Kamala Harris’s Bratty Coconut Memescape + What Does $1,000 a Month Do? + The Empire CrowdStrikes Back

An episode unburdened by what has been.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell, AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 0:35Kevin Roose?

  Coconut trees actually make me quite nervous.

• 0:37Casey Newton?

  Why? Because you think you're going to bonk on the head?

• 0:39Kevin Roose?

  It's the only tree where something can fall out of it that kills you.

• 0:43Casey Newton?

  Kevin, I got news for you. There's all kinds of things with trees that can fall and kill you.

• 0:45Kevin Roose?

  Like what?

• 0:46Casey Newton?

  Snakes, bears.

• 0:47Kevin Roose?

  Name one.

• 0:47Casey Newton?

  Snakes, bears. Terror decels. Branches.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  Well, another thing that confuses me about the coconut tree meme is that, like, falling out of a coconut tree implies that you can climb up a coconut tree. And coconut trees, I would say, are among the hardest trees to climb because there are no intermediate branches. What do you, how are you, you just shimmy up the tree?

• 1:10Casey Newton?

  Yes, you have to shimmy. Have you ever watched Survivor? People are always shimmying up those trees.

• 1:13Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  Shimmying is a major part of the show.

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  God.

• 1:16Casey Newton?

  You've got to shimmy to win.

• 1:17Kevin Roose?

  Could I shimmy up a coconut tree? Could you?

• 1:18Casey Newton?

  I would love to see you try. If there's ever an event where you shimmy up a coconut tree, I'm buying a front row ticket.

• 1:29Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Drew, the tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 1:31Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

• 1:33Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard For.

• 1:34Casey Newton?

  This week, we're falling out of a coconut tree. How Kamala memes are reshaping the 2024 election. Then, Open Research Director Elizabeth Rhodes stops by to discuss the most comprehensive randomized control study about UBI and whether it can be a solution to AI job loss. And finally, The Times' Kate Conger on how a little-known company called CrowdStrike crashed the global IT infrastructure. You might say crowd struck.

• 2:06Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, it's time to get brat-pilled and fall out of a coconut tree.

• 2:10Casey Newton?

  Heck, yes, it is.

• 2:12Kevin Roose?

  Because today on the show, we are talking about Kamala Harris and what her candidacy means for tech and specifically for the memes on the internet where people are having a lot of fun with her.

• 2:23Casey Newton?

  Yeah, this feels like a moment where the internet was truly just reset and we are like, starting from scratch and everything that was old feels new again.

• 2:31Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and we should also note for our listeners who are not watching us on YouTube that your t-shirt says, "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" And then on the bottom, it says, "You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you." Where did you get that and how are the merch makers so fast at turnaround these days?

• 2:49Casey Newton?

  Would you believe it when I said that I've had this shirt since February?

• 2:53Kevin Roose?

  Really?

• 2:53Casey Newton?

  Yes, because the thing about gay people is that we're very fast to these memes, Gavin. So in May of 2023, Kamala Harris gives this speech where she gives her now iconic line, "You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?" And it's so good, I want to play it for you.

• 3:08Speaker 03

  My mother used to, she would give us a hard time sometimes and she would say to us, "I don't know what's wrong with you, young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?

• 3:19Speaker 03

  You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you."

• 3:26Casey Newton?

  And Republican opposition researchers see this and they think, aha, we have a way of damaging the vice president. And so they put this on social media and the most beautiful thing happens, which is that the gays see it, we just fall in love. We think, we don't know what's happening, but it sort of reminds us of when you're hanging out with your aunt and she's had a little too much wine and she starts giggling and saying silly phrases.

• 3:49Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it had goofy aunt energy.

• 3:51Casey Newton?

  It had goofy aunt energy. And so in February, my friend Alex has become obsessed with this quote and will not stop saying it. And he took me and some friends out to dinner and he presented all of us with our own coconut tree shirts. So since February, me and my friends have been walking around on our coconut tree shirts.

• 4:07Kevin Roose?

  Wow, so this is not official campaign merch. This is like, somebody had this printed.

• 4:12Casey Newton?

  No, this was just, at the time, it was like a sort of like a joke about Kamala Harris. You know, like, this was not really seen as like a political shirt. It was a joke meme t-shirt that my friend got me that was crazily relevant to this week's news. So that's why I'm wearing it here today.

• 4:26Kevin Roose?

  Well, it looks great on you.

• 4:27Casey Newton?

  Thank you.

• 4:27Kevin Roose?

  So I've been dying to talk to you about this all week because there's been like a real meme renaissance on the left after the announcement last weekend that Joe Biden was not going to be the nominee, that he was going to instead endorse Kamala Harris for president. And there's so much to chew on and grapple with here. But I want to just start by maybe doing a little bit of like a meme glossary for people who are not as terminally online as you and I are.

• 4:56Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 4:56Kevin Roose?

  And I wanted to ask you to just quickly try to explain some of the leading Kamala Harris memes.

• 5:03Casey Newton?

  I'd be happy to.

• 5:03Kevin Roose?

  The first one that you just mentioned is the coconut tree meme. We won't go back over that. The second one is brat. Kamala is brat.

• 5:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 5:11Kevin Roose?

  What does that mean?

• 5:12Casey Newton?

  So there is a popular music artist named Charli XCX, who has been honestly fairly underground up until recently. But she put out an album a couple of months ago called Brat, and it has been sort of the talk of Gen Z and the gays, I would say, all summer. It has already produced a number of other viral moments. For example, Charli was sort of feuding with the artist Lorde at one time. And then Lorde did a remix with her and they sort of squashed the beef on a remix, which no one could remember that happening. So there have already been all these moments that were leading people to say, we're having brat summer.

• 5:51Casey Newton?

  And in this sort of stew of Gen Z, gays, TikTok, coconut trees, along comes brat and it just kind of all came together, Kevin.

• 6:03Kevin Roose?

  Like, what does it mean to describe someone as brat? And would you describe me as brat?

• 6:06Casey Newton?

  I would not describe you as brat. I would say if you're a suburban dad, you're kind of outside the, you know, contours of what is typically considered brat. What Charli XCX has said about brat is like, you're a fun girl, you like to party, right? You like to have a good time. And so when Charlie tweeted Kamala is brat, that she was saying that, but she was also basically saying Kamala is one of ours. And essentially, that was like the Charlie endorsement.

• 6:34Kevin Roose?

  I see, I see. Okay. And, and I also saw that the Kamala Harris sort of campaign, or at least the online part of the campaign, has sort of been playing off this. They changed their social media sort of header picture to be in the same kind of like font and color as the Brat album. So they're having some fun with this.

• 6:51Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and let's just say like this is, this must be such a surreal moment for Charlie XCF. So the thing is, you know, Charlie has about 22 million listeners a month on Spotify. That's like a good number, but someone like an Ariana Grande has like more than three times that, right? So like Charlie is still a sort of up and comer, even though she's been around for more than a decade. And for her aesthetic and like her album artwork to be like co-opted by the presumptive Democratic nominee for president is just like an extraordinary pop culture moment.

• 7:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 7:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 7:25Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so we have Coconut Tree, we have Brat. We also have this meme of the phrase, "What can be unburdened by what has been?" Do you understand this one?

• 7:35Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so this is essentially one of Kamala's catchphrases, you know? And it's just a way of saying like the future can be better than the past. And like, we know a lot of horrible things happen in this country, but the future doesn't have to be burdened by that. But it's also just such a fun phrase and you can kind of sneak it at anything.

• 7:51Kevin Roose?

  It sort of sounds like something you would see like at a, like a spiritual bookstore, like on a, on some sort of a tapestry.

• 7:59Casey Newton?

  If you're at a yoga retreat in Sedona, someone is saying that to you.

• 8:03Kevin Roose?

  Exactly.

• 8:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Kevin Roose?

  It's very like crystals coated. Okay, one more Kamala meme that I want to get your take on is something that I honestly do not understand, which is the connection between Venn diagrams, Kamala Harris, and the gay community.

