Unveiling Flows! A Revolutionary Approach to Onchain Micro Grants with Rocketman

In this episode we chatted with Rocketman, the creator behind Flows.wtf, a unique micro grants program within the Nouns ecosystem. This conversation explores the foundational ethos of crypto and how Rocketman is harnessing the power of streamable money to fund public goods, foster creativity, and encourage more democratic participation in blockchain projects. Discover how Flows.wtf is changing the game for grant allocation by offering a more dynamic and fluid approach, removing obstacles for creators, and empowering individuals. Join us as we unravel the possibilities and challenges of implementing such innovative systems in the Web3 space.

08:49 Empowering Opportunities for All

10:45 Verbs: Democratizing Voting and Ownership

20:50 Open Source Protocols and Hesitations

24:34 Improving Impact Verification System

29:19 Managing Diverse Contract Complexities

35:28 Challenges in Public Goods Feedback

38:31 Automating Grant Program Workflows

45:01 Flows: Grants and Real-Time Voting

50:01 Nonviolent Revolution Strategies

59:00 Innovative Graph Engagement Idea

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

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Transcript

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I didn't like how, like, plutocratic. It was, like, entirely controlled in a large part by, like, how much money you had and the fury of a buy vote or not. And I just felt like there were thousands of, like, creators and artists and entrepreneurs and builders, like, within the Nazi ecosystem that had zero say over the direction of the community, like, in terms of, like, on chain voting. And so we really started burps to, like, try to get more votes in the hands of more people and primarily so that you could earn a vote for your efforts. All right, welcome back to another episode of behind the Screen with Gramaho, the podcast where we unravel the stories of the best on chain builders and creators. I'm your host, Gramajo, an avid crypto enthusiast that's been in the space since 2012. Yeah. This week we sat down with Rockman ETH, one of the creators of Flows. WTF from nouns? Flows? What the fuck is a micro grants program from Downs? What that means is instead of doing the traditional prop submission, you could apply here. It's a bit more dynamic and fluid so people could challenge your specific submission, which you can get paid for. Yeah, just a very different way of approaching grants or micro grants in this case. But nothing's to say it can't move past micro grants either. Really cool experiment that's being done on chain with streamable money. I am a recipient of one of these, so I've been really interested and I've covered it in my newsletter before. So, yeah, thanks to Rocketman Eth and the Flows team for the support and for jumping on this podcast. Let's dive in. Awesome. Yeah, thanks for having me. Excited to be here. I go by Rocketman. I've been messing around in crypto for the better part of a decade now. Super excited about kind of the, a lot of the ethos underlying crypto, like giving power back to the people, having a more like open and transparent system for all of us to put our money on, coordinate on. Yeah, I'm a programmer by trade. I've been building a bunch of different things, like way back in the day on Bitcoin and then Ethereum got super into NFTs, more recently into nouns DAO and yeah, just super passionate about crypto. Awesome. Yeah. And I know that you've been. Yeah, you've been tinkering a lot on Chain from what I've seen. So I think we're going to cover kind of what Flows is and some of the other stuff that you're working on. Like, it's like Peripheral or even connected to Flows as well. Yeah, so what? For people that aren't familiar, what is flows? Wtf? Yes. Flows is a grant program that was actually born out of verbs dao, and we're currently building it for nouns. And so the way it works is you can basically get paid a stream of money or a salary every single second now, which means you can withdraw your salary every day, every other day. And we pay almost 200 grads now for a whole host of different things like community improvement, athletic stewardship, public spaces improvement, public gardens. Really a whole lot of stuff that wouldn't normally like have a business model or be funded in the real world is now being funded and incentivized through flows. So basically trying to build this kind of platform and system that funds public goods with like a really high level of competition and accuracy. Yeah, no, I know. As a recipient of one of those flows, it's, I think it's a game changer. Like I, I know I've written about it before for Flows when you were, I think before it kind of launched for me it's like the concept of like money being streamed to you by the second or minute. I forgot the, the cadence. It's, it's kind of crazy to, to think about, you know, because like most grants or the way money is distributed kind of in daos right now it's all one large lump sum for the most part. And there's a lot of risk kind of that can go with that in terms of will people deliver on what they say they're going to work on and just like accountability. So having this happen like by the second and people are able to react more actively is like a huge unlock. Yeah, I totally agree. I think it's like for the dao, like you said, it's lower risk, like you're not paying somebody some huge lump sum of money and then having them run off. And I think it's just more aligned like as a builder. It's cool to see like, oh, you're earning$5,000 a year with nouns and we can potentially show like the yearly amount you're earning, but you're getting paid every second. So it's like if you don't deliver then like we're going to start paying you to remove you from the program. But I think it's cool because like, it fosters this level of like long term alignment that's really nice where you can go in and again next year, yearly salary, but we're not necessarily paying you all that upfront. Yeah, Exactly. And something too that I've noticed. Like, at least for me as a re. Well, I guess I'm not as recent of a nouner now, but in the grand scheme of like how long nouns has been around, I still consider myself new. But you know, sometimes there's like certain activities or items that just submitting a big prop and having it go through that process doesn't seem worth it. Almost like for something underneath, you know, it just seems like a lot of work, a lot of gathering the votes and all that. Yeah, for sure. I think like the coordination, like basically the effort for voters is like so high for proposals that it. Like you said, it doesn't make sense to have everybody vote whether or not to pay somebody a hundred bucks to go improve their neighborhood every month. Like, that's just like a ridiculous thing. So I think the. The small grad side of it makes a ton of sense for me too, where it's like, again, we can lower the effort required for voters but still fund good themes and yeah, meanwhile, I mean, we're able to fund more people. And I personally think like nouns and like downs in general are a lot more