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Pilote Podcast Episode 2 – Show Notes
Facebook, NFT Sales, Identity, Gaming & Digital Marketing.
(2:05) NFT is the WAP of Web3!
(2:58) Facebook User Numbers and Share Price – Daily Active Users (DAU) are down… kinda.. Facebook’s owner Meta Platforms says DAUs fell to 1.929bn in the three months to the end of December, compared to 1.930bn in the previous quarter.
(9:00) Napster V Apple Music is Sandbox V Meta
(12:20) Certain NFTs outsold the global film industry in January? “NFTs Outsold the Entire Movie Industry in January. The NFT Bored Ape Yacht Club & Mutant Ape Yacht Club collections did more in sales on OpenSea ($495m) than the global movie industry did at the box office ($482m)
(16:03) NFTs as Profile pics. Linkedin has a policy which says that profile pictures should be photographs and has asked some users to take down their NFTs.
(18:20) We Need to Talk About…. Identity
(20:16) Bitcoin Whitepaper.
(33:24) The Metaverse, Destination Marketing and Gaming
(33:36) Rockstar announces GTA6
(41:25) Can you learn Digital Marketing in 8 Days?
(48:33) Tommy Emmanuel’s Classical Gas
Transcript
Dave 0:16
It’s February 2022. This is the Pilote podcast with David Fuller and Cory Smith. Let’s kick it off. The response to our first episode, we had some amazing comments.I was actually blown away.
Cory…
I think that people like us. It’s not just because we’re so handsome, the subject matter resonates. I get a lot of positive responses too. “We really like what you’re talking about and how you’re talking about it.” And I think that’s not only a testament to our thinking about doing this podcast, but I think there’s an appetite for not only information about the subject matter, but honest information.
Dave
And I and I had a haircut, which is always good for radio. I like some of the comments. One of the comments I saw was, “I like your anti crypto bro, attitude or something like that.”
Cory
We’re not anti crypto.
Dave
But I always have to now put a caveat at the beginning of every comment, which is that I am bullish on this technology. I think it’s awesome. But we need to just call out some of the Kool Aid drinkers.
Cory
I think it’s important. We’ve seen this before. A lot of these things are just a natural part of the exploration of this next evolution, thisWeb3, right. I may have been joking around last week about NFT’s as trading cards.
Dave
And some of them are trading cards.
Cory
And that may be a model that lasts 10 or 12 or 25 years. It may not. You know, there were a lot of things like we talked about last week, ring tones and screensavers.
Dave
NFT is the WAP of Web3. NFT’s is to Web3 what WAP was to the mobile internet? It was rubbish. It was the first thing out there. It was a terrible technology. But it was the beginning of mobile internet.
Cory
That’s right. It’s a stepping stone. It’s the idea to fail fast and fail forward – things that we talk about in business and in agile all the time. We got to not be afraid to fail and not be afraid to try new things. And try new models. And these things are important. It’s just another stepping stone
Dave 2:50
Well, that leads us into our first news story of the week. Facebook has seen a decline in daily active users. And consequently, it might be related and might be correlated. It might not be that they’ve seen a massive decline in their share price. Maybe Facebook’s time is done. What do you think?
Cory
I’ll tell you my opinion, and I’m not afraid to share it. I think that Facebook is making these large investments into the metaverse because they know they’re done. I think they’re in decline. A lot of people are very averse to Facebook, they have a very negative emotional response to Facebook. People kind of maybe unfairly hang all of social media’s, ill will to our social fabric on Facebook because they’re the largest. And I think that they probably wisely have made investments in the metaverse changing their name to meta or changing their parent company name to meta and investing into the metaverse because they see this is where they the time that they need to pivot their business towards what’s next. Knowing that social media is in decline, that’s my personal opinion.
Dave
Well, the timing of the Facebook rebranding was off. After the Facebook papers after these allegations or stories came out that Facebook wasn’t very good for people. I mean, it’s not very good for young girls who have body image problems. It’s not very good for people who are being bullied. A whole bunch of people who are identifying themselves and their success based on what they’re seeing on social media, which isn’t how it started.
