Challenging the Algorithm | Mario Vasilescu

On this episode of Anchored, Jeremy is joined by Mario Vasilescu, co-founder of Readocracy, a technology that allows people to track their knowledge in the form of data and share it with others. He explains the benefits of the technology as a way to discredit the culture of division and noise and award those who are mindful of what they put into their minds. They also discuss the origins of the company and the pitfalls of the current education system that leaves brilliant thinkers behind.

Transcript

Jeremy Tate (00:01.94)
Welcome back to the Anchor podcast. I'm here today in Annapolis in the CLT office with a very special guest here from Toronto, Canada, Mario Vasilescu. I think I pronounced that right, Mario, who is here with one of the most big picture, potentially disruptive education startup ideas I have ever heard. I met Mario just last week at the American Enterprise Institute and he presented to about 70 folks at the American Enterprise Institute. The room was spinning.

I mean, this is such big picture concepts that you're talking about. It's incredible. So I would probably butcher Mario if I tried to explain to the audience here what redocracy is. Redocracy, you and your brother have founded redocracy. Tell our audience, what is this? Where would you even start? Yeah, no, it's definitely very big. Thank you for having me, by the way. So the easiest way to just dive into it and explain it through an analogy is if you're familiar with Strava.

So it's, Redocracy is like Strava for knowledge. If you don't know what Strava is, Strava, if you've ever seen your friends sharing their running routes or their cycling routes online on social media, and then people posting their data from their running and whatnot in a kind of social way, that's what Strava is. It's huge with runners, huge with cyclists. So Redocracy is kind of doing that for knowledge. The idea is that your path through knowledge and learning in life, no matter where it happens, whether it's, you know, articles and newsletters, podcasts, YouTube tutorials, books,

any of that stuff, finally making it count, giving you the data and then being able to show it off to others or use it to understand yourself and be motivated yourself. Awesome. We heard at American Enterprise, a number of, it was about 45 minutes of you just fielding questions. And my experience, Mario, was being deeply skeptical at first. And the more I listened to you, the more I started to think that there were aspects of this I really liked.

One of the reasons I didn't like it in the first 10, 15 minutes is I thought that it would potentially change the motive for learning. Right. So we just had a solar eclipse, you know, last week, maybe you would read about a solar eclipse just because it's amazing. But here this, this kind of makes it part of credentialing. You would read about the solar eclipse and yes, it's still amazing, but you're also getting credits. So that was one of my, my areas of concern initially. And I know.

Jeremy Tate (02:20.18)
folks that are listening with a classical understanding of why we do education, they may share that concern as well. What would your thoughts be there? I have a few. One is that right now, learning, unfortunately, in our world isn't nice to have formally. Outside of school and work, it doesn't actually really matter how informed you are. It's not going to help you be popular on social media. It's not going to help you with your friend groups or networking events. It doesn't plug in. And so I don't think there's anything wrong actually with living in a world where we're better at

mapping knowledge to status. And until we do that, we're unfortunately going to live in a world where it's not status and people don't feel any need to invest in educating themselves or the classics beyond the contract purpose of, you know, education with a big E. And so, you know, sure, if it makes people, I think that's like a very specific example, but what I'm more afraid of is the current situation where there's no opportunity cost to your time at all. So.

somebody gaming the system quote unquote by looking at something about the eclipse, you know, sure, but what's the alternative, which is spending six hours, you know, going down a rabbit hole about the Kardashians. And you have no shame, no reason to care. Nobody's going to know. There's no data about it. And so when you have a system that actually makes your time count, you start thinking twice about that and you start saying, Hey, is this really worth my time? Okay. And this is where I started to come around and the presentation last Thursday.

is thinking through all of the wasted, wasted time. I do it, everybody does it, we're all guilty of it, you know. You're scrolling reading about some meaningless whatever, you could be reading something about substance that would be, you know, we kind of know what we always ought to do online, and then there are the things that are just more entertaining. Yeah, and there's nothing wrong with that, by the way, so there's nothing wrong with having a McDonald's Big Mac once in a while, right? Like, I love McDonald's, like there's nothing wrong with that, but.

Um, the problem is that the best analogy I can give you is that there's this concept we've tried to popularize about information wellness and infobesity. And we obsessed these days about, um, our bodies, you know, we track our steps, we track our calories, our ingredients, are we getting fat, all this kind of stuff. But when you think about your diet of your mind, we have no idea. And so it's basically the reality today is it's like, we're sitting at a buffet for about seven hours a day.

