Want to learn about blockchain and NFTs the risk-free way? That is what Metacademy is all about. Today’s guest is Shelly Palmer and he has been helping educate the masses about the meaning and possibilities of Web3, the metaverse, AI and much more. In this conversation, he explains how the free educational platform he co-founded does what it does best. He also shares incredibly informed analyses on the emergence of advanced AI tools like ChatGPT and what it means for the future of the industry. Plus, Shelly and our hosts trade their thoughts on Amazon’s rumored NFTs. All of these and more in this episode of Edge of NFT!
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Shelly Palmer Of Metacademy, Where You Earn To Learn About Blockchain, Plus: Amazon’s Rumored NFTs, And More…
I'm Shelly Palmer of Metacademy, the platform where you can learn about all things NFT risk-free. I'm here at the Edge of NFT where you can educate yourself on what's cutting-edge now and beyond.
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NFT-curious readers, stay tuned for this episode and learn how our guest is helping to educate the masses about the meaning and capabilities of Web3, the metaverse, AI, and much more, why our guest thinks Amazon is like an alien with acid for blood that can take on any new challenge and come out ahead, and why the only grudge you want to keep is against grudges themselves. All this and more on this episode.
Finally, NFT LA 2022 was a blast. It was also a blast-off in a giant plume of bright burning rocket fuel. Web3, NFTs, blockchain, decentralization, and a suite of immersive new tech developments have exploded onto the canvas of life. Outer Edge is the theme of 2023's event dedicated to those of you building with us at the outer edges, making the future happen.
The community-centric gathering returns to Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2023 to uplift creators and technologists through interactive experiences, a wide variety of discussions, presentations, and entertaining surprises that transport participants to the outer edge of what's possible when we co-create a new paradigm, embracing the decentralized web, artificial intelligence, extended reality, and more. To register to attend or learn how to co-create an experience on the Outer Edge, head over to OuterEdge.live. The event is being organized by the Edge of Company and us, the founders of the Edge of NFT. See you there.
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This episode features Shelly Palmer, the Cofounder of Metacademy, the world's first platform where you can earn while you learn about cryptocurrency and NFTs. Shelly is the Professor of Advanced Media in residence at Syracuse University SI Newhouse School of Public Communications, CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media, and marketing, and Cofounder of Metacademy, a free educational platform that teaches practical applications of blockchain, crypto, NFTs, Web3, and the metaverse. Shelly, welcome to the show.
Thank you. What a nice intro. I'm going to record that for my wife. Put that in the loop.
Shelly is a great guy. Give him a break.
That's some great subject matter. It's all stuff near and dear to our hearts. Shelly authored a couple of big books like Blockchain - Cryptocurrency, NFTs, & Smart Contracts: An Executive Guide to the World of Decentralized Finance and also Television Disrupted. Even though they're different subjects, there are a lot of commonalities and some of the underlying themes there, especially as it applies to the world that we're in or the current market, which is evolving so quickly. We would love to start there and get a sense of insights from those texts into our world and this market. Everything is moving so rapidly.
First of all, thanks for mentioning the books. Realistically, everybody is a content company. Everybody is a media company. All communication now fits into one big bucket. It doesn't matter if it's just you and your smartphone or you and a film crew. You have one job, and one job only. Oddly enough, it's the same job. Forty-five thousand years ago in a cave in Spain, someone took some red goo and put their handprint on a wall. The job of that media was to be seen. Whoever did that wanted someone else to see it. First, they wanted to enjoy it for themselves or they wouldn't have done it, and then they wanted other people to see it.
Realistically, everybody is a content company. Everybody is a media company. Click To Tweet
The technology they had at the time was red goo on their hand, and you had to go into the cave to see it. Now, anybody with a smartphone can do anything they want. It's available to every 1 of 4 billion people on Earth almost instantaneously and the other 2.5 to 3 billion that could potentially see it who are conscious enough and old enough and could get to it at a certain point. You go from, "I must go in the cave to see the technology displayed," to, "I can reach every person on Earth that's connected."
The change isn't what. It's how. Everybody forgets that first and foremost, you need to have something to say. You have to want people to understand what you're feeling and realize that in a way that they can feel and understand what you are feeling or understand. The idea of the right person, the right place, the right message, and the right time has never changed. All of my books are about that, first and foremost. The methodologies, the workflow, and the process you will use in the modern era or in what's coming over the horizon will change the way you think you should do it and help you do it in a more efficient and effective way. That's what the books are about.
We have to talk about ChatGPT if Shelly is on the show at some point. That's a good teaser right there.
We will get there.
It's a favorite subject, as you can imagine.
It's on our roadmap for the day. That's a well-crafted answer, Shelly, as the university professor that you are. It's delivered concisely.
I teach in the Master's program at the Newhouse School. I teach a course called Advanced Media Business. There's a Master's degree called Advanced Media Business there. They hired me to help teach it.
I like Nassim Nicholas Taleb's approach to professorship. He's a quarter-time or a halftime professor or something like that. He says that's all he wants. He wants a nice academic environment and all that but not all the logistical responsibilities and politics of the whole system.
I can't imagine politics at a university.
It's certainly there. Whether it's inside of the traditional academy or outside, education is important to you. I'm sure that's a big part of what's behind founding Metacademy. People can learn about how blockchain works and how to send crypto, mint NFTs, and lots more stuff. How did this come into being? Why do you feel it's such a powerful tool here for the future?
It's such an interesting story to me. In 2018, I've collected a bunch of essays. I write a newsletter every day. It's a very large mailing list. I'm lucky. We have been doing it since 1996 every single day. During the week, it's a rant and synopsis of the news stories that have my attention. On Saturdays, it's either a full day of AI. It's either AI Saturday or Web3 Saturday. It's a synopsis of those interesting stories. Saturdays are off, to tell you the truth. I grab all the things that were good for the week. On Sundays, I write a thought leadership piece. That's what I do on Saturday. I spend a couple of three hours writing 1,500 words or something like that about something that I care about.
By 2018, I had written a bunch of fairly good essays about blockchain, cryptocurrency, smart contracts, and pretty much the whole world of DeFi. I wasn't thinking much about it, but I had these essays. They were all on ShellyPalmer.com online. I had collected them. We were going to make an eBook, and then we got busy doing something else. At the end of 2019 and early 2020 or the year of crypto, everybody was crypto-crazy. NFTs exploded. We went back and said, "We should probably collect the writings and throw an eBook online so that people know that we know what this is."
