Is Blockchain A Good Fit For Your Business? A Tech With Heart Interview With Tracy Hazzard From the Tech With Heart Podcast with Michelle Calloway

Sam.

Hi, I'm Michelle Calloway. I am your host of Tech with Heart. And we are all about empowering business success in a digital era. And today we are going to talk about a topic that many of you probably have heard about, but you just really have no idea whether or not you should be fully paying attention to it or not. And that is blockchain. And what we've done is we've brought an incredible innovative expert to our show that's going to talk to you about blockchain and cryptocurrency and what it is that you as a business owner really need to know about in order to identify whether this technology is indeed something you should be adopting today, tomorrow, or maybe in the near future. So with that, I just want to introduce Tracy Hazzard. Tracy, thank you so much for joining us today.

Oh, thanks for having me, Michelle. You know, I would take any opportunity to be able to talk on a show where we get to sort of detect the tech talk. That sounds awesome, right?

Yes, thank you. That's what Tech with Heart is all about. We really want to empower people by dumbing it down sometimes so that they can digest it and understand it, see how it's applicable. And then we love to educate and empower and enlighten. Right. So we want to show them maybe how they should be or could be using it. And then we also want to.

I love that it's bridge building. That's what I always call it. Like that's what I want. Because you know, we get like when we're building our tech, we sometimes get so in that world that we forget that we have to bring people along to come to be new users to be able to get the most out of it. And otherwise they just get overwhelmed and they're like, you know, as a very good friend of mine, Tom Livesay, says, a confused mind doesn't buy.

No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not. So Tracy is the best person to be talking to about this and let me introduce her to you and so you understand just why she's the best person to be talking to you about it in our Tech with Heart community. Cause she's a very heart centered individual as well. So Tracy is an Inc. Innovation columnist and the co host of four top ranked podcasts. One is Feed you'd Brand, which is listed as one of the CIO's top 26 entrepreneurial podcasts to listen to and product launch hazards. Her last name being Hazard. Ha ha ha. For big product brand builders and WTFF? Exclamation point, which is her 3D print innovation start point. And now she's got this new trust economy which is exploring the emergence of blockchain in business. That is why she's gonna be talking to us a little bit about blockchain today. But in addition, she's been writing over 300 articles for Inc. Magazine. Tracy's been featured in CIO, Forbes, Thrive, Global, Wired, Fortune, Small Business, and CNN Money. So she is really got a lot of understanding, education, she's been interviewed by the best, and she's interviewed the best. So she's learned a lot along the way. And with a constant stream of content and products from her authority platform, she's been able to reach over 100,000 listeners and viewers each month. And Tracy continues to influence design and cast for branded content and $2 billion worth of consumer products and innovation around the world. So she's an innovator, she's an inventor. She's created so many amazing products with the 3D. I know that's kind of where she got her start. And now she's the co founder of a organization or company called Potatize where it's a full production, brand casting platform, exploring blockchain incentive program. So this is an amazing opportunity for us to hear from somebody who totally knows about the technology blockchain and how we as businesses could learn about it, incorporate it, and decide whether or not it's a good fit for us for now, like I said, and for in the future. So thank you, Tracy. Welcome. Welcome to Tech with Heart.

Okay, thank you. Yes. So I want to just step back for a second and you know, kind of correct something that's not that you said wrong, but the way my resume reads or something like that, it sounded, it sounds wrong. So I'm not an expert in blockchain. I'm an expert in disruptive innovation and evaluating whether or not it makes sense for business and application. Right. So if you want to take a look at my blockchain history, you'll see that my co host on the show, Monica Profitt on New Trust Economy. And of course it's two Fs and two Ts with the two Zs. So we really have it going on profit and hazard, but we look at it. She wrote the book Blockchain 101. So she's really the deep expert on like what it is, all the tech side of it and what goes on in it. My role in everything, anytime I look at innovation is, is there a market for this and what should People care about it. Is it important to them? Are they going to do something with it? Is it going to be useful? And that's my role as more of, like, the journalist and the outside person who's looking at, are we going to use this? Is this going to be a value? And do I need to explore this for my clients, for my businesses, for what's going on in the world? And so that's always my approach. So that's kind of. I'm like an expert in being curious about innovation.

Actually. I really appreciate your clarity on that, because what you just said is exactly why I thought you would be a great fit for our Tech with Heart show, because you're hopefully not going to talk above the average person's head. And that's what Tech With Heart is all about, is providing a place, a warm environment for us to ask questions that some may feel like are dumb questions because they don't want to be, like, ridiculed because they don't know enough. No, no, no. Check with Heart is all about supporting you to ask, feel safe to ask those questions. So with that, Tracy, let's go ahead and dive right on in. So what is the difference? Well, maybe you can even start with what, what is blockchain? Quickly, and then go into the difference between blockchain and what we all have heard about cryptocurrency, right?

So this is the thing. Is there two totally separate things? And the people think blockchain and cryptocurrency interchangeably, like, they're just like the same thing, but they're really not. Blockchain is like an information superhighway. It's the new Internet. So I was just interviewing someone today earlier on my show, and he's one of the people who I've like, reiterated the way his name is Steven Mead, the way he says this, because I think it's brilliant. If I asked most people, If I asked 100 people, do they know how the Internet, you know what the Internet is? They would say, oh, yeah, yeah, I know what the Internet is. And if we popped up on a screen, the code that is the Internet, there might maybe one person in your region of the country and the rest of the world, we don't know what it is like, you know, so most people have no clue that. That that's actually the essence of the tech and what the Internet is. Blockchain's the same thing. It's going to be that big, that broad, that foundational for businesses, for financial institutions, for different types of structures of what's going on in the world today and in our digital world today. But things are going to go on, on top of it. And we confuse those things that happen on top of it with.

With the structure, so the foundation and then there's the building.

