censorship
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Jeremy Kauffman, founder of LBRY, talks with Rob McNealy video content publishing, censorship and competing with YouTube.
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY Transcript
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, we’re gonna have a good show because we are talking to the CEO and founder of library, Jeremy Kaufman. And we’re going to talk about a lot of different things today. And I’m actually kind of like schoolgirl giddy about this, because I love their platform. So, Jeremy, welcome to the show. How are you today?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
I am doing well. And I’m also excited to be here.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, good. Well, thank you. I know we’ve you know, we’ve chatted a little bit on, you know, social media over the last few months, and you guys have been very helpful and onboarding me to your platform. And I really do appreciate that. And I can tell you in and you’re not paying me for this, just so you know, everybody out there full disclosure, I am literally a fanboy. I’m not even trying to build up my YouTube anymore, I just find that YouTube’s a waste, it’s a waste of time for me as a creator. On that side of it. It’s not worth me putting the energy into building up a YouTube following anymore. I’m putting all my energy into building a library following not only because of the democratization of YouTube, and but the fact is that I deal with controversial subjects that, you know, the people that run YouTube don’t like, and so I think there’s too great of a risk, long term building on that platform, at this point, and I’m putting my energies in the library. So Jeremy, tell me about you. And then let Tell me about library?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Well, first, just want to say that’s, that’s awesome to hear. YouTube has definitely become very corporate, you know, they’re basically the cable that basically cable news now. And library, we think is, is a big part of the answer to that, you know, if if I introduced library to, to Super do in the super normal way, I might call it something like, Oh, it’s just your library TV is just YouTube with better policy. But ultimately, what we’re doing is much, much more ambitious than that. You just can’t always express that ambition in a single sentence. You know, since your audience is, is nerdy, you know, maybe I can, you know, we’re trying to build a decentralized digital content marketplace. You know, the idea is to make services like YouTube possible, but to do it entirely via open technology to do it in a way that’s not owned or controlled by any one entity, just like the Bitcoin network or any other public blockchain network. It’s, and so I think that idea is really powerful. I think it’s part of why we will ultimately succeed, because it’s also it’s different in a fundamental way. You know, like, if I if I started another video platform, and it was just YouTube with better policy, well, you know, who else had a better policy than YouTube? YouTube did 10 years ago, right? When you’re, you’re the underdog. You know, you’re super nice. And then when you’re the when you’ve won, you become a big jerk, right? That is the pattern of Silicon Valley. Right. And I haven’t talked about myself much. But this is not my first venture. I have been in the software industry for some time, and have built a much more traditional SAS company, before starting this company, and working on working on this one. Um, but I’m much much more motivated to work on this one. Because I think what we’re doing is so important.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So tell me a little bit about your structure. How are you governed? And are you a company foundation? Are you decentralized? How does library function and govern itself?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
In a pretty boring way? We’re actually so there is a separate library foundation to be that to be that nonprofit, and have that set of incentives and be community run a library Inc, which is the company that originally created the library technology is a, a pretty boring, Delaware, C Corp, traditional Corporation. All the corporation is almost entirely owned by people who work here. So I will say that’s different library did get a little bit of VC funding, but the the VC has a all investment actually all investors in aggregate, have a substantially minority stake in the company. So the company is effectively owned by the people who, who work here. Right? So it’s they that we, and then we function like a traditional Corporation, there’s a board of directors, the board directors, Alexa CEO, which is me. I am also on the board, and that and then I I run the company. Now, what’s different is that what the company produces is all completely open technology. It’s all open source. It’s all open documentation. And there’s the key. The key difference in terms of what we ended up building is this ability to leave this ability to, essentially to, to exit to change the rules with which you’re governed by and I think This is the key component in systems that actually prevents them from sort of going downhill. And that email would be an example of a system that is interoperable and not owned by any one entity. And this means that one company, even though Gmail has cornered the has has a lot of the email market, I went to the corner, because you can’t really, they don’t have that same potential that a Facebook does, or a YouTube does, where once they’ve gotten a certain segment of the market, they can now you know, squeeze, start squeezing you and start taking advantage of you. We don’t see this nearly as much with email as we do with large social media platforms, were all of a sudden bad policy, right? Like, no one knows Gmail, Gmail has never Google would never consider you filtering emails out of your inbox without your permission, but they’ll filter videos because they, they can. And that becomes profitable for them to do that. So that’s what we want to do. We want to turn video distribution, digital content, publishing, not just videos into something that is, I know, it’s not the sexiest word, but we want it to be a little bit more email, like in terms of not being locked into one piece of software not being locked into one way of doing things.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what prevents you devil’s advocate, and I’m genuinely curious, what prevents library from growing, growing, growing, growing, and you guys have been growing exponentially, especially in the last six months, at least what I’ve seen what prevents you from being the big YouTube in the future and turning into a bad guy? What, what have you put in place to, you know, try to make it so that doesn’t happen? How do you mitigate that risk?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Yeah. So that’s, that’s a great question. And I would in general, like, be skeptical, ask, ask hard ask hard questions, we want this stuff to stand up to scrutiny, because that’s how we know that it works. And it’s possible that there’s a key distinction. And this is actually something we’re working on, we had a blog post out about this, about how we’re going to be straightening out some of the and changing some of the naming of some of these things. So there’s library.tv library.tv is like Coinbase, right? It is not a fully decentralized experience, it’s interacting with the decentralized network, right? Coinbase interacts with a bunch of different decentralized networks. But Coinbase itself is not decentralized. Coinbase is Coinbase. It’s a company you’re interacting with Coinbase. Though, we are currently providing both the coin based experience, and we’ve built the software that powers the the Bitcoin experience, right? In the center, I say the Bitcoin experience, I mean, you can use it locally, you can use peer to peer version, you can use a desktop client. So that client is always going to be completely up to the users how they want to use it, they will never be something at that level, where there’s censorship, you know, network wide, or anything like that, you will have the ability to use that software locally, configure it now, you have to know you should still follow the law, right, you still have an obligation to use that software legally. But that software will not be controlled by us will not be censored by us that interacts with a peer to peer decentralized network. And so that will always be there, that level will always exist, and really can’t be interfered with the web versions are going to have to set policies, right. It’s not as simple as it’s both not, but it’s both not legal, nor as simple as like, just try to serve everything as as much as possible, right. And so our goal with the web experience is to provide something that works for large numbers of people, if that ever means some people, that that experience doesn’t work for them, there’s an ability to have both a multitude of web experiences, you know, so if Gmail stops working for you, you go to protonmail, you go to Hotmail, whatever you go to where whoever else you want to go to. And so we expect the same thing to happen with, with any web experiences that we provide, ultimately, that following that you’re building up, all of that is not owned and controlled by the company. So you can take your wallet out and go take your wallet and go put it into another service or go use your wallet locally. At which point, we don’t have, you know, we don’t have that level of, of influence or control of me. So that that’s a huge check. You know, there’s no if you stopped liking Facebook, or you stopped liking Twitter’s policy, you’re there’s no ability to like all of a sudden all of your friends on Facebook to with better policy, whereas in the library design of things, that’s all possible.