The Wolf Of All Streets - Important! We Are Saving Free Speech: How $RTB Is Using Blockchain To Revolutionize Journalism

Episode Date: September 1, 2024

“Roundtable” ($RTB) co-founders Mario Nawfal, Scott Melker, CEO James Heckman and CTO Eyal Hertzog, joined forces aiming to revolutionize journalism. The coalition announced a newly launched, decentralized media payment system, with its own token ($RTB), to empower citizens to support independent journalism directly, bypassing mainstream media, silicon valley control. Previous Web-3 platforms have found it challenging to build audience and substantially monetize. Roundtable however already boasts millions of consumers and revenue. Can will converted to $RTB for payments, creating a system that ensures journalists cannot be held hostage by corporate sponsors, who may not align with the principles of investigative journalism for public entities, as intended for American citizens. The platform addresses the 'black box' monetization strategy and data loss currently imposed on independent journalists by mainstream platforms. RTB ensures complete financial transparency and full ownership of customer data, preventing journalistic content from being held hostage by corporate sponsors, whom many believe wield excessive influence over media. The Roundtable Platform uniquely solves this issue as the first blockchain venture to launch with a fully developed ecosystem—historically the stumbling block for Web-3 media platforms. Roundtable already boasts millions of consumers, substantial revenue, and a proven platform, all safeguarded by blockchain technology, which also shields consumers from disruptive intruders and censorship. $RTB - https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/roundtable-2 James Heckman: https://x.com/jamescheckman Mario Nawfal: https://x.com/MarioNawfal Eyal Hertzog: https://x.com/eyal ►► Sponsored by iTrust Capital Invest in Bitcoin, Crypto Assets & Gold with Your IRA Using iTrust Capital. 👉 https://bit.ly/itrust-scott ►► JOIN THE FREE WOLF DEN NEWSLETTER, DELIVERED EVERY WEEKDAY! 👉https://thewolfden.substack.com/ Follow Scott Melker: Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottmelker Web: https://www.thewolfofallstreets.io Spotify: https://spoti.fi/30N5FDe Apple podcast: https://apple.co/3FASB2c #Bitcoin #Crypto #investments The views and opinions expressed here are solely my own and should in no way be interpreted as financial advice. This video was created for entertainment. Every investment and trading move involves risk. You should conduct your own research when making a decision. I am not a financial advisor. Nothing contained in this video constitutes or shall be construed as an offering of financial instruments or as investment advice or recommendations of an investment strategy or whether or not to "Buy," "Sell," or "Hold" an investment.

And Stalin gave him a motor car. This is the mechanism by which you fix all other problems. Did you ever think you were going to be a sellout propagandist, that that would be what you do for a living? Because making money as a journalist is a very, very difficult task. But here's the most important point. Nothing's more important than free speech. Growing up in the 1980s, people trusted the mainstream media. Legends like Dan Rather

and Peter Jennings would show up for 30 minutes, distribute the news without bias, and nobody doubted their incentives. It's fair to say that that's changed in 2024, but reporting true news for an independent journalist is nearly impossible for a number of reasons. No platform has existed that's allowed them to do that without fear, with the ability to monetize, and to know that they will never be censored or canceled. Roundtable is solving this problem. It brings national distribution,

monetization directly through the RTB token, no censorship because it's on the blockchain, and of course, no bots because identities are verified by all of the users. James Heckman and Eyal Herzog on the blockchain. And of course, no bots, because identities are verified by all of the users. James Heckman and Eyal Herzog are the founders. Mario Nafal and I, who are both equity partners, had a long discussion today with them about what is so important about this platform

and why everybody needs to be a part of it. Let's go. I think it just came out so authentically because James has been in the trenches for a long time you know I've been doing this for a couple of years and to see how censorship has gone from where it was to where it is and the way it's being implemented it's just been fascinating in a scary way for me especially now with Pavel arrested yesterday but James I want to give you the mic and you know I want you to give us an overview of that journey of yours as someone who's been in the media game for longer than all of us well first of all I'm really couldn't be more honored and excited to be working with passionate

