Tarun Chitra on whether Code is Law | Layer Zero

Tarun Chitra, in addition to being Founder and CEO of Gauntlet, is a gigabrain, polymath type in the Ethereum space. His fluency in mathematics results in a creative, almost artistic approach to a traditionally rigorous and analytical field. Perhaps related to his search for beauty, Tarun observes the structural changing of massive systems happening in the broader geopolitical ecosystem today. We explore the relationship between regulation and finance in a unique light. Finance itself is fundamentally a legal practice—it’s money plus law. Finance becomes more elegant with smart contracts, and we muse on the idea that broader governance structures can improve with smart contracts as well. Is code law? Can we generalize capital efficiency? ------ 📣 OPOLIS | Sign Up to Get 1000 $WORK and 1000 $BANK https://bankless.cc/Opolis ------ 🚀 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 | SMART ORDER ROUTING https://bankless.cc/Matcha 🚀 SLINGSHOT | LAYER 2 SOCIAL TRADING https://bankless.cc/Slingshot 🏦 GEMINI | TURN FIAT INTO CRYPTO https://bankless.cc/Gemini 🦁 BRAVE | THE BROWSER NATIVE WALLET https://bankless.cc/Brave 🦄 UNISWAP | DECENTRALIZED FUNDING https://bankless.cc/UniGrants ------ Topics Covered: 0:00 Intro 4:30 Tarun Chitra 8:15 New York City & Boom Cities 14:00 Global Crypto 18:00 Leapfrogging the US 27:45 Governance & Regulation 31:55 The Fundamental Crypto Shift 35:53 The Great Re-Shuffling 43:08 What Works vs What Doesn’t 48:07 Core Blockchain Governance 52:40 Scaling with DAOs 1:00:00 Upgrading Financial Law 1:09:00 Code is Law 1:14:05 Tarun’s Approach to Life 1:20:34 Optimism through Beauty 1:26:00 Basins and Sinking to Elegance ------ Resources: Tarun on Twitter: https://twitter.com/tarunchitra?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ https://twitter.com/tarunchitra?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ Gauntlet: https://twitter.com/gauntletnetwork?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ https://twitter.com/gauntletnetwork?s=20&t=-Wk1FKVJz6cQrJM6EzusdQ Episode with Santi Siri: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/-santiago-siri-layer-zero?s=w Fundamental Theorem of Algebra https://www.britannica.com/science/fundamental-theorem-of-algebra ----- Not financial or tax advice. This channel is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions. This video is not tax advice. Talk to your accountant. Do your own research. Disclosure. From time-to-time I may add links in this newsletter to products I use. I may receive commission if you make a purchase through one of these links. Additionally, the Bankless writers hold crypto assets. See our investment disclosures here: https://newsletter.banklesshq.com/p/bankless-disclosures

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I think crypto is, you know, one of the more interesting things because it's like if we zoom out enough, you could argue that the entire goal of crypto is just to make organizations that can do commerce with each other on the internet.

• 0:17David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Layer Zero. Layer Zero is a podcast of unscripted conversations with the people that make up the Ethereum community. Crypto is built by code but is composed by people, and each individual member of the crypto community has their own story to tell. Cypherpunks understood that the code they write impacts the people that use it, and Layer Zero focuses on the people behind the code, because Ethereum is people all the way down, and it always has been. Today on Layer Zero, I'm talking with Tarun Chitra, who's generally known as one of those giga-brain math wizards on crypto Twitter and around. And Tarun is so good at like math, so fluent in math, that he actually comes out the other side and he's actually really creative about it. So he's

• 0:57David Hoffman?

  like a creative math geek, I'd say. And you can definitely see that in like his style, that of his clothes and apparel. But this is, this episode turned out to be less about the creative side of math and the beauty of math. We do touch on that at the end, but more about the relationship between regulation and finance. And we talk about how smart contracts are more of an innovation in the legal space, more than they are in the financial space. And we unpack the fact that finance is really just the combination of money and law. Money and contracts is how you create finance. And we talk about how United States regulation is perhaps holding back the truer

• 1:38David Hoffman?

  manifestation of this world of finance, not just inside of crypto, but outside of crypto, and how this incumbent regulation actually slows us down in the way that states can engage with each other. And what if we had interstate law agreements that were based on smart contract, rather than a federal system, which was very slow? So some very hypothetical zoomed-out applications of what it means to have smart contract law is code law. So let's go ahead and get right into this conversation with Tarun, right after we talk about some of these fantastic sponsors that make this show possible. Slingshot is a decentralized trading platform that combines the performance and ease of a centralized exchange with the openness and transparency of DeFi. Slingshot aggregates liquidity from all of DeFi in order to find the best price on

• 2:22David Hoffman?

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• 3:03David Hoffman?

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• 3:43David Hoffman?

  using bridge.arbitrum.io in order to experience DeFi and NFTs the way it was always meant to be: fast, cheap, and friction-free. The Gemini exchange has been my exchange of choice ever since I got into crypto. I use Gemini to both buy the dips and also manage my regular, automatic, monthly purchases of my preferred crypto asset. On Gemini, you'll find over 50 different cryptos, including many of the top DeFi and metaverse tokens like YFi and Axie Infinity. Using Gemini Earn, you can earn yield on your various cryptos, including 8% on the GUSD stablecoin. Gemini is available in all 50 states and more than 50 countries worldwide. So if you're looking to upgrade your crypto exchange, sign up at Gemini with gemini.com/go-bankless

• 4:26David Hoffman?

  and get $15 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within the first 30 days. That's gemini.com/go-bankless. Hey, Trin. How's it going?

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Great. How about you?

• 4:38David Hoffman?

  Oh, absolutely fantastic. Trun, I think you have a very interesting position in the crypto industry. And I think it's one that what I want to parse apart is, are you more analytical and math focused? Or are you more creative and art focused? And I actually don't know the answer to this question. And so do you?

• 5:00Speaker 00

  I don't think I know the answer to this question, but I will say it's like a coin flip every day. I prefer it having some like randomness and, and kind of things changing.

• 5:14Speaker 00

  I also think there's kind of like a, a sense in which it, there's like phases and seasons of, for things for me.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  You know, sometimes it's like, I, you know, there's a time where it's like you, people are more in the like production mode and creating things mode. And other times you're like consuming things. You want to read, read things, go see movies, go places, stuff like that. And I, I tend to think of things and more in that dichotomy of like, am I in a production mode or consumption mode? And like, well, how, how, how are things changing? And that, that usually guides that. But I don't think, I think kind of, I try to stay in the middle as much as possible.

• 5:54David Hoffman?

  I think if somebody was watching on the YouTube, they would look at you and be like, oh, that's definitely an artist. Like got colorful, stripy shirt, got colorful glasses, got a colored hair. But I think if somebody looked at your Twitter, they would think like, oh, this is the biggest math giga brain. Like, like theoretical physics type, like brain person. And so like this is, it's interesting to see that you, I think are very much on a barbell. As in like, you know, math and cryptography to the nth degree. But you know, it's so well that you've actually been able to make creative stuff out of it. Like you're like, you're fluent in math to the point that it becomes creative for you.

• 6:32Speaker 00

  I think there's always like some element of that. But I think one of the things that, um, you know, I In retrospect, got lucky with with I didn't go do a PhD. Um, I think, you know, after undergrad, I was like, oh, I got into a bunch of PhD programs. I was gonna go do my PhD, but then effectively

• 6:57Speaker 00

  it sort of became, I don't know, I I just like got a little weirded out by like, hey, you have to like pick a field now and then you have to stick in it for seven years.

• 7:08Speaker 00

  And I kind of had this like wanderlust of like, ah, I like some fields. I like, you know, I like some math. There are many math related fields. Why do I have to pick one and get stuck in it for seven years? And then even after being stuck in it for seven years, there's like no jobs at the end and dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, right? Like there are, there are a lot of problems with academia.

• 7:30Speaker 00

  So I I I feel like that just led me to be like, all right, well, I'm gonna try to optimize for what city you can have the most fun in. And then that's just like led me to not not real like to kind of like move back and forth between all these different worlds. And I think living in New York, especially like post financial crisis, I feel like there was actually quite a bit of like unbridled creativity here.

• 7:58Speaker 00

  And, uh, you know, I think that was like a fluke, luck and time type of thing. I mean, you know, I I think in general, it's easy to get like stuck in one thing. And I think, uh, you know, I I just personally always had a little bit of an aversion to that.

• 8:16David Hoffman?

  When did you move to New York?

• 8:18Speaker 00

  Two thousand eleven.

• 8:20David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 8:20Speaker 00

  Uh, so like just long enough after the financial crisis that like things started getting back to normal, I feel like. But also.

• 8:32Speaker 00

  Excuse me, around the time that um like San Francisco was starting to have this like

• 8:42Speaker 00

  uh you know, kind of grow and have this like economic boom and from my perspective uh attract all the assholes uh from New York uh to go ruin the Bay Area. So I I I found that also like to be like a great time to be here because a lot of people who are kind of shitty left. I know that's like a weird weird reason to be like, I love this city because all these people left. But I feel like there was a while, you know, probably 2000s where people were like, oh, New York, it's like the like finance bro, like stereotype, real estate, Trump, Wall Street, bro, whatever type

• 9:23Speaker 00

  of thing. Um, and like with the younger versions of those people, a whole generation of them just didn't go New York and went San Francisco, which was great. And that that actually I feel like was good for like music and arts here in a lot of ways.