interesting if we're funding a thousand people. A thousand dollars a month instead of like one person, a million dollar proposal or a small team. A million dollars. Yeah, I would agree with that. I mean, I think we've even seen just recently, like, I believe her name's Naomi Afro chicks on warpcast. I know that she's a flows athlete recipient, I believe, but they've gone kind of from like. Like that, I guess like a. One way to think about is like almost like a seed investment. And now, you know, I think they just re. She recently got funding from like octant to get more people on chain. So it's really cool to see these. These smaller investments that flows is kind of enabling and then how it can kind of snowball or become a bigger thing. And obviously like she is working on some other stuff that helped her as well. But I think it's fantastic. Yeah, I didn't know that at all. That's awesome. I mean, I know Naomi applied and we were like so shocked we had some like professional athlete apply. It was super cool to see. And I've been loving to see your videos of onboarding people to base and yeah, I think you hit a nail on the head. Like we're trying to give like as many people the opportunity to be great as we can. And I think like, I mean, this is obviously outside of here because I think she's already Doing amazing things, but like, there's so many people out there that like, if they were to just like, have the opportunity to go out and like, make some positive impact and start that kind of snowball effect of like building more and more, getting the support, and then be able to kind of grow into this larger thing. I just think, like, so many people don't have that opportunity. And if all it takes is some community support, some cool journalists writing some stories about you, and a couple hundred bucks a month to start, then that starts your larger journey. I think that's like an incredible investment. Yeah, 100%. So what kind of. I know that you said that you kind of went about it in the way of like, you implemented something like this in Verbs. Verbs Dao, which I know you're. You're the founder of, right? Or the co founder of it. And then would you say that with Verbs Dao? And this idea was kind of like trying to see if there's like a product market fit, like in terms of like, does this idea work? And then you're like, okay, this seems to be working. Let's move it up to a bigger scale, essentially with more eth. More people and all that. Is that kind of how Flows came about or kind of what made you go down the rabbit hole of exploring streamable money and creating flows? Yeah, great question. I think I was like, for everything that Nouns got right, I think there were like some things that were missing for me. And that's a lot of the reason we started Verbs was like, I didn't like how like, plutocratic it was like entirely controlled in a large part by like how much money you had and the fury of a buy vote or not. And I just felt like they were thousands of creators and artists and entrepreneurs and builders within the Nazi ecosystem that had zero say over the direction of the community in terms of on chain voting. And so we really started burbs to try to get more votes in the hands of more people and primarily so that you could earn a vote for your efforts. And that this grassroots on chain movement is owned in large part by the people that are building it just as much as it is by the people that are consuming money. And so we built Verbs with that in mind. And I think what we realized is like, okay, well, we have an ERC20 in addition to an NFT that both have voting power, but we still didn't really solve effective or what's called fair token distribution. Like, how do we get these voting tokens in the hands of the best builders and the people that are like having packed for verbs and what are we kind of looking at? Are we like, well, we have like the dao or people submit proposals and they vote. And it just, it brought back all these memories of like, dao voting just kind of sucks. Like, it's a pain in the ass, requires a lot of effort. It's also like a full time job after you buy one of these things. And there's a whole host of issues with it. I mean, I think it's like one of the best things we have so far and especially at the time when it launched. But like, that's kind of what led us to build this grants program is like, okay, well we want to get paid, like to build verbs at least to like cover costs. But do we want to submit a big proposal every couple months and have everybody vote on it? Like, no, that kind of stinks. Like, we want to try to pay as many good builders as we can and also like pay them these voting tokens. So that's kind of what led us to like, think through like what an optimal, like capital allocation system would look like for verbs. And we kind of settled on this like, like list of lists where the money kind of streams through the lists and in like a much more fluid way that requires less effort for voters and is also like a markedly better experience for like the builders or the people that are getting funded. And within verbs, it was like, like at a high level, like very similar concept. Like you had the top level budget and then you had budgets underneath that that got like a proportional stream based on how many people voted for it. And then within each budget, you could apply as a builder to like clean up a park or make some artwork or stuff like that. But yeah, it was working pretty well. But it was like pretty centralized in terms of like, you just needed a verb or two verbs, I believe, in order to like approve a grant. There was no like built in way to kind of gate builders or make sure we were funding quality builders. It was just like whether you had two verbs or not sponsor them, which wasn't ideal. And so we were kind of like, the grants program is like, in addition to a lot of the underpinnings of like, earn a vote for your efforts, like, in order to make that happen, like, we need to double down on this capital allocation mechanism. And so we were like, okay, well it's gonna take a lot of months to like engineer something better. What better place to get funded to do that than announce? I feel like they're having issues like with their grants and would love like better capital allocation systems to be built. So we made a proposal to Nouns and that's kind of how Flows is born. We used a lot of the same kind of low level ideas and yeah, started working on it in August of last year. Built a whole new protocol, got it audited then. Yeah, we've been working on it ever since. Man, that's awesome. Yeah, I know that for me like I went from I think like in 2021 I was very hopeful on daos and then very quickly kind of saw that it just the tooling or the way that they were currently working, it wasn't working essentially. At least that was my interpretation as someone that wasn't really in one back then I would say. But in the last year or so like I'd say I was looking to give Dallas another shot and it's long winded way of saying like I know what attracted me to Verbs was seeing the way that like how grassroots it was and it was so it was super cool like just to see it. Like I'll show