Talk You Book: How to Fix the Plumbing of the Financial System

Today's animal spirits talk your book is brought to you by Chainlink. Go to chain.link. To learn more about Chainlink, it's trying to create the industry standard platform for capital markets on chain and empower the majority of decentralized finance. That's chain.link to learn more. Welcome to Animal Spirits, a show about markets, life, and investing. Join Michael Badnick and Ben Carlson as they talk about what they're reading, writing, and watching. All opinions expressed by Michael and Ben are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for any investment decisions. Clients of Ritholtz Wealth Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. Welcome to Animal Spirits with Michael and Ben. Michael, I think we found the use case for crypto, potentially. I think the traditional finance people we we've talked to a handful of people who've made the shift from TradFi, which is a word I just don't like. I don't know why. TradFi doesn't do it for me. But traditional finance into crypto, and those conversations are usually around people who understand it from the rails perspective. Right? Like, how the financial system works, the stuff that we usually don't see the plumbing as they say. Right? So it's the transactions. It's the cost of transactions. It's the speed of transactions. And the whole idea is that the blockchain technology and crypto can help make those things more cost effective, more efficient, and faster. That's it. I think that's that's the hope. Right? Oh, I said that's it. I mean, that's everything. It's the it's the whole thing. Yeah. And the financial system is obviously huge. We're due for, like, a Windows upgrade. Right? That's what it seems like. Getting from here to there is obviously the hard part that no one knows about the timing of it, obviously. Today, we talked to Ryan Lavelle. Ryan is the director of capital markets at Chainlink Labs, and Chainlink is essentially trying to do this. They're trying to take all these other blockchains, how many of them there are, and bring them together and be like the middleman, for lack of better term, to, like, make all these rails happen. And we're still at the early innings because they're still figuring out all the regulation behind this. The rules are being written as we speak. But I think Ryan, who actually comes from Vanguard, is an interesting person to talk about this stuff because he he's worked in the plumbing for for his career. So, here's our talk with Ryan Lovell from Chainlink. Ryan, welcome to the show. Pleasure to be here. Pleasure is ours. So let's start here before we get into Chainlink and the Oracle and the the tokens and the stables and the all this good stuff. I wanna learn about you, Ryan, because, I can't imagine that there are dozens, let forget about …