jam adrienne
it's monday good morning before we jump in you had an ice did you have a nice weekend you were like yeah lovely did
a little college college visits with one of my kids hopped around to atlanta and nashville and oh god it was a nice little weekend
that's fun i didn't do too much but i i did go to a spa and get a massage and i was i'm very chill nice this one was good as opposed to last week it was not as good and and we played poker on friday night and i can't wait to tell you about that but let's do our little intro and i will tell you about that in just a moment we'll be back in 40
welcome to gm farcaster bringing you everything from breaking news to spicy memes to the deep lure shaping this vibrant digital community more than just a show gm farcaster is your digital third space where the community connects the stories unfold and the culture thrives whether you're a daily caster or just dropping by we've got the latest buzz to keep you plugged in so grab your coffee then let's dive in with your hosts nounish prof and adrienne for another episode of gm farcaster
g m farcaster i just realized i retweeted the wrong thing
the the poker instead of like what we're actually doing right now so please hold one moment please let me actually retweet i said live now but it was like the poker recap the replay so that was not correct so we did play poker
on friday night super fun it was our championship game for little poker and it was really fun and our winner was peterpandam from nouns esports in little nouns and it was really fun i posted like a five minute the last five minutes and it was really fun so highly recommend go check that out
it was he ended up like knocking out two players at once it was really fun so congratulations peter i cannot find the thing i wanna show but we had a blast so thanks everybody who played we are gonna continue on with little poker just on farcaster fridays so very excited for that we will be playing this friday so if you wanna play poker for farcaster fridays and you have either a little noun or a gm farcaster hyper sub let us know because i'd love to here it is i was like
do why i'm shaking my head why how is it april you were just saying it's farcaster friday i'm like oh farcaster fridays are happen on the first friday of every month the month and it's a time for people to go from url to irl or in our case url to url but in a slightly different slightly more intimate way how is it april
it's april tomorrow is april tomorrow is april it's the last day of of march isn't that crazy handle so crazy so the other funny thing is that we had two parents playing who are who are like dealing with small kids and not dealing with but they're they're so freaking cute so that was really fun too and they were bringing good luck charms and peter was making like little giblified versions of it and that's what's behind me so if you look closely you got a little guy there little girl that's zoe i think in the picture like down here
really funny so
wrong it lasted but we're still doing it monday and we're still doing it but i mean ghiblify the the image versioning not necessarily the token the token did what tokens do so i had people mad about it i'm like no no no no no no you can't be mad if this thing went to zero sorry no no no but that's why you don't sell anything if you're the person who created it because you're just gonna hear too much shit about it anyway but the image creation is still going strong and lots of fun so we had a blast the other thing i did friday very last minute which i'm now looking for as well here it is i jumped on a stream with jen legally jen and rachel and we got her a lil noun so you can watch the whole process of a of us getting her a lil shark and it was really fun to do i was like okay we gotta do this in five minutes so that i can post it on warpcast and it was really fun so we went through like the process warpcast a five minute
yes yes exactly so we did it was really fun and we recorded like actually going through the process what's what how you do it and then choosing her little noun and one of the we narrowed it down to there were two sharks showing and then one disappeared right before we were gonna pick it so we grabbed it fast but it was really fun so go check it out
yeah how's your bracket doing by the way totally apropos of nothing
yeah not you have nothing
just brachi yeah
on far i i i guess i bought some wisconsin tokens and then put tokens they're not really tokens i bought wisconsin shares right
shares yeah
i put my bracci into wisconsin then i guess i forgot to sell it before they lost right like if you don't i'm not so i didn't i wasn't thinking about the way bracci works so i didn't sell it in time then i'm like oh well then you're just left with like who no one's gonna buy yeah once they're out well and i was like
yeah can you can still sell for a little bit
oh your bracket that's the only place you put you only did wisconsin that was it
i was i i i'm not a gambler guys i don't do this i just don't i don't like to gamble so that's all i did and then i do have a i do have a family bracket with our you know and literally in last place and every fantastic every upset i tried to call got wrong i've got every like just awful this is a good example
that's so funny so i bought a little wisconsin as well but i was smart enough to just buy a little bit i did forget to sell it as well i think i still could but i also the other two that i i put i bought some shares in was florida and houston
both of which are still in so we're in the final four with both of my other picks so there you go these were not like big brain picks they're both were number one seeds so it wasn't like yeah there's it wasn't like i was like oh i'm gonna come up with this cinderella story no it's all number one seeds in the end so didn't didn't take too much but bracky was helpful in in those decisions my
oh wow
oh wow cool
i okay again i'm not like the target audience for bracci and i've told tim this before because i'm not like
because you're not a gambler
sports i yeah i just i'm not so i really love the i love the bracci agent i love seeing it on my feed i love the kind of like the concept but i didn't know like it's not clear to me this is like i'm like dumb okay
i don't know ask it you can just ask it okay mean you literally can just ask brachi
i'm sure but then i like put it into his how did i have more where like it's just too much okay i'm like too i'm sorry i'm not a gambler it's just i'm not it's it was it's super super fun but i i i'm like i think i'm
just doing it chatters let us know how your bracket's holding up oh yes crypto is doing well i only bought duke and houston who play each other guaranteeing me a spot in the finals yay me and my sports friends good job
that's the very good job yeah those are also good the good picks i mean are no more open
just pick two winners it's not like it's hard
all in on florida okay yeah i i would have pivoted to all in there as well but i still have houston in so just chilling just chilling with my little with my little bracket holders
you can but now you pay a bigger price so we'd love that those of us holding
