Technology, Connected - Why Web3 Marketing Failed: Diego Borgo on Brand Strategy, AI and Blockchain

Episode Date: March 6, 2025

Diego Borgo has helped develop Web3 strategies for brands including Adidas, Porsche and Mastercard. In this episode, he explains why many corporate blockchain and NFT projects failed, and what brands should do differently.Much of Web3 marketing prioritised hype, technical jargon and short-term attention over clear customer value. Brands launched tokens, NFT collections and online communities without establishing why their audiences should care or how the technology supported a broader business strategy.Diego joins Mark and Jeremy to examine what went wrong and how marketers can approach emerging technologies more effectively.We discuss:Why many Web3 marketing campaigns failedHow brands mishandled customer onboardingWhat makes technology-led communities valuable and sustainableWhy artificial scarcity and superficial engagement rarely build trustDiego’s “See the Unseen” framework for identifying market shiftsWhere AI and blockchain can create practical business valueWhat marketers misunderstand about decentralisation, culture and ownershipHow executives should evaluate Web3 projects before launching themThis episode is a practical discussion about Web3 marketing, brand strategy and emerging technology. It’s intended for marketers, strategists and executives deciding whether blockchain, AI or digital ownership belongs in their business.Please enjoy the show.--Follow Diego: https://x.com/don_borgo --Chapters(00:00) Disruptors And Curious Minds(00:35) The Problem With Web3(01:56) Welcome To The Show Diego Borgo(02:19) Simplifying Web3 for Your Family(06:14) Audience Infrastructure in Web3 - What Did Brands Get Wrong?(09:52) Short-Term vs Long-Term Brand Strategies(12:31) The Web3 Echo Chamber(14:53) Meet People Where They Are(16:56) Web3 On-boarding Is Patronizing(17:58) Hot Buttons(19:04) What Has Diego Changed His Mind About Regarding AI(23:08) Decentralized AI(28:19) Trust (30:31) Follow On Question: AI And Blockchain Scaling(32:54) UBI And Diego's Question For WorldID(35:11) Backstage After Show--Full episodes and archives: www.thinkingonpaper.xyzWatch On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@thinkingonpaper/videos--

Disruptors and Curious Minds. Welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper where we take you the curious-minded individual, the disruptor, building the new future of the world behind the scenes of the latest and greatest new technologies that are out there, not just tech for tech's sake, but tech to figure out what it means for you, what it means for your work,

what it means for your family, what it means for the world. It won't always be easy to listen to, but it will always be interesting and it'll always get you thinking up here. My name's Jeremy. This is Mark. Mark, what are we learning about today?

We're learning about AI and blockchain. Jeremy, our listeners are going to be learning how one technology can help the other, how AI could solve some of the challenges of blockchain, how blockchain, perhaps more importantly, can solve some of the challenges of AI. We're going to be talking about Web 3 marketing on this show. We've spoken to a lot of people in blockchain. We've spoken to people about personal fitness, logistics, art, music, IP, authenticity, provenance, all these really good, great benefits of blockchain technology.

But unfortunately, it's all hidden beneath a veil of inept marketing. It's all barricaded behind tech jargon that six people in the world understand. And today's guest, Dialli Borg, is going to give us his blueprint for a new type of webtheme marketing is going to change how brands think about it. Outstanding. Well, that's a thread we've been talking about a while. I've been exploring Web 3, the early iteration, the phases, the failures, the reboots, the technical jargon, the disconnects.

So now we're looking into the future. We're looking still at a collection of technologies that has an interesting potential to me, but still hasn't all come together. So without further ado, Diego Borgo, welcome to Thinking on Paper. Thanks for thinking with us today. coming to you from Portugal. Diego, how are you feeling today? I'm good, Bradda. Thanks for having me, man.

I'm stoked to be here and I love the jazz you guys are already playing in the back there, so let's go. Very cool. It's almost like Diego notes the hot buttons before I've even asked for them, speaking of jazz. There you have it. So, Diego, we like to start with a question that is relatable to a lot of people

when you're talking about something complex. So you have an older relative and a few friends at the table that are non-technical. You guys are getting ready to break some bread, have a great meal. And they ask you, what is this Web 3 stuff all about? What is blockchain? How do you explain it to them simply and succinctly to get them a little bit ahead of the curve? Yeah, I would say, don't even bother about it.

