Offline with Jon Favreau - What the F*** is the Metaverse?

Episode Date: July 17, 2022

For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.

the image of all of us sitting in our homes with headsets on or glasses on for 90% of our lives, because our virtual lives are more important than our real lives, will keep me up at night. Well, so John, let me hit you with one more thing, because I think it's important. I often hear this criticism of we're just going to sit at home like the characters of WALL-E strapped to a device and do nothing. There's that funny Icelandic video where they say like, don't visit Iceland in VR, come hike Iceland. We are TV species. The average American is awake for 14.4 hours and that spans work, leisure, and necessity. We watch an average of five and a half hours of TV per day. The average

American does. 75% of that is done alone. It's almost all done sedentary, just sitting there. Hollywood talks about TV as lean back entertainment as though disengagement is good. When you factor out the fact that the average American spends six and a half hours per day working, then the hour and a half you're commuting, the 45 minutes you're eating, we do nothing but TV and essentially nothing but TV alone. I personally think shifting from TV to a more social, immersive, engaged environment is a positive thing, not a negative thing, but that's separate from whether or not we should be going outside.

I'm Jon Favreau. Welcome to Offline. Hey, everyone. My guest today is Matthew Ball, author of the upcoming book, The Metaverse and How It Will Revolutionize Everything. So I want to spend less time online. If you're listening to this podcast, hopefully you do too. So when I saw that Facebook was rebranding to Meta so that it can help build a metaverse where we'd all spend 90% of our waking hours plugged into a VR headset, I was not thrilled. Between the disinformation, the harassment, the dopamine addiction, and the slow but steady destruction of global democracy, being online hasn't exactly been a pleasant

experience lately. Why would anyone want to spend even more time on the internet, let alone in a virtual reality created and controlled by Mark Zuckerberg? On the other hand, what if I'm wrong? What if one solution to all the failures of the internet is to make all of our online interactions look and feel more like they do in the real world? What if someone other than Mark creates the next iteration of the internet? And what if the metaverse isn't just living out the rest of our days strapped into a VR headset? These are some of the questions that my friend Matt Ball has been asking.

Matt's a technologist who's been thinking and writing about the metaverse long before Facebook changed its name. And his new book about that topic is out this week. In it, Matt makes the case that the Metaverse will radically reshape society, changing our lives, our labor, and our leisure. But he also makes the case that there's no reason we have to make the same mistakes with the Metaverse as we did with the 2D internet. He argues that the Metaverse can complement our reality, similar to the way our mobile devices complement our personal computers today. We talked about what the metaverse actually is, how it's technically already here, what meta and other big tech companies are up to,

and some unexpected ways that the metaverse could help us improve our offline reality. For me, the conversation was a great introduction to the metaverse. And while I'm still not sold that we won't fuck it up, I can at least see how we might be able to avoid that. As always, if you have any comments, questions, or concerns, please email us at offline at crooked.com. And please remember to like, review, and share the show. Here's Matt Ball. Matthew Ball, welcome to Offline. I'm really excited to be here.

So I want to start with an admission that's somewhat embarrassing considering how long I've known you and known that you are an expert on this issue. When I think about the metaverse, I still think about a virtual reality version of Mark Zuckerberg looking and sounding like an absolute goober. And that's it. That's like all I have. You have frequently made the point that the metaverse isn't virtual reality. VR is just one way to experience the metaverse. So help me out here. Like, what is the metaverse? A question that I'm sure you get every single interview all the time. Well, let me start by saying I can help you out by saying you have a common response. You actually have a response that is to the consternation of many people trying to build or contribute to the metaverse, which is a feeling that that narrative, the term has been co-opted, at least in the minds of consumers who now inextricably link a much broader idea to a specific person, a specific company, a specific product line,

and frankly, a specific visual. None of us went through the internet really thinking of it as a specific company's expression, even though AOL, AT&T, and IBM tried to own it end-to-end. They were almost so early that none of us had to say, wow, I don't want that thing. Everything that technologists are excited about is just this company's product. And so that's common. But so we should think about the metaverse really as the internet, but in 3D. There are limitations to that definition, but let's put the internet in

