Animal Spirits Podcast - Bankless & Animal Spirits

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

On this special episode of Animal Spirits, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are joined by Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman, of the Bankless podcast, to discuss: crypto cycles, Bitcoin vs Ethereum, crypto entering politics, and much more! This episode is sponsored by Public. Make your savings work harder and earn an industry-leading 5.1% APY with a high-yield cash account on Public. Visit https://public.com/ to learn more! Sign up for The Compound newsletter and never miss out: thecompoundnews.com/subscribe Find complete show notes on our blogs... Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor Check out the latest in financial blogger fashion at The Compound shop: https://www.idontshop.com Feel free to shoot us an email at [e-mail] with any feedback, questions, recommendations, or ideas for future topics of conversation.   Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. The Compound Media, Incorporated, an affiliate of Ritholtz Wealth Management, receives payment from various entities for advertisements in affiliated podcasts, blogs and emails. Inclusion of such advertisements does not constitute or imply endorsement, sponsorship or recommendation thereof, or any affiliation therewith, by the Content Creator or by Ritholtz Wealth Management or any of its employees. For additional advertisement disclaimers see here https://ritholtzwealth.com/advertising-disclaimers. Investments in securities involve the risk of loss. Any mention of a particular security and related performance data is not a recommendation to buy or sell that security. The information provided on this website (including any information that may be accessed through this website) is not directed at any investor or category of investors and is provided solely as general information. Obviously nothing on this channel should be considered as personalized financial advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any securities. See our disclosures here: https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/ A High-Yield Cash Account is a secondary brokerage account with Public Investing, member FINRA/SIPC. Funds from this account are automatically deposited into partner banks where they earn a variable interest and are eligible for FDIC insurance. Neither Public Investing nor any of its affiliates is a bank. Learn more at public.com/disclosures/high-yield-account Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When planning for life's most important moments, sometimes the hardest part is simply knowing where to start. That's why we're here to help. When you pre-plan and prepay a celebration of life with us, every detail will be handled with simplicity and professionalism, giving you the peace of mind that you've done all you can today to remove any burden from your loved ones tomorrow. We are your local Dignity Memorial provider. Find us at DignityMemorial.ca. The Dignity Memorial brand name is used to identify a network of licensed funeral cremation and cemetery providers owned and operated by affiliates of Service Corporation International. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Batnik and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching.

All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ridholt's wealth management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ridholt's wealth management may maintain positions in the securities discussion. in this podcast. We're very excited to be joined by the bankless guys. This is David Hoffman and Ryan Schott Adams. I guess I started listening to you guys. I don't know, 2019, maybe, 2020.

Oh, wow. It would have been 2020. We started the podcast in 2020. I hope you guys loaded up on some crypto at that time. We were down bad. It was a good time to buy. I don't have I loaded. We dabbled.

We'll get into that. that. All right. All right. So I don't think that, so for our audience and for my benefit, I've listened to you guys for a while, but I don't think I know your origin story. How do you guys meet? How do you get into crypto? Why do you start a podcast? Just give us the, whoever wants to take us. Just give us the background. Do you want to do it, David? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Well, so we met on Twitter because we were just saying similar things about crypto. Crypto has always been in flux, in debate, people debating about what crypto is, what's its future. And in 2018, when Ryan and I, like, discovered each other on Twitter, and I think, like, meeting each other

counted as just, like, him following me, me following him, and engaging in each other's tweets, we were just saying similar things about, like, what the future of Ethereum could be. And in 2018, the concept of, like, Ethereum as it is today just didn't exist. Like, Ethereum, as a blockchain was contrarian inside of crypto at that time. And crypto was contrarian to the rest of the world at that time. And so it was a very small group of people who were like publicly supporting and interested in and having conversations about Ethereum. And so everyone knew everyone else in that circle of like people on Twitter engaging in conversations, trying to discover truth. And then me and Ryan were just like saying similar things for a sufficiently long amount of time.

and one day we just like for whatever reason like hopped into a Zoom call just to like pick each other's brains and it turned out we just had a lot of similar ideas so that was kind of like the foundation of it all I was actually a listener to David's podcast so he had this podcast at the time where he would argue with a Bitcoin Maximus

yeah different podcasts different podcasts from Bankless and I found it so entertaining I was like this guy I don't know about this other host but I like this David Hoffman guy and so one day I saw an article you wrote David And I don't know. I think I slid into your DMs. I don't know if it's the other way around, but I think that's how it happened. I think I slid into your DMs. Really? I don't know. Yeah, I think we've ever known this before.

We will never know. I'm pretty sure Michael and I met on Twitter as well. You guys read on Twitter too? We did. This is so funny. And by the way, I'm in the, we're in the recording studio here. You guys are using Riverside and had some of your production folks on. This feels so similar to how we do things at Bankless. This is how we do it. And it's like our audience has told us that Animal Spirits is like the best. for stocks, basically. So, yeah, it's really cool to meet you guys and, like, talk to our counterparts in the, uh, the equities world. What we would call it crypto, the tradfai world. I don't know if that's a slur for you guys. Are you just like, uh, are you okay with being tradify? Uh, totally okay. No, I embrace that. So just, but you, I'm curious about how you guys even taking a step back from that. How did you get into crypto? Are you guys computer nerds or

money guys or what's your story? Well, Ryan, you got into crypto before. I, So yeah, I probably a computer nerd, not really a finance guy. I learned everything I know about money and finance through crypto, which is kind of like a interesting way to learn it. I should step back. I did a business degree, okay? And then went on like to an entrepreneurial bent. So I knew the basics, right? I knew how to read financial statements and such. But for me, it was like discovering Bitcoin in 2014. There was a guy I knew and he told me he was running machines from his house. He was like crypto mining and he was earning Bitcoin. And I thought, well, that's some weird shit. I should look at like, what does that mean? And 2014, I just

figured out what Bitcoin was, did a lot of Andreas Antonopoulos, like books and talks. And basically, it was just sort of a, wow, this is going to be big as big as the internet type of moment for me. It's like transmitting money over internet protocol. It just like, it very much appealed to me. But after that, there was like, you could buy Bitcoin, you could move it around. there's not really much you could do with it. So my second trip down the rabbit hole was really Ethereum, like 2016, 2017. And so it's the idea of like money being also programmable. So, you know, if you imagine like something like Bitcoin, you've got a spreadsheet and it's got like,

it's just a ledger, right? Credits and debits kind of ledger all the way down. Well, if you think of Ethereum, it's the idea of you have a spreadsheet, you have something like Excel or Google sheets open. And then every single entry point in the cell is like you can program. it. You can launch a macro from it. That appeals to a finance list. It's like if then statements for every single transaction on the ledger. So it's this concept of programmable money. And then I started to use like these early primitive forms of defy and they suck. Let me tell you, the user experience was

absolutely terrible. But I used some of, I remember using some of my ether as a as a collateral asset and taking out a loan on this this protocol called Maker Dow. I was like, oh my God, I just took out a collateralized loan. I was in the process of refinancing my house and the amount of paperwork, you know, like hundreds of pages of paperwork to get a collateralized loan against an asset that I held, which is basically my house. I could do this, even this clunky-ass like UI, but like I could do this in a few clicks without signing any paperwork, without paying tens of thousands of dollars in refinance fees. That was amazing to me. And then I met David, And he was saying the same things.