Just think about something else. Wow. Yeah, I love that. Hey, that's kind of a fun answer, man. But here, well, I'm going to push you on the challenge. No, I'll joke. I'm a joke. I love this pace.

this industry. The thing I keep going back to is you should be seeing those type of technologies as nothing else than an evolution, right? It's just a little evolution piece by piece, part by part. It keeps going forward, forward, forward, like everything else, like your car, things that you use at home, cell phones, like things just keep evolving a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit. And everything is focused on giving people better experience saving time or any other type of utility that, you know, humans are designed for, you know, to go after. Keep things very simple, right? We don't need to be, oh, we're building the rock science. No, fuck that, right? It's as simple as that, which is just a little evolution. The internet is going to keep evolving forever in different

parts. I break that through in three specific areas. The first one being the interface, the interface of the internet, the way we connect with the internet has been evolving throughout throughout the time. We started with chat rooms. We started with ICQ, send as a messengers. And now we hear. We have audio. We have video. We have all different types of engagement. How we connect. We all in three different countries right now and feels that we are very close connected right now. So that's one part of it, which keeps evolving. Immersive experience is a good example of that, augmented reality. I put that under the web tree bucket. The second pillar there is the database. how information is transmitted, how is goals from A to B, and that can be data, that can be money,

that can be any type of information. And the big evolution here where blockchain is nothing else more than that database, is that this database is now decentralized. This database is now running to millions of computers all over the world, and it's much more secure by doing so because nobody can take it down. It doesn't belong to one entity. Plus, you have transparency so everybody can look on what is being transferred left and right. And then the third part of that is the logic, is the language, the way that things react,

if this, then that, the input you give gives another output, which then, you know, I play a lot under the AI element right now, of course, which AI is evolving the logic of the internet, the logic of how we interact with content, how we interact with services within the web. If you think about your phone, the way your phone works is because there's a stack of technology that is put together in it that makes your phone be what your phone is. and the internet is the same. And if we claim that Web3 is the next evolution of the internet, it cannot just be one stack of that.

I think that makes a whole lot of sense, and it's relatable to you mentioned infrastructure a few times. And I want to go into this pretty quickly because you were involved in some pretty cool projects on the early onset of Web3. I've always thought of the most compelling aspect of Web3 to be this idea of audience infrastructure, to have these purpose-built highways directly to members of

your audience to enable not just one-way communication, but Mark and I call it, you know, bidirectional value exchange. I can send stuff, send stuff to the brand. The brand can send stuff to me and we can contribute together. We all want to contribute. That's meaningful. That's humans. Question for you related to this first wave of Web3. And I'm wondering if the brands could have done it a little bit better in the fact that most brands charged for their NFTs early on. And that was their moment of engagement with Web 3. Given the fact that it is, audience infrastructure, but digital products aside, should that have been a free thing, a highway for audiences to jump on without, you know, a heavy investment?

100%. Yeah. So for the sake of the audience, I spent the last four years working with the largest brands in the world, from Adidas to Porsche, to Salesforce, to Unilever, to MasterCard, all of them, bringing that into this industry. So I know exactly what you're talking about. I couldn't agree more with you guys' physies. I would add to that all those major brands from a retail perspective, they're all going D2C now, right? Direct to consumer has been the biggest movement that all those brands have done. I spent 40 years within Adidas helping them shape that infrastructure aside of blockchain. DTC is nothing more than cutting the middleman, right?

It's nothing more than getting the brand to talk directly with the customer and getting them closer than ever. So you get to learn everything the customer wants and you shape your offerings to that. I think that within your guys' thesis, you know, blockchain Web3, NFTs is that on sterile. right? Because you're literally going direct to then. You can get input. You can prove where they've been. You can prove what they've done. And a lot of those brands that came to the space

within the realm of the Fortune 500 or was 300 plus brands that entered this industry, which is quite mind-boggling if you think about it. The majority of them, 95% of them came with one thing in mind. We want to make money. We want to drive revenue. We want to extract money as quick as possible because it's a product. That's what we do.

We sell shoes. We want to sell NFTI. We sell cars, we want to sell NFTs. So NFTs became the product and not the enablement layer on how brands can get closer to customers. And that's the biggest problem why most of them fail. I'm going to push back on a bit of that.

I'm going to push back first on what Jeremy said about should they have been free. No, I don't think they should have been free. I think like everything, it depends. A lot of my early work in WebVee was working and writing for Elvimash explaining a lot of the luxury NFT activations that happened. NFT by Tiffany, for example, and the Louis Vuitton case.

It was $60,000. I think it was definitely one of the most successful brand activations in Web 3. But on the other hand, some of the Louvittons, they were equally as expensive and they didn't do as well. There's something happening with the culture of the brand and how they chose to activate it that affects the success and influences the cost. I don't think all the brands were in it for the money. Some of them seem to have a good heart. Many didn't. And I think that there's definitely a lot of people who did it wrong.