context. It spans 40,000 different networks, over 4 million domain registrars, 20 billion different devices, nearly 7 billion people. And on top of that, it supports 20% of the world economy, according to the UN. That's irrespective of any one company, any one technology stack, any one device, software, browser, web page. That's what we want to think about, but in three dimensions. What Mark is seeking to do is be a leader in that space, the way that he was an early leader in the consumer internet, an early leader in the mobile internet, but also migrate what is today a predominantly advertising and web and app-based business into a hardware company,

into an operating system as well. So I want to get to Mark in a little bit, but just to sort of drill down on, okay, so the metaverse we should think of as the next generation of the internet that's in 3D. What are some examples of 3D spaces that exist today that could be described as part of the metaverse? So there are really two different ends that we should look at. One is your Roblox or Minecraft example. Now, these are flawed examples in the sense that talking about AOL or the Yahoo portal in the 1990s was the easiest way to articulate the internet, but we know that it was wholly inadequate. It's consumer-focused, it's finite, it doesn't speak to the economic significance. But when you take a look at Roblox or Minecraft, you're talking about tens of millions

of different interconnected worlds that you can transport yourself to seamlessly with great diversity, with industrial applications, entertainment applications, educational applications. Can you explain for listeners who don't know what Roblox and Minecraft are, what they are, listeners and potentially hosts of this show for sure so think of roblox as youtube but for three-dimensional worlds it is designed so that truly someone at the age of six seven eight can create their own virtual space they can operate it they can populate it with millions of people around the world with rich imagery functionality much like we would say a YouTuber can instantly create a video and share it around the world. And I have read this, that some crazy high percentage of young people are using Roblox already right now.

Are they experiencing this with VR headsets? How do they experience these worlds? So this is a good way to separate virtual reality headsets as a requirement from what is actually true today, which is we have 250 million people who use Roblox each month. Over 55 million people use it each day for an average of two and a half hours. Roughly 60% of those users are under 13. In the United States, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Australia, Canada, 75% of children between the ages of 9 to 12 use it on a weekly basis. Wow. Okay, so that's a lot of people. To my question, how are they using it? Are they looking at a screen? Do they have a they using it are they using it are they looking at a screen are they do they have a headset on almost none of them are using a headset

ah okay they're all using the devices that we have available today but it's just 3d worlds right i mean one of the fun things is look virtual reality actually just refers to any computer simulated virtual environment. Super Mario in the 1980s, that's a virtual reality. It is a reality that exists only virtually. We typically use the term virtual reality today to refer to immersive virtual reality headsets. The technology is actually no different. It's like going to a 3D movie. What you're seeing with a headset is actually just two different displays, not unlike you would see on an iPad, except duplicated to provide perspective. It seems immersive. And then your head can move rather than just your thumbs.

That's a presentation and an interface decision. It's actually not technologically that different. Because you can look directly at just a screen like you would today with any device and still look into a three-dimensional world. Correct. And hundreds of millions of people are each day. Billions of people are each month. So these are examples involving gaming that we just talked about, Roblox and Minecraft. What does the metaverse beyond gaming look like so we're so deeply anchored to gaming because it's the closest that we can experience today and that leads to a common criticism which is kpmg city bank mckinsey pricewaterhousecoopers goldman sachs morgan

stanley they talk about this being a 5 to $12 trillion per year part of the global economy in 2030. Wow. That would make it 40% of GDP growth over the next decade. When you factor out just baseline growth in energy, in automotive, in resources, it's an even larger share, right? Those things just go up on a secular basis. And so it's weird to talk about the metaverse given gaming is a $200 billion industry. And so what we're seeing right now

is the rapid expansion of technologies historically limited to gaming into other fields. The Hong Kong International Airport runs on what's called the Unity Engine. If you've ever played a mobile game, there's three quarters of a chance that it was running on Unity. And they use that to simulate the entire building in 3D in real time. They did that so that they could design better up front, what happens if there's a fire, a flood, a terrorist incident, but also so that they could

better operate the building. We're all reproduced live when we walk through but also so that they could better operate the building. We're all reproduced live when we walk through it so that they don't have to say, if gate 82 is closed, let's move everyone to gate 84 because it's close. We can say, what are the implications of moving people from 82 to 84 and back? How does it impact density of people in the building? How does it cascade into boarding times, to tarmac congestion? Then they start to expand it even farther. How does that impact the local lights grid so that we can actually manage the flow of traffic in and out of an emergency? And so we shouldn't think of the metaverse just like touching a video game, much like we don't just think of the Internet as Facebook. When you span a crossing walk, odds are that information is on the Internet.