We have been doing supply chain, fraud prevention, and all the things you do with tokenized content for our media company clients. NFTs were the same tech but a different animal. They had a lot of consumer hype around it. I thought I would put together the book. Thank you for mentioning Blockchain - Cryptocurrency, NFTs, & Smart Contracts: An Executive Guide to the World of Decentralized Finance. I was going to give it away for free. That was my plan. I collected it, made a little cover, and did the whole thing you're supposed to do. I thought, "Make an eBook on Amazon KDP. I'll put it in Kindle Publishing."
I'm up there and I'm uploading the thing. I do the cover and everything you're supposed to do. It starts asking for SEO. I'm like, "I teach SEO. I do it for a living." I spend an hour. I have all my tools and everything I know how to do to SEO this to death. I change the title slightly and put it up there. Amazon says, "What's the price?" I'm thinking, "Free." Amazon is not thinking, "Free." It's $2.99 or $7.99, "I'll put a number." I put a number, go to sleep, and don't think about it anymore. I woke up the next morning, and we sold 35,000 copies. The book was number one in three categories. I'm like, "What?" This was 100% about the title. Honest to God, if I was trying to do this, I would have failed miserably.
All I wanted to do was put a value on this. I figured, "You're getting a $7.99 book for free or a $2.99 eBook for free. It's good marketing to give away something that has value." The first moment I put it up, I needed to do the second edition because things had changed that week, and I needed to update them. Updating an eBook is no problem at all but updating a little paperback requires new pagination. They have to approve it. On Amazon, that is a week-long process of pain. I was like, "I'll do this second edition." We're in the 19th edition but it's still called the 2nd edition because we're having an argument with Amazon about the cover.
Why am I telling you this story? It occurred to me that all this content ought to live on in a learning management system, so I could keep it updated every single day and that when something changed overnight, it would take me 30 seconds to go into the CMS and change it. We could use it as a teaching tool for all of our executive clients. We do workshops and seminars for our Fortune 500 clients. We can work right off the screen. They don't have to have the book. The book doesn't have to be out of date. I can give them a blank notebook to take notes that they don't want to take notes on their PC. That's how Metacademy was born.
It's an easier way to keep stuff up to date. That's the whole purpose. We've got a bunch of courses. The NFT and crypto are up as are a bunch of others. We're about to put up Web3 and the metaverse. We've got another course of study that's a little more eclectic called Prompt Crafting, which is about properly crafting prompts for generative AI, whether it's AI or pre-trained transformers like ChatGPT where you're learning to coach it and give you the best possible most efficient outputs. That's what Metacademy is for so that we can teach the most current information all of the time.
That makes so much sense too. Every time the concept of the metaverse and what it's going to look like comes up, I'm always like, "It's going to look like what works for people. Usually, it's going to not look like what we already do." The answer to the metaverse is not a lecture hall in the metaverse. You can have a lecture hall in real life. In the metaverse, it's better to have people up close and not pretend like you're in this huge room with an echo in it or something.
We have a very different set of thoughts about the word metaverse, which is undefined in every way. Web3 is also undefined. If you ask anybody, they're going to tell you what they think the metaverse means. That's not good for anybody, to be fair. We define this every time we talk about it. The way we look at it is what I call the observable metaverse. The observable metaverse goes from augmented reality on one side. Augmented reality starts with a heads-up display in your car, or maybe holding your phone up and seeing something superimposed over the image that your phone camera is showing you.
Some data is being surfaced that augments your experience. That's one side. We move closer to extended or mixed reality where there may be haptic feedback. You may be in a retail environment. Maybe the end cap is changing. It doesn't need to be with goggles or glasses. Maybe it's a projector or a screen. The key part of this is that there are a bunch of different data sets. There's batch data in the CRM system at the client that has a single view of the customer.
There's the network topology of the wide area network. It understands where you are and what you're doing. There's the local area network that is very much attached to you and your device. There's whatever you're using for edge computing, whether that's goggles or your headset. All of these data sets have to be brought together in near real-time to surface the data that's going to build the experience that we're talking about. In our world, the observable metaverse starts at AR, goes to mixed reality and extended reality, which have similar definitions, and then ends up in virtual reality or virtual worlds.
When most people say metaverse, they mean virtual worlds. We have what we call the standard model of the metaverse, which is all the technologies in columns that you need to create everything we described from augmented through virtual reality. All of this is usually conflated rightly or wrongly because there's no accepted and agreed-upon definition. All of this is usually conflated with some weirded-out definition of Web3. There's no agreed-upon def, but the way we think about Web3 is a decentralized platform that will allow both users and creators to share in the value they create.
That's a pretty broad way to describe it, but the key there is decentralization. If you're saying to me that metaverse means Roblox, first of all, it's Web2. It's fully centralized. It's in a browser. There's nothing Web3 or metaverse about it. If that's your definition, then your definition is an online graphics game that's world-building where you're building virtual worlds. Virtual worlds don't need to be decentralized to be played. It's not what you find a point in it. We try to be very precise when we define these things because we're building for clients with real money for real outcomes.
You say, "I need a decentralized environment to do what." Most brands are central authorities. Where does decentralization come in? You would like the secondary market for NFTs to be capable of being traded in a trustless environment. I would like that. If you are going to put together a DAO or some kind of ownership model, you might need to be able to trade in a decentralized way. If there's decentralized governance, there are a bunch of good reasons to think about the decentralization of your business model, but most of our clients are central authorities. They're big brands.
What makes them essential authorities is that you trust them. It's not a trustless environment. It's exactly the opposite. If you're a big sports league or if you're Top Shot, the NBA is the central authority in the United States about basketball. The NHL is hockey. The NFL is football. There's no bigger central authority in football than the NFL. What is decentralized now exactly that you want to do? Come and bring me your use case and the business outcome you're trying to achieve.
That's why I feel like everyone is using these terms all over the place and pretending they know what they're talking about. Every time I say to somebody, "What do you mean? What are you trying to achieve?" I get a lot of word salad back because these are definitions that you need to state when you start the convo. For us, the metaverse as we look at it is a data play. Turning those data sets into action and surfacing these experiences is the future.
How you do it is way more complicated than how I said it. From a Web3 perspective, the key there in Web3 versus Web2 is decentralization. If you don't have the decentralization schema that you need, then you might as well do it with a well-structured database and a secure password in Web2. It will be faster, cheaper, and more bulletproof by definition. I sit in a different place than most of our friends that are deeply into the word salad and less into the business outcomes, to be fair.
That's very useful too. Part of the reason I brought up the concept, in general, was around the function. Functionality is what's most important in all of these things. People sometimes miss it. My point, too, is when you talked about how you're releasing this book and turning it into online courseware, I've seen this. Look at Malcolm Gladwell. He puts out an audiobook. It's got recorded quotes from the people instead of him reading the quotes. Why not do that?
It's wonderful.
Why not add music and all these things? That's what you're doing. Think outside of the box and create what you can that's most functional for what the users want out of it. It's beautiful and elegant.
