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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“Like this is beginning to unlock for me in an important way, so Unreal has moved, as you said, into Hollywood. It's moved into cars. You just see this graphical engine appear in more and more places where graphics need to be rendered. And it feels like part of your idea is, all right, you've done all of the work to shoot a movie. I think the Mandalorian did this other big productions have done this, where the background is actually rendered on giant LED monitors behind the actors in Unreal. But the same work that has been done, the same virtual world is now available to Peloton to say we're going to bike through the virtual world of the Mandalorian. And that is somehow an open platform for that kind of development.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A dating simulation to a theme park or to Fortnite, that's probably more useful. But when it comes to your question of visual cohesion, It's not just a question of how do you want to express, it's about what dimensions do you need, what density, pixel density do you have, and the technology in particular from Intel for machine learning to up and downscale is pretty strong. You can take a 2D object and 3Dify it. You can say, you know, the Verge makes virtual shoes that don't separate between the sole and the fabric, but our system can actually separate the two for different designing. A lot of that is going to be interpretive software that takes what is not standardized and modifies it.”
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 number one, the example with emoji is a good one because it's an example of where slow moving standards bodies, even when they are successful, end up being corralled through standard participants who aren't overtly saying here's what the standard should be, but drive all of the other members along. That actually helps with standardization. When you're talking about 3D objects, look, there's a large contingent to believe that the consumer facing 3D objects are less important. bringing your briefcase from one environment to another is less important than having the environment itself useful to more developers to be repurposable, to take the investment that Disney has made into Hoth or Nouveau for the Mandalorian and making that easily used by Peloton for a virtual biking course”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People love the blobs, and Google got rid of them because Apple is dominant and they needed to conform to what Apple Emoji looked like. Do you see that playing out with 3D objects that the way that an outfit or a briefcase looks in Fortnite will eventually come to dominate what it looks like everywhere else?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's the grimace emoji, right? That on Samsung phones for a long time it looked like it was smiling. So Samsung owners were sending people grimaces when they meant they were smiles or vice versa. You have a 3D file format. Everyone's agreed, okay, this is the one. How do you make sure it's rendered across all these systems? Is that just over time where Samsung's going to realize, like, a lot of people are confused by our emoji. We should come together with Apple and make sure they look the same. Google had to go from blobs to faces. Very controversial in Verge world, I point out.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is really profound in the internet. It's so hard to create in 3D. And then you have this question of, okay, well, now the thing that you want to do in 3D, well, your partner to your point is using a different system. Unity in Unreal actually use different XYZ coordinates, if you can believe. It's kind of intuitive to say that at this point, if we've literally had hundreds of billions of dollars in 3D assets invested, which we have, that all of those essentially get deprecated after their first use. That means that we either need to remake them, or we just will never use them. So that's part of the premise here.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of all products in all markets went up. In the social era we easily take for granted that anything we create works everywhere. I create text, audio, video, and I can take it anywhere. I can take a photo with my iPhone. It stores to iCloud. And I don't have to say, well, darn, now I can't put it on Facebook. I can put it on Facebook, right click, save as, upload it to Snapchat, screenshot it on Snapchat, and put it into TikTok. The utility of global commerce and trade, the utility of having common file formats.”
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 just mean, like, one of the weird things is that transition point was actually relatively late, right? Even as late as I think 1996, there were fewer than 50 million Americans who would use the internet in a month, right? And most of that use case was pretty frivolous. When I was in high school, Wikipedia was seen as deleterious, right? It actually worsened education. And so I think that's part of it. What we're seeing here is really network effects in the sense that, and I don't mean to be evasive, partly because we're talking about combinatorial innovation that isn't yet present yet and therefore remains speculative. But I think the fundamental argument would be if you take a look at the world economy as an example, it's not that having independent nations and industries wasn't hugely profitable. It was. It's that the utility of all investments”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, so it's interesting. I mean, to start with, I would personally disagree as to whether or not the utility of the internet was self-evident. I mean, we have the classic Paul Krugman example as late in 1998, specifically about”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has replaced the ability to look up anything. The other day I was cooking and I wanted to figure out how to cook something and I just watched the YouTube video and that was the end of it. I knew how to do it and we were off to the races. Where are the compelling immediate uses of the metaverse that showcase that multiplicative effect beyond you can just get to the Boeing simulation faster?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“back as we talk about the metaverse the thing i keep coming back to is the interconnection between the different worlds to me that's where the value multiplier is that you can build all this stuff as one-offs and all you've really ended up with is aol and compiserve and then you connect those things together and connect them to a hundred different networks and servers and you multiply the value of all of it everyone rushes into it because it's so compelling that you can't say no and then suddenly you end up in 2022 and every now and again i'm like maybe we should turn it off right like it eats the world in a way that seems remarkable but the immediate compelling use of the internet was obvious to everyone in the sense that i don't know you wanted to look up movie times you could just do it faster wikipedia just came into existence and suddenly the encyclopedia britannica seemed unwieldy and old and not up to date anymore and that”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That means that you throw a grenade eight times. You might get seven different answers, somewhat. It's only recently that the fidelity of the simulation, the sophistication of the simulation, and frankly, the investment that EPIC made has made into vertical solutions makes it practical for deployment in healthcare, in military, in education, in automotive. And so we're very early on that deployment curve, then you need to get it right, then you need people to adopt it, and so forth. And that's one of the reasons why we struggle with this odd juxtaposition of talking about the trillion dollar metaverse economy while turning over and saying, right, but we're talking about $200 billion in gaming spend mostly on cosmetics.