Episode 174 - Jeremy Kauffman, CEO of Odysee and LBRY for Decentralized Video

Today’s guest is Jeremy Kauffman, founder and CEO of Odysee and LBRY. LBRY is the underlying technology and blockchain that powers a decentralized video hosting service, but Odysee sits on top of it, and makes it a credible and increasingly popular YouTube alternative. Max talks to Jeremy about how he did it, and how the blockchain strategy can be replicated.

About Jeremy Kauffman

LBRY Team Page

Jeremy created LBRY because he fell in love with the idea of shared, global content registry that is owned and controlled by no one. Unsurprisingly, he is a longtime supporter of decentralized technology and freedom of information.

Prior to LBRY, Jeremy founded TopScore, a startup that processes millions of dollars monthly in event and activity registrations. He attended Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he received degrees in physics and computer science.

Twitter: @JeremyKauffman

Links

Odysee.com
The Local Maximum on Odysee

Related Episodes

Episode 153 on the Web Decentralizing Before Us
Episode 6 on Cryptonetworks to the Rescue

Transcript

Max Sklar: You're listening to The Local Maximum Episode 174. 

Time to expand your perspective. Welcome to The Local Maximum. Now here's your host, Max Sklar. 

Max  Welcome, everyone Welcome, you have reached another Local Maximum. This is Episode 174. Today is a pretty cool day. This is the first time we are using this studio, The Local Maximum podcast studio with an in-person guest other than Aaron, which was the last time and also, if you're a member of the locals, that's www.maximum.locals.com. I put up a little poll, very unscientific poll very, not a whole lot of people who were in it, it's just the paying members of locals. 

But that's one of the benefits you get to be a paying member. You get more input on, in terms of like, what topics you want me to cover here on The Local Maximum. The ones that I got, the number one that I got was people wanted to talk about the new, decentralized tech, decentralized web. That's something I've been talking about since the beginning here in The Local Maximum since we started in 2018. That certainly goes along pretty well with today's guest, which we'll get to in a second. Another one is people want me to keep talking about math and machine learning topics. That's great. I've also been talking about that since the beginning. I'm going to continue to do that. 

Then of course, emerging tech as well. I'll try to focus on those things. It doesn't matter, it doesn't mean that I'm still not going to do all the other things that I want to do. But that was good to know, if you have some input on what you'd want me to cover here, please let me know. We've got a very busy week coming up, very busy month coming up in June, in terms of guests, because we have Jean Epstein. Next week, we have our Local Maximum emerging technology panel. Our tech retreat is next weekend in Hampton Beach, New Hampshire. 

We're going to talk about emerging technology there and do a little brainstorm. We're going to open up some of the predictions that we made a year ago, two years ago, five years ago, even, yes, we've been doing this for six years, these predictions. We're going to open up predictions that me and my group have made in terms of, mostly on technology, but also social issues as well, and we're going to see how we did, and we're going to make more predictions. That's coming up in a few weeks. Very exciting. Today, we're going to talk about LBRY and Odysee. 

If you haven't noticed, YouTube is insane. It's not really a partisan issue. People have noticed for a long, long time that YouTube is like, it's very dangerous to start a business on YouTube, because it can be demonetised at any time, they can change the algorithm on you, you don't know what's going to happen. When it comes down to it, you don't really own your audience on there. Today, I look at a decentralized alternative, called Odysee and LBRY. 

Now you notice those two names in there, I'll talk a little bit about this with our guests, Jeremy. But the bottom line is that, this is I think, a good kind of test case, or, sort of a pattern in terms of how some of these decentralized tech work where you have a LBRY on the bottom that's decentralized, anyone can use it. Then you have Odysee, which is kind of building the front end on top of it and self Odysee, you know, if Odysee goes wrong, then someone else could just build on top of LBRY. 

That's where all the content is. I'm going to get into more of the specifics with the founder and CEO of LBRY Odysee. That is Jeremy Kauffman. He joined me today in this room. Let's bring it up. Let's have a listen. Jeremy Kauffman, you've reached The Local Maximum. Welcome to the show.

Jeremy Kauffman: It's great to be here with you, Max. 

Max: This is, I feel like every week I have another milestone these days. This week, you are the first in-person guest I have had since February 2020 when I had Professor Adam Kapelner on to talk about experimental design, which turned out to actually be pretty useful over the next few months. But, man, I'm just in, somehow I'm in New Hampshire, like I never would have guessed. If you went back to 2020, February, and been like, you're not gonna do these for a while and you're gonna have your next person in an apartment that's yours in New Hampshire, in a room dedicated to podcasting. I'd be like, holy crap. No way.

Jeremy: I'm thrilled to be here with you, I'm thrilled to be participating here in your triumphant return to in-person show.

Max:  Yeah, yeah. We'll talk about this at the end. Hopefully my debut on Odysee and LBRY. Let's just start with that, like, how did you get involved with LBRY? How did you get the idea? When did you start this whole thing? Tell me a little bit.

