CC0, creator royalties and NFT mental models for business and community

Transcript

what's up friends welcome to web3 academy a place for entrepreneurs creators and marketers to explore and learn how to use web3 to transform business models and create thriving communities enjoy this next episode gmgm what's up web3 academy welcome to another episode of the doer spotlight featuring zenika this week i am jaybird coming at you from portugal currently uh joined as always by my co-host kyle read head with subchi also in portugal currently but only one more week of that but what's up friends we are super stoked to have with us one of the leaders in the nft space zenica

xenica zenic is a former professional poker player turned nft project founder investor and educator and he's really looked at as a leading thinker in the nfc space followed by over 300 000 people for his opinions his sub stack is an incredible read on many deep thoughts and analysis in the space and he's also the founder of zen academy an nft community that aims to create a safe learning environment for people discovering their place in web3 and i am a proud holder of zen academy and and the 333 club uh welcome to the show zenika thank you so much what an intro uh it's

a pleasure to be here thank you for having me we're so so excited we were kyle and i were giddy with excitement leading up to this uh episode so we always like to start uh with the rabbit hole story but before we go there uh i just want to explain a little bit of um the overview for this episode what we are planning to do is break down some mental models for nfts and we we sort of have three mental models that if if time permits we'll hopefully dive into all three of them first is building a business with nfts and particularly those are usually social community led businesses the second is using nfts as a tool for your business or products and the third is art and digital

collectibles and how nfts can support musicians and artists and photographers and creators in that space but before we jump into those mental models uh zenica let's let's start with your rabbit hole story take us back to the beginning uh how did it all begin is there somebody in particular that first pushed you down the rabbit hole i love the i mean first of all i love the name rabbit hole story it's such a great term and uh yeah it perfectly describes i think almost all of us have how we felt getting into the space so as you mentioned i was a professional poker player uh before all of this i did that that was the only real thing job thing i

did before crypto and nft so i did for about 15 years straight out of high school wow uh i did go to university uh i dropped out on three different occasions i tried i tried really hard i tried like when i was 18 i went back after six months and then i tried again when i was 30 i went to law school just like you know because i was looking for something else to do and then like 18 months of that i was like no all right i've given it my all it's just that life is not for me uh so i first became aware of crypto in 20 actually 2011 i think back when bitcoin it was really early i unfortunately didn't buy any or get any um personal exposure but uh online poker became illegal in america or like banned and very difficult to

play because of some new law that passed and then all of a sudden people like playing with bitcoin and these bitcoin sites popped up so it was on my radar then but it was until 2017 that um when ethereum came out and was gaining popularity that that big bull run that gained a lot of attention that's when i started getting more and more interested in it i always i did a bunch of reading and research into ethereum and i was like oh this sounds awesome this is way cooler than bitcoin you know smart contracts and doubts you can do all this awesome stuff but i didn't really i didn't have like a deep technical understanding of it and i couldn't really conceptualize the the reality of what it would look like and so i got really excited by it but then when

you know and i just bought a bunch and i would talk about it i was like hey this is really cool but it's more of a case of like all these really smart people love it and they say really good things about it but i don't know why i get it so when the bear market came and like everything came back down i was like oh all right that was a fun experiment uh let's go back to poker back to real life i didn't sell though i still i mean i kept about like 15 or 20 eats i had in a hardware wallet and you know i held it all the way up to whatever got to like 15 1800 back in the day and then down to 80 and then but then yeah early 2021 you know everything started going up again and i was like oh

okay let me go check in on on my bags and see what's going on and i had some friends who had never they'd never left the space that they were like through poker that stuck around um it was actually friends of friends like mutual friends and uh one of my best friends jamie who's actually the co-host of one of my podcasts he asked me in february last year uh do i know what a hash mask is which is it was an nft project that came out then i was like i have no idea and you know we went back and forth he was just figuring out about it as well and that's that was my first reaction or like uh introduction to nfts and as i started to learn about i was like oh this is some this is clearly a scam this is some ponzi cult you know

because the way he was talking about it and you know i think most people's first reaction is oh you can you can buy a jpeg for a thousand dollars being a rare one for five thousand dollars it's just it seems so ridiculous even now it's ridiculous yeah it does and so there's a couple of weeks of just skepticism and like honestly just making fun of our mutual friends like how they lost their money yet etc etc but it eventually did some reading uh there's a very specific article by [ __ ] mccormick who has a a sub-stack newsletter called not boring uh called power to the person or power of the people i always forget exactly what it was called but it's about the creator economy web 3 nfts as these early digital assets and collectibles and pieces of art

and that's when it started to begin to click for me and that that's like when i started diving down the rabbit hole and you know i've just been falling head first ever since i'm still falling it's it's been a fascinating journey i love it take us uh take us up till now so because i think you have such a an interesting background but also what you're working on now is so applicable to making you a leader in the space so tell us a little bit about zen academy and then also maybe a little bit about the consulting work that you do and i know you said that you're you know probably doing 10 plus meetings a week with various projects and so tell us a little bit about what you're working on currently yeah so most of my time these days is

devoted to zen academy and within that the 333 club so let me take it back a bit and like go to the origin story of zen academy maybe and so last year february march april i was getting into nf crypto really first and then nfc sort of took over but originally it was like figuring out this whole crypto thing again uh after a while i settled on nfts as just you know so fun and exciting to collect and i was trying to make money from it i was failing at first i think because a lot of people do also the market was not good i think there's like a mini bear market back in in march april last year but you know i stuck around and eventually things started going crazy and bonkers and was able to flip and you

know that was a really fun and exciting time i was making money but it was not fulfilling it was not um rewarding it didn't feel great at the end of the day like as a poker player for 15 years i never really reconciled the whole like adding value to society like that was not something the world does not need professional poker players the world does not really need professional jpeg flippers either sure you know some degree of flippers is great you need liquidity and market makers and all that but uh it just it never felt super good even making decent money uh but around i think i think it was june i started my newsletter and i just started creating and writing on various topics uh across

my newsletter and on my twitter feed and then i started the podcast my friend jamie and i was just creating content and like it was resonating with people people were appreciating it they were liking it and it felt good you know when people were like appreciating something i did i was like oh what's this warm fuzzy feeling this is this is nice and so and i enjoy it like i i love writing i love creating content i love thinking about nfts and so i said how can i lean more into this and less into the flipping and i basically i got burnt out as well it was like you know several months of flipping when you just it's all you do 16 hours of days you watch the markets and yeah it gets exhausting uh it was exhausting then and so i shudder to think what it would be like

now if i kept doing it so i i sort of thought about how i could lean into that side of things more and that's where the idea for zen academy came from i thought it'd be cool to have my own project um you know the traditional ways of you know monetizing content in web 2 would be you have a paid newsletter or you have a patreon or whatever and i thought well that's cool but that's not very web three maybe i can figure out a web three way to sort of have a membership token a community that is focused on you know where i can dedicate my time to sort of creating value providing value and content uh and sell these to these tokens as access or something like that it was all very up in the air

