Odd Lots - This Is What Happened When They Tried To Fix Journalism Using Blockchain

Episode Date: September 24, 2020

Back in 2017, during the Bitcoin boom, there were a number of different attempts to use blockchain technology to improve a host of businesses and industries. Many of those were cynical attempts to cash in on the bubble, but some did have loftier ambitions. On this episode of Odd Lots, we speak with Maria Bustillos, who was the co-founder of a project called Civil, which aimed to fund a series of newsrooms, backed by their own Ethereum-based token. Maria talked about what the vision was, why it didn't work, and the lessons learned for journalism business models and new endeavors.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm June Grasso, inviting you to join me for the Bloomberg Law podcast. Every weekday, we help you make sense of the legal stories that shape the nation and the world. Listen for complete analysis of the biggest court cases, the latest actions from Congress and regulators, and the legal moves driving the markets, from corporate law to constitutional law, and from state courts to the Supreme Court. At Bloomberg Law, we go beyond the day's headlines. We speak with top attorneys, judges, scholars and policy experts to break down what the rulings really mean. We do this every weekday,

then bring you the best conversations in our daily podcast. Search for Bloomberg Law on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or anywhere else you listen. On the East Coast, listen as you start your day, and on the West Coast, catch up in the evening. That's the Bloomberg Law podcast with me, June Grasso. Subscribe today wherever you get your podcast. Oh, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. Unfortunately, my colleague, Tracy Alloway, is out again this week, so it's just going to be me. And I'm going to be talking again kind of about the broader crypto world.

But I think a really interesting different story this time. So listeners might remember that in 2017... during the last cryptocurrency boom when Bitcoin was taking off, there were all these follow-on coin offerings. And beyond just that, beyond just other coins, there are all these ideas about how different industries could be transformed via blockchain technology in some way or tokens or their own cryptocurrencies.

And there were stories about putting banana trade on the blockchain with a currency and dentistry, having its own currency, and all kinds of weird things that never really took off. Tomatoes. It was a famous story about putting the tomato trade on the blockchain. Anyway, none of that has really taken off. And at the time when a lot of this was going on,

I thought a lot of these endeavors were kind of cynical, just attempting to cash in on the hot market for coins in general without much purpose. But some of the projects actually did seem sincere. And today we're going to be talking about, one such project that did sincerely try to solve an interesting problem, and that problem was journalism. And so the question was, could this technology, could a currency somehow help build a sustainable journalism business model in some way that existing subscriptions or existing models weren't capturing well or weren't doing a good job of? So I'm very excited about our guest.

I'm going to be speaking with Maria Bustillos. She's the founding editor of Popula. She has a new endeavor called the Brickhouse Co-op. But several years ago, she was a co-founder of a project called Civil, which attempted to create a new journalism business model and, in part, using its own cryptocurrency. We're going to be talking about what she learned from that project and the sort of potential and limits of the technology should be very interesting discussion for both people interested in finance and markets and how markets create incentives, but also journalism and journalism business

models. So without further ado, I want to bring in Maria. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here, Joe. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting your story. But it's always, I've been following you in your career on Twitter from afar for a long time. We've never talked before, but it's always seemed interesting and you seem to have a inclination to experiment and try new things and be open-minded about new ideas in a way that strike to be is kind of rare for this industry, to be honest. But I'm just sort of curious your background first, you know, how you got into journalism and how you got interested then in the sort of world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. Well, I am kind of a serial entrepreneur, really. I started my first business when I was in my early 20s as a designer of like overpriced chakas for the home.

