Wizard Wednesday Episode 86 Transcription

Wizard Wednesday Episode 86 May 10th

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Dotta: [00:00:00] And

Elf: Doda. Hello. Where's Bear? He's supposed to be here. You know, I just, I, I've learned to just not trust anything dealing with Bear anymore. I think, uh, I think he is just full of hot air and, um, I think we can do the show without, wow.

Dotta: You went there. You went there. Yeah. I don't know where he is.

Elf: But, uh, I'm sure he'll be here eventually.

Um, in fact, I think Bear even wants to, to rant a little bit, uh, judging by his commentary and the discord over the last few days. So I'm sure he will be here. Um, Nevertheless, we've got a big show today. We've got updates, we've got black fans, we've got cult questions. We've got, we've got a guest coming on later today.

There's.

Dotta: There's so much. We had, we had, uh, a cult wedding this weekend. Okay. It really wasn't a cult [00:01:00] wedding. It was just a wedding from a cult member. But, uh, it was, uh, super duper fun. Our very own Magnus, Waze, uh, and Artis Rock were beautifully. We, this weekend in Louisiana. I went to the wedding. It was incredibly fun.

Yep. Uh, And there was, there was a bunch of wizards there that, uh, slim was there. Um, we had, uh, Angus Amu was there also with his son, uh, boop was there, who's a warrior. Um, Slim's wife was there. It was just like such an incredible, uh, credible, credible time. Uh, it, you should all know that Slim is a dancing god.

Uh, he is the life of the party. Um, yeah, we gotta get. Slim to, uh, the, the next, you know, the next forgotten ruins wizards party. You, you'll all fall in love. Um, as I did, my family did.

Elf: So,

Dotta: yeah, it was, it was such a fun time. So we, we went out to Louisiana. Uh, we had [00:02:00] the, they got married. Uh, they, they, they, they rang a bell on the way out of the chapel, which was just delightful.

Uh, we all danced on the dance floor. Uh, uh, I tried to copy some of Slim's moves, but I danced like an adult baby. Uh, there was a big roasted pig, which was incredible. And, and really one of the things you should know is just like, you know, it just feels like everywhere you go and you meet a group of wizards, they're just such good people.

And that was totally, totally the case there. But you know, there was like, Five or six wizards there. And, and it, and it just felt like just this like built in friend group. They made us feel like super duper welcome. And, and then when we saw the bride and groom off, uh, instead of throwing rice we handed out, uh, they hand out little bells to everybody.

And so yeah, the one who rings, uh, was, was sent off with, with, with his, his wife, uh, to the sound of tinkling bells. We've still got our bells. My kids ring it all the time. It's super annoying. And uh, yeah, we've, we've had, we just had a really beautiful time. [00:03:00]

Elf: Congrats to the one who rings an artist. Um, uh, slim is asking why I did not go to the wedding.

Is it because I hate him? Uh, no slim. It's because when the black goat walks walks into a church, the whole place catches on fire. So I didn't, I didn't wanna crash the wedding. Uh, bear, where the hell have you been?

Bearsnake: Oh, hey, it's Wizard Wednesday, guys. I was hosting Different Wizard Wednesday in a different spaces, so, uh, I decided to come.

You guys beat me with the attendance, so I'm here. Hi.

Elf: No, nobody came to your wizard Wednesday, did they? No one gives a shit about my Wizard Wednesday.

Bearsnake: Uh, yes. Hi guys. Welcome. What's up?

Dotta: What's up? Yeah. It would've been fun to have you at the wedding. Everybody, everybody who knows you thought you should have been there.

Elf: Um, yeah, no, it sounds amazing. I, I'm so happy for, for Woz and artists. [00:04:00] Um, uh, Woz is like back to work today. They haven't even taken, uh, a vacation, like a honeymoon.

No. Yeah. They need to take a honeymoon. Yeah. So yeah. Woz, I highly encourage you to take a break. Um, and, uh, um, yeah, just do it. Um, Okay. Yeah, so that was the first cult question from Slim. We've got a, we've got a handful more. Um, let's get this one outta the way. Shalee is asking a question that has been asked a lot, and, uh, I'd like to know the answer to this question myself.

Um, Any updates on the Ledger? Forgotten ruins, uh, collaboration. I don't even

Dotta: know. Every time we, uh, every time we reach out to Ledger and they say that they're waiting on their suppliers, so yeah. Does anybody

Bearsnake: have like a real issue? Yeah, I do. Um, I think everybody was, Like there's a timeline, right? And like, I think everybody saw the Dead Fellows Ledger come out, but the reality is [00:05:00] Dead Fellow Ledger was like two or three months before us.

So there is like just a production timeline that's always sort of been the case. And I was actually, uh, WhatsApping with uh, the guy who run partnerships with Ledger this exact morning. And yeah, everything's on track, so everybody. Just, uh, you know, like, uh, let's, let's take a chill pill. They're coming.

They're gonna look incredible. Uh, let's just relax. I know it's, we taking kind of a long time. Yeah, well, I mean, we did it, what? We launched it in December. Um, yeah. You know, these are physical items. They're being packaged with some other things. They were kind enough to, uh, put a comic book and some stickers and, and, and I think some other things in there.

So, Um, of course we couldn't just do what everybody else did. We had to do, we had to like pile on extra cherries on top. So it is absolutely happening. Of course it is. Uh, I know that we, uh, magic [00:06:00] Machine bought a bunch for the team and extras as well. Um, and I even got a picture of the custom box this morning.

Um, totally. So yeah, it's like, it's totally happening. Just, um, you know, the usual web three, hurry up. Um, and I promise you, uh, If I could go to France, And stand at the manufacturing line and, and, and give massages and make them work faster. I would, but I don't think that

Dotta: would work well. Yeah. Actually I'm very thankful for Ledger, for including us in this process.

Don't want to kind of Yeah. Rag on our partners. Too bad though. I do kind of feel like in hindsight we maybe could have done better, uh, getting expectations for them on timeline, just so that way people know like, Hey, if you buy this, it's gonna be, you know, eight months before you actually get it in your hands.

