Kyla Scanlon: Gen Z Creator on Why Decentralization and The Metaverse Matters

10/21/21 • 42 min

The creator economy, crypto, and the metaverse have been probably the buzziest concepts of this year (or in tech at least), and Kyla Scanlon straddles all three of these worlds on a visceral level. She is a content creator who focuses on financial education, which entails explaining to people hard to grasp concepts like crypto and other vehicles for decentralization. And by being a creator, she naturally occupies a majority of her life in the online world, aka, the Metaverse. As a GenZ (or as she’d like to say, a Cusper, which are are GenZ folks on the cusp of being a Millennial) and an online creator, she has forged a livelihood online through her work, and as a result, has made many rich relationships with people online, even more so than offline. In her own words, she is a prototype for the concepts that she creates content around.

This is what made my conversation with her so interesting and meta. Foremost as an educator, Kyla explains and unbundles difficult web3 concepts such DAOs, NFTs, Social Tokens and Defi. From her creator perspective, she explores how these emergent concepts directly impact her life and her work. Finally, as a GenZ, she muses about why these concepts (especially this desire for decentralization) are emerging for her generation and what it might be a cultural reaction to. We explore some real issues for GenZ such as the growing sense of loneliness, the dark and exhausting elements of creator culture, and the repercussions of growing up with information overlap and no room for processing and introspection.

ABOUT THE GUEST

Kyla Scanlon is a popular financial content creator and educator. She started options trading in high school, previously worked at Capital Group and was a participant in the TAP program. She is now building a financial education company to onboard people to the world of investing. You can subscribe to her financial content on substack, Youtube, TikTok or wherever you like to consume your content.

SHOW NOTES

[3:55] The power and influence of creators

[8:30] DAOs as a community organizing vehicle

[13:50] NFTs, digital ownership, and how they can serve creators

[20:40] Social Tokens and the idea of monetizing every aspect of yourself as a creator

[23:55] The loneliness of being a creator

[25:40] Living life more online than offline

[27:40] The Metaverse as a solution to information overload

[30:20] Loneliness

[32:35] How to create the right education framework for younger generations

[34:35] Defi and the future of finance

[36:10] Why decentralization matters for GenZ

[38:00] The Debt Ceiling, economic collapse, the Fall of Rome

ABOUT THE GUEST

SHOW NOTES

[3:55] The power and influence of creators

[8:30] DAOs as a community organizing vehicle

[13:50] NFTs, digital ownership, and how they can serve creators

[20:40] Social Tokens and the idea of monetizing every aspect of yourself as a creator

[23:55] The loneliness of being a creator

[25:40] Living life more online than offline

[27:40] The Metaverse as a solution to information overload

[30:20] Loneliness

[32:35] How to create the right education framework for younger generations

[34:35] Defi and the future of finance

[36:10] Why decentralization matters for GenZ

[38:00] The Debt Ceiling, economic collapse, the Fall of Rome

Previous Episode

Kenshi Arasaki: Psychology of Games and NFTs

The best games are often built by those who have developed a mastery over human psychology and motivation and Kenshi Arasaki one of them. He is the creator of multiple hugely popular mobile, free-to-play games, and he shares his principles and insights on what makes games enticing to players and sustains traction.

We deep dive on why a master of psychology and human incentives is the recipe for creating good games. We’ll cover how to create an environment for interesting emergent social behaviors, capturing the full spectrum of human emotion as a means to create true community bonds, and what it means to create a perfectly competitive environment where people are motivated to progress.

After all his experiences in gaming, Kenshi is most bullish on the opportunities NFTs are able to unlock for the industry. We explore the economic implications of the evolving vertical of play-to-earn games and how it can make spending time in virtual worlds a worthy and legitimate investment of time. We’ll talk through some of the challenges that NFTs are facing as well as what it means for gaming and virtual experience beyond, to have a real mechanism to enforce digital rights.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Kenshi Arasaki is the CEO and Co-founder of A Thinking Ape Entertainment, a gaming company that has produced some of the top free-to-play mobile games It was recently acquired by the Embracer Group. He is an angel investor and jpeg/nft enthusiast, and is the primary author behind US patent 8918725 for systems and methods to support real-time chat on mobile devices.
SHOW NOTES
[4:30] How to create initial traction for games and effective mechanisms

[11:00] Importance of helping people express their full emotional spectrum in virtual experiences

[17:00] Maintaining a balanced virtual economy

[21:10] Tapping into fundamental human motivations

[27:20] Play-to-earn games

[29:50] NFTs, digital ownership, and interoperability

[33:20] Creating native containers for NFTs

[37:40] What NFT would Kenshi want to build

Next Episode

Jacob Navok: Computing and Network Needs of the Metaverse

Jacob Navok is the co-founder and CEO of Genvid, which is the leader in interactive streaming technology. They are working on one of the most interesting problems in the pursuit of the metaverse vision which is, how do you get millions of people to concurrently be participating and interacting in one live experience with no latency (delay or lag)? This is as opposed to what’s happening right now with server sizes of around 50 people in say Fortnite concerts.

Jacob was the co-author of the networking and compute articles in Matthew Ball’s Metaverse Primer series. There he outlined the technical and infrastructural limitations and challenges we have today to make the metaverse a reality.

Beyond the buzz around what kinds of new use cases and consumer experiences the Metaverse will enable, it’s important to think about the foundations. What is the infrastructure and computing power we will need to actually power this future? This is not something that will be solved by any company alone, but a collective effort of all the builders of the internet.
ABOUT THE GUEST

Prior to founding Genvid, Jacob led worldwide business development and strategy at Square Enix Holdings, reporting to the CEO. He also built their cloud gaming division, Shinra Technologies, where he met many of his Genvid colleagues.
SHOW NOTES

[5:20] Definition of the Metaverse

[7:20] Why VR is not representative of the Metaverse

[13:05] Concurrency and the challenges of hosting live, synchronous events with millions of people

[17:35] Twitch as the first example of massive multiplayer concurrent gaming

[19:40] Rival Peak, Genvid’s Live Interactive Multiplayer Reality Show with AI contestants

[22:50] Hacks for the concurrency problem

[25:30] Why decentralized systems don’t work well for live 3D experiences

[27:15] Future use cases of live synchronous events

[30:30] Social platforms like FB, Twitch, Discord as identity systems of the Metaverse

[37:15] Why FB keeps investing in AR/VR

[39:10] How will life in the Metaverse be different from the real world?