Category: Podcast

While I was in Lisbon a few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to meet in person and interview Amir Taaki (@Narodism), one of the first Bitcoin core developers. For a long time Amir has been involved in left wing activism including volunteering in Rojava and is a big digital privacy advocate. At Liscon, Amir…

For this interview I spoke with Alexandra Elbakyan (@ringo_ring) the founder of Sci-Hub, the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of academic research papers for absolutely free. As you can imagine, what she’s doing is illegal and has had countless issues with government and privately owned…

For this week’s episode I spoke with Ethan Buchman (@buchmanster), the founder of Cosmos and the CEO of  Informal Systems, a worker-owned cooperative helping build the infrastructure of the Cosmos Network. Cosmos is a particular blockchain with the goal of creating the internet of blockchains by creating a layer that facilitates interoperability between different blockchains. During the interview we talk about…

For this episode I spoke with Maryam Monalisa Gharavi (@wcncnd), an Iranian-American artist, writer, and theorist whose work explores the interplay between aesthetic and political valences in the public domain. She conceived of the Oil Research Group, a one woman collective exploring the relationship between oil, data, and bitcoin. “Data is the new oil” was coined by…

For this interview I spoke with Rhea Myers (@rheaplex),  an artist, hacker and writer originally from the UK now based in Vancouver. Her work places technology and culture in mutual interrogation to produce new ways of seeing the world as it unfolds around us. She’s been involved in the blockchain art world probably for as long as…

Bailbloc is a cryptocurrency scheme against bail through The New Inquiry, in which you can  download the app and a small portion of your computer’s unused processing power is redirected toward mining Monero. At the end of every month, Bailbloc exchanges the Monero for US dollars and donates the earnings to one of the bail funds in the National…

The Drivers Cooperative is a ride-hailing platform similar to Uber except owned by the workers not venture capital starting in NYC. They are currently having a fundraiser here where you can invest in and support the workers’ movement in the US directly while receiving potentially a 2.5x return. For this interview, I spoke with Jason Prado (@jasonpjason),…

It has been reported that the country of Iran has been using bitcoin to get around sanctions imposed by the United States. Some Iranians are even using it as a hedge against inflation some say. To get a better understanding on the situation, I spoke to Salman Sadeghi (@salman_sadeghi), a Masters student at GCAS studying cryptoeconomics based…

For this week’s interview, I spoke with Murtaza Hussain (@MazMHussain), reporter at The Intercept focused on Foreign Policy with an interest in cryptocurrency. The past year Murtaza has been researching and learning more about cryptocurrencies specifically because of its anti-imperial potential. During the interview we spoke about how the United States specifically uses US Dollar…

Although it feels like the Bitcoin Miami Conference was ages ago, it still only happened a little over a month ago. There were plenty of memorable events, like Laura Loomer heckling Jack Dorsey, the weird doge coin guy who took his pants off on stage, and the announcement that El Salvador will pass a law…

For this week’s episode, I spoke with Caleb James Delisle (@cjdelisle),  founder of PKT Cash, the world’s first bandwidth-hard blockchain meant to support de-monopolizing internet access through mesh networking. Previously he also founded Cjdns, which implements an encrypted IPv6 network using public-key cryptography for address allocation and a distributed hash table for routing, and Packet Crypt,…

For this week’s episode I spoke with Samer Hassan (@SamerP2P), activist, researcher, and Associate Professor at Universidad Complutense Madrid and Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center. His current focus is his work on P2P Models (@P2PMod), a project to build collaborative economy organizations that are decentralized, democratic & distribute their profits through the use of decentralized…

This week I spoke with Dr. Filipe Calvao (@filipecalvao), a  socio-cultural anthropologist and professor of Anthropology and Sociology at the Graduate Institute of International Development Studies in Geneva and trained gemologist with ethnographic research in diamond mines in Africa. He is the author of two different papers published comparing crypto mining with physical mining : “Crypto-miners: Digital…

For this week’s episode, I spoke with Austin Robey, cofounder of Ampled, a cooperatively owned music platform owned by artists and workers similar to Patreon. He recently published an article through Forefront titled “How Community Tokens Can Power Cooperatives.” During the interview we talk about how Ampled is working to create a cooperative alternative to Patreon for…

For this week’s interview I spoke with Kris Jones (@KrisJ_Official) who wrote his Masters thesis in 2018 titled “Toward a Political Sociology of Blockchain” as well as another article titled “Blockchain in or as governance? Evolutions in experimentation, social impacts, and prefigurative practice in the blockchain and DAO space.” He also has a Medium profile where he…

For this week’s episode, I spoke with 1Dime (@TheRapNerd7), a youtuber who focuses on videos about politics, critical theory, and pop culture.  During the interview we talk about his latest video which was a Marxist analysis of the stock market, how Karl Marx would probably be a dogecoin trader, and why many of the left’s criticisms of crypto tend…

For this interview I spoke to Julio Linares (@Julio_Linares_) an Economic Anthropologist studied under David Graeber at the LSE, Social Outreach at the Basic Income Org, and Research & Community for CirclesUBI (@CirclesUBI). CirclesUBI is a project seeking to provide people a universal basic income using the xDAI ethereum sidechain based on mutual credit. You may have…

For this episode I spoke to Chris D’Costa (@cjdcosta), the founder of Totem Live Accounting (@totem_live_). Totem is building a real-time global accounting ledger built on the Polkadot blockchain to compete against traditional accounting and ERP software. I thought it was interesting to hear how blockchain could potentially be used to develop alternatives to the bureaucratic free…

This week’s episode is dedicated to the crypto influencers. For the first half I give a crash course on the history and some of the more well known influencers and for the second half I have an interview with Tom Gillespie (@TomPeterGill), former currency trader on the Perth stock exchange turned TV investigator and filmmaker…

For this week’s episode I spoke to Dr. Emaline Friedman (@emalinus4). She is a network activist for the Commons Engine, part of Holochain, a social critic and theorist, has a PhD in psychology, a writer for Mad In America, a researcher at GCAS, and author of the recent book Internet Addiction: A Critical Psychology of Users. During the interview…

For this week’s interview I spoke with Mike Watson (@_leftaesthetics),  co-host of The Acid Left and author of “Towards a Conceptual Militancy” and “Can the Left Learn to Meme: Lessons for the cultural left, from cat memes to gaming, to Stranger Things, and more.” with an upcoming book “The Memeing of Mark Fisher: How the Frankfurt School…

For this week’s interview I spoke with Ruth Catlow,  Artistic Director at Furtherfield (@furtherfield), a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain, Director of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using…

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…