Julian Fahrer - 00:00:00:
Look, there's a paradox. There's kind of a tradeoff. On the one hand, information wants to be really expensive because it's so valuable, so insanely valuable that it seems like it would make sense to put a high price on it. And on the other hand, it wants to be free. The Internet has given people, you know, there's been a kind of Cambrian explosion of new ways for people to earn money, new ways for people to monetize their time in so many different ways. The reliability of reviews, I think, is only ever as good as the incentive structure underneath it. Again, we're talking about a search problem. Like, people have some problem that they're trying to solve in their lives, and they're looking for directions on how to get there. Micropayments payments in general are just going to allow companies and advertisers and users to engage in a market for the exchange of information and the solving of these search problems. Transcending advertising is the holy grail.
Kevin Rooke - 00:01:03:
Julian Fahrer is the CEO and cofounder of Apollo, a platform for discovering and writing reviews about the products you love and a place where great reviews get rewarded with Bitcoin. In our conversation, we explored the idea that information should be free, but your time should not be. We also discussed the issues that are facing review platforms today and how the Lightning Network and payments can improve the quality of reviews on platforms like Apollo. I've also added Julian to today's show, Splits. So if you enjoy this episode and if you learn something new, the best way you can support the show is by sending sats over the Lightning Network. You can use any Podcasting 2.0 app, but my favorite to use is Fountain. Quick shout out before we get into today's episode. This show is sponsored by Voltage. Voltage is the industry standard and next generation provider of Lightning Network infrastructure. Today's show is also sponsored by Stakwork. Stakwork is a Lightning powered transcription tool that takes the best of AIs and humans to generate better, faster, and less expensive transcripts. We'll have more from Voltage and Stakwork later in the show.
Kevin Rooke - 00:02:18:
Julian, welcome to the show. Thank you for joining me today. I am excited to talk about all that you're building first before we get into Apollo, how it works, all that. Let's start with your background in Bitcoin. Give listeners an idea of how you first discovered Bitcoin and why you decided to build on Lightning.
Julian Fahrer - 00:02:38:
Sure, yeah. Well, first, thanks for having me, Kevin. It's great to be here. Big fan of the show. Yeah. So how we got into Bitcoin. So my Bitcoin background is kind of a tech background. I've been working in Silicon Valley kind of more traditional tech for about five years and so actually moved over to San Francisco from Australia in 2017 to get into tech and really didn't know anything about either tech or certainly not Bitcoin, but just kind of being immersed in the scene and in the industry and ecosystem. You can't not realize when all these people around you are kind of going crazy during the bull run and making and losing a lot of money. And so that was when it, I guess, first showed up on my radar in a big way. But after that, obviously pretty quiet as things tend to get during bear markets. And along the way I started a company that was a little recruiting company. Ended up selling that to Sequoia Capital, which is one of the major VCs and spent a couple of years there working with lots of different early stage portfolio companies, doing all kinds of different things, really soaking up just what it's like to be, I guess, on the investment side of the tech industry. And while doing that, that's when I really started to go down the rabbit hole in kind of 2018, 2019 got sucked in as we all do in our own different ways. And then, yeah, I guess 2020 happens and then the rest is history. And so fast forward to start of this year and decided to work on Bitcoin full time. I knew that's what I had to do and what I was going to do.
Kevin Rooke - 00:04:45:
Was there anything in particular about Lightning and Bitcoin that stuck out to you this year? Why did you build on, let's say, on Lightning rather than building on any other thing that you could have built on in the crypto ecosystem? What stuck out to you there?
Julian Fahrer - 00:05:03:
Yeah. So I think Lightning is Lightning is really exciting for several reasons, and I certainly want to preface it by saying, like, I'm early on the learning curve, for sure, but what has really excited me about the potential of Lightning is, I guess, the big problem that I think about and care most about and I guess, was my real motivation for working on Bitcoin full time in the first place. I was helping adoption. And so for me, the Lightning story is one of opening up to, I guess, the rest of the world, the next billion Bitcoin is, and finding new ways of getting people connected to the network. There are a few, I suppose, light bulb moments for me this year. One was spending a bit of time in El Salvador. I actually have had a couple of trips down to El Zonte this year. And yeah, certainly seeing it use in real life with normal people just going about their day to day lives to varying degrees, running on Lightning, that was certainly a turning point for me. And the other thing was when thinking about Apollo and thinking about our business, as I said, we started Apollo because we want to help Bitcoin adoption. Very straightforwardly. And this year has been, I guess, a challenging year to do that in the way that you normally might do that, which is just trying to get people to buy Bitcoin. It's not so easy during bear market when the price is crashing. And it's funny, we actually started out doing that. The first thing we did and we said, hey, we want to start this company, is I kind of hit the streets. And I was like, all right, well, I'm going to learn what it's like to talk to people about Bitcoin. And so I went to farmers markets and cold approached people on the street and was hosting kind of meetups in the town nearest to me and just learning what it's like to, I guess, go to the very top of the funnel and find out what it's like to try and mince new Bitcoins. And it turns out it's really hard for lots of different reasons, particularly, as I said, with the market the way it is. But to bring it back to Lightning, I think one of the most astounding things about Lightning this year has been and this is something that you have spoken about and lots of people have observed, is that the capacity of the Lightning Network continues to go up independent of Bitcoin's spot price. And so when we saw that happening, we realize, hey, here is maybe a different way of both building on Bitcoin, talking about Bitcoin, helping people to experience it that can maybe allow us to, as I say, build in the bear market without having to do something that is so focused on Bitcoin's, spot price or reliant on it.
