Best Web3 Empire Podcasts (2025)

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Guantanamo: The Myth vs the Reality 45:50

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6h ago45:50

45:50

Dick Cheney died four weeks ago, but his dark legacy lives on—quite literally—at Guantanamo Bay. The human rights lawyer Joshua Colangelo-Bryan was among the first attorneys to enter the notorious prison in 2004, and what he found there shattered every official justification for its existence. The “worst of the worst”? Most detainees were never eve…

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The AI Race is a Myth: Why "Who's Winning" is the Wrong Question 47:23

1d ago47:23

47:23

Who’s winning and losing in AI plays like a wacky race in that every week there seems to be a new leader. But that’s actually the wrong way of thinking about today’s AI revolution. The right questions are about the three Cs: Capability, Capital and Civics. That’s the lesson of Keith Teare’s latest That Was The Week tech newsletter which focuses on …

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Strategic Hibernation: A Business Survival Guide for Turbulent Times 45:10

3d ago45:10

45:10

“May you live in interesting times,” is supposed to be a Chinese mantra. But according to Cambridge University China expert, Christopher Marquis, our current interesting times are actually a curse for businesses seeking stability rather than disorder. Is this, then, a moment for “strategic hibernation” Marquis asks in a provocative Harvard Business…

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Italian Football: The Art of Defense and The Soul of a Nation 55:53

4d ago55:53

55:53

Few journalists, certainly non-Italians, know Italian football as intimately as The Athletic’ James Horncastle, co-author of The Soccer 100. For Horncastle, Italian football presents a fascinating paradox: a nation celebrated for beauty, fashion, and La Grande Bellezza built its footballing identity around winning ugly. Forged in post-war austerity…

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Building a Brain and Hands for Blockchains with Mike from Talus Network 41:46

4d ago41:46

41:46

AI is shifting from chat interfaces to agents that act, earn, and participate in real economic activity. Mike Hanono, CEO of Talus Network, explains how this agentic economy takes shape and why it needs crypto rails. We explore idol.fun as the first live example of agents competing and generating value. This is a public episode. If you would like t…

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Your Wallet, Your Chain, Your Apps All Powered by THIS — Yair Cleper | Ep. 101 57:39

4d ago57:39

57:39

In this episode, I sit down with Yair Cleper, founder and infrastructure builder, to uncover the invisible layer that keeps crypto running — RPC, nodes, and decentralized access.From UX and fintech startups to building Magma Devs and contributing to Lava Network, Yair explains how blockchains actually communicate, why most of Web3 still relies on a…

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From Feudal Lords to AI Billionaires: Capitalism's Thousand-Year Conquest of the World 49:37

5d ago49:37

49:37

Should we be giving thanks today for our capitalist system? Maybe. But we should certainly be thankful for a 1100-page book about the history of capitalism published this week by the Harvard historian Sven Beckert. Entitled Capitalism: A Global History, this magisterial history, which took Beckert 8 years to write, covers the last thousand years of…

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Why Football's Greatest Player Might Be Its Most Boring: The Problem (Yawn) of Lionel Messi 36:36

5d ago36:36

36:36

In The Soccer 100, the Athletic’s list of the greatest footballers in history, Lionel Messi is ranked number one. Perhaps. But he might also be its most boring—at least as a man. For Michael Cox, a contributor to The Soccer 100, Messi is undeniably great, but compared to his fellow Argentine Diego Maradona, he’s a nonentity. Football is theater. Th…

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Maradona, Pele or Messi: Who is the Greatest Footballer of All Times? 51:35

7d ago51:35

51:35

Maradona, Pele or Messi? It’s the eternal debate. Who is the greatest footballer of all time? According to The Soccer 100, The Athletic’s new book ranking football’s hundred greatest players, the answer is Messi. But the North London based contributor Amy Lawrence cast a dissenting vote: she chose Pelé, deferring to those who witnessed the Brazilia…

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All Sparta, No Athens: The Decline and Fall of Empires 40:45

8d ago40:45

40:45

Whither America? It’s the question that the Swedish writer Johan Norberg examines in both a recent Washington Post op-ed as well as his new book, Peak Human. What we can learn from history’s great civilizations, Norberg argues, is that they decline when they turn inward, away from both the outside world and innovation. “All Sparta, no Athens”, as h…

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Where Does Abundance Come From? How to Reinvent a Fairer Future in our AI Age 44:18

9d ago44:18

44:18

I’ve spent this week in Washington DC where most people seem suspicious and sometimes even downright hostile about the future. Especially the supposedly “abundant” AI future being built in Silicon Valley. So where is this abundance going to come from? Some optimists, like The Great Progression’s Peter Leyden, believe there’s an emerging coalition o…

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The Zakaria Paradox: Fareed Zakaria on the Triumph of Reactionary Politics in Our Revolutionary Post-Industrial Age 44:34

10d ago44:34

44:34

Call it the Zakaria paradox. We live in revolutionary times, the CNN host and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria explains, and yet it’s the reactionary MAGA politics of resentment that is currently ascendant. It’s this paradox that laces Zakaria’s 2024 book, Age of Revolutions (just out in paperback), a narrative that traces the history of li…

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How American Eugenics Fueled Nazi Euthanasia: Psychiatry's Forgotten Complicity in the Holocaust 41:24

11d ago41:24

41:24

Did American eugenics really fuel the murderous euthanasia programs of the Nazis? Yes, according to Susanne Paola Antonetta, author of The Devil’s Castle, a history of Nazi eugenics and euthanasia. According to Antonetta, pioneering American eugenicists not only influenced Nazi thinking—Hitler himself corresponded with them and praised U.S. sterili…

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⛏️ “The Next Oil”: Why Critical Minerals Will Make or Break Superpowers — Mikhail Zeldovich | Ep. 100 1:04:03

11d ago1:04:03

1:04:03

In this episode, mining and commodities expert Mikhail Zeldovich joins host Constantin Kogan for a rare deep dive into the real engines of the global economy — critical minerals, geopolitics, and the future of resource investing.From BCG to Rio Tinto to negotiating in Beijing and analyzing assets in remote mining camps, Mikhail brings nearly two de…

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Building for Institutions with Eric Saraniecki 1:05:38

12d ago1:05:38

1:05:38

Eric Saraniecki has spent the past decade building the infrastructure that large financial institutions need to participate in crypto. As the Co-Founder and Head of Product at Digital Asset and a core builder behind Canton Network, Eric has a perspective that few operators in this industry share. He works directly with banks, asset managers, and ma…

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Chris Matthews on Robert F. Kennedy: Ten Reasons Why Bobby Still Matters 50:05

12d ago50:05

50:05

On November 20, 1925, Robert Francis Kennedy was born in Brookline, Massachusetts. A hundred years later, Bobby might matter more than ever. Chris Matthews, longtime host of MSNBC’s “Hardball”, is already the author of one bestselling RFK biography, Bobby Kennedy: A Raging Spirit. And today, to celebrate the centennial of his birth, the pugnacious …

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Ep.78 The Future of Collecting: Matt Bartlett on Tokenization, Syncd, and What’s Coming Next 27:13

13d ago27:13

27:13

Matt Bartlett, Head of Web3 at VanEck and the mind behind SegMint Collectibles, returns to break down how tokenized collecting is shifting faster than anyone expected. From building real infrastructure for brands to the upcoming launch of Syncd (a social collector app described as “Robinhood meets Tinder for collectibles). Matt shares why he believ…

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One Battle After Another in Hollywood: Why Gen Z Has Abandoned Cinema and What It Says About American Culture 43:42

13d ago43:42

43:42

25 movies and 0 hits: it’s been a particularly rough quarter for Hollywood. But as I discuss with the cultural commentator David Masciotra, it’s actually been a pretty strong quarter in terms of movie quality. From Paul Thomas Anderson’s “One Battle After Another” and Jennifer Lawrence’s astonishing performance in “Die My Love” to a glitteringly ba…

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Student Debt as Modern American Serfdom: A Mother Stole $200,000 in Her Daughter's Name 38:42

14d ago38:42

38:42

It’s the ultimate financial nightmare. Kristin Collier, a young student in Minnesota, woke up one morning to discover that her mother had taken out $200,000 in Kristin’s name. Collier tells this story in What Debt Demands, a book about America’s student debt crisis that is both personal and political. Collier, who proudly defines herself as a “demo…

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Keen on Hispanic America: How Latino TV Networks Reshaped American Politics and Culture 34:13

15d ago34:13

34:13

There are those who ask why so many Americans speak Spanish. But according to the Latino media entrepreneur and historian Javier Marin, you might as well ask why so many Americans speak English. Over the last half century, the Hispanic community in America has risen from 3.5 to 62 million. In his new history of Latino media, Live From America, Mari…