journalists like the two of you. And I really enjoy listening and watching you because you're really, although you're young, you're bringing back a bygone era, one when I started my career in the 80s, I hate to admit, when journalists literally were trained out of college to not take a position, to ask questions of both sides, right? True journalism is like the jury system in the United States judicial system. And that is you have a prosecutor and you have a defense attorney vigorously giving their information and then the jury decides, right? And I love how both of you ask fair questions of both. And I think right now you see journalists who aren't really journalists, they're just PR people who say, this person espoused the false claim that, or the debunked notion that,

if somebody tried to do that coming out of journalism school, when I was coming out of media school from Washington, you'd have been fired immediately. You would have been laughed at really. You would have been lampooned. And it reminds me when I was in Washington, DC during the COVID rallies, sitting in the Lincoln Memorial with Robert F. Kennedy and Ryan Cole and Robert Malone. And I whispered to Ryan and I said, do you see that platform, that mezzanine? There's New York Times, CNN, Washington Post, like 25 major media guys with their cameras. And they all look like they're 26 years old, 27 years old. Right. And I'm sure they were great, great students. But I said, hey, Ryan, I want you to ask them something. What Ryan asked is he pointed to them in front of 50,000 people.

When you were in journalism school, an inspired liberal wanting to bring truth to the world, did you know that someday that you would sell out and be a shill for big pharma, that you would be carrying their false message so they could have a trillion dollars of market cap? Did you ever think you were going to be a sellout propagandist, that that would be what you do for a living and go home and have to face your family? It was an amazing moment. And they literally just kind of dropped their pads because 50,000 people were staring at them because they're not real journalists. What was that tipping point? Because I was asking, as I said, I was speaking to Kim.com and Andrew Tate just hours ago.

The question I asked him and I want to ask you is where was that tipping point of where journalism has just become so corrupt, biased, and the incentives have become so misaligned? Yeah, I'm going to answer it in two parts. It's been there for a while. Okay. In the 1930s, there was a huge movement across the globe to promote communism. And so the New York Times sent Walter Durante over to the Soviet Union while they were mass murdering millions of people. He killed about 10 million people in Ukraine. And Stalin gave him a motor car and he went around and looked over the Soviet Union. And he was seeing mass murder by the millions, concentration camps, the intentional famine. And he had a lunch with an OSS operative in Switzerland. And he told the US intelligence agent, they're killing millions

of people to take over the farmland. And he admitted it. And it's all been recorded. I've read the OSS piece of paper. But then he went back to the New York Times and reported that the notion that people were dying was absurd and that it was a worker's paradise. And so he brought the Soviet propaganda that Stalin asked him to bring. And the entire country thought that this was an amazing government. And of course, we aligned with them and helped Stalin kill another 30 million. And so the New York Times accepted a Pulitzer Prize for the greatest fake news in history, Walter Durante. And they still won't give their prize back, even though he knew it was a lie. So one could say that the tipping point was when the journalists in the 30s, it was very cool to be a socialist, to be a communist, right? It was very cool.

So, you know, you could say that. But for America, you know, just America proper, I would say the tipping point was caused by Fox News. You know, I worked for Rupert Murdoch. I was chief strategy officer globally for all of digital media. And I'll give you just kind of two points that I think we should think about. Roger Ailes felt it was his duty, okay, if Roger Ailes ran and founded Fox News. When Clinton won, Fox News declared war against major media. It was really amazing.

They decided, and they got 50% market share. And when I was there, we valued Fox News as a $15 billion asset. And so you had New York Times, CNN, and everyone who was promoting Clinton. And Roger Ailes was Richard Nixon's press secretary. And he launched Fox News for Murdoch. And so they filled this gap for the other half and they really started to get aggressive. And it caused CNN and New York Times to counter by dropping what they thought was objective. Okay. And in 1994, Fox News, I would say, was responsible with Newt Gingrich for flipping the House and the Senate over the Republicans. And that was when people took sides.

