YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Ball

lines on the record: 99
first: 2022-07-19
most recent: 2022-07-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“The indicator that I pay attention to is the early demographic transition, 75% of those 9 to 12 in most Western markets use Roblox, and just roadblocks on a regular basis. That isn't to say that they don't use other things. We know fundamentally Gen Y games more than X, Z more than Y, and A more than Z. And that trend isn't turning around. But I think the big thing that I'm getting excited about are those industrial applications, the deployment of what we call ACE architecture, engineering, and construction. The challenge with those is lead times are long. You have to convince businesses to use new technology to solve problems they're not used to trying to solve. They have to then deploy them. They have to get good at using. Proper civil engineering, that's what gets exciting to me”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's end with a look to the future. I think one of the things you and I would both agree on is this isn't going to be a light switch. The metaverse isn't going to just turn on one day. It's going to happen to us slowly over time. But I'm curious. That big picture What is the signpost for you that the metaverse is more likely than not or that it's arrived in a real way? What would be the indicator for you?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problems of the past 15 years raises the specter of accidental damage to an area that doesn't really exist yet. But I'm more hopeful that it actually sets us on a clearer path rather than 15 years of catch up.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alliance and effectively required body that is also effectively mandating standards nationally. Their perspective seems to be, yes, the standards group will force things that many don't want and are individually disadvantaged by, but to the national benefit. And of course, in China, which is its whole other issue, I don't think it's a coincidence that just after 10cent unveiled its hyper-digital reality vision, which is their essential trademark for the metaverse, China began the biggest ever crackdown of the space. I think the US is probably the farthest behind in at least formal recommendations, but I think that in many territories, Southeast Asia, China, and the EU, governments seem very focused on this now in a way that surprises and inspires me. The fact that it coincides with regulation designed to fix”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the interesting thing about regulators leaving their hands off on the internet is, of course, the internet came from government, and many of its foundational bodies, the internet engineering task force, which stewards most of TCPIP, was developed by DOD and then relinquished but still strongly influenced by government. And that is to say, one of the reasons why governments left it was because there was a pretty strong and important self-regulating body, actually there were many, that worked together pretty effectively that they had helped to create. You're right that we don't see this here. I actually think it is changing pretty quickly. Yesterday, the EU released their think tanks policy memorandum. The chief negotiator of the EU for the Digital Services Act has been very critical, very vocal about what they need. The South Korean government has established the South Korean metaverse.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I keep doing companies forever. It's a fun game, but I want to end actually on the regulatory scrutiny piece. This space is unregulated in a way that if you make the comparison to the early internet, it's very different, right? The early internet was a government project. There was the idea that we would keep regulators away from it. But even that decision to keep regulators away from it is itself a regulatory decision. And then you had all of the public investment into the internet around the world. That's not happening here, right? This is all kind of a purely private company kind of investment and regulators seem like they have no idea what to do here in a way that even like regulators have no idea what to do with crypto, but they have a lot of ideas. Here it's just silence. Where do you think that comes into play? Where do you think the government comes into play here with Metaverse?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels like execution, bringing the pieces together, which is the same for Google, the same for Amazon, but less clear, could be extraordinary for them. And I think that's why you've always seen this commitment and why he's so quick to bet FTC scrutiny, DOJ scrutiny, $75 billion to build it.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“History at $75 billion, and in the opening graph, the last line he says it's for the foundations of the metaverse. In many ways, Minecraft presaged everything that he was going to do the strategy at large, and they have been very focused here. The number of different pieces that they have is actually really exciting. I talk about Microsoft Flight Simulator as perhaps the most technically impressive consumer deployed persistent live digital twin or metaverse-style experience that any of us can do. And so this is a company where putting aside the fact they were public about the metaverse before Facebook was.