What if there was a way to replicate all your memories across thousands and thousands of computers that no single entity controls and is publicly accessible? Blockchain technology is a great way to overcome the historical obstacles to broadly preserving our memories and history. This episode of The Future of NFTs brings Yu Kai Chou, the founder of Metablox & the founding partner of Octalysis Group. Metablox aspires to build a meaningful bond between the metaverse and the physical world by anchoring real-life memories and virtual assets to real-world locations that are owned by people.

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Minting History- Yu-kai Chou

Participants:

• Nadja Bester (CEO & Co-founder of AdLunam)

• Yu-Kai Chou (Founder of Metablox NFT & Founding Partner of The Octalysis Group)

00:22

Nadja

Hey, web3 world. This is Nadja Bester from AdLunam, and you are listening to The Future of NFTs, the show that looks beyond current NFT use cases and dives into rather, what Non Fungible Token technology is evolving into. All of this as seen through the eyes and built by the minds of the fascinating guest speakers we speak to each week. AdLunam is the only IDO Launchpad that rewards attention with allocation. Our Engage to Earn platform features dynamic NFT investor profiles, NFT allocation fractionalization, and our one of a kind Proof of Attention allocation mechanism. You can catch Future of NFTs live on Twitter Spaces every Tuesday and subscribe to our podcast for any episodes you miss out on at. AdLunam's other show, Diving into Crypto, which is live every Thursday, same time, same place. So do join us for both shows as we speak through thought leaders and change makers in this game changing industry onto today very special guest today.

01:32

Nadja

Because if you are familiar with the gamification industry, chances are that today's guest is someone you will have heard of. You might have watched his TEDx Talk gamification to change the world. If you haven't yet, bookmark, it's real good stuff. He's been called the godfather of Gamification. Not hard when he's rated number one out of the top 100 gamification gurus year after year. But don't take my word for it. He has spoken at organizations such as Tesla, Google, Lego, Stanford, Yale, Oxford, various government organizations like the UK, Singapore, South Korea, and Kingdom of Bahrain as a Gamification OG. His consultancy Pedigree includes the who's who of the business world. Lego, Uber, Porsche, Walgreens, Microsoft, AIG, Japan, Verizon, to name but a few. But although we will certainly tease out some nuggets of wisdom from him today on the topic of gamification, I'm very excited to be talking to Yu-Kai Chou today about his first NFT project, Metablox.

02:49

Nadja

Coming as he does from the field of gamification and behavioral design topics on which he's an expert author and an international keynote speaker, Yu-Kai is leveraging his many years of experience as the founding partner and chief creation officer of the premium consulting and design firm The Octalysis Group to translate his creation of the Octalysis framework into an obviously gamified Web3 focus project with Metablox. Now, a little bit of context. I first came across the Octalysis framework years ago, and I've been a huge fan of Yu-Kai's work ever since. But I'll let Wikipedia do my work for me. In describing why Yu-Kai's creation of the framework had such an impact on the gamification space to the extent where his design work has empowered over a billion users user experience. So I quote, the Octalysis Framework is a human focused Gamification design framework that lays out the eight core drives for human motivation.

03:56

Nadja

Human focused design acknowledges that people, unlike machines in a system, have feelings, insecurities, and reasons why they want or do not want to do certain things and therefore optimizes for their feelings, motivations, and engagement. Now, if you've been in the Web3 space for any amount of time, you'll know that this is absolute gold to any project's ears really just reframing how to engage with community in a way that is meaningful, which is really the crux and the kernel of what Web3 community involvement is all about. So, next part of the quote, the Octalysis Framework is used in healthcare, fitness, education, training, company and product design to increase user engagement, return on investment and motivation. So please join me in welcoming Yu-Kai to the Future of NFTs, because today we are going to talk about how Wikipedia can now add Web3 to that already long list of industries applying UK's work.

05:05

Nadja

Hey, Yu-Kai, where are you joining us from today?

05:09

Yu-Kai

It's a pleasure to be here. Right now, I am in Taipei, Taiwan.

05:14

Nadja

I am in South Africa, and I came across this little tidbit of information that some part of your childhood was spent in South Africa. So, yeah, nice. I'm saying hello to Cape Town on your behalf.

05:28

Yu-Kai

Yes, I did live in South Africa, Pretoria, when I was two to eight years old.

05:35

Nadja

Have you ever been back? Have you been back since?

05:39

Yu-Kai

Yeah, I went back to Johannesburg and Pretoria about five, six years ago.

05:47

Nadja

You should definitely come make a stop in Cape Town. Well, the weather is absolutely perfect. I just came from Europe where it's extremely cold, and now this change of seasons immediately down with the flu, but very appreciative for the fact that I don't have to wear thick jackets, but can just enjoy myself. Summer sun, see all the good stuff.

06:09

Yu-Kai

Yeah, it's a beautiful country and very comfortable and warm to live there.

06:16

Nadja

07:23

Nadja

A Gamified social media influencer ranking system, which I especially enjoyed reading about because it shares certain similarities with AdLunam’s Engage to Earn platform and our Proof of Attention allocation mechanism. And now here you are applying NFTs to human memories of all things. What about you makes you get into stuff that most people only hear about ten to 20 years later?