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So what kind of drove you to do this? You guys have been around since 2015?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Yeah, the first work began in 2015. The company, I don’t believe technically existed in 2015. The the no one was the first sort of like full time real work began. Like mid 2016 and onwards, shortly after the blockchain launch, we basically launched the blockchain in 2016. And did some fundraising actually after that when we were a we did no Ico and no Uh, no real fundraising until after we put the blockchain up. And we didn’t we didn’t either. Yeah, nice. Excellent. Yeah. I actually potentially strategic mistake, who knows. But honestly the reason it all went this way and was like, you know, to me, if I have like if I have a certain itch when it comes to building something, it’s just like really, really hard for me not to scratch it. And so I was working at another company where it also sort of built that company up. And it’s another software product much, much more boring than this one. And that company was doing decently but I just couldn’t stop thinking about this idea. I am a computer scientist by, you know, education and I was learning and going into blockchain and thinking about how it works and thinking about other technical systems and like, where, what’s different about blockchain? How could it be used, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about this. This this idea of building using a public blockchain to serve as a registry of content that exists. It’s why the company is called library. And I’ll continue to make unsexy metaphors and references here, you know, like, we wanted it to be something like the old card catalog, right? That everything except for everything right? can we can we use a public blockchain this permissionless system to keep a register of stuff that exists? Because we already had good peer to peer tech like BitTorrent works. BitTorrent, censorship, resistant, BitTorrent, user experience sucks. BitTorrent is not great for creators. But as a peer to peer tech bit torrents amazing and it’s elegant, and it’s well designed all these things. And so really, the core idea, we did several things on top of this and afters, but the core idea was a public blockchain could solve some of these problems with BitTorrent around indexing identity payment.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Sure, um, compliance is a big deal. And in the censorship is a big deal. That’s it’s all the rage right now. Right, especially in Silicon Valley. They just seem to like want to wield that hammer. Yeah. How is censorship and in house bad content, for instance, or maybe potentially illegal content dealt with on your platform?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Yeah. So this is a this is a great example of some of the things we were talking about before. And those answers can be slightly different, right? If content is illegal, there are strict things you have to do, and we follow all the laws. And I’ll talk about specifically what we do that there’s also content that could be damaging to a brand or that people may just not want to be associated with, right. And how you deal with that stuff can actually, that’s also very tricky, right? In fact, all the debates with YouTube, right, it’s generally not around illegal content. Everyone think, you know, right? It’s generally around stuff that’s legal, but debatable to certain populations. So I’ll let me give the full answer on like the illegal stuff. And then if we want to talk about the legal but debatable stuff, we can talk about that as well. On the illegal stuff. We are a Registered Agent, with the federal government, United States government. And so when we received DMCA I assume we’re mostly talking about DMCA is but for other legal stuff, it’d be a similar process. But basically, we receive complaints, we validate the complaints, it’s illegal, we maintain a list of essentially hashes that are known to be illegal. And then those hashes are circulated to other operators in the network, who who choose to if they want to use the software legally choose to respect those lists. So this basically comes down to your wallet server when you’re using the desktop client. So your desktop client, by default connects the wallet servers that we run, which are then going to listen to our our blacklist, and we encourage our wall, all wallet server operators to obey the blacklist. But if you’re in a country with a blacklist don’t apply or whatever, you could run a wild server and then not not listen to those blacklist and return whatever metadata or data you wanted to, that you wanted to return. So basically, we provide those lists as a service and circulate them so that operators can, can follow and listen to them. And of course, all the websites that we run and everything that we run a baseless blacklist.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So that kind of almost voluntary kind of methodology. Is that, I guess it sounds like it’s compliant with us regulations. And like, have you had any pushback from the government on that?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
We haven’t had any pushback from the government yet. I’m sure. I’m guessing you and your audience will appreciate that. You know, the nature of the law is frequently that there is no clear Answer and ultimately find out in court. So you were trying very much to follow the law, I pay lawyers amounts of money that I really don’t like paying them, for them to tell me. Well, this is probably how you follow the law. But we don’t really know. I mean, because you don’t know, you don’t know, sometimes it goes, sometimes the cases are so ambiguous, they go all the way to the Supreme Court, right? cases, like the the grokster case, or the Aereo case, are two examples of case law that come up when you’re when I when both I or the law, the lawyers attend to do research on this. And, you know, these cases made it all the way to the Supreme Court, because it was unclear, right. And so we think very much that what we’re doing follows the law. If, however, like a you know, real challenge, like it would have to go probably through some layers of court, because you’ve got a bunch of laws that aren’t written with decentralized networks in mind. They’re written with a traditional sort of client server model in mind. So when they’re using some of these terms, your What do they mean? Who is responsible? You know, like, for example, not trying to I hope the federal government is listening to your show, I think the federal government could argue that every, every person mining on the Bitcoin network is violating money transmission loss. I’m not saying that this, this argument would hold up. I have no idea what the courts would say, right? I think it probably wouldn’t work. But I think you could plausibly argue it. And if the government decided to argue it, it would have to go all the way to the Supreme Court. Right. Right. So that’s a that’s the unfortunate, unfortunate answer.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Well, it’s interesting, you know, because we’re a project as well. And it’s like, we’ve done things that are gray, like we you do everything, we as a project have done everything to avoid regulatory risk, right? We’re not out there thumbing our nose at the government and things like that we we want to focus on lawful markets and things like that, and do really good things, right. But there’s still some like, basically, areas where the guidance from the SEC doesn’t apply to things that we’ve done. Like, just doesn’t cover it. Like they don’t address it. And so that’s what I always say it’s gray, because no one’s determined or tested the theory legally, one way or the other.