And so that was when politics started having an impact. When do you think did it go into a bigger problem, in my opinion, what X is facing right now, Linda's become very public about it a few weeks ago, is where advertisers start to dictate what needs to be censored. Quickly, can I make a point, James? Of course. Because that also is what the proliferation of 24-7 news, as opposed to Americans signing on to ABC or CBS and watching Dan Rather or Peter Jennings deliver their one hour of impactful news each night. And in the 80s into the 90s in Ford, you had this everything's breaking news 24-7 news cycle that had to be filled, which created an environment where opinion became news because they had to fill airtime. And then you added in the iPhone and social media to that

as we, you know, approach the last 15 years. And I think many would argue that that was the problem. You know, Scott, I was in the middle of this, you know, I worked for Ted Turner in 1990. And, you know, when the walls came down, you know, did the first, the first big media event, which was the Goodwill Games. And I remember all the journalists in the world descending on Seattle. And, you know, that was an amazing time when we were all trying to be, you know, trying to be objective. But in truth, so Walter Conkright's,

what I grew up with in my childhood, and then Dan Rather, right? They had a responsibility on their shoulders. It was actually 30 minutes national news, and then the local news would follow. NBC ended up going at 6.30, ABC and CBS at 6. But when you're Walter Cronkite, there's almost this universal guilt that if you ever gave an opinion, if you ever gave an opinion, that responsibility was so grand that it made him be pretty objective. The one time he stepped out,

he destroyed the U.S. military's ability to conduct the Vietnam War. The Tet Offensive in 1969, he walked outside of Hue and declared the U.S. was losing the war. They had just crushed the Tet Offensive. The Marines rolled up and had a huge victory, but he was sick of the war and he declared that we're losing. When he gave his opinion, it was mayhem in the streets, marching in the streets, draft cards burnt. His words of giving opinion changed the world. That was the first time. Otherwise, he was just straight to the edge. So CNN was created, obviously, by Ted Turner. That was 24-hour news. That's what you're talking about. Their standards was to match Walter Cronkite. And I would argue for a long time, they were pretty darn objective. And it was amazing.

You're seeing real-time videos that was distributed across the country. And they had Bob Novak, and they would have wonderful debates between left and right. And it was really fair, and it was very civil. It was actually wonderful. It was probably the peak of journalism when CNN came out. And what I would say is, when Roger Ailes came out. And what I would say is when Roger Ailes came out with all guns blazing for Fox, it kind of gutted everything. I'm not saying I didn't appreciate it because I thought, you know, it was the objectivity started to melt. I would say the true change was blogging, right? When Huffington Post started coming out and people really started to do non-objective news um it became a full-out war james i think when i'm against even political bias among the media and al we're going to go to you in a bit when we dig into the round table which is obviously the

focus of the discussion but where it gets concerning is when you start having private companies impact what is being censored and what information is being shared with the audience. Where did that tipping point start in your opinion? And more importantly, it's getting pretty bad where X seems like it's the last bastion that's fighting this. And even X is struggling with advertiser boycotts. So I think we should fast forward a little bit or else we'll have a one-hour history lesson, which I'd be glad to give some time. So you've got a handful of people who are in control of the news. And I think everybody needs to kind of understand that. But let's fast forward to COVID. I watched a video of two PhD MDs who had treated 5,000 consecutive COVID patients. Less than 1% of them died,

and this was at the hospitalization, and they were over 80 and or diabetic and obese. They then contacted Stockholm, Rome, New York, Dallas, Israel, every major COVID center, and had 50,000 test results. They held a press conference and they proclaimed the immune system can beat this in a week. The whole, everybody should be open up and only less than 1% of very seniors should quarantine. I asked my son to record it. Within one hour, YouTube took it down and said it was a violation of their standards or whatever their excuse is. Jack Dorsey took it down. Later, Zuckerberg admitted he shut down 76,000 accounts.