Jeremy Tate (04:40.276)
designed to make you gorge yourself without ever thinking about it and it's built around sugar and fat. That's what we're doing for your mind. And so we need to, you know, be equipped to actually see that because until we do that, we're just like, we're in the dark and becoming very, very unhealthy. So if you're five minutes into this now and you're thinking, I don't, I don't even get what we're talking about, right? Maybe we'll rewind just a bit and unpack it a bit more. So we're essentially talking about.

a tracking technology that allows potentially everything anybody does online. That's content. That's content. That's safe content to be tracked. Yeah. So basically - Track and then visible to others, explain. Yeah. So we've put so much effort into making sure it's privacy first. We've already been recognized by Mozilla and others as fixed Internet champions. So we're really trying very hard to be the good guys and everything from our business model to the interface to how you experience it. I would challenge you to find another tool that -

you know, as thoughtful about that as we've been. Um, but basically we have technology patent pending, which can tell if you are actually paying attention to a piece of content and how intensely it does not use the camera, it's extremely lightweight. And so we package that in a browser extension for every major browser. We now have mobile apps. And if you're a website owner, like producing media and you want to recognize and reward people for consuming your content, you can also embed it in your site. And so the idea is that when you land on an article, a YouTube video,

a PDF, you can basically automatically, without taking any extra steps, automatically it will detect your attention, start quantifying it, it will automatically detect the subject you're giving attention to, and essentially start giving you what we call credits. They're basically points, subject matter points, towards the subjects you care about. And that data goes into your account, and you can use it for your mind or for your career. You choose when you sign up, and you can obviously expand. If you choose for your mind,

It's completely private and you're using it essentially to get, you know, this part we say is like a Fitbit for your mind. You're seeing insights that help you understand how what you're consuming is affecting your mood, your agitation, your bias, your worldview, all this kind of stuff. You can also use it to build a second brain. So you've ever, you know, be like, where did I see that? Where is that in my bookmarks? Like, you know, obviously the stuff we use all the time, this automatically builds a second brain that is searchable for you. And then if you want to use it for your career, this is basically making it so that,

Jeremy Tate (07:02.9)
the best of it, not all of it, but the stuff that you want to get recognized for, you automatically turn into this beautiful portfolio page driven by data. It's like an intellectual profile page that upgrades your LinkedIn, your resumes, your email signatures, all sorts of benefits that basically help you show the world that you deserve a chance and that you're committed and smart and well -read.

Well, hopefully folks are listening. There's some interest. I want to rewind and I was going to start with this. We'll go back to it now. I always loved this hearing about the origin story of companies, of ideas. I mean, what's crazy to me about this is that at scale, it would present a massive risk to, I mean, traditional colleges and universities potentially, but also certainly to any social media platform as well.

And that's why I kind of think of this as like the DNA is sort of like an Amazon of education. Really, really big potential. But where did this all come from? What is your background, Mario? Where did you grow up? What was your education like? Tell us a bit about yourself. Yeah. And just before I dive into that, just a quick comment. I think it is a threat to social media in the sense that they obsess about quantity over quality. This would force them to adjust their algorithms to care more about quality. For higher ed, I actually don't think this is a threat. There are ways that this can help higher ed make more money. What it will do...

is it might scare you at first, but in the end it will actually let schools focus on what they should be doing, right? And invest their energy better. Now our background. So yeah, doing this with my brother. He's my CTO and co -founder. I studied robotics engineering and minored in business, but I knew it wasn't for me. I basically did it because I didn't like so many students, you don't know what to pick. And so you just go into what you seem like good at that will provide the best outcome long term.

Realized it wasn't for me halfway through and just finished it more to prove a point to myself and I appreciated how it was changing how I think. But that's when I realized, first of all, I'm largely autodidactic. Like everything I do now with Redocracy, I taught myself. My brother even more so. So he is the poster child for how our education system leaves very brilliant people behind. He taught himself to code when he was 13. By the time he was done high school, he built one of Canada's first social networks for students. It had over 200 ,000 members. It was doing 40 million hits a month.

Jeremy Tate (09:16.468)
But you know, that's what he was into. He wasn't into school. That was too boring for him. So, you know, he wouldn't engage. And as a result, he barely passed high school. And as a result, he couldn't get into college. Now he made some of it was something of himself, which is fortunate in his situation, but it just makes you wonder how many people are being left behind constantly that could probably affect our society the most. And those brilliant people are usually self -based learners. Um, so that's like part of it is like, you know, motivated by a system that how can you take all this learning you do on your own time, which especially the internet has only accelerated.

How do you make it count? The bigger picture of why we're doing this. We're from Romania, Eastern Europe. And growing up, we heard so many stories about our grandparents, great grandparents, great great grandparents, and that they were impressive intellectuals, like extremely smart, but also very civically minded. So we'd hear these stories of things they would do to better society, often at their own sacrifice, right?

