Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3
Interviews with Leaders in Fintech & Web3
Metaverse Veteran Doug Thompson Talks About Opportunities in the Metaverse and How You Can Get Started
Doug Thompson has been working in and around the metaverse for the last 15 years.
Doug is a serial entrepreneur running a metaverse strategy agency, co-founder of a NFT project called Echocore and is involved in DAOs such as the Open Meta DAO.
He is a digital nomad and a true expert in all things related to the metaverse. His newsletter Out of Scope is a must read.
Hear Doug's thoughts on:
- How gaming is the onramp to the metaverse
- What is the definition of The Metaverse
- How big is the metaverse opportunity
- What and where are the metaverse jobs
- DAOs and NFTs
- How to get started in the metaverse
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This is Matt from Work in FinTech. And today I'm delighted to be joined with Doug Thompson, who is the CEO of the Bureau of Bright Ideas and also co-founder of Echocore, which we'll hear more about later. I've been looking forward to this for a long time because today we're going to talk about everything to do with the metaverse. Doug Thompson has been involved in the metaverse for some 15 odd years or so much. He'll learn a lot more about today. So. Good morning, Doug. Good morning. Great to be here. So so just to kick off, can you just give a brief introduction of some of your background and how you've been working on the edges of the metaverse since kind of the mid 2000? Oh, goodness. How far back do you want to go, I guess is the question. Yeah. I mean, this is a fun time because I've actually been working on or in or around the metaverse for about 15 years. And it's I feel it's sort of ironic because the metaverse is on everybody's lips these days. There's some confusion about what it is, but it's we've entered one of those hype cycles. And I think that hype cycle is in part because of Facebook deciding to go all in on the metaverse and change its name to meta. And the irony is that about 15 years ago, it was sort of Facebook's fault that attention drifted away from the metaverse and into social media and mobile devices. So my background is that I had an agency in Canada for about 15 years, and out of that agency I had some spinoffs. So I had a bunch of startups out of that agency. And about 15 years ago, a lot of our work was in the metaverse. So we did really big projects with health care organizations, with banks, with social justice and social causes. So it was a super exciting time. And then attention shifted. It shifted to mobile phones. That shifted to kind of more casual bite sized experiences. So here we are back again, back into another hype cycle. And I think something more endearing, which is that we're really starting to understand that that as as we shift into this next phase of technology, it's starting to look a lot more like a game, you know, like it's starting to look a lot more like Fortnite or the games that you play on a console. So it's in a kind of an exciting time. So you just mentioned Fortnite there, and quite a lot of our listeners are young people who are at university at the moment of May, been playing Fortnite for the last three or four years or have long been around. Can you talk about how where is essentially a metaverse as well as lots of other metaverse? But can you also talk through how they've been using that to stress test infrastructure? You know, having some of these virtual concerts and having hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people in one place at one time. And some of the some of the vision, actually, that, you know, like the epic CEO who who owns Fortnite are looking to do in the long run. Yeah. Your your parents may not agree with you, but the reality is that if you've played Fortnite, you're actually building up a great work skill. Right. You'll you'll be able to put that on your resume at some point very soon, especially because Fortnite has shifted over time. If you think about if you think about how it launched and what it was even a couple of years ago, it was mostly Fortnite Island. It was Battle Royale. It was you going in and being one of the last survivors, as you know, as the island shrunk. But then they did. Then they discovered a couple of things. And one of the things they discovered was that people were sticking around after a match and they were sort of socializing. They were using it as a platform to just kind of hang out. And they built off of that. And what they did was they started to create social opportunities. So they see that people are going into these game spaces. Fortnite being one of them, others like it, Grand Theft Auto being other examples, and they're using them as social spaces. And so they started expanding that and adding concerts like Steve Aoki was in there, the big ones like Travis Scott and Ariana Grande, because they started to realize that these platforms can become social places to socialize. The third thing they added was creative, and I think that's the probably the place if you want to understand where the metaverse is going, the two things to think about are Roblox and Fortnite creative mode. And Tim Sweeney, as you say, who's the CEO of Epic, has talked about the fact that you will soon be able to start making money off of what you create in Fortnite. So if you create your own little island in Fortnite and players come in and engage on your island, you'll