Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Hey folks Rob McNealy here. And today I am super excited we are talking to David Leibowitz, he is the Vice President of Business Development for ever pedia. And ever pedia is this new online not so new anymore, but it’s an online encyclopedia similar to Wikipedia, but it’s built on blockchain. And that’s what really gets me excited about these kind of new applications. So, David, welcome to the show. How are you today?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
I’m doing great. Thank you for having me, Rob. Really excited to be here.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, I’m excited to have you here too, because I’ve been a big fan of your project now and tell me a little bit one. Let’s go I always like to back it up. Yeah, who are you? And I’m not gonna ask you how did you get into bitcoin? But how did you get into tech? How did
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
How I get into tech? It happened really by accident really, very naturally. So I’m originally from New Jersey. I grew up in the northeast went to school in Massachusetts, and I’ve always been a writer I got really good at writing in college, and that’s what originally led me to ever pedia. So I wrote a different blog. I’ve always been on the internet and stuff. And then ever pedia kind of came out to me out of nowhere. And I just started writing ever pedia pages, the encyclopedia entries. I’ve never pedia so I write about, you know, current events, you know, you know, I would call them evergreen pages. So I wrote a lot of like about up and coming musicians. I like I was doing a good enough of a job. They’re like, Hey, why don’t you move out to LA? I’m like, sure. like four years ago, I bought a one way ticket to LA. just sent it in September 2016. And I was there for four years. You know, I was just a writer. I was just making pages on stuff. We all live in this apartment in LA outside of UCLA. It was really like the Facebook movie. You know, everybody was living in that house. It was like that in an apartment. You know, the living room was the office. And then we kind of got pulled into crypto. We saw this opportunity in 2017 2018. You know, aetherium was getting hot. You know, smart contracts. We’re getting interest and we’re like, hey, like why don’t we make a decentralized transparent A mutable version of an encyclopedia if you want to really be a next generation encyclopedia, so I kind of hung around for the ride, as we know, we raised money. We got like a new office. And as ever pedia grew, I grew along with it. And so I was, you know, I’ve always been a social person, I’m really, you know, love talking to people meeting people. You know, we met, we only met like, on Saturday or Sunday as Friday on Twitter, and then we went shooting the other day, and it was a lot of fun. So I’ve always been a networker like that. And so, you know, I slowly got into more business stuff. There’s partnerships than exchanges, I got partnerships with anybody ranging from brave browser to a few years ago, I got partnership with the biggest teach in the world excision. So I’ve always been really good at that. And then, you know, got to work on exchanges. And now I’m doing PR, and it was really like, really a, I feel like it just happened so fast from being just an executive editor to being Vice President of Business Development. So it happened very naturally and very fast. And that’s how I got involved in tech.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So all those functions that you’ve been doing all those different kind of roles that you’ve been growing into which was your favorite so far and which was your least favorite so far?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
My favorite I think has to do with PR cuz I you know, I love telling stories and with PR you’re really telling the narrative of ever pedia and what we’re doing and you know, so that’s been my favorite so far, partnerships is up there too. It’s always partnerships. I’ve what I love about partnerships, it’s a lot of work, but it pays off so much in the end like it took you know, it takes you know, time and patience and you know, it’s just the same thing you’re trying to construct a narrative so you know, how is this partnership you know, mutually beneficial to you know, who you want to work with and to you know, who I work with every pedia so you know that’s definitely up there to me when you get the partnership I remember when we got the brave browser partnership. I was in Las Vegas up watching we can it’s just like such like a is definitely one of the crowning achievements of my career so far. probably my least favorite. I still like it, though, is dealing with exchanges and stuff just because you know, it’s just you have a cryptocurrency you understand what it’s like to do, and whatnot. But you know, I actually even though it’s my least favorite, I got like a ton of experience in there between, you know, dealing with people in negotiating standing your ground, knowing your worth. So even though you know, you learn a lot dealing with exchanges. Yeah.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And you and I talked offline about that, the trials of tribulation. And you know, one of the things that I thought was interesting about crypto is that, you know, I’ve been in business a long time, I’ve been an entrepreneur for a long time. And it’s like doing dealing with crypto. It’s like different than a normal startup, like, especially a decentralized project. So it’s like this weird hybrid mash up between being a nonprofit. This is how I always kind of describe a crypto decentralized project. It’s kind of like a nonprofit, kind of like a co op. And then you’re a publicly traded Company basically, at the same time, your global company, and you got all those things in the mix. And even as someone who’s, you know, done a lot of startups and stuff, all that a lot of that stuff is new to me too.
