Bankless - Coin Bureau’s Guy Turner Interviews Ryan & David

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Coin Bureau’s Guy Turner interviewed Ryan and David on November 15, 2023. We’re re-releasing this episode on our channels thanks to Coin Bureau. We hope you enjoy this meta-conversation of Ryan, David, and the Bankless brand. Happy Holidays!  ------- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 1:55 Crypto YouTube vs. Podcast 7:10 Creating Crypto Content 16:55 SBF vs. Erik Voorhees  32:50 Crypto Industry Mistakes  41:05 Ethereum & Crypto Cycles 55:43 Crypto, Social Media, Madness  1:03:00 Podcast Guests 1:09:00 Final Thoughts ------ RESOURCES Full Coin Bureau Interview  https://youtu.be/HVpQroG434E?si=Yl0IR-LUd8dRQZ3l   ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://bankless.com/disclosures 

Hey, Bankless Nation, this is a special episode. Actually, an interview we recorded with Guy from Coin Bureau about a month ago. So some of the prices, some of those details might be dated, but I think we talked a lot about the bankless story, David. So we thought you guys would enjoy it during the holidays. Importantly, this is an interview of us by Coin Bureau. This is not a Bankless podcast, but we are putting it on the Bankless podcast feed. Yeah, so I hope you guys enjoy.

As usual, I was shocked that he did a podcast. I still to this day have no idea. why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Coin Bureau. We have two very special guests with us today. I am deeply honored to welcome none other than Ryan, Sean Adams and David Hoffman, better known as Bankless, one of the best crypto podcasts out there, an invaluable source of information for not just all things Ethereum,

but all things crypto and beyond as well. I've been listening to Ryan and David for years now, and they just keep on getting better and better. I'm really glad that they've been able to join me today. It's pretty early in the morning for them. But guys, welcome and thank you so much for joining. Thanks for the kind word, Guy. Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

It's great to finally meet you. Like I say, I've been listening to you guys for years now. And like, there are so, you guys have had so many incredible conversations with some of the, you know, some of the top, names in the space. And there's no way we've got time to sort of dig into all of those today. But I do want to sort of get your thoughts on a few sort of episodes that you've done, a few people that you've spoken to. But I thought an interesting thing to do to start with, because one thing I've kind of noticed is that the crypto podcast world and the crypto YouTube world

seem to be sort of quite separate polls a lot of the time. And obviously, like you guys, you guys, have a YouTube channel, but I think you're sort of best known as as podcasters. So I thought for anyone sort of unfamiliar, for anyone who sort of gets most of their information from YouTube, could you guys, you know, give us your backstory a little bit, like how you came to, how you, you know, how you got into crypto and how you came to do what you do with bankless? You want to start, David? Yeah, sure. I think to start things off, Ryan and I are definitely podcast people, I would say. We both are big podcast consumers. And I don't really know how anyone would start a podcast without having that as their foundation. Like first we enjoy a podcast and then we are like, okay, we could we could start a

podcast. And so that's probably why Bankless is known as a podcast is because that's where we came from. Yeah, like David, how much how much podcast listing do you do versus YouTube would you say? Yeah, like three to one ratio. And it used to be a 10 to one. It's gotten. YouTube has increased lately. And I would say that's been on track with Bankless's emphasis on YouTube. Like, we've nailed the podcast game relatively early, but the YouTube game is still like new to us. We snuck at YouTube. Yeah, we stuck at YouTube. We're working on it. But we started first, you know, as podcast consumers and then podcasters.

And that's really where Bankless came to be. It filled this niche in the early days of Ethereum where there were a lot of people that had a lot of shared ideas and understanding about what this Ethereum thing is and what it could be. And this was back in like 2018 to 2019, which it was very, very early and no one knew what Ethereum was or where it was going. It's like we had just coined the words defy. And so we started the podcast to help articulate that story. And a lot of Ethereum people at the time were like, oh, thank God, finally someone is

saying the words that I feel about Ethereum. And that's kind of where we got our first early foundations in the world. the space. Yeah, I think like the perspective at that time, 2019, when we kicked things off, was we had just come out of 2017. And Guy, you remember this, right? The highs of 2018, the elation all the way, and we're going to change the world in crypto's everything, all the way to the lows of 2018, 2019, and the absolute despair. And so David and I were on a kind of a similar request and journey where we were fully bought into this crypto thing. And we obviously, we had bags from 2017.

So we're trying to figure out like, oh my God, are we wrong? Like, did we miss something? Did we screw something up? So for me, it was just going down to base principles and trying to figure out if I was crazy or everyone else was crazy. And so bankless really began as a quest, right? It was just a couple of investors on the journey to make sense out of crypto. Like, what are the use cases?

What are blockchains good for? how do they actually accrue value? And so we basically open source this quest. And it was a series of conversations between David and myself, and then we'd bring guests on, and we developed what we call the bankless thesis. Indeed, the name of the podcast is kind of a thesis for crypto, which is, what does crypto do? Helps us go bankless, right? We have a money system, an alternate money system that does not rely on central banks or commercial banks in order to thrive.

So even the name of the episode is kind of the name of the thesis is in the, the podcast format. But like one other thing I'll say is, um, I think that podcasting is a different medium than YouTube. Yeah. Right. So our podcast like the reason it hasn't translated so well previously to YouTube is just we tend to go on for a long time.

Long time. It's like deep long form conversation. And, um, you know, YouTube, at least my impression of YouTube. and I think there's some convergence. I think things change. But YouTube just like, give me the answers, right? I want like, I want to see 15 minutes, like articulate something. And it takes David and I longer than 15 minutes to actually go through an idea maze

and talk to a guess. So that's why we're probably native podcasters rather than YouTubers. Yeah. Well, because I mean, you guys have been, you guys have been working together for so long now. And you, you know, you gel so well together. I think that's part of the appeal, isn't it? It's like it's not just two guys who really care about what they're talking about and what they're into, but also just like, you know, really sort of bounce off each other so well.

I think that's why, you know, I think that's one of the many reasons why it works, why bankless works so well as a podcast. Yeah. I mean, you know, from my experience of it, like from my experience of YouTube, because I mean, when we started, when we started Coin Bureau, you know, all those years ago, we had to sort of, we had to kind of figure out YouTube as we went along and it was sort of like, surely, surely what people want is just like really short like you know a couple of minutes and then we were quite surprised when they wanted kind of turns out they wanted kind of longer form stuff um but it's just it feels like a lot

of the time it feels like the sort of goalposts uh are almost shifting in a way because you're sort of trying to you're trying to find that balance like people do like longer form stuff on youtube but only only up to a point and then there's a sort of moment where they're sort of like no this is enough like I can't deal with this anymore. Yeah, I was actually going to ask you, Guy, because I think you do this really well with your YouTube channel and kind of your platform. But it seems to be there can be a challenge with anyone who is in crypto media with presenting candy to the audience versus presenting vegetables, right?