07:51

Yu-Kai

08:43

Yu-Kai

So, of course, there were ten years that it's completely crazy, and then maybe around ten years of still really strange or different and being adopted. But sometimes I'll go to a country and I'll talk to them about the latest innovation, let's say in Silicon Valley or where not, and they'll say, oh, I really like there's these case studies out there in the US. And somewhere, but it doesn't fit into our culture. It wouldn't work in this country. And I've come to realize that when they say that, it basically just means that, yeah, they'll do it eight years later. Because if you look at any innovation, it's kind of hard. It's kind of strange also, right? Uber sharing a car with someone else, kind of weird. Airbnb the Internet was super weird. Blockchain technology, NFTs all of these things are super weird. Gamification and most countries are like, well, we don't get it.

09:37

Yu-Kai

This doesn't work for us. But then eight years later, people start doing it. So I think when you start to move around, you get to see what is on the horizon. What are the problems we're facing today? What are the technology trends that are kind of just popping up left and right? And then you can start to synthesize, all right, how do we use the new technology that wasn't available five years ago to solve the problems we're faced today? And I think that's how you stay at the cutting edge of innovation.

10:09

Nadja

Brilliant. My son is also, like you, someone who travels the world, and I really see the difference in my own upbringing as someone who was brought up in one single country to him who is in a different country every couple of months. And just the way that it shapes your level of thinking. As you say, everything is variable when all of the conditions that you find yourself in are constantly changing. But I think something you touched on that's really important to highlight is this idea of Silicon Valley is the one sort of moving and shaking trends on the horizon. Whereas now in Web3, we see that innovation is coming from countries that traditionally, even in the tech space, didn't get as much attention. Asia, for example. In many ways, Asia has been leading in terms of Web3 development. And that is something we can talk about this from a variety of aspects, whether it's regulation that are perhaps more sort of overbearing in countries like the US.

11:10

Nadja

But at the same time really just this level playing field that Web3 offers in that people, no matter their geographical location or the fact that they can move around the world or not, but can all kind of make use of the same opportunity at the same time. But I am really curious because I always enjoy hearing people's NFT origin stories. So what is yours? How did you get into this technology?

11:37

Yu-Kai

12:40

Yu-Kai

And I didn't have all of this NFT world in mind when I wrote my book. It didn't really exist back then, but I got very curious about NFTs. I think most people, when they start seeing NFTs, it is again a very curious thing. Why are these JPEGs, these images? Whatnot worth so much? And so I started applying my Octalysis framework by the, I'm known for this thing, the Octalysis framework. It's Octagon analysis breaks down all human motor into these eight core drives. So we can talk about that now or later. You can find it online. So I was using the Octalysis framework to decipher, okay, what is it about NFTs that people love so much? And I broke it down to three of those eight core drives. So scarcity, meaning and also community. So that's core drive basically six, one and five. So scarcity, I think most of the audience knows about the scarcity in terms of you have a serial number.

13:35

Yu-Kai

Actually, when I talk to my friends who don't believe in NFTs, the way I kind of explain to them is this that, again, I've sold about 100,000 books out there, but they're fungible. People just want the knowledge, they just want the text, the meaning behind the text. So the digital book is just as good, the eBooks just as good, audiobooks just fine. It doesn't matter if people swap it around. But in my life, I've signed maybe three to 400 books and those books are non-fungible. So even if people trade, it's not the same. I wrote different things in it, I wrote it a little differently. And so NFTs allow, basically, digital versions of things to have higher meaning. You can establish a higher meaning with the artist. You like a musician or a project that you believe in, like women empowerment. And so that's the scarcity component, that the serial labeling is there.

14:28

Yu-Kai

Each one is unique and non-fungible. But the issue is that you still have to trust the developers a lot on this, right? Because developers, they can issue more of these NFTs anytime they want. Hey, this project is very successful. Let's mint another 20,000. Let's mint another 20,000. So it's almost like the US government can print out more money, fiat money. And so you just have to trust them to keeping the scarcity. The second component is meaning. And so if something is scarce but it has no meaning, then it's still not very valuable. And an example I give is, I have a friend in Denmark and he owns a very broken and rugged couch. And even though it has no cosmetics, it has no utility. He Cheers it greatly because it used to be owned by Winston Churchill, and in his mind, Winston Churchill is a world hero.

15:18

Yu-Kai

So therefore, it has a lot of meaning behind this pretty broken item, this couch. And so when you look at NFT projects, you want to know, what is the meaning? Is it the artists? Is it their background? Again? Is this a movement that you care about? And then finally, it's the community part. Core drive five, social influence and relatedness. If my friend was the only person who cared about Winston Churchill, sure, the couch would be very valuable to him, but he probably can't liquidate and sell to someone else. But if there's a whole community of 100,000 people all caring about Winston Churchill, then he can probably sell the couch to someone else, who can sell it at a higher price to someone else. So once you have these three companies, scarcity, purpose and community, purpose and meaning and community, then you have the core foundation of what makes NFTs valuable.