Kevin Rooke - 00:08:25:
Right now, I want to get into the idea of earning Bitcoin. I want to get into Apollo. But first I want to highlight a quote from the Apollo site. It's attributed to Steve Wozniak, and it's a quote that says, information should be free, but your time should not. Can you explain the meaning of that quote for me?
Julian Fahrer - 00:08:49:
Sure, yeah. So I first became familiar with the first part of that quote, the first half of that quote, which is, information should be free. It's kind of a meme that I've seen floating around generally also in, I guess, cypherpunk Bitcoin circles. Like, it's just a popular idea, right? Information should be free. There are kind of like noble piracy ideas bound up in that and just this, you know, this idea of bringing down barriers, bringing down walls, bringing down anything that's stopping the free flow of information. It also is something that I've heard people talk about in the context of maybe being a counterargument to either the utility or the likely success of micropayments, which the idea of being like, hey, information wants to be free, people don't want people don't, like, paywalls anything that gets in the way. Any, like, dikes that you put up in the river or anything that stops this flow is because of some fundamental, like something intrinsic to its nature. You're kind of running contrary to it and therefore is unlikely to succeed. In other words, it's just to me, like, information wants to be free. But I was curious about it, and so I looked it up. Right. And so the actual origin of this quote is from, I think there was some kind of hacker conference in the Bay Area four, and Steve Wozniak and a bunch of other Apple folks were together in a room and hashing out, really, the early days of what it meant to be. What does open source mean? What does billing for the public mean? It's kind of an interesting time capsule to go, and it's not so easy to track down, but you can find a clip of this kind of back and forth. It's kind of a Socratic style debate anyway. And so there's this back and forth with Steve Wozniak, and I think.
Kevin Rooke - 00:11:01:
You and Brandon right?
Julian Fahrer - 00:11:03:
Yeah. The kind of extended quote is, to summarize it, it's basically this idea where Woz is saying, look, there's a paradox. It's kind of a trade off. On the one hand, information wants to be really expensive because it's so valuable, so insanely valuable that it seems like it would make sense to put a high price on it. And on the other hand, it wants to be free because by its nature, it's so easy to replicate and transmit and send to anybody in the world. So there's a tension. There's a back and a fourth and then a synthesis. I think towards the end of this clip where I think it was, it says, look, okay, so information wants to be free, or information should be free, but your time should not. And so I think that the real understanding of this idea is that we need to reconcile these two concepts. Yes, information has this nature of information that wants to be free and replicate itself, but people's time is valuable, and people never have liked giving away the fruits of their labor for nothing. And so, yeah, I found that to be a really interesting quote because of this maybe irreconcilable tension between the two. And then I think the reason why we put on our website is because we're building micropayments into everything that we do, Lightning micropayments. And so we want people to create value on Apollo, and we want people to get value from Apollo, and we think the best way to do that is to incentivize it with the market, and that maybe microbiomes might be the way to do that.
Kevin Rooke - 00:13:00:
So I want to break that quote down into two parts here, and I want to get your sense for how well we are doing at accomplishing these things. Right. So the first part, information should be free. If we fast forward that quote from the 80s, we're now almost 40 years further along. Have we accomplished that part, information should be free. And then the second part, have we accomplished your time should not be free.
Julian Fahrer - 00:13:31:
So I guess there's an optimist and a pessimist view to both of those questions. On the one hand, I think just on the information side of things. Undoubtedly information is so in the one big obvious way, which is like the proliferation of internet adoption, information is so much more free than it was several decades ago. And this is the optimist version. I think clearly it's been an innovation on the scale of the invention of the printing press in terms of the significance for humankind. I'm not saying anything new or interesting here, but that's like the superficial answer. There is undoubtedly information is way more free and it's awesome. And perhaps the pessimist view is, or the cautionary part of it is I think information is being increasingly captured and corralled and there are guardrails put up around what people have access to what they can consume in a way that is also a relatively recent change, I think, in this story. And I think most people are familiar with the ways in which the predominance of platforms on the internet has changed the free flow of information generally. When I was growing up, the internet was completely different. I used to have an RSS feeder that pulled in information from like 100 different websites and I would download things freely without worrying about the consequences. And all these other things like just the Internet in 2008, 2005 was a completely different place. And so I think in some ways it's clearly less information is clearly less free. But yeah, there's an optimist and a pessimist case. As for time being valued, perhaps you could frame it in a similar way. I think the internet has given people, there's been a kind of Cambrian explosion of new ways for people to earn money, new ways for people to monetize their time in so many different ways. And that has been a boon for civilization, for international commerce, for just when you connect people around the world, you also find you're going to connect them in ways where they can exchange value. And so, so many new ways of valuing time have been invented or have emerged also. We have these giant, parasitic sucks on our time, and anybody with a smartphone is victim to this, where it's like if you tally up all the minutes and all the hours in your life in a week, that if you look back on how much time you spent on social media and other, let's say, just parts of the Internet that you maybe wish that you hadn't in a week. I think an honest assessment of that I can speak for myself, an honest assessment of that would say, you know what, I didn't properly value that time or I certainly didn't get maybe rewarded for it in ways that I could in a world in which some technological changes happen. And so I think the Lightning Network and we can talk about that, but I think there are going to be, there already are and there will be continue to be new emergent ways of repricing the time that I think people are maybe, well, not pricing properly, not valuing properly. So excited about that.