There’s there’s a network effect that happens with all of these platforms. And I was involved with one very early in the in the early 2000s. There’s a few things going on. One is that people went to Facebook because that’s where their friends and family were and rightly that’s what a social network was. I’m a digital nomad. I’m currently living 5000 miles from home. And I’ve lived away from home for a long time. So it’s kind of nice to see what my friends from high school are doing. My friends are doing or you know, they that was its purpose that was its promise, stay in touch with friends that you have fallen out of touch with friends and family be part of a community join a tribe, and then it gets corrupted,
Cory
You can’t control what users do with the tool that you provide to them. Right. So, you know, like you said, yeah, when, when we, when it came, when it was created, there was the promise of, you know, this was something good. We all remember what it was like when Facebook, MySpace, all these social tools first came out, it was a great way for you to reconnect with old family highschool friends that you never talked to and see what they’re doing. And it was a great thing. And then, you know, it’s kind of torn in our social fabric and created all of these, like you said, problems for young people, young girls with body issues, or bullying, or just created this rift and are certainly in American culture and political rift and further widen the chasm between conservative and liberal people are progressive and conservative people and just serve to kind of divide people rather than bring people together, which was the promise of social media. And I think that’s gonna be true with the metaverse, too. I’m not trying to pivot the courting conversation towards Metaverse or web three, but I think we’re gonna face the same challenges.
Dave
This happens with every platform. Facebook was started as a let’s call it what it was, is effectively a dating platform for people.
Cory
Now the thing is ironically, this started as a dating platform for college kids. And now it’s kind of like the platform for boomers.
Dave
Right? Although they always forget us. We’re Gen X right? So we always get forgotten completely.
Cory
Right? Which is fine. I like to be the invisible generation. Just keep me out of it, man,
Dave
The Facebook papers came out and basically showed that they knew that they were causing harm to certain people and they didn’t know absolutely nothing about it. Right, that’s one thing and I think certain people have said, I don’t need to use Facebook anymore. There’s other things out there. Content creators can use tick tock and kids can use discord. I mean, there’s there’s, there’s always new ways that people can talk to each other and relate to each other. Right? And there’s this Metaverse play or meta play, which some people just don’t get, and then other people have gone. Well, do we really want to live in a Metaverse controlled by Mark Zuckerberg?
Cory
Controlled by Mark Zuckerberg? Right? I can’t call it meta. You have to forgive me. It’s Facebook. I understand Facebook’s play from a business standpoint of pivoting towards the metaverse. And I’d love for you to frankly, I would love for you to disagree or give me a counterpoint perspective on this. I feel like Facebook is going to become the AOL of web three. And let me explain that I see rolling your eyes that
Dave
Yeah, I’m just trying to roll my memory back to getting CDs in the mail from from AOL
Cory
Remember like during the first iteration of the web,when we had to connect to the internet through dial up, and you had to use a service like AOL or CompuServe. And then your interface, the way the web looked to you looked like the AOL interface. You didn’t have a web browser. You have Chrome, Firefox. I remember that day, right. So like your only kind of perception of the way the web looked and felt was the AOL interface.
Dave
I can see a mass market Metaverse, which could be, which could be meta. There could be a version of the metaverse, which is, I don’t know the next evolution of Sandbox or Decentraland, or something we haven’t seen yet. But I can also see an AOL version of the metaverse, which is, which is just a safe corporate version, right? It’s the difference between Napster and Apple Music.
Cory
That’s right. That’s great analogy.
Dave
The super cool early adopters who were like, ”I’m not gonna I’m not going to pay for music. I’m going to download Napster, or I’m going to download torrents and I’m going to get my music for free. Because I’m a cool geek and I and I know what I’m doing”. And then Apple comes along and says, well, downloading Napster or a torrent service is really difficult, and you don’t know what you’re going to get. And it’s and it’s illegal. And wouldn’t it just be easy if you download the Apple version and you pay $1 for a song and the mass market goes – Oh, yeah, I don’t understand Napster. I’ve never got it. But if Apple told me that I can download a song for $1. Then that’s my version of music streaming.
And the metaverse I think is going to be very similar. You’ll have the cool kids and the geeks who go Yeah, I’m out. I’m out pushing the envelope doing something completely new. Downloading my NFT avatar and buying land Then, and everyone else is like, I don’t understand that. Meta, can you just give me a version that I don’t have to think about and meta will give them that version of the metaverse and a whole bunch of people go, that’s so much easier than the other, the other.
Cory
And that’s exactly what I think that they’re going to be. They’re going to be the really simple, easy way for people to enter the Web3 or the metaverse and access it. That’s the safe corporate way. Right. And I think that that will be a very popular and used platform for a while.
Dave
At the end of the day, I can go into a new Metaverse, I can go into The Sandbox tomorrow. But none of my friends are there. Why would I join a new strange place? If none of my friends are there? If none of my people are there, and that’s this network effect. And maybe that’s why Facebook’s the shine is coming off Facebook because people are starting to leave it.
And Twitter’s the same. When I joined it had a lot of engagement. I had a lot of people replying to my posts, there were a lot of likes, or whatever. I felt like there was a discourse. And I feel like from a professional point of view, a lot of that engagement and interaction has moved on to LinkedIn. So my LinkedIn feed now looks like what my sure my Twitter feed
Cory
I see the same thing.