Well,

Bearsnake: I think there, there's something we can, sorry not to cut you off, but I'm, I'm pretty sure we're still on track, on timeline. Um, it was great. I think we were like, you know, four months. I believe we were four months [00:07:00] after, um, the date in January, February that they would be available. So we're well within that timeframe.

Elf: It's a good question and I was wondering the same, um, But yeah, they're coming. Uh, okay, Marco? Fine man. Speaking of timelines, uh, Marco Fine is asking when scree, I'm guessing that's, uh, asking about Goblin Town. Dodo, what can you tell us? Oh, you know,

Dotta: you play it when you play it.

Bearsnake: I will elaborate on that. Um, the team is working very hard.

Um, the, I mean, I, you know, I think, I'm not sure if we've talked about, but there's a goblin town specific dev channel or server. Um, and every single day we see incredible headway going. Um, and just kudos to Doda, nis, and the entire team, v Mark, s p, z. Uh, I don't know. I mean, from my perspective, it's going really well.

I know it's taking longer than you [00:08:00] thought, Dota, but I feel like it looks freaking

Dotta: incredible. We're getting, and we're getting great, great, uh, design work, uh, from SUMS and pixel shop. They're like really helping work through a lot of the details. I think that it's like, It's, there's so many kind of, um, design iterations that come through making a game UI that like in hindsight, once you've worked it out, it feels like just so obvious, right?

That's hope. When you get a game in your hands, what you hope is that the UI feels intuitive. You don't have to watch a big tutorial. You just like the buttons are where you would expect them and it works, right? And like, it, it feels so obvious, but then like when you're actually kind of, Um, building it out.

I think there's like UIs we've had to redesign four times because they just kind of like, you get in and you add something and you're like, ah, maybe we shouldn't have to add it over here. Maybe we should be over here. And so yeah, we're, we've got, you know, again, we're releasing new betas to Arbitra on kind of the on Arbitra Gurley.

Uh, probably every week. I [00:09:00] think Nisi just released a new beta, uh, internal build this this morning. And yeah, still, still making progress there. It's gonna be super duper fun. I'd be happier, uh, to do the mint when the market is gonna pay attention to this sort of game a little bit more. But let's get the game working and then we'll talk about when the mint

Elf: is gonna be.

Okay. So bear, I'm gonna let you take the heat for the ledger. Doda, you're taking the heat for the Goblin Town timeline. I am gonna take the heat for the 3D timeline. Um, it's called,

Dotta: it's called

Elf: Accountability. Yeah. Yeah. Accountability. So, 3D update, you know, like, like I said last week, the, all the, the characters are more or less done.

We're still working through bugs of the gin, like all the, the generations of them. And then it's just website, uh, that's still being worked on. And, and we're also trying to do a really nice trailer cause um, you know, if, if one thing that for, forgot if there's anything forgotten rooms could work on, it's.

It's not, it's [00:10:00] not that we don't ship enough, it's that we don't, uh, talk about all the things that we ship enough. So, um, so yeah, so we're trying to do a really nice trailer for our whole 3D rollout. Um, and that is the 3D update and that's why it's taking so long. But it's in progress. Yeah. 3d. The 3D

Dotta: stuff has, um, yeah, we've got, um, well, okay, so when you have the, the, the, the skeleton, um, then you attach it to the geometry with this sort of like, uh, they call it a weight.

Paint. And that basically says like, you know, I've got these bones and this is how I want, you know, let's say the cuff of the robe to move as the, as the, uh, wizard moves his arm. And so frog eater and the 3D team have worked quite a lot on just kind of finalizing those. I think as we start running each one of them through animations, you see a little bit of, you know, uh, Bugs or file names that were, were named improperly or skin tone mismatches.

And so we're basically going through our, [00:11:00] our, our phase of kind of like making sure all of that works, right? We don't wanna release something and have it crash or not work. And so yeah, we've got that. Um, basically just working through all those things. Um, and then another part is that we wanna make sure that it's wor usable in a lot of metas.

Ooh, I almost dropped the name of a meta. I don't know if I should have. So there are some metas that we are going to be in. That, uh, well, every, literally, every single one requires a different code and infrastructure. So, uh, you know, again, uh, max was here is kind of taking the lead on that as sort of writing these scripts to export from blender into all the different formats and create 10,000 wizards, you know, five different ways.

So there's, you know, 50,000 files that you'll be able to download and, uh, well just. It, uh, it just all is just taking longer than we would hope, but if anybody kind of wants your specific wizard, we can probably make it and get you at least some sort of format.

Elf: Yeah, I, I've actually received a handful of requests lately, um, and I haven't distributed those.

Don't [00:12:00] worry. They're on the list. Frog eaters, putting them together. Um, so it's, I haven't forgotten about you. It's, it's all on the list. Um, but yeah, if anyone else wants their 3D rig, just DM me and we'll put it in the queue. Um, okay. There's a few lower questions. Uh, EZ is asking, has there been a war between wizard factions?

Um, yeah. I mean, nothing that's been like documented in the Wikipedia. I haven't checked the book of law to see if there's anything written on that, but, but yeah, as, as I've, as I said, said before, like the, the map itself was sort of de designed to sort of inspire inherent conflict between regions. Um, You know, just for example, like you've got sr's Keep on Kelps Bay.

Sr's Keep is like a hub of, of maritime merchants. And Kelps Bay is full of Kelpies and Kelpies are known for like destroying merchant ships. So there, there's a conflict right there. [00:13:00] Um, the Kron Mans Riviera, which is known as a place of, of just sort of deba carefree parties, is. Uh, next very close to the quantum shadow, and only Battle Ma Mountains sits between them.

So there's inherent conflict there. Um, The Blue Wizard Bastion, which is a place of sort of ac an academic scientific approach to magic, is sitting adjacent to places of almost pure magic, the sacred pillars and the gates to the seventh room. Um, there, there's tons of examples like this across the map. So while I've not taken the time to like spell out any inherent conflicts, um, they are sort of sitting there for anyone to, uh, Right lower upon.