so that that idea came around july august last year it was until november until we sort of minted and then around september october i had sort of yeah in the course of six months it was just a crazy time just really blown up in terms of following and the whole space was going bonkers and so i had a lot of people reaching out asking if i could be like an advisor or consultant on their project and could help them out and it was far more than i could reasonably realistically work with and so the idea for the 333 club came about where i thought well what if i could sell it another token and almost like an experiment in tokenizing my time where you know i might not be able to be a full-on advisor for all these projects

but maybe i can um you know sell this membership club where people i can help out like light mode you know an hour here and there 30 minutes here and there but more importantly the community itself would become this place for founders and builders to help each other and so yeah but they both launched the same time november last year zen academy in the 333 club and uh it's sort of it's got it's coming up close to a year now i think it's nine ten months which is crazy and it's basically what i spend most of my time on now so it's thinking about how to like what's next for zen academy um how to create more content better content reach more people help the whole onboarding process because i think that's a wild wild west area

as well as how to have fun and incorporate the community element because that's a whole other piece and we have plans for like a pfp and fun stuff like that and then um on the three through three club side like you mentioned uh i i chat with like 10 companies or project founders a week it's probably three times that amount like honestly it's like i'll spend two to four hours a day at least talking to like three through three members and then uh there's all sorts of other projects that i would advise and consult on and it's it's a i feel like it's an awesome way like i love it and i i really enjoy talking to different founders and people with varying levels of experience in the space and with different desires and i learn a lot and so that's sort of how my

time is divided up these days well first of all thank you for your service i think that it's needed in web 3 and in nft space as well um but i'm just curious so i mean you're working with startups all the way up to like big corporations that are using nfts and we're seeing a lot of big brands and big companies that are getting into nfts right now i assume you're speaking with many of them i'm just curious like what's that vibe like what are they what are they asking in these meetings like what are the questions what kind of questions are specifically the big brands having um like i don't know maybe what are their problems that they're having or what are they thinking about uh and maybe you can contrast a little bit about like a little bit into what that's you know the

startups are doing as well what they're asking um but if you can give some insights here that would be really cool yeah so one of the biggest things that big brands are concerned about is their brand obviously their brand identity and so like they don't want to do something that is going to damage their reputation and a lot of the time that's what happens you know you hear about big brands or celebrities entering the nft space and it's like oh you know that's a cash grab that's something terrible and so they thankfully are taking the time to try and you know do it the right way and talk to people who are sort of in the space and you know there's a very specific culture in web 3 in the nft space on the blockchain

and it's difficult to understand that from the outside and like a lot of the traditional web 2 models that are very acceptable in the web 2 space like paid marketing and advertising and that stuff is like just a given they're kind of like you know looked down upon in our space so uh it's about one of the biggest things that the big brands are concerned about that no one like the smaller companies aren't for obvious reasons is their brand identity and how to protect that stay on brand and do things that will um enhance their or if not enhanced like just not damage their reputation and for the most part most of them they're not looking to at this point establish like any enormous presence in the space and like shift the majority of their

company into web3 because the world is not ready but they see that there is a uh just a shift and a tech movement this new technology is coming up and they don't want to be left behind and so they're trying to experiment basically and dip their toes in and be like all right so what might it look like if our company did have a a presence in the metaverse in web3 and uh you know for a lot of these big brands it involves setting up a new division and hiring people and figuring out the corporate structure and you know what roles and responsibilities and what areas of the business that would cover and it's a whole thing and uh you know it's literally it's gonna take years for some of them to but but they're just dipping their toes in now

which i think is is smart on their behalf uh and it's just very different to like a smaller company or a startup who you know might be looking to fundraise or or they need they really need to bootstrap a community and and have a whole host of different reasons and and problems and uh goals compared to a bigger brand so it's uh yeah it's fascinating just to talk to the whole spectrum and see the different approaches that people are taking so before we jump into these these three mental models i'm curious when you talk to people whether it be and maybe it's better to think about like talking to your friends or these people who are not necessarily in web 3 in the nft space

why nfts what's your elevator pitch yeah it's a good question uh i think it's sort of it changes and evolves but i always come down to the the point about digital ownership and i think that at the core of it is it can be a concept that's a little tricky to understand but when you talk about how our lives are just moving into the digital age more and more and more like that's just clear as day and especially the younger generations like growing up in front of an ipad they're growing up in roblox and fortnite and like in these virtual worlds it's sort of if if you can put like get across the the idea of you

know we've had ownership in the real world forever but we've never really had a way to have true digital ownership now we do and i think that is that's the point i try to hammer home uh you know i often go to gaming as a great example because you know people are spending a ton of money on in-game items already and it you know you can see that there's demand and people clearly especially again younger generations are happy spending you know their discretionary money or even even more sometimes on skins on experiences in virtual worlds and uh nfts as a technology just enhances that experience for the consumer uh actually for basically

everyone i think it's it's a benefit so yeah i really just try and and get through that you know i don't have a specific elevator pitch i think it varies person to person and depending on their background their age their where they're coming from but just trying to get across the point of digital ownership is uh is the thing and it can be difficult at times but that's what i aim for yeah and i think the thing that comes up for me so much is that a lot of times when people think about especially right now in the space because there's so much focus on making money and investing and return particularly within the nfts you mentioned flipping before

that people think digital ownership that's all that means right it's like oh the purpose of digital ownership is so that i can make money right and increase value but the thing that i think we're missing is that most of the world actually doesn't necessarily i don't know if care is the right word but they're not focused on that and those aren't the people that are in web 3 yet right all the people that are in web 3 are very much unfortunately or fortunately sometimes focused on that speculation and that opportunity to turn a profit but most of the world they don't necessarily need that return but ownership is so much fun it's so exciting to i mean i remember one of my first businesses that i was involved in

was a small startup and i started i was not a owner when i first started and then i i got equity as an owner and i didn't get much equity that equity actually didn't ever really turn into money to be honest because the business never became liquid but that feeling of ownership puts you in a different state of mind and that's something that i find is such a big opportunity for businesses with nfts it's like it's like i mean it's the community economy you're super charging your customers to now feel this sense of ownership versus just feeling like a user or a customer and i think there's just such a big unlock there

