the farcon og panel was recorded at farcon rome featuring those attendees who have been to all the past farcons sharing their thoughts on the url to irl connection farcon is farcaster's annual event organized by the community for innovators builders and network contributors thank you to all the sponsors who made these conversations possible including media partner gm farcaster media sponsors purple abc dcl tours word a day and clanker thanks to all the far con sponsors and special thanks to the far con team of volunteers from builders garden learn more at farcon.eu
alright we're missing matt lee so shout out matt lee you're supposed to be here too we're missing you we're gonna talk a little bit about farcaster culture through the lens of far con and i'm kinda gonna take this through
each far con kinda touching on it and touching highlights and we'll go from there i'm gonna keep an eye on the time and we don't need the other chair because he's not here are we just gonna just in case okay just in case okay symbolic chair for matt
alright we're gonna start with far con the beta and that was held we say boston but it was not it was actually cambridge and if you're from there you know and so i wanna go to grin talk about this how did this come together and how did you like come up with this concept and get it planned and all that kind of stuff let's start there so
i forget exactly when
and just hold mics kinda close
like this is it better
yeah that's better sorry i
thought about doing far con when i think i saw cameron cast something that was like i'm on a plane i'm i haven't slept in three days i don't know exactly what he was saying but i had this feeling for a while that was building up to that moment that social networks that happen only online tend to have these weird social dynamics that don't happen in person people are really good at working together in person at seeing each other as human beings at doing all these social cultural norms that we've built up for a long time when they hang out in person and when they don't when they only see each other through a screen they only see a pfp and some text that it's very easy to feel that someone is very different than you feel that someone hates you for some reason or saying something mean about you when really they're just talking about themselves or something completely unrelated and it leads to maybe the most extreme version of this is i wish that people could physically get into fights on twitter because then the fights would end and you just like go and you take it outside and you beat each other up
all fun and games till you get punched in the face right
yeah exactly but like it's impossible to punch someone on twitter it kinda sucks and so all of this also combined with i've run a similar event to far con for my friends on twitter and so i had this experience of seeing them meet each other go oh you i know you from all that and it was magical and i felt that farcaster would really benefit from that i dm'd cameron i was like dude i have a crazy idea for you since you haven't slept in a while i know you might say yes so we should do we should invite our friends to come hang out with us nobody nobody just like shows up in boston randomly people are often like oh i'm in the bay or i'm in new york who wants to hang out nobody's like i'm in boston who wants to hang out but if we ran the event in boston all our friends from the internet who we've spent years on farcaster with would come to boston and thankfully he said yes and that's how it happened
and that ended up being about about the same size as we are now for this one and it was this one co working space room it was basically a day and a half long so you had one day with like talks and things like that and then the second day was more of just a meet up there was a dinner there was an attempt at a pickleball tournament that got rained out and it was i think incredibly magical so i wanna kinda just go down the line what were your like what are your memories highlights of that first farcom the beta
so for me that was my first experience of doing meeting anyone from the internet in like in person yeah in person actually i take that back i did meet someone on twitter the summer before a few people but i think it was the first time that i kinda showed up somewhere as like a stranger it felt like like there was no like let me talk to the people i knew and said hey let's meet here and it did like it didn't feel like a safe it wasn't easy to to go and not that you guys didn't make it easy to show up you know what i mean did i come out wrong i'm just saying for me it was like it just not it wasn't something i did it was like let me go to a city i don't live in
and meet people
online your comfort zone yeah so i kinda went in with no expectations didn't really know what to expect and yeah it was like the the just it it felt like the the reason i liked farcaster so much it was that in real life like it felt like the the the feed in in person so like yeah there were people you met and it was i'm looking at pfps like everyone from two d came three d and it was awesome like it was great and met people that obviously professor and i met and we started a little thing together and little
thing just a little thing
and
