Brennen

In today's episode, we delve into the VC world's growing interest in protocols, Brennen's unique perspective on the profitability of products over protocols, and his hands-on experience in the early days of Bitcoin and Ethereum. We'll also explore Tavern's journey, from its inception and funding struggles to its ambitious plans for improving user experience and integrating with other platforms like Polymarket.

Brennen opens up about his ongoing battle with a grade two glioblastoma, the impact of heavy anti-seizure medication on his cognitive functions, and his determination to contribute to medical science amidst personal adversity. We discuss his philosophy of not comparing products before building, the importance of focusing on user activity rather than token-based incentives.

We'll also touch on his past ventures, including innovative projects in digital art, decentralized wireless networks, and the growth of Tavern to nearly 2000 active monthly users. Plus, we'll get into his thoughts on the future of fully on-chain art and the crossovers between social audio platforms and betting markets.

00:00 Feeling stuck at work, started exploring entrepreneurship.
05:57 Mom's cancer led to quitting and startups.
15:24 Guy interested in selling product, collaboration begins.
16:53 Created Elementop, a decentralized wireless network company.
25:30 VCs invest in protocols, not applications or clients.
27:23 Investors seek higher risk, limited exposure opportunities.
33:04 Community-driven energy, financial connection, simplified user experience.
38:24 Health issues impact productivity and success.
43:36 Hospital recovery from coma, drugs, muscle atrophy.
50:24 Drug studies for large inoperable tumors take time.
57:20 Fundraising, code refactoring, scaling, open source goals.
01:02:46 Innovative approach to content sharing across platforms.
01:07:50 Excited about Polymarket, political integration, and communication.
01:13:50 Careful deployment is crucial for successful scaling.
01:15:05 Successful independent studio made most successful game.
01:23:47 BTC, binance, crypto, NFTs, ETH, art, expensive.
01:26:58 Discussion about wrapping up, asking questions, staying under 2 hours.
01:34:41 Thank you for listening, subscribe, share, suggest.

Music & Sounds By: Lakey Inspired
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CastOff/Episode Discussion, here.

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Transcript

0:00

They were able to take me, and I guess I had another one. So I'm having a flurry of these seizures all the way to the hospital. They take me to the neurologist center, and again, I think I have another one in front of the neurologist specialist, and they're like, okay, well, we have to. These are so dangerous. We have to basically put them in a medicated coma. GM GM welcome back to another episode of behind the screen with Gramaja, the podcast where we unravel the stories, insights, and secrets of top tier artists, avid collectors, innovative builders shaping the digital frontier, better known as web three. I'm your host, Grabaho, avid crypto enthusiast that's been in the space since 2012. Yeah. So this week's episode is with Brennan. He's a creator, co founder of Tavern, which is trying to challenge or create a digital alternative to Twitter spaces, which I feel is like a really untapped or going to be an evolving space. And definitely Tavern is one of the big players in this, like, web three version of it. Yeah, Brendan's been in the space for quite some time as well. He's an OG. He's been building iterating companies and products for quite some time, specifically in web three as well. So he has a lot of insight into some of the challenges with being a web three builder and founder, and he's also had some personal stuff get in the way of some of the stuff he wants to do, so, yeah, looking forward to kind of diving in. Hope you enjoy this episode. Thanks. Thanks again for doing this. I know, Humpty. I know he has something later on today, so I think we'll do well. If anyone wants to transition to his. His podcast after, we'll. We'll try and wrap it up before that 1030 start time, I believe so. Yeah, man. So today's about you and Tavern, I think. Tavern. So, me and you were talking in Taverna in May, and time flies when I initially asked you to do this with me, but I usually do my content schedule three months in advance, so I was kind of booked up when I had asked you about this. So we're right on time, even though it was late. I mean, a lot has changed. I know, since May. So it's kind of interesting because literally, uh, I. I am a completely different perspective than I was back then, so. Which is very interesting. Is it okay we talk about that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I've been very cool because I kind of live in a public, public narrative way. Yeah. So, yeah, I think. Yeah, I think let's just go there, and I think I might just dive into it. Like, sure. Uh, into that part what happened in July with you? Because, um, I. Yeah, like you said, you're, you're building in public, but I think it does kind of. I'm sure it changed a lot for you. So. Yeah. Who is Brendan? Of course, you know, doxes, doxx yourself as much as you'd like. Sure. And kind of how long you've been in the space. Yeah, absolutely. So I'll go all the way back. Maybe college is the best place. So I graduated in 2010 with, like, economics finance major, with a minor in computer science. But I always wanted to build, like, trading bots for basically, financial institutions. So, like, I had an internship with Credit Suisse in Singapore, but then the, like, 2008 market kind of fucked up a lot of, like, job opportunities there, so I went fully. I had an opportunity to go work for Booz Allen, which is like a government contracting consulting agency, to be a software engineer there. So I did that because they also paid pretty well. I was like, oh, this is pretty dope to be out of college and getting a pretty decent paycheck. But the licensing to basically the secret, to get the secret clearance took a really long time, and it was basically estimated for like six months. So I really didn't have much to do during that time. And 2010 is when, like, the social network came out. I don't remember that movie, but, like, you know, it's about Mark Zuckerberg and sort of, like, you know, the building of Facebook, you know, early on. And I had been on Facebook, obviously, and I. But I didn't really know the story. And I had, I had heard of why combinator and hacker news tangentially from some other people, like, in 2009, like my senior year, and kind of had broadcasted it. But anyway, so, like, I kind of got stuck into this founder bug where I was like, oh, man, why am I working for Booz Allen? Why am I not working and building myself? Like, I could go build some, some cool stuff. And so I had met two other colleagues at Booz Allen, and at the same time, we were all. One of them already had his clearance. One of them was waiting just like me. And so we just started playing around, like, me and one of the guys, Hunter. We would actually literally book meetings to talk about our projects that we were going to be on. But really it was just the bullshit and think of ideas that we can go work on. And then we would all three work after we got off work on different ideas that we thought were going to be really good if we were to quit and go do that. And coincidence is, my mom actually had cancer for a really long time and she passed away August of 2010. And we're originally from Austin. So I, during that time, I was still waiting on my clearance and I told these guys, I was like, you know what, I need to go back home and help the family a bit, and I'm just going to quit and go work on, go work on the startup. I'll just go do that. And they were all like, okay, well, we'll just quit too. Let's just go do it. So it was kind of funny that that sort of kicked off us all three quitting and going and working on some of our own projects. And in the first one, we called Globe, Q l O B E, which, hold on, let me find a video of it. But actually it changed, but I'll find a video that we made. Anyways, the idea was to build, again, a social network, but it was built on blue marble, which was open source photos, like basically Google Earth, but it was an open source variant of that which actually came from NASA. And one of the guys, John, was working on a project for it. And he was like, yeah, we could do some cool 3d modeling stuff on it. So we worked on that, found out it was really expensive and hard. We did inevitably raise some through some friends and family, like 100K. They're all like, you know, we split it up. We're like, okay, we have one hundred k to go, like, build something. And we iterated on so many different things. I mean, it was like, surely the, we had, you know, a shitty house in Austin, not near downtown, like outside Austin. I had like, smurf carpet and we just built a whole bunch of stuff. But one of the things we build was, was this. I felt like eBay was not a really good site for a bunch of stuff. It was really slow, it was tedious, and people wanted, like, really fast and quick. And I saw that YouTube obviously at this point had taken off. I was like, people should just upload YouTube videos and, like, pitch their products, right? A lot of like, QLTV was back in the day and. But it's like, you know, peer to peer kind of thing. So we came up with this thing called five Min bids, which was, you have five minutes to pitch yourself. You're the only thing on the network for five minutes in the day. And we told you what your spot was, and you would upload a YouTube video that basically pitched for five minutes, whatever you were selling, and obviously people have to bid on it, and you only have five minutes to bid. So it was like a really quick bidding system. And I didn't want to use PayPal because I felt like PayPal was clunky and old and it was connected to eBay. And I was like, let's go find another electronic, like another digital payment experience. And that's when I had found bitcoins whitepaper posted on Hacker News. And I just started going down and I was like, oh, my God, this is the future. This is fucking awesome. I also, I'm a huge gamer, so I had a gaming rig that could easily mine it. And I think at that point, even in 2010, the faucet was still giving out, like, some significant amount of bitcoin. Not over one, but it was like half a bitcoin or something like that. So we started experimenting with it and had an opportunity to buy some local bitcoins in Austin. Austin was a pretty good fertile ground for bitcoin, and we started implementing it into the app itself. But our mistake was that, well, one, from a consumer perspective, bitcoin was still really, really hard to use in the confirmation process. Again, the bids were five minutes, but to confirm, you know, each confirmation takes basically ten minutes for each block. And you needed a certain amount of confirmations to guarantee that the bid happened. So we were like, oh, shit. This isn't actually going to work for the type of bidding we want to do. It's not a quick payment system. It's actually a very long winded payment system. So we decided to, like, roll that back and try and look for something different. But that really got me hooked because again, I graduated