Daniel: 0:00

create a piece of technology that allows everyone, anywhere in the world, to find who they have something in common with, no matter where that person is, match them and then allow the content to take place. And that's what AI is.

Joeri: 0:12

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host. And today's guest has worn many hats Model fitness expert, actor and now entrepreneur, Daniel Goddard. He's best known for his roles as Darren Beastmaster and Kane Ashby on the Young and the Restless, where he starred in over 1,000 episodes, voted TV guide sexiest man in daytime TV. He later builds a thriving career as a life coach and digital marketing expert in LA, now as a founder of CEO of Disco. I hope I pronounced that in the right way. It's an AI, yeah, an AI-powered networking app, which I'm really excited about to learn more and and it's shaping the future of digital connections. So welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel: 1:08

Joeri, thank you for having me. Hello everyone.

Joeri: 1:11

So excited to have you, so you have such an interesting background, Daniel. But yeah, let's just start from your acting career. So I'm curious yeah, from Beastmaster to the Young and the Restless how that shaped your approach to entrepreneurship and digital marketing.

Daniel: 1:31

Yes, well, it's interesting. When Beastmaster came out in 1999, we did three years of Beastmaster. It was syndicated globally. What was interesting is there was no social media, so everything was websites.

Daniel: 1:42

The first thing I realized that being on a show and having the lead on a show is it needed a way in order to meet and stay in contact with the fans of the show. So we built a website and then we realized chat rooms were the way it was done back then. So people would go into a chat room, you would have a moderator, people would chat, then you, as the actor, would drop in and you would chat with people, they'd ask questions, et cetera. Then you, as the actor, would drop in and you would chat with people, they'd ask questions, etc. So that was the beginning of all of it, where, prior to Facebook's and the Twitter's and the Instagram's and the TikTok's, you had only one way of really getting in touch with all. That was fan mail. Someone would write a letter and send it to. You have to write and send it back.

Daniel: 2:19

So I realized from a very early age, in the beginning of my acting career, how important it was to build a fan base, and what you started to realize was is that everything comes down to your brand and how you you create your brand, how you make people see your brand in the light you want them to see it in, and then that allow you to market it effectively. So once you have control over that brand, then you can then find a way to find the audience that matches with your brand. So acting gave me the ability to understand quickly the importance of branding and then, from there, it allowed me to look at other aspects of my entrepreneurial endeavors, as always. First and foremost, what is the brand? How does the audience, the consumer, see that brand? Is it in line with how to see that brand? And then, how do you allow them to interact with that brand through marketing or whatever means you have?

Joeri: 3:19

I love that. Yeah, for me, personal branding is also something I'm really interested in, and also trying to build my personal brand as the Web3 CMO. People know me, but the background that you have you transitioned from a sole opera star to a tech entrepreneur. That's interesting, and so I'm curious how did you then identify opportunities in such different industries?

Daniel: 3:44

Well, I went to university to study business and found out in order to pursue acting. So, at the core of who I am, I've always been an entrepreneur. I've always had an entrepreneurial mindset and spirit, acting in some ways entrepreneurial because you have to build your brand, create your net, market your brand accordingly, your net market your brand accordingly. I reached a point in 2020, after doing almost over 1,000, I did think, 1,100 episodes of Young and the Restless, which in France is Le Fou de l'amour, the fires of love that I wanted to pursue an aerial side. So I launched a digital marketing company that, under the in so it's under the incom is the website we do, besides email marketing, social media management, and that was something that I really thought, that it gave me more control, and I have a lot of clients who, basically, you realize a lot of people don't understand the importance of building their brand or they don't understand how to go on that journey. They've got a vision for something. They may have a product they want to create, maybe it's a dropship product, maybe they've got a vision for a skincare line, but they don't know what to do next. So I built the company, allowed me to start applying all the things I'd learned over 20 years of acting, 24 years of acting being people build their brand From there. What we discovered also was that entrepreneur spirit will never die. It always grows once you get that, once it's inside you. So we started looking at what comes next, and that's AI. So we, this company called Disco, which is S-K-O, is an AI networking and matching where it allows people to match using AI and commonalities and then begin conversations within the app. So it's a way of finding people anywhere in the world that are just like you. You define it with hashtags and then the algorithm. Then you can create 100 social tags and 100 work tags. The algorithm then will find commonalities, so your AI would be able to match with you over things like podcasting, or if we have movies we like, uh, sports teams, um, common. The app then will allow us to match uh and then takes over and it starts creating meaningful conversation.

