154. Zeneca on the Future of Crypto, the Psychology of Money, and the Shortness of Life

I have crazy 2021, July, August and I peaked in terms of portfolio value and net worth, it was like eight figures. And then I started from maybe $10,000 of savings that I put in absolutely wild one to two years. In terms of the money side of things, I think about it a lot lately. There is a certain point where your life doesn't change that much. Another zero, you know, whatever amount of money won't dramatically. Like maybe you can buy a nicer house, a nicer car, a nice this, that or the other. But it comes back to being able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, forever long you want. Building a business is tremendously difficult and going through a crypto bear market and sort of like sticking around and being there every single day in the thick of it is. Yeah, most people don't know what that's like. The liberating moment for me was when I realized that I would actually be able to help the community more by not running the business. It was such a clear win win to me because I wasn't enjoying running the business and I would find a little difficult and stressful. I feel a million times better.

Welcome back to another episode of the Ben and Bergs Podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift alongside Ms. Bergs, your MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling a fully remote subscription research business here in Australia. If you like these episodes, we'd love for you to share it with a friend. Hit the subscribe button. It's how we grow the podcast each and every week. And today we've got an absolute legend on the podcast, Top Tier guest, Zeneka, an ex professional poker player turned crypto investor advisor, content creator and project founder. He writes a popular newsletter on NFTs, Letters from Azeneca, which has over 400 so. And he also has 400,000 plus followers on social media. He manages two NFT communities, the Zen Academy and the 333 Club. He's also passionate about creating educational content to help people learn about Web3 and the next generation of the Internet. Bro, thank you so much for coming on.

Thank you so much for having me. Hello. An intro. Happy to be here man.

I feel as though we missed out a bunch of stuff on that intro, which I'm dare say we're going to dive in today, but we want to start with man, you're in Dubai. You are, you're living there at the moment. You probably went to the Conference Token 2049 and mate, all we've seen over here in Australia is just floating Lamborghinis, you know, Rolls Royces in dinghies. What the hell's going on over there?

Man, oh man, it's been what? It's one of the craziest weeks so of my life, but certainly in Dubai. So we're recording this on. Was like a Wednesday. Last Tuesday was just last Monday was bright blue skies, sunny 30 degrees. Wednesday with bright blue skies. Sunny Tuesday was just torrential downpour. The whole day it was just bucking down rain. Like in Australia. That's, you know, a random summer day in Brisbane or Melbourne. It rains a lot in Dubai. It's the middle of the desert. It doesn't rain. It's not meant to rain. The city's not designed for rain. And so it just completely like there's a little shower. The city shuts down. Cabs refuse to drive. You can't get anything delivered. This was just like 12 hours of storming and the roads were just flooded above car level. People were trapped. It was a nightmare. Like we got very lucky because we landed. We're in Australia. We landed back on the Monday, the day before. But I know people that were flying in on Tuesday. Their flights had to get diverted to a nearby airport. They had to spend 10 hours on the plane on the tarmac before they can leave. I don't probably half a dozen people had to walk about 10, 15 km through the water just to get back to their hotels. Some of them were carrying bags over their heads. They were hitchhiking. It was. It was absolute chaos. Our apartment started leaking. It was just like. It felt like you in the apocalypse a little bit. You just be walking around and like this eerie silence and you just dark water and cars floating. It's like, what the hell is happening? That was a fun week.

It was just crazy. I remember seeing videos of people in restaurants, just like at a bar and the ceiling just falls in and you got crazy people like Bitlord out there making social media content, going to helping people in their cars and submarine Lamborghinis. It was just. It's Friday when you're in your car, you're driving, all of a sudden it starts floating away and you've got no control. And people going down like both ways on a highway is just so crazy.

Oh yeah, that happened as well. You just go like, there's no road rules. During the few few days Afterwards, like, red lights didn't matter, highway direction didn't matter. You just like. Like, I was in cabs. We didn't drive here, which is probably a blessing at a time like this, but we were getting cabs and Ubers and, like, they're just like, reverse a kilometer down a highway because they got to a point where they're like, we can't go this way. You just got to figure out a way back. Or they'd literally turn around and go the opposite direction down the highway.

That's nuts, man. That's nuts. I saw the. Some videos, the airport, and it was just chaos. Like, basically water across the tarmac, no planes could leave, and there's just, like, tens of thousands of people just chalkers at this airport trying to leave. Like you are. That is like my worst nightmare, just being trapped in an airport. Like, it's.

And Dubai is the busiest international airport in the world, the second busiest airport overall. So it was, yeah, just absolutely chaos.

Yeah, nuts. So talk to us, man. Why Dubai?

You're.

You're an Aussie, dude. I've spent six weeks living in Dubai. You're spending a lot more time there. What. What was it. What was the motivation to move there and what's it been like?

Yes, we. We actually left Australia about five years ago. We moved to Germany first. This was pre crypto. My fiance, Rachel, got a job over there, and one day was like, you want to move to Germany? And I was playing online poker as a professional poker player at the time, so I had to play for wherever, and I was like, you know, let's do it. We didn't have any ties, and I always wanted to live overseas. We'd only been going out a month, by the way, when she asked me. And so, like, six, seven months later, we actually completed the move. And it worked out.

Crypto people have higher risk tolerances or something like that, but. But yeah, so then we were in Germany for a while, and then we always wanted to, you know, live overseas for, like, three, four, maybe five years. Coming back to Australia was always the goal. And then as we got into crypto and started realizing how amazing Dubai is for crypto in terms of a regulatory perspective, you know, we set up company here for Zen Academy. From a tax perspective, it just. There was a lot of benefits to coming here. Also the social and the networking perspective, meeting so many amazing people. So, yeah, a couple of years ago, I would decide, hey, let's actually move to Dubai before we come back to Australia. And we moved here sort of late 2022, early 2023.

That's awesome, man. And what's it been like running your businesses? Social media, content? Like you've got a global team. What's it like? You know, I was a nomad for 18 months. You've been doing a lot longer than I have. Like, what's it, what was it like for you, man? What's, what's been the, what's been the, the upside and the downside of moving around?

Yeah, I mean, the nice thing is for the most part we sort of stayed in one spot. This last year has been a bit of an exception. But the hardest part about running a global team is managing time zones and balancing all that, especially in crypto, which is a global space. Like Twitter doesn't sleep, the markets don't sleep, you've really got to be on 20%. Discord doesn't sleep, Telegram doesn't sleep, your members don't sleep. So there's been a million challenges along the way, I think. What. And it was just stressful. Like it was two years of stress and burnout and like, you know, really finding it difficult. Late last year, sort of made some decisions to sort of scale back the business and focus on like more work, life balance and more healthier outlook for me and I think also ultimately the community as well. So. But yeah, a lot of challenges.

So I'm going to hand over to Berg. So I just want to give our listeners a bit of an insight. If you don't know Zeneca, so basically, you know, one of the Seneca's education company I think is pretty similar to Collective Shift in, in terms of a model, but I guess far more web3. I'd probably put that in terms of like the, the native, I guess audience or community or customers that Zeneca has are Much more like Web3 native access via NFTs and via crypto, where we've kind of gone more the. I'd say the Web 2.5 route. I'm so keen to dive into like the business model and how you decided to cut back on things and the way you think about where you want to spend your time and like, because this is all Bergs and I chat.

About basically that's, that's pretty much our podcast and maybe we could start off with how you actually got into crypto, created following and created your business businesses, just that kind of journey and then we can dive into the decisions you made along the way.

