Endgame with Amanda Cassatt

In this episode of Endgame, the roles are reversed. Timour Kosters takes the mic to interview Amanda Cassatt. Together they explore why technology can both expand and limit freedom, how smartphones and algorithms shape our choices, why LLMs may homogenize culture and creativity, and what crypto still offers as a hedge against centralized control. They also discuss Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, f...

How Swift works is one of the most misunderstood topics in crypto payments. Tom Zschach spent six years as Chief Innovation Officer at Swift, and he has unique insights to share. In this episode: Why stablecoins aren’t replacing Swift; they’re connecting to it Why Tom called Ripple a fax machine and stands by it Why a token isn’t money and what that means for settlement Why faster and cheaper isn’...

Adam Back invented the proof-of-work system that became Bitcoin's foundation. The New York Times says he's Satoshi Nakamoto. He says he isn't, but he was the first person Satoshi ever emailed. Every major publication is asking whether quantum computing will break Bitcoin. The consensus is nervous. Adam Back, the man who built Bitcoin's cryptographic foundation, is not. In this conv...

Cultural theorist and essayist Toby Shorin joins Amanda Cassatt to explore one of the most urgent questions of the AI era: What happens to the human body and human meaning when thinking itself becomes commodified? Drawing on his essay “Body Futurism,” Toby argues that we’re witnessing a massive embodied turn in culture, from peptides and biohacking to looks-maxing and sports investment. But the re...

Your identity, your assets, your privacy, do you actually own any of it online?  Binji Pande from the Ethereum Foundation says no. And he's spent his career trying to change that. In this episode, Amanda sits down with Binji to explore why crypto is really about redesigning human incentives, what digital rights actually mean, and what it would take to build a world where freedom online isn&#39...

Everyone in crypto is chasing TPS Eunice Giarta thinks that's the wrong race entirely As co-founder of Monad Foundation, she spent four years building what she calls the Ethereum of high-performance blockchains  a chain with validators on six continents, in 30 countries and 58 cities, that doesn't sacrifice decentralization for speed. In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down wi...

“A lot of users don’t need a bank. What they need is a wallet.” In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Richard Teng, CEO of Binance, for a conversation about what crypto actually became and whether that’s the right thing. Richard spent three decades in traditional finance, including the Central Bank of Singapore, before joining Binance in 2021. He doesn’t argue like a convert. H...

“The block explorer is your x-ray machine. Open it up, and you find rooms full of people.” In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Austin Federa, former Head of Strategy at Solana and co-founder of DoubleZero, for a rare, candid conversation shaped by shared history on opposite sides of the Ethereum–Solana divide. They unpack the real meaning of decentralization: is it a philosop...

In this episode of Endgame , Amanda Cassatt cuts through the AI hype to explore what happens when creation becomes free. The result isn’t less competition—it’s more noise. She unpacks a web flooded with AI content, misaligned platforms, and the rising value of curation, taste, and real skill. From the future of digital work to the surprising role of crypto—where AI agents, stablecoins, and frictio...

“The scammy elements of crypto are turning people off—and that’s something we need to fix.” In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Yat Siu, co-founder of Animoca Brands, to unpack crypto’s evolution—from idealism to hype cycles—and what comes next. They explore AI agents, the open metaverse, and who actually benefits as technology scales. Yat argues blockchain was built for a fu...

Most of the people running the world are not evil masterminds; they are sincere operators trapped in an “epistemic maze.” In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Curtis Yarvin to explore why the rules-based international order was always fragile and how elite decision-makers operate on unexamined assumptions. They unpack Yarvin’s “interchangeable baby theory,” the 20th-century be...

"If you are using technology to manipulate other people, you should be ashamed of yourself."In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with George Hotz to explore when technology empowers and when it traps. Using the framework of finite and infinite games, they define manipulation as placing someone in a system designed to extract from them without their awareness. They examine...

As artificial intelligence agents become the dominant interface to the web, the question is no longer just “Who are you?” but “Who is acting on your behalf?” In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Billions Network CEO Evin McMullen to examine the rapid shift toward agent-mediated internet use. At the end of last year, roughly one in every 31 website visits was conducted by a non...

As artificial intelligence becomes the dominant interface for work, creativity, and competition, some people are adapting to it far faster than others. In this episode of Endgame, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Dragonfly Capital’s Haseeb Qureshi to explore a generational shift in technological advantage: the biggest winners of every major tech transition are not the most experienced, but the most “...

Technology is the most powerful force in history, and whether it liberates or consumes us depends entirely on how aligned it is with human agency. For Amanda Cassatt, this belief underpins her techno-optimism: the conviction that progress must be actively built, not passively awaited. In this solo episode, she explains how she sees technology as upstream of culture, economics, and politics, and vi...

As nation-states double down on borders, nationalism, and readiness for war, some people are choosing not to wait around to see how that ends. Amanda Cassatt sits down with Timour Kosters, who worked alongside Vitalik Buterin on Zuzalu, and co-founder of Edge City, a borderless pop-up society where highly driven builders, thinkers, and creators experiment with life beyond the nation-state. Emergin...

What if aging and reproduction were engineering problems, not biological limits? In this episode, Amanda Cassatt sits down with AthenaDAO founder Laura Minquini to unpack how reproductive biotech could transform same-sex reproduction, family structures, and the future of population growth. Laura explains how AthenaDAO and the DeSci movement are using crypto to fund research that has previously not...

What is the future of Arbitrum now that L1 Ethereum is becoming scalable? In this episode, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Offchain Labs and Arbitrum co-founder Steven Goldfeder. Arbitrum began as Ethereum’s scaling answer, borrowing its security to add more bandwidth, faster confirmations, and better UX. As Ethereum solves the scalability problem that was Arbitrum's original raison d’être, Stev...

What happens when crypto stops optimizing purely for profit and starts optimizing for people, planet, and long-term coordination? In this episode, Amanda Cassatt sits down with Gitcoin founder Kevin Owocki to discuss Ethereum’s public goods, swallowing the Green Pill, and what onchain coordination will look like in the future. Owocki maps the cultural fault lines inside Ethereum: the libertarian a...

Crypto was supposed to be the escape hatch. So why does it increasingly feel like it’s being absorbed by the very systems it set out to challenge? In this candid conversation, Amanda Cassatt sits down with cyberpunk crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro about the “fintech-ization” of crypto, where the industry stands in the post-Gary Gensler era and the fading relevance of the four-year cycle. Is crypto a...

Is crypto’s biggest rival artificial intelligence?  As AI absorbs talent and capital, it’s not clear yet if crypto and AI are competing or converging but crypto’s focus on human agency may matter more than ever in an automated world. Amanda Cassatt is joined by Aaron Wright, crypto lawyer, former Wikia general counsel and CEO of Tribute Labs, to unpack the battle between crypto and AI and what the...

What if the biggest forces shaping crypto today are hidden behind VPNs? In this episode of Endgame, host Amanda Cassatt sits down with Mable Jiang, Trends co-founder, former Multicoin partner and founding member of the Solana Foundation Council,for a rare, unfiltered look at the Chinese and Asian crypto markets — the traders, the memes, the exchanges, and the invisible liquidity that moves the ent...

What happens when the country that taught the world inflation becomes the testing ground for the future of money? In this episode of Endgame, Amanda sits down with Camila Russo, author of The Infinite Machine and founder of The Defiant, to trace how growing up in Latin America shaped her understanding of money, power, and why crypto matters long before the West noticed. Before becoming one of cryp...

In this episode of Endgame, Ethereum Foundation Co-Executive Director Tomasz K. Stańczak joins Amanda to discuss how the organization behind Ethereum is changing. Together they talk about why institutions on Wall Street are now asking for more decentralization, open source, and censorship resistance, and what it means for Ethereum to actively defend its values while staying credibly neutral. Tomas...

In this episode of Endgame, Milk Road’s Co-Owner and Head of Research, Kyle Reidhead, joins Amanda Cassatt to share his take on how crypto works today, across markets, media, and the broader tech cycle. Kyle outlines why he thinks crypto cycles follow global liquidity rather than the Bitcoin halving, and why he believes the surge in AI infrastructure spending could stretch this bull market longer...