Why he left crypto for AI w/ Nader Dabit

I spoke to Nader Dabit, longtime crypto developer and educator who built at Aave, Lens, and Developer DAO, about what it felt like to be at the frontier of Web3 and why he eventually left.

Nader spent years genuinely believing in decentralized social and censorship resistant platforms, and we dig into why those ideas haven't found their footing: the brutal difficulty of onboarding people, a culture that kept rewarding hype over substance, and watching the space forgive grifters over and over while builders burned out. We also get into the moment AI clicked and why late 2024 felt like a real turning point, what agentic coding does to the software engineering profession, and whether the crypto-AI intersection is real or just the latest way to raise money. And Nader shares some thoughts as a Palestinian American on why censorship resistance still matters to him even if the tools haven't delivered on it yet.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

But the people that do the opposite, the scammers and all those people seem to be the ones that actually like are being rewarded often. That kind of burnt me out and disillusioned me. Building successful software is just incredibly hard, period. Like you can do everything right, you can use the fastest database, you can have the most optimal UX, you can do everything right and still not make it. And then, you know, we're now adding that additional complexity of decentralization and kind of like now have all these additional constraints. So the first app I ever built on an AI API was in like 2023, and it literally got over 100,000 users within a couple of days per day. It was like the most successful thing I'd ever built. Oh wow, like I can just spend a weekend building something and everyone gets value out of it. That was a really great feeling as a builder. But really, I think the big one was in December, and a lot of people have written this when Opus 4.5 and Codex 5.2 came out. They were kind of like a tipping point where you could say that there was like a before and an after. Like, you know, this is gonna change really everything. That job is like probably not gonna exist in six months. I'm not even like exaggerating on that.

SPEAKER_00 1:13

This episode is sponsored by NIM, the world's most private VPN that protects your internet traffic and metadata. Unlike traditional VPNs, NIM uses a decentralized mixnet to scramble your internet data, hiding who you're talking to, when and how often. You can switch between full mixnet mode for maximum anonymity or a faster VPN mode for everyday use. Paying crypto or fiat, and even your payment stays anonymous thanks to ZK-powered anonymous credentials. Take back control of your online life at NIM.com. Sign up today using the code BlockchainSocialist and get an extra month for free. Hi everyone, you're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I'm Josh Davula, and I'm here today with Nader Davit. You guys may know Nader because he was for a long time a pretty well-known figure in the crypto space. Doing a lot of work in the dev rel at some pretty popular projects, including Ave, Lens, Developer DAO, I think you were also a founding member of, and most recently EigenCloud, also called Eigenlayer before. And but you recently transitioned, you did the pivot that everyone said to do, pivot to AI, once all the AI stuff started getting big. That was a really interesting thing to see because I've been following your work for a long time. Really object your perspective from a technical point of view, and like uh so you had someone that was really a really good follow in order to keep up with what was going on in the crypto space. And then, you know, AI, by coding, agentic coding, whatever you want to call it, kind of I think has taken over a lot of the mind share of a lot of people, especially on social media and the tech world. So that would be really interesting to have you on and just kind of hear some of your reflections on your time in the crypto space and kind of advice that you have for people who are still in it, since I think you would have a really interesting perspective on that. So yeah, I think to start off, I mean it would be great if there's any more introduction you want to give, and like is there anything I guess I'd be interested to know like what was the initial thing about the blockchain space that really drew you to it, like its early ethos and whether you think that ethos has kind of uh has stayed or it's changed, and yeah, I guess whether and like how do you think about your transition into AI?

SPEAKER_01 3:31

Yeah, well, happy to be here and um you know excited to maybe dive into this because I haven't really talked about it publicly, I don't think, other than when I kind of announced the move. So it'll be cool to kind of you know dive a little bit deeper into that and just go back and forth over some of these different things that have been running through my head and maybe other people's head as well.

SPEAKER_00 3:52

Yeah, for sure. So yeah, like I curious, like what brought you to the crypto space in the first place? And do you think like is it still interesting or exciting to you in that way?