Jeremy: I'll talk briefly about what it is. I'll give this sort of simple explanation, and then the complex one. The simple one is, there's a website called Odysee, www.odysee.com. We think it's the successor to YouTube, and that's partially because of this LBRY technology behind it. But it's used by more than 20 million people each month. There's lots of content on there. It works very similarly to YouTube, it's not gonna be hard to use, it's very user friendly, less ads, less spying, less exploitation. You can just go on there and have a good time. In fact, one of the things a lot of people say they joined the sitenetic, I remember when I used to see this guy on YouTube, before YouTube, you know, started putting their thumb on the scales and started hiding that person. 

Max: That's just because I found Odysee only like a couple, well, I think I've been in and out of it. But I really looked into it, like a month ago, I tweeted this, which I like: it's like when you're at an event called YouTube and you realize that like, slowly over time, most of the interesting people have left the room and then later, you're like, they're all at the after party. That's Odysee.

Jeremy: I may be picking up that language in the future, you're gonna hear me say that on a future podcast. That's exactly what's been going on. YouTube's become very political, very corporate, they've really dismissed the kind of independent voices that YouTube used to be all about. That's Odysee, and you don't need to know, it's LBRY is this kind of crazy, decentralized blockchain-based.

Max: We're gonna get into that in a few minutes. But that's under the hood. We like to look under the hood in Local Maximum. But before we get into that, yes, you don't need to know about it. 

Jeremy: In fact, I guess the number one recommendation before we go into LBRY is, if you're listening to this, and you're not on Odysee, it's a great chance to switch over, check it out and see what it's all about. Create an account, subscribe to Max. Just kind of dip your toe in the water and see how it feels.

Max: I'm now thinking about YouTube, like pre-2010. Do you remember how fun it was? I know you probably haven't said good things about YouTube in a while, but do you remember what, I just remember people on there would be doing, it was kind of like long form TikTok almost, but it was like it was interesting, and a lot of interesting people on there.

Jeremy: Look, I completely agree with you. I was a fan of YouTube for a long time. It wasn't there, wasn't this like sharp moment, but it's been this dissent. I think in the last year or two, it's been unequivocally obvious that they're remotely playing fair. They're much more interested in boosting Stephen Colbert and Gordon Ramsay and like, high end this quarter of very produced content and the kinds of independent stuff that you used to find.

Max: It’s very, you said, like corporate, very vanilla, very basic. Not something that I would, say, never listened to, but like, you know, it's just, it's just not gonna—

Jeremy: They openly say this, by the way, like, the YouTube CEO is on record multiple times saying that they boost “authoritative content” even if their audience doesn't like it. Like they see themselves as playing this role as this kind of like, mommy or daddy to their user base, rather than treating them like the adults that they are.

Max: It almost feels like it's sort of accelerated in the last couple years. Well, certainly during COVID. But even like, even the year before that, it was accelerating. I covered this on the show, I remember as late as 2018 like my take was, well, they might not be doing this on purpose. It might be like, the people that work there are a little biased and some people are complaining that they don't have enough users, maybe they're just not as good. I don't know. Maybe they didn't get deplatformed. But I think that plausible deniability has gone out the window. For me, I mean, I don't know, maybe some people realize it way earlier, but it's gone out the window for me.

Jeremy: I'm completely with you. I don't think it matters when you've realized that I think that it's difficult at this point not to realize it.

Max: Yeah. Okay, so, like you said, Odysee, it looks like YouTube for the outside observer, so you'll be able to use it. If, if that's all it was, if it was just a YouTube clone, if it was successful, I'd say, “Well, hey, that's pretty neat.” But first of all, there's no like, there's nothing interesting that went into that. It’s just a copycat. Secondly, you could expect the same forces that took over YouTube to also take over this new thing. Instead of doing that, you built Odysee off of this decentralized system called LBRY. Library with no vowels, L-B-R-Y. That hosts videos and all sorts of documents. I want to get, I have all sorts of questions written here about how LBRY works. But why don't you give us the whole, the overview before we get started?

Jeremy: Absolutely. This might get a little bit nerdy. The one thing I say, before we dive in, I love getting nerdy, I'm a nerd. But the one thing I'll say is, you don't need to know or understand any of this. If you're if your attitude is, I'm frustrated with YouTube, I want something better, you can go on to Odysee and you don't need to understand anything that I'm about to say. We've tried to design Odysee in a way that doesn't surface these kinds of things. 

I think this, so LBRY is a blockchain-based protocol. I think that this is something that the blockchain industry gets wrong a lot of times is they force you to learn about it. It's like they've invented the car, and they're like, it's not sufficient to drive it, you need to know how the internal combustion engine work, right. 

Max: And you definitely do not.