And then I sold that and opened kind of like a proto Etsy in 1998. Like I was always really interested in the internet computers. I met my husband on Prodigy, you know. So I kind of came at. journalism from an interest in the internet and you know how a long time interest in sort of research and writing and entrepreneurial stuff and my husband's a wall street guy so um there was a lot of business in our in our house business talk and that's kind of how i how i approached it to start with but i mean you know i love sort of literature and and blogs and uh i wound up going to um see that terrible

movie Avatar with my husband and I just hated it so much and I just came home and banged out this like absolute screed about how awful it was and sent it to my favorite blog to Corey Sika and he printed it and that became my job like 11 years ago almost that's awesome I love I love stories like that I feel like so many of the most interesting people in media came at it from some angle where they didn't originally intend to be in journalism, but then all these new tools opened up and they realized they could write and they're like, oh, this is pretty cool. And that's a pretty great story. I love it. I like, this is my favorite job by far. And there's, there's a lot of work to do in it. So I've been really fortunate to be the forefront of some really interesting projects. A lot of short daily news podcasts focus on just one story. But right now, you probably need more on a Up First from NPR, we bring you three of the world's top headlines every day in under 15 minutes because no one's story can capture all that's happening in this big, crazy world of ours on any given morning.

Listen now to the Up First podcast from NPR. So let's talk about civil. And I, this, civil, you can describe it, but it got a lot of attention from the sort of like media world. media, the media world's always upset with like media business models and sustainable journalism and who's going to pay for journalism and, you know, understandable and why there's so much concern. But talk to me about that project. When was it conceived and sort of what was the problem you were trying to solve? Well, the interesting thing is I had been really interested in founding a blockchain-based journalism publishing platform like before civil contacted me. It was

like this really weird coincidence, you know, because I had been interested in Bitcoin and blockchain technology from very shortly after it started, you know, maybe 2010, 2011. I started looking into it. And I wrote about Bitcoin for the first time in 2013 for the New Yorker blog. I was, you know, people all thought it was very weird at that point. And I mean, it is really weird. It's still weird for sure. Yeah. I know. Well, what interesting is, me about it always was here is a way to produce incorruptible records and they cannot be altered. And I have a very big interest in archiving in general. And so I kind of still see that as the most valuable aspect of blockchain technology.

That's what, you know, people talk about applying it to voting. They talk about applying it to cold chain, you know, supply chain, like all this stuff. What they're really talking about is that. They're incorruptible records or unfalsifiable records because they're distributed. So when you kind of apply that idea to journalism very separately from the idea of a currency or a token, it looks different, right? It's like this is a way to record things. I was really fortunate, you know, as able to be the first person ever to commit the full

text of a news story directly into the Ethereum blockchain. This is like really important, right? This is an IPFS or some other kind of corruptible distributed things. It's like it cannot be changed until you basically have to shut off the internet once you have recorded something in the Ethereum blockchain. It's now on what like, you know, a fluctuating number of computers, but tens of thousands of computers. There's always going to be a record of it. Kind of like there used to be micro-feas records of newspapers. It's very similar to that.

You can't falsify that. I like wrote about Barack Obama's birth records, you know, like really there was an unfalsifiable microfish in Hawaii. If that had not existed, it would have given a lot more oxygen to the birth or movement, but there were unfalsifiable records in that library. And so I kind of view what blockchain can do for journalism as being related to that. So I've been looking for a way to, you know, to instantiate these ideas. And then I got this phone call, like just out of the clear blue from Josh Benson at Old Town Media, who had been consulting for Civil. And what it was, it was a consensus-funded project.

I mean, at that point, you know, end of 2017, the price of Ethereum got to 1,400, I think, at the end of that year. And so it would go down, you know, between that point and the bottom, I think, was, So consensus was very flush with cash money and they were throwing it around at a lot of projects that were, you know, sort of had a social, you know, component of some kind, you know, or there's a do-gooder stuff, you know, there's like, they just had unlimited money and they were handing it out. And so this is consensus. So this is one of the one of the original sort of co-founders of the Ethereum Prize. project started a company called Consensus, which I think characterizes itself as a development studio for Ethereum projects. And as part of it, they fund various endeavors designed to build something atop the network. Yes. Joe Lubin, you know, funded civil directly. And I think it was

originally like $5 million or something like that. It was a really substantial investment. And so So, you know, there was money in it and it was the idea that I wanted to work on. And I'm like, oh, my God. They're like, we want to start a blockchain-based project. I'm like, sit down. Let me tell you what we're going to do. But, you know, it was really fun. And a lot of the ideas in it are, I haven't changed my mind about any of it, really.

