Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.
Speaker 1: I'm Joe Wisenthal. Unfortunately, my colleague Tracy Elloway is out
Speaker 1: again this week, so it's just going to be me
Speaker 1: and I'm going to be talking again kind of about
Speaker 1: the broader crypto world. But I think a really interesting
Speaker 1: different story this time. So listeners might remember that in
Speaker 1: two seventeen, during the last cryptocurrency boom, when Bitcoin was
Speaker 1: taking off, through all these follow on coin offerings and
Speaker 1: beyond just that, beyond just other coins, are all these
Speaker 1: ideas about how different industries could be transformed via blockchain
Speaker 1: technology in some way, or tokens or their own cryptocurrencies,
Speaker 1: and the work stories about putting banana trade on the
Speaker 1: blockchain with the currency, and dentistry having its own currency
Speaker 1: and all kinds of weird things that never really took off.
Speaker 1: Tomatoes there was a famous story about putting the tomato
Speaker 1: trade on the block chain. Anyway, none of that has
Speaker 1: really taken off, And at the time when a lot
Speaker 1: of this was going on, I thought a lot of
Speaker 1: these um endeavors were kind of cynical, just attempting to
Speaker 1: cash in on the hot market for coins in general
Speaker 1: without much purpose, But some of the projects actually did
Speaker 1: UH did seem sincere, And today we're going to be
Speaker 1: talking about one such project UH that did sincerely try
Speaker 1: to solve an interesting problem, and that problem was journalism.
Speaker 1: And so the question was, could this technology could a
Speaker 1: currency somehow helped build a sustainable journalism business model in
Speaker 1: some way that existing subscription subscription or existing UH models
Speaker 1: weren't capturing UH well or weren't doing a good job
Speaker 1: of So I'm very excited about our guest. I'm going
Speaker 1: to be speaking with Maria Bustillos. She's the founding editor
Speaker 1: of Popular. She has a new endeavor called the Brick
Speaker 1: House co Op, But several years ago she was a
Speaker 1: co founder of a project called Civil which attempted to
Speaker 1: create a new journalism business model and in part using
Speaker 1: its own cryptocurrency. We're gonna be talking about what she
Speaker 1: learned from that project, and these sort of potential and
Speaker 1: limits of the technology should be very interesting discussion for
Speaker 1: both people interested in finance and markets and our markets
Speaker 1: creating centers, but also journalism and journalism business models. So,
Speaker 1: without further ado, I want to bring in Maria. Thank
Speaker 1: you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1: It's a real pleasure to be here. Joe. Yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: really looking forward to getting your story. But and it's
Speaker 1: it's always I've been following you in your career on
Speaker 1: Twitter from Afar for a long time. We've never talked before,
Speaker 1: but it's it's always seemed interesting, and you seem to
Speaker 1: have inclination to experiment, to try new things and be
Speaker 1: open minded about new ideas in a way that is
Speaker 1: kind of rare for this industry, to be honest. But
Speaker 1: I'm just sort of curious your background first, you know,
Speaker 1: how you got into journalism and how you got interested
Speaker 1: then in the sort of world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.
Speaker 1: Um well, I am kind of a serial entrepreneur. Really.
Speaker 1: I started my first business when I was in my
Speaker 1: early twenties as a as a designer, like overpriced tchaticas
Speaker 1: for the home, and and then I sold that and
Speaker 1: opened uh kind of like a proto at Sea in ninet. Like,
Speaker 1: I was always really interested in the Internet computers. I
Speaker 1: met my husband on Prodigy, you know, so I kind
Speaker 1: of came at journalism from an interest in the Internet,
Speaker 1: and you know how a long time interest in sort
Speaker 1: of research and writing and an entrepreneurial stuff, and my
Speaker 1: husband's a Wall Street guy, so there was a lot
Speaker 1: of business in our in our house, business talk, and
Speaker 1: that's kind of how I how I approached it to
Speaker 1: start with. But I mean, you know, I love sort
Speaker 1: of literature and blogs, and I wound up going to
Speaker 1: um see that terrible movie Avatar with my husband and
Speaker 1: I just hated it so much, and I just came
Speaker 1: home and banged out this like absolute screed about how
Speaker 1: awful it was and sent it to my favorite block,
Speaker 1: to Corey Spica, and he printed it and that became
Speaker 1: my job, like eleven years ago. Almost. That's awesome. I
Speaker 1: love I love stories like that. I feel like so
Speaker 1: many of the most interesting people in media came at
Speaker 1: it from some angle where they didn't originally intend to
Speaker 1: be in journalism, but then all these new tools opened
Speaker 1: up and they realized they could write, and they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is pretty cool, and that's a that's a pretty
Speaker 1: great story. I love it. I like, this is my
Speaker 1: favorite job by far, and there's there's a lot of
Speaker 1: work to do in it. So I've been really fortunate
Speaker 1: to be for in front of some really interesting projects.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about Civil and I this civil you
Speaker 1: could describe it, but it got a lot of attention
Speaker 1: from the sort of like media world. Media. The media
Speaker 1: world is always upset with like media business models and
Speaker 1: sustainable journalism and who's going to pay for journalism and
Speaker 1: you know, understandable and why there's so much concern. But
Speaker 1: talk to me about that project. When was it conceived
Speaker 1: and sort of what was the problem you were trying
Speaker 1: to solve. Well, the interesting thing is I had been
Speaker 1: really interested in founding a block chain based journalism publishing platform,
Speaker 1: like before Civil contacted me. It was like this really
Speaker 1: weird coincidence, you know, because I had been interested in
Speaker 1: bitcoin and blood chain technology from very shortly after it started.
