From the Road: A Blog of a Crypto Vagabond

SWAC Podcast Ep 8 – Linton Johnson of OVIS.News. Journalism 2.0 – Not Your Daddy’s News

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

bill deignan, corporate media, elsa ramon, journalism, linton, money, news, ovis.news, people, platform, sinclair, token, truth, validated

SPEAKERS

Elsa Ramon, Bill Deignan, Linton Johnson

Elsa Ramon 0:03
Hi, everybody. Welcome to so what about crypto? And, Bill? i, you and i talk about a lot of things. I always say that when we start a podcast, but I know everybody lately has something to say about journalism and the media, especially. Yes, but you know, you’re not alone. A lot of people have their thoughts. I would say lately, they haven’t been the best opinions about the media, but, you know, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, and they’re certainly with not without any merit, certainly aren’t without merit, because there have been some grave mistakes and, you know, just not as much care put into journalism as there used to be. And you know, as you know, I spent 21 years in the news business, and there’s a The reason why I left several but that’s one of the biggest ones. But there are problems on the local level and there are problems on a national level. And they’re very different.

Bill Deignan 1:13
Yeah, yeah. You and I have talked about that, you know, a couple of years ago, I remember asking a lot about that and trying to get a sense of, you know, here I am with a industry professional, give me the inside scoop. What the hell is really going on in newsrooms? You know, and it sounded to me like, my impression you gave me was there was quite a bit different on that level that you were, you know, more localized and it was, you know, newsy instead of opinionated

Elsa Ramon 1:41
not Yeah, on the local level really, not much punditry. You know, we we would invite people on to talk professors, political professors, you know, local political pundits, but they would have their opinions it would not come from us on a national level is different because that’s cable. It’s paid. And it’s a totally different ballgame. And I believe it’s also totally out of control, which is why we have Lyndon Johnson, who is the founder of obus dot news here with us today and, and I and I want to disclose right off the bat that Linton is a founder of overstock news but I’m also a co founder and on the advisory board. Linton and I both have an extensive background in television news. Linton was also a television news reporter and anchor for several networks. The last one you worked for was for NBC up in the Bay Area in California. So we know some of the same people some of those people have cross paths and those people led Linton and I to meet each other because we both, Bill, were at points in our careers, where we saw the troubles rising with journal Islam and we also had our aha moment with Bitcoin and blockchain. And we both knew that we wanted to merge the two somehow and make things better. So that’s how our paths crossed. And we’ve been working together ever since. And I have to say, it’s been an absolute joy. Linton is a compassionate, smart person. And when you hear more about obus I hope you’re more excited about the future of journalism like, like we are Linton has poured his heart and soul into this. And for us, it’s personal.

Linton Johnson 3:39
It’s very personal. And first of all, thank you for allow me to come on to your amazing show. And, you know, we you and I also shared almost like identical careers like the parallel Yeah, in so many ways. And I think that’s what attracted us to each other. Your talks about all the circles, we’ve run around in, we all know that news is an incestuous

Elsa Ramon 4:07
a snakepit?

Bill Deignan 4:12
I’ve never heard that.

Elsa Ramon 4:14
Oh, yeah, it can’t be it. Because you know, you think of all these people who have all these resources at their fingertips and you’re working with some very talented smart people, not all of them are that way. But nonetheless, it’s still a place where people want to move up. There jockeying for position just like any other career, and when you get people who are on air involved, it is sort of it adds that element of entertainment. Hmm. Hence the term that popped up over the years info-tainment and you tried it, you get the egos and you get all those other things that jumble everything up, and it creates drama. You know, that’s not the fun part of it.

Linton Johnson 5:00
It is not the fun part of it. And you know, you go to journalism school. Go ahead.

Bill Deignan 5:06
Well, no, I’m interested to hear about what you’re going to say about journalism school because it kind of leads to my, you know, next question, I think.

Linton Johnson 5:15
Well, I went to Northwestern University’s journalism school, middle school journalism. And, you know, I got

we like to say that we’re number one in the country. Well, well, are you

Elsa Ramon 5:34
in the journalism world? Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, guys are top notch for journalism.

Linton Johnson 5:40
But you know, at school, you learn about the values of telling the truth and trying to be as objective as possible. And transparency, democracy, all of those core values as a journalist you embrace. It’s the reason why you want to go into journalism. You just have a desire. To be able to tell the truth, present the facts in an objective way, and let other people make their decisions based upon that story. Of course, you want to tell a great story, but not one that is trying to drive an agenda. And you’re at Northwestern and journalism schools all across the country. I think they’re really striving for those ideals. And then you get into the corporate media, and they’ve got different goals. their goals are to drive up ratings, their goals are to get you to click, and the truth seems to kind of slip away. It’s not that they don’t want to do cover stories, truthfully, but they’ve got an agenda because their agenda really is about clicks and ratings. And I need the truth and money right, because that drives that drives the clicks and ratings drive profits and they’re only a few people get the profits. Those are the shareholders of the corporate media outlets. So you know, the drive every single morning in the morning meeting is alright what story is going to get us the most clicks from That story is going to give us the highest ratings. And when that is your focus and your focus is not on the truth. I mean, you say in the back of your head that I’m going to do a true story. But your agenda changes and your focus changes and the truth starts to slip. And then you find yourself as a journalist doing stories that I know, this is not really what I went to journalism school for. Oh, God, I do have a paycheck.

Elsa Ramon 7:27
How many times have you said that to yourself? A tree down in the street or a car chase or you know, whoo, it’s windy.

Linton Johnson 7:39
Yeah, that’s this rain.

coverage of the rain.

Elsa Ramon 7:44
Have you seen this new phenomenon? It’s called rain

Linton Johnson 7:49
or snow.

Have you seen this

Elsa Ramon 7:58
bill, I know where you are.

