and here we go gm farcaster it is tuesday i'm not used to saying that december 19th and we are here with adrian and nanish proff bringing you 21 minutes of farcaster news to start your day and a very special guest dan romero one of the founders of farcaster is here with us welcome dan to our crazy morning show that we just permissionlessly launched on your sufficiently decentralized network thanks for having me
yeah thanks for having
me and adrianne i'm looking at your background is that your actual wood stove
no yeah it's like a picture picture it's a picture yes g m g m lost power yesterday casted this photo of my wood burning stove that kept me cozy people liked it and then now it's my back
decided to try and match with you with my fake my fake wood stove because obviously i do not have one in florida
it's and just to be clear this background is fake i'm sitting in a spare bedroom at my parents' house
so we generally go with some kind of background dan just so you know usually it's a meme of some sort but today we're we're going with adrian lost power meme okay so we're gonna start with our regular type of show for our regular chatters who are with us we're gonna start off with that and then switch over to a little ama with dan so first up we've got farcaster wrapped 2023 nfts are available commemorative nft for all the people who contributed to farcaster protocol in 2023 and i got mine it was really cute you can see mine i had a 9,264 minutes spent casting and then my longest streak was 106 which was interesting because that was also du not duovies with dwrs and also cicharellas so then we started to notice a little pattern so oxen went you might have a bug and yes it was a bug but now we have club 106 so it was a bug it has been fixed he is airdropping to those who minted already and got an incorrect number there but club 106 will live forever so there we go
well i didn't know that but between between farts between farts and wrapped everyone's building in public this week good job everybody
i know
i tried to mint i did try to mint i almost didn't want to because i don't wanna see i know i know how much time and by the way and this is from fun at fun welter
yes yeah
who also did hate cast
oh that's right
and i gotta say i'm a fan of the positive casting so i wanted to mint i had some trouble with wallet issues i'm gonna i also you know i
had this moment where i was like where am i minting this i had a moment where i gave a little pause and then i realized when it was charging 0.000777 that it was somehow connected with zuora and i was like oh okay i'm like alright that's fine then dan what did you think about the wrapped nfts what did you think of your time spent on on warcrafts
i minted 1 i think it was under counting the amount of time i spent casting this year but you know it at first i was like well this seems high and then i kinda did the math and i was like oh well low yeah it might be it might be low
the one i when i saw that i had 106 and you had 106 i'm like that part's gotta be wrong like he has to have a longer streak than i do yeah but that was c corella's point too for my mental health someone post higher numbers so adrienne to your point
i got you i got you c corella i'm coming for you
chris would love it if you could post some higher numbers
yeah i i i wanna say i don't think i missed a day this year but i
i can imagine you did
yeah we'll see sometimes some days you know kids just you get to a point where you might have missed you know you check it but you you forget to actually cast
that's true and i wonder i don't know if it's is it tracking casts or casts and replies and that i'm not sure about because there are plenty of times when i haven't casted but i've replied to stuff you know where you know and then dewolfe of course reply guy supreme so i'm like you know he has he probably hasn't missed a day either so therefore yeah it might not be counting replies we'll have to double check on that moving on we've got the i minted today the 1st nft on warpcast with warps that would did not come from direct from merkle manufactory so gm builders wondering what we've been up to this last year here's the answer the 1st year of nouns builder in a 101 seconds sound up and stay tuned for more in the new year and you can mint that with warps so that was my exciting thing so i was talk i was telling you dan this this morning so you mentioned something that i didn't realize if you can say which ones can be minted on warps if you're creating them yourselves does it have to be it has to be zuora and zuora net is that correct
so so right now i think it's it's zuora only on zuora's chain jacob would be mad if i call it anything other than zuora but i think we have plans to add base and a couple of other chains and then hopefully other platforms so the goal is to make warps extremely useful i i'm gonna repeat this a 1000 times warps don't fluctuate in value they're not an investment they are strictly used to make things more convenient on chain within the app that are kind of benefiting the farcaster ecosystem adding farcaster apps we call that technically that's called adding a signer but you know installing supercast for example you can use warps we're gonna have it so that you can pay for storage next year when when everyone has to pay for storage you've got a free account in september that will be with warps you could do that today when you invite someone with warps so the goal is warps are meant to be used there are no benefits to hoarding them and so we want to continue to add functionality to making warps really useful
i'm gifting them left and right and i'm also getting them from people left and right like out of the blue for no reason which is which i love i think that's amazing because then i do the it inspires me to do the same so i know adrienne you've seen that too i think you've you got and then they're coming from like unexpected places of people that i don't really know that well too which is kinda fun yeah
dan are you are you seeing all the gift
activity
yes we have that i don't think anyone's looked at it like we just have
are you surprised but even on on just the way people are talking about it are you surprised to see i don't know if our skimping is happening
