MAX IMPACT EP. 408 Nounish Impact

Recorded: Jan. 26, 2024 Duration: 1:23:01

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Let's grow, Todie!
We got Will T. in the building.
Welcome Daniel.
Here we grow.
Let's grow.
Everybody, Tod, let's grow in the comments.
Bottom right.
And the show will begin in just a few minutes.
Hey, get the emoji dance move growing.
Everybody tap an emoji to the beat.
It's Friday, baby!
Once upon a time, there were beings who wanted to create something.
These beings carefully guarded an aspect of consciousness called light.
At different times, these guardians of light met and worked together in the different realms
of reality.
And they designed a time when their plan would go into effect.
These beings are you, and that time is known.
And each of you knows, in the deepest portions of your being, that you have come here for
You are beginning to feel what may be coming.
Hello and welcome, everybody, to the Maxim Packed Show!
This is the live podcast that is all about empowering you, the changemakers, to maximize
your positive impacts in the world by leveraging the latest and greatest of technology.
With me today is an absolute legend in the nounish space, in the spaces space.
The founder of the Noun Square, which has done more than 500 episodes.
They do spaces every single day, onboarding people into Web3.
And they've also forked nouns recently with the Yellow Collective on base.
So I'm really excited to get into all of that and the whole nounish ecosystem.
As you can see, I'm repping my public nouns today.
It's a special day for it.
Todie, we have a tradition here, and that's to always start with why.
I want to ask you, what is your why?
I'm talking about your personal why, your inner drivers, your motivators, what gets you
out of bed in the morning, what fuels you to burn the midnight oil.
How would you describe the why of Todie Hawk?
GM, GM, Jimmy, thanks for the invite.
Nice to be here.
What is my why?
Well, I think I have a long sort of history of entrepreneurship in the meat space prior
to coming on chain.
And I think the biggest shift for me when I started working at Web3 is just being in control
of your own destiny, being in control of your own finances, being in control of your
own identity.
These are all things that I always was so frustrated by doing business in the meat space, dealing
with banks.
Banks are just terrible to deal with as an individual and even more difficult to deal
with as a business and often cases.
So those were the driving forces that made me want to sort of shift gears and go sort
of full time Web3 like three years ago.
And so I think that's why I love working in this space so much is just because you
can kind of help other people make that understanding, too, about, you know, why it's so much better
to just own, own everything about yourself instead of being beholden to, to, to others.
Okay, so you're in meat space and then you're learning about having the first
frustrations with the banks.
I feel like everyone has had frustrations with banks at different points in their life.
Like what were some of the frustrations for you?
And then in your view, how exactly does Web3 solve these frustrations?
Well, just generally, anyone, like you said, anyone who's dealt with a bank in
empty capacity has been frustrated by them at some point, I'm sure.
But anyone who's run a business and dealt with a bank knows that, you know, banks
love to tell you when and how you can spend your own money, when and how you can do your
own payroll.
And there's all sorts of frustrations that come with that sort of thing.
And especially when it comes to payroll, you know, you don't mess around with that.
People need to be paid when they're going to be paid.
And so when banks would, you know, make it difficult to do what you need to do as
an entrepreneur, as an owner, it just gets frustrating.
So yeah, and obviously, you know, dealing on chain, you just take custody of all that
stuff, which, you know, comes with it, some responsibility and some risk, of course.
But, you know, the risk reward is pretty good, in my opinion.
Okay, so you realize that, you know, a serious problem can be solved with Web3.
And you're, you know, went into that space.
How did you then get involved with nouns?
How did you discover the nouns ecosystem, or maybe even before that, like, what were some
of the first moves that you made in Web3 to then get involved and become the 700th noun?
Well, everybody has their own story of how they became crypto-pilled.
And you know, mine is maybe a little bit embarrassing in the sense that I was actually
kind of crypto-pilled by Sailor, the Bitcoin Chad, watching a podcast with him.
And he was just talking about how he was so convicted of Bitcoin being the future that
he had put, you know, X amount of his treasury for his company into Bitcoin.
And I was like, Jesus, this is crazy.
And I started going down the rabbit hole and doing research about it.
And that ended up that week with me doing the same, putting a bunch of my reserves
from my company and my own personal life into Bitcoin.
And then I just kind of fell down the rabbit hole from then.
That was 2020.
Obviously, things were kind of crazy that year, as we all know, with COVID and whatnot.
And crypto obviously went on a crazy tear.
It's always a lot easier to get onboarded to these things when things are frothy and
Kind of fell down the NFT rabbit hole.
You know, my first NFT was a pudgy penguin, shadow pudgy penguins.
And I kind of got a little bit burnt out, though, after a few months of like riding
that wave.
And then I found cryptodes, and I did cryptodes and I got sort of super involved
with that community.
And it was like a breath of fresh air compared to the previous like frothy few
And anyone who lives through that era of like early NFT bull market vibes will
know that it was just all about the numbers and pump and dump and, you know,
that can really tax you very quickly.
And then cryptodes was like just this island in the sun where everyone was just
saying vibe, vibe, vibe over and over again.
And I really related to that and made a lot of friends in that community.
And I loved that it was CC0.
I started falling down the CC0 rabbit hole.
A little bit of context, too, is that in the meat space, most of the work
that I did was around branding and marketing.
And so the idea of like just making your complete brand open source was really
interesting to me, really caught my eye.
It was actually in the cryptode community that I met someone who was launching
a nounish derivative project in the I guess I would have been December of 2021.
I kind of knew about nouns at that point, but just sort of peripherally,
I didn't really dig in.
I was maybe even a bit intimidated by the price of of the daily auction
because at that time they were still going for like 90 East in the peak
bull market vibes.
So I was like, you know, that's not that's not for me.
I'm not there yet.
But I was interested in a lot of these smaller derivative projects
because I loved, you know, the look of them.
I love pixel art.
And so I ended up offering volunteering to help this project launch.
It was called Noun Punks.
You might remember it.
And I just started doing Twitter spaces for them
and helping with their marketing and getting them off the ground.
They helped them make out their project and then worked with them
for for a little bit, sort of helping them build ties
with the rest of the noun diverse.
And that's kind of how I started in nouns.
And just literally, it's been a rabbit hole since then.
I've just gotten deeper and deeper entrenched in and, you know,
contributing to this community in many different ways.
I'll pause there because I could probably talk a lot longer about nouns,
but I don't want to blabber on.
Yeah, so for those who are kind of beginning to learn about nouns
and, you know, what it's about, I mean, it's such a successful model
that it has been forked a bunch of times.
And you forked it recently.
And of course, I'm wrapping up public nouns.
We can get to that a little bit as well.
What is it about nouns that you think works so well
that has not only had so much success,
but is able to be forked in so many different ways
to continuously add value to the ecosystem?
Maybe just give a quick overview of nouns
and why you think it's so successful.
I think the two things that really stand out about nouns,
it's what really attracted it to myself
and what a lot of people love about it,
is the CC0 art and the slow governance model.
So I can kind of talk about each of those in turn.
But for one thing I mentioned a little earlier
that the CC0 aspect was really interesting to me
as someone with a background in branding
and just the idea of all these people all over the world
kind of coming together to create this decentralized brand
with no licensing on any of their brand marks or anything
was just a really interesting challenge.
And it was going well.
And I could see the benefits
of leveraging that kind of virality.
So that was really interesting to me
and still is to this day.
Everything I've built in nouns has also been CC0.
And so definitely trying to pay that forward
and keep the flywheel spinning in that regard.
And then the slow governance model, I think too,
is really important because at the time,
as I mentioned, all of these projects were launching,
10K projects, 20K projects,
thousands and thousands of NFTs
onboarding all these people all at once.
And not meant to be shot fired
at any particular other project,
but nouns by contrast being like,
hey, what if we just did one every day forever?