Speaker 1: You know, maybe I started looking into it, and um
Speaker 1: I wrote about bitcoin for the first time in for
Speaker 1: the New Yorker blog. I was you know, people all
Speaker 1: thought it was very weird at that point, and I mean,
Speaker 1: it is really weird. But the things that, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: what interested me about it always was here is a
Speaker 1: way to produce incorruptible records and they cannot be altered.
Speaker 1: And I have a very big interest in archiving in general,
Speaker 1: and so I kind of still see that is the
Speaker 1: most valuable aspect of blockchain technology. That's what you know,
Speaker 1: people talk about applying it to voting, talk about applying
Speaker 1: it to cold chain, you know, supply chain, like all
Speaker 1: this stuff. What they're really talking about is that they're
Speaker 1: incorruptible records are unfalsifiable records because they're distributed. So when
Speaker 1: you kind of apply that idea to journalism very separately
Speaker 1: from the idea of a currency or a token, it
Speaker 1: looks different, right. It's like, this is a way to
Speaker 1: record things. I was really fortunate, you know, as civil
Speaker 1: to be the first person ever to commit the full
Speaker 1: text of a news story directly into the Ethereum block chain.
Speaker 1: This is like really important, right, This is an I
Speaker 1: PF S or some other kind of incorruptible distributed things.
Speaker 1: Is like it cannot be changed until you basically have
Speaker 1: to shut off the Internet. Once you have recorded something
Speaker 1: in the Ethereum block chain, it's now on what like,
Speaker 1: you know, a fluctuating number of computers, but tens of
Speaker 1: thousands of computers, there's always going to be a record
Speaker 1: of it, kind of like there used to be microwthiast
Speaker 1: records of newspapers. It's very similar to that. You can't
Speaker 1: you can't falsify that. I like wrote about Barack Obama's
Speaker 1: birth records, you know, like really there was an unfalsifiable
Speaker 1: mark microfish in Hawaii. If that had not existed, it
Speaker 1: would have given a lot more oxygen to the birth
Speaker 1: of movement. But there were unfalsifiable records in that library.
Speaker 1: And so I kind of view what blockchain can do
Speaker 1: for journalism is being related to that. So I've been
Speaker 1: looking for a way to uh, you know, just kind
Speaker 1: of instantiate these ideas, and and then I got this
Speaker 1: phone call, like just out of the clear blue from
Speaker 1: Josh Benston of Old Town Media, who had been consulting
Speaker 1: for Civil and what it was. It was a consensus
Speaker 1: funded project. I mean at that point, you know, end
Speaker 1: of twenty seventeen, the price of ethereum got to fourteen
Speaker 1: hundred I think at the end of that year, and
Speaker 1: so it would go down between that point and the
Speaker 1: bottom I think was sixty six. So consensus was very
Speaker 1: flesh with cash money and they were throwing it around
Speaker 1: it a lot of projects that were you know, sort
Speaker 1: of had a social you know component of some kind,
Speaker 1: you know, or there's suitor stuff, you know, there's like
Speaker 1: they just had unlimited money and they were handing it
Speaker 1: out and so this is Consensus. So this is one
Speaker 1: of the one of the original sort of co founders
Speaker 1: of the Ethereum project started a company called Consensus, which
Speaker 1: I think characterizes itself is a development studio for etherium projects,
Speaker 1: and as part of it, they fund various endeavors designed
Speaker 1: to build something a top the network. Yes, Joe lit
Speaker 1: bin Um, you know, funded civil directly, and I think
Speaker 1: it was originally like five million or something like that.
Speaker 1: It was really substantial investment and so you know, there
Speaker 1: was money in it, and it was the idea that
Speaker 1: I wanted to work on. And I'm like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: They're like, we want to start a black chain based project.
