The Pomp Podcast - Jarrod Dicker, VP Technology at The Washington Post: Free Speech and Censorship on a Blockchain

Episode Date: February 6, 2019

Jarrod Dicker is the former CEO of Po.et. In this conversation, Jarrod and Anthony Pompliano what's wrong with the media today, what potential solutions may be, how censorship and free speech are constantly tested ideas, and how foreign governments like China will deal with un-censorable content on a blockchain. ----- Join the Off the Chain newsletter. Pomp's daily email analyzes the crypto market for institutional investors. Simply, it’s the best crypto newsletter delivered to your inbox every morning. No frills. No bullsh*t. Just everything you need to know in a 3-minute read. https://offthechain.substack.com/ ----- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by BlockWorks Group. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworksgroup.io

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off The Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off. Jared Dicker is the former CEO of Poet. In this conversation, we discuss what's wrong with the media today, what potential solutions may be, how censorship and free speech are constantly tested ideas, and how foreign governments like China will deal with uncensorable content on a blockchain. This conversation was really entertaining and informative. I hope you enjoy it nearly as much as I did. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the

opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. All right, guys. Super pumped. Jared's here. Are you ready to do this?

I'm ready. All right. What's your background? So I have a media background. I actually, my early, early background was in music. I wanted to be a music journalist. What kind of music? I like jam bands.

I'm a big Phish fan. I've seen Phish about 200 times. That's it? I love the dead. i wanted to write about music did that for a while made no money um realized real quickly that i can make more money working in advertising so i went so like that's where everything just propelled i i got a job off craigslist at the huffington post um before they sold to aol the huffington post was looking for uh employees on craigslist yeah yeah it's crazy right i don't

know if that's good or bad we'll keep going yeah and i joined in december 2010 so they ended up selling for 315 million in January. So Craigslist might've been the right approach, right? Rather than paying recruiters. And like, that's where everything happened. I really started to recognize that the media industry really doesn't know what it's doing and really appreciates anyone who wants to make an effort to try to make things better, especially on the business side. Like early days of the Huffington Post, we couldn't get anyone to give a shit about advertising, to really think differently about how to grow our business. Everyone just wanted to focus on the creative side i said look if you'll pay me double i'll work on the business side uh found that there

was huge creative opportunity there we we like created native advertising there um everything blew up then i went to time inc i went to rebel mouse which was a uh i remember yeah a tech company the social uh social page for everything right right so paul berry who was cto of the huffington post and uh ken lear and eric hippo who um run lear hippo ventures kind of launched Rubble Mouse. The team got back together. We built that for the distributed web. The whole idea was you don't need websites. You build everything for social. We kind of see how that's happened politically now. Kind of went backwards. And then I went to the post. I went to the other post, the Washington Post for three years. I led innovation, really focused on the

business side of things. It was an amazing time to build a media company that had a great reputation that was owned by Jeff Bezos. So you had full flexibility. He's struggling right now. Dream job. But yeah, I know the news, the news is the news. Right. So and then, you know, towards towards the end of my tenure at The Washington Post, I really started thinking about like, what is the future in media? Right. Like, do are we valuing the work that we're doing correctly? Right. We're constantly screaming, hey, you should subscribe to our work or you should pay for our content and turn off your ad blockers. But do the consumers actually really understand that? Do they even know the work that goes into creating this podcast and the hours that you're putting in and why you're

actually asking for it because it takes your time and there's value and that to me became extremely obvious that there was nothing out there that there's nothing out there that literally proves effort right and proves the work that goes into certain things when it comes to the creative side then boom right it was um at this point it was like uh october right of last year during the crypto boom and everyone's thinking of different ways right to really start to leverage blockchain and to me blockchain became insanely interesting because i'm like here's something permanent where I could expose information that can't be manipulated. And when we talk about what's premium versus not premium or who owns what or who has the rights or the licensing to what, why not use something that is more kind of immutable, right, than current databases and current systems?

