In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Ramani Ramachandran, Founder & CEO of Router Labs, talks about cross-chain communication issues, the future of crypto, and how developers hold the keys to crypto mass adoption.
About Ram Ramachandran
Ramani Ramachandran (Ram) is the Founder and CEO of Router Labs, which runs Router Protocol, a cross-chain infrastructure project, and Dfyn, a cross-chain AMM. Ram has been in crypto since 2014. Before Crypto, Ram was in the financial services industry and spent time across various functions, including product management, research, fundraising, and investments across the US, Europe, and Asia.
Ram Ramachandran gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- What problems does Router Protocol help solve?
- Addressing cross-chain communication issues, including security, scalability, and decentralization
- Creating a shared security model in which bridges are secured by the blockchain validators
- How does Router differ from its competitors?
- Mahadev initiative – equipping developers with true-blue cross-chain dApp building capabilities
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing, as always, still coming in hot from Mexico. The second last pod that will be recorded in beautiful Mexico before we head home to Toronto, which hopefully will be a little bit sunnier and not as gloomy and not as gray. But that is not why we’re here today. We are here because we have an incredible guest on the show. Ramani Ramachandran, the founder and CEO of Router Labs, which also runs Router Protocol, a crosschain infrastructure project, and Dfyn a crosschain AMM. Ram has been in Crypto since 2014. That is a hot minute ago. Prior to Crypto, Ram was in the financial services industry and spent time across various functions, including product management, research, fundraising, and investments across the US, Europe, and Asia. Been a hot minute we finally got him on Ram welcome to the show, my friend.
Ramani Ramachandran
Thank you, Matt. Pleasure to be on the show with you. Thank you for having me.
Matt Zahab
Pumped to have you on. You’re chillin’ in Dubai right now, right?
Ramani Ramachandran
Yes.
Matt Zahab
It’s crazy. The Crypto Hub of the world. It seems like every second or third guest I have is chilling in Dubai. It’s crazy. I haven’t been since 2021, dying to go back. Is it still a big hub, still tons of events, still the Crypto buzz? It’s all there.
Ramani Ramachandran
Yeah, there’s a lot of energy, there’s a lot of activity. And then, I guess, especially given the regulatory clamped out of the bigger geographies, USA, China, Europe, India I think one of the talent is congregating in Dubai. So the sort of energy and way.
Matt Zahab
Just like a nice central hub. You got to love that. So you got into Crypto in 2014. I always love hearing my guests sort of Crypto inception stories. Was there a particular moment or aha, moment or story from a friend or coworker that got you onto it? How did you get into Crypto way back in the day? Heck, almost ten years ago in 2014. What was your inception story?
Ramani Ramachandran
Yeah, it’s a great story. I was building a power plant in Myanmar, all places. It was a 600 megawatt power plant, outside the angle in my previous life as an innocent banker, investor, whatever bucket that I broadly fell in. And a 600-megawatt power plant needed a billion dollars investment. And you do these things. There’s a lot of operational stuff, there’s a lot of financing stuff, as with any large project. And one of the investors I was speaking to was a Chinese guy who said, listen, I mean, I can give you 50, 60 million in investment. I really like this, but I’ll pay you in Bitcoin. A few years ago in London, good friend of mine, he had his laptop set up, and this was 2009, 2010. He was literally mining Bitcoins in his laptop. And he would tell me, listen, come over. I’m going to set up something on your laptop. It’s probably nothing, but just let me do it, and then maybe if this becomes something, you’ll thank me.
Matt Zahab
This is 209? Yeah. Jesus.
Ramani Ramachandran
The sad part is, I never took him up on the offer to install this Bitcoin mining thing on my MacBook whatever back then. But in 2014, the Chinese investor mentioned, oh, my god, what are this Bitcoin thing before? Let me look up, and obviously so that’s how I got a Bitcoin. And yeah, that’s also the first remote story with Bitcoin not entering at the right time.
Matt Zahab
That’s crazy. And what about 2014? What about when you actually got in the space?