Dave
And nobody’s really engaging on Twitter because it’s it’s weird, hateful place.
Cory
It’s interesting that you said that because I was just thinking that the other day that LinkedIn has become the new Twitter maybe for guys like us, social media has become as much of a professional content outlet and input is a personal one. I probably spend as much time on LinkedIn than I do on every other social platform for intake. Things that I do in my life like if I’m sitting around at night, tick tock number one.
Dave
I’m not into Tik-Tok yet but I love Instagram and I and I post a lot because I just find joy in Instagram, It’s the only social media I get joy out of.
Cory
me too. And well Tik Tok.
Dave
Let’s get into our second big news story of the week. NFTs outsold the entire media industry in January. The NFT collection Bored Ape Yacht Club and Mutant Ape yacht club did more in sales on open sea 495 million than the global movie industry did at the box office. 482 million. Is this actually a new story?.
Cory
I think it’s a news story.
Dave
I can’t think of a decent big movie released in January.
Cory
Well, let me think, no, there’s not
Dave
No one went to a film because of the pandemic. And this is based on box office. So this isn’t anything. This is a kind of selective data that says there are a bunch of NFT sold in January 495 million worth. But at the end of the day, people aren’t going to cinemas, Netflix alone would have done $2.2 billion dollars worth of revenue. So to say that NF T’s are doing better than Hollywood is kind of a really selective statistics.
Cory
But I still think that this number is significant.
Dave
The price of a movie ticket is what 20 bucks. Yeah. And the price of of the lowest Bored Ape NFT is $280,000. So it’s not exactly comparing apples with apples.
Cory
No, it’s not. Well, I mean, it’s selective. The lens that I’m looking at it through is the volume and the amount like this is this a substantial amount of money changing hands like this, it doesn’t get press and I think that it shows
Dave
495 million is a is a big number. But when you compare it to what Amazon did in January, or what Apple did in January, so to say outsold the global movie industry is a little bit misleading, misleading
Cory
My point of view, if this number is real, if this much currency has changed hands in this marketplace, is substantial considering who they are, and it’s in the size of the market and the size, and these are individuals. Still half a billion bubbles. I’m just more interested in the story behind that, I guess I should say so. Right. I think it is misleading.
Dave
Out of that came another story, which is that the creators are in talks to get some funding, which would value this company. I’m not sure it’s even a company right at $5 billion.
Cory
This goes back to 1999. Right if you can find Ready to put that kind of a valuation on your company give me the money. God bless you.
Dave
BuzzFeed this week, kind of outed the founders. And I saw that the entire web three community went that’s not on, you can’t actually want to know who’s going to get the money from a $5 billion company. That’s, that’s not on.
Cory
Let me let me take a step back, if you don’t mind. So you mentioned that they’re there. They’ve gone to a VC that specializes in Metaverse or web three companies. That’s interesting to me, right? I’d love to, I’d like to get one of these guys on the show. Yeah. And like, ask them what’s the criteria by which you evaluate web three companies, and not only evaluate them, but value them? For what they do? And what and you know, how do you look at them and say, Okay, here’s a company that’s building something that’s going to have some longevity.
Dave
So moving on, there is a link between this this story and and our next one, which is that some people on LinkedIn, are trying to use their NF T’s as profile pics. But LinkedIn had a very different purpose. As you know, from as we were saying, Before, different networks have different purposes. If Corey is connected to Dave, and you trust Dave, and you can trust Corey, and your reputation kind of went with your connections, some of that has been lost.
And there’s a lot of social media mechanics now, where people are literally just collecting connections, as you know, for volume. LinkedIn has terms and conditions. And they always have that say, for the same reasons that your profile picture should be your photo. But there are some people who are saying they should be able to use their Ape as the profile picture on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn is pushed back and said, No, you can’t.
Cory
It is a professional networking site. Right? What Why would you need? Why would you want in a professional context, to have an NFT, picture of whatever, that’s not a picture of you, as your profile
Dave
Their argument is that they saw it early, and therefore, they were really smart by seeing it early, and thereby having it shows that they were early and smart.
Cory
Yeah great, you get a gold star for that. But that doesn’t take away from the fact that that defeats what I believe is the ethos or the purpose of this website, which is to professionally connect with other professionals, and they want to see who you are. That’s just dumb. I think it’s dumb. I’m gonna say it’s, it’s dumb.
Dave
That’ll be the soundbite for our next promotion.
Cory
I try not to engage with people. And you know, you’ve seen me do it, I will argue with people online. I try not to but like, it’s just like, this is not the hill to die on. Nor is it the time to die on it for your NFTs.
