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

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  What's up everyone, this is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 0:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Jared Dickers, the former CEO of Poet. In this conversation, we discuss what's wrong with the media today, what potential solutions may be, how censorship and free speech are constantly tested ideas, and how foreign governments like China will deal with uncensorable content on a blockchain. This conversation was really entertaining and informative. I hope you enjoy it nearly as much as I did.

• 0:37Speaker 00

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Alright guys, super pumped. Jared's here. Are you ready to do this?

• 1:07Speaker 02

  I'm ready.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  Alright, what's your background?

• 1:09Speaker 02

  So, I have a media background. Actually, my early, early background was in music. I wanted to be a music journalist.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  What kind of music?

• 1:16Speaker 02

  I like jam bands. I'm a big Phish fan. Seen Phish about 200 times.

• 1:20Speaker 00

  That's it?

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Love the Dead. I wanted to write about music, did that for a while, made no money. Realized real quickly that I can make more money working in advertising. So I went, so like, that's where everything just propelled. I got a job off Craigslist at the Huffington Post before they sold AOL.

• 1:39Speaker 00

  The Huffington Post was looking for employees on Craigslist?

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's crazy, right?

• 1:44Speaker 00

  I don't know if that's good or bad, but we'll keep going.

• 1:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I joined in December of 2010, so they ended up selling for 315 million in January. So Craigslist might have been the right approach, right? Rather than paying recruiters. And like, that's where everything happened. I really started to recognize that the media industry really doesn't know what it's doing, and really appreciates anyone who wants to make an effort to try to make things better, especially on the business side. Like, um, early days of the Huffington Post, we couldn't get anyone to give a shit about advertising, to really think differently about how to grow our business. Uh, everyone just wanted to focus on the creative side. I said, look, if you'll pay me double, I'll work on the business side. Uh, found that there was huge creative opportunity there. We, we like created native advertising there. Um, everything blew up. Then I went to Time Inc.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  I went to Rebel Mouse, which was a, uh,

• 2:33Anthony Pompliano?

  I remember.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:33Anthony Pompliano?

  A tech coming out. The social, uh, social page for everything, right?

• 2:37Speaker 02

  Right, right. So Paul Berry, who was CTO of the Huffington Post and, uh, Ken Lear and Eric Hippo, who, um, run Lear Hippo Ventures, kind of launched Rebel Mouse. The team got back together. We built that for the distributed web. The whole idea was you don't need websites. You build everything for social. We kind of see how that's happened politically now. Um, kind of went backwards. And then I went to the Post. I went to the other Post, the Washington Post for three years. I led innovation, uh, really focused on the business side of things. Was an amazing time to build a media company that had a great reputation that was owned by Jeff Bezos. So you, uh, had full flexibility.

• 3:10Anthony Pompliano?

  He's struggling right now.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Dream job. Yeah, I know. I know. The news, the news is the news, right? So, um, and then, you know, towards, towards the end of my tenure at the Washington Post, I really started thinking about like, what is the future in media, right? Like, do, uh, are we valuing the work that we're doing correctly, right? We're constantly screaming, hey, you should subscribe to our work or you should pay for our content and turn off your ad blockers. But do the consumers actually really understand that? Do they even know the work that goes into creating this podcast and the hours that you're putting in? And why you're actually asking for it because it takes your time and there's value. And that to me became extremely obvious that there was nothing out there, that there's nothing out there that literally proves effort, right? And proves the work that goes into certain things when it comes to the creative side.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Then boom, right? It was, um, uh, at this point, it was like, uh, October, right of last year during the crypto boom. And everyone's thinking in different ways, right, to really start to leverage blockchain. And to me, blockchain became insanely interesting because I'm like, here's something permanent where I could expose information that can't be manipulated. And when we talk about what's premium versus not premium, or who owns what, or who has the rights or the licensing to what? Why not use something that is more kind of immutable, right? Then, then current databases and current systems.

• 4:20Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, hold on, before we get into the future, let's go to the past first.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:23Anthony Pompliano?

  What the hell is wrong with media today?

• 4:25Speaker 02

  So, a lot, you know, I think, I think, I think the biggest problem with media is that everything's at a default. Like, everyone is, is, is valuing everything the same. So, so in my opinion, you have how many followers now on Twitter?

• 4:37Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't know, a lot.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  A lot. So you are a media company.

• 4:40Anthony Pompliano?

