building a credibility layer in web3 w/ mike elias

Welcome to the Armada Podcast, where we are focusing in on DAO governance. Let's hop into the show. If you could start with who you are and what you're working on.

Sure. My name is Mike Elias, and I'm building the credibility layer of the internet at ideamarket.io.

Super succinct. I love that. And which fictional character would you like to have dinner with?

I would like to have dinner with Master Oogway from Kung Fu Panda. I've always felt like he had a certain soul and depth that's really difficult to fake. And I just like the whole vibe there.

I love this question. I love hearing everyone's little flashes of personality through that. And that's a— that's an awesome answer. And I appreciate— what would you— what do you feel like— what do you feel like the dinner would go like with a— with a person like that, character like that?

I think it would be kind of frustrating and silly. I kind of imagine Curb Your Enthusiasm-style trombones playing in the background while I say dumb things and get made fun of by him. Mm-hmm. Um, I'm kind of in a constant search for geniuses who will, will slap me and tell me I'm wrong. And I feel like he would be good at that.

Love it. And so you talked about building a credibility layer. Why is that so important?

The internet needs one. The old mechanisms for deciding what's true are not adequate for the information age. Uh, there was a time when a centralized entity that, you know, produced all the newspapers and then all the news, all the radio hosts, all the radio shows, et cetera, was the sort of most effective way to have an interface between the people who knew things from being out in the world to disseminating those to a wide, wide public that works 2 jobs and doesn't have anything remotely close to the ability to do their own research and just sort of make that connection. But now the internet means that all the best information in the world is free and publicly available. The ability of even average citizens to do their own research on a lot of topics is extraordinary. And the gaps in the model that the centralized media provision leaves have turned into these gaping voids through which an enormous amount of information now falls. And that's leaving aside all the ways that these centralized credibility entities have abused their power and privilege over decades and become propaganda arms for this and that private interest or government. So I think the loss of trust in these centralized authorities is extremely well-merited and also extremely transparent. And it's generally just no longer necessary. They're a relic of a bygone era, and the internet means that we can do a lot better.

And I totally buy that. And one thing that, you know, there's been different projects that I've heard, you know, throughout the years of— I think Elon even had one around, you know, like this journalist, you know, ranking system or something of that nature, right? And I suspect maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but It sounds like the only solution has to be decentralized. It can't come from another centralized thing due to all of these pressures that you talked about with corruption and influence and things of that nature. Is this something that you see as only can truly exist in a decentralized format?

Yeah, absolutely. And I think one of the major reasons for that is persuasion. People need a reason to trust that whatever is curating their information does not have private, uh, ulterior motive or agenda. The ad-based model of the past 10 or 15 years of social media has incentivized media corporations to compete on the basis of outrage and clickbait and pitting tribes against one another to get engagement. And what this does is it pigeonholes people in tribal viewpoints and And there's kind of no way to bridge that gap. They end up sort of driven into completely different epistemic realities, and there's no trust between these groups. The left side of America politically thinks the right side is just trying to destroy America for fun in its spare time, and the right side thinks the same of the left. There's this deep suspicion between tribes that has no chance of being bridged as long as there's not trust that wherever the curation and information decisions are coming from doesn't belong to one party and not the other. So decentralization is a crucial ingredient in persuasion, the kind of persuasion that can bridge tribal gaps. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. I think it— I love the political framing of it. And one of the comments you made before is that I think COVID, not to get too far down the COVID rabbit hole, but I think it stress tests things like the CDC and the WHO organization, which I feel like, to your point, decades in the past, we sort of thought about those as these credibility layers. But now we've gotten to see a little bit of how these different influences, now China's influence and all these different things of how that can be corrupted, for lack of a better word, and how that decentralization is so important. The second thing I wanted to kind of piggyback off what you're getting at with the kind of left and right in the United States with the information era, part of my mind, sort of a student of history is that a lot of these problems have been solved with violence, unfortunately, in the past, right? Like Civil War, revolutions, those types of things where one party literally dominates, kills, hurts, whatever, you know, bad things to sort of create this new brand of truth of how this organization or these groups of people want to act. The reason I bring that up is, do you think that it's more likely that this sort of clash and this problem is sort of solved with sort of these old human ways of solving disputes in truth, which has traditionally been through violence, or because the internet exists now, we fundamentally have to solve that in an entirely new way? Because if we solve it with violence now, it's just going to pop up again with new subcultures and sub-tribes because the information and the internet is here, and that's a fundamental shift. So trying to boil that back down to a question, do you think that in the past we would have solved this with violence potentially, and now we're in a world where we have to find new, new ways of it because it'll just be a cycle of violence?

