Welcome to Episode 2 of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class.
Clips:
BeavChris: A billion dollars. That’s what it takes for something to have status https://drakula.app/post/bca13929-a3f5-47be-ad07-0ab5c99d5607
BArt-Head trolls the kids too https://drakula.app/post/b05e60b7-6949-42db-b36c-a2e9a8fcdb26
BArt-Head: We are beyond that. One person cannot put the genie back in the bottle https://drakula.app/post/c889643f-2456-4292-995f-99114a491ee3
BeavChris: adding value with no memecoin brain at all https://drakula.app/post/a283c45b-3a8f-41ab-bc6a-0e756a477363
BeavChris: Is that considered a little bit of pooping? https://drakula.app/post/6d94abbb-1f3e-42db-87fd-410f1b417722
Watch the episode on Zora, and Mint to collect.
Summary
In the second episode of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show, a podcast for the Farcaster middle class, we dive into "Pics Or It Didn't Happen" bounties, blending Web3 insights with personal tales. BArt-Head juxtaposes Easter Mass with $DEGEN trading, while BeavChris discusses the toll of crypto monitoring on mental health and her new fitness challenges on Farcaster.
They examine the Farcaster platform's evolution, moving from FUD fears to recognizing its community's widening scope. Spotlight on projects like Anky and the Folklore Institute for promoting writing and community beyond just financial gains.
The duo candidly navigates meme coin dynamics and the cultural pivot of startups towards more meaningful, communal digital engagement.
Transcript
BeavChris
Oh yes, I was letting go of my GI system. Right before the show.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I on the other hand, have kept it all in, ready to drop.
BeavChris
Exactly. We have the Pics or It Didn't Happen bounty for today's show. So some of you might be here for that as well. And we are now at 8 o'clock sharp.
Let's start. How are you today, BArt-Head?
BArt-Head
Good morning. Good morning, BeavChris. Doing great here. On this rainy morning in New York City, Tuesday, April 2nd. Greetings everyone to our show, The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show. I want to shout out to our permissionless partners who make this possible. Permissionlessly: Unlonely, Base and Zora for mints, Paragraph for our blog posts and presence, and of course, Warpcast, Farcaster for our accounts, Drakula for our short video clips, and for today two POIDH (Pics Or It Didn't Happen) bounties to spice things up a little bit.
Very briefly, I'm BArt-Head. I am @artlu on Farcaster, and I am one of the co hosts of this show.
BeavChris
And I'm BeavChris, the comedic persona of @christin, who's completely unrelated to Christin. BArt-Head you surprised me yesterday with the offer of the bounty. Can you explain the bounds of the bounty again, since you wrote the whole thing?
BArt-Head
So with our episodes zero and one. I talked bad about different projects in the Farcaster ecosystem. And you even said are we going to FUD things too much? And so I want to try as a discipline for myself to say, I'm going to talk up two projects that I'm unrelated to, but I, Really have no involvement in and I am not going to poop on any projects, but if I do, it's like a swear jar, but it's an onchain smart contract controlled bounty where you can provide some proof of anything that I do.
And the smart contract would pay out the funds that are locked in there. So the first one is two positive projects, no pooping on any projects. The second bounty is even larger. So last week we went pretty deep and I used some pretty strong words talking about grift and corruption. And that really made us both uncomfortable, but especially Christin.
And I wanted to lean into the discomfort and say, look I promise I'm not going to say anyone's name, even though it's pretty interesting who those people are. And so there are eight user accounts on Farcaster that tipped themselves FarCats. And if I say any of those eight there is 500 in ETH that's available, but you have to figure out who they are and call it out.
BeavChris
Somehow you have drawn even more prominence and achieved your goal by making it into a bounty little puzzle. So I'm like yes, that by spirit of the law, you are trying to be more good. I'm not sure if this is really true. I hope you all in the audience can have some fun and have an interactive experience.
Yes BArt-Head, what did you do over the weekend?
BArt-Head
Yeah some people might know that Christin is a Buddhist chaplain, and some people might know that I am a Catholic Sunday school teacher on the weekends on a volunteer basis. We had Easter Mass. And we had a wonderful time. A pretty decent time to reflect on all the things that have been happening in our lives, especially with Farcaster and $Degen hitting an all time high, Merkle Manufactory announcing that they got a fundraise round at a 1 billion plus valuation.
Those are really massive things. Before Mass started, I I traded some $degen. I bought.
BeavChris
Just as Jesus said.