Dave
That brings us into our topic of the week, which I’ve renamed based on what you’re watching last week, but we’re gonna call this segment we need to talk about and this week, we need to talk about identity.
Cory
Yes, oh, I love that great, great name for the segment, let’s keep that we need to talk about identity I got I got I got things to say. But I’ll let you start.
Dave
Alright, so I’m going to lay this out here because we need to put it into a Web3 context, ID in the old sense, and identity are not the same thing. So we need to we need to say that up front. So ID is something that you use for your age verification, you might need it to buy alcohol, you might need to get into a, you know, a certain place in order to buy a plane ticket move between countries.ID is not the same as identity, right?
So an identity is a very amorphous thing. It’s the sum total of a whole bunch of things, including your appearance, your actions, your beliefs, your relationships, your your identity is a much more complex thing than then than your ID. So in a web three context, it’s conflated and mixed up with a whole bunch of other issues, which include things like privacy and anonymity and transparency and accountability and reputation. And these are again, these aren’t the same thing as identity. Right? Some people get these things confused. They say, Oh, no, Facebook’s using my data and they’re selling it. They’re selling it to advertisers. Okay? They may or may not be but that doesn’t change your identity, just because Facebook knows your birthday, which is public domain information anyway, and they allow an advertiser to use that to target you for a certain type of product. Then that actually doesn’t invade your privacy in any way at all.
To bring this back to basics as to why the web three crowd put identity as part of this new movement or new type of internet. It goes back to the original white paper written by Satoshi Nakamoto. And Bitcoin is a currency. And it was about financial transactions. So it wasn’t ever a white paper to define a new community or, or a new utopian vision for the way individuals interact with each other. It was, it was a currency, it was a way of trading with each other. When he wrote the white paper it had no identity requirement, unlike a lot of websites, and even a lot of web three companies that require you to put in your name, your email address, your mobile number and a bunch of other data in order to create an account.
The Bitcoin blockchain doesn’t actually require that. You can just be an anonymous public, you know, wallet with a private key and a public key. And there’s no other requirements. You can just be that, right, which is one of the reasons why it’s been used for nefarious purposes. Right? Yes. There’s a reason why elements of society have cottoned on to blockchain because there’s a way of hiding your identity. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that everything has to be anonymous. Right, right. And actually, a lot of people are saying that there needs to be this, maybe at a personal level, yes, my private data needs to be protected. But at a corporate level, there needs to be absolute radical transparency. And potentially, there is some real brand of business value in radical transparency,
Cory
Identity is a big thing. Identity and Access Management is a big thing here. Because of the recent story, that the IRS the Internal Revenue Service here in the United States is going to start to require users to use an Identity Service ID me to to access your internal revenue service your your tax records, through their website, and people are freaking out, because they got you know, you got to provide us a selfie, and a picture of your driver’s license to to authenticate yourself or your your identity. Meanwhile, everybody’s on Facebook doing a 10 year challenge, nevermind that, but they’re freaked out that they have to provide a selfie to get access to your tax records, which I think is hilarious. But you know, I think there’s a disconnect, like you said, between the general public and their identity, that, you know, their reputation, or whatever, and they think there’s, it’s all the same, it’s really not. And as we move into this new evolution of the web and web three promises of that with the blockchain is like, as you said, Now, it’s anonymity, but it’s also identity portability. Right? So like, so like, as we get to think back to these people wanting to use their NFT’s as their profile pictures, one of the things is they can actually port their identity, their immutable identity information. So for into the future, they’ll be able to attach their identity information to those NFTs and use that as access, which is one of the big things that we talked about in corporate America now is the experience friction that people have in providing like the the situation with the IRS, people don’t like to have to provide or go through extra steps to provide identity.
Dave
So I was looking at one today. There is a new crypto exchange every hour, it seems. So I thought, Okay, this, this one’s offering something which I haven’t seen before, I’ll download the app. So I downloaded the app. And then it said, Okay, we need to do your KYC, which is also known as know your customer. It’s a compliance process that basically is to stop money laundering and you know, terrorist funding and a whole bunch of other stuff. If somebody is coming on to a platform where they’re trading real money, then you need to know who that person is, where they got their funds from, and what were these funds to etc. I can kind of understand that. But on the other hand, they wanted three forms of address ID. And at the moment, it seems that your physical address needs to be the thing that everyone’s had upon. They don’t actually care how old you are, then it can help you know who you’re married to or what nationality you are. It just depends on where your mail is sent to you. Which which I think is a hangover from when mail was the thing…
Cory
That’s becoming less and less important, as you said, people become digital nomads, I think people in you know, we’ve called it the greater resignation. I’m changing it to the great reassessments. I think that people are changing the way they perceive their lives and their jobs and their occupations. And they’re thinking about this is like, you know, the address where you live, how many people are using like it, whether they’re digital nomads or not, they’re using like, anytime mailbox.com, where they have a mail forwarding service, where they have an address, where they have all their mail sent to and then once a month, they have it forwarded it to them wherever they’re at.
