Driving Brand Loyalty Through the Metaverse with Lindsey McInerney - Step into the Metaverse podcast: EP13

Good day everyone and welcome to the Step into the Metaverse podcast. My name is Marc Van Rimenam and I'm also known as the Digital Speaker. I'm a future tech strategist and I think about how emerging technologies change organizations and society. This podcast is part of my new book called Step into the how the Immersive Internet Will Unlock a Trillion Dollar Social Economy. The book is available as an ebook, hard copy and audiobook. As part of this book, I did nearly 100 in depth interviews with the stakeholders involved in creating the open Metaverse, the investors, the developers, the artists, the collectors, etc. And I've turned a selection of these interviews into this podcast as I think that these conversations are too valuable to leave them on my computer. In this interview, I interviewed Lindsey McKinney. Lindsey calls herself an early Internet nerd and tech futurist. Lindsay is consumed by the emergence of the Metaverse and excited about the ways Crypto, blockchain, gaming, NFTs and XR will change our current digital and physical landscape. As the former global head of technology and innovation at AB InBev, the world's largest brewer, she launched the brand into the Metaverse. She currently works on a new venture exploring the intersection of Web3 and entertainment. During the interview, we discussed the important role that NFTs will play in the Metaverse, what brands need to do if they want to become successful in the Metaverse, how the Metaverse will change the future of Europe, as well as the ethical challenges of the Metaverse. Enjoy the conversation.

How did you end up in the Metaverse? Because until recently you worked for ndev, which is already an interesting angle to go into the Metaverse. So I'm very curious.

Look, I've always been a tech nerd and I've always been sort of early into technologies. So, you know, I can remember being interested in computers from a really young age. I got into startups and just loved the ability to build something from nothing and create and deliver technology and find solutions to difficult problems, and then ended up at AB InBev after spending my entire career at startups as global head of technology and innovation. And in that role, it was all about bringing the most exciting technologies to the world's largest brewer. When I started figuring out, you know, of course with AB InBev, there's so much you can do around technology because you could go into the agricultural technology space, you could go into the marketing space, you could go into HR legal. Like they have every, you know, every department and every technology.

Fair enough.

But you know, perhaps because of my background, the one that excited and interested me the most, I think, you know, I've been reading a lot of sci fi, I watch a lot of sci fi and I've been thinking about the Metaverse a long time. Was what I saw creeping up with the convergence of the technologies that make up the Metaverse, the pandemic as the big accelerator. And just this feeling that we were in the middle of a tremendous shift that I hadn't felt before. I mean, I rode the first wave of social, the first wave of web 2.0 really hard. And so a lot of these feelings were very familiar to me. That was sending off every spidey sense in my body. So dug in, wrote a thesis on metaverse for big brands at AB InBev, how big brands could take advantage or leverage the metaverse, or enter the metaverse just to play. Wrote a thesis on cryptocurrencies and NFTs, how they could be used there, or how brands would be able to start thinking about them and then. Well, not like everybody else, I suppose I probably lived a little bit more in isolation than a lot of folks these past two years. My partner and I moved out of London to the English countryside and completely just removed ourselves from, I guess, a big city life. And so that left a lot of time to just explore digitally. So reading more books, watching more films, going down deeper blog rabbit holes and Twitter rabbit holes and making more friends on the Internet and just became obsessed with everything that I was feeling and looking at things that were happening in crypto, et cetera, and it just became an absolute chase.

Nice, nice. I'm curious, is that thesis you wrote about the Metaverse for brands, is that public? Would you able to share them with me? Because I'm very curious to read that.

