Tech Brew Ride Home - (Portfolio Profile) Readocracy

Episode Date: October 29, 2022

Readocracy is restoring sanity to the world by making how you inform yourself count for something. Troll-free, bot-free, ad-free. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the TechMeme Right Home and another portfolio profile episode. We're going to talk to another great startup that the Right Home Fund has invested in. Today we're going to talk about Redocracy. We're going to talk to the co-founder of Redocracy, Mario Vesalescu. He's actually sitting, if you can hear the sound quality again, in my kitchen, across from me at the kitchen table. So this is another kitchen table episode, if you will. Mario, thanks for coming and talking to us today. It's my pleasure.

I'm honor to be here. I hear these are special, so I'm excited. People tend to like them. I guess it's because, I don't know, when you're doing stuff in person, maybe it's always better. Yes, I think so. Than virtual and remote. So let's just start with the quick sort of what is reedocracy,

what are we doing with redocracy? And then we'll go into a little bit of the founding story. Sure. So a readocracy, as you probably gather from the name, comes from reading, times meritocracy, supporting democracy. We give you credit for all the content you consume. So all the huge amount of time you spend online reading articles, watching YouTube videos, reading papers, all that, you normally have nothing to show for that. Everybody else has data, you have none. We make it count.

So privately, we give you insights that are like a fit bit for your mind. So you start understanding how your consumption is affecting your mood, your anxiety. anxiety, your bias, all that stuff. And then publicly, we actually turn it into credentials in some cases that are defensible in terms of school and jobs. And also basically like an intellectual portfolio page, it lets you prove yourself on any subject you are passionate about using the time you're spending anyways. So credentialed, you mean that in the actual sense of the word, so that I could get credit

for being an expert in a certain area if I've done enough reading or watching or listening? Yeah, so there's kind of two ways. is literally just showing it. So one of the issues we see is that schools and the way we think of school has abstracted credentials where you get this piece of paper, you get a badge, and you just rely on the brand to be credible. But then you have no idea about the learning the person did. We think it's important that you had some transparency there. So the first piece is just, here's a page where with data and also by scrolling through and quickly filtering, you can literally see what's in my mind and my annotations and the time I spent. The other side, yes, the other side

is actual credentials. So if an expert says, hey, me and my friends think you should read, these eight articles and two books on neuroscience and we're experts in neuroscience, reidocracy will know that you actually did it. And that way we can check it. And basically it's making credentials programmatic. And there's also credentialed in the sense of this can follow me around the social web. And as you said, it's sort of a way of showing people what you do know, even if they don't know you. Exactly. So you can think of this as being really important to trust. trust in terms of hey should I give this person a job even though they might not have the experience I'm looking for but also trust hey should I listen to this person who may be a lunatic online but they seem very tantalizing their inflammatory statements

this can be and that's one of like for example that's one of the integrations are really excited to roll out soon which is a discord integration discord can get super noisy you don't know who you should be listening to same thing with reddit threads imagine you suddenly had a little thing injected under each person who posted saying this person actually knows a lot about the subject or there's nothing And so we're doing this obviously by plugins and apps and browser plugins. Yeah, so that's a really important question, both for how it works, but also the privacy side, which I want to emphasize and is very important to us. The core technology, it's because we can tell if somebody actually paid attention to a piece of content, how intensely it's patent pending.

We've worked with leading experts in Israel and the U.S. on this. What we're doing is truly leading edge. It's very hard to game. You can't just leave the page open. you can't just scroll to the bottom, like, it's tough, and it's only getting better and better. So that's packaged as a browser extension, as a mobile app, or if you're a website owner, you can literally just put it in your site so that every visitor gets rewarded for spending time with your content

and is incentivized to keep coming back. So it's great for quality content creators as well. From a privacy perspective, you know, using the words that follows year-round is terrifying these days. So it is very important to emphasize that reidocracy is, extremely privacy first. First of all, it's designed so that you always know when it's on. It's not like one of those extensions where you have no idea when it's tracking or what it's tracking. You always can see it and know. It only runs on regular articles, regular PDFs and YouTube videos. It is incapable of turning on an adult content, banking content, shopping content.

And even if it is what seems like a normal article, but it detects sensitive words, derogatory language and whatnot, it will switch to private just in case. So, you know, we've already been, we got an award from Mozilla. Like, we're super, super committed to the privacy aspect. All right, let's talk about you before we come back to what you're doing. This is not your first startup. Right. But from talking to you over the last year, I can tell that this is something that you're

extremely passionate about. So maybe this is your dream startup. Yeah. But real quick, you just give me your back. background and your entrepreneurial story? I studied robotics engineering, but halfway through realized it was not for me, decided to finish

because I felt like it was really in a helpful way changing how I think, and also to prove a point to myself that I could finish something torturous. But halfway through I got into social impact entrepreneurship and was really into that, so that's kind of how things started. And then