16:09

Yu-Kai

And then you kind of think about what are the utilities?

16:11

Yu-Kai

So that's really what pulled me into the web3 NFT world advising on projects, designing tokenomics, because I used to do that for game economies anyway. And now eventually got into the new Metablox project.

16:26

Nadja

Absolutely fantastic examples you gave. I mean, first of all, the difference between books being fungible, but then your signed copies being non fungible because there is this particular value to it that people can agree on, that there's just more value to this. Even if to someone who doesn't know your work, that signed copy might not mean anything. I think what you touched on in terms of these three core drives, we have moved, or we seem to be moving from this trend of scarcity, which, of course, is what drew so many people throughout the world to NFTs in the first place, because there were all these huge gains to be made because of the scarcity factor. But now, really, I think that to the fore, especially in a down market, where scarcity is not really something that draws people anymore because there needs to be value attached to it's, not monetary value.

17:19

Nadja

Then the question is, what is their value in? And I think this is really the trend that we are seeing now, which is surely a good thing.

17:29

Yu-Kai

Yes. A lot of the talks I do is about how do you imbue yeah, so a lot of the talks I do in NFT conference is about how do you imbue purpose and meaning into your NFT project? Why is humanity better 20 years later? Because of your project. Because if you don't have that meaning and purpose in place, then everyone's there just because they believe they can get rich in four months. And of course that's not sustainable. And as you know, in a down market, those people tend to realize, oh, we can't be rich in four months, and that's when they abandon these projects.

18:07

Nadja

Yeah, it's very well said. So I'm keen to get into Metablox. I have to admit that I was super excited that I saw you announce that you're getting into NFTs because I have a huge amount of respect for the work you've done elsewhere with Gamification. Now, Metablox offers users the opportunity to own real world places as NFTs powered by real life memories. You state that your mission is to preserve humanity's most important memories. So please tell us, how are you doing this? And I would love to hear how you are incorporating the Octalysis framework into the building out of Metablox.

18:47

Yu-Kai

19:33

Yu-Kai

When you visit grandma's home, you'll see all these physical photos.

19:35

Yu-Kai

Nowadays, almost all our memories are digital. And so he wanted to see if there's a way to not have a single failure point on either Google Photos, Google Drive, or Dropbox. And so he came to me and talked about it. And so of course, because of the time I've spent in the Web3 world, I realized, hey, Blockchain is probably actually a great use case for this application. And I started thinking about it from a game case, a design standpoint, experience design, about how do we fulfill the scarcity, the meaning and the community aspect of things. And so we saw that, okay, well, in terms of scarcity, what is scarce in the real world, right? It's gold and real estate, but again, gold is fungible. My goal, your goal, we can trade, doesn't really matter, but real estate is non fungible. My place, your place, they're totally different.

20:31

Yu-Kai

Even if they're exact same dimensions, we have different, again, memories of these locations. I had my first child at my home. You maybe graduated college from your home. And so they all represent different things. What we did with Metablox is we divided up the world a few cities at a time. So San Francisco, Miami, Singapore, New York, and so these cities and we divide up all these we call them blocks into NFTs so people can own these NFTs, almost like a Gamified Monopoly game. And these NFTs generate what we call Meta rent on a daily basis. You can go and collect them, and they do certain things as part of the game loop, but then the second part is the most important, which is the purpose. Again, it's about preserving memories, right? So the purpose of it is we want to preserve a lot of memories onto the blockchain.

21:26

Yu-Kai

So the way you level up these NFTs, these blocks, and make it more valuable and have it generate more Meta rent and all these resources, is that you or other people want to submit upload memories related to that location. So as you upload memories to that location, then it begins to level up the blocks and then record it onto the blockchain. So of course, some of that is still roadmap. We haven't done all of the things I've described yet, but the goal is that we want to incentivize people to constantly improve their NFTs, their properties and level up. And the way they do that is, instead of running or instead of killing monsters or picking carrots, they're uploading memories that are related to location. So that's basically the project we're doing with Metablox. We're still early and we're still learning. I think my co-founder, Jun, he's the CEO, so he guides a lot of the company direction.

22:30

Yu-Kai

And for me I think about the long term experience, how to create a sustainable game loop that's not about suddenly exploding like crazy and then exploding to its death. Because when you look into the Octalysis framework, there's what we call white hat gamification design and black hat gamification design. And black hat is a lot more about creating urgency, obsession, even addictiveness. And it gets people to just jump on and behave like there's no tomorrow. But then people burn out after three to eight months and they don't want to come back. And this is what a lot of companies are doing. And you've seen projects face that exact consequence I talked about. And then there's white hat motivation design, which is about it makes people powerful in control. They feel good, but there's no sense of urgency because they can do it anytime they want. But it's long lasting.