Dave
There’s some really interesting advantages to this kind of new form of identity IDs, which are a combination of your actions online and on-chain, which a lot of people stay at web three folks are starting to talk about. So certain actions you take are taken on-chain, and they’re recorded forever. And you can have multiple identities, and you can have combined identities and whatever else. So I’ve got my identity, which is my activity online, on chain off chain, whatever else, and then you and I would have a certain part of our identity, we just co join because we’re doing this podcast together, and therefore your identity, my identity would, there would be a certain part which which would be mixed. And so you’re gonna have multiple identities, which are also mixed identities. But the advantage is, some of the advantages of this are actually quite interesting.
If you think about college applications, or you think about job applications. And you think about the amount of prejudice which might be included in somebody’s name, this person has submitted an application for a job. And you don’t need to know the name, you don’t need to know when they were born. You don’t need to know their nationality, you don’t need to know their gender. But this signature says that they went to school at Harvard, and they graduated with this degree. And that’s included in the application. But none of the other personal information is shared. So there is there are some advantages to that.
Cory
Right, if people choose to use them.
Dave
And then the other problem is the onboarding. So where does the original information come from? And how do you verify it? How do I put my birthday into this chain in a way that you can verify that it was actually my birthday? There’s got to be a trust agent in there somewhere, whether it’s a hospital
Cory
You can divorce the systems right, you divorce the systems between what you choose to use to identify your identity and what you choose to use to share your information in that trust this architecture, right? So those things are divorced from each other and separate so that they don’t commingle. But that’s a really great use case. For that it’s like an application for colleges, or an application for a job. Do you think that overtime, at least anyway, as a culture, humans can get past the, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before, it’s like, well, we want to make sure this person is a culture fit.
Dave
That’s the utopian side of it. The dystopian side of it is that everything you ever do is recorded forever. That’s, and then there’s this credit, there’s this social credit style enforcement like China does where basically, all right, oh, exactly. I tweeted something when I was 18. And it’s gone into the blockchain, and I can’t remove it. And it’s part of my identity,
Cory
Which we already live in today. To an orderly to a point where like, but think about all these people, celebrities and public figures, they get canceled, because they made like a comedian made a joke in 1993, and tweeted it and it was completely appropriate. 1993 right. But I mean, like, that’s a whole other topic. But it’s like today and 2022. That joke is no longer socially acceptable, and they’re canceled.
Dave
Yeah. Or if you get conned by a Ponzi scheme, and they say, well, this person is obviously not very bright because they were conned by a Ponzi scheme. And it’s like, yeah, but there were 27 million other people who also got conned right? Certainly mean, they’re intelligent or not.
I think the saddest thing right now is this again, going back to this, I’m going to use a picture of an animal NFT as my profile picture. To me, that’s really sad, that shows that my self esteem, or my self worth has been defined by and then it’s been designed or by some other person, that apparently gives me more clout than my own face.
Cory
It’s not new. It’s like saying, Well, you know, I’m defined by where I went to school and what car I drive. But it would be questionable. It’s like, okay, why does this guy not want to show his face? Like, is it more important to be like, Look how cool I am. I’m using the latest greatest G Wiz and NFT, which you know, as my profile pic. And that’s more important than showing my face. That would be questionable to me. If I was considering him for a job. If I was considered like somebody was reaching out to me, he’s like, Hey, I’d like to meet or collaborate with you. Or, you know, like, hey, let’s talk about something or I have an interesting idea. I’d be like, I know about this dude.
Dave
And I remember going to Indianapolis one year, and there was a guy who had the logo of the Indianapolis Speedway tattooed on his arm.
Cory
Yeah, but I find those people questionable too.
Dave
It’s one thing to say, I believe in this thing. So intensely, I’m going to have it permanently inked onto my body. It’s another thing to replace my face with that image.
Cory
Right. And as you said, at the beginning of the podcast, I don’t want to sound like I’m down on NFTs or this idea. I think there’s a time and a place for it. You know, I think that using your NFT as a profile pic is appropriate in some places. Twitter, Twitter allows you to do it. If you want to do it, do it right.
Dave
And always had anonymous accounts. That’s right. You can be the queen. You can be Devin Nunez cow, you can be whatever you want on Twitter, right. And there’s a certain amount of cool stuff that has happened from, you know, the Arab Spring. You know, allowed by certain social media platforms being anonymous, and people being able to say what they think without any repercussions, I think there are certain places where your face is still important. And I think LinkedIn is one of those places.