When you check out at a grocery store, that payment is being managed over IP as well. So what are some other practical everyday examples of what you might be able to do in the metaverse like what what problems are we looking for the metaverse to solve that the 2d internet or mobile internet cannot solve so there are two fields that we can go down one is education and one is actually environmental concerns i talked a little bit about how we were using the Hong Kong International Airport to better simulate the flow of people and the implications. But we're also using 3D simulations to become much better at overall infrastructure investments. Do you recall a few years ago, they talked about this building in the UK where a few days of the year, the light refracts off this tower and it melts cars on the sidewalk?

I vaguely remember this story, yes. So we can now simulate this. It's called graphics-based computing. And so we have buildings that are designed to perfectly simulate how energy is used in the building. Where is air? Not just how does air flow, but on November 22nd, if you have 18 people in the building, what's the likely temperature and humidity in the facility? Then how can we extend that back so that we can better build that facility? We're now deploying this technology to say, if we build a building that's 17 stories versus 14 stories, how do we affect local congestion, emergency response times? Should we put the car park on the north or the south?

What happens to the illumination in a local public park? How does the choice around density, but also traffic, impact local retailers who both want more people around, but they need free mobility of individuals? We are in a sense making the physical world legible to software and then using that to make better investments as part of the network. So energy, efficiency, infrastructure, planning, these are all areas where 3D models can actually really

provide a lot of value and seem like they are already doing that. Like, I guess that's another big question. It doesn't seem like the metaverse is something where, okay, now we're all in the metaverse before we weren't. And there's like an on and off switch. It seems like sort of a gradual move into sort of an evolution of the internet that we have now. Is that right? Totally. It's diffuse. We think of these eras in very binary terms, mobile versus the personal computing era.

But they unfold over decades. The first mobile cellular call was in 1973. The first data wireless network was 1991. The first smartphone in 1992. By the late 90s, you probably remember, we could access primitive versions of the mobile web. You go to BBC or New York Times, you get a white background and blue, purple, and red links. In the early 2000s, we have the first consumer, BlackBerry's, the Curve, and the Pearl. And in 2007, the first iPhone, 2008 the second iPhone, the 3G. That was the big hit device, the first with an app store. A few years later half of Americans have a smartphone, a few years

after that half of the world over 13 does, but there was no clear point when did mobile arrive. We instead see incremental improvements, but I think the more important question is, you highlighted efficiency and infrastructure, and obviously those are really important. We've talked previously about the ways in which infrastructure ends up being overtly or accidentally racist, to put things lightly. We have a better ability to understand

how we will affect every constituency when we're building. But there are more overt opportunities to use this technology for good. I like to focus on education for three reasons. First and foremost, it's not just financially valuable, it's societally essential. Two, we have long expected to disrupt the education space. Harvard would come out with a degree that has all of the imprimatur of its in-person class, but is one tenth the cost and reaches 100 times as many people. It hasn't happened. The result of this is education is actually showing the greatest cost inflation of any part of the US economy since the Internet was invented.

Health care is up 600%. Education is up 1,200% at the high school level, 1,400% at the collegiate level. And that's because we've learned a lot. We're not better at teaching students in the same amount of time as before. We don't teach more students per teacher effectively than before. We don't use fewer resources to teach than before. And during the pandemic, we realized how much we try to do at distance doesn't work. A student misses the teacher's eye contact. They miss their peer beside them. They miss the ability to touch a building block to dissect a cat, creepy though that

may sound. And so the idea of saying we can create virtual simulations with tactility, with responsiveness, starts to make sense. The magic school bus becomes realizable. Not every school board can afford feral cats and not every student gets to dissect one. But a virtual simulation that is not only as accurate as the surgeons which use those same technologies to perform spinal or heart surgery today, but allows you to travel its circulatory system. That can actually have a profound impact on exactly what I just mentioned, how quickly we can educate, how many students we can educate with the same resources,

and the reach of a teacher. That's fascinating to me because we've talked on this show before too about, you know, I think the pandemic was an example of how technology sort of massively failed us and that people thought that remote learning, distance learning could somehow, like, I don't think anyone thought it was as good as in-person learning, but people didn't realize, I think, the chasm between of correct the problems of remote learning that that the internet could not that the 2d internet could not do you think that's all that we were missing for remote learning like what what would that look like what would like an a metaverse sort of classroom look like would it just be like a virtual reality classroom kind of? Well, so there's a bunch of things that are really fun here.

