On Episode 19 of the Zero Rights Reserved Podcast, hosts Toady Hawk and Prof Werder sat down with Roy aka Zeneca, founder of ZenAcademy and the 333Club, cohost of the Two Bored Apes podcast and beloved web 3 educator! 

We talked with Roy about his journey, from playing poker professionally to teaching NFT-curious people when to hold'em! We ask what it was like to build ZenAcademy through the bull market and the bear, talking about the realities of founder burnout, and why he believes that many projects should concentrate on building communities, not necessarily companies. 

And of course we had to ask Roy for his takes on Nouns and CC0, a topic he has written about extensively. We hope you enjoy this conversation with a true legend of the space! 

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Timestamps:

00:00 - Communities and Companies
01:58 - Intro
02:57 - Poker Days
03:50 - Crypto journey
06:00 - The difficulty of HODLing through multiple crypto cycles
07:35 - The “Zeneca” backstory
10:23 - Zeneca x Seneca wen?
11:06 - The Zeneca Spreadsheet Era
13:43 - Experience building a community during the bear market
16:16 - Lessons learned from the previous cycle
18:11 - “Infinite Regret”
22:00 - Taking profits when you know all the project leaders or are in the public eye
24:47 - The Denizens PFP Collection
28:28 - ZenAcademy DAO?
30:57 - How can NFT projects grow without extracting from their communities?
32:00 - Communities vs Companies
33:37 - Recent tweet announcement about the future of ZenAcademy: https://x.com/Zeneca/status/1731669637572796634?s=20
35:00 - Being honest about burnout and mental health
39:28 - Zeneca the Writer
42:00- The importance of education in this space
44:00 - What is Zeneca looking forward to most in this coming cycle?
48:00 - Roy on Nouns 
51:00 - Thoughts on CC0 and other IP experiments
56:00 - Roy on Royalties
1:00:00 - Crypto / Poker Overlap
1:03:00 - Outro

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Podcast recorded by Toady Hawk, edited by Toady Hawk and JackWyldes. Hosted by Toady Hawk and Prof Werder. Music by SuperTightWoody.


Zero Rights Reserved, please remix and reuse our content in any way you like!


Produced by The Noun Square onchain media collective. Follow @ thenounsquare on Twitter for daily content about Nouns, NFTs, Ethereum and more or visit https://tns.wtf to learn more about us. 

Watch in HD on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/M5VLY2jJgLI