It's not public that I left when I. When I left at ab, when I left abm, that's something I left there. But, you know, like a lot of the core concepts kind of remain in that. Brands like to be where people are. People are moving to this space faster than ever. People are converging there. It's a place to excite and delight them. I believe the first and early experiences in the Metaverse will be entertainment based and entertainment led. It'll be sports media entertainment. It's the future. The Metaverse is the future of sport media and entertainment. And it's certainly the early experiences will be exactly those. And so that leaves a huge opening for brands who love to delight customers in those ways, to participate in a really seamless way that makes sense. And I think those were. A lot of my recommendations were around. You know, brands need to enter in a way that feels natural to the brand. So if you're not an artist, if you're not a brand who's a creator or an artist, in reality, it's not sensible to jump into the Metaverse and start to sell your art. Right. And that was one of the things I did with Anheuser Busch and Zed Run, where Anheuser Busch is the world's largest sponsor of sport. And so looked at Zedrun, which is the premium sporting platform of the Metaverse. It's a crypto based horse racing game also located in Australia, by the way. And Ab and Bev, there were sort of two natural fits there. Budweiser in reality has Clydesdale's. They're iconic. You know, Budweiser owns Stables in St. Louis, Missouri. And so there was a decent fit there. And then with Stella Artois, who sponsor one of the most premium horse races in the world, there was another natural fit. And so we looked at it and kind of went, you know, it really mirrors very much the Stella Artois partnership with premium horse racing. And so decided to lay a partnership and foundation there where we felt consumers would welcome us, they would expect us. It wouldn't feel too dissimilar to where they kind of expect to see us today. When you show up to a Super bowl, you expect to see Budweiser. When you show up to a baseball game, you're probably going to see one of Ab and Bev's beers. Hockey, same thing. And so horse. And likewise, we're horse racing. And so it felt like a good place to sort of dip our toes and test people's response to us entering this space, which can be a really tricky thing to do.

Yeah. And how did people respond?

It went famously well. We garnered the metrics that a big brand care about. We garnered a ridiculous number of media impressions, which is a key one. The campaign was seen as being one of the more creative ones this past year. I believe it's being submitted for a number of different awards, things like that. And it exploded in a way that I truly, maybe naively, didn't expect it to.

Nice. I guess that's a recognition for your work and having a vision to be open minded and to be innovative.

This is it.

You know, this is the hard part for brands right now is figuring out how to move quickly and be open about it. Because there's a lot of ethos in this space that don't really make sense or don't jive with how brands traditionally operate, like not having complete control, like co ownership or, you know, not actually owning everything. Different kinds of data, I would say, like no data, but that's not true exactly, because the blockchain, of course, allows you to track things in a much more precise way than the traditional Internet. But the kind of data you're getting is very different, you know, so, so things like that.

Cool. So for the Metaverse, obviously you're involved with NFTs as well, and I think you have a bored ape as well, if I'm correct.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I have a. I did buy a bored ape and have been playing in that space for a while also. And you know, again, kind of going back to this interesting concept of ownership, you know, being able to actually own an asset for the first time digitally, which is a really cool experience for me because of course people have been able to own assets digitally before. People are used to buying skins in video games, et cetera, but those are so centralized and siloed that they can't be taken anywhere else. And you actually don't ever really own them. You just put your credit card into a video game platform, you spend thousands of dollars, you outgrow the game, and you kind of leave your thousands of dollars there. And so this idea of being able to own something, but own it in a way that was decentralized, that allows you to leverage open marketplaces, those kinds of things, really interesting. But then the communities that are being built around these assets are actually really tremendously interesting as well. And the board apes have been an interesting purchase for sure.

So how important are NFTs and communities for the Metaverse?

They're everything. I mean, if crypto is the currency, NFTs are the assets. They're what will allow us to own objects in this new space. And so the way that in reality, we humans like to own things, whether they go and hunt and gather them, or whether they go to a shop and buy them. Humans like to own and take things home and physically have them. And that is what NFTs are to the Metaverse. We will be able to purchase and own assets. I think a lot about the direct to avatar economy. And this is one of the low hanging fruits that I see for brands, you know, where as people start to show up in these new worlds, they're going to want to express themselves the same way they do in reality. And what's exciting about that is you can be a lot more expressive than we've ever been able to be in reality. But people want to express themselves. And so what does that look like? It means they're going to want T shirts, sweatshirts, outfits, and, you know, costumes, headwear, footwear, color. You name it. You know, folks are going to want that. They want to own it. Own it, you know, and be able to prove that they own one of a certain number, which I think is something that parallels sort of the premium space in fashion, where when you buy a limited run of a certain pair of Nike high tops or something by Louis Vuitton or Chanel, you know, it's quite limited and scarce. And in this way, because NFTs have serialized, certifiable ownership, you'll also be able to know that you only own one of 1,000 T shirts or 10,000 T shirts. And humans are squirrels, man. We like to collect. We like to know that what we have is scares. We like to trade a lot of early behavior that I think got me excited about what's happening right now, too. I've been a collector my whole life, and collector communities are interesting, man.

