gm farcast
oops it is monday august 19th and you are here with now nurse prof and adrienne for 29 minutes of farcaster news to start your day and we have a very special guest we have murtaza hussain who is here with us to chat about all things farcaster and also we're gonna do a little mini interview and chat with him about his recent foray into farcaster and sort of what he likes about it and why he you know why he ended up here we're really glad you're here so welcome murtaza it's so great to see you
oh oh thank you both for having me great great it's got nice and early to come on gm forecast
we are so happy to have you here we're gonna start with our usual shenanigans with a few news items and we're gonna have you jump in and and chat about them as well so first up let's talk about whoops that is not where i wanted to start i wanted to start here a webcast experiment x posting this is from v a few users who were active on x but not on farcaster were invited to cross post we want to see if cross posting makes them more likely to engage with farcaster beyond the cross post if that happens we'll roll it out more broadly if it doesn't we may pause and this is from dan related to it everyone opted in for what it's worth a consistent piece of feedback from people with large audiences on twitter but were early to farcaster because i knew them farcaster is great but i forget to post there so this is an experiment to syndicate their content to farcaster may take some time for people to start responding but certainly the next time they open the app they will have a a full notification speed and hopefully some thoughtful content if cast with no chance of reply is how you're viewing this i e it's a negative just don't follow an account or if you're seeing recast mute them the pragmatic view is still a higher chance that an account replies to you on farcaster than on twitter that's just reality
so one of the folks that i've seen who obviously is part of this experiment is p marka marc andreessen and i've seen like in his cast it felt they've just been directly recast of what he's posting on twitter so i think that's some of the pushback how are you seeing this experiment what do you think adrienne or or murtaza either one who wanna jump in here
you would adrienne
well are they actually is it a is it a copy of the same thing they're posting on twitter or is it the actual twitter link it's what they're
posting on twitter yeah
but it looks like it's a
barcaster post it looks like a barcaster post
twitter oh then go for it i love it
they are actually posting on twitter the exact same thing it's that when you look at marc andreessen's for example he's retweeting a lot so you're seeing the link to the retweet that he's doing on twitter and then occasionally if he does an actual tweet you'll see whatever he's tweeting so that's a that's a good example if you're not sure what i'm talking about
got it and that's why people were complaining about that's why all of a sudden i what i saw were people talking about yeah people posting twitter twitter content
i just twitter links yeah it looks kinda like twitter links sometimes if you if they're retweeting yeah so what do you love about it why do you think it's a good good idea
also it's x now not twitter i don't know if you got that memo and i know you i
will never ever ever call it x i'm just gonna tell you right now leland there is nothing you're gonna have to pay me a lot of money to call it x i'll just put it that way i'm not doing it i'm i'd still call it the boston gatton if that helps me out paid on
it hasn't been the boston gatton for decades
you want to pay me
i'll call it x but anyway
what do
you yeah
so what
do you think do you think we're getting a good experiment here or
yeah there's very little downside so it's we need more interesting content if people are posting other places let them also post on farcaster i think to dan's point if you don't like it guess what you can unfollow you can mute so it seems like a very safe to fail experiment and and and i do think i think it's good
what do you think martaza are we getting is the experiment worth it do you think if
like should we be trying to attract these really large twitter folks over here and is this a good way to do it
yeah no i think that to adrianne's point that it's there's no cost to it and it's harmless kind of to try it out so i think try it out and see if it works well the way i personally do it because i still use twitter or x or whatever but i i can't really abandon it because i've built you know 12 years of posting there and i have a really big following i know a lot of people on it but i like to post on warcast too so i just kinda treat them to as 2 separate tabs so i would and also i think that the audience in warcast is different so you would say it's a different character and tenor of the whole you know platform how it is so i kind of don't do that i don't post the same things on x and or and webcast or repost them generally speaking because i just feel that the audience is different so you know just tailor it a bit that way but i think that the best way to get people to do it hopefully is to treat it like that like treat it like it's 2 different rooms of the same app or a similar app because the you know the user experience is so similar so i think that reposting is good and because there's no cost doing it to try and see how it works but my own way of doing it is just to try to just you know i don't know keep treated it as 2 different things that you're gonna post on both but with an eye to a different audience so i think and i think it's not hard to encourage people to do that too as well but i think seeing how people post it it could be really good and then you know getting those people on like posting the people big following just getting them used to having yourself on a forecaster if they start getting a big following comparable to twitter on forecaster then they'll just be naturally inclined to post more so it's definitely worth a shot
yeah and i i agree with jeff here i agree with the point that recycled content is less than ideal content should be platform
vibes are different i agree with that totally because i do not post the same and i i think i did in the beginning i think i very much did post in both places but i've definitely shifted and i find myself rarely posting on twitter now but when i do it is usually something different it's not necessarily the same except for the show the show is on twitter right now hi twitter how you doing i am still calling you twitter hi elon so yeah and then this was interesting also this is from xmon cross posting a farcaster versus twitter thread see above some pain points maybe justify from twitter brain rotted people like myself so this was a whole conversation that was happening over on the burd app and yes i'll still call it the burd app too between a few folks who are you know pretty well known within crypto twitter and it was really about why it started with horse facts talking about why are you not casting on barcaster
and then people kind of saying oh i don't really get it i don't know how to do this right
so there was there was a whole big really really good conversation back and forth about why do this and then i liked luciano's takes here why because he was replying to andy 8052 what makes it worth you worth it for you compared to twitter and his comments were higher quality network higher quality conversation far less noise very reminiscent of pre-twenty 14 twitter basically farcaster for insight conversation twitter for distribution and i felt like that was a really great point because that's kind of if i need to broadcast broadly i'm probably gonna use twitter if i want to have a conversation and actually engage in a social network i'm gonna focus more on war cast and i think that's probably a good rule of thumb in what i'm seeing so
