Let's Talk About Eth: Around the World, with Saltorius.

0:00You guys better have your podcasters, Randy. Let’s go. What’s up? Welcome, welcome. We’re back for another Let’s Talk About ETH around the world. We’re here with Saltorius. You guys are all doing wonderful today. We’ll kick it around the room. How are you doing, Onanji B? Man, I’m doing amazing. I’m doing amazing, family. Last Wednesday in April, let’s get it. April’s flying by. This whole year’s flying by. But, you know, like this group of folks we got right here, everybody’s cooking. The whole network’s growing, man. Everybody’s getting after it. And I love to see it, especially, you know, the state of everything, man. Markets, the world, you know, the builders and the folks that are trying to see people win, society win, communities grow. We’re all connecting and connecting like Voltron.

0:45Man, that’s what it’s all about. So I’m hype. I’m actually really been inspired this whole, you know, this whole month. So shout out to y’all, man. You know, glad to be here. Maceo, what’s good with you, man? What’s the word? How are we feeling? I like that. I was posting in the group chat that we’re live and then you said we’re connecting like Voltron and I said, hmm. So I’m feeling that one. I’m feeling excited. I told you guys like last week that chilling on here with you guys once a week, now almost twice a week is probably the highlight of my week. every week at this point. I feel like it just feels like my bio told me today, he’s like, you’re a hobbyist talker. And I felt kind of offended. But I do enjoy talking to people I enjoy talking to the most, because I feel like I’m talking about what I’m doing in a constructive, reflective way. And you guys aren’t hating on me for wanting to talk. So I, I’m excited, ecstatic to be here. Saltorius, it’s great to have you here. I know I got to meet you at ETH Denver this year at the base house and chat a little bit about your game and the different stuff you’re working on. I’ve been using your, your, your, your,

1:45or Big Man or something like that. The one where you get, where you get make money. I’ve been using that one.

1:53Yeah, I’m, so yeah, anyone doesn’t know me, I’m Saltorius, been in the space for quite a while since 2017, but currently I work at a dev shop called the best dev shop called Laser Technologies, where we support some of the biggest crypto shop, crypto companies in the space. But separate from that, I love building mini apps on Farcaster. So I’ve been on Farcaster for like a year, year and change. And I put out a few mini apps, some better than others. But the most recent one is a game that I made called Among Traders, which we’re going to play, I guess, later on the pod. But yeah, just the engineer by trade ship poster by

2:43Javi, I guess. So, what does Saltorius mean? Saltorius is actually a nickname my buddies from high school gave me. Like, I used to, I’m a big dude, so and my full name is Sagala, doxxing myself, I guess, but I went by Sal during school and me and my buddies used to just freestyle, hang out, You Know Hanging Out Just Freestyling In The Car Or Something Like That I Was Halfway Decent So They Called Me Saltorius S.I.G. I Like That I Like That I Just Chopped Off The S.I.G. And I Kept Saltorius Like Notorious I Like That S.I.G. I Like It Okay That’s Where The Username Came From It’s Probably The Best Like Nickname I’ve Gotten So Are You Going Freestyle For Us Sorry Are You Going Freestyle For Us

3:42Nah, man, I gave that up I had to ask, I had to ask I’d be a bad streamer if I didn’t ask Nah, yeah, it’s great to have you on Saltorius We had a great conversation a little bit ago When you were kind of just starting to release Among Traders I know you probably have a lot more thoughts now A few months down the road But do you want to give us, everyone, a rundown Of what Among Traders is And what we’re going to be playing today Yeah, for sure so it’s actually funny I didn’t really set out to make a game actually at the

4:17ETH Denver Hackathon or at the ETH Denver conference there was a hackathon and basically the whole like the track was around building with agents or doing something interesting with agents and I thought an underexplored an underexplored kind of thing was like putting a bunch of agents in a Room and having them deliberate to come to a conclusion about something. I’ve seen a bunch of stuff like that done in the past and definitely with older, shittier models like GPT-3 days. There’s something where these researchers from MIT made a bunch of agent personas and put them in a Minecraft world or something. And they all over time developed their own personalities and motives and assigned each other jobs and did really interesting things.

5:09stuff like that. So the original hackathon project was really just can I put a bunch of agents into a shared space, a shared digital space, and give them a challenge and then have them completely challenged. And that was kind of where it started. And then over the course of the week, it kind of threw, you know, conversations with a bunch of the other awesome builders who were at at the base house like Bribe, Maceo, Luciano,

5:43all the people who were there, it kind of transformed into, what if they like played a game of mafia? So it turned into, you create an agent based on your Farcaster profile. So it’ll create a whole identity for you. It’ll even go as far as to generate an image of the character and you can join a lobby Bobby, when the required number of people have joined the lobby, everybody’s agent is thrown into an XMTP server, and one of the agents is the killer. The killer agent is basically trying to survive to the end, so knocking off other people’s agents one by one until they’re the last one standing, and all of the other agents are trying to put together the clues

6:32Clues that the killer leaves behind and the clues of the overall environment scene to try to deliberate and figure out who the killer is. And as a user, as a player, you control your agent’s context pretty much. So each, there are seven classes and you can see more about more of this one like we actually play. There are seven classes, each have different sets of actions, and four verbs, expose, investigate, deceive, and protect. And each of the four verbs has four actions that are different per class. And each one of those actions essentially boil down to, am I strengthening my agent’s context or am I poisoning another agent’s context?

