The Empowered Customer with Richard Reukema

How'd you like to listen to dot NetRocks with no ads? Easy? Become a patron for just five dollars a month. You get access to a private RSS feed where all the shows have no ads. Twenty dollars a month. We'll get you that and a special dot NetRocks patron mug. Sign up now at Patreon dot dot NetRocks dot com. Hey guess what. It's dot net rocks all over again. I'm Carl Franklin and I'm Richard Campbell. We're gonna be talking

Yes, friend, I'm good. Somehow it's February, you know, time shifting wise?

Yeah, somehow?

Oh yeah, this is publishing on February thirteenth, which means my thirtieth anniversary just happened.

Wow. Yeah, Are you gonna go out to this store and buy an eight dollars head of lettuce? Just wondering?

Is that the is the thirtieth Lettuce anniversary? Is that it? No?

No, I just think it's when.

The tariffski get.

It's not even funny, you.

Know, it's I don't all right, of course we're speculating as to what's actually going to happen.

Yeah, we don't know.

We don't know, we don't we don't know.

It makes a good joke, might even doesn't It.

Might even be in US dollars.

Yeah, I have the Canadian US saying I guess I'm going to come up to America. Yeah, the Gulf of Canada.

This is bad. I have two Canadians that are ganging up on the American here trouble. All right, let's kick it off with better no framework, roll the crazy music.

All right, man, what do you got?

Okay? Well, I went looking for, you know, GitHub repos that are trending right now, and like the top five are all AI things.

Oh geez, no, you.

Know it's no surprise, right.

So yeah, no, it's all it's getting a lot of energy and it's down two ways about it.

The number one was coge kho j. I don't know how you pronounce it. It's one of those made up names that nobody knows how to pronounce, Codge, coge whatever. But here's the about your AI second brain, self hostable, get answers from the web or your docs, build custom agents, schedule automations, do deep research, turn any online or local LM into your personal autonomous AI supports GPT, Claude, Gemini, Lama Quen, is it Gwen or Quinn.

Yeah, it's one of the local LM and.

Mistral and get started for free. That's all I know about it. But they have some videos and that kind of stuff, and like I said, it's trending and it's in that AI category. It's all built in Python by the way, so you know, but they have documentation and they have source and all that stuff. So if you're into it and you want another, you know, another Python project to look after, go for it. That's what I got, all right. He was talking to us today.

Richard Grady comment, I went the way back machine on this one, okay, because I know we're going to talk about data privacy and the like. And back in twenty fourteen, on show nine sixty five, so almost a thousand shows ago, we did a show with Hugh Jones talking about EU data protection losses. This when of the GDPR was just coming into play, right, and so it was good to have a conversation about, you know, what does this look like,

And you could follow us on the other social media's We've been on ex Twitter forever. We're also on Macedon in Blue Sky is the current hotness where there seems to be a lot of engagement there, so some variation of at Carl Franklin, at Rich Campbell, We'll get you there, you'll find us, you'll find us. Let's talk about the year, right, nineteen thirty seven, eighteen thirty seven. I'm just going to

Yeah, okay.

Nineteen thirty seven saw a massive destruction in massacres in Ethiopia at the hands of the Italian forces were very bad. Also, many events in the Spanish Civil War, too many to mention. March third, Emelia Earhart's mysterious disappearance and you got anything, Richard.

Yeah. This nineteen thirty seven is the year that Hindenberg went down that famous video clip. You've seen it and the oh the humanity.

That's oh the humanity. Ay. Yeah.

It's also the year that the first jet eng were being tested be into development for a couple of years, but both Ohan and Whittell did their ground testing of turbine engines. So yeah, even before the war started, the engines were already in development, right.

Yeah, there's a lot of military technology going on.

There's a lot going on. It was a spendee time.

It was a spending time. Yeah, all right, so let us bring in for the second time on dot net Rocks the third time? Is it second or third?

Second? We've met three times?