Ramani Ramachandran
Yeah, again. Ah, you have two mindsets, so you have a trader, builder mindset and trader mindset. And I was sort of, I guess, more of the builder and less a trader. And just when I sort of looking at started looking it up, this thing called Mt Gox happened. A large amount of people lost a ton of money, and I sort of lost interest, to be honest, right. But again, a couple of years later, when I was trying to make markets for Pre IPA Securities, unlisted shares in Airbnb, Uber, etc, I had a fair bit of success placing these large blocks with investors in Singapore and India. And that part of the world, right? Again, there’s a beam about it. When you built the product, and instead of trying to convince somebody to buy 5 10 million worth of Uber shares or Airbnb shares before they list it, why did I set up a platform that would tokenize these things, right? So that’s when I sort of started digging into Bitcoin, found a couple of friends who were developers and actually built a system on Bitcoin, not Ethereum, right, on Bitcoin where folks could come in and offer up and basically make a market for unlisted IPO shares and sort of list them as tokens worth $10 or $5, very small amounts. And that did very well for a couple of weeks. But then my friend who’s a lawyer at Cooley, he called me and said, listen, if you don’t shut it down, you’re going to be arrested, and you’ll probably never enter the US again. Because obviously to solicit interest in any sort of US registered security, you need a veritable alphabet soup of licenses, right? CD-7, CD-63, Finra registration and all that crap. And then this is one place where Uber Travis’s act first and then apologize later. That probably doesn’t work with the SEC as if I think of that’s the big loop, right? I heard about it in 2010. I came in 2014 and then built something already in 2015 16 and since then we’ll be building and iterating and so on and so forth.
Matt Zahab
And fast forward to present day, you and the team are buzzing and continue to build incredible things at Router and of all things though, why address cross chain communication? Like, obviously you and the team are incredibly talented. You guys could have dove in to a multitude of different verticals within the Cryptospace and you decided to jump into that. And more specifically these issues including security, scalability and decentralization. Why address cross chain communication over everything else in the space?
Ramani Ramachandran
Right. I wish my CTO was here. My city of Shabbat is actually I think it’s one of the sharpest brains in the business. In fact, the whole team was actually punches way about Swede in terms of a level of resource. So back in 2018 we’re having a conversation and it’s Shubham and Venkatesh was actually the chief blockchain architect at Router right now. Back then he was building Polygon with JD and we were all in the same co working space in Bangalore back then. And then Shubham was asking Venki how do we get Bitcoin and Ethereum to talk to each other? And I was like what the hell he’s talking about? Why should Bitcoin and Ethereum talk to each other? Right? And then as the discussion progressed, I realized that all these Blockchains are like operating systems. So way back in 2001, 2002, up till I guess both of us sort of remember the time you had Linux, you had Solaris, you had Microsoft, you had all these areas operating systems and let’s say you got a Word document that somebody sent you from Microsoft Windows to your Apple laptop, right? It’s a nightmare trying to open it up. The formatting will be messed up, you recall somebody to fix it for you. And it’s a lot of issues with just software, the user experience. Being very segregated, depending on what platform you were in right? And you had the same issue as a developer, too. As a developer you had to actually install your software on Linux separately, on your map server for Linux, your map server for Windows. So depending on the operating system, you had a different experience. The developer experience is fragmented and the user experience is also fragmented. And you have the same thing in Web3 today, right? As a developer, you basically develop for Polygon or Aptos or Solana or Avalanche or Arbitrum or what have you as an end user again, you’re logged into one platform, right. You can’t I mean, although and then each of these platforms sort of try and maximize one part of the trial of scalability, security and decentralization. And you can’t really sort of say that, you know what, I want the scalability of the Solana and I want the decentralization of Ethereum, and I want something the third variable or something else. You don’t really have the ability to pick and choose best in breed characteristics and mix and match venue. Now in Web2, what happened was you had two things happening. One was basically the cloud, right? So Google came in and dropped google Docs. So you have Google Docs. I don’t remember the last time I opened up Microsoft PowerPoint. It’s all Google Slides and Google Docs and Google Sheets, right? Yeah. And Google Sheet. Exactly. And the Google Sheet is a Google Sheet, whether it’s a Windows or a MacBook or Android or whatever, right. And from a developer perspective, you’re basically developing software for AWS. You just have the right setup and then boom, you build once deploy anywhere. That’s a paradigm, right. So in Web2, the standardization of the unification of both the developer experience and the end user experience happen, and it’s only natural that Web3 is going to have the same thing. You don’t need to let the end user or the developer know the complexity of what’s underlying under the hood. And a car is a car. You drive in a stick shift, you don’t have a clutch in the gear and all that. You just put it on drive and you run, right? The other analogy I love using is expedia.com or priceline.com. Say you want to go from Mexico to, let’s say Dubai, you just go log in there and you say, you know what, I want to go in this state, I want a business class seat and then boom, that’s it, right? Whereas the Web3 analogy of that experience would be you would first have to sort of solve for gas at the Mexico airport and then you have to sort of solve for gas at Frankfurt, right?
