In this episode of Digital Marketing Masters, host Matt Rouse welcomes Marv Paul, a technology enthusiast and host of the podcast "Is This the New Internet?". The discussion delves into the concept of a new Internet, exploring how blockchain technology could revolutionize the way we interact online. Marv shares his insights on the evolution of the Internet from a stationary experience to a mobile one, and the implications of privacy and personal data in this digital age. The conversation touches on the potential for blockchain to enable a more private, user-controlled Internet, where individuals can manage their own data and privacy.
Matt and Marv also discuss the challenges and opportunities of adopting blockchain technology, including the need for user-friendly interfaces and the importance of community in the crypto space. They explore the idea of decentralization, where users can have more control over their digital identities and interactions. The episode concludes with thoughts on the future of the Internet, emphasizing the potential for individuals to build and shape their own online experiences using emerging technologies. Marv encourages listeners to embrace these tools and consider how they can contribute to the evolving digital landscape.
Marv Paul
Hook Digital Marketing
Hook DM Canada
SMB Autopilot
MatthewRouse.com
https://serve.podhome.fm/episodepage/digital-marketing-masters/267
https://serve.podhome.fm/digital-marketing-masters
(00:22) Introduction to the New Internet
(01:19) The Evolution of Internet Connectivity
(03:18) Building a Better Internet
(07:24) The Importance of In-Person Connections
(16:20) Blockchain and Personal Data Control
(23:41) Challenges of Blockchain Adoption
(34:07) Community and the Future of Web3
(46:44) The Role of AI and Blockchain in the New Internet
[00:00:10]
AI Narrator #1:
Today on digital. Marketing masters. Mart is on a mission to build the next Internet, working on the blockchain to move forward the tech. Let's talk tech. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Raus. And today, I've got Marv Paul. How you doing, Marv? Thanks for having me, Matt. It's amazing to be here. So Marv and I met at Podcamp in Toronto when I was out speaking out there about AI. Marv and I had had a couple pretty lengthy conversations about technology and what's coming, and he also has a podcast called Is This the New Internet?
I think what we wanna talk about today is what is this idea of of a new Internet and
[00:01:18] Matt Rouse:
is there a new Internet? That is the question, isn't it? Is there a new Internet?
[00:01:23] AI Narrator #1:
So let me ask you this. Why do you think that there might be a new Internet?
[00:01:27] Matt Rouse:
I'm a child of the Internet. I'm like an not a younger millennial, sort of. So I've kind of the world I've grown up in has effectively been connected from, like, day one. Like, I my earliest days were, like, very, you know, basic home computing, Windows 98 sort of set up, and the Internet was like a place back then. You sort of went to a part of your, you know, the the computer or entertainment room in your house. You're plugged in. The moment you left that computer, the Internet was effectively you you weren't connected to it anymore. So that all changed with mobile, and the Internet became this thing that we just carried in our pockets. And as the technology and our dependence on it increased, we tended to sort of give up a little bit more of our privacy, of our right to be left alone, sort of. So it really became intertwined with our lives. And I don't know really anyone who goes more than an hour really without touching their phone or device.
So it's our lives are now inseparable from the internet and the whole vibe of my podcast was we've all grown up with the internet. We all have these parts of this expansive place that we love, we dislike, and it's a very personal experience. So, like, what the Internet is to everyone is unique. Therefore, the problems that people have with the Internet are also unique. And we have such amazing tools right now that just empowers people to build build solutions. You don't like something, build it afresh, build it in the way you see it. And as someone who's sort of been in this technology space with a lot of friends who are builders, entrepreneurs, programmers, I've seen this desire to put a new version of something that already exists that sort of more closely aligns to what you would like. I've seen that really up close.
So it was a very simple set of steps actually for me to say, okay. These are really interesting people with very clearly defined visions of what they would want from the Internet. Let's talk to them about their process. Let's talk to them what's wrong with it, how they're putting a better Internet in place, really. You know, it's interesting you say that.
[00:03:32] AI Narrator #1:
I was listening to the AI podcast the other day, and they were talking about the AI powered Alexa. Right? The Alexa plus or whatever it's called. I don't know what it's called. Amazon's, you know, talking device thing that now you can pay more and you can get an AI. And their example was, you know, if you if you're gonna have people over for a dinner party and the system knows that your wife is vegan and your cousin can't eat this kind of food and and whatever has an allergy or something and and Bob's gluten free and whatever, then it can actually, you know, figure out a recipe for these things or order you your meals or, you know, your washing machine is broken. It can go out, call, find a service center, set up the appointment and put it on your calendar and do all these things. The question was Paul Roadster, the other host of that show, he's he said to Mike, he's like, Mike, would you be comfortable giving all that information to Amazon so that the AI could do this thing?
And Mike had the most interesting answer. He said, you know, not at first, but it's a slippery slope and eventually I probably would. He's like, over time, I'm gonna leak more and more personal information to the thing until it can do the thing that it needs to do. Right? Yeah. I feel that's what's happened with the Internet. Right? Because everybody slowly over time leaked their personal information to the point now where people just go, well, you know, don't use TikTok because some Chinese companies or your government is gonna get all your information. They're like, who cares? Everybody's got all my information.
[00:05:10] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Exactly. And I think this is a bit of the, you know, the weird situation about our time growing up. Like like, my generation was the first one that didn't really have we didn't know. Right? So we were just putting everything out there. Gen z knows that, hey, we shouldn't really share everything. We kind of learned the hard way, like, oh, some people started missing out on job opportunities because of their social media presence. You know? So we were the first generation to be feel the negative effects of this, but also the first generation to really snap back and say, okay. We need to clean everything up and make sure that whatever we're putting out there is something we don't care if everyone in the world can see. And then this got complicated further with the need to have a personal brand online because a personal brand needs to have some level of authenticity in there because you are talking to people. You need to be perceived as a real human being with real ideas and motivations and emotions on the Internet. So straddling that line is super hard. Like, now with my more recent foray into newsletters, writing, and just being a little bit more of a consumer facing individual because I'm quite I like being left alone. I love Right. Just going offline for an extended period of time, and this is a conscious effort to share more about my life.
And it's tricky, but I also think it's needed because who you are online is kind of the first impression someone might have of you in a professional setting as well. So it's all about curating an image that you are proud of, that is honest, and it's also gonna help you build bridges because there's too much stuff going on about first impressions right now, and you gotta make that right first impression especially in these networking meetups. In the crypto space and web three, there's a lot of in person stuff because we spend all of our days like this, and it's sort of a arrangement plugged in, working all day. The teams are spread out all over the world. So the chance to meet someone in real life is really, really something that we look forward to. So being able to skip a lot of the uh-huh, like, will we get along? If someone's actually seen your profile a little bit, they can say, hey. That guy does some cool stuff. I wanna have a chat. So Now you record your show in person. Right?
Yes. I do. I do. And that's, again, because I feel like if I record it, remotely, it's like an extension of my workday, and I sort of despite me covering a lot of topics that I would cover in the workday, it's for me to step back and add my own flavor to the conversation. Yeah. We started out in person, but it just became
[00:07:47] AI Narrator #1:
too difficult for us to get the people that we wanted to get on the show all in the same place at the same time. You know, I used to have cohost as well. Right? So now we got more people and just became became the scheduling thing. And then it was COVID and, you know, I would love to do it in person all the time, but where there's no one where I live. So Oh. Yeah. In in the the 500 people in the nearest town, probably no one there that is, you know, gonna be a a guest on our show.
[00:08:16] Matt Rouse:
Fair. So, actually, well, I'm fairly recent. Like, I've moved to Toronto last year, like, maybe through last year. And this podcast is a bit of an exercise to get me out of my shell as well because, again, I could tell you, I love being left alone. That's, like, leave me with music, a book, and some gaming, and, like, the Internet. I'm happy effectively. So this is a way for me to really explore my new surroundings a little bit more, get involved with more meet ups, and say hi first, you know, instead of waiting for someone to approach me. I think Right. It's it it it makes it feel like every time I leave the house, I'm trying to get something done. It isn't even if it's just, you know, a casual chitchat that doesn't involve meeting someone who is probably gonna change my life. It's so yeah. I tried, and I think that effort in getting out of the comfort zone a little bit, it gets easier each time. So
[00:09:06] AI Narrator #1:
it's a habit that I sort of want. You know, there's a theory. I actually wrote it in my book, Start Saying Yes, which was seven years ago now that I wrote that book, I think. Anyway, the first time I heard it was from a keynote speech by Rand Fishkin, who used to be with Moz. It was called generating serendipity. And the idea is you you don't get luck because of luck. You get luck because you put yourself in places to make yourself available for good things to happen. Right? %. I could not agree with that more. Get yourself out there. Like, I don't need to go to to Podcamp. Right? Mhmm. Like, it probably cost me almost the same as it cost to run Podcamp for me to go there. Right? Because I had I gotta go. I gotta get a hotel for the night before, and then I gotta fly there. I gotta fly back. I got a hotel there for three days. You know? I got meals. I got transportation.
I got all the money I'm not getting from my not working. Right? You know? But I met, you know, you and and a number of other people there and people who I'm gonna know, like, you know, maybe for the rest of my life. Right? So Yeah. It's great. I love going there. And and you know what the other thing is? They say when you go to, like, a conference, they say, you know, well, some people say the the, like, the value's in the hallway, and some people say the value's in the bar. I mean, it could depends. You know? But, yeah, it is. It's it's the people that you meet, not necessarily the speakers that you listen to. Right? True. True. And, you know, listening to somebody have a good talk is great. You know, maybe you jot down some notes. You go, oh, hey.
This is good. I should go look into this further. I found this chunk of, you know, piece of gold in there. It's the people you meet that are really the most important. For sure. Like, I met you. We got on immediately.
