Will A.I. Break the Internet? Or Save It?

The internet is in decay. Do a Google search, and there are so many websites now filled with slapdash content contorted just to rank highly in the algorithm. Facebook, YouTube, X and TikTok all used to feel more fun and surprising. And all these once-great media companies have been folding or shedding staff members, unable to find a business model that works. And into this weakened internet came the flood of A. I.-generated junk. There’s been a surge of spammy news sites filled with A. I.-generated articles. TikTok videos of A. I.-generated voices reading text pulled from Reddit can be churned out in seconds. And self-published A. I.-authored books are polluting Amazon listings. According to my guest today, Nilay Patel, this isn’t just a blip, as the big platforms figure out how to manage this. He believes that A. I. content will break the internet as we know it. “When you increase the supply of stuff onto those platforms to infinity, that system breaks down completely,” Patel told me “Recommendation algorithms break down completely. Our ability to discern what is real and what is false breaks down completely. And I think, importantly, the business models of the internet break down completely.” Patel is one of the sharpest observers of the internet, and the ways technology has shaped and reshaped it. He’s a co-founder and the editor in chief of The Verge, and the host of the “Decoder” podcast. In this conversation, we talk about why platforms seem so unprepared for the storm of A. I. content; whether an internet filled with cursory A. I. content is better or worse than an internet filled with good A. I. content; and if A. I. might be a kind of cleansing fire for the internet that enables something new and better to emerge. Mentioned: Help us win a Webby Award “Scenes from a dying web” by Casey Newton “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” by Walter Benjamin “257 CES gadgets in 3 minutes — CES 2015” by The Verge Book Recommendations: The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank Liar in a Crowded Theater by Jeff Kosseff Substance by Peter Hook Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany Extremely Hardcore by Zoe Schiffer Beyond Measure by James Vincent Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Claire Gordon. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing from Isaac Jones and Efim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu and Kristin Lin. Original music by Isaac Jones. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Sonia Herrero.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Ezra Klein?

  From New York Times Opinion, this is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  Earlier this week, we did an episode on how to use AI right now. Now I want to turn the question around and look at how AI is being used on you right now. One of the conversations that's been sticking in my head was with this person in the AI world, who was saying to me that if you look at where AI use has been sticky, if you look at where people keep using it day after day, you're looking at places where the product doesn't need to be very good. That's why it's really helpful for college and high school students. College and high school papers, they're often not very good. That's sort of their point. It's why it's working pretty well for very low-level coding tasks. That kind of work doesn't need to be very good. It gets checked and compiled and so on. But there's something else it is working really well for, which is spewing mediocre

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  content onto the internet. And the reason is that a lot of what is on the internet right now isn't very good. Its point is not to be good. Spam isn't very good. Marketing emails aren't very good. Social media bots aren't very good. Frankly, a lot of social media posters, even when they're not bots, are not very good. There are all kinds of websites and internet operations that are filler content designed to give search engines something to index. Filler content structured to do well in a Google result. So people click on it and then see an ad. Something you're going to hear a lot of in this episode is a term SEO. And that is what we're talking about. Search engine optimized.

• 1:48Ezra Klein?

  Things that are built to rank highly in Google, in Bing, just to get somebody to click on the website. It doesn't always matter to that person if they read the website. But into this comes AI. Over the last year, Google and the big social platforms, they have been flooded with AI spam, flooded with fake news sites filled with stolen or made up stories. There are TikToks of AI voices reading random text off of Reddit, nonsensical YouTube videos for kids. It's no novel observation to say the internet has felt like it is in a state of decay for a while. Google search results, Facebook, Twitter, or X, YouTube, TikTok, all of it felt better, more human, more delightful, more spontaneous, more real a few years ago.

• 2:31Ezra Klein?

  So what happens when this flood of AI content hits this decaying internet? And then, and I actually think this is the harder, weirder question, what happens when this flood of AI content gets better? What happens when it doesn't feel like garbage anymore? What happens when we don't know if there's a person on the other end of what we're seeing or reading or hearing? Should we care? What if that content is actually better than a lot of what we're getting right now? Is that an internet we want to be on or not? My friend Neelai Patel is the co-founder and editor in chief of the tech news site The Verge and host of the Great Decoder podcast. And I gotta be honest, I can't tell from this conversation if Neelai is more or less

• 3:14Ezra Klein?

  optimistic than me, because he seems to think AI is going to break the internet. But he seems kind of happy about it. Okay, before we get into the actual conversation here, we are nominated for a Webby, speaking of hopefully good things on the internet, in the best interview talk show category. We are up against Oprah here, so we are decided underdogs. But this is a voting category, so if we're gonna win, we need your help. You can vote using the link in the show notes or go to vote.webyawards.com. And as always, if you want to email me with guest suggestions or thoughts on the episode, that is [email protected].

• 3:56Ezra Klein?

  Eli Patel, welcome to the show.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me. This is very exciting.

• 4:00Ezra Klein?

  Let's just begin with like the big question here, which is, what is AI doing to the internet right now?

• 4:07Speaker 01

  It is flooding our distribution channels with a cannon blast of, at best, C plus content that I think is breaking those distribution channels.

• 4:16Ezra Klein?

  Why would it break them?

• 4:18Speaker 01

  So, most of the platforms of the internet are based on the idea that the people using those platforms will, in some sort of crowdsourced way, find the best stuff. And you can disagree with that notion. I think maybe the last 10 years have proven that that notion is not 100% true when it's all people. When you increase the supply of stuff onto those platforms to infinity, that system breaks down completely. Recommendation algorithms break down completely. Our ability to discern what is real and what is false break down completely. And I think importantly, the business models of the internet break down completely. So if you just think about the business model of the internet as there's a box that you can upload some content into, and then there's an algorithm between you and an audience, and some audience will find the stuff you put in the box.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  And then you put an infinity amount of stuff into the box. All of that breaks. My favorite example of this is Amazon, which allows people to self-publish books. Their response to the flood of AI-generated books was to limit the number of books you can upload to like three books in a day. This is really, like, that's a ridiculous response to this. It just implies that the systems that we've built to sort of organize audiences and deliver the right thing to the right person at the right time, they're not capable of an increase in supply at the level that AI is already increasing.

• 5:37Ezra Klein?

  Ah, thank you for bringing in the supply language. So, I've been trying to think about this as this supply and demand mismatch. We have already had way more supply than there is demand. I wasn't buying a lot of self-published Amazon books. Is the user experience actually different?

• 5:56Speaker 01

  That's a great question. The folks who write the algorithms, the platforms, their CEOs, they will all tell you this is just a new challenge for us to solve. We have to sort out what is human, what is AI-generated. I actually think the supply increase is very meaningful. Like, maybe the most meaningful thing that will happen to the internet, because it will sort out the platforms that allow it to be there and have those problems and the places that don't. And I think that has not been a sorting that has occurred on the internet in quite some time, where there's two different kinds of things. The example that I'll give you is every social media platform right now is turning into a short-form video home shopping network. LinkedIn just added short-form videos.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Like, they're all headed towards the same place all the time, because they all have the same pressures.

• 6:46Ezra Klein?

  Didn't we already pivot to video a couple of years ago?

• 6:48Speaker 01

  We pivoted to video. I actually love it when LinkedIn adds and takes away these features that other platforms have. They added stories, because Snapchat and Instagram had stories, and they took the stories away, because I don't think LinkedIn influencers want to do Instagram reels. But now they're adding it again. And what you see is those platforms, their product, the thing that makes the money, is advertising, which is fine. But they don't actually sell anything in the end. They sell advertising. Someone else down the line has to make a transaction. They have to buy a good or a service from someone else. And if you don't have that, right? If you're just selling advertising that leads to another transaction, eventually you optimize the entire pipe to the transaction to get people to buy things, which is why TikTok is now,

• 7:31Speaker 01

  like, all of TikTok is TikTok Shop, because they just want you to make a transaction. And that, those platforms are going to be most open to AI, because that is the most optimizable thing to get people to make a transaction. And I think real people will veer away from that.

• 7:45Ezra Klein?

  So I want to hold on to something that you're getting at here, which, to me, is one of the most under-discussed parts of AI, which is, how do you actually make money off of it? And, right now, there are not actually that many ways. So what you can do is you can pay some money to the big AI companies, so you get the pro version of their models. There is a certain amount of enterprise software flying around. You can, you know, subscribe to versions of Microsoft Copilot, or there's going to be more things like that, where you can subscribe to something that is supposed to get you to buy, you know, the next iteration of Slack, or whatever the enterprise software is. But it is hard to not notice that a lot of the AI is being built by companies that

• 8:30Ezra Klein?

  exist on advertising. Google has a huge AI program. Meta has a huge AI program. And advertising is fundamentally a persuasion game, right? They are trying to persuade you to do something with the advertising to buy something. And right now, it's pretty bad. I always think it's funny how long after I make a significant purchase, I will be advertised to to make that purchase again. It's like, you just bought a fair amount of luggage. Would you like any more luggage from the same company you already bought? Like, it's a very weird. But if this gets good, what is that? What are safe business models and what are very unethical ones? Because when we talk about harms and benefits from AI, how people are making money off of it is going to be a pretty big intermediary there.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've been talking to a lot of CEOs of web companies and email companies on Decoder for the past year. I asked them all the same question. Why would you start a website? Why would you send an email? And so you ask the CEO of Squarespace or Wix, or we just had the CEO of Mailchimp on the show. And her answer is a little terrifying, like, maybe openly terrifying. She's like, we'll collect enough data on you, and then we'll know exactly when to send you an email, so that you buy the right thing at the right time. And we'll just have AI automate that whole process. So you come to the website for your local dry cleaner or luggage store. You type in your email address to get the 10% off coupon. We look at what you were looking at. And then somewhere down the line, when some other data broker has told us that you searched for a flight, we will send you

• 9:59Speaker 01

  a precisely targeted AI-generated email that says, you're going to Paris, buy this suitcase that matches your style from our store at this dynamically generated price.

