Some Future Day

Marc [00:00:00]:
NFts are back. Blue chip NFT collection cryptopunks experienced a record breaking 17 million in March of 2024 and is now the third highest ranked NFT collection of all time with almost 3 billion in sales. Companies like Gucci, Coca Cola, Porsche and Nike are already operating in web three's ecosystem, offering a wide range of value, including vip membership programs, special communities, exclusive perks and beyond.

Nikheel [00:00:34]:
Regardless of the amount of revenue up and down and the media excitement or hatred that comes and goes, how do we leverage this automation for the good of humanity?

Marc [00:00:45]:
Will the NFT community's next bull run kickoff concurrent with the world's biggest gathering in the space NFT NYC?

Nikheel [00:00:53]:
The most exciting thing is that when you look at nfts, it is about decentralized approach to take the power away from the largest governments and the largest businesses and the largest brands institutions and put the power back into the hands of individuals and small communities.

Marc [00:01:11]:
Ian Utili is a tension live CEO, an eight time co founder, four time entrepreneur in residence and a pillar within Silicon Valley, Ian has also been a key cognitive in the growth of NFT NYC and thus provides valuable insight about the category's future iconic digital artists and what role multinational corporations will play or not play in the future of web three. Ian, thank you for sharing your very personal, rich story regarding your californian heritage and joining me on this episode of some future day. Ian, Ian Utili, it's so nice to see you. Welcome to some future day. How are you?

Nikheel [00:02:04]:
I'm wonderful. Thank you for having me. Mark. I've watched your other podcast episodes with your incredible guests and it's an honor that you invite me to come be a part of this. I have a ton of respect for you and what you've done in the industry, and I love the way that you cast this optimistic vision and pull the gold out of your guests and have them kind of share both what they're doing and what they imagine the future be.

Marc [00:02:32]:
Well, Ian, talking about gold, you're a west coast guy and in fact you're a west coast family. I wonder, like, did your family start out on the west coast because of the gold rush?

Nikheel [00:02:44]:
We were here before that. That's a good question. So my ancestor founded the city of San Jose, and the way the family story goes is he second command of the spanish army lands in Monterey, California. Toward the end of his career, the general says, I'm going back to Spain, checking in with the queen. You're retired, Lieutenant Moraga. You do whatever you want. So my ancestor grabs the priest 18 men, all the women and children that were part of those men's family lands in the presidio, which is, like, where the Golden Gate Bridge is in San Francisco. He founds the presidio in San Francisco, establishes that military base, and eventually makes his way down south and founds the city of San Jose.

Nikheel [00:03:25]:
So he's the big 30 foot mural in the city hall building. And from him in 1776 until now, it's ten generations of entrepreneurs. And so we have a really cool family heritage in terms of just people that have lived here before the gold rush and have been a part of creating some of what the Bay Area has become.

Marc [00:03:45]:
That's, like, very interesting, particularly as it relates to responsibility of our generation. I don't know a lot of families. In fact, I don't know anybody that has a history like, but I do know families that have a responsibility to preserve their legacy. And one, for example, is a client of mine, Nelson Mandela's family. So I'm wondering, Ian, like, do you feel a responsibility to preserve the legacy of your family and your ancestors?

Nikheel [00:04:15]:
I feel like, in the best regard, my ancestors ceiling is my floor. So I have this opportunity to build upon what they've done. So for generations, they've taken risks as entrepreneurs here. They have involved themselves, invested into the government, into nonprofit work, into business development. And so I think part of that responsibility, that legacy side, is I can always look back at what others have accomplished and say, well, I can do it, too. Like, you know, this is an opportunity for me. If it's not a destiny, it's at least an invitation. And so I do think that it does make an impact on me.

Nikheel [00:05:00]:
When I started speaking at tech conferences about 15 years ago, I was young, so I didn't have much to say. So I'd come out.

Marc [00:05:06]:
Let me tell you about the first.

Nikheel [00:05:07]:
Great entrepreneur of the Silicon Valley, you know? And so I think that type of mentality that I come from, a long line of creators that have created things that did not exist and innovated here. And as far as responsibility, I do feel a sense of responsibility, both for the Bay Area as well as California. My parents, my mom's side goes back to the 15th century in California as a Native American. And then my dad's side, he immigrated. Our family immigrated from Europe. But I have this not only in the Bay Area, ten generations, but 20 generations in California. So there is a sense of responsibility, and I don't really know other people that have the same heritage, because many times throughout the last couple hundred years, it was just one of the children that survived, you know, back in the day, people would have ten kids and only one might survive. And so there is a sense of, like, a uniqueness to it.

Nikheel [00:06:06]:
So I don't make more of it than it is, but I do try to use it as fuel. And I try to say, okay, let's build upon what my ancestors have done, and let's rise to the occasion and not be discouraged and continue to press forward and work to accomplish these ambitious goals that I have always bubbling forth in my soul.

Marc [00:06:31]:
Do you feel that generationally we have lost a sense of depth of what has come before us? Maybe we could look back towards our grandparents, but we don't go further as, and I'm talking, like, in general terms here, like, as a society. And as a result of that, it hurts us. We tend to make the same mistakes culturally. We tend to make the same mistakes at a familial level or even in a business level. Do you see that as an issue?

Nikheel [00:07:04]:
I do. I do see that as an issue. I think it's an individual path. I don't think there's, like, a certain declaration that if everybody just woke up and got it, then that would fix this familiar issue. I think oftentimes we have a tendency to not be super self aware. And one of the ways that we can become self aware is not just psychology or, you know, going through the motions of dealing with your mental health or, you know, having the right community around you. Part of self awareness is also just knowing who you are based on where you came from. And history does have a tendency to repeat itself.

Nikheel [00:07:41]:
And so if you can look back and you can say, okay, there's bright spots and there's dark spots. In my past, my family were slaves. And in my past, I assumed my family were slave owners. In my past, my family were probably noble, valiant kings and queens and the most peasant, impoverished people. And so as you look back and you say, okay, history has a tendency to repeat itself. So in my family history, with my parents and grandparents and so on, what are some of the hangups that have happened and don't see that as what might, some might call like a generational curse, like, oh, no, I'm bound to repeat the same mistake, learn from those mistakes, and guard yourself in order to protect yourself and try to make better decisions, but also you're not guaranteed success, so you can't look back and say, well, my parents or my great great grandparents were this. So I. Therefore, this is my.

Nikheel [00:08:33]:
I'm going to have this thing. Well, maybe if you earn it if you put forth the consistent, dedicated, disciplined action to where you actually will have that and attain it. But there are no guarantees in life. So I think looking back through your family history can be really helpful in terms of self awareness and being both motivated and also, you know, maybe warned of the type of things that could be a hangout.