100 yeah i totally agree i think it's also the utility that comes with it too right and i think that's what you're saying is most people are not people that are investing in the stock markets and in trying to you know invest to make money but they use technology for utility it makes their life easier it makes your life better and i think nfts can do that for many many many things which i think we're going to break down here in these mental models and so um before we pick your brain on that zenika i guess why don't i give jay you just gave your the kind of mental models of the three let me explain it in a little bit of a different way and then we'll let zenika kind of run with it and see if you have more to add um but we were just trying to break down

you know all the different ways you can use nfts we have people ask all the time like i want to start an nft what should i do um and i'm like well that's kind of not the right way to look at it i think it's like what business do you want to start and then let's figure out how nfts can like you know can help you with your business um and so the way that we kind of explain this is think of like three different circles or sort of big categories one is sort of like a community-based nft and you can branch off that with things like you could make a dao with a community nft um you could make like a membership site or a membership thing where you give access to real-life stuff or to uh digital things with that um and what was there's

one more on the um on the community entity oh yeah v friends kind of thing we're going to build movies around it or games or whatever and those who own it you know they own some of that branding in ip so that's really cool that's one of them then you have the other box another circle let's call it and this is sort of like nfts which help you with products right or services so actually i would say maybe the three through three club is one of those where you sort of have a service based nft where it's like your time you said there's also like nft ticketing there is you know i think it was nike or whoever launched a a cloak i think it's a shoe or clothing but you can buy the nft first right and then you can go and claim that to claim like a

real-life clothing or whatever so it's just helping enable how we do commerce essentially uh or services and things like that and then the last one uh which we sort of touched on which is like collectibles this could be art this could be music this could be whatever you think you said baseball cards it could be any kind of cards um are there i guess first those are kind of the three big categories there's many that things that you can do with all those are there any other categories you mentioned fundraising for startups maybe that fits in there maybe it's its own zenith is there anything else you would add to that or what are your thoughts on that model yeah i think the model is pretty comprehensive and you can probably fit most things into one of those three categories i'm trying to think i wonder where

gaming would fit uh it's probably under the community aspect but yeah uh largely i i think that um it's a good framework to sort of have in mind and and most projects will will be able to fit into one of those three categories i think one of the most important things is for a project to figure out exactly like why are they launching an nft like just exactly how you said it's it's the wrong approach is hey i want to launch an nft let's do this it's like hey i want to do this how can nfts enhance that experience or would they enhance it in some instances you know you feel that a lot of people are going

around uh they have a hammer and they're just looking for nails and and there's so many uh projects that you know especially where we are right now like nfts make the experience worse or they make it more there's more friction and i think it's awesome for projects to be experimenting because that's how we learn and grow and and uh a lot of the use cases that might not work so well now in five five years two years whenever they'll be commonplace and it'll make total sense but i think yeah just understanding your why is something that i think is super important for a business or project looking to incorporate nfcs i i do agree that in many cases nfts do

make the experience actually worse especially if it's like that's your sort of commerce or the way that someone has to purchase like a subscription right now doesn't really make i mean there's a lot of people wanting to experiment experiment with it i'm like that's cool if you want to do that but no like there's not many people that can purchase your subscription because one they don't know how to do that and two it's just a very clunky experience instead of just like putting in a credit card you know um is there any specific use cases maybe it's one of the ones we just mentioned that you're like oh nfts are nailing it it makes it way better than the real world already i kind of think of maybe the way you've set up zen academy as one and that's sort of like membership which you don't really get in the web 2

world like you can but i think it's it's definitely i think it enhances the experience when it's an nft i'm curious to hear your thoughts on that just based off your own story and maybe there's other use cases that you're like oh yeah nfcs are already way better than the than the traditional world yeah i think memberships are an excellent example because we you have traditional memberships all over the place you have you know people can subscribe to a patreon or a newsletter on a monthly basis a yearly baseless i get like a discount uh but sort of nfts just can and have made that experience better you can have a lifetime membership uh which the buyers can then resell you know that's

something that you could never do or you have like some projects have a one-year membership or three-year like proof which you know you can resell which is just something like if i go subscribe to someone's sub stack for um 12 months and then i decide after two months oh i don't like it i i can't then go and resell that subscription and certainly like all right maybe some platforms have a refund policy but there's almost no instance where i could sell it for more than what i paid for it and and i think the the [Music] the fact that it's all on chain allows for the founders or the community managers or owners to do fun and interesting things with the community you know like airdrops or like token

gated access uh or partnerships with other projects and it really is just an excellent way of um just uh attributing ownership of a membership to people and yeah i think that's probably one of the best use cases we've seen right now and a lot of these sort of pfp projects are you know in large part a membership token as well like board ape your club it's it's a yacht club you have a club membership you know in the traditional world people pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for like the most expensive country clubs and golf clubs and stuff like that it's not because uh it's that much money to play around the golf it's you know sure it's probably a

nice golf course and nice amenities but most of the money is like because of the other members of the club and maybe the networking opportunities and stuff like that and you know say what you want it maybe is not the most egalitarian i hope that's the right word i always get that one messed up but approach to life to have these gated communities but it is a reality it's been around for for centuries millennia and i think that uh it's just sort of taking that whole almost like country club approach to the digital space but um allowing for infinite types of models like you have free mints that you know that launch and and generate value for their holders and it's it's interesting because the members are

so much more incentivized to build out the the brand and the value of the club because if they do it then their token membership can go up in value and so you now have these um members who are also brand advocates if they believe in it and i think that it's just a really powerful use case if done if done well that's a good point because if you are in let's say a golf club you don't you're not really incentivized for that golf course to be in good conditions or to have better things in the clubhouse like you don't really care you hope they do because you're like well i want to play here but you're like i could just go to the other one over there if this one yeah if they kind of you know stop taking care of it all whereas if you own some of it and

there's potential that it could your your membership could go up in value you could actually earn from it you go out there you start mowing the lines and helping them yeah i want to make sure that it's just you're replacing those divots and you're taking good care of that yeah yeah it's true you might you might even do the opposite if you have a membership where you take advantage of it because you're spending so much money that you want your return right like it's natural okay let's let's um let's break down these community-based nfts and let's just dive in each one and so we first you mentioned membership in zen academy let's just dive into that one further a little bit because the the one question that comes up for me and

you're the perfect person to answer this because you have a 10 000 person community membership is okay so in the in this current subscription model for web 2 you have recurring revenue which is really important to manage your business right so how does that translate into if we look at the nft side obviously if you do you get more up front assuming you do not a free mint you mint at some price so you get more up front is the royalty enough to sustain revenue is like that's that's the one question that always comes up to me i love

the side of the community ownership that goes to your members and the fact that they can sell and continue to add value and you know we've identified the benefits of that but what about as the business owner is is is the revenue model make sense and can you break that down for us yeah this is an excellent question and it opens up a giant can of worms basically and stuff i've been thinking about i really i think the entire the structure of things right now is totally broken and i think unsustainable where most projects zen academy included in large part rely on secondary market royalties to maintain revenue um to pay for ongoing expenses like yes we did raise a decent amount up

front it actually wasn't much for the zen academy portion the 333 club raised a lot more and that's a separate kind of a separate thing because it's it's tokenizing my time specifically and but anyway uh yeah i i don't believe it's enough and i don't believe it's sustainable because i mean there's so many reasons one is you're relying on turnover and that's not exactly incentives are misaligned you're hoping people sell right which is not great um you yeah there's so much like royalties are not enforceable at a smart contract level so there's this race to zero happening i think in real time where we're seeing marketplaces now pop