mertasa even though you had a very you have a very big twitter following you're you know been very active in there for awhile you really have dove in really into the farcaster ecosystem and i appreciate that and so what first brought you over to farcaster and what has made you stay i guess is a good question that might be helpful to others
yeah it's funny because someone was commenting jeff goldberg who i think people on farcaster know he's like very comments about the the platform quite a bit so i know him for many many years professionally because i'm a reporter and i would draw upon his firm's analysis for some stories that you know i was doing which relate to social media manipulation usually by states and then a couple of years ago he was threatened by somebody and he goes like his life was in danger somewhat so i wrote a story about him for that and it was a very stressful time frame and so forth but you know we kinda kept in touch so a few a month or so ago i was in another story and i was like i should call jeff to get his take on this and then we reconnected and he's like can you please check out this thing farcaster like a webcast like this thing that's going i really we're trying to make it big and you know like just wanna get different people noncrypto people and using it and i've always said no to using any of the social media i know i never used blue sky i never used mastodon or whatever it's called i just feel that i already been locked into twitter and i have no reason to use those it just seem the same to be to be the same as twitter but he was like look this is like a crypto component too too and i i'm actually interested in crypto and like a lot of people in in my field i guess but i find it very fascinating but yeah so i was like okay well that's interesting so then i i posted a little bit and then i got such a nice response from people people were so welcoming and you know everyone was saying you know gm and welcome and so forth and that was kinda nice and then they were sending me all these things like what's ham and what's djen i have no idea no one explains what this means i have no idea what this means but i was like okay this is like something is going on here which is interesting so i was like okay well i'm being tipped in like cryptocurrency and i was like and at the same time i'm getting all these followers and all this like very you know warm non hostile environment because twitter has become extremely hostile it's very like it's not like i don't know how to describe it it's very very strange but you know people were kinda nice and normal so i was like oh this is a very positive vibe here and you know because of the i'm interested in like protocols and blockchain and so forth i find it very fascinating and using the internet as a means of like trying to build like a better platforms which have some sort of exchange of value and things like that so i was like okay i'm accumulating all this cryptocurrency i'm meeting all these people who are nice and you're developing a warm relationship with them through like these exchanges so i was like well yeah i can tell my wife i'm working actually when i'm personally on on webcast actually getting off twitter and wasting time you know basically it's like that so you know those two aspects of it it's definitely like you know it's nice to be able to have a social platform where everyone is kind of you know civil a little bit and maybe when it grows or as it grows that may change a little bit but i think that it has a very good initial culture and then if you can have a platform where there's a gamification aspect of it where your content if it's good and people like it you know you kind of compensate for it in a way too that's really preferable to being on twitter or being on facebook or something because then you're kinda like a sharecropper and your all your content is benefiting only the platform or the corporation but you can own the benefits of it much more so here but i think it's a much more healthier a better form of social media to have it structured so all those things it's only been like a month and a half like who knows what could happen but like so far wow
it seems so much longer i feel like you've been here
forever honestly it's real and that's a great thing i mean that in the best way like that i feel like you're really
most of it the 1st week of july so it's around 4th 4th july at that time so that's why i started doing it so like a month and like a week or a month or 2 weeks something like that so yeah but it feels like a longer time and it feels that i've already feel like i'm kinda locked in because you have so much you develop relationships and then you have a bit of a following and then you feel like it'd be bad to abandon my followers abandon that that's not happened with twitter with me originally i have like 1,000 followers i was like well i can't you know what would happen to these people to starve and not do anything so i have to keep doing it so yeah now i feel like i'm kinda into it and you know it's just cool to see people build iterate new things also because there's no introduction manual or anything i have to kinda figure out what's going on but as far as i understand people can iterate and build new things onto it because it's open source people are developing new ways to interact so that keeps it always interesting and new in a way as well too so that that's my thought about so far and you know i don't know like i don't know what the goal is exactly for the platform they wanna build like a full news kind of like capacity for it or expand the whole ambit of topics beyond just the ones that are focused in which are more tech based i think it's very doable and possible because the ux is not intimidating at all for people who use twitter it's very very naturally intuitive and i even told some people about it for webcast i was telling people you should get on this to give it a shot try it out and people you know i i could keep pushing about it but you know i'll wait till people are ready to onboard or when the platform is ready and so forth but i think it's definitely something that you know is definitely plausible and i certainly enjoy it i think it's nice and the people are much less cynical and yeah i could talk a bit more about it but i feel that it very much has a capacity to be a big social media platform in my opinion
so much murtaza the way you describe that experience is so similar to i think a lot of our experiences coming in when you say there's no instruction manual i always think like is that a is that a feature or a bug because when there's no instruction manual it's a little bit of a almost a gatekeep of if you can come in and be earnest and be willing to ask questions and kind of figure things out and be comfortable when things aren't totally clear and give people the benefit of the doubt i think it's a good way of getting in i don't think that scales i think it probably should be a little easier to onboard but i i love just the way you described it because i kinda feel like that that you know it's kind of hard to quantify but there is like an earnest culture that you were able to kinda keep up on right away
it's a good way of putting it it's very earnest culture and you know i guess it would be hard to make an instruction manual because it keeps changing because they keep building a new thing onto it and so forth but yeah i think the basics you could you could get people a little bit acclimated to it well you don't have to use all those functions you can just say that you know i'm just gonna post and cast and these are channels and that's pretty easy for anyone who uses twitter but yeah i i was just wondering what is like ham like what does it mean someone gave me 300 ham like i still don't fully know to be honest but i kinda understand a little bit more now