It was like 2018, 2019, everyone was fading crypto. Not only were they fading crypto, within crypto, they were also fading defy. They were fading Ethereum, this whole concept of programmable money. So David and I thought, well, that can't be right. And we sort of launched bankless to fight back against this. And it started as a newsletter. And David's like, you know, you should try podcasting. It's great.

And I was like, what are we going to talk about? And so we launched the podcast. And then I don't know, 900 episodes. or something later, we're like, we're still talking and we're still doing things. And yeah, it's been an incredible experience. We've watched crypto grow up. We've watched it go through cycles, multiple cycles now. So 2022 and the bust and all of that.

Now it's now it's kind of risen like a phoenix from those ashes as well. So here we are, 2024. David, what's your origin story? Yeah. I discovered Ethereum through mining. I discovered that like my gaming computer, I could just get like $5 a day from mining Ethereum. And I had no idea what that meant. But I was trying to save up some money to go to physical therapy school of all places. And that kind of interest in just like some passive

income grabbed my attention. And if I continue that story, it'll be like a pretty generic like crypto background story. I think the patterns that are kind of worth like pulling out are like, I had a bunch of friends who went to a business school at my university and I was in the psychology program of all things. And all of them were like, that's actually pretty useful for crypto though. Yeah, exactly. And so all of my business major friends, my finance major friends, like they couldn't wrap their heads around crypto. And I had like as little financial education as possible. Like my like relationship with the IRS was that they paid me money. Like I like I didn't I didn't get it like savings like marketing, entrepreneurialism. All of that I learned just like Ryan through crypto. But the psych element I really like lean into as like part of my origin story. Because it gave me. First, I didn't have to unlearn finance to learn crypto, whereas a lot of my financial, like, major friends, like, really struggled, like, understanding crypto from first principles because they just, they had to unlearn stuff before they could learn crypto.

And I never had to unwrap myself in my previous, like, previous education to really understand how crypto works. But it's really, and I think Ryan also definitely has a skill as well. But, like, the skill that I, that, like, gravitated me towards psychology and also, I think, helped me understand and how to navigate crypto was pattern recognition. And crypto is a lot of patterns. And it's very multidisciplinary as well. And so it's not really just one field of study.

Crypto is like an integration of many different fields of study. And I think both for Ryan and I, it was just a huge nerds night. And a lot of early people who came into crypto, like there's the meme of like in it for the tech or in it for the money or one of the things. A lot of people are just in it because it's so interesting. There's so many like facets to peel back and to understand. It is the great educational system of like the wild west of education. It's like raw learnings. And you also like it's live too. Like everything is a market. And so you get to like place

your bets on how you learn and you get validated or not validated. It's just it's a fun game. Where do you guys think crypto is today versus where you maybe hoped it would be idealistically when you first got involved. And David, I'll just, I'll tee you up with your Pintweet. You said, this is in 2022. Crypto wasn't created to make you rich. It was created to set you free. So riff on that.

Sure, yeah. A lot of people like to do like the whole like crypto is in like the 90s of the internet, which is like a fun comparison. I kind of prefer comparing crypto to like a biological organism and and seeing it on its like growth arc. And I think right now crypto is in like, early stages of puberty. Like Bitcoin 2009, Ethereum 2015. So Ethereum's now nine years old. Bitcoin is 14, 15 years old. I think the industry is around like what we would call like

13, 14 or 15 years old in human terms. Just like starting to figure things out, like not an idiot, but like still a lot of growing up to do. Like not done growing, not done maturing. And that comes from a variety of different places. All of our protocols, other than Bitcoin, still aren't finished. Like Ethereum, not finished, Salana, not finished. There's a lot of work to do on these smart contracting platforms. And so the layer ones, the tech still is, and they have like developmental roadmap so they need to complete. And then how to use these things, the applications that we're using, just experiments, all experiments. Some have like meaningful, like adoption growth, like stable coins, very, very mature.

Stable coins are the most secure, mature part of crypto. Other things, we have, like, directional security ends. Like, we know we're going in the right direction, but, like, we're still not done yet. But overall, I would call it, like, we're in, like, a early puberty phase of, like, the entire, the entire movement. One of the things that surprised me about the onset of the Bitcoin ETF was just how much excitement it caused from both trad-5 people, like you said, and crypto people. And it seemed like the crypto community, I'm painting a broad brush here, was pretty receptive to like letting

Wall Street and other people in to the ETF. And that would have surprised me a few years ago. I almost view like the crypto natives as soccer fans in a way. Like, you know, soccer fans are like very knowledgeable. They're a little snobby, no offense. And it's sometimes soccer people like, the fans, they don't want like other people outside of soccer into their inner saying. But the crypto crowd, it seemed, was very welcoming when black rocks of the world and Fidelity came in with these ETFs. Did that surprise you guys at all? Go for Ryan.

I think, let's see, it's actually the most surprising thing was the adoption of Bitcoin and that like the size, the growth that it's seen has like, I think, floored people in crypto, but also on the trad-fi side of things. I'm not surprised that the social community around crypto, like, was excited for this because there's one sort of soccer chant that, like, just is throughout crypto and always will remain in crypto, and that is the chant of number go up. So anything that starts making number go up, and if you are talking about my bags, you are good, if you are talking against my bags, you are bad, right?

That is just like the, you know, like the monkey brain, the lizard brain at the back of every, everyone in crypto's head. And, you know, Bitcoin is certainly no exception to this. So to hear Larry Fink, who is kind of like a banker, establishment type guy, start shilling Bitcoin, right? It's just kind of like whoever shills Bitcoin is good because Bitcoin is good. This is kind of like the ethos and rationale. I do think that can go too far.