economic finance and I computer science. So the cross section of all three of those things really got me hooked on these new digital electronic payment systems, right? These digital cash. So I started digging in, found colored coins that were getting processed, and like, the idea of connecting other digital identity or digital contracts to bitcoin and these transaction payment systems, which inevitably I would call as now ordinals. But that got me hooked up. And I had followed the forums, ended up inevitably seeing Vitaliks contributions. And when he launched Ethereum, I was super sold. I was like, this is really cool. Now, I only threw in one bitcoin. I should have thrown in a lot more. And basically one bitcoin at the time in the pre sale gave you 2000 eth, pretty much. It wasn't exactly, I think it was a little less than that, but yeah, got into that. It was like the first ICO, right? It was like, give this dude who looks like a giga brain person your bitcoin and hope that you get a wallet full of ethereum. I mean, that was. That was literally the black hole. But at the time, I wasn't really using. And, I mean, I had tried to push and use bitcoin wherever I could go. Cause again, I still inevitably did not realize that, you know, it would become so deflationary. I thought it would become a peer to peer cash system. So I try to use it everywhere I can. You know, I talk to friends, family, retail, everywhere I could go to try to spend bitcoin, which I don't know is a word, and sometimes it didn't. But I did spend quite a bit. That was also the beta back then, too. I remember vividly it was spend your bitcoin to give it utility. That was the flag everyone was pushing. I don't think anyone was really looking at bitcoin, you know, as. I mean, I think people were looking at it for, like, a, you know, holding value, but I don't. Yeah, yeah, that wasn't like that. That's kind of why I laugh a little bit when people are like, oh, you know, like, I would have never spent my bitcoin back then. I'm like, man, you weren't there back then. Like, I. Yeah, exactly like I was. I bought VPN's with my. With my bitcoin. And looking back now, I'm like, that's the most expensive VPN, VPN, like, year that I ever paid for because it was so much like, yeah, but it. It just wasn't like the meta back then at all. Dude, I bought a tv from a friend who never sold his bitcoin. Still don't think he has, but, like, the most expensive tv, I was like, can I buy this tv from you? But, like, I'm only going to give you bitcoin. And they were like, are you serious? I'm like, please just let me give you bitcoin for it. That was the type of deals I did. I was like, basically junkyard buying things from friends using bitcoin. So it's great, but no, 100%, right. Your VPN, it was probably thousands of dollars for. For a time period. So, yeah, so simultaneous. I still. So I caught, obviously, the crypto bug, but at the same time, I still caught the founder bug. I did end up working for a bigger startup called Crimson, which got bought by advisory board and then left that. This is, like 2012 eradic to this company called Civitas, which was like a higher education software AI company left that to go work for this company called Cake, which got, ended up buying out from Cisco, the food conglomerate. And I'm just kind of jumping around, and I'm never staying long enough to realize their exits. It's one of those things where I'm like, oh, this is really fun to work on. Just doing full stack engineering. At the same time, chill. Trying to develop, you know, a product for myself. One of those products was called bunches, which was a higher education kind of like a supplemental learning tool, which was very social in nature. Again, another social network I couldn't get out of social networks for the longest time. They're so fun to build. So it's like one of those things where it's like, I'll just keep, I just want to keep building fun things inevitably, you know, and again, still building an ethereum. So when Geth dropped and then solidity dropped for building contracts, I started playing around with that. I think that's in 2015, early 2016 era, and had this, met this friend, well, met this guy. I was sitting on this app called Party AI, and the idea was to build, like, remember when chatbots in like 2016 were getting, like, really popular, like the old school chatbots where you can kind of programmatically insert, like, steps that to do certain things. Was it anything like chat Gbt or LLMs today? Right. That was like the earliest form of, like, when AI was really cool to develop with. I was like, oh, shit, I'll jump in that, that bucket and try to do something. And I wanted to build, like a AI that helped you plan a party. Like, would ask you what type of venues you want, you know, obviously your location, the type of services you want, you know, food and do catering, invitation list, all that type of thing. All done through chatbot, which seems really easy, but it was actually incredibly hard. So I had this thing called party guy. A guy hits me up at the end of 2016 and just sends me a thing that says like, hey, you own thisparty? A are you willing to sell it? And I was like, oh, cool, no, im not willing to sell it, but what are you working on? And he gives me his background. So he was one of the first employees of pebble, the smart watch company, and they had gone through y combinator, and they're selling to Fitbit, but he has cut out a core of what's called Pebblecore, but like, had cut this out of the ip purchase and was trying to do something with it, like something social. And, and he was just like, looking around for some things he could do with it. So me and him started working on some stuff, inevitably realized that part of the app was not. I was basically telling him, like, what I was trying to do was really hard. Um, and we figured, like, okay, so this is getting into early 2017, and crypto's kind of back. Like, as in, like, it started popping off everywhere. And so I tell him, it's like, hey, do you know about Bitcoin Ethereum? He's like, oh, yeah, I've heard of it. I think I have a little bit of bitcoin. I think I bought some ethereum, too. But he wasn't, like, super deep as I was. I was like, well, I've been experimenting with these smart contracts. I think I have some interesting ideas that we can play around with. And also, no one's building hardware, because he's coming from the hardware space. No one's building consumer hardware that we can connect to these smart contracts. He was super engaged and interested, and he had some hardware buddies that were pretty interested. We started building this thing that we inevitably called Elementop, which was the original company that's spelled out like LMNop. And we basically started building this wireless network, decentralized wireless network, like a mobile virtual network provider where we would rent space. So they still had contracts from their pebble Fitbit days, like pebble, before it transitioned to Fitbit with at and T, where they had enough of the network that they could actually use and consume and people could pay for it. So we basically wrapped the rest of their network up and put it behind a smart contract and oracle system that could, like, ping at and T and get the data for the SIM card, like using eSims, so people could buy data through an eSIM or our hotspots, which we call nether devices, in this cool, really meaningful way. Like, my grandfather ran one in the middle of Texas somewhere out, and it worked. So we tried to do this. So all 2017, we built this kind of cool network and these devices, which are really retroactively, like, using, like, off the shelf devices and tried to raise a bunch of money, tried to talk to a lot of the different telco providers to try to, again, rent more space, because we were basically running out of. Out of the network that we had obligated through with at and t, through pebble that he was able to get but no one would get. Again. Crypto was still, from their perspective, was, like, illegal in a way. It wasn't illegal, but, like, for them, it was like Silk Road went down. It was you know Ross Ulrich, right? I actually knew some friends who knew him at Westlake. Kind of sensitive topic, but so the whole idea is that everyone still thought it was pretty legal in 2017. It's not like today where it feels much more commercialized and kind of more or less government approved. So everyone said, the FCC is going to shut you down. You basically have this perfect, what would you call it? Shadow network. Because no one really technically knew who they were. They're just addresses paying for data. And as long as you didn't put your personal shipping address to pick up the Sim or register an ESIM, which you could get anywhere, then no one really knew who you were. Technically, the FCC and the telcos could block the sim from accessing data or communicating. But it really was just sort of like kind of underground data network, which is kind of cool, but it's nothing illegal. I mean, yeah, people could use it for nefarious ways, but they can do that with any phone really, if they wanted to. But yeah, we couldn't raise money, couldn't get telco contracts. And so we started looking at what are other things? I really wanted to stay in the crypto space and I liked what we were doing, but my partner really wanted to get into financial services because he just felt like all these funds that were happening because he was really tapped into the VC world. So he saw all of his buddies all creating these crypto funds. Hes like, oh, lets go build, we know more about crypto than they do. Lets go build them a bunch of tools as a SaaS product that we can just sell to them and make money or whatever. And so thats what we did. And that we ran from basically 2018 and then raise some money from polychain in 2020 to continue doing that. And we personally used the tools to trade ourselves. So we kind of prop traded our own money that we are raising, which was pretty profitable and pretty good until 2022. And we hired quite a bit of people at this point, a lot of them trader based stuff. And I had gotten pretty bored. I get bored pretty easily on different products. I was like, I don't want to build any more financial services products. This is like super boring. I also got really tapped into nouns, really tapped into NFTs, and love the idea of Daos subdals, the idea of these newly conformed, like, groups of people, I would just call them cults coming online and everyone having their digital identity backed by these NFTs or these digital assets. And it really felt very native to me. It felt like something that I was like, this is the future. This is what I want. Because it's also, like, this gamification and my idea of, like, I have a gamer identity, and now I have this crypto identity, and it's backed by the things I purchase and use. And now I actually have a voting, voting tokens in this really awesome dao. And I was like, the one thing we don't have is a really cool, decentralized platform to communicate because we were using a lot of discord. Obviously transition that to farcaster or Twitter, random Twitter handles. I was like, well, I'll just go hack out this thing, which I obviously, inevitably call Tavern, that allowed people to communicate in open, decentralized way that could be really good for