Latest / Best of Business / Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on the decline in interest in the Metaverse

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Sam Dickie: Fisher Funds expert on the decline in interest in the Metaverse · Best of Business

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  Speaker 1: You're listening to a podcast from News Talks'd be follow
• 0:12
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• 0:16
  Speaker 2: Cast your mind. Back a few years and everybody was
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  Speaker 2: talking about the metaverse right the market thought it would
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  Speaker 2: be the next big thing, the next big computer platform.
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  Speaker 2: After we transition to mobile computing fifteen years ago or so.
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  Speaker 2: What happened to the metaverse? Sam Dickie from Fisher Funds
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  Speaker 2: has been looking into this.
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  Speaker 3: Hey Sam, good at evening here.
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  Speaker 2: Sam, remind me why anybody thought this was going to
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  Speaker 2: be the next big thing.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, well that the most evangelical believers back in twenty
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  Speaker 3: twenty one thought it could be the new Internet. So
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  Speaker 3: instead of interacting via text and video, we would interact
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  Speaker 3: in virtual reality and cruise around as kind of lanky avatars.
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  Speaker 3: And if your children irritating you play Fortnite or Roadblocks,
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  Speaker 3: well they are really just dumbed down versions of the metaverse.
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  Speaker 3: And you might remember another virtual world we talked about
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  Speaker 3: back then, Head the Sandbox, which specializes in virtual real
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  Speaker 3: state and a virtual neighbor of Snoop Dog brought a
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  Speaker 3: plot of land back then for a million bucks, and
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  Speaker 3: that early height was a bit like the NFT market
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  Speaker 3: smoke and mirrors and the price of this online where
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  Speaker 3: the state has kind of collapsed by ninety nine percent.
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  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, and so what he can't do anything
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  Speaker 2: that that's real money he's lost.
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  Speaker 3: Yes, absolutely, it's real money on a on a virtual
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  Speaker 3: plot of land.
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  Speaker 2: Okay, who Okay? This was expected to be massive, right,
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  Speaker 2: so who put money into this stuff?
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  Speaker 3: It was expected to be massive and and some massive
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  Speaker 3: unders thrown around. So I think mortgagerstanding to report at
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  Speaker 3: the time saying it could be an eight trillion dollar
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  Speaker 3: market and it was the next generation kind of social
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  Speaker 3: media stream in a gaming platform and virtual reality, and Facebook,
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  Speaker 3: remember changed its name, So I went so far as
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  Speaker 3: to change his name to Meta show how serious it
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  Speaker 3: was about chasing the next Internet. It wasn't just Meta.
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  Speaker 3: Apple invested heavily in virtual reality hardware like It's goggles,
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  Speaker 3: and the gaming company is like ten Cent in China.
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  Speaker 3: Microsoft invested heavily as well.
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  Speaker 2: What's the reality, you know, compared to what they were expecting.
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  Speaker 2: What are we dealing with today?
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  Speaker 3: Not much? Not much. I mean I talked about those
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  Speaker 3: virtual real estate prices, but necessarily as a poster child here,
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  Speaker 3: so there's eighty llion dollars on a metaverse to date,
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  Speaker 3: and they've got less than ten billion dollars of revenue
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  Speaker 3: to show for that. But they are even kind of
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  Speaker 3: stepping away from the goggles of the online world, and
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  Speaker 3: they're really just focusing their attention now outside of AI
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  Speaker 3: of course, which we're not speaking about tonight, on its
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  Speaker 3: joint venture with ray Band, where instead of kind of
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  Speaker 3: picking up your phone one hundred and thirty seven times
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  Speaker 3: per day, you can cruise around with a cool pier
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  Speaker 3: of ray Band glasses on with the heads up virtual
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  Speaker 3: reality display.
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  Speaker 2: Okah, that sounds cool. What happens from here though? Sam?
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  Speaker 1: Is it?
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  Speaker 2: Is it possible that this idea just was before it's
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  Speaker 2: time and it might catch on in the future sometime.
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  Speaker 3: Yeah, they all known. We overestimate technology in the short
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  Speaker 3: term and underestimate in the long term. Could be, could be,
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  Speaker 3: I think, but even the most evangelical Zuckerberg is kind
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  Speaker 3: of stepping away from it for now. I do think
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  Speaker 3: he's online. But your worlds, also, the market is selling now,
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  Speaker 3: are unlikely to be anything more than Niche use that
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  Speaker 3: hashaps for gaming, and perhaps remember we talked about the
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  Speaker 3: time head Perhaps if you had a friend in Partmerston
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  Speaker 3: both you could team up virtually and attended constant at
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  Speaker 3: high Park. Sounds pretty cool, but I can't. I guess
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  Speaker 3: we'll sit around at work with goggles on and working virtually.
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  Speaker 2: No, when you want the real life experience, don't you.
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  Speaker 2: I mean, is the lesson in this for investors to
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  Speaker 2: perhaps be a little bit wary of tech nerds getting
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  Speaker 2: extremely excited about things.
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  Speaker 3: I think it is. The metaverse is not in portant
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  Speaker 3: per se, but it is a great lean through which
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  Speaker 3: to view that the kind of aggressive spending we're seeing
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  Speaker 3: right now. So remember the scale we talked about a
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  Speaker 3: month ago, Microsoft needs Amazon, Google, just for companies. It's
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  Speaker 3: been one hundred and forty billion on capital expensive last
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  Speaker 3: year and US spend two thirty billion next year. So extraordinary,
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  Speaker 3: right guy? So meta and all line. So despite the
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  Speaker 3: incredible success of these companies, they're backed uns of losers.
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  Speaker 3: So think of the windows phoned by Microsoft, or a
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  Speaker 3: firephone by Amazon, or the Google Glass which was a
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  Speaker 3: wearable computer. So the point of all of this is
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  Speaker 3: the biggest resk for these big tech companies outside of
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  Speaker 3: the government trying to split them up. Alligivate them is
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  Speaker 3: being out innovated, so being beaten at their own game,
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  Speaker 3: and they do this or they get ahead of this
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  Speaker 3: by throwing couns of money, anything with an innovation pulse,
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  Speaker 3: and that kind of healthy paranoia is just kind of
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  Speaker 3: a poster doing business with these big companies.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, fascinating. Hey, Sam, that was absolutely fascinating. I really
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  Speaker 2: appreciate it. You're talking us through Sam Dickie Aficier.
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