• 8:20Kevin Roose?

  I want to, I want to read you a line from an article that ran in TechCrunch, where they were sort of interviewing these like viral content creators about Kamala Harris. And I'll just read the quote. Because of her Venn diagrams, quote, Kamala goes viral on gay Twitter every couple of months. She has turned into this like pseudo-gay icon. So, help me understand, why are Venn diagrams and Kamala Harris and the gay community related?

• 8:49Casey Newton?

  Okay, so Kamala Harris gave this interview once, where she just, seemingly out of nowhere, just said that she loves Venn diagrams. You know, there's a sort of clarifying power of a good Venn diagram. And, you know, as with everything else that she's done, the gays are noticing this. And it is just, it's a little weird. And, you know, the gay community in John, we just, we love powerful women. We love messy women. I'm not saying she's messy, but like, there's just a lot of like female archetypes.

• 9:17Kevin Roose?

  Do you love Venn diagrams? Is the gay community supportive of Venn diagrams?

• 9:20Casey Newton?

  Like, I feel fine about Venn diagrams. Do you know that Venn diagrams were banned in the country once?

• 9:25Kevin Roose?

  Really?

• 9:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I gotta look this up.

• 9:27Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 9:29Casey Newton?

  During Argentina's extremely repressive military dictatorship of 1976 to 1983, Venn diagrams were banned from being taught in primary schools, Kevin.

• 9:40Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 9:40Casey Newton?

  Because the practice of comparing and contrasting could prompt citizens to find commonalities among themselves and encourage collective organization. So, I mean, first of all, that's crazy that Argentina did that, but...

• 9:56Kevin Roose?

  That would not be high on my list of things to do if I had a military junta that came to power.

• 10:01Casey Newton?

  Well, and let's just say that that junta did not survive, okay? This was not one of the better organized juntas we've ever seen. But, so, a Venn diagram can be a powerful thing, is the main message that I want to give you. And Kamala loved them. But, look, why do the gays love this? I would just sort of put this in the basket of kind of kooky things that Kamala Harris has said, that can always be trotted out and made fresh again. And we always have a reason to make a fresh Venn diagram in this country.

• 10:24Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 10:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 10:24Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so that is the sort of abridged meme glossary of the Kamala Harris universe. What did you... You make of sort of the way that the internet reacted to the announcement over the weekend?

• 10:34Casey Newton?

  You know, it was, uh, it was a really interesting moment because I think until it happened, I did not realize how much pent up enthusiasm that Democrats had that they were just sort of looking for the right candidate to give to, right? I think a lot of Democrats were thinking, look, I will vote for Joe Biden if it comes to that, but it's very hard for me to get excited about him because I, you know, people had a sense that he was not electable. And so there was a sense that they were just sort of, you know, marching toward defeat. Kamala came along and thanks to the Gen Z's and the gays and the gals, there were all of these meme templates that could just immediately be filled.

• 11:17Casey Newton?

  It was like this was the dry powder of the Harris campaign. And the moment that she became the candidate, the entire internet understood the assignment and they knew what they had to do.

• 11:27Kevin Roose?

  What do you think makes a candidate for political office a good meme target? Like, what is it about Kamala Harris that was better for memes than Joe Biden was?

• 11:38Casey Newton?

  Every candidate gets memed in one way or another. There are, you know, Biden memes, there was a sort of dark Brandon moment. There are obviously a lot of Trump memes out there. But this has been a really difficult moment in, in American politics. And I think what Harris offered was folks a chance to make memes that were a little lighthearted. They were a little silly, right? They could sort of help people get excited about politics again, because they really just took a lot of air out of the fears around the future of democracy and all these other questions that people have about the election. All of a sudden, we could just laugh at the coconut tree. And so to me, it's like what you've seen on the internet over the past week

• 12:20Casey Newton?

  has just been this like collective exhaling, like this sense of relief. And maybe we can have a little fun over the next few months, right? There's no rule that says a political campaign can be a little fun.

• 12:31Kevin Roose?

  Right. And most successful political campaigns are a little fun.

• 12:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Remember what, I mean, look at Bill Clinton playing saxophone on the Arsenio Hall show. That's what politics used to be.

• 12:40Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I was gonna, I was gonna mention Barack Obama, whose initial sort of run for office, like, I remember this was sort of during the, the growth phase of, of social media and YouTube and like, there were people making websites called Barack Obama is your boyfriend or something, you know, it was just like a very fertile ground for what we would later call meme culture. But I, so I've been interested in the memes, I've been following them, but I'm also, I've also been working on a column about how the online left and especially the kind of professional, you know, sort of content creators on the left are reacting to the sort of, the ascension of Kamala Harris. And the first thing to say is that like, their engagement has never been better. They are seeing massive increases

• 13:25Kevin Roose?

  in engagement on their social media accounts, lots and lots of attention being driven. And I think we should say, like, it's been a rough few years for a lot of political content creators on the internet. I would say especially on the left, you know, you have X, which got taken over by Elon Musk and basically turned into like a sort of right wing megaphone, where it was much harder for those voices on the left to break through. We also had Meta basically deciding that it didn't want anything to do with political news or political content. And so trying to sort of get that stuff out of people's feeds. So a lot of these big meme pages, these big content creation machines have just really been struggling to break through over the past few years. And so for them, this is sort of like, they

• 14:09Kevin Roose?

  feel like this is their opening, they can actually get some attention again.

• 14:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah, there's, there's a new player on the national stage, and that feels weird because she's been vice president now, you know, since 2021. But there's definitely a lot of fresh blood now.

• 14:23Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. And I want to make a few caveats because obviously there is a lot of energy and excitement right now among Democrats over the Kamala Harris campaign. I think we should still say like she is, you know, in some polls tied with or close to Donald Trump, but he is still favored to win the election at this point. And I don't think that memes alone can reverse a political candidate's fortune. We know from 2020 that Joe Biden was not the most popular candidate online, and yet he won the election in part because of all this offline organizing that was happening. So I think it's really important for the sort of political machine surrounding the Kamala Harris campaign to figure out

• 15:06Kevin Roose?

  how to translate this online energy into the thing that actually matters, which is people showing up at the polls in November.

• 15:12Casey Newton?

  Sure. I mean, you know, we should say that over the first few days of her campaign, she did raise an extraordinary amount of money. And I do think that was effectively her campaign translating that online energy into something that they can use. But at the same time, we should also say that this whole meme thing, it can have a very short shelf life, right? Like this stuff can turn cringe in a hurry. I've read some pretty good analysis this week saying that the Harris campaign might have already leaned a little too far into this stuff. There's this now famous moment when Hillary Clinton during the 2016 campaign, in one of her own bids for relevance, told us to all Pokemon Go to the polls.

• 15:48Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 15:49Casey Newton?

  When Pokemon Go was sort of having its moment. And we all look back on that as a moment where Hillary Clinton seemed a little out of touch. I actually think that so far the Harris campaign has played this really, really well. But I will also say that if they're still doing brat memes in October, that will be a negative indicator. So they're gonna have to stay current and they're gonna have to have some new memes.

• 16:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. My theory on this is that she is allowed to mention it once. Like she can, you know, come out at the DNC on the stage like to over, you know, while while brat is playing over the loudspeakers. Or she could make one reference to the coconut tree in her speech. But like any more than that and it's gonna turn cringe.

• 16:29Casey Newton?

  Let me paint a picture for you. She comes out to accept the Democratic nomination. Like, you know, they announce her and there is a giant coconut tree sort of on the stage. And she sort of rappels down from the coconut tree into the context in all of which she exists. Do you think that that is the moment that she wins the presidency?

• 16:46Kevin Roose?

  I think you should pitch that to our team. Yeah, I think this could be a real, a real moment.

• 16:50Casey Newton?

  If any one of the Pod Save America team is listening, could you please tell that to the right guy? Because I don't even know who to tell that to. Anyways.