We like to say at Bankless, what we're trying to do is like healthy candy. But like sometimes that's difficult because if you go by attention spans or narratives, then you're just talking about maybe the latest meme coin. And what is the substance there? Like, how does that actually help us change the world and fulfill the promise of crypto and actually go bankless, right? And so if you give, it's like the audience just the candy, oh, here are the 10 coins that are mooning and you need to buy right now, then I feel like you lose the plot. But if you don't do any of that, and if you're just deep into the research and you're talking about like, ETH research posts all the time with big brain cryptographers, then you're not

changing the world either because you don't have an audience that actually cares about that. I'm curious from your perspective, because you seem to balance this very well. How do you like manage this, the candy versus the health foods? It's tricky. It's a good question. Yeah, it's that idea of, yeah, calories and calories or sweeties. And it's, you know, healthy calories, healthy candy, as you say, it's, it's tricky. I think one of the things that we found that that kind of helped us grow was that was the sort of

realization that, you know, crypto is no longer in a bubble. And I think this was coming, this was really sort of coming out sort of 2020, 2021, I think, this realization that crypto had evolved from just this thing that a few people were interested in and the only, that kind of existed in and of itself. And suddenly it was much more susceptible to macro forces to, it was a part of, you know, it was becoming a part of the kind of traditional system, which isn't, you know, which isn't great in many ways. But that's still that's kind of cold, hard facts. And I think, I think sort of we pivoted a little bit to covering sort of more macro content as well in order to just kind of, you know, flesh out the ecosystem for those who maybe sort of had a kind of passing interest in crypto,

but like, you know, kind of like you say, they didn't want, they didn't want to listen to like a deep dive into the latest EIPs or anything like that. But they're still, you know, they've still got enough intrad. They still want to know what's going on. But, yeah, you can't, they don't want, they don't want the hardcore tech. But it is tricky because, and I think especially during kind of periods like we've, we've just come out of. And I think this is why, certainly here, it's here at Coinbier, I'm kind of getting the

sense of it from you guys as well. You know, sentiment is kind of really sort of picking up because in a bear market, when things are really bad, it's so difficult to keep people engaged and entertained. And you sort of feel like, well, I should try and find some good news to cover. And then you're like, pivot to AI. You know, everything sucks. Everyone's at each other's throats and all this sort of stuff. It can be really difficult.

So, yeah, it's, I guess, striking that balance between what you think your audience wants to see and what you think. they should see and sort of try and give them both. Because, yeah, I mean, it would be very easy to do, like, top 10, top 10 meme coins for October. It's just like, even as a little piece of you dies. I mean, we try to balance it out a little bit, but we will, like, still do a show on an entire EIP. Like, we did a show called Dank sharding, and, like, we didn't even know it.

No, no, blobs space. Blobs space. Sorry. So, like, but as it can't be all of our episodes. That's how we just do a portfolio, right? So you get some vegetables mixed in with everything else. I think that's where we've kind of settled is there's just an extreme amount of variety on bank lists. So you get the one and a half hour long, very technical deep dyes with Justin Drake.

And at the end of that, you end up saying, like, I can't really regurgitate anything, but I still kind of got it anyways. And if you feel like that, that's how David and I feel. And then there's like the 45 minute shorter forum episodes where we're specifically talking about market movements and like kind of doing the dopamine content that everyone in crypto pays attention to whether you're an 80 IQ DGEN who just got in or you're Justin Drake. Like one of these like both everyone kind of pays attention to like market drama no matter what. Maybe Justin doesn't actually. There's plenty of market drama. Yeah. Isn't there always all the time in crypto?

I would say in the YouTube game, and this is something that we identified pretty early at Bankless, I would say. We didn't, the first podcast episodes were no video just because we didn't have that set up. The technology wasn't there, and we weren't very good at, like, we could have done it, but we weren't very good at it. But it was something that you tapped on to Guy,

when you said just like the chemistry between me and Ryan is really, really good. A lot of, I say like content producers as an industry, when people watch content, they kind of want to just catch a vibe. They want to like feel things. And one of the ways that me and Ryan got traction in the early days is that we were able to articulate some of the grand visions of crypto in the grand scheme of things and the fullness of time. And you put those into words, but that was a, that was an articulation of the way that a lot of people felt about this industry. And then we're also doing it like me and Ryan lean inherently optimistic. And then we also kind of have this, like, we think similarly so we can bounce ideas off

of each other. Yeah, but I, David is gas and I am breaks. Yeah, we're saying it's all this contrast to you. Yeah, but you have the difference is in you and me, which is like the gas and breaks and like the you're a business background. I'm a psych background. But these are actually a complimentary, not like they don't conflict. And so like the bankless brand just makes people like feel things at times.

Sometimes negative things. Some people don't like us at all. But like the idea is like the people do feel stuff. And like we have like leaned into that a little bit. It's not an apathetic brand. By the way, you could tell that David and I are still podcasters because we have these big, big ass headphones on. We were just talking about. David just sent me.

Yeah, I want to get the invisible headphones. I want to get at that point. You'll know that we are trying to like do more with YouTube when we get the invisible headphones. That's the moment you transition. The headphones come off. and suddenly you're a YouTuber and it's all good. Yeah. Is it better on the other side guy?

Is it better to be on the YouTube side? It's okay. It's okay. It has its moments. It can get a bit weird as well. People can. Well, you guys deal with some characters on YouTube that I just don't,

I don't think exist in the podcast game. Like there are some absolute like crypto YouTube personalities, I would say. There certainly are. I was, yeah, sometimes. you just find yourself kind of, you know, it's like, what is going on? Is this real? Is this real? Am I actually seeing this? Am I actually, am I actually a part of this world?

Yes, it would seem that I am. Good Lord. It's, yeah, it can be very, it can be very strange. There's never a dull moment. But yeah, I mean, going back to what you were saying, David, I think, you know, I think the chemistry that you guys have is really sort of tangible. But I think, like all the best podcasts, I think, when it's two people talking, like, you know, you feel like you're in the room with you guys. And I think that's, but I think that's a big attraction for, you know,

for people with podcasts, you know, I think most people tend to consume podcasts like, you know, when they're, when they're kind of, you know, walking or going,

you know, kind of going about their day. And I think that's part of the joy of it because you can just sort of, you know, you can get on with your day whilst also having, whilst also being in the company of these,

of these people talking about, you know, blob space and all this kind of, you know, all this sort of weird stuff. Because I listen to you guys on my, on my way into work. I've got one of those, I got one of those electric scooters. Because I thought, I'm not going to go down the Dubai route of buying a, buying a big supercar and getting stuck in traffic. So I listen to you guys on my, on my scoot in.

And it just like, you know, it just makes the time go beautifully. But it's obviously, you know, YouTube is a kind of, is a kind of different, different medium entirely. It takes, it takes a bit of cracking. It's, yeah, it's rewarding. Come, come over to the other side and join our head. We're working on it. Our team is coralling us over there, and they're doing a good job.