actually be able to make a little bit of money off of that. Similar to how you can off of Roblox. So that starts to give you a little sense of the path that these these games are taking. And underneath those games are game engines. So Fortnite is created with a piece of software called Epic. And their story. Unreal and unreal is a game engine so similar to how a program, you know, if you're programing an iPhone app, you use something called Swift and Xcode and so on. The future of the Internet is going to be built with game engines. That's what the metaverse is. So it's a kind of an exciting thing to think about the fact that what you may have experienced is mostly kind of social and entertainment. That's where that's where the Internet is headed to be more immersive places. You can hang out with your friends and eventually places that you can also do work. You know, it's going to be a platform, not just for entertainment, but also for for work and collaboration. And obviously we can't talk about the metaverse without talking about ready player one and where you were just talking about kind of this immersive experience, obviously the ultimate immersive experience to be having the at least with current technology, having, you know, a VR headset, having some sort of haptic suit, like a Tesla suit and being able to interact with with other people inside the metaverse. Now, the problem with that is obviously there's a high barrier to entry because it costs you know, if you want to buy a decent VR headset, it's, what, two, three, four or $5,000? I don't know how much a haptic suit costs per. I'm sure it's about the same kind of cost. So that's not you know, that's not doable for the majority of the population of the planet. So how do you see people being able to interact in these in the in some of these environments just using a computer or a mobile? And also, we've already seen people doing this in Fortnite. You know, for us, a great example again, isn't it? Yeah, you've got it on a mobile, you've got it on your PlayStation and all the other interoperable connectivity you've got via, you know, Fortnite sitting in the middle. But how do you see that progressing as I think a lot of people want to hear metaverse, they think of ready player one you put your goggles on, your goggles on and ultimately the piece when you when you have, you know, near the same as human vision kind of level of clarity with some quantum computing engine driving it behind the scenes. That's that's probably where we going to get to when, you know, ten, 20 years time or some point in the future. But where do you see things going over the next few years as people started to onboard to this? Yeah. So I think let's let's step back a second and just get get to a couple of definitions. So in. One of the reasons that we do these definitions is so that when people who are building the technology get together, they have a common language. Right. So for example, we in technology, we talk about the metaverse, that there's really only one metaverse. And the reason that we say that is because we're trying to express the idea that there that we will arrive at one set of standards for how I can move around between spaces. So if you think of ready player one, you know, they put on the goggles and then they can easily jump from a disco to another planet where they do a racing game without, you know, you don't have to log out and log back in the way that you would log out of Call of Duty in order to log back into Minecraft. The idea with the metaverse is that you should be able to jump from place to place without needing to log it like back in. Now people do talk about our metaverse. So there's the metaverse. And then people say, Yeah, but I'm building a Fortnite metaverse, I'm building a minecraft metaverse. But I understand that in the end, the idea here is all of these things will be interconnected. So the second thing I think when we talk about definitions is that it doesn't necessarily mean just on a screen in a in a virtual environment. And what I mean by that is that if you if you've ever played Pokémon Go, Niantic is building what they call a real world metaverse. And the idea here is that the world around us itself can become overlaid with digital content, the way that you can hunt Pokémon and imagine that getting much more, you know, richer and have having more content. So now you've now you start to get this idea that there's going to be a bunch of ways to access this fun gaming immersive content, the same way that you can access Fortnite on a phone or tablet or console. Now extend that to include being able to access content in the physical world. As you walk around, you might see things overlaid over buildings. You might see game objects on the street in front of you. So you have a couple of realms that you can think about when you think about the metaverse. The first is the metaverse will extend into the physical world, and the second is that you'll be able to access it through a whole bunch of devices, including VR. And I think what will happen with VR is that the headsets will get smaller and smaller and smaller and they will eventually merge with glasses that you can wear , you know, around the around your neighborhood. And they call that kind of mixed reality. And that expectation is that within five years you should be able to essentially wear your phone and think of everything you can do on your iPhone. You should be able to wear that phone as a pair of glasses. So that's pretty exciting. So, you know, so I think Ready Player one was super exciting and that talks about a super immersive entry into a metaverse where you almost can't tell whether it's real or not because it's so immersive. But there will be other ways to access the metaverse, including, you know, just a computer. And go back to that mixed reality place, the intersection of physical and digital. If you think about, what, ten years ago when you left your house, you would take your wallet, your phone, your keys. Right. I don't take my wallet anywhere. And maybe a map. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. If you're going somewhere far. Whereas now I take my keys, like my front door key and I take my phone as I've stopped using a wallet. I went to a conference the other day and people are still handing out business cards. I was like, Why are you doing that? But the but you're exactly where you're going with what you just said. You know, there'll be a point in the future, probably not too far away, where the phone disappears and it's. Everything is just a. Yeah. A contact lens and using your fingerprint or whatever it might be. Yeah. I'm so. So you. Let's talk about, um, we've. We've spoken about gaming quite a lot because I think that is the, the onramp to a lot of this stuff in terms of infrastructure and just a way of thinking and way of living inside these digital worlds. What we've seen since the big Facebook news six months ago and ever is that's obviously being good in a way, because it's meant that there's lots of investment, focus and spotlight on this area, which means more money going into it, which means it will move faster. And what we've seen probably throughout this year is lots of companies now normal S&P 500 type names getting involved, either buying land in sandbox or Decentraland or someone like Nike buying artifacts, which is an NFT studio. Can you can you talk about firstly on let's talk about the land space, you know, when people are buying some land in the metaverse. Can you can you just talk through why companies would be doing something like that? Um, what's kind of the benefit to them and where is that going to go to? Because something this in a digital world, the land is infinite, right? Yet this land is commanding a very, very high price because some of these companies are getting involved and some of them are doing it because they truly want to embrace the metaverse and do business in there. And some of them are doing it just for PR, obviously. Yes, it's quite clever, some of the companies. But can you just just provide you all your thoughts around that? Yeah. So Jensen Huang, who is the CEO of Nvidia, which makes the chips that a lot of gaming computers have, for example, but they also create server chips. They have A.I., they have, you know, all kinds of stuff that they do, including a kind of a corporate metaverse product. He says that that that the GDP of the metaverse will eventually be equivalent to the current global GDP. That's my that's crazy. That's, like, insane. Insane to think about. Is it insane because you think about how many hundreds of billions of dollars have flowed through Fortnite? And if you scale that out across all kinds of games and social experiences and concerts and relationships with musicians, and maybe it's not so insane. So why is that important? I think that's important because these brands that you're talking about and companies that are coming in are realizing that we're we're basically launching a new country. And if you went to Nike and said, hey, I've got a new market for you and it's going to be about the size of the U.S. market or the UK market, they probably wouldn't want to ignore it. Right. So that's one that's one kind of path for companies into the metaverse is they're starting to realize that there's a lot of economic value in the metaverse. It's a place that a lot of values can be exchanged and we can come back to how that value will be exchanged. So it's a new market. They do want to buy land, which is really the equivalent of buying access. And in things like Sandbox and decentraland, it's buying access to the early innovators. So it's not so much the traffic. You're not going to get a billion people flying through your sandbox land, but you are accessing those early innovators so that you can try to understand where these markets are going. So that's one. Two is if you are a company that does anything that is special. Then the metaverse is going to change your business. And by spatial, I mean you may have a retail store. You may have a factory. Anything that is three dimensional. Is going to be impacted by the metaverse. So if I even think about a factory is wondering how can a factory that makes physical goods, why would that be affected by the metaverse? Because that factor we could take, we could create a mirror image of that factory in the metaverse, go into the metaverse itself and control, analyze, evaluate the factory. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is that if you create anything that is, you know, three dimensional, there's a good chance that you hope that there's a new market for you. So Nike, of course, we all need to wear shoes. Your avatar doesn't technically need to wear shoes, right? You don't technically need to wear shoes to play in Fortnite. Because your feet actually can't get hurt running around the island. And yet you do. Because we still want to look good. Like, I still want my avatar to look really good. So this is like a whole new market for something like digital fashion, interior design. There's all kinds of ways that we could see companies like Nike selling just as many digital shoes as they do physical. So I think that's why why land isn't even so much about real estate. I don't think about it as real estate. I think it's overpriced. I really do. I think you're paying way too much for access right now, but that'll stabilize. But if you think about it again, if you think about Fortnite and you think about all creative mode, there's a hub that you go into in order to play other players islands and imagine how valuable that real estate is as that scales up. So that's what you're paying for. You're paying for access and you're paying for it. And right now, you're paying for access to early adopters. You just touched on digital fashion and you're having sneakers in on your avatar and so on. Some of the, um, some of the the young people have grown up as creators in this world. Can you talk through how you how you think about some of the job opportunities for building things, which some of them is replicating what's in the real world into the digital world? And some of them are completely different and completely new and novel. Yeah. I think it's an exciting time. I mean, anything you could do in Minecraft. Think about it like that. Anything that you could do in Minecraft as a kid, if you liked building a little house or a castle or a city in Minecraft, if you liked scripting in Minecraft, writing a little scripts. Same thing with Roblox. Those. Those are the equivalent skill sets to coding a website. Or coding a mobile app on your phone. Right. So we all knew that ten years ago those were the two big in-demand skills that you could, you know, make a good salary doing those things. And that the equivalent to that in the metaverse era is all of this stuff, all of these things that if you got into that as a kid, if you liked creating in 3D, that's what this next skill set is all about. And that's where the game engines come in, you know, like, like unreal and unity. Let's talk about the currency of the metaverse. Cryptocurrencies is continuing to grow. It's been around for quite a while now since, what, 2008, the original Bitcoin white paper. And but what's quite interesting is this intersection of crypto is kind of the rails payment rails for the metaverse because it's in it's interoperable in the fact that it can be used as a payment across lots of different, um, siloed metaverse environments at the moment. But then the other piece where there's another crossover and that's where we could probably start to talk about your echo core projects is the idea of nfts these as again some kind of unique identifier in terms of an object that may be in the metaverse and also there's value attached to a monetary value attached to it so nft that people are willing to pay for. And nfts are the moment the currency of nft is is a theorem. You know, generally NFT is a you know, the bulk of them are based on the Ethereum blockchain. Whereas you've got something like Bitcoin is seen more as a currency rather than a smart contract. Right? So can you just talk through how you see crypto currency working and enabling the metaverse? And then let's talk about Nfts and the intersection in the metaverse. Yeah. So when I when I look back 15 years ago. We thought that the biggest challenge to making the metaverse a reality was technical, that the real challenge was How do I move my avatar from one place to another? But it turns out, I think, that the biggest challenge was cultural. Creating a cultural demand to be able to move myself around three dimensional space. And I think what's happened with cryptocurrency is cryptocurrency has created that cultural pressure. It's created that cultural demand because there are people that are early adopters of cryptocurrency, who are big fans of cryptocurrency and what it can do. So think about again coming back to Roblox. Minecraft and Fortnite. And the thing that you can't do and one of the things you can't do is you can't take your wallet from one place to another. So if I have coins in Fortnite and I can't take those coins and spend them in Roblox. Right. Second thing I can't do is I can't take my inventory. So if I win a deadpool's skin in Fortnite, I can't wear that skin over in Minecraft. Or Call of Duty. Right. You're really just renting, even though you paid for it, you're really just renting those assets. You're renting that skin. You're renting that costume. You're renting that weapon. And I think one of the things that cryptocurrencies did was that it showed us that we could actually have more direct control over our digital assets . Right. And that's what Nfts represent. Nfts represent the ability to say that nobody can take your. Take this ownership back from you. When I buy this digital asset, it's mine. And I have proof on the blockchain that this digital asset is mine. Now to start, we couldn't do very much with those assets. So I could buy a profile picture. A lot of people have heard of the of the board of Yacht Club or Cryptopunks. So I was really just buying a little piece of art and yeah, I could use it on my Twitter profile. Can really do very much with it. It didn't have a lot of utility. But the big breakthrough, the thing that people like kind of, wow, I can't believe this is I own it. It's a it's one of the first pieces of digital content that I can