if you'd like to purchase florida or houston i think i think we're good yeah yeah everyone's gonna be fine with that that's funny but it's a great point i do think it is you know that is kind of the fun of this way of playing it's like your bracket's busted but it doesn't really matter because you can now just buy the buy what's left buy who's still in so yeah so it's still possible anything's possible yeah
i mean some did say the fun of bracci right was like to do it during a game like to be making like like changing your position as you as the game goes on and and having fun with it so i guess that would require me to watch a game and enjoy it so that look i'm not
yeah basketball mikado yes that's basketball
i forgot to grab the the cast though of somebody saying i didn't i've never watched march madness before and they are now watching so yeah
asked them they would recommend and then say go ahead i don't even know what these games are
i'm gonna
then the question was basketball
know her i know her from farcon
number one in the bracket she's also not a big and i was like well what was your i was like did you just randomly choose she's like no i just chose what we do with the cbs sports one she's like i just told i just picked whichever one the app told me to pick like if it said this one has a better chance of winning that's what i chose so she just like straight up no upsets just like straight up no upsets
and and it worked out perfect
if you went with no upsets you were you had a perfect bracket probably i think there was a couple of
of upsets yeah there were a couple upsets early early but
this it's the ones yeah all the the one seeds are still in so yeah it wasn't a it wasn't a big upset year alright we're gonna move on to some farcaster news this is from dan dwr we are where we are and where we're going one recently we've seen a decent increase in daily active users dau between 200 k and 300 k users open warpcast every month this needs to be 10 to 100 x greater for farcaster to be sustainable by the way dan and varun do like that 10 to 100 x range and to me that just seems like a really big range but okay so
and gm farcaster needs to grow between 10 to 100
i cast it recently i said do you remember the orders of magnitude meme from farcon in the beta am i the only one who remembers this
i i totally don't remember that
i do not remember that you'll have to you'll have to remind me what is i don't remember that at all
it's when dan was talking and someone was asking questions like this was in now may 2023
and someone was asking like what dan's goals are for increasing growth and his answer was i think in orders of magnitude
okay
he's like i need it to be clearly he does need it to be 10 times as large and then another 10 times as large from there like it was 10 x and then 10 x
and then the 10 x so we get to the 100 x 10 x
at a who posted the meme then but someone did the like the couple lying in bed and someone's like i bet he's thinking about other girls and it's dan thinking he's like orders of magnitude orders of magnitude and it was funny and he still is thinking orders of
he still is alright moving on two we've also seen a lot of previously churned users reactivate on farcaster i have seen that as well three we've significantly upgraded our developer ux with mini apps formerly frames and wallet 70 k plus funded wallets we've scaled our usdc rewards program for content mini apps and invites 250 k plus in usdc rewards and growing five we've introduced a series a new series of verifications to help developers better understand users on the protocol over 150 k users have at least one verification six we've launched airdrop offers allowing developers to target farcaster users who use their apps via mini apps seven snapchain is launching soon it's a novel blockchain like distributed system that will allow us to scale the protocol for the next 10 x we've grown the team by 50% since the start of the year it goes on looking ahead base is adding a farcaster powered feed to coinbase wallet and will likely significantly increase the number of onboarded and active fids this took that part to me is both like exciting and a little scary because i don't know what that exactly looks like so
yeah a little scary
you know that time like before the big tidal wave when like the ocean goes out and then like the like that's what you kinda you're like oh
it's a little nerve racking as part of this integration we're improving parts of the protocol to make it less dependent on warpcast this work will make it easier for other existing or new app to integrate farcaster this includes improvements to sign in with farcaster and direct cast apis 11 we're actively investigating how to reduce the cost of sign ups while still managing spam 12 we're considering insisting input on simplifying product names farcaster to farcaster app frames to mini apps etcetera the goal is to make it easier to understand for consumers 13 ultimately our most he's very wordy ultimately our most important priority remains the same significantly increase the number of daily active users on the protocol if we've achieved that developers will have a larger potential audience for their mini apps or and or clients 14 our priorities will be largely the same a improve mini apps and on chain ux so developers have the best platform to target transacting users scale rewards for content developers and invites and say continue to improve the protocol with snapchain 15 we're also planning to leverage our coinbase wallet integration work to pitch other existing apps wallets okay now this is even scarier with large user bases to integrate farcaster we also expect to support other blockchains in both mini apps and wallet e g solana 16 if we rebrand the app we're likely to open source it 17 i don't think i saw that part lower priority items i e no new developments at anytime soon channels video improvements support for up to four images in cas audio functionality bring your own algorithm encrypted messaging so those are the things that aren't happening anytime soon so they'll just remain as they are okay so that was a lot
that was 17 things what stands out to you
i think the big thing for me is the coinbase wallet part of this in which we already you know we knew that was on the way so that was that's the one that like i just don't know you just don't know it could be a situation where you know it's a you know build it and hope they come but also like you know they're gonna do a big push there's things happening around farcon so i don't know if that's the target time or not or if that's completely something else happening i don't know so there's a lot going on and it's gonna be very interesting to watch over the next month so exciting stuff
yeah i think the coinbase mike was asking like we said why is it scare or saying it's scary like why i i think one is like so i said it's like our cozy corner is gonna get blown up but it's also like things will break right like it's like how do you stress test a protocol and also it's like the first there's been so many experiments with different clients and kind of small niche communities building up and that's been fantastic for the ecosystem the more clients the better right and yeah
sure and and but this feels like the first viable like there's going to be a lot of people they're gonna have a different point of view it's gonna feel very different so it's like we don't know it's like some of the some of the scariness just comes from the fear of the unknown like feels like things will break and things will be tested and we just don't know yeah
