This Is What Happened When They Tried To Fix Journalism Using Blockchain

different story this time. So listeners might remember that in two seventeen, during the last cryptocurrency boom, when Bitcoin was taking off, through all these follow on coin offerings and beyond just that, beyond just other coins, are all these ideas about how different industries could be transformed via blockchain technology in some way, or tokens or their own cryptocurrencies, and the work stories about putting banana trade on the

blockchain with the currency, and dentistry having its own currency and all kinds of weird things that never really took off. Tomatoes there was a famous story about putting the tomato

trade on the block chain. Anyway, none of that has really taken off, And at the time when a lot of this was going on, I thought a lot of these um endeavors were kind of cynical, just attempting to cash in on the hot market for coins in general without much purpose, But some of the projects actually did UH did seem sincere, And today we're going to be talking about one such project UH that did sincerely try to solve an interesting problem, and that problem was journalism.

And so the question was, could this technology could a currency somehow helped build a sustainable journalism business model in some way that existing subscription subscription or existing UH models weren't capturing UH well or weren't doing a good job of So I'm very excited about our guest. I'm going to be speaking with Maria Bustillos. She's the founding editor

of Popular. She has a new endeavor called the Brick House co Op, But several years ago she was a co founder of a project called Civil which attempted to create a new journalism business model and in part using its own cryptocurrency. We're gonna be talking about what she learned from that project, and these sort of potential and limits of the technology should be very interesting discussion for both people interested in finance and markets and our markets

creating centers, but also journalism and journalism business models. So, without further ado, I want to bring in Maria. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you for having me. It's a real pleasure to be here. Joe. Yeah, I'm really looking forward to getting your story. But and it's it's always I've been following you in your career on

Twitter from Afar for a long time. We've never talked before, but it's it's always seemed interesting, and you seem to have inclination to experiment, to try new things and be open minded about new ideas in a way that is kind of rare for this industry, to be honest. But I'm just sort of curious your background first, you know, how you got into journalism and how you got interested then in the sort of world of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology.

Um well, I am kind of a serial entrepreneur. Really. I started my first business when I was in my early twenties as a as a designer, like overpriced tchaticas for the home, and and then I sold that and opened uh kind of like a proto at Sea in ninet. Like,

I was always really interested in the Internet computers. I met my husband on Prodigy, you know, so I kind of came at journalism from an interest in the Internet, and you know how a long time interest in sort of research and writing and an entrepreneurial stuff, and my husband's a Wall Street guy, so there was a lot of business in our in our house, business talk, and that's kind of how I how I approached it to

start with. But I mean, you know, I love sort of literature and blogs, and I wound up going to um see that terrible movie Avatar with my husband and I just hated it so much, and I just came home and banged out this like absolute screed about how awful it was and sent it to my favorite block, to Corey Spica, and he printed it and that became my job, like eleven years ago. Almost. That's awesome. I

love I love stories like that. I feel like so many of the most interesting people in media came at it from some angle where they didn't originally intend to be in journalism, but then all these new tools opened up and they realized they could write, and they're like, oh, this is pretty cool, and that's a that's a pretty great story. I love it. I like, this is my favorite job by far, and there's there's a lot of

work to do in it. So I've been really fortunate to be for in front of some really interesting projects. So let's talk about Civil and I this civil you could describe it, but it got a lot of attention from the sort of like media world. Media. The media world is always upset with like media business models and sustainable journalism and who's going to pay for journalism and you know, understandable and why there's so much concern. But

talk to me about that project. When was it conceived and sort of what was the problem you were trying to solve. Well, the interesting thing is I had been really interested in founding a block chain based journalism publishing platform, like before Civil contacted me. It was like this really weird coincidence, you know, because I had been interested in bitcoin and blood chain technology from very shortly after it started.