nouns. Started hacking this out, got to the point where I felt like it was reasonable. I went back and was like, hey, team, I want to go build this. Would y'all take an ownership stake and give me money to continue building this? And took a while to kind of come to, like, a yes answer, like, yeah, this actually seems pretty profitable. We can do that. And so I was able to allocate some funds to it. Not a whole bunch, but enough to, like, spin up a design, like, contract out some design team, spin up, like, one engineer from a contracting side to help me do some. Some of the scale stuff. And this was in 2020, late 2022, early 2023. And then, I don't know if you guys remember when Silicon bank crashed and a lot of stuff with just crypto went down really bad. That was. Was that April 2023, I think. Yeah. Yeah. Well, inevitably, our main bank was Silicon Valley bank, but also without sharing too much information, but I won't. But we put ourselves in a position that was. It was probably the first time where we became illiquid on the trading side, and things happened, basically closing off the door for providing more funding to this project. Had to do a lot of organization shifts. A lot of things happened, but we felt promise in tavern building basically growing from the ashes of our other company. So we were like, let's double down. Let's try to go raise money externally for Tavern and try to go from that. And so that's kind of what we've been up to for a year, while also just me solo dev ing on the project and expanding it. And that's where we started thinking about, okay, well, we need to incentivize it with tokens. Start thinking about roots. Started also thinking about other protocols which became pose that we could build. Because again, VC's want a protocol, they don't want a social fi app, so it's really hard to pitch them on. Like, oh, we're going to grow. And inevitably we can monetize. They're like, no, show us a protocol that backs all this stuff. And so we thought about this idea of like this extracted user protocol where it's nothing based on a certain blockchain, it's actually connected to many chains. You can export your social network and your social graph and connect it to all your other places because most people have multiple identities across different networks. I myself probably have freaking ten different wallets and they're all disconnected. I have to manage them in certain ways. Right. So the idea was to like have a central place where you can sign all that and you sign it on behalf of like a user model. Right? Like, so that either be Twitter discord, an email like Gmail, or your farcaster account even. Right. And that's become obviously the most useful currently. Yeah. And so that's kind of caught us up to almost present time where just doing a few things on forecaster. And our goal was inevitably not to build something specifically for a farcaster. We were trying on a bunch of different things and that's just what took off. And so now we're refocusing on, okay, how do we make far caster users have a better experience? And that's kind of like where we are right now in terms of whole product. And that was a lot. I talked a lot. I'm sorry. No, you're good, man. You're good. Yeah. It's interesting that like, the VC world, like, it cracks me up that you're saying that like, you know, they want to, I mean, it makes sense to, from their perspective, why they want to invest in protocols. But like, if you abstractly think about it, it's like, yeah, they, they want to bank on people building the next like email client or like, you know, email network. And then, you know, there's only so many protocols that can get built to, for there to be a bunch of winners. You know, it's like, cool, you, we will only bet on email, but any company that builds like an email client or anything, you know, peripherally associated with email, like, we're not going to put money on that. Yeah, it's like, why warpcast didn't really get funded. It was farcaster, right? Yeah, I think that's what we had to position ourselves to, to develop, which is sort of the case, but I'm still against it. I still think products as products and not protocols can still exist. And still be very profitable. Yeah, I think right now they're mostly like, they're probably looking for the big bets and the big wins. So they're looking for their protocols, I'm sure. Once again, let's say we have a social fi protocol that's already taken off. It's going to be very hard to build another one from scratch. Um, so it'll be easier to build like an app or something or a product within that protocol, and then that's when the money will start trickling kind of downwards, I would say. But yeah, it's insane, like, to hear that because it's like, oh, like we only want to bet on, like, the biggest ideas, but hey, and I think. It'S a different type of risk, right. And finding investors that meet with that, and usually it's ones that already sort of want to double down on a protocol. So if we say, hey, you're an investor in XYZ, whether that be farcast or even bear chain, and we're saying, hey, we're going to build in that ecosystem, or people who only got slightly exposure. So a lot of people we talk to, the ones that are really interested, we're limited in their exposure. There's only so much money you could give these companies until it just gets stupid, which there's still stupid valuations going on anyways. So it's one of those things where someone's like, well, man, I would have put in half a million on this, but I could only get 50k edgewise. Those type of angel investors are really interested because we're building those ecosystems and they can get more exposure at a higher risk. And so that's the type of plays you have to get into to be able to be at least raise that initial funding or not initial because we had initial funding, but the next round of funding. Yeah. All right. Yeah. So it sounds like you've been in this space for a while and you've also been building and playing around with kind of web three or kind of like the next evolution of what the Internet will look like for quite some time as well. And like, you've been thinking about it, iterating. So bringing us to kind of present day with Tavern. So based on getting money from polychain, you guys are exploring, you know, bear chain or you are going to work with bear chain. And bear chain itself is actually really interesting. Like, I hadn't even heard of Barachain until I spoke with you earlier in the spring and went down this rabbit hole of kind of exploring it and really good like branding and marketing for sure. Yeah. Like, I know I asked you this last week, but I think for the people that weren't here, like, sure. What is the connection between like Farcaster bear chain and all these wallets and identities? I know you were mentioning about somehow finding a way to connect it all. Yeah, absolutely. Inevitably, we want to be this layer zero for identity is probably the best way to frame it, where you're not really connected like a bridge, except you're not tying financial assets through it. You're really tying identity and personal information. Right. Or, you know, social information, whether it be your anonymous identity or your actual identity. And so we don't want to be, we're not really wanting to be connected to a specific social protocol or any, any protocol, but we do have to have a registry if we want to do on chain transactions on behalf of people. So we have to pick one and we want to pick like some version of an l two normally, right? And so like currently taverns were in on Polygon and to be able to test this stuff out, and at the time I thought matic was a really good vertical. I think it was getting a lot of hype. You don't want to do something that no one's going to use or care about. And then obviously with base coming on, I was like, oh, that's a really interesting one. But we got connected when we re approached polychain and had some friends who were pretty heavily exposed in terms of like, them wanting, you know, or talking about barachain. And I had heard about it through the NFT projects, but hadn't really like dug into it. And I was like, oh shit, they're making like an l two. They're like, well, they're actually making like an l one. Um, and I was like, what? I was like, no one makes l one s nowadays. Um, and so I started digging into it and found it to be really community and future looking in terms of how does a group of people operate and govern a protocol, like at the ground level, rather than it be like, oh, we have an Ethereum foundation where we have elected engineers and contributors, but it's not like you own a theory and you can't really vote new additions. It's really hard. Just like in bitcoin, it was really hard if you were just holding a bunch of bitcoin to even contribute to it. It. And so I love this idea. And also their approach when you talk about marketing is just great because they already have this super feverish amount of interest and they're really focusing it back on the community. Like if you go into all their discourse, if you read all their content and when you even talk to them, you can get a sense that they really value the people who are helping build this thing, rather than like, oh, we're just these adults in the room and we're just going to go top down and like, here's what we want to build. Build, which there are a lot of protocols that are like that. I mean, one of them that I still think is one of the smartest protocols to ever exist, called Chia, which they call it greener bitcoin, I think is genius. It's absolutely amazing. Written by Bram Cohen, who's basically invented bittorrent or torrent technology or basically transmitting data decentrally, but it's just them making decisions and has nothing to do with the community. And so it's basically fizzled off hundreds of thousands to actually mine Chia. And like I literally, if you look at me, I'm in my study with like I had to bring my miners out of a data center because it wasn't worth it anymore. And like they're in my study and I turned them off recently and like I just have these massive servers that could, could be minting Chi. And I was like, nah, I'm over it. So I felt like it was a very different approach where it felt like building a community first and getting people just like feverish about it. And it doesn't have to be. Again, a lot of these l one s don't even need to be better. They just have to have energy in a community behind it. Right? I mean, and so I was like, okay, that's really interesting. And then again, our financial connections made sense to where, you know, if we're going back and asking for money and we're saying like, oh, we're going to put our registry and some of our main stuff on, on bear chain, then it makes sense. It has to be, and also the protocol has to be cheap because we're going to socialize gas cost and make it to where basically you as an end user doesn't need to know anything about crypto and could just show up and make transactions. And you're getting these things through our user abstracted wallet that's on parachain. But like you don't have to do shit, right? All the other transactions are socialized through us and through the community. So that's kind of like the connection between it now I don't think we've made 100% decision to build on bear chain. I think it's