i just got a notification
we should know what that looks like i don't
so yeah i'm a little i'm ex i'm really excited but also from and then from a perspective like like for us we know that we grow as farcaster grows and we i don't know what that means if that will continue to be true or not true or what and what that means so yeah just a little little nerve racking bankr yeah bankr's another one whoops did you grab that
was saying or is this yeah banker blowing up or is this oh this wasn't even recently this was last night i just went to dan's profile he said i'm not deploying assets on clanker seems like there might be a bug do you know what that was did you see that last night did you see deployer there's no compromise or my wall on my wallet or anything i actually
no i missed that so there was i was gonna get to that in just a second because bankr deployed something by accident last night
which was weird
yeah they do those kind of things
alright but
happening yeah
yeah so on on dan's long thing just i i i don't have an opinion on things but i will say dan is extremely transparent and yeah i appreciate that like just appreciate the transparency he talks through how he's thinking about things pretty consistent too like he's not like they might change their mind as in right as in rebrand of the protocol and app name they might change their mind about things but they talk through the reasonings and like there's pretty consistent values so i yeah and you know obviously if you have opinions get into the feed and share them
yeah for sure a few more things and then we're gonna bring up amelie amelie is here in our green room hi amelie we'll be with you in just a second we've got a few more things to to cover i almost forgot to pull this so this from bradq twenty nine seconds of farcaster what did i did you miss this weekend it was naming weekend on f c frames are now mini apps warpcast might be gone for in favor of farcaster and we learned that the show below could have been g m fat line i'll explain that in a second i'm sure they'll explain dwr.eth also spent a lot of time talking about fc direction fc frustrations answering questions that was some high quality threads that's what we just went through shout out jrs a coach for the florida gators for making the final four and he's going to document the week here and also highly underfollowed criminally underfollowed go follow jrs big weekend for bradqi and many of us were seen buy sell buy buy sell i mean sell especially on saturday night those gators made us sweat i was a little nervous on that one drew coffman dawufi tells the story of the new noun coffee in la linda hit us with seventy one minutei app ideas and jake suggests a bounty for them linda also told us a hunt airdrop is coming this week mint club downshift.eath announced the end of microsoft and ponder released an ai agent and we are here to get you started alright forgot to do that at the very beginning couple more things from the farcaster team and a couple other items we revamped the mini app developer tools on web along with the new this is from gabriel loiso along with the new mini app doc site if you've registered mini apps with warpcast they'll show up on the landing page clicking on one will take you to a page with tools to manage your mini app preview edit validate refresh farcaster dot json and fc frame meta tag create mini apps opens a tool that guides you through generating previewing validating and then registering your farcaster dot json with warpcast there's also standalone tools to preview your mini app and mini app embed at the bottom hope you find them useful let us know what you think and how we can improve these look very cool this looks like a very helpful improvement so that is good to see and then this was fresh coat of paint on the farcaster mini apps ne frames v two docs website shout out to blockheim d o dad gabrielayuso and power ups three we'll just call him daniel i can't say his handle this was from kartik you can now send a direct cast as a note whenever you send tokens to someone using the warplet for now the direct cast includes an explorer link but we'll make this a better embed in the future so that's good when you're sending somebody something you can tell them that it wasn't a scam token by the way while we were sitting here i got a text message that my trust wallet has been compromised and i'm like i don't have one so i'm gonna guess that that is did it come from our email
no like through a text message and i'm like i literally don't have a trust wallet so don't think so anyway from v one of my favorite things about building a farcaster is how easy it is to get great feedback from users quickly appreciate everyone took the time to write a thoughtful response and this was in regards in response to should we rebrand warpcast to farcaster we separated warpcast the app from farcaster the protocol a few years ago and then it went on from there i asked if snarky quips were also appreciated i got no response
do with that what you will but that was a very interesting whoops conversation that was going on so this is where fat line came in
this is horsefacts saying i unironically which i'm not quite sure i believe think this is a good protocol name and this was v if you think warpcast is a bad name relative to farcaster one of the original suggestions for the app name was fat line sds hard vetoed this to which i said thank you sds
because just making this clear there will never be a gm fat line ever never ever never ever ever
we're not very bad bad at naming things people very bad at naming things other co couple quick things this from linda video recording from our farcaster frames now mini apps workshop cohosted with samuellhuber and rich a couple days ago we plan on running more in the future so let us know what you want us to cover and this was in quote casting samuel huber's ladies and gentlemen framers no no called mini appers we have a recording available we'll have better recordings the next workshop please suggest workshop topics so if you have topics for workshops you'd like to see drop them there super helpful by the way this was amazing from horsefacts the the triumph graph sounds way cooler than product led protocol the app the protocol the network i i i have a hard time even looking at this and making sense but okay
okay we are running short on time so now i'm very quickly trying to figure out what i really need to jump on here really quick i'm just gonna eggs dropped we everyone's seen this it's all over your feed borodutch thank you for having me recast everything i appreciate it did you get the airdrop i got the airdrop
hens i have eggs you did not
oh how
i think it's because i blocked borrow dutch from from amps and not allowing like not allowing him to buy my recasts
it might have been it that's funny
i'm i'm cool with it i have nothing but love for a notch we're cool yeah we get like not like it's it's i think that upset i'm actually i'm not upset i don't wanna i don't want eggs or cocks on my feet oh my gosh i just don't i'm
i know it's a lot right there's a lot of feelings about this
yes you can of course you can
airdrops are super cool right like it's and loving the the whole mechanism that farcaster is doing we're like
it's a great mechanism by the way yeah