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
And it’s funny, we don’t need it. This is my first time really in business and stuff. And so this is what this is what I’m used to, and it’s such it’s such a nexus of all these different things that you were saying, you know, and it’s just really you know, and the thing was crypto evolves so fast, it’s so easy to get left behind and even if you don’t pay attention for a few months, hell like I was I wasn’t really paying attention this weekend because I was just, you know, driving down here and I felt like I missed so much over the weekend. So you always have to be on your toes and crypto.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Oh and stuff is definitely changing. So you said when you first went to ever pedia they weren’t blockchain based.
No we weren’t we were just the normal website. You know, I’ll give you a little bit of background ever pedia. However PDS start in a little bit before that. So I don’t know if your listeners know but early And Wikipedia is history was a lot more egalitarian site, you know, there were a lot more open. So you know, pages being made about different kinds of subjects, they definitely had exponential growth over those first 10 years. And you had two camps of editors develop, develop. So you had your inclusiveness, which lead, Hey, everybody can have a page, if it’s a stub, it can be improved. And then you had your delicious, which we’re like, No, we got to be restrictive, we have to have requirements, they want it, you know, they want it to be that, that kind of way. And so around 2010, the Jewishness went out, and if you noticed, you know, kind of the editors, you know, cats off around 10 K, their pages capped off around 6 million, they had much slower growth, and pages that were being included on Wikipedia. And so they became a lot more strict and they had these notability requirements. And you know, there’s a lot of, you know, different complaints about their community and being toxic and all that you can look all that up on Google. So there’s definitely like an opportunity for an alternative to arise. And so that’s really how every pedia is came about in 2015. As you know, more inclusiveness, friendly, open minded version of an encyclopedia, a new way to do knowledge. And Paul Graham said in in 2010, there’s room to do to Wikipedia. Wikipedia did Encyclopedia Britannica. So I see ever pedia in that same element right there.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s interesting, and I am not an ego test. But, you know, I’ve done a lot of things in my life. I mean, I was even a congressional candidate back in 2010. And, you know, worked on a lot of different projects and
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
..so much stuff, honestly, like you told me the other day, “I owned a liquor store, I did that.”
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
But I could never get a Wikipedia page like I wasn’t and it was funny because I was never notable enough by their standards, like, it was like, and not that I cared like, it wasn’t a big deal to me, but it was like to me though, it’s like, and I’ve met a couple Wikipedia kind of editors, and they wield a tremendous amount of power over that.
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Oh yeah, yeah, no they do. It’s it’s pretty abdurd how much power like these, uh, not me, not these unknown anonymous people have. And they’re, you know, Wikipedia is one of the top 10 websites in the world.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Right. And so there’s, there’s a lot of power in that. So you could you can change narratives with that. You can control narratives with that. And then there’s no accountability. And, and so to me, I’ve interacted with, like, you know, the founder of Wikipedia, on social media over the years and stuff and, and it’s clear that there’s a huge left leaning bias, not only by the founders, but the editors. And so and so to me, it’s like, you know, and again, it’s not that big of a deal to me, but I do see that as a problem is that if because they are such a powerful site? I mean, if you get a wiki page, that’s one of the first, you know, that’s one of the first pages that comes up
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
that is one of the best. Yeah,
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Right. And then in you know, a lot of the search engines also we’ll do a, you know, they’ll do a little excerpt from Wikipedia. And so to me, it’s like, you know, it’s what I just frustrates me. And and, you know, I, you know, we’ve talked a lot. I mean, I’m socially very tolerant, and you know, on some things very liberal, some things very conservative. I’m an independent minded guy. And it’s like, even but the conservative side of me goes, you know, it’s not right, that they’re there. They’re basically stifling opinions. They just don’t like. And so, yeah, so that’s what excites me..