23:23

Yu-Kai

It doesn't have the immediate buzz, it doesn't have the immediate spread like wildfire. But people feel good, it's meaningful, it's sustainable. And so we're really betting on the long haul. We believe that 10, 15 years later, we don't know if people are going to be playing the same NFT games or not. We don't know if people are going to like the same NFT PFPs or animals or not. But it would be unthinkable that in 10,20 years later, people will stop caring about meaningful memories in their real lives, where they had their first child, where they proposed to their wives, where they had a lot of big events that happened and also the location they VIT that happened, where these big events happened. So these things will always be important in people's minds and we want to combine that to timeless technology, which is the blockchain. So these are the ways we kind of incorporate a lot of these concept ideas and game design into Metablox.

24:21

Nadja

Awesome. Thank you so much for that really great summary of what Metablox does. What came up for me, as you said, this gamified monopoly, but also coupled with almost an Instagram kind of approach. Because, I mean, people we live in a world where people really like to display in some sense not necessarily. I mean, we come from this sort of era where keeping up with the Joneses and I need to look like I'm a bigger influencer than the person next to me. But I mean, I think at the core, this sense of community that unites us where we want to feel like we're part of the human family. And this is really what I'm hearing and what you're saying is that not only about, but it's also for people have ability to give own meaning to a shared physical location, which is a very novel concept that you said about, I'm familiar with the black hat and the white hat motivations.

25:22

Nadja

And in web3, I mean, this is really what has been driving the industry is the sense of urgency and buy now or forever hold your peace. You're not going to make the big gains if you don't invest in this project. And so few of those projects over the years have really come to fruition. I mean, if I look at so many of the companies that I've worked with over how many of them still exist? And the long term game plan here is to understand what people want need, and then to build a solution for that instead of applying this blanket sort of web3. Okay, I'm just going to web3-fi everything, because this is the hottest new trend. So I'm curious, coming from the professional and the personal background, what is unique about your approach to creating NFTs?

26:22

Yu-Kai

I think it's really about how are you balancing those eight core drives? Again, there's again, what we said, white hat, black hat, motivation, design. There's also like a left brain versus right brain core drives. And so once more extrinsic motivation, once more intrinsic motivation. And when you look at people who are designing game loops, gamification, tokenomics, and some of it is lack of skill, some of it is just not knowing what's there. But the challenge is how do you balance it for long term short term and attract them with a reward versus giving them an enjoyable experience? So I think what's really different is we are actually looking at the long haul, 10, 20, 30, 40 years. We talk about in our internal discussions, we're talking about how do we preserve it to our kids and even grandchildren. I think very few projects actually have internal discussions that are making decisions on things that far away.

27:31

Yu-Kai

And this is why we chose Arweave as a technology provider to put things on the blockchain because there's a few solutions out there.

27:39

Yu-Kai

IPFS, but IPFS for instance, charges a very small amount of storage space fee to keep things around. So we thought, okay, if you're trying to keep these things on there forever, that cost is going to add up. Where Arweave is more about, there's a small upfront fee, but then it can stay there forever without paying more. So we're making these decisions based on if this is going to stay there forever. If we want this to be around forever, what should we do? And I think that's a pretty unique thing that we're trying to do as far as I know about NFT projects.

28:19

Nadja

I think what you are touching on this idea that in web3, the short term gains, the short term attention, the short term hype having received all the attention, this is what attracts people in the now, but it doesn't keep them in the long run. And I think with every down market we see this trend that the industry is maturing and people are getting to the point where they are getting slightly fed up with this wild roller coaster where it's just a psychological nightmare to be in this industry sometimes because there's ups and downs and ups and downs but it doesn't always feel like things are really moving ahead in a way that is sustainable. So I'm curious because we live in this crazy beautiful but at times wildly frustrating world where we are always on. People are constantly chasing the next big thing. So you said that what really matters and what will not change is this idea of people wanting to preserve memories.

29:22

Nadja

Why is that so significant in this world that we live in today where things are always changing and the bright shiny objects syndrome is on everyone's mind? And what do you think can NFTs do for memory preservation where existing technologies is lacking? Of course the decentralization aspect that you mentioned is a very huge incentive. But are there also other benefits that a technology like NFT has, that web2 technologies just simply don't offer us a good long term solution.

29:58

Yu-Kai

I think that's a great two part question. So I think memories are important because it represents who we are, right? There's this thought of spirit. So hey, if you wake up and if I'm born today but you're installed a lot of fake memories, you would not feel comfortable with that, right? Because you want to know what are your real members, who you are and it doesn't matter what you have right now. When you have watch these movies with anyone’s amnesia, the first thing they want is they want to get back their memory. It doesn't matter how rich they are afterwards. It doesn't matter how happy they are. They just want to know where they came from, who they are. And I think our identity is going to be important no matter what and where we came from.

30:41

Yu-Kai

I think that's an innate human need to understand this and we kind of joke around internally saying when the government wants to preserve a memory, quote unquote forever, they have to create a national holiday or they have to create a whole monument, a landmark to remember this forever.

31:05

Yu-Kai

And so what we want to do with Metablox is democratizing that process where every location, every digital block can have, memories that are worth remembering, even if It’s not because we've made it so much easier to preserve the memory because of blockchain technology. You can only have that many holidays, you can only have that many monuments. But now we can preserve a lot more.