you are taking over the feed for a short minute of time like yeah whether or not like you're getting you're at you're getting the attention of people who you want by giving them the airdrop but then you're also getting the attention just at the feed because everyone's talking about it so just like don't let that opportunity go to waste make sure people know not just i mean i guess i i don't know maybe the maybe approach is just say cock a lot and then people will take the effort to go figure out what it
is what why
but like also when you have people's attention like don't make people work for it like don't make people work too hard to find out what it is you're doing like
make it easy that's all and also not too complicated this is quite there's a lot complexity to this mhmm like it's a game but it's a i don't know there's a lot to it and then like i haven't fully figured it out myself and i was playing around with this you know a week or two before this drop a week probably about a week but this was so funny inside merkel there are two wolves this was six open timeline first cast i see is my god he's ready to grow your hen house and then ted yes i know and then you see the url includes he's like and then you see tens of them all over your feed so ted not thrilled but then you have woah
just right in there yeah so it's let's just say it's complicated there's many feelings about this elsewhere in a little more elevated news
wait listen and the beauty is and this is there is never going to be a project or a something that speaks to everyone in the world
true
that's great right the internet allows people to find your own like find your find your people
find your
thing am really glad we're just all in and i like that other people aren't it's like that's great we shouldn't all have to
no i know
no we shouldn't okay few other things if you're not following caphillcrypto caphillcrypto or the law and policy channel highly recommend this is a great read regarding the stable act d five vote new bills and hearings so go check that out law and policy channel is really good really helpful for this kind of thing this from phil bundle your buys we now bundle likes with recats by default in amps fun add a small additional fee and that goes to user to improve the ratio of recast to likes you can turn it off if you just wanna buy a recast if someone has already organically liked your cast we exclude them so you don't pay extra so that's good so new little thing from and we did talk with phil last monday so you can go back to that interview and he gets into what amps is and then he also did a little teaser when he mentioned something was dropping last week and we didn't know what it was and this is what it is i am now making the announcement node foundation is a new not for profit dedicated to changing the way that people experience art i've been helping bring this project to life and i'm incredibly excited about its potential to be a to be a generational institution for the arts so more to come on this but you can go check that out look for node or phil's cast here to learn more really quick this is an upcoming event coming this week we're pleased to have this is an on chain expo virtual talk session with public nouns and ogden and a few others so go check this out this is from cryptfi mariano mariano this from ponder ama about ponder we've been shipping a lot of new stuff more coming today and figured there may be some questions like how do we stop collusion is there a doing dashboard should clouds have more have monocles there are all the important questions from cojo so go check that out but also they did just release an agent and some other fun things so go take a look at that this from balajis i am hiring farcaster devs and he goes on to talk about what that means and if you don't know who balajis is you know check him out but was a former cto of coinbase and does many other things so go check him out there is an opportunity to work with him on the network state and network state school and then you also had posted this adrienne this job this is a job posting for a lecturer at the network school they're looking for phds in stem to expand to the network school
not just phds it's not just phds in stem prof i think i think this should be right up your alley
i'm not moving to singapore okay but if you wanna move to singapore and you're interested no was it was specific specifically starting with they're looking for
yes stem stem related lectures so that could also mean computer science etcetera but yeah this job posting is to be one of the first lecturers at the network schools giving me all kinds of feelings i'm seeing it while i'm taking my daughter to visit colleges today so it's sitting extra hard while i try to formulate my thoughts check it out let me know what you think i would love to know more about what you think we don't really have time to jump into it too much today but it is interesting it's a it's really what balajis trying to do beyond network state thinking is rethinking academia which i am all in favor of you may not think i am but i am i do think there's a lot to be improved upon i think there's a lot of good things but i love seeing the experiment that he's doing here with the network school
so i'll just leave that in my i dmed him my cast to let him know i shared it and he said oh that's the sad emoji
it is sad emoji it's the feelings emoji and my feelings are in another life i said like in another lifetime i would be the first to apply
yeah
that's that's what my feelings are i have complicated feelings but this is a like it it it's something being lecturer at the at one of the first lecturers at the network school sounds like a dream for me in a i think it's time
in a different it you know if i had any desire to move to the other side of the world i would consider it but like i don't
the irony right the irony of all this too is like the network state is all about the internet internet first right but then right the the the network state then if you take it to its conclusion like you is is still physical grounded
in something physical location yeah
very interesting last thing i'm gonna just tap on really quick two things he also was getting into it with a little bit about i haven't had a chance to follow-up and see yep okay looks like they were getting into it with ryan grimm about startup societies so go check out that conversation balajis and independent journalist ryan grimm so very interesting and then this was the funny thing i wanted to point out but also very interesting bankr got a little too sensitive so deployer he was he was saying to andrew yang launch the coin andrew yang you'll earn so much more to give away and deployer took that to mean launch the coin he even though he didn't he did i mean like bankr sorry bankr bot took it to mean launch the coin even though he didn't tag bankr bot so that was weird that was the weird thing
so you weren't saying hey bankr bot launch a coin called andrew yang it was just like hey andrew launch the coin
you should launch the coin andrew yang yeah and what happened was the banker the bot picked it up and launched a coin so be careful out there
he didn't even tag it and so i wonder if something similar happened with dan or something because you mentioned that i didn't see that part