What if it would take 20 years for us to meant 10,000 of these?
How would that change things?
And how it did change things, in my opinion,
or my experience, I guess, at this point
over the past two years of being super involved in nouns
is that everything grows really organically.
Everybody, it's easy to welcome one person
into a community every single day.
And those values and everything can be super emergent
in that kind of a structure.
So you kind of like nouns becomes what it becomes over time
as it adds new people.
And even some of the challenges that nouns has had
with the DOW split that we went through last year,
whatnot, even that was like,
almost like watching a slow motion train wreck
because only one person can join every single day.
And so it was like something that we saw coming
for like five months, six months.
And so instead of it being like this giant nuclear bomb
of an event, it was just something
that we could like see coming down the road
and try to prepare for it on the social layer
and on the tech layer as best as we could
until it came to a head and then move on.
So I think those two things are the secret powers of nouns.
And when we launched the Yellow Collective last week,
which I'm sure we'll get into a little later,
we did sort of hem and haw,
but like what do we do daily auctions?
Like, is there enough demand on base
for there to be just one person joining every day
or should we go somewhere closer to where like little nouns
did with like 15 minute auctions?
Are we trying to build something a little quicker here?
And ultimately we were like,
just kind of landed on if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
We can always speed up the auctions later
if for some reason it didn't work,
but let's start with one a day forever
and see where it goes.
Boom, I love it.
So you allow anyone to use the artwork
and for their own purposes and you slowly onboard.
It's not like you build up and build up
and do some crazy marketing thing
and then you either mint out or don't.
It's like every day you're able to really onboard
and people feel welcomed into the community
because each day the community can really focus
on welcoming that one person that was on board.
It really sucks out the speculative energy too.
I mean, not completely obviously,
like I just talked about a DOW split
that was largely about arbitrage,
so you're never gonna get rid of that human behavior.
But if you put 10,000 people in a room
who just paid a bunch of different prices for the same NFT,
you're just inviting speculation immediately right off the bat.
All these people are just waiting to see
how much they can make off the NFT that they just bought.
It's not the best climate
to be trying to build any kind of community.
So yeah, could you speak a little bit more about that split
and why that took place?
Yeah, I'm almost sick of talking about it at this point,
but we can talk about it briefly.
I mean, the reality is that with any DOW,
with any community, over time,
there are gonna be differences of opinion,
especially when the DOW directly controls the treasury.
There's going to be some differences of opinion
about how that should be used.
In the case of Nouns, two things happened.
One, there was just a group within the DOW
that thought that the DOW should be more conservative
with their spending by contrast
to the actual state admission of the DOW from the beginning,
which was to be an open, decentralized art project
that freely spent funds to proliferate the brand
and do good and all these things
that sort of emergently became Nounish values,
while there was other people that just joined
and had a different view of Nouns,
and that's okay in a DOW, but then they wanted out.
They wanted out and they wanted to be able to leave
with the funds that they came in with,
but at the time, Nouns did not have
any kind of rage-quit mechanism, so you couldn't leave.
You could sell on secondary, of course,
but you couldn't just leave
with your prorata share of the treasury.
Adding onto that, there was another group of people
who are kind of famous in the space,
or infamous, depending on your perspective,
for identifying DOWs with treasuries,
where the token does not reflect the prorata share
of the actual treasury, and for lack of a better term,
attacking it by purchasing as many of those tokens
as possible, and then pushing the culture
and pushing the governance in a direction
to implement rage-quit so that they can take,
make a profit on that trade.
These are called risk-free-value raiders.
There's a few leaders in the space
that have done this before to other DOWs like Aragon.
They saw that weakness in Nouns,
targeted Nouns, and over an eight-month period,
were able to essentially tack on to the other folks
that didn't agree and push that to completion.
But Nouns responded to that in a,
I think what is a really positive way,
which is like, free exit is not the worst thing
in the world, it is, maybe it's a good idea
for anyone to be able to fork away
for whatever reason they may have,
and so just allow them to leave
so they can move on to keep building
what we're trying to build.
And so eventually that is sort of the solution
that was built, V3 was deployed last August,
and it allows any subset of Nouners
that owns tokens to trigger a fork
with reason or without,
and if a certain percentage of other Nouners join them,
then they can leave and form their own DOW
and do whatever they want, including,
but not limited to, taking out the money
from the treasury that they took with them.
So that's the quick and dirty on the fork,
but what I like to focus on from the fork
is that since then, I feel like Nouns
has been a lot more aligned than it ever has been,
and like pulling in the same direction
because we kind of got a renewed alignment, basically,
of those, if you're presented a 35 ETH payday
in the middle of a bear market and you don't take it,
I mean, that means you believe quite a bit
in the mission of the DOW,
and so the people who stayed
obviously really care about Nouns deeply,
and it's been pretty fun since then.
That, yeah, that does-
No, you asked.
You asked me.
Yeah, no, it's fascinating to learn, right?
Because, yeah, of course, DOWs have challenges.
To be able to build in a rage-quit functionality
like, you know, that far into it,
it says a lot about what's possible with DOWs,
you know, to adjust to what might be needed,
and yeah, that's super cool
that that led to good things
and being really high-quality, passionate believers
in the startup to really stick with it
and not take that out as well.
So, no, it's super cool.
And you continue to see buildings,
so yeah, I think we maybe went over this briefly,
but basically the concept as well is that
you can put forward proposals
in order to build things with Treasury funds.
So what are some of the exciting things
that you've noticed come out of that
in terms of what people have, you know,
successfully gotten approved by the DOW
to build with Treasury funds
and try to make an impact with it?
You mean since the fork?
What are some of the things that we've-
Or just in general, no, like, I mean,
it could be since the fork or even before.
Like, which proposals do you find,
you know, pretty interesting?
I love a lot of the media proposals
that we've done just because I think it's amazing
how inspired creatives get by the NAMISH IP.
One example would be Suprio and the Atrium folks
have been literally funded to make, you know,
a full-length animated feature film about nouns.
So I always like to kind of use the meme,
like, does your PFP do this?
Because I think that's something that only a DOW
like this could do.
I guess any other project could sort of make a movie,
but, you know, they haven't, so that's pretty neat.
I think it's awesome.
You can check it out at Nouns Movie.
They're actually appearing at a film festival right now,
so that's really exciting to me,
is that, like, you know, maybe in a year's time
or however long it takes them to finish,
you know, I can literally show my son
an animated movie about nouns.
That's awesome, I think, from a decentralized body.
Really cool.
And in a similar vein, there's a prop that's been funded twice now
called Noun Short Shorts,
headed up by Goldie Pix and Joshua Fisher and some others.
And that, and actually the folks from Robot Chicken,
stupid buddy if you're familiar with Robot Chicken
from Adult Swim Days, really cool.
They're doing their second term now of this Noun Short Shorts
where basically they just reach out to animators
who are already kind of entrenched in the industry
and they, you know, they basically say,
hey, how would you like to be funded, you know,
seven grand to make a short?
And you can make it about anything, there's no brief.
And we encourage you to make it CC zero,
but it's not necessary.
And it's just amazing to be able to do that
and go out to creatives and, like,
I feel like creatives are like, what's the catch?
Because they're not used to, you know,
we've talked to Stupid Buddy about this
when they came on our podcast.
And it was like, in that industry,
it's just unheard of to not have some kind of strings attached
when you're getting funding for this type of work.
And so for these creatives to be able to just be given
carte blanche to make, you know, fun, interesting stuff.
And the only string, if it is a string,
is that it somehow, you know, relates to the IP
that I think of Nouns as building a giant,
you know, decentralized brand.
And so these are the types of creative endeavors
that I think get us closer to it.
But at the same time, I also think,
like, we can celebrate Nouns funding,
you know, infrastructure as well.
An example might be something like Nouns Agora,
which, you know, we funded Yitong
to create this front end, this alternate front end
where we can do our own Nounish governance.