Right? So blockchain's process came about with the need for what was going on with bitcoin and cryptocurrency in that way. And we also use cryptocurrency for lots of things that aren't cryptocurrency. They're really like glorified tokens and reward systems. So we also have to be really careful there. You know, just because you get points at something and you want to call it cryptocurrency or digital currency, doesn't mean it's actually money. And there. And the SEC would regulate it and there would be all these issues. So it's not really currency as it's defined today. So we need to be really careful with that. But we're talking about bitcoin in its original formation, revealed what was the blockchain and how it would work. And it's a distributed ledger, which means that there isn't. And I like to talk about it this way. We have a lot of trust problems. We have a lot of issues with our financial institutions, with the way money is run. And so you can see why bitcoin came out of it is that there's this crash, there's the market problems, everything's going on at the time that it was invented. And there people are worried, like, what happens next when I don't have access to my capital, to my money, to what I need to do to run my businesses and pay my employees and do all of these things, we need some alternative that some government can't control. And so this is how they started to look at it. And they said, well, how do we do this and not create a giant state silo of information with big targets on it, which is what our banking system is right now, right? This is where all the valuable data is. You know, hack Facebook and get all these username and passwords and all this valuable information, hack Equifax and get everybody's credit scores. Right? Like, we see that going on and again and again. And the only way that we have come out of doing it, and I like to look at it as I started working and developing e commerce sites and all kinds of things back at this, at the dawn of the Internet. And so, like way back in the mid-90s, this is when I started doing this. And so we were building carts and other things, and everything was hackable. Like, everything was like a mess. Next time you turn around, you were like security breaches. It was a nightmare. And. But it was also an unknown because no one had imagined that this information superhighway wasn't just gonna have information, it was gonna have transactions on it. And so it's not built for it.

Yeah, that's really interesting that you bring that all up because it really. You've set the stage pretty well, I believe, in the sense that, you know, we are. Have been operating with the Internet since the 80s or whenever.

Yeah, yeah. And then we really took off in the 90s, in the mid to late 90s. And that's really, really started taking off and becoming more E commerce friendly and transactional in its nature. And now we've turned it into something more social. So we keep adding these layers to the road. And I like to think of it like a superhighway, right? Like the highways down here near LA and Orange county, like, they're a mess, and we just start patching them up. And so that's exactly what we've done. We're just building layer upon layer upon layer on our Internet. That's why we call it Internet 2.0, 3.0. Like, we keep calling it that, right? And so we're just layering up the, like, SSL layers and we're laying. Which means that, you know, we're putting secure technology on top of things, right? So we just start layering these catchphrases and these things that we hear over it. And it's important because it's creating more security, but the reality is that it's kind of unstable underneath. We probably have sinkholes under there. And so no one knows that. And so when we start looking at that and we say, well, what if we just created this, like, you know, air highway above it? All that works in a totally different way now that we know what needs to happen on the Internet.

So we've grown up a lot. We've grown up and we've learned a tremendous amount. And I love the fact that what I do know about blockchain is that it is basically like the honor system. I mean, it's like everybody.

I would say it's not that, actually. It's the. It's the. I'm going to trust but verify, right? Like, trust but verify.

Yeah.

And so it's like. It's like how I. You know, the honor systems I have with my children. Did you brush your teeth? I'm going to smell your breath like, I trust you, but I'm still going to check you out when I kiss you good night. Like, it's, you know, it's that kind of. So what happens with a distributed ledger is that basically all the information, all the security is broken up into little pieces, blah, blah, blocks. So they're broken up all over the place. And in order to get access to the next piece. So let imagine if your Social Security number was broken up into three blocks, right? You've got your first set of numbers, your middle set of numbers and your last set of numbers, and they're not in one single place. So if they got something, you know, my first three digits basically tell you that I'm from California, that I was. That I got my Social Security card here. So did millions and millions of other people, right? So it's not going to change anything for you to have those three numbers. We also know all the time we use our last three numbers as pins, and it doesn't tell you anything either. So it's only when we have the combination of the three things that it matters. So if each one is contained in a block and we can't get to the next one without the address and key being revealed from the current one, so we have to have a password to get ourselves into the first one. It's called a passkey. And so we get into the first one and we don't get the passkey for the next one unless we're verified and authorized to be able to do that. So it's going to go back out and authorize against whoever is the owner or whoever has that information before it can get to the next one. And then even if they still got two, they can't. So we're starting to get a process by which it actually would take a. They can hack into one, but they can't hack into all of them fast enough. So we've made something that's more secure in all of its process, and we've made something that. Where the trust factor goes with whoever. We allowed trust and access to this single thing, and then we haven't given it to one core place. It's not with our bank, it's with this distributed network around the world that has agreed to participate in this. And this is where people get, like, confused. But they can't do anything with the small pieces of data they have. They don't know what the data is. They don't know how valuable it is. They don't do anything but store it and verify that that's what it is. And when someone comes in with the right password, the right passkey, they're allowed to release it. That's the only job that they have. And so that's how we reassemble our account number, reassemble our Social Security numbers or in the future world, right, our IDs, our information, our health information, it could be, and we reassemble that and we only give it out temporarily or in part, not in whole, to the people who we authorize. It puts us in greater control of our data and our information overall. And what it's done is just create this whole new process for how data flows, how trust is created. And so that's why I like to look at it as a new infrastructure.

So you just described basically blockchain, right? That's not what's not what cryptocurrency is. You're saying there's a difference between the two.

So what is cryptocurrency works on top of that. So in other words, it uses the same model. So if I want to give Michelle, I want to send her 10 bitcoin, I have to authorize that transaction. So imagine if I did it in my bank, I'd go to my bank and maybe I'd use a bank was Chase and I'd use Zelle or something like that. And I go over and I, and I send Michelle 10 bucks. And you know, but in this particular case, what's happening is, is that that bank has to verify against your bank. Has to verify against my bank. And you know, it's, it's a process. And while it seems instantaneous to us and everything like that, there actually can be problems like what if in the same moment that it went to go send to you my bit, my bank account overdrew, it just ran out of money. That can't happen in Bitcoin because it has to verify that you have the money, you have the bitcoin, and that it is going to the right person and that everybody agrees that it was supposed to go to that. So it has like this multi layered agreement that's going on in the process that's following it. So it's utilizing the blockchain, but it's not the blockchain. The money is just the transaction that's demonstrating the use of the blockchain.