neither do we it's another it's another token there's always something popping up and you have to kinda just roll with it
yeah yeah yeah and you know for me i i am a little bit acclimated to crypto and blockchain just not because of my job just because my it's like a hobby like i find interesting so from i was more incentivized to figure out what it means and try to you know connect all the things to it together but you know not everyone is there at that point at the moment but you know you can just kinda you know that can be a way of onboarding them into the whole thing because it fits in very naturally
and i think the other thing is hey adrian he thinks maybe a class might be useful maybe something to help people walk through yes we're we're putting one together we're
working on a
farmhouse a good place
class alright we'll send you we'll send you the registration link
we'll let you know yeah it's coming soon and then there will be recordings that'll be available too so yeah we're actually in the process of working on that so that's very soon but it's yeah it's a great point because there is no instruction manual it does like early on it kinda i think does help filter a little bit so you do get no
one thing i will say with the quality a lot of people de seed me they de seed me saying hey if you wanna chat i can help you just get acclimated not for any wanting anything returned just to add up like a you know a generous spirit which is really nice it shows it exemplifies the culture which is very collaborative and friendly and so forth i don't think anyone ever dm me on twitter saying hey can you help with twitter you know it's not really the culture of it but they did that which is quite nice
i liked i think it relates to this farcaster has less price chatter because the user base is a higher percentage builder creator than ct it's a high agency mindset and i thought that's a great point and kinda relates to this of when you have that people hear for different reasons and you do have a lot of builders and you do have a lot of creators and it changes sort of the conversation where nobody's here just looking for the car wreck where on twitter that's often what's happening is that you're looking for the entertainment value you're looking you know the negativity is is more a part of the conversation this was also from dan that was a similar similar to this discussion it's not hard to be intellectually honest and negative negativity also performs better than optimism on social media much harder to be intellectually honest and optimistic with bias for action willingness to fail learn ability to find the appropriate amount of signal in all the feedback then discard the remaining noise and most importantly not quitting so for those who do stick around i feel like you get a much more positive than other social platforms but also sometimes that's not what people are looking for right they're just looking for entertainment they're not looking for deep conversations about you know play doh which literally happens all the time like
on a
podcast and it's very hard to find on twitter so yeah
yeah no there are a lot of very smart people on webcast even the people who work on tech you just know about these things but i really like what dan casted there actually because there's kind of like a balance you have to have between self criticism or you know critical sense and optimism and i think the optimism always has to be at least a little bit more otherwise it's very deflating if it's just very negative you're just gonna like you know you're you're demotivated and so forth but if you're not self critical then you become vulnerable to all these shortcomings and so forth so that's also not good to not have that aspect as well too but you also have to like have the gears just aligned in the right way so what he described is is very right and unfortunately the bias of human beings is to spread negative news more it's like an evolutionary thing like negative news is very you know could be dangerous could be important you have to spread more so that tends to go more viral on social media and then the morale of people using it becomes very low accordingly so how do you maintain a self critical and critical perspective but also keeping optimistic perspective can you scale that in a huge group of people i don't know it's more like a sociology question but i think you can certainly try and you can try to in in certainly a smaller community as you're building it up to implant that idea first and i actually think that in webcast going back to what i said originally it's kind of well geared to that because of the fact that you can use it to do other things just talk you can do exchange you can sort of if you're doing well at it you can accumulate things just people's goodwill and then that makes people more optimistic so i think it changes the vibe a little bit potentially to have you know i don't know and and twitter everyone thinks they're gonna die on twitter the next day so like you could look at every single tweet and then initially it looks like this tweet is like telling me the world's about to end and that's kind of like just so you can experiment with these tweets they're kind of like very interesting but on webcast i think it's different
or right now in 2024 it's it's the world's gonna end if you don't vote for my candidate
if you vote for that
other candidate the world is absolutely going to end
yeah you look so good now
november or whatever
yeah i think everyone has a 4 elections in them and at that point they end up running out yeah i don't know yeah oh yeah i think that's it's a very good point that you made and i think that's something that can build into the culture
yeah i think that i think the builder culture has definitely helped i think the conversations that go a little deeper help to frame the culture and you had a and i couldn't bring it up just because i'm having some issues
so many issues this morning but there was a there was a post that you did about reading and reading books and that kind of spurred some good conversation around that but like that i thought was a bigger conversation than it actually became because i i see this with my kid i see this with myself i read a lot less than i used to a lot i used to read a ton and i mean like back into when i was in law school i would still read a lot for pleasure and i think it's cause i was in such a reading mode and i think we get separated from that and it's hard to get back in and that all ties to me to critical thinking and it's the thing that i see in students that is severely lacking and i think that's gonna be the biggest challenge moving forward especially with ai that people who lack critical thinking skills are gonna be in big trouble if you can't discern what's ai what's not what's hap you know just reality so i think it's going to twist a lot of things around and i think we're we're heading for an interesting end of the world just kidding just interesting times ahead on twitter that would mean the end of the world but i just mean you know but it is i think but i do see on war cast is a lot more critical thinking and i think that's what's important
totally and i think that the the the message lengths are optimized to something which is not just a sound bite but also not such there's no there there's enough scarcity of space that you have to be somewhat concise and somewhat targeted and think about what you're saying whereas i think the x or twitter just we get to go on on the space to kind of like lose track of the argument i've never read a super long tweet before like the really long ones i've never read one i don't know what anyone's saying oh the long one's saying yeah i don't think i know what reads those but but yeah
we had like a month where all we didn't talk about long tasking
you just walked right into her heart