BArt-Head
Sorry, no, I didn't buy. I sold. I casted. I said if you're not going to take profits above a nickel, you are NGMI. And I actually took some profits and then it was above five cents and after Mass I checked again.
It was below five cents. I'm like, oh, so I bought a little bit back and i'm watching $degen fall this morning. It's all really really fascinating, going to Mass on the most holy day of the year and book-ending it with trading is a, it's a really a crazy thing to reflect on.
Another thing we did over the weekend. We did a very Asian thing. We jumped in the car and drove from New York City to Washington, D. C. to see the cherry blossoms which are in bloom around the National Mall and all of the monuments there. There's a place called the Tidal Basin and there's, I think, 3, 000 some trees that were a gift from the government of Japan a long time ago.
It's a big festival, and it was really beautiful, great, a great experience.
I found myself thinking we are living in the best of times. We have all of these blessings. And at the same time, these blessings are bringing some difficult things to our little utopian community of really nice people.
And we're finding, lots of feelings, lots of different expressions of things. But let me come back to you. How have you been, Christin, since last week when we were talking about $DEGEN, concerned about FUD,
BeavChris
Mm-hmm
BArt-Head
then you saw it absolutely moon.
BeavChris
Oh, I think this was my first experience of holding anything that mooned.
Again, it's so hilarious to me to learn that you are a Sunday school teacher, because when I, you're always like, or artlu, the goose picture profile person, is always trolling everybody. So
BArt-Head
I troll the kids, too.
BeavChris
Yeah, you must be an expert at it. Gosh I feel and of course behind the scenes we're more like the opposite personality, right?
I'm the one freaking out and being all disturbed and you are the one being chill. And I think what I learned through this whole week of, seeing it go up and now dropping back down, back to the Prius is, man, this is not worth checking. But at least for me if I'm trying to diamond hands.
For my mental health. I cannot be looking at my wallet every day. So I've now ceased that activity. However, in terms of like web3 not to make up for the mental health detriment. I'm trying to make up with physical health improvements. Now I'm using receipts really actively to log my running.
In order to win the raffle of $25.
BArt-Head
Receipts is really fun.
BeavChris
Yeah. And also with pics or it didn't happen I asked Kenny to make a custom bounty just for me to do two pull ups. In order to earn
BArt-Head
So as a background, Keccers can do
BeavChris
the newest thing in the world of ETH.
BArt-Head
Keccers can do ten times as much as you.
BeavChris
I know and so can Adrienne and then fun can do all these perfect form pull ups as well. So for me to be able to even eke out two would be freaking amazing. So I will be reporting on that on the fitness channel over the course of several months probably.
BArt-Head
And am I mistaken, but are you or are you not a power lifter?
BeavChris
Oh, yes. So I have officially retired from power lifting. And actually I plan to put out a bounty soon a little puzzle for people to solve about my powerlifting record and how I screwed it up.
BArt-Head
Oh, okay. Okay. We'll look out for that.
BeavChris
Stay tuned.
All right. Hot topics.
BArt-Head
Yeah, so I want to say
BeavChris
I don't understand your jokes anymore.
BArt-Head
I want to say we did cover a lot of it. We were quite concerned last week about whether we were fudding too hard or criticizing the ecosystem too hard, and I used very harsh words and I sought out responses from people and that has tempered some of my thoughts, but it has also brought some light to the ecosystem, and it also showed me somewhat that the ecosystem has gotten way bigger than it used to be.
There was a time in the past where one person with a very big voice could have, made a difference. And I think we are beyond that. Personally, I think we're beyond that. I think one person cannot put the genie back in the bottle, for example, of $DEGEN. Even DWR and Varun would not be able to say, look, we don't like $DEGEN.
It will not exist on our protocol. I think that is out of the bottle. I think with all of the users it feels like we are not default dead anymore, which is a pretty interesting observation.
BeavChris
What does that mean? What is default dead?
BArt-Head
So in startup land, a lot of people talk often as a way of getting focus and drive.
Hey, this company, it doesn't matter what we did on Series A, Series B, we are still default dead. We do not have product market fit and this enterprise can disappear.
BeavChris
Oh.
BArt-Head
And there's a shift between a default dead startup, which is just trying things and throwing money and trying to grow and maybe burning money.
And there's a shift when it does establish PMF, product market fit, and it becomes something that is not default dead. It's actually alive and, we're seeing some signs of that and it's being, it's definitely being reflected in the valuations. It's, in fact, the valuations are probably pulling value from the future and discounting it to the present time.
