Forecasting the Future of Tech with Scott Belsky | Where It Happens

0:00greg we are back we are back 2022 uh [ __ ] man a lot uh crazy break i feel like um normally i try to take the like holidays as a time to kind of like catch up and regroup on things and um i felt like with covet it was like 2x the ability to do that because i was able to just get out of a bunch of stuff that i didn't really want to do so it was good i feel like i got a lot done over the break it's good to see you man if we haven't really chatted so i mean we've dm'd a little bit so and

0:33and we talked we talked about some articles we we had enough of each other after that like week in miami right like it was kind of we kind of needed like a little break um you know i felt like we got in real you know we spent a lot of time together so it was good to have a little break it's like distance makes the heart grow fonder right all right yeah but i'm ready let's let's get everybody back into it yeah and you know like we have a very cool set of things to talk about um today which i'm personally really excited about we um

1:01you know we've both been talking over the last few days about like what does 2022 look like and what are our personal goals like we talked about late checkout talked about some of my personal business stuff what we were focusing on and a lot of it always honed around um you know like predictions for the future what does the future look like and how we can actually build into that future i always think um like this concept and this framework you and i have talked about of like variant perception like you have to have a variant perception of what the future looks like i.e like a

1:29contrarian or different perspective um and then go build into that and then you're paid when you're proven correct about what that variant perception is of the future and so you and i have jammed a lot on that like what are our contrarian views of what the future looks like that not a lot of people understand or believe and how do you go build into that um and that's kind of a good frame up for what we want to actually get to dive into today so okay so what do you what's on your mind 2022 predictions where are we going where's the world headed i feel like the common wisdom today says

2:05that the world is never going to be as in person as it was pre-covered um and my like one of my more contrarian views is that i think a lot of things are going to go back to normal like i actually i might be totally wrong in this but i think that a lot of tech jobs are going to go back to being in person versus this like you know assumption that everything is going to be a remote forever and i think i saw some chart on like hacker news or something that like 80 90 of job openings for developers were now remote um i just think it's going to swing back in

2:42some direction i think people are going to find it hard to manage and build culture and scale culture in a remote context and i i honestly i think i'm like a total uh unicorn in thinking this right now because um everyone's gonna yell at me and say that i'm an idiot for for making that statement but i still just think it's really hard to like manage time and and really build and scale culture in a remote context i mean so i've been working remote since 2014 which is a really long time and even when i had a company in san francisco and our team was in san

3:17francisco i was like we're working remote i think people like me who have seen like the unlock of productivity and remote it's gonna in tech it's gonna be hard for us to go back i think what you're gonna see is a ton of like like um summits like late checkout we're remote company there's 50 team members like how do we do a summit every month three months whatever in different cool places that we can come together again facetime i think that's where i think there's a ton of opportunity to build companies around that yeah um i like that i think that's like a cool infrastructure thing too of

3:55like bridging the gap in between the two and how do you go build a business that allows people to you know basically like culture as a service right like you know you need to have culture it's so important for growing businesses can you create a culture as a service business and it sort of relates in to some of the deeper stuff i wanted to get into too with our guests today um just around like polygamous careers as he called it so scott bilsky is our guest today um amazing tech entrepreneur writer etc um wrote over the weekend this epic piece on um predictions right like it was 10

4:34predictions for the near future of tech was what i think it was called and i saw it and i immediately sent it to you and was like holy [ __ ] we got to get scott on we've been wanting to have mine for a while but with kovid really hard to do in person right now and getting a video team that doesn't have covid right now is like next to impossible uh we have a friend uh who was hosting a new year's party and he was like i can't get vendors that don't have kovitz so i think we were stuck in that but i was like dude holy [ __ ] we gotta get scott

4:58on to go through these things because a few of them really spoke to me a few of them i totally disagree with um and i think we can have a really cool conversation with him just like jamming on a bunch of these predictions and the businesses that can be built around these ideas yeah and i think uh right before this we actually had a community call uh in our discord and just got the feedback from people from the room where it happens discord and and just to get us into like what do you think do you agree do you disagree and it's really interesting like i you know scott is i have the most

5:30amount of respect for scott he's he invested in my last company islands um you know everything he says i think is like gold but at the same time it's so interesting that we disagree on some stuff you disagree on some stuff and our community disagrees on stuff it just goes to show you that like not everything is a gold i should say not 100 is gold um just because you know and we were talking about this earlier like aaron aaron levy and uh brian chesky were are kind of talking about how web 3 is you know basically a sham that's basically what they're what they're saying just because these leaders or

6:10titans of industry are saying you know this is where the world's gonna go doesn't mean it's the gospel so take everything with a grain of salt i agree i want to get i actually want to talk to scott about that too because i think he'll have a great take on it so let's bring him in um and uh and just dive in on this stuff cool let's do it captrace is the financing solution for fast-growing startups it lets companies access their revenue today so that they can reinvest in their business and grow and scale much quicker than they otherwise would be able to is it complex though no it's super easy to set

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8:02is creating the platform for you to learn alongside the best and also as i said let your gains speak so to level up your investing game today check out commonstock.com you won't regret it there he is the man the myth the legend what's up guys how you doing thank you thank you so much for joining us it is our is my pleasure well it's funny i was saying to greg before you jumped on here that like basically we had been we had you like on our tier one list i was like we have to get scott to come on an episode of the show but with kovid right now it's

8:39basically impossible to do anything in person you know we've been filming most of these things in person but like you know let alone us all sitting in a room together and not getting covered but like go find a video crew that doesn't have covert right now it's basically impossible which means we'll probably all be back together again soon right last time sahil and i were together recording i got coveted [Laughter] i didn't by the way we sat together for like eight episodes and i was somehow resilient and came through it so but with a pregnant wife at home me doing things that expose me is like a

9:11non-starter so we're ultimately just trying to avoid it but um thank you so much for joining i mean the um it felt like a perfect opportunity to bring you on because i'm sitting around this weekend i think it was like on fridays like new year's day or new year's eve rather and um i see this thing pop up and a bunch of people are sending it to me being like oh [ __ ] have you seen this piece that scott wrote and i pull it open i'm reading through it and i text it to greg like i think i was one thing into it i texted to greg and i

9:39just said like dude we have to get scott to come on because this is epic um and so now here we are like a few days later this is the world of the internet so a few days later we slid in your dms and here we are filming an episode so i'm super stoked well it is a pleasure i mean greg and i go way back we've had quite a few gems over the last 10 years on various topics um and yeah i mean this is like my own little mental exercise i try to capture some things that are interesting to me over the course of a year and then i try to force