Jeremy: That’s not our attitude. But so LBRY is a decentralized—

Max: But I should point out, there's a little bit of a, there's one thing that I want to add: if you're going to put your business on Odysee, like if you put your business, because if you feel like you were, for example, screwed over by YouTube, you might want to know why Odysee is not going to do the same thing.

Jeremy: That's exactly right. It is important that LBRY exist, even if you don't understand all of it, sort of like understanding the properties. In fact, actually, this is a great way to introduce it: what are the properties? LBRY does to publishing what Bitcoin does to money. What that means is, it disintermediates it. It means that you can have local control and local ownership without relying on this sort of central authority to provide everything. 

What that means is you can have a, when you're publishing the LBRY, everything is recorded on a public blockchain. All of your content, your settings, who you're following, everything that you're doing on the network, almost everything that you're doing on the network. It is built into a cryptocurrency wallet. If you start via Odysee, you can download that wallet, you can delete your Odysee account, and you can be interacting completely in the decentralized network. 

There's this LBRY network underneath it. It's peer-to-peer, blockchain-based, decentralized. What that means is you can have these YouTube-like experiences which Odysee provides, and there are other apps. You don't have to surrender. The properties are completely inverted, right?

You can have local control over what you're doing. Your handle and all of these things. Literally, we can't take them away from you. You own them, right. If you want now when you're on Odysee we still have the ability to sort of interact with your account because you're trusting us as a custodian. 

Max: Right. Okay, so, oh, I see. I'm sorry, go ahead.

Jeremy: Yes, so an analogy that might if you're if your audience is like even loosely familiar with cryptocurrency, like, LBRY is Bitcoin. If you want to go hardcore, you can have a local wallet. If you lose your local keys, and you've lost everything, right, but you also have full control, no one can take it away from you. 

Odysee is like Coinbase. It's not like Coinbase in the sense that it's a crypto trading site, but it's like Coinbase in the sense that it's a really easy way to use it. You don't have to assume all the responsibility and you still get to interact with Bitcoin, although in this case, we're talking about LBRY.

Max: Okay, so let me see if I could take this analogy further. I'm gonna explain a little bit, not because I'm explaining to you but because I'm reminding the audience, but when you have Bitcoin on Coinbase, or some other custodian, that's fine. If you want to have it yourself, you either need to have a hardware wallet like a treasure or a ledger, or you need to have a paper wallet, or you have a wallet on your phone. Does any equivalent to that exist for LBRY?

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. It does. Both the LBRY desktop appvand the LBRY Android app, and what we're moving towards is basically everything branded LBRY will mean local control. Everything branded not LBRY will mean sort of custodial control. We do have a legacy app, I don't encourage you going to use this, but we're in the process of migrating. 

There's a website called www.lbry.tv. That is not meeting that LBRY standard. That's part of why we replaced lbry.tv with this website called Odysee, but basically outside of lbry.tv, If it's branded LBRY, it means that you have these local control properties. If it's not branded LBRY, it means you're going to, and my company has made it or whatever company makes it, it means that you're going to be trusting them to be providing some additional layers on top.

Max: Right, so when the individual has control I'm just trying to imagine like what can they do? Can they delete stuff that they own? Can they, you know, what is it that they control?

Jeremy: Yeah, so you can let me know if this gets too technical, but basically what the LBRY blockchain does is it's a public proof of work blockchain. What it does is it stores content metadata. Content metadata is things like who made the content, the description, all of these kinds of things. Embedded in that metadata is a pointer to a peer-to-peer network, think BitTorrent. 

When you're using LBRY desktop, you're not reliant on my company to provide that service. You have a much better experience than using BitTorrent. It's also much more legitimate than BitTorrent. When I say BitTorrent, I don't mean you're going to step into this, this world of where it's 99% infringing content. Similarly, your identity when you create an identity on the LBRY blockchain, which we call a channel, you also own that. 

Your channel handle exists on the blockchain, your channel handle provides a fairly standard public private key cryptographic pair, and that channel handle is then used to sign content that you publish, or that anyone publishes. It's, I don't know, if you're getting some of these things, it's a very beautiful kind of system.

Max: Yeah. I kind of get it. I mean, we've talked about on this program from the beginning how a blockchain could be thought of as a decentralized database. It's just like YouTube’s database in a blockchain, something like that.

Jeremy: Yeah, I wish, this is maybe getting off topic, but whatever. That's me. I wish more people thought this way about blockchain actually, so many people are obsessed with the financialization of it. I'm much more interested in the fact that we can now, it's sort of the database aspect of it right, we can have these systems that no one owns and no one controls, where we're still having an agreement on the state that exists within that system. 

We can have, and this is why it's called LBRY like, I'll be honest, when I started LBRY, I did not think I was creating a YouTube competitor. I wasn't like, I want to compete with YouTube. That came actually like more than a year after we had started where we're like, we should probably compete with YouTube more, because this is a good opportunity for us. What it was, was I just fell in love with this idea of the fact that you can have this registry of content that exists, literally like a library, like the old Dewey Decimal type system, this registry of content that exists that's not owned or controlled by any one party.

