Randall Fort is a seasoned security, intelligence, and technology leader known for his grasp of enterprise mission needs – and his ability to track the rapidly advancing capabilities of technology to meet those needs. His background includes time as the Director of Global Security for Goldman Sachs. He also led one of the most highly regarded teams of analysts in the world, the Department of State’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Randy later worked at Raytheon and is now the COO of QWERX. He has also been a long-standing member of the AFCEA Intelligence Committee.

Over a series of conversations, we garnered “quick takes” from Fort on a variety of topics, including exponential technologies, misinformation, the metaverse (specifically in a national security context), and much more.

We began the conversation with a discussion of critical thinking, exponential growth and risk. We pick up where we left off in that conversation, with a focus on the future of the metaverse and exponential growth.

“The estimates that I’ve seen range from, by 2030 – so not very far away – between one and $32 trillion of economic activity in virtual worlds.”

Daniel Pereira: Let’s expand our discussion of exponentials to the future of virtual reality.

Randall Fort:  Every business today – I’m not talking about the tech providers here in this case, I’m just talking about Fortune 500 companies – we are at a point with the metaverse right now where we were with the web in the early nineties, you know, ‘93, ‘94, ‘95, when in January of 1993 there were a total of 500 websites on the planet Earth.  500. There are 1.2 billion websites this past January.  So there is your literal exponential growth of the last 30 years. Great.

So in 1993, how many companies were talking about what their web strategy was going to be? What was their web platform going to look like? How were they going to manage customers digitally? How were they going to, what was their digital literally zero, et cetera, all the Yes, correct. Zero, the five hundred websites that existed. No, I haven’t gone back and looked at each one, but undoubtedly most of them were saying,

Pereira:  It was zero at that point.

Fort:  Colleges. Yes. You know academic institutions, laboratories, et cetera, et cetera, nerds that were setting up their own web servers, but Fortune 500 companies, probably not.

Pereira:  Even if Prof. Oettinger was interacting with some of his Fortune 500 clients at his think tank, this was nothing like digital transformation language.

Fort:  Do we really need to forget the history that is not even 30 years old, it is within the working lifespan of everybody that’s employed now and say, “you know, that web thing kind of turned out to be a BFD.   Maybe we should take a hard look – today, right now, at this metaverse thing and put some serious thought into it – not turn it over to the interns coming in over the summer, which was how people handled the web.

That is something that I think every company ought to be taking a hard look at today. It’s going to be different approaches:  are you B2B or are you B2C?  Are you B2G?  What is your bread and butter? And obviously, B2C, if you are in the B2C business at all, you better have a metaverse strategy or you’re going to die, right? And so B2B?  Probably.  B2G?  Government, again, will be the last major set of institutions to figure out what they need  – outside of a few little nodes of expertise and competence, mostly in the intelligence community.  But do you really think the education department or labor or HUD is going to get around to having a metaverse strategy until like we’re at the 8.0 version in the commercial marketplace?

The estimates that I’ve seen range from, by 2030 – so not very far away – between one and $32 trillion of economic activity in virtual worlds.  Now, even if it’s only $1 trillion in the next eight that is a very serious number.  It took a long time to even get to $1 billion on the web. I think the year 2000 was the year we finally got to a billion dollars transacted on the web.

“If you think all 500 of the Fortune 500 have clear metaverse strategies, I’d say probably not.”

Pereira:  Amazon was in the red until a few years ago. And AWS is stronger in revenue than the parent company Amazon.

Fort:  Yes. Taking the long view, which is what Bezos did, which is what I think Zuckerberg is doing now, right? He’s not worried about this quarter or this annual number or all the people making fun of him.  In 20 years, when he’s the first trillionaire in the world because he was the one who figured out the metaverse, if I were him I’d be taking names of every single one of these journalists and critics that are making fun of him right now and criticizing his metaverse strategy.

But you know – in all seriousness – every company should, if they don’t have a strategy today, they ought to have somebody  – in whatever their long-term, long-range planning group – tracking the technology, to be thinking about what the different moves a company should make now.

This is something I do now.  Whenever I meet people – receptions, parties, whatever, where do you work is always the first question, then I ask “What is your metaverse strategy?” And pretty much everybody I get right now is “What are you talking about?”   Or, they know what it is but we don’t have one.  Are you going to be the last one in your sector and amongst your competitors to figure this out? Do you think that’s going to be good for business and for shareholders? So I think the smarter companies are probably doing that now but not all of them  If you think all 500 of the Fortune 500 have clear metaverse strategies, I’d say probably not.

“In digital terms:  Kurtzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns.  Progression and evolution – it speeds up, it is faster. And so the ability to react and adapt to those changes becomes tested…”

Pereira:  So, it takes an act of God for me to engage the metaverse because I was at USC in the early ‘90’s in a Silicon Graphics, George Lucas sponsored MFA in Computer Graphics, with Silicon Graphics Onyx machine, et cetera, et cetera.  So my guard has been up about this whole thing because I know the heavy lifting and the interoperability issues ahead to even make it a partial reality relative to what is already promised by the tech press. Matt, in his annual book list (Top 10 Security, Technology, and Business Books of 2022) included Matthew Ball’s The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything, which is very good and captures some of my concerns.   And that is part of the reason I scheduled this time with you.  You and Bob have both been evangelists of the metaverse, certainly since I came on board with OODA Loop, and I have been flinching on the metaverse for many years.  Between the Ball book and this conversation, I need to pull away my onion layers of resistance to the metaverse for OODA Loop research purposes.

Fort:  Well, you know Daniel,  I want to be clear.  I’m not so much of an evangelist about it.  Maybe more of a prophet, you know, Jeremiah. <Laughs>.  I’m just prophesizing about what’s going to happen.  Whether it’s good or bad. And it’s going to be both because it’s just a technology and the technology is morally neutral.  It can do lots of good things. It can do lots of bad things. And how it ends up being used will be in the hands of humanity. And that will mean a lot of good people will do good things with it, and a lot of evil people will do evil things with it, and everything in between. Again, the bell-shaped curve.

You can see it right there. It’s coming at us.  It is coming at us with exponential speed.  And that hockey stick, when it goes vertical, is going to knock you over. So instead of being surprised by this new technology and unprepared and not having started to think about the consequences of it, particularly for national security  –  shame on you if you are not.  And all I’m saying is: “This is a thing.”  I’m not a technologist. I can’t tell you the speed of this and this and the pixels and, you know, all the compression algorithm  – and blah, blah, blah, blah – and whether all that stuff that is going to actually work, other than every technology I’ve ever seen goes from big and slow and clunky and expensive to small, fast and cheap within a progression and an evolution.

In digital terms:  Kurtzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns.  Progression and evolution – it speeds up, it is faster. And so the ability to react and adapt to those changes becomes tested because the capabilities are constantly in flux. It doesn’t just sit there for ten to twenty years the government needs to figure something out.  What is the policy going to be? What are the regulations going to be?  Which subcommittee is going to have oversight?  Is there a metaverse subcommittee in Congress? No, there is not.

“You have major, major exponential technology companies that are putting serious money into the metaverse.  And so that’s not hype.  That is real.”

Pereira: To continue to deliver insights on metaverse, Kurtzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns will be central to our research this year, and coming up with “quick and dirty quant” in an effort to map nodes of exponential growth.  So we want to leverage that into our research.

Fort:  That will be good.

Pereira:  But what you are really making me realize is that what I was perceived as just another hype cycle – which I have been discounting – this is a different exploration altogether.  If you add the way Fortune 100 was broadsided by the pandemic and its impacts on the supply chains, people have their strategic sleeves rolled up within these companies – and the Fortune 100 are building out their strategy divisions.  There is a lot more hiring of that kind of team to look at all these long-view issues. And the metaverse is a development that should be on their roadmaps.  And actually has supply chain implications possibly.

Fort:  The one thing about the metaverse:  if you look at the billions and billions and tens of billions of dollars to be invested:  this isn’t just hype.  Companies are betting with real, serious as a heart attack dollars.  Tens of billions of dollars are being invested in this. So this isn’t just a bunch of guys that are sitting there, oh, come on, let’s try to spin this thing up and then sell a few goggles or whatever. And then we’re going to go off and sit on the beach. You have major, major exponential technology companies that are putting serious money into the metaverse.  And so that’s not hype.  That is real.  The market right now is punishing Zuckerberg and Meta for having wasted all that money and the tens of billions they’re spending now when they’re raking in trillions, he is going to have the last laugh.

“Where are the offices of Metaverse Affairs at the Commerce Department or State Department? You should be able to create virtual embassies and a virtual U.S. presence worldwide.”

Pereira:  There are also hard metrics available already.  Roblox does annual year-end reports of their current business model and they are clearly early pioneers of what will become the metaverse. They have cash flow and, you know, they’re in the game. I now realize there are going to be some great analyses and some great case studies we can take a look at this year.  So we have that research antenna up.

Fort:  Yes.  They’re not just throwing that money out there for nothing. You’ve got some people that are very hard series number crunchers that are figuring out what the long-term return on that is going to be. You have to respect that.

Pereira:  Yes.

Fort:  Where is the government R&D on metaverse, virtual reality, and virtual worlds?  Well, first of all, is there anybody in the entire US Government even aware of what the private sector is spending?  I think that is a question with a very uncertain answer.  And even if they were, who is listening to them?  And where, as I said, where is the metaverse subcommittee on the Hill?  Where are the offices of Metaverse Affairs at the Commerce Department or State Department? You should be able to create virtual embassies and a virtual U.S. presence worldwide. They should be absolutely involved in these efforts.  There are just a whole bunch of applications for it and I just don’t see the activity or the interest anywhere.

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2023/03/17/qwerx-coo-and-ooda-network-member-randall-fort-on-critical-thinking-exponential-growth-and-risk/

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2021/08/27/randall-fort-on-the-future-of-the-metaverse-and-its-cybersecurity-and-intelligence-implications/

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2022/10/31/the-october-2022-ooda-network-member-meeting-oodacon-2022-exponential-disruption-and-the-future-of-innovation-at-speed-and-scale/

https://oodaloop.com/ooda-original/2022/06/24/oodacon-2022-and-periods-of-economic-downturn-as-a-climate-for-innovation-discussed-by-the-june-2022-ooda-network-member-meeting/

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2023/02/06/ooda-loop-on-exponential-disruption/

About the OODA Loop Exponential Innovation Series

https://oodaloop.com/archive/2023/02/06/designing-quantifying-and-measuring-exponential-innovation/