🎙️ #5 - Crypto Memes Good

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 this is ryan sean adams i'm here with david hoffman and we're here to help you become more bankless hey david we've got an exciting topic today man what are we going to talk about oh yeah this episode is going to be super fun talking all about memes what they are why they are important how they emerge and how they fit into a crypto world yeah these aren't just gifs these aren't just internet jokes these

are actually pretty fundamental there have been a few memes going around these days uh we've got the the money printer go brewer meme how do you say bird by the way i i've seen it like spelled but how do you how do you say it if you are a follower of military aviation burr comes from the a-10 warthog uh like chain gun that they have built into the the plane and when it comes in it comes and it goes burr and then it just you know throws like a thousand around so that's where burr comes from fun fact no way it's just being you're way more

researched on that than i thought you'd be that's super impressive yeah i know uh yeah that was that's where burr comes from uh and it really sounds like just a bur and then and then they just got repatriated to uh money print or go burr so it it actually comes from just the sheer magnitude of bullets that can come out of an a10 warthog that's wow so i thought it was like you know the sound of like a photocopier made my grandparents used to have a photocopier my grandpa did at his office and he used to get like like that something like that yeah you know that's that's pretty close

if you guys are curious to learn more you should go to youtube and go and just type in a10 burr and like 100 like 10 10 different videos will show up all right so memes we're going to talk about memes uh before we get to it let's uh just do some chit chat uh we are all getting checks this week we live in the us both you and i do david we're getting a check from uncle sam for one thousand two hundred dollars each five hundred dollars per child if you have any children uh and i believe if you know your spouse gets a check too if you have a spouse

uh is that exciting or what getting a check is exciting uh what's not exciting is that most people getting checks are no longer getting checks from their jobs uh the if you go look at the amount of unemployment filings that have been filed in the last two weeks the uh you know the big greens uh you know the big candle the big green candle that spiked this week is like at least five times larger than what happened in 2008 uh and so this is kind of the reason why we're getting

checks is because we're not getting checks anywhere else we have record unemployment uh and so the the trump administration is is sending out you know twelve hundred dollars to every adult plus five hundred dollars if you have a kid to help compensate for this the narrative that that i see forming is that this is just a slap in the face for what is actually needed if this is the first of many checks then that's one thing but right now this sounds like a one-time check that's taxes taxable income which is weird but uh we'll we'll see what happens

money is fun but not losing your job isn't and and other countries are doing this as well so this is not just a us event this is happening with central banks and countries around the world uh but you know where are they getting this money from it's definitely a case of money printer go burr nice nicely done yeah you know i had a a friend um who for the first time i've talked to him about crypto a number of times never really been interested the first time he texted me and he said oh my god we're getting checks the government's printing

money what crypto should i buy very first time he's ever texted me and asked me that question and i wonder what percent of this essentially temporary ubi check is actually going to end up in crypto obviously a lot of folks need the money they need to pay bills my friend fortunately is in a better position than that and he's just wondering where he should actually store some of this some of this wealth uh you know and his question like like anybody to me was like you know

how can i get how can i get five x how can i get 10x which crypto should i bet on that was his question it's just interesting so you told him to put it into xrp the standard right totally that's the standard man i was like extended it's the standard it's a well-established meme that means it's obviously true you know and then i was like just kidding you should put your money in bitcoin and ether some combination of both and that's an interesting question i think because it made me think later in the week of well like what is a good combination of

crypto money of ether and bitcoin if those are sort of the you know the recommendations uh what's your thought on that topic what would you do 100 your friend asked you 100 david what should i put it in bitcoin or ether i've heard they're both great what's the allocation i i've had this question asked me multiple times and i always give two separate answers and i and i tell them both answer answers the the first answer i say is do a 50 50 split uh because you know the the only two crypto economic systems that exist are

