88 - Forward With Crypto | Andrew Yang

Andrew Yang is a former Presidential and Mayoral candidate, entrepreneur, and founder of the new Forward Party. Seeking ways to push our democracy into the future, Andrew has championed novel ideas to improve the deep intrinsic problems of the current two-party system. We see aligned interests between the Forward Party and the crypto community, and Andrew says during the episode that the Forward party IS the Crypto party. Re-establishing legitimacy to our institutions, evolving our governance system, and upgrading our economic protocols are shared interests of Andrew Yang and the Bankless Nation. We are stoked to have Andrew on the podcast, so dive in for a fascinating discussion of what's wrong with our current system and what we can do to fix it. ✨ EPISODE DEBRIEF ✨ https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/exclusive-debrief-forward-with-crypto ------ 📣 POOLTOGETHER | DEFI LOTTERY https://bankless.cc/PoolTogether ------ 🚀 SUBSCRIBE TO NEWSLETTER: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/ 🎙️ SUBSCRIBE TO PODCAST: http://podcast.banklesshq.com/ ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: ⚖️ ARBITRUM | SCALING ETHEREUM https://bankless.cc/Arbitrum 🍵 MATCHA | DECENTRALIZED EXCHANGE AGGREGATOR https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🔐 LEDGER | SECURE YOUR ASSETS https://bankless.cc/Ledger 🧙‍♀️ ALCHEMIX | SELF-PAYING LOANS http://bankless.cc/Alchemix ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 8:00 Andrew Yang & Crypto 13:20 American Democracy 17:38 A Third Path 24:51 Banking is Broken 30:19 Big Tech 34:45 Open Primaries 43:47 A More Intelligent System 51:00 Crypto UBI 57:57 Crypto and the Forward Party 1:04:19 Lobbying & Stigma 1:10:27 Clarity and Platforms 1:15:01 The Forward DAO 1:22:00 andrewyang.eth 1:24:57 Optimism about the 2020s ------ Resources: Andrew Yang on Twitter: https://twitter.com/AndrewYang?s=20 Andrew's Book 'Forward' https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/667341/forward-by-andrew-yang/ Forward Party on Twitter: https://twitter.com/Fwd_Party?s=20 Welcome to Bankless: https://shows.banklesshq.com/p/-welcome-to-bankless-2021-edition ----- 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.

• 0:07Ryan Sean Adams?

  Welcome to Bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance. This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity. I'm Ryan John Adams. I'm here with David Hoffman, and we're here to help you become more bankless. David, Andrew Yang on the podcast. Can't believe it, man. What an epic podcast that was. What were some of your favorite parts?

• 0:33David Hoffman?

  Well, he just came out and said it. The Forward Party is the crypto party, apparently, according to Andrew Yang. You heard it here. And so, we really had a podcast about the deep alignment behind Andrew Yang's vision for the future of the world, and how crypto relates to that. And not only how crypto relates, but also how crypto can actually achieve some of these same goals and visions that Andrew's looking for, but perhaps in an easier, more direct way. As somebody that volunteered for Andrew Yang's campaign in 2020, it was an absolute honor to get him on the podcast. And even just being able to talk to him about our advice for what we have for the Forward Party as it relates to crypto, and his advice

• 1:18David Hoffman?

  for the crypto industry as it relates to politics was insanely valuable. And I don't think that this will be the last of Andrew Yang on the Bankless Podcast.

• 1:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I don't think so either. And it's definitely not going to be the last of Andrew Yang's conversation about crypto. I felt like in that episode, he almost stood up and said, hey, I'll be an advocate for crypto. I'll help you guys. Like, you know, and maybe he couldn't do that when he was a Democrat. Maybe you can't do that as a Republican either. You're too embedded in the existing institutions. But the Forward Party provides him an interesting platform to do that in. Because the Forward Party is all about, like, you can be a Democrat and be the Forward Party. You can be a Republican in the Forward Party. Just in the same way, you can be a crypto advocate and be a Democrat or Republican in the US. And what really struck me, David, from that conversation is like this. Andrew Yang really gets

• 2:10Ryan Sean Adams?

  It like he understands what crypto is trying to do and he understands the existential threat or the kneecapping effect. He used the word kneecap several times when talking about the US government's interference in the crypto industry. He understands that's a real threat and he knows how to work the process and how to navigate that threat. I think he can be a huge ally for crypto and regardless of what where you are in the political spectrum, Bankless is not a political podcast, but for crypto we are. Crypto needs to step into the political arena. If we're going to actually mainstream this, this is sort of our next step. So it's not about being a Democrat or Republican or left versus right or anything else. This is about being pro

• 2:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  crypto and anti authoritarian and Andrew Yang gets the struggle, understands why they're doing this, why we're doing this and understands the benefits that crypto can provide. What a fantastic conversation, man.

• 3:07David Hoffman?

  Yeah, there are some things about Andrew Yang or perhaps some things that he's not that actually makes him the perfect crypto representative. Well, he's no longer a Democrat. He was running under the Democratic Party, but now he is making a third party called the Forward Party and he's also not an institutionalized politician. He's not a politician. He's a guy trying to get things done and the way that he sees getting things done the most effectively is via politics and government, but he doesn't want to be a politician. He just wants to see results. And in the same way that crypto is not a left or right industry, we just care about innovation and moving forward.

• 3:50David Hoffman?

  And so I think of all industries out there, crypto is actually the most interested in a non partisan party, which is itself a party that is trying to be outside of the realm of politics and just trying to do what we use on the podcast, a protocol upgrade to the way our democracy works here in the United States.

• 4:11Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I love it. You know, he's the son of a physicist and his mother was, you know, computer science. He grew up playing video games, right? And, you know, dabbling in Dungeons and Dragons, these things. Like, he's a systemic thinker. He's also an entrepreneur. These qualities, I think, make him finely tuned to actually understand this industry and understand what we're talking about here.

• 4:35David Hoffman?

  Not to mention being very young as in comparison to the other politicians that are out there.

• 4:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, absolutely. Young of mind as well, you know, eager to dive into these things. So, in this podcast, we opened up with the problem that he sees in America and the fact that the problems he sees require systemic solutions. Then we talk about what solutions he thinks American democracy needs in the realm of nation-state reform. And then I think we get to a really interesting point in the conversation where we talk about this third path, which is crypto, which, you know, the crypto solution is basically a blank slate to many of the problems that Andrew Yang sees. Building a fresh new system from the ground up and building trust that way. So, a lot of cool things to talk about. He also mentioned a DAO for his political party.

• 5:24David Hoffman?

  Forward DAO?

• 5:25Ryan Sean Adams?

  What? What is this?

• 5:27David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 5:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  Guys, you're just gonna have to tune into the full episode to get the digest. And also, if you are a premium subscriber, make sure you tune into the debrief that David and I recorded post-podcast. It's a hot one. Without further ado, we want to thank the sponsors that made this episode possible and get right into the podcast with Andrew Yang.

• 5:50David Hoffman?

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• 6:34David Hoffman?

  If you're a developer and you want to save on gas costs and overall make a better experience for your users, go to developer off chain labs.com to get started building on Arbitrum. If you're a user, keep an eye out for your favorite DeFi apps building on Arbitrum. Many DeFi applications that are on the Ethereum layer one are migrating over to layer twos like Arbitrum, and some are even skipping over layer ones and deploying directly on layer twos. There are so many apps coming online to Arbitrum. So go to bridge dot Arbitrum dot I O and start bridging over your Ether or any of the tokens listed and start having a DeFi experience that you've always wanted. Living a bankless life requires taking control over your own private keys. Not your keys, not your crypto. That's why so many in the bankless nation already have their Ledger hardware wallet,

• 7:19David Hoffman?

  which makes proper private key management a breeze. But the Ledger ecosystem is much more than just a secure hardware wallet. Ledger is the combination of the Ledger hardware wallet and the Ledger Live app. And if you're used to seeing all of your crypto services and favorite DeFi apps all in one spot, Ledger Live is where you want to be. Not only does Ledger let you buy your crypto assets straight from the app, but it also hooks into all of the DeFi apps and services that you're used to. Using Ledger Live, you can stake your ETH in Lido, swap on DEXs like Paraswap, or display your NFTs with Rainbow. You can also use Wallet Connect inside of Ledger Live to connect to all the other DeFi apps that keep coming online. DeFi never stops growing, and the Ledger Live app grows alongside with it.

• 8:03David Hoffman?

  So click the link in the show notes to see all of the DeFi apps that Ledger Live has, and stay tuned as more apps come online. And if you don't have a Ledger hardware wallet, what are you even waiting for? Go to ledger.com, grab a Ledger, download Ledger Live, and get all of your DeFi apps all in one space.

• 8:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Bankless Nation, we are super excited to introduce you to our next guest, who probably needs no introduction for a number of our listeners, particularly those US listeners. Andrew Yang is On the Bankless Podcast today, he's a former presidential candidate. He's a former mayoral candidate, New York City as well. He is the founder of the newly launched Forward Party, which we're going to talk a lot about. In fact, he's just written a book on why he's doing it. We're going to go through some of the concept in his book. The book is called Forward. I've got it right on my back shelf there.

• 8:53Speaker 02

  I see, look at that. Yeah, it's looking good.