still in flux and we have time because they haven't launched their l one yet, and we want to time with that as well. But I still think base is a really good option. There are other, some opportunities as well. Like Monad is another l one. That's interesting. Also, just building an l three on top of one of these others, it's like, oh, we'll just have our own protocol. I don't know if that's the greatest thing to do, but it is definitely something possible. Like Dejan did, right? Yeah, that's kind of where we landed. And again, I go back to always still wanting to build a great product, not just put it on the right protocol. And that's why I'm much more interested in still making something that works for people rather than incentivize use on some protocol, give them a bunch of tokens and then go and build a product, which, yeah, pretty much against that. That makes sense. It's funny, too, because, like, like the late night crew and just recently, like, even Dan, I think when he joined, because that was like their second or third tavern that they've had, everyone was immediately like, whoa, this is actually, like, kind of nice and slick looking. And that's what kind of caught me, like, caught my attention when I first used tavern, too, because I think this. So I had access to, like, alpha access to, like, farhouse back then. I had used Arbour before. I don't think the butterfly one had come out yet at that point, but I had seen all these other ones and. And I used to frequent a Twitter spaces for a while. And I really liked Twitter spaces. Like, at least I like the idea. Like, I've never really thought about, I don't know, social. Like, I had used clubhouse before and stuff like that, but I had never really thought about it for, like, web three. So I, for like, a while, I've been really teetering about kind of building, like, a weekly, like, chat in addition to, like, the written stuff that I do. Yeah, absolutely. From the podcast. Yeah. Like, I think you remember when I was talking to you about it. Um, and the. So I was kind of exploring. I was, like, in my exploratory phase, and when I found the nouns o'clock group kind of having their tavern, I was like, oh, I've never heard of Tavern. So I, like, when I clicked in and I came in here, instantly, I was like, well, this is really nice. Like, and I think it's. It's nice to see people are finally also appreciating kind of what you've built already, like, yeah, it's nicely well done. So what was I going to say? I can see where you're saying where, like, it's good to focus on a product and the chain and all that. Like, you know, you can figure out later, especially since you're not. You haven't made a decision and you're kind of stuck with that decision. You're kind of. You're building the product. You're. I think you said you're getting close to, like, 2000 active daily users or something like that. A little. Or we're getting close to 2000 active monthly users. There you go. That's what it was. That'd be sick. That'd be awesome. Great. Yeah, no, it's okay. That's how many. How far Caster has now. Yeah. And I think, again, it's like, to me, what do people care about? First, if everyone is just trying to get tokens on a protocol and not using the app, then what do you have? I mean, you don't have anything. Sure, you can go and say, oh, we've got 10,000 people who own our token, and it's like, cool. Well, you could just easily have just airdropped that to whatever forecaster accounts are popular and try to incentivize it that way. But honestly, I'd rather show them activity in the app and how many taverns and how many people are joining those taverns and the speakers that are going on, and then later, you know, take that data and create a fair and contributing airdrop that makes sense for the people who are using the apps. And to me, that feels. That feels fair. So I feel like we still have time, because I still have a lot of things that are on my priority list, I think do need to get built to hit that next. We call it the next chasm. There's multiple chasms. Everyone says, talking. I don't know if you heard that book, crossing the chasm, but there's always multiple chasms in building a product. Yeah. And unfortunately, we got into a weird state where I got hit with this, you know, this health stuff at the moment, that a week or two weeks later, tavern started kind of taking off way more than it was before. Um, and so it was just sort of, I mean, maybe serendipitous, I don't know. But it was one of those things where I used to be able to code 12 hours straight and just pump out features from a protocol level, from a product level, ux ui, all that stuff. And now I'm down to. I was able to ship a few things last week, a couple hours each. Probably do the same thing this week, but I'm very much on a, like, you know, smaller capacity, but I'm getting even more and more features that are coming out from people who are using it now. So I'm in that weird state where like, yeah, we absolutely are trying to close money as fast as possible to try to spin up a team to help deliver these. So it's kind of good because, I mean, obviously we can use the momentum and energy to go close the rest of our funding, but it sucks that I personally want to go deliver these, and it's just. It's just much harder than it was before. Yeah, no, I mean, that's tough, man. Yeah, I think we can kind of, since you segued into it, like, let's take a quick break. I hope you're enjoying the episode. This episode was made possible with support of my premium subscribers, Seattle dog mag, vinyls, OG Lecrest, the bluffer non linear running peachy inceptionally. Topo's and Tani, thanks again for your guys support. Really appreciate it. It's always good to have a group of people that kind of support you and that are there to, like, bounce back ideas from them and have kind of like a soundboard. So if you'd like to receive exclusive drops, access to token gated content or token gated chat, you know, you're welcome to subscribe to my hyper sub. You get referral money back, you get revenue sharing as well. So a lot of. A lot of good perks. So make sure to check it out. Thanks. I mean, yeah, walk me through what happened on 4 July of all days, too. Nuttiest thing ever, man. Yeah, it was pretty insane. Supposedly. I have no recollection of this. I had woke up to let our dog

out, like, I think, like 07: 40:49

00 a.m. 640 on July 4. And I guess had passed out on the couch and I guess had a major seizure. Well, we assume that's what it was because when my wife woke up and found me, I had blood on my cheek, was completely unconscious from biting my lip and cheek. And so she called. When she saw that and she couldn't wake me up, she called the Ems. They came pretty quickly. We live pretty close to downtown, so it was quite easy. They got there really quickly or like first responders. They were able to finally, like, get me conscious. And then minutes later, I supposedly started having another seizure. And these are like these grandma tonic, tonic seizures that pretty much like, I don't remember anything. They're pretty violent, and they're like, oh, yeah, well, we got to take them in. So they were able to take me, and I guess I had another one. So I'm having a flurry of these seizures all the way to the hospital. They take me to the neurologist center, and again, I think I have another one in front of the neurologist specialist, and they're like, okay, will, we have to. These are so dangerous. We have to basically put them in a medicated coma. So they do everything they have to do. Again, I don't remember any of this stuff, and I don't even really remember the day before all this stuff happened. Like, very brief memory of July 3 and kind of, like, leading up to that time. So they put me in a coma. I'm in a coma for four days. And then when I finally, like, kind of come to, they bring me up. It's just one of those things where I felt like I just see myself strapped in. I see charts. I kind of look over. I see my dad, my wife, and one of my best friends. And I felt like I was in an accident. Like, I was like, oh, shit. Like, was I in a car accident? Couldn't really speak, but was just, like, super confused. And then my wife started explaining everything that happened, and I was like, oh, my God. And then the doctors came in, tried to explain something to me, went over our charts, and then, like, showed me the MRI, and I was, like, basically half. Half my brain was, like, clouded in this edema. And then they focused on the actual tumor itself and basically explaining that due to this inflation, due to this, like, you know, what was going on, you had these crazy seizures and blah, blah, blah, blah. And so I was like, oh, shit. And so that's, like, where we went through. I stayed in the hospital basically recovering from being in a coma. Like, you basically have to recover from because you're on, like, fentanyl, you're on a bunch of crazy drugs, and you already have, like, quick atrophy. So I work out pretty much almost every single day, and I, like, could barely walk, even just four days in a bed. So it's, like, crazy that you have to go through kind of, like, a recovery program pretty quickly while you're in the hospital. I had a little bit of pneumonia I was recovering from because they had a breathing tube and a feeding tube. And so you go through all that stuff until you basically tell them, okay, I've got my memory, or I can remember stuff. You have to go through a test that they give you a bunch of things. You have to tell them, like, what's the date, what's your name, where are you from, all that kind of stuff. And then they check all your vitals and stuff. And then once you do that, they'll release you and then basically prescribe me, like, a bunch of anti seizure. So, really, what's causing me the most difficulty is the anti seizure. So they put me on the max. So I'm on 1500 milligrams of anti seizure twice a day. Um, and plus another drug. I forget what's called, but it's pretty heavy. From what? From the research I have. Like, most people don't go to that. I mean, I am a. Like, a bigger dude, so I don't know if that plays a role in terms of weight, but, like, our size. But I'm pretty much maxed out. And it definitely, when you take the drug, it's pretty. It's. It's a. It creates, like, a haze. Like, it feels like you're kind of hungover, like, you're not nauseous, but you feel like you can't really think. So cognitive function is pretty low, but this protects you from seizures, which is the main problem with these tumors in your brain. So I've been going to PT. I went to speech therapy, and basically from a lot of the symptoms they described. So I had really bad motion sickness, really bad altitude sickness. I would have crazy bouts of nausea if I drank, which I'm an idiot and still did. I would get really sick afterwards. I just thought it's one of those things where, I guess when you're a texan again, this is going to be me throwing a bunch of stereotypes of Texans, which I think they're true. It's mainly a thing where, don't be a bitch. Why are you complaining? You know what I'm saying? It was very much a machoism thing of, like, don't complain if, you know, if you feel bad, get over it type of deal. And I come from a very deep rooted Texas family, and so I was like, oh, I never really thought these were problems that I should