AI Is Making Your Mind Easy to Hijack | Amanda Cassatt

**Timour Kosters** (0:00)
What is your Endgame? What are you working towards here?

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:02)
I really think if you have a goal, or if you have a protocol, then you are co-optable in that exact moment, because you're a machine, and you're too similar to the things being built to be meaningfully differentiated, and you're hijackable. I'm Amanda Cassatt, and you're watching Endgame.

**Timour Kosters** (0:22)
I listen to your content and read your blogs, and I think that there is a constant questioning of the purpose of technology, and what is it all actually for? What are we doing this all for? And I think there is an interesting concept here of human agency.

**Amanda Cassatt** (0:38)
Who here has an iPhone?
Who here identifies as owning that iPhone? You don't have root access to that iPhone. It's rented. It's a rented phone. And so what does it mean to own something versus rent something?

**Timour Kosters** (0:52)
You're talking with folks like Brian Johnson, Dr. Aladjee Srinivasan and many other interesting thinkers. What you're building is interesting, but why? What are you actually doing?

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:01)
What got me into crypto is the potential to change how the economy works.

**Timour Kosters** (1:11)
Amanda, welcome. It's really good to have you here.

**Amanda Cassatt** (1:14)
Thank you for having me. It's wonderful here.

**Timour Kosters** (1:16)
I am very excited about this conversation. As all of you know here, we at Edge think a lot about the futures that we're building, how to make them better, and what roles we have as builders and as people that will experience those futures. And Amanda is someone that has been thinking about this for a long time. She has built a career around making frontier tech legible to the rest of us. I kind of think of you as almost the CMO of Ethereum, or at least were back in the day. And more recently, she has built an amazing company called Serotonin and is the host of the Endgame podcast.
So, what I'd love to start with is this concept of Endgame. I'm curious how this idea came to be, why it's interesting to you, and what you're exploring in this project.

**Amanda Cassatt** (2:04)
There are so many podcasts, but so few that I enjoy listening to. It's this funny thing, right? And I just thought I would create the podcast I wish to see in the world, where I ask the questions about what I'm actually curious about. Without worrying what anyone's going to think. And it's like being a good dinner party guest.
If you're sat next to someone, and you don't really know them, you've got to figure out what's actually interesting that they could say, and make them say it, even if you're sometimes going to have a tense time. Because you want to make that time be wonderful. And that's kind of my theory behind it. Inviting people on that are building interesting things, thinking interesting thoughts, and asking them questions that might surprise them, that sometimes are on the edge of what's normal to talk about.

**Timour Kosters** (2:59)
That's a really good motivation for creating more content in the torrent of audio content out there. But I'm curious why this topic in particular, like why is the, what does Endgame mean to you? And why is that the kind of crux of what you're exploring with these folks?

**Amanda Cassatt** (3:17)
There's this funny thing. So my company Serotonin, we work with a lot of founders on telling their story and doing, bringing their products to market. And funnily enough, a lot of the time, and this happens more with kind of corporate type clients, but they'll come to me and they'll want me to retroactively create for them their raison d'etre, which is a bizarre position to be thrust into. The conversation goes like, we're building this thing. The thing is like this. But we need like a mission, and we need a reason why we're doing this in order to make this charismatic, in order to make it compelling.
And so I wanted to bring people on to Endgame to ask them or try to ask them why they're really doing what they're doing, like what their goal really is, how they really think about it. If you've been running a company for long enough, you have some cached answers about who you are and what you're doing and why.
And it gets kind of hard to break you out of them, but you can if you try to get into someone's actual motives and the actual thing that they want to see in the world.
And this happens sometimes on Endgame where we'll have a guest and we get under there and we discover sometimes without putting such a fine point on it that their deep motives and what they think is good and what they wish to see in the world are actually at odds to some degree with what they've created. And it's interesting to bring out those schisms and divergences in real time because we do contain multitudes.