• 10:08Ezra Klein?

  But how is AI changing that at all? Because that sounds to me like the thing that is already happening.

• 10:13Speaker 01

  So this is what I mean by the increase in scale. That's the dream. This is supposed to be what actually happens. But they can only do it in broad cohorts, which is why you get the luggage email after you've bought the luggage email, right? Or the luggage ad after you bought the luggage ad. They know you are a person who used a Wi-Fi network in a certain location at a certain time. They can track that all over the place. They know what you've searched for. They know that you went and made a luggage transaction. You are now categorized into people who are likely to buy luggage, whether or not that loop was closed. You put some luggage in a shopping cart. Okay, but that's still a cohort. They can only do that broadly. And those cohorts can be pretty refined, but they can only do it broadly. With AI, the idea is we can do that to you individually.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  The AI will write you an email, will write you a marketing message, will set you a price. That is a hundred X increase in the amount of email that will be generated. So now our email algorithms will be over flooded with commercial pitches generated by AI. And this sort of makes sense, right? It makes sense for a Google to want to be able to dynamically generate AI advertising across the entire web. It makes sense for Meta to invest massively in AI so that when you're watching Instagram and you scroll a dynamically generated Instagram video that is an ad just for you appears. And all of that is down to their belief in targeting. Their absolute belief that they can sell more products for their clients by targeting the ads more directly.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  And you are in that uncanny valley where the targeting doesn't actually work as well as it should, and no one will admit it.

• 11:47Ezra Klein?

  When I get spammy advertising, I don't really think about there being a human on the other end of it.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:54Ezra Klein?

  Maybe to some degree there is, but it isn't part of the transaction happening in my head. There are a lot of parts of the internet that I do think of there being a human on the other end. Social media, reviews on Amazon, books, right? I assume the person who wrote the book is a person. How much of what I'm currently consuming may not be done by a human in the way I think it is? And how much do you think that's going to be in a year or two or three years?

• 12:25Speaker 01

  I'm guessing your media diet is pretty well human created because I know that you are very thoughtful about what you consume and what signals you're sending to the algorithms that deliver you content. I think for most people.

• 12:36Ezra Klein?

  My moms. Let's use my moms.

• 12:38Speaker 01

  Moms are good. I would love to take my mom's phone and throw it into the ocean and never let her have it again. I openly fear what content comes through my mother through WhatsApp. It terrifies me that I don't have a window into that. I can't monitor it. The same software I want to use to watch my daughter's internet consumption, I would love to apply to my parents because I don't think they have the media literacy. They're much older to even know. Okay, this might be just some AI-generated spam that's designed to make me feel a certain way. And I think that is the heart of what's coming. I think right now it's higher than people think, the amount of AI-generated noise, and it is about to go to infinity. And the products we have to help people sort through those things fundamentally are in

• 13:22Speaker 01

  tension with that. Google is the heart of this tension. You can take any business at Google and say, what happens when the AI flood comes to you? And I don't think they're ready for it.

• 13:32Ezra Klein?

  How can they not be ready for that?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Because the other one's making it. This is the central tension of, in particular, I think, Google. So, Google depends on the web. The richness of the web is what Sundar Pichai will tell you. He used to run search. He thinks about the web. He cares about it. And you look at the web and you're like, you didn't make this rich at all. You've made this actually pretty horrible for most people, most of the time. Most people, if you search Google to get a credit card, that is a nightmarish experience, like, fully nightmarish. It feels like getting mugged. We just went on vacation and I Googled a restaurant review in Cancun. And I got, halfway through the actual review, when I realized it was sponsored content by certified Angus beef. And like, just in the middle of this review, they're like, this restaurant uses this kind of beef and here's why it's great. And I was like, oh,

• 14:19Speaker 01

  this is, I read an ad. And Google should have told me that this was an ad. Like, this isn't useful to me in any way. Like, I'm discarding this. I don't want this anymore. I don't think Google can discern what is good or bad about the web. I don't think Google has reckoned with how its incentives have shaped the web as a whole. And I certainly don't think the people who are making Google Search can say, AI is bad. AI content is bad. Because the whole other part of Google that is making the AI content can't deal with that.

• 14:47Ezra Klein?

  This helps explain a story that I found very strange. So, 44 Media, which is a sort of newer outlet reporting on tech, they found that Google News was boosting stolen AI versions of news articles. And we're seeing this all over, right? An article by me, or by some other journalist, shows up in another place, very slightly rewritten by an AI system, with an AI-generated author and photo on top of it, right? So we're seeing a lot of this. And when 44 Media asked Google about this, Google News said that for them, it was not a really relevant question whether an article is by an AI or a human. That struck me as a very strange thing to say, to admit. Is your view that it's because?

• 15:31Ezra Klein?

  Their business is in the future replacing human-generated content with AI and saying that's good? Like, that's the thing happening at the center there?

• 15:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, fundamentally, I think if you are at Google and the future of your stock price depends on Gemini being a good competitor to GPT-4 or 5 or whatever OpenAI has, you cannot run around saying, "This is bad. The things it makes are bad." I think this is actually in stark contrast to how people feel about that right now. One of the funniest cultural trends of the moment is that saying something is AI-generated is actually a great way to say it's bad. So I saw people reacting to the cover of the new Beyonce album, Cowboy Carter, which is just a picture of her on a stunning horse. It's Beyonce. It's very obviously human-made. And people who don't like it are like, "Was this made by AI?" And it's like, "Well, you know. You know for a fact that Beyonce did not have AI generate the cover of a new album."

• 16:22Speaker 01

  Like, you can look at it and you can discern that it isn't. But you can say, "Was this AI-generated?" And that is code for "this is bad."

• 16:29Ezra Klein?

  What about when it's not?

• 16:31Speaker 01

  I don't know how fast that is coming. I think that is farther away than people think. I think "will it fool you on a phone screen?" is here already. But "is this good?" is, I think, farther away than people think.

• 16:43Ezra Klein?

  But a lot of internet content is bad.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  That's fair.

• 16:46Ezra Klein?

  I mean, you know this better than me. Look, I think it is axiomatic that AI content is worse right now than it will ever be.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 16:55Ezra Klein?

  I mean, the advance in image generation over the past year has been significant. That's very real. And preparing for this conversation, I found myself really obsessing over this question. Because one way to talk to you about this is there's all this spammy garbage coming from AI that is flooding the internet. But you could imagine an AI developer sitting in the third chair here and saying, "Yeah, sure, but eventually it's not going to be spammy garbage. We're getting better at this." And compared to what people are getting from a lot of websites, you know, if you're going to Quora or Ask.com or parts of Reddit or whatever, we can do better than that. The median AI article within three years is going to be better than the median human-produced piece of content.

• 17:39Ezra Klein?

  And I really, I found that I did not know how to answer the question in myself. Is that a better or a worse internet? To take almost Google's side on this, should it matter if it's done by a human or an AI? Or is that some kind of...

• 17:56Ezra Klein?

  What's the word like sentimentality on my part?

• 17:59Speaker 01

  I think there's a sentimentality there. If you make a content farm that is the best content farm that has the most answers about when the Super Bowl starts and those pages are great, I think that's a dead end business. Google is just going to answer their questions. I think that's fine. I think if you ask Google what time the Super Bowl is, Google should just tell you. I think if you ask Google how long to boil an egg, Google can just tell you. You don't need to go to some webpage laden with ads and weird headings to find those answers. But these models in their most reductive essence are just statistical representations of the past. They are not great at new ideas. And I think that the power of human beings sort of having new ideas all the time, that's the thing that the platforms won't be able

• 18:41Speaker 01

  to find. That's why the platforms feel old. Social platforms like enter a decay state where everyone's making the same thing all the time. It's because we've optimized for the distribution and people get bored. And that boredom actually drives much more of the culture than anyone will give it credit to, especially an AI developer who can only look backwards.

• 19:00Ezra Klein?

  I'm going to spend some time thinking about the idea that boredom is an under discussed driver of our culture, but I want to get at something else in there. This idea of Google answering the question. We're already seeing the beginnings of these AI systems that you search the kind of question that might at another time have brought you to The Verge, to CNN, to the New York Times, to whatever. But now perplexity, there's a product ARC. They'll basically use AI to create a little webpage for you, right? The AI itself will read, you know, read in quotation marks. The AI itself will absorb some websites, create a representation of them for you. And you'll never go to the place you were that actually

• 19:42Ezra Klein?

  created that data about the past that the AI used to give you something in the present. Casey Newton at Platform, his word was, he felt revulsion. And that was how I felt about ARC's product here. You take all this work other people have done, you remix it under your thing. They don't get the visit to their webpage. Nobody has the experience with the work that would lead them to subscribe, right? But two things in the long run happen from that. One is that you destroy the score of growing value, growing informational value.

