Podcast
Plutopia News Network
Hosted by Plutopia News Network · EN
We talk to interesting people via podcast and weekly livestream.
32episodes
Episodes
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Amber Case: Calm Technology
1w ago01:02:06Tap to summarizeCyborg anthropologist Amber Case argues that technology should quietly support human life rather than dominate our attention. Contrasting clock-driven “Chronos” time with meaningful “Kairos” time, she explains how smartphones, unstable interfaces, and AI can disconnect us from our bodies, surroundings, creativity, and direct experience while requiring constant maintenance. Through calm technology—durable, intuitive, unobtrusive tools designed around human senses—Amber envisions objects that people can master, value, and preserve. The conversation also explores nature’s influence on creativity, technology hype throughout history, the cognitive risks of outsourcing skills to AI, and the fragility of digital culture, emphasizing the need for physical engagement, better questions, resilient archives, and technologies that serve humanity rather than dictate how people live. Amber is the author of the book Calm Technology. Amber Case: I created this certification called Calm Tech Certified that’s looking at the primary attention it takes to do something, your secondary attention… you know, the durability, does it work when it fails or does it become e-waste? Light, does it shine a bright blue light into your face when you’re trying to sleep? Is there diffusion on the LED? How does it sound? Does it sound like a microwave or not? What are the materials? Is it just some low quality plastic, or is there a wood facade on it? And how are the buttons articulated? This is my attempt to maybe try to get us out of this very temporary, like neo-Victorian era, in which our lives are filled with so many objects, but very few of them do we treasure. And getting back into an era in which we would care about what objects we make, and there’s an industrial design idea on how we could make these. That we carve them out of balsa wood first, and we then try different shapes and forms in the three-dimensional space, and we let our hands do the understanding versus CADCAM software and how it looks.
Transcribe →Brett Hurt: Love Conquers Fear
2w ago01:02:06Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia podcast interview, entrepreneur and author Brett Hurt presents the optimistic thesis of his book Love Conquers Fear: humanity can use AI and other rapidly advancing technologies to create broad abundance, cure disease, and expand access to energy and knowledge, but only if it replaces fear, tribalism, materialism, and profit-driven exploitation with love, cooperation, and concern for human flourishing. Drawing on Buddhism, multiple spiritual traditions, philosophy, and his experience in technology and investing, Hurt argues that mastering one’s mind is essential to overcoming suffering and that wealth and consumption cannot produce lasting happiness. He acknowledges legitimate concerns about AI, including overvalued startups, data-center demands, corporate concentration, and exaggerated predictions of job losses. But he expects open-source models, cheaper computing, and human-AI partnerships to make advanced intelligence widely accessible rather than render people obsolete. The discussion also distinguishes intelligence from consciousness, questions whether current AI can reach true general intelligence, and emphasizes that technology alone cannot resolve political and social problems. Ultimately, Brett believes humanity faces a choice between self-destruction and a global awakening rooted in shared identity, spiritual responsibility, and cooperation, and is optimistic that it will choose the latter. Brett Hurt: A lot of people — in America, especially — are afraid of AI. The recent reports show that only about 25% of Americans are positive on it. And there’s a reason why there’s a lot of hand-waving going on by CEOs that are doing layoffs at public companies saying that it’s because of AI. It’s really just a convenient excuse. It’s the next excuse that they’re using to not take the tough medicine and talk about the fact that they’re actually laying off people because they overhired during the pandemic, as a lot of people did, as we had this melt up to the ZERP period, the zero interest rate period. And now they’re correcting as a result. Actually, if you look at the job stats, we haven’t had a meaningful change in hiring, and for engineering, it’s actually up to a five-year high right now since AI came online in terms of large language models starting three and a half years ago. YouTube Video
Transcribe →Rob van Eijk: Privacy, AI, and Digital Sovereignty