Um, Hen Boyd is asking, uh oh on that. One of the [00:14:00] things that, one

Dotta: of the things that I'm like, uh, realizing just mechanically as you're talking is how much we need to get like transcriptions of W Wednesday into Wikipedia. Um, because there's so much of this lore that you've dropped. Um, you know, I know we have some of it, but we should basically use whisper or whatever to get.

Get the actual full text in there. Um, because for example, one of the things that, um, I've been working on is just like I'm, I'm exploring this idea of using, uh, the language models with the book of Lore, um, to build tools that create this sort of like, um, human and l l m collaboration, augmented, uh, of storytelling, particularly around our map and, uh, One of the things that I was doing this week is I was generating, like, I was just like, kind of, I've been happy with what it's generating and I sort of set it loose to say, you know, generate these locations across the map.

Like with, with, with a finer grain resolution, right? Take these [00:15:00] top level locations that we have, the lesion gates. The infinity veil, the gate to the seventh row and, and take what we know in the book of lore, like search up what's in the book of lore, search up what's on Wikipedia and generate some locations.

And, and one of the things that happened is I was generating the, the sub locations for, um, for, um, The, for Callista's Citadel, I was generating Callista Citadel's locations, and it started generating this crazy location that was called like the Apex Rocket Company headquarters. And I was like, what? And then it generated like the Apex Rocket Company Plaza, which is this like, you know, where the, the rocket company displays the latest innovations and sales components.

And I was like, this is so weird. I mean, I'm like, I get, I know there's like modern technology and, and uh, and rockets and I was like, It is the ai kinda like going off the rails here, like going off script, what's happening? And then I basically looked it up and uh, there the, there is actually a wizard.

There's uh, the pyro manor. [00:16:00] Calista of the citadel. So it's Wizard 33 44, and Calista of the pyro manor. Calista of the citadel. If you actually look at her lore entry, Um, the, the, the owner has basically written this pretty involved lore about how she was the founder of the Apex Rocket Company and she basically went to engineering university and then now that she dazzles the crowd with her fireworks.

And so like, what, what I basically realized is that like, um, the tool was working sort of without my knowledge of kind of searching the book of lore. Mining it for like events that actually happened, uh, and then sort of like creating locations that were like entirely consistent, uh, with, with the owner's lore.

And so, well, I just love that in terms of like the potential of, of what we have going on here. And so I think this idea of even just having you say, Even when you just like speak these words, which is like AAR's Keep is like a merchant trading post and Kelpies are known to attack trading ships, right?

Like even just that little fragment. If we can capture that and put that into text and put that in the, in [00:17:00] Wikipedia now that's actually like this knowledge bit that you spoke into like instruction for the machine and, and the machine has a better recall than any of us. And so we can kind of use that as a resource for future tools.

So yeah, that's

Elf: what we've been working on. This. This is speaking to a much longer conversation maybe we can get into later, but I think one of the most valuable things that Forgotten Rooms is sitting on right now is this massive data set that has been created by all of our community. And every day our, our team talks about what are ways we can leverage this beautiful, unique data set to make awesome things with.

Um, you know, it's something that we're definitely gonna get more and more to into as time goes on. Um, but, but yeah, I mean, it's, it's just, again, we just, we just have an amazing data set that we're sitting on, so please keep writing in the book of lore cuz you're, you're contributing to this large lore model.

Um, well, and

Dotta: well, yeah, yeah. Sorry, not, I don't wanna harp on [00:18:00] this too much, but like, whatever, we're here the. Eh, there's something around like, how do I say this? I feel that there's dialogue around data collection that usually gets villainized as sort of this like, Privacy invading, um, like machine eating like, or this machine, like eating humanity or something, or that, like, you know, and there's an aspect of that.

Maybe we can have that as part of a little bigger conversation. But for me to kind of say, well, when you write lore, you're contributing to this like data set that then we can, like mine to me sounds almost like so stale and, and, and for me, The, how I view it is actually in this like positive aspect, which is something like I.

When you write lore about Calista the Citadel and how she starts the Apex Rocket company, you're actually sort of like manifesting this kind of like this world building, [00:19:00] um, with your words that now we can make inferences about to build these other stories. It's almost like. We, we woke up as like this baby, and our eyes haven't come into focus yet.

And like each word that you speak brings this like higher grain resolution to the world, um, to this like collaborative, legendary, and you're like creating with your words. And so like, you're technically right, like when you write in the book of law, you're submitting to a data set that can be mined, but it's like such, it's so much more than that.

It's like you're actually. Your world, world building with your words, this like environment we can now all like collaborate with and build on. Does that make sense?

Elf: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. You believe

Dotta: that too? I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Elf: Um, okay. Hen Boyd is asking, uh, is the quantum speaking of ai, uh, he's asking is the quantum shadow really artificial intelligence?

Uh, this is a really fun question. Um, When you asked this question, hen Boyd, uh, where my mind went. [00:20:00] Okay, well let me just, okay, let me clarify. In the past I've said that the quantum shadow is just sort of this placeholder stand-in for the unknown. Um, a good scientific corollary to this is like dark energy or, or dark matter.

Um, it's just sort of a mathematical placeholder that physicists use to describe this force that they can't account. For, um, and so, you know, but when you ask this, I, I, my mind went to this, this theory that I read about many years ago in this book called The Cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies. Um, and he posits this theory where he uses the observer effect in quantum mechanics.

Um, if you don't know what that is, it's. It was sort of epitomized by the double slit experiment where light can ne is neither a particle or a wave until it's observed. Um, another sort of example of this is Schrodinger's cat. [00:21:00] Um. There's a, there's a box containing a cat, and you don't know if the cat is dead or alive until you open it and observe its state.