361 episodes later yeah justin what was your like what are your memories from that first far con
i mean i've i've met people i've met online
yeah i mean i've been active since like i've been online since like 1996 on forums and stuff like that so it's not odd to meet people you meet online to me i've been most active the account i still have that's most active today is i used to be a big runner and letsrun.com if anyone's familiar it's a big running website and it has a forum and that's been an account i've had since 1999 and i've gone to meet ups with other runners this way online and so it's not odd to me to converge with people you have shared interests with i think another thing that makes farcaster i guess for someone like me easier like i came in through orangedow
right
so like there's a lot of guys in there
there was a bit of an orangedow presence like i remember the guy with the backpack like he had an like it was a led backpack with the orange dao of juicy because it was it had noggles on it that's why i noticed it
his name is juicy
juicy yeah
but yeah i mean it just kind of reinforced that i think for daos too it could be really i mean i know daos aren't fashionable anymore but it daos stop it could have been a i think it was a great value add for daos to be able to connect irl with people and so that kind of strengthened my relationship with a lot of different because orangedao is huge and you don't know most there's like a thousand plus members and you don't know most people and so i think finding opportunities to in parallel meet with people that you're connected with with some kind of mission i mean i i would never hesitate to to meet up with people online if we have some sort of shared vision shared mission those kind of things those opportunities are great if you can take them have them
grin what stands out for you from that first farcon
i think the everyone's willingness to pitch in was really magical like i remember adrienne and jack i think they were there before cameron and i even showed up and you were kind of like i'm here i'm ready to help what do you need do you need do you need to carry some stuff do you need to make name tags
right we were organizing swag
yeah yeah you brought a bunch of that was it was super helpful and throughout the whole day people were like what do you need like can i get this for you do you need help with filming even before far con happened we first asked people you know if they wanted to come people when we first launched tickets we got like i think two people bought tickets and we were like alright man like this nobody wants to actually do this thing it's not gonna work out but then we thought about it we're like okay maybe it's too expensive maybe people don't wanna come to boston all these and eventually we talked to a bunch of people and they told us what the problem was we rearranged things and ultimately the community came together around the idea of coming together we i think we had maybe 60 people i think maybe another 30 bought tickets and couldn't make it or passed their ticket on to someone else there was a lot of this like helping each other because we're in it together energy and yeah that really stands out
so for me there's a few things like the room had kiwis on all the tables and if you don't know the kiwi lore just ask warpy just tag at warpy and ask about the kiwi lore so that was one thing that stood stood out to me but also and i wrote about this after far con so literally this is always gonna be my favorite far con i'm sorry rome i'm sorry venice and brooklyn cambridge is gonna be my favorite because it was literally life changing for me so my life literally changed after that so for me it was being in that room and feeling like i was the dumbest person in that room and that was a good thing like i was learning all day long because these were some of the smartest people i had ever met in person and listening to the different talks the community talks i learned so much throughout that whole day and vividly remember rish he presented on like four different things like it was nayanar which was a whole different it was an nft platform there was base hadn't launched yet so he was talking about base he was help helping with that launch there was a couple other things i just remember it went on right
what ethos
ethos there was like he had like port everything and then there was colin kojo talk i mean he like there was all these different and that wasn't even ponder that was free port free port free port so it was all these like really interesting things and then this one with the seniors and that is when i was like okay she's really smart we should we should i should chat with her more and i left that room and i left that weekend thinking okay i love this community i wanna dive in and i really want to see what can i build because i'm not a dev so i can't do the things they're doing but what can i do and that's what led me to eventually three months later start jam farcaster with adrienne one yeah
can i just add on to like share can i just raise a hand who was active on farcaster three years ago
if your fid is below 10,000 yeah so if thousand yeah
