Are You Ready for the Metaverse Revolution? A Deep Dive with QuHarrison Terry

Are You Ready for the Metaverse Revolution? A Deep Dive with QuHarrison Terry

Kelly Kennedy: Welcome to Milestone Episode 180 of the Business Development Podcast. And today we're chatting with the co host of CNBC's No Retreat: Business Bootcamp, QuHarrison Terry. And we're chatting all about his latest book, The Metaverse Handbook. Stick with us. You are not going to want to miss this episode.

Intro: The Great Mark Cuban once said, Business happens over years and years. Value is measured in the total upside of a business relationship, not by how much you squeezed out in any one deal. And we couldn't agree more. This is the business development podcast based in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and broadcasting to the world.

You'll get. Expert business development advice, tips, and experiences. And you'll hear interviews with business owners, CEOs, and business development reps. You'll get actionable advice on how to grow business. Brought to you by Capital Business Development. CapitalBD.ca Let's do it. Welcome to the Business Development Podcast.

And now your expert host, Kelly Kennedy.

Kelly Kennedy: Hello, welcome to episode 180 of the business development podcast. And on today's milestone episode, we bring you none other than QuHarrison Terry. QuHarrison is a trailblazing digital marketing expert. Author and entrepreneur, renowned for his innovative contributions to the tech industry.

As the head of growth marketing at Mark Cuban Companies, a leading venture capital firm in Dallas, Texas, QuHarrison plays a pivotal role in shaping marketing strategies for a diverse portfolio of companies. His career is marked by groundbreaking achievements, including co founding 23VIVI and the world's first digital art marketplace powered by blockchain, and leading marketing at Redux, where he specializes in lead acquisition and content marketing.

An influential voice in technology, he has co authored seminal works such as the NFT Handbook and the Metaverse Handbook, innovating for the internet's next tectonic shift. Guiding readers through the complexities of emerging digital landscapes. QuHarrison's expertise extends far beyond the written word to the screen and stage.

As the co host of CNBC's No Retreat business boot camp, he helps businesses overcome challenges through transformative experiences at Joe DeSina's elite Vermont training facility. His thought leadership has earned him features on CNN, Huffington Post, and Forbes. And he has captivated audiences at CES, South by Southwest and TEDx.

Recognized four times as a LinkedIn top voice in tech, QuHarrison Terry is not just a marketer, but a visionary shaping the future of digital interaction. His work transcends traditional boundaries, pushing the limits of what's possible in the metaverse and beyond. QuHarrison, it's an honor to have you on the show today.

QuHarrison Terry: Yo, what's good? What's good, man? It's a pleasure to be here. You know, the Kelly Kennedy show, this is, this is a big deal. I hear your voice all the time. It was like, it was weird. I'm in, in the podcast and I'm hearing you give the intro and I'm like, man, I've heard him give that same intro before. Like it's pretty good.

You've got that dialed in.

Kelly Kennedy: It's an honor to have you on the show, man. Like I was so surprised when I reached out to you and your immediate response was, I love the show. I was like, what? You listen.

QuHarrison Terry: I mean, dude, it's, it's a small world. Like there's not that many people that are consistent. Like, so you talked about being at 180 shows.

Do you understand what that takes? I mean, I know you do about two shows a week. So even still, you've been at it for almost two, a little, a little over two years. I mean, it takes dedication, man. This is not an easy thing to do to produce a podcast. I've been there myself. And I know that, you know, you've got to have a crazy rigorous schedule.

Not only for yourself, but then your family and then also your business. So hats off to you. It's a pleasure to be here on the 180th show. And like, of course, if you hit me up and you've got to show it, it's good. I'm gonna be like, yo, yeah, I love the show.

Kelly Kennedy: I just, I think it's crazy because dude, when I started the business development podcast, talking literally in my basement at the time to a wall.

I was like, who in the world is going to listen to this show? Just some guy coming on and talking business development twice a week. Like, is anyone even going to give a shit? And to honestly have an impact worldwide. And you know, even to someone like you, as influential as you, to be able to reach back and say, dude, I've heard your show and I love it.

Man, it's like, it's unbelievable. It really is.

QuHarrison Terry: Man. Well, hats off to you, man. I think that you just, let's just keep it going. You know, this is the, this is just the beginning of something that is probably going to be much bigger because every time you do this show, not only do your hosting skills improve, but also your, your connections and your world horizons, and you know, I'm sure you you've, you've learned this when you do a podcast.

It's almost like going to college all over again. You said these are almost like mini lectures and then being able to talk to people and build that relationship. Some people you're never going to talk to again because they were just like, Hey, you know, I learned what I learned. They were just on a soapbox.

They use my podcast to sell something, but then some people you're going to do business with and others you're going to like learn from, and they might have a mentor mentee relationship, all different types of things. And you know, that's the beautiful thing about, I think, podcasts in 2024 and beyond is like.

It's not necessarily just a mechanism for groupthink. It's a mechanism for connection because there's no other form where I can come and talk to somebody and also have their tribe or their audience listen to my thoughts and challenge my thoughts, right? It's not just a collective like, Oh, everything he said was great.

There's some times where you have some people on and you're like, man, I guess wasn't our best guess. But it strengthened your own opinion or your own perspective of the world, because you're like, okay, I don't necessarily agree with everything, but at least I got a chance to see the other side.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, no, dude.

And you know, talking about the power of connection. And really, that's kind of what we're going to be talking about today. Like so much of what we're talking about today is the power of connection. But I could have never imagined the doors that would have opened from Kelly talking to a wall in his basement and putting himself out there.

Like you said, like the odds of me and you running into each other on the street are like zilch. We live like probably 4000 miles away from each other, right?

QuHarrison Terry: I mean, it happened at a conference, right? But then now, like in the world of conferences, it's, there's so many of them that like, you know, we don't all go to the same conference, like 10 years, 20, like even say 15 years ago, we'd all go to CES.

We'd all go to like the big health tech conferences, but now there's like so many niche conferences, even if you're a marketer, right? Like it doesn't even matter what type of marketing there's video marketing conferences. There's a event marketing conferences. There's like social media marketing conferences.

If you are into business development, You know, the whole concept of networking has changed quite a bit because LinkedIn I know it sounds, you know, a little archaic now because there's so much more than LinkedIn. But like, think about the world where collecting the business card actually matters now.

It's like, I actually feel I think I still carry some business cards because I go to conferences and everybody has the damn QR code and they're like, scan my code, scan my code. Imagine like, imagine being a human bro and having like a barcode and like, just like this book, like, just scan my scan right here, man, scan right here.

You want, you want some of me? Scan right here. That's really, if you've been to a conference lately.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, well, that that's where it's going. I agree. But you know what? You're right. You kind of, you kind of touched on something. I think now to stand out. You have to go back. Like there's a certain level. I do that to you.

I totally do that to you.

QuHarrison Terry: You got this? You got the little code? I mean, this is weird.

Kelly Kennedy: I got the little code. I got the little code.

QuHarrison Terry: We carry around a barcode.

Kelly Kennedy: But on the front, I still have a regular business card with like my picture on it and stuff. Like I still, I mix the worlds, man. I mix the worlds. You got to.

QuHarrison Terry: I have it because, you know, you have to have it. But like, it's still, it's weird. But to, not to cut you off, you were on a really good point there. You were like, you know, I just think it's weird that we are barcodes, man. We barcoded ourselves.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, yeah, we did. Yeah, we did. And you know, like, we're going to get into it today because we are going deep on the metaverse, which is something that dude, your book opened my eyes.

And I remember talking to my fiance and just saying like, holy shit, babe, this is coming. Like, this isn't just coming. It's literally here. And I barely knew about it. It's like, I understand that there's like Oculus and stuff, but like, I didn't understand how deep. It was how entrenched it already is and how much money is being funneled into it until I read your book, dude.

And so I want to get into that, but before we get into that today, tell us, you know, you're a serial entrepreneur. You've been doing this for an incredibly long time. You know, you are so prominent in the tech industry. Frankly, you're like the futurist, you know, everything that's going on before it's even where anyone else does, you know, how did you end up on this path?

Who is QuHarrison Terry?

QuHarrison Terry: All right. So yes, you covered a lot. I, you know, what's funny is like growing up. You know, I think there was always this point where like, Oh, I want to be as futurist. Do I want to be a futurist? And then like, I started meeting futurist and I just wasn't that impressed. So I, it's like, I don't have any qualms with it, but it was like, it was like, to me, a futurist was someone that just sat back and like, they predicted like what would happen in the future, but they had like no real world experience or not all of them, but most of them don't.

Right. So there's people that just sit on online and they have their subspecs and they're like, it's, it's kind of the equivalent of like fantasy sports. And so. The problem there is like when you want to like actually do something as a futurist, you actually have no real world knowledge of how to deploy systems at scale, how to actually get people to care about what this is versus next.

