My friend Chris Spoke sent me this article yesterday. It's by Paul Stanton (at Thesis Driven), and it's about "why the next generation of real estate fund managers will be built on video reels and newsletters." As someone who has been writing a personal blog-slash-newsletter for the last 13+ years (though largely focused on real estate and cities), this post really resonated with me. I wish I could say that I was early and that it brought me great riches, but sadly, that is not the case.

Regardless, what all of this is getting at is the value of parasocial relationships:

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided connection where a person feels they know and have a bond with a public figure (celebrity, influencer, fictional character) who is unaware of their existence, often stemming from media exposure like TV, social media, or podcasts.

I wouldn't call myself a public figure, but a daily blog does inherently foster parasocial relationships. Generally, though, the real estate industry has been slow to adopt new media. The prevailing thought has been that social media is good for selling stuff like fashion, but not appropriate for syndicating large and serious real estate deals. I've even heard some people argue that a strong social media presence is probably inversely correlated with actual real estate performance.

This is true of the grifters that Paul talks about in his article. These are the people posing in front of fancy cars or on a private jet, claiming that they can 10x your money using some dead-simple real estate strategy. They cannot. These people are not in the real estate business. But the marketing strategy clearly does work for raising capital, which is why you now have accomplished people who actually know real estate and finance becoming influencers:

Top executives of Wall Street’s largest private equity firms have recently joined the social media influencer ecosystem—perhaps none more so than Jon Gray, President and COO of Blackstone.  

Gray has become known for his candid videos filmed in Central Park during morning runs, sharing his views on recent shifts in the capital markets, macro events and even celebrity gossip—all with a sunny and sometimes self-deprecating disposition.  

I’ve watched many of these videos, and I now know (or, Blackstone has successfully planted in my brain) that Jon is exactly who I’d want running a massive pool of long-term capital: measured, self-aware, allergic to hype. Blackstone no longer feels like a faceless capital machine.

The fact that Jon Gray is doing this should give everyone in our industry the confidence that it's more than okay to be a real estate social media influencer. In fact, it's the name of the game today, even for the most sophisticated companies with long and proven track records, like Blackstone. There's nothing to be shy about. People do not want to follow faceless companies. They want to follow humans. So, be a human.

I was thinking about this very topic over the holidays, and I ultimately landed on it needing to become a bigger part of what I do in 2026. I will obviously continue to write this daily blog, but I want to be better at putting myself out there in other ways, creating more video content, and building up Globizen's overall brand as a city-builder committed to creating better places.

We have started by posting regular (almost daily) content to Instagram (Globizen & Parkview Mountain House), but there's more we want to do. The first obstacle is getting over the fear of what people might think if I take candid videos of myself running in Central Park (people couldn't care less). And the second obstacle is time. It's a lot of work. But building a company and raising capital have always been a lot of work.

This week has been a busy one, but I managed to get through this recent Prof G Markets interview with Mark Cuban while on the road and in between meetings. I like Mark Cuban. He comes across as likable and balanced. He's also pretty good at making money.

The conversation covers a lot of topics: AI, why AI could change the way we design housing, healthcare, the media landscape, social media algorithms, why it should be easier to be a public company, and what Cuban would do if he were president of the US, among others. If you're interested in these topics, maybe have a listen.

The discussion around social media algorithms struck a bit of a chord. At one point, Cuban makes the statement that this is one of the underlying challenges facing the US: whoever controls the algorithms controls our thoughts. He goes on to say that the social media algorithms know his kids better than he does.

Algorithms also shape our cities. Everything these days is being reverse-engineered for the attention economy. Typically, this means promoting more extreme views, instead of measured ones, which can drive a further wedge between cyclists and motorists, existing communities and new developments, and so on.

We know all this. But it's scary to think about the influence it has on our behaviors.

For the last few weeks, I've been playing around with a new social platform called Rodeo. It runs on the Base blockchain (which is an Ethereum Layer 2 chain), but you don't really need to be aware of this or understand how it works behind the scenes. If you've ever used Instagram, then you will already know how to use this platform. You can upload photos, scroll through photos, and heart photos.

But what's unique is that you can also "collect" photos. This requires a very small amount of Ether (0.0001 ETH), which works out to somewhere around ~$0.33 today. But there's also the option of just buying credits with your credit card and bypassing the need for an external crypto wallet. Whichever option you choose, you are minting an NFT to your wallet every time you "collect" a post. This is whether you are aware of it or not.

What this then does is send the creator reward money. Every time someone collects/mints a post, the creator of that post earns 0.00005 ETH (~$0.16 today). And already, there are users on the platform who have collected thousands of dollars in rewards as a result of their posts. It is also possible to earn referral rewards. If I collect a post and someone sees that I did it and then collects it, I earn a percentage. I can also send direct referral links (similar to how people on IG share posts via DM).

So despite looking a lot like Instagram, this is a fundamentally different platform under the hood. There is an embedded economy where artists and creators can get paid directly by collectors. At the same time, the platform itself collects a fee from interactions and transactions and so, in theory, there's no need for them to turn to advertising and selling our personal information.

There's also no reason that any user needs to remain wed to Rodeo. When you collect a post, an NFT is minted and it goes directly into your crypto wallet (assuming you've connected your external wallet). That crypto wallet is yours and you can do whatever you want with its contents, including selling the NFTs on some other marketplace or gifting them to a friend or family member for Christmas.

So other than the fact that the biggest audiences are on platforms like Instagram and X, I'd much rather share my photos on a platform like Rodeo, where I have full control. This is also why I switched my blogging platform from Wordpress to Paragraph and why I've started using Warpcast alongside X. It's the same idea. This has always been the promise of blockchains, but it's amazing to see it playing out with all of these new platforms.

I have no idea if Rodeo will ever surpass Instagram as the dominant photo sharing platform. But I have a high degree of conviction that our online lives will eventually migrate onchain. It's for this reason that I largely don't care about the daily fluctuations of ETH or BTC; I'm far more interested in the software that is getting built out on top of these chains. That is what will generate the demand for these cryptocurrencies long-term.