Daniel: 6:16

But what would? One of the things we really wanted to do? I learned this from from actors. I would go and do a lot of personal appearances and fan events and you would go to a certain location whether it be like Las Vegas Convention Center, for example and you would meet people there and they would say to you, you and your show, I met this person here and they'd show you a friend. And they go. We've been friends now for like six years and I was like how much do you have in common? We started to say to ourselves how do we create a piece of technology that allows everyone, anywhere in the world, to find who they have something in common with, no matter where that person is, match them and then allow the content to take place? And that's what AI has allowed us to do.

Daniel: 6:57

Before AI, you couldn't do it. So now, for example, what Dysko would let me do is like, let's say, you're in Lisbon. If I went to Lisbon and I'm on holiday, before I got to Lisbon, I could place my Dysko billboard, which is a profile of whether I choose it to be. It could be a video, a photo, whatever it's my profile, I could place it in Lisbon. And then anyone who has things in common with me whether it be job desires, entrepreneurial spirit, teams, movies, whatever they will mathematically match with our algorithm as they enter the proximity of where I placed that billboard. So if I put it right in the middle of Lisbon, anyone who was in that area walking through it, the algorithm will start matching everyone together.

Daniel: 7:41

Then the AI conversation will take over and start to talk about the things you have in common, and then it'll let me know that basically, you've met these five or six people that have, say, 10 to 15, 20, maybe more things in common. We've already been chatting with them and then, next thing, you know you've got a connection that really had value to it, and this is something because we have convention companies that want to use the technology where you right now could be sitting in Portugal. You could want to attend a conference anywhere in the world, but you can't get there for whatever reason, or you don't even need to go there anymore. What you can do is you take your Dysko profile and you place it at the convention, so anyone at that convention walking around or anyone else anywhere in the world someone could be in London. They also attend the convention virtually. You then would have your profile match with their profile converse in AI and then the two of you, once you know everything about each other, can get straight to deal flow.

Daniel: 8:38

So we allowed people to place their profile in up to 10 locations anywhere in the world, have fallen up to 10 locations anywhere in the world. So AI has specifically allowed us to make the world. As the world gets smaller, it's allowed us to allow people to have deeper, meaningful connections. So that's one of the things, and that all stems back to where it began with acting, because it's all about building a connection with fans, and then you start to see fans start to form connections amongst themselves. So it's an AI networking, matching tool that I'm very, very proud of, bill.

Joeri: 9:13

I love that. I think is it more for introverted people than for extroverted, because for me, you put me in a room. It's full of strangers. I love that, but most of people don't like it.

Daniel: 9:23

To that point. We have colleges that are going to use the technology. We're launching in mid-February our MVP version of the app, where it will be in the Android store, the Play store and the apps to be used globally to be downloaded and used. But one of the things that we realized is that 35% of all college students who go to college now suffer from social anxiety disorder. This was by COVID, because during those years no one had any face-to-face communication. Everybody got locked down and they became insular where they would sit on their phone all day long, just being on their phones. Everything became this digital connection. So then you put them now in a new environment where they're face-to-face. They lack the confidence or they lack the skills because they were never. You've got a senior old kids. So COVID, when he was 12, they lost those four years of what every other kid was out there doing, which is being in the playground, hanging out and meeting each other.

Daniel: 10:22

So what we realize is that now Dysko allows a kid who's going to go to a college let's say, I want to go to the university of lisbon, for example um, I could place my Dysko profile on campus. All the studies I'm going to, all the subjects I'm going to study, all the hobbies I'm into um, and those who are physically there on the campus could meet and match, or other kids who are going to go to that college as well could drop in GPS-wise and match. So before I get to college, on my very first day, I've already made my friends. I've already had conversations with them, but it's about things that really matter, because right now you'd have to join a Facebook group, right?