Hold on. Before we get into the future, let's go to the past first. What the hell is wrong with media today? So a lot. You know, I think the biggest problem with media is that everything's at a default. Like everyone is valuing everything the same. So in my opinion, you have how many followers now on Twitter? I don't know, a lot.

A lot. So you are a media company. 150, 60, 80,000 followers. Right, right. So you are a media company, right? And I think anyone who has a voice and an audience and content out there is a media company. However, we're baselining all of the values against certain things like audience and CPMs and advertising and subscriptions. If I'm a media company, by the way, I'm firing myself.

Right, right. Yeah. I mean, you need an HR, right? You need to start figuring that out. Um, but, uh, that's kind of the biggest problem is that there really is no business model. And people are saying that advertising is the web's business model and that's a problem. And, and, and I don't necessarily think it's a problem. I just think that it was our first stab at doing something.

And, and now there's so many things to focus on and so many things to compete with that no one's really thinking differently about how that works. So, so the big problem really is people are great at creating content. People are great at building these audiences. And it sounds like the issue is that we just can't figure out how the hell to make it sustainable and monetize that in a way that doesn't put all these pressures on the media companies that they're getting today. Exactly. And it's extremely undervalued, right? The work, everyone always said struggling artists, but we feel that more than ever now when we're really

trying to think about the work and things that go into it and how much we get paid and the value behind it. What's a great example of somebody or some company that is drastically undervaluing the work that they're doing? Yeah. So I think a big example, I think it's easier for me to reverse on that question and tell you so so like i'll give you an example the times right when they recently released the fred trump donald trump real estate dossier um that was like a massive article when they published it right they basically did their own tldr so they said look here's the full article you should read it it's important i understand that you're going to skim it we're going to tldr our own content right so you're seeing the value there and then what they also

did is they actually broke down the work that went behind that content so they said we put three journalists on this. It costs $500,000 for us to do the investigative reporting. It took us, and I'm making some of these numbers up. It took us two and a half years. And then as a consumer, you're like, holy shit. So I had a paywall. Here's a great piece of content. The New York Times is not just saying subscribe to great journalism. They're saying subscribe to this because it costs us half a million dollars. We spent three years and this is information that you can only get here. So like to answer your question indirectly, I don't think it's content actually necessarily being undervalued. I think it's a new way to really convey that. And that

I think is awesome, right? Because it's not making anyone go out of their way to do something completely new. They're already doing this. They're already taking the work. They're already putting it into it. Just the consumers have no idea. And that happens across all of the industry, right? No one knows how long it takes to build this podcast. No one knows how long it takes to write a book. No one may give a shit, right? But at least we should try and put information out there to see if that helps rise the models. How much of the quote unquote undervaluing of the work is driven by the owner or the creator undervaluing it versus there's just so much competition that it's like downward pressure on prices and so maybe the new york times actually

knows hey we should be charging 10 times this because that's what it's actually worth but by the way our three competitors are all you know selling it at one tenth the cost and so we actually have to drop our prices to be competitive to try to have any sort of traction yes so is it a mix yeah so that's exactly what happened over the past five years i mean when we launched the huffington post we literally created a business model that said let's take content that's created by the New York times or other publishers. Let's paraphrase it. Let's do proper attribution link back. However, let's beat them in social. Let's beat them in search so that we get 10 to one traffic so that we could sell programmatically and grow our audience. That was the game, right?

That's how Buzzfeed grew. That's how Vox grew. And that's especially how Buzz grew. Right. Business insider. It's how can we put our own perspective, but really how can we dominate in tech and take great content and do proper attribution back. Now, I think five years down the road, that's completely flipped where back then when we used to publish content on the Huffington post, no one cared about the URL. No one looked at who the byline or the writer was. It was just information that was easy for them to get to. Now we have fake news everywhere. Things are spreading across social. No one knows what to believe or who to believe. They're questioning everything. So now the brand actually matters, right? It is about reputation. Wild stat for you. This is a, you

