I debated for a long time whether I should write this blogpost – because as a reputable known person, it’s extremely embarrassing. I had a lapse in intelligence and suffered humiliation and financial loss because of it.
However, I decided to write this because that’s how the Twitter Scammers get their way – people are too embarrassed to call them out so they keep scamming.
I wanted people who follow my work to avoid making idiotic mistakes that I make and prevent this terrible experience that I went through. So here you go:
Here’s the story of how I got scammed for the first time in my life (after fending off dozens of scammers), and the heartbreaking fact that Twitter wouldn’t even allow me to report the scammer (and hence, the scammer is still out there scamming people before my eyes).
Specifically, I got scammed by a person pretending to be a reputable YouTuber on Twitter and lost $400 as I pulled the plug right before losing more.
This post about the Twitter Scammer is broken into three sections:
How I got scammed
Why I couldn’t report this on Twitter
Some lessons to avoid being scammed in the future
The pandemic of Twitter Scammers
Twitter scams are quite common. The fact that people can change their Twitter Handles and IDs very easily – while useful – also leads to scammers constantly changing their identities while having an account that seems to be long lasting and credible.
But the craziest thing is, after an hour of trying, there is no valid way to report a scammer on Twitter (only other things), until I finally gave up.
Without anything else I could do while knowing that this Twitter Scammer is scamming other people constantly even right now, I decided to write this blogpost.
As a former Chief Experience Officer with the Cofounder of Ethereum Anthony Di Iorio as well as former Head of Creative Labs/Digital Commerce for HTC, Yu-kai has had a lot of experience and exploration into the upcoming Metaverse.
Yu-kai even started his own Web 3 project Metablox.co (own digital real estate that represents real world locations and level them up with real world locations) – join our Discord here!
Here he interviews one of the most influential Youtubers in VR and Gaming – PapaFearGaming VR!
PapaFearGaming not only is edging towards a million Subscribers on Youtube, he actually had another previous channel that had over a million Subscribers.
Watch as he explores what is the future of the Metaverse (as well as the VIVERSE), Web3 and VR/AR with Yu-kai Chou.
Check out an older interview between Yu-kai and PapaFear earlier!
This is a Memory from Metablox.co, my NFT Platform aiming to preserve humanity’s most important memories onto the Blockchain. Check out the Memory (and more photos) here: Metablox – NFTs powered by real life memories
This was the second time I hosted the Octalysis Gamification Full Day Workshop at The Vault Coworking space in San Francisco.
The reason why I used this space is because I was part of the Founders Network, created by a good friend Kevin Holmes. It’s a network of Founders helping Founders. I asked if anyone had a good venue suggestion that I could use.
Kevin D Smith was kind enough to share his space The Vault with me, and as a benefit The Vault Members could attend too (my workshops can run up to $1000 per person). For this workshop, it turns out that Verizon sent quite a few of their employees to this event.
Since I was hosting a gamification workshop, I brought in a lot of fun game props. The Plants vs Zombies Flower and the Final Fantasy VII Cloud Sword was a favorite.
One of the innovative things I did for this workshop is that when people contribute or answer questions, I give them a magnetic dart. At the end of the workshop, everyone plays a dart throwing game.
Everyone has one score, but if you have more darts you get more tries. You could see for the whole day, people were eager to get more darts because they were afraid to only have one dart and it wouldn’t even make the board.
As you can see people had a lot of fun playing the dart throwing game towards the end. Even the online audiences (who was in a different timezone and pulled an all-nighter for this workshop) asked if I could turn the webcam and they wanted to see who would win the event.
Towards the end, the winner of the Dart throwing game received an Apple Watch.
However, awkwardly, a week later the winner had to return the Apple Watch because they said Verizon was the company that sponsored them to attend the workshop, but due to company policy, they cannot accept these rewards at the end.
Still everyone had a great time, and I hope by now they have all applied the Octalysis knowledge to all corners of the world!
As you are well aware, the world’s economy is in turmoil due to a combination of inflation, COVID-19, war, and commodities/supply chain shortages.
As we are officially in a recession (and things are looking to become way worse before becoming better), no investment market has been safe from huge declines — crypto, stocks, even gold and bonds have been suffering greatly.
So what do we do in this chaos? Where do we invest our time and money to not only protect what we have, but thrive to ascend above our environment in this new world?
If you look at the Hero’s Journey (or any game), at the beginning there is usually some shock in the system that changes the whole world negatively.
This becomes the call to adventure for the main character (you) to begin a heroic journey.
If there was no negative shock, then the hero would just stay in their comfort zones and not become heroic.
But the journey is still uncomfortable and scary.
There’s usually a “refusal of the call” where the hero still doesn’t want to go outside their comfort zone and change the course of this new world of chaos.