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Yeah, I mean, it’s awful. It’s awful. I mean, the case of the SEC stuff, it’s like, I’ll give you an example of like, there’s no pro you can’t get any proactive assessment, right? You can’t spend any amount of money for the SEC. So I like Oh, okay. It’s not and I’m talking about like, yo, you can’t pay $100,000 sec, go, please tell me what the legal status of this is new doesn’t you can’t do that. All you can do is operate. And then one day, they may or may not. They may or may not come and ask you a question. That’s the way it works. And in terms of some of the SEC stuff around our token securities, the SEC has said this. Ethereum was a security when it started. Right. That’s what they said security means that it’s not a security to that. Right. Okay. Logically speaking, something that started as a security and is not a security now had to, at one point transition from one state to the other. Right, you can’t go from it. Okay, When did it happen? Well, we’re not gonna tell you. Right. So they’re saying that at some point between the founding of it there, because they have no precise criteria, they don’t have it. What they do is they, they they write laws, so that they’re incredibly vague. And then there’s a bunch of discretion that’s left up to, to the people. And so we have no idea what tokens are securities or not. I mean, they’ve been very, very few cases that have actually, you know, even happen, for the most part, the ones that the SEC has chosen to do a case on have been the ones that are like they’re pretty, very pretty, very clearly a security. So there’s a whole bunch there is a whole wide swath here where we have no idea what’s what’s legal and what’s not.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, and it comes back down to is that there’s always that that hammer, like hanging over your head, right. And like, you know, I choose to ignore the hammer because I want to be able to function and work hard on our project. But there’s always that little gray thing like, Oh, yeah, if someone really wanted to be a jerk, they could, you know, cost you a lot of money going to court. Yeah, ultimately,
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
I hate it. I hate it. Honestly, it’s Sunday. It’s like a real it’s something I’m actually pretty passionate about. Because I think it’s I think it’s sad. And it holds back a lot of things. It means you have to be like a we like I’m a risk tolerant person, like I’m very comfortable with risk. And it means that you’re basically like, I you’re restricting like that. The only weird people like me, are going to do some of this interesting work, right? Yeah. Yeah. But like, but there are lots of people who are like really smart people who are not as risk tolerant maybe as you are, I are, and they’re not going to enter this space, and they’re not going to do interesting things. And that’s sad. Like there’s no because I could have been I could have in 2016 describe for you exactly what library is what the network is going to do. How’s it going to work? And like it would be nice to be told, even at some expense even if it’s $100,000 even a million dollars or more? Can you tell me like before we spend way more than a million dollars? Like, is this allowed or not? Like, is this the right way to do it? How do I do this? It’s legal, you can’t do that. All you can do is spend, you know, we’re talking about hundreds of thousands of hours of human effort has been put into the library project at this point. And I fully expect it to be legal. I want to be clear, I don’t think it’s like some 5050 thing. But I don’t think it’s literally zero. Like, I don’t think it’s because I would have said there’s no way that area, which is this antenna case in New York City, I would have thought I said there’s no way area is gonna lose the Supreme Court case area is definitely legal. And then the Supreme Court made up a law made up a rule to say that area is not legal. And we can talk about that case if you want to get into, but it’s like, it’s so you never know.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Yeah, I think that’s it’s really unfortunate. But I mean, even if you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on attorneys, you might get something called a Saft. And then you try to call it a utility token. And we know how most of that’s ended up already. So it’s like, like….
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
I should be able pay the government, like I should be able to pay, like if you’re gonna if you’re willing to investigate people on your own dime sec, like, let me pay you to get a proactive judgment. Like even if the sticker fee is really high, that you should be able to get a proactive judgment from courts before you like to say that like the only way we can tell if a technology is going to be legal or not, is to build it. And only after you built it, dispute it, it’s just crazy. Like, why can’t we have some more more proactive way of getting some of these judgments? It’s just incredibly inefficient, like area a bunch of people spent their lot, you know, multiple years of their lives building up a company in the Supreme Court says you can’t do it. I mean, why couldn’t the Supreme Court like why couldn’t do it, even if it’s, you know, $10 million 100 million dollar areas probably spent hundreds of millions of dollars before they’re shut down? You know, so you never, it’s just, it’s just, um, well…
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
What were the circumstances in that case?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
The area cases the one so this is I love this case. So the, this the, it was, it’s like a rebroadcasting thing. So Aereo, did antennas in New York City. So they would, on your behalf by you, personally, an antenna, so you would own an antenna in New York City, your antenna, one antenna per customer, a discreet antenna, that antenna was yours, and then they would rebroadcast the output of it over the Internet to you. Okay, so you could basically get in New York City, over the air television, anywhere in the in the US by buying an antenna and letting area post it for you. That’s the Supreme Court said that, because users interact with this service as if it were a cable company. It therefore is a cable company. So they said that this makes Aereo, a cable company. In the same ruling, they said that it would be completely legal for me to go onto Craigslist and post and say, Hey, will you put an antenna in your house for me and hook it up? In this way? I’ll pay you $100, right, that’s legal. So I can still hire someone to do this exact service. If a company tries to proactively do it, they basically said that makes you a cable company. Because users think that you are one, therefore you are one and you’re governed by cable, cable company law. Like nothing in the cable company law says this, like they basically made it as far as I can tell. I mean, they didn’t literally make it up. They they come up with a chain of logic. But I think it’s like utterly crazy to say that, like what makes something a cable company is whether people perceive it as one, you know, they’re not a cable guy. They’re not they’re not running cables through the line. They’re taking a you know, they’re, they’re taking something over the air. And, and you know, so it’s like, were they, you know, to me, if you want to be part of a society is you need to have like laws with clear meaning. And I think that we have a lot of laws that basically end up with these very vague meanings. And so you never know what how they’ll actually be interpreted-until they’re interpreted.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So where do you see the future of library? What would you say your main goal with library is at this point, you guys are humming along? You guys have millions of users on your platform now? Where would you like to see library over the next three to five years?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Uh, so I think we’re close to I think we will absolutely be cementing ourselves as the number one alternative to YouTube. And then soon YouTube will be, you know, the number one alternative to library, I think. I think but I think I actually I want to grow beyond video. I think we’re gonna be everywhere be YouTube. I’m not saying it’s like, easy, like we’ve won or something. But we’re gonna be we’re gonna be YouTube. I mean, YouTube’s done. Like, there’s just like everything about the way that Google works as a company, all of their policy actions. It’s like, I like if I were observing the way that I guess I kind of observe them from the outside. I don’t work there. Like it’s seriously like someone in my company is like paying them or has like blackmail on them. Like, they’re my, they’re our best friends. Right? They’re literally helping us succeed. And everything they’re doing is just driving people over to library. And I think that what we’re doing is is so fundamentally different, that they can’t adopted, that’s really important, by the way, in terms of success in business, you know, like, one of the reasons that underdogs frequently don’t win is the, the the established the overdog, whatever, can just Co Op, right? The same reason that third parties don’t win in politics a lot, you know, a lot of the time is that if a third party has a really good wedge issue, well, just one of the major parties will just adopt the wedge issue, right. And so, same kind of thing. But in this case, our whole competitive advantage is tying our own hands. And so it’s like YouTube, you know, and when your competitive advantages is so fundamentally different companies tend to not adopt it, like YouTube would have to blow up their entire business to defeat us. And I just don’t see them doing it. What I want to do is, I want to begin pressing into different areas. Like right now, everything’s been library library library, it’s been all one, one single, multi purpose app. That’s not the way we ultimately experience media. We use one app for podcasts, we use another app for news, we use another app for video. And even then, for video, we might use a different app for user generated content versus for, you know, more corporate content. And there’s even other things, there’s CAD files, there’s comic books, you know, there’s all kinds of even niche, digital media. And ultimately, I think library can disrupt any number, any number of these spaces. And so I want to start looking at forming partnerships, business development deals with other entities that could adapt the library technology and and disrupt, begin disrupting some of these other verticals as well.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
I might have someone I want to introduce you to off the air. That might actually be beneficial.
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Yeah.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
So I know you’re kind of pressed for time today. So well, Drew real quick. Where can people find out more about you and library and how can they get started on the library platform?