• 20:18Ezra Klein?

  That you need to keep the internet healthy. You make it, say, impossible to do the news gathering that allows there to be news because there's no business model for it. The other is that you also destroy the training data for the AI itself because it needs all that work that we're all doing to train, right? The thing they need is data. They are just colluding that data with AI content currently, but it also can begin to destroy that data by making it unprofitable for people to create more of it in the future. I think Brian Broderick has called AI search a doomsday cult. How do you think about this sort of deeper poisoning of the informational commons?

• 20:56Speaker 01

  I think there's a reason that the AI companies are leading the charge to watermark and label content as AI-generated. Most of them are in the metadata of an image. So most pictures we see on the internet, they carry some of that metadata that describes the picture, what camera it was taken on, when it was taken, what image editing software was used. So Adobe and a bunch of other companies are like, we'll just add another field that says, here are all the AI-generated edits that were made on this photo. I think it is in their self-interest to make sure that that is true, then they can detect it and exclude it if they need to. I think there are moral reasons to do it, too.

• 21:28Ezra Klein?

  So their training data remains less corrupted?

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think there's a very straightforward incentive for them to figure out the watermarking, labeling stuff they want to do. And they have coalitions and task force. And Adobe talks about the image of the Pope in the puffer jacket as a, quote, "catalyzing moment" for the metadata of AI because people freaked out. They're like, oh, this thing looks real. But they have a real incentive to make sure that they never train on other AI-generated content. So that's one aspect, which I think is just sort of immediately self-interested. The other thing is, that's why I keep asking people, why would anyone make a webpage? There's a site I think about all the time. It's called HouseFresh, which is a site that only reviews air purifiers. And to me, this is the internet. Like, this is what the internet's for. You care about air purifiers so much, you've set up a series of webpages where you express

• 22:15Speaker 01

  your expertise in air purifiers and tell people which ones to buy. That's all they do. And Google has started down-ranking them because big publishers boost their content because AI is lifting their content, because companies like CNN, in order to gain some affiliate ad revenue somewhere, have set up their own little mini-content farms full of affiliate links. I'm not saying we don't do, like, other publishers do this. But the point of these algorithms is ideally to bring you to the HouseFresh people, is to bring you to the person who cares so much about air purifiers, they made a website about air purifiers, and we're not doing that anymore. And so if you were to say, where should a young person who cares the most about cars, or who cares the most about coffee, or whatever, where are they gonna go?

• 23:00Speaker 01

  Where are they gonna make stuff? They're gonna pick a closed platform that ideally offers them some built-in monetization, that ideally offers them some ability to connect directly with an audience. They're not gonna go to a public space like the web where they might own their own business, which would be good, but they're also basically at the mercy of thieves who come in the night and take all their work away.

• 23:19Ezra Klein?

  But also, if you kill HouseFresh, then two years later, when you ask the AI, "What air purifier should I get?", how does it know what to tell you?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know the answer to that question.

• 23:34Ezra Klein?

  I don't think they do either.

• 23:35Speaker 01

  Yeah. Again, this is why I think that they are so hell-bent on labeling everything. I think they need some people around in the future.

• 23:42Ezra Klein?

  But labeling is good. I mean, that keeps you from getting too much AI garbage in your dataset. But replacing a bunch of the things that the entire informational world relies on to subsidize itself, to fund itself, like this to me is a thing that they don't have an answer for.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Wait, let me ask you a harder question. Do they care?

• 24:04Ezra Klein?

  Depends on they. But I don't think so.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:07Ezra Klein?

  Or at least, they care in the way that I came to realize Facebook, now Meta, cared about journalism. People say they didn't care about journalism. I don't believe that's actually true. They didn't care enough for it to mean anything. Like, if you asked them, if you talked with them, if you had a drink, they would think what was happening to journalism was sad. And if it would cost them nothing, they would like to help. But if it would cost them anything, or forget costing them anything, if they would begin to help and then recognize an opportunity had been created that they could take instead of you, they would do that. That's the way they care.

• 25:12Ezra Klein?

  So when you have a financial crisis, you have something oftentimes called a flight to quality. Investors flood into the things they know they can trust, usually Treasury bonds. And I've been wondering if this won't happen in this era of the internet, right? If I wanted to take an optimistic perspective on it, that as you have a sort of ontological collapse, as you don't know what anything is, I already feel this way with product reviews. When I search product reviews, I get reviews now from tons of sites that I know don't really invest that much in product reviews. CNN, all these other organizations that I know have not really, truly invested in high-quality product reviewing. When you search, you now get them, right? They're telling you what to buy. That makes me trust The Wirecutter,

• 25:56Ezra Klein?

  which is a New York Times property, but that I know we've put a lot of money in more. Similarly, the other one I use, which is a Vox Media property, is The Strategist at New York. Because I know, like, I knew what the development of that looked like. I know what they put into that. You can imagine this happening in news for things like The New York Times or The Washington Post. You can imagine it in a couple of different places, right? If people begin to feel that there is a lie at the heart of the internet they're being given, right? That they can't figure out what's what and who's who, and if it is a who at all. I mean, maybe you just end up in this internet where there's more of a value on something that can be verified.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  I keep a list of TikToks that I think each individually should be a PhD thesis in media studies. It's a long list now. And all of them are basically just layers of copyright infringement in like, in their own weird way. My favorite is, it's a TikTok that has millions of views. It's just a guy reading a summary of an article in the journal Nature. As millions of views, this is more people that have ever considered any one article in the journal Nature, which is a great journal, I don't mean to denigrate it. It's a proper scientific journal, they work really hard on it. And you just go five steps down the line and there's a guy on TikTok summarizing a summary of Nature. And you're like, what is this? What is this thing that I'm looking at?

• 27:18Speaker 01

  Will any of the million viewers of this TikTok buy one copy of Nature because they have encountered this content? Why did this happen? And the idea is, in my mind at least, that those people who curate the internet, who have a point of view, who have a beginning and middle and an end to the story they're trying to tell all the time about the culture we're in or the politics we're in or whatever, they will actually become the centers of attention. And you cannot replace that with AI. You cannot replace that curatorial function or that guiding function that we've always looked to other individuals to do. Right? And those are real relationships. I think those people can stand in for institutions and brands. I think the New York Times, I'm your Ezra Klein, a New York Times journalist, means

• 28:03Speaker 01

  something. It appends some value to your name, but the institution has to protect that value. I think that stuff is still really powerful. And I think as the flood of AI comes to our distribution networks, the value of having a powerful individual who curates things for people, combined with a powerful institution who protects their integrity, actually will go up. Right? I don't, I don't think that's going to go down. You mentioned 404 Media. 404 Media is a bunch of journalists who were at Motherboard Advice. Advice is a disaster. They quit, they started a new media company, and we now all talk about 404 Media all the time. This thing is 25 minutes old. We don't talk about Jason Kober, the editor in chief, we talk about 404 Media, the institution that they made. A new brand that stands for something, it does reporting, it talks about something. I think there's still meaning there.

• 28:50Ezra Klein?

  You said something on your show that I thought was one of the wisest single things I've heard on the whole last decade and a half of media, which is that places were building traffic thinking they were building an audience. And the traffic, at least in that era, was easy. But an audience is really hard. Talk a bit about that.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, first of all, I need to give credit to Casey Newton for that line. That is something at The Verge, we used to say that to ourselves all the time, just to keep ourselves from the temptations of getting cheap traffic. I think most media companies built relationships with the platforms, not with the people that were consuming their content. They didn't think about them very much. They thought about what was hitting in the Facebook algorithm. They thought about what Google Search wanted for Game of Thrones coverage that day, which was everything all the time. And everybody had a Game of Thrones program. Vox had one, The Verge had one, The New York Times had one. Why? Like, that's weird. It's we constructed this like artificial phenomenon.

• 29:48Ezra Klein?

  Because people searched for, I mean, just to say the answer, because we know it. Because people searched for Game of Thrones content the morning after the show. And that was an easy way to get a bunch of traffic. And at least a theory of the time was that you could turn traffic into money through advertising, which was not totally wrong, but not nearly as right.

• 30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:08Ezra Klein?

  As the entire era of business models was predicated on.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  The other thing that those business models were predicated upon was you'd get so good at being a supplier to one platform or another with Game of Thrones content, or whatever it was, that they would pay you money for it directly. That Google would say, this is the Game of Thrones link that most people are clicking on. We ought to pay Vanity Fair for its Game of Thrones content to surface it. Or all of BuzzFeed was, we're going to be so good at going viral on Facebook that Facebook will pay us money. And that absolutely didn't pan out. But no one hedged that bet, which is utterly bananas to me. No one said, "We should take these people who came here for Game of Thrones and figure out how to make them care about us, and we should care about them." Everyone just looked at it as a number that was going up against some amount of interest as demonstrated by some platform somewhere.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  And I think that is the mistake. It is the mistake that creators on the creator platforms are not making because the terms of that arrangement are so much more cynical. You see TikTokers, they know at any moment their videos can get down ranked, their accounts can get yanked, their stuff can get banned. They're constantly trying to get you to go to Instagram. Every YouTuber gets their wings when they make the video about how they're mad at YouTube. There's a woodworking YouTuber that I used to follow, and he just sort of got to the point where he was like, "I hate YouTube, I'm leaving." And it's like, dude, you made videos about jointing wood. Like, what are you doing? And it's like, his relationship with the platform was so cynical that he was like, "I'm moving my business elsewhere, you can sign up for a masterclass."