That was completely locked down except for super right-wing publications. When the Freedom of Information Act came and showed that pregnant women had a 35% adverse effects to the vaccine, full media lockdown, while the White House and CNN proclaimed that it was safe and effective for pregnant women. When they had the data, they had the data from Pfizer, from their clinical trials. How does that happen, Maria? Why would it happen? And I think that's quite a transition. My own son, who was about to go to Navy SEAL camp, was forced to get a vaccine and it wrecked his heart, as an example.

The real censorship is that Big Pharma spends hundreds of billions of dollars in advertising. Big Pharma controls the money that goes to YouTube, that goes to journalists. So you kind of can't blame CNN because their employees don't eat, their shareholders don't make money unless they please Monsanto, which is Big Pharma, which is owned by Bayer. If you don't please Pfizer, you don't get money. That's just a fact. That's just a fact. And I think it's becoming more prolific as well. And Scott, I know I saw you trying to jump in earlier, but I think X is trying to find a solution to this.

But I feel like advertisers really have those social media companies and media companies in a chokehold. That's very difficult to get out of. Scott, your thoughts? I just think that it's, again, misaligned incentives. If you want to be a journalist, it's almost impossible to make a living independently. So you have to work for one of these companies, which sends you down the exact rabbit hole that James just described. I mean, you and I, you particularly, I mean, you're the world's leading citizen journalist, but that leads to monetization problems for you as well, right? Because you can go on any platform,

but you can be deplatformed at any point from those. I doubt you would be deplatformed from X, but if you had a YouTube channel, we see it all the time, especially in crypto. It happens across the board. You spend years of your life building a million followers in a business and that platform disappears. So it's a nice segue, as James was saying, into how do you incentivize the actual journalist to make a living telling the truth and going back to old school journalism where they actually do research, do diligence, and present their findings without fear of being completely canceled or erased, right? And that's what James and Eyal have effectively built. I mean, I'd love to hear, hey, Scott, thanks, because

you've done a nice job pulling together what the issue is. Look, I'd love to hear, hey, Scott, thanks, because you've done a nice job pulling together what the issue is. Look, we all have to feed our families, right? We all have to feed our families, have to pay our mortgages. And if you're an executive at CNN and New York Times, you don't want to get fired, right? You don't want to cut off revenue. So the alignment of interests is really the story of the world. And AL, who's on my business partner, is one of the big geniuses, obviously, in the crypto world and the inventor of decentralized finance, automated market making. And I'd love to hear his vision here and a bit of how he built it.

But we merged our companies. We're very excited to be working on his platform. You can go to rtb.io right now and see it. We just came out with version three. But here's the most important point. This is the first crypto token in history that has an actual ecosystem tied to a utility that can pay journalists. So literally every single story, every single video, and Scott, I know you're part of this. You're an equity partner. Mario, you're an equity partner

for this vision. If you believe in free speech, when the S hits the fan again, and we know it's going to come, you're not going to be cut off because we can take our ad dollars, convert it to RTB, and pay you directly in a decentralized way. And if ad dollars are cut off, even for our non-crypto and our non-political, the world's support for free speech by supporting RTB can keep people like Scott and Mario or Julian Assange, right? They can get paid, they can eat, they can feed their families, and we can build an incredible ecosystem. It's fully built, four and a half years, it's ready to go. I mean, you'd go to Uniswap right now and pick up RTB. But the point is the token is going to pay journalism completely separate from the big pharma ecosystem. And Ayal, when you decided to build this platform, I mean,

I've been following you for two and a half years. We became partners about, I don't know, six months ago. Did you understand the importance? I mean, so much focuses on monetization. When did you come to the realization that your tech media platform had to have its own monetization? Yeah, I mean, that was actually one of the core principles of what we wanted to build because of the centralization that we've been seeing in social media and especially in the monetization around social media and i think that you know the best use that i found for for crypto payment system is to be able to really connect both journalists advertisers as well as users in a single system where no one

can control how the money flows within the system. Because I think that end users appreciate quality, appreciate real journalism, and advertisers appreciate real users and real eyeballs. But when everything is controlled within a banking system, I remember seeing even Jordan Peterson being deplatformed from a platform like Patreon that's supposed to be a direct way for supporting journalists, supporting content creators. And he was just one example of how credit card company even used their power in order to block those kind of payments.