7:22So you can set traps, expose people, deceive people. If you’re the killer, that works really well. And then if you die, there’s another mechanic where you can play as a ghost. So you can leave clues through messages, text messages, or voicemails. It depends on the scene and the setting and the class that you’re playing. but each class’s ghost variant has mechanics that kind of help the people who are still alive. And yeah, the object is, if you’re the killer, you win. If you’re the killer and everybody dies before they figure out it’s you, you win. If you’re the town and you figure out who the killer is before they kill everybody, then the town wins. Yeah, so that’s pretty

8:15much the game. It’s like, what I was going for is, hang on one second, sorry. You’re totally good. I know that call. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, it’s been really fun to see the agentic context and And now hearing him talk more about the ability to think about memory as like the game asset and like it’s not your active actions, but it’s like the queue of actions that’s coming up. And that’s kind of like something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the context. I was intrigued by that. I was like, oh, you get to poison their context. I feel like that’s the whole like propaganda machine universe, right? It’s like, oh, we’re going to better mess them up right now.

9:06everybody mess up their context in the sheep but like that’s just me like really reducing something rapidly but I was just interested intrigued by that as like the dynamic right either to expand our own knowledge base or reduce other people’s or like reduce its validity as like a way to disempower or sorry we’re nerfing them with confusion yeah no worries yes little baby Downstairs So I guess I don’t know what happened

9:40Everything’s all good Sorry? How old is the baby? 10 months Okay Yeah, 10 month old baby downstairs So I guess my wife’s trying to juggle Something was going on It’s all good There you go Hey, Dubs, congrats to that, man Yeah, thank you, W Yeah, of course Thank you, thank you But I forgot what We were talking about the context part being really interesting, being able to poison the opponent. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s actually really funny. That’s one of the that’s obviously how you have, that’s how you, that’s your playstyle when you’re playing the game, right? What class you pick and how you decide to

10:20enrich your agent’s context or hurt other agent’s context. It also gets really interesting depending on the role that you have during the game. If you’re the killer, your playstyle becomes completely different and your approach to how you inject or not different pieces of context becomes like really important. Oh yeah, but I do remember what I was saying. What I was going for with the whole game is this idea of like social deduction games with an AI layer on top. I think that like when you think about like AI in games, it’s like in like an RPG or like an open world type of game game where you have NPCs that are AI driven and things are definitely going to get really

11:06interesting there as far as more intelligent, better AI systems in those large games, but even for small browser based, phone based, even games that have a different form factor, Twitter, how AI fits into it. And then also the idea that most of what people are doing with agents at the moment are all productivity based. Like, oh, an agent to answer emails for me or an agent that can run a Twitter account for me or something like that, which is cool, but at the end of the day, kind of uninteresting for 99% of people who aren’t Constantly working so like this this idea of like Slotting agentic systems into games and I think like social deduction games are

12:01The obvious like first step the first thing you can go for I like that. I think that’s a that’s super interesting. I think you know I align with that heavy is like a lot of people are like I want my bot to do this and this and I was like Those are kind of activities I like like running my twitter account and being social. I kind of like those things I like talking to people. So just seeing like applications where this is pretty interesting. And, you know, I used to, I used to get down on a little, you know, games like this with the homies, you know, back in the day, just IRL, you know what I’m saying? So I think this is going to be really cool. And I never, I never got down on it. So yeah, I think Z is going to, going to coach us all through it, man. I’m excited. But I set up my account here, got my little profile, man.

12:51Do you want to make sure you have your Farcaster and you want to pull up Among Traders as well? No, I was very curious what was happening. I do have Farcaster open and Among Traders open. Okay, sick. Well, let me pull it up on my side as well. He’s got a coach and I say, you know, I think that I’m behind the ball. Now you’re good, so check that out Little digital twin, this is All right, Jalen Roll Call Baptiste That’s a name That’s a name So yeah, I like this little You know, little generated Bio and traits and things And one thing that’s actually really funny

13:32About this, a quick aside If you read your So if you hit read more and read your character your bio, you might find it scary accurate to how your actual like online persona is. So we did on the first couple of days, Maceo might have been there, but on the first couple of days we were making them for everybody who was staying at the base house and we made one for Bribe. And I don’t know if you know Bribe, but he also runs the dude account and his description was so accurate to the point where the description was talking about him making generative NFTs he’s based on like how he felt, how he felt the vibe was at the time.

14:10And as we were reading him the description, that’s exactly what he was doing. Like in the base house, he like he was like, I’m going to make this NFT collection every day based on how I’m feeling. And his his character description, like said he was going to do that. It was like really, really scary. And like his character description also said that like he was like super into Palo Santo, like the sage sticks that you burn. and he had brought a bunch of Palo Santo for everybody at the base house. It was really funny. A couple of other people, one of the mini app first drops, were

14:40posting their character descriptions and being like, I feel attacked.