You know, maybe I started looking into it, and um I wrote about bitcoin for the first time in for the New Yorker blog. I was you know, people all thought it was very weird at that point, and I mean, it is really weird. But the things that, yeah, well, what interested me about it always was here is a way to produce incorruptible records and they cannot be altered. And I have a very big interest in archiving in general, and so I kind of still see that is the

most valuable aspect of blockchain technology. That's what you know, people talk about applying it to voting, talk about applying it to cold chain, you know, supply chain, like all this stuff. What they're really talking about is that they're incorruptible records are unfalsifiable records because they're distributed. So when you kind of apply that idea to journalism very separately from the idea of a currency or a token, it looks different, right. It's like, this is a way to

record things. I was really fortunate, you know, as civil to be the first person ever to commit the full text of a news story directly into the Ethereum block chain. This is like really important, right, This is an I PF S or some other kind of incorruptible distributed things. Is like it cannot be changed until you basically have

to shut off the Internet. Once you have recorded something in the Ethereum block chain, it's now on what like, you know, a fluctuating number of computers, but tens of thousands of computers, there's always going to be a record of it, kind of like there used to be microwthiast records of newspapers. It's very similar to that. You can't you can't falsify that. I like wrote about Barack Obama's birth records, you know, like really there was an unfalsifiable

mark microfish in Hawaii. If that had not existed, it would have given a lot more oxygen to the birth of movement. But there were unfalsifiable records in that library. And so I kind of view what blockchain can do for journalism is being related to that. So I've been looking for a way to uh, you know, just kind of instantiate these ideas, and and then I got this phone call, like just out of the clear blue from Josh Benston of Old Town Media, who had been consulting

for Civil and what it was. It was a consensus funded project. I mean at that point, you know, end of twenty seventeen, the price of ethereum got to fourteen hundred I think at the end of that year, and so it would go down between that point and the

bottom I think was sixty six. So consensus was very flesh with cash money and they were throwing it around it a lot of projects that were you know, sort of had a social you know component of some kind, you know, or there's suitor stuff, you know, there's like they just had unlimited money and they were handing it

out and so this is Consensus. So this is one of the one of the original sort of co founders of the Ethereum project started a company called Consensus, which I think characterizes itself is a development studio for etherium projects, and as part of it, they fund various endeavors designed to build something a top the network. Yes, Joe lit bin Um, you know, funded civil directly, and I think it was originally like five million or something like that.

It was really substantial investment and so you know, there was money in it, and it was the idea that I wanted to work on. And I'm like, oh my god, They're like, we want to start a black chain based project. I like, sit down, let me tell you what we're going to do. But um, you know, it was really fun and a lot of the ideas and are I

haven't changed my mind about any of it really. But what happened is that the crypto winter came and you know kind of why, well, you know, regulators didn't like all these I c o s. You know, they started there started being a lot of money raised in those markets,

and I mean, I don't know. I know that this is maybe a slightly crazy idea, but I I think that regulators watching those markets swell up, you know, and seeing like an actual direct threat to the regular capital markets, you know, started paying a lot of attention, and suddenly it became, you know, very difficult to do an ic out you don't you say, direct friends to capital markets.

A cynic might say a bunch of people got fleeced on some of these huge things because the projects were always sort of um, you know, some of these mega ones never really took off extraordinary amount of money, raise extraordinary amount of short term speculation assets that by many accounts looked like traditional security regulations whose purpose exists to protect investors in theory loss a ton of money. True, I mean, and go past that, there was like scam Scalore, right,

Like there's also scam Scalore markets. So that's true. Maybe people forget this, you know, but so like this is what I was saying in the intro, which is that at the time, you know, I was like, there struck me as a lot of projects that had no purpose other than to cash in on the market. And when Symbol launched and seeing the participation of people like yourself and other sort of like long time veterans of the

media industry. It has had a pretty impressive roster. It did not look to me like a sort of get rich quick thing by any stretch. And so that's why at least seemed different than all these other projects. And so like what was the premise because it wasn't actually putting content on the blockchain, right, well, it was for me.

I mean there's one thing, right, there's a number of things that you can do with this technology, like, for example, you know comments, Yeah, you can, Like I actually built this with the last of my civil many because I was just so interested in popular which tiny, tiny little laboratory. It still it works. You know, you can only put a comment on a popular story if you're a paying subscriber, and it costs five cents worth of eat to do that.