surprised i'm i'm i'm happy people are excited about it i i think if i was to model how i expected it to go it's probably down the middle of of where things are in the sense that i think the people on forecast are tend to be pretty kind at least the the early group of people and we're still pretty early so basically everyone and so naturally when you give them the ability to send a little gift people use it and so i think that that and i think the the cast of appreciation i i like that i so i i think just thinking how how we can make that a little bit easier from a product standpoint
mhmm
so you can imagine you know you you get the gift there hopefully is a reason at some point if if someone chooses to have that and then the ability for you to either dm them or you know thank them publicly or something like that you could you can make that like one tap
yeah that would be great yeah cause i was thinking that the other day i'm like i really would love to just be able to cast this and say thanks and thank them publicly very easily instead of you know having to having to do it a couple of different ways but i think that's awesome i love that we're using warps i think it's great and i my first thing when you came out with warps i and she was joking about this the other day was that i was like i can't wait to gift them to our audience was the first thing i said before we could even do it so that was the first thing i was thinking about
sorry news i was gonna say quick news yesterday in the beginning of the day riley bean's casted that she wanted to host a community channel didn't have enough warps and i was like okay by the end of the day i guarantee you're gonna have enough warps and 20 some people get good warps and that was my next story
that was my next cast
it existed it's just it's beautiful by the way real quick before we go dan i do when you're talking about zuora the is it an app what i don't know it's zuora the company the platform the platform zuora the chain i'm old enough to remember when wordcast was called farcaster and the friction of don't you know do not change the name and you decided to so maybe you can give jacob some advice on actually no you know it's it's not too late yeah i i just think it should
be zoronet or zorachain like just very simple to delineate between yeah because there's the company there's the platform there's the you know like all that
yeah you
know it's interesting that the name change i think i've kinda waffled back and forth on now in the sense that when we did it we we had always planned to do it i think it was good for developers but it's bad for consumers it makes it more confusing right like what is farcaster versus warp cast like i thought the email analogy is really easy it's like oh email gmail it doesn't matter so i think that there's a version of the world where we didn't change the name early on and we kept it the same and you hit some amount of product market fit or scale and then you do a rebrand and and it's painful like then because obviously more people know it but but you kind of like really manage through that but then the idea is that you you simplify the concept of farcaster for people is farcaster is a social network it has an app but the itself is a protocol like so for the developer they they know okay hubs exist it is permissionless i can actually fork it all this other kind of stuff and i think we maybe made the mistake there of adding some consumer confusion at the benefit of being like explicitly clear with developers so you know you you do make mistakes sometimes in the sense that i i think long term it should have always been separate but the timing might have been a little premature
i can say that yeah but i also think we're adapting pretty easily and i've noticed that a few in a few different things that you all have done that i've even been more adaptable as time goes on so the the switching of the buttons is a great example the cast versus undo was seriously messed up but i was only seriously messed up for like 2 days so i did a job finally but and i think that was everybody so i think there's some of that that like and this just takes a little bit longer time to adjust but i think putting warps into it now it's like okay now you can't change warp cast back to farcaster because now you got warps and they won't make sense you know and it's definitely better than farts is what i will say so i'm kind of glad you went with warp cast and warps
so it
works better that's
people people are more adaptable than they think especially if if they have a community of people they're excited about interacting with so i i think i love when i see the threats of i am no longer using forecaster because of x or i'm going not and then give them like 2 weeks and then they they come back tail between their legs because they actually are there for the people not
the teachers that's that's incredibly true so that's the you know that's the part that i think we have to be a little more aware of is that we need to make sure we're protecting the vibes a little bit but and that's hard to do so i don't know that it's sometimes it's features but sometimes i think it's more like vibes shifting and people get a little bit like okay i'm gonna go spend more time over here or something like that i'll be back i'll be back i wanted to go back to your you mentioned riley beans i just wanted to read this this cast riley beans i would create a community channel but don't have enough warps farcaster needs more community education care presence for community builders since the creation of so many channels it's great to have builders and devs and d gens but without community it's just chaos and like you mentioned the warps started flying in and she had enough to launch that and i even sent some after she had enough i was like here you probably depleted your warps here you go but i thought that was amazing a little crowdfunding happening via warps and one more mention before we shift over to our little interview because i have to mention this adrienne there's a new channel i don't know if you're aware but it's called farcasthim yes
there is a farcasthim
