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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