• 9:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah. How would you characterize the city now? Have you been in New York ever since 2011?

• 9:43Speaker 00

  Yes, I've been here for uh 11 years. Um, yeah, I think it was like, everything was, I mean, the pandemic, I I don't think the pandemic is over here. So like, I I I've like definitely traveled a bunch in the last year and have kind of come to the conclusion that, you know, people in New York were very scarred um by the original part of the pandemic and haven't quite got like, okay, here's a great example. This week, I believe on Monday, all indoor mask restrictions were removed everywhere in New York. And yet you cannot go on the subway and find very many people not wearing masks. In spite of the fact that like, there's no, you know, like, things have

• 10:28Speaker 00

  have gone, people are just so wired to that right now. So I would say things have changed a little bit because of that. Um, and people are more mobile, so there are a lot more people who are me, myself included, who are like, kind of like, hey, I'm, I'll move around in winter and like go somewhere warmer and come back. So I feel like the, there's kind of this interesting thing going on where like, a lot of people are like, part-time, who were full-time New York residents or like part-time New York residents. But there's also way more people here right now than I've ever seen. So like, it feels like post-pandemic. Um, there were just like more, a lot of people who were stuck in the suburbs at home for like,

• 11:12Speaker 00

  months. My theory is that they just hit some turning point where like, we need to be around fucking people. And like, lo and behold, you got this like, huge, huge uh, increase in the population, especially in Brooklyn. Like Manhattan, I think is actually lower than its population pre-pandemic. But Brooklyn and Queens are like way higher. Um, and so that, that's been like kind of an interesting.

• 11:34David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Brooklyn has turned into, would you say that Brooklyn's kind of turned into a new shelling point for, definitely for crypto people. I don't know, I don't actually, honestly, I don't know anything about any industry that's not crypto at this point because I'm so into crypto, but like, everyone seems to be moving to Brooklyn.

• 11:50Speaker 00

  I think that's definitely true for people in tech-related fields. So like, there's a ton of people who have come from SF. Uh, I call them the, the, the, the Fang refugees. Uh, and they've, they've sort of like all moved en masse. Um, and uh, you can see this in New York in a funny way in that like, kind of the shitty, the like, not very artistic, but like, very modern buildings are all, all the rents for those skyrocketed. But like, the rents for like the brownstones like are the same. Um, so I, I think it's true for tech people, especially tech people who want to get out of California.

• 12:34Speaker 00

  Um, and then I also think like this whole like Miami, Austin, Denver thing was oversold. And having been, having been to all three of those cities this year, or in the last 12 months, let's say, sorry.

• 12:49Speaker 00

  I'm not convinced they've like built up this like whatever tech hub shit that you see in like the New York Times. You know what I'm talking about? And you were just there like I, I, it doesn't feel like it's really there. It feels like it's like kind of flimsy at best.

• 13:02David Hoffman?

  Yeah, Denver always has had some sort of presence in web, web three, but I don't see it like growing. Miami, I do see growing and Austin, I see a lot of people moving towards just generally. But again, Brooklyn is definitely up there in places that people are going towards. And it definitely seems to have like a frontier of, of technology, frontier of just like human exploration and innovation. Kind of vibe to it.

• 13:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, kind of in a weird way, uh, because like,

• 13:33Speaker 00

  you know, I think people, you know, if you went to like another country and you're like, okay, what, what is like the most innovative part of the US? And like 99% of them would just say like Silicon Valley SF, something like that, right? Does not seem to be true at all right now. Um, or at least like, I feel like a lot of the really, a lot of really smart people took advantage of being remote and are just like, I'm never going back to that shithole. And, uh, that, that seems to be what has happened. I, I actually feel like Europe also, London also felt like this. Super, super alive. I mean, London is post pandemic. New York is like on the precipice of crossing the, the Rubicon, but it's not quite there.

• 14:13Speaker 00

  But like, yeah, London also felt like really back alive in a way, like way more than I remember it. So I think, I think it's cool that the world is like kind of having these new centers. Um, but personally, I'm actually more excited for like Latin America. I kind of feel like

• 14:32Speaker 00

  in the same way that um, Asia like leapfrogged the US.

• 14:41Speaker 00

  By like skipping building landlines and like fiber and stuff like that and like went straight to mobile. Like, I kind of feel like Latin America is going to like skip. Uh, like the Venmo era and go straight to crypto. Like, it feels like they're just like way more primed for it right now than I. I was, I was living, I was living and moving between cities in Latin America.

• 15:04David Hoffman?

  Mm hmm.

• 15:05Speaker 00

  And pre pandemic, um, like.

• 15:11Speaker 00

  No one took credit card, like absolutely no one took credit. If you, if you had a credit card, you're, you're already looked at a little bit weirdly and someone would, you know. It was, it was already kind of like a weird thing. This time I, I went to like Mexico City, Bogota, um, other places south, uh, like Chile. Everyone takes credit card. Everyone is taking like tap to pay stuff. And I kind of just feel like they, there's this weird chance that like the US gets leapfrogged. By, by like Latin America and maybe Africa, although I, I haven't been there, so I don't know what to say, but.

• 15:45David Hoffman?

  That's definitely aligned with what I'm hearing from, I did a podcast with, um, Santiago, Santiago Siri, Santi Siri, yeah. Uh, talking about the rate of crypto adoption in Argentina. Uh, and he says that everyone's got, um, everyone's got crypto on their phones and they use actually Binance, the Binance exchange. They all have Binance accounts. And so when they're sending stable coins, they go from Binance account to Binance account because they can't pay for the Ethereum fees. So they're all using like the Binance exchange, not, not BNB, not Binance chain, but like Binance, the centralized exchange.

• 16:19Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:19David Hoffman?

  And that's how they pay, they pay with stables in, in just using the Binance exchange. And he said that, um, Vitalik's recognition, like Vitalik as a celebrity status is like bled out from the crypto community. And now like it's just the regular Argentine society that is where Vitalik is a superstar and regular like Argentine societies using crypto.

• 16:41Speaker 00

  I I I think Argentina has always been at the cut ahead of everyone because of all of their kind of uh debt failures historically. Um but like Mexico, you know, if you asked me in 2019, if like Mexico was going to be a big crypto place, I would have said not really. Cause like I'd gone there a bunch of times. Um, and I I don't I don't mean like Tulum and like that. I mean, like actual like Mexico City, like Mexican people who are who are who are using uh digital assets, because I was like, everyone wants to use cash there, like no, everyone's like, we just want cash, we hate credit cards. And uh, you know, the pandemic, you know, for for them seems to have really made them suddenly embrace digital finance like way more.

• 17:26Speaker 00

  Um, and I think the interesting thing there is that uh there like the apps that people use are way more like one stop fits all type things like that, like, you know, their app for like Robin Hood like thing does like Rob, it's like Revolut. It's like a even more crazy version of Revolut, but it's like you can trade stocks, you can send staples to each other. You can buy crypto, you can buy insurance like in in app like you. It's it's actually kind of crazy because it's it's easier than anything you get in the US.

• 18:00David Hoffman?

  I'm I'm seeing this trend. I think we're we're seeing this trend across the globe. Um, I mean, this is the like in China, they have the super apps, right? Uh, and FTX is kind of turning into like a financial superstructure. It's a bank, it's a crypto exchange, it's got derivatives, uh, it just got an integration with Stripe for payments. Um, they're doing NFTs, they're doing it all, right? And so I'm I'm seeing kind of like a converge on to like, if you don't build an app that does everything, then like you're gonna be bought or can or your or your services are just going to be integrated. Have you seen this the same trend?

• 18:35Speaker 00

  Uh, for sure. I think in the US, you don't see it because there's tons of like regulation reasons and like, for instance, insurance, right? Like the fact that I can go into an app in Mexico and buy car insurance. And it's like five steps and like I I'm done, I literally just take pictures of the car. Uh, and then you have car insurance. And then here it's like every state has a different law and like to be an insurer in each state, you have to like have deposit capital with each state's registry.

• 19:03Speaker 00

  It's just it's just natural that the US is going to be last in the aggregator game. Because it's just like, there's just too much like state by state financial regulation. Whereas I think in like places like in Latin America and Africa, this aggregator thing works like insanely well. Like the Binance and FTX examples are like, I, I, their American branches of all these exchanges are kind of not that great. Right? Like volume wise, like user wise, but like their international stuff is like insane. And I, and I think, you know, they're all private companies. We don't know, but I would love to see like the breakdown of like Latin American and African users.

• 19:43Speaker 00

  In terms of like, not in terms of dollar amounts, because like if you, if you try to like, say like, hey, like who, what, who transfers the most, obviously it's going to be like. The whales in China and like American like institutions or whatever. But you know, like if we actually do some more like transaction count based type of thing, how many users do you have who are regularly using certain things? I would, I wouldn't be surprised to see like somewhere like Mexico had got went from like 50th to like second. Uh, since pandemic, which is like, that's like an interesting trap. And so definitely recommend going, going and taking a little tour.

• 20:21Speaker 00

  Just to like, see how like behavior has changed.

• 20:25David Hoffman?

  Do you, do you think that the leapfrogging of the United States, just in general, is because many other countries in the world just don't have the same the sheer volume and magnitude of regulations that we have?

• 20:39Speaker 00

  I mean, I think, I think part of it is the regulation, but part of it is also like.

• 20:46Speaker 00

  You know, uh, Matt Levine, this Bloomberg columnist, he, he always says like, everything is securities law. Uh, like, cause like, you know, someone can commit a crime or like kill someone, but then like. If you look at the statistics, half the time it will be like, hey, they didn't pay their taxes. Right? Like, that was like how all the mafia Rico stuff happened in the eighties, right? Like none of them were really arrested for like. The murder crimes because of, you know. But a lot of them were arrested for like tax evasion. Um, and so in the US financial law, uh, maybe a less pithy version of this is like in the US financial law is the strongest

• 21:25Speaker 00

  seeming law here, right? It seems like if you can convert some type of social moray into a or like, hey, like there's some, some financial mismanagement here, you can get your case through more quickly and like it work, the system seems to work only for those cases.

• 21:43Speaker 00

  And I just don't think that's necessarily true in most places. And then like, I, I, I think that, and, and so because of that, we have this somewhat onerous system. Um, and, and, and the leapfrogging, I think will be interesting in that, you know, I remember like in the early 2000s, Japan was still kind of like the

• 22:08Speaker 00

  viewed as like the most technologically sophisticated country, right? Whereas like, like right now, it's probably like, I don't know, Taiwan, Singapore. Right? Um, and Japan seems a little old, like it's like still stuck in like, sort of like the Sony era. Um, and, uh, you know, I think an interesting thing was like, everyone was like, oh, Asia like completely leapfrogged the US. They went straight to mobile, never did, you know, everyone had 100 M bit internet in their house. Um, but yet if we look at what products ended up being distributed the most, right? It was, it ended up coming from South Korea and the US, right? Apple and Samsung. So the leapfrog might just like be a good way of like, you know, if we, if we play the game out two steps, you know,

• 22:54Speaker 00

  Latin America and Africa leapfrog the US, you see some huge companies get built out of there. And then people in the US are copying that. And then like they are able to effectively lobby Congress to basically give some exemptions to things that look like the things they see outside that are working and successful. And then the US can kind of innovate that way. Like I could totally see that ending up being a, a thing. I, I think the the mobile thing was actually is a similar regulatory thing, but sort of different in that in the US, um, You know, there's there's sort of spectra. So like, you know, the frequency, radio frequencies, the frequencies on the electromagnetic spectrum.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Um, there's certain frequencies the government has dictated that they they own and you have to buy licenses to broadcast on those frequencies. Um, from them. And so there's this thing called the spectrum auction. Uh, and you have basically the you it's almost like a patent, like the government gives you like the rights to that. Like one oh two point five megahertz to one oh two point seven megahertz. And like radio stations usually lease their um their frequency from from someone else. So the spectrum auction actually kind of kept the US back in a lot of mobile stuff like that's the reason five G is taking forever is like people can't actually get that. Can't like, there are a few players who own the spectrum and they're not the technology providers. They're like.

• 24:19Speaker 00

  Um, you know, like the Comcast type of companies that bought up all bought up all the spectrum a long time ago. And, you know, I think basically what happened is South Korea leapfrog US. And now there's like all this pressure and this is why five G was in the news right before the pandemic. Uh, we're like the US government's like, we can't get left behind. We're willing to get do anything. And it like plays catch up and I kind of feel like that's how it always is like someone figures out how to do something somewhere easier. And it like blows up in a good way, like grows really fast.

• 24:51David Hoffman?

  Hmm.

• 24:51Speaker 00

  And then the US suddenly is like. Ah, capitalism must run faster and like, so I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing. I think it's actually a good forcing function. Cause it kind of is like a way to be like to give a narrative to regulators to be like. Yo, this is fucking stupid. Like you should allow certain types of things to happen.

• 25:10David Hoffman?

  So is the pattern that's unfolding here is like, we're America. We have American exceptional exceptionalism. We're in the lead. We have all the money. We have all like the talent. But then we rest on our laurels uh and like regulation perhaps kind of like. Disincentivizes innovation. And so because of this like disincentive to get up and do something because of regulation, we let somebody else do it. But then we see that being innovated somewhere else. And then we're like, all right, well, we were resting on our laurels too much. Now we got to get up and go. And so we make an exception in the regulation to capture that new innovation that was made offshore to bring it home to America. And then we innovate on that, build that out, and then we can rest on our laurels again.

• 25:53David Hoffman?

  So it feels like we're the hare in a tortoise in a hare race where like, we go really fast, we sit down, we take a breather, we rest on our laurels because we're Americans and we're awesome. And then innovation continues. The march of innovation continues elsewhere because they don't have the same regulations that we have. And then at some point, something inevitably crops up out of just pure unbridled innovation that's unbridled by regulation elsewhere, outside of America. And then we just repeat this process. Is that a fair way to describe this?

• 26:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like an iterated tortoise and the hare. Like the hare is like only realizes it's losing the race when the tortoise is like five feet from the end and then suddenly runs and like just tries to like play catch up.

• 26:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 26:35Speaker 00

  But I think that's generally the like the whale versus minnow dynamic that often happens even in other types of games abstractly. Where like the whale with a lot of resources gets lazy or like they have too much concentration of power, wealth, resources. And then that just like has a sclerosing effect. And then, you know, someone more nimble kind of takes advantage of that. And then like eventually the whale is like, oh shit, I gotta like save myself. And the question is, how many rounds of this can we survive? Right? Like the pandemic was like a weird, you know, it was like someone like, that's like playing chess and someone just

• 27:16Speaker 00

  in the middle of your chess game randomly removes like 50% of the board spaces. And you're like, all right, go, you have to play now. And anything that doesn't have a piece, you die. It's like, so I think there's like kind of a question of like, is it sustainable?

• 27:34Speaker 00

  To kind of always have this repeated tortoise and the hare type of thing, or is it, is it like, is it inevitable? Is there like no other alternative? Um, yeah.

• 27:44David Hoffman?

  I, I think the crypto industry is generally a fan of just like, we have way too much regulation. Let's reduce regulation by like 90% and go from there. Uh, would you be in that camp as well?

• 27:58Speaker 00

  I don't know about like 90%. I think it like needs to be metered. I think the, the beauty of the US, right? It's like, we built this union founded on this notion of like a very clear separation of like local versus national rights. And you could have the separation of local versus national in the same way you're supposed to have separation of church and state. Um, I just think like in a world where internet commerce is larger than real life commerce, perhaps. Um, then the state versus national thing doesn't really matter anymore. And so then you kind of end up needing a different legal structure. Uh, otherwise like you're gonna have, you're gonna kind of always run into this tension.

• 28:42Speaker 00

  Um, and like a very stupid example of this, uh, but like one that that's interesting is that, um, so, uh, you know, if you go to say Mexico, Argentina, the delivery apps there can deliver you any type of alcohol, basically any time of day. In the US, however, because certain states want to charge a liquor tax on stuff produced in that state, they don't allow delivery outside that state. And like, there's this very complicated set of rules of like, when you're allowed to deliver alcohol, and if you cross the state border, you have to pay taxes on both sides. And like, it just becomes like kind of a huge mess, right?

• 29:27Speaker 00

  And all that you wanted was just like, hey, guy in Florida making some small batch whiskey. I'm in New York. Why the fuck can I just order that online? And I was just like, New York and Florida just agree to split the tax evenly.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Well, that doesn't happen, right? And so then then you have these like turf wars between states. And then eventually that fragments the apps, right? Like the now the liquor app has to be kind of separate from like the Uber Eats DoorDash thing. Um, so I think this like the the the maybe ten thousand foot view of this is actually. There's this challenge when you have so much commerce done on the internet. Uh, there's this challenge of like reconciling that with like these like state and national laws. And let alone international, like international is even more complicated. Let's just start with state and national, like those things are even hard to reconcile. So. I think the question is.

• 30:26Speaker 00

  Do we end up with a different governance structure, which then would, yes, it would change ninety percent of regulation, but it's unclear if it would remove all of it, or if it would just like reshape it, or if like. There would be some sort of like treaty. You know, cause like in the the the articles in constitution, we have this interstate commerce clause. Right? And the interstate commerce clause is very interesting because that's the thing that ensures that one state can't ban you. From going to another state and selling stuff, we're you know, basically doing any type of business. Um, and a a very interesting anecdote about this is that in Australia. Uh, the western part of Australia.

• 31:09Speaker 00

  Um, basically until like last month. From two twenty twenty to last month. Completely shut its borders to any other Australia. Like in the US, you can't do that. You can't just like have one state say fuck you. You can't come in here like, right? And and so. There's kind of this thing that like at the time that the US was founded, this interstate commerce thing was kind of a a. A groundbreaking sort of form of of governance in that it like. Allowed commerce to be free. And sort of the internet sort of also does that. But somehow like we have to reconcile the fact that with our current legal system and that that that that's going to be the tension, I think, of the next like 20 years in the US.

• 31:55David Hoffman?

  Is the story of that just that we as humans are coming together as a global society faster than our regulations are? As in like, we're all on the internet, we're all having commerce with each other. The regulations still think that we're in a pre-internet, you know, you know, atoms bit like no, not less bits, more atoms type of environment. And like, it just hasn't caught up with this like globalized society that we're creating on the internet?

• 32:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, basically, which is why I think crypto is, you know, one of the more interesting things because it's like if we zoom out enough.

• 32:34Speaker 00

  You could argue that the entire goal of crypto is just to make organizations that can do commerce with each other on the internet. And those organizations can be as loosely defined as a club. Or as strictly defined as a nation state that has like capital flows, like a DeFi protocol is more in that side. And then like, you know, these other types of more loose styles are a little more like clubs. But the idea that the internet lets you kind of have the same substrate for all different type types of organization.

• 33:09Speaker 00

  Versus like in real life, you can't have that. You have like some defined locality. Of like what types of structures you can create.

• 33:20Speaker 00

  Kind of makes makes reconciling those two things quite, quite difficult. And I, I, I don't know. I don't know if I would say it's going to be like a revolution, like a war. But I do think there's going to have to be some sort of generic reform of like how law in the real world interacts with law in the digital world and like we're, we're, we're still living in the like surf days of Europe, you know, like 1500s, 1400s, something like that. Like we haven't figured out how to reconcile those. We didn't have the French Revolution. We didn't have the, the, you know, British Empire growth and crash, you know, like there's, there's still a lot of stuff in like the institution building phase that.

• 34:08Speaker 00

  You know, we're we're still waiting for it. So the question is like, what is the catalyst for that? Right? The pandemic was one catalyst for people to realize, oh shit, you can basically build institutions online. Whether it was crypto or whether it's not crypto.

• 34:23Speaker 00

  Because people were forced to run their institutions online and then they realized, oh, you can do that.

• 34:28David Hoffman?

  There was a Planet Money podcast I listened to about the pandemic and it was about all these regulations that maybe they were just like in the back of people's minds and we're paying we're paying attention to them pre pandemic. But once the pandemic hit, all these like regulations got in the way of stuff. One of the regulations was cross state nurses, as in nurses couldn't go and do nursing in a different state. And probably kind of some of the similar regulations that you kind of listed off with commerce and alcohol is just like licenses didn't work cross state, you would probably need to get a different license. But then that held so much of just like healthcare back in times where we needed it the most. And so the pandemic kind of just like took the regulatory cage and like rattled it and some stuff fell out.

• 35:11David Hoffman?

  And we were like, all right, like, let's get rid of that regulation that's like holding us back. But I don't think that's nearly enough. Like you just listed off like the French Revolution or the fall of the British Empire. Like, we, I think, have so much like, instead of technical debt, we have like regulatory debt. As in where we have regulations that I think perhaps the paradigm of these regulations probably started post World War Two. Like just in the rebuilding of, you know, Western liberal democracies post World War Two. And the regulation probably, the culture of regulation probably got started right around there. But now we have this brand new regulatory paradigm with the internet and now also with crypto.

• 35:53David Hoffman?

  And so what you're kind of alluding to is that we need this great reshuffling, reorganization, re regulation, rewriting of the rules. And this kind of reminds me of what a lot of what Ray Dalio is talking about with like, and also what people are talking about with like the whole fourth turning where we're going from one paradigm to another. Where there seems to be like, the world seems to be ready for something new and we don't know what. And I think that perhaps regulation or the regulatory debt that we have is part of that story is like, we're trying to find new social structures, we're trying to find new systems of engaging with each other. But things are holding us back and it's making us as a global society frustrated.

• 36:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think the, you know, like, one Thing to kind of remember is that, you know, in in history, the length scale of organization was quite limited by, you know, A, geography, B, resources, C, technology, and D, sort of like rate of population growth, which you could argue was metered by resources, but some some version of that. And so we have these organizations into like cities, agoras, nation-states, and the nation-states sort of congealed into like state-ish things.

• 37:15Speaker 00

  And then we fractured the states and it it wants to say grew big enough, we had to like break it again. And we, you know, there's sort of this like aggregation and disaggregation thing that we've had to do as we like built institutions and collectivism in in human society. And somehow

• 37:37Speaker 00

  the internet makes it so that there's not like a clear length scale, right? There's not a clear size, a notion of a distance that is the right sort of organizational one scale. But it's very clear that the ones we use in the real world of like state and nation and maybe city are not really good for the like, they just don't work, right? Like the the it's the wrong metric, the wrong distance function. Uh, and I think like, once we, once people decide whatever that is, that will determine what this new structure looks like. That makes sense.

• 38:12David Hoffman?

  Yeah, yeah, I think so. Um, but also I think there's room to say that like there is perhaps we can't find that new like frame of reference, that new meter stick between physical nation-states and digital societies. Like some things about the nation say really only operate on the scales of atoms, atoms and not bits. And and like the

• 38:38David Hoffman?

  True aligned governance in the digital age, especially in the crypto age, I think probably is like nonsensical to ask that to come from a nation state. Cause a nation state is really only good at governing over the physical world, not the digital world. And so like when they, like the, all the, the regulations that you talked about, about like, hey, like when I'm on the internet in New York, why can't I buy that whiskey that's in Florida? Well, that's a physical product that's going across physical supply chains. And it has less to do with like, and this is why I think like there's inevitably going to be like a coming, we're going to come to a head with crypto regulation and nation state regulation, just because like so many things are gray areas in crypto that the nation state, I don't think will ever really have a clear answer towards.

• 39:23Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I guess it gets back to this question of like, should a nation state really be able to regulate? Like these entities, like, like what, what type of aggregation of people is the right one to regulate these things? And like, it's not clear it's actually nations or states, right? It could be a larger thing, maybe.

• 39:50Speaker 00

  Nations want to regulate it, of course, but I, I don't think it's like a very clear, like who's a sort, like what, what level of like this many people agreeing is like the correct authority. And like, I think that, yeah, to your point, that, that's where we're, we're going to get in trouble. And I think all of the supply chain shit we saw during the pandemic and like, we still are seeing, right? Like the US is still living in this like crazy supply chain world. I don't know if, I don't know if a lot of people have paid attention to this, but like the US's shipping,

• 40:26Speaker 00

  infrastructure, like physical infrastructure is really, really bad. Like. There was a story of this guy who, you know, this like startup founder guy, who like, I guess, works in this logistics infrastructure space. And he, you know, he was like, you know, there's this law, I guess, in Long Beach, California, that you can't like stack shipping containers more than like three shipping containers up or something. And this led to basically lines of trucks, just like acting as storage for shipping containers, like on the street in parking lots.

• 41:08Speaker 00

  And basically, there were too many containers coming in and like you couldn't find them. And it's completely manual. There's not like these things were tagged. And you could be like, oh, this is, there's a GPS location for like where this container that contains X, Y, or Z good is. Completely not robotic, not automated, no tagging. And he just like wrote this like viral tweet. And then after that, like apparently like the, I guess, the county official like changed the law for this thing. And like, basically,

• 41:39Speaker 00

  you know, like this two months backlog suddenly was able to get cleared pretty quickly. And compare this to places like, I think the most, as far as I know, I'm not like an expert in this. So this is just, you know, whatever little I've read on this. Rotterdam in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, sorry, has like this like fully robotic automated tagged shipping container thing. It's like processes like, you know, the US receives like hundreds of times the number of shipping containers. But Rotterdam can basically process more than what the US does with one tenth the number of people who are working on it. And so there's this interesting thing on the supply chain side too of like, hey, we've kind of been like completely leapfrogged

• 42:25Speaker 00

  by a bunch of places. And I think now the last six months, you've seen like a ton of investment and like acknowledgement of this as like one of the bigger problems. But this gets back to this question of like,

• 42:42Speaker 00

  Why did this guy's tweet suddenly get the law changed overnight? Right? Like the fact that it took that is already like a weird, a weird kind of thing that shows you that like the internet has changed our perception of like state, like local regulations. And in a way that means that like the definition of a state as this regulating entity might be sort of boomer in like 10 years.

• 43:08David Hoffman?

  Well, the state is always like a lagging thing, right? Like legislation is slow, governance is slow, passing laws is slow. But I think especially with the technologies that we have these days and also triggered by COVID because COVID just made us feel like much more of a global society. It's like, oh, when Italy gets, when all of Italy gets the COVID, it comes for us like two months later. All of a sudden, we start to pay attention to what's going on around the world a lot more just because that data means more to us now. Especially during a pandemic, but then, but then like we're just getting better at like taking a look around the world and saying like, well, what they're doing over there is working out real well. And we have some problems back home.

• 43:47David Hoffman?

  And so I think maybe perhaps it just like, especially with societies moving so incredibly fast, like technology makes time speed up. Like we innovate faster, we can produce things faster. And like our governance systems are going at the same pace that they were, if not slowing down. And so like the juxtaposition or the dichotomy behind things that are working and things that aren't working. I think people have a lot less tolerance for these things nowadays. And things like Twitter allow us to actually like discover the working things versus the broken things.

• 44:20David Hoffman?

  And so like, maybe, maybe it's just like, actually Twitter was really the upgrade here rather than our, like our governance didn't get any better, but our dissemination of information got better.

• 44:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, I definitely think there's certainly a sense in which dissemination of information is important to this. Although there's this other problem of like.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  You know, like, you know, obviously, I guess this is like a topic de jour of like, what is information and misinformation? I can of worms. I don't I don't even know if we want to approach that. But there's a question to me of like,

• 44:57Speaker 00

  how is it possible that the people regulating this thing didn't know that there was this problem like, right? Like, they needed this like, external feedback loop to pass this information back?

• 45:09David Hoffman?

  Well, they needed the kick in the butt because they were the hare resting on their laurels, right?

• 45:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, that's a good way of thinking about it. I just like, kind of, there's kind of just something wrong, though, if like, your legal system needs this other system to like, kick it into doing anything, right? Like, at some point, it has to change, like, very dramatically, right?

• 45:33David Hoffman?