everybody right now on the screen and I think we have a couple people on YouTube watching as well. I'll show the flows one and I can show also the, the verbs one as well. But I mean this is like really cool. Like you said, it's like a list of lists. Like you could see like the, the hubs here of like beach cleaners, the software makers, people that are doing music. And this is just like a really cool graphic. And I know like even a couple, I want to say like four or three months ago when I looked at this it was smaller and now it's just, it's freaking. It's nice. It's like awesome to see this. You know, you could see everyone that's. You could click into it and see what it is this person's doing. So really great stuff. And I want to say like that's what made me. That's what I would say like verbs and a couple other daos that I join have slowly changed my mind on like I think daos can work essentially. So it's really cool that, that you're doing this. Yeah, for sure. I think like that's what excites me most about the verb's idea is like this grassroots nature of it. And like again like I think these like movements that are going to pop up on chain and be these huge like global agents for change are going to like, like they need to be like owned and directed by the people that are building Them, not just the people that are like funneling money into them. And I think, like, if we're able to get that right and do it in a way that we're also able to like allocate our resources and pay a bunch of different people all over the world to do good stuff, I think it's gonna work out really well. Yeah, I know this is not a one for one, but this is kind of like what got me very interested into Verbs Dao is like all the different mechanisms of money coming into, into the treasury and then the breakdown of like who's being supported and other aspects as well. And these are things that I also kind of have like grapes with, with nouns down. Like I love nouns down. But like, like you said, you know, like for, for a while, like, I. I've been aware of nouns since 2021 or whenever they got started. And I know everyone has because they're like, they were really popular back then. Still pretty popular, I'd say now. But you know, you needed like 30 plus E25 plusies to get involved essentially. There wasn't like a, a way to get involved really at a more grassroots level. And that's what I like about Verbs is that even if you don't have money, you could still participate by making art, joining the community, and you can kind of earn votes that way and then you have like some skin in the game and, and all that. So. Yeah. Yeah, I totally agreed. I think we're trying to prove out a little bit more of the flows system and like get in enough. More stable state. And then the plan is to bring like all the infrastructure back to Verbs. Obviously. Our kind of random question and you, and you can choose not to answer this if you, if you don't want, but because to me, I think this is like, if it works well with Nouns, I would say it's going to work well for a lot of daos, essentially. Not that Nouns has like the most money, but it's not like a small dao for sure. I think they have like a couple million in the treasury last time I checked. But I know Octant also recently is looking at streamable grants as well. So things are kind of going in this nature. Are there any ideas of going beyond, I guess, offering this as a service like a streaming flows, but for another dow, if that makes sense. Yeah, we definitely, I mean like the protocol is open source, the front end and indexer, all open source. So anybody's welcome to like fork and spin up their own. I think. I don't Necessarily know if we're gonna focus on like turning it into a platform for other communities to spin up stuff anytime soon because I don't think we've solved the quote problem yet. But I mean, I do think like it makes a ton of sense. I guess I'm just a little hesitant on the. I don't know, I honestly, I haven't really thought through it. I just, I think nouns is such a great culture that I would prefer to like stick around the noun space for now because I think they're all about public goods and like positive some behavior and like they have generally this like really great brand that you can build on. And I think there's a lot of pieces in the background, like just from NAOS itself that make flows like work a lot better from like the branding to the culture to the community. And so I think even if we were to replicate the copper allocation infrastructure, like a lot of that lower level stuff that also like, kind of improves that like effectiveness of the whole system, like wouldn't necessarily translate. But I don't know, to be honest, there's just kind of top of my head thoughts and I haven't thought too much about it, but definitely, I mean, long run, if we're able to figure out like effective capital on the Internet, obviously, like we'd want to get it in the hands of as many like positive groups as possible. Yeah, no, no worries. Yeah, sorry to put you on the spot like that. It was just something like came to mind because I know octids do it in and like, you know, like little nouns could probably do this. I don't know, there's just like a bunch of other towns where I'm like, I could see them doing something similar as well. All right, let's see. So what are kind of the biggest challenges you're working on that you're like either working through right now or experiencing? I guess I had an example of Dr. Gonzo. Like I know you're essentially trying to build like an on chain AI agent, but. Yeah, I just wanted to, I was curious to see kind of like, or hear like what are some of them. Yeah, for sure. Things you're working through right now. I think like the, the fundamental. Then I just sort of try to stay focused on this and then talk through like the associated problems. But I think like the fundamental problem we're trying to solve is how to, I guess I'll just kind of step there, like how to convert money into impact. And as a part of that, like you need to know like what impact is how you can or cannot measure it. And also just being able to verify and like trust what people are self reporting in terms of like what they've done. Um, and I think everything else is downstream of that because it's like, if we can, if we can prove to you that if you put a thousand dollars into this system, you're going to get out like, I don't know, five clean beaches all over the world or something. And like, we have a very high confidence in that and we're able to say that like within the balance of like 10 to 15%, like your money is going to be spent towards that. Cause like, and it's all on the Internet and it's all grassroots. Like that's like a crazy, crazy system that doesn't exist yet. And so, yeah, I mean, I think the fundamental problem is like how to solve this flywheel if like Renaissance flywheel just concretely, like kind of convert money into impact. And so I think we've built a pretty good way to spend the money in terms of like this list of lists that we talked about and how the money is stream and you can be removed at any time. And we use like a TCR to kind of curate the lists. So