Okay? Well. Richard Rukmu's expertise is in creating or integrating software into a business value proposition. He's performed in many roles throughout his career, but remains focused on delivering an efficient and effective business process, blending the characteristics of a deep technical resource, an entrepreneur mindset, and a business analyst. Richard always begins his work by understanding the business context for his service. There's more about that, but he really

The pairing of coding in a castle and wine go very well together.

Yeah, they certainly do. So, welcome back, Richard.

Thank you very much. Appreciate appreciate being on the show.

Absolutely, and you have a lot to talk about today. You send us a whole bunch of topic ideas well, one big topic idea. But I'm just gonna let you take it.

Well, I've been working in this space for a while, and I thought I had some time off, and I thought, what can I do with my time off? And I thought, I know what I'll do. I'll write a book. Yeah, sure, And the book's called The book is called The Empowered Customer dot Com. Yeah, and it takes the perspective of a customer's viewpoint of their data and how it's used in marketing, and how I can control and use that data.

Give me an example of this I'm trying to find. I mean, when I think about data, I think about data being you know, usage, data being stolen from people's phones and they're never seeing a dime for that data.

But stolen's too strong a term. Right now, Natalie, give it away.

You agrieved for them to you let them steal it. Okay, how about that?

So one of my one of my posts that I've put up often is what if Google was a cooperative right, would may be worth billions? It's worth billions if not more right every time, wouldn't be you know? Said m hmm, yeah, I wouldn't. Well, the data is worth billions that are providing it, right, But the the how does Google get their data that they can sell and make that valuation?

Like?

How do they get their data? And it's very simple in that they it's the breadcrumb of information that you use for search terms in their search bar. So if you say ski Calgary, that reveals a lot about you and that gets tagged to your profile and Google immediately then says, hey, I got a customer that wants to go skiing and he lives in Calgary. Who wants to know about this guy? And they sell that targeted advertising

And everything that you search for goes into that profile and then can be put together to form a more complete picture of you. Correct.

Correct, And now AI agents are even taking that further with contextual information about a discussion or anything that you have. And that's the same model being introduced where data is extracted from our activity involving with this information, and they make the money on information that we gleefully give them for free. And what I want to try to do is set up a cooperative that is owned by people that we willingly provide that same data but to the cooperative.

And what kind of commie talk is that, Richard Rukma, that's crazy talk.

Well, I don't know, gonna send me a check, Richard. I'll bow to your memory of what a cooperative is because it started in the thirties where people it was a weaving shop and they all helped each other build sure and do weaves and then sold the product. And then and then that was in the Saskatchewan. It started off as for power consumption, where a bunch of people wanted power and no corporation was going to do it, so they all got together and built themselves a power plant.

And we have food co ops all over the place in the United States and Canada.

Yeah, no, I think, I really think it starts with the farmers with consolidating cereal crops that you need to be there best stored en mass and defended on mass and packaged in consistent formats and sold as scale. And

So I parallel that example exactly with everybody else, because we're actually the farmers of our own words that we create, and we contribute that into a cooperative which then aggregate. Through aggregation, becomes extremely valuable. And we've seen, like they think of all the social media platforms that leverage this model, Google, Pinterest X or ex Twitter as you call it, next Twitter, I mean blue Sky, I mean they all, all of them,

So I'm thinking about this. I have a local grocery store. I go to check out and I scan everything, so there's the list of items that I bought, and then I pay with my credit cards. So there's my identity. What don't they already have?

Well, the credit card is not your identity.

In fact, the merchant has no identity from the credit card at whatsoever, and that's protected by what we call the bank Act. Okay, the only thing that will allow you to see the basket which is which is what you're talking about, the basket of at the checkout is a loyalty card.

A loyalty card, of course, that's what they're for. That's how they do it.

And the loyalty card is not for loyalty, it's for accumulation of data that's associated with the customer.

Yeah, of course, and you get a pitily little discount to make you think you thank you, you're getting some benefit from it.

So I've been at this a while, and there's we have this what they call a coalition program. The coalition program that that is in Canada is called air Miles.

I think you guys have it too in the States.

Right.

So in air Miles, they had to stop giving loyalty to gas stations. Do you know why why people were pouring gas on the ground so that they would get their next point Because they had to spend X number of dollars to get their loyalty points.

Oh, so they fill up their tanks, but they hadn't gotten gone quite far enough to get their next set of points, right, So they'll just hump all the x dice gas.

They poured it on the ground, like, oh, I'll just pour thirty cents on the ground make sure I get my next my next loyalty point.

That's outrageous.

And then what people didn't understand. What people didn't understand is that for every point in the air Miles program, it was worth a penny, and air Miles sold that data worth about twenty bucks. So you know they were giving away a penny but earning twenty.

And doing it by dropping a couple of bucks with a gas on the ground in the process.

Yeah right, because you know they It's just crazy. It's crazy.

What the.

Calculation of loyalty points is not done because it's money. It's because nobody can do it in their head and understand how many points are worth.

All right, So back to this whole co op thing. Are you suggesting that these existing companies that collect data turn into co ops or are you suggesting that we create new services and new institutions that adopt the co op model.

I think there's a great article I read by Simon Schneck.

I think is es. I don't know if I say it's spelt it right.

He's a business leader, and he says the capitalism of today is changed dramatically from the capitalism that we have in the thirties. The capitalism we had in the thirties was the benefit of the company to the people, was the primary concern of the corporation. The capitalism we have today is how much does the shareholders get? What is the revenue potential for the shareholders? And if we have to cut eighty percent of the staff. We'll do that just to make sure we keep the shareholder value up

But how can we do that and keep our existing institutions? So how do we do it?

The one example I often cite is gas stations in Canada. Everybody, if there's collusion at the gas stations, I'd like they say there isn't. They They've done studies it isn't. But when somebody goes up a penny, everybody goes up penny at the same time.

Is it collusion? It's collusion. If they all got on the phone say I'm going to raise my price a penny, it's not collusion. If one of them raises the price of penny and the rest of them see that and then follow, that's true.

True, But market market forces say that that shouldn't happen. They should.

Right Like this is Adam Smith's sort of fictional idea that this had drive that down. You mean, the corollary should be true. If one of them reduces by a penny, the rest of them should all reduce because their sales would dry up.

That that's true, and it does happen. That does happen. But what happens is if you raise your price a penny and everybody follows to raise the price of penny, the consumer still has no choice when when somebody who raises the price a penny should have less demand because there's other demands. There's other suppliers that will have a reduced price. Right, But if you collude to with each other, and I'm using that word clude that, oh his price

Just stop it.

Yeah, but that's their sales go down for the week.

But that's not always a choice that every consumer can make, right, true. I mean, if I live in an inner city and my market is right downstairs from my apartment, and somebody says, oh, you know, to be a good CISZ and we're not going to buy from this marketing. We're going to buy from that market, which is, you know, ten minute walk away. My lazy ass isn't walking ten minutes just to satisfy some data sharing algorithm. Do you know what I'm saying.

I hear you. I mean if we look at clothing and we buy, and we have two T shirts in front of us, one's a fifteen dollars shirt and the other one's a five dollars shirt, Yeah, which one is the consumer going to buy? We are so as consumers centric on the right that we are causing demand like even in North America and the United States especially nowadays,

All right. Let's take a town. Let's just start small here. Take a small town, maybe population twenty thousand, right, very small town, and there's a whole bunch of local shops. You know that everyone who lives in that town would prefer to buy local. They would prefer to visit the local coffee shop rather than go to Starbucks. They would prefer to, you know, go to their local restaurants rather than go to chain restaurants. And so you know, there's

Well, I think I think the onus. I'm just proposing that we.

Look upon ourselves to change.

Okay, Like we can't if we don't blame if we blame the government from doing something wrong, that's a pointless argument. You got to look at yourself and who you voted for.

You Well, there you go, right, Like good, point right.

So your dollars are your voting mechanism for businesses that surround in your community and well, and governments are trailing indicators. It's not just who you voted for, it's what you told them you wanted in the process. You know, they're supposed to be. It's a representative government. So it's up to us to represent the ideas that we want to them, hopefully to get manifest in some way.

Mm hmm.

But this, you know, the cooperative model banking is a great example of that, because we do have cooperative banks we call them credit union might and they try to be more regional and deliver services specifically to their communities and products so forth. They're still you know, regulated to a degree, so they there's limits on what they can do, But it's just a question of do you get as

So the only thing I'm trying to arrange is the net. So if that's the thought of having a data cooperative and we clumulate data, the question then becomes, and I think you pointed out, Carls, how do we gather this data?

How do we get this data?

Because if you start a war against Google, you're going to lose. Sure, you start a war against Microsoft, you're going to lose, right right, So where is the source of data that we can have that streams in for this cooperative? And I'm proposing that we do it with QR codes that consumers can scan either at the door of the merchant or within the context of whatever that QR code represents. And now it's it's an opt in process. I'm not watching your WiFi, I'm not taking your bluetooth.

What is the benefit to the merchant to enroll in a co op where they have to pay out for data rather than just take it the way they are doing now?

Participation? If I have a merchant that drives a loyalty program and I ask for everybody's email address, I'm going to get about three three to four percent participation in the loyalty program.

But what if you give out cards though, loyalty cards?

No, but that's the loyalty card has an identity to it that identifies you to that merchant.

Yeah, but everybody has them. I mean, it's what I'm saying. So if all their shoppers have identity cards loyalty cards, what is the benefit for them to move over to a model where they actually have to pay for that to the consumer.

A larger broader audience of customers. So if I not everybody gets a loyalty card, yeah, and not everybody gets a wealthy card too, But think about just the data. If I take a loyalty card with Starbucks, I know how many times I go visit Starbucks, but I don't. I don't know how many times I went to the luck to the that my profile doesn't at Starbucks doesn't show that I like bread, So it's an incomplete profile of the customer.

So I'm sorry, I just have these questions. Getting back to the grocery store. You scan your loyalty card, you scan your food. They know you like bread.

Yeah, that's true, but whose benefit is that? Is it to the customer that they like bread or is it to the merchant?

That definitely, it's definitely a merchant, and they reward you by giving you discounts. That's how they reward you. And I'm sure somebody did the math to say how much do we have to give them so they keep using the card? Right, So that's an economic measurement.

There's one thing here that you have to understand. Okay, when you scan the QR code, the data doesn't go to the merchant. It goes to the snapching iq business model.

So instead of you know, shopright getting selling their data as a global company or whatever, just the data that they have about you and your you know, your your bread choices, now they would become part of a bigger co op that has to do with you know, the kind of cars you buy and the kind of tires that you get, and where you go get your lunches and dinners and and all the all of the things. Right, So the data sets more valuable.

And it's a much more complete. The data set's extremely valuable because not only is it not fake, because you can't fake going shopping at your local merchants, right, you can't let hire a click team in India to actually do that for you anymore, right, But the activity of a customer in that environment is shared with all the

Right right right, instead of getting ads for things that you just bought, which is my favorite thing in the world. So let's stay with the supermarket thing. So you're basically saying to shop, right, Hey, give up this your your own little world of you know, QR code or barcode scanning thing for your own data set tap into this

So I outlined one other party in the data model, and that's called influencers. Right, I'm going to touch on influencers, but I want to go back to your barcode. We wouldn't replace the barcode because the barcode's tied into their pos and that's already very in pricing and everything else, so you can't. You're not going to displace that. But I'll get give you an example of what some markets did in Spain that caused a tremendous amount of traffic to grocery stores in Spain.

Okay, are you familiar with this story?

No, but I can't wait to hear it. That's why I'm smiling.

So somebody thought, you know what if you're single and you want a date, go shop groceries on Thursday night at Spain. Wow, and everybody was single that went out and they shopped groceries. They went and bought groceries in Spain on Thursday night. They showed pictures of these grocery stores so jam packed with guys and girls running their carts into each other. Oh, that's great as introductions to.

Do it, that's great, But.

That wasn't because the market thought it was a great idea to do. That's because consumers came up and said, you know, we're not having this virtualized stuff. We want to have real face to face visits and through the cooperation of the of all the customers.

They did that.

So that's interesting in this model, we are joining a cooperative group. And why does the merchant want to do that? Well, it increases participation because people want to scan those barcodes because it represents pennies on the dollar for their activity.

Sure.

I mean the part I don't think you've emphasized here is participating in that cooperative for one store means that they also get access to the customers of all the other stores.

Yeah.

Now so yeah, yeah, you know the customer that signed up in that got into the cooperative because they went and got tires, now also is in the cooperative for grocery.

Yeah. And the important charact that is that there's no outbound activity for marketing out of Snapchin. It's always inbound. So in snapchain, there's an inbox.

Now, snapchain is something that you've mentioned a couple of times without really defining it. What is that?

So in the book I talk about the snapchaing IQ, which is the business model, and then I did an MVP of the model in a product called Snapching. Oh okay, And you can go to snapchin dot com and there's it's a full site where merchants can enroll, generate QR codes and hang.

Them up in their merchant locations.

Okay, right, as part of the See this is how it would work in terms of one hundred percent privacy compliant, ethical data management of customer data. Because merchants can participate in this and get huge participation in the program. Merchants, the customers enjoy it because they're actually getting benefit from participating in the model. And I talk about how we're going to build this so that it's a worldwide movement, and it's like, you know, think big, but build small.

They don't get that.

They only get statistical information. If they say, hey, I want to do an ad for cauliflower, we can use that definition against the database to see who's interest in cauliflower, So they would know how many emails they're going to send now I say emails, but it's actual really a message to a consumer that wants cauliflower through the app in the app, but that's charged to the merchant. So therefore the efficiency of the marketing in the in the

So, by signing up and sharing your data, you mentioned you know, ethics and privacy and all of that stuff. The data is obviously scrubbed, but you also said that the data would be sold, and the sale of that data would precipitate payments to the people that participate in the co op. So in order to in order to join this, you really have to sign the agreement. Read it really closely that you are going to be sharing

Remember that the data that's being shared with the merchant is statistical and aggregated information. It's not personal. They don't get email editors, so they don't get phone number.

Right.

Because the model, the business model sits in between and protects the customer from all the forces that want to understand that information.

It's interesting. All right, let's take a little break. We'll come right back with Richard Rukima. And you're listening to dot net rocks and stay tuned. Did you know you can easily migrate asp net web apps to Windows containers on Aws. Use the app to Container tool to containerize your iis websites and deploy to AWS managed container services with or without Kubernetes. Find out more about app to contain at aws, dot Amazon dot Com, slash, dot net,

These ethical data management, ethical data manage.

Ethical data management. Yeah, it's really cool. So my next question is how can you know when we come up with these great ideas. Sometimes we don't think, oh, I forgot people are evil? How are they going to take advantage of this system? So how do you see the protections in place, and what are the places that somebody could gain the system.

Well, we're already seeing it in some areas where the QR codes are being like are being other QR codes are being stuck on top of the QR codes and then you don't see the scanning and where that takes you. Right, The important difference in the technology of snapchain the business model is that when you scan a QR code, it doesn't take you anywhere because it generates a text message.

You have MFA jeez, can somebody set up a phone farm and you know, create hundreds of thousands of accounts to to get money, to steal money out of the out of the co op. I mean, are there other potential pitfalls there? Well?