Okay, you just have to, you know, you have to lose it at some point and just, you know, give over to the nuttiness of it all. You'll enjoy it. I wanted to, so, like I said earlier, you know, there are so many great episodes that you guys have done. I want to take you back in time, if I may, to sort of just over a year. ago because my wife Katie and I had just moved into our house here in Dubai and she'd set me the task of building the bed that we'd had delivered. And I noticed that there was a bankless episode on and it was the debate that you guys hosted between Eric Voorhees and Sam Bankman-Fried. And I kind of put it on and my wife came up about an hour later and found me just sat on the

floor, uh, surrounded by a completely unbuilt bed, just sort of, you know, this, with my, his headphones on. She was like, what, what, what, please tell me what is so fascinating that you completely failed to do this. But, um, yeah, I mean, I remember that was such an incredible, an incredible episode to listen to. It was an incredible debate. I just wanted to, I just wanted to get your guys take on it, you know, after everything that's happened, obviously we're talking in the wake of SBF being found guilty. He's looking at, you know, possibly, possibly 100 years plus in jail. But looking back on that time, do you guys, what do you guys make of all that? I mean, I think it's fair to say that Eric kind of won that debate hands down.

Oh, yeah. I think that's right. What did you, what did you make of it all at the time? Did it, did it feel as surreal as it kind of came across to listen to? Yes, definitely. And there's, if you go, if you look at, I mean, only we can see it because we're only we have the back end to the particular episode, the analytics, but you can see the chart of viewers, concurrent viewers who are watching the live stream. Like it spikes up as all live streams do,

and then it hovers around some flat line for a little bit, and then the debate really picks up. And you can see the moment when friends are texting friends or people are sending out tweets, and they're like, yo, everyone get in here and watch this. Eric is dismantling SBF. And so, like, it's right around halfway through. And like the viewership like triples.

very, very quickly. And at the same time, like, everyone talks about, like, oh, this, like, just huge episode that the bankless did that you guys produced. Ryan and I stopped talking about, like, one third of the way through the podcast. And, like, we had, like, a mid-roll sponsor break that, you know, we do for every single live stream. And I'm texting Ryan's, like, texting that we should be doing sponsors right now. But, like, we can't end this. Like, we just have to let this roll.

And so, like, we. We just went hands off. Like the episode wrote itself. SBF like handed Eric his jugular and Eric was like, okay, thank you. And he proceeded to just dismantle SBF. Yeah, it was a surreal moment, I think, for the entire industry. I think it was.

And I think that this was part of the unveiling. So let's remember, you know, go back in history, rewind a bit further. So this happened in the end of October 2022. But if you rewind to January 2022, the three smartest people in crypto were Doquan, SBF, and Suu. These were the legends. These were the people we put on a pedestal, right? SBF, this phenom that built an exchange faster than Brian Armstrong, right? He was so big at the time.

And then, of course, we saw the downfall of Doquan. We saw the downfall of Suu. But who is still standing in October 2022, the savior of crypto, Sam Bankman freed. And so this debate actually happened 12 days before all of the shit went down. And everything came to light. And so we were actually, first of all, I was shocked that he did a podcast. I still to this day have no idea why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet.

That to me does not make logical sense. That is some kind of like SBF level hubris. We didn't yet know that SBF didn't shut up. Like he had just entered that arc of I talk walk. He does not have the shut up gene. And I think we saw that in court. He decided to testify in his own behalf. Like he's got something that most human beings don't have.

And so the reason he came on was because he was pushing forward this anti-defy legislation in D.C. Behind closed doors in a way that would effectively pull up the ladder from the decentralized exchange front ends and accrue more power to his exchange. And so we were like, SBF, come on, talk to us about it. Engage with us. And then, yes. And then Eric Vorhees wrote a blog post about the same issues that were like, you know, what's even better than us talking to him is Vorhees talking to him. And so that was the genesis for the conversation. But I thought it would be a bit more equal, like sparring back and forth. But at the time, the piercing moral clarity of Eric Voorhees, just to kind of like, why are we here? Like, what are we doing, Sam, juxtaposed with the kind of like compromising Faustian bargain that was SBF? It was so clear even at the time. And we didn't know that he was short $8 billion, but we knew he was short, like, values.

We knew he was short, like, the reason we're all in crypto. And Sam articulated, like, I am here not for decentralization. I'm a mercenary. I'm just going to make as much money as possible. And then I'm going to give it away. And I think people were okay with that until he stepped into Congress, until he, like, started to play into the regulatory arbitrage game. Anyway, the other interesting thing about that episode, David, is like when we were going through it, like, SBF seemed like shaken during the time.

Like, if you watch, like, he was unable to articulate in the same way that he usually is. He started to fall apart. He started to fall apart. Yeah. And, you know. If, like, I speak English, but I'm guessing if you didn't speak English and you watch that episode, you would understand that, like, yo, that the Eric guy won the debate. Like, you don't have to understand the words that were said to understand that, like, Sam Bankman Free just, like, fell apart. I don't know.

What did you think of it, guys? So at the time, of course, the entire industry didn't know that what SBF was up to behind the scenes. But, yeah, what did you think of that when you were trying to assemble that bed? Yeah. It was like, you know, the more that it went on and the more, you know, because Eric just sort of killed him with logic and clagely. like you said, didn't it? It was so, it was so clinical. And it was sort of like, I don't, I, you know when you, you know when you sort of feel like, oh, you feel on edge, even though you're, even though you're completely, you know, in agreement with, with the party that's winning, you're like, Eric is absolutely right here. Like, wow, it was still kind of, it was still sort of painful to listen to in, in a way. Because it, you know, even though the, even though Wright was winning out, it was still like, this is. I mean, this is kind of, this is embarrassing for, for SBF, you know, this.

And I guess at the same time, you're like, wow, hang on, this is someone who was, you know, the JP Morgan of crypto a few months before that. You know, as you said, the savior of it, or so we thought. And Guy, I'm so glad we did that episode and that it's on the record. I'm glad on behalf of bankless, but I'm also glad on behalf of the crypto industry, because I think after that, crypto has been painted in such a light that it's full of SBFs and scammers and people who don't, you know, like take accountability for their actions, right? And indeed, we had an episode with SBF, like even before that in March of that year,

where it was just like, you know, we've had CZ on the podcast, we've had Brian Armstrongstrat, we've had the Winklevoss Twins, where you've got a big exchange, let's talk about your vision for it, right? And so I am so glad we had an episode pre-FTX collapse where there's someone in crypto who represents like why we're here calling this man to task like on behalf of our industry. I feel like that is evidence we can point to you as an industry and just be like, no, we knew something was going on. He was not our guy. He was not one of us.