[00:10:52] Matt Rouse:
Shared love of gaming and technology. Are you one of the few tech focused people over there? And I I could feel it in your energy effectively around there. But, also
[00:11:02] AI Narrator #1:
My nerd energy.
[00:11:05] Matt Rouse:
It's a kinship. And and, and, but but what you said about the talks as well, I took so many notes. Like, I've been wanting to publish it, but it's like, how do I make these things human readable? Because these are just my thought trains that I've sort of just Right. Drawn parallels to what I do and how she likes me. Notebook l m. I do. I have. I love it. So okay, so NotebookLM is my my assistant in the kitchen effectively. So my wife and I have in India, we didn't cook all that much. It was mainly cooking as a passion. So since we moved here, we need to cook most of our meals. So we see recipes that we like. We drop the recipe into notebook l m. If it's not in English, then we say, hey. Translate this into English.
Scale up the quantities for, like, one KG of chicken versus the 500 grams in the recipe. And they said, I don't like these ingredients. I'm allergic to this ingredient. Swap these out with something comparable. So and then split the process into for two people so that we could work in parallel so that we can quick finish this as quickly as we can. So I found that that was a lifesaver. Like, all this like, can I do this myself? Yes. I totally can. But can I get the the AI to do it in two minutes rather than me writing this whole thing out again in, like, twenty five, half minutes, half an hour? And for sure. So, yeah, it's an absolute lifesaver for research stuff as well. I like dropping a few research papers in there and saying, hey. Can you find me where these papers have reached a similar conclusion and where are the conflicts? And then it just highlights the bits, and then I can go in and figure it out for myself.
[00:15:07] Narrator AI:
This voice over used to be done by a human, but now it is synthetic. Oh la la. If you want to know if your job or business is safe from disruption, read Matt's new book, Will AI Take My Job? Predictions about AI in corporations, small business, and the workplace. Available now on Amazon. Trust me. It'll be worth it.
[00:15:31] AI Narrator #1:
Nice. You know, that's brings up something that's kind of an interesting point that I've never really heard anybody talk about, which is, like, everybody says, I can save time if I give this task to the AI. Right? So they go, okay. Well, it would take me twenty minutes to do this, but I have the AI doing five minutes. I save fifteen minutes. It's all great. What people never mention is what are the tasks that the AI is doing that you would never do yourself because you're like, I'm not gonna spend twenty minutes doing that thing, but it's worth thirty seconds.
Right? Yeah. And so there's a lot of little tasks that I find myself doing too where I'm like, it's not really worth it to do this. Oh, but you know what? I can chuck this into, like, Sonnet and have it done in five minutes, and it'll spit out the output I need or write the piece of software I need, and then I can use that. I know that's kind of an aside, but let's kind of circle back for a minute. We're talking about the new Internet. And so my understanding is the idea of a new Internet is that it's based on blockchain technology or at least kind of a sub chain or something. I don't wanna get too into the specifics of of of that. But the idea being you have your own personal data that you take with you, you temporarily allow use of that data to other companies or websites or whatever that is, and then you can revoke that that use.
Is that kind of do I have the general idea of it or is it I'm sure there's more to it. But
[00:16:56] Matt Rouse:
So this is definitely an aspect of it. So the reason why I called my podcast is this the new Internet and not is this the new crypto implementation is because I find there are ways to do this exact thing that don't really involve crypto. Right. So effectively okay. Let's dial it all back. Let's talk about the crypto and the blockchain itself so we can make it a little bit easier to explain. All a blockchain is is a ledger of transactions. Right. That is all it is. And what is this ledger recording? Transactions of cryptocurrencies from one party to another. So effectively, on the base layer of any blockchain is just a book, effectively. Right. It isn't smart. It can't do anything for itself. It can't make any proactive decisions.
It is just a record. What we are doing so that's what Bitcoin effectively proves that I can send you money and you can trust that I am sending you the money because the ledger has noted down how much money I'm capable of sending. So I can't send you a million dollars that I don't have if my balance is, like, a few hundred. And the blockchain proves that this is a false transaction. It is an impossible transaction. So this effectively, what the blockchain did then was it it made trust aspect that we didn't it it enabled trustlessness in communication, and this form of communication was money transfer.
This idea of trustlessness was built on with Ethereum, but then you could make trustless software and applications. So this very concept of me being able to send you money and it being preproved that I can do that, you can use this to work on things that maybe have more privacy. It would require more privacy. So you don't need to see my ID, but we can use the computer to verify that my ID is in fact valid. So this is just an idea of this implementation. So trustlessness and democratizing, decentralizing trust. So it's no longer a centralized authority saying, oh, you can do this. The system handles it. So in a world where, you know, privacy is a very legitimate concern on social media, on all these platforms that we use, you sign in with Google, Google can read all your emails, you know, there is very little that you're actually keeping away from big tech.
So the goal with some implementations of crypto is to make a lot of these existing services a little bit more private and working for us. Sovereignty of our own data is becoming an increasingly large concern, especially, like, you brought up the TikTok example about their concerns in The United States about a government being able to read this information. Governments have backdoors. If any using any US based company, the government effectively has that same thought for backdoor. Like Edward Snowden, when he made the news back in the day, it was because he leaked this program called PRISM, leaked news of this program.
PRISM effectively looks at every keystroke that you make online, and that includes spying on US citizens despite it being not allowed. So that was the crux of why it was a big deal. So privacy comes and goes in our discussion, but like you said, right, we will there's a slippery slope in just seeding this privacy for convenience. So a lot of the development in the crypto and web three space right now is to try and find a way to get that convenience without seeding this privacy. It's a very difficult problem because the business model of a lot of these companies relies on you being the product. Especially if it's a free company, you're the product. Your usage is a set of metrics that they can sell to advertisers that lets them keep the lights on. What are you getting out of this? You can communicate for cheaper than ever before to anyone on this planet instantaneously.
Right. If if they allow it. If they allow it. If they allow it. So that's their value proposition, and that's again where another aspect of crypto and blockchains come in, which is censorship resistance and tamper proofness. So if I wanna send you a message, let's say, on WeChat, if you're in China, we're in China hanging out, I send you a message critical of the government. WeChat will kind of make sure that message doesn't come from me to you. Right. So they can stop that. But if, for example, we used a blockchain based communication system, No one can stop it because the only thing that matters is do I have the balance to engage in this message. There is no external right or wrong being applied to the system. So, of course, this has lots of valid use cases when it comes to people escaping persecution from governments, whistleblowers, and stuff, but it also enables criminal activities on the other hand. So that kind of becomes our industry responsibility to ensure that we're using this in a way that is benefiting society.
Like legislation, a lot of people in my space see as a big problem, but I want more users. I want people to find value in crypto, value in expressing themselves, value in building out a parallel Internet persona where they can actually retain some of this privacy, their their ability to allow people to access certain information and not allow certain bits. And you brought that up with token gating. We call it token gating. So if you have a newsletter, you can have paid subscribers, non paid subscribers. There could be a block in the newsletter that a paid person can access, but a a free person can't. So it's about finding ways to make this more flexible for you as a user. So you can see if you sign up to my newsletter, I can get your email address for my back end system, but I will never know your email address. So you can create these little these services and these, these, like, walled gardens for information. You can allow the people you like. You can and it can incentivize participation. So it's it's an open tapestry effectively of stuff that we can do with this.
And that's what I find really exciting about this week because every day, someone has built something all on their own and say, hey. What do you think? And it's go growing out in every direction at all times. Like, this is not possible for one person to have a handle on everything.
[00:23:40] AI Narrator #1:
Physically not possible. Well, I think one of the biggest kind of I I don't know if I would say that it's necessarily a problem, but one of the biggest things is that there's no not having a central authority of some kind gives people this you have to do it on your own problem. I mean, anybody can open a Facebook app, put in an email and a password, and off to the races, you can go you can open TikTok, put in your phone number, and you're like, hey. I can watch videos that they tell me to watch. Right? But, like, trying to get on some kind of blockchain technology is I mean, it's a big step up in understanding trust in technology. And I think what's gonna happen over time is that these systems will be built in to perhaps other forms of software or, you know, kind of like the idea of, like, Blue Sky. Right? Where Yeah. Do you sign up for Blue Sky, but you can use your own domain and you can actually, you know, transfer your messages and your content to other apps that are kind of on a similar system?
[00:24:46] Matt Rouse:
You're absolutely right. Yeah.
[00:24:49] AI Narrator #1:
But I think that's that's that's that's that's model, that Blue Sky kinda model, you know, Blue Sky last on whatever. Right? I think that's kind of the start of it. It's kind of people are dipping their toes in it. You know? Same with cryptocurrency. Mhmm. Problem with cryptocurrency is that it's it's speculative. Right? So most people have no understanding of how the technology works, why they would use it. The the only thing that they're using it for is to buy some because they think in the future, it'll be worth more than it is now. Right? They're not out there using the Bitcoin bank machine or, you know, they're not Definitely. Buying pizzas online with their crypto.
[00:25:26] Matt Rouse:
So I completely agree with everything you've said because it's difficult. Onboarding people into crypto is really difficult because it isn't very forgiving. You know? If you make a mistake and if you lose your seed phrase or your private key or someone gets access to your private key, they effectively own the contents of that wallet. Right. So this is a very big UI UX hurdle that people have been mobilizing the smartest people to fix. So we have a few halfway systems right now in crypto. So the way it used to be back in the day, you create a new wallet and you get a 16 word seed phrase. You need to write the seed phrase down. They will tell you every time you open a new wallet. Do not say this on a computer because 99.99% of the time when people's wallets are drained, it was because they downloaded an unauthorized software onto their PC.
It scanned all the contents of the hard drive, and it found seed phrases and private keys, and it cleaned them up. So good old notebook and paper is your best friend for the old way of setting up wallets.
