# The Metaverse & How It Will Change the World with Matthew Ball

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHc9_KTljxA
Duration: 1 hr 9 min
Language: English
Words: 12328
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/FHc9_KTljxA

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[0:00] but experientially we are talking about a parallel plane a virtual plane that we can all access at the same time individually and that's living that remembers what we've done [Music] what is up to you guys today I am so excited to share this conversation that I just had with Matthew ball amazing technology writer and author of my favorite new book The metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything Matthew is really the foremost thinker on the metaverse it's a buzzword that you've probably heard countless times over the course of really the last couple of years but he has completely taken the World by storm on this topic the

[0:48] conversation ranged from the theory the threads through time of where this all began and really into the Tactical investment landscape around it and how you can participate in this future that is rapidly being built it was mind-bending it completely blew my mind and I really feel like I owe Matt some money for coming on because of how much I learned so I am so excited to share this one with you and without further Ado please enjoy my conversation with Matthew ball competition for great talent is more brutal than ever almost every startup I know struggles to hire fast enough to keep up with demand to be able to hire

[1:28] better and faster you need a trusted source of pre-vetted candidates lemon.io is a place like that they have a network of Engineers from Europe and Latin America and every candidate has already been tested and interviewed by their team you'll ask me how it's different from hiring on your own you can have an engineer start working on your project within a week instead of within months you don't waste your time on candidates that aren't qualified you'll have easy access to Global Talent without having to go through dozens of job boards and finally it's more affordable than hiring local talent so if you need to expand your engineering team or just delegate some

[2:11] of your work use lemon.io you can also claim a special discount for where it happens podcast fans visit lemon.io room to receive a 15 discount for the first four weeks of work with a developer you won't regret it super super excited to have you on Matthew ball uh you know a complete legend in the in the writing uh in the technology world you know I first encountered your work basically while I was like sitting around by myself during covid and I think probably there were a lot of people who have a similar experience as I do which is um you know covet started suddenly there were a lot of changes in the world

[2:51] um probably uh underselling it in that regard and we were all looking for things to do and things to learn about and for me one of those things was trying to understand where technology was going there was this like massive shift in the technological ecosystem and you were one of the people that had this unique ability to distill all of this insane complexity that was happening happening in that ecosystem and deliver these amazing insights um and you know I dug into your work and started learning more about you and as it turned out that wasn't the beginning of your journey uh as a writer you had

[3:26] been doing it for many years prior um but I want to talk and maybe start before we get into all the specifics of your book and some of the things you're doing today with like your journey um because I think this you know this book is the culmination of a long journey for you and one that you've been on for for a while as a writer and also just as a person and developing your own patterns of thinking so maybe we can just start there like what is your um your map of reality uh Matt like how did you kind of form that map of reality where are you

[3:55] from what is your background and uh let's see where that takes us well first of all thank you for the really kind words it's it's such a treat and honor to be told that I'm great at distilling complex information because that is of course what you do on a day-to-day basis and so I'm hearing that from an expert thank you my background so I'm Canadian my OU's will give me away you're talking about spending time during the pandemic I've lived in the states for more than a decade most of my Canadian accent had subsided and then I spent most of 2020 in Canada and a lot of it has returned

[4:28] but so I grew up in Canada from a fairly liberal family my parents both worked in government my father was a speechwriter so we get a little bit of the sense around the genes for writing and my mother was a policy advisor and so they had always really instilled a love of learning reading was a very important part of my upbringing intellectual curiosity was key and my specific path to writing really reflected that I was working at Accenture as a corporate strategy consultant in their technology media and Telecommunications practice and I was learning a ton that's the incredible thing about management consulting but you usually don't have an opportunity to

[5:09] express it your Junior the partners lead the delivery even if you disagree on the thesis and so I started writing for myself really because there was no audience what I thought where I thought things were going and I slowly started to pick up I remember when slate picked up and wrote about one of my essays I remember when Reuters did I have the screen caps on my computer still because I was stunned and I've kept them ever since what year is that

[5:38] I think that was 2012. oh late 2011. okay because I was going back like I was on your site poking around at some of your earliest works and earliest essays I'm fascinated and we've talked about it on several episodes I talked about it with Tim Urban who you must know from wait but why like all of these people that I consider these uh Titans Now of um of really like of idea creation and like the intellectual Gauntlet as it were they all started with some like kind of janky version of whatever it is they're doing today and they were doing some like really simple version of it

[6:12] before becoming who they were and it's not dissimilar to like you know someone starting a small company and it was you know small for a really long time it takes 10 years to become an overnight success it's a short way of saying it um but you know your earliest pieces on your website I can find her like in 2015-ish time range and like already starting to talk about you can see when you read them the seeds of these ideas that have now grown and grown and grown over time so it doesn't surprise me when you say that you know you were starting to hammer these things out in 2012 and

[6:41] that people were starting to notice totally and whenever I'm asked about how I write or how long I write the answer is usually I get really inspired and obsessed with sharing something I'm either frustrated by The Narrative or feel like I have a different perspective to add and I write over a month and a half most of my essays but that's always a limited perspective because I've always found that my most successful essays are by far those that I've taken a second pass at usually a year year and a half later if you go through my website you'll see the tick in the talk every time my first big

[7:21] metaverse essay was the second time I took a crack at that thesis last year I wrote a nine part series the metaverse primer that was the backbone for this book and is you know I hope 20 times better and the result of a hundred times more writing and so I think that looking at the decade-long success in edification and learning process is key but also just remembering most of them were my second at bats the ones that really connect with the ball yeah ball pun intended I'm gonna have to make that punt over and over again unfortunately you're the baseball player yeah I'm holding a baseball too it's like my

[7:58] fidget toy um so when did you I mean when did you actually start to get obsessed with technology like we you mentioned you loved reading growing up you're intellectually curious were you a Sci-Fi lover or were you reading like business type books no sci-fi and fantasy for sure okay I remember going through the Dragon Ball phase in the early 90s but I owned a business or you know quote unquote owned I had a business in the early 2000s flipping blackberries on Craigslist huh I had a really good sense of what the value of these different devices were and it was weird at the time if you

