Unchained - The Chopping Block: The Role of Media in Crypto, Blockworks Op-Ed, and Apps vs. Infrastructure - Ep. 673

Episode Date: July 12, 2024

Welcome to The Chopping Block – where crypto insiders Haseeb Qureshi, Tom Schmidt, Robert Leshner, and Tarun Chitra explore the latest trends in the crypto world. In this episode, Jason Yanowitz from Blockworks joins the squad to explore the media's significant role in the crypto industry. They discuss challenges faced by the media in meeting client demands and industry expectations, and highlight financial sustainability and biases. The hosts compare crypto media to mainstream journalism, examining the balance between journalistic integrity and revenue. They critique broader media trends, discussing monopolistic narratives and public dissatisfaction, with a specific look at political coverage. The episode concludes with reflections on the media's evolving role in truth dissemination amidst industry fragmentation. Show highlights 🔹 The Airdrop Era: Examination of the potential end of the airdrop/token narrative.  🔹 Investing in Apps vs Infrastructure: Debate on funding apps versus infrastructure projects. 🔹 Crypto Media Trends: Analysis of shifts in crypto media, major acquisitions, and industry stance. 🔹 Challenges in Crypto Media: Ethical questions and investor pressures media firms face.  🔹 Future of Media: Trends in media companies, prediction markets, and trust dynamics.  🔹 Media Integrity: Exploration of media's perception, skepticism around its business motives, and flawed business models.   Hosts ⭐️Haseeb Qureshi, Managing Partner at Dragonfly  ⭐️Tom Schmidt, General Partner at Dragonfly ⭐️Robert Leshner, CEO & Co-founder of Superstate ⭐️Jason Yanowitz, Founder of Blockworks   Disclosures Timestamps  00:00 Intro 02:30 Airdrops and Token Valuations 04:04 Apps vs. Infrastructure 14:26 Venture's Not a Charity 22:41 Crypto Media Landscape 32:31 Revenue in Media 34:26 Trust as the Cornerstone of Media 35:27 The Blockworks Op-Ed Controversy 38:55 Navigating Media Bias and Trust 44:18 Balaji's Anti-Media Sentiment 49:57 The Future of Media and Truth Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I wake up every day and there's a person mad at me every morning for something that we have done, right? There's someone like, here's the message I get every day. Why didn't you cover us? Like companies that I've invested in or sponsors or advertisers or big clients of our research platform, why didn't you cover us? We just raised this money. Why didn't you cover us?

And it's funny. I'll see like people kind of shit on the media a lot because it's a common thing to do. Right. It's like that, the damn media. But then like in the DMs and the emails, it's like, yeah, but please, please, please, can you write a story about us? Not a dividend. It's a tale of two Kwan. Now, your losses are on someone else's balance.

Generally speaking, air drops are kind of pointless anyways. Unnamed to trading firms who are very involved. D5 protocols are the antidote. D5 protocols are the antidote to this problem. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the shopping block. Every couple weeks, the four of us get together and give the industry insider's perspective on the crypto topics of the day. So quick intro is for us you got Tom, the Defy Maven, and Master of Memes.

Hello, everyone. Next we've got Robert, the Cryptoconisur and Tsar of Super State. Good afternoon. And today, joining us, we've got special guest, Yano, Media Elite at Blockworks. The Media Elite, tough intro. We're waiting all day for what is the scene going to say, and it's the media elite. I thought it was supposed to be an alliteration, you know? I know. It just felt like right. A minute in and he's coming for the media jabs. already are. I know, I know. Look, this is going to be the media super show. Last week, we had politics. This week, we're coming after the media. And so I'm a see of the head hype man of dragonfly.

We're early stage investors in crypto, but I want to caveat. Nothing we say here is investment advice, legal advice, or even life advice, please see chopping block. That xyz for more disclosures. So we got a lot of people saying last week, hey, politics is fun, but like, please don't be a politics podcast. Let's talk about crypto. So we decided this week we're going to shift it up a little bit. We brought, of course, our good friend from Blockworks, Yano to, I'm sorry, Yano, bring him on the podcast and talk a little bit more about some of the higher level things that are going on in the crypto landscape. And you very generously gave us some topics that you wanted to run through today. And so I'm going to hand off the reins a little bit to you and let you drive some of the

discussion that we're going to just kind of bounce off popcorn style a little bit to some of the topics that you wanted to jam on today. So what would you propose that we light things up with? Sure. Let's start with maybe the easiest conversation before you guys tear into me for random media media things. The first question I'd love to get your guys' take on and maybe we can have a conversation around this is it's starting to feel like the air drop slash token. And I will admit, I listened to the last episode, but haven't listened to the few before that. So I don't know if you guys have already covered this, but it's feeling like the token slash airdrop narrative is kind of coming to an end. I would say like this era of airdrops kicked off with the Gito air drop. And once Gito did their air drop, it basically, everyone said, we got a sprint to market.

And this has been a six or nine months sprint to the market. But now what you're starting to see is people starting to do air drops at valuations lower than their last private market valuation. And one of the things I'm curious to get your guys take on is I think I've been waiting for people to invest in an app. Everyone says, when are the apps coming? It's the same question people said a few years ago. One of the institutions coming. Now it's one of the apps coming. I'm curious what you guys think, the thing that will get people to, when the apps come is

really when do people invest in the apps? So like Tom and Haseev and your guys' shoes, when are you incentivized not to invest in the new L1 and the new L2, but incentivized to invest in the new apps? So I'm starting to see this like infra fatigue meets tokens going live at valuations lower in the last private market. And I'm curious to hear your guys' take on, is this what pushes us into the, okay, fine, we'll finally invest in apps era?

Or how do you guys think about that? So maybe we can kick up with that conversation. Well, I can start with the most controversial view because I assume this is in the controversial view. I don't think there's ever going to be a seismic shift in valuations where apps are going to become suddenly more attractive than infrastructure. I think one of the reasons why investing in apps is difficult,

is an app has to be judged on its own traction. And infrastructure for a long time does not have to be judged on its own traction. With an app, you're basically forced into a very complex, you know, process of saying, will this specific app succeed? Will it get critical mass? Will it make hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue or value or whatever to justify its valuation today, which is hopefully, you know, a quarter or a tenth of what its future values can be. And the app in its own way has to have traction or product market fit or success.

Otherwise, it's a shot in the dark and the valuation for it's going to be. With infrastructure, you know, almost all infrastructure has ever launched has been a build-it-in, hopefully they will come type scenario. There are no users. It's accepted to be much more speculative. And I don't think it has to be judged on its product market fader's traction in the same way, coupled with the fact that infrastructure valuations, once things are public are like 10, 20, whatever times at valuations. I mean, 50X in a lot of cases. And so you're discounting a much larger number in a much more rosy glasses, I think, with infrastructure than with apps.