Yeah, I think there's nothing inherent about the internet that prevents violence from arising. It seems— it doesn't seem like— it seems like the atomic bomb is kind of more of a war prevention invention than the internet, but I'm not really an expert in that. But the way I think about this is that war is actually a subset of persuasion. War is a means of getting another group of people or another leader of another group of people to say, okay, I'll stop fighting you. You can have what you want. It's about decisions. War is about creating decisions. The goal isn't to literally kill everyone on the opposite side. It's to get the other side to make a decision that is favorable to you. And I think the internet has a great persuasive power latent in it, the information and now the decentralization, give us the ability to accomplish the ends of war without resorting to means like violence as quickly as perhaps we would have in the past. So about that, I'm very optimistic.

Yeah, I agree with you. The optimism in me is high, and I'm hopeful that this— a really great framing. I think it was Bankless DAO in their podcast. I'll put it in the show notes to try to go back But I think they were talking about this idea of that you could sort of, using code, we can basically outline, this is how we're going to disagree. And then that's going to be resolved programmatically, as opposed to through a court and then obviously through a nation state with a threat of violence. We're going to do that with a snap of a finger through code, which fundamentally allows us now to operate hopefully in a more less war world because of exactly what you're talking about, that decision is effectively premade as you enter into that protocol or into that system in order to interact that way. So I totally subscribe to that belief. And I agree with you that I'm optimistic. I think taking a step back from the student of history perspective, I am nervous that we might be in the beginning era of that, right? And how do we kind of get in that? What are we going to see sort of types of chaos that we saw with the Industrial Revolution? and times before that as you kind of transition between those 2 phases. But I agree with you, I'm an optimist. And so I believe that we're on the cusp and hopefully enough in it that we see a more peaceful world.

Yeah, and I completely agree. I would— I'd like to add something else that I haven't really said before, and that is, I think, a large part of the globalist agenda, to use kind of a cliché term, The, the vast difference in prosperity between the wealthier nations and the poorer nations, uh, that the wealthier nations kind of generally exploit. Um, the power of the wealthy nations largely depends on maintaining the population's illusion that everything is fine and humanity is all civilized and stuff like that. We have people living in abject poverty in certain parts of the world, and their poverty sort of is a threat to the people above them who are creating enough resources to be, uh, useful labor to the West. You know, the, the people who build iPhones in, in sweatshops and stuff like that. Um, in order to sort of keep that division going, The West has to maintain a general feeling that, that its own people are nice and friendly and genteel. And if we break out into war, it sort of breaks that illusion. Like, we care less about the suffering of others when we have less suffering ourselves. And we sort of abstract our own experience out into the world. Oh, the poverty isn't that bad. We are just kind of living in this genteel world, but generally everything is fine. But as soon as we become confronted with sort of survival-level shit that about, you know, what, 25 or 50% of the world's population is, it sort of breaks that illusion and forces us to confront Injustice to which we've been a party for a long time. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think, I think it does make sense. It reminds me sort of the Disney World effect a little bit, right? It's like, it's a very crafted experience. And part of that is to make you feel a certain way. So you sort of absorb yourself in that, in that Disney World experience. And that was obviously consumer and a fun and an adventure type thing. But if you kind of take that framing a little bit more broadly. It's how do you influence psychology and sociology to manipulate and persuade people to act in a certain way is what I'm hearing in that.