And what this does is make zeros fam You don't have to have any kind of thing like that's just one thing. There's a hundred things like this that you can do with it, right, But the way it was supposed to work was the token. It was an ARC token, which is like sort of you know, sort of ethereum is kind of like programmable currency, right. It's it's like

bitcoin that you can put code to it. And so you you have a token that is specific to a certain project or set of properties or people or whatever. You can you can program it to be for one purpose. Now, if you have like a journalism denominated token, let's say you have to purchase subscriptions using the token, you have to do your comments using the token, you have to like you create like an economic world um that's denominated in this token. And so you know what I like,

I was really excited about things like micro tipping. This was like a huge, huge thing for me. Microsipping is still huge and we can do this up popular right now. But I mean very few people have eight So I mean at the same time that this whole thing is happening, the market is contracting, you know, there was there were there were some regulatory blows that were well, the one fatal one I think is when Finsen decided tightened the

rules for what counted as a money transfer business. Like what it sort of meant was if I were to tip you know popular writer in eat and popular is holding that eat for the writer, I'm now I'm now a money transfer potentially now it costs three million dollars a year to get licensed for that, like in all

fifty states, because it's like a state regulated thing. And so they made it impossible for these projects to be viable, and you know, and it kind of all goes hand in glove, you know, the prices, crashing, confidences, you know, eroding and all this stuff kind of happened at the same time. But what it was supposed to do is stuff like that, is like make it make it possible to do like frictionless micro tipping really really cheap wit.

So I want to actually, before you go any further, I want to ask about that point specifically, because the idea of sort of micro payment for content for journalism. People have fantasized about this for a while, and from what I understand, and I've never been directly involved in any of these projects, but from what I understand, the issue is never really I mean, maybe the issue is partly of the cost, but also the issue is sort

of the mental cost. Do I want to think about doing a transaction every time I make a comment or load an article or whatever like that is sort of like a mental tax. And when I think about doing that in a cryptocurrency which is already like ten times

more complicated. It's like, okay, I'm gonna like pay an Eve, and now I have to check the eight to US dollar exchange RAID, and I have to have like my separate Like okay, I got to go buy some Eve and then I have to convert that into the civil token, and I have to hold that into a wallet, and I need to remember my password for the wallet, and

if I don't, then all that money is gone. It always struck me as like, all right, so we've taken all of the difficulties of micropayments, which we know are enormous, and added about five different complicated, uncomfortable layers on top of it. So tell me why my that perception is wrong, because that's my outside perception of the challenge here. Yeah, well it's it's you can do it today and it's really easy, uh, with a metal mask wallet that just

sits in your browser. And this was in vision right when we started. Meta Mask was like, well, on its way, you can do meta mask. This is a meta mask is a browser based ethereum wallet, right that allows you to hold ethereum and any Ethereum based token such as the civil token. And when we started, the idea was, well, by that time, you'll be able to buy eight with a credit card. It will take five seconds, you know.

And so but I mean, right now, if you just if you, if you get through the hoops, which is like roughly like opening a bank account, you know, to open a crypto account at you know, coin base or whatever, you have to show them, you know, picture idy and all the kind of junk. But you know, you you can buy ethereum and you can put it in your browser and it's just always there, so you don't actually

have to think about anything. That like my theory of it was, I had this moment when we were in development and I read this really good story that Frank Rich had written about the history of his his career. You know, he's a New York magazine or something. And I got to the end and he has really meant

a lot to me in my career. It just in heeps such a wonderful writer, and so um, I got to the end of this thing and I thought, if I could send this guy fifty dollars right now, just so he knows, you know, what he just is a is a way of saying I appreciate this piece, like you've so much for me, I don't know I would

send it, And so I thought this is gonna work. Right, there's this moment of passion at the end, like after you hear the song or whatever, after you read the story, that your heart opens to the idea of contributing to that person's welfare directly. I think it's very important, and so you can do that right now at popula Um using a metal mask wallet. It really once you set it up, it takes five seconds. It doesn't interfere with

you in any way. You just click two buttons. All the exchange and all that stuff is handled in a very smooth, seamless, very simple way. Just that you want to do it in dollars, you want to send fifty dollars, it just automatically does the eighth transfer whatever price it's at at that point. And considering the problems that we're getting this thing started, it's remarkably simple right now. So but I mean, you know, people are afraid of it,

and I mean with good reason. They should be careful, just like they should be careful with their regular money, just like they should be careful not to let their credit card never be stolen. I mean, these are problems. It exists in all of every economic transaction. You know, if there is a store of value that somebody can sees, they will do it. And in the case of crypto, you can seize someone's assets with a very little risk

of being caught. Although there is that risk has increased substantially. So um, I'm still a big believer in all these in all these principles, it's just not a way to do it. Now, why not dollars? Like if I go to if I see like this is this is still I guess, you know, if it's about tipping. So you know, I think we want to if we sort of decompose the question of how the technology could be applied to journalism.