So I think you did a very good job explaining the difference between cryptocurrency, which is like the financial transactions that take place on top of the blockchain foundation, which is going to like you're, you Keep saying it's going to replace the Internet or it's the new Internet.

It's. I think, yeah, I think it's going to replace certain types of structures within the Internet. So I met a woman from Chase, speaking of that, I met a woman from there, J.P. morgan, at an event that I did last July or earlier this year in New York City. And it was all about, you know, investment, women, women in investing and all kinds of things. And I was asked to talk blockchain there, and she came to me and she said, my company is spending billions of dollars on this blockchain group that we don't know what they're doing and what they're working on. And until I heard you speak, I didn't realize that it was going to be of any value. Like, I just didn't understand it. And I said to her, well, the one consideration that I probably didn't say on stage that you should be thinking about here is that your company doesn't have a choice. A bank in this particular case doesn't have a choice because right now, today, they run on a batch system. And so you know how your bank, like says if you don't make the transfer before 7pm Eastern Time or Western time or whatever it is, right? Pacific Time, if you don't make that transaction and transfer by 7pm then your account is technically overdrawn, but yet they don't process the whole statement and all of the other stuff till midnight that night. And all these transactions you didn't know about come in, right? You've seen that happen before. And all of a sudden you wake up in the morning, you're like, how did those checks come in? When I checked at 7 and I had enough cash, and by morning it's gone. Like, what happened there? It's because they do this batch settlement. And so we don't. We who maybe used to grow up in the old days of actually having statements and all of that, we didn't have the luxury of thinking. This stuff is instantaneous, right? And so our, my, my daughter, the next generation, says, this is ridiculous. Midnight, my time is midnight, my time. And that's when your statement closes. This is a digital world. There's real money here in their brain. These transactions are automated. No person has to do this, reconcile this. Why isn't this happening faster? And it's their archaic system. So they're built on the old blockchain with all these security protocols, with everything that they have to do. And that archaic system can't keep up. And so if they're going to keep up with this perception that money and digital money, especially digital transactions, should be instantaneous and I should have the money at that point and my account should always be absolutely, perfectly in reconciliation. That perception is what the consumers want. So the minute something new comes out on the market, their business is gone. And so something new could totally disrupt them by starting out, by building it on a better system and structure without this history of, like, how you got built and all the patches that they added it. Their company, their databases are just as patched up as our Internet roads.

Yeah. So that leads us right into the very next question, Tracy, which I was going to ask you, is that, okay, so you've described blockchain. You've described what currency is on top of the blockchain foundation. And then you talked about instantaneous transactions and how everything is pretty much automated through the, you know, midnight. My time shouldn't matter whether or not that's not midnight, your time. Transactions should take place in the time zone that they're supposed to take place in at the time that they're designated to take in happening because of the fact that it's all automated.

Right.

So now we're talking about business. Back to business again. So you mentioned Chase, so obviously we can see how this is going to severely affect the banking industry.

Okay, right.

Talking about, you know, cryptocurrency or just the new way of doing financial transactions. Okay, so now let's talk about small businesses or even just regular businesses in America. What should we be paying attention to in this regard? And, and what do you see as far as adoption rates of being able to start making our system so that they're not all patchy underneath, but are incorporating more blockchain technology so that we are set for success in the long game? Because we all know that this is happening. Some of us just aren't clear as to how soon, how soon, how much is it going to cost me to transfer that whole, like, infrastructure of our business over to it? And can you speak to any of these pain points that I'm mentioning right now?

Yeah. So first things first, your database systems and the way that you're working is probably good enough right now. Not every business needs to move into a blockchain. But if you're struggling with certain types of products, problems and you need solutions that are out there, now is the time to consider as you go in to rebuild a system because you're trying to solve a problem that's going on in your business. And I'll talk about some of those in a second. But that when you're looking at that, now's the time to consider is blockchain a better solution for that? And then we want to look at do we do enterprise blockchain, which is blockchain for businesses where we can create privacy factors and a couple other things where we're customizing them and making them proprietary to our business, or do we want to use a public blockchain because it serves the public good? So I might want my health information to be completely out on the public blockchain so that any hospital, any emergency company, I can authorize at a moment's notice to have a release happen where if I did that only within a private company, only within your network. And when you're out of network, you're screwed. Like, you know, so like that kind of idea. So we want to think about which would make the most sense. That's your next step question. But thinking about the kinds of problems that we might have. Supply chain has a huge lot of problems. Like where is food? Is a really great example of this. We have a lot of problems with food safety. So we have a lot of issues where foods going into Walmart or Target or any of these grocery stores that we have all over the place that they might be contaminated. We've had lots of issues here with contaminated lettuces and all kinds of things out here in California.

Right.