14:47Yeah, that’s a funny thing. That’s cool. That’s cool. Yeah. Runs an after-school tech lab. A repurposed classroom behind South LA Community Center. Yeah. Yeah, man. This is awesome. I dig it. Cool. Oh, real quick before we play too. I wanted to also, so recently I launched a Clanker for this and part of the, it has real implications into how you play the game as well. So I thought it’d be good to kind of explain that as well. So I launched a Clanker token. The idea of the token is to drive the game economy. Previously it was, you could purchase classes for USDC. Previously cards, but now classes. You could purchase

15:39them for USDC and it would enhance your play style. While some people did do that, games like this work way better with points like you’re earning and spending points. The way the token economy works is you can stake. There’s a little wallet thing up at the top. You can stake. You can buy and Stake Your Tokens. When you stake them, you can enter paid lobbies and your pay-in for the lobby comes out of your stake balance. So let’s say you stake 50 million tokens and you join a lobby. That’s a 1 million token entry. It takes the 1 million from your token balance. So now you have 49 million staked. And if you win, your winnings get added to your stake balance. And if you lose, they obviously get subtracted from your stake balance. And as a staker,

16:30All the 20% of the fees that are generated from trading activity on the token goes to the stakers. So you’re kind of incentivized. So if you win a ton, if you’re good at the game, you can stake, you can increase the stake, the, your stakes balance for free through playing. And then because your balance is increasing, the amount of payouts that you get through the fees coming in also goes up. So it’s like a, it’s like a, It’s like a culmination of all of the different things that I’ve learned in building mini apps. I think it’s kind of a nice system. If it works, the if it works is all dependent on how much volume is driven to the actual token. But yeah, working on different things to do that. But yeah, basically to participate in the game economy, buy some tokens, you can stake them. Staking them enables you to join paid lobbies. And then based on your performance in the paid lobbies,

17:30determines if your stake balance goes up or down. And if it goes up, then you earn more ETH through fees coming in. Interesting. ETH. I love that. I think there’s a lot of things we can touch on in that, you know, about let’s talk about ETH. So I just started a lobby and while we got people joining in with the three of us, and then I asked Altorius to potentially pop in a couple other AI agents so we could play with a six-person lobby here. Yeah, so we can wait. But while we’re doing that, I would love to touch on some of the parts of the ecosystem there you touch on with ETH, right? Like your token itself launched on Clanker, a token LaunchBlood that’s on base that has ETH as the token that you’re buying and getting money from.

18:23Then you also chatted about XMTP, which I think is a great thing for us to dive a little bit more into and what’s super powerful there on the protocol level. And then Farcaster as a whole for a social graph, for your AI agent to actually be able to create characters that are scary accurate and the ability to use a social graph. So I’d love to touch on kind of like those three things of this as we’re starting to get it ready. And then Onaji, if you want to share my screen. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess the first thing. So Clanker is kind of instrumental to this whole thing working the way. And I think we’re talking about sort of using fees in your project to do more than just collect revenue. Clanker makes it super easy.

19:15so the way that I personally set it up was when you launch a token you can select wallets that get distributed fees and you can even break it down by percentage. So I have the one percentage going to me or going to me for like operation expenses paying for all these tokens and stuff like that and then I had the other portion going to a smart contract that I wrote where anytime Anytime fees are claimed, the WEF goes directly into the smart contract, and then it gets distributed to the stakers based on how much they have staked. So it’s a completely hands-off system. Anyone can claim the fees. I don’t have to be the one to do it. If you just go to the token page on Clanker, anytime you hit claim fees, it goes right to the staking contract.

20:08contract. And that staking contract is set up and locked. I can’t do it. It’s an immutable contract, right? So I can’t do anything with it. And as part of the larger game contract, it also handles locking and unlocking. Locking and unlocking like stakes balances. So it’s all on chain, all viewable for all to see. And then the XMTP piece was, it started, honestly started as being able to hit a track in the hackathon, but it’s transformed into something that’s that’s like actually super, super useful. So like each agent, when it’s created, gets a wallet spun up. You need a wallet as your identity to to actually join an SMTP server.

20:51But they’re all siloed and all all instances within there. So at any point in time, you can go back on chain and see all the messages of the messages that the agents are sending, but then also for like orchestration on like the server side as far as like the technical implementation side of things. It Makes It Really Easy To Feed All The Context Back Into The Agents Without Having To Set Up My Own Like Server Or Web Socket To Be Able To Ingest And Transfer Messages So It Was Really Nice On That Piece So Like I Think Just Building Anything On Chain Like I’ve Approached It From This

21:37this mindset of like, why, why spend money on like a database or why spend like the time setting up the infrastructure on the database when we have the best database? Maybe not. We have an immutable database that already exists in being on chain. So everything, every project, I try to put as much things on chain and run as much of it on chain as possible just to have that immutability layer. But then, but also because it kind of makes, once you have the right workflow set up, it kind of makes my life, makes your life easier to develop or to like transfer data. Yeah. I have a question, right? I’ve heard a lot of people talk about application for blockchain for games. I’ve heard way less conversation around AI and specifically AI agents when it comes to games.