Um, you know, another sort of, sort of zen way of saying this is if a tree falls in a forest and there's no one around here, it doesn't make a sound. The, the point is, is like, what, what was the name of the book? Uh, a co, the, uh, the cosmic Jackpot by Paul Davies. Paul Davies. And so anyway, this, this theory uses the observer effect to extrapolate this idea that the universe itself only exists because in the far, far future, every single particle that makes up the universe will be observed.

Um, and this only seems possible. By a super intelligence, uh, by either humanity augmenting itself with, with this super intelligence or, or the super intelligence itself becoming [00:22:00] sentient. And so long story short, hen Boyd, uh, yes, the quantum shadow might, might be an ai. I don't know. I, I don't know what this stand-in for the unknown actually is, but it, that could be it.

I don't know. Um, and then that's interesting. A

Dotta: lot of religious people, uh, basically see this cosmic jackpot theory as like, uh, well, a rational reason for the proof of the existence of God.

Elf: Yeah, except Davies uses it to actually prove the opposite, which is we don't live in a universe. We live in a multiverse.

And so there's intimate multiverses out there. And the cosmic jackpot refers to we hit the jackpot by living in one that supports our life. It's, it's interesting. It's a game of statistics. If there's infinite universes out there, then of course there's gonna be one that all the, the conditions are [00:23:00] fine tuned to support life.

There's infinite others out there that do not.

Bearsnake: We've all seen Dr. Strange. I mean,

Dotta: hopefully

Elf: it's the same thing.

Dotta: I actually have not Oh, you, you love, is that the one where he like rides the rocket? The, like where he rides the nuclear bomb like that? Dr. Strange. No,

Bearsnake: no, no, no. That, no. This is, um, this is, this is the Marvel movie, Dr.

Strange. And it basically talks, listen, you guys are the intellectual ones. I'm coming in with the big tempo movies. References? No, he just, he talks, it's just talks about multiple dimensions and they go in between them and some of them are

Dotta: weird. I'm thinking about Dr. Strange Love. That's

Bearsnake: strange love.

Good movie too.

Dotta: Yeah.

Elf: Okay. And then this one is from O and he addresses it to me, but I think you guys can chime in on this. Um, it's just sort of like a generalized question. Um, he is asking can I get an assessment on. Just sort of [00:24:00] n f t cult culture across the board. Um, at, at this current moment, uh, he's asking how we think about Mala and Yuga, and then just generalized, like conflict resolution that's at the topic.

Notions of, yeah. Cancel culture, house of cats. Lord, meme coins, decentralization. What's, what's your sort of impression of

Dotta: the community? That's a lot. There's love on here. That's a lot. We can talk the whole time about

Elf: love. Yeah. This could, this could take up a whole, uh, space, but like just general impressions.

Do you guys

Bearsnake: wanna take Yeah, I, and if we could, let's keep it at like the general sort of temperature where NFTs are at right now. I think

Cult Member: that would be a good topic.

Dotta: Yeah, go for it. I don't know. I, I can't keep it surfaced, but go ahead. We'll start there.

Elf: Well, okay. I, I can riff on this. Um, me, ladies not a fan.

Uh, nihilistic, [00:25:00] uh, culture is, has never been my cup of tea. I realize that there are sections of the internet who love it. Four Chan, eight chan garbage. Um, you know, if that's your thing, go for it. Um, okay, so ma,

Dotta: ladies, here's my deal. I'm, I am of like a few sides. One, when I saw Maad originally, like very, very early on, like when it was like less than 0.1, like around mint time, I was like, ah, I can totally see that these are going to do well.

But I just, the art makes me feel weird. Like I just can't, I, I don't, I can't put my finger on it, but I don't. I, I don't like it. I don't wanna participate. Um, I think that the, like, and then there was basically quite a lot of sort of, I don't, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use the word fud, but I think that like, I'm not trying to speak to like the truth or falsehood about it, uh, around kind of like some of the early members, creators.

I don't really know. Um, that kind of also, like there was a time where ma ladies was like quite [00:26:00] counterculture in terms of like, To sort of like buy and sport a mala. P f p was really to try to draw this line in the sand. Um, that I think it kind of lost a little bit. Like Mala has kind of gone mainstream in my opinion.

Like, it's like not actually that edgy, like, like there was a time where like if you had Alas P F P, you'd be like just canceled because you were just so clearly associated with like some pretty atrocious behavior. And I don't think that's the case. Somewhere along the line, like Mercedes went mainstream, so like, I think now it's way more of sort of this like kind of posing, um, where like you want to be tough and associated with this like very dark side of the internet, but I actually don't think that, I think it lost that, like somewhere along the way.

Elf: Yeah. But you can still be mainstream and like doer pilled or black pilled and it's, it's. Still nihilism, even if it's quote unquote mainstream. Um, I, I mean no, I

Dotta: agree. I just think like at one point it was like a cancelable offense to wear, I'm a lady, and like that got [00:27:00] lost. Yeah. And I think that was actually like even the essence

Elf: of it.

Yeah. Not interested. But if that's your thing, go for it. You know,

Dotta: like if you look at the top. More generally, if you look at like the top like blur of seven day volume, it's a zuki, mutton, apes, mal, ladies, punks, bored, apes, de gods Ramos, pudgy penguins and captains, right? So like, you know, I look at that and um, you know, kind of without criticism to those projects.

I think that like, I look at that and I see a certain mood, right? Like you can see the market mood reflected in that. So you clearly have kind of these like. Let's call them neutral mega players, which would be like the Yuga stuff, punks and, and bored apes. Right. Um, but I think, yeah, I think when you look at kind of like Zuki, Degos, uh, you know, moon Birds a little bit, Peppes, uh, ma ladies, those are all a mood for me.

They kind of like reflect sort of the, like, [00:28:00] I wouldn't say bearishness, but something around like the kind of like, Um, the grit, you kind of have to have to stick around in a market like this, right? Like, I don't really see those as this kind of like, Fun, lighthearted, optimistic project. It's like they're, they're, they're kind of like ready for battle basically, and like here to make money.