He wasn't us. Yeah. I think it's so important. It is like, you know, people outside of crypto think that it's, you know, the whole, the whole industry just sort of exists to scam people or whatever. I think it's really important, like you say, to have a record of that, to have a record of people in the industry going, hang on a sec, no, what's going on here? You know, you have to explain this. And I think, I think Eric around that time was talking about this idea of having industry standards as well. You know, the industry itself saying this is acceptable, this is not.

You know, a lot of it, I think, was going to be around sort of exchanges and proof of reserves and solvency and things like that. and it was such a great conversation to have because it's like yeah yeah how do we expect how can we expect government agencies you know people who people outsiders to come and to come and regulate us if we can't sort of clean out our own house if we can't you know try and try and try and draw up try and police ourselves try and draw up regulations for ourselves and that's yeah I mean that's one of the reasons why I wanted to sort of discuss that that discuss that episode with you because I think it is a really sort of important moments in the history of crypto, really. It's like, you know, not only was this guy sort of the whole facade started to fall apart, but it's also like,

you know, here is evidence of it. Here is evidence of the industry sort of, you know, policing itself to an extent. Well, absolutely. And I don't know if you read a post from Balaji Srinivasan who makes this point. So it wasn't just that bankless episode. It was crypto media who actually like broke the story. It was like that coin desk article from the reporter who revealed the balance sheet. And then it was crypto Twitter that was looking at kind of, oh, what's this money going on in the blockchain? Let's look at Alameda's accounts. Let's look at FTC's accounts and see where's the money, right? It was these citizen journalists. It wasn't traditional media that actually broke this and disclosed. It certainly wasn't Gary

Gensler who had multiple meetings with SBF earlier in the year. It was really, really the crypto industry that revealed this. And so that's another untold story. And I hope, Guy, I hope these stories make the Hollywood like movies and the documentaries. When the social network comes out for crypto, I hope they cover it in the right way. But if they don't, then I think, you know, the real ones know, people who are in crypto at that time, you know, they know what actually happened. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think, well, it's so important to pass that lesson on, isn't it? to go look because that's another thing I wanted to ask you guys just on that on the on the subject of that interview. So do you think do you think crypto has kind of as an industry has kind of learned its lessons from that whole saga? Are we are we older and wiser or do you think there's still a likelihood that we're we're going to make the same mistakes again? I think this last 2022 the year of just terrible price action and blowups and fraudsters being revealed as fraudsters. That was pretty unprecedented in crypto. We had some pretty undesirable behavior in the

downfall of 2018 in that same kind of era, but it was not at the same level of the gaping hole that was three hours capital or the absolute just toxicity that was the Doquan army and Doe Kwan himself followed by like the level of fraud in 2022 was quite unprecedented. And I think a little bit of that was because there had been fraud in the industry before and no one had really gone to jail yet. And so it was perceived as like a crypto is an industry where you could get away with fraud and you could make billions of dollars and walk away without ever like being tried by a justice system. So I think 2022 was useful in the fact that like, no, actually if fraud is fraud, no matter where you are or what industry that you're in. So now that we have this precedent,

I'm optimistic. I'm happy that we have that foundation to stand on. I'm also cautious about entering a bull market in which people's values tend to be forgotten. And it is the time in which leaving your values behind is the most profitable time to do that. And so, you know, crypto is more mature. If we do enter a bull market, people will do less than desirable things. But at least we have precedent of people. You will go to jail if you do anything significant. So check yourself.

I'm mixed. Yeah, the way I would answer that is we will make the same mistakes just in different ways. So I think that if you look at kind of the parallels between ICOs and all of these like futility tokens and all of this money that was raised in 2017, that was the mistake. That was the Cardinal Sin of the 2017 bull market. And then if you look at, you know, 2021, 2022, it was quite obvious the Cardinal Sins were there. Algo, stable coins, you know, margin trades with hedge funds, you know, pumping these ecosystems that really didn't deserve it and ultimately centralizing all of our private keys, right, and trusting the block fives and the Celsius, Alex Mishinsky, God, he doesn't get enough shame.

Alex Mishinsky and, you know, all of those people that stole our funds. we will make mistakes that are fueled by the basic human psychology of boom, bust, of bubble, every cycle, but we won't make them in the exact same ways. I don't think we will trust another Alex Mischinsky who's wearing a shirt that says, Don't trust banks, and is himself the least trustworthy banker in existence. Actually, maybe not in existence because he had quite a list of other untrustworthy crypto bankers at that time. But so, and in fact,

Dave and I just did an episode. I think you listened to it, Guy, because you mentioned this before we recorded with, an investor who's outside of crypto, just a trad-fi kind of investors named Morgan Housel and wrote a book called The Psychology of Money, where he's just like, the reason it will never change is because

human beings don't change. We're running the same, like, homo sapient software that we always have. And so we're going to have these you know, envy, greed-filled, boom, and these buss that we have to live with. We're going to throw the crazy wild party

and everyone's going to get drunk and then someone's going to have to clean up afterwards. That's just how it is. And I guess I've come to terms with kind of accepting that. And my belief is, and I think our hope is, and the optimist in both David and I, is like, well, the benefit at the end of this is going to be worth all of the painful hangovers

and parties that we've had along the years because we are building an open, permissionless money system for the world. If it was all neat and orderly, if it wasn't chaotic, that would be an indication that it was a centralized system. It's almost like it has to happen this way

if it's bottom up and decentralized. Like, that's how you know it's new and it's a movement from the bottom up. Yeah. I was listening to that episode that you did with Morgan yesterday. And can I just say to anyone watching if you listen to anything before the bull market starts, you should listen to Ryan and David speaking with Morgan Housel.

It was such a good episode. Obviously, the psychology of money is a wonderful book. And I haven't had a chance to read his new one. That was what you were discussing, wasn't it? Same as ever, I think it was cool. Same as ever. And he just talks about the timeless principles of life and investing, things that don't change.

Yeah. It reminded me of something my, grandmother used to say. She always used to say like if something if something is easily got, then it isn't worth having. And I think I really kind of felt that with listening to that discussion. It's like, yeah, it has to be hard because as you said, we're starting, we've started from zero. We started from, from, Satoshi started from zero 15 years ago. And I mean, that's no time in the grand scheme of things. And we're still kind of, we're still building. We're still making mistakes, we're still screwing up. Some things are working. Some things are collapsing

into dust. But that's the way it has to be. Otherwise, you don't get progress from that. Yeah, I completely agree. I don't think there's an easy path here. Volatility is the price of entry. That's another thing that Morgan Hasel said. If you want something to 5x, okay, the reverse of that is you have to be comfortable with an asset losing 80% of its value. Like, that's kind of the trade-off that we make. And so, yeah, we don't get to have our cake and eat it to in crypto. We can't, it can't always be infinite up. That's not how life works. Yeah. Well, of course, because, I mean, that was the point, that was a point he made, wasn't it, about, you know, this idea of people years ago sort of trying to figure out how to stop recessions. It's like,

well, you can't. Like, if you never had a recession, that would, that would create the perfect conditions for an absolutely massive recession. Well, I just think, imagine how much worse our industry would actually be if we didn't have 2022. And we still had an Algo stable coin that was now, rather than 30 billion, it was now 300 billion. Okay. And then actual retail, non-crypto retail got involved because some fintech app started offering it. And we had Sam Bankman-Fried who had grown to the largest exchange in the world with FTX. And he was, it was larger than Binets at this point in time. And it wasn't $8 billion in lost private keys.