complain about because I would recover from them. Right. And so, like, I never really said anything. I've had them for 15 years, and based on the slow growth of the tumor, they think I might have had the tumor, like, that entire time, where it was a grade one, which is classified as more of a benign. So all brain tumors aren't benign. They're all growth malignant tumors. They just go really, really slow until they get into higher grades. So mine is a grade two, which is pretty normal for my age. So they start as grade ones when you can be very young, and then they just start to get worse and worse over time, and they will always grow back. Even if you were to surgically remove them or, you know, use chemo radiation to remove them, they will inevitably resurface. They always do just the type of cancer it is. So anyways, it's kind of funny that I had gone out two days prior to July 4, July 2 for my friend's birthday, and we got completely trashed. I had, you know, blackout levels of alcohol. And so we think that's actually what triggered it. So alcohol is one of the worst inflammations for your brain, for your body in general. And it just took that long to somehow trigger these seizures, which is kind of funny because it may be saved. I'm saved my life, but maybe triggered it a bit early because some people don't know until they're, like, forties and fifties and then turns into a grade three, grade four glioblastoma. And those are way worse. So, yeah, it was very interesting to figure that out. And then recently. So last week, actually, a week from today, Wednesday, I got the full pathology. So it took that long to get the pathology back. And this is like the genetic breakdown, the type of cancer. There's way more different types in the brain than there are anywhere else in the body, and they matter about your treatment. Luckily, I got one of the more promising ones in terms of the mutation types. So the IDh one, it's a oglio. I can't pronounce the full name. The only issue, and it's in my left frontal lobe, the only issue is the size is really big, and it's infiltrating the terms of. Like, it touches a lot part of your motor, your memory, your speech, to where it is inoperable. Well, from the Austin neuro surgeon, basically the brain surgeon. So he believes it's inoperable to get. And you never really want to do surgery unless you. You're pretty sure you can get more than 70%, or else it's kind of one of those things where it's, like, not risk. It's not worth the reward to remove it versus the risks. Right. Because you could do a lot of harm on the brain cells themselves. Right. Which can make, you know, my quality of life terrible. Right. If I can't speak, I can't move, you know, lots of memory, a bunch of other triggers. Can happen, happen. So that's the state we're in where it is inevitably inoperable. Now, from the current, you know, I'm getting second opinions from other specialists that deal with brain cancer, a lot more so than like, the one in Austin, which has a good program. It's just not like the specialist program. But the exciting news is a drug had, literally Tuesday, last week had just been FDA approved, which targets the exact markers and mutations that myocurrencancer has. And it had been very high efficacy rates, um, that you can take orally, uh, which is great. It. And it has very low symptoms, um, and is something that doesn't allow you to, like, walk back, like some, some. Some treatment types in cancer. And again, I've. Most of my family members, I kind of have a genetic disposition. Disposition to cancer is if you take a treatment sometimes that locks the door to other treatments where this one doesn't, which is really great. So, yeah, so that's exciting news to be able to get on that program as soon as they have access to the drug. Basically, once FDA approves it, then they work with the manufacturers, and then they work with the pharmacy, then they work with the healthcare providers in the US. And that can just take a bunch of time. He said probably the fastest it could go is like three to four weeks, but it could go a little bit longer than that. The only downside of having a pretty large inoperable tumor is that the drug normally the case study. So the patients that were in the studies, all were post op patients, as in, they had already removed most of the tumor and then were taking this drug. There had been cases of people being pre. Pre operation with inoperable tumors and had some good signs, but it wasn't statistically significant to put in the data. Right. You can't say, like, oh, you know, we had some good cases in this category, but if you don't have enough patience, then you can't make any. You can only see anecdotal evidence from that, right. You can't say there's any p values that could relate. So I would be in this, like, outlier bucket, which I'm excited for, because contributing to medical science, I think, is a really good thing, you know, that that brings meaning to what I have, and I've used that as a way to feel better about the whole situation. So being able to say, like, oh, you know, I'm an outlier and I can contribute data to this drug and into the rest of the population, you know, take it later. So, sorry again, I talked for a long time, but that's kind of where things are right now. No, you're good, man. It's a traumatic event. It's a thing that you're going through. Like you said, it's. There's a lot of, like, silver lining to all that, you know? Like. Yeah, like you said, like, you. You caught it. Like. Yeah. Hypothetically, could you've caught it sooner? Sure. You know, that's. That's always, like, a thing, you know, like, that you could always get information sooner. Yeah, but you caught it at the time that you caught it, and. The. Drug just got approved as well. And like you said, they don't want to include. If they didn't have enough information on it, it's better to not include it just because then they can get it approved, and then it's kind of up to your doctor whether they give it to you or nothing. But, like you said, like, you're still contributing to the knowledge base of how this drug will work. Yeah, man, I'm rooting for you, man. Cancer. Cancer is. I used to work in the cancer space, in the biotech space. Yeah, you were telling me. That's crazy. Yeah, and it's tough, man. It's nuts. I remember some of the cancer treatments or drugs that we would release, like, we were the only one, and. And people were like, you know, a couple of weeks is actually pretty good. Like, we would get approved. One of the things that we, uh. A lot of biotech companies work on is, like, the moment it gets FDA approved, how quickly can you ramp up to sales? Yeah. And, you know, like, the capitalist, pessimistic person in the world is like, yeah, of course. Like, they just want to get their money, and it's like, no. Like, there's people's, like, lives on the line, dude, 100%. I mean, there are people been waiting for this drug for, like, multiple years. They've heard, because they were able to not go through the case study because it's sometimes really hard where they are. But, yeah, so I'm. I. Yeah, I feel bad. Yeah. Kind of going with that, like. Yeah, so, like, I know you've had that. Like, the medicine has been, like, fogging up. You're not able to code as long. I mean, it's fine. I feel like it's tough because I'm sure, like, you're used to just cranking out for 12 hours in building, but do you think it's almost made it again? Going back to that silver lightning, do you think it's made it, like, where you're clear on, like, you know, what features to work on or what requests or what bugs. I mean, like, bugs, obviously. I'm sure, like, if they're p zeros or p ones, you're gonna. You're gonna have to work on them immediately. But, like, you know, like, do you think it's giving you a little bit of, like that? Like, you're better at kind of assessing what needs your time versus someone else's time or what's important and what's not important? Maybe a little bit. I don't know yet. Because it's one of those things where my personality and what I've been doing for the past 14 years of my life is just coding. Like. Like, this is the longest. The 40 days I went before I submitted my first, like, a code edition was the longest time on two things. One was the longest time since I drank, which is great. Now I'm, like, 100% dry. So that was, like, a big achievement. But on the other side was the longest time, but I've ever gone without shipping code. And so it's just one of those things where it's just so different than what I'm used to, where I'm like, oh, I'll just fucking. Just code bust this out. Just. Just done. And so you're right. I mean, I have to think more about, okay, how do I optimize time? For now, it's different. If I were to get a team, and then I feel like I could, you know, chess out my plays, but it's just so hard, because I was like, if I were to get all my hours back, I'd be like, I could get all these features done in, like, a week, like, everything that everyone wants right now, and that hurts. It's like. It feels like you get to the gym and you're so used to throwing up, like, let's say, you know, 400 on squats or deadlifts or whatever, and you can only put on, like, 20 pound weights, and you're like, oh, that's what it feels like. It feels so bad, and, you know, that's all you can do. So it's just one of those things where it just hits the ego pretty hard. Yeah. Have you thought about. Because I know I saw. I'm gonna probably butcher his name. JG. Jtjnar. Yeah, yeah. You know, he was like, you know, offering to help, like, have you thought of, like, maybe, you know, using bounty, like, caster or, like, some kind of. Yeah. The problem is, Isdev. I wrote this code base as, like, my personal project, hackathon code base. I just kept building on top of it. So I'm so embarrassed to open source it and allow contribution like on a bounty cast. It is not in a great state. And it was one of those things where I wait till we hit some sort of scale, which is now to then go back and start to figure out how to basically the code base in a reconcilable way for new contributors to come on. And it is not in that state. We could try it, but I feel so bad for anyone even attempting to jump on. And that's where I think if we were to finish raising money, then I could just focus on getting. The first thing is like, okay, we have to refactor the code base so we can scale first and scale development time, then start to move into, okay, we can then start using the community to be contributors and open source. The entire, the whole goal was to get to a point where completely open source. I just didn't think that the numbers that we had were meaningful enough to do that. And maybe I should have made it open source from the get go. But then I'm just like so embarrassed by how my code looks that I probably would never ship where if it's just me looking at the code base, I'll ship fucking often and early because I'm not, I don't need to be embarrassed. So it's that catch 22 model. But you're right, we need to get. To that point where they can. That makes sense. I understand that. Yeah, I don't. Not saying you have to open source everything, but totally get like, you know, if, even if you let someone in, you're like, you know, this room looks like a mess, but it all makes sense to me. And like, how it's