really cool artists using our hardware and software around the world.

And I got invited to Curiosity Camp put on by Eric Schmidt, and it's this camp in the middle of nowhere. Literally, you show up and there's a Boy Scout leader there and he's got a sash and the little scarf. And then, he hands you a tin cup and they fill it with champagne. So, it's like the ultimate glamping experience. But it's investors and entrepreneurs and researchers all coming together to talk about the future. And I got to perform there. I played on my Emulator DJ System.

And then, afterwards I went into this tiny, dimly lit tent, and a friend of mine, we sat there and they were doing demos of this thing. You couldn't really see. It looked like somebody was wearing headphones and they were pointing the other direction. My buddy goes in and he does the demo. And he comes out of it and he looks at me, he's like, "Oh, my God. I've just seen the future." So, that kind of set me up for my excitement.

I went in there, put on this clunky VR headset, it was the Oculus DK1 - it was the very first one - big, huge box glued to my head and big huge headphones. And then, they put me in an audience watching a concert by Beck and he's playing in front of me. And then, I looked up and I could see the ceiling. And then, somebody touched my shoulder and turned me around and I could see behind me. I could see full 360 degrees. I could see the people sitting next to me. I could see the artists. I could see everything like I was there.

And then, they hit a button and put me on stage next to Beck, like standing on stage. Holy crap, I was like, "Okay. Well, I can't do this." I've been a DJ my whole life. I've been on stages and very, very, very few people stand on stage. They just won't let you because it looks dumb having a bunch of people on stage. So, being able to be on stage with an artist in a pair of glasses, I had this aha moment that this was going to be the future of human communication.

And shortly thereafter we sold the company and we started what became MetaVRse. We started a company called Shok Kreative, and then that became MetaVRse. And MetaVRse, we changed the name in 2016, so if you think about it, everybody's just kind of catching on to the term MetaVRse now. We named our company that in 2016 and we started building virtual augmented mixed reality solutions for businesses around the world from everything, from Samsung to Mastercard to Microsoft. And we built all sorts of projects, almost 200 projects now.

And then, we acquired a technology, we merged a technology company with us back in 2019, and that became our MetaVRse Engine, our platform. And then, since then, we've built almost 100 projects for different businesses on the platform. And just recently we're super excited to launch a public beta of the platform so that anybody can start building. And we set the mission for that company to be MetaVRse creation for everyone.

And that's kind of how we got in this long arc of this. But in between there, I had an interesting moment. My daughter, when she was ten years old, invented sandals that leave a heart shaped tan line on the top of your feet. You mentioned that in the bio, but it was super cool because everybody rallied around this ten year old kid. We had UPS help her out and sponsored her. The president of Aldo was coaching her. She built these shoes. She sold 3,000 pairs of shoes. It was an incredible experience.

And I realized that kids, even at a young age, could be taught things like marketing, gratitude, positivity, deep breathing. Because it's stressful having a business. Even if you're ten years old and everybody's supporting you, there's a lot of work to be done. There's early hours. She went to the shoe show in Vegas.

So, all of these things together, I realized that we, as a society globally, we teach people math, science, geometry, geography. But we don't really teach the soft skills that are going to be required in an age of exponential growth of everything due to AI, robotics ,and technology. So, that is really kind of what pivoted my mind to think how can we build a new education system that reinforced the basic success principles of humanity and deliver that through technology, and how do we use the technologies that we're building for brands to sell more things, to make people more successful, and give people a better opportunity in life anywhere in the world.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I'm loving this. I do want to ask, it's been on the tip of my tongue since you started talking about DJ-ing. You had to have a cool DJ name, right? What was your DJ name?

Alan Smithson:
My DJ name was Pseudosonic. It means fake sound. And so, the problem was I used it for years and everybody spelled it wrong, every single person. So, I kind of got rid of it and just put my name.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
That's funny. I knew there was a name though. There always has to be.