And you're right. So many of these are observations. We mostly expected distance education to scale better than it did. But we can also observe other things. The field of holography or holographics sounds like it's from the Jetsons because it is. But it exists now. The problem is the devices are very expensive and they're huge. But the studies peer-reviewed show that just having what we call volumetric video displays, that is to say, I have dimensionality. You're

usually taking multiple different camera feeds so that you have texture to my existence. You're presenting it on multiple different tapestries rather than a single 2D screen. The results are extraordinary. 30% improvements in retention, 20% increases in nonverbal forms of communication, moving your hands, a 50% increase in eye contact. And that's one of the big things we know misses in remote education. It's not great for any of us, least of all a 12-year-old, to look at their teacher as one of 25 Hollywood squares as their friends try to pretend that they haven't minimized the tab to go play another game. And so just holography, 3D presentation, has been very clearly shown to improve intimacy, retention, interaction, and commitment.

You then start to say that the actual tools for education have improved. I learned about physics, I remember it, from watching a NASA commander drop a feather and a hammer on the moon. You've probably seen this video yeah and then my teacher did the same thing and you're trying to understand how that is that's always going to be an evocative example but kids today can't really play with physics now and fortnite and roblox do this you can produce extraordinarily realistic simulations of a Rube Goldberg machine, but not just on Earth, but on Mars, on the moon, on the clouds of Venus. Tactility matters. Connection matters. Immersion matters. That's never going to mean that sitting in a classroom with 15 other peers and a teacher a few feet in front of you is going away but it does

afford a lot more opportunity that today our answer for those who don't have access to adequate teaching resources is just there's a lot on youtube so it doesn't go that far just to back up for a second how did you become one of the world's uh most foremost experts on the metaverse talk to me about your your journey into the metaverse when did you become one of the world's foremost experts on the metaverse? Talk to me about your journey into the metaverse. When did you first become interested in this? So the term comes from 1992 and Neil Stevenson's snow crash. But the ideas span nearly a century earlier. You have Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, and others writing about these very ideas.

I've been familiar with them since the early 90s. I've experienced many of the early efforts to build it. Second Life is the one that most people are familiar with, if not Roblox. But in 2018, I started to get the sense that this long-considered fantastical idea was starting to become a practical business opportunity. And so I started writing about it, investing in the area, starting to produce content that I thought would be fun or interesting, part of that far-out metaverse. And then suddenly, as we all know, by 2020 and then especially 2021, it became one of the most singular buzzwords used in business. That's as much a surprise to me as it is anyone else. But that's kind of how I landed here. And when did you begin to realize that the metaverse, as you say in the title of your book, will revolutionize everything?

So between us and, of course, all of the listeners, I will say it's not my favorite title, but it's one of those places where I defer to my expert, and I mean this sincerely, my expert publishing and publicity team at Norton Live Right. They do push you on the subtitles. They want you to have a subtitle that really pops. They do.

It has to stand out in the airports, they tell me. Yeah, that's right. I hear that. Look, I do sincerely believe it. And that's ultimately why I stood behind it, even if it's a little bombastic. And that's because we've gone through three eras of computing and networking.