so if you remember like just the vibe of farcaster was so different so in this space the it's right now it's like farcaster's so much more established yeah it's like farcaster farcaster itself takes up like a bigger presence in this room and back then it didn't it was kinda like this loose thing that brought people together so it really felt like you had all these kind of different people doing really different things and farcaster was just the it happened to be why we were all in the room yep so a lot of the talks were not about farcaster it wasn't about how to you know yeah it was just about like weird people sharing their nerdy interests and it was we did
a we did a art our art thing with chris co creative yeah like he he ran a art session like yeah it was
all it was all the first nft because you taught me how so but dan was there because he had but even that like he did a like a he talked for a few minutes but like the center of gravity wasn't around dan merkle farcaster it was just like so just if we as we go through kinda different farcons or where we're at i think it just just that always like that's why it feels different because it wasn't it
was more decentralized
yeah it felt yeah just a
dan was also there kinda by accident
yeah he just happened to be
in town
he was
originally planning to come he had i think he had a family thing on the cape and he was like oh i happen to be in boston i'll swing by for a few hours
so and and my one question to dan was how much runway you got before i go build something and it was like five years i'm like okay alright that's good i can do that the one other thing that i wanna just like flashback and shout out purple so builderdao nouns builder was one of the sponsors there was only a few sponsors and we had sponsored and one of the things i said to cameron was like i can get you some funds but we need like a panel on on purple or something to to have it make sense and he said sure so we had this panel it was it was me and it was oh god i'm forgetting his name right now not no no no the the the the bill bill z oh bill z me bill z and derek g taylor were the planned panel and at the last minute cameron goes nonlinear would like to join the panel johnny mac is that okay i'm like sure that sounds fine there was an internal battle going on with purple where purpler had launched as a rival dao because there was a argument over a proposal so this like little panel that was gonna be about daos turned into like this debate about daos and it was hilarious honestly it was really funny bill and johnny just going at it and me trying to moderate and derek taylor just sitting there like i just came to grind some coffee like i don't even know what's going on and it was really like that is stands out in my mind because that was just so unexpected and it was just really fun but again it wasn't like necessarily about farcaster even though purple was a dao specifically designed to support farcaster builders it still was like yeah ancillary to to the protocol so any other highlights from that real quick before we move on to the next ones
i actually think i met up with farcasters before that too ted had hosted in austin and i think that's kind of what convinced me to keep doing irl things is it was like 14 people on a random rooftop
oh cool and
just donuts and yeah i mean like it wouldn't happen without key community figures like like ted and
yeah shout out ted
really convenient
we're gonna talk more about ted in a minute
even when i went back to paris i wanted to do the same thing which which is why i kept doing it in france and yeah i think that was actually an impetus to be like i wanna attend more of these things and you're right we didn't talk about farcaster at all
yeah very little
talking about other things that inspired there was a meet up at ethdenver yep that was a really big so that was an inspiration for far con as well i think it
was huge
it was huge it
was huge it was huge i heard it was huge i wasn't at that one
yeah i think it was like max and
chris corella chris put it on yeah purple it was purple put it together and they actually bought they bid on the auction for a noun's builder token at that meetup so i remember that yeah
it was more than 37 people even
no it was definitely more than 37 people yeah it was pretty big and then those ones kept getting bigger until they didn't so moving on so then we have ted actually mcbain was the one who came up with like we'd like to do this in venice and in la and connected with ted and erica i think johnny was involved johnny mac was involved with that you were involved in helping them like advising sort of dylan supporting dylan dylan
dilstack added a hackathon so this still started it it was gonna be fairly small it was they were thinking maybe double so maybe like a hundred hundred and twenty people and that's what they planned for and then february hit so now we're at february 2024 this is supposed to be in june or may 2024 and everything goes crazy because of degen and frames and now the demand for far con goes through the roof as well as even like you know and then base had launched and base was exploding and they wanted to be involved and so they had to expand and get a larger venue more support it would and then it turned into this massive thing they had to do tickets and applications because of space constraints some people think it's because they were like the cabal cabal ing it wasn't it was space constraints and they added the hackathon so there was a there was a dev day builder day and then the summit day and oh is that our cooking instructor paula hi