Max: Yeah. Was it always video or was it—?

Jeremy: LBRY is not, it's agnostic to any content. Video was like, pretty close to a day one thing where we're like, videos are really logical use case. We started tailoring design, like towards video. But people use LBRY to distribute, well text is probably the second to video, but behind text, text and images, behind those. I mean, we have people, it's a popular system for CAD files, actually. Because that's a network where people like their technical and they like decentralized publishing. That's a big area. You get like, data dumps.

Max: How do people search like CAD files? Because it's not like there's a Odysee for it, 

Jeremy: Well, they use the LBRY desktop app. The LBRY desktop app is used by hundreds of thousands of people every day. It's not quite as big as Odysee, which is getting used by millions of people every day. But there's a lot of people who prefer that peer-to-peer desktop experience. It gives them more control. I already, just because I've been nerding out for like, probably 5 or 10 minutes. I do really want to emphasize www.odysee.com, you don't need to understand anything that I've been saying. It's gonna work just like YouTube. Something that people said—

Max: People listening to this podcast are used to getting, you know, okay, 70-80% of it. 

Jeremy: Okay, because we will say to me sometimes, I didn't even know that a blockchain was involved when I signed up for Odysee because some people are like, it's just a better YouTube.

Max: Well, that's fantastic because people are used to, I think, with Bitcoin people are used to, I used to do this to like, you have to understand how cryptography works is like, “Oh, no, I don't want to touch that.” I'm the few people who are like, “Oh, I do want to touch it,” but then it's like, you don't want to start with that necessarily. You just wanna start with the properties. I think like you said.

Jeremy: Like, I like Ethereum. But yeah, like MetaMask is not fun. Right? It's nothing like that. It's gonna be really user-friendly to come on to Odysee. I just, I do like to make sure when after I nerd out, to come back.

Max: Okay, yeah. I wanted to ask about, you know, the hosting of a file, so I'm thinking, okay, I'll use Bitcoin as an example or any of the financial blockchains like every node in the system has all of the transactions. Great. But surely, not everyone has every video that would be like petabytes. When I upload a video to YouTube, it goes into a server controlled by Google, controlled by YouTube. When I upload a video to LBRY, and when I upload the video to Odysee, what happens in the backend is it's really uploading to LBRY but who's hosting that? How do you know it's going to be there?

Jeremy: Yeah. The content is not going into the blockchain, you're absolutely correct, that would bloat the blockchain incredibly. Just the metadata goes into the blockchain. In fact, for these reasons, the metadata is limited. The metadata on every publish is eight kilobytes or less, you're not using all that. Included in that metadata is a entry point, a hash, that's an entry point to a DHT-based peer-to-peer network, which is basically what BitTorrent is. 

When you're uploading it through Odysee, because you're not participating in the peer-to-peer network, the Odysee servers are participating in that peer-to-peer network. But all of the LBRY desktop users, hundreds of thousands of them are participating in that peer-to-peer network, as is a community of people and some and some other enthusiasts who are sort of participating in a more industrial kind of way. There are some market incentives there as well to be participating in that network.

Max: I guess I still open the question. If I upload a video and someone in the network is hosting it, how am I sure that they won't drop offline or something like that?

Jeremy: Technically, you can't be. LBRY does not promise that your content will continue to be available. If you uploaded some metadata, and then your pointer was to some 50-petabyte file, people might not host it, right? Things that are uploaded to Odysee, the company does continue to run servers to continue to host that. But there's not, this service does not promise. 

Now that said, there are some we do think the system has some incentives, it's like, you don't have a contract for you know, bread. Yet, nonetheless, when you go to the corner store, bread is always available, like so there, we do think that like content will still be available at a very high level of availability, even though there's not strictly someone who is promising you that it will be available. We now have more than 10 million items that are available over the network. 99.9 plus percent of them are still available. There's not that much content that's kind of aging out or disappearing.

Max: Gotcha, so yeah, so that's interesting. It sounds to me like LBRY, no absolute guarantee, but pretty darn certain. Then Odysee takes one step further. Well, we're custodial, and we'll also host your stuff. We'll have that extra layer of certainty. 

Jeremy: Exactly.

Max: Okay. Cool. I'm sure like, are there certain things that need to be taken down or are not YouTube-style, but there must be some things where it's like, hey, this is uploaded to LBRY. Maybe this won't go on Odysee?

Jeremy: Sure. There's two different standards we had. I'll talk about how we handle both sort of, there's basically content that's illegal, copyright infringement, or whatever. Then there's content that may be distasteful. In terms of, they're handled in similar, a similar system handles both. What we do is, we actually mark blockchain segments, blockchain entries as containing either illegal or infringing or alternatively distasteful content. That is not deleting anything from the blockchain, we don't have the ability to do that. It's additional metadata that says these segments contain content that's of this type. 