• 8:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's there. Fantastic book, Andrew. You know, two fun facts before we begin, just for our audience. Fun fact number one is David Hoffman, my co-host, actually volunteered for your 2020 campaign out in Seattle. He's a contributor. Fun fact number two, and this is for the Bankless listeners. I learned as I was reading Andrew's book that he grew up playing Dungeons and Dragons and video games and reading comic books and sci-fi. So Andrew, I feel like you're already one of us. This is very much our clan and our tribe, people who did that growing up. So officially, welcome to Bankless, my friend.

• 9:31Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me, Ryan, and thank you so much for your support on the campaign, David. We had some great times. And yes, I definitely was a bit of a geek or a lot of a geek growing up. So if that's the tribe, then certainly count me in.

• 9:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think that's the early tribe of crypto adopters. We all kind of come from that heritage, you know, and video games and geekery, computer stuff, that's all us. But I gotta say, it's really great to see a politician actively engage with the crypto community, because most of you guys are still scared of us, Andrew. But you don't seem afraid of crypto. And I want to start with this question. What do you make of crypto? Like, what's your take on it? At the highest level, is this a good thing? Is this a bad thing? What are you thinking about the subject?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  I have a lot of friends in the crypto community, and I got to know people like David when I was running for president. I am a huge proponent of cryptocurrencies as a force for

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Innovation and democratization in the future. I hope that we can help it realize its potential and that frankly, government doesn't come along and do something to screw the industry because it doesn't understand what the heck is going on. And that unfortunately is a very real possibility. I think most people saw what happened recently where there was this infrastructure bill. And then people were like, that's fine, you know, infrastructure bill. And then all of a sudden cryptocurrencies get wedged in there. They're like, what? What just happened? And then some of like the discussion around it seemed completely incoherent. There was like a scramble to be like, can someone explain to these folks what is going

• 11:16Speaker 02

  on? And then there was this unfortunate intersection between US politics and its dysfunction and the cryptocurrency community. And so my, my hope is that we can try to get some sanity into Washington around the fact that cryptocurrencies should be here to stay. And if we are thoughtful about it, could do an enormous amount of good to solve some of our biggest problems that we're struggling with.

• 11:47Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just, just really quick on the infrastructure bill. Why do you think that happened? Why do you think there was that sort of reaction? Do people just not understand it? Are they, do they feel threatened to buy it? Is it a mixture of both?

• 11:59Speaker 02

  It's a mixture of both for sure. I mean, the reason it happened in real life when the infrastructure bill is they're looking for money. They're just like, hey, we're going to pay for this thing. You know, I hear that if we tax these cryptocurrency transactions, we can generate billions of dollars. Ooh, let's do that. And then someone was like, well, come up with the language. And then someone came up with language that did not make a whole lot of sense and would have roped in a bunch of folks that would have had a very hard time actually complying or, or shouldn't have been considered broker dealers in essence. And so then the industry did reach out to various legislators and sympathetic senators. And then there was a

• 12:40Speaker 02

  A compromise that was broached and then the compromise kind of ran aground because of the timing and there was I think at least one senator who stood up and was frankly, you know, against any amendment. And so we have to do our best to try and edify and educate some of these legislators because one of the functions of our leadership right now is it's kind of old. Like the average age of a US congressperson is 57, a senator at 62. And if you look at leadership, it's generally even 15 to 20 years older than that.

• 13:20David Hoffman?

  Andrew, one of the big discussion points we want to have on today's show is how we think that crypto actually fits into a lot of the visions that you have and articulate for the future. But before we actually get there, I think it's important to kind of back up and start this story at the beginning, at the where it should start, which is at your 2020 campaign was a campaign to drive awareness towards the coming tidal wave of automation and perhaps the amounts of social unrest that that promises to bring. And I would say more or less mission accomplished on that endeavor.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  David, you helped make it happen. Thank you, gang, gang, and everyone who helped advance the case.

• 14:04David Hoffman?

  Absolutely, absolutely. And while unfortunately you didn't win the 2020 campaign, you did achieve those goals. And now you have redirected your attention on towards a bigger, a bigger fight, which is the reconstruction of the way that our democracy actually works. So Andrew, can you let our listeners know, why is that the fight? Why, why have you shifted from automation towards this new fight, which is the structure of the American democracy?

• 14:34Speaker 02

  Running for president was an incredible journey and I tried to document it in my book, Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy, but I also tried to figure out why we feel so stuck. Why is it that America does not seem to be humming or working? And what I found was that we're stuck because our government system is essentially designed to fail us. We're at a point in American life where if everyone does the reasonable thing according to their incentives, we are sunk. Because our political incentives will lead legislators into their corners and blame the other side for failures, because it turns out that some

• 15:16Speaker 02

  of these issues are more valuable to politicians unsolved than solved. Like, if you came forward and solved it and had this mammoth compromise, instead of being rewarded, you'd be likely to lose your job. And so, nothing gets done. And so, I started to dig in, okay, if we shouldn't expect it to work, how could you make it work better? And I will say that I believe that the future of this country is very, very dark if we don't make serious changes politically. Where polarization now is at civil war levels, we're seeing political violence in real life. Forty-two percent of people now regard their political opponents as evil or their mortal enemies. And so, if that's the context, where does it lead?

• 16:01Speaker 02

  If you get rewarded for extremity. So, I came to these conclusions last year and thought, well, what you would need is a dynamic change. What you would need is incentives that reward leaders for catering to 51% of us instead of the most extreme 20%. And that systems change consists in real life, and I'm happy to say you actually can do something about this, I mean, it seems impossible, but you can, is you switch to open primaries and ranked choice voting in the 24 states that allow for ballot initiatives, where if enough of us get together, we can say, you know what, I don't like the fact that the... Party controls a primary and controls all the levers, like let's switch to open primaries.

• 16:42Speaker 02

  And so that became my mission. And I thought, okay, let's make that happen. But the mission overall is still the same. It's just to make stuff work better and have our democracy stand the test of time. And for the cryptocurrency community, you all are whizzing along, just like, you know, creating things and like seeing how things can be so much more efficient. You're like, I don't need these cludgy bureaucracies. Like, this is fantastic. And then you look at government, you're like, what? So, so in many ways, I'm trying to bring the future to government. But I've concluded that the single biggest problem really is the duopoly problem.

• 17:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, it's fascinating. And we want to get into more of kind of the duopoly problem and actually the solutions that you're presenting, because in crypto terms, what we would call the idea of ranked choice voting and open primaries is like a protocol change, a upgrade to the core mechanism of the system, right? That's really what you're doing. But before we get into some of the solutions that you're presenting, your book is presenting with some of these upgrades, I want to dig a bit more into the problem. And one of the themes of your book, as I was reading it, I took out that really resonates, I think, with the crypto community is the problem of institutional distrust. Okay, so people no longer trust

• 18:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  the legacy institutions. In fact,

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 18:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  In crypto, we've started calling them legacy institutions, Andrew. And one of the lines we often say is our institutions are failing us. So I think part of it, Andrew, is like, there's institutional distrust, but a lot of it feels like it's deserved distrust. And I want to ask you the question, why do you think people no longer trust the legacy institutions? Have they failed us? Or is there just a miscommunication somewhere down the road? What's going on here?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  Many of these institutions have failed us. And then when you look to hold someone accountable, there's no one to be found. And so then the anger and resentment builds up in various ways. And you can pretty much pick an institution. I'll just use government as the big example because I talk about in my book. The United States is now 28th in the world on measures like drinking water, clean drinking water, that is. I'm sure there's shitty drinking water.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Clean drinking water, quality education, infant mortality, life expectancy. 28th with a down arrow, like getting worse. So you look up and say, hey, why are things going poorly? And then everyone's like, oh, you know, don't worry about it. Like, we've got it. It's like, oh, really? You've got it? You could look at any institution of American life and start questioning. Like, the media. And the media is actually now the defining institution for a lot of partisans at this point, where 69% of Democrats have a high trust in the media. And if you look at Republicans, it's down to 15%. So what you're seeing in terms of the two-party system is that Democrats kind of embody

• 19:50Speaker 02

  and trust these fading and failing institutions. And then Republicans have this anti-institutionalist fervor, which is like, you know, this shit's not working, tear it up, break it up. And what I'm hoping that we can provide as this middle ground of the forward party is say, these institutions have real problems and we need to upgrade them. We need to try and have them get with the program. And the hope is that that actually can clarify people's sense of what their real problems are. But institutional mistrust has been earned.

• 20:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I want to talk about this because this hit me like a pile of bricks when I was reading it, is you actually talk about the institutions. You're talking about media and education, all of these other things. But the core institution that's at the base layer of all of these other institutions is democracy itself, right? Our governance protocol, because that's the way we actually improve these institutions, is through a decision-making process. We call it democracy, right? In theory. And you said this, you said, "Democracy itself is losing legitimacy." What did you mean by that?

• 20:56Speaker 02

  This past election...

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Is still in question in the minds of tens of millions of Americans. I think 21 million Americans say that force is warranted to try and restore who they believe the rightful president is. So in that environment, and again, if only 15% of Republicans trust the media, then you can't rely upon elections to peacefully transfer power from administration to administration. I mean, that sounds dire, but we're seeing this play out in real life. One of the things that I'm going around on my book tour talking about is that, at this point, everything is on the table in American life.