Matt Zahab
Well said.
Ramani Ramachandran
So the gate fee at Frankfurt or that you need to pay, right? That’s why you’re flying. You get a message saying, you know what, this is too much. Do you want to speed up? It’s just a nightmare. Every step, it’s not atomic. Every step is very linear and you can’t really do much about it from a planning. So I think that is going to happen. Everything that you take for granted in Web2 from a user experience perspective has to happen in Web3, right? And then granted that what’s happening now is all these chains. There are these cities, you have Polygon, all these guys have raised gazillions of dollars, right? 500, 600 billion treasuries, and they’re going to go away anytime soon. They’ve all built these sort of wall cities where they want to aggregate the maximum amount of LTV and users and all Arbitrum, as you probably attacking this now, right? This is crazy, right? There are a lot of LTV. They go to attract developers and users and all that. So you have a fragmentation of users and developers across these chains and therefore cross chain is a natural crushing communication is essential for the process of standardization of experiences or users and developers. And that can only happen if there’s messaging and communication.
Matt Zahab
That’s such I love how you distilled that down and gave the flying plane analogy going from place X to place Y. That’s absolute gold. So interesting. I feel like that’s one of the most underrated skills in Crypto to have is explaining incredibly complex topics and distilling it into bite sized Web2 analogies that people can understand. You know what I mean?
Ramani Ramachandran
Right. No, you’re right. I think we get lost in the weeds at all the technology, but the 95% or 90% of what world, they just need simple explanations on why they should use Web3.
Matt Zahab
Yeah. So there are a bunch of companies in the space right now, and incredible organizations that are trying to address the cross chain communication issues like we talked about, more specifically, security, scalability and decentralization. These sort of three pillars of the triangle that you discussed. But how does Router differentiate from the other projects in the space?
Ramani Ramachandran
Absolutely great question. Right, so I think a couple of things. One is Router was started way back in Q3 or Q4 2020, and we actually had a working cross chain transaction capability in Q1 of 2021, right. And then super excited. But we sort of went through what we had and we realized that there were six or seven key security issues that we sort of started sadly and for good or for bad, every single one of them played out over the course of the next 12 to 18 months in various hacks, the Anyswap hack, the Ronin hack, the Wormhole hack. So that’s one reason why we didn’t sort of go aggressively build TVL, started taking program and so on and so forth. So what we’ve been doing is continuing on that path of just super focus on security. We’ve actually built a chain that leverages the tenderman Consensus on Cosmos, right? So if you look at the overall space, there are a few different players. And we decided to build our own chain on Cosmos. And the reason we did that is because we also wanted to introduce the element of composability that building a chain would give us, right? I mean, you have a lot of competitors that are basically very good for just the case of token transfer. They don’t address the generic case of messaging. So you have a very large name that’s very good at token transfer. There are a bunch of them. But if you want to look at generic crosschain messaging, then you want to layer on composability there. I think that’s our differentiator, right? We have a full fledged middleware architecture where there is cross chain statefulness. You can build a bunch of Dapps that can take advantage of the statefulness across chains. For instance, you want to build cross chain swapping engine and you want to layer on cross chain limit orders. So let’s say that you have a condition where you know what, I want to track what’s I’m on Ethereum, I ant to track the price of Arbitrum on Solana or a Polygon. And I want to sort of transfer and buy Arbitrums on Polygon the moment the price goes above 1.5 or sell.
Matt Zahab
Interesting.
