From Army Green Beret to crypto CEO and a16z deal partner? It's not as unusual as you might think. Alex Pruden, now CEO of the Aleo Foundation, recognized a connection between terrorism, economic inequality, and the lack of secure digital identity while serving on three different battlefields. In this episode, he shares how his experiences led him from the military to the world of venture capital at a16z, and ultimately to zero-knowledge cryptography, exploring how this technology can help address some of the most fundamental but poorly understood human rights: privacy and digital identity.

In this episode, we dive into the origins and impact of social media with one of its OGs, Evan-Henshaw Plath, better known as Rabble.

Rabble is one of the original minds behind X, then known as Twitter. We explore his serendipitous journey from Odeo to Twitter, candidly address both the overwhelming net good and unintended consequences of social media, and weigh the impact of disinformation and societal division on democracy and participation. We also tackle the complexities of content moderation, privacy, and the challenges of fostering healthy online communities. This episode offers a nuanced perspective on the tech world, blending personal anecdotes with deep insights into the ever-evolving relationship between technology, society, and ethics.

Jon Wu is head of growth at Aztec, a privacy preserving Layer 2 for Ethereum that took home an impressive Series B last year, led by A16Z. As arguably the public face of Aztec for the past several years Jon speaks and writes some of the most consistently cogent content on everything from encryption and privacy to DeFi and finance to civil liberties and the future of open societies. He's never boring, and you'd never regret being 20 tweets into any X thread that he's written. Here, we compare crypto to casinos and what casinos do right versus what crypto does wrong, examine the multi-hundred year bet Apple made on trust, and understand cryptographic privacy as an insurance policy against volatile times when things don't "just work" as expected.