On The Brink with Castle Island - Jared Nusinoff (Mash) on Remonetizing the Internet with Lightning (EP.285)

Episode Date: February 14, 2022

Mash founder Jared Nusinoff joins the show to explain how internet monetization is broken and how lightning-based payments fixes it. In this episode:  Jared's professional history and how he came to work on Bitcoin Going from an adventure guide to bitcoin Jared's early entrepreneurial work Jared's early history sharing music prior to torrents Why Jared quite Google to found an adventure guide company How Jared thinks of Bitcoin's MoE/SoV debate Why internet monetization models are flawed today - and the missing middle How the technology of payments online directly affects the quality of internet experiences How Lightning uniquely solves the monetization of quality content online Jared's view of Lightning's maturity and momentum as a payments infrastructure How Lightning provides completely novel business models on the internet How Mash could change the game for internet 'miniapps' Get started on Mash here and follow Mash on Twitter.  Sponsor notes:  Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for bitcoin mining hardware, hosting, and ASIC reselling. Start mining your own bitcoin by visiting compassmining.io

Hello and welcome back to On the Brink. I'm Nick Carter. Today we're sitting down with Jared Nusinoff, the founder and CEO of MASH, a lightning-based payments layer for content monetization on the internet. Jared has a fascinating story taking us from Google to running an adventure guide company to now building on Lightning. MASH is a company dedicated to re-monetizing the internet and providing an alternative to subscription or bundle-based models or affiliate models or internet ad models. And MASH proposes an alternative where end users get much more discretion and control over how they're paying for content and creators are able to monetize content that was previously completely unmonetized, what Jared calls the missing middle of internet content.

Full disclosure, Castle Island is an investor in MASH. In our view, it's completely in line with how the internet should be developing. And it leverages lightning in a way that uses its unique properties to provide genuinely novel experiences online. Suffice to say, I'm pretty excited about it. Let's dive right into the episode with Jared Newsom. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, 85 billion. dollars. This is a different kind of market and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all the sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. Today we're sitting down with Jared Newsomoff. founder of MASH, which is here to fix the way content is monetized on the internet. Is that fair to say?

Welcome. Welcome to the show. Thanks, Nick. It's great to be here. So this is your first podcast. Is that correct? This is my first podcast, yes. Sometimes I forget that not everyone in Bitcoin is on the podcast circuit. But you've just started somewhere. Yeah, I have, you know, I've tweeted about 50 or 100 times. So I'm getting there. So the first podcast I did was with Marty Bent, great podcast. And I really had an aversion to podcasts. I didn't want to do them. And he convinced me.

Well, he bribed me. He said he would buy me a six-pack of Coors Light if I did it. And we drank the Coors Light on the show. And on that episode, I said I would never do another podcast. I would just do one. and then I did 300 more. So I really defaulted on that promise. So maybe this is the first of 300 for you.

That's what I'm saying. It could be. So I want to talk about MASH, of course. But before that, tell me about your background. You have a pretty interesting story. So let's hear it. Sure. So I'm from Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

I'd sort of categorize my experiences in life. in sort of two buckets. One is adventure travel. So I was a canoe trip guide, led people on trips to the wilderness by canoe through rivers and lakes. I still do that every year, you know, drive 15 hours, take a couple of flights, paddle a couple hundred kilometers with a group of friends. And before starting MASH, I, you know, I founded and ran an adventure travel company in Central Eastern Canada. So adventure road trips, 26 days long. which was an awesome experience. I was the first tour guide and bus driver for that company.

And the other, I guess the other part of my background would be, you know, technologist, entrepreneur, product person. And so I started my career at Bain & Company. I was also the person, you know, selling burn CDs, underground bird CDs in junior high and things online in the late 90s. was at Google for seven and a half years, part of it on the strategy side, that it did a bunch of computer science classes at Stanford to build up some more technical chops and led location, display ads for a few years.

And then was on the product side, the head of mobile apps for Google Fiber. And then it was the adventure travel company and now I'm at MASH and we've been, you know, building for seven or so months. So I have a lot of questions about what you just said. So what was the most popular underground CD that you sold in, I guess, middle school or high school? Middle school? Middle school. It was, I got access to a lot of underground Tupac.