31:30

Yu-Kai

Hey, this is a well-known local chef and this is where he did his first big gig. This is where Michael Jordan practiced basketball or this is where just my cousin did this. So everywhere there's something that's worth remembering and that's what we're trying to preserve there. So. I think, again, having meaningful projects is important, and I think preserving memories is one of the most important things. And we talked about how blockchain technology and being decentralized is so far, what we know of is the best technology to preserve that. But of course, the web3 technology has also a huge amount of advantages.

32:11

Yu-Kai

33:14

Yu-Kai

I bought in all those ranges, right? And so now the lowest point is actually the craziest high .2 years ago. That's like someone telling you, hey, two years later there's going to be like a devastating bear market and the bitcoin price will drop to $70,000 and everyone's going to be depressed and they're saying, we're getting nowhere. The industry is like, falling apart. You'd think that person is pretty crazy and very optimistic, right? And so I think it is continuously growing and growing. But I think there is that emotional roller coaster that you just have to sustain and you have to recognize where the true value is at the true value. Like I said, the blockchain interoperability, when you have something, whether it's a signed digital good, right, by your favorite athlete, it's like a jersey being signed, but it's digital, or your favorite musician or something you believe in.

34:07

Yu-Kai

And I think having that there and you know it's there even when they rug, because think about this with web2 projects, when a company, quote unquote, rugs you, which means they shut down, maybe because they just don't want to deal with it anymore. They just take money and run. They shut down the servers, everything's gone, right? With web three, when it's rugged, you still actually have the assets. Of course people shouldn't rug. I also find it very amusing that people are saying, hey, we don't trust the government, we don't trust the big banks, but we trust three anonymous developers out there with the white paper.

34:43

Yu-Kai

It's kind of funny there, but for Web3, the things that you get they can be used in other places. So we're looking at more and more partnerships being formed, getting an NFT from this project and you take it to another NFT, you'll have benefits, and you’ll have joint utility going to an offline event. You can actually act as an access pass people call token gating. I think most people understand the idea of access passes more easily.

35:14

Yu-Kai

Just go in there and you do that and so I think that part is very valuable. And so there's a lot of applications that suddenly became possible now. There's a lot of inefficiency. And I think the projects, the user experience is not very smooth and delightful yet it's very confusing for the common person. Just like back in the day when people are working on the Internet. It's just confusing with the dialogue even today, right? Doing all the TCICP or all that stuff, people it just confuses people. But then there's a seamless experience that just was laid out over time and that's when the industry matures. Right now there's a lot of promise in the blockchain, but it's kind of crowded by all the greed both from scammers that run projects and also from consumers who hear that their neighbors got rich, so they just want to jump in so they can get rich too.

36:07

Yu-Kai

I think that creates a lot of distraction to the healthy growth of the industry.

36:13

Nadja

But I think just adding on to what you are saying it's really the proliferation of companies and projects now starting up, going you know what? I'm not only in it for the short term gain because they are bringing with them users who perhaps are not currently in a Web3, but because of these new ways of thinking about these technologies, they are onboarding these people in a way that doesn't make the focus gain the scarcity. Okay? It's only this limited amount of time and then you lose your chance forever. But it's more changing the way that projects think about things that is also leading to changing the way that users think about things. But I absolutely loved what you said, the example you gave earlier with Metablox because it really just made me think of this global collaborative process of people just loving on a particular place in space and time.

37:12

Nadja

As I travel, I love Urbex and so one of the thoughts that constantly come into my mind is you explore these places that are now abandoned and they have so many stories to tell, but you don't know what they are. And so you might find some reference on the Internet by one person, but you don't even know if that's true or not. So I want you to time travel with me a little. Project us into, let's say the history class of the future, 50 to 100 years from now. No idea what the world's going to look like then. But anyway, how do you envision that web3 technologies could change our relationship with the past. And specifically in terms of audiences, at the moment, we are focusing only on this one sort of audience group, but right now there are so many audience segments that are not aware of Web3 or not knowledgeable about Web3.

38:07

Nadja

A project like Metablox, how could that change the way that people interact with the past, with memories, and of course, with this technology as well?

38:17

Yu-Kai

39:33

Yu-Kai

So they're lost in the Ether space or whatever they're going to be calling it. Probably not because of ethereum. It's all gone, it's all lost. But the projects that are on the blockchain, a lot of them still exist. People can see what it is. It's the archive of what happened in these few decades, right? And you have the Wayback machine these days that people rely on that's just one big server. They scrawl the Internet and they save a copy of that in a big server that could be torn apart if there's a tsunami somewhere or whatnot. So I do think Web3 may not be the most mature technology. Well, it's not going to be the most useful technology 50 years later. But the hope is that because of Web3, people can see what happens in our daily lives and what we do. That record keeping will be there.