It happens everywhere around the the world. And when they do, it can take up to 10 days for them to figure out where the source of it came and remove the proper products from the shelf or figure out what that is. And if they don't take it within that 10 days, usually what they do is at some point when they realize it's romaine lettuce or something, romaine lettuce disappears off the shelf and gets destroyed. And even though it's not probably all contaminated. And so because, you know, it's better to be safe than sorry is the view in foods. Right. We don't want to get people sick. So we look at that. But now we've reduced the for us to, well, Walmart, specifically utilizing a specific type of enterprise blockchain, has been able to reduce that down to seconds. So when they receive that there's a contamination happening or some kind of foodborne illness that has gone on and it's identified as melon, they go and they, they can go through the exact supply chain of every single place that touched that melon along the way and know if there's at the source. So by the time you walk from picking up a melon in the grocery sect, walk to the register, if it's contaminated, they will not sell it to you and they will pull it from the shelf. So that's how fast they can be and how many people that they can serve through that process. But we have other problems in supply chain too, because as you know, I done a lot of consumer products, so we have problems getting, making sure that payment has cleared, that we have don't have child labor through our supply process. Like there's a whole bunch of things and if we can have audits and security and things that like going through that says, and I've had this happen with furniture we saw, we go through furniture and furniture can go through an extreme amount of testing required by a company like Costco, for instance. And you go through all this extreme amount of testing only to find out and get some here in the US and you, Costco will go and pull a few off the shelf and they fail the test standards even though they passed over in China or wherever they came from at the source, and only to find out that that test that was run on it didn't come from an actual trustworthy source from an audited third party. So its submission in and itself was tampered with. So how do we build a supply chain where all of these things have to be documented, have to come from the right source if they aren't received from the right source, if they don't follow the proper format, the proper protocol come in, and then once they're in, no one can touch them, no one can edit them without it being revealed to everyone within the supply chain. Now we have a lot safer process and more transparent supply chain. So that's a really great way to do that. And then to add one more layer to that, just before you ask your next question, Michelle, which is a one more layer to that is smart contracts. If we need a smart contract, then it may make sense to absolutely build that rather than build in a complex accounting structure. And this is where I looked at that as being my kind of interest in blockchain originally is that I get paid royalties when products sell at Costco or Walmart or Target. And so when I got paid royalties on that auditing, that that was the right amount of shipped and that's how much I got paid and it was correctly done and in the right time frame. Auditing on that, I can tell you, I have had to take so many clients to court over the years. You're nodding because you work in the design industry, how to take so many clients to court over the years to try to get payment for stuff that I did that it was ridiculous. And so that's why I was so happy to leave that industry. So creating that royalty stream, digital rights management comes into that, music rights management, being able to ensure that artists and creatives and those type of people in the world that are paid the value for what they've done. And there's an audit trail that doesn't require them to go to court and spend tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars on lawyers and accountants in the process to be sure that they were paid fairly for the work that they did. Now you're not selling products that are on stolen labor because the reality is is when you've stolen design, you've still stolen the labor when you don't pay for it. And so that's unethical in the process. It's also illegal. And so if we. But you got to prove it on the other end. So if we've got a proof built into the process now we don't have to trust each other. I can take more royalty projects. I don't take them because I can't trust that someone will pay me at the end. So what happens, this happens with developers, that happens with designers. You start cranking up your fees because you know how hard it is to collect on the other side to get a piece of a company or shares or what you were promised. So now we have a different model that removes the trust factor. And it doesn't matter if you trust them or not. Your pay structure is built into the process. Automatic distributions, all of those things can be built in. So we call that feature fractional, you know, fractional ownership. If you go into a share situation, an equity situation, different from distributions on royalties or payments of sales commissions.

So that was amazing.

I know that was a lot to absorb, but I hope it was still in English.

It really was. And I love the pictures that you helped paint. But still, I'm coming back to the to tech with heart's here to empower business owners. So you're talking. I love the fact that you talked about the clean supply chain. You know, there's. There's just no margin for error. I mean, that's one of the things I love so much about what I'm seeing about Blockchain is that I had mentioned earlier, it's like you can trust people, but you said trust and verify. And so that's just one more reason why you can trust it. Because it's being verified. And though I really do like that, and that there's very low error margin, margin for error, there's. I don't even know if it exists, but maybe it does because we're not.

I mean, don't get me wrong, yeah, I don't like to call anything. I mean, there are people who call it, you know, infallible, indelible, like all of those things. But I don't like to do that. I like, I say, you know, where there's always corruption, there's always all of that, but it is much less actually when you don't know what's of value, why are they going to go hacking at it or why are they going to corrupt the system when they don't know where stuff exists and why it's valuable? So, you know, keeping that in mind is it just makes it less likely to happen. Now, there have been some cases where people stole someone's pass keys and their bitcoin got disappeared. And like, so, you know, these things can happen, but I think they happen anywhere. Someone gets mugged on the streets in New York all the time. Right? So it's no different. It's just they thought, oh, well, you can't steal that. Well, you can't steal it unless you actually steal, steal it. And so it's a crime at that point.

I just think, I mean, look at where we were just 20 years ago. I mean, the advancements that we've made in technology and science and this, this new approach, this new era of blockchain that we're entering into, I mean, you will not have a choice. At some point you will have to get on board or you won't be able to be in business, I believe, because that is the only Mechan that we're going to have for transactions.

Right.

I think we're heading in that direction because it is so much more secure. We see so much corruption, so much corruption happening in so many of our different systems. You brought up stuff in the supply chain that I had never even thought of. You know, there's the royalties and all that stuff. I mean, it's a web of mess.

And it's an archaic mess because, remember, it all runs on like mouse mounds of paper. That transfer between a factory and a driver and a driver and, you know, a shipping company and like it's. And there's copies of things and there are banks involved that release money that you stored over there, you know, waiting for everything to be delivered. And then now the money gets released and the bank doesn't know what's good and what's not. So they just say, the paperwork's in order, check, check, check, and you receive bad product on the other side of it, you know, four to six weeks later, when you open every, the box is up. So we. I see this happening all the time. So there's problems there. And when you see see problems like that, that's when your eyes and your ears go, I need a new solution. Let me go out there and investigate what makes the most sense. Blockchain may be the answer for you, and it may not be. And so that's where we start to really see. So when you're coming in a pervasive business problem that could create a innovation for you to be the solution for something that doesn't exist today, then that's a great thing. So we are working on that right now. It's why I got curious about blockchain. It's why I started doing interviews. It's why I started asking all of these questions. Because I saw a problem in my industry, in the podcasting industry in general, and that is that big brands want to go and write one giant check. They want to write a big campaign for $100,000 a month, and they want podcasts to put those ad dollars on, right? They want to put their ads on there, and they want. They want that. There are so few podcasts that qualify to use up $100,000, they'd have to write hundreds of checks, tiny little fractional checks to use up and get the right audience and the broadness. It's not like there's no Google AdWords for podcasts, right? And so I said, well, I've got a whole system for ad mixing and all the things that I could do, and I have shows that would be so valuable to put them on. Why can't I attract the advertisers? And it's because the advertisers want to spend a big check. So if I just resolve the problem of how that the advertiser still does what they want to do, they write the big check, they get the audience profile they want. It doesn't matter to them what show it's on. They don't care. It's real estate, right? It's just ad real estate. As long as it's going to the right community and the right listeners, they're happy. They're going to get their return on investment. So no one has to write a check. It goes through the system, and it's all fractionally divided and distributed and all the hosts out there are so thrilled that they didn't have to go and seek a sponsor, work really hard, give them stats, do anything in the process. They just allowed those ads and agreed to allow them on their show and then they were paid.

