Latest / Crypto Altruists: Real-World Stories of Social & Environmental Impact with Web3 / Episode 255 - Separating Hype from Hope: A Pragmatic Take on AI, Crypto, and the Cost of Overpromising

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Episode 255 - Separating Hype from Hope: A Pragmatic Take on AI, Crypto, and the Cost of Overpromising · Crypto Altruists: Real-World Stories of Social & Environmental Impact with Web3

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: A few years ago, we were told the new technology was gonna change everything.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: We would bank the unbanked, topple corrupt institutions, create generational wealth, solve problems that have plagued humanity for centuries.
• 0:11
  SPEAKER_00: Some of that came true to a certain degree, and a lot of it didn't.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: And along the way, we lost a lot of people.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_00: I'm talking about crypto, but I could just as easily be talking about AI.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_00: Today I want to talk about what one can teach us from the other and how we can learn from the lessons of the past and truly build for future where tech is designed for the betterment of humanity and the world.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to CryptoAltrips, where we explore the intersections of Web3 and social good through the stories of impact-driven builders and offer actual insights to empower your journey into the world of blockchain for good.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: I'm your host, Drew Simon.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Now before we dive in, please remember that this is not financial or legal advice, and always do your own research on any of the projects or investment opportunities that we discuss.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome, welcome, and thanks so much for being here today.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: You may have noticed that the opening was different from a typical episode, and that's because we're taking a short break from our usual interview format to host a solo episode.
• 1:01
  unknown: Yay!
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: It's just you and me working through something I've been thinking a lot about lately, and I think a lot of people have, and it's something that I think has so much impact on the future of tech for good.
• 1:12
  SPEAKER_00: So I hope you like these types of episodes.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to do a mix of different formats.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I've gotten some feedback from folks that like these type of episodes, so I want to make sure I'm putting out content that works for everyone.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: So let me know what you think.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: If you hate it, let me know.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Message me, tell me you hate it.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: If you like it, message me, tell me you like it.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Either is great, I'm doing all this for you, and so I want to make sure that it's serving you.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: But anyways, here's where my head's at.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: Everywhere I look right now, there's AI.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's in every app I open, every product update, every pitch deck, every conversation.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: I was out at a store recently and saw an AI TV, and I was like, what the hell is an AI TV?
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like we're probably a couple months away from AI toasters.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: And I've started to notice something.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of people just aren't excited anymore.
• 1:51
  SPEAKER_00: They're tired, and some of them are even a little resentful, some a lot.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I get it.
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_00: When you're told that one technology is going to fix everything, every single problem humanity has ever faced, something in you starts to push back.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: Because that's not how the world works.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: That kind of promise comes from a black and white view of humanity that honestly feels pretty detached from reality.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the thing.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are genuinely incredible things happening with AI, real, useful, even life-changing applications.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: The problem is that they're getting drowned out.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_00: The signal's getting buried under the noise.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we've all seen this movie before.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: So today I want to draw a parallel.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: I want to talk about crypto's hype cycle, what it cost us, and what quietly emerged on the other side.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_00: And then I want to talk about how AI is running a similar playbook right now, and what we might do differently this time around.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: But before we dive in, I want to be clear about what this episode is and isn't.
• 2:39
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't me telling you AI is bad and we should all calm down.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: And it's not me telling you crypto was a scam.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_00: You know I don't believe that or else I wouldn't still be here.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: This is something more pragmatic.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's about managing hype in a way that's human-centered.
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's about recognizing the real harms and actually working to mitigate them.
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_00: And it's about protecting the genuinely good stuff so it has a chance to grow.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: So let's get into it.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: And this episode will be broken down into a few segments, with the first segment being Crypto's Hype Cycle, a cautionary tale.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: So let's rewind to Pete Crypto Hype.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you're around for it, you probably remember the energy.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_00: Banks were gonna die, everyone was gonna be financially free, dials were gonna reinvent how humans organize, NFTs were going to revolutionize ownership and put artists in control of their destiny.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_00: The entire world was going on-chain, and it was gonna happen fast, it was exhilarating.