• 21:42Speaker 02

  And generally speaking, when I talk about that, I'm being kind of bleak, honestly. Like, whatever crazy shit you can imagine in American life, like riots and civil war and disintegration, it's all possible. You know, I mean, we have actually seen an insurrection attempt in Washington that cost American lives. Like, whatever crazy shit you can think of, it's on the table. And so we have to try to accelerate the positive possibilities as well as the negative possibilities. You know, it's like the things that other people regard as too good to be true. It's like, actually, we probably could build an alternative financial system where people

• 22:23Speaker 02

  have control of their own data and it's seamless, there's trust. I mean, it is fascinating. The cryptocurrency community really is, in some ways, the antidote to this mistrust because you're like, hey, like, no one can even tamper with this stuff. Like, I couldn't if I tried.

• 22:37Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we really do feel like this is a third path, right? You said, you know, some conservative Republicans right now want to tear it all down, Democrats want to, you know, bolster the existing solutions, right? And I get the forward party is really a third path. It's kind of this middle ground of reform. The crypto path is operating in parallel, and its motif is like, let's build a parallel system and a new source of trust for some of these things and some of these institutions. But we'll get to that in a second.

• 23:08Speaker 02

  Oh, it's true. The parallels are very, very strong, you know, and I love that. I mean, you, there's like a new way in crypto. And there's a new way, hopefully, with the Forward Party. I mean, that's the goal. And I will say too, people probably gathered this, but the Forward Party wants to help the cryptocurrency community navigate this political landscape and see to it that our legislators don't do something dumb and crippling.

• 23:38David Hoffman?

  Well, we definitely need that help because we don't have very many allies when it comes to Capitol Hill. And so we are looking to bolster our ranks. And in addition towards what you were saying with-

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Well, one thing I can say, just to chime in on this, David. So the Forward Party can support Democratic and Republican candidates who are, for example, pro-crypto. And we can intervene in primaries, like we can do whatever we want. So this is something that I want to do. Like, I want to help reform government and build the future. And so to the extent that there are different approaches that the cryptocurrency community wants to take, I think the Forward Party can be one approach.

• 24:19David Hoffman?

  Absolutely. And one of the best things about the crypto society, crypto culture, crypto people is that we generally are inherently apolitical. We're not ideological. We enjoy innovation as our solutions rather than tribalism as our solutions, even though the crypto world does come to be very, very tribal at times.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  It's the irony of it all, David, because the Forward Party is kind of the anti-polarization, anti-tribalism tribe. So I get it. I get it.

• 24:51David Hoffman?

  Right. Andrew, in addition to talking about how our democracy has lost legitimacy, there's also a section in your bank about how, or excuse me, in your book, about how the banking system also you ran up against in trying to achieve your goals. And in our minds, the democracy side and then also the finance world are kind of like the two pillars that are holding up our entire country. It's how is our country going to be run and how are we also going to allocate money towards the rest of the economy? And you had this UBI experiment where you wanted to distribute a bunch of cash towards a bunch of different people.

• 25:28Speaker 02

  Million dollars, yeah.

• 25:29David Hoffman?

  Yeah, so you could prove the efficacy of UBI. Can you talk about the problems that you ran up against when you tried to do this?

• 25:38Speaker 02

  Yes, so it was March of 2020, the pandemic had just started and I was looking around saying, what's the most positive thing I can do? And so what I came up with was giving a million dollars to a thousand poor families in the Bronx. And I thought this would have a few effects. Number one, it would enable them to stay indoors and adhere to public safety guidelines if that was hard for them because maybe they had to leave the home to get stuff or work or something. And I also wanted it to be an emblem for what our leaders should do, which is like, look, we should just be sending people cash to stay home when the pandemic first had us isolating. And so I called JP Morgan Chase and I called Citibank and was like, hey, we'd like to identify

• 26:20Speaker 02

  a thousand of your poorest customers in the Bronx so we can send them a thousand bucks each. I mean, pretty good deal, right? You could probably guess what happened next. They gave us the runaround and then we went through regulatory and then they shot it down saying like, oh, there are like privacy problems. And meanwhile, I'm going to guess that anyone who has an account with these banks would have loved a thousand bucks and would not have had a problem with Citibank or JP Morgan Chase sharing their information for this purpose. But being an entrepreneur, I kind of guessed that they might not be able to... Oh, the next thing I did is I said, hey, how about you just give us like $4,250 gift cards or bank cards or cash cards, like debit cards? We'll maybe be able to use those.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  Maybe I'll like run around and like give them away or like mail them to people in the Bronx. And they couldn't even do that. Now, that one was a mild surprise. I was like, that really did not sound that hard. It's like, just give us some freaking debit cards. But being an entrepreneur, at the same time, I was running around trying to find institutional partners who might have these relationships and I found one in the form of Neighborhood Trust that works with the working poor. And so we... They actually had the bank account information. They had a credit union, so they had accounts for a thousand poor families in the Bronx. So we went through them. We gave each of these families a thousand bucks and then Neighborhood Trust even did a counseling session with each of them so they knew it was coming and the rest of it. Very, very positive.

• 27:48Speaker 02

  Still run into people who got that money occasionally or someone who knows them. It's like, hey, hey, my friend got a thousand bucks from you like, you know, we'll always appreciate you. And I was like, oh, thanks. But you can tell, I mean, like, our banking system just wasn't up to the challenge. And then when our government decided to follow suit and send $1,200 checks to tens of millions of Americans, how did they do it? The IRS. They said, you know what, you know, like, we have tax returns, we'll send checks, we'll put money into people's accounts. That had a lot of problems, too. I mean, there are a lot of people at the bottom end of the income scale that don't file taxes. Very sensible, right? I mean, if you're making below a certain threshold, they're working off the books. So they didn't get anything. Meanwhile, the government of Togo

• 28:31Speaker 02

  set up a digital currency payment system and got some like digital money, which translated to real money, to millions of people in one of the poorest countries in the world. So like, we had this scrappy nonprofit, we managed to get this million dollars out. The US government was just relied upon these old pipes. And everyone looks up and is like, yeah, that's fine. I mean, to me, it's not fine. It's like you missed millions of people that probably could have used it the most.

• 28:56Ryan Sean Adams?

  Totally agree. This is actually an area that that crypto can solve, you know, fairly easily, sort of airdropping, you know, stable coins or dollars to individuals' accounts. But but I'm curious, because you sort of see this as like, the the basics of a banking system, right? The the ability to send a simple payment. And then you, I think, conclude that chapter with like, if that's broken, we can't even distribute a simple payment via our existing banking system. Like, what else is broken? Is the rest of the banking system broken? What are these other areas in the economy that are broken? I'll say another thing that, you know, crypto community often talks about with the existing banking system, if you want to save money, right? You put it in

• 29:41Ryan Sean Adams?

  the bank account, a savings account, you're earning 0.01% interest, right? How's that a savings account?

• 29:47Speaker 02

  Good old 0.01% interest.

• 29:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  I mean, you're forced.

• 29:50Speaker 02

  You don't even bother, because it's like, it's so dumb.

• 29:52Ryan Sean Adams?

  You don't even bother. And or or you just, I guess, you're forced, if you have any scrap of savings at the end of the month, to invest. In the stock market or something else, right? There are no savings accounts. So as you compare our system to China, it really does feel like the US banking system is behind, is failing us. And you know, China's doing some innovative things with their fintech companies, but they're adding a whole level of state surveillance, which obviously is not what we want. But anyway, that's a hallmark of a broken system. Want to talk about another chapter in your book, Andrew. Big tech. They seem to control everything around us these days, right? We've entered this digital era, but we don't have digital property rights in the digital era.

• 30:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  And so, large social media companies own all of our digital property. They own our usernames, they own our passwords, they own all of our data. We don't have any of the data. Is that a problem in your mind?

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Very much so. And it's bad for our mental health. It's bad for our human agency. It's appropriating more than $200 billion a year in economic value from us that we're not seeing a dime. I actually kind of got a laugh out of this entire Facebook whistleblower stuff because she has unearthed these reports saying, "Facebook knows that Facebook is bad for you." And then I was like, "That's newsworthy?"

• 31:18Speaker 02

  "Didn't we already know this?" "Like, what's going on?"

• 31:20Ryan Sean Adams?

  I've seen a few documentaries already.

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, at this point, it's common sense. I knew that I'd already seen studies saying that all these teenage girls were getting super depressed on Instagram and the rest of it. And so, horrors, like Facebook had data saying that it depresses people.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  I mean, I shouldn't laugh because that shit's fucked up. But it's one of the things about our data that's getting used against us. And so, I believe that we should have the ability to own our own data, even if we decide to lend it or lease it to various companies for our own convenience. And the single biggest... A ridiculous example of where we are are those consent agreements we all click I agree, I agree. It's like, what the heck is going on with those agreements? No one knows. You know, it's like, it's pretty much like, just sell your stuff to us and pray for the best and click this button. And then you're like, okay. And then you just move on and you hope

• 32:20Speaker 02

  nothing blows up. But it's not the sweet deal that a lot of people hoped it was when we came up with this as the business model.

• 32:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  So I guess I want to zone in on this, right? We've got these problems, and these are just two examples. You have chapters on this, and that's the middle part of your book, all around the different problems and the ways the institutions have failed us. We haven't talked about media and other things. But I guess, to your point about Facebook, like, we all know that these social media companies are a problem. We all know that our banking system sucks, isn't great, could be upgraded. But here's the thing, nothing ever gets done to fix it on capital.

• 32:57Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 32:58Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, so, tell us why.

• 33:00Speaker 02

  Pretty good summary, right?

• 33:02Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, why? Why does nothing ever get done about this stuff?