But I don't think we should necessarily paint the whole space with the same brush. I don't think we're painting the whole space with the same brush. I think we're just calling it like we saw it. Diego, you hit this spot on. You can't sell the marketing enablement or the enablement of your audience as a product. That to me seems very disingenuous. And I think that's when people ran into some stuff. What do you think about that?

That's exactly the point, right? Like you're selling the technology. You're selling selling what makes it happen. You're selling the microchip. You're selling the bandwidth. You're not selling the experience on top of it. You're not selling the utility on top of it. You're not selling the enablement on top of it.

And that's the problem. NFTs became the product. You sold NFTs. You bought NFTs. You minted NFTs. You traded NFTs. To Mark's point, a lot of them came with like intentions, quote unquote, but we can't forget. Those are not NGOs, right?

They are in the business of making money. There's nothing wrong with making money. There is ways on which you can make money that can be thinking on the long term, and there is ways of making money that you can think on the short term. Majority of then fought on the short term. And that's the classical case of innovation led by marketeers. I am a marketeer by heart. I've been a marketeer since I was 15 years old.

I'm 36 right now, so I'm putting myself as part of the problem. I'm not pointing fingers. Innovation led by marketeers drives short-term growth, or drive short-term thinking, you know, because it's the next high. What is cool right now? How can we get PR? How can we get big numbers so the board is excited? Budgets are short.

And now you start seeing AI-generated commercial. Why should a customer of Coca-Cola give a fuck about AI-generated commercial? They shouldn't care, but that's the marketing mindset. Oh, we need to talk to this is AI-generated commercial. It shouldn't be the point. The point of a commercial is to convey a message and to talk close to someone. hard to create cultural relevance so they take decisions on buying the product. If that's AI generated made or not, it doesn't matter. So we just start seeing the repetition of that. Was NFTs, was Metaverse,

now is AI and whatever else is going to come next. It's an interesting piece too. Another way I look at this too is when they're building digital products before the use of that products, those products are fully defined yet. It's like we're not living in space yet, but someone's selling me an astronaut helmet that hopefully I can use at some point, right? But you know, you got to push the boundaries. You've got to start leading into stuff or things wouldn't really get done. Question for you, we're famous for these weird thought experiments. So I watched one of your talks where you put together these five steps to see the unseen, which is really cool. I want to highlight the framework and you guys can watch this talk that Diego has. We'll post a link in the show knows, but his framework

present the undeniable change. Number two, who are we against? What are we for? Three, show the promised land. Four, present the counter movement. And then five actually build the movement. So he talks more about these in his talk. But I think it's really interesting. You've got to find that through line, right? And you find the through line and then figure out how you build from there.

Why do you think having been in a space and experienced it so much that crypto and blockchain is so reluctant to embrace that way of brand building and brand culture? Why is it almost reticent to approach that and focus on the features and focus on the tech and focus on these incomprehensible terms that nobody understands. It's very simple. This industry was built for technologies by technologists. It happened to start getting the hands of people by mistake

or just, you know, just happen. And the more it goes towards the direction, the deeper we go. We are just inside of the jar shouting at each other and trying to sell to each other and money is just going around in circles. It's just technologies trying to do tech for the sake of tech and whoever has the most complex and the most hype ecosystem wins. That's the race to the bottom that we're currently yet.

And thankful for us writers and those who think on paper, stories are harder to come up with and we're still going to need stories. One other thought on that, Diego, that I think is interesting. We'd love to get your ideas on is that traditional marketers and crypto natives, I think, couldn't be further apart. Traditional marketers speak in like net promoters score. they speak a brand strategy, audience engagement. And then you have on this other side, not to diminish too much, but what some of those

folks are seeing, they're probably closer to my age, at least from a management perspective. They see the memes, Gwen Lambo. It's not just tech jargon, it's also this crypto-native jargon. How do you bring those two audiences together, or those two groups together, and do they even need to be brought together? Yeah, that's a really good point. So I spent the last four years with the thesis that the way we will be able to be able to bring mainstream adoption to this industry is going to be by bringing the biggest brands in the

world, which as a byproduct will be bringing their audience to Web3. Right. And as we already touched upon, it wasn't very successful at scale, right? And I think that one of the core elements of why it wasn't successful is because, one, we are not building applications for a daily user or applications that, you know, the average Joe can see value on. Very few of them exist today. And two, we are not meeting people where they're at. And we are trying to onboard. We are trying to bring the masses.