• 3:28
  SPEAKER_00: But at the same time, the volume was deafening.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone had a token, everyone had a project that was gonna change the world.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_00: Your barber was giving you trading tips, there was this sense that if you weren't all in on absolutely everything, you're gonna miss the future.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: But underneath a lot of that noise was speculation.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_00: And worse, there were scams, rug pulls, pump and dumps, projects that existed for no other reason than to separate people from their money.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_00: And to be fair, those problems still very much exist today.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: There will always be issues like that, but it was seemingly a lot easier to separate people from their money back then.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the honest builders, the people genuinely trying to use this technology for something meaningful, often got lumped in with the grifters, and the signal got buried.
• 4:05
  SPEAKER_00: And here's the part that really matters to me.
• 4:07
  SPEAKER_00: People got hurt, some lost money, others just got exhausted by the chaos and walked away.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of them didn't just leave, they left angry, they developed a real lasting resentment towards the entire space.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_00: Crypto kind of became a punchline.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_00: We lost a lot of people, and once you lose people's trust like that, it is incredibly hard to win it back.
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_00: Now I want to be honest here, because I think this is where the story gets more interesting and more true.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of that messy experimentation was necessary.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_00: I know that might sound strange coming right after everything I just said, but it's true.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: The wild speculation, the thousands of projects that went nowhere, even a lot of the failures, that's how the technology got built and stress tested.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_00: The infrastructure we rely on now, and a lot of the rails that the useful applications run on today got funded and refined during the frenzy.
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_00: The same mania that burned people also capitalized the foundation that the good stuff now stands on.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_00: So I'm not here to tell you hype is purely the villain, uh, it's a lot more complicated than that.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_00: Hype is a phase.
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_00: It has real costs and it has real byproducts too.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: And some of these byproducts turned out to be valuable.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: So the question was never hype or no hype.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_00: The question was how do we get through that phase without losing people?
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_00: How do we get through it without torching the trust we need to actually scale the good?
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_00: Because we didn't do that well, and we paid for it.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_00: And for round two with AI, the implications and potential harms are much more profound.
• 5:22
  SPEAKER_00: And that leads me to segment two, the quiet consolidation where the real impact lives.
• 5:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, what happened after the noise died down?
• 5:30
  SPEAKER_00: This is the part I find quite hopeful, because once the hype faded, once a lot of the speculators moved on to the next shiny thing, something really exciting happened.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_00: The real use cases start to emerge, and the big twist was that they were often the boring ones, the quiet behind-the-scenes applications that nobody was really making viral threads about.
• 5:47
  SPEAKER_00: Here are a couple examples.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_00: Stablecoins is the first one that comes to mind, obviously.
• 5:50
  SPEAKER_00: I know you're probably sick of me talking about stable coins because, well, they're not glamorous and I talk about them a lot.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_00: Nobody's getting rich overnight on a dollar peg stablecoin.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: But the impact has been transformative, to say the least.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen the UNHCR partner with Stellar to send cash transfers to refugees instantaneously at a low cost transparently.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen remittances that let migrant workers send money home without losing up brutal chunks of fees, aid going directly to individuals in Afghanistan and Myanmar, bypassing centralized institutions under the control of authoritarian forces, and families in economies with collapsing currencies finally having a way to hold some things stable.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's not loud, but it's definitely changing lives.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: And stablecoins are growing into a massive force outside of the charitable sector as well, with$33 trillion in transaction volumes in 2025 alone, far outpacing the combined transactions of Visa and MasterCard at$25.5 trillion.
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Another great example is crypto philanthropy.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing millions of cryptocurrency flowing to nonprofits every year.
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_00: Back in 2021, this might have been mostly one-off donations from Wales or huge NFT projects that gave a percentage to nonprofits.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_00: But this has changed to more sustainable forms of giving.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_00: We're seeing on-chain donor-advise funds that anyone can set up to give on a regular basis, or staking in validator nodes that allow nonprofits to raise funds without giving up principal, or rise in smaller-scale donations to it to matching funds, giving power to donors who don't have a high net worth.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: It has opened the door for nonprofits to connect with a new generation of donors, which is huge considering the average donor in the US is about 65 years old.