[00:26:33] AI Narrator #1:
Or change the words in your seed phrase.
[00:26:36] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Yeah. And that but that's a little tricky because then it's very difficult to communicate this to, like, your to your trusted family who you would like to share this stuff with. Right. So there's a halfway point, actually. It's called embedded wallets. So embedded wallets use encryption to break up the key into different shards. So it saves one shard on your device, one shard on your Google Drive, and one shard is with the company that started the wallet. So you need two or three Shards to access the wallet. So you can then come like, mobile phones have been an absolute godsend for making this a lot easier because now you can use your fingerprint scanner, your face scanner, all as and your phone is a secure enclave for accessing this stuff. So phone security and these aspects these hardware additions have made it fantastic.
So you don't need to really remember the seed phrase, but you should write it down for sure. Right. But they will encrypt it and make it very easy for you to use it. So it's happening. Then we also have another technology called MPC, which is multi party computation Mhmm. That this is actually thought up in, like, the seventies and eighties and, like, it's one of those really cool states where it was provable to that it's possible. Technology is now caught up and we can implement it now. Right. So, again, this makes it easy to, like, if you lose your seed phrase, we can rotate keys and and you can click the forgot password button for crypto for the first time now, thanks to MPC.
So it's these little innovation that are making it, you know like, human beings make mistakes. I fat fended a trade. I've been in this space for so long. I've added a zero when I shouldn't have added a zero in a trade and made a big mistake. It's happened. And you can't undo mistakes in this space. But what you can do is try to make it make people aware. Are you sure you want to do this? You know? Create more responsive feedback loops to make our applications better, to make it a lot more human usable, really. So it's gonna be little bits, and once someone cracks a good idea because of how permission list this place is like, so much of our code is open source because we need to, like, inspect it for bugs and security flaws. So people make it all open source Right. Because it's just good practice in a space where the stakes are so high.
So if someone does as well, they open source this, everyone uses it. And therefore, we have the floor of security and expectations rising a little bit. So it we're definitely not ready for my mom to come on and start leverage trading with the decentralized exchange. We're not there yet. But I don't think we're as far away from that as one would have thought even a year ago. So it One It's a lot of positive sounds coming from this market in that regard. Right.
[00:29:25] AI Narrator #1:
I think one of the the things that are gonna be a difficult kind of hurdle to get over is the idea of having, you know, this this free application structure without the the company harvesting everyone's data to use to sell ads. Right? Because that model is anybody can log in to my central authority space and use whatever my my application gives them. But because it is both free and really, really low stakes, then if they lose it, it's not a big deal. Right? They're like, well, you know, my my Instagram got compromised, but unless you're like an influencer or a monetized creator or a business person, for 99% of people, their Instagram gets hacked or something, and they're like, oh, whatever. I just made a new one. You know? Mhmm. But the problem is where does the money come from that runs the system?
You know, if it's like, if you're gonna make something like distributed Instagram that's that's on chain, somebody has to pay for the calculation to put the stuff on the ledger. Right? They do. They do. And there's a few examples of this.
[00:30:38] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Yeah. So there's a few examples of this. So we acknowledge that, you know, to make a parallel space for all this activity, we need roads, we need plumbing, we need all these things to be put in place. So a lot of crypto's criticisms have been about scalability, have been about when there is like, like, when we saw Trump coin launch, like, a month before president Trump got inaugurated, he launched a meme coin, and this was unprecedented levels of traffic on the Solana Blockchain. Solana has been purely designed for ultra high transaction throughput and attention.
Despite all that, this Blockchain ground to a halt because this was, again, unprecedented traffic. So this is definitely something that needs to be put in place, and a lot of the major blockchains have foundations as a part of this. So because this is money, because money is programmable, and because it's also not centralized, like, it like how interact you can effectively make free transactions or very, very cheap transactions, it's a very similar way on blockchains. So you are paying people as part of your transaction to ensure that the transaction goes through. Right. So you have lots and lots of it's decentralized.
It's but these are all participants that are in it for their own gain. They're earning on transaction fees. Right. So their job is to ensure that the network is up so that they can keep getting transaction fees. If the network is down because of them or they are not able to participate in the network's uptime, they get penalized for transaction fees. Right. So this is like a very high level way of how this would work, and it is very much going on a everyone is in it for themselves game theory kind of model to so that you are, rewarded for good work and penalized for bad work. And we've put this in code across the system.
So this is happening, and the Ethereum Foundation and the Solana I don't know if there's Solana, but there's definitely an Ethereum Foundation, and Cardano has a foundation. These are all very key players in nudging the direction of development to put these roads and plumbing in place so that we can actually entertain this traffic. And Yeah. It's not like a one size fits all solution. Like, Ethereum has, like, they call them layer twos. So there's the main Ethereum chain, and then there's lots and lots of different companies building out, like, widening the highway effectively.
So Ethereum can be like a small road where all the high quality consensus and verification happens. Like, this is the truth line. And over here, we have, like for example, we're cooking in the kitchen together. I'm on the main island chopping and say, hey, Matt. Can you cut those onions for me? You're taking off the onions, chopping it, and then you bring them back to me to combine into things. So that's effectively what layer twos are doing in terms of offloading computational complexity onto different spaces, but hoping that they deal with larger volumes so that they can earn on the volume side rather than on the per unit side. So there's different ways of skinning this cat effectively, and it's a long process. We don't know if any one of them is guaranteed the best way, And I think this is why there's more blockchains, more alternative blockchains coming out because the goal is we want this to be seamless, private, yet space for people to make profits through running services and through by providing services.
[00:34:07] AI Narrator #1:
I think one of the biggest things is gonna be getting over the hurdle of telling people, like, let's say, for example, email. The easiest way to stop spam and stop people harvesting email data would be to have a fee for every email. Right? Mhmm. It could be $1.01 thousandth of a cent, you know? Yeah. But that would be enough that the average person is gonna spend $2 a year on email. Right? But your average spammer can't send 10,000,000 emails a day because it would cost them a small fortune. Right? More than they could possibly make.
[00:34:43] Matt Rouse:
So Yeah.
[00:34:45] AI Narrator #1:
In that case, what you would be doing is saying, okay. You know, mister email user, basically, what you're gonna do is you're gonna put $5 in the tank to pay for the fees. Right? And then you get to use this service until you use up the amount of money that you know, the fees that you use for it. Kinda like a pay phone. Right? Yeah. Put in another 25¢ to call for two more minutes or whatever. Right? Except it would be, you know, way more efficient than that. I think you've there's a lot of people who would buy on to that model now if there was, you know, if you could get enough of them together at the same time, I think is one of the difficult parts. Because I would say the biggest thing that I hear from people when they say, oh my god. I can't believe Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, doing this or that or he's following Trump or, you know, when Instagram showed a zillion users, like, super violent and and things that shouldn't be seen that were supposed to be moderated.
And I say, well, how come you didn't leave? Right? And they're like, well, all my friends are on here or all my family's on here. Right? Like, a lot of people say I'm gonna take a break for this or I'm gonna go use another network. But the majority, they, they can't because the cost of switching is too high. The cost of switching is not a dollar cost. It's a, nobody that I know is their cost. So I'm basically going to be out of my tribe. Once the the hardest part is gonna be getting a tribe of people on another system where they see the value of, you know, holding the cards of their own data and saying,
[00:36:18] Matt Rouse:
I'm willing to pay a few bucks for this to happen. Yeah. Right. And the the tribe the tribe aspect you bring up is really, really important because community is the lifeblood of crypto. There aren't that many in the grand scheme of things compared to, like, the users on even, like, fine. Instagram is huge. Right. Facebook is huge. Twitter is huge. Like, maybe 1% of all the Twitter users you can say are active crypto users. And that's probably being generous because what is an active crypto user? Someone who buys and just forgets about it, say, I will sell in ten years. I wouldn't call them an active user. They're a participant in the market for sure. They're contributing to the to the market. But in terms of actively, you know, being a DAU, daily active user, they won't, like, come up. So there's a very, very small pool of highly engaged users in crypto.
And I'm a Web three marketer, and my whole I've been shouting this from the rooftops for for years now, it seems. Like, we need more people. We need to make the narratives more approachable. We need people to feel comfortable getting in over here because you mentioned some very valid points about people not liking speculative aspects of it, people not liking the complexity of it. The space is large enough for us to move beyond these aspects if you start delivering goods and services that people genuinely want to use. Like, it's it can't just be incrementally better than web two. We need to be so much better than web two that these tribes that you speak of that are keeping people on Instagram despite their multiple lapses.
Like, this needs to be a very, very simple decision and a compatible, you know, step. Right? Can I migrate my Instagram following onto a new application? So Mastodon is part of the Fediverse Right. That is doing this in a similar way. It they're decentralizing, but they're doing it without crypto. So mass so Nostr, Mastodon, which is the other one, Blue Sky Yeah. That's all fairly compatible with each other. There is one that isn't as compatible, but I still think it's a very valuable space. It's called Farcaster. And this goes back to actually putting out that infrastructure. So Farcaster is the company behind Farcaster is called Merkle, and they are responsible for the Farcaster protocol.
So, effectively, what they're doing is they're putting out a set of, like, servers and technology that is a base layer of information for which people can make clients. So client is how you interact with the protocol. So it's like email is the protocol, and Gmail is what you're using as the client. So Parcaster is the protocol that's being built, and the same company building the protocol is also building a client, which is the biggest client right now, called Warpcast. But there are other clients based on your requirements for the network. So Warpcast is gonna be everyone's probably standard one. But let's say, for example, you prefer a chronological news feed versus an algorithmic news feed. Right. Then you can create your own And this is like a social network.