They're.

They're subcultures, they're countercultural. And if you go into, like, you know, any of the subcultures around collecting, you'll find people that are just, like, you know, on fire for these objects in a way that you couldn't understand unless you were there. Comic book collectors, you go, it's just a comic. Go to Comic Con. Like, are you nuts? You know, you think it's just a guitar? Yeah, right. Go to, you know, go to a great vintage guitar shop and talk to someone there. It's. It's really exciting. And that's the kind of sort of sentiment and behavior that NFTs now will be able to, you know, allow us to have. But digitally, yeah, we're digital creatures, so this is a really interesting way to start to transition some of our ownership.

So are these NFTs, and also, what is the prerequisite for a rich and vibrant metaverse economy, or is there more things that are required to get that?

Yeah, I think, you know, so I think probably the cryptocurrency and NFTs will be two of the big things that light this space up. But of course, none of those will be worth anything without creators. People who are creating space that people want to be in, people who are setting up experiences that people want to participate in, and who are delivering goods that people want to buy and have and hold and trade. This new space is in. The metaverse is nothing without community. And this planet's nothing without community. But I think the metaverse that's sort of evolving right now in its very nascent stages, is really making that quite clear that we're nothing without each other.

Yeah, yeah, that makes total sense. And one of the things that you see happening in these communities is a new concept called Play to Earn. How is that going to affect the metaverse? How important is it for the metaverse?

Yeah, I think Play to Earn is incredibly interesting. I think that just the idea of being able to earn from doing things you love is incredibly important. We'll see a whole bunch of new jobs and job titles emerge within the metaverse, and that's because there's an economy there. So it'll be play to earn. It'll also be create to earn, it'll be participate to earn, it'll be learn to earn, which I, you know, which I'm finding all the time. And so it's this idea, I guess, of being rewarded for the time you spend. Whereas in Web two you had data sucked out of you for the time you spent, and the more time you spent, the more you had sucked out of your experience and you were contributing to something that made other people rich, brands who you inevitably purchase from, or large networks that were charging for the advertising and scraping that data out of you for spending time there. You'll be able to actually get rid of that model and become an earning individual in that space, you know, for doing the things you love instead of, you know, the opposite.

Yeah, for me, I completely agree with you. The only way forward with the Internet, because the current model is completely broken, I think. So similar to the first phase of the Internet and the mobile Internet, you know, those companies that were able to embrace those versions of the Internet, you know, companies that are able to embrace the immersive Internet will have a head start, you know, which brands do you think are taking the leads and what are they doing?

Yeah, look, Adidas this past week has done great work. They've, you know, and it's early work. Right. You know, but it's important in that they're demonstrating thought leadership, they're demonstrating they care, they're thinking about it. So Adidas this past week is partnered with Coinbase NFTs. So that's going to hopefully have huge distribution and sort of is a signal that they have NFTs that they're going to be launching, which is great. They have partnered with the Sandbox, which is one of the immersive worlds within the Metaverse. Again, you know, fantastic move. Shows Thought leadership, very excited to see what they're going to do there. And last night they dropped a partnership with the Bored Ape Yacht Club, so still don't know what that looks like. But they dropped, you know, an image of a three dimensional ape wearing an Adidas tracksuit jacket with two other logos that are sort of, you know, big in the space attached to it. So they're doing a great job. Nike are doing some interesting things and thinking about it. But I think importantly, there's some new brands emerging, like Artifact, who for all intents and purposes have an opportunity to be the Nike Adidas of this new space. And the way I see things going, I believe that the big brands of this next wave, so if in Web two you had Uber, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, those kinds of things, the big brands of the Web3 space, I think will be decentralized, co owned, built by community. And that's what you're starting to see emerge with groups like Artifact, who I think are just doing incredible things in the space.