everybody turn around and say hi up to paula
say hi to paula hi
she taught us how to cook on saturday night excellent italian chef
yeah she taught us how to cook yeah she's she's tough too by the way she's tough so we so ended with this very different event in venice so we'll go to you guys what are your okay and hold on so we snuck justin on this panel he did he wasn't in venice but where were you justin instead
i was in london
at what
at the stylization is far apostrophe away apostrophe con
yeah far away a con was where justin was so we we we we let him on the panel
manon was there yeah yeah yeah we there were some of us that didn't wanna go all the way to the west coast of the us
fair fair fair oh and also higher higher took off at that same time so there was higher meet ups there was a lot of side events all those kinds of things so when you're thinking back to venice was that tattoos there was tattoos the whole thing was crazy adrienne what are your like core memories from that from that year
okay or somebody else
my high my highlight was the was the brackie pickleball tournament
oh yeah with a prize of how much
okay so which there was a degen prize at the time that was like $25,000 and we said okay we're gonna we're gonna call it we're gonna look back and and that was that was just like that was just my highlight of the the weekend but
and there was there was like fierce competition they were like you guys were like going hard
yeah there's some athletes yeah in in the crowd
we also did episode 100 i don't know if that rings a bell
i think the location yeah barely i really like i kinda loved how also like the location like where we'll get in here in rome and it was just like it was so la
yeah
and it did feel like and having ted kind of be like the the face of farcon yeah i'd say and as much as i i know it i i i don't really have anything words but it just like captured that moment yeah in time for if you've been on farcaster for like it
yeah yeah and i remember seeing ted going back and forth to the venue in in different places and she'd be on her skateboard just you just see her like rollin' down the street and the other thing was that you'd be walking down the boardwalk and see people from farcaster which was really cool like i remember seeing matthew's smiling face walking down the boardwalk i'm like oh hey what are you doing here
but it felt like yeah and i guess maybe that was part of it it was like there was so much demand
yeah
for people getting in and being able to just see the
the stress on some of like the organizers' faces which were just beyond of like we've got hard limits for this space and people trying to get in that didn't have tickets
they were just showing up
yeah yeah and there were so many side events and like just the scale was a lot
it was a lot it was a lot grin what do you remember from that one what stands out
for me well i got to kinda have the behind the scenes look in the lead up to it i i did very little for this for the second far con because i wanted ted and mcbain and dylan and everyone to do their version of it and i think the second one is the hardest event to run for anything whenever you do the first one there's like no expectations you can do basically anything and then the second one you have to now exceed these expectations you have to do all the things that people liked from the first one but also put your own touch on it and also then they were dealing with the challenges of it being much bigger it was it was so much more work than we did and i thought that was really cool like seeing it come together and it also kind of proved in my mind this idea that a different crew running it every year while they have the challenge of like they have to do it the the first time but they all set to meet these expectations they get to do things differently in a much better way i think the way far con venice went is not the way i would have done it but it was better than i would have done it like i i was actually originally like why are we doing a hackathon like this doesn't make sense to me why would people fly from around the world to stare at computers when they can do that already it doesn't it's not a unique thing but i was proven wrong like the hackathon was a huge highlight people spent days on it they're really into it dylan did a great job organizing it so that's one example like it went much better because i was less involved or i would have actually capped the number of people who were coming to far con much earlier than ted and graham did but they were like no we want everyone to come like anyone who wants to come should have worked on
they just kept trying to find larger and larger venues
and it it made it much harder for them yeah but much better for everyone else so
give us some highlights from faraway con
no i mean for me faraway con it it was clearly not the scale of venice i i think even for me at the time that kind of intimidated me because i felt like wow like how did this network jump from like a few 100 active users to suddenly like everyone trying to enter get access yeah so london i thought was great it was very it was really core people like you said there was a lot of excitement still because of degen everyone was talking i think and we did take a more i i'm i'm remembering the talks and the conversations we did start looking more internally about like how do you build on like what what are things you can build on farcaster like what makes the social graph interesting to incorporate in different things we were having like conversations about farcaster at a farcaster event