We're trying to show them what we have seen. People don't care. People don't want to be onboarded. Nobody got onboarded to chat GPT. People downloaded it. Saw one simple bar. Type a couple of things. An entire word opened up in front of them.

It changed their life and their perception. And they're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to pay 20 bucks. for it. It's a very different approach, right? Now, my new thesis, which I've been spending the last year on, is going the other way around, is how do we get Web3 companies that already have found product market fit, that have already working applications that do solve a real world problem, and how we go the other direction, how we go mainstream, how we meet people where they are, how we show them how that can improve their life, how that can give them a better experience, right? So a lot of what we've been talking about is exactly that, is this industry is so inside the jar,

is so focused on the tech jargons, it's so focused on the hype, it's so focused on cycles, right? We're still talking cycles all the time. Bare market, bull market, bear market, boom market, bear market, bull market, right? Which is not long-term thinking, which is not, let's build something sustainable. A brand is long-term thinking. You don't build a brand overnight. Nike has been doing what Nike is doing now for 40-50 years, right? It's the same thing, just cutting through,

cutting through every day, every day. We're not thinking that way. So, of course, when you talk with Web3, Web2 legacy brands, and they come into the space, like, there is that mentality of where do we fit, right? Do we bring our existing customer here, or do we tap into a new audience, right? Do we want to just talk to the Web3 native,

or do we want to bring them together? There is a layer of technology, which is complex by itself, but there's also a culture layer, which is not a problem because people, and especially brands, love underground culture, right? That's exactly what happens in Web3. That is the sneaker hat culture back on a day, the hip-hop culture back on a day, skateboard went through the same process, and look at all those things. They're all mainstream.

They're everywhere. Surfing is going through exactly that right now. It's always, you know, underground, and now surfing is like the forefront of a lot of, you know, mainstream places. And Web3 is still there. And I don't think that is a problem. I think that's an opportunity for brands to know how to tap in an underground culture that is extremely unique and very rich.

The problem is do we bring our audience here or do we build a separate branch of our brand to tap into this B-R-R-D and to build something sustainable for the long term? That's all the time is the question. And I'm being asked. I just want to make sure we highlight this onboarding word. And I think that was one of the biggest mistakes that, that that industry did. Because when you think about onboarding, what do you think about?

You think about a picture like a subway line in New York City where everyone's like kind of corralled and smushed in and they're forced to go into this line. And there's someone in the end that's going to onboard them, right? So did anyone stand with a big sign and say, hey, we're going to onboard people to vacuum tubes? Hey, did anyone stand with a sign and say, we're going to onboard you to TCPIP?

It's bonkers, right? And it's even worse than that because it's patronizing. Onboarding, I mean, come here. I'm going to tell you how this works. You know, Because you don't know what to do. You don't know, Jeremy. Come here.

I'll tell you how this works. I'll show you my word. Okay, you're going to catch up because you smart enough. You're going to figure out. That's what we're doing. Do you think anybody has ever succeeded in actually onboarding someone into Web 3? If you think about all of the time that people have spent writing posts on LinkedIn, writing tweets on Twitter about education and onboard,

I just wonder how many have actually been onboarded, if it's like five or six people. Right. Aware of DeGargo's time, I'm going to hit the Hot Burns after I've got a good question about what you've been doing for the last six months, Diego, because I think people want to know that. So, do the Hot Burns.

This is five, one-word answers, yes or no, thinking fast, thinking slow. You have 30 seconds. Don't think about it. They're easy. You got a clock, Jeremy? Skateboarding or surfing? Both.

Salana in one word. It's Cam. What's your favorite meme coin? None. Decentralization, security or scalability. Scalability. Jazz or classical? Jazz.

And again, we need more questions. Well doing, thank you, Diego. Although you can't have skating and surfing. You have to choose. Quick, three seconds. Two. You never got to make me to make that choice, sir. I'm either I'm both, not an either or kind of guy.