Yeah.

Elf: Th this, th yeah. There's a strong domer culture that's sort of gripping the market right now. I think that's speaks to the rise of Pepe coin and mean meme coins. Like these are projects that have nothing to offer beyond just cynical. Meme shit posting. And that's, that's, uh, yeah. I mean, I can see that reflected across the market.

Dotta: Um, yeah. And I wanna be clear too, I'm painting with such a broad brush. Like I'm not making like, personal criticisms of any of the founders and certainly not any of like the individual holders. I'm not trying to like paint a broad brush around a group of people by association. I'm just sort of like, but still, I think you can look at that and see like a, a mood [00:29:00] pattern, something like that.

Yeah.

Elf: Yeah, for sure. Yep. Um, yeah, I mean just, I dunno, bear market blues is, I, I think what we're seeing and it's, it's, uh, it's manifesting in some sort of ugly ways. Uh, but I don't think it's, I don't think it's here to stay, it's just the current cycle. Um, okay. I think that's all the, the questions we have.

Uh, do, should we bring our guest on? We're about halfway. Yeah. Let's do it.

Dotta: Um,

Elf: Seb, uh, if you actually, let me just send you an invite, uh, if you're ready. Um, bear, do you wanna, do you wanna

Dotta: introduce Seb?

Bearsnake: Yes, I would. I would be happy to introduce Seb. So many people. Nicole probably know who Seb is. I've had the honor, um, to hang out with Seth quite a few times in real life.

His team, Um, and even his extended family, uh, coming out of, [00:30:00] uh, outta, um, Eastern Canada. He's the c e o of, um, zapper Fi, uh, platform that I will butcher if I, if I try to describe what it is. Um, but that's why he's here. They have a new, uh, new product that they're sort of, or new functionality that they're rolling out that we're actually really excited about.

I know Elfa and I were playing with it. Um, and it's really exciting, right? It's like a new to us. It's like a new, a new perspective on, on how you engage with your community. Diff it like highlights different things maybe than like an open sea would. Um, so happy to have you Sab. Uh, would love for you to tell us about what you're up to and, and, and congrats on all the success.

Cult Member: Hello?

Elf: Um, hello. Hey, what's up?

Cult Member: Uh, thank you so, so much for having me. Um, I've been a fan of Wizard since, I mean, I think like the beginning or maybe like a month a after you guys minted. Um, and I know that a lot of folks [00:31:00] at Zapper two are a huge fan, uh, fans of Wizards. I think our, our conversion rate.

It's probably like 75%, which is like an important key metric at Zapper is to maintain that as high as possible. Nice. So we, we do have a lot of, uh, zapper, uh, uh, wizard collectors at Zapper. I think it's like a lot of us are kind of all geeks. Um, and so we relate a lot and I think it's a really good entry.

Um, I mean for people like us into the NFT space, it was like one of the first collections that I really gravitated to cuz I'm a geek. I love Lord of the Rings. I've been reading fantasy like since I was super young. So, Very easy for me to like, understand and, and see the potential here. So congrats. I love the Wizards.

Thank

Elf: you. Thanks Seb. Thank you. Yeah. Well, Seb, I was playing with, uh, zapper Fi the other day. I didn't know much about it. I dug in and I, I think I understood it within like five minutes of playing [00:32:00] with it. But I, I, I want you to like just sort of tell everyone here what exactly it is that you're building.

Cult Member: Nice. Yeah, so Zapper, our goal is to make the blockchain readable for everyone and going a bit through like the story. Initially our focus was really. Uh, tracking your Defi portfolio. So it was the first window into which we were making the blockchain readable. Um, but we quickly realized as we were kind of building a portfolio tracker is, we're ki we're like building, like there's one moment we're like, we're actually building an account profile and just so happens that we're surfacing assets that are in Defi, but they could be NFTs, they could be, you know, membership in, in a dao.

Um, and that realization kind of came with. How many users we notice. Were just looking at other accounts, which is one of the, uh, important use cases of blockchain is to look at what other people are doing, what things are happening. Um, so. And so we kind of evolved [00:33:00] from the initial use case of, you know, tracking your Defi portfolio to really kind of exploring everything.

Um, and our vision of the future for Zapper is kind of building a retail ether scan, you know, a block explorer that anyone can read, uh, see what's happening on chain. And to us it's, it's something that's really important because, you know, when, you know, when I was really thinking about how people read, On information or like the places they do it.

Um, Most often than not, it's on like web two products. It'll be on Twitter. Uh, we'll be talking about things that happen on channel. We'll be finding things or opportunities through Twitter. Uh, we'll be doing it through Telegram and Discord. And one of the main problems with that is, uh, there's signal distortion, right?

It's happening a distance away from, uh, the chain. So the chain is the source of truth, and you have distortion. Like I always find it weird that, you know, [00:34:00] We can all have different experiences of crypto Twitter, right? Some will have a bit more of an N F T angle, some defi. And it's, it's weird cuz we're all living at our own echo chambers of unchain information in a way.

Um, but we do have like this foundation that is there, you know, it's not questionable. It's unopinionated things that are happening. And so having people be closer there. Uh, it is really important. You see like the amount of influencers that will just s shell stuff to just dump it immediately. Um, and then people find it out.

Or like, Zack x BT finds it out. Um, like that's just to show, like right now we're in a state where the distance between the information happening and it being relayed, it's just so, so wide. Um, so yeah, zapper Zapper is making the, the blockchain readable.

Elf: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Th that's, that's a great description.

Uh, for me, if I was to describe this to someone else, I would [00:35:00] say it's Twitter, except all the posts on your timeline are blockchain transactions. And you can like, follow different wallets, which are essentially just accounts. Um, You know, the, one of the first things I did when I, when I connected my wallet was I followed pretty much all the wizards that I saw and now I'm watching all of your transactions.