Bill Deignan 7:59
This confirms my theory that you guys on TV guys are all in the in the break room. This is the conversation. The cynical, you know, conversations about oh my god, I got to cover this bs today, you know? Yep. Rain again. Yeah, yes

Linton Johnson 8:17
Live team coverage.

Elsa Ramon 8:18
Yes. or live team coverage,

Elsa Ramon 8:21
Live team coverage, team coverage or storyline 2020 22 it’ll be STORM WATCH 2030 Yeah. You know, but I

Bill Deignan 8:34
want to take it deeper than I want to talk about this whole, you know, what’s what I perceive now on a national level? And, you know, and so, you know, I do a lot of research on, you know, all kinds of deep things and, and maybe borderline conspiratorial, you know, you could say about history of, you know, corporate media and banks and propaganda and the like, but, you know, it’s just, I don’t think it can be denied that, you know, regardless of the leaning, you know, left or right of a news, national news organization these days, there’s some talking points being passed around. And as just an observer, I’m like, Who’s handing that stuff out? Because everybody’s using the same buzz words on the same day, about the same thing. And I just feel personally like somebody at the top, whoever that dark person is, you know, that dark soul may be that corporate media talking, you know, person pulling strings. Somebody, in my opinion, is just saying, here’s what you’re gonna say today.

Elsa Ramon 9:41
The man behind the curtain

Bill Deignan 9:42
Multiple outlets. All right, so Well, do you guys have knowledge or are you willing to impart the knowledge to me of who the hell is doing this?

Elsa Ramon 9:52
Okay, just to ease your mind Bill. I know there’s a lot of conspiracy theories about some puppet masters Like, you know, Bill Gates or George Soros that run the left liberal media and, you know, we’re all on the take to take their positions. And you know, I, it’s crazy. First of all, in my 21 years in TV news, I haven’t gotten one check from Soros and I am pissed. I’ve been hearing about everybody in the liberal media getting checks from this guy, and I haven’t seen anything so I’m waiting for back pay. But it Bill seriously, it’s not that nefarious, at least on a local level. I can’t speak to the national level

Bill Deignan 10:41
and I agree on the local level,

Elsa Ramon 10:43
but I agree with you on the national level there. There isn’t so much like the man behind the curtain type of thing pulling the strings, like this unknown figure. But I say it’s more of a trickle down effect where, you know, we’re all at the top, maybe kind of Dry have the agenda for the day. And then you have your executive producers and producers who craft stories with then the on air people, the reporters, the anchors and you know, everybody gets on the same page. There’s no like, secret plot where everyone’s sitting there going, Okay, today we’re going to tell people to think this.

Bill Deignan 11:23
But you can’t do just that. It’s I literally see like one cable news station, say something, a buzz phrase of the day and the other one is almost the same time we’ll use the same terminology. Well,

Linton Johnson 11:36
so that that does actually happen. And I think if I think to Elsa’s point, it’s not necessarily that it was designed that way. But if you think about it, there is a central for most news organizations like conglomerates. They’ve got kind of, you know, a central desk where all the copy is written and then they disseminate it out to all They’re affiliates. And I think it’s it’s probably more lack of laziness, from the affiliates to rewrite the copy, they just take what was given to them. And then they, because they’re so strapped with people, they don’t have time to rewrite stuff. And if it’s already written, it’s like, well just copy paste, and then the anchor will say it. So

Bill Deignan 12:18
So the feed is doing it, you know,

Elsa Ramon 12:20
sort of but but when you’re getting things on the feed, you could get things from the AP and other news sources, Reuters and all that kind of stuff. But there are also all of our affiliates. You know, I last worked at CBS. So we’d have a feed from all the CBS affiliates on local stories happening in all their local areas, and we’d pull in the interesting stories, and there would be this level of trust there because you would hope that they went through the channels of checking everything before they dumped it on the feed to send out to all the other CBS stations to be able to say pick and choose. Oh, we like this story. We’d like the story. Oh, that’s a cool story out of Minnesota or that’s interesting. story out of Texas and put it all together. So it’s not like, you know, again, an an evil plot to, to craft something that’s going to manipulate you. It’s I agree with Linton, there’s a combination of things laziness, skeleton crews, as newsrooms see budgets dry up every single year, investigative units taken away consumer units taken away. So you have all these people who have a wealth of experience that now the network’s no longer want to pay. So you’re left with, you know, people who would who don’t have very much experience and they’re turning out content. And it’s not necessarily necessarily quality anymore, or 100%. checked.

Linton Johnson 13:51
Right? Yeah, and I think, you know, they’ve got a newscast to fill. Five o’clock comes on at five o’clock every single day. You Can’t wait. So, you know, it’s like, you’ve got 30 minutes of news, well, maybe minus commercials that you got to fill. And so if you got a skeleton crew, the script is already written, you don’t have time to go back and double check all the facts in there. One thing that, you know, make sense, I think in the moment is just copy and paste what’s there, don’t try to change it around, because you change around, you might make a mistake, if you don’t have that opportunity to go back and investigate it. And you also said, there’s a level of trust. Well, this came from our sister affiliate, they must have done the work. And so let’s just keep it the same. So you know, I think you see, like on Sinclair and YouTube, there’s these videos where, you know, they have like 50 different stations from the Sinclair network, or whatever it is, whatever network and all the anchors are saying exactly the same thing. Well, that’s probably what happened. I don’t like I said, I don’t think there’s an evil plot. It’s just lack of resources and

Elsa Ramon 14:59
Although I will say with Sinclair because before I came back home to LA and worked at CBS I, I was working at a TV station in San Antonio for five years at an NBC affiliate. And we were owned by small television groups. And the last year I was there, Sinclair purchased the station. Now that last year I was there. I was on maternity leave for four months, because I had my son and then I left shortly after that when I came back to work for a few months and then came back home to LA. But the short time that I was at Sinclair, what happens there is that there is one central reporter or a few, they all they write the same copy the same script of a message they want to send out. Now this is absolutely targeted. I can tell you I was there every day. I mean, it’s still happening with Sinclair. They send that script out to all of their affiliates and they demand that they be run in in their shows. There is no

Linton Johnson 16:07
then there there’s your conspiracy right there no bill.