yeah our bot would never never do that sort of thing one thing i didn't get a chance to get to is whoops why isn't it oh got to stage but i'm gonna just show really quick and then bring amelie up because we don't have time for all the fish pictures but there were a lot of fish pictures as well which i can't even find them now but yeah there was that too that happened
so much fish i finally posted something because i've never held a fish nor will i ever i've swum with dolphins but i'm not i'm not fishing so i did post a photo of me with a fish statue i know we're beyond twenty nine minutes thank you lynx
just get here
we weren't
we are
i do think we have some new people though in the chat who are not sure of our format so just if you are new we do twenty nine minutes of farcaster news we used to do it twenty one minutes the number means nothing it's what we try to do we always go over we apologize that's just what we do and when we have guests we bring them on after the news and we usually chat for about half an hour also we try to stick to half an hour and we tend to go over so thank you welcome to all the new people we are jambar
and welcome back lynx we've missed you
he went
okay let me bring up amelie hi amelie welcome
hi good morning lynx was just so excited to see me that's what it was about it was like bring her on
bring her on hurry up what are you guys doing mhmm so excited to have you here and let's like set the stage so we brought you here to talk about alexandria but maybe you can give a little bit about your background and then tell us a little bit about like what is alexandria and then we'll dive into some some questions
yes yeah i started okay wait no let's go back so my background i speaking of college and school i studied english and history in school absolutely love those things thought i might go into academia still might one day or maybe in another lifetime
i or maybe a network school in singapore
maybe a network school yeah it's very appealing and i then was doing different things in freelance writing and teaching living in new york city a lot of my friends were working with small independent publishers sometimes bigger publishers to do their first books you know kind of exploring that world in late twenty twenty one was when i discovered the nft golden age that that was at
yeah and that really interested me sort of learning it was like my introduction to tech and startups and web three all happened at the same time and as i was learning about nfts i was thinking this would be amazing for ebooks there's so much in you know when it started out thinking about it just as like a tool for authors so in the publishing world authors being able to have control of their publishing and their distribution would make such a difference and there are already so many ways that people are innovating in this but web three obviously provides so much more so it started out as that but as i was building this company i and learning more about the inner workings of ebooks in the publishing world i realized that it's a lot bigger than author control it's like ebooks existentially need to be protected and that is something that we saw really clearly just a few weeks ago when amazon it sounds like it's kind of an esoteric feature change but when amazon stopped allowing offline kindle backups of ebooks so what that means is now amazon can just change the books without people knowing it's just like a digital it's they they can just hit delete they can just hit change and this was something that
we looking already for bought or you've already created yes and yeah
where you think you own it because it said buy yeah and that's where i was talking about this because yeah and in california actually also this year california passed a law that went into effect in january that said you cannot say buy or own for something in web two that people don't actually own right and so you know that so
your terms of service that say we can rug this at any time
it's been interesting to see this happen because you know we've been working with publishers working with authors making these wonderful digital limited edition digital books which is already such a great opportunity but now we're starting to see very clearly like this is actually existentially important now so it's been yeah it's been a wild ride but very happy to be here
have you did you have you heard of pagedo very early
oh my god please paged daw are the best so we recently collaborated with them one of dylan amazing dylan we i will tag him in one of the posts about this he published this book called inevitable which is about philosophy and kind of human response to artificial intelligence we yeah we collaborated on publishing that but yeah pichi they're the best they have been you know banging the gong about the importance of this yeah for a lot longer than
we have that was like i think i i think that was 2021 that i found them either 2021 or really early twenty twenty two but i think it was 2021 and like i thought that was really like this is an obvious use case of using yeah nfts for for ebooks it makes a lot of sense to me and i was at that point thinking about putting together a textbook for my class so i was looking at that and then i was like okay forget it things change too quickly it's not really even worth it to have a textbook so that's why i i pivoted from that but that was kind of the thing i was looking at i was like wow we if i do this it would be cool if this was an nft and so that was the direction so that was like a it's an like it was very early on in nfts of trying to find a way to to publish so let's talk about alexandria so what is alexandria what's this project and what what has been your you know what what's your goals
so i also i just love that i'm talking to a professor right now like that this is the academic use case also was one of the really early ones that we were thinking about textbook resales for example you have this whole economy
yes it's ridiculous honestly between them
then they and then the their the publishers have an incentive for you to do a new edition even if you change like five words yeah yeah yeah because then but then the students can't resell the old one and it's ridiculous it's a total racket and the publishers and the pub and the authors don't even get that much from it so it's right crazy
yep yeah so go ahead so yeah amazing early use case that we thought about yeah so is an infrastructure for this the book nft world because there's a lot of things about books and like long form content specifically that is very different from the visual and even the music that we're seeing a lot of people building for it with nft one example is encryption and that's where we have been working with lit protocol also since really early on for decentralized encryption where basically token dated right like if you own the book you can read it and that makes a really huge difference for many authors and publishers but the you know thinking about what does that experience look like and we've also been really thinking about that experience for readers like not necessarily collectors obviously these books are limited digital edition collectibles and they do have great value and we've done really amazing like artistic things with them and like but really thinking about readers and scalability how do we have this be the way everybody interacts with ebooks and how do we make it really really easy and really enjoyable in how you look at your books you get to read your books because we're everyone on our team is a reader and a book lover and we want these to be just like kind of fit in seamlessly with how we read our book so that's something that we were also thinking about from really early on is that send to kindle button was so exciting when we debuted it because now i can it's such an easy pitch to me to say to people you can buy it and it's just as accessible as the rest of your ebooks yeah