Ramani Ramachandran
Or yield farm. So I have a ton of capital tied up on a farm on Ethereum, but I want to track what’s happening on another farm that I like on Polygon. And the moment the yields there go beyond a certain level, I will move all my fronts from Ethereum to Polygon. So those are basically use cases that require true cross chain smart contracting. So smart computing, smart contracts, that’s what they do, but on a specific chain. So with how to chain, what we’re enabling is a cross chain statefulness smart contract computing platform that sort of spans chains and sort of builds state tools across chains. Now, one important thing is not every use case requires this middleware capability. There are some chains where you just want to say, you know what, I just want to get a token across from chain A to chain B. For that, you don’t need the middleware functionality. So we have the Omni chain framework for developers and Dapps that require this sort of complicated cross chain smart contract communication, composability and all that. And we have a framework called Crosstalk that just basic. The middleware functionality is sort of kept to a site and we just are able to talk in a secure seamless fashion between chains, they’re sending tokens across, setting NFTs across, and so on and so forth. So the idea behind Router again, is to understand that Prussian communication is important, understand that various Dapps and various developers have various different levels of needs. Some need just bring token transfers, some need far more complicated use cases, and therefore taking that into account provide a highly customizable composable solution that sort of addresses the full spectrum of crushing needs. So that’s, I think, a summary of what our vision is.
Matt Zahab
Wow, you threw a lot at me there. Let’s keep buzzing on the developer topic for a while here. Now, one of the most difficult parts about Crypto, when you have founded a company and you want to scale it’s attracting developers because there’s so many incredible companies where developers can go to. You guys launched the Mahadev Institute, where you equip developers with true blue cross chain Dapp building capabilities, a series of workshops, hackathons seminars, partnering with universities, large protocols, Dapps around the world. Talk to me a little bit more about the Mahadav Institute and why this has been so paramount to your success.
Ramani Ramachandran
Absolutely. I think this is something that the growth team. Have going habit in tongues. And so Mahadev actually is in India that in the Hindu religious and the three gods is Brahma the creator, Vishnu the manager of the preserve status quo and Shiva the destroyer. This is cycle. I know if you heard of the Holy Trinity, I mean I like the Holy Trinity, art of the Christianity, but a very similar concept, right. So Shiva is also known as Mahadev or the great God, right? We had a part of the word dev and Mahadev and so it’s the joke is that Shiva stays upon night and these are night owl and all devs are night owls and there’s a we have a ton of means going around. So I guess that was the Genesis of the word Mahadev and it’s throwing out there because the key though is ultimately it’s all about adoption and you need to sort of make it easy for developers to find you, build on top of you. So to that end, we have this whole Mahadev effort, Mahadev program. We also have to add to that we’re going to announce a grants program. We’re also going to announce an ecosystem fund with participation from a bunch of our existing investors as well as new investors, ecosystem partners. The idea is to basically make it very easy for developers to come build crosschain applications. And to that end we have in fact even the way we work, we work out of a couple of adjacent villas in Dubai and a lot of the devs sort of live and work here and they keep rotating in and out from wherever they are. So it’s a distributed team. So we have folks in Bangalore, New Delhi, Singapore, Hong Kong, Portugal, but a good chunk of them are between India and Dubai and this hacker house that we run sort of we have our own developers but we also host developers that are passing through Dubai, for instance. They come and crash with us and sort of we survive. So, yeah, so there’s a lot of the ideas to sort of build the collegial. Web3 is changing the way we work and it’s not Web2 very strong affiliations, top down management. Web3 is all very fluid interchange of ideas in a seamless fashion. It’s not command and control and that sort of seeps through to the way people live and work. And this is the whole digital nomad concept, right? So why we are geographically, primarily in Asia, what we want to do is sort of make sure that we extend this concept by partnering with other similar projects that have hacker houses across the world, in Tokyo and Lisbon and so on and so forth. So I think that’s also part of the roadmap for the Mahadev Institute.
Matt Zahab
Ram I absolutely love that the name too. It’s just like whenever you can tie some innuendo or hidden message into the name, it’s absolutely world class and I freaking love that. Ram we got to take a quick break, give a huge shout out to our sponsor. The show that is PrimeXBT. PrimeXBT and Cryptonews have been partners for a long time. We absolutely love the team as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. Doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Cryptonews Podcast. After making your first deposit 50%, 50% of that first deposit will be credited to your account as a bonus that can be used as additional collateral to open positions. The promo code is CRYPTONEWS50. That’s CRYPTONEWS50. All one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account and now back to the show with Ram. Ram when I asked about how Router differs from its competitors, I love the parts and the use case. In regards to sort of the limit orders and the crosschain communication, how you can pull from sort of one pool to the other. I know you guys have a shitload of other use cases as well. I know we have tons of listeners who are big NFT fans. I’d love if you could get into some of these other use cases like the crosschain NFTs, crosschain Governance, crosschain Stablecoins, Oracles Marketplaces. The key commonality and theme is the word crosschain. But I’d love if in walking through a couple of these initiatives and use cases besides just sort of liquidity pools and limit orders.