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Yeah, so the number one thing I’d say you can ignore everything else after this. I’ll say a bunch more things. Go to LBO. YTD create an account. Follow me. Follow Rob. And follow some other creators on there. There’s lots of great youtubers making their way over. There’s lots of great original stuff. And just start there. If you’re a creator yourself, and you’re on YouTube, you’re not safe. At a minimum use lbr y comm slash YouTube to copy everything over. We are on basically every social site, I would say we’re the most active on Twitter, but we’re also on Facebook and everything else. We have a Reddit and you can find all those just type them in. I won’t say all the links. And if you want to follow me personally, I’m probably Twitter’s the best. My handle is my full name. Jeremy Kaufman.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
Jeremy, thank you so much. I’ve enjoyed chatting with you today.
Jeremy Kauffman – LBRY
Thanks, Rob.
Rob McNealy – RobMcNealy.com
You have a great day.
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Kingsley Edwards – CEO of Flote Transcript
Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos may be present.
Rob McNealy
Today I am talking to Kingsley Edwards. He is the CEO and founder of float app, which is a new social media sharing platform. And I think the timing of this is great given what’s going on in the crypto world with YouTube right now. So, Kingsley, how are you today?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Doing well, just you know, little bit of rest after after yesterday, Christmas, but yeah, glad you got to be here. Thanks for having me on.
Rob McNealy
Cool. I literally laid on the beanbag for 14 hours yesterday.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Did you break a record or?
Rob McNealy
I think I got bedsores, but I don’t know if it’s a record but yeah, I kinda was a complete pig slouch, just kind of hanging out. But you know, me and my, my wife and I, I mean, we both are, we’re both co founders and Tosca, and so but we both have full time other gigs because everybody on our products is a volunteer. So it’s like, we’ve been going crazy. Just we launched this week. And I got on Main net and opened it up and got block producers on the network and stuff. So it was like literally two days before Christmas. We’re like literally been doing tech support helping people sign up and get their nodes on and stuff. So it’s been a little crazy. So we took the day off yesterday.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, well, congrats. I know that’s got to be that’s a huge feat to get over. So,
Rob McNealy
You know, when people say, Oh, you can just you know, make a blockchain just point and click on my get go do that. Let me know how that works out for you. Because, you know, it’s interesting, because, and we’re getting our topic but you know, we launched first as a token, and then we swapped and built our own chain. And it’s funny because people don’t realize how all the little things you have to do to make that work. You know, even just, how do you get your first nodes ready? How do you recruit people to set up servers to support your network in the beginning, it’s like, you know, it’s one thing if you’re just setting up a token or something on someone else’s blockchain but when you have to build up And recruit, and persuade and try to negotiate and get all sorts of, you know, people involved in your project and anyways just to take a risk of their own time and whatever money and stuff to do that that’s hard. It really is a lot of it’s a lot of work. It’s a lot of lunches and a lot of phone calls.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I did. I did a token sale in at the, the kind of the height of the market or close to the height of the market in 2017. And yeah, I was it was even just even just doing that was just, you know, crazy. I stayed up for like, 72 hours at at the one point, I do not recommend doing that. But um, but yeah, you know, a lot of things that seem easy to others and just, you know, with technology in general, are there’s a lot happening behind the scenes that a lot of people don’t know about, so.
Rob McNealy
Absolutely. So give me a little bit of background about what you are. Sounds like you’re an entrepreneur. So how did you get involved with starting float?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah. Well, so I started my first crypto startup in, in 2013 actually was a eSports Bitcoin platform where people can play against each other and popular video games for Bitcoin kind of a skill base. You know, being from Vegas, we’re just talking about I’ve always thought that and also playing video games growing up, I always thought that be interesting to kind of recreate, you know, the poker environments and with with video games and how EA Sports is is taking off. So so we we created that it was called leap coin, which later turned to leets. And then in 2015, we ended up getting some investor money from from boost VC and Tim Draper and in Vegas tech Fund, which is run by Tony Shea, and some other angels and VCs. We ended up selling that in 2017 to to a larger startup, and that’s where I actually directed their token sale and then after that, year I did some consulting for four different crypto companies and more recently we’re focused on on floats and really came about which is you know, we we, we we will first of all we’ve you know we’ve been part of the kind of the Liberty movement or what do you want to call it or or at least myself for over a decade starting with with Ron Paul back in the day and and then you know that that kind of led me to learning about Bitcoin and all this kind of stuff in the ron paul forums like in 2010, or something like that. But, but yeah, you know, so so just kind of seeing this the way things are going with social media especially like all the people getting shadow banned, banned, and demonetised especially over the last last few years, and now all of a sudden, you know, just the same that you support free speeches, you know, the mainstream narrative is saying that that’s like controversial or not not the right thing to do. So So yeah, we you know, we have a lot of friends that are that are content creators, independent journalists, on on YouTube and other platforms that have been affected by what’s going on they’ve been D monetized they’ve lost their These are people that you know, they survive off of off of YouTube monetization and in, in their, you know audience supporting them through donations and all this and we’ve seen them the struggle over the last couple of years losing anywhere from 80 to 90%. Some have been completely demonetised hundred percent of their their income just you know, overnights gone for what we feel like is really unjustified reasons. I mean, a lot of times these people don’t get responses from YouTube and Twitter and Facebook and others and and they’ll be like an email response. They’ll say, you know, a little show you’ve been kicked off or have you been banned because of and I’ll just have a blank won’t even have any from there. So it’s it’s like, you know, I think a lot of like I said, a lot of us saw this coming and we just wanted to offer just an alternative. Last year, I actually tried getting off of all kind of this decentralized platforms that are there today. And I went to various other decentralize, you know, offerings. And it was just, you know, is way too confusing. A lot of them have like a lot of these token schemes that are kind of built into just the basic like, feed and stuff like this, that they, you know, this is cool if you want to partake in that, but, but we just wanted to offer something where people can, you know, speak freely, we have chronological time timeline with no kind of deceptive algorithms deciding what content you see or interact with and engage with. And, and so yeah, so we decided to kind of, you know, dive deep into it. And in I’ve been working alongside of a lot of those friends that that have been affected by what’s going on.
Rob McNealy
So it’s float like a blockchain based app or is it not based on blockchain? Or is it crypto related? How is it kind of build what kind of platform is it on?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
So right now we are we are, we are centralized? So we have plans to decentralize Over the next year, we did we went through boost again with this with this company boost VC, which is one of the leading blockchain startup accelerators in San Mateo, run by Tim Draper son, Adam Draper, who’s done a lot of great work in the space. So so we with through boost VC, we got we got actually quite a bit of credit on on various server, you know, like AWS and digitalocean, which isn’t, you know, the best place to be but as it as a scrappy startup where we want to use those those credits, until until we can’t. But we do have plans to to decentralize. We don’t we don’t. We’re not we’re looking at various technologies as far as our decentralization strategy. And we’re not quite 100% sold on a blockchain yet for for social media. There may be an opportunity to like interact with other block chains if a user does want to, but we’re looking at other other distributed ways where we can have different People partake in backing up their own content.
