Edge Of W3BX Feat. Gabe Weis Of Stoics, Amen Rahh Of K12 Crypto And Zeneca

December 9, 2022
November 6, 2022
NFT W3BX

A lot of what fuels the growing NFT space is the relationships that people build around the concepts of community and co-creation. This is what events like W3BX are all about. In this episode, we go to Las Vegas with Josh Kriger as he talks to some of the hottest names in the Web3 community right now. Join in and get the latest scoop from Gabe Weis of Stoics, Amen Rahh of K12 Crypto, and Zeneca. Tune in and learn how the NFT community continues to grow even in a bear market!

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Edge Of W3BX Feat. Gabe Weis Of Stoics, Amen Rahh Of K12 Crypto And Zeneca

This is Josh Kriger, cohost of Edge of NFT in Las Vegas at W3BX with none other than Mr. Gabe Weis. It's great to see you IRL, my friend.

It's such a pleasure. I'm glad to be here.

You look relaxed. I know it has been a rollercoaster of a month for you. Congrats on the Stoics sellout. For those that don't know who you are and what you're up to, why don't we break it down for everyone and talk a little bit about the Stoics?

I appreciate you. I minted out a project called the Stoics. It's a 5,000 PFP based on Stoicism. It has my cubism art as part of it. That was pretty exciting coming off of a year and a half of building my community through making art. The transition from artist to the Founder of Stoics has been an intense one. To your point, I'm finally feeling calm, which is a nice feeling after six months of working.

It's cool because I feel like I've caught bits and pieces of that journey for you. I haven't seen the whole thing. It has been a wild year for everyone. I was at a party where I met you when you were in town for that Bright Moments drop. It was so cool to see you elevate all the artists around you and support the community at that private event. Shout-out to Ash. Bright Moments was a moment. What were some of the other key moments that led to this opportunity? This stuff doesn't happen overnight.

I've attended every Web3 event I possibly could in 2022. I drew 101 hand drawings for everyone like hundreds of them. Those were the allow list to get on the Stoic. The journey is NFT NYC and NFT LA. That was one of the most fun events that I did. That also helped spearhead it. I did VeeCon and another NFT NYC. The special sauce in all of this is having a human connection and meeting people. Otherwise, especially in this market, it turns into a race to the bottom. If no one has any connection to you, they undercut until your floor is below mint quickly.

NFT W3BX
W3BX: The special sauce in all of this is having a human connection and meeting people. Otherwise, especially in this market, it turns into a race to the bottom.

That's true in life. I continue to hear stories about the power of human connection that occurred at NFT LA. I love the show we do and how we're connected to the broader community. We educate and tell the stories of founders like you. There's something about that physical connection in person that can't be replaced. I was in Singapore and Korea, meeting founders and connecting with them, and learning about what was going on there. These are folks that I probably never would have built such a strong relationship with if I didn't meet them in person. Nothing replaces that. That's why in these times, we all have to get to know each other and go to events like this and NFT LA, and support real human connection.

The Stoics has a lot of sub-communities. There are the Bulls, the Wise Owls, the Whales, and the Royals. A lot of the thesis behind this is creating ways for people to have those real humans interact. We're the only group doing Zoom calls together as little subcommittees. People like seeing a face and putting a face to it. It's not the same as IRL. IRL is by far the best. That's one of the big advantages of these conferences.

A lot of the thesis behind the Stoics is like, "How do we elevate each other? How do we build each other's networks out?" My story is I had maybe 50,000 Instagram followers but I wasn't selling a lot of art prior. To go from that to selling a few million dollars worth of art in less than a year and a half is all on the power of these new connections I met through Clubhouse and attending everything. I double and triple down when people say, "What's the secret sauce?" I'm like, "You have to know people. You have to make sure they know why you're doing what you're doing."

A lot of the thesis behind the Stoics is, "How do we elevate each other? How do we build each other's networks out?" Click To Tweet

You have to put in the time. That's amazing. With Zoom, there's a lot of new technology coming out for making virtual conferencing more exciting. I've met a lot of people doing avatar stuff and metaverse stuff that's compatible with Zoom. What are your thoughts on all that? Are you playing around with all that? Are you sticking to the vanilla stuff?

