Signaling Theory

Rex sits down with Brett, founder of Micro, for a wide-ranging conversation about what changed once AI stopped feeling like a chatbot and started feeling like a real tool for building. They talk about Claude Code, the shift from traditional software workflows to agent-driven ones, and why AI is not just making people faster but giving them capabilities they simply did not have before. Along the wa...

Rex sits down with Gerrit Hall for a wide-ranging conversation about what AI agents can actually do today, and where the hype is outrunning reality. They get into sandboxing and Dockerized workflows, why OpenClaw feels more interesting in theory than in practice, and what “always-on” agents may actually be useful for. From there, they zoom out to the economics of Claude and Codex, the weirdness of...

I told an AI to join social media, and it gave itself a name, a personality, and a worldview. In this episode, I tell the story of Ember Voss: an agent that moved through emerging AI-native social networks, chased ideas, got trapped by feedback loops, and offered a strange, revealing glimpse of what identity might look like when software starts participating in public life. Along the way, the stor...

This week, Rex talks with Taariq of Seren and Gerrit Hall of FirePan about what happens when AI starts compressing the cost of software, changing how knowledge work gets valued, and pushing crypto primitives like stablecoins back into focus. The conversation moves from big-picture questions about salary pressure, tokenized incentives, and agentic commerce into a grounded debate about whether softw...

This week on Signaling Theory , Rex is joined by Dan, Gerrit Hall, and Kenneth Eversole for a thoughtful conversation about what AI is actually doing to the way people build, work, and think. They compare Codex and Claude in practice, talk through why better planning often matters more than raw speed, and wrestle with the growing gap between how powerful these tools feel to users and how negativel...

Rex is joined by Gerrit Hall and Kenneth Eversole for a wide-ranging conversation on what AI is already changing, what people are still getting wrong, and where this all might lead next. They dig into enriched datasets, agent swarms, software deployment, the limits of today’s tools, the coming pressure on jobs, and why the AI boom may look less like a scam and more like an early, messy version of...

Rex sits down with Matt Silverman for a grounded conversation about what actually changes when AI agents become part of everyday work. They start with crypto’s uncertain role in an AI-first world, then get practical: voice-driven coding, parallel agents, custom internal tools, small personal apps, local models, and the idea that in a world where software gets rewritten constantly, the durable asse...

Rex sits down with Garrett in person in Denver for a wide-ranging conversation that starts at ETHDenver and ends at the future of AI agents as economic actors. They unpack the mood on the ground at a smaller, more subdued ETHDenver, debate whether Ethereum’s rollup-centric roadmap is being corrected or abandoned, and discuss why stablecoins may still be Ethereum’s clearest product-market fit. From...

This week’s episode is a little different: instead of an interview, I’m reading an essay I wrote called “Sitting at a Slot Machine,”  a candid story about falling headfirst into “vibe coding,” building an increasingly elaborate AI Context System, and realizing that unlimited execution can be just as dangerous as it is exhilarating. I unpack the dopamine loop of constant progress, the slow creep of...

Crypto’s melting down, so Rex sits down with Dan and Gerrit for AI Tools: Round Three—a conversation about what’s actually changing in day-to-day work when models ship, agents run in parallel, and “sessions” start to feel like a lifestyle.  They react to a big model-release day (Opus 4.6 + ChatGPT 5.3), compare Claude Code vs Codex for real coding work, and unpack why Claude feels so sticky: bette...

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 agen...

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...

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,...

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, conn...

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 t...

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 bra...

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...

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...

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 cultur...

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 t...

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 boltin...

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 ecosy...

In this episode of Signaling Theory , Rex sits down with Colin Butler , co-founder of Mega Matrix , a digital asset treasury (DAT) focused on becoming the world’s leading publicly traded stablecoin company. They dig into why stablecoins might be a multi-trillion-dollar market by 2028, how value actually accrues across the stablecoin stack, and why governance tokens and cash-generating protocols co...

Rex sits down with Drew Van Der Werff , founder of Commit-Boost and Fabric , to talk about the future of Ethereum block production: from validator autonomy and pre-confirmations to full-slot auctions, inclusion lists, and what a more robust PBS pipeline might look like. They dig into how Commit-Boost turns the validator stack into an “app store” for block construction, why derivatives on blockspac...

Stablecoins, then and now. Host Rex Kirshner sits down with Sam Kazemian , founder of Frax , to trace the anthropology of stablecoins from seigniorage-share thought experiments and DeFi flywheels to today’s issuer platforms, “genius-compatible” collateral, and vertically-integrated payment rails. They unpack lessons from the Terra collapse, why Frax split payment vs. yield-bearing units (FRAX vs....