I'm a big fan of Metacademy personally. I've recommended it to a number of folks. Oftentimes, I've been asked the question of speaking and various things, "Where do people go to learn?" There's a lot to unpack here. Metacademy is a great learning environment that you've created. I appreciate what you're doing there. There's another set of definitions we should unpack while we have the professor on our show. Why not? That's about synthetic media, which is a topic that you've spoken about quite a lot. I would love to delve into what's different or similar about it to generative synthetic media.
We are very familiar with synthetic media. Everyone is an expert in it, to be fair. Whether you know you're an expert in it or not, everybody is from the first time you saw anybody in a science fiction movie or TV show and went, "That looks fake." As soon as you said, "That looks fake," what you were doing is you were criticizing the people who created the synthetic media. In 1977 in Episode IV - A New Hope in the opening scene, the Star Destroyer is coming over your head. You are out of your mind when you see it in the theater for the first time. You don't even know what to do.
I was sitting in the third row because we got there late. We might have been sitting in the second row. I had never seen anything like it. Lucas filmed it with motion control. That media can't exist outside of that experience. You needed to be watching it on a screen. There are no Star Destroyers, and they don't fly over your head normally. We're all experts in synthetic media. The way you create something synthetically now is very well understood.
You will use every tool you can get your hands on. You will use digital audio workstations and digital video workstations. You will use AI-assisted or generative adversarial network tools to build whatever it is you're building. You will animate. You will use computers and everything you can to build these experiences for people to see. The original movie Avatar or the first one is a synthetic world. It's gorgeous. It's unbelievable how much time and energy they spent making this thing.
We know what it looks like when it's great, but it also requires lots of people. Do you see the credit list of the original Avatar? It goes on for 30 minutes. It's almost as long as the movie. You've got this credit list of model makers, puppeteers, and animators on and on. We're all experts. We're in a new place now. Within more than a year or less than three years, we're going to see the generative tools that are based on the pre-trained transformer models or the large language models that Google and OpenAI have.
We're going to see people start to do generative synthetic media. This is going to change pretty much everything. You open up ChatGPT, start to coach it and tell it what you want. The first thing you say to ChatGPT is, "You are an expert tech blogger. Your audience is an audience of senior executives at Fortune 500 companies who are interested in tech but do not know all the tech nomenclature they should. In simple terms but with respect to their senior positions, please write an outline for a blog post about the following." You describe the blog post.
You're going to get something pretty good back. You coach this for another couple of minutes, giving it a little, "Attaboy," when it gets it right, and, "Bad computer, stick your nose in it," when you get it wrong. You're going to get some good output. You need the subject matter expertise at the moment to do your fact-checking because when a large language model is right, it's very right. When it's wrong, it's very wrong. It speaks authoritatively to you in human speech and human ways. You're going to sit there. It's so authoritative because that must be true. You have to google that stuff if you don't know what it is because you can write a blog post that's complete nonsense out of ChatGPT. I'm setting this up.
Don't ask ChatGPT to write history because it will rewrite history.
The way we look at ChatGPT and all the transformer models is you've got accuracy on one side and fluency on the other. That's the one axis. You've got high stakes and low stakes. If I'm writing a poem for my daughter's birthday, accuracy isn't important but fluency is. It needs to be flowery and have good language. It's low stakes. If it doesn't get it right or wrong, I'll fix it. If you're writing a recommendation letter, it's pretty low stakes. You're going to edit it right there. You would like it to be fluent.
If you're asking it to make a decision that you're going to base something on if should you buy something or make a business investment, you need the accuracy to be high. The stakes are getting high. You need to find a sweet spot at the moment inside these large language models and the applications that sit on top of them. You need to find a sweet spot where you are comfortable with the output. These models learn. Think about the three layers. You've got the infrastructure layer at the bottom where the GPUs and the TPUs are sitting.
All of the inference workloads will be done by whatever AI model is going to be put on top of it. Sitting above that are the foundational models or the models themselves, and sitting above that are the applications. You need all these things in order and in line for this to work for you. Once the models start to get good and once people start to build applications that are uniquely crafted for making videos, replacing faces, synthesizing voices, and replicating styles of music, you're down the list of things you would need in the media business to help you craft a message or create a piece of content.
We are this close to you being able to describe in words what you want and having it surfaced, "I need a fifteen-second video about blank. I want it to feature Morgan Freeman or someone who looks like him. Describe it in words." Once you get there, which is more than a year and less than three years away, you are seconds away from using another AI tool or the description in data that's more efficient. Rather than sending one message to the whole audience, you can target individuals with the media they're going to be most likely interested in.
We are so close to generative synthetic media in the history of media. We're under 60 months away from seeing it workable. It's going to start with text as we're seeing with ChatGPT, and then it's going to go to audio because it's easy. Music is incredibly algorithmic. After you get the music going, you're going to start getting some primitive videos and graphics. Ultimately, the whole thing is going to come together. You can see the sequence. There's so much of it out there. We know deeply the synthetic media story. It's just automation at this point.
This doesn't just apply to words. I moderated a panel in Miami with a company that's building infrastructure within virtual worlds using generative AI, where you could build the infrastructure based on the taste of the individuals whom you're building it for. It's so mind-blowing to think about this. I'm a little bit apprehensive to go down that rabbit hole because I don't know if I'll ever get back up.
Honestly, the things that are going to work well are things that are ordered and highly algorithmic. They're going to work the best and the most accurately. In music, if you want to do something in the reggae genre, the jazz genre, the swing genre, or hip-hop, there are rules that make these pieces. I take the same chord progression and make it sound like club date musicians are playing it at a wedding or bar mitzvah or make it sound like a metal band. It's the same chords.
It's the way you play, what you play, the orchestration, the instrumentation meter and rhythm, the way that this thing feels, and the timbral elements and the sonic landscape you choose. This is very rule-based. It's easy to do by computer because you learn the rules. If I'm writing a four-part barbershop, I had to learn the rules of four-part harmony to write this. The rules are well-understood by everybody who's ever been to music school and a lot of people who haven't. It's well-understood.
When you start talking about writing code and being able to build the infrastructure the way you were, remember that what makes a transformer interesting is that you can parallelize it very well. With the older AI models and neural networks, you could not parallel compute and gain many capabilities. With these, you can parallel processes and gain a lot of function.
The other important thing is the way that the transformers work. What made this thing crazy is that the order of words and instructions matter, "Jill is looking for trouble," is a different sentence than, "Trouble is looking for Jill." They're the same words in the sentence, but they have completely different meanings. The order of the words is what gives the meaning. The transformer models take these things in order, and that's the methodology that the pre-trained transformers used.