Um, and so this was our notion of a role model. We grew up thinking like, oh, these are the people we admire. And as we got older, whether it was, you know, post communist corruption in Eastern Europe or, you know, growing up in Canada and seeing like the social discourse evolve, it became apparent that those people that we admired and that's the idea of what a person should be. We're basically losers in today's society. They were invisible. And the only people you heard about and the people winning were the polar opposite, the most aggressive.

divisive, ignorant, loud people. So true. So true. So we just like, we've been working on this nonstop. You know, we tried different platforms before, you know, took our hits, learned our lessons, and now we're having more successful redocracy. But it's always been the same through line of how do you build a new infrastructure for society that makes it possible to compete with the one we have today, which only cares about noise? How do you make one which will make smart, thoughtful, balanced, well -intentioned people be popular?

So this to me, Mario, is the intersection with classical education. Classical education, fundamentally concerned about education as human formation, people that are kinder, more empathetic. And this is the problem that must get solved. You just spoke about this so clearly and passionately, is that right now, social apps, they reward the loudest, most polarizing, the way I thought of it before, is like, nobody cares about nuance on these apps.

Jeremy Tate (11:39.956)
Tell us a bit more about how Redocracy would discredit uninformed loud people and kind of raise the microphone for folks that are calmer and well -read on these topics. So I can give you a couple of examples. I mean, at the basis, it's also just motivation, right? There's like gamification in this. It's lightweight. It doesn't require to change your behavior. And so in the past, there was no reason for you to bother being informed because all the rewards were just being loud.

but this gives you an alternative. One example, coming from big picture down to a more specific one. Big picture, the reality is that if you look at a Twitter X thread or really any thread on any platform online, there is no other way to optimize. The only thing you're gonna see when you're deciding popularity is how many likes you have, how many replies, how many followers. It's all about volume. There is no other way to change the algorithm currently. And so what we're really saying is,

This is why we say a different infrastructure. Like what is the alternative? And so with our system in place, you could plug it in and have discussions and threads, which instead of being optimized for just who had the most views, who got the most reactions, even though it was the dumbest, fakest thing possible. It's like, oh, who's actually most informed on what we're talking about and algorithmically plugging that in. So like the top person appearing in the thread might have fewer likes, but there's a label saying, hey, you're talking about this.

And this person has by far the most material spent, invested, contributions and discussions are appreciated. And you can go see it's transparent. So this is how it would work where you're creating an alternative where social media and our platforms don't only optimize around noise, but have an alternative for the first time. Secondly, even in our own platform, something we're building out is when you talk about balanced, currently it optimizes the platforms optimized for hating each other.

Right? Like if you're on opposite side of the political spectrum, you are my enemy. Uh, well, the redocracy, we will actually give you bonus credits if you get somebody who's not politically aligned with you to appreciate what you say. And so we are adding all sorts of thoughtful elements that make people be incentivized to realize that popularity is not a function of just being loud. And we are releasing integrations later this year for discord, Slack, and Reddit, where you will literally become more popular and visible because when you say something,

Jeremy Tate (13:55.796)
and you're using readocracy, a bot will inject a comment saying like, hey, Jeremy's actually really knowledgeable on this and you should pay attention within the noise of the thread, which has no boosters. So it's going to have a personal booster saying, trust this person. And here's the data why. High school students are already using this. What has their experience been like? One of the things that you said when I went from a bit of a skeptic to thinking this could really be maybe a good thing for society.

was thinking the ways that it could change behavior for high school students, making them more, I think the language you used was talking about an opportunity cost, that it makes more tangible for students. Yeah, yeah. So it's so fascinating because when we were rolling this out, we thought this would be for university college students and people in their careers. And then we discovered that high schoolers were our most passionate users. And that's because what we discovered is, first of all,

You know, your assumption might be that, oh, they're like digital natives. They, you know, they understand everything and know everything. They don't need help, but it's because they understand this ecosystem the best. They also see the issues more clearly. This is why you're seeing an explosion of dumb phones and, and people going back to, to, you know, even using pagers sometimes like just, and these are the young people. And so they need a solution, first of all, to understand how this is impacting their mental health and have better habits. So they've jumped at that. The.

Second piece is that when you're at that stage in your life, you are automatically being conditioned to think about your future and your reputation and respect. Like are people are going to give me a chance? Is this college admissions going to work out for me? Is my first job? What is that going to look like? And so anything that lets you take control of the reputation mechanism and your fate in a way, in terms of your career is very powerful. Cause until that point, people feel like their reputation is the hands of others. Sure. And this lets you like create your profile, create your own credentials.

