(52) The Ultimate Guide to the Metaverse | Matthew Ball - YouTube

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• the fact that the metaverse comes from 1992 in

• snow crash but of course the ideas of a virtual plane of existence effectively parallel to the real world that spans back nearly a century into the 1930s where we have the first science fiction novels to discuss vr ai environments and nurseries actually building and living out life in simulated worlds i define the metaverse as follows a massively scaled and interoperable network of real-time rendered 3d virtual worlds which can be experienced persistently and synchronously by an effectively unlimited number of users each with an

• individual sense of presence while supporting continuity of data such as identity communications payments objects and history what i'm effectively doing is describing where i started which is a parallel plane of existence we've thought about the metaverse in some way shape or form or name for a century but it's only recently that we have the requisite mix of technologies to pull it off

• ultimately the term is not that important i talk about the metaverse as in a single unified experience akin to the internet we don't say an internet we don't say the facebook internet but whether or not we use the term the metaverse or metaverse whether or not we talk about the internet the decentralized internet virtual existence in china they use the term hyper-digital reality it doesn't matter we're ultimately just talking about an observation that an ever-growing share of our time labor leisure spend

• happiness wealth life is going to be inside virtual environments

• i've heard you use this analogy on almost defining the metaverses as being comparable to asking someone to explain the mobile internet right uh people struggle with this they're then inclined to define it really just on their personal experience right so your average person like i might explain mobile as like well it's my iphone right like i've got uber and snapchat and things like that a

• developer might talk about the standards and the protocols and if you ask that to someone in the 1990s like good luck getting a smooth answer out of them um so when i hear you explain it like that it feels like your comparison is uh i almost started to think about like where the metaverse lives on the tech stack right so you would compare the metaverse to the internet rather than like uh like facebook or microsoft um so so that's kind of the analogy right is is comparing it to there's one internet there is one metaverse yeah

• we're thinking about it from the protocol stack perspective the technologies and experiences which create a field of other things mostly at the application layer right that analogy that you're referring to i really like because the internet does mean different things to different people or at least it's described differently and that is partly a reflection of how many things make up the internet and are required for the internet and partly a reflection of the enormous impact that it has had it is extraordinarily

• relevant to a healthcare professional as an investment banker as a teacher as a network engineer but in very different ways and this is where we get into this question of decentralization centralization what is in the stack versus what is at the application layer those are all different questions right how do we operate the internet and how concentrated is engagement on the internet are both separate questions but also codependent

• so i think that there's really two different elements here one is the social elements and i'm not going to use this to litigate against any one perspective because i'll get to exactly why there are varying answers in a second but we always have compression of timing of urgency you know you're talking about satya nadella microsoft bill gates has this famous adage where he says that we overestimate what we can do in three to five years but dramatically

• underestimate what we can do beyond that and yet ultimately narratives shift to the time horizon the now tomorrow over morrow not years from now and so i do think that as we went through the rush in 2021 which coincided with such a rapid j curve in nfts that there was a tendency to talk about the transformation as if not present certainly imminent a

• there's no individual answer i like to talk about the mobile internet if you ask someone when was mobile here we generally believe somewhere in the late 2000s but there's no literal answer 1973 we have the first mobile network call 1991 we have the first wireless digital network that was 2g in norway but only in norway 1992 we have the first smartphone from ibm if you can believe it 1999 we have wap wireless application protocol that's what made primitive

• versions of the web accessible on a mobile device older listeners will remember when the mobile internet was a white background with red purple and blue text when you clicked a link by the early 2000s we hit the first mobile centric content median services companies primarily in japan then we have the iphone in 2007 the iphone 3g which had 3g and the app store and somewhere after that we said mobile was here but there's no literal answer there was no before and after we can't specifically say mobile arrived on this day

• we can say that by sometime in the early 2000s that era had arrived we lived in it the more relevant question is when was it too late when did you have to start investing okay let me here i'll give you my i'll give you my version of when of when mobile really started and i think there are three there are three time periods to look at and and two of them are what you said so the first is 2007 when the iphone launched the second is 2008 when the app store launched but i would say that

• mobile really was here to stay when in early 2012 zuckerberg redirected all of facebook if you remember that uh redirected all of facebook to focus on mobile he basically abandoned his laptop started working primarily from from from his phone made he forced pms to disable all their own desktop versions of facebook forced them to instead use the mobile versions so that felt like the that felt like the the turning point for mobile and and maybe maybe you might argue that was a little late

• that's that's a funny point in reference certainly facebook changing its name to meta platforms is as much of a mic drop declaration as we've seen in decades past it was at the time the seventh largest company on earth i actually like to use this to highlight how it's different from buzzwords past we're all familiar

• with words being hyped up long before they're possible or practical drone internet or autonomous vehicles buzz words that came and went and weren't what we expected them to be 3d tvs not disruptive no one wanted them and yet those comps don't actually fit here no one renamed themselves 3d tv not least of all the seventh largest company on earth the other day mckinsey published a report saying and this is not speculative it's based on their math that 30 billion will be spent by the big five companies on the metaverse this year

• they estimated that private equity vc and big tech at large would spend 130 billion this year in 2021 we saw before mark ever uttered the word publicly tencent unveil its metaverse initiative hyper digital reality we saw microsoft in may of 2021 unveil their metaverse stack we saw this absolute rush unity and roblox both wrapped themselves around the theme of the metaverse at the end of 2020 in early 2021 the biggest gaming ipos of the past decade and by the end of 21 they were the two largest companies except for

• tencent and conglomerate such as microsoft and sony in that field and so i absolutely agree with you that that mic drop singular moment was so much around the i think october 27th name change but it was a culmination of many many reinforcing trends which frankly probably gave mark the confidence to make that name change in the first place

• first and foremost i want to stress that my opinion would be that we shouldn't think about centralization versus decentralization you never get just one or the other and a good version of that is the first web 1.