Matthew Ball considered a futurist and author of the brand new book, The Metaverse, continues to have very fascinating ideas about where the world is going. In this conversation with Anthony Pompliano, Ball gives us an insight into Metaverse.
Can you share some of your past experiences and tell us how they shaped your views about how the world is going today?
I started my career in deep tech that was aerospace and defence, oil and gas, energy in the mid-2000s. I’m Canadian, so we went through the energy spike, the oil rush, the rise of nickel and other precious minerals in Canada. That gave me a really good foundation for deep infrastructure and technology problems. Those come back when we talk about the metaverse because we’re talking about really sophisticated 3D simulations, far more so than the games that we’re used to playing, but with those same technologies now playing a hand in those problems. But in the interim, I shifted very quickly to the mobile app economy in the early 2010s helping publishers, TV broadcasters, video game makers, music labels, adapt their businesses to direct-to-consumer or at least consumer facing digital products. After that, I was cultivating unique digital first communities, brands, e-commerce businesses. After that I went to Amazon building out one of the world’s largest ever premium media company. All those converged into this idea of the metaverse focussing on a global community of media, of new business models and experiences.
So I think the very first piece of your work that I came across was you talking, I think, through the lens of Amazon Studios, about the movie business, and how the intellectual property was going to be so important. But you then extend it out. Talk a little bit as to how you see the intellectual property that may have just been a movie in the past now seeping into these various media formats. Because I think that, in some way, is the easiest way for people to understand this idea of a metaverse.
So this is really fun. Most of our early advances in technology around entertainment were designed to reinforce that pre medieval gardens were arranged with Gargoyles and other epic statues to bring you closer to that experience. It was to get closer to that supernatural fantastical idea that extends into the 20th century. Of course, we would go see Star Wars in 1977. But for many of us, we would then go home and imagine more of it, we would go into the bathtub as an infant, and play with a Luke Skywalker figurine. What has changed over the past 20 years is what technology can provide in particular, that is live, semi curated by the audience, is nearly persistent, and has a visual fidelity that we’ve never before achieved Gargoyles. If that makes sense, that we can access our stories more often with more people no matter where we are with greater capability. It makes sense that we’re falling deeper and deeper in love with the stories we love most. If you don’t want to see Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, you’d rather spend more time with Captain America, you can in 2022, you couldn’t in 1982.
What’s interesting about this is I think of young kids. And in some way, they are immersed in these worlds. And adults may kind of talk down to them. Is this really what we’re talking about, that there’s all these new surfaces and kind of platforms that we can go to?
So there’s two angles to that. One is to talk about the ways in which we’d stigmatised virtual enjoyment and Sandbox play. You go back five years ago, and it was considered antisocial to come home and spend hours and hours building in Minecraft, it was very much the young millennial version of a 40-year-old man who comes home after work, goes into his basement to play with his trainset. The pandemic has destigmatised that quite extensively, we know that the capabilities, the shared experiences, the creative expression is extraordinary. And so that’s a big part of that, we know that everyone likes to imagine fictional worlds. But we were basically told that after you’re 12, unless you’re talented and professionally focused on it, you shouldn’t do it. But the second part is industry. The technologies which run game engines, game physics, game rendering today, are now being used to live operate the buildings you walk into, when you go into the Hong Kong International Airport… That is the much bigger opportunity for the metaverse.
What are some of the things you’re most excited about—whether it’s new platforms or specific pieces of technology—that you think people may not really understand in terms of how quickly this is going to accelerate?
The example that I just used about the Hong Kong International Airport is such a fun one, because there’s this eerie gap between what is the world’s most valuable asset class. And that is real estate. And what is the world’s largest and most successful development platform, which is the world itself, and how online real estate.
(The conversation has been edited for brevity)
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