Bankless - Cults, Culture, & Crypto with Meltem Demirors | Layer Zero

Starting point is 00:00:06 Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code but is composed by people and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code because Ethereum is people all the way down and it always has been. Today I'm talking with Meltem Demir's, the vibes sorceress, the queen of crypto, has been in the crypto space for over eight years now and has. there's so many lessons to share as to what goes on in part of every single corner of the crypto industry. Meltem is a relentless grinder. She's a super hard worker. And she's also, as I alluded to, the queen of vibes, I'd like to say.

Starting point is 00:00:50 She's a big curator of experiences and vibes in the real world, which is where the crypto world is trending towards, in my opinion. I actually didn't know that we were going to get into the subject, but we end up talking a lot about the concept of cults, of communities, of organizing. organizations with shared values and how we are going from a world of few of these things, starting with empires back, you know, a thousand years ago, going into religion, going into nation-states, going into corporations, using the cult model to understand what a corporation is, to where we are now with where there's one community per token, and we have DAWs and NFT projects, and each one of these things represents, in a way, some sort of cult. Well, there's a lot of people that think the word cult is negative.

Starting point is 00:01:36 don't do that. We actually kind of consider it as for what it is, which is, you know, alignment of people around shared values, shared sets of interests. And now that there's so many tokens and so many DAOs and so many NFT projects, there's many, many different reasons to all find one's resonance with some sort of organization. We also talk about the moving from the, you know, computer-only era of crypto to where crypto is really starting to take over in terms of social culture. We have our own language in crypto and now that's starting to bleed out into the rest of the world. And so what does that mean for a crypto culture moving forward? So I really hope you enjoy this conversation with Meltem DeMir. She's insanely intelligent. She's one of my favorite people in this

Starting point is 00:02:18 industry. And she has a lot of very unique insights about how the world works and how it relates to crypto. So I think you will learn a ton in this podcast. Let's go ahead and get right into it right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Arbitrum is an Ethereum layer two scaling solution that's going to completely change how we use defy and NFTs. Over 300 projects have already deployed to Arbitrum and the defy and NFT ecosystems are growing rapidly. Some of the coolest and newest NFT collections have chosen Arbitrum as their home, all the while Defyretero protocols continue to see increased usage and liquidity. Using Arbitrum has never been easier, especially with the ability to deposit directly into Arbitrum through all the exchanges, including Binance, FTX, Hwbe, and Crypto.com.

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Starting point is 00:05:09 And you are in London. How long have you been in London before? So I'm here for three weeks. So I was in London, then Paris, because coin shares acquired a company in Paris. So we now have a Paris office, which is really fun. Got to hang out with our French team, which is very focused on D-5. we're going to be rolling out some really cool stuff in the next few months and now back in London. So good times. I think your trajectory throughout crypto, I think is interesting. And it's I think the thing that I kind of want to focus on over time.

Starting point is 00:05:38 But I want to start at the very, very beginning. Can you just give us the basic piece of how you got into it? What do you mean the trajectory is interesting? You have to like, you have to expand on that a bit. Like unpacked up for me. Sure. Yeah. I want to know what I'm getting into.

Starting point is 00:05:50 I think how I view your trajectory in crypto is grinding super, super hard for two, three years. and of which you still are, but then the bull market came and now you are viking. That's kind of the mental model I have for Meltem. It's just, I remember when you came on bankless and you had the line, I've brought the receipts. And this is in regards to like the money printing, the inevitable debt issues that the United States is going to go through. And then also just being like working your ass off at coin shares for years and years. And then the bull market came. And then all of a sudden, the social life of crypto has taken off.

Starting point is 00:06:23 Yeah. In my brain giving you the nickname, uh, vibes queen. Queen of vibes. I love my vibes. I love my vibes. You know, crypto needs a high priestess of sorts. So, you know, if we're going to create any energy, I want it to be good energy. But we can definitely delve into that.

Starting point is 00:06:39 I will also say, by the way, David, the way this whole thing came about. So I came on bankless, I think over a year ago at this point. We had a fun conversation. I think we were in Whistler. We were a few glasses of wine deep. And you were like, hey, vibe source. sir can I recruit you for my new podcast. So this whole situation materialized during a high vibes moment. Absolutely, absolutely. And it takes a special person with a lot of vibes that have

Starting point is 00:07:10 interesting perspectives on crypto. You know, crypto is only so many years old. And so much of that history is really baked into like the last five or six years. And I think you've had a pretty privileged like bird's eye view of the industry just as somebody who is already, financially minded, investment minded prior to starting in crypto, which is, I think, for a lot of people, it's their first escapade into the concept of money, economies, finance. But I think you were already pretty well savvy in that before getting into crypto. And so gaining that perspective from your first entrance into the industry, watching it evolve as an industry, having that prior knowledge, I think is really interesting. And then also, like I alluded to, watching the social

Starting point is 00:07:54 world of the industry blossom, especially in New York, I think is definitely interesting as well. So I want to get into all of these things. Yeah, well, let's rewind maybe. I think at this point, I've been in the industry for close to eight years, which is a crazy number, if you think about it. And when I started, it was really Bitcoin. So personally, I got into Bitcoin in the end of 2012. So at this point, it's been almost 10 years that I've personally been really into Bitcoin. I'm still really into Bitcoin, which perhaps, you know, Bitcoin's been interesting. To some people, I'm a Bitcoin maximalist to others. I'm not a pure enough Bitcoiner.

Starting point is 00:08:36 So it's interesting. Like there's this purity test. We now have to pass, apparently. Some days I pass. I don't. I've given up trying to figure out where I am, what camp I'm in. But I started my formal career in crypto in 2015 at Digital Currency Group. And I think what's so funny to me is when I talk to people now who are new to the crypto

Starting point is 00:08:59 ecosystem who maybe came in in 2017, 2018, and sort of the first, like, big wave of growth with ICOs and tokens or people who came in in this wave with NFTs, when I talked to them about 2015, 2016, 2016, 2017, Bitcoin, the block size wars. They've no idea what I'm talking about. They have no idea of who I'm talking about. Even going back and talking about the Dow hack and what happened there, like most people in crypto today when I say slocit, right, like they can tell me who that is. We talk about like the parody hack, like a parody bug, right? They don't know what that is. So I think it's just really funny in a way I feel like cryptogramma, because there's all this really rich, really relevant historical context that I think so many people newer to the industry just

Starting point is 00:09:47 don't really have. And I think having that context is so important in understanding like why we're here, how we got here. Because really the ideas that we see implemented today, the ideas we've been talking about since 2013, 2015, right? Like these ideas are not necessarily new and in and of themselves. What's really exciting for me is that we're finally at a point, right? It's especially as an investor who's invested in these ideas and watch them fail, perhaps, or not really achieve their end goal. It's really cool now to see those ideas we've been talking about for so long actually being implemented and being feasible to implement because all of the tooling and infrastructure, the sort of requisite building blocks around these ideas now exist and also

Starting point is 00:10:34 the market for these ideas exists. So, yeah, it's been a long time. It's also, it's also, I feel sometimes I feel tired. I'm not going to lie. The last six months have been challenging for me personally. You know, there's so much happening in the space. A lot of it's really exciting. But you also see the same patterns repeating, particularly with like influencers and influencer culture continuing to be a part of crypto. And it brings out sort of this really gross side of the industry. We see a lot of this with NFTs, right? We can delve into that. I'm not judging it. But it's just, it's a little bit exhausting. And sometimes I look in the mirror and I'm like, is this really what I'm here to do with

Starting point is 00:11:15 my time and my energy? I'm not really always sure. Like I like to believe that what we're doing is making the world a better place. But when 40, 50% of all crypto in circulation is held by centralized custodians that are effectively banks that are subject to all of the same controls that traditional financial institutions are, I just feel like we've missed the place. plot maybe a little bit. So that's where I'm at personally. That's why I'm trying to lean into the vibe. I'm like sort of feeling my way through because I do think some of the aspirations we had,