Um, which like, you know, it's it, which is interesting cuz like, let, okay, so let, let me give you a few anecdotes. Uh, the other day, um, I bought a really stupid meme coin, L F G. And I am like, on the one hand, kind of embarrassed that this transaction is, is there for all to see. I mean, it's a public transaction anyway, but Zapper Fi makes it like super readable and like I, you know, I, I say this sort of tongue in cheek it, I'm, I'm actually, I, I think it's great that, that this is like [00:36:00] being shown.

Um, Another thing that was great was, uh, I, I started like looking at my account and, and all the other things that like zapper fi like brings to the forefront for you. And I discovered, unbeknownst to me that I had, like I. A thousand dollars of unclaimed wrapped eth on look and like without zapper fi, that would've probably sat there forever.

And so you just made me like a thousand bucks. Uh, you can

Cult Member: send me a check. Anything, yeah, I'm going,

Bearsnake: I'm, I'm going back into zapper right now. Let's see if I got,

Elf: Yeah, I mean, who, who knows how much unclaimed tokens are out there? And, and Zapper five will show that to you, or Zapper will show. So

Cult Member: one, like on your first one, I think it's such an interesting, uh, topic because I mean, the fact is we, there's a blockchain that's transparent.

Everything's there. Anyone can look at it and, [00:37:00] and see what people are buying, right? Um, but I think now, and what's gonna happen in the future is like, We're gonna be confronted with that aspect, um, and we'll have, it'll, it'll change our behavior, I believe, because I think a lot of people coming to, into this space aren't confronted with the fact that the blockchain is transparent.

Because it's happening somewhere else. You know, they're using adapt. They're swapping on you to swap the blockchain's, like, you know, whatever. I'm used to using Facebook, YouTube, I know it. Like you're kind of going through these web two patterns and not really thinking about it, but. If you're using a technology and you're not really understanding it, not necessarily like from a technical perspective, but more from, you know, more from like an abstract, um, macro perspective, the fact that it's transparent, like zapper kind of makes that obvious to you, right?

You go on Zapper and you see all the transactions, you see [00:38:00] accounts. We're, we're not telling you. It's transparent. You're seeing it. Um, And I think it, it'll have consequences on how you like the fact that the blockchain will become more and more readable with time will Yeah. Make us think about. How we choose our identity.

Potentially more people or more, more people take a, a conscious decision about their identity, whether it be choosing their real name, uh, pseudo Anon or Anon. But I think like it's important that people know that so they can take a decision and not be like, oh shit, I, I didn't realize that, and now people are just gonna look at what I'm doing on chain.

And then the second thing I think is like what you do on chain is such a, like a, a. It tells a lot about the person in the sense that it's like high, high, high intent data, right? If you think about like web two, I could decide to. Put any like illusion of myself that I want, whether I'm [00:39:00] Facebook, Twitter, like you see it with Instagram models, right?

They're putting out illusions cuz they decide the content. But like on chain is very different. Um, it's very high intent and immutable. It's like you have a trace of something you've done in the past. Um, and like, you know, like we say, like actions speak louder than words. Um, and so I think it's like, Really important in, in, in helping people like understand identity.

Like you'll see the scammer dumping something on you on sap. Like you'll be able to see someone's identity from there. And I think it's, it's important for building a, you know, trustless economy of, you know, aons, pseudo aons in the future. Yeah.

Dotta: One of the things that I, uh, tweet a lot about is this idea of kind of follow trading.

Um, On chain rather than following tweets. So this is a topic that's really interesting me for a long time, like one of my, uh, even bigger tweets from like, gosh, [00:40:00] 2017 probably was that I was kind of like trading and I was. Interested in like, you know, you have so many people posting this like selection bias, like after the fact of, you know, they put in, you know, a thousand dollars and now they turn it into a million bucks or whatever, and all these coins that you should buy and everybody has their first coin.

But like, I think like the first coin for me, It really taught me like, don't listen to influencers with this old coin called Octo. I don't know if anybody got Octo, but like the, all the influencers sort of coordinated to be like, oh, Octo is gonna be the greatest. They're gonna have this wallet and get like credit cards.

It was just like amazing and you know, it was supposed to be amazing. And it of course like went nowhere. And, uh, like so many of the questions that you did, and, and so what I did is I wrote some code that I actually said like, okay, I'm gonna look at all of the price history of I'm, I've got all these biggest influencers and I'm going to look at.

Um, the price history of like, when they tweeted about it and then summarized to be like, if you had [00:41:00] bought when they tweeted, like, how good would you be within like 24 hours? How good would you be? Like, like best case scenario, like, let's say that you sold the peak within like 30 days after they tweeted, and what you basically found is that every single one of them, you would've lost money.

That like, and, and I haven't run the numbers in 2023, but I guarantee you it's pretty much the same, which is like if you buy. Based on what people are tweeting. Best case scenario is you're like, if you buy that, do the all the time, you're gonna lose money almost every single time. And which means on average you're gonna lose money, right?

Because the way that you have to think about your trading is that it's not that, like sometimes you get lucky, sometimes you lose. It's about like the average. It's a lot better to think about your trading as a probability distribution than, uh, than like a number. And if you don't understand what I mean by that, you should go research probability distributions, right?

That like you have to basically have an edge to win more often than you lose. And so by following tweets, you don't get that. And, and contrary, on the contrary following, On chain. You [00:42:00] absolutely do. Um, I would say that that's been like one of the edges for anybody who can read Ether Scan is that what you basically should do is, is go and find the t the coins that everyone are tweeting about, that they made so much money on, and like look at the wallets of who was buying those before.

For it pumped. And what you can actually find if you're willing to put in the work, right? If you're willing to track down each one, put the accounts in a spreadsheet and kind of run some numbers or learn how to use, uh, you know, dune is, you can actually find the same accounts, start to show up time and time again.

And if you, so like. One things you have to know is that influencers often have their public account and then they have their anon wallets. I know personally of at least two mega influencers that I, that I've caught more than once, where they will, um, they'll give themselves coins from their ALT accounts, right?