Totally. I think if I could boil it down, and I should, because I'm not practiced at delivering this particular idea, it's that it's easier to maintain inequality when there's also enough comfort that people don't really care that much. That makes sense. Like Netflix and chill, go back to your iPhones, go back to your DoorDash. I mean, I enjoy all 3 of those things immensely, so I don't— don't take me as, as not being a hypocrite. I totally am. But I think that's a part of it, that the comfort of the culture insulates us against the hardships that other people still really totally have to face. And if we start having to face those too, we'll have a lot more sympathy for those people. And that's a— that could be a threat to the dominant.

Right. Which I think ladders back up to my question of sort of, we have this violence of solving things, and then we have these protocols and programmatic solutions of solving things and our optimism into that. And laddering that back up into credibility, we kind of just teased a little bit of a shared vision of maybe what that world looks like. But how do you imagine a world with a stable and scaled credibility layer? How does the world look What that vision—

It's kind of a frighteningly steep learning curve that humanity will have, I think, um, because they're— for, for a few reasons. For the first time, it won't really be possible for centralized authorities and governments to control public opinion the way they've become accustomed to doing for the past 100 years or so. This is because a credibility market sort of puts a minimum viable credibility cost out there. There's sort of a minimum amount that you have to pay or crowdsource in order to imitate a voice or a publisher that has genuinely earned the respect and trust of an audience. And as the market gets larger, that cost increases. And if you're genuinely earning the trust of your audience, you're crowdsourcing that rank, that cost for yourself. But if you want to imitate it, you have to pay for it out of pocket. So if you're a propagandist or a fake news purveyor of some kind, the cost of spreading fake news or propaganda or whatever comes from your net. It comes out of pocket. It's a new marketing cost. But if you genuinely earn people's trust, you have this new income stream. Money comes in. So this creates this vast profitability divergence between earning trust and faking it. And when that's really mature, the, the rapid iteration of human knowledge doesn't really have a upper limit on it. I think the progress will be so fast that the biggest threat is that we'll look extra closely at the Navy UFO patents and, you know, start having interstellar travel and all kinds of crazy tools and tech that have been the realm of sci-fi until now. Does that make sense?

Yes. Yeah, I, I really like this idea of, you know, you're basically saying, hey, if you want to come into this world and you want to buy a bunch of credibility, you can because we've built a market for that. And so if you want to bring capital and deploy that and whether that's legitimate, fake, whatever it is, there's a vehicle to now accomplish that. And then on the flip side, though, if you can earn that organically, or in Facebook's world, I spent some time in the face that they kind of have organic reach, paid reach, and viral reach, right? And so what I hear you kind of talking about is like viral reach, right? And that's sort of, there's obviously a little bit of a connotation there in our kind of Web2 world that I'm kind of disregarding in the Web3. But the idea is that I'm trying to get at here is that you can sort of earn it. And as more people just organically share it, and as that gets more exposed, like, you kind of build up that revenue stream. So I love that splitting of those 2 things, marketifying them, uh, and being able to drive that world. And so then what I hear you saying beyond that is like, okay, now that you have that system, you can just— the ceiling has been shattered because we can just scale just about everything. Because now we're going to be able to have more credible news sources, information sharing, building practices. Like, everything in theory should get a lot more more signal than noise than we've ever had in the past.