[8:35] remember there were blackberries that had Wi-Fi but no GPS there were blackberries that had GPS but no Wi-fi then there were the zero zero zero models that had neither and it was also this weird point in time where we were still getting a 600 device for 99 and so when someone wanted to sell those devices second hand there was no real price Discovery people just said I paid 99 bucks for it and I can get 300 bucks on Craigslist I'll take it but I was sitting there saying no the market price for this is 600 bucks so I would just go around Toronto at the time

[9:10] buying up all of these devices and then flipping them usually to people who worked at a bank didn't care about the extra 50 bucks just wanted the device now and so that was helpful for you when you were doing that you know old enough that I wasn't letting my mother know that I was doing cash deals in a subway station which I chose because there were cameras above but I think I started doing that when I was 12 or 13. wow maybe I love these stories as a side note of like uh you know people I admire today like their childhood hustles like those little things that people do you know the like

[9:46] lemonade stands that a lot of these people had you know and a lot of them for people that are now technologists did revolve around some form of technology and like you know um jailbreaking iPhones and doing things like that you know it was um it is definitely a Common Thread that you find today it's almost like if you could invest in an index fund of all of the kids that are doing stuff like that today I bet you'd turn out pretty well you know uh 10 15 20 years in the future um okay so you were a Sci-Fi lover you loved fantasy um I'm in the same boat by the way like

[10:19] all of that stuff I'm actually going back now and on a big kick over reading some of the Sci-Fi stuff that I loved as a kid like which probably a lot of it resonates with the stuff you're interested in today and that you're writing about you know like Ender's Game and um some of those but I don't know like uh Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which Elon Musk often talks about as being one of his favorite books like that stuff is just so so good and it's so great to reread because you find these common threads um that somehow like tie to the reality that then has happened and not just in

[10:49] the technology sense which I think a lot of people think about but even like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has things in it where you're like it feels like it predicted Donald Trump being elected president in some of the ways where they're talking about things early on so it's quite quite amazing um I want to talk about that concept of like threads through reality it's something I think about a lot as like a general framework especially around technology where um you have these ideas that have the seeds planted a long long time ago and that continues to grow and that thread continues to run throughout history and

[11:27] now suddenly it becomes very real and you can see the kind of um you know the blooming of that plant and I feel like that is a really good framework for thinking about this concept of the metaverse and and what you're writing about today because you talk about it in your book and I don't want to give away too much the book is absolutely fantastic and we'll put in the show notes all of the information for where people can get it but you talk in the early part of the book about some of those threads and I'd love to just have you walk through a few of those

[11:53] like where did those seeds of this metaverse idea start and how are you kind of tracking them over time to where they are today so this is a really fun place to start because we're situated in this point where the narrative around the metaverse is either hyper acute we're talking about Facebook's vision of the metaverse or we're talking about the metaverse as

[12:15] a buzzword in 2022. but of course if you widen the aperture a little bit we know that the term comes from 1992 and so we start to look at this as a three decade exercise many of the leaders in the space epic games Nvidia the seventh largest company globally were founded in the early 90s for this era but in fact as you're teeing up you can go back to the 1930s and that's where we really start to see science fiction through popular Works describe these ideas not in the term metaverse that comes decades later but in idea these virtual playgrounds AI nurseries using holography and 3D TVs VR

[12:55] goggles and then parallel to that is the development of the Technologies which produce virtual experiences they start in the 1940s mainframes emerge in the 1950s the first really 2D based metaverse experiences 2D text versions of Roblox emerge in the 1960s and 70s and so we have these two parallel paths that bring us to today where the technology to realize the long considered Vision starts to feel like a practical business opportunity a practical product rather than just a Fantastical one it's so interesting the way you said that I thought was very clarifying for me of like um how it stops feeling like a Fantastical one as you as you kind of

[13:44] progress through time because you know you always hear that quote of um you know like the the things of the future or feel like um the toys of today or something like that I don't know if it's Chris Dixon who originally said it but someone in that General realm uh it's Dixon yeah and that's how I think about a lot of these things like in your book you talk about Stanley winebaum and I think it was like Pygmalion spectacles uh cite something very specific but he had like VR like goggles or Philip K dick and um the world creation device and these science fiction authors were writing

[14:16] about and kind of crafting something that felt like a toy and I imagine when you were reading it back then it was like this childlike curiosity and wonder that you would have with learning about those things and now you fast forward to today and there are people building those exact things as part of this future as the infrastructure of this future that were that we're envisioning so it is I mean it is quite amazing the one other thing that jumps out to me and I'd love to hear your perspectives on it is so much of uh the the metaverse of what we had read in kind of Science

[14:49] Fiction over all of those decades was very dystopian you know like whether it's Stanley winebaum or whether it's snow crash or whether it's ready player one which is like my favorite example of it candidly just I love that love that book and my wife still makes fun of me um for loving the movie because I think the book was actually much better than the movie for what it's worth yeah um but you know a lot of them are very dystopian it's like oh the world has gone to and so uh here is this alternate world that is created where people spend their time because it's so

[15:19] much better than the reality even the Matrix right it's like the same kind of General principle why do you think that is or like and do you think that that has had a negative effect on societal perceptions of the metaverse and what it means for you know our Collective future great question does it have a negative effect absolutely and certainly if you are suffering from some form of confirmation bias it reiterates that confirmation or that bias there's an understandable hesitation about enlarging big texts involvement in our lives and it's actually very easy to look at the big Tech obsession with the metaverse for decades and to say it's

[16:00] techno feudalist capitalist trying to enslave us or put us to work in yet another plane of existence and of course the fact that as you've described the metaverse in snow crash The Matrix in Neuromancer The Matrix in the Matrix or dystopic doesn't help but we should keep in mind that at the root of most fiction is drama and human drama tends to be the most potent form of drama put another way there's a reason why most novels aren't set in Utopias they're not very interesting except when they go wrong and so I look beyond that and of course I use all these lines throughout the Book of Neil Stevenson trying to warn us