Cory
There’s some baseline rules or understanding so that we all agree to you, there’s a terms of service, right? All agreed when we get on these platforms. And it’s like, if you want to use it, if you want to do this thing, if you want an NF t as your profile pic. There’s there’s places that are cool with that. LinkedIn isn’t one of those places. LinkedIn, by design is a professional networking…
Cory
Its a web two platform that has its own web platform designed for this specific purpose. Can we just play by the rules that are the construct that they’ve set up for that? And that’s and that’s we all agree to play by those rules. And we’re not we let’s not change the rules for you. Let’s say that the platform shouldn’t evolve to meet the bit like the as the business or the model for what it’s designed to do
Dave
There will be an alternative that says this is the web three version of LinkedIn where anything goes, and people would say, right, fine, I’m going to use trustless architecture and I’m going to use blockchain to verify whether this person is a good person or not a good person. And then there’ll be a corporate fork. That is this is old school LinkedIn that only photos apply. And you can either play by the rules or not, surely the market and users will say I’m going to move either to one or the other one or the other way. They would go to either tick tock or Facebook or they’ll go to
Cory
right. That’s right. You know, I had an interesting conversation with a client this week. That got me thinking about how a destination might use the metaverse to promote tourism.
Dave
There was a piece of news that came out yesterday, which I’m super excited about, which is that Rockstar have announced Grand Theft Auto six. Oh yeah. And that actually Red Dead Redemption two is the closest thing to Metaverse I’ve ever experienced.
Cory
I haven’t actually played I actually own the game but never played in
Dave
Red Dead Redemption two I’ve lost months of my life to is the most immersive digital experience I’ve ever experienced. And if I was a if I was a destination, and I had a choice of building a Metaverse to attract tourists, or getting a triple A game studio to recreate my city slash country as a level or a world for a game like, like, Grand Theft Auto six, then I would go the ladder every time because I’ve only ever been to LA twice. But I’ve played GTA five, right. And I was watching Bosch, I think it was Bosch, or some other series the other day, and yeah, and I was like, I’d been here and then I’m like, No, I haven’t actually been there. But I was there in Grand Theft Auto Five, because the mapping that they did in that game is so realistic, that I feel like I’ve been to places in LA that I’ve never been before. Red Dead Redemption two is a step up from Grand Theft Auto Five. And from a Metaverse experience, there’s a lot of stuff going on in that game, like you have to go fishing. In order to catch fish, you have to cook that fish on the stove. And if you don’t cook that fish on the stove, then you lose energy. And there’s like there’s a real time element to that. So it’s not just, oh, I’m leveling up or I mean, I’m making my character the next cool character or whatever. It’s a Metaverse experience that says that. And there’s an honor system within that game, the outcomes of the game and the way the characters in the game relate to you. And the outcomes that you get in the game are related to that honest,
Cory
I think I need to change my perspectives a little bit. And you’re helping me think about it because you know, I’ll admit to being a bit that old fashioned but about gaming. Right? So gaming is an escape for me, I like me to it’s my TV and my PlayStation, right? It’s here in my office, my little cave, where I work and play. And I often retreat to games as a way to decompress. Right? Yeah. So the kinds of games that I have been drawn to in the last few years are stuff that I can jump in and out of and not have to invest time, right, so but my wife, I got her a Nintendo Switch. And she likes Animal Crossing games like Animal Crossing, which kind of lend themselves to these kinds of Metaverse games where you have to do things and accomplish things and build honor and credit and grow and build. Like I don’t I’m not typically attracted to those kinds of games I’m attracted to Call of Duty or Battlefield
Dave
I love Call of Duty. COD Mobile is my nightly get rid of stress
Cory
that I’ve played for literally years and my son plays too and it’s an old game is Rainbow Six Siege. Yeah, where you can just kind of jump in kill people get out.
Cory
So I’m going to make a concerted effort to learn more and play more of these open world games and open myself up to be I’m gonna be a yes person. And open myself because my son play loves those kinds of games.
Dave
And this again, this comes back to value. Right, so we were talking last week about some of these new gaming companies that were charging silly money $1,000 For an NFT for a game that hasn’t been built yet. Right? Red Dead Redemption. 50 bucks. 60 bucks. I don’t know. 75 bucks if you get the super deluxe version, Dutch Gold Edition, right? Get the Gold Edition. Just put this into context, the main storyline of Red Dead Redemption two is 60 hours of gameplay, right? Just the main storyline. And there’s probably about 400 hours of side missions. That’s insane. Right? So in terms of the value for 75 bucks, you’re getting 600 hours of entertainment versus what a movie ticket gives you 25 bucks for two hours or an NFT game that’s giving you nothing.