Ramani Ramachandran
No, absolutely. I think just taking a step back, I think to complete the question how it differ? Obviously I spoke about the infra level flexibility where you can either build stateful apps that sort of take advantage of the middleware or you could build stateless apps that just won’t secure Prussian messaging. But I think there’s a couple of other things that are worth highlighting is one is the support for multiple languages, right? You have obviously custom wasp because it’s built in Cosmos, but there’s also a lot of EVM support. So basically developers can deploy the Midway contracts on a Router and trust fiber or solidarity soon even more because we are putting it to be Aptos and so ecosystems as well. So that’s one and then this also the modular security aspect of it, right? So you can obviously you have the cosmo security and then you have the Router validator security, right? And then depending on, let’s say you’re plugging into Optimism for instance, you could actually add a rule up there as additional thing. Let’s say that for instance, you have a transaction value which is $50,000 at greater and let’s say that you want to sort of use an Optimistic model to verify that you can layer that on. So there’s a very modular approach to the security aspect. So I think that’s also worth highlighting a range of languages that Router enables the security aspect that Router enables, and also the infallible flexibility. Now, you bring it all together. There’s a ton of use cases, right? I think crushing limit orders, crushing yield farming, those are interesting use cases. But crushing Stablecoins are a lovely use case, right? So right now, in the centralized world, what USDC is doing for instance is giving the ability for folks to burn on one chain and mint another. Imagine that decentralized framework. You have a true crosschain Stablecoin, so somebody could conceivably come up with a Stablecoin that you could automatically lend on one chain, borrow on another chain. It’s a powerful use case. You could have vaxed NFT minting. Let’s say that you have a ton of NFTs that needed to be minted on a launch. But the command for the Dapp that is sort of sending the command for the mint is sitting on Ethereum, for whatever reason, designed reason. Now, you could actually have a counter sitting between Router and Avalanche sorry, sitting on Router between Ethereum and Avalanche. And it could, at the middle of the contract, sort of add that, sort of keep track of the counter, pass the transactions and then send them to Avalanche in one go, so that all these are ventured in one go. That’s a huge saving in multiple NFT use cases in gaming and just NFT new launches, what have you. So you have swapping, crushing NFT minting, crushing governance out of the use case. So you have SushiSwap or Uniswap that needs to sort of aggregate votes across 15 different chains there on right now there’s no one way to do it. There’s Snapshot that you need to do individually and then maybe you can manually add them up. It’s a nightmare. So that’s another use case, right, with Router In fact, we’ve launched internally. We’ve got a couple of really cool things. One is Exchange, which is a test token trading venue where you can buy and sell and all these test tokens that are very popular, right? We have something called ping pong that we’re working on, which is the cross chain gaming solution which lets people play ping pong across chains, right? Literally. So it is crazy that the number of use cases beyond the standard bridging and swapping and crushing, farming and all that. I think the broader where we’re going though is you got to look at the world. So right now you’re looking at the car from the bottom and you’re saying that you know what, there’s the carburetor, there’s the engine, that’s the crank shaft and this is how it’s fitting in one chain. This is how it’s fitting in one chain. Eventually we want to get to a place where folks are looking at the car from the top and they don’t see the details unless they want to, and open up the hood and all they see is a nice steering and plush upholstery and steering system and all that and they get in the drive, right? I mean, they don’t need to worry about the underlying complexity. And I think that’s the focus here. I mean, let developers, end users, forget about what chain they are interacting with.
Matt Zahab
Again, another great analogy. How far away are we from looking at the top of the car and the inside of the car rather than what’s under the hood and what’s under the bottom? A couple of years out, a couple of months out, decades out. How long?
Ramani Ramachandran
I think there’s two answers to that. One is from a Router’s perspective and second is from mass market adoption perspective, right? I’ll give you the easy answer, is from a router’s perspective. We just launched DevNet. There’s a ton of adoption. The testnet is out in maybe two or three weeks and then the main net launches, I would say late Q2 early Q3. So at that point, if you’re a developer, you have the ability to do everything that I just described, right? Stateful transactions, stateless transactions, Omnichain framework, Crosstalk everything. If you’re an end user, again, once developers build this, you can. Sort of take advantage of all the beautiful Prussian applications they’re building right now with anything in crypto. I think you need to have true product market fit. I think at some point they will be done with the whole djin, let’s pump this token and then dump it and then let’s fake TV and let’s get some bots.