• 16:56Kevin Roose?

  Do you have a theory about like what makes a good meme or a good political meme?

• 17:01Casey Newton?

  Um, let's see. I think it is often a mismatch between the gravity of the office and the silliness of what is being said, right? That has kind of been the key of these Kamala memes is you have somebody who is in a huge position of power, who is saying silly things about Venn diagrams and coconut trees. So these sort of little unexpected moments that puncture the like gravitas of the office, I think often rocket to people's attention. As a sub like comment on that, Kevin, it's very funny to me that like many of the biggest

• 17:42Casey Newton?

  Kamala memes have been essentially identified and promoted by Republican operatives who are publishing them as opposition research. The coconut tree clip-

• 17:51Kevin Roose?

  Right, that was supposed to damage her.

• 17:52Casey Newton?

  Yes, this was like a weapon that they deployed against Kamala Harris that made her more powerful than she's ever been. So what makes a good political meme? Well, it's like if the RNC uses it to attack you, you might have something good on your hands.

• 18:06Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. We should also just talk about Kamala Harris's views on tech and what we think Harris presidency would mean for the tech industry and some of the issues we've been talking about. So you wrote a little bit about this this week, but what do we know about how Kamala Harris feels about the tech industry?

• 18:25Casey Newton?

  Well, she has been pretty close to it. In fact, she's sometimes been criticized for being too close to it. She is a native of Oakland, so she grew up in the Bay Area. And basically immediately after she announced that she was running for president, some of the big Democrats in tech stood up to support her. So Reed Hastings, the former CEO of Netflix, said he was donating $7 million. Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, endorsed her. Sheryl Sandberg, formerly of Meta, endorsed her. So Democrats are showing a lot of enthusiasm for her. I would say that when it comes to her policies, she looks a lot like President Biden. There is not a ton of daylight between them. There are some big topics on which she frankly has not said a lot.

• 19:10Casey Newton?

  One of those things is crypto. Another one of those things is antitrust, right? The Biden administration has really cracked down on tech giants buying smaller companies. Would Kamala Harris allow more of that? We sort of don't know. In terms of what we do know, she was the Biden administration's AI czar. So this has been part of her portfolio. So she was part of the team that put together the executive order that the administration released last year, which calls for some very gentle safety guidelines around the industry. She's also made vague promises to hold social networks, quote, accountable. This was when she was running in the most recent presidential primary. We don't really know what that means. So that's kind of a basket of her opinions.

• 19:52Casey Newton?

  I think that in general, Democrats in tech look at her and they think we can work with this person.

• 19:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's what I've been hearing too. I talked to one Democratic donor over the weekend who was basically saying the same thing. That, that, you know, it's not like there's some huge track record of Kamala Harris being sort of gentler on the tech industry than Joe Biden was. It's not like they think they're going to get everything they want from her, but they feel like they can work with her. They feel like she will return their calls. Like there's a sort of open line of communication there that maybe they didn't have with the Biden White House. And so, yeah, a lot of the people who are Democrats and even independents are enthusiastic. I'm very curious if you think this will stem the tide of the sort of Trump support among especially venture capitalists and some of the more outspoken people that we talked about just last week on the pod.

• 20:39Casey Newton?

  What I do think is going to happen is that the Democrats who've been sitting on the sidelines, who have been telling the Democratic Party, like, we support you, but we cannot support Biden because we think he's going to lose. Those are the people who you're starting to see come out of the woodwork now, right? So there was this imbalance where the only vocal tech voices in the 2024 campaign were the ones who were supporting Trump. Now you're starting to see more Democrats come out and be vocal voices for Harris. And I do think that that is going to matter.

• 21:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I also just think it's, it's a sort of comfort thing with some of the Democrats in Silicon Valley. I mean, Kamala Harris, she spent a long time as the Attorney General out here. You know, she was not always gentle with the tech platforms. She went after some of them, especially she was very concerned about exploitation online and revenge porn and things like that. But I think they generally feel like she speaks their language. She understands where they're coming from and they're excited about the possibility of working with her.

• 21:36Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Casey Newton?

  So you don't know how to do the Apple Dance?

• 21:41Kevin Roose?

  What is the Apple Dance?

• 21:42Casey Newton?

  The Apple Dance is brat, Kevin. Oh my gosh. Looks like we're gonna have to start at the beginning.

• 21:51Casey Newton?

  When we come back, it's UBI, a universal basic interview.

• 22:10Speaker 00

  Support for this podcast comes from Dell Technologies. It's time to put AI to work. Is your business ready? The challenge isn't getting started with AI. It's scaling beyond pilots while maintaining control of your data, governance, infrastructure, and costs. Dell AI Factory provides the integrated foundation you need to scale AI securely and efficiently with one trusted partner, Dell. AI on your terms. From idea to impact. Learn more at dell.com/yourwaytoAI. That's dell.com/yourwaytoAI.

• 22:44Speaker 04

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• 23:18Speaker 05

  It's time to innovate at the speed of AI without compromising control. That's OutSystems. Take a look at what happened with one global retailer during a period of massive expansion. They used OutSystems to build AI agents to automate invoicing and translation processes, shifting 95% of their daily store operations to a new digital app, saving thousands of hours of manual work. OutSystems gives you the flexibility to deploy how you want and the governance to do it safely. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.

• 23:54Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, I like money. What about you?

• 23:56Casey Newton?

  I love money so much. In fact, the best kind of money I can imagine, Kevin, is if somebody just hit me like a bolt out of the blue and said, hey, I'm just gonna give you a thousand bucks a month for no reason.

• 24:05Kevin Roose?

  Okay, well, I'm not gonna do that for you.

• 24:07Casey Newton?

  You're not going to, but you know who might are the folks over at Open Research. This is an organization that just completed, Kevin, the most comprehensive randomized control study of unconditional cash to date. Now, what does that mean? Well, in Silicon Valley, for about a decade now, we've been having a debate about universal basic income.

• 24:28Kevin Roose?

  Yes, UBI. This is an idea that people like Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, Elon Musk, Jack Dorsey, Chris Hughes, one of the co-founders of Facebook, and Marc Benioff, they've all sort of expressed some degree of interest in studies of UBI. Because, and I think we should just connect the dots a little bit here. So a lot of these people believe that at some point in the not-so-distant future, there will be an AI revolution that will put lots of people out of work.

• 24:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 24:57Kevin Roose?

  That AI will be able to do many people's jobs better than they can. And so as a result, we will have this sort of mass unemployment crisis that we will need to figure out some policy response to. And one of the leading contenders for how to help people during that kind of transition and disruption is through just giving them money through something like UBI.

• 25:18Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and so the folks at Open Research came along, and for a period of three years, they gave a thousand dollars a month to a thousand low-income folks. And they just studied, what was the effect of having that money? How did it affect their health, their mental health, their employment? Did it make them want to start a business?

• 25:35Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and we should say this specific study that came out this week from Open Research was conceived of by Sam Altman. Sam has been interested in the idea of universal basic income for many years. Back in 2016, when he was running Y Combinator, he spearheaded the earliest version of this project at what was then called Y Combinator Research. And since then, he, along with OpenAI, their nonprofit organization, have collectively invested something like $24 million into this project. So it's been a big Long-term study that was mostly conceived of and supported by Sam Altman.

• 26:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and of course, since this is a study that OpenAI helped to fund, we should acknowledge that The New York Times has sued OpenAI for copyright infringement. But when it comes to unconditional cash, we are finally starting to see the fruits of this one, Kevin, because eight years after this idea was conceived, this week, Open Research published their findings, and they were really interesting. So to talk about what this study revealed, we've invited Elizabeth Rhodes to the studio. Elizabeth is the research director of Open Research, which is the nonprofit that conducted this study. Let's bring her in.

• 26:40Kevin Roose?

  Let's bring her in. Let's ask her for some money.

• 26:42Casey Newton?