Yes. So this is a social network. It is an on chain, like a crypto native version of Twitter and Reddit combined. Right. So it uses, like, subnets. We call them channels on Firecaster, but it also has your normal feed, which is like tweeting on Twitter. So it's a hybrid of the two, and it completely embraces on chain stuff. So there's a lot of AI agents on there. There are bots that you can launch your own community token. I haven't launched one for my community yet because I don't see how I can use this to immediately benefit my community beyond speculation. I don't really wanna get into the speculation side. Like, if I can, for example, create, like, a pro, like, a paid version of the thing, but I don't want people to pay me directly, they can just show their loyalty in what I'm building by holding the token and, like, you know, having a ticker. Like, you need to hold this much for a hundred days, and then you can access this pro stuff for free. I would much rather use these tools to enable access rather than to gate access.
So I don't want so my podcast is also hosted on chain for this sort of a reason. Like, because I'm talking to a little bit of a tech native community, I want an a new Internet. I want to sort of be the change that I'm speaking about. Right? So let's embrace these tools. Let's build out on the very tools that I am positioning myself to saying, hey. Is this what the Internet could be? So it's iterative, and I think it's really experimental and fun, and it's all back and forth with the community. You know, there's there's also the thought that,
[00:41:14] AI Narrator #1:
you know, something doesn't have to serve 8,000,000,000 users to be worthwhile. Right? Yeah. It could just be for that community, and that might be enough. And, you know, you see people at Ziptrons of the world who are are, you know, always talking about, you know, what's wrong with this technology kind of thing. And I think the biggest thing that that you hear from those people is, like, where's the the killer app that was blockchain based. Right? Like, how did this where is this being used that it changed everything? And I think what happened was a kind of a combination of two things. One thing was too much focus was put on the speculative side of finance, right, with your coins and meme coins and and the shit coins and all the other crap that's going on. Right? And, like, Trump coins and Melania coins and rug pulls and all those kind of ridiculous things. Right? But the other side of it was there was never a UI that was good, honestly. Like, I mean, I used to work as a UI designer. Right? And, like, I see these things and they're like, oh, you wanna play our blockchain game? Well, it's gonna be great. First, go get this wallet you've never heard of.
Download it to this place, get the seed phrase, write it down, go in go into your other place, transfer crypto from this wallet to that wallet, and then that wallet has a bridge that could go bridge from that coin to this wallet. And then you gotta transfer it into the game and convert it into this currency. And I'm like, I was like, I didn't even get past step one. Right? Like, I'm just like, it's just not worth it. You know? And that's, yeah, that's exactly the problem. Right? There's so much friction and just doing something simple. And it needs to be trend. The technology needs to be transparent. Right? People are like, this is gonna be great because it's blockchain. Right? Which matters if you're a person in the blockchain community, but to everyone else, it's it's a nothing burger. It's like saying, well, you should pay with with your credit card on my machine because it's Interac. And people are like, oh, it's Interac. Well then I will then they don't care. Right. They just want to beep their card on the thing. Beep. Right? Yeah. This is how, that's how it needs to work. Right? It needs to be like swipe your card, put in your code or your ZIP code or whatever. Right? And it works. Like, that's that's the system. Right? Remove all the friction from the system and it will work. And if So we're getting there. We're actually getting there. Well, that's what I'm talking about. Right? So if you're talking about, like, an app or something, really good example would be, I wanna upload all the records for my property. I wanna put my house. I wanna put my survey information, my mortgage, or whatever it is. Put all that data, put it in a wallet that's on chain kind of thing that's secure. I could give it to somebody if they need it. I could retract it if they don't. But it needs to be an app on my phone where I put in my email and my login kind of thing.
And, you know, however that login kind of gets converted to security. But, yeah, it has to be it has to be easy. Right? And then people don't care if it's on the blockchain. What they care about is, is it secure? Am I gonna lose my stuff? What's the cost? What's the time investment? Right? And I think that those are the things those are the things that are really holding back kind of blockchain applications for being, you know, as big as they could be. Like, if you look at, you know, something like XRP where they're like, we're using this so that you go to the bank and you move money from our bank to Japan, and the Japanese bank gets it through XRP, and then they give them cash.
So I give the bank cash, and Japan gives the person back that I was sending the money to, gives them the money, and my money doesn't get lost in the way. That's all I care about. I don't care if it's on blockchain. Right? Yeah. And I think that's that's where things are going. Right?
[00:45:02] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. For sure. And what what you mentioned about that complexity, so a few blockchains are fixing some of these things. Like so we have this thing called so every action like, let's say, you can extend your analogy of the game and the complexity of onboarding onto the game. Because once you're in the game, every single on chain action requires a transaction and for you to verify that transaction. So what we have is called session keys, where you can sort of create okay. It'll be seamless for the next five minutes of all your transactions. You can buy and sell freely within this platform, and then you can sort of leave the area in the game, and it kinda closes off the session keys. So you can have, like, an actual market within, like, your Skyrim on the blockchain. You know, people can physically meet and hang out and trade stuff. So, like, making some of these things possible. And, also, a very key part about moving to a world beyond private keys and beyond seed phrases and beyond, you know, being able to lose access to your account by just misplacing a note a sticky note on your PC is account abstraction.
So this has been in place now. Like, we've so the way these upgrades happen on a blockchain network is they're already maintained by a bunch of different participants around the world. Everyone managing a node, which is a contribute which is like basically a spoke in this massive network. Right. It needs to sort of agree that, hey. We're gonna run this upgrade together, and that's called a fork. A hard fork is effectively when everyone reaches a consensus and they upgrade the network, and it's not backward compatible. So this is like we've decided we're going forward with this. So a very major thing that happened with this was account abstraction.
So that effectively separates your your private key from your account, and it, like, makes it so that you can use the same private key, and you are Matt. You are no longer a string of code. Right. Your name is now Matt, and Matt has several wallets. So the intention for this is to make it so that not every single interaction that you make with this wallet will be you paying for it, you sending it out. Right? We can have companies coming in and sponsoring your transactions. So you can pay me effectively for free because if you use a smart account paid for by, let's say, a Zirayan or a StarkNet wallet, they have part of their budget to help onboard more people into this. So this is part of their whole outreach to say, hey. For a limited time, we will sponsor all your transactions.
And then as this network in this space builds out, you have more people sponsoring transactions, more people incentivizing participation. Therefore, your wallet becomes your identity. And should you choose to reveal your identity wallet link to an advertiser, you can potentially get paid for that. You know? Right. So it's about creating it's about giving you the flexibility to choose. There's no such thing as a magic bullet solution because as I started, everyone's experience on the Internet is different. What everyone wants from the Internet is different. Therefore, we need to give people the flexibility to choose. It's like you look at, you know, how people considered decades back in the day. Right? We have a very clear picture in our head what the sixties represented, the seventies represented, the eighties represented. But since then, we've fragmented in every direction. Like, the nineties means something different to everyone.
The the oughts, something different to everyone. The tens, something different to everyone. And I think that is just a wider representation of how our society has become so diverse, so many different ideas are existing concurrently. So exactly what you said, it doesn't need to appeal to 8,000,000,000 people. We can have a group of 10 k super fans and run a multibillion dollar company based on just 10,000 users because the value that each individual can drive and create is so much greater than ever before, thanks to all the tools that we have, the open source, and the knowledge that, honestly, every participant is coming onto the Internet with. Like, people right now, we love to say that, you know, people, like like, they're, like, brain rot through TikTok by letting the algorithms do all of our thinking for us and stuff, but, no, actually, people are a lot more knowledgeable now. They may be knowledgeable about things that you may not value, but they are, in general, more knowledgeable about stuff.
So I think it everyone's gonna find their own little paths, their own little cozy corners of the Internet where their friends hang out and create something afresh. It's a little bit more private, a little bit more intimate. They can make friendly wagers with the money part of this Internet that we're putting in, but they don't need to participate in that money part of it. So I think this is the main value proposition of what a crypto world could bring, I think, and that is the ability to choose.
[00:49:49] AI Narrator #1:
Absolutely. And I think the idea of of having control over your personal information and your data is is only gonna be something that that happens more as, you know, especially with AI systems and things coming online, talking about the slippery slope, you know, it's it's gonna be a it's gonna be a new world. Right? And so maybe we will have a new internet coming soon. Marv, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best place for them to get ahold of you?
[00:50:17] Matt Rouse:
Great. So I have a newsletter, www.marvinpaul.com. So it's on my website. I'd say, released my second edition. It's new. I'm using it to effectively consolidate all my activities because because I am active on the blockchain this is something no one tells you about blockchains. There's no notifications. So all that notification spam you get on your social media, you're not gonna get it on here. So I've effectively had to recreate a notification system. Sorry. There's a sun coming sunlight coming in. To recreate a notification system, so my newsletter is for that. Consolidates all my writing, my podcast.
I being a media guy, I love watching stuff on YouTube. YouTube is my most important subscription. Forget Netflix and Prime and all that. YouTube is my is my go to. So things that I that made an impression on me, I shared that on the newsletter. Then I'm active on x because I'm in the crypto space. M p web three wordsmith. That's my name on there. And I'm active on Farcaster too. So I find I on on Twitter and Farcaster, I spend a little bit I sort of spread my time out on those two. And, yeah, I'm quite active. Free to DM me at any point on there. I'm always down for a good chat. And where else am I active?
It's mainly those places. On Instagram, it's mainly memes. You're gonna get zero value from following me. I was gonna keep shopping.
[00:51:38] AI Narrator #1:
Marv, I appreciate you coming and and explaining what potentially could be the future of the Internet for everybody here. I know it's a little techie, might be a little over some people's heads,
[00:51:48] Matt Rouse:
but, you know, it's it's good to have an idea of, you know, what are these things, what's coming down the pipe, and, you know, what could be the next Internet. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And see, the the and the new Internet isn't gonna be a winner takes all situation, I think. I think each of us are gonna have our own say in how this looks, the space that we can participate in. So if you have any ideas, just my advice, build it. You know, there are so many AI tools. You don't need to be a programmer anymore to create a website or to launch any services. Like, the AI will help get your idea out there. So I think this is the best ever time to be someone who is unhappy with the service that they use because, like, there's never been a better time to just make your own. That's right. Build your own social media, people.