SPEAKER_01 4:02

So what brought me to the crypto space was 2020, I believe. 2021 was when I actually made the move, but 2020 I was starting to dive a little more into it. And I've been dabbling in crypto since like 2016, 2017, and as a spec like in speculative ways, but not really in a way like a developer would until like the 2020, 2021. At the time I was working at AWS, which was a pretty it started to become a little bit boring. I've been there for almost four years, and there really wasn't much happening in the cloud like world. We were shipping new features that were like incrementally improvements over incremental improvements over the things we had. But for me, it wasn't like a really fun thing to wake up and do every day at the at that point in time after almost four years there. And then I started learning more about crypto from the perspective of like a developer from looking at DeFi protocols and smart contracts and all those things for the first time ever. And because the technology was so new and it was so just I would say not figured out yet, it just seemed so, so exciting relative to kind of the stuff I was doing at AWS. And I was also inspired a lot by some of the ideas behind like Web3. So essentially, you could think of I would kind of more categorize like decentralized social or decentralized like applications, shared backends, more in that category as opposed to like finance. So that was always the thing that kind of really excited me and interested me. And it was a complete like 180 from what I was doing at Amazon, which was like boring, I would say infrastructure style work. And this was more exciting news, things that just hadn't been figured out. Really, you know, most of the work that we were doing at AWS, we figured out how to scale, we figured out how to build things, like all these things that we were doing were like there were answers to it. We were just making incremental improvements, whereas crypto seemed like, oh, nothing is figured out yet. So it just seemed so exciting to me. And I decided to make the change to work into crypto almost overnight, like literally within a couple of days, I decided that's what I wanted to do. And then I decided to start like interviewing at companies, and one thing led to another.

SPEAKER_00 6:22

So it was really like uh kind of a as a technical challenge, it sounds like. But yeah, I think it's interesting that for you, what was interesting was not really the financial aspects, even though that is like generally what a lot of people focus on.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Yeah, I mean, I think stable coins were always really interesting to me, and DeFi was interesting to me, but it wasn't the most interesting part. The most interesting part was more of like the shared infrastructure ideas resulting in products like you know, uh Farcaster and Lens protocol and decentralized social and decentralized front ends.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

So I mean, at this point, do you I mean, are you disillusioned with kind of the crypto space and has it been able to live up to those things that like you were excited about in the beginning, or has it really lacked?

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Okay, the answer to am I disillusioned? Yes, I am disillusioned a bit, but that doesn't mean a lot of these things haven't really become successful. I think crypto has proven itself to be extremely good at certain things like finance, trading, payments, a lot of like really great, powerful things that enable a lot of cool stuff. But the things that I was interested in and that I was trying to be a part of didn't really pan out as well. And then there's all the other stuff that's happened over the last few years with a lot of the you know, the grifting and all of those things has seems to have just gotten worse, and our industry seems to reward those people. Or I wouldn't say our industry like does that on purpose, but they're very forgiving, like and people are get away with a lot of stuff. And I think for people that are in it for reasons that are more balanced, and I'm not gonna say like I wasn't in the I'm not working at a company to not get paid, also like all of us want to make a living, but it's not like the most important thing. Like we we often almost always actually take less money to do things that we think are like more interesting and more impactful. But the people that do the opposite, the scammers and all those people seem to be the ones that that actually like are being rewarded often. You know, you could almost argue more often than everyone else. And that yeah, that kind of burnt me out, and that that did disillusion me. And then kind of seeing what happened with Farcaster and Lens and you know, a lot of these decentralized like applications that weren't financial and not really making it was also a little disillusioning. So yeah, it was kind of like a bunch of things.

SPEAKER_00 8:46

Yeah. Do you have any thoughts on like why you think those maybe just speaking about like maybe decentralized social applications, like why they didn't pan out the way that people wanted them to pan out?

SPEAKER_01 8:57

Building successful software is just incredibly hard, period. It's just so fucking hard. Like you can do everything right, you can use the fastest database, you can have the most optimal UX, you can do everything right and still not make it. And then, you know, we're now adding that additional complexity of decentralization and kind of like now have all these additional constraints. And this was an argument that a lot of people made to me like a long time ago, like so it's not like a new argument, right? It was just something that I was not, I would say, bought in on in the sense of I thought that people would see the value of some of these features that can be like enabled by decentralization, and it would become successful because of that, but the barrier of like onboarding the masses is just really hard when you have these additional constraints, and kind of we've seen that happen over and over in different ways for these types of applications, whereas finance is a more optimal like use case, I would say trading and all these different like financial financial as applications are a better use of that, and therefore that value proposition really shined a lot better as opposed to these other like ideas, right?