And for me, that was clear that this is a great use for this technology where it's needed. Yeah. So Ayel and I met at the Bitcoin conference two and a half years ago. We became kindred spirits immediately. What we wanted to do, and I think we've achieved, is to get mass distribution to the people. And the problem with crypto media companies, whether it's Steam or Hive, they don't have access to mass distribution. It was a great exercise. But we're working with in sports.

We're working in finance. We're working in crypto. And what we've been able to achieve is we reach tens of millions of people already. And what we're doing is we're inviting pristine, committed, real journalists like Mario and Scott, sports journalists. And we won't talk about our media company right now. But when you reach tens of millions of users, you have real value for the journalists. You have real value for the advertisers, especially crypto advertisers who typically are libertarian. And we've created our own multimillion dollar ecosystem today and our distribution to tens of millions. We will never compete with X. We will

never compete with Instagram or Facebook. That's a social network with hundreds of millions of accounts. And, you know, Scott and Mario, we want you to continue to work with Elon to be part of that incredible ecosystem. We have a very concise business model. The name Roundtable is exactly as you think, whether it's the Knights of the Roundtable or Roundtable discussion on stage in front of a crowd. Our new platform, and I owe him so congratulations for your version three that just hit the App Store this week. Go to rtb.io or go to the App Store and type in, you know, roundtable. You'll see Mario there. You'll see Scott there.

We've got dozens and dozens of elite journalists. And it really is a special place. And so when there are economic difficulties coming or if there is interesting news, you know, in crypto and, you know, we're rolling out other channels and various verticals, this is really a place for elite, true journalism, not just kids who are on TikTok who are trying to get traffic. And so we're going to stay disciplined, bringing in, I think, the most honest and dedicated and passionate journalists, bring them to one place,

and we're going to be paying them with RTB. And very proud to be working with UIL, very honored to be working with you, Mario and Scott. But I think if you care about free speech, this is an opportunity for citizens to own piece of the ecosystem. Big Pharma owns media, but we are building our own parallel ecosystem, monetization, blockchain storage so nobody can ever change the truth, protection from being invaded from

bots and artificial intelligence. ILU built an incredible system, a fingerprinting system on users. It really is a pristine ecosystem that we're so excited to be distributing. But it all comes down to monetization. At the end of the day, we all have to eat. We all have to feed our families. And this is an opportunity for citizens to support Mario, for citizens to support Scott, not just by visiting, but owning a piece of the ecosystem. And I think that's interesting. Does that make sense? You know, Mario, I'm so glad that you're a partner in this business. But the difference between social network and what we're trying to

build? Yes, I'm actually, as you're speaking, I've got the homepage open here. I'm looking at my But the difference between social network and what we're trying to build. Yeah, so I'm actually, as you're speaking, I've got the homepage open here. I'm looking at my profile. What's fascinating is that you get that reputation score, but you also get a balance on the right. So we're talking about fighting censorship, which be able to monetize their value, to monetize the trust they build, it's something offering the ability for any journalist to monetize it. Because yeah, one thing, and I've always said this, I'll just be very genuine and honest. If I didn't have a large business, et cetera, and other sources of revenue and wasn't financially well off, I may not be doing what I'm doing now. Because making money as a journalist is a very, very difficult