Elsa Ramon 16:13
For Sinclair, I was by work for them I worked for you know, for brief time and when that started when they bought us and that started happening, all of us were like, what the f*%^? Like what we’re being that we have, we have to say word for word. What it says on that script that sent out to all the affiliates. We have to run the story, not edit it down at all. It has to come in and be aired in its exact form that it was sent to all the Sinclair affiliates, and we have to read the script exactly how it was sent. So imagine Sinclair owns I don’t know how many stations they own now 50, 75 I have no idea and their attempt to take over the world but they every single one of their anchors at every single one of those stations are reading this Same exact script and running the same exact story because they have an agenda and they are demanding that story

Linton Johnson 17:07
who is Google’s right 294 television stationS

Elsa Ramon 17:11
294 holy cow

Bill Deignan 17:12
their phones the who owns Sinclair, like, is there?

Elsa Ramon 17:15
No, they’re their own television.

Bill Deignan 17:20
Like, who are the major stockholders? I wonder

Elsa Ramon 17:22
Oh, I don’t know. But Sinclair it’s it’s it’s very well known that Sinclair is very right wing that they lean that way very hard. And so when when they came and bought the station and started mandating these, they’re called must runs. That we must run these stories in the in the shows the producers don’t have a choice. You as an anchor don’t have a choice. If you don’t want to read it, then they’ll give it to the other anchor and if you keep refusing that then there’s going to be a problem.

Bill Deignan 18:01
So that was to what degree did that factor into you deciding to leave the newsroom?

Elsa Ramon 18:09
Well, I, I mean, I wanted to get out of that station after a Sinclair bought it quite honestly, because of that, that was my first direct, like, wide in the open not even hiding it experience with that kind of mandate coming down from up above. Right. So that really bothered me and it bothered everybody in that newsroom. But, you know, everybody was like, What do we do? I mean, you resist

Linton Johnson 18:39
you got a family, you’ve got a family, you got a mortgage. You know, got you by the you know, what,

Bill Deignan 18:46
that, you know, this will be my last question on this part, but I just, I think Megyn Kelly kind of proved proved it to us like it’s, it’s, you know, I see reporters have their sort of biases revealed. But I saw that with Megyn Kelly and then she went to another station and she had a new bias. And she had a huge paycheck to go with it. Right.

Elsa Ramon 19:11
Exactly. Because Money Talks, right, Linda? I mean, you know, and and you were you were pointing out Linton, that the lines start to get blurred when corporate gets involved because they’re a business. They want that networks want to make money. They want the stories that drive the clicks, they want the stories that make the money, they get the attention. And it just seems like that’s the problem that we’ve seen with so many industries, the insurance industry, hospitals, jails, when you monetize something, shit gets messed up. The lines get blurred.

Linton Johnson 19:49
here’s, here’s the difference with all this, but you’re right about that. But I think what we have figured out our business model that Els and I and the rest of the team have figured out Is that we have to recognize that money does drive the world. So how do we incentivize the truth? Instead of incentivizing clicks and ratings? How do we incentivize the truth? So that way, in order for you to earn money on the OVIS platform, you have to tell the truth. And so that’s what the game changer is with OVIS is we’ve reinvented, we’ve disrupted the news industry, the corporate media world. And we have created a model where the more truth that is told on our platform, the more money a journalist can make. But if they start to lie, or they start to bend the truth, but they try to put out fake news, then they lose money. So I don’t think there’s a way to get out of, you know, trying to change the world by saying, we’re not going to use money anymore. That’s just what it is. So let’s

Elsa Ramon 20:52
use it wrong with wanting to make money and make a good living right and do it but not at the expense of the truth. Right. Exactly. And that’s where OVIS is different. And you were saying Linton that, you know, you tell the truth, you continue to grant a gain credibility on the obus community. And that allows you to make more money because then more people trust you, and more people, you know, and so on and so on and start so you start earning more trust, you start with trust comes more money. And, you know, the radio trading, yes. And your rating continues to climb in a favorable way in the obus community. So that people start to have their trusted sources where they know or the consensus is in the community, that this person is generally telling the truth. Almost always I can trust this person to be non biased about a story I can trust this person that I’m, I’m getting the facts. And so just like Linton said, the truth said the truth Is incentivized.

Bill Deignan 22:03
I’m still a little confused. In reading the website, you know, it’s like, I’m the type of person almost have to do it to get it. But you know, let us know, like how a person how I would like to say a content creator, or journalist would get started.

Linton Johnson 22:22
Let me ask you a question. What story? Are you interested in that you’re not seeing the news media cover right now? Oh,

Bill Deignan 22:31
wow, where do I start? I think, you know, Elsa you know, and, and some of our listeners, you know, because I mentioned was, well, I’m very interested in the Federal Reserve, and how the, the power the gigantic power structure that it supports globally. How we don’t really see how that does exert enormous power on other countries. How It’s, you know, extracting money from everyday people like you and me through inflation and you know, all of those things we just we just don’t as Americans, or I guess, global’s you know, people, citizens of the world just aren’t aware. We’re just blissfully unaware. And I wish some really good journalists would just dig deep and hard on that sort of sort of thing.