And so, you know, I think, you know, if I were a founder, I probably would not want to be building an application in, unless. I was highly confident that there was going to be actual adoption and actual usage. Okay, so I agree with the basic facts that you laid out about, okay, valuation differences and what founders want to be doing and everything. But I strongly disagree with the theory that you're propounding here. And I think it's also implicit whenever somebody says, why is that there's so much funding for infrastructure as opposed to applications?

Implicably what they're saying is that you should be funding applications. Agreed. And you're not doing it because you're lazy, because you're wrong, because you're greedy or something. It's almost like for the good of the industry, you should be funding applications and you're not doing that even though you should. Okay. I generally come from a place of assuming that markets are efficient. So let's start there. Let's assume that the market is right.

What does it mean that the market's right? What the market's right means is that it is correct for infrastructure to be valued more highly than applications. What would that imply if we take that seriously? First, it would imply that there are very few applications that have been shown to actually accrue value and be useful to people. And in practice, we see that, right? Most of the applications that did get funded, you know, people say that, oh, where's all the funding for applications? Remember in 2021, 2022, how many social apps, how many Metaverse things, how many games were getting funded? Huge amounts of capital were poured into applications.

And of course, most of that ended up not getting any kind of consumer traction, right? And so it's not true that historically there hasn't been a large amount of capital invested in applications. There has been, and most of that investment failed. Most of that investment went to zero or close to zero. Not all of it, obviously, but much of it. So the first thing is that it's just not true that we've only ever funded up infrastructure. Second is the other thing to understand is that when somebody says UVC should be funding more applications, what they're saying implicitly is that there should be more applications.

it's bad for crypto that there aren't more applications. But another way you could read the current market structure is you could say, actually we already know what the killer applications for crypto are, which is that they are sending money, spending money, using defi, and a few other things that we already understand,

stable coins, and they actually don't require new apps. Like we kind of already found the things that people are going to do. In the same way, you could say on the internet, Look, it didn't take us that long to figure out what people are going to do on the internet is like post stuff about their lives and buy things, right? Like that core loop of activity, we basically figured out 20 years ago. And there's been fairly small innovative, like, oh, there's Snapchat and stories and there's

TikTok now. But like the core things of what we're going to do on the internet, we actually did figure out a very long time ago. And you can see, you know, you can ask like, why aren't people funding new kinds of social experiences on the internet? And the answer is because we found them. We found what people want to do on the internet. we don't need new versions.

Now, that is not to say that there's literally nothing new that people are going to do on blockchains, but it does mean that the rate of people finding new things on blockchains to do is much lower than what we would expect it to be if we hadn't found those killer use cases for blockchains, right? The idea of, okay, people are finding infrastructure, therefore we don't have applications,

therefore we're never going to go mass market. I reject that claim. I think actually it is the case that we found the mass market applications for crypto, which are about money. It's not social. It's not, you know, gaming. These things may work, and I'm bullish on some version of them working at some scale.

But the real mass market thing is the money stuff. And that doesn't require a new application, a new team, a new token, right? It just requires a substrate on which to do those things. And for Ave or compound or for Uniswap to dual deploy or not do multi-deploy on this new chain that people launch. And so the fact that infrastructure is very highly valued is another way of saying that the thing that people want to do, all it requires is infrastructure. It requires block space. Blockspace is a thing that's really valuable. And if you build better block space, that huge market that is available

to you of all the people who want to do things on blockchains, that's the market you're competing over. And that market is definitely really big. That's why these companies are, you know, projects that launch infrastructure are valued so highly because we know the TAM is big. But what is the TAM for somebody launching a social app, I don't know. Nobody really knows. We're kind of guessing that there will be a real market here. You know, look at Farkaster, Farkaster, you know, it's like 60, 70,000 daily actives. Maybe there's a long-term market there, but it's also possible that maybe there's not. But there's no question that there is a market for building really valuable infrastructure. This is a problem we know we have. Everybody in the industry knows we have

an infrastructure problem. And that's what all these new, you know, people building infrastructure are trying to fix. So that's my. steel man for why it is the case that VCs are funding infrastructure more than applications is because we know there's a there there. Yeah, I am more or less agree. I think, you know, this is kind of a classic, like you show me the incentives. I show you the outcome kind of thing. Like, yeah, it's people want to get paid.

And in apps, there had not been great outcomes. There isn't really liquidity. There isn't really necessarily durability. Like there's a lot of sort of inherent issues. And I think there are still some verticals that I think are still being explored, like a polymarket, which we announced our investment to recently is a good example where, yeah, it's fundamentally financial at the end of the day. It's not, you know, decentralized Twitter. But, you know, it did take a while to kind of manifest immature and get liquidity and sort of hit its current trajectory.

And so that was a new, you know, category that maybe you could invest to you a while ago, but it would have been attractive until more recently. But I think the question for how this kind of changes is, like, how do you produce great outcomes for investors? That's ultimately what's going to say to the market that, hey, this sector requires more allocation. And, I mean, the weird part is, like, apps actually do monetize quite well. I mean, you look at how much money, like, you know,

telegram bots are making or wallets are making or front ends are making. And it's like tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, you know, way more than most chains infrastructure. And the question's like, well, why isn't the public market rewarding these things, you know, like, like, I think the question is kind of almost flipped. Like people on crypto Twitter get mad. They're like, well, I'm like, well, why aren't you buying, you know, the banana gun token? Like, you go do that.

That's what that's an app, you know, and you're not. And so it's like, yeah, it's, it feels kind of a spider man, you know, putting, putting fingers at each other. Like, you know, the market is the market. and I think stuff is generally, you know, probably priced accordingly. Well, the thing I want to keep hammering on is this like moralizing about it, right? Like generally, if you take the view that the markets are giving you information, they're embedding information about where value is likely to accrue,

then, you know, saying that, well, the founders, like, they just want to get paid and, like, the investors, they just want to make money, implies that the prices are wrong. And what I'm making is a stronger point, which is not, like, that's obvious, yes. of course, the investors, their incentives are over here. The founders, their incentives are also in the same direction. But I actually don't think the markets are wrong. I think the markets are correctly saying that we do know that the TAM and the value for building the next Ethereum, building the next Solana is actually really high, and that's correct.