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
The way they frame certain people and it’s undeserved. And they and the problem is the people that are framed a certain way, they can’t go in and change it because they’re not allowed to edit their own page.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Right. And that’s, that’s part of the problem. You know, I know I’m not gonna say who it is, but I do know, a crypto editor for Wikipedia. And he is about his left leaning is it Can you come and I’m like, why are you in crypto because crypto seems like the whole nature of crypto it seems a lot more libertarian to me. I mean that that at least that’s where I think you know that whole cipher funk you know, you know passed that drove a lot of this was very libertarian and cap, you know, kind of in that war world and then I’ve definitely seen like over the last, you know, three, four years as crypto becomes you know, really entrenched with the more Silicon Valley software world that whole left leaning thing is coming in and really kind of you know permeating so anyways it’s not supposed to be a political thing but you know, telling stories can be political so ever pedia How are you different from Wikipedia when it comes to that kind of notability and things of that nature?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Yeah, I like to think of ever pedia as the up and coming wiki and culture. So you know in what happened in 2010 between 2010 and now get a rise of influencers and YouTubers and all these people As you know, either millions of subscribers or hundreds of thousands of followers and whatnot, you know, people are searching for these people. But there isn’t a good scholarly wiki, maybe, you know, you’ll get like a click Beatty like wiki page that’s just for SEO, but you won’t really get a good quality page. And so that’s where we’re really ever pedia thrive. And for a long time, like that’s where we got a lot of our traffic. We also imported all of Wikipedia as well. So, you know, we had we had Wikipedia, I sometimes I like to think of every PDS of supplements in Wikipedia in a way. And now recently, we’ve been really doing a push to focus on cryptocurrency and blockchain content. So how you were talking about TUSC with me the other day, and you want to focus on just the gun industry. And really now that vertical like we decided for the best way for us to grow is to focus on cryptocurrency content, because that’s where we seem to get, you know, a lot of engagement on social media, you know, that’s where we get a lot of like new visitors to your site. That’s how we attract a lot of new editors as well. And so that’s where we’re really focusing on right now. But I’ve always thought of us as you know, up and coming with the culture instead. That.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So tell me about the economics?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Oh yeah, the token economics. So Ivor pedia runs on the IQ token and I really consider that the skin in the game for ever pedia. So in order to create a page or edit the site, you have to put up IQ. That’s the name of our token. So you put up 50 iq. So let’s say Rob, you want to edit your own page, you see the mistakes. And so you know, you edit your page, you make your changes, you submit the IQ and then there’s a 12 hour voting period where people vote with their IQ tokens whether to approve an edit or reject an edit. If it’s approved, you know, then you actually get rewarded newly minted IQ tokens if it’s rejected, then those IQ tokens are locked for a period of time.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And are they traded somewhere?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Yes. So if you want to edit the site and get involved and also we have predict as well as our prediction market platform, which we can get into later, were traded on binance trade on okay x we’re traded on Bitcoin next up it in Korea. some pretty big exchanges if you want to get involved.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So where do you see the possibilities in the future? What like what is the roadmap look like forever PDF.
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
So we’re really doing a big defy push, we see that, you know, in 2019, we actually launched our prediction market platform with predict. I call it the augur of iOS. And you were like, oh, but it’s a prediction market have to do with, you know, Encyclopedia, I think, you know, there are two sides to this same coin. Well, every pedia you know, is to circle knowledge and past knowledge, you know, people using the knowledge to contribute to these pages that are, you know, on the record, predicted future knowledge and people using you know, that what they know, to kind of anticipate future events and get, you know, reward if they’re right. And so, I see with a future push where, you know, we’ve been really building predicts out it’s a super clean platform. And then we want to add like a few new defy primitives and slowly evolved that out. So you know, we’re looking into Oracle’s as well having on Knowledge like that all this has to do with on chain knowledge. So Oracle’s and then possibly having, you know, synthetic assets, leverage, we’re, you know, we’re trying to explore all these different things, we actually have a, you know, we actually have a fund dedicated to funding these projects. So we have our IQ fund, where we committed over a million dollars worth of tokens to funding projects that have to do with everything I just said. So if any of you listeners are interested, they’re welcome to reach out to us.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So you said that you’re based on iOS 10? Is that correct?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Yes, yes, we’re based on iOS.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Why did you choose the EOS blockchain?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