Speaker 1: I like, sit down, let me tell you what we're
Speaker 1: going to do. But um, you know, it was really
Speaker 1: fun and a lot of the ideas and are I
Speaker 1: haven't changed my mind about any of it really. But
Speaker 1: what happened is that the crypto winter came and you
Speaker 1: know kind of why, well, you know, regulators didn't like
Speaker 1: all these I c o s. You know, they started
Speaker 1: there started being a lot of money raised in those markets,
Speaker 1: and I mean, I don't know. I know that this
Speaker 1: is maybe a slightly crazy idea, but I I think
Speaker 1: that regulators watching those markets swell up, you know, and
Speaker 1: seeing like an actual direct threat to the regular capital markets,
Speaker 1: you know, started paying a lot of attention, and suddenly
Speaker 1: it became, you know, very difficult to do an ic
Speaker 1: out you don't you say, direct friends to capital markets.
Speaker 1: A cynic might say a bunch of people got fleeced
Speaker 1: on some of these huge things because the projects were
Speaker 1: always sort of um, you know, some of these mega
Speaker 1: ones never really took off extraordinary amount of money, raise
Speaker 1: extraordinary amount of short term speculation assets that by many
Speaker 1: accounts looked like traditional security regulations whose purpose exists to
Speaker 1: protect investors in theory loss a ton of money. True,
Speaker 1: I mean, and go past that, there was like scam Scalore, right,
Speaker 1: Like there's also scam Scalore markets. So that's true. Maybe
Speaker 1: people forget this, you know, but so like this is
Speaker 1: what I was saying in the intro, which is that
Speaker 1: at the time, you know, I was like, there struck
Speaker 1: me as a lot of projects that had no purpose
Speaker 1: other than to cash in on the market. And when
Speaker 1: Symbol launched and seeing the participation of people like yourself
Speaker 1: and other sort of like long time veterans of the
Speaker 1: media industry. It has had a pretty impressive roster. It
Speaker 1: did not look to me like a sort of get
Speaker 1: rich quick thing by any stretch. And so that's why
Speaker 1: at least seemed different than all these other projects. And
Speaker 1: so like what was the premise because it wasn't actually
Speaker 1: putting content on the blockchain, right, well, it was for me.
Speaker 1: I mean there's one thing, right, there's a number of
Speaker 1: things that you can do with this technology, like, for example,
Speaker 1: you know comments, Yeah, you can, Like I actually built
Speaker 1: this with the last of my civil many because I
Speaker 1: was just so interested in popular which tiny, tiny little laboratory.
Speaker 1: It still it works. You know, you can only put
Speaker 1: a comment on a popular story if you're a paying subscriber,
Speaker 1: and it costs five cents worth of eat to do that.
Speaker 1: And what this does is make zeros fam You don't
Speaker 1: have to have any kind of thing like that's just
Speaker 1: one thing. There's a hundred things like this that you
Speaker 1: can do with it, right, But the way it was
Speaker 1: supposed to work was the token. It was an ARC token,
Speaker 1: which is like sort of you know, sort of ethereum
Speaker 1: is kind of like programmable currency, right. It's it's like
Speaker 1: bitcoin that you can put code to it. And so
Speaker 1: you you have a token that is specific to a
Speaker 1: certain project or set of properties or people or whatever.
Speaker 1: You can you can program it to be for one purpose. Now,
Speaker 1: if you have like a journalism denominated token, let's say
Speaker 1: you have to purchase subscriptions using the token, you have
Speaker 1: to do your comments using the token, you have to
Speaker 1: like you create like an economic world um that's denominated
Speaker 1: in this token. And so you know what I like,
Speaker 1: I was really excited about things like micro tipping. This
Speaker 1: was like a huge, huge thing for me. Microsipping is
Speaker 1: still huge and we can do this up popular right now.
Speaker 1: But I mean very few people have eight So I
Speaker 1: mean at the same time that this whole thing is happening,
Speaker 1: the market is contracting, you know, there was there were
Speaker 1: there were some regulatory blows that were well, the one
Speaker 1: fatal one I think is when Finsen decided tightened the
Speaker 1: rules for what counted as a money transfer business. Like
Speaker 1: what it sort of meant was if I were to
Speaker 1: tip you know popular writer in eat and popular is
Speaker 1: holding that eat for the writer, I'm now I'm now
Speaker 1: a money transfer potentially now it costs three million dollars
Speaker 1: a year to get licensed for that, like in all
Speaker 1: fifty states, because it's like a state regulated thing. And
Speaker 1: so they made it impossible for these projects to be viable,
Speaker 1: and you know, and it kind of all goes hand
Speaker 1: in glove, you know, the prices, crashing, confidences, you know,
Speaker 1: eroding and all this stuff kind of happened at the
Speaker 1: same time. But what it was supposed to do is
Speaker 1: stuff like that, is like make it make it possible
Speaker 1: to do like frictionless micro tipping really really cheap wit.