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Is There An Orchestrated Moral Panic Against AI? Or Is This Just Another Figment of a Paranoid Silicon Valley? 46:22

16d ago46:22

46:22

The big news in Silicon Valley this week of a supposedly orchestrated “Panic Campaign” against AI. According to the researcher Nirit Weiss-Blatt, the campaign about the apocalyptical inevitability of AI is being driven by doomers like former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Weiss-Blatt’s analysis are now being taken seriously in a Silicon Val…

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What Yogi Berra can teach Silicon Valley: From Tulip and Railway Manias to Dotcom and AI Bubbles 43:02

17d ago43:02

43:02

“Predictions are hard,” Yogi Berra once quipped, “especially about the future”. Yes they are. But in today’s AI boom/bubble, how exactly can we predict the future? According to Silicon Valley venture capitalist Aman Verjee, access to the future lies in the past. In his new book, A Brief History of Financial Bubbles, Verjee looks at history - partic…

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The Case for American Power: Why Hypocrisy is the Price of Idealism 40:24

18d ago40:24

40:24

America is not only a good country, but it can also make the world a better place. That’s the somewhat surprising conclusion of the progressive Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid, whose new book, The Case for American Power, argues that America remains the one great power that can improve the world. Hamid, once a militant anti-Iraq War campus ac…

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Obama as Gorbachev and Trump as Yeltsin: How America is Like the Soviet Union Before Its Collapse 46:12

19d ago46:12

46:12

We’ve done shows before on how contemporary America resembles late-stage Soviet society. But none quite as intriguing as with the Russian-born, US-based journalist Mikhail Zygar. In The Dark Side of the Earth, his new history of the Soviet Union’s demise, Zygar underlines the moral exhaustion of its citizens. People no longer believed in anything, …

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Dr Stranglove 2.0: Silicon Valley as the New Trillion Dollar Military-Industrial Complex 32:50

19d ago32:50

32:50

The world is a remake. Yesterday’s show featured the MAGA remake of The Handmaid’s Tale. Today it’s Dr Strangelove 2.0 and the remaking of the trillion-dollar military-industrial complex in Silicon Valley. As William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, notes, Dwight Eisenhower’s old military-industrial complex has migrated west t…

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The Handmaid's Tale Is No Longer Fiction—Welcome to the Brave New MAGA World of Trad Wives and State Fecundity 35:36

20d ago35:36

35:36

Back in 2021, Margaret Atwood came on the show to give her dark take on the American future. Four years later, Atwood’s prescience, particularly in her 1985 classic The Handmaid’s Tale, is increasingly self-evident. As the journalist Irin Carmon notes, MAGA America has become an Atwoodian dystopia of trad wives and state fecundity. But it is also, …

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From Pigeons to Polyamory: A New Yorker Cartoonist's Fix For American Loneliness 41:53

21d ago41:53

41:53

How to fix today’s epidemic of loneliness? For the New Yorker cartoonist and author Sophie Lucido Johnson, the answer involves both pigeons and polyamory. As she argues in her brand new book, Kin: The Future of Family, Johnson provides the tools to forge kinship in everything from asking for help on a grocery run, to choosing to have roommates late…

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Ep.77 Building a Sci-Fi Gaming Universe Across Chains - TCGs, AI, and Esports in Web3 25:42

21d ago25:42

25:42

Kohji, Co-Founder and Head of Game Development at Parallel, joins the show to break down how his team built one of Web3’s most ambitious gaming ecosystems. Blending a digital-first trading card game, an AI agent called Wayfinder, and multiple cross-chain game worlds into a single sci-fi franchise. We recap Parallel’s journey from pandemic Zoom brai…

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How Lawyers Created a Can't Do America: The Tragedy of Too Many Laws and Not Enough Innovation 43:52

22d ago43:52

43:52

Lawyers usually like the law. The more the better. But in addition to his life as a top corporate lawyer, Philip K. Howard has made a second career out of criticizing the invasion of law into American society. In books like The Death of Common Sense, Life Without Lawyers and his latest, Saving Can-Do, Howard argues that a uncontrolled thicket of le…

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Enstatification Over Enshittification: America as the New China 38:55

23d ago38:55

38:55

My neologism-du-jour is “enstatification”. It’s what is happening in MAGA America with Trump’s Gaucho-style swaggering into the economy and his reversal to autarky and a back-to-the-future Monroe Doctrine. With the growth of a 19th-century style state power, America is trying to become the new China. Meanwhile, as Keith Teare notes in his latest Th…