right
and it was exciting and i think i think the thing the the takeaway i had was
it felt very bullish everyone wanted to like how can how can i grow like there were questions like how can i grow my account but it it also i guess in a way we felt like kind of like the junior varsity broadcaster team like we didn't have heavy hitters like adrienne or noush phra in the audience it was it was b listers like me and they were just they were like
cochri getting in getting he's gonna be you know insulted that he's a b lister he was there
yeah yeah yeah no chris was there arteon was there yeah it was it was it was it was still very intimate it felt like for we didn't have the crazy california skateboarding to another venue kind of thing it was still core people who were really interested in building and so i thought that was still my enthusiasm for farcaster increased because of that i think if i went to california if i'm honest i would not have been as enthusiastic i
don't know i don't know you might have it was and just some like other highlights that i remember there were purple jackets that were made specifically for v and dan and again warby might have a picture i don't know if we can find a picture of that one they were wild and they wore them in the opening session so that was that was something you're right the first far con we really didn't talk about farcaster that much the second one that was almost all we all we talked about and i actually got jacek a purple top hat so he had that's the one he still wears every once in a while that's was when i gave him that and then we my personal highlights were our happy hour on the roof that we did for our hyper sub supporters and i got to meet like the people who were supporting gm farcaster so that was really a big highlight for me some of you in this audience i won't point you out but you know who you are and also our episode 100 where we got to interview dan and varun and that was the first and maybe the only time they've done a podcast together so that was really cool and we that was you know for me a a big highlight and you can find that in our playlist the audio only version is better has better quality any other thing else from venice it was a lot it was overwhelming it was a lot of work i i that one for me i had i had like a couple suitcases that were just swag and about eight boxes of stuff that i had shipped there it was crazy
like the activations and parties at night between it was a lot was like were a lot i remember they set up the buy coffee with crypto
yeah that was the first time we were doing that yeah
it every at the that was i guess two years ago but it felt like super novel and cool i was like oh you can buy things on gm farcaster one of our lightning round questions we used to ask people is what's the last thing you bought with crypto and like when we started doing this people had to really think hard it was like no i don't know i don't really buy anything maybe an nft and then now it's like normal post warplit people are buying things on far caster all the time it's like oh you know but but i just i remember that being like this felt like like a milestone in crypto adoption
yeah too and the hackathon was by variant in the variant space so it was like there were vcs there was a lot of like investors lurking around and it was yeah it was a very different different moment
seed club hosted a whole day
yeah
of side events
seed yeah that reminds me what'd you do
that reminds me that london was hosted in the a 16 z office i think
oh yeah
we were
alright see if we can get your mic fixed
uh-huh
there we go so after that one there was this battle for where the next one was gonna be and it became like it was it was there was a lot of arguments going on there was a crew who wanted it in new york there was a a crew who wanted it in tokyo who launched a token they never did anything and then there was jam who had done a half day at that event at venice they actually wanted to do one in singapore and they ended up doing farcon asia which very few people were at but again this is where justin comes in he was at he was at farcon asia so what was that one like
yeah farcon asia was i didn't think i didn't know the the history that there was it
doesn't count but
no it was during token twenty forty nine it took place as a side event like you said it was hosted by the jam team so we spent a lot of time talking about jam but still i think jam was a client on farcaster at the time i think it started out through jason betashop who initially had launched jam and then it was acquired by a team out in asia because they thought asian far forecasters could benefit from an asia specific client
yeah