Yeah.

And then I think it's also natural that fashion brands are the first one to jump onto this with the whole, yeah, you want to have your identity also in Metaverse, and you will probably have more identities, the Metaverse and you have in your real life.

So it's actually the lowest hanging fruit out there right now because people have avatars now, they want to dress them and there's not very many options. And so there's opportunity there to just provide differentiation for people. But of course, some of the coolest experiences so far, some of the coolest assets that have been built have come from the biggest fashion houses in the world. And I don't think that that should surprise anybody because you're right, you know, they're allowing people to explore their identity in a way. The Metaverse allows people to explore their identity in a way that they've never been able to in physical worlds. And, you know, we can be entirely expressive with no confines of physics, which is very cool. And you know, there will be spaces that invite us to be a lot more expansive in the way we think about identity. So, yeah, the fashion houses have done some very cool things as well.

Yeah. And so Direct to Avatar is sort of the low hanging fruit. But I think it's part of a bigger concept which I call E commerce or immersive commerce. What do brands need to do to become successful with icommerce? Because it's different than E commerce completely.

And it's funny because I talk about there being a couple different waves that are really similar to this. But this, by the way, what's happening right now is the velocity is 1020 x what I've seen in any other moment. But you know, there was the early hey, we don't need a website. Don't be, let's not be ridiculous, right? And then of course that was stupid and everybody needs a website. There was like, you know, we don't need an email address, we'll just have one for our department and we'll distribute the mail when it comes in. Like haha, everybody has five now. There was we don't need social media, we've got press releases. That turned out to be silly as well. Facebook's a trillion dollar company, of course you need social media. And then there was like we don't need E commerce, we've got brick and mortar. And I think again this past year has just made that quite laughable. But E commerce was doing really well even before the pandemic. This is going to be another really similar one where you're going to have folks saying we don't need E commerce. It's not for us, it's not really going to. But today you have for example, PO apps, proof of attendance where people will go and they'll get a token for having been somewhere. Well, what seems more sensible to me is again replicating reality. When you go to a concert, what's one of the biggest things people walk away with? A T shirt, a tour shirt where it's got the name and date of each of the stops on the tour and your favorite band on the front. And that's something people walk away with. It seems nonsensical to me to believe that that wouldn't parallel what's happening right now very quickly. Same with in general attending any of these conferences where you're getting PO apps, why would you want a sticker that says I was there when you could have a shirt for your avatar? And again, remember, avatars are very boring right now. You can choose a red shirt, a yellow shirt, a blue shirt and green shirt. And so if you gave me a great shirt that says I was at NFT NYC or Art Basel or any of these other places, that is already way cooler and identifies me with groups of people that are similar to me, like minded early. So of course I would prefer to wear that on my avatar than what exists today. So this feels like just a no brainer that even the most basic fashion. And in reality I might not wear an NFT NYC shirt by the way, but where I have Very few options in a metaverse today. That seems completely normal. You know, at AB&VIV, I was talking a lot about, you know, there being opportunities to enhance commerce today. So if you think about like the average e commerce experience, say it's a two dimensional website, you scroll through, it's boring, you order a bunch of stuff. And I see my friends do this all the time. They order a bunch of stuff knowing they're going to keep maybe 50% of it. They'll order a pair of trousers in four different sizes, right? So they'll get all of these items to their house and then they'll return 50, maybe more percent. And that is incredibly costly to the manufacturer, to the provider. So I see the ability to have three dimensional stores where they're fully staffed with people to ask questions to, just like real stores. So you can go in and say, I'm looking for something for a fancy dress event. I only like the color black and I want trousers, not a dress. And rather than try to scroll through the 50,000 items on a website and I'm thinking about groups like asos, right, or some of the large platforms, it's impossible to find what you're looking for more so than reality. You know, they'll be able to help round things up for you. And part of this might be driven by AI, part of this will be driven by an actual human being who's being paid a living wage to staff this physically from their home, but digitally in the 3D shop that you're shopping in. And then what you'll be able to do is actually go and try those items on your avatar who you know will be able to be modeled after your own human body. And so you'll be able to try it on, have a look in the mirror, see does this fit. So now you're reducing the returns from 50% of your bags, maybe 20%. You'll have someone there who just like reality will be able to suggest, why don't you put this belt with it? Or you know, it would look really great, these accessories. So now you've got upselling ability that you don't as well in this, you know, in this current E commerce model. And so I see like not only purely digital abilities to sell things into, create experiences and provide assets to people that you don't right now at all in reality, but also that digi physical experience where you can increase revenue, decrease returns and create opportunity to allow people to engage with you that they, that they didn't really have previously. So you know, with AB And Bev, I was talking about even, you know, because people go, okay, physical goods, but what about consumer goods? Like, have you tried to buy wine online this past 24 months? It sucks, right? Like, if you don't know exactly what you're looking for. If you're looking for that gold nugget recommendation, the reason you go to a wine shop today, you know, is to talk to the person there who recommends a killer bottle to you you never would have picked up. We can do that this way. If you and I were to go to a concert together, Mark, we could buy the T shirt and enjoy it for our avatar, but also have it shipped to our house two weeks later, you know, physically. And we could also share a beer, right, where I might buy us a beer to watch the concert from, that we're watching digitally in totally different time zones. And that beer went shipped to my house via Deliveroo in London and yours via Ubereats in Australia. And now we're having a cross time zone digi. Physical experience where we're both watching a concert in this new world, but also enjoying a beer together as though we were in person. And so there's just absolutely infinite opportunities if brands are sort of willing to be a little bit open and kind of accept early on that brands are often wrong about trends like the Internet, like E commerce, like social media, and just take some risks, take some risks and partner with great groups who are building some of these assets and try.

