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Curiosity First. Signal Over Noise.
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Episode 15
Building with Agents Part 2 w/ Gerrit Hall & Dan Pollmann
Are we building useful developer tools—or just feeding an addiction?In the second episode of our AI tools series, Rex, Dan, and Garrett dig into the internal systems they've built around Claude Code: markdown session logs, pre-commit hooks, context management strategies, and notification hubs. Dan shares war stories from running AI on helicopters inspecting power lines (including the time an agent changed his root password without asking). Garrett walks through his approach to scaling ten concurrent projects. And Rex asks the uncomfortable question: is all this meta-tooling actually helping, or are we just tinkering because it feels productive?The conversation moves to local LLMs—Qwen, DeepSeek, Mistral—and whether a $15-20k home lab makes sense when Claude iterates faster than anyone can keep up. The hosts wrestle with context window limits, the ROI of refactoring, and what it means that these tools are specifically designed to make you feel like you're accomplishing more than you are.
Episode 14
Building with Agents w/ Gerrit Hall & Taylor Savage
Rex digs into how AI coding agents are changing the way real teams build software. Taylor Savage and Gerrit Hall share the workflows, tools, and guardrails that actually work: from custom IDEs and inbox-driven agents to multi-pass code reviews, collaboration at “agent speed,” testing that matters, and keeping data safe. A grounded look at what to automate, what to supervise, and how to ship faster without losing the plot.
Episode 13
A Conversation with a Crypto-Skeptic w/ Taylor Savage
Rex brings on his longtime friend Taylor Savage — a lifelong “techie” turned software engineer and product manager — for a candid, outside-the-crypto-bubble conversation about what crypto actually looks like from the broader tech world. From an early Bitcoin birthday gift (and an early sale…) to the last decade of fraud “speed-runs,” they debate irreversibility, regulation, institutional adoption, and whether crypto’s real promise is narrow-but-real or mostly drowned out by hype and extraction.
Episode 12
Reject Nihilism, Build Solutions w/ Sam McCulloch (USD.AI)
Rex sits down with Sam McCulloch (Growth Lead at USD.ai, formerly Leviathan News and Flywheel DeFi) to talk about what crypto’s been optimizing for—and what it should optimize for next. Sam argues the last couple of cycles rewarded extractive “attention finance” (meme coins, short-horizon speculation), and that the industry needs to reclaim a more constructive narrative: build real products, connect to real-world balance sheets, and make the rails useful outside of crypto itself. In the back half, they go deep on USD.ai’s thesis: bringing DeFi-style, programmatic lending to GPU infrastructure. Sam walks through how tokenized “title” to GPUs can stay productive inside data centers while changing hands—using familiar commercial-law concepts like warehousing and documents of title—so liquidations look more like transferring ownership than physically moving hardware.
Episode 11
A Masterclass in Based Rollups w/ Jason Vranek (Fabric)
Based rollups have been floating around Ethereum discourse for a couple years now, but the concept remains confusing even to people who understand rollups generally. The pitch sounds almost contradictory: use Ethereum's decentralized validator set to sequence rollups, but somehow still get the fast, smooth UX of centralized sequencers like Base or Arbitrum.Jason Vranek works on Fabric, building the infrastructure to make based rollups actually work. In this episode, he walks through the architecture piece by piece: what "based sequencing" actually means, why the original "total anarchy" designs had terrible UX, and how pre-confirmations and gateways solve that without re-centralizing everything.The conversation gets into the PBS (proposer-builder separation) analogy—just as builders abstract away MEV sophistication from validators, gateways can abstract away pre-confirmation complexity. Jason explains the transaction flow from user to blob, how proposer commitments enable coordination without requiring validators to become sophisticated, and why the real unlock isn't necessarily replacing centralized rollups, but enabling L1-to-L2 composability that doesn't exist today.They also discuss where things actually stand: Tycho is live on mainnet with a rotating sequencer set, the Fusaka hard fork just shipped a critical EIP for deterministic lookahead, Fabric is deploying a universal registry contract for proposer collateral, and real-time proving has gone from "years away" to "usable building block." Plus: why the end state probably isn't "all rollups become based," but rather a spectrum of designs that pick their tradeoffs deliberately.
Episode 10
Crypto Tools for Real People w/ Russell Castagnaro & Gardner Loulan (My Unicorn Account)
Crypto has a user experience problem—and it's not just about complexity. Every phishing link, every airdropped scam token, every "is this email real?" moment is friction that keeps normal people out. Meanwhile, the industry keeps iterating on DeFi protocols while the debit card market sits there, largely untouched.Russell Castagnaro and Gardner are building Unicorn, a B2B2C platform that lets brands create complete Web3 experiences—onboarding, wallets, approved dApps—without exposing users to the chaos of the open blockchain. Think of it like the difference between AOL's curated internet and the raw Netscape browser: same underlying technology, radically different experience.In this conversation, Rex, Russell, and Gardner talk through what's actually broken about crypto UX (hint: it's not the wallet UI), why most brand NFT drops failed, and what kinds of companies are starting to get it right. They make the case that the real opportunity isn't convincing Delta to put their loyalty program on-chain—it's giving the next wave of competitors the tools to outflank them.The conversation also gets into identity, provenance, and why "sign in with Ethereum" might be the actual killer app. Plus: the role of stablecoins, why building in a bear market has its advantages, and what happens when AI agents need to transact.
