The tables are turned as Raoul Pal interviews David and Ryan on all things Bankless. 
 They share respective origin stories of how they got into crypto, meeting each other for the first time, how Bankless got started and where the future frontiers of Bankless are headed.
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 ✨ DEBRIEF | Unpacking the episode:
 https://www.bankless.com/debrief-raoul-pal 
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 TIMESTAMPS
 0:00 Intro
 5:50 David's Crypto Journey
 11:04 Ryan's Crypto Journey
 19:12 David's 2017 Story
 22:11 Conviction Through The Bear Market
 28:00 Bankless Origin Story
 32:53 Vision For Bankless
 39:23 From DeFi to Web3
 48:44 Tribalism
 54:56 A Helpful Mental Model
 1:01:39 Dealing With Hate
 1:08:38 Bankless Ventures
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 RESOURCES
 Raoul Pal
 https://twitter.com/RaoulGMI 
 Real Vision
 https://www.realvision.com/  
 Real Vision Newsletter
 https://www.realvision.com/dailybriefing  
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 RELATED EPISODES:
 118 - Raoul Pal | Should We Be Scared Right Now?
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzGMSKbqjco  
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 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://www.bankless.com/disclosures 

And yes, we're in this bear market phase of it all But there is total magic going on and that just gave me another shot in the arm to think you know what?

What comes out of this is gonna be massive

Welcome to bankless where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance.

This is how to get started, how to get better, and how to front run the opportunity.

I'm here with David Hoffman, And we're here to help you become more bankless.

Guys, this is part 2 of our conversation with Raoul Paul, and the tables have turned.

This time, Raoul is interviewing David and myself.

So we wanted to publish this on the Bankless Podcast as well.

I hope there are some good takes in here for you.

This is really an opportunity to talk a little bit about the founding of Bankless, our early theses, where we got our start, how we met.

We're not usually interviewed, and I don't think neither David or myself are in a place to kind of ask each other questions as well as a third party would ask us.

David, you have any reflections on this episode?

Yeah, yeah, like you said, like we don't, I always enjoy being on the other side of the microphone.

The times that you and I both have been on the other side of the microphone are very few and far between and nothing of this caliber of like Raoul Paul.

I'm pretty sure the Bankless Nation will thoroughly enjoy us being interviewed rather than doing the interviewer, interviewing.

So yeah, like Ryan said, like the early days of Bankless or the genesis of Bankless.

Like maybe you came into Bankless during 2021 or later and missed mine and Ryan's trajectory up to the genesis of Bankless and then also the early years of Bankless.

Like this will probably provide you a lot of context and probably illustrate how we got to be the way that we are and why we say the things that we say.

So I think this episode is gonna be pretty fun for a lot of people.

It was also an episode, very very rare episode, where we were recording in person like sitting beside each other so There's that dynamic.

So guys, that's the episode today with Raoul Paul talking to, I guess, David, you and I are guests today.

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It's good to be on this side of the table, and this should be a bit of fun.

Not only are we infrequently on the other side of the microphone, but we are even more infrequently actually together in person.

And David, you just put on your Wells Bankless t-shirt, I noticed.

Yeah, we got the Bankless America as well.

So as ever, I always like to start with people's journey into the space because everybody comes in different ways.

There's a different hook that brings you on and then your understanding grows from there.

So I know David, do you want to start with you?

So came in, bought the top of 2017 as 1 does.

Net worth went to 0 in 2018 and again in 2019.

My first job out of school was in social work.

After that, I was going, trying to figure out my way into the world of health sciences.

The through line between that and crypto was that I was in search of trying to find the way to improve people's lives in the biggest bang for your buck.

So how do you do the smallest things that produce the largest net outcomes in people's just well-being?

My major was psychology with a focus on positive psychology.

And the TLDR of that is just like, hey, psychology as an academic study is all about improving sick people to be normal.

But what if you apply psychological principles to normal people to just make them feel stronger, more self-actualized, just better?

And so in pursuit of that, I was like, OK, that's great.

But in order to make people feel more psychologically sound, you need to also improve their fitness, right?

Like, you can't be psychologically sound without exercise.

And then once you do those 2 things, you might as well round it all out with nutrition.

And so there's just a bunch of low-hanging fruit to make the average individual feel a lot better.

So on my search for how to find a private practice role in that, I discover Ethereum because of 2017, and my mind gets opened up to the world of money and finance as an economic substrate for all humans.

And so understanding how do we improve everyone's lives very simply and very easily?

Well, money and finance goes down to the root of all things.

So like very far from psychology, but the through line of just like how do we improve the most people's lives in the easiest, most systemic way possible?

As soon as I kind of had the aha moment of like money and finance is at the root of all things and Ethereum is a new platform for producing that, I was immediately compelled and there was no going back.

I think David is 1 of the only people I've ever heard who came through to crypto through route of psychology and nutrition.

She just thinks my NFTs are just ridiculous.

There's no psychological thesis behind why humans collect these sorts of digital objects.

Yeah, I mean, and full credit to David, too.

I think 1 of the things that I've observed, because I've got to see him since 2017, we probably started working together more in 2019 and then beyond to start bankless, but this guy has taught himself everything and he's gotten up to speed, you know, just so quickly and To not like no, I don't know.

A lot of my friends in college took business, like went through business school.

Is this the antithesis of what you were doing, right?

It's like money was root of all evil when you go through kind of sociology, psychology.

So so but this I don't know if you've observed this row, but but sometimes the most tradfy deepest Economists people who have gone to graduate school and pursue their PhD, they miss this crypto thing for some reason.

It's because I think they learn bad habits.

And so you almost have to enter crypto as a child.

Right, and like kind of go back to the basics of let's build out from base principles what this money thing actually is and then work from there.

And that's what I observed David doing in this space.

I was going to mention when we were speaking yesterday, but I've now on my screen got the bell curve of the mid-twit.

And I was speaking to Meltem about this, that we've both realized that it's the single most important thing is never be in the middle.

And that's why most of these guys, like you saw Taleb yesterday on CNBC, right?

And it's the simplicity of the idea is what can drive much better results, I think.

Yeah, I tease all of my business school friends that, you know, I was the 1 psych friend amongst a bunch of C a business school people, but I was the 1 that discovered crypto well ahead of the curve and did well for myself.

Well, well, at an accelerated pace in comparison to

Well, I tell you that you guys had to unlearn all of this stuff in order to understand crypto it's about like the unlearning that I never had to do I never had to learn anything because I never told

because you could come in as a total moron

And then move to Jedi Master over time, right?

Are you on the left side of the mid-twit then, David?

That's all right, as long as you're not in the middle.

Not by way of nutrition, not by way of psychology.

I actually did the business school kind of thing, right?

And so somehow I unlearned the lessons of Keynesian economics and everything they kind of teach you in business school.

But I would say I kind of came at this through the, you know, technophile, startup, entrepreneurship kind of thing.

I remember sold a healthcare tech company in 2014 and the co-founder, the guy I was working with, said something to me in passing.

Because I have set up a bunch of Bitcoin mining machines in my garage, and this was 2014, right?

Of course, that was never profitable for him, unfortunately.

The idea of mining using machines, using computers, that idea was so foreign that I had a holiday, like kind of a Thanksgiving holiday in the US where I had some time and I just went deep down the crypto, Bitcoin at the time, rabbit hole in 2014.

Spent the entire weekend, didn't spend as much time with my family as I probably should have, but I was just everything Andreas Antonopoulos had written or said on the subject, I absorbed that.

I read everything I could on the subject and by Monday at the end of that weekend I was ready literally to kind of quit my job as

I opened up 5 exchange accounts had no idea what I was doing and these were some shady exchanges at the time Let me tell you And I was just you know starting to invest or I wanted to go all-in After that, I must think of that as a sort of a manic type of weekend for me.

Because after that I kind of woke up on Monday and I was like, okay, back to work, back to what I am doing.

And the idea, you know, crypto kind of left me until Ethereum really entered 2016.

And now there's the idea if Bitcoin was money over IP, which was so incredibly important, money over the internet, digital money as a bare instrument, that idea is so powerful.

Now the ability to program it, this ability of smart contracts to actually build a Didn't use this phrase at the time But a bankless money system that totally gripped me and totally captured me.

still had no idea what I was doing in the space.

And actually, I wanted to start a crypto fund.

So, you know, your assets appreciate a little bit and you've rode Bitcoin up, you've rode Ether up from some lows and you're like, I'm an investor now, I can do this, I am brilliant, so let me manage other people's money.

Did you ever put blockchain expert on your LinkedIn.

right, I'm kind of a kind of cringe but but so I didn't do that because I went down the path in 2017 and I realized 1 there was so much I still needed to learn Like I didn't have an underlying thesis of where value would accrue in the space.

And so I had no business managing someone else's money.

I want to, I think a lot of people didn't in 2017 because that was the time of like crypto hedge funds and everyone was was kind of launching 1 and you know another reason I think in a story arc of my life and my narrative has been this pursuit of Freedom and in kind of autonomy, right?

And I saw in crypto a technology that would deliver that not just to myself but to society, to self-sovereign money, this concept of once you own private keys, no 1 can take that away from you, right?

Decentralization really kind of captured me almost like spiritually as well, if that's a way of kind of capturing it.

And so I knew if I took other people's money at that time, I didn't know what, that would be a shackle as well.

I was here for kind of, you know, everything that that entailed.

And I spent the next few years really trying to understand and develop my thesis for this space.

And it turns out David was doing that at the same time.

We kind of met and converged in this path.

I just want to hear the genius to idiot phase of suddenly the space collapses.

It's the first time you've fully gone through it.

I want to hear your mindset, because a lot of people are going through that now.

I was a class of 2012, so I've gone through it a few times.

It's never fun, but you kind of get used to it.

Okay, so, you watch the price of Bitcoin appreciate to above 20K, right?

When you'd purchased much lower than that, obviously.

And then you watch the price of ether appreciate, you know to

Just hit that very briefly, but like that was it right that That was the top and then you watch it fall over the preceding months, right?

And fast, okay, so, you know down down to 800.

Okay, you can hang with that It's just a dip right?

It'll it'll pass down down just like a massive fud at this time You know ethereum's only kind of a Had

And that's when you think you're sort of a genius and you do things like, 1 mistake I certainly made on the way up is Discovered this really cool.

You know d5 protocol called maker Dow and opened up a you know a nice CDP

row of course right and I'm protected because if you can't go below

can't go below 100 get it Of course not that would be impossible hit, you know 1420 We're in a new paradigm and then what happened over the the months and and and even years to come is this massive amount of FUD This kind of dark period where well, maybe it was all a bubble, just ICOs, and they have ETH on their treasury, and they're selling.

Did you sell anything, or did you just ride the whole thing?

And particularly, I spent all of my waking hours trying to figure out if I was crazy or not.

And I don't know if people can identify that right now, if they're kind of first cyclers, if they're just sort of wondering, am I the crazy 1?

And not only that, Raul, in crypto in 2018, that's what the Bitcoiners would say, Bitcoin maximalists would say.

Yes, it's not only, like the outside world is saying crypto is dead, but inside of crypto Ethereum is dead.

If there is dead, there's no like defy wasn't a thing It's just I feel flat I see us flash in the pan and so what I spent that year doing was trying to figure out if I was crazy or not.

And in 20, I didn't sell during this time until I had some kind of conclusion of whether I was crazy.

And why sell when you're down bad, you know, that much anyway.

See all Bankless transcripts on Applepodcasts

179 - The Bankless Origin Story - Raoul Pal