Matthew Ball - A Manual to The Metaverse

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Invest Like the Best is sponsored by Canalyst. Canalyst is the leading destination for public company data and analysis. Founded by a former buy side analyst who encountered friction sourcing, building and updating models, Canalyst is now used by over 400 institutions, including the largest money managers globally and by a number of guests on the show.
With detailed company specific models and data on virtually every public company, Canalyst clients are able to ramp up faster, update models instantly and incorporate the highest quality fundamental data into any workflow. If you're a professional equity investor and haven't talked to Canalyst recently, you should give them a shout. Learn more and try Canalyst for yourself at canalist.com/patrick. That's canalyst.com/patrick. Today's episode is sponsored by Brex, the integrated financial platform trusted by the world's most innovative entrepreneurs and fastest growing companies. With Brex, you can move money fast for instant impact with high limit corporate cards, payments, venture debt and spend management software all in one place. Ready to accelerate your business? Learn more at brex.com/best. That's brex.com/best.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money.
Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:36)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:03)
Matt is an investor, the former head of strategy at Amazon Studios and one of the brightest minds in the media industry. Through his essays and now his book, which launches today, Matt has established himself as the foremost authority on the metaverse, which has stormed into the public eye since I first had him on the show two years ago.
The metaverse is the focus of our discussion and I hope you enjoy this encyclopedic tour through all of its details as much as I did.
Well, round two is here. We get to talk about one of the most interesting topics in the world, especially because of how much insane detail there is under the topic of the metaverse, much of it contained in your awesome new book that I just finished a couple days ago. I think a fun place to begin picking up on our last conversation is with a couple analogy questions, specifically around things that already exist that people will be familiar with and the degree to which you think they represent something like the metaverse. I want to start here as an anchor point rather than go deep into the infrastructure right from the beginning. And so I'd love you to stack rank these four big ideas. And you tell me which you think from most to least represents metaverse elements, those four being Minecraft, Ready Player One, Fortnite and Facebook's Horizon.

**Matthew Ball** (3:14)
So let me swerve quickly. I would say that the closest representation that we have comes from one platform that you didn't list, and then another perspective on one that you did. Roblox, for all of its focused on children, they have 55 million daily active users, about 45% of them are under 13, 85% of them are under 25, lacks many of the things that we expect from the metaverse, certainly enterprise applications, certainly a degree of criticality in the modern economy at large.
But we're talking about a platform that has hundreds of millions of monthly users, billions of hours of engagement in excess of 75 million different virtual worlds, each of which is tightly integrated with one another, consistent communications, hierarchy in access, the same avatar and identity system, same currency, import export of objects, a single path of discovery.
We're talking about a parallel plane of existence that is simultaneously enormous and highly diverse, but also cohesive. The second closest would be to take a look at the Epic Games ecosystem. We can really take a look at two different aspects of that on the consumer face inside. One is Fortnite, which is for the most part a battle royale, but they also have Fortnite Creative Mode, which is their Roblox platform. What's fascinating about that latter platform, which by the way they say is nearly half of all engagement time today, is that later this year they're planning to bring Unreal based editing. This is going to fundamentally overhaul how you can tool, author, modify. You have the consumer facing low or no code platform that children could use, but then you can tap into the million plus expert developers who can supplement that with their professional capabilities.