The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Etha.one – Nicole Ogloza, Founder & CEO Interview At Collision Conference 2022

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

p> Etha.one - Nicole Ogloza, Founder & CEO Interview At Collision Conference 2022 Etha.one

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain now here's your host chris voss hi folks this is voss here from the chris voss show.com the chris voss show.com hey thanks for tuning in guys hey we're covering collision conference we're going to be interviewing about, I think, about five or six different companies from the Collision Conference in Toronto, Canada, 2022, if you're watching this later. And we've got an amazing lady.

She's on the show with us today. She is Nicole Agloza. She is the founder and CEO of Etha, or Etha, however you want to take it and pronounce it. Welcome to the show, Nicole. How are you? Good. Thanks for pronounce it. Welcome to the show, Nicole. How are you? Good. Thanks for having me.

Good, good, good. Thanks for coming. We certainly appreciate it. Now, you guys have a booth there at the Collision Conference. Give us your.coms, or your.1, I should say, so that people can find you guys on the interweb. Sure, yeah. You can find us at etha.one. It's actually not.com.

So we wanted to use the.one because we want, you know, obviously the whole world together one day. There you go. etha.one. And so give us an overview of what your company does and how they do it. Sure thing. So basically what we're working on is a social and a news media app that is using AI to prevent political polarization primarily. As you know, in the U.S. it's pretty bad. Is there polarization in the U.S.? Really? I don't know. But yeah, primarily we're trying to fix the polarized climate and then after that we're also trying to help with misinformation a little bit further through that and provide extreme exposure to and transparency to the news media and politics I think now it's super super important to hold our politicians accountable for what they say or do and

this is the first half of its kind that allows you to do that and then eventually we'll be able to have an area in the media where our AI was able to cut through the noise and really find things that have been mentioned before straight from the source and track it over time to show how narratives and misinformation as well as fake stories arise in the news media. Now this is pretty cool. This is an app you can get on your mobile phone. So it's available on Google Play. It's in the iTunes.

I'm actually downloading it right now and signing up. And it mentions here on the app that it helps hold politicians accountable. How does that work? Yeah, so there's two parts to this. There's a leader Q score and then a user Q score. I guess you could kind of think of this, if anyone in the crowd has watched Black Mirror before. Kind of a similar application. But what a leader cue score does is that,

let's say you're voting and commenting and sharing about that politician on a platform. Over time, these scores are amassed almost like a report card. And over time, you could actually see in real time that these politicians, how they fare in the news media from basically what they say or what they do. And then this also is directly reflecting on the person as well that's also commenting about them. So if you're a constructive user also trying to get to the bottom of a situation or law or policy or something like that, you know, constructive users will be better on this platform. But, you know, if you're deconstructive and sending spam links, viruses, or just not being helpful at all, this also affects your score. Kind of like Reddit, but not as severe.

And the other thing is we don't ban people off of our platform. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah. And so you download it on your phone. I'm taking a look at it now. I got my name set up and stuff and uh so uh i can take a look at different leaderboards and what's trending tell me a little bit about how that works yeah so

the leaderboards those actually show all of the politicians on the platform still in the pretty early stages but a long story short this shows like who and what politician is trending the best based on what they're saying in the media. So I guess the first person that's up there has 888 points. This person has been probably, I guess, doing well in the media and promising whatever they're promising through their campaigns. Similarly, politicians that don't promise very well in the media will obviously fall to the bottom of the score um you know this is also updated in real time as things go along and these scores are actually calculated in the long

run right so like let's say there's 500 statements about trump or biden right those are calculated over time to an overall score with overall population like almost judging them kind of wow so now uh the app so basically is the hope that maybe some of these politicians will start worrying about their score to make sure they have a good score maybe? That's kind of the whole point. You know, I think that, you know, they've always been able to take, like, you know, opinions on us as the general public, and I think now it's time to flip the script a little bit.

But, you know, like this also isn't a bad thing. You know, this could actually help the way that politicians communicate to the news media and vice versa. Same thing with holding journalists accountable and pranksters, you know, exposing all of that kind of stuff to help cleanse the ecosystem and the media. Now, it'll help news stories in real time through crowdsource things get rated as well. Is that just news stories that are attached to the politician then? Yeah.

So right now, they're the ones that are kind of attached to it. So eventually, you could see that first statement that's ever been mentioned anywhere on social, video, audio, any of that. And you could actually see the source of it and confirm source, right? So like, let's say a politician is at an event, there's 70 people using the app, they can actually say and verify that this actually happened as opposed to one video kind of being moderated on media. But another element is that crowdsourcing can also help with pseudo events in the media and preventing those kind of fake events that do occur in the media and it's almost like a wisdom of the crowd, you could kind of say.

And so it looks like you've got the, let's see if I can put somebody up. Here's the, let me see if I can hold this up so people can see it on the screen. I'm not sure if it's going to come out too well. But yeah, so you've got an upvote, you've got a downvote, basically with the agree and disagree. And then you can leave a comment and then you can share individual stuff

on social media or wherever you want. This is kind of interesting. You guys have the sourcing for it too. So I can go to where the source is and actually see the information so right now that's like kind of how generally all news media works but eventually we'll have a whole web where you can see like and play around with the whole web and see just what you're reading that's fake and what's not it's actually really cool on interactive graphs so media companies actually do have them internal to their companies. But what we're trying to do is actually expose what's inside of our company and make it open source so people can actually see and play around, you know, with very difficult topics.