Alan Smithson:
We also had Sofa Kings because we were sofa king awesome.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Oh, that's sweet. That's fucking awesome. I'm not sure if that just triggered the explicit language checkbox or not for this episode, but --

Alan Smithson:
We'll find out.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
We will find out. In all seriousness, let's jump back now. MetaVRse, if somebody has heard the term, if somebody doesn't really know what this means, what are we talking about? What is the MetaVRse?

Alan Smithson:
I think the easiest way to do it, I'll just share an image for anybody who's watching this, but for people listening, the MetaVRse, to me, I look at it from a technology lens. We have the Internet. The Internet's got videos. The Internet's got images. It has text. But you typically couldn't own an asset on the Internet until recently, until blockchain came along.

So, it's the Internet plus 3D, so being able to visualize in 3D. Instead of just scrolling a website or watching a video passively, you're now going to be an active participant in that. So, you're going to be able to walk into a website, whether it's using a game controller on your computer or your phone or even a pair of VR glasses. But you'll be able to go in, wander around, and you'll have autonomy to move around in a website. So, that's the 3D XR component of it.

Then, you have AI, you've got generative AI, natural language processing, all of these different technologies that allow you to interact with the computer in a natural way. And I think AI is really just kind of scratching the surface. You know, ChatGPT, to me, was the tipping point. So, November 30, 2022, to me, was that AI tipping point where this technology starts a revolution. And I think we're well into that and we're seeing billions of dollars being invested in this.

In fact, some friends of ours in WordAi, they do conversational AI for game avatars. So, you can be in a game and talk to a non-player character, an NPC, and have a conversation with it and it'll answer you, and you can give it backstories and you can give it personalities and stuff like that. They just raised $100 million and they are the largest funded gaming and AI company in the world right now. So, that was super cool. That just happened yesterday.

And then, the last part of the trilogy is really blockchain and being able to have digital ownership of places in the web, so maybe a digital land, but also objects. If you create a 3D object and you want to trade it to somebody or you buy it, let's say you buy it on a platform and you want to trade it, you should be able to own those things as, let's say, NFTs or Non-Fungible Tokens. But the idea of ownership of the digital landscape, and this encompasses Web3, NFTs, DAOs or Distributed Autonomous Organizations, but then you kind of have this trilogy of XR, AI, and blockchain, plus the Internet makes up the MetaVRse.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
So, it's got obviously a lot of components, components that are very dynamic that are changing at a rapid pace. So, now what? So, let's talk about if somebody listening to this are saying, "Great. What can I do on the MetaVRse?" So, let's go there.

Alan Smithson:
I would say the easiest way to kind of think about it is, if you've ever played a video game like Fortnite or Roblox where you're not only able to go in there, but you can impact the world around you. So, you're going in with friends. First of all, you're creating an avatar, and the avatar could be Spider-Man or it could be looking like yourself, it doesn't matter. For more business applications, you'll probably want to look like yourself and you'll tweak yourself to make you look a little taller maybe.

But you'll meet up in these virtual spaces with friends and colleagues and get work done. And what this does is it gives you a more immersive sense of space. And especially in VR, you can stand next to people and give them high fives and this sort of thing. But even on a desktop, being able to walk around a space and navigate it yourself, it really ingrains in your brain the ability to keep track of time and space. And people learn. It's been proven, people learn a lot faster using three dimensional or spatial computing than traditional videos and audio and text.

And so, what we're doing with one of our clients, a medical device company, is we're training their teams on these devices. So, the medical devices are quite complicated, and repairing them requires a giant, thick PDF manual and a two week long course. And so, what we've been able to do is turn that into 3D and really give these learners the ability to learn by doing by actually touching these things, and I think it's super cool.

And for the people watching, I'm going to show a quick demo. I'm basically showing a three dimensional view of an ultrasound machine that I can zoom in, zoom out, I can look at any angle, I can understand this. And then, I'm going to click the overview button, and what you're seeing now is the ability to teach people about parts of this.