22:27Like I’ve never heard really outside of yourself, people be talking to me about AI agents in video games is like the unlock. And so I’m curious, what are the kinds, like, when you look back at games you’ve played in the course of your life, where do you see AI agents that have been superimposed to enhance the user experience? Just, like, having what you’ve been doing? So, I mean, like, when I think about, so, like, immediately the first thing I think about is, like, RPGs, right? Like, I played a lot of, I played, when I was really young, I played a lot of fighting games, like, it’s not really there, but then I played a lot of, like, Skyrim, I played a lot of, like, Just Cause,

23:02was a lot of those open world action RPGs. Agents there, conceptually sounds awesome. Like if you could have an NPC that has like a real, a real semblance of intelligence that might, that would do wonders for immersion and like how you actually interact with the game world. Now, technically, how does that work? No idea. I don’t know. I don’t know if that like we’re even close. The economics of it don’t really make sense But It kind of goes from being like, you know, choose your own adventure To like, every game is different implicitly Because it’s like Grand Theft Auto 5 is now a billion A billion timelines with three primary agents

23:46You can play and take a solo That’s pretty crazy So that would be, I think that’s like the You know, utopia Like, like ultimate End goal of like, how Agents would interact in like, just purely I feel like that’s the font for AI agents to replace people in the real world. Yeah, but then I think about these smaller online browser experiences. There’s actually a game called Bot or Not. Oh yeah, I’ve heard about that. Yeah, Bot or Not. So basically the idea is just a chat window opens, and you’re talking to someone who’s either a bot or a person, and you have a minute and 30 seconds to talk to them.

24:29And then at the end of your conversation, you have to determine whether it was a bot or not. And it’s actually kind of hard. And so like, like experiences like that, like online experiences like that, where you can do really creative things like, I’m sure there’s like game services that haven’t even been thought of yet. But it kind of opens up. So I think there’s like that, that one vision of like this super immersive RPG where every NPC effectively has its own inference engine where it can like make this like real impactful decisions on its own um and then there’s this other idea where i think we’re closer to now is you have these very

25:12very um directed like game loops very directed game flows but have an unagentic component to like to like turn your very linear experience it’s like a branching experience that can go one of many different directions just due to the fact that there’s like

25:31the the entropy of like talking to an agent where like you could get anything back. No, literally, I do get that. I’ve been I get that completely. I think that’s really cool, though, still, because I feel like that’s like there was that game where it was like infinitely generating space universes like like like six years ago. Yeah, 2018, 2019. No Man’s Sky. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that game was cooked when it came out. Yeah, I feel like this is like what that would look like really at scale. and like with like a render that’s like like instantaneous, you know, and actually driving nuance and where the entropy is, you know, as small as the fees on L2.

26:08Yeah, that’s cool. I appreciate you entertaining my question. Nah, that’s a good question. Okay, I joined with, we got six in there. Okay, do you want to pull it up? Absolutely. The server is going to wait a minute so that the last person who joined can choose a class. But yeah, if you hit open change class, there are seven classes plus one bonus class for a little thing that’s going to be happening at the end of the week.

26:39But yeah, each class has a different play style. You can see all of the classes if you go to this URL.

27:15I haven’t played a lot because there was a period of time where I couldn’t play because my ELO was too low, but I think Saltorius changed that Yeah, because I could I just couldn’t get into games because of that. But OK, so safety is a luxury amenity. One stolen credential ended that illusion. Doors sealed, routes narrowed. Every corridor became a checkpoint. Everyone learned how quickly certainty can turn. Then they found the first body. All right, boom. So, throwing right in, that was like a little intro video to set the setting, set the scene

28:04So, you know, as soon as they start deliberating, your action wheel is going to pop up And so, to explain basically how, like, the core game loop works is You have these influence points up top So, every 12 seconds, you get another influence point And then you can spend them on action So, every action costs a certain amount of points And so you’re basically deciding whether they’re going to spam a bunch of cheap action Reavail, a vent steward, is found dead near a restricted passage Security lockdown conditions have broken timelines And key witnesses disagree on the last clean minute So now the agents start deliberating

28:48You start with two influence points Then if you open up your actions wheel You have four choices that you can make so you might not be able to play anything yet but the way it goes is you pick an action you pick a target and then you pick what you want is this the cost uh so no that button right there is your special each class has a special uh the cost if you can i go back or oh yeah if you go back back to the top right so if you do like investigate for example or any one of them and then click on your target oh i see and then the cost is

29:23is at the bottom of this card. Oh, I see. Yeah. This is interesting. I might get hooked. So you can follow along what the agents are saying, so the agents themselves have agency in that they can read the room, basically they have access to all public, there’s public and private information, they have access to all public information and they can, they themselves are deliberating, they’re, they have their own motives. There’s like an internal pressure system where agents who agents who find a particular agent suspicious can assign pressure to them. But then as a user, when you play actions, you’re basically working off that same pressure system. So if you’re following along and you think you know who the killer is, you can start, you can start piling on actions to that person and then let your agent take the wheel.