ever been in an elevator where they've got the screens and they just throw up like random stats. Like if you walked down the street, your chance of dying increases 20%, you know, like shit, i should walk down the street um i saw the other day it said uh boomers like you know whatever 45 50 years older or older uh share fake news like double digit percentage more than any other age group and i literally was like every person i know in that age group definitely thinks facebook is still cool and it's just sharing the hell out of stuff like my mom shared something like like from the from the facebook page chicks on the right and i'm like how the fuck did you even find the page chicks on the right but but like no one the problem is that that information's

underexposed, right? So exactly to your point, is it a down model where pressures are being pushed because of competition? I think it was. Now I think everyone is actually feeling personally threatened by the fact that no one knows where information is coming from or who and what to trust. And I'm hoping that there's an opportunity to expose that. Now, the great part, right, about what we're doing, like we, like the royal we in the blockchain space and how we're thinking about exposure of information is that, you know, Facebook, Google, like no one really wants to be the arbiters of truth right no one wants to be responsible for that that's become very very clear right when it comes to how information is being shared and so forth so are there outliers and

other things that can start manipulating these systems so that we're starting to see that information and start changing the world for good now i'm being a hyper optimist right and that's fine have you read my twitter account optimism is okay right all right so those are the problems uh what what did the solutions look like yeah like what does the future look like yeah so i think i I think what the future looks like is just a general way to expose information and allow people to choose, right? We talk about curation markets, right? We talk about ways for people to create their own worldview.

And that, I think, is extremely important, right? I think people will look at information deliverers like, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times and whoever they trust as people to help curate that information for them. But I think more so people want to start seeing their own views, right? Going beyond an algorithm of what Facebook should tell me in my newsfeed or how Google renders my results, I may feel differently about something that others don't, right? And thus the information should be changed. The future is kind of scary, right? When we were talking early on, when I was building Poet, but having conversations with other newsrooms, the notion was like, how do we keep people like Alex Jones, right?

And people who are doing fake news off the site. And I said, that's the exact problem of how we got here in the first place. Right. You may live next to someone who you think is, you know, completely, completely left wing and, you know, excited about certain things and talks to you. But under the table is funding, right? Like conservative, extreme alt type content, because deep down inside, they want that. And are we further pushing things further apart by assuming curation of information to people, thus pushing people towards reading things that, you know, they otherwise wouldn't if they can make decisions on their own? so to me like the future is like how do we expose reputation right how do we build like the nutritional label for the web that isn't controlled by a central authority where everyone can see the same amount of information like hey look if i want to smoke this pack of cigarettes i can it may tell me that it'll kill me right there may be all these warnings on top of it however i could still make that decision on my own that's the future of information the censorship of information is uh people get really really sensitive about all this stuff but one of the arguments that i'm i've always

made is, you know, I was in the Army for a long time, right? And I think we forget that the right or free speech is a right that we have said is important to us as a country, whether I agree with you or not. And I actually think the Alex Jones thing was so interesting. Like, I don't care if you agree, you don't agree, whatever. The idea that somebody was being censored, right? And there's always boundaries right so it's really clear that look if you are you know inciting violence if you're doing like there's some things that definitely cross the line but for the most part the time when we need people to stand up and say well actually the people shouldn't be censored is the time when the most amount of people disagree with the person who's being censored

right and it's always this idea of like you know look it doesn't matter i don't care until they come to censor me right right right right and like that is why right as a country um we pay right and look at institutions like the washington post and the new york times and and ones who have editors that we believe uh have our best interests in in mind to curate content who wouldn't necessarily publish now out in outshone this article now if somebody wants to go and find that content right do i believe that we should be censoring them or keeping that content out there they're going to find it anyway right it's like the drug wars it almost makes it more popular by censoring it because you draw attention to it exactly and and look i mean when we talk about crypto right and

the opportunity for you know anonymized payments and you know the ability to engage and do things that you may not necessarily have to tie yourself to then we are opening up a world where you know there may be more alex joneses that could be funded and get their information out there but that's why again going again complete full circle that's where the value on these sort of media companies and these like true creators uh comes up right because you as a reader or a listener or a watcher of somebody will further trust them and want to better engage them because the information they deliver to you it's also uh this idea loyalty and trust with a content creator and content consumer is not predicated on the size of the audience right so i may think every