I think like the, the money flow side on the left is good. I think what we're figuring out now and struggling with is like, okay, the impact side, like, how do we, how do we verify impact? How do we make it as easy as possible to see like, who's doing a good job and who isn't? How do we display people's track records? How do we. I mean, there's a whole host of things that we're kind of trying to figure out, but it's really led us to like this week we're working on like displaying impact on people's grant pages. And my game pack for your grant would be like, hosted podcast with XYZ on this date and wrote article about XYZ on this date and, and being able to see like this kind of timeline of this stuff that you've built and like tangibly changed about the world is something that we realize like totally missing from this site right now. And yeah, that's kind of like what we're trying to figure out. And I think without AI it would probably be pretty impossible to manage and do all that for such a large grants program. But yeah, I think we're well on our way to figuring out at least something that's pretty good. But yeah, I mean, curious if you have any thoughts on impact display or measurement or maybe what you'd want to see in terms of impact about what you're working on on your grass page. Yeah, no, I would agree with you. AI is like a huge unlock because especially for you guys, as this thing gets bigger, if you have like a, that like you said, if you have a thousand people that are receiving money like it, you either need to hire a village to keep track of everyone or, or it just becomes like very hard to keep track as a one or two man team. And it's also like not a good use of your time as well. I think you're a good software developer that ships and is doing great work. So you spending time keeping tabs on everyone is also like, I don't think a great use of time. So I'm glad that AI is kind of there to like assist with that problem. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And I think like the, the overall goal, like what I would want to do is like fund more people every month than there are like employees in the US federal government, which I think is like 4 million people. So it's like that's like the high, high, high overarching long term goal. And I don't think it's like impossible by any means. But again like if we have a grab program that's paying a million people a month, it's like it's literally impossible to manage something like that with like obviously small team, but even with like a larger team. So yeah, it's a fun problem I'd say. You know, I think like for you, I would say like that's, that's some cool problems to have, man. You know, like I. At work I'm not a software developer but I, I'm in a technical, like a technical operations role. And some days I just have like a ton of work that's very operational and it's not as fun. And then other days I have work that's like I need to like take out a whiteboard and try and solve things. And those days, yeah, those days are fun. They, you know, you kind of want to bash your head a bit, but definitely fun. So I'll give you like a little bit on thoughts because I'll give you an example of. I don't want to say it's similar, but it's like the different, like a different definition of like defining what impact is. So like, so I work in a legal department and we try and measure. So we do about, I want to. Say. Like fit over 15,000 agreements like contracts a year for my department and each One is very different, obviously. Like, like, for the most part, some of them are very, like, there's like, commonalities on some of them. So like something like order form, like if you were buying, you know, OpenAI plus or whatever,$200 a month, very standard. OpenAI has a ton of, like, negotiating power. There's not many changes you could do as a small time individual, like, to negotiate that agreement. So, like, if you give that a score of one, you know, like one out of five. So five being very complex, one being not that complex of an agreement, and then something like a master subscription agreement or, you know, a privacy agreement with like, anthropic or OpenAI, it can get a little bit more complicated, especially if, like, they're willing to negotiate it. So. So you could give that like a four or five. So essentially, like, at my job, we try and measure complexity because you could have someone that can have 400 agreements that they do in a month. But if 400 agreements are all one point, like they're all NDAs or order forms, then, you know, it looks like they're doing well. And they probably are, but. But you could have someone that's only doing 100 agreements. So. So just by the sheer number, you're like, hey, this person's doing four times more than this other person. But if the a hundred agreements that that person is doing is all, you know, five or fours, you know, who's actually, like, having a bigger impact. So that's where kind of when my brain goes is like, you're trying to measure. You're not measuring the same thing either, you know. So, like, the impact for a beach cleanup is very different from the impact for me. The KPIs or the metrics are different almost in that. So how do you measure that? I think it's a fun problem that you're working through. All right, let's take a quick break. Hope you're enjoying the episode. This episode was made possible with the support of my premium subscribers, Seattle Dog Mike Vinyls, the Bluffer, Nonlinear Brennan and Branson Young Humpty. Thanks again for all your support. If you'd like to receive exclusive drops, access to token gated content, make sure to subscribe to my hypersub or if you just want to, you know, support me continuing doing cool stuff on Chain. Yep. Let's get back to it. Yeah, but sure. And it's cool you put it that way. And it is super complicated. And it's like. But what's cool is because we, like, we have a beach cleaning budget that means we have, like, let's say 100 people that are getting paid to clean up beaches. And because we've been able to scope, like, in kind of get, like, a smaller subset of all the grantees into this, like, specific category, I do think it's, like, a lot more dragged more to like, figure out what, like, we should say is impact for, like, beach cleaning. Like, it's obviously, like, I don't know, amount of garbage, like, pounds of garbage picked up, like, number of beaches clean, like, prevention, actions taken, like, stuff like that. It becomes, like, a lot easier versus, like, comparing, like, beach cleaning to public gardens. And then you're able to go onto the site and say, like, okay, use the beach cleaning budget. They've cleaned up 500 pounds of trash over 50 beaches in the last six months. You're like, that's pretty sick. Like, I love the beach. And then you can go and see, like, okay, the public Gardens grant, like, they have 50 public gardens, mostly in these countries, that have given food to however many people. And then you're able to make a determination, like, as a voter or as somebody who wants to put in more money. Like, okay, like, we're not able to compare these. Like, it's like apples, oranges. But I am able to look at them at a high