Yeah, yeah. When the world is crowdsourcing the discovery and dissemination of its own best information, period, the latency of improving common knowledge just gets closer to zero. Like right now, if some new discovery is, is made by physicists or whatever, how long does it take to get translated into popular articles? How long does it take to get put into textbooks? How long does it take to get put into curricula? How long does it take to start influencing precedent for future news articles, etc.? If there is a mechanism where people are actually profiting in the way that venture capitalists and people who, you know, seek out early-stage startups, you know, as a profession, if there's that sort of hunger and curiosity, to discover the obscure geniuses of the world and bring them into public awareness, if there's that sort of rapid iteration on any matter of public import, things are going to change really, really fast and in a really sort of antifragile way.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I'm thinking about the white paper world and obviously in the crypto space, that is a common theme, especially in the ICO boom. But this idea of like, hey, here's a whitepaper, here's the information, and like, now run with it. I'm thinking about your kind of story and kind of taking the original Bitcoin Satoshi's, his whitepaper and sort of like, oh, like the whole world could have looked at that thing and been like, oh, let's like go do this now. Right. And what I hear you saying is our existing process is very much like someone else saw that. They're like, oh, that's cool. Let me play around with it. Like, and it took all this time and energy and sort of momentum. And then the media is like, what is this thing? This is You know, and like that whole game to kind of get to a point where, you know, we're at some form of scale at this point. But what I'm hearing you say is that those things could move much more quickly. And perhaps Satoshi's original whitepaper is even already prepackaged, right? Like what I hear you saying is that regular people are going to be able to contribute this to regular things anywhere, which allows that to scale much more rapidly. Is that, is that a fair caricature of that?

Yeah, absolutely. The idea that we are still sort of celebrating when major media institutions say something nice about Bitcoin indicates that they still play this really authoritative role in culture, whether we kind of still trust them or not. They are still sort of the central banks of credibility. They can still print legitimacy just by saying the word. And they have this sort of unassailable, powerful position. And in order to, uh, make the public free to decide what's important to itself rather than rely on media corporations to decide for them, they have to be replaced with some kind of decentralized market like this in order to facilitate that. Does that make sense?

It does. It does. Yeah. What's coming to my mind is sort of a bit of a hybrid question here. So I apologize to kind of catching you off guard. Oh, no, no. But it's like, how do you think about credibility of a person, and then a person who also represents a component of organization? And not to go Elon Musk, to go too heavily, right? But like, Elon as a human is Elon. And then he has this connection, obviously, to Tesla and SpaceX. It's like, how do you think about a credibility layer as it relates between organizations and individuals?

I'm leaving that up to market participants to decide. That's the kind of distinction that it doesn't seem incredibly necessary to make with any kind of force or coercion or predetermination. On the other hand, it kind of makes sense that if an individual has enough public influence that people would want to measure their credibility. that, that they should have that ability because all a market is doing in that case is measuring something that's already there but has been heretofore unmeasurable.

I see. So in, in my example, the Elon example, it's like as the market in theory would price in to the Elon Musk bucket, his SpaceX and Tesla sort of credibility, and then Tesla would price in some component of Elon and some component of their organisation. And so what you're saying is like, hey, as sort of a market maker, it doesn't really matter because you'll have these different entities of some kind and the market will price in whatever that blend of that person's balance between versus a random intern engineer at Google who says Google is going to colonise Mars, right? Like that person's credibility into the Google credibility is probably— zero. And so the market will reflect that as such.

Yeah, exactly. And one of the things I love about markets is the non-coercive aspect, that these are decisions that we don't have to make on anybody else's behalf, that the swarm, the due diligence, will kind of take care of that by itself and find, find its own equilibrium without intervention.

Interesting. Yeah, that, that's a really, really fascinating— like, I can already feel myself sort of thinking about things in my old mental paradigm, right? And then I'm kind of hearing you in sort of this market enlightened perspective of like, well, it's just, it's just priced in. And it's like, that's a really, really cool feeling that I'm experiencing. So thanks for that. Do you, do you see credibility as like a foundation to decentralized IDs and kind of governance more broadly? Is that something that you see kind of being intertwined as a layer that maybe governance is built on top of? Like, how do you see Those two playing out.