[16:43] away from a too literal read he says keep in mind I was just making up as I go along but with that in mind I think it is more helpful to look Beyond a fictional representation from even a string of influential authors to the experiences Second Life the text-based worlds of the 60s and 70s roadblocks fortnite they are not designed on subjugation but self-expression collaboration creation kids who are in these adults who are in these environments talk about how they feel good how they connect more with individuals that doesn't mean that technology can't be used for ill but I would say stress the experiences that have been in development and experienced

[17:30] by billions at this point rather than a string of authors writing a Sci-Fi novel yeah you hit on several really important points that I want to double down on first off Neil Stevenson correct me if I'm wrong author of snow crash which is kind of like the first book that talked about the metaverse he you know it was dystopic um but he had a outsized impact on the future in terms of his involvement in technology right like he was uh early on with uh blue origin with with Jeff he was the first employee yeah first employee of blue origin so he wasn't just some like sci-fi author that did

[18:04] nothing else right like he ended up becoming part of blue origin um I think he's still a senior advisor to it it's like you know the second most important um uh uh space technology company in the world um I think like the early creators of um Google Earth like Keyhole were um uh relying on and like learning a lot from him magic leap um you know VR company uh that raised a ton of money uh was also you know tied to him in in a lot of ways so he he had an outsized impact from an actual technology standpoint as well well and then the other point you made is a a

[18:39] really interesting one because I feel like I've heard this over and over again on this show and more broadly and talking to um sort of like this next generation of leaders in the technology landscape that their most formative experiences growing up were in Virtual Worlds and whether that virtual world was like an aim chat room or whether it was Minecraft or whether it was Roblox for some of the younger uh younger kids it's really amazing and a lot of them say like look we were kind of nerdy we didn't really feel like we had that sense of community in the real world um and with kids at school we didn't fit

[19:18] in in the way that we were supposed to into that like nice neat um you know square into a square and so these worlds were our way of self-expression and like we had um Gabby Goldberg on who's a I mean she's amazing 23 year old investor at tcg crypto you should meet for sure and she was like um telling us that she she was selectively mute which um effectively meant she didn't speak for like a four year period of her life and her Escape was in chat rooms like she was in these digital worlds engaging and that was where she made her friends and expressed herself and so she says

[19:54] that it's now so logical for her to engage in this new kind of crypto economy and in discords and interact with people that are pseudonymous um it's really quite amazing the unlock it can have for people's mental health and you know and and helping kids feel like they have communities and that they can be a part of something that doesn't just rely on being normal quote unquote that's that's totally right I think of two stories one comes from the Shopify founder and CEO Toby Luca and he talks about the fact that Starcraft was more important than anything that he ever learned in school and he talks about it

[20:31] because it's resource allocation it is fitting in with a team it is understanding when what you're best at is not necessarily what you should contribute to the team relative to its needs and he talks cheekily about learning that the best strategy is sometimes doing things to distract your competitors rather than to fortify your own kind of overt offense at the end of the day we're talking about this as a tool set and what you're discussing with Gabby and with others is providing them with an increasingly fertile environment to build to try to test to learn and to co-experience one of the best things that we've experienced

[21:14] recently in gaming has actually been input devices supporting those with different abilities if you're not familiar you should look up Xbox's accessibility controller it's so clear that there is not a traditional business case for this type of device it's designed for those who have no limb Mobility those who are constrained in it those who frankly can just speak or just move using a straw and their mouth and the premise is that Virtual Worlds which require very different physical abilities should be the single place in which we have the most people able to participate most often with the greatest range and if you believe in network effects one of

[21:54] the most potent discoveries of the digital era you believe actually we may not have a direct business case for producing and distributing this device relative to what they can pay us and what we can charge for but the value that comes from bringing more people into the network which enriches everyone else's experience gets us there that's inspiring yeah extremely expiring I would encourage everyone to look this up by the way the Xbox adaptive controller um it it does look quite amazing they have a video on the on the home page of it that is um you know really inspiring and and heartwarming I actually it reminds me of

[22:32] a conversation I had I'm gonna name drop so I apologize in advance um conversation I had with Tim Cook who's been a mentor and friend for for many years um and he was talking about this exact thing it was at an Apple annual shareholder meeting and someone you know there's always a few people who kind of ask the like gotcha question at those things right like they're trying to trip up the executive and someone asked him um will you commit that Apple will never make a decision that is not Roi positive for the company like directly Roi positive for the company um and he responded uh and basically

[23:06] said no um he said no I will not say that and I'll give you an example and the example he gave was something like this he said um apple has a commitment to accessibility we create you know accessible content for people that are blind and there is absolutely no business case I can make to you that all the resources that we need to develop that are going to be Roi positive in terms of the additional sales and margin that it creates us as a company but it's the right thing to do and it is core to the values that we are trying to create as a

[23:36] company and love them or hate them as a company and I know people say all sorts of things about about Apple you know detractors Etc I thought that that really resonated and I thought it was really interesting and clearly you know Xbox similar similar set of values around that but it is that principle of the internet and the founding principle of the internet and of Technology of accessibility and opening up these worlds and being like truly positive some right of like creating a bigger a bigger pie for everyone um I would hope holds true as we think about this next era of the internet and the metaverse

[24:08] um I feel like that does lead us to um a natural point in this conversation where I do want to talk very specifically about the metaverse we've been winding around it a lot talking about and honestly Society and the media has wound around this a lot over the last two years you've been writing about it and talking about it for much longer than anyone else um you know several years probably five plus years before it became Facebook's uh name um you were writing about it uh you became as a result of all of your writing on it I think the like leading Authority on this topic rightfully so

[24:43] as you would just spent more hours thinking about it and and kind of battle testing all of your Frameworks and thinking um maybe we just start with uh the fact that your book is really the first time I've seen a comprehensive definition that feels understandable of what the hell is the metaverse when people talk about it what does that mean um would you mind just giving us the like fine points of that sort of at the high level what does the metaverse mean to you sure so one of the fun things about this is we get to differentiate between a technical definition and a description and what that actually means