I think that there is a failure mode where crypto gets captured by bankers and institutions. And like, easy to see. Let's say all of the Bitcoin or all of the ether ends up inside of institutions. And no one is actually using these assets to go bankless. Right. It's just like, what have we done? Well, we've probably recreated the banking system that we just left. And like, what's the point of that?

I don't think we'll fail in that way. But that is certainly a concern that crypto would have. to avoid. But right now, you know, just like given that 50, 15 years old, as David said, this entire industry, the biggest threat for something like Bitcoin or anything like in crypto is that it gets strangled in its crib. And when you have like the most powerful asset managers in the world now just like being advocates for this thing and you look at and you're like, oh my God, how far have we come from this crazy internet money that like everyone was fading to now? I think that's what the crypto community is really celebrating here.

So the podcast is called bankless. Again, David, you said that crypto has created to set you free. Let's zoom in on that. What exactly is wrong with the current institutions and the way money works? What are you trying to set us free from? Yeah, crypto is all about like individual sovereignty and individual power. Cryptography in his essence is a technology that like strictly benefits individuals over institutions. And so, like, you have, like, the institution, the large centralized institution of, like,

a government. And then you have the many, many, many individuals. Like, cryptography strictly benefits individuals. And applications of, like, and this comes in the form of just, like, communication privacy, like privacy to a privacy channel between two humans, freely able to communicate between themselves without, like, the government also watching. And so it's a sovereignty tool. Cryptography is a sovereignty tool. Cryptocurrency is similar when you apply cryptography to the world of finance. A big Bitcoin or philosophy is that just like, and also Austrian economic philosophy would say this as well as like the individual is the best decider of their local like market environment. They are the best decision maker of their own of their capital and how

they allocate it. And so like cryptography does similar things of pushing the decision making powers and to the individual. And this starts from like what Ryan and I call like being bankless, going bankless. Like, do you think those are dollars in your Wells Fargo account? Like, are you sure about that? Because that's actually up to Wells Fargo. Like, you're, you're cusseting, your capital, your savings, your money, your investments with, with intermediaries, and you're bestowing your trust on them. And inside of America, that generally works out, okay, but there's plenty of instances where, like, your money and your bank gets stolen from you by the bank, by the government, like, look at Venezuela, look at Argentina,

look at India who like just like invalidated bills, like denominations of bills one day, just canceled them. And so the idea of like crypto is really about making sure the individual has the maximum amount of sovereignty. And that starts with like in Bitcoin, it would say a money that is out of the purview of a central bank. And Ethereum would say banking out of the purview of a commercial bank. And so the assets that you control are yours and no one can seal them from you. And it really kind of starts there. And we use banks and going bankless as a an idea to accept that. But the vision of Ethereum, I would say, is even more broad than that. You can kind of think of Silicon Valley tech companies, Google, Facebook, Amazon, anyone with

data, big data. These are actually banks of your identity and of your data. They are, like, you are bestowing trust into them to, like, manage and use your data. And so, like, ultimately, privacy and just being able to be a little bit more in control of your own life. is one of the grander visions of Ethereum and it all comes down to just like making sure that your rights as an individual are like upheld. And it's kind of an, there's an extension of like kind of like ideals developed in the Renaissance and making sure that like individual, the individual sovereignty is like preserved in a world where like it's getting infringed upon left and right in like very small ways. Yeah, there's like a lot of political underpinnings behind the philosophies

behind what you guys are talking about. And while I don't necessarily, I guess, love the idea that my data is all over the internet, I also like don't care enough to do anything about it. I understand that like, all right, well, I guess my data is being sold. But there are certainly pros to having these giant institutions. Like, there's, there's some services that they provide that. I just, I don't want like, I think the idea that people are going to self custody and like that, that was ever going to.

And listen, ever is a long time. We're still very early in the journey. I think those are grandiose visions that might or might not come to fruition. But I think more likely, at least in the near term, is that these institutions, whether it's banks or technology companies, use blockchains because some of the ways that these systems were built that we're using today are just ancient. And if nothing else, the technology that like maybe there is no killer app that brings a billion people onto these like consumer facing applications. Maybe it's the institutions that

adopt them and then we're not even aware, now that this is an original idea by me, of course, but what do you guys think about that? Yeah, I think that's totally valid. I think that, I mean, the banking system, the financial system in the U.S. is like pretty broken. Even if you just look at payments, compare like a payment system in the U.S. to even what China has going on in like AliPay and we chat and this type of thing where they've moved to a digital currency. 3%. Every single transaction, it costs the system, generally in the form of a merchant fee, 3%. Whenever you use your credit card, visa, this is true for the U.S.

This is like a 3% hidden tax that we all pay. In China, when you move to something that is digital, it's like fractions of a cent, right? It's like very low percentage of fees that they've developed in their payment system by migrating that to the digital world. Now, the trade-off there is, in China, you have like a financial surveillance society where the government can freeze your bank accounts. And it's, that's not a trade-off that crypto is making, which is kind of nice, right? So you get the digitization aspect of this. We get a chance to, you know, upgrade our entire financial system. And it's not just an upgrade for the U.S., but it's like a global upgrade. So if you're in a, you know, like poor emerging

market country, you've access to the same tools as somebody in the U.S. and the idea is it's going to be like a more efficient marketplace. I think one great export that is kind of a banking plus crypto collaboration is just stable coins, stable coins in Argentina in a crypto wallet. Okay? It's like Argentina's local fiat system is like breaking down inflation that pays is just absolutely crazy. They have capital controls.

It's like 100% inflation. David was just there a few, like months ago, heavy crypto adoption. And what is it? It's just where the U.S. banking system in the form of like a coin base and a circle is just exporting USDC, which is a dollar stable coin. People are using it in their crypto wallet. So they have some level of, you know, like sovereignty over their dollars. Of course, you know, Circle and Coinbase can freeze it.

So it's not 100% bankless. And they're using it as an alternative. And in fact, it's a better alternative for payment. than some of the crypto anarchists in the early days of crypto who are like, everyone's going to use Bitcoin. Well, they're actually not using Bitcoin as much as they're using like stable coins in a crypto wallet. So I think there's something to exactly what you said in that like Michael, like this is how

the financial system is going to be upgraded. You don't have to be fully, you know, crypto anarchist of, you know, digital internet property rights system alternative to see the benefit of this thing. I've heard Ben Thompson talk about the payment system before. And he says it's kind of like a timing and luck situation where we built our whole financial system in like the 60s and 70s as credit cards were coming up. And so it's like that just because that's how things were done. In China built their financial system later and they were able to upgrade more.