10:08myself uh under pressure to like synthesize cut down and uh you know and and and declare like which ones i think you know are really relevant you know and can you in your future and these are the ones that made the cut so excited to discuss can you actually talk just for one minute about that process because i think a lot of people find it interesting like so during the course of the year do you like have a document like a living document where you're jotting things down that you're noticing and then you try to synthesize it or like what's your actual process around formulating these yeah i mean listen i'm

10:41a compulsive capturer um you know both of the books that i published were like seven years of scribbled notes and then one year of synthesis and organization um my feeling is that you know ideas are all over the place but if you apply like a really you know concentrated form of execution and organization around them you can like 10x the outcome of them and so i feel like i try to treat my writing the same way so in this case i have a notion doc called annual photo forecasts and i just think about you know things that i feel will be extraordinarily relevant over the next

11:14three to five years whenever i come across them and then you know i try to have some like culling periods throughout the year and then i try to you know take the last few weeks just to synthesize because to me it's you know it's casting the line for a lot of interesting you know founders that are exploring these ideas it's um it's also sending some signal to my own teams you know my day job as an operator building products for creative people about things that are interesting and it also just it's mental exercise totally do you pressure test them with people along the way like do you call

11:46smart people you know and tell them to tell you you're an idiot or what are you missing or i do um my dms are full of debates with a number of people about a number of things number one number two i do send like a draft out to a few friends usually just to get um their take on like what they think i should cut so usually it's like if you had to cut two of them which would you cut so actually the 10 that i came out with i had around 16 or 18 of them before and then i just kind of cut them down that way and then um and then

12:15you know twitter is great for just like sharing things in real time throughout the year and if everyone you know dunks on it that usually means it's actually super interesting by the way i know that was what i was gonna say the ones that like everyone agrees with aren't that interesting no right it's the stuff that people are really uh thrown off by because that's where the opportunity lies right is where we are uncomfortable absolutely we were just talking about uh i don't know if you saw last night aaron aaron levy and brian chesky's sort of web three yeah yeah i heard i have a few dm's

12:45going right now so i i'm i'm aware of his views and you know and i think he's he has a lot of great points and he's really smart like these are the people that i think bring us up to another level you know when we're trying to reconcile some new technology and the implications of it so what do you yeah i mean i don't know how to process it because i look at those guys as sort of inspiration you know inspirational um you know they help build the what you know current web 2 infrastructure and build really big businesses and then i look at it and i see them

13:20just completely dunking on like um you know where i'm spending all pretty much all my time so yeah i'm curious you know how would how do you think about that and what sort of advice do you give to people who who see that and and don't know how to digest it well i mean it's one of those moments right now in technology where everyone is both right and wrong right now right i mean whoever thinks that this is going to reinvent the world and solve every problem as we know it is probably wrong and those who feel like it's nothing are certainly wrong as well i i always find it fascinating when a

13:55technology forces on us a compromise of something that we typically thought was extremely important a great example happened in my industry where five to seven years ago when adobe about my company behance actually back in 2012 the idea of a creative tool for professionals on the web was insane like no one would ever trade performance and precision for ease of access and collaboration you know when we went to creatives and asked them like would you want a web-based application for image editing or screen design or whatever it was like laughable it's like are you kidding me i'm not gonna bring my performance down to like whatever my web connection is

14:40right and yet there were some teams out there like my friend dylan and others who recognized that people are willing to trade performance and precision for ease of collaboration and it was like this insight into this next you know generation or psychographic of like i want everything to be with other people like i i grew up in the age of google docs and even if i have a little more kind of latency issue i'd rather have that than not be able to work with other people in a truly multiplayer way and that to me has redefined the web as we know it um for for my industry and

15:15now we have photoshop on the web and illustrator on the web you know that's the direction that things are going so here we are in this whole web 3 debate one of aaron aaron's biggest points is that um it's slow you know it's like why would you build a company with slower process why would you serve customers with more onboarding issues and more friction like it defies everything we know about modern software everything succeeds based on speed internally and for customers and now web 3 is like throwing 30 wrenches into the system and so he's right like speed is critical and speed will be required for things to

15:55succeed however what is the compromise that we're all maybe willing to make for speed i think one of those compromises might be autonomy you know might be control might be privacy might be be the sense of ownership you know the desire to be incentivized for everything we participate in like some of those desires that our very innate consumer desires are legitimate and may in fact you know have us trade a little bit for speed and um you know and then of course speed will come in later generations of attack i think a piece of what you're getting at is something i've mused on in various ways in the past which is just that like

16:36the future of tech allows individuals to make decisions on those trade-offs being versus being forced into them like historically you were kind of forced into whatever the trade-off was that the biggest company decided for like privacy versus functionality as an example like you just were going to give up your privacy in order to have the high functionality of facebook or whatever these consolidated platforms are now now in the web 3 world part of what makes me optimistic is that individuals will actually get to choose with their feet around where they want to be on these different spectrums and so like i think of it even in the most primitive context around

17:11like centralization and then like speed and functionality when you go from like say bitcoin ethereum solana there's clearly difference in the like actual decentralized nature of these and you get a trade-off in terms of the speed like solana versus ethereum and the trade-off there that exists around speed pricing et cetera the ability to batch transactions etc um so part of what i think is interesting in all of this is like that idea of individuals actually being able to go and make those decisions on the trade-offs i think that's right and i think that um you know in many cases centralized services will win or hybrid you know

17:47decentralized by ethos but centralized to some extent by like certain aspects of the user experience you know i think are you maybe going to ultimately win but i love your point i mean i the fact that we're no longer forced to do anything you know is an incredible feat in and of itself and you know whenever there's competition it always rises you know the customer experience and the options that we all have which is a good thing ultimately yeah and you figure out what people actually care about right like everyone says they care about privacy one of my like general hot takes is that people don't actually care that much

18:23about privacy or like the average person doesn't really care that much about privacy and won't be willing to actually pay for it with worse functionality and so i think you finally learn what's that especially in the next generation yeah no totally yeah yeah you've gotten used to it right like people are still posting their entire lives on tiktok which is like owned by the chinese government so um anyway why don't we dive into some of these um greg what do you think let's do it um [ __ ] where do we start it's so there's so many good ones in here let's start at the top actually um because i thought

18:56the first one was like really ripe for some interesting things so recommendations kill favorites um can you talk a little bit about this one to start us off scott yeah well i'll be like provocative just to try to make this interesting for all of us but what what if we're all living in our own prisons so to speak you know everything that we happen to be exposed to throughout childhood based on our location cultural you know uh the the music tastes of our parents the restaurants we happened to learn about when we were you know living in our city and traveling like all of these things

