Confused by Web 3.0? We were too. The promises of the next iteration of the web are lofty: data de-centralization, transparency, and trust on the web. It won’t happen overnight, but the next wave of the internet is coming. In part one of this 3-part podcast series, we’re breaking down the basics. What is web 3.0? What important change is it bringing?
Confused by Web 3.0? We were too. The promises of the next iteration of the web are lofty: data de-centralization, transparency, and trust on the web. It won’t happen over night, but the next wave of the internet is coming. In part one of this 3-part podcast series, we’re breaking down the basics. What is web 3.0? What important change is it bringing?
George:
Welcome back to another episode of People of Product. My name is George Brooks, and on today's episode, I'm joined by Daniel Linhart and Tyler Hilker.
Dan:
Tyler's in the house.
George:
Tyler's in the house. We're going to jump into a topic that every single person on the face of the internet is talking about right now, and that is web 3.0. It's an exciting space, it's an exciting time, because it feels like that next wave of what a lot of us experienced when we first got into this business, which is what 2.0, we'll unpack what that is, but it feels like we're on the precipice of this next thing that everybody's kind of chatting about and trying to figure out, honestly. It's a little confusing, there are a lot of new words and there's a lot of new technologies in play and purposes. And why does it exist? Why do we need this?
George:
So we're going to jump into that. Tyler's probably one of our most experienced, only because he's just nerded out on the nights and weekends playing around with some things. And so we thought we'd bring him into the conversation, really start to talk about why does web 3.0 exist? What's its promise to the world? And then, because we know we won't be able to get this all in one episode, this is just going to be your setup.
This is just helping us to kind of start the conversation that we think that this is something we need to be paying attention to. And quite honestly, every organization is going to have to pay attention to, because the wave is coming. But how fast and what it means and everything else we'll unpack a little bit more.
So this is going to be the start of a quick series we'll be doing at the beginning of the year, and really starting to unpack each of the areas of web 3.0. And we'll go through some of the vocabulary of that. But you're looking at a few episodes around this topic. And we'll try to tie it back to who are the people doing this work? How will it affect the work that we do? And what does it mean for Crema and what might it mean for your team or your organization? Sound good guys?
Tyler:
That sounds great.
George:
That only took us four takes to get to that, but yeah, we're here. We're here.
Dan:
It's the new year. It's the new year. Come on.
George:
We're getting it, we're getting it.
Dan:
Yep. Okay. So if we're at web 3.0, it leads me to assume there's been two points before this. So someone unpack for me what's been the history of the internet?
Dan:
Oh yeah. I'll be happy to tackle the history of the internet and humanity and, no.
Tyler:
Well, it starts with Al Gore. So please start there.
George:
Al Gore. Thank you Al Gore.
Tyler:
Yeah. So there have been at least two iterations to the internet. Maybe more, I don't know, I haven't been keeping track, I'm just using the convenient decimal system we have. But it's been said that web 1.0 was largely about publishing, where you had one person or one company and they were creating websites and content and then pushing it out into the world. And a lot of that was driven by companies, but it was also driven very heavily by individuals. And there was a sort of ground swell that created room for these companies to move into.
But the internet was pretty, or as somebody who was building the internet, it was pretty focused. I could build my own website and push it out into the world. There was a technological hurdle where I had to learn HTML and some of those early languages, but I could do that. And it was not simple, but I could do that for myself.
Dan:
So Tyler, that's really good. Give us an example, our listeners also an example, so web 1.0, you mentioned you're building contents and you're pushing it out into the world. What is maybe one of those platforms or one of those ways you could do that in web 1.0? Kind of bring us back, bring some of that stuff out of our memory.
Tyler:
Yeah. So the more common ones were news sites. It was like a reflection of a newspaper or a magazine, where it was all them and they were pushing their content outwards just in the same way that they had done. It was very skeuomorphic in terms of how they talked to their audiences.
George:
Yeah. But early days, we're talking like you did have to teach to yourself how to write HTML. It was all inline styling, you're not even dealing with CSS or anything like that yet, that came later. It was really truly image references, links and text on a rendered view that was pulled down from a file server from an FTP someplace.