40:27

Yu-Kai

And I think maybe even historically there'll be a gap, right? There's a gap between you can find a lot of archaeology, you can find the books people read, and then suddenly it's all on a Kindle, on an iPad, on a computer, on a hard drive. And now when the hard drive is destroyed, you can never retrieve. So there might even be like a 20, 30 year gap where no one knows what's the content that's been flying around there. And then Web3 comes about and suddenly people can see, oh, those are the it would be funny if they don't see the high quality visuals and animations, but they can see all the JPEGs and NFT projects like, oh, those are the NFTs, or these are the artwork people do. And I know, as you all know, some of the most well established NFTs have pretty silly artwork on it.

41:17

Yu-Kai

It's endearing, but a bit silly. And that would be a funny thing for people to look back on. I think if we look at a three to five year window, I think it will be a lot more seamless. I think it will be friendly. I think people maybe five, eight years later, people won't even call it web3 anymore. They just call it using the web. Just like no one really used the term web2 or web 2.0 anymore for, I think, ten years. The only reason why people said web2 again is because web3 came about right. Web2 just became the web. It just became things you use. And I think that's where web3 is going, where people don't realize that it is using special blockchain technology. It just powers up. It just works just good, decentralized. And if you look at things like the new Starbucks loyalty program, Starbucks Odyssey, they're introducing web3 components to it, but they're not really calling it using all those jargons.

So I think that's where the future is going on.

42:21

Nadja

That absolutely great answer. You made me think when I started my career in digital marketing, as it was called back then, I mean, today it feels really silly to even be using this term, because today, of course, all marketing is in some sense, digital. It's very difficult to find completely offline marketing. So I want to get back to the Octalysis framework. Eight core drives, white hat and black hat, core drives, game techniques. This is a question I have been dying to ask you. What can web3 and the NFT community learn from Gamification and the Octalysis framework in terms of what is it doing well and where can it improve in terms of user and investor experience?

43:12

Yu-Kai

Yeah, when I started seeing a lot of these NFT projects, I felt a lot of it is the 8 core drives at Octalysis just kind of being on steroids. When you look at how the discords are run, when you look at the mystery box designs, a lot of NFT projects, when you purchase, you don't even know what it is.

43:30

Yu-Kai

There's going to be reveal. This is core drive seven unpredictable curiosity design. There's Easter eggs, there's these quest lists to get on a very scarce whitelist. And what blew my mind away is that people are doing all these actions to get on the whitelist. Like, I'm noticing they're doing marketing, bring people in doing all this work, and I'm like, oh, so they get compensated with free NFTs? No, their compensation is that they get to be on a whitelist that gives them the permission to pay full price for the NFT. I'm like, wow, that's pretty crazy, right? You work for a company for the right to buy their products at full price. All that stuff has been pretty crazy. But we know from the Octalysis, which is based on the Octagon so like we talked about the top or white hat, the bottom or black hat, the left side or left brain which is extrinsic motivation, the right side or right brain which deals with intrinsic motivation.

44:30

Yu-Kai

If you look at a lot of that, it's a lot of extrinsic motivation design with giving people rewards, right? Dangling rewards in the bull market projects of giving out free Teslas and then a lot of black hat motivation driving urgency and then you're seeing some projects that are more just purely white hat, purely intrinsic and a lot of them are very small communities because there's no urgency and they're not giving out free Teslas. So there's a small community of people passionate about it but oftentimes these projects don't sell out or they don't have monetized, they don't grow fast enough to be exponential and the founders become discouraged. I think the key again is to create that balance. When do you have white hat? You create an overall white hat environment so people want to work with your project. They're inspired by the meaning and purpose they transition to the black hat when you're minting, when there's like short bridge of activity so there's a bit of scarcity, there's a bit of curiosity unpredictability, maybe a bit of FOMO.

45:38

Yu-Kai

So people do this one time action to be part of your project and then you move back to that intrinsic where it's just enjoyable to be there. You're using your creativity, there's a lot of user generated content, you're using social, you're having social emphasis relatedness. So the community makes it very easy for people to express appreciation for each other. Having group quests are very helpful and you continue to maintain that unpredictable curiosity for people to feel like, hey, every day is a new journey adventure. So I think web3 projects can absorb a lot of these principles in the Octalysis framework to make it more engaging both long term and short term. I think they're doing a very I wouldn't say great job thus far, but they're doing a pretty strong job because I say that because a lot of it is really on the black hat stuff.

46:30

Yu-Kai

I think the black hat extrinsic was really like being pushed on steroids. They're doing a strong job so far, but I think in order to make it a great job, I think they need to learn how to transition and balance with the white hat and intrinsic.

46:46

Nadja

So I'm curious then, because you've worked with everyone from precede startups to some of the world's leading conglomerates in terms of approach to audience onboarding user retention and other factors, who is going to own Web3 or just the web as we'll refer to it in future? Is it going to be Web3 native projects or is it going to be existing multinationals that we are now seeing coming into Web3?

47:16

Yu-Kai

You are right. I work with a lot of both native Web3 projects and a lot of conglomerates trying to and not everyone has revealed their project yet. But a lot of large conglomerates want to also get into Web3. I mean, it makes sense, right? It's the future of the web and the web is where everyone's at. If you also include a lot of what's going on with the metaverse and whatnot. So I think who's going to be the winner is unclear. I think there are going to be and this is not going to be answer. A lot of people like the dominant players that are strong and they have a lot of money these days especially they already have a strong network. They will probably continue to have great influence over Web3. Even though Web3 is created to be like, hey, everyone can overthrow the established entities.