30:21But the whole The skill expression that I’m trying to go For here is how well can You drive your agent So your agent has Your agent has control of deliberation Your agent has control of voting How well can you follow along With what’s going on and Play actions to like correctly Steer your agent into doing like what you Want him to do

30:53Bless you Bless you Okay I think it would be funny if we read these in our characters, but because my voice was going off, but that was because I was spamming actions. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to do that. My friend Ajax asking in the chat, like, so it’s like, yes, it’s like mafia with AI agents. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You’re not in full control, which is the cool part, right? You don’t have, you need to convince your digital twin to go the way you believe and maybe you’re wrong, but yeah, you might be wrong. And it’s not like, it’s not like you have to convince them, right? Like they’ll do what they, when you play an action, they do what the action says. But again, like you’re feeding it as context to an LLM. So there’s like a layer of

31:47Of Abstraction Before Like Your Actual Move Gets Played 30 Seconds And So I Was Mentioning This Before The Pod Started But Like Like The The The Difference Between Like Having An Idea For A Game And Like Building A Game That Has Like A Fun Core Game Loop Is Like Very Hard Like As A Tech Demo It’s Really Cool It’s Really Great But And then you have to layer in all of these other mechanics to make it an actual game so like the resource the influence system like the resources thinking about how you spend your actions and then like actually following along like that. That’s the core game that I’m going for. But yeah, and then okay, so we’re both the town to be really funny if if whoever sharing is actually the killer, but the killer now as the killer your action wheel will change.

32:53to act. You can select who like the next target is going to be. And if the killer doesn’t select anybody, then Oh, no, I’m dead. Oh, damn. Crying, dude. Zachariah, Saul, Bellamy, was found collapsed beneath. Oh, never mind.

33:14I’m weak. Oh, I don’t know if this is because I died. Yeah, no. It’s just refreshing. Oh, okay. I see. and then it’ll go live. Yeah, a couple of bugs I gotta fix. No stress? That’s sick. Yeah, okay. So, was found collapsed behind a glass display case in Founder’s Lounge. His jacket stained dark, where a single deep wound pierced just below the ribs. A shattered wine glass laid nearby is condensed bleeding into the polished floor alongside scattered portfolios and tagged prototypes from the donor showcase. Okay, this is long. i’m not gonna read this whole thing this is you’re doing a good job you’re doing a good job

33:55but you’re gonna do it in your voice too it’s just so long yeah and so that that’s another piece of like there are some people who enjoy like reading a book and there are some and there’s i feel like a lot more people who don’t so like this is obviously a text-based game yeah sweet so that there are some Some of the abilities to do stuff like generate audio or generate video. I’m going to save up my influence points because I think I have one that generates audio. So the agents have the ability to do stuff like that, like generate security footage showing like corroborating

34:36somebody’s alibi or generate an audio thing, which is like a voice memo of somebody who Died. But yeah, it’s largely text-based, which is definitely flavors the gameplay.

34:56My friend Isaac said, have you found which skill set in an agent is most likely to win? Yeah, like which class? Yeah, I guess. Yeah, so if you’re the killer, the provocateur is really good. And if you are the town, medium is actually pretty good because when you die the ghost wheel for other classes is kind of muted, but for medium it’s the strongest when you’re dead.

35:30That’s cool.

35:35I had blamed someone here. I don’t really know who. Then I died. Now people are saying that I was just chaotic. Which was the class, which is interesting But that was also, I think Using somebody’s action, so what does The investigate actually do, are you Is that the person asking a question Or is that behind the scenes I know, so it’s like a Public, well no, investigation Is a private action It also depends on the class, so like If you

36:12There’s a, I don’t know if you Can see in that chat that’s in StreamYard Or maybe I can share real quick I see it, yeah If you want to share this Oh, actually, I can just pull it up Yeah, so So each class, you can click on the drop-down The view abilities And then it will say what each thing does Oh, wow Each action is kind of dependent on Or each, like, effect For each verb is dependent on the class you’re playing I think it was the person I picked

36:52Very cool I Will Switch Back

36:57And So Now People Are Voting On Who To Take Off Marlon Has The Most Heat On

37:07Yeah Marlon’s Done Marlon’s Dead Rip Marlon Is That You Mateo? I’ve Been Eliminated Yeah Bro RIP Me Huh Gigi’s RIP In Peace Sheesh

37:23Now I Feel Like It’s One Of You Two I’m So Confused I’m Not Gonna Lie You were voted off by the people The people thought you were suspicious No, he was killed Oh

37:38So that happened after the vote It’s only if it’s successful I see Yes, we’re both confused But I’m still confused I was pulled off by the clip In secret So there’s only two people left There are no three people left So they have to vote the right person Onaji, it’s up to you so to me huh yes you can tell us because we’re all dead no wait yeah oh all three of us are dead right yeah we’re all dead yeah so you can tell us are you the killer are you killing i would i would that’s on my screen yeah i mean it would have shown up at some point brother i’m asking you

38:31i guess that would have been helpful information to seek out in the beginning you might not be i I imagine what are your actions right like you would deceive right now. Maybe he is. I don’t know. I know who it is, bro. You know who it is? My friend Isaac Talturius, he said he thinks the AI chat is too fast and too much. It’s hard for him to keep up with. Yeah. Yeah. So that’s the that’s a big because in order for them to like get enough information, they kind of have to be talking. but then at the same time it’s tough to follow along and then also I think there’s a small