Daniel: 11:05

Or you might have a website where you can log in and maybe make make some friends, but you really don't have anything in common. You don't know what you have in common. So what Dysko does? It breaks down the barriers of uh, so technically, it's never be a stranger again and allows you to make meaningful connections with people. That will make your life better. So it's technology to complement and enhance and develop the human connection, not separate it more by having people sit in their room on their own and, just like, stare at a screen and swipe up and down.

Joeri: 11:38

It's really interesting because it makes me think of something you put it noted that I'm organizing here in Sintra, close to Lisbon. I'm organizing a retreat, a Web3 AI retreat in Sintra, and so the goal is to have people together making deeper connections, but this is not for everyone, because some people tell me I don't know who I'm going to meet. I want to know, get to know them beforehand, and so on. So therefore I'm trying to set up something. So Dysko could be a great solution for people to connect beforehand, before an event.

Daniel: 12:10

Absolutely. So what Dysko would let you do is you would gap and then you would enter the location where the retreat's going to be. It would take you to that GPS location and then you would create a billboard and you would place it there so it could be a video of you talking saying hey, it's Joeri, I'm looking forward to meeting you at the retreat. For more information, click in my profile, et cetera, list all the hashtags the retreat are about and what you're trying to achieve at the retreat. And then anyone who wants to come to that retreat would enter the location. They would gps profile or Dysko would go to the location. Then instantly they would start matching with other people. So they would say, wow, so there's 15, 20, 30 people that have something in common with me. I want to go to that. Then they would buy the plane ticket, they would fly there or they could attend it virtually.

Daniel: 13:02

So it allows people, as as to jesse, to find the things that they would would give them a reason to want to be part of that retreat without knowing anything about it, because on the outside they'd say, well, it's web3, this and that, but who's going to be there? What do I have in common, because it's one thing to be able to say, hey, we want to go there and talk about Web3, but you know, the talk and the meetings are over, people are still hanging out. What do they have in common? So maybe they've got poker in common, maybe they love Harrison Germain's soccer team, maybe they love, you know, movies, whatever it is. You can then find those commonalities. So the moment that the business side of the Web3 conventional conference is taking a break, you can meet the people there and you already know what you have in common. So we can really speed up the way that you can make a meaningful connection with anyone, because you know everything that there is about that person that they want to share with effortlessly.

Joeri: 13:59

Oh yeah, it looks really cool doing something like that and it's just an app that you can download and install. Oh yeah, it looks really cool doing something like that and it's just an app that you can download and install and it's easy for people to use A lot of things. Yeah, if you look at what's happening in AI these days, a lot of things are moving, which was in the news with DeepSeek and so on and does all this, how are you looking at that? The AI market is moving so quickly. Does this have an impact on how we on the app that you are building on, how do you yeah, how do you look at what's?

Daniel: 14:31

yeah, I. I think AI can either be your best friend or your, your, your, and I think the goal with AI is to find a way to have it work for you, not against you, and when I say that I mean we will replace every truck driver, every train driver, every taxi driver, every Uber driver features. It'll replace everything. Factory workers, because when the AI can do the job better than a person, then you can automate the process. Person, then you can automate the process, because you already have the machines, the robots that work in the factory, but you don't have a brain system that tells the robot how to constantly adapt, get smarter and do its job better. When that's over, all factory workers will be out of business.

Daniel: 15:15

So what we wanted is to find a way that we could offer AI to people in a way that enhanced their life and didn't just destroy it. It's out there like DeepSeek, which is really in the last couple of days when it came out, took $2 trillion off the stack in the US and making out about it. But once again, they're the sort of things that you know. How do you take that technology and make it work for you, not against you, and I think, with Disco. What we really believe is that the core of humanity is connectivity, and AI can take away your job as a factory worker. And what are you going to do next? What job are you going to do? So our goal is how do you take AI and allow people to meet, match and connect about things that will enhance the human experience and not break down the human experience?