but it again it was super interesting because there were more people thinking about what opensocialgraphs could do it was still a lot of hype at the time i think token prices were still very high so it was packed but definitely a different crowd of people people more interested in trading i remarked that we were talking about the guys tony the guys that do far cards and mint club and all those guys were there so definitely interesting to see the different dynamics within asian farcaster community i'm trying to recall if anyone here was there ted ted was there ted was there dan beam
was there right luciano
there was a farpack
oh so may yeah maybe you were there i i think garrett was there i i think i recall talking to garrett dan beamed in he didn't wanna fly out all the way to asia but he beamed in and still like i i recall like a lot of more open interesting technology kind of conversations as opposed to just like how can i how can i make money on farcaster how can i grow my presence on farcaster so it it was quite tsuji from mask network that now owns lens protocol yeah and firefly he was there he he gave very interesting talks on data sovereignty stuff like that so yeah still very farcaster adjacent i would say
and that one happened sort of i think it was like six months later it wasn't a full year it was a little sooner
yeah
and then we had
and then we move on to brooklyn or what we call far con nyc
can i interject yeah we had one more and a a bunch of these guys are here and i wanna shout them out we had dgeniversary in poland which is like a quasi farcaster event yeah
i got these nice degen socks from degeniversary but it really did feel like it was irl reply guys because it was a completely we didn't talk about building on firecaster we didn't talk about tech everyone was just talking about token prices so high and it's just interesting to see how many different niche communities can form on farcaster yeah
but it
it like really if you look at a reply guy thread that's what this event felt like and it was fun to see the different dynamics that could evolve from like a common platform yeah yes to crypto was there obviously jacek was there
right right
even samuel was there
oh yeah
yeah samuel hubert was there sticky sticky fingers was there that was it was a very good time this was a very exciting time in farcaster history
and then we so after that battle after venice the new york crew icebreaker mostly kinda took took took the lead for the next like what we'll call official unofficial bar con and that was in brooklyn and that was i think the most stressful appropriately so far con at least for me and there was a bazillion side events and i was trying to go to all of them and also we just had a lot of setup for what we were doing but it was crazy so but i also think for that one those have some of the most memorable content that in in terms of the content curation was really good so you had fred wilson and dan doing an interview we had hot ones with rich and cassie and if you have not watched that please go watch that you can find it on jam farcasters all their all the places because literally if you are familiar with hot ones on youtube you eat a hot wing and you go through a progression of sauces and they went all the way up to the end and it was insane while they were getting questions from the audience and they were asking each other questions and it was that was a year ago it was a very pleasant conversation they were on stage together you should definitely watch it and that's so that's what i remember from last year is that like that the content from that whole day felt just really interesting and and tapped in and kind of like a different level and in terms of like the production itself too like the base area was crazy and like so you had a lot of base support a lot of we're they were turning i mean poor lamone they were turning away sponsors last year like they were like you know like they really were it was crazy but what are your memories from last year's far con like what stands out to you
sure i'll go first the the fred wilson talk with dan i thought was really really good it was clear that they both spent a lot of time thinking about start ups social networks like the decentralized social crypto it was just very interesting to hear from fred's experience it was interesting to hear dan interview him
yeah
other than that the setup with blackbird was really cool talking about oh yeah yeah first we had you know buy coffee with nouns now it's like reserve restaurants get rewards blackbird's big in new york that was really cool and a lot of the side events every far con kind of has the vibe of the time on farcaster and also the city that it's in so new york is all about like there's a ton of stuff to do right you can do whatever you want there's events here here here here and here the especially phil's art bar after party was like the bar itself was really cool and like he did a good job
with all the different rooms the rooms were weird you were sitting in like a camper van but it's in a room or a bunk bed it was weird but really cool yeah i forgot about that
the other big thing was base announcing going all in on farcaster yeah there was that that was a year ago that was a year ago
and
you know massive announcements so i just for us being active on farcaster i remember like it was a big validation yeah and we obviously believed and
then millions and millions of people were gonna be joining farcaster in just a few months