So unreleased Tupac, I think if it was, are you still down before it was released with lots of interesting mixes? And I swear I had a thousand plus songs at one point from like different FTP servers. They're long gone and a hard drive in a, in that garbage dump that I'm looking for still. So it's your version of the Welsh Bitcoin wallet that's in the landfill somewhere, but with deep cuts from Tupac. Exactly. I don't know what's more valuable, though. So what did you sell them for? Was it like a dollar a CD?

I think it's $20. What? 15, 10, 20. How rare were these tracks? I mean, did they exist? Or is it like the Bhutan clan album where only one copy exists? They weren't in HMV yet. I'd put it that way.

I don't even know what HMV is. Oh, it's probably Canadian. I think it's like a Canadian CD record store from back then that does not exist. I didn't put it, sorry, I didn't put it together that that was not a North American or international brand until, nor have I said HMV probably in 10 years. I couldn't even name a brand pretending to CDs. I don't know if I ever bought one in a store. That's interesting.

And so did you obtain them through torrenting or did you know someone? the record label. I thought I were so my memory this is what 23 years ago or something

it was some FD like I play IRS it's probably IRC channels FTP servers I don't I can't even remember the clients

I was using was this before Torrance this before Torrance existed yes wow I didn't even know there was music sharing before like lime wire you know what maybe I don't want to say it was before Torrance because I'm not

sure when that started but it wasn't through Torrance just wow that's incredible that's incredible so this is pre-bit Torrent me P to P music sharing yes there's yeah there's definitely a lot going on in in in the servers beyond beyond this that's like the equivalent of being into crypto like before Bitcoin existed almost I I mean, I genuinely thought that peer-to-peer file sharing began with your bit-torn, so you're torrenting clients. But I guess there was something before that. I guess so.

It's not, I'm not the expert on the history of peer-to-peer, but I'll say that I was part of that crew, pre-bit torrent peer-to-peer. Wow. So your peer-to-peer credentials go deep. See, you know, I learned something new every time I do an episode of this podcast. Wow, that's really cool. And how did you, what was the transition from Google to being a founding, an adventure guide company like? What was the reasoning there?

So I was looking for something that I thought would provide positive value to people's life and experiences that I've, that I really want to do because I'd spent my time at Google doing a lot of, you know, location tracking and targeting sort of in some ways funding, disinformation through the sites where the ads were shown. While it wasn't my intention, you know, I really came to realize that. And then it was also how do I help people more easily and conveniently watch TV? And what I had traveled, you know, I lived in California for five years, went to New Zealand, And on a six-week break before moving back to Toronto with Google, and it was actually my first sort of group tour that I thought was really awesome.

It was in New Zealand with a company called Stray Travel. And it was like a hop-on, hop-off bus trip. It wasn't super expensive. They did lots of really cool things. Now, it wasn't exactly what I would want to do. Like, some of my trips is like taking trains throughout China in like 2007. Yeah, that's 2009 maybe without a cell phone, just phased. figuring it out and going. But it struck a balance with the time restriction, even though six

weeks for a lot of people seems like a wild amount of time to travel. And what I saw, you know, New Zealand's beautiful. They had 500,000 youth travelers there per year, spending over two weeks. And I knew a lot about Central Eastern Canada, not, not, you know, a ton. You know, I'd only travel parts of it, but arguably more beautiful, more cultural diversity and some amazing experiences that there was no infrastructure for, in no way to really enjoy. it. And so I sort of, you know, put the two together and said, oh, you can create the infrastructure for it, provide people an amazing experience in some of the most, you know, one of the wildest countries in the world. So I sort of set it on that mission, knowing it was a bootstrap business.

I'd saved my money to start something for, you know, throughout my career. And I also thought it it would be fun. Creating a software product is just like creating a real world product. So people an amazing experience that they absolutely love and it should work. as long as, you know, regulatory and other things don't get in the way. Did you ever see that film? I think it came out maybe two years ago called the Alpinist about Mark LeClerc? I haven't seen it. He's one of your countrymen.

And everyone's seen Free Solo, which is about, you know, Alex Honnold free soloing, all these granite faces. But the Alpinist, Mark basically pre-Solo's ice faces or mixed rock and ice. Anyway, you know, figured I'd mention it, given the Canadian connection. What was the most, I have to ask, what was the most touch and go situation you've been in as a guide in the wilderness? In the wilderness. Yeah, what, you know, grizzly encounters or floods or? So we have, so we don't have grizzlies like in Ontario and Quebec where most of my paddling happens. But when I was guiding like those types of trips, I woke up to like, you take a cabin out on a bunch of days.

