The Metaverse - The Future of the World: Graduate Advice from Technology Futurist Theo Priestley

Technology Futurist, Theo Priestley joins Matthew Cheung and Benjamin Ahmed to discuss the future of the world!

Theo Priestley has worked within the technology industry for up to 20 years in both the client facing side and the vendor side. During his time in the industry, Theo study various trends that occurred, leading him to write "The Future Starts Now", which encapsulates all these trends.

In this exclusive interview, Theo breaks down what the Metaverse is and how students can take advantage of future trends in technology.

Check out our website: https://workinfintech.com/ and subscribe to our mailing list to hear more about opportunities in fintech and web3

Follow our socials:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/work-in-fintech-global/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/WorkinFintech
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCdS4bYoCXaHVgfVm6syUrDw

Transcript

Matthew Cheung  0:03  
Hi, this is Matt from Work in Fintech. And today we're delighted to be joined with Theo Priestley, who's a technology futurist. He's a best selling author of 'The Future Starts Now. Has spoken at TEDx and spends a lot of time thinking and talking about the metaverse. And today, we're joined also with Work in Fintech founder member & NFT  prodigy, Benyamin Ahmed, who's going to be joining me in this interview. So good morning, Theo. Thanks for having us. And it's great to have you on the podcast.

Theo Priestley  0:30  
Thanks for inviting me again, Matthew. It's great. Thank you.

Matthew Cheung  0:34  
You're welcome. Can you can you give us a brief introduction to your background? Kind of your personal journey and kind of what you're working on today?

Theo Priestley  0:41  
 Yeah, sure. I mean, I come from a technology background. I've been in the technology industry for around 20 years. Working on both client side and vendor side. I've done a lot of studying of technology trends and future trends and where they seem to be leading both businesses and society in general. Like you say, I've written a recent book, which encapsulates all those trends somewhere with fellow futurists, and where we see a variety of technologies and societal differences all heading. I've been writing about technology trends for best part of 10 years. Speaking at industry events for the same time. IoT, 5g, cloud, big data, VR, AR, and let you say everything just seems to be converging into this one big mega trend called the metaverse. So it's really fascinating to see everything all heading in the same direction and potentially working together as well.

Matthew Cheung  1:39  
And the metaverse has been on everyone's lips for the past couple of months. Why do you think now? And can you talk to us about what you think it is? And does it exist yet? Are we in the early stages of it? Or is there still a few things that needs to happen until it becomes a bit more adopted and understood?

Theo Priestley  1:57  
Yeah, I mean, we've lived with the metaverse in very early conceptual stages for a very long time. If you look at MMO RPGs for example, you could class those as very sort of rudimentary examples of metaverse because people live in that particular virtual world they have an avatar.

Matthew Cheung  2:16  
For non gamers, can you explain what MMO RPG is?

Theo Priestley  2:21  
Yeah, massively multiplayer online role playing games. So World of Warcraft, for example, is a good example. Eve Online, Elder Scrolls Online, all those things that we typically ignore as geek type things because, you know, people spend a lot of time on them, And they, you know, and it's a leisure activity. You can class that as a type of extension of the metaverse where people have socialized have lived have almost lived a second life. Second Life is another example as well, where people have essentially built second lives and businesses that have generated money. And I think this is where we're starting to see more of an evolution and maturity in the space is that the metaverse is becoming an extension, a digital extension of our physical reality. That's probably a bit the simplest way I can put it. You can live there, you can work there earn money there, learn there. You know, essentially everything that you can do today, in reality you can do digitally in the metaverse. That's the ultimate goal of where everything needs to head.

Benyamin Ahmed  3:32  
So a lot of people think NFT's & crypto will power the metaverse. Almost as if it's the fuel for the metaverse. What do you think about this? And what are your thoughts on metanomics? What are metanomics?