SPEAKER_00 10:18

So I think like one of the things that I've like kind of felt whenever there's a certain moment that I can't really say when exactly happened, but I remember feeling that like AI kind of took all of mind share and all the space and like air from the room that like a lot of times crypto would kind of inhabit just because it was like this new thing and people kind of figuring out, like you said, there's all this space to kind of figure stuff out and like play technical challenges around. But there's also been this kind of I think part of the thing is that like when you grab when you do something with AI, do if you try a little bit of i coding, agente coding, you are able to like immediately create something and it becomes real. Like you're able to like move from idea to to something that you can play around with quite quickly, and it has nothing to do with finance. And it was to me a moment of just like wow, AI immediately made something that was like useful to me, that had nothing to do with finance, and like I can begin playing that it like I feel like that interaction pulled it was like one of the things that pulled the air out of the room for crypto because crypto was just kind of repeating the same thing of like another meme coin launch pad, another like financialized bullshit, whatever. Yeah, I don't know if you have any reflections on that.

SPEAKER_01 11:34

Yeah, there was like two, um in my opinion, at least, like at least for me, there were two times when I was really compelled, maybe three times I was really compelled by the AI space as someone that's just always looking and excited about like the cutting edge or bleeding edge. And I'll go into more where I did think the future is even headed that's beyond AI, even. But for now, I'll say it was like 2023 when GPT started becoming like pretty good in terms of what people could build on it, the Chat GPT I heard and talked to quite a few people that kind of pivoted into AI at that point from other areas of software, and it was the time when I also kind of considered it about doing that as well, just because of the you know, big value proposition, and you also have this opportunity cost of not doing things, and but I would say mainly the exciting thing was the ability to create valuable applications really easily, whereas it's so much harder to build value applications, valuable applications on crypto that are apparent to the like normal person. So the first app I ever built on an AI API was in like 2023, and it literally got over a hundred thousand users within a couple of days per day. It was like the most successful thing I'd ever built. And I'd built you know tons of things on crypto rails before that. None of them had like really done that well. So that was a really cool feeling. Oh wow, like I can just spend a weekend building something and everyone gets value out of it. That was a really great feeling as a builder, and I think all builders love that feeling, right? So AI just makes it really easily easy to build cool stuff, right? And a lot of us are in crypto because we like to build cool stuff, you know. So, but yeah, there was like a couple of times, I think you know, 2023, and then you know, depending on how tapped in you are, you might have seen the like improvements happening with like Claude and these other different coding tools or the agentic coding, agentic coding LLMs that that had kind of like moments where you were like, oh wow, this is we can kind of see where this is going, and yes, this is awesome. But really, I think the big one was in December, and a lot of people have written this when Opus 4.5 and Codex 5.2 came out, they were kind of like a tipping point where you could say that there was like a before and an after. Like before Opus 4.5, I couldn't reliably say that the LLMs that are out there could do most of the work that's out there consistently, reliably, like a bar that most people would be okay with. But Opus 4.5 like was that, and that was like a moment where everyone was like, oh shit, like you know, this this is gonna change really everything. And it became really like fun and exciting to start diving into that a little more. So, yeah, I would say the moment for me was like two moments like 2023. Wow, this is crazy, and it's gonna change everything, and then 2025 December, wow, it's actually here, and now it is gonna change everything. So which is pretty fast.

SPEAKER_00 14:51

I mean, that is like I feel like it happened much faster than I thought it would, I guess, or like the models kind of improved a bit faster than I thought it would. But yeah, I guess I'm curious, I mean, maybe speaking on a little bit like what you see coming, one of the questions that I've kind of been asking a lot of the AI researchers that have come on is like what what you see the effects of agentic coding on the on software engineering as a profession, kind of generally. You know, there's the you know, a lot of people, there's like the classic tweet that everyone has like, we're you know, we're so screwed, you know, everyone's losing their job and everything is going to, you know, we're just not ready for this type of moment. Where do you stand on that? And do you think that I mean, one, I would imagine like everyone has basically said it kind of fundamentally changes a lot of software engineering, but I imagine it kind of clashes with this contradiction of like, because one of the things that people talk about is the lack of need for like junior developers. How do we get more developers if nobody needs a junior developer afterwards? Yeah, I don't know if you put your thoughts on that stuff.