Yeah, just give it a shot thing and explore it, I guess, and fail. And that's okay as well.

That's it. And there will be a lot of failure. We're going to make a lot of mistakes, you know, and this is every era. Every era. If you look at early social media, so many ridiculous errors and silly things done. And same with E commerce, same with the Internet. But you know, out of all of that iteration and failure, and I believe that anybody entering early should be commended for the bravery and sort of courage that it takes to get there. I know how difficult it is to get things done in these early spaces for big brands especially, they should all be commended for it. And there will also be a failure. And we need to accept that that's how you learn and grow and build new things.

Absolutely. If we shift a little bit from the consumer and the branding perspective to sort of more enterprise perspective, how do you think the Metaverse will change the future of work?

I mean, if you look at the future of work right now, it has changed a lifetime in two years. I personally believe that Work from anywhere or work from home is here to stay. What challenges us in some ways are these zoom calls. Right? Like, they're great, and they've allowed us to survive and continue and carry on in a way that, you know, 20 years ago wouldn't have been possible. And yet there's an ingredient missing. And I think that, you know, there's already a lot of studies on how much easier it is to learn and digest and sort of what triggers in our brains are hit when three dimensions are involved. And so, you know, I can imagine for big meetings in the future, potentially taking them in VR, certainly, trainings, certainly. And you're already seeing that even in manufacturing and machinery. You know, training is happening in these because it's safer as well. But even these kinds of meetings like you and I are having, where, you know, we're just talking can be really interesting to have in, you know, in 3D worlds, conferences become more interesting. Being able to walk the halls and talk to people just like you would at a conference, but not having to take a flight halfway across the world to get there, you know, makes these kinds of things, I think, a lot more interesting.