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Well, the main reason is that nothing will happen to anyone if nothing is done about this stuff. So Congress's approval rating nationally right now is 28%. So three out of four Americans don't like what's going on or not going on. They've noticed. The reelection rate for individual members is 92%, which is a pretty freaking high reelection rate. You know, I mean, you can't get much higher than that. And so you have essentially near-permanent job security for these legislators, regardless of whether or not these problems get solved. And again, if you did try and meaningfully solve a problem, you'd be much more likely to lose your job, because it probably would have involved some compromise, maybe you

• 33:46Speaker 02

  reach across the aisle. Some people will accuse you of being ideologically impure, of working with the enemy, that, you know, like, you're not the true warrior that I wanted. And one of the reasons why the incentives are so polarized and extreme is that the folks who will decide whether or not you come back to office in two years are not the everyday voters in your community, but they're the most rabid Extreme partisans on either side, real oddballs.

• 34:17Speaker 02

  People who are just super plugged in to party activities and will be there and just yell and scream at you if you deviate from orthodoxy. So in this

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  People that shift the Overton windows against the people in the middle.

• 34:33Speaker 02

  Yes, that's true. They're just saying, don't do it. Don't do it. Be ideological. Be extreme. And so in this environment, you're actually more surprised if something does get solved than if it doesn't.

• 34:47David Hoffman?

  So Andrew, we have this broken, broken democracy. We have this broken, and we have so many other things in our nation that are also broken that we would love some effective regulation for. Yet, nothing seems to get done about it. And so this is perhaps the motivations behind why you've created the Forward Party. Because you think that like, if you try and fix it from the left, well, then you are ultimately fighting the right. And if you try and fix it from the right, well, then you have to fight the left. So you need to make something in the middle, which you've labeled the Forward Party, which I think is a great name. And one of the big platforms that the Forward Party is standing on is this idea of open primaries and ranked choice voting.

• 35:28David Hoffman?

  And as Ryan said in the beginning, this is, in crypto terms, what we consider a protocol upgrade, where if we have these systemic problems, the only way you solve systemic problems is with systemic solutions. So Andrew, why are these the systemic solutions that we need to go after? Why is this going to be the thing that helps fix everything else?

• 35:50Speaker 02

  So this has happened in real life in the state of Alaska. Love you, Alaska. I don't know how many listeners are in Alaska. So last year, Alaska switched to open primaries and ranked choice voting, which means that the current legislators can take their case to the entire electorate and not just the 20% most rabid partisans. And there was an example of what happened here, where Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted to impeach Donald Trump, the only Republican senator to do so, who was also up for reelection next Her approval rating among Alaskan Republicans now stands at 6%. So it like it genuinely was political suicide. Then if she had to go through a primary, she loses for sure.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  But because of the protocol upgrade, she doesn't need to go through the gauntlet of the 20% most extreme. She can just say to all Alaskans, look, you know, you like me, give me another shot. You know, I'm an independent person like I have my own judgment and opinions. And so what we need to do is flip the switch in states around the country. So that the reasonable middle actually gets rewarded politically. That people who are willing to do work and compromise with the other side get rewarded. And it's doable via ballot initiatives in 24 states around the country. It happened in Alaska. It costs $7 million to flip that switch in Alaska.

• 37:13Speaker 02

  And I'm going to suggest that liberating two senators and probably the same number of members of Congress from perverse incentives was like the best investment of like $7 million that a lot of us can imagine. So imagine running around to another 20 states and doing that. Let's say that costs, I don't know, 500 million or something like that. Because Alaska is a pretty cheap media market, so it's not like they'll all be seven. Like some of the states get pretty expensive. But if you were to make our government more rational, more reasonable, more productive, more prone to compromise. For $500 million, I mean, that'd be like the best investment of all time, given that, you know, the direction we're heading now is dysfunction and eventual civil war, in my opinion.

• 37:57Speaker 02

  Not to be hyperbolic, but it really is on the table. I don't know if people sense that.

• 38:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  I think crypto senses that for sure. Like, we're right there with you.

• 38:04Speaker 02

  I bet crypto does sense that, it's true. Crypto folks would be like, yeah, I could see it.

• 38:08Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, we could totally see it. All right, so but let's dig into the to the mechanism here, right? So understand that this is a very practical solution. Good ROI, right, can be done in a lot of states by ballot initiatives. But but guide us through for somebody who's not politically minded and some in crypto aren't, right? They're part of that middle.

• 38:28Speaker 02

  I bet a lot of you aren't because you're too busy making shit happen. And you're like, why would I give myself brain damage?

• 38:33Ryan Sean Adams?

  A little bit.

• 38:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, no, don't worry about it. I get it, I get it.

• 38:36Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some people in crypto just kind of stay away from politics, as a matter of fact, but like.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Well, also because politics is all this like tribal bullshit and like that's not your jam either. I get that too.

• 38:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Okay, but open, open, political upgrades are our jam, okay? So we want to understand them.

• 38:49Speaker 02

  I agree, I agree. Political upgrades are your jam, yeah.

• 38:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  What, what's, what's an open primary? Like, so what was it like before? Was it only Democrats and Republicans, two parties could run? And with an open primary, does that mean basically anybody can run unaffiliated? And anyone, you don't have to be a Democrat or Republican registered, anyone can vote for them among the, among the population? Is that what that looks like?

• 39:12Speaker 02

  That is what it looks like, but I want to take it back to first principles because I think this will be interesting to people. If you look in the Constitution, you won't find a word about political parties. Because the founding fathers weren't fans, they actually tried to warn people against political parties. John Adams said the worst nightmare would be two political parties because they would just smash each other into oblivion and nothing would happen. I mean, you know, imagine that. And so all of the mechanics of these elections are decided at the state level. And the political parties are not official fixtures of government, they just happen to run everything.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  They are, you know, depending upon which one you're looking at, something like 150 years old, that sort of thing. And so a closed party primary is the norm in most of the country. And what it means is that if you're a Democrat who's registered as a Democrat, you can vote in the Democratic primary. And if you are not a registered Democrat, you cannot vote in, in that primary. I can use an example, my own race, the New York City mayoral primary. About 900,000 people voted in the Democratic primary, all of whom were registered Democrats. Now, this city has 9 million people or so in it. So 10% of people voted in what was almost certainly going to decide the next mayor of this city.

• 40:36Speaker 02

  Independents and Republicans who were registered to vote had to switch their registration. Four months before the election in order to vote in the primary. Who the heck is gonna switch your registration four months before the election? So they'll come up to me four weeks ahead of the election and be like, "I wanna vote for you. What do I do?" And I'm like, "You are three months too late." So that's the norm in most of the country is a closed party primary. And what you wanna do is exactly what you just described. Make it so that you can run under any party line, any affiliation. Raise your hand, like, "Ryan could show up." I don't encourage this, Ryan, though maybe I do. Ryan could show up and be like, "Hey, I'm running for Congress. It's under the Bankless Party, the Forward Party."

• 41:16Ryan Sean Adams?

  I'm all about it. We might actually do that at some point, who knows?

• 41:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, you should. You'd have a great set of stories. So you put your party next to it, and then everyone just votes for whomever they want.

• 41:33Speaker 02

  And then the top five vote-getting candidates go to the general and have something called a ranked-choice voting. Final general election. So the ranked-choice voting is a system where you can rank up to five candidates by your order of preference. So if you just love Ryan, you can just be like, "Ryan is my guy number one," and just walk out. But maybe you like Ryan first, and then David second, and then Andrew third. So you go one, two, three, you know, Ryan, David, Andrew. And ranked-choice voting is incredibly powerful because it eliminates what's called the spoiler effect. It also can make it so that if you had two Republicans and one Democrat in the final five, the two Republicans don't cannibalize each other, which is everyone's concern,

• 42:19Speaker 02

  and then somehow make it so that Democrat wins. Because let's say I was a Republican, I came in, and there are two Republicans and one Democrat. I could vote for my favorite Republican first, and then my second-favorite Republican second.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  And then there isn't like a vote-splitting that happens. You get rid of the spoiler effect. It discourages negative campaigning, because if I trash you, then we both look bad. And then the other candidates look better by comparison. You can end up building interesting coalitions, because even if I don't command 51 percent... Of the vote, let's say I have an issue, let's call it crypto. Let's say I show up and it'll be like, hey, I'm a one issue candidate, I'm the crypto candidate. I don't have 50% of support, but I've got 10% of support. And then someone else is trying to build their coalition, they'll look at you and be like, what is your issue? Well, how about I adopt that issue and then maybe I can have your support? And then they can try and get their way to 51%.

• 43:14Speaker 02

  So it empowers dynamism, it empowers minority points of view. It gets rid of the party dominance of everything because right now you have no chance of winning. If you don't have a D or an R next to your name and the machinery has to anoint you essentially in a lot of these places. So this upgrade, combination of open primaries and ranked choice voting would introduce genuine

• 43:43Speaker 02

  ideological and political diversity and innovation and dynamism.

• 43:50David Hoffman?

  Andrew, I want to check this mental model against your beliefs and see if this is right. One of the metaphors that really helped me understand how our democracy and our political system ended up being the way that it is, is that we have the Republicans and the Democrats. And these are kind of two monopolies that are trying to consume everything, right? They want, and because there's only two of them, that's what stretches the middle and pushes the middle towards the fringes. And a lot of the behaviors or the incentives that we've seen, such as like actually registering with a party, not being able to vote outside of your party, are efforts in continually to monopolize more and more of the voting base.