48:13

Yu-Kai

I think some people get moved up there, but the established entity notice it and they come into Web3 and they still have the connection, the resources, the ability to pull celebrities into and influencers. They will probably still remain empowered. A lot of them, some of them are crippled because of COVID some of them innovate fast enough. Some of them talk about innovation but they keep sabotaging themselves internally. But there's some really established ones I think will still become powerful. Some are the talk about breaking the wheels, it's just rotating the wheel. Just everyone that takes turn going on top. Some of the new guards of Web3 will probably unless they make some huge mistake, you've seen some huge entities in at least the cryptocurrency world just basically implode and melt overnight, right? So sometimes you can make a big mistake or just literally use unsustainable design.

49:12

Yu-Kai

Like a lot of some of it, you just see it coming but some of them will melt. But some of them, the new guards, they'll be more established. Yuga Labs, I think if they don't make any huge mistakes, they're probably going to be strongly established in the industry. They can purchase a lot of strong players, they can create partnerships that everyone wants to agree to and this is how the real world is at, right? It's basically success breed success. Everything's a booster. So you do this, you get twice as good and you get to work with others, people who are twice as good and then you leverage that to get you snowball effectiveness. And then the good thing is also just like any world innovation and startups, new players can rise to new startups with one or two people. Google was doing YouTube videos, google videos, but YouTube came about and it beat Google videos, so Google had to buy YouTube.

50:06

Yu-Kai

You can say they also got joined the establishment, but yeah, small players do become huge. So I think it's coming from all angles. It's definitely not going to be one player. And sometimes the small players over ten years become the dominant apple or Google or Facebook because they all started as startups 30 years ago or depending on which company you're looking at, it's all over the place. There's opportunities for everyone, but definitely it's not going to be replacing the establishment, quote unquote.

50:38

Nadja

So that might be good news or bad news, depending on your disposition. But having said that, we love all to talk about web3's bright shiny future, yet at the same time we still live in this real world and until the Metaverse comes along to take away all of our troubles and cares. What do you think is hindering progress or mass adoption for this technology and for this way of thinking between where we are right now, where it's more something that catches the headlines to a point where it is like that Starbucks example, where it just becomes part of the seamless experience that companies offer to their users and their customers.

51:18

Yu-Kai

Yeah, I think the biggest hindrance is probably greed and regulation also greed causing regulation. So obviously having a lot of scams in the marketplace, which is there's a lot of scams, right, and a lot of hacks, a lot of dishonest people trying to grab money and run. That obviously hurts the space tremendously because the mainstream audience, when they think about, they hear about the big news, oh, wasn't just like $200 million being stolen or there's a scam that happened, isn't it just being used to buy human parts and whatnot? So all that stuff NFT is like, oh, aren't NFTs a scam? So there's all these stories out there that I think tremendously hinders the industry both from adaptation, but then the second part, regulation in general, of course, always slows down the industry about what is regulation created for? It's created to protect people, right?

52:22

Yu-Kai

And so when more and more people are getting scammed and being hurt and they don't understand what's going on, they don't know any better, there's going to be more and more regulation coming in to try to protect people and of course that stops innovation. So I think those two things are a big issue. And then besides that, it's just more and more people care about human focused design. It's not function focused even if the technology works. But you have to take twelve different steps using all these different tools and go to Exchange, verify your bank account. That's the regulation part, right? Verify your bank account, buy your first crypto, transition it to your Solana, move your Solana to your different wallet, and then over this other one, you got to move it to your MetaMask and then do all these steps just to get the NFTs and to keep them and to maintain and manage them, import tokens.

53:15

Yu-Kai

What does that mean to your MetaMask? All that stuff is high friction. So I think it just requires people who are not just technologists, but people who understand human focus design to make it seamless and delightful.

53:30

Nadja

Thank Yu-Kai, I'm going to ask you a final question before I open it up to the audience. I see there's a truckload of questions, but I'm also very mindful of time. We always run out of time. It's sad fact of life. So I'm going to try to work in at least one. What is your philosophy about Web3 changing lives?

53:50

Yu-Kai

My philosophy of Web3 changing lives, there's multiple aspects actually. I think the obvious one people talk about a lot is the financial aspect. I do think this whole industry is not a fad as a trend and it's trending upwards. So people who do believe in putting their money, that is going to be dominant important in the future, I think it would create opportunities. But of course there are a lot of projects that's just too greed driven and there's a lot of pitfalls of traps. But I think if you believe in the long term because of solid foundations, you look at their tokenomics, you look at what they stand for, and you look at the community. Are they there because they believe in it? And I think if you have investment into these projects, I think it would financially change people's lives. Now, this is something people talk about.