And the chance that you build, you know, a banana bot or the next telegram bot, and it becomes, you know, yeah, I can make, you know, $30 million a year or something. But what's the likelihood that it's going to make $200 million a year or a billion a year or be the future of money or whatever, you know, however it is you want to describe, you know, a leading layer one. I think the market's correctly saying not very likely. Now, there is the flip side of that, and you alluded to that a little bit of Tom about the modernization, which is, okay, let's say you invest into, you know, some business that is, you know, kind of a brick and mortar business that just makes money on chain, launches a token,

maybe the token, it's like, is this thing decentralized, you know, is this thing a security, is it not? Like, there are some regulatory and legal questions that do get hairier when you talk about applications that have centralized teams. So that's an element of it that does play into the market, and that's a real thing that is a market structure thing. But I guess I'm trying to take issue with is like the laziness idea, that like investors are being lazy or the founders are being lazy.

The moralizing of it is why aren't the VCs moving this space forward by investing in the, by investing in the apps? That's obviously what, yeah, yeah. Well, venture is not a charity at the end. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, I think there's basically three camps, right? There's three camps of crypto people of what they think about the world. There's the Bitcoiners who think from a macro perspective and like a almost sometimes doomsday.

And it's like a macro hedge and it's a hedge against chaos, basically. That's the Bitcoin crowd. Then there's the what I'd call the finance crowd, which says that defy is going to, our traditional capital markets, rails were created in the early 1970s. They're super antiquated. They're all built on cobalt. They're like 55 years old. We just got to create better rails, and that's a better product.

And that in and of itself would be the biggest transformation since we created the internet and moved information online. Then there's bucket number three, which I'd call like maybe the Chris Dixon camp, which is Facebook, Amazon, Google, et cetera, have too big of monopolies. And the information used to flow freely on the internet. and now the information flows through five companies. And I think the first one is, and we need to, we need crypto to break down those monopolies. And I think the first one is right. That will eventually play out. The second one is right.

That will eventually play out. But I think, has seemed to your point, I'm not convinced the third one is right yet and that will play out. Like I think about social apps. I'm like, I don't know. Like, TikTok is such a good product. I don't download it. because it's so damn good. Like that I, it's so good of an app that I refuse to download it

because my rat brain is not able to not open it. Like, that's crazy to me. Now, I do think there's probably a fourth bucket, which we haven't seen yet, which we will see, which are marketplaces connecting some sort of supply and demand that hasn't been able to be unlocked because of maybe the frictions of Web 2, with quotes around this big Web 2 bucket.

in the same way that, you know, things like a smartphone in the internet unlock the Airbnb's and the Uber's of the world. I think we could, maybe this is, maybe this is D-Pen, maybe this is something else. But I do think we'll get some sort of marketplace, like some of these companies that don't look like apps getting unlocked. So I don't know what you guys think of that. Yeah, I think coordination networks, you know, if you think of D-Pen and, you know, some of these other sectors that look similar where you're getting people to cooperate in a way with their resources they might not otherwise. That feels like a real thing to me. I don't know that it's going to be an aggregate at the scale of the financial use cases for crypto. And I agree with you. Look, there are many VCs who have really bet the

farm on this idea that there is going to be this mass consumer moment for crypto and that crypto is fundamentally about disempowering or disintermediating some of the media monopolies that we have the Facebooks and the Googles and so on. And for me, from the beginning of Dragonfly, we've always taken this view that you cannot be too thesis driven in crypto because crypto is just too difficult to anticipate where it's going. You kind of have to shut up and listen rather than try to dictate where it's supposed to go or where you said it's going to go or where your blog posts and your your whole storyline about what crypto is supposed to do or what it ought to do is going to define how you invest.

Like, as an investor, your job, especially in the space that's moving as quickly and is as unpredictable as crypto, is to pay attention and to change your mind as quickly as possible. There were many, many times in the past where I was a lot more agnostic about how crypto was going to interact

with things like social and consumer and, you know, gaming and so on. And like you have to, you just have to make sure you're learning. Like, if your mind hasn't changed at all in the last two to three years, about your view about social and gaming, then you're just not paying attention,

you're not learning. So what did you learn? It's fine to still be bullish on these things, and it's fine to still be working on them and building them. I have all the respect in the world for people who are actually adapting and updating their worldview and changing their strategy based on what they're seeing, what worked and what didn't work and how consumers are reacting.

But people who are just like a Roomba and they're just like hitting a wall over and over again, like that is both, it's value destructive, both for people as founders and even more so as investors. The question I think becomes, if you believe the tam of blockchains is all of the value of all of the value that transaction, transactions in the world moving on chain, which is like a, like that on a long enough time horizon, that's my belief is that, you know, I don't know if it's five years or 10 years or 50 years. But one day, all of the value in the world will move on chain in the same way that all of the information one day will move online. at some point the apps have to at some point there has to like Facebook has to be on chain if that's the case like one day right um I think if you extend the thesis out on a long enough time horizon but at that point it's too tough to rob you you shook your head there what's I'm skeptical that one day Facebook will store all of its ridiculous large numbers of data on a blockchain it might not be their data maybe it's just the financial transactions um

Maybe that's what happens. Maybe it's the extremely high value data, which is a small subset of the infinite terabytes of data they have, but every photo ever created for, yeah, financial transactions. But I would be highly skeptical of the statement that Facebook will one day be entirely on blockchain. To your point, maybe a small sliver, the most valuable sliver will be. Just like I don't think all data will be on the internet. Like there's still, you know, roughly 50 years into the internet, you know, not yet 100% adoption of information online.

Yeah. I mean, obviously, a big part of the reason why you don't put data on the internet is that if it's not on the internet, people can't pack it, right? So, like, there's a, we've learned this lesson many times in crypto is that, yeah, crypto is putting something on a blockchain makes it totally open, right? Obviously, you can encrypt it, you can do ZK magic, blah, blah, blah. But the end of the day, you are creating more connectivity between your thing and the outer world. If you want that, and there are many things for which that is a tradeoff worth

making or even to your benefit, but it's not worth making for everything. Like, obviously, there are some things that, you know, I would not want to put my, I don't know, my personal finances entirely on the blockchain because, yeah, maybe I can obfuscate it. Maybe I can do some fancy something, something, something, something. But, you know, what is the benefit to me of doing that? Right now, it's like, my feeling is that, you know, you don't have to be a maximalist in order to believe in crypto. You know, in the same way that you don't have to believe that we're all going to be living our lives, intermediate through VR goggles to believe in VR, right? I think that VR and AR are going to be fantastic technologies.

But then you have like sort of the topology vision of like, okay, well, we're now just entirely going to live in bubbles and like interact through the metaverse. I'm like, I don't think that's true. I think that like with all things, reality is messier and has kind of porous boundaries and the way that real technologies play out is that they're kind of messy and complicated.