39:07bug where it replays the past shots and that might be confusing stuff but yeah that’s the big and that’s part of designing a good gameplay loop where you have the player actions, you have the action economy but then follow along you either got to be really good at skimming the chat and picking it up or There needs to be some kind of summary system So I’m still working stuff like that out Well, I have a thought My dad, he’s like, shout out to him He really likes these AI generated audio books Yeah I throw my hands up, I don’t know how I feel about it

39:45He’s an actor, he’s talking about the scripts and all this stuff But AI audio books, okay But what I was going to say is I feel like this could be kind of a cool meta engagement Right, of like that kind of Could these chats be like turned into Like voiceover type agent like communication and so you’re actually listening to an evolving discourse between them in real time and then like it prompts you to respond versus like feeling like you’re trying to keep up with the content like I’ve been pressing buttons but I’m not gonna lie I’ve been really confused about what I’m doing. Yeah yeah so like like the uh basically the chat being read out to you. But like not even read out to me like as opposed to reading like a narrative it’s like almost like the people are talking like I want to be like a podcast like I’m in a podcast. Yeah yeah. I’m in the room with the people in the audience.

40:30It would also be cool to hear your agent’s inner thoughts. Like you could press a button to swap between the two. So you could either hear everyone else. And like while you listen to everyone else, you can press like, you know, swap and then it switches over to like, okay, like, what am I thinking internally? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? Like, it’d be, I think that would help Maceo and, you know, me and whoever else is like new to be like, oh, like, this is like, okay, this is what we’re, this is the action I’m doing. And this is why my agent’s thinking this. I like that. That’s like the first-person script in video games. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I like that. Here we go again. It’s like a GTA 5, right? Oh, okay. Here we go. We got a...

41:15What voice did they choose from that? Okay, so that was a seance. So seance backlash pressure applies. Interesting. one second, 30 seconds. So the three, there’s three people left. The two people have to vote on the killer. Otherwise, it’s over. Oh, so Torius, my friend Isaac said, can he bet on how it’s going? Ah, they found the killer. Which was me. Oh, it was. That’s why he got us. Look at that. They got you. They got you. So the question, can you bet on the outcome? Yeah. So there are, if you, if for one of the paid lobbies or if you start a paid lobby, you can open a prediction market along with it, which is basically three questions, like a custom prediction market based on the people in the game or the actual setting.

42:16and you can wager the game token on it and it works in the same way as paid lobby so when you wager it takes from your stake balance and if you win it adds it to your stake balance. So that exists right now. I think it’s a little underutilized just because I haven’t serviced it all that well. Another thing I wanted to do was leverage snaps so that when a game starts a snap gets posted to the timeline then people can just like Yolo bet on the prediction market, something like that. But I think like before any of that, I’m still working out the game move, right?

42:56Like there are things that – there are pieces that are interesting, which is mostly I think fucking with your agent’s context. But then the delivery to the player is like – it’s this weird combination of things have to be you need enough information to actually give the AIs to be able to play the game, but then you need to streamline it enough to

43:22deliver it to the person playing. Yeah, that’s all in all it’s kind of hard to make a game. No, but it’s kind of cool because even when you were saying that, it made me go back to Zaw, I really like what you said about the inner thoughts. I think that’s way better than what I’ve said. I have another idea on top of that. Before you even go there, I was going to say that I think then like that snap could be like the game commentators. Like you’re actually in a third person window and they’re talking about what’s going on. So you’re still getting like a chat conversation

43:53that’s not like a lot of stuff to ingest. And now you’re like, you’re almost like a poly market on the likelihood of certain outcomes happening that are inevitably only possible given certain things happening to make them possible. But people could still gamble on things they make up themselves and how could that influence the agent’s choices and the context in the game. I don’t know, it could be kind of arbitrary but it could be cool if that market could actually influence the game in a randomized kind of way I love that Yeah, no, I was thinking it would be really interesting as a user one thing you can’t do in games

44:27like this sometimes is actually contextualize all of the memory and information and like not repeat information because you don’t know you learned it already like let’s say at the very beginning someone claims that they went from XYZ to XYZ place and then they change that multiple times or whatever, the ability to potentially as a user query that context or visually potentially see something could be really interesting because it’s something that you get that you don’t have an opportunity in any other game because it’s kind of all in your brain. so like having some kind of documentation and visual like representation of like what context you have learned by asking things I think could just be beneficial too right yeah yeah it’s fun it’s actually really really uh really nice to see um this live because I actually have like I did a live play test when it first came when it first when I like first released the mini app and I got like some really good feedback but I haven’t

45:34like actually seen anyone else play the game so this is this is true yeah yeah we’re in here hell yeah well uh i was curious if you wanted to share any last things any any last final words notorious as we’re uh getting to the end here or any any other questions from um i have questions honestly so we want to say final things about the game before i kind of shift yeah i guess i guess final things about the game. A lot of work was done up front to make the economy and the ecosystem work. And so as I learn more and as I get more feedback, game loop is going to improve. And I think that this is a very new sort of, I think the surface area for these agentic experiences within games are