Rob McNealy
Well, I think that’s important. And I actually commend you on that strategy. And I think it makes more sense. Get your MVP out there, start on a centralized system, and look at where the technology is, and then adopt whatever back end that’s decentralized that you want. To me, that actually makes more sense. Because I think you probably are well aware. I mean, with the social media platform, it’s about eyeballs and audience. I mean, that’s why people are on Twitter. That’s why people are on Facebook, because that’s where all the people are. There’s lots of actual alternative media, social media sites out there now. And you know, I’m getting inundated like nobody here go to there. And it’s like, okay, but no one else is there, or there’s not as many people there or this one community like is on this platform and not on your platform. So who would you say your technology closely or is a close resemblance of are you more like a Twitter or more like a Facebook?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I feel I feel like we look more like a Twitter right now but I would say as far as features that really going for Facebook, we see a large opportunity with with both those platforms and and also including YouTube, where, especially Facebook, where, you know, there’s a lot of studies out there where 66% of Facebook users do not trust Facebook, even though they, you know, they do use it because that’s where the users are at. I don’t know, really anybody who really likes, you know, they’re the CEO Mark Zuckerberg. And so we see a large you know, an opportunity there to kind of go after that feature sets and and that’s really you know, we want to build a place where, where, you know, free speech, can I can live you can engage with you, you know, you follow who you want to follow, you can gauge who you want to do you want engage with, and in Facebook as far as, as features is kind of the most our has has a lot of features that we’d like to, to to implement. So, right now we have, you know, just kind of the social network side, we do have crypto integrated, where every every account comes with a Bitcoin BTC wallet right now. So people can with without wallets, you can you can tip people you can you can do we have a Patreon type model already built built out where you can subscribe to content creators for premium content for for whatever tier they want to set which is really cool. We have encrypted messaging. So you know again kind of going back to to Facebook and Twitter I’ve noticed over the past couple years where now it’s been made public where they actually they can and they seem like they do read your read your messages, your direct messages to other people and people don’t really realize that so, you know, we don’t we don’t want to read your messages. And that’s what we make them encrypted and peer to peer and you know, a lot of lot of other little other things where we’re just trying to make floats a friendly place for for people to you know, create a second account on there’s a lot of studies to how social media, you Users they used to have, I think was like 2.4 accounts couple years ago. Now I believe it’s closer to five. And the next two years, they’ll have up to like 10, or some of that. So we’re looking at different, like, interoperability between us and the major platforms. So to just make it easier switch to, you know, at least use us as a as an alternative.
Rob McNealy
So I have a pretty big social platform, you know, footprint on like Twitter, smaller one on Facebook, sell me on flow, why would I want to be on flow versus these other platforms?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Well, again, you know, I think you notice I I personally, very much dislike the way that Twitter and Facebook feeds been becoming more and more kind of deceptive in the way that they use their algorithms as far as the the home field and timelines. So even with Twitter, you know, you have to constantly change for me, I have to constantly change that. I want to see things chronological as from the people that I’ve seen, or that I that I follow, and and you know, it just we don’t we don’t push any information that you don’t want to see. And, and again, we don’t read your messages, respect user privacy. And we don’t, you know, we’re not out to censor us. So now that’s what we’re seeing more and more on on all the major platforms. And we don’t want to we don’t want to partake in that.
Rob McNealy
So you’re funded through boost VC. Is that where you’re getting the funding to grow this out?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, we Yeah, we receive some initial funding from from boost VC right now. We are in the middle of fundraising right now for our full seed round, but we received Yeah, we went through boost earlier this year.
Rob McNealy
So that was gonna be my next question is, I like what you’re saying. I think we need more alternatives to what we have out there. The next question is, how do you combat that network effect of the big networks? That’s the big challenge. How do you take away their market share, and what do you think your marketing strategy is going to be to onboard some of those new users and kind of pare away some of their market share?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Well, so we definitely wanted to take advantage of the way that YouTube is treating content creators, the way the distrust of Facebook and the other platforms. So that’s one of the biggest things right now we’re actually working on adding ad monetization for content creators so that we can, you know, we can provide a way for for content creators to, to join our platform, and not only you know, receive Patreon, Patreon, you know, revenue from their audience, but also tips but then also add revenue from from different ad networks. And eventually we’ll be implementing our own ad platform that’s that’s fully integrated into our platform. One thing about us as far as for content creators is that we don’t take any percentage of The payments to content creators or or just users in general. So that’s one of the things that you know, we’re really focused on to is showcasing how lightweight crypto actually has a use case here, where when I send a Super Chat, let’s say to a YouTuber, and YouTube takes 30%, or YouTube takes 45% of ad revenue from content creators, we don’t sit as a middleman, as far as you know, in terms of payments. So I think that’s one one place where we’re kind of, you know, placing our bed on and saying that, hey, you know, kind of be the old saying our content is king. And if if content creators can create an as you know, a second account on on on floats, and hey, maybe not the user base isn’t there yet. But I’m making 100% of all my tips on making 100% of my monthly subscriptions from my audience, and I’m getting a larger percentage from ad revenue. While it might make sense to try to start moving by my people over to this, this platform Where I can ultimately make more money with less followers.
Rob McNealy
So you as float up, how do you guys make money if you’re not taking a, you know, cut of the content creators, you know, earnings.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
So we have for, for ad, we have two sets of ads, we have content ads that will be similar to a, it’s kind of unique actually, to we have, we have content ads. And then we have two forms of content ads. Right now, we have video ads, where it’s kind of a we’re just we’re testing this out right now with a few content creators. But a video ads are similar to the YouTube ads that you see that go before and after videos. And then post ads for content creators that can be done on any post which is kind of unique. So if a content creator just doesn’t like a normal kind of Twitter style or Facebook style post, they can have a small ad on the bottom little banner ad where they can also monetize out of that. So we have those sets of ads for content creators where they get 100%. And then we have network ads, which is kind of can be seen almost like if you think of a YouTube video page. Like the top right, they’ll have a little ad you know, post up on the top right. So we’ll we’ll take the percentage off that and then we’re also going to be implementing network ads within within the feed of users. So we’re yeah we’re going to be you know, mostly focused on on ads ad revenue, we are going to implement a premium subscription where will provide ad free experience for users? And we’re hoping that you know, eventually once once we get more more and more content creators on our platform and higher tiers as far as how many people follow them that that eventually you know, we’ll be able to really monetize it monetize it well with with the ads that we’re showing that we profit off of.