well yeah i mean there's no way i could not mention this today g m
and you'll never
guess you will never guess if i
give you a hundred guesses who created it
i know you'd never guess i'm showing it on the screen it was voronetsch g m the fellow man of farcaster let's discuss all the things we men usually discuss which became kristen i will invade your safe space meet is good for you grunt many such things hdmi cables i'd like a bag of them i thought that was good therapy is a rocket and it just you know went on from there so adrienne i have to get your i have to get your thoughts on this what were your
thoughts on love it
love it
love it i joined the channel i sent him more have your safe space
i sent him more so i'm like very good i thought it was fantastic actually so if you were trying to upset the feminists didn't work
can't do it
we're on board we can't be upset
let me
know how i can help we're channeling that i'm your ally
get offended genex doesn't get offended sorry all right adrienne we've got to switch over to our very very brief lightning round interview with dan and the first question is how was mole we have great
so the the backstory in the mole is we have a lovely woman who helps us with our kids and she is from mexico and makes a bunch of homemade mexican food and so you know maybe it didn't photograph well or the my angle was bad but like i don't know if you've ever had mole like rather you know it's like a darker color or the green mole it's unbelievable it takes any any meat
and turns it into the that said it may not look good but i bet it tasted amazing
yeah it was it's it's it's unbelievable so alright you know sometimes you put stuff out and you get memed and maybe i get memed a little more than the average person which is fine but yeah otherwise you take
that very well and you roll with it very well and kinda run with it sometimes too and that i think is a very big positive to what you're doing like i think it it really it really helps to and let things roll off your back that maybe you know sometimes might be a little tough i would assume
well i think what i would say is i grew up i'm one of 4 boys and so in my family if there's a little bit of an opportunity to to get you it immediately happens and then everyone piles on so i'm kind of well trained in the handling a teasing internet mob and if and if and if it if you show signs of letting it get to you you get even more relentlessly teased so show weakness you adapt you adapt pretty quickly to the best way to handle is to to run with it and then at that point you just start to realize it's actually kind of fun if you play with it yeah
it definitely is i think it can add add a lot of a lot of value actually the memes are the memes are what we talk about most on the show flat out
dan are your brothers on farcaster
oh good they are goose is on farcaster and then the other 2 are not as active but that they lurk
yeah adrienne it's all to you now go lightning round
we've got what we've got 4 minutes
yeah you you we can go a little longer as long as you guys wanna keep going
yeah we can go a smidge longer on this one
well we always do
too long we can't have that much longer
our brand is 21 minutes so we gotta kind of can't drive too far
dan i wanted to hear about your earliest experience with social media so like what was
so i was i was into blogging in high school so kinda like played around with all the early blogging software movable type i don't know if you guys ever used that like required like a cgi bin and all that kind of stuff so that that was
a
kind of like fun experience but i think like social media as we think about it the the very clear memory i have is as soon as i got into college and then i got the dotedu email address this summer between you know kinda senior year of high school and freshman year of college it was 2,006 so i was able to sign up for facebook because facebook was still gated by dotedu email addresses and it's kind of interesting because there's actually a lot of similarity to farcaster today is facebook at that time obviously people weren't sophisticated about social media people would put a ton of information into their facebook and people were like making friendships like light lightweight like setting it up for showing up freshman year on facebook that summer it's like you could see what classes people were taking you could throw a bunch of tagged interests in and and so you got into a place where i met my future college roommate for the next 3 years not the freshman year on on facebook that summer and so in some ways like kind of this like internet stranger thing is is kind of you know what farcaster is is is actually early days of facebook so that that definitely was my my kind of like first you know memorable experience with social media
and that was actually yeah that was my next question is when did you make your first internet friend sounds like college roommate through facebook
yeah yeah and then and then i was i was on twitter it's actually funny i signed up for twitter the year it came out with like a
that was one of my questions i'm like weird question but how in the world did he get dwr on twitter
well what's interesting is i signed up with my internet handle which was like you know some made up word that i've been using and then i was like you know what i i should probably just like get my actually my friend had a three letter handle and i was like you know what i might create another account and so dwr is actually my second twitter account i don't even know what happened to the first one but if you look i think my my sign up date i don't know if they still publicly show this it's like march 2007 or maybe it was like fall of 2007 for dwr but the original one was within like the first i wanna say like 10,000 people on twitter i'm like 1987 user 1987 on instagram i have dwr so like i i've been pretty successful in a lot of these like you know gen one social networks of getting good usernames
really early yeah
yeah i don't have a good username on twitter it's dwr romero so
right it's it's dwr yeah it's the same as your farcaster so i was like how how yep did you get that