The mainframe era began in the 1950s, ran to the 1970s. In the early 1980s, we get the advent of the personal computer and the internet. And over the past 15 years, we've been in the mobile and cloud era. Every time we change who accesses computing and networking resources, when, where, why, and how, we see fundamental revolutions in almost everything. Mobile is such a good example. We think of the innovation being compressing a large computer into a pocket-sized device. The fact that we used to log onto the

internet, now we have inches away access to it at all times. But what was profound about that was what then happened. Who accessed a computer or the internet? Two of the most incredible resources we've ever created changed. Where you did it changed, when you did it, and why. And so when we take a look at the metaverse 3D persistent simulations, a quasi-parallel plane of existence, we know enough about the problems we've struggled to solve and that will soon be possible. We know enough from young people, we talked about Roblox earlier, about how fundamentally different their habits and expectations are. And we've seen some of the early use cases, the Hong Kong International Airport,

Johns Hopkins now performs surgery using XR devices on live patients, spinal surgery, one of the most tricky there is, to then start to expand it out into other categories. Can you talk about how Johns Hopkins does that? How do they perform spinal surgery via 3D? So first of all, the neurosurgeon who did it, I think it's Timothy West, Dr. Timothy West, talked about it as being like driving a car with GPS for the first time. And I love this analogy because there's a tendency to think of the metaverse as replacing everything, partly because of how Zuckerberg has portrayed it. You're not going to go to work anymore. You're going to strap a VR headset on and go to a VR boardroom. I don't think that's fun. I don't think it has much utility. It makes

sense if you and I are going to go do a biopharmaceutical experiment. We're going to go tour a building, but I don't think it helps in a meeting. But we don't drive GPS instead of a car. We drive a car with GPS. It complements what we do today. I still use a personal computer. I wrote my book on one. That doesn't mean I don't also use a mobile

device they complement one another and so in the case of surgery here robots didn't perform the surgery but they produced a simulation to individual to the user using x-rays and other ultrasonic devices to understand the interior composition of the patient, then to overlay that with real-time diagnostic information, then to monitor in real time the responses from what the surgeon was doing. Think of this very much like saying the Hong Kong International Airport was put into a living 3D simulation. So too was this patient's vital systems. Ah, that makes a lot of sense. One more thing I've been wondering about too is

what is the difference between the metaverse and Web3? Because I feel like sometimes those two terms are used interchangeably, but they are different. I'm glad you asked this one because I found myself as the metaverse guy right around the time in which Web3 became huge. And so everyone kind of assumes that I believe deeply in crypto totality. We've solved for injustice through the blockchain. Crypto totality, I like that.

We have to buy virtual plots of land and use Bitcoin to pay down the mortgages for both our real home and our virtual home. Those are certainly not beliefs that I hold, but there are good reasons why those two terms are conflated. Web3 describes a recomposition of the internet as we know it and therefore would succeed it. The metaverse is understood as the next evolution of the internet. Two things which succeed the current thing are naturally conflated. The Web3 movement is primarily talking about decentralized networks and databases. Today, we mostly use centralized databases and services. Twitter is one, Google is another, Apple is another. We put a lot of power into platforms and so-called aggregators, and the Web3 movement wants to push that all out to the individual.

This is why we have the common terms of custody, the idea that you should take literal possession of your data rather than permit someone else to capture it. The metaverse, meanwhile, is talking about a 3D version of the internet, a real-time simulation that we all participate in. At the end of the day, those two things may be coincident because technological change and societal change tend to have interplay. One produces or enables the other or the other responds to the other. But we're essentially talking about decentralized and distributed servers, databases, storage versus 3D.

All right. So let's talk about a centralized platform that believes very much in the metaverse. And that is a company run by Mark Zuckerberg now called Meta, who has just refocused, renamed his entire company based on this concept. That sort of fills me with dread considering what Facebook has unleashed on humanity. But like, why do you think Mark made such an early definitive move on this? So first and foremost, there was certainly the cynical perspective that this was about

regulatory misdirection, about shedding a name that had become tainted, about trying to signal a new era before the company had fundamentally changed. Parts of that argument are obviously valid. We certainly can't falsify them. But he has been working on this for quite some time. A year after Instagram was purchased, they bought Oculus for twice as much as Instagram. They tried to buy the world's largest gaming software company in 2015. We know from a memo that leaked last year that in

2018, they considered the metaverse, quote unquote, theirs to lose, which starts to creep into your fears. And so this is not a new belief for Mark. But the other thing that's interesting is there are five big tech companies, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. Facebook is the only one which doesn't have its own hardware, doesn't have its own operating system, and it has been uniquely stymied as a result. This year, the consequences of Apple's privacy changes will shred 10 billion alone from their bottom line. They've tried to launch a creator platform, but it's very hard to pay a creator much when Apple takes 30% first, and then they need to take a cut. No one's going to sign up to say, yeah, for every 10 bucks you sell me, I'll get 44 bucks back.

