Bankless: Why 2023 is Different

27:07Maybe five episodes worth, it's not going to be a thing. You both got faces for radio. Yeah, exactly. That's what I told him, especially me. And so, but he, I don't know. I don't know how you did it, man. But like - It took me a while to convince Ryan that a podcast was a good idea. Yeah, I had been a podcast consumer, but didn't think that I at least had the skills to produce. And then we just hit record one day. Somehow you convinced me, we hit record. And that was episode one, I think in May, sorry, March, 2020. Um, right. Was it before or right after COVID hit? Episode number two was the day of the COVID dump.

27:47There you go. And so that's where we started. And then, um, we just kind of grew it from there. And of course, uh, this is, uh, this for the last couple of days is only the second time Dave and I have met in person. Um, no way. Yeah. So we had, we developed this entire thing through COVID, uh, and, um, met for the first time last year. It was over two years of working together before we met. yeah i mean we had like a 10 plus person company at the time before we ever met yeah uh yeah i mean is that how you remember david what's your yeah that's your story that's right uh i had my own medium and so i would that's where i was writing all my articles and publishing all my articles and then i had that that other podcast uh that was called pov crypto point of view crypto and so i had never really meaningfully considered about like branding and business like yes pov crypto was a sex even though it was about like two was it yeah i'm just learning this what the hell it was like it's like point of view crypto point of view with wow and also bitcoin but also haha sex uh like never never really like put on the like hey let's be professional and turn this into a business and scale this out and like lean into a brand i was like writing on my medium just because i wanted people to read my stuff and i because i didn't go to business school i did not have that part of me to actually be able to build a foundation that was like in that mindset, right?

29:05Like a self-sustaining, hey, we can scale this out. We can do this better and more intentionally. And so I'm just like writing on my medium, producing my content. And then Ryan makes the Bankless Newsletter and he's like, and I kind of like get it. It's like, oh, distribution, like consistency, brand. Oh. And I'm like, okay, what if I just take all of my writing and deposit it into the Bankless Newsletter? right and and then it's like ryan and i are saying the same words anyways and so it's not and there's no like misalignment there and not only that but like the more i talk to him the more precise both of our words become uh and so like we're just sharpening each other's sticks uh and so it goes from a little bit of just like hey can can we work together and be like oh we're this is working out can we do a podcast together oh this is working out uh and so it was just like bankless for me has just been this like bastion of uh creative expression that i think always just like gets me going yeah and like gives me like what a reason to like hey what's the next bit of content i can produce like what's the next thesis i can spit out what's your what's your guys vision now for bankless that's a good question i mean i think what you've been talking about you guys because now you've had some time together but you know where do you want to go with it i think i think bankless started and uh in a way that you know dave is talking with with it's just an exploration a discovery.

30:24We've always called it kind of going bankless is sort of the journey west, right? Where you set sail and you go try to discover undiscovered lands. And I think that's why the podcast has been for both of us, just energy producing, because we're both learning as we go. And so - And you get to meet amazing people and have fantastic conversations. Absolutely. And then you're developing your thesis in kind of real time based on conversations with some of the smartest people. I do think that crypto, yes, crypto attracts the scammers and the grifters. And we have some of the worst of that. It also attracts some of the most brilliant, humanitarian, wonderful people that I've ever met.

31:11And to have an opportunity, you know, being David and I, at least myself, on the left side of that bell curve, to have that opportunity to talk to some of these crypto geniuses, these kind of researchers, you know, best in their field is absolutely incredible. And so the cool thing about this now, using obviously media as a tool, is we can open source this entire journey and this entire pursuit. And so it's an open sourcing of that journey to go bankless. And it's inviting a community to come along with us. And that's really what the newsletter has been for us and also what the podcast has been for us.

31:51And so I think in the bankless community, there's now about 300 ,000 members who kind of subscribe to the newsletter. And, you know, that was growing. I remember in, you know, 2019, no one has noticed. I remember the first time I hit 10 ,000 on the newsletter and I was like, this is what could be better. I can't believe 10 ,000. That's like, yeah, that's it. And so, I mean, what is kind of the end state ambition here? I think the end state ambition is similar to the ambition of crypto, which is private keys in everyone's hands. You know, every citizen on the planet ideally has the ability and is going at some level, at some point in the spectrum on the bankless journey.