And I think the same thing is probably going to be true for blockchain is that, yeah, Facebook may start adopting more crypto things, but probably it'll be like this little 10% thing

or 5% thing off to the side. And the main application, like Facebook works. You know, I don't see Facebook crying out for, oh my God, you know, But we have this massive problem that only blockchains can solve.

Yeah. Haseeb, I don't know if you've handed the mic to me, which is a horrendous mistake to run this thing. No, no, no, no. If I'm asking the question, or if you are, you are, I will say, the way you naturally just like started driving the mic, I'm like, this guy's a pro. We don't have a separate our game here. No, this guy is somehow agreed to do a run a podcast network. That is the thing.

But I actually would love to get your guys's take on this thing that I spend like 110% of my life thinking about. which is crypto media and research and stuff. And so like in the world that I live in, which is crypto media and research and information flowing in crypto basically, it actually has been a really crazy last 12 months. Like our two biggest media competitors sold, right? The block sold to Forsyde Ventures,

which is the family office of Bitgett and CoinDest sold to bullish, right? Which is the Block 1 EOS company, holding company, basically. or exchange or whatever you want to call it. It's been crazy in my world. But I would actually love, and I'm happy to talk about crypto media, but would actually love to get your guys' take as people who probably spend. So first question, first question. Before you get into that, why did you guys not sell?

Ooh, ding. Dhing. Let's see. We didn't have to sell. We were not a forced seller. So, yeah, Coin Desk, it was owned by DCG. DCG is owned by Barry. they owned Genesis in Grayscale, and Genesis went belly up through the FTX stuff,

or through three arrows, loans, and we all know that story. And they basically, and Barry was paying the bills. So every two weeks, they would, you know, Kevin, the CEO of Coin to S would go to Barry and say, please, sir, I might have some more. Can I need to make payroll this week. And that went on for months. And they basically, they were a for seller, right? I think at a certain point, Barry just said, get this thing off my hands.

My experiment with media has not really paid off for me. Although I guess it did because he bought the company for like 500K. Yeah, it did. Yeah, no, no, sorry, it actually extremely did. He bought the company for $500,000 and sold it for $80 million or whatever. But so they were a four-seller. And then the block was a four-seller because their CEO at the time, this guy, Mike McCaffrey, took $40-odd million under the table from SBS.

And so they were funding the company via loans from SVF. And then they had to basically he McAfri owned the most of the company. And so they had to repay the loans. And so they needed to do this deal. So they were four sellers. Blockworks has a weird funding, funding history. So we actually didn't raise any money for the first six years of the business. We didn't go.

So like we actually raised $12 million in May of 2023. And outside of a 100K friends and family. checked that we took on day one of the business. That was the first outside capital we had taken. And the reason for that is we'd been profitable since, I think, month three of the business. So we've, we didn't, we didn't really, we weren't a four-seller. Last year sucked. It was horrendous. It was a god-awful year in many ways. It was very tough. But we weren't a four-seller. So I think that's the answer. So you weren't a forced seller, but my understanding was that there were a lot of bidders in the market at that time who were just looking to snatch up media companies.

So I have to imagine, okay, you weren't a four-seller, but you probably did get propositioned, I would assume. Yeah, we got actually a lot more propositions for basically acquisition offers at the peak at top of 2021. Right. The folks in 2020, actually, 2020, through is the first time we ever looked at buying something, right? We knew CoinDesk in the block we're looking to sell, and we said, let's take a look at these things. Some folks reached out in 2023 with saying, hey, look, we're looking at Coin Desk.

Would you be interested in selling too if we bought CoinDesk? There were some like PE roll up firms looking to do some things there, and we said no. But the crazy offers really came, I think, in the back in 2021, the Pico top. There were crypto companies. There were media companies. So that was really the time when we're like, do we do something? No, no. What do you guys think about?

What do you guys think about crypto media? What do you think about like? Tom, what's your take on crypto media businesses? Love, love the media. I love reading. Yeah, yeah, true. I mean, I think, you know, the media world overall right now is struggling and kind of going through a lot of changes.

And like, crypto media is part of that. I think, you know, what, like, you know, BuzzFeed is on, like, life support and vice is dead. And, like, these things that 10 years ago were, like, the darlings and we're supposed to be huge are now dying. There's, like, mass newspaper consolidation. I mean, it was like paramount. It's also like everything is basically getting rolled up or consolidated or dying. And I think, um, kind of the model or models that kind of, you know, you kind of see emerging are either A, you have something that is super proprietary and you have an audience that is a high willingness to pay for it. And you are just sort of locked into whatever that is.

And that's kind of like the information or substacks or things where it's like, this is like a one of one and whatever you have is super valuable. And your audience has enough to spend or willing to spend it to go and buy it. Or in some ways, the media is kind of like a loss leader for some auxiliary business. And maybe that is, hey, doing something like events or you're selling something on the side of is kind of how like every creator monetizes where like, you know, unfortunately, like, the media industry also mirrors sort of the

consolidation in the advertising industry, which is like, you know, for every incremental dollar that's going into digital advertising, like 99% of that is going into, you know, Facebook, Google, you know, Amazon or TikTok. Like basically none of it is going to sort of legacy media. And then it's like, well, how do you actually get, you know, new cash in this business?

like the pie that you, in theory, should be growing into is actually quite small and shrinking. And so I think that's why people are also looking for, you know, revenue sources elsewhere. I think crypto media, you know, arguably kind of falls into that, you know, bucket as well. It's maybe a little bit more distinctive or maybe a little bit more defensible in that. You do have kind of that proprietary high willingness to pay audience. And maybe you do have some proprietary, you know, proprietary content that that isn't just sort of doing, you know, mass reporting. But I think the monetization question is still like, okay, well, if you're not getting, you know, amazing industry leading CPMs, what is sort of that, you know, secondary revenue source? And it seems like everyone is sort of experimenting with that right now, sort of my perception.