organized because, you know, I organized it like in what me, but. And trying to explain to someone else, like the madness that you, that is your, that is your brain, you know, like, you might spend more time trying to get them up to speed to make sense of it all than actually them contributing. So, yeah, okay. Yeah, that makes sense. I saw that and I was like, yeah. I was like, man, you know, like, just do a bounty and give out some roots or something and then see. Yeah, I mean, want to help. I think that inevitably is our first goal is get to the point where the community becomes massive contributors and that there's great incentives lined up to producing those contributions. Right. So I definitely know that's part of my passion to get to that point. Right now. The biggest thing is that, that bug, that two hour bug, which makes sure we're not going to hit. So going back and forth with our third party provider, which basically provides the audio syncing, like the live streaming platform, because we didn't build that from the ground up. We want to. And I tried initially, but it was so hard to scale it correctly. And also I wanted to do it on decentralized nodes. But then how do you prove that what you're serving is, and then you're building a bittorrent network on streaming audio, and we want to get to that. That's like the final goal. I was like, oh, let's just use Agora, who scaled a whole bunch of different services around the world, but we're using their legacy code. And I didn't realize that they had changed to this feed, too, which does look way better and I think can provide us some really dope stuff once we convert. But they basically were like, we think it's a legacy issue. We don't want to contribute any talent, like basically any engineering sources to fix your problem. So you need to update to v two, and that's it. Like, we just got that back yesterday. So that's what I'm trying to figure out is like, okay, how hard or how long is it going to take to basically update their legacy code to the v two code? So that's like, the biggest thing on my mind is just get that there and then add chat. People want the fucking chat. Yeah. Which is so funny because I purposely delayed original, the original chat code because I was like, why am I adding chat? Everyone's got chat everywhere, right? Like, there's, there's chat on discord, there's chat on Twitter. You can link. There's chat on Farcaster. And I was like, I don't want to do chat. I want to first solve audio. But I didn't realize that people really do love that simultaneous audio chat all in one. And I was like, you know what? I missed that. So I'm thinking about that, but I also want to make it where it feels more novel, which is why it's, it took longer to deploy before all this went down, because I also felt like I don't want to cannibalize the chat that could happen on Farcaster, like some of the late night stuff or even the Nounstown square. A lot of the discussion still happened in Farcaster because you can't say it in the tavern and you lose that social signal where I think a lot of people found the late night one because people were talking about the tavern. And if there was no way to broadcast and they weren't using Farcaster Warpcast to do that, then I think it would have been a much smaller tavern. So I want to do something where it's like combined where you can choose to just chat or you can choose to basically auto, if you come in from Farcaster, we have your token enough to basically publish to Farcaster on the channel you're coming from. And so doing more interesting things like that to keep signal very high, but also allow you to still chat quickly in the tavern itself. Yeah, yeah. I mean, like, you could even take the approach of like Alpha friends where if something like in the chat when it's going back and forth, like the bar, if you're like, oh, this would be a good one to like, you know, share on Warpcast. Yeah, you know, they have it on Alpha friends where you could share, like, like you said, like, it basically posted actually to Warpcast. And then people are able to see, like, you know, for Alpha friends it's like token gated, but, you know, for your case, it could be like, you know, like join the conversation or whatever. Like, yeah, so there are cool ways, but I also don't want to make it spammy. So it's like one of those things where it, I don't know, I'm a stickler for not making things feel spammy, so. Yeah, but exactly that. Like something that's more embedded. We're also looking at and found a way to finally embed into Twitter spaces, into YouTube streaming, live streaming on YouTube, where we can intake and republish simultaneously to both those platforms all in one stroke, which is quite nice. So you can turn on YouTube connect and Twitter and connect to it and then publish to both at the same time. So we're trying to, like, work on that because again, one of the biggest things for us, and obviously is get, get signal as loud as possible for folks. So once we go to v two git chat, I think one of the big things we want to do is just have bigger and better broadcasting for, for folks that are creating taverns. Yeah, no, that'd be dope. I think you would get a lot of crossover. You know, like people could like it. I mean, obviously it takes, it brings your name out more, you know, like, yeah, you know, it's native over there and then they're like, hey, what's this tavern thing that it's showing or whatever? Yeah, absolutely. And people can do then just choose if they want to or just stay tavern. Who cares? Right, exactly. Yep. Kind of speaking about, you know, these other tools and the chats and all that. So obviously, a lot's changed to me since, like, we've talked back in May, you know, personally and product wise and with the spaces as a whole, you know, like, Degen went up and now it's like down a shit ton. The nature of all tokens. Exactly. But, yeah, I was gonna ask you, though, is there anything you, you've now that, like, farhouse has been out for a while, butterflies also come out. Arbora is like, on b two now as well. Is there anything that you've learned or observed kind of from those other apps and, you know, that might help you with your vision here in tavern? Like either things you could borrow or things you're like, oh, I don't want to do that because that doesn't sound, you know, like Tavern. Yeah, I'm going to be contrarian to a lot of people who build products and our founders, where they go study every competitive app. I actually do the opposite. I feel like it puts you into a box of creativity, and you might not think the same way if you go study those. Also, I think it takes a lot of time to really understand those apps, regardless of the lack of information. I just, I'm more of like a kind of a gut experience. It's like I want to build something that I would use, and I want to do that first, and then only when you're trying to min max the product experience is when you can start to go look. And I don't think we're anywhere close to min maxing the experience that I want to first present. So I'm going to tell you, I haven't used any of those, not a single one. Haven't even looked at them. Not because I saying that they're not worth it. I mean, they're great for their, I'm sure they're great apps and products. I just, that's just sort of the way I build, unfortunately. And I do the same thing. I'm also a game developer as well. That's like my biggest passion, video games, but mainly tabletop games. I do the same thing. I mean, I play a bunch of games, but I try to not go study. If someone was like, oh, you should really go look at this game, it's kind of similar. And I'm like, well, maybe I'll just build what I want to build and then see what the crossovers are. Unless it's like some absolutely God amazing game that someone's, like, begged me to go play. But yeah, I just think that's been my kind of philosophy, and maybe it's a terrible philosophy because I've never had a product reach any sort of, sort of massive adoption. So maybe it's been the wrong thing all this whole time, but it's just, I don't know, I find it boring and kind of tedious to go do this rather than just build something. No, that makes sense to me. I think, like, I. You're right. Like, if you go look at other products, then it sort of limits your creativity. Like, you're only thinking about you versus them or how your product relates to them, but it doesn't really fully, like, so you've already kind of constructed a box for your creativity as opposed to, you know, on here. You could be like, oh, you know what would be really cool? Like, people are talking about chatting, but, like, what if you could draw together something, you know? Yeah, they're completely novel like that no one's even ever thought of. And then that's the thing that, like, you know, takes you to the next, like, level. And, you know, if you were just like, oh, like, they're doing tipping, they're doing this, like, oh, I should do tipping, I should do this, like, you know. Yeah, you would have never really thought about, fuck it. We're drawing together, guys. Like, well, like, I was just talking to the polymarket guy because he came on to the Trump Elon interview that we did on Monday, and I was like, holy shit, this works so well. Like, there's some really cool discussions with the bets. I was like, like, what if I could consume what they're doing and, like, make you not tipping, but, like, get polymarket done first? Like, how can we integrate these communications? And also, selfishly, I actually wanted. One of the first things I wanted was to handle open discourse and communication on governance, starting with Dallas. But I actually really wanted. And at a time, we started talking to the political parties and lobbyists, but they wanted us to pay so much money to even then contribute. Like, we actually had some inroads, like RFK, but they wanted, like, 100k just to have RFK on a tavern, right? And we're like, no, we're not going to pay 100k. You just come on because you think it's a useful technology, right? So, like, it's one of those things where Polymarket is such a cool crypto avenue to get into politics without getting into politics and the communications about people just coming together. It's like going to a Vegas casino and making bets, like, on racing or sports games. They always have these lobbies or even go into a crab stable or blackjack. There's definitely these really cool just conversations that could come out of that. Mostly when people stake and are staking, you know, like, significant amount of money or not, or just playing around, but I don't know. So, like, that's like, I think, very different and could be really cool. But, yeah, you know what's funny about that? Going back to, like, they get outside the box and not, like, limiting yourself to what other projects are doing. But, like, we're, I'm noticing, like, more people are doing taverns or spaces, you know, like, commentary. It's kind of like the Eli banning and the pain manning approach of, like, you know, like, we have the Super bowl and, yeah, neither, neither of their teams are, you know, in the Super bowl, but they're going to do, like, live commentary with their community while watching this thing together. Yeah. And that happened with, like, Ted, with, like, yep. The, the debate and all that. And then there was, like, on poly market, there was like, what? Tampon? Yeah. So, like, wouldn't it be kind of funny if you had, like, an integrated polymarket frame or I don't even know what you call it and all the people that are waiting for Trump to say the word tampon. I mean, I can only imagine, like, if you were all in a spaces just chatting, like, commentary and stuff like that, and then, you know, the thing that everyone's betting on, which is for them to say tampon the chat and the, the thing would be hysterical, you know, like, dude. Exactly. And it hit go off. Everyone's going off. And I think having this integration because, you know, polymarker doesn't want to go build a social network or social audio platform, and we don't want to go build a betting platform. Exactly. When they're layered together, it's kind of this cool experience that feels kind of dope and is very relevant. I mean, yes, they're memes and yes, they're jokes, but at the same time, still governance and it's, and it's politics. And I think more people should be talking about that out loud. And so I don't know, I find it a very interesting crossover that that could be really fun. Yeah, I mean, I know we talked about this, too, like, tokengating and even, like, I think me and you, I'm pretty sure it was with you. We were talking about, like, minting that you were there as well, like a po app kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, I think that would be hysterical. Like, that's technically all built. It's just all on polygon. And I just. And I just don't have it to put, like, I just turn it off. Yeah. Yeah. Cause I feel like it'd be kind of cool because, like, if you did the tampon one as an example, like. Yeah, you were there when the table. You were there when. When, you know, you were at the spaces when. When tampon was said, you know, so, like, now you have an onchain, like, you know, street cred that you're like, okay, so even if you didn't bet on the polymarket skin on the game in terms of, like, putting money on polymark and, like, that's all verifiable as well, you got at least be like, look, I was. I was in the spaces when it went down. Like, I don't know. That seems kind of hilarious, too. Yeah, those are the funny cross sections that I like. Tavern to be tavern. Like, I don't know. I think web three is better when it's just more fluid and just flexible. And so that's. That's kind of what I want to build and make sure we keep that going in a weird way. Yeah. Yeah. So being conscious on some time, and I don't think we're going to hit the two hour, the two hour rug. We're good on our end. I think you kind of alluded this to a little bit, like, but I guess I wanted to dive into a little bit more. But what are the biggest challenges you're facing right now? Is it really, like, you know, like, you only have 4 hours to code. People are asking for, you know, new features, like, what, what is. What do you think is the biggest thing that you're facing right now, challenge wise? Yeah, I mean, devs is always a problem. Like anytime just getting more effort, and it usually wasn't a problem because I could handle quite a bit of load, but obviously recently is much more challenging. So to mostly to handle the momentum, because the moment you stop, the momentum can die out. Like, if you just don't deploy the right features, late night crew could just be like, nah. Well, we're less interested in what you all have because it's taken so long to deploy now. It doesn't mean you lose them forever if you come back and have something. And I think that's a struggle also if you deploy too fast. So you have the other struggle where if you deploy too fast, let's say I was actually in a perfect state and I was deployed. Deploying. Well, if I deploy prod, really quickly and I ruin the experience as in like everything breaks and no one can make taverns, which obviously does happen sometimes when I deploy, then that's even worse because now people can't even use the core experience because I haven't really built a huge testing framework because I don't really do that until I feel like something's going to scale. And so it's one of those things where it's two challenges of the same coin that you have to be careful. And I rather do the, what I call the, I don't know if you've ever played the game no man's sky. It's like a video game where, yeah, the developers teased out some ideas and they said they will make them, but when they shipped, I still think it was a good game, but it didn't have anything near what they were kind of promising. But what they did is they actually spent tirelessly, like what was it, six years? And deployed everything that they promised plus one, even further and deployed even more and worked on the game where updates were free. There is no, you pay that. You pay the base game, you get all the updates for it, which was, you know, very unusual. But they did own their own independent studio, so they could do that. And it became the most successful game ever. Like, not ever, but like, it became one of the top ten successful games, I think, in the past five years. Yeah, because they did that. And I want to be an app like that where it's like, hey, these are the things we're going to build. And it might take some time, so we might lose a little bit of momentum early, but we will deploy these things if it, you know, if possible. And I've already made a contingency plan with our team in terms of the actual founders and investors and be like, we can get this to stability and it's not going to cost that much and can really maintain that forever. And I can just work it on a passion project. I mean, I am in a situation where with crypto, that I don't need to work a full time job and can still work on passion projects. So it's not something that I need to do. So it's one of those things where I want Tavern to succeed regardless of the situation. So it's not something where I even ever want to turn down the servers. I'll just minimize and spend time slowly working on the, on the features that I want, even if it takes me another year or two years. Right? Yeah. So is LMnop and the whole like, original group that's working on the finance stuff. Are they still around and working? I don't know what I'm illegally allowed to say, but I'm going to say no. So they are technically an investor in Pose Inc. Which is the main now corporation that launched Tavern. Got it. So, yeah, I was mostly curious, like, if you were getting pulled over, you know, like. No, no. Yeah. Due to other issues that I had warned before, I went full time on Tavern. Yeah, that's a whole nother story that I hope comes out. I have. It's like a two hour, three hour story of what went down. It's pretty nuts, actually. It's kind of funny, but not funny at the same time, but yeah. So the investors are exposed to Tavern and pose pretty much pro rata. So I think actually even bumped up to basically give them, since we're not growing LMNop anymore, really element of p just becomes this proxy company to get investment into pose and tavern while still trying to raise money for Tavern as well. It's a very complicated mess, which is why I don't want to handle it. And I'm glad Assad, my co founder, is able to handle it and structure those contracts. Yeah, yeah, no worries, man. Once the. The legacy agora gets upgraded, you know, then we'll spend the 2 hours plus talking about it. Yeah. I wonder when I'm allowed to. If we raise funding, maybe I'm allowed to talk about what went down. But it is a very. It's. It's. It's a long yet interesting story. Yeah, yeah, I was trying to make. I was trying to get an understanding if you were getting pulled in multiple, like, by multiple companies for, like, your technical expertise. But it sounds like. No, I mean, well, personal. I mean, there's always personal. And I have already show this, so, like, I do digital art as well. So I've made, like, ordinals. I was pretty early on to ordinals, so I've done a bunch of ordinal projects. Can actually share one of my top ones. Yeah, please do. I'm deep into ordinals. I love ordinals. Oh, fuck. Yeah. But, like, I own, you know, ordinal punk. Ordinal. Shroom. Yeah, my shrooms. Fucking dope. It's a pink chair, but yeah, I'm. Bullish on the shrooms, dude. Oh, dude, absolutely. I've thought about going complete shroom, but I mean, my noun is like. I really love my noun, but yeah. So I did this thing. I call it deterministically infinite on chain art. So I took the squiggle pattern. And I was really, I love squiggles and I love, you know, what was built through art blocks. Oh, you worked on sport nulls? Yeah. So I was, I was, yeah, the main dev on it. But I was like, they're, they end so early, like just the fade. I've worked with P five for a very long time and I was like, we can do something way better. And I wanted to. This was early on when no one's really found a way to compress and like reuse, um, you know, JavaScript libraries from the different ordinal collections. And so, um, this is before recursion was made where it became really easy. So we trimmed down and cut out everything from the paintbrushes needed to create squiggles. But then we animated it all. And then I used uh, hashing, hashes to create an infinite series with each score nose with some family traits. So it basically just makes this infinite squiggle that's fully animated. So that was kind of like my contribution. And then we put it on, put it on bitcoin, which I thought was more serious because it's not like, you know, stored on ipfs or anything. Yeah, exactly. I know, man. That's where I've been. I've been really kicking the idea of like starting a like fully on because like it really irks the crap out of me that the basis coinbase is just so good at branding and like marketing at this stage. But you know, like they're like, oh, on chain summer, on chain this. But you know, like, to me, on chain is like no dependencies. Like full. Like I'm fully on chain art. Like, even my photography is fully on chain right now. And like, I just personally believe in that. Um, it just makes sense. Like, I totally get, not everything can be fully on chain because it's very cost prohibitive. Yeah. Um, but I just really like on chain r and I'm like, dude, I think we need like a dow for like fully on chain r. Luckily, nouns are kind of like that. Um, dude, exactly. There's, there's a lot more on chain. I mean, I would, they're the most on chain dow, so to start 1000%. Yeah, yeah. So that's kind of what stopped me from going down that path. But I was like, we need to, you know, like if you're familiar with fccacs or did. Yeah, yeah. So I was like, when he was like, I need money to do v two of his tooling, I was like, dude, there has to be some group of people that care. Luckily, noun stepped up, so I was like, that's what got me to pay attention to nouns. Oh, nice. Yeah. Hell yeah. And I was like, oh, shit. I was like, maybe I just need to get a noun because it seems like they're all about this. Um, but it looks like they do a ton of other stuff, too. So I was like, okay, maybe like a subset or something, I don't know. But, uh, that's really cool, man. And everyone that's not into nft or fully on shaders, like, what the are these guys talking about? Exactly. And again, I I've always been a bitcoin, Maxi, even though I was in the pre sale for Ethereum and had put a lot of my life on solidity