What's cool about this is it applies to all human endeavors that are language-esque. It applies to chemistry. Chemistry is a language. I was talking to some guys at IBM. They're working on a generative pre-trained transformer. It's a large model not for language. They're going to build it for the language of chemistry. They're getting into materials processing for one of their clients. I was talking to the chief data scientist on this thing. He was like, "Let me explain to you the language of chemistry." He starts going. I'm not a chemist, so he is speaking martian to me, but you could see where he was going with this.
It's rule-based. We understand it, and because we can understand it, we can describe it. If we can describe it to each other, we can describe it to a computer or an AI model. They're building the foundational models for chemistry. It's mind-blowing. That caught me off guard because I don't think about other things that humans communicate that aren't music, words, and pictures. That's my world. This guy's world is chemistry.
There are two things I want to share. One is right off the back of what you're saying. I heard somebody was mixing ChatGPT with WolframAlpha, which has mathematical languages. They did an incredible job of interpreting it. You could tell it to solve an equation in language, and it will do it. It's fascinating stuff. Here's what I want to share though before we go to the next question. I did have ChatGPT write a poem for your daughter's birthday. It's flowery with good language. I wanted to share that, "A blossom of grace, wisdom's bright ray, you've grown into a beauty come what may. On this special day, your birthday, my dear, may joy follow you always year after year." You can take that and pass it along.
I will. I don't know how long it would have taken you to write that on your own. I promise you that ChatGPT took under fifteen seconds to do it.
The first version had several more stanzas. I said, "Flowery with good language." It took it to the hilt there.
Honestly, there was a time before artificial light and after. The world changed. Once you had a commercial artificial light bulb and you could light up and stay up for twenty hours a day, the world was different. There was a time before the steam engine and after the steam engine. Before the steam engine, we could build what we could build. After the steam engine, we built the world around us. It amplified the value and the power of our muscles by thousands, if not millions of times. In AI, there are going to be before-pre-trained transformers and after-pre-trained transformers.
This is going to amplify the power of our minds by thousands or millions of times. I'm gaining about 15 to 25 minutes a day of extra time because of my use of Davinci or ChatGPT. We have been using it for a long time. At my pay rate and my advanced age, 15 to 20 minutes a day is real money. I appreciate the time back. I can see it becoming more valuable as we incorporate these tools into the daily workflow and process. It's not taking away my job. It's making me better at my job.
It's not going to steal anybody's gig. It's going to make everybody better at their job. If everybody was 15% better, can you imagine the explosion in productivity by 15%, 10%, or 5%? I don't think I get 5% better ordinarily in a given year. I try to get better at my job every day, but I don't know what my percentage improvement is. With this thing, I can see the time coming back, "I spend an X amount of time doing this, and now I spend this amount of time." It's pretty obvious.
It's a massive leap forward in a very short period. We know that it will continue to accelerate exponentially with each improvement. It's crazy that we have crossed that threshold here. There's also a mass awareness of it. The media's job is to be seen. It's here now. Everybody knows about it.
It's exactly what that is. People don't think exponentially. Everybody thinks that tomorrow is going to be like today because of most of our human experiences, "Tomorrow I'm going to get up, have breakfast, go to the gym, and walk the dog." Whatever you're going to do every day, you do it every day. The days don't seem very different, but in this case, tomorrow is nothing like today. The way I like to think about it is I imagine a lily pond. There's one lily pad in it. You are told that the lily pads themselves will double every day for 30 days. At the end of 30 days, the pond will be fully covered.
On what day is the pond 50% covered? Day 29. It takes 29 days to get the pond half done. Anytime you walk by that pond as a human being, you don't think anything is happening. One is a little number. Two is a little number. It's two lily pads. Four is a little number. Eight is a little number. Sixteen is a little number. Thirty-two is a big pond. You don't think about it, "Half the pond isn't even covered yet." The next morning you wake up, and it's completely done. We don't think that way, but that's what's happening here.
There are a bunch of different ways the acceleration of technology is impacting us. We have covered a big swath of it. One of the ones that we talk about a lot here on the show is fandom, whether it's sports, gaming, or other elements. It's a big part of the world of NFTs and how it has been applied so far to date, rewarding folks and making them part of those communities in a distinctive, transferable, and also transparent way. Where do you see the current state of fandom going here in the near future? How is that world impacted in your view?
We're at a very interesting inflection point. In America, the TV business is the football business. The NFL contract is signed until 2031. Between now and 2031, what we understand as broadcast television is unlikely to change very much. They have made a couple of deals for streaming. We know that they will continue to do what they're doing with ESPN, ABC, CBS, Fox, and NBC because those deals are for Sunday night football. Those deals are in place until 2031. We got some time. As we understand, television and fandom are unlikely to change very much.
While this is going on, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are coming of age. They are completely different human beings from their predecessors. I don't even want to say these are children that are umbilically tied to their devices. It's way more than that. Their brains work differently because their brains have been trained differently. They're not going to accept what their parents or their grandparents accept as entertainment. They're going to need a much deeper level of experience. It is going to have to come much faster. We see it. It's obvious to everybody.
What's not obvious is how traditional sports are going to evolve to meet the challenge. I'm not saying that NFL is going to be three-on-three blockees on somebody's screen somewhere, but something is going to change over time. Most of the sports business is so based on money. You've got a lot of new stadiums being built. If I have to take a guess, I look at SoFi Stadium as the model for the future. That stadium has 1,400 small wireless cells in it. You can get about 70,000 people into SoFi.
Everybody could be FaceTiming with grandma at the same time and get a good solid signal with good solid bandwidth. That's not true in most arenas and most stadiums, but it's true there. That's the model, "What experience am I empowered to bring? Are the players clickable? Can I wear a near-field communications chip? Can the arena know that I'm sitting in my seat if I'm wearing a jersey that has an NFT? I have five radios on my smartphone. Does the phone know where it is?"
"Does the stadium know where the phone is? Does it have privileges? Is there an NFT or some version of either a self-sovereign ID, a decentralized ID, or a non-transferable NFT? Do I have a Soulbound token? What is it that is identifying me to where I am and empowering me with data from either the league, the club, the venue, or the sponsors to surface some experience that will enhance my day so great that it has changed the way I think about going to the arena or the stadium tailgating?" This is what has to happen.
It's terrible that it's infrastructure-based, but unless you've got insane connectivity and data-processing capability, it can't change. You can't do what I described inside most arenas and most football stadiums. You don't have wireless connectivity. The tools are getting better. Apple is going to come out with xrOS, their Extended Reality Operating System. Their first augmented reality headset is supposed to come out sometime in 2023. That's the beginning. We've got a little ways to go, but a lot of how we're going to experience sports is data-driven because we want to know all the things we want to know about our players.