Tyler:
Yeah. It typically lived on one of your servers, either a server in your college dorm room or a server on Rackspace, or even your own on premises, server servers. Like you owned a space right there and that was your defined contribution.
George:
And there were no platforms at that time. It was truly just a file in a storage that you could access.
Dan:
Well, even you mentioned, George, the rendering itself was just text, and if it was a link, it was blue with a line under it.
George:
Yeah. Browsers weren't really that sophisticated at the time.
George:
Yeah. Okay. So fast forward a little bit. There was an age of publishing, becoming a little bit more sophisticated, but then we started to see the rise of a couple things. And then I'll tee it up and you can take it from there. But a couple things, one is you started to see hosting providers providing centralized places to store data, rather than me having to store it on my local desktop that was sitting underneath my desk.
And also, people starting to create platforms that reduced the level of effort to create websites. And then what would become this new wave of creating apps. And it was pretty close to that time was also the dawn of the mobile device, I think.
Tyler:
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I would say 2.0 starts a couple years before that. And 2.0 is defined by companies enabling people with no technical ability whatsoever to contribute to the internet. So web 1.0 is either an individual with technical knowledge or a company pushing out content in one direction. It was almost entirely one directional. And web 2.0, it became sort of bidirectional, where I could, Twitter is the easiest example, where I could sign up for Twitter with an email and a password and immediately begin contributing to the internet, putting out my own content as it were.
And so web 2.0, back in those days, I was doing social media strategy and research. And so there was this interesting confluence of, honestly, even before Twitter, but there were bulletin boards where people, that's how social interactions would take place. And they were very rudimentary, basic by today's standards, but they were tremendously effective in terms of building communities and helping people get their content online. And web 2.0 is largely conflated with social media. But it was much more than that because it was this defining aspect of helping other people get their information online, and whatever that meant to them, videos for YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, that kind of thing.
George:
And really what we saw is the evolution of that. It wasn't this short period of time, we're talking about 15 to 20 years that web 2.0 has really been in full swing. So I think a lot of us have been kind of going, "What's next?" Like if anything, I'm not going to say we're bored, because it kind of got down into like we're really refining the things that we already have so much that it didn't feel like anything was that revolutionary.
There was little peaks and moments of like a really cool new SAS product that would come out or a new social platform that was using audio and video or disrupting industries with the same exact kind of technology, which is about storing data, updating data and making sure people could communicate through these platforms. So you got Airbnb that disrupts hotels, you got Uber and Lyft disrupts taxi and ride services. You had disruption of different industries, but at a certain point, even that became a saturation. It's like, "What industry are we going to disrupt?"
George:
There were ones that adopted slower or faster, and we're still benefiting from that because we're helping our customers, our organizations, still think about how to adopt truly web 2.0 technologies, cloud servers, authentication platforms, data storage and data access, machine learning when it makes sense to process large amounts of information. But it's the same thing we've been saying for the last 10 years.
Tyler:
Yeah. Another key differentiator that we'll get into with web three is we saw a mass distribution of how technology is stored. So it's not just, I'm outsourcing my content to be owned on Twitter servers, but Twitter themselves has data centers around the world. And those data centers are massive, and obviously AWS and other enterprise level solutions. And so we saw the power of having content distributed and stored elsewhere so that it wasn't just on a given server in New Mexico or wherever, but we had access at any given point.
George:
Well, and I think you also saw, so I think some of the backlash or some of the concern around web 2.0 is it did create these monolithic giants, these what we refer to as our tech giants, that for all practical purposes own all the data, they own all the access to the data, they own the means and processes at which the data is distributed and repurposed and monetized and everything else. And there was really only a few players. So you're talking about Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft. I guess then there are the subsidiaries of those, so you get things like Digital Lotion is a big provider for large scale data.