• 31:38Speaker 01

  Those individuals have these very cynical, very commercial relationships with the platforms that the media companies, for some reason, just never hedged. And so they actually do have audiences. And I think media companies need to get way back on the game of having true audiences.

• 31:52Ezra Klein?

  This gets to something that does worry me about this phase of AI hitting the internet, which is it's hitting an internet in a moment of decay and weakness. And here, by internet, I mean this sort of content generating internet. And I break that into a couple of categories, right? The media is very weak right now. The media business, we have seen closures left and right, layoffs left and right. I mean, a bunch of players like Vice and BuzzFeed, who are believed to be like the next generation of juggernauts, are functionally gone as news organizations. The big content platforms, they're doing fine from a financial standpoint, but people hate them, right?

• 32:33Ezra Klein?

  The relationship between the users and Facebook, the users and YouTube, the users, and to some degree even, it seems now TikTok, is just darkening in a way that it wasn't in 2014. And so there's a lot of desperation on all sides. Sometimes the desperation is you don't have the money to pay the journalists you need to do the work you want to do. Sometimes the desperation is that you're trying to figure out something to make this audience like you again and not get eaten by TikTok or whatever comes after TikTok. And into this comes AI and all the money that AI seems to bring. And even the AI companies might pay you some money for your stuff, right? Reddit just licensed a bunch of its content as training data to Google. So you

• 33:16Ezra Klein?

  could really imagine a thing happening again where all these media companies or content companies of some form or another license out what they have for pennies on the dollar because at least you can make some money off of it that way. But what worries me is both the weakness, but that also it does not feel to me like anybody knows what their relationship is to this is supposed to be. Do you use it? Are you just training data for it? Like, what are you in relationship to the AI era?

• 33:44Speaker 01

  As a consumer or as a producer?

• 33:45Ezra Klein?

  As a producer.

• 33:47Speaker 01

  The idea that media companies are going to license their stuff to the AI companies is just the end of the road that we've been on for a long time. We are suppliers to algorithms. Okay. And in any normal functioning capitalist economy, supplier margins get squeezed to zero and then maybe we all die. Like, that's a game we've been playing without saying it for a long time.

• 34:05Ezra Klein?

  Which I think is why you see the New York Times suing OpenAI, right? Like, a real desire to not be in that game again.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  You see the New York Times suing OpenAI, but you don't see them suing Google. You don't see them de-SEO-ing pages across New York Times. Like, they still need the audience from these platforms. And I think there's a very tense relationship there. The idea that you could sue OpenAI and win some precedent that gives you enormous amount of leverage over Google, I think is a very powerful idea. Most of the media company executives I talked to would love for that to be the outcome. I don't know if that's going to be the outcome. I feel like I should warn your audience, like, I'm a failed copyright lawyer. I wasn't good at it, but I did it for a minute. Copyright laws are coin flip. Like, these cases are true coin flips. They are not predictable. The legal system itself is not predictable. Copyright law inherently is unpredictable. And a really interesting facet of the internet

• 34:53Speaker 01

  we live in today is that most of the copyright law decisions were won by a young, upstart, friendly Google. YouTube exists because it was Google. Like Viacom famously sued YouTube and they might have won and put it out of business. But Google, the friendly Google company with the water slides and the office, the upstarts that made the product you loved, went and won that case. Google Books, we're going to index all the books without asking for permission. They won that case because they were friendly Google. And the judges were like, look at these cute kids making a cool internet. Like it was new and novel. Google image search. These are all massive copyright decisions that Google won. As a startup company run by young people, building a new product that the judges were using on their Dell desktops or whatever.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  These aren't those companies anymore. They're going to go into a legal system as behemoths, as some of the biggest, best-funded companies in the world that have done bad things to the judges' teenage children. Like, all these things are different now. And so I don't know if Google or OpenAI or Microsoft gets the benefit of being like, we're young and cool and hip. Brand copyright laws who are will.

• 36:02Ezra Klein?

  You don't want to staunch innovation, right? Like, that was a big fear in that era. We don't know what we're building. And that's still the thing you hear, and it's not even untrue. You crack down copyright and maybe you do staunch innovation. You don't crack down copyright and maybe you destroy the seed corn of the informational commons. It's very fraught, I mean, for the copyright judges, but, but also just for all of us.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are you as a producer on the internet is totally governed by copyright law. Like, a joke at The Verge is that copyright law is the only functional regulation of the internet. The entire internet is just speech. It's all it is, top to bottom, it's speech. In the United States, we don't love a speech regulation, and I think for good reason, but we love copyright law. We love it, can't get enough of it. Like, YouTubers know the YouTube copyright system back and forth because that's the thing that takes their content down. And we allow this regulation on the internet at scale. And so the parameters of this one body of law, as applied to AI, which is a taking, training an AI model is fundamentally a taking. And the AI companies-

• 37:07Ezra Klein?

  Taking in the legal sense of the term.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  No, in the moral sense of the term. They come to your website and they take your stuff. It's not a zero sum taking, but they've extracted value to create more value for themselves. I think that's just a moral taking. There's some permission there that did not occur. Joanna Stern at the Wall Street Journal just interviewed Mira Murati, the CTO of OpenAI, about training data for Sora, the video generator. And Mira said, "We just use what's publicly available." And it's like, "Yo, that doesn't make any sense." There are lots of rules about what's publicly available. Like, you can't just take stuff because you can link to it on the internet. That's not how it actually works.

• 37:44Ezra Klein?

  Let me try to take the argument I hear from the AI side of this, which is that there is functionally nothing in human culture and human endeavor that is not trained on all that has come before it. That I, as a person, am trained on all this embedded knowledge in society, that every artist has absorbed all this other art, that the AI, I mean, this is just learning. And as long as you are transforming that learning into something else, as long as you are doing something new with that learning, then, one, copyright law is not supposed to apply to you in some way or another, although that's obviously complicated.

• 38:28Ezra Klein?

  But, two, to go back to your point of morality, if you want to see culture, humanity, technology advance, it is also not supposed to apply to you. Because if you do not let things learn, people, organizations, models, you are not going to get the advances built on all that has come before. And like, that's how we've always done it. What's your answer to them?

• 38:51Speaker 01

  I hear this idea all the time, often from the sorts of people in Silicon Valley who say they do first principles thinking, which is one of my favorite phrases, because it just means, "What if we learn nothing?"

• 39:04Speaker 01

  What if none of the history of the world applied to us and we could start over to our benefit? And that's usually what that's code for. So I hear those arguments and I think you guys just weren't paying attention. You're entering a zone where the debate has been raging for decades. A lot of copyright law is built around a controversy around player pianos and whether player pianos would displace musicians. But you just have to rewind the clock to like the 80s and be like, should sampling be legal in music? And now we are having the exact same conversation in the exact same way with the exact same parameters. The only thing that's different now is any kid can sample any song at scale, feed it into an AI and have Taylor Swift sing the Dolly Parton song for them. That's a weird new turn in the same debate, but it is a massively age old debate. And the parameters

• 39:49Speaker 01

  of that are pretty well known, right? It's how do you incentivize new art? How do you make sure that it's economically valuable to make new things? How do you make sure the distributors don't gain too much power? And then how do you make sure that when people are building on the past, the people whose art they're building on retain some value? And that, I think, is the AI companies have no answer to that last question. We're just going to take a bunch of stuff and now we're just going to say, look, we just summarized the web. The people who made the web get nothing for that. Will you pay us 20 bucks a month for the service? But somewhere in there, as a policy matter, as a moral matter, the people who made the foundations of the work should get paid. And this is where the sampling debate has ended up. There's a huge variety of licensing schemes and sample clearances

• 40:34Speaker 01

  so that those artists get paid.

• 40:36Ezra Klein?

  Judge Patel, if you're thinking about cases in this area, like, what do you think? The answer is here. Is it the sampling model? Is it something else? What do you think the right broad strokes resolution is?

• 40:48Speaker 01

  Let me stick on the music example for one second because I think music is really interesting because it's kind of a closed ecosystem. There's only so many big music companies. It's the same lawyers and the same executives and the same managers going to the same clearing houses and like having the same approaches. We're going to give you a songwriting credit because we interpolated the baseline of this song into that song. And now here's some money. And this is the mechanism by which we'll pay you.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  The AI companies are not a closed ecosystem. It is just a free for all. It's the open web. It's a bunch of players. So I think in those cases, you're just going to end up with vastly more outcomes, which I think leads to even more chaos. Because some companies will take the deal. I'm guessing the New York Times is going to pursue this all the way to the Supreme Court. Like, this is an existential issue for the Times. Some companies don't have the money to pay for Supreme Court litigation, and they'll take a shittier deal, like pennies on the dollar deal, and maybe just go out of business. And I think that range of outcomes in the near term represents like a massive failure of collective action on the part of the media industry. To not say, this is actually the moment where we should demand

• 41:59Speaker 01

  that human journalists doing the real work that is dangerous are valuable. We need them. And we will all together approach these players in a way that creates at least a semblance of a closed ecosystem.

• 42:11Ezra Klein?

  Well, the media industry, but also at some point, this is a regulatory question, a question of law. I mean, nothing is stopping Congress from making copyright law designed for the AI era. Nothing is stopping Congress from saying, this is how we think this should work across industries, right? Not just media, but novelists, but everybody.