A few reasons: One at the time, you know, to edit, you know, the problem is that they’re going back in 2017 2018. And so to this day, are the transaction you know, you know, everybody that deals with uniswap now, didn’t notice like the transaction fees and you know, the, you know, all the problems with their fees, you know, transactions and whatnot, speed and fees and whatnot. And so if you were to make an edit and every time you had to pay like a few bucks and make an edit, that’s doesn’t make economic sense. Both As you know, it’s you know, free, you know, free transactions and, and it just made much more sense for a consumer products like everipedia to be built on iOS than it would be to be built on it there. But there isn’t there yet for for that kind of debt. And also, we just got support from within the EOS community. They’re really excited about it from you know, people that are EOS token holders to like people high up in the EOS VC world. So we actually raised $30 million from EOS VCs and 2018 from galaxy digital. They were super excited about the project. So between, you know, the technical capabilities and the support we got, it just was only logical for us to build on iOS.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So right now, you mentioned that people can go through and vote on you know, whether or not to approve and edit or things like that. Is there a way that people can make money doing that kind of thing and breastfeeding on the platform?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Yeah, so the tokens are, you know, they have a monetary value. So we’ve had a few editors that are some power editors that have made it You know, hundreds, if not thousands of dollars worth of IQ tokens, especially if they held on to it over, you know, over the past year, we’ve been live since 2018. And so which is really cool. Do you think think about all the blockchain projects that constraints have in 2018, they were just a white paper and just never launched a product like we’ve been live even, you know, kind of, we’ve been through the store in the valley of the bear market. And, you know, now we’re just attracting more editors, there’s people like that want to get involved.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And you know, that’s really fun. I like the the platforms that I see now that are starting to evolve like ever pedia in library and some of these, you know, hives, were in brave browser and to me, personally, other than what I’m doing with TUSC those apps right now, to me are the shining stars in crypto.
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
I couldn’t agree more.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
And the market, I don’t believe is fully appropriately valuating those projects that are valuing those projects yet. I think that’ll come But to me, I see that as the future and the fact that you have users and you have a product and you have sustainable built in economics on the platform. That, to me is a winning combination. And I hope that with our own product tests that we get to that point, we’re definitely working on that. But I really like what you guys are doing with your tokenomics. And I think that that’s going to be the future. And I think ultimately, projects like ever pedia are going to be major major block chains and major major projects. I would expect it you’ll be in the top 20 next year in the next couple of years. No doubt about that, in my mind.
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Yeah, I think the same way between what we have built the killer scene that we have, like we wouldn’t have been able to gone this far if we didn’t have just, you know, such a great team all around that everybody’s just so committed to the project and development and you mentioned brave browser before I would love to talk about our partnership with them. It actually fits really well with our ethos. So you know, I was thinking like, Well, you know, we’re We really fit well a with pages, you know, that are not novo enough with Wikipedia, but these people still need to be recognized. And so with brave browser, we have this partnership. One part of it is we have our brave creator of the day. And so you know, brave browser has all these different Yep, hundreds and thousands of people signed up accepting praise tips. But a lot of people in the bat community don’t know who to tip they don’t know where to start to, like, find people to support. And so with our brave creator of the day, we provide that so every, you know, every Tuesday and Thursday, will tweet out a brave creator of the day. And, you know, they’ll, you know, we get tons of streamers as they’re very creative. They, you know, we get, you know, analysts we get all kinds of different people become a very creative the day it’s got, you know, the brave community really likes it, the bat community, you know, they always hype when they see somebody on Reddit like, Oh, this is something new that we can support. So, you know, the brave team has really liked it. It’s been really beneficial for us, so far is beneficial to them as well. They really see it as a tool to help you know, promote their community within their community. And with us, we’ve been able to, you know, get free advertising some brave browser. And so we’ve been able to recruit editors that way as well.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Perfect. It’s really good stuff and I’m glad to see somebody really taking charge in this space. David, where can people find out more about you and ever PDF?
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Yeah, so you can find out about me I’m on Twitter at at Dave said that underscore on Instagram at doing things underscore forever PDF, you can go at every pedia on Twitter, definitely join our group at everipedia. And, you know, no, come say hi. You know, we’re always you know, we’re always looking for new people. We’re very welcoming computed community, make a pacer yourself make a page for you know, somebody you look up to you. You know, we’re here.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
David, thank you for so much for coming on and spending time with me today. Appreciate your time here. Thank you so much. No problem. Hey, there’s Rob McNealy here. I will have all of David’s so And all those links up at Rob McNealy calm make sure you mash that subscribe button. Review us on iTunes. let your friends know how great we are. We really appreciate it. Let him know. Alright guys, you have a great day. Thank you.
David Liebowitz – Everipedia
Thank you