And like, there's always been an emerging wave of technology. That's, that's, that's, that's, presented in front of us, right? Like we talked about the QR code. QR code was here since the early 2000s. It didn't catch on until 2024. And it took a whole pandemic for us to realize the great value of a QR code.

And so if you were a futurist back in the early 2000s, you could have said, everyone's going to do it. And in heck you go to Japan, they adopted the QR code in ways that was way, way more prominent than anything we had done until the pandemic. And still they're quite, they're quite, quite, quite. quite in the future as it relates to some of this adoption.

And so like on how I describe myself, I think about it is let's take it one step down. I just see myself as a future thinker. And every day I ask myself, what's the future? And I take detailed notes and I store them in a journal. That journal used to be on every note. Now that journal is on everydays.wtf.

It's open source. Like you can go right now and see what I've been thinking about since I've written the metaverse handbook. And I did this for a couple of reasons. One When I was young, I always did this. I always said, Oh, okay, this is cool. New iPod came out, new Toshiba came out, new you know, zoom, Microsoft player, whatever, right?

Like I was always intrigued by technology and like just kind of the state of it. But the, the insights. Don't really come from the devices themselves. Like, yeah, the iPhone is cool, but you really learn more when you understand Johnny Ives insights into why he wanted it to be a single slate of glass or, you know, everybody talks about Steve jobs, you know, right now Jensen Wang NVIDIA in his whole concept of accelerated compute, you learn more from actually looking at the people and you take the notes to follow kind of their heartbeats, like the heartbeats of these emerging technology ways.

And they come from some of the visionary founders that we've run across. And, you know, it's not always the visionary founders. Sometimes it's just like a little entrepreneur or technologist or someone that like is a researcher. Look at all the insights that we found with the generative A. I. In the last couple of years.

And like, you know, we were following Mustafa Sullivan way before he would go to Microsoft, right? Like I was I was talking about that guy on on on on on my notes, like, like for the last, like, three years. And I was like, Yo, this guy's gonna be big, like, because he was doing these incredible things that Deep Mind.

And you're like, damn, like they figured this out at DeepMind way before anything. And DeepMind was, is Google's like generative AI platform where they, I oversimplified that, but it's where it was the, it was the, it was the research institute of Google where they actually would go and discover a lot of the breakthroughs that will become generative AI, what we now use known as chat GPT, et cetera.

And so like, yeah, you can see, I'm passionate about this stuff. I can go on and on. But, you know, the, the, the simplest form of like the future stuff is like, I just think that like technology has such an instrumental impact on, or it's such an integral impact on our lives nowadays. And if you don't understand it, you're kind of left behind because there's going to be somebody that does understand it.

Come through and just show you, show you how to do what you do better than yourself. And all they did was press some buttons on a keyboard. And I think, you know, for five minutes a day, if you want to like, just go and see, you know, what was game changing about some of the innovations. Cool. All you got to do is just, you know, open up your device and like scroll.

It's never been easier. And so my notes are free. If anybody wants them every day, that WTF I call it a WTF because every day I ask myself, what's the future, but nowadays, most of the things that we look at from the technological element really do make you go, what the, you know, I'm not going to say the rest, but I mean, yeah,

I mean, you know, A lot of this stuff doesn't make sense if you just look at it from the surface level, right?

And so that's why I named it WTF and you know, it's been, it's been going well. So we, we, we do that. But that's like more so a hobby for me, man. Like, you know, I've always been that way ever since I was a little kid. Like there's, that's, that hasn't changed. And so when I think about my actual career, you know, I've always been intrigued by like growth as well.

And more so how you can, how you can grab people's attention. And, you know, create, you know, shifts and not only culture, but just mass understanding. And that has been something I've been a part of as far as back into, you know, I worked a little bit in the fine art world. You touched a bit on that when we were selling like NFTs before they were known as NFTs.

It was like, I was still in digital art and like, you know, it was. Wow, it was wild. But you know, we did that. And it's crazy because you can go back now and like everyone can see that like, Oh, yeah, he was actually selling digital art in like 2015.

Kelly Kennedy: It's crazy. It's like, sorry, I'm just gonna pause you there for a sec.

But like, one of the things that blew my mind from the book was honest to God, dude, like, and I might sound like a bit of an idiot here. I didn't even know what an NFT was until I read your book and then literally realized after reading that that holy crap people are spending astronomical amounts of money on digital art on on NFTs on tokens on avatars and I'm just like.

How did I not know about any of this? And I know that I'm like, I'm like the perfect consumer of technology. It's like, I love new tech.

QuHarrison Terry: I love this. I love this segment here because if I go to any crypto group, they're going to be like, Oh, he's a doomer boomer. He doesn't know anything. It's like, no, you were doing business development.

You were doing what you said you were doing. You were focused on the thing you were focused on. And the crypto industry is not as big as we think it is. If you're in the epicenter of it, it looks, it looks humongous. It looks like it's the behemoth of the year. But when you actually step a step a few steps back, you'll see that it's still a nascent industry.

It's still growing. And like, you know, there's some cool innovations, but you know, it's not a problem that you don't know what an NFT is. And like, quite frankly, some of the people that think they know what an NFT is don't really even understand what an NFT is from the fundamental standpoint. Like it's just a file format at the end of the day.

Right. I'm oversimplifying it a lot, but like, I think sometimes oversimplification can help in that going back to the point I was making earlier. The actual understanding when you grab someone's attention, their understanding, which they have, everyone doesn't have to understand it at a, at a, at a microscopic level.

Like how many things do you actually understand at that level? I'm asking you like we all, we all, do we all understand electricity at it's.

Kelly Kennedy: No, it's magic.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah. Like, you know, if the light doesn't work, you know, I'm going to try to change the light bulb, but at a certain point, You know, you've got to call an electrician and then maybe that electrician has to call a master electrician.

Maybe the master electrician has to call the manufacturer. You don't know, right? So it's impossible for us to have such deep understanding about everything that goes on in our day to day lives. And so I just look at it. I'm like, okay, like, If you can oversimplify some things so people can just have a generalization that they can then transform, I think that is one of the cool things about technology and society and mean culture today is like you can take a mean and people can understand a world event.

Yeah, I can understand a shift in. And, and, and, and, and norms all off of me. Yeah. Right. And heck, we're, we're taking memes and driving current, like economic growth. So it's like sometimes that oversimplification, if done properly can still get you to the destination. And again, I I under, I understand and agree with everybody that's a purist or about the fundamentals.

Understand? Well, they don't understand it. They don't understand it. I get it. But like a lot of people nowadays are just chasing dopamine hits and you gotta give 'em what, what they're looking for because if you don't TikTok with, yeah.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, sorry, dude. I didn't mean to. I didn't mean to break you there. It was just one of those things.

It was like, holy cow. Like it was mind blowing for me.

QuHarrison Terry: You're fine, man. You're super fine. Yeah, this is, this is all good stuff. I feel like we're still in the early inning. The first inning of this conversation.

Kelly Kennedy: Oh, yeah. Oh, dude, we could have multiple conversations just given how much is here, right? Like we talked about this before the show, but it's like, There's so much here and we're not even going to get into the marketing side of the storytelling of your career.

Like I was like, dude, we need to spend some time here because I think like, dude, I'm 35 like I'm, I'm old in the grand scheme of like new electronics for sure, but it's like I'm not that old. Like I know enough. I feel like I try to keep up, but for me, this was so eye opening and it's like, dude, if this is eye opening for me, this is going to be super eye opening for, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people over time.

Because. I don't think there's a lot of people who truly understand what the metaverse is or what's coming our way. They still look at the web and you're like, yeah, like I hop on there and I do what I need to do. I do my banking, I do my LinkedIn and I get off, right? Like, I think most people that's, that's the web and it's like, holy crap.

No, you go through in the book, you talk about, you know, web one, the first integration, web two, which is kind of where we are today and then web three, which is coming. And I was just like, holy crap. I never even thought about it as an evolution.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah, I mean, web, web three, as we think about it today, it's interesting because again, going back to the crypto side, crypto is taking a lot of the attention.

And I don't see it as like, you know, the metaverse will definitely have some parts of it that are tied to blockchains and crypto economies, because that's just that's I think that's just an inevitable part of it. But as you've even seen today, that's not a necessity. So you look at, like, Apple's Vision Pro and that device, like, fundamentally speaking, it's kind of weird.

Have you used it yet? Not yet. Okay. So it's weird because it, when you think about the Apple vision pro, you're like, all right, we've got this device that like is you know, it's heavy. It's not very Apple, like you put it on your face. And if you can get past that, everything else is mindblowing. It's literally, if you can get past the, like the form factor that it is in today, everything else is mind blowing because the web three, as you described it, it actually does exist and you can go into it and like, you know, you don't, we don't use.

We don't use, we don't use our hands in the same way. We don't use keyboards and mice. Like you just look at things and tap and like all of it comes to life and it comes into your, your purview and then like you can interact and you know, Apple is allowing more people to. Build on that. And so we're starting to see what Marvel experiences are like, you know, here recently the, the Marvel, the Disney plus show.