It was $50 billion. And then we had Alex Mishinsky and BlockFi and all of these things were continuing to grow. Imagine that. Like to me, we dodged a bullet, honestly. It was like 2022, as painful as it was, was the best possible thing that could have happened to crypto. Yeah. We did clean up all of the mess in 2022 in 18 months. I mean, it was one year of time between the fall of FTX and Sam being charged guilty.

I remember one of the very early takes that I heard in the middle of, middle of 2022, I think right after the fall of FTX was from a friend of our pod, Nick Carter. And he said that, it was Nick Carter and Matt Walsh. And they said that we're not going to be able to have a bull market until we clean up the fraudsters and the scammers and we throw them in jail. And I remember listening to that take and like not wanting to believe it. This was like November, December of 2022. Because I was like, man, Doquan's still out there. SBF just, we had a new one, right?

Like, three hours capital, they're still running free. Like we have to, like, according to this take, we have to get every single one in jail before we can have a bull market again. And like, it's obviously not perfectly correlated. Like, we could find some internal like catalyst like DFI summer to have a bull market. But just like the sentiment of just like, we will never be legitimized as an industry until we throw away the scammers and frosters. And then on the dot, the week that SBF gets charged guilty, like tokens pump 50% off

the ground. Like the take was super prescient. And again, correlation, not causation, et cetera. But I thought it was a great take. And also at the same time, we can now feel good about prices going up rather than bad. Like I wouldn't feel the same if SBF was walking free and like Doquan wasn't in jail and Three O's Capital was still being Three O's Capital after all of the harm and fraud that they caused. And then we just had another bull market with them. That would not make me feel good.

Well, I'm actually curious from you guys. Are you surprised that this is happening so soon? I mean, there's an element of me as like, this is my third cycle here. And I'm just like, wow, we've recovered from that. Yeah. Yeah. I do feel like that. Like you said, at some level, I'm like, it was only a year ago. It was only a year ago when we had that. a conversation with SBF. And so much has happened. And now you're saying we've healed and we're back to bull market like too soon. It seems fast, but also it's the same exact time as last cycle.

And I think time just goes faster now because we're older. We've done, we've seen this before. Okay. I know first cyclers are like, what are you guys talking about? We went through so much pain. That was the worst. Yeah. But I don't know.

I'm just like, wow, that was quick. Yeah. Well, you guys were talking about this the other day. weren't you? Because you're like, there's always that thing in the back of your mind. It's like, okay, so it goes in cycles. But is it really going to, are we really going to have another cycle? Is this actually going to happen again? It can't be that easy. If everyone thinks it's going to go in cycle, it's not going to go into the cycle, right? A four-year cycle. Yeah. And then it's like, going back to the Morgan-Hausel thing, right? If it's, if it's easy, it's not worth doing.

It's like, yeah, the four-year cycles, if they really play out that way, that's super easy. but come on you had to live through 2022 and 2023 wasn't great either like those weren't that was hard that was a hard thing it was hard that was hard you guys earned it hey if you're still listening to Coin Bureau if you're still listening to

bank lists it's likely you were you live through all of that and I feel like you have you've got veteran status now all right you were going to be the OG for future generations of crypto I mean we are still like you know one fifth of the US owns crypto we are still

the early side. I mean, barely anyone's using defy and actually, you know, has possession of their own private keys and is actually bankless. We're still very early. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And it's, yeah, it's like that OG status is kind of hard earned, isn't it? Like, you really have to, you really have to walk through the fire to get that. And I mean, I guess you look back to, you know, some of the, some of the trio, like, you know, like Eric Vohy's, who was there sort of almost at the beginning and went through Mount Gox and went through, you know, all that sort of stuff. It's like these guys have, these guys have earned a right to have an opinion for, by, you know, through years of just kind of putting up with, I guess, what might be termed, you know, even worse

back in the day, like Mount Gox sort of was almost terminal, wasn't it? I remember getting into crypto about that time. I heard about crypto sort of late 2013 and then I think it was sort of early 2014, when Mount Gok started to crumble, I was like, whoa, this, hang on a sec. And then it survived. And I was like, okay, wow, this is more resilient than I thought.

That was a moment for me. But like, to have been someone in it, you know, invested in it or like I speak to a lot of people who had money on Mount Cox. And they were just like, yeah, I remember trying to do that. I remember trying to get it off. It was, I remember just like, like trying to email Mark Carpellis directly.

And it was like, it was, it was pretty wild. It's like, you guys have earned it. Yeah. We've come such a lot. I mean, that was a magic, the gathering, like, card changing, trading exchange that converted to a crypto exchange. You know, it's like, we have come so far since then. We have real companies here.

You know, like, it's 10 years. I mean, it's not a long time. No. We have, yeah, we have. real companies we have we we have we will have ETFs before too long it's it's it's crazy to think um touching on touching on the ETFs i like obviously you guys are not not in tight not solely focused on ethereum but you know Ethereum is is kind of a large part of bankless's focus um so can i just get your get your take on on where Ethereum is at the moment obviously it's been kind of in

Bitcoin Shadow a lot recently. Network activity has been down. You know, ETH went inflationary for a bit again. There's kind of a lot of fud flying around about Ethereum, which I think is sort of always the case. I don't think that's necessarily anything new. And then, of course, suddenly we're now talking about Ethereum ETFs as well. So yeah, I just wanted to get your guys take on it. Has Ethereum store got kind of quite a lot of work to do before it can really join the party or are you sort of more optimistic? Are you ready to cope, David? You could.

Yeah, like you said, like Ethereum always kind of occupies this uncanny space in which it never really seems to be popular. I think from January of 2021 to like May of 2021, Ethereum was like in vogue for the moment of time in which I thought like, okay, finally, like it's getting the recognition. deserved. Like, defy is now being recognized. NFTs are now being recognized finally. And then people just went down the market cap stack into, like, more shinier objects, right? And this is where, like, the whole Sol Luna Avax, like, trade came about. And it's like, oh, let's find the even shinier object than Ethereum. And like, Ethereum's roadmap and what it wants to do is so incredibly ambitious

and multifaceted, that it, like, not, most people don't have the whole entire scope of it able to, like, be realized inside of their brains. Like, it takes a lot and a lot of knowledge and a lot of appreciation for the many, many, many moving parts of Ethereum to really understand the grand vision of the whole entire thing. And so, and then also at the same time, Ethereum's market cap is big. It's $300 billion right now, $250 billion. And so it's not a penny stock anymore.