Alright, Marv. I appreciate you being on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Take care. Talk to you soon.
[00:52:39] Narrator AI:
Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us an honest review on your favorite podcast app. Be sure to check out Matt's book, Will AI Take My Job, and have a wonderful day.
Today on digital. Marketing masters. Mart is on a mission to build the next Internet, working on the blockchain to move forward the tech. Let's talk tech. Hey, everybody, and welcome back to Digital Marketing Masters. I'm your host, Matt Raus. And today, I've got Marv Paul. How you doing, Marv? Thanks for having me, Matt. It's amazing to be here. So Marv and I met at Podcamp in Toronto when I was out speaking out there about AI. Marv and I had had a couple pretty lengthy conversations about technology and what's coming, and he also has a podcast called Is This the New Internet?
I think what we wanna talk about today is what is this idea of of a new Internet and
[00:01:18] Matt Rouse:
is there a new Internet? That is the question, isn't it? Is there a new Internet?
[00:01:23] AI Narrator #1:
So let me ask you this. Why do you think that there might be a new Internet?
[00:01:27] Matt Rouse:
I'm a child of the Internet. I'm like an not a younger millennial, sort of. So I've kind of the world I've grown up in has effectively been connected from, like, day one. Like, I my earliest days were, like, very, you know, basic home computing, Windows 98 sort of set up, and the Internet was like a place back then. You sort of went to a part of your, you know, the the computer or entertainment room in your house. You're plugged in. The moment you left that computer, the Internet was effectively you you weren't connected to it anymore. So that all changed with mobile, and the Internet became this thing that we just carried in our pockets. And as the technology and our dependence on it increased, we tended to sort of give up a little bit more of our privacy, of our right to be left alone, sort of. So it really became intertwined with our lives. And I don't know really anyone who goes more than an hour really without touching their phone or device.
So it's our lives are now inseparable from the internet and the whole vibe of my podcast was we've all grown up with the internet. We all have these parts of this expansive place that we love, we dislike, and it's a very personal experience. So, like, what the Internet is to everyone is unique. Therefore, the problems that people have with the Internet are also unique. And we have such amazing tools right now that just empowers people to build build solutions. You don't like something, build it afresh, build it in the way you see it. And as someone who's sort of been in this technology space with a lot of friends who are builders, entrepreneurs, programmers, I've seen this desire to put a new version of something that already exists that sort of more closely aligns to what you would like. I've seen that really up close.
So it was a very simple set of steps actually for me to say, okay. These are really interesting people with very clearly defined visions of what they would want from the Internet. Let's talk to them about their process. Let's talk to them what's wrong with it, how they're putting a better Internet in place, really. You know, it's interesting you say that.
[00:03:32] AI Narrator #1:
I was listening to the AI podcast the other day, and they were talking about the AI powered Alexa. Right? The Alexa plus or whatever it's called. I don't know what it's called. Amazon's, you know, talking device thing that now you can pay more and you can get an AI. And their example was, you know, if you if you're gonna have people over for a dinner party and the system knows that your wife is vegan and your cousin can't eat this kind of food and and whatever has an allergy or something and and Bob's gluten free and whatever, then it can actually, you know, figure out a recipe for these things or order you your meals or, you know, your washing machine is broken. It can go out, call, find a service center, set up the appointment and put it on your calendar and do all these things. The question was Paul Roadster, the other host of that show, he's he said to Mike, he's like, Mike, would you be comfortable giving all that information to Amazon so that the AI could do this thing?
And Mike had the most interesting answer. He said, you know, not at first, but it's a slippery slope and eventually I probably would. He's like, over time, I'm gonna leak more and more personal information to the thing until it can do the thing that it needs to do. Right? Yeah. I feel that's what's happened with the Internet. Right? Because everybody slowly over time leaked their personal information to the point now where people just go, well, you know, don't use TikTok because some Chinese companies or your government is gonna get all your information. They're like, who cares? Everybody's got all my information.
[00:05:10] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Exactly. And I think this is a bit of the, you know, the weird situation about our time growing up. Like like, my generation was the first one that didn't really have we didn't know. Right? So we were just putting everything out there. Gen z knows that, hey, we shouldn't really share everything. We kind of learned the hard way, like, oh, some people started missing out on job opportunities because of their social media presence. You know? So we were the first generation to be feel the negative effects of this, but also the first generation to really snap back and say, okay. We need to clean everything up and make sure that whatever we're putting out there is something we don't care if everyone in the world can see. And then this got complicated further with the need to have a personal brand online because a personal brand needs to have some level of authenticity in there because you are talking to people. You need to be perceived as a real human being with real ideas and motivations and emotions on the Internet. So straddling that line is super hard. Like, now with my more recent foray into newsletters, writing, and just being a little bit more of a consumer facing individual because I'm quite I like being left alone. I love Right. Just going offline for an extended period of time, and this is a conscious effort to share more about my life.
And it's tricky, but I also think it's needed because who you are online is kind of the first impression someone might have of you in a professional setting as well. So it's all about curating an image that you are proud of, that is honest, and it's also gonna help you build bridges because there's too much stuff going on about first impressions right now, and you gotta make that right first impression especially in these networking meetups. In the crypto space and web three, there's a lot of in person stuff because we spend all of our days like this, and it's sort of a arrangement plugged in, working all day. The teams are spread out all over the world. So the chance to meet someone in real life is really, really something that we look forward to. So being able to skip a lot of the uh-huh, like, will we get along? If someone's actually seen your profile a little bit, they can say, hey. That guy does some cool stuff. I wanna have a chat. So Now you record your show in person. Right?
Yes. I do. I do. And that's, again, because I feel like if I record it, remotely, it's like an extension of my workday, and I sort of despite me covering a lot of topics that I would cover in the workday, it's for me to step back and add my own flavor to the conversation. Yeah. We started out in person, but it just became
[00:07:47] AI Narrator #1:
too difficult for us to get the people that we wanted to get on the show all in the same place at the same time. You know, I used to have cohost as well. Right? So now we got more people and just became became the scheduling thing. And then it was COVID and, you know, I would love to do it in person all the time, but where there's no one where I live. So Oh. Yeah. In in the the 500 people in the nearest town, probably no one there that is, you know, gonna be a a guest on our show.
[00:08:16] Matt Rouse:
Fair. So, actually, well, I'm fairly recent. Like, I've moved to Toronto last year, like, maybe through last year. And this podcast is a bit of an exercise to get me out of my shell as well because, again, I could tell you, I love being left alone. That's, like, leave me with music, a book, and some gaming, and, like, the Internet. I'm happy effectively. So this is a way for me to really explore my new surroundings a little bit more, get involved with more meet ups, and say hi first, you know, instead of waiting for someone to approach me. I think Right. It's it it it makes it feel like every time I leave the house, I'm trying to get something done. It isn't even if it's just, you know, a casual chitchat that doesn't involve meeting someone who is probably gonna change my life. It's so yeah. I tried, and I think that effort in getting out of the comfort zone a little bit, it gets easier each time. So
[00:09:06] AI Narrator #1:
it's a habit that I sort of want. You know, there's a theory. I actually wrote it in my book, Start Saying Yes, which was seven years ago now that I wrote that book, I think. Anyway, the first time I heard it was from a keynote speech by Rand Fishkin, who used to be with Moz. It was called generating serendipity. And the idea is you you don't get luck because of luck. You get luck because you put yourself in places to make yourself available for good things to happen. Right? %. I could not agree with that more. Get yourself out there. Like, I don't need to go to to Podcamp. Right? Mhmm. Like, it probably cost me almost the same as it cost to run Podcamp for me to go there. Right? Because I had I gotta go. I gotta get a hotel for the night before, and then I gotta fly there. I gotta fly back. I got a hotel there for three days. You know? I got meals. I got transportation.
I got all the money I'm not getting from my not working. Right? You know? But I met, you know, you and and a number of other people there and people who I'm gonna know, like, you know, maybe for the rest of my life. Right? So Yeah. It's great. I love going there. And and you know what the other thing is? They say when you go to, like, a conference, they say, you know, well, some people say the the, like, the value's in the hallway, and some people say the value's in the bar. I mean, it could depends. You know? But, yeah, it is. It's it's the people that you meet, not necessarily the speakers that you listen to. Right? True. True. And, you know, listening to somebody have a good talk is great. You know, maybe you jot down some notes. You go, oh, hey.
This is good. I should go look into this further. I found this chunk of, you know, piece of gold in there. It's the people you meet that are really the most important. For sure. Like, I met you. We got on immediately.
[00:10:52] Matt Rouse:
Shared love of gaming and technology. Are you one of the few tech focused people over there? And I I could feel it in your energy effectively around there. But, also
[00:11:02] AI Narrator #1:
My nerd energy.
[00:11:05] Matt Rouse:
It's a kinship. And and, and, but but what you said about the talks as well, I took so many notes. Like, I've been wanting to publish it, but it's like, how do I make these things human readable? Because these are just my thought trains that I've sort of just Right. Drawn parallels to what I do and how she likes me. Notebook l m. I do. I have. I love it. So okay, so NotebookLM is my my assistant in the kitchen effectively. So my wife and I have in India, we didn't cook all that much. It was mainly cooking as a passion. So since we moved here, we need to cook most of our meals. So we see recipes that we like. We drop the recipe into notebook l m. If it's not in English, then we say, hey. Translate this into English.