But it was all owned by, we're talking a dozen or less organizations worldwide for hundreds and hundreds of millions, if not billions, of applications running both everything from a kid building a game all the way through an enterprise running their entire supply chain management. And it's all stored in the cloud, which was the big thing. But really, it wasn't actually in the clouds, it was in these monolithic companies, distributed servers across the world.
Tyler:
And the interesting thing is it wasn't just users flocking to these platforms, it was also aggregators. And Ben Thompson and his stratechery work, and he's been talking about this for a long time, talks about aggregators. And so in such an economy like web 2.0, the goal is to build up as many users and as many suppliers as you can to drive ad revenue, because we know that we don't pay for most of this stuff.
And so you have to build up, you have to aggregate as much as you possibly can, and that's where the competition is. And so that drove improvements in user experience. And so we have very high expectations compared to where we were even just couple years ago in terms of what an app does for me, what I get out of it, the level of effort that I have to put into a product in order for me to regularly use it.
Tyler:
And that's where the strongest competitive advantages came is companies that were willing to invest in, not just design for design's sake, but understanding the customers, because technological advancements could only get them so far. So Airbnb and Uber, it started out with a technology that connected supply and demand, but eventually, in a way it was a pretty easy, easily replicable model, that companies like Lyft and VRBO and whatnot started moving into that space. And that started with, how easy you're going to make my life as a supplier or a user?
Dan:
I think what you just said there, Tyler, is the best way for me to, the difference between 1.0, 2.0, and then three, which we'll get into, but is just, you mentioned economy, the economy of 2.0. So I think of a give and take. So in 1.0, I didn't have to give anything, but I also got very little, and it had very little effect. It was more of a tool that I might use once every so often, a research paper or I want to read a newspaper, something to that extent. And then you get into 2.0 and what happens, like we've all given a lot, but the expectation is that we receive a lot in return.
And if you think about it, 90%, if not all, of your life can be facilitated and functions because of web 2.0. All that they have of me from a personalization standpoint. But it's also facilitated, whether I'm paying bills or I'm doing banking or a whole career, is based off that we've given a lot, but there's also this expectation of also receiving. So from a personalization and also economy standpoint, that kind of helps me wrap my head around the difference. And it's all around data. It all comes back to data.
George:
And as an individual, you're expecting to get this great UX, which Tyler was talking about for basically no cost or very little cost. We think about how much we used to pay for cable, like just cable TV, and now we're like, "Oh my gosh, something that would cost a hundred dollars plus a month, that's crazy." But yet, we have access to unlimited knowledge, and basically we can communicate with anyone in the world instantly for next to no money.
And yet we are exchanging, as Dan has said, we are exchanging something, which is our privacy, our information, our eyeballs, or we have our attention, or we're participating in an experiment that aliens are funding. I'm not exactly sure. Could be any of those things.
Tyler:
You never know.
Dan:
We'll find out at some point.
George:
Yeah. Yeah.
Tyler:
Even the so-called innovative apps like TikTok, I'll pick on them, not that they're all that new anymore. But it was a hit because it provided a certain interaction model and a certain type of content that was unique, but in terms of aggregating a bunch of eyeballs and aggregating advertisers. And it, it wasn't fundamentally doing all that much different than Vine, which got bought by Twitter years ago, or even Twitter, because it simply allowed somebody to easily push their content out into the world.
And so what we've seen in the last couple years is this sort of extraction of content from a broader array of people. And so it's just the same thing, how do you create an app or a product that allows more people to get their input out into the world and then allows other people to see that? And so it's like a Twitter for this, a Vine for this, an Uber for this. And when you start hearing that, you know that you are reaching the sort of extraction phase where a certain model is nearing its date of its lifespan.
George:
Critical mass.
Tyler:
Yeah, yeah.
George:
Well, and Tyler, I think that's really key, because we're not suggesting, let's jump over to web 3.0 real quick here, but we're not suggesting that web 2.0 is going to like disappear overnight. So many of the platforms, principles, technology, conveniences that we have are not going to go away anytime soon. And we can talk about the level of the barrier to entry or the friction that is necessary right now in web 3.0.