  Do you think that we're ever going to be able to update our governance structures? Like, talking about like, American democracy here, in a way that can actually keep up with the rate of innovation in society?

• 45:48Speaker 00

  Has any government structure in history ever been able to keep up with innovation? Well, it needs to- Start with that question.

• 45:55David Hoffman?

  It probably the answer is no, but it just basically needs to not fall off the end of the treadmill. Like, it doesn't have to keep up with the head of the chain, but it needs to keep up with it before it falls off. Like, it just needs to be able to go fast enough. And I think people are saying like, hey, like, it's not fast enough right now. Like, you gotta go faster.

• 46:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, and, and so, so the, the like, physics analogy I like to make is like, there's, there's the second law of thermodynamics, which kind of says like, in sort of these open systems, uh, open physical system, uh, would, you know, entropy is sort of always increasing. Like, the more, there's like, this tendency to hire chaos always.

• 46:37Speaker 00

  And there's just inevitably going to be that when you have sort of like innovation in the society. Or even just unrest in a society. And the question for government is not, hey, can we actually live forever? Even though like, obviously, that's like, when you're writing this, the rules and structuring things, you're supposed to like, be thinking of it like that, like that. But the question is, how long can we live before the entropy of the universe?

• 47:05David Hoffman?

  Eats us, right?

• 47:06Speaker 00

  Right? And and like, the question is like, what, there's this trade off uh between being really fast and reactive. Um, to changes and being very slow and methodical and like making few changes, right? And like, you know, governments are always like moving on that dial to try to like, they're trying to measure the amount of chaos and then like decide based on that. Where where they are with that. And I think the problem is that the longer your government structure exists, just naturally, just like humans themselves, even macro structures built of humans seem to have this thing of like. They get more conservative as they get older.

• 47:46Speaker 00

  Um, and and we've yet to see a human structure that is like. A blockchain in that it like, it like consistently replaces its leader. Uh, without like lots of strife. Uh, you know. I guess the US is the best example, but it's not, it's not clear that it's going to just like be able to continue that way without sort of.

• 48:08David Hoffman?

  Can you unpack what you meant by that? Uh, how does a blockchain consistently replace its leader? We're talking about a pending blocks of the chain?

• 48:14Speaker 00

  Yeah, I just mean like on every block, at least for sort of a leader based blockchain, right? You're sampling some distribution, whether it's a stake distribution, whether it's like hash power distribution. And you pick a new person at random for that block. And and yes, it's it's random, dependent on the resources they're providing, but it's still, you know. You trust the randomness. That's the crypto part of of this thing. Um. And so I I guess it's like, you know, do we trust the the randomness or like the thing, the process that's like generating like the new? Uh, you know, the either the new laws or the new sort of like structure?

• 48:56Speaker 00

  Or is it actually like eventually just school or, you know, tightens up? And you don't, you know, we can't, it becomes too much of a structure to re kind of fix and one you have to kind of blow up.

• 49:13Speaker 00

  And that's sort of where I I I just feel like this, the current system of like state and federal laws. Somehow has to adapt to the fact that like for some matters, you know, for some matters, you might actually only care about federal law.

• 49:33Speaker 00

  For other matters, you might say like, hey, me and my neighboring states, we all need to have the same law. And for some matters, you might just say, oh, this only applies to this city, right? Like it it it can like move between those scales. And DAOs basically do that, right? They have like different scale, different scales of DAOs in terms of like how much power or treasury or whatever they have. And coordination between them kind of lets them say, hey, we're we're like actually just only going to do this for the city. Oh, we're going to do this for this group of things. We're going to do this for this bigger group of things.

• 50:04Speaker 00

  And I think like eventually physical nature will have to be able to adapt, adapt to the internet by allowing all different scales of organization. If that makes sense. And like that sounds like a revolution, like that doesn't sound like a, hey, we're gonna just like tweak like state laws until we look like that, if that makes sense.

• 50:24David Hoffman?

  Yeah. So just to make sure I'm up to speed with where where your head's at, um, state laws and federal laws have a friction behind them because they're, uh, if you pass a state law. Then there's like regulatory overhead. So maybe it worked for doing the thing that it meant to do. But it also caused a bunch of collateral damage with other and and also in the future you don't know about. Uh, and so making the laws precise to where it wants to go. Oh, it's difficult in the physical nation state environment. But then you're saying with DAOs, like with Uniswap raises or lowers its fees like 50 bips or whatever. That's, that's a big change because so much of DeFi relates to Uniswap. But then Uniswap can, but it's also contained to Uniswap at the same time.

• 51:08David Hoffman?

  Same thing with like the Maker DAO stability fee. But then you have like much more smaller DAOs, like, I don't know, friends with benefits. And they change like a bylaws and it only contains, that's only self-contained to friends with benefits. Are you saying that like DAO governance structures just like are inherently more surgical? And therefore much more aligned with what is being governed over? Is that, is that kind of what you're saying?

• 51:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, sort of. Yeah, like imagine if like, you know, let's say we have a liquor law, but people in aggregate vote on its jurisdiction. Okay, are we going to make the liquor law only apply to the states of California, Oregon and Washington? Or are we going to make it sort of apply to the whole country? We're going to make it apply to like one city? And imagine if there was sort of a market mechanism for determining the scale at which a law gets applied. DAOs kind of do that to some extent. And that's a very different version of the law we have now where it's like this, you, you, to create a new law, you have to pick a, a, a sort of jurisdiction in which it is enforced, right?

• 52:13Speaker 00

  Like a picket for the municipal government or a picket for like the federal government.

• 52:19Speaker 00

  It doesn't naturally move between those. Like maybe a law needs to be able to scale with its users. Like a law only impacts 10 people at the beginning, but all of a sudden it impacts 10,000 people. Now its jurisdiction needs to also change. I think DAOs actually allow you to have that like scale up and scale down. And whereas like laws in the world right now do not do that, right? You pick the jurisdiction size, like boundaries first, and then you say, hey, it's going to hold here.

• 52:51David Hoffman?

  Can you illustrate the scaling up and scaling down of a law with a DAO, just to make it super concrete?

• 52:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So let's suppose that, um, Uniswap, uh,

• 53:02Speaker 00

  And you know, Uniswap raises their fee.

• 53:07David Hoffman?

  Uh huh.

• 53:08Speaker 00

  Uh, and then in response, Curve raises their fee. And there's this natural market mechanism of like people trading between them, which changes the volume and liquidity structure. And then at some point, people say like, oh, uh, we want to vote on actually like, Curve always following Uniswap's fee. And now you've kind of merged the two laws, right? Even though they're technically their own sovereign protocols, they can choose, like the users, one can choose to just follow the other one's law. Right? And they vote on it once and it goes into action. That's very not true in normal life, right? Like if Pennsylvania makes a law, it's not like New Jersey is like, yeah, we're going to follow the Pennsylvania law. Right? Like, no, instead you have to like go to, you know what I mean?

• 53:51David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Okay. So like, yeah, so like, there's like this,

• 53:55David Hoffman?

  it's like a, it's like a bottom up federal law system where like if Curve and Uniswap, uh, if like Curve agrees to follow Uniswap, uh, and then, I don't know, Sushi Swap agrees to follow Curve, which is then following Uniswap, there turns into like this.

• 54:09Speaker 00

  Now you scaled, you scaled it up, right? You went from like only.

• 54:12David Hoffman?

  This pseudo universal fee that's determined for all of DeFi. And that's like the federal government's law, because everyone in the DeFi ecosystem is using the same source for the fee structure, but that source is Uniswap instead of a globally mandated law.

• 54:31Speaker 00

  Right? Exactly. Like there, there's some sense in which them, they can, you can have market effects determine how, why, how widely applicable the law will become. Right? And, and like, that's very different than state laws, right? State laws don't have this like competition between them in some sense.

• 54:47David Hoffman?

  So like the, the, the power here is of course smart contracts where like Curve can just like build this into a smart contract. Just as like, hey, like what, tell me, call, call the Uniswap fee number, tell me what it is. And so this is akin to like California pinging Washington and be like, all right, tell me what the liquor law is there. But they don't have that ability because they're not on smart contracts.

• 55:07Speaker 00

  And like, yeah, sure, they can find it, but it's not like they can copy it. They can't just like write a piece of law that says, hey, we're going to copy Washington and update it every day. Like, it's not going to work. They they they won't view that as sovereign, right? They're like, our law can't be superseded by theirs. It can only be superseded by federal law, which covers everyone. But what if California and Washington just want to have a little alliance? They want a little federation?

• 55:33David Hoffman?

  And so like, is the, if this like, if you scale this out to like, all the laws, like, imagine, imagine the states were some sort of like crypto economic network of DAOs and organizations or whatever. Like, is the idea that we can actually outsource the role of the federal government, just like this mesh network of interstate agreements about every different relevant laws? Like, all right, guys, like, what are we going to do for, like, the driving age? And what are we going to do? What are we going to do for the drinking age? And what are we going to do for, like, whatever this law is? And like, it's just like

• 56:02Speaker 00

  You could imagine there's like federations, right? Where there's like, the the Northeast Federation, uh, says the max speed limit is 70 miles an hour. And the South, you know, like, but Texas, Illinois, and Washington State decide to make their own federation, say, fuck you, we're going to make the speed limit 100 miles an hour. And I feel like this idea of being able to like, group together units and break them apart. This bundling and unbundling of laws that like you can agree to or break apart from. That does not happen. Like, you can do it in in in in normal society, but it's not built to do it. So the system takes forever if you ever want to do something like that.