Kevin Rooke - 00:17:45:
Right, okay, so let's get into Apollo now, because you have chosen the avenue for figuring out whether or not people are pricing their time appropriately. The avenue you have chosen is reviews, and you found that this is going to be a place where you can maybe make some like, maybe there's an arbitrage opportunity here, right. Where people aren't being rewarded today, they can be rewarded in the future. Talk to me about why you chose reviews. What was the backstory of, like, why is this the right place to focus on when you're thinking about helping people monetize their time?
Julian Fahrer - 00:18:21:
Yeah, so the backstory to reviews, it kind of goes back to earlier when I was talking about this problem of Bitcoin adoption, and basically back to when I was out on the street trying to convince people that Bitcoin is a great thing or at least gauge their opinions on it. I learned a bunch doing that. One is maybe two major takeaways. One is that it's really hard to predict what a Bitcoin it looks like. Who is going to respond positively, who is not, who is going to tell me to get lost? That's just a really hard thing to figure out right now. But the second major takeaway from that was even when people responded positively, not just in those interactions, but just generally when I talk to people in my own life about Bitcoin, when people respond positively and they're curious and they want to learn more, there's been this recurring flavor of question that comes up. It's like the very next follow up question people have, which is, all right, sounds good, but what's next? Where can you send me? Where do I go? I guess I never really thought about that. When you're on the other side of the rabbit hole and you've gone down it and you know all the podcasters and you know all the exchanges and you know everything, at least you think you might know everything about Bitcoin. It's hard, I think, often to remember what it's like to be approaching it for the first time. And the more that I was in touch with people who were approaching it for the very first time, as I said, the more I realized I didn't have a great answer to that very basic, fundamental question of where next? Where can you send me? And that seemed like a problem to solve. And I think if we were talking about other niche interests or other companies or other technologies, often there is an answer to this, right, which is like, go to the home page, talk to the company. There will be a sales rep you can talk to or something. But for Bitcoin, it doesn't exist. Right? Because, you know, the Bitcoin ecosystem reflects the Bitcoin network. Like it's decentralized. I mean, there is a Bitcoin.com, but we don't have to talk about Bitcoin.com for other reasons. And so that was a bit of a light bulb moment. And then we kind of also realized that, hey, I think we're talking about a search problem. This seems like it might be a search problem. And in other industries or other verticals, let's say there are vertical specific search engines. This is a category of product called vertical search. So people are probably familiar with Yelp. Like, you could call that a vertical search engine for finding restaurants. There are a bunch. There's this Glassdoor. If you want to work at a company and learn what it's what the culture is like and like to get paid, there's G2. If you want to compare different enterprise software products, there's this category of vertical search. That you see increasingly showing up in different places, maybe in part because of the degrading performance of the horizontal search engines over time, like Google. And we can talk about that as well. But in any case, vertical search is a thing, and we seem like we were trying to attack a search problem. And so we thought, well, hey, there should be some kind of vertical search solution for Bitcoin. There should be not a completely centralized owned and operated answer to every question that people have. But maybe at the threshold of the rabbit hole you can instead of being completely lost and having to figure out your own way, what if you could just like see, okay, these are the products and services and sources of content that are on offer and this is what other Bitcoin is saying about them. How people and so forth. So really, it looks like a lot of these other products I've described in many ways. I guess the foundation of all of that, the base layer really, of this is the review, the humble, like, PeerToPeer review. That's what separates I think that's where, as I said, that's the base layer. All these businesses are built on reviews, and there are good reasons for that. But yeah, that's, I guess, the story at least of how we wound up focusing on reviews to begin with.
Kevin Rooke - 00:23:19:
Nice. And when you think now about the vision for Apollo right now on your site, you have various Bitcoin products that people can review. Is this something that you want to continue to do for Bitcoiners only? Is this something you want to expand to take on the likes of Yelp and Glassdoor and Google? What does the vision look like for you?
Julian Fahrer - 00:23:44:
Good question. So to begin with, we're focused on Bitcoin isn't Bitcoin products. And there are a couple of reasons for that. One is that's what we really care about, where our mission really is, as I said, it is to facilitate and help with Bitcoin adoption. And so we're kind of laser focused on that right now. But what we're also we're not just building like another version of Yelp for Bitcoin. We think there's a genuine innovation here built on the Lightning Network, which is the micropayments natively embedded into the app and maybe one day into the internet generally. So you can sign up for Apollo, write a review, earn some sats in a bunch of different ways. Like you can if somebody upvotes your review, they'll send you sats, vice versa, leave comments, leave replies. And so what we're trying to build with that is a market mechanism of incentives that I mean, it is like product skew agnostic. It doesn't have to just work with Bitcoin products. That's where we're starting. But certainly the vision could extend beyond that. I think an intermediate stage for us is we want to be the place to go to start this kind of search in Bitcoin. And I think as Bitcoin swallows crypto, it'll be Bitcoin and crypto. And that in itself is a pretty, I think, bold ambition to have. We want to be one of the most trusted sources of information generally for Bitcoin. And we hope that when the next bull run happens, as millions of people join the network, they're coming to Apollo to learn about it for the first time. But for sure, what underlies it all, I think, is an incentive structure that can grow beyond it. And whether it's us that do it or somebody else, I think at some point in the future, this is the future of, like a post ads based, post attention based internet economy is something running on payments like this.
Kevin Rooke - 00:26:13:
So how does the incentive change for someone writing reviews for the community, reading reviews? How does an incentive change when you flip on Lightning payments?