Scale up the quantities for, like, one KG of chicken versus the 500 grams in the recipe. And they said, I don't like these ingredients. I'm allergic to this ingredient. Swap these out with something comparable. So and then split the process into for two people so that we could work in parallel so that we can quick finish this as quickly as we can. So I found that that was a lifesaver. Like, all this like, can I do this myself? Yes. I totally can. But can I get the the AI to do it in two minutes rather than me writing this whole thing out again in, like, twenty five, half minutes, half an hour? And for sure. So, yeah, it's an absolute lifesaver for research stuff as well. I like dropping a few research papers in there and saying, hey. Can you find me where these papers have reached a similar conclusion and where are the conflicts? And then it just highlights the bits, and then I can go in and figure it out for myself.
[00:15:07] Narrator AI:
This voice over used to be done by a human, but now it is synthetic. Oh la la. If you want to know if your job or business is safe from disruption, read Matt's new book, Will AI Take My Job? Predictions about AI in corporations, small business, and the workplace. Available now on Amazon. Trust me. It'll be worth it.
[00:15:31] AI Narrator #1:
Nice. You know, that's brings up something that's kind of an interesting point that I've never really heard anybody talk about, which is, like, everybody says, I can save time if I give this task to the AI. Right? So they go, okay. Well, it would take me twenty minutes to do this, but I have the AI doing five minutes. I save fifteen minutes. It's all great. What people never mention is what are the tasks that the AI is doing that you would never do yourself because you're like, I'm not gonna spend twenty minutes doing that thing, but it's worth thirty seconds.
Right? Yeah. And so there's a lot of little tasks that I find myself doing too where I'm like, it's not really worth it to do this. Oh, but you know what? I can chuck this into, like, Sonnet and have it done in five minutes, and it'll spit out the output I need or write the piece of software I need, and then I can use that. I know that's kind of an aside, but let's kind of circle back for a minute. We're talking about the new Internet. And so my understanding is the idea of a new Internet is that it's based on blockchain technology or at least kind of a sub chain or something. I don't wanna get too into the specifics of of of that. But the idea being you have your own personal data that you take with you, you temporarily allow use of that data to other companies or websites or whatever that is, and then you can revoke that that use.
Is that kind of do I have the general idea of it or is it I'm sure there's more to it. But
[00:16:56] Matt Rouse:
So this is definitely an aspect of it. So the reason why I called my podcast is this the new Internet and not is this the new crypto implementation is because I find there are ways to do this exact thing that don't really involve crypto. Right. So effectively okay. Let's dial it all back. Let's talk about the crypto and the blockchain itself so we can make it a little bit easier to explain. All a blockchain is is a ledger of transactions. Right. That is all it is. And what is this ledger recording? Transactions of cryptocurrencies from one party to another. So effectively, on the base layer of any blockchain is just a book, effectively. Right. It isn't smart. It can't do anything for itself. It can't make any proactive decisions.
It is just a record. What we are doing so that's what Bitcoin effectively proves that I can send you money and you can trust that I am sending you the money because the ledger has noted down how much money I'm capable of sending. So I can't send you a million dollars that I don't have if my balance is, like, a few hundred. And the blockchain proves that this is a false transaction. It is an impossible transaction. So this effectively, what the blockchain did then was it it made trust aspect that we didn't it it enabled trustlessness in communication, and this form of communication was money transfer.
This idea of trustlessness was built on with Ethereum, but then you could make trustless software and applications. So this very concept of me being able to send you money and it being preproved that I can do that, you can use this to work on things that maybe have more privacy. It would require more privacy. So you don't need to see my ID, but we can use the computer to verify that my ID is in fact valid. So this is just an idea of this implementation. So trustlessness and democratizing, decentralizing trust. So it's no longer a centralized authority saying, oh, you can do this. The system handles it. So in a world where, you know, privacy is a very legitimate concern on social media, on all these platforms that we use, you sign in with Google, Google can read all your emails, you know, there is very little that you're actually keeping away from big tech.
So the goal with some implementations of crypto is to make a lot of these existing services a little bit more private and working for us. Sovereignty of our own data is becoming an increasingly large concern, especially, like, you brought up the TikTok example about their concerns in The United States about a government being able to read this information. Governments have backdoors. If any using any US based company, the government effectively has that same thought for backdoor. Like Edward Snowden, when he made the news back in the day, it was because he leaked this program called PRISM, leaked news of this program.
PRISM effectively looks at every keystroke that you make online, and that includes spying on US citizens despite it being not allowed. So that was the crux of why it was a big deal. So privacy comes and goes in our discussion, but like you said, right, we will there's a slippery slope in just seeding this privacy for convenience. So a lot of the development in the crypto and web three space right now is to try and find a way to get that convenience without seeding this privacy. It's a very difficult problem because the business model of a lot of these companies relies on you being the product. Especially if it's a free company, you're the product. Your usage is a set of metrics that they can sell to advertisers that lets them keep the lights on. What are you getting out of this? You can communicate for cheaper than ever before to anyone on this planet instantaneously.
Right. If if they allow it. If they allow it. If they allow it. So that's their value proposition, and that's again where another aspect of crypto and blockchains come in, which is censorship resistance and tamper proofness. So if I wanna send you a message, let's say, on WeChat, if you're in China, we're in China hanging out, I send you a message critical of the government. WeChat will kind of make sure that message doesn't come from me to you. Right. So they can stop that. But if, for example, we used a blockchain based communication system, No one can stop it because the only thing that matters is do I have the balance to engage in this message. There is no external right or wrong being applied to the system. So, of course, this has lots of valid use cases when it comes to people escaping persecution from governments, whistleblowers, and stuff, but it also enables criminal activities on the other hand. So that kind of becomes our industry responsibility to ensure that we're using this in a way that is benefiting society.
Like legislation, a lot of people in my space see as a big problem, but I want more users. I want people to find value in crypto, value in expressing themselves, value in building out a parallel Internet persona where they can actually retain some of this privacy, their their ability to allow people to access certain information and not allow certain bits. And you brought that up with token gating. We call it token gating. So if you have a newsletter, you can have paid subscribers, non paid subscribers. There could be a block in the newsletter that a paid person can access, but a a free person can't. So it's about finding ways to make this more flexible for you as a user. So you can see if you sign up to my newsletter, I can get your email address for my back end system, but I will never know your email address. So you can create these little these services and these, these, like, walled gardens for information. You can allow the people you like. You can and it can incentivize participation. So it's it's an open tapestry effectively of stuff that we can do with this.
And that's what I find really exciting about this week because every day, someone has built something all on their own and say, hey. What do you think? And it's go growing out in every direction at all times. Like, this is not possible for one person to have a handle on everything.
[00:23:40] AI Narrator #1:
Physically not possible. Well, I think one of the biggest kind of I I don't know if I would say that it's necessarily a problem, but one of the biggest things is that there's no not having a central authority of some kind gives people this you have to do it on your own problem. I mean, anybody can open a Facebook app, put in an email and a password, and off to the races, you can go you can open TikTok, put in your phone number, and you're like, hey. I can watch videos that they tell me to watch. Right? But, like, trying to get on some kind of blockchain technology is I mean, it's a big step up in understanding trust in technology. And I think what's gonna happen over time is that these systems will be built in to perhaps other forms of software or, you know, kind of like the idea of, like, Blue Sky. Right? Where Yeah. Do you sign up for Blue Sky, but you can use your own domain and you can actually, you know, transfer your messages and your content to other apps that are kind of on a similar system?
[00:24:46] Matt Rouse:
You're absolutely right. Yeah.
[00:24:49] AI Narrator #1:
But I think that's that's that's that's that's model, that Blue Sky kinda model, you know, Blue Sky last on whatever. Right? I think that's kind of the start of it. It's kind of people are dipping their toes in it. You know? Same with cryptocurrency. Mhmm. Problem with cryptocurrency is that it's it's speculative. Right? So most people have no understanding of how the technology works, why they would use it. The the only thing that they're using it for is to buy some because they think in the future, it'll be worth more than it is now. Right? They're not out there using the Bitcoin bank machine or, you know, they're not Definitely. Buying pizzas online with their crypto.
[00:25:26] Matt Rouse:
So I completely agree with everything you've said because it's difficult. Onboarding people into crypto is really difficult because it isn't very forgiving. You know? If you make a mistake and if you lose your seed phrase or your private key or someone gets access to your private key, they effectively own the contents of that wallet. Right. So this is a very big UI UX hurdle that people have been mobilizing the smartest people to fix. So we have a few halfway systems right now in crypto. So the way it used to be back in the day, you create a new wallet and you get a 16 word seed phrase. You need to write the seed phrase down. They will tell you every time you open a new wallet. Do not say this on a computer because 99.99% of the time when people's wallets are drained, it was because they downloaded an unauthorized software onto their PC.
It scanned all the contents of the hard drive, and it found seed phrases and private keys, and it cleaned them up. So good old notebook and paper is your best friend for the old way of setting up wallets.
[00:26:33] AI Narrator #1:
Or change the words in your seed phrase.
[00:26:36] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Yeah. And that but that's a little tricky because then it's very difficult to communicate this to, like, your to your trusted family who you would like to share this stuff with. Right. So there's a halfway point, actually. It's called embedded wallets. So embedded wallets use encryption to break up the key into different shards. So it saves one shard on your device, one shard on your Google Drive, and one shard is with the company that started the wallet. So you need two or three Shards to access the wallet. So you can then come like, mobile phones have been an absolute godsend for making this a lot easier because now you can use your fingerprint scanner, your face scanner, all as and your phone is a secure enclave for accessing this stuff. So phone security and these aspects these hardware additions have made it fantastic.
So you don't need to really remember the seed phrase, but you should write it down for sure. Right. But they will encrypt it and make it very easy for you to use it. So it's happening. Then we also have another technology called MPC, which is multi party computation Mhmm. That this is actually thought up in, like, the seventies and eighties and, like, it's one of those really cool states where it was provable to that it's possible. Technology is now caught up and we can implement it now. Right. So, again, this makes it easy to, like, if you lose your seed phrase, we can rotate keys and and you can click the forgot password button for crypto for the first time now, thanks to MPC.