3w ago01:00:16Tap to summarizeDr. Rob van Eijk discusses how Europe treats privacy as a fundamental right under the GDPR, contrasting it with the United States’ largely consumer-protection approach. He explains the distinction between pseudonymized and truly anonymous data, the principles of data minimization and purpose limitation, and how European authorities audit and penalize organizations for unlawful collection, tracking, and sharing. The conversation also explores cookie-consent fatigue, targeted advertising, AI privacy risks, and the advantages of narrow, purpose-built AI models over resource-intensive general systems. Broader topics include the environmental and social costs of data centers, Europe’s push for digital sovereignty, the value of open-source technology, AI-enabled cybersecurity threats, and uncertainty surrounding the continued viability of EU–US data-transfer arrangements as American regulatory independence weakens. If you want to look into the servers, where that information ends up in, obviously you need the power of law to go on the location and to do a spot check. And this is what the DPAs [Data Protection Authorities] are for. I’ve been on those teams as well in my previous life. And then you can basically take samples from databases and ask questions about “what does the script do?” “How long do you keep this data?” “To what extent do you consider this data anonymous or personal data?” “What about your compliance here?” “Did you do a privacy impact assessment?” Etc. , etc. Depending on the complaint, obviously, it matters which legal article is being examined and zoomed in on. But that’s typically what’s happening. So DPAs do have the ability and sometimes also they have to act. I mean, we had a lot of cookie complaints all over Europe. And some of these actually lead to fines, hefty fines as well. Links Guidelines 02/2026 on Anonymisation – European Data Protection Board Guidelines 01/2025 on Pseudonymisation “No, Trump v. Slaughter does not undo the EU-US data-transfer redress mechanism” – International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Data sovereignty Rob van Eijk: Hyper-Nudging – Previously on Plutopia News Network Video on YouTube
Transcribe →Living Your Truth: Counseling, Community, and LGBTQ Resilience
4w ago00:57:13Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia News Network interview, Dallas, Texas counselor and longtime LGBTQ advocate Candy Marcum reflects on more than four decades of providing affirming mental health care, her activism during the AIDS crisis, and her belief that LGBTQ people need support in accepting themselves amid discrimination and social pressure. She discusses growing up gay in West Texas, the influence of her medical family, and her path into counseling, as well as the continuing challenges faced by LGBTQ people, especially transgender people, during periods of political backlash. Marcum also explores common relationship issues such as communication, sex, finances, divorce, parenting, and family acceptance, explaining how counseling can help couples either repair their relationships or separate more constructively. She describes the importance of trust in therapy, professional boundaries, medication when appropriate, and virtual counseling, while emphasizing that a therapist’s role is not to fix clients but to help them understand themselves, manage their lives, and make their own choices. There are difficult things if you’re gay or lesbian, but there’s difficult things for a lot of things. And it gets better, and it’s character building. But we somehow have an idea of what a perfect person is, looks, and does. We try to put that on other people. I could tell people like to talk to me. And so I kind of put that together as I evolved and matured, and came to the conclusion that gay people need to feel good about themselves, need to feel good about being gay, and need to talk to someone about that. That’s how it all came together for me, was exactly, you know, what I am made of. I wanted to help other people, and knew I could do that through counseling. The Gottman Method Video on YouTube
Transcribe →Texas at a Crossroads
Jul 601:04:18Tap to summarizeThe Plutopia News Network team takes a wide-ranging look at the changing political landscape in Texas, using Jon Lebkowsky’s experience as a delegate to the Texas Democratic Convention as a springboard for a broader discussion of democracy, public policy, and the state’s future. The conversation explores Democratic efforts to compete statewide by expanding voting access, supporting public education, improving health care, protecting civil rights, and addressing climate and infrastructure challenges, while also examining water shortages, AI data centers, renewable energy, immigration, and Texas’s independent power grid. Along the way, the hosts compare American and British perspectives on issues such as universal health care and immigration, reflect