That’s usually when some kind of aid or mentor (potentially me, but could be anyone you respect and want to learn from) gives them the extra encouragement and reassurance to take on the heroic path.
Okay, so what’s this heroic path, and what do I actually do in this recession?
I’ve said this before, and as cliché as it sounds, in a recession, you want to double down on investing into YOURSELF and your Growth.
Even in good markets, you could make 0.1% — 20% returns with a variety of risk profiles, but if you invest in yourself and become more skilled/knowledgable/effective, you are GUARANTEED to reap returns from the investment for your entire life.
For example, I bought Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking: Fast & Slow for $50 back in the day, and the knowledge I obtained from it at least helped me make $400,000 more — either because I used the knowledge to close a number of client projects (each worth $100K-$200K), or it was the key knowledge that formed my designs for these client projects.
The crazy thing is, I will keep reaping benefits for the next 50 years from this small investment in money (but larger investment in time).
This is just one example, but there are a lot of great pieces of work and knowledge where my return was actually much higher than buying my first bitcoin in 2013, as crazy as that sounds.
Ever heard about people going back to getting an MBA or Law School when they got laid off during a recession?
That’s because they know at that point, they can only invest in their skill growth, to prepare for the time the economy is strong again.
But why wait for being desperate before doing the most effective thing? During a recession you want to build your super powers so you can start dominating when the timing is ripe.
So how do I invest in myself and my growth?
There are a lot of ways to invest in yourself and your growth. As mentioned above, if you want you should go buy Thinking: Fast & Slow and read it 3–4 times.
You could also read a bio like Elon Musk’s and see how accomplished people get to where where they are in life via the choices they made on that journey.
Or you can look into what I’ve worked tremendously hard on for the past 6 years to offer people who follow my work: Octalysis Prime.
Octalysis Prime is like a Gamified Mentorship Journey where you essentially get to download my brain and access me directly.
I’ve made over 900 videos of my greatest learnings/insights/case studies on how to live a more effective life: from productivity, to behavioral design, to parenting, to career, to managing finances.
To be clear, I’m no Elon Musk (I learned a lot from his bio), and don’t have random Lambo’s lying there in my garage next to my garage bookshelves, but I’ve definitely mastered some techniques and systems in my life that made me effective at things I do.
My design work has empowered over 1 Billion Users. I’ve sold 100K books with at least a handful of billionaires being fans of my work. I’ve taught at Stanford/Yale/Oxford/Tesla/Google/Uber/IDEO, and was rated the #1 Gamification Guru in the world 3 out of 4 years.
For $50/mo, OP Members get to download my brain and have weekly Live Coaching Sessions (in a group) with me.
They also get my full Masterclass content which I ran in 2020 on the 5-Step Octalysis Design that we charge $100K-$200K to implement for clients (the workshop was $1000 per person and had 17 hours of content) as well as my latest research/learning/insights on everything Octalysis.
So how do I know this works?
The proof that OP works is that more than 80% of the Consultants/Designers I hired for my own consulting firm The Octalysis Group came out of Octalysis Prime.
It’s literally the best things I have to offer, and I would not be hiring them and putting them in front of my clients like Microsoft or Lego if they didn’t learn everything it takes to represent my work and my brand.
The proof that OP is engaging can be seen from OP Members that have been logging in EVERY SINGLE DAY for years (we know because we have streak rewards), who have consumed all my 900+ videos and pushing me to make more faster.
We have a DAU/MAU (Daily Active User/Monthly Active User) of 38%, which is pretty unheard of in the online education space.
To promote the newly minted Metablox, I decided to apply to speak at a few NFT/Blockchain conferences. One of the conferences was the Blockchain Fest 2022.
They were very happy that I was willing to be a speaker there without cost and covering my own travels (normally I get paid a 5-digit USD Speaker Fee and travel expenses covered). I asked if I could at least get a table to sign books as that tends to improve the experience of the attendees, and they agreed. They also promoted my name on their website and social media as a keynote speaker.
My talk was about “How to Imbue Meaning & Purpose into your Blockchain Project,” which was related to Core Drive 1: Epic Meaning & Calling design in the Octalysis Framework. The goal was to tell people they need timeless meaning within their projects because if not then everyone is there just because they believe they can get rich in 4 months, which is obviously not sustainable.
Also, people might not want to play the same NFT games or like the same animal PFPs 10 years later, but the meaning/purpose of what they represent can last forever.
Since my talk was on Day 2 (June 2), I was thinking about announcing that we just opened up Singapore for minting, while sharing that my book is for sale and I can sell/sign books – all at the end of my speech. However, on Day 1, we just put my pile of books on the table, and within a couple hours they were all sold out. My friend Joey Lin (ex-Zynga/Google/Uber) was very impressed about it and claimed he has never seen anything sell itself like that.