But we are suggesting that there is a movement coming that's gaining enough traction that people should start looking picking their heads up a little bit and start looking at it. So let's jump there. So web 3.0, let's just go with the definition, but how would you define what web 3.0 is?
Tyler:
Yeah. So building on our previous concepts, web.0 is basically one way street, writing and then reading. 2.0 is more like a two way street where I can consume content, but I can also contribute content easily with minimal technical knowledge. And yet that information, my photos, my contributions are generally owned by the company that owns the platform that I'm using to put those out there.
So there's centralized ownership, but broad contribution. And web 3.0 is a next step in terms of ownership. So it's decentralized ownership, typically. This is not always the case, this is just a very generalized definition. But the driving idea behind web 3.0 is that I can contribute information to the internet and then it is not owned by one centralized authority, it is really owned by me, is the central idea?
Dan:
Would you say that's the crux, Tyler, for anyone learning about, it's like that's the crux, if you had to get to, I guess, the bottom level?
Tyler:
I would say that.
Dan:
Okay.
George:
And that, by definition, is what everybody keeps saying it's decentralized, it's decentralized. Whether that's decentralized finance or decentralized organizations or decentralized ...
Dan:
Ownership, really.
George:
Ownership, yeah. Like it's a sense of that that information is no longer held in one place, it is [crosstalk 00:18:59] distributed across. [crosstalk 00:19:02] block, so we'll get into that in a second.
Tyler:
Yeah. Yeah. It's important to understand that it's not just decentralized technology, it's decentralized ownership and contribution. Because like I was saying before, AWS is inherently distributed, Facebook, their storage is distributed and, that's all good. And so web three is, in a way, building on the strength of that.
Dan:
And with that, the decentralized ownership, there's transparency there, there's ownership. So everyone who's contributing knows there's a transparency of like what transaction has taken place or who might own what. Can you go into that a little bit as well, Tyler?
Tyler:
Yeah. So web three is, some have said is just a clever marketing term for technology built like blockchain type technology. Blockchains are a kind of technology that, again, in general, this is not true of all of them, but most of them are open source. They are open technologies that everybody can see what's what's happening. It's a system of record or like a ledger that everybody can see every transaction and every owner on that particular blockchain.
And that provides a sort of transparency that we don't have in terms of finance, for instance. And that scares a lot of people, because in a way it's, "Oh, but I don't want people seeing how much money is in that particular wallet or account." But it's also really revolutionary in the sense that if somebody's on this blockchain, I know exactly what's happening. And if it's a city government or a company, then that can build trust in that company because I know exactly what's happening there.
George:
As we were doing some research on this, this idea of it being a bottom up designed structure came up. And I thought that was an interesting way to look at it, because what you're suggesting is is when you think about the people that are both building these solutions, creating these communities, releasing these assets to purchase and to invest in, et cetera, really it rarely comes from, again, one organization going, "we're going to make the thing that everybody wants to buy."
George:
Instead, I've heard the term recently flipped, web 2.0 was all about the MVP, especially with lean startup, it was all about minimum viable product, like what's the thing I can release as a company to get users engaged and bought in as quickly as possible to get to that critical mass we talked about? Whereas web 3.0 is really about what's the minimum viable community? How can I gather enough people to say, "Do we in this white paper?" Which truly is to say, "Do we believe in this idea of value, of asset creation, of ownership, of shared ownership, that we would invest a shared amount of time, a shared amount of design, a shared amount of skill in creating something together?"
And it will be kind of in the open, this is where it gets super nerdy, depending on how open you want it to be. Which what we found is that there is this tension in the web 3.0 because it is so vulnerable, it's so transparent, people have found ways, because people do this, of creating anonymity through basically fake accounts or fake names or multiple addresses in order to hide their identity.
George:
But then you have the community, which says, "Well, if you want to participate here, we need to know who you are." Which then goes into the whole process of doxing, which is basically saying like, "I'm going to show you everything that I have, everything that I am, so that I can prove that I am the person that this account says that I am, so that you will trust me even more as I'm contributing to this shared idea."