Yeah, let's actually get even more basic because I think for a lot of people who haven't spent much time thinking about it or aren't VCs, they may just not have ever really thought about how a media business makes money. So, Tom, how do media businesses in crypto actually make money? Sure. I mean, so a couple different sources. One obviously is advertising that's like, you know, hey, just basic display ads. It's happened to, you know, in that network. And sort of, you know, it's the stuff that you see when you, you know, go to Korn desk and sort of banner ads and things like that or sponsored articles as well. There's stuff like paid premium subscriptions, you know, research services, things like that. Things that maybe mirror more of like how, you know, Bloomberg or something would monetize. And then three is sort of these, these authority sources. So it's things like, events or it's things like, you know, direct research partnerships with projects or things that, again, are sort of proprietary to those outlets. But I think that the question is like, well, how sustainable is that? How big can you actually get with that? I think the rub is always, you know, it's sort of mirrors traditional startups in that it's like, what amount of the value that you create can you actually capture? And if you think about, you know, crypto media, a lot of that

is maybe selling to investors or selling to projects who, by and large, will capture a lot more of the value that you were creating for them than, you know, you will be able to. And so it's like, well, is there a way to sort of get into that flow is the way to sort of, you know, sit more deeply with those teams. I think everyone is trying to, you know, figure that out and sort of get out of just basic news reporting. And that's why you kind of see people trying to go, you know, more and more premium or offer sort of, you know, deeper and deeper integrations. But I think, again, a lot of these problems are very similar to the problems that the media industry at large is facing, which is just like, hey, in a world where

there isn't that sort of traditional revenue stream in the form of advertising and we're just like not competitive, not really able to sort of get incremental dollars there, how do we sort of think about diversifying and looking elsewhere? Let me simplify it a little bit. Media and information companies make money in two ways. And there's really only two ways. Advertising, which is simply the act of connecting potential buyers with active sellers and subscriptions, which can be broken down into consumer subscriptions, your $10 a month news subscription or enterprise subscriptions, buying a Bloomberg terminal. The reason media is struggling so much right now. I saw it CNN announced another big batch of layoffs today. If you look back at the

last 15 years of media, so I would categorize it as the era of mass consumer publications is over. Media, I still think, is thriving, but at two ends of the spectrum. New York Times, New York Times is doing phenomenally well. People might not realize that. The New York Times is of the world, which is really a product company at this point. So I think it's, 30 or 40% of their business comes from their games and cooking. Another big bucket comes from their subscriptions. Advertising is dropping a lot year after year. And then the other end of the spectrum, which is niche publications.

So industry dive, for example, industry dive just sold for $500 million. They are a collection of 22 different niche newsletters. Shipping operators, grocery store operators. So they have a newsletter with 300 grocery store operators. miniscule newsletter. But, you know, it's an audience that you can't really reach anywhere else. So those are the two buckets of media that are doing well. If you look at from 2005 to 2015, media was really just a game of how could you distribute

content further? Like how could you be more discoverable and how could you get socialized? And that was, you guys probably remember the brands. It was like Vox and Vice and BuzzFeed and Complex and Huffington Post. And they raised like hundreds of millions of dollars on the idea that we could build a media a company optimized for the internet and for social. So they became the new media giants. And they actually at one point in time, kind of passed the likes of the New York Times

and Wall Street journals. And the game back then was about, was it more about, it was less about reputation. And it was more about being the first to link, right? It was like the first to link or URL to reach back to the user. And the difference between, like, if you think about how it worked back then is if a user googled something or saw it on social, they just clicked the link. Like, remember clicking all those dumb links on Facebook and you're like, oh, a survey from my friends, like, whatever, I don't care the URL. They just kind of looked for anything. And they just kind of clicked it. And they didn't

actually think about the actual media site. But around like 2015, 2016, that really reversed. Right. Users started to make sure that anything they clicked on was a source that they knew and trusted. And the game really changed. And the biggest thing that these venture back media companies like when you see Vox and Vice and Buzzfeed and Complex and HuffPost, the biggest thing they got wrong is that media companies are like Blockworks in one word is just trust. Like we can do so many things wrong, but if people keep trusting Blockworks, we'll ultimately be fine. And you can't throw money at trust.

You can throw money at customer acquisition. You can throw money at sponsorship sales, but you can't throw money at trust. It can't be hacked faster with money. And it's nice to like build a media company with a lot of page use. But in order to really grow media company, you have to create brand affinity, which is another one of the reasons that like we lead so heavily into podcasts and like lead with like our people is because people trust people. They don't trust brands these days. And I think people are now waking up to the fact that like you have to actually focus on an actual audience as opposed to random people hitting your site.

So like for block. I don't care about. Yeah, yeah, go, go, go. Okay, so speaking of that, we were talking a little bit of pre-show about that famous op-ed that Blockworks ran, which was an op-ed. I can't remember the name. It was some journalist who basically said, you know, to be a one-issue voter in this election about crypto is wrong.

Something along those lines. Right. That op-ed pissed off a lot of people, created something of a firestorm. It was one of these moments that I imagine if you run into, obviously, I'd, I, I don't know, but if you run a media company, I imagine it's a very nerve-wracking moment to have, you know, sort of become as an organization the main character of Twitter when you are trying to yourself, you know, write about main characters. So to your point about, okay, trust and, you know, the brand that we're trying to build at Blockworks, how did you think about that moment going through this crucible of, oh, my God, the internet, the industry is mad that we ran this? So the way that I think about Blockworks in terms blockworks is blockworks is nothing if not trust and trust can be built in many ways. And for me and Mike building Blockworks, it's been built on having Blockworks sit at the cutting edge of crypto.

So I don't there's a reason like you'll never see like what is Bitcoin on Blockworks? Like we don't care about the 101 level content, even the 201 content. We don't care as much about that. That's why we build brands like Xerox research and Bell curve. and permissionless. And we try to take people, like, my audience and the person I care about and close my eyes thinking about is like you guys. It's like crypto natives.

It's not the person from Adidas looking at crypto, like CoinDesk and CoinTelegraph and other people can have that audience. So the cutting edge of crypto at a couple months ago, now it's mainstream. I'd say, but the cutting edge of crypto a couple months ago was the election. It was this thing that everyone was thinking about that nobody was publicly talking about. except for probably Ryan Selkis. But nobody was really publicly talking about it. Nobody would say, I, you know what, I am pro-Biden.

Or you know what? I am pro-Trump. It wasn't a thing, the chasm had not been crossed. And so yeah, we published this op-ed. Actually, Robert, I was sitting across from, so I don't see any new stories before. I deal with sponsorships and sales at Blockworks, right? So I'm actually not in a single editorial channel in Slack. I've been kicked out of all of them.

I'm not allowed in them. I don't see a story on Blockworks until it hits our website. So I'm sitting across from Robert at dinner. And I think he, maybe I'll kindly phrase these. It said something along the lines of what is this shit. Yeah, I was being rude and I was like very briefly checking Twitter during dinner with, you know. And I immediately was like, oh, you've got to see this. Yeah.

And I think Hayden looked at it for a second. He was like, yeah, that's trash. Or something along this. And I had like five likes and like maybe a retweet. And I was like, I'll look at it in the morning. That's okay. And I woke up in the morning and I had about somewhere between 70 and 100 messages from everyone from our investors to our clients to my friends saying some form of what is this shit. And it had probably, I don't know, I've had probably 2,000 retweets and quote tweets saying blockworks is scum.

