The hardest part of building a DAO is that, there's no room for any vanity metrics like we've been used to on social media. For example, since Facebook was created in 2004, we've been fine relying solely on the key metric of "followers" on social media as testimonials or markers of validation.

Despite the obvious bot market, gaming of the system, and the lack of engagement from 80-99% of these followers, our perception and sublime valuation has relatively stayed the same.

We still inherently equate the size of someone’s following on social media with status, trust, social standing, yet this metric has been majorly bogus for a very long time. The clout market of twitter, tiktok, youtube views, and followers are all for sale... and it's affects can be damaging.

The pseudo-intellectuals¹ align their personas to authority figures, they don't typically admit to misrepresenting themselves. You'll see 10+ years of experience in their profile, but ask them to explain what they did... crickets. They can't back up their experience or knowledge credentials because these people are fake based.

Pseudo-intellectual "cosplay" the aesthetic of an intellectual in order to utilize the appeal to authority fallacy². They have little training or background or qualifications in the field in which they are trying to portray themselves in as an expert. The fact that they feel the need to misrepresent their qualifications signals to me that they're lying, and willing to lie about other things as well in order to manipulate. - Dr. Ana Yudin

True intellectuals simply state their qualifications as a fact. It's not used as an argument or to leverage the power of authority, an intellectual simply states their qualification so you know where they are getting their information from. Pseudo-intellectuals are the opposite, they cosplay as the qualification because they want to borrow the pros of intellectualism without the intellectual values.

When I first proposed Mental Wealth Academy as a concept in Twitter Spaces hosted by KOLs, the most common criticism and pushback I heard was "Oh... didn't Constitution DAO ⁴ use it and lost their bid because of the transparency" To blame the tool is asinine, as DAOs are inherently transparent and just a tool, they are software, code. The way they operate is based on the Smart Contracts which govern them. Wallets, Tokens, Voting, are all based on Smart Contracts. So if I use a tool like a hammer, to build a house, and you tell me the house is flawed because the window is too big, who's the uninformed one?

I'm not saying this to be rude, I'm angry because I was right but because I was not in an authoritative position I was kicked off the stage after and the conversation digressed into racism ragebait and drama... typical crypto twitter.

Unfortunately these are some of the things we deal with, the funnel of knowledge, the sanitization of it, and the sequestering of it due to capitalism and more favorable topics lining pockets with incentives.

We like to imagine ourselves as the future of schooling, an online digital space where you can sit at different lunch-tables, talk to people, and build meaningful and long-lasting connections. Mental Wealth Academy is a consensus that's dedicated to nurturing education, human potential, intellectual growth, and financial independence. We do this by making as much information possible for free.

Despite all of the struggles and frustration we continue to stay positive and build. Currently we have over 60 pages for the Mental Wealth Academy article dropping soon in Q4. It features based opportunities, events, questions from builders in the space, and cool projects being launched as well as onboarding guides for all of your friends that may not be involved in web3 yet, but want to be. We strived to put a huge focus on safety and onboarding, and focus solely on fully vetted and audited projects. It's our way of saying, we're here eating shit with you, we see you, and we want you to be seen.

When it comes to DAOs.... simply having a large following isn't helpful, the members have to match the attitude and that must be reflected in the tokenomics to properly mirror the value each individual contributor brings to the table.

When we started a Decentralized Autonomous Organization. We had hoped the simple money pool and collaborative effort of everyone was enough to bring people together. But the biggest flaw was we were continuing to equate interest and membership as a metric to the aptitude and labor we were unknowingly asking for.

When it came to creating Mental Wealth Academy's DAO, the most difficult part was getting everyone's attention to voting. We mainly use discord for communicating, however not everyone actively uses it so sometimes a private DM is needed, a message elsewhere or a text message.

This was incredibly laborious and draining, it feels like sending emails for surveys out... it means a lot, and each contribution adds valuable insight and data to the case-study. But it's so boring.

Most of the time, we have physical lives and work and relationships to deal with, you know... "Touching Grass" type stuff. Most people relax when they're home, not vote and read proposals all weekend.

A ping about voting on a proposal can be a bother, especially when you know they don't care.

Recently in the past few Presidential Elections, voter turnout has been relatively higher than the past. However, only about 66% of these eligible voters are actually voting, with 66% being an outlier on the high-end in recent years. (Pew Research Center, 2023).

We want people actively voting, contributing to discussions, and incentivizing collaboration. How do you accurately encourage that without spam pinging people? You build a brand that people are electrified and connected to, which we started building through our aesthetic dominance and visual electricity.

I myself am the most active and I hold 41% of the tokens, 183aaros is 2nd in activity and contribution so holds around 21% of the tokens accordingly. Other members who have also voted on the proposals when asked individually all hold around 5% of the tokens.

We created a groupchat setup and the wallets are visible, if for some reason I were to die. Lord forbid, the rest of the members could still collaborate and control the Ethereum Treasury by hitting the programmed 40% vote requirement. It was made this way to give myself autonomy with finances for now and the future safety proofing of the DAO.

We also have money set aside to create a liquidity pool, to make the tokens tradable so that interested parties can purchase and trade tokens freely to hold and be a huge part of our ecosystem. This idea still needs a bit of refinement as we aren't sure where to list the token at.

October 10th, 2024 was global mental health day. We celebrated this onchain by hosting a twitter space talking about various topics on the subject. 80 people tuned in to listen to the space and it was 1 hour and 33 minutes long, <13<33.

Thank you for reading the weekly recap for Mental Wealth Academy!!! Remember to stay hydrated, drink water, charge yourself up and stay Based! 💜🌸🌼🌷🌺🌻🍇🌿🌱🌞🍃🌈✨💖💞💐🌟

Discord: https://discord.com/invite/bhV8YXxfKk
Twitter: https://x.com/MentalWealthDAO

Warpcaster: https://warpcast.com/~/channel/murder

¹ Pseudo-intellectuals - By Dr. Ana Yudin

Dr. Ana Yudin

Real-life psychology applications by Clinical Psychology doctor and author Dr. Ana Yudin. Providing hundreds of free resources, books, journaling workbooks, and soon courses! Stay tuned for Dr. Ana's new journaling workbook The Personal Growth Journal, as well as her upcoming course on healthy relat

https://www.dranayudin.com

² Appeal to Authority - Grammarly. “Appeal to Authority Fallacy.” Grammarly Blog, 14 June 2021, https://www.grammarly.com/blog/rhetorical-devices/appeal-to-authority-fallacy/.

³ Pew Research Center. - “Voter Turnout in U.S. Has Soared in Recent Elections but by Some Measures Still Trails That of Many Other Countries.” Pew Research Center, 12 July 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voter-turnout-2018-2022/.

⁴ Constitution DAO - "Why Did We Try To Buy The Constitution?: Crowdfunding With Crypto" God's Favorite Q, May 1st, 2023, https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/mental-wealth-academy-whats-a-dao-and-what-s-the-point-reviewing-constitution-dao-68b71efd46f1