54:53

Yu-Kai

Now, I think the second one is about empowerment. I think it is about people being able to create a project that can influence entire industry and can be very well funded. Not because you are begging VCs on every door and they may not see your vision. It's because you are exciting the people you're trying to serve and uniting them in the same movement. I'm also a moderator and helper for a Miami Commerce. Coming up, the Miami Web3 Summit, and they have a theme about woman empowerment. And in the weekly Twitter space we talk about, most of the industries were kind of designed by men and then women joined them. But for Web3, there's a lot of women who are there at the get go, they're creating, designing it. And I think a lot of the women are very excited about seeing a whole new industry that has also conceptualized, design and created with men alongside women together.

56:00

Yu-Kai

And they're really excited to see what kind of industry it will be. Which leads to the third part, which is more of that community. That community. Because most Web2 projects, when you launch them, you first do a product development phase. And then once you do product development, then it's always stealthy, right? You don't want anyone to know what you're doing. Then you launch and you do PR and do social media. But in web3, it's community first. People form a community based on the idea, based on what they love, based on their passions. And this is why you have a lot of white paper driven communities and then the founders couldn't execute and sometimes they run away or whatnot. But that community is on day one. It's early, it bonds people together. There's a lot of projects where the projects are rug pooled, but the community still wants to be together because they created meaning for each other. Their lives have changed, they bond with people. And I think, again, this is what our lives are about.

57:01

Yu-Kai

It's about the meaningful relations we have. It's about the purposeful things that we pursue together and it's about the memories we leave behind. I think from all these aspects, people's lives would change because of what we're doing Web Three.

57:18

Nadja

Yu-Kai I'm going to work in just at least one question. Let me quickly see. Let me just pick a random one. So considering it will be homes and personal experiences being shared, I presume this is on Metablox. How will privacy be maintained while oh yeah. How will privacy be maintained while using Metablox? Yeah.

57:43

Yu-Kai

58:38

Yu-Kai

Because if anything, a lot of stuff is public, right? The public ledger, whatnot? But we're also generally doing a public and private mode where you can have things in public, but also you can have and the public ones generate resources for your NFT lousy level up because it gives you what we call memory marks. So the public marking as either inspiring, heartwarming, enjoyable, or solemn and that helps it level up or you can make it private and so people cannot see it on our platform and you can just share it with those that you like. Recently we've been really honing in on this one challenge about, okay, how do you share private memories to your loved ones? Only because for Instagram we're talking about family values and we also don't like how Instagram is focused on being popular to the world. And so we're trying to tackle the issue of how do you create something.

59:39

Yu-Kai

We're inspired, I think partially by the Be Real app also about how do we create experiences that it's about purely about preservation and sharing to your close network. Like, I take photos of my children, I share to my parents, those don't need to be public. And so this is something we can't announce yet, but it's something that I think will be pretty exciting to solve that problem and it's going to be like a wingman project for the Metablox NFTs. So that's something that will probably come out in a few months.

Nadja

That sounds very exciting and we are going to follow along with you and see what you guys are releasing publicly when the time comes. Thank you so much today for letting us peek under the hood of what makes you tick and what you're working on to unleash onto the NFT world. Very excited about this. And yes, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on the show today. I love geeking out about NFTs, but combining it with gamification and with memory, it sounds my day is made. So thank you so much, you guys, for just joining us and for your time and your insights and then audience, as always, thank you for giving us your time today. If you are as keen as I am to start breaking that monopoly that Google Photos and Dropbox and all of these centralized organizations have on our memories and just all of our content, be sure to check out Metablox.

Nadja

You can start decentralizing your memory preservation by following the Twitter Metablox NFTs. And of course, you guys own twitter as well that he's using today. And before we close, as promised, the results of the non-fungible talent season one is in. The entries came from as far afield as Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America, and I am delighted to announce the following winners. So it's very difficult announcing people's names via their Twitter handles. Let's see, in third place, ArtofRahul, who created a video time lapse of a little boy dreaming of the moon for one day when he's going to reach that moon. In second place, the ricksev for Lumina Moon Princess. And in first place, JPalagbas to the moon. So guys, congratulations to all of you. In addition to the prize money that all of you will be receiving, the winning entries will also be minted as NFTs, and the artists are going to be joining us on a future episode to talk about their work and in addition, keep an eye out for other additional prizes that we will be announcing for other participants in closing.

Nadja

A big, huge thank you to everyone who participated in the competition. We'll see you soon for season two, and in the meantime, catch you again next week for another episode of The Future of NFTs brought to you by. AdLunam and Yu-Kai, once again, absolute pleasure. Thank you so much and really looking forward to seeing what you are building with Metablox. And, yeah, we'll be walking that journey with you because I feel your pain about content getting lost and decentralized servers just walking away with all of your I mean, it's not possessions in the traditional sense, but I mean, digital possessions are as much part of us as physical objects. And I've been through this a couple of times where I've lost photos and just information that was really important to me and I think it's such an important topic to do something about this. So very delighted to hear that this is exactly what you are doing.

Nadja

And, yeah, the best for the future.

Yu-Kai

Thank you. Great pleasure to be here and love what you're doing also with everything here.

Nadja

Cheers, guys. Have a good day.