Then they will tweet about it from their main account and they have their public wallet or whatever, and to get all the followers to buy. The [00:43:00] followers buy, they sell from their non account and then they don't sell on their main account. So then they can be like, look guys, I lost money too. Like it's just so ridiculous.

And so like if you look on chain it, that's actually incredibly obvious because a lot of times it's really sloppy. So what I'm getting at is that. Either scan is very hard to read and what you guys are creating with Zapper is actually very easy to read. And so it's this like incredible opportunity for anybody who's willing to sort of find the wallets of people who who trade.

Because what you basically have right now in this moment where we don't have like private transactions, is the opportunity to literally sit. Over the shoulder of like the greatest traders in the world. And they'll like see exactly what they're doing and how they trade and what they're buying and in how much.

And like this window will not exist for the next 20 years. Like basically what's gonna happen is we're gonna figure out on chain privacy, all the chains will basically be like, Um, like zero knowledge proofs and you won't be able to follow trade anymore because the transactions will, will turn private.

And so you, you basically have [00:44:00] this, I always say, five to 10 year opportunity to, to look over the shoulder of the greatest traders in the world if you can find them. Um, and so what you're doing is like, just far more powerful than I think a lot of people, um, even realize.

Cult Member: Thank you. Yeah, I, I really appreciate it.

And it's honestly, and like the examples you've given are some th things that I myself have experienced and it's like, how can I bring that to more people? How can you know, there's so ma much people with a, um, information advantage, usually people that are technical, that understand how to leverage Ether scan, dune analytics, and a bunch of other tools.

Um, And that's not something that's available to everyone. And you, you, you see it, uh, with the, the people that get caught in stuff or just follow trade on using Twitter, had they been closer to the source, that probably would, wouldn't have happened. Yeah. There [00:45:00] are people,

Elf: one thing, uh

Cult Member: Oh, sorry. Oh yeah.

Like one thing too is I think we're, we're gonna like, There's gonna be a flipp of identity. At one point, I think it already started, where your, your reputation sprouts from the chain versus the other way around. And I, I, it's already started in the sense that, take for example, dingling. Dingling has a ton of followers on Twitter, not because of the content nickling posts.

It's because, Of what Dingling has on chain. Um, and for the same reason, like, you know, when I was in the, um, lineup for N F T N yc, I was in that lineup because of, you know, something rooted on chain and the fact that I had a wizard, right? Um, and I, I think we're gonna start seeing that more and more where the reputation will be based on chain instead of an influencer that has 200,000.

Followers and then [00:46:00] talking about different coins, you'll be following the person based on their actions on chain. And then what I think is really interesting is once you make the chain very readable and access accessible to a lot of people, you can make the social side much, much closer, uh, in terms of proximity, right, to where things are actually happening versus them just being used on telegram, discord, uh, and Twitter.

Yeah.

Elf: Seth, this, this is, this touches on something I wanted to ask you, which is okay. Number one, just off, off of what Dota said, I love how I'm an idiot with the Ether scan and so I'm, I, I love how you've made it more human readable. But the other thing that I find really fascinating is, is yeah, the community and social component of this and.

We've seen, I don't know, like a dozen people try to crack the so-called decentralized social media app. Um, and I don't know that any of them have [00:47:00] succeeded, and I'm, I'm wondering if you guys. Actually have a real chance at doing that now because the base layer is the blockchain. You've got so many social features in here already, and I'm wondering if you have any plans to expand on these social features.

Like, I don't know, lemme just throw a few out there. Um, DMing on the blockchain or, um, being able to post things on the feed, uh, that are not just pure transactions on the blockchain. Um, can, can you speak to that?

Cult Member: So, yeah, absolutely. It's, it's something that we're really thinking about and I think if you think about like a retail block explorer, to me it is a social product by nature because.

Blockchain is people doing things. It's people walking downtown, going to the Open Sea gallery, buying art, going to the Ave Bank, taking out a loan. It's about people. Um, and [00:48:00] so making it readable is kind of like, if you're thinking about it, uh, through a tech tree, it's like a note that you need to unlock to be able to enable the, uh, other social use cases.

And, and I think what's what we're seeing with a lot of current. You know, web three social products is they're kind of taking web two products and, you know, bringing them and translating, translating them kind of almost one to one to web three. Versus thinking about like, fundamentally what is social about our space and how like blockchain works.

And like, one analogy I like to think about is like, blockchain is kind of like a city. Um, and so. Take the example of, you know, uh, that I use with crypto, Twitter, um, and using it with like cities right now, web two. The digital fabric of like this digital downtown is very distorted. We all have [00:49:00] different, um, point of views or different windows into understanding like our digital reality.

Be, and we're kind of seeing right now kind of fall apart. Um, that fabric starting to tear, um, in real life. Um, you know, downtown is downtown, right? Right. If you're walking downtown, you're not gonna see different buildings and different things. And I think that's something that's sorely lacking in the digital world.

Um, and so if we're thinking about the social aspect through that angle is instead of building echo chambers, Why not surface the blockchain as its own downtown and return that sense of like anchored digital reality. Like you're walking through a, a downtown and meeting other FO folks or finding other opportunities.

And I'm not saying this like literally, but like when you're using, you know, zapper, that's how you should feel. So in terms of social, I we're still like ideating a lot [00:50:00] into what it looks like. One thing I do like. To think about is one thing about social is, and that's like a trick or something I've learned from like building products, is trying to find like how people are hacking, you know, different products together to solve a need, uh, for a product that like say Twitter, uh, and on chain information, people are building bots.

They're trying to build. Bring on chain information into Twitter and you see it on discord. Twitter is use case, and it wasn't really to like surface on chain information, but people are using bots to bring on chain information to Twitter to then be able to talk about it as it's like a, you know, public town square.

So I think, you know, finding those insights is getting closer to what social could look like, but I think it looks more like a. You know, town square, actual town square, not like each and [00:51:00] everyone has a different times square. And then from there we can kind of build our own echo chambers. Like I think the, the pillar has to be like an immutable digital reality.