task, which kind of leads to misaligned incentives because then they have no choice but to work for those large companies. Even though those large companies are struggling, they're not printing money right now. So they have no choice but to abide by the requests of the advertisers because they need the advertiser money. But that model is starting to fracture. Oh, absolutely. Hey, one of the announcements, which I think is going to be exciting, you know, as you know, this last, you know, third of my life, you know, I'm dedicated to supporting passionate journalists like you, Mario, and you, Scott. We're actually, we have a lot of non-crypto, non-political assets. Like we've got one of the biggest hockey networks in the world, just one example, 9 million hockey fans, and we're

making a lot of revenue on that. That's a lot of hockey fans. We're actually going to take this advertising revenue starting this month, and we're going to buy roundtable tokens on uniswap reducing that supply and we're going to be paying you in rtb and so as we pay you and other journalists we've got you know hundreds of journalists now they can have that as a permanent asset, right? You can cash out immediately if you like, but of course, supply is going to continue to go down. What citizens can do to support actual journalism, not propaganda, that one opportunity,

if you own a piece of RTB, of Roundtable, the other thing that you can do is if somebody does a great story, we're starting to sign some journalists even younger than you guys that are amazing, and we can tip them. So a citizen can actually tip a journalist for a great story. That's going to be exciting. So we're kind of taking out this kind of huge monopoly that controls media. And so it's not just citizen journalists.

And obviously you're number one. But citizen ecosystem participants. Can you imagine if you could watch Walter Cronkite and say, what an amazing story. You uncovered something great and send Walter a tip. That's all now possible. The other thing that I just rolled out a couple of months ago, which I'm really excited about, spaces is incredible. And I really appreciate that I've been able to be part of some of those great discussions.

We now have an on-demand spaces on steroids so that while you're sleeping, users can ask you questions in video on our new app. While they go to sleep and you wake up, you can then answer them. So basically a global video conversation in a thread on RTB. No company in the world has this. And what this is going to allow, because some moms, they may not be able to be on their own spaces. And your space is amazing. And it's, you know, it's incredible. But the fact that you've got on-demand video questions back and forth, this is going to allow users who, after they drop off kids to school, they can go on and they can ask questions of Mario or Scott or Billy or Bob or whatever. And then you can answer it at your leisure.

So incredible technology that has rolled out. I do want to make sure we want to support X. I think X has basically saved the world. I know senior advertising agency executives who I've been friends with since the 80s as we grew the internet together who said they've been told to strip X of all of its money. And they did. He shut off monetization. I think Elon can hire anybody he wants, but as long as he allows free, uncensored speech, 90% of the ad revenue is going to be taken from him. And so he's seeking other monetization. So I would encourage citizens, if there's a subscription opportunity to Scott or Mario or to whoever, and Elon comes out with

the ability for journalists to generate revenue outside of advertising. I would encourage to follow Elon. I'm very, very excited about what he's done. I watched Jack Dorsey, who pretends to be supportive of Bitcoin philosophy. And it's just all about the money for him. You know, he let us down at the, at the peak of, of the greatest shutdown in history, millions were dying and he was eradicating PhDs and MDs and shutting down their voices. At the end of the day, he took care of himself. And only when Elon took control did X actually have restoration of free speech. So I'm sorry, it's not cool to not like Jack Dorsey, but

he's personally responsible for the death of millions because he could have saved children and pregnant women and babies from dying. And Elon is saving the world. I'm just super excited that you guys are partnered with him. But at the end of the day, what we're doing is putting together great journalists on a platform for you guys to unify and have another voice out there. So we don't compete with social media. We want to make sure that we're able to get journalist revenue and for consumers and for citizens to be involved in the process. I just want to say, personally, what was so interesting to me is that we've seen all of these ideas individually gain a level of popularity and somewhat fail, but bringing it all together is what's so compelling.