Starting point is 00:11:51 particularly at least someone who identifies as a libertarian and a bit of like a cypher punk. I'm not really sure we're living up to those ideals. In some ways, we are in other ways we're not. Sure. And I definitely want to go into that. But first, there's many phases of crypto that you've been through, right? There's like the proof of work fair launch phase, the ICO phase. One thing I think might be frustrating is that like how recyclable are those experiences and skills that you developed while navigating like the Bitcoin proof of work fare launch phase, right? Or like being good at like investing in ICOs. How useful is that those experiences now that crypto is completely different and has nothing to do with ICOs? And like crypto goes through these

Starting point is 00:12:34 waves of bowl markets and bear markets and each one has its own flavor and has its own characterization. And you talked about like you can see the patterns, right? Like the influencers always arrive every single bull market. But when you say, tell me, you've been in this industry for eight years. I look at this industry and I really only see the last like two to three years as being real. Like only in the last two to three years to the use cases actually like have stickiness when it comes to actual utility for mainstream. Other than like the true nature of Bitcoin to 21 million units, that, you know, that'll be forever, of course. I would actually fundamentally disagree with that.

Starting point is 00:13:07 Look, I think the premise for me has always been, like, money is free, money is speech, right? Like, money is a core pillar of democracy. Money is a core pillar of what makes a free society possible, right? And so I think the premise of Bitcoin has remained unchanged. The value proposition of Bitcoin has remained unchanged. You know, I see right now there's a lot of like pearl. clutching around proof of work versus proof of stake. First of all, they're not substitutes. They're not even remotely close to substitutes. They accomplish two very different things,

Starting point is 00:13:40 both of which are valuable and should exist. But conflating one to be equivalent to the other is like insanity. I think the whole ESG movement is complete insanity. Like, do I agree that we need to be concerned about sustainability? Absolutely. It's something I'm very concerned about and invest in. But do I think the way in which we're doing it makes sense? Like, no, absolutely not. And so I just think there are a lot of these sort of narrative violations in crypto that come up every single cycle. And there are certain things that it just have remained consistently true. Like crypto, by and large, the majority of volume is still coming from market makers, large institutions. It's just that instead of the institutions being tradfied, like we thought they would be, crypto institutions have become so large and command so much capital that they're actually the largest players in this market. And, And I think we'll be the largest players, actually, in all markets going forward, which is kind of a scary thought. But look, I think the last eight years have been really informative. And what I've learned does translate from cycle to cycle.

Starting point is 00:14:43 And the same characters pop up time and time again. They may have different names. They may have different faces. But every cycle, we have, you know, the same sort of characters, the same personalities, the same waves. Which, again, is not necessarily a bad thing. But I think it's interesting to observe because there's, is a sort of cyclical trend that occurs every two to three years in crypto. And then on top of that, there's this broader secular trend. So cyclical being short term, secular being, you know, longer term.

Starting point is 00:15:12 If you look at the 10-year trend line on Bitcoin, it's up into the right. If we zoom out and look 10 years ahead for Ethereum and Web 3 and other protocols and ecosystems, I think you'll see the same secular trend. I think the question is how do you navigate those cycles, both as an investor, but also as a person, right, who has emotions and an ego. And so a lot of what I've been doing with the viking, as you call it, is just trying to manage my mental state through this extreme volatility. Because after eight years, it does become mentally taxing. And I do see so many people in the crypto space attach their identity and their sense of self to a company or an investment they've made that that's done really well, like a protocol they got involved in, an ecosystem they got

Starting point is 00:16:00 involved in early on that has changed their life. And I think that's really dangerous. Anytime you start to attach your identity to things outside of yourself, I think that's setting yourself up for disappointment inevitably. You know, it's always interesting to see in these cycles. I think right now people are going through like these waves of emotion, but so much around what we're doing in crypto is around sort of memetic transmission, right? We're turning memes into money. but then we're also creating these cults of belonging, these cults of personality, these cults of belief. And I think that's just a challenging space to operate in because just as quickly as those cults can create positive momentum and like lift people up and propel an ecosystem forward. They can turn negative equally quickly.

Starting point is 00:16:51 And we've seen that time and time again. So I do worry about people in the space about their mental health. Again, we see this every cycle. And so I do spend a lot of time managing my own mental state, keeping my own ego in check and like remembering, you know, 90% of our success is being in the right place, the right time. And then luck is really, you know, when preparation meets right place, right time. So we have to keep doing the work. I think the challenges, I think in these cycles, a lot of people stop doing the work. And when I say doing the work, I mean, what we do has to have intellectual rigor.

Starting point is 00:17:27 in an analytical sort of empirical evidence-driven basis, right? At the end of the day, like, the world is filled with observable phenomena, and it's our role to observe those phenomena, right, and to attempt to understand relationships between different factors and use that to inform our thinking or investing or our approach to what we do. It influences our ability to be successful, whatever our aim is, whether that's developing and shipping a successful L1 or running an investment fund or creating a successful NFT ecosystem. Like, there is an assertive. amount of work that has to be done. And where I start to get concerned is when I have conversations with people and they're not doing the work. There isn't actually any intellectual grounding or

Starting point is 00:18:07 understanding. And that doesn't mean it has to be a formal education. It doesn't mean you need like pieces of paper degrees as we call them. That's not what I mean. But there has to be sort of an analytical intellectually driven approach to what you're doing. And what I worry about is I talk to a lot of people who have zero grounding in any sort of objective reality and have zero basis or sort of zero intellectual basis on which to articulate their view of the world, to articulate their thesis to articulate the value proposition of what they're trying to build. And I think that's challenging. It's challenging for that to be sustained a long term. I think if you've been in crypto for eight years, that means you're on your eighth or third cycle, I believe, your third

Starting point is 00:18:51 bull market, bear market cycle. And you talked about how separating your identity from like a blockchain or separating your identity from the company that you work for is probably helps you navigate that. And, you know, removing yourselves from perhaps from the ebbs and flows of a bull and bear market allows you to maintain some sort of sanity. But also at the same time, I think that's the less frequent case for people in the industry. Like most people come in with some particular route. They came in through Bitcoin. They came in through Ethereum. They came in through NFTs. And then that's their brand, that's their thing. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:19:23 Would you say that like having that like removal of your ego from particular like blockchains or companies or projects is what has enabled you to maintain your presence in the industry for three cycles? Because every single cycle bucks people off. Like usually people get bucked off by their first cycle and then they usually get bucked off by their second cycle. And very few people have made it to three cycles. Would you credit like that sort of just like removal from some sort of just like material

Starting point is 00:19:50 attachment to some aspect of the industry is why you've been able to survive for so long? Yeah, I think that's one important component of it. And to be very fair, I did make that mistake myself. I attached my identity like very much to what we built at DCG. And, you know, at the end of the day, that wasn't my company. And that became very clear to me. And that was challenging and an important learning sort of moment for, for me. I think the second piece is it's really important to be willing to admit that you were wrong and to be willing to change your mind. I think one of the things I know for sure is that the arc of time, right, A, it's very long. And over the arc of time, like, there are periods over which you will be proven right

Starting point is 00:20:29 and periods over which you'll be proven wrong. And I think it's important to have a perspective and to be willing to articulate that perspective and put yourself out there. I think it's a really important test for yourself to develop conviction, whether that's around a specific investment thesis or a vision for what the ecosystem will look like in the future. And there are very few people today who I think are willing, just in the world in general, right, who are willing to, like, have a perspective, have a view and to articulate it in the public sphere. Most people try to walk this line of like not being about anything. And I'm like, what's the, what's the fucking point? Like, what are we doing here? It's important to have a perspective. But it's also important

Starting point is 00:21:08 to be able to admit when you're wrong and to change your mind and to change your perspective. So I'll be very honest. I was wrong about Ethereum. I have no issue saying that. I have no issue admitting that. And I look at that and I'm like, okay, why did I miss this? Why was I wrong about this? I've identified like things I need to shift in my mental model. And I think a big one is just being intellectually flexible. And as you're presented with evidence and data, right? Change your worldview. Like no one's going to be 100% right about everything if you were. You know, that would be a very sad world to live in. But I think, you know, develop perspective. Don't be afraid to articulate that perspective. Putting that perspective out there is like a magnet.

Starting point is 00:21:48 it attracts like-minded people to you and also people who are going to challenge your view, right? And I love it when people challenge my view because it forces me to examine my thinking. Sometimes the data they bring or the evidence they bring is relevant and changed in my mind. Sometimes it doesn't. But even being able to have the conversation without getting emotionally heated about it is like an important sign that you've been able to attach your identity from your perspectives. And then allowing yourself the grace of being like, okay, you were wrong about this. And it's okay to be wrong. I've been wrong about many things. I've also been right about many things. And so being able to adapt and I think to change your perspective and then not being afraid to articulate that in public sphere, I think is a huge part of why some people, I think, continue to grow and evolve with the industry. And others maybe don't because they get very locked into a very specific vision. It becomes a core part of their identity. And then they have challenges evolving beyond that because their whole personalities is. tied up in this very specific worldview. Right. And I think in some ways, Bitcoin has become that

Starting point is 00:22:53 way. Like, there is a whole cohort of people out there who believe that Bitcoin exists in isolation and exists in this echo chamber. And I'm like, that's, you know, just looking at the evidence out there, I think that worldview is no longer one that is necessarily like supported by the evidence around you. And I think for a lot of people, we saw this recently actually at the BSC, community, right? People don't even know. Probably people who listen to this probably don't even know what BSV is. So I'll just take it. Talk about BSB a lot. So maybe I'll just take a moment and articulate like what's happened here because I think it's a helpful, illustrative point. So Bitcoin block size wars, Bitcoin basically split into two. And I kind of think of it like the schism that

Starting point is 00:23:37 happened in the church, right, where you had the Catholic Church, Henry the 8th wanted to divorce his wife. So he, like, branched off and the Protestant church became a thing. They had this schism, right, like between Catholics and Protestants. And I'm not a history buff, so I'm probably overly simplifying. But effectively, there was a schism in Christianity. And there are now two dominant branches who had similar beliefs, but the implementation of those beliefs was different, right? So Bitcoin, same thing.

Starting point is 00:24:07 Two cohorts of people, fundamental agreement on sort of white paper differences in in vision. So there is Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and then this thing emerged called BSV or Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision, which was all about making Bitcoin. I'm not sure. I wish I was joking. It was highly relevant at the time. And BSV or Bitcoin Stoci's vision was all about Bitcoin for payments and like really big block size and lots of blocks that could do a lot of payments. There was a whole community of people who sort of went off in this direction where like this is Satoshi's original vision, we need to build BsV, put all their cats, sold all their Bitcoin, sold all the other forks of Bitcoin, went hard into BSV, and BSV basically fell off a cliff. I think for those people,

Starting point is 00:24:53 one of them, like last month came out, he was like, you know, I went so hard, like, emotionally, psychologically, financially into BSV. It's ruined my life. It's ruined my family's life. Like, I don't know how I'm going to recover from this. And it was really sad in a way, but people get, I think, trapped in these mental models or these views of themselves that are very narrowly defined by a specific ideology they had a specific point in time. Like, the world is not a static place. The world is a very dynamic, ever-evolving place. Change is the only constant. You know, I feel bad for people who feel trapped in whatever identity they create around themselves. And it would be interesting to see, honestly, what happens, like, a lot of the

Starting point is 00:25:34 NFT influencers we see whose domain expertise and whose relevance is, like, limited to pumping specific NFT collections, they're paid to pump. Again, not a criticism. That's, that's a business model for sure. That'd be interesting to see, like, what they pivot to next and are they able to move beyond NFTs or do they sort of stay in this narrowly defined thing that's become their identity? But, you know, I certainly don't think 10,000 PFP collections are the path forward for NFTs. You said you were wrong about Ethereum. And there was a moment in time in the crypto industry where, you know, Ethereum was like, from what I've gathered, I wasn't here at this point in time. From what I gathered, Ethereum was like the contrarian bet.

Starting point is 00:26:16 When you say you were wrong about Ethereum, were you wrong about Ethereum because you had your own independent internal beliefs about it that were wrong? Or was it like the climate and the environment of the whole entire industry at the time that you were a part of that really like guided what you believed about Ethereum? Because, you know, if during the phase of 2014 to 2016 part of crypto when Ethereum was really getting off the ground. It was basically Bitcoiners. And, you know, Bitcoiners generally don't really like Ethereum. So can you like parse apart how much was like your belief and how much was like the general entire belief of the industry? Are those like separate? No, I think those are one and the

Starting point is 00:26:53 same. And again, I think at that point in time, I was still, so the firm I was at DCG was very anti-Etherium, a very pro-Ethereum classic, which is like looking back was a preposterous perspective. So part of it was the firm I was at. Part of it was the industry itself. community of people. And honestly, I think the other piece was I was still so focused on Bitcoin because there was so much happening with Bitcoin at the time that I didn't really dedicate a ton of time to Ethereum. I will say in 2017, I started spending more time on Ethereum. I started investing in Ethereum, luckily. So, you know, the worked out, okay. I think the group of Bitcoiners that like are Bitcoin only and no Ethereum, I actually think that's a very vocal

Starting point is 00:27:35 minority, like extremely vocal, but I do think that is a growing minority. And honestly, I do worry at this point about Bitcoin's culture. I think there are elements of Bitcoin's culture that are extremely unappealing and are extremely concerning to me is a long time Bitcoiner and someone who really does believe in like Bitcoin's very unique value proposition as not just store value, but a medium of exchange and a layer for public blockchain innovation is really concerning to me. I think it really turns people off. I think we start to see that now in Ethereum as well, right? Like, they're now Ethereum maximalists, which I think is never did I think I would say those words, that they're definitely Ethereum maximalists. You know, again, I think there is, and this is where I think

Starting point is 00:28:21 one of the areas I've been really interested in lately is religion, divinity, and sort of what cults or belief systems in a more technocratic society look like. You know, I jokingly like to say, that I'm going to start a cults. And then I realize I'm already in like several cults. But there is this really interesting movement. And we talked about this a bit when you and I hung out last time in person. Like the largest spiritual movement in the world isn't an organized religion. It's the spiritual but not religious movement. Around 40% of Americans belong to this. They identify spiritual but not religious. But this affiliation, it doesn't have any formal identity. It's not organized. I think for a lot of people who are spiritual but not religious, for a lot of people who

Starting point is 00:29:09 don't have a specific sort of spiritual practice they prescribe to, crypto actually has become a form of spirituality, which sounds a little bit crazy. But I do think for many people, crypto, and in particular, like whatever specific blockchain or ecosystem they have an affinity with does become, in many ways, a belief system. There are components of mysticism and esotericism in crypto. If you look at Satoshi, if you look at the cult of personality around Vitalik in Ethereum and the way people look at what he writes as though it's scripture, the way, you know, people look at decrees from Charles Hoskinson and the Cardano ecosystem. The same way, like, we looked at Papal Bowl probably in the 1100s, you know, in the world still was by and large in grips of

Starting point is 00:30:00 Catholicism. So it is interesting to observe these elements of sort of organized belief systems that are emergent in crypto and really all meaning, right, if we sort of take a step back and you know, I like to get esoteric. But if we look at Badriard, right, who wrote a great book called Simulacran Simulation. It's basically around like how we as humans make meaning and construct our reality. All meaning, sort of all reality, all identity is based on symbols, icons, and memes effectively, right? This is how we sort of transmit who we are. We teach this to our friends. It's omnipresent in the way we conduct ourselves. It's present in the way we communicate, in the way we dress, the way we present ourselves. Now the way we behave online,

Starting point is 00:30:50 right? I think NFT is like the PFP you choose says a lot about you. It's become your identity. I always love that Pughey Penguin. I don't know if it was a parody, but like that Twitter spaces where someone's talking about their pudgy penguin, they're crying and they're like, I am my penguin and my penguin is me. I was like, this is exactly what we're doing. This is exactly what we're doing here. But I do think it's really interesting to start to see with DAOs and these NFT communities and Web 3 communities, how people are starting to imbue these groups of people who believe in things with organization, with financial capital, with like community governance tools and infrastructure is still very nascent. And that whole stack is

Starting point is 00:31:30 extremely underdeveloped, like very piecemeal approach for challenging to navigate still. But I think it is really interesting to see, like, as we start building these tools and as we start seeing this infrastructure, the fact that these communities are day one imbued with an enormous amount of financial capital, but then also have a tremendous amount of social capital in the form of like online personalities who have a reach that's much larger than any traditional media outlet, right? And then you think about the human capital because you can work anywhere. Anyone around the world can contribute to these communities. That starts to become a really powerful force that can radically reshape society and how we think about power and influence

Starting point is 00:32:07 in our world today. Well, I'm so glad you brought this up because if you didn't, I was definitely going to right after you. You brought up about the block size wars and how it felt like a schism between like the church. And like I think as the world becomes more trends towards more and more atheist that we've seen this trend for the last like 20 years, my general gist is that as the world gets more and more atheists, it actually creates more and more demand for some sort of alternative, not some ancient religion, but some new source of, like you said, spirituality, some new source of affinity. And not only is the world trending towards more and more atheism, but it's also trending towards more and more loneliness, especially with COVID, where people

Starting point is 00:32:47 are like stuck inside, they're learning how to be on their computers for 16 hours a day. And all of a sudden we have these like new like techno religions around some sort of like shared set of values and vibes. And you talked about like the guy that fell in love with BSV and he put not only his identity but his financial capital and like the capital of people around him into BSV. And it's very, very cult like you can hear the same story with other cults like normal cults that you would see on some sort of like Netflix like movie or something. Now we have all of the cults, right? Like a Tao is a new cult like an NFT profile picture is a new cult like blockchains themselves are new cults and like rendering yourself immune from the in a poll of one of these things is really really hard and like

Starting point is 00:33:32 i find myself in it as well like you know i kind of really align with the particular values of ethereum and i can't really figure out how to get my headspace out of that just because none of the other cults i found out there resonate with me all that much and so i find myself very very comfy in this particular flavor of spiritualism which is the values that I see embodied by Ethereum. And I'm wondering what you see is like the long-term trajectory of this thing. Is this like part of just like the bootstrapping of this industry or is this kind of the new status quo moving forward into the digital age?

Starting point is 00:34:05 Yeah. So I've actually been doing some research on this and I'm going to be giving some talks over the next few months. So what I think is really interesting, right? When we talk about occults in this sense, I'm not just talking about crypto, right? If we look at the top 10 companies in the world by market capitalization, right, the largest companies. And I do think companies are incredibly powerful. I think brands are incredibly powerful. And we've sort of, if I may, again, I'm going to take a little detour, like historical detour.

Starting point is 00:34:33 If we look at what defined power, right, and where influence came from, it used to be that influence came from empire, right? And these were monastic, legacy-driven empires, right? And typically they were patriarchies, right? So we had the age. of empires. Then emerged organized religion. We saw the age of a new empire, the age of religion, where the church was the most powerful entity. And then that started to splinter and fracture. And then we entered the age of the nation state, right? And nation states became the dominant forces. And that was probably around like the start of the industrial age. Then in the mid-90s, after World War II, right? And we saw the splintering of nation states. We started to see the emergence

Starting point is 00:35:17 of corporation states, right? And this new, more savage form of worship, which was capitalism. And if we look at where we are today, we still live in the world of the corporation state, but something new is emerging. We can see it and we can feel it. And I think a lot of it's being driven by what's happening in our, you know, little sliver of reality and the little, you know, segment that we live in. But it's present in a lot of different places as well. And this new age, like we're sort of in the age of the influencer, but we've moved beyond that into the age of these increasingly small

Starting point is 00:35:55 and specific communities that congregate both online and in real life. But like these little pockets of society that used to be difficult to find are now becoming the norm and becoming very mainstream. And I think QAnon was a part of that, right? Like that whole thing was insane from the outside. But to people who were in it, like for them, it was very real.

Starting point is 00:36:21 And it grew very quickly and it was very powerful. And so this new age, there's sort of a new power struggle. There's nation states. There's corporation. And I think nation states are on the decline. Their influence is on the decline. Their relevance is really on the decline. And what we're seeing is like these grasps for power from an institution that realizes that it is no longer really relevant at all.

Starting point is 00:36:46 Corporation states so highly relevant. And I did this interesting analysis where I looked at the top 10 companies by market capitalization. So I'm just going to run through them. Apple. Does Apple have cult status? Yes or no? Certainly. Yeah. 100% does. Right. So Apple is a cult. I'm surrounded by Apple products right now. Yeah. I'm in the cult of Apple as well. But even going to their stores, right? It feels like you're going to church. Like there's a religious element. It's like sparse. It's clean. It's very specific aesthetic. Apple cult. Second largest company, Saudi Ramco, cult status. Company itself low, oil, high, right? Our world runs on oil. It's a company that is tapping into the power of the cult, which is the resource. Exactly. Microsoft, third largest, cult status.

Starting point is 00:37:31 Weaker than Apple, kind of a shitty cult, but it's still a cult. But for worker bees and knowledge workers, right, for people who work in corporate America, life. They live their life inside of Microsoft office and inside of which. knows. Still the large OS in the world. Crazy, but true. Cult of Microsoft is strong. Alphabet slash Google, cult. Amazon, cult. Tesla, definitely a cult. Berkshire Hathaway is 100% absolutely a cult. People go on a pilgrimage to the middle of nowhere, to Omaha, Nebraska, to pay homage to their Lord and Savior Warren Buffett. Like Berkshire Hathaway is the craziest cult I've probably ever seen. It's a finance cult, like wild.

Starting point is 00:38:17 Navidia, not a cult yet, but powers cults because all cults, all metaverses need GPs for rendering. And that's the game, NVIDIA's in. I would say that AMD, which is the NVIDIA's competitor, definitely a cult. There's cult following behind AMD's. Yeah, we stand for Lisa Sue. She's a baddie. Yes, yes, yes. Sadly, AMD's not in the top 10 yet. Meta. Definitely a cult, but I think meta is one of those companies. It's a really crappy cult, right? Like, it's a cult in the sense that people love to hate Facebook, which is really fascinating, yet we still use Facebook products every day.

Starting point is 00:38:54 Also a platform for other cults. Absolutely true. Correct. And then last is TSMC. Again, semiconductors. It's the input that you need to have a successful online cult. Okay, so all of these top companies in the world, right, have an element of cult status or affiliated with things that have cults. status. And then lastly, if we look at what we're doing in crypto, like, we are effectively developing communities that act like cults. And I think the way you described it before,

Starting point is 00:39:24 it's not necessarily atheism. I actually think it's slightly different. It's, what is it called? You're not atheists. You're agnostic. Sorry. It means that you haven't chosen a specific belief system, but you believe in spirituality. I think atheists, like, atheist is someone like my dad, who's a scientist and he's like, I only believe things if they're like mathematically verifiable. And maybe in a way, Bitcoin are the atheists of the crypto space. They're like your weird atheist uncle. Isn't that a cult of a different form though? Absolutely. It's a cult of science. Yes. It's a cult of irrational, which in and of itself like has been perverted, right? The cult of science, the cult of knowledge has been perverted into something completely dysfunctional as we see

Starting point is 00:40:05 with like modern academia. But we're creating these like really interesting communities and they're becoming increasingly esoteric, right? Bitcoin, large community, Ethereum, large community, like top 50 coins by market cap, large communities. But there are some long-tailed coins out there that have like really, there's a whole dash community out there. I don't know if people remember dash. There's a whole, I'm showing my crypto age, cryptogramma over here talking about VSV dash. You can talk about dash master nodes. Like there is a whole community of dash loyalists out there. It's crazy. So there are these really interesting behaviors that are emerging. And again, I think what's going to be really powerful is as we move out of this age of nation states,

Starting point is 00:40:51 out of this age of corporation states and unbridled capitalism into this age of capital imbued with purpose and community, what will that look like is the question I'm really interested and really excited about. So I'm going to be giving a series of, I'm doing research right now. So if anyone has anything they want to share, I'm reading a lot of Marshall Luhan, obviously, but all recommendations, welcome. If anyone wants to riff on the topic, drop me a DM on Twitter. Happy to do that. I'm going to be giving a series of talks over the next few months, starting in June on the topic, and then hosting a workshop in the summer and in the fall on it, and then hopefully be doing some more writing about it. But I'm excited about the future of cults,

Starting point is 00:41:34 tooling, infrastructure that we can utilize to help people in to build cults and communities in an open source manner and make them interoperable. But imagine if we could have these small pockets of people that congregate in physical space, that pool and share resources, right, that use all this open source tooling and infrastructure to manage their local communities, both physically and digitally, and that these small sects or cells are then interoperable and communicate and transact with one another because they're on the same underlying infrastructure, which public blockchain. Like all of a sudden we just start to see is the emergence of this really powerful sort of organic organism. That's almost my celial in nature,

Starting point is 00:42:15 where you have these individual hubs or cells that have their own unique belief system or their own unique values, but there's universal sort of compatibility in this broader network. I think that is incredibly powerful socially. I think that's incredibly powerful economically. And I think that is what we're starting to see. It's not unique to just crypto. Crypto is not the only tool in our toolkit. But I think it's an important component of what the future might look like as people start to dissociate their identity from where they were born, what passport they hold, their religion they belong to or their parents belong to, what they do for an occupation, what products they consume, right? We no longer identify ourselves that way at all. Like,

Starting point is 00:42:58 when's the last time you went to a crypto vet and you knew anyone's nationality or anyone's religion? We just don't talk about it. So that's what's really exciting to me. There's like this really big shift that's underway. We're not talking about it. And so what if we were to give an identity? What if we were to sort of put more structure around it? What would that enable people to do? I don't know, but we're going to find out. So yeah, this is super wild and I think we can get even more wild here. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative is trying to find the next hidden gem. Also, IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax advantage ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Also,

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Starting point is 00:46:09 empires can the world really support? Three, four. And then religions, it gets larger with more and more denominations. And then, you know, countries and nation states, there's a lot of those. There's like 150, 180 nation states. But then there's corporations and there's more than I can count number of corporations. And now with crypto, there's like one cult per token, right? There's one community per token. And we also see this outside of crypto, right, where like every single subreddit is kind of its own community, his own cult. And I think we might be conflating the word community and cult, but we'll come back to that later. And so like I'm using cult here. People have a negative connotation of cult. Sorry, just to identify the term. When I say cult, community is probably a good

Starting point is 00:46:51 word, but I think community is not strong enough, right? The community is like something you belong to. A cult is something where you have to go through right of initiation where you prove your loyalty to the group in a very public way. I think in crypto, we do that, right? If you're like part of an NFT community, you make that NFT, your PFP. Or if you're part of Ethereum, you put like the dot Eath or if you're a Bitcoin or you put the Lightning Network, like the emoji on your Twitter handle. Exactly. Or you put like hashtag Bitcoin. Yeah. Or you get like a Bitcoin tattoo. So I think there is this very cult component where there's like a very public display of your affinity to that group and there are escalating levels of commitment. Yeah, like a concentric circle of like more and more like extremism.

Starting point is 00:47:31 Yeah, exactly. It's important. Right. Something that Chris Berniske implanted into my brain is that he thinks like crypto offers like the foundation for economic viability of culture as in if a culture is economically viable, crypto can enable it to be so. And so we're like we're going from like empires of like three to four major global empires to like, you know, 50 religions to 200 countries to 20,000 corporations to 200,000 like tokens. And like my optimistic take on this is that for every single new community slash cult that's out there, the reason why they exist at all is because they allow for a higher fidelity representation of the desires of the humans that compose them. And so, like, human interests can span so many different domains, whether it's, I don't know, like, you know, rock climbing comes to mind or finance or, like, pick your domain of interest. And now that we have, like, many, many more cults and more niche cults, cults that are answering to the long tail of human interests, we are actually producing, like, online organizations that represent human interests with higher fidelity just because we can have more granular cults because of the technology that we enable it. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on that mainly? Yeah, I like that concept. I think the only thing I struggle with, and again, is probably

Starting point is 00:48:50 syntax thing, is what does culture mean? Like, to me, culture is kind of challenging to define or disambiguate from religion in a way. And again, here, I think the challenge is, like, language is so tricky because we're trying to use language that we haven't yet created to describe something that we all feel in sense, but like putting the words to. that feeling is difficult. This is why the crypto industry has its own language. People come in from the outside and they're like, you guys speak differently. I'm like, yeah, we know.

Starting point is 00:49:22 But I think again, if we think about how humans construct meaning, right, it's through language. And if we think about language, right, I've always, I don't know, it's like when I get weird, this is what I think about, right? We use words to try to simplify and communicate things universally. But like the, what's the word for this? It's water, right? But there are so many different ways I can experience water. Like when I take a sip of water and then you're really thirsty, it's like refreshing. It like makes you feel alive. It's like an incredible feeling. Swimming in water is

Starting point is 00:49:59 totally different. Like the word water does not capture all of the different ways in which we as humans can experience water, right? I also think English. I did not grow up speaking English. I grew up speaking Dutch and Turkish. But growing up speaking other languages, but growing up speaking other languages where language is very like linguistically Turkish is very different. I would say Dutch is very similar to English, it's very different, very expressive language. Language is really limiting, right? Because we have these very seemingly simple words that describe radically different feelings and emotions, right? That's why I like languages where there are like multiple words for the same thing, but describe the different ways you can experience that thing. I'm like,

Starting point is 00:50:40 this is what we need. And also I think in the cryptosophobic. space. We're really good at co-opting language where we'll take words that mean one thing and we'll twist them to mean another thing. But I think, again, the way we construct meaning, it's through symbols, right, through visuals, it's through actions. It's through words and language. But it's really limited still. And now we've added a sort of new aspect to it, which is like your on-chain activity. What you do on-chain is also part of who you are now. Are you familiar with, I think he's a, uh, philosopher, but also an author, Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death.

Starting point is 00:51:17 No, I haven't read it. Yeah, so the gist is that humans have this incentive to contribute to symbols because we all know that we are all going to die, but we don't really want to wake up and think about that fact. So we repress that and put it back into the back of our minds. But this incentive to not die comes out in our commitment towards something that's bigger than ourselves. And so we're going back to the conversation of like people that are members of a religion

Starting point is 00:51:40 or people that participate in governments or. people that build a corporation or people that help promote their preferred L1 or their preferred community. We all know we're mortal, but we work towards these symbols that we believe are going to outlast us in an attempt to achieve immortality, right? Like Ethereum, the blockchain is going to continue to append blocks long beyond my life here. And so I can achieve some semblance of immortality by like helping it do that. And there's always this like incentive to be a part of the winning team, whether that winning team is like a religion or a winning team. It's literally a sports team.

Starting point is 00:52:16 Like sports team is another like thing that is greater than oneself. It's another cult. Yes. But what you're alluding to here is very important, which is why I think religion is like the best cult of all and also sports. There has to be intergenerational product market fit, right? Which I think speaks to this like defying death idea and speaks this legacy idea is there has to be belief that by contributing to this like you are extending your legacy beyond your

Starting point is 00:52:41 your lifespan. Right. Again, going back to that poor BSV guy that put all of his resources into a symbol that died. Like, this is the consequences of picking a losing team. And as all of these, like, cults of the world spin up in many, many different ways, some of them die off and some of them win. But we can also see this like in global politics where, you know, China didn't side with Russia because they saw that as like aligning with a losing team, right? Like, they need to preserve the symbol of China by aligning with the winning team. And this can also work its way into like nationalism, right? Like one of the large reason, a large reason as to why like Nazism actually took place in Germany is because a lot of people saw them as really powerful and didn't want to be on the losing

Starting point is 00:53:22 side. And so they just picked this weird cult that, you know, had power for a meaning of time. And I think this is why this partly answers the question as to why so many in the crypto industry always find some tribe to be a part of. Because we like camaraderie, but we also, want to be a part of a winning team. But let's loop that back again to sort of where we started this conversation, which is it's very important, I think, especially in a community like crypto that's so driven by memes and trends and these phenomena, some of which can be very ephemeral in nature and some of which have permanence. I think it's, again, very important to develop a perspective that is uniquely yours and to behave in a way that is consistent with your perspective.

Starting point is 00:54:06 And I think the challenges, when people are unclear what they are about or why they're here or what they're interested in or what they're trying to do with like the limited time we have here, then it becomes very challenging to identify which group to align with. Then you end up chasing the trend, right, and you become part of a larger herd. I think, again, having a unique perspective and having a perspective that is leverages your experiences, your strengths, your insights in a unique way. and then being consistent with it, articulating it consistently, defending that viewpoint consistently becomes a very important part of maintaining an identity that is independent of and not attached to anyone's single cult. And I think the great thing is cults of belief and, like, cults of belonging are highly scalable because most of them don't demand complete loyalty. Empire demanded complete loyalty. Religion demanded complete loyalty. I can't be Christian.

Starting point is 00:55:05 Jewish, right? Nationality used to depend, depend on complete loyalty. Now, you know, I have three passport, so that's no longer the case. And the great thing is, in Web 3, you can belong to so many different groups, right? I just think of the number of dows. I'm a part of it, like, makes my head hurt. Some of them I have a very low level of commitment. Some of them I have a higher level of commitment. But the fact that we can now scale and go from belonging to just a handful of groups to belonging to thousands of groups and those groups can evolve and change and merge and split over time. I think it allows people so much more expressivity around like how they think about their belonging to these different groups. And maybe the next age is the age of cults and

Starting point is 00:55:48 everything becomes a cult. I'm in the cult of Apple. I'm in the cult of Bitcoin. I'm definitely in the cult of oil. I'm the cult of second actors. I'm in a lot of different communities. cults, whatever you want to call them. And again, some of them require very high levels of commitment and others much, much less so. But at their core, I think for communities, cults, whatever you want to call them, these organizations, these entities, these organisms to be viable, you have to have a core group of people that's deeply committed. Yes, you need the center of the concentric circle. You need the hardliners to always embody the cult, right? Meltem, I think you would be a fantastic cult leader. If you are not going to particularly identify with one particular cult, maybe you

Starting point is 00:56:33 should start one yourself because I would join that cult. You know, the cult I'm in right now and what I feel really passionate about, I think one thing we tend to forget is that we have direct control over the reality that we live in. And I think nowhere is a better example than Bitcoin. Right. When I started working in Bitcoin, Bitcoin was this fringe, esoteric ideas. I would talk to people about it and they'd be like, what's wrong with you? Like, why are you like this? I'd be like, no, no, no, trust me. No, like, you wouldn't believe it sounds so silly now. But in 2015, I was in grad school. I was at MIT. It was graduating my background. Like, I'd had a quote-unquote successful career. Like, I was a good little corporate person. I'd done very well. I'd done well in

Starting point is 00:57:19 grad school. I had all these job offers to go to great companies. And I was like, no, I wouldn't go to the Bitcoin thing. And everyone's like, what the fuck is? wrong with you? They were like, why are you like this? You were defecting from one cult for another. Oh, 100% is the best decision I've ever made. But, you know, people forget how much has changed in the world. Like, crypto and Bitcoin in particular is a very non-consensus thing, even as little as five years ago. It has now become a more consensus thing. It's become very socially acceptable. it's become cool. Like, we're cool now. This was never cool. But I say it was not cool. Like, I would go to events. I remember I went to my one-year grad school reunion. And everyone was like,

Starting point is 00:58:04 do not talk to her. She works in Bitcoin. She's weird. She's going to talk to you about Bitcoin. One of us. People forget how much has changed, which I think is interesting. But we do very much influence and create the reality we live in. So the reality I lived in seven years ago, Bitcoin was not a part of that reality. The reality I live in now, what we've done with the hundreds of thousands of people who've worked on Bitcoin, worked in Bitcoin, and been out there, like, putting their names, their faces, their reputations on the line and going out there and advocating for Bitcoin, educating about Bitcoin, talking about Bitcoin. Bitcoin is now a globally recognized asset. It is held by some of the world's largest financial institutions who now trade in it.

Starting point is 00:58:45 It has crossed the chasm, in my view, from a cultural, financial. sort of technology perspective is cross the chasm. We made that reality. It didn't happen magically. There was a group of people who dedicated a lot of their time and energy into making that reality. And we did that. You push the boulder up the hill. Exactly. We're doing the same thing now with other elements of what's happening crypto and with three. But we are directly responsible for the experience that we have of reality. And there are people who accept reality as it is. And there are people who envision different reality and then work to make it happen. And there's a great book, speaking of books, since you recommended a great one for me, it's called Finite and Infinite Games by

Starting point is 00:59:28 James Kars. And it's basically about this philosophy, right? Where in a finite game, there is a specific objective and your mission is to reach the objective at any cost, and then the game ends. In an infinite game, there's no objective other than to keep playing the game. And so as you play, the game evolves. Your role in the game evolves, right? And the idea is there's sort of these, like, levels of awareness in the game that you move through. And to me, the one thing I keep thinking about is, like, the objective for me is to get as close as I can to creating the reality that I want to live in and that I want other people to live in. And what I love about crypto is that as an industry, I do think that we are inherently optimistic. We're inherently optimistic about human

Starting point is 01:00:09 nature, as we see from like the very flawed designs that we implement. We're inherently optimistic about human nature. We're inherently optimistic about what people can achieve. they work together. We're inherently optimistic about our ability to impact reality in the trajectory of the world, right? And we have to be. And so I'm actually really excited about getting people to believe in their own power and their own ability to change the trajectory of the future, but also to change their own experience of reality. And so when we talk about vibes, right? And I like throwing these fun, interesting events that bring a weird mix of people together. It's like, we need to remind people that magic is real. When I say magic, I don't mean like woo

Starting point is 01:00:52 magic. I mean, these transcendental like moments where you feel just an amazing connection to a room full of total strangers. And you can feel this on Twitter spaces. You can feel this at a conference. You can feel this at a rave. You can feel this at a show. There are a lot of different ways that we as humans like create these experiences. But I think in crypto, sometimes what's lacking, we get so like in the weeds and like the technical details. We get so obsessed. with our own little tribe that we forget as a whole. Like our objective is to convince other people. Like the core selling point of Bitcoin was never like, hey, buy Bitcoin because it's

Starting point is 01:01:27 going to make you rich. The core premise of Bitcoin was like, get involved in Bitcoin because we can change the trajectory of the future to not be so grim and fucked up. And so I think we just sometimes have to remind ourselves that there's like a bigger sort of unified objective no matter what little tribe or sect of crypto you belong to. like we all are sort of aligned in this idea that we can change the trajectory of the future, we can bend the arc of reality. We may not necessarily all agree on what that should look like, but just the belief that

Starting point is 01:01:56 we can do that is incredibly powerful. And I think we need to remind ourselves with that. Sounds crazy. Maybe to the listener, but not to me. I'm definitely on board this train. Melton, as you've gone through the ebbs and flows of the crypto industry, you've been here for eight years. I've been here for like four or five.

Starting point is 01:02:12 But when I first got started in crypto, I wasn't like going out to conference. I wasn't like meeting people in real life. I was still kind of just like in my head's down face. And so this is kind of what I want to pick your brain about next is how the social life of crypto has adapted and evolved. What I've been saying to people and I want to check with you if this is true is that like really the social culture, the in real life social culture of crypto wasn't at all defined up until post-COVID, up until 2021. And just because like, yeah, we had the bull market of 2017 to early 2018. But that was like defined by ICOs. And I'm not really sure how much in real life crypto socialization there was. And so my gut take about

Starting point is 01:02:50 like crypto social life is that it really just came about starting in Manhattan, starting in New York in like the end of 2020 and early 2021. Would you agree with that? No, absolutely not. Oh, okay. Where did it begin? It began. I would say in like 2013 with the Bitcoin conferences. And back then the group was small. There were maybe like three, 400 people you'd see these things. The scaling Bitcoin conferences were like 500 to 750 people, but the energy there was like absolutely electric. All the people you wanted to see were there. Then it became like the Bitcoin meetups. So the Socratic meetup in New York was huge. That's, you know, shout out to Jonathan Mohan, who ran the New York Bitcoin meetup. Those were huge. Those were really formative part of my

Starting point is 01:03:37 early years in Bitcoin was the weekly meetups. Also, we were all really poor and they would have pizza and sometimes beer. And so I was like, yay, like, this is my dinner on Wednesday night because I was broke. Great. No, I just finished grad school. And I work in Bitcoin and I'm, I'm poor. I'm multiple. Nice to meet you. Great. No, it's great. But there was such a strong sense of community. And these people became my friends. Like, it's really funny. I don't think I have that many non-crypto friends anymore. And I think it's really different when you go through these life experiences with people when you are in the trenches with the group of people. And I've had like the privilege of working with hundreds, if not over a thousand different founders over

Starting point is 01:04:24 the last eight years that I've been in this industry, going through those crazy highs and crazy lows with people, not just in their startups, but also in the industry overall. It's a really special bond that you have. So there was a really vibrant crypto culture before. the pandemic. I think post-pandemic it accelerated because we have a lot more money and people actually started spending that money. So I think that's what changed is like we have more money. We have better taste. Like back in the day, we had bad taste. Now we can afford good party planners and we've developed some taste and some sense of aesthetic. There's also more people in the space who aren't just like purely devs or business people or finance people like with the introduction

Starting point is 01:05:12 of NFTs in the art world, in the music world, and the fashion world, like more of the creative domains into crypto has also, I think, radically changed the nature of events and the look and feel of events. It's much higher production value. So I would say post-COVID, like the influx of capital, people's willingness to spend that capital, as well as more people who come from the broader sort of world of culture coming into crypto has elevated the experience. But I would say that IRL sort of connection has always been such a strong part of crypto, even from the earliest days of Bitcoin. And those events, like those meetups, they were really, I mean, it was like the who's

Starting point is 01:05:54 who of crypto. I met the chain link founders seven years ago at a bit devs meetup. They were running a company called Smart Contract Solutions. And seven years later, it's chain link. It's like a lot of those relationships still persist. When I talk about like in real life crypto events, I always. speak with such like high regard. And I'm trying to get like out of my bias with it just because, you know, I had decently fun college days, high school days, not so fun. But I've never had as

Starting point is 01:06:20 much fun as I've had with crypto people. And maybe that's just because I'm a crypto person and I like crypto. And so of course I want to talk to crypto people about crypto stuff. But also there's some properties about the nature of crypto people. As you said, like inherent optimism, inherent curiosity, big brain or big ideas than people that like to think. And I think that is really what is so infectious about in real life crypto culture that if, you know, the normies of the world end up at a crypto party, they also feel it is my assumption, even though I don't know if that's completely true. I think so.

Starting point is 01:06:54 I think my normie friends around crypto people and they're like, that's the most epic experience I've ever had. All of these people are insane and beautiful. But I'm also very selective about the vibe I curate. I definitely think there's like crypto people that I don't want to hang out with. And most of the time, so I spent, I just spent a week. in Jackson Hole and I invited like 15 crypto people out. And it was so funny. Everyone's from really different walks of life. Everyone knew maybe one or two people there, but no one other than

Starting point is 01:07:22 me knew everyone there. And we were joking at the end of the trip. We were like there were literally no bad seats. Like everyone's amazing. Everyone's super interesting. And we didn't even talk about crypto at all. We talked about life. We talked about philosophy. We talked about existentialism. Like one night we talked about music. We talked about a lot of different stuff that's sort of tangentially related to crypto, but it wasn't like, oh, let's nerd out, right? But I think it's very important to curate like a good group of people around you and to expose yourself also to different ideas. I like hanging out with people who challenge me. I like hanging out with people who have a different worldview than me, right? Because it forces me to expand my thinking. I like it when I can

Starting point is 01:08:00 disagree with someone. I think that's important. But I think you do find these amazing pockets of crypto. There's also really cringe pockets of crypto. Certainly. There are probably people listening to us who are like, I have not. never had that experience to describe my experience of cryptos, like, especially as a woman going to an event, I'm like one of three women in a room full of, like, sweaty, weird dudes. So, yeah, but I will say the one thing that has never changed, even in the early days of Bitcoin, I remember in like early 2015, I had a question about, what was it about lightning at the time, Lightning Network? And I DM'd someone, and they immediately responded to me. We got on

Starting point is 01:08:35 a phone call. We had a great conversation. Cryptos still the same. Like, for people who are willing to do the work and who want to engage. I love the openness of crypto and how willing people are regardless of what level they're at, right? Whether they're, you know, well-known crypto person that's been around for a long time for Snoopy. Like, it doesn't matter when you got into the industry, who you are, what your quote-unquote social status is. I do think there's like really incredible willingness of people to engage with each other, which are just absolutely love. And I think is really unique to the space. I see disappearing a bit with like these mega funds and, the corporatization of crypto, which makes me sad.

Starting point is 01:09:13 But I do love that aspect of crypto culture, and I hope that continues to persist. Yeah, yeah, certainly. That's definitely something that I felt, I think, is missed by a lot of the newcomers that come into this industry. Something that I really value in this crypto industry is when you come into crypto and you start learning about it, as soon as you start to get your bearings and as soon as your questions turn from bad questions to good questions, like the difference between the entrance level of crypto and like the top of crypto, if we envision this thing as a hierarchy,

Starting point is 01:09:42 it's actually not that much of a hierarchy. Like the distance between the bottom and the top is actually really collapsed, at least in comparison to like the traditional world, the traditional trad-fi world, where like climbing the social structures of like Hollywood or New York or whatever social structures of the world is a grind. And sometimes you can spend your whole life and not really get anywhere. But in crypto, like it's really easy to tell, are you here for the right reasons? are you a good person? Like, crypto is very like, strips away the clothes from the emperor, right?

Starting point is 01:10:10 Like, it makes everyone kind of come in, just like lose their ego and it makes everything really transparent. And so, like, if you are a person of the appropriate vibe, and it becomes really easy to identify that amongst other people. Yeah. And so, like, climbing up, like, the social ladder of crypto, there's only, like, four or five rungs you have to climb before you're at the top because crypto's, like, still so in its early days. Would you agree with all that? Yeah. We're all just trying to catch a vibe. end of the day. Totally.

Starting point is 01:10:39 Yeah. This is why like curating a vibe is really important. But again, curating a vibe requires figuring out what you're about. Right. And it requires you having the confidence and like the ability to detach from your ego. I do interact with a lot of people in this industry who are like easily triggered and they're easily upset and they're very delicate and you sort of have to tiptoe around them and their ego.

Starting point is 01:11:03 And like I just, I can't with that. I'm like, let it go. Object. Let it. Let it go. So one thing I'm looking forward to, which I think is coming, is like, crypto people are inherently innovators, right? Like we all like to think and tinker and it's like, hey, does it have to be this way? It could be this way instead. And now that crypto has become insanely social with like NFTs and NFTs have really unlocked a part of the like the social culture around crypto that we've never had before. What I'm starting to see is crypto people kind of getting tired with the classic hire a DJ, find a club, put the DJ in the club, invite all the crypto people and have a an um's party yeah i think people are starting to think about like how can we innovate on parties

Starting point is 01:11:41 like how can we innovate at the social layer how can we innovate in to have like more vibes like let's not just throw a like-minded people into the same room together let's actually like curate an experience yeah go for it here's the thing here's what i can't stand about nfts events you go to nfts events and i'm guilty of doing this i've done this myself you go to an nfts event and it's like a bunch of screens with people's pfps on them and then like bad lighting bad music, bad drinks. I'm like, let's do anything else. I think some crypto events do a really good job. I've actually not been going to as many conferences lately just because I find the conference is really tiring. And like, I don't understand people who want to have meetings at a conference.

Starting point is 01:12:21 Like, I'm exhausted. I'm overwhelmed. I don't want to sit for 30 minutes and talk about business because I'm not going to be able to focus. Like, this is not a productive place to have a meeting. If I want to actually have a productive meeting, like, let's just do a call or like, have a meeting in the city that we both live in. But like, don't ask for. This is conference time. Yeah, but like, I don't know. People are like, oh, yeah, let's go to this conference and like have hours of meetings

Starting point is 01:12:46 with people. I'm like, that makes no sense to me. That like defeats the purpose of going to a conference, which the whole point of going an IRL event is to increase the probability of serendipitous meetings. It's like, why are you sitting in a meeting room for hours on end with people that you already know and already have a relationship with when you could be out like. meeting a high volume of people very rapidly in a very compressed window of time. So if you ever try to have a meeting with me at a conference, respectfully, no, thank you.

Starting point is 01:13:15 Because it's not productive. Like, why did I go to the conference to sit in a meeting room and talk to people I already know? Right. We can achieve these goals elsewhere. It is not productive. But I've actually stopped going to so many conferences. What I've started doing is going to smaller events. I love these like weekend long, couple of days, week-long events.

Starting point is 01:13:34 I've hosted a couple of them where I just bring a bunch of people I really like. I'm really interested in together and we all shove ourselves into a container. And we just five and see what comes out the other. And you and I went on a trip like this, right? We just like, we've backed for a couple of days. It's super fun. It was great. And some fantastic things came out out of that weekend, including this podcast.

Starting point is 01:13:53 Exactly. But also, we would have never had that level of intimacy, that level of discussion and that level of friendship, like at a party or at a conference. So I do think we need to invest in relationships. And we also need to be very specific about who you want to have relationships with, right? Because you can't have relationship with everyone. It's like, who do you want to spend time with in what container? What do you want to get out of that time? For me, I don't necessarily need to have a specific objective.

Starting point is 01:14:23 But having sort of a theme, right, should I want to do these workshops around the future of religion and what divinity looks like in a technology-driven society? and that'll be sort of the overarching theme. But you create a container, you get people together in it, and then you see what unfolds. You add a little bit of structure to it, but not a lot. And I think that's, to me, far more interesting, far more exciting. Melton, as a veteran of the industry, as crypto, grandma, what advice do you have for the youngsters in this space who are coming in for their first or second year? What's really useful for you?

Starting point is 01:14:56 My firm belief is, like, it doesn't matter whether you're an hour into crypto or 10 years into crypto. Like everyone is equally deserving of being here, of being a part of this. So it doesn't really matter. There are a lot of people who've been in crypto a very long time who have no goddamn sense, who would not take advice from. And there are a lot of people who are like very new to crypto who have a lot to offer. So I think your tenure in the space is not indicative at all of like anything. You're equally capable, I think, of making contributions and playing a meaningful role, regardless of when you got into the space. So that should never deter people. Sometimes people are like, my God, I'm so new. Like, I don't know anything. I'm like, first of all, you know more than like

Starting point is 01:15:35 most people because you're here. Number two, it doesn't matter. Like, whatever. My advice, honestly, the biggest thing is like, be about, figure out what you're about, be about something. Don't do this thing that so many crypto people do where you're about absolutely fucking nothing. Be about something. Like, figure out what it is. Be about something. And then talk about it. Like, so many people are observers, do something. Buying a coin is not doing something. Like, do something. literally do anything do something do something that other people aren't doing is that the no it doesn't matter if other people are doing it do something like put some skin in the game make some commitment and then the second piece is like be willing to be wrong i think a lot of people are afraid to be

Starting point is 01:16:16 about something and to publicly articulate it because they're afraid of being wrong you are going to be wrong about many things you're going to be right about many things it doesn't matter the only thing that matters is that you're still playing the game but if you never get in the game you can't play the game. So like do something, be about something, and then talk about it. Talk about it with your friends. Talk about it with people on the internet. Lurking is one way to do it, but I don't get involved. There's a lot to be done. And who knows what might happen if you like take that first step and what that might turn into. But I see so many people who are like just passive, passive passengers on this ride. And that's just not going to cut it.

Starting point is 01:16:55 Melton, what about the current state of the world, including crypto or not including crypto, makes you optimistic? Honestly, it's tough some days. What makes me optimistic, first of all, they can't put us all in jail. There's not enough jails. They can try to build more, but somebody has to do stuff. So they can't put us all in jail. They might try, but they just can't. That's optimistic.

Starting point is 01:17:20 Look, the world is run by incompetent buffoons. I think we are seeing how incompetent our institutions are, which is accelerating this tremendous power shift that we're living through. And again, what makes me optimistic is like we have seen single-handedly how powerful individuals and communities on the internet can be. So that makes me really optimistic. Like if we could meme Bitcoin into existence, imagine what else we can do. That's exciting.

Starting point is 01:17:54 Nelson, thank you for coming on and sharing your thoughts on Layer Zero. Thanks, David. Thanks for having me. I'm excited that you're doing this show. Oh, it's great. It's my favorite show. It's basically story time with David for 90 minutes per episode. So I just get to listen to and hear what people really care about, which is always

Starting point is 01:18:08 exciting. I love it. Well, to anyone who's listening, feel free to drop me comments at Melt underscore Dem on Twitter. If you want to talk about cult, religion, drop me. out suggestions on things to look at, things to read as I researched this topic, let me know. And then looking forward again to like writing a bit more on this topic. I've been slacking a bit on the research side lately. So I'm excited to get back to it.

Starting point is 01:18:33 Awesome. I have a few potential bangers coming up. Oh, gosh. Well, you know, I'm waiting with bated breath and we will put all of those links in the show notes when the time comes. Amazing. Melton. Thank you once again. Thanks, David.

Bankless - Cults, Culture, & Crypto with Meltem Demirors | Layer Zero

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