Yeah, so I, I first heard about bitcoin and crypto all the way back in 2011 because as a professional poker player in America. In 2011, they sort of banned the ability to play online poker with US dollars. And just like there was so many professionals that were just like displaced because of that. People moved to Canada, people moved to Mexico, elsewhere. But then because bitcoin was a thing, someone decided, hey, why don't we just try set up a site and play in this bitcoin thing? And for years, people would play online poker in bitcoin. And I shudder thinking of like there were pots that were like 50,000 Bitcoin and you know, 100,000 Bitcoin. And I'm sure people have lost, you know, so much, like just dead money on there. But unfortunately, I think, or fortunately, I was living in Australia and, you know, we could play online. And so I never really played on these sites. So then 2017 is when I like really properly sort of dipped my toes in. You know, I started hearing about Ethereum and, you know, everyone was talking about crypto. It seemed like this global. It was the first time it was like a global phenomenon. Like the previous bulls were still a little more insulated. 2017 and like every poker table, everyone was just talking about crypto all the time. And so I bought some. I just bought a smattering of random things and was just like trying to do some random trading. And you know, it was a bull market, so it could do no wrong number went way up. And then because the bear market number went way down, basically round trips, almost everything took a little bit out. But. And then I went back to poker. Then I was like, you know, that was a fun experiment, but I think I didn't really grasp it at that fundamental world shifting, paradigm changing level. And so because of that, during the bear market, I went back to poker. And then I also needed to make money. And. Yeah, and then 2021 rolls around and obviously prices started going up again. People are paying more attention and had a friend, Jaylee messaged me and go like, you know what an NFT is? And I had no idea. And he started telling me because some of our mutual friends were buying and selling them and we literally thought they were getting scammed. Like we, we thought that we had a cult because they were like, if you buy this rare one, you get like a next level and then you can buy an even more rare one, $5,000 and get the next level up. And that was my reintroduction to the crypto space in 21. But, you know, we did some research and read this great article by packing McCormick Power people and then that sort of made something click. And, you know, I'd been looking for a way to get out of focus for a while. I've been doing it for about 15 years. And, you know, after learning about NFTs a bit more, learning about DeFi, I really realized that this is world changing. This is paradigm shifting. There's amazing opportunity here. I want to just make a hard pivot and just devote 100% of my time to figuring this space out. And yeah, that was 2021. And, you know, I started a Twitter account because not many people were creating NFT content at the time. That will just blow up. And yeah.

Did you have a following beforehand, Zenica, before getting into crypto, or you basically started fresh?

I started fresh. I had a very, very small following in my poker days, like with a poker account, like a thousand followers or maybe 2,000 or something like that that I'd built up over five, 10 years. But I had to use Twitter in a few years. And so when I first got back into crypto, I, I did, I kept using that account, but basically I just kept seeing poker content on my feed. So I said, you know, let me just start fresh, create a new account. And it was, I think, March 21st that it. I created it. And then, yeah, crazy, crazy year.

That's nice, man. To go from zero to whatever, 400,000 followers around 400,000 on Twitter. That's nuts, man. Well done.

I know.

How much.

And what do you think when you were building that account so you pivoted into NFTs, you're posting on Twitter, what do you think led to such a large following? Was it, you know, the content you're doing, the timing your businesses, how did you grow that channel and how do you think about that now?

Yeah, I thought about it a lot. I think it comes down to three things mostly. And when I first set out, I wasn't trying to create a big account. I was like, let me just create an account to consume content. And like, what do I know? Why would anyone care what I have to say? Probably how most you feel when they're first starting out, learning about something. But I think the three things that led to the growth was that not many people were writing or creating content or talking even about NFT specifically. And that, you know, 2021 was a massive bull market. So whenever anyone joined the space and was like, I want to learn about nft, who do I follow? If you had made it into the list of like the top five or 10 or 20 or whatever accounts to follow, you just got Thousands of followers a day. It was kind of ridiculous. But in order to get there, I think the thing that helped was, I think it was around June I started I the first time I just tweeted out this image of a spreadsheet where I linked. I listed the floor prices of the popular NFT projects because back then the infrastructure was so bad on opensea and there really weren't any other marketplaces. You couldn't even find the floor price of an NFT project, which is basically the metric that everyone valued these things on. You had to manually go click into a collection page. It wasn't by default sorted from price low to highs. You had to click that and do that. And so I was doing the track off my own record keeping because I was doing some trading at the time. And then a friend of mine said hey, it would be cool if we, you know, you can see the full price of projects. And so I had that. So I just showed him and he liked it and I said let me just tweet it. And it exploded. People like oh my God, this is crazy and valuable and thank you. And so I was like, huh, all right, let me do it again the next day. And then I just did it every single day for six months basically till the end of the year. Sometimes it would take like two or three hours does manually updating it. When it first started out there were like four projects. By the end I had two spreadsheets of like 100 plus projects. In hindsight that was the top signal but it's. Yeah, so I think that consistency. A lot of people said that they just became accustomed to the end of the day that all this data depending on where in the world they are. My NFT spreadsheet and then I'd write, I'd write like a threaded like daily analysis on the market and yeah, that basically just contributed to everything going absolutely crazy.

There's so much effort. Like here I am thinking you pulled in an API or you know, you've just got something going in. No, you're going through. You're doing each individual one which is amazing and then that'll give you market insights and you're able to post about it again. That's incredibly valuable.

Yeah, I, we tried to automate it. I got a few different people in to try and help some of programmer or anything like that. And at the end we almost got there but I didn't like the automation for two things. One, it was never fully accurate and there always errors and had to go through and check it anyway. And two, I, because I was trading so much, I felt, I felt like I was one with the market, like I felt so in tune manually going in and checking the prices, seeing how thin the floor was, the amount of times while I was doing that process that I saw something that I thought was really mispriced and I just bought it and then, you know, flipped it for 2x or 3 whatever later on. Just the market was so inefficient back then, so I enjoyed the manual process of it. But by the end of the year there opens out as long showing floor prices. People had websites that were automating it. It became less valuable of a thing for me to do. And I also just wanted to reclaim my life back a little bit.

Well, you got into NFTs crypto, but got into NFT started creating content, you started to build a following. You're doing this every day for six months. You're finding opportunities. Are you making good money at this point or is it, you know, was it at this point you're like, I've got so much knowledge here, I'm doing so much. I've got this following. Like when did the business start to come into the consideration of creating something a bit more substantial?

Yeah, I have crazy 2021 because NFTs have gone so crazy. So I think July, August is probably when I peaked in terms of portfolio value and net worth. It was, I was just talking to a friend. It was ludicrous. It was like eight figures that I started from, you know, a few, maybe $10,000 of savings and stuff that I put in and on paper obviously didn't, I mean round tripped a lot of it, but now it's coming back nicely. But yeah, so I sort of quote unquote made it or made way more money than I could ever have imagined in my wilder trees. And I was trying to think about like what do I want to do in life? What do I want to do with my time? How do I. I sort of skipped a step. I'd gone from making all this paper money to feeling financially secure for the rest of my life. I hadn't sold and you know, realized that profit yet. But in my mind I was figuring out, all right, you know, I've made all this money, what do I want to do with my life. And I still love crypto. I love, I still do loved NFTs. I love creating content. I was writing a newsletter that was educational and I love that aspect. And so I thought, well, what if I were to create some sort of NFT project or community or thing that I could sort of work on. I'm a believer in not retiring. I think that, you know, there's value in working in some capacity forever. And so that's where the idea for like Zen Academy first came from. I was like, well, I'm not a. Back then people were creating NFT projects because they were creating a video game or they were artists creating art or they were musician, whatever. And I was like, I'm none of those things. Not even a dev. I'm a writer, I'm, you know, I'm an educator. And so maybe there's some sort of NFT membership based community that gives you access to courses and educational content. And actually the very first idea was, what if we create this? I knew how like steep the learning curve was for crypto and nft. What if we create this one stop shop where, you know, people can say, I want to learn about NFTs, where do I go? You go to zen academy.com is going to teach you the history and everything you need to know. And then very quickly I realized how monumental a task that would be to create, let alone update every single day. There's like, oh, there's a new wallet, you need to figure out this new layer or block. It's like, okay, that's too crazy. And so I did a complete 180 and said, what if we just start with the Discord server? I just, I just create it and I say, hey, this is a place where I want to post some thoughts, we're going to help each other out, chat, connect, network and we'll see what happens from there. And that was really the genesis of Zen Academy. This just Discord Server.