Rob McNealy
Very cool. So with a lot of the so a lot of what the the normal big giants in this space. Some of their excuses for censorship and and you know, D platforming people is one they’ll say they’re combating hate or in some other People will say they’re just trying to cover their tail legally in case someone you know, does something stupid on their platform, so they don’t directly get sued themselves for hosting this content. So if you’re a centralized and you’re gonna allow free speech, are there any limits to that? Or are you going to have some basic rules? How does that kind of work? And if you allow free speech, unfettered free speech, are you worried about liability for your group?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
So we do, you know, we are a were a US Corporation, we do have to follow us laws. So if there are things that that uh, that we find or others bring to our attention, or if you know, there’s one of the alphabet, US government agencies that you know, request something or something we you know, we’re not going to go to prison over something over a social media post or something like this. We’ll we’ll do what we have will only what we have to do, but we’re not going to go out of our way to censor people for no reason. Which seems to be where all the other platforms are going. When it comes to you know, the story of you know, advertisers and all this kind of you know, seems like they’re they’re kind of pulling the strings and all this you know, I believe that I believe that that that is the case in some circumstances but at the same time it’s it’s interesting to see that you know, especially YouTube is using that as an excuse why they’re censoring people yet all the major other you know, the the mainstream media that’s that’s on YouTube are talking about the same things that all these independent creators are talking about maybe maybe in different ways and you know, this and that but but you know, they do cover a lot of the same topics that YouTube says is controversial and all this yet YouTube doesn’t take down you know, Fox News, CNBC, talking about crypto, CNN talking about Epstein, all this types of all this type of stuff. So so you know, we’re going to we’re going to test out the waters we’re going to we’re going to roll with the punches, but also Yes, we want to we want to support free speech and we feel that what’s going on right now. It’s just it’s there’s there’s something, you know, seems a little sinister, but happening behind the scenes. And it seems to be maybe politically motivated or whatever. But, but we’re, you know, we just we want to be we’re just really rewinding the clock, just about three, three to five years of where social media was why YouTube became so great why Facebook became so popular and Twitter became so popular. And so we just, we just want to basically, you know, be be what it was before and offer, offer that to our users and respect our users.
Rob McNealy
And I think a lot of people want that. And I think on the other hand, I think there’s also a big market for curated content as well. And I can see both sides of it. The the anarchist part of me is like, you know, what people should do without the want to do, but, you know, if they want to do it on their own platform, you know, if they want to do it their way and not my way on my platform, then they go build their own and you did so I kind of like that and I’m actually very interested to see where this positive plays out for you. You guys float. But on the other hand, there’s a lot of bullshit out there. I mean, there’s a lot of stupid people there a lot of assholes. And, you know, I kind of look at it like, we have a forum, for instance, with Tusk. And we haven’t we have rules in our forum and our groups in our telegram, because we believe like, we don’t allow certain types of spam because we find that spam does make the community suck, you know, all these online groups, once they stop having moderators and admins is just the nonsense takes over. And I’m just putting out my little brainstorming hat here. And it’s like, Okay, if everybody on your in your neighborhood turns out to be a jerk, and people don’t necessarily honest, is that a great neighborhood anymore? And I and I, and I wrestle with these kind of, you know, internally I wrestle with these kinds of, you know, thoughts philosophically, because I always want to weigh my own freedom. My pro freedom orientation with people are still stupid and jerks. He helped Part of the world, right? You got to kind of look, there’s both there. And I do think there’s a nuance and it’s interesting, especially with a lot of folks in the Liberty movements, whatever movement you want to call it, that have a hard time with that nuance that, you know, just because you can be a jerk doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to be a jerk all the time. And, you know, I heard voices coming out and this is supposed to be a new social media thing out on the iOS network, and supposedly it’s everybody’s doxxed and I’m mixed on and I’m actually interested to see how it works. So for instance, on and to me, I docs myself a long time ago, I’ve always been Rob McNealy and everything I don’t have. I don’t have any sock accounts. I am myself out there. So I’m always kind of flying without a net. But I can tell you Kingsley, you know, I’ve had a lot of assholes take advantage of that trolls, doing crazy stuff. And it’s like, oh, you’re you’re an anonymous avatar. And you You’re going to be a jerk. I’m doxxed. You know, I’m myself I’m I’m a target. And, and I and I think there’s a weird trade off there because I one part of me, a lot of people are really anti social non civilized because of that anonymity. On the other hand, I always think that while we still need to have that ability to be completely private, because maybe someone needs to be a Hong Kong protester, right. And so, I don’t know the balance. And, you know, libertarians will have this, you know, they’ll they’ll shred me on this, because I’m not quite 100% pure, but I’m like, you know, but sometimes people lie and say things that aren’t true on the internet because of their anonymous. You know, avatar, what have you I mean, what do you think about that?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Right? So I mean, if you’re, you know, if you’re a public person and you have a public profile, then you know, you’re going to run into this stuff, no doubt, and then it’s up to you to curate, block or mute people who you know, want to are trying to harass you or engage with you that you don’t want to You know, that you don’t want to engage with. So you know, I would say, if you if you’re really against people, you know if you know, coming after you or doing this doing that, then make your account private and then choose who you know who can who can really engage with you, if you’re willing to take the risk of being becoming public and you want to, you know, promote your voice and you want to grow your audience a little bit more easily through through a public profile, then, you know, you take on that risk yourself, and you have to kind of deal with the things that come at you. It’s a, you know, I think it’s no different the online identity versus the real life identity. You know, there really isn’t much of a difference between besides people being are able to be anonymous on are more anonymous, I’d say, are easier to be anonymous online. But But again, you know, there’s there’s there’s interesting features that we’re building out, like shareable mutes and blocklist where let’s say there’s a full list of people. That’s have shown of users that have shown to be, you know, I don’t know, kind of a difficult to deal with online. Well, you know, if there’s an easy way to, to share these lists, and you know, with one click being able to block a full list of users that have engaged in this type of behavior, then, you know, let’s let’s make that easier. Let’s use technology to make make our lives easier, easier, not only to engage with people, but also to disengage with people.
Rob McNealy
And I think that’s actually an amazing idea. You know, I know I’m saying I understand blocking, and I block liberally and I have a pretty thick skin and I me, and I’ve been out there for a long time. So I really normally don’t care when someone says dumb shit, because that’s just the internet. I did have a guy who’s actually kind of pro popular, but he’s, you know, anonymous, and he runs a podcast and he’s a crypto maximalist of one flavor and a year ago we had a problem and he just didn’t like my project because it’s not Bitcoin. Let’s just put it out there. just you know, he’s like anything that’s not Bitcoin is a scam. And I’m like, Okay, well that’s not true. Okay? A Scam is is accusing someone of a fraud or a crime and a violation than happy and a B. And you know, and you know, it started coming up in the search engine results and I’m like, okay, he wrote a blog post and all the saying that I’m a scam and I’m like, Okay, one I’ve never taken anybody’s money. I’ve done everything I said I would do I created something that we gave away that became valuable. That’s not a scam. That’s a gift. But it was interesting. Like he was very toxic and I ignored him for a year but I had to deal with and deal with some of the, the SEO Fallout, right? Because marketing is kind of a thing. And and I called him up and I’ve figured out who he was, I did some digging, and I’m pretty good at finding out some things that I actually know who he is now, like everything about him personally. And I emailed him and I used his first name and now he’s got a public email just for his avatar, you know, and I emailed him by his First Name, and last name, and said maybe we could have a phone call. And we did. We had an hour long conversation, he still hates my project. And I said, That’s okay. But don’t accuse me of being, you know, a fraud or criminal. You can say you hate my project. I don’t have a problem with that. But let’s just be honest. And, you know, here’s the thing, Kingsley, if I hadn’t figured out who he was, he wouldn’t have cooperated with me, because he felt protected by that anonymity. And he felt that he could break the law and call somebody things that aren’t true. And I think, you know, that’s the problem I see out there and I do understand where some platforms come from on that. And and to me, it’s like, you know, sometimes people just aren’t nice. And are mean because of that. And I think that’s the the downside of the whole keyboard warrior thing. But.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
They’re going to be perfect. Just like in in you know, IRL real life. It’s never going to be perfect no matter what you’re going to have people out there that are that hate you and Whatever. And so, you know, and then we’ll we’ll continue to see this you know, I think a lot what’s what’s interesting with crypto in particular is that we’re seeing a lot of people that that were Bitcoin maximalists starting to at least be more open minded to new projects. And I never you know, I, I was more of a I would say a Bitcoin maximalist years ago, but I would never hate other other projects out there because competition is good. And you know, we’re really actually a big one we’re seeing that that as far as advancement and and you know that the protocol and so with that we’re seeing a lot of other protocols that are kind of blowing past that as far as things that you can do on chain. So, so, you know, I think competition is good, whether it’s social media, whether it’s money, I mean, obviously, and and really, you know, let’s let’s really keep our eyes on the target, which is the, what we’re creating is an alternative to central banks and then felician and, you know, this this kind of crazy system that That’s that we’ve been born in.