  Let's ask her for as much money as she's got.

• 26:53Casey Newton?

  Elizabeth Rhodes, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 26:55Speaker 06

  Thanks so much for having me.

• 26:56Casey Newton?

  So before we get into the findings from this study, I want to start by talking about what your goals were with this project. So what was the research team hoping to find?

• 27:07Speaker 06

  When we started this back in 2016, it's been a while, there wasn't much going on in the space in the US. There were not a lot of other pilots. The most recent studies have been back in the negative income tax studies of the 60s and 70s. So we really wanted to approach this as an exploratory foundational study, to ask the broad, open-ended question, what happens when you give people unconditional cash? And understanding the role of the cash in participants' lives.

• 27:37Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and universal basic income, as I understand it, is not a new idea. It's actually been around for quite a long time. Various politicians have advocated for it over the years. But this is sort of, from my understanding, like, the most rigorous study of what actually happens when you try to put something like UBI into practice.

• 27:54Speaker 06

  So technically, this is not a UBI, because if it were, there would be no income requirement, no age requirement. Every single person within a community would get it. And obviously, that's really difficult to test. We considered trying to find a town with 1,000 people, but it's not representative of

• 28:13Speaker 06

  The country as a whole and also, you know, what happens if you found shale under that town or during the course of the study?

• 28:18Kevin Roose?

  Sure.

• 28:19Speaker 06

  So we aren't actually able to test a basic income. We're testing more unconditional cash.

• 28:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so I just want to talk about methodology for a second because I read the studies and it's just incredibly complex undertaking to to study this many people in a kind of randomized control way. So walk us through sort of like how many people were involved in the study? How you found them? How much money they got? The study design, walk us through that a little bit.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  That was one of the most exciting parts for me. We have 3,000 participants. They were recruited from Illinois and Texas. We wanted to have a group of people that came from different geographies. So that's one thing that a lot of other studies that are place based don't have. And so we have rural counties, urban, suburban, medium urban, large urban. And we sent mailers to randomly selected addresses. We had targeted Facebook ads. There's an app that a lot of SNAP recipients use to manage their benefits. We put ads there. So we didn't want to have a massive call for applications. We really wanted a randomly selected group.

• 29:27Casey Newton?

  Was it hard to come up with that ad? Because just imagine, you know, you're browsing Facebook and it said, hey, you want $1,000 a month for no strings attached? If I saw that, I might think somebody's trying to pull something on me.

• 29:37Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Actually, so our control group gets $50 a month. So everyone was participating in the program. And so we talked about it being $50 or more a month. So there was no ad saying $1,000 a month.

• 29:50Kevin Roose?

  So of the 3,000 people in the study, 1,000 actually got the highest payment, the $1,000 a month payments for the length of the study. And then there was a group of another 2,000 people who just got $50 monthly payments. Why did you design it that way?

• 30:08Speaker 06

  We were asking a lot of participants. We collected an enormous amount of data, which is really exciting to work with. But also, you know, we sent monthly surveys. We had an app. And so having a control group that didn't receive anything wasn't something that we were willing to go with.

• 30:25Casey Newton?

  And how did they actually get the money? Is this like a debit card or how'd you give it to them?

• 30:29Speaker 06

  We actually custom-built a payments processing system where they, now there's a lot more technology out here for this, but at the time, we weren't finding a lot of off-the-shelf options. So we linked existing bank accounts. And that's how the partners distributed the cash transfers. There were a number of people that were unbanked, so we helped them open up an online bank account. Or if they weren't able to do that, we had a prepaid debit card.

• 30:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah. What was the like? I don't know if you'd interface with these people directly, but I'm so curious what the reactions were from these participants. When like you get the, I don't know if it was an email or a phone call saying, hey, you're about to get another $1,000 a month.

• 31:07Speaker 06

  Oh, I got to make a couple hundred of those phone calls. And it was, this really illuminating. I think I should have walked away from those calls having a better sense of what we were going to see. Because every person I talked to had like a very unique need in that moment. Someone had finished beauty school, but couldn't afford the cosmetology license, so couldn't get a job. Someone had a $300 speeding ticket. Someone was just diagnosed with cancer. Like, there were, you know, hundreds of different specific needs that people had. And in that moment, like cash was the only thing that could be used. It couldn't take care of all of them by any means, but could be used towards addressing those. And then immediately you see that, that it's going to go in so many different directions.

• 31:48Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And am I right that the median amount of money that people made who were getting these $1,000 a month payments was about $30,000 a year?

• 31:55Speaker 06

  Yes, the average was about 30,000.

• 31:58Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 31:59Kevin Roose?

  And you mentioned data collection and sort of what happened to participants in this study after they got the money. I read the sort of methodology parts of these studies and was just amazed. You not only had an app that they had to sort of download that would track their time and allow them to sort of like, say, what am I doing? How am I spending my time on every day? But you actually took their blood, is that correct?

• 32:23Speaker 06

  You know, there's this really strong correlation between income and health across time, across countries. And so we did collect blood samples to look at markers of health, like A1C, cholesterol, C-reactive protein.

• 32:37Kevin Roose?

  To figure out if the sort of guaranteed payments had had an effect on their overall health.

• 32:41Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 32:41Kevin Roose?

  Got it. Wow.

• 32:43Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, so why don't we get into the findings from the work that you did? There is a lot in there and people can go on your website and read more. But I want to start by talking about mental health. One of the interesting findings in here is that participants experienced reductions in their stress and mental distress in the first year as they start to receive these payments, but that these benefits basically go away in subsequent years. So why do you think that is? And was that a surprise?

• 33:13Speaker 06

  I think perhaps a bit of a surprise. I think one thing to acknowledge sort of upfront before we go into overall is that these are sort of the average effects across all participants. Our next phase is to dig in and try to see like four different groups of participants. Did they experience differently? But I think I have a couple of theories. I don't know if any of them actually hold, but the first transfers were distributed during 2020, which was a very unique year, both in terms of all the things that were going on, but also existing benefits. So there were a lot of pandemic era aids that expired by the end of 2021. And so it could potentially be some of that. They were losing some benefits. It could be an adjustment to a new normal. Like, I'm not entirely sure. I was surprised.

• 33:56Casey Newton?

  And just to get the timing right, like what during what years did people get this $1,000 a month?

• 34:03Speaker 06

  November 2022, October 2023.

• 34:06Casey Newton?

  Got it, got it. A lot of people who are skeptical of universal basic income or of these sort of guaranteed cash transfers will often say that this is a bad idea because, you know, people are not going to use this extra money, you know, productively. They're going to spend it on, you know, drugs or lottery tickets, like stuff that is not going to make them happier and wealthier in the long run. What did your study find about how people were spending this money?

• 34:35Speaker 06

  Largely, they were spending it on basic needs. The three biggest categories were food, transportation, and housing. Another larger expense was on financial support to others. But I think it also varied a lot based on starting income. I think that's another sort of high-level takeaway is the cash means something very different at different income levels.

• 34:56Kevin Roose?

  And what effect did it have on the amount that people worked? Because that's another big sticking point among skeptics of universal basic incomes. You know, you give people money, they're just going to sort of like, they're going to work less, they're going to spend their free time, you know, playing video games or whatever. It's not actually going to make anyone's life better. What did you find when it came to how much people worked after they got this money?

• 35:18Speaker 06

  Overall, we saw some modest decreases. At any point in time, recipients of $1,000 were about two percentage points less likely to be employed. They worked about 1.3 hours less a week, which adds up to about eight days a year. But there was quite a bit of variation across the sample. For example, single parents decreased their labor by more than non-single parents. And those under 30 also worked a little bit less. We didn't see any effects on those over 30. We do see suggestive effects of under 30 pursuing more education. So, you know, it's a complex story.

• 35:56Kevin Roose?

  There was also some curiosity about whether receiving these cash transfers would make people more likely to start a business. I was personally curious about this because I never would have started my business unless I had a lot of savings in the bank. What did you all find when it came to entrepreneurship?