That's amazing. And I could just see it now where it's like you want to create something that has longevity, that gives you kind of a sense of purpose, you're able to help other people and like a lot of entrepreneurs I imagine, like filling out a lean canvas like what you're going to solve. But then you start creating it and you get hit with the reality of what a business is, how difficult it is to run. There's a lot of opportunity that will come your way and I'd love if you could just talk us through what that, let's just go. Even first year was like of creating that Discord server, different opportunities coming your way and how you kind of decided what you were going to do, what you're going to try and what your team looked like as well, like how you thought about, you know, hiring People to be able to fulfill those different aspects of business.

Yeah, it was, I mean, absolutely wild. One to two years, I would say. When I first started out, I. I didn't even think.

I wanted to or that I was creating a business. I really was thinking about it more from the community perspective. I'm going to create a community. I'm going to create this educational hub. And the business side of it wasn't front of mind maybe because the crypto market was so bullish. I was like, I don't need to make money and, you know, we can just keep doing it as we're doing. And it was kind of like that in the early days because it was, it was just me. It was me. And then I, I started the Discord and I asked if anyone wanted to help out, moderate and get some volunteer moder generators. And this was before we sort of sold any entities. And it wasn't monetized in any way. And it was like, it was kind of great. And in many ways, I think trying to force a business out of it was, I don't want to say mistake, but was probably not the right path to have gone down. And so we started our Discord server and then I sold NFTs to like token gate and give access to the server. And that was, you know, we raised a bunch of money up front and then it was like, all right, what do we do now? What do we do with the money? How do we just keep it? I was like, let's, you know, figure out a way to provide value back to people. And there's many different ways you can do that. You can, you know, in the, this was peak metaverse hypes, people saying, buy a bunch of sandbox land, build a virtual clubhouse. And I was like that, you know, one day that could be a good, nice pipe dream. But, you know, sandbox plots were like 3 or 4e each at the time. So that, that was like half our treasury if you wanted to do that.

Plus the gas fees were insane at the time.

Oh my God. Gas was nuts at the time. I remember side story. I remember an eth in gas for a transaction. Yeah.

So Steve from NFTeams, he was telling us a story where he was, I think he was claiming land or something for his ape and he didn't have enough ETH in one account to claim it, so he had to send a cop, like an eighth fee and then like go across and then cop another like 1.58 just to claim this thing, which nowadays is worth not much at.

All, yeah, at least at its peak that that thing would have been worth about 50 or 60 or something, which is, it's also crazy to think about. But anyway, we had this Discord server and it was growing and people were coming in and the market was being. The NFT market stayed bullish, I think longer than the crypto market, which peaked in November. And then it was like, all right, well what do we do now? And it was very reflexive of like, oh, there's other projects are doing this kind of stuff and people are doing like whitelist collabs and giveaways. Maybe we should hire someone in to be a collab manager and help with that. And. And then, you know, we started paying for some moderators because we're now we have the treasury and you know, becoming a. More.

Like a bigger operation and that kind of stuff. And then in early 2022, I got talking with NAS Academy, which is. Was this company out of Dubai of all things. It's probably why I'm actually living here. And they created online courses. They're kind of like masterclass, but for everyone. Not, not anyone can be a masterclass. And they said, hey, we're, you know, we're exploring Web3 and we're going to, you know, we're working with a bunch of creators to make some courses. Do you want to do something together? And they had a full studio set up and a director and multiple cameras and all that kind of stuff, lighting. And so I said, yeah, that sounds amazing, and started working with them. And I put together a couple of video courses and I flew out to Dubai, filmed them and sort of released those to the community. And they were, they were like paid courses that anyone in the world could pay, I think a couple hundred dollars to take. But if you had one of the NFTs, they were fully free. And so that was the first sort of real form of utility. And that when the inkling of, all right, this is how we can make money as a business. But still, early 2022 was sort of royalties were still coming in from NFT sales and it was like, it seems sort of sustainable. It wasn't until that, halfway through 2022 that the writing thing became on the wall that A, it's. The market is getting very bearish and maybe royalty is unsustainable and B, they're not enforced by smart contracts anyway, so royalties aren't sustainable. So then there was, you know, a mad. Sort of like the next year after that was figuring out how can we create sustainable revenue, which is, you Know, a problem that basically every NFT project has faced. Almost every NFT project because you front load so much of the income and then you especially in the early days were expecting or depending on royalties and then that all disappeared and was like, all right, now what do we do? And over the course of the first six months, 2022, the team had grown. You know, we got someone in to help with marketing and community management, we got someone to help in with operations because I'm terrible at that stuff and I hate doing it anyway, we got a whole bunch of people. I think at our peak we had five or six full time and then maybe another dozen very part time, like you know, moderators from random, all parts of the world. But then yeah, you know, we had expenses, payroll and how do we sustain this? And yeah, it was a lot of trial and error. Let's, you know, do we do consulting, do we do sell more NFTs, do we do paid courses, do we do, you know, monetized newsletters and ad revenue? And there's a lot of routes to go down and we explored a lot of them. And then ultimately in like late 2023 or like halfway through 2023, I realized, you know, I don't want to run a business. I don't, I don't enjoy it, I don't like it. I'm not particularly good at it. I think I don't like the life that it forces a founder and CEO to have, which is always on working long hours, problem solving, stressed out when things aren't going well. And I realized that, you know, I don't need the business to sort of make lots of money. I'm not trying to make a super profitable business, but I love the community. And so it was this like conscious shift where I said, you know, let's stop focusing on the business. Unfortunately, that did mean like almost the entire team had to be like, oh, a couple of people we've kept on that are helping with the discord and a couple other things. But then that way the focus can be back on simply just running an online community, which people have been running for decades. And I think that's.

Sort of ironically the community members I think have appreciated that and like it even more now than when we were trying to build a massive thriving business because attention was fractured that way and like the community members were kind of missing out while we were running off trying to make ad revenue and stuff like that. So been a full 360.

This is a really important lesson for everyone out there about business it can be something that facilitates your lifestyle or it can be a noose around your neck. And I'd love to know how you felt back then when you were the CEO, you're running the company and you, you know, I guess you stress out and compared to how you feel now with the way that things are actually.

Structured, I feel a million times better. Like there were definitely, there were a lot of amazing moments running the company and being CEO and stuff. Like there's nothing quite like the pride of having a team do good work and know that you sort of like put that team together and brought those people together. And then it's just so proud when your team members are out there doing good stuff. And like that happened. We had such an amazing team at Zen Academy. I'm still friends with every single person that, you know, they did amazing things and like that's something you can't really get just being a solo operator. Um, and like the impact that we had and people that we helped and the challenges that they were, that the problems to solve is like, it was interesting and I love games and thinking about how to solve problems and things and all sorts of positives. But at the end of the day it was a stress that I didn't particularly want in life and it was, yeah, it's, it's so much more liberating now. And I think, you know, we were just off air before this talking about the Psychology of Money book and Morgan Housel. I think in the book says the true meaning of wealth is to be able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want, however long you want. And I didn't feel like that almost at any point when was writing Zen Academy. And now that I've sort of, you know, Zen Academy is still there. It's obviously almost self sufficient community where now I, whenever I do want to spend time, which is still most days I'm active in there helping the community out and everyone is happy and we're all thriving together. But if, you know, I don't want to, I don't feel obligated to in the same way that I did when we had a team and a staff to pay for. So I'm just a lot happier in life I guess.

