The Alfalfa Podcast | Layer Zero

The Alfalfa Podcast—comprised of Arman Assadi, Nick Urbani, Stephen Cesaro, and Eric Johanson—is the shared mindspace of “four radically moderate internet and finance entrepreneurs.” The Alfalfa bros wash down mezcal with hot takes about crypto, the macro outlook, politics, investing, and philosophy. This one is a lot of fun. Also, is this episode a try-out for the Alfalfa Podcast to join the Bankless Network? We’re not totally sure, so you’ll have to let us know! ------ 📣 ALCHEMIX | Get a self-repaying loan today! https://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALED ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum ❎ ACROSS | BRIDGE TO LAYER 2 https://bankless.cc/Across 🏦 ALTO IRA | TAX-FREE CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/AltoIRA 👻 AAVE V3 | LEND & BORROW CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/aave ⚡️ LIDO | LIQUID ETH STAKING https://bankless.cc/lido 🔐 LEDGER | NANO S PLUS WALLET https://bankless.cc/Ledger ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 6:53 Alfalfa Origins 12:55 Nick Urbani 17:39 Arman Assadi 20:35 Eric Johanson 23:08 Stephen 31:40 The Vibe 35:30 Alfalfa vs Bankless 43:08 Squad Wealth 48:45 Authenticity 55:00 Bullish 1:02:53 Bearish 1:11:45 Macro, BTC, ETH 1:17:05 Is David Bearish? 1:22:08 The Merge Trumps Macro 1:29:06 Priced In 1:42:20 Why Alfalfa? ------ Resources: The Alfalfa Podcast https://linktr.ee/alfalfapod Nick Urbani https://twitter.com/NUrbani?s=20&t=1wXIWr2RUOfyHKw9zJqREw https://twitter.com/NUrbani?s=20&t=1wXIWr2RUOfyHKw9zJqREw Arman Assadi https://twitter.com/ArmanAssadi?s=20&t=1wXIWr2RUOfyHKw9zJqREw https://twitter.com/ArmanAssadi?s=20&t=1wXIWr2RUOfyHKw9zJqREw Stephen Cesaro https://twitter.com/StephenCesaro?s=20&t=1wXIWr2RUOfyHKw9zJqREw https://twitter.com/StephenCesaro?s=20&t=1wXIWr2RUOfyHKw9zJqREw Eric Johanson https://www.linkedin.com/in/ericjohanson1/ ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You don't talk about this stuff on Bankless.

• 0:04David Hoffman?

  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. Cypher punks 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 always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I have a very, very special episode. I'm extremely excited about this one because I have not one, not two, not three, but four guests. The four members of the Alpha Alpha Podcast, and I met these four individuals, you will hear this story in the podcast, during my times in San Diego, and they have been grinding away at producing an All In-style podcast. For those that enjoy the All In podcast,

• 0:49David Hoffman?

  this is one of those, and they talk about a very wide range of subjects, not just from the crypto world, because they are all very deep in the crypto world, but they also talk about things that you might not hear out of Bankless, other components of the crypto industry, but also other investment strategies that have nothing to do with crypto, and also just life advice and politics and just some other topics that you would definitely not get out of Bankless. This has kind of turned into the other half of my podcasting side of things, where there's Bankless going very, very deep in the crypto world, and then there's the Alpha Alpha Podcast for literally everything else. And these four guys that I met here in San Diego have turned into some of my closest friends, and they are becoming great podcasters.

• 1:34David Hoffman?

  And so before I made my exodus out of San Diego, I called them all over to my apartment, and we did an Alpha Alpha Podcast together, but I co-opted the whole thing, and I was the host, and that is what you are about to hear today on Bankless Layer Zero. So I thoroughly hope you enjoy this co-opted episode of the Alpha Alpha Podcast, because if the Bankless Nation likes this, this might be a regular thing that you might hear as one of our many, many podcasts in our podcast network. So. I hope you guys enjoy this podcast and we'll get right to it right after we talk to some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. The era of proof of stake is upon us and Lido is bringing proof of stake to everyone. Lido is a decentralized staking protocol that allows users to stake their proof of stake assets using Lido's distributed network of nodes.

• 2:17David Hoffman?

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• 2:59David Hoffman?

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• 3:41David Hoffman?

  assets between Ethereum, Optimism, Arbitrum, or Boba networks. If you're trying to grow and preserve your crypto wealth, optimizing your taxes is just as lucrative as trying to find the next hidden gem. Alto IRA can help you invest in crypto in tax-advantaged ways to help you preserve your hard-earned money. Alto Crypto IRA lets you invest in more than 150 coins and tokens with all the same tax advantages of an IRA. They make it easy to fund your alternative IRA or crypto IRA via your 401K. Or by contributing directly from your bank account. There is no setup or account fees and it's all you need to do to invest in crypto tax-free. Let me repeat that again. You can invest in crypto tax-free. Diversify like the pros and trade without tax headaches.

• 4:24David Hoffman?

  Open an Alto Crypto IRA to invest in crypto tax-free. Just go to altoira.com/banklist. That's A-L-T-O-I-R-A dot com slash banklist and start investing in crypto today. Welcome Bankless Nation to a one-of-a-kind show on Bankless. Brand-new guests, a brand-new format, different kind of content. We've got four members of the Alpha Alpha Podcast and here they are. On our hands, we've got a yield farmer with a chip in his brain. He can calculate APY in his head, but he can't understand the opposite gender, which is ironic because he's got more farms than you've had girlfriends. Ladies and gentlemen, DGEN Spartans Apprentice, Steven Cesaro. Thank you, that was beautiful. Yeah, you like that one? Welcome, buddy.

• 5:08David Hoffman?

  Coming up next, a man who's confused as to whether he's an investor or a painter. He can't really sell his art because he only accepts ETH. The man whose cash flow is up only, but his portfolio just bores me. He's built a lot of companies, but none of them count because they don't have tokens. I think he's got a Crypto Punk, but at least there's one on his hat. He's the reason why we're all here today and why we'll all be hungover tomorrow. Nick or Bonnie?

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Hello, hello. Please buy my art, I have a habit to support.

• 5:38David Hoffman?

  Coming in hot, the Chinese Dutchman. He's got CFA in his Twitter handle, so you can't really trust him. The only person here who's got an actual job, but at least is funneling boomer bills into our bags. Ladies and gentlemen, the crypto financial analyst, Eric Johansson.

• 5:51Speaker 00

  I got you guys, yeah. Dollar bills are coming in.

• 5:55David Hoffman?

  And last but not least, the latest and greatest, holding down the fort. When he talks to his Insta stories, it feels like he's talking to me. If he were an author, he'd write romance novels with himself as the main character. The man that identifies as a beard, our man Asadi.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  I've never felt more flattered.

• 6:12David Hoffman?

  That's good.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  That was perfect.

• 6:14Speaker 00

  Beautiful beard.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  That was perfect. I think we got one more. I think we have one more. Right. The only thing he's rug-pulling is the city of San Diego. Crypto girl swoon, but he is in a committed relationship with his plants. He feeds us more smoked salmon than alpha. It's the Slayer of Moloch, our fearless friend, leading us into the frontier. David Hoffman, everyone.

• 6:37Speaker 03

  Trust us, Dave.

• 6:40Speaker 00

  That's so good. I'm so glad I didn't read those beforehand. Steven hasn't read a single message on our text thread. Never read a message. Two years.

• 6:47David Hoffman?

  Oh, and you can tell because he tunes in about three hours late and he's like, guys, what have you been talking about? Okay, so Bankers Nation, this is the Alpha Alpha Podcast. These are for DeFi Dejins that I've met in my time here in San Diego. And I'm very sad to leave them, but they are hard committed to their podcasts. And so their podcast is going to be the main topic of conversation today. So to get started on that, whose idea was Alpha Alpha Podcast? How did this get started?

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a good question.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Take him to the tipsy talk.

• 7:14Speaker 03

  I don't know if I would say it was my idea, but I have, I have my flow with Armon Asadi podcast.

• 7:19Speaker 00

  It was definitely your idea.

• 7:20Speaker 03

  Okay, I pulled them into this and I pulled them individually onto my podcast. And then eventually I said, what if we all got together and did one together? We called it Tipsy Talk and they were a hit. And mostly just because I had a blast and I had fun and I'm sitting with my three best friends in the world, getting to shoot the shit, talk life, alpha, politics, investing, crypto. And then we did a second one and a third one. And then I just started incessantly pushing the idea of a podcast. It's like, why are we doing this on my show? This should be its own thing. How many months did it take to like fully get you guys moving though?

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Armon's got another nickname. It's the wolf because the wolf will pressure you, fear pressure you into doing things. We have lots of all cap, all cap text messages.

• 8:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, none of us like the idea of being like a persona online, actually. Except Armon, really.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Love it.

• 8:12Speaker 00

  Steven, Steven kind of likes it too, but like, I think like Nick and I have been like kind of avoiding, sort of putting our head out of this hole. And now like we're being coaxed and.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  You're so good at it. You guys are fucking natural.

• 8:23Speaker 00

  It feels, it feels good now.

• 8:24Speaker 03

  This is destiny. So it's happening. That's the inception and yeah, we're like 24, 25 episodes in. I think it's the best thing we've ever done.

• 8:32David Hoffman?

  I've been watching it through and through and it's getting better and better and better and more and more Dejan, you guys are coming out of your personalities as this goes along. But why does the world need Alpha Alpha? What, what is the alpha that Alpha Alpha has to bring to the table?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  I mean, I think, you know, Bankless has its values, right? And those come through and through through the content and how you guys conduct yourself and your guys' perspectives on the industry. And I think we definitely have our values as well. Like, our core values are that, you know, it's critical for people to have a group of friends that they respect and they think are thoughtful to kind of dissect the world around them and figure out what is our perspective and how do we go forward. So whether you have a crew, you know, in person with your friends or not, like, come join us. We think that, you know, it's success, it's critical to be successful in life and to get fulfillment, to have people to bounce ideas off of. So we go into crypto and investing is number one. We talk a little politics, you know, and, and I think most people don't want to get

• 9:25Speaker 02

  into politics or be active, but the next best thing is to be informed, you know, over time, create a perspective for yourself so you could talk about it with your friends and maybe create change that way. And then, yeah, of course, a little life alfalfa because we're all good friends. We've been friends for a long time. We help each other out through the opportunities life presents itself and the troubles. So naturally, we got to help each other out and make sure we miss the, you know, philosophical pitfalls of being a crypto degen investor, I think.

• 9:52David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think at Bankless, we definitely try and promote everyone to just basically take the crypto pill and stop taking every other pill and only think about crypto for the rest of your life, like, only buy ETH, only buy Bitcoin, only think about the merge, only think about ETH staking, because we got to promote crypto to the rest of the world. And I think you guys are the much more healthy and balanced side of that. It's like, okay, here's how crypto fits into the world. Here's how you can integrate this and have a part of your life. But then when you talk about life alfalfa, you also talk about work-life balance and just like how to do other things in relation to all your investments. You guys are all crypto people, but crypto is part of my identity and I don't think you guys have that. You haven't gone that far down into the crypto world.

• 10:36Speaker 03

  So, you know, it was Eric that actually said this one time. He's like, "I don't give a fuck if it's called crypto or it's called smorgasbord or whatever the hell it is. It's the thing that's interesting right now that's giving me the most alpha. It's the thing in life right now that we are paying the most attention to. It doesn't matter what it is, but that's where we're currently putting our attention." But, you know, you come from like trad-fi background and that's what became most exciting to you and we all started pivoting toward that. But it could be anything. It's just the common denominator, I think, right now.

• 11:02Speaker 00

  Oh, I'm a devout listener to the Bankless Podcast and I give you guys a lot of credit in my adoption into this industry. And like, one thing I noticed was when you were talking with SBF, he said he chased the money into crypto. And then he like got sort of pillowed by the values and that's exactly where I'm at. Like I wanted the returns, but then after like getting deeper and deeper into it and like especially listening to what you guys are talking about, I'm like, wait a second, this is like actually better for humanity.

• 11:34David Hoffman?

  Crypto should by its own merits like work their way into everyone's portfolios. But I think you guys like, I will never say that like crypto is not the right time to get into crypto. Because because of like, it's more for like, you know, you can get in here as a long-term investment, not just for you and your financial assets, no matter what part of the cycle that you're in, because crypto is good for the world. But you guys are like, well, it kind of feels like a top right now, guys. Like, man, but let's start talking about real estate and like some other assets.

• 12:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do owe it to Steven though, for dragging us along, like big time. I think, yeah, maybe I pushed the podcast, but Steven's the one that dragged us along with crypto. Hello, Lord.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  But this is a good entrance for the DeFi nihilists, speaking of toppy tops and what we're gonna do.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  What do you want to talk about? Everything's dead, we're all gonna die?

• 12:21David Hoffman?

  Is everything dead, we're all gonna die?

• 12:24Speaker 04

  Almost everything, yeah.

• 12:26David Hoffman?

  Yeah?

• 12:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's a rough time out there right now.

• 12:29David Hoffman?

  You're a fan of this is gonna be as bad, as bloody as all the previous cycles?

• 12:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm kind of open to the idea that it could be worse.

• 12:37David Hoffman?

  Oh, God.

• 12:38Speaker 04

  In a lot of ways.

• 12:39David Hoffman?

  All right, let's change subjects.

• 12:42David Hoffman?

  This mess calls tasting like today.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  I don't know, how sunny, do you want to keep this thing?

• 12:47David Hoffman?

  I think after we will return to the DeFi nihilist last, because we'll go into that after after we do all of this. And so we've talked a little bit about what alfalfa is. It's a bunch of different things, a little bit of crypto, a little bit of real estate, a little bit of normal finance, a little bit of life alfalfa. I'm sure you guys talk about even like health stuff sometimes every now and then too. So let's go into each one of you guys, just to explore who you guys are for the audience, for the Bankless audience. We'll end with Steven, so he can just bring us all down again. But we'll start with Nick, because Nick and I have an interesting story about how I met him.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Should we talk about our origin story?

• 13:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah, you want to do that?

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Oh, man. Well, I was showcasing some art at a local neighborhood art festival. And this guy comes up and says, can I take a picture of your art? Well, your art's amazing, by the way. Oh, thank you, thank you. It's only purchased on ETH.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  He says, can I take a picture of your art? And I'm like, sure, go ahead and do a double take. And I'm like, oh, God, this is gonna be really weird. And I'm like, hey, man, are you the guy on the Bankless Podcast? And he's like, oh, yeah, sure. Well, what a crazy weird fan again. And, you know, are you into crypto? And I pull off my hat, which has my CryptoPunk on it, and show it as like my verified street cred that I am in fact into crypto. Point to the QR code that says only purchased on ETH. And then he just leaves me, just ghosts of me. Well, see you later. Our story could have just ended.

• 14:11David Hoffman?

  That could have been it. That could have been the whole thing.

• 14:14Speaker 02

  Ended very quickly. Could have been like one of those like misconnections on Craigslist. Well, how are you feeling in that moment when he's just like, cool, well, see ya? I was like, well, yeah, like ghosted at a bar. I wanted to post on Craigslist misconnections. Guy with black CryptoPunk hat, sorry I didn't get your number.

• 14:35Speaker 02

  But luckily, David came back a few hours later. And, you know, I told him, I said, hey, we got this group of guys that get together typically every Wednesday. We like to dive deeper into crypto and life and be a little thoughtful. I think it'd be cool if, you know, you come by. And I think from there, a little hundred of friendship seeds were planted.

• 14:53David Hoffman?

  Yeah, no, that's about right. From my perspective on things, I was on my way to the gym. And so I had gym on my mind, but there was the art walk going on. So I was like, I'll take the long way to the gym and I'll check out all the art. And that's when I saw your painting of all the fists, the power fists with all the skin tones on it. And then I yeet out of that conversation very quickly. And I'm in the gym and I'm like, this is like, not even two months of my time in San Diego. And I'm like, just doing the foam roller, just like reflecting on, oh, I just met a guy about my age. Except he lives like a couple of blocks down from me. He owns a CryptoPunk. So clearly he's into it. And I just was like, all right, bye. And just like, my social awkwardness was like, oh, yeah, this is where you make friends, David. This is like how friends happen.

• 15:37David Hoffman?

  And so like, I'm at the gym, I'm like, oh, I gotta go find that guy. And thank God I did, because that's how I found the rest of you guys.

• 15:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's good because I told my girlfriend I was sad and then I was happy when he came back. It all worked out.

• 15:50David Hoffman?

  But a little bit more about Nick, like you're a painter, but you also have a-

• 15:54Speaker 03

  A hell of a fighter.

• 15:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, hell of a fighter, yeah. So like, what alfalfa do you have to bring to the table?

• 15:59Speaker 02

  Well, let's see, started in TradFi, managing money in 401k plans and quickly saw digital media and digital marketing like growing. Figured a trend I need to get on and not be left behind. So started, helped build a digital marketing consulting firm that turned out pretty well. And then got hired by one of our clients to be CEO of the company. It was a growing software company. And there learned how to manage large groups of software engineers. And at some point I was like, well, I'm going to take this skill and go off on my own. And so had like a few companies that did pretty well and kind of find myself managing two e-commerce companies right now, operating them. And got into crypto in 2017, I think between companies.

• 16:40Speaker 02

  And like many people was asking myself, you know, how do I like intelligently manage my money and my investments and do a good job? And then proceeded to do the exact opposite and trade shitcoins on Coinbase all day long like it was my job. And luckily, you know, made it out alive and got back in like 2019, early 2020. Talked with Steven about Bitcoin, about, you know, potential store of value. And then on Wednesday, Steven starts showing up telling he's getting 50, 100% plus yields on these food tokens. Sushi, Uniswap, Pancake Swap, and I think- Yeah. He lost millions of dollars selling his Pancake Swap too earlier. And I was like, wait a second, should I, should I get involved in this?

• 17:21Speaker 02

  And I think the rabbit hole just got really big all of a sudden and just sucked me in. And, you know, we started a little crypto gaming guild as a sandbox to kind of learn the area, learn the players, learn the economics. And try not to scratch the itch to build just yet. Just enjoying the conversations with the boys in the alfalfa podcast for now.

• 17:40David Hoffman?

  And that is Nick Rabbani, ladies and gentlemen. Let's turn to the man who identifies as a beard.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 17:47David Hoffman?

  Armon, what's your story?

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Oh, my story. So lately, I've been calling myself a thinker, builder, and creator because it's almost impossible to

• 17:55David Hoffman?

  Very romantic of you.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 17:58David Hoffman?

  Such a novelist.

• 18:01Speaker 03

  It's impossible to encapsulate yourself. And, you know, the great Alan Watts, a hero of mine, always said like, "It's irrelevant to describe the past. It's just whoever you are today." So I'm a thinker. I'm very philosophical. I love modern psychology as well. I spend a lot of my time reading random shit that most people aren't interested in. But every once in a while, I get to sprinkle it into alfalfa. Every once in a while, I get to go really deep down the rabbit hole with these guys. Especially this guy. He likes to follow me down into these crazy ass places. And that's where I get the most enjoyment out of life. Builder, building a company called Collective Shift right now, crypto analysis education platform.

• 18:40Speaker 03

  We're doing some huge things. And creator, you know, podcaster, actually am an author, working on the first book. It's not a romance, not a romance model. It's very philosophical. It's tentative title is Unleashed. And yeah, man, I'm just creating, I'm building. I have this incessant burning desire to put everything I have inside of me out on the court. Like, I have the constant awareness that I am a mortal being and one day I will no longer be here. And I also realize that most of the great people that we remember from the past, we barely remember. They are forgotten. And the best case scenario for them is that they get a statue. And sometimes even the statue gets torn down because society says, "Fuck that person now."

• 19:25Speaker 03

  So what am I here for? What am I trying to do? I'm constantly thinking about that. I think it's a driving force for my whole life. And if it wasn't for these guys and my friends and the amazing people in San Diego, I'm really sad to lose you.

• 19:38Speaker 03

  You'd be lost. It's the most important thing in life. I mean, we tweeted about this the other day. So that's the thing I'm most grateful for in life is people and experiences.

• 19:46David Hoffman?

  Yeah. And Armon is the, in the intro, I had the guy who's back is broken from carrying this podcast. He is the meat. The guy with all the

• 19:54Speaker 03

  It was actually like a very healing way to say that. And like, you feel so validated. So valuable. Thank you so much.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Somebody finally recognizes our one. Thank you, David, for the conflict resolution.

• 20:09David Hoffman?

  You guys are gonna have to go to group therapy after this one. Or maybe that's what this is. He's the one with all the microphones and all the cabling and also does all the content editing. And so he's the reason why Alfalfa looks like Bankless, if you follow it on Instagram.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  We're trying.

• 20:21David Hoffman?

  And you, well, I think, actually, I think you guys kind of edit your clips even hotter than than we do sometimes.

• 20:25Speaker 03

  To be clear, I don't actually edit them, but yes, we make it happen.

• 20:28David Hoffman?

  I don't, I don't edit them either, brother.

• 20:31Speaker 02

  Louis is gonna step his game up.

• 20:36David Hoffman?

  All right, coming third, third but not least, Eric, who are you, man?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  Okay, so my story begins at San Diego State University. I was not a CFA at this point. I was filming MTV dating shows, working, trying to work in the NFL. I was working for the San Diego Chargers as an intern. And like, I was also like making straight A's and being on the dean's list and stuff. Thank goodness I met these boys, because they like sort of redirected my energies towards like, what I would call like my, my career pursuits. And, you know, I think, after, after graduating college, I went into like corporate finance, investment finance, or whatever. But, you know, in 2019, Nick and Armon brought Steven around. Steven introduced me to this thing called DeFi. And from there, I was like,

• 21:24Speaker 00

  wait a second. I had previously thought of crypto like in the, in the Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger sort of like way. I was like, this shit is so scammy and disgusting. And then when I was, I saw that these were not just speculative coins. They could be like used as capital assets or, or, you know, like collateral. I was like, wait a second, there, there might be legs here. And then I dug deeper in and like got into LPing and everything. I like, I really was unleashed in that like early COVID time when we were still meeting up on Wednesdays. Everyone else was kind of locked in, but we were, we were like doing our little pod. And it was awesome.

• 22:00Speaker 02

  Who, who owns the rights to Eric's baptism? Who set up his crypto baptism of setting up his Metamask wallet? Was it you? Or?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  First of all, nobody. I leaned on Steven at some point. I was like, okay, so. I I I put two assets in LP and Steven's like, I'm drunk. I'm like, well, I'm down like $400 on gas. Like, help me. And you're like, I'm too drunk. And I was like, what? I didn't understand. And like, gas was so high, like during Devi summer. Like, I was just like, lost. I didn't know what I was doing. I had this LP token and like, I didn't know how to stake that. I was just like, I figured it out on my own. But these, these were like educational expenses and, you know.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  And now you got, you know, TradFi, like wealth management clients coming to you saying, hey.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  So I think like, yeah, Scope Wealth Management is, is the TradFi firm and we're, we're like, we've been moving more and more towards crypto ever since. And I, I like attribute all that to like our early conversations, particularly Steven sort of like ushering us all down this path.

• 22:58David Hoffman?

  Wait, the guy that, that lost a million dollars on Pancake Swap is the reason why you're coming?

• 23:04Speaker 00

  Steven made a lot of money on Pancake Swap. He just did top ticket is multimillion.

• 23:10David Hoffman?

  All right, Steven, the man that made a million dollars on Pancake Swap, who the hell are you?

• 23:14Speaker 04

  I, I wish I made a million dollars on Pancake Swap. I think I bought it at a penny and sold it at eight cents and thought I was a genius. And then it went up to like $38.

• 23:25Speaker 04

  I, I was very early on that kind of, uh, people want to farm and Binance chain is cheap, so people are going to go there, right? And a lot of people were kind of doing the big brain, oh no, Ethereum is decentralized. People don't want that. And I was like, no, people want to gamble. I'm going to start farming on Pancake Swap. But I, I didn't, I didn't really have an exit strategy. I just, I threw like five grand in there and it went up to like 100 grand. I was like, I should probably sell. And then like I checked like a couple of months later and it would have been like 3 million, you know? I have a lot of stories like that from the last bull room.

• 23:58Speaker 02

  Give us some Bridgewater, maybe poker, professional poker players.

• 24:01Speaker 04

  Oh, my, my.

• 24:02David Hoffman?

  Go back to the chip in the brain reference.

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, so out of college, my first job was working as a emerging market bonds trader for Bridgewater, which is Ray Dalio's hedge fund. That was during the great financial crisis. So that was like a baptism by fire for me. Fortunately, I went in, I realized we were short the world and immediately sold all of my stocks because I figured they were probably smarter than me. So I did well on that trade, did badly on some other trades. I remember one time I accidentally bought $100 million of Brazilian bonds instead of selling them.

• 24:39Speaker 00

  Fat finger.

• 24:41Speaker 04

  Which is a pretty big fat finger. It's my biggest fat finger of all time. They didn't fire me, which is really nice. We accidentally made money on the trade.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  That happens.

• 24:54Speaker 04

  In spite of all the slippage, we incurred getting out of it, which is a lot. But during the time at Bridgewater, I was playing online poker as like a hobby. And it kind of got to the point where I was like hating my life. And I figured out how to like exploit this online poker game by buying in short, you know, with the minimum and kind of using this like strategy where I didn't have to think and I could play 20 tables. And we called it rat-holing back in the day. And everybody on the internet hated me. I had like a target on my back in the online community, but I didn't care. So I ended up just, I quit that job. One day I became a professional poker player, stopped kind of exploiting and then ended up playing a lot of like high stakes heads up.

• 25:39Speaker 00

  Were you playing heads up against Phil Ivey for two weeks straight?

• 25:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, when I moved to San Diego, I was just trying to meet people for the first time. And I met some other poker players and I just told them like, hey, I want to play Phil Ivey in this game. I can beat him. I'm better than him at this game. He's not good.

• 25:59Speaker 04

  And for some reason, nobody was like, that's a stupid idea. Everybody was like, yeah, here's like a hundred grand. Here's like, so yeah, like my third or fourth night in San Diego, I was sitting in my little beach house that I rented. I was playing Phil Ivey, like 500, 1000, no limit, or whatever the biggest game on Phil tilt was at the time. And I was like, I had to use two hands on the mouse because I was shaking so hard. I remember the very first hand, like, this is, this is an honest to God, true story. I got pocket kings. And I was like, oh, you're so fucked, Phil. So he raised, I re-raised, he went

• 26:36Speaker 04

  all in, I called, he had aces. Immediately lost $30,000. I was 24 at the time, too. So I was like, oh, my God. But that ended up being the most I was ever down in that match. I came back, I think I won like a million, a million and a half or something off of him. And then he quit me. And then I got a lot of free drinks for a while.

• 26:59Speaker 03

  When did nihilism start?

• 27:01Speaker 04

  No, that started at a far earlier age.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  To be fair, I actually don't think you're a nihilist. I just like calling you.

• 27:08Speaker 04

  I do sometimes. But yeah, I played poker for a while. Ultimately, the government, you know, kind of ban hammered us. Came down one day, opened up my computer, there was like an FBI logo on the screen. And I was living with four friends in a house at the time that we kind of bought together. We were playing poker and we just looked at each other like, that's, that's bad, right? It's just like, you look at, we had this like kind of a room, it looked like a NASA kind of control station. There's monitors all around the whole room. We converted this whole room into like a poker den. And like, you looked around the whole room and there's just like FBI symbols. I could smell that disgusting room. Yeah. So, so I was like, I need to find a new career. Kind of got into internet

• 27:53Speaker 04

  marketing for a bit and did well there. Along the whole way, I was always into crypto, you know, I found it because of poker. A lot of guys found poker, found crypto because it was, it was posted on the, the two plus two forums was where we all hung out back in the day. And like, there's tons of people in crypto from the poker world because it kind of translates over. Yeah, I was looking back at some old messages like a couple of years ago from 2010, I think, where I was messaging a guy trying to buy $5,000 worth of Bitcoin and swap them for PokerStars money. And I, like, the price was like, it was like a dollar or something.

• 28:31Speaker 04

  And I didn't end up doing the deal because I couldn't figure out how to make the wallet work back then. And that was a mistake. And in 2013, I finally bought some. I had like a half million dollars or something worth of it when it was like 300 or 400 bucks. And I was like, sold it all. 2017 rolled around and I was like, you know what the lesson to learn here is? Never sell. So I put like, you know, 80 grand into it. I think I ran it up to $4 million in like six or seven months trading altcoins and stuff. And then like immediately lost like all of it. I think I think I left with like 100 grand.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  So, so, so learning the, you know, adjusted again. Okay. So the answer is not to never sell anything. And then, you know, I've been planning for this net last, last bull market to come around again. And when I, when I felt like it was time, you know, I was working in online marketing and I knew this guy. I didn't really know him. I just knew his screen name. There were a lot of people who were like Anons in like the online marketing world. Because people were doing shady stuff. So I just knew him as this kind of guy on Telegram. And he was just like, yo, bro.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Synthetics, Ave, Ethereum, Chainlink. I was like, what? He's like, Was it Van Spencer? That sounds like Van Spencer. Those are the, those are the, those are the, he just like, just kept saying that over and over again. And I was like, what are you talking about? Because I was like a hardcore Bitcoiner at the time because I'd just been annihilated and I hated shitcoins and I kind of hated crypto. But I mostly hated shitcoins and I thought Ethereum was a shitcoin. Everything was a shitcoin. But he was like, yo, you got a farm, you got a farm, bro. I was like, what are you talking about? He's like, you, you stake money and you get free money. I'm like, that sounds like a scam. And it was kind of, it was kind of a scam. Now you do it for a living. Well, I used to. Now it's all gone to zero, but.

• 30:25Speaker 04

  We had a good run for a while. So yeah, I tried the DeFi thing out like way early. I was farming all like the food stuff, like the yams and the grapes and like the, I don't know. It was, it was like the stupidest thing back in the day, but like I was obviously making tons of money. So I, I quit my company and I just went full-time crypto. Got really, really into it. I brought all these guys along with me. Shilled them CryptoPunks, which I sold way too early and, you know, a whole bunch of other stuff. So yeah, it's been a, it's been a fun ride. I mean, I think the, the DeFi farming thing is, is definitely done right now. So I've been

• 31:07Speaker 04

  trying to think like, what's the, what's the next thing?

• 31:10David Hoffman?

  I think of everyone here, you are definitely the resident Kobe in a sense that somehow you're like good at making money, also good at losing money, also super nihilist. I think, I think it all fits.

• 31:21Speaker 04

  I've just gotten rugged so many times at this point. Many of them just like self-induced rugs, you know, so I'm, I'm a little bit.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  We did have one, one listener remark, and maybe because of you that either I'm gonna get really rich or really poor, really, really quickly to listen to this, but otherwise it's gonna be fun. And I think it's mostly because of your DGEN farming for sure.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  I think that's my favorite review so far.

• 31:45David Hoffman?

  All right, guys. So now that we've established the characters, what's the through line? What's the through line behind all of you guys? Because you guys are all, not just podcast co-hosts, you guys are just also friends. But the best podcasts have the best banter because the best banter comes from the best friends. So what is the through line behind all of you?

• 32:00Speaker 04

  I mean, this, this pod, I think is, we, during COVID, we started doing this thing called like Men's Night. We found like the one place in town that was open still. Another thing I had to drag them to do.

• 32:11Speaker 02

  Yeah, that was all, that was because of you, dude. Great call.

• 32:14Speaker 04

  You did not have to drag me to do that. Also, you were like, you were like, do you want to do a podcast? And I said, yes.

• 32:20David Hoffman?

  That's true.

• 32:22Speaker 04

  So I, I reject this, this storyline. But yeah, we, we found this cigar lounge in, in Old Town, which was thriving during COVID because some city ordinances basically allowed them to take over the entire like plaza patio.

• 32:38Speaker 02

  It was outdoors, yeah.

• 32:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And they like quintupled their capacity and then they were the only place open. So they became the spa and we just started going there every Wednesday night and smoking cigars and hanging out.

• 32:49Speaker 03

  Churchill's San Diego, yes. And we were just like, let's just do this every night. Well, we'll call it like a men's night, which is not the most creative term, but you know, we went with it. And, and while we were out smoking cigars and drinking wine, everything, you know, we were always just talking about everything. Obviously, we talked about crypto a lot. It's where everybody kind of got like DeFi pilled for the first time and punk pilled for the first time. But we, we talk about other stuff too. Like, we love to talk about politics and culture and just business and, and life stuff, right? So I think this pod was an, an attempt by us to kind of like bring these Wednesday night discussions with friends where we're sort of trying to just sort through the world,

• 33:32Speaker 03

  right? And kind of make sense of everything and to just bring that to like a larger audience and try to replicate that.

• 33:39Speaker 02

  Yeah. We, we joke that we're for radical moderates and who are truth seekers. And I think we, we joke about the radical moderate part because the truth often lies in the middle. It, it lies in the gray and it lies in the purple in terms of political spectrums. And so what we're trying to do is just, you know, hash out as good friends and, and as hosts of the podcasts, you know, dish out and debate the investing, the, the policy and the life alpha that we can come across. So I think that's, that's primarily the through line.

• 34:07Speaker 03

  Which is so enjoyable. It's such an amazing thing to like swim in the messy gray ocean of, I don't quite know the answer. And most people are just like so quick to want to latch on to some sort of identity, some sort of, um, you know, group. Obviously, we talk about group thing all the time, but some sort of identity where they can say, who's going to do the thinking for me? Who's going to make this decision for me? Who's going to tell me what's right or wrong? But most people do not have the capacity and do not want to take on the, like the, the responsibility to make those decisions in the first place. And I think that's like, perhaps one of the through lines as well as like, we're trying to promote this idea of like, perhaps just who we are, but the idea of like, the responsibility

• 34:49Speaker 03

  could fall on the individual. And maybe you do have the tools to come up with the right answers. And maybe society could look very interesting if we all sat down and we trusted each other to Say, yeah, I can, I can sort through the mess. I can figure out what's fake from what's real. And it's going to get more difficult. It's going to get more crazy. But that really seems to be the only way that we can retain any sense of individual power. And that's what radical moderate means to me.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  Dave, as you, you got like indoctrinated into our crew by Nick, right? As, as you guys explained, but like, uh, when you came in to our circle, we were talking about all this stuff, you know, like not just crypto, but like also other life stuff. And you fit right in, like you, you were able to sort of like hold your own in all these conversations. You don't talk about this stuff on Bankless, right? Like Bankless has its own clear niche and it's very successful doing what it does. But you're so good at talking about other aspects of life too. And I feel like, uh, you, you fit perfectly in our little circle of, of talking about all aspects of life.

• 35:50David Hoffman?

  Yeah. When I listened to your, the first Alpha Alpha podcast, I can't remember which one it was. It was, it was, um, you guys were contending with so much different sources of information. It's like, well, here's what this source thinks, here's what this source thinks. And you guys were all bringing your own like thoughts about different sources to the table. And so I remember hearing, I can't remember what it was, but like you guys said, oh, well, Bankless said this, but then somebody else said that. And I'm like, well, we're right guys, but we're the right ones. But the, but the point is, it's just like, you guys are, are not a, uh, a, Bankless is like, we try and do primary research, we try and do our, do our own thought, but we project it out into the world and it's ultimately up to the listeners to come up with their version of the truth.

• 36:35David Hoffman?

  And a sad thing about the crypto industry is that so many people just want to be told what is true. Right? Uh, and so many projects lean on that and just to say like, well, there's so many people asking just, hey, please deliver me the truth so I can just get the alpha from it. Where you guys are coming in, you're integrating Bankless and you're integrating other experts in the field, regardless of whether it's about crypto or it's about like political matters or it's about whatever. And so where Alpha or excuse me, where Bankless is, is like, here's the information about Ethereum and ETH and the merge. You guys are like, "Well, here's what this authority said, here's what that authority said, and then let's throw all these topics and slam them together and see what we get out of them as individuals who are multifaceted and multidisciplinary."

• 37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we can get into the differences between the two podcasts for sure, but just to add on to that, I think most people are aware that the extremes are often the loudest voice. The extremes, the left, the right, the min, the max, are often the ones that get the most attention. And I think we all also know inherently that the truth does not lie on those extremes, and so it's a muddy middle. And we have to find groups of people that we respect, that we think are thoughtful, to hash through those. And we're not always going to get it right, but at least the process of questioning those things leads us to a little more truth. And yeah, hopefully make a little more money in the process and understand how we perceive the world along the way.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  I mean, I've often asked that, right? We've talked about this on the pod. It's like, how do you find any level of objective truth at all when you have all of this absolute chaos and madness and everyone has these terrible incentive structures to feed you lies? And I think this was one of your points, Nick. It's like, it comes down to the people you surround yourself with, because they're doing the filtering for you. So, one of the benefits of like, I don't know, listening to a podcast, or having a great group of friends, or listening to the podcast because they're like your auxiliary group of friends, is that they're doing that filtering for you, and you're determining the truth together. But in the same way as Bankless, you leave it up to the listener at the end of the day to determine for themselves, "What's the truth here?"

• 38:32David Hoffman?

  The angle that we try to promote at Bankless is that we don't teach you what to think, we teach you how to think. And so, we do have like, heavy emphasis on Ethereum, decentralization, and all those things, but we also promote how we got there in the first place. And I think that is there, the commonality between Alpha Alpha and Bankless, is it's not just, we don't skip to the conclusions, we process it together as a group, and then go through that journey together.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, I think, you know, Bankless is, is the best at teaching. Teaching a specific topic or an opportunity. I mean, you guys are impeccable about grabbing an expert and then using this Socratic method to kind of linearly bring the listener onto a new topic or a new opportunity. And I kind of think of like every sit, every time I sit down, I'm gonna sit down for class because I'm gonna learn something and you guys fulfill that promise every single time. And then I think like where Alpha Alpha comes in is like, well, when you leave class, you want to go to the bar and drink with your buddies and be like, what do we think about this topic? So they, they taught us a little bit how to think about this. They, they taught us this new topic. So let's sit around the bar and figure out, what do we think about this?

• 39:44Speaker 02

  How is, can we make money off this? And how do we position ourselves if we think it is an opportunity to take advantage of it? So I don't know. That's how I kind of find, you know, like where they, they two kind of parlay off each other and, and I appreciate.

• 39:56Speaker 03

  In other words, please never take us too seriously. Basically wasted.

• 40:03Speaker 00

  No, I actually like that. I, I like what you just said there because what Alpha Alpha does really well is that we, we are trying to make money too. Like it is about Alpha as well as truth. Like, uh, you know, you can get it, you can get it right, but if you don't make money getting it right, then you know, like, how do you make money? How do you make money?

• 40:25Speaker 04

  Armon doesn't care about money though. He's like, he's, he's above.

• 40:31Speaker 03

  It's a byproduct of.

• 40:33Speaker 04

  He's almost like hovering, like the whole podcast.

• 40:38Speaker 00

  We did a whole episode on like the idea of wealth and money too. Like, you know, the, the Mexican parable episode where it's like, it isn't about money necessarily, you know? You can, you can like get to the end circumventing the money just by like living this rich life that, that is doing what you love. And I think like that's very cool too.

• 40:56Speaker 02

  But the first thing we do in the podcast is talk about the money.

• 40:58Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 02

  Can we, I feel like I want to give a little intro to the agenda if that's okay, because I think it, it does give a little, you know, it signals some of the differences. So first of all, there's drinking involved. I think there's a, as, as we are now.

• 41:10Speaker 03

  Unless we have COVID.

• 41:11Speaker 00

  This is very good mezcal by the way, that we're all enjoying.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  So I think there's a two-drink minimum typically before we hit record. And we can only do it once a week. We can only do that to our bodies once a week. So it's a weekly podcast, comes out on Friday mornings. And right at the top, we hit the alfalfa round, which is basically round robin. You know, what trades, what actual trades and moves do we make in the market? And, you know, we know the bags the bankless crew is holding and they ain't wrong. But we try to dive a little deeper into like, what am I doing with my own money? You know, whether that's long, short, or sometimes it gets a little more.

• 41:44Speaker 04

  I mean, this round has been very sad recently.

• 41:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's true.

• 41:48Speaker 04

  It's a lot more exciting in the, in the bull market.

• 41:51Speaker 02

  For sure, but sometimes.

• 41:52Speaker 04

  What'd you do this week? Sold.

• 41:54Speaker 00

  Well, you know, there's been like an epic, epic money-making opportunity on the short side in the last like six months, actually, like, which I think a lot of us have taken advantage of.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  For sure. So we do a little more, you know, spicy stuff, like a little derivatives options, but more than BTC and ETH, some alts and NFTs, of course, is part of it. And then we hit into like crypto, like in, in making money as the number one priority. So, you know, it's usually driven by, by weekly events. And so we do, do our typical bull case for ETH for sure. And talk about Yuga land sales and stablecoin yields and stablecoin death spirals. We talked about some of our biggest investing mistakes and, and, you know, are we going to recession, how to play it? And then, like I said, the, the policy stuff is, is good to, for people to be informed and for all of us to kind of make a, make a, you know.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  We don't shy away.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  No, we don't shy away. I mean, we did talk a little Roe v. Wade overturning. We've talked about taxes on billionaires, you know, retrospectives on pandemic policy. And then of course, you know, a little life alfalfa. The boys have dived into experience, taking some mushrooms, maybe, exploring our behavioral biases when it comes to investing. You know, most life-changing purchases and, and goal-setting frameworks and.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Toilet additions.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Toilets. Yeah. So, so by the end of the life alfalfa, there's some, definitely some slurring going on, but hopefully, you know, there's some perspective.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, end on a high.

• 43:11David Hoffman?

  The enjoyable thing about listening to it is that it very much comes off as a squad. It's very big squad wealth vibes. And it's like, well, what's the point of making money together if I have no friends to take with me along the way? Right? And that's definitely something I've enjoyed just getting to know all of you guys is that like, while making money, making money comes first in the podcast, it's because you've got to end on a high note and you've got to end on the life alfalfa and then end on the friend alfalfa. I don't know if I'm just keep on butchering the word alfalfa over and again, but if that's how you guys use it.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  Just keep, just keep repeating it.

• 43:47Speaker 03

  Maybe it do existence.

• 43:48Speaker 02

  But I mean, to your point, we often talk about this Harvard study called the Grant Study. And it is to your point, it was a longitudinal study, it was an 80-year study where they took these Harvard graduates and they follow through them throughout their life, all the way till a lot of them were on their deathbed and even pass. And they interview them along the way. And funny enough, a lot of them show dispersion on where they ended up in life. But consistently, they found the most important thing, you know, throughout life and at the end of your life, was that your relationships, your community that you build. And for crypto people and listeners, it's online and in person as well, is what makes you happier. And in fact, having that close community and that group of respectable, thoughtful people to bounce off of

• 44:32Speaker 02

  actually influences a lot of health outcomes. So it helped create more wealth for those people, it helped create better health outcomes and help people.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  That was the surprise.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  That was the surprise.

• 44:41Speaker 03

  They were studying happiness. They wanted to know what fulfillment looks like. And then all of a sudden, these people lives longer and they were healthier. It was a huge surprise for them.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so I think that's like common, you know, a common thread, common to the values that like you need these groups of people. So, you know, we want people to come, come join us and partake and, and, you know, ask questions as well, you know, about, help us dive deeper into what should our perspective be about the world? And obviously crypto and into making money.

• 45:08David Hoffman?

  Yeah. What does squad wealth mean to you guys? Nice of you guys.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  Good question. I think the most important thing is to be able to share in the experiences, right? So as you get older, maybe you have kids, maybe you don't, maybe you move, maybe you don't. You want to start to partake in experiences that are more luxurious, that are more interesting. I think there's a very important factor of like watching out for hedonic adaptation, another major theme that I think actually unifies us. Yes, we all make money and we love what we do, but we're all very like aware of the fact that, you know, too much luxury can actually really hurt your level of enjoyment. So it's like, yeah, sure, I, I think like one of, one of you will probably be on Stephen's

• 45:53Speaker 03

  private jet, but the point, the point isn't that it's, it's deeply rooted in gratitude. It's deeply rooted in what we already have and having that and being appreciative of what you have creates more. And so I think the ability to then share in those extra bonus luxury cherry on top experiences becomes even sweeter as a result of it. That's what it means for me because if I was, you know, at, at, at a level where I wasn't able to either take care of my friends in the process and treat them to the entire experience, or they weren't able to participate with me, it would be completely meaningless.

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, when you find that alpha, it's, it's not fun if you just keep it for yourself, but if you and the whole crew can, can make money off it, how much more fun is it? And I think Balaji has this phrase like win and help win. And that's like a little mantra that I try to like, you know, repeat in my head is like win, but also let's make sure that everyone comes along for the ride because like it's just a whole lot more fun.

• 46:48Speaker 03

  I think part of the two, go ahead Eric, but part of it is like it's a positive sum game, it's an abundant game. We are all helping one another. I think that's a huge part of it. Like we've all at some point done some sort of like beneficial transaction with each other, but never in like a very formal, official way. It's just like, I'm going to help you, I'm going to invest in you, I'm going to give you my capital. Like there's so many ways in which you grow together and that squad wealth happens that way.

• 47:12David Hoffman?

  All right, all right, go ahead Eric.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Like my, my answer is more of a question and it's a question to all you guys. Like, uh, I'm sure we all have other friends outside of this table of five, right? And like, um, for me, I have friends that we talk about sports and girls, okay? Like that's just like so.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Great topics.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, great topics, but like this is like, uh, yeah, Stephen wants to kill himself.

• 47:38Speaker 00

  But these are like very, you know, they're like basil, you know, like this is like what you grew up talking about, right? And I, I still have that. I have that with other guys. But with this crew, that's unique is that like, we still have this like camaraderie and this friendship, but like the, the conversation is elevated. You know, like we talk about how to improve our lifestyles and, and things like, like these are like way cooler conversations. And like, I, I don't find that very often. And when, when I found that with you guys, like I saw the value here and I was like, holy shit, we need to share this. Like, we want other people to get involved.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Dude, I remember when, I won't name him, but this guy came to our Wednesday and he's, he's come back consistently, but.

• 48:21Speaker 00

  I'm picturing, I'm picturing.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  He, he was so, uh, over the moon about what he was exposed to. He was just like, this is the most enlightening conversation and group of people I've, I've ever met. And I, I, I know that because I'm grateful for these guys. So I say that not in a way like, oh, I'm so proud, but like, no, no, I'm so grateful. Like, wow, I know these guys. And you've said that too, David. You're like, this crew is different. It's special. And I remember this guy showed up and he edified that and he acknowledged that and validated it. And I was like, yep, I'm in the right fucking place.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  I think this is why we connected very quickly with you, David, is like, I think you even mentioned it, like, you, you want to think about how you think. You want to think about the, the way in which you think about the world. And that's why we meshed really, you know, quickly together. And Eric mentioned it. I'm kind of like sad that you don't, you know, show more of that on the Bankless podcast, but there's a time and place, um, you know, maybe in person at the crypto conferences is our, is our Sherpa. People get a taste for that.

• 49:16David Hoffman?

  I, I think we do. Uh, but I, I don't, well, I guess you're the listener. So, so maybe you, you would have better information, better alpha about that than I do. Um, I do think that like, uh, the Bankless content style has like latched on to communities that otherwise wouldn't have, it have because of the authenticity. And so ma- maybe it's the authenticity word as to where that alignment does happen as in like, Bankless, one of the reasons why Bankless was so successful coming out of the 2019, 2020 bear market is because we were the first major. Media organization that wasn't here to show you their token, right? Like we were, yeah, and so like that authenticity came out. Uh, and one thing I was talking to you, Armon, when we were here in, um, uh, Joshua Tree,

• 49:58David Hoffman?

  was that this was the first group of, of men that it, the relationship amongst men was a little bit inverted in the sense that, you know, in high school, like dude clicks, if you like, uh, expose your vulnerabilities, it's like, here's what is like emotionally troubling me, you would get a slap on the wrist. Like, don't talk about that. Like, that's not what we talk about. Uh, and, and this group, it was inverted. It was like, you guys will discover who, who is not sharing all of their, their thoughts.

• 50:26Speaker 00

  Some people are tumbling nuts to crack.

• 50:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 50:30David Hoffman?

  But, but it's inverted. It's like when it's discovered that there isn't somebody who's being totally forthcoming about what is tumbling around in their brain, then that's when you get the slap on the wrist.

• 50:40Speaker 03

  Well said. And I think the reason for that is that.

• 50:42David Hoffman?

  That's because you said it.

• 50:47Speaker 03

  I liked your version better.

• 50:49Speaker 04

  Armon loves Armon.

• 50:51Speaker 03

  I honestly was lost in a trance as if I heard that for the first time. But well said. And I think the reason for that is because it's rooted in authenticity.

• 50:59David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  So if somebody was not being forthcoming, it would just be like, what the fuck, bro?

• 51:02David Hoffman?

  Why are you here?

• 51:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, what's going on? So, well said.

• 51:07Speaker 00

  Well said myself.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  You're so smart and good looking.

• 51:16David Hoffman?

  Steven, why are you, uh, tough enough to crack, man?

• 51:19Speaker 00

  Oh, that's a good question.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  We just want to.

• 51:22Speaker 00

  How much time we have?

• 51:25Speaker 04

  Just, I just don't like being vulnerable, man, you know?

• 51:27Speaker 03

  It's okay.

• 51:28Speaker 04

  Like being on my own island.

• 51:29Speaker 02

  But you're vulnerable about your portfolio sometimes. You're not an alpha rounds.

• 51:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, I have an outlet through my financial nihilism, you know? It's like where I, that's where I express my inner turmoil. It's through my, my, uh, my financial degenning.

• 51:42Speaker 00

  And I think it becomes a meme in and of itself. Like, oh, here's Steven not sharing again.

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Maybe not on the podcast. We're sharing more in real life.

• 51:53David Hoffman?

  Is this a two glass conversation out of one glass conversation?

• 51:57Speaker 02

  Necessary. It's necessary.

• 52:00Speaker 04

  I feel like I lose money, so you don't, you don't have to.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  Kind of like Jesus Christ in that way, you know?

• 52:09Speaker 02

  And it's out.

• 52:13David Hoffman?

  Oh my god, you guys should open that as a tagline. Steven loses money, so you don't have to.

• 52:18Speaker 04

  I hope my mom doesn't hear that, it's so bad.

• 52:22David Hoffman?

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• 53:06David Hoffman?

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• 53:49David Hoffman?

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• 54:10David Hoffman?

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• 54:54David Hoffman?

  right next to all the DeFi apps and services that you're already used to doing, like swapping tokens and staking. So if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger and take control over your crypto. Alright guys, let's talk about some Marcus. Pull around the table, bearish or bullish? And then we'll kind of unpack those things later on, starting with number one, Armon. Bearish or bullish?

• 55:15Speaker 03

  Well, in what time horizon?

• 55:18David Hoffman?

  Whatever your current bags reflect right now.

• 55:24Speaker 03

  Bullish.

• 55:25David Hoffman?

  Bullish, alright.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Good luck to you. Poor guy.

• 55:30David Hoffman?

  Do we have the bulls and the bears with the white and the black? Is that what's going on?

• 55:38Speaker 03

  Obviously, I'm gonna watch my portfolio go down another 50%, 80%, according to Steven.

• 55:46David Hoffman?

  Oh god.

• 55:47Speaker 03

  We'll see. But I'm happy where I'm sitting. I like what I'm holding. I got rid of what I need to get rid of.

• 55:55David Hoffman?

  Trim the fat?

• 55:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I think I played the games I wanted to play. Within Allcoins, within NFTs, I got into some communities. I learned how they function. I now understand the infrastructure that so many of these projects are built on. I've barely scratched the surface in many ways. And where I'm at right now, I'm just very happy with it. But like, will I be able to withstand the volatility of like watching my portfolio go down 80%? Personally, yeah. Because I'm in this for like, I mean, life? I don't know. Like, I mean, this is modern finance.

• 56:33David Hoffman?

  I'm gonna go interpret that as actually bearish. I think that's a bearish answer.

• 56:38Speaker 00

  Bullish, but I'm ready to go down 80%.

• 56:40David Hoffman?

  He's just too optimistic.

• 56:42Speaker 03

  Obviously bearish.

• 56:43David Hoffman?

  He's prepared to be kicked in the balls.

• 56:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I'm gonna get kicked in the balls. And I think like, sure, let's see if this lasts 12, 18, 24 months. But long-term, what I'm holding, overall bullish. But yeah, we're obviously very bearish in the short term.

• 57:00David Hoffman?

  Eric, bearish, bullish.

• 57:01Speaker 00

  So, this is nuanced conversation. Uh, yeah. Like, this side of the table-

• 57:06David Hoffman?

  There's only two answers here.

• 57:07Speaker 00

  Well, okay. So, this side of the table in particular has been very good about moderating bullishness. Steven, in particular, like on one of our first episodes, like, we've labeled this clip, like, Steven predicts doom in 2022. And he did that in 2021. So like, uh, you know, we are not long only on alpha, alpha. We like play markets as we see markets. And I think that is a benefit. You know, like, um, you know, I was around for many bear markets. I was around in 2000, 2001, Steven as well. Like, I've seen shit go down.

• 57:43David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I forgot to mention that you guys are old. I forgot about that.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're older than some. What, than 25? We're older than some. Okay, so like, when I was trading in 2000, like, I was 14 years old, like, uh, I wasn't that, I wasn't that old. But like, uh- Back in the dot com, but-

• 58:04Speaker 00

  Shaking with my cane.

• 58:08Speaker 00

  We've seen this before, and like crypto traders have certainly seen this before. Uh, I think obviously we're bullish on the industry at large, otherwise we wouldn't be here. But I, it, I don't want to fall into this, like, into this trap of saying, like, just because we believe the industry at large is going up and to the right means that we have to trade it that way. It doesn't, it doesn't have to be that, right? And like, you know-

• 58:31David Hoffman?

  If you trade it that way.

• 58:32Speaker 00

  Sure. And, you know, like, I remember the moment at Steven's house, all five of us are there. And I told David Hoffman that, like, I sold almost all my ETH at 3,500, 3,400, whatever. And Dave's like, "Are you, what?"

• 58:48Speaker 00

  And now it's a 2K. And like, I think it's going lower. And like, I haven't even bought back, like, there's a long bag that I will never sell. But like, you know- You don't have to just raw dog it, like I said on Alpha Alpha, where you just, you like go unprotected forever. Like, you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. And like-

• 59:07David Hoffman?

  Your boy did not sell his ETH at thirty-five hundred.

• 59:10Speaker 00

  They would never sell you. That's good for you. Like, I, I want, like, I'm wearing this ETH shirt. I'm wearing an Ethereum shirt. I love ETH. It's just like, at, at what point do you want to, like, play this thing sort of correctly versus just like raw dog it? And, you know, you can, you can do that if you want. But I, I really believe that, like, this crew here, we're, we're very pragmatic and, and that, like, supersedes our, our, our long bias and whatever.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  So give me the answer. Bear Bull.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, he wants to bathe in the gray.

• 59:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:43Speaker 00

  Uh, no, I, I'm like, all right, I'm obviously bullish, but like, in the near term, you know, this is not the time to- I, I don't believe this is the time to be buying right now.

• 59:53David Hoffman?

  You haven't bought back in with yourself.

• 59:54Speaker 00

  I haven't bought back in, uh, yet, but you know what? Here, here's another thing I will say. Max Payne, like, a lot of people talk about Max Payne on Crypto Twitter. Max Payne is watching this industry that you believe in through, thoroughly, run right past you as you, like, try to bottom tick this thing. And like, I refuse personally to be that guy. So I will buy back in and I won't bottom tick it. But like, I don't believe that now, like, right now is the time.

• 1:00:23David Hoffman?

  Uh, Stephen, we're not going with you next. You're going last.

• 1:00:27David Hoffman?

  Nick, bearish or bullish?

• 1:00:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm bullish on the number of, like, ETH, active ETH developers. I'm bullish on the number of active ETH addresses. Like, we are on this network building path that will, we're laying the infrastructure for the future of what may be like the internet or our, you know, digital economy in the future. So bullish on that. Um, I'm kind of like a little bit of between Armon and Eric in that, like, I have bags that I, I'm not a trader. So like, I have my bags and I'm gonna hold them forever, but I also want to hedge. So, you know, I was calling these guys, you know, intra-week saying, you know, I'm, I'm not really an active trader. I don't set up options. I don't set up shorts. But, you know, I have definitely been, uh, you know- Buying puts on the QQQ and the general stock market to hedge hedge my part of the portfolio

• 1:01:13Speaker 02

  that's very boring to you, David.

• 1:01:16Speaker 02

  I'm hedging those public equities and certainly playing around in D Y D X. You know, multiple shorting shitcoins and all L ones. You live in Switzerland, huh? Oh, yeah. I take I take Steven's jet to Spain to make my trades and then I come back and I watch them from my screen. That's good. So I mean, I think what we're looking for is like, you know, I think historically we've seen Bitcoin when it hits its 200 week moving average. I'm not a technical guy by any means, but follow some. When Bitcoin hits that 200 week moving average, so looking for like Bitcoin around 22K, maybe ETH around 1200 ish. And, you know, it's going to wick below that probably most likely, but that's where I'm personally looking and will kind of DCA in.

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  And then on a macro like bullish or bearish, you know, I think we still need to see a Fed pivot. You know, whether inflation slows down or does does the credit market pop? And Steven and I debate that all the time. And I think we're starting to see signs of a of a credit market. You know, these collateralized loan obligations and corporate debt start to show some weakness and will that turn the Fed around? So macro level, looking for a Fed pivot and on the micro crypto level, looking for kind of those those bottom averages to hit.

• 1:02:28David Hoffman?

  Although I do think your your bags are boring and they do provide alpha. So when the when the markets ultimately do change, it's because your boring bags told me so.

• 1:02:38Speaker 02

  I mean, it's kind of embarrassing to admit that like, you know, the the real estate portfolio is is larger than than the crypto portfolio. And I kind of want to keep it that way. Is this a place where I can be vulnerable about that? Trust tree?

• 1:02:52David Hoffman?

  Love that.

• 1:02:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, we like those cash flows from real estate.

• 1:02:56David Hoffman?

  All right, Steven, bearish or bullish? What, like uranium?

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  I didn't get that joke.

• 1:03:02Speaker 04

  I'm very bullish on uranium.

• 1:03:03Speaker 00

  Well.

• 1:03:04David Hoffman?

  Oh, because we're talking bullish commodities, therefore bearish everything else?

• 1:03:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, you mean bullish bearish crypto?

• 1:03:10David Hoffman?

  Uh, bullish bearish on your bags. Well, I guess, I guess you would only be bullish.

• 1:03:15Speaker 04

  Got a lot of USDC.

• 1:03:16Speaker 00

  I want to talk about uranium, because I actually, I'm, I'm bearish uranium. We're going, going to fusion, not fission.

• 1:03:23Speaker 04

  I still, I still do have a lot of ETH. I actually sold all of my Bitcoin. Um, I still have a little bit of ETH. I basically have net short exposure because I've just hedged with a bunch of shitcoin shorts.

• 1:03:36Speaker 00

  Have you been net short before in your life? Because I've never gone net short and like I, I've hedged, but I've never gone net short.

• 1:03:44Speaker 04

  You guys, you guys know, like I, I shorted ETH at like thirty four hundred. They're my brother's bachelor party and I got stopped out on the, on the jet and.

• 1:03:51Speaker 00

  Whoops. The fucking jet. Blame the jet.

• 1:03:55Speaker 04

  It's always the jet.

• 1:03:55Speaker 00

  It's always the jet.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  It wasn't my jet. For what it's worth.

• 1:03:59Speaker 00

  Not yet.

• 1:03:59Speaker 04

  So that, that was, that was a painful miss. I mean, I did, I did sell a lot of spot around thirty four, thirty five. I had, I had friends who were telling me to sell at like forty two, forty three. And I, I didn't listen to them, but like I, I was, I was quick to realize that the, the tide has shift, had shifted into, to go the other way. And, and, and since then I've progressively realized just like how much we're, we're fucked.

• 1:04:27Speaker 04

  Uh, whi- whi- which is a lot, I think. It, it's, it's kind of rough right now because everybody's bearish, right? Which either means that we're just going to pump and that was the bottom. Or nobody's really just comprehending like how bad it's going to get. Uh, which, which, which is what I'm, I'm, I'm concerned with. I, I think everybody lives in the crypto world and we've gotten used to, we, we've, it's like a, such a short little bubble, right? Even Bitcoin, like people post these like Bitcoin rainbow charts and all these things. There's Bitcoin goes up. It's just a logarithmic regression. It just goes up and to the right like this. It's, it's network growth, right? And if you look at something like as basic as commodities cycles, right?

• 1:05:07Speaker 04

  If you pick one commodity cycle, you would have like, in some instances, like a fifteen, sixteen year period where said commodity just goes up and to the right and you just buy every dip. And even though there's tons of volatility, you make tons of money. But then there's another commodity cycle where it's just down only, right? So like the entirety of Bitcoin, for example, is what now, like 14 years? It's like one commodity cycle. So all the data people use to model Bitcoin, like the 200-week meme, right? It's a thing, everybody's just gonna buy the 200-week and then that'll be it. It'll just go up from there. You just buy the 200-week, you'll be rich.

• 1:05:44Speaker 00

  I'll buy it.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Like, there's no sample size on that outside of this one very specific paradigm, right? And if you look very dispassionately at Bitcoin, right? Like, just anybody, go home and just overlay Bitcoin with the Russell 2000 chart, right? Like Bitcoin's just like, it's just like a leveraged play on the Russell 2000, basically. Every time the Russell 2000 goes up, Bitcoin goes up a lot. Every time the Russell 2000 goes sideways or down, Bitcoin goes down or sideways a lot. And the Russell 2000 is like, it's kind of like a micro cap. It's like the smallest of stocks, right? The things you would presume would kind of benefit the most from like excess liquidity in the system, right? So it's very unclear to me.

• 1:06:27Speaker 00

  Fed monetary policy?

• 1:06:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's very unclear to me that Bitcoin is like actually like an inflation hedge versus just like the beneficiary of like the, it's just like the largest sort of like liquidity battery that might now sort of be discharged. Like, I don't know, like I think about these things, right? But Bitcoin is like a, is like a, is like a good case, right? You've got things like Avalanche and Solana or like Harmony 1. Like, that thing's going to zero.

• 1:06:53Speaker 00

  I'm sure, I'm sure all the shitcoins, but I want to ask you this, like, so Russell 2000, on TradingView, you can model this against like money supply. And I've seen you do this before. Like, what's your thought on that?

• 1:07:07Speaker 04

  Like, it's sort of just like a, kind of...

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  I don't want to say canary in the coal mine, that's not the right term, but it's sort of something that's like quarterly, but I don't know if that's the thing. Right? I, I think it's more complicated than, oh, we, we print money. Cause even the money printing is, is nuanced, right? Did, did, do we, there's a difference between giving the banks all the money via QE, basically versus like helicopter moneying people via PPE and mailing them checks, right?

• 1:07:34Speaker 00

  One is like reserves versus one puts money in your pocket.

• 1:07:37Speaker 04

  Different kinds of increases in the money supply, right? Everybody wants this like simple explanation of why this thing went up and why this thing's going down. But it's, it's, it's always like more complicated than that. And I'm always wary of these like simple narratives, these simple explanations. Oh, this is this, so it's gonna, this is gonna happen. It's, it's very rarely that simple. Like the, the whole system is very complicated. Like we've talked about this a lot, the idea that there's this like narrative in Bitcoin that, oh, the dollar is just gonna get printed into oblivion and go to zero. And then everybody's gonna buy Bitcoin because it's gonna be like a haven from the dollar printing, right? That's like a very common thing that everybody throws around, which might be true, but like I tend to believe is probably kind of nonsense until.

• 1:08:23Speaker 00

  So do you, do you believe that crypto at large will continue to exist?

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, crypto at large will continue to exist. Like you're, you're seeing.

• 1:08:32Speaker 00

  What? David's like, okay.

• 1:08:36Speaker 03

  I didn't even realize that was, that was an auction. Just pulls all of our biker boats.

• 1:08:42Speaker 00

  Guys, we are not airing this.

• 1:08:46Speaker 04

  Like at the NASDAQ right now, there, there are some stocks that are down like 90 plus percent. Like there are stocks in the NASDAQ that are gonna wreck worse than like all L1s, which is insane because those things are dead. Like a lot of these things, they're just dead. They're obviously dead. They don't have cash flows or any, at least some of these companies like had some semblance of cash flow or there might be a cash flow in the future. They're, they're still dead, right?

• 1:09:07Speaker 00

  That's what I love about like sort of my client base or my peers who are saying like, oh, well, you're invested in crypto, you moron. And it's like, oh yeah, well, my alternative was I could be invested in these like shitcos in tech that were, they're only down 70% instead of 80.

• 1:09:22Speaker 04

  Arkay?

• 1:09:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:09:23Speaker 03

  Maybe even a fucking break, right?

• 1:09:24Speaker 04

  I mean, Ark is like a good, I think the Ark like Bitcoin chart is really interesting. They're both kind of these. Bets on like hopium and liquidity and zero interest like Bitcoin I think like does really good when you have like negative real rates because you're like why I don't want to buy this long duration but it's kind of similar to like gold right where you're like what why do I want to buy this long duration bond with a negative yield maybe I'll just buy gold right it looks worse when you can actually get like three four five percents in in like a bond it like kind of kills that narrative a little bit and and something like ARC is like a huge beneficiary of like artificially low rates because you're just trading on this

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  infinite future cash flow that you can just discount to infinity and it basically allows you to just sell whatever narrative you want because like the more the real rates go to zero and negative like the more like math doesn't matter and you're just kind of selling some weird vision of the world right and and in some ways I'm like worrying that Bitcoin is sort of like ARC because it is just like Bitcoin is kind of selling hopium to to a degree like there's no cash flows in Bitcoin right and like like fees are just like a dead like heart patient where

• 1:10:39Speaker 00

  Crypto fees crypto fees dot info whatever you can see like fees are completely out

• 1:10:45Speaker 04

  Yeah like that's scary to me because I I think that we are moving to this like totally different paradigm that like nobody's lived in before like we like everybody has this very narrow kind of frame of reference through which they view the entire world right but like you can look back at like 100 year financial cycles and everybody's modeling everything on this 10 15 year cycle but there's no guarantee that that's going to be the same thing moving forward right like

• 1:11:11Speaker 00

  This is what Ray Dalio talks about he talks about the long term debt cycle not just the not just the eight year

• 1:11:16Speaker 04

  Yeah like cycles within cycles you eat little 10 year cycle but then you get 10 10 year cycles and then you get like the long cycle and then like all the things you were trading in your 10 year cycles just explode and if you weren't ready for that kind of game within the game then you just you just blow up right and most people don't think about that they have like this huge recency bias am I rambling now

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  No, no This was his answer to bullish or bear

• 1:11:45David Hoffman?

  Okay, so you talked about monetary policy. You also talked about like a lot of these assets being dependent on liquidity. You're talking about how Bitcoin is just related to the Russell. Not to say that Bitcoin just tracks Russell, but also the Russell might be tracking Bitcoin, but it's more likely that they're actually tracking some more basal level thing.

• 1:12:07Speaker 04

  They're both sort of like liquidity batteries.

• 1:12:10David Hoffman?

  Sure.

• 1:12:11Speaker 04

  Like there's like this, like liquidity is sort of like energy in the system. And this isn't entirely my idea. I saw this on Twitter once. I forgot who wrote about this. Sounds like your inner Michael Saylor. I don't want to. Energy batteries. It's like the opposite of the Michael Saylor thing, to be honest.

• 1:12:29David Hoffman?

  Is it a liquidity battery? Or are we just really talking about the value of the denominator here?

• 1:12:32Speaker 04

  It's like, when you have a circuit, right? Where like the Fed is sort of like the battery and you think of money as like the current in the system, right? Are you familiar with the concept of like a capacitor in a circuit? Right? The capacitor stores all this charge and it discharges it very quickly within the system, right? So in a situation where like the Fed battery is pushing like all this excess money, i.e. energy into the system, it tends to flow to like the capacitors in the system. Like that's where the bubbles form, where these things rapidly soak up and store that monetary energy. But capacitors, once they have like a discharge gradient, right? They also very rapidly like zap out all of that energy and like the system kind of like

• 1:13:17Speaker 04

  kind of returns to like a different state, right? So I worry that Bitcoin is just like a very elaborate kind of like liquidity capacitor, which has soaked up a lot of monetary energy. Like in my mind, like ETH, for example, fits a lot better into the new sort of like investment paradigm we're moving into, right? We were in this area where, era where rates were zero. Where like ca- cash flows, what the, what the hell are cash flows? Like, I don't know, cash flows, like, stop it, man. You're just thinking too small with your cash flows. What about, what about three decades from now and how this is going to like, we're all gonna, i- i- i- Now, now it's very different. Now, like, it's, it's a new era where, like, we care about, like, real things, like, like commodities

• 1:14:00Speaker 04

  and energy and, like, how much money you're gonna make next year, right? So in that sort of, like, paradigm, like, to me, as far as I can tell, like, the only asset in all of crypto that actually fits into that framework is, is Ethereum. Because, like, ETH does have, like, a pseudo-case for, for being, like, a commodity. And it does have, like, a pseudo-case for being, like, kind of like, uh, Arthur Hayes, you know, infinite duration bond type thing, right? But i- i- it has something that it's anchored to. It's like an asset that's actually demanded, that's being used, that has, like, a, uh, like, a cash flow that can be attached to it, like, a multiple, right? So I, I kind of feel like it might come out of this whole mess a lot better than, than Bitcoin, right?

• 1:14:42Speaker 04

  I'm like, like, I'm, I'm, I'm trying to write a, write a whole piece on this right now, but I'm trying to, I'm struggling to find a scenario where Bitcoin goes to the moon and, like, the near term and, and ETH doesn't, right? Because all the scenarios I see where Bitcoin goes to the moon, first, they first involve, like, worldwide political chaos, which I think will send everything to close to zero, if, e- e- even though they might moon after, like, it's, it's-

• 1:15:08Speaker 00

  You're making me grab the mezcal more. First of all, this is David Aubin's, like, favorite scenario of all time.

• 1:15:14David Hoffman?

  No, no, no, those are the Bitcoiners, that Bitcoiners are the memes that, that-

• 1:15:19Speaker 04

  I've been the biggest Bitcoiner in this group for a while, right? I know there's been, like, a gripe of, of Davids for some time, but I feel like I've been reevaluating my position on this. Because I, I think your time horizon's important. I think a lot of Bitcoiners, they talk in this kind of, like, uh, elaborate, sort of, very aspirational, multi-decade, or even century-long time horizons. But like, I, I wanna, I wanna buy a house and maybe have kids someday and buy stuff and, like, in the real world, so I care about what happens in the next five years.

• 1:15:50Speaker 00

  I'm shorting, I'm shorting on this. First of all, you already own the house. I'm like, oh, here, I'm sure this kid's gonna-

• 1:15:59David Hoffman?

  Okay, so here's how I'm hearing all of this and like I agree almost 100% and it sounds all about right. And I do believe like it's all about capturing cash flows and Bitcoin had this premium in the last like two years where it was the inflation narrative. It finally caught wind out of coming out of the bear market of 2018 to 2020 because the Fed started printing off money and to their credit Bitcoiners have nailed the Fed. They called the Fed monetary policy for like the last decade before before Bitcoin was even on anyone's radar. They said, this is what's going to happen. There's going to be some minor hiccup and for all intensive purposes, COVID was a minor hiccup as far as a pandemic goes. Like it wasn't really, it was

• 1:16:42David Hoffman?

  a worse common cold more than it was like a black plague. And all of a sudden that worse common cold causes trillions of dollars of money printing and Bitcoin sucks up all of that. But then as soon as monetary, as soon as the flows disappear, Bitcoin discharges that. It sends it back into the economy, right? And so it captured the money during the bull market, but then because it has no value capture mechanism other than a meme, it puts it right back into the economy when the time comes to it. And so asking myself, David, are you bullish or bearish? I'll ask myself the question. Thank you for asking.

• 1:17:19David Hoffman?

  We all know what you're gonna say. On what time horizon? I think is important right now. So I think that there is a short to medium term grit your teeth because there is going to be a culling of the herd as we know. And I'm actually not, I'm bearish on alt layer ones as a category, but I'm waiting for the one of those few alt layer ones to make it through the bear market because there's enough of them or some of them will. Yeah. And as soon as one of them is like the clear like survivor of the of the 2022 to 2024 bear market, then I'm bullish. And it's going to be the alt layer ones that figured out how to adapt and how to adapt to the new monetary policy, the new standard of the economy. And all of a sudden, one of those things is going to make it through and all

• 1:18:04David Hoffman?

  of a sudden it's going to be the next, the Ethereum that was of 27, 2017.

• 1:18:10Speaker 02

  So I have a follow-up question for you, David, and I don't know if I've

• 1:18:12David Hoffman?

  That was only one-third of my rant, by the way.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  Oh, you want to continue first?

• 1:18:15David Hoffman?

  Oh, I want to continue.

• 1:18:16Speaker 02

  Oh, let it rip, my friend.

• 1:18:16David Hoffman?

  Oh, I want to keep on going. And so we got all these alt-layer ones, which for the first time are layer ones with like investor unlocks. So they have that to contend with.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  Great to see, by the way, that Bankless is acknowledging alt-layer ones.

• 1:18:32David Hoffman?

  We got spanked for not doing that in the last like six months or so.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  Decentralization, Max.

• 1:18:39David Hoffman?

  And so they have the investor unlocks to contend with, so that's going to flood the market. They also are scaled in block size, which floods the market in inflation. And so Ether Ethereum has like 4% inflation pre-merge in a proof of work form. And Solana, Avalanche, Phantom, they are all higher issuance than Ethereum is in. Well, Ethereum is in its proof of work form, so they're already proof of stake and they still have higher issuance. So they have all this issuance to come to the market. One of these chains is going to figure out how to deal with all of these things. And one of these trains is going to figure it, be able to go into into the next bear market, deal with it and come out with it on the shiny colors on the other side.

• 1:19:19David Hoffman?

  Chris Bernitsky called this the hazing cycle of Ethereum to these alt-layer ones, where like Bitcoiners hazed us going through 2018 to 2020. And now we are hazing the alt-layer ones and like we're hazing them into our principles. Like, stop issuing all of your tokens, like start having a decentralized block production. And then maybe you'll make it through the other side and maybe we'll accept you then. And a lot of Bitcoiners started accepting Ethereum when Ethereum came back and started going up versus Bitcoin, starting in 2020, right? And so that's my bull case for alt-layer ones. Bull case for alt-layer ones doesn't start until like late 2023, however. So they got a while ago.

• 1:19:59Speaker 02

  Agreed.

• 1:20:00David Hoffman?

  And at least one of these things is going to figure it out, maybe just one. If I put money on any of them, maybe Avalanche.

• 1:20:07Speaker 04

  I love Avalanche. Put money on that? Yes.

• 1:20:10David Hoffman?

  I'm a Solana boy.

• 1:20:12Speaker 04

  I think Solana is the obvious.

• 1:20:14David Hoffman?

  No, Solana is building towards something entirely different. Avalanche allowed for fees to go up, dude.

• 1:20:21Speaker 04

  Doesn't Avalanche have like two times the transaction capacity as Ethel one? Isn't it like, it's just like this giant facade?

• 1:20:28David Hoffman?

  I'm not saying I'm bullish versus Ether. I don't think we need to like really get lost.

• 1:20:33Speaker 04

  At least the Solana has like, you know, a bunch of billionaires who are trying to get rich behind it. You can kind of ride that wave. You can kind of make that. I think this is not like a tech space thing.

• 1:20:41David Hoffman?

  We don't need to get lost in the.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  I want to get lost in it. I want to, Avalanche.

• 1:20:45David Hoffman?

  We don't need to.

• 1:20:45Speaker 04

  I want to hear it.

• 1:20:46David Hoffman?

  But what's much more bullish than that and much sooner than that is the merge. It's the merge. I'll press this button, which you guys can't hear.

• 1:20:58David Hoffman?

  There's a bunch of applause. And so talking about flows, right? As soon as the merge happens, coming in late August, maybe early September, probably late August, Ethereum goes from the first time ever, a negative fifteen million dollar a day flows, where it leaks fifteen million dollars worth of monetary power, if we're talking about the battery metaphor, fifteen million dollars a day is going outbound out of Ethereum. And it's been that way ever since Genesis, because of proof of work. As a function of market cap, so divided by market cap, it stays the same. And so there's always these outflows to secure Ethereum every single day. And so the flows are outbound, the battery is being discharged into the market in order to sustain the blockchain.

• 1:21:41David Hoffman?

  And once proof of stake happens, that fifteen million dollars a day leakage turns into fifteen million dollars a day, these are rough numbers, but these numbers are generally accurate, turns into fifteen million dollars a day of absorption. And so if Stephen's theory about how Bitcoin is just like this monetary battery that sucks up all the liquidity, at least Ethereum has this mechanism that actually collects the energy and then retains it. That's the main differentiator is it retains the energy. We're on the same team here. I'm wearing the shirt, man. I'm talking about why I'm bullish. I'm not.

• 1:22:13Speaker 04

  Can I go to the bathroom? Do I have to ask permission for that?

• 1:22:15David Hoffman?

  No, absolutely. Not until I'm.

• 1:22:19Speaker 04

  I just really have to go?

• 1:22:20David Hoffman?

  Not until I'm done chilling eat, brother.

• 1:22:22Speaker 04

  When I'm done, I need to dump on David's theory a little bit.

• 1:22:25David Hoffman?

  All right, here we go.

• 1:22:26Speaker 04

  Just for the spice of it all.

• 1:22:28David Hoffman?

  Bring the microphone to the bathroom.

• 1:22:31Speaker 00

  Let me go. I'm wearing the shirt. I'm the same. I'm on your team.

• 1:22:35David Hoffman?

  Yes.

• 1:22:36Speaker 00

  It is going to improve and like I think price will follow, right? But I think you're talking about the fundamentals.

• 1:22:42David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:22:43Speaker 00

  And price and fundamentals don't always align, okay? And I think the price where-

• 1:22:47David Hoffman?

  We're only two-thirds through my ramp, by the way.

• 1:22:50Speaker 00

  Okay. Yes. I want you to follow me. Okay, so when price and fundamentals deviate, it's typically because of some exogenous factor, right? And right now, it's macro at large is causing that deviation.

• 1:23:03David Hoffman?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:23:03Speaker 00

  And I don't think that deviation is set to change any time soon, okay? And I think you would probably agree with that.

• 1:23:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:11Speaker 00

  Okay. But I-

• 1:23:12David Hoffman?

  I think it will change in like, within six to nine months.

• 1:23:17Speaker 00

  Okay, maybe six to nine months, but maybe a little longer. But like, I agree with you. There will be an accumulation phase where you can buy back into ETH. It's not just gonna be V-shaped. It's not just gonna be like, okay, merge and then-

• 1:23:28David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:23:29Speaker 00

  Goodbye.

• 1:23:29David Hoffman?

  Oh, I think that will happen.

• 1:23:30Speaker 00

  Well, it might. And like, Squish Chaos would agree with you, etc.

• 1:23:34David Hoffman?

  Yep.

• 1:23:34Speaker 00

  I'm not really necessarily thinking that. What I'm thinking is that like, you know, I think it was Kobe who said that like, "The merge is not an engine upgrade to ETH." He called it like, if you were like, making the analogy that ETH is a race car, "We're not changing out the engine." Where now this car just goes like, 10 times faster than the other car. It's like, he said, Kobe said, that it's like, "We made this car more aerodynamic." Like, over a long period of time, it will improve against its competition, but it's not just gonna be like, just take off. And that's, I completely believe in that.

• 1:24:18David Hoffman?

  Uh, no, I'll take the other side of that bet.

• 1:24:21Speaker 00

  Well, I know you would.

• 1:24:21David Hoffman?

  The idea is that like, you can feed the same amount of gas into two engines and receive two different outputs from those two different engines, based on their design, right? And so, one is leaking gas as it goes, and the other one is like, very, very efficient.

• 1:24:37Speaker 00

  You're right, but like, you're talking about fundamentals, I'm talking about markets.

• 1:24:40David Hoffman?

  Right, okay, so the argument that I'm making is that the merge overpowers macro.

• 1:24:47David Hoffman?

  Because, which is a big statement to make, it's a big statement to make. And I'm not saying it overpowers it like on a dime. It's not like we hit the merge and we just, we just reverse. The only, the only reason where that would be true is that we hit the merge and then we start reversing because that would happen because of narrative, not because of fundamentals. But the argument that I will make is that fundamentals start accruing faster than people are expecting.

• 1:25:10Speaker 00

  There's a reason why there's terms like buy the rumors, sell the news. Like it's because investor behavior also matters, like for price, not, not for value, but for price.

• 1:25:21David Hoffman?

  But all those people selling the, selling the news are going to have to eventually, they will get overcome by the $15 million a day net sell pressure, buy pressure, the 30 nets.

• 1:25:32Speaker 00

  Agreed.

• 1:25:33Speaker 02

  And I listened to your podcast with the founder. Yes, exactly. North Rock Digital. And he was talking about how there's $12 million a day of sell pressure from, from miners. And post-merge, if that doesn't continue, it's going to be hard to stop the price from going up. But I do disagree with, you know, ETH and the merge escaping macro fundamentals. But I do have a question for you in regards to ETH price going up post-merge. You know, I think Hal Press mentioned that he thinks that the price is going to front run the merge. And I disagree with that. And I think you've said that you think the price will go post-merge. But on, on what time horizon? Because I, I do think these narratives have to develop. There, the market does price in some technical risk. And so the, the market just may need to see this thing work for a little bit.

• 1:26:18Speaker 02

  And then they're going to need to see the yields and appreciate the yields. And those will show up on CNBC and Bloomberg and what kind of yields you can get. And then the market will, will capture of like how much electricity was decreased through this update. And those narratives will, will take time, but they will develop. And so I'm more of like Eric's on terms of like a, a longer time horizon.

• 1:26:38Speaker 00

  It will definitely benefit ETH in the price, but are you more of a V shape like post-merge immediate pump?

• 1:26:45David Hoffman?

  No, I'm more of a curve, more of a curve rather than a V. And I think the crypto industry will figure it out first because what we'll see a very big breakaway is the ETH BTC ratio. Because that will happen first, because if macro hits once again the crypto markets and we all take a big leg down, then we're all going down, but we're going to notice ETH do very, very well in a post-merge Ethereum. We're going to notice ETH doing very well because it has $30 million a day of less sell pressure than it previously did. And so the Bitcoin ETH ratio is going to look much more violent than the Bitcoin dollar ratio. Steven's shaking his head.

• 1:27:27David Hoffman?

  But then the Bitcoin ETH dollar ratio will, over 90 days post-merge, will have started to accumulate 90 times $30 million worth of net buy pressure in comparison to its previous equilibrium. And then savvy US dollar investors, US dollar investors, lol, will start to notice like, wait, why isn't Ether completely obliterated? It's doing okay. And that will start to, so first the narrative will spin in the crypto world and then it will start to bleed out into the macro world.

• 1:27:57Speaker 00

  And you think that the crypto world will use the ETH BTC metric as a signal? And do you think we're in this channel of the ETH BTC ratio? Do you think we'll break down out of that channel in the short term?

• 1:28:08David Hoffman?

  No.

• 1:28:09Speaker 00

  Okay, so, because like in your episode with Ben Cowan, he literally said himself, he's like, "Okay, you're probably right on this, but it will take longer than people are thinking."

• 1:28:21David Hoffman?

  Right. And how long, that was like six months ago?

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  2024, he was predicting or whatever. And I'm kind of on that time horizon, but...

• 1:28:31David Hoffman?

  Was he privy to the merge, though?

• 1:28:33Speaker 00

  Does Ben count on about the merge?

• 1:28:35David Hoffman?

  No, the fundamentals of the merge, because like, a lot of people know about the merge.

• 1:28:39Speaker 00

  Like, literally, this is his entire life? Guy draws lines on a chart. He's just a chart guy. I know, I love him, I love him, but... Come on, he doesn't know about this stuff?

• 1:28:48David Hoffman?

  Well, okay, it's one thing to know about the merge, but it's, it's different to know the magnitude of the merge. And so, I'm, and I'll, I'll say I'm not 100% confident on that the merge overpowers macro, but I'm more than 50%, and of those cohorts of people, if I'm in the right camp, the cohort of people that think that the merge is more powerful than macro is like, less than 100 people.

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  Let's get, okay, first of all, let's get Steven's take on this, because I, I want Steven's, but like...

• 1:29:15David Hoffman?

  I'll just bend over now.

• 1:29:21Speaker 04

  Alright, so, I have a couple, I have a couple of thoughts on this. I find it really peculiar, right, that everybody seems to think like, the merge is this like, revolutionary event that everybody at this table knows about, is, and is talking about, and there's billions of dollars in the line, but for some reason, like, nobody else understands it, right? Like, we're the only ones who've understood, it's not priced in, right?

• 1:29:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, less than 100 people.

• 1:29:49Speaker 04

  I'm, I'm, I'm very skeptical about that point. And then there's this other narrative, right, that's like, there's gonna be so many fewer outflows of Ethereum being dumped on the market post-merge, right? But what I never hear people, hear people talking about is the idea that, leading up to the merge, there's also probably way more buy pressure on Ethereum than is going to exist post-merge, because a lot of the market is probably buying more Ethereum than they would be post-merge, because they're betting on this narrative happening, right? So, I, I'm not buying this like, idea that like, the buy pressure is going to remain constant pre-merge, and then post-merge, and then because the buy pressure is constant, the sell pressure drops off, and then the price moves, right?

• 1:30:34Speaker 04

  I think buy pressure is way higher now than it will be post-merge. I think obviously, post-merge, buy pressure way drops off, because people trading into that narrative goes away. So, I'm like, super skeptical about that. I am definitely not of the camp that like, the merge like, erases macro, right? Like, I think macro is king, I think anybody who thinks that crypto is going to, in the short run, like, out-trade macro, I think that's like, that's like a crazy, uh, pipe dream. The other thing I would say is like... We're all very familiar, I assume, with like the Ethereum Foundation selling the top of every frickin' thing that exists, right? So if I were like an Ethereum whale and I had billions of ETH right now, what would I be doing?

• 1:31:17Speaker 04

  I would be like engineering this like very gigantic hype going into the merge so that I could dump all of my stuff in August, like please, right before everything really fully goes to hell. And then like that, that's what I would be doing. Spoken like a Trinylist.

• 1:31:32Speaker 03

  Spoken like a Trinylist.

• 1:31:34Speaker 04

  Liquidity event, right? And like, is there going to be like adoption on ETH in August? Like, is there going to be like, like DeFi just got like, took like a bullet to the head, right? NFTs are like, it's getting to the point where it's like embarrassing if you have an ape as your profile picture on Twitter. Excuse me? Gas, like last I checked, it was like 12 GUE to do stuff, right? So like, I don't, I don't see that demand just suddenly returning because the merge happens in August. I'm very mid-long-term bullish on this, but I'm not really trading around it. And I find it to be like very opium. And it's exactly the stuff I would be wanting all of you guys to think if I was just about to dump on your heads. It's exactly what I would be saying.

• 1:32:19Speaker 00

  Ethereum Foundation would dump.

• 1:32:21Speaker 04

  Really? They're pretty good at it. They're pretty good at it.

• 1:32:24Speaker 00

  They sold 4,200. They didn't, they're not gonna sell 2,000.

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  I am skeptical of every narrative that comes across crypto Twitter as though it's like, you're the first person to hear this narrative and nobody else knows it except you. Or maybe other people knew it, but you're like the next in the chain. And then retail is gonna get this after you. So like, who else is buying into the merge narrative after us? That's like what I want to know. Like, who's gonna come after us in August and like support the price of ETH? I just don't see it in, in, in the short run.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  The same people who think there's technical risks, the same people who think there's like a climate issue with, with proof of work. I mean, all those people that need to be brought along, they need to be shown evidence. And I agree with you that like, obviously this is priced in.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  Why do you need to see evidence that proof of stake doesn't hurt the climate? That does not, they, execution risk, I see.

• 1:33:09Speaker 02

  We, we don't, but I do think that the general financial markets need to see that it's true. And they need to see someone publish some data and the, and the narrative to take hold. Like, that is true.

• 1:33:18Speaker 00

  I'll latch on to that narrative. It's like, it's the next 100 million users. And like, to be fair, there are not that many users in crypto right now. Like on a global scale, there, there aren't that many. So like, it's not gonna take much to like increase buying demand, really, like globally?

• 1:33:35Speaker 04

  From who? Who's buying right now?

• 1:33:37Speaker 00

  Globally.

• 1:33:38Speaker 04

  Globally, from where? Where's the money coming from? Where's the money coming from? Everybody's wealth is being destroyed. It's being fucking annihilated, like eviscerated, right? Like everybody's valuing stocks is going down, everybody's valuing homes is going down. The Fed is doing QT, which is pulling money out of the system. People have to pay more money to heat their homes to buy food.

• 1:33:58Speaker 00

  But we agree, like, we've been, we've been bearish enough of it, like, we agree. But, but there, there does come a point at which you wanna be a buyer and holder of, of good assets. Of which we believe that ETH is.

• 1:34:11Speaker 04

  Sure, maybe like a year or two from now.

• 1:34:13David Hoffman?

  Plus, the, the whole point of the merge fundamentals is that it doesn't, no one needs to buy because the Ethereum ecosystem has established itself around an equilibrium of a certain amount of daily cell pressure that all of a sudden inverts from negative fifteen to positive fifteen million dollars a day. And so, the whole idea is that, no, we don't need anyone. It's baked in, it's literally baked in code.

• 1:34:35Speaker 04

  Right, but can you refute my point that like, I believe that the market has put additional buy pressure in, in the lead up to the merge that would not otherwise be there? Ergo negating the whole existence of the merge in the first place.

• 1:34:46David Hoffman?

  I thought everyone has been selling for the last like six months because the price is going down.

• 1:34:50Speaker 04

  I think the price of Ethereum is still like astoundingly high.

• 1:34:53David Hoffman?

  Because of the merge!

• 1:34:55Speaker 04

  Correct. So once the merge narrative doesn't exist anymore, what's gonna keep the price up?

• 1:34:59David Hoffman?

  All of the people who knew about the merge haven't sold, and all the people who don't know about the merge did sell.

• 1:35:04Speaker 00

  Let me play a little bit of a mediator because Steven on Alpha Alpha on our episodes has, has said himself that he's setting his own buy limit orders, like, right? And you've set your own buy limit orders at eighteen hundred, fifteen hundred, twelve hundred, whatever, right?

• 1:35:18Speaker 04

  Twelve hundred sounds okay.

• 1:35:20Speaker 00

  There is a level at which you wanna buy, and like, I agree with you. Like, and we would all agree that like, we wanna own ETH long-term. And I think that is irrefutable, like, we do wanna own this asset. It's just at what price do we wanna own it?

• 1:35:33Speaker 04

  You guys saw Snapchat, right? Like, it retraced its entire run-up. The entire thing, gone. So the idea that like ETH is here like 2K when it was $200 during COVID and we're all like, can only go up from here.

• 1:35:49David Hoffman?

  Did you just compare Ethereum to a dick pic app?

• 1:35:52Speaker 04

  Yes, I did, because at least the dick pic app has a lot of utility in people sending their pictures of their dick to people, right?

• 1:35:59Speaker 03

  A lot of people getting laid.

• 1:36:00Speaker 04

  It's much more utility than me creating some weird financial derivative than borrowing against it 17 times and having it blow up, right? Like, I would argue that sending dicks is like a very

• 1:36:11Speaker 00

  Such a nihilist.

• 1:36:12Speaker 04

  Human thing.

• 1:36:14David Hoffman?

  Putting Ethereum and Snapchat into the same category.

• 1:36:17Speaker 04

  Humans were beginning of time.

• 1:36:18Speaker 03

  Sending dicks has more utility.

• 1:36:21Speaker 00

  The fact that Ethereum right now as a market cap is trading lower than like individual companies is laughable long term.

• 1:36:29Speaker 04

  Like, long term, maybe I agree with you, but in the short term, I don't think any of that matters. I think in the short term, everything is just liquidity flows. It's just like, everything is risk off.

• 1:36:39Speaker 00

  And of that, we agree. It's just like, at what price do you get back in?

• 1:36:42Speaker 02

  Your bids are gonna be there to support us at 1200.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, I will buy it 12, 13.

• 1:36:47Speaker 00

  Please, sir.

• 1:36:49Speaker 04

  I think, I think, I would be stunned if we don't like run those 1700 lows, at a minimum. I would be shocked. And like, in the Bitcoin ETH chart, by the way, which you got, like, that to me, that chart looks terrible to me. Like, I look at that chart and I'm like, this is, this is losing like 30, 40%. Like, it's just like

• 1:37:10Speaker 04

  The ETH B2C chart, it just, it, it, it looks like it just, it just wants to roll over and die. For reasons like I don't understand, because like, I think ETH is better than Bitcoin for the next five years, I do. And I don't own any Bitcoin, but I own ETH. But also, like, as an objective person, I look at that chart and I go, that chart looks really bad. That, it's not a bullish, it's not a bullish chart.

• 1:37:33David Hoffman?

  Do you, do you accept that if it's all based on flows, that the ETH merge with the inversion of 15 million negative to 50 million positive is bullish under that same reasoning?

• 1:37:43Speaker 04

  I, my, my point is that there have been excess Inflows on the basis of the merge trade. And when the merge trade doesn't exist anymore, those inflows will go away, possibly at an exact equilibrium point of the reduced outflows, right? So I don't, I mean, like, I listened to this, this episode with the whatever is faced, the hedge fund guy, and like, to me, like, that point didn't, like, and, and I was skeptical of this, what, like, the Bitcoiners and the, oh, the, the halving, it can't be priced in. It can't be, and then people make these, like, tortured analogies of why, like, oh, you can't pa, it's so stupid. Like, like, you just buy, like, why can't I buy more Bitcoin in advance of the halving, knowing that there's going to be, like, this reduced sell pressure at the end?

• 1:38:28Speaker 04

  It ma, it never made any sense to me.

• 1:38:30David Hoffman?

  Right, so right now, you are Nick Harder, and I'm the Bitcoiners. We're like, Nick Harder writes this, like, massive essay about how the merge is completely priced in because of just, like, efficient markets, and all the Bitcoiners are like, it's not my match priced in. But what they're saying is, what I'm saying is, where as soon as the flows, the outbound flows gets kneecapped, all of a sudden, it slowly manifests a bull market. And, and we get, with the whole triple point, excuse me, the triple halving, like, it happens three times as fast in Ethereum land.

• 1:38:59Speaker 04

  I think you are right on a different timeframe. I think, like, one, two, three years from now, you're definitely right. But I don't think you're right in August or September, or like, November or December, and that's kind of what I care about, right?

• 1:39:16David Hoffman?

  I, I can see, I can see down only for the rest of the year, but like, it's gonna be, it's gonna be, if that is true, then it's gonna be a green 2023. I think it's gonna be a green 2023 for ETH regardless. Alt Layer 1 still have another year ahead of them.

• 1:39:28Speaker 04

  I, I, I agree with you. Like, I do think there is going to be this pivot, right? But I think the pivot is going to, i, i, it's going to be like a different investment environment, right? Like, I don't think the pivot is just gonna be like, risk is back on, let's buy all the dumbest shit possible. I think it's gonna be like, okay, it's back on, but like, interest rates are probably gonna stay high, I think, persistently now. I think, like, we're probably gonna enter a paradigm where we have, like, really high rates. But also like a lot of money printing and we try to like pull money from all the rich people and like helicopter it to the poor people and there's gonna be like persistently high commodity prices and all this stuff we haven't had to contend with before.

• 1:40:10Speaker 04

  And I think there is going to be like a premium to invest in things that have actual utility that like you can actually derive some sort of valuation or price from, which is why I think in the medium term, like I like ETH over Bitcoin because I look at Bitcoin and like to me Bitcoin is like, it's pure speculation. It's just like, it's like a call option on Beta liquidity, right? On like, it's basically just some call option on, or like some massive put, I guess, on like worldwide fiat, but like, I don't think the dollar is going anywhere anytime soon. And like I said, I think if the dollar does go somewhere, there's still going to be like an extended period where everything gets wrecked while the dollar goes to the moon,

• 1:40:56Speaker 04

  including probably Bitcoin. So, okay, why not just wait until that point to buy it then? Right? Like I don't, I don't see like this scenario where Bitcoin thrives, but Ethereum dies in like the next like three or four years. That's like the thing I'm trying to like convince myself of and like this piece I'm writing and I haven't been able to do it yet. So if anybody has like a good argument for it, like please.

• 1:41:19Speaker 00

  I think the better, the better question, like David asked if we're bearish or bullish. I think like the better question is like, where do you see ETH price in 2027? Like where do you see ETH price way down the road? And I think we would all around this table say

• 1:41:35Speaker 04

  Valhalla.

• 1:41:36Speaker 00

  Valhalla.

• 1:41:39David Hoffman?

  Say Valhalla, Stephen.

• 1:41:40Speaker 04

  Say it.

• 1:41:43Speaker 04

  We want you on record.

• 1:41:47Speaker 04

  I really don't want to lose everything before Valhalla. I'm like hopeful it goes there and I think it probably will.

• 1:41:55Speaker 03

  But I don't want to, I don't want to, I don't want to bet the farm.

• 1:41:58Speaker 02

  David, I mean, part of this is on your shoulders. I mean, like, these narratives will be seeded with the crypto-native media.

• 1:42:06Speaker 03

  Goddamn right.

• 1:42:06Speaker 02

  And post-merge, someone's gonna have to prove that electricity and power consumption is down, and, you know, these yields exist. Like, do you ever feel like a little weight on your shoulders? That you're gonna have to bear the inception of these narratives and how they grow?

• 1:42:21David Hoffman?

  I haven't been wrong yet, brother.

• 1:42:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right, man. Well, our money's on you, my man. Money's on you.

• 1:42:27David Hoffman?

  Alright, guys. Well, since the camera on YouTube keeps on cutting out, I think we'll have to have our last final words. And so I'll ask the group one, one question, guys, who will each get to ask is, why should the listeners listen to Alpha Alpha? Armon, number one.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  Number one? Oh, God. I like the compilation of their answers. It's synthesizing. Why should you listen to us? You shouldn't if you didn't enjoy this.

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  And if you did, you should. We'll be your homies. And we're taking this very seriously. I think that's something that I want to really put out there. We're really enjoying this. We're really taking this seriously, and we're really having a fucking grand old time. And, uh, yeah, come join the journey with us.

• 1:43:17David Hoffman?

  Eric, number two.

• 1:43:19Speaker 00

  The mezcal just hit me like a friggin' ton of bricks. I just slumped way down in my chair, because like, I don't know, it's, I'm feeling the weight of the mezcal.

• 1:43:30Speaker 03

  Dude, you're sweating, bro.

• 1:43:31Speaker 00

  I'm sweating. Is it a, are we in a sauna?

• 1:43:36Speaker 00

  Are we in a sauna? Okay.

• 1:43:42Speaker 00

  Bottom line is this, like, this is the type of conversation that we have on our, on our Wednesdays.

• 1:43:47Speaker 03

  You enjoyed this?

• 1:43:48Speaker 00

  And our podcast. And like, I think it's valuable. Like, for me, it's valuable. I've gotten, like, immense value just from talking to you guys over the years. This is an example of that. And like, that's why we did the podcast. It's why we started. It's like, to share this type of talk.

• 1:44:03Speaker 03

  Yes, well said.

• 1:44:04Speaker 00

  Steven.

• 1:44:04Speaker 03

  Steven.

• 1:44:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, if anybody just heard me rant for a while, and they were like, that was so annoying.

• 1:44:11Speaker 03

  But it was actually phenomenal. I really enjoyed it.

• 1:44:14Speaker 04

  Well, if you enjoyed that, then I guess you should listen to the.

• 1:44:16Speaker 03

  I always enjoy you, Steven. That's why we're co-hosts.

• 1:44:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I like to, you know that episode, you know, the Lord of the Rings where the orc kind of runs in with a dynamite, just dives in and blows everything up? That's like what I try to do with everything, you know? So if you don't, if you don't like that, if you just want to like be like comfortable and like, yeah, this is my thing, and I just want to reinforce my thing, then you should probably not listen.

• 1:44:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, you should definitely not listen to us if that's what you're doing.

• 1:44:40Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I like to, I don't know, I just like to shit out everybody's ideas once in a while.

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  It's good. He challenges me a lot, a lot. It's been beneficial, though.

• 1:44:49David Hoffman?

  Nick, can someone please tell the listeners why they should listen to your guys' podcast?

• 1:44:54Speaker 04

  Do not.

• 1:44:54Speaker 03

  You can work under these circumstances.

• 1:44:56Speaker 02

  Man, well, I'll give you the facts, and it's straight, is that I've become richer talking to these people, listening to these three other guys and debating topics, and it's made, it's made me money. And yeah, yeah, maybe a little happier. Yeah, and I think, like, like we mentioned, like, the grant study has proven that when you have a core group of people that you respect and that you, you dissect the world around, you get a little wealthier, a little healthier. And I think that's what we're trying to, trying to, you know, develop on the podcast, and so come, come join us.

• 1:45:26Speaker 04

  That's good. That's why you're the marketer in this group.

• 1:45:29Speaker 02

  Well, well, come join us, you know, let's, let's try to make some money together and, at the very least, hop in the Discord and make fun of our logo, so I can convince these other guys we need to change it.

• 1:45:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, make fun of us. We like those reviews. Yeah, for sure.

• 1:45:41David Hoffman?

  All right, guys. Well, Bankless Nation, you know what to do. All the links, per usual, are in the show notes. If you want to listen to Alpha Alpha, if you want to listen to these D-gents, and if you want to listen to them yell at each other for various topics of which you will not see coming, but the Alpha Alpha is with the Alpha Alpha boys. Guys, any last words?

• 1:45:57Speaker 03

  Bro, you're the man. We love you. We appreciate you. That was phenomenal. It's an honor. Like, I'm actually really sad you're leaving San Diego, but to be continued in many ways.

• 1:46:11David Hoffman?

  Certainly.

• 1:46:11Speaker 03

  And this has been an honor for us.

• 1:46:13Speaker 04

  I am sad, too, on a personal level, that you're leaving, because you are the only time in my life I've like walked into a group, and there's been like a person there who's like liked crypto more than me.

• 1:46:25Speaker 04

  It was so refreshing to be able to like even just take a step back and go like huh. Because I've just always been like the totally off the defense. I love that. And I'm going to miss you. Now I'm going to just be just tilted on by myself.

• 1:46:43Speaker 00

  The most vulnerable Steven's ever been. That was huge.

• 1:46:48David Hoffman?

  Earthshatter.

• 1:46:49Speaker 04

  Fuck you guys.

• 1:46:51David Hoffman?

  Well, guys, Brooklyn feels very, very uphill as in it seems like I could roll off of that thing real quick. And San Diego has treated me well. And a large part of that story is because of you guys. So thank you for welcoming me and then I'll see you guys again in the future.

• 1:47:05Speaker 00

  Thanks, bro. Love you, brother.

• 1:47:06Speaker 04

  Love you.

• 1:47:07David Hoffman?

  All right. Cheers, guys. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks and exclusive content and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today. Also, don't forget to subscribe to the channel for in-depth interviews with industry leaders, Ask Me Anythings and weekly rollups where

• 1:47:52David Hoffman?

  we summarize the week in crypto and other fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless nation.