Speaker 1: So I want to actually, before you go any further,
Speaker 1: I want to ask about that point specifically, because the
Speaker 1: idea of sort of micro payment for content for journalism.
Speaker 1: People have fantasized about this for a while, and from
Speaker 1: what I understand, and I've never been directly involved in
Speaker 1: any of these projects, but from what I understand, the
Speaker 1: issue is never really I mean, maybe the issue is
Speaker 1: partly of the cost, but also the issue is sort
Speaker 1: of the mental cost. Do I want to think about
Speaker 1: doing a transaction every time I make a comment or
Speaker 1: load an article or whatever like that is sort of
Speaker 1: like a mental tax. And when I think about doing
Speaker 1: that in a cryptocurrency which is already like ten times
Speaker 1: more complicated. It's like, okay, I'm gonna like pay an Eve,
Speaker 1: and now I have to check the eight to US
Speaker 1: dollar exchange RAID, and I have to have like my
Speaker 1: separate Like okay, I got to go buy some Eve
Speaker 1: and then I have to convert that into the civil token,
Speaker 1: and I have to hold that into a wallet, and
Speaker 1: I need to remember my password for the wallet, and
Speaker 1: if I don't, then all that money is gone. It
Speaker 1: always struck me as like, all right, so we've taken
Speaker 1: all of the difficulties of micropayments, which we know are enormous,
Speaker 1: and added about five different complicated, uncomfortable layers on top
Speaker 1: of it. So tell me why my that perception is wrong,
Speaker 1: because that's my outside perception of the challenge here. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well it's it's you can do it today and it's
Speaker 1: really easy, uh, with a metal mask wallet that just
Speaker 1: sits in your browser. And this was in vision right
Speaker 1: when we started. Meta Mask was like, well, on its way,
Speaker 1: you can do meta mask. This is a meta mask
Speaker 1: is a browser based ethereum wallet, right that allows you
Speaker 1: to hold ethereum and any Ethereum based token such as
Speaker 1: the civil token. And when we started, the idea was, well,
Speaker 1: by that time, you'll be able to buy eight with
Speaker 1: a credit card. It will take five seconds, you know.
Speaker 1: And so but I mean, right now, if you just
Speaker 1: if you, if you get through the hoops, which is
Speaker 1: like roughly like opening a bank account, you know, to
Speaker 1: open a crypto account at you know, coin base or whatever,
Speaker 1: you have to show them, you know, picture idy and
Speaker 1: all the kind of junk. But you know, you you
Speaker 1: can buy ethereum and you can put it in your
Speaker 1: browser and it's just always there, so you don't actually
Speaker 1: have to think about anything. That like my theory of
Speaker 1: it was, I had this moment when we were in
Speaker 1: development and I read this really good story that Frank
Speaker 1: Rich had written about the history of his his career.
Speaker 1: You know, he's a New York magazine or something. And
Speaker 1: I got to the end and he has really meant
Speaker 1: a lot to me in my career. It just in
Speaker 1: heeps such a wonderful writer, and so um, I got
Speaker 1: to the end of this thing and I thought, if
Speaker 1: I could send this guy fifty dollars right now, just
Speaker 1: so he knows, you know, what he just is a
Speaker 1: is a way of saying I appreciate this piece, like
Speaker 1: you've so much for me, I don't know I would
Speaker 1: send it, And so I thought this is gonna work. Right,
Speaker 1: there's this moment of passion at the end, like after
Speaker 1: you hear the song or whatever, after you read the story,
Speaker 1: that your heart opens to the idea of contributing to
Speaker 1: that person's welfare directly. I think it's very important, and
Speaker 1: so you can do that right now at popula Um
Speaker 1: using a metal mask wallet. It really once you set
Speaker 1: it up, it takes five seconds. It doesn't interfere with
Speaker 1: you in any way. You just click two buttons. All
Speaker 1: the exchange and all that stuff is handled in a
Speaker 1: very smooth, seamless, very simple way. Just that you want
Speaker 1: to do it in dollars, you want to send fifty dollars,
Speaker 1: it just automatically does the eighth transfer whatever price it's
Speaker 1: at at that point. And considering the problems that we're
Speaker 1: getting this thing started, it's remarkably simple right now. So
Speaker 1: but I mean, you know, people are afraid of it,
Speaker 1: and I mean with good reason. They should be careful,
Speaker 1: just like they should be careful with their regular money,
Speaker 1: just like they should be careful not to let their
Speaker 1: credit card never be stolen. I mean, these are problems.
Speaker 1: It exists in all of every economic transaction. You know,
Speaker 1: if there is a store of value that somebody can sees,
Speaker 1: they will do it. And in the case of crypto,
Speaker 1: you can seize someone's assets with a very little risk
Speaker 1: of being caught. Although there is that risk has increased substantially.