I won a competition for the future of work in Canada for predicting work in the year 2040, got picked up by a think tank in Paris, and so I spent just over a year leading innovation project on like how generations are changing how we work, how technology is changing how we work. And so I think in that process, I really learned a lot about how organizations work, but also the flow of knowledge and the flow of how people behave with technology. And that was, I think, really informative to kind of how I think now. the journey itself is kind of our first startup was still around content and it still had a similar

mission of like how do we elevate smart people and like if you read a lot you do a lot of research like how do we make that more visible and so at the time we had some what I would say is more like an active annotation tool like you're highlighting you present your research that kind of thing so it was I would say for more academic people people who are really digging into it when we would demo, people would love our pitch. Like I can't remember a session where they weren't coming out being like, I need this, this is going to make me more productive, my life is chaos now, bookmarks, whatever. But then when they would start using it, there was a browser extension as well, when they would start using it, they would forget to use it. And that was when we learned

the powerful lesson that bad habits and leasiness is like one of the hardest things to break. So what we tried to do is we're like, okay, people say they want to use this, they say they keep forgetting, what if we could detect if they were really into a piece of content, and instead of having to click the extension, have the bubble, like the buttons appear and remind them like, hey, maybe you should be doing the thing you said you want to do. And when we did that, we, on a whim, added an extra button that was like, well, we've kind of detected that you read this sort of, do you want to claim it? Do you want to claim your read? Yeah. And the users kind of started using our main thing more,

but then they started compulsively claiming their reading. And that was like a eureka moment for us. Like even when we stopped updating it, these people were like compulsively trying to get credit. And so we... There's a gamification. Yeah. Yeah.

Which we really did not expect. And that kind of turned on, you know, the idea of, hey, when people are annotating or adding notes, it's like actually a tiny fraction. If you can actually start valuing and digging into just how they spend their time with information, that unlocks a whole new world. So that was kind of the eureka moment for us, and that's kind of how we started getting into the direction of redoocracy. And I would be, I do need to mention my brother's kind of as well. You keep saying us, yes.

Yeah, yeah. So my brother is my co-founder and CTO. He's a genius, and he's also the poster child, I think, for what we do with the redocracy, especially from an education perspective. I would say I'm autodactic as well to a certain degree. I mean, everything I do now with the startup is not really from my engineering degree. But he truly is, you know, somebody doesn't fit in the current system, but is really smart.

And if we would have relied on the current system, God knows where he'd be right now. He was this kid who every parent teacher interview, same thing every time telling my parents like, oh, he is so smart. When he does the work, he gets the best grade in the class. But that happens like once a semester and cannot be bothered otherwise. Fortunately, when he was 13, a family friend gave us a book called Learn H-TML in a weekend. And my brother did learn HTML in that weekend.

And basically, within years, he built one of Canada's first social networks for students. It had over 200,000 members. It was doing 40 million hits a month. this was just before Facebook and this was happening as he was finishing high school and by the traditional standards he was still a failure and could barely get accepted

into any college and so I think given what we do now especially in terms of recognition and who gets an opportunity and what learning means he's kind of poster child for that so yeah since that point he kind of went on and built his own proprietary architecture from server side all the way to the front end

that has supported over half a million users for different clients. It's very fortunate that I was born with him in my time. I didn't have to go find somebody of this talent. They always say that finding the co-founder is the most important hire of any startup. So you either got lucky or you got forced into it, I guess.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. I love the forums, and they ask, oh, how did you meet your co-founder? and like it's only, that's how they're afraid the question, you can't change it. And you're like, I guess since birth, yeah. So one of the things that we talked about, you know, when we first started talking, is the fact that, and, you know, listeners to the show will know that this was right up my alley. But the idea that when the internet first came around, and especially the web,

when I was young and coming up and using technology and things like that, it was always sold as, can you imagine how our world will be changed if every person on the planet has access to all of humanity's collected knowledge? And we've got that, and yet that sort of transformation for the good, I don't know that it's exactly shown itself yet. And so one of the first things that you said to me in terms of like the why of this company and this idea was just sort of to not rediscover is the right word, but try to bring the focus back to the learning and knowledge and the straight knowledge potential of technology as we have it today.

So let's let's start there. Yeah. Um, and I guess there's two sides of looking at that. Can I like also, I want to tell this, the like the deep down why for me and my brother like from my family because it ties to this. This is the real why why. Yeah, yeah. Like maybe, maybe not the why you lead with in the pitch, but exactly. Yeah. Go ahead. But for people want to hear the real like the story that really motivates us. Sure. Um, we, so our family's from Romania in Eastern Europe. Um, my parents left during communism.

And growing up, we would hear so many stories constantly about our grandparents and great grandparents because they had been very impressive intellectuals, but also just like really impressively civic-minded. So they were just great people in like the, you know, big-hearted sense of the word. And like alongside being very smart. And so we kept hearing about this. And these became the values I think we grew up with. and it just seemed like whether it was

post-communism corruption in Eastern Europe or like just the Western media ecosystem it seemed like the world was optimizing for the polar opposite of these values so like it wasn't that you know people who were informed and helpful and balanced those were the losers the winners were like the most agitated divisive angry ignorant

and so you know deep down and then when you talk about the instrument giving access to everybody and everybody to be heard and then a system that optimizes for what I just described without having a way to optimize for what I grew up these values I was thinking of, I think deep down

for us from the very beginning and now like really with the reidocracy is how do you how do you provide an alternative so that this internet we have has another way of incentivizing which is scalable, appeals to people's egos and vanity but in a healthy way and allows