Yeah, you know, the Metaverse has a lot of good things, a lot of fun, and a lot of opportunity to collaborate better and faster and more efficient and more fun. But they're also, you know, the ethical side of the metaverse, and what are some of the ethics involved with the metaverse? And then second question is, what are some of the dangers that we can expect to happen in the Metaverse?

This is a really important topic and one that I like to talk about and I want to talk about a lot. And the reason is that we screwed up big time in Web two, and it wasn't for lack of foresight. You know, there are sort of two sides to every new technology. Right? There's the good it can do, and there's no question technology is great. And also it can equally do evil and be really bad. And some of the ways that Web2 went have been really ugly. And we have an opportunity to take a step back and build this a lot differently. And there's so many, so many ways for this to go wrong and be used badly. Anonymity gives people a chance to explore identity in a safer way than you ever could imagine in reality. And also anonymity gives people the ability to do bad things in a way that they could. They don't get away with in reality. Right. Like, really two sides of the coin. I think one of the things that occurs to me A lot is that a lot of metaverse comes from a dystopian place in science fiction. And as we build this, and as this starts to emerge, we want to make sure that we're also not forgetting about the reality that we live in and making sure that we're building a metaverse to enjoy and to escape for pleasure because we choose to, not because we have to. And that's like, that's incredibly important. And so, you know, especially for big corporates, I think it's important that they're remembering to do things like allow their employees to vote, engage in politics, have politics. You know, Nike's done a great job this past four or five years of being more politically engaged and sort of not just being a brand, but a brand with a moral compass, at least on certain topics. Right. So it's really important that we don't disband in our politics and disband in our physical world just because we've got these cool places to go, you know, even as individuals while we're. We're building. And a lot of. A lot of what's being built is being built from a political place. Like, we cannot abandon our physical politics just because there's these new worlds where we can go and sculpt the politics a little bit easier because it's being shaped from the beginning, that kind of stuff. Environmentalism, super important, Right. And a lot of the technology that we're building right now is incredibly intensive from an energy perspective. It is going to get better. It will get better. It must get better. There's smarter people than me working on it, and, you know, and that will happen. And also, we need to be very conscious about how we are engaging, I think, with our environmental politics as well, and doing our part to make sure that this world is not in our problem. And also, it would be, I think, unobservant not to recognize that this trend has emerged as a notable topic in the middle of a pandemic, in the middle of a couple of years of tremendous political unrest globally, where there's never been a greater disparity between the rich and the poor, where we have forest fires, burning things down, flood, taking things out. We are on the cusp of a pretty dystopian place, if you couldn't agree that it was already quite dystopian. Right. So how do we kind of, like, tend back to those important topics? Because, you know, otherwise we will all be plugging in from shipping containers somewhere and having to put on headsets because we failed to act on incredibly important topics in reality. And I think that we cannot obsess with one without remembering the other.

Yeah, completely agree. But then let's say that we do manage to create an open and decentralized metaverse and fully creator focused or creator owned, then there are still the dangers that we have as a webtooper though. You know, we have misinformation, we have deep fakes, we have scams, we have malware, we have hackers, and the metaverse will get hacked. You know, how can we minimize this or how can we deal with this?