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two points there. I don't mean to oscillate between the two. My point is rather that when people express skepticism as to whether or not standards and interoperability can be achieved, it's important to say that that progress is happening. We had cross-platform gaming in 2018. We have common account systems and entitlement systems for EPIC. And then we have the Omniverse platform for enterprise. But the fundamental tension that you're talking about”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I feel like we're bouncing back and forth between where the money is now and where the money will be in the future in a way that is to some extent making my head spin. So you are saying the money in the future is not just avatars and skins and items. It's some massive B2B market where the real world is being simulated at a level of high fidelity and some revenue will be created there as different businesses find different things to do to each other. The money right now is very much in Fortnite skins right and like how do you go from one to the other?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what you see with Epic is one potential example. They launched their Epic Online Services. That's a live services suite for independent game developers. And if game developers want to also access Epic's 500 million account user base with 3.5 billion user connections, and at this point, 30 billion in invested avatars and skins, they can, which is to say, just like New York Times taps into Facebook's account system to speed up the user flow, not to say that they don't prefer their own account, but they recognize there's utility in getting some information. You and I can go make a game and then access Epic's avatar suite and its users. Therefore, driving from smaller developers less endowed technically and financially to consolidate around their conventions, their file. Types their engine to tap into their networks.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or Minecraft. It's actually more of a middleware simulation DMZ. It's actually where Dassault and Boeing take their simulations and interconnect them with NVIDIA's machine learning, upscaling, downscaling, translating, and then operating that simulation. But there's a lot of work to do. If you want to talk about what's the progress, A, we do have some standards groups. Again, there's an old XKD joke that basically says what happens when 14 people disagree about 14 competing standards is you get a 15th standard that no one uses. And so I don't want to be too optimistic there.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Most technology problems are only masquerading as technical problems. There are actually business and or societal problems, as in can we agree. In general, most in the games community, and I share this opinion, see limited benefit from taking your gun or avatar from one environment to another. That's not to say that there isn't some utility, and particularly with cosmetics with no functional value. It's easier. But at the end of the day, how important is it that I can wear a banana pee skin in Call of Duty? Probably not that important. And the technical impediments, not to mention the commercial ones, plus creative, are pretty high. When you take a look at industrial simulation, the utility there is a lot higher, but the technical solutions are already in place. You mentioned NVIDIA's Omniverse platform. It's not really a platform in the sense that you would say robot.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“As you describe all this stuff, there are a bunch of very hard technical problems to solve to make this all work. If I build a digital twain on NVIDIA's platform of the airport and then someone builds another digital twin on another platform for the office building, it's not just me, the person who built the digital twin that needs to want to interoperate. The platforms need a core capability to interoperate. If I want to jump from Roblox to Fortnite to keep using that example, those companies have to agree that my avatar can go between the worlds. If I buy a gun in one video game and I want to go to another video game, and that gun is a hundred times more powerful in a second video game, I might just wreck it for everyone. Some of that is technical and a very difficult technical problem. Some of that is cultural. Some of that is straight up business and politics. Have you seen the beginnings of solutions?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I do. My point is that digital twin is more, at least foreseeably, a B2B application, not something that you, the consumer, is going to log into and explore. There's very little practical value right now in you saying, I want to go navigate MIA, that being the Miami airport rather than the code sign in a 3D digital twin. It's not interesting, not useful. It doesn't mean that it isn't super valuable to the operator.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exploring the digital twin of the environment you're in for any purpose. Now, you might wear augmented glasses in 2037, in which case a version of that digital twin is being overlaid selectively to you. But look, I also don't agree with the premise that we're going to be in an airport and then put on a headset or take out our device to go navigate the thing that we're in.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's two things to unpack. Number one is digital twins aren't the metaverse. Much like you would say if the internet is a network of networks, difference autonomous systems, exchanging information consistently under common protocols, then a digital twin is like an office network. It's the Vox Ethernet. It's the interconnection with other digital twins, other simulation for the exchange of information, your user identity, your payment history, your avatar, if you so choose, that is what collectively produces the metaverse. But in this instance, there is not necessarily any utility of you, the consumer.