  150, 60, 80,000, whatever it is.

• 4:42Speaker 02

  Right. So you are a media company, right? And, and I think anyone who has a voice and an audience and content out there is a media company. However, we're baselining all of the values against certain things like audience and, and CPMs and advertising and subscriptions.

• 4:54Anthony Pompliano?

  If I'm a media company, by the way, I'm firing myself.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Right, right. Yeah, I mean, you need an HR, right? You need to start figuring that out. But that's kind of the biggest problem is that there really is no business model. And people are saying that advertising is the web's business model, and that's a problem. And, and, and I don't necessarily think it's a problem. I just think that it was our first stab at doing something. And, and now there's so many things to focus on, so many things to compete with, that no one's really thinking differently about how that works.

• 5:20Anthony Pompliano?

  So, so the big problem really is, people are great at creating content, people are great at building these audiences. And it sounds like the issue is that we just can't figure out how the hell to make it sustainable and monetize that in a way that doesn't put all these pressures on the media companies that they're getting today.

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Exactly. And it's extremely undervalued, right? The work, everyone always said, struggling artists. But we feel that more than ever now, when we're really trying to think about the work and things that go into it and how much we get paid and the value behind it.

• 5:46Anthony Pompliano?

  What's a great example of somebody or some company that is drastically undervaluing the work that they're doing?

• 5:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I think a big example, I think, I think it's easier for me to reverse on that question and tell you. So, so like, I'll give you an example, The Times, right? When they recently released the Fred Trump, Donald Trump real estate dossier, that was like a massive article. When they published it, right, they basically did their own TLDR. So they said, look, here's the full article, you should read it, it's important. I understand that you're going to skim it, we're going to TLDR our own content, right? So you're seeing the value there. And then what they also did is, they actually broke down the work that went behind that content. So they said, we put three journalists on this, it costs five. $500,000 for us to do the investigative reporting. It took us, and I'm making some of these numbers up. It took us two and a half years. And then as a consumer, you're like, holy shit.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  So I had a paywall. Here's a great piece of content. The New York Times is not just saying subscribe to great journalism. They're saying subscribe to this because it costs us half a million dollars. We spent three years and this is information that you can only get here. So like to answer your question indirectly, I don't think it's content actually necessarily being undervalued. I think it's a new way to really convey that. And that I think is awesome, right? Because it's not making anyone go out of their way to do something completely new. They're already doing this. They're already taking the work. They're already putting it into it. Just the consumers have no idea. And that happens across all of the industry, right? No one knows how long it takes to build this podcast. No one knows how long it takes to write a book. No one may give a shit, right? But at least we should try and put information out there to see if that helps rise the models.

• 7:17Anthony Pompliano?

  How much of the quote unquote, undervaluing of the work is driven by the owner or the creator undervaluing it? Versus there's just so much competition that it's like downward pressure on prices. And so maybe the New York Times actually knows, hey, we should be charging 10 times this because that's what it's actually worth. But by the way, our three competitors are all, you know, selling it at one tenth the cost. And so we actually have to drop our prices to be competitive to try to have any sort of traction.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it a mix?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that's exactly what happened over the past five years. I mean, when we launched the Huffington Post, we literally created a business model that said, let's take content that's created by the New York Times or other publishers. Let's paraphrase it. Let's do proper attribution link back. However, let's beat them in social. Let's beat them in search so that we get 10 to one traffic so that we could sell programmatically and grow our audience. That was the game, right? That's how Buzzfeed grew. That's how Vox grew. And that's especially how the Huffington Post grew. Right, Business Insider, it's how can we put our own perspective? But really, how can we dominate in tech and take great content and do proper attribution back? Now, I think five years down the road, that's completely flipped. Where back then, when we used to publish content on the Huffington Post, no one cared about the URL. No one looked at who the byline or the writer was.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  It was just information that was easy for them to get to. Now we have fake news everywhere. Things are spreading across social. No one knows what to believe or who to believe. They're questioning everything. So now the brand actually matters, right? It is about reputation.

• 8:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Stat for you. This is you ever been in an elevator where they've got the screens and they just throw up like random stats like if you walk down the street, your, you know, chance of dying increases 20%. You're like, shit, I should walk down the street. I saw the other day it said boomers, like, you know, whatever 45, 50 years older or older, share fake news like double digit percentage more than any other age group. And I literally was like, every person I know in that age group definitely thinks Facebook is still cool and it's just sharing the hell out of stuff on the internet.