Julian Fahrer - 00:26:28:
Well, I think the incentives there are a lot of things that go into incentives. One is just the nominal amount of sats that are flowing around. And I should also say, like, we're really early and figuring all this out on the fly. And so that's part of the fun of it, too, is trying to like the way I picture it is we've got this big dashboard of all these levers and buttons to pull that we think could affect incentives in different ways. And rather than there being one formula that's going to solve everything, it's probably going to look like tinkering for some time to figure out what it is. But we have a few, I guess, higher level targets in mind for how we would describe the marketplace. And so all of that tinkering is hopefully going to get us there. Some of these things that we're focused on, really, I would describe them as the characteristics of any successful marketplace. And we are describing, I think, a marketplace for reviews or a marketplace for the exchange of information. And so one question you can ask is, what does a good marketplace look like? Well, or a good market? And so it needs to have a few things. It needs to be Liquid. It needs to be transparent. There needs to be low barriers to entry. And also part of that is people need to be properly incentivised with the actual rewards that they're getting. But there are a number of features and then the payments part of it is one of them or one set of features, maybe undergirding all of the rest of them, too. And so, yeah, not sure if this is like maybe a super detailed answer, but certainly these are the kind of high level principles we're thinking about. And then for the next who knows how long, I mean, short to medium term, it's going to be tinkering. So how much should people get eventually? I think we want to get to the point where it increasingly looks like a self-sustained economy where people are funding their own accounts and they can certainly I think we're building this now. By the time this airs, people will be able to fund their own Lightning wallet. They'll be able to withdraw, they'll be able to log in with Lightning and do all the cool things that Lightning enables us to do. But the tinkering will be with. All right. Also, how much should we reward people for posting reviews? How much should we moderate those reviews versus letting it be, I guess, a freer market? How much should people get rewarded for getting an upgrade or a comment or apply? All of these types of things I think we're going to play with and help us push us towards our kind of definition of a good, healthy market for the exchange of information. But the cool part is I don't know that one of those really exists today. And so it's kind of figuring it out for the first time.
Kevin Rooke - 00:29:38:
Yeah. So for listeners who aren't familiar the way the platform works today, correct me if I'm wrong, anyone can post a review for free, and anyone can kind of like tip or boost a review that they see and then is that the mechanism that ranks those reviews?
Julian Fahrer - 00:29:56:
Yeah. So I guess if you think about how Amazon works, like, you can review a product on Amazon, post it, and then other people might vote on, like, I think was this review helpful? And it's like a thumbs up or a thumbs down. And we basically have the same system where it's well, minus the thumbs down, there's just one thumbs up, and it's a little Lightning bolt. And it's an upload button. It's a tip button. So you sign up to Apollo, you review a product or a service that you know something about. Right now we have a kind of manual moderation process so it's not completely ungated. Like, we have some review guidelines to filter for the obvious things like spam, obscenity, defamatory language, whatever else. But if people meet the guidelines and the bar is, like, not that high right now, or we want to be accommodating of different styles of review, but then people can post it and from that point, it's just what do other people think of it? If they like it, click the Lightning bolt up, vote it, and then everybody has an account which has a sats balance into which you will be earning sats from other people on the platform.
Kevin Rooke - 00:31:11:
I see. Now, when it comes to negative, you mentioned there's no thumbs down, right? Like, Amazon's got thumbs up, thumbs down. YouTube has a thumbs up, thumbs down. But I think they actually made a change recently where they hide the thumbs down count. I get the sense that it's a helpful feature for social platforms to have a negative. Like, you know, on Reddit, there's an upload, there's a down vote as well. Right. You have the ability to show that this was not good, this piece of content. I didn't like it. It's not good. Is that something that we need to have in a Lightning enabled kind of social platform? One example is Stacker News. Right now they have a tip or a boost button. You can add funds. There's no negative. There's no direct negative. Like lower this one. Like, put this one further down the page. I don't want to see it. Is that something that's necessary when we're using money to determine what is valuable? Can we just continue to, like, bid up the things that are good and continue to, like, pay for good things and hope that drowns out the bad stuff? Or does there also need to be long term, does there need to be this negative mechanism to determine this stuff is bad, I don't want to see it? And can you do that with money?
Julian Fahrer - 00:32:50:
There's one big challenge to doing it with money, and we've spoken about this, and I think we probably will continue to. It's something that we haven't reached a final determination on. But the big problem with it is in a world in which you can upvote someone positively and send them sats, which seems like a good thing, does the flip side of that have to mirror it? And I think if it does, it would be problematic. In other words, if you can take sats from someone by downloading them on its face, it seems to me to introduce a new incentive problem. Where I'm not saying there's no way to get around that, but in a world in which you can costlessly take money from someone, I think we have a pretty good idea of what that might devolve into unless we're really careful about it. That's one immediate objection, I think, to do it with money. As I said, unless you're really careful about it. There are other objections too, just in general, and I think other social platforms have dealt with this, where I think the data shows that, like, in general, negative reaction buttons, down vote buttons, are not so good for engagement. Like, you want a lot of positive engagement. You don't want to be hiding content. I've kind of seen this on. I mean, I'm not a huge Reddit user, but I've kind of seen this over time where it's like if something is mildly controversial or interesting or bucks a consensus, if we get immediately flooded with downboats and buried, it's gone forever. So there are many economic reasons, maybe social reasons, just reasons around like the health of discourse in general that make down votes problematic. But I think there are some like longer term and haven't certainly built any of this and maybe it will be a while before it's on the roadmap, but I think there are maybe more sophisticated ways of signaling unhelpfulness that are less reliant on individual actors. And so maybe if a certain threshold like number of users have flagged something in a certain way, you can maybe I guess it's more of a distributed consensus, right? As opposed to just putting all the onus on or giving the decision making power to one person to decide who's getting Sats and who's not.
