WHY PEOPLE STRUGGLE WITH THE CONCEPT OF WEB 3.0 | Digital Ascendant Fireside Chat

people didn't understand that humans basic need is to communicate social allowed people to communicate through pictures and words at scale and when i was an early investor in twitter everyone's like this is the stupidest thing i've ever heard in my life like in all of 2006 789 that was my only conversation everyone's like who cares if you have if you're walking the dog who cares if you're eating pizza going to spain and my answer was always consistent i said everyone which is by the way at that point no different than what happened to me in 1997 when i said i'm gonna sell wine on the internet and everybody in my world was like why would anybody buy wine on the internet you can go to the store who's gonna buy wine on the internet and i said everyone what people struggle with is they make decisions based on themselves their opinions their self-interest instead of having the humility to look at scaled human behavior nft and the metaverse talk about it today it's in the press and knows here gentlemen give us the truth what's going on and why should um i think we should care because we should care about what consumers are doing i think we should care because the consumer blockchain is the biggest technology shift in our society since the internet i think we should care because looking around this room most of us were professionals or starting our professional careers when the internet was doing the exact same thing the wall street journal ran the same article about the internet and said it was a fad when wall street's stock prices collapsed in march of 2000 uh they are down 92 from the gold rush greed insanity bad behavior of september but they i got you brother uh but they are they're up dramatically from a year ago billions of dollars of nfts were bought in that 92 decline and most of all we should care because the smart contract and the utility of digital ownership will impact consumer behavior in a substantial way you know my career has been pretty much predicated on web one web two and web three web one i used to build my dad's wine store and took a three million dollar business to 65 million in seven years with no capital and no credit line because email open rates were 93 google ads words were 5 cents and i rode that wave web 2 for me obviously was where more people got to know me and i built a lot of wealth and a brand and built a very large agency on the back of that web 3 is much more web one because it's complicated technology the reason a lot of people in this room who are incredibly bright and thoughtful may struggle at first is it's very easy for us to bring our internet brain to the blockchain right we're bringing assumptions of what we've learned for the last 25 years that are just not true if you actually understood the underlying tech of the blockchain and so the biggest thing that i'd like to get out of this session with this group is nobody here is not going to be affected in a very substantial way by the blockchain for the rest of their lives so before we read headlines hear the hyperbole pro for me or khan from another direction please make sure you put in the 15 20 hours of homework on actually understanding what a smart contract is what minting is what gas fees are what if the area and solana are i think most people will come to a conclusion if they actually do homework and don't just read a headline that there's a lot going on here and i think things like every sporting event ticket every airline ticket every receipt from a premium brand i mean i really do believe that most of lvmh's receipts of items over five thousand dollars will be in nft form in a decade and there's a lot of reasons why royalties the economics this is a profound consumer shift and just like every other one i've seen the masses are underestimating it and that's where the opportunity is there's such a fundamental difference between crypto currencies and hold the mic because we can go cryptocurrencies and nfts right like for example i only own bitcoin as a cryptocurrency and only because i bought it in 2014 right so for me cryptocurrencies are so different because i'm really more about human psychology and communication where that's where nfts really kick in right for me nfts are going to trade on the same reason the fashion industry exists we spend lots of money on fashion brands for the name on the apparel not for how much it cost so it's all community it's really actually all communication i think the thing that most one of the biggest reasons i understood that social was going to work was people didn't understand that humans basic need is to communicate basic human need is to communicate and social allowed people to communicate through pictures and words at scale right and when i was an early investor in twitter everyone's like this is the stupidest thing i've ever heard in my life like in all of 2006 789 that was my only conversation everyone's like who cares if you have if you're walking the dog who cares if you're eating pizza who cares if you're going to spain and my

answer was always consistent i said everyone and that really made everyone struggle which is by the way at that point no different than what happened to me in 1997 when i said i'm gonna sell wine on the internet and everybody in my world was like why would anybody buy wine on the internet you can go to the store who's gonna buy wine on the internet and i said everyone and that's because what people struggle with is they make decisions based on themselves their opinions their self-interest where they are in their career instead of having the humility to look at scaled human behavior history always tells you the future i had an e-commerce site in 97. do you know how many people did not want to put their credit card into a computer everybody here who has not wanted to take the three hours of work to build like a non-custodial wallet doesn't realize they just became their parents from 25 years ago everything you made fun of your parents for you've become and i think that's cool because that's what p that's what humans do but it's very true right for us looking around this room it seemed very simple in 99 and 2000 to put a credit card in it didn't seem like high friction to our 40 and 50 year old parents it was massive they were completely scared of getting their credit card scammed and things that nature that's just what happens you became your folks one of the barriers um on the mt front is more about the fact that crypto is an appreciating asset and you don't want to actually at least as i would have been owned by a bunch of manatees when i feel like the crypto itself is so valuable and most entities you still have to use cryptocurrency what is the what's going to change there well it's not to your point and this is where a lot of the tax law kicks in a lot of people are undereducated on this it goes both ways right like for example i actually buy nft i'm the reverse of you i buy nfts as a hedge against ethereum because i rather have it in crypto punks because like the nfts can be bridged over to the platform that wins so for me my nft is more valuable i do i think it's more stable right so i'm more scared that ethereum doesn't win and is the yahoo to the google of what ends up winning more than crypto punks because i'll be able to bridge over the crypto punk from the ethereum blockchain to solana or cardano or to something else right so i think that there's you know uh you know i'm very aware that i'm spitting out a lot of words yeah i see you too but you know what's so funny i really want you two to hear this 15 months ago i sat on my carpet i like consuming content on the ground for who knows why and literally typed into youtube what is an nft 15 months ago i just intuitively understood it was time and the consumer was here and i was willing to take time out of everything for 40 50 60 hours and it's really cool like it seems i mean to me and i'm really in this stuff and i've always been right it's who i am and like the first pass-through was like oh this is [ __ ] complicated but you know 40 50 60 hours later you start getting these words that i just threw around down but more importantly this becomes very obvious on why consumer because you have to understand every app every qr code every membership card every points every airline mile everything you're thinking about is better in decentralized server land than centralized server land they become interoperable like eventually delta's gonna realize people trading their delta miles for something else is better and more people will fly that way it's not in a closed world it's in an open world and what we learned from the physical world to the internet we're about to learn from centralized servers to decentralize servers and it's going to change the world can i say one thing um why i really want it for this room is the 50 hours of homework is going to really impact your professional life in the next 36 to 48 months some of the biggest companies in the world are going to really need marketers that understand this some of the biggest companies in the world are going to be formed that are only about this world and many of you are in very advanced places of your career and that knowledge base and maybe a couple of things you share on linkedin can be very disproportionately important for your opportunity graph so just on some real like human level stuff the way i kind of think about why i show up to anything at this point in my life is for a couple of you going down the path and putting in the work may actually create opportunity for you in this next 48 months which are going to be profound opportunistic times like every person here has unlimited friends family that collect things magnets ticket stubs like people are very bad at understanding what humans do normally like everyone has an ant that collects elephants right like