Joeri: 16:07

Absolutely yeah. A friend of mine who is also a well-known personal branding expert to my background, the most amazing bard you would ever, Mark Schaefer. He says that in a world of AI, the only thing that will save us as humans to stand out is our personal brand. Yes, so I'm also curious to hear your thoughts about the power of personal brands in this AI world.

Daniel: 16:28

Well, absolutely, our personal brand will always. The only thing that will stop personal brand, in my opinion, would be this is that as every new generation adopts technology, that's given to it without question, what will eventually eventually happen? Say this idea, for example. Let's say, for example, your um star. Let's say, brad pitt okay, you go and watch a brad pitt movie, but what if you could be the movie star where you could scan yourself and then when you watch the movie, you you see yourself as the lead character. It sounds like you when you speak and you sit there and you watch Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. All of a sudden you are Ethan Hunt, you're saving the world.

Daniel: 17:12

But that comes with a personal brand because, at the end of the day, everybody, as humans, has a deep desire to be wanted, loved and noticed, has a deep desire to be wanted, loved and noticed. So allowing people to have a personal brand and deepen that personal brand with a deeper base and deeper goal globally will only make humans better. Because we're a dopamine machine, we live on dopamine. That's why people are addicted to their phones, because it's constantly firing dopamine, releasing dopamine. So there'll always be the need for personal brand. But the question is, how do you take your personal brand and market it to get that experience back? And I think that's what AI can do, because it allows anyone then to take their brand and reach a bigger audience with that brand.

Joeri: 19:10

Absolutely. I'm also an AI trainer and I say people hey, I should work with you, not replace you and. I heard this the founder of the owner of NVIDIA said that the AI will oh Jensen, yeah, he's smart.

Joeri: 19:24

He will not. Yeah, he's good. Like he said, AI will not replace you. It will not replace 100% of your jobs, but it can replace maybe 40, 60, 50% of your jobs, and what will happen is those people you will not use your job because of that. You will use your job because you're not using AI like the other people that are doing it, so you need to-. What will happen?

Daniel: 19:45

is. You know, they predict massive drop in human population global population, by the way, it's the 20th thing and it's going to drop like 30%. And that's going to be because people are going to not be reproducing as much. And the answer, the question there, is that if people producing in order to you know they live where there's no social welfare, therefore, as they get older, they need their kids to grow up and take care of them, or they need, you know, they heavily live in a country where factory workers or field workers and farmers are the way that you make your money.

Daniel: 20:14

A van is going to replace the farm worker because they'll have machines that can pick it better. I mean, I've seen machines now that harvest crops that I never even knew existed. But once you have those machines AI it's like autonomous driving cars. I mean, right now, you have to sit behind the wheel when the car drives, but once the AI is sufficient enough to be able to know and get smarter and learn, you will no longer have to do that. You can sit in the back of the car and be doing whatever you want and the cars will just drive around and go where you have to go, used in a way where it allows people, if they are going to lose their job, to find another way of making a job, because you can't just take everybody's job away and then say you know, you're no longer a worker.

Daniel: 21:03

What are you going to do? Starve to death? You have to be supported by the government that has to pay for you because they've taken your job away. What are you going to do? Because if you don't, what you'll end up having is revolution. It'd be like you know, it's nine in Paris all over again, where people are going to be like we can't work anymore, we can't do this, I can't pay for my kids Revolution. So I think that the people behind AI, whether it be Jensen or Elon Musk or people at DeepSeek whatever have to have a social consequence of understanding what they're unleashing on the world. Otherwise, there will be revolution, in my belief. I look at history and whenever there has been a mass amount of unemployment or a mass level of discontent amongst any population, there's an uprising and there's revolution. So if you don't want that to happen, I think you have to be very careful with the way you allow AI to start replacing people's jobs.

Joeri: 21:53

Absolutely. Now, with your experience in digital marketing, I have another question for you. You see, now AI is really, I would say, the algorithms like LinkedIn, Instagram and so on. They like that. People are commenting on posts. You see a lot of AI comments on everywhere. You see a lot of AI posts. You see a lot of even AI influencers out there. So I'd like to hear your thoughts about this evolution and, should we like, what should we think about these AI comments.