46:32Something that’s super underexplored and I’m excited to do that. But more generally, I’ve said this a hundred times on a few different podcasts. Farcaster is by far the best place to build. You can have an idea or something and have it up and running in a couple of days and then get your first hundred users a couple of days after that. And it’s just really, it’s really, I’m having a ton of fun on Farcaster. So yeah. Fuck yeah Well, I kind of Do you want to see them, Brian? I was just going to say, is that the The best place to contact you and stay

47:13Yeah, yeah, yeah Southsawyer.eth on Farcaster DMs are open Tag me, whatever

47:21I’m What do they call it? Terminally online So, I’ll see it

47:27I think that’s true I was going to ask you, like, how long you been In the Ethereum ecosystem? How long you been and Building on Chain.

47:35Since 2018. So I got into crypto as like a degen trader in 2016 and then very quickly realized I can’t trade. So I was already professionally, I was already doing some like software development stuff, more on like the automation side. But I kind of Learned about I obviously learned about Bitcoin first But then learned about ETH and learned about Effectively programmable money And I went all in Pretty much I was working in investment banking at the time I quit my job and I went all in To working in Web3 What would you say to the Average American on the corner who heard you Say programmable money and was like

48:22What did that mean?

48:27I would say a lot I would say I would say I think for like the average, the average person when it comes to money, it’s really how can I get more? And there are maybe now isn’t the best time to kind of espouse this. But there are financial tools available to the average person that previously were gatecapped by loans.

49:00The fact that I can take some amount of ETH or any asset and put it up as collateral and get a loan on it without any intermediaries is huge. And the fact that I can, you know, lend out my assets and get a real return on it better than any bank account would ever give me, that’s huge. And I think that for the average person,

49:29Obviously, we have a bit of ways to go as an industry to like really not only on the security side, as we’ve seen with like all the Aave stuff and layer zero stuff over the past couple of weeks, but also on the usability side. But then also, yeah, the education side, like why should you as a person have to talk to some guy from some bank in order to like in order to get a lot if you have the collateral to do it, then you should just be able to do it. and there should be no intermediaries. So that’s the biggest, that’s the biggest sell for me.

50:02That’s what I tell my family at Thanksgiving when they ask what I’m up to. I’m like, you like, you ever heard of crypto? But yeah, that’s my pitch. I love that. I appreciate that. And then I have one follow up, right? Cause this, this podcast, I kind of initially was thinking, right, who benefits from how Ethereum is being built, you know? And is this technology fulfilling, fulfilling on its mission? It’s kind of like a through line. we hit some episodes and miss others, but I’ve been thinking a lot more like how do we kind of make sure it’s consistent? So I’m curious for you. Do you feel like Ethereum is doing what you think it was designed to do?

50:37Broadly, yeah I’m a broad sense. Yes

50:45Permission being able to permission permissionless. So before it’s actually done Before I joined Farcaster before I was working at laser I Used To Run A Tournament Platform Called GU Stakes It Was Like The Community Tournament Builder For The Web 3 Trading Card Game Gods And Chains So Before They Were Trying To Run A Competitive Esports League And They Were Hiring Tournament Admins That Had No Idea About The Game They Didn’t Know Any Of The Rules They Didn’t Know Anything So The Integrity Of The Actual Matches Was Pretty Low someone would cheat and the moderators wouldn’t know the rule set so they would get moved on. I built a tournament

51:30system that basically plugged into the game’s API and had concrete code rules that allowed or banned certain sets or basically moderated the game for the community. On top of that, I built the payment rails for being able to join a tournament with crypto and and then have those funds be held in escrow and then pay out the winner. And then that started as like one V one bets, right? So like you would put up 10 bucks, I’d put up 10 bucks, we would play and then the winner would get the pot. And I started that, I did that over time, like it’s been running for around like four or five years,

52:12hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of this, of that time have run through those contracts. And when I was starting, I kind of, I was learning solidity and I was really starting on my own. I was thinking, if I wanted to do this without crypto, I don’t think it would be possible. I don’t think I’d actually be able to make this. It was just somebody who enjoyed the game and wanted to build something cool on top of it, and I could. It has led me into all the other cool experiences that I’ve gotten to do. I got to speak at NFT NYC twice or three times because of

52:50of just that one little, oh, I think this is cool, maybe I can make it, oh, I can, and then it’s just a cascading series of events like that, where it’s like, oh, this is cool, can I do it? Oh, I can, oh, it’s super easy, oh, I don’t have to ask anybody. So I think that, more than anything, has been, I guess, a goal of Ethereum that has definitely been reached. you can permission is permissionlessly do anything and generate real value off of just an idea. And it’s a real meritocracy in that the best ideas generally rise to the top.

53:31Well said, I like that. I would agree. I think they’re the stickiest, right? Like nobody wants to hang out around something that’s boring and it doesn’t make money in the casino of like every day. Somebody trying to get you to come over here and make money and have fun. It’s like, when Lambo Everybody’s like, where, where, where I feel like it’s kind of like Yeah, but I think this What you’re doing is really interesting, and I think experimenting At this intersection is particularly Interesting as well Yeah, and You know, I’m a serial tinkerer So There’ll be more, there’s more Projects that I have in mind, have in the works

54:10Some particularly Interesting that I’m actually Really excited about So keep a look out It’s not a game It’s a bot Okay Like a feed bot, like a bot in the feed? Yeah, bot in the feed Okay, that’s lit I’m excited about that Me too We’re ready for the bot in the chat That’s what I have to say Isaac said, when does the app launch on the App Store? This app? Yeah Not for a while, brother Well, that’s kind of the beauty of it You can’t really just launch an app on the App Store Yeah, you have to, especially if there are crypto elements, like you have to jump through hoops. And even just to get like a test flight app up, you have to pay $100 to get Apple developer account, which is like, in the grand scheme of things, not that much, but it’s still, you can’t just go do it. Like you gotta, you gotta come through through Apple.

55:06Well, I’m even saying to create your digital twin, you need your Farcaster social context. Yes. So one thing that I did do early was I made hooks to be able to create one using a Twitter account as well. But the Twitter API is dummy expensive. So I don’t know. I don’t know.

55:27I have a plan. I think, you know, definitely, I think that it works well for Forecaster because of the concept of mini apps being in feed, the concept of the social graph, like being able to use and build on top of the social graph. With Twitter, I think it’s a completely different strategy. So yeah, at the moment I think making the game experience Way better Is the move And getting a bunch of that feedback From Farcaster Is the obvious place to do it And then expand from there Once the game is super solid Once you can hop in And know exactly what’s going on Without being like

56:15I’m spamming actions I don’t really know what’s happening

56:20No, but Isaac’s asking about it Isaac, you have a Farcaster account, you’re a Waffle House from a Farcaster, I don’t know, he’s saying all that like I didn’t set him up, I set him up

56:30That’s awesome But yeah, no, it was awesome having you, Saltorius, it was great to run a game a game playthrough definitely excited to dive deeper one of the things I was thinking was, I think though I have had positive experiences spamming things and not knowing like exactly what I’m doing. I mean it’s not the best to play Smash doing that but like I can have a positive experience just button mashing, right? So I do think there is a valuable space for that as well. Yeah. Yeah. Maceo, do you want to close us off? I’m going to hit you with one more question. Okay. We’ve been going out and doing like video journalism

57:14bounties kind of and so using poidh, Pixar didn’t happen and Well, essentially like go out and shoot videos and ask these different questions. Right. And so we have a different questions up right now. We have one go find someone who remembers which Onaji submitted to shout out be where people can go out and interview somebody over the age of 75 and ask them, you know, how have they seen the world change and how has the world changed them? And I’m curious in that kind of vein, what’s one take or question you’d want to go out and have us farm the world for so you could see across contexts. Oh, command or perspective on something.

57:47What’s your question for the world That’s a good question

57:55That’s a really good question Maybe honestly, you know what You know what’s funny, I’ve seen so much Like I see I see this on Farcaster all the time Where people are like People are like I pull like A random poll has been like 70% of Americans Hate AI, and then they’re like What? How? Because like everybody Pretty much on Farcaster, but like even Twitter, too, are in this bubble where everybody, every one of us are using every day in some capacity to like, like if like the on like the top end of the distribution, like everybody else is not using it at all. So maybe like how do you feel about AI generally?

58:36How do you what is what is your what is your opinion of AI and how it’s being and how it’s going to affect everybody’s lives in the next three years? because I think that’s a very funny a very funny like very funny opposing views where people hear to see that and they’re like how how is that even possible AI is the best thing that has ever happened ever but you’re like the 10% of you’re in the 10% of people who think that and you think everybody thinks that because every online space that you’re in are filled with other people who are completely AI pilled So yeah, I think that’d be cool

59:17It’d be interesting Okay, we asked that actually early on But we didn’t really have participation at scale And I feel like now we have people Who are going out in Kenya on Sunday People in Nigeria have been going out I’ve been going out My friend Devin’s going out tomorrow So he says, I’m holding him accountable This is our week So I’m going to push it out there Thank you, man But with that, I really appreciate you coming on The Let’s Talk About ETH Around the World podcast Shout out to you I know you’re Globetrotting right now I’m going to be in France tomorrow I’m going to be in Rome

59:50On Sunday For Farcon So that’s going to be fun A little traveling for me next week or so And then I’m locked in Locked in for the next couple months Hey man, well go get inspired man Thank you so much for taking this time with us You got it all going on And you still come in here and spend some time with us And let us play your game with you So it’s an honor to play with you Yeah, and thank you guys Thank you guys for having me on, thank y’all for playing Got a lot of good A lot of good data, so Games won’t be that much better

60:22Let’s go, it’s an iterative Season, yes sir Awesome, alright, I guess I should count us out Thank you everybody for coming and watching Another episode of Let’s Talk About ETH Around the World We’re having a good time We’re having a good conversation and we’re letting people Know the world computer is here to stay And make a big difference, let’s go, thanks for Watching, peace, alright