Innovative Entrepreneurship: How Web3 and NFTs Are Changing the Game w/ Eric Mchugh Ep 37

Join our Newsletter and visit http://TransformYourFuture.com where I write about reinvention, identity and entrepreneurship.

[00:00] - Introduction

• Eddie introduces the episode's focus on how Web3 and NFTs are revolutionizing entrepreneurship.
• Overview of how these technologies offer new ways for businesses to operate, engage with customers, and create value.

[02:23] - The Impact of Web3 and NFTs on Entrepreneurship

• Discussion on how Web3 represents a shift towards decentralization, giving more power to users.
• Exploration of NFTs as a tool for creating and trading digital assets, opening up new business opportunities.

[04:10] - Eric McHugh on the Importance of Energy, Frequency, and Vibration

• Eric shares his favorite Nikola Tesla quote and discusses how the concepts of energy, frequency, and vibration influence both his personal life and business approach.

[06:48] - Personal Growth and Entrepreneurship

• Eric talks about his background, the challenges he’s faced, and how his personal growth journey, including meditation and mindfulness practices, has shaped his entrepreneurial mindset.

[09:34] - Introduction to ShopX and AI-Powered Matchmaking

• Eric introduces ShopX, a platform helping Web2 brands transition into the Web3 space, and discusses his AI-powered matchmaking service, which uses digital footprints to create meaningful connections.

[13:02] - The Unique Revenue Model of ShopX

• Exploration of the ethical considerations in creating revenue through positive means and the importance of serving others in business.

[20:40] - ShopX and the Web3 Transition for E-Commerce Brands

• Eric explains how ShopX allows e-commerce brands to easily enter the Web3 space by launching NFT collections.
• The significance of owning digital assets in the Web3 ecosystem and how it benefits both brands and consumers.

[28:12] - NFTs as Community Building Tools

• Discussion on how NFTs can be used to create exclusive communities and offer special benefits to customers, enhancing brand loyalty.

[34:36] - Future of AR/VR in Web3 and NFTs

• Eric shares his thoughts on the potential of AR/VR in Web3, how it will influence digital ownership, and the integration of physical and digital worlds.

[39:37] - The Impact of Social Media and the Need for Balance

• Eric talks about the addictive nature of social media and the importance of maintaining a balanced approach to technology and real-life interactions.

[42:11] - Final Thoughts and Takeaways

• Eric emphasizes the importance of conscious creation in both life and business.
• Encouragement for entrepreneurs to focus on ethical practices, continuous learning, and leveraging new technologies like Web3 and NFTs to drive growth and innovation.