And one morning I actually woke up to like the other counselor. I said effectively she was punching me to wake up that there was a bear like poking its head into our tent. And then actually like right right beside a tent full of, you know, I think there's 11 year old girls. So we had to like jump out, make crazy noise, pretend it was a bear fire drill. and chase, you know, these you chase away. You just make as much noise and try and scare them. So it's fine. But it wasn't the nicest wake-up I've ever had.

What kind of bear, black bear? Yeah, black bear. They're black bears can still be pretty dangerous, right? Yeah, but they're more scared of you than you are of them. Right. You know, the real things you make noise being a group. It's different than Grizzlies. You know, the only time I've heard of a, you know, you have the story that you tell people to not keep food in their tents with black bears is, you know, you tell the story of the kid who got bit in the ass by a bear through the tent wall because they had chewing gum.

So in their back pocket. I don't, I think it's real. It's so long ago that, you know, it could be, you know, one of those folk's folklore stories, but you still tell it. apocryphal Canadian wilderness folklore. Love it. So what was your, what was, you know, what, what caused you to abandon your idyllic, you know, wilderness adventures and then return to the world of software? What was the motivation? There were a few things. One is, you know, it was scaling and doing well, but, you know, when, when I saw the, you know, the pandemic happening, And how it's a difficult business.

It's a slog. You'd sort of need a network of people to continuously tell people that are traveling in the country or working here to go do it. And the regulatory environment was very difficult in terms of like multiple provinces. It was getting really challenging. They've effectively in Canada shut down this type of travel, which is the best way to experience the country. So there's that side of it.

And the other side is in my downtime knowing that my, you know, business that I've been slogging away for two years has effectively imploded. I had heard about Bitcoin a few times and I was reading every, just absorbing as much as I could to figure out what to do next. And my friend just said, read the Bitcoin standard and then talk to me. And so three days later or two days later, I was done that, started researching what the Lightning Network was and everything in the space. And that was it.

Once I saw what Lightning did with sound money, you know, I think a lot of people have had this experience is, you know, you can imagine so many amazing new things and improvements to the world, not just from like preventing central, you know, central bank debasement of our currency and like hidden taxation. But also in terms of, you know, fixing a lot of the problems I saw in my experience online with how things are monetized. And it was just, you know, it was a lightning rod up to my break. This episode is brought to you by Compass Mining. Compass Mining is the world's first and largest online marketplace for Bitcoin Mining hardware hosting and ASIC reselling. Bitcoin mining is only getting bigger and so is Compass Mining. Compass is adding 280 megawatts worth of hosting capacity next year with more to come.

That's over six times Compass's current hosting capacity, meaning more people can mine Bitcoin. With Compass, anyone can mine Bitcoin. Start mining your own Bitcoin by visiting compassmining.io today. So I want to get into that, the problems with monetization, but before that, you know, I was reflecting on this today. I think a lot of critiques of Bitcoin are grounded and people have these very fixed taxonomies of what they sort of think money is or ought to be and then they evaluate Bitcoin on that basis and it doesn't really neatly fit into the taxonomy, doesn't fit into the category, doesn't

fit into the categories and or it's ill fitting for their defined chosen uh category for what they think money what money is or what it should be you know with the classic example being the medium of exchange you know people think transactions should be free maybe um and instant and cheap because they're thinking about cash and so they evaluate bitcoin on that basis and then it seems to you know fail the test so long-winded way of asking You know, what do you make of the medium of exchange store value sort of distinction? And do you think of them as distinct? Do you think of Bitcoin is fitting neatly into one of them?

How do you think about that? As humans, we live and think in a short time frame. And when I look at Bitcoin, you know, there's narratives around it. You know, we talk about it as a store of value. There is digital gold. And like you said, you know, medium of exchange. and then maybe unit of account. And I consider it, you know, the most pristine monetary asset that is conceivable and real and likely could ever exist just from its conception and its story.