But also in terms of the conversations that we see and the content that we see emerging permissionlessly out of different places in the world. Like we talked about last week, some communities that definitely developed independently of the OG community and now they have a voice. They get to say, I'm part of this and they get to prove. I'm part of this. Look at my wallet. Look at my attestations and verifications. So it's actually quite fascinating to watch.
BeavChris
For sure.
When that billion dollar Bloomberg article came out. I think it's almost like it makes me sad because I realized that with this article, now I can send it to my web2 creator friends and be like, look everybody the thing that i've been on i've been telling you about for the past few months is legit,
BArt-Head
Yes!
BeavChris
And people paid attention and then I realized that oh that's what it takes for something to have status.
How like that's just pretty famous now, like writing entrepreneur teacher David Perell, who has an article that talks about how you have to do low status things in the beginning in order to be like successful, because that's really the only alpha you have, right?
It's not going to be sexy in the beginning. So I feel now suddenly, like people are paying attention to Farcaster, the ones who were dismissing it as like a come and go platform before.
BArt-Head
And that's really interesting, comparing the life of a startup with a creator's journey of finding a voice, finding an audience, and developing a presence.
Kind of similar to a startup, similar to an enterprise. And then, of course there's money.
BeavChris
Exactly. It's all fractal.
BArt-Head
So part of me was thinking, okay, what is going on in our ecosystem that is not about money? Because if there are, let's say, 500 meme coins, They're all competing against each other for attention. When there was 1 or 5, they could all exist in a nice like pie growing world.
But when there's 1000, the 1000th meme coin is going to have a very difficult time to get attention. And I wanted to highlight 2 different projects that are coin adjacent, but not purely or primarily about scene, Vibes or making money.
The first one is something that has, this guy has been working on for a while. It actually appears to
BeavChris
A long time!
BArt-Head
Be his life's work from many years ago,
but evolving, of course, with the technology and it's called Anky, A-N-K-Y.
And I'll just first primarily say I'm not involved in it. I haven't minted. I've played with different versions of it, but I haven't really jumped in the community yet. But the project, as I understand it, is to encourage people to explore their writing, which is part creativity and part self introspection, and to encourage that in a collaborative way to produce a book that will memorialize people's writing.
And there is a process to help you, which is informed by JP's thinking and ideas, where everybody should write for eight minutes everyday. So you think about it. Do I have eight minutes to sit and write? And then you try it and you find out how good your writing is. It's a really fascinating way and there are tokenomics around it.
They are not the traditional tokenomics and they are designed to encourage you to stick it out. And also to create things of value.
And so I've been watching Anky for a while. They just launched last week a token called $NEWEN. And again, this is not financial advice. You can all see my wallet. I'm not in it.
But I am really fascinated to see how how it's working and how it develops.
BeavChris, have you tried Anky?
BeavChris
Gosh, I remember trying a really early version of it. It was one of the first things I tried when I came to Farcaster. I remember that JP was super nice. And in fact he's the original designer of the spirituality icon.
That was actually his idea. The more complicated complex version of it when it switches. And I remember it was weird. I actually gave him feedback at the beginning that like, I don't know, I understand we're trying to get at with Anky, but then it's a little bit intrusive and I feel a little bit of a hangover when I use it.
So I think since then he's like taking feedback and tweaked it to be more and more engaging. And I really admire him because he's been on this idea for a long time. I could see him like grinding at it and I can see the usage uptake. Right at first, I'm like, Oh no, people are not liking, but then I'm seeing more and more people are mentioning using the product in my feed, so I'm really happy to see that it's taking off.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I think it's interesting that he's been working on it for so long, and grinding at it, And now I think it's perfectly positioned for something to do on Farcaster, which is different from the other things. And like you said, it is challenging. I did it. I definitely found it challenging and rewarding in a challenging way.
The second thing is something that I've only spent 10 minutes looking at, but it's from another OG who's been around and I've admired for a long time. As mutual follows but not really knowing very much about him, but there's something called the Folklore Institute,
BeavChris
and
BArt-Head
the Folklore Institute is a collection of max 150 people who are collecting lore related to various things, but definitely adjacent to Farcaster and Web3 and sharing it in a decentralized fashion where and the way I really found this was I was looking for tokens to buy that would give me stuff and I found this is that, oh you can, you could spend a significant amount of money as a gate.