It's quite powerful for students. And the last thing I'll say that is super interesting, on the insights specifically that you get, like the whole Fitbit for your mind, it was so interesting hearing students tell us that they didn't even need to keep using it. It was enough for them to see that page once for them to tell us, you know what, once I saw this, I had a visualization and something tangible to think of in the back of my mind. And when I landed on some junk article,

Jeremy Tate (16:20.436)
instead of just diving into it, now this picture was in the back of my mind. I knew it was going somewhere and I would be confronted with it. Well, let's talk about this component of it. And again, you did a great job at the American Enterprise Institute of having heard a lot of the objections to it. And we were just walking in Annapolis talking about this. I mean, NeuroLink, some of the AI that's coming.

How does what you're doing interface or interact with that? Are you excited about these technologies that potentially, I mean, they're basically going to the concept of just basically downloading information. Yeah. So I'm not a huge fan. I think I'm a big fan in terms of accessibility, people with disabilities, limitations like that, which is the use cases they're being used on now. I think we shouldn't be carried away with a hype and think that's around the corner for ordinary people without doing invasive surgery and just doing chest.

But I'm not crazy about it because for general use, I think it is, it's a sign of where SDI has been going in general, which is a compulsion for speed, acceleration, and quote unquote efficiency without thought. And without the time for things to percolate or to settle deeply. And I don't think that's the answer. And I think we need to stop taking shortcuts. We already have created a society that is based entirely around shortcuts.

These platforms which maximize engagement without thinking, maximize speed without thinking, they've only led to a ton of distraction, a ton of superficial thought, a ton of inability to really cope with the world. And I don't think the answer is to just take a shortcut into our brains. Wow. Well, very classical. I'm sure folks that appreciate classical education, that would resonate. And I think something else that would resonate, and a question I can almost hear kind of through the computer is,

We need to just get kids offline. CLT works with almost every Chesterton Academy in the country. This is a whole network of schools that is keeping their students off the computer. What is the value of redocracy? Or how would you respond to folks that are very intentional with wanting to keep their own children offline and themselves as well, as much as they can, at least? There's kind of two sides to that. One is that you should want to take control.

Jeremy Tate (18:44.052)
So until now, if you use Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, any of these are Google, like you basically can't exist in today's world and be online without using these services. And you are, you know, giving away responsibility of your data and what it says about you to them. You have no control. With Redocracy, you are taking control of filtering and protecting and being mindful of your mind, but also what that data says about you. So you are taking, there's the agency side of that. The other side,

I would say is that we don't want people to be online all the time. Redocracy is not built around the same business model as social media platforms. They're extractive. There's surveillance capitalism. They care about you getting addicted and spending as much time as possible, reacting as much as possible. We are not like that. And so we are only providing a service at a cost, which means we are helping you understand your mind, get deeper insights, and then present yourself to the world to improve your lot in life. And that doesn't depend on volume of time.

That's just, you know, it's a subscription service basically. And so in that way, we want to get to a point where actually we help people get offline. Right? Like we're going to have support for physical books later this year. And I would love it in a scenario where actually that ends up dominating our platform and people are using it for that more. That'd be wonderful. I have no problem with that. Um, we have a, something on our roadmap, which is called intellectual matchmaking where your data, if you want to opt in, can be used to connect you to somebody else. And the ice is broken. You know exactly what to talk about.

But even with that idea, we were telling ourselves, how do we speed up taking this offline so that somebody can have a human connection? So, you know, and just for context, my grandfather was a poet. My dad's a classically trained visual artist. Half of my family are all in the arts, classical arts. And so everything we've done with the readocracy is deeply mindful of that. Yeah. Love that. It's really beautiful. What is the future for kind of getting, getting word out about.

I mean, is this something folks can already download? I mean, I'm hanging out with you in Annapolis. I'm set up now and I'm tracking and I'm going to get this experience over the next few weeks. But what do folks who have their Endersons, maybe want to give this a shot? Yeah. So as we were talking when we were walking around town, we have tried to be very careful and mindful about this. I think it's part of why we've gotten the recognition we've gotten around being, you know, what we call humane and ethical technology. But we are on a wait list. We've been letting people in in batches.

Jeremy Tate (21:08.308)
The wait list to be honest has gotten out of control, which you'll probably see when you add your name and you see the number on there. But in the notes, if you say you heard about us on the podcast here, we will make sure to fast track you quickly and get you in. Awesome. Amazing. Again, we are here with the founder of Redocracy. I'm super excited about the future of this. I love that you're being so thoughtful and creating incentives that I think are...

much, much more aligned with the classical vision for education and what we're trying to do here. So Mario, awesome. Thank you for being in Annapolis and we look forward to following up with you in a few months. Thank you so much, Jeremy. Thanks for having me. And I really believe in what you guys are doing. We're on the same page and I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.