• 42:30Speaker 01

  Well, there are some things that stop Congress from doing a lot of things. The idea that Congress could pass a massive rewrite of copyright law at this moment in time is pretty far afield.

• 42:40Ezra Klein?

  But won't and couldn't, I do want to make this distinction here. What you're saying is Congress is too polarized and bitterly divided over everything. It can't do anything and can't get anything done. And like, that's my old job, man, I know. But what I am saying is that you could write a law like this. So I mean, this is something that ultimately I don't just think is like a media collective action problem, but is going to be ultimately a societal level collective action problem, right? And maybe we cannot, as a society, act collectively very well. I buy that totally.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  So there is one law, right? There's the JCPA, the Journalism Competition Preservation Act, which allows media companies to escape antitrust law and bargain collectively with whoever they wish to bargain with. I don't know if that's going to pass. I know there's a lot of interest in it. So there are these approaches that have appeared in Congress to solve these problems. But the thing I'm getting at is you have sort of the rapacious wolves, and then you have an industry that's weak, as you said, that I think is not motivated to value the work it does as highly as it should. And that is step one.

• 43:44Ezra Klein?

  You and I are both fans of Marshall McLuhan, the media theorist. And he's got this famous line, you know, the medium is message. And more deeply, what he says is that people, when they see a new medium, they tend to think about the content. For television, it's the shows, right? What do you think about this show or that show? For Twitter, the tweets. For, you know, a newspaper, the articles. We have to look behind the content to the actual medium itself, to understand what it is trying to tell you, right? Twitter, at least in its early stages, was about, all these things can and should be discussed at 140 characters. Television made things much more visual. Things should be entertainment, right? They should be entertaining. The news should be entertaining, which was a little bit of a newer concept back then.

• 44:27Ezra Klein?

  I've been trying to think about what is the message of the medium of AI? What is a message of the medium of ChatGPT, of Claude 3, et cetera? One of the chilling thoughts that I have about it is that its fundamental message is that you are derivative. You are replaceable. AI isn't good at ideas yet. It is good at style. It can sound like Taylor Swift. It can draw like any artist you might want to imagine, right? It can create something that looks like Jackson Pollock. It can write like Ezra Klein. It may not be exactly as good, you know, at high levels of these professions, but what it is functionally is an amazing mimic.

• 45:12Ezra Klein?

  And what it is saying, and I think this is why a lot of people use it for long enough, end up in a kind of metaphysical shock, as it's been described to me. What it's been saying is you're not that special. And that's one reason I think that it can, you know, we worry about it proliferating all over social media. It can sound like a person quite easily. We've long passed the Turing test. And so, one, I'm curious if that tracks for you. And two, what does it mean to unleash on all of society a tool that its basic message is, it's pretty easy to do what you do, sound like you sound, make what you make?

• 45:52Speaker 01

  I have a lot of thoughts about this. I disagree on the basic message. I do think one of the messages of AI is that most people make middling work and middling work is easy to replace. Every email I write is not a great work of art. You know, like so much of what we produce just to get through the day is effectively middling. And sure, AI should replace a bunch of that. And I think that metaphysical shock comes from the idea that computers shouldn't be able to do things on their own. And you have a computer that can just do a bunch of stuff for you, and that changes your relationship to the computer in a meaningful way. And I think that's extremely real. But the place

• 46:33Speaker 01

  that I have thought most about AI was at the Eras Tour in Chicago, when I watched Taylor Swift walk onto a stage, and I saw 60,000 people in Soldier Field just lose their minds, just go nuts. And I've been watching the show, and I'm a Taylor Swift fan, and I was there with my niece and nephew and my wife, and we were all dressed up. And I, why am I thinking about AI right now? Like truly, why am I thinking about AI right now? It's because this person has made all of these people feel something. The art that has been created by this one very singular individual has captivated all of these people together because of her story, because of the lyrics, because it means something to

• 47:14Speaker 01

  them. And I watch people use Midjourney or generate a story with an AI tool, and they show the art to you at the end of it, and they're glowing. Like, look at this wonderful AI painting. It's a car that's a shark that's going through a tornado, and I told my daughter a story about it. And I'm like, yeah, but this, I wouldn't, I don't want anything to do with this. Like, I don't care about this. And that happens over and over again. The human creativity is reduced to a prompt. And I think that's the message of AI that I worry about the most, is when you take your creativity and you say, this is actually easy. It's actually easy to get to this thing that's a pastiche of the thing that was hard. You just let the computer run its way through whatever statistical path

• 47:57Speaker 01

  to get there. Then I, I think more people will fail to recognize the hard thing for being hard. And that's like, truly, the message of AI is that maybe this isn't so hard. And there's something very dangerous to our culture embedded in that.

• 48:11Ezra Klein?

  I want to put a pin in the hard things, easy things. I'm a little bit obsessed by that and I want to come back to it. But first, I want to talk about AI art for a minute because I do think we're talking about everything that's going to come on the internet. We're talking about AI art. Obviously, much of it is going to get better. Some of it is not distinguishable, right? You talked about the example where somebody comes and hands you the AI art, says, hey, I did this with an AI. Like eh.

• 48:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:36Ezra Klein?

  And I have that experience a lot. I've also really been trying to use these systems and push them and play with them and, you know, have AI character relationships on my phone, you know, with the kin droids and whatever. And there is this deep hollowness at the center of it. It is style without substance. It can mimic me. It can't think.

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Have you found an AI that can actually write like you?

• 49:01Ezra Klein?

  I found an AI that can mimic certain stylistic tics I have in a way that is better than I think most people could do. I have not found any AI that can in any way improve my writing, for all that you're constantly told it can. And in fact, the more I try, the worse my writing gets. Because typically, what you have to do to improve your writing is recognize if you're writing the wrong thing. That I don't find writing hard. I find thinking hard.

• 49:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:29Ezra Klein?

  I find learning hard. How good a piece of writing is going to be for me is typically about, did I do enough work beforehand? And the AI can never tell me you didn't do enough work. You need to make three more phone calls. You need to read that piece you skimmed. But it can mimic, and I think it's going to get better and better at mimicking, right? I think GPT-3 was much worse at mimicking me than GPT-3.5 was, worse than GPT-4 is, and GPT-5 will be even better than that. I believe this is going to get stronger.

• 49:59Ezra Klein?

  It raises a question of whether there is anything essential about something being from a human in a wide frame way. Taylor Swift is singular, but the point is that she's a singular phenomenon. Do we care that things come from people? I was thinking when I was preparing for the show with you, you know, the Walter Benjamin essay, it's called "Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

• 50:20Speaker 01

  This is like the Verge's DNA.

• 50:22Ezra Klein?

  Is it? Yeah. So it comes out in 1935. It's about the ability to reproduce art. And he says, and I'll quote it here, "That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art." And he goes on to say, "By making many reproductions, it substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence." Benjamin is saying at different times here, in different ways, and I'm going to simplify it by trying to bring it into the present, but that there is something lost from when you take the painting and make a copy of a painting. And he's obviously right, and he's obviously then, on the other hand, a lot of people like copies of paintings, right? It's easy for the artist to think more of the original than the original deserves to be thought

• 51:05Ezra Klein?

  of. But I wonder about this with humans, right? How much of something is just the fact that there's a human behind it? My kindroid is no worse at texting me than most people I know. But the fact that my kindroid has to like me is meaningful to me, in the sense that I don't care if it likes me.

• 51:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:24Ezra Klein?

  Because it's no achievement for it to like me. The fact that there is a human on the other side of most text messages I send matters. I care about it because it is another mind. The kindroid might be better in a formulaic way. The kindroid might be better in terms of like the actual text. I can certainly tune it more to my kind of theoretical liking, but the friction of another person is meaningful to me. Like, I care that my best friend likes me and could choose not to. Is there an aura problem here?

• 51:53Speaker 01

  It is so hard to make someone else feel anything other than pain. Like, it's just like, it's just like-

• 51:59Ezra Klein?

  Jesus Christ, no, it's the darkest thing I've ever heard you say.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, but I believe it in my soul.

• 52:06Ezra Klein?

  Really?

• 52:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think the hardest thing to do-

• 52:08Ezra Klein?

  It's gonna take a really different turn as a show right now.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Maybe.

• 52:13Ezra Klein?

  You don't make people laugh? You don't give them hugs?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  No, I think that's hard. I think that effort is worth it. That's why I don't think it's a dark thing to say. I think the essence of being a good person is pointing your effort at making other people not feel pain. I think bullies make people feel pain because it's easy. Again, I come back to Taylor Swift and Soldier Field. The thing that was going through my head is, this person is making 60,000 people feel joy. And she's doing it through art. That is the purpose of art, right? The purpose of art is to inspire feelings, inspire emotion. And so I look at this AI and it's like, okay, we're gonna flood our stuff and the only emotion that it is really meant to inspire is materialism, is a transaction.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  That's bad. I just, I just think that's bad. I think we should make some stuff that inspires more joy, that inspires more affection, that inspires more consternation. And one of the messages embedded in the medium of AI is that there is an answer. That's weird. That is a truly weird thing for a computer to say to you. You ask it about a war and it's like, I won't answer that question because there's no answer there. You ask it about how to cook an egg and it's like, here's the answer. You're like, what are the four steps to fold a bed sheet? It's like, here's the answer. I did it. Tell me a bedtime story for my child. It says, here's an answer. I'll just deliver this to you, your specifications. And I think the thing you're saying about having another mind there is you want to be in a relationship,

• 53:43Speaker 01

  like an emotional relationship with another person. Maybe it's mediated by technology, maybe we're face to face like we are now. But that tension and that reality of, oh, I can direct my effort towards negative and positive outcomes. I have never found it with an AI.