What if it was like Marvel's? What if you know where they take it?

Kelly Kennedy: We saw it last weekend.

QuHarrison Terry: Okay. Yeah. So, so you have that, but now they're bringing that in the Apple vision pro. So in one end you can like on a regular TV or a smartphone device, you can watch the show, right? Or now you can put the Apple Vision Pro on and you can be in the show and literally be a part of it.

And now you're one of the what if characters and you can see how big Thanos is in real life. It's no, it's no longer, you got to go to an IMAX screen to kind of get the perspective and scale. So you can just do that at the in your own bedroom or your own home. And so that's cool because As we start to build more experiences that are tied to kind of this new reality, we're going to further define what Web 3 looks like.

And I think that Web 3 even when we wrote the book, has changed, you know, a little bit and I think it will continue to evolve because, you know, we have to see what, what actually sticks and what actually shifts a lot of the, the cultural understanding of this. My favorite point here on Web 3, and this is the one thing that I'll, I'll touch on, is, You know, I was, I was on the, I was on Instagram like I think last week or this weekend and I was scrolling and obviously I see a lot of like metaverse content went up and there was a, there was metaverse church and it's a, it was metaverse church man, it was metaverse church.

And. But what's crazy about this metaverse church was you have everybody in their costumes and you know, you got even

Kelly Kennedy: Not a typical church outfit.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, like, you know, they like they they're out here Just you know, i'm like half naked women in church. This is crazy like but in the metaverse, right?

Like maybe that's not I mean, maybe that is accepted like because like you wouldn't go to church in a bikini but in the metaverse I guess you could yeah Like, cause the shame, like who's going to shame you? And if so, you just mute them. Like you don't have to hear them. And so like, it sounds wild, but like, you know, we're looking down on it and like saying, okay, there are people that are coming up through it that have been playing Minecraft their whole lives that have been playing roadblocks their whole lives.

And so digital economies and digital destinations are things that are just a natural fit for their, their, their consciousness. You have to look at that because, you know, there's, there's more value there and then being there right now than it would be in 10 years when we're trying to catch up, you know, it's like funny.

It's like thinking about the brands that just what it did. Tick tock. Let's just say in 2018, where would they be today? Right? Like they would obviously still care about the band, but they wouldn't be like all these librarians that are trying to catch up and say, Oh, yeah, I'm trying to get my tick tock going.

I'm trying to get my tick tock going. It's like, you're already too late. Tick tock is tick tock is almost gone.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, for sure. I think at the other side of it, too. It's like you can be early, which is, I think, kind of like where you're at, because you have such a future understanding. You've seen this coming, like the fact that you were selling digital art in 2015 shows just how early you were, because I don't think people were even thinking about, you know, Anything in 2015 on this front, for the most part, aside from, like you said, meta, who was heavily investing at that point.

And I'm sure some of the other companies that were, you know, building XR experience, but nobody would have thought of them. Like it wasn't in the pop culture. Like you said, COVID kind of changed everything.

QuHarrison Terry: It did. It changed a lot, you know, and when it, and when it changed it. It allowed for some new understandings to be developed, I think, about not only the world and society, but also connection to the point of your podcast.

Like, I think it's amazing that we can hop on this podcast, not even be in a studio, remake content, share content, and be connected with everybody. So when I say we're more connected than we ever have been, it's like the power of sharing your voice. It's just, it's infinite now. Like you, you can literally go from nothing to something in near real time.

And because of some of these algorithms and some of the shifts in the algorithms, you now have the ability where if you only have 200 followers, as long as the algorithm sees it and says, this could go far, you know, you don't, you're not limited to your own reach as an individual. And that's, that was true of Tik TOK is now true of X is probably going to be true on the meta properties and it's going to cascade.

Downward, I think, because, you know, there's, there's something to be said about it now on the flip side, if you don't agree with that, again, I said, we'd never been more connected. You know, you can go into the Fediverse and yeah, the, the Fediverse is. Are you familiar with the Fediverse?

Kelly Kennedy: I am not, no. Bring us in.

QuHarrison Terry: Alright, so the Fediverse is, this is funny, this is my first time giving this like live, and I wanna, you know, I wanna, I don't wanna simplify it too much. It's not

Kelly Kennedy: live, dude. I'll, if you, if you jumble, I will fix it. Don't you worry about it.

QuHarrison Terry: No, so like, you know, the Fediverse, you know, I'm gonna try to get it right so that way it's not too crazy, right?

So, the Fediverse, As it stands, stands for like, you know, like a federation. So that's what fed, that's where the Fetty part comes from. Federation and then universe. So universe is like you know, like we're all connected in one universe. And the cool thing about this is. The federation side is they're saying, what if there were some accords or customs that we could all just kind of have as we go about our digital ways?

So why do you have to have 15 social accounts? Why can't you just have one user name in that user name be reflected? So why can't? You know, when you go on your ex per se, why can't your ex content live on Instagram or live on Facebook? Why do you have to repost it 15 different times, right? Agreed.

That's probably like the easiest way to understand what the federation stands for. And then obviously it gets more technical. There's some blockchain elements in some cases, and there's all types of cool stuff that happens on the back end. But as far as like actual practicality as why me and you should care about it, it's like now we have, we went from many different social profiles.

To one and one that's connected that where you can control the data so you can say, I don't want this information to be shown on X property. I don't want this information to be here. I actually want this information to always be cross posted. So you get to control that. And obviously, when you get a little bit more manual control, things can get a little a little bit more technical.

But the funny thing is, most of us already have a Fediverse account. Do you know what that what platform is using the Fediverse today? No, it's surprisingly is not Google. It's Meta. So threads is it's a, it's Fediverse compliant. It's part of it.

Kelly Kennedy: Okay. Okay. I thought Google, because whenever I go to sign into something now, it's like, you want to sign into your Google account? I'm like, yeah, sure.

QuHarrison Terry: No, Google's just being Google. They just want, they want all your data. No yeah, yeah, I know.

Meta, meta, many people wouldn't get that right because it's like, you would have never thought, but like, no, I've met in the last two to three years has made this big shift to like open source, like, you know, llama, which is their, you know back end model for their generative AI chat. GPT like functionality.

All that's open source. You could be a developer today, download their model, install it and start building. And unless you have, like, almost a billion users, it's totally It's totally free. So, you know, like Google can't go and download their models and use it without talking to meta first. But yeah, you're, you're all, you're any, any kid in their college dorm room, any business, really, that doesn't have nearly a billion users, they can go and start building on meta.

And like you get all of the developer resources and ecosystems and just some of the learnings that have been had, you get to build on top of that. So now we're in this world where it's kind of shifted, you know meta And Facebook and all their properties used to be kind of closed platform. Yeah.

They're now kind of opening it up and, and, and, and some of the winning content that is derived from that has been quite fascinating. They've got the, the meta ray bands, which are, yeah, kind of cool. You can like, create content real time. Just press a button, captures it, share, share it to your story share with your friends and you know, it takes away this.

You know, it creates this abstraction layer where I don't have to do this. So when I travel, I go to Japan and whatnot, I press the button and I can still be in the moment, still see everything. And then when I miss it, I can go back on my phone and see those experiences as they happen in real time. So I think that that is kind of cool.

And we're starting to see some of these, these companies change and shift. And so when I look at it, it's like today, to go back to the earlier point of why we were doing that, you know, publishers are preparing to federate their sites because the algorithm that I was talking about how we were saying, like, the algorithms are giving you you know, I mean, they're giving you some some lift, right?

You don't have to be, you don't have to have 100, 000 followers to get lift. So they're deciding it. Well, that's not good. If you're a publisher, you have built, you know, a brand and you have a million people and those million people never see it. Well, you know, now we do need things like the, the Fediverse that still kind of worked like the old way, where it's like, if I follow this feed, I want to see the content from this feed, not what I think the algorithm will give me.

And, you know, now is the early time to really go lean into I think the Fediverse and build some understanding. Like if I was a young kid in my dorm room thinking about like, you know, how to make an impact or how to be impressive, you know, I would start Literally writing, you know, just a couple of documents about what the Fediverse is, make a couple of presentations, put the stuff on YouTube, write some blogs, go pitch some local businesses and like, you know, figure out how to federate someone's site and their content.

You know, what does it take for a musician to exist in the Fediverse? What does it take for an author or a publisher or a podcaster to exist in this platform and just do the work right? Like, If you can create value, people will figure out a way to compensate you. So I think sometimes today we get so fatuated with like, how do I get paid?

How do I get paid? How do I get paid? Well, you get paid by adding value. Like that's never changed. Right. If you show up and do good work, people will pay you. Like, I mean, heck. You could, you could not even ask for it. And it's like people that just go play and busk on the street. They play guitar or sing or whatever.

There's people like, Oh man, this is amazing. They just want to tip you. So it works for them. Don't you think it works the same in business? Now some people give away this stuff for free and there's a lot of sharks out here and all that. Yeah. But like, I'm telling you, there's still a lot of people that don't mind paying you and you hear those stories a day in and day out, like, you know, there are still good people in the world.