Some of you might have watched a football game in the playoffs that doesn't need to be mentioned where the officiating might have sucked, and there might be a team going to the Super Bowl that maybe shouldn't have gone for some penalties because the officiating sucked. A lot of the things that were officiated could have easily been interpreted by technical means. Keep those particular referees off the damn field. They were watching and weren't making the right calls. Anyone could see what was going on there. What's my fan experience going to be like if I'm enraged that way? How will I change that experience? What needs to cobble together to make everything better?
Even if there's some AI determination of fairness, you still need some type of referee, robot, or scapegoat that you can yell at.
I'm doing this tongue firmly in cheek.
The coaches are already using analytics to try to drive what plays they're calling.
It's with great feedback loops too.
I don't know, Shelly, if you're familiar with our friends at Fan Controlled Sports. We talked to them on Twitter Space. They're building a basketball court with LED-enabled floors. It's beyond the game of basketball where they have to go to a certain part of the court that lights up so they can make extra points and things like this. They're already developing these awesome things.
At the end of the day, all of this is trial and error. Tastes evolve. We have a new generation of fans that are coming of age. They have very different expectations than their older siblings, their parents, or their grandparents. We're going to see who wins. Sports are expensive to participate in. It's a big-money game across every professional sports league. When I think about the future of fandom, I know that two things will have to be true. One, we're going to need to collect an awful lot of data. The other is we're going to need a lot of infrastructure to deliver experiences that these youngsters are going to expect.
The reason I say, "Youngsters," is that the group that already likes sports the way it is, truthfully, is on its way out, not on its way in. It's a new group coming. This is a nice big group of people. They're going to have different expectations. The good news is everyone I know and every one of the leagues we work with, their innovation teams are doing all kinds of great stuff. I'm not at liberty to talk about it.
I don't know if it's going to work or not. That's for the new audiences to decide, but it's not for lack of trying. No one is sitting on their hands and thinking, "It's fine. We will do it as usual." It's not what's happening. Everyone is trying new stuff every day. It's the most exciting time. Our company is 40 years old. It's going to be 41 in May 2023. Honestly, 2023 is the most exciting year we have ever had. I said that in 2022.
One particular sport is bright for disruption. It's pure intuition. It's tennis. They unleashed the ability for players to get coached from the sidelines. They know that the game has to be exciting for people to watch it. That's interesting. I also want to delve into the DNA that gives folks like LeBron James the longevity they have to continue to be a top scorer and break records that haven't been broken in decades. There's something in that athletic performance arena that will continue to be a focal point as well.
There's one topic that I wanted to make sure we covered. We were chatting about what you're doing and what's top of mind for you and your clients. This came up, which is SSI or Self-Sovereign Identifiers and FIDO or Fast Identity Online. It's a little bit of a sequitur, but it's an important thing to cover. It's not something we have talked about on the show before. What role do these guys have in terms of the NFT industry?
First of all, as everybody knows, NFTs are smart contracts. For those of you who don't know, a smart contract is like a regular contract except when the terms and conditions are met, the contract executes automatically generally in cryptocurrency, but that's not necessarily mandated. It just happens to be how they're associated. Google is in the middle of a giant lawsuit both in Europe and here. Facebook is being sued. Everybody is being sued in the data business over this idea of data privacy.
The idea behind self-sovereign identifiers or decentralized identifiers is we are in a Web3 environment, meaning a platform of decentralized tools that allow both users and creators to share in the value they create. That's my definition. In that defined world, a self-sovereign ID or a decentralized ID would empower the user to choose what data is shared with wherever they were or the venue.
Imagine the following. I'm walking up to a bar. I'm in New York State. In New York State, the only requirement to walk into a bar is that you be over the age of 21 years old. They don't care if you're male or female. They don't care what race you are. They don't care about anything. You just need to be over 21 to walk into a bar in New York State. Now, the way it works is you walk up. There's a bouncer or somebody guarding the door. They say, "May I see your identification please?"
You take out whatever you have. It's generally a driver's license, which has your address, which they don't need, your name, which they don't need, your driver's license number, which they don't need, a picture, which they do need because they have no other way to verify that you and your license belong to one another, and your birthdate, which they need. They don't need to know your birthdate. They need to know that you're over 21. They're getting too much information but they need that to do the calculation.
If you meet the two standard tests, which are, "It's you because the picture is close. The birthdate is right," you get to pass. Otherwise, you don't. Imagine that you're biometrically identified by your phone and attached to your phone for this argument. There is either a DID or an SSI in your phone, which is a smart contract, or an NFT that's sitting on a blockchain that has a bunch of metadata that describes you, but you choose what anyone gets when they hit this thing.
You walk up to the bar. There's no bouncer. The door is locked with a big red glow around it, but as you walk up, it checks to see if your wallet contains the appropriate identification or meets the test. In this case, the only test is, "Are you over 21?" If the answer is yes, the door turns green, but it gets better than that because once you walk into the bar and you're there, you are now known to this, "Are you entitled to the VIP room? Are you entitled to a free drink? Are we going to seat you in a special area?"
Your wallet and your previous behaviors are stored publicly but not associated with you but with it, your ID. Your ID has been verified by an untrusted, unknown, or fully trustless third party because it needs to be. That is the definition of what a Web3 environment ought to be like. I can also surface augmented reality experiences, virtual reality experiences, or extended reality experiences in this bar for you in this venue because I have a sense of what this wallet wants, what it does, and what it is.
This SSI or DID sitting in this wallet has a tremendous amount of power both to keep you as anonymous as you want to be kept but also to give you the rights and privileges you deserve. It's a different way to think about how to do this if there were an open marketplace for this NFT and if it were transferrable. Maybe I have more than one. Maybe I've got a Soulbound token the way that Vitalik laid it out. That is the senior non-transferable NFT to my little NFTs or identifiers that are sitting below that I'm using. I have one for my college music experience.
There are many different schemas we have seen. The stuff we're working on is that level of practical use case, which gathers data as anonymously as the user wants and creates value for both the holder of the DID and SSI. It's both the users and the creators. The venue owner, the sponsor, and the holder of the ID get to share in the value created by the fact that the particular holder is in the venue.
It's a nice flip of the script. It empowers people to act in ways they would not able be able to act ordinarily. You can't do it with a straight ID card. It's like a loyalty program on steroids. It may not be the best use case ever, but it's the one that we see the most traction in the work that we're doing. It seems to be that all the crypto millionaires became crypto thousandaires. All the get-rich-quick people headed for the hills.
The people who are left are super serious, "What are the business outcomes that we can achieve using these tools? Is there a business case where we need to invest in?" The answer in most cases is there is. It spans a very wide gamut from fraud prevention and supply chain monitoring all the way over to user experience. What can I do to make people happier or enrich their experience in some way? That's the work we're doing. That's where it is.
