Roger Sader is a friend with whom I share many interests and ways of seeing the world, and I'm constantly inspired by how he strives to live a multi-faceted life. He's a systems engineer turned roboticist who has lived in metropolises, warzones, and remote indigenous communities. He's a guitar collector and published recording artist who embraces both artificial intelligence and cultural wisdom passed down through generations. I had a great time with him in the studio, where tech was just a means of connections so we could talk about life.
I always wanted my podcast episodes to serve as more of a character piece, where my guests showcase their visions through a snapshot in time. This notion of bottling the lighting carried over into the content of our discussions as well, where we literally covered AI’s effects on cultural preservation. More on that later, though.
Roger was born in Lebanon during times of extreme instability. This is a sharp contrast to many who I have met in my time so far in Canada, and is also very different to my own upbringing. These challenges can absolutely shift our sense of what we value, and what we hope to achieve. For people who have gone through what Roger has, decentralised money isn’t just a speculative tool, but a means of survival.
This was literally a situation where we had to bank the unbanked, because the central banking system collapsed. Navigating daily life in a world where centralised notions of value no longer existed provided challenges that us in the West have rarely had to reconcile. This episode is a must-listen, and you can hear directly from Roger as he guides you through his life and the socially-driven ideas he wants to help facilitate.
His stories are layered and interlinked. So in this piece, I’ll touch on the short and sweet ideas that I hope will whet your appetite for the big picture. Here are 5 things I learned in conversation with Roger Sader.
We all used to love social media until brands and rage-bait content replaced our friends' posts in our feeds. For me, the attraction had always been human connection—Facebook and Instagram for friends scattered worldwide, Twitter for companionship as a lonely Man United fan in Spain. As the humanity vanished from these platforms, so did my interest.
This decay of social media highlights a fundamental truth about technology—it's valuable only when it brings us together. Our new wave of Web3-based social apps offers a chance to recenter human connection.
"I don't think it's the technology that gets us together. It's a mean, it's an excuse. But the tech is a conduit to expression."
All ChatGPT/Claude/DeepSeek do when they generate outputs is try to understand the relationship between characters and words, and how they follow each other. When we train LLMs, we're teaching them to recognize patterns, but for anyone who has learned a second language, it becomes clear that ideas transcend mere words.
This linguistic truth becomes strikingly apparent when we examine cultures with fundamentally different language structures. For example, some Aboriginal societies don't have the concept of 'left' and 'right,' instead using cardinal directions (north/south/east/west) in everyday life. In practice, an example of raising hands in class to participate might sound like "put your west hand up if you agree." People who speak these languages have an inherent understanding of cardinal directions, and don't need a compass to navigate.
Language carries the DNA of a culture and peoples within it, and is kept alive by those who keep using it. Ideas can be lost to history simply by languages going extinct. So knowing how deeply language ties into one's sense of self makes preserving the diversity of culture in our world even more important.
"If you want to cripple a culture, just cut the cultural tie through language and tradition. You made yourself a very much easier community or society to rule.”
"AI would be a very good conduit to cultural preservation in a sense where the input that is being taught is through elders, especially in communities that are verbally past storytelling, past traditions, and not written."
Roger speaks at length about the prevalence of fluidity in Eastern cultures. We don't do punctuality, we prefer flexibility. There's an easygoing nature to interactions, and this isn't only in village life. You just drop by your neighbour's home, no need for calls in advance, stay for dinner, head home late. For us who have lived it, that just seems normal.
When we look at blockchains, we see open rails where various services can be built. Roger believes we've only begun exploring this potential, and this is a matter of perspective. The over-zealous view of Western critics who brand blockchains as 'a solution without a problem' reveals a blinkered worldview.
It's a technology whose limitations we're just beginning to understand. Yes, there will be scams and bad actors. But dismissing blockchain technology entirely, especially when we've barely explored its cultural applications beyond financial services, is shortsighted. Our industries have shown time and again that the path to improved systems is rarely smooth—necessity drives innovation. Perhaps it's time to apply blockchain technology to actual societal problems rather than merely creating marginal improvements on the SWIFT system.
"Crypto to blockchain is tree to soil. Soil can grow many trees. Crypto is only one of the trees that can be grown on a blockchain."
What do Thailand, Dubai, and El Salvador have in common? These vastly different economies all have incentive structures to limit crypto holders' tax liabilities. This approach stands in stark contrast to many traders' view of the taxman as crypto's "big bad.”
Many believe that crypto gains should be untaxed—after all, they took the risk and did the work. This individualistic view of taxation conflicts with Roger's lived experience in Lebanon, where community resilience depends on collective support systems. His perspective reveals a crucial oversight: our societies and economies didn't spring up overnight.
Many of our discussion themes centered on preserving cultural ideas for future generations. Communities are places that require funding and support for their sustenance. Through my work with Breadchain and GreenPill (of which Roger is a part), "regenerative finance" emerges as a focal concept. We don't celebrate efficient supply chains—the result of generations of nurturing, course correction, and oversight.
Perhaps we need not a rejection of taxation, but a reimagining of our relationship to it. When we view taxes as investments in infrastructure that enables innovation, we honor the systems that enabled our success. Crypto's true potential lies not in escaping societal obligations but in redesigning them for greater transparency and effectiveness.
"We should feel proud to contribute and to embedding where we live, we should not feel heavy weighted…about the tax man"
I often end with something adoption-focused because the slow progress of crypto adoption has been disappointing. Our task of getting cryptocurrency into people's hands has proven harder than expected, but we're also learning this might not be the ultimate goal.
What if crypto's best use case remains under the hood, used invisibly by banks and financial services? We've witnessed rising adoption of embedded wallets where users don't handle private keys—these use encrypted Google Drive backups, eliminating unsafe storage of seed phrases. Where unintuitive hurdles exist, users will ignore security best practices. The responsibility falls on builders to create something more human, more usable.
Returning to my first point about technology as a conduit for connection: Are we building products that serve as such conduits? The goal isn't crypto adoption for its own sake but improved human life through crypto.
"It's still tech centric. It has to get to a point where it is no longer tech centric, but it is usability centric. It becomes a much easier onboarding when you don't have to mention blockchain, when you don't have to mention crypto, when you don't have to mention wallet."
My conversation with Roger was, honestly, not unlike actual conversations we have when hanging out. The only difference this time was that we recorded it. We love bouncing big ideas off each other, and trying to tackle old problems from new angles. And even in discussions where we find ourselves proposing opposing points of view, it’s a matter of having a different idea of achieving a similar result.
So if you liked this piece, I have a nearly two-hour podcast episode where Roger meaningfully dissects these ideas while interweaving his life experiences. The Linktree is embedded below, so do give it a listen on your preferred podcast app.
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