level and, like, pick which one I care more about based on, like, the impact that's been happening. Yeah, no, 100%. That. That's. That's super cool. You know, like, you said, like, pounds, like, bags weight for the beach cleanup. I mean, you could even do, like, crop yielding for, like, the garden, you know, like, how much yield is coming out, I guess. I don't even know. Yeah, it's all very fun. Interesting problems. I know, like, for. For content specifically, like, it's. It's a little bit easier sometimes because, like, Here we have 10 people on. On X. Shout out to the people on X. And I think we had, like, three on YouTube, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. So 10 people on X. And that's just for the live portion. So, like, you know, I'll be repackaging this and creating, like, the podcast episode that's audio only and then doing shorts and stuff like that. But all that kind of forms. There's, like, numbers to it, you know, so it is interesting to see, like, Dr. Gonzo and I think you have actually a couple other agents too, right? If I'm not mistaken, you have, like, one that helps you create a grant. Yeah, there's like, three of them now. Yeah. Do you want to kind of break it down a little bit because I, I do think that like, they all have like a specific purpose, but they're all very helpful and they're getting better, like faster, like really quick. Yeah, real quick. You kind of made me think of something on the point of like, impact measurement. Like the private market, just like buying goods and services works really well because you have, well, I mean, there's basically like signal about like, what's good and what's not good. Like you're not going to buy like, I guess, some options on like, what eggs to buy or whatever. And then based on like, what people's preferences are, which is expressed through their purchases, like maybe the egg companies start realizing they need to sell more organic eggs or whatever. But I think there's no like, clear like signal feedback loop for public goods or like beach cleaners, for example, because it's like so hard to measure a lot of that stuff and like, get some actual like truthful signal out of it versus with like a private market goods. You can say like, okay, like organic eggs sell like three times better than regular eggs, so we're going to start selling more of those. It's like within the public good sphere. Like, it doesn't really work that way right now. But I, I just think that, like, if we're able to give people that have money, like much better signal and verifiable transparent data around, like, what impact will happen for the dollars that they spend, then it can function pretty similarly to like, like a market for eggs at the supermarket or whatever. It's like, oh, there's like beach cleaners and public garden people. And these people have had this impact and this budget has had this impact. Like you're able to make a determination as like somebody who's spending money or voting like where your money goes. So yeah, I think it's like a signal and measurement problem in a lot of ways. But sorry, I was thinking about that in terms of the AI agents. I think we added Dr. Gonzo first as like somebody who's gonna write stories. And the thinking is that we want to build this system of, I don't know, just like helpful agents that do a lot of like the managerial tasks for people, help them apply, help them simplify, like the crazy, complicated information landscape, but also like, I think, hype them up and like, write stories about them and congratulate them on like, good stuff that they're doing. And genuinely we want to like, feel more like, like you join the program now you have this like, startup team of like, four people who are, like, helping you have more impact versus, like, oh, you joined this grant program and now there's like, four corporate managers, like, breathing down your neck, making sure you're filling out your reports and doing everything to a T. Like, it's not gonna work like that. None of that. You need to, like, you can do a lot more positive sum. And so, yeah, we have, like, the agent, Dr. Anza, that writes stories. We have Flow, which helps you submit applications. There's another one called Marvin, who's the man, and he calculates, like, your scores and your grades and updates you on them. There's another one called Holmes that does the investigative work and, like, calls out any challenges to existing grants of, like, somebody is challenged for not doing a good job. Like, he'll start a thread and talk about it a little bit and tag the relevant people. But yeah, I think just like, this has shouldered a lot of the workload that normally would come with, like, running such a large grants program in terms of, like, support. Like, we can just kind of slowly start to automate a lot of these tasks, like welcoming new builders and shouting out people that do a good job and, like, writing fun stories about them. So I think it's like, a large part of the reason, like, the program's working so well is, like, you join, you're welcomed with a nice message, you get reminders, they hype you up when you do good work. Like, it makes it a lot more fun and less lonely because it's like, crypto is so, like, the tension star. But it's hard to finally start a new project. Like, nobody really pays attention to it at first, but we're just all about trying to give more people opportunity and, like, shoulders to stand on. So it's been working out pretty well so far. Yeah, no, I, I agree with you. I mean, especially for, like, a solo content creator. For me, like, it's been fun to, to interact with Dr. Gonzo for sure. At least even, like, Flows, when I was initially getting started, like, it made it so I didn't have to go to, like, Cloud or. Because I tend to. I tend to ramble a lot. And it's probably like a legal thing for me, like, over explaining things. And then usually I just run it through chat, GPT or something like that to be like, hey, can you just make this a bit more succinct or straight to the point. And. And Flows was very helpful in that regard. And Gonzo is very good about, like, when I post something, be like, hey, like, what was the impact? What are the metrics? Even when I posted kind of like the link for this live stream, it was like, let me know the numbers, which I gotta go respond to it. So, yeah, I agree with that. It does feel like you have a team kind of behind you versus just you by yourself. Yeah, for sure. And I hope he's not, like, overbearing or too annoying. So if he ever, like, gets confused or, like, pings you too much or whatever, definitely let me know. I mean, the models will get smarter and smarter, so that won't be as much of an issue. But I do think, like, some people have, like, been at least before we upgraded the latest one. Like, if he's not sure whether it's an update, he would, like, follow up. And then a lot of the time it just wasn't. An update does come up here and he has to keep responding. So, yeah, definitely let me know if it ever gets annoying. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. I think, like, in the last week or two, it, like, got really good. Like, I think I was getting pinged a lot more often and like, it. It kind of just stopped and it was like, hey, is this related? Yes. No. And then I just said, like, nope, not related. Just me being a DJ on chain. Yeah, no. So it's gotten a lot better. And I think that's the cool thing. So, like, I know for me, so, you know, I. I don't work at anthropic or at OpenAI, but we do have, like, I do work with AI very frequently. And I'd say, like, our. My company is like, tangentially, like, grouped with, like, spearheading how AI can change work. So I get exposed to it very frequently. It's a long way of saying that. So I know at my work where we've rolled out, like, even like four months ago, we were rolling out like AI teammates essentially, like, not even agents. You literally consider them, like, a part of your team and they do work for you. And yeah, it's kind of nuts, like, how much in six months, how much it could change. So I can only imagine, like, these AI agents that you're building on Farcaster, just how much better they're going to get, like, in a year from now. Yeah, I totally agree. It's awesome because we can just upgrade the model in the back end and we already have a lot of the data infrastructure built out that we're constantly improving. And so it's like, as the models get smarter, the whole flow system will get a lot smarter, which is crazy to Think about. Yeah, and you're mostly doing this only on Forecaster, right? Just because it's like. Yeah, I mean, it's like tough because I would love to like, take over Instagram and bring everybody over to Farcaster by just like paying them to make good content and make positive impact. But, like, those APIs are just closed or whatever. They're really hard to access. And yeah, I think Forecaster is perfect just because, like, all the data is available and it's super open and we can have like, agents without worrying about, like, whether they'll get banned or not. Oh, yeah, no, 100%. I agree. The, you know, as much as some people spend time on Twitter or on X, you know, they made their API really expensive or like you can't access it. Like you said, like, I know, like, even OpenSea, like, even their API is like super hard to get access to it. And you know, that's like a Web3 company and, and all that. Yeah. So it makes sense to do it on Forecaster. It seems like they're, they're more open about giving you the access to that data and, and using it for your agent. All right, let's see. We're at the 40 minute mark, so I want to be conscious about that. But yeah, if you're a noun, how can you get involved? I'm hoping most people know now, but just as like a recap, like, if you're a nouner, how do you get involved with Flows? Yeah, I think what's also about Flows is like, we're not necessarily asking you to come do more governance work and vote on stuff. It's like, if you care about nouns, if you care about the vision and the brand and like the impact that you think you can make in the long run, then like, you can come to Flows, WTF and apply for a grant and start getting paid and like having an opportunity to start, like, growing whatever project you're passionate about, which I think is super cool. And then if you do want to vote, it's super easy. You can go onto the site and click the big vote button and decide in real time, like, how the money is split, which is super cool. So if you care a lot about, let's say esports, you can come and vote on the esports flow and then the streaming money will actually update in real time to give that budget, like, a larger portion of the overall budget. And then you can do the same, like within the actual budget itself. So if you like one creator or project in particular, you can put some boats behind it. And they'll actually earn a larger salary, which is super cool. Oh, wow. So it could actually even go down within the budget itself. Like the. So like within the nouns, storytellers or content creators. You can even go down to the actual people themselves. Yeah, exactly. At least you've like, somebody. What is your grant called? I think it's just called, like, oh, Nanish. Stories. Stories. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, I think that's. Yeah, you could get some boats and get some more money. I don't know if you haven't yet. But put your votes in. There you go. I don't know. I know I recently did it, but I did it at the budget level, you know, like, I did it like, you know, these are the. The big budget items I care about. But I didn't go. I didn't even know you can go down to that level. So that's really cool. Actually. Love that. This thing is so awesome. Like, I cannot get over how cool it is. Um, it's. It's so nice to see because I know, like, when I joined burps, like, I was able to do that and it was super cool from that regard. All right, what about if you don't hold it now? So I know with verbs you were able to. I think you could buy some votes. You can earn some votes. What are some ways? Like, if you're not an outer, how can you get involved? Yeah, the main ways to get involved. Vegas Search 2 so if you're passionate about something and always wanted to start this project or make some impact in your local community or you are somebody that already does something super cool, like trying to think, like, are you a Jet Ski rescue person? Like, you can apply to the athletes grant and get some money to like, rep nouns in the work that you do already. So yeah, if. If there's. I'm guessing there is. And if there's something that you're super passionate about or something that you do every day and there's a budget for it, you can go in and apply and continue making impact and kind of wrapping nouns and getting paid every month to do it super easy. Takes like a couple minutes to apply. So that's one way to get involved. The other way is if you feel like you have some domain expertise in a specific, like, budget, whether it's like esports or athletes or public gardens or whatever, you can actually become a curator of that flow. And what that means is you can go in and spend however much money you want buying some tokens of the flow. So let's say you know a lot about beach cleaning. You can go in and buy the beach cleaning token. And once you buy the token, you are expected to curate the flow. So like, as new applications come in, you're incentivized to check them, make sure they're legit. And you can actually earn money by challenging bad applications and generally like keeping the flow that you're a curator of like a high quality list, if that makes sense. No, it does. That's awesome. I didn't even know you can earn money. All right, what are some, what are some other categories or flows that you'd like to see? Yeah, I'm actually reading a book right now which is super cool, called Blueprint for Revolution. And it's this book written by somebody, Popovich, who was like a college kid when the Serbian revolution happened and they toppled this like dictator in the 80s or 90s. And he's basically like turned it into a career of like helping out other young people in all these like war torn countries that have like bad governments and figuring out how to use like non violent techniques to like enact really positive change in most cases. And