And, you know, they went on to ship that out
to the Optimism Collective and to the ENS DAO
and to some other DAOs.
And now those DAOs are all using that infra day-to-day
for their own governance.
And I think that that's the most Nounish thing,
in my opinion.
Not everyone agrees, but I think it's the most Nounish thing
possible is to, like, build things that we need,
but then also make them open source
and ship them out so other DAOs can use them
and benefit from them as well.
Of that, yeah, that camaraderie of open source
and focusing on the ecosystem and empowering creators
to, you know, who are going to onboard more people
and inspire more people and ultimately support
many different forms of creations.
And I understand that's part of the reason why
the Yellow Collective is getting started as well, right?
It's about supporting creators.
Could you give us the rundown on the Yellow Collective,
the fourth that you've spearheaded there,
and why you decided to set up Yellow Collective?
Yeah, for sure.
So maybe I could start with a brief description
of the Noun Square, which is an on-chain media collective
that I founded over two years ago
with sort of a mission of creating, well, first of all,
doing daily spaces about Nouns, but also creating,
you know, educational and hopefully entertaining content,
video content and otherwise across our socials
on YouTube, on TikTok, on Instagram,
and just with a goal of teaching people about on-chain life
from a Nounish perspective.
And we've always also had a big goal of onboarding artists
from all over the world because, you know,
artists love the Nouns IP.
And so, you know, we started out often
doing these kinds of art contests,
and we're always just blown away by the entries
that we would get still to this day,
but the entries that we get to our art contests
from people in the Philippines and Thailand and Africa
and all across the world, you know,
people see an opportunity to draw something they love
and potentially win a little bit of ETH,
and it's a pretty cool little flywheel
that we've managed to spin up.
And we've always had a goal, sort of a stretch goal,
to eventually spin off the artist-empowering side of that
into its own Dao or Dao-like structure
so that it could potentially have its own sort of mini flywheel
within a flywheel where, you know,
people would purchase the auction because they love Nouns,
they love, you know, L2s, and they also, you know,
wanted to be like a patron of the arts
for artists who are, you know,
who are trying to make it in the Nouns ecosystem
and in the Superchain ecosystem,
in this case on Optimism, on Zora, or on Base.
And the Yellow Collective was the sort of culmination of that goal.
And what the Yellow Collective is,
why it's called the Yellow Collective is because Nouns
originally had, their logo was a yellow background
with red glasses.
We did a sort of a spin on that with the Noun Squares.
We got our clock mascot on the yellow background as well
with a different color red noggles.
And also just took some inspiration from Base
with their on-chain summer with a little yellow emoji
and we were like, hey, it could be kind of fun
to make that into a little meme.
And that's how the Yellow Collective was born.
It is a full fork of Nouns using the Nouns Builder Protocol.
So one is born every single day.
The main differences are that all of the heads
are drawn by our community.
So kind of in keeping with that community focus
in terms of helping artists from all over the world,
we ran a contest in the fall.
Had over 400 people enter to basically create the heads
that would become the collective Nouns project.
We chose the top 52 and then we commissioned
three additional ones as homages to Optimism, Base and Zora.
If you go to yellowcollective.xyz,
actually today's Noun that came up
was the one that we made for Optimism.
You can see the little sunny Optimism head
with the super chain cape.
So 55 heads total.
All the accessories and bodies for now
are just the same ones from the original Nouns collection.
The backgrounds are a little bit different.
We've got a very light blue and a very light yellow background
instead of the traditional beige and gray from Nouns.
And all of the noggles throughout the entire collection
are yellow in our Yellow Collective color
to kind of give them consistency throughout the collection.
So we launched last week.
We decided to launch on Base
because it just felt like a good cultural match.
And Jesse Pollock and the team from Base
have been amazing with their support.
It's been going super well.
I think the average price on the auction over the last eight days
has been something like 0.5 or 0.55 ETH.
So really, really been super blown away
by how many people have been interested in joining
what we've been calling the Coolest Noun Chain Club on Base
and excited to see where it goes.
Not ready to call it a success just yet.
We're only like one weekend, but so far so good.
Congrats, man.
That's awesome.
I'm so happy for you.
And yeah, okay.
So you said it's a cultural fit to build on Base.
Can you tell people a bit more about Base,
why you think it's a cultural fit,
and what's the bull case for Base?
The bull case for Base...
Well, let me start with this.
The bull case for OP stack, okay?
We had to make decisions early on
about which L2 we wanted to explore,
because again, with an international audience,
we had, for example, a collection called Nomo Nouns
that we meant as kind of a proof-of-attendance token
on every show that we do, every Twitter spaces.
And it used to be on Mainnet when we first launched it.
And it got to the point where, like,
during Pepe Mania and stuff last year,
nobody was going to mint $1.50 proof-of-attendance token
because it was costing them $50 in gas.
And so it just ruined all the fun for everyone.
We were like, okay, we obviously have to make the plunge now
and figure out an L2 to migrate to.
And at the time, we looked at sort of all the options.
Base wasn't around at the time yet,
neither was the ZoraNet, but we looked at OP
and we were like, okay, we like the culture of OP.
It's very Nounish in a way.
It's very, you know, all about builders,
all about supporting artists, all about open source.
It's a collective.
It's a DAO.
They're all about governance.
You're like, okay, we're just seeing a lot of parallels here.
And even though there's lots of other great options,
lots of other rollups that have great tech stacks,
like Arbitrum, et cetera,
we just thought that culturally,
OP was showing early signs of, you know,
what I call winning the culture war, you know,
bringing builders over because the vibes are good,
which is a highly, highly underestimated factor
of why people choose to build where they build.
So that's kind of where we got the bug for OP.
When we started our podcast last year,
we have a biweekly podcast called Zero Rights Reserved.
When we started that,
we wanted to also mint those in addition to, like, traditional,
more web-to-distribution.
We wanted to also mint them and make sure they were all on chain.
And the only problem was that they're big files, right?
So we have a podcast like this podcast.
If you were to save it as an audio file,
it probably wouldn't be that big,
maybe like half a gig or something.
But when we have a video, a video podcast like ours,
it was coming up to like two, three, four gigs,
sometimes depending on the length of the podcast.
And Jacob from Zora sort of approached us like,
hey, like, I'm going to help you get these on chain.
And, like, personally made sure that the limit
that they had on their IPFS was high enough
that we could get those on chain.
So at that point,
we started putting all of our podcasts on Zora.
So now we've got, you know,
our daily editions being minted on Optimism.
And then we've got our biweekly podcast being minted on Zora.
And so when it came time to figure out a launch plan
for this collective, we were like, you know,
maybe it makes sense for us to do like an infinity gauntlet here
and like get our last gem and try base.
And that's kind of how we started looking into it.
And we opened that conversation with Jesse
and the rest of the base team.
They poured into their launch with On Chain Summer.
We were just like, okay, we made the right decision.
We're definitely going to get a lot of builder energy
and this is the right choice.
So that kind of takes you through, I guess,
our evolution or our thinking
and why we decided to build on the OP stack
and more specifically why we decided to launch on base.
Super cool. Yeah.
Thank you for shining light on that.
Also very bullish on Optimism.
I think a lot of regions are, I mean,
retroactive public goods funding is phenomenal.
So it's cool that there's this whole ecosystem of L2s
that are being supported by Optimism as well
and the OP stack and yeah, that's super cool.
By the way, friends, if you're listening to this right now
in the Twitter spaces, if you want a triple shout out
from me, all right, type let's grow in the comments.
I will not only retweet that,
but I'll also pin it up to the jumbo and read it out.
Okay, it's the end.
Triple shout out.
All right, type let's grow.
Is this like rainbow points?
Is this like Jimmy points?
Yeah, you get Jimmy points.
You get three Jimmy points.
Three shout outs from Jimmy.