• 36:16Speaker 06

  We found a significant increase in interest in entrepreneurship and ideas for businesses. We saw very strong effects across everyone on those levels. That didn't necessarily translate into everyone. We didn't see a significant effect overall on starting businesses, though by the third year, among underrepresented groups, especially women and black participants, we did see increases in starting businesses by the third year. So you see how that adds up. But I think one of the things that, from talking with participants, came clear to me is, I think tied to that entrepreneurship interest, is the need for more flexible work options, especially for people who are single parents and they don't have... You know, daycare is really expensive. It works also nine to five.

• 37:01Speaker 06

  People don't work nine to five often. A lot of jobs are available that are overnight shifts. And so that flexibility is, I think, having the time to kind of think about a business. There was definitely a big increase in interest and ideas.

• 37:16Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. What were some of the things that you expected to see out of this? Maybe when you, at the outset of the project, that you didn't find in the results?

• 37:26Speaker 06

  That's a good question, and it's one that I have a hard time answering, I think, because I've been living and breathing this for the past, you know, eight years. I knew always that it was going to be a complex, a nuanced story. But probably some of the, the stress reductions, I didn't expect to fade out quite as quickly as they did. I think there's unreasonable expectations from a lot of us about what an extra $1,000 a month can do at different income levels. And so, you know, it allows people to pay their bills and rent, but it's, it's not going to necessarily transform.

• 38:01Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, I remember I was, I reported on the Andrew Yang campaign and spent time with him, talking about his idea of a freedom dividend. That was his sort of rebranding of universal basic income. And his big central idea of his campaign was that if you give people $1,000 a month with no strings attached, it will kind of heal all of society's problems, right? We will, we will no longer have poverty. We will, you know, we will all be able to afford basic necessities, but also it'll sort of bring us all together because we'll all be getting these checks and it'll sort of bond us. And I'm, I'm, you know, making his argument seem a little more rosy than it, than it was. But basically, there was this idea, especially among some people who supported the Yang candidacy, that this would sort of heal all ills.

• 38:45Kevin Roose?

  And it seems like what your study found is that it doesn't.

• 38:49Speaker 06

  Absolutely. I think there's a couple of responses to that. You do see a bit of a disparity when you look at the sort of the high level overall statistics and when you talk to participants. There was this sort of intangible sense of agency that by having this cash and being able to prioritize their specific needs that people talked about and it came up a lot in the conversation, that that ability created possibilities for people. Not everyone, obviously, because poverty limits choice, it limits agency. And people were like, well, I paid my rent that I was five months behind on. Like, I didn't have a lot of choices. And so we do see that it has different effects based on individuals' circumstances.

• 39:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. A lot of the folks that I follow online and have talked to about UBI and sort of related ideas over the years were really disappointed by the results of this study. The effects that the proponents of universal basic income were hoping to see, you know, people's job quality going way up, their health becoming way better after getting these payments, just didn't materialize or didn't materialize to the degree that they had hoped. But I'm just curious what you make of the kind of UBI community's reaction to this study, that they're excited that it was done, they appreciate how rigorous it was, but the findings kind of bummed them out.

• 40:11Speaker 06

  To me, one of the important goals of the study from the beginning is not only to look at the potential and the benefits of cash, but also the limitations. Because this doesn't, we didn't find negative. You know, it wasn't like people went out and, you know.

• 40:28Kevin Roose?

  They didn't ruin their lives to get these cash transfers. But it also doesn't seem to have helped many of them in the ways that some economists were hoping it would.

• 40:37Speaker 06

  Yes, and I do think, you know, we do see in our qualitative sample, people for whom this did achieve some of those things. We had a participant who was able to take a job that paid, she was making $18 an hour, and she had this other opportunity that was $14 an hour, but it seemingly had opportunities for growth. She couldn't have afforded to take it without the money. Then by the end of the study, she had received two promotions, had a full-time job with benefits. You know, someone else was able to participate in a year-long job training program. So there are examples, and so I think our... Question is how to dig in to see like, what are those conditions that create those possibilities? And where are the limitations? Like, we know that we had a sample that was struggling with a lot of chronic health

• 41:20Speaker 06

  problems and $1,000 a month can't buy good health.

• 41:24Casey Newton?

  So that's kind of what I wanted to dig into. You know, I mean, this, this was like 20 years ago, but my first job in journalism paid $28,500 a year. And over the next, you know, five or 10 years, I eventually got paid another $12,000. Right? So I basically got the amount of money that you gave those people. And there was absolutely a change in my quality of life. But I think of it mostly as like a little bit of peace of mind of like, you know, my car breaks down or I have a medical emergency, like I'm not going to be out on my back in the first month. And that was like, great. But if you'd asked me like, how different is your life than it was three years ago when you were making $28,000 a year? I would have said, well, it's like basically the same. So I'm so curious what we think would have happened if you'd like doubled the payments

• 42:07Casey Newton?

  or tripled them like, and do you expect that you wouldn't actually see incremental changes here, but maybe you would just see wildly different results?

• 42:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a great question. I'm not sure, you know, exactly what, what would happen if you, if you doubled or tripled. I, I think providing some of the systems, the support systems that whether it's, you know, robust healthcare or other things would help people meet those needs and then be, have more opportunities to use the cash. One of the things that we do see is people actually experience more unexpected expenses, partially because they are buying cars that they need to break down. Or there's a, an increase, people are more likely to be paying for housing as opposed to like staying with other people. And so, um, you know, they are taking on more expenses as well.

• 42:55Casey Newton?

  Some people have said, more money, more problems.

• 42:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 43:01Casey Newton?

  That was Milton Friedman, right?

• 43:02Kevin Roose?

  I believe that was.

• 43:06Kevin Roose?

  I mean, one thing that I've heard from people in the tech industry who are sort of looking at universal basic income or something like direct cash payments as a way to sort of cope with what they believe will be widespread job loss after AGI arrives, say, is that there's sort of this idea that people will still need meaning in their lives. People who get laid off because their job was replaced by AI, they're not just going to be satisfied with getting a little bit of extra money to pay the bills, but that there's actually something important about work on a spiritual and existential level, that we are not creatures who are designed to sit around all day, playing video

• 43:51Kevin Roose?

  games and making art and talking about philosophy. What did you find in this study about how people's attitudes toward work did or didn't shift after they got these payments?

• 44:04Speaker 06

  I think it depends a lot on what type of job you're working in, in terms of how much meaning it provides. There are people that we talked to who were working incredibly difficult jobs, working 60 hours a week, that were physically hard on them, and the chance to work one less job or cut back those hours meant a lot and actually gave them more meaning because they were able to spend time with their kids. One of the things that I found interesting was the growing interest in entrepreneurship and having ideas for businesses. People were, we saw a lot of increase in planning for the future, and in a lot of ways, I feel like it gave people some space to sit back and think about what

• 44:48Speaker 06

  would they do if they had more opportunities. Because there are a lot of people, I think, now that Are just surviving and maybe work is not is not providing that sense of meaning and they don't have those choices.

• 45:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, can I just say, Kevin, like, that that question, which a lot of people really are asking, just feels like the most American puritan question I can possibly imagine. You know, it's like, if you're not working like eight to 10 hours a day, your life could not possibly have any meaning. And if we were to give people $1,000 a month, then all of a sudden, like, we will lose our being. Anyway, it's just like, it's the most American idea that you can have. And I would posit that, you know, maybe people could work one hour fewer a day and, you know, the country would be okay.

• 45:35Kevin Roose?

  Wow, spoken like a European.

• 45:39Casey Newton?

  I'm going on strike after this episode, by the way.

• 45:42Kevin Roose?