But what happened is that the crypto winter came and, you know, kind of why well, you know, regulators didn't like all these ICOs, you know, there started being a lot of money raised in those markets. And I mean, I don't know. I know that this is maybe a slightly crazy idea, but I think that regulators watching those markets swell up, you know, and seeing like an actual direct threat to the regular capital markets, you know, started paying a lot of attention. And suddenly it became, you know, very difficult to do an ICAO. You know, you say direct threat to capital markets. A cynic might say a bunch of people got fleeced on some of these huge things because the projects were always sort of. That is 100% true.

You know, some of these mega ones never really took off. Extraordinary amount of money raised. Extraordinary amount of short-term speculation. Assets that by many accounts look like traditional security regulations whose purpose exist to protect investors in theory, lost a ton of money. 100% true. I mean, and go past that. There was like scams galore, right? Right.

Like, there's also scams galore. This is fiat market. So it's kind of, I mean, people forget this. But so like this is what I was saying in the intro, which is that at the time, you know, I was like, there struck me as a lot of projects that had no purpose other than to cash in on the hot market. And when Sybil launched and seeing the participation of people like yourself and other sort of like longtime veterans of the media industry, it had a pretty impressive roster, it did not look to me like a sort of get rich quick thing by any stretch. And so that's why at least seemed different than all these other projects. And so like what was the premise? Because it wasn't actually putting content on the blockchain, right?

Well, it was for me. I mean, there's one thing, right? There's a number of things that you can do with this technology. Like, for example, you know, comments. Yeah. You can, like, I actually built this with the last of my civil many because I was just so interested in it, a popular, which tiny, tiny little laboratory.

It's still it works, you know. You can only put a comment on a popular story if you're a paying subscriber, and it costs five cents worth of eat to do that. And what this does is make zero spam. You don't have to have any kind of, like, that's just one thing. There's a hundred things like this that you can do with it, right? But the way it was supposed to work was the token, it was an ERC token, which is like sort of, you know,

Ethereum is kind of like programmable currency, right? It's like Bitcoin that you can put code to it. And so you have a token that is specific to a certain project or set of properties or people or whatever. You can program it to be for one purpose. Now, if you have like a journalism denominated token, let's say you have to purchase subscriptions using the token. You have to do your comments using the token. You have to, like, you create like an economic world that's denominated in this token.

And so, you know, what I, like, I was really excited about things like micro-tipping. This was like a huge, huge thing for me. Microtipping is still huge. And we can do this popular right now. I mean, very few people have eaten. Right. So, I mean, at the same time that this whole thing is happening, the market is contracting. You know, there was some regulatory blows that were, well, the one fatal one, I think, was when FinCEN decided,

it tightened the rules for what counted as a money transfer business. Like, what it sort of meant was if I were to tip, you know, popular writer, in ETH and Popula is holding that ETH for the writer. I'm now a money transfer. Right. Potentially. Now, it costs $3 million a year to get licensed for that, like in all 50 states because it's like a state regulated thing.

And so they made it impossible for these projects to be viable. And it kind of all goes hand in glove. You know, the price is crashing. The confidence is, you know, eroding. and all this stuff kind of happened at the same time. But what it was supposed to do is stuff like that is make it possible to do like frictionless micro-tipping really, really cheap. Well, so I want to actually, before you go any further,

I want to ask about that point specifically because the idea of sort of micro-payments for content for journalism, people have fantasized about this for a while. And from what I understand, and I've never been, never been directly involved in any of these projects. But from what I understand, the issue is never really, I mean, maybe the issue is partly the cost, but also the issue is sort of the mental cost. Do I want to think about doing a transaction every time I make a comment or load an article or whatever? Like that is sort of like a mental tax. And when I think about

doing that in a cryptocurrency, which is already like 10 times more complicated, it's like, okay, I'm going to like pay an ETH, and now I have to check the ETH to U.S. dollar exchange rates, and I have to have my separate, like, okay, I'm going to have to go buy some ETH, and then I have to convert that into the civil token, and I have to hold that into a wallet, and I need to remember my password for the wallet, and if I don't, then all that money is gone. It always struck me as like, all right, so we've taken all of the difficulties of micropayments, which we know are enormous, and added about five different complicated uncomfortables. layers on top of it. So tell me why that perception is wrong, because that's my outside