up with zero fees zero creative royalties and people just circumventing the the whole royalty aspect and traders especially the people who would trade high volume um i just flock like would naturally want to do that that is very much a cultural and ethos um that's against that spirit but at the end of the day anonymous traders will will go where the fees are lower and because it's not enforceable on chain i'm not sure that it's a long-term viable model uh so that's another piece and yeah i just think that it's really important so like with zen academy i always had the idea that we'd launch an and have a lifetime membership but then maybe in the future we include a yearly

token membership to help pay for ongoing revenue and stuff like that uh that might be something we do in the future perhaps it depends on the landscape of where we are what the market is like what the demand is like i think that i'm really like honestly over the last week have been very actively looking for other revenue sources or like just how we can bring revenue back to the business that is not reliable or reliant on secondary market activity because it's very unsustainable and so things like uh offering turning zen academy into like a marketing consulting advisory house or offering services like contract ordering auditing discord auditing security services uh there's a lot more

like there's so many companies coming into the space and like i turned down like quite literally one to two advisory positions per day or per weekday at least and it would it just sort of it seems like a lost opportunity because there's demand and people want that and maybe i can't help and work on every single one but i can work with people on my team i could train people we could turn zen academy into this this place that helps businesses and generates revenue that is not reliant on on turnover so yeah absolutely i think the system is kind of broken uh i'd be surprised yeah it's it's really it's a tricky nut because and and not all nfts are created equal i think for art it makes

total sense for there to be royalties and for the artists to be able to in some part rely on that and have the freedom to create and be rewarded for their early work which maybe they sold for very cheap and and also like that that makes total sense to me but then i think for these larger collections that yeah the reliance on royalties i'd be shocked if it's still a thing in five years basically interesting you know it's interesting that your sort of solution of okay how do we continue to make this a sustainable business is you basically what you discuss is forming a dow right if you get zen academy to start helping you with consulting services and things maybe it doesn't call it a dow but it's

basically they're helping you build a business inside of it so now you almost are using your nft to go into some form of dow or contributor nft it seems like which is interesting because that's one of the other arms of these sort of community nfts and i think what jay and i were saying before we started this podcast is there's a lot of crossover between them because the other thing you could do is let's say your nfts had some design you could start to build some branding around those right and now you have the v-friend style where you can create movies and games and things around those i think what board yacht club did for instance though is they started with additional tokens so they had boarded yacht club and then they went to you know was it mutinate yacht club and then um and then they even went

into like launching a token right like a fungible token and so like they've just consistently launched new things to generate additional revenue so i mean that's another option i guess um i don't know if that i mean i kind of think it was like if you go to a gym sometimes you need to like you got to pay a registration fee first which is like let's say the zen academy nft or any social type nft but then you still pay a fee you know a yearly or a monthly fee to attend the gym um and maybe that's kind of where it goes and that's your secondary token just thinking that yeah there's a lot of models that that could and would work i think we're still in the experimentation phase and i think we're going to see a lot of stuff tried and see what works and what

doesn't the board 8 model has worked fantastically for them obviously but i think them yeah there's probably about quite literally at least a thousand maybe 10 000 projects that have attempted to emulate it yeah and it just doesn't work because there's no demand and it's pointless to launch a secondary collection if if there's not demand if the floor price isn't sufficiently high in the original collection uh and it's sort of like band-aid solutions to my mind so yeah uh every project is different and i think that we need to innovate and think about uh just yeah new new models new mental models i think the key is if you're going to

launch a secondary token of some sort there needs to be additional value made or created than when you launched the first one and i think when boarding did or when a lot of these do it it's more just like we had a bunch of people now let's just do another one you know but they didn't build anything there was no new service or new like value creation coming into that like business let's call it um but it's so long as you continue to grow that business whether it's creating more revenue streams for it or more access into different events or something then it's like that's why i feel like when you could do the secondary thing and now it's more like a vip thing or it's more broad either way depending on which way you want to go with it that's the only way i can kind

of see it but you need to keep innovating otherwise these secondary tokens make no sense yeah no i totally agree uh yeah it again it it it can work if there's crazy demand and people want in but for the most part i think figuring out that utility piece and the that's such a tricky nugget and then yeah that i really think more projects should be and enter their credit a lot of them are now thinking about alternative revenue streams and maybe the bear market was like a wake-up call to some yeah but yeah we're sadly going to see many projects fade away and just like they'll run out of their treasury and their runway they

would totally rely on secondary market sales and you know the market is just not supporting them anymore and the the nf will yeah so the founders will disappear but the nfcs will always exist because that's the beauty of nft so maybe the community does something with it maybe it doesn't uh but yeah i really think that yeah looking for alternative revenue streams is super important if you want to build a sustainable business uh in this space that's reliant on on this space and you know a lot of a lot of projects can be relying on web to revenue and like have their web 3 presence and can afford to you know support it because they're trying to reach almost like use nfts as a funnel to bring people back to their

absolutely uh models of that as well where a project will have a you know an app in the app store and have a subscription-based service and they're happy to quote unquote lose money on the nft department or division or strategy because it will it's almost like marketing and it's it's community building and it will reach a wider audience and those people will hopefully pay for their their subscription and so they're making money and fiat and maybe they're losing a bit in the nft space because it's uh yeah there's a lot of different models that's a great point you don't always have to make the revenue or the value creation come as a result of just number go up of your nft yeah you can also just maybe it stays the same but you're

making revenue from fiat or from whatever an ether or whatever like it doesn't always have to be like that's ownership that's equity and of course you want that to go up but it doesn't also have to be your revenue stream that's a that's a great point i like that yeah and i think the using the like a traditional model we talked about country clubs uh is the there is always an upfront fee to to join the registration and then there's dues right and that that does make a lot of sense to me there's there's two two different models that i think country clubs have for revenue one is dues which are usually annual dues to

maintain your your access right and the other is uh minimum spend is also often a revenue model they use so uh you you can't just pay your dues without going to the country club and like buying some food or buying some some clothes or buying some merch right and country club is probably not the greatest example because i don't think that is spreading equality in the way that we want but this idea of there needs to be which i think is really interesting it's so interesting to hear you say that you think it's broken there needs to be other forms of revenue uh is really powerful okay i'm gonna move us on it's it's

august 9th right now when we're filming this and a topic that is very hot right now is ip uh it was just a few days ago that moon birds made the announcement to move from ipo or commercial rights ownership or licensing to their nft holders to moving to cc0 what's the relationship between nfts and into intellectual property yeah it's it's such a fascinating topic and it's very [Music] wide-ranging there's a lot to unpack uh generally speaking i think it's sort of been broken since inception because when an nft is created usually what happens is the creator the