So you created a brokerage system for advertising.

It's still behind the scenes. It's not. I mean, we do it, it's manually being done right now because that's how we always prefer to do something. We want to brute force test it, see what's wrong with it, so that when we go to fully build it in the tech, the final tech, we know that it will work, we know that we've got the right features because so often we over build and this is my tech startup complaint, they spend too much time creating a minimum viable product that fails and doesn't do what it needs to do and then they don't scale up and receive the funding that they expect to do because they didn't get the client traction that they expected or the customer acquisition that they expected. And no wonder who wants to use something that's kind of broken and they know it's not good enough from the beginning. So what we always do is we manually do things on the back end that require more labor, require more time and energy putting into it, but we're learning all along the way what they want, what they need, what they don't like on it. And no one's complaining because we didn't, didn't like reveal this giant tech that was so amazing and we just spent millions of dollars of our profit on it or, you know, of the money you've been giving us every month on it. And so we actually have actual users, actual clients. And so we always have a use, a proof of use that goes into it. So when we're ready to build it, we know exactly what it is, exactly all the features that need to happen on it.

So that's not on Blockchain. Are you building it on blockchain?

We will be building it on blockchain. That is what's going to happen. Yes. So we built it off blockchain and we're building it on Blockchain next. So. And that's our next year. But I wouldn't have come to. Yes, it's a definite, I need to use this to make this happen. If I hadn't been transacting and realizing there's so many problems and this doesn't make sense and no one trusts the data and I'm having trouble acquiring bigger brands and I'm having trouble with this because it needs to happen in that way. It needs to be as simple as Google AdWords. So that's what we built on the, on the, on the blind side. Right. On the beta side, We've built Google AdWords for podcasts, but it will be a brokerage, as you put it, on the other side of, of the blockchain completion, which will be next year.

That's really exciting. That was actually a really super great, like, real life application of blockchain. When you saw a problem and you figured out a solution, and then you figured out the solution would be even better if it were built on this.

It was even better. Exactly. And so, you know, this is the thing. It's like we always are seeking those sol in our businesses. Every small business has it. What's your edge? What do you do really well? How can you be a more value? How can you be a person of increase? Right. And, you know, always thinking about that. That's where our heart comes from. Right. Our goal is to be solely focused on podcaster centric innovation. And if it requires reinvention of systems, then we're more than willing to do it. We're reinventing microphones or reinventing whatever it takes to make sure that the podcaster and the listener both benefit. And that's our sole focus. That's our connection focus. If it doesn't benefit both, then it doesn't work.

So this is great, you guys that are listening or watching. I just want to reiterate if you have any questions as to whether this or, you know, something that you're thinking about should be built on blockchain or then you don't even really know where to go. You're welcome to reach out to Tracy Hazard. We're going to give you her information at the end of this broadcast. Or you're welcome to reach out to me either Michelle Calloway at Revelia or go to tech with Hart on Facebook, I mean, just shoot us your questions. We'd be more than happy to answer or at least point you in the right direction. Right. So speaking of business and blockchain, you identified that it's good to ask good questions to identify whether or not blockchain is the right fit for you. It's something perhaps new that you're building. Maybe if you're a small business, you don't really need to worry about right now modifying your model until more mechanisms are built for you. Kind of like, you know, when businesses went from just strictly brick and mortar to online businesses in the Era of when the Internet first came out, it took a couple to, you know, a couple years to kind of get to the point where average users were able to, like, build on it.

So because we have a lot of hype, that's what I want to say is, like, you get a lot of hype in some of these things where you think, if I just say I'm building it on blockchain, I'm going to get invested investors. And, you know, and so that's where the overbuilding comes from. But it will cost you if it's not the right solution for you. The tech is expensive in these early days, so if it's not going to deliver you the right results, it's going to cost you. And it actually will hurt you to think that you've used this hype to get the investment, but it ends up with a net loss at the end of the day.

Well, like you had mentioned, with your own discovery, you needed to identify whether or not it was going to actually work and learn a lot about the process along the way. While you're testing it out, you don't have to build it on blockchain in order to test it and see if it's going to actually be a viable solution. So that's perfect. That's a great example. But I'm talking about, like, just regular small business owners, whether they need to be concerned, should I start accepting blockchain? Or what do I need to do in order to be able to. I'm sorry, not. Not blockchain. My bad. That was my crypto. Yeah, back it up. So business owners are asking, should I be accepting cryptocurrency of some sort? And what does that even look like? How would I even go about it? I don't know if that's necessarily where we're at today.

So let me tell you that my most popular episode on New Trust Economy, our most popular episode is an episode Monica and I did where I said to her, monica, I hate to admit it, we've been doing the show a while, but I don't own any cryptocurrency. I don't own any Bitcoin. And I was like, and it's a stupid reason why I don't. I don't know how to get a digital wallet. And so she's like, let me walk you through it. And so it's, you know, this is why we don't do it. We don't take it in. We think it's more difficult than we, you know, than we imagine it is. And it's actually really not. It's like you just sign up for something, you get it started, and you move money there, you know, and you. You actually put, you know, fiat currency, our actual money, you know, dollars, whatever your local currency is in your country, and you put that in it and you get. You buy some Bitcoin and you get started, and now you start utilizing it. Places that take Bitcoin. So my question back to you, though, it would be, do your clients care? Do they transact in Bitcoin? Lots. If you're doing a lot of business with. With Twitch hosts, with Twitch in general, yeah. You should take crypto.

Like, they.

Yeah, it happens all the time. So thinking about is like, is it right for my community? And do they care about it? And would it be a reason for them to choose doing business with me over doing business with someone else?