Episode 9
Building a DeFi-Native Chain w/ Justin Havins (Katana)
What does it actually mean to build a chain around DeFi—not just host DeFi apps, but bake decentralized finance into the architecture itself?Justin Havins spent 13 years in traditional banking before joining Polygon's DeFi team, and now he's helping lead Katana, a new L2 that's trying something different: sharing chain revenue directly with users who put their assets to work in DeFi protocols.In this conversation, Rex and Justin get into the mechanics of Katana's "DeFi flywheel"—vault bridge yields, chain-owned liquidity, VE tokenomics that span the whole chain—and what they learned from earlier experiments like Canto and Blast. They also talk honestly about where DeFi innovation has stalled since 2022, why regulatory uncertainty may have pushed us toward memecoins, and what it might take to get real momentum back.The second half gets more speculative: prediction markets, consumer apps, the role of abstraction in onboarding, and whether the intersection of AI and crypto is mostly hype or genuinely important. Justin walks through the risk stack of using DeFi on an L2 with vault bridge exposure, and they close with a look at what Katana is prioritizing in its grants program.
Episode 8
Value Accrual and Market Reality in DeFi w/ Adrian (Steakhouse Financial)
Stakehouse cofounder Adrian Steakhouse joins Rex to unpack what “curators” actually do: turning DeFi’s powerful—but nerd-only—primitives into infrastructure that feels like a normal financial product, including the behind-the-scenes rails powering stablecoin yield inside apps like Coinbase. From there, they get honest about why innovation feels slower post-2021, where the real open problems still are (insurance, first-loss capital, and credit), and why most crypto tokens fail to hold long-term value—while a handful (like Aave and Sky) look more “investable” because they embed clearer ownership or governance rights.They close with a grounded look at stablecoin profit pools, lessons from free banking history, why “depegs” are often misunderstood, and how “yield coins” (USDAI, Daylight, Ethena) could become a major new venue for capital formation—and risk. Reference Material: Wildcat Banking - https://x.com/nic_carter/status/1950984660290613655 Fractional vs Full Reserve Business Models in Stablecoins - https://kitchen.steakhouse.financial/p/the-color-of-money Token Launches - https://kitchen.steakhouse.financial/p/token-launches-in-the-modern-era Stablecoins and Cryptodollars Hierarchy of Money - https://kitchen.steakhouse.financial/p/cryptodollars-and-the-hierarchy-of SNB Balance Sheet - https://dune.com/steakhouse/snb SNB Philosophy on Bitcoin and Stablecoins - https://x.com/adcv_/status/1915754341870272603
Episode 7
What Happened to the Modular Blockchain Thesis? w/ Dino (Fluent)
Rex sits down with Dino, co-founder of Fluent, to ask a simple but loaded question: what actually happened to the modular / “VM meta” everyone was so excited about? They trace how the narrative around modular blockchains went from red-hot to ice-cold, what still matters underneath the hype cycle, and why today’s real bottleneck isn’t infra anymore but product taste, startup execution, and culture. Along the way they talk about “price is the product,” the blurring line between good and bad actors, and why it’s so hard to attract serious builders who treat blockchains as boring backend tools rather than casinos. Dino also shares how Fluent and its Blended Builders Club are trying to cultivate “crypto Navy SEALs” and ship apps that normal people actually want to use, from creator markets to prediction platforms and new kinds of payments.
Episode 6
ZK, TEEs and Verifiable Compute w/ Vanishree Rao (Fermah)
Rex talks with cryptographer Vanishree Rao, founder of Fermah, about what verifiable compute actually unlocks—and why the real story isn’t “ZK eats the world” just yet. They get into ZK vs trusted execution environments (TEEs), how oracles really fail in practice, why restaking got ahead of real demand, and what a universal proof market like Fermah is doing differently. It’s a grounded look at the compute layer under rollups, oracles, and AI agents—and where the next wave of applications might actually come from.
Episode 5
Upgrading EVM Application Security w/ Bobafetador (Drosera)
Drosera just shipped to Ethereum mainnet after two years of grinding weekends, audits, and architecture debates—and in this episode we unpack what they’ve actually built and why it matters. Boba, co-founder of Drosera, joins Rex to explain how “traps” let smart contracts watch on-chain conditions and automatically react, turning Ethereum into a far more expressive, always-on system without bolting everything onto a centralized backend. They dig into Drosera’s “L1.5 bandwidth layer” design, how shadow forks and ZK proofs make continuous off-chain execution verifiable on Ethereum, and why decentralization isn’t just about more nodes—it’s about who can realistically run them. The conversation closes with a candid post-mortem on restaking: what the original vision got right, how the incentives went sideways, and why ZK plus lean, grassroots communities may be a healthier path forward than hype-driven “crypto-economic security.”
Episode 4
Why Are Vibes So Bad This Cycle w/ Fiddy
Rex sits down with Fiddy — DeFi “trench warrior,” Curve and Lido contributor — to ask a simple but uncomfortable question: why do the vibes feel so bad this cycle? They trace the arc from the 2020 DeFi summer through Do Kwon, FTX, and the meme-coin era, and talk about what happens when years of extraction, broken experiments, and aggressive speculation finally catch up with a still-nascent ecosystem. Along the way, they dig into how Twitter’s algorithm shift and the rise of easy online gambling have siphoned energy away from “builder crypto” toward pure conflict and get-rich-quick schemes. From there, the conversation zooms out: institutions like Stripe and major banks are quietly building on crypto rails, often in ways that don’t yet feed value back to DeFi. Is that net-bullish, or does it threaten the credibly neutral, censorship-resistant core that drew so many to Ethereum in the first place? Fiddy shares his view on Ethereum as an “infinite garden,” the evolving role of the Ethereum Foundation, and why, despite ugly vibes and broken governance experiments, he’s still deeply optimistic about the long-term cultural and technical trajectory of the space.