32:35So I think the end state for us is sort of how do we get a billion people into crypto and provide kind of the open source journey, you know, the tools, the media to do that, you know, podcasts that they can turn to and, you know, jump aboard. I think we still have some limiters, though, in crypto, like in terms of our scalability. I'm trying to think. I don't know how you would answer this question. But lately, David, I've been thinking about 2023 and kind of reflecting on it. And I feel like crypto has gone a bit more passive in terms of it's a little bit different than the previous bear market, I would say.

33:19Like, you know, 2019, there were crypto natives using all of these tools. And, you know, 2023, I feel like we are caught in this rut almost where all we can talk about is regulatory. All we talk about is Gary Gensler. We talk about price. We talk about the investing side. There's tons to do in crypto. Don't get me wrong. But it almost feels like some of us have been content to sit a little passively and watch prices. and I'm just hungry for more on-chain stuff to happen. And I do feel like the community has to build the apps in order to get us to the next level so that we can continue the journey and get to 100 million, 500 million, a billion people.

34:05We really have to earn that. And we're in this place where we haven't quite earned it in 2023. One of the things that I've noticed with you guys is your journey has gone from DeFi as like here's the killer app to a broader understanding of Web3, which is the applications layer of a lot of this. What was your Web3 journey? Why did you suddenly start to see the bigger picture? I mean, there's ownership of crypto dick butts in this now. David's sporting a Solana NFT. You've clearly got something. I mean, I've been down this route for a while, but there was a magic moment for me. I was at Ian Rogers' house in Paris, And I was having dinner and next to me was like artists, musicians, technologists, finance people, just this eclectic group of brilliant, talented people.

35:01And I'm like, this does not happen in your lifetime. Yeah, right. It really doesn't. Something truly magic is happening here. And yes, we're in this bear market phase of it all, but there is total magic going on. And that just gave me in the, I don't know when that was last December, it just gave me another shot in the arm to think, you know what, what comes out of this is going to be massive. What's your, how did you start thinking about Web3 more, well, not more than, but, you know, as another layer to what you guys do at Bankless? Yeah. Think about. Yeah. Well, I think one of the neat things about crypto is that it seems to present some sort of like singularity about many different topics and like areas of focus, right?

35:45So typically there's the contrast between DeFi and NFTs, right? Like either it's DeFi or it's NFTs. But the T in NFT is token. And a token is a financial instrument. And that's DeFi. And then we have like the relationship between protocols and community. And this is where I think just like everything kind of weaves together. So to understand deeply, whatever this thing is, DeFi, like NFTs, Ethereum, Web3, crypto, internet money and internet, what words do we even use to explain this thing in totality? I don't know. I kind of like the digital nation state. I mean, that's it. But I would also say that's another way to approach the knowledge, right?

36:29There's there's and this is why I always say crypto has something for everyone. And there's 10 ,000 ways to find crypto and what that what it what you see in it. But to stop at DeFi is to only paint in like a certain corner of the picture. Maybe maybe it's towards the center of the picture. Maybe but maybe that's up for interpretation. But I think a holistic understanding and why people really enjoy Bankless because we try and go down every single rabbit hole that crypto presents us. And so we go down the DeFi rabbit hole. We go down the Web3 rabbit hole. We go down the NFT rabbit hole. And we also try and do our best to weave them all together to tell the grand story that is this movement that we're all on together.

37:11And I think perhaps one of the reasons why Bankless is what it is is because I think we've done a bang up job, like weaving it all together. But it's still like there's still corners and dots and data to connect. And from a content perspective, it's very, very rich. Right. Like, why are we able to produce three episodes a week at minimum? It's like, oh, it's because there's so much data and data points out there to connect and so much knowledge to share and weave together. And so we started in DeFi just because like Ryan said, like first off, no one in 2018 to 2020, no one believed in crypto. And then even inside of crypto, 90 percent of people didn't believe in Ethereum.

37:47And even inside of Ethereum, like half of Ethereum didn't even believe in DeFi. And so it was the conviction. It was the. what's the word? When you're like, it's a contrarian bet layered inside of a contrarian bet layered inside of a contrarian bet. And being right about that, like put many, many people on the map and bankless specifically. But then it just grows from there. It's like, okay, now that we have this foundation of like, hey, DeFi is real. Tokens are a thing. Smart contracts are a thing. That just makes so many other downstream technologies also a thing, right? And that makes DAOs a thing.