Let's say, I want to teach somebody about the convex array. It zooms me into the convex array and says, Hardware Overview Convex Array, abdominal transducers are curvilinear in footprint shape and in order to conform to the shape of the abdomen. Great. Okay. So, you learned a little bit about that. You can also get really deep and look at every single piece of this thing in fully exploded view right down to the screws, nuts, and bolts. And so, now you can teach somebody how to repair, replace, and use this complex piece of machinery without having to see it in-person before. So, you can really reduce training times, increase training outcomes. So, I think training and learning is probably the number one use case for this technology right now.

And, also, people are looking at the industrial metaverse. What if we make a digital twin of a factory? I have a factory. I make a digital twin, meaning I just make a digital copy of it. However I do that, I put it into a virtual world and now I can walk around the virtual warehouse. So, instead of walking around the real factory, which may take me six hours to get from end to end, some of these factories are massive, I can now teleport to the places I need to see, see a report of what's going on in real time. I can connect the data from the factory back to the digital twin.

And so, what you're seeing is, not only can you do that once a factory is built and operational, but you can do it to build the factory. So, you can actually test, if we put these 16 robots together and they're all moving around, do they hit each other? Do we need to move them one inch out? And so, you can run these really complex tests way before you've even built something. And this is decreasing times to development times to building by 50, 60, 70 percent.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
This is nuts because after COVID, we had this work from home revolution. Like the question was, Why do we go into the office? And the argument has been, because you're still getting the interpersonal contact, people synergize better when they're in a room together. We know this. But this is different, this is being in that room with your coworkers while wearing a headset or even just looking at it.

Alan Smithson:
Or not or using a phone.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Or not.

Alan Smithson:
So, imagine like a giant Roblox game where everybody can participate. You can work on something together. Maybe you're a shoe designer and you want to design a shoe together. Shoes are really a problem because you design them by yourself and you ship or you send the file to China or Asia to be made. They make a sample, they ship it back. This is like a three week process. And then, you realize, "Oh. That didn't look the way I want it to look. I got to do it again." So, they make a change, send it back, and this happens ten times to make every shoe. So, if you can do it real time where you're both interacting with the same virtual shoe and you can say, "Well, no, that's not going to work the way you want it to do. You can do this."

So, they're doing it with cars. They designed a helicopter at Bell Labs - Bell helicopters designed a helicopter in, I think, it was something like six months, where it normally takes three years to design a new helicopter, because they were using VR. It's bonkers how quickly we can get things done.

And now in an age of AI to everything, text to everything, text to video, text to audio, text to text, soon text to 3D image, we'll be able to really just dictate to say, "I want a room that is four meters by four meters by six meters high. I need it to be all white and look like a surgical suite. And I need ten of the most common surgical equipment pieces in there." And, boom, it'll populate it. And I can move it around and I can set it up however I want.

So, I think we're coming into an era where everybody will be a creator, whether you're the trainer of a medical device company or the designer of a shoe company, everybody will be a creator in the MetaVRse, and that's the whole point.

And this is why companies like Canva have done so well in the early days of kind of the creator economy. You know, you look at Photoshop, Photoshop was for professionals, and you could use it, you could do some stuff. But to to really unleash the power of Photoshop, you had to learn it and it took a lot of time. Canva came along and said, "Well, you can still get that. Just use this template over here that we built." And so, you grab the template and you're like, "Oh. All the things I need are there." Just change the wording, change the image, and boom, I got a poster or I got a marketing piece, or whatever.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I could see this expanding far beyond, far beyond the business space. And one of the conversations that a lot of people have been having with ChatGPT in particular, because for thousands of years, what was the greatest currency in humanity? It was knowledge. And people got paid. People were put on pedestals depending on what degree of knowledge they had. Are you a doctor or are you a lawyer? You have more knowledge. You went to school for all these years --