And they're actively trying to bring down the industry. things like that. So that was a lot of fun dealing with it. My take on the op-ed is, here's the thing that people got to realize. Nobody read the damn op-ed. And when I say nobody, it got several thousand views. I don't know the exact number, but it got several thousand views. So people did read the op-ed, but it, the number of people, I think it got 1.5 million views on Twitter and like several thousand views on Blockworks. So the number of people, quote-tweeting it and posting about it. Nobody's actually reading the article.

And I think the article, the reason I don't personally agree with everything in the article, but the reason that I like having an article like that on Blockworks is it's an opinion piece by one of our opinion writers, Molly Jane, who's phenomenal. There are three types of pieces from Blockworks. There's news stories. There are op-eds. And there's this other thing that people do in media called like an editorial, like the editorial board writes something.

thing. And there's a lot of, I think people thought that this was an editorial board piece by Blockworks. It's like, this is Blockworks's opinion. And it's not. It's one person's opinion. It's Molly Jane's opinion. And for that reason, like, I mean, I like that we wrote it. It got the like I saw people who have never publicly posted about their political take. Then it stirred them up so much. And they said, I am pro Trump for these reasons or I am pro Biden for these reasons. And that to me is a success is we got we were at the cutting edge of crypto and we got people to kind of have this bigger conversation so but was there was there a lesson that you took away from that whole episode or is there no lesson they're just like well wrote an opinion piece got a lot

of people excited that was the point i think the lesson yeah i mean the lesson is if you're i mean if you're a niche uh b-to-be media company and you say something that goes against what the industry likes, you should be ready for some backlash. But no, I think one of the things that we did afterwards is like we made it much more clear from a UIUX perspective that it was an opinion. But we also penned some alternative opinions as well. So Austin Campbell wrote a piece about being a single issue voter, you know, on the conservative side, Mike and I just had Ryan Selkis on the podcast, right? So I think a lesson for us is like we, when you share an opinion, it's very good to share the other side of the opinion as well. And we do things like, you know, we have this podcast called

Lightspeed. I'd call it like a pro monolithic, whatever you want to call monolithic or integrated chain podcast. It's very like Solana, Monad, like whatever, the monolithic chains, I would say. We have another show that we just launched called Expansion, which is like modular like movement and Celestia. And like, I think it's just good as a media company to not take one side. But no, the lesson, like, my takeaway is like, I mean, I told Molly Jane this last week. I was like, let's, let's keep them coming. As long as they sit at the cutting edge of crypto, let's keep opinion pieces coming. So now we lost, like, we lost some business from it.

Like, we had a sponsor. Really? Yeah, we had a sponsor say, I don't like what you're doing for the industry. What? Hold on. You got a name in shame. Who, what fucking sponsor pulled out based on an editorial? You kidding me?

I would never. But that is like, I mean, no, I mean, the amount of times that we've lost a sponsorship deal because of something editorial rights is like the amount of times I've had a salesperson come to me and say, I've got this $200,000 deal, but we just wrote this piece on them that is not a super kind piece. Can we take the piece down? Okay, that's different. Well, yeah, doing some, doing like journalism is very different than a single person

writing like an op-ed piece. Yeah, like writing an op-ed about like, yeah, if you're like, okay, you know, know, we're going to shit on Project XYZ using some journalism, and then they're like, oh, no, we lost the deal from Project XYZ. That I get. Look, we're in an industry where that kind of stuff is going to happen. You know, that you have to, you do have to navigate as a journalist is like biting the mouth that feeds you.

We are in this weird space where, yeah, it's business journalism. And business journalism, you do kind of need a symbiotic relationship with your business contacts and with your clients and your customers. But, you know, I don't know, somebody getting freaked out over a political op-ed, I'm like, come on. Crypto is all about letting people say what they want to say. Like, I wake up every day. I wake up every day and there's a person mad at me every morning for something that we have done, right? There's someone like, here's the message I get every day.

Why didn't you cover us? You don't, like, companies I've been like companies that have invested in or sponsors or, or advertisers or big clients of our research platform, why didn't you cover us? We just raised this money. Why didn't you cover us? And it's funny. I'll see people kind of shit on the media a lot

because it's a common thing to do, right? It's like the damn media. But then like in the DMs and the emails, it's like, yeah, but please, please, please can you write a story about us? So there's this fun little game that is happening here. Yeah. So we've had Bologi on the podcast before. and Bologi is kind of the, he's made himself known for this anti-media sentiment that he has really.

Bollogy was not happy with me. I was talking to Bology after this op-ed and he, um, really? Yeah, he said that. I mean, he was, yeah. Isn't he about going direct? Why does he care what the media is writing about? I mean, he spends half his time railing against the New York Times. So, clearly, he does care what the media is writing about.

Yeah. So, okay, so let's take seriously this idea for the, for those who have not heard the concept, Bologi has very often advocated this idea that, you know, the media is kind of their own political body slash their own social group that has their own incentives. Their incentives are to tell a story that is, obviously this is more general press, not business press, but it's sort of anti-business, anti-startup, anti-innovation. They're out there to frame people to create bad guys to sell, sell stories, and get clicks. And as a result, these people do not have your best intentions in mind. They are not pro-tech. They are not pro-business.

They are not pro-innovation. And so you should circumvent them. You should build your own audience. You should go direct. You should front-run the media. You should not count out to them. And their sense that, okay, if it's your time to get a negative story written about you, just shut up and take it and, you know, accept the, you know, judge-jury executioner

status that the media has taken on with respect, especially when it comes to business and tech. And so the advice that he gives to startups and founders is fuck the media. don't talk to the media, don't do interviews with them. When they are coming to you to do a story, it's probably going to be negative, especially if you're in tech. And so go straight, circumvent them and effectively stab them in the back, if you can because they're coming to you first.

So now that, I think that does hit a little bit differently when you're talking about business media, right? Like crypto media obviously has a much more symbiotic relationship with the industry that it serves than the New York Times, for example. Like the New York Times, and I think it is of more fair criticism than New York Times. New York Times almost uniformly negative coverage of crypto, basically ever.

I can't think of any single positive story they've written about. Yeah, forever. Yeah, except maybe a few small, like, oh, this one-off project or something, or Ethereum's going to proof a stake, you know, that seems good, I guess. But almost everything else they've written has been negative, whereas, you know, Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg have been more even-handed. Cryptojournalism, I tend to think actually is pretty positive, like usually good valence. like they talk about good things.