single person in the world's an idiot but like you're creating content and i think that you're really intelligent and i like your view of the world and when you talk about this stuff and if i'm the only one who thinks that between you and i is trust loyalty all that it doesn't matter if everybody else trusts you or not right like we should be able to allow you to create the content and me to consume the content um i guess how do you do that in this new world using blockchain like what are you guys actually doing at poet yeah so uh that exposure of information i think is a, is a fuel to thinking differently. Like, I think, I think you're absolutely right. I think your relationship, right. If you are a blogger with your readers, uh, should not be equated

with the relationship of, you know, Vox media and their readers or, you know, another publication and their readers. I think that's how we got into this mess. We, we, we literally, um, uh, commoditized, right. What a user is. And we put them all as the same value, right. Because they're eyeballs, even though, um, you know, I may reach someone who's C-level or I may have a better relationship with somebody and so forth. And we're not able to quantify that. So what we're doing and what I'm most excited about is quantifying those things. Like I call it proof of effort because why not do proof of something in this space? There's not enough of it, but it's kind of this idea of how can we expose like the value of information that really is tied to people's

actual work. So a great example is like when I go to Medium and I read an article, it tells me how long it'll take me to read that article, which fine, sounds exciting because it's like, look, I have five minutes of my day. I'm going to read it. But what if I went and read an article written by you that didn't actually say it's going to take eight minutes to read? It says it took 500 minutes to write, right? Then I'd be like, fuck, I have five minutes to like, like if Anthony took 500 minutes of his day to do this, then I could give at least five minutes to read it. And that kind of brings a new perceived type of value. It brings a new loyalty and connection to the audience. And that's where I think things become more interesting. So that's kind of the new world.

And how does that work? I mean, that works by building verifiability structures. So that's what we do at Poet, right? You can make claims about something. I'm the author of this. This has been fact-checked. This has been funded by this person. This took X long to write and X long to read.

And just being able to expose that information in a data set so that people could figure out what to do with that. That's where I think things start to become really interesting, where we don't just look at the results of something, like its traffic and its page views and its users and things that are heavily commoditized. We're actually looking at what makes it unique and different. Right. The work that went into it, how much research went into it. Why is this information important? And why should I trust this over another thing? Like a great example is Google. Right. Doesn't again, may not necessarily want to be the arbiters of the content that they expose and how that information comes through and they have an algorithm to do so. But if you Google something like, you know, I want to learn about Blockchain 101, and if the original creators of that content was Bitcoin Magazine back in 2010, right, how do we make sure that that wins in search, right? Because if everything else was basically referenced from that and driven to that, the algorithm may see more value in, you know, a Coindesk article or something else that came up because it's gotten more traffic. Yet the originator of those thoughts and that content is, you know, Bitcoin Magazine in this state. And is that important for Google, right? To be able to say, do you want to know what we don't want to be the mediators of all these things, but here's a new value signal that's coming from poet that's tied around reputation, right? And exposure of these verifiability. You see it on Twitter and Instagram all the time now, right? Somebody comes up with a good funny joke or whatever, like the new thing on Instagram is you take a screenshot of a tweet and you post it on Instagram and it goes viral, but that value doesn't accrue in terms of account growth, et cetera, to the originator of the joke or the idea or whatever.

it goes to the person who was first to put it back on Instagram and let it go viral. Right. And so in that situation, there's just more attribution and more that you can give back to the original creator for those ideas that they put out in the world. Yeah. Yeah. And like a great example is, I mean, even like the, the best technologies today can't solve for this. If you Google image search, like empire state building, and if you pull up that Google image, iOS allows you to just hold down that image and save that photo. And you may not necessarily want to steal that person's photo um but it's not a default for ios to be able to like add an attribution to it right or do a watermark to it so that's exactly the point right we uh it's very easy for me to

kind of start talking about what it means for media and what it means for news because that's my background that's what i understand but yeah think of it for photography right how do i know that this image that i'm using has the correct rights right what what is the future of rights management when it looks like things don't change uh what does the long tail look like right what Like, what happens if I'm an independent creator and something goes viral and, you know, the fat Jewish uses my stuff? And, you know, how do I even know if people are using it? I don't want to search Instagram and do all these things. That verifiable claim structure helps with that.