well it was consistent a a lot with what dan talked about in terms of like why do you build on farcaster developers wanting distribution and you know kind of that cycle and how do you grow so
it all you know it's it's looking back a year now we've got some hindsight a year but i it it it was like it was a big validation and it felt great to see a public company investing in farcaster
and and then from a vibe perspective though you know and base i think was a big sponsor probably was active they were the biggest yeah so they kind of had the big activation so it there was this kind of a center of gravity pull mhmm kind of towards i feel like and content coins exactly
a lot of content coin talk
oh my i did the hackathon
and you did the hackathon i'm traipsing suitcases down the street just set up and she's hacking away
so here's my public apology to nana shpraf for doing all the work because she let me go hack and and i and and we hacked a thing called coinaroid which was coining content from the feed and it was before the base app right but it was before like content and
core was built in to yeah
and we got a shout out from fred wilson on from the show so that was my my personal highlight
great that was good the other biggest highlight does anyone remember it didn't happen during it was the very last event beer pong sponsored by brackie brackie beer pong was the craziest thing it was totally last minute it was in this freaking in the warehouse district of bushwick or something and i'm like where am i going up these stairs into this empty room and then there's like and it was hilarious it was honestly really fun
fight club
fight club it felt like fight club yeah i'm sorry were you not supposed to talk about beer pong bracket beer pong
no actually you're you're you're wrong because there was something crazy
what was it
proxy studios
oh for god's sakes yeah you're right you're right you're right but that then that happened after that was after beer pong we didn't know about that
craziest thing
we didn't know about that till we left after the summit it happened during our con before before the summit before it was at a side event like the day before
leaked out during the summit
or it didn't leak out until sunday until later until after after threading
during the summit
yeah okay but he and there was discussions with i remember talking with proxie like oh he's like well still gonna be at nond but yeah we'll meet up with a few people in person i'm like oh great i'm looking forward to meeting you and i never ended up meeting him because he didn't actually show up because all the things happened so yeah i forgot about that jeez that was wild then we we weren't planning to do gm forecaster that monday we're were gonna take it off and they were like well now we got it and it was one of our biggest live shows up to that point i don't know if you remember well like well we gotta break this down this is breaking news that was crazy so last year was just like crazy on top of crazy on top of crazy it was just and it's very new york very new york and very that moment and i i like you said that yesterday too grin that each far con feels like it matches the moment of the far caster culture and i feel like yeah it really did anything else that comes to mind from any of the far con experiences that maybe we didn't touch on or like why do you keep coming back i guess is the best question
can you tell i didn't give him any questions ahead of time
this is a tough question because we do gm farcaster
yeah
so it you know it's like why do i keep coming back it's we're the official media partner of far con yeah three years in our you know this is our third year running so in some ways like i it's like it feels a little disingenuous to be sitting up here because it's like well i'm working on farcaster but at the same time i chose to build a business on farcaster early on and we kinda
but also to be clear farcaster's not paying us to be here no they're not well
that's just saying we took a bet on farcaster
and and i and and and you know adults have agency so i actually don't we don't actually have to be here so shout out dan my favorite so yeah i mean i think i i really kind of fell in love with farcaster ultimately in the beginning it was really from the culture yeah you know it was like i was interested in the technology i was interested in the promises
and it was really the people earlier this is like early on pre far con one it was like that core group of people really just kind of like hooked hooked me and then once i kinda made the commitment to keep building on farcaster so we do immediate business but the development it's continued relationships it's hacking it's
i can't imagine not being here and then the fact that it's in a different city it also feels like it's like okay well that's the this is the one conference that i'm not gonna like it's not a choice it's not like i'm deciding should i go this year this is aside from the fact that we're doing media that's the place and i love it's like it can kinda become like it's my vacation every year as well like go hang out with friends it's like feels like a reunion
it does feel like a reunion