carry around with me on my Twitter profile, or I can put it on Instagram, I can put it on Facebook. And I could always point back to the fact that I owned that digital asset. I'm not renting it from anybody. It's not sitting on some server somewhere that if they pull the plug, it disappears, kind of it exists in perpetuity on the blockchain. So that's a major, major shift in how we think about digital content. And I think because it has become a cultural movement. That is forcing us to rethink some of the old paradigms of how they how the Internet is organized. And in fact, in some ways, it's taking us back to the original point of the Internet, which was that it would be more distributed, not the big silos, that it was protected from attack because it was a web. Right. That was the whole idea of the World Wide Web. So I you know, so cryptocurrencies. And Nfts. Her allowing us to realize that our content, the photos that I take. The things that I buy and game environments I have the right to those I have. There's a way now that I can actually own them instead of them being owned by Facebook or Instagram or Ubisoft or whoever. So that's really exciting. I think that's a really exciting moment for the Internet in general, for digital culture, because it's giving us power. It's putting power back in the hands of the people. So we've seen the boom in NFT sales over the last 18 months or so went from near about zero through to you're doing tens and hundreds of billions of dollars of sales. Digital law is one use case of NAFTA is and it's kind of one of the easiest ones to get started with. However, there's hundreds, if not thousands of use case from NAFTA, from looking at, you know, instant when you're buying a house, all of those transactions could be in, you know, as an NFT through to airline tickets, could be NAFTA was you know, you could just go on and on and on and on. Now, the project you're working on is using NAFTA is around. Telling a story and a narrative. And and essentially for the owners of those adaptations to be part of that bigger law they kind of call it don't like. Can you just talk through what's going on in this world of kind of media and nfts and filmmaking and comics and narratives and so on and how house, how, um, how your projects echo core is, is looking to do something again, very novel in this world. Yeah. So Echo Core really comes out of Hollywood. The ideas for it and the storyline behind it was developed by a group of people by my co-founder Ty, first of all, who has been working on Hollywood for the last decade or so. And it's this idea that entertainment itself will start to be composed of nfts. And what we're doing within it with Echo core is giving using nfts as the building blocks for storytelling. So if you think of the Marvel Universe or, uh, I kind of think of like Batman has his bat Batcave. Superman has this fortress of solitude. You have these locations, you have these characters, and you have objects, you know, things like weapons, cars, whatever. And that if you put these things together, you can create stories. And fans can create stories. So if you think of fanart or game modding, fans are participating in these story universes, but they're not benefiting. So the idea with that, of course, is to try to explore. First of all, it's just a really great story. That was play out in the metaverse and film and TV and streaming and so on. But the second is to really allow give economic opportunity to people who like being part of creating story franchises. And I think we'll see more and more of that. I think, A, we'll see. NAFTA is one of the things I think that's interesting. But our kicker is that my my belief is that entities are programable. So you tend to think of an NFT as something like a a painting that hangs on the wall. But the reality is that behind an NFT is you talked about this earlier as a contract and those contracts are programable. And because they're programable, nfts are really just part of a big database programing language. And what we're trying to do with Echo core is push the limits of that programing language and use it as a way of telling stories. Yeah. Work in fintech are launching an NFT project next month in June and part of that is so we can help raise funds and proceeds of that will be helped for providing more work experience, more learning, more teaching, more mentoring. But in the longer run, what we want to be able to create is going back to your piece of programable part of NFT is having on chain credentials which can change state as and when you're earning more tokens which are on chain credentials of things that you're learning. And any NFT becomes a basket of all these on chain credentials that you have, which is representative of your learning and work experience, and you can use them in the metaverse or in real life. So this is definitely, you know, so another use case, again, one of thousands out there in terms of young people who are either studying or just hitting the jobs market. Now, we've touched on some of the skills where the gaming, the propeller parents probably told them not to do is actually becoming quite useful and and having value. But how and where is a good place to start to to experiment experiment with some of the things we've been talking about, like the metaverse you can how can you start experimenting in the metaverse if you don't have a VR headset? Because a lot of people associate, let's say, when they're not necessarily, you