Speaker 1: So um, I'm still a big believer in all these
Speaker 1: in all these principles, it's just not a way to
Speaker 1: do it. Now, why not dollars? Like if I go
Speaker 1: to if I see like this is this is still
Speaker 1: I guess, you know, if it's about tipping. So you know,
Speaker 1: I think we want to if we sort of decompose
Speaker 1: the question of how the technology could be applied to journalism.
Speaker 1: There's the first thing that you've described which is super
Speaker 1: powerful to me, the idea of creating a truly permanent record.
Speaker 1: And as you say, if you have like a sufficient network,
Speaker 1: enough computers, enough hash power, you could inscribe something onto
Speaker 1: the blockchain as you have done, or onto a blockchain
Speaker 1: um that really like cannot ever be tampered with. And
Speaker 1: that's pretty powerful. When it comes to something like tipping,
Speaker 1: it could be done with dollars. I mean Venmo exists,
Speaker 1: I get, you know, that's a mobile thing, but right,
Speaker 1: like the Apple pay exists, what is the idea by
Speaker 1: which a cryptocurrency solves this problem and creates new incentives
Speaker 1: for journalism business models that didn't exist. We've seen many
Speaker 1: attempts at micro tipping. They never took off because the
Speaker 1: transaction costs were too high, you know, the tips that popular.
Speaker 1: I mean we've only taken you know a few fewer
Speaker 1: than a thousand so far, but like they're quite often
Speaker 1: like ten cents, you know, cents, which would be great,
Speaker 1: right if if there were a way to do that.
Speaker 1: All these other technologies didn't work out because they became
Speaker 1: keeping track of the transactions. It's very bloated. This is
Speaker 1: a great thing that crypto or you know, really chain
Speaker 1: technology can do. It's like it removes the overhead and
Speaker 1: creates like a bulletproof audit trail for every transaction. You
Speaker 1: can have a quite complicated system where people are leaving
Speaker 1: each other ten and twenty five cents, you know, and
Speaker 1: it's it doesn't create any sort of accounting overhead at all.
Speaker 1: It's all done automatically. So that's like a huge thing.
Speaker 1: Like the other thing is you know the system I
Speaker 1: have right now, If you write a comment and you
Speaker 1: pay your five sets and you write your comment, that
Speaker 1: comment is also eligible for tips. The idea is to
Speaker 1: create an economy of discourse. So here here's something I wondered. Okay,
Speaker 1: let's let's talk a little bit more about the civil
Speaker 1: structure and how it was supposed to work. And so
Speaker 1: the idea was it was going to be this token
Speaker 1: offering And tell me if I'm wrong, but this is
Speaker 1: my impression from the outside. There was this token offering
Speaker 1: that was going to raise some money. Then that was
Speaker 1: gonna fund a series of news rooms that were like
Speaker 1: a sort of multiple journalism endeavors under the civil umbrella.
Speaker 1: And then that token uh would be used to a
Speaker 1: fund the newsrooms and then people would have that and
Speaker 1: they could um then what happens from there, like what
Speaker 1: what is the purpose of the token after the sort
Speaker 1: of fund raise to get the journal uh, the initial
Speaker 1: ce see the journalism? What is its purpose there? And
Speaker 1: how why and why would it go up or down
Speaker 1: at that point? Like what makes it fluctuate? Okay, So
Speaker 1: there were multiple projects going on at the same time.
Speaker 1: There was a token curated registry. Have you heard of this? Yeah,
Speaker 1: but only kind of, so maybe explain that. Okay, So
Speaker 1: they I was not in favor of having this be
Speaker 1: the first project, but it was the first project at
Speaker 1: Civil and what it was supposed to do is actually
Speaker 1: determine who was allowed to publish ah UM. And it
Speaker 1: was supposed to be like the community itself is sort
Speaker 1: of this self policing thing. There was like a civil
Speaker 1: code of conduct is like it was actually pretty good.
Speaker 1: I helped them work on an UM a bunch of
Speaker 1: us did. It was like, you know, no plagiarism and
Speaker 1: make your best efforts to verify what you print and
Speaker 1: all this kind of stuff. And the idea was the
Speaker 1: community would cause new new applicants to come in and
Speaker 1: stake a certain amount of tokens, and then people would
Speaker 1: decide between themselves whether or not this person is okay.
Speaker 1: And you know, it's sort of like they like an
Speaker 1: entrance fee or whatever. That is then sort of help
Speaker 1: by the company. But if people want to complain, then
Speaker 1: they have to stake tokens and they say, like you're
Speaker 1: a neo Nazi whatever, and so like I'm going to
Speaker 1: stake these tokens and vote you out, and so like
Speaker 1: if there's it's kind of like a a voting situation,
Speaker 1: but you vote with the token and so you you
Speaker 1: allow people into the network or you you throw them out,
Speaker 1: you know, based on the sort of token government system. Um.