perception of the challenge. Yeah, well, it's, you can do it today. And it's really easy with a MetaMask wallet that just sits in your browser. And this was envisioned, right, when we started, MetaMask was like well on its way. You can do MetaMask on mobile. This is a, MetaMask is a browser-based Ethereum wallet, right, that allows you. you to hold Ethereum and any Ethereum-based tokens such as the civil token. And when we started, the idea was, well, by that time, you'll be able to buy ETH with a credit card, it'll take five seconds. Right.

And so, but I mean, right now, if you just, if you, if you get through the hoops, which is like roughly like opening a bank account, you know, to open a crypto account at, you know, Coinbase or whatever, you have to show them, you know, picture ID and all that kind of junk. But, you know, you can buy Ethereum and you can put it in your browser and it's just, you know, always there. So you don't actually have to think about anything that like my theory of it was I had this moment when we were in development and I read this really good story that Frank Rich had written about the history of his his career, you know, he's in New York Magazine or something. And I got to the

end and he has really been a lot to me in my career. I just think he's such a wonderful writer. And so I got to the end of this thing and I thought, if I could send this guy $50 right now just so he knows, you know, what he just as a way of saying, I appreciate this piece. You've done so much for me. I don't know. I would send it. And so I thought this is going to work, right? There's this moment of passion at the end, like after you hear the song or whatever, after you read the story, that your heart opens to the idea of contributing to that person's welfare directly. I think it's very important. And so you can do that right now at Paukula using a metamasker. wallet, it really, once you set it up, it takes five seconds. It doesn't interfere with you in any way.

You just click two buttons. All the exchange and all that stuff is handled in a very smooth, seamless, very simple way. You just say, you want to do it in dollars. You want to send $50. It just automatically does the e-transfer, whatever price it's at at that point. And considering the problems that they were getting this thing started, it's remarkably simple right now. So, but I mean, you know, people are afraid of it. And I mean, with good reason. They should be careful, just like they should be careful with their regular money, just like they should be careful not to let their credit card number be stolen. I mean, these are problems that exist in all of every economic transaction. You know, if there is a store of value that somebody can seize, they will do it.

And in the case of crypto, you can seize someone's assets with a very little risk of being caught, although that risk has increased substantially. So I'm still a big believer in all these, in all these principles. It's just not a way to do it now. Why not dollar? Like if I go to, if I see, like this is still, I guess, you know, if it's about tipping. So, you know, I think we want to, if we sort of decompose the question of how the technology could be applied to journalism. There's the first thing that you've described, which is super powerful to me, the idea of creating a truly permanent record. And as you say, if you have a sufficient network of enough computers and enough hash power, you could inscribe something onto the blockchain as you have done or onto a blockchain that really cannot ever be tampered with.

And that's pretty powerful. When it comes to something like tipping, it could be done with dollars. I mean, Venmo exists. Again, that's a mobile thing. But right, like the Apple Pay exists. what is the idea by which a cryptocurrency solves this problem and creates new incentives for journalism business models that didn't exist? We've seen many attempts at micro-tipping.

They never took off because the transaction costs were too high. You know, the tips at popular. I mean, we've only taken, you know, fewer than a thousand so far. But like, they're quite often like 10 cents, you know, 25 cents, which would be great, right? if there were a way to do that. All these other technologies didn't work out because they became keeping track of the transactions. It's very bloated.

This is a great thing that crypto, really blockchain technology can do. It's like it removes the overhead and creates like a bulletproof audit trail for every transaction. You can have a quite complicated system where people are leaving each other 10 and 25 cents, and it doesn't create any sort of accounting overhead at all. It's all done automatically.

So that's like a huge thing. The other thing is, you know, the system I have right now, if you write a comment and you pay your five cents and you write your comment, that comment is also eligible for tips. The idea is to create an economy of discourse. So here's something I wondered. Okay, let's talk a little bit more about the civil structure. and how it was supposed to work.