There's the first thing that you've described which is super powerful to me, the idea of creating a truly permanent record. And as you say, if you have like a sufficient network, enough computers, enough hash power, you could inscribe something onto the blockchain as you have done, or onto a blockchain um that really like cannot ever be tampered with. And that's pretty powerful. When it comes to something like tipping,

it could be done with dollars. I mean Venmo exists, I get, you know, that's a mobile thing, but right, like the Apple pay exists, what is the idea by which a cryptocurrency solves this problem and creates new incentives for journalism business models that didn't exist. We've seen many attempts at micro tipping. They never took off because the transaction costs were too high, you know, the tips that popular.

I mean we've only taken you know a few fewer than a thousand so far, but like they're quite often like ten cents, you know, cents, which would be great, right if if there were a way to do that. All these other technologies didn't work out because they became keeping track of the transactions. It's very bloated. This is a great thing that crypto or you know, really chain technology can do. It's like it removes the overhead and

creates like a bulletproof audit trail for every transaction. You can have a quite complicated system where people are leaving each other ten and twenty five cents, you know, and it's it doesn't create any sort of accounting overhead at all. It's all done automatically. So that's like a huge thing. Like the other thing is you know the system I have right now, If you write a comment and you pay your five sets and you write your comment, that comment is also eligible for tips. The idea is to

create an economy of discourse. So here here's something I wondered. Okay, let's let's talk a little bit more about the civil structure and how it was supposed to work. And so the idea was it was going to be this token offering And tell me if I'm wrong, but this is my impression from the outside. There was this token offering that was going to raise some money. Then that was gonna fund a series of news rooms that were like a sort of multiple journalism endeavors under the civil umbrella.

And then that token uh would be used to a fund the newsrooms and then people would have that and they could um then what happens from there, like what what is the purpose of the token after the sort of fund raise to get the journal uh, the initial ce see the journalism? What is its purpose there? And how why and why would it go up or down at that point? Like what makes it fluctuate? Okay, So there were multiple projects going on at the same time.

There was a token curated registry. Have you heard of this? Yeah, but only kind of, so maybe explain that. Okay, So they I was not in favor of having this be the first project, but it was the first project at Civil and what it was supposed to do is actually determine who was allowed to publish ah UM. And it was supposed to be like the community itself is sort of this self policing thing. There was like a civil code of conduct is like it was actually pretty good.

I helped them work on an UM a bunch of us did. It was like, you know, no plagiarism and make your best efforts to verify what you print and all this kind of stuff. And the idea was the community would cause new new applicants to come in and stake a certain amount of tokens, and then people would decide between themselves whether or not this person is okay. And you know, it's sort of like they like an entrance fee or whatever. That is then sort of help

by the company. But if people want to complain, then they have to stake tokens and they say, like you're a neo Nazi whatever, and so like I'm going to stake these tokens and vote you out, and so like if there's it's kind of like a a voting situation, but you vote with the token and so you you allow people into the network or you you throw them out,

you know, based on the sort of token government system. Um. There have been many attempts at token curity registry before civil happened, and they have all failed because you know, I think the idea is not without merit, but it is not ready for prime time by any means. It depends on you know, a large group of people having enough overhead to pay attention to the rules and to sit there and that this is work, you know, vetting a newsroom deciding whether or not they've committed plagiarism or

whether or not they're adhering to this quota conduct. However simple, it is a bunch of people have to sit there and and you know, spend valuable time looking at some bozos website. You know, it was insanity. So um, I was fummed about that. But I mean, but the idea of the premise was is that there are all these contentious fights that happened online all the time. Is this tweet misleading? Is this Facebook post a lie is this

hate speech, etcetera. And the hope was that if there were some sort of monetary stake involved in the debate exactly, that that could resolve these questions an agreeable way for the community exactly. And even the right to the right

to publish itself, you know, was contingent. You know. The thing is, I took a lot of civil tokens as a compensation for this thing, you know, the idea and the way that the I c o s were going When we first started looking into this, it was a great bet, you know, because like any etherory token was gonna like I was having a ball, you know, um, and I just like to roll the dice. But I

mean I believed in it hugely. I still do. Because the thing is, if you have a you don't really need to call it a token, right, But if you have a community like like that is linked in it's and it's within its economy, is interlinked, all the participants have a stake and what is going on, and it's frictionless way of recording things that happened, that would be

great for this industry. It would still be great. The problem is how to make those principles um attainable within the current frameworks that we haven't they're not right now.

