Speaker
Molly White
Appearances over time
1 episodes
Episodes
1
Podcasts
Quotes & moments
President Trump has cashed out over $1 billion from crypto holdings during his current term, according to Molly White.
Hundreds of prolific Wikipedia volunteer editors are threatening to strike after the Wikimedia Foundation laid off engineers from the community wishlist team, some of whom were involved in unionization efforts.
A 2024 Maine referendum to limit corporate political spending passed with 75% of the vote, reflecting broad bipartisan public opposition to money in politics.
Doppel ran voice deepfake simulations against real corporate employees. The results: targets spent an average of 6 minutes conversing with the AI, and 100% of them believed it was a real human afterward. Leo Laporte demonstrates with an AI clone of his own voice created from just 4 minutes of audio by the show's producer.
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.
The web is increasingly full of AI-generated content, which is then scraped as training data for the next generation of AI models. Molly White cites research on 'model collapse' — where models fed too much AI-generated training data begin to degrade. Meanwhile, Google's AI search is simultaneously destroying the human-created web it depends on.
Waymo robotaxis drove into floodwaters with passengers, got stuck circling roundabouts endlessly, and failed to recognize school buses. The company has paused all highway operations while it tries to diagnose problems in an AI-based system where the behavior is fundamentally harder to debug than the old rules-based approach. Sam Abuelsamid says nobody is making money on robotaxis yet — and won't be for years.
The auto industry lobbied furiously against seatbelts and emissions standards. They lost. And in the 60 years since, the industry innovated more than in its entire prior history. Sam Abuelsamid argues this is the perfect counter-argument to Silicon Valley's claim that AI regulation will kill innovation — constraints force creativity.
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket exploded during a hot fire test, destroying the company's only launchpad and setting back NASA's lunar program by at least a year. The explosion was so massive that Ring camera videos captured the sky lighting up miles away — and it puts the spotlight on how Blue Origin's failure creates a dangerous SpaceX monopoly on U.S. launch capacity.
Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical is a surprisingly sophisticated AI policy document, built on years of Vatican engagement with Silicon Valley leaders including Reid Hoffman and Microsoft's CTO. The core argument: a small group of tech elites in Silicon Valley and Beijing should not be deciding the future of AI for all of humanity.
The tech industry's favorite argument is that AI development is inevitable — if we don't do it, China will. Molly White and Pope Leo XIV both reject this framing, arguing that humans retain the capacity to decide whether, and how, to develop AI. It's not physics. It's a choice.
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?
Andreessen Horowitz has become the single largest political donor in the current U.S. election cycle, outspending Big Oil, Big Pharma, and even Elon Musk. Molly White and Gary Rivlin explain that crypto and AI companies are running identical playbooks: dump hundreds of millions into politics, write your own regulation, and crush competitors with compliance costs.
Ferrari's first EV, the Luce, costs $640,000 and carries design input from Jony Ive's firm LoveFrom. Sam Abuelsamid's verdict: the interior is genuinely interesting, but the exterior could belong to any premium brand — it just doesn't look like a Ferrari. Many suspect this is essentially what Jony Ive wanted Apple's canceled Project Titan car to look like.
Sam Abuelsamid's Operation Frodo charity drive transports rescue beagles from Nebraska to the Pacific Northwest, where demand for the breed far outstrips supply. This year's drive uses an all-electric vehicle fleet — Cadillac Escalade IQ, Lucid Gravity, Hyundai Ioniq 9, and Kia EV9 — covering 2,700 miles with free charging from EVgo at Pilot Flying J stations.
Peter Thiel, one of the architects of Silicon Valley's influence over American politics through companies like Palantir, has relocated to Argentina with his family. He already holds New Zealand citizenship and applied for Maltese citizenship. Molly White notes that crypto billionaires collecting passports to non-extradition countries is a familiar and worrying pattern.
Mark Gurman's Bloomberg leak shows iOS 27 will feature a persistent Siri window at the top of the screen, a chatbot-style interface, and deep AI integration throughout the OS. Gary Rivlin points out this is Apple's fourth AI strategy reveal in four years — and it's still leaning on Google Gemini underneath. The panel wonders whether Apple's famously polished UX will make AI more palatable to mainstream users.
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.
Analysis
What they talk about
- Technology 75%
- Government 25%
Connections
Shows they appear on and people they share episodes with. Drag to explore.