• 56:42Speaker 00

  And and during the pandemic, we saw that, right? Where like, states tried to like, join together to buy masks. Because like, they then had better purchasing power. But then they like, couldn't agree. And like, they couldn't like, get their their like, one, one state would like, apply instantly. Because they like, had enough of a budget like allocated. And another state would be like, no, we have to like, go through our procedure processes. Oh, wait, everyone has to come in person. Oh, shit, we can't do that. We have to rewrite the law to like, you know what I mean?

• 57:12David Hoffman?

  You have to rewrite the law to rewrite the law.

• 57:14Speaker 00

  And and the recursion on this type of stuff makes it such that people don't do it. Whereas like recursion in the smart contracts is easy. Or like, gluing together these things is easy. And so like, there's a sense in which the laws can now scale to what they're, the the use, the correct user base. And like, to me, that's like the cool. Thing that like the internet lets you do that like kind of normal law doesn't. You have to like kind of choose these boundaries beforehand.

• 57:41David Hoffman?

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• 58:25David Hoffman?

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• 59:08David Hoffman?

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• 59:50David Hoffman?

  No matter how big or small your idea is, you can apply it for a unique grant at uniswapgrant.org and help steer Uniswap in the direction that you think it should go. Thank you, Uniswap, for sponsoring Banklist. One of the big critiques of government, mainly from libertarians, but mainly I hear it from the Bitcoiners, is that like nation states never get smaller, they only get larger. And like, I think a different way to state that is kind of what we just said is that like, or alluded to is that like laws only get added, they only get appended rather than erased. And that adds on like regulatory complexity. And so like, like if we've discovered a problem, what we do is like, we write a law to fix that. And then we discover a new problem. So we write

• 1:00:33David Hoffman?

  a new law. And it's like this patchwork of like laws layered on laws layered on laws. And that adds friction. But what you're saying is that like, the routing or navigating of all those different patchwork mesh network of laws becomes trivial if it's a smart contract, because you could just have the code.

• 1:00:47Speaker 00

  You can also just fork if you say, fuck you, I don't want to be part of this, right? Like, you can't fork the liquidity and whatever, sure. But my point is, if you really, really are like, I hate this thing, you do have this like exit criteria. And so I'm not saying that the real law will copy this type of behavior, right? Like, it is hard to do in the physical world, right? Just by the nature of it. But I do think there will be some lessons that have to come, go backwards from like, we learned from like, internet institutions that go back to real life. And we don't know what that looks like right now. But I think like, that's something that,

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  you know, the next 20 plus years, we'll see. And I think, I think the question is like, do we exit serfdom, you know, in our lifetimes or not?

• 1:01:36David Hoffman?

  Going back to our metaphor of just like, the United States resting on its laurels, and then innovation happening elsewhere, and then copying, copy cutting that. Like, do you do you see a world where like, we actually figure out how to do some sort of real world governance on Ethereum? And then like, kind of using the structure of like, smart contract based laws, or just like, if this, then that statements for laws? We, in like 10 years, the United States is like, oh, that's working out really well for them in the, in the internet world. Can we apply this to our world? And like, we actually have like, governance innovation at the, at the federal level?

• 1:02:11Speaker 00

  I mean, I guess effectively this would work if you were like, hey, the Congress is the oracle that like guarantees the the data input from the real world is correct.

• 1:02:23David Hoffman?

  Well, isn't Congress just an oracle of the desires of the people? Isn't that what they do? It's just like.

• 1:02:29Speaker 00

  Supposed supposed to be.

• 1:02:30David Hoffman?

  Supposed to be, yes. Design, yeah.

• 1:02:33Speaker 00

  Supposed to be.

• 1:02:36Speaker 00

  Unclear if it's uh unclear if it's uh this is realizable. I think like this is why DeFi is to me the place I find the most interesting. And that it's very precise, like the things DAOs, DeFi DAOs do are extremely precise things. And like I said, in the US, financial law dominates overall. And so if you can show that this thing can do better than existing financial law, but with way less resources, then you can you can now start to say like,

• 1:03:14Speaker 00

  you know, hey, maybe you should start thinking about replacing. And I think that's why to me DeFi is actually the pill towards this direction, more so than like NFTs right now.

• 1:03:27Speaker 00

  Because it is way closer to this like real world law thing. And I'm not saying like all like, I don't see like liquor laws somehow being done this way.

• 1:03:36David Hoffman?

  With liquor laws on the blockchain?

• 1:03:38Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm sure there are some shitty ICO that would do that.

• 1:03:43Speaker 00

  But like I do see like financial law going this way. Like I really do see it could very well kind of move in this model. And then financial law, for a lot of financial financial stuff is federal. Of course, insurance and stuff is not, but like, but but you know, for broadly speaking, we could argue mainly federal. And so. I just think it will kind of be the first test and we're not DeFi isn't like good enough yet

• 1:04:17David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:04:17Speaker 00

  For that to happen, but like I think it will be the place where we we get to this point of like, oh, this shit's working a lot better and uses less resources to maintain.

• 1:04:26David Hoffman?

  Right, right. I want to dive into the whole like financial laws get enforced the most thing because you brought that up and again, and I want I want to dive into that because like I think if you zoom out and view the nation state holistically, that actually makes a ton of sense. Because like all nation states are are like these meta organisms of resource capture and management, right? Like what nation state can capture and utilize its resources better than a nation state and Ray Dalio had this really good line in his book where like,

• 1:04:55David Hoffman?

  like social structures, like cities, cities have laws that we all follow and cities have to follow the state laws and the state laws have to follow the federal laws and but then at the nation state level, once you get to the nation state level, like there is no bigger structure than that. And so at the nation state level, it's the law of the jungle because we don't have any sort of meta organization but behind all these different nation states. Like we have the UN, but like doesn't it's more of an agreement between nation states.

• 1:05:22Speaker 00

  Come on, the UN Security Council couldn't even like do anything for Ukraine like.

• 1:05:27David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:05:28Speaker 00

  It's kind of a bit of a joke in some ways.

• 1:05:30David Hoffman?

  Right. And so as soon as you get beyond at the nation state level, there is no higher order of organization that forces the the the lower orders to like adhere. And so at the nation state level, it's it's just the law of the jungle and that means resource capture and resource management. And so like, that's why like, that's why taxes are such a big deal. And that's why we're watching like capital controls happen in Russia right now. Because capital is leaving the country or attempting to. And that's the number one thing that a nation state is concerned with, which is resources. And like, and and so this is this is in my mind, when you tell me that financial laws are the things that get enforced the most.

• 1:06:10David Hoffman?

  To me, that's the nation state doing its damnedest to make sure that the resources that are inside of its borders are properly managed and counted for and taxed by the nation state. Is that is that a fair assessment?

• 1:06:21Speaker 00

  I think it's also to some extent. Again, a form of this thing I was just saying of like, they're very precise decisions, relatively speaking, like, you didn't pay your taxes by this amount and this time, right? Whereas like, a murder trial is very different, because there's so many ways in which, um, you know, a, a, a, a trial, murder trial where, say, ninety percent of people polled, say, like, the person did it, can still end up having them not be found guilty. And so,

• 1:06:57Speaker 00

  I, I think like, there is a sense, though, and with the nation state for enforcing these, like, kind of more complex matters, it can only expend a certain amount of resource, like, the resources there are like, the time it takes, time is a resource, the judges,

• 1:07:16Speaker 00

  you know, getting, doing the whole jury process, like, there, it is, it is, it is a laborious task, and there's only so many you can do, right? Whereas with financial cases, there's so much more precise that there's like, they're almost automatable, and my argument is in DeFi, you're basically removing all lawyers and automating as much of that as possible. So you actually might get to the point where it's like more efficient for the nation state to just use something that looks more like DeFi as a way of enforcing thing.

• 1:07:46Speaker 00

  You know, obviously, that's what the CBDC type of things want to do. I, I, it remains to be seen if anyone smart ever wants to work on that. That, to me, that's like the bigger problem, is like, no one, no one super bright really is like, yeah, I want to work on like, the, you know, US CBDC, or like, work at Visa, and like, on one of these things. Really, it's, it's the talent differences, like, between cryptocurrencies and, you know, like Visa, or like, you know, these kind, like, the Chinese, um, digital dollar, digital Remini. But is huge, right? Like you don't see like really smart people going into doing that. And like that should tell you something about like how feasible it is for a government to do it.

• 1:08:29Speaker 00

  And so if it turns out that like it just grows so big on its own, it might just become easier to just adopt DeFi as the law for that, right? And like, I I am sure small nations will be first to do that. Cause they get free currency stability per possibly. Um, and so that that will be, that that's why I'm I'm much more bullish on on like DeFi being the the kind of way of the real world kind of um, real laws kind of being restructured.

• 1:09:00David Hoffman?

  Right, okay. So the the argument is that like all these financial laws, financial laws when they go to court are just so incredibly objective because it's just like, all right, what are the numbers involved with what are the, what of the parties? And and did the numbers get transferred in the most appropriate ways? And so this is all like, almost like math based, almost like trust in math, which is like part of like the the crypto ethos. And so what what you're saying is that like porting over this legal structure onto DeFi allows us to just reason about these things better and also with the aid of smart contracts to make sure that we never actually have to go to court in the first place. It's just like all automated on on DeFi. And so you're saying that the gap between

• 1:09:40David Hoffman?

  managing interstate commerce laws versus like interstate finance and tax laws is like much smaller if to actually put that on DeFi versus like, how do we manage like alcohol like licenses on the blockchain?

• 1:09:55Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 1:09:56David Hoffman?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 00

  And it becomes easier to adopt, right? Like it just becomes easier to be like, in the same way I was like, oh, Curve just adopted Uniswap's fee. A nation state can adopt a AMM's price as an oracle for a off-chain contract, right? It's not, it can go the other way, right? Like, we've spent all this time using oracles to like pump in prices.

• 1:10:19David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:10:19Speaker 00

  But if it becomes the most liquid venue in the world, then you can also go the other way. And that's the equivalent of a nation state taking the rules of DeFi are now our law, right? That's a very simple case, like a, maybe not like a crazy case, but it's still, it's still like an example.

• 1:10:35David Hoffman?

  And and the the case for that would be like, uh, in some sort of like courtroom, they're like, all right, well, the Uniswap price for this token at this time was this amount. Therefore, you owe this much in taxes, or the settlement is like determined like this, or something like that.

• 1:10:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I mean, or a more like nationalistic version is suppose that there's some nation whose currency is majority issued in a stablecoin.

• 1:11:03Speaker 00

  And they, instead of making a digital dollar, they just like act like Circle or Tether. And they just like make an ERC 20 that is, I don't know, the Marshall Islands dollar. I'm making up a currency.

• 1:11:19Speaker 00

  And they just issue their stablecoin on there. And then there's a Uniswap tool of USDC versus the Marshall Island dollar. And any, anything that the government needs to ever get the exchange rate for, and governments have tons of stuff where they need exchange rates and contracts in law, to enforce the law, comes from Uniswap. Right, that's, that's, that's another case where like you're basically adopting the laws of DeFi in some way there. And like, I think, I think it, you know, there was a lot, a lot of time in crypto, I think in like, especially in the bear market, was spent on like, I don't know, I remember like Ripple like tried to like get itself adopted as like the currency of some like random country or whatever, right?

• 1:12:03Speaker 00

  None of that shit worked regardless of how much money like people were like giving these random countries. A more powerful version is the opposite, right? Of like the thing that already has a ton of liquidity, also has the sovereign coin. And now they're accepting the laws of DeFi, right? Like, and like, that seems kind of not impossible.

• 1:12:27David Hoffman?

  Uh, do you believe in Coda's law? Like straight up Lex Cryptographia or whatever it's called?

• 1:12:34Speaker 00

  Not really, but more because it's so easy to write bugs.

• 1:12:39David Hoffman?

  Okay, do you believe in the philosophy? As in smart contract laws supersede nation state laws?

• 1:12:45Speaker 00

  Hmm, you still have to care about the users, right? Like the smart, a lot of these smart contracts only work under some conditions of like there are certain types of users or providing liquidity, trading, doing whatever, right? At least for DeFi again. And, and it depends on the users plus the contract. And I think.

• 1:13:10Speaker 00

  It is law, code is law conditional on some assumptions being met. And then without those assumptions being met, you can't assume, you can't say that is a causal statement.

• 1:13:21David Hoffman?

  What's an assumption that needs to be met?

• 1:13:24Speaker 00

  I'll give you a simple example. Uniswap, to be a good oracle, needs a ton of liquidity. And the cost of manipulating the price is sort of like

• 1:13:33David Hoffman?

  Above a threshold.

• 1:13:33Speaker 00

  proportional to like sort of a function of the liquidity in there.

• 1:13:39David Hoffman?

  Okay.

• 1:13:39Speaker 00

  And, you know, if I'm going to use it, you know, if the code is like law in that like some governments like using that Uniswap pool to like figure out how much to pay to some other country, like there should be some condition under which that's true.

• 1:13:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, right. Code is law when we're ready for it as a society, basically.

• 1:14:02Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 1:14:03David Hoffman?

  Yeah, okay. Drew, when you wake up in the morning, what does your brain go towards? What do you focus on naturally? What's downhill for you?

• 1:14:12Speaker 00

  Uh, where is caffeine?

• 1:14:16Speaker 00

  Like, that's, I mean, you want the honest answer, that's like the first, first thing.

• 1:14:20David Hoffman?

  Okay, when you're caffeinated, what do you start to think about?

• 1:14:24Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  I don't know. I feel like most of, most of it is just like reading like the news and seeing what happened overnight. I mean, the thing about crypto, right, is like, there's so many times I've woken up and there's just been like some crazy ass surprise. And, or like some crazy thing happened overnight in Asia.

• 1:14:50Speaker 00

  And like

• 1:14:56Speaker 00

  I don't know. Yeah, the world's gone crazy. I, I'm actually a late night type of person. So like, actually in the morning, I'm kind of bleary and like, uh, no good ideas. No good ideas come in the morning. Uh, it's actually like, usually like, I, I just take a long time of like reading things before I can finally start like thinking about stuff. And then usually it's, it's, uh, you know. Trying to understand what things in crypto are actually working by usage, not by hype or

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  things like that. And then trying to see if there is, you know, my research process for coming up like papers to write is like really trying to understand if the, the, there's something that's working in spite of the fact that the developers had no clue why it should work. They just like wrote the thing, kind of hoped it worked and they duct tape and bailing wire, put it together and it's like 90% of the time this thing should fail. But for some reason, it's like able to survive and not get exploited and not get people are not like, you know, uh, and then so like, I spent a lot of time thinking about that and like trying to analyze the space of these things because I think that that that's how you find what the new primitives are, uh, at least in DeFi.

• 1:16:15David Hoffman?

  So much of like, and we, we saw this with the internet and it's also true with DeFi is like so much of it is emergent. Like I said, when we started with the internet, we just were making newspaper websites instead of what we know of today.

• 1:16:26Speaker 00

  GeoCities.

• 1:16:27David Hoffman?

  Right. Uh, what's that?

• 1:16:30Speaker 00

  Yeah. Maybe that's dating me. Uh, GeoCities used to be this like, it was the first, uh, website that was like, build your own website for free. And like, um, it, it, it got bought by Yahoo. Um, but like, it was like Squarespace, but really, really like shitty, like, you know, it would, it had, it had, it was most famous for inventing the following feature, which was the page counter, which at the bottom of the page would like show you the number of time visitors this page had.

• 1:17:03David Hoffman?

  Okay. So yeah. So like, so a lot of the early internet stuff that actually never ended up like manifesting into what the, the internet is we know of today. And I think now that we have that primitive, we kind of can apply it to DeFi, right? Like, uh, or at least with Ethereum too. Like when in 2015, 2016 Ethereum, we had Peepeth, which was like Twitter on Ethereum as in like you would write tweets and they would be in transactions on the L1. And this was back when gas was like basically zero cents. But now it's completely ridiculous. Uh, and so like, but it, but now we understand that like, There's going to be some sort of emergence with what we build in DeFi. We know that like the things that DeFi will look like in 20 years. We're probably going to be completely different from what we're building out today. And what we're building out today are probably skeuomorphic and backwards and reductive.

• 1:17:44David Hoffman?

  So like, is that, when you think about DeFi, like, are you always on the like lookout for it's like, oh, well, like, is this really going to be what it looks like in 15 years? Or how do you, how do you navigate a world that we know we don't know what it will be like in the future?

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  But with DeFi, it's like, I, I feel like the, the key is there's, you know, I, I, I prefer

• 1:18:10Speaker 00

  saying this, and I say it all, well, maybe too much, but DeFi has nothing to do with actually changing much in finance. Has everything to do with changing things in law and like removing law more than finance. So if you see something work, there has to be some analog that's existed in finance somewhere. It might be an arcane esoteric thing that like doesn't exist anymore or like blew up in some weird way.

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  But there probably is an analog. For, for like NFT stuff, I, that, that's above my pay grade. Like, I, I, I, I have no clue how to think that way. And like, I, I know there are these people who are geniuses like Andy, who are just like always on for that stuff. But like, I just, I can't see that. Whereas here it's more about like trying to draw analogies and also to understand kind of like the users really well. And like, and I think like, yeah, for finance, it's just a little bit easier. It's like, I, I just don't think we're going to like invent something that's completely new. It's going to be more like something that was very hard and could have existed or did exist. Somehow was able to be made really easily.

• 1:19:22Speaker 00

  With smart contracts, like before it was like too complicated, too expensive. And the cost of it somehow went down 10,000 X and that made it an attractive product. And that's, that's sort of how I feel with, with, with, with like a lot of financial.

• 1:19:38David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I, I think one of the things I've learned about you the most is exactly, almost exactly what you just said, where like, this isn't finance, this is law that we're working on, like smart contracts is an automation of law, not an automation of finance, but finance itself is inherently law based, right? You can't have finance without contracts. Because like, that's all the finance is, is money and contracts, basically. And that's how you create finance. And I think a lot of.

• 1:20:05Speaker 00

  Money is a contract. Look at the back of the bill, it has all the philosophy written though.

• 1:20:10David Hoffman?

  That's a really good point. Yeah, I never even, even thought about that, but I think that's something that like a lot of listeners probably, people that think about DeFi, think of it as finance and don't really consider the law aspect of it.

• 1:20:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, and I think, I think like when you make law cheaper, you change which products are used.

• 1:20:29David Hoffman?

  You change which products are viable.

• 1:20:31Speaker 00

  Which project, yeah, exactly.

• 1:20:33David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Tarun, when you wake up in the morning, what makes you optimistic? Other than your cup of coffee that's coming?

• 1:20:44Speaker 00

  You know, obviously, human, humans seem to be unable to, to not cause strife for themselves, but,

• 1:20:54Speaker 00

  I just think there's just so many kind of like, pretty things in the world that come from very different aesthetic standards, like, you know, certain types of math are very pretty, certain types of, you know, people's like devotion to something is very pretty, like, you know, like people, like, I don't really find this art very interesting. I don't like it. But the dude, the fact that the dude did that for like so many days in a row and didn't get bored of doing it. You gotta respect that. It's very, it's, it's like there's some, there's some joy, beauty to that. So I think it's more about finding like, taking all of these kind of things that you see in the world,

• 1:21:35Speaker 00

  especially on the internet, in internet culture, and trying to like be able to find some like little nugget of like, hey, you know, like, I probably hate that thing, but it's actually kind of, there's some, there's something, some like, you know, there's always something, a kernel of niceness in a lot of things and, you know, to do that, you have to keep yourself only locked into certain parts of internet and away from others, but.

• 1:21:59David Hoffman?

  Uh, to do what?

• 1:22:01Speaker 00

  Oh, to always be able to find some like nice, like nugget of like fun, like, hey, this is cool. I appreciate it. Type of thing and like finding those things every day. Like that's, that's kind of my.

• 1:22:13David Hoffman?

  Why, why do you have to lock yourself in this, into the internet to find?

• 1:22:17Speaker 00

  Oh, I, I, I just don't, I, I was just trying to say like, I, I don't read 4chan.

• 1:22:23Speaker 00

  Like, you know what I mean? Like, there's certain parts of internet that, there's some things where I, I'm like, I don't think I'm gonna find anything positive here.

• 1:22:31David Hoffman?

  Hmm. Okay. All right. What, what's, um, what's an example of a piece of math that's pretty?

• 1:22:39David Hoffman?

  What's the last pretty piece of math that you saw?

• 1:22:42Speaker 00

  So I, I, I think like my favorite proof of all time is like the, the one thing I think that's very interesting in, in, in, in math is like, the more powerful like a theorem or statement, um, the more A, it gets used, but B, the more people try to find different ways to prove the same result. And so the more fundamental and important, um, an object is, the more you find like 500 proofs of it. And within those 500, there's, there's many different forms of style and aesthetics that some are, you know, they're, they're pretty because they use really fancy machinery and the proof is really small.

• 1:23:25Speaker 00

  Some of them are pretty because it's like very first principles. You don't need to know that much background. And some of them, they're pretty because they like are a tour de force. They like are able to like glue together things that you wouldn't have thought would like work together. But I think my favorite proof is the the fundamental theorem of algebra, something you kind of like learn in in high school, which is like. Any polynomial has n roots in the complex numbers, like it has it has all its roots. And like when you learn it the first time, you always learn this like really ugly, super ugly proof, but. There's this one proof using Leuval's theorem, uh, which which is something in complex analysis that.

• 1:24:07Speaker 00

  It's just very, very clean and I I find like the fact it's like it's it's it's like a proof I have committed to memory. And I think like it's kind of like finding a poem you really like, you know, there might be 500 poems that are going to the same sentiment. But there's sometimes you find one where you're like, this is the this is the one that like. You know. I I you just insta commit to memory and so that that's probably it.

• 1:24:33David Hoffman?

  I I the way that I relate to that is um. When I I'm when I'm doing my writing and I'm writing out paragraphs to make a point. And going through the revision process, I find a way to take like this three paragraph section. To that's making I what I think is like a really awesome, very strong point, but it took me three paragraphs to make it. And then when my editing process, I'm able to like actually like. Take the third paragraph, cut some stuff out and then like integrate that into into the first two paragraphs. And if I'm really on my game, then I can actually find a way to cut that paragraph down into two paragraphs. And like the best theorem, if you will, is like, oh, I actually collapsed a whole entire section into these two sentences.

• 1:25:12David Hoffman?

  And these two sentences actually land so much harder with the listener, with the reader than this whole entire paragraph. Uh, and uh, Ryan always uh, says like when he when we were trying to onboard like writers into bankless is that you're supposed to write like you tweet. Like if you're actually constrained for characters, how do you get your point across? Uh, and like it's the art of like writing a whole entire like 10,000 word article. But that you get the point across inside of 500 words and it kind of sounds like the same thing.

• 1:25:44Speaker 00

  It's the same. It's the same thing. But somehow you need to have written. Struggled through the long one to figure out the short one and like that that process is also very. And sometimes be pretty to see like how that how the simplification happens.

• 1:26:01David Hoffman?

  Are you familiar with the concept, a mathematical concept? I'm sure you are actually with basins.

• 1:26:07Speaker 00

  You mean like basins of attraction and then simple system?

• 1:26:10David Hoffman?

  Yeah. Yeah. So is it fair to try and extrapolate this out as in like the bottom of a basin is like the most simple and most reductive proof? Or in my world, the most simple, like the, the, how do you collapse 10,000 words into a single meme? Like, do you think the base of the attraction basin is like the bottom of it is like the most distilled thing of what we're trying to talk about?

• 1:26:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I like the analogy. I will say it's not true for all basins. Because, because oftentimes they don't have the unique points, like unique minima, they can have like many bottoms. And so, you know, but like the sentiment's correct. For sure. Assuming you have a way of describing like a dynamical system that's like your thought process, right? But then, again, neuroscience is very far from being that precise.

• 1:27:04David Hoffman?

  Well, uh, can we, we can also extrapolate, extrapolate this to DeFi, right? Where like, maybe there's a desire to swap tokens on DeFi. So what do we do? The first thing we do is we build Ether Delta. And that was a very, very messy proof of trying to swap tokens. And then, you know, later we find Uniswap, we find X times Y equals K. And that seems to be like the most reductively simple way of swapping tokens. And I feel like you could probably extrapolate this to like almost all domains of knowledge where like you can just find the most simple and most easy way to do something. But then when you extrapolate that, like, do you get into the conversation of singularity? Like, what is the most bottommost basin of the universe? And if we all end up there, like, what happens?

• 1:27:50David Hoffman?

  Did I just get way too far out there?

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  I don't know. I feel like that's just like so. That's, that's just like. Yeah, I, I guess so. I think the interesting thing is, I feel like the concept of the singularity seems to have like lost popularity. Like, I feel like 10 years ago, it was like Kurzweil was like, uh, you know, really like hot character. And now instead, we have his son making very cringe fake DAOs.

• 1:28:21David Hoffman?

  Wait, is that real?

• 1:28:22Speaker 00

  Bessemer DAO, like, like this venture fund is like claiming they're making a DAO and they're like gonna invest out of it. But it, I don't think they understand what the D stands for.

• 1:28:32David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:28:34Speaker 00

  And his son is running it, so.

• 1:28:36David Hoffman?

  I do think we actually kind of accidentally went down like the wrong path with naming these things. Like, none of these things are DAOs.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  I mean, pets.com was an era, right? Like, no one says like, you know, banklesshq.com.

• 1:28:50David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 1:28:51Speaker 00

  Yeah. So, well, you know, you have to go through this. Again, this is like the, you know, we're going through this dynamical process, you know?

• 1:29:00David Hoffman?

  All right, Tarun.

• 1:29:02David Hoffman?

  Do you have any, like, rule of thumb that you follow or bit of advice that has been useful for you?

• 1:29:10Speaker 00

  Um.

• 1:29:18Speaker 00

  Good question. Um.

• 1:29:23Speaker 00

  Probably like.

• 1:29:27Speaker 00

  You know, I, a thing I started doing in college and then like kind of have still done is I have this rule of like, never eat a meal alone. And so like, that leads you to like actually try to find to meet new crazy people. Obviously pandemic kind of ruined that rule, but like, let's ignore that fact, but, uh, and like, I think like, being able to like, have some like very simple structured goal like that, which forces you to like go, you know, change your social behaviors.

• 1:30:03Speaker 00

  Somehow is, uh, I feel like is a very good, good thing. Uh, and yeah.

• 1:30:11David Hoffman?

  So if, if it's dinner time and you don't have somebody to eat a meal with, what do you go do?

• 1:30:17Speaker 00

  Go meet someone random. Go eat at a bar.

• 1:30:19David Hoffman?

  Eat at a bar? No, no AirPods allowed? Sit at a bar?

• 1:30:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly, exactly.

• 1:30:25David Hoffman?

  You're talking to a guy that like eats most of his meals at a bar with his AirPods in?

• 1:30:31Speaker 00

  You know, in New York, though, I feel like it's very, it's very different. Like, there's like tons of people who just like go and hang out on their own. And it's not, yeah, so.

• 1:30:40David Hoffman?

  All right, Bankless Nation, action items. Go to a random bar and get a meal and talk to a stranger. Hey, we hope you enjoyed the video. If you did, head over to Bankless HQ right now to develop your crypto investing skills and learn how to free yourself from banks and gain your financial independence. We recommend joining our daily newsletter, podcast, and community as a Bankless premium subscriber to get the most out of your Bankless experience. You'll get access to our market analysis, our alpha leaks, and exclusive content, and even the Bankless token for airdrops, raffles, and unlocks. If you're interested in crypto, the Bankless community is where you want to be. Click the link in the description to become a Bankless premium subscriber today.

• 1:31:23David Hoffman?

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