I want to be careful in saying this, but it has a lot of socialism kind of terms and thinking in the sense of like there's a very shared responsibility in everyone bringing something to the table, voting on it, everybody kind of contributing an equal level, rather than having one pinnacle owner.
Tyler:
I'd call it less socialist and more collectivist.
George:
Communist. Oh, collectivist.
Tyler:
Definitely not that either. But no, because it's purely voluntary. You're opting into this system that says, "I want to contribute in this way and these others want to contribute in this way." And so an important point about blockchains and how they're distributing, bringing it back to your community point, is that blockchain networks is a network of actual computers running a virtual computer software. And I'm borrowing from Chris Dixon on this, he's been a bit of a, I'll call him a web three crush, if you will, because his thoughts are just so clear and concise.
George:
We've all got our web three crushes, it's cool.
Dan:
Yeah, 100%.
Tyler:
It's this network of computers owned by different people. And then those people, based on their participation, will vote on particular initiatives within the community. And so if you're running Ethereum nodes, you have a certain level of voting power.
Developers on a network can vote on particular measures to say, "We want to change the way that this works. We want to change the way that this works." And in order for a blockchain network, it needs a community to build it up and develop a certain number of nodes to make it worth using, in a way. And so that's how communities are driving these different networks. And each blockchain is built with certain assumptions about the way that things should go.
Tyler:
So Bitcoin was primarily financial, and that was the first one of its kind. And then Ethereum obviously has become a massive force. And it was built with certain assumptions about the way that blockchains should operate. And then we have these other chains that are, some of them are purpose built. And that's where I've been pretty intrigued, because there are some that are built for supply chains or some that are built for gaming or some that are built for video or advertising or whatever it is.
And so instead of having a community around geography, you have the community around a shared interest about how a particular blockchain could influence the world in new ways. And so you have these communities driving that.
Tyler:
And then George, what you were talking about, where a community can buy into a performer's contract, theoretically. And this is where we can start defining some basic vocabulary terms. Let's say there's an artist who has released an album on blockchain and they are committing to the proceeds of those record sales, because they're tied into a smart contract, which is basically a contract written into code, that whenever somebody, at the end of the year, all the proceeds from that album will be divvied up among people who have purchased an NFT.
And so that gives them some sort of investment in the outcome of this artist. And so you get communities rising up around artists, either music or JPEGs or whatever it is. And those communities combined with the developer communities are driving the growth of these various blockchain networks.
George:
So there's a few terms already that have gotten thrown out. And this is, I'll be honest, this is probably the biggest barrier to entry for most folks that are getting into this. They're hearing these terms, they're seeing people talk about it. Definitely celebrities are participating, because they've got the capital to jump in and do these very influential campaigns, in some way. But I think you said a few things there.
So what I want to do is, I want to just kind of queue these up. I don't want to time to explain what each of these are, because that's what we're going to do on the following episodes. So we'll go through and we'll unpack these and we'll probably even have more words and more subtopics that will unpack in each of those. So if you're actually into web three and you're listening to this and you go, "Well, you didn't list those other things that are really important." Well, just be patient, we'll get to it.
Dan:
Yeah, just slow going here. We got all the time in the world.
Tyler:
Send us a note, we'd love to hear what you've got to say.
George:
So you already mentioned blockchain. We're going to jump into blockchain as one of the core foundational things that we need to unpack, really explain a little bit more of how that works or where it came from, the history behind it, the potential of it. Because everything that we're going to talk about from here on out, in some way, shape or form lives on what we're referring to as the blockchain.
And it's not new, but we need to explain it. We're going to get into NFTs, non fungible tokens, what they are, what they are not, what that they're capable of being. And that probably will be closely talked around this idea of a smart contract and the potential smart contracts, really to disrupt, pretty rapidly, some pretty big companies in the world.
Dan:
And just service industries. You think about any industry that involves middle men individuals, those that are processing or verifying that a transaction is taking place. That is going to be a big -
George:
Threat.
Dan:
Absolutely. So it's really the service industry in general.