on Texas’s political history, and critique the influence of Donald Trump and right-wing culture wars, ultimately arguing that the state’s future will depend on pragmatic solutions to environmental, economic, and democratic challenges rather than ideological battles. Jon: The candidates for the Democratic Party were not — for one thing, there were many seats where Republicans were running unopposed in the past. This time every seat in the state has a Democratic candidate. They’re concerned about voting rights and democracy and the erosion of democracy. So they want to expand voting access, which has certainly not been happening in Texas. Maybe they’re even considering going for online voter registration. Scoop: You’ll hear some of the Republican office holders Kind of kissing up to Trump about doing away with electric vehicles and the windmills, as he calls them. But the reality is that’s the only thing it’s going to save Texas. Wendy: This is one of the things that when you live outside the states, most countries have some form of nationalized health care. You know, Britain was, of course, the pioneer in this. And that anybody sees it as socialist to have universal health care or somehow wrong just boggles people’s minds. Video at YouTube
Transcribe →Peter Richardson: Brand New Beat
Jun 2901:03:38Tap to summarizePeter Richardson joins Plutopia to discuss Brand New Beat, his history of Rolling Stone’s first decade and its roots in San Francisco counterculture, Ramparts, and the Bay Area music scene. The conversation covers Richardson’s access to Rolling Stone’s private archives, the magazine’s founding by Jann Wenner and Ralph J. Gleason, its early tension between rock journalism and radical politics, its male-dominated “boys’ club” culture, and the roles of writers and editors such as Hunter S. Thompson, Ellen Willis, Ben Fong-Torres, Greil Marcus, Ed Ward, and Cameron Crowe. Richardson also explains how Rolling Stone evolved from a countercultural rock magazine into a broader entertainment and political publication, shaped by celebrity journalism, changing music economics, Annie Leibovitz’s photography, and the magazine’s eventual move away from its original revolutionary hopes. Peter Richardson: Jann Wenner came through town to promote his memoir, and I met him, and at the same event, I met Ben Fong-Torres. And I asked him if I had his support for this book, and that I didn’t want to do it if I didn’t have that support. And he said, well, what do you mean by that? And I said, I want you to talk to me. I don’t want you to tell other people not to talk to me. And I also want to make sure that I get to those papers that his biographer had access to and were not publicly available. It’s not in an archive somewhere that everybody can access. Those papers, they’re all the Rolling Stone papers going back to the origin of the magazine. Those papers, by the time I got to them, were in deep storage, secure storage, in a New Jersey warehouse. So I asked for access to those papers, too. And he said, okay, and that was it. That was actually a difficult thing to arrange because they’re not used to people coming in and pulling things out of a working warehouse to look at them for weeks at a time. So that was a big break.
Transcribe →Hugh Forrest: Growing Experiences
Jun 2201:02:56Tap to summarizeFormer SXSW co-president and chief programming officer Hugh Forrest joins Plutopia to reflect on nearly four decades helping shape South by Southwest, its growth alongside Austin, and the challenges of scaling creative communities without losing authenticity. Forrest discusses how SXSW succeeded by bringing diverse creative people together, but also how rapid growth created problems of cost, accessibility, logistics, and community displacement. Now leading Gather and Grow Experiences, he advises organizations to build meaningful, locally grounded, face-to-face experiences that prioritize quality over quantity, reflect their host communities, and foster human connection in an increasingly digital, automated, and politically fragmented world. Hugh Forrest: The most successful events and experiences — again, I like the word experiences more than events, as much as I use the word events — are very much a reflection of the local community that they’re in. And certainly, I think what we found with South by Southwest when we tried to do these events in other markets, was that you couldn’t treat this as a franchisable cookie cutter approach if it was going to be successful. If we’re going to do an event in Blank-blank city that’s going to be successful, it really has to reflect the the values, the the strengths, the interests of that particular city. So I don’t know that there’s a playbook on that. If anything, the playbook is reflect where you are. YouTube Video
Transcribe →Steven Bellovin: Don’t Get Hacked!