That makes total sense when you say, "Is there a business use case?" All these things make so much sense, but what's standing in the way is people are used to the traditional ways of doing it. They will get confused if you say, "There's a phone," but once the businesses go ahead and implement the use cases, and it's there, then it becomes a no-brainer for people, "I have to walk up to the door. It's on my phone. No problem. I'm going to do it." Somebody has to implement that.
When Apple Pay, Samsung Pay, Google Pay, and the big wallets start to accept SSI or DID and allow you to put some kind of representation of your tokens in them and they're readable, that's when you're going to see this thing explode. Until that happens, it's hard because you've got to download an app. You have all the problems you have with a good old-fashioned app deployment. You need this to be part of a wallet that's used every day. People don't even use their Apple Wallets every day.
You see some people who are into Apple Pay, Google Pay, or Samsung Pay, but for the most part, people still reach for their credit cards. People aren't doing the whole phone thing with the NFC-tapping, not at any level that would make you go, "Sea change," but if this were to be implemented, a sea change could happen because there would be value created for the user. Now, it's convenience. Is it more convenient to tap your phone or hand them your credit card? That's a toss-up, but if you tap your phone and get all this interesting stuff to happen, maybe.
Like the pond analogy, it's going to happen overnight. I want to take it back to ChatGPT because there's this topic we haven't talked about yet, which is prompt crafting. We might have mentioned it breezing by. What could you say more about this concept of prompt crafting and how it's going to be built into working with your AI coworker these days and beyond?
We coined the term prompt crafting at The Palmer Group. I've also heard prompt engineering or prompt tuning. There are a lot of different ways people describe it. That's our way. What we have been working on, what we work on with our clients, and where we have spent a crazy amount of time is trying to get the most out of GPT-3 or GPT-3.5. Most people will interface with GPT-3 or GPT-3.5 using ChatGPT. Most people aren't going to go to the various models over at OpenAI, start to open up APIs and deal with it.
To get the most out of ChatGPT as of the recording of this episode, you could get on a waitlist and spend $20 a month to get privileged access to ChatGPT Plus. I'm not shilling for them, but it guarantees that you can get on when you want to get on and that you can use this thing at will. Anyone who has tried to use ChatGPT up to now knows that the free version either is online or isn't. You can get to it or you can't. It's not as reliable as you hope it would be. The paid version is as reliable as you hope it would be.
Crafting a prompt is to properly describe what you want to the model. It's a pre-trained transformer and it's a large language model. It understands English, but that doesn't mean you want to speak slang to it. That doesn't mean you want to use contractions everywhere and metaphors. It's not a person. It's read the internet up to 2021 at the moment. It knows what it knows.
The first thing you want to do always is to tell ChatGPT what it is. Give it a role, "What are you doing? You are a tech blogger. You are a data scientist. You are a secretary. You are an administrative assistant. You're something," so it knows. You must tell it what the audience is. It needs to know what it's supposed to do for the best outcomes. If you're looking for something long-form like a long blog post, you're going to ask it to make an outline first.
If you can find a paragraph yourself of what it is you are looking for, that goes deep. You might spend a few minutes thinking, "What do I want out of this?" You might not want to ask for the whole essay at once. Sometimes it's better to ask for an outline and then say in the next prompt based on the outline you've provided, "Can you expand point one with 200 words, including examples?" so that you are so explicit. You will look at that paragraph and decide, "Is that what I need? Do I need more?"
The beautiful thing about this is that it can bring you examples. You said it's not good at history. I disagree. If you ask it specifically about a thing in history, it will get it. If you ask it for a point of view, it may give you someone else's point of view. If you ask the wrong question to ChatGPT, it's going to start giving you nonsense from the internet, but if you said, "During the Roman Empire at the end, the coins, and the way Caesar did this," and if you give it what you want and in the context of rampant inflation and runaway inflation and give it real parameters, this thing is going to come back to you with something that looks like a college essay. Prompt crafting is this constant coaching.
The worst thing you can do with any of these tools, whether it's Midjourney for art, Stable Diffusion, or ChatGPT, is to write a sentence, expect it to give you an outcome, and then go, "This doesn't work," because that's you not understanding. This is a tool. Technology is a fancy word for a tool. We have been using tools since someone figured out how to use a rock to hunt with.
Someone figured out, "If I put a point on this stick, it's going to be better than a blunt stick." Someone figured out, "If it was a long stick with a point, it's going to be better than a short stick with a point." Those are tools. This is a tool. You need to constantly hone it and yourself. One good thing is if you have an account at Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, your model, the main ones, or ChatGPT, it starts to learn from you.
You can tell it what tone of voice you want to be in. You can tell the character in a snarky but not insulting way. Know what the word snarky means because it does. If you don't and you say it in a snarky but not insulting way, you can be snarky and not be insulting. If you think those words mean the same thing, you're not asking it enough. You have to press it.
It's subject matter expertise and practicing your prompts. At Metacademy, we're going to put up a free course in prompt crafting. There are so many wonderful YouTube videos and bad ones, too, but you will know the good ones because you see the outcome happen immediately. Type in prompt engineering, prompt tuning, or the word prompt in ChatGPT. There are tons of blogs out there. You're going to have to practice it.
I asked ChatGPT in a snarky but non-insulting way, "Please say that we've got to move to the next question," but it's still in the thread where I asked it to write a poem, so it said, "Folks, let's step lively. Move along. Time flies by quickly. Another question to prolong, not one to dilly-dally. We've got places to be. Let's leave this behind. Shall we? Next question."
That has awesome written all over it.
That's hilarious. What do we have up next? Are we on to the next segment?
That's a good place to end this segment. We could go on forever about this stuff because it's amazing. Let's shift gears and do something fun here. It's a segment that we call Edge Quick Hitters. I would be curious as to what ChatGPT would say to our Edge Quick Hitters. We might have to do an episode where we ask. In this case, we would love your answers, Shelly. This is a fun and quick way for us to get to know you a little bit better. We're looking for short, single-word, or few-word responses, but we may go a little bit deeper here or there if we find something of interest. Let's dive in. Question number one is this. What is the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
That's easy. The first thing I ever bought in my life was a soprano saxophone.
Question number two, what's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
I worked at my dad's music store. The first thing I ever sold was a Fender Stratocaster.
A fellow musician is Eathan.
I worked at Sam Ash for a while out of college.
It's the enemy.
Did you buy the saxophone from your dad's music store?
I didn't. I bought it from a wholesaler.
From the enemy.
It was a Yanagisawa soprano sax. I bought it with my money. It was my first big purchase. I probably bought some candy bars before that, but you asked me what I remember. I remember playing about 50 sopranos and grabbing that one.