And so the idea was it was going to be this token offering. And tell me if I'm wrong, but this was my impression from the outside, there was this token offering that was going to raise some money. Then that was going to fund a series of newsrooms. There were like sort of multiple journalism endeavors under the civil umbrella. And then that token would be used to, A, fund the newsrooms, and then people would have that and they could. Then what happens from there? Like, what is the purpose of the token after? the sort of fundraise to get the initial see the journalism what is its purpose there and how and why and why

would it go up or down at that point like what makes it fluctuate okay so there were multiple projects going on at the same time there was a token curated registry have you heard of this yeah but only kind of so maybe explain okay so they i was not in favor of having this be the first project but it was the first project at civil and what it was supposed to do do is actually determine who was allowed to publish. And it was supposed to be like the community itself is sort of this self-policing thing. There was like a civil code of conduct. It was like it was actually pretty good.

I helped them work on it. A bunch of us did. It was like, you know, no plagiarism and make your best efforts to verify what you print and all this kind of stuff. And the idea was the community would cause new, new applicants to come in and stake a certain amount of tokens. And then people would decide between themselves whether or not this person is okay. And it's sort of like an entrance fee or whatever that is then sort of held by the company.

But if people want to complain, then they have to stake tokens. And they say like, you're a neo-Nazi, whatever. And so like, I'm going to stake these tokens and vote you out. And so like if there's, it's kind of like a voting situation, but you vote with the token. And so you allow people into the network or you throw them out, you know, based on this sort of token governance system. There have been many attempts at token curated registry before civil happened. And they have all failed because, you know, I think the idea is not without merit,

but it's not ready for prime time by any means. It depends on, you know, a large group of people having enough overhead to pay attention to the rules and to sit there and vet. This is work, you know, vetting a newsroom, deciding whether or not they've committed plagiarism or whether or not they're adhering to this code of conduct, however simple it is. A bunch of people have to sit there and, you know, spend valuable time looking at some bozo's website. You know, it was insanity. So I was fond about that. But I mean. But the idea, the premise was, is that there are all these contentious fights that.

happen online all the time? Is this tweet misleading? Is this Facebook post a lie? Is this hate speech, etc? And the hope was that if there were some sort of monetary stake involved in the debate, that that could resolve these questions in an agreeable way for the community. Exactly. And even the right to the right to publish itself, you know, was contingent. You know, The thing is I took a lot of civil tokens as a compensation for this thing. You know, the idea and the way that the ICOs were going when we first started looking into this, it was a great bet, you know, because like any Ethereum is not the token was going to like, I was having a ball, you know. Right. And I just like to roll the dice.

But I mean, I believed in it hugely. I still do. Because the thing is if you have a, you don't really need to call it a token, right? but if you have a community that is linked and within its economy is interlinked, all the participants have a stake in what is going on. And it's frictionless way of recording things that happen. That would be great for this industry. It would still be great.

The problem is how to make those principles attainable within the current frameworks that we have. And they're not right now. You know, something I was thinking about. So, like, when I first got into writing, I just started, you know, blogging. And I just, like, set up a, I don't know, I think it was like 2005 and I set up a typepad account. And I just started blogging and, you know, just for the fun of it. You know, when you mentioned, like, these tips of, like, sometimes just a few pennies or 10 cents or 25 cents. Like, does that ever sort of, I don't know, I could see that having a negative effect.

Because here you are thinking, like, I'm just doing, you know, I kind of wanted to do it for the fun of it. And then it's like, oh, great. I got 75 cents, which is really not that much money. For a thing, it's like, that's what it's worth to people. Like, I would, it doesn't, it seems like that would be perhaps, even though it is technically some sort of compensation, that that might have a sort of deterring or demoralizing effect. It's like, that's it. Well, that's a very mercenary joke. No, but it's like, I'm saying like once you establish the idea, like, it's one thing if you're just like, I want to like be part of the conversation.

