Daniel Keller Podcast Transcript
Daniel Keller joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Daniel Keller. Daniel Keller is co-founder and community member for Flux. Daniel has over 25 plus years of IT experience in technology, healthcare, and non-profit works. As an entrepreneur, investor, and disruptive technology advocate, Daniel’s ethos resonates with many on the Flux team.
Daniel is focusing on projects that are uplifting to humanity.
Well, good afternoon, Dan. Welcome to the show!
Daniel Keller: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it! Our paths finally crossed again.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Dan, this is awesome. You know, you and I both worked at Ascension Health for many years, and we were actually there at the same time.
You were there a bit longer than I was, but it was definitely a great time. And I’m just glad that our paths have crossed again. So, thank you again for jumping on.
Daniel Keller: Absolutely.
Brian Thomas: Dan let’s jump into your first question here. With over 25 years in IT across technology, healthcare, and nonprofit sectors, what initially drew you to the fields of IT or information technology, and how was your original motivation evolved over the years?
Daniel Keller: Well, I’ll tell you, I love to have a different challenge every day. And I think as I was going through my different career paths, I saw different, different ones that made sense to me, and IT challenged everything I knew every day. And I love that. And that’s why I ended up, you know, working in technology overall.
I love disruptive technology. I’m a little bit too young for the Dotcom boom. So as web three and deep in and started to grow, I really started gravitating toward that. You know, I really helped. Implement a large portion of the mass exodus from prem to web to centralized cloud services. And it was exciting and we’re there again.
So, I love how everything continues to change. Everything continues to iterate. And I think it’s probably if you love technology, now is the time to be alive because we’re seeing amazing things.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you sharing that. I actually lived through that dot com bus. So, it was a fun time. I actually was investing in companies at the time as well.
And yeah, definitely a learning experience for sure, but I’m glad you jumped into the web three space where that’s where I’m at now. And this digital publication here is also built on web three. So pretty exciting. Dan, co founding Flux must’ve been a significant undertaking. What were the main goals you’re aimed to achieve with Flux and how does the platform stand out in today’s crowded tech landscape?
Daniel Keller: That’s an excellent question. And the fact that Flux was born, it was a passion project originally. I was very early to the game with Bitcoin. So I love the disruptive technology structure. I knew that Bitcoin was going to disrupt finance, but the bigger disruption was going to come when somebody could figure out how to How to harness all that decentralized compute and apply that to our current compute models.
So, you know, it kind of grew and morphed as it, as it grew, because we did figure it out with Flux. We were able to take the Nakamoto consensus mechanism and basically build our node structure on top of it. And Flux is the largest truly decentralized platform out there. We’ve got 13, 000 plus decentralized systems administrators all over the world.
We’re in 78 countries. We run the better part of the 25,000 applications today. We’ve launched front ends, back ends, game servers, you name it. You can run WordPress; you can run WordPress. Why is that significant? Because we do not depend on centralized data structure. So, our data centers let’s say in AWS, Microsoft, Azure Google, you know, we know they depend on their data centers.
And we don’t. We are actually, we shard our data across all the network. Microsoft You have full redundancy built in and we started looking at what we had to rebuild from Web 2 to Web 3 because they’re not all turnkey. I give you for instance, Brian 2 Factor Authentication seems benign enough. You download an application.
You use it. But in the back end, it’s all resides on servers that are deployed by Google or whoever is using your 2FA. So, we had to reinvent 2FA, and we created decentralized two factor authentication that uses the Bitcoin blockchain in basically sequential time structure, and that’s how you use your 2FA.
Doesn’t seem like a big deal, but that took us the better part of Let’s say three months to develop and deploy. And we’re a six-year-old project. Well, a seven-year-old project that is literally a startup because we’ve had to rebuild so many of these things. But the good news is it’s all built and it all works.
So that’s the key.
Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. I love that. And, and that’s what’s really attracted me to blockchain technology. Is there so many use cases and the fact that you can actually run your infrastructure at a fraction of the cost and you’re typically not subject to ransomware like most general it shops are or the technologies, which, which I really like, but love defy love blockchain and you’ve shared some great examples of that.
So, Dan, as an advocate for disruptive technologies, which innovations do you think hold the most promise for fundamentally changing our lives here in the next decade?
Daniel Keller: Wow, that’s a loaded question. I’m going to get my soapbox out. You know, people are very wrapped up in the AI scenario right now and AI is nothing new.
I mean, the, the way that chat GPT has deployed it and the digital gold rush that’s accompanying it is, it’s awesome to watch. But in the end, it’s still hosted and monitored and developed and trained by centralized entities. There’s a reason why Microsoft bought ChatGPT or OpenAI immediately for a ridiculous amount of money and continues to cultivate it, because they harness the ability to control the input models.
And we, as we know in technology, the input model affects the output model. So, if you are able to train it in the way you want to train, then the output models will be exactly what you want it to be. So, what, you know, what Flux has done and what other projects are doing. So, whether it’s Flux or Tensor, Bit Tensor, or some of these other platforms is working on decentralizing those training input models.
So, Flux has developed Flux AI. Yeah, I’m good at the naming convention there, but Flux AI and it uses open-source training models. So instead of being the keeper of the keys. Which has been the story of technology up till today. If you hold the keys, if you’re an AWS, you hold the keys. If you’re a Google, you hold the keys.
If you’re a Microsoft, you hold the keys and they manipulate, extrapolate, use all the quantitative data that comes in, Brian, and they use it to their betterment. Where in the next 10 years, I see that a completely big paradigm shift where we move away from depending on the centralized entities to be the gatekeepers to the people that actually control the infrastructure, they will be the gatekeepers, and we would never accept this in business or retail, especially with health care to have all of our patient data record maintained by an entity that uses them, manipulates them, extrapolates the data.
This would fly in any other area, but for some reason it does for health care. So, where I see us going in 10 years is you’re going to see open source models of AI that help to drive the medical sector, that help to drive maybe supply chain management, asset management, RWA, real, real life applications, so on and so forth.
So. Over the next 10 years, I think if you’re a disruptive technology advocate, you’re going to have all that you can get. And then some, because we’re going to watch blockchain technology and AI as a partnership, dismantle 90 percent of the way technology looks today. And it’s going to be glorious.
Because as Brian, you and I know working in healthcare, there is no other business segment that needs an updated infrastructure and updated paradigm change like healthcare. So, I think we’re definitely going to see that happening over the next 10 years.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s awesome. And I would definitely share the same sentiment there.
And it’s time that some of the big behemoths get disrupted. I think it’s power back to the people. We really need that. As you can see it’s very obvious in our country today. So. Appreciate that. And Daniel, last question of the day, given your background in healthcare, I.T. what are some of the unique challenges the sector faces today?
And how can emerging tech help address these issues?
Daniel Keller: Oh, well, let me tell you something, you know, there’s many challenges out there today and mostly I would say around the regulatory space. The people that are, you know, building this disruptive technology, the cypherpunks that came together that wanted to see a different way, they’re not business leaders.
And I think as the business leaders start to adopt and understand that there is another way for technology growth models. I think that’s when you’ll start to see a real, almost parabolic growth model in technology and blockchain. You know, part of me doesn’t like things easy, so I love the fact that as we build these things, they’ve never been done before.
It’s, you know, we recently released Flux Edge, which is our enterprise for AI compute. So, you can use, we pull graphics cards from all over the world to provide, like, real time access to, you know, rendering, edge compute, AI, you know, all that kind of stuff. Thanks a lot. And I think you’ll see other products continue to build that.
And in the end, I think they end up working together to give us the next version of the Internet. And I, and I do believe that, you know, we have been, I always make this joke. I said the disruptors were disrupted. So, when the Internet was originally created, we had all these grandiose ideas on, you know, free speech, communication, people being able to, you know, work together remotely, you know, work from home, all this kind of things, all the value add that comes with the Internet.
And then along comes all the censorship, all the regulatory challenges, all these, these hurdles that are put up by the government. And as a technologist, I always say there has to be another way. Well, there is. And that is the new version of what the internet will become. Web three, decentralized protocols.
That’s what’s going to drive us into the next 10 years, the next 20 years and beyond, and it’s also going to start to separate a lot of the controlling features, and I hate to say this cause the government doesn’t like to hear it, but they need to become more proactive rather than reactive in the past.
If they wanted to censor something, or if they wanted to, you know, interact with something, they sent a subpoena to Google or Amazon, whoever it was. And they would take the data down and they would share it back with products like Flux, Akash, Bit Tensor, all these decentralized protocols, you need to become proactive.
You need to have analytic, you know, programs such as Chain lysis and others that are going to be able to give you the data that you need. So, it’s good. There’s going to be a lot of change is going to be a lot of disruption. And I think there’s going to be a lot of regulatory hurdles that are going to be put up because the immediate gut reaction in the government, at least here in the States, which is a shame is to kill it with fire and then figure out what it was.
So, you know, and so instead of being invited, I am going to D.C. next week to speak in D. C. about, you know, web 3D pin and the importance of understanding it. But will they listen? Brian, that’s the question. And I highly doubt that’s the case.
Brian Thomas: Yep. I totally agree. Special interests rule the day in DC. And so, I wish you the best of luck there for sure.
But I love, I love your mission, your vision. Please stick with it, brother. I really do love that part of what you’re trying to do. And I’m very supportive of, of this web three environment that we’re moving into. So, thank you. And Dan, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Daniel Keller: Awesome. Thank you, sir. And it was good seeing you again.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Daniel Keller Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