Yeah, so we did that. We went out there and said, you know, hey, I'm willing to put cryptocurrency as one of our forms of payment. We take PayPal, we take everything else. What, credit cards? Why not take Bitcoin and. Or, you know, Ethereum or anything like that. Why not do it? And we said, our clients aren't that savvy. Like, that's not who they are. Like, they're. They don't. I mean, that's an investment strategy for them. They treat it not like currency, they treat it like stock, which is really what it technically is, by the.

So if they're going to treat it like stock, they don't want to buy stuff with it. So it's not at that stage where we said it's worthwhile to just add this on. It complicates your shopping cart. So why do it if you don't need to? But if it's your client base, it could be your competitive edge to attract the right users, to attract the right clients. You should definitely do it then.

Those are great points. When we come back, we're going to talk with Tracy a little bit more about perhaps identifying whether blockchain is indeed good for your business. Like, she just gave a couple points and, you know, how many years out are we before we can tell whether this is going to become mainstream? So we'll be right back. The problem is that business owners are losing millions of dollars of potential revenue each year because they don't know how to stand apart from the competition. I'm Michelle Calvo. I am the founder and CEO of Revealio, an augmented reality marketing tool that we've created for business owners like you to help you captivate people's attention.

Oh, that's cool.

Influence their buying decisions.

I like it. I like that a lot. Oh, I want that.

I love it. We do this by making your brand or product come alive with virtual content. You can actually take a viewer through the entire buyer's journey in less than 60 seconds. It's super easy to do. Just send us your artwork, send us your video, and we'll connect them and make the magic happen. So start standing out and influencing today.

All right, well, welcome back to Tech With Heart. We're all about empowering business success in the digital era. And I have our special guests, Tracy Hazard, who is an innovative expert, and she's talking to us today about blockchain and how it's applicable to your business. And before the break, we just got a chance to talk a little bit about identifying whether or not you should start accepting cryptocurrency, whether that's something that's really a must right now. She mentioned that it's very important to get the feel of your consumers, what is it that they want, and meet them where they are, because they're the ones, obviously, that need to be kept happy. And you don't want somebody bouncing from your business to somebody else's business because they got on the cryptocurrency bandwagon sooner than you. So just keep, you know, keep your eye out. And again, if you have any questions regarding anything crypto related or blockchain related. Even though Tracy claims she's not the expert, she definitely can. She's curious enough to know a lot of things to be able to point you in a good direction. Tracy Hazard, and we'll give her information at the end of this broadcast. So, Tracy, I know we reviewlio is an innovative software development company, and recently, just within the last six months, we've had a lot of application development requests coming in that house, some form of blockchain in them. Mostly what I'm seeing, though, is that some of these businesses are thinking, oh, I want to create my own, like, internal reward payment system, tokenization or whatnot. And I would love for you to share a little bit of. Have you seen a tokenization concept be built and be highly effective? And how are people grasping.

I've seen a lot fail. Let's say that I've seen a lot fail in the system, because they're no more. So when I was a girl right here in the same town that I live in now, I was a teenager, and we would have. We had this ice cream shop and it was called Varsity and there were tokens, right? And when you bought ice cream, you would get a token which you then could go use to play Ms. Pac man or whatever, video games. See, now I'm really dating myself there, but you get what I mean. So it's a token, right? And so what you're talking about is tokenization rewards system. It's no different today. Looking at that as I go into a retail store and they give me bonus points, or I use my Discover card and I get bonus points and I can apply it to my statement, or I can go buy something with it. So you know, these reward system exists already in any kind of regular format of business that we do. It's cool to be saying, oh, I've got blockchain tokenization going on in here. But tokenizing something and a point system and having a real purpose for it where it would make sense to spend the extra money and the extra energy and all of the time that it will take to develop it on the blockchain has to be purposeful. So thinking about it has to be some complexity in the reward system. So in other words, I might be earning points, but the reality is there are tokens, but I can't use it outside of the platform. And if I can't use it outside of the platform, it's not actually useful. So if you want to build on a public blockchain allowing me to convert that into Bitcoin or convert that into something, convert it into dollars, right? Convert it into something that I can use outside of that, then I may need a public blockchain to be able to do that, to make sure the transactions are real and everything. Because there's a complete complexity in doing that and leaving your own isolated game platform community, whatever that is. So I was just driving in an Uber yesterday for a very long time and he was showing how they gamified the way it is. And they have bonuses and all these things and so they might have a hundred dollar bonus if they do 19 rides in 48 hours or something like that. If they, if they deliver 19 rides in that much time and they get a hundred bucks bonus, but it's going into their regular paycheck. So that transactional process, while it is gamified and it is cool, there's no tokenization necessary. They're getting paid anyway. It's just an accounting calculation. So a straight database. They're already trusting Uber, right, to manage the fact that they're going to get their pay rates and their commissions and all of the Things that they make off of that right already. And if they've won this thing, they get a bonus commission, then that should just happen regularly. So there really isn't a reason for them to have done that. I don't think that they have by any means. But you know, that kind of system of rewards doesn't necessarily need it. Now if you're creating fractional ownership of something. So in other words, if my, if a reward system is buying you pieces of a company, buying you pieces of a thing, buying you pieces of something now we have to have a smart contract that manages that fractional ownership and all that. It must be built on the blockchain and in some cases it must be actually regulated by the SEC because its equity, it's stock ownership. And so there is a company out there that has done that in, I'm going to call it in the video watching world. Like it's sort of like, it's like the video version of Periscope. And so they've done that out there and they were, it's called Props and they've been approved by the sec. They were the first platform approved for a tokenized reward system. But they're regulated and that's what you have to keep in mind. So what they did it is it's actually for the creators to earn rewards, not the viewers. So in their case, the creators by putting up lots of videos and there's complexity in the calculation for the rewards. So it's not clear, like you put up 10 videos and you get a reward. It's you put up 10 videos, you get 10,000 viewers on those videos. And plus you do this, this and this in that process. And there's so many comments, so much engagement. It's a complex algorithm structure that is calculating and doing that. They needed a blockchain system to build that on. So that's what we're talking about in terms of the complexities of the rewards. Do you need it? Should you do it? Yeah. The reward systems and gamifications going great for lots of companies. We reward our podcasters. If they refer someone to us, they get five free episodes. We don't need to build that on blockchain. They make a referral and we credit 5 to their account. They see it instantly, they know they got it. If they didn't, they send us an email. Why would we spend the money and the time to build blockchain? We would. They're happy though. Everybody loves the process and it creates it so that 90% of our business comes from referrals so it's purposeful and I'm glad to see more people are thinking about doing that with you, Michelle, because it's going to make their games, their programs, their systems, their softwares more effective.