So. Like show up, do the work. And if you're younger in your career we know what's coming started to be a vessel and start to simplify this stuff and make it easier so people can approach it. And, you know, if I were, if I were super young, like, again, that's where I would, that's where I would be because.

It's, it's, it's, it's, it's inevitable that this shift is going to happen. And if Mark Zuckerberg already took a bet on it, you know, it's like all of Instagram and said, Hey, I'm going to lift it up. We're going to connect these Instagram profiles with these Fediverse profiles, but like call it threads and tell people it's our ex competitor.

Well, that's, that's cool. It's great business development standpoint, but obviously, obviously there's a nice little component there. That's very convenient for him to like, you know, now approach into a new, a new, a whole new world of social media.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. And you know, you, you touched on the fact that it's all changing, but like so much of this, like I said, I had never even come across and dude, like I've talked to a lot of people by the time we're doing this interview, I've probably interviewed at least 80 experts in various fields.

And I haven't heard one of them talk about any of this until I read your book and I was honestly it's that big like I'm hoping our listeners can understand how mind shifting this book is you have to get the Metaverse Handbook if you are not familiar with what is going on in the metaverse you have to get it because it is changing mind shifting Everything is going to change the web is going to change the way that we interact with the world, the way we do business, it's all going to change and probably a lot sooner than you think, which is why I'm kind of really pinning down QuHarrison today on this, because I think it's that critical.

I think we nobody's paying attention and it's time to start paying attention.

QuHarrison Terry: I couldn't agree more with you. And you know, I showed the book while you were talking about it. So when I was writing this, I just got off the NFT handbook and we had finished it in chapter nine of the NFT handbook. I touched on the metaverse because I was like, okay.

If you have NFTs, you have these digital files that are immutable in nature, like, you know, like, you could, you can prove provenance and all these, these good things and attributes about NFTs, they have to have value somewhere. And, you know, I'm hard pressed to tell you that, like, you're, you changing your phone screen, or you changing your, your profile picture on Twitter.

Or X or any of the meta properties is going to be what the future holds. And so a lot of the future thinking in that book was, I was like, if NFTs exist. And they really only have value in like these metaverse worlds, where, which already have value in the real world. So it's like, we're saying NFTs don't have value.

And then, you know, you have all the things that happen there and like all the money that's transferred, but like, you know, let's just say that was, that was hype. Then you say, okay, the metaverse doesn't have value, but then you say, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up, hold up. Some of these metaverses don't have enough people.

So they don't have, you know, true economies, but a lot of them do You look at Roblox, I mean, Walmart. One of the largest companies here in the U. S., they have an incredible Walmart world and Roblox. You can go scan the aisle, shop, kids can interact, they can be there. And you know, like when you go and look at the numbers for Gen Alpha, which, you know, Gen Z and Gen Alpha are like the largest components of Roblox when you look at like who is there.

Walmart's a top brand, Walmart, who would ever thought, but then you go back and you look at it and you're like, well, damn, why is Walmart a top brand? Well, okay. Mr. Beast launched Feastables in Walmart, so that was like, that was, that was a few years back. Then you got Roblox. Walmart's been with the kids the whole way through.

And so then of course, yeah, when you go look at the numbers and you see Walmart's right there, you're like, ah, I guess it makes sense. And so when I look at that, it's like, okay, Walmart's there. They're not selling enough teas. They're not doing anything. But like, there's a lot of kids that want to buy roadblocks gift cards to get the roadblocks.

And I talked about that in the book, right? Like those roadblocks, it's a real company. Roblox is not a fake company, right? It's a real company, real value, billions of dollars being transacted. So if there's already value there, and this is just one closed economy, what happens when you open this up? What happens when you start to tell people that can export the creations in one world and bring it to another?

Well, in order to really do that, you're going to need some infrastructure. The infrastructure looks like, I think an NFT but there's going to be upgrades the same way that the. Digital music file that we used, like if you remember you go all the way back, remember that there was like dot a I F F and then it was dot W A V.

And then now we have like the dot MP3. And then even from the MP3, we have dot A C C. Right? Like the codec has changed and it's evolved. And you know, most people don't know. Most people still call it just an MP three and like move on with life. But the point I'm making is mhm. You know, if we call it NFT today in the format changes, cool, whatever, but that method of thinking that ideology is what's going to be needed to transact and create value and crystallize that value in some of these digital economies that we see known as the metaverse and others.

Now, the problem with the metaverse is there isn't really. A true use case yet where it resonates with the masses. So if I give you a headset and you see it as a gaming instrument, or you see it as a vehicle to just find common understanding with other techies and futurists you know, that's cool, but we've got to get past this, like.

This moment where it's a, it's just a I don't know. What do you call it? Novelty kind of exactly where it's just a novelty, right? Like you don't want it to be a novelty. It's like our phone. You know, there's like probably 40 different use cases. You'll use your phone for it today.

Kelly Kennedy: Definitely not a novelty anymore.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah. Yeah. And I don't think it really ever was even one flip phone. If you go back 30, like 30 years now. You remember the candy bar phones and the flip phones? Like we still were playing games and we're still like batteries didn't last. Actually, batteries lasted long in the beginning. Right. We had all day battery life in the beginning.

And then like you got the 2004 and battery life just flooded. And now it's catching back up.

Brick

Kelly Kennedy: breaker was really good.

QuHarrison Terry: It was, it was, you know, you could, you could spend nine hours on that. Do you remember snake?

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, of course. Yeah. Honestly, dude, like, oh, man, that brings me back. But yeah, no, you're right.

Like they were tools, but they were still, I think the idea. Okay, so the problem that I see with the metaverse and the reason that people is because the metaverse as we think of it is still kind of an idea, but it's an idea that's very real. I think it's the way that we define it. So in the book, you kind of said the metaverse isn't just one thing.

You can't just look at At the Oculus and say that that's the metaverse because the reality is you can access the metaverse from a flat screen. You can access the metaverse from your phone. I think that's an idea that people have not really grasped yet when they look at the metaverse or they think about metaverse, they think about a VR experience.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah, I agree that the metaverse, like how you define it and how you access it. It's going to be fleeting. Like it's like right now it's, it's changing. Like even when I wrote the book, like the Apple vision pro didn't exist. The. X real air to pros didn't exist. Like, you know, that's a really cool device cost.

Like, it's like sub 1000. I think it's even less than that. But like, I don't have the exact price in my near me right now, but it's 1000. You put these classes on. You could plug them into any, like, pretty much any device with USBC component on it. And like, dude, you can have like a 200 inch screen just floating in front of you.

And like, you feel like you're a minority reporter, you're like Tony Stark, right? Like, you're just like, yeah. And it's like, this isn't the Apple vision pro, but this is also a device that's kind of sitting next to it now. It's still too techie, right? Like it looks cooler than like, you know, Some of the devices that exist, but it's still like, not like sexy enough where like, yeah, this is a probably gonna look.

Kelly Kennedy: Like big bricks on your face.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Or yeah, yeah, yeah. You look like you're going back in time. So it's like, the question here is like, how do we get that to a sexy form factor? And I think, you know, the company that I'm going to actually give some praise to again, as far as them being like super future forward, his meta, like we talked about those meta Ray Bans.

That is the metaverse, right? It's, it's not necessarily the one where it captured, it captures your whole peripheral view, but it augments your experience of everyday life in a way that, you know, was, is, is quite invisible to the everyday user. Like you have these glasses on. That can see the world around.

You can give you contextual understanding of certain things. If you say, what type of cat is this? What is the, what landmark is this that you can talk to it and they'll give you, you know, complete breakdowns. And it's quite good. And so they have that on one end. Then you have like the social layer where it's like, I can take a picture or a video.

It goes to my, my digital properties. I can share that content on those digital properties and the people around me can kind of see it, you know, if I want to live stream it or do a video call, I can do the same, whether it be on instagram or what's that now will sound like I'm an ad for meta, but it's like to many, that is the evolution of the internet, right?

It's like we go from just using the singular devices for the single use cases to more of this omnipresent interconnected world where you just show up and you exist and a lot of the technology does all the hard work for you. Now, that's hard to do because we've got some limitations on processing and compute, we've got some limitations on battery, we've got some limitations on form factor and like, how do you actually get all this in a way that, you know, doesn't cause strain to your eyes.

Yeah, your face, your, your, like your body in general, like, you know, cause we, we know what this looks like. You can be the coolest person on the world, but you got to wear like this, this trench coat suit of technology. And like, quite frankly, you're going to get pulled over walking down the street. Cause people are going to think, you know, you're up to something dubious.

Kelly Kennedy: So I get such bad motion sickness from VR headsets. Honestly, I am like almost embarrassed to say it because. We got a PSVR 2 for the boys, right? They absolutely love the thing. I've played it. We got Gran Turismo 7, which is completely immersive. Honestly, one of the craziest experiences I have ever had in my life.