One notable purchaser of my book was Carol Zurita (Speaker on Women Empowerment and Author of books including Get Powerful Now), but unfortunately she didn’t have cash and paying crypto from her Gemini account was too difficult due to me needing to be verified. So I just gave her a book and trusted her to pay me later. She did fulfill her promise afterwards so that’s a plus one in my book (no pun intended).
I also took the opportunity to meet my friend Rahul Daswani (Head of Partnerships at GovTech for the Singapore Government) and his friend Randeep Melhi (ex-COO and ex-Chief Commercial Officer of the prominent crypto project Cardano) at Toastbox in the Marina Bay Sand mall area. We discussed about how blockchain technology could help governments.
On the day of my speech, the audience was not huge but people were really interested in the topic, and they also scanned the QR code to get a free Tier-1 and Tier-2 Blox in Singapore. However, due to a bug that was introduced last moment for the QR code, people couldn’t normally mint Singapore if they were not logged in and it didn’t have proper feedback messages to explain that either.
It made Jun and I pretty sad thinking that no one wanted to mint but quickly recomposed to focus on our mission. Then we realized people who wanted to mint couldn’t mint, so we “felt better” even though the issue was obviously a bit frustrating. We probably lost quite a few people minting on the spot, but since we are focused on where Metablox will be 3-5 years from now, these bumps won’t cripple us.
Then another very odd thing happened. As the paid attendees went into the lunch hall, I was blocked by the doorman, saying that I must have a lunch voucher to enter. I thought, this must be a mistake, as I have a speaker badge. Generally the speaker badge is the most powerful of badges, allowing me to go to the backstage, VIP sections (which is true in this conference too), so I must have the right to eat lunch with the attendees, right?
So I found the organizers and explained the situation. To my surprise, all they could do was apologize, but no food for me. It’s the first time after 100-200 speeches and 40+ countries that I go hungry as a speaker. While I was planning to stay at the conference and mingle more with my the attendees (and my new friend Daniel Chou), I was hungry, so I left the conference to find food at the Marina Bay Sand mall area.
I took the suggestion of our Metablox Discord Neighbors, and went to a fancy Japanese restaurant called Koma. I might have done a little bit of “revenge eating” but just ordering 4 appetizers cost $107.42 USD. It was good food though!
Afterward, I met up with my dear friends Nir Eyal (Bestselling Author of Hooked and Undistractable) as well as So-Young Kang (Founder/CEO of Knowbe, ex-Harvard Business School, and ex-Mckinsey) at Toastbox again.
It was unfortunate for the conference because previously I invited them to meet me at the conference and so we can walk around and mingle with attendees together (I gave them free VIP tickets days beforehand). It would have been a really cool experience if someone met two authors of books they read at the same time and probably would have made it a highlight for the event (which becomes good marketing material for their next year’s marketing).
Unfortunately, due to not having food for the speakers, I just left and didn’t go back. We had a great time catching up as I learned how Nir Eyal moved to Singapore with his family from NY two years prior due to COVID-19 (when Americans were fleeing Singapore to return back to the States due to ultimatum warnings of citizens returning or else they might be disallowed indefinitely). Nir loves it in Singapore so we’ll see how long he ultimately stays there.
So this was my memory at Marina Bay Sand and the Blockchain Fest 2022. It might not have been the smoothest trip, but that makes this a great and unique memory to add on Metablox. I sure would want this memory to be preserved for myself decades later, and for anyone in the future to see how I am as a human being, and how things were like when we were launching Metablox in different cities.
May all the important memories live on through the Blockchain!
Have you ever thought about encountering once-in-a-lifetime opportunities? Those opportunities at your doorstep that you might regret 30 years later for not taking?
As an esteemed author that sold over 100K books and a handful of billionaire readers – as well as a designer that has empowered over 1 Billion user experiences – I certainly had no shortage of exciting opportunities in my life (a couple of them nation-changing).
But when my long-time friend from Google, Jun Loayza, reached out to me about this Metablox Concept, I felt this would be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and immediately jumped on it.
So, is this the opportunity that will make you rich in 4 months? NO – if that’s what you want Metablox is not what you are looking for.
This is an opportunity to be part of an ecosystem to preserve humanity’s most important memories onto the blockchain, so they don’t live on a single server like Google Photos/Drive or Dropbox.
It’s an opportunity to turn every location in the real world into a historical site or a museum so our important memories will carry on to generations to come.
Minting on May 23rd 6AM Pacific (less than 18 hours away)
After 6 months of extraordinarily-hard work, including building a full game mechanics platform and becoming officials partners with Polygon, we are finally ready to launch our Metablox Minting tomorrow for San Francisco and Miami – with Singapore and New York coming shortly after.