in a good way yeah
i don't know how it's first of all a a long piece of text usually needs an editor and i took years of writing to know that how important editors are an unedited long ramble is like this is unreadable and you know it's not good for the writer or me so i don't think anyone reads them but because of suppression of links too i can't find news on twitter anymore it's very difficult to find news i can't find sources i can't report things anymore so i don't know if the the usership's gone up or not but certainly the content the quality of the content has gone significantly down just in a practical useful standpoint so you know another platform could emerge on multiple platforms or something to to to fill some of those those tasks but yeah i don't know that's you know speculative but i think it's very possible but
yeah well you're you're speaking my love language right now and i know you're just getting into read write own
yeah yeah it's great
it's dixon's book
very good
i think a lot of the concepts he's writing you'll already be familiar with because you've covered crypto and blockchain and you're living it he does kind of articulate it in a way once once you've been through it it makes it a lot clearer at least it did for me yeah i was like obsessed with twitter changed my life i've written about this i got so much value from it until i didn't and then what do you do like there's nowhere to go because of locked in because of lock in and network effects so that is kind of the reason why i became so bullish and dedicated to kind of making forecaster succeed it's easy to be like this place sucks because it's not perfect yet but i wanted to succeed i have this there's a lot of conversation about why there's only kind of one core client which is warpcast and why there should be you know a healthy protocol should have dozens if not hundreds of applications on top of it or at least more than 1 3 to 5 at minimum
i have this kind of feeling where at at least for now i'm kind of okay if it's just warpedcast because because it's built on blockchain because i own my identity there is protection so when farcaster or when warcast takes its evil arc which it if which it will i mean we all like it has to as you when you extract so much value that you have an out like that there's an exit that there's another way to build something else like imagine
like
elon doesn't really have to listen to everybody because he it's a privately owned company and he's you know head product manager because people can't leave
yeah you
just don't have the same power
well so this is actually because no i don't really understand this entirely so webcast forecast there's a protocol and then you own your social graph and even they can't like ban you from it or if you don't like it you can take that graph with you somewhere else so that's that's great that's great i was not suspected as such but that's in greater sense
yeah there's multiple clients but just they're not as popular so supercast is 1 and if you go over to supercast you'll see a different feed because it's unfiltered it's you know anyone who may have been blocked it it might be a little extra spammy cause anyone who's been blocked for spam may not show up on warpedcast may show up there for you so depending on who you follow and things like that so we already have that and we have a couple of there's a few other clients as well that have different ways of approaching the content so you're going to get a different experience but the plus side is you can take you take all your followers with you over there you take all your content with you attached with your to your fid so yeah so if you so for example i was thinking about this when jeff got i think this is what attracted jeff to farcaster as well was when you're deplatformed somewhere right if you're deplatformed on twitter you don't necessarily have a great substitute it's not the same you lose your followers all those things if that happens on warpcast you just hey i'm over on supercast now
that's it right
we should you're still there
yeah
yeah
but we should plug vee wrote a blog post varun who's cofounder of farcaster and cto of workcast marco he wrote a blog post early on it's called sufficiently decentralized social network i really should read it because he describes the vision for it and he defines sufficiently decentralized as if 2 people on the network want to communicate but the rest of the network doesn't want them to they still can mhmm
so it
doesn't mean he doesn't say you can't be deplatformed he doesn't say you have a right to an audience it just means that you're able to communicate if you want to
that's only reason why i'm guessing i should definitely read that and you know to adrian to your point reading read write own is actually great for me now because sometimes we get self doubt about the demand cryptos it was like a big like dogecoin something like no it's really significant you know technological change and twitter also changed my life all whatever negative comments i have about today it definitely transformative positive effect of my life so you know i would like to see that whole dynamic continue i like the internet i like the ideology behind trying to make it freer and live up to its potential so this is great like to have it build something else it's very promising i would say at least so yeah i should definitely read this and yeah i'll look it up right there also in his yeah
well and we'll we'll send you a link to it directly so you have it
yeah and last point of distinction i'm sorry and just martaza last point of distinction is your identity like your your identity is on chain it's on optimism which is you know super chain on ethereum but your casts are not your following graph that's all on something called hubs which is that's the farcaster protocol so the farcaster protocol contains your social graph and your cast content your identity is on chain so people can't so you own that
oh you own that this is really good because if you get yeah if you get blocked from twitter it's game over actually there's not really much you can do if you built everything on twitter which i i have actually which was part of a mistake but
yeah well no i mean many such cases
yeah many such cases and
and i don't think you know there until the early one right until you get deplatformed until something happens until you no longer like the person running the platform whatever it is and then you're like why did i do that but i so i think that this solves a big problem but a lot of people don't see it as a problem until it is for them so
i think people don't understand it's a hard
selling point
yeah yeah people don't understand the substructure of the internet they don't understand they're using the thing they don't understand there's a corporate choke point they don't understand what a protocol is and i i myself among those people didn't understand many many years ago and only just kind of trying to look into it myself and like you know reading about it and so forth they kinda get it now when you get it you're like oh i should build out a protocol i definitely should do that because you know what's gonna happen but yeah and you know yeah gen z gen z might just open webcast accounts instead of x that could be you know a good move to them
that would be interesting
yeah i've got a few
gen z's as roommates and i've been trying to get them on on work cast and they won roommates
we'll build we'll build some good memes and good conversations on work as they will wanna be part of it that's kind of like the quick
yeah i haven't gotten my roommate to to to dive in yet that'd be my child my 16 year old child i do wanna share this question from jeff and let me read it in case for those who are just listening question for mataza much most of social of media is anti crypto not even social media media nathaniel hopper new york times for example basically spent years working on convincing his peers at the new york times that crypto was worth covering the question is do you feel there are many other crypto friendly crypto curious journalists out there