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Connect that to the metaverse for me. This is a concept that is often called digital twins. So you've built a digital twin of an airport, you've built a digital twin of your office building, those are operating, they can proceed down different timelines based on different choices to give you a sense of what might happen if you make physical changes in the world. Do they interact? So someone is going from the digital twin of your office to the digital twin of the airport. Is that where you think the metaverse is? Because I think the idea of simulating physical environments more directly more accurately is very powerful. The idea that then there will be some layer of commerce in those digital twins that is independent of what is happening in the real world seems like the big step.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The physical world, the one that you are standing on, that you exist in right now, that has many of the attributes that I mentioned, persistence, maximum capacity, et cetera. I'll give perhaps two examples are helpful. Nvidia redesigned its headquarters, and what they did was a real-time rendered 3D simulation. And what that was used for was to understand from every design choice. What happens when you put a piece of window in one spot, when you use one construction material or another at exactly three twenty two PM in the conference hall on November twenty second, what's the climate implication? How do you simulate the flow of energy, of heat, the refraction of light to drive energy, right? To operate the building. We're seeing that premise.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Simulation at large. Let me make that less abstract. Jensen Huang, the founder and CEO of Nvidia, now the seventh largest company globally, believes that the economy of the metaverse will eventually exceed that of the physical world. So we're talking 51% right now that would be 50 trillion per year in spending. He's not at all interested in virtual clothes nor leisure at all. He's basically talking about real-time 3D simulations running the world's best development platform, which is the world, a building, infrastructure, where goods flow and why, how you programmatically advertise in 3D space, often for physical things. That doesn't require scarcity of the odd avatar, certainly.”
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 really interesting, and this is where we get into a fundamental break between how different believers in the metaverse actually imagine the value. Just as I'm not a huge believer in, well, not a believer in scarce virtual land that costs thousands, if not millions of dollars, there's probably a pretty low ceiling to virtual goods and apparel. They're usually in support of experiences. And it's the experiences that either drive the underlying value, if that's the case in Fortnite, not the items per se, or it's what we would consider graphics-based computing or”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then you talk about the metaverse and you say, okay, I want to have digital goods, I want to buy and sell things here that creates a world economy that rivals the real world economy. How do you do that without scarcity? How do you just, are we going to DRM all the virtual clothes? There's an element here that it strikes me that you need to create some sort of scarcity if your goal is to buy and sell 3D digital objects at a rate of transaction that mirrors the real world.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The two brilliant things about the internet among all are network effects and zero marginal costs, trying to then say, let's create a next version of the internet that constrains networks through money and that introduces scarcity that need not be there for a virtual plane of existence that doesn't actually need to simulate the real world. Don't get it. And frankly, I don't believe in it yet either.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the 70s, second life, some of the other metaverse style experiences from the 90s, the 2000s with Roblox and later Fortnite, the tone is very different. It's not dystopic. It is creation, exploration, identification, collaboration. Those are all very important. But at the end of the day Don't know that scarcity is that important. This is actually where I think I disagree with many of my peers in the investing community, especially as it relates to the blockchain. I don't really get virtual land, certainly not scarce virtual land.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I agree with a lot of that, and I disagree with some of it. The literature for the metaverse and its kind of antecedents is dystopic. But one of the important reasons why that's the case is because human drama is the root of most drama, which is the point of most fiction, especially science fiction. Put another way, utopias tend not to make for much human drama. And so it's true that when you look at neuromancer, you look at the matrix Ready Player 1, I go down to the 1930s, Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, these virtual planes of existence are not described favorably. Why? And that's the problem. The technologies amoral, the consequences are not. But when you take a look at the actual examples to build these things, whether that's multi-user shared hallucination,”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's like a, I have an instinctive recoil from that in a way that makes me skeptical of the entire enterprise because I think life in the real world is actually rich and rewarding. And I can go out and touch grass and Apple or Google or Facebook or Epic or whoever does not get in the way of me doing that. Like fundamentally, what makes this not the dystopia that it is always described as?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Reason I'm pushing on it is you have described the Metarist now as this parallel reality that you can live in and transact in that will grow an economy that mirrors the world economies because we'll figure out some way to have scarce digital goods and I will come to the blockchain portion of this conversation later, but that's what you're describing. In science fiction, where the word metaverse comes from, That vision is always dystopian. You in the book you refer to Neil Stevenson's Snow Crash a lot and you point out that the metaverse in Snow Crash made life in the real world notably worse. That is the heart of the tension for me is that the idea that we'll build a parallel world and end up with so many brains and that's transacting on other people's platforms.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is 3D oriented and social, that connects into another thing, then you start to get organic kind of alignment around that standard set. The number of examples where someone or even a group says, this is the thing, let's all do it, you're right to be skeptical. Rarely happens that way. It's actually more power-based.