• 9:07Speaker 02

  Like my mom shared something like, like from the, from the Facebook page chicks on the right. And I'm like, how the fuck did you even find the page chicks on the right? But, but like no one, the problem is that that information's under exposed, right? So, so exactly to your point, is it a down model where, where, where pressures are being pushed because of competition? I think it was. Now I think everyone is actually feeling personally threatened by the fact that no one knows where information is coming from or who and what to trust. And I'm hoping that there's an opportunity to expose that. Now, the great part, right about what we're doing, like we like the royal we in the blockchain space and how we're thinking about exposure of information. Is that you know, Facebook, Google, like no one really wants to be the arbiters of truth, right? No one wants to be responsible for that. That's become very, very clear, right?

• 9:51Speaker 02

  When it comes to how information is being shared and so forth. So are there outliers and other things that can start manipulating these systems so that we're starting to see that information and start changing the world for good? Now I'm being a hyper optimist, right?

• 10:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's fine. Have you read my Twitter account? Optimism is okay. All right. So those are the problems. What, what did the solutions look like? Like, what does the future look like?

• 10:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I think, I think what the future looks like is just a general way to expose information and allow people to choose, right? We, we talk about curation markets, right? We talk about ways for people to create their own worldview and, and that I think is extremely important, right? I think people will look at information deliverers like, you know, the Washington Post and the New York Times and, and whoever they trust as people to help curate that information for them. But I think more so people want to start seeing their own views, right? Going beyond an algorithm of what Facebook should tell me in my newsfeed or how Google renders my results. I may feel differently about something that others don't, right? And thus the information should be changed. The future is kind of scary, right?

• 10:55Speaker 02

  When we were talking early on, when I was building Poet, but having conversations with like other newsrooms, the notion was like, how do we keep people like Alex Jones, right, and people who are doing fake news off the site? And I said, that's the exact problem of how we got here in the first place, right? You may live next to someone who you think is, you know, completely, completely left-wing and, you know, excited about certain things and talks to you, but under the table is funding, right? Like conservative, extreme alt-type content, because deep down inside, they want that. And are we further pushing things further apart by assuming curation of information to people, thus pushing people towards reading things that, you know, they otherwise wouldn't if they can make decisions on their own?

• 11:38Speaker 02

  So to me, like, the future is like, how do we expose reputation, right? How do we build like the nutritional label for the web? That isn't controlled by a central authority, where everyone can see the same amount of information? Like, hey, look, if I want to smoke this pack of cigarettes, I can. It may tell me that it'll kill me, right? There may be all of these warnings on top of it. However, I could still make that decision on my own. That's the future of information.

• 12:00Anthony Pompliano?

  The censorship of information is, people get really, really sensitive about all this stuff. But one of the arguments that I've always made is, you know, I was in the army for a long time, right? And, uh, and I think we forget that the right or free speech is a right that we have said is important to us as a country, whether I agree with you or not. And I actually think the Alex Jones thing was so interesting. Like, I don't care if you agree, you don't agree, whatever. The idea that somebody was being censored, right? And there's always boundaries, right? So it's really clear that, look, if you are, you know, inciting violence, if you're doing, like, there's some things that definitely cross the line. But for the most part,

• 12:44Anthony Pompliano?

  The time when we need people to stand up and say, oh, actually, the people shouldn't be censored is the time when the most amount of people disagree with the person who's being censored. Right. And it's always this idea of like, you know, look, it doesn't matter. I don't care until they come to censor me.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. And like, that is why, right, as a country, um, we pay, right? And look at institutions like the Washington Post and the New York Times and, and ones who have editors that we believe have our best interests in, in mind to curate content, who wouldn't necessarily publish an Alex Jones article. Now, if somebody wants to go and find that content, right? Do I believe that we should be censoring them or keeping that content out there? They're going to find it anyway, right? It's like the drug wars.

• 13:25Anthony Pompliano?

  It almost makes them more popular by censoring it because you draw attention to it.

• 13:28Speaker 02

  Exactly. And, and look, I mean, when we talk about crypto, right? And the opportunity for, you know, anonymized payments and, you know, the ability to engage and do things that you may not necessarily have to tie yourself to, then we are opening up a world where, you know, there may be more Alex Joneses that could be funded and get their information out there. But that's why, again, going, again, complete full circle, that's where the value on these sort of media companies and these like true creators comes up, right? Because you, as a reader or a listener or a watcher of somebody, will further trust them and want to better engage them because of the information they deliver to you.