So I agree the intermediate stuff. I just I wonder how that transition is going to take place, like how hard it will be just because of the whole, well, this is what we've always done it kind of thing because this is what we built back in the day and we're stuck with it. And so I do wonder how hard that's going to be to change that entrenched attitude. And maybe it's going to take, I don't know, older generations dying off and younger people coming up to actually force that change because they're more used to it. I think it's starting to happen right now.

So you've got like Stripe. They are going basically they're going all in on stable coins, not 100% all in, but they're massively expanding their stable coin support starting the summer. PayPal now has its own staple coin project as well. So I think they're recognizing exactly what you said, Ben, which is like you have an innovator's dilemma of it's really hard to upgrade all of kind of the main frame finance banking system. And like the banks are so big. They're not incented to do this.

And the government really just doesn't care. So you have like this collective action problem. And so in the background, a whole new financial infrastructure is being born. This like open source, like it's scaling really well. It's getting bigger and bigger adoption. And so they'll just ride on those coattails. They'll just swap out the back end from the traditional banking system and, you know, like swift payments to something crypto. So I do think that's how it could happen.

There's definitely a meme that like the crypto industry, crypto people want to like tear down the financial system. And that's like a very small extreme part of crypto, far more likely. And the thing that we're actually seeing is like both systems are developing in parallel. Crypto is developing much, much faster. And really, like, this is the main difference about, like, watching the rise of the internet and, like, thinking about crypto in terms of the rise of the internet. When the internet was being built in the 80s and the 90s, it didn't have a competing internet. Like, its competition was, like, newspapers and actual snail mail. Crypto's competition is, like, Robin Hood and Square and Stripe and the existing, you know, banking sector, which, I mean, it's archaic, but it also works.

And there are things about crypto that, like, definitely don't work. Like, we still have a lot of work to do, and we're working on them. But we're working on them way faster and with new tools that the traditional finance system is. And so both industries are going to be, like, in parallel. There's just going to be your typical banked industry, your traditional finance industry, and then there's going to be your crypto world. And I think people are going to learn how to navigate through both. And slowly over time, the bet, as like crypto is a technology that improves, is that slowly

you get more comfortable with crypto and slowly crypto actually becomes more useful for you. And then you just find yourself just being in the crypto world and you haven't really thought about it because we figured out our ux thing. We figured out our custody thing. We figured out the keys. And that's going to take a while. But in the grand scheme of things, it's not going to take that long. One of the big problems that crypto has right now is a messaging PR nightmare. Yeah, I always have. For people that are not financially savvy that don't know anything about the traditional financial system or crypto, they know Sam Bankman-Fried. and they see the scams and what do you guys as industry leaders, what can you do about that? I know it's like a, you know, a gigantic challenge, but what will you say to the average person who just all that they know is bad shit? I do think this is one thing that's, you were asking earlier, Michael, about like, what surprised you? It has surprised me a little bit the like repeated fractal boom bust cycle of crypto in that every single cycle.

this one will be no exception. I just want to set expectations here for animal spirits listeners. This will be no exception. It will end with a whole bunch of scammers. It will end with a bubble. This is going to happen. And this surprised me a little bit that this has always got to be the case. But it feels like these are the animal spirits of crypto. I guess a few things I'd say on this. One is what crypto is doing here because it's a permissionless open financial system is just, It's revealing what's already there. Okay? It's providing an outlet for something that we've seen in pockets in traditional finance

with equities of like, you know, meme stocks, right? GME. These financial nihilism that's kind of like spread across our culture. And you could talk about like the different reasons for this. Maybe it's like younger generations feel like they're getting the short end of the stick. Maybe it's like the money printing. There's all sorts of different narratives for why this is happening. But the financial nihilism is being expressed in critical.

and it happens every single cycle, so that crypto turns into eventually a casino. And the beauty of crypto, I guess, or maybe you see this is the tradeoff is it's open permissionless, anyone can do it, so you're going to see the raw thing that already exists without sugar coating. You got nothing to hide. Yeah. You can watch it all. Well, the double-edged sort of it is the casino is a thing that gets new entrance to enter.

Yeah, it does. But it's like it does, but toward the end of the cycle, you know, there's a difference, I think, between, like, you know, scammers abusing and getting entrance this way. Like, the point is to me, when all of the people bought monkey jpegs at the top last cycle, right? And they watched those monkey jpegs that they thought were going to generate life-changing wealth for them, like decrease and, you know, collapse to something near zero. That is really bad user experience. Like, your net promoter score for crypto is just, like, super negative. And so, yes, it does drive adoption.

But it doesn't drive long-term status. Like, the speculative markets don't drive long-term satisfied users. And a whole bunch of them, not only exit when things go bad and when, like, the Slebcoin, I don't know if you guys saw this this week's, like, Iggy Azalea is releasing Sleb coins. Caitlin Jenner came out with, like, Jenner coin. And these are like just low effort, pot and duff. Like, I don't want to be associated with that.

But, like, it's permissionless. It's open. We can't stop it. Yeah. I do think, though, on the flip side of this, this is why there's like a great buying opportunity. I've always seen this in crypto. It's like if somebody is just floating on the surface and all they hear is the media headlines of Sam Begman-Fried and like Jenner Coin and like the ninth crypto founder who's like three

hours capitaled everyone and stolen their money, right, then they'll dismiss it. They'll dismiss it without going deeper. And I think that's why there's still a buying opportunity here, honestly, is because the world, this is a revolutionary technology that's disguised as a scam, you know? And so, like, that's why people miss it. In the early 90s, like, I remember in the adoption of the internet, some early critics would be like, it's just, what is it? It's just casinos in porn. It's like, what is the internet going to be? And they miss the commercial opportunities on top of it. So that's the flip side. If you're a savvy investor and you actually go deep and you see the

potential what's really being built, you ignore the top stuff that it gets, transmit in the media, I think there's a buying opportunity. Well, more people are going to hear about crypto, whether they like it or not, because it's now coming to Washington in a big way. That's true. You guys had a representative on your podcast last week. So what is the state of affairs with crypto and Washington, D.C.? Yeah, like last week when the Ethereum ETF went from like almost definitely getting denied

to surprise 180 from the SEC and getting approved, it was probably the biggest week in crypto history in terms of just like a political win. if not just the biggest week, we went from just, like, kind of being behind the scenes when it comes to Capitol Hill and politics, to both parties vying for the crypto vote. As it turns out, there are 20 million registered voters in the United States that say that crypto is an important issue for them. And I think, like, the Democrats were in denial about this. It was invisible to the Republicans.