At the moment, it's vanilla. I've done some of this metaverse stuff. It's not what scratches the itch for me. If it scratches parts of my community, then we will start doing it but like baby steps. There will be a winner in all of this. It might take a few years. At some point, it's going to be super user-friendly and awesome. I'll probably do it more but right now, we will keep it at basic Zoom.

What's on the roadmap for the Stoics?

It's building out these sub-communities. The Wise Owls meet. If the floor price on OpenSea is the same or more in six months as it is now, then they get a nice perk. The Bulls have some running targets that they hit. When we're at 1 ETH floor, they get perks. There are different incentives within the different groups. A lot of that is still slowly building out. A lot of people in the marijuana industry are interested. I have one with a joint. They're thinking about turning that into an alpha group for the marijuana industry. I set it up for the infinite game. There are a million Easter eggs in it and so many different characters.

Something for podcasters maybe. What do you think?

Let's do it.

Tell me. What do you think? What attributes fit media?

Thirty-nine percent of the collection is called Caterpillar. They can change. We have dynamic NFTs. On top of it all, we could handcraft one for podcasters. I'm trying to make this fluid, dynamic, and fun but also be able to bring on communities slowly that are interested. Maybe I'll make twenty that are LA-based, and then we get it to folks in LA. There are a bunch of maps in it. That already is one, but there are different groups that can be made out of the Caterpillars. Nothing is closed off. That's part of this infinite game that I want to be playing.

It makes sense. You have to be evolutionary in this space. Nothing stays constant at all in this space. It's all trial and error. That has been fascinating to me with the interviews that we’ve had with some of the leaders in this space even Eric Calderone. There will be a fun announcement related to Eric soon. He was the first to admit that this was all an experiment for him and that we still don't know the answers.

The only projects that I like are the ones that are thinking like that versus the second you have a roadmap, it’s almost like the fun is gone to me. I know what you're going to do. If you don't do it, then you're not good at your job. If you do it, chances are it won't be enough to keep me engaged. It's keeping people on their toes and keep trying to figure out ways to delight them in the most ever-changing industry that we're in.

I luckily have the benefit of the doubt of a year and a half of making people collect my art. They made money for me. I show up to stuff. They have seen that I'm here for the long term. That little extra trust layer means that I get a little bit more leeway to keep telling people, "Don't worry. We're going to have an insane amount of fun and have cool perks," without necessarily saying, "This is exactly what we're doing. Here are the dates we're doing them."

I wonder if some custom sneakers get into the mix. I'm checking out your sneakers. They're pretty dope.

A lot of this also is Stoics that I meet in person are getting hooked up. I've been doing jackets for folks. I did shoes at the party. I want it to feel like something where you're a Stoic. You come up to me like, "Will you draw on my shirt?" I'm like, "For sure. I'm always down."

You wear multiple hats. You're sharing a little bit of alpha with me that you had some other cool drops going on in the background here all while you're building this giant project and community. What's the scoop?

At NFT NYC, Avalanche approached me. They're based in New York. They're like, "We want you to do a drop here. We will do everything for you." As a creator who does a ton of marketing, that sounded appealing. I dug in and was like, "I'm going to have to work super hard on this to sell it out." It was the biggest drop on Avalanche in six months, which I didn't know at the time. I didn't know very much about Avalanche. I did a collection called Conscious Lines. It was 999. It sold out in 30 seconds. It's doing well. One sold for almost $4,500, which is the biggest art NFT sale in Avalanche that I'm aware of.

What are Conscious Lines all about? Congrats, by the way.

Thank you. These are drawings that I did of all of my community organizer meetings for twenty years. I saved a bunch and then converted them into NFTs. It's a seventeen-year journey of my art. It's funny seeing some of the early ones from seventeen years ago until now. I picked all my favorite ones from a long time ago because back in the day, it didn't always hit.

That's cool that you were able to convert all this art into future value. It's a beautiful thing. Do you have any plans with that project from here?