We call this, we do call it blacklisting or graylisting this content. It's not removing the segments, but it's basically instructing wallet servers and other node operators that this content is either breaking the law or may have other distasteful characteristics. In the case of www.odysee.com, basically content that's illegal, or in the distasteful category is not going to be shown. In the case of the LBRY desktop app, content that is in the illegal category, assuming you're still relying on the default wallet servers, is also going to show up as blocked or as illegal. It may be possible to use LBRY illegally, but at the point at which you'd be doing it, you wouldn't be using any servers that my company is involved in.

Max: Is there anything to stop some other company to use the custodial analogy saying, “Hey, I'm also building a YouTube clone on top of LBRY and there's nothing you could do about it.”

Jeremy: Yeah, we would encourage that competition. Like if someone wants to build another Odysee, we think that that's great. The metadata that, when you publish, includes rules about who can do that, and this is an aspect we're working on expanding. Currently, there are some rules that you can encode. To be honest, it's a little bit crude. 

But basically, we anticipate continuing to build the system into something where you can specify fairly complex monetization and licensing rules. If servers, and then anyone can spin that up. Right now, most people use the default license, which is basically anything goes. You're basically saying anyone else can can create software and can publish and distribute this content is the default. 

Max: In most cases, it's like, why wouldn't you?

Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, I think something that we designed LBRY with this idea in mind is I think there's a lot of, a lot of people don't understand technically how challenging, I would say impossible, it is to actually stop content from being distributed. To some extent, LBRY's trying to acknowledge that the emperor has no clothes. Like there are a lot of people in business who want to believe and are eager to be sold on this idea that actually, we can stop your content from being copied or distributed, and so on. 

LBRY tries to sort of start by acknowledging that that's not really possible, and instead says, “Let's encode metadata that says, the legal realities, and let's go after people if they break the law, we're not trying to encourage people to be breaking the law. But it's not trying to promise things that aren’t possible.” YouTube and all these companies, they spent tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars, trying to do these DRM type things, and they literally don't work, right. 

Everyone can download a video from YouTube. Every movie is available, you know, if you want to go and get it. This idea that it's not going to ever work this way, I think is somewhat delusional. I think we're better off, and we went through this lesson in the 90s, where it turned out, what did you need to do to stop music piracy? You needed to build solutions that people would use instead of the infringing ones? 

Max: Yeah, gotcha. Well, that leads the question to me like are, so presumably LBRY is available all over the world. What about in countries that have pretty draconian speech laws, like is this thing available in China or some other place? What do you, what have you seen? Have you seen any examples of interesting things happening there? 

Jeremy:It is. It is available in China. I'm pretty proud of this. We actually recently hired someone to do development for us.

Max: How did they react, how did government react? Sorry, go ahead.

Jeremy: Right. Well, so the Chinese government has blacklisted Odysee. But if you open the LBRY desktop app, it works no problem. You don't need to use the, you don't need to circumvent the Chinese firewall, you don't need to use a VPN. 

Max: Really? 

Jeremy: Yeah, that works directly. Should that, so we're not aware of any country or place where LBRY desktop app does not work, where it's being filtered by the country's internet filtering. Should we learn of that, we would attempt to evolve the system to evade that. We believe people have the right to communicate and exchange information with other people, we see that as fundamental to our mission. I think it's really hard. You're basically talking about, you know, arbitrary encrypted traffic from one IP address to another. It's going to be difficult to impossible for governments to stop this technology.

Max: Right, so they can't— yeah, It sounds like they haven't really tried.

Jeremy: I do think it's possible they haven't tried, right, like what LBRY desktop doesn't really slot into their model of the way they are traditionally blocking things. There could be a game of cat and mouse, right? They could start attempting to identify traffic that really looks like LBRY traffic. But again, you're talking about, it's arbitrary IP-to-IP traffic of encrypted data. It's just, okay, here's this one megabyte being sent from one IP address to another IP address. It's encrypted, it's gonna be hard to find ways to find rules. 

Max: They could randomly shut off other people's websites. You never know what's gonna happen. Did you know of any communities in any other countries that have actively used LBRY to get around censors. I guess that's, well, I'm not sure what the answer is.

Jeremy: Well, I don't want to get anyone in trouble. 

Max: Okay. 

Jeremy: But absolutely. I mean, and there's a deep community behind this project like this is not just LBRY Inc. doing the work. We have a discord with 40,000 people in it, and then their spin off discord and spin off chats and telegram groups, and all this stuff. There's a deep community of people who are enthusiastic about the idea of what we're building. There are absolutely people who are political dissidents or other kinds of things. 