Yeah, I like what you're saying, Tracy. I mean, it's always going to drill down to logic. Doesn't make logical sense at this point. This blockchain technology is very expensive because we still are in the new years of IT and for smaller companies. I just want you to be aware that because we all can see that this is our future, there are organizations out there working on providing platforms for the rest of us in society to be able to easily adapt into the blockchain world. So we don't feel like we have to get involved in any of the programming, the development essentially back when the world Wide web opened up there, you know, now there's platforms like today you can get on like Wix and just, you know, create a website like in a splash, right? So over time there will be more platforms like that. I went to a small business expo and I saw a company all about, you know, how you can manage your own cryptocurrency, like, you know, breaking it down so that you can manage your own, like brokerage on crypto and it makes it all visible. It's all on the honor system kind.

Of thing, you know, and no transaction.

Fees right in there and you can play the game and then they've pretty much worked hard to dumb it down so that you can play. And so we all as business owners, small businesses especially, because we can get overwhelmed with technology. I'm having Tracy on the show today to help you hopefully feel like, okay, I just need to be aware what's happening. You can't be going around with your head plugged into the sand these days. I mean, I'm all about helping you to realize that technology is not so scary. It's actually something to embrace because that is our future. But I love the fact that you mentioned some good use cases, bad use cases, and I'm going to just talk a little bit more about the gamification and the rewards mentality because as we move forward, last year Salesforce did a survey and said that consumers want to experience your brand before they make a buying decision. And one great way besides Revealio, just so you know, Revealio is an interactive branded experience. It uses amazing technology called augmented reality to, to make your marketing materials come alive, which is an experience that has just really got a lot of wow factor. So besides Revealio, which is A little plug there for our sponsor. I also want to talk about just the mentality of rewarding people for engaging your content. There's too much blasting of here's what I do, here's what I do. Promo, promo, promo, promo, promo, promo. If you really want to get in the good graces of your consumers and make it a fun engagement, something that, that's super memorable for them, make it a game somehow. Make it a game or reward them for.

It's also great educational formats. So I did a panel recently with the group from Amazon Moments, and they were talking about adding in rewards into your system that people actually really want. Because. And if you plan your gamification process so that you are planning this process, that's teaching them how to properly use it in the way that you want them to use it. So, like, I want people to consume, like I would want listeners to listen to multiple different podcasts. I don't want them to just subscribe to one, although I want them to subscribe. So I want to reward them for subscribing. I also want to reward him for subscribing to seven different ones, because that is value to my clients as well. Right. So I might gamify that as a part of the process. And Uber, with the Uber examples, the same thing. Right. They were gamifying what Uber wants. They also gamified, though, that if you are between 6am and 9am in this particular region of LA, then you're gonna get bonus points too, because they need to make sure there are more cards available at that time of day. So you can create your user to create a certain experience for how you want them to use it by the gamification. That's of great value to you.

It's incentivizing them to behave the way you want them to. That's right.

And learn how to use it. That's right. I love it. I love it. But you know that, Michelle, when you talk about your AR platform and what you do and the excitement and the fun and delight of it, this is part of the process of get people to also love your brand. And that is always critically important to me because I don't want to just. I always use, I mean, our sort of ongoing terminology for the 27 years I've designed stuff, is that we want to get. We want to design products and tech. It doesn't matter what type of product it is, the service, whatever it is that people buy, use again and again and rave to their friends and business partners and whoever might be your core Audience is ideal. Right. We want them to rave about it. And when we do that, now we have a really valuable brand at the end of the day. Now we have a business that we don't have to work that hard to grow. It's growing for us. And that. That's the most important thing. So delight, and that's what I like to call it, delight in the process of getting a card, getting your book, getting all of those things like you do at Revealio. That's valuable.

Yeah, it really is. It's all about the memorability of the experience, making people feel something and getting excited. So I just wanted to talk a little bit about that reward system. I think that if even. Even though not everybody's adopting blockchain today, everybody should start. Start considering adopting some sort of a gamification reward or at least, you know, just make people feel, wow, you know, something that's going to make you very memorable.

It doesn't have to be gimmicky, right? I mean, it doesn't have to be. It just. And I always think, like, it's silly, like we used to. There's this. One of the failures in the blockchain and crypto market was this. This one was called Sweatcoin. And you would. You would. Basically all you had to do is walk outside. You registered for a Sweatcoin, you walked outside. You couldn't walk inside. You had to walk outside. If you walked outside and had your phone with you, it would track on the app how many coins you received over time. And you could redeem the coins for these certain promotions that they would have in. In the cart. And I would look at them and I would. Because I just thought, I got to test this out and understand this. This is really early on when I was trying to understand what cryptocurrency and blockchain was. And I would use it and I would walk, and then I would go, this is so stupid. Like, you want me to buy chocolate with my sweatcoin? Like, I'm walking it off. Like, that doesn't make sense. Like, my rewards are not in line with your business, with what you want to do. That's when it becomes gimmicky, right? So we don't want to do that. We want to do something that's in alignment with what our clients, our users, actually want.

So, Tracy, thank you so much for, again, painting the good pictures of good use cases, bad use cases. When might we want to jump in? When might we want to ask those good questions, like, should I go down this path? Of blockchain or not. Let's talk about, to wrap it up, what do you, what do you perceive as far as duration? Because we saw what happened with the Internet and then we saw what happened with the mobile explosion now. So now we're moving again into another realm of blockchain. It's already upon us. It's not like it's not here, it's just early. So what do you perceive is for a small business owner to the point where you think that this is going to be mass adoption? Any ideas on that?