Yeah, that could be really cool. Um, it has crossed my mind that if we do figure out a way to isolate credibility as a really sort of uncorrupted signal, that the people who win that battle, who win that market, would be really well positioned to be given more responsibility because they would have it in a context that involves a lot of scrutiny already. And easy replacement. Like, if you kind of imagine the people that we elect to powerful positions, if— how, how much more interesting it would be, how much more satisfying it would be if we could recall them really easily, if they were under a ton of scrutiny and that scrutiny mattered. If we, if we can combine power with this sort of instant reckoning that a market can provide and the due diligence that a market can provide, There could be a sort of unprecedented governance assigning feature there that could be really interesting, but I haven't thought about it incredibly thoroughly yet and it's kind of big and scary. So we'll just kind of see how that goes. But yeah, I do kind of have some hope in that area.

Yeah. I think one of the things that I've observed kind of early in my DAO adventure here is this idea that you know, you have a Twitter identity and then that Twitter identity has some form of credibility sort of built into the system of followers and engagement, you know, like all these things that, you know, Twitter would probably argue is value of credibility. Right. And then that same individual as a human being is over in a Discord channel and they're doing something else. And some people have Discord bots that give points and all this crap. Right. And then there's humans obviously interacting with both of those things and It's such a fragmented kind of ecosystem of identity. A, there's a lot of trust that we believe that this person is in fact who they say they are on Twitter. And that's the same, you know, and like we kind of have this layer of trust and then their actions hopefully match that. And then when I think of credibility applied to that, it's like I can see myself wanting to sort of centralize, for lack of a better word, not centralized in the classic definition, but sort of aggregating this and saying, okay, this is my credibility broadly. But I could also imagine a world where it's like, well, my credibility for organization 1 might be a certain manifest, and for organization 2, it might be entirely different. And that might be okay. And maybe they don't need to be connected at all. And so I'm just sort of trying to play out this world where thinking about governance of these different entities and different organizations, of how you may want to dip in and out of credibility and not in a malicious way, but in a sort of like the scoping of the credibility and what the importance of that scope is. So, um, anyways, sort of random thinking there.

No, I like that a lot actually. It makes perfect sense. You know, who better to give power and responsibility to than someone who has earned genuine trust, someone who is under a lot of scrutiny, and someone who is instantly replaceable? It kind of fits hand in glove. And the hard part might be subdividing a sort of general credibility score to apply to a specific application. Like, someone who ranks high for their philosophy of aesthetics might not be the best person to govern your DAO, right? So there may be some, some filtering to do, but I think the general principle has a lot of potential.

Yeah, it also strikes me of, you know, how humans perceive credibility as well, especially a lot of our political leaders and just leaders more broadly, right? There's— it always fascinates me, and maybe I'm a bit of a pragmatic mind, but, you know, you hear about this leader, political leader, whatever it may be, company leader, and they're doing incredible things for that core goal that they've been hired for, you know, let's say their organization or the country or whatever it is that they're working on. And then they have these character flaws that are, you know, significant, let's just say, that then detract that. And it's really interesting to me that humans, we really, really struggle with being able to separate that. And of course, there are situations that clearly cross the line, especially things that are illegal and manipulative and things of that nature. But there's other ones where, especially further back, like being in a same-sex marriage, you could have been the world's greatest governor, but if it turns out you're in a same-sex relationship, your credibility was shot. And it was completely disconnected, but it had to do with social society and pop culture and things like that. And Incredibly unfair way of thinking about it. But that's this piece I'm kind of thinking about, this credibility market, right? And it's like, I mean, and again, I think I know what your point will be on the, I'll let the market determine this, but I'm so fascinated to see how humans will price in completely disconnected things. Because I could see the market going one way and being just an exact mapping of how we interact with the world today. And I could see the world going to a beautiful place where it's like, well, no, the objective here is the best leader for Operation X, and like these things don't matter and the price might reflect that. That's, that's a really exciting, interesting idea to me.