Kevin Rooke - 00:35:34:
I hope you've enjoyed the show so far. Just a quick message from our sponsor Voltage. Voltage is the industry leading provider of Bitcoin and Lightning node infrastructure. Many of your favorite Lightning apps and services already use Voltage today to scale their business quickly and easily without maintenance. Voltage also offers an inbound liquidity product called Flow, which allows you to get easy access to inbound liquidity for your node. Overall, Voltage is creating the industry standard suite of noncustodial products, helping brands, engineers, and startups scale. To learn more, visit voltage. Cloud.
Kevin Rooke - 00:36:14:
When you look at the review ecosystem today, do you see the same problems that we hear about in? We have people have talked about fake news, there's bolts on Twitter, there's all sorts of issues with information. And it's becoming increasingly clear that some of these platforms can kind of, like, tilt the board and kind of like, move things in the direction that they want things to go, whether that's sharing certain articles over other articles, censoring things, whether that's bolts, creating fake engagement on people's content or attacking other people and trying to get their account suspended. Does that same problem exist in review landscape today?
Julian Fahrer - 00:37:06:
I think it does, undoubtedly in a couple of different ways. The reliability of reviews, I think, is only ever as good as the incentive structure underneath it. And so some ways in which that is problematic today for certain platforms, for example, if we just want to talk about how people are rewarded for reviews, certain platforms, I won't name them by name, but have a very opaque, arbitrary process for how they incentivize reviews. There's some mix of like, hey, maybe we'll send you an Amazon gift card or we'll send you some money via PayPal. You don't necessarily know which is going to be or how much or when or on what basis. The models that people have today for rewarding reviews are not so good. And so the market I think is a little bit broken in that sense again, which is one way that I think Lightning is just a clear order of magnitude improvement. But there are also other, I guess, social problems, as you said, that mirror other information exchange problems that we see in other places. So kind of a favorite of mine. It's always funny to see there's kind of this meme now where you see people comparing like aggregate critic review scores for movies versus audience scores on like Rotten Tomatoes or something. And so people kind of for various reasons, something is politically controversial or it's not. And so I think people are like this is an example now where we say, hey, there are interested parties not dispassionately reviewing products, pieces of content or services or anything. And so reliability is breaking down there. That's one way. Another way is just spam. There's an enormous amount of spam out there for some research that I've done into some of some other platforms that rely on reviews. Estimates say that up to 20% of it is just spam. And then you have some proportion on top of that that is clearly they're not genuine reviews. I mean, reviews depending on the incentive structure, the moderation, that can be not, they're often not that hard to fake. And so the long tail of user generated I mean, this is, I think, the case for all user generated content, but the long tail is often pretty unreliable, I think, when you also add in AI to the mix. Like, in a world in which everybody just has some really easy to use GPT-3 front end that can spin up an infinite amount of written content. Like, I don't think we're quite prepared or understand what the deluge of information that's going to come from that is going to do in a world in which posting information out there is costless. And so I think that is another I think Lightning micropayments are actually coming just in time because in a world in which people can verifiably price information and you can see that this information has been priced by other people, like there's a real human marketplace for it right now. That's the only way that I can see that we're going to be able to realistically distinguish between completely fake information and the stuff that people are actually using to help them solve problems in a real way.
Kevin Rooke - 00:41:05:
Now, does the introduction of money cause any second order effects where it may skew the review process? Like, I imagine if someone is willing to spend a bunch of money to upload good reviews on their particular product in a way that almost turns into an ad, right? Are there safeguards in place to prevent someone with a lot of money from just uploading good stuff, making people think it's a good product? What do you think about that?
Julian Fahrer - 00:41:42:
Yeah, so the answer is well, yes and no for us. We're really early and so we haven't built a lot of this stuff yet, but I'm actually really excited about, for example, what Kean is doing with Stacker News with his kind of Web of trust algorithm. And I know other people have built similar things where the process of floating something to the top of a ranked search is not it's more sophisticated and nuanced than the raw count of uploads or the raw count of sats boosted or tipped or however you want to describe it. And so it's reliant on, hey, what is your reputation on the platform? What is the reputation of other things that you've voted on, commented on? And so there's a more holistic way of determining, again, what's real and what's fake and separating people from noise. But the answer to the question of like, hey, are there incentive problems? Is absolutely yes. And so that's on our big board of dials and knobs and levers to play with to get the incentives right. That's a big part of it. And we've already seen it's really interesting. We're not giving away many stats right now to people to post reviews, but it's enough already where people are really excited about the stats that they're getting. Like it might be 20 US dollar terms, might be $0.20 worth of sats, but we've seen people who are so excited about that they're going to sign up and post a bunch of reviews. And for us, the challenge is separating, okay, to what extent there's a healthy version of that, where it's like a healthy engagement with the platform, where people want to share information and it's good information. And then, yes, we want sats to be part of that motivation, but we don't want it to be the total sole motivation. And if that's all people care about is extracting the maximum amount of stats, then it gets problematic. In general terms, yes, it's something that is going to be a challenge, but then also specifically and weirdly, and it might be just a feature of the fact that our earliest users are the people that are most excited about sats in general, but even the correct nominal amounts to apply to get people into the right patterns of behavior that we want. Even that's not super clear right now. And so I think when it comes to stats, there's actually maybe a bias on a positive end of just how far people are willing to go to get their hands on some.