It's just abundancy after abundance after abundancy. you could frame that question. If you were stuck on a desert island and you had to choose one, oh, I wouldn't do it. Yeah. Oh. So for the last year,

I believe you've been working with brands at that famous intersection of AI and blockchain. And my first question is, in the last six months, having been exposed to all these brands and doing all these cool things, what have you changed your mind about regarding AI in the past six months that you didn't think you would change your

mind about. I want to change my mind. I would say that I changed my mind because it got exposed to more facts. So my initial hypothesis with AI when I first got in touch with it and I started playing around was this is exciting and I think it's centralized, but it might not be a big deal. And the more I start playing with it and the more I start going deeper into the rabbit holes of decentralized AI, the more I realize the size of the beast, right? Simple example, look at Gemini. When we start seeing all that woke content coming out of it, you go and prompt, you know,

we create an image of a Viking, and then they would have like, you know, an African-looking Viking or an Asian-looking Viking, and people are just like, what the fuck you guys doing, right? And then DeepSik lately came out and everybody was playing around, everybody's so excited, almost crashed the stock market, crypto went down,

because it's going to replace chat GPT, and NVD's dad and all that drama that, you know, happens in the macroeconomy nowadays and everything that happens. And as soon as you went on and started like questioning about the Chinese government or some cultural movements that have happened within China, it would just go after, go right. Oh, let's talk about chess. No, I wouldn't really know what is your opinion about the current politics in China. Do you want me to solve mathematical problems for you? The thing, which is ringing huge alarm bells inside of me right now, that has actually... accelerated the way I've changed my mind more and more is that whoever controls the AI

controls the truth. Whoever controls AI controls the truth. And we are going more and more towards a world where AI is going to be extremely centralized. He's in the hands of Microsoft, is in the hands of Google. It's in the hands of the big tech players that we all know. And there is a very big risk on those models that are being trained, be trained in a bias. manner that is going to shape the future of knowledge, the future of truth, where our kids are going to learn from? And they're going to be learning from a biased source, which it's going to be increasingly more difficult to differentiate what is true and what is not. That has been something that I changed my mind a lot when I first seen. I thought it wasn't a big deal. And the more I learn

and the more I go deeper, the more I realize the size of the trouble. Sounds like an advert for our book club, Jeremy. I think exactly like what we've been talking about. Well, even a call back to conversations we've had with Reed Hoff. Was it Reed? What's his last name? Reed Hoffman. So philosopher, AI ethicist, but we talked to him a really long time ago.

And you have these things that are out there, these AI, these models, right? I always thought like a great way to do this with blockchain. So you can't change it. You can't change it at all. Whenever an AI model is built, whenever an AI is built, you actually have to, to basically point whatever you're pointing to the data sets and say, hey, this is trained by this data set, this data set, locked in stamped in blockchain so you can always see it, can't be amended. And the people can actually go critically think for themselves and look in the

dataset. Yes, cumbersome. Yes, the AIs won't develop as fast. But that could be a really interesting way to handle the whole whoever has it, has the truth or some transparency. if it's a public blockchain. If it's a public blockchain. Yeah, there is a lot going on already within that side of the industry. It's centralized AI. It's being around already and it's very early infancy and who knows

whether it's going to scale, where it's going to work or not. But there is, if you keep the same fundamentals of Bitcoin when it comes to a tech standard, like the peer-to-peer element of that, the nodes, the stability of the network, of course, the speed is one of the biggest troubles you're going to be looking into here when it comes to scalability for sure.

But an immutability, which you already touched upon, the fundamentals are similar there. You can do peer-to-peer-l-lm training where if 300 people thumb up and say that that information is true, then it goes forward. If it doesn't, then it's sort of like, almost like mining, right? If you were able to solve that equation, then it goes forward. If not, it doesn't. There is a way to obviously tap into that.

The element of being decentralized, which means, you know, nobody can take it down. which of course is the beauty of Bitcoin itself because nobody can shut it down. And if someone would be able to, they would have done already because it's worth a lot of money right now to do it and nobody has done. And also there is this element of the transparency of seeing where the information is coming from. Who is interested to be, that information is being transmitted forward or it's seen as true, right? So you're able to sort of like to track back to that. So I'm excited about it. I definitely think that there is a lot of elements in it that are that makes sense.

But my my concern within our industry is that a lot of things that make sense don't fly. It's just the pump and dump and it's just the memes and it's just the bullshit that goes and get lags

and go forward. So, you know, like I'm, I'm not sure how far is going to go, but I'm really, really fascinated by learning as much as I can about it because I think it's a big deal.

Yeah, it's super interesting that also the scary part to me is, I wish I like to find that thread that you can kind of pull on and tug on. And the biggest thread that's going to have the biggest impact, and it's so simple. Humans love shortcuts, easy buttons, right? They love when something lands on their plate, including me, all of us. We're in this group.