19:30were exposed to by circumstance we cherry pick the ones that we like and then those become our favorites and those become our go-to's and we end up in some ways living the life where we're like more and more constrained to those things because time is limited and you want to make sure you have a good meal at night you want to make sure that your hour of listening to music is good music and so you just go back to music you've always listened to and so i've always been you know worried that i'm being like increasingly confined to some degree and i used to insanely uh organize my playlists on you know my

20:02music playlists and stuff and my dinner party playlist was my go-to playlist for so many years and so many years and then over the last year or so you know spotify launched their enhance function so any three or four songs you put in a playlist you can push enhance and have it a refreshed ai driven playlist based on that you know short short set of songs and my running list became that list and i was like oh my gosh new music every single day when i run and suddenly i realize that my playlists are like these old you know dusty limiting things that i've been a prisoner to to

20:39some degree and um and maybe recommendations have reached that singularity moment at least they have for me and my musical taste where i trust the ai more than my own kind of go-to's you know my own like sort of you know circumstantial run-ins with random songs from shazam or whatever and so you know that for music that for travel that for restaurants that for whatever like maybe we're all going to vastly increase the surface area of our exposure to stuff we like and in some ways like abandon the concept of favorites all together i have okay so my reaction to that is and you know i worked at stumbleupon which

21:18is like og spotify recommendation so i'm a huge believer in this um finally this is like hitting mainstream what scares me about it is or actually it's a question to you like do you think that we lose like in a world where you know ai is giving us all our recommendations do we lose like let's say i create a playlist for you for you know scott like that emotional connection that i you know oh like yeah maybe greg doesn't get me as well as you know an algorithm that has been learning you know trained to learn about me for 10 years but um the fact that he actually created

22:01this and thought about it even the fact that i don't like the rolling stones and it's literally my most hated band like do you feel like we'll lose that that's a good question you know i think that i think that it will i think these i think the list that you're describing you might make for me will never be as good um now i do think we'll still have spawns in 80. you know i think that spotify probably knows you and i are connected and you know might say hey you know let's algorithmically test greg's favorite three songs with scott and see if he you know

22:36replays them likes them or ignores them or skips them and you know and so i feel like i mean the answer is of course yes and yes right like i mean we should still we will still be exposed to music in totally random ways i guess this is more about our human tendency to always collect favorites and go back to the stuff we know versus surrendering ourselves to like the ai algorithms that we don't know because they're just so reliable and they push us to actually open our boundaries you know more so than our own go-to's it's also interestingly self-limiting from a happiness perspective so i have this

23:13like utilitarian view on this which is somewhat informed by like my childhood radio nostalgia where me playing spotify my car i have my playlist i have my like 50 songs i like they're probably embarrassing to a lot of people you know i still like the goo-goo dolls i still like semi-charmed life if you don't bop to semi-charm life and you don't like sing that out loud i don't trust you um but i still have all of those things but there's something different about when you turn on the radio and the song you love just comes on without you pressing the button it's like a totally different level of

23:43happiness and part of me thinks that there's actually like a increase in overall societal happiness from having things that we love surface to us without us actually doing it um and this is like an unlock for that if you actually have ai that suddenly is able to maybe not suddenly slowly then all at once um able to surface things that you're like holy [ __ ] i loved that and it was totally new to me and it brought up this nostalgia this different feeling versus me going and picking the song that's actually like a net happiness driver societally so i like where you're going i mean you

24:19just made me realize that the only company that would probably let put a patch on my arm to like determine and detect my pheromones and my like moods and my temperature and body and everything else would probably be spotify because you know i'm i am totally fine with music being like as you said like perfectly teed up for me based on like all of these signals about me that i don't even realize and if i'm suddenly sad and then boom that like perfect song from like you know the 80s that always got me pumped up when i didn't want to go to school if that came on like that would be

24:56pretty amazing so that's epic that's actually like a totally epic idea um that i've never really everyone always talked about like um you know when i when we were kids actually those mood rings you'd have those rings that would like claim they change colors for your different moves you guys just like this crazy idea whoop we should get the link band yeah yeah spotify into a partnership no i like that all right writing that down yeah well i wonder yet i mean it's it seems like a no-brainer to do something like that right because music is like i mean historically even if you just look at human society music has

25:32always been a common thread of things that brought people together things that drove different you know relationships religious spiritual whatever it was unlocks i mean even if you think about people with spiritual wellness meditation like all of the like calm and you know headspace and all the apps around that like how do you integrate all of this into this like holistic human experience that's driven through sound um kind of brilliant actually i'm a little bit thrown off by this i didn't think we were going to come up with [ __ ] well this kind of goes into one of the uh one of the other predictions i don't

26:04know if you want to jump around or not yeah please you know this whole this whole question about us opting into ads and you know i wanted to like kind of strike out the word ads and just call it personalized experiences but i think that you know we we grew up in the age of banner ads and like two teeth whitening ads and weight loss ads and like we see ads as dirty and interruptive and takeovers of web pages and [ __ ] like that we just hate ads right and yet we love it when we walk into a restaurant and they know our name we love it when like uh you know a

26:39restaurant ordering up like sweet cream knows that we're a vegetarian and oh just like hides all the menu items with meat like you know we like we like to get personalized experiences in every part of our life people love uh you know that not all people but i know a lot of people who like the instagram ads you know that they get because they're like i actually click on them it's like cool stuff you know that is seems geared towards me and so you know i know we're in this era right now of like the great opt out and as ios you know surfaces ad tracking and

27:10kind of makes it harder for brands to give us personalized experiences but i think as we're about to enter a world where we want our music to be served up to us based on our body temperature you know we want our uh we want our it's just me maybe i'm not suggesting that's all of us um we want we want to have um experiences with brands where they know who we are i think we're going to start opting back in and i think especially in the world of ar you know where we have immersive experiences around us we're going to want to be known everywhere we

27:41are yeah i think so yeah good yeah no i also think like first of all when i think of my own life like probably like five percent of my wardrobe is from instagram if i actually think about it really like is that high or low i i don't like it's high it's high it's like when i'm when i think of my flip-flops i have some hats like i don't when i'm scrolling through instagram i don't feel like i'm getting targeted you know i feel like that's like the old guard that target like that targeted feel just feels like oh this is interesting you know i talked about

28:13stumble upon earlier for those of you who don't know someone pano was this uh this website or toolbar actually that you'd press a button based on your interest that would serve you up websites that were interesting to you and we invented this we didn't want to call them ads we called it paid discovery which you know one in every 10 stumbles would be this you know relevant for you web page and [Music] i think that that's the direction i mean it's it's happened with instagram but i think like you're totally right on this prediction i think it's 100 gonna happen and i think that people like me are just