• 7:12
  SPEAKER_00: And as the hype died down, crypto philanthropy has continued to grow, with one study finding that three-quarters of Forbes' top 100 charities now accept crypto donations, and thousands more of all sizes are getting set up on various platforms.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_00: And there are many more examples, whether it be tokenization or using crypto Rails for payments, but today I want to focus on AI.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_00: So the point that I'm trying to make here is that the flashiest promises, the ones that were going to overthrow the entire financial system by Tuesday, mostly faded.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_00: What stuck around, what actually started creating impact at scale was the quiet infrastructural, genuinely useful, and sometimes boring stuff.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_00: So let's move on to segment three now and talk about how AI risks running the same playbook.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_00: Because if you've been following along, you can probably already feel where this is going.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: Listen to the promises being made right now.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: AI is going to cure every disease and all poverty, fix education, solve climate change, make human labor thousands of times more productive or replace the need for it entirely.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: Every woe humanity has ever known solved.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sound familiar?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: It's the same absolute promise, the same idea that one technology is going to fix everything.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_00: And just like crypto, it's built on this oversimplified black and white view of the world that doesn't match the messy reality that most of us actually live in.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_00: And then there's the accelerationist push, the race to build as fast as humanly possible.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I want to be fair here because there's a real argument on that side, and I don't want to straw man it.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_00: The case goes something like this.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: This technology is coming no matter what, so the responsible actors had better build it first.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: If the thoughtful, safety-minded people slow down, they just hand the lead to those who don't care about safety at all.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_00: It's a serious argument, and I don't dismiss it.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_00: But the costs of moving this fast are also serious, and we need to name them.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_00: Powers concentrating in the hands of a few enormous tech companies.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: There's real environmental strain to all of our AI agent swarms, and maybe, most importantly, there's a public that increasingly feels like all this is being done to them, not with them.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a tale as old as time.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_00: And that backlash is already here.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_00: People are organizing against data center construction in their communities, there's a growing public disdain for AI that you can feel in the culture, a sense that they're being steamrolled, that nobody asked them, and that the future is being decided in rooms they'll never be in.
• 9:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that right there is the crypto resentment pattern repeating in real time.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_00: And some may say, well, it's not our job to make people feel good because we're building the technology that will solve all of their problems, which let's be real is just neocolonialism in a trench coat.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_00: But here's the question that framing ignores.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_00: What if it doesn't solve the problems?
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_00: Speaking in absolutes is dangerous.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_00: When you're certain you're building utopia, every harm along the way, whether social, environmental, or economic, gets waved off as necessary evil, a price worth paying.
• 9:40
  SPEAKER_00: But time and time again, we've seen humanity get things wrong.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_00: We've seen tech leaders confidently misjudge the economy, the market, and the future.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_00: Nothing is ever a sure thing.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: And if AI doesn't end up delivering the incredible impact so many are promising, the harms won't disappear with the hype, but they'll still be here, real and ours to deal with.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_00: By pushing AI for everything, as hard and as fast as possible, the accelerationist movement might actually be hurting AI's long-term future.
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Just like the crypto and NFT and DAO hype may have had inadvertent harms that ended up hurting crypto.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's the truth.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: If AI is ever going to truly thrive at scale, it needs human buy-in.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: You can't bulldoze your way to public trust, you can't force a technology down people's throats and then act surprised when they push back.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: Trust doesn't work that way and it never has.
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_00: So that leads me into segment four.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_00: A more responsible path and do no harm.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: So what here's the alternative and what does a more responsible path actually look like?
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I would like to take a look at the world of humanitarian and development work because there is something I think we can borrow from here.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: There's a principle that's absolutely foundational in that space.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: Do no harm.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: Before you intervene, you think about the unintended consequences.
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_00: You center the people who will be affected, not the intervention itself, and not your own excitement about it.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: What if funding dries up?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: What if it doesn't all work out as intended?
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_00: What if it fails completely?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: How will communities be impacted and how can we mitigate those potential harms?
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Imagine if we built AI with that posture, where the first question wasn't how fast can we ship this or how much can this disrupt, but who does this affect and how do we make sure we're not harming them in the process?
• 11:09
  SPEAKER_00: And this isn't just a nice idea coming from outside the industry.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Some of AI's own builders are starting to say similar things.
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_00: Just last week, in early June of 2026, Anthropic called for the creation of a system where governments and AI developers collectively decide when to slow down work on the technology, specifically to get ahead of the risks it might pose.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_00: They said it would be good for the world to have the option to temporarily pause AI work that may be dangerous.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_00: And they made a pretty striking comparison, likening it to the international regulation of nuclear weapons.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_00: I want to be precise about what this is, because this stuff gets fuzzy fast.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't one company unilaterally hitting the brakes.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's a call for a shared industry-wide mechanism, a kind of collective pause button so that no single lab feels like it has to choose between safety and falling behind.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_00: And this conversation isn't new.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Back in 2023, the Future of Life Institute put out an open letter calling for at least a six-month pause on training the most powerful AI systems, warning about things like extreme job automation and the loss of human control.