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think, look, the latter is more likely, but it's more of an organic process. I mean, the truth of the matter is, if you take a look at one idea that we have long believed would have utility, which is a federated universal identity in digital space, Microsoft tried that multiple times. The.NET framework was the last big time that they tried that, but no one wanted it, right? And it was rarely deployed for many of the reasons you just mentioned. I don't want to use Microsoft's account system. What happened to be the best way to build the de facto standard for identity was Facebook started as a college hut or not. The best way to build A or the metaverse for Epic wasn't trying to build it. It happened to be a battle royale game that wasn't even intended to be a battle royale. That is to say that this process starts from building something tangential.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some point dollars are going to get allocated across whatever the metaverse is and owning the early access points in metaverse seems really valuable. Is this race that we're in now or this amount of hype that we're in now? Is it really about we're going to initiate the customer into whatever the metaverse is and make sure that every time you buy something in another 3D world, we get a 30% cut? Or is it, as you were saying at the beginning, the technical ability to start building an early version of what you might consider the metaverse is there and that is net good. So we should just start doing it and see what happens along the way.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea of a metaverse standards forum is very funny to me particularly because we, you know, in covering consumer technology, you come up against standard bodies all the time. Are hyper political, I would not say that Bluetooth is an example of the tech industry making something great that everyone loves, right? But it's pervasive in its way. The beginning of a standard is great and that early energy is great. I think I'm just pushing on.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Some markets, some products, some countries suffered from time to time, but the network was much stronger. And the last thing that I'll say is, you're right that the Internet could have gone a different way, but we did have many competing internetworking standards. There was a point in time in the early 90s where the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense disagreed. They pushed different standards. The idea that Comcast could email IBM could email Telefonica, could email China Mobile was really not consensus. We had the protocol wars, but network effects and utility won out in the end.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And CEO has been talking a lot about their explicit designs for interoperability. They've open sourced some of their scripting languages. He's even talking about embracing NFTs to take some projects off of Roblox. But last week, the Metaverse Standards Forum was established by the Kronos Foundation, 28 companies from Qualcomm to Epic, Meta, and others, specifically to solve this problem. That is the easiest part coming together. It's not forcing anyone yet to make a concession, to pick something that they didn't advocate for. But this is all in service of expanded network effects, utility. The belief is if 3D objects that are created can be used in more places, if consumers can buy 3D objects or encounter history that has more persistence, more utility, it will grow much like the world economy did through trade, individual instances of compression.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So let's pause for a second. Of course, that wasn't the necessary outcome for AOL. And in fact, we would know now that no matter how successful AOL might have been in expanding its geographic footprint in connectivity, the largest opportunity for them was in horizontal software and services. There's a world where AIM, AOL Instant Messenger, becomes one of the world's most significant communication platforms like WhatsApp or Snapchat. There's a world in which its search engine turns into one of the world's most dominant ad networks. Microsoft is a pretty good example of that. They have never had a smaller share of computing devices, hardware, or operating systems, but they're horizontal business far more valuable than ever. But when you're talking about what's the incentives, first of all, we're already seeing this progress. The Roblox”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I would push on there is that the internet did not have to be built that way and the AOL example is very interesting because AOL did not want it to go that way And the value of AOL plummeted when it went from being a provider of first-party services like chat rooms and groups and email to an ISP that connected you to better versions of those services run by other people. What is the push for epic games or Roblox to enable that connectivity in a way that historically the people who own those experiences, the second they gave them up, they faced a raft of competition. They became kind of like dumb pipes and they disappeared.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, if the definition of the internet at its most basic level is a network of networks, so you are connected to the network at your university or at work or your home network, and you can go out and then connect to Amazon's network of servers and browse Amazon and then leave Amazon and connect to Facebook's network of servers and do Facebook stuff. overarching network of networks. You're saying the metaverse is the same thing. It's the connectivity between multiple different 3D worlds.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, this would be a little bit like saying if AOL ran on multiple different devices and a few different networks, is at the internet? You know, we could say it is, but in particular, if you talked about just AOL services, you would just be talking about a proprietary platform. You wouldn't be talking about a unified experience that spans into industry with myriad different outputs, multiple different servers, domain registrars. The metaverse is really describing that unified experience rather than a single expression, much like we wouldn't say Facebook is an internet or Facebook is the internet. When you're talking about Fortnite, there are certainly a whole bunch of things that don't fit there. It's not actually a persistent experience. There's actually very few people who can connect to it at one point, nominally 100 people in a match, but they use a bunch of cheats that basically mean that they're only really”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's really a question of what is versus what connects to and is part of it. I mean, look, my building in some regard that I'm speaking to you from right now is not the Internet. It's not really on the Internet, and yet it is part of the Internet in one way, shape, or form. Wordle, of course, is mostly locally run on your device. You wouldn't really call it an internet service, but some of it is delivered. When you're talking about the metaverse as a new computing platform, 3D is for me a requirement. We may talk about the internet, but 3D. We may just use the term internet. What matters is really the real-time rendered element, which basically means the world as it exists is legible and changeable to software. And the advent of graphics compute doesn't need to be a game. It's just an expression.”