Theo Priestley  3:46  
Yeah, metanomics I see is basically the digital economy within the metaverse. And again, it's something that mirrors the physical economy that we have today. I see NFT's as being a critical component as well as crypto economics as well. Because essentially, you're dealing with a digital reality. So you need the digital currency that you can trust. And whether this is based on an etherium layer, and protocol where we can generate smart contracts or whether it's Bitcoin, you know, all of that is up for debate right now. But essentially, you will own a digital wallet with numerous currencies much like we do today. And this is where you will not only extract value from your digital reality, but use that digital currency to pay for physical goods and services in the real world. NFT's are we're just literally scratching the surface here. I think a lot of people see NFT's as a bit of a quirk. Especially with the the sort of art based examples that we see in the news today. Where I see things going and where things will mature is when the NFT actually has utility within the context of it. So we've seen movies being produced and then minted as an NFT. We're seeing music being produced and minted as NFT's. In game assets, for example, and video games are another great example of where, if you have, you know, if you buy something before a game has bought, say, a spaceship or a house, kind of sort of thing, or even a digital piece of land, you own that piece of land and then once the ecosystem matures, that piece of land or that asset that you've bought actually has utility, and you can use it digitally in the environment that you've that that's been built around it. So at the moment, you've got an art piece that has some limited use, you know, you can display it, you can tell everybody, you know how much you know, you own one, you can change your avatars. That's kind of all you can do with it at the moment. But when you start building assets that have utility in the metaverse, so shoes, clothing, that kind of sort thing, suddenly, you're having a little bit more utility, you're being able to interact a lot more with it. It's being able to generate something else. So there's triggers happening as you use that utility, you know that asset and utility within the metaverse context. And again, using that you could generate money you could generate, you know, interactions, other experiences, etc. So, like I said, we're at the very beginning of the journey. And it's the same with a metaverse in itself. We've lived with it for a long time. We're seeing another iteration as our thinking and as our technologies mature.

Matthew Cheung  6:43  
Benyamin, do you do you want to kind of comment on that as well, because you've had a similar I suppose, journey yourself with NFT's with your Minecraft avatars, and then more recently with your non fungible heroes. And there's a kind of a roadmap for the non fungible heroes isn't there where you kind of pull together script writers and illustrators, and so on to actually take something that's starting off as a digital art and NFT's, but actually to be able to create some something commercial, a TV series merchandise, so the kind of physical goods as well as digital. Can you just talk on that? And what the idea is around NFH?

Benyamin Ahmed  7:24  
Yes, so the recent launch of NFH, which stands for non fungible heroes, so it was an NFT collection consisting of heroes and villains, which are male or female. And they come in different shapes like different forms. And if you look at the roadmap, we're planning to do a comic series, which could hopefully be expanded out into maybe a TV series, which the royalties from that TV series have flown back to the token holders. So that will give the NFT utility and will prove that NFT's are not just JPEGs.

Matthew Cheung  8:04  
And Theo when we spoken before we were talking about the idea of I think at the time, it was Fortnite, and we've had these different online concerts and gigs inside Fortnite. And you were talking about the idea that, in fact, they're just stress testing the infrastructure. Can you talk about that? Because there's obviously this this big overlap between the technologies you're seeing used in gaming, which are now being used as a foundation? You know, we'd like the Unreal Engine, for example, for some of the next iteration of the metaverse. Can you talk about that?