Honestly, look, it's, you know, if we were having this podcast five years ago, we would not be talking about it being necessary in America. It's necessary in America too. I mean, there is footage that's available on LBRY that's been censored from YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and every major social media.

Max: That’s innocuous, or telling a new story that happens to be true, that is somehow being told.

Jeremy: Yeah. I mean, I have a common one. One of the most topical ones currently is the origins of COVID. Yeah, where that was prior to a couple of weeks ago, was being scrubbed from every site. What was always available on LBRY. Another really good example on this is an example a great example—

Max: That's the kind of thing where I'm like, I don't understand that. I can't get into the heads of the people in these social media platforms who are like, oh, okay, we're just gonna, like, just just by mentioning the possibility it was created in the lab, we're just gonna shut that down. Like, you know, there are possibilities for anything. I don't know, I just, this is where I was like, whoa, the people I work with in tech are a lot crazier than I thought.

Jeremy: Yeah. Like, that's my mindset as well. I share your confusion as to how it's not a more common one, although I'm certainly well aware of the fact that it's not. I think that, to me, almost everything, really everything should be capable of being, you know, at least debated or presented, especially something as novel as this, how could you possibly have a conclusion about these things? 

That's not me trying to say like, I don't, I'm not trying to say COVID was came from China. My attitude is I have no idea. Even more, my attitude is, why would you want me to decide that for you? That's the thing. Why are you turning to, why, it's like, no one trusts Mark Zuckerberg. Ever. Right? We watched the movie. No one trusts that guy. Then like, but why would you turn to him and say, “Mark, we want you to control what people get to see?” It definitely reveals a streak, I think a lot of people have a sort of authoritarianism streak that I don't really have. 

Although I will also, I do also want to say that our intent is not to put edgy or provocative or sketchy or this type of content in front of people. My attitude is people should be able to make choices for themselves. If people want to only see content that's government-approved, I want to build that for them. I'm not trying to show you things that you don't like, but I don't want to be someone who says, “You over there, you're not allowed to see this thing that you want to watch.”

It's an interesting thing, because if you ask these people who are pro censoring this stuff, you say, “Would you personally like Mark Zuckerberg to decide what you're allowed to watch? Or would you like to decide for yourself?” They all will say themselves, right? They want to decide for themselves, but then also they want to decide for others.

Max: Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting point. I’ve spoken out against it, but I can't for the life of me get into the psychology of it. We'll have to do that, we'll get to that another time. But I want to jump back from the philosophy and the tech of all this. I want to step back and look at the product a little bit more, because we talk a lot about products on the show, as I've worked on consumer products before, particularly recommendation engines. 

We just touched on, you want to show people what they want to see. Oftentimes, you know, a lot of these centralized systems, YouTube has its own recommendation system, obviously. I worked on recommendation system at Foursquare. How does, does LBRY have a recommendation engine or does Odysee kind of just build that on top of it? How does that work? 

Jeremy: Actually, until very recently, neither of them had much of one, so it was basically more feed-based. There was categorization schemes, then there were trending schemes within the categorization, but sort of more where we were a decade ago than where we are now. 

We have recently begun adding a recommendation system to Odysee. The first design of that system, it's, I'll be honest on your podcast, I imagine that most Odysee users listen, a lot of people kind of assume one is there, but it's not, when there wasn't much of one like people just, they're so useless. I'll tell you, we were using basically—

Max: There's, I'll tell us from firsthand experience on Foursquare. There's a lot of times where people will come on to praise us, but then they think it's a lot smarter than it is, because we gave them a particular recommendation. But really, it just happened to be the place they were, that was the most popular nearby. How'd you know that was my favorite place?

Jeremy: Yeah. Maybe I'll learn some probably honesty credits for saying this. What we sort of presented as recommendations was actually just a search of the title of the video you had just watched. We had a search system and we would just feed the title of the video you watched into the search system and show that back to you as next suggested videos. It is now getting more sophisticated than that.

Max: Yeah, there are a lot of things that you can do that are pretty cool. Yeah. There's a lot of research that have, that should be put to good use. Because I feel like in recent years, like, I used to go to the recommendation, RecSys conferences, and there were all these people with all this ideas and how to build the best recommender system. I feel like there are tons of ideas out, dozens of great ideas out there, It's all been used for like, not necessarily evil, but for not in the consumers best interest. Let me put it that way.

Jeremy: Yeah. These are some of the conversations we're having right now as we develop and build this stuff. We do want to bring it into the LBRY protocol itself. One of the things that Odysee has let us do is, it's also let us move faster and be a little bit, I'm pretty idealistic, but it's maybe moved as just a notch down from being like, completely idealistic, because we can, well, we can build something on Odysee first and then figure out how to bring it into decentralized plan.