a different way of deciding how we use this information. So in terms of like you think about the information commons and now that we're all plugged in and have this hive mind, that's, I think, like a really big line how we'd like to shape it. But there's also, there is also the aspects like we can get into of, you know, how we value our relationship to the information. Yeah. Well, it's also about how it's how we measure what happens on the internet in the sense that, you know, the web is largely been monetized through advertising. Advertising is throwing money against attention, and it doesn't, there's no value in the attention. Well, there's no value in the quality of the attention,

but the quantity. So as we've seen with social media, the thing that has been valued is sort of the addictive nature, that just keep watching more, just keep scrolling more, just keep clicking more. But there's no incentive structure for measuring the, there's nothing wrong with cat videos. There's nothing wrong with, you know, frivolity and things like that. But there's no incentive structure for measuring for, again, quality. And you shouldn't, and that's, and so I think that is, and these are kind of our two formally are two big wise.

Like, that is a huge missed opportunity economically. And secondly, it's also incredibly dangerous for society, coming back to your point of like, we're all plugged in together. So, like, first of all, in terms of the opportunity, coming back to, like, the internet and how you think about it, first of all, again, so there's nothing wrong with cat videos. The issue now is that when you think of advertising, that's a monetization scheme, which is designed for the cat video style of content. When you talk about educational content and really informative stuff, the best way of valuing that is not advertising. That's you just use that because that's the only method you have. Logically, when you're talking about really informative educational content,

that aligns much more closely to how we value education. Right? Like whether it's gaining like this, we already have a path for this, right? Like what people pay for degrees, certificates, membership, educational content. There's a whole world out there, which by the way is more valuable than the digital advertising market. Right. People just assume, oh, this is how we have to monetize. You want me to throw you a data a data figure that is from your deck and from your... Do you know, Mario, that people are spending over a trillion dollars every year to prove their subject matter credibility by getting things like degrees and credentials and things like that?

So it is a huge market. Yes. And also, these same people... So, first of all, you got these people who spend over a trillion dollars a year through the only methods they know have formally signaling their knowledge, while spending so much time online that for most people, this is the other fun fact, over the course of your life, you will spend as much time consuming content and all the discussions around it as you would study for about four college degrees. Four college degrees.

Right. That's insanity to not happen anything. Because you want to have another data point that you gave me that I'm going to spit back at you. We spend, North Americans spend 13 hours a day with media, whether it be online or I guess even now there's no distinction there. But with media. And so if you were, even if you're not. doing the highest quality stuff all day long. As you're saying, you're still going to sort of, through osmosis, also learn some stuff.

Yes. That could be the equivalent of degrees. Yes. That you're not getting credit for. Bottom line is that institutions, kind of, they abstract the relationship with experts, right? You have professors, you have these people affiliated with the institution. But in the end, you just get the brand of the institution. And we're seeing an unbundling where you have all these, like,

like experts creating their own courses, whatnot, that extends to our entire relationship online. The tendrils of expertise are everywhere online. And so if you could map that, when you spend time with content, which is often created by experts or endorsed by experts because they shared it or they mentioned our podcast,

if you can map that back, you can create credentials which say, like, I spent all this time, you could check it, and also these are all the experts who endorsed it. And so they work at these companies and you should want to hire me type of thing. Like that, it's a different way of looking at our relationship to expertise and reputation.

Because how many times have we heard the stories about, like, I learned how to do woodworking or become an electrician by watching YouTube videos. Yes. No one's actually going to give you a license for that right now. Yep. But hopefully in the future they would. Or if you listen to the entire run of the British history podcast, which I think is, you know, 700 episodes or something, like from Roman times through, you know,

Liz Trust. Like you're talking about you've listened to hundreds of hours, more than you would ever have spent in any British history college class. So when you say measuring and credentialing this, this is kind of, I'm kind of skipping a little bit into like the go-to-market and things like that. But so what you're trying to do is create a platform that not only will allow people to, in the background, measure their knowledge intake. But then a platform for, say, your employer to be able to credential you for continuous learning and learning new skills, an academic institution

to adopt this as a platform. Totally. Totally. Yeah, so that's really important to us, and it's kind of being part of the learning journey of where does this fit in. I think for forward-thinking and knowledge or different organizations.

So what I want to, because you say, like, oh, companies can use this in terms of continuing learning. The continuing learning space in corporations is, I would argue, toxic in terms of, you know, it's a totally backwards way of thinking about learning where they say, like, we think this counts as good content. And if you don't learn through here, your learning doesn't matter.

Or like, here's a backdoor to, you know, in a very high friction way, pull in your learning. And so people, you know, you ask anybody in a corporate environment if they use the formal learning, I'm doing air quotes, formal learning that their company gave them, like, very few will use it and most of them will be like actively antagonized by the proposition. And so I just highlight that because like I don't want people to think we're building like a corporate LMS or anything like that. Right, right. The point of this is to, again, explode the idea of learning because it is part of our lives

continuously. And if you have a learning passport truly that is like data driven, yes, that fits into a company. But it needs to be a company that is investing in their employees learning and professional development because they truly believe in their people, not as a means of like surveillance or as a means of like tripling down on their definition of. But, but within that, yes, it's super cool that we make it incredibly easy, whether it's a professor who has some friends in industry or a company that can look to a specific department to say, hey, guys, can you just put in what you think are the essential readings or viewings or whatever it may be and your notes on the subject and with a reidocracy we will be able to know if people work their way through it whether that's

outwardly to clients whether it's inwardly when people are onboarding into the company so yes totally and then in a classroom environment that gets super cool because you can start generating hybrid credentials between courses in school and practicing industry experts so students become like pre-vetted as they enter the workforce in a way that companies want And that also is kind of like our Trojan horse is not a good word. But a way we can get into work with academia, despite the fact that at first blush, you might think that they'd be scared of us.