Resources - https://shopx.co/

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:00

Shop X is another way for a web two brand to earn Web3 revenue. So again, in no way did we replace how they're doing sales now it's just another additional stream of something they can do. So I think the Y is important. So my why behind Shop X is overall I wish I could. I want to live a nice peaceful life. I don't think that's too much to ask. I found that more difficult to do if me personally, I just thought the money system was corrupt and that originally led me to physical gold and physical silver as a potential solution to that. Then Bitcoin for me was a next evolution that whether that's right or wrong, only time will tell. But either way, that's what I think it is. And then Shop X is a way for me to scale people onboard people into that ecosystem at scale. So since we offer Web two brands a product and service where they then offer to their customers that can bring their customers into Web3 at scale, and that's a zero to one moment for a lot of people. Papaya. Hello all and welcome to another episode of Transform Your Future with me, Eddie Isin, where I sit down with entrepreneurs, thought leaders, and high achievers as they identify areas I can improve on and guide me to further my self-improvement practice. For more information and insights, join my newsletter@transformyourfuture.com where I write about reinvention, personal growth, and entrepreneurship. If you like the show, you'll love the content on my site. We want to hear from you. Let us know how we can improve your listening and viewing experience. Suggest upcoming topics or a great guest for the show. Please reach out to us through our website, your podcast app comment, or just text me directly at 3 7 2 2 1 4 1 7. We want to hear from you. In today's episode, we dive deep into the cutting edge trend shaping the world of business. Today we are exploring a topic that's at the forefront of technology and entrepreneurial innovation, innovative entrepreneurship, how Web3 and NFTs are changing the game. The world of entrepreneurship is constantly evolving, but few shifts have been as transformative as the rise of Web3 and NFTs. These technologies are not just buzzwords. They represent a fundamental change in how businesses operate, engage with customers, and generate value. Web3 often describes as the next phase of the internet is all about decentralization, giving more power and ownership to users. Meanwhile, NFTs or non fungible tokens have opened up new avenues of creating and trading digital assets from art and music to virtual real and beyond. In today's episode, we're joined by Eric McHugh, an entrepreneur who's at the forefront of this revolution. Eric has been leveraging Web3 and NFTs to build innovative businesses that challenge the status quo and offer new opportunities for growth. He'll share his insights on how these technologies are not just changing the game, but creating entirely new ones. We'll discuss how entrepreneurs can harness the power of Web3 to scale their ventures, build, engage communities, and create sustainable revenue streams. Eric will also delve into the mindset needed to thrive in this rapidly evolving digital landscape where flexibility, creativity, and a deep understanding of technology are key. Whether you're an entrepreneur looking to stay ahead of the curve or simply curious about the future of digital business, this episode is packed with valuable insights. Then it can help you navigate the exciting possibilities of Web3 and NFTs. So get ready to explore the intersection of technology and entrepreneurship and discover how you can transform your future in this new digital era. Eric, welcome to Transform Your Future podcast. How are you doing today? I'm doing amazing, Eddie. Thank you so much for having me. I'm really grateful to be on it. I'm looking forward to meeting you based on your smiley and just cool. Thank you. Thank you. I do my best. I do my best to be a good human being first, right? We've been communicating back and forth. I've been looking at your stuff. Let's start in by talking about your favorite Nikolai Tesla quote. Yeah, sure. So my favorite quote is, and I think of everything, if you want to understand the secrets of the universe, think of everything in terms of energy, frequency and vibration. And so that really struck home in me, especially with the whole spiritually spirituality aspects. And it's funny, he draws back from ancient wisdom, so ancient cultures like Hermeticism, and he pulls from that to manifest what he did. So in terms of basically if you think of everything, everything in the universe is energy, frequency, vibration, and every single possibility is happening in this present moment. And the present moment that we're paying attention to is the one we're giving attention to. So in terms of energy, frequency, vibration, it's very powerful in business and in life because if you think of the emotional spectrum, every emotion is just a different frequency. So if you're saying you're sad, it's a different frequency, you're saying you're happy, it's a different frequency. If you're saying you're loving a different frequency, and if you're saying you're just trying to do your best and be kind, that's our frequency of itself. And just like a radio station, if you turn to a specific station, you get that frequency. So that's why sad people get sad people. That's why angry people attract angry people. But the flip side, that's why positive people attract positive people, loving people attract loving people. So it's beneficial for me, it's beneficial for you if we're all kind, if we're all nice and we're all positive. Yes, if we're all having those higher frequencies, like gratitude and love, respect and kindness. The gratitude's attitude, gratitude is gratitude's. Great. I have a gratitude journal right here. I used it before this podcast. Cool. Yeah, get yourself in the right state. I'm really big on the emotional state and the energy level and the frequency that I'm in because I want to always be my best and perform at my best no matter what I'm doing. Right. So let's talk a little bit about your background. I know you have had a lot of challenges in your life that you've went through, and I know you talk a lot about intention and about