Something lands on your plate. Yeah, what's the quickest way I can get it off my plate? And we don't hold space to critically think. That's the biggest danger because people start relying on these models. Oh, it's Google. I put all my stuff on Google Drive. I'm good. My email's with them. I'd search them every day and not pick on Google. There's plenty of others, right? But how do we manage that as a society? That's the hard, that's the big

thing for me. Well, we need catalysts, right? We need global wide catalysts that display that certain systems are broken. I think we are coming, everything that's happening in the world right now, not to get political, is exactly that. It's a reaction to what has happened within the last eight years. And then a lot of people are just like, oh, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a like we need to figure out something out of this. I don't think this direction is the direction should be going. Maybe we need to go that direction. Those catalysts are needed.

That's how humans are. If you're not getting at the edge of extinction, you're not really bother about it. But once you get close to it, then you're like, oh, okay, we need to figure out something else that we keep existing, right? And I think we're going to need to get to that point with AI too, to be able to find what the line on the sand is.

You're going to cross it. Disruptors and curious minds. something to keep in mind, too, the broken system. We talk about broken systems. We talk about calcified systems, just systems that have been in place for so long. Yeah, we don't know why, but the systems don't appear broken to the people running the systems. So that's the catalyst that you mentioned Diego and I love. Guess what it's time for?

Let's get into the news. God, it's graphics. I think it worked. I'm thinking on paper news. We have one topic that has been spinning around this week that everyone I'm sure has heard about that's adjacent to blockchain, that's adjacent to crypto. So the biggest hack in crypto history happened. 1.4 billion by bit, right? Biggest heist ever.

I'm pointing to a certain group, a specific group. What does that mean for people kind of tiptoeing in? And what is the impact of that in your mind? I mean, I know there's financial impact, but what is that the impact to this to growing this piece of the industry? Yeah, I mean, people said that King John Woon wanted to have some EF OTC at $0. dollar and that's why that happened. So.

His wish. Hot take. I mean, it's just, this year has just been so difficult. Trump coin came out. And then, you know, a bunch of other catalysts, just being so, so difficult. And I say, you know, a lot of people like, I'm not, I'm not a fan of any musician or artists or anything. But a lot of people say that being Web3 is like being a Coney West sand or, or, you

You know, a EA fan. It's just so hard. Every week there is something that happens. And he's just like, oh, here we go again, right? And this is another one. And of course, it's part of the industry. But it just makes it very difficult to be taken serious. It just makes it very difficult to build trust.

The fundamental thing that sits at horror of finance is trust. Nobody wants money. That's why you trust in the bank and you leave your money. of that and God knows with the do of it, but, you know, it's being safe since the 1700s, so it's going to be fine. And we're going to just through that process to it, you know? So I think that the biggest point,

apart from, of course, the financial damage that it does for people that had money within the exchange is the brand, is the image, is the perception damage that it caused. And that was a cold wallet hack, too, wasn't it? Yeah, well, they tricked, like,

the transaction between the multi-sigs, they were tricked into believing there was something else. So the transaction was programmed elsewhere, but on their multisigs, they believed that it was like oney. As far as I understood, it was a safe issue on the UI

where they tricked the UI to show you something different, but behind it, what you're signing is not what you're signing. Yeah. I don't know. Do you think, I'm not like savvy enough to understand any of it. I just saw headlines. Here's a question for you both,

since we were on the intersection of AI and blockchain. I wonder how much, AI played in that particular hack and how in the very near future people's ability to use AI to steal to corrupt Web 3 as a whole what kind of impact it might have it'll make me trigger the dark and nefarious music again Mark

we've got Nexus tomorrow Jeremy so we might think what goals get get into it because I think it's a valid question that I mean AI is making coding available to everybody and blockchain is coding essentially that the base Well I mean, out of speculation, I think that it's going to create good and bad things as always does.

And the bad things is, of course, is going to empower scammers to scam better and faster as it empowers creators, as it empowers writers, as it empowers designers, artists, to do stuff faster and better. It's going to do the same on the other side. Yeah, two pass.

Cheers the dark or the light. Well, let's, all right, let's get to our carryover. question. We had a great guest on last week that described quantum computing so succinctly. And we look forward to having Coleman back on from IonQ. But let me give you his question for you. And then at the end of your answer, if you could give a question for our next guest, and we'll tell you who that's going to be we're very excited about. So your question, where do our current approaches break? Can we just keep scaling forever? Or are we going to have to do something different at some points?

I think that where AI hits a bottleneck is data integrity, right? So we've been talking about it, like how much can you trust in that data and how good that data actually is. Right. Who is behind it and is it biased? It's not bias. And then computation limit, right? We've seen NVD stock exploding because everybody's batting that is going to need a ton of chips.