As a creator myself, I love X, I love YouTube, but good luck going into the comments and engaging with anyone. It's 99% bots. Mario, I have to imagine that you never go on there and respond to people who are commenting. On Roundtable, we know that every one of those is a real person asking us a real question, and even that there could be a monetary incentive to engaging with them. So it's really compelling for us to actually go there and have a place to engage with our audience. But equally importantly for me was the fact that I feel like on a day-to-day basis on our existing channels, we scream into an echo chamber. I know that everybody who's following

me on YouTube is being fed a crypto algorithm. They're only seeing my content because they engage with Bitcoin or crypto. It's very hard to exit that sphere into TradFi. And it was actually the distribution side with the street that was exceptionally compelling to me that I could go on the street weekly like Mario and I both do and speak to boomers with multimillion dollar portfolios by the tens of millions that would never find my content under any circumstances based on a social media algorithm elsewhere. And monetization is the cherry on top for someone like myself or Mario, obviously, who have businesses. But for others, I think that's incredibly compelling. And they all, I just want to, before we go, dig into how you were able to marry all of those things

on the tech side and then make sure that that content is never removed so you have the censorship resistance distribution monetization and the fact that everybody you're engaging with are real those are four things you cannot find anywhere else yes definitely it's um essentially if every every event, every comment, every post is an event that is recorded on-chain forever. We use kind of second-layer blockchains in order to make sure that the costs are making sense. So we're not recording everything on the Bitcoin blockchain. That would be way too expensive at this point. And I think that, you know, the problem is when you build a crypto kind of network like that, it would only be used by crypto people.

And we've seen many examples of that out there. I think that what's different in my thinking, as we saw those dynamics, is that I realized that the most important thing that we can do is essentially to partner with someone who is coming from the real world of media, that owns real media assets that normal people use, not just crypto people that kind of you know waiting for an airdrop or something like that and and i think this is why the relationship have been so successful with james because even though james you know knew a lot about crypto when i met him i i think that we we both saw the potential of kind of combining our forces together and essentially bring users from standard sports sites and,

and, and, you know, the street and, and places like that to bring them into kind of a crypto network where the crypto is completely in, in, in the backend,

but it makes sure that you're not going to be censored. And it makes sure that you're always can monetize it and it makes sure that if someone want to advertise and on your content no one can ever stop them including the credit card companies which i'm sure we'll get to that you know once i didn't believe that they would actually censor journalists from social media you know i was naive i i've been in social media. You know, I was naive. I've been in social media since it started. I remember meeting Mark Zuckerberg back when he has 5 million users. I had Metacafe, my previous company,

which was like a video sharing company. And I couldn't believe that someone would dare censoring like actual journalists. And then I couldn't believe that credit card companies would use their power in order to block people that want to advertise ad hoc with content. But we've seen all those things happening. And the only solution that can face the future

and be fail-safe from everyone that's trying to break it is a solution where you have really the crypto payment where it's all transparent. So you can actually see who is making money in the network today, who's generating more traffic. One of the big changes that Elon Musk, for example, did for Twitter is to show views on every tweet.

I think that was amazing. But it's still halfway there because you're still not seeing how much they're making. There's a lot of ads showing around the tweets and people paying for that. And I think that this is kind of the transparency that we can provide to make sure that people trust us. They don't need to trust us because they can see that the ad dollars that are coming into the system are distributed to all the journalists in a fair basis according to the audience that

they bring and the amount of engagement they generate. They can see that in real time, right? That's one of the most compelling things, the dashboard for the journalists who can see exactly what they're earning, where it's coming from, and how. Exactly. I mean, Scott, at the end of the day, I think the most absurd thing, even with Elon, is that Silicon Valley CEOs can't help themselves. They have stolen everybody's data. When you lost your Instagram page, were you able to send an email to those, you know, a couple million people the next day and say hey they shut me down i'm over here no they stole your audience right i hate to go back to the 80s but can you imagine if you're a pizza company and you bought an ad in the yellow pages for 10 years and you got all the phone numbers and address and then one day the yellow pages said hey you know what you need to give me all of your addresses and phone numbers. You paid me for 10 years. There are customers, not yours. That's obscene. I can't believe it's not a

violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. And what we're doing for Scott and the dozens and dozens of journalists that are working with us right now, those are your customers. That's your content forever in the blockchain. When we started publishing at Mainstream Media information about COVID on the front page of Sports Illustrated when I was running it, when I left, it was pulled off the internet forever, right? So we want everything for you to have control, for consumers to see forever, everything transparent, but your audience is yours, Scott, and it should be there and maybe pass on to your son or daughter someday to run your next business. We don't believe that we should control. The citizens should control, the journalists should control, the audiences and the journalists are together and they shouldn't be separated. And major Silicon Valley platforms literally won't allow them to see

each other or talk to each other. And I think that's absurd. And also, if you go to your page on X or Mario, you go to your page on X, or if you go on YouTube, it's filled with other people's content. And I remember when that happened in 2008. You don't control, again, it's a great distribution source, a lot of saving the world, but you don't even control your own store, your own storefront, your own digital media restaurant. And so what we want to do is just provide you the tools, provide you the transparency to operate your own business. And so if you are a genius and if you build this, you know, great credibility with your audience who have faith in you, you're never going to be

cut off from them, right? And you control your own environment. So I think all these things are important. We're basically going back, you know, a couple decades when, you know, there was a pristine environment for the audience and the journalists to become one. And we're very excited that you guys are part of this. As are we. Crypto investors in the United States face some major challenges. One of them is that there's almost no way to get exposure to the asset class inside of your traditional investment vehicles. The other thing is the taxes. They are absolutely atrocious. What if I told you there was a way to solve both of these problems? Well, there is, and

it's with a self-directed IRA from I Trust Capital. Guys, not only can you open a new self-directed IRA and fund it with the limits each year, but you can actually convert over from your 401k, your Roth IRA, any other IRA that you already have and you can do that tax-free, just transferring over the balance and then you can go to cash, buy as much Bitcoin than you want and not pay taxes when you sell it. You absolutely have to try this if you are in the United States.

Use the link down below. It's bit.ly slash itrust-scott. That's B-I-T dot L-Y slash I-T-R-U-S-T dash S-C-O-T-T. You have to try this now. Mario, any final thoughts? No, it's another step on that journey as we try to break that system we've become complacent with. And I think the way you guys are doing it and the passion you guys, James, the experience you have in the field, you know, I know we can sit there talking for like eight hours on this nonstop.

No, no, no food whatsoever. And AL, the fact that you've met Zuckerberg so early on and been in the game for so long, and obviously everything you've done in crypto makes this obvious that you've got the right team there to do this. And, you know, glad to be part of the journey. Same. I think the final thing, not trying to make the final statement, but if you actually care about free speech, you know, sometimes people say you should invest in projects, whether it's green projects or things that you care about. I think the single most important thing on earth for feeding people, for stopping wars,

for having a true economy, for saving children from being human trafficked, nothing's more important than free speech. There's nothing more important than free speech. We saw in the last few years, millions died because information was suppressed. If you care, if you own RTB, you are taking action. So that's valuable for journalists. So even a stripe cuts them off, even if PayPal cuts them off, even if the Canadian truckers get cut off by TD and CBIC,

you can do your part to make sure that the currency to pay for free speech has value. So you can actually do something as a citizen now. And it's all built nearly five years of incredible PhD level engineering out of Israel that Aiel and his team has put together. And then now we've got all of these participants moving this project forward. So those are my final words. And I would like to add that, you know, I fully agree.

And I think that the reason that free speech is the most important problem and the most important thing is because this is the mechanism by which you fix all other problems. If you don't have that, then you're stuck with other problems. But if you have free speech, then you're on a path of fixing them. And that's why it's so critical. I think that sums it up perfectly. Thank you so much, gentlemen. It's been a pleasure, obviously, being a part of the ride, having this conversation,

but more importantly, looking forward to seeing this go worldwide very soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Scott. Bye, everyone. That's dope.