wanting to impact the world through what you do. Let's talk a little bit about how you ended up becoming the Eric that wants to impact the world. Yeah, dude, it's just one step at a time. I'm just living in the present moment and I believe in every present moment, just like in chess, you could have screwed up the last move, you could have made the best move possible, but either way, either case, you can always make the best move right now. And so that's just what I've been doing over and over again. I think it had some compounding effects, but it's nice to meet everyone. I'm Eric, just a normal person. I love anime, I love hiking. I have friends. I have family, 30 years old, blessed to be living in beautiful southern California. My main hobbies right now are chess, reading Muay Hai, anything under the sun and meditation. I just got back from a 10 day vin pause and meditation retreat, and that was a beautiful transformative experience for me. So if that interests you at all, highly recommend you check it out. And sorry, Eddie, that's my thing. I plug on every podcast. I just have to because it's No. That's cool. Talk about that a little bit. What was the name of it again? It's a Vin Pasa meditation retreat. So it's a 10 full day one in noble silence. And noble silence is no talking with anyone, no looking at anyone, no writing. You really just have your room, a walking path, a meditation hall, and you spend the whole time doing inner work. So it's the method that the budy used to reach enlightenment. So for the first three days, you focus your attention on the area around your nostril, you start to pick up different sensations, and then from there you scan your body back and forth over and over again. And this extracts the traumas that you stored in your body in the form of different sensations. So just like let's say you're a NASA scientist, you have to send a piece of metal into space, you would need a hundred percent pure. The best way to purify that is to run it through magnets, and the magnets would extract the impurities. So you're just doing that on a spiritual level. And then of course you close the meditation by soaring top of your head. And then you wish everyone in the world peace, love, and happiness, which shows if you go back to the vibrational frequency thing, if you're wishing everyone peace, love, and happiness, everyone's wishing you peace, love, and happiness. And that's honestly just like it's a better place to be, in my opinion. It's called mpaa. It's 10 days. The cool thing is it's completely free too, and there's centers all over the world. It was a transformative experience to me. I suggest you look into it. I mean, you could show up and you don't like it after day. It's like no one's holding you there, just walk to your car and leave. But the 10 day is well worth it, in my opinion. Interesting. It sounds like a great experience. I'd like to do it. Yeah. Absolutely. I'll send you the link out to this podcast. Cool. Cool. So let's talk a little bit now about some of the companies. I know you're a serial entrepreneur, you've founded Do you want to talk about your AI matchmaking company, which is kind of very interesting? Yeah, sure, I'm happy to. And the reason there's multiple companies is, first off, I think everyone is happiest when they're serving other people. And I thank God the creator of the universe, whatever you want to call it, I think he gives me individual gifts. He gives you individual gifts. You can't beat me up being me, I'm number one, but I can't beat you up being you because you're the number one Eddie. So logically, if you're trying to best serve other people at scale, the best way to do that is to follow your individual gifts. What you're number one at, and this just so happened to manifest in two different companies, one shop X and the one we're about to talk about is Data Inc. And that's the first ever AI powered matchmaking service. So what we do is we auto generate a profile for you based on your digital footprint, and then we create matches based on other users' digital footprint to put users in the position to succeed. So let's say four example, I get three matches a day. I don't want to be flooded with matches. Ashley, Kimberly, Jane, I would see Jane. Jane seems cool. I get a bio of an AI generated bio summary based on her digital footprint. I'm like, okay, Jane seems cool. Tell me more about Jane. Okay, she connected her Facebook, she's the youngest, you're the oldest. Our pattern recognition software says that works well. She connected her LinkedIn, you both went to a four year university, studied a similar major, she connected to Instagram, you both tag a bunch of national parks. She connected her Spotify. Did you know both follow this one artist who has a concert coming up? Would you like me to suggest date with Jane? The AI suggested Jane, she sees a brief summary of me along with my social media because from the female perspective, obviously it's harder for a female to meet an online stranger just in person. She sees me, she makes sure I'm a normal, she makes sure I'm a normal guy. She sees my mutual friend, she's like, she seems cool. Let me go on that date. She clicks accept. Let's say we go on that date, we fall in love and get married and then from there it can act as a relationship butler. So it can be like, yo, you guys haven't been on a date in three months. Would you like the place you had your second date has half ice cream? Would you like me to make reservations? Reservations made? Oh, her birthday is coming up in two weeks. You don't want to miss it. You missed the last one. She just added the Pinterest board. It might be a good gift. And this model, it differs from the current dating app model. I can go into detail on the problems with current dating apps and if you're on dating apps, I don't think I really need to go onto detail just because it's not a great experience for a lot of people. But the largest reason is it's the incentive structure behind the dating apps. So it's a little known fact that most dating apps are owned by match.com. So there's that monopoly aspect, but it's the incentive. So just think about logic. Let's use Tinder as an example. Let's say Tinder were to match a happy couple. That couple would then hopefully leave the dating app. Tinder then loses a paying