Theo Priestley  8:38  
Yeah, sure. So, at the last Ariana Grande concert, I picked up a rather cryptic tweet from one from the Chief Creative or Commercial Officer at Epic Games. And he used the hashtag blue strategy. And everybody kind of sort of lept on it thinking oh, "what's this, is this the is this a next new game" or something like that. But in actual fact, blue strategy refers to blue ocean strategy, which is you create a product in a space where everybody's heading in one direction, but you suddenly grow that concept out to own that space, because you're essentially doing something completely different. And that's what, Epic have been on this journey since they started. In fact, Tim Sweeney is a very, very smart man. And his vision was always pointing in this direction. And Unreal Engine and Fortnite has basically been helping steer the ship of Epic Games in this direction. When we look at Fortnite, Fortnite is obviously grown in huge, huge numbers since it launched. But all these external parties coming in, and allowing people to congregate in large numbers and then do certain activities, whether it's running up and down stairs, interacting in different ways. It's all part of a plan to actually stress how many people you can get into the platform at one time concurrently. What kind of actions you can actually do all at the same time, and then allowing sort of external sort of third parties to hook in and then do something else into that platform. So is, I see Fortnite as a yet, like you say, you know, it's a stress test of what is possible and incrementally every time they do something, they're testing just that little bit more to see if it breaks, how much more it can handle how many more people can you get under the one roof? You know, how many more different layers of interaction can we switch on? And this is, you know, it's a perfect model. In a sense, you know, most people are trying to build something big bang approach, and say, yo, we've launched something and then everybody runs in and it breaks. And then they go, Oh, I wish we had known, you know what to do next. Whereas Fortnite and Epic are basically, you know, an Unreal Engine basically said, you know, we've got this, people have been using this tool for, you know, for 10, 20 years now. We know what we're doing, we've got the infrastructure, just turn the tap on a little bit each time, and let's see what we can do.

Matthew Cheung  11:11  
And following on from that point, Do you see the we've seen the I suppose we've seen the increase in these weaker exponential technologies with, you know, kind of VR, AR and IoT, and 5g and all of these factors. When will we see the kind of the interface moment for kind of the the true Ready Player One, type metaverse? You know, getting getting to that point, obviously, is pretty far in the future. But is there a set of kind of interface moments you might see in the meantime, is there is there like a big technological breakthrough that's still needed? In order for the metaverse to become mainstream? Or is it more the little iterations? Like, I know, you're not a big fan of Facebook, but you're having the, you know, the Facebook Ray Bans? That's essentially AR and having it in real time and so on? Is that next kind of step towards the, the bigger Ready Player One type future? When do you think that interface moment will be? Or is it a sequence of many, many steps?

Theo Priestley  12:14  
It's many, many steps, but I don't see it as a technological breakthrough, in a sense, it's more about accessibility. You know, the metaverse is the concept of the metaverse is that it's, it's inclusive. And I find that a lot of technologies that are being built today are exclusive. So if you take glasses, and if you take headsets, for example, you know, you have to have the money to buy when you have to have the PC or the the machine to be able to run it as well, even though some are quite, you know, basically free of that and wire free, you still require, you know, a good piece of hardware kind of sort of thing to access this. Nobody else you know, and then, you know, I think, you know, glasses are another example where it's, you're overlaying a digital layer on the physical world. But again, do you really want 8 billion people to be wandering around wearing glasses when they didn't actually need to? I find that people are ignoring browsers. And the mobile phone quite a fair bit at the moment. And in terms of accessibility, you know, there are 7 billion or 7.8 billion mobile phone devices or smartphones out there in the world today, all sitting in someone's pocket. You have the convergence and the release of 5g and 6g (obviously 60g coming along) but 5g technology, which allows upload speeds and download speed, you know, download speeds of around, you know, 900 megabits per second, on a mobile device is just absolutely insane. And if you can think if you have a screen device, whether it's a mobile phone, or an iPad tablet, or you know, that kind of form factor, or even a Chromebook, and all you need to do is open up a browser. And then you have a gateway into you know, a metaverse environment or a virtualized environment, how, how easy is that for people, rather than having, you know, a set of headsets that only a finite number of people can actually access? So, you know, there's a lot of maturity in terms of thinking about accessibility first, before we get to anything about technology.

Matthew Cheung  14:22  
And what I've seen some of your articles on this idea of Generation-M, where you've got obviously young people that have been born recently, and they are going to be living in this kind of world. So from what you've just said, obviously, accessibility is vitally important because there's already you know, billion billions, lots of people who do not have access to the Internet, and it needs to be made easy for those people moving forward as well. The idea of then maintaining human contact in a world where Generation-M is growing up in a fully digitized world. How do you kind of see that changing at all like obviously you said, it's a bit of a mind mindset shift. And and on a similar note, if there's more of a digital existence, do you think that's gonna exacerbate that divide? I mean, it kind of sounds like he probably would do from, from what you're saying if if it's not an equal level playing ground?