There's a few plays here and there where you'll see these very negative stories about particular things. But mostly when I see crypto media being negative, it's investigative journalism about a particular project that makes the industry look bad, but is honest work that needs to be done. Curious, Tom, Rob, what's your guys take on this, like, anti-media slant and how it applies to crypto media in particular? Well, I think the Venn diagram here is that there's a general distrust of the media from

crypto circles. because there's a generalized distrust of authority and, you know, we'll call it elites in general. Large people got into crypto in the first place because of this distrust, you know, it runs through the veins of Bitcoin and crypto in general to some degree. And so I think it's just, you know, one tangent that comes off of this, like, presumption that, you know, truth is only inherent in blockchains and everything else is spin. So, you know, you've done, you guys do just traditional financial journalism as well as crypto journalism. How do you notice the difference in like the audience reception or trust

or distrust of the stuff you guys put out? I mean, we are a crypto publication. Like, if we cover finance or macro, it is only to serve the crypto audience, I would say. Like, I don't really care about the person outside of crypto. You know, we, we, if we have a, if we're talking about interest rates, it is only to serve the person in crypto who is concerned about interest rates. We are not here to like do good for the industry. I am here to do good for the industry. I like, I mean, I've spent several years full time in the industry. I like I've, I'm 100% exposed to crypto and I love this industry more. I couldn't imagine working somewhere else, But block works as like, we have a bunch of different things that we do.

We have events. We have research. They all serve different functions. The news team specifically is not here to like prop up the, to like just write press releases and to like prop up companies in the industry. We are here to try to get to the bottom of truth, to try to like bring truth to light, I would say. And I genuinely believe that.

And I genuinely believe our journalists try to do that every single day. And it's really hard. It's because every day, think about the role of a journalist. We get like 300 inbounds a day of press releases. They're just people. They're just marketers promoting things all day. And you are trying to cut through the noise and basically figure out some kernel of truth. And if you even start talking about it publicly, you will get you, I mean, you'll,

I mean, Molly Jane was getting death threats, right? She was getting literal death threats and anti-Semitic comments for writing a piece about anti-crypto stuff. So I don't think people understand how hard it is to actually be a journalist. I think there are things that can happen. Basically, I think what will end up happening in media, whether it's crypto media or not, is there will be some connection with, I actually, this thing that I really believe in is prediction markets. What prediction markets, prediction markets help you size outcomes. I think actually maybe Robert mentioned this on the last podcast here.

Like prediction markets help you size or maybe it's Turin or someone like prediction markets help you size outcomes. But they don't give you any context and nuance. And what media gives you is the ability to uncover information that people maybe don't want you to have. So I think there's this like perfect marriage that will end up existing between like really, this really nice harmonious marriage between like prediction markets and media and like this kind of ebb and flow.

it feels like they're very disconnected today, but like I actually think that's one place that Blockworks will end up leaning into in our future is like, how do we, I don't know, how do we find this equilibrium with prediction markets? Because I think that will ultimately drive the end goal of delivering truth to the reader, which is really the goal of the news team. Okay, so what's your answer then to Bologi's line of attack, which is to say, okay, you call it truth. You know, where have I heard that before? You know, Bologi would say, well, Pravda, Soviet Union, right? That was literally the state-back newspaper whose name literally translated to truth. And what the media wants you to believe is that we are the arbiters of truth. We just tell the truth.

Everyone else has a perspective except the news. The news is the view from nowhere. It is the capital T truth. And Bollagy would say, no, fuck you. You guys have your own perspective. You're pushing. and we as entrepreneurs and as, you know, crypto denizens have a responsibility to advance our own narrative the same way the news is advancing a particular narrative. Now, again, I assume that you're a friend of the industry and of Bology, but how would you respond to that line of attack if Bology is saying? Yeah, I assume he has.

Yeah, okay, I have two thoughts on this. One is there is no capital M media. There's no group of like six media elites. I mean, they probably do meet in a room and have lunch. You do one of them, yeah. They probably do actually meet in a room and have lunch. But the reason why media is so liberal and liberals are very, have been for one reason or another in the last decade, anti-tech and anti-crypto.

But the reason that like media is so anti-tech and anti-crypto is because the people who work inside of media companies, specifically the journalists are oftentimes very liberal, right? They oftentimes came from Colombia. or Harvard or Penn or whatever East Coast or West Coast kind of like more elite school that you want to talk about. So when people say the media is elite, media is not elite. The people who work inside of media companies oftentimes come from West Coast or East Coast

elite school. And the media is not liberal. The people who work inside of media companies has gotten... What is the difference exactly? The difference is that I don't think you can talk. talk about like capital M, there's no media, there's no, there's no goal of media. There's no goal of media to bring down crypto or to bring down tech. There's no like a objective there. It's just the people inside are writing about it. What is the objective? The objective is to try to find the truth,

I would say. Now, I think the media, the capital M media has done a horrendous job in the last decade of finding the truth. And the reason for that is because as they started to hire, more and more liberal, like very liberal people, they basically let the inmates run the asylum or something like that. There's probably a better analogy to use there. But it was like that happening at the same time as like extreme cancel culture. And people being very almost like scared of their employees. So like one thing that ended up happening is like that in and I think the media of the last 50 years,

Saan's the last 10, there wouldn't have been a bias, I would say. There wouldn't have been that big of a political slant on the news. But in the last 10 years, that basically ran away from the media companies. And they let their journalists get a little to embed their own political stance into it. I think that will end up getting pulled back as people realize that's not what actually their readers want. But that's my take on it. Like me, I think I'll, yeah, go ahead.

Okay. Let me channel the spirit of Bologi here. Sure. And so I've imagined Bologi was here, what he would say is like, okay, you've just said again that the objective function of the media is to arrive at the truth. And Bology would say, fuck, no, it's not. The objective of the media is to maximize revenue and is to make money. And how do they make money?

It's by selling their audience exactly what they want to hear. Sometimes their audience wants to hear the truth because they gain some benefit from hearing the truth. But the reality is like there is no the truth, right? There is, okay, you make editorial decisions, but what goes on the front page, about what goes where, what gets how much reach,

what stories do we work on this week, what is the theme of the overall coverage about, you know, this, what kind of people are we going to, you know, op-eds don't just show up on the front, like, oh, somebody mozied up and just like, you know, put the, there's no algorithm,

maybe there is very mildly, but ultimately there are human beings, they're editors, they're making very discreet decisions about what goes where and what kind of stories we're going to write and what kind of framing or, valence we're going to give to these stories, right? So what Bollardee would say is once again,

this is the framing of the media to say, we are the view from nowhere. We are, we don't have a perspective. You might have a perspective. But as the media, we're just telling the truth. And if you don't like the truth, that's your problem, not the media's problem. Yeah, I think that's how it's always, I think that's how it's always worked, though. Like, in the, in the U.S., there have been, like, I was just reading this book about the Civil War, and they talked about the three newspapers at the time. There was the newspaper that catered to the Republicans, the newspaper that catered to the Democrats. There are two factions of Democrats.