And it's just going through a monetization phase that's reliant on education around the world and the importance of this. At this, you know, and then you don't have to wait for that to happen to enable it to be a medium of exchange. that's what's happening right now with what lightning does in superpowers it gives to Bitcoin. And so, you know, there's some people who would say, oh, there's volatility on it. Why would people want to have that? Or don't they just want to save it? And why would they spend it if they believe this? I believe that there's another world where you can have and anyone can have this special

digitally native money to use how they want for purchases that make sense for the power. powers that lightning gifts. And so when I think of like instant programmable, sendable in any amount at low cost purchases, it's not, oh, I want to go buy a Tesla with Bitcoin that doesn't, you know, take advantage of that value compared to other things. It's all these new things that, you know, that are a little bit different. And I can jump into those, but I don't want to jump too far ahead to what Mash is about. Yeah. So, yeah. Yeah, I keep jumping around too. But so in terms of realizing the way that content monetization is broken on the internet,

I think a lot of people aligned with this idea now. Did this realization emerge from work you'd done at Google? Or was, so was it an outgrowth of some of those realizations you had when you were there? It was an outgrowth from time at Google and an outgrowth from lots of other experiences. So when I was working in location for display ads, you would see the types of sites that had these ads on them in the quality of those experiences. And you could understand why, you know, how many millions of views do they need to get to earn anything. Then there's just myself as, like, I don't call myself like a researcher or if I'm, like, if I'm going to buy something

or do something, I'm going to find every resource that there is to try and do it the best way possible, like what's the best camera? What's the best way to cook a suit? It doesn't matter. I'm just going to do it. And you can see the result of, if you follow the incentives, you can understand the result of why all those pages are. Like, why is every single review site scraped content written by AI that just links you to Amazon? That's how they make money. It's no other way. Quality is not rewarded. So the search costs for actually finding things that are quality is very difficult. The other side is, you know, I should go back to my, is with apps and episodic experiences. And so when laser eyes was happening on Twitter, for those aren't familiar,

it's you take your profile photo and you put on some lasers and there's, you know, lots of different interpretations of what that means. It was like, why can't I just find an app, give them a little bit of money and actually have an amazing laser eyes profile picture. I went, I spent like 30 minutes trying to find one. I downloaded like three different like art apps to finally get like, I think it was like lightsabers that I just moved around to make them work. It's because, you know, it would take a developer, a U.X or like a couple days to make something really amazing. That just that performed the job and they could probably make a couple million bucks that they had lightning embedded on their experience if you could pay in the right amount. Instead, it's all subscribe to this, buy it for

20 bucks. There's this middle ground of experiences that don't, you know, that shouldn't require a huge commitment to make. And, you know, I sort of, I sort of saw all that together of, you know, what's, how are things being monetized right now? And it's not based on the value they provide. And then combining that with how could you pay for these experiences, which is the other side. and large upfront purchase, big commitment. And there was nothing in the middle and sort of tied that back together through all this experiences. So in terms of internet monetization, we have free plus ads or sort of affiliate models.

And then you have bundles and subscriptions. But what you're saying is there's a missing middle there. There's maybe transient experiences, which you may not use with frequency to justify subscription, but things that ought to exist and should be monetized, but maybe ads aren't suitable for it. And there's no easy way to pay, you know, $2 to the creative of a widget. Is that, is that fair to say? Yeah, I think that's a really good summary. And there's also additional effects to this. So one is if you're relying on ads or affiliate models, you need millions of users or a very

high valued niche to earn anything. And so lots of things can't be created there. And the other side is when you're trying to sell something at a high price or a subscription amount, you need to have a certain, you know, how complex is your SaaS app? It needs to be a full blown out app that's frequently used. Or if you want to sell a guide to something or a book, how much pre-sale do you have to to have, how much trust do people need to have that this is actually going to be good when they also can't trust the reviews that are coming out online. And so, you know, a lot of this is,

that's online is filled with misinformation and sort of, not deception, but like overselling and over investing in the get you to buy rather than all of the energy on the quality of what you're actually getting. And so it's, it's, that's what happens in this space of, you know, like a barrier, and reliance of value somewhere else. So how does the actual technology of payment processing or methods of payment on the internet play into all this? Because I think that's, you know, we have obviously digital payments,

but there's holes there. How does that play into this? Yeah. So I think there's a few things. One is I'm going to talk about interoperability. And the money that, you know, the money that is, that exists online right now, the way to make payments for things is not interoperable.

