Yeah, no, what happened there i i got invited to a book launch in a in a met not one of my books i'm sad to say but somebody else's book um in in a virtual world and and it was fun i mean you know i was chatting to people i haven't seen for a long time and we were all you know virtually walking around and you know in the metaverse we were all a lot slimmer for one thing and the hair was a little darker and it was infinitely preferable in every respect to do it until i wanted to buy the book and then i had to come out of the metaverse and you know use credit cards and other such antiquated mechanisms to buy and i just thought this can't be right you know i think we have to look at other ideas there and that led me to talk to a few people about developments that are going in that direction that took me towards digital assets and web3 essentially transactions that can be resolved inside the metaverse that you don't have to drop out and access banking networks for that kind of thing and then that made me realize that the digital wallets were a core to this. I know a little bit about them, but Victoria Richardson knows a lot more. So I asked, it's one of those typical things where you think you know roughly about something, and then when you ask somebody who actually knows about it, you realize, oh my God, I know next to nothing about this, which is how come i was able to convince her to write the book with me the reason for the timing is this i was doing some actually for insurance company which i regard as you know the most conservative institutions but if you're trying to think strategically you're thinking in five years time there's a cohort of people who are going to be buying their first car insurance, their first renter's insurance, their first travel insurance, their first health. You know, how do I get those people? Where are those people now? Well, we think of young people as being, oh, they're all messing around on YouTube, or, you know, they're doing the TikTok throw yourself off a building challenge or whatever it is this week. But actually, if you look at the figures for attention span where the attention is going is fortnite minecraft roblox it's those proto metaverses i'll come back to say why i say proto in a moment it's those proto metaverses where they where they go with their threat or they we think of them as games but they're not really games they're they're social spaces that have you know which have control and rules and and that's where they go to interact with their friends that's where they go to learn about things you know so you can sort of see the next phase of commerce i saw mark zuckerberg was talking this week saying that he he was uh he was looking to get rid of smartphones. He was going to use the sort of smart glasses as the first step, you know, and eventually it'll be smart contact lenses. And then I assume it'll be Elon Musk-style chips in our head and this sort of thing. But there's something to that. The idea that the next generation are already comfortable in these more immersive places. So now to get back and actually answer the question what's a metaverse well a metaverse is like a virtual world but the property rights in it are real so in other words when i'm messing around in you know some game and i buy a giant magic sword to you know like or i buy a hat in fortnight or something whatever it feels like it's mine but it isn't really it belongs to the platform i'm i you know they could delete it at a moment's notice or they could make 10 they could do what they like with it the financial times original definition of the meta which i think holds up very well says okay it's like virtual worlds except the identities and the assets are real they're yours they're not the platforms you can take them from one place to another and i think that holds up pretty well if you look at what apple are doing with their glasses for example it's very clear that you're not talking about a metaverse you're talking about lots of metaverses that you'll go into to do different things and the ability to move things between them becomes really rather interesting. And I don't know what kids are going to do with that and what people are building in their basements right now. But, you know, I can see that's where things were going.