Cool part with Poet and what we're doing is that we're basically building the protocol so that other developers could build things on top of it. So we've had there's there's this guy, Brian Isbell, in our community who I met literally over Twitter, who just builds on top of the protocol that built an Alexa app that basically allows him to, like, say, hey, Alexa, put this on Poet. And then he'll say anything and anything that he says is now immutable and written to, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain via Poet, which is kind of cool and kind of scary. Like if this whole conversation was on the blockchain, we wouldn't be able to edit or alter anything. I said something I regret. You say something you regret. And it's out there. yes it's terrifying but it kind of changes the way that we would think about going about things

and how we build things in the first place so like those sort of things i think are awesome and i don't know what the absolute application is for all of this but i do know that behaviors will change if people start to think about what information looks like when it's out there if we're able to do better attribution if we're like able to you know build better provenance based on reputation i think the entire industry changes and like now more than ever the industry is just on fire so like anyone who is a host could come in and just like make some sort of impact i'm gonna ask you about three separate types of content you tell me how you see it coming from the media world uh first barstool sports yeah so good bad oh good good good i mean i mean there's

like this recent news about the comment section right and and dave portnoy kind of came out and i'm actually not a huge stool fan but i watch them from a technical perspective because i'm obsessed with it so just everybody knows uh barstool sports is like been around for 15 years or whatever it is they built a uh a pretty big loyal rabid fan base they've done it on social they've kind of grinded it out raised some money uh eventually from churning and uh started to grow and the recent kind of controversy one of many that they've had is they shut down the comment section because basically there's a bunch of vile comments that were kept getting posted yeah really bad um but do you want to what's really interesting is like when you know you

have a brand is when you when someone wakes up in the morning and it's going to be like where is that brand, right? And that's kind of how I think about media companies now, where if I wake up in the morning tomorrow and BuzzFeed goes out of business, how am I going to find out? It's not because I can't find my BuzzFeed content or my BuzzFeed article. It's going to be because you text me a link and that link is broken. And I'm like, oh, I didn't realize they went out of business. Yep. Barstool has built this community and this following where people wake up in the morning and they don't get the podcast, right? And they don't get their newsletter. There'll be riots, riots in the street.

Right. And that's and that's huge. Right. That's kind of what the skim has done. That's what Girlboss has done. That's what these media companies that are really focused on kind of community engagement and growth have done in way different ways than a lot of modern media companies have. Watch this. We want to see how loyal the fan base is. If you're stoolie and you hear this, go ahead and tweet it, Jared and I, and let us know that you listen to this and we'll see how how rabid that fan base is. Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Um, all right. So, so we've got the barstools of the world. What about what I'll call like the, uh, Instagram influencers models, all that kind of stuff where they're basically creating tons of content that doesn't necessarily go viral, but has really deep engagement. Yeah. So that to me is the future of kind of where we're hitting with media is this idea is this idea of interoperability. I don't believe that in 10 years, uh, we will have 80% of the media companies that we have today. I think, I think media companies have served as

platforms. Um, they think that they're competing with Facebook and Google, uh, in terms of like ad share, but they're actually competing with them in terms of like operators, right? Like if I'm a creator, uh, and if I already built my audience and if I could get more money and more exposure on Instagram, uh, but I may be a photographer, why would I shoot photographs for sports illustrative? My sports photography is doing better on Instagram. And that's kind of the notion of where I think we're going with interoperability. I think we're still sort of disparate in that sense. Like you may have 200,000 followers on Twitter, zero on Instagram, some on like Facebook or YouTube. How do we bring those things together so that you as a brand