And then from there you can build your own communities or echo chambers. No, I, I think that's the part that's needed to have like social, really work, um, because that's the nature of blockchains.

Elf: So, Okay. I have a really obnoxious question, and I'm gonna ask it in an obnoxious way when Zapper coin.

Dotta: Oh my God.

The question

Bearsnake: You can, you can, you can, you can ignore that question if you wanna. You

Dotta: don't have to. Yeah. I've ignored if it came towards us, that's for sure. I don't know.

One of the things that I think is like really, uh, uh, Challenging about this problem because, you know, I've, I've done a lot, some follow trading in my day and I think like just writing the [00:52:00] code to make smart contracts interpretable is well difficult. You know, it's easy to kind of like to, to to understand the big players, but there's so many new contracts every day.

Um, what kind of like framework do you have for sort of like, Taking a function call and like making the parameters understandable. Like, do you guys have like a forum where people submit calls? Are you using like G P T to help create descriptions of, of like what's happening there? You know, like I, I've seen, um, have you seen like mint.fun?

One of the things I love about there is they're like super smart about kind of automatically detecting, uh, like the contract calls from new mints. It's a lot of magic in a really sweet interface, which reminds me of like what you guys are doing. But anyway, I'm just curious like, how do you think about.

How do you think about that? Because for example, I could imagine something like, we would wanna create this like card about like writing in the book of lore that shows up in like z someone's zapper feed in this kind of like way that you might do like a social card on Twitter or something like that.

Like, so yeah, [00:53:00] tell, give a how, how do we get, how do we get the book of lore in the zapper feed?

Cult Member: So that's a really good question. Um, right now, uh, so we've built a, uh, Event interpretation, uh, model, I, I should call it transaction interpreter. We called it event cuz it's more like general term. Um, and basically what it it does is it, it takes the, um, transaction, all the logs, um, parameters, method, you know, and then you're kind of, you're building a sentence in a way.

You're saying like swapped and then you're. Pointing to different, uh, you're pointing to these parameters or you know, a specific thing in a log, um, to surface that, that new interpretation. And one thing I'm really excited about is that we haven't launched yet, but we're building and we're currently [00:54:00] testing in-house is, uh, allowing anyone to come in and interpret events.

So right now, this is like behind a feature flag. We use it internally, but. You can go directly on Zapper, uh, you'll be able to go directly on zapper. There's gonna be a little edit icon at the top right of a card or inside the event page, and it'll pull up a modal and you're basically like writing out in a sentence and then adding these little pills representing a unit inside that transaction.

But that unit can be a NFT collection, it can be a number, a text, uh, it could be text, it could be. Um, an account could be at E R C 20 token, uh, it could be an app as well, and you're kind of taking those all together and you're stitching it into a sentence.

Dotta: Cool.

I love it.

Elf: Yeah, I, I just wanna say this is not a sponsored like, [00:55:00] um, spot for zapper. We, I mean, I legitimately think this site is really cool. I highly encourage everyone to go check it out. It's, um, just zapper.xyz. You don't have to like, it's not a web two product. You don't have to like, give your email and make a password.

All you do is connect your crypto wallet through meta mask or whatever. Um, and, and you've already got an account. It's just, it's so cool. You can see all the people who hold wizards tokens or, or whatever, N F t you want. Um, you, you can follow wizards. Um, and, and you might find that you have unclaimed tokens somewhere out there.

Like I said at the top, I, I found like, Like 0.7 unclaimed, wrapped eth that I never knew I had. And um, it basically just made all the money back that I lost on LFG tokens. So,

Bearsnake: well, not to, not to one up you, but I just found $11 in my wallet. So Z zep, I'll [00:56:00] send you, I'll send you 20% of that.

Elf: Wait, bear, where did you find $11? I don't

Bearsnake: know. It's like the looks token thing. The same thing. Okay. Okay.

Cult Member: 11 bucks, baby.

Elf: Damn.

Yeah, it's super cool. So it's, it's really fun. I'm, I'm gonna be connecting to this a lot. Um,

Bearsnake: is there, uh, is there anything else, Seb, that you wanted to touch on or.

Cult Member: No, I'm good. Uh, really thank you. Thank you guys. Uh, I love, love this community. I love wizards. Uh, I'm a proud holder, um, of Wizards, souls and Warriors.

So, yes. I'm, uh, I'm always lurking to in the discord. I'm not really commenting, but um, I'm sometimes in the Alpha Channel just looking at stuff. Cuz I heard that wizards are, are pretty good at finding

Bearsnake: Alpha. Yeah, we have, uh, one of the best alpha channel out [00:57:00] there I would say.

Elf: Yeah, it's true. It's true. But if they try to suggest a shit coin, maybe ignore that.

Yeah.

Cause I know if I've mentioned.

That that loss is, is uh, right in plain view of everybody on zapper dot experts.

Dotta: Yeah. They told me that I would get the Boomer coin for free, and then they told me I had to send my coin to the deployer. I missed out like the boomer that I am. Well,

Bearsnake: I don't know if you knew this, but LFG is coming back.

Elf: I, I, I agree.

That's why I haven't sold yet. It, it's, it's, it's, yeah. It's definitely coming back. There's a rally on, on the, let's

Dotta: pivot this whole space. It's not coming back. Damn, it.

Bearsnake: Can I, can I make another $11? Just tell me that, please.

Dotta: Nope. Damn. Oh, man. [00:58:00] All right, well, all

Elf: right. Um, great. Well, uh, yeah, unless there's anything else, I think we can end it there.

Dotta: All right. Thank

Elf: you, Seb. Uh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna sign us out with, uh, another recommendation from Za Lasso. I'm sure you all recognize this song. Until next week, this has been Elf Doda Bear, and Seb with Zapper xyz channeling out from the Quantum Downs. Gian, everybody.

Dotta: Bye. Thank and thank you Tony for putting together the, uh, cult uh, content thread for the week.

We'll go over it next week, but follow Tonya Del Rio. If you haven't.[00:59:00]