artist or the company behind it owns the intellectual property and what they sell is the nft the token and the token does not come with the intellectual property so then it's like what are you buying you buy a token but you don't own the ip to it so there's like already a mismatch there and so in some instances i think it's fine especially art is a really good example where uh you buy an nft of art to collect art to hang it on your wall doesn't mean you own the ip of that art you can't then go and make prints of it and or sell copies yourself that's how it's worked in the traditional world i can go

out and buy a piece of art but that doesn't mean i own the ip the artist still owns it they created it and they they want some sort of control and ownership over it so that someone doesn't just buy a piece of their art and then just plaster it all around the world dilute their brand and all that kind of stuff that that sort of makes sense to me um but the the tricky part comes from you know these community projects these pfps especially pfps because people now want to use them as their profile picture as their identity but if they don't own the ip it starts to become a little strange and so what we saw evolve was the i want to say the broad ape yacht club model uh they weren't the first to do it avastar's did it and i think maybe some other projects

but they were the first to make it popular where the hugo labs the company said all right so we own the ip oh that's how it always works but we're going to give holders of the nfts full commercial rights so they can so it's a license agreement between yugolabs and the nft owner uh to allow them to commercialize their the art of their nft so they can go out and make a brand out of it they can plaster it on on shirts and mugs and this that and the other they can license it they can sub license it out to third parties if someone else wants to use a board ape and an animation maybe they have to pay that ape owner so that became a popular thing and a lot of projects copied that

but that is it's still not a hundred percent it doesn't solve the issue of the the disconnect between nft ownership and ip ownership because the end of the day the the token holder has a license to commercialize it but the intellectual property is still owned by the parent company so there are situations where you know in the terms and conditions of that license arrangement the parent company can decide to take back some of those rights or change the the agreement and you know maybe that happens maybe it doesn't but that the ability for a centralized entity to control the ip rights and the licensing rights of an ft

holder it's again it's not really web 3. you don't truly own everything around the nft if if that is the case and the sort of like the scary scenario is always what if maybe you trust the company maybe you think that they won't do anything maybe it's an irrevocable license but i've heard that there's a way there's ways around irrevocable licenses if the company goes bankrupt or something gets acquired maybe that there are ways for that to break as well um but yeah let's talk about getting quiet imagine if uh i always go to this example disney acquires you collapse and you know disney then says all right we we're gonna pay yuga

50 billion dollars and uh you know that's obviously way more than it's it's worth and the founders are like okay that's too much money we can't say no and the investors now say okay we can't say now we're gonna take it now all of a sudden disney owns the ip and they can say all right we're gonna we don't want everyone commercializing it to their heart's content we're gonna put some restrictions on it you have commercial rights but you can't use it for drugs guns violence and maybe those are good things but then maybe they extend it and say you can't use it to create anything that is a competitor to our existing disney content and you see how it gets a little messy so a solution to this whole problem is um where cc0 comes into play and

many projects now i think was popularized by the blitmap project in august last year august 2021 they said they recognized the founder dom recognized this disconnect and mismatch and said all right what if it might have been nouns actually announced out that did it first but uh either way there's a few projects that did it around the same time they said well what if we just release relinquish the intellectual property rights and ownership so we no longer own it we'll put it into the public domain and that's what cc0 means that means that anyone in the world can use the the underlying assets to monetize create a brand do whatever they want with it and and nobody has any legal recourse to ask them to take it down to ask them for

financial compensation there's no need to license a underlying asset you can go and do whatever you want from it and it sort of solves that issue of the mismatch of ownership between the centralized entity and the nft holder and the goal is also that by doing so you allow this freedom and flexibility for anyone to build upon these assets and build up the brand like there's very little reason for like if i want to create a comic on the nft space for instance i would either have to own the nft characters i want to put in the comic or license them like if i wanted to put a bunch of bought apes in the comic i'd need to license the rights from those

board a owners uh or get their permission like maybe they're happy to do it for free but you still have to get the permission whereas when it's cc0 anyone can be creative be like i would love to create a story like this nft space is fascinating imagine like a uh a futuristic like a story set in the 2200s nfc are proliferated they've come to real life and and i want to see what like a war between board apes and and doodles and like this world it's really creative imagination it's very difficult for them to create that as a current standard but what they could do is they can say all right well now we have moon birds they're in cs0 and now we have blip maps and nouns i'm going to create this universe using these characters that are in the public domain and build a story

out of that that people aren't they recognize the brands because a lot of these are brand household names in the space now uh but i don't need to go through the whole rigmarole of licensing and uh paying for it and you know it's a whole count of worms and uh it's it's a fat like i can i can talk for hours and hours on the topic but uh yeah maybe one last thing on the on the public domain thing uh two last things first is uh there are a lot of works that are in the public domain now that people have built upon and so generally speaking ip will go into public domain i think after like 75 100 125 years of creation or maybe after the creator of creation and after the creator has passed away

like there's some rules around it they change a bit but things like the original fairy tales that they're all a public domain the entire works of shakespeare public domain um sherlock holmes went into the public domain i think like 10 or 20 years ago and so we saw this explosion of sherlock holmes movies and tv shows whereas prior to that there really wasn't much and then you know over the last 10 years there's been at least two tv shows that i know of and multiple movies and that's because they didn't have to license the rights it was like open season anyone can create it and i would say that the value and the the brand awareness of sherlock holmes has exploded like way more people know who sherlock holmes is now that i'm sure that they did in the early 2000s or the 90s um if sherlock

holmes was an nft i would imagine it would go up in value and i think that's an interesting use case of it but um yeah and so and the second point i want to make is that because even if the underlying assets are public domain and cc0 if someone creates something on top of it the new creation is not cc0 so you can still hold the intellectual property rights so all of these sherlock holmes movies tv shows um the ip rights to those are owned by the the movie studios that created them uh just like disney owns the to their interpretation of snow white like anyone can go out and make a snow white character or a movie but if they use the exact same like what is it blue dress

gold hair or whatever then all right maybe that's infringing on disney's interpretation of it but you're still free to use the underlying character snow white uh so with a lot of these nft projects going cc0 you can still build a brand on top of your own nfg if you want or anyone and you can protect that and own the ip writes to that but anyone can use the underlying assets to do something in a different area yeah so it is fascinating it's very fascinating i feel like we're going to see this continue to just like adapt and as we go but okay so if if you go cc zero then they're not entitled entitled to any revenue that comes in from let's say a movie was made or a story or something

like that why does the value of the nft go up that's what i'm just trying to figure out is it because it now becomes it moves from our first category and goes down to like a collector's item and now it's like oh you own the like whatever it is like the mona lisa kind of thing you know and like is that why or i guess like you said there are some ways where you can start to have ip um and that could obviously do it um just curious though it's full cc zero you don't have any revenue generating from that what do you think i would say it's probably two things one is definitely the collector's item if the brand continues to grow in awareness and more people know about it it's very much a collector's item and people will

