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.