[25:19] experientially and by that I mean go to Wikipedia and read the definition of the internet the technical definition is an Internet working standard TCP or the Internet Protocol Suite it's a little bit more helpful to describe the internet it talks about a network of networks supporting the World Wide Web email Communications file sharing and so forth and that does not get very close to describing what the internet does today what applications were built on it and how it changes the world and I don't mean that as a hedge I mean this because I'm going to describe the metaverse not Define it and that is a massively scaled and interoperable

[26:00] network of 3D rendered real-time Virtual Worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of people each with an individual sense of presence that's how I describe it because it allows me to hit on all of the keywords synchronous persistent sense of presence but experientially we are talking about a parallel plane a virtual plane that we can all access at the same time individually and that's living that remembers what we've done what's fascinating about that is first of all the technology to even have this sort of discussion is pretty new talking about operating something we can all access you and I can often struggle to

[26:49] connect to a zoom reliably and that's just a video feed on a half second delay but secondly the technical complexity involves building for things that we never have to think of in the real world we never say there are too many people in Idaho for Idaho to exist we never say you can't carve your name into that tree because the Earth doesn't have the processing power to remember the carving and so those keywords are designed to express what we need for us all to be able to access the same live modifiable copy of a parallel plane so there's so much here that I want to that I want to dig into

[27:34] um so first off you know I remember reading on this last point of like these random things that you don't think about about the technology that needs to be developed and that is is being developed presumably um to enable this one of them that jumps out to me from one of your prior pieces is this idea of everyone actually existing in the same plane at the same time and I remember it in the context of your um it was your piece on the Travis Scott concert that happened in fortnite and I forget what the number was but it was some like 20 million people like it

[28:06] was some absurd number of people yeah 28 million people break it down I'll bring it down for you yes please I love this I find it really fun I'm excited that you share that perspective so 28 million people participated in the quote-unquote live Travis Scott concert yeah let's start from the perspective Travis Scott wasn't live he was broadcast live but everything that he was doing the animations the vocal track that had all been done previously but there weren't actually 28 million people participating in that concert there were over 250 000 simultaneous simulations of that concert none of which were precisely in synchronization I mean some of them

[28:49] probably were but think of them as being 20 50 80 milliseconds separated a minute separated and each of those simulations was split into groups of 50 to 100. and that's because we don't have the technology required for even 200 people really to be in what we call a richly rendered virtual environment when you play fortnite fortnite has a hundred players in it it kind of cheats through game design to get you there why because the map is two and a half kilometers by two and a half kilometers and so for all intents and purposes most of the players don't exist by the time you come to one another most

[29:32] people have been purged and so even when we think of these experiences having dozens of people it's only through brilliant game design that we pull it off that's so interesting okay so now you're kind of sending me down a rabbit hole on this so in these game worlds it it works because we're spread out as individual as players within this game like if 500 people were to try to operate in a very tightly confined space Within These worlds within a fortnight game it would actually like reduce the latency of the game because it would start struggling with it well think of it as a simple way to think about it is the

[30:11] number of operations that can be processed per second and those are scarce now how can we manage that you can have a lot of people able to do very little or you can have few people able to do a lot so one of the ways that the Travis Scott concert actually manages is they turn off lots of functionality right you can't build for example you can't equip any weapon in many concerts they actually take away your dance moves you get to pick from Two and so what they do is their scarce resources for computing power and the question is how do you allocate them more people fewer

[30:46] things more things fewer people got it got it okay so you kind of have like a fixed pie and it needs to be allocated in a certain way in order for this to operate and function what is the actual just from a technology standpoint as you think about that like so so that is a fundamental constraint on us getting to um the you know the end state that you're in Ready Player One everyone yeah yeah exactly of us getting to that end State what is the actual technological constraint there like what would need to be true uh for seven billion people to be able to operate in a you know

[31:21] persistent environment together so the basic answer is computing power more of it okay Chris Dixon has this line that says we've always run out of computing power because as more is made available we go after harder problems the number of people we can render in a virtual environment is a good example when we can put more in we put more in and therefore run out of what's spare there are two ways to answer that that is more power in your device or more power in a remote data center the challenge with the latter is as we know the internet is not reliable it often spikes we can struggle to have a high

[32:00] quality video conference and therefore we should think of this adage that has kind of fallen out of usage that comes from the 1990s from Sun Microsystems the computer is the network and so when we're thinking about the metaverse a virtual persistent network of simulations we want to think about the Network's combined computing power not just that of your device how we're going to solve for that is not yet clear some talk about decentralization not just in the blockchain sense but in the idea that think of the solar panel model if your house has solar panels up top and you have Excess power generation or capture you can lend it out to your neighbor

[32:41] rather than needing to take it far away from the grid but in strict technical terms the general consensus advocated by Folks at Intel and meta is a thousand Factor increase in computing power wow we are up about a hundred since two thousand so we need a thousand on top of that wow although I guess you know if you if you map out the way technology tends to accelerate um maybe a thousand X is not quite as crazy as it's you know it's not linear right like if it's been 20 years to go 100x you know it's it it maybe stands to reason that there are these step

[33:18] function improvements that make that faster than you might otherwise assume yeah and look the the field of quantum Computing is one of those other areas where we think in terms of Fantastical ideas this is a Jetsons thing it's not a human thing but there's increasing consensus that that technological problem will solve within our lifetime in which case we're no longer talking about Moore's Law traditionally defined that chartable predictable increase in computing power we're talking about you know the discovery of electricity versus the use of the flame for light competition for great talent is more brutal than ever almost every startup I know struggles to hire fast enough to

[34:02] keep up with demand to be able to hire better and faster you need a trusted source of pre-vetted candidates lemon.io is a place like that they have a network of Engineers from Europe and Latin America and every candidate has already been tested and interviewed by their team you'll ask me how it's different from hiring on your own you can have an engineer start working on your project within a week instead of within months you don't waste your time on candidates that aren't qualified you'll have easy access to Global Talent without having to go through dozens of job boards and finally it's more affordable than hiring local talent

[34:44] so if you need to expand your engineering team or just delegate some of your work use lemon.io you can also claim a special discount for where it happens podcast fans visit lemon.io room to receive a 15 discount for the first four weeks of work with a developer you won't regret it it's me it's a little mind-bending for me like when I start to think about this this does the same thing to my head as you know a conversation with Tim Urban on the immensity of space and like the cosmic calendar uh you know and thinking about those massive uh leaps forward as a society this is like it's it is a bit

[35:22] mind-bending for me the the other thing you know you hit on uh decentralization one thing when I read your definition that I keep thinking about is this whole idea that there needs to be a standardized Ledger across seven billion people or however many people are operating in this world of what has happened right like there has to be some way of if I go in and do something it's somewhere stored like that I did that thing whatever it was whether I transact or whether I died or I gained points killed someone whatever and then I leave and I come back in that needs to have been stored somewhere within some open

[36:02] Ledger that is accessible no so a bunch of different ideas there right there's a question of does it need to be open not necessarily right open as in readable to anyone and in fact one can certainly imagine many instances in which we don't want that information to be provided can you use a blockchain to store your 23andMe results yes do you necessarily want that to be on an open Ledger not necessarily but we do have these fundamental questions of where is the record stored and right now we actually have this privilege of the fact that were mostly expressing our physical existence in digital space not virtual

[36:46] ones right Facebook is not your life even if two young girl or boy it feels like their life but you're expressing it right it's a photo of what you did you didn't do it there your assets and your wealth exist in the real world not in the virtual world when you come into these questions about the reverse that you work inside a virtual plane you don't just use your iPhone to work through the internet when you have virtual assets of extreme importance what's the governance model who has you know to use a buzzword custody of them do you want to trust someone of that importance or do you want to trust no

[37:27] one and therefore use Consensus These are some of the open questions but there are alternative opinions so for example epic games which makes fortnite the Unreal Engine a Pioneer in the space has this perspective that they haven't stated but I might observe of solving for decentralization through democracy right democracy is a form of decentralized governance we all have input and then we have centralized authorities who make the decision on our account they are doing something fascinating which is consistently relinquishing their rights over things they have rights to to hand them over to the judicial process and that is kind of a perspective which is we may store Matt's

[38:08] record and virtual objects we may store Jim's virtual business but we are giving up the right to shut it down to take it to move it that is up to the court process if we want to shut you down an injunction is required huh the same rights that a landlord would need to lock you out of your home a virtual platform owner requires in a virtual space and is that in an effort to uh set a precedent for other companies um or operators to follow like what what is your perspective on the reason they're doing that if they don't have to you can think of three different

[38:48] potential answers number one is to pass the buck on the problem right moderation virtual rights are hard there's a more optimistic perspective which is really the same but less cynical which is this is hard we shouldn't be the ones who decided Society should and then the third is a recognition and again these are all different skus of the same thing a recognition that we actually have pretty good systems for this and this is where you get into the blockchain movement of how much is actually a technical requirement versus replicating the things we already have right so I'll give you an example we talk about the importance of trust on

[39:32] the blockchain to manage who owns what well we do have that system for example it's Deeds you don't worry I don't I don't know if you own your house or a condo it looks like a house but like you don't worry about the fact that your deed might be in a bank safety deposit box it's written into a public record and so it's partly I think these companies saying the enormity of what we want to build requires extraordinary trust in the system extraordinary investment and we actually have these Frameworks we need not reinvent we can iterate on but even there if we should Pioneer on the 3D tools not the societal governance

[40:11] and Provisions it also just strikes me as like maybe it's partially your first um rationale but like play the games that you're uniquely well suited to win and leave the other ones to other people and like for epic I mean the Unreal Engine when you see the new video like the the new iterations of the Unreal Engine it is it's scary uh when you watch some of the promo videos they put out for how incredible that technology is um truly truly remarkable stuff when you when you see it and you see it in action um you know one of the other things that strikes me as we walk through your your

[40:47] vision for this is that maybe there's some sort of like it's probably actually true it's almost like a program people talk about Progressive decentralization like the path towards Dao's that was a big thing within web3 it was like you don't just become decentralized overnight you kind of have Progressive decentralization my analog here is like do we have sort of progressive metaverse metaversation where you know we we have what the current form is and over time you kind of make steady technological uh progress towards this end-state vision of what you believe is kind of this true form of of the metaverse um because it does seem like some of

[41:26] these technical hurdles are you know 10 20 30 years um of building away like the ability to have seven billion people in this simultaneously in the same world that seems like a huge daunting task some of these other ones it seems like you can kind of build workarounds right like the fortnite thing what they did with Travis Scott you can start to Envision ways where well the seven billion people aren't going to be in the same place all at once right so can you create these you know sort of simultaneous worlds that are that are operating probably and you can kind of work your way towards

[41:58] that end State progressively absolutely let me provide a three-part framework the first is precedent the second takes a look at societal changes and then the third talks about step function changes so if we take a look at the mobile and Cloud era we're in right now you can ask the question when did it arrive and there isn't really a specific answer because there's no switch that flips in 1973 we have the First Mobile Cellular call we wouldn't say that the mobile era was here but that was clearly a start an important First Step 1991 we have the first 2G network in Norway that's a wireless digital Network required for

[42:38] data 1992 we have IBM's for smartphone by the end of the 90s we have the Blackberry the wireless application protocol you probably remember growing up you'd access A Primitive version of the web with a white background blue purple and red links and that was it then we start to get the first consumer smartphones like the BlackBerry Pearl and curve the first direct Digital Media Services primarily in Japan building for the mobile web and then we get the iPhone 3G the first iPhone which was still 2G somewhere along that Spectrum we start to mature into the mobile internet era so that's one which is to recognize that these are multi-decade

[43:17] transformations the second is to understand generational change and here's where I also use a three-point hitch the first is when the technology is available the second is when you have a generation that grows up with that technology and is native to it in much the same way Millennials were native to YouTube and they consumed content very differently just like gen Z and gen Alpha are growing up with Roblox three quarters of those between 9 and 12 use roadblocks regularly social media to them is 3D avatar based and so Step One is when the technology is available to create a new generation step two is about when they

[43:56] start to use that content and then step three is the entrepreneur era and that's where we're still early in 3D Zuckerberg creates Facebook in his dorms in his early twenties in the 2003-2004 Evan Spiegel another child of the early mobile internet era in his early 20s creates Snapchat 2011. that third event is when that generation born of the new wave goes through the period of consuming content created by those which preceded that that era and then goes on to make it themselves and the last part of this three-point framework is recognizing that while that's a Continuum there's no sudden moment where you hit a new point there

[44:39] are technological bursts and breakthroughs we know that 3G and the iPhone were singular achievements that all of a sudden took us off the old trajectory that will be the same thing here do you think you're able to spot those in real time or is it only possible with the benefit of hindsight like I often feel when I when I read you know technology writers and I'm a huge fan of all these writers but you know the Ben Thompson and Benedict Evans and some of these people who I admire greatly I feel like okay with the benefit of hindsight you're able to analyze and say oh this

[45:14] was a you know world changing event this was when everything changed Etc but in the moment it's often very hard or even in advance it's very hard do you feel like it's going to be possible with this or are we going to be kind of left looking in hindsight as well it kind of varies in the sense that sometimes you need to look back over multiple different years to understand that critical threshold in other times we start to figure it out pretty quickly so we were talking earlier about how many people are in a shared environment it was really around 2014 to 2016 that we had graphical

[45:46] processing units gpus that were powerful enough and widely deployed enough into standard consumer Hardware to support what we call High concurrency games that's large numbers of people in the same shared simulation it's no coincidence that around 2016-17 is when all of the major battle royale games came out battle Royals were not a new idea but they were newly technologically possible and by 2018 they were blowing the doors off of every precedent for what a game can do cultural impact Revenue generation but more importantly reach the entire traditional gaming industry has about 250 to 300 million people in it and yet the top five battle royales were reaching several hundred million

[46:38] people per day many of whom had never participated and so it didn't take long to look at these and say no we reached a critical threshold maybe going from a hundred people to 200 people or 100 to 500 is not that meaningful but somewhere between a dozen or 16 that's what I remember for the Wii Mario card if you remember all of a sudden you could go to 16 different humans yeah somewhere between 16 and 100 we hit a critical breaking point and we understood that pretty quickly it's um it's making me want to ask you you know like what are the in your mind um what are going to be those like oh

[47:21] moments like when you see X you're gonna your eyes are gonna light up and be like oh my God this is coming or um it's gonna trigger you to think about you know oh we're actually making a real step function Improvement here in regard to the metaverse so there have been some recently I think when you look at Unreal Engine 5 which you mentioned and the meta-humans Creator and they have something called live link face that allows you to take your standard iPhone put it in front of you you create this realistic human and then it mimics you live yeah you look at that and have we passed out of The Uncanny Valley

[47:58] does it look exactly like a human no but you realize that this is free pocket size instantaneous technology and you say holy crap there's this Tech demo that unreal released called The Matrix awakens and by the way if you haven't downloaded you guys have to download it now because it's coming off the store shortly and it's this extraordinarily large procedurally generated City there's 64 000 cars that you can drive and crucially you can change all the settings so that you can see basically the developer mode so that you can see all of the polygons you can see how light refracts and you start to look at

[48:35] this and you say it's a fully immersive Dynamic populated city where you can turn off the people drive any car that you see and see and feel how it's alive that to me is where you start to say what used to be hard is now easy and we have always learned that when that happens the world changes you everyone everyone has to go on the websites like go to unrealengine.com and just spend an hour because it's like a total nerd Rabbit Hole going through these things the thing that got me about some of these videos is you can see the like vibration in rocks or in the road

[49:14] in certain cases on things like that's how realistic it feels uh when you're experiencing it like you can actually see the vibration of rocks as like rocks fall down around the main character around things it's truly remarkable to uh to experience and to your point um that is one of the things that feels like the oh moment of uh where things are headed um you know so I do want to transition I know we've got about 10 minutes left uh you're also an investor um and you've spent much of the last five years I imagine investing in a lot of the technology companies and trends that you're writing about and that

[49:49] you're passionate and deep on what are like for an investor so kind of putting our putting our head our investor hats on you know I have a small fund um many of our listeners invest you know personal or institutional Capital what are some of the most exciting Entre entrepreneurial opportunities um that you see out there within this kind of broader ecosystem like is it infrastructure that's being developed is it application layer stuff that's being developed um what are some of the things you're looking for that you're super excited about great question I look right across infrastructure is really difficult why because the technical bottlenecks right now are so

[50:30] severe that while there's a lot of potential value in unlocking them they need to be unlocked for developers to then deploy them to then monetize them to then figure them out so that they're highly monetizable and that ends up being a bit of a chicken in the egg problem where especially because of infrastructure it's Capital intensive but not quick to deploy and where the actual value capture is uncertain so that ends up being a tough problem yeah so sorry to interrupt you is the is the infrastructure if I were to characterize it is it like the infrastructure problem right now is in like the research phase

[51:08] where many of the solutions are literally being developed at academic institutions by like researchers mathematicians people you know computer scientists that are really trying to Envision and jam against these incredibly hard problems and they're still years away from taking those you know with anticipated Solutions and then battle testing them in the kind of entrepreneurial Gauntlet is that a fair characterization yes and I think if that's why if you take a look at many companies like Roblox like Roblox keeps hiring Advanced technologists and PhD students who are coming out of the especially UC system and that's actually really fun because what we're starting to talk about is

[51:48] this field that has been built for quite a while that now has some of the widest and most scaled testing environments right tens of millions hundreds of billions of people with billions of dollars of infrastructure behind I get really excited in the book I talk a lot about how it's weird that the metaphor seems to be coming from a relatively small part of the consumer Leisure economy and yet gaming companies have always been Pioneers at some of the most sophisticated simulation exercises you might remember early in the 2000s PlayStation 2s were placed on export limitations because Japan believed that if they release their signature product it would be used

[52:32] for terrorism late last decade the 25th most powerful computer owned by the U.S military was 1700 PlayStation 3s and by the way they said that by using PlayStation 3's interconnected de-shelled they used 95 percent less energy to operate it and spent 10 percent of the alternative use and so I know it sounds crazy to talk about like these Advanced Technologies trying to solve brutally heart problems but like it's really really well encapsulated here and so when you take a look at these companies like epic and Roblox and unity they're attracting some of the world's most Brilliant Minds because they actually have a place to apply it like

[53:18] semantic recognition not actually that fun for Skype but you're talking about a virtual world where you're also trying to map that live to facial recognitions you're also able to tap into Apple's AR sensors it's fun yeah it reminds me of like Bell Labs like you're creating these modern day Bell Labs so for people that aren't familiar is like you know it was a t before ATT right and it was like um you know it's like the original Skunk Works yeah exactly it was like basically they brought together some of the smartest PhD scientists in the world and what came out of there is completely remarkable when you look at the early

[53:54] technologies that were built and that you know were seated within that place that became you know like the future of semiconductors and the future of all of these industries was really created at Bell Labs you can trace their their lineage back to that but you're kind of thinking about a world where some of these companies and I imagine meta or Facebook is probably doing something similar where they're starting to amass a a talent War chest of just Brilliant Minds to start thinking about and envisioning these extremely technical Futures that need to be built so that's on the infrastructure side I cut you off um on the application side what's

[54:28] getting you excited about investing so I've kind of two things there number one is we have this ongoing lesson that trying to build the next big platform in Computing especially on the consumer side less so on the Enterprise side you shouldn't seek to do it and by that I mean there's this classic example of we've always known that a quote-unquote Federated identity system in the internet would be super useful Microsoft tried twice in the 90s you might remember the older listeners the.net framework and it didn't work because like no one wanted to sign up to have an account or identity system and they didn't want to proliferate it it was

[55:07] scary and Microsoft is scary what ended up being the way that four billion people would get a single identity system the answer was it started as a college hot or not and then turned into a photo sharing and messaging platform epic has been focused on the metaverse for decades but its onboard experience was a battle royale that was itself a pivot from a quasi you know necessarily a failed game but a strong single light double and so the ongoing lesson is trying to produce a really compelling fun social product at least for me I'm not a SAS or enterprise software investor that in particular takes advantage of

[55:47] new technologies that's the big one here Snapchat didn't design itself to be an AR camera and spectacles company it started on ephemeral messaging primarily for sexting and so I'm really excited about that and entrepreneurs are the other side my favorite entrepreneur are those who have spent a decade trying to solve these problems with a lot of backing but a company that was never going to see it through because they come away with it firstly having basically financed one of the world's rarest experiences on the corporate dollar secondly they've learned a lot they've built up a network of people with shared Acumen and expertise and a working relationship and

[56:30] third pretty pissed they haven't solved it yet and so they come out of that system they know exactly what to do they know exactly what not to do they know who they want to work with and good Heavens are they going to commit their life to solving it I love the uh I love both of those um you also hit on something that was a thread to the very beginning of this conversation when you talked about some of your best works of writing being your second at-bat and you referenced you know just now with epic games fortnite you know it was sort of like a second

[57:02] at-bat at that game or it was like a single or double and now it's become you know I I mean it's it's really become what a lot of people point to as an early version of what the metaverse is and you know the way that people operate within it so it's um it's a great framework actually for thinking about these things that second at-bat I really really like that where does um if at all where does web3 fit into all of this you know I've been having and we have just as pre-text a lot of debates on this show I'm sort of the uh Curious Observer kind of skeptic

[57:35] um Greg my co-host is a lot more optimistic on the future of web3 I would say and um you know what I struggle with here as I think about it is these Technologies are um you sort of have this Confluence of factors right where the technology required to make this work is extraordinary in terms of compute power speed all of these things that frankly like decentralization really struggles with it's very very difficult to do this in a centralized way let alone a decentralized way from a governance standpoint from a technology standpoint Etc and so I struggle to understand how we can do this or how web3 really fits

[58:18] into this at least at the like biggest infrastructure level of it maybe there are sort of applications that end up feeling like web3 or they're token enabled and there's kind of components of web3 economies that fit into it but I struggle to see it at like the broadest level of all of it I think you and I are quite aligned here I think there's enough that we do know to believe that elements of these systems are going to be important partly because the enormity of the task requires us to tap into all available resources secondly we don't just want to technologically realized metaverse we want one that we're happy exists the

[59:01] principles of web3 are admirable yeah the idea that we need to contend with multi-trillion dollar corporations this is ready player one this is snow crash well the best defense of that is decentralized coordinated action right the idea that who's richer than Apple all of us combine many times over and so some of the technological problems we do believe decentralization is required for in some instances we know that the philosophy is relevant in other instances it's not about tapping into our Technical Resources it's our energy our individual capital and collaborate is blockchain the best system for that not necessarily but I like to highlight you know one of

[59:46] the perspectives of Tim Sweeney the founder and CEO of epic games where he says it's scams or the whole field is currently caught up with an intractable mix of scams interesting decentralization and scams but he's very clear saying that while we're surrounded with either overt misrepresentation which I think is an important element right there are many people who over promise what can be solved by these Technologies and I think that that's not because they're necessarily wrong it's just they're mistaking what's a human problem versus what's a technological problem but a fundamental belief there's something really interesting here and so that is to say in a simpler sense I'm

[1:00:25] not one of the revisionists that believes that we're going to strip out tcpip and replace it with web3 but I do believe and am quite optimistic that parts of our future are going to be supplemented by these Technologies but I do think it's still a little hard to see exactly where when and why yeah it's I think that's the right way it's it's the exact way that I think about it too where like the dogmatic perspective that it has to be web3 or web 2 and there's not a blend of the two or a blurred line seems silly to me like even with desktop and mobile right like I'm sitting here

[1:00:58] on a desktop talking to you mobile exists and has proliferated obviously and changed the world but they're still desktop it didn't just completely disappear and get ripped off the face of the Earth and I think about that similarly here I mean will nfts digital ownership some of these components you know tokenization uh Community governance like some of these things will they be components of this future I can totally see and make a case where that is you know where that is true um but at the infrastructure level I would you know Color Me skeptical I suppose um for the ability to do this at a grand

[1:01:31] scale and maybe there will be some Innovation that completely changes that and I get completely wiped off and I'm notoriously bad at making those long-term predictions so um I look forward to be proving wrong in that regard um I want to close with just two questions for you um as we as we wrap up first um what do you think are the greatest risks to this future um like if you were to be scared or be kept up at Night by something uh about this future that you're writing about and envisioning what would that be connects to the web 3 movement I think that the web 3 movement is really

[1:02:04] powered by this dissatisfaction with the last 15 years and I think that for a long time we tried to lull our sense into the idea that it was a good trajectory because we received really high quality products for free and yet the fact that I'm not trying to make a specific Facebook point but as an example we got Instagram which was incredible for free doesn't mean that the value exchange was just the fact that Google Maps was stunning back in the day and still is for free the fact that there's two sides of that transaction doesn't mean that the trade was right and I think many people have

[1:02:41] woken up in 20 20 21 22 and said I don't like the Arc of Technology it is not advantaging me it is having deleterious effects on society and we don't know how to manage it I think that's powering the web 3 movement at large and perhaps an over correction to no centralization and this connects to your question more directly I think we can fairly look at the state of the internet today and identify many problems Miss and disinformation radicalization toxicity harassment abuse data rights data security data literacy platform Power Platform regulation and we can understand how every one of them will be exacerbated by the metaverse

[1:03:26] because it means that the importance of what we do online increases and the amount of society that goes online increases and frankly we're 15 years in and we haven't gotten great at solving any of those questions that's a reason to be up at night it's also a reason why many people are worried that the tech Titans are focused on what's next without having solved what is and yet I also find this inspiring because every platform shift the current crop seems infallible there was no way to look at Microsoft in the late 1990s and believe that witty would be in a future where none of us use

[1:04:02] Windows on our phone and that our PCS would be a minority share of it that Internet Explorer wouldn't exist that Bing wouldn't be a thing and so I get inspired by the idea that we as users consumers voters developers governments have real agency over that future and if we don't like what happens now we don't need web3 but the spirit of it and action allows us to change the powers that be extremely well said you know I um I think there's this pervasive false narrative around digital worlds um that they need to be or should be or will be perfect um and if they're not oh my God you know

[1:04:49] awful we need to reprimand everyone we need to you know regulate do all of these things right and it strikes me as it's nonsensical because why would we assume that our digital worlds will be perfect in utopian if our Real Worlds are not that um we're like creating this false standard it's the same thing that has um applied to like autonomous vehicles right when you have um an accident where like a robot kills a human we've decided that uh n over zero is completely intolerable when really it should be you know whatever uh T like the number of deaths from human on human accidents minus one should mean

[1:05:26] that we would go with autonomous vehicles but we create this false standard that technology needs to be perfect completely idealistic for it to exist otherwise it's intolerable and I think we're doing that now as a society as we think about the development of these digital worlds and of the metaverse so it'll be interesting to follow that thread I think through time as things progress last question before I lose you predictions for the future so we've talked a lot about the future impossible to predict always and very funny to even ask you to do this I'm just going to try to frame it in a simple way

[1:06:01] what will happen first uh a man will walk on the face of Mars or we will be able to exist in a world that looks like Ready Player One the latter because I think we're gonna spoof most of it and so it looks like ready player one but isn't okay it's a good answer and spoofing most of it I I think it would be an amazing amazing uh world to be able to do that I mean I am hopeful that I'm going to be able to operate in in Worlds like this in the next you know one or two decades and that my son will be able to experience

[1:06:40] them as he gets um you know as he comes into his teenage years so I hope you're right but I do think that the to not cheat the answer and by the way one of the most fun Parts about this book was spending time with game developers who explain exactly how they cheat physics but with a view to how you can't beat physics going to Mars you have to collaborate with it I think to not cheat your answer I think we'll hit Mars first and I certainly hope that's the case it is a giant leap for uh for Humanity in both regards both on the you know

[1:07:15] technological side to live in a world where we do have something like a Ready Player one but also reaching Mars as as a you know to become an interplanetary species would certainly be something very cool I mean I saw Tim Urban tweeted something about this the other day that what a cool thing that we're going to get to be hopefully fingers crossed alive during the time when Humanity makes one of its great you know three or four leaps uh in the history of of the world that we get to be alive during that is a pretty cool thing um Matt thank you so much for taking the

[1:07:45] time to do this uh everyone seriously everyone should go online or go to your local bookstore and buy this book it I read it over the weekend prior to having this conversation with you and was completely immersed in it uh you know like I have a newborn son at home and my wife was staring daggers at me because I was sitting out by the pool and just completely locked in and obsessed with what you had written the book is called the metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything it will be released on July 19th globally is that correct and I'm sure you're going to be out and

[1:08:19] about and doing the doing the tour and we're going to see a lot of you over the coming weeks which I am personally extremely excited about it was an absolute honor to uh to have you and have this conversation I feel like I owe you money for coming on because of how much I learned from it that's too kind thanks man thank you thanks so much for listening to today's episode if you have any questions that you want featured in a future episode email us at high at trwih.com leave us a review at Apple or Spotify to help us grow the reach of this podcast until next time we will see

[1:08:54] you soon [Music] in the borders

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