You know. Something I was thinking about, so like when I first got into writing, I just started, as you know, blogging, and I just like set up ah, I don't know, I think it was like two thousand five, and I set up a type Pad account and I just started blogging, and you know, it's just for the fun of it, you know when you mentioned like these tips of like sometimes just a few pennies or ten cents or twenty cents, like, does that ever sort of I don't know, I could

see that having a negative effect because here you are thinking, like I'm just doing and I kind of wanted to do it for the fun of it, and that's like, oh great, I got seventy cents, which is really not that much money for a thing. It's like, that's what it's worth two people like I would it, doesn't It seems like that would be perhaps, even though it is technically some sort of compensation, that that might have a sort of deterring or demoralizing effect, just like that's it. Well,

that's very mercenary, Joe. You know when it's like, well, I'm saying like once you established the idea like like it's one thing if you're just like, I want to be part of the conversation. This looks fun. I want to blog. I want to write my take on a movie that I just saw. I want to take down an article that I run in the New York Times and that right, want to write a thing debunking it. Well, those you know, that's like what I felt like motivated.

And then it's like you introduced the idea of like Okay, I'm gonna join this network or be part of this network of and there's gonna be some compensation, and then people like send a few tips and they come out to a dollar fifty. It's like I would rather just sort of I don't know. I feel like that would be a less I feel like that would be a

counter motivator. Well, I don't know, and I disagree. I think it's it's sort of like a if that somebody comments favorably on your work with no money attached to it. It's I find that pleasurable, the idea that somebody is reading it. Yeah, it's pleasurable to me. And you know, I agree completely. I mean that was to me, like that's the fun part, right, so you have that plus this other thing that's just a goofball thing, right, Yeah, I mean, what what people are really doing is entering

into a dialogue with you. It's had a little buddy attached to it. That's fine, and it's fine. It's good. So you know you mentioned that. Then I want to sort of talk about your new project in a second, But you mentioned that. At the time that you got this going, it's civil launched its token. At the time, it was still like all these tokens were just flying to the moon and make a fortune, and it was

probably like a good bet to hold onto them. Do you think actually you were penalized in part because it was a serious project designed to solve a serious problem and not the sort of get rich quick scheme slash scam that other people are running. Oh no, not a bit. I mean, yeah, no, I think it was we were just one of this huge constellation of projects in the

consensus universe. They were starting so many things at once because this huge amount of wealth had just ballooned like so fast, and so the seriousness or otherwise of a project was like the absolute least consideration. You know, it's kind of like just just look at all the millions of things that we all have to rent to do this as quickly as we can. You know, if I mean probably if Civil had ic O like you know, and six months earlier, Yeah, it would be really would

be looking at a real different story. I don't really quite know how exactly, but it wouldn't be like this. Let's talk about what you're up to now. So, I mean, this is a pretty interesting time in UH journalism because they're actually does seem to be the emergence of sort of sustainable subscription business models with normal fiat money being used. We see a lot of journalists this year having launched their own newsletters on services like substack and actually in

some cases making decent livings. A number of sort of independent outlets have gone hard paywall UH the athletic as a sports thing, as a bunch of different people writing about the local sports team. They seem to be doing well, and people are showing a willingness to pay for media in a way that a few years ago there seemed to be a lot more doubts about. So that's encouraging.

So talk to us about sort of what you've learned from that and how you see your current endeavor fitting into this new media landscape which seems to have some space open to it for paid subscriptions for Yeah, it's

really exciting. Well, this kind of came out of Civil really because there were a group of US publishers who really believed in this sort of cooperative model that we've been working on its Civil where basically the token was supposed to be the vehicle by which we were sustaining each other's work, and it was a really cooperative idea. So you had all these publishers after Civil broke up, and we're thinking, Okay, that was a little too our out apparently, but like, let's let's put these ideas to

work using a more conventional cooperative model. And so we studied cooperatives and um, there's a bakery here in Oakland called Arismendi that has like an interesting cooperative structure. There's cooperatives in Barcelona. And so we put together this really novel sort of business model with a friend of mine in Cleveland who's a business attorney, and um, I really love it. It's like each each publisher, there's nine of us in I knew venture. Um it's called the Brick