So let me come to a flip side of a coin, even though I think I'm going to have a third side, so coins only have two sides. But the flip side would be, if we're talking about information, diets and there's all the talk of, you know, false information, misinformation, misinformation, disinformation. One of the problems is, is that old New Yorker on the internet, no one knows you're a dog. I love that. In the same way that you can talk about any, you can go on and talk

about nuclear physics and any idiot in the world on Twitter will come up and tell you you're wrong. even though you're a, you know, a PhD in the field or whatever. So one of the things that credentialing and signaling is, I think a term we can use, is we can, if we have a platform that is understood and is sort of universal, it will allow us to identify the people that are true experts in an area. And I'm going to go on a little bit here because this is one of the things that excited me the most about it. And so obviously you say, well, a PhD should credential you enough, and that should matter and should count. But a PhD could still have a debate online with somebody that's knowledgeable in a space.

And so a PhD could know, well, this is a person that knows what they're talking about. And one of the things that you and I talked about early on is you think about areas where, especially in recent years, there is no credentialing and there was no tradition of expertise. If you're going to be an expert today in crypto and Web3 stuff, it's all about all the time you spend on a Discord channel. And sort of the debates you've had there, the learnings you've gotten there. And so that's not a PhD. And yet that, you know, the people that are moving Web3 forward are learning there. And so if there was some mechanism to be like, listen, this person knows about, you know,

Salana or whatever is because look, they've been in the right Discord channels from the beginning. Yeah. They've learned a lot. And also, we can prove that they got positive feedback from others who also learned a lot.

Because that's the danger. When you start saying, like, oh, you know, I'm big on Twitter and, like, therefore you should listen to me. It's like, okay, like, are you popular because you write really provocative things? It's the same thing we were just saying. Being popular on Twitter or Instagram

is the quantity over the quality. Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. And so if you could change that. And that gets to the heart of like, you know, we've talked about this a lot. I'm a first principles kind of guy. Therefore, in terms of Web 3, I'm skeptical of a lot of the aspects. But like when you talk about Daos, for example, we've seen how many of them flame out when they become anything other than financially oriented. Like if they try to run an organization or a community, like it becomes like a tire fire most of the time. What would happen if power could be assigned with how you've committed yourself to the subjects that the Tao is about? That seems like a more rational. and safe way to scale DAW's with integrity. Right. And so, Redocracy can become a protocol, and I think as we move in that direction, that's something we've looked at. We've talked a lot of folks in the space.

But I also don't think that you need to start there. I think we can talk a lot about how you can have an impact on Web 2, how you can have an impact Web 2.5, and we can also talk about Web 3. You know, we don't need to... Well, I'm only using the Web 3 as an example of an area where... Yeah, subject matter, totally. Right, a subject matter where... And Web 3 likes to use the term...

skin in the game. But that's true for any subject matter where it's like skin in the game is also time spent in the space. Yeah. Right. And I think I said to you the first time we talked that, like, one of the things that I has held true from the first time ever went on the internet is in weird little pockets of the internet, there are people that if you go to the right Discord channel or the right message board in 1995, people will rise to the top and become the king or queen of that message board and be the go-to, no one in the universe would know that this person is an expert, but if you've spent enough time there, they've qualified themselves to you, and you know you can trust them. And so what's so fascinating to me is this is an attempt to

solve the big problem of like sort of organizing that. Yeah. And allowing the, the example I used to you is when I was day training in the late 90s, there was a guy on the Yahoo message boards that absolutely knew his stuff. If you could have followed his picks, he would have made a ton of money, but there's no way he ever would have been on CNBC because I don't know who the hell he was. He was like some retired judge or something

in Western Pennsylvania. But he knew what he was talking about in terms of day training and stuff. And so like, when we're talking about this in the lens of learning and expertise, but what we're also talking about here is credentialing, and that can apply to something. No, exactly, in the world.