So it's these little innovation that are making it, you know like, human beings make mistakes. I fat fended a trade. I've been in this space for so long. I've added a zero when I shouldn't have added a zero in a trade and made a big mistake. It's happened. And you can't undo mistakes in this space. But what you can do is try to make it make people aware. Are you sure you want to do this? You know? Create more responsive feedback loops to make our applications better, to make it a lot more human usable, really. So it's gonna be little bits, and once someone cracks a good idea because of how permission list this place is like, so much of our code is open source because we need to, like, inspect it for bugs and security flaws. So people make it all open source Right. Because it's just good practice in a space where the stakes are so high.
So if someone does as well, they open source this, everyone uses it. And therefore, we have the floor of security and expectations rising a little bit. So it we're definitely not ready for my mom to come on and start leverage trading with the decentralized exchange. We're not there yet. But I don't think we're as far away from that as one would have thought even a year ago. So it One It's a lot of positive sounds coming from this market in that regard. Right.
[00:29:25] AI Narrator #1:
I think one of the the things that are gonna be a difficult kind of hurdle to get over is the idea of having, you know, this this free application structure without the the company harvesting everyone's data to use to sell ads. Right? Because that model is anybody can log in to my central authority space and use whatever my my application gives them. But because it is both free and really, really low stakes, then if they lose it, it's not a big deal. Right? They're like, well, you know, my my Instagram got compromised, but unless you're like an influencer or a monetized creator or a business person, for 99% of people, their Instagram gets hacked or something, and they're like, oh, whatever. I just made a new one. You know? Mhmm. But the problem is where does the money come from that runs the system?
You know, if it's like, if you're gonna make something like distributed Instagram that's that's on chain, somebody has to pay for the calculation to put the stuff on the ledger. Right? They do. They do. And there's a few examples of this.
[00:30:38] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. Yeah. So there's a few examples of this. So we acknowledge that, you know, to make a parallel space for all this activity, we need roads, we need plumbing, we need all these things to be put in place. So a lot of crypto's criticisms have been about scalability, have been about when there is like, like, when we saw Trump coin launch, like, a month before president Trump got inaugurated, he launched a meme coin, and this was unprecedented levels of traffic on the Solana Blockchain. Solana has been purely designed for ultra high transaction throughput and attention.
Despite all that, this Blockchain ground to a halt because this was, again, unprecedented traffic. So this is definitely something that needs to be put in place, and a lot of the major blockchains have foundations as a part of this. So because this is money, because money is programmable, and because it's also not centralized, like, it like how interact you can effectively make free transactions or very, very cheap transactions, it's a very similar way on blockchains. So you are paying people as part of your transaction to ensure that the transaction goes through. Right. So you have lots and lots of it's decentralized.
It's but these are all participants that are in it for their own gain. They're earning on transaction fees. Right. So their job is to ensure that the network is up so that they can keep getting transaction fees. If the network is down because of them or they are not able to participate in the network's uptime, they get penalized for transaction fees. Right. So this is like a very high level way of how this would work, and it is very much going on a everyone is in it for themselves game theory kind of model to so that you are, rewarded for good work and penalized for bad work. And we've put this in code across the system.
So this is happening, and the Ethereum Foundation and the Solana I don't know if there's Solana, but there's definitely an Ethereum Foundation, and Cardano has a foundation. These are all very key players in nudging the direction of development to put these roads and plumbing in place so that we can actually entertain this traffic. And Yeah. It's not like a one size fits all solution. Like, Ethereum has, like, they call them layer twos. So there's the main Ethereum chain, and then there's lots and lots of different companies building out, like, widening the highway effectively.
So Ethereum can be like a small road where all the high quality consensus and verification happens. Like, this is the truth line. And over here, we have, like for example, we're cooking in the kitchen together. I'm on the main island chopping and say, hey, Matt. Can you cut those onions for me? You're taking off the onions, chopping it, and then you bring them back to me to combine into things. So that's effectively what layer twos are doing in terms of offloading computational complexity onto different spaces, but hoping that they deal with larger volumes so that they can earn on the volume side rather than on the per unit side. So there's different ways of skinning this cat effectively, and it's a long process. We don't know if any one of them is guaranteed the best way, And I think this is why there's more blockchains, more alternative blockchains coming out because the goal is we want this to be seamless, private, yet space for people to make profits through running services and through by providing services.
[00:34:07] AI Narrator #1:
I think one of the biggest things is gonna be getting over the hurdle of telling people, like, let's say, for example, email. The easiest way to stop spam and stop people harvesting email data would be to have a fee for every email. Right? Mhmm. It could be $1.01 thousandth of a cent, you know? Yeah. But that would be enough that the average person is gonna spend $2 a year on email. Right? But your average spammer can't send 10,000,000 emails a day because it would cost them a small fortune. Right? More than they could possibly make.
[00:34:43] Matt Rouse:
So Yeah.
[00:34:45] AI Narrator #1:
In that case, what you would be doing is saying, okay. You know, mister email user, basically, what you're gonna do is you're gonna put $5 in the tank to pay for the fees. Right? And then you get to use this service until you use up the amount of money that you know, the fees that you use for it. Kinda like a pay phone. Right? Yeah. Put in another 25¢ to call for two more minutes or whatever. Right? Except it would be, you know, way more efficient than that. I think you've there's a lot of people who would buy on to that model now if there was, you know, if you could get enough of them together at the same time, I think is one of the difficult parts. Because I would say the biggest thing that I hear from people when they say, oh my god. I can't believe Mark Zuckerberg is, you know, doing this or that or he's following Trump or, you know, when Instagram showed a zillion users, like, super violent and and things that shouldn't be seen that were supposed to be moderated.
And I say, well, how come you didn't leave? Right? And they're like, well, all my friends are on here or all my family's on here. Right? Like, a lot of people say I'm gonna take a break for this or I'm gonna go use another network. But the majority, they, they can't because the cost of switching is too high. The cost of switching is not a dollar cost. It's a, nobody that I know is their cost. So I'm basically going to be out of my tribe. Once the the hardest part is gonna be getting a tribe of people on another system where they see the value of, you know, holding the cards of their own data and saying,
[00:36:18] Matt Rouse:
I'm willing to pay a few bucks for this to happen. Yeah. Right. And the the tribe the tribe aspect you bring up is really, really important because community is the lifeblood of crypto. There aren't that many in the grand scheme of things compared to, like, the users on even, like, fine. Instagram is huge. Right. Facebook is huge. Twitter is huge. Like, maybe 1% of all the Twitter users you can say are active crypto users. And that's probably being generous because what is an active crypto user? Someone who buys and just forgets about it, say, I will sell in ten years. I wouldn't call them an active user. They're a participant in the market for sure. They're contributing to the to the market. But in terms of actively, you know, being a DAU, daily active user, they won't, like, come up. So there's a very, very small pool of highly engaged users in crypto.
And I'm a Web three marketer, and my whole I've been shouting this from the rooftops for for years now, it seems. Like, we need more people. We need to make the narratives more approachable. We need people to feel comfortable getting in over here because you mentioned some very valid points about people not liking speculative aspects of it, people not liking the complexity of it. The space is large enough for us to move beyond these aspects if you start delivering goods and services that people genuinely want to use. Like, it's it can't just be incrementally better than web two. We need to be so much better than web two that these tribes that you speak of that are keeping people on Instagram despite their multiple lapses.
Like, this needs to be a very, very simple decision and a compatible, you know, step. Right? Can I migrate my Instagram following onto a new application? So Mastodon is part of the Fediverse Right. That is doing this in a similar way. It they're decentralizing, but they're doing it without crypto. So mass so Nostr, Mastodon, which is the other one, Blue Sky Yeah. That's all fairly compatible with each other. There is one that isn't as compatible, but I still think it's a very valuable space. It's called Farcaster. And this goes back to actually putting out that infrastructure. So Farcaster is the company behind Farcaster is called Merkle, and they are responsible for the Farcaster protocol.
So, effectively, what they're doing is they're putting out a set of, like, servers and technology that is a base layer of information for which people can make clients. So client is how you interact with the protocol. So it's like email is the protocol, and Gmail is what you're using as the client. So Parcaster is the protocol that's being built, and the same company building the protocol is also building a client, which is the biggest client right now, called Warpcast. But there are other clients based on your requirements for the network. So Warpcast is gonna be everyone's probably standard one. But let's say, for example, you prefer a chronological news feed versus an algorithmic news feed. Right. Then you can create your own And this is like a social network.
Yes. So this is a social network. It is an on chain, like a crypto native version of Twitter and Reddit combined. Right. So it uses, like, subnets. We call them channels on Firecaster, but it also has your normal feed, which is like tweeting on Twitter. So it's a hybrid of the two, and it completely embraces on chain stuff. So there's a lot of AI agents on there. There are bots that you can launch your own community token. I haven't launched one for my community yet because I don't see how I can use this to immediately benefit my community beyond speculation. I don't really wanna get into the speculation side. Like, if I can, for example, create, like, a pro, like, a paid version of the thing, but I don't want people to pay me directly, they can just show their loyalty in what I'm building by holding the token and, like, you know, having a ticker. Like, you need to hold this much for a hundred days, and then you can access this pro stuff for free. I would much rather use these tools to enable access rather than to gate access.