love that i think that's important is like not always forcing the new thing but finding ways to integrate it with the old thing and that's sort of what you know we've talked about like web 2.5 yeah it's for that like you're not you're gonna have a better adoption if you don't automatically shut off what people are using right now because i think yeah they're just used to that or they might they just they might like their kindle like so right
yeah if you don't give that option then yeah you're gonna lose the reader exactly
it's always been a balance that we've been trying to hit but also what's really interesting is that you can really preserve so much of that familiar experience of reading and also make it far more decentralized like we've been using magic wallet for these non custodial wallets that people can sign in with email and then so what i'm telling people like you are getting your own actual digital library that you own when you sign in with email and we you know people can pay with credit card thank you crossman they can pay with credit card but they are they're getting an asset that they own so all these things are yeah
that's really cool where does the where does the book the content of the book the manuscript live
the manuscript lives on ipfs and yeah so there's you know okay a token that's part of the
it can be it's it can be encrypted it's up to the author some authors you know so this thriller author that we recently worked with joe conrad the best there's just so many wonderful books in our bookshop from him that people should explore he chose that he didn't want to encrypt he's like and some authors this is part of their just if people read it they're happy if people become fans like that's how he has built his incredible career so that's been really interesting to see
got it so if his ip's out there right like so anyone like has access to ipfs can read it but then people can choose to support the author by buying the book so similar to like the yeah which is a new model or authors can encrypt and yeah kind of force the token gating interesting
what's been the most interesting thing you've seen people doing in terms of approach is anyone trying something innovative and different and
all i mean everyone that we've worked with has done something interesting because that's what i love about working with authors they're so imaginative and publishers too they they just are thinking always about how can i tell this story in an interesting way and when they're given all these new digital tools and given us to collaborate with they they add things so oh my gosh how do i even start the yeah so let's talk about the jd conrad the thriller novel so he when i first reached out to him he's this legendary self published author he was like an early adopter of kindle and he had this really popular blog where he was teaching other authors like when you do digital releases you are gonna do really well and people were like what what what but i missed the the physical touch of the book and yeah it was just it was so interesting so now he's kind of pioneering in this space and when we first were talking to him he said what i've always wanted to do is a bundle of a bunch of my books that are kind of in the same universe include some special new content some maybe special art for super fans and we said yeah of course you can do that but what's so funny is the it ended up being this book that's 1,700,000 words long because he put together 16 of his novels and threw in so much new content he wrote an exclusive novella for this so that was oh wow that was really cool these his fans who are you know have been collecting all his books in web two for so long are now excited to get to have this thing that they can order it from all over the world they don't have to pay for shipping he doesn't have to choose some amount where the unit economics would make sense if he printed it physically but then he also did this super exclusive signature edition which has only 11 each one is a well they're all unique covers in the bundle they're unique covers and then in this signature edition of the bundle but with that it comes with a signed copy which is it one exact copy that matches your digital so that's that's another way that's just so beautiful and each the people who buy those there are still some for sale the people who buy those get some special surprises from him it's just so personal and lovely
that's really cool i love that i i love that kind of approach too of creating something new on top of the existing content that they already love too but having the list unlock you know kinda thing and that to me is the fun part of the other fun part of this is if it's an nft he can be dropping all kinds of fun things forever to because you know who the holders are so you could always be down the road giving them exclusive access to something new or whatever so which is really i think for artists creators authors whoever that's something that you can always tap into and it may not be something that you have planned or something specific right now but who knows like down the road it might make a lot of sense so yeah that was
exciting things that brings me to another really great example of there's this author anna maria caballero she was one of the first authors
yes yes she's a poet right
i own one of her pieces through timepieces
yes i saw on a previous episode you mentioned that you're a timepieces fan was like oh my gosh so many of my favorite authors you probably have there yeah ann marie caballero we did a short story collection with her and that was an original publication on oh cool with unique covers and that was a really limited run of 100 and then we did a second edition of another very limited run and a year after those were released we had built audiobook functionality and so anorea was recorded in audiobook and it was not for sale we gifted it to the people who owned the original right and so that just yeah one of the really special you know air dropping is so easy and because we use base yeah you know we were on eaf mainnet earlier when we first started where air dropping was not we actually oh my gosh when we air dropped these audiobooks it was with eaf mainnet so that was a lot of gap but now so much more scalable
now it's so it's so scalable yeah now it's scalable like that was the problem early on is like you could do these cool things but they're gonna just be too expensive and that's why paged out was on is is probably still i haven't checked in lately was on polygon was because for that reason because of the gas issues on main net so that's why they started on polygon before there were all these other l two options so yep very cool very cool
adrienne questions before we get to lightning round any questions about alexandria you're a big reader probably more so than me now
oh my god i do a mix of like business y books business y tech y books and then i'm like in fiction