But just, like, something happened where I think, like, Donald Trump got wind that, like, he can say one thing that's positive about crypto and he can win a bunch of crypto votes. And then that all of a sudden turned into a massive, it has turned into a massive tug-of-war between the Dems and the Republicans about who gets the crypto vote. So it went from like the Democrats kind of being like pretty oppressive to the industry, like Gary Gensler from the Biden administration, more or less just like hazing us as an industry and like doing things that we would consider unconstitutional. And so like the Democrats known to be like pretty anti-crypto.

And the Republicans, at best indifferent, with some supporters. And then all of a sudden, that flipped around and everyone realized that, like, not only are there, like, 20 million voters that say that crypto's important, but just, like, millions and millions of dollars. Like, we're an industry that learned how to print money on the Internet. Like, we have money. We're a very, like, wealthy, like, voting base. And there's a lot of single-issue voters in crypto who, like, really care about crypto as their primary concern.

like either for ideological reasons, for financial reasons, maybe a mix of both. But like people have just realized, like Washington, D.C. has realized that like the crypto voting base is wealthy and populous. And so like that's pretty simple calculus. Yeah, I think that explains a lot of it. Just like the fact that David, you're saying 20 million of voting is like 20, 20% of voters in swing states think that crypto is an important issue. 50 million Americans own crypto right now. Mike Novogratz has said this is almost the amount of people who own dogs, right? More than more people own crypto than own dogs. If you come out and you say, we're the party against dogs, right? That's just not very popular. Like, I mean, I have a dog. I love my dog,

right? I love my crypto bags. You're against my bags? You're making me, like, poor. I don't want you. Like, I want the person who's like for my bags, right? I also think an unspoken story is how organized crypto has been this cycle in DC. So last time, the guy that was sucking all of the oxygen from the room in D.C. was a guy by the name of Sam Bankman Freed. All right? And like what crypto realized the industry in that vacuum is how hazardous it is to have people like that be the representative for crypto in D.C. And so during the intervening period of like the bear market, they got super organized. So the crypto lobby groups in D.C., the inroads to members of Congress, even into the White House, have been actually impressive.

Like, there's this website called Stand with Crypto. It's, like, incredibly organized. You can go and you see the politicians, and it gives them, like, a letter score of, like, A, B, C, D, F on, on cryptos. Like, so we've gotten organized. And also, I'll say the last factor here is, like, Black Rock gets what Black Rock wants, okay? And, like, right now, Black Rock, they saw the Bitcoin ETF inflows were incredible. and they're making some moves as well. This is kind of like a, crypto is making this alliance with banks like Black Rock, I think,

with like, I don't know, they could turn on us as well. But for now, we're just uneasy bedfellows. And that's been interesting. The last thing I'll say, though, is I'm not, I think we're in the phase until November of the politicians being really nice to crypto and like giving us what they want. And I don't know that that last pass

an election cycle. So it's kind of like, now is the time, get all of your requests in. Well, what would those demands be? Is it just like don't overregulate us? Is that essentially? Like Gary Gensler, the SEC is right now in a lawsuit against five companies that are legitimate like companies. Our most legitimate companies. Uniswap, Metamask, the wallet, Coinbase, Crackin, these are exchanges and products that did not fail, have not failed, have been in existence forever. Haven't lawsuit. Even Robin Hood. You guys know Robin Hood? That there's a lawsuit against Robin Hood for listing assets. So, yeah. There are plenty of scams to go after it. And they would be easy to go after. Jennercoids. They could do animals anything else. But they're going after like the people that have actually worked hard to promote this industry. And for some reason, they seem to want to give out Wells notices like candy despite having like lost. I don't think they won a single case. And so, the bad faith regulation around the crypto industry by the SEC is like, it's like not up for debate. It's like pretty clear. What's going on in Washington is uniting the crypto community,

which is very bifurcated. And it's like a lot of other things, it's very tribal. I know you guys are, I don't know if you consider yourself eth-maxis. You could come up to that. What's that? David, do you consider yourself eat maxi? This is a frequent topic of conversation between me and Ryan. It's funny because you don't have, you don't have like stock maxies. Like, Michael's not an Nvidia Maxi or like a NASDAQA100 maxi. That only happens in crypto. Yeah. Well, okay, the quick explanation behind that is like generally there are like values that each layer one ecosystem has built into it. So like Bitcoin has certain values, very strong Austrian economics values. Ethereum has different sets of values. So these are like if you really get down to the basement

of crypto, each blockchain represents kind of like a political movement of what your values are. And the adoption of that blockchain is like kind of the dogecoin values. That one would take me a moment. So something about community, the celebration of community culture banding together under a joke. What do you guys see? We like memes, right? Yeah, we like memes, yeah. What do you guys see when you're saying, you don't see this in the equity space, in the stock space, right?

But although I will say, like, there are some tribes that I've seen in, like, like, the Tesla. The Tesla, the Buffett tribe, yeah. The Vanguard tribe. Buffett tribe. Vanguard for sure. Yeah. But even you get like the Tesla moonboys are pretty like, I would say ardent. I don't know if that would characterize that as a subclass.

I guess the difference, though, is that Bogleheads, for example, I don't think they're spending a lot of time thinking about what other people are doing. Like, right? I don't think they're like arguing necessarily with like Kathy Wooden. Yeah, they're not. They're not. We do what we do and I don't care what you do. They're more confident.

Right, within crypto, there are. battles. And I know you guys like to roll around in the mud sometimes. And it makes sense because this is a very nascent industry. You're looking to plant your flag and fight for what you believe in. But there's a lot of friction within each individual vertical in crypto. There is. And it's ugly as tribal at times. One thing I'll tell you this, and this is another thing you don't see until you kind of look below the surface is all of the argument is like bag argument. There's some values argument, as David said, but it's all about it's all about assets. It's like all about assets. But under the surface. I'd actually like contest that.