This is the issue. We think of that. education in this like super narrow artificial way which was invented before the internet by the way and this is why it's so disjointed and we have a issue of supply and demand where we can't match it because we're like super fast information highway and job defined by it and this ridiculous system which requires institutional manual verification happens at four years at a time like it's absurd when you think about it objectively but coming back like again it's the signaling of knowledge right if anybody's read the post status signaling as a service or any of that stuff like education is

if you're intellectually curious, of course. It has its own value. But in terms of how it maps to society, it needs to be able to be signaled and people need to be able to trust it. And we have an issue now where all this learning that happens, if it doesn't happen through these like gatekeepers, you know, you're stuck. Right. And so we need better ways. And secondly, not at signaling, but also self-evident signaling, something that somebody can believe in within the first 15 seconds so that you don't have to say like, oh, well, how do I decide? You're in a space online, whatever and it's like oh but this little redocracy credential is following this person around and so I can give that a certain amount of credence well so you can you can hover on it so when redocracy is

integrated you can hover and actually shows you all the time the person spent you can scroll you can see the data so it's not like oh redocracy says like who cares about redocracy the point is that should be self-evident right and the credentials we generate come with a QR code whether it's on your resume whether it's on LinkedIn wherever you want if you scan it it will pull up a full transcript that immediately the top has the data, has the most important things the person thought were the most valuable to their learning, their annotations, and the most helpful things they said to others who know what they're talking about. And if you still don't believe that, there's a link at the very top big that says, not sure you should trust this, click here, and within 30 seconds,

you will see it working on your own attention. And so, again, self-evident. You shouldn't have to trust the reidocracy brand. It should speak for itself. Okay, as I premise, the third side to the coin is what you sort of mentioned with your first startup and learning that this sort of gamification, which I would generally use as a pejorative even in this sense. Except for the fact that the third side of the coin is if you understand that and you start to see this credentialing gaining purchase around different spaces, then you have an incentive, you're incentivized to be like, all right, how do I raise my? score. Because then it would be, I want to get in on these conversations. I want people to listen to what I

have to say. And so the incentive or the gamification would actually be, all right, where do I have to go? What do I have to read? What do I have to watch? That will put me on the same level as these people. And give me access to discussions that I can only earn if I've read the required things or if I've hit the right level, which redocracies is able to facilitate very easily. Right. Yeah, that's a different way of kind of thinking about the internet, which is very, very important. But it's also how education, again, we keep hitting the same points from different angles. That's how education always functioned because why do you want to go to Harvard? Because I want to get in the room where it happens. They won't let people in unless I've been to Harvard or Yale. I'm never going to become a Supreme Court justice unless I've gone to the right law schools.

I'm never going to get in the internship at the right place in Wall Street unless I went to the right business school. That's what education has always been. And when we talk about democratizing it, it really hasn't been democratized because it's only gotten more expensive. It's only gotten more exclusive. And so if we do live in an environment where all of human knowledge is by and large, of course, not everyone's online, but more accessible than it's ever been to more people on the planet than ever before, then we have to be able to find a way to think differently about how to credential the knowledge gain.

Yeah, so two points on that, which I'm so glad you prompted me to because, yeah, we didn't. So one is, it's the simple fact that when, and this is the first thing you said, so we have this incredible thing the internet, it ripped down the walls of the gatekeepers in terms of access to information, But we don't realize that when we talk about the promise of the inch and anybody will be able to learn But in terms of how we value our relationship to the information not just accessing but valuing formally the relationship The information that hasn't changed that's still stuck behind the gatekeepers And so the whole value of the whole thing is stunted and that when you talk about like oh it's still stuck behind these things

Of course because we have this miraculous thing which gives you access But nobody gives a shit like there's no way of measuring it there's no of signaling it And coming back to the point of signaling it we've made redockers So that that profile you get, that intellectual, that personal landing page of your life's learning, that you choose to share. You choose what's public, just to be clear. We've made it so that it is packaged in what we call assets so that you can take that page and put it everywhere where somebody decides if they should trust you.

It comes with LinkedIn upgrades. It comes with Twitter upgrades. It comes with resume upgrades, presentation upgrades, like literally everywhere that you would want to signal. Because when we talk about, like, oh, I want to be able to be in the room and so Harvard, this and that. The other thing we forget is that degrees are not even enough. People are already doing this in a totally roundabout way. Think about the fact that the majority of professional activity on LinkedIn, on Twitter, and you could argue the newsletter boom, is people posturing around subjects they want to be respected on.

Because a degree is not enough. It often pigeonholes you. It's irrelevant as you get further and further from it. You're not going to go back to school. And so people are like always signaling. That is like a tiny trace. When they share that one article, when they share that one comment, when they finally find the time and they do extra work to do it.

That is such a convoluted, ridiculous way to signal this invisible labor they're doing, right? And so this is about, you know, Harvard makes you look cool because it's a brand. This is about, you know, exploding that idea of this abstracted brand and distributing it across all the touchpoints with data so that your intellectual labor authentically counts wherever you want and how you want. Coming back to the idea of quantity versus quality, again, when you're saying like the experts on Twitter, the substackers or whatever,

every single one of these platforms that I've seen for 25 years, there's an advantage to being the first. And so it's hard. That's why the Vine Star is, you know, because if you're first to something, if, you know, the people that are big on substack were already big in another arena or whatever, so it's harder to. One of the things potentially for social media that this is a problem that Redocracy could attack is that to get the 300,000 followers on Twitter or to be able to make a living at a

substack, you're already behind the eight ball and the people that got there first and planted their flags first have this sort of stranglehold on the conversation. You just learn about a new thing in crypto. I've come back to crypto, but, you know, people got to it six months before. Oh, I'm too late. So this would allow a way to get on a level playing field without having to be there first. Yes. So when we're talking about democratizing and signaling, this is a way that it is sort of leveling the playing field as opposed to just the person that, you know, got there when the coin was half a penny. Exactly. And also we are very mindful of this even. So we have, we have community badges that you can get, which like if you're in the top 20% on a subject in terms of consumption, you are well read. If you're in the top 20% of contributing,

like you are super helpful, you are well respected. These things, you can earn it and it shows if it was all time. So this happened at some point in the past. Or if it's like recent, you also get it if it was just a couple. month and people can see that so that people don't feel like oh I like it's too late for me like why would a bother cold start problem like no like you can still be respected if you put in the time starting now so this sounds great and all sort of pie in the sky idealistic stuff but what are we doing right now but like give me the the state of readocracy if I go and I sign up for it first of all I go and I sign up for it and I do the plugins or whatever and create the profile and start reading and it's just plug and play easy to easy to do it it's plug and play and