come all together and you actually become more appetizing for these media companies or these platforms to get on there because they're going to offer you things, PR, distribution, management, operations, HR, backend, things like that. So these influencers I think are way ahead. I actually think the news industry is going to go this way. I think you're now subscribing to say the wall street journal and the New York times, and you're watching things on CNN, but you most likely without realizing it or watching and reading just for one person. So why are you going to subscribe to an entire media or news organization? If you just want that one person and you want that one person, not just on the wall street journal, you want them when

they're on Bloomberg, you want them on Twitter, you want them on Instagram. So that's where I think the kind of Instagram influencers have a huge leg up with how that model works, because I think the there's no longer such a deep reputation on the domain right it's not just hey i'm jared and i write for the wall street journal and that's what makes me special it's i'm jared i'm special and the wall street journal wants me because i could help grow their brand right and that's the change in the finance world uh matt levine from bloomberg like crushes it right it's literally i know so many people who are just like yeah i don't even know if i'm reading a bloomberg a cnbc article like it's all the same to me but like i i read that email every day right and if

everything's about scale and and and and kind of growing and outwards then how much is that brand like is that brand valuable um because it's bloomberg or is that brand valuable to him because bloomberg gives him a paycheck and an office and a travel expense and pr and like that may be it so if that's the case that's a great value for these media companies to battle with the platforms because they're like look instagram could just give you instagram distribution it's programmatic it's easy but we're not handling anything else and then bloomberg says come here We'll give you A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And then that becomes more interesting and appealing for the creator. Email delivery of news and media gets more or less popular in the future.

More. I mean that, yeah, that is like, goes back to what I was saying earlier about if you wake up and you know, someone goes out of business. I mean, look at the, the biggest media companies, right. That have bloomed over the past, like three to five years. And I'm using media loose, but you have Axios, right? You have the skim, you have things that you love to wake up to read in the morning that you trust that if they weren't there you'd be like you know freaking out right right and that's the thing you know you we we're very cyclical in media right and we like repeat behaviors we declare things dead we declare things back alive and then we start over again um we used to say hey look like you don't want to make your users um search for your content you

need to deliver to them and that's why all these media companies went on to social platforms right because they said it's not about getting audience to your site it's about reaching the audience where they are now everyone's like shit we need to get that audience back because facebook's taking all of our money so now it's kind of going back that way but the newsletter thing is extremely interesting because you can monetize that it's a personal one-to-one relationship you get data and information and you're providing a service that when people wake up in the morning it's like an alarm clock it's like wow i overslept because i didn't get my axios newsletter for sure that's an amazing way to make an impact my uh my girlfriend uh writes term sheet at fortune

so we should use fortune as the example not that axios perfect shout out to dad too but but played it, played it with on that one. Um, what about audio? Yeah, I, uh, I mean, I'm a huge fan of audio. Uh, I'm kind of weird, you know, being a huge music head, like I actually don't listen to too many podcasts. Um, uh, and I know that I'm, uh, I know that I'm, I'm rare there. I'm kind of more like when I have headphones on, I'm listening to Spotify. Uh, I think audio is the future. I mean, I think, I think the AirPods are, I mean, I think AirPods are wild. Yeah. Or the next frontier of technology and the fact that we don't advertise on them already or that I don't put them on and you know there's not a message delivered to me and so forth that like my text

messages aren't like that that frontier is massive right so if I'm a creator or if I'm a media company that's where I'm thinking that everyone in the world in five years is going to have these things in their ear you're going to be able to reach them at any time and they may be able to turn it on and off but likely they will want that so do they go in the brain yeah I would put them i would put them inside inside the head yeah i mean i would take it why not turn on music whenever i walk through i actually like for a very long time whenever i walk through the city i put on music and i like pretend i'm in a movie i feel like i'm in the soundtrack i don't even put on music i just do that normal just yeah it's uh i forgot what spider-man it was but but like that