There are the war Democrats and the Copperheads who basically opposed the Northern Democrats. And there was a newspaper that supported the Copperheads, the newspaper that supported the war Democrats, and the newspaper that supported the Republicans. And I think that's like, yeah, it's truth for your audience. That's right. We're not a nonprofit and we're not a function of the state, basically. So it is truth, but there is always going to be a sloth. Lant towards what your audience wants to hear. What I would argue is that the slant in the last 10 years ran away from what it should have

been. There will always be a slant, though. So that's what I think. Well, here's my dystopian take. That slant is going to increase exponentially as more and more media and content, whether it's like, you know, the algorithm on a Twitter feed or Google or whatever, as more more content becomes programmatic in some fashion, I think that slant is going to continue to increase. And there's a lot of analysis right now on like the fact that people's echo

chambers are increasing as different algorithms or tailoring content to them, just like they did in the civil war between, you know, two parties of, you know, and two pieces of Democrats, you know, everyone's news is going to be customized to that. With the opeds, the opinions, the biases, to phrasing. And I think this is just going to be a snowball that continues to build momentum. And I think, you know, like 20 years from now, you know, the news is going to be exactly what you want to read because that's what maximizes revenue to the Haseebology perspective. Well, okay, so I think what we're, there's a little bit of a, I sort of detect in this conversation

a little bit of like the good old days when the media really was unbiased and there wasn't this echo chambery thing. And then, you know, Yano, you pointed out that, well, in the Civil War, there were three newspapers and, like, nobody was under any illusion that there was the one unbiased one, right? They were all written by factions of people who are fighting in a literal war. So obviously, it is the case that not everywhere do people have this perception that the media is unbiased or even can plausibly be unbiased, that there is such a thing as a view from nowhere or just the truth.

I think in some way, maybe what people are nostalgic for is this period in, you know, the 70s and 80s and 90s when the country was actually like politics was quite centrist. There was a lot of moderation and the two parties were just much closer together. And I'm speaking specifically from an American perspective. And as a result, there was just less polarization, not because, you know, oh, well, because the newspaper monopolies or because, you know, everybody was just friendlier back then or whatever. but just because that's how politics played out. That's what the issues of the day led people to was being closer to the center. And as the parties have become more and more polarized

relative to each other, that ends up impacting everything, right? Like if you had a war, it is no surprise that there's going to be one newspaper that's pro the war, another newspaper that's on the other side, and nobody is going to be under the illusion at any point that there's a neutral newspaper.

Right? You can't have a neutral newspaper when you're in a civil war. There's just the ones on this side and the ones on that side, right? And so on some level, if that is, in fact, happened to the culture, and I think there are good reasons to believe that,

that are not about looking at, oh, well, you know, people on Google and Facebook only read news that's catered to them. It's like, yeah, but they would be doing that anyway. Like, it does feel like there's this thing, you know, it's now, there's these stats that Republicans are now, they're much less likely to marry Democrats

relative to any time in the last 30 years, right? There is this sort of cultural caste system that really did this really a relatively new thing in American politics. And that, this might just be an offshoot of that, that is normal, like in a sense, like this is how maybe things mostly are in the sweep of history. And where we were in the past maybe was abnormal, right? Just a result of just a really strong middle class and not a lot of wars and not a lot of things to worry about. I think there's a small new, I agree with most of that. There's a small, and, um, there's a small nuance that I would add, which is, like, we have extreme, we have bias in all

of the things that we do at Blockworks, which is pro-crypto. And then even inside of our different channels, we have like our light speed newsletter. That's like a pro, like monolithic chain, like Solana like integrated, whatever you want to call it, a newsletter. We will always write the truth, but there might be a bent towards talking about things like in Solanaland, for example. The moment, And I think having a bent is like is fine. It's like it's it's actually part of the media. The second that you that you let your bent get into writing things that I think are not factual, that's when you have a problem. And that's what I would say categorize the main.

The reason people don't like the mainstream media is not because they have a bent. It's because they they let their bent overpower what I think was actually factual. And that's a relatively new phenomenon. And Robert might be right. like that might keep happening or they might realize that like look if you keep doing that you're going to lose your whole audience your your audience will not trust you anymore um so we'll we'll see i think the lesson is the opposite which is that if you try to be too neutral your audience will yell at you and they'll try to cancel you and they'll pull their contracts and whatever and like yeah

i imagine for almost for most media organizations whether it's cnn or new york times or fox news like they know what their audience wants them to hear and the only time they get a revolt is when the opposite narrative is proposed, right? So now look, you can say it's the truth, but if you guys wrote, you know, if you had a series in the entire week where you just look at comparing the amount of Bitcoin emissions to like other horrible things in the world, then you would be people like, okay, yeah, this might be the truth, but like, guys, fuck you. Like, what the fuck is this?

Yeah. And I think that, like, I do agree with you. look, at the end of the day, media is a business. The only time you can pretend not to be a business is when you're a monopoly, and we're way past the point of media monopolies, right? Media could pretend that we are a, you know, basically like a political branch. We're here for protecting the integrity of our public discourse or whatever. That's something you can really only pull over people's eyes when you are a monopoly, right?

In the same way, Google can say, we are the Internet, and our interests are just the interests of the Internet. They can say that because they're a monopoly. But if you are, I don't know, Juniper networks or something and you're just like another internet company, you're like, no, no, no, I'm a business and I have margins and I got to protect my shareholders, that I think is where the media sits today,

which is why a lot of these stories we have told for a long time about the media, that the media is this neutral thing that's there to protect citizens and to protect the public discourse only really works when either one, the media is funded by the state, which in many countries is the case. Or two, the media was a monopoly. But when those two things go out the window and we see the media acting like any other

business. Like, you know, the reason why people get fucking pissed is that they can see it with, it's a whole thing with Biden, right? They can see it for themselves. And the one thing people absolutely hate is to be told that they don't see what they actually see. I know Robert has to leave. I have a whole thing about how the third problem, Steve, is that there's a bad

business model in just media. you need to build a product at the bottom of your funnel and create this like negative cack, SAS playback period. But that's a, Robert is going to get mad if I keep him, keep him there. Okay.

We got to wrap things up. Yeah, thanks for coming on, sharing your perspective, being our media punching bag. Yeah, we hope as immediately that you're going to take it on the strike. Yeah, exactly.

Take it as right. Look, you're elite. You can take it. You'll be fine. Hopefully you get more ridiculous acquisition offers. If anybody's looking for, to expend an extravagant amount of money

on the media business. Yano's there. Blockworks. You heard of here. Anyway. Thanks. Awesome. Thanks for coming on.

Day, everybody.