28:54gonna want to opt in to content from brands basically or or influencers or whatever that's the way i see it at least so i get a little scared here um and it ties the first prediction set together to this second one for me and i want you guys to tell me if you if you disagree um what scares me here is like so music tied to your mood and your daily habits and yeah like whether you're tired awake whatever i love that like i think it's human you know happiness utilitarian view is is net positive when you start like now venturing into the world of like

29:30consumer brands being able to know how you're feeling and target you at times when like your emotional state is most you know attuned to spending money because you're depressed or whatever it is i start to feel this like little dystopian tickle on the back of my neck that um i don't love like it starts to get black mirrory for me and so what i worry about with this like opt-in ads like super personalized everything is perfect right when you need it um is like okay where does the data sharing um where does all that just like cross that very thin line to being overly intrusive in your life

30:05i mean listen i'm scared about the same thing and as i'm sharing ideas and brainstorming with you guys i'm also cognizant of the fact that we're going to have to have an incredible amount of transparency with the user so they understand you know what they're doing you know what they're sharing and why um you know maybe it's like a um maybe it's like a way where you kind of get paid for your willingness to contribute that additional information into these algorithms like um you know conceivably in a in an economic sense more highly efficient ads allow consumer companies to lower prices because they're able to actually drive better

30:45margin efficiency or better kind of return on that spend um so i wonder whether they can kind of pass through some of that like you know you actually kind of get paid in a certain sense more directly for your willingness to contribute additional data or opt-in to these things yeah be interesting there's a lot of innovation to be had here like can people be informed why they're seeing or why an experience is a certain way you know when you're looking at an experience you already kind of know what's an ad i mean they have to show that but if you can further understand like what's being personalized for you and

31:17where it's coming from you know imagine if it doesn't you know if it's a normal thing for us as consumers to kind of go in and just look at our profile from the standpoint of the of the brand like what are you know or do they see me as an athletic person do they see me as a uh this person or that person and why i mean it's it's it sounds kind of scary and controversial but shouldn't we as consumers kind of know how we're being profiled to some extent and maybe even be able to you know to impact that to some degree that's interesting i wonder whether

31:50there's a way to do that in a third party context so if you could like create a tool that basically takes as inputs everything you're being served up and then creates an output of like here's the archetype that you are being um targeted based off of in your in your online persona you know it's um it's somewhat related which is you know another idea that i've been um growing and hopefully i'll find some founder that's tackling this and wants help but is the idea of us you know as consumers filling out a profile for ourselves all of our likes and dislikes and everything and proactively opting to share that

32:31with every brand and restaurant and hotel and airline that we ever come in contact with because everyone in the hospitality sector wants to know more about us and there's a lot of information that we want everyone to know about us or at least like the subset of brands and experiences that we patronize as consumers and so why isn't there like a a brand for that you know where you fill out your preferences you know i don't like shampoo bottles in my hotel room so i don't want to waste plastic every time i stay in a hotel put that in there and then boom every time i'm at any participating hotel they have

33:02my profile they don't waste the money on the shampoo i'm not pissed about it and everyone wins is safe so so okay so well for like i might want to go do this this is brilliant so basically like you have a central hub whatever call it uh belsky yeah and you log in and it collects up front a bunch of information about you on all of your different preferences food hospitality all of these different things and then hospitality industry whatever it is travel industry hotels restaurants everything start in a given city they all pay to then access this hub it's all it's an api thing you

33:44know we would make an api that interacts with all their databases for all their customers right and they just do and then it's hugely valuable for them because then the first time i go to joe's bar and grill on the corner they create the best experience for me they already know exactly the five things that i'm going to want they know the exact drink i always have a woodford on the rocks when i come in they already have it ready for me it's like that amazing restaurant experience you get when you've been somewhere 100 times and they know you're the usual and they give you the thing and they know exactly what

34:12you like and they know it's your birthday and they know you know give you a rose because it's your wife's you know anniversary that week like they do all that and isn't it funny that like every brand out there is trying to suck data out of us that we don't necessarily want to have shared and i'm suggesting like let's make a company that gets all the data we do want shared you know let's structure it in such a way it you know gets it from us for free because we want people to know it and then every brand that we patronize you know that's that pings this api like you know gives us a

34:43better experience and it's sort of in our control right because we furnish the data ourselves would you would you make this product web 3 or do you think it's more of a web 2 product i mean you know what i that's a great question like i don't know like i i've only built products in the web 2 world so i think about it that way you know my view on my view on the decentralized concept and it goes back to like the early conversation is the trade-offs right and you know if there's an instance where the customer needs or wants you know something like the benefits of the

35:19decentralization of the of the product experience or the underlying like you know the data structure whatever the service itself if they're willing to trade you know a lot of the benefits of centralization for that sounds great yeah i think i think some of the benefits just like jamming on it a little bit um some of the benefits of making a web 3 is well firstly it's just you know if you want to you know let's say you earned tokens you'd be able to swap it into ethereum or other you know usd tokens for what so let's say every time you like checked in a like so to speak or you posted a like you got

35:57one token of some sort so the more that you contributed to the network and the deeper the the network you gave so you're incentivized to to publish because you're getting um you're getting tokens and maybe those tokens so that's oh sorry you have something you want to say there nope cool so so like number one is like the financialization of it and swapping number two is um the social aspect of it so let's just say um you know a friend of mine actually bought me an xbox for uh for christmas and i started downloading some games and i started like understand you know kind of getting into it i go on to eisenberg you

36:46know my like published page and i say like i like halo infinite i like to play with danny tren um et cetera et cetera i earn these tokens and if i have enough xbox tokens or i've enough overwatch the game tokens or enough you know you know halo infinite tokens then i get access to maybe a private community of people with certain exclusive benefits i guess i think about this and just like and maybe i'm just being like naive on it but i think there's like a pretty simple mvp that you can build something around in one city like say we were doing it in new york i would just go

37:24you go get 10 000 20 000 users to fill out the info and then you go on the back of that and go to a thousand you know kind of single ch like single um location restaurants hotels whatever that are in the city and you tell them to pay you a hundred dollars a month to have access to this pool of information from these people and then you use it to serve up hey here are these places to the 20 000 people you just signed up and say here are these places that are going to know exactly what you want deliver a great experience and the places are willing to

37:57do it because the retention on these users that are going to love their first experience is going to be amazing and they're going to have customers for life or at least longer than they otherwise would because they're going to serve up a great experience but you like what is that i mean at a thousand stores at 100 a month that's a million dollar arr business um right out of the gate um i just like i think you could spin some and you would get smarter over time because you'd be able to as you got more data make the algorithms better and uh provide a better service and you know and