yeah there definitely are and they're also the majority i would say are crypto indifferent they're just kind of agnostic about it and but they like to use they need to use social media for work so i think they the majority i would say fall in that category they're not just not really thinking about it and and different either way but if they saw someone who's working which was using it they would not be averse to that it's just not really something like that i will say when you have like a bunch of people like i'm just one person if you have like a 1000 people who are journalists or people whose job is to think critically about various subjects i i don't cover tech i cover more foreign affairs and conflict and so forth but those people will ask critical questions they'll ask critical questions they'll ask questions of people who used the platform if they're like people who are powerful and influential and stuff like that they're gonna ask very tough questions but that's like part of society it's like like just having society on the platform will inevitably entail that and the last question is about crypto but the thing is if the protocol works and it offers those benefits it's kind of an irrefutable argument to itself that's like a that's a reason to use it and so forth so you know the people who would be averse to it just because the crypto component i think they're quite small i think it's mostly people who there's a small minority of people i would say who like me are actively interested and find it fascinating and so forth i think there's maybe 85% who would just like just let me post and then you know i don't know anything about this but if you give me some crypto or if it works something like that that's great it's not a problem and there's like another smaller percentage maybe 10% of people who are like turned off by it not because of the technology because of the gauche sort of financialization which has become the major face of what crypto is to most people but in the book i can
see a number yeah
yeah but creating the casino what chris dixon said the casino versus the computer the casino thing is turn people off and you know if i didn't know about technology i'll be turned off by it but if i had not learned about the technological aspect next to it then you know i would if i've written it off but no i i do see the the value behind it or at least the potential behind it in that sense so i think that no i think generally speaking it's not really a problem at all i think the main problem as with a social network is that is the initial network effect why am i posting when there's no one there i wanna have a huge audience on twitter but i think that warpedcast does kind of get around that a little bit by the welcoming and warm community like the very like ostentatiously welcoming community which is really really great positive feedback we join and secondly the financialization component which builds in organically into it because you know i would say that i've casted this before but there's a very big differential between the tech world and like the analyst and journalist world whereas the former has a tremendous amount of comparatively resources financially the latter has very little it's kind of always looking for and ways to augment what they what they do so if you can like make a little like elon musk pays people who have blue checks to post a little bit to generate content it's very minimal it's like literally like coffee in the morning once a month something like that whereas you know if you can generate a reasonable steady stream not even a lot of money but something from using warcast they will 100% post their content on warcast instead of twitter because at least i'm getting something out of it and i'm i have to promote my work anyways not to network anyways so if i can turn that into a small stream of regular income which could fund further work there's no doubt about it the the logic all rev makes sense for that other things through channels and things like that which warcast has which twitter does not and twitter is really suffering for not having that now because it becomes so chaotic you know i would be like how could you not have a social media channels now i feel that's actually why i think that once you use it it's it's far superior so so those things it's just a question of getting people on and i would say that if you get like 3 people on just to test it out for a few months get them acclimated to it get them like the way i'm into it now then you can ramp up and then you can have 10 people then you can have 20 people and then slowly slowly you'll have a venue where conversations are happening where others want to gravitate towards and another thing i would say to jeff's point is i wouldn't get new york times journalists i wouldn't get washington post journalists to come on because those people they may be more you know a lot of them are really great they're really nice but they may be more pretentious or they may be more you know they i don't know it's just a little different you wanna get the mid high to mid category of people and on the lower category as well too the people who make up the bulk of the you know discourse you could say get those people on and then the the big top people will come later like the cnn anderson cooper whatever will come later because they wanna be where the conversation is and that's how twitter got going it wasn't the journalists that are using it who are very famous it's that a very critical mass of people who are news consumers and producers in the mid tier started using it and then everyone was like i can't miss this conversation i have to be there for that so i think it's absolutely replicable if not to the full extent of x or twitter to a certain still a you know significant degree and i think it's just about talking to people talking to people who are in those categories and getting them to to use it and incentivizing them a little bit and tell them they can ask questions about crypto and get crypto moxie yeah no no honestly like yeah yeah someone was i'm making like cryptocurrency from posting on social media and she's like hey sure you are and but i was like no actually i have a look and then she's like you know whatever like if this working do it that's a really important thing actually and it sounds frivolous and sounds like it's a gamification of it and so forth but i think it's not actually because it's a very big wake up call that you know things you do in the online world are real they're not not real it's not like a video game and when you're doing something successfully there and it's having even like you know small to medium benefit in your material life in terms of something quantifiable like revenue from it that's a big wake up call that's like the thing that this is real this is something you should take seriously and it can scale and it can also have implications on your relationships and so forth so that you know that's like the essence of what i think the promise of you know blockchain internet could and should be that type of thing it kinda feel like the the metaverse is real like if you're earning money in the metaverse then you know you're doing work there then it's real so i think that that's a really promising wake up call for me that was like a really this is a real moment when i was using it so yeah