• 53:57Ezra Klein?

  Shannon Valor is a philosopher of technology. And she's got a book coming out called The AI Mirror. And I like the way she puts this because there's this way that the AI turns this somewhat warped mirror back on ourselves. When I was saying a few minutes ago that the message of AI is that your derivative, that leaves something out. What it's really saying is that the part of you that often the economy values is derivative is copyable. Because we actually ask people a lot of the time to act like they're machines. This is why I don't take much comfort in the Taylor Swift example. You said a few minutes ago, most people do mediocre work most of the time.

• 54:42Ezra Klein?

  Even great people do mediocre work most of the time. We constantly ask huge amounts of the population to do things that are very rote, right? Keep just inputting this data on forms. Keep filling out this tax form, right? Some lawyers are arguing for the Supreme Court, a lot of them just write up various contracts, right? That's a good job in the sense that it pays well, it's inside work, but it doesn't ask you to be that full of a human being. Now, you can imagine a sort of utopian politics in society, and people on the left sometimes do, that this comes into and it's like, great, we can automate away this derivative inhuman

• 55:27Ezra Klein?

  work. And people will be free to be more full of human beings, right? You actually, like, maybe the value of you is not what you can create, but what you can experience, right? The AI can enjoy a day at the park with its family. But we have an entire society set up to encourage you to premise your self-worth on your work and your wages. And also, if you lose that work and that wages, to rob you of that self-worth. And one thing I'm sure of is that our politics and our economic systems are not going to advance as quickly as AI is going to advance, right? This is where I think people do properly worry about automation. When, when people lost manufacturing jobs to lower wage workers in China, we didn't

• 56:09Ezra Klein?

  say, great, you don't have to do this stultifying work in the factory anymore. We said, you're out of work. You're screwed. And I do think one of the the deep confrontations of it is like, what do we value in people? And then how do we express that value? Because I think what AI in some ways is going to take advantage of here, or at least is going to challenge, is that to the extent we value people socially for their economic contribution or what they're paid, that's a pretty thin read for human value to rest on.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I buy that. One of my favorite things that I've covered in the past years is a thing called robotic process automation, which is very funny, just abstractly deeply hilarious. There are lots and lots of companies throughout the United States that built computer systems 10, 15 years ago, 20 years ago. Hospital systems are famous for this. They have billing systems. They have buildings full of people who use Microsoft Excel on Windows 95. And replacing that is costly and complicated. It can't break. You know, if you put in the new system and it didn't bring all the data over in exactly the right way, the whole hospital stuff's working. So they just buy other computers to use their old computers, which is wild. And there's like billion dollar companies that do this. They will sell you a brand new state of the art computer,

• 57:26Speaker 01

  and it will connect to the keyboard and monitor jack of your old computer. And it will just use the Windows 95 for you, which is just bonkers. It's like Rube Goldberg machine of computers using old computers. And then your office full of accountants who knew how to use a system all go away. But then AI creates the scale problem. Okay, what if we do that? But instead of some hospital billing system built in the 90s, it's just the concept of Microsoft Excel. And now you can just sort of issue a command of computer and it'll go use Excel for you. And you don't need an accountant, you don't need a lawyer. And I think even in those cases, what you're going to find is the same thing you talked about with writing. You have to know what you want. You have to know what the system doesn't know. You have to be able to challenge the model and have it deliver you.

• 58:10Speaker 01

  The thing that in most business model conversations I find to be the most important word are assumptions. And then you can poke at that really hard.

• 58:19Ezra Klein?

  What percent of workers are actually asked to poke at the assumptions of their organization? Because I worry it's not as high as you think it is or implying there. I'm not worried about Taylor Swift, I'm not worried about Nilay Patel. And I don't just want to make this about wages and jobs, it's just sort of another AI conversation. But I do, I mean, as you're saying, these are billion dollar companies that automate people who do backend office work, right? Already. All over the place. There's a huge amount of work like that. And if I felt confident, as some of the economists say, that we'll just upmarket people into the jobs where they use more human judgment. David Autor, who's a great trade economist at MIT, just made this argument recently, that what AI is going to do is make it possible for more people to exercise judgment and discernment within their work.

• 59:03Ezra Klein?

  And I hope he is right. I really hope he is right. But I think a lot of organizations are not set up for a lot of people to use judgment and discernment. They treat a lot of people like machines and they don't want them doing things that are complicated and step out of line and poke at the assumptions in the Excel doc. They want the Excel doc ported over without any mistakes. Yeah. It seems possible to me that we're going to get to that. Do you think their bosses want to be able to poke at the assumptions, though? But if you, you know, I mean, this is actually something I believe about the whole situation. The economy needs fewer bosses and workers. Yeah. Like, think about this in the journalist's context or the writing context, where I think what AI naturally implies that it's going to do is turn many more people into editors and writers.

• 59:48Ezra Klein?

  Because for a lot of content creation that doesn't require a lot of poking at assumptions, mid-level social media marketing, a lot of people are doing that job right now. But the people doing marketing for a mall. Yeah. That is the MailChimp example. That is the product they are building. And so what you have then is, you know, we used to have a bunch of these social media marketers, and now you have one person overseeing a couple of systems, like making sure they didn't say something totally crazy. But you need fewer editors and you need writers. I mean, you know how The Verge is structured, you know how The Times is structured. And like, this is one of my deep worries. And then this goes to the thing you were getting at earlier, which is, one way I think that AI could actually not make us more productive, more innovative, is that a lot of the innovation,

• 1:00:33Ezra Klein?

  a lot of the big insights happen when we're doing the hard thing, when we're sitting there trying to figure out the first draft, or learn about a thing, or figure out what we're doing. One of the messages of the medium of AI is be efficient. Don't waste your time on all this. Just like tell the system what to do and do it. But there's a reason I don't have interns write my first draft for me.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:53Ezra Klein?

  They could do it, but you don't get great ideas, or at least not as many of them, editing a piece of work as you do reporting it out, doing the research, writing the first draft. Like, that's where you do the thinking. And, you know, I do think AI is built to kind of devalue that whole area of thinking.

• 1:01:10Speaker 01

  We are working on a big story at the verge right now that I'm very excited about. But there are four of us right now in an argument about whether we should tell that story in chronological order or as a series of vignettes. There is no right answer to this question. There's just four people who are battling it back and forth.

• 1:01:26Ezra Klein?

  Think vignettes.

• 1:01:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, by the way, I'm on team vignette.

• 1:01:29Ezra Klein?

  Good man.

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  My, you know, my belief is that it's easier to digest a long story when it's composed of lots of little stories as opposed to one long one. I'm being outvoted right now, editor in chief. I should replace him off AI, just get him out of here. But that is the kind of work that I think makes the end product great. And I think going from good to great is still very human. Into the economy, though, you're right. Most people are not challenged to go from good to great. Most people are challenged to produce good consistently. And I think that is kind of demoralizing. Like, I don't know how many first year Deloitte consultants you have encountered in your life. I've encountered quite a few if I went to law school. It's like a, we made a, there's a factory of that thing.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Our first year law associates, they're not in love with their jobs. They're in love with the amount of money they make, that's for sure. But, you know, any sort of first year associate doing doc review in a basement. Yeah, you could probably just be like, tell the AI to find the four pieces of relevant information in these 10,000 page records from whatever giant corporation we're suing today. That's fine. I think that there's a turn there where maybe we need less first year associates doing that thing and we need more first year associates doing something else that is difficult that the AI can't yet do. And I think a lot of this conversation is predicated on the notion that generative AI systems, LLMs, will continue on a linear curve up in terms of capability. I don't know if that's true.

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  But I hear a lot of this conversation. I'm like, There's always a thing they can't do. And maybe that thing is not the most amount of scale, social media marketing for them all. But it is always the next amount of complexity. And there's no guarantee that this set of technologies will actually turn that corner. And you can keep going all the way to AGI, right? Like, there's no guarantee that an LLM is going to hit AGI and just like run the world economy for us. There's a lot of steps between here and there that I think human beings can fit into.

• 1:03:44Ezra Klein?

  So I want to go back then to the internet for a bit.

• 1:03:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:46Ezra Klein?

  Which is, I think the presentation we have offered is fairly pessimistic.

• 1:03:52Ezra Klein?

  You, when I read and listen to you on this, are, I wouldn't call pessimistic. I would say like a little excited by the idea of a cleansing fire. So one theory here, and you should tell me if this is reading you right, but is that this will break a lot of the current internet. The current internet is weakened. It's weakened in many cases for good reasons. Google, Meta, et cetera, have, they've not created an internet many of us like. And that this will just make it impossible for that internet to survive. The distribution channels will break. And then something. So first, is that how you see it? And second, then, what is something?