All right, you got to retweet.
You get a pin and I'll read it out.
All right.
Happy days.
A lot of people who are listening, and by the way,
I think it's super cool that you're putting your podcast
on chain.
I've seen recently the Green Pill podcast is also going
on chains.
You can like mint that and like vote on future guests,
which I think is really cool.
So Max Impact is currently in the process of getting
incubated by Let's Grow Dow to launch a podcast as well.
What would you recommend in terms of launching a podcast
the right way, the right web-free way?
You think we should also think about Zora as you're
What do you think is the best way to do like a web-free
I don't know that we've gotten it all figured out yet
because it's hard enough to launch a podcast that's
interesting in the first place.
Lots of people have tried.
Many have failed.
And so we've just kind of focused on getting really
great guests and having really great conversations
that hopefully are in and of themselves evergreen
content that we can also use in our media collective.
That's been our primary focus.
Yes, we have put every single episode on chain,
but I think we'd be lying to ourselves if we said
like that was our primary distribution method.
I'd love that it were, but it's just not there yet.
You know, if you want people to actually watch the
thing, unfortunately, it needs to be in some kind
of an RSS reader and or on YouTube at the time.
So usually when we drop an episode of the podcast,
it goes live on X and then we give a link directly
below one to mint a fully watchable version of the
podcast on Zora, one to watch it on HD on YouTube
and another one to listen to it on your listener
watch on Spotify or your podcast app of choice.
I would love to be able to get to a place where
literally it's only distributed on chain.
I just don't know how.
I don't know how to get there.
So I'm still trying to figure that out is the
real answer.
Fair enough.
Yeah, of course, you got to be everywhere.
I distribute everywhere.
I think it's the anchor tool that allows you to
auto distribute on like a whole bunch of different
platforms.
You know, those ones, but honestly, if you're in
video podcasting, you better get ready to do the
work because there's really none that do.
There's not no tools that will actually get you
to all the places that you need to go.
And that's because you want to be on YouTube as
a video podcast, not as an RSS audio only feed.
And so we end up having to upload to, you know,
YouTube separately and then and then put it on
Spotify as a video and then and also mint it to
So a lot of a lot of replicated work at the
moment, but hopefully it's worth it to get broad
distribution.
Yeah, no, it's great stuff.
Okay, so a lot of people who listen to Max
Impact are thinking about public goods,
regen vibes.
So and today is the day that I swap PFPs over
to my public nouns.
And I was asked recently by Nico Gallardo,
who's in the space now, of like who started
public nouns?
And I was like, I will find out for you.
I don't know.
Do you know anything about the origins of
public nouns?
How it started?
Who started it?
Anything that you can shine light on about
public nouns as a fork?
You know what?
One of my co-hosts on the Nouns Square,
Joshua Fisher always jokes and says,
if you can come up on stage and stump Todie
about nouns, you get a prize.
But I think you did just dump me.
I don't actually know who started public
I know some of the people who were involved
in it and I've been sort of following it,
but I don't actually know who was the
person that started it.
So I can try to find out and come back to
you, but I don't know.
Fair enough.
No worries.
All right.
Well, I'll try to come up on the show
and stump you.
You better find out.
Maybe Joshua will have to give me a
Get that prize.
Well, yeah.
And so it's just high level about public
nouns friends.
It is very similar to the Nounish
And, you know, but of course, the
Treasury is intended for public goods,
specific related stuff.
So I've seen some interesting
proposals go through there.
It's a bit more affordable.
It starts at point three three.
I was only one of it on mine.
So that's what I scooped it up for.
And people have been applying for
like five.
I think in some cases 10 East and
the Treasury is 135, I think.
So yeah, if you're interested, check
out public nouns.
So you said that it's Nounish.
And I've heard this term Nounish
and, you know, the being open
source thing is Nounish.
What does it mean to be Nounish?
Like I know like it's all Nouns,
you know, Dow and the ecosystem.
But like deeper than that, like
yeah, like what are all the things
that it means to be Nounish?
Perpetual question of the Nouniverse,
for sure.
What does it mean to be Nounish?
The only answer that you really
can give that's accurate is that
Nounishness, like all values in all
Dows, is emergent.
And so what might have been
considered Nounish in the early
days of Nouns might have changed.
It might have evolved.
Hopefully it would change and
evolve as, you know, the number
of the number of members has,
you know, grown exponentially
and also has changed in and out.
But I guess some, I can,
all I can tell you is what I think
is Nounish to me.
And what I think is Nounish is,
like you said, open source ethos,
CC0, builder energy, supporting
artists, supporting builders,
doing public good, doing things
like funding $100K to the
Gitcoin crypto advocacy round
just because we have the means
to do it.
And it's an important, it's an
important thing to fund.
So funding things not with an
expectation of a monetary return,
not doing things always for a
specific monetary ROI, but
rather, you know, maybe a return
of attention or a return of
public good.
These are all things that are
Nounish to me, but someone else
might have a different answer.
That's awesome, man.
That's super cool.
That happened as well.
And I also saw on Givith, like
the Christmas Givith round was
also sponsored by Nouns as well.
Or was that any public Nouns
sponsored the Givith one?
So it's cool to know that,
like, yeah, public goods are
already like a part of the core
Nouns ecosystem.
But then there's like...
That's a cool example of the
flywheel at work, though,
It's like, you know, you can
have Nouns, which lent its IP
and some funding to public Nouns,
which has now become its own
thing and is funding a round in
Givith, which is then helping
these other people from that.
And same thing with the Yellow
Collective, you know, with all
of our treasury being earmarked
for empowering and funding
artists from all over the world
and creatives.
These are people that are being
funded by people who are buying
into the Nounish ethos, even
though it's not the original
Nouns DAO.
It's a new DAO on base.
And so that's kind of the
beauty of the CC0 and the open
source vibe is that it does allow
for a lot more reach for these
Definitely.
Yeah, that's such a cool
flywheel effect and how it's
been able to multiply through
the builder ecosystem.
You can build this.
You can...
There are like these tools
that are made available.
I mean, I don't think they've
really supported them so much as
they've just made it possible
for what they've done and for
their success to be replicated.
And that kind of comes back to
the CC0 thesis, right?
Like, Little Nouns is a great
They've done a lot of work.
They've done a lot of work.
They've done a lot of work.
They've done a lot of work.
They've done a lot of work.
They've supported them so much
as they've just made it possible
for what they've done and for
their success to be replicated.
And that kind of comes back to
the CC0 thesis, right?
Like, Little Nouns is a great
They did receive some small
amount of funding from Nouns
early on for deployment costs.
But it's not like Nouns was
like, let's spin out a
franchise.
We're going to give $100 to
Little Nouns.
Like, Little Nouns, you know,
bootstrapped that shit.
You know, Dot and the guys that
were behind Little Nouns, they
drew all that art.
They used the IP and they put
their own spin on it.
They did the work.
They launched.
They built their own community.
And that was all kind of
enabled by the Nouns IP and
also definitely bootstrapped by
the community that already
existed in Nouns.
And it was already, you know,
already loved Nouns.
So there was a lot of things
that like Nouns contributed
that weren't monetary.
But fundamentally, it was just
someone that said, this is
I'm going to do it.
And then just did it.
Love that.
Love, love, love it.
And yeah.
And in terms of like empowering
other people to take
initiative and things like that
are like, you know, the general
I mean, it's also cool that you
can you can nominate.
It's not necessary entirely to
own a Nouns NFT to put forward
a proposal.
If if you have contacts who are
a part of the ecosystem and
they believe in what you're
doing, they can kind of like
nominate your proposal.
Or like sponsor the proposal.
That's a really good point.
I'm glad you brought that up
because that's something I always
like to explain to people about
Nouns because it can be hard to
understand when you look at
You say, oh, there's only 300
Like how big could the community
really be?
How how large could the impact
really be of 300 individuals?
But the reality with Nouns
and something that's always
enamored me about it is that
it's actually this weird
community where like, yes,
there's like a small body of
of holders who actually hold the
NFT, but then there's like
these concentric circles
expanding out from that center
of people who are building on
Nouns and then people who are
fans of the people who are
building on Nouns and people
who are just fans of Nouns in
And you get to that outward
circle and maybe it's like
10,000, 20,000 people
who are fans of Nouns and are
participating in the ecosystem,
even though they don't own an
actual NFT.
And that's something that's
pretty unique, especially in the
NFT world.
Like you wouldn't see like if
you go to Pudgy Penguins
I love Pudgy Penguins.
I think what they're doing is
But I would hazard to guess that
the vast majority of people in
that Discord own a Pudgy
And I think that's something
that's a little bit different
about Nouns.
And to your point about
proposals, one of the things
that kind of got overshadowed by
the DAO split when we did the
V3 upgrade in August of last
year is what you're talking
about, which is a new
governance module that allows
anybody to put a proposal up
for a very small amount of
ease just to avoid spam.
And you don't have to have a
It's called a candidate.
You can go to Nouns.wtf or you
can go to Nouns.camp or you
can go to Nounsagora.com.
Those are some of the places
that you can go to put a
proposal up.
And you just put it up as a
candidate and you wait.
And ideally you go to places
where Nouns talk like on
Farcaster and the Nouns channel
on Farcaster and you tell
people about your idea.
And if you manage to convince
two Nouns worth of people that
your idea is good, they can
sponsor your idea and it goes
on chain.
So pretty cool.
You know, pretty neat in the
funding sphere because I don't
think there's many places in
the world alone in the Web3
world where you could
potentially put up an idea for
let's just say 100 East for
this amazing idea.
Convince two people that it's
a great idea.
Convince 30 more that it's a
good idea.
And then, you know, have 200
grand in your bank account or
in your on chain bank account
as it were a couple of weeks
It's pretty awesome.
That is super awesome.
And yeah, so I know with the
public Nouns you need three
nominations for a proposal to
go through for voting and
people are typically asking
like five to ten kind of
Ethereum in those proposals.
Is it the same for the main
Nouns where you need three?
In Nouns it's actually a set
percentage of total circulating
So it was one.
It was one Noun for a while
after the Dow split and now
it's just recently gone back
up to two.
So now you do need to either
own two Nouns or have two
Nouns worth of people vouching
for your idea in order for it
to go on chain and be voted
That's for the on chain piece.
There are other ways of
getting funding in Nouns.
The main other way would be
through either a sub body like
TNS where you can get funded
to do art for contests and
whatnot or something like
Prophouse, prop.house where
you can, there's always
rounds being run for, you
know, one ETH, two ETH, five
ETH where you can put your
hat in the ring to get funded
for smaller initiatives.
Super cool.
I love learning about the
ecosystem.
Friends we're more than
halfway through the spaces
so it is your turn to
shim on up to the stage.
Bring your questions, bring
your queries, bring your
comments.
Don't be shy now.
Tap the mic in the
bottom left and get on up
We want to hear from you.
So this is a bit of a
left field question but where
do you get the glasses?
Like IRL.
I think so many people
are wearing the Nouns
glasses and they're super
This is a cool story and
actually one of the
favorite ones that I like
telling about Nouns because
it really demonstrates sort
of the CC0 flywheel in a
really real way.
And that's that Nouns has
never once commissioned
anybody to make physical
versions of the Noggles.
It's never been a dowry
decision to be like we need
physical Noggles.
Who will make them?
But rather instead several
different groups from all
over the world have just
taken the initiative and
some have been funded and
some haven't to just make
Make physical Noggles.
Noggles are the Nouns
glasses that all the Nouns
Make physical ones that
people can wear at events
or in my case I wear them
when I do my podcast, this
type of thing.
So motivate me.
You might know him from
He's been the community
leader and one of the
founder of the Toads
He made a bunch for NFT-NYC
that you'll see a lot of
people wearing.
One person who was funded
to make Nouns glasses was
this Noun who we still
don't know the real
docs identity of,
Salvino Armati, who made
a prop to make designer
sunglasses that are super
high end.
So you'll see sometimes
people wearing those ones.
We've got Klim, Big Shot
Klim, who's made a fun
version of them.
They're comically large, I
So some of you would wear
at a convention or whatnot.
So if you've ever seen
someone wearing oversized
plastic Noggles, those are
the ones that Klim made.
I think they're in Brazil,
if I'm not mistaken.
And they have made a set of
Noggles that they're
selling made with recycled
Really cool.
They take plastic, they mix
it together into different
And they've made a set of
Noggles as well.
So that's like, I don't
know how many I named, but
like six or seven
different groups that have
just taken it upon themselves
to make these Noggles.
And I think it kind of shows
you the kind of passion that
can be ignited when people
are a fan of a project, you
know, rather than just doing
a job because they were
paid to do it.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's, that's the power of
intrinsic motivation, right?
So you said precious plastics.
I want to get it.
I think they're on Twitter.
I think they're on Twitter
Precious plastics.
I don't know.
I think that they just made a
new Twitter called Precious
Let me just double check here.
Oh, Precious Noggles.
Pat Precious Noggles.
Make sure you give them a
It's a pretty new account, but
they are, uh, the Precious
Plastics is the company that
does the recycled plastic and
Precious Noggles.
Uh, uh, to make sure that
they're working on a custom run
of, of yellow collective
Noggles right now.
They're going to be going out
to the first, we have like a
swag pack that we designed for
the first 30 token owners of
the other collective.
And it's going to be like a
And it's going to be like a
It's going to be like a
It's going to be like a
And uh, Precious Noggles are
working on those Noggles for
Pretty excited about that.
Look at that.
NFT utility straight out of the
Of course, there's a lot of
utility with, uh, we hate the
word utility, but swag is the
only good thing.
Look at that.
NFT utility straight out of the
Of course it's a lot of utility
We hate the word utility, but
swag is the only good thing.
Swag is the only good utility.
If that's your only utility,
you haven't done it right.
I think with NFTs.
It's a bit of swag, but, you
know, it's super cool that
there is that like one
unifying thing that no matter how many forks spin off, you
know, they're all kind of unified under this nounish umbrella
with it with the cool glasses and the pixel art. So we
mentioned little nouns, we mentioned public nouns, we
mentioned nouns, sorry, Yellow Collective, of course, it's the
OG one. What other nouns forks are there that you might find
interesting?
Sorry, which ones did you name?
Little nouns, Yellow Collective, public nouns, these are the ones
that I'm aware of.
So that we've got Nars Dao, which is a great one. It's a
really thriving community. It's a nouns fork that's all about
supporting adventure athletes, founded by Oksigami. So really
cool. Love that community. And they just really have a thriving
community all over the world. So that's really cool to see. I
think like nouns, forks as subcultures is a really good
thing to replicate because when there's already a subculture
there as like a skeleton, it's really easy to build on top of
and Gami has definitely shown that to be the case. So much so
that from Nars, another subdao was born called Alpstao, which
Gami was involved in and also Ben Boddy, a friend of mine. And
that one's all about Alpine lifestyle as well. And then the
heads are all kind of like around that theme. So there's a
couple more that right out of the gate. There's a bunch of
regional ones, which again, like I talked about building nouns,
forks on top of subcultures, well, you know, regional or
geographic. Forks are also a great example, because you know,
when people already speak the same language and have the same
cultural touch points, it's so much easier to build from that
from that point as well. So we've got nouns Brazil, which
has some really great art. There's nouns amigos, which is
a sort of based out of Mexico, but a Latin American group.
We've got that several, several in Japan, we've got
nouns down Japan. And then we have P nouns from Japan. There
is what else? There's a lot. There's a lot. If you can think
of an area of the world or an area of interest, there's
probably someone that's launched a nouns project for
that. And that's kind of like the double edged sword of CC
zero. But yeah.
See the cool man. Yeah. I mean, well, I think it's, I
think this is a great thing that nouns is put forward, right?
The builder. Thanks. If you guys just go to nouns builder, I
think it is. Yeah, nouns dot no, nouns dot build.
Nouns dot build. Yeah, now shout out nouns builder. We use
their tool to launch the other collective and it's an awesome
That is amazing. So yeah, if you're looking to get, you
know, start a web three project, that's something to really
consider. You don't have to know about the code. There's
even like, art built into it, the whole treasury system, the
auction, it's open source, there's governance, whole
I will say one thing, though, on that, if I may, and this is
something that a prof worder, a friend of mine, who's the
community lead for nouns builder, often repeats is that,
you know, not everything has to be a DAO. It's great for
things to be DAOs. DAOs can be really interesting. But not
everything has to be a DAO. And, you know, more importantly than
that, if you are going to launch a DAO or a DAO like
organization, you need to have a MVC, the minimum viable
community, before you even think about launching a DAO. You see
so many people that just sort of go for it. There's
nothing wrong with that, inherently, but it's really
hard to just literally bootstrap a community by, you know, by
trying to start auctions where nobody has any demand or
interest or knowledge of what you're trying to do. So my
recommendation would be to build a reputation, build a
community over some amount of time, whatever that might be
before launching a DAO. But when you're ready, then
nouns builder is definitely the best place to do it. And
actually, they're just in the process right now, of like
making it even easier than ever to launch on L2s, which is
super exciting, because a lot of DAOs that launched
previously on mainnet ended up, you know, coming to a
halt, because people didn't want to pay 50, 60, 70
dollars just to settle each noun every day. And so that
became a problem for a lot of communities. Well, now, you
know, that's not a problem, like with the Yellow
Collective, for example, has been costing like five
cents to settle auctions. So no problem there, lots of
people willing to do it. So I think that's going to
cause hopefully, if all things go well, and the bull
market continues, we might see a Cambrian explosion of new
DAOs and new interesting organizations launched on nouns
builder this year.
Just DAOics. But yeah, no, good points. But yeah, there
are some prerequisites to that. Build your community up
and, and then launch the DAO. But it's also cool that it's
kind of stealth mode too, right? You can steadily grow
it and grow, but yeah, you need to have that, that
underlying. So look, Todi, you've been crushing it with
obviously some of these daily spaces and the podcast, and
you've clearly built up a community as well. And I know
a thing or two about building communities. So on that
note of that being the prerequisite, what do you
what do you recommend as far as community building if
someone is starting out wanting to make an impact in
web3 and build out their community? What are some some
steps you recommend taking?
All I can say from what we've experienced at the noun
square is just show up and be there every day. I think
that's a huge part of the equation. You know, I don't
think it has all that much to do with all the members
of the team, myself included, even though I do love
them all. And I think they're all very talented
people. I just think like being there, never
leaving, you know, we never left during the bear
market. We were there every single day doing spaces.
I think today's space was like our 580th space in a
row without missing. And not only that, but our
spaces aren't even at the same time every day
because we did this, we decided to do this crazy
thing where we follow the nouns down auction
around the clock. And because the settlement time
on the auction can change a little bit every day.
That means that every day the auctions are like
15 minutes, 20 minutes, sometimes an hour later
than the previous one. You know, so we've gone
around the clock literally four times now with
our team hasn't been easy. It's been fun, actually,
I think mostly, but we've been able to build this
like interesting, awesome community that's not
necessarily North American centric all the time.
We've got people from all over the world because
we kind of slide in and out of different time
zones. But the main like core tenet of what
we've done is just showed up, showed up every
single day. And, you know, there's probably
other stuff, other advice I could give as well.
And if I had to pick one more, it would probably
be just be flexible and listen to what the
market wants. And when I say the market, I
don't mean like in a very financialized sense,
I mean like your your your community or your
customer or whoever you're doing what you're
doing for just like try to be responsive to
what they actually want and need. And if you
do those two things, you probably will grow.
There you grow. Love it. Yeah, that's, I agree,
a big part of it and super inspiring, actually,
every single day. Like, yeah, I try to do five,
six days a week sometimes. And but yeah, no,
every day, like, to be fair, you're doing these
all yourself, though, which is quite an achievement.
I could never have done 580 in a row by
myself, especially not all around the clock
like this. So we definitely have a good team
of people that are helping us to do that.
Primarily two of us that are hosting the
spaces, but even that makes it a lot easier
to be able to trade off and help each other out.
So still quite an achievement to do
four hundred and eight spaces by yourself.
So thank you, man. Appreciate that. Yeah,
but okay, so that makes sense. There's people
all around the world to be able to make
all those different time zones. Do we go all
the way around the clock four times?
Come up here. So let's go right ahead.
Feel free to raise your hands or I will call
upon you and then we'll move on to words of
wisdom and conclude. Yeah, go ahead, Nishal.
Hi, Jimmy. Hi, Tony. Yeah, I'm new to the
noun space. I'm really excited to get into
the community. I seen a video on YouTube
and I liked the whole concept of paying
it forward and doing something from the
bottom of your heart, not expecting
anything back. And I'm new to Web 3.
I just want to learn a lot. I just would
like to find out if you guys have any
kind of guidance on how to learn about
this tokens and NFTs and where I can get
information because the more I know,
the more I can spread the word.
And I'm just a beginner, so I really
want to learn. So if you guys can point
me in the right direction or I can come
into spaces and just ask questions, is
that okay? But if there's some way
that, you know, there's literature that
we can go and learn about Web 3 and
NFTs and how it works in the chains
and all of those things, I'm not a
developer of any sort. So, you know,
it's a bit confusing. I have done a
bit of reading, but I need someone
to basically hold my hand and just say
this is what it is about. But thanks,
thanks for letting me come up and
speak to you guys.
Jimmy, did you want me to take that?
Or did you want to go first?
Yeah, no, please do.
Sure. The best advice I could give
from my perspective, I said there's
two sort of ways that you can hear me.
Or maybe you can't hear me.
Yeah, classic rug bug. Okay,
Nishal, if you can hear me, stay put.
I'm going to drop you down to a
listener and then bring you back up.
Okay. Okay. So you should be able to
hear you as the listener, but I'm just
going to invite you back up. So you
go ahead and accept that. And then
we're going back up here, Nishal.
So he gets back up, so it doesn't
get lost in that wonderful period
where you can't hear anything while
you're being added to the stage.
Yeah, I'll fill the void while we
wait for him to do that. I was
literally just answering this
question from John. John, by the
way, is the person who got me
into public nouns. He's like, yo,
did you get one? I'm like, he's
like, oh, there's one with the
tree thing. And I'm like, all right,
great. So shout out to John
Ruth of the Solar Foundation. But
he was saying, he was asking how,
you know, what would you recommend
in terms of educational stuff? And
for what really helped me are these
nonjudgmental, really welcoming and
informative Twitter spaces. So, you
know, there's a lot of them out
there. The two examples that gave
them that tweet was Will T's space,
Kingfisher's Corner, and then also
Geezer's and Crypto. So the reason
I gave those two examples is this
is literally like the community that
onboarded me into Web3. It was
like the social bees. They were live,
talk about showing up and not
leading. They were literally on
spaces 24 seven for more than 60
days straight. They've been going
currently again for like 80 hours
straight. They have this
monster's freemen thing going on.
But basically, just be able to go
in there and just ask any question
you want, share your ideas, get
feedback from people, and be able
to explore these different things.
It's great, but there's a lot of
great YouTube classes out there.