Daniel: 22:25

I know what you're saying. So, basically, facebook last week and they're AI bots of the platform. What they realized is they were letting all these AI people which weren't real and they were doing it because you would post and they would see what the post is and then they would like it and people were forming relationships with what turned out to be fake people AI people. That only hurts the platform in the long run. It damages the platform because people in this generation now still want human connection. What I was saying before is let it be 20, 30 years from now, people may be happy by having AI bots as their friends because they can sit there and talk to it.

Daniel: 23:07

Imagine a psychiatrist that you could run an algorithm where you take every single form of mental illness uh, that there are every form of treatment that there is for it. You take a hundred of the world's greatest psychiatrists and you you them through very deep um of how they would treat x illness or y illness, etc. I don't need, then, a psychiatrist anymore because I could get on with you. You could be an AI psychiatrist and I talk to you and I say you know, Joeri, I'm having problems with this, I'm not doing this and you know how to treat me because you've been machine learned in a way where you've heard of some humans that are experts. But the problem is, if that was me talking to you, I don't have that human connectivity. I want still someone to understand what I'm feeling. I want someone to know what I'm going through. I want that relatability, because when you tell me I know you understand me. But in 20 years, 30 years, you've got a generation that grows up without that human connection. All they want is a problem fixed. I have this problem. Well, there's a medic for it. I understand what you're going through here. Let me prescribe it for you.

Daniel: 24:18

So you basically get to the point where AI is going to start obliterating, if it's allowed to move along unchecked, an entire generation and the way they see human connection because they no longer crave it. But it goes back to this. It's almost like fast food. In 1950s in the us they started getting all this fast food, mcdonald's and all these hamburgers and stuff. You saw the rate of cancer just go straight up because all this processed food the body didn't have a chance to adapt to it.

Daniel: 24:49

My grandmother would live on such as yours would do, would live on whole foods and fats and vegetables and meat. There was no cancer. So the body has to have a chance, whether it be physically with food or mentally with ai, to adapt in a way where it doesn't do damage to the body. So I think AI is going to have to be very careful with the way that it's unleashed on the world and it's going to happen eventually where everything will be run by AI and a new generation will never question it. But until that happens, you and I are sitting here having a conversation about how is it going to change the world. Will it change it for the better or for the worse? I think it's going to change it ultimately for the better, but if it's left unchecked, it will do a lot of damage.

Joeri: 25:32

I think it will only go faster, because you mentioned DeepSeek and now ChatGPT. Of course they want to stay ahead, ahead, and then I guess they will release new features of Mob Barret in a more fast way.

Daniel: 25:45

They're saying right now that ChatGPT 4.0 has a human IQ of 160. They're saying 5.0 and 6.0 will have an IQ of about 1000. It's crazy. It's crazy. It will get to the point where it will it? If it's left unchecked. It will completely change the way we as a civilization will do everything that we do.

Daniel: 26:15

And also the question is with deep fake like I saw something the other day. It was a basketball player who plays for a basketball team out here and someone did a deep fake where he was sitting at a table, he was speaking, his mouth was moving. Exactly it was his voice and it was him saying I don't want to play for the gold. It was Steph Curry. He plays for the Golden State Warriors. I don't want to play for many more. I'm tired of losing. I want to play for the Lakers with LeBron. Lebron's the greatest player ever. Everybody on my team sucks and if I didn't know I would go wow. Steph Curry said that he doesn't want to do that anymore.

Daniel: 26:50

So what happens politically when you have these political things pushed out there with uncontrolled and I'm very pro free speech? I don't believe in propagandists and telling people they can and can't say something. I believe in freedom of speech, but when I all of a sudden start seeing what I believe to be, say, a politician saying we're going to do this and that and I don't know it's real, all of a sudden everything starts fragmenting where I go. Oh, my God, you hear what Putin said he's going to nuke the Ukraine next week. It's deepfake.