Rob McNealy
Lost you. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I think I lost you, buddy. Hello, there you are. You’re back.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, I lost you too.
Rob McNealy
Having some bandwidth problems on your side. I think keeps saying that you have low bandwidth. I hate when you have low bandwidth. You got low tea or something?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, it’s weird cuz I have really good internet. Anyway, I’m not sure right cut off but.
Rob McNealy
Okay. So I’ll just pick it up. You know, I think I think competition is excellent too. And I think so the crypto crypto space as well. I’m an entrepreneur and I actually am kind of late to crypto. I don’t click came to I don’t claim to be like an early adopter at all. I’ve only been in this space a couple of years. And it surprises me because I view everything as an entrepreneur and I always look at opportunities and you know mitigating risk and flaws and markets and that’s kind of how I view crypto I just see it even if it’s decentralized, it’s still a market it’s still a product and service and it’s interesting with like, the old maximalists that are so defensive about Bitcoin it’s typically been you know, I think you’d agree it’s typically Bitcoin maximalist it seemed to be the most toxic maximalist. But I think I have a theory on why I think it is, I think it’s that these guys have been like, you know, singing the tune of Bitcoin for so long that it’s become kind of their personal identity. And I think that the competition to Bitcoin and some of it is a lot more innovative and even not only on the tech side, but on the governance side on the speed side on the scalability side are far better.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I use to use Bitcoin all the time to pay people you know with $20 Bitcoin on on Reddit and you know yeah the speed was was great you know and now like I wait for 20-30 minutes confirmation for this small transactions it’s actually very frustrating.
Rob McNealy
Right, and so then something and I think it just comes down to what the maximalists is that no one likes their baby being called ugly and and that’s what it’s about and I think the the the maximum was just fear the competition that maybe they backed the wrong horse at some point..
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
..to kind of reverse their opinion.
Rob McNealy
It’s human nature and no one wants to admit they’re wrong or their their baby’s ugly. It’s like, but to me, it’s funny because like in my own portfolio, I mean, I own Bitcoin, I own a Etheoreum. I have my own take somewhere. I think they’re going to be an end up and I think some things I think it’s, you know, I can’t make a decision yet because I think there’s a lot of things moving in This space, but I think I have my own theories on how crypto will be adopted. And that’s why we launched our own project anyway. I mean, that is why we launched our own project, because I think that some of the other big projects out there are kind of going the wrong direction. We’ll see if I’m right or wrong. We’re going to work really hard to figure that out. But I think that’s the same thing with social media, right? I mean, social media proved to be a thing, people like it, people like communicating digitally with each other. They like to be able to communicate with groups, they like to communicate with people on the other part of the planet. Social media is a good tool. The question is now, the governance of social media has kind of gone downhill, pretty bad over the last five, six years. And I think this is why I’m excited to you know, talk to you about what you’re doing with slope because to me, we need competition to kind of hopefully push back, you know, on some of those major social media platforms that in my opinion, are abusing their users.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, no, absolutely. I’m not sure why I cut off earlier, but I was just saying that let’s let’s remember, you know, whether it’s Bitcoin or other technology, but specifically with Bitcoin and money, you know, it’s not that, you know, it’s great that all these different cryptocurrencies and blockchains are competing against each other, define what what is going to serve the market best. But let’s remember that, that what we’re what we’re trying to replace is central banks. And so just because something isn’t as decentralized as this or this and that or you know, like, let’s focus on on what what the actual goal is, is that’s creating a better technology for money and in whether something let’s in you know, it should it should work as good as as the best thing out there. So, that’s what I like to support. And that’s what you know, kind of the, the foundation is set for as far as social media with flow, is that you know, okay, right now we may be we may be centralized, but hey, we support free speech, you’re not going to get thrown in 30 days. Facebook Jail for posting a meme or you know, you we’re not going to suspend your your Twitter account because you you work for anti war calm. So you know, it’s just like, hey, let’s support things that, you know, may might not be the most decentralized or the most, you know, in our case libertarian thing, but let’s focus on the things that hey, maybe it has easy, good, great UI UX, you know, it’s it offers an alternative, and maybe, you know, they’re not they have they don’t have all the features yet, but on the roadmap, you know, they’re playing this and that and, you know, great team and good backers, and great community. So that’s just that’s just kind of where I’ve gone from, and I used to be kind of one of those more things like, Oh, this isn’t as decentralize or censorship resistant and as is that but, but, but, you know, I would say I’m more of like a kind of a incremental approach myself, where incremental ism has been used against us for, you know, years and years in the past, but now It may be maybe to get the masses to adopt certain things we don’t need to go fully you know crypto anarchists maybe we can just kind of incrementally get there and just use technology as as a way where indeed show people that hey technology can be used for you know obviously obviously very good things that they can they can help us move money you know communicate with each other.