This looks fun. I want to blog. I want to write my take on a movie that I just saw. I want to take down an article that I read in the New York Times and I want to write a thing debunking it. You're a great blogger. Well, those, you know, that's like what I felt like motivated. And then it's like you introduce the idea of like, okay, I'm going to join this network or be part of this network of and there's going to be some compensation. and then people like send a few tips and they come out to a dollar 50 it's like I would rather

just sort of I don't know I feel like that would be a less I feel like that would be a countermotivator well I don't know I disagree I dig it it's it's sort of like a when if somebody comments favorably on your work with no money attached to it it's I find that pleasurable the idea that somebody's reading it yeah it's pleasurable to me and you know I agree completely I mean that to me, like, that's the fun part. Right. So you have that plus this other thing. That's just a goofball thing, right? Yeah.

But I mean, what people are really doing is entering into a dialogue with you. It's had a little money attached to it. That's fine. It's fine. It's good. The news doesn't stop on the weekends. Context changes constantly. And now Bloomberg is the place to stay on top of it all. Hi, I'm David Gurra. Join us every Saturday and Sunday for the new Bloomberg this weekend.

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Saturdays and Sundays starting at 7 a.m. Eastern. Make us part of your weekend routine on Bloomberg Television, radio, and wherever you get your podcasts. So, you know, you mentioned that I want to sort of talk about your new project in a second, but you mentioned that at the time, that you got this going in Civil launched its token. At the time, it was still like, all these tokens were just flying to the moon and making a fortune, and it was probably like a good bet to hold on to them.

Do you think actually you were penalized in part because it was a serious project designed to solve a serious problem and not the sort of get rich quick scheme slash scam that other people are running? Oh, no, not a bit. I mean, yeah, no, I think it was, we were just one of this, huge constellation of projects in the consensus universe. They were starting so many things at once because this huge amount of wealth had just ballooned, like, so fast. And so the seriousness or otherwise of a project was like the absolute least consideration.

You know, it's kind of like just look at all this millions of things that we all have to run to do this as quickly as we can. Yeah. You know, I mean, probably if civil had ICOed, like, you know, and six months earlier, Yeah, it would be looking at a real different story. I don't really quite know how exactly, but it wouldn't be like this. Let's talk about what you're up to now. So, I mean, this is a pretty interesting time in journalism because there actually does seem to be the emergence of sort of sustainable subscription business models with normal fiat money being used.

We see a lot of journalists this year having launched their own newsletters on services like Substack and actually in some cases making decent livings. A number of sort of independent outlets have gone hard paywall. The athletic is a sports thing. There's a bunch of different people writing about the local sports team. They seem to be doing well and people are showing a willingness to pay for media in a way that a few years ago, there seemed to be a lot more doubts about. So that's encouraging. So talk to us about sort of what you've learned from that and how you see your current endeavor fitting into this new media landscape,

which seems to have some space open to it for paid subscriptions for journalists. Yeah, it's really exciting. Well, this kind of came out of Civil, really, because there were a group of us publishers who really believed in the sort of cooperative model that we've been working on at Civil, where basically the token was supposed to be the vehicle by which we were sustaining each other's work. And it was a really cooperative idea. So you had all these publishers after Civil broke up. And we were thinking, okay, that was a little too far out apparently. But like, let's put these ideas to work using a more conventional cooperative model.

And so we studied cooperatives. And there's a bakery here in Oakland called Erismendi that has like an interesting. cooperative structure. There's cooperators in Barcelona. And so we put together this really novel sort of business model with a friend of mine in Cleveland who's a business attorney. And I really love it. It's like each, each publisher, there's nine of us in my new venture. It's called the brick house and it's totally flat organizational structure. Tom Skokka, who's one of the publishers in it and I were talking about what, are we going to, we got to make a thing that just can't be blown down by outside forces. And that

was kind of how the name came up. So, because we both worked for outlets that were like demolished by, you know, one way or another, like the sort of business craziness storms that have happened throughout journalism. And it's like, okay, let's just try something of our own on a small scale that's absolutely free of the outside influences of advertisers or owners. for executives or anything. There's nothing in this thing but editors and publishers. And there's nine of us, and each of us has one share.