Cory
And it’s funny because like you said people are like oh my god, it’s $75 it’s so expensive. It’s like it’s 600 hours. Yeah, of a game.
Dave
And this is why Microsoft bought Activision. And this is why the gaming company Yeah, I mean, watch demand because the metaverse is going to be game driven. These guys know how to create virtual worlds. They know how to create missions, they know how to create economies. If your meta and you’re saying Facebook, if you’re Facebook and you’re just saying we’re going to do it Port Facebook into a virtual world. It’s not going to work. It doesn’t matter whether it’s movies, books, games, the human imperative, the quests,
Dave
I mean, the Hobit It’s a pretty boring story, but it’s a quest. It’s a very simple psychological trick. You can’t just have a meta verse that says turn up and hope you find something by serendipity, right? You need a meta verse that says, Oh, by the way, if you go into the metaverse with Corey and you team up, and you two can go on on a quest, and you can find do whatever find the ring and and share the share the spoils, then that’s a totally different motivation to just well, you can talk to Cory in the metaverse Oh, yeah, well, I can talk to Craig.
Cory
I value these. I’ve been doing these podcasts because they changed. It causes me to think about things like, everything. But like in this case, the metaverse that I had not thought about before. And relative to this gaming thing, you know, like you said, it’s like this, this makes sense to me. And it helps me think about it in terms of business as well. This gaming channel is was obvious to me is an area of growth or a initial area of growth or a path forward for Metaverse, but it’s become much more clear to me now because this is a natural evolution of the way games of games have been going already for years like with World of Warcraft, right? And those types of quest based games. This is the natural evolution of the an open world games, like you said, like Red Dead Redemption,
Dave
People now are thinking, okay, the metaverse is this vr Virtual world. But a book is a Metaverse in a sense, right? Because your imagination is filling in all the gaps that the writer is describing in it. And adventure because you and I were playing text adventures and it’s like, you’re in a room, it’s dark. And you’re like, Okay, well, my mind believes I’m in a room and it’s dark. I don’t need to be wearing VR goggles. Right? That’s right, but myself in that situation. And it’s like, okay, there are three exits, and you type II for East and you go, Okay, you’re now in a forest and Right, right, right, right. Now, okay, Red Dead Redemption. Two is that 25 years later, amazing open world version of that. But it’s still a quest.
Cory
It’s, it’s still at its core, the same thing. Hey, quickly, I want to pivot to one other thing that I had a conversation about this week. So I was having a conversation, as you know, in the midst of this 30 year career in, in digital and technology, and all the great stuff that we’ve done. I worked briefly for a number of years, and advertising and marketing, and ad agencies. So of course, I have a lot of colleagues that work in advertising and digital advertising and marketing still, oh, and I tend to be protective, maybe a little sensitive about my friends in marketing, because I think it’s a systemic problem, not only in the advertising marketing world, I just think in business in general, that creative workers and creators are devalued, right? Like I think that they think that creativity is a commodity. And that people that work as creative folks tend to not get paid as much or not as valued as much as people that work in the tech field. You’ll find that programmer, that’s true. But well, certainly here in the US they are so as
Dave
Madman in the madman days, those guys were the rockstars Oh,
Cory
sure. But like today, you’ll find that if you find a Python programmer, that dude’s making 80 100 grand, where a designer UX person might be making 65 grand, you know, I mean, or, like our traditional art director or creative director, if they’re making $100,000 a year low one hundreds, they’re making a lot of money in the United States, where as a you know, I recently was hiring for a architect position that somebody that we would, you know, of course, now with the the great reassessment, the prices of people gone up, but you know, they’re looking for $200,000 A year for somebody with like, 656 years of experience. So anyway, as I was surfing LinkedIn, as I do in social media, this this past week, it’s I do, I saw an ad from a prestigious very prestigious university, learn digital marketing in 18 months, and I really, and that’s
Dave
That;s a long I got one. I got one in six days.