Kevin Rooke - 00:44:23:
Yeah, that's fair. I want to think more about distribution and how do you get to the scale where you become the best source of information for Bitcoin? Because when I look at other review platforms, I see Yelp reviews that are basically attached to every restaurant I search for. Google reviews, natively embedded Airbnb reviews, obviously natively embedded in the apps, starting from scratch and not having the distribution of Google or Airbnb or any of these other platforms or Amazon. How do you get your reviews in front of the people that are searching for these products. What does that distribution strategy look like?
Julian Fahrer - 00:45:16:
So part of the answer there is this is why we're focused on the Bitcoin and Lightning community to begin with. One of the great features of it is because it's so insular. To some degree, insular is not even the right word. Everyone's really highly engaged in this community with new companies that are being started, the products that are out there. There's a real organic, community driven thirst for making sure the best information services gets into the hands of people who need it. Just the tightness of this community I think, makes it a really good place to start. And so then specifically what we need to do it's like anybody who starts a marketplace company is you need to bootstrap a network. Bootstrapping a network is kind of hard. I actually was listening to your interview with Wildcraft at Vida and he talks about the same thing, right? And I think the way he describes it is he said, hey, we're casting a bunch of nets out there and trying to catch people in different ways and draw them into the network. And then there's kind of like alchemical process involved with that where maybe, I'm sure he's doing a lot more sophisticated stuff too, but to some degree starting any network, bootstrapping any network, there's a bit of an alchemy involved which requires doing things to get to critical mass. That's what we're focused on first is how do we get to critical mass where we've got both sides of the marketplace. I think in our case, it's actually three sides to the marketplace. You have people writing reviews, you have people searching, reading reviews, and then you also have the companies or the creators, the product owners on that third side. So from a distribution point of view, it's going to be engaging all three sides. And I think for us in particular, the great challenge for us will be how do we remain a trustworthy verifiable? Our reviews are trustworthy, the information is verifiable in some way. And also how do we engage with the other major stakeholders like the companies themselves while not compromising that trust in the first place. And so on the one hand, they're going to be a big part of our distribution strategy because we want companies and eventually we're going to start posting content as well. So we want content creators to care about what people are saying about their stuff on our platform and take a direct interest in what's going on. And we've got some ideas of different partnership models there. And so distribution I think, is going to be leveraging the networks of all of these different stakeholders who will take an interest in the platform. Obviously we're going to need to make sure that we are not just farming out all of our users to companies who have an unbiased interest in capturing their attention. But I think we've got a good plan on how to do that as well.
Kevin Rooke - 00:48:49:
Right now, you mentioned you got to get to critical mass at some point, and all networks do. I want to hear your thoughts on how you'll figure out whether you're at critical mass and if you extend your vision beyond just Apollo and you look at the products in the Lightning ecosystem, which ones today, if any, are at that critical mass?
Julian Fahrer - 00:49:17:
Yeah, that second question is hard. So I'll think about that. But I think the way we think about critical mass, critical mass is a little bit like, you know, talking about Product market fit. It's one of those things where people like, I've spoken to founders who have been there and I've watched interviews, people talk about this process, and it seems like it's one of those things where when you know, you know, but also if you think you might be there, you're probably not there yet. And so there's this kind of from what I know about it and from what I expect to happen, there will be a great sucking sound and force that's just so irresistible that it should make itself manifest and self evident. For us, it's going to look like, hey, when we get to a point where things are breaking, like the volume of reviews is so high, the number of people on all those different sides of the marketplace wanting to engage with us and partner with us and vice versa is getting to a point where the market is growing beyond the extent to which we are kind of actively simulating it ourselves. I think we'll have a good idea that at that point this will be an organically growing thing, and maybe at that point we'll reach something like Product Market Fit or Critical Mass.
Kevin Rooke - 00:50:56:
Right. Now, when you think about Product Market Fit and you think about what a business model might look like, I was just looking at Yelp's numbers. They're a public company, and they release their earnings reports every few months. Surprisingly, they're doing over a billion dollars of revenue per year, and 90 plus percent of it is coming from advertising. What is a business model look like for Apollo? Do you think that by introducing money, it changes that percentage of revenue that comes from advertising? Does money act as advertising? As we talked about a few minutes earlier, what shifts might should people expect to see in Apollo's business model versus the business models that you see today from, like, Google and Yelp and the traditional review platforms?
Julian Fahrer - 00:52:00:
Yeah. So transcending advertising is the holy grail here, right? Like, the vision is at the highest level that natively embedded money into Internet native money and payments will be a paradigm shifting innovation such that some of these business models you've spoken about are either obsolete or they're just no longer the best way to make money. And I think for us, that's what we're really excited about. There would be an easy way to run a business like this, which would be to do it in the web two way, which would be to say, hey, we're going to get a bunch of eyeballs on our stuff. We're going to pour all of our money into SEO, and then we're going to convert that into advertising dollars. And that's just not it's not interesting. It's not but not only is not interesting, you know, it's not just like aesthetic or reasons that we wouldn't want to pursue that path, but it also is because we genuinely think that, as I said, internet native micropayments can unlock something new and greater and completely different. And, you know, to some degree we don't know like what we to a larger we don't know what that looks like, but we do think that I certainly think that these advertising based business models are not long for this world. Like the clock is ticking on this. We could call it Fiat style thinking, if for no other reason than I think a lot of these businesses rely on just a cost of capital that doesn't exist today and it might be some time before it comes back. If you want to start a business like that, you need a lot of venture capital and it's not clear that anybody is going to have access to capital to make those kind of investments on a return timeline that I think is probably not particularly advertising for investors today. So whether or not we like it, I think a lot those kind of ads based SEO optimized businesses, perhaps a thing of the past. But yeah, looking to the future, I think we don't know what we don't know about what Lightning micropayments can unlock, but I think it's a paradigm shift. And so that's what we're going to try and figure out. What's at the other end of the tunnel.