the book, super cool, it talks about how there's like so many different ways you can kind of bring people together to coordinate towards like higher goals in a way that like, even under like an oppressive regime, people are still able to like come together and make change in the face of all that violence. And so there's a ton of examples in the book that I think are super interesting and funny even on like how they've been able to make change. I mean like they use humor in a lot of cases. So I think like, as this translates to like what we're doing with nouns. I mean we're not trying to overthrow some like some violent dictator or whatever. But I do think we're like starting this really large social movement around like public goods and positive impact. And so yeah, just trying to take some ideas from there. I mean one of them is like laughtivism is what they always call it. But just like using humor is a way to like diffuse situations or like get more people interested in what you're doing. So I've always wanted to add like some sort of humor budget or maybe it's like you, you get paid to buy some funny like nouns themed T shirts with like jokes on it that you have to wear to work every other Monday or something. And you can use like the budget, you're getting paid to kind of pay for new T shirts or whatever. That's one idea. There's a lot in the book about, I don't know, food. There's a way of like bringing people together. Don't know what a budget for that would look like, but some sort of like, like almost like free food in a public space or like meals for the public where you kind of just try to get people coming together around a dish that everybody in that region really likes and just kind of sitting down and having conversations are. Yeah, I mean it's a lights a lot of really simple stuff, but I just think it's like it's hugely powerful just like bringing people together in that way. Yeah, no, I agree with that. Laughter's laughter is a good one. Like even like a stand up comedy. Even if it was like one joke or a bit. I don't know, like there's lots of opportunity. Like you said different. Really. It's like almost like sky's the limit. Almost like on the creativity that you have and how, how you could tie it back 10 ounce and stuff like that. So yeah, I need to get more creative with my, with my thinking. Yeah, I love it. It's like a pretty wide open canvas in terms of like what you can get paid to do, which I think both, I don't know, it's like really interesting and fun and diverse ideas, but it also makes it harder to like quantify impact. And so to a certain extent, like we can't quantify or compare a lot of this stuff. But I think if we're able to show off like the impact that, that people are having in a easily digestible way and give like rough approximations of like whether they're actually doing what they say they're doing and like to what extent they're doing it, we'll be able to have like a pretty damn effective grants program. Yeah, I know there's like some of my favorite ones I've seen so far are like there's a skin care one which is really cool. Is the. Is coffee on this one too? Like verbs, coffee, I should get them to apply. That's a great idea. I don't think it's on you, but should definitely apply to the physical products flow. Yeah. Because the coffee one, like I think of it like, you know, coffee brings people together. It's kind of like food, you know, like brings people together. Coffee and chats, stuff like that. So. But the skincare one's really cool. I know you guys are doing Precious Noggles as well, which has received funding. I think even at the nouns level they receive funding as well, but they just Have a cool mission statement. I know you have some selfies on here which are great. Yeah, Some people are a little less, like, into the selfie. I mean, one person was against the selfies idea, but it's like, I don't know. I think, like, giving people, like, a simple way to get started is cool. Like, buy some noggles, take some funny selfies in some cool locations and, like, well, fun you to buy more noddles and just pay for your time. Like, seems kind of silly in some respects, but I also think, like, some people are taking it to such a cool level. Like, they're you just hitchhiking all across the Middle east and, like, taking Naugle selfies with, like, all these people that he meets along the way. And, like, that's totally worth the impact, I think. Yeah. I mean, I think kind of like what you said. Like, I think there's, like, a couple things. So, like, attention is very hard in this space. So I feel like having. There's like, one person on Forecaster that I didn't even know they, like, until I joined Forecaster and got a noun. They post, like, their food. It was like the verbs logo or I've seen, like, nouns as well, too. It seems, like, silly, but, like, it's funny to me. Like, I'm like, oh, that's. That's clever. You know, it takes time, too, to do that kind of stuff, but, like, sometimes that's what you need. You need to, like, be in people's, like, mind constantly and in different places too. Like you said, like. Yeah, it doesn't have to be, you know, super bowl commercial. It could be as simple as, like, on your Instagram feed on a frequent basis. Yeah, I totally agree. Like, attention, super tough. And like, seeing the brand associated with, like, good stuff and, like, so many different ways, like, really hammers home what we're doing. Yeah. Yeah. All right, so I think we're getting close to the end. Wanted to ask you. Yeah. Did you have any questions, like, for me or anything else you wanted to chat about before we get into this last one? Then they just like, if you have any ideas or frustrations with flows, definitely let me know and we'll work on fix them as soon as we can. Nothing. Nothing. Yeah, I know, I know. Like, when it first. First launched, I wasn't able to put. I was getting like, a RPC error or some kind of error like, to. For my vote, but that that's been fixed. Like, I've been able to, like, place my vote on, like, the different buckets you Know, I think what would be something kind of interesting would be like having a frame asking people to vote. And obviously I think this can get gamed. So, like, I don't know if I'm thinking out loud, so don't. Don't hold me to it and just ideas. But you know how you were saying, like, oh, like, I can actually get people to vote for my specific flag flow. It'd be kind of cool to have it like, as a frame almost. You know, like, I could put my grant on Farcaster and it shows up like, as a frame that's like a V2 frame. Like, boat here. Yeah, that's a good. I really like that. I've been thinking about that for a. While because people like the, I don't know, V2 frames are very powerful and obviously this is giving you more work, so my bad. But, you know, it just makes it so, like, people don't have to leave the graph, you know, so, like, I could literally, like, post it after this, you know, podcast, or be like, hey, you know, like, just click on here and you know, if you like this kind of content, like, vote for it or something. Again, I know people could probably game it and I don't know, but just an idea. I'm a