absolutely pay massive premiums for like you look at some of the early comic books and you know you get the exact same comic but it's just a later edition the original is worth more uh plus the it still acts as a membership token like it doubles it doesn't eliminate that and so there is yeah the yeah so you still have all the utility that the membership token entails you to or entitles you to and the company behind it can derive drive value to that community as well and especially if the the brand blows up maybe there are opportunities to monetize it that are different to like licensing it directly and and i mean honestly i would say that

very few people are monetizing their nfts at this point very few yeah it's it's minuscule it's it's not zero though like especially like bought apes uh there have been a lot of like medium sized uh licensing deals and probably like a small handful of very lucrative ones but for the most part it's just not a thing that's happening and if a big brand wants to create a story on a board 8 they're far more likely to just buy the ape you know if if disney comes along and says hey we want to create a story uh they're probably not going to pay someone and to license it you know what if that person that they license from sells the board ape and like it gets messy and

it's like they would probably prefer to just buy the ape outright and and have their own control over it and so cc0 i think starts to make more sense as you unpack it uh but yeah there's all sorts of other issues like you can't you can no longer protect the brand where if someone takes the underlying asset now and creates a uh you know a hate speech video out of it or um you know really heavy into like drugs and violence and and like paints the brand or like quote-unquote teens around that way that you can't really protect it but i i think that it's less of an issue in that area than most people think it is and another

thing is like in reality like the logistics of protecting it it's very difficult even if you have full ip rights if some anonymous person on the internet takes that and creates animation of violence and hate and drugs good luck like take once something's on the internet you can't take it down like good luck and and going after them it's going to be very expensive it's probably not going to be lucrative or worth your time so in a lot of cases uh especially when it comes to individuals protecting their own ip uh i think it's a bit overblown um obviously if the brand blows up and it becomes like disney then you know disney spends a crazy amount of money protecting their ip these days but uh yeah it's all an experiment as well

like we haven't seen this play out before in human history we've seen what it looks like where a centralized entity owns the ip and builds a brand around it and create controls a narrative and it's you know it's worked fantastically for some that have done it again disney is just the best example uh nintendo is another great example and we have not seen what it looks like where it's sort of in the public domain from very early on and then the community is free to just build upon it and go crazy uh i'm really fascinated just to see how it all plays out so let me ask the direct question do you think moon birds made a good decision yes i think that they did i think long term

cc0 is uh is the right play i think they were in a really really tough spot so the way i look at it is obviously the best time to have decided to make remember 60 would have been prior to launch and the second best time is today or the day that like every day that they had waited it would have gotten worse and worse and worse so it's so much better to do it now than a year from now when you know maybe a lot more members of the community would have decided to try and build something and protect their ip uh yeah i i have reservations about the way that they did it and i think that their communication could have been way better

and their approach could have been a lot softer and there's a lot of nuance to that but i believe that if we look back in five or ten years most likely like i guess my opinion is that uh it will be looked upon as a good decision but who really knows like there's always some risk that they damage they shot themselves in the foot and damage their brand too much in the short term and it's gonna hinder their ability to make it to the 10-year mark um in a really successful way but um knowing what i like what i know like what everyone knows about moon birds is like it's proof is the company behind it they

raised a ludicrous amount of money from the sale and from others and from secondary market royalties they've been hiring like mad for the last few months they're building something massive so it's if everything that they build plays out and you know moon birds become a household name i really think that you know as a collector's item as a early piece in the proof ecosystem as a membership token and with utility uh i i think cc0 or the previous way it would probably is going to be a successful project and i think cc0 uh allows for some interesting stuff to happen uh if they can survive you know the the just the crazy fun storm that they're in

right now which i think that they can yeah there's i think there's incredible irony in the fact that they they made a decision to decentralize to be more web three but they did it in an incredibly essential way and i think i agree i think we'll look back and right now everyone is so focused on the uh [Music] because that's the only model that we know right we know disney works we know marvel comics works right but you bring up great examples of sherlock holmes works and shakespeare works and so i think but we just don't think about those examples really right

yeah and also no one likes being no one likes anything taken away from them that they think absolutely especially without their decision yeah and you know one of the big things is people bought in under the impression that they would have full commercial rights and it was like advertised on the website and you know people had the rug pulled out of under from them from under them for lack of a better term and so yeah it really is a messy situation but yeah i think we'll look back on it hopefully favorably you know i think about this this community nft or whatever we're calling them and there's these three sort of arms we just kind of pull on all three of them and you ask the question j at the beginning of like why nft

and the one thing that i'm noticing here is like why nft it's because you can do all three of these things branding an ip membership and like build a business together like equity let's call it you can do them all with one tool one nft right like if you wanted to you can start a business let's say zen academy um and you get a bunch of people in there who want to learn about nfts together and you're like well let's turn this into a consulting business as well well now you have membership and then you also have sort of dow and equity in that and you share in revenue and then if you also made those nfts some sort of branding in ip maybe the dow starts to build movies and games and metaverse is like what moon birds is doing and now you have like

branding and ip which is going you have business going and then you have this membership which just becomes even more valuable and it's like this one nft can do it all and you can't get that in the web in the traditional world um that was really cool yeah the possibilities are endless and limitless and fascinating and exciting like two days ago i i've been thinking about this a lot lately i went through like a e s registration storm and i registered zen media zen advisory zen consulting zen castles and you know 20 or so i was like just thinking like because we registered an entity in uh dubai in the uae recently zen labs is the name of the entity uh because apparently academy is

like a restricted word there anyway uh but then like i was like i don't own i own zen academy.etha i don't earn zen labs on ethan i went on i was like it was listed for sale for 18th and i was like i'll buy this but now i want to register everything else just in case yeah i feel like we all went through that like 10 years ago with dot coms as well yeah and email addresses yeah totally totally okay let's shift gears to the second bucket that we talked about at the beginning using nfts as a tool for your existing business or your product uh a couple examples of that off the top are physical goods using an nft so you buy the nft and then you get the physical

good or you buy the physical good and then you get the nft as a like a collection to show that you were one of the first purchases of it i mean i can imagine if when nike first dropped the first air jordan if they had an nft with that like a cohort nft almost and you were one of the first purchasers of an air jordan you could show that you wanna think that would have incredible value and would also build really cool community and would be uh would fit with the the ethos of the space another example is ticketing is a big you know a lot of people talking about ticketing um what do you think about using nfts as a tool for your product business products

are there any other use cases that you've seen yeah no i i think it's something we're going to see way more of and i think it's such a great way to use them starbucks recently announced that they're implementing some sort of web 3 metaverse nft strategy thing i don't i don't know the full details i don't know if they've been announced yet but over the last week or so and i think this is just such a i've been talking for like i think a year now on how eventually we're going to have everything will be nft5 like your your loyalty cards your reward cards you go to your local coffee shop you have currently you get you know cardboard card you get nine stamps you get the 10th coffee free or something like that there's no reason for that not to be an nft in some form or another and i think