Marc [00:08:59]:
It's so special that you have that, and it's even more special that you have the ability to look back and perhaps understand a true knowledge of perhaps milestones or even maybe skeletons in the family closet through generations. I'm curious, is there any part of american history or California history that your family played a role in that is worth mentioning?

Nikheel [00:09:28]:
Well, I mentioned Lieutenant Moraga, who founded the presidio in San Francisco and the city of San Jose. So that's a great, noble one to talk about. I'll give you one that's not so encouraging, and that is the heritage of the Pacheco family. Many have heard of Pacheco Pass or the trail of tears. Well, the Pachecos were Native Americans from Mexico that came up to California, stole Native Americans in California, took them through the trail of tears, and sold them as slaves. So that's a terrible history. So. And the Pacheco's married the Moragas.

Nikheel [00:10:02]:
So on one side, 200 or so years ago, you have this family that has been seen through history, whether true or not, as noble, valiant, you know, effective, productive, the Moraga family. And then you have this other family. Whether accurate or not, history would tell us, is a family that left a lot to be desired, one that was plagued with alcoholism, gambling, all sorts of things that were negative in terms of the impact. And worst of all, stole their own types of people, Native Americans from California, and brought them down to Mexico. So, again, you can look at history. At any point, you can choose to say, well, here's the great stories, which are easy to share, but you also can choose to say, well, here's a real warning. Like, in my past, there was this family, and this family made these decisions, and I would never want to repeat those. And so I must be aware of what would cause them to do those things.

Nikheel [00:11:02]:
And how do I protect myself from ever doing similar things in our culture that today might be accepted? Even though we don't accept slavery, maybe we accept other things, and how do I protect myself in that way?

Marc [00:11:14]:
But here's the thing. Human nature is such that we often don't learn from our mistakes. I mean, you mentioned vice as it relates to gambling and alcoholism, and you mentioned slavery and in our world today, we still see all three of those elements. Slavery, gambling and excessive drinking, excessive alcoholism. What is it, in your opinion, that allows for humankind to keep repeating the same types of mistakes from generation to generation?

Nikheel [00:11:48]:
Mark, I think it's really, really hard to be a human. One way I describe it is we have the body of a beast and the mind of a God. So we have these very difficult swirl of desires of what we want. Pleasure, sleep, eat. And then we have these noble things of what we could be. Service, love, sacrifice. And so that's a big reason why there's a struggle now. Today, we don't have slavery.

Nikheel [00:12:18]:
And where you live? Where I live. But are tech companies creating slaves with their technology apps? So maybe that's the new slavery. So maybe I have to be aware, as a technologist, I may not be involved in kidnapping humans and selling humans to other people as slaves. That's not accepted in our society. But am I involved in technology development that would enslave people by getting them into the doom scrolling thing, where they never get out of the cycle? So that would be another way to look at it.

Marc [00:12:49]:
Well, we could talk about that. I think that's really interesting. But unfortunately, I think there are parts of modern day technology that are reverting back to terrible times. Maybe borderline slavery. Like, for example, as you are probably well aware, cobalt mining to help support major multinational corporations, including a lot of the electronic vehicle batteries in Africa. Right now, the cobalt mining is my understanding that it's become borderline slavery. It's high risk. And most of the people in those cobalt mines are youth, are children.

Marc [00:13:26]:
We live in a global market, and it's a global economy whether we like it or not. And yet we're still looking the other way towards these issues.

Nikheel [00:13:37]:
So that takes it even further. There's a direct correlation to. I'm a technologist. Am I involved in technology that's enslaving people's minds? But then there's every human is wearing clothes. So how much slavery is involved in making this apple watch? How much slavery is involved in these gator glasses or this Robert Graham T shirt? So when you choose to buy something, even a name brand thing, you can look back if you really want to. A friend of mine started a blockchain company called Freedom, and the whole point is to help the largest organizations in the world look at their supply chain and eliminate any slavery that's involved in the clothes they make, the consumable products like watches or glasses that they make, because all of us are unknowingly participating. But when we purchase certain things that we are not saying, well, if there is any source where there's anything that has to do with a child being forced to work, then I'm not involving. Well, that may cut out, like 90% of the things that we purchase or a lot of things that we choose to do.

Nikheel [00:14:42]:
So that is a very difficult and complicated, you know, thing to navigate when you start getting into that type of thing. But just because it's complicated and just because it's uncomfortable doesn't mean we shouldn't be having these conversations, if nothing else, internally, our internal dialogue.

Marc [00:14:58]:
I agree. And so that's interesting. So the company you mentioned, it's called freedom.

Nikheel [00:15:02]:
Yeah, FRDM. A friend of mine named Justin, he's pretty well known. For the last 25 years, around his fight against human trafficking, he wrote an incredible book called a selfish plan to change the world. And his premise was, no nonprofit, no charity, no philanthropy will ever be sustainable if the person and the people involved do not have a selfish motivation for why they're doing it. And so he's trying to go to the fortune five hired companies and say, listen, here's a selfish motivation for your corporation to eliminate human trafficking from your supply chain and your solution with the problem that you're currently facing.

Marc [00:15:39]:
The folks at Ann Rand would love that. I don't know if you're a fan of her philosophy. I certainly love Ann rand, and I think her definition of selfishness definitely comes into play here with freedom. So is the idea basically to record a company's supply chain on the block, on a blockchain protocol to follow the provenance of different products, et cetera. Could you explain how that would work.

Nikheel [00:16:08]:
A little bit, please? So, from what I understand, his blockchain does a couple of things. One is awareness. So that is going through the Fortune 500s blockchain and going and doing all of the background that needs to be done to prove what is happening in their supply chain. So one is just exposure, authenticity, transparency, and having a data on distributed ledgers. The other is solutions. So if and when they find problems in their supply chain, he also has a number of different solutions that are laid out that they can then apply those solutions to fix the problem with what's broken in their current supply chain issues. So he has both a ability for awareness, transparency, and then the other ability is specific to having solutions to change the problem that they're facing.

Marc [00:17:00]:
That's really interesting. So something you mentioned in the midst of all of this exciting talk about freedom is real. Estate in people's minds and doom scrolling. Let's go back to that concept for a second. Like are we living in a moment in time where people are slaves to social media?

Nikheel [00:17:18]:
Well, I can say from personal experience that I have seen two and 5 hours go by in a moment and it's 09:00 p.m. And then all of a sudden it's 03:00 a.m. And I ask myself, how in the world did I just watch 400 YouTube stories? How did that happen? I thought it was 15 minutes. I was ready to go to bed. I have my own personal experience and then I have to ask myself, okay, it's not just doom scrolling, so we have a word for that. That's the TikTok thing, that's the Snapchat thing. Obviously it's going on every platform, but it's beyond just doom scrolling. There are other ways that technologies are being created and the premise is how much time can we get people to use this platform.

Nikheel [00:18:03]:
So if the primary goal of a, of any technology company is the amount of time that we can get a user to stay on the platform, if that is the primary goal, if we want them to stay on for a half hour or an hour or 2 hours, we may want to ask ourselves, well, is that good? Is that a good thing to have people come in and feel a sense of they're stuck, they're stuck in this thing? And these are difficult things to navigate because also these different platforms provide laughter and entertainment and education and joy and connection. So just only looking at it from a critical standpoint doesn't make a lot of sense because these different technologies are two sided. There are things that we should be concerned by, which we're talking about, and there's things that we should be encouraged by and maybe lean into and not lean away from. And I'm not sure that anybody today has the capacity to really understand how to navigate this well, I think in 50 or 150 years we'll look back at this time and we'll say, why didn't they get it? How could they make these type of mistakes? How did they not know the consequences that would happen? But I don't know that we actually see that so clearly today.

Marc [00:19:15]:
Well, let's break that dichotomy down a little bit further as it relates to content on devices, right? It's, sometimes it's social media, sometimes you're engaging with gaming, sometimes you're taking in long form educational content that could be entertaining, but you could also create a dichotomy between bad content being pushed into society with a mission, a negative mission, perhaps propaganda like. And then on the other side, enjoyable content, but enjoyable content that's so mindless that it blocks that individual because they're spending so much time engaging with that pleasure, that joyful content, it blocks them or prohibits them from growing as an individual, learning more, engaging with their friends, going out and exploring the world. In your opinion, do you think that those are real problems, the propaganda scenario, as well as destroying your mind with too much pleasure? But the pleasure is coming from nonsense.

Nikheel [00:20:21]:
Deep philosophical question. Here's what comes to mind. We're in America, so it's easy for us to look at the problem of demonizing and glorifying amongst the Democrats and Republicans. And it'd be very easy for us to say, this is the worst it's ever been. Trump and Biden, the supporters, the way they love and glorify their leader and hate and demonize the others. It's never been so bad. Well, not really. If you just look back to plus years ago, the way Thomas Jefferson and John Adams published articles about how evil and horrendous each other were, and if this person wins the election, it's all over.

Nikheel [00:20:59]:
So I think it's important that people realize that these extremes have always been there now. Same with pleasure. You know, 100 years ago, cocaine was legal. You know, it wasn't that long ago that. That things that are totally taboo today were totally acceptable. And same thing will happen in the future. In the future, things that we accept today will be completely unacceptable and taboo. As far as the pleasure thing goes, like where I would say, think of your mind as a muscle and your mind, when you resist pleasure and you resist ease, your mind grows strong.

Nikheel [00:21:39]:
And if you just have nothing but pleasure and nothing but ease and nothing but just the cruise line, emotionally, it's just everything's easy. Well, your mind's going to get mushy and soft. You're not going to be as sharp, you're not going to be as strengthened internally. The same thing for our body. If you just sit around all day, you're going to get soft. And if you work hard and if you're outside working out or even playing or doing things, you're going to get strong. And so we want to recognize that we have a tendency to lean into the ease, even of though it's not good for us in the long run, we have a tendency to run away from the pain, the suffering, even though ultimately that produces great fruit both immediately and in the long run, I think ice baths are a new thing right now. And that's an example of choosing not to the pleasure of a warm shower, but choosing the pain of an ice bath.

Nikheel [00:22:32]:
Why? Because it does something to you emotionally and physically changing your physiology. So we might want to think of what type of ice baths can we take emotionally. And sometimes people will tune out of social media or technology for a period of time and that's like an ice bath for their mind. So everybody is responsible for themselves and they need to think through what is the right decisions to make in these regards. And that's something I'm more interested in looking in the mirror and talking to myself about how I can be a better man. I'm a lot less interested than telling other people what I think they should do.

Marc [00:23:06]:
I love that. I love that. Let's talk about pain a little bit more. I like that you raised the pain flag. NFT trading volume in 2023 was less than half of what it was in 2022. It slid from $26.3 billion down to $11.8 billion from 22 to 23, according to Coingecko. I'm curious, where do you think NFTs are heading as we go into, deeper into 2024? And we've watched the crypto markets totally rebound. Bitcoin is at an all time high.

Marc [00:23:48]:
ETH is on the rise. Seoul is on the rise. Where is the NFT market in all of this?

Nikheel [00:23:55]:
Well, the NFT market is quite interesting because it's not clear cut. It's not simple or clean. $50 billion in NFT sales in 2021 and 2022 makes NFTs the number one fastest growing consumer market since the smartphone. That's a big deal. Nfts are a hard consumer product to get into. It's not as simple as just going on your cell phone. And it takes some work to actually get into the market. And a lot of the motivation is around speculative investing and ultimately gambling.

Nikheel [00:24:30]:
So much of what drove the success of art NFTs and that kind of whole medium that drove the revenue was not necessarily based on long term sustainable success. It was based on immediate the ability to buy something that goes up in value and you flip it. So here's my take on NFTs in 2024 and beyond. Non fungible tokens or digital assets that we call NFTs are an inevitable automation tool, just like AI. An inevitable automation tool. So what is the inevitability? It's that every single car, pink slip, every house deed, every hotel receipt, every membership program will all be digital assets. And this is a very good thing for the consumer and it's a very good thing for the organizations. And it removes a ton of middleman.

Nikheel [00:25:23]:
So is the future of NFTs images and pictures of monkeys or really expensive digital art? Probably not. I think it was the entry point by which there was this catalyst moment. Just like the future of crypto is not ICOs and ERC, 20 tokens that are spun off the Ethereum chains. That was like the big thing that happened. 20, 1718. That's not the future of crypto. Cryptography is about automating the ability for trust and having trustless, permissionless distributed ledger networks by which everybody, organizations and people know that what they are interacting with is what it appears to be. So when it comes to nfTs, I think what we see happening in the near future are the arts.

Nikheel [00:26:09]:
Not just images, but musicians, podcasters, authors, movie makers, anybody in that world that today it's not necessarily set up to where everybody that participates is being benefited, compensated wise fairly. And so I think NFTs are going to play into that quite a bit. And so to me when I look at 2024, I see the boring applications of nfTs. Real estate, insurance, intellectual property. That's where I think NFTs are really going to thrive in this upcoming season and upcoming number of years is the boring applications. And in many ways you see that with blockchain as well, right? You see the largest institutions in the world applying blockchain technology in boring ways to automate their business and their ability to do honest interaction with customers.

Marc [00:27:03]:
So let's break it down a little bit further for the audience, for those who might not be familiar with what we're talking about. So talking about the boring side of land deeds and other important documents, what you're highlighting is the fact that perhaps there's a better filing system, that individuals can now file important documents permanently in an immutable way on the blockchain and then transfer those important documents, the ownership of a house, the ownership of a car, the ownership of a super high end spirit, proof of authenticity to another person easily. Is that the value that you're seeing in those scenarios?

Nikheel [00:27:43]:
That and so much more. And the thing is, there's no limit. So you and I can list off hundreds of boring applications using this automation technology, and that would just scratch the surface. And the most exciting thing is that when you look at NFTs, it is about decentralized approach to take the power away from the largest governments and the largest businesses and the largest brands and institutions and put the power back into the hands of individuals and small communities. And the way that individuals and small communities will use these digital assets will be shocking to us, because they will just simply say, oh, look, there's this automation of a smart contract. Well, why don't I use this for my hoa? Why don't I use this for my dog park? I mean, one of the most successful daos, a decentralized, autonomous organization, one of the most successful DaO I've ever heard of is a dog park, of all things. All the people that brought their dogs to a dog park, they all joined the Dow, and they all took responsibility. And everything that happened with that park, in terms of maintenance, cleanup, improvement, it was all registered on the blockchain, and the people that were involved with it were given credit for it.

Nikheel [00:28:50]:
And in this way, the credit wasn't financial as much as it was just emotional. If you look at faith institutions, okay, so there's over a billion people that would claim to be Christians or Catholics. I think there's about a billion people that claim to be Muslims. And you go down the line of all the faith institutions, and for generations, our ancestors have freely given money to the faith institution, the synagogue, the temple that they were a part of. There's no tracking, there's no record. There's no ability for anybody to recognize that, hey, this family's responsible for 5% of the ability for us to build this. Or this family has responsibility in feeding all these hungry people, are housing all these homeless people, or counseling all these needy people. And so when you just look at the ability to apply this technology to simple things like existing communities, and then you realize the impact that might make generations to come, it can become quite enticing to lean into this and say, well, regardless of the amount of revenue up and down and the media excitement or hatred that comes and goes, how do we leverage this automation for the good of humanity?

Marc [00:30:03]:
Yeah, it's interesting that you mentioned that faith based scenario, Ian. It's actually, it strikes a chord with me. My wife's father, who today, if he was alive, he'd be about 110. He passed away a long time ago, but his family actually contributed a lot of money to one of the synagogues here in New York City and helped build it and sustain it, and put years and years of effort into it. And now the next generation of people that are running the synagogue don't really realize how much my wife's family did for that synagogue. And it's impacting my wife's family in a very emotional way. So it's interesting that you mentioned that. The other thing that you mentioned before we got into the idea of record keeping is the idea of recording permanently recording content.

Marc [00:30:51]:
And I'm really fascinated. You mentioned music. I'm really fascinated with superfans and super bands. Like, what if we took a band like Metallica that has such a massive built in base on a worldwide scale? When will we see them using NFTs to distribute their music, to protect their financial stake, to protect their intellectual property? How far away are we from seeing these super bands and super fans from interfacing exclusively on blockchain?

Nikheel [00:31:26]:
That's a good question. I'd like to think that we're going to see that with most of the largest supergroups in this next cycle. And the reason I would say that is it's becoming more evident of the benefit of all parties involved to get away from private servers, private ledgers, and get into the ability to say, no, this is what's right. So if you look at a band, Metallica is not just for musicians, and Metallica is not just their agent and not just director label. Metallica has a lot of people involved in the songwriting, in the creation of a record, in creating concerts. And so it's not just about Metallica. Those four guys getting their due, maybe they're currently not being compensated, or given what they could be, but how about everybody else that's involved with them? If everybody around Metallica that supports that empire, that brand, starts to benefit in a way that is fair, based on what they've invested into it, then not only is Metallica benefiting, but everybody around them starts to benefit. And so part of the effort of using automation, in order to have these blockchains provide automation tools so that bands like Metallica can be in control and be compensated the way they need to be compensated, put up certain elements where people have to have maybe an NFT to have access to something, whether that's a digital piece of music or a concert.

Nikheel [00:33:04]:
By doing that, they have a future that they can look where everybody involved begins to have. That sense of a rising tide raises all ships, where today that is not the case. Today you have the band, the agents, the record labels, and all the people with the most amount of power, all fighting for as much as they can possibly get, trying to prove in court, trying to prove through any means necessary, that, no, this is mine, no this. And in the future, hopefully that won't be the case. And maybe the fans who make Metallica who they are, without the fans, any band is nothing. If the fans don't want to listen to the music. They want to go to the concert. The band doesn't exist.

Nikheel [00:33:47]:
So how about an ability for the fans, if not to benefit financially, which is a potential possibility, at least, to feel like they are a part of something and that things are authentic and transparent and real and not just this kind of facade that people are often faced with. A lot of people have a problem with some of the more wild voices. So I'll just say for a moment, like Kanye west, right? Yay. He's slandered a lot for being a manic man, and rightfully so. He's done a lot of weird things, and he'll keep doing weird things. However, he's definitely not one that's marching to the beat of the drum, that everybody wants him to just go along the. So he's, he's, he's making, he's using his voice, even if some of the things he says is totally inappropriate and wrong, he's using his voice to try to stand up against the machine that is the record labels and is the music industry. And because of him using his voice, even if the way he's doing it is not honorable, there's other people that are now standing up and saying, well, you know what? Like I just heard Snoop Dogg say, I just realized I get $45,000 for every billion streams on Spotify.

Nikheel [00:34:54]:
Now that's a big statement to make. Nobody really understands all that. But because it's not on the blockchain, because there's no authenticity, there's no way for him to know exactly why he would be compensated $45,000. Well, stoop, that's because you don't own your music and it's owned by. But right now, there's just a. There's just a lack of awareness. There's a lot of mystery involved. And so for bands like Metallica and everybody else, there is this concern around the current system is broken.

Nikheel [00:35:21]:
What is a system that would be better for the bands and everybody involved and could digital assets on the blockchain that we call nfts, you know, really have a place in this?

Marc [00:35:31]:
It's interesting that you connect the fan base directly with the success of Metallica. I agree with you. I think that they're incredible musicians, but their fan base is incredible, too. And at one point, you threw in the word dao. And I wonder, do you think we'll see daos created in the future where fans own the rights to the band, to the music, to perhaps digital assets that are spun off? Maybe physical assets different elements of their business. Can you explain, please, what a Dao is? And if you ever envision, perhaps you could use an example like if Metallica, the band and its entire ecosystem, including the fans, created a Dao, how would something like that work?

Nikheel [00:36:18]:
So a Dao is a decentralized, autonomous organization. So what this is, is it's an organization without a centralized leader or a sense of control. So people are voluntarily opting into this autonomous organization. And so in the sense of a band, a band would say, okay, everybody, we have our autonomy, Metallica. We have our contracts with our agents, our record labels and whatnot, the stadiums that we play in. But all of you that are fans, we want you to verify what you've acquired from us. And so there's a way for people to verify, I bought this many CDs, I've gone to this many concerts, and that might give them a, their seat in the Dao. And so their seat is a premium seat because they've been to 100 concerts, bought every album, or their seat is an entry level seat because they've gone to one concert, or maybe just stream some music.

Nikheel [00:37:08]:
Now, in this Dao, Metallica could choose in this case, to do some things and say, okay, a certain percentage of our royalty fees we are now going to put through to the Daoist, a treasury. And we're going to do this to encourage the dow to take ownership over the trajectory of our music, especially as Metallica starts to go into the next phase of their career, where they're going to not be, you know, they're not young anymore. And so how could a Dao, this decentralized, autonomous organization of their fans, their super fans, how could they be, you know, seen by the band as equated to what they've actually participated in, the number of concerts they've gone to, the number of albums they've bought, the amount of comments they've posted on social media.

Marc [00:37:57]:
Or likes, shareholder of a company.

Nikheel [00:38:00]:
But it's not a cooperation. Yeah, and maybe it's not a corporate and it doesn't have to be a financial benefit, because then you talk about, well, Ukraine is security, and that's a real concern. So maybe it's not a financial benefit. Maybe it's an emotional benefit. So there's a dow around Metallica and all the people that are part of the DAO, the benefit for them is a sense of, of being seen, of being known that people recognize their place in the Metallica legacy as it has been, as it will be. So again, there's no limit. So any band can use this technology to create a DAO with any parameters they want, as long as they're obeying the law. And in doing so, they can innovate and allow their people to innovate with this new automation tool, which never could have been possible without the Internet and without tools like the blockchain.

Nikheel [00:38:54]:
And AI will play a big part of this as well.

Marc [00:38:57]:
So just staying on the NFT front for a little bit more, I really enjoy talking about web three, honestly, in your opinion, which branded corporate NFT has really stood up as we've gone through this crypto winter and we've seen a slowdown in the NFT market, which brands? And it doesn't have to be digital artwork, right? There could be a utility, it could be a loyalty program. But in your mind, which brands do you think have done it right in the NFT space?

Nikheel [00:39:25]:
That's a good question. You know, I mean, I think it's telling that nothing comes to mind. I think it's telling that when you ask me the question, my mind starts going through the different things I could say and then I. Nothing stands out as like, totally this one for sure. I will say this. A lot of the music NFT companies, Royal was one, and there's many. I thought they had a great approach. Unfortunately, the government did not understand what they were doing, and the american government declared that they were creating securities.

Nikheel [00:40:02]:
So these music NFTs were saying, hey, when you buy a song, you actually own this song, and then you participate in a small percentage of the royalties of that song. I think the last great moment was when Rihanna did the Super bowl song a year plus ago, and the songs that she sang were nfTs. And I think that was like maybe the last moment before the hammer came down upon some of these organizations. So I'm not going to say that just one of the organizations is did it right, but I would say that approach was really compelling. I started to think through what happens when authors start to do this, what happens when publishers start to do this? What happens when podcasters? You look at the greatest voices in tv and podcasts, you think about the Joe Rogans, the Oprah Winfreys, the Jordan Pearsons, Brene Browns, the Russell brands of the world. And you say they have these massive communities, all this influence, and every single time somebody likes or comments or shares or talks about it, they do it on their own free will, but there's no benefit. So what happens if these people that are super fans of this content creator have an ability to participate in the benefit of that content creator becoming greater? Or how about the girl in the ghetto, that's 17, that has all the same stuff that Oprah had when she was young, and then she starts to build her collection of influence over TikTok or over Snapchat or over the next platform. What if she could take her community along for the ride? And those that supported her earliest benefited the most as she became a global known icon in her trajectory of success?

Marc [00:41:45]:
I think that's really compelling, and obviously I hope that we can see that soon. In your mind, though, what's the barrier for entry? Right now with that is the fact that that we haven't, as builders in the web three community, done a good job at creating a frictionless, seamless experience for the masses. Right? For my sister, Amy Beckman, who has zero understanding of how to set up a digital wallet and to hold an NFT, is the fact that it's just too complicated right now for most people to do that.

Nikheel [00:42:18]:
This is an interesting thing. I'm gonna say it this way. Hard is good. Easy is not necessarily good. And the reason is you're talking about a paradigm shift from you are giving all your data to this big trillion dollar empire and they make it easy for you to sign up for their platform, right? But you are basically enslaving yourself to them. And this new paradigm is you are a owner of your own data and an owner of what it is that you present to this platform. Now, I think we don't want to be overly sensitive and just make everything easy. Like when people talk about, we just need to be able to sign up with an email and not know that they're using a wallet and not know they're using a blockchain.

Nikheel [00:43:11]:
Like it should be just like web two. And I say, well, at some point, it's not going to be. At some point, everybody's going to have to go through the hard process of learning how to have their own wallet and own their keys and protect their data and take ownership. And then I think about when I travel and the first time I went to Southeast Asia and I couldn't use the Uber and I had to use this other app called Grab and the.

Marc [00:43:33]:
Pain in the ass.

Nikheel [00:43:34]:
It was for me to spend 20 minutes on grab, trying to figure out how to sign up and use it so I could get from one place to the other. It wasn't easy, it wasn't fun. I didn't know how to use the app. It wasn't like Uber, it wasn't like Airbnb. It was a completely different approach to creating an app. And I thought in that moment, I finally got done and I got a ride. I thought, man, that was hard. And then I thought, you know what? That's how it always is.

Nikheel [00:43:59]:
Like, Facebook was hard at first, MySpace was hard at first, Gmail was hard at first. We didn't know how to do these things. Now, is this harder than those other platforms? Sure. But just because it's hard doesn't mean we should shy away from it. Because the benefit of going through the hard experience is ownership of your data and your content and ability to have an anonymity, which is very important.

Marc [00:44:21]:
I get it. I understand the value of protecting my personal data. I get that most people, I still think, do not understand that. A majority of people, generally speaking, they don't care, especially the younger generation. But what's remarkable is you are paying attention. You are in the middle of all of this when you say there's not one brand that really comes to mind as far as doing it right. We've seen Nike, Adidas, Porsche, we've seen Starbucks in Bev, we've just seen so many iconic multinational corporations, incredible brands, come out into the space. Do you think maybe it's not the process of using the web three components, maybe it's just that the real value proposition between the brand and the consumer hasn't been striking.

Marc [00:45:07]:
Do you think maybe that's what's lacking?

Nikheel [00:45:09]:
Yeah. Yeah, I do think that's lacking. I think it's very difficult to enter the space as a big brand. I think brands have a tendency to see a gold mine and let's bring all the heavy equipment in and extract the gold from the mine. Not fully understanding all the complexities of what they're about to do and not understanding the accountability. There have been some of the biggest well known entrepreneurs in the world, guys like Gary Vee and Kevin Rose and others that have come into the space that had massive success. And then as success waned and the assets that they sold to the world went down in value, the impact that made upon them and the way people viewed them. So these individuals are like big global brands.

Nikheel [00:46:01]:
You know, I do think that Gary Vaynerchuk did an interesting thing when he said, don't do anything with NFTs when you got started, until you spend like 50 hours researching, and then you build all of these different how to videos, how to set up a metamask wallet, how to set up a Coinbase account, how to get on discord, how to parti. So now, was Gary like the ideal? No, I mean, there is no ideal. I mean, Gary sold digital assets that went up 100 x and then went down 99 x. It's very complicated. When you mention all the big brands like the Porsche and the Starbucks of the world. I have honor for what all these folks and these organizations have tried to do, especially the boots on the ground that really encourage them to give it a good try. And we're seeing some incredible brands doing innovative things. It's just that none to me stand out so much that I say, well, this is the one, here's the lighthouse.

Nikheel [00:46:54]:
Here's the one organization that we can do a draft behind. I don't yet see that at this point.

Marc [00:46:58]:
So then let's look at, there are some incredible brands and businesses that came out of the NFT community. Native NFT brands. Let's talk about those for a minute. Let's look at crypto punks. Let's look at board ape Yacht club. Let's look at doodles out of the brands that came out of and the communities world of women. Incredible, incredible concept, incredible founders out of these brands, which do you think are the most valuable, most successful, most important brands that were native to the NFT world?

Nikheel [00:47:30]:
Okay, so I'll give you three examples. You have the bored Ape Yacht Club, Yuga Labs, which has now acquired many other of the brands, the crypto punks and the moonbirds of the world. They have done an incredible job with intellectual property. It's fascinating how well they've done to create this super, super exclusive, expensive club to join into. And when you think about the automation that people can buy membership without ever talking to Yugalabs privately, Ugalabs gets benefited with a royalty fee and then that person wants to leave the program. They don't walk away from all their investment. They can sell their membership to somebody else. And again, Ugalabs doesn't have to be involved.

Nikheel [00:48:11]:
Like, that's a very powerful, we don't talk about the impact of the automation that Ugalabs has had where they've had, you know, just hundreds of millions, billions of dollars of revenue going through. Now that's one example. Pudgy penguins would be another example. This is a intellectual property, a native web three brand that emerged, imploded and then has had a reemergence and is now one of the biggest in the world today because they end up making physical objects and putting them into Walmarts and things.

Marc [00:48:43]:
That's very.

Nikheel [00:48:45]:
Yeah. Yes. And doing some very innovative things around their physical merch the way they dealt with things. So that's the second one. I'll give you a third. I think that when people look back at this time, they will be shocked at the innovation of two projects. One is on Chainmonkey and the other is cyber brokers. On Chainmonkey has been one of the most innovative with both the ethereum and the bitcoin ordinals protocol.

Nikheel [00:49:12]:
Some of the things that theyve done is so thorough and strategic and well thought through, and their community are super committed and professionals. I think that as far as like a professional approach from a to z, beginning to end, it's hard to find any organization that has even come close to matching on chain monkey. Now, in terms of the degen approach and in terms of like comic books, AI, art, you know, movies, tv, and all those elements, I don't see any group that's done what the group cyber brokers has done. Cyber brokers is not highly valued in the market today. They've never imploded, but they haven't been some outstanding valuable asset in that way. But I think that in the near future, or at least in the distant future, it will become so because of what they've done to prepare themselves for the metaverse and for all things around intellectual property, and the way they've empowered each and every single one of their digital asset owners to take true ownership over what they've built. And they did something nobody else had ever done. They put every single piece of art natively on the Ethereum blockchain, and it cost them several hundred thousand dollars.

Nikheel [00:50:29]:
They did not need to spend in gas fees to put that artwork on the Ethereum blockchain to where everything cyberbrokers has ever created can never be erased or deleted or eliminated, unless the entire Ethereum blockchain went down. I just gave you four examples that stand in my mind as really amazing inspiration of what could be done and some of the things that I've been impressed by.

Marc [00:50:54]:
So, Ian, I have to ask you, when you talk about cyber brokers taking this step forward, where they're actually putting the artwork on chain, isn't that what all digital artwork is? Aren't they all on chain?

Nikheel [00:51:08]:
Yeah, if only that was true. No, a lot of the times these assets are simply on a ledger. It's like what's on chain is a spreadsheet and the actual artwork is on Azure, Microsoft's cloud or AWS, Amazon's cloud or gcs, Google's cloud. Or maybe it's on ipfs, which is like the decentralized approach to it. But the truth is, no, a lot of the actual artwork is not on chain because it's so expensive, technologically challenging to put this high number of megabytes and gigabytes on chain. So what the people do is they do a shortcut and they say, well, our spreadsheet, our ledger's on chain, but our artwork, but we don't want to pay for that. So we put our artwork on a cloud service. And that's why some of the early NFT projects, their images no longer are there anymore.

Nikheel [00:52:01]:
You have an asset, but there's no image because the storage or whatnot was not paid for.

Marc [00:52:06]:
So let's talk about this for a minute. So if I understand correctly, I could have spent millions of dollars to purchase a piece of digital artwork in the form of an NFT. Perhaps it's a bored ape. And that bored ape is not necessarily permanently embedded into a blockchain protocol. Perhaps it's in a cloud storage that's controlled by Microsoft. And the issuer of that NFT can go out of business for not paying its bills. And as a result, Microsoft shuts down all of the storage. And then I, as the purchaser of perhaps a million dollar NFT, I lose that NFT.

Nikheel [00:52:50]:
That is a, that's a, that's one way of seeing it. I don't think it's quite that simple because these NFTs are one small, small, small percentage of a huge collection that's made up of a community. And these NFTs are not about the centralized power. So for the bored apes, it's not actually about Yuga Labs. The founder, you know, the creator of the bored Ape Yacht club. The bored apes have a lot more to do with each and every single individual. There's 10,000 bored apes. There's 20,000 plus mutant apes, plus there's all these other pieces of the empire.

Nikheel [00:53:28]:
So when you talk about like, could you buy a million dollar asset and one day it's just gone. Not really, because the ledger is still on the blockchain and there are unlimited paths by which if you go, labs implodes that the owners of all of the digital assets can say, okay, we're going to now take our assets and we're going to move all of our things on chain to bitcoin ordinals, or to Solana or to Hedera or to polygons. So I believe there is a solution to the problem that is being faced by some of the organizations that didn't make wise decisions because the community is taking ownership over the brand and its intellectual property. So, yes, what you said is true, but it's not the whole story. There are ability for communities to basically take over. And you've seen that happen many times have been different NFT projects that were launched, and it turns out that they were bathed by people that the community did not want to deal with. And the community took control of the entire project, removed the founding organization, and even have moved that digital asset collection from one blockchain to another, from one discord channel to another, from one community hub to another. So I believe in this.

Nikheel [00:54:48]:
Did you see that with. You do, yeah. You see that with rug pools? And you see that just. Yeah. Yes. So the answer is yes. You see that with rug pools. You know, I.

Nikheel [00:54:58]:
I have a unique place in NFTs in that I was part of the team that launched NFT NYC in 2019. I started interviewing a lot of the, you know, important people in this industry. 2018. I did my first NFT event at Twitter's headquarters in 2018 called the Future of blockchain. But I've never actually flipped nfts. So even though I've been a part of this industry, I've interviewed 500 people and I have all these relationships. I know the founders of almost all the projects that we've talked about, and I have participated. Maybe I've bought the NFTs or I participate in the community, but I never did the speculative investing.

Nikheel [00:55:35]:
I never did the gambling side of things. So I never had that emotional high and low. I never went through that, like, stock market crash thing where it's like, I bought all these nfts, I was trying to flip them, and I lost everything. Like, I never had that. So I don't feel the same emotional sting that some people feel because they heavily invested in this as a gambler into this medium, hoping they'd be able to make a profit. Every time I ever bought an NFT, it was because I love the founder and I like the community and I like the project. I want to be a part of it. I wanted to participate in the discord and hang out with them and, you know, like, I liked what they were doing.

Nikheel [00:56:15]:
And when I bought an NFT, I figured I'd own that thing for the rest of my life. It was like buying a painting to me. And when I buy paintings, I'm not buying it so I can sell it. I'm buying it cause I love it, or I like supporting the artist or whatnot.

Marc [00:56:28]:
So when you talk about artwork in the NFT space, you know, Beeple was remarkable. Most of the people that I speak with regarding Beeple's quality of artwork and design, they don't like it. Like, I've actually heard a majority of people say that. They actually don't like people's style and design. Personally, I think he's incredible, and I also think he's thought provoking. But it's still the north star when it comes to investment. Like you're talking about, it's still sold. That iconic piece of artwork sold for $69 million.

Marc [00:57:04]:
Do you think we'll ever see another beeple in this industry, in the space?

Nikheel [00:57:09]:
Yes, we will definitely see more peoples. I want to clarify something with a six $9 million sale. Beeple did not sell his artwork for $69 million. Metakoven bought his artwork for $69 million. There's a very big difference. See, Beeple didn't try to sell his. That was like 15 years of his art. It was like 15 years of everydays.

Nikheel [00:57:34]:
People didn't think he was going to sell it for a million or 5 million or 10 million. He just auctioned it. Medicovin. It's not like somebody else bid 68.9 million, and Metakovin just came in with 69 million and, like, just barely got it. No, Medicovin came in and just, like, threw down the gauntlet and said, I Metakovan have made a lot. He didn't say this out loud. He said it with his actions. I've made a ton of money from cryptocurrency.

Nikheel [00:58:02]:
I believe so much in digital art, and I am. So I want to invest in Mike Winkelman as a human, the person that we know as beeple. And so I am going to both make a statement to the world of the value of digital art. I'm going to make a statement to Mike of how much I value him as an artist. And I'm going to do a bunch of things right now. I'm going to give $69 million for this collection of art because Medikovin bought it for 69 million. Mike didn't sell it for 69 million. That's a.

Nikheel [00:58:33]:
That's a wild difference. So when we talk about the future and the hundred million dollar sale, that's bound to happen one day against Rafiq's artwork or against Jeremy Cohart's photography or against, you know, Violet as a Roni's music, right. When you talk about the $100 million sale that will happen one day in three months or three years, it won't be because Violetta or Jeremy or Rafiq sell one of their digital assets for $100 million. It will be because somebody that has an excess of capital, likely because they made a tremendous amount of money from making wise decisions around cryptocurrency, that they choose to buy a digital asset for that amount of money to support the artist for generations to come and to make a mark in history, and to say, I value digital music, I value digital photography, I value AI art. And when that happens, it'll be like, can you believe it? Rafique or Jeremy or Violet, they just sold their NFT for $100 million. No, they didn't. No, no, no. Homegirl or homeboy that had a lot of money and had excess capital, they bought it for that much money because they wanted to support the artist.

Nikheel [00:59:47]:
And this is something that has happened for many generations. We forget, in the 18th and 16th and 14th and 12th century, the wealthiest people in the world, by choice, gave massive amounts of money to artists that they believed in so that those artists did not have to struggle constantly to feed themselves and house themselves. And they come in with this huge gift as a sale for a painting or a sculpture to support the arts. And that's what Medikovan did, is one that supported the arts. And that's what he did when he bought that $69 million.

Marc [01:00:21]:
Why is that important? Why is that important? Why is it important to support digital artwork?

Nikheel [01:00:27]:
Well, it's not important to everybody, but it certainly is important to the artist. And it's not important just to the artist. It's important to all of the artists. You see, when Medicovin bought people's art collection for six, $9 million, it radically impacted the three other artists. I talked about, Rafiq and Jeremy and Violetta. You see, when those three humans, the musician, the photographer and the AI artist, saw that beeple's art was bought for $69 million, that filled them with courage, right? It filled their soul with courage. All of a sudden, they're encouraged and they think, wow, somebody out there supports the artist and supports the arts, and they believe in this digital medium. Like, I should keep going, I should be more innovative, I should try new things.

Nikheel [01:01:14]:
And that is why supporting the artist actually supports all of the artists.

Marc [01:01:20]:
And when you talk about, you mentioned that you were one of the founders of NFT NYC. What is nftNyc, and why is this entity important?

Nikheel [01:01:32]:
There's only one founder of nftnyc. That's Jody Rich, to be clear. But I have co produced the event with him and his team, and I've been very proud to do so. What is nftnyc? It's a centralized event for decentralized communities. So NftNYC is a centralized event run by a team. And it's so big now that it's the Javits center, and we'll have almost 10,000 people and over 1000 speakers and 4000 artists. Now why would a centralized event be so important to a decentralized communities? Well, because there's been over a thousand satellite events that have happened around NfTNYC just this year. When we meet in two weeks at the Javits Center, April 3 to the fifth, there'll be over 100 community events that happen.

Nikheel [01:02:14]:
The community events have no direct correlation with NfTNYC. You see, what we do is we drop an anchor. We bring all the speakers and the artists and the people to come to our event. And then all these other projects, the cyber brokers, the on chain monkeys, the Yuga labs with the pudgy penguins, the violettas and the Jeremy's, and their feet to the world, they come and they say, okay, everybody's in this one place. So I can do a concert, I can do an art show, I can do a community gathering. So the reason why NFT NYC is so important is it's a known brand in the world, in the media, it's talked about globally, a lot of big announcements happen. A lot of really important, innovative talks are given about what could be. And so it is a centralized event run by Jody and his team at NFT Credit.

Nikheel [01:03:01]:
It's their event for their company, and it's become this unexplainable, huge institution at this point. And we're on, I think, event number seven. But around the event, you have all these community events. And that's what makes it so special is the decentralized communities are leveraging our event to launch their own mini events attached to it during the same time.

Marc [01:03:23]:
And why, why was Jody Rich, the founder? Why was Jody capable of building such an enormous platform for this community? What makes him different? What makes Jody Rich special?

Nikheel [01:03:37]:
Well, I've, I've worked with Jody. We met in 2018. I've never met anybody like him who makes him special. He's an unusual leader. He is able to get the best out of his people. He's able to get people that maybe did not have the traditional skill set that you think would then thrive to be running this part of the event. And he's been able to inspire them one way or another to get them to rise to the occasion. He is surrounded by incredible people.

Nikheel [01:04:10]:
I mean, Cameron Bale, who is the true co founder of it, Alex and Devin the two founders of Opensea have been there by Jody's side, and they really kind of brought the Opensea community to the table. They're a big part of the success. And then you have all these amazing people that are on his team today, Noah and Michael and LJ and others, and people that have been on his team, Quinn and Tony and others. And so it's not Jody. Jody is just a very unique leader that approaches leadership in a way that he is a nice way of saying is just very much inspiring people to do the very best work of their life and to rise to the occasion and to execute a very difficult event with a lot of complexity well, over and over and over again. And I will say this about Jody. He is an incredible risk taker, and he certainly doesn't get credit for the amount of courage that he has because of the six events that we've done, more than half of them were not profitable, which means that Jody put all the expense forward. It wasn't a profitable event, and he went back and he did it again.

Nikheel [01:05:16]:
Now, of course, some of the years have been wildly profitable because it got so big. But he is very courageous in that he's not even an event guy. He's a technology guy. His company's NFT cred. Nftnyc is just his event to kind of, you know, support around NFT cred. So you have a guy and a team that aren't event people executing an incredible event. And I would say it has to do with Jody's people, because Jody is a great leader that gets a lot out of people. And Jody has a lot of courage and has taken big risks again and again and again, even when maybe an average person would say, enough's enough, I'm not losing money on another event.

Nikheel [01:05:55]:
But he continues to say, no, this is the future. I want to take over Times Square. I want everybody's artwork and everybody's projects up on the billboards. I want to gather the community. I want NFTs to work. I want to put this in action. And he's done a great job in that regard.

Marc [01:06:10]:
Yeah, I agree. I agree. He's also a very kind individual. He's certainly a visionary. And his deep roots into the advertising community are particularly appealing to me as the owner of an advertising agency. So, Ian, you and I can do this all day long. And there are so many topics that I wanted to cover with you today, ranging from artificial intelligence's impact on NFTs to the digital dividend. But it's getting late, and you've given us a ton of time.

Marc [01:06:41]:
But before you go, it's a tradition on my show for me to end, where I kind of tee up the beginning of a sentence and incorporate the name of the show some future day into the beginning. And then I allow for my guests to finish the sentence, are you game?

Nikheel [01:06:59]:
I'm ready. Let's do it.

Marc [01:07:01]:
All right. So I think that you're really a visionary of a point of difference as it relates to the NFT that you enjoy most, which was my understanding. It's about the idea of capturing content and creating value, whether that's in music or in video, film, poetry, whatever it might be in that NFT. So for you, I'd like to say in some future day, content based NFTs.

Nikheel [01:07:29]:
Will become the primary way that content creators and the communities that support those creators flourish together.

Marc [01:07:39]:
That's beautiful. Ian, before you go, do you have anything else that you want to put out there that we didn't cover today?

Nikheel [01:07:45]:
I would encourage everybody that chooses to watch this or listen to our conversation, whether in whole or in part, to tune into the other conversations you've shared some future day. I will say, mark, that you are very curious. There's no doubt about that. I think it's a great gift, a great attribute of yourself. I certainly have enjoyed this conversation. I can see that your other guests enjoy their conversations with you, and I anticipate that for the next 555 and 555 guests that you have, that it will be one of one conversations like no other. So I would say to your audience, congratulations. You found Mark's podcast on future day.

Nikheel [01:08:27]:
Lean in. Remember, you may not be able to have access to me or all of Mark's guests. You may not be able to sit down with us and tell us to repeat something over and over and over again. What you can do is you can rewind our conversation and listen to that part again. You can apply the different insights that we're sharing with you through this medium. So I think that's how I would end that. As far as for me and all the things I could promote, if you're interested in me and what my team and I are doing at attention live or what's happening at nfTNYC, I am util across every social media channel. I am accessible.

Nikheel [01:09:05]:
I'm happy to connect with people. And rather than give some sort of big promotion about myself, I'd rather just acknowledge your greatness, Mark, and thank you so much for having me on your show.

Marc [01:09:17]:
Ian, it's truly always a pleasure speaking with you. I'm looking forward to being with you in New York City in April.

Nikheel [01:09:25]:
Me, too. Me, too.

Marc [01:09:26]:
All right, I know your time is very important, so thank you so much for joining me today. For ongoing insight surrounding these important topics, you can join the conversation on my social media channels, including Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn arcbeckman. And to sign up for my newsletter on Substack, you can find me at markbeckman dot substack.com. To make sure you don't miss a show, be sure to subscribe to some future day across all major platforms worldwide, including YouTube, Spotify, and Apple. Special thanks to New York University for producing some future day. And a big, big shout out to my producer extraordinaire, John Boomhoffer, for being patient and always encouraging me to push through. Thanks a lot, John. Have a great day.