Never, there's there's I don't know who set up, but somebody said, never underestimate the creativity of a criminal mind.

Yeah.

Right, But remember the activity of a bot as opposed to activity of a human is vastly different.

Right.

If you're in two different shops within ten seconds and the shops are five klomters apart, yeah, somber. I. I chose local merchants for a reason because I want to support my local merchant in the business that they do. Because ninety five percent of all employment is local merchants, it's hard.

To argue against it, against buying local, right.

It's it's hard because we all have to support each other, right, right. But the whole model of this was I didn't want a mobile application. I didn't want to have a registration process. I just wanted somebody to see a QR code and think that's a good idea. I've heard about this snapchin business model. I want to participate. All you got to do is scan the QR code with your camera, it generates the text message and you're registered. You're in the program.

Oh, so it's all through Smster. There's no apps.

There's no app as of this right now, there's no app, and I don't want there to be an app because I don't want the friction of saying, oh, to participate, you got to download this application and register.

Yeah. Also, you know, if you're going to be on iOS, which is probably where you want to be, you're going to have to you know, share revenue with Apple and all that stuff. Nobody wants to do that.

Well, but it makes sense to me not to have the app because it's more of a friction to register. Anybody today that sees a snapchain QR code can scan the code and immediately be very participating in the model.

Right, Yeah, I get it.

You need a particular kind of customer for this, right that this is someone who cares about how their data is uses. Because the non trivial number of people who just don't care, right, it's an overwhelming problem people talk about all the time. Lots of will say, yeah, I care about my privacy, but won't lift a finger to actually do anything about it. I totally agree.

The only difference here that I think is different, and it really talks to the millennials and even anybody under forty, is the fact that if you participate, you're going to get paid.

Yeah. Yeah, I don't know how much of an incentive that really is not going to be that much money. I'm more con I think most people would be interested in just my data not being abused.

Well, that's fair. There's a new model out called customer Data platforms, and we're seeing everybody gather this data in the customer data platforms. There is another company that I just found, in fact, I saw it yesterday. It's called Rupt, who does this thing called pods, which allows companies to store their data, your personal data into a repository called a pod.

You know this is this is tim Berner's Lee's solid technology.

You're guid that into that Internet that introduced internet, right, that created the Internet.

That made the world Wide Web world.

The The problem that I see about that, though, is your identity is still attached to the data in the pod. So therefore it becomes an incentive to break into the pod because once you break into the pod, you gather all kinds of information about a person with identity.

That's not how Solid works. Solid they would have a token to the data, which they may or may not have rights to, like it's not actually in the pod, just the token identifier. The whole point of Solid is your data stays with you, and you only assigned tokens out for utilization.

Well, like I said, I found it yesterday, and my interterpretation of that was different where because I looked for that specifically and they said the identity and the data were stored and that in snapchain, I want to use distributed identity and verifiable credentials to separate identity from the data. So the data that's in the database doesn't have identity right in Snapchain's model to eliminate that. To have a take on but yeah.

You're only you only want to deal with the aggregates where I mean Solid's real mission there and on include a link to the Solid project was about how do I say, how do I give a company my information to deliver a product to me but not have them be on their mainly list for forever. So it's literally like for the duration of this transaction, you have my address at the end of that transaction, you don't.

Yeah, And in that regard, snapchain is identical because the customer is in charge of how much information they allow the merchant to find them.

I mean, I would argue just realistically, like giving the customer a sense of what their data is being used for would be a hell of an improvement. But I got one other angle for you, Richard to consider, which is that personality that kind of customer is also the one who just wants to remain hilt. Yeah, it's just going to block their don't block their cookies, use VPN

You know, both of you guys are assuming that people are a lot more intelligent than they actually are.

Now, the whole preamble of this, Carl, was that the customer here is a small segment of folks. Most people don't care.

Most people don't care. Yeah, yeah, you're right, okay.

And most people don't care about their data. Absolutely I agree with it, because there's no value to them all. The value for them to putching my terms into Google is I get the Google product for free.