SPEAKER_01 15:52

Yeah, I think that there's a lot of nuance there. And if anyone is gonna sit there and say nothing is gonna change, like everything is fine, they're obviously not being like honest. And then if on the other hand, people are like, oh, everything is gonna end, it's the end of the world, like those people are also not really being honest. There's a lot of like clickbait and stuff out there. There's definitely nuance there, right? So for me, the way I look at it, it's like before you had the printing press, you had these people that were like scribes, I guess, that would like write books and stuff, and it was being able to like express your knowledge was only and your ideas was like only available to like a very small number of people, and it wasn't scalable. But after the printing press, and as things progressed from there, you had a lot more people that were able to kind of express ideas, so a lot more people became like writers, and you ended up now having instead of the ability for only a small number of people to kind of like print and create like books at scale, you had this opened up to it to a lot more people. It might be kind of like an analogy, I would say similar to that, where the craft of software engineering has completely changed, right? You can't sit there and say, Oh, I'm gonna go and learn how to code and get out of school and become a junior engineer. That job is like probably not gonna exist in six months. I'm not even like exaggerating on that. So, what does like software engineering look like? Well, you still need more of the advanced, like senior level people that know how to architect and engineer systems together. And you still need, I would say, a little bit of knowledge around how source control works and how to wire in back-end systems. So it's still like tech work, it's just a lot, it's just gonna look a lot different. So if you want to be a software engineer today, you need to probably expand like what the definition of software engineer means. You can't just go learn JavaScript and expect to get a job. You should learn how to like orchestrate agents, you should learn how to do cloud computing, you should learn how infrastructure as code works, you should learn like AWS and maybe dive into DigitalOcean, all these different types of like server software or server services. You should learn everything about the most bleeding-edge, like agentic uh coding tools. You should learn all these different things, and then you're a so that that's kind of my definition of a software engineer today. And if you're not there, you're gonna be you're gonna lose your job probably like very soon if you haven't already. So that's kind of where we're at. That doesn't mean that software engineering like is going away, it's just like you're gonna change a lot, and you can't just be a specialist at one thing, you kind of have to be more of like a jack of all trades. And I think staying on the cutting edge and bleeding edge is important, but at the end of the day, you just want to provide like value to a company that's gonna hire you or be able to build something like yourself, right? So if I'm gonna hire someone like and I can just do the work myself with the prompt, I'm not gonna hire that person. But if I can bring someone in and they can do like a million things, then that makes a lot more sense.

SPEAKER_00 19:08

Right. It sounds like to me, like you have to think like an architect rather than like a craftsman, maybe. If that's the right analogy.

SPEAKER_01 19:17

That makes sense, like an architecture, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:19

That makes sense. Like to because you have the details, the smaller bits can be figured out by agents, is just knowing whether or not at the high level, this whole thing that you're trying to make sense in the first place, and maybe from an uh architectural point of view.

SPEAKER_01 19:35

Yeah, and there's like little complexities like creating and configuring environment variables and having like local and testing and production you know systems, and all of that stuff is kind of like engineering type of stuff that you should know. And if you're just again just writing JavaScript and testing it locally, and like that was your job in the past, then you're not as valuable as someone that knows how to do all these other things. So, yeah, just learning how to build end-to-end systems, maintain them. I think site reliability engineering is gonna be like around for a while. I think that type of work that's beyond just coding, yeah. Like understanding how to work on a server and stuff like that, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:18

So, yeah, I guess we can kind of all see what's coming with the AI stuff. I mean, probably models will at the very least improve a little bit from now. They're already pretty good. I think one of the things that has been a narrative that's like for some bit in the crypto space is like this intersection of the two. And that, you know, one of one of the things that I'm trying to figure out myself is whether or not like does blockchain play a role in the ownership governance and verification of these the use of these AI models or not? Or is it simply like superfluous kind of like things that we thought would be interesting, but actually in practical reality, that's kind of too difficult? I'm curious for you, you know, having been in both now and deep in it, do you think there is anything interesting there with this intersection, or is it mostly bullshit because it seems like a lot of companies are raising on like you just say AI and crypto in one sentence and then you get money thrown at you?