38:22that makes NFTs a thing, that makes layer twos a thing. And so everything kind of spawned out from there. And after that, it's just been like trying to capture lightning in a bottle because like there's so many conversations to be had about where this thing goes. Yeah. I mean, for me, it's sort of a few mental models that really clicked to kind of understand this and understand NFTs. And, you know, one of the mental models is the digital nation state, as you said, and And a cornerstone of any nation state, digital nation, or sorry, any kind of physical manifestation of a nation is this idea of rule of law and property rights.

38:59And what we have created, kind of the mental model to unlock with something like Ethereum or even a Bitcoin, is we have created an Internet-based digital property rights system. And so that can be any type of property. That can be fungible property, like tokens. either could be stocks and bonds or currencies and kind of the nation state world. Those are all forms of property of the nation state. And we can have that and register those as assets on something like Ethereum, or it could be non-fungible elements of property. And we see that, of course, in the physical world too, your house, your apartment, a collectible that you purchase.

39:38These are also forms of property that are kind of registered via the nation state, through rule of law. And so it's all the same side of the coin. But you were mentioning that meal you had where you saw artists and finance people and everyone collectively together. Another mental model unlocked for me was we did an episode with a historian. His name is Josh Rosenthal. And it's probably my favorite episode that Bankless has ever produced just because it was so pivotal to my crypto journey. And he basically went through the Renaissance. And he talked, he compared where we have been to sort of the feudal system where there was no democratization of property.

40:27It was sort of our feudal lords kind of, we worked on their land and toiled for them. And that's sort of the present day internet. And then we unlocked a couple of things that led to the Renaissance. And these were technologies. We unlocked the printing press, Gutenberg's printing press. And so this enabled mass distribution of communication. It was a communication technology. And then we also unlocked, you know, Medici and others, double entry bookkeeping, right? And so you have a communication technology and you have a ledger technology. And what do you get? You get the Renaissance, this splash of human creativity and science and progress.

41:06And man, the roots of everything that humanity has achieved up to now, a lot of that was rooted in the Renaissance. And so now what do we have? Well, we have a communication technology that democratizes communication. That's called the internet, TCPIP. That's the protocol for it. That's like the printing press. And we have a new triple entry bookkeeping system, a general ledger. That is crypto. All right. So we've got these two technologies. And I think why you're starting to see what you're seeing, Raoul, is we are starting, we're seeing the early phases of unlocking a new renaissance, almost like a crypto-penesance.

41:44I've been writing about this myself, this whole exponential age thesis. Yes. Just builds on that. It's where AI fits in, robotics, the internet of things, genetic sciences. All of this is building on an entirely new system that has the opportunity to be a renaissance that we can be optimistic about and not fear. People fear change, right? It's a natural human thing. But if you embrace it and go with it, that's the rewarding journey. 100%. And I think that that is the opportunity for everyone, I would say, listening to this, consuming Real Vision content, consuming bankless content. We are at a very unique place in history, where we've just had the...

42:23I think there's a tendency, particularly among younger generations, to be almost nihilistic about their place in time and history. And you could certainly go down that path. And there have been points in my life where I've gone down that path. We've all been down that path. Look at the flip side of this. The massive exponential opportunity that is available to you. The tools that we have at our disposal right now in this period of change, the old institutions aren't going to take us to the next stage in human progress. And so we have an opportunity. This is sort of what we're talking about yesterday, Raul, with the fourth turning.

43:03We have the opportunity to set up a new set of institutions that will help humanity coordinate better. And that's kind of the 21st century technology. And what a gift to be born and to be alive at such a time and a place. That's the flip side. I mean, to me, I know David has talked about this with his own sort of journey. But to me, that is the nihilism killer is when you see the pie expanding opportunity. That's going to get me into another thing. Is I really worry about this, the abundance mindset that many of us have. And then there's the tribalism. And it is, I mean, I left the Bitcoin ecosystem.