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Six Books, One Story: The Closing of the American Century 39:32

24d ago39:32

39:32

One big story captures all six books selected by the Financial Times for their short list of best business books of 2025. As the FT’s Senior Business Writer, Andrew Hill, notes, it’s the story of the shift in global economic power from the United States to China. It’s game over. From Dan Wang’s Breakneck, which contrasts China’s “engineering state”…

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Women Lie Too: A Smug San Francisco Intellectual Cross-Examines a Fearlessly Authentic Florida Psychologist 34:32

25d ago34:32

34:32

We all have our roles. I’m the smug San Francisco intellectual and the Orlando-based Dr Chloe Carmichael is the fearlessly authentic psychologist. She’s also the author of Can I Say That?, a feisty defense of free speech in our time of cancellation and unfriending. Most of us are too scared to say what we think, Carmichael argues about this anxiety…

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Beyond the New Deal: How the Left Must Reinvent Itself in a Populist Age 46:01

25d ago46:01

46:01

A week is a long time in American politics. I did this interview with Alex Zakaras last week, before the midterms and Trump’s slide in the polls. But in spite of Mamdani’s victory earlier this week, the left still needs to figure out how to successfully reinvent itself in the MAGA age. That, at least, is the argument that Zakaras, a progressive pol…

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Why Tech Billionaires Are So Angry: Elon Musk and the Gilded Rage of Silicon Valley 40:01

26d ago40:01

40:01

If money is supposed to make you happy, then why do tech billionaires like Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen seem so miserably angry? That’s the question at the heart of Jacob Silverman’s new book, Gilded Rage, an expose of Silicon Valley’s angry plutocracy. The weird thing is that a lot of these billionaires behave little differently from…

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Ep.76 Pixels, Plushies & Pop Culture: The Rise of Chimpers 26:48

27d ago26:48

26:48

Insight, co-founder of Chimpers, joins the podcast to talk how they've become one of the most recognizable new brands. Insight shares how Chimpers grew from a Bored Ape derivative art series into a multimedia IP spanning digital collectibles, plushies, trading cards, and viral short-form content with over 3 million followers across TikTok, Instagra…

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Zynga's Founder Justin Waldron 1:08:16

27d ago1:08:16

1:08:16

The conversation with Justin Waldron, co-founder of Zynga and now founder of Open Game Protocol, is a masterclass in how distribution models evolve in games and how Web3 could power the next one. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.decentralised.co…

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The Bell Curve Author Takes God Seriously: But What if God Doesn't Take Him Seriously? 46:10

27d ago46:10

46:10

Bell Curve author joins the intellectual mob (Peter Thiel, Jordan Peterson, Ross Douthat et al) and finds God Charles Murray, the infamous co-author of the Bell Curve, has joined the crowd and is Taking Religion Seriously. But what if God doesn’t take him seriously—or worse, finds his work on cognitive elites sufficiently annoying to sentence him t…

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Dignity Has Never Been Photographed: More Balkan Ghosts for our Indignant Times 42:44

28d ago42:44

42:44

Lea Ypi’s new book about her Greek-Albanian grandmother is a philosophical meditation on dignity, a history of Ottoman collapse and Balkan nationalism, and a warning about our own indignant age of manufactured identities and resurgent tribalism. Back in January 2022, Lea Ypi came on the show to discuss Free, her brilliant account of growing up in c…

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Democracy's Dangerous Flirtation with Autocracy: Michael McFaul on America's Abdication of Global Leadership 52:25

29d ago52:25

52:25

A former US ambassador to Russia warns of America’s slide into autocracy As American ambassador in Moscow between 2012 and 2014, Michael McFaul had a front row seat on Russia’s slide into autocracy. But in his new book, Autocrats vs Democrats, McFaul warns that it’s not just Putin, but also Xi and Trump who are fueling the “new global disorder”. An…

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Nobel Laureate Peter Agre: Why Scientists Must succeed Where Politicians Fail 27:37

1M ago27:37

27:37

A Nobel laureate on why we should sometimes trust scientists, and not politicians, to fix the future Peter Agre won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 2003, but he’s not interested in playing God. Or even know-it-all. “When Nobel Prize winners start predicting what the stock market would do, or who’s going to win the World Series, they may be beyond …

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Why Our Fear of Technology Is Nothing New—And Why That Should Give Us Hope: From Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT 38:42