Therefore, you know, computation limits is going to be a big bottom act. And then on the blockchain side, it's what we already seeing anyway. One is speed. It's always about speed. How much transactions per second can you actually achieve? Cost. You know, everybody has this race to the bottom and I was joking around Solana before. It's just because how sustainable is something that is close to free and how decentralized can that be. Right? So the cost is going to be an element. And in blockchain, specifically, scalability itself is a problem. Back on a good old days of NFTs, you would be paying $1,500 for gas so you could get a transaction through a chain. How are we going to be able to scale that as both technologies marry and people are prompting every second across the globe, millions and meters of people doing it, right? And I think that, you know, we cannot just scale forever. At some point, we're going to need new architecture.

We're going to need evolution on those architectures. We're going to need more modular chains that interact with each other. We're going to need zero knowledge proof base that will give people, you know, the privacy and ensure privacy behind the scenes as well, which I think is extremely important. within every own chain activity. And also we're going to need less bias, the AI models,

but also that can sustain and process more data. So I think that one thing comes hand on hand. And as always, as long as there's money behind it, it's going to keep evolving. Sure is. Good stuff. So our next guest, you'll like this, Diego. Our next guest is Ajay Patel,

head of product at World Coin ID. So a question for Ajay. What would you ask him? You might have heard already a lot of what I have to say throughout the show the way I think about something. So the thing I'll be the most excited to know is that I really see this concept of UBI, universal basic income coming out of like different versions, right? It became, do you know that meme that the guy has a sticker on his hand and there is like

a tube that is leaking water and he's just like putting this sticker on it? It's a very famous meme, which essentially is like a quick fix for it, right? And UBI has been posed as the quick fix for AI going at scale, right? AI is going to replace everybody. So solution for that, boom, is universal basic income. So if UBI will become the norm and then a biometric identity is what's going to be differentiating whether you are a machine or a person, what are the risks that come with it?

Because it's going to be a centralized control where governments and corporations could impose conditions for people to be qualified to be able to get that UBI, to get that money from it, right? And how does World Coin ensure that participation becomes voluntary and doesn't become a tool for excluding or coercing people out of the system? So I'm going very far with that. But I'm like Mr. You might have just put together a whole episode outline right there. That is a super intriguing question. And I can't wait to hear what, what Ajay says about it. I definitely want to tell you, Jeremy, that for our show with WorldCoin ID next week, you actually have to go find an orb and have your eyeball scanned.

I'll go see where one is. I'll go see where one is. No, I think there's one near you. All right. All right. As long as I don't end up like Tom Cruise's character and minority report, get my eyeballs replaced and all that stuff. All right, well, before we dive too deep into the darker side of things,

Diego Borgo, thank you so much for joining us today. I think we had a fantastic discussion on where Web3 came from, maybe some things that we could do as participants in the industry to help communicate the next version of it that is helpful, that is accessible, that is doing things that will make transactions, better, experiences better. Thank you so much for joining us today. Mark will hit everyone with links. Come see us again and thanks for joining it.

Thanks for having me, guys. I appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. All right. Backstage, just me and Mr. Fields. stage VIP access all areas just if you're still here thinking on paper not if you're still here they're still here they're still here you're still here for the good ones thinking on paper to xyz to learn more about our guest next week's world coin you'll also find information on the guests after that we've got david bianke hollywood actor film 3 web 3 we have the mighty famous kevin kelly coming on so we've got some great guests thinking on paper to xyz you can catch up on all the shows you've missed all the shows you've missed all the shows you've that are coming up and join the book club and can read books with us.

So Web 3, Marketing, AI, brands. What are you thinking? First thoughts, Jeremy. The strategy framework is really interesting to me. The tangible steps to execute the strategy, I'd be curious to learn a little bit more about, and I know a lot of our listeners leading brand initiatives,

leading technology initiatives for these big companies. So maybe we do a follow-up workshop where we say, you know, hey, brand, X, or put it out. to everybody and say, hey, look, you can get a free workshop to figure out how to do all of this stuff or if it makes sense. We bring Diego or someone in to lead that one hour workshop and the idea of not staying in strategy land, but to give them some tangible takeaways. I don't know. I started thinking about that as we were digging in. Yeah, what did you, what did you come away with?