And so they seem to be specifically exposed to the problem of intermediation. And they see in virtual reality and augmented reality handsets an opportunity to get out from the Google and Apple hedging. So they want to own the headsets, basically. They saw that in mobile internet, Apple owned the phones

and was controlling their apps. They didn't like the idea that the Facebook app only exists on Apple phones or Samsung phones or something like this. And so they want the hardware for this next generation of the internet so that they can have a bigger foothold. So, right, that is the fair view.

But if you take a look at what's happening in the EU that Senator Klobuchar is also advocating for, there's an increasingly large amount of evidence that shows apple and google are able to wield their influence over the hardware to deeply disadvantage their competitors oh that's interesting so what do you think of the version of the metaverse that facebook that meta is uh is building because we talked about this at the beginning but like when i think of sort of the mockery that goes along with the metaverse again i think of zuckerberg being like yeah look now we can all sit in a virtual room together and have a meeting and to me that seems like a fucking ridiculous use case i also saw there was

this you know like viral video that went around when when meta announced of like what walmart shopping might be like in the metaverse and you're you're in this virtual reality walmart you're walking around you're picking stuff off the shelves and it's like okay well i could just go to the website and just like click a bunch of shit and buy it that way why am i like going into a virtual reality store and picking stuff off the shelves um so like what do you think about how meta is building the metaverse so far so there's a weird irony in meta's representation of the next generation internet. Let's take a step back to the first iPhone. We tend to forget how weird it was. The first notes app was yellow with red lined paper

because that's what a notebook looked like. Why wouldn't a digital one look like that? The first calendar had stitching as though you would ever need to physically sew something inside of software. The games table looked like a blackjack table with green felt. It took four years before they shed that. Steve Jobs, one of the most brilliant interface designers and hardware designers on the planet, thought that you should have stitching in a diary and yellow paper in a notes application.

We almost always start the next wave when we have a new medium, a new form of expression saying, let's make the thing that we know and couldn't do before. And later we end up shedding that. We call that skeuomorphic design. But the irony here is Facebook is actually the best counterexample. In the 90s and early 2000s, there were many companies that believed having some form of de facto universal identity on the internet would be useful. Microsoft tried twice. You might remember it was called.NET. Everyone should get a. dot net id and then everyone was like i don't want microsoft to be my passport why would i do that what ended up being the de facto identity online was your facebook id and where did facebook come from a college hot or not application that turned out to be an easy way to look at your friends photos and

to send messages so Facebook didn't seek out to become an identity Network or ad Network it was just to see who was hot in your dorm and that was the onboard and now in the metaverse it seems like they're succumbing to the exact reverse of saying wouldn't it be nice if your ikea living room existed in virtual space most people like not not really but you don't have legs so you don't even need to sit on the couch i mean is it possible for meta to own the metaverse it doesn't seem like that from how you're describing the metaverse and how how might it work like would we all be users in facebook's metaverse would could there also be like an amazon metaverse a microsoft metaverse like how does that actually work and and what are what are some of the

potential financial opportunities for these companies aside from owning the hardware as we talked about so we should put this in context. No one owns the internet, nor do we use the term the Facebook internet, the Google internet. But certainly those companies have disproportionate influence over the internet and the global economy. And that's actually far in excess of where we typically assume the numbers are. The digital economy, the UN estimates to be roughly 20 trillion. The big five tech companies have one and a half trillion in total revenue. That's actually a fairly modest share of what is overall one fifth of the world economy. And yet their influence goes much broader.

Every airline ticket you buy, typically running through the Google system, you're buying that ticket on an Apple device. Apple mandates exactly how the application operates. And so the first perspective is actually just to recognize that we may not exist in the meta-metaverse or the Amazon metaverse, but we shouldn't underestimate how much soft, hard, and often accidental power they have over the global economy. But at the end of the day, each of these players are fighting to provide the hardware, to be the payment provider, to be your digital passport to the world.