1M ago38:42

38:42

Why our panic about AI is nothing new—and why history suggests we have far more creative agency over our technological future than either Silicon Valley’s determinists or the neo-Luddites would have you believe. Who isn’t afraid of AI? But according to the San Francisco-based technology historian Vanessa Chang, that’s nothing new. So, she says, our…

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Not Even God Can Judge Tupac Shakur: How a White Suburban Sportswriter Found the Humanity and Tragedy Behind Hip-Hop’s Most Misunderstood Star 36:57

1M ago36:57

36:57

WHY LISTEN? Because Jeff Pearlman strips away the myth to reveal the real Tupac Shakur—a brilliant, wounded, and fiercely human artist whose story still speaks to America’s struggles with family, race, trauma, and truth. Happy Halloween, everyone. To celebrate, we’re turning our attention to one of white America’s most mythic—and most feared—figure…

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🎮 Yat Siu on Animoca’s 600+ Web3 Investments & Gaming Dominance | #99 1:10:19

1M ago1:10:19

1:10:19

In this eye-opening episode, Animoca Brands co-founder & chairman Yat Siu joins host Constantin Kogan to unpack his extraordinary journey - from a 15-year-old Austrian kid coding MIDI software on Atari and getting paid via mailed checks, to building one of the first ISPs in Hong Kong, dominating early mobile gaming (200M+ downloads!), and getting d…

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Fighting to Tell the Truth: Why every Film about War is an Anti-War Film 39:48

1M ago39:48

39:48

After almost two decades in limbo, Michael Pack’s once-rejected Iraq War film finds its moment — a reminder that even the most supposedly “patriotic” war stories reveal the tragic cost of battle. Seventeen years after PBS rejected his Iraq War documentary The Last 600 Meters as “too pro-military,” conservative filmmaker Michael Pack is finally seei…

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Between the River and the Sea: American Jews and the Soiling of the Zionist Dream 53:53

1M ago53:53

53:53

Perhaps the real question isn’t whether we can still talk about Israel, but whether we can afford not to. Silence, Daniel Sokatch warns, is complicity — and in both America and Israel, there’s already too much of it. Four years ago, Daniel Sokatch came on the show to discuss Can We Talk About Israel?, a guide for what he called “the curious, the co…

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Ep.75 Inside Vibes TCG: Balancing Quality, Community, and Chaos | Jeremy G 27:18

1M ago27:18

27:18

Jeremy G from Orange Cap Games sits down to talk about what it’s actually like building one of the fastest-growing trading card games in the world, in real time. We get into why Vibes TCG is selling out print runs in weeks, how they’re landing partnerships with PSA/eBay/Barnes & Noble–tier players less than a year in, and what it takes to keep both…

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EP 47 — Solving the AI Curation Problem with Andrew Hill from Recall 53:36

1M ago53:36

53:36

AI agents are cheap to launch and impossible to trust. This episode is for people building and backing growth-stage crypto startups: how do you pick between thousands of on-chain “trading bots,” research assistants, and execution agents when most collapse in live conditions? Andrew Hill, CEO of Recall, lays out how Recall is trying to become crypto…

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The Vinci Code: How AI is Turning Everyone into James Bond 47:04

1M ago47:04

47:04

As AI radically democratizes the world, we’re all about to become James Bond — or so says longtime spook watcher (and player) Anthony Vinci. In his new book, The Fourth Intelligence Revolution,, Vinci argues that we must all become spies in order to save America. That’s the future of espionage in an age when, at least according to Vinci, the Chines…

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Huawei vs Ericsson: How Huawei Turned Sweden's "Neutral" Tech Advantage Into a Cold War Liability 41:17

1M ago41:17

41:17

Huawei matters, not just because it’s the world’s largest telecommunications company, but because it reveals so much about contemporary Chinese economics and politics. In House of Huawei, just shortlisted for the FT business book of the year, the Washington Post’s Eva Dou has written the untold story of this mysterious company that has shaken the w…

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How Smart is the MAGA Intelligentsia? The Professors, Philosophers, and Trolls who Transformed Rage into a Winning Political Ideology 43:25

1M ago43:25

43:25

So how smart is the MAGA intelligentsia? According to Laura K. Field — a longtime observer of the American right and author of Furious Minds — the making of the new right has less to do with original intelligence than with timing and marketing. What the professors, philosophers, and trolls of this movement have done so effectively, Field argues, is…