Jun 1501:01:05Tap to summarizeIn this Plutopia podcast episode, security researcher and educator Steve Bellovin discusses the increasingly centralized and balkanized internet, the practical and social problems with age verification, the limited role of consumer VPNs in an era of widespread encryption, and the history and evolution of cryptography. He also shares advice from his new book Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home: keep software updated, use two-factor authentication—especially on email and financial accounts—and rely on a password manager to avoid password reuse. Steve Bellovin: I think the most important things you can do are keeping your software up to date and using two-factor authentication. Especially on the most important accounts, and that especially includes your email account. Which other than maybe your bank account is your most important password, most important account, because it’s used to reset all of your other passwords. So two-factor authentication, keeping your software up to date, and, given reality, probably you should use a password manager because you cannot keep track of a hundred or more strong (I’m not fond of that word) different passwords. Password reuse is a much greater sin than a quote weak unquote password. Links Don’t Get Hacked, Protect Yourself at Home “Netnews: The Original Story” On the Early Days of Usenet: The Roots of the Cooperative Online Culture Video on YouTube
Transcribe →Deborah Cohen: Bad Influence
Jun 801:00:04Tap to summarizeAward-winning medical journalist Deborah Cohen joins the Plutopia News Network to discuss her book Bad Influence: How the Internet Hijacked Our Health. Deborah examines how social media algorithms, influencers, podcasts, wellness brands, and AI tools have transformed the way people find and evaluate health information. She argues that online platforms reward certainty, emotion, and personal storytelling over scientific nuance, while commercial incentives increasingly shape what health advice reaches the public. The conversation explores the erosion of trust in traditional institutions, the rise of health influencers and wellness marketing, the promises and pitfalls of patient empowerment, the quantified-self movement, GLP-1 drugs, and the growing role of AI in medicine. Throughout, Cohen emphasizes the challenge of navigating a digital health ecosystem where expertise competes with attention, commercial interests, and algorithmic amplification, leaving patients to determine whom—and what—to trust. Deborah Cohen: Obviously, you want to sell newspapers — if you’re a mainstream media, you want to get eyeballs on the screens. But this is all monetized on social media. So if you have a video that goes viral, you potentially stand to gain financially. Also, a lot of influencers work with companies for product placement, to advertise products. And there’s a massive market in healthcare. So there was one study that suggested — and this is a couple of years old, it’s a US study — that there’s over 3 million health providers on TikTok alone. So, We’re getting our information from people very much with a commercial incentive to sell. Video on YouTube:
Transcribe →Patient Power in the Age of AI
Jun 101:01:49Tap to summarizeThree longtime patient-empowerment advocates — e-Patient Dave deBronkart, Hugo Campos, and Gilles Frydman — join Plutopia to discuss how AI is transforming participatory medicine by giving patients new tools to understand medical research, manage personal health data, challenge institutional failures, and act with greater agency. They explore the promise and risks of large language models in healthcare, including hallucinated scientific references, poor interoperability, rare-disease knowledge gaps, and the need for patient-directed AI rather than institution-controlled systems. The conversation frames AI not as a replacement for human judgment, but as a cognitive aid that can help patients, caregivers, and communities ask better questions, validate information, and regain power in a broken healthcare system. Gilles Frydman: How do we find ways to? Help people who are not trained as scientists to get the latest scientific information so that they can get the best care in case they get diagnosed with serious stuff. Hugo Campos: How much agency do I have, and how much agency? does AI give me? And I put AI in these two different categories that tend to be opposing in terms of agency, which are what I’ve been calling institutional. AI versus patient directed AI. Dave deBronkart: My best talks have been entirely about the trajectory of empowerment. Not specific to healthcare, but empowerment in general through the last half century and how access to information alters that. Links Society for Participatory Medicine Collaborative Healthcare Action Measurement Platform (CHAMP) Gilles Frydman at LinkedIn Critical AI Health Literacy as Liberation Technology: A New Skill for Patient Empowerment by Hugo Campos and Liz Salmi e-Patient Dave: Democratizing Healthcare Patients Use AI (Substack) Video from our YouTube channel:
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