Brick House and it's totally flat organizational structure. Tom Scoca, who's one of the publishers in it, and I we're talking about what are we going to We've got to make a thing that just can't be blown down by outside forces. And that was kind of how the name came up so UM, because we both worked for outlets that were like demolished by you know, one way or another, like the sort of business craziness storms that have happened

throughout journalism. And it's like, Okay, let's just try something of our own on a small scale that's absolutely free of um, the outside influences of advertisers or owners or executives or anything. There's like, there's nothing in this thing but editors and publishers. And there's nine um, nine of us, and each of us has one share. You buy one share for one dollar, and all you can do with it is sell it back to the company for a dollar.

So this company is capitalized with nine dollars and so it's an LLC, but it runs according to an operating agreement where we share subscribers and revenues and expenses according to certain formulas. And there's a board of directors and and then we have an advisory council of industry leaders

in case there's stuff that we can't agree on. And so we worked really, really, really hard on the structure of this thing, because you know, I was in the courtroom when Gawker was taken down the whole Hogan trial, and I was covering it for death and taxes, which is also no more. But but I mean, we did not realize what was going on when that thing happened.

It was just really shocking, right that, when you had William brink With saying, you know, in the eighties defending the right of Larry Flitt two say in his magazine that Jerry Fallwell had incest in an outhouse. You know, like First Amendment principles of the press seemed to me to be absolutely ironclad. When William Brinquist was defending that, it seemed impossible to me that Gawker would be closed down for publishing this tiny little bit of like security

camera footage of called Cogan having spects. It's just like, yeah,

it's offensive to people, but it's that's that's protected right. Anyway, it did not work out, and so it was really shocking, and it took us a really long time to discover that it was you know, Peter Teel had bankrot dosn'ts of you know, a lot of lawsuits with a view to taking this this organization down, and he finally got lucky with his judge and and so I was like, wow, you know, one person can demolish the livelihoods of hundreds of people and remove the reading material for millions of

people because he was offended by something. And so I thought that it's just terrifying, you know, it's terrified that many can just shut something like this off. And it really motivated me a lot to figure out how to how to protect that, you know, speech rights and press freedom and so that's a lot where this comes from. There's not a way for anybody to come and buy it out. We're not relying on any billionaires to put

the bills. It's like, I don't know if may may succeed or it may fail, but at least we're trying, and it's really fun and we've got a really great um group of publishers and uh, we're raising some money in a Kickstarter building a simple version of it and we'll see where it goes. So where ship people check out to learn more Kickstarter, or you just go to If you go to Google and type in brick House Kickstarter, you'll you'll see it at the top. There's a lot

more detail there. Ben Smith interviewed me at The New York Times about it, and I wrote a piece about it the Columbia Journalism Review that explains the details. We're probably like at the current pace. I think we'll be publishing at the end of October. Well, I really appreciate

you joining me for this. Um, it's really cool, I think, Um, you know you're sort of your appetite to trying new things and experiment and see things like civil not work out but then just move on and sort of trying to experiment is a really cool and refreshing and thank you. I'm looking forward to seeing how brick House goes. And you know, obviously still a lot of uncertainty in this industry about how people are going to get paid and how many people will get paid. So it feels like

the more projects the better. Thank you, Joe. I really appreciate it. Handled so much fun talking. I could yell about crypto all day long. Yeah, it's great to finally meet you, and good luck. Thank you so much. All right, take care Maria. Well there you go. Um. You know,

I think it's super interesting. Like I said in the beginning, I guess I viewed a lot of the projects back of the I c O Cryptomania is kind of cynical, and then I became cynical about them, and I'm still cynical about them, and even in with this new sort of crypto boom, I'm still sort of super skeptical of them all. But I did really like hearing the inside story of one of them. So looking forward to checking out how Maria's current project goes. So this has been

another episode of the Odd Lots Podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal. You can follow me on Twitter at the Stalwart. Follow my co host Tracy Alloway. She's on Twitter at Tracy Alloway. Our guest Maria Bustillo, She's at Maria Bustillo's. Check out her project brick House on Kickstarter. Follow our producer Laura Carlson at Laura M. Carlson. The Bloomberg head of podcast Francesca Levy at Francesco Today, And of course you can check out all of our podcasts at Bloomberg under the

handle at podcast. Thanks for listening.