Cory
Yeah, right. And so like I saw that infuriated and compelled me to play post about it simply because I just think that further goes to perpetuate this myth of creativity and people that work in marketing that it’s, it’s something that you can easily teach yourself, you can go buy a book from Amazon or take a crash course online, and somehow learn how to be a proficient and prolific Digital Marketer. I know I’ve worked with people that have dedicated years of their life, to their careers and their craft, to insinuate that you can even learn the basics of just marketing in 18 months, let alone to learn any one of the 62 different channels of digital marketing with any proficiency in 18 months, is insulting
Dave
A three year bachelor’s degrees that take you from being an 18 year old beer drinker to being a qualified economist. And there’s nothing to say that a three year undergraduate degree qualifies you for anything except that you’ve read a bunch of books and listened to, you know, the professors that taught you. But I do think there is a difficulty in assessing hard skills versus soft skills. So you know, a Python programmer can say, I can write this, I can write this many lines of code in a day, and it’ll do X. And here’s the results. Whereas a guy is a branding guy, you know, a branding guy who’s thinking about psychology, he’s thinking, if I change this font, what’s the impact going to be on somebody reading this ad? If I change the color from light blue to dark blue? What difference is that going to have that if you learn by experience, and by experience, and actually today, it’s easier, because you’ve got things like A B testing and multivariate testing and, and things and you can say, right, 500 ads out on Facebook, and if one of them gets a 30%, click through and the other three, get no click through, then we know, and maybe I’ve got said that was going to be the answer. But at least we know that now with some evidence,
Cory
I also think that there’s like this kind of like, misconception or mis selling of, quote unquote, digital marketing, as like, oh, I can, in six weeks, go out and learn how to to master the Facebook market, you know, like the ads suite on how to target ads and inline content to people on Facebook. And somehow now I’m a digital marketer?
Dave
It’s even worse than that in the web three crypto space because you talk to some of these companies and they say, Oh, we want to, we want a CMO. You say, Okay, fine, what do you need your cmo to do? And they’re like, oh, we need someone to run our Discord. Right? We need someone to run our Discord channel. That’s what our CMO does. That’s not That’s not marketing. That’s right. That’s, that’s community management, which is a Sub Sub Sub Sub subset of marketing. If somebody has no idea about digital marketing in a days, you can actually give them a pretty decent foundation on how to give them a digital marketing plan and say, Okay, this is back to fundamentals. This is my customer proposition. These are my buyer, these my buyer personas, this is my customer promise, this is my, these are my keywords. Now, are they going to know as much as me? No, especially in a discipline that’s creative, or it’s got soft skills attached to it? There is a certain amount of experience braised knees, war wounds, gray hair that you need to be able to be be really, really good at,
Cory
you got to understand that, you know, for somebody that’s like a small business owner, that selling widgets on amazon marketplace or something, be learning how to do Google ads, or in Google keywords, and Facebook ads is probably enough, right? But for a brand, or somebody is trying to build a brand, like somebody like Coca Cola, their marketing machine is complex, right? They’re doing campaigns, and they’re doing programmatic. In addition to organic and paid social, and other type of content marketing, that has to all work together in tandem, that requires coordination, planning and creativity. That involves multiple skill sets and multiple days,
Dave
Here’s an analogy for you, which I’ve just thought of, right? I love reaction Videos. That’s your guilty pleasure, actually. And it’s really funny because a lot of these reaction videos, especially around music, they kind of follow each other and so one of one of these guys will watch something and then the rest of them will all do the same song and the law, right react to the same song but there’s an Australian guitarist called Tommy Emmanuel. I’ll put this in the show notes, but this guy’s been playing guitar for 45 years. Right? And he does a version of Classical gas, this guy is the guitar as a guitarist, if you take the same analogy and you say, right, I can teach you guitar in 10 hours. Right? That’s true. I can get you out, I can show you the chords I can say, right? This is where you put your thing. That’s right, a and this is where you put your fingers for B flat. And this is where and this is how you do finger picking. And this is how you do strumming. And this is how you do tuning. And in 10 hours, I can teach you guitar, but that doesn’t mean you’re going to be any good. So this was his name that the New York writer who did the 10,000 hours thing, Gladwell, Malcolm Gladwell, he did a joke about, like, the 10,000 hours that you need to become an expert at something. And I think that’s been debunked by some people. But it’s a similar kind of thing, right? I can teach you how to play guitar in 10 hours, but that doesn’t mean you’re any good at it, you need to practice it. And you need to, you need to do it over and over and over and over and again, to become an expert. Yeah, it’s same with digital marketing, I can teach. That’s right, I can teach digital marketing in 10 hours, but that doesn’t mean you’ll be any good at it.
Cory
That’s right. And you have to go do it and do it every day. And that, like you said, that’s that’s what it comes down to it’s then there’s
Dave
There’s a market for these people. There’s only so many Python people who went and decided that they were going to learn how to code Python. And therefore they’re in more demand, because there’s only so many of them, because it’s hard, and they’re and therefore their price goes up. Whereas everyone thinks they can do marketing. And there’s a bunch of those people out in the market and therefore the price goes down because there’s a whole bunch of people out there in the market out.
Cory
there doing it right in a market, right and then and then the P the amateurs are devaluing the people that are at you know, it’s the doom loop.
Dave
Once again, this has been an enlightening discussion. Thank you very much, Cory. For your insight. I always use your viewpoint.
Cory
I’ll see you next week.