Speaker 1: There have been many attempts at token curity registry before
Speaker 1: civil happened, and they have all failed because you know,
Speaker 1: I think the idea is not without merit, but it
Speaker 1: is not ready for prime time by any means. It
Speaker 1: depends on you know, a large group of people having
Speaker 1: enough overhead to pay attention to the rules and to
Speaker 1: sit there and that this is work, you know, vetting
Speaker 1: a newsroom deciding whether or not they've committed plagiarism or
Speaker 1: whether or not they're adhering to this quota conduct. However simple,
Speaker 1: it is a bunch of people have to sit there
Speaker 1: and and you know, spend valuable time looking at some
Speaker 1: bozos website. You know, it was insanity. So um, I
Speaker 1: was fummed about that. But I mean, but the idea
Speaker 1: of the premise was is that there are all these
Speaker 1: contentious fights that happened online all the time. Is this
Speaker 1: tweet misleading? Is this Facebook post a lie is this
Speaker 1: hate speech, etcetera. And the hope was that if there
Speaker 1: were some sort of monetary stake involved in the debate exactly,
Speaker 1: that that could resolve these questions an agreeable way for
Speaker 1: the community exactly. And even the right to the right
Speaker 1: to publish itself, you know, was contingent. You know. The
Speaker 1: thing is, I took a lot of civil tokens as
Speaker 1: a compensation for this thing, you know, the idea and
Speaker 1: the way that the I c o s were going
Speaker 1: When we first started looking into this, it was a
Speaker 1: great bet, you know, because like any etherory token was
Speaker 1: gonna like I was having a ball, you know, um,
Speaker 1: and I just like to roll the dice. But I
Speaker 1: mean I believed in it hugely. I still do. Because
Speaker 1: the thing is, if you have a you don't really
Speaker 1: need to call it a token, right, But if you
Speaker 1: have a community like like that is linked in it's
Speaker 1: and it's within its economy, is interlinked, all the participants
Speaker 1: have a stake and what is going on, and it's
Speaker 1: frictionless way of recording things that happened, that would be
Speaker 1: great for this industry. It would still be great. The
Speaker 1: problem is how to make those principles um attainable within
Speaker 1: the current frameworks that we haven't they're not right now.
Speaker 1: You know. Something I was thinking about, so like when
Speaker 1: I first got into writing, I just started, as you know, blogging,
Speaker 1: and I just like set up ah, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I think it was like two thousand five, and I
Speaker 1: set up a type Pad account and I just started blogging,
Speaker 1: and you know, it's just for the fun of it,
Speaker 1: you know when you mentioned like these tips of like
Speaker 1: sometimes just a few pennies or ten cents or twenty cents, like,
Speaker 1: does that ever sort of I don't know, I could
Speaker 1: see that having a negative effect because here you are thinking,
Speaker 1: like I'm just doing and I kind of wanted to
Speaker 1: do it for the fun of it, and that's like,
Speaker 1: oh great, I got seventy cents, which is really not
Speaker 1: that much money for a thing. It's like, that's what
Speaker 1: it's worth two people like I would it, doesn't It
Speaker 1: seems like that would be perhaps, even though it is
Speaker 1: technically some sort of compensation, that that might have a
Speaker 1: sort of deterring or demoralizing effect, just like that's it. Well,
Speaker 1: that's very mercenary, Joe. You know when it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I'm saying like once you established the idea like like
Speaker 1: it's one thing if you're just like, I want to
Speaker 1: be part of the conversation. This looks fun. I want
Speaker 1: to blog. I want to write my take on a
Speaker 1: movie that I just saw. I want to take down
Speaker 1: an article that I run in the New York Times
Speaker 1: and that right, want to write a thing debunking it. Well,
Speaker 1: those you know, that's like what I felt like motivated.
Speaker 1: And then it's like you introduced the idea of like Okay,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna join this network or be part of this
Speaker 1: network of and there's gonna be some compensation, and then
Speaker 1: people like send a few tips and they come out
Speaker 1: to a dollar fifty. It's like I would rather just
Speaker 1: sort of I don't know. I feel like that would
Speaker 1: be a less I feel like that would be a
Speaker 1: counter motivator. Well, I don't know, and I disagree. I
Speaker 1: think it's it's sort of like a if that somebody
Speaker 1: comments favorably on your work with no money attached to it.
Speaker 1: It's I find that pleasurable, the idea that somebody is
Speaker 1: reading it. Yeah, it's pleasurable to me. And you know,
Speaker 1: I agree completely. I mean that was to me, like
Speaker 1: that's the fun part, right, so you have that plus
Speaker 1: this other thing that's just a goofball thing, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, what what people are really doing is entering
Speaker 1: into a dialogue with you. It's had a little buddy
Speaker 1: attached to it. That's fine, and it's fine. It's good.