George:
Yeah. Oh man. And Crema is that, to some extent. And so that's one of the reasons we're paying attention, is because it will be real for us. So we'll talk more about smart tracks in smart contracts, NFTs, tokens. Crypto, so currencies, coins, decentralized finance, DeFi. DOWs, that took me a while to wrap my head around what a DOW was and the potential if what a DOW could be. I was like, "Is Crema a DOW? Could we be a Dow? I don't know. How does that work?" And wallets.
So again, we want to kind of break down some barriers to even how to start to play. So I've said this a couple times, is I'm learning web 3.0 the same way that I learned web 2.0, it's primarily for me by getting my hands dirty, or mostly just my pointer finger, because I click on a mouse and I move it around. But you get it, what I'm saying, like I want to click around, I want to play with it. But there are some things that are a pretty real barrier and a financial risk to playing, depending on what you're playing with.
Tyler:
None of this is financial advice.
George:
Yeah, let's just say that right now.
Dan:
Yeah, that's a good disclaimer.
George:
Nothing here is financial advice on this or the future episodes, and we'll remind you of that. And there'll be other pieces as well, but those are kind of the core areas we want to camp around. Finally, where I think we're going to land, and this is kind of at the very end of it, but maybe actually the first thing you're hearing about, which is this idea of the metaverse.
And so that, actually, in some ways is a slightly different thing, but it's built still on the technology and the platform on the ownership of these things, on the space at which people will participate, on who owns the verse or not. And so we want to need there, because I think it'll culminate in the potential of what an alternate internet reality might be. And so we'll go through that, we'll go through each of those things.
George:
I want to end real quick though, because we kind of touched on this. And then, Tyler, I want to throw it to you. But real quick to wrap up before we wrap up this intro episode, what would you say is the promise of web three? We talked a little bit about what it is or maybe a little of even how it functions, but what is it promising us? What's that better future potentially look like as we start thinking about this wave of web three? Dan?
Tyler:
I have so many thoughts. Dan, do you have thoughts?
Dan:
I was just kicking it over to you.
Tyler:
The thing that gets me most excited is not the technology, it is the increased accessibility of almost all of this. So when I think about financial access or the unbanked in many parts of the world. Being unbanked means that you don't have access to a bank for whatever reason, whether you don't have an identity in the country you live or you don't have consistent income.
And so it's more about, I don't really like this language, but wrestling control away from certain gatekeepers, like Facebook and massive institutions, that for in their genuine best interest they've avoided working with certain parties. But in doing so, that's keeping so many people, millions of people, out of an environment in which they could thrive.
And so that includes finance, that includes connections to other communities, that includes access to different kinds of work. And so in a way, it's hard for me to hold the web 2.0 companies in too much judgment, because there's some genuine risk out there to supporting communities like that and these smaller economies.
Tyler:
But there are lots of people who are willing to support those kinds of communities and take on that risk. And so building networks and platforms that support people like that is really, really exciting to me.
Dan:
Yeah, that's really good. I think where my mind went first was, but I'll preface it, I think using an analogy, it's going to be like moving a really heavy boulder up a hill for a long time first before the kinetic energy can happen. It's just this idea around security and trust and privacy. I think there's a big deal to be said of knowing that my data, my information is decentralized. It's not all owned and used by corporations and only a few corporations for whatever they want to use it for.
Now, granted, I enter into that. But there is something to be said about, again, security and trust. And I think this could be its own topic, honestly, is like what is going to have to happen in just human psychology and just the mind to be willing to, because George you mentioned earlier, like to prove who I am I have to give all, a lot of information that normally I wouldn't on the internet.
And so what's going to have to happen, what level of vulnerability or trust are people going to have to get comfortable with to release that information knowing that that information is actually probably better kept, that data is better kept, there's better privacy around blockchain? But I think it's going to take a little bit.
Dan:
And, as we mentioned at he beginning of this podcast, it's so complex and complicated right now and confusing. There's going to have to be work towards that, of making it to where there's better understanding and education around how to use this technology and what it does for me, before individuals jump in. But I think the promise of it and one of the beauties of decentralization is security, trust, and privacy. But I think it might take a little bit to get there.