Yeah, totally. Um, I'm happy to say I want to go into more detail than, than just letting the, the market decide because, you know, it will. Um, but I, I have a lot of optimism in this area because when people are fooled now When they're misled by this or that message or meme or viral notion or emotion or tribal psychological need or whatever, when the moment passes, it just kind of recedes into history and life goes on. But when those decisions and beliefs are codified in money and in financial risk, being wrong will be something that you feel in your wallet. It will be difficult to do over and over again. without reflecting, without being cautious. So, I do see a mechanism here not only for signal to improve over time, but also for signal to immediately become a function of that caution that has been added to public discourse by financial risk. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I love that. I mean, I think that what we've seen in the last 4-plus years in the US politics has been this idea that in a post-truth society, if you have a large enough following, you can just let anything that is subjective or emotional sort of slide by. I mean, obviously there's even, you know, more tangible and direct things that can be let slide by. But generally speaking, if you sort of hold to a particular narrative, the cost is relatively low. And so what I'm hearing you say a little bit here is like, That's become a new tactic that I think has started to really thrive over the last 5+ years and probably longer. But this idea of this post-truth that just deny, deny, deny, and just, and just let that small cost bounce off you in some unknown way. And what I think is really interesting about what you're getting at, and correct me if I'm wrong, is that you're moving that into a financial cost. And so some of those dings are going to be meaningful and some of those dings aren't going to be meaningful, and the market will determine that. And so you as sort of the, the kind of the owner, for lack of a better word, of that of yourself in that regard, you will have your own decision-making process to say, well, this thing really mattered or didn't matter on a financial basis. And then the opponents of that, the people who do think it matters, can also voice with their dollars and be able to say, no, like, this actually is like a really, really big deal. And here we go. And it reminds me of the presidential election. Like, I was glued to a lot of the prediction markets and, you know, some headline would happen with some of the candidates. And the first thing you'd go I would go look at prediction markets like, oh, it didn't move an inch, right? The probability of the election did. And then something small seemingly from the world, maybe oil prices spike or something like that, and it takes a huge dip, right? And it's like there's, there's something going on in there that I want to know more about. And so that's, that's the world that I'm hearing you describe for everything.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Credibility market turns reality and sanity into fundamentals. So whatever flurry of fanaticism and whatever are surrounding a topic or a person or an idea, the effects of those things will diminish compared to the effects of the actual signal. And the people who identify the actual signal the best and the earliest are going to make the most money, and the people who confuse the noise for it are going to lose money. And just that mechanism by itself, uh, non-coercively invites the kind of behavior that we need in an information-abundant society.

Totally agree. Totally agree. So there's a little line inside your site that's— it's in the FAQ that jokes about being accused of being a BitClout clone. I was just super curious, aside from you guys being out before them, what are some of the main differences that you kind of see between where you guys are at today and what you're seeing from BitClout?

Yeah, I like to joke that we're different from BitCloud in that Idea Market is decentralized. And beyond that, uh, beyond that, we have very different sort of outlooks for this space. I think BitCloud has done a lot for advancing the idea of using markets for credibility or public reputation or whatever. That used to be kind of a difficult sell for me. So I'm glad that they have made this notion popular because I think it's inevitable one way or another. Markets are going to be the answer to credibility because there's no centralized alternative that can come even close to resolving the problems that they inherently create. So I think that's, that's going to happen one way or another. We are also different from BitClout in the approach that we take to, uh, our role in the ecosystem in general. They're kind of trying to replace existing social media incumbents and start completely over, move everybody over onto a BitClout-based Twitter, a BitClout-based YouTube, a BitClout-based Substack, etc. I don't think that's going to sit too incredibly well with the incumbents whose fortunes depend on, you know, keeping their users where they are and the users who are probably perfectly happy not to move. So Idea Market takes a more, um, be the stream to which all rivers flow kind of approach and has instead just built a tool that plugs into any platform that exists now or may exist in the future. So we provide an income stream to the platforms, we provide a market curation protocol for the platforms so that they don't have to censor fake news on their own. I've described Idea Market as being sort of like Chainlink for public narratives. We take market scrutiny and due diligence coming from a wide variety of perspectives and apply it to the content on any social media platform. Does that make sense?