Linton Johnson 23:24
Okay, so we’ll call that in the newsroom. We call the title of a story a slug. So the slug of your story is the Federal Reserve that kind of summarizes what we’re talking about today. So on the OVIS platform, everybody has a token. Now think of a token is, if you’re really old school, when you rode the subway, you had a token, right? Or if you go to the fair, or if you’re gamble, you have to buy tokens or chips, right? So you go into, let’s say, a gambling facility, and you buy your chips so that way you can participate gambling or you go into a fair and you buy tickets. It’s the same thing. It’s a token, but the token is a digital piece of money. And it has, it’s like money 2.0. It was money on steroids because not only is it money, but it can also act like a ballot. It can act like a store of value. It’s very versatile. But the token is really important to answer the question that you just had. So the way the newsrooms work right now, the corporate media works is there are a select few people who decide what the agenda is of the day. On the OVIS platform, we let the people decide, we want you to decide what the News is. So you can put up this your slug is basically the Federal Reserve. So you put on there on the OVIS platform, I like a journalist to cover the Federal Reserve and you describe it and blah, blah, blah, which what you’d like to understand. So then other people on the platform have tokens, they bought these tokens, and let’s say Each token is worth $1 they bought these tokens and they use your tokens to vote on that Federal Reserve story. Instead, the Federal Reserve story comes with, I mean, 50,000 people vote, and they put one token, that’s $50,000 worth of tokens that is now attached to that story. And so what the community has now said is wow, not only do we want to hear about the story, we’re willing to put our money where our mouth is, and we want to journalists go out and cover it in journals like 50,000 bucks I can make $50,000 off of this story. Yeah, but you got to tell the truth about it. So the journalist goes out and and they’ve got a bag of money a person’s money attached to the story, they go cover it

Bill Deignan 25:39
and then they send it they receive it? Like literally they have access to that money or it’s a it’s a carrot waiting for the end of the

Linton Johnson 25:47
it’s a carrot waiting yes a carrot waiting. We have

Elsa Ramon 25:50
a lot of fun. So pairing to Ibiza.

Linton Johnson 25:55
Yeah. So the whole community. So you as a as a reader We’ll have tokens, there’s going to be a group of people called fact checkers. And when the journalists submits their story to the fact checkers, these factors are approved by the committee, they were voted on by the community. The fact checkers are are supposed to uphold the Constitution of Ovis, or the charter, all the ground rules to ensuring that a story is fact checked properly, and that it is fair and objective. So if the story passes the fact checkers review, then the journalist gets to keep the Well, there’s actually one more step. But the journalist is now past step one in the effort to keep that person $50,000 tokens. And then the community gets to vote on the objectivity of the story. And let’s just say the scale is and we haven’t finalized this piece yet, but there’ll be something along these lines let’s say the scale is one to 100 in Objectiveness this receives a 100% objective rating, then the journalist has to keep all $50,000 that receives a 90% rating, they get only 90% of the of the $50,000. So at every step along the way, they’re trying to ensure the truth and ensure that that story is objective. Because if they don’t, they lose money. And they could either get kicked off the platform in some cases. So that’s kind of the 30,000 foot view of how we incentivize the truth. And we make a whole community built around wanting only truthful stories. Now, here’s the last part of this, you as a token holder. So this ecosystem starts to make money, right? The platform will start to take, you know, a fee for each of these things. And that’s the pay for the operation of the platform. But any profits that the platform makes, will be returned to the community of token holders. That means you as a reader or a viewer We’ll get profits, because we redistribute the money and I’m liking corporate media where it only goes to a select few shareholders and they get rich and they don’t really care. This all the money goes back to We the People, it’s about the people, it’s the people, by the people about the people. So that money goes back to the token holders, you the reader, and you’re like, Well, obviously I want more money. So I know where to get my money is to ensure the truth. So there’s just all these checks and balances on the journalist on the fact checker is on the community. And as long as we’re all aiming for one thing, the truth, we can all make money.

Elsa Ramon 28:39
And Linton, there was something we’ve all been adamant about with OVIS is that the old model of shareholders being way up here, the tiny, tiny percent of a company, a big corporation, and then the rest of us, you know, worker bees, human stock, whatever we’re seeing as we didn’t know He didn’t want that at all, because that’s part of what’s driving the problem is shareholders put the pressure on the lower people to turn the profits and get the clicks and do the stories and whatever their agendas are. This diffuses that it breaks it up and breaks up that that little exclusive club that makes the money. And now it’s all in the people’s hands in the community’s hands, the OVIS community’s hands. So it’s, you know, we’re all taking care of each other in a way as opposed to working our butts off to take care of a tiny group of people will never see who don’t really care about us.

Linton Johnson 29:48
Can you imagine Sinclair trying to operate within this they go bankrupt within?

Elsa Ramon 29:57
have your money yeah,

Linton Johnson 29:58
yeah, exactly. Yeah. I’m sorry, we’re not approving that story. Yeah. We’re kicked off the platform. Yeah, I mean, it would just it would never,

Elsa Ramon 30:08
it could never have. Right. And those are the those are the things Linton that prevent people who have an agenda who get into obus. Right? Because we ask these questions of ourselves as we’ve been kind of putting this together. I mean, Lintons has done the lion’s share of the work, no doubt, this is his baby. But we’ve all thought of these situations like, well, what if you have a whole group of conservatives and a whole group of right, you know, liberals getting on OVIS and trying to drive an agenda? Well, they’ll be weeded out pretty quickly, because the community will see that Come on, you know, this is so biased. I’m taking my token back.

Bill Deignan 30:50
Right, I guess, you know, that would be my concern as a you know, sort of a 51% attack type of thing. You know, whoever has the most tokens wins in you know, could a person buy their way into that?

Linton Johnson 31:01
No. Well, here’s the thing is only one person, one vote. And the other thing is everybody on this platform is validated. So one of the biggest problems in social media In fact, this is one of the reasons why I wanted to start OVIS is that there’s so much fake news out there, they’re bots, the duplicates are people pretending to be who they are not. Um, and on the oldest platform, everybody has to be validated. So we have a validation process that ensures that each person is real. Not about not a duplicate. So any only get one row.