Kevin Rooke - 00:54:59:
Yeah. Now, what happens to advertising? Because I can see the viewpoint that payments may unlock some new use cases and may reduce people's reliance on ads. We're seeing that already with Twitter Elon taking over. Now, if you have a revenue stream from users paying, you don't need to rely as heavily on ads. But one of the comments he made when he was just kind of announcing the acquisition was ads can be good if they're targeted well, they can be content. And I don't see a future where ads disappear entirely. I don't buy that narrative that I think is pretty popular in the Bitcoin community, but I don't know what role ads will play. What is your feeling for like, how payments and ads will interact with each other online and what does that shift look like? Is it going to be all payments? We're already living in a world where it's basically all ads online. What does that composition look like?
Julian Fahrer - 00:56:14:
Yeah. So, firstly, I would say I agree with Elon. Right? And I think it should be uncontroversial that ads can be useful and be valuable for the simple reason that, again, we're talking about a search problem. Like people have some problem that they're trying to solve in their lives and they're looking for directions on how to get there. And so there's like a low resolution, crude version of Ads, which is maybe what we've lived with for a long time, which it doesn't necessarily look like it's solving a search problem because they are static and poorly targeted. And the product of some people who are in a boardroom sitting around Mad Men style like crudely, trying to figure out what the right ad is going to look like. That doesn't necessarily look like a sophisticated search problem that's being solved, but I think it is. And so when it's done well, there's a real need that's being met there, I think, in the future. Like what we could see is just more of a synthesis between, on the one hand, user generated and priced and uploaded and valued content and company generated advertising. Like a melding of those two streams where, you know, it's not to say that it's hard to separate them in a way that's going to be misleading, but there's just more of a dynamic dialogue between the two. And so what could this look like on Apollo or anywhere else? Well, if a company has somewhere where they can enter into this dialogue with their users, we already see this in like Bitcoin and Lightning space. Like companies have telegram groups and discord channels. And so in a way, you could think about that as of course you could think about that as advertising. I mean, that's why companies set up these channels, because the better job they do of communicating with their customers and their users, the more product they're going to ship, the more product they're going to sell. And so the way I see it is micropayments payments in general are just going to allow companies and advertisers and users to engage in a market for the exchange of information and the solving of these search problems. That is just much more if we go back to our kind of definition of what a good market looks like. It's just a way better version of that. It's more transparent, the barriers to entry are lower, it's a way more Liquid market for the exchange of information. And so I imagine just more of a melting pot and a synthesis of like in the past we had billboards and then we had people talking around a dinner table, whatever, and then you see these two streams merge where it's kind of just one maybe marketplace for information.
Kevin Rooke - 00:59:28:
Right. Now, when you think about using money to filter out signal and noise and doing this in like a marketplace, are there any other apps or use cases that you'd like to see built or you think might be particularly well suited towards using money as the tool that determines whether or not something is good or bad.
Julian Fahrer - 00:59:58:
Yeah, for sure. Generally, one of the things I think about when I think about micropayments is not just pricing, let's say, information uploading, a comment that you like or whatever, but it's kind of in a sense, you could maybe think about it as pricing time more generally. Like this may be getting a little bit abstract, but I think something that I something is on my mind generally is to what degree can native micropayments embedded in the way that we interact with our screens on a day to day, hour to hour basis? To what degree can that help us almost lower our time preference, maybe, to put it in Bitcoin terms? Or just to help us properly? As I said, help us properly. Price time. And so one application of this, if we go back to when we were talking about screen time earlier, the way that you can get a sense of am I happy with my screen time or not, is I get to the end of the week and I see how much I've used. But if we can shorten the feedback loop or find some way of helping people to vote on or again, just price properly how they're spending their time yeah, this is maybe the most far out their application, but I think there's a way of maybe in the future getting a sense of, like, hey, if I'm buying my time at a certain if I put a certain sat price on my time and I've just been stuck in the infinite scroll on Twitter for 90 minutes, that's costing me in a way that I feel more acutely. So that's maybe a big picture.
Kevin Rooke - 01:02:03:
So the idea there that then you charge Twitter and say, hey, Twitter, spend 90 minutes on your app. You got to pay up. Is that the idea?
Julian Fahrer - 01:02:11:
Well, Twitter maybe not so much, but, you know, charge yourself. I mean, this is I'm kind of struggling to remember it, but I think there's like a type of productivity app, these types of productivity apps exist where it's like, hey, I'm going to make a deal with myself. I have to stick to my plan or limit my screen time or do whatever and stick to my habits. And then there's some, like, carrot. There's a reward associated with that. Or even I've seen examples of it where it's like if people are trying to abstain from a vice of some kind, like, hey, I only go 90 days without drinking. You can make a bet with somebody, a friend, and they hold you accountable. And it's like you fund maybe you fund a two of two multisig wallet with a certain amount of Bitcoin. And then it's like, if I can't value my time properly, I lose access to my funds. And so I don't know what that looks like, but in a general sense. I'm excited about the possibility of people continuing to lower their time preference, value their time more.
