Coin Bureau’s Guy Turner Interviews Ryan & David

Hey Bankless Nation, this is a special episode. Actually, an interview we recorded with Guy from Coin Bureau about a month ago. So some of the prices, some of those details might be dated, but I think we talked a lot about the bankless story, David. So we we thought you guys would enjoy it during the holidays.

Importantly, this is an interview of us by CoinHydro. We are this is not a bankless podcast, but we are putting it on the bankless podcast feed.

Yeah, so hope you guys enjoy. As usual,

I was shocked that he did a podcast. I don't I still to this day have no idea why SBF came on a podcast with an $8 billion hole on his balance sheet.

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Coin Bureau. We have two very special guests with us today. I am deeply honored to welcome none other than Ryan Sean Adams and David Hoffman, better known as Bankless, one of the best crypto podcasts out there, an invaluable source of information for not just all things Ethereum, but all things crypto and beyond as well.

I've been listening to Ryan and David for years now, and it just they just keep on getting better and better. I'm really glad that they've been able to join me today. It's pretty early in the morning for them. But guys,

Welcome and thank you so much for joining.

Thanks for the kind words, guy.

Yeah, it's a pleasure to be here.

It's great to finally meet you. Like I say, I've been listening to you guys for

for years now. And like there are so you guys have had so many incredible conversations with some of the, you know, some of the top names in the space. And

there's no way we've got time to sort of dig into all of those uh today. But I do want to sort of uh get your thoughts on a few sort of episodes that you've done, a few people that you've um spoken to.

But um

I thought an interesting thing to do to start with, because one thing I've kind of noticed is that uh crypto, the crypto podcast world

and the crypto YouTube world seem to be sort of

quite separate polls a lot of the time. Um now, and obviously, like you guys, you guys have uh a YouTube channel, but I think you're sort of best known as as podcasters.

So I thought for anyone sort of unfamiliar, for anyone who sort of gets most of their information from from YouTube, could you guys uh you know give us your give us your backstory a little bit, like how you came to how you you know how you got into crypto and how you came to do what you do with with bankless?

You want to start, David?

Yeah, sure. Um, I think to start things off, Ryan and I are definitely podcast people, I would say. We both are big podcast consumers. And I don't really know how anyone would start a podcast without having that as their foundation. Like first we enjoy podcasts, and then we are like, okay, we could, we could start a podcast. Uh so that that's probably why Bankless is known as a podcast, is because that's where we came from.

Yeah, like David, how much how much how much uh podcast listening do you do versus YouTube? Would you say?

Like personally. Uh yeah, like three to one ratio. And it used to it used to be a ten to one. It's gotten it YouTube has increased lately. And I would say that's been on track with Bankless's emphasis on YouTube. Like

we've nailed the podcast game relatively early, but the YouTube game is still like new to us. We s

Okay, YouTube.

Yeah, we stuck to YouTube. We're working on it. But we started first, you know, as podcast consumers and then podcasters. And that's really where Bankless came to be.

Uh filled this niche in the early days of Ethereum where there were a lot of people that had a lot of shared ideas and understanding about what this Ethereum thing is and what it could be.

And this was back in like 2018 to 2019 when it was very, very early, and no one knew what Ethereum was

or where it was going. It's like we had just coined the words DeFi.

Uh and so we started the podcast to help articulate that story. Uh and a lot of Ethereum people at the time were like, oh, thank God, finally someone is saying the words that I feel about Ethereum.

Uh and that's kind of where we got our first early foundations in the space.

Yeah, I think like the perspective at that time, 2019, when we kicked things off, was we had just come out of 2017. And guy, uh, you you remember this, right? The highs of 2018, the elation, all the way, and we're gonna change the world, and crypto's everything, all the way to the lows of 2018 and 2019, in the absolute despair.

And so David and I were on a kind of a similar quest and journey where we were fully bought into this crypto thing.

And uh we obviously we had bags from 2017. So we're trying to figure out like, oh my God, we're are we wrong? Like, did we did we miss something? Did we screw something up? Like, so for me, it was just going down to base principles and trying to figure out if I was crazy or everyone else was crazy.

And so Bankless really began as a quest, right? It was just a couple of investors on the journey to make sense out of crypto. Like, what are the use cases? What are blockchains good for?

uh how do they actually accrue value? And so we basically open sourced this quest. And it was a series of conversations between David and myself. And then we'd bring guests on and we developed what we call the bankless thesis. Indeed, the name of the podcast is kind of a thesis for crypto, which is what does crypto do?

Helps us go bankless, right? We have a money system, an alternate money system that does not rely on central banks or commercial banks uh in order to thrive. So even the name of the episode is kind of or the name of the thesis is in the uh the podcast uh format. But like one other thing I'll say is um

I think that podcasting is a different medium

than than YouTube.

Yeah.

Right. So our podcast, like

the the reason it hasn't translated so well previously to YouTube is just we tend to go on for a long time.

Time.

It's like deep, long form conversation.

And um, you know, YouTube, at least my impression of YouTube, and I think there's some convergence. I think uh things change, but YouTube just like give me the answers, right? I want like I want to see 15 minutes

like articulate something. And it takes David and I longer than 15 minutes to actually uh go through an idea maze and talk to a guest. So that's why that's where why we're probably native podcasters rather than YouTubers.

Yeah.

Well, because I mean you guys have been you guys have been working together for so for so long now, and you you know you gel so well together. I think that's part of the appeal, isn't it? It's like it's not just two guys who who really care about what they're talking about and what they're into, but also just like

You know, really sort of bounce off each other so well. I think that's why, you know, I think that's one of the many reasons why it works, why Bankless works so well as a podcast.

Yeah.

But I mean,

you know, from my experience of it, like from my experience of YouTube, because I mean when we started when we started Coin Bureau, you know, all those years ago, we had to sort of,

we had to kind of figure out YouTube as we went along. And it was sort of like surely, surely what people want is just like really short, like, you know, a couple of minutes. And then we were quite surprised when they wanted kind of

turns out they wanted kind of longer form stuff.

Um

but it's just it it feels like a lot of the time it feels like the sort of goalposts uh are almost shifting in a way because you're sort of trying to

you're trying to find that balance. Like people do like longer form stuff on YouTube, but only

only up to a point. And then there's a sort of moment where they're sort of like,

nah, this is enough. Like I can't, I can't deal with this anymore.

Yeah, I was actually going to ask you, Guy, because I think you do this really well with uh with your YouTube channel and kind of your platform. But um it seems to be there can be a challenge with anyone who is in crypto media with um presenting candy to the audience versus presenting vegetables, right? We like to say at Banklist, what we're trying to do is like healthy candy.

Uh, but like sometimes that's difficult because if you go um by attention spans or narratives, then you're just talking about maybe the latest meme coin.

And what is the substance there? Like, how does that actually help us change the world and fulfill the promise of crypto and actually go bankless? Right. And so if you give most like the audience just the candy, oh, here are the 10 coins that are mooning and you need to buy right now, then I feel like you lose the plot.