bitcoin and ethereum like it looks like litecoin is also a cryptocurrency in the same category as bitcoin and ether but it's really not and i explained to them why i explained to them that okay so the very very core principle of every blockchain is that there's demand for block space and only these two blockchains are are generating any amount of fees which illustrate that there is only these two blockchains that have demand for block space and i'm pretty easily able to illustrate that to a newbie and i just tell them that there's only two blockchains that have scarce block space

and that's what's really important and so a 50 50 split into bitcoin and ether is a 50 50 split into the two blockchains that are actually real blockchains uh and then i tell them what my portfolio is which is a hundred percent into ether and then i explained that you know bitcoin is an asymmetric bet versus the world but ethereum is an asymmetric bet versus bitcoin uh in my opinion uh and so i tell them like those are those are the two somewhere between those two answers is a

good place i think i i totally agree i don't i don't have a strong opinion on um you know for for people who are new to the space on what percentage to allocate to what it it it depends on risk tolerance what i what i do have a strong opinion on is you know trying to keep them away from xrp the standard and i definitely do that in all of my advice but everyone's going to find the right the right answer in terms of allocation between those two and it really depends on what you think about the future and your risk tolerance and where you want that asymmetric

upside both good stuff all right we should why don't we get into it then today but before we get into the topic of memes which is super exciting crypto has the best memes by the way uh let's talk about our sponsors so this is for our us listeners primarily this first one is rocket dollar if you have an ira or a 401k it's probably jailed in your brokerage that means you can't access crypto very easily you can't use that money and buy

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that there's ethereum inside of it last uh last episode we talked about uh the different m1 m0 the monetary layers of ethereum dye is ethereum's m1 and the monolith d5 card allows you to tap into ethereum's m1 wherever visa is accepted basically all over the world so go to monolith.xyz to get your defy card this is specifically for our european listeners at the moment but when they come to america you know i

will be the first to sign up and so if you want to spend your die and put some of the world's economy onto ethereum it is your duty to go to monolith.xyz and get your d5 card so you can spend your die out in the real world i think that crypto has the best memes i think there's a lot of compacted wisdom i think you can be taught the ways of crypto and the wisdom from previous generations through some of these memes and there's other memes that you should be wary of we're

going to talk about that today in our meme episode but we should start maybe with uh with a definition david because when people hear the word meme i told my wife we were going to do an episode on memes and she was like what like you know those internet jokes like what what's a meme though david i'm pretty sure a meme is a gif with text on it or a still photo and it's a funny joke that makes me blow around out my nose is that what a meme is yeah that's what she thought right so that's that was exact that's the common definition that's what we think of when

we think of a meme but the the idea of a meme in mimetics was actually birthed in the 1970s by a gentleman by the name of richard dawkins which we'll get into in a little bit um but what a meme is more fundamentally it's not a gif it's not just an internet joke it is a thought or behavior that spreads within a culture so a thought or behavior that spreads within a culture so memes can be images memes can be behaviors learn traits behaviors

memes can be slogans they are compact units of information that have an aspect of virality and they become pretty powerful because of the most important and most interesting large scale communication tool that humanity has ever devised which is the internet that is essentially a meme propagation tool what else does it mean david yeah memes go all the way back uh the whole idea of how to conceptualize a meme should kind of relay itself as a mind virus uh so

you can go all the way back to like um just religion and and spirituality as like kind of the early semblances of memes people believe in religion they have belief or have faith in this idea or concept and then they share that with others and so this idea spreads from brain to brain and lodges itself in there so like i mean a meme is very much like a virus in that it's it packages up information and then it is easy to

spread and share and so that's why the internet and memes are actually so well intertwined because the information the internet is a platform for free and cheap data proliferation and a meme is a small bundle a small little packet of information that goes from brain to brain and it's something a good memes there are definitely good memes and bad memes right good memes are things that are easy to understand and that everyone can relate to and that's why

memes on the internet which we often think as jokes or you know little cartoons or pictures or gifs the reason why good memes spread and bad memes die is that good memes are relatable everyone can immediately understand a good meme and the bad memes are the ones that people don't understand and so a meme is this thing is this culturally relevant thing that is spread that we can all look at and be like haha i relate to that and bringing this back to like today's

context money printer go bur is something that is a funny packet of information that is easy to spread and all of us can relate to it right now because we are all looking at the money printer going bur at this present moment and that's why money printer go bur it communicates a ton and it's easy to spread and it is the current topic of conversation and the internet is proliferating that right now the cool thing about that meme too is the money printer go bird like i mean who created it we have no idea no idea i mean it

it's it's something that really emerged out of our collective conscious but there was probably somebody out there right one person or maybe a bunch of people at the same time who came up with that idea and that's why memes are so interesting is because they're essentially a decentralized system uh just like cryptocurrencies are decentralized and permissionless anyone can create a meme you don't have to ask permission if you want to create a new word for example and you know

words language those are meme expressions as well if you want to create a new word you don't submit a form to webster's dictionary and have them add it right it's more like webster's dictionary has to catch up with the words that humans create and they add new ones every year and so all of these words are created by individuals in a permissionless way to describe something and the way they propagate is other nodes on the network other humans brains have to actually download the

meme and accept it or reject it and so it's decentralized and permissionless in its creation but it's also decentralized in its uh propagation humans can decide whether or not to accept a given meme and if they reject it you know then it's it's kind of gone if enough of them reject it it's gone but if enough of them accept it it becomes established and that it can become even embedded even deeper into the fabric of society as well yeah 100 and and

making this a little bit more tangible i want to turn to richard dawkins in his book the selfish gene where he talks about the fundamental base layer of any human is one gene right and all these genes connect to other genes to create your dna well what is what is the cumulative human body is just a collection of genes and each gene is something that is trying to get itself replicated and shared over and over and over again and the idea of the selfish

gene is that each gene is motivated it's it wants to survive and it needs to survive by a being a good gene something that is beneficial to survival so you know this this particular gene makes you more muscular it makes you run faster it makes you think better these genes survive and they spread and they spread in the physical world via reproduction and memes are the same thing but memes are this intangible layer on top of

consciousness right like memes require consciousness we all need to be able to understand and spread information and so memes are like genes except they are part of the culture they're part of the information that we share and understand as a culture so memes are really spread across time across people in specific cultures memes are really the genetic makeup of culture yeah there's definitely an element of survival of the fittest for memes memes

can have a life span so you know some last days weeks months some last years they cannot also mutate so they can become other things and they absolutely have to survive in their environment or they die but the ones that do survive the fit ones they can become almost a uh a shelling point of sorts um david maybe you want to describe what a shelling point is yeah sure so i'm gonna give you a list of three numbers ryan and uh i

want you and the listeners to all pick the same number are you ready yeah let's do it 7 342 204 1. now i want all the listeners to pick one of those three numbers i got mine you got yours yep okay was it one yep yeah and i bet all the listeners uh also probably picked one and so that's what a shelling point is if if you the idea of a shelling point is it's this point that we all can agree to choose without actually needing

to communicate with each other and so this actually is very relevant to things like game theory this is a shelling point is how you break the prisoner's dilemma if you have a shelling point between you and your other prisoner you can coordinate without having to communicate and so shelling point is something that just people automatically choose as defaults just because of what it is yeah do you want to know why i picked one why'd you pick one i mean it's first of all it's the easiest to remember right

the other ones were not i can't even recall them now you just said it and i can't recall the first two but the second thing and i think this compounds it if you were to ask the question now ryan what which of the three numbers do you think everyone else is most likely to pick right then it would have been hands down the number one because you know that that that it's obvious i think memes are very like some some memes are very obvious in terms of which which ones individuals and humans would prefer and i think that's an example of that

and some of these you know become so deeply embedded into our society that we don't even notice them you know they're just like they're just like common sense you know some of them some memes even can become so embedded they become almost institutional right there is a a gentleman who wrote one of my favorite books um you've read this too david the book sapiens eval harari and he talks about human beings as a storytelling species one of the big distinctions from kind of

the animal kingdom all of humanity's sophistication its civilization its society maybe is partially rooted in its ability to share stories and to believe in those shared stories he calls them shared narratives or he calls them myths and that's what human beings are really great at we're like biologically adapted to share stories and to believe in myths and once society shares these myths once there's a collective belief in these myths they can form some of our most

important underlying institutions and technologies when i say technologies i'm not talking about you know technologies like computers and science and advanced technologies i'm talking more about the the softer technology that is underneath all of our civilization and all of our society you know things like money things like government things like um you know the the constitution as an example of a protocol technology we've talked about uh several times so these

things become embedded and they become almost common sense and they become almost indisputable they win these like network effects within a society and they're very difficult to change at that point and we don't even notice that we believe in these shared memes we just operate as if everyone else obviously does the cool thing about memes and the inside of the context of humans telling stories is that you know we tell stories to pass information right so like ryan i know a secret that this grocery store

down the street actually has toilet paper in stock so you should go take advantage of that but me do you really yeah no that was just i just made that up okay cause i need some toilet paper uh but memes are a way of our ancestors to communicate with the current set of people it's a communication mechanism across time in the same way that money is actually something that develops across time memes and information cross across time as it's shared by culture to culture and that's

really why the bible is actually so incredibly important as a log of memes the bible is this book that is a fable of stories it's a set of stories that are supposed to teach you a lesson and that lesson is so in the the bible is just this collection of short stories and and and lessons to be learned that can be shared and propagated as memes so the bible's just this mean book it's this mean book of sharing all the important things that our ancestors have learned that is worth transcending

through time absolutely it's it's all the memes are the wisdom of our ancestors the wisdom of humanity really like passed down to us from generation to generation um very powerful oh you know i am i had a friend of mine who um said you know when asked like what's the meaning of life he said two things to spread my genes and to spread my memes you know like i i don't know if that quite does it for me as far as like life fulfillment um but there is an element of truth that

those are the two things that that human beings biologically do and they really do well so if you were to like ask an alien what do humans do the alien might say something like that well they spread genes right biologically and then they spread memes which are these societal beliefs and through those two things they've actually become pretty powerful because memes are incredibly incredibly powerful right um you know um they're almost like a way to program a society

they're um also a superpower is that they're reflexive in nature uh some of them anyway um do you know what i mean by reflexive um i could use some elaboration so some memes are powerful and um become more powerful and more true the more people who believe they're actually true i'm not sure if this is a property of of all memes but it's certainly uh true of of some memes like the meme of money

you know something becomes more like a money and exhibits higher moneyness when the more people believe it's a mummy it's a money and so this like this this feedback loop of you you believe the meme and you get other people to believe the meme and the more that they believe the meme the more the meme actually becomes true and then the more people who believe the mean there are a few memes like that that can become incredibly powerful because they're reflexive in that way and they also can exhibit really high

network effects so once a money becomes embedded like the us dollar for instance it's now an embedded money meme it's really hard to disrupt that and it's really hard to you know because you essentially you have to get all of the other nodes on the network these are human brains to go you know replace their money meme with another meme and typically that happens over decades and generations which is incidentally why i think we think that the crypto movement is not going to happen overnight right

um the the money meme actually has to shift some of this will be generational change this will play out over decades yeah absolutely so speaking of crypto why are we talking about memes ryan like what does this have to do with anything well okay so i think that uh one of the most interesting ways to actually learn crypto is through the memes that folks in crypto have created over the years right maybe we should start by talking about some like non-crypto memes first that are really good and then talk about

the you know the crypto memes that are also good and have really you know held up well um we talked about money printer go burr right at the outset um how about this meme it's just the flu it's just the flu bro yeah just the limit just the flu yeah uh that one is like that's like an offensive meme that's a meme that's supposed to make fun of all the other humans who actually do think that it's just a flu and it's it's a shaming meme this meme is this meme is all the people

that are taking chronovirus virus seriously and shaming all the people that don't take it seriously hahaha it's just the flu bro like we're all making fun of those people collectively through this meme to shame them into going inside and quarantining themselves like that's what that meme is supposed to do right and it's it's definitely effective in terms of its ability to uh to spread virally right so but but but another i think aspect of a meme and you know that this one is no exception it actually has to uh has to in the long

run anyway be true right so you know it's easy to say it's just the flu brah like at the beginning of coronavirus and maybe before the the deaths and the hospitalizations a lot of folks will kind of download that meme and and propagate it but over time if that meme becomes less true and you know we realize that wow our workplaces are closed our schools are closed uh people are dying on mass the mortality rate is higher than the flu then that meme starts to lose its its

relevance and starts to die it's it's no longer fit for its environment so it no longer gets passed on and no longer gets embedded in human consciousness and the it's just a flu meme is going is going to die when coronavirus dies because it's just a flu is locked into coronavirus right like we're not going to be saying it's just a flu bro in five ten years like it's only relevant for as long as coronavirus is relevant and so this this is a meme that is good now but

it's not going to serve us any purposes later and so you know it's going to you know be eventually a thing of the past into the future absolutely and it compresses a lot in that in that in those four words it's just the flu right um i think actually uh trump is a master meme maker he's created like several memes and i think this is through sort of repetition listening to his audience he's able to do this but it accounts for a lot of his political success in my mind that he's able to get these memes

together and to propagate them and compress a lot of information in like three word memes like build the wall or lock her up right like these memes convey a lot of underlying information to their you know the groups who have tribal affinity with them and they're very they're very viral um particularly on the internet uh these quick three-word memes can spread like wildfire and uh propagate very quickly

and you know i think politicians some politicians might underestimate the power of memes but we're really living in a meme-centric world now yeah absolutely donald trump's biggest uh you know boon to his success is his mastery of the three-word meme he he speaks simple words in a simple way for people to understand and he really just sets up memes to be born into existence he's a master memester the other really good meme that's

outside of crypto that's come out recently that i think is a really good case study is epstein didn't kill himself and this is one of my favorite memes because it just shows the sheer power of the internet where you know the the wealthy and the the elites do their whatever with epstein they they kill him or they they kidnap him or whatever conspiracy theory you believe that i'm on board with uh the internet the internet acknowledges it yeah like while any one person can't do anything

we can at least use memes that meme epstein didn't kill himself to create universal recognition without needing to actually like trust the authority or instance of one person statement or whatever the epstein didn't kill himself is the human collective mind agreeing that epstein didn't kill himself and also sharing and spreading that information as a middle finger to the elites that did whatever they did with epstein and so that that meme itself epstein didn't

kill himself that means so much more than the four words epstein didn't kill himself right i mean like what what what does that actually mean that it's it's it's more like a um uh i guess you know common man against the plutocrats and oligarchy that is organizing uh society and bending it to their will uh you know it's like it means so much more than the actual statement i think totally it's it's an absolute acknowledgement that this is being covered up by the powers that be

whatever those powers are it's an acknowledgement that we don't actually know much more than that but we do know that it is not the only part of the story the least interesting thing about jeffrey epstein is that uh is that he died that's not that's not really the fact that he died is is not the story the story is how he died and how it has been told to us and how we actually think of it and that's the the fact that we have to say what um something that happened didn't actually

happen the the epstein didn't kill himself it's the didn't word it's the something else happened and look at that something else all right so david i've got a list of crypto memes here that we should go through some of these have been successful and have held up they've survived they've been the fit ones and they have collective generations of crypto people to um like they're passing down that information from the wise crypto uh people of of ages past

others have been unsuccessful um but i want to ask you know what you what what you think each of these each of these mean let's start with the general crypto memes here here's one that i'm sure almost everyone listening has heard of hoddle what does that mean what's the meme yeah huddle came out of this guy i believe on the bitcoin talk forum who was drunk posting during the 2013 crash and he said like [ __ ] it i'm huddling i don't care i'm gonna huddle through uh you