Let's say it's an infrastructure bill. What we'll do in this little net is actually showcase and boil it down point by point. So that way people can be educated about the article before they actually start commenting and sharing on our app. And that's really important because, you know, media literacy, depending on, you know, what age bracket you fall in, some people aren't used to technology, right? And that's what we're trying to also aid with is help with education in the news media. But through comedy, that's kind of what I wanted to do, have a more comedic spin rather than focusing on the kind of fear-mongering

that is in the media right now. Yeah. I like this because it kind of cuts right to the point. People can look at the topics, and it educates them. Now, according to this, my news here, your AI can invalidate over 60% of current news stories. Is those like opinion-based news stories or places that come from, you know, that Snopes needs to check or something? Yeah.

So, like, let's take Fox News as an example. This would be a pretty big deal for them. You know, like, you know, honestly, if they don't work with us, then yes, it is actually possible to discredit about 60% of their business because of the way that they use media tactics, right? So, you know, there's a lot of fake news out there, but the way that the media works is that large media houses like Fox, CNN, they have reporters or they actually go on smaller blogs to find those juicy headlines. They don't necessarily have time to check for news or fact check things and things like that. So it kind of gets really lost in the sauce. And then over time, that's how they blow up to these ridiculous narratives and absolute chaos that you see in the media. I've actually been told that the world is a boring place, but media makes it exciting.

So, you know, that's kind of what we're trying to do is boil it down. Definitely, definitely. And hopefully this can make people understand topics more. You know, when I talk to people, we have a lot of political books and authors that come on the show, people from the news media. And, you know, when I go talk to my friends, I'm amazed at how out of touch they are. And this does seem a lot more easier to go through and look at what people are saying. And then, of course, you know, one of the other problems is now no one knows who the representatives are

unless they're really into politics like I am. Like they don't know who their senator is. They don't know who their House of Representatives, whether it's a state or a national. Yeah, that's a pretty big problem, and what we're trying to eventually do is use this system, I guess you could kind of say, oh, can you hear me? Yes. Yeah. So, what we're kind of trying to do is, you know, over time, people will actually be able to be in their community, and like, let's say there's a pothole right um and people start getting hurt over it

right and it's not being escalated to the right person this platform will actually be used to help escalate certain processes and help like with law and policy making saying like hey people are dying over here let's fix this thing first before anything else, all the way down from a granular community level to the rest of the world eventually. Wow, that's crazy. That's crazy. I think it's good for educating people because they can kind of know who their representatives are and what representatives out there are talking about and kind of see their own spin. Anything more we need to know about the product and what you guys are doing there at Collision?

Yeah, I mean, you know, now we're just, like, trying to get the word out there as much as possible. But another thing that we're doing is also fundraising for community rounds. So anyone that would like to take part either in helping us build our product, again, it's for people. We're not actually directly connected to any politicians or big techies or anything like that um we're actually trying to get communities to help chip in and our see our product and also build it with us because you know it's the future um so yeah that's that's some way you know people couldn't get involved with we have stacy abrams actually on a call in about five or six weeks.

And what we're doing with her is that she's actually going to be sitting with her community and saying, like, hey, this is what our problems are. How do we solve it? And then what me and my co-founder are going to do is actually map it out, map out the whole system of how people would like to actually bridge that gap between a politician and their communities and, you know, really start getting people to start talking again. That's definitely important. People need to talk more and communicate more and talk about different things.

I'm sending out my little profile here, but I noticed it's got an Invest Now button in the app. So if you're in the app, that's where they can go invest with you guys and become part of the program? Yeah. Yeah. So through WeFunder and things like that. We've done a little bit through WeFunder, about 20,000, but that's what we're trying to do and spread the word out. Anyone that's listening, they have a connection either in political technology or other space or media. This is kind of what we should really get out there because it's going to really help all of us.

Anyone that's involved with media down to the general public and even politicians. This isn't one of those scary things that's going to kind of ruin the very fabric of disruption of startups. But it's definitely going to be able to help media sort through some things and really actually see what politicians are saying because we're so far away from them that this has never been possible before except with technology. Definitely, definitely. Well, thank you very much for coming on.

We really appreciate it, Nicole. Likewise. Thank you so much, Chris. There you go. And give us your.1 again so that people can find it on the interweb sure thing so you can go to google and search or the apple or google store um e-t-h-a dot o-n-e there you go and anything that can make politics better uh people understand the better people being involved and voting and stuff that's really important i mean it's uh that the i think like half this country doesn't vote at all and that's kind of the problem

i know like it's it's actually surprising like 159 million people voted last year like in the 2020 election yeah this was like a record-breaking one but if you actually look back in history it's been declining um significantly and i, it's been declining significantly. And I think it's because of the loss of the trust in the media. Obviously, there are politicians, but you can't blame them because we didn't have these problems back then when we didn't have these technologies. So this is just sifting the information back and forth right now. That's true. Well, thank you very much, Nicole, for coming on the show.

We really appreciate it. Yeah, sure thing. See you later, Chris. There you go. Thank go thank you and thanks to Monix for tuning in be good to each other stay safe and we'll see you guys next time and awesome