It's from this, you know, this card to another place one time. And then you can't really, you don't pay small amounts, you can't store it there and transfer elsewhere. So the closest thing we have to, you know, money they can send in any amount anywhere is sort of within these closed systems, like sorting games with their own, you know, you buy a bundle of coins and you spend them, but it's not real money. It's stuck there. It doesn't really have any value beyond what you're getting within that experience. And so that's the closest thing is you still have to buy a bundle and you can use it. But you can't get to a space where I want to load up 20 bucks into this digital bundle of just money that I can use anywhere in any amount. That's what lightning does. So how can you have this wallet or how can you make a payment of a penny here. I'm just talking, I'm not saying this is the right thing for a business model per se, but just without issue of just sending little bits of money wherever you want, whenever you want. And that's not possible right now online. And that's led to in many ways,

you know, bundled platforms rather than, you know, disaggregating them as well. At the same time, and it is incredible to me that we don't have internet native payments. I mean, it seems like that would have been such a core piece. of fundamental internet infrastructure that somehow just didn't get built alongside the internet. It's kind of astonishing, really. I mean, yeah, it's kind of hard to believe. So with credit cards, I mean, you know, the fact that these payments are not interoperable and, you know, they're not final, strictly speaking, does that directly happen?

an influence on the nature of content delivery online? A hundred percent. Right now payments with credit cards, you know, they have a minimal amount. They are fairly expensive. They're not, you know, they're getting better internationally, but they're not global. There's lots of restrictions on who can accept payments. And what this does is it forces that one time purchase for specific content that they accept. If you look at all the payment processors online, look at their terms in what you're allowed to buy and pay for. So there is also a censorship angle on top of this. But, you know, and if I look at, you know, what would you want in digitally native money? Sendable in any amount,

instant, programmable, no trust involved, trust minimized, private, global, fully interoperable, not locked in anywhere and no cost. Those are the properties that I would look for. And with current payment rails, you either have closed system, controlled and sensor system, high amount minimum, high fees, a long time to settle, charge backs with huge costs, not really global. And the list goes on.

And so if you extend that further and say, okay, What do these new properties of money, if you had them, let you unlock? Okay, instead of buying that full, you know, that full like video tutorial or that full masterclass or that full, you know, at, I want to use it on a usage basis. Fine, I'll get the first X minutes for free, X articles for free. And then I'll contribute as I'm going. And now, okay, I'm not committing up front. I'm not worried about the pre-sale and focus on the quality of that. experience. And that's just, that's one of examples. I'm keeping them generalized for now.

But you can see a world where that, you know, if you could monetize that way instead of ads, or at least monetize something at all because subscriptions didn't fit for it, then you can reinvest in all these experiences. And I like to say, you know, good quality will squeeze out the bad when you have these payment rails fix. So when you were starting MASH, did you think to yourself, okay, we need to fix content monetization on the internet? What? what's the best medium of payment for me to do that? Or do you think to yourself, well, lightning is really great. Let's see what problems it solves and how I can use it.

I wouldn't say it was explicitly linear. When I looked at what lightning did in the properties of what it was, it naturally mapped. I thought through a lot of different use cases and products and experiences you can build, but it kept on mapping back to you. What is the biggest problem online today? And it's the monetization or business models available for quality content and experiences and tools and apps and games. And this was a tool to fix that.

It's, you know, right now we live in a world of like lack of trust and quality and disinformation in these experiences. And if you can fix sort of how money is transferred and, you know, what people are calling value for value today, you can amplify what's. good by giving them what they actually have earned their proper fair value. And so, you know, we could have gone and targeted, I think, a more, you know, I think maybe a smaller problem, but it wouldn't be nearly as exciting as, and I think impactful as this larger problem. And so as a business that's building with or on lightning, you know, I think a lot of people have felt the lightning is last momentum, even though the metrics are actually pretty good in the last 12 months or so, what is your view as someone that sort of deals with lightning every day in

terms of its maturity and whether it's fit to be built on as of today? So the way I describe it is the backbone, like the protocols and the services on lightning right now are maturing and in many places mature and they work. And so from protocols that are available like LND, LD, LDK, C Lightning, like Eclare, the base layer works. You want to get lighting up and running as a business. There's multiple service layers that can help you do it. You can buy your own server farms that are pre-built to do it. You can go on to different cloud services that can manage it for you.