customer. Tinder is working with Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs would sell out their own mother for probably five bucks. So they don't like to lose money. So this results in an incentive structure where it's like they want people on the app and it's called churn marketing. So they want a Ferris wheel text. So if you ever heard of someone down the app, delete the app down the app, delete the app, it's all by design. Whereas doubting our revenue model, and my thoughts are money is, it's an energy to me too, and I believe there's positive ways to make money and I believe there's negative ways to make money. And I believe in karma too. So if you make money and good ways, and if you provide a lot of value to a lot of people and you become rich, hey, good for you, man. But if you make money in bad ways, arm will come back to get you. So our revenue model is if you like our app, you like scheduling dates through our app and you pay for the date through our app, we can get a commission. We're incentivized to get people on the dates. We're incentivized to get that match and we're incentivized to provide a good service because think about you don't know a girl, it's her first aid. You get all the data from her, she gets all the data from you. You're not reading it but suggesting cool dates based on bad data and you're just like, yeah, I don't want to do, I think about it, I just want to go here. This seems cool. No, I don't like this one. Give me another, you pay the credit card and we suggest it's that way. And that way we can follow you through the life cycle of the relationship if that's what you're looking for. Because again, we are in a no judgment zone. If you want to pursue whatever you want, I'm sure there's someone for you, but just be kind nice, be honest with other person on what you're pursuing and hopefully we can match people with what they want. And dude, the cool thing is dating is just the first part. It can expand to a community app. Imagine us, we meet for the first time in person. I don't know this guy, he seems chill, but I don't know. We tap our phones and then it shows us what we have in common and it's just stuff for us to do together. Or I think human relationships are a very important part for human happiness. And I think males are especially lonely just due to dating apps and social media and all that, all the whole agenda against them. That's a whole thing. I could be, find me five guys in my local area who are into mohai, who aren into meditation, who would like to find to get talked. I can make friends that way. Interesting. I really like the concierge portion as well, to be my concierge to my relationship to make sure I remember anniversaries and birthdays and follow interest and stuff. That's very cool. That's very cool. And maybe as an upper level service to be able to buy the gifts for me and mail them. No, I think AI at its core is, first of all, AI is core, is pattern recognition at scale. And I think it's a way for people to leverage their natural talents to enhance their experience. I don't think AI can take over human creativity. I just don't think it can because again, energy frequency, vibration, if you start a beautiful piece of art, it's vibrated at high frequency. You're like, that's why I like it. Or a beautiful building, that's why I like it. AI can copy that, but it can be very helpful. And so that's what it is. It's just helping people in their dating experience, whatever they're looking for, it's not taking over the dating experience. They can't do that. The people, it puts people in the position to succeed. They still need to go on the date. They still need to be pleasant to each other. They still need to be kind. They still have to make it work from a human to human level. But we set up the back and forth to work. So for example, in our Spotify example, it suggested the Spotify date. It's like, yo, you follow, this person should go to this concert, but let's say it didn't suggest that as a date. It's still matched because of that and that can come up organically. So you're in a position to succeed, and the longer you're on the app, the better it gets at matching you, the more chance you have of finding your right partner. So what's some of the stats about actually matches in people going on successful relationships or whatever, or successful dates? We're just on the wait list phase right now. So we're at around 400. The reason we're on the wait list phase right now is because we're waiting for the Apple app approvals and we're training the AI on real data. So as soon as that comes out, we'll be publishing the stats as much as possible because KPIs are extremely important, but it's getting better in every day in terms of matching people because before, at first it obviously just sucked, but it's improving every day. And we have a test group that's just like we're gauging and rating matches. Yeah, yeah. Well it sounds very interesting. I'll drop a link in the show notes so people can check it out and maybe get on the wait list. Yeah, very much appreciated. We're following the Uber model, so we're going city by city just, I mean, it doesn't really make sense If we can, let's say match 50 people are in New York, 50 people are in la, 50 people are in Houston, you match someone, it's like, what's the point? But so we're going LA first and then we'll probably expand to either New York, Austin or San Fran and just kind of go from there. Interesting, interesting. That makes sense. That makes a lot of sense. Tell me, is there anything else you want to talk about that? No, I mean unless you have any questions, the company's there to help and they'll be around for a while. So the fact that we can plant the thought seed is greatly appreciated by me. And if anyone has any feedback, obviously when you're building software, user feedback is the most important thing. So feel free to reach out if you have feedback or I can help. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I got divorced. It was a very challenging thing to do in my life. It took me a long time to make the decision to do it, and it was very uncomfortable, but I did it and later I went out looking for another relationship later apps and it was interesting my experience doing that because I'm a little bit older. So back in the day, that's not how we found people. That's not how you found a relationship. That's not how you found dates. But now it's the new world and this is just part of how things are done. So it was a great experience for me actually, and it ended up working really good for me. So I mean, I don't have no qualms about it, but I know I did recognize that sometimes people would present themselves in a very, very positive light and put a glamor shot up or whatever, you know what I mean? So I liked the idea that your app is based more about really looking at the social medias and interest and involvement and all those things involved in the network of job school interest to put people together, which I think is much more useful than sexual attraction, so to speak. There is one thing I'm going to touch on and that's that doting. It's not our intention for that to be the sole way for people to meet people like me personally. I better luck meeting someone face to face, and I don't think that'll ever change. But if someone feels like trying to meet someone online, we're just offering another option. Again, I believe in human connection and I think meeting someone face-to-face is a fantastic way to do that. We have no intention of replacing that. I hope that actually happens more. No, but I mean it is part of the process in many ways. You have to figure out who you're going to meet and if you could figure out who you're going to meet and then go meet them and see how that all works out when you have that real human face-to-face connection. So that's how I used it anyway, was using an app to get to those people that I wanted to spend more time with and find out about them. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. I'm happy that worked out for you, by the way. Thank you. Thank you. It's, it's the best thing, honestly, it's a miracle. I feel like she's an incredible woman and she's a great fit for me, and I don't know why she puts up with a high level crazy person like me works 14 hours a day. You seem cool. It's almost like the universe had a plan for you and everything was just It did. Yeah, it always does. It certainly feel that way. Yes, I certainly feel that way. Thank you for recognizing that. So let's talk about Shop X. Sure. This is interesting. So you're taking e-Commerce brands into the Web3 oh world. Let's talk about that and what that means and why people should do it. I love that question and to reiterate similar dating where it's just simply another option for people to meet people. Shop X is another way for a web two brand to earn Web3 revenue. So again, in no way did we replace how they're doing sales now. It's just another additional stream of something they can do. So I think the Y is important. So my why behind Shop X is overall I wish I could live. I want to live a nice peaceful life. I don't think that's too much to ask. I found that more difficult to do if me personally, I just thought the money system was corrupt, and that originally led me to physical gold and physical silver as a potential solution to that. Then Bitcoin for me was a next evolution that whether that's right or wrong, only time will tell, but either way, that's what I think it is. And then Shop X is a way for me to scale people onboard people into that ecosystem at scale. So since we offer web two brands a product and service where they then offer to their customers that can bring their customers into Web3 at scale, and that's a zero to one moment for a lot of people. So X is a way for a web two brand to enter the Web3 space. So let's go over what is web one versus web two versus Web3? Just because. Yes, because some people don't know. Yeah, no one knows, but it's still working itself out. But the easiest way to think of Web one is just think of Read only. So you can go online and you can read stuff, which is fantastic. The information is spread that way. Web two, let's frame it as social media, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, all that stuff. You can read and you can write but you can't own. So I could write an Instagram post. You could read my Instagram post. The only issue is Instagram owns that post. So if we say something, they could cancel us. They could sell our data forfar purposes. Instagram is in complete control over there. The difference between Web3 is it's read, write, and own. So not only can you read the content, write the content, but you can also own the content. Owning the content comes in the form of a cryptocurrency or A NFT. And NFT stands for a non fungible token essentially. That's a just think of there's a piece of land in the real world. It's your land only. You own it. You can do what you want with that. You can build a house, you can build a school, you can build a garden, you can do nothing with it. It's your land, but you own it. Then Web3 is just a digital version. So you can own a digital piece of land in cyberspace, and you get to decide what you build on that. And since my area of expertise is e-commerce, let's use E-commerce as an example, and e-commerce brand, they down the Shop X app. They want to enter the Web3 space. They can launch an NFT collection with zero technical help. You could do it, I could walk you through it after this call in 10 minutes. It's just filling out two forms. It's like price, name, image, description, cool, stuff like that. You as the brand, you then deploy your NFT, and now you want to sell that NFT or your customers. And you may be thinking, why would my customers ever want an NFT? Why would they care? And that's where you get to come in and as a brand program, an e-commerce benefits to NFT in the form of discounts and real life events, free product, free exclusive content, you as the brand get to decide that. And the cool thing is, let's say I'm the brand, you're the consumer. You have my NFT, now there's a connection between me and you. So we can send value each other's way with no third party interfering. If you decide to, even if I'm the brand, I created the NFT, if I want to take it away from you, I'm like, guy, I can't take it away from you. It's your NFT, Amazon, Instagram, the government, they can't come in and take away from you. It's your NFT. And the cool thing is long-term, let's say I become the most successful brand in the world. You own that NFT because you bought in