Tyler:
Yeah, for sure. And behind all that is a new level of responsibility for what we put out into the world.
Dan:
That's a really good point.
Tyler:
And we outsource a lot of that to Facebook, and they haven't always handled that well. It's pretty easy for them to not do that. And I wanted to throw this out as a sort of challenge, and it's why I made my point about user experiences earlier in our conversation, because we've grown so accustomed to experiences that make things easy as possible, that cater to us as end users.
And so our expectations are that any new thing is extremely easy and mindful of us. Whereas in the web three world, this is messy territory. I like to say that we're on trails, we're not on paved roads. And in most cases, we're bushwhacking. And we found that in our experiments earlier this year, where we started building out our own NFT platform and there were very few resources for how to do that well. And so we spent most of our time bushwhacking our way into this and getting our hands dirty and working with the material.
Tyler:
But as people who were curious about this kind of thing, and I would argue that almost everybody should be, we need to keep in mind that fact, that there's an increased responsibility, because the safeguards that we're used to aren't there yet. And so we need to be more mindful of what we put out there, there is genuinely more risk.
But because our expectations are high from these web 2.0 experiences, we need to hold those in tension and push on web three experiences to make them more like 2.0, but know that it's not going to happen overnight, just like you were saying, Dan, it's going to take a while. But it's easy for us to dismiss web three technologies like crypto wallets, which we're buying something on OpenSea, these things that are pretty normal in that web three world. But if you're not familiar with it, it took me several days to understand what was happening.
George:
Well, then you tried to explain it to me, and it took me a week of going and doing it for myself because I didn't understand what you were talking about, yeah.
Dan:
I don't know how many different blog articles I've read, Tyler, even since you and I talked about it, I was just like, "Okay. There's a lot of education here."
Tyler:
Yeah. And it's messy. And that similar complexity is behind every experience we use today, we just don't see it because we've kind of slowly become acclimated. And the companies, to their credit, have hidden a lot of that complexity from us. But if we dismiss these new experiences because they're difficult and hard to understand, then we're going to miss out on some pretty cool opportunities. And I'm not just talking financial, but I'm talking in terms of the way that things are done more broadly.
George:
So what you're saying is everyone after finishing this up needs to go download a MetaMask wallet and then go buy a CryptoPunk and a Bored Ape.
Tyler:
I'm not saying that all.
George:
Okay, cool. Financial advice brought to you by Tyler Hilker. No. I love that language though.
Tyler:
No, but in the next couple episodes, I have more thoughts, so many thoughts. It's pretty fascinating. Not my thoughts, but other people's thoughts.
George:
Well, and I think this is it, we're in a phase of learning, so we thought we'd just be transparent with our learning and share it with you. So come along this journey with us, make sure if you haven't subscribed already to the podcast or you know others that might be interested in this space, as we explore this, hopefully they'll be interested to see what we're seeing from the position of an organization that often is being hired to be looking ahead for our clients. So a lot of the folks that we're working with are asking us, "Where's this going? Do I need to be paying attention to this? Do we need to be looking at this?"
And quite transparently, most of it, it's like don't worry yet. We're looking ahead, we'll get there, you've got some time. It maybe is coming faster than we thought it would, but we'll be all right, we'll all figure it out together. And so if you want to learn a little bit about what we're seeing, yeah, subscribe. And definitely, if you can, share this podcast out. Because I think the next few episodes are going to be a lot of fun to learn together. So Tyler, Dan, thank you so much for exploring this, setting this up. I'm excited for the next few episodes, it's going to be really good.
Tyler:
Same.
Dan:
Looking forward to it.
Tyler:
We haven't got to the good stuff either.
George:
All right, well. It depends on when you listen to this, but merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year, all that good stuff. It was fun to be with you guys this year. And I think you all froze, but I didn't, so I know that it recorded fine on my side, we're going to keep going with it.
Dan:
Yep. It sounded great.
Tyler:
Wonderful.
George:
Thanks, everybody.