So clearly, when it comes to the 2D internet governments particularly the u.s government hasn't done a great job of regulating uh some of these big companies uh and we have seen the effects of that over uh the last several years do you have any optimism that governments will get their act together this time as we're heading into the uh the metaverse era I have optimism yes I think look we've come out of 15 years of the mobile and cloud era and we're contending with many really profound issues missing disinformation toxicity harassment abuse the role of algorithms data data rights, data security, data literacy, radicalization. The list is pretty daunting, but I think that we are more cognizant of those problems than ever before. And intra-cycle change is really hard. Getting Apple to change is hard.

Getting us all to move from the Apple ecosystem or from Facebook to a competitor that doesn't exist and isn't quite good, that's all hard. But fundamental change in which companies lead under which philosophies and paradigms, that's a feature of cycle change. Microsoft got kicked out almost entirely out of the mobile era. And so one is to recognize we have this rare, and by that I mean every decade and a half or two decade change, or opportunity to change who leads. The second thing is regulators, more than I've ever seen before, do have a handle on the problems today, and a sophisticated one, not just a question of

who has what share in devices, but what power comes from that share of devices. And the third is to recognize that we don't have to fully rely on the United States. When you take a look at the EU, the EU is pushing for such broad shifts into digital ecosystems, supported at the same time by changes in Japan and South Korea, that it may soon become impractical for these global giants to truly fork or split their platforms. And so even the specter of some clampdown in the United States, which we're seeing from Klobuchar's office, plus actual enforcement abroad, is going to mix this up.

So I do have a concern that goes beyond what government regulation can solve, which is sort of our individual relationship with the Internet, which is what this show is about. The dangers of spending too much time online, what it's doing to our brain, our relationships, our politics, our culture. Back when Zuckerberg first announced meta, there was this viral Twitter thread I'm sure you saw from tech entrepreneur sean perry who said quote soon some company will make smart glasses that sit in front of our eyes all day will go from 50 attention on screens to 90 that's the moment in time when the metaverse starts because at that moment our virtual life will become more important than our real life um that sounds like a fucking nightmare to me do you but do you think that will happen and are you worried about that happening so let me tell a fun story tim sweeney is the founder and ceo of epic games which makes fortnite famously sued apple the most valuable company on earth arguing severe antitrust issues. He said in 2016, before anyone, myself included,

was really paying attention to the metaverse as a realizable or imminent tech wave, that if any one company should gain control of the metaverse, they would be more powerful than any corporation or state on Earth. They would be like a god. Now, what's funny about that is and i'll get to the terrifying part you're already there when the court for northern california found in its judgment largely against epic in apple last year they found as a point of opinion that the court

generally finds tim's beliefs to be sincerely held you juxtapose that with jensen huang who's a not particularly well-known founder of a company called nvidia which is now the seventh largest company in the world he believes that the economy of the metaverse will eventually exceed that of the physical world. And so we're talking 60, 70 trillion. We're talking about at that point where the hyperbole that Tim spoke about starts to become a little bit more practical, that someone might literally own the rules of physics in the virtual atoms of a parallel form of our existence. Whether or not that parallel version of ourselves is marginally more or less valuable than the real self-identity self kind of doesn't matter. Whether it's 51% or 25%,

there's serious reason for concern. Well, and that's the concern about ownership, right? And there's a whole lot of issues that go along with that i guess what i'm also wondering is just like is there an optimistic case that the metaverse and a 3d internet could somehow improve our current relationship with the internet which is fraught with all of the issues that you were just listing toxicity abuse discrimination harassment the fact that we are you know we feel like we can say whatever we want on twitter because we don't actually see the people that we're talking to or that we're shooting insults at all the time um radicalization all the this stuff. I mean, I did hear someone make an argument that I thought was interesting where, you know, maybe in 3D, when we're interacting with people in a virtual setting that we can

see, perhaps we will be less likely to be as strident as we tend to be when we're just in a text-based internet system. Well, certainly to return to holography, I think if we see appreciable changes in intimacy in 3D, then you actually could come to the conclusion that yes, abuse and harassment will reduce in that forum for the same reason that when you're an anonymous egg on Twitter, it's pretty easy to be snide and rude. It's hard to do that when you're staring someone in the face. Of course, that doesn't necessarily mean everyone you're going to chirp will be in front of you in a large-scale 3D screen, so who really is to know? What I think is important is to recognize two different things.