  So, one of the backers of this project is Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. He's been talking about universal basic income for years as a sort of antidote to widespread AI-related job loss. It seems like recently he might be cooling on the idea of UBI. He recently said in an interview that he now wonders if a better approach would be something like what he called universal basic compute, basically giving everyone sort of a slice of the computing power to, you know, to run their own versions of GPT-7 or whatever. What do you make of that? And do you think attitudes in the tech industry toward UBI are shifting at all beyond him?

• 46:23Speaker 06

  I mean, I can't speak for Sam. I have heard, you know, him talk about basic income being one piece of a larger policy framework, which I think is very true. And what we see from this study is that people need more than just money sometimes, or what amount of money people need. Like, there's a lot of people that aren't able to participate in the economy now, or share in the benefits of the economy, and they're not, don't feel like they have a voice now. And so I think, for me, it is a question that we should be asking ourselves now about all the challenges that that individuals and families are facing, and the inequalities, they're only going to get worse. They've gotten worse over time. And so, thinking about how do we create a more inclusive economy now, and I think

• 47:06Speaker 06

  it probably involves more than just money. And I think Sam is thinking about those things, although I can't speak for him.

• 47:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Have the findings shifted your own thinking about UBI? Do you still think it's kind of a promising idea? Or how did the research change the way you thought about it?

• 47:23Speaker 06

  People have asked a lot of questions. It's like, does this work? Or does cash work? And my sort of immediate response is, does food work? Right? Like, everyone does need, need cash.

• 47:35Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 06

  I think a question that, that I have is, is what does it look like for it to work? And what are the goals that it should achieve? And, and one of the things that we learn the most is that cash is an imprecise tool. If you're trying to move health, for instance, for everyone, there's probably a better way to do that. Some of the average treatment effects being null can be masking like very strong improvements or improvements, small improvements across a number of different dimensions for different people. And so measuring that and sort of one of those metrics, what is the goal of this policy? I think is a critical question. Like, this was not supposed to be a referendum on UBI or a specific policy. It was, what is, what happens when you give people cash?

• 48:20Speaker 06

  And understanding, like, we have very granular data on the lives of participants over three years.

• 48:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Also, I'm going to guess that none of the participants like wrote a note to you at the end saying, you know, I really regret taking this money over the past few years. And I, if anything, I wish it had been less.

• 48:35Kevin Roose?

  Well, as someone who thinks that AI will change the labor market in many ways over the next decade or so, and will change a lot of people's jobs and, and will eliminate some people's jobs, I'm really glad that these kinds of studies are happening. I'm really grateful for the research that you and your team have done, even if it didn't, you know, make the, the proponents of universal basic income universally happy. I just think we need a lot more people looking into, what does a society look like when AI can do 20, 30, 40% of all jobs? And how do we sort of help the people who may fall through the cracks? So I just think this is incredibly valuable and important work.

• 49:14Speaker 06

  I think it's really important to be proactive. And, you know, we learn a lot from these studies about what works, what doesn't, and under what conditions. And I think that is really important work that needs to continue.

• 49:25Casey Newton?

  You know, it's just occurring to me that you're a researcher whose last name is Rhodes. You must get so many Rhodes Scholar jokes.

• 49:32Speaker 06

  No, not usually.

• 49:33Casey Newton?

  Oh, wow. Okay. Well, I'm excited to tell people we have a Rhodes Scholar on the show this week.

• 49:38Speaker 06

  I'm honored.

• 49:38Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 49:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Well, thanks for coming by. It was really good to talk to you.

• 49:41Speaker 06

  Thanks so much.

• 49:42Casey Newton?

  Thanks.

• 49:45Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, CrowdStrike pushes an update to its Falcon software.

• 49:50Casey Newton?

  And then everything goes Falcon haywire.

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• 51:47Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, this past week saw us all getting a harsh lesson in the dangers of using a Windows computer.

• 51:52Kevin Roose?

  I assume you're talking about the global tech meltdown that happened last Friday.

• 51:59Casey Newton?

  I am. On Friday, July 19th, a faulty update to cybersecurity software from a company named CrowdStrike took down millions of computers, causing a global calamity. This bug knocked Sky News offline in the United Kingdom. It took out 911 call centers for a while, and it grounded commercial airline flights. And, on that last point, our team, which had been visiting us last week here in San Francisco, their flights were delayed and canceled due to this bug. And that makes this personal, Kevin.

• 52:29Kevin Roose?

  Well, it's personal for me, because I was also supposed to fly out on Friday.

• 52:34Casey Newton?

  I don't care about that as much. I feel bad for our team. But what happened to you?

• 52:38Kevin Roose?

  Well, I was scheduled to fly to Cleveland to see my family, and the morning of the flight, I got a notification that my flight was three hours delayed. And it actually did end up taking off, but it was very bizarre. I went to the airport in San Francisco, and all of the screens were down, like that show you the arriving and departing flights. And at the gate, like the screens that show you, you know, Boarding Group 1 is now ready to board, were just completely either black, or they had sort of gotten the blue screen of death.

• 53:08Casey Newton?

  And this really was, you know, so of course, if a Windows computer can't boot, it will show you what is known colloquially as the blue screen of death. And this is the moment when we found out how many computers around the world were running on Windows, because all across social media, we saw these frankly beautiful photos of these like everyday environments, where there were these giant screens that were just showing the blue screen of death out of nowhere. And it truly seemed like an experimental art project that like Grimes would have done.

• 53:32Kevin Roose?

  Totally. It was pandemonium at the airport, because not only were a lot of flights delayed and canceled, but the actual, like, the computers in the restaurants and like the Hudson News kiosks, many of them were down. So like, I tried to get some snacks for my flight, and literally, all of the self-checkout things were down. There was one register open, and like, they were doing the tabulations by hand on paper. No, it was it was cash only like we had reverted to to the to the 19th century.

• 54:02Casey Newton?

  Well, look, I mean, this seems like a very dangerous situation if we're going to have to be doing calculations by hand in this weird future that we're living in. So we need to get to bottom of this, Kevin.

• 54:11Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 54:11Casey Newton?

  So, you know, by now, some of you may have heard some details about how this happened. But today, we want to offer you the clearest explanation we can give you of how just one 40 kilobyte file can crash the global IT infrastructure and to discuss what we can do to prevent it from happening again. Because we're very solutions oriented on this podcast.

• 54:29Kevin Roose?

  It's true.

• 54:30Casey Newton?

  So to talk about this, we're bringing on friend of the show, Kate Conger. Kate is a tech reporter at the New York Times and has been covering this crowd strike debacle for the past week. So let's bring her in.

• 54:41Kevin Roose?

  Let's bring her in.

• 54:45Casey Newton?

  Kate Conger, welcome back to Hard Fork.

• 54:47Speaker 08

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 54:48Casey Newton?

  So what were you doing when you learned about the crowd strike situation?

• 54:53Speaker 08

  I was waking up.

• 54:56Casey Newton?

  Because it actually started sort of very early in the day, Pacific time, right?

• 54:59Speaker 08

  Right. Yeah, well, I was in New York last week. But yeah, it happened overnight, basically. So we're still waking up to it.

• 55:05Casey Newton?

  And did it seem like a really big deal at first? Or did that sort of dawn on all of us more gradually?

• 55:11Speaker 08

  I think it seems like a really big deal right away, but I'm waking up in when it's already been happening for several hours. So I think I had enough context to be like, oh, this is quite bad, actually.

• 55:21Casey Newton?

  I had this experience of seeing all the photos on social media of the blue screens of death, like, like, including in a lot of places where like, they shouldn't have been there. It should have been showing you an advertisement or like, you know, airport departures or whatever. Instead, it was these blue screens everywhere. Did those also strike you as very beautiful?

• 55:38Speaker 08

  I do really like them. Yes. Well, and the the little frowny face that some of them had, the frown emoji, I was delighted by.

• 55:47Kevin Roose?

  But we should say, like, lest we be accused of making jokes about a global tech outage, it did actually have. No, you're joking, but it did.

• 55:55Casey Newton?

  I would never.

• 55:56Kevin Roose?