• 14:04Anthony Pompliano?

  It's also, uh, this idea, loyalty and trust with a content creator and content consumer is not predicated on the size of the audience, right? So I may think every single person in the world is an idiot, but like, you're creating content and I think that you're really intelligent and I like your view of the world and when you talk about this stuff. And if I'm the only one who thinks that, between you and I, is trust, loyalty, all of that, it doesn't matter if everybody else trusts you or not, right? Like, we should be able to allow you to create the content and me to consume the content. I guess, how do you do that in this new world using blockchain? Like, what are you guys actually doing at Poet?

• 14:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, so that exposure of information, I think, is a is a fuel to thinking differently. Okay. I think you're absolutely right. I think your relationship, right? If you are a blogger with your readers, should not be equated with the relationship of, you know, Vox Media and their readers, or, you know, another publication and their readers. I think that's how we got into this mess. We we we literally commoditized, right? What a user is, and we put them all as the same value, right? Because they're eyeballs, even though, you know, I may reach someone who's C-level, or I may have a better relationship with somebody and so forth, and we're not able to quantify that. So what we're doing, and what I'm most excited about, is quantifying those things. Okay. Like, I call it proof of effort, because why not do proof of something in this space?

• 15:25Speaker 02

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

• 16:08Speaker 02

  I mean, that works by building verifiability structures. So that's what we do at Poet, right? You can make claims about something. I'm the author of this. This has been fact-checked. This has been funded by this person. This took X long to write and X long to read, and just being able to expose that information in the data set, so that people could figure out what to do with that. That's where I think things start to become really interesting, where we don't just look at the results of something, like, its traffic and its page views and and its users and things that are heavily commoditized. Yep. We're actually looking at what makes it unique and different, right? The work that went into it, how much research went into it, why is this information important? And why should I trust this over another thing? Like, a great example is Google, right? Doesn't, again, may not necessarily want to be the arbiters of the content that they expose

• 16:51Speaker 02

  and how that information comes through, and they have an algorithm to do so. But if you Google something like, you know, I want to learn about blockchain 101. And if the the original creators of that content was Bitcoin Magazine back in 2010, right? How do we make sure that that wins in search, right? Because if everything else was basically a reference from that and driven to that, the algorithm may see more value in, you know, a CoinDesk article or something else that came up because it's gotten more traffic. Yet the originator of those thoughts in that content is, you know, Bitcoin Magazine in this state. And is that important for Google, right? To be able to say, do you want to know what? We don't want to be the mediators of all these things, but here's a new value signal that's coming from poet that's tied around reputation, right? And exposure of these verifiability.

• 17:34Anthony Pompliano?

  You see it on Twitter and Instagram all the time now, right? Somebody comes up with a good funny joke or whatever, like the new thing on Instagram is you take a screenshot of a tweet and he puts it on Instagram and it goes viral, but that value doesn't accrue in terms of account growth, et cetera, to the originator of the joke or the idea or whatever. It goes to the person who was first to put it back on Instagram and let it go viral, right? And so in that situation, there's just more attribution and more that you can give back to the original creator for those ideas that they put out in the world.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. And like a great example is, I mean, even like the the best technologies today can't solve for this. If you Google image search like Empire State Building, and if you pull up that Google image, iOS allows you to just hold down that image and save that photo. And you may not necessarily want to steal that person's photo, but it's not a default for iOS to be able to like add an attribution to it, right? Or do a watermark to it. So that's exactly the point, right? We, it's very easy for me to kind of start talking about what it means for media and what it means for news because that's my background. That's what I understand. But yeah, think of it for photography, right? How do I know that this image that I'm using has the correct rights, right? What what is the future of rights management when it looks like things are going to change? What does

• 18:48Speaker 02

  the long tail look like, right? What does like, what happens if if I'm an independent creator and something goes viral and, you know, the fat Jewish uses my stuff? And, you know, how do I even know if people are using it? I don't want to search Instagram and do all these things. That verifiable claim structure helps with that. Cool part with poet and what we're doing is that we're basically building the protocol so that other developers could build things on top of it. So we've had, um, there's, um, there's this guy Brian Isbell in our community who I met literally over Twitter who just builds on top of the poet protocol that built an Alexa app that basically allows him to like, say, hey, Alexa, put this on poet and then he'll say anything and anything that he says is now immutable and written to, you know, the Bitcoin blockchain via poet, which is kind of cool and kind of scary.