38:27eventually you could have some of these restaurants or hotels or others you know they could start building the profiles for you because you know you book at a local hotel or you look at a you know wherever you go or an airbnb and they say hey you know before you come like fill out the survey so we know your preferences and so it's a white label version of the of the questionnaire that you mentioned in the beginning and then at the end it says do you want to only share this with airbnb or do you want to share this with every brand and restaurant and whatever you go

38:57to so you can have a personalized experience everywhere like what percentage of people are going to be like yeah you know everywhere and then yeah like you have it for the for the entire yeah of consumers and yeah that becomes your you know you you leave sdk steakhouse in new york and they tell you hey you can get 50 off your next meal if you fill this thing out right and now you have you know as a company you have another you know thousand people a week or something that are filling this thing out for free and the company pays for it exactly like i think it's you know it could be it

39:27would be like the one massive consumer data company where everyone's information is in there because they want it to be in there it's stuff you want the world to know about you you know and that's what i find so compelling about it i i actually agree in the sense you know in terms of an mvp like it doesn't need to be web 3. and in fact like 90 of web 3 ideas mvp it in web 2 and just learn yeah and then if you can add a web3 component once you've understand the problem set a lot better i think that makes a lot more sense just

40:02because it's harder to build on web3 i'll tell you like somewhat of a tangent because i know we get to jam on this call right yeah yeah please it is is also around i mean listen you know i bet i've had a lot of these web 3 debates with people as well as as you have and i've seen a lot of them transpire and there's a cynical side of me that wonders also if the reason why a lot of things will have to become web 3 is because of the financialization of all of us and in some ways it's a sad statement on humanity but you know do we

40:36are we gonna no longer participate in things unless we're compensated you know there was an interesting debate i was having with a few folks over on twenty this weekend about about wikipedia you know um bill gurley mentioned you know to me well you know wikipedia seems to be going pretty well and no one's peed it's not a dao you know and it's probably one of the most you know incredible gems of the world in internet at least right now a couple questions that i pose in response number one is wikipedia all it could be you know is it some ways being held back by the fact that it's like point zero

41:11two percent of participants are actually contributing content everyone else is just using it like could it be something that's 10x better if people were incentivized if maybe the best talent in the world were incentivized to engage number one but then number two i was like what if less people actually contribute to it in the future because of the desire to be compensated for everything you know like what is that like this new trend i okay so first of all have you guys been to wikipedia recently like the home page oh my god like how much earlier did i pay money yeah exactly like a third of the website is

41:45like give us money and it's it's a nonprofit and i totally get it and but it just feels potentially unsustainable and for for one of the greatest uh contribution like wikipedia could be one of the most important products of humanity if if you think about it the fact that that could potentially break is really scary yeah i mean it like brought the entirety of like human knowledge based on the base of human knowledge online it was like what the research papers did except they did it for the mainstream right like it wasn't yeah it's like a non-profit you know it's it's the closest thing to a dow that we basically have today um in

42:34the sense that it's communally governed and and it's owned by no one essentially uh but did you guys ever do as a side note did you guys ever do wiki quests when you were like younger as kids no this was the most fun thing we used to do during like uh during like free periods in middle school or whatever you would start at some page like say you started at space jam and then there would be an end point like you had to get to you know from space jam to pope leo the 10th and you had to just only using link clicking you had to find

43:06your way from one to the other and it was such like it was actually a very cool thing because it forced you to like create these mental connections and map out in your mind like okay what's my general path to get from one to the other and it was all like it was speed and then sometimes you do one with number of clicks and so you'd say you have to do it in under 10 clicks um and get from one to the other but it's actually like pretty fun i now i'm on wikipedia right now as we speak and it's making me like the nostalgia is kicking

43:30in of wanting to go back and do one it's so funny it is an incredible resource yeah it would be a shame if it was less maintained in the future because of the you know this strange change and that we we feel like everything we want to contribute to we want to be an owner of and otherwise not contribute so yeah so with wikipedia with that example if you were trying to create a web 3 version of that do you think that's a worthwhile endeavor or or you know what would it look like that's different than the current version yeah well i guess the grand experiment

44:06would be that instead of having you know this loyal army of volunteers very very small minority of users give up their time to kind of sustain it you know if you had a group of people that were otherwise incentivized to not only sustain but innovate it right to like bring it to new levels or whatever you know there's i guess the negative argument would be hey first of all if it's not broken don't fix it but i don't like that argument generally because it doesn't bring us to extraordinary ends of anything um and so like what else would you do you know how would well look if he ever

44:42become an immersive experience um you know why aren't why isn't why doesn't wikipedia have a meme layer associated with it you know we know that memes are a compression vehicle for knowledge like but no one has an incentive right to build on top of wikipedia if you you know if it's still if it's just going to be part of the nonprofit unfortunately like it doesn't seem like it's attracting that level of like innovator necessarily um so i i that's an open question right if it were if it were sort of if it were an organization in which every participant gained tokens based on their contributions would there

45:15be 10x more contributors or there'd be 10x more developers would there be 10x more designers you know making mock-ups of concepts that are voted on and then executed and whatever or not would it just be like a you know a crazy crap storm of stuff without any you know centralized leader and decision maker like i don't know but it's definitely worth the experiment what if you made wikipedia into like a play to earn game greg um and you had to kind of like buy some number of wiki tokens in order to be a kind of builder and contributor on the platform and then you can earn them for

45:53contributing well and innovating around it um and then you kind of cap you know the ability for new people to buy into it so that it never becomes like centralized in the hands of one given party or body that would then control the internet i think uh so i love that i think gaming is a really great way to to get people to do things um and it's just a really great you know i'm curious scott's opinion but like great product design uh or experience to bring people together together immerse them and get them to click buttons so yeah i think if we were doing wikipedia

46:313.0 uh you know in web 3 it makes sense to to think about it in a gaming perspective yeah i'm inclined to agree in the sense that you know i've always felt like um you know leaderboards you know would incentivize you know further people to be kind of greatest contributors in certain verticals right and you know you're you you are always wanting to defend your position on that leaderboard and that means you have to do a great job in terms of community guidelines and you have to make sure that everything's factual and backed up and whatever i mean i think game mechanics ultimately you know drive those like ego analytics

47:09that make us feel like we're successful you know contributing in the right way to a product so it'd be super interesting to see that layer you know yeah yeah alexis ohanian has at 776 they have this internal proprietary software they built out called cerebro i think it's called like star trek reference um that manages like all of their internal stuff and one of the portals is this like value add like how can i help portal within it that actually gamifies their you know ability to execute against asks from portfolio companies and how much value they're adding and so like every single investment professional or team member