Oh yeah. We got the steering wheel and all that. I'm like, I'm racing in Gran Turismo and I'm, I'm literally feeling it. I'm feeling the experience, which blew my mind. My mind was actually making me feel the turns and like it was very weird. I don't know how to explain it, but you can actually, if you've experienced it before, it's like your brain can remember and when you're turning, you're feeling it.

But then probably about lap three, I'm like, man, I am gonna lose my cookies. And unfortunately, since that point, that's kind of been my experience with VR. So it's amazing. But for whatever reason, I struggle with it.

QuHarrison Terry: No, I mean, I love Gran Turismo 7 it's an incredible game. I actually, I bought one of the rigs and bought a PlayStation 5 just for that, and I have the VR 2.

I've never played any other game but that on the PlayStation 5. No, literally, like, I have a PlayStation 5, I only play Gran Turismo. And it's for the reasons you described, it's like, You know, that's the first, that's the, if I want a game in PR, that's what it should look like. That's what it should feel like.

I've done a lot of experiences. The only other experience I might say that it was kind of cool. It's like I play, I was in Japan once and you, we had, they have like, they've got these suits. You can kind of get in like, here I go talking about tech suits and it's like a, like, think like you're in this giant mech.

But it's like, you get into the suit and so it's like, it copies the movements of these massive robots like that, but then they put the headset on you, so now you feel like you're in this massive robot, and then like, you're like, actually like, piloting a gundam, and you're like, fighting with other people in wars, and that's like, Oh, it's funny.

The gundam comes in, like the machines are listening to us. It comes on screen as I'm talking about it, right? Then it runs away. Oh, you know, that's like, that's what it feels like. Yeah. It's like that, that it's still red trees. Once a muse, the better experience. Cause it's like, It's like, it almost feels like when you go, if you like, did you, did you do like the licensed part in Gran Turismo?

Kelly Kennedy: No, like, like I said, I, like I, we got it for the boys and I think I played it like a couple times, but it made me so sick. But you know, you were talking about the suit experience and me and my fiance, we actually did do the suit experience in a VR, VRcade, right? Okay, yeah. Where you could actually move around.

And I didn't get sick from that. So I think for me, it's the body disconnect. If I can actually move around in VR, I don't get sick, but if I'm sitting in the world is moving around me, it throws me for a loop.

QuHarrison Terry: That's interesting. Right. That's super interesting because Researchers that are building these things need that feedback right there.

That's a prescient insight that allows them to then kind of say, okay, well, what does this look like? You know, what's also fascinating when you look at the, the meta quest platform What is eye opening to me is like the prolificness of fitness apps. Like, I mean, obviously, you know, we live in a world and like, as a marketer, there's always, there's this common trope, like you either help people get paid or get laid.

And so then like, you start to go down some of the attributes of those and like on the getting laid spectrum, you're just like, obviously losing weight and diet and all that. So it's like, okay, you've got this like crazy trend where like people will pay 30, 40 bucks a month just to like put this headset on and work out and they'll do that versus going to the gym.

Or doing anything else. And like, we've seen this phenomenon before. Like, remember the Wii? The Nintendo Wii? Remember how that was like a crazy workout like device? Like, you know, people would do Zumba, people would do bowling and tennis and all this stuff. And it was like, the Wii was like one of the devices that got people to like workout in ways that they wouldn't have ever expected.

And I think you can even tie the Wii to some of the revolutions that we saw with Pokemon Go. Like when you think about Pokemon Go and how that got people outdoors and walking around and all that good stuff. Like, I think that like, we saw the early beginnings of that with the Wii. Obviously there were like games for the Nintendo DS and all that stuff before and in between that.

But like, I still think that like, you have these moments where there's these, there's these big shifts in like understanding. And so, those were shifts. Wait, the shift right now on the, the quest platform is like, it's a workout device, but then like to your point now, it's like, okay, a Peloton is stationary.

You sit the bike down, people cycle, watch screen. Okay. Life is good. You need a lot of room now to say, Oh, you're, you're, you're, you're meta quest device is going to be your new gym. Okay. So I'm going to go, you know, box, I'm going to go do the beat saver. I'm going to go do all these, these actions, but like you need space.

And what we also know is like, you know, space is a luxury nowadays.

Kelly Kennedy: That's right. That's right. You know, one of the concepts that you really, and you know, we're talking to an entrepreneurial and business audience here, right? So I can hear a lot of people, I can already see the wheels turning, okay, this is going to be big.

But what is it? What does it really mean? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, and in the book, you really kind of focused in on NFTs. And I think people are like, well, what is that? And really what it kind of comes down to is it's a digital asset that there's a limited amount. It's not like going to the store and buying a digital video game or renting a show on Netflix.

It's, they're, they're, they're probably limited to a certain amount. So it has scarcity. And it is essentially property, like when you own it, it's not like in a video game where you unlock a gun or whatever, and then anyone and their dog can unlock that gun, kind of what it does is it gives you essentially a digital asset that is linked to you, that is linked to your digital wallet, and literally becomes property that you can then buy, sell, and this comes down to property, like in the book, you talk about digital land, like, They're it's going to be like a whole nother world where there will be like digital real estate agents.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah. Yeah. And it's already happened. Like, you know, you can be a digital real estate agent today. If you go to Fabrica there's a website that allows you to do that and You know, it sounds wild, sounds super wild, but it's, it's, it's here and I think you know, people should check that out to talk to your, to talk to, to your insight around it being finite and some of the, the, the concept there, you know, most people understand college, they understand that you go to college, you do your time for years, whatever, and you get a degree degrees in themselves are kind of finite in the sense that however many students are graduating, that's how many degrees there should be.

So it's not like there's an endless amount of degrees. There's just like, you know, 2000 kids, 2000 degrees. Yeah. That's if all 2000 kids graduate. So maybe there were 4, 000 kids, you know, you lose half of that population, 2000 finished and completed on a set time. And so you're at that time when you have your graduation, that's when you get those degrees.

Now in a world where. There isn't a database of that. I mean, the schools obviously keep records. And if you want to request your transcripts and all that information, you can get that from the school, but it's centralized. And, you know, there's something to be said about that. Obviously, there's been like the paper mill degree farms and all that, like we know about all the scams.

And, you know, we're not here to solve that, but I'm using this is just more so a model, a vehicle to understand like an analogy. And so when you look at it, the transformation, right, is like the first time ever. In the digital world, you know, the paper mill can't exist, right? Like you can't like it used to be.

You take a photo. I screenshot the photo. Now we both got the same photo. Now you're yours might have a little bit more resolution. But for some of the screens and devices and things that we're doing, resolution is kind of, it's a moot point because it looks good enough on both. The screenshot looks just as good for the intended use case as the actual real deal.

And so how do you prove that you have the real deal? And you know that that that had been a question for a long time. Yeah, The concept of an NFT and that technology is kind of solved that understanding what we've done with that understanding today is now you can go into a digital space. You can say, well, if you decorate your digital home that you can, those items can be rare and unique.

And you know, you have the art use cases. But even more fascinating is like, how do NFTs interact, intersect with the, or how does the, how does the concept of digital sovereignty intersect with the actual real world asset, a real world with real world assets. And so we see it with money like Bitcoin and Ethereum finally starting to really be introduced into the tapestry of finance.

So you see the global economy is now finally starting to, to liken, you know, digital money as if it were any other instrument. And there's still a little bit of resistance, but not as much as it nearly was last like decade or so. And so as that opens up. You have some qualms that come alongside it, but like now there's this whole new concept where like, you know, you do have stable coins, you do have Bitcoin, the price of a Bitcoin might fluctuate, but it's the same price everywhere in the world.

That's insane, man. That's insane. Right? Like the U S dollar doesn't even hold the same price everywhere in the world. Like the value of it in Mexico and the value of it in Europe and the value of it in Japan and the value of it in you know, Nairobi is different. just based on the currency exchange and the value of that currency and the importance of it there.

Now it's still a U S dollars, so you're still going to have it. But compared to the local currencies, there's this, there's this, there's this, there's, there's going to be some type of loss. Whereas with crypto unless you're trying to convert it into something else, you typically don't experience that.

And that is like fascinating, but it's finite, right? And the reason why you have that, that, that value that's kind of locked in is because it is this, this. I mean, Bitcoin, there can only be 21 million of them. Yes. Yeah. Right. So that's it. Like there's not, we can't make more Bitcoin. And so that's where digital something that's digital, that's also finite.

That's like what it looks like at the massive level. Now, the question I have, and I still have to this day is like, you know, I don't think it's just going to be financial instruments. There's so many assets that. You know, are unbankable by nature that can be, I think, brought into the world of digital economies via NFTs and other entities.

And I think the metaverse will solve for some of that. But I, I think that this is, this is where the stuff gets really fascinating. And I think the technology has to catch up a little bit. I think you need generative AI for a metaverse to really populate or I think you need generative AI for a metaverse to really be a When you have generative AI, you can start to generate some of these assets, some of these things to fill up some of the spaces.