To get a token and you get access into this community as a curator or a moderator. And so there's a channel slash folklore. It's called the Folklore Institute. Again, this is not financial advice, but it's a fascinating project that has been going for a while. And it's another thing to do on Farcaster, which is not money related, which you know, we all spend a lot of time chasing financial rewards, and I personally think that's totally fine.
Especially, and my personal view is, for people who have less, we should give them even more space to chase financial reward. For people who have a lot, okay, maybe you throw some poop at them because they're behaving as if they have a little. But for people who have little there's no reason to pull up the ladder behind you or say, this is this is immoral to be chasing financial rewards.
I think there's plenty to do to chase financial rewards, and maybe some of that will be wasted, and maybe some of that will be very rewarding,
BeavChris
Mm-hmm.
BArt-Head
That's great for people to try, but on Farcaster, there are also other projects that people care very deeply about. And have put a lot of thought into really cool mechanism design things, and I wanted to highlight those two, Anky and Folklore Institute.
BeavChris
That's fantastic. And I think this relates to what we were chatting about before the show started, which is like my relationship with $DEGEN right now. So instead of checking helplessly at my wallet balance, I've been trying to think of it I think someone had mentioned this in the one of one of the feeds and sorry, I forgot who it was.
But someone made the comparison to a creator grant for some of these meme coins. And I thought that is a healthier way for me to relate as someone who is holding a medium sized bag of Degen that you know what I can do regardless of whether the number goes up or down is to provide more value that is related to the coin and, by doing the show with you by doing what I would naturally want to share anyway, that is more like healthy way for someone who is has no memecoin brain at all to contribute to this community.
BArt-Head
Yeah, sorry, I think I've talked a long time again in episode two. Shall we do some ad reads?
BeavChris
Yes, we should. All right, so Farchiver, this time I actually do see the ad read. So this episode of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show is sponsored by Farchiver, the easiest way to save your Farcaster activity. As you may know, everyone's account is tied to storage, which pays each year for the network to preserve a fixed number of casts, reactions, and follows.
And there's actually some frames where you can check out how all of our likes are actually running out. When storage runs out, those casts, reactions, and follows get pruned. But Farcaster is permissionless. Read, Write, and Own all your interactions. You may right click, save everything and anything, and own it forever on your computer, or in the cloud, or even pinned via Pinata IPFS.
I hope you know what that is, because I don't know what it is. Farchiver saves not just only your cast, but everyone else's likes, recasts, and replies to all your brilliant thoughts. You get a download link with a file that you can browse forever on your own computer. And that's like a markdown file, right?
BArt-Head
It's a gzipped tarball which may be symmetrically encrypted of markdown files in a folder hierarchy. Yes.
BeavChris
Which you can open with any text editor, including Obsidian. So check it out at Farchiver. xyz. Tell them BeavChris and BArt-Head sent ya.
BArt-Head
And for the second ad read, we're going to talk about some mints that are available.
So this episode of The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show is sponsored by The BeavChris and BArt-Head Show NFT collection. Mint our Base episodes on Zora. Mint our Paragraph posts. Collect our Drakula clips. Tip us $enjoy. Tip us $degen. At bcbhshow.eth That is set up to receive it. And we also have BeavChris's or BeavChris's alter ego, Christin's comedy collection NFT, which is still available on Zora.
I believe that is, is that a limited edition BeavChris?
BeavChris
No.
BArt-Head
Oh, it's an open edition, which is even greater.
That's an abundance mindset.
BeavChris
I was quite torn about this. Actually, this is related to even our Mint collection, right? And actually, GM Farcaster brought this up as well, which is like, why would you Mint anything, given that you can watch it for free?
And I think that's the paradox of onchain media right now because my understanding is that if you mint something that if someone else is using an app called interface or something like that, then other people can see what you have minted. So to me, minting is an activity to, as a taste making activity almost,
for me to indicate, Oh, I really like this, and I think you should see it, too. So I've done that with some of our other Unlonely shows, and I highly recommend that we support each other in this way, because it's the simplest onchain activity to indicate support.
BArt-Head
Yeah, I think it's more pure than some of the Web 2 models, which maybe intrusively track your activity across your devices, across your browsing, and then you have to find ways to break the tracking.
Minting is definitely skin in the game. It is an active expression to share, to collect, all these are like very human emotions and in some ways it is more pure where you don't focus on How many views you had? Which can be gamed, it can be, it's non transparent, and the creator does not own it, you're at the mercy of the platform's payout ratio. Whereas minting, you set your price, the market chooses to take it or not, and you get to decide if it's an open edition or if there's limits. So far for BeavChris and BArt-Head, we've put limits on them, And actually, sorry, for the episodes we have not, but for the blog posts we have.