  Hospitals, schools, airlines, all experienced outages as a result of this. So Kate, from your reporting on this, who sort of felt the brunt of this outage and how?

• 56:08Speaker 08

  I mean, I think you just kind of ran through the list. I mean, 911 centers, airports, hospitals. And then, of course, everyone that's relying on those services, right? You know, I think we saw a lot of people talking about having surgeries or procedures. They were supposed to get canceled. Obviously, tons and tons of flights got canceled. So, you know, very quickly went to critical businesses and then to all the customers that are relying on them.

• 56:31Casey Newton?

  So let's go a little bit deeper here. And Kate, I have to ask you a question that I hope to never ask on this podcast. And it goes like this. What is CrowdStrike?

• 56:39Speaker 08

  Okay, so CrowdStrike is a huge cybersecurity company. And I think everyone outside of the security industry woke up on Friday and was like, what is this company? And I think everyone within the industry knows them to have this almost mythic status of being the guys that are called in to fix it when you have no idea how to fix it.

• 57:02Casey Newton?

  Really?

• 57:02Speaker 08

  Yes. So they have a pristine reputation in the cybersecurity industry. They were called in for the 2014 hack on Sony Pictures. And when they're trying to figure out, you know, how North Korea had gotten all their files and dumped them. Again, the Democratic National Committee calls them in in 2016 to investigate the email hack and leak where we saw Hillary Clinton's emails exposed. And so they are kind of known in the industry as the people that can come in, track very sophisticated nation state actors and remediate those kinds of really intense hacks.

• 57:35Casey Newton?

  So in a lot of ways, that up until this happened, these were the last people who you would expect to be behind a global IT outage.

• 57:41Speaker 08

  Yes.

• 57:42Kevin Roose?

  They were the people you would call to fix it.

• 57:44Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 57:44Kevin Roose?

  I did not actually realize until this happened that they also make their own software that goes on millions of computers around the world and that that's part of the reason that this happened.

• 57:54Casey Newton?

  So. Because you only knew them from those things Kate just mentioned.

• 57:57Kevin Roose?

  They were sort of the fix it guys that you would call when something calamitous happened to your computer network.

• 58:03Casey Newton?

  All right, so all of this happened when CrowdStrike was updating its Falcon software. What do you know about Falcon? And what were they trying to update here?

• 58:12Speaker 08

  Okay, so Falcon is a piece of security software that I think we have on our computers at work, probably. And, you know, it's on, I think, 300 of the Fortune 500 companies use their software.

• 58:26Casey Newton?

  That's a lot of Falcon companies.

• 58:28Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 58:28Casey Newton?

  So what does it do besides leave kids stranded at the airport?

• 58:32Speaker 08

  Okay, so the way the CrowdStrike software, the Falcon software works, it sits sort of at the kernel level of the operating system. And I'm already watching you glaze over.

• 58:43Casey Newton?

  No. You have to know about the kernel. It's like at Kentucky Fried Chicken. You have to know about the kernel.

• 58:48Speaker 08

  One must always think of the kernel.

• 58:50Casey Newton?

  One must always. So what is it?

• 58:51Speaker 08

  So this is sort of the heart of the operating system that gets the computer going, boots everything up, and then you have all the software and the apps that you use running on top of that.

• 59:00Casey Newton?

  This is like the first thing that happens when you turn on a computer is that the kernel gets involved. So before even the operating system is loaded, right?

• 59:06Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 59:07Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And so CrowdStrike has access to the kernel, which is like, that's already, some would say, a risky thing to give a company access to, right? Because of all the havoc it can wreak.

• 59:17Speaker 08

  Right. But if you're thinking about, I mean, take a second and think if you've gone into hacking instead of podcasting.

• 59:24Casey Newton?

  I've thought about that in the past, I'll admit it.

• 59:25Speaker 08

  Sure. Who among us? But, you know, if you're thinking about how you want to get access to a system that you're trying to spy on or infiltrate, you know, would you rather be at the software level or get into someone's email account? Or do you want to be sitting at the very base of the system? So you have that broad, broad access.

• 59:43Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you want the kernel.

• 59:44Speaker 08

  Right. You want to go wherever you want to go in the system. And so that's part of the reason why CrowdStrike software sits there. It wants to monitor activity that's going on and see, you know, what kind of malicious things might be happening kind of beneath the surface.

• 59:57Casey Newton?

  Right. So CrowdStrike has access to the kernel. What goes wrong?

• 1:00:00Speaker 08

  Okay. So they send an update out to Falcon. And the update is meant to look for a new kind of attack that they've started to see and detect. So file goes out and there is a problem with the file. And so when it's installed on the system, the computer tries to boot and then it fails. And then it will try to boot again and fail and boot again and fail and boot again and fail. And so then you get to the blue screen of death.

• 1:00:32Kevin Roose?

  I mean, presumably before they push out updates to millions of computers that use the Falcon software, CrowdStrike is doing some kind of internal testing on a smaller set of computers to just say, hey, does this break the operating system when we push out this update? So. What do we know about how their internal quality control process might have failed here?

• 1:00:55Speaker 08

  Yeah, so they do a lot of testing and they just put out a blog post about how they run through that and what went wrong. And they do a mix of automated testing and, you know, hands-on, personal testing. And they said that there was a problem with the testing software that they used that allowed the flaw to slip through in this update. And then they shipped it.

• 1:01:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Now, that said, the fact that they didn't test it more before sending it out, would you say that was a huge Falcon mistake?

• 1:01:26Speaker 08

  I mean, it does seem like there should have been more testing here, obviously, like this is something that should have been caught. It wasn't. There's also a question of, you know, wanting to roll out an update to every single computer that's using your software at once. And it's one of those kind of classic tug of wars that you see a lot in security where you want to get the fix to people as quickly as possible. So if they are presently under attack, you can detect it and stop it.

• 1:01:55Casey Newton?

  Yep.

• 1:01:55Speaker 08

  So ship the update everywhere, right? But, you know, should you happen to make a mistake in your update, perhaps ship it in like a staged fashion. So it's going to a couple of people and then a couple more people and you're making sure that you don't cause a global internet

• 1:02:09Casey Newton?

  I mean, that's what we do on Hard Work. Every episode, we ship it out to a small number of test users to see if it crashes their phones. And if it doesn't, then we send it out to the rest of them.

• 1:02:16Kevin Roose?

  That's not true. I have a possibly a dumb question, Kate. So CrowdStrike pushes out this update to Falcon that breaks all of these computers and prevents them from loading. But they know there's a problem right away. And they know that there's a fix to this. Why couldn't they push out a second update to fix the problems in the first update?

• 1:02:34Speaker 08

  So that's what they did. A little bit less than an hour and a half after the first update. So they send the bad update. They go, oh, no.

• 1:02:44Speaker 08

  Something has gone wrong. And an hour and a half later, they send a second update that will, in theory, fix the problem.

• 1:02:53Kevin Roose?

  But I've also seen reports that it could take weeks before all of the computers that are affected by this are fixed or, you know, back online. So what's the disparity there? Why did this problem continue late into Friday?

• 1:03:07Speaker 08

  OK, so all of the computers that got the bad update, 8.5 million or so, were online, obviously, at the time that the update was shipped out. And like we talked about before, they are now in this cycle of crash and reboot and crash and reboot and crash and reboot. And because the Falcon software is sitting sort of at the kernel level of this operating system, a lot of these computers are not booting up far enough for the new update to come through and fix what's happening. That is something that started to happen. And I think Microsoft was even suggesting to their customers, try rebooting the computer 15, 20 times and that update might come through and come onto the system. And then- That sounds like trolling, you know? If someone is like, oh, did you try rebooting it 20 times?

• 1:03:52Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:53Speaker 08

  Come on, but I guess it works. One of the blue screen of death images that I saw, the text on it was like, you know, if you are comfortable doing the reboot, try it. If not, call someone you trust. It's just like, so my mom?