SPEAKER_01 21:23

Like in the real world, you have to have product market fit in order to make it, right? Like in the regular software industry. So I think that's kind of what crypto needs to prove in the AI space as well. There's a lot of like theory and ideas, and often those theory and those theories and ideas are ahead of their time and they do end up being like really true, and those companies make a lot of money, right? But what we've seen in crypto, it's more not that. It's more people promising the world and delivering nothing. And I think people are just tired of that. So specifically with crypto and AI, yeah, I do think. There's a lot of potential there, and there will be some really big companies that are able to figure things out. But on one hand, you can argue that crypto is probably like at least stable coins are probably the ideal monetary system for AI agents because they are permissionless and you can send and spend and all these things without having to go through a lot of these like regulatory hoops. And that's true for sure. And I think that's gonna probably pan out to some extent. But who's gonna capture the value? Like you can't just say, oh, like crypto and AI are perfect, and AI agents are gonna use stable coins, so I'm building this company and like we should be worth a billion dollars. Like, how are you gonna make money off of it? How are you gonna make money off of this, right? Like our company generates revenue, the company I work for now, a lot of these companies like Figma and all these companies are worth billions of dollars, and they've taken a huge hit over the last few months, and they're still generating like crazy amounts of revenue. They're profitable, they're literally making money, and they're worth less than you know, some of the valuations that we've seen in crypto for companies that literally make like almost nothing, right? So I think like what crypto is gonna start moving into, it's it's just gonna be like normal software because it's maturing. You're gonna need product market fit and you're gonna need revenue, and you're gonna need to have a balance sheet that shows that I'm making$100,000 a month and I'm spending$80,000 a month, so I'm profitable, and therefore people want to invest in me. Because you see the stock market is really outperf out outperformed relative to crypto. And if you take it on a case-by-case basis per capita of the number of things that have launched on the stock market versus that have launched on like crypto, like tokens, it's in crazy disproportion between what the valuations have changed over time. Because there are there is red tape to launching on the stock market. You have to go through a lot of scrutiny to be allowed to be a publicly traded company, and therefore you can't really scam and like do this crazy stuff for the most part. Yes, it happens, but if it does, it makes national news. But it happens every day, every few minutes, maybe, like in the crypto space. Yeah. And you have millions of tokens that have launched, maybe. Where's all the money going to come from? Like, how are all these companies gonna be worth anything? But if you have to go through a year of red tape and proving yourself and revenue and like profitability and all these things to get listed on an exchange, which is a not the stock exchange, right? Then you have like already done all this due diligence. So like the filtering is done up front. Now, I'm not arguing that that we shouldn't have permissionless token launches because those are great because they allow people to invest early. Because let's say the next anthropic is a crypto company. If you spotted that early and you're able to invest, you should be able to invest. You shouldn't have to be a billionaire and like have all these connections. So there's definitely some like nuance there. But in general, what you're kind of seeing is the fact that I can go and write a script and launch a million tokens tomorrow. But to get listed on the stock market, I have to put in 10 years of work and have a profitable company. There's a massive discrepancy there. And that's why I think that crypto, in order to have that product market fit, needs to actually, and they are, I guess, it is seems to be moving in the direction of profitability and revenue, almost to the point where you're seeing crypto companies start to launch their own stocks as opposed to tokens, right?

SPEAKER_00 25:49

Right, right. So I mean it's been kind of crazy to me to see like people refer to it as the revenue meta or something like that in the crypto space, as if it was like a narrative that you have to make revenue. Like I'm the socialist here, and I know you have to make revenue to make a company and make profit. That's the whole point of it.