early. Hopefully there's a monetary increase, and if you want to sell it for a profit, you can. So it's a way to share the value with the community and me on the brand side, if you decide to sell it, that's totally within your right. But I can program 'em royalties too. So if you want to sell it, I decide I want royalties that's programmed in from the beginning of the creation of NRT. So if you sell it once, twice, three times, I can get my percentage as well. And from the brand side, some of the benefits you get are higher conversion rates. So because customers have already bought into your product, you can assume an 80% conversion rate they've already bought in. So this gives you a better idea of how much product to make. You can do marketing tactics like, okay, I have a hundred NFTs, I can safely say eight are going to sell. I know that I can create 80 products or I can create 40 to create that sell to create that fomo. You get repeat, the biggest brand benefit is probably increased repeat customer. So in e-commerce, the name of the game isn't acquiring the customer because more often than not, the brand will spend more money to get that first customer than they make from that first purchase. So it's like, how do I get them coming back? And that's where the ownership aspect comes into play, because if you feel like you're part owner of the brand, you're not going to go to the competitor. It's like, if I have a timeshare in Hawaii and you're my friend and you should go in Hawaii, it's like, just stay at my timeshare. Whereas it's like, and the third thing is honestly, I think the more, it's one of the most important things. It's harder to track. It's the word of mouth marketing effect. And that's because if the customer feels like they have ownership in the brand, and we've seen this in the past where on their social media account change their Twitter, their Twitter Instagram profile to the NFT of the brand, and they start telling their friends about and talking organically, it's like, Hey, I bought this on part of the brand. And then obviously we're all tired of ads. I'm tired of, if I mention Coca-Cola on this podcast, I'm tired of going to Instagram and be Coke, Coke, coke. It's like, no. But I would trust my friend recommending something. An email from Noah Kagan. It wasn't a personal email. I'm on his mailing list and it was about skincare regime. And about an hour later, my Amazon account, I went in there and it was recommending I buy some skincare products. Must have been a weird coincidence though. Maybe. Yeah. Right. Weird. I guess to give your listeners some value, it's not so much related to web two. It's just useful. I used to work with a ton of brands in the past. A common retargeting thing they use is if they have, you put something in your cart and you don't follow through the purchase, just wait a couple days and you usually get a discount on the product. So if there's something you want to buy, just throw in your product in your cart and just wait for that discount. Might as well. If they're doing it already, I don't feel bad about it. They've already factored that into their bottom line. So they would've increased the price of the overall products to cover this cost. So it's like if they're already factoring, why not save yourself some money? Yeah, yeah. Let's go a little bit deeper about this because I'm very interested. Web3, oh, I understand. We're talking about NFTs and creating NFTs. Is there something beyond just creating the NF t, are we creating a space, like you talked about you have land in the real world, we're going to take this land out there. Is there actual space in a community that I'm building or just an NFT that my customers would buy to be part of the brand? So as in terms of building community space, NFTs are a great community building tool. And if you want to create the space that NFT can act as a key to get in the space. So we have brands where they have a community discord to specific sections, specific section discord where they vote on stuff they say on what the product's going to be. You can also get access to community content too. So one of our clients Foxes show OPIS says, we have an NFT, you can early access to product, but in direct access to building the community, yes, you can talk with 'em in Discord, but that really comes into play with ar, VR type of thing. So in the ar vr, let's say Nike has a NFT collection, they launched their NFT, you buy their Nike goal pass, you can gain access to the Nike VR lounge and communicate with other Nike members. And the cool thing is because NFTs are the perfect transition from physical to digital, and that's another thing Shop X is doing. So we've started tokenizing luxury assets. So for example, someone bought a supercar Ferrari is like 250 K. They bought the NFT version of that. So the NFT and the car. So let's say hypothetically in that example, if Ferrari so chose, they could create a Ferrari lounge. So only owners of the Ferrari can have access to that lounge. The car clubs have their car clubs. It's like you have the product, you get the digital copy that gives you access to that. It works vice versa too. And this is all future talk because obviously AR and VR is still, but in the future, this is probably what it's going to be. It's like in, let's say I'm in my metaverse or my AR or my VR world, whatever, I purchase a product in the VR world, I purchase a Nike sunglasses because I want my avatar to have it or whatever my cryptocurrency wallet is the one that owns the NFT, that's the transition. The one-on-one transition from digital to physical. And because my wallet owns it in real life, I can go to the Nike store with that NFT and unlock the product in real life. So all of that's just still being built in the background. And I think it's been pretty cool. To help me really understand this better and how we could use it to our benefit. Can you give me a real world example of a e-comm, like a product, somebody has this e-comm product and they develop NFT. Can we talk about in real terms? Yeah, sure. I'll give you three. I think it gives you a better cover. We'll do the enterprise example, we'll do the mid-tier company example, and we'll do the startup example, the enterprise example. I like to use Fox Studios, their new show called Populis. If you're a fan