Theo Priestley  15:19  
Yeah, I mean, we've seen, we've seen an interesting experiment in the sense with the pandemic, about social isolation and exclusion. When we've had physical contact removed from us, we've all started to become more aware and more in tune with being able to live digitally. And having to sort of use the tools around us to connect. And I think that's been a, it's been a sort of rapid journey over the last 18 months for people who used to think, well, I can live on Twitter, or LinkedIn, or Snapchat, and that's all, or Facebook. And that's all the interaction I kind of need to keep in touch with people. Whereas when you remove the ability to go outside and physically see someone, suddenly you think, well, actually, I want to see, you know, Benyamin or you Matthew, but not just your avatar, I actually want to see a representation of you that I can interact with, you know, not a static avatar, like on Twitter or something like that. So I want to be able to communicate, see your facial expressions, all that kind of sort of thing. So when we get to something like the metaverse, I think, you know, there will be people like introverts and other people who will be very comfortable with living fully digitally, as long as their avatars can have that kind of level of expression. And again, we've seen you know, what, what will Epic are doing with meta-humans, for example, that sort of really fully rendered digitalized sort of facial and Avatar system. And if we get away, you know, we'll migrate slowly away from cartoony type things to something that can allow us to, one express ourselves in different ways to how we want to look but two allow ourselves to fully facially express ourselves. And that will be through, you know, really sort of advanced sort of motion capture, just by using the camera, you know, that Snapchat is shown that you can do kind of basic stuff with with lenses, you know, on camera lenses are getting more and more and more sophisticated that you know, motion capture, you don't need this up full mocap suit with a dots all over your face kind of thing anymore. So, you know, it's we are getting to that point where people are going to feel comfortable because the technology allows us to feel comfortable interacting that way. But again, a lot of people see this as a once and done shift, you know, it's going to happen in the next couple of years. And how am I going to cope? It's not as as you know, it's a gradual thing. You know, the metaverse itself isn't going to fully realized itself until, you know, a good 5-10 years where we actually figure out what are the core technologies? And what are the core infrastructure requirements that we need to power it?

Benyamin Ahmed  17:58  
How will the developing world position itself with the metaverse?

Theo Priestley  18:04  
Yeah, it's a really good question. And it goes back to the sort of accessibility here. I think the developing world in some respects has an intresting acceleration point because they can build some of the infrastructure like 5g and everything else like that, without making the same mistakes that the western world has done. The other thing as well is that accessibility is key. So they understand that, you know, giving people basic browser access would mean that they have that first metaverse experience immediately, rather than having to, you know, find the means to give everybody some kind of headset or glasses. So the most basic piece of equipment, whether it's a tiny tablet, that's been, that's three generations before, as long as it has a browser, most of the heavy lift and internet capabilities, most of the heavy lifting is done in the cloud anyway, so that, like gives that. I also think that the way the developing world is really hungry to learn. They understand that you can solve problems with very little. You know, so the western world is very kind of saturated with capital and that kind of sort of mentality where I need lots of money to solve a problem where if you go to the developing world, it's very much a case I've got sticky, but you know, sticky plasters and everything else. And I want and I need to solve this problem with the tools and the materials and the talent that I have. And they're much more adaptable that way. So I think that the developing world have actually got a really interesting inflection point to actually take hold of the metaverse concept in its early stages and actually do something really clever with it, and accelerate.

Matthew Cheung  19:47 
We kind of seen that with Maxi Infinity in the Philippines where, you know, they've obviously used some of this technology to extract value from the digital world back into the real world to help them in a time of need and that is, you know, It's grown exponentially over the last couple of months.

Theo Priestley  20:07  
Yeah, that's a really good example actually, Matthew, and it's one I wrote about as well, which is, you know, Axi is quite a ship in the bottle example where I think it's, it's grown exponentially. It's had, it's kind of supernova moment, and it's no starting to dip. Because it is quite limited in what it can, what it allows you to do, and how he allows you to engage. But it's a glimpse, if you can actually capture that moment, but also build the mechanics around that, whether it's a, you know, whether it's a bigger game, or whether it's sort of more virtualized environment where people can do a little bit more interaction, instead of just firing little critters. That's, I think that's where, you know, real value comes from, you know, Axi over the last 12 months, you really want to be building and thinking about something that's going to last 12 years, as you know, that kind of thing. That's where thinking needs to start.

Benyamin Ahmed  21:02  
What do you think young people like, what skills do young people, what skill do they need to learn in order to thrive with the metaverse and life in the next 10 to 20 years?

Theo Priestley  21:15  
Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I've got two teenage boys, and are very different. You know, my 18 year old is actually learning game design. And I think that's a really, really interesting and powerful skill to have for the metaverse. Because you need to understand how people want to interact, you need to understand the levels of interactivity, and how to design the design worlds that people want to live in. You know, and whereas my 15 year old is very sort of physical and practical, and he wants to learn physiotherapy, for example. So the very sort of chalk and cheese. So I can't say to people, or you must learn something, you must learn all digital skills, because we've seen this happen in a cycle before where everybody, in previous governments in the UK, everybody was told, learn a digital skill, and then what happened was all the trade skills disappeared, because they thought all the money was being poured into learning coding. And then suddenly, nobody could do plumbing or electricity or builds, you know, kind of sort of thing. And then what we saw was that shift from overworked sectors, like health care, where doctors and general practitioners who who worked 70, 80, 90 hour weeks for very little pay, were actually learning and filling those trade gaps that were there, because they had a better quality of life and have a higher pay. So I think for younger people, I still say go out and explore, you know, don't be to be set by school to pick a career and then live by it at a very early age. Certainly, like yourself, Benyamin, go out and explore digitally what's out there, learn about it. Because, you know, as you've proven the tools that are out there to allow people to learn, you know, everything as much as possible is like open source now because they want people to, you know, have a go, and you know, start fail start again, kind of thing. So, you know, learning all about the metanomic side of the metaverse and how NFT's and crypto, you know, cryptographics and crypto economics are gonna play a big part in this, I think is a really sort of interesting skill to learn game design, you know, building assets, you know, you've got your iPhone that has like a really interesting and cool LIDAR system that allows you to scan 3d objects. Now you can go out and scan the world around you and sell those assets on sketchfab. That, you know, all the tools are there. I think it's, I think, now, it's just the kind now we need the educational authorities to step up, in a sense and tell the young people that these are the opportunities that are there and point them in the right direction rather than sitting them down and saying we'll learn something classical today. You know, there's a big problem with education. And I've had a bee in a bonnet about this for a long time. But that's, that's for another podcast, I think.

Benyamin Ahmed  24:08  
Earlier we talked about how Ready Player One gives a good glimpse of what the metaverse can be like in 15 to 20 years. So what is your favorite book, game and movie?

Theo Priestley  24:24  
Well, my favorite book is a science fiction book called 'Gateway'. It's by an old school 70s author called Frederick Paul. And it was just a story. It was just a science fiction stories quite small. But it was just one of those that kind of sort of captured my imagination. And it was just it was, you know, it's not even particularly well written. In a sense back then, you know, in the early 60s and 70s. There was a lot, there was a lot of sort of pulp sci fi but it was just such a good story. And I've got a signed copy on my bookshelf because I had to. My favorite game Although it's a toss up between, so I like big world stuff. So I like Elder Scrolls Online and Skyrim because it just allows me to explore and tap into that side. I like Elite Dangerous because it's basically a space game that's modeled on the Milky Way. So I get to like, fly spaceships and who doesn't want to fly spaceships these days. Eve Online is another favorite of mine. Because in a sense, Eve as a as a metaverse in itself on an example. That's been going for 20 years. And it's, you know, it's a microcosm of society and there, you know, there's political, there's socio economics, you know, it's a hot, hot, you know, hot mix of a lot of things and the freedom that it's given players to generate is great. And I don't mind the old shooting up now again as well. So any any sort of FPS like Halo, I think I'm very much in tune with more with science fiction kind of games, and movies. I'm old school. So The Thing and Jaws and Aliens are my sort of three favorite movies.