Bill Deignan 31:36
So now it’s becoming more clear to me. So is this the type of place that you know, similar to AP news or Reuters where, you know, outlets go to source stories? Is this what you’re trying to make it or is it a platform that an everyday viewer just might go watch news?

Linton Johnson 31:57
I can be both. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it could be both, you know, the stories that will be on our platform will be validated, trustworthy, inaccurate. And so if you know CNN or MSNBC or Sinclair wants to actually report on real, unbiased, factually based, trustworthy, accurate, verifiable news, they could definitely come to us and know that they’re going to get an unbiased, factually based, trustworthy, verifiable and accurate story. Now they want to not go, they want to do what they continue doing. They can, you know, we’re not trying to solve their problems. We’re creating a whole new paradigm.

Bill Deignan 32:35
Right? And the token holders when you say they’re validated as you know, being real people, let’s so that’s the reason I asked about is this going to be a platform where everybody would come consume news, you know, there that scale represents a lot of work for you guys to sort of really do a know your customer type of thing. So

Linton Johnson 32:57
well, the technology is a lot better now. To be able to To validate folks, we’re most likely going we’re not going to get the company name because we’ve made the final decision on it yet, but there’s about three different companies that were very happy with, they’ve got almost like a 99% accuracy rate in ensuring that people are real and validated. You know, they can validate, folks. So that’s gonna be central to this because we need you to trust as a viewer or reader, you We need you to trust the fact that the journalist interviewed somebody, there’s also real, the journalist is real, and that their sources are real because the part of the fact checking process will be that did the journalist validate their sources? Did they go through our fact checking and ensure that the sources are who they are? And we’re going to require that every source be validated. So there’s no bots so no duplicates? No people making up quotes from people that don’t actually exist,

Bill Deignan 34:02
so if I do I have to sort of get some marching orders or incentives from OVIS before I go create the story, or could I create a story? Let’s say I was already creating some stories about the Federal Reserve, and I’m gonna try to get these on this OVIS platform. How does that work? You know,

Linton Johnson 34:23
well, if you

Bill Deignan 34:24
I’m not going out to create what I think the token holders have asked for. I just have already been doing it. But could I leverage that onto the platform?

Linton Johnson 34:33
Absolutely. You could now that would require you coming up with your own tokens to be able to pay for the validation part of it, but not in the first round and what we call the MVP, the minimum viable product, that’s the that’s that’s what we’re launching on Labor Day weekend. But in the second round, when we go to beta stage, the if you wanted to bring your own story like the Federal Reserve, you did want to put it up For a token vote, then you can put it on the platform, the fact checkers will be able to validate that and then people can then tip you. So that’s one way to kind of get yourself started. So this story is really great people on the platform, say, yeah, it’s validated stress ways accurate, subjective. This guy did a great job, I’m going to tip them. And then this now kind of starts, especially young journalist, or early in their careers, even if they’re not particularly young. This This helps them gain their credibility. So they’ve been validated by the community. They’ve got a list of stories that the community says are fact factually accurate, trustworthy, verifiable. And then as they start to pitch stories onto the platform, then people like oh, yeah, I know that journalists he has done a body of work that is excellent. And I think that’s probably a good story idea. I’m gonna I’m gonna vote on that as well.

Elsa Ramon 35:58
And the people who are in the community Bill are, obviously you see how it’s very community driven. So you’re incentivized to vote to stake your tokens on stories you like, because the more people that do that, and the more that story succeeds, the more you get back and continue to earn yourself. So it’s it’s a win win for everybody. It’s not like how you hear a lot of times in crypto communities where you know, the the buzzword is HODL, which means, you know, hold on to your Bitcoin and as a store of value and let it grow, you know, and let it gain value

Linton Johnson 36:43
Can we talk about that real quick. But, yeah, can we talk about that piece? You were really instrumental and feel free to jump in because you’re really instrumental in helping us talk about the trustworthiness of art of our token. Um, one of the things For those crypto nerds that are out there, like ourselves, we’re differently. Our token is really different than any other token that’s out there. It’s the first of the kind hybrid token. So what does that mean? This is usually have a token that you just want to hold on to don’t want to do anything. But those are stores of values. Those are like stocks, right? Then you’ve got the utility token, which is, doesn’t have any value, but you can use it to participate in in that ecosystem. And then a couple other types of tokens. Ours is a hybrid, it combines the best of all these different worlds. And what’s really unique about this is the fact that it’s not subject to security Exchange Commission rules. And the reason for that is there was a Supreme Court decision that define what a security is. And there’s a four pronged tests called the Howey Test and and the fourth prong says a security is when someone purchases something in the hopes of gaining value, and here’s the key on the backs of everyone else’s efforts. So you sit back like a stock, you own the stock, and you do do anything and wait for the stock prices to rise. But that makes it a security on our platform, you have to actually use your tokens for the remaining tokens to have any value. So I buy 1000 tokens, I have to do a certain number of activities to improve the platform with a portion of my tokens in order for the remaining tokens and I have to be able to increase in value. So that’s kind of the game changer for this because now our tokens act like a ballot, they act like a store of value money. They can act like an investment instrument, all in one digital asset. And they’re not subject to sec, we don’t believe because of the fact that it doesn’t meet the fourth prong of the howey test. So With that, we are a game changer for those crypto folks who are looking to buy a token that it can use and also earn money as it increases in value.

Bill Deignan 39:11
So it’s not a token that would be listed on an exchange anywhere.

Linton Johnson 39:15
It Well, we hope that it’ll be listed on an exchange, we’re going to be we hope. Yeah. I mean, right now, there are a lot of tokens that are privately traded, so you’ll be able to buy it definitely from the OVIS platform as an aetherium based token. So it’s a theorem technology. And what right now you’ll do is you’ll buy eath ether, and then exchange it for token all on the platform with one click of a button. Okay.