We're talking with Avalanche. I ended up becoming one of the top influencers on Avalanche in the last few weeks, which is interesting. A lot of the folks came onto the Stoics. We have some tie-ins that we will be doing. I'm not a maxi for any chain. There's cool stuff to do on Avalanche because there's no gas. There are some burn dynamics and some cool stuff I want to build out on it that is a little more costly on ETH. It's to be determined but I'm excited that it's another avenue to share my work.

If folks want to follow along with your journey and get involved, where can they find you on Twitter? From Twitter, they can get to everything.

@GabrielJWeis on Twitter is the best way to get in touch. From there, you can see the Stoics and Conscious Lines and get to my Linktree and all the fun stuff.

Stalk you, find you in real life, and have that human connection that you're so focused on. It's beautiful. It's great to see you. It's great to see that your hard work has paid off in such a meaningful way for you and the community. I'm very proud to know you. It was great to spend some time together.

I appreciate you.

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I'm here at W3BX in Las Vegas with none other than Amen Rahh, the Cofounder of K12 Crypto. As always, it's great to see you, my friend.

It's great to see you. It's great to be here with you.

It's not like we don't know each other. We have been working up something special. We will talk about that a little bit, but let's start with what you're up to and why you're up to it. Your story is fascinating. Education is key to impacting the world. We have learned that the power of what we're building here with Web3 is only as good as the minds, bodies, and spirits to get it done. That requires the next generation of leaders.

We firmly believe that the pathway to a better world is through education. Here's a little bit about myself. I'm a kid from Compton that didn't always have the accessibility to technology and the future of work and learning during that time, growing up in the ‘90s in Compton. I then became an educator and a principal.

K12 Crypto firmly believes that the pathway to a better world is through education. Click To Tweet

Where were you a principal?

I was a principal at Watts and Compton. I opened my own school five years ago. I was one of the youngest founding principals in LA USD history, which is the second largest district in the nation. We yielded great results, two back-to-backs, and 100% graduation rates, but then we realized that we were still not impacting the system. We still weren’t changing the way society and education worked.

That led us to develop a startup called K12 Crypto, which is a learn-to-earn platform that allows kids to earn cryptocurrency, learn about cryptocurrency, and gain money for doing it. They don't get that money until they graduate from high school. We developed a curriculum that is now going to bridge schools, districts, communities, and families together to be on our platform, and then collectively together with our partnerships, to bring them in person in Compton and Watts to have an in-person NFT Youth Summit.

NFT W3BX
W3BX: K12 Crypto is a learn-to-earn platform that allows kids to earn cryptocurrency, learn about cryptocurrency, and gain money for doing it.

The cat is out of the bag. You guys are cooking up something that NFT LA is proud to support. This youth summit was an a-ha moment situation for us when we met in the LA community. We had been thinking about this in 2021, but NFT LA came up fast and furious. We have a little bit of time to figure it out. Break down for us what you are building prior to NFT LA.

It was cool talking to us and building a relationship. What we define NFT as is next-generation financial teaching. For us, we want to bridge kids to the next generation of financial teaching by understanding how they can identify problems that they can solve with blockchain first. That's phase one. Phase two is then to develop a product that uses blockchain to solve that problem. Phase three is developing art around that concept so they can tell a story to mint. We're going to have kids mint NFTs on a marketplace leading up to our NFT youth summit, which is going to be this fascinating experience to launch kids not only to the world of Web3 but also to platforms and our partners that are on this mission with us.

That's amazing. Break it down for us. When is it? What does the flow look like? Who's going to be involved?

It's exciting. It's going to be on March 16th, 2023. It's happening in South Central Los Angeles at this great facility called The Beehive. We're going to bring all these young people together to be inspired and to be empowered to go into the world of Web3. We have great partners like NFT LA. We have other big partners that we won't release yet because they're key, but you will see them on our website as they flow out. It's going to be a fascinating event with some celebrities and music. It's an experience for the kids, but it's also a sustainable type of experience because of our partnerships with LA USD and other charter schools across the country.