43:48Yes, because ETH was outperforming as an investment guy, but because I fucking hated ETH ecosystem. You weren't treated well. If you want to join a digital nation state and they don't treat you well as citizens, you want to leave. And I think we're starting to see that. But the tribalism is still immense in the space. and something has to change there if we're trying to onboard a billion people it can't be a group of people throwing poo at each other let me ask you do you think um because there have been those that argued that the tribalism is actually a feature not a bug i get i get that but you don't have to be nasty about it protect your own and be somebody who wants their ecosystem to succeed even above others but it doesn't have to be a pie mentality it can be a abundance mentality if we all do this together, we all succeed.

44:45I just don't get it. My interpretation on this, we use this line at Bankless a lot. It's like we're speed running the history of money and finance. And so like the compression of time in crypto, if you want to extrapolate it out and layer it on actual human history, like Bitcoin invented in 2009, that's like us discovering gold on the internet. It's like Bitcoin's great. It is primitive. And so it makes sense that Bitcoin looks and feels. And if you like, which I do accept Nick Carter's interpretation of this, it is a religion. It is not like a religion. It is a religion. It acts like a religion.

45:22It quacks like a religion. They have religious purity tests. And so like the and so that is where, you know, crypto is in the landscape of time. Like Bitcoin is the earliest discovery of Bitcoin. And so it's like you have your high priest of Bitcoin. You have the word of Bitcoin, the word of Satoshi, interpretations of the word of Satoshi. And so this is where crypto was when we discovered it in 2009, where Bitcoin is. And then we move forward in time and space and very rapidly. And then we also move forward in technological progress of crypto. And then all of a sudden we have something more advanced that looks and feels more resident with modern technology and modern values and modern society, which in my mind is Ethereum.

46:05Do you think, though, that the religious aspect of it is a product of stagnation more than anything else? I think it's a product of valuation. Because valuation in this space is Metcalfe's law. So it's about trying to get the most activity on your chain. I guess stagnation plays into that. When the market is stagnant, there's no new capital coming in. So you're fighting for your share of the capital. You can see it in NFT space as well. It's got the exact same thing is going on because there's a scarcity of capital. So people become more fanatic about attracting that capital. And they coalesce, tell themselves different stories to try and attract capital via narrative.

46:53Once the space starts growing again, it does drop a bit. But it's particularly bad in bear markets. Yeah. There's always the, hey, let's grow the pie conversation versus just splitting up the pie. And that's why I like to talk about Ethereum's roll-up centric roadmap in the conversation of that pie. Whereas layer twos on Ethereum, optimism competes with Arbitrum, competes with Polygon, competes with ZK Sync. Yet when an application deploys on any one of those things, it's very easy to transfer and spread that value around to the other layer twos. And so the layer twos of Ethereum exist in this harmonious equilibrium between competition and collaboration.

47:36And so it's, hey, we can grow the pie, but we're all trying to take our larger slice, but we're still going to grow the pie. And I don't think other communities have that, like that, that balance between that design philosophy, like Solana and the monolithic architecture, it is just like Solana, the layer one, they need to capture a larger share of the pie. That is their wind condition. Same thing with Bitcoin. It's like they don't have this harmonious balance tug of war between competition and collaboration that the Ethereum layer twos have. The wind condition for Bitcoin is that it eats the entire damn pie.

48:10And that's the same thing for almost every layer one. I think Ryan agrees with me that layer ones are maximalists of themselves. They want to dominate. And so how do you as a layer one win? In my mind, you win by having a harmonious balance between collaboration and competition. And that's why I see layer twos. And so like the reason why we are so tribal is that I think layer ones themselves, if you apply agency to layer ones, they know that they need to dominate. They need to be the biggest layer one. Like this is a competition of empires and layer ones are, you know, warring with each other.

48:43And so I do understand why we're all so tribal. It gets worse in bear markets. But I think the layer one competition kind of induces that. I think that's right. I mean, I'm working with Kevin Kelly from Delphi to try and put together a research piece on analyzing ETH as a digital network state, comparing it to traditional economies using similar metrics. So it's kind of dropping all the crypto-specific stuff, looking at that, and then looking at these other economies. And look, the story of economies is also the story of competition. And it depends how you compete and how you work together. That's the interoperability layer that can drive some of this too.

49:27Holland is a small country. Holland benefits massively from being in the middle of Europe, having the same currency and borderless. Okay, so there's a lot that's going to apply. We've got a bit more work to do in it. But I think I want to try and reframe the conversation in the market about understanding for the next phase forwards. Because I think people who are coming into the space, particularly in the institutional investment space, need a framework to understand that these are emerging markets. We've got emerging market credit systems. We've got emerging market. We've got business layers being built on top, infrastructure layers being built.

50:06It really is an economy. People just don't see it yet. 100%. 100%. That is the best mental model, I think, for these crypto networks is as nation states, is as emerging economies. And that's essentially what you're sort of investing in. And I do think that's why we see some of the tribalism, too. It was a Supreme Court justice, I believe. I can't think of the person's name right now, but called America's 50 states, 50 experiments in freedom. And I see at their best, that's what we're doing with all of these layer one experiments, right? And even the layer two experiments, right? Because you see now, in 2023, there's a lot of tribalism between different layer two ecosystems, even in Ethereum, right?

50:50And some of that is good, though. I think it's great. If you can just ignore, delete crypto Twitter for a few months, right? Or for a year, just ignore all of the noise and the yammering, the claiming back and forth, ignore all of that, and actually see the outcome is the alternative layer one ecosystems are making Ethereum better, and Ethereum is making them better. The layer two competition, this experimentation at the state level inside of the federal nation state of Ethereum, they're all improving each other. It is actual evolutionary progress, survival of the fittest experiment. So we get to let all of the experiments play out so while i think um tribalism is kind of negative and toxic and when when you're in the moment um you know like it is all of these things you know i agree actually i i still kind of argue would argue that it's more of a feature than it is a bug yes we don't have to be toxic yes we don't have to be nationalistic but don't try and invade other country you know it's like, I agree.

51:57I agree. It's not fine to invade somebody else. Let's compete. Let's compete in kind of, you know, the right way. And let's have a healthy competition as between sports teams or as between, you know, healthy nation states that aren't going to war. That kind of competition, I think, is healthy. Once you kind of declare a jihad against another, you know, crypto community, Then it starts to get into unhealthy territory, certainly. But the net is we get to let all of these experiments play out. And that's a great thing for the progress of this space. And that, by the way, is why I think crypto is absolutely unbeatable.

52:35Like we're going to win. Like this level of experimentation is not happening anywhere else. It's not happening at the nation state level. This speed and this scale? No. Right? Nothing is like it. It's not even close. So this is why at some points you have to kind of step back and ask again that question, like, am I crazy? Right. It's a valid question to ask. And I keep going back to like with all of the experimentation, the rapid pace and acceleration of all of these things, it's all open source. We're trying all of these things all at once. It's almost feels that this could be this could sound hubristic to say, but it feels inevitable is my conclusion on crypto.

53:15Like it is going to be absolutely massive. This is absolutely going to be the property rights layer of the internet. The internet, a communication network, completely needs a property rights system. And that's it. That's crypto. And so if you can kind of zoom out, when in doubt, zoom out, zoom out above what's happening in 2023 and the tribal crypto battles and kind of see the big picture here. And like, look at, I mean, you've been here since 2012, Raul. So look at the progress. Look at how far we've come. over a trillion dollars. Like, this is, it's happening. It's weird because my hypothesis when I first saw Bitcoin and blockchain was like, oh, well, here's the future of the financial system.

53:58We need to put all financial assets on chain to start with so we know who owns what. Here we are 11 years later. We're not even close. It's true. Other things I didn't imagine happened, which was smart contracts and NFTs. And it's, you know, we don't know how it works, but it kind of just finds its way like Mercury. But it's very much like, I mean, we've seen this before, haven't we? Even in all of our lifetimes, that's how the internet emerged. You remember the internet of the 1990s? People predicted all sorts of use cases that really didn't happen and it evolved in unexpected ways. I mean, no one predicted kind of the rise of social networking.

54:37Because it's evolutionary, I think to your point, there's an evolutionary element that's organic about it. Yes. Which makes it less predictable. I think there's two halves of this conversation. We have the technology of the pre-existing world pre-crypto. And when we see and then invent crypto, we can be like, oh, we can improve our old technologies by applying these new crypto things. And that's totally true. But the problem is you're fighting against like a massive ship that you have to turn, right? You have incumbents that you have to fight. You have regulations that you have to fight. You have like old companies that are doing things in old ways that you have to convince to pivot.

55:12And so, yeah, eventually the whole world will be built on crypto. But in the meantime, while the whole world adapts to this new crypto paradigm, we have these new digitally native use cases that have no incumbents to fight against, like brand new startups that can capture that real estate. This is something I learned when I was at that tokenized real estate startup. It's like tokenizing real estate is trying to get the old world to adapt to a new system and you have to get new regulations. And like, man, like houses already exist and regulations already exist. what's going to happen faster and what ultimately did happen faster is jpegs right like uniswap like digital things like for there's a fertile landscape out there and it's going to be it's going to be a hundred times easier to build digitally native things that have zero competition versus like trying to get the old world onto crypto because also you're then doing show not tell so you're showing people okay here is the efficiencies of using this new system and eventually the old system migrates as opposed to telling them the need to go on chain and then fighting tooth and nail for decades with you right plus if we bring the old world on chain they're going to be like but we need this and we're going to like what you don't need that uh and it's they're going to bastardize like the nature of these crypto platforms yeah they're not going to use the tools as well as crypto i just want to switch a bit the one things i want to see your thoughts on or how it's impacted you is look you guys are public like me like a bunch of us who were trying to help as many people as possible understand the narratives and then suddenly hate comes right you i mean i spoke to scott melker about this as well you know we've all been down how did that affect you because you you know you go from your mission doesn't change you do the best you can and suddenly the narrative about you changes people get angry or lose money or upset talk me through how it affected you guys because it can't not affect you there i go no you go yeah it's definitely not the thing that i expected um like i'm a content producer like one thing that we we made uh a decision very early in bankless is that like we are investors we're investing in this like we built bankless from the early days on a thesis around ether and defy and we invested in those things and then wrote theses about why we're investing in those things and that and in the start of bankless for the first like two years i was like great i was like everyone loved that now there's not as much uh acceptance of like ryan and david as investors in this space while also being content producers like we have to like i feel like we have to fight for that a little bit more.

57:53It's like, hey, we also want to be investors in this crypto thing is why we're here in the first place. I don't think people as readily accept the relationship as like Ryan and David as crypto investors that are also content producers in a way that they once did. Like the OGs understand it because they've seen our track record through and through and through. The newer comers into the crypto space are like, oh, Ryan and David, they're biased. They have investments, which I mean, it's totally true, but like it didn't, it never used to be so critical or toxic or like mean before. And so that's something that I'm like trying to figure out how to navigate.

58:25We've been, does it affect you at a personal level? Yeah, sure. It does. I, I think, uh, where it affects because we've been, um, we've been attacked at, you know, multiple stages of this journey. You mentioned the tribalism from multiple places too. Yeah. So, I mean, there were, there are a few notable attacks, you know, one was, uh, Danny, uh, Danny Sesta Sesta and, kind of a we call them frog army attacks because it's often kind of like but either it's bots or it's people human beings behaving as bots or both saying the same thing not responding to you know rational thought and of course Raoul like the the social media algos reward this as well so that that um doesn't cause the problem but certainly amplifies the feeling of it and um and so we we We had a frog army attack, Danny Sesta, and that entire ecosystem.

59:20That kind of, what is it, the magic ecosystem? Wonderland, yeah. Spiral magic, yeah. Yeah, and so that seemed to us to be scammer-laden, fraud-laden, and we said as much. We didn't talk about that content, got attacked for that. We got attacked because we weren't hosting Danny Sesta on the show. Yeah, I've been through that as well. We got attacked at one point in time by the Terra Luna community, And I think we actually presented a very fair take on Terra Luna, which is basically, is this a ticking time bomb? Let's do the bear case and the bull case for this. And even posing the question, even asking that at that point in time in the market subjected us to a massive amount of attack.

1:00:03um by the way at one month after we got attacked by danny sessis frogs like a month later it was exposed that zero x sifu was the old old quadringa x like a co-founder and so then that whole ecosystem like crumbled and then one month later after we had the is tara taking time bomb episode like tara blew up i've learned i try and step back from the anger yes and think about the motivation but now the market's a little bit different yeah i think 2023 is different but what i my feeling on 2023 is the crypto community is in a mood. And they're in a mood that's been caused by, on the back of 2022, which is a whole bunch of public figures that segments of the community trusted.

1:00:47Alex Mashensky, SBF, Suzu, Three Horse Capital, even, you know, like the GBTC, that coal kind of empire, putting money in Gemini, right? Like all of these things, betraying trust. And so we are now white blood cell attacking everything. And the reality is the time to launch these attacks and for the white blood cells to come like attack kind of the invaders and the bacteria and the viruses was actually 2021 and 2022. Right now in 2023, predominantly, there's a bunch of good faith actors that are still here that are still building during the bear market. There's always, you know, kind of the oddball people that are not doing that.

1:01:31But and yet the the it's an it's an autoimmune disorder because still the immune system is kind of now attacking some of the good faith actors. And that's what I see. But honestly, Raul, it does get me down, particularly when the attacks are coming from the in tribe kind of group. Right. And they're coming from inside the house. And you're like, wow, you know, but it's it just goes with the territory. and I think getting off of social media for a period of time and zooming out and looking at this has been helpful for me personally. I mean, I've had the other line of attack, which is interesting, from the old school.

1:02:06They're like, you're a macro guy. Why are you doing crypt? I'm like, I've been doing crypts longer than most people and it's all part of macro. And then it's like the market goes down and it's like you're a scammer. You've ruined people's lives. I'm like, no, I've always explained my thesis, how long-term. You know, it's people just want to find reasons to try and unsettle you for various reasons. And usually it's their own insecurity that's driving it. Yeah. So the reason the Terra Luna community was so angry with you guys is because they were feeling insecure. Right. Generally, it's a lack of security or the feeling of security that creates that behavior.

1:02:42That's why I try and step back to do and try and think, why are they being like that? Yeah. I mean, I never do that. It's just not part of my personality. But I guess I'm less insecure about certain things. I'd probably do it with my wife if she threatens me about something that she notices that particular point that's going to upset me. Your NFT collection. Yeah, exactly. The NFT collection. There we go. Yeah, I do think the insecurity angle is the right one. That's also like the laser-eyed Bitcoin maxis, the ones that are really loud and tribal. They get insecure because there's like things about Bitcoin that are worth like talking about and they just want to brush that under the rug.

1:03:21And you get that about every single loud people, loud tribes on crypto. I've just learned those are loud and insecure are almost the same thing. Yeah. So finishing off, you guys started another chapter as well, which is the VC fund. Talk to me about that because that's super interesting. Yeah. So over the course of, I would say the last three years, as David mentioned, we've always been crypto investors on the journey. And so we've obviously backed that up with investments in some of the publicly traded tokens, let's call them, in kind of the open markets. We've also been angel investing over this time, too.

1:04:02And so unfortunately, because of accredited investor laws and all sorts of other reasons, there are projects that don't have anything that retail can kind of invest into. And so they're kind of in the pre-token, pre-public type phase. And so for the last three years or so, I think David and I have been involved in 70 or something different investments. Again, this is crypto infrastructure building in the future. And so what we decided to do is essentially parlay all of this into more of a structured VC fund. It was becoming unwieldy to manage. David and myself, you have spreadsheets of kind of your investments and tracking all of this.

1:04:43So we decided to formalize this and spin this up into bankless ventures is what we're calling it. And so we brought on a partner who's absolutely fantastic. His name is Ben Lakoff, and he has helped organize all of the activity. We've recruited a team. And so we are staying on kind of the frontier of what crypto is building and some of these early stage seed level crypto projects. And that allows us to do that. So I think we've already invested in or getting ready to invest in four to five different things. And, you know, we just finished a$30 million fundraise, which was difficult-ish to do in this type of 2023.

1:05:25Although it's brilliant timing to launch a VC. But as ever, it's the hardest time to launch to raise bloody capital in the middle of that. Yes. So it's just complementary with everything we've been doing as investors in the crypto journey, trying to build tools to help people go bankless. It is a crypto fund, VC fund. So it's got a 10-year time horizon. So again, one of the ethics that we've always observed at Bankless is long-term games with long-term people. So this isn't a type of fund that receives tokens and then dumps them on the community. We have a very long-term time horizon. And so it's just complimentary with everything that we've been doing in the space up to date and keeps us sharp from a content and thesis perspective, too, because we get to see what's happening in the very early stages.

1:06:10Yeah, the long term goal of the ventures is to that, like Ryan said, there's a lot of activities that we're already doing, right? We're already doing angel investing. This conversation about ventures really got started when we were talking about like, hey, we're doing a lot of angel investing. What if we just hired an analyst to help us just research these angel deals a little bit more? And then we're like, oh, that's more than half of a VC firm that we already have. We've got the deal flow. We're writing the checks. If we hire an analyst, we might as well just do this thing outright. And so the idea is we spin this thing up.

1:06:38We pass all of our deal flow in through ventures. We hire out a team to turn it into a professionalized, streamlined operation that is dotting I's and crossing T's in the ways that maybe Ryan and I weren't when we were doing this individually because we didn't have the time. But now we have the team to get that done. And my long-term idea for what Ventures does is it actually, hopefully, informs the podcast about these frontiers that we are exploring. So the idea is like, well, the podcast and the newsletter and bankless media grows the network that bankless ventures can latch onto and get deal flow from just because that's our network, right?

1:07:11Monetizing the network. It's a 360-degree kind of flywheel that you can build from this. Yes. and then because of the information and education that we are able to scale through the research team at Ventures, like we are able to be more informed on the podcast. But I do want to draw a very clear line that the podcast and media entities are very much firewalled from content from the venture firm. Like they're just because you're a deal that goes for Bankless Ventures doesn't mean just get to waltz on the podcast. You have to earn it just like everyone else. So there's no like back and forth there.

1:07:43I'm just laughing myself knowing that this time in four or five years time at the bottom of the bear market, that's exactly the stick you'll be beating with. Oh, we're already, yeah. People are already doing it and it hasn't even been an issue. Yeah, right. I think one defense against that, and I don't know what you guys have done at Real Vision, but I'd be curious to kind of compare notes, is have the best disclosures in the business. And so that means basically wherever possible, we are fully transparent with our crypto holdings and our crypto wallets and what BBC owns at any point in time. The great news about this, lack of privacy on chain also means anyone can look at your address and see exactly what you're holding.

1:08:22Having a disclosures page that is continuously updated so that people know exactly what David holds, exactly what I hold, exactly what members of our team are holding at any given time. So we just say, we have a thesis. Of course, we're investors on the bankless journey. We're pursuing that thesis. Of course, we're going to, we're not, we're not journalists. Like we're, we're going to, uh, invest in things that we believe in, right. As should you like, that's our encouragement is be an investor in the space. That's how to kind of maximize the opportunity. And so as long as we have some of the best disclosures in the business, I think that is the ultimate kind of shield and we can always direct people to there.

1:09:02It's all fully transparent. You can, you can see it at any point in time, you know, exactly what we're holding. And then we disclaim them, uh, you know, as we go through the content. Yeah. I just tell people, as you know, I just tell it because I don't, I don't trade a lot. I don't do special situations. I'm not involved in stuff. So I just tell people, this is my rough waiting and this is what I'm doing and this is what I own. And that's it. I think it's pretty normal for people to be like skeptical at, at front. It's like, Oh, the biggest podcast in this space is doing a VC fund. Like what's going on with that?

1:09:34So like the gut reaction I think is totally justifiable, but we're going to do the same thing that we did with Bankless, which is like, nothing's going to change. We're going to be here. The podcast won't change and we will earn the legitimacy once again. And also you will find a way over time, because I know you believe in it, to allow regular people to invest in this kind of opportunity. That's what we're working on at Real Vision as well. Even for the asset management firm, which is separate to Real Vision, everything is all the same thing. And it's this democratization of finance. And that's what we're trying to get to.

1:10:09Guys, listen, it was fantastic to have you on, really enjoyed the conversation. It was good to turn the tables and hear your stories. Because I think, you know, your stories, because you're so much the other side of the camera, they're as important, you know, you have you play an important part in this ecosystem. And just to hear that, I think it's fabulous. So thank you for sharing your time with us. Thanks, Raul. Thanks, Raul. It's been fun. David and Ryan great guys really fun passionate about what they do and they make a real difference it's a shame to see that they too have to go through the tribalism the hatred that Scott Melker's gone through that I've gone through many others in the space have gone through it is a feature of what this space is about unfortunately right now but all we can do is work together to make this space better and to give people the opportunities that they deserve to navigate this over time.

1:10:59Anyway, great conversation and really inspiring. What's up, revolutionaries? Thanks for tuning in. For more content like this, head over to realvision.com and get unfiltered access to the very best, brightest, and biggest names in finance.