Something that is really interesting that I think will end up being one of the more impactful properties about LBRY down the road is when you're talking about blockchain activity. It's something that can't be faked. If I'm tipping cryptocurrency to someone else, or it's, it's requiring like a real world resource, so it we can do some really interesting things like build this web of state connections between channels and identities. We can, the ability to sort of fraudulently create accounts where they're cheaper free, to do that is like not it's not quite the same. I do think you because this is something all these sites struggle with.

Max: There's a lot of user spam, we deal with it all the time. I guess you guys, well, yeah. Tell me about it.

Jeremy: Yeah, well, we deal with it, too. We actually deal with it more from the side of, my company is willing to give you small amounts of cryptocurrency for signing up. Like one of the biggest spam problems that we've been dealing with, playing cat and mouse for months, it's you get about three cents, five cents worth of cryptocurrency for verifying your email address and creating your account.

Max: Who gives that to you, the system? 

Jeremy: My company does. This is when you create an Odysee account.

Max: Okay, gotcha.

Jeremy: But three or five cents worth of cryptocurrency, like that's enough to create a channel and you know, published dozens of things. It goes a long way. But nonetheless, if you give out three cents for creating an account, that's something that people will try to abuse. That's something that we have to unfortunately spend engineering time on, is trying to stop people from abusing that says.

Max: Well, how about I'm just spitballing here. How about you have to pay to create an account, and then Odysee just like, if you're using Odysee, then Odysee pays directly. But then since you're using Odysee, you have the right to kind of run an algorithm to check if someone's a real person. 

Jeremy: Well, that's what we do. Right. But the thing is that as you've seen, people will circumvent those algorithms. They'll try to learn how they work. 

Max: It's a whole arms race.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. We're going through some of that.

Max: Yeah. All right. You mentioned monetization. Let's talk about this. People make money off YouTube. I don't, but I know that some people do and they get like, lots of they get lots of plays and there are all these ads. You guys don't have a lot of ads or any ads. How do people, what happens? How do, people are making money on there, though? What's going on?

Jeremy: Yeah, so well, so one, we do have a robust tipping system. There's a lot of people who are enthusiastic, like you'll publish this podcast. I bet, you know, some people won't. We'll give you some tips. 

Max: I'll try on that. 

Jeremy: But we actually do provide, Odysee provides monetization if you create your account on Odysee, so if you publish straight through the desktop app, peer-to-peer, the monetization that you'll currently get is basically from users supporting your content. If you publish on Odysee, we have begun some advertising experiments there. Then we also provide monetization from our own cryptocurrency reserves. 

You will receive, if you sign up through Odysee, you will receive a monetization that's comparable or higher to YouTube. It'll be paid in cryptocurrency, it'll settle right away, you won't have to hit various thresholds. That's obviously not a system that works forever, right? There's no free lunch. We can't give out free cryptocurrency. 

Max: It's just, it's definitely—

Jeremy: It's literally our reserves. 

Max: Okay. It doesn't last forever. 

Jeremy: Yes. Yeah. Now, that said, the system is designed in this auto adjusting way that our reserves that we've allocated, and we allocated them specifically for this purpose. They'll last more than three more years. But we are now building out an advertising system into Odysee. Something that we are going to do that's different than YouTube is, choice is one of our central values or themes throughout what we build. 

One of the things that I think YouTube does that's very wrong is they force these ads on you, when frequently the value of those ads is very low. Right? Like you might be being, you're frequently forced to watch an ad that, to the creator is earning them, they always get these numbers in CPM. I actually like getting them in CP1, right? As the CPM is per 1000. 

Max: Oh, okay. Yeah, I'm a cost per individual.

Jeremy: Yeah, I like, I think CPI is an acronym that’s taken, so I don't know. But yeah, like, because it's like, oh, your YouTuber is earning 10 or 20 dollars CPM. Well, okay. But what is that per person? That means it's a fraction of a cent, or one cent or two cents, then it's like—

Max: It's not in the user's interest. I  wouldn't go through a, I wouldn't go through the whole credit card thing. But if somehow I could magically be deducted a 10th of a cent to not see that dumb ad, maybe that is in my interest.

Jeremy: Exactly. Our intent is to give people a choice. As advertising, more advertising does get added to the system. Similarly, as a creator, our intent is to give you the sanctuary. Right now, oh, LBRY provides also monetization in the sense that you can say this as a cost. You can say this content costs $5 and sell it for $5. Right? 

But we want to match the YouTube model, and to you, but you'll be able to basically encode rules where you're saying things like, I want, my content is free if the site is free, but if you're making money, I want 70% of it, or I want these micro costs that can be subsidized by advertising. But whatever we do, we do want to maintain choice. Users who don't want ads, who would prefer to pay, they will always be given that choice.

Max: That's pretty exciting. I mean, last question I've written here, I feel like we've already answered which is like, YouTube has been under these tremendous pressures to deplatform, demonetised, censor. When do you guys come under that pressure? Do you feel like there's going to be a war sometime and at some point, and then the people who are applying that pressure are going to realize, hey, or it's just the pressure to become corporate? They're going to realize, “Oh, my God, this doesn't work. What do we do?”