spider-man scene when peter park is like dancing in the streets like that's the life i wish like i wish music was coming from the sky and i was just do you want everyone to listen to the same music though? No, it's pretty open. That's the problem, right? That's why it can't work. That's fine. Well, somebody will figure that out. Trust me. I'm not sure people are going to love my music. All right. Before I finish up, I usually ask a bunch of rapid fire questions. Uh, what's the most controversial thought you have in crypto? Uh, the most controversial thought I have in crypto is that I think everyone's driving a hundred miles per hour and we can only go 20. Why? Uh, I just feel like, um, I just feel like we like to say that people aren't ready for all

of this, but I don't even think we're ready for all of this. I think like we need to be honest that things are unexplored and undiscovered yet. And that should make us excited. But the fact that we keep looking into news and it's like, wow, someone is using this and someone is able to use this, I don't think is as exciting as if we could start getting things institutionalized. So I know that you often talk about the financial side of it. I often think about, you know, what it means for the creators and what it can mean for media and changing these things. And we're a long way away. And that's fucking good, right? That's a great thing. And that's going to get more people interested and more people engaged. But by no means, like I find myself

constantly driving 100 miles per hour and having to look back and be like wow we're leaving people behind but that's actually bad for our business we gotta go back bitcoin realized that in december of uh of 17 like oh shit we probably should go back right come back down to earth um all right what uh what do you think is the most important company in crypto uh that's a great question actually um can't say yourself oh i definitely don't think that it's us right now i mean right now like spoken like it's your entrepreneur all right what is it i uh i mean i'll actually give a plug to like like i love the block i love what dudas is doing um uh i think shout out shout out to dudas and i think um i think that uh the content that he's providing the information that

he's providing is really awesome uh i think a lot of the media companies like bitcoin magazine i think everyone who's trying to think about what media looks like in this space is doing something extremely interesting um all right so let's talk actually a little bit about uh what's going on in china so uh basically there's these two incidences where people took information they put it onto an immutable blockchain which is ethereum um and one was about a sexual assault case uh and the other was about this pharmaceutical company and a bunch of you know investigative stuff going on there how do you think that type of stuff is going to evolve in countries where we know they're not cool with it yeah no it's that's a great question so um three or four months ago i it's all a fog

but i did shanghai hong kong and sydney in seven days so i flew more than i was on the ground speaking kind of about immutability in news and information and each place i went to i had to change um kind of the directive because here it's like we talk about google we talk about facebook we talk about alex jones china has no idea about any of those things or cares about any of those things and when i went to sydney it was really interesting because they were terrified of immutability because of like how strict the libel laws are so the libel laws are so strict that if you like make some sort of misinformation or some sort of case that has to be deleted from everywhere um or else you know you are put in prison yep so i think uh i think that it's important to think

that way i think that in life we don't really have a do-over button in general like like if i decide to do something completely insane right now i'd have to pay for those repercussions right it's not like i could be like all right like delete it i don't like those results so i i think it's important i think that it's going to change the way society works i think that's why we're all bought into this, right? Because we actually believe that it's bigger than ourselves. So if you know that whatever you do or whatever you say is recorded in public and going to be seen, then it's not trying to think about, well, is that okay? And is that right? It's okay. Well, maybe before I do certain things, I'll think differently. So when it comes to those countries,

yeah, it's terrifying, but that's why I'm actually bought into this because I think that it's going to change the way that we behave and the way that we do things far more differently than we've ever thought before for the better so it's fair yes it'll take time but i also love the notion that information is out there and it's going to be immutable because i can't wait to see how people behave and react when they know that that's the case i love it uh most important book you've ever read the most important book i've ever never read a book ever yeah i was like whoa uh probably i mean i love sapiens i know that that's a tradition or that's a trendy thing but like my favorite books greg allman biography eric clapton biography i i eric clapped it man whoa eric