I want to make sure I want to come back also because I feel like I dodged on the on the information diet part so I want to come back but but it is it kind of touches on that it is plug and play we have a wait list we've been like very careful I think we followed kind of the superhuman approach carefully letting people and making sure we get people who really get it and so we've done that for the past year in a couple of months, we are planning to open it up mostly. You'll still have to read a short page that says, like, do you understand what it means to be a good information citizen? If you don't read it, you don't even see the sign-up button because we're using re-docracy,

which is kind of neat. It's like a terms of service of not being an asshole that is built in. So, yeah, it's just that. You sign up. And once you add the extension, you're off to the races, and you'll see your insight starting to populate. You'll start getting the professional and social upgrades. The idea is that it's premium, so you use it for free the basics, and for a month you have almost everything for like included.

And after a month, it rolls back to the basic account. And if you want to get, you know, the LinkedIn upgrades, if you want the advanced insights about your mind, these things are paid. Like that's how we monetize. We will never sell anybody's data. It's in our guiding principles. So that's kind of how we structure it. Well, and again, that sounds great. Maybe I'm motivated to go sign up and better myself.

but also to the degree that you can talk about this because, you know, some of these things that you've been doing are not for public consumption yet, but you're also working with organizations, corporations, academia, various institutions and things like that, that this is sort of a platform that will hopefully see people integrating into traditional learning. So you might find your way into reidocracy. Yes. Can you give me an example?

example? A great example is a fantastic institution which I always love promoting because I love what they do. They're called the Knowledge Society. You may or may not have heard about them. They punch way above, you know, the scale of what they have. Basically, their idea, okay, they were thinking it's two brothers actually also, coincidentally Canadian that I guess made it in the valley, came back to Canada, and they set up this international alt school, which was saying, well, if we want to change the world, maybe the best way is to find the smartest teenagers in the world and equip them to immediately start making change instead of having to wait or respect or grind it up.

So they have a school set up for this. It's international. I have American students, Canadian students, international students that are just terrifyingly brilliant. They are some of the top users on Redocracy. The volume of quality research papers and content that these kids consume is horrifying compared to how it makes me feel about myself.

But they're basically going to be using Redocrydictory. more and more across, you know, already a bunch of their students use it a ton. And they have a really neat model around credentialing in terms of students have to work their way through, the material. There's, you know, brands that come and sponsor credentials, so they're ready for industry. And so that's like one example of how you can use it in one institution that is using it. But like that, that use case is what we're doing with a variety of schools and also formal colleges, universities. And what's really exciting is, I can't mention the names yet, but there's some really big upskilling, reskilling jobs programs, rethinking employment in the pipeline from school to employment in America that we are starting to work with. Another side of the coin is what this could do for creators.

Is the YouTube live? It's live. It's live. It's live. So imagine you're a YouTube. creator and let's say that you're teaching concepts about artificial intelligence. And if someone watched your whole channel, there's 70 hours of learning to code or learning concepts of AI or learning, you know, complicated math or something. But do you have this huge catalog

that, again, is either the equivalent of anything in a college or better? And you could then offer your what you've done, your corpus of work as something that people could get credentialed through and say, I went through Brian's entire AI course, all 70 hours. And so as a creator, this is a way to get value of the back catalog is reductive. But as a creator, I know that that's incredibly valuable. Yes. But also, it creates a stickiness and a sort of you know, a community around work that you've done? Well, there's two important points there. One is, first of all, just identify your super fans.

Like, just whenever you write a substack post, you put a medium post up, you put your next to YouTube video up, just have a badge generated by Redocracy. You can embed in the page that says, if you've consumed more than this, I have a whole, I've accumulated it through this list on Redocracy. If you have worked your way through it, I would love to give you this badge. and give you special access, a discussion that is only accessible to people have done it. Readocracy can tell.