Well, let me just like finish though. Like so under the surface though, there's a massive wave of cooperation that's happening in that all of the tools and technologies that are built are like open source. And so they're shared, right? And so if Bitcoin is launching a layer two, for instance, I'm using crypto terms here, but they go, they get some code, open source code that the Ethereum tribe has developed. Right. So under the scenes at the builder level, because this is.

an open source permissionless movement because I can look at something that Uniswap did with their, like, you know, their curve and the way they price their assets, I could just take that and adopt that. There's a ton of cooperation that actually happens. The arguments are mostly over assets. But David, you were going to contend with that. You don't think the arguments are over assets? Yeah, David, you think this is altruistic behavior? No, not necessarily that. The people think that it's the tribalness in crypto is because of bag bias. And that's not wrong, but I think it's the wrong framing. Like people, like, they come into like the chakoutary board that is like the layer one landscape in, in blockchains,

like Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, like, pick your layer one. And then they like kind of like, you know, try it out. Like what is this blockchain represent? What are its values? Solana is like super low fees in good U.X. Ethereum is like maximal decentralization and credible neutrality with like a layer two landscape. Bitcoin is. like Austrian economics and hard money. And like each one represents like beliefs about like what the future of crypto could be or should be. And then as a crypto participant, you place your bets, you buy your bags, you buy Bitcoin, you buy ETH, you buy Solana, you buy Dogecoin. And then you get loud because you place your bets. But it's not saying, it's not so nihilistic in the sense

that like I'm just here getting loud about my soul bags because I have soul bags. I've chosen my soul bags because it aligns with my personal beliefs about how this thing will work and should work. that other people will, like, agree with me, and I'm going to get really loud, and it gets loud because everyone is, like, financially motivated. Yeah, people are talking to their books. It's both. It's both. And I think, it's both.

Like, if TradFi people behaved the same way that crypto people behaved, imagine that I was, like, screaming every day, you guys, you could fucking own Apple. You could own the best company in the world. We should. Why don't you? Well, okay, but crypto has, like, way more. growth potential, at least it's perceived by crypto people to have way more growth potential. And so, like, the next 10 years of crypto means so much more than the next 10 years of Apple,

because Apple's already like so much. But also, David, I would say it's like, you know, when you sign up for crypto and you pick your tribe, you're picking a subculture, but you're also picking a religion. Yeah. Like, you definitely are. Me, the closest in Tradfai is just, you remember those old like, I'm a Mac, I'm a PC type ads and that religious warfare they kind of tapped into? so there were like Mac subculture people and there's like Windows subculture people like

all the nerds do you know like there's an element of that but even more so it's it's more like am I going to be a Muslim am I going to be a Christian am I going to be a Buddhist there's an element of that tied into these assets too. This is one of the reasons that I first bought Bitcoin and I think June 2020 was because not because I believed but because I believe that enough people believed yeah and it is a simple supply and demand story and I could give two shits. In fact, I don't like the Austrian economic philosophy of buy Bitcoin, your dollars going to zero. Like, to me, that feels like a shitty message. And I don't like that. And I don't like it so much that if Bitcoin went to 100,000

and I didn't own it, I would light myself on fire. So I bought it to protect myself from having those shot in Freud feelings. But it is a religion. And I don't say that in a bad way. Like, people really, really believe. Yeah. And it's the sales sphere around Bitcoin. has no marketing department. Bitcoin has no, like, promotion or foundation or anything. There's no face of, there's no face of Bitcoin or crypto for that. Wait, you guys. Which is probably one of the beautiful things about it. No one's listening. Tell us. Who's Satoshi? How has this not been?

How is it, David? How is he, David? Who is he? David? Yeah, there's a bunch of speculation of, um, Nix-ZATO. Would it be really boring if it actually came out? It would be. And I also, I think we're past the point of like if there was actual proof that a particular person was Satoshi. it wouldn't matter and no one would care like he is he is now up in the realm of mythology

let me ask you guys something really trivial I look at I look at the price I have like price on my screen every day like like a lot of people in like a lot of people and I look at the price of Bitcoin and Ethereum I don't know 475 times a day I'm curious what about you guys I used to do that last cycle I bought as soon as the bull market kicked off sometime in 2020

I bought like a cheap like 30 in Chelsea like TV and I plastered it up on my wall behind my computer and I was just like everyone on on like my YouTube comments were like why is David always looking up into the left and after going through that bull market and like kind of like without really like admitting it to myself letting some of my mental health slip I moved and I did not put that TV back up I was like no no no no I even like moved in the price off my phone and so like I'll look at the price quite frequently but like it's never in like my default valence of my screens. Ryan, over under 100 times a day for you.

Way under now, but like- Ryan's pretty good. He's always been pretty good. No, I've had to change. Honestly, have you ever like gone in your phone settings and kind of looked at the number of times you pick up your phone a day? Like I was doing that at times over 100 times a day

and it was just like checking some like crypto app to see prices. That's not a healthy place to be because I actually like pride myself philosophy like philosophically in terms of investing style and being long term. And you are not long term oriented at all if you're looking at the price 30 to 100 times a day. Do you know? Like it just snaps you into a different kind of dopamine type hit that then like to orient yourself psychologically to to play the long term game here. Well, especially as fast as the cycles in crypto move. Does that surprise you guys at all? How fast? Like I understand that it moved fast at the beginning, but the speed at which these moves are happening, like I, I, for one, was surprised

how quickly things came back after the San Bankman Free Day. It was, I mean, people were calling it a crypto winter, but it wasn't nearly as long as the last one. It seems like the cycles are only getting faster these days. Time dilation in crypto is definitely a thing. I spent last bull market, the 2021 bull market in San Diego, which is a pretty like calm, laid back town, laid back city. And after like the workday was over 5, 6 p.m., I would go out with my friends. And going from like the fury of the 2021 bull market to my friends who didn't work in crypto, you know when you're walking in the airport and there were those like automated walk pads and you walk on them to go a little bit faster and then you get off of them and you

like lurch backwards. That was like me every single day, like 6 p.m. I'm like, okay, it's San Diego. I need to calm down. Like my foot is like jiggling. And I ended up just moving to New York where I live now. And like the speed of New York and the speed of crypto much more resonant. But still, nonetheless, like a week in normal world is like a day in crypto. The comeback story, this cycle has been surprising to me. Like, I had faith that it would come back. I think it happened a little sooner than I thought, maybe like 12 months a year sooner,

something like this. But one thing I'll just say and something I've learned and if you're like continuing to tell myself is this has already happened. Like, this is the fourth time the cycle's playing out. Like, just don't mid-curve it, right? Yeah. Four-year cycles, guys. So here's what's going to happen.

Until further notice. We're going to continue to go up. We're going to, cryptos at like $2.5 trillion right now. We're going above $10 trillion, all right? 10 to like $15 trillion around that, that like mindset. It's going to bubble. It's going to top. You're going to see more Jenner coins.

It's going to get stupid. And then it's going to crash. Like, that's just probably, again, you know, not financial advice. But, like, trust the cycle. It's happened four times. It's the fourth time. It's the only thing that's like it's dead. Yeah.