of Rick and Morty, it's by the same creator. That's a funny show. I check it out. They launched an NFT collection called The Crap Chickens. So what they did is they launched this prior to the release of their show. So going into their first episode, they made millions of dollars. So the NFTs, but who cares? It's Fox. Millions of, I mean, don't get me wrong, I don't want to sound like it's not, millions of dollars is a lot of money, but to Fox, it's like, so they made a good amount of money doing that. But more importantly, going to the first episode, they already had a community behind the show and the first episode hit record numbers partly due to that community. And now you get specific benefits depending on what the show wants to get. Your chicken can show up in the show, you can get merchandise, you get early access to content, you can vote on stuff that's going to be the show. So it's building that relationship for you. The mid-size example we were working with, it was is a hyper store in la. And so their biggest issue was they, I'm sorry, what. Kind of store? Like a hype hat store. So like a fashionable streetwear store. So their biggest issue was they were selling, they would create a hat line for let's say 500 hats. They're cool, they're collectibles, and then within seconds, bots would come up and purchase all the hats. Their customers wouldn't get the hats. The bots would then flip the hats on the secondary market for 10 times the profit and no one's happy. So they created a gold, silver, bronze style past collection for their customers. And so now their gold, silver, and bronze style, they get a reserved place in line. So they get first access to the hat, the NFTs, they completely block out the bot collections, they get discounts, they get free products, they get a bunch of benefits, and that's because of that collection. And the cool thing to note about this is the NFT pass was 0.75 eth, which at today's prices is around $1,750. And the clientele of that hack brand, I mean they're people into streetwear hats. So they're not bowling out by any means. It's just like 23, 24, 25 year olds type of thing. But they wanted the NFT, they wanted the e-commerce benefit that came with that. So they learned the cryptocurrency technology to get that n ft. So that helps speed up mass adoption. The third example I like to use, and this is the startup example, we're working with a dog on Instagram. I personally love dogs, so this is cool. He's a Husky and Huskies are super derpy. The Husky Jackson, he had a brand, so he had some followers, but he didn't have a product. He didn't have a way to monetize it. So what he was able to do is he launched an NFT collection for his community. Prior to the release of his product, he was able to earn some revenue without even releasing a product. And then he could use that to build the store. Again, he's a normal job, normal dude, if you can earn revenue to build your store before you can, a approved his concept and it acted as like a Kickstarter type thing. And on top of that, because the hardest thing to do as a new e-commerce brand is to get your first customers, but he already had a community of people willing to buy his product because of the NOT pass in place. So it worked out pretty well for him. And I want to note on Web3, it's still very new. A bunch of brands are trying a bunch of stuff. A bunch of stuff is failing, some stuff is working, and then they're just going to optimize from there. Interesting, interesting. Yeah, I mean, I think I've heard people talk about how you can build your own virtual world and then your customers can hang out in the virtual world and they can have benefits and be able to do things and communicate with the brand on a different level so that maybe they might even be involved in developing new products and new lines and ways to improve things. Yeah. That's exactly what's happening with some of the streetwear brands we're using minus the virtual world, but they have their own space, the virtual world, and I think it's going to be the future. It is just a ways off the UI for the virtual world, still worse than the UI for the Web3 world. So we need to fix that. And the biggest issue we're tackling is for the virtual world, you can't show too many products type of thing. So if you go to Ralph's, we can just walk up and down at Ralph's is a grocery store in my area, but you can just walk up and down and you can pick with that. But the virtual world, the attention spends much cheaper. So you need to have five to 10 products just out in the front. It's not like that walking experience. You're not going to scroll over virtual like, eh, you need to limit the products. Everyone's still optimizing for that. I think the industry that's going to move fastest with that is probably high fashion because a fashion dresses are very, there's not too many of them, like a Gucci store. There's not a flood. It's not like a TJ Maxx. And on top of that, if you have that digital avatar based on your metrics, like your stats and everything, you can try the clothes on in the virtual world and then order it online. So I think that might be the biggest adopter. And they're limited high ticket items too. So just having that monetary backing, it's more likely to spread that way and then trickle down to the other products. Very interesting. Very interesting. And I know that obviously it's really about another way to really communicate with your customers and really find those raving fans that are going to help you to grow whatever your industry is or whatever your business is. No, you hit it on the hand, you find your super fans and you enhance their power. If you had that core people, you want a thousand core customers who are love your brand versus a hundred thousand, you're just saying. Yeah, I think the core ones are more powerful and they're more fun to deal with, to be honest too. I love it. I want to figure out, you need to help me figure out how I can participate, how I can do something like that. I was thinking when you were talking also people, maybe you're a writer and you have a Patreon account or you're a writer and you have, I can't remember the name of the starts with an S. But anyway, you have these accounts, you're still managed by those people. So if those people want to drop you for some