Podbit · This Week in Tech (Audio)
Molly White reveals that Donald Trump has cashed out over $1 billion from crypto holdings since taking office — not counting illiquid meme coin wealth worth billions more. A CoinDesk poll found most respondents oppose elected officials personally profiting from crypto, but only a tiny fraction were even aware Trump was doing it.
Where this was said
At 1:08:20 · chapter starts 1:00:30
Google has gone all-in on AI Overviews, placing AI-generated answers at the top of every search result and giving users no easy way to opt back to blue links. The market response is immediate: DuckDuckGo installs jumped 30% in a single week, [1] — Leo Laporte "Google has bet its search product on AI Overviews, putting AI-generated answers front and center. The backlash is immediate: DuckDuckGo ins…" 1:13:55 with Molly White reporting her own mother discovered DuckDuckGo independently. Gary Rivlin frames the deeper problem: with approximately 58% lower click-through rates to source websites from AI search, the financial model sustaining the web's content creators is collapsing. Leo Laporte confesses he has already largely stopped using search engines — his AI agents query X, Reddit, Hacker News, and his RSS feeds directly, synthesizing the top stories. The panel identifies the ouroboros problem Molly White has tracked in research: AI scrapes the web, generates AI content, the web becomes AI slop, future AI trains on that slop, and model quality degrades through 'model collapse.' Gary Rivlin quotes Mustafa Suleiman acknowledging that Microsoft is trying to avoid training on AI-generated data — but admits the distinction is increasingly hard to enforce.
A 2024 Maine referendum to limit corporate political spending passed with 75% of the vote, reflecting broad bipartisan public opposition to money in politics.
The panel traces a direct line from Citizens United to the impossibility of meaningful AI regulation: when money equals speech, the entities with the most money — tech companies standing to make trillions — will always write the rules. Larry Lessig has been warning about this for years. Molly White offers a rare note of hope: Maine's 75% referendum vote shows the public wants change, even if Congress doesn't.
President Trump has cashed out over $1 billion from crypto holdings during his current term, according to Molly White.
Google has bet its search product on AI Overviews, putting AI-generated answers front and center. The backlash is immediate: DuckDuckGo installs jumped 30% in one week. Even Molly White's mom is using DuckDuckGo without being told to. The panel debate: is Google destroying the web ecosystem that feeds its own AI?
Ten years ago, 90% of tech media coverage was relentlessly negative and Kalanick felt he couldn't speak freely. Today, the rise of independent podcasters and Elon Musk buying Twitter has fundamentally changed the game — and it's why he's finally willing to talk.
Kay Classman, 28, was arrested for repeatedly posing as a 16-year-old and enrolling in Bronx high schools across multiple districts. She wasn't a predator — just someone so sad and lonely she wanted her lost childhood back. That's somehow sadder.
Disney, Meta, and Paramount have collectively paid Trump roughly $60 million to settle what Galloway calls nuisance lawsuits — all routed to his presidential library. Newsrooms are folding. The White House is handpicking press pool participants. This is what the end of a free press looks like.
One cheap fake documentary made by a teenager in his mother's basement convinced 16% of Americans that 9/11 was an inside job. Social media didn't invent conspiracy — it just gave it a rocket engine.
A progressive organization with a stated mission to destroy Turning Point USA received millions from ActBlue and is now publicly pushing the narrative that TPUSA insiders and Israel murdered Charlie Kirk. Andrew Wilson traced the network of accounts all amplifying the same conspiracy in perfect unison.
The microphone-bomb theory fails on every physical front: no smoke, no ignition, mic on the wrong side of the wound. And the .30-06 rifle round used is extensively documented by the US Army — it does not always produce a through-and-through wound. Wilson argues this is a well-studied projectile with well-understood behavior.
Andrew Wilson publicly offered Candace Owens $300,000 to debate her theory that Israel and TPUSA murdered Charlie Kirk. She refused. He argues that flat-earthers will debate anyone, but Kirk conspiracy theorists won't defend their claims under scrutiny.
Erika Kirk became the CEO of TPUSA while grieving her husband's murder in public, and now faces tens of thousands accusing her of conspiring to kill him. Andrew Wilson calls it mind-boggling psychological torture. The sparklers at the memorial weren't suspicious — they were a grieving widow doing her best in an impossible situation.
Joe Rogan and Andrew Wilson watch a bystander video of the Corey Ruiz police shooting in Madison, Wisconsin live on air. The video is so blurry they initially think a female officer fired the fatal shots. They later learn a male officer did, after Ruiz allegedly pulled a knife and stabbed officers. Their conclusion: you cannot have a hot take on a story you don't understand yet.
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