47:45at 776 has like a scorecard that shows up publicly every day and they all try to compete to see who can add more value to the portfolio and it's it's sort of brilliant right like they invested in axi so i know they understand gaming and and you know play to earn in general but it's kind of a brilliant way of just incentivizing people to actually execute against the whole how can i help thing that vc you know it's become a vc meme um you know make it less make it less meme-like and more reality you know in some ways like any mechanic that brings us back to the way things once were you

48:15know i i also shared in this article like that that's always my governing kind of compass for predictions is you know what sorts of technologies are enabling us to go back to the world we long for and so in some ways what did we do in the early days to amuse ourselves we just played games right i mean we competed in the gladiator arena we watched other people compete we you know we always were like having that sort of um very visceral physical like gaining mentality as as uh as early humans and so to bring in some of those mechanics to the types of you know work and

48:54kind of things we do together these days you know seems like a no-brainer yeah it's like um i think of it as like nostalgia as a service yeah like it brings brings you back um it actually ties into one of my favorite ones on your list too really well which is this whole idea of polygamous work um and the reason i think it ties in is because to your point on like arrows of progress being really around back to the way things once were i think of like the cl when you read the classics and you read the classic works of all of these like stoic philosophers or ancient

49:23greek philosophers so much of them was like they were grounded in being polymaths they weren't just one thing they were a philosopher they were a writer they were an athlete they you know they were like 10 things and they did all of them they were socialites and then somewhere along the way like the industrial age brought us this whole idea of you graduate college which you had to go and spend way too much money for you get done you take a job you work in that job for 40 years and then they give you a gold watch and you retire and that's your life that's what

49:55it looks like you hope you save enough money to be okay but that's your life um and i thought your way of phrasing the polygamous careers um was brilliant so i'd love to dive in on this one because i think there's also you know hundreds of businesses that are going to be built around this exact trend and this exact kind of flow of progress well i mean you're exactly right i think that uh i mean i've always found personally like you know that i'm most happy when i feel fully utilized and i feel fully utilized both in personal ways with my family and friends and then professionally i feel fully

50:28utilized both building products with teams helping founders go through problems of their own partnering with designers to solve gnarly problems and you know to have to pick one of those tracks as my full-time forever role would leave me depressed and i actually made that mistake once in my career um where i said okay i'm only going to be you know an investor and it just was like i felt like i'd hung up my sort of uh spurs you know in every other aspect of what i was proud of about myself and it just did not you know it wasn't it didn't it didn't work well for me so you

51:01know i think that the uh and to your point of the entire system right from college recruiting to healthcare linkedin profiles tax forms they're all geared towards monogamous careers and it's not really about people splitting themselves now why is but why is this suddenly a turning point like what's really systematically changing right now and why i mean first of all we've like grown up in the generation that's now in there you know entering the workforce they grew up with like constant bells and buzzers right they were in a hyper-networked world where they would be you know on facebook and then on a math tutor and then in roblox and

51:37chatting live with someone and live broadcasting something to their friends and whatever all in the same hour and so the idea of like building that skill set until you're 18 or whatever and then suddenly being told okay now your job is to just crank out excel spreadsheets at a bank you know that's going to be like such a drop in dopamine for lack of a better term i don't know like it's just going to be driving us nuts and so why you know what what does this new world look like right now a lot of people that are kind of anti this thesis would say one of two things oh

52:10that's just the millennials they're all selfish you know they don't want to like work hard you know and then others have told me hey um scott you're missing the fact that like specialization wins like i would only want to bet on people who truly specialize well to those people you know my one retort is that creativity is the new productivity you know we're going to stand out increasingly in our work and on social media and on any other thing that's you know amplifying our opportunity stream through our creativity you know it's not about doing things faster it's about standing out and doing things more beautifully and elegantly and whatever

52:47else and so if they're if we're all becoming artists of ai and robots you know is automating all the productivity side of our equation and it's all about creativity well then we you know we better be acting like artists and artists die when they become too specialized like the whole point of being an artist is to be like exposed to many mediums and constantly be changing your own craft yeah there's so much there to dig into so creativity is the new productivity i've never heard it phrased that way and that's brilliant um i think like i always go back to this whole concept of working like a lion not like a cow if

53:22you're if you're a creative worker you have to work like a lion it has to be bursts and sprints of creative energy followed by legitimate periods of rest and the industrial age work culture which we've that's persisted over the last several hundred years is not suited to that right you're supposed to go to the nine to five job that's like what 90 percent of people still do and it's what you're supposed to do and all of society and all of our infrastructure has been built on top of that to your point you know financial services is one of the hugest areas of disruption for this in my opinion

53:56because the way i put it is like 1099 income is effectively taxed at a much higher rate than w-2 not in the sense of like an actual tax rate but in the sense that you can't go get leverage on it good luck getting a mortgage with a bunch of 1099 income if you have a million dollars of 1099 income here and a million dollars of w-2 income here what is that worth to you in society a whole hell of a lot more on the w-2 side for better or for worse because all of the systems all of the underwriting everything has been built around it i mean we greg and i both have

54:25a friend who has like you know eight plus figures net worth and is not able to get like a really low rate loan um on a house and he could buy the house outright but he cannot do it because he doesn't really have w2 income that's crazy like that we live in a culture where that's the case and so i think there's all of these cool business opportunities that are going to be built around assuming this trend is real which i do personally believe it is building the infrastructure layer that allows polygamous workers to thrive in society in the same way that w-2 workers have been able to like i think

54:59there's this business collective a friend human radfar was the founder of that is like enabling 1099 workers from a kind of tax and back-end efficiency standpoint brilliant um things like you know new banking um for for businesses for startups for small businesses that enable you to do things more efficiently that are going to start being you know able to underwrite more effectively there's all sorts of businesses that i think are going to be built around this trend um but fixing the infrastructure is like it's the only thing that's going to allow it to really thrive and you know greg i feel like this is curious here your thoughts but i feel

55:38like this is an actual area where the notion of dows for future businesses might have a talent advantage because if you are just a rock star engineer or designer or whoever else who has this desire to have two or three irons in the fire that really fully utilize their skill sets and interests you know and subscribe to this new kind of polygamous career mo you know manifestation of you know or just or approach to life i guess you know they're not it's not like freelancers they're actually going to want to own right some of their outcome they're going to be they're going to want to be

56:15compensated based on their contributions not some like predetermined contract that's super ambiguous it's like i want to be compensated for the code that i connect for the design that gets in to production and you know are there models that could allow people to kind of you know have some percentage of various different projects you know act as an owner of those things you know be rewarded for their efforts to market it and almost almost behave like a founder i don't know if google still has it but they used to have this um i think they called a spot on bonus where you basically can give a co-worker