reason, then you lose it. Just like social media. So I like the idea of a writer, a brand like that, who releases intellectual property, having that kind of virtual world to talk to their audience and understand the audience better to do things. I think that's interesting. Yeah, no, I had a couple of friends who got canceled too for the first one. He's a famous, whatever, famous, he's a famous Twitch streamer, so he played Fortnite or whatever, and he said something, what he said was he shouldn't advertise adult content to kids. That's literally what he said. And then they canceled him instantly. So all of us, the community was gone, his skins were gone. He lost pretty much everything. He got it back since. But he was on their platform. And I had another friend, she runs an Instagram store, and this is going to be interesting. It's going to come up in the future. She's a mother. She posted a picture with her child, the child, they were swimming, so the child was shirtless, but the AI flagged that as illicit content, and they took down everything instantly. And it took her around three weeks to get everything back up. Obviously it's fine. So it took three weeks to get down, but at the same point, if that's your livelihood and they're just going to take it down for no, for not even a human dealing, it's all AI at that point for just for being arbitrarily flagged and you can't do anything about it, that may be a problem going forward. Yeah, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. What do you think the future really holds 10 years from now, 15 years from now? Are we all going to be living in VR now? Just like everybody's walking around with their phone glued to their face all day, watching content on Instagram or TikTok or whatever, or going to all of them. And all day you go through all of the social medias. What's going to happen 10, 15 years from now? Are we just going to be with VR and just be in VR all day? So I always like to pick the pause that's spin of it. I like to joke that Web four is probably 10 to 15 years out, and web four is ar vr, NFTs, cryptocurrencies on your phone if you've seen the movie Ready Player one, that type of thing where you're just kind of hooked in the world. But I like to think VR because everything always spirals, everything always comes back, everything goes full circle. So Web five is like, we've had enough of that and we're like, we need to go. I love the outdoors when I can go phoneless for a day and just walk around in nature. It's a good time. So I think Web five is, everyone's like, I've had enough of this ar vr, we need to go back to getting some sun. Yeah, yeah, more real world walk around, disconnect type of information, spend more time with human beings talking rather than in face-to-face situations. And Dopa me started on the TikTok, what you mentioned, everyone on the screen, it's frying everyone's dopamine receptors. It's frying everyone's central nervous system. So it's actually pretty bad for you. So if you're listening to this on your screen, yeah, it's not good for you. So just be aware. And on top of that, your diet isn't just your food diet. So a bad food, you feel bad the next day. It's the same applies for content. So if you absorb bad content, it won't be good for you. And the way TikTok and the algorithms made, the way they structured their addictive algorithms is just like an early casino. So the early casinos, they're going to monitor your body functions, and when they can detect you're about to leave, that's when they give you a win to give you that hit of dopamine to win. The social media companies, they did that exact same framework better. So that's why whenever you're about to stop scrolling and knows when you're going to stop scrolling, they'll give you something you really like and then the mind, the scroll continues. And what I did about this stuff really helped is because I am 30, so I think I got a good age where in high school or in middle school, I was all outdoors. I didn't have a cell phone until eighth grade, and at that point it was a flip phone. So I was blessed to not be start from an early age to be stuck on my phone, but I still am addicted to Instagram and social media. So on my apps, on my phone apps, I put chess.com right next to the Instagram app. So whenever I have the urge to scroll Instagram, I just go to chess.com, break out a couple games, and that's just much more productive. I recognize the addictive nature of social media and how easily it is to get hooked into it. And when I'm going to go in there, either I'm going in there for one specific reason and trying to focus on the one thing that I'm trying to do, or I set a timer and after 15 minutes I have to get out. That's it. Otherwise, I might sit there for an hour and just waste an hour of my life Scrolling. You're just programming yourself with is dumb stuff too, because it's all programming. You're feeding yourself conscious. Just like, because what hit me is I went on Instagram reels, I'm like, let's see how much of this adds value to my life. And I was like, nothing. It was like, okay, well this doesn't serve. You got to let it go. Which is why I like going on podcast like this. We spread some paw of content, hopefully they find this instead. So we've talked about a lot of things. Is there anything else you want to talk about that we haven't discussed? No, honestly, I think you're a cool guy. I love talking with you. I just like to push. I think everyone's a conscious creator, whether they don't or not. So when you're creating, when you're doing your thing in real life, I just said, don't harm anyone and don't take anything away from anyone, and you should be chilling. Yeah, I love it. That's good advice. That's good advice. Be more. Yeah. Well, I appreciate you, Eric, and I'm going to be in touch with you. I want to learn more. I want to look into those things and I want to hear back from you, bring it back on the show in a few months and see where you're at. Oh, I'm happy to. And if there's anything I can do to support you in any way or your listeners, let's have an open on communication and just give each other up, just like friends. Very cool. I appreciate you, brother. Yeah, you too, man. For more information and monthly topics of interest, please go to transform your future.com and join the.