well that's actually one of the it's funny when we went to go do stuff for farcaster we were gonna use dns and then i was like wait a second i can't register dwr like absolutely not like i'm not gonna be another that's like my internet handle and then halfway through they finally released the three letter names i was able to register it so that's why i go by wwvr.eath now but yeah like it's it's it's for me it's actually pretty important i think actually the reveal preference is most people don't care about usernames but like there's a certain group of people that really really do and i'm definitely one of those people
so one thing forecaster taught me this year which i love and dan one of the you know you can take credit for this or we can all take credit for it but the norm of like it's okay to not know right so you don't have so one of the things i learned over the last year is that there's status in these short usernames
mhmm
had no idea that three letters or this and even when i signed up for ens and i was like oh didn't even understand why you would charge more for shorter names so learned a little bit about that but
yeah there's there's some people on podcast that are trying to make low fids a thing and i i'm like a little less like because reality is fids aren't presented in the ui and you know there are a bunch of people i onboarded early on who kinda churned so it's not like that that that they have high status because of the low fid if anything it's like kind of embarrassing it's like i onboarded you in the first 100 people and you didn't log in for the next 3 years
well when you talked about when people say oh i don't like the new vibe of forecaster and you said oh opportunity to make a new client and you know the truth is is we already have that i can go to telegram with my group chat i don't think people it's well it yeah the group chat is nice but it's the status it's like the oh i'm and i'm early and you can't get in so we're all and i'm not gonna say i'm not immune to this either so but the
well well the way the way reason i say new client is the way i would frame it is it it doesn't have to be like a full blown app it could be a feature for another client but like here here's a simple example like supercast has lists we don't have lists and work casts you could very easily create a kind of experience where it's like i only wanna see people from this cohort of farcaster and and and you could just flip between that so i i think if it's like people are like oh i can't find my old friends like that i push back on a little bit it's like maybe unfollow some people like you know but i think the reality on all this is people don't they don't wanna do work and so you know we had this whole mute thing this week about channels or like all this and i think we're i'm the sales guy and varun is is like the level headed one so the sales guy is always wanting to please people and i'm like oh well we can just do this quick feature and then everyone will be happy but the reality with that
i'm pushing back on that i'm pushing back and miss dan you do not wanna please us like you
do have all these
extra features you can't take them away and i think varun's inclination is is correct so that's why we're doing it is let the problem bake a little bit assuming it's not existential assuming like people just literally all stop using the app and then once you have a sense for what the problem shape of the problem is build the feature and build the feature that is the default that gets like 80 to 90% of the way there for most people and so it's just like don't make people do work and and so that that that's that's our kinda like philosophy on a lot of that
someone who said oh monkey link said new feature 10% happy 10% angry 80% indifferent i was like
that but it's a 100% true it's it's it's you have a very vocal minority of people who are either extremely excited about a feature or not and then everyone else is just like man i don't care
by the way adrian we're getting some non fungible clips and your super cap the super cast mentioned just got clipped i'm assuming by woj
and is woj here is he in the is he in the stream woj just giving me a 100 wharfs thank you buddy i love you
i think he is i think he might be i think he might be hiding in there
oh my god remember ice cream
yeah oh god adrienne
okay sorry thank you woj okay
alright maybe last question and then then no
we gotta wrap let's let's
wrap up i'm just gonna do a few quick lightning lightning things and we're and we're wrapping it dan favorite holiday
christmas morning person and then 4th july
oh alright very patriotic morning person or night owl
ideal is morning person right now i'm just a work and sleep because of kids kind of person
next country on your list do you wanna visit good question
i have not been to brazil and i've been to a lot of countries so i'd like to visit brazil
very noun ish by the way very noun ish go see the noggles in the skate park
completionist yes or no
absolutely not
go to a concert or sporting event
read a book
nerd okay yeah if you were to write a book sorry okay if you were to write a book what it what's it about
history of civilization
okay ambitious last question when video
i'm teased 2024 2024 you can hold me to it you know
oh i really thought the answer was gonna be never
december 31 2024
we got a year okay
varun right now varun is on a 20 hour flight to india and you know salesperson is on the last 3 promised promising features
future self next december is not gonna be happy yes i'm promising video by end of 20th 20th
salesperson promising feature
as well the cto
is on a flight classic a story that's been written alright
let's wrap thank you dan so much by the way this okay the chat thank you for the to the chatters we love you so much and it's been really amusing i know we haven't been watching it but they're now putting in i'm putting in they're basically holding you to it we're just flat doing the flashing things it was really funny anyway thank you so much this has been amazing we'll be back on thursday this week instead of friday a little adjustment for the holidays and with your usual 21 minutes of vargastr news to start your day and thank you dan so much for being here with us we will see you all thursday bob alright
thanks for having me