I liked his answer on what he'd changed his mind about, about AI and the impact and the importance. I think he called it a beast at one time and that's a very astute analogy and I think we can extrapolate out if he's thinking like that and he's working with all these Fortune 500 brands that he like Shell, Adidas, Prada, Mastercard

VW Porsche, some of the brands he's working with or has worked with. That thought is percolating very quickly around the world of business. It was a great question Mark and I think it's super important. You know, reference back to our Paki McCormack review of his

his paper, more human wins, I think the big thing to think about is, like, it's changing your mind is a good thing. Adapting your thinking space is a good thing. And to be, even if you're an expert in a field, things change and things moving more so than, more so now than ever, this is going to be an ever, almost like a, I don't know, a quarterly evolution of our place and our position in this technology as we move forward as individual. So I thought that was a really cool question. Yeah. Well, I thank you. I want to ask Kevin Kelly that question because I think that I can't like to ask him that question in two parts. In the last six months, what's he changed his mind about about AI? You know, 20 years ago, 25 years ago when he was just starting out at Wired. He's probably

got some impactful, powerful ideas there. But how can you not change your mind about AI at the moment? If you've got your eyes open, if you've got your ears open, if you're listening to the whispers of the universe, there's sure. It has to be. Here's why people don't. change their mind because remember what we talked about, humans love shortcuts, right? And when we find a trusted source for our information, that information becomes our information. If you say something counter to information that I pulled into that is now stamped with Jeremy's information, it becomes an ego thing. I defend it. No matter what, I'm not open to listen to you. I'm trying to win the battle. And that's literally half the challenge of the world today, just all encompassing,

is if we could do better about that. So it's not as easy to change your mind. We'll have to be curious. People will have to be open to new ideas and recognize when shortcuts, like Shane Parrish, our book club, thinking clearly we outline all of this stuff. I think we would all be better off.

So going back to what Jago was saying about that, do you think that plays a part in this broken webstream marketing in culture that's afflicting the industry, that people are just there. By changing how you approach brand building and culture building in blockchain, you have to change your view of the world and your view of how things work. And that's very hard, like you say, for people to do. If I were running in a large company, large global brand,

you know, I would challenge my internal leadership of different groups like technology, like marketing, like product. And to have them build a working group that meets to discuss, the impact of things like blockchain, AI, you know, immersive experience, spatial computing, and then use that to think big and look silly and push ideas around and try to figure out what this stuff means to them, not just grabbing what someone else is doing. So that's where, that's where my head went on that. So it's a nice sound bite from Diego.

I liked his, I, is Web3 not learning really from the information that's available to it, that it has to shift this marketing viewpoint. And he said that because blockchain was a technology created and built by technologists for technologists, by technology for technology. And I don't think much has changed. It's in the 10, 20 years since it was first. So it was the internet. Internet was the same thing?

Well, that was my question to you. It was the Internet. But you're a bit older than me. So you probably remember. Oh, easy. Easy. You remember, like, if you probably remember the ship from Net, the shift from Netscape to a useful entertaining internet, it didn't take as long as blockchain is taking now? Did it?

Or like, what were those time spans like? Well, I think the internet provided unique access to things that you weren't able to access before. So there are a couple of moments that I recall. I think it was in college and I was sitting at my big, clunky computer at my apartment. and I had the ability to send a message to somebody near instantaneous and get a near instantaneous response. And, you know, I think texting was still early in that as well. But that was really interesting. And then also, you know, as I moved forward when my jobs I had allowed me to work from wherever,

that was a big moment where I was like, well, I don't have to sit at my desk in the office. I can now be somewhere else. You know, just accessing email and ordering systems and that sort of thing. thing. So it was a series of inflection points, probably over, you know, five to 10 years. But yeah, I think it was, but the internet didn't come out with, with, you know, TCPIP hats and, you know, OSI model hats and, and, you know, hey, Mark, I'm going to onboard you to the internet, stand in this line, go through this stuff because you're dumb and you don't know what you're talking about. We're going to onboard you because we know better than you. That, that is a, that's a

different. We are, we're rabbit-hulling, man. We need to wrap this up. Note to future, note to future Jeremy as well. So again, to Kevin Kelly, we should have this conversation. Can we get some virtual backgrounds in here? So like we start the conversation in 1990. Like in his living room or in your living room

and we have the big old, funky, massive, dorky computers. And as we progress through the show, backgrounds update in real time to match the time that we're in. And then we end the show in the, in the far future on the rings of Saturn. That's a grand idea, but as you see, I can't even push the right buttons

for the news segments. So sponsors out there, drop us a line at Hello at Thinking on Paper, right? Send us a note, and that way you can sponsor Mark's grand visions of the production of the show. Thanks for listening.

Thinking on Paper, XI, Z for all the information. Jeremy, this is Mark. Be curious. Stay disruptive. Thinking on paper. No, for real. Really keep thinking on paper. You'll need it. Do it down a pen, paper. Put them together, magic happens.

There you have it.