Category: Podcast

I spoke to UnhappyBen, head of growth and marketing at Peer (formerly known as ZKP2P) which is a service that allows you to officially delete Coinbase and every other centralized exchange account you may have. Peer is protocol that allows people to do P2P trading of crypto assets and fiat through neobanks like Revolut, Venmo, Wise, etc.…

I spoke to Boris Mamlyuk, co-founder of Clean App an AI-powered, crowdsourced environmental app designed for users to report waste and hazards in real-time, essentially a system for reporting civic feedback.  I had him on to talk about the app which boasts over 1 million installs, his critique of the crypto libertarian project’s capture by Wall Street…

I spoke to Tan Zhi Xuan, Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore’s Department of Computer Science and founder of the Cooperative Intelligence and Systems Lab, a research group confronting the gap between the rationalist AI alignment discourse focused on superintelligence and what is actually happening. I had her on to talk about her work…

Continuing the publication of interviews from DevConnect in Buenos Aires, I sat down with Theo Beutel (academic secretariat at the Ethereum Foundation, researcher at Centre for Democracy Studies Aarau, University of Zurich) to reflect on attempts at democracy with DAOs. As someone who has worked as the governance lead at several DAOs, Theo had a lot of…

In this episode recorded at DevConnect in Buenos Aires, I sit down with Eugene Leventhal (researcher at Metagov, podcaster at Governance Futures, new head of governance at Octant) to discuss the current crisis in crypto governance. The general feeling is that governance has been declared dead, foundations are being pushed aside, and the decentralization theater is being abandoned now…

In this episode I spoke to Jarrad Hope, founder of Logos, and Peter Ludlow, philosopher and research advisor at the University of Hong Kong, and co-authors of the new book ‘Farewell to Westphalia.’ In the book they detail the historical trajectory of nation states and what they perceive to be their failures as well as propose…

Dr. Christoph Sorg is  a social scientist at the Humboldt University of Berlin. He researches theories of capitalism and post-capitalism and the new debate on economic planning in times of digitalization and the climate crisis. During the interview we spoke about his work around understanding economic planning and his recent publication Finance as a form of…

It’s feeling like we’re living in a very strange moment in time where liberal norms of openness have been shattered by the same class of tech industry titans who expressed these values just a decade ago. In this episode I spoke to Nick Houde and Severin Matusek from co-matter, a research and strategy studio based in…

In this episode, I talk with Adina Glickstein — Master’s student in Media Studies under Nathan Schneider at UC Boulder and editor-at-large at Spike Art Magazine — whose recent Compact Mag article, The Rise and Fall of Urbit finally gave me the excuse to talk about Urbit on the podcast. We unpack what Urbit is trying to be (although many don’t…

About a month ago I spoke at Dappcon about Solidarity Primitives we’ve been building at Bread Cooperative. Before my talk, Naomi Oba gave her own wonderful presentation titled Crypto Culture and its Discontents that unknowingly set the stage quite well for mine so I had to ask her on the podcast.  We discussed the issues with crypto culture including obsession…

They say on the internet no one knows you’re a dog but this has created a digital space that is dominated by more bots than humans and crypto space that is easily sybil attacked. Worldcoin, a project led by Sam Altman, is purporting to tackle this issue as AI (ironic?) proliferates content by scanning our…

How can digital cash truly be “trustless”? What does it mean that blockchain offers a new paradigm of the “rule of code”? How are decisions made when a blockchain system faces an emergency, and who gets to make those decisions?  I spoke to Wessel Reijers and Morshed Mannan, both great thinkers and recent authors of the book Blockchain Governance (by…

How in the world is anyone meant to derive the “real” value of a crypto token? Especially in THIS market??  I spoke to Vasily Sumanov, founder of Valueverse and inventor of the Token Value Capture Mechanism Framework to share how he sees it. Valueverse is a utility-centric token tracker that helps you understand the demand-side pressures for token value. Part…

I spoke to Thomas Heremans, CEO of the Obol Association. Obol is an ecosystem for trust minimized Ethereum staking that enables distributed validators (DVs) across a cluster of nodes in order to improve resilience as compared to running a validator on a single node. Previously I spoke to Osín Kyne, the CTO of Obol Network and they had…

I spoke to Ferran Reyes and Pau Escrich, co-founders of Vocdoni, a blockchain based voting protocol used by several non-web3 organizations. They were born out of the Catalan independence movement in Spain from which they have designed Vocdoni to be censorship resistant and friendly to your average non-web3 user. During the episode we discussed some of the elections  where…

I spoke with Paul Glavin, contributor to 1Hive and founder of Gardens v2, a platform for communities to manage assets democratically using conviction voting. 1Hive was one of the first projects in the crypto space to explore alternative governance mechanisms on Gnosis Chain which is the chain where we’ve build Breadchain Cooperative. We discussed what conviction voting is, how to…

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Beth McCarthy, program director of Funding the Commons which I also spoke at in Bangkok about our progress on building on-chain post-capitalism with Breadchain Cooperative. Beth is also my co-author for the Katabasis crypto science fiction series and we spoke together at Devcon about the meme power of capital and why it’s bad. We discussed Beth’s suggestions…

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Andreas Tsamados, cofounder of Fileverse and anime gif connoisseur. I highly recommend trying out ddocs.new as a decentralized alternative to google docs. We spoke about the issue of radical communities using google docs, the importance of decentralized and censorship resistance knowledge sharing systems, and how this is all possible on Fileverse.

While at Devcon 2024 I spoke to Sarah Friend,an artist and software developer from Canada and based in Berlin. In 2023, she was a research fellow at Summer of Protocols, led by Venkatesh Rao and the Ethereum Foundation, studying the death of protocols and published a paper on “Good Death“. We discussed her findings in her…

In Thailand at Funding the Commons I spoke to Jake Hartnell, co-founder of Layer, a modular tech stack to build decentralized protocols using Eigen Layer’s shared security. Jake is also a contributor to Juno and DAO DAO in the Cosmos ecosystem. During the discussion we simplify how Eigen Layer works, what new affordances it brings, and what…

While at Devcon I spoke to Anuj Das Gupta, co-founder of Smart Transactions with Vlad Zamfir. Smart Transactions offers advanced blockchain solutions with context-aware, decentralized, and customizable transaction capabilities. We spoke about how MEV (maximum extractable value) gives someone the ability to control time for a split second, how the control of time has influenced the transition to…

In Thailand I spoke to Florian Glatz, probably the first crypto focused lawyer in Europe and possibly the world and co-founder of Common Ground, an on-chain social network. Florian also helped author some part of the MiCA legislation in the EU which lays out the legal framework for cryptocurrences. We spoke about his experiences in the early…

While in Thailand during the Funding the Commons design jam, I spoke to Tony Lai a co-steward of Mothertree Labs with Susanne Aichele who I spoke to in the last episode and Founder of the Blockchain Group at CodeX Stanforf and an Edmund Hillary Fellow. We spoke about Tony’s interest in how to embody being a post-capitalist, Buddhist vs. Christian imagery, as well…

While in Thailand during the Funding the Commons design jam, I spoke to Susanne Aichele from Mothertree Labs. Susanne is a filmmaker, researcher, and communication practitioner focused on the intersection of ecology, community, and identity, leveraging experience with BBC, National Geographic, the UN, and WHO to create projects that foster interconnected ecologies and non-extractive practices. We spoke about…

There seems to be an ever increasingly thin line between crypto, scams, and financial domination. I spoke to Steve Pikelny, CEO, CTO, CFO, COO of http://FastCashMoneyPlus.biz and Jesus pamphlet collector aka steviep about his newest art project FinSexy to explore the uncomfortable intersection between AI, findom and crypto. If you liked the podcast be sure to give it a…

I spoke to Eric Alston again! Eric is a professor at University of Colorado and recently completed a fellowship with the Summer of Protocols studying the governance of killswitches. His report is titled “Killswitch Protocols: Or On Engineering Recursive System Death” and co-authored with Seth Killian and Garrette David. During the interview we discussed the history of…

For this episode I spoke to Simone Robutti. Simone works as an organization designer, adversarial researcher, and teacher. Formerly a software developer, he has been part of different chapters of Tech Workers Coalition since 2018. During the interview we discussed how to start a labor union at your tech company, innovative ways to go on strike, and how…

For this episode I spoke to Ahmed Gatnash, the Executive director of Kawaakibi Foundation. He is also a Strategy Advisor at the Albert Einstein Institution, and is the co-author of Middle East Crisis Factory, a primer on systemic crises and a vision for a positive future for the MENA region. During the discussion we spoke about the context…