Right. And so that's really powerful. The other way, which is more like macro and why this is so important for, you know, a huge issue in society right now is how do we justify quality journalism? Because it's always losing compared to the most inflammatory insane stuff. And even the quality stuff gets pulled in the direction of like a race to the bottom. Right. And so ultimately, I mean, we spent two years kind of leading into Redocracy,

learning a lot about the media space and what? working with media companies as well. And ultimately journalism, quality journalism, as much as it pains me to say this, the fact is it's a nice to have. You do it for your own responsibility, your own satisfaction. That's why you pay the money or spend the time. You don't get anything formal, the vast majority of the time. And so what would happen if quality content was now able to be attached to reputation with formal outcomes? That gives a distinct advantage to quality content where it becomes a vector for identity. And so at that point in time,

and this comes back to it, if you have an amazing YouTube show, if you write incredible things, we're going to be working with podcasts soon as well, like in terms of even if you don't have a video. This is something that should count for something, both in terms of you recognizing your fans and being able to build a community around that

for the people who really know their shit and will have the best possible conversation. But also, how does this map, like you're putting value out in the world because you know something and you've committed to it, how are people able to show that right well and as a perfect example i know there are people listening that have listened to all 1400 episodes of this show and i've said before and i'm

kind of joking but kind of not that like if you listen to six months of this show you'd kind of be qualified to get a job at a VC firm maybe not become a VC jump right in right away but like you would have good knowledge of where the industry is at the tech industry's at right now so imagine you listening right now and you know you've listened to all 1,400 episodes, a badge could say, hey, this person is fairly up to date on the tech industry. And again, it's not just reidocracy saying. It would be, there would be a QR code that is in their LinkedIn, that is in their resume. If they want to put it in there, that when they trigger it, it pulls up a page immediately

that shows all your episodes, like the data, like the number of time spent on each, their notes. So in the same way, the original Google algorithm was, based on the concept of the citations in academic papers and so if if the internet or the the tech meme right home podcast is leveled up by readocracy for being a venue of expert knowledge and then in the same way that the Google page juice says what is the authentic or the authoritative site the same thing would happen would accrue to to that knowledge base and then to the people that have done the whole 90 yards. Yeah. And by the way, again, when we talk about like, okay, how do we make

the internet better? Again, when we distinguish between the cat videos and the super informative, like, don't get me wrong, really informative stuff should be entertaining if it's good, entertaining stuff should be informative. But the bottom line is, right now, the scrape the barrel, get your attention, high volume stuff, has a way of monetizing and incentivizing. So they have a way of rising in the ranks. The good stuff doesn't. So this is a way of saying, hey, there is another way to get value here that you can optimize for. And the neat thing about it is that, by the way, the shitty stuff, like their attention grabbers, that can't work with the system.

So they suddenly have their own counter incentive to be like, oh, shit. Like, what am I going to do this? Or I'm going to choose this path that allows me to do like high value audiences, high value partnerships, credentials, all this stuff. Let me, let me, incept something to any media brands out there. Imagine you could charge a higher CPM because a trusted system tells people that you have higher quality content. So even though we're trying to get away from the world of monetizing through ads. Just a thought.

One of our partners actually, so we, and we forbid this, you can't use our data to target people. But we're open, for example, if you have an ethical media alliance that only wants to work with publishers who do, not inflame and only put out quality ads that are not trying to grab your attention, hey, if we can help, you know, say that this is higher quality and these people are more committed, we're happy to support that. And all that advertising is evil. And there's a reason for it. It's not like it's going to disappear completely.

But so, you know, we're open to that kind of thing totally. And also, if you're a media brand out there, by the way, to add to the inception, what would it mean if somebody shows up on your side? And a little thing up here is saying, like, thanks for reading these first two articles. is you are eight away from gaining access to a VIP discussion. You should keep coming back. Right, right. Okay, before we wrap this up, you wanted me to come back around to information diets.

Have we hit that? Yes. So at the very top I said there's kind of when we don't value, you said also, when we don't value how we spend our time, one side is the opportunity. And I promise we don't go this long on this side as if, you know, the second half. but the other side is that it's dangerous. Something we've been popularizing, I just spoke in Washington on this, again, some partnerships who can't name, but fairly high profile, hopefully, coming soon.

You can draw a very tight parallel between the obesity epidemic and the dysfunction of how we were feeding ourselves and the systemic nature of it, like the lack of regulation, around ingredient labels, nutrition labels, all that stuff. You can map that very tightly to what I would say is an infobesity epidemic, with the issue of how we feed our minds. And so right now, the fact of the matter is that if I give anybody, like anybody who's listening, like if you had an hour and I have two, like in each hand I have like a burger and a set of vegetables and like what are you going to eat right now, so many things are immediately going to

come to your mind that instinctively would make you lean one way or another. Not that there's anything wrong with burgers, but at least you have a framework and a set of ideas to immediately think of. if instead with that hour we replaced the food and I put like super saucy tantalizing misinformation click baits and every tablet gossip on one hand and the other one I have like a few amazing long form timeless pieces from experts right now you give that somebody online you make you that opportunity there is literally no consequence or reward right like why should they care right they're not going to be judged the experience is invisible they'll disappear

into the ether, they have no data about it, there's no reason to care. So, and the problem is we're in a system that is definitely designed to make you lean for the burger, you know, informationally, and also to not make you think about it. Like gorge yourself, it's like a buffet. You're out of hours a day like consume, consume, consume. And so the other side of this is, you know, the mindlessness with which we consume, in our opinion, is upstream of so many issues you see in society. Like whether it's the ease of which misinformation spreads, because you're like completely

mindless, you're not thinking, there's no friction, why would you care, the ease with which you can like agitate people, and then just like how, you know, truth disappears basically, again, under all this. So like downstream from these things, whether you're afraid of what's happening with democracy, you know, misinformation you said at the top of the show, like this is something where it's not just about how we signal trust outwardly, but it's also about our mental health. And like the sanity we have as a society basically depends on us also. Also. in the same way we're equipped to think more mindfully about how we feed ourselves, you know, physically, how do we feed ourselves mentally and having the framework and the thinking

and the data to think around that? Right. That's really important. And by the way, like, I'm super excited because this is something we've just solidified over the past month. We're going to be working with some of the top researchers in the U.S., and so by next year we should be the only platform that can actually prove that we reduce your anxiety and indicators of depression because of like the news overload.