Minting can be done with Debit Card (recommended for those who don’t have Crypto/MetaMask experience) or MATIC/Polygon via MetaMask (for more advanced users)
If you feel that at some point in your life you might want to own Metablox NFT, here are a few reasons why reserving Blox on our platform before our minting begins would be a pretty smart thing to do:
1) Reserving a Blox ensures that the location you care about (meaning) or with high growth potential (value) cannot be taken by anyone else within 48 hours of minting. It would just be yours alone.
2) Reserving a Blox ensures that the mint price will always be Phase 1 pricing. In our game mechanics, every 10% ownership of a city, the mint price will increase by 50%. But for the property you have reserved , it will always be the base lowest price ($100-$300 per Blox depending on Tier). Even if you missed your reservation, you might still want to mint on Day 1 because after a few days minting could become 150% ^ x higher.
3) Reserving a Blox actually will earn an additional 50% discount off the base lowest price. Due to the recent decrease of the crypto market, to show appreciation for our reservations holders that have been with us since January, we decided to cut all minting for reservation holders by half to factor in potential weaker buying power. This means the $100-$300 per Blox will decrease to $50-$150 ONLY for those who reserved a Blox before the minting 18 hours from now.
The only catch here is that each person can only mint 3 Blox before the normal mint phase begins.
Influencers resonate with our mission
Metablox is all about preserving meaningful memories to a location (Blox NFT) forever on the blockchain. Some influencers who care about Metablox and have uploaded their Memories into Metablox (private beta) include:
We think these meaningful memories will become more and more valuable as time goes by – which is proven by historical landmarks and museums in the real world.
You’ll also get to experience probably one of the top Game Loop / Tokenomics Designs in the world by me, while making history together as a Memory Creator and Memory Curator of our precious real world.
So what now?
If you have already made 1-3 reservations on Metablox, here are a few tutorials to prepare for minting.
Important: All reservation holders get a 50% discount during the Reservation Minting Phase (which lasts 48 hours after launch).
Why Game Based Learning and Learning Games are essential
Humans have an innate desire to learn. Learning is one of our most fundamental activities. In fact, when things become too easy and no more learning opportunities are there, it becomes boring.
We don’t like to learn from long lectures or huge paragraphs of text. They learn from 3 ways:
They learn from trial & error.
They learn from watching other people do it.
They learn from Stories
1) They learn from trial & error.
Imagine at primitive times – people just figuring how a stick works, or inventing the wheel – the process of trying things, seeing it work or fail, and then iterating, is very engaging.
2) They learn from watching people do it
We like to learn from watching other people do the activates. If they succeed, we are happy for them. But when they fail, our brains take special notice.
This is likely why we think it’s funny when people something stupid and hurt themselves – our brains want us to take special attention to this event by making it pleasurable.
We would even want to tell this #fail activity to our friends so we could all laugh at it. It’s not just about being morbid, it is a survival trait that uses joy to spread important lessons (much like gamification and learning with games)
3) They learn from Stories
Even when we are listening through long monologues, we feel immersed when it is in story form, with people we care about, and events that surprise us. Think about times when people in a village sit around the campfire and listen to the elder talk about experiences and adventures he had in his youth. Our brains are fully engaged, and we likely learning all the lessons.
The relevance of of Educational Games
These are the 3 ways our brains like to learn. But what shook up the system is that the things we have to learn in the past century became dramatically more complex – things like advanced mathematics, philosophy etc.
Unfortunately, the technology to deliver the education was always stuck at the same place – we rely on pen and paper, and to some extent powerpoint. And therefore, the tools we have failed at engaging our brains to learn the most important things in life.
This is where educational games and learning games come in place.
The opportunity of Learning Games
Because of new gaming technology, for the first time in history, students can now learn through
1) Trial & Error by playing and replaying through the game
2) Watch other students and players play the game and learn from that
3) Instead of listening to a story, they actually become part of the story.
And this is why Educational Games are so impactful.
Nowadays you will find a variety of stellar learning games and educational games for every grade level that teaches all sorts of topics in a classroom, including math, science, research, writing, and language.
This helps educators and students grown and learn in schools and classrooms. Some even help engage parents to become of the interplay between the teachers and the children.
No longer would kids need to deal with boring school skills and tests, but students become excited through the gamified class that now involves teamwork and gameplay.
Every classroom can now help students through learning from games and math to achieve maximum fun.
This will help them become excited in school, while succeed in the fields of math, science, language, and more.
Educational games and learning games makes learning amazing for teachers and students alike.
In order to progress in our skills, free our knowledge, focus on distance learning, and support our assignments and scores, educational games are definitely the best way to go.
Of course, the big question is what Educational games to use and discover, so that students and teachers can both growth and have fun together while improving their skills.