And so when so much of crypto is kind of like the craps table and rolling of the dice and like trying to get the 10x, the 100x quickly, like Ethereum doesn't really occupy that space. And so it's always there's that one meme of the like the guy up against the wall and there's like 50 swords pointed at him. That always kind of felt like Ethereum. Do you know what movies that from? That's from David? It's like a Pixar movie?

Yeah, tangled. Tangled? Engled, yeah. Sure. Angled. All right. Fun fact. Yeah.

And so like Ethereum occupies the space where, yeah, it's getting the ether ETF because of its size. But then also just the ambitiousness of the roadmap is too long to be realized and catch that dopamine hit of people in the short-term investing cycle that is a bull market to be interested in that. So it's just always occupying this like uncanny valley of just like it's too big to be a fun speculative bet. And it's moving too slowly in its roadmap to satisfy a lot of the now, now, now investors.

So I guess that's good cope, David. Yeah, thanks. Excellent. Here's my cope on it. So first of all, I think things in Ethereum are going just fine. Like, I think it is executing incredibly well from a fundamentals perspective. And you just look at the growth of layer two's. And also, it's doing pretty well from an institutional narrative perspective.

There will probably be two ETFs that we get this bull cycle season. One of them, sorry, XRP lovers, it's not going to be XRP. Unfortunately, that was fake news. But it's going to be Bitcoin and Ether. And those are the two ones that I think will get institutional capital attention. But what I think is going on is this reminds me a lot of 2020. And if you remember 2020, so this was like when we were just starting to recover post-COVID, it was about this time back in 2020.

And the things that were pumping were smaller cap defy tokens and Bitcoin, not Ethereum. And so there was very much this narrative of you, Ethereum is just a gas token. It's just for payment only. What does it really do? You want to own a store of value, which is Bitcoin. You want to own your money. And then you want all of these defy tokens, which gives you exposure to the defy economy, the neo-banking system.

And that's all you need. And as David was saying, like, Ethereum in that world, in that narrative world just gets left behind. It's, you know, the stepchild that no one loves, right? It's just like not even part of the appetite in that kind of world. I think something similar is playing out right now, but it's not defy tokens. it is Bitcoin and all of these very fast alternative layer ones. And so what's interesting to me is actually what happened in the aftermath of 2020

because any time price runs up like so high, remember what we're actually doing. Of course, there's the narrative reason it pumps. But if you still believe in fundamentals and I might be one of the last guys in crypto, still that believes in long-term fundamentals. But if you think that the world of fundamentals is, a real world and that narratives are shorter term, but fundamentals are the things that last. What happened with defy tokens is they pulled forward a whole bunch of future expectations. And I'll admit, I got caught up in it too. The thesis for defy tokens in 2020 was that these

governance tokens would pivot into, like governance would vote in profit share, essentially, so that you'd have on-chain revenue and on-chain profit associated with these defy tokens. And so what happened? massive run-up. The whole market realized that this would be huge. And so defy tokens absolutely went on a tear. And all of these future expectations, hopes were pulled into the present. What has happened since then? It's been completely flat. Three-year bear market in defy tokens. And let's talk about the reality. Very few defy tokens are more than governance tokens today. Very few of them actually pay back token holders with on-chain profits. Very few of them have actual solid fundamentals.

So a lot of the expectations that was pulled forward at that time turned out to not be true. And I worry a little bit about this alternative layer one run up, right? Because I don't know that a block space is as valuable as people think it is. Or at least what's happening is a lot of future expectations are being pulled to the present. And I don't know that these tokens and assets will be able to sustain that over like the one to three period of time. your period of time. So I don't know. Maybe none of that matters. And by the way, if you're a narrative investor or if you're a trader, it honestly doesn't matter. It does not matter. It totally doesn't matter.

You should go chase these things and do well. Like, God bless. Like that's a character class that you're choosing. So like just kill it. Crush it. I hope you crush it. But if you're a fundamentals investor, then you're looking around and you're kind of scratching your head and you're wondering, well, like, I'm not seeing on-chain activity yet that matches this. I'm not seeing like total value locked increase. I'm seeing a lot of hopes and expectations being pulled forward. And maybe those expectations come true. But if they don't, we're looking at a pretty flat asset class after the bull run.

So that's my hope. And I do think I do think Ether will have its time. Like just like in, you know, it happened actually around this time in 20, In December 2020, Ether had an absolute massive run-up, and people woke up to it, and it did pretty well. I think that will also happen this bull cycle. Yeah. I think you're right. And I guess this idea of narratives is kind of so much easier to buy into, isn't it?

It's like the alternative layer one narrative. It's like, oh, it's a layer one, but it's faster than Ethereum. That's easy to understand. Yes. Whereas kind of to go back to what you were saying, David, you know, Ethereum is just so sprawling, isn't it? There's so much happening on it. You know, there's a whole layer two ecosystem on it.

As you said, there's however many EIPs being worked on, there's things like blob space and dank sharding going on. It's kind of difficult to get your head around. You're just like, eh, a faster, you know, a faster layer one is a lot easier to understand. You know, that's, why not just go for that? Yeah, but Ethereum has its. roll-up-centric roadmap, right? And so this Ethereum growth strategy is not to hold growth

internally into its layer one. It's supposed to allow room for its layer two's to like take the baton and run with it the rest of the way. So when it comes time to be narrative season and no one cares about fundamentals anymore, now it's like the Ethereum layer one versus Solana, which has the stronger narrative. And Ethereum has sharded its narrative into, the Ethereum layer one, optimism, polygon, arbitram, ZK Sync, you know, pick your next layer two, pick your next layer two, as tech, like pick your next layer two. And so like it's Ethereum and one of the reasons why I find so much resonance with Ethereum is it's a pluralist system. It's trying to make room for as many diversity of chains spawn out of its core base so that

every single chain can have its own flavor, its own autonomy, its own ecosystem, its own throughput. And when it comes time to be narrative season, Ethereum has actually giving, giving its narrative power away to its layer twos. And so they all have a smaller share of this grander Ethereum vision, but it's never contained inside of one container. And so when you have like the alt layer one versus Ethereum narrative season, well, Ethereum gave up some of that power to its late. Do you know what's funny though? As I'm listening to your talk, David, is like, you know, just to play devil's advocate. I'm spinning a narrative right now on that, right? Yeah, yeah. One man's narrative season is another man's like a fundamental season. Look, the fundamentals are finally showing up.

So I can I can hear somebody in the listening to this in the Salana community listening to these old coping, Eith Maxis drone on of which, by the way, we are not Eve Maxis. And I'm also not coping. I don't feel like no coping. No, fantastic. Everybody like, I hope you make insane profits during this cycle. But somebody's listening to that and they're like, David, you're absolutely wrong. This is actually the fundamentals catching up. Okay? Sure. So this is like, finally, the market has woken up to high TPS integrated blockchain, block space. And like now it's no longer a narrative.