56:52500 like almost at any time if they do something really great um and i thought that was really cool because it you know it's not about the money but just the fact that you know if you do good things here's a bonus and to your points got around like gen z especially like they need to be an environment that feels more like you know roblox than um you know doing data entry right or just not gonna work and what i love about uh dows is you you're you're getting dopamine you're getting dopamine by virtue of like the discord is buzzing there's community calls and most importantly

57:34um you're getting you know every day or every time you contribute um every time you commit code every time you design every time you do something you get that hit of like i just earned tokens yeah and it's funny like again back to that financialization of everything thing you know i don't want us to i don't want to turn us to all turn ourselves into hamsters you know where it's like do this get this do this get this and it just keeps like doing that over and over but i also wonder if you know there is some gain in empowerment right when you know that like every contribution you're making is

58:12being valued as opposed to like wondering you know whether you're just a cog in the system and not moving any needle forward so i think there's something to be explored here i do think that the companies that embrace this this you know new modern form of worker are going to have a talent advantage there's someone yeah there's someone i know who um well actually style and i talk a lot about balance and rest and and that all the time and there's someone i know who who's a part of a dow and this particular dow has this token that has just gone through the roof so you know he was getting

58:52you know a couple hundred dollars a week or a few thousand dollars a week um and it's now you know to do a couple tests and all of a sudden now i don't know what the number is but it's something crazy like 50 or 100 000 a week um and he's working 20 hours a day contributing to this doubt he quit his job and stuff like that and i facetimed with him and i like saw his eyes there's like either drooping he looked terrible he didn't shower it was like brutal and i was like dude you need to stop and he couldn't get him and he

59:23basically told me he's like i can't i can't stop so i think what we're gonna see is you're right like i think that like i think there's going to be a subset of people who are going to be contributing to dows who are going to be unable to basically take a step back and be like okay i need to go eat with my family i need to take a shower etc and that's scary there's a there's also just going to be opportunities around like the polygamous worker operating system um both from a company standpoint and from an actual individual standpoint where like right now all of these companies have built um

1:00:02uh the kind of operating system for like managing hybrid workforces or managing remote workforces right there's all these great businesses out there that are doing that that enable like talent hr teams whatever to manage where are people working when are they working etc but like extending that to now i have workers who are working maybe 20 of their time i have like a two-day you know worker and i need to make sure that um you know we're optimizing what they're working on when they're working on maybe i want to make them 40 rather than 20 and kind of manage that and negotiate it like the operating system

1:00:32to do all that i think has yet to be built um around this you know kind of polygamous work future um and it's pretty interesting because right now it's like really fly-by-night [ __ ] if you're a 1099 worker and you're trying to do a bunch of different projects where do you go like maybe you have an upwork profile maybe you're on fiverr you know maybe your kind of tweet you know twitter dm'ing with people to do some work there's no like central portal that actually allows you to kind of you know manage all of this in one place and have the companies be able to like

1:01:00manage trade etc i think it's a great it's a great opportunity because being in a big company i know how hard it is to bring on a freelancer to do a specific project for us and you kind of have to go through someone else and yeah and if you're in new york or california yeah good luck it's crazy and and yet i've also seen the other side of this you know having built behance and seen the creative careers of the most talented people i you know on the network that i always followed those folks they don't work for anyone like they work for lots of different

1:01:30people right they don't work for any one particular company only is what i mean to say if you're like an incredible illustrator typographer a person like jessica hish or if you're a you know just an amazing you know motion graphics designer or data data infographic kind of person or whatever like you are you are working for the best agencies and brands in the world and whether it's nike or whoever else like you know they're kind of working with you at your terms because they want your skill set um but those people are so famous that you know they can get companies to bend over backwards to have to work with them but

1:02:05if that's any lead indicator of what the best talent in the world will be doing in the future you know i think it's a i think it's a decent one and i think that to your point the system that allows folks to be engaged by many different brands and projects without friction you know that that just unlocks a massive talent advantage for the um you know for the companies ultimately so yeah and for the people it's more efficient pricing of their services right if it's all in one place you don't get these like massive gaps um you know it's like a much more efficient market for them which is good for the

1:02:38individual so you can kind of like um you know you can onboard people that way because you're actually they're not going to have the friction cost it'll just be like pretty transparent that's right yeah and scott used this use this word scott um or two or just to say um standing out it's really about standing out and i think that's so true that um i'm happy that we're you know going to 2022 where it's you know it's not about you know if you graduate a certain school or so to speak it's about just um can you be creative and can you stand out amongst the sea i mean it's that's

1:03:12very difficult but i think that if you you know for everyone who's listening um if you can you know orient yourself around standing out i think that's going to go a long way i think that's right and that's also why i feel like the democratization of these creative tools that let you stand out is also so critical um you know another one of my sort of thoughts in this piece was around the the mainstream of 3d creation because i just feel like right now it's still something that's pretty hard to do and most of us you know can't just create in 3d but uh you know if we're if we're

1:03:46starting to have experiences with each other in vr in soon ar i feel like just like you know facebook started to introduce photos into the activity feed actually like after their launch like it was just the profile photo as we might remember and then photo and everyone sort of became a photographer once social media welcomed photography as a mainstream you know part of the product and cameras on our phones allowed us all to be photographers and edit our photos same exact thing's gonna happen for 3d i'm like wholly convinced that that's the case and uh and you know but the tools don't exist for that yet which is pretty exciting

1:04:23but yes standing out i mean we're at the end of the day we're all brands to some extent and we're all only as late as good and fresh as our latest content right yeah yeah and i think it's like what does that really mean concretely like standing out it's like understanding like cultural zeitgeist and you know if people are going this you know zigging this way like zagging and using design and creativity to to be different and so you stand out on a timeline you stand out on a feed exactly yeah and it's it's just like we we fundamentally now live in a very very cool era for entrepreneurs

1:05:03um i'm not old enough to say that it's like you know the first time in history but the barriers to starting something are so damn low i mean with no code low code um you know with communities being able to actually surface and find niche communities as quickly as possible i mean if you were to just like very quickly want to come up with a business idea you go out and find a large market say financial services you go find a niche community that is underserved by incumbents within that you go ask a hundred of them have a hundred conversations and ask them what their pain points are and then you go use no

1:05:42code low code to build something that is like very well suited to that niche tiny community you can spin up a business in an i don't know a week if you wanted to and like get something off the ground and start it um and for very i mean you can go use like uh one of these um services to hire developer talent to build something out very cost effectively like it is amazing the era we live in if you're entrepreneurial and you have a builder mindset i i love that i i i totally agree with you and you know i think obviously spotify and shopify and some of the other companies