and building smart contracts, but I still was, like, bitcoins the future still as the main gate. And it hurts Ethereum axis when I say that the ratio between the ETH BTC ratio is going to keep going smaller and smaller, which we have actually seen recently. When ordinals came out and Casey kind of came out this theory, I was like, holy shit, this is really, really interesting. Yeah. Um, and I wanted to see it manifest. So I wasn't, like, the earliest. I wasn't, you know, I wasn't there in the first, but, like, I mean, two months later, I'm jumping into it, late February. So it's like one of those things. I was, like, early enough, but, um. Yeah, so. And then I was like, wait, I'm gonna build shit on this protocol. I feel like, for me, it was like I had seen that, like, what's the term that people use for Eth? Like, legacy nfts? Like, you know, like, the really early nft. Yeah, yeah. I forgot what the term that people use, ancestry nfts or whatever, you know, like, only, like, very few actually are still relevant. Like, puns, but everything else, just because it's, like. And cryptokitties, I guess, but, like, even they're down, like, substantially. Who knows about the future or whatever. But I saw, like, the potential of ordinals, like, very early too, like you said. But, like, I wasn't really rushing to go buy, you know, anything just because it was under 10,001st ordinals. Like, oh, yeah, whatever. Like, it hasn't worked well for east. So I was like, I suspect it won't mean shit for BTC as well, you know, binance crypto assurance. I think so, yeah. Like, the theory and, like, the tech behind it, I was like, dude, this is nuts. Like, I don't know, like, the nerd in me was like, yeah, this is dope. And I've been. I'm glad to see more artists have taken it more serious, too. And I think kind of at least the circles that I run in the, the current thinking is, you know, like very premium art. Nfts will be either ordinals or eth layer one, especially as eth gets like more and more expensive to start minting on. And then kind of like the Zoras and the base and like the free, the free mints are like. I don't know. I don't want to say like, not real art, but like, you know, it's just like a different type of. It's just like print for behavior. Yeah. I can only paint so much. And if people love my piece, prints are still really popular, right? I mean, mainly, actually, a lot of money going to artists actually comes from prints. Right? If you get popular enough, yeah. So that's, that's how I explain it where I'm like, all these l two s and even things on Ethereum are great for this mass, mass printing of these pieces. But if you're looking at a one of one, it has to me, it has to be on chain. So that's like terraforms on Ethereum. I'm a huge fan. Or they're on ordinals. Right. And so that's where I see I'm also a huge traditional art collector as well. That's how I got into NFTs is because I was already collecting a whole bunch of art. And actually where I spent most of my bitcoin, it was much easier to convince galleries and artists to accept bitcoin back in like 20, 1716. And so it was just kind of funny. Now those pieces are worth way more than I spent back then than they are today on the open market. But some of them were good, good bets, but yeah, so I feel the same way. And again, that doesn't demean base nfts or and stuff like that. It just, it's just a different market. Right. It's a different placeholder. That's why their co ops are so good is. I still think those are meaningful. Like, you know, a badge at a concert that you got, that everyone got but you kept it and no one did. You know, ten to 20 years later is very meaningful. Right. As an artifact of the time. Yeah, no, I agree. Yeah. I mean, even Xcopy has shown us that base editions, you could still make millions. Yeah, he's definitely found the pattern, um, to make it. I mean, yeah, his fully on chain art collection, though. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh. I'm trying to collect every single piece that comes out of that collection, because that's dope. That will stand a test of time. No, very true. Yes. Let's see. Yeah, I think we're close to wrapping up. If Jeff or Moctezuma, if you guys want to come up and ask one question, we can. If not, we can go to the last question, the hardest questions of all. I'll give you some background on that question in case you're like, why the hell is this question on here? Especially because we want to stay under the 2 hours, but. All right, we'll proceed, then. So, initially, when I got started with this a long time ago, again, I'm telling you, dude, I come up with these ideas for names, and LmNop is definitely way, way cooler than anything I've come up with. So, initially, I was like, my whole gist of my weekly newsletter is to. It's like a recap of what happened in web three, and it's less than ten minutes. That's always the goal, is less than. Oh, nice. And so it's always been, like, snacks. I didn't want to call it, like, bite size news or snacks or whatever. So, uh, me being the. The spanish person that I am, I was like, peaches. I don't know if you know what peaches are, but they're like tapas. Uh, oh, yeah, yeah. They're. They're. They're. They're from, uh, the basque region, where, like, my ancestry's from. Oh. So, I. For the longest time, I called my newsletter and my podcast, Pinchos. Uh, and so one of the questions I've been asking everybody is for everything that I've done is like, hey, what's your favorite snack? And that's the one thing I've kept. I'm like, so I've changed the name a couple times now on the, on the podcast and the newsletter, but we keep this one question for that reason. So, yeah. What is your favorite snack, though? Right? It's changed. But I, um. Favorite snack, I'm trying to think, because my wife is kind of a psychophant on getting snacks without the bad oils and good, natural ingredients, so she's removed all my classic ones that were terrible for you to eat. So I don't. Maybe I'll pick a new age one. But there's these chips. God, I always forget what they're called, though, but they're literally just, like, the most natural sweet potato chips, actually, which I love sweet potatoes but it's sweet potatoes, salt, and avocado oil. And that's it. It's, like, those three ingredients, that's all it is. And they're so. And they're addicting tasting. If you like sweet potatoes. But, man, I did. I just finished last bag, but I forget what they're called. They're just huge bags. You can get them on Costco, which is crazy, because Costco is, like. I think Costco is finally adopting, like, a new age approach to food. Yeah. Like, where they're adopting a lot of these niche brands and, like, helping them grow, but they're, like, really good ingredients. I'm. I'm also a huge promoter of Costco. I think it's an. It's an amazing place, but I forget what they're called. But those are really addicting. Yeah, I would say that's probably the thing I snack on the. The most. Um. All right, you're gonna have to send me the name for them because I know. I'm trying to. My wife's on the same. My wife's on the same cake, too. Like, no canola oil, no sunflower oil. This is, like, expelling rest or whatever. Yeah, it's hilarious. These. Someone's gonna have Jackson. Here we go. Right here. I found it on the Costco website. I'm linking it. Buy these. Absolutely phenomenal. Just super delicious. Oh, these look fire, dude. They're. They're insane. All right. And they're so addicting. I'm gonna get a bag of. Picture. I. Yeah, they're just. They're just great. So I would say this is. This is. This is it. Other than that, any sort of popcorn is delicious. Bad or good. I'll eat popcorn for days. Do you guys have. I didn't realize this was, like, a very niche thing to where I live, but do you guys have kettle corn at your movie theaters? Oh, yeah. Some movie theaters will have it. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realize that was a thing. Like. Like, it wasn't a thing. Sorry. Like, all the. All. Like, all the movie theaters near me. Kettle corn. And then I went out of town one time, like, to. I forget where. And then I was like, I showed up to the movie theater, and I was like, yeah, you guys got kettle corn? They're like, we're not at the fair. I was like, what? You guys don't have kettle corn? Your movie theater was standard. Yeah, no, that's. That's very true. I feel like regionally, things are just way more common, and then you go somewhere else. And you're like, wait, this doesn't even exist here. Yeah. Yeah, I had the same thing happen with mimosas, too. I think, like, here in California, we're used to having, like, mimosas with, like, everywhere. Yeah, well, like, different fruits, too. Like, passion fruit, like, you know, and then I forget where I was. I was, like, somewhere in the south. And I was like, yeah. I was like, what kind of juice do you have with, like, for this mimosa? And they're like, just. What? It's. It's just orange juice. Like, we don't understand your question. And I was like, oh, okay, my bad. That's funny. Yeah. Well, thanks again for doing this. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, man. Appreciate it. Yeah, I hope that, you know, I hope everything works out with the. With the cancer, man, or the tumor. Like, that's. Yeah, that's. That's rough, man. Oh, well, we'll do it. I got a really great support system. Real life people, friends, family, but also strangers online. I mean, that's why I really believe in Internet tribalism, is that you can really generate maybe the best friendships and kinships that you can possibly find, because there is no regional filter. It's literally anyone, any, anywhere in the world. And I think that can create better bonds. Um, and I've always been very supportive of that. And I've had some amazing relationships form over the past decade, um, through crypto, so. Yeah, awesome. Uh, yeah, so thanks, everybody, for joining those left, as well. Thanks for joining. Uh, to recap, I'll edit this and upload it to pod so everyone can listen to this at their own leisure. Make sure to follow Brennan Tavern. Send your. Send your feature requests and suggestions to them. Be kind. Yeah, man. Thanks again, and I hope you have a good rest of your day. All right, you too. Bye. See you guys. All right, welcome back. So, before we log off this week's cast off, and for those that are new to my podcast or my content, cast off is where I want to hear from you. So this week's episode cast off. Question is, should we start a weekly spaces on Tavern? Let me know. Just reply to back to me, wherever is easiest for you. Warpcast, Twitter telegram. Potato, potato. Yeah. So if you're hearing this message, you've listened to the entire episode, thank you for that. If you're listening from another platform other than pods, make sure you go collect this episode. And if you are on pod, make sure to subscribe from your favorite podcast app so you're notified when I drop episodes. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Definitely be tipping Degen, you know, for people that can show this or approve it. Please share that you think might be interested in this topic. Let me know if there's any specific people or topics you'd like me to cover in the future. You can get in touch with me again. Whatever's the easiest. Yeah. See you next time. Take care. See.