• 1:04:27Speaker 01

  That is very much how I see it. I would add a generational tinge to that, which is, I grew up in that weird middle generation between X and millennials. I think temperamentally, I'm much more Generation X. But, you know, they describe it as they didn't have computers, and then you have computers, you play the Oregon Trail. That's me, like, on the nose. I distinctly remember life before computers. It's an experience that I had quite viscerally. And that shapes my view of these tools. It shapes my view of these companies. Well, there's a huge generation now that only grew up in this way. There's a teenage generation right now that is only growing up in this way. And I think their natural inclination is to say, well, this sucks. I want my own thing. I want my own system of consuming information.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  I want my own brands and institutions. And I don't think that these big platforms are ready for that moment. I think that they think they can constantly sort of be information monopolies while they are fending off AI-generated content from their own AI systems. So somewhere in there, all of this stuff does break. And I, the optimism that you are sensing from me is, well, hopefully we build some stuff that does not have these huge dependencies on platform companies that have no interest at the end of the line, except a transaction.

• 1:05:43Ezra Klein?

  Okay, but you're telling me how the old thing dies. And I agree with you that at some point, the old thing dies. Like, you can feel it. It's moribund right now. You're not telling me what the new thing is. And I'm not saying you fully know, but I don't think the new thing is just a business model that is not as dependent on meta. I mean, on some level, there's going to be a lot of AI around here.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  It's an audience model. It's not dependent on these algorithms.

• 1:06:06Ezra Klein?

  But is there, I guess, one question I have is that, one, I mean, you know where the venture capital is going right now.

• 1:06:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:12Ezra Klein?

  Everything is going to be built with AI.

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 1:06:14Ezra Klein?

  Laced through every piece of it. And some of it, you know, for all we're talking about, might be cool, right? I'm not saying you're mostly going to make great art with AI. But actually, like Photoshop did create a lot of amazing things. People are going to get better at using this. They're going to get more thoughtful about using it. The tools are going to get better, but also the people are going to figure out how to use the tools. I mean, you were talking about player pianos earlier, right? I mean, way beyond player pianos, you have huge libraries of sounds. You can manipulate however you want. And now I go listen to a lot of experimental electronic music, and I think a lot of that is remarkable art, right? I think a lot of that is deeply moving. I am curious, like, what the, to you, the good AI internet is? Because I don't think that the next internet is just going to be like, we're going to

• 1:06:58Ezra Klein?

  roll the clock back on the business model. The technology is going to roll forward into all this stuff people are building.

• 1:07:05Speaker 01

  I'm not so sure about that.

• 1:07:06Ezra Klein?

  Really?

• 1:07:06Speaker 01

  I actually, I think we're about to split the internet in two. I think there will be a giant, commercial, AI-infested internet. That's the platform internet. That's where it's going. Moribund, I agree. But it will still be huge. It's not going away tomorrow. And they will figure out, these are big companies full of smart people with the most technology. Like, Mark Zuckerberg is like, I have the most Nvidia H100 GPUs. Like, come work here, we'll pay you the most money. They will invent some stuff and it will be cool. I'm excited about it, but that version of the internet-

• 1:07:35Ezra Klein?

  You sure sound excited about it.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Well, I am. I mean, I love technology. This is our, the vergiest competitive differentiation in the entire media industry is like, we really like it and I'm excited to see what they build. Like, I think there's some really neat things being built. When I think about the information ecosystem, I am vastly more pessimistic because of the fact that all of these networks are geared to drive you towards a transaction. And I don't mean that in some like anti-capitalist way. I mean, literally the incentives are to get you to buy something. So more and more of the stuff that you consume is designed around pushing you towards a transaction. That's weird. I think there's a vast amount of white space in the culture for things that are not directly transactable. I think next to that, you're gonna get a bunch of people, companies, who

• 1:08:18Speaker 01

  say, "Our differentiation in this market is that there's no AI here." And they will try to sell that. I don't know how that experiment plays out. I don't know if that experiment will be successful. I do know that that experiment will be outside of the distribution channels that exist now, because those distribution channels are being run by companies who are invested heavily in AI. And I'm hopeful that over there, on whatever new sort of non-AI internet that exists, that some amount of pressure is placed on the other distribution channels to also make that distinction clear.

• 1:08:52Ezra Klein?

  I'm just thinking about this, and the thing that it brings to mind for me is the resurgence of vinyl-

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:00Ezra Klein?

  -and the dominance of streaming platforms. So, you know, what I would think of as the music industry of, how many years ago was CDs? I don't actually remember now. But what it did was split into, there's been a resurgence of vinyl, the sort of analog, it's a little cool. I actually just bought a record player recently, or was given one by my wonderful partner. But that's not very big. And there's these huge streaming platforms, right? I mean, most people are listening on Spotify, on Apple Music, on YouTube Music, on Amazon, etc. And I don't think we feel like we figured that out very well. But I do think that's probably going to be the dynamic. I mean, I do think there are going to be things you go to because you believe it is a human being, right? Or because you believe the AI is used well.

• 1:09:44Ezra Klein?

  I do also think the big things to come are going to be things that figure out how to use AI well rather than poorly. Maybe that also means honestly and transparently rather than dishonestly and opaquely.

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Ezra Klein?

  Maybe like the social internet dies because, one, we don't really like it that much anymore anyway. But also because it's too hard to figure out what's what, but actually an internet of AI helpers, assistants, friends, et cetera, thrives. And on the other side, you have like a real human. I don't know. But give me more of the Neily technology side.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Ezra Klein?

  Like, what can AI do well? Like, if you were building something, or if you were imagining something to be built, what comes after?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  By the way, the music industry just released its numbers.

• 1:10:24Ezra Klein?

  Uh huh.

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  Vinyl outsold CDs for the second year running. Double the amount of revenue in vinyl and CDs.

• 1:10:29Ezra Klein?

  And that's wild, actually.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  It's crazy. And all of that in total is 11% of music industry revenues in 23 compared to 84% of the revenue is streaming. So you're correct, right? This is a big distinction. People want to buy things, and so they buy one thing that they like, and they consume everything in streaming. What happens when Spotify is overrun by AI music? Right? Like, you can see it coming. What happens when you can type into Spotify? Man, I really like to listen to a country song. Just like, make me one. And no one down the line is like, had paid for that. Like, Spotify can just generate that for you. I think that's going to push more people in the other direction. Like, I really do. That there will be this huge pot of just make me whatever exactly I want at this moment money over here.

• 1:11:15Speaker 01

  But the, the cool people are still going to gravitate towards things that are new. I just believe that so firmly in my heart that when I think about where does the technology for that come from? I still think it comes from basic open platforms and open distribution. The great like power of the internet is that you can just make a whole new thing. And I don't think that anyone has really thought through what does it mean to decentralize these platforms? What does it mean to, I don't know, build an old school portal where it's just people pointing at great stuff? As opposed to open this app and an algorithm will just deliver you exactly what we think you want?

• 1:11:56Speaker 01

  Or down the line, generate content for you that we think that you will continue watching.

• 1:12:01Ezra Klein?

  I think, and this is maybe a little bit of a counterintuitive thought, that this is actually a great time to begin things in media. I think that we have a more realistic sense of the business model and what will actually work. They need to build audience, they need to build something people actually pay you for. I think that a lot of the problem right now is things built for another business model that failed are having a lot of trouble transitioning. Cause it's very, very hard to transition a structure. Now, that doesn't mean it's a great business, right? It's not what I hoped it would become. It's not the advertising revenue I hoped we would have, but it's something. What feels fully unsolved to me right now is distribution, right? When I was a blogger, right? The way distribution worked was people would find me because other blogs would link to me. And then if they liked me, they would put me in their bookmarks section.

• 1:12:46Ezra Klein?

  Then they would come back the next day by clicking on a bookmark. I don't think any of us think that much about bookmarks anymore. Like, that's not really how the internet works. Things moved to search, they moved primarily for a long time to social. And, and that was a way you could create distribution. You go from, you know, you, you've started a website, we started Vox, right? We started Vox in 2014 or 2015. The day before we launched, we had no visitors. And pretty quickly, we had a lot of things that were working on social and working on search. And we had millions and millions and millions every month. But now social is broken as a distribution mechanism. I mean, Elon Musk has made Twitter kind of anti-news distribution. Google search has become very, very messy. People don't have the old bookmarks habit in the way they did.

• 1:13:29Ezra Klein?

  And so if you're starting something new, the question of how you build that audience, how you go from nothing to an audience feels very...

• 1:13:40Ezra Klein?

  Unsolved.

• 1:13:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the cleansing fire. That's the thing I'm excited about. Here's a new problem in media. Here's a new problem that's being created by AI. If I were to tell you five years ago, I'm going to launch a new property and I'm going to, the core insight that I have is that we need to replace the distribution mechanisms of the internet. You would not pay me any money. You would not fund that idea. You would not say, well, you would say, get some traffic on Twitter and start a Substack or start a YouTube channel. Anything except figure out a new distribution method to compete with these social media companies. You have that idea now. And people are like, yeah, that's the problem. We have to solve that problem. That is the problem to solve. Because Twitter has blown itself up in whatever way

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Elon is blowing it up. Because the other social channels have become the home shopping network by and large. Because YouTube has optimized itself into making Mr. Beasts and only Mr. Beasts, right? It's weird, by the way, that YouTube exists. We've barely talked about it on this podcast. It is the thing most people watch most of the time. It supports no journalism. Like, at scale, the idea that there's not an ABC News of YouTube on that, a distribution platform of that size, is a moral failing on Google's part. I really believe this. And no, we never really talk about it. It's just YouTube is ignored. It's, it has become such an infrastructure that we never talk about it.