SPEAKER_01 26:09

Yeah, I mean, you have I mean, at some point you have to pay the bills, right? And the money in like for a while we could be driven on hype, but that's so exhausting. Imagine every day you come to work and you're like, I have to go on Twitter and like talk about how our company's gonna be worth like a million dollars or a billion dollars, whatever, I don't know, in the future, even though we haven't done shit today, like that's your job is to go on Twitter and like hype yourself up. That's not fun. Like, yeah, do you think a smart person graduating from like Stanford or a high-agency smart person that drops out of high school that can go do whatever they want because they are that smart? Any of these like extremely smart people, they can apply themselves anywhere in the world. Do you think that's the type of work they want to do? Like to go and try to like you're essentially trying to kind of like con people out of their money into buying your token because you're promising the world that you haven't delivered anything. Like, that's not fun and exciting. That's exhausting to even think about. And that's kind of what crypto has been for the last few years, right? Because you're kind of like getting more people to buy than to sell because you haven't made any money. Like hyperliquid is a great example of a company that literally makes money and like is doing some shit with it. Like that that's an example. I'm not like you know, saying I support or I don't support or whatever. I'm like, you know, I think hyperliquid's kind of cool, but it's just an example of a company that that actually makes money and they're doing stuff with it and good for them.

SPEAKER_00 27:33

Right. But it is still an example of a financialized use case. Yeah. To me, at least amongst my cohorts of people in the crypto space, there has always been a hunger for something else that was not so financialized to be something that was like big and successful in the crypto space. For sure. Yeah, so I want to talk a little bit about this if you're open to it, because you know, you're pretty well known in the crypto space, you have a big presence, you do a really good job at like herding the nerds together, I guess, and like bringing a bunch of people who are really interested in technical problems uh together. So I mean I assume you think a lot about the technology, sovereignty, and like the control the control that like tech technology has as well, and like who controls it and how that influences things. There was like a moment I wanted to maybe talk a little bit about because you've spoken a bit about being Palestinian, being Palestinian American, and I'm curious like how that perspective has maybe shaped how you think about technology and you know having still ongoing genocide. Yeah, if you have any sort of reflections and how you know there's a certain moment in the crypto space if you care to talk about or not, where you know the Zionists were out to get you a little bit. But yeah, I think you've you've upheld quite well.

SPEAKER_01 28:45

Yeah, I mean I've had a lot of people for sure. And I think what I've learned at this point, like regarding politics and a lot of these very like heated things that that are out there, it's that there are people that like believe things based on ideology, and they're impossible to argue with. And all they do is drain you of your life and your energy and the positivity that you can bring into this world. So the only way to deal with them is to just delete them from your life. So my strategy has been okay, I'm very fortunate to make a good amount of money, no matter what I've done in the last seven or eight years. I've been very fortunate. The way that I can impact people is by like, you know, sharing my own story every once in a while because I do have a large platform and I've written about things in the past and they're available on my blog, and I've never deleted anything. In fact, I try not to even edit anything because I want that story to stand at that moment in time because things have changed so much. Since then, someone can go back and see that snapshot of like where I stood at that point in time, and they can't argue that I've changed anything. But yeah, for me, the most impactful thing I can do is just give back financially or personally or things like that, because I have like a lot of mental health issues with anxiety, depression, and I would say, yeah, anxiety and depression are like the two things that that I struggle with a lot. And having like a public presence and then being attacked is something that is really hard for me to deal with. Like I literally will go into kind of like a spiral for like weeks or months at a time from little things that might that shouldn't probably affect me at all. And I've had that happen so many times that I just don't want to deal with it anymore. And I've also realized it's like pointless to argue with people online. Like, but what's also cool though is that the world is starting to become more aware of the truth of things that are happening in the world. It's crazy. The things that like I've known and that a lot of other people have known, and that I would say were almost too like crazy to believe, or things like that in the past, are now becoming like general knowledge. So that's really interesting to see. So I almost feel like the voice that I have like would you know still probably be good for me to speak up more than I even do at this point. But the but everyone is talking about it. Like it's really interesting to see that the a lot of these like people that maybe would have been bullied in the past are not afraid to speak up anymore. And it's becoming like, you know, you have people like even, I don't know, Tucker Carlson that are coming out and talking about things that I don't even like. I really didn't like this guy like ever. But I feel like even people that I didn't like are starting to see the truth and things and speak their own mind. And I don't agree with everybody all the time, but it is interesting to kind of see people that I completely disagree with on everything start to come around and have like more balanced views on things, which is really interesting to see. But yeah, I mean, for me, the TLDR is like I've dealt with a lot of mental health issues like lately with some of that stuff. So I've tried not to get in these online arguments anymore. And I think the most like impactful way that I've been able to make a difference is like monetarily helping people and doing things that I know this is gonna go and help this one person or this family, and then I can feel like I've done something and they know that I've helped, and the world doesn't really have to know about it, and I can go to sleep at night without having to worry about someone like attacking me or my family.