yeah and you don't know what you're getting at every every year has been different so it's not like it's like i go to these corporate conferences that are held in the same hotel in vegas every year and it's like it's the same thing and every year far con is different totally different vibes so different and and just huge shout out to all the local organizers because it's a tremendous amount tremendous
like all i mean every organizer who's ever done it and even if they're not hanging around still don't get mad at them you know maybe they just need a little break it's okay they'll be back how about for you guys anything else you wanna like to cap us off of thoughts on this of why you why you keep coming back
i mean i think i've just been able to have some great personal relationships from the being online matt who's not here i always go back to this story he just i just happened to be in new orleans randomly and he reached out to me and we had coffee we chatted about a bunch of things he's a little bit younger but like we we we got along very well and i just mentioned yeah i had i was flying out i was in town for like a personal thing i was mentioning i was flying out the next day like probably gonna take a cab and he offered to drive me to the airport and i mean it's not a huge thing but it's so random like why give an internet stranger a ride to an airport and i still i
still give my family members rides to the airport
yeah i still think of that i think adrienne i i met up with her in new york city once and she bought me coffee and lunch actually maybe i'm just a world class person
you're welcome
or so art lou who's no longer so active had bought me lunch before victor and and sergio i think bought me dinner before i mean
so justin's available if you'd like to take him out to lunch he's available
i mean people are just extremely obviously there's like a professional connection as well because we're all interested in crypto and we work in crypto but i've just found that people are a lot more accessible than for example on crypto twitter and yeah i'll never stop meeting and going to
okay so he has given back he's given back okay okay he's not a total mooch okay is what you're saying okay got it that's good that's good grant i want you to kinda cap us off like what would you like to see in terms of like if you have advice for like the next person who's maybe thinking about organizing the next far con which personally i vote arizona with a burt meet and greet burt wurst meet and greet anybody anybody burt fest let's do it but what would you like suggest or like some any like kinda thoughts on somebody thinking about this
i think if you're thinking about it you should totally do it you should wait about a month or two before asking limon how it went because if you ask him today he'll he'll be like oh you shouldn't do it don't do it but if you wait a month or two he'll tell you about all the great things that come out of it and i'm of course happy to support advise i think many of the people here would support you in running another event but also there's no no one can do it for you no one can like give you permission to run far con you just have to stand up and do it that's how they've all happened i i'm shocked it still happens this is i did not expect that if i just asked farcaster at large to continue to host an event without any details or just be like you know it was great but i'm never doing this again and someone else should just do it every year just take on a bunch of work for because you just love it because you have like you know no expectations of getting paid for it or anything like that i would have guessed that it would never happen again but here we are it's number four it's it's it's amazing i think that it's very rewarding to bring people together like this in a way that's maybe hard to even really describe in words so if you're thinking about doing it yeah you should do it
and i'd also say like even if you can't get to wherever the next far con is look for those smaller meetups i'm excited for what rish was talking about this morning with making that like more prominent and more and easier for people to organize and find your people and we've been interviewing folks while we've been here and the same thing keeps coming up over and over again when we ask them about far con rome how are you finding it what's been your favorite things and the same thing over and over again is the people i get to meet my timeline in real time i get to see the people that i interact with every day in person and that's been the biggest thing they take away so is those deeper connections from just being in the same room and experiencing the same thing and i think that's it that's it for us and next up is lunch i think oh question
is the number of farcons the measure of your worth is the number of farcons the measure of your worth the grin says
it's going on the badges next year
grin that is the wrong answer
adrienne what's the right answer
the number of farcons you have attended is not your worth the your follower count is not your worth the number you see in your warbler is not your worth in this house
there's no rewards for running hubs that's right it is shout out horse facts
you guys it's you're you're all bring your own unique uniqueness to
the world and we love you you're good enough you're smart enough and gosh darn it we love you people like you we like you yeah alright everyone go enjoy some lunch we'll be back with community talks after