Bill Deignan 39:39
Because that’s the part that makes it fuzzy for me about the potential potential of it being a speculative investment. And yes, and and, and as it relates to the fourth prong of the Howey Test.

Linton Johnson 39:54
Right. So I’ve answered the question, right.

Bill Deignan 39:56
Well, I answered it. I still don’t know if I can not that

Linton Johnson 40:03
I need to save you.

Bill Deignan 40:05
I just I just have to take pause, from that point of view to say, is it really neat? Is it really safe from that part of the Howey Test? I don’t know, you know?

Linton Johnson 40:18
Well, I mean, the fact is the Howey Test specifically says that you have to, it’s a security if you are letting other people do the work. And you’re earning the money off the backs of others.

Bill Deignan 40:29
Because you’re saying if you don’t use that token, it’s losing the value?

Linton Johnson 40:33
Well, you can’t, you can’t, it’s basically worthless, until you use a portion of your tokens. So I mean, you if they’re locked, what happens on our platform is, say buy 1000 tokens, they’re all locked. You can’t sell them, period. Until you perform these actions on the platform. You got to vote. You got to post a story. You’ve got to participate in this community because participant in the community now adds value, and you’ve got to be part of that process. You’re going to just sit back and wait for your tokens to go up, well, then we’re not gonna let you do that. So you’re not gonna be able to trade it.

Elsa Ramon 41:06
You’re not adding value at all to the community, we need you to be active, we need you to vote. We need you to have an opinion. We need you to pitch your story ideas and say I’d like to see someone cover this. That’s the whole point is community driven, you know, for the people by the people, as opposed to all the models we see now, which is, you know, shareholders and everybody else. That’s not

Bill Deignan 41:30
how we want to that’s not how we want to roll. This is all smart contracts on Etherium.

Linton Johnson 41:36
Yes, Yes, that’s correct.

Bill Deignan 41:40
Yeah, you’re ready for Etherium 2.0

Elsa Ramon 41:44
Etherium is ready for a theory on

Bill Deignan 41:49
Journalism 2.0.

Linton Johnson 41:52
This is definitely journalism 2.0 This is a whole new paradigm in journalism, I kind of my favorites scene is from the show Silicon Valley on HBO. I haven’t seen it. But I encourage people to look it up on YouTube. There’s a scene where Richard who is the CEO of Pied Piper, this is a blockchain based company. That’s the disrupt the internet. And it gets up before Congress. And he’s talking about how his company can change the world when it comes to ensuring privacy for folks. And Congress is demanding that he explain why Facebook and Twitter and all the rest are taking your privacy and he basically says this, and I’m not I’m gonna butcher it. So it’s really fun to watch it on YouTube, but, but the idea is that he can’t change Facebook. He can’t change Twitter. They’re the kings. They’re the they’re dominant. It’s not unlike when the pilgrims before they were pilgrims over in Europe or they’re sick and tired of the tyranny of the kings. They couldn’t beat the king. They’ve already won they’re the kings, so they had to just go to a whole new world and rewrite everything. And so that’s what we did with OVIS. We’re rewriting everything. We can’t beat CNN. We can’t beat MSNBC and Fox News. They’re the kings of the media world. And we not even gonna try it. Why try? They’ve got problems so big we can’t fix them.

Elsa Ramon 43:20
So we’re gonna fix them we not their problem.

Linton Johnson 43:26
Yeah, we’re moving somewhere else.

Elsa Ramon 43:29
Yeah, but we, you know, again, yeah, that’s the philosophy that no, we’re just gonna go around these problems and do better.

Linton Johnson 43:37
Exactly, creating a whole new paradigm. We invented the news from the bottom up. But by keeping to our core values, which is trust, worthy, verifiable and accurate news, what everybody wants, we want the truth. Everybody wants the truth, and you’ll be able to find that on our platform.

Bill Deignan 43:54
Now, how do you pick your fact checkers? You know, how do you avoid the inevitable accusation that well, who’s your facts checkers? You know, what do they believe in? Because there’s some subjectivity to that.

Linton Johnson 44:12
Right? Great question. So the fact checkers, we’re going to go through a process we’re going through a process of picking right now and model, a fact checking that will be validated by the community to ensure objectivity. So that and when we launching on, on Labor Day weekend, what we’re doing is we’re inviting people who are skilled at journalism and skilled at fact checking. And we’re helping create a model that all the community can agree upon. Republicans, Democrats, everybody in between people from around the world. We all come together, and we create a model that is objective. The fact checkers once that model is created, and we all agree upon it, we all validate it, we come to consensus on this model, then the fact checkers are required to uphold that, that model that we all as a community by the people who, for the people we create, can agree up, they have to, they have to abide by by that model. And then now the community can be checked on the fact checkers, in fact, checkers failed to do their jobs, they can lose their position instantaneously. With smart contracts, we don’t have to wait for an election. They’re basically on notice every single day. So they’re there, their whole focus is to ensure the truth. And if the community starts to see that they’re not upholding the charter of how factchecking is supposed to be done, then they can get voted off the island, they can lose money. And, you know, we the community want the truth and truth is being incentivized and if the fact checkers aren’t doing their job, then we’re all losing out. So there’s an incentive to make sure that these factors are on us.

Bill Deignan 46:00
So how does that launch look? What is it literally gonna be?

Linton Johnson 46:05
Well we’re gonna be

Elsa Ramon 46:07
we have it’s fabulous.

Linton Johnson 46:10
We’re talking to the chief fabulous officer right now

Yeah, that’s what else’s title is. Chief Fabulous Officer

Bill Deignan 46:22
fabulous meaning meaning when you say launches it just we’re just gonna make the website and program live or are you having some events or do you have in mind?