Number one, if there's a reason to be optimistic about who might lead in the future, it's that the cultures of the companies that are building it are quite different. Game developers, as an example, are organized and rewarded for very different things. Why? Because you don't play a game if it makes you feel bad. You play it because you feel good. It's a game. We scroll Instagram and feel bad about ourselves, but you don't keep playing Minecraft or Fortnite because you hate it. And that extends into how they design these environments. And I'll give you a good example of harassment. We all know the term reply guy, but if you don't, it's when you just deliberately reply to someone on Twitter.

The point is frustration. You're not violating the terms of service because you're not overtly harassing someone. You're not calling them a racial slur. But I'm just saying, you know, John, I didn't think this tweet was very good. It can be literally just that. And I'm going to do it all the time. That's compliant with most social networks. In gaming, that's actually a bannable offense. We call it griefing because they consider any behavior which frustrates another person deliberately adversely affects their sense of fun. Now, I'm not going to say that these game developers haven't had it easy. They don't have to contend with freedom of speech, with overt efforts to radicalize and misinformation. That's going to be hard.

Roblox scales right now pretty well for under 14. It doesn't to a Fox News listener. But we shouldn't underestimate the decades of training around different philosophies, not optimization around algorithm, the N plus one click engagement retweet, but a sense of fun. That I do think matters.

The second thing that's important is we see a different degree of reverence for legal process and, frankly, democracy. When you take a look at the primary approach that these platforms have as they move to the metaverse, the gaming companies are actually giving up significant controls to the judicial process. For example, Epic Games has changed their terms of service irrevocably. It says if they ever have a dispute with one of their licensees, they need to go to the courts. They have to get an injunction to shut them out. They have made the overt argument that they have to have the same relationship that a landlord a tenant has your landlord can't just show up and lock you out they

can't take your stuff they can't burn it down they can't delete your building and so they seem very cognizant of what they should and should not be in control of and in contrast to perhaps the web 3 movement which says let's decentralize, which says, let's decentralize authority, they're saying, let's decentralize by putting it into the forms of decentralization, which have scaled for centuries, which is the judicial system, democracy at large. Okay. I will let us end then on that optimistic note, because otherwise the image of all of us sitting in our homes with headsets on or glasses on for 90% of our lives, because our virtual lives are more important than our real lives, will keep me up at night. Well, so John, let me hit you with one more thing, because I think it's important. I often hear this criticism of we're just going to sit at home like the characters of WALL-E strapped to a device and do nothing.

There's that funny Icelandic video where they say, like, don't visit Iceland in VR. Come hike Iceland. We are TV species. The average American is awake for 14.4 hours, and that spans work, leisure, and necessity. We watch an average of five and a half hours of TV per day. The average American does. 75% of that is done alone. It's almost all done sedentary, just sitting there. Hollywood talks about TV as lean back entertainment, as though disengagement is good. When you factor out the fact that the average American spends six and a half hours per day working, then the hour

and a half you're commuting, the 45 minutes you're eating, we do nothing but TV and essentially nothing but TV alone. I personally think shifting from TV to a more social, immersive, engaged environment is a positive thing, not a negative thing, but that's separate from whether or not we should be going outside. I do think if we can improve technology aside, if we can always improve the quantity of connection and the quality of connection with other human beings, that's going to be a good thing. If technology can assist in that, that's great. If it gets in the way of that, that's bad. All right. Last question. I'm asking all of our guests, what's your favorite way to unplug and how often do you get to do it? So we have two dogs and we will go hiking for 60 to 120 minutes a day off leash in the woods. I'm often on Twitter or writing or thinking about work during that time. But, you know, for the spare 15 or 30 minutes, I'm unplugged.

That's good. That's good. I guess good. Dogs are good, too. Matt Ball, thanks for joining Offline. This was fun. Thank you. Offline is a Crooked Media production.

It's written and hosted by me, John Favreau. It's produced by Austin Fisher. Andrew Chadwick is our audio editor. Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis, sound engineer of the show. Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Tanya Sominator, Michael Martinez, Andy Gardner-Bernstein, Ari Schwartz, Andy Taft, and Sandy Gerard for production support. And to our digital team, Elijah Cohn, Nar Melkonian, and Amelia Montooth, who film and share our episodes as videos every week.