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think two things that are interesting as you think of Microsoft. Number one, and I talk about this a bit in the book, there's this fascinating aspect of Microsoft, which is, yes, the company has absolutely thrived under Satya by becoming horizontal, shedding the stack requirement and rich vertical integration. But when Satya took over, the game's business was being called on for divestment. And yet the first acquisition he did was of Minecraft. And he did something really unique at the time. And that was he committed to keeping it fully horizontal, available on all platforms, not exclusive to Xbox, and keeping it agnostic to the endpoint, not even preferring Xbox hardware. And then, of course, it was about five or six years before he did another large acquisition, that of LinkedIn. And then you have Activision Blizzard, the most expensive big tech acquisition in the world.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ask about two more here Microsoft CEO Sasha Mandela has said the metaverse is already here he's buying Activision, he has the Xbox. That seems to be growing. He needs to keep buying everything. But they don't have great hardware. The Hollands is not a huge success. They just shuffled that team and fired Alex Kitman, who was in charge of the Hollands. Are they on track or are they just going to be a horizontal software provider, which has been enormously successful strategy for them, as you pointed out?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there's a good question of whether or not. And so, as you take a look at Amazon's interactive business, they've rewritten many job descriptions to focus on the metaverse in name. A big proponent of the Unreal ecosystem. They're trying to advance certain standards. But a lot of it still feels externally, like more potential and conjecture than it is as yet product.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How much that moves into value added services and machine learning and others is as yet to be known, and Snowflake is a good example of other companies building value add services on top of the pure racks. But the bigger challenge is the one that I find really interesting, which is Amazon has spent a lot of time focused on more traditional media categories than it has in gaming or interactive, even though the latter seems a lot closer to their core business, at least the AWS side, and their success rate has been mixed. Jason Treyer at Bloomberg has estimated billions were spent into lumberyard, their game engine. That was given over to the Linux Foundation earlier this year. Luna, their cloud gaming service, seems to have had less of an impact than Google Stadia. Amazon. It's a very”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would probably guess that they are number one in virtual assistant hardware, but I would also guess that Siri and Google Assistant are probably the most used virtual assistants. And of course, they have the other benefit of having the device everywhere, right? Mobile, better tailored. Amazon's really interesting. Of course, the computing and data center business is going to be an extraordinary beneficiary.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You mentioned AWS. Let's keep going down the list Amazon has some pretensions here. The sense that they have a big hardware division that invents a bunch of stuff all the time. They have the most pervasive voice assistant, which I think is an interesting sort of sidelight into the idea of a secondary world that you can interact with in different ways. Are they a player? Do you see them making an investment?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so even the tangential argument that increased computing power is going to be good for Google, their business currently loses money every time a new server is stood up.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it's clear that they're focused here. The problem has always been their software is never considered best for consumer applications. Their hardware has never really taken off. Their efforts in gaming have barely been funded. Many of their best potential plays, Niantic and others, were divested or spun off or allowed to competitors. If Android is and remains the most used ecosystem globally, it's the second highest revenue generating games platform globally, they're likely to benefit, but the big opportunities, new hardware, a virtual world platform managing the standards all seems tough. Even when you take a look at Google Cloud, it's estimated to be losing $5 or $6 billion per year. AWS has more profit than Google Cloud does in revenue.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, it's a great question. Google, of course, has spent quite some time focused here. Google Glass was, yes, a famous disaster, but they've released another two versions of Google Glass or Enterprise Editions. They made a billion-dollar acquisition last year, a $200 million acquisition, the year before. Clay Bayvor, an SVP in charge of essentially all special projects plus AR and VR and has been for some years was realigned, as you mentioned, to directly report to Sundar.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mentioning the open web, which means we should talk about Google next. Google is Google, they have multiple competing projects. They've just restructured some things. They've announced some little things. Are they a player?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Browser based games like Axie Infinity Visually, and that's because you can't pull off complex rendering without most of WebGL or native app, and Apple won't allow it.