starbucks has such a tremendous i really hope they do this i don't think they will tremendous opportunity to do something really cool where they launch a thousand nfts and uh whatever the price is one eighth five eight maybe less but it the nft entitles you to one cup of coffee free per day for life or maybe for like a year or 25 years or would probably need to be some time limit uh that is a great use case of the technology you know you can't there's no way to um copy this you can't like fraudulently copy that there's no counterfeiting that type of thing and imagine just the

the impact that would have if there's now a thousand people around the world going to starbucks every day with their friends and and you know every day they get a free coffee and a free coffee and it's like how why oh because i have this nft oh what's an nfc how does that work the possibilities are crazy and and it seems like a win-win-win-win situation and i think we're gonna see more of that across all sorts of areas like discounts reward cards uh yeah the possibilities really are endless for companies to include nfts as as a way to add utility to their ecosystem i think about when you say that i think about do you remember when you used to go to restaurants uh or like ice cream shops and it was like every time you get one

or you'd buy one a lot of times it's at coffee shops they would like have this little piece of paper a car that you keep in your wallet and they would like stamp it and then you got to get like 10 stamps and you get a free one it's like that that's great and all but like you could just oftentimes people would lose them or they'd go on the washing machine and then they were done and it's like there's an obvious nft being is just makes way more sense than that right like i wouldn't imagine imagine uh you know it just keeps adding up as well it doesn't have to be after 10 you get one free it could be after a thousand you get you know a month free or something crazy and then you that nfp accrues value over time if you move across country you could sell

that to someone who's renting your apartment or buying it from you and now you've got like it's just this value transfer and maybe there's like a 50 royalty or something so like the company is happy and uh although this gets back to the whole royalties are not enforceable on chain and people will circumvent it but uh yeah there's all sorts of cool stuff you can do absolutely and we're going to see it all we're going to see it all yeah go ahead when i think about it is um it's kind of like supply chain issue and inventory management it's like let's say i'm nike or whoever and i want to launch some collection of shoes or t-shirts or whatever and i want to get really innovative and creative with it well instead of me like making a thousand shirts or ten thousand shirts because i don't know how many

people want to buy this i could just go and min like do it as an nft first and then have the people go and buy them that are interested cause they're my super fans and then i know there was like oh there was eleven thousand people okay i'll go make eleven thousand of those shoes shirts or whatever and now i don't have a bunch of inventory sitting there that didn't end up selling or have you know it's late because there's some supply chain issues and whatever else you can just do it without hurting the environment at all you just do it digitally and then you can go and they can claim it and collect whatever it is that you're selling i think that is a huge unlock for like fashion and just brands in general which you can do across any domain not just clothing or shoes

yeah 100 that's that's another really great example and yeah we're going to see do you have any like businesses that are talking about doing these kind of things or are they mainly on the other side of like the community entities that's what we see in the space right now is like everyone's launching a 10 000 you know collection or whatever or art but d are you talking to many that are trying to do these sort of more product i think it's more innovative at the moment because there's not many people doing them but do you have those discussions yeah i would say like the vast majority of my conversations are not people trying to launch another pfp project or something like that which is awesome because i get crazy bullish hearing all the different things like every day i i i've never been more bullish basically because of all this

cool stuff that i see and i guess specifically in terms of like the supply chain i don't think i've seen that use case yet but certainly a lot of people who are merging digital and physical fidget tool is the word i hate it um there's another one i heard like digi fizzy or something i don't like either or we need to come up with something better but yeah there's certainly people doing stuff in that area and i think it's really fascinating and uh there's a lot of cool things you can do even down to having like nfc chips in like uh in your shirt or on your pair of shoes because you know

this is something that i didn't know either but like once you get to the high-end market for shoes or bags and stuff all bags there's a lot of fraud and like fakes yeah you know around and imagine being able to prove oh that's an authentic bag or an authentic pair of shoes uh there's value in that so i think you know we're probably it's already starting to happen and we're not that far off from it going so even more mainstream where probably all of the big companies will have some element of that where it's really easy to tell oh this is a legit bag this is a legit um louis vuitton bag or this is a legit pair of um nike shoes or whatever it might be so

yeah and then when you if someone has that asset and wants to sell it they sell it along with the nft or something like that and then now the new owner is like all right i probably have this um it's genuine uh i can i can tell the provenance it came directly from the company to this person and then i bought it and yeah yeah there's so much cool stuff coming it's it's crazy the other the other use case that i think a lot about is r d and feedback so you know brands uh exchanging nfts in return for insights product development you know uh you uh some sort of um

customer focus group right you know and then as a result of you participating in that the nft could unlock early access to the product or to releases or maybe profit sharing as part of it uh you know and that's an opportunity for a brand to also maintain a key relationship with somebody who really understands you and what you're doing and then i think that could extend even further to education and customer support right like we talk about so much about education in terms of web three but like every brand out there especially tech companies you know they need they need educators who are out there teaching others like the best example i

can think of is web flow is a you know a platform used to no code build websites and they have created a such a powerful community of people who are producing videos and teaching others how to use it notion would fit into this as well airtable like a lot of these no code tech tools they really require their their power users to go out and to educate and so whether it be you get an nft in return for you know being a part of onboarding into their community or providing support and that's way better than an employee doing that right like because you're an active user or that could extend into content

submission too maybe you know you love a product so much that you submit content like short videos or reviews or tutorials and in exchange you get a loyalty nft for that which really just creates this incredible marketing flywheel right yeah so yeah i think there's so many so many cool use cases it's so so true uh on that yeah on the first piece i think yeah that's a fantastic use case because currently what happens is like a company will want to survey a lot of people and they'll be like all right we're going to send out surveys uh if you respond you'll be entered into a raffle and the winner will win a 50 gift card or something like that um which is cool and great but yeah nfts allow for so much

more creativity and value creation there and on the second piece uh there's a website curious.xyz which is kind of already doing that where it is it's created by some friends of mine uh ben and mai from curious adi so actually in the 333 and it's basically they created a site where anyone can go and ask a question about anything that they want to know in the web 3 space because everyone has questions all the time and then they have people there community members who will answer the questions and as an add-on everyone who answers questions can get a a an nft which is soulbound so it can't be traded it's locked to their wallet and every time you answer a question um the metadata

updates and so you can see how many questions you've answered you can see how many times people have thumbs up your responses and all of a sudden now the company can see like all right these are the people who are adding the most value to our community if we ever do a token if we ever do some sort of thing we can reward them and it's a very clear way of aligning incentives and you know some people honestly for some people that's enough it's like some people like number go up even if it's not a financial numbers like people like gamifying gamified experiences are amazing and if if you can get uh yeah so yes absolutely we're going to see so much cool stuff like this you you just actually said the fourth category that we didn't include and i just realized it is soul out on a tees