little elephants that right or like it just right like like i had some big advantages in this i grew up heavy in sports cards comic books toys and i lived on ebay the first five years that platform launched like it is profound how much goes through that system in marbles match boxes magnets like profound because it's how people actually live and you want to talk about real friction buying and selling things on ebay is real friction pack it ship it cancel it like the blockchain is actually not a lot of is no friction once you get over to technology humps so anyway i'll leave with this because i know there's some other stuff we want to talk about i'll leave with this one point because i was there wasn't a marketer in 2007 eight nine that took social media serious you know like really at the level that i mean social media put democracy on its knees people thought it was for kids like the same thing's happening right now with the consumer blockchain use this use the fact that you came here as a spark to at least go a little deeper because it's really gonna play out the biggest observation i have is that money clouds everything and right now even that statement like the economics are extraordinary there are people that literally bought board apes for 250 a year ago that there were two three four hundred thousand dollars that's profound you don't get those kind of returns so i think we there's just a lot of money hysteria so i've been very happy about the recorrection of the market and the decline because now we get into the fun part again for some of the people that were there for this part of the career just to remind people pets. com was valued at 43 billion and had zero sales so like the hysteria of this is nothing compared to internet one stocks which is why all of them went to xero but to remind everybody amazon and ebay and paypal were sitting there for a dollar two dollars and six dollars a share in march 2000 and that's what's happening here i think every norm is going to be affected by this i think we can all agree in the last 25 years the internet has touched a lot a lot's changed dating has changed transportation has changed i mean a lot has been affected this actually has bigger ramifications because it really does take out power to your point from a lot of places that have historically had the biggest loser in this game is people in the middle that take a vig for doing little so if you're in that business be careful the biggest thing that i think is a theme to this is more thoughtful conversations around real human psychology and behavioral truths i think open up a lot of opportunity i mean look what's going on with content i know we didn't get to it i know it was part of this every brand in here b2b included not taking advantage of the tick tock arbitrage in the marketplace right now is a huge miss the land grab for attention grab and awareness is extraordinary this played out on facebook fan pages in 2012 a lot of people missed it but i'm stunned how many people have not reallocated their media spends and their creative spends to tick-tock at the scale in which uh the consumption is on that platform and so there's just always opportunities to innovate and back to faster and more as an industry i think we need to do less putting yesterday on a pedestal and doing a lot more of understanding what's actually happening today because what's most fascinating about this industry for me now being in it 15 years most people treat today as it's coming oh tick tock it's coming it's tick tock has hundreds of millions of 30 to 55 year olds on the platform consuming at scale and so we're very good as an industry saying today is coming tomorrow and we fantasize about yesterday like the fact that we did up fronts a couple weeks ago what the [ __ ] todd grey everything is getting slaughtered right now nasdaq is down 28 30 percent a year to date big dislocation in the economy and we have three of the smartest people on the stage right what do you think is going to happen here i think it's a great point i mean look it's talk about human behavior oh every everybody in here probably at this point has read or at least someone knows that most of the wealth creation and the opportunities career advancements all happen during times of this however it's just not the human spirit of most to go on double offense when it feels scary so what's gonna happen there's only two binary outcomes one what always has happened up to this point which is things get better at some point right and all the people that doubled down during this time benefit from that or this is actually the apocalypse and

it's all gonna go terrible and at that point i don't think we're gonna give a [ __ ] about all those other little things and that's what i keep telling my friends i'm like if the thing that you're scared of is gonna happen [ __ ] money you're gonna care about like your kid's health and your own health and like where you like you know and so it there yeah survival and so it's a really interesting behavior like there's a lot going on but i think from a micro life standpoint it's always been a binary game and the micro of the silliness of what we're talking about here our careers in business the consumer is going to behave the way it's always going to behave with modern technology which is nobody really actually acts based on the stock market even though a lot of people focus on the stock market or the economy like the stock market crashed in 2000 on every internet stock the internet still played out and so like all this stuff get like i mean i have nev every single share of a wall street stock i own is based on a company that i invested in pre-ipo i've never liked it it's not where i'm at this is the first time my entire life i'm considering buying because companies that are not disappearing just because the inflation is up and there's a war in the ukraine are getting slaughtered because the market has decided to not focus on growth companies and they want ebitda but the consumer doesn't sit around and say oh i'm not going to use snapchat today because their stock is down 43 percent