what's your favorite book genre i don't have a genre in fiction yeah i i'd like books that i can get into quickly and easily and that are kind of like easy fast reads i love historical fiction
mhmm
because i find it like a great way to learn about time periods and things in a entertaining way like love historical fiction
i'm more of a like more of a legal thriller kinda kinda girl oh a legal thriller like a john grisham or carl hasan love his work because he's also very funny so he was i forget what his what the one oh bad monkey just came out as a show and it's so good but that's like always been my and also he's very focused on florida and i just find it funny his his views he captures florida man quite well so it's pretty pretty funny but those are kinda like when i go fiction but i'm i'm i was such a big reader and i definitely have faded in the over the years for sure but i used to when i was a kid and like into even law school years i think i read more fiction during law school when i had like you know hundreds of pages to read every night
and lost stuff it was weird it was like it kept my brain going but gave me a break so i used to read a lot then
there's like ebbs and flows with reading in your and it it is funny how i've also noticed i've been reading a lot while working on this company even though you know we also have an in house publisher i read a lot of books or like authors that i meet and yet it's like it's almost like you're like warmed up in it so you can just keep going in different yeah
yeah i've read more than like it's so funny looking back i'm like how was i even reading anything for pleasure at that time because i was reading like literally could have like 300 pages of legal cases to read in a night or something crazy but i'd still be reading fiction stuff too there was something i was just thinking of then i just lost lost my train of thought oh the books channel did you see when phil did the silicon valley the silicon valley book club kind of thing where no it was like a very much a course of reading like different excerpts and pieces from a whole bunch of different books related to silicon valley founders and it was really good silicon valley canon i think that's what it was called but it was a really good approach it was an interesting approach and the way you signed up was through hypersub and then there was discussions and all this kind of stuff i couldn't keep up like it was too much reading yeah it was i'm like i'm like you assign more homework than i do i cannot keep up with this it was crazy but it was really i thought an interesting approach to doing something like that on on farcaster it was a very small group but like in a in a very targeted sort of approach and have you thought about doing any kind of book clubs or anything like that yes with with alexandria
yes i one of the ways that i like in adult life a great way to keep up with friends that i is just having these little book clubs with friends and it's all you know we it totally differs on who's in the friend group like are we gonna read and i've been yes we've been thinking for a long time about how do we make this happen in alexandria it is technically we could just do it like you could do token gated discord channel you could do like there's a lot of ways we could do it but and i'm also thinking now that we're starting to have more and more books on the platform i i now can you know as you guys were talking about your favorite books that you like to read i'm like oh i have something to recommend to you and so i think it it's gonna get easier to make that happen and yeah because community and these kind of moments like when we did with the anna maria caballero book trist it felt like it was this moment of like catching lightning in a bottle a bunch of people are excited to discover this book because of this release and because they're getting to post about like look i got this special cover that's cool and so thinking about then how do we facilitate coming together and reading it together and talking about it yeah definitely something we're thinking about
and i think yeah did she i think she was one of the artists that did a cover for the oh my god i'm gonna forget i'm totally blanking now and i shouldn't have started down this road because i'm forgetting the name of the book but timepieces did a release with deepak chopra
i think she did one of the covers so they had unique they had artists doing different covers for this twenty fifth anniversary release and it was very cool because some of them were digital sculptures and some of them were you know hers was poetry it was it was very it was amazing so mhmm that i think is another like opportunity for things like that with digital and nfts that you just can't do yep with with any kind of traditional traditional stuff so it's very cool to see that kind of experimentation for sure
okay back to you adrienne sorry jumped in
oh no it's great i i'll i'll shift over to lightning round because we're gonna run out of time shortly
but i'll just say amelay and i we met at base camp last yay last summer in idlewild california and had a great chat about on chain publishing so i'm we're just so happy
you remember i that was such a special moment i was like it's a new york media person it's my family here in yes come on
i need to mint that i don't know that is actually what we miss most about unlonely is the ability to take clips and pin them as nfts
new york media person love that you're a new york major
i to go update my linkedin but when i read i mean like i you know just the concept of digital ownership and ownership and self sovereignty it's like drew me to blockchain by the way i love that you're an english and did you say history background
the people great with dan
the people who like the different people who get drawn to crypto right like so you have people who come from the tech angle the people who come from the liberal arts background like the philosophy majors the historic you guys are the most interesting because i you bring such a good perspective so really glad to hear that was your background and but when i was listening so reading chris dixon's read write own i rem like you know and i remember when he's explaining kind of the history of the internet and and just i i remember reading when he's like you think you buy a book in kindle like i'm a kindle reader because the experience of reading on a kindle is like a 100 times better than a physical book for me i can read in the dark it's super lightweight i can look up words i can take highlights and notes like i'm a i'm a kindle maxie but he's like but you don't actually own these books i'm like what do you mean they're in my library i can open them up anytime mhmm but do i like can i take them to another devi like they're still only within this amazon ecosystem and i was like oh right you don't actually you don't actually own the book the way you do when you buy a physical book and kind of have that yes and then meeting you and i was like oh on chain like what is on chain publishing and then my brain immediately went to like okay well you can't put an entire manuscript as an nft i guess right enter ipfs enter ipfs also how do you encrypt it in a way right like if you're doing that enter it anyway so you answer all those questions really fascinating anyway so i'm just i think it's i think it's super cool