Question three, what's the most recent thing you purchased?
A lock picking kit from the LockPickingLawyer's website. It's the Genesis set and a whole bunch of locks to go with it. This guy on TikTok blew my mind. I found him on YouTube. I'm learning to do this. It's fun.
It's pretty cool. There are competitions and stuff.
Believe me, you cannot be thinking about anything else when you're doing this. It's the most Zen thing in the world. You're doing it by feeling. It's like, "What's this?" It's fun. That's the most recent purchase.
That's the beginning of a novella or something.
There's something there. Question number four, what's the most recent thing you sold?
It's my house in Vermont.
It's getting colder over there.
It's a little chilly.
After many years, one of our children lives up there full-time now. We are not responsible for getting kids to the program in the morning. We're ski bums. We're now moochers. That's the most recent thing I sold.
It's time to sell Vermont, folks.
Question five, what's your most prized possession?
The thing that I prize above everything else is how much my family cares about me and how much I care about them.
A family enters the equation often on this question but is never put that way. I like how you put that. Question number six, if you could buy anything in the world, digital, physical, service, or experience that's currently for sale, what would it be? What do you have your eye on?
I have to say with brutal honesty that I've never asked myself that question in any manner, shape, or form. I wouldn't even know where to begin to answer that question. I have strived for things that I want that I can't afford. Over the course of my life, things that were important to me have become unimportant and things that were unimportant to me have become important, but none of them are material.
There's no material thing that would ever get my attention that way. If I need it for business, it's not a purchase. It's an investment. You said, "Buy." The way I'm thinking about it is, "What would I buy for myself other than a healthy time on Earth?" I can't imagine what I would buy. I don't think that way, but thanks for asking. I don't have an answer.
Whenever we ask that one, I think of this problem-solving strategy. I don't know if you are familiar with it. It's called What Would Croesus Do? Croesus was an extremely wealthy king that had unlimited funds. I like the problem-solving strategy. When you run into a problem, and you have limited funds, think to yourself. What if you had unlimited funds? What would you do? Often you come up with something creative that doesn't even necessarily require unlimited funds but you opened up your thinking.
Now that you've said that, I have an answer, but I never thought about it. If I had complete Elon Musk money, after much exploration, I would probably buy myself a nine-foot concert ground from Bösendorfer.
I'm a piano player.
I have a Yamaha 6'1" in the house here. It's a piano I love, but if I didn't care, it's like, "Let me get one of those." I would probably get one of those. That would be fun to have.
We will shift gears a little bit on this next one. If you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
Insatiable curiosity.
We have seen that throughout the conversation. We do appreciate it.
The most interesting people I've ever met, and I'm not one of them, are the people who ask why about everything, "What is this? How does this work?" They're fun to talk to.
You described my four-year-old son perfectly. He has lots of whys. Let's flip it on its head. Question eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
Grudge holding. That's easy.
That's a good one.
I like that one too.
Make that go away. I would love to be able to forgive and forget. That would be awesome if I could forget the people that have crossed the line.
It's not in that creepy Severance show way. It's there, but it means nothing to you. It's the past.
I'm not proud of grudge-holding in the classic definition of the word, but if I could get rid of it, that would be awesome. It's not healthy. It's not a good thing to do. I'm guilty of it constantly.
It's a hard one. This is a little easier. Question nine, what did you do before joining us on the show?
I was talking to a gentleman who I had never met before and who had a parallel life. We were introduced by the dean of the Newhouse School. He's got a friend in Ukraine who has come up with an interesting generative AI toolset. He wanted to know if I would help him evaluate it to see if it was worthy of investment or further study. We spent a half hour on Zoom. I hung up the end of that thing one minute before I joined you.
That's a solid ending here to these questions. The last piece of it is a simple one. What are you doing next?
What I am going to do next is I am going to pack up here. I'm going to take my entire family to Deer Valley. We are going to spend a little bit of time celebrating a very big birthday of mine. I'm going to come back and hit the ground running because there's way more to do than has ever been done. We have more stuff to do.
That's Deer Valley, Utah. I was over there for an event. I had to take a very small plane back to LA with Baron Davis. It's beautiful over in Deer Valley with the mountain landscape. You can smell the salt in the air. I'm sure you will have an amazing time.
We have been there many times. It's a wonderful place to go skiing. We're Vermont skiers. They have so much snow in Deer Valley. We're looking forward to a great ski vacation from our ski vacation. We're looking forward to skiing out West. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go and turn a certain age.
There we go. That's a big one. That wraps Edge Quick Hitters. We always appreciate these great insights and tidbits about you, Shelly. Thanks for sharing with us. I threw a couple of little facts about some of the things that we talked about that I thought were interesting and wanted to hit. We mentioned Star Destroyers in that initial scene of Star Wars. They range in crazy lengths. The smallest one is 1 mile long, and the largest one is 12 miles long in Star Wars lore. It's a pretty interesting thing that you don't recognize. There's no real sense of scale in the middle of space in these Star Wars movies but that was an interesting tidbit.
You get a sense of it when the Star Destroyer crashes into the Death Star. Did you get a sense of how big it's supposed to be based on the curvature of the Death Star? You say to yourself, "How big is that thing exactly?" The Death Star is supposed to be moon-sized.
That's a big one.
It's not that I'm too much of a Star Wars nerd.
We were talking about AI and how it's tapping into creativity and the science and the methodology behind it in chord progressions. I know the old axis of awesome chord progression. Is it the 1-5-6-5 move that all pop songs are based on?
Ed Sheeran says 3-6-2-5 is the progression that he can sing every song over. Theoretically, you probably could fake 90% of pop songs into 3-6-2-5. The most popular chord progression probably from the '50s and '60s is 1-4-5. In jazz, the most popular progression without question is 2-5-1, but 3-6-2-5 is what you're calling up. I've seen him do it. He will get up and say, "This chord regression is the most famous chord. I can sing any song." People call it any song, and he does it. It's funny. He tweaks the melody a little bit to make it happen, but the short answer is yes.
That's a good one for anybody that wants to fiddle around with it out there.
Those numbers are what scale tone the chord corresponds to in a diatonic scale in case you're wondering. If you're at the piano and you're trying to figure out what one is, pick any note. That's one. Count up four notes. That's the fourth chord. Count up to five notes. That's the fifth chord. It's not rocket science. It's music.
It's fun. That was one I threw in there because I thought there were a couple of fun topics.
I wish we could close out with a jam session. Are you going to be with us at Outer Edge LA, Shelly?
I'm you planning to be out there.
We have to play some music. We can get Dave from Orange Comet and jam out.
I'm in.
It will be awesome. Scott Page is on saxophone.