And, you know, it's really good at that. I mean, even more recently when we were looking at GPT 4. 0, you know, its ability to even make a GLB, which is the 3D object file that people use to, you know, fill out a video game or a digital environment. You know, you can generate these things now with the generative AI model.

Beforehand, I needed to get an artist and design it. They need to, you know, color it, do all these things, and then, you know, present you the file. And it just wasn't an efficient way to do work at mass. And so that's why video games take so long to build, is because, you know, they have to render out all these different, Yeah.

objects and composites. And so as that time is diminished because of generative AI, we're going to see some of these worlds just get transformed. And a good example here is you know, again, I, I go, I go back to Japan because they, they, they, there's a lot of qualms, but when we look at the future of technology there are a lot of, they've already taken a lot of shots on goal.

And so they've got, you know, some pretty cool examples as it relates to the metaverse and, and AR they've got this VR world called hello, Tokyo friends. And they've got a web a web app called Tokyo hunt. Now, both of them are, I think you have to look at them both because they both came out at around the same times and they both are, are doing something really cool in these digital spaces.

So hello, Tokyo friends is a VR world. So think of the metaverse as we've been describing it, places where people go, put the headset on, okay, you've got hello Tokyo and then that VR world is based on Roblox, which is crazy, right? Like we talked about that in the book, but like. They said, let's just put this in a Roblox and that gives people a space where they can like, they can go and be interested about Japan and Tokyo and they can connect and interact with people that also have that.

And, you know, what's funny is you have visitors, like people from around the world coming in. You've got locals in there. And like, now you have this, this connection where some people are sharing their expertise, not only about where they live, but also learning about, like, Japan and Tokyo. And so that's, that's an interesting point.

And that's on the metaverse side, like, you know, VR works. Yes. On the flip side, you've got Tokyo hunt, which is a web app. And this is a web app that you can use on your phone, your tablet, whatever your iPad, however you want to do it. Right. And it can be used before and during your visit to Tokyo.

Now what this does is it gives you a whole new way to experience Tokyo that combines basically your real world experience with the virtual. And so they have like this AR camera function that allows you to take like, let's just say, elevated postcards, right? So you're like sightseeing in Tokyo and you can bring these various characters to life.

And the, they only appear at various locations. So when you go to Tokyo and Shibuya, there's this, there's this, this famous statue is called Hachiko and very interesting story. But you know, when you go to Hachiko statue, there's millions of people taking photos literally every day of the statue. You go there and you have this this Tokyo hunt app.

You can take your photo just like everybody else's, but now your photo has the cool, unique AR filter built into it. And so there's cool, there's like today, these seems like, Oh yeah, that's cool. It's cutesy. It's whatever. But fundamentally, these are some of the first steps towards kind of that world.

It's kind of like we go back to 2000 and the earlier part of this conversation, we talked about QR codes, like Japan was using QR codes. And 2000, that was not new. Like they didn't have to make this massive shift for all their menus in order for people to get it, you know? And so the point I'm making is like, we can look elsewhere and say like, Oh, so that's how that might look.

And so the, the VR worlds. Not much different than what we're doing here. Right now we put on AirPods. We put our, our, our computers, we get them ready. We go to LinkedIn, we go to X, we go to Instagram, and we just kind of talk in this 2d world, the kids already are on roadblocks. The kids are already in Minecraft.

The kids already are in video games. As you spoke at, you know, grand trees, you can't do it. You get motion sickness. Your, your boys will probably be great drivers because they had way more simulator time than anybody else. And if you play GT seven. You know, that like, it's pretty, it's pretty good. It's pretty good.

Like it's, it's not, it's not the same thing. No, it's not. But as far as like, if you drive a pickup truck and, and, and GT seven and you get an actual pickup truck, it's the same kind of movements.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah. Yeah. It's pretty close.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah. So because of that, they will have a different understanding, a different perspective.

Then many of us. And so what we have to do is lay down some of the infrastructure. So that way, the innovators of tomorrow can actually just step in and say, okay, this should be this or this should be that. And I think Roblox has done a great job of growing with their users. You know, if you would have talked to anybody at Roblox probably just even seven years ago.

They probably would never thought that they would be in some of the places they are or have some of the economies that they have even within their video game and to see where that goes as their as Gen Z and Gen Alpha both grow is just going to be such a fascinating experiment. And, and just and just, yeah, just experiment because we literally don't know where this is going.

Kelly Kennedy: No, no. And I think that that's the crazy thing, right? Like, you know, I mean, I'm a parent. I have four boys, right? Ten, eight, seven, and literally six months today. So it's like, they're, they're a wide range. And you're right, like, they've been playing, you know, Fortnite for probably the last three to four years, Roblox, at least the last two years, right?

And they love that stuff, like, they love that stuff, like, to the point where they really love that stuff, right? And so for me as a parent, like, me and you grew up in a completely different world, you know, we had friends, we played at the park, we hung out with our friends after school, like, that was the things that we did.

And they're kind of doing those things in a different way. And I think one of the struggles that I have, and I think a lot of parents is like, how much should we let them live in the digital world versus the real world? How do you balance it? Cause it feels impossible.

QuHarrison Terry: Well, see the question I have there, I'm not a, I'm not a parent, but I get people ask me this question all the time.

It's like, should their kids have tablets? Should they limit their, their, their device and screen time? Like, and you know where I say is like, I get your concern. It's a valid concern. But if you hold your kid back, you actually hinder the technological growth and development. The thing here is, I think, you know, we have to change.

We have to adjust morals and we have to address the integrity and how we train and teach integrity and also how we how we teach independence and trust, right? Like all of these things are that that's where I would start if I had a kid. So I would focus. Okay, what is trust? Right? I trust that you have this device.

And I trust that, you know, kind of the rules that we have trust that you can be independent because I can't always be there in like, you know, I like we have to have a relationship where you have to manage kind of your own time. Like you have some responsibilities that you have to be accountable for, and that's going to grow as you develop and grow.

But like I like it starts with this device, like you have to take care of it. You have to like understand like everything you see on it isn't real. And then like morals, man, like, you know, the thing that young minds really need a lot of guidance for is like, you know, Sometimes you don't always want your kid to put their hand on the stove and to see that it burns, right?

So you don't always want your kid to like be the kid that starts the fight and like pushes the kid and start it Like starts punching people. You're like, well, why can't I do that? It's like, you know, like there's there's this there's this moral part, right? Yeah, so I think we have to look at that and it also realized that these devices We're not you don't get too many people complaining about all the iPhones back.

It's a bad piece of technology kids shouldn't hold it it's always Oh, you know, online, you're kind of low self esteem, confidence comparison, this, that, and the third. So it's like the networks and what you expose the kids to also can be, you know, quite demeaning. So it's like you have to like be careful because if you don't even expose them, like, let's say you don't let your kids get on Roblox because you're like, man, the kids on Roblox, they're talking crap, do all that.

Let's like, dude, let's go back to when we were kids when we were riding our bikes. What the fuck were we doing? Yeah. Excuse my language.

Kelly Kennedy: Playing Need for Speed talking smack.

QuHarrison Terry: We were talking so much shit and so much trash, right? Like, we, like, were we holier than thou? Like, if we, if we, the problem is for them is it's, it's documented.

It's like, yeah, this, this, this account stays with them. So it's like, yeah, don't let your kid use their real name online. I think that that's probably where it starts.

Kelly Kennedy: That's pretty fair. Yeah. Well, I think about it. I actually agree with you completely because it's like, look at the world we live in now.

Look how important a computer is. Like, let's get real. If you don't know how to use a computer, you're probably dead in the water. Like, like there's not like you have to use a computer, but you're right. If you never got those basic skills on how to use a computer. We you couldn't you couldn't interact today.

And I do kind of feel like if they're not able to use tablets, if they're not able to use VR, if they don't understand the rules of the next world, you are hindering them. I guess the thing is, is it's also new. We're not sure what that actually means long term.

QuHarrison Terry: Well, I mean, we have our own lives, right?

Like, I mean, you're, you were savvy with the computers and internet and now you have an internet podcast that allows you to get more distribution for your business, et cetera, right? So, I mean, had you not, have you, had you been a Luddite your whole life and you're just like, I'm not going to use the internet, you probably wouldn't understand the benefits of podcasting.

And there's still people today that are like anti podcast. podcast. I don't want to listen to podcasts. Like, okay, that's cool. But like the world's changed, right? Even, even, even podcasts have shipped. Like, remember, I remember podcasts in 2006. Like, when they were on the iPod, and it was like, you remember when it was, when we had the scroll wheel, and there was like a little thing, and it said podcast, and you click on it, and you used to put podcasts on the iPod via iTunes, like, with the cord?

I remember podcasts then, when Steve Jobs made it cool.