Again, there's pros and cons of everything. And I think whether you engage in Web 2.0, whether you engaged in Web 1.0, I remember growing up, everyone said, you know, don't talk to strangers on the Internet, right? Like, it's not like this is a new problem, but it is becoming a more complex problem because we've got big amounts of money and a big amounts of commerce happening and you know, effectively new economies happening in this space. And these are one of the things that worry me a lot because, you know, I think right now you have to be quite savvy, frankly to figure out what's going on and to stay out of trouble. And by trouble I mean, you know, avoid being scammed or losing your passwords or monies or whatever, right? So I think new technologies will emerge. And I say to people like, this is like going on engaging. Where we are right now is like being on the Internet in like 1994, 1992. Like, it sucks. It's really hard to get there and it's really hard to figure out how to stay there. The technologies are going to get better, they'll become easier. No question. There's a huge amount of education that needs to go into this space. And if we're going to call it an equal place or a place of equal opportunity or anything like that, or want to, or hope to, then we need to ensure that that is an inclusive education that is broad in scope, that is multi device capable, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I think about this a lot, you know, as a woman in this space, you know, we need to make sure there's more women there, we need to make sure there's more people of color there who are able to identify how these problems are unique for them, the queer community, like et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We need to do a better job at listening to voices in communities that are not the ones we're from to make sure that we don't replicate mistakes. We need, you know, the tech needs to get better. We need to educate those kinds of things. I mean, no different than when you're 15 years old and you're allowed to go to the big city for the first time. You know, you were coached on, here's how you don't get taken in a white van. Here's how you don't get robbed. Here's how you ride the subway. Look both ways before you cross the road. Like, it's a little bit of, you know, all of these things. And then, you know, some of the other stuff I don't have all the answers for. You know, I think there's child psychologists that would argue completely differently. There are, you know, psychologists in general who will argue that, you know, spending this much time digitally makes us sick. And then on the flip side of that, there are people who do enjoy escaping because the reality that they're living is. Is unpleasant or is this is much better than. And while that is damn unfortunate, who the heck am I to judge whether or not them spending eight hours a day digitally is better or worse for them based on their own circumstance? You know, these kinds of things. And so it's balanced. And we need to be engaging with ethicists and sociologists and, you know, everybody needs to be working. We need to try and have some balanced perspective while we're building this and not just assume it's the right thing all the time. I don't have all the answers is the simple answer.

I think you're absolutely right. You have a ton of knowledge on the space. We have this clean slate. You know, we can create something amazing out of it, or we can create something terrible out of it. And it's. I want to really focus on creating something nice which is good for humanity.

Yeah, this is it. And I think, you know, the other thing that I always acknowledge, or I've been. I've been saying this a lot recently especially, is that, you know, we are so early, in two years from now, in five years from now, you and I could sit down and have a coffee and laugh at probably half of what you said right now because it would seem ridiculous. Like, oh, my God, how, You know, our brains are not elastic enough to think as big as this thing goes yet. It's like the early days of the Apple App Store where people were developing apps that, like, I think one of the first apps I downloaded was like, an egg timer. Like, why did I need an EG timer app? Like, that's ridiculous. What a silly application to build. On such an intelligent machine. And yet there we were. And here I am now. There's billion dollar applications built in the App Store, but when it was released, people couldn't think to do anything more clever or creative than build an egg timer. And that's what we're doing right now, Mark. We're talking about egg timers. Really? And five years from now, people will have thought way bigger than this, hopefully us included, because these stories emerge over time and these thoughts emerge over time. We can't have them all right now. You know, like I said, our brains just aren't elastic enough to think as big as this thing goes. But as more becomes revealed and other people make, you know, their moves, will, you know, move our chess pieces accordingly, and hopefully be responsible for building some of the more bigger, sophisticated things. But I kind of like reserve the right to change my mind on some of this stuff. And I think that that's an incredibly important skill set to bring to this space. You can't know it all. I can't. The second you think you know everything in this space, you're dead and behind and an idiot, frankly. And so being able to be free, flexible, being able to admit that I'm totally wrong about that thing or whatever else I think, you know, will leave people in a really interesting place to see and spot the next things, be creative and go after them. And that might mean old ideas in the dirt. And old ideas could only be two weeks old. Who knows? And that's so exciting right now for me, honestly.

Well, thank you so much, Lindsay. I really appreciate all the knowledge that you share with me. It's been absolute pleasure.

And that wraps up the conversation with Lindsey McEnany. If there's one thing that stands out for me from the interview, it is that the Metaverse is a goldmine for brands who want to connect with their customers in novel ways. The Metaverse will enable brands to create unique experiences and drive brand loyalty and engagement. I couldn't agree more, which is why in my new book, Step into the Metaverse, I provide clear steps for brands who want to explore the immersive Internet. If you enjoyed this conversation, don't forget to hit the like and subscribe subscribe button on your favorite podcast platform so you will be notified when any of the other interviews will become available. Thank you and see you in the Metaverse.