know, entirely, you know, exclusive and things as well. Like, you know, we mentioned crypto. Crypto I think is a lot more accessible now. But another and just another thing to mention is, is the idea of a DAO as well, a decentralized autonomous organization and how they are providing job opportunities as well. And then there's the big intersection of all of those things. I think you're involved in some tackles as well. We could just talk about how. Yeah, I'm involved, for example, in the Open Meadow. So a DAO is a community owned organization, usually with a fairly defined purpose. So the Open Meadow's purpose is to create the tools for a more open metaverse so that it doesn't get controlled by the big companies like Facebook. A DAO is a place often, uh, often. A lot of the activity of a Dao will happen on things like discord. Discord. And to me is, is a really great place. First of all, a lot of younger people know discord really well. And it's a place that a lot of these projects are building their communities. So it's a kind of proto metaverse. I think the place to start really is with communities of interest. Find something that you're passionate about. It could be, for example, in open matter, which is the Dow I'm involved with. I think we now have 15 houses there. Everything from wellness to sports to virtual production, which is like movie production in the metaverse to game modding. So there's all kinds of like interest categories. So the first recommendation would be to kind of follow your passion and find that those communities align to your passion and not be afraid to just like make mistakes as stupid questions, get your hands dirty. I really think that by building from the community up, that's probably one of the best ways into the metaverse, because we're all making this up. There's no secret course. Like there's no degree that people are getting on the web three, especially on the web three side of the metaverse. There's no degree. We're all making it up as we go along. Even a year ago, as you say, like Nfts were barely a thing a year ago. You'd never be able to take a course about it because we've just invented it. So jump into some of these communities. I mean, just Google Dow Web3 and then some of your areas of interest and kind of just join some of these discord communities, join some of these forums online and find those fellow travelers. That's the way that I recommend it. And to finish off, would you give any other advice besides what you just said if you were to go back in time and you were, you know, 16, 17, 18, starting off life again? It sounds like what you just said still rings very true for just life in general. Would you have anything else to add to that? That's a good point. That's a good question. You know, I think I always like the this is just me and it's not necessarily for everybody. But if something is a little bit confusing at first, it probably means that it's an area of opportunity. So don't be intimidated. That would be my main message. Every time I've spoken to you, you know you've been in a different continent or a different country, and you're kind of embracing this idea of a digital nomad. I think when we first spoke, you're in Sri Lanka where they're building a new crypto city and you're in Barcelona now, you're on a visa and you're moving around. That's that sounds very appealing to a lot of a lot of people and particularly young people. And, you know, the ability to be able to do it at certain times in your life, because once you do have children who are going to school and you might have a mortgage is very difficult or not very difficult, but it's it's there's a lot more hurdles involved to do these things. What would you say to young people with the way this kind of web3 world is working, where everything is global and connected and you don't necessarily need to be in an office in front of people. What what's your observation? You've been an early innovator in being a digital nomads. Can you just give us some insight on that? Just to finish off. Yeah. I think it's an absolutely fabulous way to live. Especially, I think, when you're younger and there are communities of, you know, I talk about meeting communities digitally, like on discord and things like that. But the same is true of the nomad community. There are certain kind of hubs for nomads where you end up meeting other people and you end up networking and finding projects that you can work on together. And it's amazing. You know, for me, it's an amazing way to keep my mind and heart open to new ways of looking at the world. Because, for example, the you know, the way that people interact with digital technology in Sri Lanka is definitely very different from how you do in the U.K. or, you know, North America. And it's a reminder that, you know, even though the metaverse will be a global phenomenon, not everybody is coming from the same background. And so it's really good to to to be in touch with that diversity. Fantastic. Okay. It's been a great interview, Doug. You know, I think people who are listening would have learned a lot about quite a lot of different topics. And and and I suppose if people want to learn more about these things, like you say, get involved in these communities, these groups, I'm sure you're happy for people to go to reach out to you as well and join and join your project eccocore as well. Um, so, so Doug, thank you so much for your time today. And it's been a it's been a great conversation.