Kelly Kennedy: I'm a horrible example, dude. Like, I didn't even like, I remember that. I didn't even start listening to podcasts till like 2015. Like, I was so late to the party.

QuHarrison Terry: Well, were you later? I mean, the party's changed, right? Because we're right on time. I don't know.

We're doing a podcast. Then it was like radio, like it captured and like spliced up and put on like people's iPods. Right. And then like, you know, Joe Rogan was around in that time. But then like. You know, very few people stuck with it, even to see where it's at in 2024 is 20 years, right? So we talk about 20 years of podcasting and we look at it.

I remember when podcast didn't have sponsors. Now you kind of look cooler if you have the, the, the, the break. All right. Now for a word from our from our sponsors.

Kelly Kennedy: It like legitimizes the whole thing.

QuHarrison Terry: Which is wild. It's like we expect ads. When the hell did we expect ads? Like we pay for and we pay other people to take away ads.

If your podcast doesn't have ads, then your podcast kind of is like, Oh, there's no one's listening to this. There's no ads.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

QuHarrison Terry: Isn't it weird how it is?

Kelly Kennedy: It's absolutely bonkers. You know, one of the things, though, that I wanted to talk to you about. It's because like I said, you, you have insights and ideas and you know, I mean, they're, they're well put together in the book.

Like the reality is there's no way in this conversation that we could have ever touched on even a fraction of what is in the book. So I do want our listeners to know, like, there's no way like this conversation is enough. There's so much more. Get the book.

QuHarrison Terry: For sure. I really wrote the book as a vessel at which a decision maker can sit down with this and build at least a decent understanding.

Of what the metaverse is and what it could mean. And I didn't get too technical as to like, what was, what was relevant at the time when I wrote it, tried to write it in a way where, you know, the major players, we knew who they were going to be and still have, still pretty much all the same major players.

And we talked about that, but what we really, really wanted to do is say like, Hey, if you're a decision maker at X company, if you're a manager, if you've got your own business, if you've got a brand, if you've got, you know, some concept that you want to bring to life and you're trying to find an audience.

I go in there and I literally say, this is what's, this is, these are the possibilities that could, that could be on earth. And here are people that are doing it. Like it's more so a it's like a book of case studies if you ask me, right? Because you know, we're telling you about what people are doing then, which is two years ago.

You know, we're talking about virtual nail salons and screenshot documentarians and like that. Like, that's crazy. Like how you think about it. But it's like the. I don't even think at the time when I wrote the book some of those things that I talk about will go on and go even further. So the, the, the, the, the movie that we talked about, the guy who was recording his screen, the guy that was recording the screen, he actually got a deal with HBO max.

And so that video, like, you know, like the movie you can watch on, on max, which is phenomenal.

Kelly Kennedy: Wow. Wow. Yeah, like I, you're right. Like it's evolving so quickly. It's like at that time, you know, MetaQuest 3 wasn't out yet. Obviously, like you said, the Apple Vision Pro just came out, like, like it's, it's changing rapidly, but I guess that's it.

It's like, what does a business do? Right? Like, If I'm a business right now living in the meat world, as it's as it's called in the book, which we all are for the most part, what what do we do? Right? Like, how do we take our first steps into the metaverse? Like, what is your recommendation to companies that are still living in web two, they just have a website, they have services or products that they're selling?

What should be the way in the door? How do they start? Like, is it just a little dibble dabble of time? Is it buying a meta quest and experiencing VR? What, what is it? What's the way forward?

QuHarrison Terry: So if I were starting in VR today, let's just say, you know, I've got a brand. What kind of brand? Give me, give me a brand.

Like, what kind of brand?

Kelly Kennedy: Okay, let's say that we're, we're a, we're a product company and we sell consumer products. You know, let's, let's just call it, let's call it, We've been talking about a nail salon. Let's let's say that we're, we're selling nail polish.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah, well, I mean, that example is in the book, right?

If I was at a nail salon, right, I'll, I'll answer the product company and I'll answer the nail salon. So the nail salon, we already talked about that in the book. The, the point here is if you're a nail, if you are a nail tech and you do It's finite. The amount of people you could see in a day, the amount of money you could make, even if you have all the demand in the world, you can only have X amount of people that come to your salon that you serve.

So the way you scale that is you get, you take the brand, you expand it, you hire more nail techs, you serve more customers you grow kind of your expenses on the, the hope that you would actually be able to fulfill. The demand through the already existing clientele and more on the flip side, right?

When we talked about it in the metaverse, you had CK who was a nail designer who was really good at what she does. She's doing celebrity nails by day and by night, she's selling the designs that she's making for the celebrities, for people that have you know, like, you know, So they're like going around and they're like, okay, I look good.

I got my wings. I got my, my head piece. I got all that. My avatar is dipped out. I want some nails. CK's got you and she's selling them for actual cryptocurrency. And so now you're starting to amass even some profits and that's 24 seven. She makes a 250 nail set collections there, sell them for whatever.

Then, you know, the cool thing about the digital space is, you know, you can do interesting things with royalties. So even after those 250 sell out, if there's more continued transactions, depending on how the contract set up, she can also get You know, royalties from all the sales. And then also if the demand and rarities are done right and like the, the volumes kind of like being addressed, like people are actually buying your stuff, what happens then is you can also you can benefit pretty well in the sense that I'm trying to think how, how I would describe this in a sense that like, You can keep releasing collections and like, you know, now you're building a brand that exists beyond you.

So like, that's what we talked about in the book on the flip side. I mean, talking about the product, the product company that you were asking me about, if I'm in 2024 and I'm like, okay, what does the metaverse look like for us in our, in our company? There's like two questions I have to ask myself. The first question is like, Now one, how do you see the metaverse?

Like, so if I'm a fitness brand, maybe I do go lean towards like, or a fitness product, I should say. If I'm a fitness product, I mean, meta's done a good job selling these Quest headsets. There's a lot of people that's got them. If you can, if you can figure out a way to like basically make your product relevant with the Quest headset, the platform, I'm sure meta will be calling you.

Because that's like what they're looking for right now. So if I had a fitness product or something and I knew I could make like the, putting the headset on cool and we can make some cool content around it and we could, we could make it so that it was fly. Like, you know, that's an easy growth lever right now.

Like there's going to be someone that does that the same way. You remember. I mean, think about iPhone cases. Think about how Otterbox like just built the whole company and a brand. Like obviously they existed before the iPhone. I want to, let's make that clear. The Otterbox company existed before the iPhone, but you remember the iPod and you remember the iPhone, you remember what Otterbox did, then you're in Canada too, right?

Yes. Yeah. So I'm using a Canadian company. You remember that? That was, that was the, that was the, that was it. That was the Dundada for like 10, 15 years. You remember that?

Kelly Kennedy: Yes. Yes. No. Like hell Otterbox is still a brand name around here.

QuHarrison Terry: That's my point. Right. And it came up off the app. Like they, they literally paired themselves with the iPod and the iPhone and they ran that thing.

But like, that's what I would do is like, you already have hundreds of millions of these devices at home. If you've got a fitness brand, And you know that this thing is being used for that. Make a cover for the inside so sweat doesn't get on it. You can probably get those online for really cheap. Get it from China, brand it, whatever.

So include that with your product. Now it's like, Hey, this is the this is the oculus face plate face plate. It's for your we're not oculus. This is the quest face plate. You put it on, you do your thing. And you use our product, whether it be bands, whether it be hula hoops. Now, the thing here is like, you've got to make sure It actually makes sense and you don't want to hurt anybody.

So you've got to like, like safety concerns are important and massively it should be, it should be addressed. But once you get past that, let's come back around and we say, all right, we've gotten, we've gotten that figured out. Let's say you're a CPG or a consumer product, good company. And like you, we don't make fitness.

What does it look like? Well, then I wouldn't probably look at like the meta quest platform. I would probably look at something similar to my example earlier when I was talking about the AR worlds and like the digital postcards in Tokyo. I would probably do something where it's web based. So I see a lot of, I think Jones is soda.

They did a cool activation with like QR codes. Ironically enough, we can scan the QR code and you know, like the AIR experience. And there's like some new formats too, that Apple's made. It's called what is Apple's format? Is it FBX? I don't think it's FBX. It'll come to me in a second. There's a, apple has a 3D format that like actually can be transferred through iMessage.

So as you start to think about, you know, elevating your marketing experiences, maybe instead of switching to email, like, you know, like everyone's always doing email marketing, maybe I switch to like, you know, I iMessage for business. And we take the people's information and then when we send them the follow up message, we send them this cool like a are a component that they can then go and take their own photos with kind of like the digital postcard.

And you gotta remember the adoption. There's going to be a little bit slower, but because that was you got away from. The Facebooks and the Instagrams and the tick tocks like you're taking the filter experience and you're, you're doing it one to one. You're not going to get the same scale. Like if someone uses your AR chat filter experience on Instagram, there's a lot, there's a massive scale.