• 19:30Speaker 02

  Like if this whole conversation was on the blockchain, we wouldn't be able to edit or alter anything. I said something I regret, you say something you regret and it's out there. Yes, it's terrifying, but it kind of changes the way that we would think about going about things and how we build things in the first place. So like those sort of things I think are awesome and I don't know what the absolute application is for all of this, but I do know that behaviors will change if people start to think about what information looks like when it's out there, if we're able to do better attribution, if we're like able to, you know, build better provenance based on reputation. I think the entire industry changes and like now more than ever, the industry is just on fire. So like anyone who has a host could come in and just like make some sort of impact.

• 20:08Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to ask you about three separate types of content and you tell me how you see it coming from the media world. First Barstool Sports.

• 20:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So.

• 20:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Good, bad?

• 20:18Speaker 02

  Oh, good, good, good. I mean, I mean, there's like this recent news about the comment section, right? And, and Dave Portnoy kind of came out and I'm actually not a huge stool fan, but I watched them from a technical perspective because I'm obsessed with it.

• 20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So just everybody knows, uh, Barstool Sports is like been around for 15 years or whatever it is. They've built a, uh, a, a pretty big loyal rabid fan base. They've done it on social. They've kind of grinded it out, raised some money, uh, eventually from churn in and, uh, started to grow. And the recent kind of controversy, one of many that they've had is they shut down the comment section because basically there's a bunch of vile comments that were kept getting posted.

• 20:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, really bad. Um, but do you want to know what's really interesting is like when you know you have a brand is when you, when someone wakes up in the morning and it's going to be like, where is that brand? Right? And that's kind of how I think about media companies now where, um, what if I wake up in the morning tomorrow and Buzzfeed goes out of business, how am I going to find out? It's not because. Because I can't find my BuzzFeed content or my BuzzFeed article. It's going to be because you text me a link and that link is broken. And I'm like, oh, I didn't realize they went out of business.

• 21:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 21:18Speaker 02

  Barstool has built this community and this following where people wake up in the morning and you know, they don't get the podcast, right? And they don't get their newsletter.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Riots, riots in the street.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  Right. And that's, and that's huge, right? That's kind of what the skim has done. That's what Girlboss has done. That's what these media companies that are really focused on kind of community engagement and growth have done in way different ways than a lot of modern media companies have.

• 21:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Watch this. We want to see how loyal the fan base is. If you're Stooly and you hear this, go ahead and tweet at Jared and I and let us know that you listened to this. And we'll see how, how rapid that fan base is.

• 21:50Speaker 02

  Yeah. Awesome, awesome.

• 21:52Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So, so we've got the Barstools of the world. What about what I'll call like the Instagram influencers, models, all that kind of stuff, where they're basically creating tons of content that doesn't necessarily go viral, but has really deep engagement.

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah. So that to me is the future of kind of where we're hitting with media is this idea, is this idea of interoperability. I don't believe that in 10 years, we will have 80% of the media companies that we have today. I think, I think media companies have served those platforms. They think that they're competing with Facebook and Google in terms of like ad share, but they're actually competing with them in terms of like operators, right? Like if I'm a creator and if I already built my audience and if I could get more money and more exposure on Instagram, but I may be a photographer, why would I shoot photographs for Sports Illustrated if my sports photography is doing better on Instagram? And that's kind of the notion of where I think we're going with interoperability. I think we're still sort of disparate in that sense.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Like you may have 200,000 followers on Twitter, zero on Instagram, some on like Facebook or YouTube. How do we bring those things together so that you as a brand come all together? And you actually become more. Appetizing for these media companies or these platforms to get on there because they're going to offer you things, PR, distribution, management, operations, HR, backend, things like that. So these influencers, I think, are way ahead. I actually think the news industry is going to go this way. I think you're now subscribing to, say, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, and you're watching things on CNN, but you most likely, without realizing it, are watching and reading just for one person. So why are you going to subscribe to an entire media or news organization if you just want that one person? And you want that one person not just on The Wall Street Journal, you

• 23:33Speaker 02

  want them when they're on Bloomberg, you want them on Twitter, you want them on Instagram. So that's where I think the kind of Instagram influencers have a huge leg up with how that model works, because I think there's no longer such a deep reputation on the domain. And it's not just, hey, I'm Jared and I write for The Wall Street Journal and that's what makes me special. It's I'm Jared, I'm special, and The Wall Street Journal wants me because I could help grow their brand, right? And that's the change.

• 23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  In the finance world, Matt Levine from Bloomberg like crushes it, right? It's literally, I know so many people who are just like, yeah, I don't even know if I'm reading a Bloomberg or CNBC article, like, it's all the same to me, but like, I read that email every day.

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Right. And if everything's about scale and, and, and kind of growing and outwards, then how much is that brand, like, is that brand valuable because it's Bloomberg? Or is that brand valuable to him because Bloomberg gives him a paycheck and an office and a travel expense and PR? And like, that may be it. So if that's the case, that's a great value for these media companies to battle with the platforms, because they're like, look, Instagram could just give you Instagram distribution, it's programmatic, it's easy, but we're not handling anything else. And then Bloomberg says, come here, we'll give you A, B, C, D, E, F, G. And then that becomes more interesting and appealing for the creator.

• 24:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Email delivery of news and media gets more or less popular in the future.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  More. I mean, that, yeah, that is like, goes back to what I was saying earlier about if you wake up and you know someone goes out of business. I mean, look at the, the biggest media companies, right, that have bloomed over the past, like, three to five years. And I'm using media loose, but you have Axios, right? You have The Scam, you have things that you love to wake up to, read in the morning, that you trust, that if they weren't there, you'd be like freaking out. Right. Right. And that's the thing, you know, you, we- We're very cyclical in media, right? And we like repeat behaviors. We declare things dead. We declare things back alive and then we start over again. We used to say, hey, look, like you don't want to make your users search for your content. You need to deliver to them. And that's why all these media companies went on to social platforms, right? Because they said it's not about getting audience to your site.

• 25:30Speaker 02

  It's about reaching the audience where they are. Now everyone's like, shit, we need to get that audience back because Facebook's taking all of our money. So now it's kind of going back that way. But the newsletter thing is extremely interesting because you can monetize that. It's a personal one-to-one relationship. You get data and information and you're providing a service that when people wake up in the morning, it's like an alarm clock. It's like, wow, I overslept because I didn't get my Axios newsletter. That's an amazing way to make an impact.

• 25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  My, uh, my, my girlfriend writes term sheet at Fortune, so we should use Fortune as the example, not Axios.

• 25:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Shout out to Dan too, but, but play the, play the win on that one. Um, what about audio?

• 26:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I mean, I'm a huge fan of audio. Uh, I'm kind of weird, you know, being a huge music head. Like I actually don't listen to too many podcasts. Um, and I know that I'm, uh, I know that I'm, I'm rare there. I'm kind of more like when I have headphones on, I'm listening to Spotify. Uh, I think audio is the future. I mean, I think, I think the AirPods are, I mean, I think AirPods are.

• 26:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Wild, wild.

• 26:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, are the next frontier of technology. And the fact that we don't advertise on them already or that I don't put them on. And, you know, there's not a message delivered to me and so forth. And like my text messages aren't like that, that frontier is massive, right? So if I'm a creator or if I'm a media company, that's where I'm thinking that everyone in the world in five years is going to have these things in their ear. You're going to be able to reach them at any time and they may be able to turn it on and off, but likely they will want that. So.

• 26:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Do they go in the brain? I would put them, I would put them inside, inside the head?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I would take it. Why not? Turn on music whenever I walk through. I actually like for a very long time, whenever I walk through the city, I put on music and I like pretend I'm in a movie. I feel like I'm in the soundtrack.

• 27:04Anthony Pompliano?

  I don't even put on music. I just do that normal.

• 27:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's a, I forgot what Spider-Man it was, but, but like that Spider-Man scene where Peter Parker's like dancing in the streets. Like that's the life I wish. Like I wish music was coming from the sky and I was just.

• 27:17Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you want everyone to listen to the same music though?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  No, it's pretty open. That's the problem, right? That's why it can't work.

• 27:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That's fine. Well, somebody will figure that out. Trust me.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  I'm not sure people are going to love my music.

• 27:28Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Before I finish up, I usually ask a bunch of rapid fire questions. What's the most controversial thought you have in crypto?

• 27:34Speaker 02

  The most controversial thought I have in crypto is that I think everyone's driving 100 miles per hour and we can only go 20.

• 27:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Why?

• 27:41Speaker 02

  I just feel like, I just feel like we like to say that people aren't ready for all of this, but I don't even think we're ready for all of this. I think like, we need to be honest that things are unexplored and undiscovered yet, and that should make us excited. But the fact that we keep looking into news and it's like, wow, someone is using this and someone is able to use this. I don't think it's as exciting as if we could start getting things institutionalized. So I know that you often talk about the financial side of it. I often think about, you know, what it means for the creators and, and what it can mean for media and changing these things. And we're a long way away and that's fucking good, right? That's a great thing and that's going to get more people interested and more people engaged. But by no means like, I find myself constantly driving 100 miles per hour and having to look back and be like, wow, we're leaving people behind. But that's actually bad for our business.

• 28:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Bitcoin, Bitcoin realized that in December of 17, like, oh shit, we probably should go back. Come back down to earth. All right. What, uh, what do you think is the most important company in crypto?

• 28:34Speaker 02

  That's a great question, actually.

• 28:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Can't say yourself.

• 28:37Speaker 02

  Oh, I definitely don't think that it's us right now. I mean, I

• 28:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Right now, spoken like it's your entrepreneur. All right. What is it?

• 28:43Speaker 02

  I, I mean, I'll actually give a plug to like, like, I love the block. I love what Dudos is doing.

• 28:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Shout out.

• 28:51Speaker 02

  Shout out to Dudos and I think, um, I think that, uh, the content that he's providing, the information that he's providing is really awesome. Uh, I think a lot of the media companies like Bitcoin magazine, I think everyone who's trying to think about what media looks like in this space is doing something extremely interesting.

• 29:06Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. So let's talk actually a little bit about what's going on in China. So basically there's these two incidences where people took information, they put it onto an immutable, immutable blockchain, which is Ethereum. And one was about a sexual assault case. And the other was about this pharmaceutical company and a bunch of, you know, investigative stuff going on there. How do you think that type of stuff is going to evolve in countries where we know they're not cool with it?

• 29:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's a great question. So, three or four months ago, it's all a fog, but I did Shanghai, Hong Kong and Sydney in seven days. So I flew more than I was on the ground, speaking kind of about immutability in news and information. And each place I went to, I had to change kind of the directive, because here it's like, we talk about Google, we talk about Facebook, we talk about Alex Jones, China has no idea about any of those things or cares about any of those things. And when I went to Sydney, it was really interesting because they were terrified of immutability because of like, how strict the libel laws are. So the libel laws are so strict that if you like, make some sort of misinformation or some sort of case, that has to be deleted from everywhere, or else, you know, you are put in prison.

• 30:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 30:17Speaker 02

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

• 30:59Speaker 02

  the way that we do things, far more differently than we've ever thought before, for the better. So, yes, it'll take time, but I also love the notion that information is out there and it's going to be immutable, because I can't wait to see how people behave and react when they know that that's the case.

• 31:12Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. Uh, most important book you've ever read?

• 31:14Speaker 02

  The most important book I've ever-

• 31:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like, I've never read a book ever?

• 31:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was like, whoa, probably, I mean, I love Sapiens, I know that that's a traditional, that's a trendy thing, but like, my favorite books, Greg Allman biography, Eric Clapton biography, I-

• 31:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Eric Clapton, man, whoa.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  Eric Clapton's biography is, he thought his mother, he thought his mother was, he thought his grandmother was his mother for the first seven years of his life, then found out that his sister was actually his mother, but his sister didn't want anything to do with him, and then he went on to be Eric Clapton. So that to me is a motivation.

• 31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  That's where the songs come from. That's like, whoa.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Right. But yeah, I love all music biographies because I'm just jealous of that life.

• 31:54Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. That's fair. That's fair. When we shut off the microphones, we'll make some music. Tap on the table or something. All right. Before, before I let you ask me a question, aliens, probability that they exist.

• 32:05Speaker 02

  Probability that a hundred percent.

• 32:06Anthony Pompliano?

  A hundred percent. Yeah.

• 32:08Speaker 02

  I mean, something has to exist. No, but something has to exist.

• 32:12Anthony Pompliano?

  You think so?

• 32:12Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, I mean, look, I don't know if it is what we think it is, but like, it'd be insane to not think anything else exists.

• 32:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Probability that the moon landing was faked.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  I think the moon landing was real.

• 32:24Anthony Pompliano?

  All right.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  You can't go a hundred percent. Yeah, I can't say aliens are real and moon landing is fake and expect to like, keep my job.

• 32:32Anthony Pompliano?

  That's my new thing is if somebody says that the aliens are a hundred percent real, all right, hold on, how far, how far on the conspiracy theory spectrum are you? Then just go right to the moon landing. What one question do you have for me to finish this up?

• 32:43Speaker 02

  I mean, I think for you, like going through kind of what's been going on during this space, like what things are you like most excited about, but also kind of what things do you think are the most bullshit and fake that have come out of this up and down trend?

• 32:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So I'll start with the bullshit stuff first. I wrote about this a couple of days ago. I said, crypto's got an execution problem, right? Like 2017 was the best and worst thing that could have happened. Everyone was worried, you know, what conference am I speaking at? What headlines did I get? How much money did I raise? What private jet can I fly on? All this stuff. At the end of the day, it's just, did you build something people want? Right? And the thing that almost every entrepreneur that I really respect has in common is they walk into a room and they say, no, that shit matters. I build things that people want. And like, we got to get back to that being a badge of honor of like, you know what? I built something that people want. A lot of people want it. I can make a lot of money because I built a really big business. And it doesn't probably matter how

• 33:41Anthony Pompliano?

  much money you raised and you know, all that kind of stuff. So I think that's one big problem. The second is just complete lack of education. Like the amount of conversations, I probably can't say, I definitely can't say who this is, but I went and I met with somebody who managed a lot of money in the institutional world, a little bit older guy, and walked in the room and he was like, I believe that Bitcoin is going to be the largest opportunity for wealth creation in my lifetime. And I was like, bam, this dude's the man. This is going to be a great meeting. Second question, what's a blockchain? We came back real fast, you know, to square one on that one. And so like, I think that's where we are, you know, is just people, even if they do believe, hey, there's a lot of intellectual

• 34:24Anthony Pompliano?

  capital and financial capital going into space, it can have a huge impact. We still have to do a lot of education. And so we just got to be patient. Like, time is a huge thing. And then, what am I most excited about? Like, I wake up every day today, believing more that this shit's going to change the world than I did when I went to sleep. And that sounds ridiculous, but the pace at which people are innovating and building things and like, like, forget all the prices, forget all that stuff. Like, even just Bitcoin, right? Like, the kind of first application that the easiest one people wrap their heads around. In March of 2018, the fall in number of transactions bottomed, and it increased all the way through the rest of 2018.

• 35:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And so what you see there is like, even when prices were falling, people were starting to adopt it more, right? You go and you look at some of these, you know, countries, the Venezuelans, Argentines, etc. Adoption's going up. Well, that's not just Bitcoin, though. It's the entire ecosystem, right? And so I think that we still are a long way away from like, the, you know, kind of, the first company or product that's going to onboard, you know, 2-3 billion users, right? It's going to take some time to build. But I have more conviction that that is going to come to reality at some point than I did, you know, six months ago.

• 35:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, I think, I actually had this conversation with someone the other day where I think that blockchain, like, impact on blockchain and value on blockchain is actually going to come from companies that aren't blockchain companies, right? Like, I don't necessarily think that you need to be working within this space to actually make impact on this space, because it is so early. But it is so exciting that I think these other point of views that are going to be coming from the outside over the next few months, like, that could be, that could be Facebook. I mean, I don't necessarily know if that's the right one, but, but it could just be like, media companies, or it could just be tech companies or others that are just dabbling that see new applications and values that aren't just so block, like, so focused on, you know, the end game that we all see because we're constantly Drinking, you know, from the faucet, but coming from the outside. And I kind of threw

• 36:27Speaker 02

  that at someone the other day where I'm like, do you actually have to work in blockchain? Or, you know, work in the space to make an impact? And my argument is no, I think actually bigger impacts are going to come from outside point of views.

• 36:36Anthony Pompliano?

  The corporate dark horses.

• 36:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:38Anthony Pompliano?

  They're out there.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  Oh, for sure.

• 36:40Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, man. Listen, this has been so much fun.

• 36:42Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you.

• 36:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Do it again. You are going to leave and you're going to put your music on and you're going to go skip down the down the street.

• 36:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll be dancing down 40 seconds.

• 36:52Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what we'll do is again.

• 36:53Speaker 02

  Awesome. Thank you. Appreciate it.

• 36:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you like this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening and see you next time on Off the Chain.