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the non application alternative using a browser, what they call the open web, doesn't really work. And the way in which Apple constrains WebGL is because Safari doesn't support it comprehensively. And whereas I can download Chrome for iOS, I'm really just using the Chrome wrapper on the Safari engine. And so their technical decisions for Safari means what Google can and can't do is inherited and the App Store's hegemony over software means that I can't download True Chrome. And so what we're finding out is why Tim sued Apple, why he says that Apple has outlawed the metaverse rather than gotten in its way, which is a properly motivated apple can effectively stymie most things. There's a reason why Web3 games are either based on non-real time collecting and trading or really”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so this is where we get into some of the interesting answers. And is there a way around it? Are there alternatives yes and no? Cloud gaming is a potential answer, but we should keep in mind exactly how many ways Apple stymies them. For example, yes, cloud gaming can work. It's not a great technical solution. In fact, it probably works 95% of the time for 40% of users. Not a good solution for a social platform. But it can work. But doing it from the browser is not a great experience. Apple for security reasons valid and not valid also constrains your ability to send notifications, right? Not great if I'm trying to tell you to log on to Fortnite, but first of all, you can't have an app. Secondly, you don't ever get the notification. The other way to do it is browser-based rendering, but Apple has historically constrained WebGL.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Things in the book that I thought was really interesting is you have a section about how the metaverse need not actually take place in headsets, right? It could be expressed in all kinds of ways. We talk about these companies, their metaverse bets are very much headsets, right? Like we're going to Facebook wants to be first to headsets at scale because then they can just leave the iPhone and the complications of Apple's platform behind. Apple does not want to have the iPhone disrupted. They're racing towards a headset. Tim Cook, I think, wants to ship the headset as his last big reveal before he moves on. He said he's going to move on in 10 years. There's right now to do a non headset metaverse, you are kind of just stuck behind whatever Apple will allow because they're the most pervasive computing platform that exists.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Token and NFT on Coinbase. But if you choose to fractionalize an NFT into a billion fungible tokens, a billion, you could actually increase it so that there are more fractionalized tokens than there are Bitcoin tokens. I think we will see how that comes. But look, when it comes to new hardware, it's obvious if AR and VR are going to be things, Apple will be at least a player, but it's more likely that they have the most performant, best looking, lightest weight, and prefer early editions. The advantage is there, especially at scale and cost, development cost or production cost are simple.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Look, I think one thing that's fun to put on the side of this is six days before Epic Games sued Apple, Tim Sweeney, the founder and CEO, tweeted out that Apple had outlawed the metaverse. And his point was exactly the cloud gaming one. And I cite the verge a few times in there with these fun quotes where the Verge basically says arguing about what Apple does or doesn't allow is irrelevant because they can change the rules anytime they want. The Apple constraint here is really profound. They have incredible hard, soft, and often accidental power, and they do work hard to prevent many standards and solutions coming into play. My favorite example, you just teed up what happens with NFT, is let's keep in mind they allow you to buy fungible tokens, ETH on Coinbase, but you can't buy a non-fungible.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's Facebook, right? And I think that set of challenges is very difficult for them. When we talk about hardware, we have to go to Apple next. Apple's very good at hardware. They're very good at performance chips that run a long time in batteries. There are lots of rumors about Apple's headsets out there. But they're pretty bad at ecosystems and playing nice with others. Interoperability. And as you've mentioned with their ad tracking stuff, they're pretty good at locking things down. They're pretty good at preventing innovation from taking place. Game streaming does not exist the way it could because Apple won't allow it on their platforms. OpenSea can't transact NFTs because it'd have to pay Apple a 30% cut. How do you think Apple's doing?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You need battery power. And all of the other things get harder despite that, right? The GPUs are smaller. We see that Facebook is investing in its own semis, and you're right, it's the stack, all of these things need to be solved. We know that Apple is planning up to 12 or 14 cameras. I think the current Oculus has six. Well, maybe you need 12. Maybe you need 14. Every time you put another pair in there, you're going to find that the GPU you thought was going to power experience X can't. It's incredibly hard.