There's no such thing as an AI strategy that ignores human psychology. That's the view from Professor Michael Muthukrishna, Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE and NYU and author of A Theory of Everyone, who joins Adi Ben-Ari, Founder and CEO of Applied Blockchain and Applied Edge, to explain what centuries of research into human cooperation and cultural evolution reveal about why some companies get real value from AI, and most don't.Michael explains why he's unusually well placed to bridge the two worlds: trained as an engineer before becoming one of the only people at the LSE to train neural networks from scratch, he pivoted into evolutionary psychology to study how humans became the only species to build a "collective brain," learning from one another at scale. That same science, he argues, explains exactly why most enterprise AI rollouts stall: companies treat AI as the goal instead of the business, run the same pilot in a dozen different corners of the org, and set up the kind of zero sum incentives that kill the cooperation adoption depends on.He also makes a claim that should give every leader pause: AI model capability has been doubling roughly every seven months since 2020, meaning a model that can reliably manage half a day's work today will be handling a week's worth within the year, and most organisations are planning as if the technology they have now is the technology they'll still have next year.→ PlusThe Enron story behind why "rank and yank" incentive structures destroy AI adoption, why AI is a general purpose technology like electricity, and why Michael believes humanity has never, in its history, outsourced the thinking itself, until now.→ Mentioned in this episodeA Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We're Going, Michael MuthukrishnaHit Refresh, Satya NadellaSapiens, Yuval Noah HarariElectric Twin, synthetic audience / consumer insight platformThank you for tuning in.appliedblockchain.com | appliededge.com | silentdata.comDisclaimerThis podcast is strictly for educational purposes and does not constitute financial or tax advice. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or make financial decisions. Always consult with a professional and do your own research.

There's not a single area of the bank untouched by AI. That's the view from Eduardo Alvarez, Partner of Strategy and Chief Data and AI Officer at Santander Brasil, who joins Adi Ben-Ari, Founder and CEO of Applied Blockchain and Applied Edge, to share the playbook behind one of banking's most ambitious AI transformations.

Eduardo explains why Santander Brasil runs AI as its own division reporting directly to top management, how a hundred year old, risk averse institution manages the risks of moving fast, and the uncomfortable conversations required to convince long tenured staff that the job they mastered no longer exists in the same form. He also makes a prediction that should worry every bank: customers will soon stop opening their banking apps altogether, delegating financial decisions to AI agents instead, and banks risk becoming invisible infrastructure unless they get there first.

Plus: How Pix and open finance turned Brasil into one of the most competitive and advanced digital banking markets in the world, and what the rest of the industry can learn from it.

Eduardo's recommended sources include:

● Anthropic Courses

● karpathy.ai

● Andrew Ross Sorkin’s 1929: Inside the Crash

Thank you for tuning in.

appliedblockchain.com | appliededge.com | silentdata.com

DisclaimerThis podcast is strictly for educational purposes and does not constitute financial or tax advice. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or make financial decisions. Always consult with a professional and do your own research.

In this episode of the Applied Blockchain Podcast, Adi Ben-Ari (Founder, CEO of Applied Blockchain) speaks with Patrick Hennes, a blockchain and digital assets servicing expert based in Luxembourg, specialising in tokenization, MiCA, and digital asset operating models.

Patrick has spent 26 years in Luxembourg's fund industry — from transfer agency and fund migrations to six years as Director at PwC Luxembourg, where he co-founded one of the earliest blockchain initiatives in European asset management. He is a speaker, author, and one of the genuine pioneers of tokenization in the institutional finance world.

Together, Adi and Patrick explore, but not limited to:

• How Patrick first encountered blockchain at a PwC management meeting in 2015 — and what immediately clicked
• The Fund Chain initiative: building the first Ethereum-based tokenization pilot for investment funds back in 2016
• Why digitalization must come before tokenization — and what that means in practice for the full asset servicing value chain
• The two missing pieces from the early days: digital custody and on-chain cash
• Stablecoins, deposit tokens, and the payment rail that will finally enable atomic settlement

Resources Mentioned & Themes Discussed

• Fund Chain initiative — PwC Luxembourg white paper: "The Genesis of a New Business Model for the Asset Management Industry"
• Forge stablecoin (accepted as settlement currency by Clearstream)
• Larry Fink's "era of tokenization of all assets"
• ERC standards & Polygon
• DORA, AML directives, MiFID2, GENIUS Act
• Atomic Habits – James Clear
• The 5 AM Club – Robin Sharma

This podcast is brought to you by Applied Blockchain, a leading blockchain development company shaping the future of Web3 infrastructure and privacy-preserving blockchain solutions.

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Thank you for tuning in, Applied Blockchainappliedblockchain.com | silentdata.com

Disclaimer

This podcast is strictly for educational purposes and does not constitute financial or tax advice. It is not a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or make financial decisions. Always consult with a professional and do your own research.