Jeremy: Yeah. Well, I personally, as the-

Max: What happens in 10 years? 

Jeremy: Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I mean, I think this system, and this is one of the reasons why I think we’ll— I think YouTube is honestly, I think Google in general is like, the future's not bright they've been and not something that that company changes. They've been like, regularly shooting themselves in the feet. I don't know if that's from the executives, or from the rank and file political opinion, but they've become a very political company.

Max: I have a book on my shelf over here called Life After Google by George Gilder Yeah. I've been meaning to go over that on the podcast. Yeah, time but I read it. It's very interesting.

Jeremy: Like, I don't think the future of Google is bright, currently. It seems like to the extent that they're innovating. They're innovating around how to be more authoritarian. It's sort of very good. I loved Google 10 years ago, and my opinion on Google has shifted so much. But we've, I've tried very much to design things that like, an analogy that I've given before is like, I could have some kind of like brain worm that turns me into like, evil Jeremy, who holds like the opposite of my values. 

We've tried to design things, I've tried to design things that, even that wouldn't stop things, right? Everything is open source, the system is decentralized. People have local control and local ownership. Everything could be forked, everything could be changed. It's not the sexiest comparison. But we've tried to turn it a bit into something like email. Email is Google's best product, right? Like, that's the product that's become the least corrupted the least where they're messing with you— 

Max: I assume they read the Gmail, but it's never gonna come back to me and bite me, you know what I mean?

Jeremy: Part of the reason I think is Gmail is also the product where you're the least trapped. They're trying to innovate ways to keep you trapped, right? They're trying to do more filtering, and more tabs and more kinds of things that aren't in that sort of standard email client. I guess maybe email is dying in general, compared to other messaging apps. But one of the things that email does have is it’s very easy to leave, because it's this interoperable system where you're not trapped into any one provider. We've tried to design a system that same properties.

Max: Yeah, no, I feel like your email is not dying so much as, yes, there are other systems that are that, that try to supersede, but email is like the old system that just doesn't go away. Like it keeps coming back. I mean, look at something like Substack now where it's just like, okay, this is a brand, if you told me like, 15 years ago, brand new company, what does it do? Email newsletters. What? That’s at the forefront? That’s crazy. But email is one of those base technologies that kind of doesn't go away. Whereas I think some of this, some of these messaging apps might be superseded by other messaging apps.

Jeremy: I think this is a bold statement. I understand that what I'm saying is I think LBRY will become a foundational part of the internet. This system of, if you think about what's the most fundamental part of the, it's actually, I didn't realize this when we were creating it but I think this way now, like, identity, right, it's like, it's your online identity. You have these identities in different places. 

You may maintain multiple identities. I don't mean like, literally you as a person, but I mean, like an identity, a pseudonym. Pseudonyms are frequently mapped on to real people, but not always. What LBRY does is it provides the system where you can have a pseudonym, you own it, that pseudonym can make statements, can publish things in a way that's provable, and you own the identity. Right? 

Some other blockchain type companies may be trying to do this, but none of them have as many identities as we do. Because we have all these creators, really big creators, I didn't, I did a bad job hyping that actually so I’m doing bad job saying this again. There are really big creators on artists in LBRY. If you go on there, you're gonna find huge creators that you know and like.

Max: yeah, this summer, like The Local Maximums. But there's also people who are like, totally different.

Jeremy: Yeah, I mean, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds, maybe thousands of creators that have more than a million subscribers on YouTube who are publishing to LBRY. There's more than a million identities on the LBRY network that can now be locally owned by the people who have them. We're really building the future of the decentralized web. I think the future for what we're building is really bright.

Max: Yeah. All right. Jeremy Kauffman, thanks for coming on the show any last, that was probably a pretty good way to close it, but any last closing thoughts? Where can people find more information about Odysee and more information about you and what you're doing?

Jeremy: Well, you better go on, if you're still listening at this point, you really better be on Odysee or going there right after this to create an account and to follow Max, and follow him over there. If you want to hear from me personally, I'm also on LBRY. My handle on LBRY is kauffj. Then the other platform that I use the most is probably Twitter, where my handle is my full name, jeremykauffman.

Max: Okay, cool. We’ll follow you on Twitter. That's another one that we're going to have to fix at some point. But let's do YouTube first. Jeremy, thanks for coming on the show. 

Jeremy: Thanks, Max. 

Max: That's the show. To support The Local Maximum, sign up for exclusive content and our online community at maximum.locals.com. The Local Maximum is available wherever podcasts are found. If you want to keep up, remember to subscribe on your podcast app. Also, check out the website with show notes and additional materials at localmaxradio.com. If you want to contact me, the host, send an email to localmaxradio@gmail.com. Have a great week.