Matt Zahab
It’s got to matter. It’s got to have a real legit use case besides just make me money. It’s got to be more than that.
Ramani Ramachandran
Exactly. So I think Web2 had the chase between 93 and 2000 and then they had a big lull and then slowly all the use cases came out in terms of the current big giants, right? Facebook and Google and Amazon and all these guys that effectively they came out of the debt of the 2000 crash, right? I think I don’t know if that’s going to be one crash for us. It’s going to be a series of small crashes. But eventually that bridge that Rubicon has to be crossed where ultimately investors and builders figure out, you know what, let’s stop having fun. Let’s build severe stuff that gets the 92, 93% that’s not all super excited. And I think one big thing obviously cross chain, abstracting out complexity is one part of it and I think the other part of it is just the UI UX experience, right? So in fact, one of the things that we are sort of internally brainstorming is building an app that sort of like a ChatGPT NLP interface and you just type in listen, I want to transfer ten Ethereum, or I want to buy ten Ethereum. That’s it. And then the system sort of default the processing and tell, you know what, this is what you need to do. You need to buy to load up a MetaMask to Uniswap or Dfyn on Polygon and that’s how you find the cheapest Ethereum. Right now I want to figure out, I have $100,000, where do I deploy? And then on the back end of the process there’s like Siri or Google whatever Google Talk or whatever they call it. Hey, siri, where do I deploy $10,000, right? And if you have the answer, I think that’s going to be key from an end user perspective because you and I care about we will take the pain to sort of go to MetaMask, have a bloody ledger wallet and all those things, but 95% of my friends start donating the rice the moment I explain MetaMask to them. And I’m sure it’s the same for you. Outside our sort of koolaid community, nobody really kills it. Flying water, innovates.
Matt Zahab
That’s very true. You just touched on AI, Ram. I’m in the same yacht as 99% of the world right now, very intrigued by AI. ChatGPT-4 just came out and it seems like it’s even more intuitive, more of a human being than Gpt-3. It just seems like there’s no end in sight. What’s your whole take on AI? Are you worried that it’s going to be too powerful? Do you think the use cases are as legit as people say they are? Are you and the team utilizing AI in any capacity to build new products and services, protocols, whatever? Walk me through your whole AI 360 degree overview right now.
Ramani Ramachandran
Yeah, absolutely. I think he’s like 99.9% super excited over AI. In fact, we have our own routed GPT where it has all the information on. In fact, I will have showed you during a podcast, but unfortunately, the server is down. We basically loaded up the white paper, all the dev docs and sort of trained the model and right now, pretty much anything you ask me. So, for example, how is it operational competitors? It actually gives a very nice article dancer, that sort of really lays out everything that I just kept. It absolutely it’s beautiful. So we will publicise and talk precise about the router GPT, we will launch it at some point and everything about Router is there and it sort of comes up with insights that even the team hadn’t thought of. It’s mind blowing. It is scary, but it’s what it is. Yeah, we’re super excited and I think it’s going to change. In fact, there are already a couple of apps that we’re thinking of. That sort of merges AI and cross chain has that really cool UX experience that GPT-4 has and so on. Your only question, right? I mean, good or bad, isn’t that the question that every technology has that was powder or printing or internet or even money, right?
Matt Zahab
What’s it going to destroy? What’s it going to make? Nullified.
Ramani Ramachandran
Yes, but think what’s really scary this time is some really smart folks, I think Elon Musk or one of them, or Peter Thiel, they’re all very scared of AI. They believe that at some point some system is going to take over. And this imagine there’s going to be multiple AI is going to be a reflection of society. So you’re going to have some systems. Which are right wing come support. There’s going to some that are going to be the other end of the spectrum. Some are going to be very green conservative. So imagine a scenario where some AI that gets very powerful, decides we human beings are really bad for Earth, it’s time for a refresh, and it sets in motion a chain of events that blows up, shit and kills all of us, right? Maybe it releases a virus from a lab.
Matt Zahab
Crazy. No, it’s true.
Ramani Ramachandran
So there’s probably a black minute episode at some point that sort of addresses this very same scenario at some point. What do you think? You speak to a lot of smart people and what are you hearing?
Matt Zahab
A whole lot of different things right now. I’m a big believer of sort of only worry about what’s under your control. Right? So I just look at how I can utilize AI to make my life more efficient and help my clients achieve their goals and just really just I feel like AI and efficiency are hand in hand, right? That’s really what AI does. It just makes life more efficient. Whether I’m sending an email or creating a new sales sequence, whatever the case may be. It’s like I can throw it into ChatGPT. It sort of takes out that first step of my thinking, and again, there’s also a con to that where it’s like I’m being less creative because now I’m stealing the stencil from GPT-4 and then adding my own touch to it. Or maybe I’m only using one line, but I feel like it gives that’s one of my favorite use cases is giving it ideas. The other day I built a website. The other day I saw a tweet went on and I I can’t code for shit. I have zero coding experience. I saw a tweet wound replic, got an account, fired up the hosting, got ChatGPT to write me a beautiful script, threw it in, and I now have a working it’s a personal blog for myself, but it works. And normally I would pay someone in my network or I would pay a friend, or I would use a shitty Shopify website or something not shitty, but I would use a stencil. I can only really look at it in my own end, but some of the very smart people that I’m very fortunate to have talked with, everyone’s in the same yacht where it’s like, it’s going to be incredibly useful and it’s going to potentially take over the world. The one thing, and I’ve heard this take a couple of times from people within the network is it’s one of the worst things that could have happened to Crypto at this specific time. Because a lot of the buzz, right, humans are FOMO incentivized, and the Crypto buzz really is not there right now. Yes, we have a bit of Bitcoin and hard asset narrative going around because of the shit show in the TradFi market, but besides that, I feel like the AI buzz has just infinitely squashed the Crypto buzz. And again, you I both have skin in the game in Crypto obviously not as much in AI, but those are just a couple of my takes. But again, I’d be lying through my teeth if I told you I knew really what the hell was going on, right? We’re all just throwing darts at a board and seeing what sticks.
Ramani Ramachandran
Even the smartest among us, right? I mean, even the smartest among us is more lucky than.
Matt Zahab
It’s very true.
Ramani Ramachandran
Yeah. To earn your point, though, I mean, 20 years ago, it was how good you were at Google searching. Once Google came, you didn’t need to sort of go to a library and catalog, and once smartphones came, you didn’t need to remember for your friends phone numbers. Right. But there was just random access memory. And AI is fundamentally changing the way we barely think, as you rightly said, you’re not going to like, for instance, when I’m asked for a tweet or a comment by a publication, I literally have one of my team members type that in the ChatGPT, send me the first response, and then I finish the writing tour. So it is making you lazy.
Matt Zahab
It’s crazy. I know. And then there’s the students and Ram think about the students. Another viral tweet I saw, I want to say it was yesterday, the day before one professor, there was, I think, 80 kids in the class. 77 of 80 kids got caught using ChatGPT on their essay. If I’m 19 years old in first year, second year university, there is a 0% chance that I’m not using AI to write all my friggin essays. You know what I mean? Why wouldn’t I?
Ramani Ramachandran
No, my niece in Australia are telling me they use ChatGPT and then so the school has instituted something called GPT-0, which sort of takes us the assays and runs it to GPT-0, and GPT-0 has a 97% chance of predicting if the essay has come from AI. They use something called QuillBot or something, and sort of spend the extra ten minutes rephrasing certain keywords editing a few key words, and then they run it through GPT-0. It’s impossible to find it. And that’s how they give the system. So you combine AI plus NI natural intelligence. It’s a recipe for the brilliant disaster, I think. What take your pick.
Matt Zahab
It’s just crazy like, my parents would tell me stories, my mom would be like, oh, yeah, you have it so easy. When I used to write essays at school, I’d be ripping through the bookshelves where you actually have to crank the wheel to make it move over, going in in claustrophobic bookshelf, finding the book, taking all the notes, checking it back out. Whereas for me and you, we just fired up Google, we’re off to the races. I couldn’t really plagiarize. You plagiarized as little as possible as you possibly can. Throw it in to turn it in, make sure it doesn’t check out. Boom. Kids nowadays, it’s a cakewalk. And even math, too. Like, if you have a smartphone at your desk and there’s a crazy math question and you just type that into the ChatGPT under the table while your prof isn’t looking. Boom. Anything you want, it’s there. It’s just crazy. It’s pretty darn cool.
Ramani Ramachandran
My daughter asked me the other day, how do you make the number nine with four Two’s. Two, Two, Two, Two. What do you mean? And then I type in the ChatGPT, of course. And then, of course, the answer is there. It’s 22 by 2 minus 2. The sad part is, I should have spent ten minutes trying to solve the problem, but no, it just makes you a bit lazy. Unconscionable, I’m sure.
Matt Zahab
Too much fun. Ram, this has been an absolute treat man. I know we’re getting a little tight for time here. We always have a segment on the show called the hot take factory. It’s where you and I jump in the hot take factory, put our shit kicking boots on, let a couple of hot takes fly. I know we just talked about AI. That’s a pretty hot one. But give me a couple of Ram hot takes where only you really believe in. Most other people don’t. Can be health, wealth, happiness, you name it. Preferably not Crypto related, but give me a couple of Ram hot takes before we let you go.
Ramani Ramachandran
Then we’re to say Bitcoin in a million dollars in sometime next 5 10 years. But I guess you probably believe it then, as soon as we say, I guess. Probably not a hot take I’d love to see it. Yeah. I think the focus has a shift to environment at some level. And I think I truly wish that more folks, more smart folks focused on how to sort of get the global warming targets below the 1.5 degree target. We don’t want to hit that. We’re going to have cities going down, we’re going to have a lot of cities sort of getting submerged, extreme weather events, typhoons, and that’s going to lead to geopolitical stress. And I seriously think there’s going to be the butterfly effect. It’s highly unpredictable, the chaos, the entropy. The system is increasing through multiple factors, geopolitics, environment, etc. But I think the fundamental underpinning thing there is just the ability for humanity to sort of come together and focus a bit more on the environment. And I don’t think we’re there yet. I mean, if you look at newspapers or the media site, it’s all the macro stuff or the Ukraine Russian war or some of the politics. What did Boris Johnson do yesterday or what did Trump do tomorrow? I just wish conversation focused on our environment. I mean, a small ball that we are on, it’s pretty flimsy and if it goes down, we’re all pardon my French, but fuck.
Matt Zahab
No, you’re bang on.
Ramani Ramachandran
Yeah. I really want to sort of at some point just come up with something that sort of makes a dent in the fight against the whole global degradation and warming that’s there. And I just wish a lot of the smart folks, creative folks that we have in the Crypto community also are part of the journey.
Matt Zahab
It’d be a treat if a lot of the Crypto folks like yourself who created incredible companies and could very well potentially have billion dollar buyouts within the next couple of years. It’d be a treat if a lot of you guys jumped over to the climate industry, fight climate change and to really help. I’m not saying what you guys are doing isn’t helping right now, but you know what I mean, right? A lot of the time it takes fire to fight fire. And without a couple of billion dollars, I feel like it’s pretty darn difficult to make a dent in such a prominent industry as climate change.
Ramani Ramachandran
We need everybody. We need communicators. You know, intellectuals like yourself, we need the builders like myself. We need the big investors. We need everybody focused on this problem, right?
Matt Zahab
You need the Avengers. You need the dream team. So, Ram what a treat. Incredible episode. Really appreciate you coming on, man. This was truly a lot of fun and would love to have you on for round two. Before you go, please let our listeners know where they can find you, Router and Dfyn online and on social.
Ramani Ramachandran
Absolutely. routerprotocol.com dfyn.network I think the Twitter handle is @routerprotocol and the Dfyn Twitter is @_DFyn and my handle is @CryptoMan_Ram yeah, hit me up in that. It keeps changing. But right now it’s @CryptoMan_Ram so yeah.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Ram, great episode. Really appreciate it, man. Thanks again. We’ll keep in touch.
Ramani Ramachandran
Thank you, Matt. Thank you for having me.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Ram, the founder and CEO of Router Labs. He was dropping knowledge bombs left, right, and center, and we also got to conclude with a little AI and climate change talk. We’d love to see it. Hope you guys enjoyed this one. I certainly did. If you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team, and I speaking to the team. Love you guys. Justas you’re the man. Appreciate everything you do and to the listeners, love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy, and happy. Bye for now, and we’ll talk soon.
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