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 key pieces of that definition is 3D virtual worlds. I've heard other definitions in the metaverse that are a little bit more expansive that get you to the place where Wordle is the metaverse, right? We're all doing it together once a day. We exist in the universe of Wordle, however that universe is defined. But you're saying this has got to be 3D. It's got to be effectively a video game, right? So you get to a place where Fortnite is the metaverse or Roblox or any number of other massively multiplayer online games. Does that count for you?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I cheat a little. I'm actually describing it in much the same way that if you take a look at the definition of the internet, it's TCPIP, the Internet Protocol Suite. The description is what's more helpful. I describe it as a massively scaled and interoperable networks of real time rendered 3D virtual worlds which can be experienced synchronously and persistently by an effectively unlimited number of users, each with an individual sense of presence. What I'm essentially describing is the technologies and capabilities and standards to support what is essentially a parallel plane of existence that spans all virtual worlds and the physical worlds. And from a human outcome, it means that an ever-growing share of our time, labor, leisure, spend, wealth, happiness, etc will exist in virtual spaces.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we got to start at the beginning. There's a couple chapters at the beginning of the book where you talk about that long history and how it has built up to this moment. And then the third chapter is called A Definition Finally, which is great because I feel like the definition of the metaverse really does need that finally moment. What is your definition of the metaverse?”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was really excited about crystallizing that, distilling my thinking into something more concrete, updating the things that I got wrong, making sure that it was comprehensible. But the most important thing was actually social. Every time we have a platform shift, we have an opportunity to change which companies lead, which philosophies, which business models. And I think many people are coming out of the last 15 years dissatisfied with The lack of regulation, the take rates, the role of algorithms, monetization, which companies lead who leads frankly. And so the best way to positively affect that outcome was to be informed about what was next. That's the goal.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What's really fascinating to me about this topic, and thanks for the tee up, I started writing about it in 2018, and that was based on this belief that this truly century-old idea, the term comes from the early 90s, but the ideas span back until the 30s was finally practical. That is to say, we could start building it, we could start trying to realize it. And over the following years, I got smarter in the area. I received more inputs from other people, more projects came to bear. And then suddenly last year it became the word de jour, not just in Facebook renaming themselves, but Google did a reorg, Amazon started redoing job descriptions, many of the fastest growing companies in Media Tech, Roblox Unity, Epic, wrapped themselves around the theme. And yet there was very little actually articulating what it is, why it mattered, what the challenges were.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Do it's my most used app. TikTok is creeping up there, and of course, my screen time doesn't register Fortnite, but it is definitely my primary channel and also where I learn the most as well.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Problem with that, of course, is that no one knows what the metaverse is, what it's supposed to do, or why anyone should care about it. Luckily, we have some help. Today I'm talking to Matthew Ball, who's the author of a new book called The Metaverse and how it will revolutionize everything. It is a very confident type. Matthew is once the global head of strategy Amazon Studios, but in 2018 he left Amazon to become an analyst and actually started writing about the metaverse on his blog. So he's been writing about this for four years, way before all this hype exploded. And he wants the book to be the best resource for understanding the metaverse. Matthew sees the metaverse as the next phase of the internet, not just something you access through a VR headset, although that'll be part of it, but how you'll interact with everything. And as we talk about in the interview, that sort of change is where new companies have the opportunity to unseat the old guard. There's also a bunch of related ideas that might be connected and even really important.”
2022-07-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Is the metaverse going to suck? A conversation with Matthew Ball · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT