51 Podcast · Conversation
Zack Guzman: Transforming Media & Food With Web3
About this conversation
In this episode, Zack Guzman, founder of Trustless Media and Coinage, discusses his journey from traditional media to Web3, the innovative uses of blockchain technology in the media sector, and how it can create a more transparent and democratized environment for content creation and consumption.
The Concept of Ownership in Web3 Ownership
Zach explains that Web3 enables a new internet paradigm where audiences can genuinely own pieces of the content they consume. Unlike the traditional models where subscribers are passive, Trustless Media allows audiences to become active participants through NFTs and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs). This new setup incentivizes both creators and audiences to contribute meaningfully to the content ecosystem.
Coinage: Community-Driven Crypto News
Coinage is Trustless Media’s first venture focusing on crypto news. Zach explains that in an industry built on being 'trustless,' trustworthy content is crucial. Coinage engages its community in the content creation process. For instance, members vote on what projects to cover, creating a collective filtering mechanism to navigate biases. This democratic approach ensures the content is as unbiased and informative as possible. An example given is the 'Crypto Project of the Year' contest, where members voted to crown the best projects, adding a level of trust and validation to the awards.
Expanding Beyond Crypto
Trustless Media is also venturing into the food industry with the Best Dish Ever show. This project allows food enthusiasts to vote on the best dishes and restaurants, democratizing food content similar to how Coinage handles crypto news. With significant community participation and partnerships with known chefs, the platform blends Web3 technology with universal interests like food, demonstrating the scalability of Trustless Media’s model beyond the crypto space.
Challenges and Future Opportunities
One of the challenges Zach points out is making blockchain technology accessible to those unfamiliar with it. The Best Dish Ever project tackled this by enabling easy credit card payments without needing prior knowledge of crypto wallets. Zach sees huge potential in mainstream content niches and believes the future of Web3 in media lies in its ability to make complex technology user-friendly. The ultimate vision is to restore trust and connection between media creators and their audiences.
Advice for Web3 Newcomers
Zach advises newcomers to focus on solving real-world problems with Web3 technology rather than getting caught up in the hype. He stresses the importance of grounding oneself in practical applications and real use-cases to navigate the noise and distractions prevalent in the space. By concentrating on tangible problems and how Web3 can address them, new entrants are more likely to succeed and make meaningful contributions.
Lightning Round and Conclusion
Mark wraps up the episode with a lightning round of quick questions, where Zach shares insights about his daily routine, favorite books, and other personal preferences. The conversation concludes with Zach encouraging listeners to explore legitimate NFT projects and get involved in community-driven content platforms. He emphasizes that Web3 has evolved beyond speculative investments, offering real solutions and opportunities for both creators and audiences.
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Full transcript
Transcript from the published episode. Automated transcription may contain errors; consult the recording for exact wording.
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[upbeat music] Welcome to another episode of 51 Insights, where we talk about everything Web3 and consumer engagement.
Today on the show is Zach Guzman. Zach, welcome. Mark, thanks so much for having me, man. Excited to be here. Yeah, thanks for joining. Where are you tuning in from? We're coming to you live from Brooklyn, New York.
Nice, nice, nice. So Brooklyn, I'm based in Miami. I'm very excited for this discussion. Zach, you're the founder of Trustless Media, the host of Coinage. Who are you, though? What's your background?
Where are you coming from? What's Trustless Media? What's Coinage? Yeah. Tell us a little bit more. So my background is in traditional media.
I was an anchor at Yahoo Finance and CNBC, came from that traditional media world, and realized, as I think a lot of people have realized, including Elon Musk, there's a lot of problems with traditional media.
The model is not necessarily built in the right way to incentivize truth or build around, I think, content that serves audiences in the way that it probably should.
And Web3 came along and created this ability to realign incentives, not just in the media, but in all kinds of sectors.
And I realized it was now or never to quit and build something out to help creators realign incentives with their audiences.
And so that's where Trustless came about as a mix of Kickstarter and Patreon, and now with NFTs, the ability to let creators co-own media brands with their existing audiences, with their fans, to build together in a way where there are shared passions out there.
If you're a fan of food shows, you love food. If you're a fan of sports shows, you love sports, and you'd love to have your opinions included in that content as well.
So that's what we've been exploring at Trustless first in the crypto news space with Coinage, and now we're expanding beyond. Mm-hmm. So the first keyword I heard now was ownership.
Uh, ownership is a very central concept in Web3. For the listeners who aren't familiar with that, that just sounds like a foreign language, owning something, owning a media brand.
What, what do you mean by owning a media brand? Yeah. It's a core tenant in Web3.
If you've heard a lot of people talking about Web3, they often cite read, write, own as kind of this next evolution of the internet, where you can actually own pieces of the internet or content that's on the internet, and I think we're in this exciting chapter of the internet where you can't just consume content, but legitimately own some of that content as it goes around the internet.
Money and content are converging in this attention economy on the internet now. And so when I say own, I do mean own.
Our model is a little bit different than what people have come to know NFTs as in terms of being collectibles, but what we're trying to do is creating memberships that live on chain that actually let our members enter a DAO co-op to become members and co-own the outlets with us.
And so it's not just being a passive subscriber through Substack or Patreon where you're paying a content creator, but you're paying to become a part of something, and I think that's what has not been enabled before in Web2 or, or old iterations of the internet.
But now as you break down that wall between someone who's putting content on the internet, it becomes a two-way street where you can not just consume the content, but influence the content as well.
And in the ethos of Web3, you should be compensated for that.
And so I think there's some really interesting things that are being built right now, not just what we're doing at Trustless, but really starting to incentivize and pulling out the network effects of kind of what can you do when you create a community online that helps create content, and it's a fascinating new way to think about content creation.
You, you mentioned DAO co-op. DAO is a decentralized autonomous organization in crypto language. Can you break this down?
What does that mean, a DAO co-op, and in the context of Trustless Media, how does that work sp- specifically? Yeah. In the US, obviously, it's been a tricky thing to crack, right?
Crypto's not exactly treated friendly here, but the idea of a DAO is not too dissimilar from what has existed for years in the form of co-ops. REI is a co-op.
Basically, you go there, you shop, you're an active member, and you get a dividend at the end of the year. And that's legal, and it's existed, as I said, for a long time.
DAOs are relatively new in that I see them just as co-ops built on chain. And so we are setting these up.
Coinage is a Colorado registered DAO cooperative where our NFT holders can enter as members and unlock patronage dividends, as they're called, in terms of being an active member if you're contributing to what we're doing, i.e.
voting on what we wanna cover, which guests we should have on the show. That is a form of, of activity.
And so we are built to basically give dividends back to our members, and I think that is a model that scales not just in the crypto news space with Coinage, but we can copy that model and apply it to the food space, to sports, as I said.
And we've been doing that now.
So not only just through Coinage, but now we have Best Dish Ever, which is a new show we've been working with Food Network stars on to roll out content and let people who appreciate food vote on what are the best dishes, uh, out there, what are the best restaurants out there, and influence the content that way.
So it's, again, a new way of creating network effects because we all watch content. We'd love to influence content, but then also when we share it and tell our friends about it, we should probably be rewarded for that.
And so it's a cool way to solve that cold start problem in content, and we've seen it work for Coinage in terms of how quickly we've been able to grow that brand, and now same thing for Best Dish Ever.
So it's if you let someone buy into something, become an active member, become a part owner, you actually start to see that they share that content a little bit more actively than just being a passive subscriber.
And focusing on Coinage now, how does that specifically look like for a reader or a listener of Coinage? What kind of contributions can I do, and how does my participation look like? Yeah.
So I think in crypto news, we started there because it's really tough to trust a lot of stuff, right? I mean, crypto's built to be trustless, so you're just, like, taught to not trust anybody.
But then how do you learn about anything? And so it came from this idea of, like, we all trust our friends' recommendations.
If they say, "Hey, you should look at this project," or maybe, "This coin's legit," you weigh that a little bit more heavily.
And there's also the same problems in traditional media where it's, okay, you normally fund yourselves through advertising, so you might take ad dollars, but then does that influence what you're saying on the program?
And then people don't really trust it. So i- it's, media has those issues, and so the way that we built Coinage is, all right, we are a DAO co-op.
We have a bunch of different members, and we have members from the Ether community, from Solana, from all kinds of different crypto communities, and we're basically all checking our biases together to where someone can say, "Hey, we should cover this project 'cause I think it's legit."
People can say, "No, it's not so legit."
And we have these back and forth battles and land somewhere in the middle around objective truth and deliver that objective truth to our members through the form of our content, and anyone can go watch it.
But I think it's been pretty fascinating because our NFT holders, our members can actually vote on... I'll give you an example, Marc.
We did a crypto project of the year last year, so it was like a March Madness competition for the best projects in crypto. We had Anatoly on the show from Solana. We had John Wu on the show from Avalanche.
We had a bunch of founders come on and debate what made their projects better than the others, and let our members vote on which ones actually were winning in those debates.
And so we slowly whittled it down to, started with 16 projects, then eight, then four, then two, then one, and crowned a crypto project of the year, and I think it's a really good example to show, again, when you break down the wall between content creator and audience, you can create more trusted content because it's not just me saying, "Okay, this is the crypto project of the year," it's a community of very smart individuals who are all Coinage members.
And so that's just one example, and then of course, as I said, at the end of the year, we can reward our most active members with a dividend for kind of all the work that they've put into this.
How do you measure and quantify the contribution of those individual members? Is this a challenge, or...? Yeah, I think that's been a huge issue with most DAOs from the get-go, right?
Is like, uh, you have the issues of people join DAOs and then don't do anything, and they stick around to get their rewards, so how do you disincentivize the freeloader problem, as it's been called? Mm-hmm.
And also, how do you deal with decentralizing pieces? 'Cause like sometimes it's inefficient to decentralize everything.
Like, the reason why good companies exist is because they're centralized at the top, and you have someone saying, "This is what we should do." But I think unchecked power has also been very bad.
Uh, if you look at a lot of crypto projects, some of the biggest ones that have died, look at what happened at FTX perhaps, like, there are issues when you have unchecked power.
So weirdly enough, I do think, like, the co-op, the DAO model works in terms of consensus, and essentially all we're trying to do is building consensus in content niches, but still leaving leeway for the creator to say, "No," like, "This is a good story."
And so we've seen some really cool doors be opened when people have suggested guests that I myself have never known before, or projects that I've never even heard of before, and we bring it to the community and say, "Is this good?"
And we go from there. And so again, it's network effects that have worked in a way that is, is still experimental.
I'm not saying, like, this is all solved right now, but it's been fun to play around with it, and we've seen doors open.
We actually now have validators that our community can stake with, and all those funds go back into the Coinage DAO. So that's a whole nother way of, again, leveraging the community and trust that we have.
Someone reached out to us because he's a Coinage member, and he said, "Hey, this is a good deal."
And now we run validators, and now our community can stake with us, and those rewards flow back into the DAO to help us support and produce more content.
And so a cool positive flywheel effect that was not possible or can't be done really in Web2 media. And again, it's risky opening yourselves up to do some of this stuff and invite people into the newsroom, so to speak.
It's not really what a CNN or a Fox News does, but I think it's a better way to be more truthful.
And just to give our listeners a little bit of a better understanding how big that project is, uh, can you share some KPIs around that? Like, how many DAO members do you have? What has been the growth now?
How many readers do you have, listeners? Yeah. So we started out basically at the end of 2022, right? So we haven't been around that long, but as soon as we launched, we put out a piece of content.
We got the first interview with Do Kwon after the Terra collapse and put that out and let people mint NFTs to watch it first, and we did about 5,000 mints and two million views across all platforms just as we dropped our trailer.
And so since then, we've added more and more members, so I think we're north of about 7,000 unique NFT holders now, so we've always limited it to one mint per IP address and wallet. So those are unique members.
And then again, a- as the Coinage brand has scaled, we've signed partnerships with Coinbase, The Street, the co-founder of Netflix is one of our backers now, as he's seeing what we're doing in the Web3 media space.
And so it's been fun. There's two awards behind me. I think they're out of frame.
But we've won Sabu Awards with Bloomberg and The New York Times, and so again, I think as much as I wanna take credit for all of this, I think, again, it's really cool to see the network effects of when you open up the ability for people to play a part.
This happens way faster than the old model, and so that's where we're at now.
We've been cranking, we've been delivering insights and access for our community, and slowly and surely, we wanna actually let them play around with treasury funds as well, which is [laughs] again, I think something that really wouldn't happen in the Web2 media world.
Yeah, definitely. And, and congratulations on those rewards as well. Thank you. I think you're one, one of the pioneers in, in the media space who does that. The big media outlets haven't jumped on it.
I think Forbes is probably the most prominent example of someone who tries to venture in that space. We've seen Decrypt and Rock Radio partnering up and trying to build something similarly.
Yeah, and when you look back now on your journey over the last one and a half years, what has or what have been the biggest challenges in setting that up, and where do you see now the biggest opportunities going forward?
Yeah, I think, well, with Coinage, it's crypto news focused, and we started in that niche because people understand how to mint NFTs, how to set up a wallet and go from there, and that's, I think, something that worked well.
But we quickly realized, like, our friends who aren't in Web3, my mom, is not gonna know how to use a wallet necessarily. And so how do we scale this outside of the crypto news niche?
And that's where we went in the food direction, 'cause everyone has an opinion on food. It's universal and can be weighed in on regardless. You don't have to be a crypto genius. You don't have to be...
Honestly, you just need a mouth. And so we went in that space, but clearly people weren't gonna mint these memberships unless it was easy.
And so we partnered with Privy, we partnered with Unlock to roll out the ability to just use a credit card, not even need a wallet. The NFT gets minted on the back end. No one even knows that these memberships are NFTs.
But we saw more than 20,000 mints over our first couple weeks with that project because it was easier and it was more universal.
And so that was an exciting signal because the challenge was, how do we actually build this tech? And luckily, a lot of people have been working on the stack in Web3 to make it more user-friendly.
And so that was great because it was like, okay, this can work in crypto and it can work outside of crypto.
And I think obviously the more exciting opportunities for mainstream content niches or entertainment is mostly outside of crypto.
And I think the whole industry right now is in this phase of when the internet came around, no one asked, "What about the email protocol? Like, how does this all work?" Eventually, no one talks about it.
It's just on the back end. And I think that's where we are as an industry is there's a lot of this stuff people talk about, which chain's best, how do you do that, but the end user doesn't really care.
And so it's been exciting because we can work with these chains. We worked with Avalanche to put Best Dish Ever memberships on there, and Coinbase to get them off and promoted to people who are interested in food.
And so I think we're at a really exciting time now, almost as exciting as the streaming era, which is why I think Mark from Netflix is one of our backers because he's like, "Okay, something's going on here in Web3, and it can revolutionize media altogether."
And so that was the first challenge, is how do we actually make this easy for people? And luckily, when you do that, it can actually take off even quicker.
So that's what we've seen with Best Dish Ever, and it's been a cool start, and obviously having Food Network stars attached to the project hasn't hurt.
So we're really excited about where we can take that and let foodies build on chain for the first time ever. That's a very good segue now to the second project of Trustless Media.
As you mentioned, it's called Best Dish Ever. Can you quickly give an overview of what this is and how it works? Yeah. So it's, again, coming from Trustless.
Trustless is a bit of a, a pun because, again, media, if it's trustless, you can trust it.
But I think there's a huge problem 'cause influencers are essentially redoing the same model that traditional media suffered from, which was if ad dollars are your only way to monetize, inevitably someone might come to you and say, "Hey, can you give us some positive press?
Can you cover this restaurant and say that it's good when it's really not that good?" And you go there and everyone's like, "Yo, what the hell? You recommended this restaurant and it was trash."
And so what we're trying to do with Best Dish Ever, the idea there was can we create a way to realign incentives in the food space to just let people tell us what the best food is? There's the Michelin Guide.
I don't think anyone really knows how the Michelin Guide says these restaurants are good. They have their own ways, but no one knows what's going on in the black box.
And so at Best Dish Ever, our goal was let's partner with super smart, talented chefs and foodies that can tell us where the best restaurants are.
Start there, and then open it up as we bring in a huge community of foodies to then vote on chain what are the best restaurants, and we go out and we highlight those restaurants. We shoot there. We put out content.
It's like Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieri, but democratizing that. And so I love watching food content, but I never get to try the food, never get to say whether or not I like it.
And so what we've done is now you can become a member. We can profile restaurants that you tell us to go profile on the show, and then we can give you discounts to go try them out in person. And we've been doing that.
We've had a couple events with Top Chef season 13 finalists. We've highlighted some really good restaurants, and it's all there, bestdishever.nyc.
But I think, again, it's a really cool way to create community around content, and we've seen it scale a lot quicker now too. And again, people can buy into it and say, "I'm a co-owner of this show."
And as it scales, as it maybe gets picked up, not saying it's getting picked up by the Food Network yet, but as it scales and gets picked up, starts to bring in advertising money, starts to bring in other forms of content, partnership money, it can be a serious player in this space.
So I'm excited with that one. Definitely sounds very interesting.
Taking a step back now, again, for listeners who may not be very familiar with blockchain technology, you mentioned now you can vote on chain, you can rate restaurants on chain. Why does this have to happen on chain?
What's the advantage of Web3 here, and why couldn't you do this on your own self-hosted platform? Yeah. I think, again, it's funny to think about this, right?
Because I think in the crypto space there are a lot of people who may be paranoid, and I say that as someone who's in the crypto space myself. Like, you're taught, like, Bitcoin is money on chain, right?
And it's because we need trustless solutions to problems in that the government can just keep printing money. So with Bitcoin, it's limited supply, and it's all on chain for everyone to see. Very transparent.
I think in the media space, there are similar views of distrusting media outlets because they don't know if it's true or if they're incentivized or biased because they're getting ad dollars or whatever.
And when it comes to putting our community's rankings on chain or letting them vote, it basically is a way to say, "Look, it's not fudged in any ways.
You can trust these rankings, and we're not getting paid to make them this way because the proof is all out there." Now, you could push back and say, "Do you really need that?"
But yes, I think the answer is probably, because otherwise there's no way to defend anything that you're saying out there, and there's no way to really defend these awards.
And I go back to Crypto Project of the Year too, because there's a lot of awards in the crypto space, but who's to say, unless you can actually point to, "No, our members voted, and here's the open and transparent results of-" Our community says this is the best project in crypto for this year.
And it's the same thing in the food space, and I think again, the on-chain element that's really exciting is that we can track.
I was an anchor for years and basically just putting out stuff into the void, and as a traditional media company, you really can't track who's watching, who's most engaged.
There's no way to really bring in your super fans. And I think what we've done on chain, it's really exciting because we have viewers who really wanna be involved.
And what you can do then is tier memberships to where people have talked about the thousand fan theory, is you basically let your super fans be involved in the process, 'cause they really care about this stuff, so you might as well bring them into the fold.
And that's what our NFTs allow us to do, is we're allowed to basically then at that point, okay, here's this user who really likes our content. Here's his wallet. He wants to be a member. He wants to be active.
And then we can pay patronage dividends to that person at the end of the year. So again, it, it invites them into the process and has opened doors in the network effects of all this.
These people are incredibly into the content, into the space, and have great connections, by the way.
A lot of the Coinage backers, our first minters, are Web3 founders who have opened doors in terms of being project leads and founders. They bring us great stories.
Like, these people are the ones in the room where it happens, and as a media outlet, that especially helps when you're trying to cover these things.
So again, I think it opens unparalleled access, whether it's crypto news, food, wherever we go.
One of the biggest challenges for rating platforms or even Google reviews or, uh, TripAdvisor reviews is always fake reviews, and I assume this you tackle by gating access to your community and vetting beforehand who's even eligible to do those reviews.
Yeah, no, for sure. Is that correct? And I think that's the cool thing about having NFTs or memberships as an NFT is that it's all on chain.
We can check the wallet, make sure that this person is a legitimate, you know, member, and then, only then, could you vote and influence kind of the things that we do, which again, isn't possible, and the co-ownership piece hasn't been possible beforehand.
And I think so many people talk about interoperability. That's another big piece is like, okay, if we own our audience, what can we do for partnerships on chain? And I think there's a trade-off there.
The more you put it on the back end, the more people don't even know. It is hard if they don't, like, understand how self-custody works. "Okay, I can go over here and mint this thing too."
You do start to run into some trade-offs as this industry evolves. I think that's one huge challenge that has not been figured out by us or anyone else.
If you move everything on the back end, the interoperability piece does get impacted a bit. You mentioned community before.
Now I wanna take a step back again now and talk a little bit about the bigger picture behind all this. So I think community is a central concept in everything you do. I think data is a really interesting part of that.
Where do you see these projects going and moving? Do you see a big opportunity in community-led brands like you're building up now, or do you see a bigger opportunity in the data play that you could get out of that?
Or is it both, or what do you think about those two? I think it's a little bit of both.
Yeah, I think it's creators, honestly, this is where the whole idea came from, is creators have historically not really had a good shake since the rise of social media, right?
They think they own their audience, but they really don't own their audience.
And so when you build an audience on chain, the cool thing, and the one thing that is interoperable there, is that you own that audience, whether it's on YouTube or Twitter or wherever.
If you know all of the info on your NFT holders, at least who they are, you can port that over wherever it needs to go, and I think that that's a piece, to your point on data analytics, that is important.
The idea of owning your audience as a creator is important.
So bigger picture in terms of how this scales, I think that there was and is a creator problem, but when you let the creator invite their community in to co-owning something that way, the way that we're doing it, it gives the creator more, I think, flexibility and power, rather than being solely dependent on an Instagram or solely dependent on a YouTube.
They become the one steering the ship, and I think that scales incredibly well.
And so that's us as a company in terms of Trustless, the way that we've structured this, is that we wanna help creators do what we've done already. They're the stars.
They know how to create great content, but they don't wanna deal with all these issues that you have to if you're doing this on your own. They don't wanna deal with ads.
They don't wanna deal with YouTube copyright problems or anything like that.
Like, they want to be just creators, and I think that that's where Web3 gets exciting, is you can cut out a lot of the middle problems and just lean into community, as you said, when you have a creator and their fans co-owning something together.
So, uh, let's play through a hypothetical scenario.
You have dinner with the editor-in-chief of one of the biggest media outlets, let's take New York Times or, or Wall Street Journal, and you have a two-minute pitch to explain what's currently happening in the media space and why is it important, and why should a media company like The New York Times watch this space.
What would you tell him or her? Yeah. I've been through a few number of pitches, right? And obviously one went well in getting the co-founder of Netflix to be involved in what we're doing, and I think that's good signal.
I guess the pitch would be, as a journalist, I could just point to all the layoffs that have happened in the media space recently and say that we got a huge trust problem.
In general, trust in media, in America at least, has never been lower. There are a few studies that have shown people do not trust media anymore, and societal issues arise when we cannot all agree on facts.
Like, that is a problem and I think what has happened in The New York Times, what has happened in a lot of publications may be really what Elon Musk is saying, is that sometimes your incentives are misaligned, and then inevitably you lose trust because people are just saying, "Oh, you're biased because you're taking ad dollars, and you need to clickbait everybody."
And that has been true, right?
Facebook and Twitter and all the social media platforms has disconnected the connection an outlet has- With their readers and with their users, and it's basically commoditized the whole space.
What I think Web3 really does well is restores that connection between an outlet, a content creator, and their fans and audience. And so when you can own that, suddenly you can monetize it in a bunch of different ways.
It doesn't just need to be ads, as historically now that's all outlets have. It can now be, all right, how do we monetize community? How do we establish events that we can invite members to?
How do we establish polls and rankings that we can have our members vote on that becomes more trusted? How can we set up validators?
We have a Coinage that becomes more of a flywheel and positive loophole effect for what we're building.
There are a lot of different ways to scale the network effects that I think historically publications have done a very bad job at because... Like, look at Instagram influencers.
Again, as I said, all they're doing is creating a huge following, but they're not tapping into the power of those fans, right?
And so what we're doing is st- is allowing a creator, an outlet, to really capitalize on that, not just as an eyeball and sell ads against them, but becoming co-owners with them, allowing them to play a part in everything to monetize your super fans.
I think that that has not been possible until Web3 came along. I don't know if that works for you- Yeah... Marc, but it's worked for us in the past in that pitch. [laughs] That's great. That's great.
So we're already nearing the end of the show.
Before we jump into the lightning round, the last question for you, Zach, what would your advice be to a person who, not yet in Web3, who thinks about this space, who listens to this podcast and thinks, "Hey, I wanna look into it.
I wanna start something"? What would be, uh, your number one advice be for that person? I think as someone who also jumped in the space 'cause I was excited about Web3, there's a lot of distractions.
There's a lot of noise. And so looking at the signal through the noise, honestly, I think the best Web3 projects that take off are gonna be solving a Web2 problem.
In that, I mean don't get distracted by what gets all the glamour and attention in Web3 itself, 'cause you can go deep down the rabbit hole and get super distracted by everything that's happening.
You can trust on-chain metrics, by the way, and get super distracted by what's happening.
So I would just say and caution some new entrants into ground yourself in legitimate problems and legitimate solutions to then apply those to the Web3 space. Like, how does this technology actually solve a problem?
I would go in reverse. And so that's why we often say we're a, a media company using Web3 technology to help creators. We're not a Web3 media company.
And so I think it's, it's kinda nuanced in that, but that would be my advice, would just be don't get distracted. Don't go too deep.
Think about these things rationally, and it's not exactly a rational space, but I think in the long run, that's good advice. Definitely good advice because there's a lot of noise, a lot of distraction.
Not everything that shines is legit in this space, and definitely good advice. Zach, we're starting a quick lightning round now. Very short questions. I wanna hear short answers. Those will be fun.
The first one, morning ritual. The first app you check in the morning. Twitter, I'm sorry to say. Very unhealthy. Don't advise that. That is not my advice for most people, but Twitter.
What's the most underrated Web3 tool for media creators right now? That's a good one, too. Our crypto project of the year was Favor and Lens, the combined communities there.
I think right now Web3 social is taking off, whether it's Farcaster, whether it's Dracula, the new TikTok challenger. I think all of those in terms of content creators are good ones to check out.
What's your favorite book that you would recommend anyone inside or outside the Web3 space? I would recommend That Will Never Work.
As I said, Marc from Netflix is a backer of what we're doing, but the reason why I met him was because I read his book, had him on my show before, and it's a phenomenal entrepreneurial take on why hearing that will never work should not stop you.
Get out there and build it and find out for yourself. What's your favorite dish from the Best Dish Ever series? Good call on that question.
We had our event highlighting the best burger in New York at Ends Meat out here in Brooklyn. Doesn't get a lot of shine. It's a butcher shop, but it's very good. Everyone can go check out that one, I think.
Best burger in New York. What's the biggest myth about Web3? I think the biggest myth about Web3 is that it's all about speculation. I think it's a healthy piece of Web3. I don't fault anybody for speculating.
I do it myself, but I think that it's about more than just that. People really want solutions to problems. That's why the real builders are here.
And if there's anything you can let our listeners know, what is it that you would like them to hear? I would say there are legitimate NFT projects out there.
There are NFT projects that are built around rational things, we are one of them, and it's not all just collectibles and cartoon pictures anymore. The space has evolved, and we're getting there.
I have to tell myself that every day, maybe I'm crazy, Marc, but I think that's what I would leave your viewers with. That's great. Thank you, Zach, for coming on the show.
If you like this show, you can listen to it on, uh, Apple Podcast, Spotify, YouTube. Please like, please share. That helps us keep it going. Zach, thank you. Where can listeners find out more about you and your projects?
People can go to Coinage.media, check out all of our reporting. Most of our stories are actually syndicated in the Coinbase app as well.
And for Best Dish Ever, they can go to bestdishever.nyc to join the most influential on-chain community of foodies. But Marc, thank you so much for having me on, man. This was great. Yeah, likewise. Thank you, Zach.
Enjoy your day, and all the best with your projects, and talk soon. Likewise, man. Thank you again. Thank you. Bye. [outro music]