Yeah, I think so. So BitCloud is, like you said, they're trying to port over kind of the whole existence. And I was looking through your guys' market and I noticed it was like, hey, here's a Twitter tab and a Substack and, you know, YouTube, like kind of that type of roadmap of thinking about these as individual kind of pieces. But I think what I also hear you saying is it's also about being a tool for Twitter. Like it sounds like that would be like a great integration for you guys, right? Twitter comes back to you guys and say, hey, we want to use this API in order for us to better improve how we do Like what we highlight in our feeds and how people understand the value in that. And so it's a little bit more of a layer play than it is a kind of product or vertical play.

Precisely, precisely. It's the credibility layer. I've said it before, I'll say it

again. Gotta say it a million times. Well, I appreciate you going down these rabbit holes with me and taking me through the credibility layer. It's super interesting to understand this. And I feel like I'm walking away from the conversation with a new lens of kind of thinking about the possibilities, because I agree with you, the optimism is really high. And I'm excited to kind of see where your guys' project goes. I'd love to ask this though, like, how can our listeners be helpful for you or the idea that you're working on?

Sure, we're actually announcing a couple big things basically today. One is the browser extension is going live. And the browser extension pipes in Idea Market data into everyday web browsing in a really subtle and elegant sort of way so that as you're browsing Twitter, you can see the rankings of the people whose tweets are, are flowing before you. So if you see something low that should be higher, you can buy it. If you see something high that should be lower, you can notice that, uh, etc. So we're, we're building the UI directly into the browser extension, and, and that's available now. It's free. You can add it with one click. There's a button to add it on ideamarket.io, so if people just go and add that, that would be awesome, and I would love to get feedback and continue to improve that. The other thing we're doing is grants. We've just announced that we're going to start giving $1,000 grants to journalists and creators to start using Idea Market to bolster their income, so people can apply at grants.ideamarket.io. to get a little free money and jumpstart their idea market-related income and start to build out the credibility layer of the internet and to benefit from that financially as a journalist or as a creator.

And sort of the— I was reading about the mechanics of how that works, but the— not the grant part, but the idea here I think is, let's just say that I wanted to do this with the podcast. The idea would be that I get listed on there and I'm able to then It sounds like there's 2 sort of input mechanisms. One is my audience and saying like, hey, we love Commodore, we love his podcast. And like, I want to like these super great price, like I want to buy, buy, buy, buy, buy, right? And then the, the interest on the amounts that sort of put into my entity on the, on the market, then I get that as an annual rate or something like that to help fund this whole, this whole journey in this process. And then it sounds like the other kind of input mechanism is sort of people in the marketplace from wherever they come from, assessing and understanding those opportunities and investing in. So is that the idea, is that the journalist themselves is probably bringing some audience and then you guys have your own audience and those 2 worlds are sort of merging together to build that market?

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Idea Market provides this new passive income stream for creators that just is a function of the trust that they earn as measured in the upvotes that people buy for them on Idea Market. And also it's a discovery engine, a sort of TikTok-style discovery engine, but as a market instead of managed by algorithms.

Yeah, that's interesting. Along that thread, I mean, do you guys have a feed of all of— like, if you have all these Substack things, like, do you have a feed of those posts that then are organized by your guys' API?

That would depend a lot on cooperation from the platforms for which we have markets. So we're not prioritizing that right now, but I could definitely see that becoming a feature in the future or something similar.

Yeah, it's almost, it's almost a, it's a half step between you guys and BitCloud a little bit, right? Where it's a sort of like, hey, you have this raw information, you guys have this raw database, and those 2 worlds overlapping. Interesting, interesting. Well, I appreciate you answering my questions. I appreciate your time. For, for being on the show, and thanks again for joining.

Great pleasure, man. Thank you.

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