Nichelle, I've invited you back
up, buddy. I don't know if you
threw it off by it. He should be
able to hear you as a listener,
Yeah, I can just sort of speak to
him and if he's able to come
back up later than great. The
advice I would give to Nichelle
or anyone else that's looking to
onboard is kind of similar to
what Jimmy just said, but find
safe places on the internet,
safe places on chain to go and
listen and learn. One of them is
podcasts like this. And also,
I hate to say link in bio, but
if you check out the now on
Square, which we founded, we
definitely do that sort of
thing day in, day out. Lots of
people have reported that they've
learned a lot from our show. So
I think that's a great way
certainly to learn about the
Nouns ecosystem and hopefully
the broader Web 3 ecosystem as
well. Nouns is a really great
way to sort of find your
footing in Web 3 because I
think the biggest obstacle to
people being onboarded to Web
3 is like needing money
immediately. Not only needing
money, but having to tell
people that you've got to put
your hard earned fiat money
into this new thing that you
don't really understand and
you don't know if you're going
to get it back and everybody
in your life is telling you
you're crazy to even think to
do it. So the one thing that's
nice about Nouns is you can
just kind of come and vibe
and learn about Web 3 and
potentially even get funded
to do art through the Noun
Square or funded to build
something cool through
Prop House in time once you
understand the culture enough
and see what's needed to be
built. So it's a lot easier to
onboard people when there's the
potential that they could
come and have a new hobby
and potentially even be
rewarded for their efforts at
some point down the line. And
on a similar note, I would
tell people to check out if
they're artistically
inclined or creatively
inclined, definitely check out
what Zora has been building
because I think Zora is like
doing an amazing job of
making it easy for people who
are artistic but not
necessarily on chain to just
learn about what it means to
bring their art on chain. Like
you can find someone, for
example, who maybe has a
small following on Instagram,
you could convince them to
put a piece of their art on
Zora for free. They can
literally quote unquote mint
their work for free on the
Zora network. And what happens
is the first person that
mints their work, and that
could be you if you're a fan,
pays the deployment fee, which
on the Zora network is
cents, not dollars. And that
person that mints first gets
a share of all future creator
rewards because Zora shares
the $1 of mint fee on every
free mint with creators. And
so you have this interesting
structure now where people
who have known nothing about
crypto, they just love art,
they're interested in the
technology, you can bring them
in, have them mint something
on Zora. And like a week
later, say it blows up, you
can be like, here's, you
know, here's $1,000 worth of
ETH, like much easier to
onboard someone, I'm telling
you, I bet you then saying
like, take $1,000 of your
own harder money and put it
on chain versus here's $1,000
that other people have given
you for your art welcome on
chain. Amazing. I love that.
It's so cool how this is
supporting artists who have
historically struggled, right,
which is sad, like art is the,
you know, the, it surpasses
any language, any language
barriers, everyone is able to
feel something from arts that
can move people, it plays
such a huge role in the human
experience, yet they've been
struggling more than so many
other professions. But the
fact that Web3 can really
change that and the fact
that things like the Noun
Square is changing that and
Nouns and Optimism are massive
grants for artists as well.
It's really exciting to see
how this is evolving and I'm
really grateful to be a part
of everything that's
changing here. Okay, unless
someone has a burning
question for Cody, raise your
hand now, or forever hold your
piece and we'll move over to,
okay, yes, grow ahead.
Hello, hello, hello. First off,
big, big shout out for the
consistency in Noun Square of
all the different hosts.
That's really, really not
easy over all that time and
it's definitely been a space
that I've been tuning into
quite a bit over the last
couple of months and it's
always, it's always something
different and it's still
always the same and so,
yeah, I appreciate that.
And when you were just saying
like the, the sort of the
welcome, like you get paid
for your art and welcome on
Shane, I feel that that is
a good sentiment that I
think is true for different
proposals that went through
Noun Star and so, yeah, I
think that's a good sentiment.
Earlier, you brought up the
culture aspect. What are some
of the things where people
maybe come in and do a prop
that fails? What are some of
the like not knowing culture
aspects that you've seen
that lead to a prop not
going through? Because like,
as you said, Nounishness
can be so like sometimes
different depending on who
you ask. I would say, yeah.
Yeah, I think the main
thing that you just touched
on is that like Nounishness
is a little bit amorphous
and so it does take some
time to learn what it means.
So sometimes people come in,
I have seen this happen
over the years. People will
come in guns blazing. Sometimes
they'll even buy a noun. I've
seen this happen. People
will buy a noun. They fall
in love with the idea of it.
They put up a prop
immediately. They expose
themselves, you know, very,
very quickly as not really
knowing much about nouns
culture. This, you know, is
something that screams into
the ears of nouns that you
haven't taken the time to
actually learn the culture.
The prop fails, they leave,
you know, doesn't happen
often, but I have seen it
happen. The people who have
been the most successful
builders in nouns have sort
of come in and figured
out, you know, what is
this project trying to
accomplish? What is the
culture of nouns and, you know,
how can I contribute to those
goals? And then, you know, I
guarantee there's ways
regardless of what your
strengths are, there's ways
for you to bring those
strengths to bear, you know,
to sort of the central
mission of nouns, but it does
take some time to figure
that out. And it's good
not to be, it's good not
to come into any community,
whether that be optimism or
Gitcoin or nouns or any
community that has a
treasury and is in the habit
of giving grants. It's good
to not come into those
communities with a sense of,
like, do you have a claim
on those funds, you know,
like it's better to come
in with an open mind, open
heart and figure out how
you can contribute versus,
you know, the reverse,
because I think the reverse
ends up being very easy
to read, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that's great advice.
Entitlement was the word
that was escaping me. Don't
come into these communities
with a sense of entitlement,
come into them with a sense
of contribution and your
experience will be much
Beautifully said. Tony,
grow ahead, buddy.
Hey, thanks for having me up
here. Tony, nice to speak
with you. My question is,
how do you think is the most
cost-effective way to get
involved in the nouns
ecosystem? Because I've always
looked at nouns as an
outsider. I've loved nouns
and everything they've done
forever. I just really like
the noggles and I've picked
up, like, some of the, like,
additions and stuff like that
and some of the fun are,
like, the nouns HDs.
But how do I get more
involved without having to
spend $50,000? I don't have
to spend. Like, what's the
best way to get into it?
I think that comes back to
sort of the concentric
circles diagram that I tried
to verbally draw earlier.
And I don't know if you were
in the space at that time
or not, but just how nouns
is very unique in the sense
that very few as a percentage
of the whole community
members actually do own
nouns. There's only 300
less than 300 holders. And yet
there's, like, thousands of
people who are fans of the
project and sort of building
in nouns are, you know,
are just interested in what
nouns is doing. So I think
the answer to your question
is you don't need to have
any ETH in order to
contribute to nouns. You
just need to basically
figure find your people,
right? And maybe your
people are the weirdos
that listen to the nouns
square every day. And if
that's the case, great. We
would be glad to have you.
Maybe your people are the
people who hang out in the
little nouns discord. They're
pretty good people. Maybe
you like extreme venture
athletics and maybe
Narsdow are going to be your
people. Maybe you're in
Brazil and so nouns
Brazil are going to be your
people. So just find your
people and connect with
them and, you know, build
friendships just like you
would off-chain, right? Not
everything has to be all that
different off-chain to
on-chain.
So it's pretty easy to join
the discord and hang out
because I know there's
usually a lot of token
gated stuff in discords. And
honestly, I haven't even
looked for a nouns
discord because I just
never felt like I belonged
to not having the NFT.