Linton Johnson 46:33
Well, we’re having an event. It’s going to be on the Zaplife platform. It’s a new you know, I gotta plug in my computer because I’m seeing the little battery

Elsa Ramon 46:47
That happened to me that happened to me the other day. I was I joined somebody on their on their podcast. Yeah, we went on for two hours and didn’t realize We’ve gone on too long. I thought for sure I’d have enough battery. So I had to say to him, I don’t mean to be rude, but we’ve got to cut it off because otherwise I’m going to drop off the cliff here. And that’ll be just a way to say thank you to your viewers.

Linton Johnson 47:18
We’ve got power, so we’re good.

Unknown Speaker 47:21
Yay.

Bill Deignan 47:23
You guys are both in California. That’s a you know, that’s questionable. I understand. Well,

Linton Johnson 47:29
maybe I mean, yeah, I mean, PG&E can go

Bill Deignan 47:34
Yep. You have no record date. What is this August 19 2020. You know, for posterity but you guys are having some serious brown out energy issues. Oh, my goodness what I’m hearing Yeah.

Linton Johnson 47:46
No,

Elsa Ramon 47:49
wow. It’s It’s pretty. There’s some records being broken, unfortunately, that nobody wants to break. And yeah, I think he it’s really it’s, it’s been terrible for the last week, week and a half. And in Northern California for Linton you guys up there. It’s it’s worse because normally the Bay Area is so mild and most people don’t have air conditioners, at least that live by the coast. And that’s gotten to a point where it’s they need. There are times it can be miserable now.

Linton Johnson 48:25
Yeah, I my little brother. He lives in San Francisco, and I’m in the East Bay. And we have air conditioning in our house. He’s like can I stay in your room? Ah, oh.

Yeah, suddenly people I had no idea was related to want to move in.

Free air conditioning.

Elsa Ramon 48:48
Oh, man. It’s it’s valuable these days.

Bill Deignan 48:53
All right. So let’s get back to zap life. I think you were talking about

Linton Johnson 48:56
right so on the zap live platform.

We are eventually why we’ve been designated as the exclusive provider of news for the zap life platform. And zap life is a great company. It’s brand new, but it’s an app that allows basically their their their, their tagline is the revolution won’t be televised, it will be live streamed. This is an app. That’s pretty cool, right, like so it’s a live streaming app. And it combines all the best of all the social media platforms all into one app. And what what allows you to do, especially in COVID, is let’s just say you’re an entertainer, and you want to hold a concert. You can hold a concert on this app and have people watching your concert but these people can all interact. Your audience can all interact with each other just like if you’re at a real concert right? You see a hot person over there. You want to buy them a drink and click on something and buy them a virtual drink and they can get a coupon to go buy a drink later or You can go into a private room and you can, you can listen to the concert where you to have a conversation. There’s a champagne room, there’s a champagne.

Elsa Ramon 50:15
Isn’t that good yet? Smoke, and you can get the full concert experience

Linton Johnson 50:25
by virtual high.

But the live event will be on the zap live platform and we’ll be inviting a few folks to development. I’ve tried to make this huge, but we are sending out RSVP’s we’ll have an art. If you’re interested in it. I’d encourage you to come to OVIS.news and sign up for the live event. I think our reservation page will be going up within the next couple of days but look out for it and we are taking a limited number of folks onto into the into the launch event, as well as being part of the MVP process in any launch, we’ve got our platform up. And we’ll be inviting specific people to join. When we go to beta, which we’re hoping will be around January or spring of next year, then everybody will be able to join. But we need to be very diligent about who we invite in this first phase because we don’t want we want to make sure that we have quality people from all walks of life, all political beliefs on the platform as we develop the ground rules to ensuring trustworthy verifiable and accurate information and objective information. Yeah,

Elsa Ramon 51:41
we’re building a foundation that will set the tone for the community. And it’s it’s exciting and it’s scary. But you know, Linton just has been incredible With this and, you know, if you talk about the ways that blockchain and cryptocurrency affect us, this ignited something in Linton, where he took his career and rolled it into something that could make it better. And we both saw that and that was our immediate connection, but he really has just taken this to another level and it’s very exciting and I really, really hope this is some meaningful change in our industry.

Linton Johnson 52:33
Well, I mean, Elsa you I mean, I, I, I love you as you know, we met I actually watched the podcast about you that you were the guests on and that was like, oh my god that her story is amazing. I have this brilliant woman who happens to also be beautiful. It was just, you know, just a bonus on my team.

Elsa Ramon 52:58
makeup and lights can do

Linton Johnson 53:01
Hey whatever

God made clear all right

Bill Deignan 53:07
I gotta get a flight look you know superstar Elsa, I’ll give her credit when we started traveling the world and shooting segments and a co producer was like Bill. we gota have makeup artists travel with us and I’m like, we can’t afford a makeup artists. They better tote some gear and run a camera too Yeah, I was sweating. Like I was like, Oh my god, I just blew the budget. And, you know, we did our best we had we were able to get some local talent for that occasionally. But when we were in places where there’s clearly no makeup artists or hair people Elsa just did it herself, you know? And just, and I thought she did better than those did.

Linton Johnson 53:52
Oh, I think so.

Bill Deignan 53:53
But yeah, I give her credit for coming right out of you know, network TV and just sort of saying, Hey, I can handle it on my own. You know,

Elsa Ramon 54:00
well, you do have to remember that I’ve used Linton and I both have been reporters and we’ve been on big breaking stories where you don’t have any luxuries. And you better have some protein bars and snacks and water in your bag and you know, all the essentials and your little makeup bag and extra deodorant and all that kind of stuff. Because when you’re out there covering some things, you have to be self sufficient. So you can’t completely be this diva, although they exist.