i think that there's 2 things there too so one your your audience can also earn crypto earn moxie for example just by following you and and interacting with you without you doing anything you don't have to even give it to them like they are just earning it so that's a new a new gamification if you will you know plus and minus and we've talked about that with the spam and things like that but there's incentive for people to interact and to pay attention and to read what you're writing which i think is always you know helpful and then the other thing is and i think you're seeing this now is if you're early and right now a lot of areas are early like a lot of topics haven't been put into a channel nobody's really talking about them whatever it is so your area of expertise and this is you know particular we're talking about journalists right now but it could be anybody any kind of area of expertise if you bring that to warpcast right now and to farcaster you're gonna own that space for at least a moment in time until someone else comes in and then you become that leading expert in that area so i just recently saw afro chick naomi has been casting fitness videos we see those everywhere else right any channel you go on to instagram is there's a zillion of them there's nobody doing that on war cast so she's kinda owning that moment right now because no one else is doing it and i see that over and over again so like for global news and for geopolitics right now you can own that space because there's no one else who's already doing it it's a lot less noise it's a lot less competition and i think that's really cool to be able to
see that it's a great incentive to start using it like sooner than later i totally agree yeah
have you guys heard the frontier the digital frontier analogy
no but i would love to hear it
so well just think about like back before the world was discovered fully not that and who were the people that were brave enough to go push the frontier literally risking your their lives right but to go push and kind of settle and
and and how much opportunity they got for it so pretty much the world has been discovered and there's not really frontiers in the world to explore but you have these digital frontiers and kinda warpcast being 1 so if you're willing to kinda go places where people aren't and explore and create you can kind of stake stake out a home in a place and kind of capture opportunities that other people aren't doing because
it's like buying a real estate in manhattan in 1800 it's kinda like that yeah i got manhattan
the oregon trail yeah
yeah yeah
exactly yeah but it's it's based definitely kind of infinite digital frontiers
yeah yeah exactly yeah i totally agree with both of you guys and like being at the if people build a good community and you help shape it in the beginning you can kinda shape the characteristics of it a little bit too and you know it's kinda good because i don't know how twitter became so hostile and so like it's like a war zone probably it was not intentionally recurated it was not intentional culture created it just kinda created exploded on its own which is fine but you know if you can intentionally incentivize and encourage a somewhat constructive culture and i think the moxie thing you mentioned too is like tech creates positive sum relationships between people not everything is zero sum if there's something which makes it positive sum keep iterating that again and again you could have a very healthy culture so i think it's something that has the the potential so i'm gonna keep playing around with it and see what happens but
yeah great
it was super nice which has been a lot easier yeah
we had one other comment here from jeff martaza recently used the phrase news influencers with me and it really resonated do you wanna what do you mean by
news influencers
conflict between the tech world and the media world i think that we have to differentiate some things too because i think there's certain like some group of elites and another group of elites who don't like each other and that's become like a big dinner party fight i think the what you wanna talk about is you wanna talk about people who are interested in the news who know how to create news who are have professional standards but who are ideologically open minded and you know there's the best predominant number of people in my opinion most people are like that i would say in my world i would say so you know how do you get those people and to sidestep this sort of like intra elite you know argument and so forth just get those people and those people are not they just need a venue to promote their work or whatever else it is to get people to see the information to connect with people who share that information as well too i i had not gone to journalism school i didn't study anything through the journalism i even journalism by accident i just kinda happened to be in egypt at the time of the arab spring i was tweeting and posting my blog and then somehow i became a journalist so i never was trying to do that and so i was a news influencer basically and then i learned how to do the professional skills later on how to you know format it investigate and things like that that took some time but you know there are a lot of people like that and they're just looking for people who somewhere to share information and connect with others and they're interested in the news as a broad category of things so just focus on that category and those people need help they need a platform they need ways to generate revenue for their work that's a lot of people and then you can build like a community like that and then it'll scale and then the people who are institutions will want to connect with those people because they rely on them for information they rely on them for an audience and so forth so i'll focus on people like that to get them on if you were trying to scale like a news type thing on webcast or broadcaster so yeah and i think it's very doable i think it's not not doable at all because people are very dissatisfied in that that world with twitter because it's been because of the suppression of links and then
i was just gonna say bill that's what i was thinking of too with with if you're trying to get your writing out there your writing lives somewhere else
yeah it doesn't get out there anymore
and the links compressed definitely throws off and you don't have that issue on farcaster which is great it's not surprised you can show the actual link if you want or if you don't want it embedded you know all those things
so i think the suppression of links has made it so hard for anyone who's starting out because i i got to get my name out there when i had no platform on twitter it was great because it was the equal playing field but now the suppression is such that if you're already in then if you're not then you're not and they want people instead to post these super long tweets but that's not really the same thing as an article it's like just it doesn't the the medium does not report to doing that effectively so you know it's tough how do you get out there now if you're just starting out from scratch like i don't know but this could it could be like that
i just i have to laugh because like seriously this is all that adrian's been preaching
for so long about the long run the web yeah don't take the web out of the worldwide web
yeah
yeah yeah and like i don't want a single platform that is not the vision of the internet oh no and i like links and i like lots of like i don't need one person i don't want an everything app
you know it's it's
i want an everything protocol
exactly i want an everything protocol it's funny i used to go to twitter to get like the news it's where i find the news every morning i just check twitter yeah but now i don't find any news there i just find people rambling and i can't i have to actually go back to the new york times website which i never hadn't done in like 10 years i hadn't checked it on a regular basis i need someone to structure the news for me in some
way more