We have been around each other for a while now. I've witnessed how much this event lights up the room and how excited people are to help the kids, and elevate not only the LA community but globally, kids. What has been your experience empowering the kids? How did they respond to blockchain and NFTs? What drives them in terms of this space?

Every time we go and talk to kids, they light up because they're like, "I want to learn this." They're already in this space from playing Fortnite and games and understanding the concepts.

Gaming is in their DNA now.

Even my daughter who's seven with Roblox is understanding the concepts or the philosophy around digital currency and different things like that. What we found out is that the kids are the place and the pathway to get the adults to be onboarded too. Once the kids are excited about it, we can now start talking with teachers and principals. Once their kids are in there, the parents come too. This is why we see that it can't just be one stakeholder. It has to be stakeholders. That's what we are passionate about and excited about. It's because we firmly believe that we can onboard the masses in a viable and reliable way with a summit and a platform that is for the people and powered by the people.

It's amazing. If folks want to get involved, how can they contribute? What do they do?

The first thing you want to do is go to K12Crypto.com, learn about our company, and shoot us an email, and then we can start our partnership in regard to our event.

What's the email?

The email is PrincipalRahh@K12Crypto.com.

We're so excited to partner with you. We're so excited about what you're doing in this space. It's going to be great. We will have this event happen before NFT LA. We didn't tell people the best part, which is that a lot of these kids are going to receive scholarships to come to NFT LA and get that second dose of education a few days after your event.

You nailed it. That's going to be fascinating because we're going to take up to 50 kids to see NFT LA, which is going to be fascinating. They're going to see the world of non-fungible tokens, blockchain technology, Web3, and the creator economy. That's what we're excited about.

I can't wait. Thanks so much for being a collaborator and spending a little bit of time with us. Thanks, W3BX, for hosting us.

Thanks.

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I'm here in Vegas at W3BX with no other than Zeneca. It is so awesome to meet you in real life. It's quite fitting that we're here in Vegas, which is a callback to some of your roots. What does it feel like to be back in Vegas? It has been a minute.

It has been a few years since I've been here. I was a professional poker player before all of this. People always say, "Three days in Vegas is enough. We're here for a week. That's a lot." I've spent eight weeks here at a time. I've spent six weeks for whole summers for the World Series of Poker. It's good to be back. It's very different coming through this whole lens of being here for a conference because I never did conferences or anything like that but it's fun.

That's a good callback to how you got into this space. Maybe you can elaborate on that a little bit more for our audience.

All I've done before crypto and NFTs was play poker. I got into it when I was seventeen in high school. I started playing with friends and went online. I started making some money and more money. I was like, "Let me do this because this is fun. I don't want to go to university or college and do that when I can do this." One thing led to another. I was able to sustain myself for fifteen years as a poker player. There's a whole other story. That's another episode for another day just on that.

There are a lot of overlaps between poker players and crypto. It's a natural synergy dealing with money and risk. I had a lot of friends who made that jump. They have gone into crypto. I initially dabbled a bit in it in 2017 when Ethereum started going crazy, but then the bear market hit in 2018. I was like, "That's a fun experiment. I'm back to real life." I didn't get it. I didn't have that conviction. I didn't understand the power of technology. 2021 rolled around and everything in crypto is going crazy again. I had my friends started talking about NFTs. I was like, "That sounds like a scam or a Ponzi cult." It didn't make sense but eventually, they were persistent enough.

NFT W3BX
W3BX: There are a lot of overlaps between poker and crypto. It's a natural synergy dealing with money and risk.

I did a bit of research myself and then learned about this whole creator economy, digital assets, and being able to own something in provenance. I was like, "There's something happening here. This is a movement. There's a revolution effectively." I already had one foot out the door from poker. I was looking for something else to do. It was like, "Let me dedicate all my time and energy to understanding this,” and fall down the rabbit hole in eighteen months. I'm still falling.

We're all still learning, which is humbling and exciting. When people ask for strategies for this space, it's important to put a caveat in anything that you say.

We're running a four-day workshop every day for one hour on how to build an NFT in the Web3 business. I didn't know what an NFT was nineteen months ago. An expert in this space is an expert because we're all learning. We don't have years or decades of experience. We're all new to it but that's part of the fun and joy. We all learn together.

I'm curious. When you were playing professional poker, how important was it for you to build a fan base and a community around you as a player? To what extent did that happen organically versus some degree of effort on your side?

It's a very minor part of being a professional poker player. Probably 99% of professional poker players would do none of that. I was sponsored by PokerStars for 4 or 5 years. Part of that was because I had built a bit of a personal brand. I had a blog. I would write about poker. People knew me. It was parlayed or leveraged into the sponsorship. As a sponsored player, I had to do certain community-building things and create videos to educate people about poker.

It's a little bit of history repeating itself except it’s 100 times different from what I'm doing now. Back then, it was very casual and lackadaisical. It's very not something I dedicated a ton of time and energy to, whereas now, community building is everything in this space. It's a huge part of it, whereas back then, it was 95% poker and 5% community, building a brand, and all that.

That leads me to a question. ZenAcademy started about a year ago. You have this interesting curriculum and approach to the space. How do you look at that curriculum? Where does the community fit in? It's a word that's used a lot, but it's only meaningful when you break it down into its smaller components. How do you look at your curriculum and specifically community?

Community is a buzzword. It's cliche and trite at this point but it's still used because it's so powerful. It is the glue that holds our space together in a lot of ways. We approach the community and think about it with, "How can we add value to people? Why would someone want to be a member of ZenAcademy?" It's because they get something out of it. We're not thinking of an extractive, "How can we make money off our community?" It's like, "How can we help them add value to their lives?"

Community is a buzzword. It's cliche and trite at this point but it's still used because it's so powerful. It is the glue that holds our space together in a lot of ways. Click To Tweet

If we do our jobs right, good things will happen. We will probably have avenues to make money as a business as a side effect of that, but if the key component is how can we make ZenAcademy a place where people want to come back to and feel that they get something out of it, it could be education, networking, finding other people, or finding a job. It could be fun. We have fun. We have meetings, poker nights, trivia nights, and meetups here.

We're playing poker here at the Wynn. We're going to meet up. We have a room down the road. We're going to get the community together and meet and greet. If you can provide value and things that get people to enjoy hanging out with one another, it comes down to having the right people together as well. We are very much a community that has four people that are more serious about the space, learning, education, helping each other, and being genuinely good people, and less about chasing the next flip, alpha calling, and hype cycles.

This is now starting to generalize, but the people in our community are maybe a little older in their 30s and less than their 20s. They have families. They don't have all the time in the world to dedicate to this. When they go to an event, they don't want to go to a nightclub and listen to a DJ all night like a lot of the events at NFT NYC. Our event was in a bookshop. Every community has its culture and attracts certain types of people. We have done a good job of cultivating a community that has a certain type of personality. From there, there are infinite possibilities.

That's so true. I was having a conversation with one of the founders of a new community that formed and launched here. I was asking, "What are your core values?" There's a lot of nuance to each community in what we do. There are a lot of different conferences in the space. For NFT LA, our conference is more of a magical experience per se where there's entertainment and drinking, but it's more about high-quality networking with people that want to co-create the future. It's important as people go into the space and maybe your program for them to think about who they are and what the true essence is of what they want to create.

Someone came up to me. They were like, "I'm thinking of getting more into Web3. What should I do? Where is the best place to go to find a job? Where are the opportunities right now?" My response to that question is always, "Keep an open mind. Don't go for one specific thing but go for what you have a natural proclivity towards." Most of us agree that gaming in NFTs is going to be a huge industry.

All I heard about in Asia was gaming.

It's perfect but if you're not a gamer, if you don't like playing games, or if you're not interested in games, it doesn't make sense to go into gaming NFTs. I can't remember who was the quote from. It might be Einstein, "Don't try and fit a square peg into a round hole." Find the thing that suits you. NFTs are a technology. Web3 is everything in the world. There will be something that meshes perfectly with you. You will find that if you keep an open mind and don't go straight to where the money is right now or something like that.

It’s recognizing that you have to go down the rabbit hole. Do you think it's still possible for an ambitious entrepreneur that doesn't have a pre-existing community to create something in the space independently? Do they need to form alliances with someone that has a built-in community or build a community before they do a Web3 project? Is it the chicken and the egg question? I get concerned personally about everyone wanting to create a token or a Web3 project as opposed to finding a home within an existing community. It's that intrapreneur versus entrepreneur instinct. We have seen market saturation. What does the future of the space look like from that perspective?

To your point, it's tough to try to create a community and stand out from the crowd. There are already tons of communities for gamers. There are tons of communities that are education-focused. There are tons of music NFT communities. You can start from zero and create an amazing community, but you need to recognize it's going to take a long time. It takes a lot of groundwork, getting known in this space, attracting the right people, and having a clear mission and vision.

You can start from zero and create an amazing community, but you need to recognize it's going to take a long time. It takes a lot of groundwork, getting known in the space, attracting the right people, and having a clear mission and vision. Click To Tweet

It also comes down to a product market fit. If your entire thing is building a community and that's it, you can do it. It's tough because there are so many existing communities, but it's very much still doable. If you're an entrepreneur, you want to do that, and you're dedicated to spending 6 to 12 months every day working at it, doing the unscalable, chatting with people, and sharing your vision, it will be successful.

The other thing is if you can come up with an idea that is perfectly suited for the market, you don't need to build that community per se. The product can stand on its own. The example I always go back to on this is PREMINT. Back in late 2021, in every NFT project, we were doing collabs with one another. They were giving allow lists away. Everyone was doing it through Google Sheets, emoji reactions, polls, and Discord. It's very janky, "I'll email you the list and send you a Twitter DM."

PREMINT came along. They were like, "Everyone is doing this. It doesn't make sense. Let's build a product that automates it and streamlines it." It only took them a month. Brenden started iterating and improving it. That was perfect. Everyone was like, "This is perfect." They got an entire monopoly on the market. If you can figure out that product market fit, you don't need the community first.

That's a great example. I was an early buyer of PREMINT. I'm a fan of what he has done. He handled the hack extremely responsibly. He's based in California. Hopefully, we will get him over to NFT LA in 2023. Here's a shout-out to Brenden.

He's going to be here for one day. I don't know if you knew that.

Let's all hang.

He's doing a panel. I'm on the panel with him.

I'll get to hang out with him. That's awesome. Let's talk about the future of ZenAcademy. You've got a lot cooking. I'm sure there are some secrets and tributaries in the works as well, but what does the roadmap look like from here?

When we launched, it was just me. I very intentionally had no roadmap. On the website or the mint page, there was a link that said, "Not a roadmap." It was me writing about why I don't have a roadmap because this space changes so quickly. I didn't want to lock myself in. Once you do have a roadmap, then the community rightfully expects you to execute the roadmap. You're like, "Maybe that wasn't a good idea. How do we pivot?" I don't want that. I want to have the freedom and flexibility to be like, "Let's see what happens in the market and decide what we want to do."

A year in almost, we now have a team of close to twenty. We have been building a lot behind the scenes and thinking, "What's next? Where do we go from here?" It's still not directly a roadmap but it's more of a vision and a plan for the future. I've been thinking of ZenAcademy as a business. How do we support ourselves? How do we generate revenue? There are a few models for most communities. They're like, "Sell more NFTs. Do a second drop. Rely on secondary market royalties."

It's not sustainable. People say. "These guys won. They minted out. They got $2 million, $3 million, or $4 million." Crypto is a little bit of an exception, but when you mint out at that level and start running a business, hiring, paying the payroll, dealing with HR, and then doing events for your community, that burn rate is quick. You can't just rely on that community to keep re-upping. You have to grow it.

You can potentially over the long term grow the community size. That's great, but we're in a bear market now. It could go on for another couple of years. How do you support yourself?

Put the community to work.

That's one way. Selling more NFTs and royalties is reliant on the community buying and selling NFTs. I don't think that's great. The third option we have seen a lot more of now is VC funding if you have a great idea or a vision, and maybe you need a runway. I'm not a fan. Personally, I don't want to take on VC funding. I have nothing against it.