SPEAKER_00 32:21

Yeah, I mean, completely fair. Yeah. Yeah. To see people like Tucko Carlson somehow making the circle and changing his view and a lot of that stuff, I think it just I mean, in one, I think it shows the obviousness of the situation and just like how the amount of mental gymnastics that you have to keep doing in order to convince yourself that that you know, to keep following the line of like American media or whatever is like I think for too many people, even on the right, even and on the conservative side, are it's too much to bear. It's like you know, too obvious in the same way that maybe like you know, uh people trying to convince that Joe Biden was like mentally all the way there too. I mean it was like, you know, you could see it with your own eyes. It's not hard to say. But uh yeah, it's because uh yeah, the um I mean does this perspective for you like I'm wondering if you have any thoughts when it comes to uh the creation of decentralized technologies? I imagine that like this type of perspective also like the like I'm interested in decentralized technologies because I'm interested in decentralized power because like many of the type of issues that I'm interested in I feel like have been the ones that have been centralized around very specific type of actors, very specific type of people. And AI in particular is like often framed as this like ultimate centralizing technology as far as like how you know the companies that make these big corporate models are able to concentrate power and wealth to themselves. And then crypto is kind of meant to be this like counterweight to it, but in practice it hasn't really been, or it maybe has been in like some in small ways. And you know, I I mean I tried to practice it, you know, when I talk about sending like a bunch of crypto to people in Gaza to send aid, to them like it's to me this is like a crazy thing that we're able to do, but it's something that doesn't get I mean, doesn't get that much attention as what it could be whenever people really love to talk about the decentralization aspects of crypto as well. So yeah, I'm how you think of like these like tensions between decentralizations and super interesting yeah, areas to dive into.

SPEAKER_01 34:39

I think like for me, censorship resistance has always been something like really cool. It's like someone can go and delete my Twitter account tomorrow and I'm just done. And that was why decentralized social was always so like interesting to me, because it is like the expressivity of what it means to be censorship resistant. Like, what does that mean to actually be expressed in the real world? Well, to me, it's kind of like having a platform that no one can take away from you, and having places to like collaborate and talk, do things that are not able to be censored, because the biggest platforms today are very prone to censorship, and that hasn't changed at all, right? Like Twitter is worse than it's ever been in terms of that. Like, we're not seeing like a lot of bans happen that I know of, maybe like I'm sure it's happening, but they can and they still do ban people. And you see that happening on Instagram as well, and then you start seeing now like these these groups of people that are buying these companies, like there's a been a conglomerate around with a lot of the media companies and TikTok and all these different things. It's just getting worse. So, like the idea of censorship resistance is is continued to be that one and big part of like what I got excited about. It's just hard to actually build a like platform that I would say has mass adoption. It is cool though to know that I can go and I can actually save information somewhere on Ethereum or another network or some other like place that isn't gonna be that cannot be erased. That's really great to know. But how can people discover that and things like that? That still is to be like, you know, yet determined. Like, you know, we don't really have a great network for that right now, I would say. So there's that aspect, and then there's the decentralized payments and like stable coins and stuff like that. So that's really important because with the stabilization become you know, you have destabilized currencies and you have people that are taking other people's money, right? Like you you literally have a lot of that happening when you have wars and things like that. So the ability to kind of like store money and prepare yourself for these sorts of situations, at least giving people that ability, and they have had that, is really great because you know you can obviously have all of your money in your head, and no one can really take that from you. Or if they can, it's gonna be in a very like crazy, violent way. At least no one can just like come and rob you, right? So, like the all of those sorts of things are really important, and they really still like excite me uh and make me care about like crypto and the ethos of crypto. But in terms of AI, yeah, this is a really another interesting point. It's almost kind of like how the social networks are. The people with all of the power are able to kind of control like what the outcomes are, and they can steer these things in very underhanded ways that are not visible to us. So there's a lot of you know discussions around the ethics of open AI and the ethics of anthropic and these things, especially in the last week, but really it's always kind of been a topic of discussion, and you can see a clear like fork in the row what happened in the last week between what Anthropic and OpenAI was willing to do. But you could even argue that anthropic has already crossed the line of what ethical coders should have been, because they've already had these contracts with the government to do these sorts of things, right? So you have like these different models and these different like I would say training data sets that affect the the future of the world because like people grow up now in this world where they're talking to AI and AI is kind of like the source of truth. So like if the source of truth is tainted, then the truth is going to be like written by whoever is in charge of these large models. Now I have hope that we're gonna have like open source models and the ability. I think this technology is gonna progress in the next few years that you'll have really great models that are trained fairly, that are available to everyone. I'm not as worried, maybe, as some people are.