All right? So what is the elevator pitch to your brother in law who you want to sign up and scan the QR code? What are you going to tell them? The benefit to them.

Is save your money, protect your data is the tagline.

Yeah that's not enough? How much? Well, how much am I going to get back?

It all depends on all the various revenue streams that can be dred from the.

Dam you lost me. I want to I want a dollar amount, right, I'm an American consumer over here, and I want a dollar amount.

One million as I stick my thinking and I know I'm not I'm just not that small.

You're right.

I mean, this is a theoretical exercise. People got all as communism, but it's you know, your fire department is a socialist movement.

Well that was a department, all right.

I know, I know, I know it's a joke, but it's true. But people will take this down because it's like I'll never work. Okay, I'll never work, but what a job?

Say? Once?

You know it takes the crazy people to change to make crazy happen.

I think it's a great idea. I just think that in order to get you know, cousin Joe to to to to enlist or whatever, you have to give him a hard benefit.

Right, Okay, so let's do let's take this one angle. Let's go to the influencers.

All right.

I wrote a whole book on this about influencers, right, and how do influencers monetize their audience? And right now they do it with advertising and branding, which is what I call a negative feedback loop. But if I am, and I'm particularly interested in your guys product your perspective, because you guys are both influencers. Right, So if you say product X is the greatest product I know of,

Carl do?

How many people do I drive? Oh?

You're driving people to I know what you mean?

Yeah?

Yeah, I mean you're driving traffic to that company.

So if you're advertising to drive people to the gigs.

Yeah, right, So this is called outcome fees.

Right.

So if I stuck a QR code on your stage and people came up and scanned it to say, this is for the benefit of Carl. Now the merchant understands what Carl's activity was and how how much influence you had to drive customers into activity.

Right, But what's the benefit to them? Right?

The benefit to them is they have got a customer in their store. They got a customer in the bar.

I'm talking about somebody who I'm talking about, somebody who comes up and is at one of my gigs. Incentive to scan the QR code can't just be because it will benefit Carl.

Sure it will. They love you, Yeah, but they'd rather daily to go see you.

They'd rather take out a ten dollars bill and throw out my guitar case.

Well, that may be true, just easier what.

A q QR code. I don't even know what that does, onlygo are you gonna send me some virus something?

That may be true.

This is the idea.

If they go to that bar continuously after your shoal and they see Carl's QR code and they scan it every time, they're contributing to your influence because it's your influence that got them to go to that merchant location. Yeah okay, And it's a way to track influence without taking advertising or branding dollars.

As long as you can give them something in return, right, I mean, yeah, a CD, a free MP three file, something like that. I don't know.

And they say like that, when you scan a QR code, there has to be some value to the customer.

Yeah for scanning, scan the QR code and we'll send you links to all of our music. That kind of stuff. Sure.

Yeah.

Can I just talk about influencers for a while, because Richard and I lived through the golden age of podcasting and maybe some people would argue that it's happening now, but no, I don't think so, at least for us. We were literally one of the first podcasts ever and certainly the longest monetized podcast and when there was no competition, life was really good advertising wise, and then you know, it's sort of just dwindled down, and now it's I mean,

You know, well, you missed the best influencer revenue generator them all. Scam coins. Okay, educate me exactly what you think it is. You create a crypto coin that you pump up with hypes that everybody buys in, and then you sell all the ords before it dumps. Yes, it's a classic pump and dump. Its multi level marketing, right. Yeah, you tell two friends, and you tell two friends in the first place, I think.

At the top end of the of the scale, like the people who have you know, YouTube shows that are have you know, bazillions of views and they sell a lot. They get a lot of advertising revenue from YouTube typically they're like into shock value. Then you know they're they're they're saying outrageous things, they're doing outrageous things, and it's not at all beneficial to humanity, not at all. It's

Yeah, I totally get it.

But and it's really freaking sad.