And when it goes up, you're going to start hearing like we did last time of, oh, this time it's different. This time we really have adoption. This time there's more fundamentals. This time we have more layer twos in block space, like super cycle is a term that's thrown around in crypto, which basically meant we're never going to have another crash again. When you start hearing stuff like that, then you know it's coming imminently. I just trust.

the cycles is like one thing I've learned about this space. All right, guys, anything else that you wanted to talk about that we didn't get to today? I want to ask you guys, like some questions here because I'm just super curious. So, so, okay, so you were saying that, Michael, you don't hold with like the whole store of value Austrian type thing. I'm just curious high level. Like, what is your mindset on macro? You know, like, does that factor into your like, so here's the basic narrative, if I would give the TLDR for crypto. Crypto people generally believe money printing is like a big deal. There's massive injections and liquidity. So they're very much on like the commodity side of things, like scarce assets. They think sovereign bonds are

going to get absolutely destroyed. The sovereign bond debt holders are going to be like a complete bag holders. That's like the macro thesis. That's never, nobody's ever thought of the last 150 years. What do you guys think? What do you guys think about that? Do you fade that idea or is that part of the kind of the animal spirit's thesis. I just, I don't live my life like that. Life is too short to worry about what's going to happen to the U.S.

debt. And I'm not like hand waving it away and saying it doesn't matter at all. Just for me and my personality, I just don't want to have that black cloud over my life. I have a family and a job that I love and people I work with that I love.

Like I don't want to live in that negative death spiral. So I'm not saying that that risk does not exist. You don't like being dumer. No, I just, I don't, we're going to die. And I don't want to live like that. So what I think about in terms of the macro, I keep like my beliefs about crypto fairly simple. I think that there is more demand than supply.

And that's the lens that I view it through. I'm more, I'm definitely more of like a glass-safel kind of person. So I don't view it through that lens either. And my whole thinking with politicians in crises type situations, some things are completely out of control. But if there's a way that like money can plug a hole and fix something, the politicians will do it. That's the way that I, like, thinking that the system's going to collapse upon itself. So I don't view it that way either. So I would look at crypto as more of, like, I've always seen it as a call option.

That's always been my view of it as that, like, I think we're going to continue to have progress. We're going to continue of innovation. Crypto is a call option on progress and innovation. Like, I was one of the people beating my head against the wall at first, and I just didn't understand it because I'm just not a tech person. And the best explanation I ever heard about Bitcoin is, listen, you can't give someone, like, you can walk up to someone on the street. give them a $20 bill, and no one can tell you yes or no or take fees off of that. Bitcoin is how you do that, or crypto is how you do that on the internet. Like handing someone, and that's a very simplified explanation, obviously, but that was the

first time to me, it's like, oh, okay, I get it now. That actually makes sense. So for me, it's always been a call option. One last thing on the, unlike the Austrian economic philosophy, that money printing is destroying, the government is stealing your wealth and stealing your money and money, a dollar, goes to zero over time. Okay, a dollar is not meant to be hoarded. You're supposed to put it back into the system, invest, buy stocks, buy bonds, by real estate, buy crypto, by whatever. You're not meant to pile dollars. Dollars are not an investment. So that argument for me totally falls on

deaf ears. Yeah, in crypto parlance, you'd say basically, so crypto talk about like a store of value all the time. And I guess your argument would be, Michael, like, look, dollars were never supposed to be a store of value. The story of value is like... Yeah. A way to invest. Yeah. I get it. Nobody ever said that you should buy it, that you, that the goal is to stack as many dollars

in your bank as possible. Yeah. I, so I'm curious in, in terms of how you guys invest. Like, there's almost an element for David and I, we are so, like, crypto-pilled. And like, I can't speak for everything that David owns, but basically for me, it's just like, I own crypto, a little bit of stocks, like some coin base and stuff. I own one stock and it's coin base. And like the rest I have in like, you know, T-bills and money,

market funds, and that's just my dry powder. So it's like, I don't have that. Not financial advice. I don't recommend this. And like, yeah, David, David's probably wish. So I, so what do you guys buy? And I think, I think Ben aligns with this. We are believers in a better future. We are believers in corporate America. They are very good at making money. And I believe that stocks are the best way for long-term investors to gain long-term wealth. And so that's our business, right? We're stock-market killed. What's that? You guys are stock-pilled? We're stock-pilled. So, Every, I mean, obviously, I'm maxing out my 401k. Every month I've got money going into the brokerage account.

But I do own a decent amount of crypto, probably more than is, I don't know if justified as right word, but I do believe that crypto is going to be bigger tomorrow than it's today. So I am a believer and an owner and, again, less so in the ideological reasons for it, but I'm here to make money. Do you guys actively manage your stuff? Like, do you just like- Actively manage my crypto?

No, no, no. Yes, yes. But just in general, in the stock world, right? It's just like the, the-Bogelhead philosophy, as far as I know, is just basically like low-cost index funds, you just like buy and you hold and you do that. And it's like very passive. But- So in my in my 401K, which is, I guess, where a large portion of my stocks are owned, it's indexes and factors and stuff like that.

I'm not picking stocks in my 401K. I have a, I have an IRA that I am picking individual. stocks and not because I think I'm going to beat the market. I almost, in fact, will not. If I do, it's only by luck, but because I love to do it. So for me, it's a passion and a hobby, but I do it for really for fun, like really and truly. And so if I beat the market, that would be wonderful. But if I don't, it's all good to. And I'm not turning my portfolio over all the time. I'm a very much a buy and hold long term, like automated type investor. And my background was like nonprofit space, endowments and foundations and pension plans. And I, for,

12 years got a front row seat to watching these like master stock pickers just fall over themselves all the time. And these are the smartest people I've ever met and they all sucked at stock picking. And I thought, how am I ever going to do it then? If these people can't do it, these teams of people that all they're doing is talking to company management. And so most of my stuff is long term buy and hold passive, set it and forget it. And I found that like psychologically speaking, David, you had to take the screen away. For me, that like makes it easier for me to follow the markets more closely because I know I'm not going to look at every little blip and make a change in my portfolio and pull a lever because it's going on behind

the scenes and I'm not worried about it. I have just two more questions for you guys. Is that cool? Sorry, it's just the podcaster kind of like kicking in where you should have not I've got one as well. I knew you were flipping this around. All right. All right. So this is just a I'm going in all sorts of places, but AI stocks right now. Okay? Something like Nvidia, just crazy. What are we like? One full crypto, I think. NVIDIA's market caps, like $2.5 trillion, something like this? What's going on there? Is this a bubble?