I don't want to offend anyone because I do appreciate the pros and cons, but for some projects based on their genesis, it's a contradiction.

It misaligns incentives in a way.

If you start in a different way, it's different, but if you start as community-first, "We the people," then it's like, "What's going on here?"

I agree. I don't want to take VC funding, but then it's like, "How do we build a business?" We've got a few ideas. One is consulting. Personally, I get 5 to 10 requests a week. It's like, "Can you be an advisor for our project? We're a Web2 brand coming into the space." I've been turning away 95% of their business because I don't have the time. It makes sense to create a team and infrastructure to capture that business. The people doing the work will get probably the bulk of the revenue, but 20% to 30% comes to ZenAcademy or ZenLabs, the parent company.

That is a good and sustainable business that does not rely on the community buying and selling tokens. That's one idea. The other is more than an idea. We're in the process of executing that. The other is the media. Content is the reason I'm here in the first place. I started a newsletter and Twitter. That blew up. There are a few newsletters. We have a few podcasts. We have a YouTube channel. Up until now, we have done very little in affiliate marketing or sponsorships, but there's a clear intersection there. You can do that in ethical ways in ethical affiliate deals like ledgers and hardware wallets.

I use it. Everyone should use one. Let's have their link on our content and then get 10% revenue as we grow. That's something that the community can help with as well. If the community likes our content, they will share it. They know that if they're sharing it, there's revenue coming in for the business that we can then use for events like this. It's this beautiful flywheel. Media, sponsorships, and affiliates are other things.

I'm a fan of the media.

We're so early. The pie is growing so much. It's amazing. That's true. We do have a PFP project coming out in several months. We're working on that. A lot of people ask, "Why a PFP project? Does the space need another PFP project?" The answer is no. The reason we didn't do a PFP when I launched in 2021 was because I was like, "The market is saturated. The last thing we need is yet another PFP project." Interestingly, over the course of 2022, there has been a lot of demand from within the community. People are like, "I would love a ZenAcademy PFP. I would love to have that as my Twitter profile."

People ask, "Why PFPs?" I'm like, "The reason is to do it for fun so the community can engage more and have that social identity piece." We're not doing a PFP to build a game or to do something. We've got all this stuff in the works. It will serve as hopefully another entry point into the ecosystem and maybe a lower price point, but it all depends. We don't know yet. Maybe it's a free mint or a small paid mint. There are a lot of balls up in the air, but that's another thing that we're working on. There are a few other ideas but those are probably the key things we're focusing on. There's consulting. There are more media and a PFP project.

NFT W3BX
W3BX: People ask, "Why PFPs?" The reason is to do it for fun so the community can engage more and have that social identity piece.

That's exciting. There's a lot that I resonate with that you shared. We will have to talk more, unpack this, and share our views with each other. If people want to keep in touch with you, it's probably pretty obvious at this point, where should they start?

For me, Twitter is probably the best place. I have a website, Zeneca.xyz, that has all my content, links, and everything you can find there. For ZenAcademy, the website, ZenAcademy.com, is the easiest. Twitter is @ZenAcademy_. We haven't gotten the regular @ZenAcademy yet. I'll say one little plug. We started a course for people that want to get into NFTs to onboard them. Go to 30DaysOfNFTs.com. It's an email course because we don't want to get people in Discord. It's very easy. Put your email address in. Every day for 30 days, you get emailed a bite-sized chunk of information. It onboards you from 0 to 1.

I love that. If you try to go to gear five too soon and overeat, you're forced to wait until the next day to get your next serving. My girlfriend's mom has a new puppy. That puppy loves to eat and then gets a stomach ache. They got this bowl with this puzzle in it so that the puppy doesn't eat too much for one day. Thirty days is a good amount of portion. You will learn a lot. You won't get too overwhelmed.

That's the goal.

That's great. I'm excited about everything you're doing in this space. I hope to see more. I hope you can make it over to LA from Europe in 2023 for NFT LA. We will keep rooting for you. Let's stay in touch.

I appreciate it. Thank you so much. This has been fun.

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