And it is.

Sad, which is why I want to do something about it. I want to do something.

Waves with this stuff so you can't find the really good stuff when you go looking for it.

I want to be able to form people into communities that benefit from each other. Yeah, not just some person that's you know, screaming at their houses on fire and whaling because her ten million dollar house. Can she's suddenly lost her ten million house, which I feel for sure great, like anybody you lose any house, it's bad. But put her on social media and like, it's sad, it's sad that we have to pay attention to this without and

Did you read the book Influencer? And I don't remember who wrote it, but I read it twenty years ago. It was actually Eileen Crane who sent it to us Richard as regional directors back in the day. Yeah, And it was stories of people who made a difference. And it wasn't that they had economic success making a difference, but they were really influential and changed the world. And believe it or not, one of them was Jimmy Carter.

I totally agree. I am an idealistic person and I think I try to think out of the box. Yeah, So I do know that today it's not working. It doesn't work for anybody except for the corporate giants and the tech giants. You know, they take our data and they use it and they do whatever they want to do with it.

Yep.

And we have to have more quality in terms of that revenue generation, I agree, in our society or we're gonna you know, we're gonna the feudal lords of medieval times died because the pitchworks came out. And there's somebody that talks about the pitch When the pitchforks come out, yep, you know, we're all going to be in trouble. And trust me that pitchforks are coming right.

By the way they have come out.

They have literally Hey, before we wrap up to I want to d d besmirched pooral Jimmy Carter because he wasn't president ntil nineteen seventy seven and the oil embargo was nineteen seventy three. That was Nixon and then Ford. Yeah.

Yeah, like most presidents, they they take the blame for what happened before they took office. Yeah, yeah, too bad. It's too bad.

Well, I really appreciate you guys taking on the show. It's not quite a technical shot. I was going for the more ethical data management.

It's definitely but there's definitely a technology here in a data privacy issue here, Like these are all topics on the show, absolutely, and you are trying to you know, we've got a problem with the way data is being you know, this all really started because we wouldn't pay for stuff on the internet the first place, right, And so they came, they came up with strategy. They they eventually discovered the strategy, Hey, your telemetry, your digital effluent

And we have a phrase that we always say, which is, hey, if the product's free, you are the product product.

Yeah, so this is my little attempt to kind of flip the tables on that.

Yeah, it's great and say, you know.

We we can do it together, right, We can and certainly can take the customer perspective on capitalism, not the merchant's perspective. And we're here to help the customer get a better experience, not the shareholders, which is the alumni ILLUMINII.

Thank you.

Of where the pitchworks are aimed.

Right well, and it also in the end helps the merchants too, so.

It does it you know that revenue is diversified across a whole wide range of merchants, each providing a service that is local to your environment, near your community.

Very good, well, I wish you good luck with that. And what's the website again?

The Empowered Customer dot Com is the landing page and from there that you can go all kinds of links. There's a whole bunch of social media posts on there. I'm trying to I'm trying to be the most social influencer, right kad alick guy, So you know I'm doing my best.

Good And I still haven't heard from Larry Lestig if we're going to do a code in the castle next year, but if we do have any suggestions, go back to the same place or the same castle, or you have any other where he was thinking about the South of France.

Maybe yeah, I would say the South of France is a great place. But I would also say that he can reduce the pricing of the of the experience by driving traffic to those merchants that we attended to in Italy, right, like it wasn't just us going to the Colden Castle. It was us as a group of consumers driving to

Yeah right, very good. And we know that those those customers have money because they can afford to go to code in the.

Castle, had mondy had Bundy.

Yeah, they had money. Right, they're going to spend some ching in your wine store.

Well that's where the then actually that's one last point.

Snapchin came from the snap of a camera and the ching of a cash register. Oh, snap ching, snapching.

Very good, Richard. It's been a pleasure talking to you, and I hope to see as soon.

Ye Take care, guys, appreciate your time, all right, and.

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