Linton Johnson 54:34
But I wanted to go back to the brilliant part of Elsa because this is where I mean she’s added so much value to obus made the things that she thinks of, and her mind works in such a amazing way. Just You’re so funny. You’re fun to be with but yet you’re so smart. It’s like you really have pushed me to think differently and to reinvent my own self and that’s the value she brings to the team. And I love how she’s a reporter since your questions. I mean, we all and that’s a good thing. Yeah, I know. But I mean, you really forced me to be a better version of myself. So I just want to solve for this project. Well,

Elsa Ramon 55:14
thank you. I appreciate that. And likewise, we’ve, and I hope for many more years working together. And Bill, I really hope we’ve answered yours and everybody else’s questions on this.

Bill Deignan 55:26
I’m a lot more excited about this than I was before the podcast.

Elsa Ramon 55:30
Yeah, I mean, it just yeah. Yeah. Good. I’m glad to hear it. And look, Bill doesn’t blow sunshine. I can tell you Linton. He’s not that guy. He doesn’t sugarcoat stuff. So you know, when he says something, he absolutely means it.

Bill Deignan 55:47
So, I’ve been accused of that.

Elsa Ramon 55:51
I, you know, sometimes I think we’re like Scully and Mulder from the X Files. In a way,

Bill Deignan 55:59
I don’t have red hair. Do I?

Elsa Ramon 56:00
no, no, no. You know, the way you know we You and I are not, you know, we do have some similar things and beliefs. I’d say generally we do but there are things where you know, then we totally split.

Bill Deignan 56:15
That’s for sure. That’s for sure.

Elsa Ramon 56:17
Yeah, if you see George Soros Please tell him I want my check.

Bill Deignan 56:22
Well, he owes me a lot of money. Yeah, I was you too, right? I don’t know what for but he’s probably does, that’s right. Oh, we lost Linton, momentarily. Hopefully he’ll come back in in a second. Say goodbye. But yeah,

Elsa Ramon 56:35
I want him to say goodbye and leave us with some final thoughts.

Bill Deignan 56:38
The perils of internet streaming. In today’s world, especially when we have every child in the world doing a zoom call. So, you know, I had to get extra bandwidth into my house for our three kids cuz it’s just like a little school going on here. And, you know, I knew it was a sign of the times when I went by my daughter, my 10 year old daughte’s.bedroom yesterday and the door was closed. She made a little sign that says I’m in a zoom call.

Elsa Ramon 57:08
When our kids are like, do not enter I have a zoom call right now. I can take you at 1130 zoom

Bill Deignan 57:14
I’m on a zoom so Be quiet.

Elsa Ramon 57:17
Oh, that’s cute. I know. That’s that’s where we are right now.

Linton Johnson 57:22
Back sorry that I thought maybe we had a PG&E outage is there you know so that’s right.

Elsa Ramon 57:32
Come down you go right back up. It happened to me the last podcast we did I mean, except I think I was gone for like, I don’t know, seven, eight minutes, but I’m gonna coffee. No, no. That just crashed here though. But we wanted you to be able to sign off.

Elsa Ramon 57:56
Yeah, we wanted you to come on. So I’ve had a lot

Bill Deignan 58:01
Yeah but before before that I did you know I’ve had your the name of your organization on the screen but I can’t recall if we actually said it properly. For the viewers we’ll put it in the show notes but you know, it’s OVIS dot news O V I S dot news but where can they reach you if they want to reach out to you?

Linton Johnson 58:21
Um, so you can reach out to me to the contact section on OVIS dot news if you want. You can get me on twitter at Linton What does my handle @Linton Johnson. @Linton underscore Johnson that’s what it is, man. I’ve got so many handles I can remember. And on Facebook and on telegram as well. LintonJohnson on Telegram I’m probably most useful on Telegram that’s one of my favorite ways to communicate. It’s telegram and Twitter is fine too.

Elsa Ramon 58:54
But yeah, we do have a page on the OVIS website with the founders and advisory board and of ways to contact us just like Linton said via email or social media.

Linton Johnson 59:08
Yeah, Linton at OVIS.news if you want to email me the old fashioned way.

The old fashioned email Yeah. Remember

and that ding, that ding we all waited for, the ding!

Elsa Ramon 59:33
Right after I said it, I didn’t get it and then it ended up in my junk mail,

Linton Johnson 59:38
junk mail or terrible’s or good old days though. Good old mail.

Elsa Ramon 59:44
Yeah, good old fashioned email.

Linton Johnson 59:46
Go old fashioned email still works.

Well, final thoughts. Um, listen, I’m very excited to get OVIS started. We are going to disrupt the media industry. And, you know, the truth always wins out. So OVIS is gonna win, we got to do this big we’re not, we’re not planning on just making a ripple in the ocean, we plan on being a tidal wave. And we are going to get a tidal wave of truth. And it’s going to be a reckoning on the corporate media. And it’s going to take all of us we this is a community about we the people, for the people, by the people, it’s about all of us getting together and telling the truth together and not letting these corporate influences try to derail us. So, if you want the truth, if you believe in the truth, you want to be part of that, then you want to be part OVIS. This is not going to be owned by anybody except us. The people, we the people. And I don’t care what part of the world you come from, what political belief that you have, what race you are. This platform is for all of us because the truth is for everyone.

Elsa Ramon 1:01:01
Linton Johnson for President!

Linton Johnson 1:01:05
No.

Elsa Ramon 1:01:08
No, I want that job. I would never want that job.

Linton Johnson 1:01:11
No, my gosh, no.

Elsa Ramon 1:01:14
No, Linton, thank you. I am so looking forward to what the future holds for everybody. And we’ll keep plugging along. And we’ll keep bringing you on and giving everybody updates on how everything’s going too.

Linton Johnson 1:01:30
I’d love that. Thank you. Thank you for inviting me on Bill, as always a wonderful talking to you. And thank you for all the question was and yeah, thanks, guys.

Elsa Ramon 1:01:40
Thank you. All right, Linton, take care. Have a wonderful day.

Linton Johnson 1:01:44
You guys. See you later and thank you, everyone. Bye.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai