Today's Top Episodes
10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)
Discover the secrets behind a decade of podcasting success, featuring insights from the legendary Michael Lewis!
Russian Soul, American Life: A Conversation with Ignat Solzhenitsyn | Peter Robinson | Hoover Institution
Explore the complex tapestry of Russian soul and American life through the eyes of Ignat Solzhenitsyn, a journey from exile to musical mastery.
Dwarkesh and Ilya Sutskever on What Comes After Scaling
The era of simply scaling AI is over. What comes next for artificial intelligence? Hear from Ilya Sutskever on the critical new frontier!
MeatEater's Steven Rinella on the Economic History of Hunting
Uncover the untold economic story of America, from colonial survival to modern conservation, all through the lens of hunting.
Is Privacy A Winnable Battle? | Andy Yen, Founder of Proton
Can we win the battle for privacy in an AI-driven world? Proton's founder reveals how AI could either tear us apart or bring us together.
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Is Privacy A Winnable Battle? | Andy Yen, Founder of Proton
December 15, 2025
- AI should actively steer users towards the center and understanding of diverse viewpoints, rather than reinforcing polarizing content for engagement.
- Less default personalization may be a necessary feature for AI to combat societal division, even if it's considered a "bug" in product design.
- The pursuit of immediate engagement and dopamine hits from AI interactions can be detrimental to individual well-being in the long run.
ROLLUP: Rate Cuts! | ZK Breakthroughs | Farcaster’s Pivot | SEC Onchain | NYT’s Stablecoin FUD
December 12, 2025
- Farcaster is reorienting its ecosystem to be wallet-first, recognizing that user engagement primarily stems from trading and token-related activities, rather than solely focusing on social features.
- The core message is that on-chain social features should be viewed as a service to add onto a wallet, rather than the primary focus of a decentralized social platform.
- This strategic shift signifies a change from Farcaster's previous model, which positioned itself as a social network with an integrated wallet, to one where the wallet is the central element.
Inside Gary Gensler’s SEC: A Conversation with Former Crypto Policy Advisor Corey Frayer
December 8, 2025
- The SEC's primary concern revolves around protecting investors and market integrity by ensuring crypto entities operating as intermediaries, like banks or exchanges, adhere to existing securities laws, regardless of the underlying technology.
- A core philosophical divide exists between the SEC's traditional approach to financial regulation and crypto's ethos of decentralization, with the SEC hesitant to grant unique treatment to crypto despite its technological advancements.
- The SEC's enforcement actions, particularly those perceived as targeting crypto innovation, stemmed from a desire for consistent application of financial laws, not from a personal vendetta against the industry, and were intended to prevent a collapse of market trust.
Crypto’s Agentic Future: AI, ZK & Money Networks | Lincoln, Shea, Michael, & Luca
December 6, 2025
- Agentic Internet & X42 Payments: The conversation introduces X42 as a revival of the HTTP 402 "Payment Required" standard, aiming to enable seamless, internet-native payments for both humans and AI agents, potentially driving mass adoption of crypto.
- The Bot Economy & Market Design: Shay Katever from Flashbots explores the proliferation of bots in various markets, highlighting how crypto has developed tools like auctions and programmable privacy to manage bot competition and create more efficient, human-benefiting markets.
- Verifiable Computing & ZK Proofs for Scaling: Michael Dong from Brevis explains how Zero-Knowledge proofs and verifiable computing are revolutionizing blockchain scalability by decoupling computation from verification, enabling complex on-chain operations at significantly reduced costs and unlocking new application functionalities.
Ethereum’s Next Decade | Tomasz K. Stańczak, Ansgar Dietrichs, Dankrad Feist, & Danny Ryan
December 4, 2025
- The Ethereum ecosystem, including L2s and EVM developers, is leading significantly in developer numbers and attracting new talent.
- The definition of the "Ethereum ecosystem" and its support by organizations like the Ethereum Foundation has been a subject of discussion.
- The report aims to counter the narrative that Ethereum is no longer attracting new developers by showcasing its continued growth across L2s.
Why Prices Are Crashing & What's Next—How Mike Nadeau Called the Cycle
December 3, 2025
- The current crypto market downturn is analyzed through on-chain data and historical cycle patterns, suggesting it is more than a pullback and potentially the end of a bull cycle.
- A key predictive tool discussed is the 50-week moving average for Bitcoin, which has historically signaled the end of bull markets when decisively broken, a pattern observed in the current cycle.
- Future market movements are linked to global liquidity conditions and potential shifts in macroeconomic policy, with a focus on identifying undervalued assets with strong fundamentals during the bear market.
The Private World Computer | Aztec Co-Founders Zac Williamson & Joe Andrews
December 2, 2025
- Aztec is launching a private Layer 2 solution for Ethereum, aiming to bring programmable privacy to DeFi by enabling private transactions secured by Ethereum.
- The project introduces ZK Passport, a novel way to verify identity using government-issued e-passports through zero-knowledge proofs, offering a privacy-preserving alternative to traditional KYC/AML processes threatened by AI deepfakes.
- Aztec's "private intent" flow allows users to route transactions through their network to gain privacy on any Ethereum Layer 2, effectively acting as a privacy blanket for the entire Ethereum ecosystem without requiring separate liquidity pools.
The Holy Grail of Crypto Privacy: Encrypted Ethereum, FHE & Living Forever | Rand Hindi, Zama Co-Founder
December 1, 2025
- The podcast discusses the evolution of privacy in blockchain technology, highlighting that public data was an initial design artifact due to technological limitations rather than an intentional feature.
- Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) is presented as a key technology for enabling private and composable smart contracts on existing blockchains, offering an "optimal blockchain stack" when combined with Zero-Knowledge proofs for scaling and Multi-Party Computation for key management.
- The increasing integration of traditional finance with blockchain necessitates confidentiality, driving adoption of privacy solutions, with Zama aiming to provide this by offering a layer of encryption compatible with existing chains and wallets.
ROLLUP: Ethereum’s Big Week | Supercycle Debate | Monad Mainnet | Bitcoin’s Quantum Problem
November 27, 2025
- Upcoming network upgrades, referred to as "forks," will significantly increase the capacity for data blobs, directly impacting transaction fees.
- One fork, scheduled for January 7th, will more than double the blob target by increasing it from 10 to 14.
- These forks, while technically altering protocol code, are background changes that do not require node operators to upgrade their software again.
Do We Need Another L1? - Inside Monad’s Parallel EVM with Co-Founder Keone Hon
November 25, 2025
- Parallelizing database lookups helps overcome resource constraints by processing multiple pieces of work concurrently and committing results while maintaining serial execution correctness.
- Just-in-time (JIT) compilation is a technique used to optimize the execution of EVM bytecode.
- The podcast discusses how computers use multiple cores and threads to run many tasks in parallel, but are often limited by other resources like database or disk access.
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