Well, this is going to
blow your mind, Tony, but
there is no such thing as
the nouns discord. So
nouns is one of the few
decentralized dows that is
actually not larping and is
really trying to build
communities that are not
centrally controlled in one
location. The people who
founded nouns had a
discord originally that was
called the Nounders
discord because they're
the founders of nouns. And
about one year and a couple
months into the project,
they made the decision to
shut down that discord to
allow other places for
people to communicate and
build relationships to sort
of rise up and bloom around
in a more decentralized
fashion, where the founders
of the project didn't have
the ability to, for example,
mute someone who they
didn't like what they were
saying, et cetera, et
cetera. You could think
of lots of ways that the
founders of the project
controlling the only town
square might be
problematic. So if you did
go and look for the nouns
discord, you wouldn't find
it. The only place that
you'll find that people
kind of get together and
congregate and talk about
nouns right now currently
is on Farcaster, which is a
pretty on chain native way
of chatting. We've got a
channel there where you
can where you can chat.
No moderators, nobody owns
it. You can chat there
about all things nouns or
you can jump on our spaces
at the noun square.
Obviously, you know, not a
decentralized place, but
that's the place you
could come to learn about
nouns and hang out. And
then there's all these
other little fractured
places, like I said, little
communities that you might
be able to find your
people. And many of them
have their own
discords and other places
where you could chat.
Awesome. Thanks so much.
I definitely didn't
realize that nouns didn't
have a discord. I am on
Farcaster. I got the
Warpedcast app. I think I'm
in the nouns channels also.
I'll keep an eye out.
Come say hi in the nouns
channel and say hello.
I'll say hello back.
I will definitely tag you
on Farcaster when I do that.
And yeah, I'm really
excited about all the
side projects like alps and
NARS and stuff like that.
And just feel like I'm kind
of starting to get in to the
noun averse, even though I've
been really interested in
it for a while now.
I love it.
I like to learn about the
noun averse for the first
time. So it's a fun
experience. Enjoy.
Super cool.
All right, friends. Well,
unless he's got a
Bernie question, we will
move over to our final
segment and that is words.
Did not mean to mute
everyone.
Final segment is words of
wisdom. Okay, so this is
where everybody has the
chance to share some wise
words. And by everybody,
I mean, Wilty and Toni.
We're going to end with
Toni. Wilty, what are some
wise words that you can
share with us before we
conclude the space today?
Where do I start?
Thanks for putting me on the
spot there, brother.
I would say,
listen before you jump
in feet first. Sometimes
that's some of the best
advice, especially in the
space of the marine
technology of new ways of
participating with each
other. You know, get involved
in some conversations and
just kind of tap in and
tune into what's being
said and learn everything
you can, you know, about
a community before
you decide to head first.
Great advice. And I think
that goes for spaces too,
right? Like, it's so obvious
when someone jumps into a
space and immediately
starts chilling and has no
context of what people have
been talking about. Like,
yeah, listen, try to add
value and good things will
stem from that usually.
Oh, but did you want to
add to that or are you
going to go into your
words of wisdom?
Yeah, I mean, the only words
of wisdom I can think of
to share, because I'm not
very wise myself, so I'll
borrow the words from
someone else. We had
Jesse from Base, Jesse
Pollock on our podcast
recently, and something
he said really stuck out
to me. And he said, if
you're trying to get
involved in Web3 was the
context. He said, just do
something at the
intersection of your
passion and this
technology. And I think
that pretty much sums up
my philosophy on things
as well. You definitely
have to find something
that you really love, and
then you go and you find
the way that you can
parley that into a way
of contributing to this
new paradigm that we're
building. So that would
be my parting shot.
That is, yeah, super
wise. The intersection of
your passion and the
technology, that is
really the sweet spot.
It kind of makes you
sound like some kind of
passionate cyborg, but
just go with it.
Just grow with it,
friends. Just grow with
it. Todi, thank you so
much for coming through.
It has been a huge
pleasure and an honor to
have you here on the
space. And I'm
definitely going to be
paying more attention to
everything that's
happening in the Nouniverse
and with the Noun
Square and the Zero
Rights Reserve podcast.
It's clear that you're
really about it and
clearly passionate. I'm
very excited to see where
the yellow collective
grows to. And yeah,
thank you so much for
coming through, friends.
Okay, I got a track
lined up for it to play us
out unless you have a
song request. Good, sir.
No song request here, but
I did just want to pin
something above and I
think you'll be okay with
it because it's an art
contest that we're running
right now. And if there's
anyone in the crowd who's
artistically inclined,
take a look at that.
We've got some nice prizes
lined up. All you have to
do is draw a collective
Noun at the race track
and looking forward to
seeing what comes out of
that one. But I'll be
happy with the track you
choose. Amazing. Yeah, I
know that we got Sunny
in here who is an artist.
Not only is he an artist,
but he knows many other
amazing artists. We got
Dorothy, who's an artist
and is also super talented.
We got Zana. Of course,
we got Centropic region,
who is my favorite Web3
artist low key doing so
many amazing designs for
us here. And I mean, yeah,
there are so many
phenomenally talented
people. James is also
making really great art.
And yeah, much love.
So thank you for doing
what you're doing. Empowering
creators. Yeah, anyone
who's listening to this
now or in the recording,
do the thing. Art
contests are fun. It's a
great way to get involved
and help you get
rewarded as well. Like it's
win, win, win, win.
So thank you so much.
You know what I was
going to say to you,
Jimmy, it's hard to find
actual organisms really
run contests and
actually pay prizes too.
And I was I was reminded
of that by the the raffle
that Mr. Beast just ran
and how like so many people
were comfortable
retweeting him because
they knew that he really
was going to give $25,000
out to 10 different people.
And I think it was
NASA today and it's like
he's built that reputation
as someone who does
what what he says.
And you know, we've
definitely done that
at the Noun Square too.
We've had we've run
so many contests over
the last two years
and we've we always
pay out their prizes
and have onboard a lot
of people that way.
So I think yeah,
it's find those find
those trustworthy sources.
Don't go around Twitter
trying to enter every
contest you see
because that's how
you get scammed.
But find the
trustworthy sources and
there are there are
lots of them,
especially in Nouns
where you can actually
get rewarded
for your contributions.
Yes, absolutely.
That is that is super crucial.
I've definitely seen
some question competitions
out there.
But but yeah,
that's the rep, right?
Do what you say
and say what you're
going to do
and keep delivering on that.
Build your web free
reputation out
and then and then yeah,
good things happen.
And that's that was crazy.
I saw that was like
many millions of
retweets and entries
into that competition.
And and yeah,
that's amazing.
So good stuff.
Yeah, I didn't I didn't win.
So of course,
you know,
yeah, my I do that too.
I hopes we're not super high,
but but yeah,
no, it's it's
nonetheless cool that
we're seeing more
Mr B stuff on X.
All right, Mike is back
and we're gonna play a song
by Fred again.
Friends, if you don't know
what what an emoji dance is,
okay, this is where you
tap an emoji to the beat.
Okay, it's how we get down
on the spaces.
I so when we put this out,
let's all do an emoji dance
together and then send it off
for an amazing weekend.
All right, cutie girl.
Much love everybody.
Thank you for coming through.
Much love to you
and all the humans in the space.
Is this supposed to be music,
I don't hear anything.
Oh, it's not plugged in.
Oh man, I know perfectly.
I'm getting down.
I'm seeing some hearts.
There we go.
Oh, okay, now we go.
Yeah, man, just the second time
go weeks where it is like
vibing out to myself,
getting down.
No one's hearing anything.
Okay, we got it.
We got it.
Yeah, it takes getting faster.
Alright. Much love friends. Thank you so much for coming through. Thanks for vibing out with your emoji dances. Until next time, keep doing what you love. Keep spreading love and making impact. Oh, Sintropic comes up right at the end. Look at this Sintropic. Let
you love. Alright, come up to the stage, bro. Come on. Alright, we can give it one more. One more musical. Alright, let's go hard on the last drop. Alright, here we go. Here we go.
Here we go. Building up. Get ready for it.
I love you all so much. From the bottom of my heart. I love y'all. Thank you. Make sure you're following everyone in this space left, right, up, down. Everybody in here is amazing. You're the best. Take care. Peace.