Speaker 1: So you know you mentioned that. Then I want to
Speaker 1: sort of talk about your new project in a second,
Speaker 1: But you mentioned that. At the time that you got
Speaker 1: this going, it's civil launched its token. At the time,
Speaker 1: it was still like all these tokens were just flying
Speaker 1: to the moon and make a fortune, and it was
Speaker 1: probably like a good bet to hold onto them. Do
Speaker 1: you think actually you were penalized in part because it
Speaker 1: was a serious project designed to solve a serious problem
Speaker 1: and not the sort of get rich quick scheme slash
Speaker 1: scam that other people are running. Oh no, not a bit.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, no, I think it was we were
Speaker 1: just one of this huge constellation of projects in the
Speaker 1: consensus universe. They were starting so many things at once
Speaker 1: because this huge amount of wealth had just ballooned like
Speaker 1: so fast, and so the seriousness or otherwise of a
Speaker 1: project was like the absolute least consideration. You know, it's
Speaker 1: kind of like just just look at all the millions
Speaker 1: of things that we all have to rent to do
Speaker 1: this as quickly as we can. You know, if I
Speaker 1: mean probably if Civil had ic O like you know,
Speaker 1: and six months earlier, Yeah, it would be really would
Speaker 1: be looking at a real different story. I don't really
Speaker 1: quite know how exactly, but it wouldn't be like this.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about what you're up to now. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: this is a pretty interesting time in UH journalism because
Speaker 1: they're actually does seem to be the emergence of sort
Speaker 1: of sustainable subscription business models with normal fiat money being used.
Speaker 1: We see a lot of journalists this year having launched
Speaker 1: their own newsletters on services like substack and actually in
Speaker 1: some cases making decent livings. A number of sort of
Speaker 1: independent outlets have gone hard paywall UH the athletic as
Speaker 1: a sports thing, as a bunch of different people writing
Speaker 1: about the local sports team. They seem to be doing well,
Speaker 1: and people are showing a willingness to pay for media
Speaker 1: in a way that a few years ago there seemed
Speaker 1: to be a lot more doubts about. So that's encouraging.
Speaker 1: So talk to us about sort of what you've learned
Speaker 1: from that and how you see your current endeavor fitting
Speaker 1: into this new media landscape which seems to have some
Speaker 1: space open to it for paid subscriptions for Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: really exciting. Well, this kind of came out of Civil
Speaker 1: really because there were a group of US publishers who
Speaker 1: really believed in this sort of cooperative model that we've
Speaker 1: been working on its Civil where basically the token was
Speaker 1: supposed to be the vehicle by which we were sustaining
Speaker 1: each other's work, and it was a really cooperative idea.
Speaker 1: So you had all these publishers after Civil broke up,
Speaker 1: and we're thinking, Okay, that was a little too our
Speaker 1: out apparently, but like, let's let's put these ideas to
Speaker 1: work using a more conventional cooperative model. And so we
Speaker 1: studied cooperatives and um, there's a bakery here in Oakland
Speaker 1: called Arismendi that has like an interesting cooperative structure. There's
Speaker 1: cooperatives in Barcelona. And so we put together this really
Speaker 1: novel sort of business model with a friend of mine
Speaker 1: in Cleveland who's a business attorney, and um, I really
Speaker 1: love it. It's like each each publisher, there's nine of
Speaker 1: us in I knew venture. Um it's called the Brick
Speaker 1: Brick House and it's totally flat organizational structure. Tom Scoca,
Speaker 1: who's one of the publishers in it, and I we're
Speaker 1: talking about what are we going to We've got to
Speaker 1: make a thing that just can't be blown down by
Speaker 1: outside forces. And that was kind of how the name
Speaker 1: came up so UM, because we both worked for outlets
Speaker 1: that were like demolished by you know, one way or another,
Speaker 1: like the sort of business craziness storms that have happened
Speaker 1: throughout journalism. And it's like, Okay, let's just try something
Speaker 1: of our own on a small scale that's absolutely free
Speaker 1: of um, the outside influences of advertisers or owners or
Speaker 1: executives or anything. There's like, there's nothing in this thing
Speaker 1: but editors and publishers. And there's nine um, nine of us,
Speaker 1: and each of us has one share. You buy one
Speaker 1: share for one dollar, and all you can do with
Speaker 1: it is sell it back to the company for a dollar.
Speaker 1: So this company is capitalized with nine dollars and so
Speaker 1: it's an LLC, but it runs according to an operating
Speaker 1: agreement where we share subscribers and revenues and expenses according
Speaker 1: to certain formulas. And there's a board of directors and
Speaker 1: and then we have an advisory council of industry leaders
Speaker 1: in case there's stuff that we can't agree on. And
Speaker 1: so we worked really, really, really hard on the structure
Speaker 1: of this thing, because you know, I was in the
Speaker 1: courtroom when Gawker was taken down the whole Hogan trial,
Speaker 1: and I was covering it for death and taxes, which
Speaker 1: is also no more. But but I mean, we did
Speaker 1: not realize what was going on when that thing happened.
Speaker 1: It was just really shocking, right that, when you had
Speaker 1: William brink With saying, you know, in the eighties defending
Speaker 1: the right of Larry Flitt two say in his magazine
Speaker 1: that Jerry Fallwell had incest in an outhouse. You know,
Speaker 1: like First Amendment principles of the press seemed to me
Speaker 1: to be absolutely ironclad. When William Brinquist was defending that,
Speaker 1: it seemed impossible to me that Gawker would be closed
Speaker 1: down for publishing this tiny little bit of like security
Speaker 1: camera footage of called Cogan having spects. It's just like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's offensive to people, but it's that's that's protected right. Anyway,
Speaker 1: it did not work out, and so it was really shocking,
Speaker 1: and it took us a really long time to discover
Speaker 1: that it was you know, Peter Teel had bankrot dosn'ts
Speaker 1: of you know, a lot of lawsuits with a view
Speaker 1: to taking this this organization down, and he finally got
Speaker 1: lucky with his judge and and so I was like, wow,
Speaker 1: you know, one person can demolish the livelihoods of hundreds
Speaker 1: of people and remove the reading material for millions of
Speaker 1: people because he was offended by something. And so I
Speaker 1: thought that it's just terrifying, you know, it's terrified that
Speaker 1: many can just shut something like this off. And it
Speaker 1: really motivated me a lot to figure out how to
Speaker 1: how to protect that, you know, speech rights and press
Speaker 1: freedom and so that's a lot where this comes from.
Speaker 1: There's not a way for anybody to come and buy
Speaker 1: it out. We're not relying on any billionaires to put
Speaker 1: the bills. It's like, I don't know if may may
Speaker 1: succeed or it may fail, but at least we're trying,
Speaker 1: and it's really fun and we've got a really great
Speaker 1: um group of publishers and uh, we're raising some money
Speaker 1: in a Kickstarter building a simple version of it and
Speaker 1: we'll see where it goes. So where ship people check
Speaker 1: out to learn more Kickstarter, or you just go to
Speaker 1: If you go to Google and type in brick House Kickstarter,
Speaker 1: you'll you'll see it at the top. There's a lot
Speaker 1: more detail there. Ben Smith interviewed me at The New
Speaker 1: York Times about it, and I wrote a piece about
Speaker 1: it the Columbia Journalism Review that explains the details. We're
Speaker 1: probably like at the current pace. I think we'll be
Speaker 1: publishing at the end of October. Well, I really appreciate
Speaker 1: you joining me for this. Um, it's really cool, I think, Um,
Speaker 1: you know you're sort of your appetite to trying new
Speaker 1: things and experiment and see things like civil not work
Speaker 1: out but then just move on and sort of trying
Speaker 1: to experiment is a really cool and refreshing and thank you.
Speaker 1: I'm looking forward to seeing how brick House goes. And
Speaker 1: you know, obviously still a lot of uncertainty in this
Speaker 1: industry about how people are going to get paid and
Speaker 1: how many people will get paid. So it feels like
Speaker 1: the more projects the better. Thank you, Joe. I really
Speaker 1: appreciate it. Handled so much fun talking. I could yell
Speaker 1: about crypto all day long. Yeah, it's great to finally
Speaker 1: meet you, and good luck. Thank you so much. All right,
Speaker 1: take care Maria. Well there you go. Um. You know,
Speaker 1: I think it's super interesting. Like I said in the beginning,
Speaker 1: I guess I viewed a lot of the projects back
Speaker 1: of the I c O Cryptomania is kind of cynical,
Speaker 1: and then I became cynical about them, and I'm still
Speaker 1: cynical about them, and even in with this new sort
Speaker 1: of crypto boom, I'm still sort of super skeptical of
Speaker 1: them all. But I did really like hearing the inside
Speaker 1: story of one of them. So looking forward to checking
Speaker 1: out how Maria's current project goes. So this has been
Speaker 1: another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.
Speaker 1: You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow
Speaker 1: my co host Tracy Alloway. She's on Twitter at Tracy Alloway.
Speaker 1: Our guest Maria Bustillo, She's at Maria Bustillo's. Check out
Speaker 1: her project brick House on Kickstarter. Follow our producer Laura
Speaker 1: Carlson at Laura M. Carlson. The Bloomberg head of podcast
Speaker 1: Francesca Levy at Francesco Today, And of course you can
Speaker 1: check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the
Speaker 1: handle at podcast. Thanks for listening.