What do you guys think? Did this catch the stock market and equity investors like you guys by surprise? I don't know about this this week, actually. Yeah. So I'm, I think the fundamental growth behind Nvidia has continued to shock everybody. the numbers that they're doing, both in terms of earnings per share and margins and growth, it's fucking wild. And so what would you expect a company that is growing like that in a potentially transformative industry? What would you expect it to be worth? Do you expect to be trading at 10 times earnings? No, of course not. It's trading at, I don't know, 40 times forward earnings, which is

not cheap, nor should it be cheap. It's earned the right to have a high valuation. But the numbers seem to be getting out of control in terms of the trajectory and the vertical nature in which the stock is moving. I don't like that it added $485 billion in three days. That makes me uncomfortable. So is it a bubble? I think it's earned its valuation. Does it seem to be like a little bit nuts right now? And certainly like due for a pullback. Yeah, sure. But that's again, not an original take. Something that people have been saying for the last three years. But if AI is everything people are saying is going to be, it's going to be the same cycle you predicted Ryan with crypto. There's no way we can get out of this without a bubble. Like the internet is everything

we dreamed of in the 90s and more, but you've had to go through the dot-com boom and bust to get there. Like, I think I see no path forward where AI does not become a bubble and then have a huge downfall, even if AI does everything people are saying. That's kind of what I was wondering. And so when I see Nvidia, I see sort of like a little bit of like 1997, 1998. I don't know if you guys remember this like at all or looking at it like, but, you know, I was just in school. I was looking at like Yahoo stock.

And the fundamentals were crazy. Like it was printing revenue and profit. Like, it looked good on paper, but it turned out a lot of that was on the back of, like, private equity, buying advertisements because the entire dot-com space was, like, blowing up. And so there's an element of, like, David and I do some VC stuff too, right? And so we are seeing tons of AI projects get hundreds of millions of dollars in private equity, you know, like funding. And they don't have...

Elon's company raised that $18 billion. Is there a product? Yeah, they don't have a business model, but they are spending tens of millions of dollars. per month on GPUs, right, like, per month. And to me, I'm like, oh, okay, well, this is interesting. And I wonder how sustainable it is. Well, I would say that Howard Linz made a good point that people comparing Nvidia to Cisco, when the music stopped playing in 2000, Cisco's customers couldn't

pay, right? Like, it just was a complete shit show. Invidia's customers are Amazon, meta, Google, right? So I think it's a little bit different there. However, in 1999, or whenever Cisco, top. I don't know what sort of multiple is trading out of. It was 100 or 200 times start earnings, whatever it was. It was totally insane. Cisco, the business, continued to grow its earnings per share, like 15% compounded for the next two decades. And it still got

clobbered because it was pricing in, you know, 37% growth or whatever. It's still underwater. The stock price is still underwater. Well, underline. So can you see something similar with NVIDIA? I mean, that's not what I'm betting on, but would I be surprised if Cisco, if NVIDio, excuse me, is flat down over the next two to three years, it would not surprise me in the least. By the way, nowhere to $4 trillion dollar valuation. Who knows? I don't know where this is going, and I'm glad that I don't have to make those sort of decisions. Do your question, David. Ready for you go back to crypto. Go ahead. So right now the ETH just got approved. We're waiting on the S-1s, but eventually the

ETF will be trading. And then it's a matter of just like the traditional financial institutions to actually pitch it to their customers, right, to end. investors. The Bitcoin narrative is pretty simple. Digital gold, like it kind of covers the bases. You can kind of elaborate from there if you want, but I think digital gold really explains Bitcoin pretty well. Right now, and the big conversation in the Ethereum world is how do we sell ether? How do we sell the ether ETF? The narrative? I mean? The narrative, yeah. It's funny. I was going to ask you this same question because I do think it's going to be a harder sell. I agree that digital gold is, that's easy for people to latch onto in the retail and the

advisor world. I think your way of pitching it as programmable money makes sense, but I do think that's a little bit of a harder leap for people to make. I think it's going to be, so I think it's going to be a little bit of a harder pitch to the Tradfire world than the Bitcoin ETF. Yeah. So bankless, we've been known as the people to really help educate around ether the asset and really help evolve its narrative. But our attention is all like consumers, individuals. Like the people, these are crypto natives who are trying to, like, you know, join in the tribal games, like be in the crypto world, be on Twitter with all of us. And so it's a different audience than what we are typically used to explaining and elaborating for. And so I'm

actually wondering if you guys have any, like, advice or perspectives or anything to add. Because like Ryan and I are in the middle of a competition where a week from yesterday, where him, he's going to pitch to me, his best sales pitch for ETH from the Tridefi perspective, and I'm going to pitch to him. But since we are both here on even playing field, I'm wondering if you guys just have any advice for us. Wow. Talk about turning the tables, asking us for advice on how yeah. That's true. The way that it was explained or like the, the clearest message that I saw in this was from, I think Matt Hogan wrote, it was certainly from Bitwise, uh, programmable money. I think, like, smart contracts where you're not, it's programmed into the technology.

This is a terrible pitch. But you're not, you're not looking for like human intuition or approval or anything like that. It's all done before you place your bets. Do I'm worried about, like I'm working on a pitch because I'm going to beat Ryan here. I'm worried about invoking smart contracts. Do smart contracts, is that a helpful term or a confusing term? To who? Like people I don't know?

Like Black Rock and Black Rock customers. That might be a little confusing. Right? Like, it's not a term that you know of. That's a crypto native term. David, David, I have my one-line pitch. You ready for this? Tradify's going to love it.

Sure. NVIDIA for tokenization. Oh, my God. What the hell is tokenization? Oh, damn. Right? So, but here's the thing.

So from the perspective of like the buyer of the ETF, I don't think they really give a shit. They're trying to make money. Is it going to go up? It's like another form of Bitcoin. I know it's not actually, but fine. It's a digital asset. That's it.

And I would just leave it at that. Couldn't you just say it's better than Bitcoin? Boom. It's just better than Bitcoin. Yeah, but why? Why is it better than Bitcoin? Because you could actually do stuff with it. Because the price will go up faster than Bitcoin.

There you go. It's something like this. Guys, this has been really cool. Actually, David, that was my question. So it was like my final question, guys. But this has been really fun. And I think we should do something like this again. It would be cool that.

like have our counterparts in the stock world whenever we have questions about our 401ks and you know what to buy and you know like we could have this on a recurring basis well i appreciate you guys coming on one of the reasons why i've why i've been listening to you over the years is because you're pragmatic and level-headed and you're not totally fucking insane so i appreciate just a little insane i appreciate the message that you guys are putting out into the world and thank you for coming on our show today this is a lot of fun amazing thanks guys bye Thank you.