I mean, how many times are you talking to somebody like, I've stopped viewing the news? I'm like, this is too much. So you're saying that you're also, you think that this is a tool for fighting doom scrolling, is what you're saying. Yeah. And I don't want to turn on my phone in the morning because I don't want to be depressed, right? We will, I'll drop a little teaser here, I won't get into details, but we will let you take control of the algorithm. Everything we're doing until now has been kind of reactive. We're going to help you get proactive as well.

Doom scrolling, I don't know if that was deliberate or not, but a few weeks ago, you may have seen in the Guardian article about doom scrolling and the impacts on mental health by a researcher. We're going to be working with them and their team, just one of the folks we're working with. So, yeah, it's, you know, one of our early partnerships actually is with a employee benefits platform. So it's quite likely that some of your listeners, if they go into the employee benefit side of their workplace, they may see a reedocracy list as one of the benefits. Yeah, I'd name the names, but trust me, if you're listening, there's some of you that are working at these companies.

Yeah. So, and then one other thing, I'm just going to jamming in here because I know it seems like we've, oh, well, we're going to fix this. We're going to solve for this. But one more thing is people, and this, you don't even have to have a comment on this. This is just me thinking about it. But like people that want to do things like create these next generation education platforms, you see a lot of it for like these coding schools and things like that. But there's other things out there that are trying to blow up. sort of the monopoly that higher education has had.

Like, this is a way around what is essentially the rubber stamp credentialing. Because, you know, those of us that have been to college, even at the best colleges, there are some shitty courses and some shitty classes. And so, on the one hand, the way to fix, as we said earlier, to democratize education is to, you know, is to break down the ivory tower. But the other way to do it is to create a platform of incentives to have these alternative ivory towers be taken seriously. Yes. And that, to me, is one of the most exciting things is the democratization of, again, to use my example of that insane AI YouTube page that's out there that is doing,

better work than you could maybe get at MIT, leveling the playing field so that that sort of learning could be as value. And the discussions around that having value in themselves being credentialing, when we talk to other people who know what they're talking about. And again, this is not to say like, oh, we're coming for colleges. Right, right, right, right. Like, we partner with them. That's why I'm saying you didn't have to comment.

That's my comment. There's a wave where everybody wins here. And we're very partnerships first. We're very win-win in our approach. This is how we'd like to think we're fundamentally different also from, you know, I think the reputation big tech has acquired. And so we, you know, we're going to be a platform of platforms. We're going to have APIs, which, like, we've been built as a series of cascading APIs.

So, yeah, that's kind of how we think about it. So if I'm just a listener and I want to find out about Reocacy and get involved that way, where do I go and what do I download? Go to reidocracy.com, spelled as you think it would be, reading and democracy or meritocracy, and then join the wait list, which is still there. But if you say you heard about it here, you'll get immediate access. We'll do that for you. Also, I think I'll put a collection together, which I'll give to you,

and maybe you can attach somewhere that has, like, background reading and all sorts of cool things we think about on the things we talked about. We can credential that. And also, we... We are fundraising. And so if you want to help usher in a smarter world, a less insane internet and society, and you like what we're putting down, we would love to have you involved. We're looking for people who are thinking big and our mission aligned.

And we want more people in our little alliance here. If there's any investors, obviously you can reach out tomorrow directly. you can reach out to me too and I'll put you in touch with them, but I'll also give you the background on having worked with him for over a year now. But also, what if I'm an employer or an institution of higher learning that wants to find out and get involved in this platform? So that would be a really good time to get involved because, again, I can't name the names. I can if you reach out to me personally, but there are some really exciting initiatives going on in Canada, but especially in the U.S., in some cases of the U.S., where working, if you're a

professor, if you're a VP at an academic institution, it doesn't have to be a college, university, also high schools, that you're interested either in improving critical thinking, if you care about media literacy, information literacy, mental health, and just like a new way of thinking about credentials and kind of giving your students an edge, yes, please talk to us because it is the perfect time to do so. Okay. Mario, thanks for coming on. One of the things I always say is to anybody that we invest in, like come and use this when you want and how you want. So I do want to say when I'm saying that,

oh, you know, I've been working with Mario for a year now, but he's only coming on now. The reason for that is because it wasn't a good time yet. Yeah. But this was one of the first investments that the fund made and continues to be one that I'm super excited about. So really appreciate it, Brian. It's been a pleasure working together. And I think this is also, I'm glad I came on now because, as you know, I was just presenting in Washington, all these things are happening. And I think there will be a lot more to talk about soon. Well, then when you come back, we'll get a, we'll be filled in on all of these exciting stuff. Thanks, Mario. Thank you.