BeavChris
Oh, I didn't know.
BArt-Head
Yeah, basically nobody mints blog posts.
BeavChris
Oooh!
BArt-Head
I think if you do, if you mint the paragraph blog, there's a little kind of a boost for you in that you are going to be 1 out of 10 [Editor's note: 20 at 0.001 Base ETH each] as an early collector with onchain provenance. But yeah, those are just different things that we are trying.
BeavChris
Wonderful. I think we are on the half hour or running close to it. Do we want to wrap up with a few quick topics and then we'll hop on to GM Farcaster.
BArt-Head
Yeah, let's see if there are any comments in the chat. Yes, there is someone --
tips on enjoy yesterday. I hope you $enjoy. Thank you.
BeavChris
Thank you so much. Oh yeah. So now enjoy has a tipping mechanism is what I've learned . So that will be interesting. I guess competition or is it not really competition to $DEGEN?
BArt-Head
Yeah, that's a good question. It's going to play out. Do alternate mechanisms cannibalize or do they grow the pie?
And it's going to be fascinating to watch. Do you have a view, Christin BeavChris?
BeavChris
Gosh I think I've s I'm a little influenced, but one of my friends said that oh gosh, I wish they didn't just copy the tipping mechanism and came up with something a little original. But on the other hand, it's really hard to beat the tipping mechanism.
Like it, it's just a good demonstration of generosity and taste making. So I feel like it's a really good bootstrapping thing, like the first thing to do. And maybe this allows like different paths. to emerge as the two different coins do their own thing.
BArt-Head
I think it cannibalizes attention. And so there will be a competition and or a segregation of types of content that seek out different kinds of tips. Which you can imagine there's different vibes in different groups and so somebody can say I would rather tip X than Y or A than B and people can also signal.
I would rather receive like the coin, the meme coin that is going up the most, and I would rather not receive the meme coin that's like down in the dumps now, or vice versa. If people can signal they want to receive the one that's really cheap, I want to accumulate.
And it's going to be interesting to see our usernames, which already have lots of emojis, but some emojis will be used for signals to say, Hey, please tip me. I am open to accepting coin X, coin Y.
BeavChris
Yeah. And triple E Anon said you can only tip $enjoy on Zora right now. It doesn't work on cast. I actually did not know that. So thanks for letting me know before I start adding $enjoy to my cast.
BArt-Head
Here's a prediction. There will become bridges, loosely called bridges for tips. I believe it might have been dawufi today was saying, Hey, someone please build quidli caster. Quid caster, like quid pro quo. [Editor's note: tipquidity, like tip liquidity!]
So you tip me a certain amount in $DEGEN, I will tip you a certain amount of $enjoy between the platforms.
And that becomes a really natural thing for people to do, either informally or formally. And I haven't thought much about it yet, but I don't think there's any corruption or extractive activity in such an exchange.
BeavChris
Wow, you really saved yourself there, because I was going to end this by saying by pointing out the cannibalization, is that considered a little bit of pooping?
BArt-Head
That's a very good question. So I will leave this...the way POIDH works is there is a smart contract where there's some funds on offer. And there's a very active Discord community, where if there are bad actors, they will be very loud. We had some fun activities in the past where people tried to submit to try to cheat the process, and other people called them out, and they got credibility in return.
And there are some people who don't want to pay out, and they get shouted down. And maybe peer pressure helps, and especially if there is someone who clearly wants to remain an active participant in the community and grow with it, then you would prefer to go with the community. So I will leave this to the Discord group as judgment.
BeavChris
Ah!
BArt-Head
And people to find things that qualify as an onchain proof.
BeavChris
Exactly. So have fun clipping. Let's see how closely you can clip it to make him seem like he's being negative.
But yeah, thank you so much all for joining the show. We're going to keep it short and sweet today so that there's less editing for us on the back end.
But yeah, we hope to be back next week same time possibly. If not, we'll announce it. And maybe we'll dive a little bit more into spirituality in the future too, now that we've outed someone as a Sunday school teacher.
BArt-Head
Yeah, thank you all for listening. We appreciate your attention. We appreciate your your comments.
Please mint our episode. Please tip us. $Enjoy. $Degen.
BeavChris
Alrighty. Take care.
BArt-Head
Thank you. Bye bye.
BeavChris
Bye.