1:06:16that are long tail e-commerce you know these are the companies that are enabling right exactly what you're saying arming the rebels and in 10 years from now i think we're going to see probably 10x the number of small businesses as there are today and uh and we'll probably we'll probably have more long tail purchases you know in our lives than we do today as well i think it's partly because of the hyper personalization targeted ad stuff we were talking about earlier you know greg can instead of five percent of his wardrobe it can be 15 of his wardrobe that's from like super niche you know uh makers of stuff

1:06:49that you know are uniquely tuned to him but i also think that we're going to want more of this back to the whole like we go back to the way things once were we're going to want to patronize local artisans and small shops or the if the future equivalent of local artisans maybe is the person who like stitches t-shirts on ebay you know with like opposite color stitching sorry etsy maybe not ebay um you know uh and makes like custom things on etsy and that's like our t-shirt person and whatever else and so that that long tail of small businesses that you know that make our lives rich and interesting i

1:07:25think that's a great positive trend for society and culture there's like an inherent tension here though right where um yes technology is enabling this long tail to exist you're able to like rent capacity um you know contract manufacturers if you're building products or at aws if you're building um you know services or tech and um and that enables a lot at the same time power laws suggest that all of the winnings are going to a fewer number of people and like i've thought about this tension recently in a very weird context with music where i was listening to like throwback 90s singing the card jams or something on

1:08:06spotify and there are an unbelievable number of songs by artists that i don't know that they produced any other song like it was you know uh steal my sunshine by like ellie n amazing song like generationally good song um don't know if they produce anything else like i i do feel as though as technology has progressed there may be fewer of those like random one-hit wonder types because all the algorithm just keeps pushing you to the exact same like small set of songs where in the past radio basically said if you can get your single on the radio uh you know you could have like just one

1:08:42song that just happened to be a massive hit and and took off and so like i'm wrestling with this inherent tension and maybe i'm maybe i'm just misunderstanding it but i am feeling this tension that exists between like the idea of power laws and technology and what it does um and this whole idea of enabling the long tail to exist and thrive yeah it's really because there's you know there's some behaviors we have in culture where we don't ever want to be like wearing the same thing as everyone else we don't want to eat the same thing as everyone else versus desire it seems to you know to seek originality right and

1:09:18to express yourself creatively through your originality which i mean i guess your point we could all be buying it off of amazon so there's the power law at work for you um but i just i just can't help but wonder like for example i've been watching this company called the custom movement where they um have artists personalized or customized shoes and it's just like huge marketplace now of people who essentially are riding buying like the white classic nikes and then they're just like doing amazing it was a yc company back you know many years ago not many but like five years ago maybe and you know it's it's artists like

1:09:54personalizing everything for everyone and the idea of like why wouldn't you want personal apparel and shoes that are one of a kind and uniquely catered to you and that's great for an artist out there that's great for a small business it also might be good for nike if they're making the underlying shoes but it's uh i can see the the two fighting i mean there will be like the cost curves you know fighting in favor of power laws and then there will be originality maybe on the other side yeah maybe well it'll be interesting to see it play out over the next five ten years um

1:10:27this was this was absolutely awesome man i feel like we've taken up a bunch of your time more than i expected we would just because we got so deep down these rabbit holes but um this was incredible um and some just amazing interesting ideas and insights and and um there are a few business ideas in here that if there are entrepreneurs out there who are listening to this that want to go build this the like uh local um customization optimization for hospitality sas play if there's someone out there scott me greg hit us up because i'm super super interested in that um but uh no thank you so much scott this

1:11:03was freaking awesome i'm glad we uh glad we got to do it i can't believe this is the first time we've actually interacted somewhat face to face in in person here but uh no guys great thanks for thanks first of all for doing these conversations in the first place and uh and for having me i'm excited should be a fascinating year ahead that's for sure yeah no and thank you for for publishing your notes your notion basically uh with the world because i think uh it's a it's a domino effect that's the best way to describe it i think a lot of people read that and we had a lot of chatter about

1:11:39in our discord um and so you know thank you for that inspiration and it's gonna be a hell of a year so a lot of trends a lot of stuff happening and um thank you so much scott absolutely thank you guys talk soon all right cool wow that was [ __ ] crazy

1:12:11[Laughter] one of my favorite parts about starting islands my last company was jamming with scott belski because he invested in the company we would have these conversations just like the one we had now about where the trends are going and what opportunities exist and more often than not scott is completely on the mark and it's such a pleasure he's such a nice guy my brain is absolutely spinning with ideas right now uh we had a few good ones so would it you know what did you think oh i i mean first off just an awesome guy um i had never met him face to face uh

1:12:58and i feel like i was best friends i mean just like he feels like your friend right away crazy smart um to your point at the end i mean i love that he's willing to just like put himself in the intellectual gauntlet i actually found it fascinating at the beginning when we talk through his um his process like how he jots down notes and he's like a compulsive compulsive um like note jotter and his notion doc and then kind of starts to aggregate and synthesize um i'm probably gonna implement that this year actually it's just like things i'm observing i'm just gonna have one one page where i

1:13:27drop down big observations to try to synthesize i love that he sends it to people and like has people spar with his ideas that's just such like a cool concept to me and so interesting um in terms of takeaways i mean i had i had a bunch um my biggest if i had to pinpoint one i think it's that business idea around you know a sas platform for like customized hospitality experiences um i think that is fascinating i'm a little bit shocked that it doesn't already exist but i think it's like a brilliant thing you could start at a regional level with a pretty light touch

1:14:04effort very little you know development build out and honestly i mean you could focus it'd be a huge driver for mom and pops for smaller restaurants smaller hospitality chains um i think it's really really interesting it goes to that mental model of like taking what the highest end premium experiences already do and bringing it to everybody um like that model that framework of doing business because the four seasons sort of does this like they once you've gone there they'll start to pattern what you like what you don't like what newspaper etc and then they provide it to you but doing that at a scale where smaller mom and pops

1:14:40smaller businesses are able to access and deliver that same set of experiences is an amazing business idea so i'm like i'm hooked on that i want to get into the community and jam on that more because i think there's something super interesting there to be built yeah i i think you're absolutely right um and like we talked about like could start on web two definitely a web three opportunity there also i loved talking about wikipedia by the way because it was a reminder that um you know if we lost wikipedia that would really suck um so uh yeah that was super amazing scott's an idea machine so

1:15:22um i loved it i'm so glad we got to do it to start the year i mean it's like a great way to frame up the year too and just like start thinking big to start 2022. so for everyone out there uh i hope you enjoyed it as much as we did and we're going to get scott into the community we'll go deeper on all of this and the discord um so so excited to release this one and uh and go further on it so thank you all so much for joining cheers the saying used to be let your game speak with common stock it's about let

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