market because they they've destroyed the curation that used to exist of all these different you know sources
so and it's just such been such a great
i think you're right too because a lot of times i would just go to trending and most of the time it would be the top news of the day and now it's just mostly what are people fighting about today
what are people fighting about and and because of
the news
it's news if something big happens it's news but most of the time it's just whatever's
i actually got get us the most attention
i actually got news several times a week when someone called me on the phone telling me something was going on like as going back in 1999 that's how i actually got information i used to get it on twitter just by seeing what people are talking about it's the data now and did this the blue check the new blue check system where you pay and then you monetize by engagement it's incentivized it's extremely negative social political commentary and you know poor standards and just what makes people the most mad you know it's not good it's actually not good for news or not good for being informed it's kind of created like a psychological dog food environment i would say just creates shoveling this crap constantly and then so much of it if it's not good for you it doesn't taste good that's what they've done and not not to be so negative about it it just makes me feel that there's opportunity then to build something else and the protocol aspect of it the extent that can be popularized and people can understand what that means and how it disincentivizes that whole episode from being repeated is a great selling point i think it's something that people could impress upon others that well you just you can still rebuild your social graph in somewhere else and you won't have to have you can own it which is really really important i think
yeah definitely and yes to yes to crypto adrian wants to know wait adrian so i shouldn't use my aol for everything actually aol was really you know if i think about aol and warped cast and channels they were onto something aol definitely helped you find things much easier within that one space
so when the last week was like
news was there like you could click on news you could click on
i don't know
there you go maybe you should use aol
but nobody's there anymore new everything old is new again
yeah pretty much
and
then we have myspace coming the announced space so there you go it's all coming back
yes and i found myself more than happy going back to the new york times recently like i really not for everything i kind of have like have pulled away because of for a number of reasons don't need to go into it and i find myself not every not every article is great but i just yearning for just like a little bit more high quality longer form
yeah this is exactly what i'm trying to escape i was trying to escape the hegemony of like 1 or 2 news organizations and that's what twitter was so good at because it broke that down but now since that's not effective for that anymore it's reinvigorated you know just by default people are going back to that but i think that the curated the open source kind of professional and distributed kind of wave to sending news is far superior to that so unfortunately we're back to it adrianne it's taking your time but i would like to not do that i would like to leave that
there will be alternatives yeah i mean that's the the world is not static yeah but yeah are we how are we on 29 minutes of forecaster news so far today
oh yeah we're we're double that and but i do think we should wrap because i know that murtaza has to get going and so does our our regular audience who's like yeah you guys never stick to that anyway but i know you have some lightning round questions for murtaza
yeah murtaza if you have a few more minutes jump into the yeah
i got something
i like to do a few lightning round questions don't overthink these are not hard hitting questions we just like to get to know we just like to get to know our guests a little better
yeah
so i start with the first question i ask everybody so if you've if you're a friend of the show you know what it is but on firecaster we talk a lot about the url to irl pipeline and lots of people here came on to farcaster without knowing anyone and made a lot of internet friends that have become real friends in real life so question to you is when and how did you make your first internet friend
i don't know when did i first make an internet friend well the thing is over the years because i didn't i mentioned that i didn't go to journalism school so i didn't know anyone who was a journalist i was so remote from that world like i could not be more remote from it i was very very far away from it but then everyone somehow became my internet friend because everyone i started knowing people who were talking about the news and responding to events on twitter and then those people became my colleagues after time people i really admired who just were much high above me ended up becoming people i work with like on a daily basis even today so i it's even hard for me to understand where i can differentiate my internet friends to my real friends i guess the ones i knew growing up were my just pre internet friends before facebook and twitter and things like this were popular as we even developed but now it's everyone like and i can't even remember the first one now i can't even tell you who it is because
of some
but it's because of everyone no okay
because you live in the metaverse officially
i live in the metaverse
i'm in the white on
the internet like everyone is kind of like from there it's like i can't even differentiate the 2 worlds from one another which shows a great you know victory in penetration of that whole software into the world
yeah alright you can't count the channel you host but what is your favorite other channel on forecaster
i like the memes channel actually i like to unwind with some some memes actually
many many such cases
oh my god
what's your favorite holiday
holiday like christmas to be honest i love christmas i just love the the lights and the the vibe and the music and just everyone's so chill and it's kind of nice i look forward to christmas every year i'm liking snow still like still snow every year somehow but just that old it's very beautiful so yeah definitely christmas i would say
morning person in in new
york is also so beautiful
oh so beautiful in new york it's so amazing yeah you know i was i was a night person but lately i've become a morning person so when you guys asked me to come on in the morning maybe like 2 years ago i was like oh my god 8:30 but now i was like oh i'm off at 7:7 o'clock anyways it's fine i was coming
we do that we get this a lot and to anyone else we ask to come on we change the time for guests all the time so if you wanna sleep in i invited greg yeah well i got all our west coast friends we always do it later but i invited greg on one time and he's on the east coast but he's like i can't wake up that early like we can do it later for you are you a completionist yes or no
yeah i i i feel bad if i if i if i abandon something midway like it's not that ever happens but i would have to get like a teardrop tattoo for everything i've banded like it's a really i feel i feel really bad if i did it so yeah i i will i'm almost like hyper focused on certain things until they're done and then i can't think of anything else
what is a country you wanna visit
i went to spain this year so i've never been to spain before so yeah
oh one of my favorite places to visit yeah concert or sporting event
depends on the sport but i really enjoy concerts so maybe it depends it depends
if you were to write a book what would it be about