sucker for these get heat maps of contributions. So sharing it would be really fun also, you know. Yeah, like, Sherry, like, here's my. Like, like, almost like even getting sillier. But, like, sometimes you just need a little bit of silly. But like, here's like my month in recap, if that makes sense. You know, like the Spotify rewind for like the year. But like, here's how I did this month. Like, how many things I. How many, like, how I. How I contributed and like my impact or something like that. I don't know, like, something fun. Like that would be kind of fun to share on social so people could see like one. They could even just find out what flows is. Like, it almost triggers them. Like, what are they even posting about? Like, what is this thing? So it gets them curious to, like, check it out. What else? Is there an easy way to. Instead of going through gonzo, is there an easy way for me to just post like an update? Because I know, like, for mine, I think. Yeah, you can just post some forecast or whatever you want, so. Oh, it doesn't have to be like the flip. No, no. Yeah, we need to make that more clear. Okay. I do like the videos that you posted because I know you took some time to like, create videos and stuff like that, which are very helpful. I'm a visual person, so definitely help. Yeah. Give me some. Give me some time to think about it. But those are the ones I could think of right now. Like, those. That is a lot. I wrote them down. Yeah. Maybe quality of life. Nice to have as well. Would be like, Rainbow Wallet claim. Probably, like, not 100 necessary, but, like, that'd be kind of fun as well. What was that? Oh, so, you know, like, on Rainbow Wallet, you can actually just go to, like, they have, like, a claim section on Rainbow here. Let me see. Actually, I don't even think I'll send it to you because they only have it on mobile, they don't have it on web. But essentially, like, it'd be kind of cool if I could just claim the stream from there. Like, from the wallet. It's not the end of the world going into the website. I don't go to it, like, too often. Yeah, I'll definitely figure out how to integrate that. This one's not gonna be a lot easier. Yeah. I mean, I think even, like, the Rainbow team can actually do most of the legwork for you. I don't even think they. I don't think there would be much on your plate for. For that. And last one, I guess, would be like, I wouldn't personally mind sharing metrics from those Web2 platforms, and I don't think it needs to be in a ZK format, but, like, I don't mind doing that essentially, if that makes sense. Yeah, I think it'd be better if we were able to just have the AI go and figure out, like, how many bees you got and stuff. Stuff. Yeah. 100%. Yeah. Like, that would be, like, you know, optimal. But for me personally, like, I. I have no qualms with, like, getting a snapshot picture or whatever and just, like, uploading and being, like, here that. I think what's tricky about some of the content stuff is, like, I'll give you, like, an example. Like, I did a episode with Jack from the icebreaker team. It's two weeks old, but I actually got, like, 20 downloads last week on that episode, which I'm not saying is a lot, but, like, the episode's two weeks old, you know, like, it's not new. So, like, I get most of my listens within, like, the first seven days of posting a podcast episode. But, like, I still get people that listen to it. They'll, like, find out about the podcast. And I don't know what happened last week, but I was like, damn, all right, I'll take the 20. The 20 listens. Yeah. So those are the only things I could think of. I. Yeah, dope. Yeah, I love it. I'll definitely keep water down one. And let me know if you got any other ideas. Yeah, I'll shoot them over to you. Yeah. All right, so we're gonna wrap this up with the last question. So you're gonna. So I used to have like this podcast where my newsletter used to be. I was going for like snack sized digestible bits of information. So this is why this question exists here. Just why is he asking me about this? So it's been the one recurring question I've asked every single guest from episode one to now. Oh, so what is your favorite snack? I know it's hard and I've been called out multiple times by multiple people that PB and JS are not snacks. They're a sandwich. So that's mine. So don't feel like you have to choose. Clearly. Hard one, honestly. Dried mangoes is what I'm gonna go with. Oh, my God. Yes. I. I only say oh my God because I gave this. I gave dried mangoes to my kid. I have a two year old two weeks ago. And I'm not even joking you. I think I must have bought like 20 pounds of dried mango. She can. She. She. I'm like, I've acted like, Use perplexity to be like, is this bad? Like, because she's like, she wants it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And I'm like, honey, like, can. Can we actually eat some food? Like daddy. Yeah, daddy cooked you bison. Like, this is not cheap. Can we please eat bison? And she's like, no, mango. And I'm like, okay, I eat it. I eat it with her. It's amazing. So good. That's hilarious. I think. Do you like good chili mango, like, or the just regular plain? I love spicy food, so the chili mango ones are pretty good. My daughter doesn't like spicy ones, so we just get regular ones. Do you have a favorite brand? This is my research. Whole feeds Organic maybe. I remember. Yeah, that one dot com, maybe like way back in the day had really good ones if I remember serious so far. But there it is again in the office I worked and it was in. Oh, I see. Oh yeah. Organic dried mango on that suck bomb used to be good enough. It still is. I'm gonna have to try this one. I tried 25 pounds, I swear. Okay, like, I might exaggerate a little bit, but like, I'm also helping her eat that. Like, I'm not saying she ate all 25 pounds per. But, yeah, like, it is insane how that's awesome. Now that she discovered it. I tried the Amali one recently, and that one was not my. Not my favorite. There. There's levels to this. All right, I'll check this one out. Nuts. All right, cool. That's a good one. Awesome. Well, yeah, thanks again. Appreciate your time. All right, if you're hearing this message, you've made it through the entire episode, and I wanted to thank you for that. Before we head out, this week's cast off is. Yeah. What do you think about this micro grants program? Do you think it's scalable? Would you like to see this being implemented by other daos? Yeah. Let me know on Telegram or on Foraster. Yeah. If you're listening to this episode on another platform other than pods, make sure to go collect this episode on Pods Media. If you are on pods, make sure to subscribe from your favorite app so you can get notified whenever I drop new episodes. If you could think about leaving us a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, that would be greatly appreciated. Please share this with anyone else that you think might be interested in the topic. Feel free to let me know if you'd like me to talk about a specific topic or person in future episodes. You can get in touch with me via text, in the show notes or on social media. All right, see you guys next episode. Peace.