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would add you two more, right? It has to actually fit and weigh little enough that you're comfortable wearing it. And it has to not melt your face while you do it. Every single thing that you just mentioned trades off with one another. You want another two sensors that's good for UIX, it drains the battery and the GPU power, increasing the cost, increasing the form factor, generating more heat. Put another way, we take for granted that today's most computationally powerful consumer devices consoles really just need to manage for a few constraints. The size, not really, right? The new PlayStations are four times bigger than the first PlayStation. They don't need to manage for battery. They have constant access to power. They can put fans in there so that the overheating problem isn't that bad. And they know that the build of materials has to cost between $400 and $700. When you're talking about these devices, you have several new problems, size, heat, you can't have a fan.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Said it's the hardest technological challenge. I always think about it as the stack of problems, right? Especially for hourglasses. You need a camera that can see the world around you in sufficient fidelity. That's got to go to a processor that can interpret that data and spit out something good to put over top of it to augment reality. You need a battery that can power that processor and that camera. You almost certainly need persistent connectivity. And then most importantly, you need a display solution that actually works, which doesn't exist yet. Do you think Facebook is on the road to solving any or all of those problems?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“World platforms. This is Horizon versus Roblox Fortnite Creative Mode. And they're simultaneously experiencing decline, not necessarily secular, but decline of the core business, the timing starts to feel tight.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think the biggest challenge and one that Mark has consistently underestimated, it seems, is the timeline for those new devices, which would allow him to get out from the hegemony of Apple in particular, but Apple in Google is probably farther out than was ever imagined. 2015 was the first time Mark said publicly they imagined by the end of the decade, last decade, wearable headsets would replace the smartphone. They have reiterated that this decade. But as you and your colleagues have reported, they've now delayed the first edition three times this decade. We may not see consumer AR hardware until 2526. And he has called it the hardest technological challenge of our era, putting a supercomputer into lightweight wearables. If that is their biggest opportunity to have hardware, to have their own operating system, and they're already sitting behind when it comes to what I call integrated virtual.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, look, the ATT shift from Apple is brutal. The estimated cost of that is $10 billion in operating cash flow in 2022. That happens to be exactly what Facebook Reality Labs was spending on their many projects, various XR devices, wearables, their operating system, the Horizon Worlds platform. Anyone finding out that they're going to have 10 billion less in cash flow is going to have to trim budgets, especially in special projects with limited revenue and probably a negative 80% gross margin overall.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The challenges Facebook in particular has is the economy slowing down. Apple's ad changes when they introduced app tracking transparency or ATT has had huge effects on Facebook's revenue. They're trying to manage this big pivot and the bet on the future. People might buy fewer Quest consoles. They're investing less in future hardware. Do you think they're going to be able to make it through?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you were to talk about number of users, amount of spend, number of developers, amount of developer profits, cultural impact, they're frankly nowhere near leads like Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, Unity on the B2B side. And they have a much harder path to doing that.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would actually say that the Oculus device is pretty open, actually. They support side loading. They don't require a central identity system. You can use alternative payment solutions for sideloaded apps. It's not even sideloading. It's just non-app store direct. And the Oculus is unique in that it's the only mainstream console, effectively, that uses open standard rendering collections, WebGL, OpenGL, WebXR, WebGL. Those are pretty significant. No one else did it. PlayStation 3 did it, and PlayStation has never done it since. But if you're talking about who's ahead, the truth is...”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like you can say, I need 80% of it, but the remaining 20% can go. But I will say that there are some systems for this that are being deployed. JJ Abrams and Aria Emanuel are on the board of a company called Otoi. They have a blockchain-based system called the Render Network. And it is designed to do exactly that. An architectural firm that perhaps doesn't need its high-end GPUs overnight can rent those out on a bid ask blockchain-based system and Hollywood studios do use them. Now, this isn't the expectation of every single person's sitting device is used minute to minute, but at least for industrial use cases on more regular basis with some high-end low-supply hardware, we're starting to see it work. But again, I put this in the, if you woke up in 2045, it might be answered bucket.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I agree with you. I characterize it as the fun one because it remains the elusive one, just like when we talk to peer-to-peer servers for multiplayer games, fun idea, no one's figured out how to do it. There are some technical solutions, of course, one of which could be done necessarily need to congest the neighborhood if you geographically constrain who your GPUs are available to. Of course, you can also have different bidding. One of the problems I talk about in the book is the fact that we actually have very poor systems in TCPIP to manage the prioritization of traffic once it leaves our network. And I'm not talking about paid peering or net neutrality, just literally the ability to differentiate between does this need to be there in 10 milliseconds or 50 milliseconds? But so these are actually more fundamental issues. GPUs, we don't have an effective way to split them.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all right there. We've been chasing it for a minute. That requires right your personal power bill might go up and down in ways that you cannot predict. Your bandwidth might get strained in a way that you couldn't predict. It would be sad if right now our call was diminished in quality because someone was running the GPU in your PS5 at 100%. And then on top of that, at least in this country, the bandwidth required to do that is actually not evenly or equitably distributed, right? Some people have really fast connections. Many people have bad connections. There is virtually no competition for those connections whatsoever. You can make that bet, but you think about how it would play out in practice and it just feels like a lot of people will be selfish, first of all. That seems like a thing you can count on. And then second of all, the infrastructure to actually pull that off does not really exist.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People, Intel, TSMC, who are starting to believe that quantum computing, another idea that has long been considered fanciful, is no longer a crazy thing to believe in and ends up being essential. But then the last and the most fun is decentralized computing, not necessarily in the blockchain sense, but in the solar panel sense. I'm sitting talking to you right now. I have two consoles with incredible GPUs, both sitting unused. There may be someone in my building right now who could use the extra GPU. Right now they either don't have it or they need to rent it from a data center that is expensive and far away thus producing latency. And so do you have a model potentially on blockchain or not that is a more effective system of renting out excess capacity like a solar panel or like And imagines Teslas will do in a self driving.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's three dominant theories here. One is just Moore's law slowing or not continues to improve. And as part of that, we get better at compression. We do start to prune out the inelegant data formats and architectures. Again, like we are moving off of GIF to MP4, lighter, more performant. The second school is really organized around more efficient resourcing. This is the cloud argument. There are problems with it, but the argument would basically be that it's kind of stupid that we put the most intensive computing at the individual user whose device has to be affordable, lightweight, replaced every two to three years versus the power plant approach of saying no one should have a generator in their home. We should deliver it from industrial scale. Again, flaws from it, but that's one argument. And then the third are the bigger punts. There's a large contingent of...”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One of the very hard problems with all of this is the amount of compute that's required. So we're going to render a bunch of persistent virtual worlds that have unlimited maximum capacity and then potentially we're going to run blockchains to manage scarce digital goods inside those virtual worlds. That is a lot of compute. It's more compute than we have right now. Do you see that just coming down because of Moore's law? Is it TSMC is going to figure out the next process node and we're just going to get there? Is it an agglomeration of other kinds of compute? Who builds the stuff? Where does it come from?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interoperability, you need a standard. You need someone to effectively take custody of an object, and you need everyone to agree that they trust it. The big problem that we have right now is EA and Activision don't have a good system to exchange anything. They certainly don't want to use one another's new thing should it exist. And when other aggregators like Steam have tried in the past, no one opts in because the platform is already powerful enough. And so irrespective of whether or not blockchains are actually the ideal solution, they clearly have some revenue attached, speculative or not. They are proving themselves to get a wide collection of different deployed solutions. And at the end of the day, it's not always important whether something's perfect insofar as whether or not everyone uses it. The GIF file format is awful. We've known that for decades.