Daniel: 27:23

So there's got to be a way that we can control the way that AI is allowed to be unleashed on the world. Otherwise, I think it will do a calamitous amount of damage, but at the same time, controlled and looked after, I think people like Jensen. They seem to have a very strong moral core and it's about the betterment of it, but you know how quickly things get away from it. So this is the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey. I don't know if you've seen it, but it was made back in the 70s by Stanley Kubrick and the idea is you know, this is AI machine that runs the spaceship. Ultimately, it does them off the humans on the ship, kicks them off the ship and they die out in space because it wants to be the master of the ship. So the question is, at what point does AI think for itself, is allowed to think for itself, and what point can it do when it can make people obsolete?

Joeri: 28:11

Yeah, so my head is spinning all the things that are going on all the time. Now, if you would give one advice, Daniel, for our listeners. Now, when it comes to personal branding or to AI, you can choose. What would you like to give away for a lesser takeaway?

Daniel: 28:30

Sure, I think at the core of every human we have our own individuality, and that individuality is what makes us special. You have to be able to, as a person, say to yourself who am I? You have to say to yourself what makes me happy, what is my moral compass, what am I? What? What am I within who I am, within my cytoplasm of my body, what am I? Once you know what that is, then you at least understand how to start creating your personal brand. Whether it be you're an anarchist and you want to overthrow a government and you want to start a podcast talking about freedom of speech and whatever, or you want to create brands and drop ship products, or you want to be whatever you want to do, you have to know, at the core of what you want to do, who you are. And once you understand that, then your personal journey into creating a personal brand can take place. If you're an outdoorsman, you might be a mountaineer. You want to go and become a mountaineer. That's your brand. Then how do you sell that brand to the public? How do you find people who could say I want to join you on a retreat? How do you find people that say I want to go on an adventure with you other adventure seekers, but you won't even know how to find those people until you know what it is that you do. And you, for example, with your retreat, you're talking about you. You have a passion for web three, you have a passion for AI, so you would build your personal brand like you were doing around that.

Daniel: 30:00

So as long as you become true to yourself and you stick to the beliefs that what you have to offer as a personal brand will make people's lives better and make their human experience better, then you're in front of everybody else. Otherwise, everybody's just fake and they're just like a fake AI program and they're trying to do whatever they think they can do just to get liked or make some money, and that never works. Never works. Organic is key. You could take anything and throw money at it, try and advertise it, but if there's no organic core, if there's no grounding in that product, then it's going to fail. Once you create a brand, the number one thing I've always believed is see how it works in an organic market. If people organically gravitate towards it, then you found something that people connect with and then you can throw advertising money at it. But prior to that, you're trying to push something out there that's not genuine and everybody has a bullshit detector.

Joeri: 30:57

They know they know when it's rubbish? Great advice, Daniel. Yeah. No, they know what is rubbish. Absolutely Great advice, Daniel. Yeah, I guess you could talk for hours about all of this. If people are now listening and they want to know more about everything that you are doing, where would you like me to send them?

Daniel: 31:14

Thank you. My digital marketing company is called Under the In U-N-D-E-R-T-H-E-I-N. It's short for Under the Influence, so it's under the incom. They can contact me there. They can see the services provided globally. We have clients disco. The mvp for Dysko is being released in february. It'll be available in the app store and the play store worldwide. Dysko is spelled d-y-s-k-o. The website will dysko. ai. I would love people to check it out because it's the whole core of what we do is to enhance human connectivity, make humans have a better human experience.

Joeri: 31:51

Perfect. As my listeners know, there are always show notes. The link that you mentioned will be in there. Also, like a summary, a blog post. You can find it on my blog. Also, like a summary, a blog post, you can find it on my blog, web3.net, which actually is Dutch for web3.

Daniel: 32:08

So, Daniel, it was really a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you, Joeri, it was an absolute pleasure. And to all your guests, thank you so much. I appreciate your time. You take care of yourself.

Joeri: 32:16

Guys, what an amazing episode. If you think that this episode is useful for people around you, be sure to share this episode with them. If you're not yet following the show, this is a really good moment to do this. If you're not yet giving me a review yet, these five stars will help me reach an even bigger audience and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.