It's fundamentals that are actually catching up. So that's why it's very hard to parse, right? And you only know who's right in the long run in the very long run. Well, we do know as the bull market continues, real fundamentals do get thrown. out the door. Everyone was like, oh, like, Tara Luna has solved alchemy at the top of last market. The new central bank. Yeah.

Yeah. By Jerome Powell. We don't need you anymore. Yeah. But it is, I mean, yeah, I suppose from the perspective of someone new to crypto, you know, there's just, it's so much easier to buy into a relatively simple narrative, isn't it? It's going to probably way more profitable guy. Yeah.

Probably you'll be on the upside. On the upside, on the downside, well, when it's no longer a narrative season and you've been buying narratives all year, all of a sudden you're on the other end of the trade. Yeah. But then on the downside, you just trade to staples, David. Again, this is why you got to choose your character. There's one thing we say on bankless is know who you are. Choose your character class. Like you're entering an RPG, you know, you're playing Diablo.

Are you a sorcerer? Are you a necromancer? Are you a barbarian? Like, what's your skill tree? What's your attribute? Like, what are you going to do? are you a trader? Are you a long-term investor buy and hold? I'm a bard.

I'm a bard. It's not a mix of things. No, no. It's just a guy with a guitar who like sings stuff and it like cheers on everyone else. You guys got this. The bard may not accomplish much, but at least the bard is happy, Dan. The bard is recording it all for posterity. Right. There you are.

Uh-huh. Yeah. The songs that will be sung in the future about all the degenerate characters and their escrow. Yeah, it is funny to talk to people. I spoke to my brother-in-law the other day who's one of the biggest D-Gens that I know. And he was just like describing, you know, how he's allocated. And he's like, it's a pretty fine balance. But so long as everything stays reasonably okay, I should be fine.

It's like just made me stress just thinking about it. But like, yeah, everyone has their, everyone has their sort of way of doing it. It's one of the beautiful things about this industry, isn't it? You can, like you guys say, adopt your character, you go for it. And, yeah, the rewards are amazing. The downside is pretty painful, but it's a heck of a ride. I think your character class can change cycle to cycle. Like, probably both David and myself were a bit more D-Gen in our,

younger days and David is even more D-Gen than me, right? And so... But on the D-Gen scale, I'm not D-Gen. But relation to Ryan, yes. Yeah. So as you kind of like, your life circumstances change, you've been through more cycles, you just, you tend to get a bit more, you know, grandpa wisdom, which I guess is what I at least offer the podcast. I wanted to ask you as well, like, I listened to your bankless takes episode the other week, which I loved, because it sounded like you guys were sort of really,

uh, really kind of letting off steam. Um, I think you'd had some sort of interactions with the Solana community and, you know, it'd all been, it had been a kind of fascinating week. Um, but I wanted to ask you like, do you find, do you find all that kind of, uh, I think we'd call it shithousery in, in, in the UK, but all that kind of mud slinging that goes on, all the chaos of crypto Twitter? Do you, do you secretly love all of that? Or do you, Do you think it's more something that we could probably do without and we'd all be a bit, we'd all be a bit happier and a bit richer? I mean, it's hard for me to know how much of this is crypto-specific versus more a symptom of

social media and kind of the algorithms and like the different rewards that, and like dopamine mean rewards and the different kind of incentives that that rest behind different influencers. And because I don't I don't know guy that any other area is that much different. Like if you go look at like politics social media or politics Twitter, I mean, shithousery, that's a good term for that too. Go look at like even AI, which is kind of like, you know, very technical. It's much of that. So the way I've been thinking about social media recently is Sam Harris is another podcast

who kind of describes it as a fun house distortion of reality. So you see all of the other humans interacting and not as they really are in person. It's not their true character. It's just this worked view of who they are. And they see you the same way. And so I'm convinced that a lot of the people who get in these shit fest Twitter battles, actually, if they had a conversation with one another, and you remove them from the gladiatorial arena of social media,

and they didn't have an audience, they weren't trying to impress each other, and you just brought them together for a conversation. They would speak to each other like real humans, like real adults, with empathy, with kind of a mutual sense of understanding, the way we're talking to each other right now, Guy, and you'd remove all of that. So part of me wonders how much of it is the medium, There's another element that is like crypto has a scoreboard. There's a top 100 market cap. Fortunes are made and lost. There is actual economic value in propaganda that can be extracted fairly immediately. There are a lot of scams. A lot of people got totally wrecked in 2021 and 22 and they don't trust anybody and are pushing out those feelings of disqualings of disqual.

trust online. So part of it's a symptom that is relevant to crypto. But I don't know, I like, I find it kind of exhausting sometimes. And the best thing I can do during those times is like, just turn it off. Like I, you know, you know it's hard when you're in kind of like media, right? Because then you lose your source of information. But change the way you're interacting. You know, ignore things. Mute if you have to. Set your profile on private for, period of time, whatever you need to do to kind of play the marathon. And it's similar to like playing the marathon with your investing, right? It's just rather than a financial volatility with, social media engagement, you have to get used to kind of like the emotional volatility of like

one week, everyone hates you. And then you're the next week, you're like a god. You know, that's just how it goes. At least that's how I've experienced it. Yeah. Yeah. It shows how it shows how badly I'm in the bubble, doesn't it? That I, you know, it's just, oh, crypto Twitter is sort of my my experience of social media. But yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, there's all these other, all these other,

I guess everywhere has its own, you know, sort of social media gathering. It's probably, you know, good chances, even more toxic than some of the stuff you get with, you get with crypto. But it is, it is lovely when you meet people in the flesh, isn't it? When you go to a, when you go to a conference and people come up and are just, you know,

All they want to do is just talk about crypto. And I remember the first couple of times I went to actual sort of live crypto events. I was like, am I going to get people come up and just scream at me? Be like, you get all over this project and that video. And no one did. You know, everyone who came up and said hello was like, I really, I really enjoy watching your videos. Thanks. You know, it's great.

And then just talk about crypto. It was an amazing feeling. But I was so nervous before I went there. because I was like, what's... Yeah, this is... That's been my experience, and the few times I do get out, but this is why my co-host, David,

is just basically addicted to, in real life, crypto meetups and conferences. I don't know, you must go to like a dozen or so a year. So, because it's exactly, it's refreshing to the soul very much.