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In addition, there's a good reason to believe that the philosophies at minimum or perhaps the technology at maximum of blockchain are essential or important to the metaverse, which is to say property rights or probably going to be important, they're important to most economies, the ability to tap into decentralized or wide networks of contributors to provide extra GPU cycles or broadband or just time and assets which are currently hard to accumulate from individuals, Patreon-only scales so much. Good reasons to believe that that's important to having a thriving metaverse one we want rather than one that's just technically possible. And so I understand why the two are conflated, but I would say that they're separate. What you're talking about when you're talking about a good technological solution is when you talk about”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I think that there are a few different things that we can unpack here. First and foremost, I and others, Mark Zuckerberg, Tim Sweeney, describe the metaverse as a successor state or quasi-successor to today's Internet. Web3 is so named because it succeeds Web 2.0. If both things come after the current thing, it makes sense that you have conflation”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It feels like everybody wants to conflate them for some reason. Certainly it is trendy in the business world to conflate them, to juice your stock price in some insane way. They're not necessarily connected, but it does feel like the game of what are some use cases for Web3 is best answered by there will be scarce digital objects in the metaverse. There is a connection there in that one of the open technical questions of how these 3D worlds might work and how you might transact in them is actually answered by the blockchain by Web3 technologies. Do you see that connection as directly? Do you think it is just a quirk of timing? Do you think there are other solutions possible?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about Web3 a little bit. We're here. I feel like we've arrived at the Web3 portion of the conversation. The ideas are in parallel, right? The amount of Web3 hype that has happened over the past 18 months is right next to the amount of metaverse hype.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Keeps people inside of a system that they trust more than another. And so even if you believe that the metaverse is a big disruptive next generation internet, if you believe in the wide deployment of blockchain and Web3 to democratize more of the stack, OpenSea is a great example of how we may still end up with no technical barriers to switching, but enormous habit and brand based or IP based stickiness to a few.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, for which there's no simple answer. I mean, these environments are managed centrally. Their permissions are going to be managed deliberately to start. And if we've learned anything from the shutter stock era and Turbo Squid or Quixel or 3D asset databases, the most valuable stuff, the IP, is not easily or cheaply licensed. This is where we get into one of those fundamental questions of decentralization versus centralization. There are good arguments to be made that the last 15 years were too centralized because the Internet Protocol Suite has too little in it. We can get into that one way or another. But there are many forms of centralization that have nothing to do with technology per se. Revenue leads to greater investment and better products. IP centralizes or drives habit and retention.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who controls the access and the connections between those things in your view of the metaverse, right? Because that seems like a very powerful vision. And then I'd start to pull the thread. And it's okay, Disney has rendered out the world of the Mandalorian. And I'm like. I want to put the verge on the world of the Mandalorian. We're going to make print versions of the Verge for the Mandalorian. I can imagine all these things we could do. Feels like I still have to go get permission. Maybe the acid is cheaper, but over time content creation gets cheaper and cheaper anyway. Where does the sort of the technical part of now it's available come from? Because that seems like actually maybe the hardest problem that we've been talking about.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And start to talk about it from, well, Ford has dimensionalized its next Ford escape. And now we want to simulate it in other enterprise environments, in a car park, for parking simulations, for vehicular design. When you say that a hummer vehicle uses its LIDAR sensors to map the local environment, then you can pre-drive that environment in your Land Rover from your car like a video game to make sure that you can make the path. Making all of this information more repurposable starts to have extreme combinatorial effect either by making new creations easier or cheaper.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're quite right. Let me frame it a slightly different way. Entertainment is such a good example, right? You have Disney will spend $100 million producing backdrops in virtual environments for a film. Those are essentially all deprecated. They're increasingly used for the next film, but that's about it. And what does that mean? Well, if Peloton wants to build a Star Wars driving sim, or biking sim, they need to build it all. What does that mean? Well, the business case mightn't be there. In addition, Disney might say, well, we've got to make the thing and then we've got to brand approve the thing. And so we need to charge a lot. And so a lot of this doesn't happen. Once you start to standardize these 3D assets, you start to say, well, we've made this investment. And now we can use it wherever we want, or at least more extensively, without building it anew. When you take that from just consumer leisure,”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT