Category: Interviews

For this week’s interview I spoke with Matt Cropp (@MattCropp), a Co-Director of the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, where he works on public education, outreach, and the conversion of businesses to employee ownership for ownership succession. Matt has a really interesting profile in that he was involved in bitcoin during the early years and actually used…

For this week’s interview I spoke with Jay Smith (@jaynemesis) one of the top earning traders on eToro, a social trading platform where people can “copy” the trades of traders and a percentage of the money they earn goes to them. What’s interesting about Jay is that while doing this he’s also openly left wing as he’s a…

For this episode I interview Dandelion Mané (@decentralion) and talk about their work on SourceCred (@sourcecred), a tool for communities to measure and reward value creation, which they founded. As the name suggests, Cred is the core idea of SourceCred. Cred is a score which is earned by making contributions to a project. A participant’s score…

For this interview I sat down with Hannes Gerhardt, professor of Human Geography at the University of West Georgia and author of a recent piece in ROAR Magazine titled, Blockchains: Building blocks for a postcapitalist future? . He has published on a wide range of political and economic issues and is currently working on a book exploring pathways to…

For this week’s podcast I spoke to Akseli Virtanen (@econaut6), one of the founders of the Economic Space Agency (@ecospaceagency) (ECSA), an organization for exploring protocols for post-capitalist economic expression. Akseli previously founded the Robin Hood Cooperative Hedge Fund and has been referred as The Andy Warhol of Finance. During the interview we talk about how ECSA is …

This week I spoke to Creston Davis, founder of the Global Center of Advanced Studies (@GCASCollege), the first cooperatively run college using their own ethereum-enabled token (called GCASY) that represents shares in the college that can be used for paying for tuition and other expenses. Many well-known academics are a part of GCAS, including Alain Badiou and they’ve hosted seminars from…

This week I spoke with Stefen Deleveaux (@stefdelev), the president of the Caribbean  Blockchain Alliance (CBA). The CBA is an organization that advocates for the use of blockchain in Caribbean, educates developers , and collaborates with regulators to create regulatory frameworks in the region. One of the purposes of the organization is to help create a more…

This week I interviewed Andrew Ancheta (@TrampAbroad1), a freelance journalist who previously wrote for crypto publications, but most recently wrote an article in the leftwing journal Current Affairs called The Crypto Casino.  It’s a great article, and I don’t say that just because I’m featured in it :). The article is in the currently most recent issue of…

This week I spoke with Morshed Mannan (@MannanMorshed), a PhD candidate at Leiden Law School in The Netherlands and  Research Fellow at the Institute for the Cooperative Digital Economy at The New School. His research interest in cooperatives and digital technologies eventually led him to blockchain and he’s produced some really interesting research and seminars…

This week I spoke to Michel Bauwens, the  founder  of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property and is known for his work on The Political Economy of Peer Production. Much of his work revolves around exploring peer production as…

This week I spoke to Jonathan Beller,  a professor of Media Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn NY with a forthcoming book “The World Computer: Derivative Conditions of Racial Capitalism.” He recently wrote “How We Short Capitalism – And Finance the Revolution” in CoinDesk. The article is really interesting in that it proposes we invest in…

This week I spoke with  Mark Alizart, a philosopher and the author of The Climate Coup, Dogs, and most recently Cryptocommunism which has recently been translated into English  from French and published by Polity Books. In the book, Mark argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well beyond cryptoanarchism. In so far as they allow…

This week I spoke with Dr. Sarah Grace Manski, she has a PhD in Global Studies from UC Santa Barbara and is now a professor at George Mason University. On one side she’s done quite a bit of work for unions and written for Jacobin and on the other side she’s the founder of the International Society…

This week I spoke to Chibu Ichiban, a founding member of afuturemodern, a network of coops delivering liberation tech to the masses through art, culture, and basic services. Their mission is to drive mass adoption of humanity’s most radical innovations by shaping them for society’s most marginalized and revolutionary communities. They leverage art, culture, service,…

This week I spoke to Aleeza Howitt (@aleezagroks),  a contributor to the Trustlines protocol. Trustlines is a mPoS (minimal viable Proof of Stake) sidechain to Ethereum and stores transactions for a system of decentralized mutual credit. Mutual credit is an alternative medium of exchange to most money that we use today in which “money” is created through…

This week I sat down with  PhD student at the London School of Economics under David Graeber and Laura Bear in Anthropology and occasional CoinDesk contributor, Annaliese Milano (@AnnalieseMilano). In this episode we spoke about her current research interests in public goods, or what she prefers to call public things. Her research suggests that studying…

For this episode I spoke with Jonathan Harris (@jonone100) aka Money Burning Guy who was recently featured as a panelist at the Consensus: Distributed conference on their panel Soft Money hosted by Joon Ian Wong and Annaliese Milano and was joined by Brett Scott, who was last episode’s guest. Jonathan is the author of The…

This week I spoke to financial activist and author of The Heretic’s Guide to Global Finance Hacking the Future of Finance Brett Scott (@Suitpossum). His last book was written in response to the Occupy Wall Street protests and is a guide to the world of high finance and the emergent forms of alternative finance, alternative currencies and…

This week I spoke with Rich Jensen (@richjensen), Co-op Executive of Resonate (@ResonateCoop). Resonate is a cooperatively owned music streaming platform aiming to give more power to artists rather than corporate record labels and VC-funded tech companies.On average their model gives a larger payout to artists as compared to other music streaming platforms like Spotify. Rich has…

This is Part 2 of my interview with Dr. Joel Z Garrod, a sociologist based in Canada and author of a recently published article, “On the property of blockchains: comments on an emerging literature.” The paper focuses on blockchain and property relations in connection to global property relations and the evolution of capitalism.  For this…

This week I sat with Dr. Joel Z Garrod, a sociologist based in Canada and author of a recently published article, “On the property of blockchains: comments on an emerging literature.” The paper focuses on blockchain and property relations in connection to global property relations and the evolution of capitalism.  I really enjoyed the article…

This week I interviewed Daniel Kronovet (@kronosapiens) at Colony, “An Operating System for Organizations”. The Colony Network is a suite of smart contracts, running on Ethereum. It provides a general purpose framework for the essential functions organizations require, such as ownership, structure, authority, and financial management. Along the way, we talk about organizations and society…

This week I spoke with Paula Berman (@_paulaberman), researcher at the Democracy Earth Foundation (@DemocracyEarth) which is a tech non-profit that aims to create platforms for decentralized and incorruptible online governance. Their projects have largely been based on Ethereum. In the interview we discuss the identity problem for decentralized platforms like blockchain, the advantages of…

This week I spoke with Dardan Isufi (@DardanIsufi), COO of the Eva Coop (@Eva_coop) which is a cooperative ride-sharing application based on blockchain started in Montreal and expanding to other cities. We discuss taking on Uber while trying to build a democratic and non-exploitative alternative like Eva. You can also find the podcast and future episodes on…

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to speak with Ben Arc (@BTCSocialist), one of the first openly leftist guy in bitcoin and significant contributor to the bitcoin FOSS space. In this episode we discuss what it was like for him to be one of the only people loudly represent the Left, and,…