you know i can't figure out i've been trying to have false starts to write books so many times but now i'm thinking maybe writing a book about language learning because i had a subset post that people liked a lot about how to teach yourself a language and i've done this a few times with different languages and i think it's quite effective and the books which currently exist many of them are very good but some i feel are dated based on the tools which you have at our availability today so thinking a book of how to self teach languages is something i'm considering at the moment
how many languages do you speak
i'll say 5 yeah
more than me football or soccer
i got a solid one
well i i can't code so as a language i don't know i wish i learned the python or something i'm very impressed people can do that so yeah
okay time out when we say languages if you are a coder you are not allowed to count your coding languages as a language okay because
i was not there
you football or soccer
soccer soccer
camping or hotel
oh if i'm by myself camping if it was my wife then it's probably hotel
last thing you bought with crypto
like directly using crypto to buy something i don't think i've i've always cashed it out i don't think i've ever yeah it's probably we'll
have to alright we're gonna get you to the coffee cafe i'm going into the best cafe
it can be digital have you bought an nft
i have bought an nft yes i have oh so you've you've
paid with you bought
something i have yeah
okay that's it for for lightning and i know we gotta get you go but i actually had one more question if you have 2 more minutes so and and i like to end on a high note but this is not so you recently casted about the pakistani military regime martaza and they were saying they were threatening to drop a bombshell leak exposing you and a colleague yeah your reaction was i was actually planning to pivot away from covering the pakistan government for a while but they're really irritating me with these attacks so i might just keep reporting on their criminal antics for a while longer
yeah
i haven't formulated a question but i think 99.9% of the people i know are going to stop and so just what just how do you have the courage to do what you do and what are your feelings on that
i'm gonna share a link in the the chat which is just kind of very funny it's kinda like it's it's almost not funny but it's sort of is but basically a few like last year they released this fake audio call of me i guess i i was doing the stories about the it's kinda complicated but i have this a source we have sources inside the pakistani military intelligence establishment there's been a big political crisis there over the last year between the military and the civilian government so people many people are not happy about it so they're leaking information to journalists or mainly to me and my colleague actually it's kind of the people who have become the main conduits for it but they released this fake audio call for me to try to disparage me to say here's him asking for money from his indian intelligence handler and his rival with the indian pakistan but if you play the the voice is obviously not me it's clearly the voice actor or something they didn't use ai to simulate my voice which they could do they just kinda had somebody and i'm like oh well when is the money coming and you know let's go like that so they're kinda trying to character assassinate me but in this very inept way so you know it's kinda funny so you know now we have more stories there's a need to blow off the heat the door is still
wow that's wild that's wild
it's the the guy other guy sounds like apu from the simpsons he's so over the top kind of voice but so you know i don't know like i was gonna stop reporting on this because the heat's getting too much but you know they're making me i still have more things i can report so i'll just keep reporting it then but you know i've had many dangerous situations in jobs i've had to go to you know syria and iraq and many other places which are dangerous and people will mail me white powder a bullet came through my window one time like all those things have happened but i don't know it's just like the other people have more they they i'm very privileged i have a western passport i live in new york it's kinda like better for me than a lot of people i know who are my colleagues but so i can't really complain but you know there's element of risk and you know they did the bombshell they dropped is what they we had a source who we're talking to in pakistan and we've been texting with him and they had arrested him i guess and and maybe they tortured him i don't know what happened but they got his number and they got his intended messages so they're they started posting our messages with him but the messages were fine there weren't anything he he's a spokesperson for a political party so he used a lot of messaging journalists it's not a big deal but that's what it was and it's not very effective but i'm sure they're gonna try more things they're gonna try more things they they threatened to sue me recently too so that's maybe they'll sue me i don't know but i'm i'm confident it'll be fine because everything we report is truthful but you know i don't know i don't really consider myself courageous i just think that i'm suing my job but yeah it's you know there are risks in doing this it's like you know i don't know that's just the nature of it and you have to just you know calculate and be as speak without fear or favor that's kind of the the motto behind it yeah
wow wow that's amazing yeah yeah
thank you it's
i think there's a amazing the cowards in the world yeah and we we talk about the things you know just in our life that i think of the kind of the dangers that i i live in i don't know i just have have a lot of respect for that so thank you
oh thank you yeah
yeah we definitely appreciate the efforts and everything you do and and all the journalists out there that are
go through the fear to report on it especially those who are in war zones all of that you know just yeah yeah amazing even if you're not in a war zone even if you're not in a war zone like the war sometimes comes to you so if you're getting bullets through your window
it's hard to say something which makes people mad too something which is true and make people mad or maybe impacts you financially or something like that or like you know politically it's very difficult that's even a hard thing to do moral courage is is difficult so that's also an aspect which i respect a lot with other people yeah yeah
yeah everyone kinda love that one yeah i agree i agree with that and and i do you know i think a lot of times we get a lot of criticism of media and a lot of it is fair i'll be honest you know in terms of mostly broadcast media in particular but i think there's a lot of journalists out there who are doing doing the hard work and people may not even realize that so greatly appreciate everything you're doing yeah
yeah but oh that's that's the kind of big middle of people that twinkie try to attract to those people who are not the 1% the like the the very large yeah that they'll have exactly
yeah alright and with that we're gonna call it i'm gonna attempt to do closing credits it may not work we might just say bye but i thank you so much for being here with us we greatly appreciate it machaza and greatly appreciate you just diving into orbcast and finding a little a little home there a little corner cozy corner love the it's drop global news correct is that your channel
i'm trying to remember exactly
drop drop yeah drop global news so drop into that channel if you wanna stay informed with some serious like news coverage that's where to jump into thank you everybody who's been here i was having issues getting on on lendly today so sorry that chat has been a little quieter finally got in there so thanks everybody no matter where you're watching and we will see you wednesday usual time 8:30 am we'll see you then thank you again murtaza and everybody have a lovely monday bye bye