Clapton's biography. He thought his mother, he thought his mother was, he thought his grandmother was his mother for the first seven years of his life. Then found out that his sister was actually his mother, but his sister didn't want anything to do with him. And then he went on to be Eric Clapton. So that to me is a motivation. That's where the songs come from. Right. All this is like, Whoa. Right. But yeah, I love all music biographies cause I'm just jealous of that life. That's fair. That's fair. We, when we shut off the microphones, we'll make some music you tap on the table or something um all right before uh before i let you ask me a question uh aliens probability that they exist probability that a hundred percent a hundred percent yeah i

mean something has to exist no but something has to exist you think so yeah i mean i mean look i don't know if it is what we think it is but like okay that's fair it'd be insane and not think anything else exists probability that the moon landing was faked i think the moon landing was real all right you can't go i don't want to go to yeah i can't say aliens are real and moon landing is big and expect to like keep my job that that's my new thing is if somebody says that the aliens are 100 real i'm like all right hold on how far how far on the uh conspiracy theory spectrum are you then just go right to the moon landing um what one question do you have for me to finish this up um i mean i think for you like going through um kind of what's been going

on during this space like what things are you uh like most excited about but also kind of what things do you think are the most bullshit and fake that have come out of this uh up and down trend so i'll start with the bullshit stuff first uh i wrote about this a couple days ago i said crypto's got execution problem right like 2017 was the best and worst thing that could have happened there everyone's worried you know what conference am i speaking at what headlines did i get how much money did i raise uh what private jet can i fly on all this stuff like at the end of the day it's just did you build something people want right and uh the thing that almost every entrepreneur that i really respect has in common is they walk into a room and they say none of that shit matters

i build things that people want right and like we got to get back to that being a badge of honor of like you know what i built something that people want a lot of people want it i can make a lot of money because i built a really big business um and it doesn't probably matter how much money you raised and you know all that kind of stuff um so i think that's one big problem the second is uh just complete lack of education like the amount of conversations i i probably can't say i definitely can't say who this is but i went and i met with somebody who managed a lot of money in the institutional world a little bit older guy and walked in the room and he was like i believe that bitcoin is going to be the largest uh opportunity for wealth creation in my lifetime

and i was like bam this dude's the man this is gonna be a great meeting second question what's the blockchain we came back real fast you know to to uh square one on that one and so like i i think that's where we are you know it's just people even if they do believe hey there's a lot of intellectual capital and financial capital going into the space it can have a huge impact um we still gotta do a lot of education and so we just gotta be patient like time is a huge thing um and then uh what am i most excited about like i wake up every day today believing more that this shit's going to change the world than i did when i went to sleep and that sounds ridiculous but the pace at which people are innovating and building things and like like forget all the prices forget all

that stuff like even just bitcoin right like the the kind of first application that the easiest one for people to wrap their heads around in march of 2018 the fall in number of transactions bottled and it increased all the way through the rest of 2018 and so what you see there is like even when prices were falling people were starting to adopt it more right you go and you look at some of these you know countries the the venezuela's argentina's etc adoptions going up well that's not just bitcoin though it's it's the entire ecosystem right and so i think that we still are a long way away from like the you know kind of the first company or product that's going to onboard you know two three billion users right that's gonna take some time to build but i have more conviction

that that is going to come to reality at some point than i did you know six months ago yeah no i think um i i actually had this conversation with someone the other day where i think that blockchain like impact on blockchain and value on blockchain is actually going to come from companies that aren't blockchain companies right like i don't necessarily think that you need to be working within this space to actually make impact on this space because it It is so early, but it is so exciting that I think these other point of views that are going to be coming from the outside over the next few months, like that could be, that could be Facebook.

I mean, I don't necessarily know if that's the right one, but, but it could just be like media companies or it could just be tech companies or others that are just dabbling that see new applications and values that aren't just so blunt, like so focused on, you know, the end game that we all see because we're constantly drinking, um, you know, from the faucet, but coming from the outside. And I kind of threw that at someone the other day where I'm like, do you actually have to work in blockchain or, you know, work in this space to make an impact. And my argument is no, I think actually bigger impacts are going to come from outside point of views.

The corporate dark horses. Right. They're out there. Oh, for sure. All right, man. Listen, this has been so much fun. Awesome. Thank you. We'll have to do it again. You are going to leave and you're going to put your music on and you're going to go skip down the street.

Yeah. I'll be dancing down for a second. And then we'll have to do this again. Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thanks. Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off The Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off The Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top

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