reputation nfts right credentials things that you can't sell that don't actually have any value except for to yourself right achievements and things like that so that's that's funny i have a question for you um zenica and maybe this has come up with a lot of your clients or like the people that you're speaking with consulting with we've talked about all these use cases and potential of nfts but we also said well they're not really ready the tech is not ready you've said that a few times and like a lot of these things were saying it's like it doesn't make the experience better yet than it does in the web 2 world except for the community side of things i guess um i'm just curious what do you think that this industry needs to get that stuff ready is it just improvements in tech is improvements in awareness like is there

anything specific that either other companies are talking to are saying like we need this first um maybe it's regulation i don't know uh but is there anything you think that we need to you know get specifically in order for this to actually work mainstream yeah i always regulation is actually an interesting one i always say two things and that's uh education and infrastructure and i think that we need both in order to go mainstream and the education piece is it's kind of obvious you know there's so much to learn in this space it's so difficult to learn the learning curve is so steep uh we need better resources and more resources and i think we're seeing a lot more come out now

and we're seeing projects that are specifically focused on education many more of them obviously that's one of the things that academy does uh i think we need like a thousand ten thousand more projects i i never view another education project as competitive at all i think it's an all hands on deck situation right as well as existing like any any project should have an education piece just to help the onboarding process for new members uh so we just need more education more awareness and that's going to take honestly just both yeah it's going to take time for everything and the other side is infrastructure and i think that you know it's so difficult to use just the technology right now metamask understanding gas and and the tech and the security issue people are getting scammed left right

and center and the ownership and seed phrases and open sea and decentralized finance and uni swap and liquidity pools it's all really taking a headache just hearing all that exactly we need to abstract and layer twos and the merge and like we need to abstract the tech away and make it i always say eat we won't be mainstream until uh it's at the same level where it is now where my 97 year old grandma and my eight-year-old niece they can get out an ipad and they can you know go to the app store download an app play a game within 30 seconds and they have like they're interacting with cloud computing mobile computing you know all this touch screen technology this crazy stuff which they have no idea how it

works but it's it's seamless and like it works and it's an easy experience and so i don't know if we'll ever get quite there on the web 3 level maybe we will but we need and that's going to take years and years and years so education infrastructure and maybe some regulation i don't know about that but yeah do you think the word nft like when do you think when we get there we don't even use the word nft or what are your thoughts on that i think we probably don't use the word nfts we're already seeing a shift like instagram uh unrolled nfts i think they call them digital collectibles coin based digital assets or something like that and it's got such a negative stigma but it's also just it's just a technical term like non-fungible token what the hell does fungible mean most people have no

idea i had no idea until this yeah it's funny that people get so angry about it and it's like like you said it's just a term that's it you know it's a it's a protocol or like a contract i guess and it's like everyone just gets so mad and it's like yeah relax people it's just the turn yeah all right i think uh i think you've only got a few minutes left here before you go to jump to uh one of your probably 30 advisory calls of the week uh so i think we're going to do is we're going to skip art and digital collectibles which was our third one uh and then our fourth sold down tokens and those whatever that whole space as well so we'll skip those maybe we'll have to get you back on for a part two xenica when we come back to those um but i just want

to first i want to ask you a couple speed round questions and then i want to give you a chance to tell people where they can find you and how they can joins at academy and uh yeah please please don't join zen academy it's a great place um okay what's an nft you'll never sell let me ask you this first actually how many nfts do you have that's a great question yeah uh so the the technically correct answer is like 50 000 plus uh because i get sent like just a lot of spam nfts all the time yeah uh i think that the real answer of nfts that like have some value or that i

might care about it's still several thousand maybe like somewhere between like three to six thousand is probably yeah way too many is the answer uh and one that i'll never sell uh i mean i think my pfp ape is is probably one that i'll never sell although when we do a zen academy pfp and stuff i'll probably be switching to that so who knows there my fedenza is one i always say that i would never sell because i really really love it but um i i could see selling it trading it for a different one i'll go with pfp8 that's uh any upcoming projects that you're following and excited about not really oh okay maybe that's true actually uh meme land is one that is

sort of i'm not really fully on top of it but it's just like everyone's talking about it and the zeitgeist i said the potatoes projects that's probably gonna do well and then there's one called crepopolis which is a animated show by dan harmon that is coming out on fox next year they're launching an nft in two days on the 11th uh and uh i did a twitter space with them last night i've been chatting to the team they i think they're gonna do well um so those are two on my radar but i sort of miss so much these days because i'm not i sort of hear about the projects that are coming out like six months or two months from now but not the ones that coming out next week yeah which is which is why you should join zen academy because there's lots of conversation oh

yeah of which ones are coming out there uh okay final question and then uh we'll give you a chance to give your show uh if you had a billboard that at one billion people were going to see what would you write oh that's a great question um such a hard time it is a hard question uh my brain went all over the place it was like uh do i try and teach people about web3 and mt's probably not because a billion people are good uh

maybe i tell people breathe or go read some some go read books or yeah i don't know some life lesson that that you know isn't very brilliant like that yeah it's like the it's the easiest thing it's free and anyone can do it we all can do it and we forget how powerful it actually is we just did a breath work session with our with our team here we're having a retreat that's why jay and i are both in portugal and everyone was just blown away by how powerful breath work can actually yeah it's it's really amazing i think a few that come up for me when we've spoken in the past is uh make haste slowly is one that you told me that you you often say and direction is more

important than speed yeah those are true motors and values that we have at zen academy yeah i really like those okay speaking of did not come up with myself stolen yeah or comparison is the thief of joy i think is the other one that yeah i've heard you used before all roads lead to dubai [Laughter] yes indeed okay we we're already over time and i know you gotta jump so before you go give us uh a little bit of a show on where people can find you and how they can get involved yeah uh twitter is probably the best place for me it's at zenica underscore 33 youtube is something that we're pushing a lot more we have a youtube channel if

you search zen academy on youtube the channel is zen academy 333 uh and then our website zenacademy.com it's actually down right now because i took it down for security reasons after my twitter hack but by the time this goes out it should be back up and uh yeah those three places and and come join us in discord and all that good stuff this has just been incredible i've deep bow for you zenika thank you so much for the time uh i i i hope we can do another one to talk to talk more because we should definitely talk for hours and this this is the type of stuff that we all need to be discussing teaching and you know there's so much uh to learn about the space and i think it's the

stuff that's not the technical stuff as you said but real use cases so thank you no thank you both so much it's been a pleasure and yeah i i could talk for hours and hours and hours more so let's do it again sometime awesome thank you for listening to web3 academy we hope this helps you along your web3 journey if it does please share this episode and subscribe so you don't miss the next one by the way if you have yet to join the discord community you are missing out this is where all the magic happens this is where we learn where we ask questions where we network uh you want to be in there the link to join is in the description below and finally a quick disclaimer nothing in this podcast was financial advice crypto and web 3 can be

risky you can literally lose it all in fact if you invest on account of what we say you probably will lose it all so don't do that in all honesty the point of this podcast is to remove the noise of markets and price and focus on utility and implementation anyway so you should not take any of this as financial advice thank you friends and see you in the next one