Matthew Cheung  26:14  
In terms of Fintech, we're obviously called Work in Fintech. And the whole idea of what we're trying to do is to help show people opportunities in this particular sector, but we've actually had quite a few discussions on podcasts in the last couple of months around metaverse, NFTs, crypto, because it does seem to be a convergence of, of different facets of that, which does overlap with Fintech and metanomics have been talking about for people who are looking to get into a career in Fintech, which could encompass any of those particular things. Do you see any particular opportunities at the moment? Like you mentioned, like metanomics? Could you expand on any particular thoughts on that? Or is there any kind of words of wisdom you could provide to young people who are thinking about kind of startup ideas, for example, to to take that idea of metanomics and actually create something a bit bigger?

Theo Priestley  27:12  
Yeah. So I, you know, for me, if you want to look at that side of Fintech, then I would look at, you know, what's happening in the Etherium space, and learn how tokens work, learn how wallets work, learn about all the kind of different side chains that are popping up like Solana and Polygon, and how how those work and how those, how you could potentially help those scale, or build something, a service on those. Also look at anything that requires a traditional financial layer. So an interesting space that's emerging is play to earn in video games, for example, which is Axi in a sense, actually is showing the way. Anything that has something like a traditional sort of subscription model, or you have to pay to get access to suddenly has has a very sort of precarious groans as a revenue model, because, you know, crypto economics, and metanomics is going to open that wide up, right up for disruption. So play to earn is something that is really interesting, because you no longer need to charge people to play a game, you know, they're going to be making money from playing a game, and so are you. But in that sense, everything becomes free, and you're giving them the platform to earn. And so those old kind of old styles of of taking money from, from people in various forms, they're going to be completely transformed. So I would look at those you know, if you're working in Fintech, or thinking about Fintech or anything that's financial, look at where you can actually turn something on its head using a crypto angle on it.

Matthew Cheung  28:59  
And to finish off, you want to touch quickly on your, on your journey, the start of this conversation, but you've actually gone into lots of different areas, lots of different roles. And this, this theme keeps coming up around, you know, generalization versus specialization, and how you can learn skills, which will help build for the future as you as you're kind of going forward. But Similarly, you can go into certain areas, or jobs or roles  which you'll fail in, but that is still a learning experience, because you get closer to finding what you want, and what you like doing. So kind of with that in mind, can you kind of talk about that journey that you've had and also if you were to go back and talk to your 18 year old self, is there any kind of particular advice you would give, that might be different from from what you did the first time around?

Theo Priestley  29:51 
Yeah, so I mean, what when I was first starting work, you know, my parents said get job in a bank, you know, job for life, blah, blah, blah. And that that just I couldn't think of anything worse. If I look at my career now, you know, and certainly everybody around me, younger and old, who has that kind of similar kind of mindset as myself is that, you know, your basic tenure is now sort of 18 months to two years, because people want to keep going, keep transferring into something else. I've never, you know, I've wanted to push myself to do something different just because it interested me, not because it meant something as a career choice. You know, I'm one that level up on the career ladder. It was more to do with the fact that I could go away and explore what that what I could do in that space. And then if I liked it, I would, I would move on to do something else similar. And if I didn't, I would just try something else entirely different, you know, and, and I'm my personality, I'm comfortable with that. Not everybody is so I can't sort of say to everybody do what I do, because it's just, you know, because it's the wrong piece of advice. If I went back in time and and said, you know, met myself, I wouldn't actually tell myself anything, I would just say just do, just do what you're going to do and enjoy it. Because, you know, you have to make those stumbles and steps along the way. And you know, some choices have been bad, some choices have been good. But you know, if I didn't make them, I wouldn't be here with talking to Benyamin and you. So, you know, there's got to be some positives that have happened along the way to get me here.

Matthew Cheung  31:27  
Exactly, and so always be learning. Okay, well, on that note, Theo, thank you so much for joining us today. It's been really interesting to hear about your thoughts on the future, and all of the amazing possibilities that are here in front of us. And Benyamin. Thank you for joining the interview as well.