• 1:15:01Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, my view is that YouTube is the most politically important platform. I will also talk about TikTok. I think YouTube is much more significant.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they run it really well. They run it as infrastructure and they talk about it as infrastructure. But it's weird that we have not built great media company sized media companies on YouTube's pipes. We just haven't done it. So you look at that landscape now, and you're like, well, if I want to do that, if I want to build my own audience, I cannot depend on these companies. I have to go do something else. And maybe AI does help you do that. Maybe it does help you send a million marketing messages so people start coming to your website directly. Maybe it does start crafting homepages personalized for people based on your library of content. So people see the thing they like the most when they show up. There's a bunch of moves we can all take from social media companies

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  now to build more engaging, more interesting products. Using AI will make it easier because AI is a technology commodity. You can just go buy it and use it. But we have to actually build those products. We have to want to build those products as an industry and that my pessimism is rooted in the idea that like the media industry is like, kind of sucks at this. We are very much stuck in, we should go send some reporters out into the world, they should come back, write down what they saw, and then hopefully someone else points them at it. And it's just like, well, that's been a losing proposition for a decade. We should try something else.

• 1:16:24Ezra Klein?

  Do you think beyond the media, because not everything online is media, do you think beyond the media that there is like the glimmers of the next thing? I mean, let me give you the thesis I have, which is that the next thing is that the AI is somehow your assistant to the internet, right? We seem to me to be moving towards something where the overwhelm is so profound that you actually need some kind of agent working on your behalf to make it through all this. I mean, you can imagine this is the world of her, right? The Spike Jones movie. But you can imagine it as other things too. There are going to be software coding agents, right? The guys who started Instagram started then

• 1:17:07Ezra Klein?

  this thing called Artifact, which was using more AI personalization to try to tell people what they might like in the news. Didn't really work out, but it was an interesting project for a minute. I think a lot of us feel we've spent years now being acted upon by algorithms. And one thing about AI is that it's an algorithm you act on, right? You tell it how to act. Assuming that business model allows that, right? That it doesn't have like a secret instruction to sell you soap or whatever. That's interesting, right? That's a pretty profound inversion of the internet we've been in.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Let me poke really hard at the true difference between an algorithm that shows you stuff and an algorithm that goes and gets you what you want. Because I don't know that there's like a huge difference in the outcome of those two different processes. So for example, I do not trust the YouTube Kids algorithm. I watch my daughter watch YouTube Kids.

• 1:17:55Ezra Klein?

  No, why would you?

• 1:17:56Speaker 01

  It is just a nightmare. I don't know why we let her do it. But we did and now we're in the rabbit hole and that's life. I mean, she's five and I will literally say, are you watching garbage? And she'd be like, I am. Because she knows what I think is garbage. She's much smarter than the YouTube Kids algorithm. And then she's like, can I watch a little more garbage? This is a real conversation I have with my five year old all the time. I would love an AI that would just preempt that conversation. Just watch this whole iPad for me and make sure my kid is safe. That's great, but that is a limitation. It is not an expansion. And I think the thing that I'm seeking with all of these tools is how do we help people expand the set of things that they're looking at?

• 1:18:34Ezra Klein?

  But let me push on this for a minute because for a long time, a lot of us have asked people, the social media companies I have, I'm sure you have, why don't you give me access to the dials of the algorithm?

• 1:18:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:18:44Ezra Klein?

  Right? I don't want to see things going viral. If there's a virality scale of one to 10, I want to always be at a six, right? I don't want to see anything over a six. And I can't. I wish I could say to Google, I would like things that are not optimized for SEO. I just don't want to see recipes that have a long, personal story at the top. Just don't show me any of them.

• 1:19:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:06Ezra Klein?

  But I can't do that. But one of the interesting things about using the current generation of AI models is you actually do have to talk to it like that. I mean, whether I am creating a replica or a Kindroid or a character.ai, right? I have to tell that thing what it is supposed to be, how I want it to talk to me, how I want it to act in the world, what it is interested in, what kinds of expertise it has and does not. When I'm working with Claude 3, which is, you know, the AI use the most right now, I have one instance of it. I'm just like, you are a productivity coach and you're here to help me stay on task. But I have another where like I'm getting some help on, you know, in theory, looking at political science papers. So it's actually not that good at that.

• 1:19:46Ezra Klein?

  But this ability to tell this extraordinarily protean algorithm, what I wanted to do in plain English, that is different, right? The one thing that AI seems to make possible is an algorithm that you shape in plain English, an agent that you are directing to help you, in some cases, maybe create the internet, but much more often to navigate it. Right now, it is very hard for me to keep up on the amount of news, particularly around the amount of local news I would like to keep up on. Right? If there is a system that I could say, hey, here's some things I'm interested in from these kinds of sources. That would be very helpful to me. It doesn't seem like an impossible problem. In fact, it seems like a problem that is inches away from being solved. That might be cool.

• 1:20:31Speaker 01

  I think that'd be great. I've known you for a long time. I think you have a unique ability to articulate exactly what you want and tell it to a computer. And I like, you have to scale that idea, right? Like, you have to go to the average for our mothers and say, okay, you have to tell the algorithm exactly what you want. And like, maybe they'll get close to, maybe they won't, right?

• 1:20:50Ezra Klein?

  You don't feel like mothers are able to tell you?

• 1:20:55Speaker 01

  I like that idea a lot. I think fundamentally, that is still an AI like closing the walls around you. And I think the power of the recommendation algorithm is not expressed in virality. It's actually to help you expand your filter bubble. Here's a band you'd never heard of before. Here's a movie you never thought of watching. Here's an article about a subject that you weren't interested in before. I think TikTok in its sort of 2020 TikTok moment was terrific at this. Like, everyone was like, gonna sing a sea shanty for five minutes, right? Like, why do we suddenly care about this? And then it's gone, right? And it was able to create cultural moments out of things that no one had ever really

• 1:21:36Speaker 01

  thought of before. And I, I want to make sure, as I use AI, that I'm actually preserving that instead of actually just recreating a much more complicated filter bubble.

• 1:21:47Ezra Klein?

  I think it's a good place to end. Always a final question for the Neil Ipatel recommendation algorithm. What are three books you'd recommend to the audience?

• 1:21:55Speaker 01

  Well, I'm sorry, Ezra, I brought you six. Is that allowed?

• 1:21:58Ezra Klein?

  Did you actually bring six?

• 1:21:59Speaker 01

  I didn't like bring six books of books. We have six recommendations for you.

• 1:22:01Ezra Klein?

  Damn. All right. Go through them quick, man.

• 1:22:02Speaker 01

  They're in two categories. One, one is the three books that I thought of and three books from Verge people that if people are interested in these ideas are, are important. So the first one is The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank, one of my favorite books of all time. It is about how advertising agencies in the 60s co-opted the counterculture and basically replaced counterculture in America. I've thought about this a lot because I'm constantly wondering where the punk bands and Rage Against the Machines of 2024 are. And the answer is that they're the mainstream culture. Like, it's very interesting. Love that book. It explains, I think, a lot about our culture. Two is Liar in a Crowded Theater by Jeff Kosseff, which is a book about the First Amendment and why we preserve the ability to lie in America. I am very complicated thoughts about the First Amendment right now.

• 1:22:47Speaker 01

  I think social media companies should do a better job protecting my kid. I also think the First Amendment is really important, and those ideas are crashing into each other. Third, I love the band New Order. I know you're a music fan, so I brought you a music recommendation. It's Substance Inside New Order by Peter Hook, who is the bassist of New Order. This band hates each other, they broke up acrimoniously, so the book is incredibly bitchy. It's just a lot of shit talking about the 80s. It's great, but inside the book, he's constantly talking about how the technology they used to make the music of New Order didn't work very well. And there's like long vignettes of why the songs sound the way they do because of how the synthesizers worked. And that just brings together all the ideas I can think of. So those are the three outside of the Verge universe, but there are three from Verge

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  people that I think are very important. The first is Everything I Need I Get From You by Kaitlyn Tiffany, who's one of my favorite Verge expats. It is about how the entire internet was shaped by the fandom of the band One Direction. And I think this is totally underemphasized, underreported, that fandoms are actually what shaped the internet. And a lot of what we think of as internet culture is actually fandom culture. And so Kate's book is really good. The other, obviously, I have to shout out, is Extremely Hardcore by Zoe Schiffer, who basically wrote about the downfall of Twitter. And I think understanding how a social network works, like, these are lots of people making lots of decisions, and it was just dismantled. And now you can see how the social network broke, and I think we take these things for granted. And then the third is Beyond Measure by James Vincent, which is a history of the systems

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  of measurement and how political they are. And it is one of my favorite books because it is, you just take this stuff for granted, and you look at it, and you're like, oh, this was deeply, deeply acrimonious.

• 1:24:26Ezra Klein?

  Neelai Patel, you're saving the internet through blogging again. Your podcast is Decoder. Thank you very much.

• 1:24:31Speaker 01

  Thanks, man.

• 1:24:45Ezra Klein?

  This episode of The Ezra Klein Show was produced by Claire Gordon, fact checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair and Mary Marge Locker. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. We've got additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Afim Shapiro. Our senior editor is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, and Kristin Lin. We have original music by Isaac Jones, audience strategy by Kristina Semeluski, and Shannon Busta. The executive producer of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie Rose Strasser, and special thanks here to Sonia Herrera.