I remember man, back in 2021, we were raising capital for our business and I was on this 12 month, nearly 18 month tour of the world trying to, you know, raise money for our business. And I remember speaking to VCs, crypto, VCS, web3vcs and they basically all of them have a mandate of not investing in equity companies that you needed to have a token or an nft. And I, I feel, and we were, we would needed the, we needed the money at the time and we were an equity company, still are. But at the time I remember having conversations with some of the team, you know, Aaron and a few others are like, guys, I don't think we're going to raise any money unless we turn this thing into an NFT or a token. And every way we looked at it we're like, if we do that, this is going to become exponentially harder to ever scale because of the recurring revenue problem. You know, it's so hard to create a recurring revenue subscription based business with NFTs, right? And then you have this liquidity and then you also, you know, you're also building a niche of a company that's only accessible to people that know how to buy NFTs. And then they just create all these other, you know, sort of risks around it. But I remember money was relatively easy at that time if you're raising capital if you had a token. More so a token I think than an NFT project. But yeah man, the idea of like, you know, trying to build a business with no recurring revenue opportunity or you know, when you had to continue, I think that's where moonbirds went, you know, got in trouble. This raise all this money, like what do we do with it? You know, how do we, let's do events, let's do this and that. It's like to just continually create new products. This is a very transactional method is very, very difficult. So like I couldn't imagine what the conversations were with you guys and like in which direction you're going to take in it. Especially feeling as though it was like it was not something you particularly enjoyed doing. Like, or love that business aspect. Like it would have been tough because how many, how many members do you have like or did have in the community?

So in terms of like NFT holders, like 5,000 people that bought and became part of the community that way. In terms of like active sort of discord members, it varied depending on bear and bull, but any from like a few hundred to like maybe 1500 people were sort of active part of the community. And then we had different metrics people that took the course on you know, NAS Academy but didn't join the academy. Zen Academy, but yeah, somewhere between a few hundred to a few thousand.

Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's tough man. Especially on employees and it's like how do we pay for these employees? Like, we got payroll. It's like these guys want to pay rises. Like, how do we do that?

Oh, it's, it's really, really. It was, again, in the early days, it was, it was great because royalty revenue, it just seems sustainable. But yeah, I think the way you guys have done it is really smart. And I think that was, that was probably the way we were going to end up, like if we kept Zen Academy going our last. Um, the thing that we're working on the most and that we, I really thought would have built a sustainable business would have been subscription revenue and, you know, give out videos and other content. And if you had one of our tokens, you get a discount. And so it's not fully free. We have the 333 club, which is capped of 333 people and it was much more expensive. So we could give free everything to those people, but then for thousands, we just can't give everything away for free. So discounted membership there and then full price if you didn't have a token. And that would have worked. And you guys are clear proof that it does work. Obviously it's a ridiculous amount of hard work and a lot of ongoing effort as well to make it work. But that's one way I think that you can turn NFTs into a business where you use them as like a discount rather than a free everything for life. But ultimately I was, you know, we were, we're at the point where I was, you know, creating content and uploading old courses to Kajabi website course and I was just like, yeah, it's just like I don't want to be doing this. So this.

Yeah, well, the other big thing that, you know, it's hard being a founder and it's building a startup, but doing it in crypto in a bear market where everything. Oh my God, you just got no hope, man.

It was rough. It was a brutal bear market.

They're like, I guess the darkest times we've had in the business where you're hemorrhaging customers. No one really cares about crypto. There's not much action at all. How are you going to pay your staff? How do you restructure your business? How do you survive? Because we all know there will be a bull market and then how do you handle that pressure as well? Day after day, just the grind. And we're getting, Ben and I are getting on calls with people and we know who they are. A lot of people that work in web, three big bags under their eyes, they're exhausted, they're working 247 trying to make it work. It was just, it was a really tough time. But I think coming out of that and what you've said as well is you come out with better perspective and I think for both of us, better, more sustainable businesses that you're more happy with.

Right? Yeah, that's the goal. And yeah, it sort of makes your character in a way that I think not a lot of other things in life can do. It's building a business is tremendously difficult and then also going through a crypto bear market and sort of like ticking around and being there every single day like in the thick of it is. Yeah, most people, most people don't know what that's like.

Talk us about your thought process or thinking around like when you were changing the business model or when you're thinking about what do you want your life to look like. You've obviously made a lot of money in NFTs. You've got money now. Like you, you know, assuming you're living a good lifestyle and you're just dealing with this, you don't want to deal with, it's like this, why am I doing this? Like, what was the, what was the thought process around like scaling back, how much money do you actually need or want? And because I feel as though as entrepreneurs sometimes what I have been through this and you know, when Aaron first joined the business, we're going to build a unicorn. We're not selling for anything less than a billion dollars. Like, let's fucking go. And then like, you know, over time you sort of mature and realize, actually no, like I don't need a billion dollars, actually, I don't need anywhere near that amount of money. Like there's actually, there's a level that you can kind of get to which makes your lifestyle better and freer and happier and then beyond that's kind of just like a bit of a status game which we, you know, we tend to play. But like what was it for you that rethought the way you wanted to do life and do business?

I think it actually didn't have to do with like money or any particular thing in that area. It was really the liberating moment for me was when I realized that.

I, I would actually be able to help the community more by not writing the business. And it was such a clear win win to me because I wasn't enjoying running the business and I would find a little difficult and stressful and all that kind of stuff. And so that Was like this liberating moment where I said, you know what, it's a win, win. And. And that like clicked in terms of the money side of things. I think about it a lot lately and have over the last few years. And you're absolutely right. Like, there is a certain point where your life doesn't change that much, where another zero, another, you know, whatever amount of money won't dramatically. Like, maybe you can buy a nicer house, a nicer car, a nicer this out of the other. But again, it comes back to being able to do what you want, when you want, with who you want. Forever long you want. If you can get to that point, then I think that's. And that's gonna be different for everyone. Some people are like, they don't want to live, they don't want to travel, they don't want to, you know, eat at night, rest, nice restaurants. I'm a big foodie, so I love that and I love traveling. And so my cost of living is going to be a bit higher than someone that is really happy just staying home. And everyone's number is going to be different. But if you. I think everyone should think about it and then try and work towards that. And then anything else can be like gravy on the top, can be passion projects can be just trying to continue to find that balance in life because, yeah, it's really easy to fall in the trap of, oh, let's just make some more, let's just make some more, let's just make some more. And then you're 60, 70, 80 years old and you look back and you're like, what was it for?

Yeah, that's it. Like, so two books I would highly recommend the Psychology of Money and Die with Zero. And I spend a lot of time thinking about this where, you know, why am I doing these certain activities? What is my ideal life? Am I just stacking more marbles that I won't even spend because I just don't have the desire to own a plane or 50 houses or a house twice as big as mine. Like, what do I actually want my life to live? Like, to, to be day to day? And I know you spent a lot of time thinking about this and how do you think about money now? Or did you have any challenges or learned behaviors that you had to overcome to get from the lifestyle you were into the one that you have now?

I mean, it was definitely a challenge watching my portfolio and net worth drop like 90% from the peaks of 2021 to like the depths of the 2022, 2023 bit, that's, that's rough. But like as a poker player I'd been through so many swings and cycles where I'd had a lot of money and lost a lot of money and it was, this was to another scale, but it was just more of the same which I think it just gives you perspective on everything. When you can, when you can be happy in those low moments, it makes you realize that money is not the answer. Money doesn't create happiness. Money can alleviate stress and it can definitely contribute to having a happier life. But at a certain point more money doesn't pull more happiness. And that sort of constant realization and reminding of myself of that fact as just it helps keeps me grounded. And then in terms of like challenges, I, one of my biggest challenges still just selling like I, I just struggle to sell anything crypto related because I'm gigabool this long term on all of it. But like you got to take profits at some point and again mistakes learned from last cycle. And so I've gotten a lot better. I've done quite a lot of selling over the last few months of just various things that know you buy a meme coin and there's 100x and then all of a sudden this bag that you bought for 500 or $1,000 worth 50 to $100,000. You should probably take some profits even if you are really bullish on it. And so I've been doing a lot more selling of things that I'm, I'm buying in the shorter term and taking it out of crypto. Like we just bought an apartment in Australia and, and sort of trying to make sure to take money out of the crypto space and realize that, you know, even having 50% of my net worth in crypto is pretty damn aggressive. You know, I don't need to have 98.5% of my net worth in crypto. So yeah, that, that sort of realization and it's again, it's a struggle because when you're so bullish on all of it, it's, it's very easy to convince yourself, well numbers is going to keep going up or even if it drops down, it'll go up again in the future and I have to hold long enough and for a lot of things. That's right. If you just hold bitcoin or eth or whatever, it's, it's. I feel very confident that 10 years from now it'll be much higher than it is now even if it drops. But yeah, taking profits along the way is an important lesson to learn.

I like what you said there. Firstly, about money only solves your money problems, right? And it can alleviate other things like stress worry, where your, you know, your basic ME needs are met. And mate, I have the cell problem as well. So the challenge for me is like, yeah, bro, like Giga Bullish on crypto. And I'm like, I'm hot. Let's just say BTC and ETH for example. In my mind I'm like, why would I sell that? And the reason I would sell it is to. For different asset allocations or if I wanted to buy something, but then if it's just an investment, I'm taking profits, it's like, great, I take the profits, I pay tax on it. Now I've got a money problem, where do I put that money back? In crypto, it's like this cyclical kind of thing and I think there's a lesson out there for everyone where when you do your sell strategy, tie it to specific things like do you want another holiday or a car or a house or pay off some debt, tie it to a specific thing and when you hit your numbers, sell it and achieve that thing. I'm so happy to hear you say that you've taken money out and you've bought an apartment because I know so many people that have multi millions in crypto and don't even do that. And I'm like, but you need to change the life you actually live. Not this digital life of stacking things online you think is going to go up forever. Is that something you kind of actively try to teach as well in Zen Academy? Do you get to that level with people there?

Yeah, we. I created this bull market survival guide a few months back where I spoke about basically having an overall strategy. And because every single person is going to be different, everyone's going to be different stages in their life, going to be able to invest different amounts of both money and time. But yeah, having a sell strategy and sell targets before the bull market and before you enter your positions is so important because if you don't, then it's so hard to sell because you get to a certain number and in your head, if you're just like, oh yeah, it's there, I'll sell, it gets there and then you're like, I'm not going to sell now. Everyone around me is so bullish, why would I sell? Whereas if, you know, six months ago you'd written down on a piece of paper and if you have it glued to your wall next to you or something. If when this hits this price, I'm going to sell, I'm going to sell 20% or 30% or 50% of my position. You have to sell everything as well as having a balanced portfolio. Because one of the things that I learned and that I think a lot of people ignore perhaps is you start out with perhaps a balanced portfolio. We're like, I want to have 50% Bitcoin, 30% E, 10% Solana and 10% altcoins and shitcoins and memes and NFTs and whatever. You start out that way and that's great. And then eight months later, the bulls gone crazy. Mean coins go crazy. All of a sudden without doing anything, you're sitting on your hands. Your mean coin portfolio is now 60% and your Bitcoin is like 30 or 20%. And that's when you might want to sell and rebalance. Not because of any other reason than you've got an imbalanced portfolio. Now obviously tax is a very real thing and it makes it difficult to do some of this. Fortunately in Dubai I don't have to worry about it. But I am forward thinking because we're moving back to Australia and basically my plans are to just trade infinitely less. I'm already trying to step back from the bitcoin casino that is crypto and I've been doing a lot more angel investing and like longer term plays is I think where it's at for me at least.

I like that reallocation. And just, just while we're still on the, on the psychology of money, people have this triangle in their lives of health, wealth and time. And from what you said, like you've kind of solved the wealth challenge and your psychology is around using money as a tool to live the life that you want. Are there any things that you do in your life to buy back your time? I know Ben does a few with, you know, a cleaner or a chef. Are there any things that you have in your life that you've been able to use money for to make it better day to day?

Yeah, I mean like we have a cleaner here in Dubai. We get someone in every few weeks to help clean. And I think that that's. Honestly though.

Or is it more traveling or living that.

Yeah, it's, it's a lot of travel. I'm not super conscious of specifically using money to buy back time. I think it's because then what are you gonna do with the time? To me it's more about being mindful of as many minutes of the day as you can be. And like, there, there is joy in vacuuming, there is joy in washing dishes. There, there can be small little joys throughout the day that you might miss out on by paying someone to do those things for you. Or there are lessons again, like I, we, we get a cleaner in, we do all those things. But like I'm, I'm also taking joy in these things in the past and so I'm, I'm not always thinking about or I have this money now. How can I buy more time? It's more about how can I just be as content for as many moments in the day as possible? I think that's entirely inner work. And it's not. Nothing external can impact that. Like literally nothing external can impact that.

And then. But the health part is a big one because I've got, I've had a bad back for a very long time and it's like I Now spend probably 92 hours a day doing various things to help fix my back. Whether it's physio exercises, intentionally going for like 2030 minute walks. And it's probably the number one thing in my life that every now and then I try and take a step back and look at my whole life and be like, all right, I'm generally feeling pretty happy. I've got a good life. What areas of my life am I not as happy with? And yet my back health is a big one. And just overall health and fitness is an area that everyone can improve a bit, but like most of us in crypto and who have been behind the screen for so long, let that slip. And so I'm really trying to be more intentional about improving that because again, it comes back to like being as content for as many minutes throughout the day. If you're in back pain, it's harder to be content for those minutes, whereas if you're in good physical shape, which helps your mental shape, you're just more likely to.

Have better minutes.

I like that inner work, especially about, you know, no one can control your rational mind. It's very like Marcus Aurelius. Right. And as well. And I take that approach too, where I optimize for happiness and how can I be more calm and more content throughout the day and have more gratitude? And I'm just so curious, like the way you structure your life and you do the things you want to do. What is like an average Tuesday look like for you? Like, what do you get up? What do you do? What are the activities you enjoy? What does your life look like?

Yeah, it's been a while since I've had like a proper average day because of so much travel the last 12 months. But like today is.

Relatively average day so like I'll wake up these days I have a normal sleep schedule which I haven't had in honestly like 15 years because even as a poker player there was nothing normal about it. Well, usually sleep around 10pm, 10, 11pm, wake up 6, 7am, drink water, go for like a short 20 minute walk. It's one thing I'm trying to get in the habit of every morning and I try and do some work. Doesn't happen every day. But like.

One of those stresses in life or like very, very minor stresses is this constant in the back of my mind build up. I've got emails to reply to, Twitter, DMS, Telegram, DMS, just got DMs and stuff. It's, they're always there and my approach these days is just been like an hour in the morning and just reply to everyone and like make sure all the urgent stuff is done and then just like don't worry about it for the rest of the day. And like, you know, if you want go back, check something, you can reply to someone, you can check in, but otherwise people can wait till the next day when I spend another hour and reply to people and that sort of helps alleviate a lot of stress there. So I'll spend a bit of time on that and then I'll do some, I guess what I just call crypto work, which is different depending on where we are. Lately it's just like I've been going through a listing every fungible token I have and evaluating them by how much conviction I have in them and then slowly selling off the lowest conviction ones and reallocating to the highest conviction and just doing some rebalancing and taking your profits. It's probably spending a bit of time on that. Hop in the Zen Academy Discord, hang out with people there, chat. One thing I like to do once or twice a week is just share like a big market update or what I'm looking at, where I'd be paying attention to what I'm investing in. So the community can sort of know where my head's at and we can chat about that as well. So some days I'll do that, but on a random day I won't. And then at some point during the day I'll do my physio exercises, you know, 60, 90 minutes. I play some video games, love video games. So get, what do you play? Dota Venture. The Ancient. It's like a League of Legends style game. That's what I'm playing a lot these days. Do that. Go for another walk. My partner will have woken up by like 10am or something. So we'll go out together. Maybe we could get a coffee at the local cafe or get lunch somewhere or dinner somewhere. Maybe watch a bit of tv, do some reading. It's, it's a, it's a very. I'm very fortunate to be able to live this life. But yeah, it's. And then, you know, uh, it used to be, I remember 18 months ago, I looked at my calendar and it was like 14 hours of calls six days a week. And now we have. Yeah, it's at the time, energizing.

Yeah, just roll over.

It's just go, go, go, go, go. And it can be electrifying, you know, for short spurts and absolutely worth it. And there's definite upsides. But now I'll have like maybe four hours of. Four, maybe like three to six hours of calls per week of just like things. And that includes things like this, which like podcast interviews or maybe a Twitter space or like a 30 minute call with a project I'm looking to invest in or something like that. And like I still have calls with my three to three club community. It's sort of like one of the utility perks was I just make my calendar available, but it's, you know, it's in 30 minute blocks only on Tuesdays. And it's just sort of a more sustainable, measured thing that maybe I'll have a couple of those calls a week. Yeah.

And how do you find the. On the content side, Danica? Like, you know, I've been in this content game now for a couple of years. Like, you know, you're crushing it on Twitter. Like, I feel as though I'm doing a relatively like average job across different platforms and it's a lot of work. Like, you know, I feel as though you've crushed Twitter. Are you looking at other channels? Have you decided to just focus on Twitter? And then also, how do you find that creative? I don't know how to describe it. You know that creative energy you get when like some days you're like, it's not happening today versus days. You're like, let's fucking go, let's create some content. Like, how did you find that when you were doing business live with 50 hours of calls versus now where it's like a little bit more open?

Interestingly.

It'S kind of the same, like in the sense that I.

I struggled with business life to also create content, but I struggle a bit now to create content because, like, the inspiration isn't there all the time, or if you're not spending as much time in the crypto space, it's harder to create content about the crypto space. I feel less in tune with the market or less like I have the authority to say certain things are right about certain things.

One of the things that I realized was that it is extraordinarily difficult to try and build a profile and audience across multiple social media platforms at the same time. Like, I. As I built my Twitter account up, I was like, all right, now what else should we do? I looked at LinkedIn, I looked at YouTube, even Instagram and TikTok and everywhere. And, you know, you can copy paste the same content across different platforms and it works to some effect, but it. It's nowhere near as good as, like, focusing on one and just going all in on that, and then maybe if you want to focus on another, go all in on that. I tried that, I tried that approach a few different places, and it was really working on LinkedIn for a while. It was like, building up a lot of followers in there. But then at a certain point, something business or life happened and I just sort of let it go and the passion wasn't really there. And so I mostly just focus on Twitter. And now Fox, which I think is a decentralized social media platform, is rapidly growing and I think is potentially going to be the future. I'm trying to spend a bit more time on that, but, like, the one constant across all my content is I much prefer written content. Like, I, I struggle with video content a lot. And so I'm happy to be on camera and talk, but it's like, the actual creation of it and the creative process of, like, thinking about how it's going to look for the viewer and like, structuring that is just not the way my mind works. And so Twitter, Fox, and my substack newsletter, I just love writing. And so it does come naturally whenever I, Whenever the inspiration does strike and I'm like, oh, I'd like to talk about this. That's when I do my best writing is when it comes to me. The worst is when I feel forced. Like, I have to write a thread today. I have to write a newsletter every single week. I sit there for hours staring at a blank screen. And I might spend three times as much time writing this thing than when I have the inspiration. And it's like 10% as good. It's just not as good.

Yeah, man, I resonate so much, but I'm the opposite, right? So, like, I hate writing, man. I hate writing.

Like, everyone's different.

It's because that Tasmanian school system failed you, mate.

That's why.

I hate writing everything. I ride Berg's like, what do you mean?

There's a rule, like, Aaron's SEO, he's made a rule across the company that I have to send voice messages. Like, I can't type otherwise.

But it's right, like, you get this creative. Like, if I have it in my calendar that I have to do a YouTube video, it's not happening. I just can't. Yeah, Like, I just, I'm just like, analysis paralysis. I can't, you know, get excited. But I, like, I might be in the shower or I might be getting my coffee and I'm like, I have to record right now. And I'm like, phone up. And I might, I might have like three ideas and I just crush it. And then the next day it's like, nah, can't do it. Like, not happening. Like, looking in front of the camera and just like, just can't talk. Like.

And that's, that's one of the hardest things about the content game in general is because the way a lot of these algorithms work, you get punished if you're not regularly posting content. Like, there's a benefit to posting a video a day or three videos a week, or, you know, tweeting every day. You sort of like lose favor with the algorithm when you don't. And so it was almost a little. I just found it soul crushing. The feeling of obligation. I need to write every single day or I need to do this. And so I haven't written a newsletter in like two months. I love writing, absolutely love it. And it's like, you know, even if there's no money, no incentives whatever, I would still find some way to write one way or another. But if, if I. The inspiration isn't there, then it's not there. And these days, probably a quarter, maybe even half of the stuff that I write on Twitter or things like long form writing, not just throwaway tweets, has very little to do with crypto. It's like more like, again, like psychology, life stuff, balance and big picture things. Because that's where my interests are at the moment. That's where my, my head is and I'm. I'm not like it used to be. Oh, what's this new Ethereum ERC coming out? And let's break it down. And look into it. And at that time I was passionate about that. Or you know, ordinals last year I did big deep dives on that because I was genuinely interested and curious. But now if I'm not genuinely interested and curious, I, I just choose not to write because I'd rather not.

Man, there's so much resonates with me. So just, just thinking about, you know, your shift and tweeting more about just life. Do you have goals for yourself and where you want to go or is it more about how you want to live your life day to day with that calmness and contentness? Like do you actually. Because I've even things like from Osho where he's like, you know, the achievement oriented mind is a person that's going to be always unhappy and you can live a very sad life if you're always going after the next thing. The next thing. Yeah, but then you need those things to kind of drive you. Do you have like a framework or a lens with which you look at your life and the direction that you're going?

Well, how do you even think about this stuff?

Yeah, I, I've never done well with goals. So I don't have like buy a house or save this amount of money or achieve, you know, even like run a marathon. I in the past been like I'd love to run a half marathon. Let me do that by doing these steps. And I, I just don't have the brain for that. I would love it if I did because there's definite value in goal setting and being able to stick to them and it's probably something you learn and maybe I'll try again later but that's not the way I've approached life to now. I just sort of have like vague.

Directions that I want to head in and influenced by whatever happening in my life. And lately it's been. I like the importance of family and just like realizing. I guess so my, my grandmother passed away two months ago, six weeks back and she was 97. She lived a really full, long, great life. She went without suffering, just amazing life, but flew to India for sort of the, the cremation and prayer ceremony, funeral, all that kind of stuff and was surrounded by family that week. Like a lot of cousins I hadn't seen. Great is my parents, my brother, my sister. Just like this really intense family packed week. And I sort of came away and was.

Just basically just realizing how valuable family time is and how important it is and how difficult it is to get sometimes in our lives and how especially if we don't focus or prioritize on it. And like my parents are getting older. They're in the 70s, dad of almost 80, I'm 36 in like two days actually. Don't have kids yet, but you know, me and my partner going to get married next year and the plan is to have kids, but like, say I'm 40 when we have kids, they're probably not going to know my parents. Like it's unlikely for them to be in their teenage years and have a relationship with their grandparents. Little in 20s. And that was like a big wake up call for me. And I was like, oh, and like I'm the youngest of, you know, my brother's 9 years old and my sister's 13 years old. So I'm like, when I'm 80 or 90, if I, you know, am fortunate enough to live that long, what are my life like to be then? And like I'm not going to have what I currently think of as family. Like probably my nuclear family won't be around and like a lot of my cousins and like I'm the youngest of all the cousins. It's like a lot of my family will probably unfortunately not be around. So then sort of like comes out of like making your own new family that everyone, you know, most people go through. And then it's about like how many kids we want to have and how do we want to build out that life and relationship. And so those are kind of the thoughts that I'm thinking of. There's obviously no goals or plans or anything firm there, but it's just, you know, I'll go through different phases of life. I'm just going through this really family and like moving back to Brisbane to be close to my parents. And there's a lot of the decisions I'm making right now or that we are making men and Rachel I think of thinking about them.

That's awesome. And this is really important. I went through that, oh, probably 2017. So yeah, I'm 40 this year. So it's a couple years older than you. And there's a beautiful post, it's called the Tail End by Tim Urban and it's on Wakeupy.com so for the listeners out there, he basically visualizes a human life in 90 years. It's like 90 blocks and then months and then weeks. But then he really gets down to it and he's like, okay, you're 40 now, you might live till 80 or 90 if you're lucky. And you go to the beach once a year. That Means you will see the beach like 40 or 50 more times in your life. But the really scary one is what you brought up about your parents. Where you live with your parents till you're 18 or 20, that's probably 90. And you see them every single day, 365 days a year for 20 years. That is about 98, 99% of the time used up. You will see your parents because after that you move out. If you're lucky, you see them once a month, once a week that you maybe only have. Like, if you see them, let's say once a month, that's 12 times. They might live another 50 years. That's just, what, 110 times that you'll see your parents again.

Yeah.

Such a great article.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. It is just really great. Sorry, public math got that one wrong. But it's a small amount of time you will spend with them, so consider that in your life.

And.

And, mate, at the end, we'll talk about. I want to cover two more things. I want to talk with a little bit about health and then we'll go to the future of NFTs. So you've spoken about your back. I saw you post on Twitter about Dubai where everyone's like, we're going out, we're going to go drinking and you know, it's going to be an amazing night. You're like, guys, I don't drink. Can we just have a coffee or a lunch or something? And then I've noticed that you've also got a continuous glucose monitor in your arm. So, yeah, look at that. So take this in any direction you want, wherever you'd like to start, maybe with a glucose monitor. How does it work? What does it do for you? Why do you have it? How long have you had it? Does it hurt putting it in? How does it all happen? Mate, I love a bit of tech.

It doesn't hurt putting it in. You just like open the package and there's like basically just shove it in your arm and it's. It's not even like a pin prick. It's like someone just flicks you, like lightly. It's like you barely even recognize it. Basically, it tracks your glucose levels in your blood or body continuously throughout the day. And so the benefit is, the reason I have is just pure curiosity and just like understanding how my body works better because everyone reacts differently to different foods. And so Rachel also got one and put it in. And so now we've both got these and we're gonna. We only put them in yesterday, but the idea is, you know, let's have the same meals at the same times and see how our bodies react. You know, do we both react the same way to bread or rice or sugar or meat? And it's just like, you know, are there certain foods that one of us should be avoiding? The other one shouldn't be other better foods for us because. And then also you can track, like if you're feeling really tired or low energy or something, is that because you've had a, you know, a big spike and a big crash or is it for some other reasons? And so just being able to identify those moments and then again, hopefully make some better decisions. I'm not here to be a Brian Johnson blueprint, meticulous every single thing about my life.

Skinwalker.

But yeah, but there's, there's benefits like some of that and moving in the right direction and it's just going to help that.

What was. I completely forgot all the other stuff.

That's all right. It's just more data, isn't it? And before you were saying that you've been on a carnivore diet before. And now I think it's really interesting, especially doing it with your partner to see what you have in common, which meals will work for both of you. Even my brother, he ended up doing a food allergy test, highly recommended to anyone out there. Do it with a proper, like doctor or clinical nutritionist. Don't do like the. I prick it and put it on a thing and mail it away. It doesn't really work. But that was, I mean, for him, fittest guy on the planet and things like bread, milk and a few other things would just make him have brain fog or he'd have like a reaction to it or it wouldn't happen straight away. It happened two days later. So you can't make the connection. That was fascinating.

Yeah. That's wild. Crazy things like.

Yeah. And I'm just. So are you. You've had your, your kind of back challenges. Are you on this kind of journey to focus on your health and better that side of, of your life?

And. Yeah, yeah, it's basically, it's, it's all centered around my back. Like, I, I just want to have a healthy back and I think I haven't really had a good one for, since I was a teenager. I had like one issue after another. I found out actually only recently that, like, I was born with like a couple of my lower discs kind of fused together, which sort of created an additional pressure on the disk above it. And so like it's amplified by sitting lots and you know, video games, poker and then crypto. Like I sit a lot in my life. Got a standing desk waiting for me back in Australia, which is nice. But basically I've had a bad back my whole life and it's been very debilitating. And I think it's like again, all the money in the world can't.

Because it can give you the time to help fix it, but it can't fix it on its own. And what's the point in having all the money if you're in pain or not enjoying life? So it's like, that's my program. My number one goal over the next year is just work on that and do whatever it takes, which is exercises, walking, but yeah, also trying to eat better because I think it all plays into it.

Yeah, there's a lot with inflammation as well. And just having a health challenge really turns up the contrast dial on life. And we say a lot on this pod where, you know, the healthy man wants a million things and the sick man wants only one. It really becomes the focus. That's, that's awesome. Ben, you've got a few new toys as well, don't you? Mate with your, your bed and everything else. You're getting a new chair too. You got your stand up desk.

Yeah, it was funny. We've been talking about like, what do you do when you have, you know, you sort of leveling up life and it's like, yeah, materialistic things are like, you know, we went and looked at a Rolex and I thought about it for a little bit, got excited like, ah, that doesn't really do too much but like, hey, a new mattress and like, oh yeah, this new eight sleep. Have you heard of the eight sleep Zen?

It's like, no, I haven't.

Okay. So it's basically like a system that cools. It's got like a, it's like a thick sheet that sits above your mattress but below your sheets. That's a water cooling mechanism. And it basically cools your body temperature down to a level throughout the night because your body temperature changes. It cools your core temperature down to a level for the optimal REM and deep sleep. It's got this like, like basically hard drive next to my bed and it's connected up to your phone. It's like this autopilot feature. And man, I've had the best sleeps. Like my whoop scores through the roof feel refreshed. Like I don't wake up during the night anymore. Like I'd highly recommend them. And we get back to Christmas. But eight sleep. Yeah, sounds amazing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What else? I don't know in health, but like, I was eating super, like, awful stuff like UberEats, basically. Like, I'll be working all day grinding like bull market. You know how it is. You don't leave your desk. All of a sudden, you haven't eaten, it's four o', clock, you're like, get some shitty UberEats. And man, it was just. It hit me one day I came downstairs and like the whole kitchen bench was just full, full of UberEats bags. I was like, oh, yeah, and I hate cooking, man. Like, I'm just. I don't like it. I don't want to go to the supermarket. I hate, like, having to be around other people and like, looking at stuff. I don't even know what I'm looking for. I get distracted and then walk out an hour later with like, nothing. So, like I and I, we just got a. My housemate and I got a cook to come in once a week, just pre. Make like a bunch of healthy meals.

Oh, that's nice.

It's been like game changer. Like having a steak or a burrito or, you know, you know, veggies for lunch. I'm like, wow. Like, I just feel much healthier. I can work longer, I go to the gym. Like, it's a bit of an expense, but also just like the ROI I find on that on health and like, time has just been brilliant.

Yeah. It's gonna be one of the best ways you can spend money, actually. Like, if you have. You don't even need that much, but like, if you're eating bad and this would help you eat better, it's probably actually, like, if you. I don't know how much is possible, like, compared to ordering UberEats every day, it might even be cheaper.

100. And it's just, yeah, the feeling I like, it took me a bit for my body to get used to, but now genuinely, I feel so much better. Like, I just felt you know, the sodium and just the crap that stuff's cooked with. Like, you know, now I genuinely feel healthy and I just feel better. Like, you. Food has a massive impact on, like, your overall feeling of the day, for sure. Yeah, 100%. I had one last question, man. What. What are you looking at the moment from an investment standpoint? What's exciting you? What are the areas that we should be looking at? Is there any narratives or sectors that you're. You're bullish on at the moment, yeah.