SPEAKER_00 38:51

Yeah, yeah, fair enough. Maybe before we go, last question, and then we can go. But are there any like advice based on your time and like reflection on the crypto space that you would give for people who are still in it? What are things that they really need to hear now? Or else, like, kind of crypto is awash, basically.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Yeah, no, I mean I've learned so much. Wow, like I've made so many mistakes, and I've had a lot of great also experiences that I would say were a success as well. So I would say that a lot of the people in crypto have this way of selling things in a way that are kind of like aspirational, and it's important to work with people who are grounded, that have a balance between aspiration and reality, and that they can actually accomplish the things that they say they're gonna do, and that you don't get conned by someone. I mean, there's been so many examples of ideas that sound so amazing to me that I was also bought into that idea. I might not have worked for that company, but I believed in that person. Like they made me believe in them only to be let down over and over. But there are also examples of people that kind of have ideas that were great, but they were grounded, and you could kind of like almost see that difference in who they are, right? So I would just say be careful about the people that you believe and try to kind of like really question everything. And if you can kind of do that, you can probably come to a place where you are not being led down a path that isn't like true or right, and that you're able to work on things that might actually have the ability to find success. You don't want to spend a year or two doing something that, like, for instance, let's just say like if I decided to go work for movement labs, there was a point in time when I first met him that I was like impressed by him a lot, but quickly before all this stuff happened, I kind of made a realization, oh, okay, I see what's going on here. And then imagine staying and kind of believing in that founder for like two years or something, right? That would really suck. So, I mean, that's just kind of an example of like, you know, try to do due diligence about the idea, product, person that you're working for, and work on things that either I would say have the ability to be real, true, valuable things at some point in time in the future, or even if you know the thing that you're not working on is ever gonna be worth anything, it's still really cool to do cool research and stuff like that. So you know, find the thing that you want to be working on, but don't put too much trust in some of these founders.

SPEAKER_00 41:31

Yeah, you heard it here. Don't trust those founders to find things that are more grounded in reality. Yeah, there are great people out there, like you know, but they're the exception, right? Yeah, yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks so much, David, for coming on and sharing your reflections. I think, yeah, it's a huge loss that you left the crypto space, but totally understandable and totally fair. You're anyways, I think, working on really cool things. And yeah, I'm sure I will see you soon again.

SPEAKER_01 41:58

Totally. I mean, I'm still in a bunch of my crypto group chats. I still I'm I'm still tapped into a lot of things happening, and who knows, I could dive back in some form or fashion as well. I think the cool thing about AI is like it touches everything, including crypto. So I think that it's not like one or the other. I can maybe do a little bit, which is fine.

SPEAKER_00 42:18

Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. If you like what I'm doing here, consider supporting the show on Patreon. Your contributions help me keep doing this work and dive deeper into the politics of decentralized technologies. I promise you absolutely zero financial returns, no airdrops, and your investment may go to zero. But you will get good content. Check out patreon.com slash the blockchain socialist to support the show.