You buy one share for $1, and all you can do with it is sell it back to the company for a dollar. So this company is capitalized with $9. And so it's an LLC, but it runs according to an operating agreement where we share subscribers and revenues and expenses according to certain formulas. And there's a board of directors and then we have an advisory council of like industry leaders in case there's stuff that we can't agree on.

And so we worked really, really, really hard on the structure of this thing. Because, you know, I was in the courtroom when Gawker was taken down the Hulk Hogan trial. Yeah. And I was covering it for death and taxes, which is also no more. But I mean, we did not realize what was going on when that thing happened. It was just really shocking, right? That when you had William Brankwist saying, you know, in the 80s defending the right of Larry Flint to say in his magazine that Jerry Falwell had incest in an outhouse, you know, like First Amendment principles of the press seem to me to be absolutely ironclad. William Rehnquist was defending that.

It seemed impossible to me that Gawker would be closed down for publishing this tiny little bit of security camera footage of Colchogen having sex. It's just like, yeah, it's offensive to people, but that's protected, right? Anyway, it didn't out. And so it was really shocking. And it took us a really long time to discover that it was, you know, Peter Thiel had bankrupted dozens of, you know, a lot of lawsuits with a view to taking this organization down and he finally got lucky with his judge. And so I was like, wow, you know, one person can demolish

the livelihoods of hundreds of people and remove the reading material for millions of people because he was offended by something. And so I thought that it's just terrifying, you know, it's terrifying that many can just shut something like this off. It really motivated me a lot to figure out how to protect the speech rights and press freedom. And so that's a lot where this comes from. There's not a way for anybody to come in and buy it out. We're not relying on any billionaires to put the bills. It's like, I don't know, it may succeed or it may fail,

but at least we're trying and it's really fun. And we've got a really great group of publishers. And we're raising so money in a Kickstarter, building a simple version of it, and we'll see where it goes. So where should people check out to learn more? Kickstarter. Or you just go to, if you go to Google and type in Brickhouse Kickstarter, you'll see it at the top.

There's a lot more detail there. Ben Smith interviewed me at the New York Times about it, and I wrote a piece about it at the Columbia Journalism Review, that explains the details. We're probably, like, at the current pace, I think, will be publishing at the end of October. Well, I really appreciate you joining me for this. It's really cool.

I think, you know, your sort of your appetite to try new things and experiment and see things like civil, not work out, but then just move on and sort of try a new experiment is really cool and refreshing. and I'm looking forward to seeing how Brickhouse goes. And, you know, obviously still a lot of uncertainty in this industry about how people are going to get paid and how many people will get paid. So it feels like the more projects, the better.

Thank you, Joe. I really appreciate it. It's so much fun talking. I could yell about crypto all day long. Yeah, it was great to finally meet you and good luck. Thank you so much. All right. Take care, Maria.

Well, there you go. I think it's super interesting, like I said in the beginning. I guess I viewed a lot of the projects back of the ICO Cryptomania of 2017, 2018 is kind of cynical. And I became cynical about them. And I'm still cynical about them. And even in 2020 with this new sort of crypto boom, I'm still sort of super skeptical of them all. But I did really like hearing the inside story of one of them. So looking forward to checking out how Maria's current project,

goes. So this has been another episode of the Oddlots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the stalwart. Follow my co-host Tracy Allaway. She's on Twitter at Tracy Alleyway. Our guest, Maria Bustillo, she's at Maria Bustios. Check out her project, Brickhouse on Kickstarter. Follow our producer, Laura Carlson at Laura M. Carlson, the Bloomberg head of podcast, Francesca Levy, at Francesca today. And of course, you can check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the handle at podcast. Thanks for listening. I'm Francine Lacqua, an award-winning journalist, and I've got a new podcast, leaders with

Francine Lacqua from Bloomberg Podcasts. I've interviewed everyone from Heads of State to fashion icons about the news of the moment. But I've always been curious, who are these people as leaders? I don't think there's one right way to be a leader. Make decisions. A poor decision is always better than no decision. Listen to new episodes every other Monday. Follow leaders with Francine Lacroix wherever you get your podcasts.