I've been really sort of disconnected for the last. It's like six weeks since my grandmother passed, went to India, spent time there, then we were traveling around Australia doing house stuff and got back to Dubai. Token and the flood, everything's been kind of chaos. So I feel very disconnected. But I think that, let's see. I think BAS is going to be absolutely massive this cycle. I've been bullish on it since like, like late last year. Coinbase backing it far cast the ecosystem. There's a lot of they say you should go where the devs are, where the builders are and I think there's a ton of that activity over on base and so spending a lot of time exploring that ecosystem, investing in tokens on base and just like keeping an eye out there, I think BLAST is probably underrated. I think most people are just sleeping on it. It's sort of like you got some fart and now people have written it off and they're having an airdrop next month which will probably be very significant. And so I think it's probably, if I decide in the next few days and dig like dive headfirst back into crypto, it's probably the first area I'm going to be focusing on. Obviously Runes launched a few days ago and is sort of again being fted and sell the news event but I think they're around to stay and there's probably some really good buying opportunities in there.

Meme coins I think will be massive this cycle. They've already shown their hand once, you know, like retail isn't even here yet I think, which is like, it's kind of the crazy part about this cycle and they will love, they love meme coins and so I think that putting, getting a position in a few of those is probably very valuable and worthwhile. Obviously high risk, but I'm sort of doing a barbell approach to like investing in strategy. It's sort of like where you have like a low risk asset like Eth and then you have like a high risk asset like Pepe and like you try not to have too many things in the middle where it's like I always fall into the trap where I have like 100 tokens in my portfolio. I mean this cycle it's like I must prefer to have 10, 5 to 10 and just pick the highest conviction. And so now I'm trying to find like what do I think is the best mean coin or maybe the best one or two or the best one per chain, something like that. And so Just spending a bit of time thinking about that, trying that. And then a lot of my time like investing is like seed rounds, angel investments into project companies. Although I sort of made the conscious decision a couple of days ago in my head that like, you know, I'm not going to do any more of that this cycle because the way that it works from an investment financial perspective is that now there's a few months till TGE token drops and then maybe you get a small percentage, then there's a month or three month, nine month cliff and there's another year or two before you get your tokens. And like if the vast majority of your tokens are going to be unlocked during the bear market, it's probably not a good thing. And the longer the cycle goes on, the less appealing it becomes to invest in companies for the token. Specifically, if it's a project that I lot of belief in, you know, five, ten years from now and great, that doesn't make a difference. But yeah, so those are where I'm sort of spending my time thinking about.

There some sick alpha in there. The listeners are going to love that. That's really good. And just on the angel investing side, getting into seed rounds, what are you currently being pitched? Are there any themes there or newer technologies or things people companies are trying to achieve?

AI everything. There's so many AI projects, so many. I must have seen 50 pitch decks that look basic, look and sound basically the same. A lot of AI gaming was huge, sort of late last year. I think it will still be big this cycle, but I've seen fewer gaming projects lately.

What else is there? There's like a lot of like after farcasting success, I think people are building like social, social fi apps across different blockchains and networks that they're experimenting with. But yeah, AI is by far the AI whatever. It's like autonomous agents or autonomous traders or own your own AI.

Farm or.

Secure your data or I don't even know, it's just the buzzword like NFTs was 2021. AI is the buzzword of the cycle and again, almost all of it's garbage. But some of it will probably succeed and you can probably make money on quite a lot of it.

This cycle I'm very dubious about. I get on my soapbox with especially the AI crossover with crypto. So I've been in crypto a while, I've worked in AI and I'm like half of this shit doesn't need to exist. Why are you complicating it with blockchains it's going to be insane. All the edge cases and technology you actually need. So I'm very happy to hear you say like a lot of it's like nonsense and they're not going to actually going to be able to deliver it.

Oh, absolutely. It's like even if they can do, they're solving problems that don't exist. They're really just putting together a random buzzwordy pitch deck to raise a bunch of money, which they will raise because it's a bull market and AI is hot. And yeah, most of them, yeah, most companies don't succeed. Most of these, like it's going to be very, very low hit rate. That said, there will be a handful of AI slash crypto companies that are projects that go absolutely ballistic. And yeah, I do think it'll be enormous at some point in the future. It's just like when and which ones.

Yeah, I think it's going to be a great narrative and they'll blow up, but in terms of, you know, angel investing, ones that can deliver, it's a completely different story. And mate, I've just got one more question for you. You're a big NFT guy. Ben and I have invested in NFTs. Ben bought a Moonbird, went to almost zero. He got mad and he sold it. Although he did get, didn't he get to see David Blaine in the, in the States?

Yeah, I had a, I had the, the wizard, the wizard hat one. Yeah, he got to see the magic show. That was one.

Hashtag utility.

Yeah, hashtag utility. So man, where do you see NFTs going in the future? Are there any cool mechanics you've seen? Will they evolve to something else? What are NFTs going to become? How do you think about that?

Yeah, I think it's kind of popular to hate on NFTs at the moment. You know, prices are sort of indicating that as well. But it's so funny how it seems to happen every few months and then drop and horror, they come back. The NFTs are, it's a technology, it's not going anywhere and there'll be a million amazing use cases for this technology in the world. It's really fundamental, foundational, incredible technology that we need in the world. Like it's at a basic level. Like we, we have blockchains to track fungible tokens and now we have blockchains to track the non fungible side of things. It's just that 99.9% of NFTs that have been released over the last few years have been speculative junk and that's why almost everyone has a negative perception of them. But within that there is a tiny fraction of a percent that are revolutionary and will be considered extremely valuable in years to come, I think. So I'm sort of like trying to figure out what those will be and allocate towards those or just rather just hold the things of those that I've bought over the last few years and sell the other stuff. Things like you know, chromie squiggles, the, you know, the early generative art pieces, cryptopunks, maybe some early AI artworks, some one on one art by like X copy or notable artists that will be valuable and revered even 5, 10, 20 years from now. And then, you know, Kobe said in a Tweet maybe like two years ago now that NFTs are just shit coins and JPEGs and that's absolutely true for the majority of them. Like all the PFP's and projects. There's a handful of them again that have culture and businesses that are sustainable built around them, thrive in communities, but most of them are just the same thing. And so treating them like that and realizing that they're part of the same bag and maybe going back to the barbell strategy I mentioned and not owning too many NFTs in different collections and just holding the ones I have the highest conviction in. Pudding Penguins I think are one of the ones I'm very likely to do very well. There's some gaming ones we've gotten, runes, parallel avatars I think will do really well. Savvy Seals I think is another really good one. But yeah, it's a handful, it's a dozen that I think will hold value and appreciate but the technology is not going anywhere as like, you know, one of the other narratives of cycles in the RWA is real world assets and I think that being able to use like they will utilize NFT technology in one capacity or another I think to help people bring real world assets on chain and yeah, so you know it's, it's a bit of a lull moment but if you zoom out and look at it a decade from now, will some of these NFTs still be valuable? Some of them will be very, very valuable. Most of them will be worth zero as always.

Well said mate.

Man, Zeneca dude, thank you so much. It was an epic conversation, man. Where can our listeners find your stuff? Where should we send them?

Twitter is probably best just at Zeneca but also Farcaster. Like I mentioned before, I'm trying to spend more time on there. I'M just at Zen on there but lucky to get a nice handle over there. And then in my Twitter at Farcaster I think you can find rings to Zen Academy. Come hop in the Discord. We have a free membership tier. You can just go to our website Mint a free student id. Hop in verify, come hang out with us and yeah, or, or you can buy one of the paid entities on secondary as well. But yeah, we'd love to have people in there. Otherwise y just Twitter or you'll find all the other links on those pieces.

Amazing.

This has been great.

So much. Yeah, that's been awesome. And that was a great insight.

That was a fun conversation.

Yeah, we'll definitely catch up, man, when you're back in back in Australia. That'd be fun. 100%, guys, thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, we'd love for you to share with a friend. It's how we grow the podcast. And make sure to go and check Zenekin out. Zenika out. He's absolute legend and all the stuff he's doing. Thank you guys and we'll see you next time.

Thanks, champions.

Thanks. All.

Right.