So I don't want so my podcast is also hosted on chain for this sort of a reason. Like, because I'm talking to a little bit of a tech native community, I want an a new Internet. I want to sort of be the change that I'm speaking about. Right? So let's embrace these tools. Let's build out on the very tools that I am positioning myself to saying, hey. Is this what the Internet could be? So it's iterative, and I think it's really experimental and fun, and it's all back and forth with the community. You know, there's there's also the thought that,
[00:41:14] AI Narrator #1:
you know, something doesn't have to serve 8,000,000,000 users to be worthwhile. Right? Yeah. It could just be for that community, and that might be enough. And, you know, you see people at Ziptrons of the world who are are, you know, always talking about, you know, what's wrong with this technology kind of thing. And I think the biggest thing that that you hear from those people is, like, where's the the killer app that was blockchain based. Right? Like, how did this where is this being used that it changed everything? And I think what happened was a kind of a combination of two things. One thing was too much focus was put on the speculative side of finance, right, with your coins and meme coins and and the shit coins and all the other crap that's going on. Right? And, like, Trump coins and Melania coins and rug pulls and all those kind of ridiculous things. Right? But the other side of it was there was never a UI that was good, honestly. Like, I mean, I used to work as a UI designer. Right? And, like, I see these things and they're like, oh, you wanna play our blockchain game? Well, it's gonna be great. First, go get this wallet you've never heard of.
Download it to this place, get the seed phrase, write it down, go in go into your other place, transfer crypto from this wallet to that wallet, and then that wallet has a bridge that could go bridge from that coin to this wallet. And then you gotta transfer it into the game and convert it into this currency. And I'm like, I was like, I didn't even get past step one. Right? Like, I'm just like, it's just not worth it. You know? And that's, yeah, that's exactly the problem. Right? There's so much friction and just doing something simple. And it needs to be trend. The technology needs to be transparent. Right? People are like, this is gonna be great because it's blockchain. Right? Which matters if you're a person in the blockchain community, but to everyone else, it's it's a nothing burger. It's like saying, well, you should pay with with your credit card on my machine because it's Interac. And people are like, oh, it's Interac. Well then I will then they don't care. Right. They just want to beep their card on the thing. Beep. Right? Yeah. This is how, that's how it needs to work. Right? It needs to be like swipe your card, put in your code or your ZIP code or whatever. Right? And it works. Like, that's that's the system. Right? Remove all the friction from the system and it will work. And if So we're getting there. We're actually getting there. Well, that's what I'm talking about. Right? So if you're talking about, like, an app or something, really good example would be, I wanna upload all the records for my property. I wanna put my house. I wanna put my survey information, my mortgage, or whatever it is. Put all that data, put it in a wallet that's on chain kind of thing that's secure. I could give it to somebody if they need it. I could retract it if they don't. But it needs to be an app on my phone where I put in my email and my login kind of thing.
And, you know, however that login kind of gets converted to security. But, yeah, it has to be it has to be easy. Right? And then people don't care if it's on the blockchain. What they care about is, is it secure? Am I gonna lose my stuff? What's the cost? What's the time investment? Right? And I think that those are the things those are the things that are really holding back kind of blockchain applications for being, you know, as big as they could be. Like, if you look at, you know, something like XRP where they're like, we're using this so that you go to the bank and you move money from our bank to Japan, and the Japanese bank gets it through XRP, and then they give them cash.
So I give the bank cash, and Japan gives the person back that I was sending the money to, gives them the money, and my money doesn't get lost in the way. That's all I care about. I don't care if it's on blockchain. Right? Yeah. And I think that's that's where things are going. Right?
[00:45:02] Matt Rouse:
Yeah. For sure. And what what you mentioned about that complexity, so a few blockchains are fixing some of these things. Like so we have this thing called so every action like, let's say, you can extend your analogy of the game and the complexity of onboarding onto the game. Because once you're in the game, every single on chain action requires a transaction and for you to verify that transaction. So what we have is called session keys, where you can sort of create okay. It'll be seamless for the next five minutes of all your transactions. You can buy and sell freely within this platform, and then you can sort of leave the area in the game, and it kinda closes off the session keys. So you can have, like, an actual market within, like, your Skyrim on the blockchain. You know, people can physically meet and hang out and trade stuff. So, like, making some of these things possible. And, also, a very key part about moving to a world beyond private keys and beyond seed phrases and beyond, you know, being able to lose access to your account by just misplacing a note a sticky note on your PC is account abstraction.
So this has been in place now. Like, we've so the way these upgrades happen on a blockchain network is they're already maintained by a bunch of different participants around the world. Everyone managing a node, which is a contribute which is like basically a spoke in this massive network. Right. It needs to sort of agree that, hey. We're gonna run this upgrade together, and that's called a fork. A hard fork is effectively when everyone reaches a consensus and they upgrade the network, and it's not backward compatible. So this is like we've decided we're going forward with this. So a very major thing that happened with this was account abstraction.
So that effectively separates your your private key from your account, and it, like, makes it so that you can use the same private key, and you are Matt. You are no longer a string of code. Right. Your name is now Matt, and Matt has several wallets. So the intention for this is to make it so that not every single interaction that you make with this wallet will be you paying for it, you sending it out. Right? We can have companies coming in and sponsoring your transactions. So you can pay me effectively for free because if you use a smart account paid for by, let's say, a Zirayan or a StarkNet wallet, they have part of their budget to help onboard more people into this. So this is part of their whole outreach to say, hey. For a limited time, we will sponsor all your transactions.
And then as this network in this space builds out, you have more people sponsoring transactions, more people incentivizing participation. Therefore, your wallet becomes your identity. And should you choose to reveal your identity wallet link to an advertiser, you can potentially get paid for that. You know? Right. So it's about creating it's about giving you the flexibility to choose. There's no such thing as a magic bullet solution because as I started, everyone's experience on the Internet is different. What everyone wants from the Internet is different. Therefore, we need to give people the flexibility to choose. It's like you look at, you know, how people considered decades back in the day. Right? We have a very clear picture in our head what the sixties represented, the seventies represented, the eighties represented. But since then, we've fragmented in every direction. Like, the nineties means something different to everyone.
The the oughts, something different to everyone. The tens, something different to everyone. And I think that is just a wider representation of how our society has become so diverse, so many different ideas are existing concurrently. So exactly what you said, it doesn't need to appeal to 8,000,000,000 people. We can have a group of 10 k super fans and run a multibillion dollar company based on just 10,000 users because the value that each individual can drive and create is so much greater than ever before, thanks to all the tools that we have, the open source, and the knowledge that, honestly, every participant is coming onto the Internet with. Like, people right now, we love to say that, you know, people, like like, they're, like, brain rot through TikTok by letting the algorithms do all of our thinking for us and stuff, but, no, actually, people are a lot more knowledgeable now. They may be knowledgeable about things that you may not value, but they are, in general, more knowledgeable about stuff.
So I think it everyone's gonna find their own little paths, their own little cozy corners of the Internet where their friends hang out and create something afresh. It's a little bit more private, a little bit more intimate. They can make friendly wagers with the money part of this Internet that we're putting in, but they don't need to participate in that money part of it. So I think this is the main value proposition of what a crypto world could bring, I think, and that is the ability to choose.
[00:49:49] AI Narrator #1:
Absolutely. And I think the idea of of having control over your personal information and your data is is only gonna be something that that happens more as, you know, especially with AI systems and things coming online, talking about the slippery slope, you know, it's it's gonna be a it's gonna be a new world. Right? And so maybe we will have a new internet coming soon. Marv, if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best place for them to get ahold of you?
[00:50:17] Matt Rouse:
Great. So I have a newsletter, www.marvinpaul.com. So it's on my website. I'd say, released my second edition. It's new. I'm using it to effectively consolidate all my activities because because I am active on the blockchain this is something no one tells you about blockchains. There's no notifications. So all that notification spam you get on your social media, you're not gonna get it on here. So I've effectively had to recreate a notification system. Sorry. There's a sun coming sunlight coming in. To recreate a notification system, so my newsletter is for that. Consolidates all my writing, my podcast.
I being a media guy, I love watching stuff on YouTube. YouTube is my most important subscription. Forget Netflix and Prime and all that. YouTube is my is my go to. So things that I that made an impression on me, I shared that on the newsletter. Then I'm active on x because I'm in the crypto space. M p web three wordsmith. That's my name on there. And I'm active on Farcaster too. So I find I on on Twitter and Farcaster, I spend a little bit I sort of spread my time out on those two. And, yeah, I'm quite active. Free to DM me at any point on there. I'm always down for a good chat. And where else am I active?
It's mainly those places. On Instagram, it's mainly memes. You're gonna get zero value from following me. I was gonna keep shopping.
[00:51:38] AI Narrator #1:
Marv, I appreciate you coming and and explaining what potentially could be the future of the Internet for everybody here. I know it's a little techie, might be a little over some people's heads,
[00:51:48] Matt Rouse:
but, you know, it's it's good to have an idea of, you know, what are these things, what's coming down the pipe, and, you know, what could be the next Internet. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And see, the the and the new Internet isn't gonna be a winner takes all situation, I think. I think each of us are gonna have our own say in how this looks, the space that we can participate in. So if you have any ideas, just my advice, build it. You know, there are so many AI tools. You don't need to be a programmer anymore to create a website or to launch any services. Like, the AI will help get your idea out there. So I think this is the best ever time to be someone who is unhappy with the service that they use because, like, there's never been a better time to just make your own. That's right. Build your own social media, people.
Alright, Marv. I appreciate you being on the show. Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Take care. Talk to you soon.
[00:52:39] Narrator AI:
Thank you for listening to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast with your host, Matt Rouse. If you enjoyed the show, please leave us an honest review on your favorite podcast app. Be sure to check out Matt's book, Will AI Take My Job, and have a wonderful day.
Introduction to the New Internet
The Evolution of Internet Connectivity
Building a Better Internet
The Importance of In-Person Connections
Blockchain and Personal Data Control
Challenges of Blockchain Adoption
Community and the Future of Web3
The Role of AI and Blockchain in the New Internet