Okay, now you want to take lightning. and the software and take it to the actual network and make it work. Okay, there's all these, you know, liquidity service providers and ways to set up channels, and it's fairly, you know, set up. That just works. The network is usable. The successes in routing of payments across the entire network is getting better and better and larger and larger in terms of the payment sizes that can be processed, including latency and privacy improvement.

And so, but at the same time, sorry, and if you extend that further, you want to make one-time payments in a variety of ways, it also works. And so you're seeing lots of use cases of send money to a friend, pay for a coffee in El Salvador, you know, send it through an email, you know, that works or a one-click to pay experience. But there's a few things missing, which is you could say opportunity for people to build on because it's the early innings of the future money layer for the internet. Right. It's, you know, everything doesn't get built in a day, but we're on the right path.

And so how do you drive usage up? Like right now we're in a world of, I'd say, passionate Bitcoiners, developers who are experimenting on it, and people building things like what I'm building in a variety of different spaces. And once it becomes easy for the, you know, the regular person to use it in a variety of ways and new use cases, that was what will drive adoption. The tech is, the tech is ready, you know, some areas near hardening, but that's, I don't see that the issue. And so when, you know, what are the, what are the key things you want? It's how does a regular, you know, it depends on the use cases and where you want to build. I'll just start with that.

But how does a consumer get a wallet and get money on lightning and a few clicks easily without having to understand cryptography or Bitcoin while you want to, you know, philosophically you probably want to teach them about it? But that's just how do you get them on the service? Two, how do you get that wallet and their funds available where they want it? Three, how do you facilitate and connect it to these experiences and make it seamless and simple without a cognitive load? And then four is how do you take that and interweave it in? into apps, websites, sites, content experiences everywhere. And so to summarize that, which I probably should have led with, which is the interconnection of onboarding a user through a payment

facilitation anywhere in these new user experiences, that sort of that layer, that application layer is being built out now. And that's where we're focused. And so what's MASH going to look like from a user perspective? What's it going to be like browsing? internet with with MASH enabled. So let's say you have something you want to sell online. I'm going to start on that side. You decide you want to work with MASH to help you monetize a new way, which is usage-based pricing for any amount, you know, streaming money effectively.

And there would be a wallet integrated right into this experience. No download. It'd be right there, right on the site. And now a consumer, when they want to actually start paying for something, If they already have a MASH wallet set up, they can just start engaging. They don't have to do anything. If they don't, they log in, they sign up, they buy an account, they get Bitcoin back as a bonus, and they can use that there. And then what's the rest of the consumer experience? Because we see for them, the core value is supporting and getting access to these awesome

pieces of content tools and experiences that make sense for them that they want. But then it's, okay, I don't want my money trapped. there. I want to be able to use it. However I want. Oh, you know, I want to go pay for a Shopify store that has stuff because lots of Shopify stores now can accept Bitcoin. Okay, you can pay there. Oh, I want to send it to an exchange. No problem. I want to, you know, store to my Bitcoin hard, you know, cold storage. Not a problem. It's you want to go use other lightning stores that don't have MASH set up. You can also do that. So you want to send it to friends. you can also do that.

So it's how do we let them do all these awesome things, but the core is how do you facilitate that relationship of value for value between someone who's creating a tool, product, experience for them that they can now contribute for it and make it easy on both sides and facilitate the relationship. And I guess this just opens up the scope for much more creativity in terms of monetizing Internet services, whether it's metered consumption or deferred metering.

per whatever variable you want to define consumption, just models that were just not available before. Yeah, these are completely new business models that I see as disruptive to most things online today. So I'll give you an example that will be later, but it's not immediately. So just because it's topical, I like UFC, there was a fight on Saturday night,

and you go at 2 in the morning, Eastern time, because that's where I am and there's these live broadcast streams of people talking about the fights breaking them down even before them they have their like picks and it's like sponsored by insert gambling company and do you trust their picks or is it because they're picking someone because there's too much money on one side or the other but anyways you have like hundreds of thousands of people just for this sub-niche going online just to watch them and how much money do they get 50 bucks like that doesn't make any sense people are staying up they're exhausted the next day just to watch this. Imagine a world where that person can say, hey, you know what,

my stuff is three bucks an hour. First 10 minutes is free. You have 10 free premium minutes. You're going to pay every minute. There's no upfront charge. If you don't like it, stop watching, stop paying. And as a consumer, you can say, yeah, but I don't want to spend more than five bucks ever at this person than asking me again. Okay, set a budget. And I want to know how much I'm going to spend And in total, I don't want to be worried about falling asleep and watching this forever if I didn't set a budget. Oh, after spend six bucks, all the contents available for free from my site. And now this person who created this thing, they can own it. They can host it wherever they want.

They can charge at their own business model and the consumer can now pay and contribute. And you've now created a flywheel for that person who built something. They can hire editors. They can bring in more guests. They can just do a lot more. And for most of them, they can leave their full-time job and dedicate their time to this, as true as everyone is, you know, you have hundreds of thousands, millions of people listening to. And so you don't require, you know, just a fan to tip you, you can turn into a paid-for premium experience.

This seems, this strikes me as disruptive in not just sort of the cliched sense of the term, but genuinely disruptive to the way content media is delivered online. Do you have a specific model of delivery or type of content which you think this most dramatically alters once these modes of transactions are normalized? Like, you know, my mind immediately goes to paywalled journalism content, which people are chafing out. But is there something in particular you think, you know, once the MASH model is established, totally disrupts the way things work online. When I think of where we're focused first,

where I think there's the first natural fit, it is in these mini apps, these tools. I almost think like these websites that provide values, sort of like that lightning avatar generator tool that are episodic and value ad for people. And then yes, 100% for content online. but not like articles, but not the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal because their business model will make sense as a prepay.

They have a huge bundle of content that's trusted, high quality, and frequently used. So we always focus on what doesn't have, you know, that immediate trust that might make someone concerned to pay for it immediately or does have it, but people don't want to frequently use it. And so we look at these mini apps and tools, almost like, if you you look at a lot of what was on, you know, the app stores that people were trying to sell as apps. And why didn't they work? You know, why didn't people pay six bucks or five bucks for the app? It wasn't the cost of the app. It's that you didn't actually know what the value was and what

you were getting. And so I think it unlocks a lot of those things and sort of the, I want to say like the no code tools, the indie hackers of the world. I see as the first. wedge for all these productivity tools that you know that I'd value to live. So it's almost more of a market creation story rather than altering market structures that already exist. I'd I'd say both it's a it's a sequencing thing. It's starting with I think more technically proficient people given the state of where things are and then moving your way up to showcase it in other other experiences. But I see this impacting, you know, information sites, you know, journalism, you know,

think of like reviews and content. I always lean on, you know, consumer reports and like how-to guides and what's the best X as an example of you rarely can trust anything you're reading online in terms of advice because all the incentives are misaligned. It's about how do I get as many views on the site and clicks on the affiliate button, not about the quality of the experience. And so you can effectively rewire that by having a new model. People start going to their trusted sources, contributing a little bit, but it's still going to be way more than ads.

And now I'll create a sharing model of, oh, these are actually good. So what can we expect from MASH? I mean, when, A, when are you looking to launch this and then B, how should people engage and follow you? get involved. Sure. So depending on when this is released, we should have something live as a, I call them like an MVP. So it's a minimum viable beta.

It shows some of the power of the experience directly in a few demo apps that you'll be able to try out. And, you know, we want to show the power of it for those, you know, mini apps and tools for that community before we expand out from there. As a consumer, you can try it. And if you're someone who's building something or has content in experiences and tools that you want to talk about monetizing a different way, you can go to getmash.com and reach out to me.

I'm on Twitter. I don't even know my handle actually. I just want to look it. You can see how many followers I have. I think it's 300. Jared NXX, J-A-R-D-N-X-X. yeah and just let us know what you care about because you know the goal is to remind you know help help enable quality content and experiences online that are abundant accessible and and also

discoverable well for the sake of the entire internet i hope you succeed jared thank you you acquitted yourself very well for first podcast thanks for coming on thanks so much nick i i i'm scared to listen to it i might just have to have some friends uh make fun of me for probably a few things I said.