So I think we're going to see mass adoption a lot faster here than has been predicted. IBM has done a tremendous job. I just interviewed Jerry Cuomo from the IBM Blockchain for Business group.

And that show should be coming out shortly, probably already before this one airs. And he was really talking about the sandbox that they've created for developers to get to learn how to utilize their blockchain. And when you create that kind of sandbox with the kind of hand holding that a company like, like IBM, and you're going to ensure that it interacts with.

Oracle systems or other types of invoicing Systems, not just QuickBooks, which is a little more basic at most of our small business level. But if your clients are bigger businesses, you have to take SAS and Oracle and things like that to interact and do business with them. You have to interact with their systems. So when they built a blockchain that already has that interaction built into the process, you're like, whoo, I don't have to think this through. It's already compatible. It makes my job easier. I'm going to send, send my developers over there, let them figure out how to play in this playground, figure out what we need to build and how we need to customize this. So I think they've already done a lot of the heavy lifting over there on that enterprise side. So when we start seeing more of those big businesses start tipping over, we're going to see the cascading supply chain have to comply and move into the process. And they're going to have to make it easy and they're going to have to make it simple for us to be able to do that if that's who our clients are and who we're servicing. And as we start to see that it's going to come down, I'm not a big, I'm going to say, I do not predict that Bitcoin is going to be every part of what every person's wallet or essential portfolio stuff has to Happen. I still think it's in this realm of not everybody owns stock. Think about it in the world like that, right? Not every single person around you owns stock. So if not everybody owns stock, why would we own Bitcoin? Like it just doesn't necessarily make sense or cryptocurrency, whatever the form of your like, I do think it will get more stronger than what it is in terms of like broadness of who adopts it and who adds it in, but I just don't think it's going to. First off, I don't think it's going to become a currency. That's my personal opinion. And as long as it stays at a level of what stock is, I just don't think it's going to go into that mass adoption level. We're going to say everybody's going to take it. Do I think our currency needs to shift?

Yes.

We need to come digitally wise. Every bit of our whole banking process is ridiculous as I just opened a new bank account this week and I went, this is ridiculously unsafe. Like everything about this process was like, I should have been able to open an account in, you know, 10 minutes with all the information you already have. You're already my bank and I'm going to just open a second account with you. And it's got, it takes 45 minutes to an hour. Like that's, there's all kinds of wrong in that process.

Right.

So those things have to shift like those. But these are big corporations who are going to make those shifts for us first. And we're just gonna find out, oh, we've got now the next Wix, the next WordPress, the next thing to use and will it be. Yeah, some of it won't be as beautiful as, you know, exit dials down to as it is today in the Internet. But it's the same thing we went through in the 90s, right. Building shopping carts ourselves and realizing, oh, we need better security systems and like. And so it's gonna go through those growing pains.

Right.

I would say we're at a tween. We're gonna be at tween level probably now the next two years. For the next two years. So we're going to be let that like awkward 12, 13 year old thing, you know, that's the stage of business we're going to be at.

Yeah, well I appreciate your input because I see it that way too. There's definitely going to be enough evidence that the big adoption is coming that we won't be left in the lurch Small business owners don't feel like you're going to get left in the lurch. I love what Tracy said earlier and I'll reiterate it again. If you can tell that your consumers want you to be able to offer the Bitcoin exchange, you need to start looking into it because you don't want to lose your business to your competitor because they were more open minded into adding one more form of payment. So you know, that is probably the most like hot topic as far as like how you can adopt it into your business is to be able to make that type of transaction possible. Because it does translate into money, right? Yes, it does translate into money. It's just a different way of thinking about money. But it's not like you're gonna have some obscure like digitized form of currency that you're never gonna be able to cash out into the green. Right.

Well, on all the other businesses, as you're going to think about like your structures and whatever, if you're about to go like replace your whole supply chain management like system or your invoicing system and like all of that, you're gonna go out there and you're gonna do some investigation and say, what system do I want to use? Do I want to buy an Oracle? Do I want to go to, you know, to all of these systems? And you're gonna go out there and you're gonna start to investigate them. If you're at that stage of business that it's necessary for you to upgrade your systems, go start to ask some smart questions, go find the right people because you're in the midst of doing something that you hope is going to last for at least a decade when you do that kind of overhaul to your systems and your structure. But if you're not at that stage, then there's no reason to do it today.

Unless it's a competitive advantage.

Right.

And competitive advantage, then go for it because you want more business. But otherwise, yeah, wait it out a little longer.

Well, this has been very enlightening, I think, also very empowering. Hopefully it's put to bed a lot of fear and also just really had a lot of light bulbs. Hopefully go on for our listeners and viewers. So we want to thank you again from the bottom of our heart, Tracy, for you to share your time with us on the Tech with Heart show. And I would love for you to share with people. How can they go ahead and get a hold of you if they have any questions? What would you prefer? How would you like them to get.

A hold of you. Well, first things first, if you want to, you know, catch up on some of the, like, detailed topics on blockchain and different things like that. My, like I said, my partner Monica is way more detail oriented in the tech weed. So if you want to go there, feel free to listen to her episodes as well as mine. But over at New Trust Economy and you can do that on any podcast player and you can also go to newtrusteconomy.com so that's really the first and most simple way. But I'm a LinkedIn girl. That's where I reside. That's where I make the most posts, my personal self. Not that you can't find me anywhere on the Internet, you absolutely can. But if you want to send messages to me and you want to connect up to me, that's the best place.

Well, that's perfect because that's all about business. So LinkedIn is a business platform, so. All right, Tracy, thank you so much. You have been just a plethora of knowledge and we so appreciate you and I look forward to again having you on the show down the road talking about another amazing, innovative topic.

Because you know what's next, Michelle, Right. You and I are always keeping our eye out.

The innovation, you got to stay on top of it. I love, love it. All right, well, have a great day and thank you for listening. Join us for our next episode or go to techwitheartnetwork.com to get on our mailing list so that you can be informed when we're going to have our next amazing expert talking about amazing topics in the tech and business industry. So thank you so much. Take care. Bye.

Bye.