But if you want the brand recognition and you want people to see you as a more authentic and forward leaning brand, well, you probably want to own that experience. So I think what's cool there is we see the benefits of that with Ikea and even Amazon, right? Like in their apps, you can go and view what certain products look like at your home.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah.

QuHarrison Terry: That's cool. Right. With the, the Apple vision pro now, right? Like. If I'm telling stories and I have a brand, let's say I'm a coach, I might make like a, an apple vision pro app. Right. Even if I have to be on the forefront today and like figure it out on the cost side, I, you know, do that, but position yourself like brand with the product.

They're like, you know, you can't, I can't be there with you all the time. For my, I don't know, let's just say my platinum package users. I actually have an Apple Vision Pro app. If you buy the platinum version of this, we actually send you the Apple Vision Pro. So you don't even have to worry about the cost there.

You get an Apple Vision Pro from us, and we give you a code for the app. You install the app, and everything that you have that you've done in your coaching platform with us is there. It's accessible, and it has these AI coaches Myself included. Blah, blah, blah. It sounds crazy, but like you can build that now and then you grow with it as the technology gets better.

Okay, maybe the coaches can only have, you know, so much memory or so much can access so much. Or maybe you can only have one coach in the future. You can have two. We already kind of have that when you think about if when you use the Apple Vision Pro They have like these holographic people they call them personas that like float in the space with you.

So it's like face time on steroids. It looks a little uncanny valley as people call it, but like I, I actually, I, I didn't like it. So it's not something I, you see me doing all the time. I did buy an Apple vision pro. It was cool, but it was too heavy and it gave me a headache. Like that was the one device where it wasn't that I was motion six.

It was just like, this thing was like heavy. It was like, And so I had to let it go. But, you know, there's a thing where, you know, some people are going to say that. But there's going to be some people that just haven't tried it. And so people that are going to be just mesmerized by the fact that you gave them this headset.

And so that, that touch point becomes an activation. And then what you have to do is you have to learn from all these different activations what's actually going to be the sensation that goes viral and creates this, this, this unprecedented moment for your brand to really shine through. And it's a, it's a really hard challenge.

Roblox has done a great job of it. Unity's done pretty decent. Apple obviously has had some moments. Meta has had some moments. When you start to go down the pathway, it's still so, so, so, so early. Like, the, the industry is nascent as far as what it's actually going to be in the next 10, 15 years.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, like what, really what you're saying at the end of the day is just do something.

Just start thinking about what you can do to play in this new field so that, so that you're ahead of the curve, not behind.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah, get active. But like, you know, if you go to chapter nine in the book, I got your metaverse plan. That's right. Check it out. You know, there's a lot more in depth information there.

And it's easy to read. I mean, you can probably read this book in like a week.

Kelly Kennedy: It's not even, I did it in three days. So yeah, it just depends how badly you want to read it.

QuHarrison Terry: Well, I wrote it that way. Right. I try, I, when I write, I like to write books in nine chapters or less. I think I have two books that don't fit that.

But one, like one by like two, like three more chapters than nine, then the other just that was my first book. So I didn't know. I also like try to like leverage all the time. Like if you know if someone's going to take the time and read and read with you or read something you wrote you try to make sure that all those words are Accommodating to their talk, because you know, there's so many things you could do.

You could listen to a podcast, you could watch a YouTube video, you could be with your kids, you could go to take a class, you could go, you know, hang out with friends. There's just so many different things that are calling our attention. And so, I really try to make sure when I write a book, we go and publish it that every word kind of counts as best as we can make it happen.

Kelly Kennedy: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And it was, honestly, it was an easy read. Like, I really enjoyed the read. There was nothing about it that was like, Oh, this is, it wasn't boring by any means. So you did a great job in the way that you did it. Where can people get the metaverse handbook? I, I, you know what I mean?

I got it off Amazon, but.

QuHarrison Terry: Yeah. It was on today for all, for all authors accounts for about 80 percent of all our sales. So go ahead and support either amazon. com. We still, it still works. Otherwise most local bookstores are going to carry. Our book, it's, it's, it's published by Wiley. So we do get the benefits of being with the actual publisher where, you know, most bookstores you can get it.

They don't have it on the store or store shelves. They can always order it and get it to you. Or most people that buy books that way are just trying to support, you know, some of their local bookshops or other establishments that aren't Amazon. I get it both ways, but from an ease and convenience standpoint, tell you to go to the metaverse handbook.

com or metaverse handbook. com actually. And you, we also. Have a few retailers there as well.

Kelly Kennedy: Perfect. I will make sure that I link that in all of our social posts that go along with this. So if you're hearing this, just come check out all of our socials and the show notes, you'll be able to find it. When we were talking, obviously we spent some time, we were talking about Japan a little bit.

One of the other organizations you work with is learnjapanese.com.

QuHarrison Terry: That's correct. Yes. We you see some of the stuff in my background working with Sonosuke and team over there to really make Japanese a lot less boring. You know, it doesn't have to be so scary and boring to learn. And what I found when I was starting to like, just get in engrossed in all the different vessels at which you can start to learn Japanese, there was nothing that was really resonating with me on a on a personal level.

The same way, like when you read that Metaverse handbook, it has to be captivating, then that's how you finish the book. Japanese was, was very much starting to become something that was a chore and not, not fun. I worked with my Japanese teacher to create an experience known as LearnJapanese. com, where we have this program called Nihon 123, where we literally make learning Japanese as simple as 1, 2, 3, and it's fun all the way through and throughout.

We're still building it, so you know, the people that are joining us now get a chance to see what, you know, it is. What it, what it, what it's like as an entrepreneur, as you start off with like, you know, your first couple hundred users to hopefully, you know, whatever the masses could be. So we're always open to feedback.

If there's anybody that wants to learn Japanese, you know, we're always willing to accept it. If you listen to this podcast, I mean, we can figure out a way to get you a code or something.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. Amazing.

Man, like, I can't tell you how much I appreciate you coming on the show and sharing that with us. Dude, like, we could have talked, like, the reality is we didn't even get any, you're a marketing expert, too.

Like, we didn't even really get into that and I feel like at another time I would love to have you back and have that conversation with you because I'm sure there's lots to talk about there. But, you know, the reality is what you're doing is super important and and honestly something that not a lot of people know.

Like, there's not a lot of people like you, QuHarrison. So, I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your knowledge with us today.

QuHarrison Terry: Thanks for having me. And it was cool to, to be able to talk about the future. I think one thing even more relevant to this conversation than anything else is if you want to know my thoughts on the future.

There's never been a better time. You can go to everydays.wtf and you will actually see that every day. I asked myself, what's the future? And I take detailed notes and I store them in the journal. That journalist open source. Anyone can access it. They can view it. It's free. I don't charge for it. And it's a beautiful experience because you get a chance to see some of these nodes or some of these these shifts as they're happening in real time.

And, you know, I'm just usually capturing like kind of notes and highlights. But yeah we're gonna get to a point where I start to actually do more presentations. The first one will be later in June. And I'll like kind of take some all of my notes and show you like kind of how I see it and that that's going to be a cool experience.

So we're working on that on the back end and then also like, I mean, it's through the books and stuff. You get to see the note cards before they become no cards because this is the same notebook that I use when I go and write. And in many ways, I open up the writing room. So if you have thoughts on something or you have questions at the end of all those notes is the comment section.

And there's people that come and they ask questions. And guess what? I respond. It's my notebook. So one of the easiest ways to get in contact with me. If you're like looking to learn more about like future thinking and just like how the these shifts in a I Okay. are going to transform a lot of different industries or even like things about the metaverse.

I still publish all that stuff there. And you cool thing too, is you can search too. So if you type in metaverse, you can see all the notes that I have or you type in something you're interested in. You can see kind of what I thought was fascinating as it stood. And this is something I've been doing for almost 13 years, but we're right now.

And our third, maybe this is our second year, third or second year, where it's open source. So, you know, I had the idea a few years back And then, like, it took some time to get a processing system that was, like, pretty reliable and, and down, and, like, it was easy to, to just maintain, and now we're there, and it's simple, like, just come check it every day, and you'll you'll always learn something, you'll always see something.

Kelly Kennedy: Amazing. Perfect. Well, I will make sure that the link for that is also in all of our show notes and posts. So, if you're listening to this, and you're getting it, you'll just be able to find it wherever you're listening. So, we're good to go. Dude, once, once again, total honor. Thank you for joining us. We've been joined by QuHarrison Terry, and he gave us all the tips on the future here.

And if you want to move forward, you definitely need to check out The Metaverse Handbook. Appreciate it. Until next time, this has been the business development podcast, and we will catch you on The flip side.

Outro: This has been the business development podcast with Kelly Kennedy. Kelly has 15 years in sales and business development experience within the Alberta oil and gas industry and founded his own business development firm in 2020.

His passion and his specialization is in customer relationship generation. And business development. The show is brought to you by Capital Business Development, your Business Development Specialists. For more, we invite you to the website @ www.capitalbd.ca. See you next time on the Business Development Podcast.