72. How To Switch From a Web2 to a Web3 Job, Are MBA’s Really Worth It? Plus NFT Investing Alpha with Greg Oakford

I flipped it for 5x and I played the momentum game with art. I'm looking at them as more longer term holds. But it also comes down to I didn't know what game I was playing when I got into NFTs. I just saw my bags go up and then I saw them go horrendously back down. And then in the aftermath I'm like, what the hell was I doing? Like I had no plan. What were my numbers? Like it goes back to why are you doing it?

Welcome back to another episode of the Benneberg show with your favorite MBA and high school dropout talking everything crypto, business and personal growth. And today we have a living legend joining us on the podcast. Greg Oakford, the founder of NFT Fest, one of Australia's biggest NFT events, Head of growth and partnerships at Upside Down, a writer at Cointelegraph, fellow Moonbirds holder I believe. Unless you've sold it.

Yeah, down bad.

Down bad. And just, just a really smart guy that we've met through our crypto journey. We had a collaboration back at the end of last year with the AP and Bird show and the Benneberg show. We did a wrap up of the year was actually one of our most popular episodes. We were all down bad and just sort of reviewed the year that was. Steve isn't with us today but today we're going a little bit more into Greg's journey. We're really going to get a good understanding where NFTs are at right now from an investment lens where he think the space is going, maybe some alpha. Then we're going to go into, you know, his experience with the, with his mba. Both Greg and Bergs have done their mba, but two have polar opposite of experiences. So that's going to be an interesting one. I'm going to be referee because it could get a little bit out of hand and then we obviously touch on some sport because we're all sports fans here. But Greg, thank you so much for jumping on man.

Thank you boys. Very, very happy to to be here and happy to see Bergs's background. As I was saying just before we went to air, it just makes me like feel at home. It's looks quite spacious. There's an art vibe to it, the whole thing, the green headphones. So pumped to be here with you guys today.

Thanks man.

Great to have you mate.

So I want to go diving head first, Greg. NFTs, you know, from a volume perspective have probably retraced 90 plus percent as a fellow Moonbirds holder that you know we are both obviously down bad on that project. I get a lot of comments and questions pretty, you know, consistently from our members going, you know, where NFTs are at? Should I get exposure to them right now? Is now the right time to buy? Where should we be looking from an investment lens? You know, you're obviously, you know, across the market. Where do you see the space of NFTs right now and where is the opportunity?

Well, I think most people would say NFTs are dead right now, you know, and when we say dead, we're probably talking like crypto Twitter dead, right, where we're sort of being a little jovial about it. But volumes pretty much since sort of we had this mini pump on the back of the Blur airdrop roundabout Valentine's Day in February. And then since then it's been just terrible. Volumes, sort of floors have just been steadily bleeding each and every day, really. There's only been a couple of collections that have bucked the trends. So Memeland, the guy Ray that runs that project with the Captains and the potatoes, they've actually shot up a bit. Frank the Gods with what he's doing with the gods and Utes, they've had a migration from Solana, sort of the first major Solana project to come across, to Ethereum on the D God side and Polygon on the. On the huge side. So those have been holding up reasonably well. Art in particular. I mean, that art has definitely taken, you know, a retrace, but not as bad as PFP collections. And I think, you know, there's been multiple factors in my mind. You know, I do think Blur has been a factor. I'm not necessarily making Blur the only scapegoat, but these weird incentives of people getting, you know, essentially a token at the end of the day to bid for NFTs that they don't actually want to hold just flips the paradigm that we've had for the last 18 to 24 months on its head where it used to be quite fun, right? You would go on opensea, you know, we were speaking of Bergs off air about the Drop Bears that are in the. In the back. So shout out to the Drop Bears there, Bergs. You got a little plug in there. But ultimately Bergs is buying those back in the day and probably searching OpenSea, seeing which traits he likes. Blur has sort of, in a way made at least the current narrative is pretty much all PFPs are just floor PFPs now. There are a few that buck the trend. Cryptopunks will still have above above floor sales. MF is doing quite well in that regards too. But yeah, it's been a really really difficult time if you're holding NFT bags in the last three or four months now macro wise like as I zoom out do I still believe that NFTs have got a massive future? I couldn't be more bullish on NFTs. The thing about it is which NFTs right? And the more I think about this as a long term thesis and sort of when I look at my own wallets as well the art based NFTs that I have, some of them I just really like. Well pretty much all of them. I really like some of them being airdropped and things like that. They don't cause me any anxiety thinking about them. And there's a phrase that I'm not going to pretend to claim. I think it was Derek Edwards who's often on the the Proof podcast. He uses this term sort of external dependencies and external dependencies what he's talking about there is when there's a PFP project like a Doodles, like a Moonbirds, like an Azuki, you know and I should mention Azuki has been bucking the trend of of you know, not having a bleeding floor floor price in the last couple of months. But external dependencies, you really, you're really relying on the founding team to garner attention time and time again make sure that you know, the perception is you're still building, you're still driving value for your holders. So if that goes away or if you have some communications fumbles like Moonbirds have had many of in the last nine to 10 months you're seeing a reflection in the floor price. Just get hammered. Whereas with Art floor prices are still dropping a little bit. But there's no external dependencies. I mean other than if X Copy went and became the next major serial killer, which I don't know how good that would be for his floor prices. Who knows, Crypto's wild. That might actually increase it. But, but you know there's the Art is art, right. And so I think I've been trying to reframe how I think about NFTs and probably the. You know this is a long answer but my TLDR right now but this is always changing and evolving is if I'm playing the PFP game it's what I would call probably more momentum NFT trading. I'll give you a good example. Tim Ferriss did a PFP in December last year called Cockpunch. I got One, I was on the, the, the pre mint list and I flipped it for 5x and I played the momentum game pre, pre reveal, right? It was one of those pre reveal mechanics with art. I'm looking at them as more longer term holds. But it also comes down to what we spoke about on that show in December last year that we recorded our co Collab podcast. I didn't know what game I was playing when I got into NFTs. I just saw my bags go up and then I saw them go horrendously back down. And then in the aftermath I'm like, what the hell was I doing? Like I had no plan. What were my numbers? Like it goes back to like, why are you doing it? And obviously with you guys at Collective Shift, you're educating members, right? And you're educating members potentially of your infungible coins like Bitcoin and Ethereum that you know, hey, maybe if you gone 5x, let's take 20, 30% off the table, right? NFTs are a little bit of a different ball game in that, that regard. Like, I mean you can, can buy three or five NFTs but it's hard to sometimes get three or five on premint lists and things like that. And there's a different psychology to selling NFTs than there are fungible coins.

What scares me the most about NFTs is that idea that it's like a startup with a roadmap that hasn't been built a lot. And there's the investors are highly volatile, emotional crypto people. And what we saw with Moonbirds is there was a couple of communication problems and then a couple of other problems. And then all of a sudden like the momentum thing, it goes from momentum going, oh my goodness, this is going to be the biggest thing ever to this is a scam. It's going to zero, get the hell out. No one knows what they're doing. Fucking panic stations. And it's like a company goes listed on the stock market where anyone can buy and sell and trade off the back of news, but it's 247 and it's degens in their room and you only own one of them. So you're either in or you're out. And that's the scariest thing I think for NFTs with that, sorry, PFPs and things like that. Not just necessarily art, but I'm talking sectors that have the helm, the leadership, the team. That's a scary part for me.

I want to go, I want to read you guys a tweet that literally I saw on the tram on the way over here before from DC Investor who's one of the most prolific NFT collectors out there. He was the first guest on Kevin Rose's Modern Finance podcast, which then span out to be the Proof podcast back in March 2021. That podcast was pivotal in unlocking my brain to NFTs. And this is something I've been thinking about, about sort of to Ben's point around like these wildly different expectations and entry and exit points of PFP communities, right when, when it's an up only market and we're all like, oh, community and blah blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was one of those guys, don't get me wrong. I don't want to sit back and pretend that I was like, you know, some czar that knew that this was coming or I got caught off by, off, off, off guard as well. But DC's in tweet today. I think it's, it's great advice. He said, my advice to all of you is never launch your own PFP or social token. Whatever you think you can do with it, it will never be enough. Someone will always buy the top and you will spend the rest of your life dealing with them. He then goes on to say it's much worse than launching a product token where a product can fail and that's the end of it. But there is no end to PFPs or social tokens. For as long as you're breathing on this green earth, you deal with it forever. Pretty stark to any pfp. So shout out to Steve, my podcast, my podcast founder. But yeah, I think that was a very poignant tweet by DC investor and.

How wild NFT mechanics where you know, you're a team, you might be three people, maybe very inexperienced and you've got an idea and you put it out to the open market and when things are hot, you can get hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of inflow when people mint that nft. And it's a really weird mechanic where you've kind of put it out there and then all this money flows in. It's like you're done, you've got the money. Like, where's the incentive to actually build this out? But also now you've got money, you're responsible. You're responsible to a community, to the owner, to the holders, and, and then you have to run a company, which you might not have done before. It's just absolutely incredible. And then you're right where you are completely open to the Market, like the market decides what the price is, whether they like you or not, whether there's a hate campaign, whether you tweak the wrong thing. It is absolutely incredible. And I'd like to bring it back to Moonbirds, where that was kind of the golden child. You've got someone like Kevin Rose at the helm, very experienced, all star team, a lot of people would say. And really it's been downhill for a very long time for those guys, really over market communication. And Greg, I'm wondering if you could kind of give us your view on Moonbirds and sort of run us through what happened there.

Well, first of all, apologies if there's any ape and bird listeners because they've heard me on my soapbox about this topic for the last couple of months, but very, very happy to go into this topic. And it is a tough one. Like, I still very much respect Kevin. I think I tweeted out the other day that, you know, I've, I've sort of followed his journey and got a lot of life value out of listening to his conversations on his not only the Tim Ferriss show, but his own podcast over the last sort of 10 to 15 years. And no doubt I was very, very, you know, one of the sort of biggest Moonbirds and proof backers and supporters. And I, I'm still a bag holder right now. But ultimately I think what has happened with, I actually put out, I don't want to make this show about a tweet, a tweet show all day, but I literally said this before to DC investor who actually went into bat for Kevin saying that this witch hunt for, you know, Moonbirds and Kevin's a little bit overheated. Like, you know, there's scammers all over the place and all of a sudden the pitchforks every day are at Kevin. And I wrote the, you know, I, I gave props about the modern finance podcast, but I went on to say I think Kevin got trapped in the PFP craze. His best lane is in art, media and product right now. In the bare market, the NFT bare market, you need founders that gobble up all the attention and lean into degen culture and publicly state over and over again that your holders are the number one priority. And I think that that's been one of the downfalls for Kevin and the Moonbirds team and community is Kevin's obviously built Web2 businesses before, you know, you guys well, especially Ben probably, you know, you've heard of Dig, but probably even too young to even play around with it. But was TLDR is it was Reddit before Reddit. Right. And I do think that Kevin did an incredible job bringing attention to particularly the NFT art space. In 2021 he launched a proof collective which I minted for 1 8. So even though I'm down bad on a particular Moonbird, I'm still probably break even maybe up a little bit on my whole proof ecosystem holdings. But I could have, I could have been in the money for sure, but I round tripped most of most of that. But back to sort of the fumbles. I think it's sort of like Kevin I think has made a mistake of trying to be a little bit web 2ish in a bear market, in a bull market. It probably doesn't matter to be honest because you know, we've seen the wallet shrink of people that are collecting NFTs on sort of a regular basis or trading NFTs shrink from about 250, 260,000 to 10,000 wallets. Right. So it's really contracted a lot.

Is that across the whole nft?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's a, that's sort of a daily stat that, that NFT statistics. Sam, who actually works for Proof, it's got a great sort of daily YouTube show on, on all things NFTs and that's sort of a regular stat he, he brings up. And I think in this bear market you just have to lean in like there's less people involved and the only ones that are involved are the real diehards. And the number one, the number one priority is like is the floor going to go up? Right. So if you're, and I think Kevin often says like, well we've got a strong treasury and we've got these long term plans and we're not going to go broke. And like in any other context that's a tick like that makes sense. Like if Ben was saying that about Collective Shift and I'm a vc, I'm like oh good, this guy's thinking long term and you know, he's not here for the short term. But in this sort of degen sort of market for NFTs, it just doesn't, it doesn't hit. So people have been hitting the eject button and going over to different projects that they think that they're going to get better returns on. So do I think Moonbirds and Proof can turn around?

I've got a little bit of conviction, but it's not as strong as it was previously. I've definitely had the wind knocked out of my sails probably from About February. And he made a, you know, he made a very bad blunder in my opinion in early February when. And this caught me off by guard, like proof pass at the time, I think was about 20, 25, maybe even higher in January. And it would, it was almost like settled like a bit of a stablecoin over December and in January. And you know, I was like, oh, that's good. You know, I still got a decent NFT there sitting in the bag and a couple of moonbirds and whatever. And then they had Grails three, which is one of the better products that they've done. And that's, that's for the Proof Collective, not Moonbirds, although they replicated a similar product for the diamond exhibition, which was sort of moon birds, quote, unquote, reward for holding for 12 months. Nesting for 12 months. But Kevin, come on up. A discord, a town, what do you call it? A town hall on discord. And essentially said, you know, the Proof Collective, you know, there's been some comments in the discord about like, is this pass expiring at the end of three years? And as, you know, like, we minted it and we did say it was only for three years. And essentially like, you guys cost us a lot of money. Like we've been running parties and blah, blah, blah. And it was just like he was trying to be too much of a CEO and board member instead of like a Web3 founder. And even if the things he was saying was correct, and maybe they are correct in terms of like the balance sheet, that's not what you say to your OG community. And the analogy I gave, which is maybe not the, the right apples for apples one, but could you imagine if the Bored Ape founders tweeted out, hey guys, been thinking a little bit about this. And as of next year, mutant apes are now the, the, the top of the food chain, right? And people went back through things that Kevin have said and he said the Proof Collective holders are at the top of the waterfall, right? They're at the top of the ecosystem. And essentially he just sucked all the air out of the balloon with the Proof Collective. And we've seen the past in the last three months, which pains me to say because I still hold it. I don't know, I must have some mental disorder. But it's gone from about 25, 38th to about 6.

Is it down to 6?

Down to 6.

Holy shit.

And 8th price is halved as well in that time.

Thank you, Bergs.

Just turning the knife, mate.

Why not?

So and then.

But what about the day where Kevin Rose came out and he goes, it was all about the art. And everyone's like, oh, we're holders now. It's just like, oh, fatality. What? What?

I. What? I'm sorry, what? I'm. I saw him also tweet recently. I want to make this about the Kevin show. I actually want to tie this back into, like, you know, what are the. One of the things we need to be looking out for as investors to like, the good and the bad of investment. But.

I saw him tweet the other day of like, something like, you know, it was like a Roast Me thread or something like that.

Yeah. He said, please share your fud. Share your fud in the comments.

And then I was reading through some of the comments and I thought it was some genuine, like, concerning tweets. And then he's like, thanks for the fud and giving the praise hands. And I was like, this.

I've seen that a couple of his threads. Like, I wanted to jump in and go, what the fuck does this mean? Like, when he's posted something.

Perception, right? Externally, what's this guy with 100 million plus?

I honestly don't know.

Probably shit like this, right? And just seems to be taking a bit of the high road a little bit in a sense of like, I don't know if it's a bit of like, you know, we're better than new culture, but it just seems to be like, like you said, he's playing the board member, CEO role. And in Web3, it's not about that for me, Web3 is about us. We're all in this together. Not a. I say this and you do that.

Incentives have to be aligned, right? Incentives have to be a lot. And that's easier said than done. And you know, to go back into bat a little bit for Kevin, I would say, like this, there's always two sides of the story, right? So one of them is he's made his OG proof collective pass holders, especially if you were smart enough to sell. Not like me, pretty wealthy, right? Similar to what bored apes did. And so incentives were aligned. Unfortunately for moon birds, they minted like a couple of weeks before we had, you know, steady lads, deploying more capital with the whole Terra Luna downfall. And then we started to saw the market started to tank, right? So he sort of had this high mint price and then it ran up to like, you know, 35, 48th. And it was just like the biggest bull out of the gates run we've ever seen with the PFP project. And Then steadily, you know, the floor just keeps declining, I think, A, because the market has tanked, but B, there's been a lot of communications fumbles. But back to your sort of point around, like the fud. I don't. I actually had a buddy of mine comment in a group chat the other day that he thinks that Frank, the gods, who I think is one of the leaders of knowing how to lean into sort of Internet culture and Israeling a community behind him. But who knows? Like this, this thing is hard to sustain, right? Like, Kevin had a big community behind him when moonbirds were popping off. So Frank, you know, has a fumble or two, they might turn on him as well. But someone thinks that Frank is advising Kevin to write tweets like that, sort of to lean into the fudge. The problem with the way that Kevin does it is it feels kind of forced at times. I think he just needs to be him. But, you know, the early days. Again, I don't want to make this a Proof of Moonbird show because, you know, I've spoke about it so much before, but the, the first four months of the Proof Collective discord was the most majestical and magical time I've ever had. It was the most desirable community to be in. Kevin would literally get on Zooms with us and because it was only a thousand person project, like Thousand Person Collective, we would have say, you know, he would say randomly on, you know, it'll be a Saturday morning for me, and he'd just crack a few beers on Zoom and he'd just like kick, kick the shit with us, talk. People would ask him anything. It felt like he dislikes being one of the boys, right? But then on the flip side, I think when the blowtorch is on him, he doesn't have this middle ground. It's either like, I want to be liked, and I think that's his natural inclination. And, you know, most people do want to be liked, but when he's got the pitchforks coming at him, I think he hasn't been able to find this middle ground. It's almost like, you know, get the feathers up, you post your FUD and sort of go at people, get nasty, or be the guy that, that, that's liked. And it's a very, it's a very fine balance to find.

Yeah, I think I just want to sort of loop this back in saying that for me, like from an investment perspective of NFTs or when we think about tokenized assets, right, I think about, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum. It's been built to do a job. You know, Bitcoin's trying to be a new monetary system. Ethereum's trying to be the new app store of the web3world and build apps on top of it with these PFP projects, It's like this is being created by a person to create a community and a culture. And it's like we're all investors. And now we're emotionally very driven by the way the price is moving. And you know, we see on Twitter, right, in Tokenized World, the bitcoin max has come out, the eth max has come out. Everyone's angry, everyone's yelling at each other like it's nasty, right? But they're massive market caps. It's not, you know, we have retracements, but it's not going to kill the project. With NFTs when you've got a thousand people who are all bearish and hate each other because you're all down and the guy at the top makes a bad call, it just spirals so much faster than anything else. I think that is the concern for me because NFTs, for me, a lot of what I've seen, a lot of NFTs were built to create a product, not let's create a product and then use the tech behind it, if that makes sense. It's like it was kind of like artifact. A lot of these projects for me were like, let's even like Jake Paul's project, right? Kind of was like just artificially created to probably just make a shitload of money and now, and now what? You know, like it's just got. I don't know what he's doing. I'm pretty sure he's getting sued by a lot of his holders, right? So for me, I try and look at the business first. What are they trying to solve? What is the problem? What is the product? How does it make money? And then look at the sort of tech behind it.

I, I've been trying to think of a good TLDR to wrap up this for, for your, you know, for your audience and your, your investors if it to think about NFTs. And you know, for me personally, I came into crypto and I've I've sort of learned about crypto and the crypto ethos and sort of just the more technical side of things as well, that you're probably much stronger on Ben and, and bergs. But for, but for me, NFTs hit because I have a marketing brain, I have a culture brain. Like I feel like I'm pretty entrenched in culture and I understand Internet culture. And I think when I. It's funny, when meme coin mania came along, right, Like I dabbled a little bit sort of behind the scenes. I said nothing publicly because I don't want to be one of those guys shilling meme coins. I was just playing around with it. But I did spend a lot of time on Dex tools and things like that, and that's something that I haven't spent a lot of time on previously. So my brain breaks a lot quicker when I start hearing about liquidity pools and TVM and blah blah, blah and all that kind of stuff. Whereas other people's brains break when they're like, why is that monkey picture worth $150,000? But my brain's like, hm, who's collecting that? Who's like, like, what's the origins of that? What's the story behind that? Where's the momentum going? Right? So the way that I would probably frame it is I think NFT art is a no brainer for you to get into. Just buy something you like for a very small amount. If you've never bought an nft, right? Just. Just get your hands dirty and buy something you like. I have two NFTs that are at home that are blown up on canvas, so it doesn't always have to be digital and you can have a physical version of it, right? And I just like the fact that those artists are in my wallet. I actually have a personal relationship with them on Twitter, we DM and stuff. So that, that whole sort of relationship is great. And look, if they go on to be big artists and you know, there were something down the track, like significant money, great. But if not, I'm still happy with it in terms of PFPs or what I would call sort of the more meme value NFTs. I think NFTs and the metaverse is the native medium to monetize culture. So if you're into culture, particularly Internet culture, I think that maybe NFTs will tickle your fancy into in those terms, right? But you have to know what game you're playing. You have to know when to hit the eject button, right? So that's probably how I would sum it up first. That's great.

That's an awesome summary, man. And I think one more thing I'd just like to know about the NFT space is what are the industry players doing at the moment? So you run NFT fest and I imagine a lot of people would reach out to you Are those brands, particularly sporting brands, reaching out to you to learn more about this technology or has that really dropped off in recent months?

This is a great question, Bergs. So next month. Oh no, we're in June now, aren't we? We're first of June recording this. At the end of this month, I'm hosting a panel as part of Australian Blockchain Week. And we've got Stacy Ann Pearson, who is the AWS head of Web3APAC, coming out to Australia to spend the week and she's going to be on my panel with a couple of other guest speakers talking about NFTs and Web3 in general. And she put something out on LinkedIn last night essentially saying, you know, Web3 is not dead. The biggest brands in the world are spinning up teams to have a Web three department each and every day. Right. And I see this myself. You know, we've had some of the major sports involved. Ben, I saw you tweeted about the AFL yesterday. I think sports overall haven't done it well yet. There has been a few exceptions, but I think the. For everything that Top Shot did well. And I will come back to your initial question in a second, Bergs, but I'm just going to go 32nd rabbit hole on sports. Everyone saw the Top Shot model work really well if you're a sporting brand, and they went, wow, bit of a cash cow here. So they wanted to replicate Topshot, which is just like the physical cards but digital and make a bag. The problem was it sports sometimes move slowly and there's a lot of internal politics. So by the time they got their shit together, the, the bear market hit and they got a product and they're like, oh crap, we can't launch it. And for those that just threw caution to the wind and did launch it, they didn't do very well. Right. But that will, that will come back around. But in terms of the overall brands, like what.swoosh is doing now at the moment, like I know again, you boys, I think on this pod, have talked about Reddit before and sort of their NFT journey, Dot Swoosh has 350,000 members signed up and they're selling like essentially digital sneakers for 10 bucks. So you want to go back to that DC investor tweet where we talked about, you know, expectations and if someone's buying something for 10 grand, the expectations are out of this world. Right. It's like buying, you know, you were saying $10,000 a Tesla stock and it tanks 90. 90%. You are. Yeah. But $10, sneakers, right. That's very affordable and it becomes more of a collector card that maybe like 0.1% of these things are going to like be like the equivalent of Michael Jordan's ticket stub that sold for $250,000 of his first ever game against the Washington Bullets in 1984. But most of the stuff is just stuff you collect like you've got in your house, right? Physical stuff that might mean something to you or bring back some nostalgia or memories. And that's where I think sort of brands need to lean into, is sort of like for luxury brands, for sneaker brands, for essentially anything that could have a digital twin of a physical Good. I think Web3 is going to be a massive win for them. Right. It's literally a new revenue stream. So as much as we've been talking about PFP's and all the sort of projects that we've become accustomed to over the last two years, there's this whole other developing world of brands, incumbent brands, household brands that are really behind the scenes learning about this space.

It's interesting. I won't go too deep into the conversation I was having with the AFL recently, but you know, it from, from what I picked up with some of the conversations I've had just more of a. On that sort of sports branding side, I think it is tough for them with the, with the volumes being so low. You know, I think like you said, I think everyone saw the dollar signs and took a long time to execute. Now trying to launch in the middle of a bear market that you're just not trying to get the revenue. But I believe sports and NFTs are the. One of the best cases for NFTs where you can enhance the experience of your favorite teams, your favorite sports through an nft. Get those digital and in person experience. Like I think it's one of the best examples. But I think the execution, like you said, has been relatively poor across the board. To be honest, I think a lot of it's been confusing. A lot of it does hasn't made sense. I think they've done a good job at explaining what on earth is going on. Yeah, I think it's been pretty poor across the board. So hopefully that improves.

What I would like to see, whether it happens or not is I remember taking it back to web two when Facebook pages became a thing, YouTube early days, sort of 2006, 7, 8. And it was almost like companies were dismissive, sort of like they are of Web3 at the moment. Right? It was like, you know, yeah, I might have a personal Facebook, but it's so dumb to have a business Facebook page and essentially give it to the receptionist or give it to the intern or the 15 year old, you know, son or daughter of the CEO or whatever, and let them play around with it. And who would have known just a couple of years later, sort of around that 2013, 14, 15 mark, when the Facebook ads platform became the number one place to spend your dollars as a business. Right. The targeting capabilities were out of this world. I went down that rabbit hole very, very early, similar to web3. Got laughed out of the room when I told golf clubs to spend 80% of their budget on Facebook ads in 2013 and 2014. And then a couple of years later they were wanting to pay me on the side to run their Facebook ads. Right. So what I would like to see is brands actually not coming from it, from a. I know there's always commercial nature to everything we do, but actually coming at it from more of an R and D perspective. Right. Like if you would have said to a brand if they could go back in time and have an awesome social media strategy to catch that initial wave, right, would they do it 100%? They would do it. Right. Rather than just being quite dismissive of it. So I would love brands to come with a little bit more curiosity rather than an extraction mindset from the get go, unfortunately. I understand there are some realities sometimes of one internal person gets lumped with like, hey, you're our web three person or NFT person and they're putting together a report and the board or the CEO says, yeah, how much money did we make on this thing? Right. But I think brands will win if they can just turn their mindset a little bit. Yeah, sure, we can still make a couple bucks, but let's have a little bit of more curiosity of how this tech works and set ourselves up for the long term.

Yeah, I really like that.

Yeah, absolutely. I would encourage, if any people that manage brands out there or marketers as well, not to set an ROI in terms of cash, but in terms of what you can learn or community you can build different metrics for this technology. And Greg, mate, you touched on golf there. I don't know why, but every golf website for every golf club or is just like the shittest website from the 1990s. I don't understand why it's horrendous. You can't book anything. It's ridiculous. Now, something interesting about you. Not only did you absolutely belt Ben at golf, which I love, but you've actually worked in. You worked in sport before you were in NFTs, particularly in golf. And I'm wondering if you could kind of give us a bit of insight there as to how the business works, what you did and what it was like.

Yeah, it's pretty crazy. I mean, I'm a sports junkie and nut in general. I was working in basketball before golf and I actually took up golf was probably around 2011, 2012. I actually took five golf lessons with my mom. So shout out to my mom. She actually. My grandma passed away and I remember my, you know, it was obviously a sad time and my mom said I want to like learn a new hobby because she was spending a lot of time looking after my grandma. And she was like, would you do golf lessons with me? I said, okay, I'll come down, do some golf lessons. We did five or 10 lessons and Cat played a couple of nine holes and all that. And then I sort of got the bug and you know, mum didn't play as much and then I just continued playing and it was sort of like an outlet. And it was sort of weird how I ended up a year later at Golf Victoria, which then moved into Golf Australia later on and sort of I looked after like professional golf tournaments. I used to do sponsorships for that. So that would be everything from, you know, wining and dining at events and corporate hospitality to, you know, the more grassroots side of the game of, you know, trying to get more people to play the sport, which was not necessarily difficult. It's a sport that people love, but it is a sport that skews older. Right. And I always say that one of the great things that I actually think golf doesn't lean into enough because, you know, often, you know, often sporting organizations do get government money and government funding to run programs and often those programs are designed to attract the people that maybe are not currently playing the sport, which is great, but we don't lean into our core customers sometimes. And the core customer, you know, the average golf age, I think still around like 63, 64 years old. But it is a sport that you can be better at 65 than you were at 25 right now, maybe you're not going to hit it as long, but I've literally played with 80, 85 year olds that just dust me, right, because they are so good around the greens and they just know their way around the course. And you know, I think it's like, it's an awesome component to golf to lean into is to say this is a sport that you can be, especially if you're a competitor. If you're like, wow, I can be a better golfer at 70 years old than I was at 40 years old. Bergs, I forget your initial question, mate. I've just gone on a rant.

No, it's to talk about your experiences and what you did there. But I think you raise a really good point around the longevity of golf.

Right.

And identifying your core customer. A business like, which people do we need to lean in? And even other things like can we have senior programs, what money can we get from the government? It's just such a, a really interesting industry. And so you worked in golf for a while and what was the kind of transition from there for you to get into the NFT space and running your own conference?

Yeah, wild.

It was sort of like in late 2020, I was learning about Top Shot and when I say learning about it, I, I was just seeing it pop up a little bit on Twitter. And I mean I, I decided to. Similar to you guys, right? Like I've got a doxed web3 Persona and you know, this, this is me, right? You know, I'm, I'm my web one and web two and birth certificate guy, right? I'm not like funky pants72 on Twitter and Discord and whatever. Um, but I was, I was reasonably quiet on Twitter in 2020 because during COVID and you know, there was just so much going on in the world and I just felt like it was a fire hose of bad doom and gloom. So I sort of stayed away from Twitter. And then the, the end of. I didn't actually make my first crypto investment till midway through 2020, so I'm still considered in my own mind a noob. And I bought Ethereum, I bought Bitcoin and then you guys are going to throw a bottle at me in a second. But I bought xrp. And you're going to say, why did I buy xrp? It was the only one that I had heard of outside of Bitcoin and Ethereum. I actually hadn't heard really. I think I'd heard of Litecoin maybe before that. I do remember hearing about smart contracts ON Ethereum in 2017 on the TIM Ferriss show with Naval and Nick Szabo. But it was sort of like piqued my interest at the time. Went out of my head, didn't think about it again. So at the end of 2020, Bitcoin, Ethereum was starting to run up. Nothing piques your interest like price goes up, right? So I'm like Okay, this is cool. You know, I wasn't really going to sell it. I was just interested that it had gone up, but I was happy it was gone up. And then I'm like, top shot and there's like digital things and I'm like, hmm. And then I read this article and I was. And my, I could almost feel my brain, like neurons starting to fire. And then I remember I had this moment. I'm like, okay, so using bitcoin technology, even though it's built on flow, right? I was like using bitcoin technology, this is how you avoid my mate saying, yeah, but I'll just copy it. Which is the thing that we always hear, right? With right click save and all that kind of stuff. And then sort of early 2021 was when people like Kevin Rose, who I spoke about today, even Gary V, who I've sort of followed on and off for the last 10, 12 years or so, they were starting to beat the drums of NFTs. You know, a buddy of mine, Steve Vallis, who I know, you know Ben, he had got a job at Blockchain Australia as CEO, so I was having some conversations with him. But really my early brain into sort of crypto was like on the defi and just crypto principles in general. And it wasn't like I wasn't interested in that, but it was way over my head at the time. But then when NFTs came like back to what I said before, like a marketing culture brain, I was like, ah, like did you, you know, like you. Essentially we are going now from an Internet of abundance where we've just right click saved and limewired this Napster that, you know, just ripped anything content for free to an error through blockchain technology that we can actually have scarcity of like non fungible goods. And obviously we have to pay homage to Bitcoin. That showed us from a currency or store of value perspective, battle tested after 14, 15 years that you can actually do that with a currency. And then I'm like, now we can do that with pitches essentially, or with content and media. So for me that, that was sort of like a penny drop moment. So Bergs, I, I spent an ungodly amount of time on OpenSea when I was working from home in 2021, you know, and I was juggling my, my Golf Australia job, which was a lot different than it had been previously because we were going in and out of lockdowns and golf was allowed and then not allowed and you know, we were copping heat because I wasn't allowed in Victoria, but it was open in, you know, sort of other areas of. Of the country. And. And so, you know, I was just really. I would say I was just laying in the cut in most of 2021. And then, you know, towards the end of 2021, I. I sort of thought I was looking for something new and I thought, why not take a roll of the dice and, like, go on this NFT wave? And, you know, I ended up running NFT Fest in September 2021, which was during COVID lockdown still here in Melbourne. Thought we'd get 500 registrations. We got 3, 600. And we had nine hours of water wall content, including, like, World of Women and, like, all these speakers. And in hindsight, it's kind of crazy, the people that I got to. But, like, I don't even know, you know, people go like, well, how do you get to these people or that people? And I'm like, I just asked them and they pretty much all said yes. But I was coming into it, I felt like I was late. Like, I was like, oh, wows, all these projects popping off and crypto punks are worth how much? And, oh, I missed auto glyphs. They're, like, worth 300 grand and all this kind of stuff. So I felt like my brain had gone down to the OGs, like, you know, D.C. investors of the world and stuff. But all these new projects that were starting to pop off, like, World of Women and that, they just wanted the pr. So, like, here's this Aussie guy, like, hey, want to be involved in, like, this event? And they're like, yeah. And, yeah. So anyway, that. That thing popped off and then all of a sudden I was getting called the NFT guy. And I'm sort of looking over my shoulder. I'm like, the NFT guy? I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, you know, Like, I'm still. I'm still learning this, but then in the end, you just have to lean into it, right? And I think that comes down to, you know, imposter syndrome sometimes and that. That whole thing. So. So, yeah, it's been a wild ride, man. Since. Since then, I've just gone head down and NFTs hit me like a tsunami. And now I feel like I've adopted the general crypto ethos as well in my own life.

That's cool, man. I wanted to touch on the conference life. Have you run events before doing the. The NFT Fest? Because, you know, I used to run an events company, not Conferences it was different sort of events, birthdays and whatnot and they are just up and that was a small scale massive pain in the ass. How did you find obviously your online one and then the in person in St Kilda. When was that?

Late last year, November, two weeks after ftx. Shout out Sam. Shout out Sammy Bank. Shout out Freed.

Shut up Sam Dog. Thanks mate.

Yeah.

How is it running it events? Do you like doing it? Are you going to run another one?

Yeah.

So we've run three events. We ran the online only and obviously Covid was prohibitive to do And I think IRL in September 2021 here in Melbourne we actually did a collaboration at Marvel Stadium with Blockchain Australia. So I ran the NFT Day at Marvel Stadium that was a hybrid event so IRL and online but the big one, the one that you know, Collective Shift was a supporter of too and very appreciative of that too Ben In November last year where a few of our sponsors fell over because of FTX happening two weeks beforehand that was a two day IRL event in St Kilda just under a thou shade under a thousand people and speakers and you know, to answer your question Ben, I think about events as they take a piece of your soul every time you run one. As you would know being in the events part business, I love running them but they are a huge mental load. It's sort of like, it's like when you, you know, I know we haven't spoke about university at Bergs but you know when you had that, that big test coming up or whatnot like you always feel guilty when you're not working on the event so it's very hard to sort of like detach even at the end of the day because you're always still thinking like oh man, I didn't get back to this person, I didn't get back to that person. And you know there's no magic wand to running events, right? It's like nose to the grindstone and you just have to hustle and hustle and hustle combat and you know like I'm proud of the speaker lineup that we put together. Like I think I've been to a number of events overseas and I think if you put. We had like eight or nine virtual speakers. One of those was actually Kevin Rose. We had like Carly riley from overpriced JPEGs, jimmy.e who's a OG in the NFT space as well. And you know I got all these people through two years of my relationships and genuine authentic relationships without shilling Anyone or trying to ask for something, you know, just for nothing. And, you know, I'm very proud of the lineup we put together and I think people had a really, really good time. Will we run another one? 100%. It's more on the timing, right? So I think later this year we've got Oz Crypto Con in Melbourne in mid November. You know, that's a little bit of a different flavor than the event we run. But we've also got south by Southwest in Sydney in October. The market, as we spoke about in terms of the projects, are down at the moment, so I'm dropping some alpha for you guys at the moment. I'm just going to be genuinely authentic and tell you what my mindset on NFT Fest 2023 is. I'm not sure if we'll run a massive one like we did in 2022 for a couple of reasons. One is I'm not sure I have the bandwidth this year because I'm juggling a few new roles at the moment. We'll definitely do something. I like to think of NFT Fest, given that we ran three of them in 14 months, as somewhat of a rock album or a hip hop album. We don't have a schedule of when they come out, but when they do come out, they bang.

You hear about it.

Yeah, yeah. So. So trust me when I say this, NFT Fest that you saw in 9th, November 2022 will be coming back in some way, shape or form like you saw it. I just don't know whether that'll be the back half of 2023 or potentially 2024. But what? Regardless, we will run some form of event in, in the back end of 2023.

Amazing, mate.

I remember being in Melbourne a maybe a week or two before NFT Fest and we met up with you at the venue and mate, you were on your 47th coffee, you were just on the phone to vendors, you were taking people around, there were photographers, you explaining stuff to everyone. Steve was there, he was cooked, your team was cooked. And I thought these poor bastards like Ben and I felt really tired. So much so we walked, literally walked past the chicken burger spot. And Ben even forgot to be like, let's have lunch there. We went to a pub two doors.

Down my favorite chicken burger spot, Burgers in Melbourne, my favorite chicken burger spot ever. And we just walk straight past and go to this shitty pub. And as we're walking back in the Uber, I'm like, what the fuck? That's my favorite chicken burger shops right there. But seeing you guys, man, I was energetic after seeing you guys.

And I remember, Greg, you were saying, like, a few weeks after the actual event, you're like, I'm still cooked. This is stupid.

Well, one of the. One of the things we actually did that I'm yet to see an event in the entire world do the same is we actually paid our speakers. We paid 50% of ticket revenue right back to the speakers. So every speaker ended up getting close to, like, 500 bucks for 30 minutes of their time. And it took me essentially three to four weeks. And Rochelle, my co founder, just slogging it out, as, you know, following people. It's never been so hard to actually give people money, like, but in a way, this was like a reflection of how good the event was, you know, because so many speakers said, I don't want to be paid. That was wonderful. You gave me a platform. You don't need to pay me. You guys have it. But we were a little bit of sticklers because we had said publicly two months before the event, we're paying speakers. We didn't want to go back on our promise. So we actually still have, I don't know, a handful of speakers that still. We have to follow up all this time, you know, six months later. But I don't know what we're going to do with the rest of that money. Maybe donate it to charity or something like that, but. But yeah, so it's a lot of work. It definitely took a lot out of me. That one in November. I think we're a little bit understaffed. It was probably three and a half months lead up. Three months lead up, you know, seven days a week, 12 to 14 hours a day, like, and that included Sundays. Like, I think. I think I took one day off where I went to the races during spring carnival, and that was it. It was just nose to the grindstone. To pull off an event of that size with, like, three people. That's a lot.

That's a lot.

Yeah.

Ben, mate, now's your time to hit up Greg for your 500 bucks, mate.

I did offer.

Oh, like, keep it, man. Keep it. Okay. This will be a good, you know, segue, you know, Craig, your background in, you know, in marketing business, you know, investing, event, you know, development or running. You've obviously had an education, and one of those piece of education was an mba. And Bergs has also done his mba. And we had a bit of a conversation over a fair few drinks one night a few weeks back around that you did your mba and he sort of Noted that you didn't get as probably as much value as you know what. I've heard Bergs talk about how much value he's got from his mba. So I want to just touch on and I just don't have any education so I'm going to be the referee. What I want to go deep on here is like you're both on your mba, polar opposite opinions. I want to give the floor to both of you. I think we're doing like three minutes each. Right. And then we might just go toe for toe. So you're basically going to give the floor to you and Greg will start with you because you're the guest. You get the, you get the home, home head start. Just to give your explanation of why you know, the NBA was valuable to you, maybe where you did it and how it has or has not helped you in your business world.

Yeah. So I'll maybe I'll get a little bit more dramatic than, than you know, just for the sake of the segment course. But I do think that university degrees MBAs are a depreciating asset. I firmly believe that.

And the why I say that is like I'm not talking about if you're going to medicine school or you're studying some type of sciences. Like I'm not, I'm not a university fudder. I think that and I actually think RMIT do a really good job with their like blockchain center.

Right.

There's some other universities out there that are just trying to force it but they've actually got some genuine people that understand the space there. But in terms of like business degrees, the amount of practical applicable things that I've learned in both an undergraduate degree and then I did an international exchange program in LA for a year that was awesome from a lifestyle perspective and contacts I still keep in touch with like the Lakers beat writer for the LA Times and stuff. Like I met all these cool people while I was in that, that environment. But my, my, my undergrad and my mba.

Other than probably a handful of classes like I remember doing some psychology classes like on consumer behavior and I think they were quite important. I was like I lucked out with one guy, Paul Harrison I remember his name was and you know he, he was sort of getting me to understand how consumers brains work in general but just how humans think. Right. And so, so that was valuable but all these like dry management classes and I think it's hilarious how they teach like you know in business degrees you'll have like three management classes that you've got to do. And it'll be like, you know, HR heavy and it'll be all this like pontification about like big organizations and you know, this person, that person, there's all stuff that's like essentially been born out of the, you know, 50s, 60s, 70s, and they're still cramming these old ass textbooks and theories down people's throats. And then I got someone that'll get up there and say like, you know, oh, we're going to do a topic on entrepreneurship and like, and they'll say like, so essentially a business, you know, is it needs to either have, you know, a high, it needs to have a low cost or a high profit margin and like all this crap. And I remember one, one night I said to this guy and I was like, you could tell he's just like a lifetime teacher, you know, 40, 50 years of teaching the exact same content. And then I was like, what about a business like the Iconic that like ships closed to your house? And he's like, what's that? And it's, I just don't think that, I just don't think the practicality and like, it's almost like universities to a degree feel five, ten years behind the current times. Right. And it's sort of, you know, marketing classes that I was doing and maybe I'm showing my age, you know, like in terms of like when I actually did my classes. But you know, I did my MBA in 2012, 2014 undergrad, I graduated in 2008. But it was, you know, marketing was always like the four Ps price, placement, promotion. Yeah. And like, yes, that's a good framework. But ultimately like marketing is about attention. And you know, Gary Vee actually has this really great line. It's like, it's all about underpriced attention. And what he means by that is if you're a marketing manager and you've got a million dollar budget, right. Your job is to efficiently spend and get the most out of that million dollars of spend. Right. And what, what platforms are you going to put into? You're going to go old world and go newspapers and billboards and radios and that's what universities were still shilling, you know, when I was doing my stuff. And granted, when I was doing a lot of my things, the emergence of digital channels and targeting hadn't really got that strong yet. But I just think the practicality lacks a lot. And I'm a practical person in the sense of that's why I learned how to use Metamask and crypto. And go down the rabbit hole and I just think there's a lot more you can learn in a YouTube environment a lot more you can learn in a podcast environment and by doing than just having this like quote unquote prestige of getting a piece of paper now last thing I'll say before I hand the mic over to Bergs is do I still put it on my CV? Do I still put on my LinkedIn? Yes I do because I still think it carries brand value. Right, that's what it carries But I think the content and the practicality is a depreciating asset.

That's great man. Just quickly before I hand the mic over can I ask what this asset costs? Roughly what does an MBA cost?

Yeah, it's a good qu. I mean we're very fortunate here in Australia I know my undergrad only costs like maybe like five to seven grand a year or maybe a semester but the school I went to in LA because it was a direct switch I just had to pay my regular hex here in, In Australia that was 42000 US it was a private school Loyal or Marymount University.

Private school in, in LA 42,000 tuition us a year and this is back in 2006 seven like I lived with a couple of rowers in a, in a house and they were on a scholarship and their scholarship essentially is worth 250,000 USD over the course of their four years my MBA I think cost.

20 maybe for the three years but when you compare it to the outlandish prices that US colleges charge it's night and day.

Yeah Bergs, you've got the mic.

I'm really sorry to hear that Your MBA sounds really shit mate. That sounds horrendous like old timey folks teaching you that we'll kick off with when I did mine So I graduated uni in 2005 for my undergrad and I started my MBA in 2015 so roughly 10 years.

Where should we kick off? Okay, it costs 60,000, that's how much it still costs today. I graduated in 2019.

And my experience was completely different so all of the units like the people that we had in the lecturers were at the top of their game. They were exploring the latest science, the latest research when you are actually referencing, you're referencing those people and an example would be entrepreneurship. They'd literally bring in entrepreneurs from people that are running digital businesses. I'll give you an example because when we first started we're like oh marketing, gross, let's do that unit first had no idea what marketing was. So of course they teach you that, you know that the 7Ps product price, promotion place, people process physical evidence, they teach you assos matrix, all of these like fancy two by two things. First day we learn a concept and then the lecturer literally brings up the website of shoes of Prey and he's like here, this is how they do it. They're holding your hand, they're building trust. You've got these digital touch points, you've got this consumer guarantee, they build it in this way and it's just highly applicable to things that are existing in the world today, which was amazing. And on top of that, just with marketing, for the first seven weeks we literally were competing in teams and we had to on the software and we had to get together, we had to work out what our budget was, what we were creating, how we were creating it, how many units. Then the actual software would run and the next week we'd see how we actually did, how many units we sold, how much lost sales we had. And we're applying all the marketing concepts and competing against each other to see who would win. On top of all the other assignments and everything else we did. I found things like organizational behavior phenomenal. So just learning about leadership, mindset, motivation, incredible strategy was my jam. Love that. International management, even things like economics and accounting and tying it all together, data driven decision making. It's like each time you do this, you're just learning a new skill set, you're learning a new language. Like the majority of people in my course were just hungry. Like they were there to get after they enjoyed being there. We did have the people that were like, oh, this is just a piece of paper. Like I'm just here to tick this box so I can get another job. I would say the opposite of it being a depreciating asset. Like this is the one thing where not only the skill set I've built, but how am I able to apply that knowledge now? And what an MBA does is MBAs float, they don't sink. That's the whole thing is to be a generalist. Like when you go for an undergrad degree, let's say you do computer science, your skill set is narrow like this, an MBA that will turn you into a T model employee. So if you're just like this, you know computer science, you know nothing about managing teams, leadership, accounting, economics, legal, you know nothing about that. But an MBA will make it so that if you go into an organization, you at least have the words and limited understanding from a management perspective, you Understand the principles that you can talk to those people in the organization and you will not sink. And I cannot recommend an MBA highly enough. And honestly, the questions I've got for you, man. So it was a very short period of time between your undergrad and your mba. Like about four years or something.

Six.

Six.

Six or seven. Yeah, yeah.

And what job were you doing at the time you started your mba?

I was, I had, I was in basketball, but I was just about to switch over to golf.

Yeah. And what was the role?

Marketing, Communications and sponsorships.

Yeah, so that's actually a really good role. So one thing I noticed in my MBA was when people have finished their undergrad and it's also age dependent and work experience dependent. Some did it too close. So mine was I had 10 years worth of work experience and then my MBA went over four years because I was doing it three units per year. And that was amazing because I was in a management position, I was commissioning a hospital and I could apply every single unit to what I was actually learning. And they encouraged that. The assignments you have, you apply it to situations you have at work, like applying organizational behavior to this one situation we had between two teams within the hospital, actually presented it to my boss and it was just so valuable and it helps you think through all the things that you're doing. One thing I noticed was that when people either didn't have the experience or was too close to their undergraduate, they really didn't get that benefit because they weren't really able to apply if they're in kind of entry level positions. And where did you, where did you do your mba?

My MBA was at Deakin, which I think you fudded off. It was sort of like when, when I sort of. You were like, yeah, that's like the sappy seals of MBAs, I think.

So this is an important point as well. When you're choosing an mba, right. A lot of it is, you know how there they call it prestige, right. But what you want to look at is who are the lecturers there? Can you look them up? Are they leaders in their areas? And then which other people do they have coming in? And then what do people actually say about the MBA and what are the results? Like good universities will post their results. Like people earn at least like 90 something percent of people earn 180 grand within six months of finishing their MBA. The ROI is insane. You'll see that on the UWA website and also see if they're accredited. So Deakin or not equals accredited. So that's one thing you want to look at they're not part of the goate. So just being one mindful of that when you're actually selecting it. And also the other things they give you in the mba, like day one, we went to a networking class so they bring all these experts in in different areas and it was like, oh, like oh fuck networking or we better go to. This is going to be super lame. But no, this bloke just told you how to have conversations and it was simple stuff like who are you having a coffee with this week? Who are you having lunch with? And he gave us examples of people just keeping other people up to date with what they're doing in very simple ways that just compound throughout your life and really open doors for you and all of those extra kind of things is what you want to consider if you're going to make this investment into an mba.

I think you make some really great points and I would say two, two things you talked about a generalist, like it opens your mind and sort of opens you up to sort of having that mind. I think, you know, we all talk from our own personal, you know, experiences. Right. I think something that I'm probably actually really good at and just in general life is I actually am a really good generalist already. So that to me is probably another reason why I probably didn't enjoy the MBA as a, as a whole. But as you were talking about some of your experiences, Bergs, which sound fantastic and I'm very pleased that you, that you sort of had somewhat of a polar opposite experience to me is I did do two electives that were done essentially in two weeks. I went down to the Deakin Warne Ponds campus and did these intensive like 5, 6 day where you stay overnight, you get accommodation there and then you essentially get one, one elective done in, in, you know, that would normally take 12 or 13 weeks in one week. And I did an entrepreneur one where entrepreneurship one where you had to come up with business idea Shark Tank style, sort of pitch it on the Sunday night, broke into teams and then you intensely worked on something and then you had to present it like five or six nights later. That was an amazing experience. I actually loved that. Right. I really did one thing I would. So. So it wasn't like I had a completely negative experience. But I still stick by my, by my point that I think unless you're going down a really corporate path in your career, I do think it's a depreciating asset. I still stick by that statement, particularly for the costs that it that it attracts particularly, you know, whatever you're paying and, and the US market's even worse. I think the amount of learnings that you can have that are for free or just widely available on the Internet for a small cost in my mind for a lot of different roles is of more value. But I completely take your point on board. I do want to ask one question of Ben though, on this topic. Ben, when you hired Bergs, did you look that he had an mba, did you care and did you value it?

I, I knew that it was super smart. It was a proof of work hire, not a. Because he had his mba. I knew that he had his mba, but I didn't hire him because he had his mba. I just knew he was a fucking killer strategist and covered the areas that I'm not good at. So if he didn't have his MBA, but it was still Bergs, 100% I'd hiring.

Yeah. Because the last, the last five people that I hired in my golf role, shout out to a few of them, Bray and Cat, if you're listening, did not give a about Literally couldn't care less.

Yeah.

Didn't even look at it.

Yeah.

But yeah, yeah, you're spot on. Where an MBA will get you the interview, but it won't get you the job. And just because you have an MBA, yes, it signals something. But not all MBAs are the same.

Right.

It doesn't mean you're of a certain quality. I know people that did my course that are absolute potatoes and I would never ever hire in a million years. So, yes, that just tells me you've done something and you've passed something and you've had that experience. But for you to do the job, I need to know you've actually done those things in your life and you can demonstrate it to me before I hire you.

Do you think. Last question on this. Back to you, Bergs, because I am really enjoying this, this combo.

Do you think an MBA and traditional university conditioned you in a way that makes it difficult to potentially explore entrepreneurial pursuits? Even though I'm sort of contradicting myself saying a minute ago that I did this entrepreneur class at uni that I loved, but that was this, like this one week, sort of, you know, sort of dip the toe in the water. But do you think that it conditions you to sort of being okay, well, you know, this is a corporate environment. This is how management structured. These are sort of the patterns and behaviors that I need to follow. Do you think that it has a conditioning element to it.

I think it Definitely can undergrad 100%. My MBA had the opposite effect for me. So what actually ruined my mindset was working in a not for profit and government where it's a very closed mindset, it's not a growth mindset, it's zero sum. But when I started doing my MBA and I started learning this, reading the research, looking at the case studies and business cases, that's another thing with, I didn't touch on business cases. Amazing. So they'll have like an industry problem within Coca Cola or another company or a small one and you have to pick apart that problem. That's generally what you do for your exams as well. It's a heap of fun and you learn a lot. It's very practical and you can see what they actually did in practice. But this actually made me more entrepreneurial during my mba. I actually started consulting with Ben because I could apply all of this knowledge. I was like a moderator in his group and I'm like, you're doing all these things, I want to apply it. The thing they don't do is MBAs are designed in general terms to manage larger businesses. That's what they are. Or go into management consulting and who can afford management consultants? Medium sized to large businesses, that's what they're designed for. That doesn't mean you can't apply it to smaller businesses and still have those lessons there. So for me it had the opposite effect. And there's there's other, say probably 80% of people it would affect to have a closed mindset. That other 20% would be people that either want to change careers. I had a lot of teachers that were doing MBA so they could shift to other careers and people like me that wanted the learning, the understanding and go, oh shit. All this stuff is just clicking in my life now. I understand it and I want to apply it to this area now.

So as my takeaways on this conversation, those are really good. My biggest takeaway I think it really, really depends. And it might be obvious though is that who's delivering the message, who's delivering the content. Because in your experience, Greg, it sounded like there was just this. It sounded like when I was at college, this old dude trying to teach you manual entry bookkeeping, you know, and I'm running my own business going, mate, how did the do I reconcile? Zero. He's like, no, we don't do that in this class. We do pen and paper. I said, well you can get the fuck out, I'm leaving. That's where I Quit, right?

Yeah. So mba, if, if that actually happened, we would complain because the classes are expensive. They're 5 to 6,000 class. We'd be like this ain't it dirty. And that's happened a couple of times. And that booted that lecture after two weeks and brought another one in.

Well, bugs, that's interesting because you mentioned that Your course was 60,000 where Greg's was 20,000.

I, I think it was, I honestly can't remember.

Yeah, you know, and, but to your point, Bergs, it's like, you know, you had entrepreneurs come in, you had like, you know, guys right at the sort of the cutting edge. That would be amazing to listen to and I'm sure you would love to have that as well. But it really depends, I think on the deliverability.

I, I don't think I'll be asking Deacon for a sponsorship for NFT Fest after I've funded him for the last 10 minutes.

You're on the no fly list.

Yeah, but any other universities out there.

Let me know you're gonna go home and short Deacon. Maybe it's changed since then, mate. But I remember for strategy I think we had Adam Pa in who worked with the F1 and he was one of their managers and strategists and he was telling us about the F1 and how they got like a pit stop down from five seconds to like three point something and how it's weird because you're traveling everywhere with your competitors and you're sharing technology and how clicky it was and weird and gave us the proper insights and they were just open to any question. We had the head of Uber come out when like Uber was just popping off in Australia before Uber Eats and he came out and talked to us and we just grilled him with questions about how things worked, like how they move fast, what their team looks like. It was incredible.

You know what, you're a theme that's coming out there, Bergs to, you know, with the enthusiasm that you speak. There is access to people. Right. That maybe that you couldn't have got access to previously. Yeah, I probably think that that access, if not even better, exists just anywhere. Like I'm sure Ben, just off a social media presence and sort of some of the content that he posts like again back to. I can't remember we said it on air or not. I'm speaking to a guy, Ben Roy tomorrow who's, you know, deep in the NFT art space. We follow each other on Twitter and we're going to record a podcast together. We've never even had a conversation. And I just think this, like the Internet just opens everything up. I was speaking to Kevin Rose on a Spaces the other day. I know, I don't want again talk too much about Kevin. We've spent a lot of time at the start of the show, but essentially, like to me, access has almost become democratized, right? So this old world of like you needing to be in a university at a, you know, a school that's got prestige and history and whatever, right? Like, I don't think you need to necessarily pay for an MBA to get access to that. And so like, yeah, it obviously worked well for you. So I'm not, I'm not trying to denigrate your experience, but I'm just saying that I think that, you know, to me that's a little bit of an old world mentality that you need to be at a university or you need to be in this elite program just to get access.

I agree completely. And I would rate proof of work and leverage of the Internet much higher because that's something you own, is something that compounds over time, something that you have built. That being said, that takes a lot of fucking time and effort. You have to put yourself out there and it's a very hard thing to do. We're doing it through, doing this podcast, right? And you're out, you're on Twitter, Greg, you've got your podcast, you've got a conference, you're putting in the work. And absolutely, that is because think about this, Pete. You ask someone to come on your podcast, they're like, who the fuck is this guy? But they, they Google you, they look you up, they see, you know, the articles you've done, the conferences you've run, the content you put out there, and immediately I already know this is a quality guy. I'm going to work with him. Rather than a CV that says I have an MBA on it. And that's the difference. It's proof of work.

I'm going to wrap this by saying like, you know, in my experience, I think it's about following one your passions, one where you have interest. And that is different for different people. You know, I think where you've landed now, you have that audience, you have that access, you have that ability. But for Joe Blow down the street, who doesn't have a profile, who doesn't know anyone that wants to get into business or get access, may not have the same opportunity that we do, and we've all had, you know, very different experiences. And, you know, I'm a part of the entrepreneur organization which has been like the most sort of structured learning that I've had after leaving school and that's phenomenal for me. It has at Access it's, it's sort of, you know, built out sessions where you have, you know, with peers and that's been an amazing learning for me. But it's not courses, it's not reading. You catch up every month with other founders and you talk about your problems. It's like therapy. And that's fucking amazing for me because it gives me that, that access to talk to other business owners. That's what I enjoy. Right, versus the MBA and you have the access on your online. So I think it's just different for different people. And you know, I think it's if you can doing that test, you know, like, you know, for me I got a few, you know, a few months into College, year 11, I was like oh fuck this, I'm out, right? Test and iterate and if it's not for you, you know, move on.

I think that's a really, really good point Ben and I, I'd say Berg's probably some of my, my negativity towards it too comes with the baggage of parents and former generations or older generations thinking or force feeding that universities and college is the only way. And I think that often, you know, Ben's talking about essentially horses for courses, right? Like your entrepreneur group, you know, the way that I'll get access, the way that Bergs wants to go through his journey and he's had a great experience with his mba but there's still a society norm that exists is sort of like well really if you, the only way is, you know, you go to school, you go to university, you know, you might get a master's, you get a job and then you know, you retire at 65 or whatever. And that sort of goes back to my conditioning question before but I think it's been a really, really good conversation.

It's been good, it's been good. I actually think we might wrap it there because that was, that was, it was a really deep.

Informative for me. I sort of got both sides and I'm still undecided. I don't think I have any place for an MBA right now. But like I think down the path if it's the right thing and if that's those, those foundational things that I want to get access to and if it's the right way that I want to learn, I might try it. But for now no, I think I'm okay.

We do need to, we do need to say one small shout out.

Do need a shout out. Yes.

Yes shout him out Friends down the road from where we're recording literally next door. Yes GT and Jane from Oshi Gallery I believe it's the one year anniversary since they took the keys so shout out to those guys if you don't know Oshi Gallery it's an NFT gallery essentially bringing to life art experiences in a physical and digital realm Very, very good supporters of the These industry and OGs of the space and I do want to say Ben, you tweeted out a photo of you and your mum this morning at what event was that last night?

We're at the FinTech Australia Awards last night.

Yeah amazing tweet and genuinely think that that was awesome like you know yeah.

I think that mum but she was over the moon she absolutely loved it so she took the day off work and flew over and I think I would have been. There was 300 people there. I would have been the only one with my mum there and it was, it was awesome.

She loved it.

She was talking crypto she was like oh you know blockchain.

She's like you.

Yeah, it was awesome. So yeah, it was a really cool moment.

Yeah awesome.

Greg, where can people follow you? You know obviously your cointelegraph stuff, shout it all out upside down. Give us the beans.

Yeah at Greg Oakford on Twitter and upside down. So yeah, upside dao.comau didn't talk too much about that today but maybe for another time and thanks for having me.

On the show no worries. Yeah we'll definitely have you back because there was some stuff we didn't get into but that was an epic conversation Bergs did anything else you want to add?

No mate, that was a fantastic conversation. Thanks so much for the first of all for just showing up and beating and beating Ben at golf but just for giving us a really like in depth view of the NFT like where the space is at, where industries are at and your view going forward that was just invaluable mate thank you so much for that.

No thanks Bergs. I appreciate it I doubt it though that we'll be doing an MBA together soon.

Hey Uwa within their business school has a blockchain division mate, cop that.

Hold on. We have omitted one last thing. I'm apologies, apologies as we wrap as I take over your show we need predictions. NBA Finals Miami versus Denver. Who's going to win and in how many games?

Denver and four.

Denver and four sweep Joker's got the sweep out bergs.

I'll go Denver four as well.

Okay. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say Denver four one. I think it's. Yeah, it's gonna be a bit of a whitewash. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I was hoping Boston would have won, to be honest. A little bit more comfortable. But anyway, I think, I think the joke is just, it's just too strong.

Too good.

Too good. Guys, thank you so much for listening as always. We'd love for you to share this with a friend if you know you've got some people in crypto or in NFTs or maybe thinking about doing an MBA. Just genuineness sports or just anyone that you think would love this podcast. It's the way we grow the channel. So we'd love for you to share it around. Please hit the subscribe button. Leave us a review, good, bad or ugly. And you can always tweet at us Ensimpsonau and at babybackburg. You've got Greg's details there. We'll put him in the show notes. Thank you so much, team. We'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks so much, folks. Thank you.