For those that weren't at the inaugural NFT LA, Shelly had quite the assignment. Jiho from Axie Infinity was our first keynote speaker. Shelly was moderating that conversation. There was a $650 million hack earlier that morning. He still showed up, you asked the question, and it created a moment in time that will never be forgotten.
That was a crazy morning. I was so impressed that Jeff was willing to come on stage that morning. First of all, I didn't expect him to show up at all. The fact that he got there and the look in his eyes is indescribable. It was 173,600 ETH and 25.5 million USDT gone.
What a gut punch.
We could talk long and hard about things they did wrong. All that was in one wallet. 5 of the 9 validator nodes on the Ronin sidechain are for $650 million. We could go deep technologically into why that was not smart, but the thing that was amazing was that he had the guts and the class to come and stand before everybody. Josh couldn't believe it. None of us could believe it, "Are you kidding me?" This guy shows up. That was quite a thing. I don't know if we're going to replicate that at Outer Edge but hopefully, nobody gets hacked like that.
I hope not.
Here's the Hot Topic, "Amazon may launch NFT Initiative soon. Amazon is rumored to be unveiling an NFT initiative as part of the retail giant's larger push into Web3, according to a report from Blockworks. The Hash panel discusses what it means to Web3 developments and if the reported Spring timeline will come to fruition." This reminds me of 2021 when we heard various announcements of players getting into blockchain and NFTs that we didn't quite expect. I'm surprised to hear some of these announcements because for all intents and purposes and to many folks, things look slow. Things aren't moving. What are your thoughts on this one, Josh?
I'll jump in first and say that Amazon is a very big company. Big companies move a little slower. There's a lot that has been cooking behind the scenes in the corporate world. I'm sure Shelly can shed some light on it. It takes a little longer to make the sausage when you're a bigger company. I'm excited. This is part of the ten-year plan when it comes to Web3 and NFTs.
I spoke to someone that was confident that we have not even experienced the beginning of what's possible with NFTs. Signals like these perk you up. This is one of the reasons why we evolved the theme of the event Outer Edge LA because you get all these converging things like what Amazon is doing in the cloud and whatnot converging with NFTs. We don't know yet what magic will happen as a result. Shelly, what are your thoughts?
We have not even experienced the beginning of what's possible with NFTs. Click To Tweet
Amazon is like Alien from the movie of the same name. It can live in any environment. It has acid for blood. It kills everything it sees. It is the most vicious beast ever created in the history of business. The reason it's the most vicious beast is that it learns. Amazon Marketplace was an abject failure when it started. They regrouped and learned from it. They now have Amazon Marketplace, which is the Amazon Marketplace we understand.
I am so excited about Amazon doing NFTs because no matter what the outcome is, if this thing fails miserably or if it's a smash success, one thing is guaranteed. Amazon is going to figure it out because they have committed to it, unlike our friends at Starbucks. Lamborghini is also not the greatest out-of-the-box performance, but when Amazon screws up, they lick their wounds, learn what they did wrong, come right back, and get it right.
If we're trying to understand NFTs at retail, there is no better company on this Earth to help us understand that as an industry than these guys. I am super stoked. I could be completely wrong about this. They could screw the pooch, put up nonsense, and then walk away from it, but that would not be historically what Amazon does. Historically, what Amazon does is try and learn.
If it fails, they fix it. Sometimes they go away for a minute, fix it for a long time, and then come out with something completely different but based on what they learned. The history of Amazon is built on these kinds of experiments and experiences that they have brought to the market. I couldn't be more excited about it. I was jumping around. I was like, "We're going to learn something. This is going to be great." I'm excited about it.
We're pumped to see where it goes. There are a whole bunch of backend applications and all the boring stuff, but it's the stuff that does move the needle around the supply chain and all that fun stuff that happens behind the scenes that I'm sure they're plugging into.
One of the biggest problems is that they have counterfeit merchandise available on Amazon. One of the best use cases is fraud prevention. NFTs can represent anything, including physical goods. There's a real opportunity for Amazon to do some amazing stuff in what we would all call the digital twinning of high-end merchandise. It's right on the top of the list.
Let's see. We don't need to speculate. It's going to come out soon enough. When the dot-com bubble burst, the internet didn't go away. We didn't stop doing websites. Wall Street decided they weren't going to make investments for a year. They got burned because of the bubble, but the progress and the internet did not stop. We're all on the same internet. We're on the same web since 2000.
You spend a little bit too much time in the sauna, cool down, and then get back in there. When you combine this announcement with the Avalanche-Shopify announcement, you start to piece together an interesting puzzle around the future of commerce and how it's intersecting with Web3. That has been discussed for a while, but the last few years were experiments. Now, the big guys are getting into the game.
I couldn't have said it better.
That's it. We're going to close this amazing conversation now. Before we do, Shelly, we have to make sure that we direct folks to the appropriate place to follow you and all the amazing things that you are doing. Where should we send them?
ShellyPalmer.com is the easiest place. Go there and sign up for the newsletter. You can get to Metacademy there. It's at Courses.ShellyPalmer.com. We would love to have you get our newsletter. I do a bunch of streaming events and other things that you can partake of. There's plenty of free stuff there. Go to the website or follow me on Twitter @ShellyPalmer or Instagram. I'm easy to find.
I'll check it out.
There are a couple of more things. Number one, I put on this new jumper because I noticed it was the inspiration for your Metacademy branding and also our NFT LA branding. I got it. I'll be wearing it in NFT LA.
I love it.
This is the last thing. I asked ChatGPT to write a poem for your birthday. It's your bio. Here we go, "A voice in technology, a leader once so wise, Shelly Palmer, a man who truly realizes the power of words and ideas, his pen, his might. Wishing you a birthday filled with joy today and every night."
I love it. God bless. First of all, thank you for even thinking to do that. Thanks to ChatGPT and GPT-3, the underlying technology for making my birthday so special.
That's beautiful stuff. We have reached the outer limit at the show. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this starship, so invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey all so much better. How? Go to Spotify or iTunes, rate us, and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again, Shelly, for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Metacademy
- OuterEdge.live
- The Palmer Group
- Blockchain - Cryptocurrency, NFTs, & Smart Contracts: An Executive Guide to the World of Decentralized Finance
- Television Disrupted
- ChatGPT
- ShellyPalmer.com
- OpenAI
- WolframAlpha
- Fan Controlled Sports
- ChatGPT Plus
- Midjourney
- Stable Diffusion
- Orange Comet - Previous episode
- Axie Infinity
- Amazon may launch NFT Initiative soon - Article
- Courses.ShellyPalmer.com
- @ShellyPalmer - Twitter
- Instagram - Shelly Palmer
- Spotify - Edge of NFT
- iTunes - Edge of NFT
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