Kevin Rooke - 01:03:24:
Makes sense. There's one app that I've been thinking about a lot. I hope someone makes this is some way to the accountability idea you just mentioned. Applying that to fitness I think would be really interesting where you have all the tools already. You have like everyone's got an Apple Watch or iPhone or some kind of device. You can track whether or not someone's actually doing activity. And maybe a person says, hey, listen, you go into an app and you say, I'm going to deposit $30 this month. And for every day I don't work out, the app is going to take a dollar or whatever, and I don't know, maybe donate it to my preferred charity or something. But you don't get the money back. And maybe that's like an accountability thing that could be interesting with payments. But you're right, there's a lot of interesting applications that I think are yet to be discovered in the Lightning Network.
Julian Fahrer - 01:04:20:
Yes. Yeah, I mean, streaming sats, right? You could be streaming sats for every minute that you're spending on Instagram above the threshold that you actually want to be streaming holding you accountable.
Kevin Rooke - 01:04:34:
Yeah, it's wild. All right, let's jump into a segment that I do at the end of every show called The Lightning Round. Are you ready?
Julian Fahrer - 01:04:42:
Let's do it.
Kevin Rooke - 01:04:45:
I hope you enjoyed the show so far. Just a quick message from our sponsor, Stakwork. Stakwork is a Lightning powered platform for generating high quality transcripts of all your audio or video content. They combine AI engines and hundreds of human workers all over the world who are paid over the Lightning Network to assemble these transcripts. That's what let Stakwork create less expensive, faster and higher quality transcripts. To see the results for yourself, I use Stakwork to transcribe all of my podcast episodes listed directly on my website. If you want to learn more about Stakwork, visit Stakwork.com. That is stakwork.com.
Kevin Rooke - 01:05:27:
Okay, first question, are there any books that have meaningfully changed your view of the world?
Julian Fahrer - 01:05:35:
Absolutely. I think, putting aside the Bitcoin ones, obviously there's a bunch of Bitcoin books that have been very influential when I was a little bit younger, but in my kind of mid twenties, I'm kind of a big poetry fan. Which is, like, not a super cool thing to admit in a lot of places, but there's this English poet who is pretty well known in the 20th century called Philip Larkin, famously, like, just one of the most miserable people alive. Like, lived a pretty sad, depressing life, but was an amazing poet. And he there's a kind of theme running through a lot of his poetry around, actually, the passage of time and how, you know, I'm not going to recite anything. But that was like, particularly as I was, I guess, emerging into young adulthood and coming to grips with, I guess, a lot of the feelings that people do of realizing like, oh, hey, this is the rest of my life now, and trying to figure out what I want to do with it. Philip Larkin was certainly a big influence on mine, on me, other people, for sure. I love essays and essay writers. There's something about that form. I love being able to sit down and I guess maybe it's an attention thing, but being able to digest an entire idea or the exploration of an idea in one sitting. And so, so many essayists like David Foster Wallace, Christopher Hitchens, and many others that spent a lot of time I'm reading over the years.
Kevin Rooke - 01:07:50:
Nice. If you could change one thing about Bitcoin, what would you change?
Julian Fahrer - 01:08:03:
I wouldn't change anything about Bitcoin. I guess I wouldn't presume to know enough or to who can, but I probably would change some cultural things around how Bitcoin is interact with each other and just with, I guess, new joiners to the network, new people in the ecosystem. And I think this isn't going to be like an antitoxic maxi thing, but I think the way that we interact with one another is so contingent on the platforms that we do it on. And for better and worse, Twitter is the public square for everything and for Bitcoin. And so I think what I would change is I would try and shift some attention and discussion, not all of it, but some of it, out of maybe the Twitter arena to other platforms and other places like Stak and Use and Apollo and other places and maybe see what could emerge positively in terms of Bitcoin discourse as a result.
Kevin Rooke - 01:09:20:
Makes sense. If you could only hold one asset for the next decade and it could not be Bitcoin, what asset would you hold?
Julian Fahrer - 01:09:33:
Maybe energy futures. Yeah, I think energy is going to do really well. Energy stocks, energy companies. I guess if it couldn't be Bitcoin, maybe it would be Bitcoin miners. Actually, that might be my other answer, and I think over the next few months they're going to be priced very attractively and a great time maybe, for people to potentially even outperform Bitcoin over the medium term. So Bitcoin miners, energy, I guess the lindy answer is gold. It's just always going to be around, but we'll see. We'll see.
Kevin Rooke - 01:10:14:
Yeah. And then finally, if there's someone, is there anyone in the Bitcoin community who you want to give a shout out to? Anyone who's doing great work? Anyone who you want more people to learn about what they're building?
Julian Fahrer - 01:10:29:
Yeah. I've got a lot of value recently out of reading about people like bootstrapping, Lightning nodes, and there are a few great sources. I don't want to get names wrong, but I think Steve and Ellis might be one. And for anybody that wants to learn about just what's on the cutting edge of the Lightning Network and what it's like to run a node and. Just like how the different mechanics of it all works. These guys are putting out just awesome content and it's digestible for nontechnical people like me. So that's what I'm really excited about is like kind of plebs bootstrapping, successful Lightning nodes and contributing to the growth of the network.
Kevin Rooke - 01:11:25:
Love it. Thanks for taking the time today. I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation. Where can people go to learn more about you and Apollo?
Julian Fahrer - 01:11:35:
Yeah, so if you want to learn more about me, I guess you can track me down on Twitter. And I think my DMs are open, so just like, shoot me a message if you want to get in touch. But Apollo, the website is heyapollo.com would encourage everybody to sign up and review their favorite Bitcoin products and let us know what the experience is like. Yeah, we love hearing from users.
Kevin Rooke - 01:12:01:
Awesome. Thank you again for the time and I hope we can do it again soon.
Julian Fahrer - 01:12:04:
Absolutely. Thanks Kevin.
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