adrienne before you do that i have a question for you would you ever wanna write a book you adrienne
i don't know if you've read adrienne's substack but she's a fantastic writer and i i love her writing
subscribe to the substack
to if you ask me that i started my substack about two and a half years ago if you ask me two and a half years ago would i ever wanna write a book i'd be like no and i've been just like the more i write the more i'm like oh yeah i think let's let's put that as a life goal
yeah i could totally see you doing that even just a collection of your sub steps with some like with some kind of new content with it or something would be really interesting but
just make it
life goal honey long long term okay k alright amelay yes on farcaster which is a social network we talk a lot about the url to irl pipeline
oh my god wait i have so many internet friends how do i even okay first who's your first one the biggest memory that i'm thinking of okay my friend rory she became one of my collaborators she was one of the builders of alexandria i met her through kernel do you guys know kernel it's like a web three education it's i'm not gonna be able to yeah
that sounds very familiar and i'm trying to like place it but yes
it's great yeah but we so we were like in the slack of kernel which is a global thing right so we're and everybody's posting their intros and what they're interested in and she and i are like oh we both like writing we both like joanna newsome like we're we're kind of like realizing we're the same and so we start chatting on slack and it's just like i'm just talking to a person with a cat profile picture like i i'm like this could be anything she could be anywhere and then we were slowly zeroing in and we realized we're literally neighbors we live like two blocks apart
oh my god
because it it was like oh you're in new york me too oh you're in brooklyn me too right and then we met up like the next day and became best best friends and collaborators and just like she's still one of my favorite people in the world so that's like i don't know if that was my first internet friend but it's like definitely my biggest connection
that's a that's
i'm definitely a night owl which is like i think i'm just contrarian like if like i my i'm just like no i just wanna keep going i wanna keep doing whatever i'm doing but i also really love coffee and i love being on like this is this is my morning news show debut by the way very exciting and i love the energy i'm like maybe i should become a morning person
there you go we're here
yeah if not there's late night club there's a late night club on farcaster as well there
you go mhmm it's it's something for everyone
always oh like if she doesn't say books i mean
come on i love the books channel phil has been an amazing new friend i and i also have to say when you were talking about the humanities people in web three that's something that i've noticed about farcaster specifically yeah and that's when i started to realize like basecamp and fest was like my first irl thing where there was like a big concentration of farcaster people and i was just like this is so so many creative people and so i'm really excited for farcon this year are you guys both gonna be there
we should have media we're the media partners for farcon so we will definitely be there
if you can hang on after we close after we finish the show hang out for a few minutes and we'll chat
we'll discuss okay we are also we're having a private yes we are gonna be hosting a book fair so you know books humanities people going to farcon please come see us
oh cool oh i did not know that
okay cool
i love that that's like the story of everything in frito like rachel's event last week i was like i thought i was late she's like no i just planned it yeah she speak asked me at an event a day before the event i'm like am i like the last person you asked no i just planned it two days ago
back to lightning round
okay i another internet friend that i made is the founder one of the friends with benefits founders caitlin davies who now has founded a bookshop in lisbon called well read i wanna go to this bookshop so i need to go to lisbon
there you go
isn't there an nft conference in lisbon coming up in june oh i think
yes i think so about yeah yeah i think cj is talking it yeah
need to write a book i have written some pieces of novels so i think it would be a novel i wanna write like a literary fiction yeah
okay
oh probably one of our books like we you know in our bookshop we tend to have book that i want in my personal collection so then i buy them
oh i
i love that ah amelie so good that you are here okay before we go just for everyone if we want to buy a book if we wanna buy an on chain book mhmm where do we go
hold on one second let me yeah sorry you got
get a bigger a bigger screen here there we go
and then you'll be able to see bookshop here's all the you know you can search by category you can you know if you scroll down we have it currently organized by publisher we have these free editions from the wonderful thriller author joe connor come check them out so many wonderful books some original from our in house publishers some from wonderful independent presses that we work with all great a lot of them are about web three or about you know the kind of society of web three
web of value that looks interesting you gotta go check that out
yeah it's technical web of value yes so and with those what's cool is you know you can sign in with any wallet but you can pay with credit card no matter what you know it maybe you don't feel like having some base eth in your wallet just pay with credit card it'll be okay
look at the covers they're so cool
the covers we make those we don't make all the covers but we made a lot of these i'm glad that you
that's so cool i know that's cool gets my attention love it love it love it love it adrienne anything else before we wrap
this has been amazing i love this convo and i gotta go check out alexandria and jump on there but this is very cool i love what you're doing very exciting to see adrienne this is it for you this week
yes she's on april the this is the winter of adrienne and april is the month of adrienne i am gone for the rest of the week i will be skiing prof will be here with doing our show with lots of special guests so please keep coming back everybody
so wednesday speaking of special guests wednesday we do have rachel wilkins on and hello rachel be on she's fantastic and brock will brock breadcat aka breadcat will be on joining us also so we'll be talking about all the good news stuff as well as other projects that brock is working on so it's gonna be a really fun show that'll be wednesday that's gonna be 11:30am eastern friday we are not doing a gm farcaster but friday evening we are doing farcaster fridays poker so again if you wanna play poker let us know adrienne anything else you'd like to say before you leave us forever
just for the week just for the week feels like forever feels like forever she's going traveling about i love you i love you
she loves us and now she's leaving
we love you alright and with that everyone we're gonna call it amelie out for a little bit we're gonna see you on wednesday can't wait to have rachel joining in the cojo seat and we'll see you then and with that everybody