• 44:33David Hoffman?

  And so when I see these two protocol upgrades, I'm seeing something along, similar along the efforts of some anti-trust efforts or a straight up anti-monopoly efforts. And so these new mechanisms allow for people to express, like you said, a greater diversity of opinions without being confined under these monopolies that the Democrats and the Republicans have established upon our democracy. How do you feel about that take?

• 45:01Speaker 02

  That's very apt. Right now, 62% of Americans say they want an alternative to the two major parties. 60% say both parties are out of touch. And so imagine if you were an entrepreneur and you arrived on the scene and there was a marketplace with two companies, and 60% of people said, "Hey, I want a third choice." Wouldn't you rush to start a third choice? Right. Though, people have been wanting an alternative for a long time, but the two parties have tried to suppress any real competition. So that's the world as it stands. Everyone wants a choice, but the two parties don't want to give you that choice. And I have a feeling that the crypto community is going to look at that and say, "You know what? I think that eventually the duopoly is going to give, because that's not a sustainable

• 45:46Speaker 02

  situation." I think that's what most of us would think. And it's been really interesting. I started Forward Party officially to the public, you know, maybe 10 days ago or something along those lines. And there is just so much, both enthusiasm and they're not going to let you win, kind of thing. It's like the duopoly is going to try and crush you in various ways. And I have to say, that's energized me. I've kind of enjoyed it, where I'm like, "Ooh, like, this is like, you know, like, the reflexive resistance of the machine, where they're trying to squash you and suppress you in various ways." But I have a feeling

• 46:29Speaker 02

  most people listening to this would look at this and say, "There's no way this duopoly is just going to keep on lumbering on."

• 46:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, I have a feeling it's not going to work, Andrew. I have a feeling they're not going to be able to squash you and suppress you. They've been saying that about crypto for years, right? And the resilience is, when you have a bottom-up movement that is by the people, for the people, and you have the support of the people, it's very decentralized. It's very hard to crush. It's very hard to choke off. It's an idea. I want to, you know, in one of your recent interviews, I think you used this term that also perked my ears up, and I think the crypto community probably resonates with, is you said, "These protocol upgrades," that's open primaries, ranked choice voting, is actually anti-authoritarianism, right? It's like protection against authoritarianism.

• 47:15Speaker 02

  Yes, it really is.

• 47:17Ryan Sean Adams?

  What do you mean by that? Because we're all about that in crypto, right? Not left, but right. But we are definitely anti-authoritarian. What do you mean by that? How does this protocol upgrade help that cause?

• 47:28Speaker 02

  Let's say hypothetically you had a really, really bad leader of one of the major parties. They got control of the party and then everyone in that party, all of a sudden,

• 47:41Speaker 02

  falls in line or they lose their job. And that's a situation. Now, this is a situation that the founding fathers would have been trying to prevent at all costs, but they never imagined that there'd be only two major parties at this scale. And so the safeguards institutionally are pretty weak. Where if you have one major party succumb to authoritarianism, they can run the government fairly seamlessly. I mean, our government's really clunky and cludgy, so it's not like they can make some things happen. But they can exert authority over a lot of the government fairly autocratically. Now, that's just a poorly designed system.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  One of the things I'm saying is that the duopoly is poor design. And again, the founding fathers would have looked up and been like, "This is the stupidest design of all time." If you were going to try and resist authoritarianism, because it's like one point of failure. Like, you just get through there, then all of a sudden, they're like, "Oh, runs one of the major parties, there are only two of them." Like, you know, they have a lot of levers. And so if you had a more intelligent system, which by the way, most other democracies have. The UK has five parties, Germany has seven, Sweden, eight, the Netherlands, eighteen. And so there, if you have a party that has really bad leadership, that's a problem, but that's not like an existential problem where you get an authoritarian that rules a country.

• 49:10Speaker 02

  It's like you have one party that loses its mind for a while, and then the other party's like, "Well, I hope they get it together." But that one party can't convince three other parties to just fall under their thrall. It's one reason why this duopoly is just so dumb.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  Like, this duopoly is almost set up to allow for authoritarianism. It's so dumb.

• 49:33David Hoffman?

  It incentivizes it, right? It's the logical conclusion.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  It kind of does incentivize it. It is a logical conclusion. And that's one of the things I'm trying to open people's eyes to where it's like, look, this system is going to fail. First, it's going to fail to deliver for the people. And second, it's going to fail to stop an authoritarian from taking control of the whole thing. So what we have to do is upgrade the protocol and design it more intelligently as quickly as possible. And by the way, we don't have a whole lot of time. And then you make that case and then people just start, you know, lobbing partisan accusations at you and you're like, you are not hearing what I'm saying at all.

• 50:15David Hoffman?

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• 50:59David Hoffman?

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• 51:43David Hoffman?

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• 52:28David Hoffman?

  Andrew, we discussed about how the banking system failed to adequately deliver the UBI that you wanted to give out to the people of New York. And recently on Twitter, you also tweeted out a tweet when talking to some crypto folk. UBI doesn't have to be denominated in fiat. So has your experiences trying to get UBI out the door and into the hands of people, have you thought about how crypto would relate to this subject matter and helping serve UBI to the people?

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. When I talk to people in the cryptocurrency community, some of them love the idea of alleviating poverty through cryptocurrency. You can get the resource into people's hands much more seamlessly, as we've discussed. And you can do it via different digital currencies or tokens. And so there are a lot of people who are working in that direction. And I tweeted earlier, I guess it was a couple of months ago now, I said cryptocurrency is one path to universal basic income, because I believe it is. You know, there's absolutely nothing saying that it needs to be denominated in US dollars or fiat. Now, if I'd gotten control of the government, like I would have done it via US dollars, I'm not going to lie. I mean, I totally still want to do that.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  But if we can do it via other currencies, I'd be equally excited.

• 53:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  Just talking about the subject of UBI because I think of the six sort of solutions that you go through in your book, these are the two almost like closest to the protocol upgrades, right? The like the, you know, ranked choice voting and open primaries and also UBI. Like, these are direct things that can be done. And just relaying maybe what the crypto community might think about this. I think a lot of the crypto community is sort of supportive, right? You know, they see that the wealthy have had sort of quantitative easing, asset price inflation for the last 10 years. And so like some getting some money to the non wealthy and equalizing things kind of balances things out, right? And obviously, you mentioned the ability to do this via crypto, crypto platforms, crypto rails, you

• 54:39Ryan Sean Adams?

  know? Ben Bernanke says you could open up a Fed account and you could distribute that via your crypto mechanisms, for instance. But there is an aspect that some people in crypto, I will tell you, are uncomfortable with, Andrew. And I'm wondering if you could address some of these concerns about UBI. And that's some in the crypto community are very worried about manipulation of, let's call it, the money printer. Okay? That is the power to Mintcoin. The, you know, because this power generally ends up in the hands of the wealthy elite, as we've seen in the past, who end up using the money printer to benefit themselves. There's also the concern about inflation, maybe either asset price inflation or just, you know, plain old CPI, you know, prices go up at the grocery

• 55:24Ryan Sean Adams?

  store. What are your thoughts on these two criticisms coming out of some of the crypto community?

• 55:30Speaker 02

  I understand. I have friends in the community, so we have conversations about this stuff. To me, we're already putting the money out there. We're just doing it poorly to the wrong parties. So what do I mean? The CARES Act that was passed... Last year was 2.2 trillion USD. A very, very small fraction of that went to people and families, 17% by one account. So 83% went where? Airlines, banks, like big institutions, we just like jammed money into their pipes. And then there were a lot of people who are suffering in various ways, even though we actually did engage the printer, as you said.

• 56:13Speaker 02

  So to me, right now, we're in the worst of all worlds, where we're like engaging the printer, like the people who need it most aren't getting it. So I'd want to invert the ratio, where if you're going to put out 2.2 trillion dollars, I'd want to see 83% of it go to people and families who are struggling during that time. So that's the point I make to folks, is like, look, we're doing it. We're just doing it really, really badly and poorly. Now, the second aspect is like, does that end up pushing prices up? It would push prices up in certain categories, you know, that you can see it. One of the major problems we have, and I've dug into what's making people the saddest,

• 56:56Speaker 02

  where if you look at the primary sources of inflation in the US economy, it falls into three categories: education, healthcare, and housing. And education and healthcare are particularly dysfunctional markets. People feel like they don't have any choice but to pay, and so the firms just say, "Well, how much are we going to raise prices by this year? This much." And everyone's like, "What?" But then it's like, "Well, what am I going to do? Not send my kid to school, or like not get that medical treatment?" And so what you'd want to do is, you'd want to attack the real sources of inflation where they exist. I do believe in a lot of the consumer categories, prices are fairly stable because you see

• 57:38Speaker 02

  a lot of competitiveness and efficiency in those markets when the supply chain is actually functioning at a high level, which right now, you know, it's not. And that's, I think, also causing some of the price increases that we're seeing. It's not buying power, it's just that, you know, people aren't able to get the materials they need to the retailers.

• 58:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  So Andrew, we've covered, I think, two main things. Some of the problems, the institutional problems that we've seen, the problems underlying the American democracy. We've covered some of your solutions. You've got some more embedded in the principles of the Forward Party. But the two big ones are open primaries and ranked choice voting, and also UBI and some other things. Want to talk to you a bit about crypto, right? And let's have that conversation because in reading through your book and digesting all of the information that you put out and your goals and your initiatives, David and I, and I think many in the crypto community, can't help but see a ton of alignment, okay? So here are the base core principles that we might be aligned on, Andrew. First, we see the same core problems.

• 58:44Ryan Sean Adams?

  Institutional problems, systemic problems, that aren't going to go away by just electing another new shiny politician representative, right? These problems are deep, they're embedded in the system. Both crypto and I think the Forward Party are super bipartisan, right? This is not, crypto is not an issue that the left or the right have taken out.

• 59:04Speaker 02

  Or nonpartisan, you could say.

• 59:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not nonpartisan, exactly. There is really no allegiance. It's also a popular movement that's on the fringe. And so I remember like when you started talking about UBI in like 2017, 2018, how much on the fringe that was, right? Like, everyone thought that was just over wacky town. Well, we've been there with crypto. They used to think crypto was totally wacky town, just, you know, drug dealers and, you know, shady things going on. And so we've been there and we built that from the bottom up. The other thing is, we want to upgrade protocols and we want to build new institutions. Crypto is not an industry that is trying to tear down existing institutions.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  You just want to build it better over on the side.

• 59:46Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah, on the side.

• 59:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, totally.

• 59:48Ryan Sean Adams?

  Exactly, new trust machines.

• 59:49Speaker 02

  Just please don't freaking come and shoot us in the leg, or worse.

• 59:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is what we want.

• 59:54Speaker 02

  Avoid mortally wounding us, yeah.

• 59:55Ryan Sean Adams?

  Thank you, this is what we want. And you said this recently, which really resonated with me, is, I think you were talking to Crystal Ball or somebody about like media, and you said, "I have a theory that in the new world, people won't trust institutions, they'll trust people." Not institutions, they'll trust people. That is crypto, okay? So I guess I want to ask you, do you see all of these alignments? And what is there for the crypto community in the Forward Party?

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  I want to make the forward party, the crypto party, truly, because I do see the alignment is very, very deep. And the parallels are so strong where you have this system, you could say the political system or the financial system, that you see that it's failing and flailing in its various ways. And then you say, okay, maybe we could do better. Maybe we, in my case, I do want to try and help the political system upgrade itself and modernize itself. One other thing I'm for that people I think will appreciate, and I referred to it a little bit earlier, is term limits for our representatives, which by the way, 75% of Americans are for. And that would keep it from being such a gerontocracy where you have, like, folks who have been in DC for 25, 30, that's another protocol upgrade.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  And I want to make the case to legislators that the cryptocurrency community is a force for progress, a force for innovation, a massive provider of jobs. You know, I think I tweeted something where I said, "Rule of thumb, if you face a trillion-dollar industry that could define the future, like, don't screw it up." You know, it's a pretty, it's a pretty simple message. It's like, guys, like, please, please, please, like, take a bit of time to figure out what the hell you're doing here, because like, this is a very, very significant generator of jobs and value. I think that's pretty common sense. I will say to folks who are listening to this, that some, some people listening to

• 1:01:53Speaker 02

  this are like, "Oh, like, we shouldn't be regulated at all." Like, I do think that there is going to have to be, like, some kind of sit-down and kind of official, almost like a détente, like a, you know, but I don't think it's realistic to say you're just gonna do your own thing entirely. Like, there will have to be some regulation, but, you know, you want to do it the right way, you want to do it in an intelligent way. And I will say to everyone listening to this, is that at root, politics is about incentives. And we have to just make the incentives stronger to be

• 1:02:34Speaker 02

  For crypto and understand crypto than just be someone who's like, oh, they're like these crazy dudes who are like building this like parallel financial system. We're gonna screw them while we can still screw them. We're like, we're gonna like freaking kneecap them while we still got the crowbar. I mean, there are a hundred percent some people who are thinking in those terms, you know?

• 1:02:53Ryan Sean Adams?

  We know. I think we've run across them. Yes.

• 1:02:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, so what we have to do is just make it in people's interests, you know, like it's pretty straightforward. So if, if the forward party has a, a set of resources, let's call it millions of dollars. And then we go around the party primaries and like there, there are Republicans running against Republicans and, and Democrats running against Democrats. And that is the practical reality, like, you know, like I'm a practical dude. It's not like there are like forward party candidates running around in these, these races.

• 1:03:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  Not yet.

• 1:03:22Speaker 02

  And so then, not yet, not yet. I mean, you know, you gotta start, start with, uh, what's going on out there. And so I'll, I'll call someone out. Like there's a guy named Brad Sherman, who's like a very anti crypto.

• 1:03:32Ryan Sean Adams?

  We know Brad.

• 1:03:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah. There you go. Um, uh, like he's a Democrat and he, you know, hates crypto. It's like pretty much said, like, I'll do whatever I can to destroy it. I think. I don't, I forget what his words were. Um, and then his opponent is a woman I'm friends with named Erica Rhodes. And, and there it's Democrat on Democrat. Um, and so we should support Erica and say like, hey, check it out. Like, you know, you're, you like crypto, you got resources, you have a better chance to win. And politicians respond to resources and incentives. Like i- if they figure out, wait a minute, if I'm, if I'm actually sympathetic to this industry, like I'll get some resources, then you'll see their attitude shift. Um, so that's the game we should play.

• 1:04:14Speaker 02

  You know, i- if, if this sounds positive, the people listening to this, like give to the forward party and then we'll give to the politicians who understand your industry.

• 1:04:23David Hoffman?

  Andrew, the, we are increasingly finding that the crypto folk are really, really care about crypto. In fact, there's the, uh, I would say that there's a increasingly high percentage of them that that's kind of the only thing that they care about. They're a single issue voter and very happens to be extremely well capitalized.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  I also will say beyond helping candidates, which I totally want to do, like we also need to have a very high level Washington lobbying organization that can talk to congressional offices and the rest of it. I'm here to tell you all that lobbying really works. Like, it's one reason why these industries do it. Like, these industries go in there and sometimes they can make things happen, but more often they can keep things from happening. That's like now the Washington arrangement. It's like, I can't do anything but keep you from doing it too. And so this is something where the cryptocurrency community needs to play catch up. So, support candidates, yes, but also talk directly to congressional offices.

• 1:05:26Speaker 02

  And they do, again, respond to resources. I mean, you know, if you go in and say, "Look", like you just said, David, where you're like, "Look, we've got resources, we care", it's not enough to have resources and care. We have to do what we do, which is be smart. Go in and be like, "Okay, like, what are the pressure points? Where can we apply resources? Where can we apply influence?" And then you'll see results.

• 1:05:49David Hoffman?

  One of the ways that I see alignment, in one of the many ways I see alignment between the crypto world and the platform that you are promoting, Andrew, is that... You want to say something?

• 1:06:00Speaker 02

  No, no. Yeah, please. I just want to share my experience in lobbying for cash relief. And so this is one of the things that we can do together, the cryptocurrency community. And if there's someone who represents the cryptocurrency community, they can get meetings with legislators, I believe, or at least their staff. And the staff is just as good, because the staff control the policy levers very much. Like, the legislator will look at the staff and be like, "Where am I on this?", and then they'll ask their policy director for a brief. But when I was lobbying Congress for cash relief, one of the things that was interesting was like, I would get, you know, my team would reach out, like, we had a lobbying operation, and, which we still do, by the way. And so the lobbying operation would reach out to these legislators. And one of the things that we found made life

• 1:06:44Speaker 02

  easier was like, "Hey, will you take a call with Andrew Yang?". And it turns out that legislators are very happy to talk to Andrew Yang, because I'm famous. And they saw me on TV and I've got like a couple million followers and the rest of it. And so they imagine that if they talk to Andrew Yang, then like some, some like social media magic might rub off on them and like, well, you know, like, like I'm like, I'm someone they recognize. So my, my ability to get a meeting with a legislator is very, very high. And, and that was something that I learned, you know, like I didn't know that, but like I, I had calls, mainly Zoom, um, because it was 2020, um, with 65 legislators or whatnot, where I just like have a Zoom with them and just like talk through things and then their policy person would be on the Zoom.

• 1:07:28Speaker 02

  Uh, and so we, we talked through in that case, it was like, hey, you know, like casually, if like a lot of people in your district really like it, like very helpful, like we should probably do it. Um, and, and so that, that is like the blocking and tackling of this stuff. But I, I've found that having someone who they recognize, who they think has some clout, who they think has some resources behind them, uh, like it makes it a lot easier to get the meeting.

• 1:07:55David Hoffman?

  I want to unpack this because I think this is really, really important. Andrew, you, you have completely, in, in your 2020 election campaign, you completely shifted the conversation with regards to UBI, but more about money, shifting the conversation about money and also society. And that is something that we in the crypto world definitely need to learn how to do because crypto generally has a pretty negative stigma of with people that don't know about crypto. And yet it is something that everyone in crypto sees as beneficial towards society. If we could just figure out how to explain it. So what lessons from your 2020 campaign about shifting the conversation, shifting the Overton window about who thinks what about UBI?

• 1:08:38David Hoffman?

  What lessons do you have to teach us in the crypto world about how we can do the same?

• 1:08:42Speaker 02

  The single biggest lesson I'm going to give you, and this is in my book, is that people listen to other people. And it was what I said to Crystal too. Um, so when I started my presidential campaign, it was actually called UBI 2020 because I was like, you know, I don't want this to be about me. I want this to be about the ideas. And that was a very dumb idea on my part. UBI 2020 would have been a total dud.

• 1:09:07Speaker 02

  Really. And part of it, I will confess to you all too, is my self-consciousness at the time as like just a fairly regular guy. I mean, there was some discomfort being like, you know, Yang for president. Like, it just felt a little bit uncomfortable. But I realized that was exactly what I needed to do. So if you want to try to convert people's perception of the crypto community, you're gonna need a human being. You're gonna need an ambassador, who then goes out there and pounds the message and can convey the qualities that you want conveyed in a way that will humanize both the community and the industry. And that's

• 1:09:48Speaker 02

  a tall order, because who wants to be that guy? You know what I mean? Like, what a drag, you know? And also because of some of like the misconceptions, people will probably be like, oh, like, look at this person. They're like out to like protect theirs and whatnot, you know? So it's, but that is genuinely, I think, what it would take. I don't know if that's helpful.

• 1:10:06David Hoffman?

  Well, I mean, Elizabeth Warren just labeled us, our entire industry, as a bunch of shadowy super coders. So we definitely have an uphill battle to get after.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  Wow, that does sound very sinister. I guess it could have been worse, in the scheme of things.

• 1:10:21Ryan Sean Adams?

  It's okay, Andrew. We put it on t-shirts now and wear it proudly. It's kind of cool, actually. You made it cool.

• 1:10:27David Hoffman?

  It turned into a cultural meme.

• 1:10:28Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. But so honestly, David and I thought in this section, we were gonna have to like pitch you on a few things that solutions crypto could do, you know, for for kind of the forward party platform. But here you are at the outset, saying, hey, the forward party is the crypto platform. So maybe, you know,

• 1:10:46Speaker 02

  The forward party is just about making things work better, which I'm gonna suggest is the crypto platform.

• 1:10:50Ryan Sean Adams?

  It is.

• 1:10:51Speaker 02

  Yes, yes.

• 1:10:51Ryan Sean Adams?

  So let's talk about this. Here's what we've been looking for as the crypto community is, number one, a politician with some legitimacy, and call it like, you know, clout, I guess, that's what the kids are calling it these days, to actually talk positively about crypto, but but not in a way that's like pie in the sky. Actually know about crypto enough to talk about the key talking points. Right? Being able to use crypto, being able to, you know, go into detail on why crypto is good for society, not just number go up, not just a small pool of people benefit, but like the the pros of crypto, because that story is not getting told in mainstream. Like, number one, that's what we want.

• 1:11:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, there needs to be like an implementation where you can frankly show the politician around the community that has been impacted in this way. Like, that's the kind of shit that would work.

• 1:11:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  Yeah. And the second thing we want is some policy, right? Some like ideas, like a platform on crypto. So there are all of these unresolved things, Andrew, in crypto. Like, we don't really have clarity on our taxes. I mean, there's a little bit of clarity, but like, we don't really know. We don't have clarity on what's a what's a security and what's a commodity. All right? And Hester Purce, a commissioner at the SEC, has proposed things like a sandbox for crypto. Fantastic idea. Why is no one adopting SEC Commissioner Hester Purce's idea from two years ago to create a sandbox for some of these tokens to let innovation thrive? We need that. We need some clarity from the CFTC on what's a commodity and whether smart contracts are

• 1:12:27Ryan Sean Adams?

  regulated the same way intermediary institutions are regulated. We need some clarity from FinCEN. What we're really looking for, I think, in the crypto community is not like no government intervention, stay away from crypto, is a partnership with the US government. Because, like, we really feel like the US's adoption of crypto is like adoption of the internet in the 1990s. It's like, the US could be home to the next Silicon Valley. A ton of the top decentralized finance engineering teams are US-based. They're here, but they're getting driven out right now, Andrew, because we have a anti-crypto regulatory regime going on, and the US has not proved itself yet to be a home for crypto innovation. So we don't only

• 1:13:12Ryan Sean Adams?

  need a spokesperson and kind of party alignment behind this, but we also need like,

• 1:13:17David Hoffman?

  A policy, some like ideas to actually implement.

• 1:13:21Speaker 02

  A few things to say to them, look, let's have the sandbox that was recommended. Let's give some clarity on what coins are commodities versus securities. I mean, like, these things are, yeah, these things are relatively common sense. And the partnership you're describing, in my mind, needs to exist because the last thing you want to do is drive this talent, this ingenuity, out of the US. I mean, like, there is a capacity here to do something really important and profound, but there's going to be reflexive resistance on the part of regulators, really. If you're a regulator, you look at it and be like, oh, like, what are my choices here?

• 1:14:00Speaker 02

  Like, they're naturally going to land on stuff that I think is going to be onerous and obtrusive, that's going to cause problems, because they'd rather do that than, in their minds, like, leave all these holes. But right now, they're just not even being decisive. And if I'm you all, I think the major problem, I mean, obviously, you'd rather than be indecisive than decisive in a bad way, but like, the thing that you don't have, really, is any kind of clarity or transparency or, like, timeline. It's like, what the hell are we doing? We're in, like, this weird holding pattern.

• 1:14:39Speaker 02

  And again, a weird holding pattern is better than them fucking it up, but... But at some point, particularly when you're talking about the level of value that we are now, it's like, you need an intelligent approach that gives people clarity.

• 1:14:54David Hoffman?

  Andrew, we've been talking about the number of ways between how the forward party and the crypto people are aligned, but I actually want to take this a step further, because there are a number of drums that you've been beating, policies that you've been advocating that I actually think that you might not be able to do without crypto, or at least it's going to be significantly easier if you do it using crypto infrastructure. And one of the visions that you've had for the world, I want to tap into now, is the concept of a social currency or social credits. Can you talk about your vision for what a social currency is?

• 1:15:30Speaker 02

  There are a lot of problems in American life, but one of them is that jobs are disappearing. And people would all the time come to me when I was talking on the presidential campaign. They're like, "Look, you know, a job isn't just the money. It's a community, it's structure, it's purpose and fulfillment." And I would be like, "I know, I know." Like, "I want those things in the worst way." And so the problem we're going to face is that there are going to be more and more Americans that are on the outside looking in. And if you are brutally honest, you would say, "Look, if we're just going to judge this person based upon the monetary value of their time," like, there are going to be more and more people where you're like, shrug, "Look, like, I can have AI do the call center job you used to do." And so, like, you know, what choices are we going to have?

• 1:16:15Speaker 02

  And if we just let the market take it to the extremes, then you're going to wind up with like, some very, very like, terrible situations. And so, one of the things I wanted to do, I still want to do, is create more touchpoints in the economy for people who do things that we're excited about. That paying them dollars for, you know, could be one approach, but maybe we can also reward them with some new currency that they can cash in in their local businesses or at their local nonprofits. And it gives you, you can think of it as like, an Amex points for like, volunteering or something along those lines. There was a practice called time banking, where if I do something for you, then I get

• 1:16:57Speaker 02

  like, essentially, an hour that I can then pass to someone else, be like, "Hey, like, do this for me," and then they get the hour. It's really cool. And so, the goal is to create new opportunities for people where they're able to help someone in the community based upon something that they can provide that might not be like, the highest order activity in the world, honestly. It could be like babysitting, like, lugging crap out of your house, like, whatever it is, to try and create more touchpoints for people. And I think there are ways to do it that don't involve money, because a lot of these things that you are asking people to do, I think it would actually work better if it wasn't just cash, you know what I mean? Like, where if someone's volunteering in a nonprofit or tutoring, you don't necessarily

• 1:17:41Speaker 02

  want to be like, "Here's, here's five bucks." Whereas if you give them some new form of currency, then it would serve the same impact, and then people would both value it and monetize it in different ways.

• 1:17:56David Hoffman?

  So Andrew, I think that this same exact vision for the world is being executed by what in the crypto world, we're calling the world of DAOs, which are unfortunately-

• 1:18:06Speaker 02

  Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, yeah. I love it. They're working on the forward DAO as we speak, I think.

• 1:18:13David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:14Speaker 02

  Where some folks are coming together to say, you know, I mean, they ended there very fast. So they've already read my book and were like, hey, we should make this happen. And oh, by the way, Yang, we don't really need you to do anything because, you know, like that's the beauty of the DAO.

• 1:18:27David Hoffman?

  Right, right, right, right. So that is absolutely phenomenal. And for listeners who are tuning into this show and have not heard yet of DAOs, like Andrew said, it stands for digital autonomous organizations. I kind of think it's a terrible name. I think that really they should just be called digital organizations. But the power behind these digital organizations is they all centered around a token that they minted, a new currency that is an internal currency to that organization. And that internal currency can be passed around as people contribute towards the organization. And so we are using this crypto infrastructure to mint new coin. And that coin is a collectively shared currency that

• 1:19:08David Hoffman?

  people pass around as they contribute. And then in theory, the value of this currency also reflects the value of the organization. And so in the crypto world, we actually think that we found a way to make sustainable wealth generation that is human oriented, rather than like corporation or like monopoly oriented. And I think that this actually, this blossoming DAO ecosystem, which is generating a ton of excitement inside of the crypto world, hopefully, we can find a way to export this same infrastructure that we've created, this wealth generation infrastructure, towards the rest of America and the rest of the world. And it also represents kind of a form of UBI. If we can mint new coin, that's not the

• 1:19:50David Hoffman?

  dollar, and actually send that to people's wallets using these very efficient crypto rails, and then have the value of these things be associated with the power of the organization that they represent. And these organizations are permissionless to enter because anyone that feels like they can contribute can enter them. We think that this very much aligns with a lot of the drums that you've been beating for the past few years.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  I couldn't agree more. It's such a wonderful vision. It's perfectly aligned with this social credit that I described in my last book. Yeah, let's make it happen. You know, one of the things I do want to try and close on for people is, this is like the realization I had, like hopefully after listening to me talk for a while, it's like, oh, Yang reminds me of some people I know. Like, I'm like, you know, I don't think I'm that dissimilar from a lot of you. And I made the ridiculous decision to run for president a number of years ago, in part because I had this very strong conviction that some of the problems that were coming down the pike, you would actually need the government

• 1:20:51Speaker 02

  to get a handle on, you know. And you can be anti-government, totally get it. But one thing I'm going to suggest to folks listening to this is like, you can't ignore politics anymore. And there may be, you know, a sign of that, just the basic one is like, well, we can't ignore politics because they're just going to come and, you know, like, do something really dumb. Like, that's a fine reason not to ignore politics, you know what I mean? Like, there are both unsolved problems and also interventions you want to try and make more intelligent and rational. So whether it's through me and the Forward Party, whether it's through some other mechanism, you're a massive community, and you're going to

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  have to do something, I know that you haven't relished in the past, which is kind of stick your head in and figure out what the hell's going on with government. Certainly, I'd love to be an asset and an ally in this, but I do want to suggest to people that, you know, I think now is the time. Like, you know, like, it's been played out over a particular period of time, but like, now, now we're going to have to do it. And it's part of the maturation and modernization of the community and the industry, in my opinion.

• 1:22:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  I agree. Now is the time for crypto to get a bit more political. Now is the time for politicians to get crypto. I think both are true.

• 1:22:12Speaker 02

  I like that. Crypto get more political and politicians get more crypto. That's a very fine recommendation.

• 1:22:18Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, on that note, I guess maybe this dovetails into one of your chapters and something we've been discussing earlier. One of the problems is big tech kind of owns your data, right? And the idea with crypto is you own your data, right? Ethereum, for example, is a digital property rights system and all of the digital data that you generate on Ethereum is yours as a user. And I guess in the spirit of politicians getting a bit more crypto, we actually had, we heard right before, a couple of days before we recorded this podcast, people found out that Andrew Yang was coming on Bankless. And there was one member of the crypto community who was super excited. He'd actually purchased a,

• 1:22:59Ryan Sean Adams?

  you might call it a domain name, Andrew. So in the internet world, this would be like a dot com. In the crypto world, we have these unstoppable domains called dot ETH domains, an E N S.

• 1:23:12Speaker 02

  Love them. I think, did someone get me?

• 1:23:14Ryan Sean Adams?

  Someone got you. I'm gonna show you this. Someone got you a sweet, a sick dot ETH. I'm gonna show you this. AndrewYang.Eth. This is the Ethereum name service. I'm gonna do a search on this. This is the individual that owns it, right here. We only know this address. Actually, we were in touch with the community. And he said, prior to this meeting, hey, if Andrew Yang comes on the podcast, I want to give him AndrewYang.Eth as a domain name.

• 1:23:45Speaker 02

  Thank you. I love this so much. I'm really grateful. I have historically been a little bit slow to get various domain names. So I had to get AndrewYang.com off of another Andrew Yang, because there are a lot of us. So this means a great deal to me. I realize how special it is. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

• 1:24:05Ryan Sean Adams?

  This is reserved till 2026, Andrew. And we can coordinate off the call with some of your people and find out a way to make sure you get this, your ETH address.

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  I want it real bad.

• 1:24:15Ryan Sean Adams?

  And connect with everything.

• 1:24:16Speaker 02

  Yes, thank you.

• 1:24:17David Hoffman?

  Andrew, this is your passport into Web3. Instead of having an email and password to log into Facebook or Twitter, in the world of crypto, this is your login information. And this is how you retain rights over your data. And also, if you want to play in the crypto Twitter games, this is also if you're an Ethereum person, you put a .eth at the end of your name to signify your tribe.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  You know, I'm so grateful. I feel like you guys just gave me the keys to an internet castle.

• 1:24:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Well, this is awesome. And it's not us, Andrew, to be clear. It's not David or myself. Somebody from the community has stepped up.

• 1:24:54Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:24:54Ryan Sean Adams?

  He believes in the platform.

• 1:24:55Speaker 02

  Thank you, community. I love you.

• 1:24:57David Hoffman?

  Shout out to Brently Milligan of ENS. That's who.

• 1:25:01Ryan Sean Adams?

  Absolutely. So Andrew, I guess as we bring this to a close, I mean, this has been super exciting to talk to you about. I think there's a kindred spirit here in the Forward Party's platform and the crypto platform. And I see lots of opportunity for collaboration moving forward. I guess we've talked about some dark things, though, throughout this conversation, right? You use the term even civil war, political violence, I've heard you say, and these are very real threats. But I think you are an optimistic person by nature, or you wouldn't have written the book, you wouldn't have run for president, you wouldn't have talked about solutions to some of the problems you see in the future. Leave us with some optimism here, Andrew.

• 1:25:43Ryan Sean Adams?

  What makes you optimistic about the 2020s?

• 1:25:49Speaker 02

  The cryptocurrency community is an example of something that does get me excited, where no one could have imagined it arising to this size and scale and impact over this last number of years. And I do think that you all are something of a sleeping giant, that if you decide to get involved in a particular direction, you can... Do just about anything out of the sun and I want you all to use that ability. One, to make sure that your industry stands the test of time and the government doesn't do anything dumb, but then also to build a version of the future we'd be excited about. I mean, I am very, very concerned about the future, certainly of the US. I mean, you

• 1:26:32Speaker 02

  can see signs of degradation anywhere you look, but I'm also someone who's seen incredible things arise out of nothingness. You know, I'm a serial entrepreneur. I saw a national company just start out as one, two during a Starbucks. I started a national nonprofit with nothing but a PowerPoint deck and like a bit of resources and then it became a multimillion dollar organization that touched thousands and thousands of lives and created thousands of jobs. So like I've seen the magic. You've all seen the magic too. Like you've seen things created out of thin air that have immense value and have changed lives. Like you know that this has the potential to change hundreds of millions of lives. So let's do

• 1:27:13Speaker 02

  it. Let's get it done. I mean, it's not going to do itself. That's for damn sure. So it's like the spirit that you all embody and are channeling. That's what gives me hope, truly.

• 1:27:22David Hoffman?

  Well, Andrew, I think the last aspect of alignment between the crypto world and the forward party and what you've been saying for the past few years is that everyone in the crypto world is extremely optimistic. And I think it's because of the future that we are trying to collectively build here gives us reason, gives us reasons to be optimistic.

• 1:27:45Speaker 02

  Let's build that future. Let's do it. Yeah.

• 1:27:47David Hoffman?

  Let's build that future. And I do hope that everyone gravitates towards optimism. And Andrew, I volunteered for your campaign in 2020 and I will be extremely optimistic about also helping support the forward party in 2022 and beyond.

• 1:28:02Speaker 02

  Thank you, David. Thank you, Ryan. You two are tremendous. And yeah, let's make this conversation like a bit of a historic occasion. I got Andrew Yang dot ETH. The crypto community and the Forward Party have linked up. Hopefully, we'll be able to look back on this as something that helped shape our future for the better. Thank you both so much.

• 1:28:23Ryan Sean Adams?

  You're welcome, Andrew. Thank you for joining us. And of course, whenever you have a historical occasion in crypto, you have to make an NFT out of it. So maybe some listener will make an NFT out of this historic occasion and commemorate that.

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  I love it. The three of us go like putting our hands up like this and like, you know, it's like some freaking spotlight shining down.

• 1:28:42Ryan Sean Adams?

  Let's do it. Absolutely. Andrew Yang, thanks for joining us on Bankless. We appreciate it.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, guys.

• 1:28:49Ryan Sean Adams?

  Action items for you today, Bankless listeners. Number one, go check out Andrew Yang's book, Forward. I've got it sitting on the back of my bookshelf. Fantastic read if you're into some of the things that Andrew talked about today. You can also check out the Forward Party platform. We covered two of the core tenants of the platform. There's six total. You can check out the platform policies. If you're feeling the vibe, you can donate. And who doesn't want to donate to a party that is going to get behind crypto? So we're looking forward to seeing that from the Forward Party in the future. And of course, if you are new to Bankless, you're just listening to this for the first time. I'm Ryan. I've got David here as my co-host. You got to subscribe to YouTube. You got to subscribe to the podcast. You have to listen to episode 55, where we talk about the Bankless journey.

• 1:29:34Ryan Sean Adams?

  This will get you on the right track in understanding crypto. Ping us on Twitter if you want more advice, at Bankless Headquarters, of course, HQ. Risk and disclaimers, guys. This is the part where I tell you, none of this was financial advice. It wasn't even political advice, really. ETH is risky. Bitcoin is risky. DeFi is risky. You could definitely lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone. But thanks for joining us on the Bankless journey.

• 1:30:03David Hoffman?

  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, podcasts, 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 we summarize the week in crypto and other

• 1:30:48David Hoffman?

  fantastic content. Thanks everyone for watching and being on the journey as we build out the Bankless Nation.