• 12:03
  SPEAKER_00: It gathered tens of thousands of signatures.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_00: The fact that this keeps resurfacing, and now it's coming from the inside of a Frontier AI lab, tells you that the tension is real and very much unresolved.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: But let me be clear about what I'm taking from this.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_00: This isn't about halting progress.
• 12:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's not about being anti-technology.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Because, yeah, again, why would I be doing this if I'm anti-technology?
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: It's about pacing it.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's about letting our society, our governance, our institutions, and honestly our human relationships keep up with what we're building.
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_00: Managing the hype responsibly isn't how you kill technology.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's how you protect its future.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_00: And that brings me to segment five: separating hype from hope.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: So let me try to bring this all together, because I don't want to leave you in the doom and gloom, that's not what this show is about.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: Here's the lesson crypto taught me applied to AI.
• 12:48
  SPEAKER_00: Just like crypto's real value only became clear once the noise cleared, I believe AI's genuine, durable impact is gonna come from the focused, human-centered, often unglamorous applications, not from the hype machine promises.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_00: The boring stuff is gonna win again, and that's a good thing.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the hopeful part is that good work is already happening.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_00: Let me point to a few examples.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_00: AI helping with diagnostics and clinics that don't have enough doctors, extending the reach of the few specialists they do have.
• 13:13
  SPEAKER_00: AI optimizing how humanitarian aid gets distributed so resources reach the people who need them fastest.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_00: AI accelerating climate research, fraud detection that protects charitable funds from being siphoned off, language tools that give marginalized communities access to information and services they were locked out of before.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, even AI agents that could one day route and optimize charitable giving in real time.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_00: None of that necessarily makes for a vile headline, although a lot of it is very exciting, and none of it promises to fix everything.
• 13:40
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly why I trust it more.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_00: Because here's how I've come to think about it.
• 13:44
  SPEAKER_00: Hope is not the absence of hype.
• 13:46
  SPEAKER_00: Hope is what's left when you strip the hype away and focus on people.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's what becomes possible when we stop trying to sell a revolution and start trying to actually help someone.
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what's been on my mind.
• 13:57
  SPEAKER_00: At crypto ultras I've had a front row seat to something kind of remarkable.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: I've watched the best of a hype technology emerge from the wreckage of its own overpromising.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: I've seen crypto go from this will fix everything to a quieter, humbler, and honestly far more impactful reality.
• 14:10
  SPEAKER_00: The builders I get to talk to on the show are proof of that.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: And that's exactly why I'm optimistic about AI, not the hype version, the real version.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_00: I think AI can follow the same arc, from noise to genuine impact, but only if we learn crypto's lesson.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: Only if we refuse to lose people along the way, only if we build with humility, center the humans, and hold on to do no harm, even when everyone around us is yelling at us to go as fast as possible.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: AI has incredible use cases.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Let's celebrate those, because they on their own are enough.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: Being an amazing research aide is enough.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Helping doctors diagnose illnesses is enough.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Helping charities more efficiently allocate capital is enough.
• 14:47
  SPEAKER_00: It doesn't need to be everything for everyone, it needs to be something for someone.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: So here's what I'll leave you with.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Stay curious, but stay critical.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Demand technology that's human-centered and developed responsibly, and keep your eyes on the quiet builders doing real good, not the loudest voices making the biggest promises.
• 15:03
  SPEAKER_00: Because if crypto taught us anything, it's that the people changing the world are rarely the ones shouting about it.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: And that wraps up today's episode of Crypto Altruist.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks so much for tuning in.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_00: I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: If you're inspired to explore more stories of the intersection of Web3 and Social Impact, be sure to visit us at cryptoaltruist.com for articles, resources, and more.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: And if you've loved what you heard, it would mean the world if you could rate review and subscribe to the podcast.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: Your support is huge in helping us reach more listeners like you and keeping the platform going strong.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks again for joining us, and I look forward to having you back for the next episode.
• 15:35
  SPEAKER_00: Until then, let's keep showing the world the good of crypto.