People are actually reasonable, like nice, pleasant to talk to and passionate. And very similar, I think. That's the thing about crypto. is what I would say is for all of our differences, there is a common core set of values that we all believe. So you might believe in a high transaction throughput, integrated blockchain versus the modular vision, right? Or you might believe in like Bitcoin over Ethereum as your store

of value or whatever, or vice versa, right? But the thing that we all believe is that it is a fundamental economic freedom and good for the world to hold your own private keys, right? For an individual to essentially be able to act without a bank account and to have possession of that, we all believe in kind of a censorship-resistant global platform for the world. We all believe in what we're trying to achieve here, which is bank the unbanked and unbanked the banked. So we don't have to go through centralized intermediaries. And at the end of the day, I think we don't probably as crypto unify on those core values enough, but they are there.

And you see them in particular when we're under attack, I think. That kind of comes out. It's one thing that in the U.S., the IRS is coming out with some very anti-Defi, anti-crypto legislation. We just got 120,000 comments from the crypto community, responding to the IRS comment, right? I mean, the crypto community does respond and is alive and well when it's under attack and unifies in those ways. And I think that gives me hope. Yeah. Yeah. Beautifully put, Ryan, beautifully put. Yeah, it's, it's, we're all, we're all going, the destination is the same. We're just all kind of going there via different paths, sometimes, sometimes radically different paths.

but we yeah there's kind of more that unites us than divides us I think at the end of the day I just there was one more thing I wanted to ask you Ryan um because you've spoken to like every time every time I'm you know researching something and I want to uh you know I want to get I'm researching a particular person in crypto um I was trying to listen to interviews of them and every time it's you guys have spoken to them already it's like well I'll just go to the bankless episode. I mean, like, just in the past sort of few months, you've spoken to, you've spoken to like Arthur Hayes, Lynn Alden, Sergey Nazarov, Vitalik, CZ, you know, kind of everyone who's everyone in crypto. I wanted to ask you, is, is there anyone in particular on your kind of wish list

for future interviews? And, and who was the most sort of, who was the most kind of surprising, who surprised you the most, or who was kind of like the most, um, the most unpredictable off stage perhaps. Well, I would say on the wish list, we've for a very long time had actually Elon Musk on the wish list as somebody who would be just a fascinating discussion. He talks about crypto so much, but it's not clear how deep he is in it. And then there's also the AI angle, that kind of thing. So that would be probably close to the top of our list. As far as big, like biggest guess that was most surprising. Mark Cuban, you know, kind of a celebrity wealthy individual in the U.S. He came on the podcast in the very early days for Bankless. And it was an absolute shock to David

and myself that, number one, he was in crypto and like using DFI protocols. Like he could talk about Avey, he could talk about compound, he could talk about solidity. And that just shocked us. Yeah. And the fact that he was willing to come on. a crypto podcast at that time. So that was incredibly surprising. I don't know. Guy asked David, who is the most surprising guest off camera that we've had?

Maybe while you think about that, I'll just say the person that is exactly the same way, off camera, on camera, no matter what is Vitalik Buterin. Yeah. Like I, you know, David and I have talked about... You know, you've never met Vitalik off camera. Not in person, but off camera.

And I meet everyone through you, David. Didn't you know? Everyone you've met, I've also met. So, yeah, I just, you know, it would be top, top three betrayals for me. If it turned out that Vitalik was not who he actually purports to be and seems to be. But I think that he actually is. Like, I think that he's actually a fantastic person. And he's the same, both off camera and on camera.

I don't know, David, would you add any surprises? weirdest guest experiences, anything like this? I think we do a pretty good job of kind of vetting guests so that the weird we don't invite the weird ones on. There was one episode that we did in the height of the bull market last year where we were just getting flamed by all these other communities, but like why won't you, you guys are just dumb ethmaxis, you guys only talk about Ethereum,

why aren't you talking about other ecosystems, talk about Solana, talk about Terraluna, talk about avalanche. And so we were like, you know, F it. We'll just do all of them at once. And so we invited Emin, Doquan, and Anatoly on a show just for one single podcast, put them all together. That show was also a mess. At the end of that show, I very much realized that, like, Doquan's kind of an asshat.

I would never really be friends with Emin. But Anatoly, I'll totally get a beer with. And then, like, interestingly enough, it's like Solana that is the ecosystem that, you know, figures out how to survive through the bear market and attract a real community. And I don't think that there's a coincidence there. Well, there you go. That's the alpha. So invest in the founders you get a beer with.

You're a crypto founders you get a beer with. That's what we're in the show with. It's how it doesn't drink beer, but he'll drink green tea. Wine and green tea. He only did that once. That's not a thing that he does. Invest in something where you can have a carrot juice with the first. founder. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Much more wholesome. I mean, I'm reassured to hear Vitalik's like that because I think if, you know, if that was an act, that would be, I mean, it would be amazing. It would be an amazing piece of theater. He would be the biggest, kind of worrying as well. Yeah, he would be the biggest just like fraudster of all time of that. He was able to keep up that act. That would just be something unreal, but no. Yeah. Yeah. We don't, we don't need that. As to Elon Musk, like, I think I would I would love to hear you guys interview him because, yeah, I think Ryan, as you say,

he does talk about crypto a lot, but it's like, it seems to be like, I mean, he was kind of on it on Joe Rogan a couple of weeks back, wasn't it? And he sort of dips his toe in and he starts talking about it. And then the conversation goes somewhere else. You're like, no, come back, talk more about crypto.

Now he's talking about Twitter becoming basically a replacement for banks. And you can do all of your banking on Twitter. And so we go and we're just like, but that means crypto, right? Like, how else are you going to do this? Because you're going to have to use the legacy banking system unless you use crypto. Right. And so, you know, maybe that will draw him in.

We'll have to see. He's amenable to crypto. Elon's a crypto guy. He's a crypto guy. He needs to be better. When you left, David, I said he was like our number one guest like on our wish list for the longest time anyway. Yeah.

Elon for the views would be the number one guest. Yval Noah Harari for the content. Oh, yeah. The other big one. Oh, and also, Ray Dalio. Well, I think, I mean, I'm looking forward to hearing all three of them.

I think, I think it would be, you know, it'd be great to hear those guys on the show before too long. So if any of, if any of those guys are watching, you guys have to get on bankless ASAP because we use a conversation. Let's agree with that. I agree with that.

reality good um well guys i've taken up a lot of your time already i'm sure you i'm sure you've got a lot more things to do but um thank you so much this was this was great i've got i've got like a list of about a dozen other questions um to ask you but it'll have to wait until another time but um this has been fantastic you guys do amazing work i love listening to you um anyone watching if you're not subscribe to bankless you're missing out um we will leave links uh below in the description where you can follow Ryan and David. And yeah, guys, thank you so much. I hope this was fun. And I hope we can catch up again soon. It was an absolute blast. David, can we say that guy is our favorite crypto YouTuber? Are we able to say that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean,

is mine. 100%. There you go. There you go, guy. Thank you for everything you do. We certainly appreciate it. But guys, yes, thank you so much. That was, that was amazing. Really enjoyed it. And yeah, just keep doing what you're doing. We'll do. Take care. Thanks. Awesome. Bye guys.