Rob McNealy
For other you’re singing my song you know I say the same thing like with Tusk were delegated proof of stake chain we are we are not quote unquote. So decentralized is say maybe one of the bigger block chains out there, though, the definition of what decentralize This seems to change a lot but here’s the thing. The masses don’t give a shit about something being decentralized. They want something that works. They don’t care that PayPal centralized they don’t get a Venmo was centralized. They don’t care that you know, authorize net is centralized or visa, they don’t care. They want their problem solved. And so it’s funny when you know a lot of the Maxis will argue about Well, it’s not decentralized. And I’m like, okay, but these people don’t care about that. But how about, but what would be better would would a local credit union one cryptocurrency or would a local credit union be a preferred business vendor than maybe a major national bank? You know, there’s a trade off there. They’re very different. I mean, I use I personally like credit unions, I don’t have account at a major bank, because I like the fact that I can vote for the board of my credit union. And to me, I still have more control over that relationship with the credit union because I can go talk to the vice president pretty easily if I want to I have actually. Whereas with the major bank, I don’t have that. So to me, that’s that whole spectrum, right. And it seems like a lot of people that are more libertarian minded seem to have a real difficult time with incremental and, you know, spectrum kind of things. That nuance right. And I agree with you and so what tasks are like, I’ll give you I’m Neil saying the same thing you are as over the top We’re trying to focus on going out and getting people interested when crypto as something that’s going to solve a problem. And then in our roadmap long term, we’re building out more resiliency and more, you know, redundancy into our network. And that’s, we got a big plan on that, if we’re successful with the first part. You know, I think it’s like this, and I think you’re doing the same thing, right? You want to build out, look, we just need to get something out there. So people can start, you know, communicating in a way without immediately being just ghosted. Right. And then you build out those other features that you want. I mean, Facebook can build all this stuff overnight, right? YouTube didn’t build that stuff all overnight, right? I mean, it takes time. You got to have a plan. And you know what, it takes a dedicated team, a dedicated visionary to grow that right and unfortunately, and this is my criticism of really hardcore Bitcoin maximalist and decentralized so that I don’t believe that a lot of these decentralized cryptocurrencies have these structure to get adoption, because they don’t have anybody out there guiding it. And you don’t have those visionaries out there that are out there talking to end users? Well, yeah.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, that’s one of the interesting things too about a lot of these dissension, you know, dials are decentralized organizations is that I have no problem with actually centralized leadership, as long as the leadership is doing something that the users want them to do, or, you know, actually, actually doesn’t really matter. You know, let the leadership do what they want to do. And, and hopefully, the leaders are making the right the right moves, where people will follow them. I mean, humans are made up of leaders and followers and then you know, just depends on the different aspects of your life and the different things that you buy or interact with. So so you know, I, there’s, for most things in my life, like I want to be able to follow to trust someone and follow a leader, that that, that I understand where they’re, where they’re going in their vision and all this when when we talk about all these kind of decentralized organizations and all this. I mean, really, that’s that’s actually like, you know, democracy which actually is one of the worst forms of governance in in organizations. I mean, it’s basically communism. So why well, why would we want that we want we want actually good leaders that are that are doing good things that we can we can follow versus, you know, direct democracy or communism.
Rob McNealy
Yeah, it’s interesting going from a token that we launched, and we gave it away. I mean, we launched it for free via faucet, so we never sold coins or tokens. But it’s interesting going to a project that actually has on chain governance this week, which was the big switch, right? We basically we gave up all this control. And I can tell you as an entrepreneur, that was hard. Yeah. Because as an entrepreneur, you want to control your baby, you spend two years busting your ass kind of trying to create it and then you push it out of the nest and hope that all the vultures out there, don’t eat your baby. But I think you’re Right, I think, you know, good, good leadership is hard. And especially in startups. I mean, the reason people love Elon Musk so much is because he’s rare that Ilan musk of the world are rare that they have that vision and the ability to execute on that vision. And you do need that, I think, if anything, at least, to design the system to design the protocol. And I think with the centralized projects, My take is that no one’s marketing them very well. And no one’s out there talking to end users, no one’s building them, like you would a normal project, or you know, service which means to me, I’m more of a sales and marketing guy, I don’t build I don’t build something anymore until I have a customer. And to me, when you build something, you should be building something for an intended customer. And if you’re just building something and hope there’s a customer, I just think that’s that’s a recipe for failure. And I think with what you’re doing with float, you like look, we see we see a gap in the market, right? You there are people that are really concerned learned about this there are people being before in the of the platform, and you’re trying to fill that gap. And I think that’s why I think you have a good chance of being successful with flow is Is that your understanding that you’re building something to solve an existing and recognized problem with a lot of crypto, they don’t solve any problem. Any buddies recognize problem. If you look at most kryptos do not solve a problem for anybody. They actually create more problems for most people, for the average person. crypto creates problems, it doesn’t erase them. And I think that the crypto projects in the future that are going to be the most successful at cracking that whole mass adoption nut are going to be the ones that are the best marketed. Yeah, and whatever that looks like.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Yeah, yeah. I definitely, you know, Yeah, I agree with a lot of what you’re saying. And I think that for us, you know, we’re right now we do, we do support BTC but we’re looking to add a lot of the other major all coins and trying to just make it you know, as easy as possible for users to not only buy and sell digital contents on our platform, but next year quarter one, we’re looking to also start a marketplace as well, so that people can actually sell real, you know, physical items or even services if they want to. So we’re really focused on making crypto, you know, very user friendly. And that’s one of the things that, you know, I’ve lived off crypto actually for four years this year. Unfortunately, I’ve had to deal more in VR than ended up in banks that I’d like to but but you know, I see there’s, you know, I truly believe that cryptocurrency is the future of money it’s definitely a better money. Yes, there’s a speculative speculation side to it. But But you know, if you do make the right choices over time, it looks like that you can potentially make a lot of money on cryptocurrency and in just but but there’s still a lack of ways to use cryptocurrency and and I think the future of that is not only through all the Other you know, companies and corporations and services where you can already already use cryptocurrency, but enabling people to we see the gig economy growing and enabling people to use crypto on a peer to peer basis in a marketplace where they can sell, buy and sell digital and physical goods and services is the future that, you know, it won’t be the kind of this this full kind of crypto anarchist dream won’t happen overnight. But, but but through, you know, through through proper, proper implementation is very achievable because I think the end result is a more more peaceful, cheaper, a faster way to to do business and then communicate with people. And I think that that you know, the
Rob McNealy
Oh, we dropped out again. I lost you again. Right at the end Now you’re back
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Hello.
Rob McNealy
Oh there you are you’re back now.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I you know it’s weird because I don’t have issues I’ve had like one issue with zoom before but my on my internet is really good so I don’t know what’s going on
Rob McNealy
Oh we’re close enough but I think you’re right i think it is the future as well and you know I really enjoyed our time today and I want you to keep me up to date on when you got things rolling out with slope because I I think this is something the market needs.
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
I really I really appreciate you having me on and appreciate the chat.
Rob McNealy
Where can people find out more?
Kingsley Edwards – Flote.App
Find us at Flote.app F L O T E dot A P P or JoinFlote.com. Again Flote is spelled a little differently and and also my I’m King King on Flote. So I was able to grab that username somehow. But But yeah, so you can you go to Flote.app/King. That’s where I post most of my stuff. And we actually haven’t so that you can like share to Twitter and all this kind of stuff we are going to be implementing so that you can share to Facebook too. So we’re trying to make it as easy, like I said, as easy as people to switch over, and at least create a second account on Flote.
Rob McNealy
Perfect. Kingsley, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And if you like this content, folks, make sure you subscribe to our social media platform channel that you can find listed at RobMcNealy.com.
Episode Links
Kingsley Edwards – CEO of Flote
Kingsley Edwards, CEO of Flote.app, talks with Rob McNealy about their social media app, which was built with a focus on liberty and freedom of speech.