Alan Smithson:
Knowledge asymmetry has been a great win for those who were on the winning side of it. Interesting point about that, Dr. Richard, I was listening to a podcast with Joe Rogan and Marc Andreessen. And Marc Andreessen is founder of a16z, a venture capital company. Very successful, the most successful VC capital company in the world. And some of the things he was saying, I was realizing, "Oh, my god. I already read that." I already knew about almost everything he said. And here's a guy with asymmetric knowledge base. He has a front row seat to all the best tech in the world. And yet, because of our global reach and news cycles and how fast and quickly things and how distributed knowledge is, I already knew what he knew and what he shared. And maybe there's other things that he didn't share, obviously.

But I think this is a really interesting point of humanity. If we can tear down the barriers of sex, race, and geography, we can build a planet full of really successful people, which brings up everybody.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
And that's what I wanted to ask you about, because as you were at the forefront of this technology, I wanted to ask you what you saw as the new educational paradigm, what it's going to look like in implementation.

Alan Smithson:
I think one of the things that is really something that - it's hard to wrap your head around, because what is the most important skill in an era of exponential growth and AI? And to quote Noah Yuval Harari, the ability to keep changing, no single skill is safe. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges of our time is that we assume that robotics and AI would replace blue collar workers. It turns out it's the opposite. It actually replaces white collar workers and does so by a factor of a thousand X.

So, if I'm a brand and I need to generate photographs for my catalog, I can do so now with generative AI a thousand times cheaper than humans. Now, I still need humans to prompt and do the work, but a thousand times faster. If I want to write text, I can do so a thousand times faster with ChatGPT. I can type in write me a 5,000 word essay on X giving the following profiles and here's some articles to cite in it, and it will write it all for me.

So, I think we're in an era of exponential growth of data, of knowledge, of creativity, but white collar work is going to be disrupted the most. And this is where we have focused most of our growth. So, in a world of exponential growth of everything, it's really going to come down to your ability to retrain quickly and also keep your head on your shoulders, and things like practicing gratitude on a regular basis, positivity, mindfulness, surrounding yourself with great people, but also physical activity, exercise, also being able to market yourself, being able to come up with new ideas, being able to execute on those ideas, being able to understand entrepreneurship and where you fit in that. Not everybody's going to be an entrepreneur. It takes a really strong stomach to go in and do that and 95 percent of all businesses failed.

But what if there was a safety net there that let you do that? Or what if there was a network that could help you be more successful? So, I really think a new education system needs to be kind of thought out and invented. We've been working on something in the background for many years to try to pull some of the technology that we're building around the world to serve this. But I think teaching resiliency and perseverance above all else is going to be the key we need.

And teaching people how to learn things quickly, whether that's through watching a YouTube video - you can learn pretty much anything on a YouTube video - finding those things may be tricky and finding what you're good at and finding what you love. We use algorithms to show you better shows to watch. And we use algorithms to show you better products to buy. We're not using those algorithms to show you what things that you should learn that really will enhance you and your passions.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
But you're working on it.

Alan Smithson:
Yeah.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
That's so awesome.

Alan Smithson:
Of course. Somebody's got to do it. I'm like, why isn't this a thing?

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Somebody has to do it. So, let me ask you this, because this feels like there's a Game of Thrones element to this, where you've got your thing, Meta is doing theirs, Apple just made a big to do about their new headset that's coming to market which is their own kind of virtual world. So, is there a place where all of these different companies can come together? Is it like the Wild West and everybody's just trying to kill everybody right now?

Alan Smithson:
Not only is it the Wild West, the good thing is nobody's trying to kill each other now, it's too early for that. Everybody's supportive. And in the virtual augmented mixed reality, XR, 3D world, gaming world, the gaming is a little bit more cutthroat. There's a lot of money there. But XR world, when we go to conferences, it's like going to a family reunion. It really is. We've been all working on this for nearly a decade. Nobody's given up. Everybody's just head down working on their thing. And then, they come to the conference and everybody's hugs and love.

But what you will see is we don't have a standard for 3D. So, if I take a photo, I take an image of us, and maybe I send it to you as an SVG or maybe a PNG, but I can send you a photo and you can get it and you can open it. It looks exactly how I send it, right? So, we don't have this for 3D yet. We've got so many different ways to send a 3D object. We've got OBJ, FBX, DAE, COLLADA files, BIM models, the list goes on and on, USDZ, glTF. So, we haven't come to a standard yet.

So, there's a group called the Metaverse Standards Forum. It's about 3,000 companies have come together and we're really trying to work out what are those standards look like, what does it look like interoperability. If I am in Fortnite and I want to transfer a file over to Roblox, can I do that? What does that look like? And those are both run on an app, so what does it look like when we have some people accessing the MetaVRse through an app, others accessing it through the web? And how do we interchange that and how do we make the web an open standard for people to work on?

Our MetaVRse Engine is completely web based. And that's why we built it that way, because the web, to us, is the ultimate unifier. If you're on the web, it can work on Azure servers, it can work on AWS servers, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter what your cloud infrastructure is. You can also access it from any device, whether you're on a smartphone, iOS, Android, you're on a tablet, you're on a Windows or Mac, it doesn't matter. And so, the web, to us, is kind of the ultimate unifier.

Now, everybody's doing their own thing, but our system, our MetaVRse Engine is compatible with WebXR, which is becoming a standard. Even Apple said they're going to support it on the Vision Pro. Oculus already supports it. So, I think you're going to see a lot more of these ways to figure out how to make things on the web because the web is an ultimate unifier.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Alan, we're at time. This has been an amazing, amazing and illuminating discussion. I knew that it would be. As you know, I ask everybody who comes on my show just one question, that is, what is your biggest helping? That one most important piece of advice that you would give somebody after they heard our conversation today.

Alan Smithson:
Sure. This advice was given to me by a mentor of mine, a gentleman who I've known for quite some time, Don. On top of practicing daily gratitude, which is essential for every human, you have to do that. Just whenever you're feeling angry, upset, whatever, just think about what are you grateful for, because it's impossible to be grateful and hateful at the same time.

But the advice that Don gave me was very simple and it stuck with me, don't criticize, condemn, or complain. Don't criticize, condemn, or complain. And if you really work towards that - of course, it's impossible to do it all the time because we're humans - if you actively do that and you work with your wife or your spouse or your friends to call you out when you do these things, when you complain, when you condemn somebody - don't criticize, condemn, or complain, I think, is the best advice I could give right now because it allows you to focus on you and the positives in your life, not the negatives. And that's where the real magic happens.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
I love that. Alan, tell us where people can learn more about you and what you're up to right now.

Alan Smithson: Thank you, Dr. Richard. You can follow me on LinkedIn at Alan, A-L-A-N, Smithson, S-M-I-T-H-S-O-N. You can also visit our website, metavrse.com, spelled M-E-T-A-V-R-S-E.com. And if you want to sign up for the world's largest virtual mall, it is simply themall.io. Thank you.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Oh, I love it. And we'll have everything Alan Smithson in the show notes at thedailyhelping.com. Well, Alan, I have loved our conversation. We have a lot of exciting things to look forward to in this space if we build it properly with ethics in mind, and I know you're doing that, so thank you for all that you do. And thank you so much for coming on The Daily Helping.

Alan Smithson:
Thank you, Dr. Richard. It's been such an honor.

Dr. Richard Shuster:
Thank you. And I also want to express my gratitude to each and every one of you who took time out of your day to listen to this conversation. If you liked it, if you felt good, if you learned something, go give us a follow on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five star review because that helps other people find this show. But most importantly, go out there today and do something nice for somebody else, even if you don't know who they are, and post it in your social media feeds using the hashtag #MyDailyHelping, because the happiest people are those that help others.