• 1:04:10Speaker 08

  A coach, a parent, a trusted friend, yeah.

• 1:04:12Kevin Roose?

  I also saw people suggesting that this could be manually fixed by like going into the recovery mode of the computer and like deleting a certain file from a certain folder. But if you're an airline like that has, you know, 100,000 computers all running Windows with this same thing, you're not going to be able to like go individually to each of those computers very quickly.

• 1:04:34Speaker 08

  Right, so yes, you could do, I think Windows calls it safe mode, but you could put the computer into safe mode, go in, delete this bad file from the CrowdStrike software and then, you know, reboot as normal. There's a couple of problems with that. One, a lot of the computers that are crashed by this are not necessarily computers like a laptop. Top where you have a keyboard right there that you can kind of log on to the computer, go in and delete the file.

• 1:05:01Kevin Roose?

  There's servers in a data center.

• 1:05:02Speaker 08

  Right. Yeah. Or like I saw, you know, I was at the gym the other day and a bunch of their screens were still blue. And it's like, you know, the big TV screens that are in the gym, there's no keyboard there. And who knows where that screen is actually running from to go track it down and remove the file. Two is that a lot of these computers exist in big enterprises, right? Like big companies. And a lot of these companies are very smartly locked down some of the machines that they use. So not any person in the building can go in, put the computer into safe mode and start tinkering with it. So I think that that's an issue as well as that some of these devices are locked down so that only certain users have the permission to do those things. And so when you're in this panic moment, all your screens are blue,

• 1:05:46Speaker 08

  and you have to wait for the one guy that has permission to go around and fix the computers. It's going to take a while.

• 1:05:52Kevin Roose?

  So this bug only affected Windows computers. Is that because only Windows and Microsoft work with CrowdStrike in this way? Does do Mac computers not have this specific piece of software? Why does? Why was it only a problem for Windows users?

• 1:06:06Speaker 08

  This is super interesting. I love this question. Okay, so and this gets into Microsoft lore. So in, I would say, I think this is like, the mid 2000s or so, so like 2005 to 2010 ish. Microsoft was working with a variety of different security vendors. And then Microsoft was like, hey, what if we acquired some of these security vendors and started bringing them in house and owning security companies? And then the EU was like, hey, wait a minute, besties, that bothers us for competition reasons. So you need to figure out how to make your operating system

• 1:06:49Speaker 08

  competitive for other security companies that want to compete in that space. And you're not privileging the ones that you've acquired and brought in house. So that gets to a point where Microsoft basically decides we're going to have a more open kernel. And then we're going to let others like multiple security vendors play in this space, make software that runs in this space.

• 1:07:09Casey Newton?

  Because, just to be clear, a thing that Microsoft could do would be to prevent companies like CrowdStrike from getting access to the kernel, but they get regulatory pressure, you're saying, to not do that.

• 1:07:20Speaker 08

  Right. So Microsoft is under regulatory pressure to allow a multitude of cybersecurity companies to have that kind of access. Apple does not have that issue. They have a completely closed kernel, no software, including CrowdStrike, which runs on Mac, has that same level of access. And I believe Apple, I want to say in 2019, was when they cut off kernel access, and they created this whole other system that allows CrowdStrike software to work on macOS without getting that same kind of deep, deep access to the operating system.

• 1:07:55Kevin Roose?

  I see. I noticed that Microsoft, in the wake of this outage, was very quick to say, this was not us. We did not cause this. We are not responsible for it. This is CrowdStrike's fault, even though it happened on Windows machines. So what kind of response has Microsoft had in maybe tightening up their security ecosystem after this outage?

• 1:08:17Speaker 08

  So I think Microsoft is in a little bit of a tough spot with this because, you know, it isn't a flaw on their end. And, you know, I think, we talked about this earlier, but there's this catch 22 of security, right, where you want to have the best protection you can have as quickly as possible. But, you know, if those updates aren't sufficiently tested, then you have a crash coming. So, yeah, I think it's, I think it's a really tough position for them to kind of strike.

• 1:08:46Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, with security software in particular, in order to keep you safe, it just needs access to everything on your computer. So it's like, in a way, the security software itself is going to be the least secure thing on your computer because it is essentially a single point of failure. And if something goes wrong with that, well then now all of a sudden, you're in a tough spot. And as Kate just explained to us, Microsoft said, well, hey, we could fix that. And then regulators said, no, you can't. So I agree with you. This is a catch 22 for them.

• 1:09:13Speaker 08

  Well, and it's kind of interesting, too, because now you have the antitrust scrutiny shifting over to CrowdStrike. And then people are saying, hey, wait a minute, like, should a security company have this kind of marketplace dominance where they ship a flaw and it takes out industries around the world? You know, and again, you have that same catch 22. It's like, sure, should we all be using the exact same company for these needs? Maybe, maybe not. But-

• 1:09:38Speaker 08

  If you're sitting there trying to pick out your cybersecurity software, aren't you going to go with the guys that were called in for the Sony hack?

• 1:09:44Kevin Roose?

  Right, right.

• 1:09:46Casey Newton?

  Well, I think that takes us into the real question that I want to get at today, which is can something like this be prevented? So what thoughts are out there right now about what we might be able to do to prevent something like this from happening again?

• 1:10:00Speaker 08

  So, I mean, I think the big thing that I keep hearing from people in the industry is to think about testing in a different way. I think a lot of software testing has shifted to a fully automated system where there's kind of like running the software real quick through these automated systems, checking a box, it's good to go, and, you know, not really heavily scrutinizing and having a person sit down and look and say like, okay, is this working? Have we tried testing it on this old outdated operating system that we know some of our users are still on? Have we tried it in this environment? Have we tried it in that environment? And it just seems like, you know, getting a more robust testing system would help with some of this stuff.

• 1:10:43Speaker 08

  I think there's also maybe going to be some renewed debate in the industry about, you know, the depth of access that software vendors are allowed to have on your machine. Obviously, you know, Apple comes out of this looking very prescient for making that change and kicking everybody out of their kernel when they did.

• 1:10:59Kevin Roose?

  I have been thinking a lot this year about a word that I keep hearing, which is dependencies. And we talked about a few months ago on the show, this one random database engineer at Microsoft who may have inadvertently sort of stopped a massive cyber attack because he spotted this malware in this piece of Linux software.

• 1:11:19Casey Newton?

  You're talking about Andres Freund?

• 1:11:22Kevin Roose?

  Andres Freund. And in the wake of that story, there were all these sort of people in the cybersecurity industry saying, our infrastructure is way too dependent. We have too many dependencies on these kind of obscure open source projects, these obscure vendors, these obscure things that, you know, they're installed on millions of computers, but that maybe aren't overseen with the level of rigor that they should be, given how important they are to our sort of global tech. Tech infrastructure. And that's what I'm thinking a lot in the wake of this CrowdStrike incident is just how dependent we are as a society on these things that most of us probably don't even know exist, that even people who who write code for a living may not routinely interact with,

• 1:12:05Kevin Roose?

  but that are so important and that have that we have very little insight or access into. So do we need some kind of like a national online infrastructure movement? Like the way that we have infrastructure bills to like invest in our roads and bridges? Like, do we need some kind of a national effort to just firm up the infrastructure that our global technology landscape depends on?

• 1:12:29Speaker 08

  I mean, I love that idea. I think that sounds so fun. But yeah, I mean, I think the to go to your broader question about the architecture of the internet. I think the internet is a very fragile and beautifully built thing. And I think there's so many fun quirks and weird things about the way the internet works. Like you mentioned, all these open source projects, all these, you know, protocols that are sort of written by committee and voted on by people who are just volunteering to like make sure the internet works good, you know? It's really cool and beautiful and also quite fragile. And I don't know. I mean, I think there's an there's an instinct to say, yes, we should consolidate this. We should have more oversight over it.

• 1:13:13Speaker 08

  We should try to run it in a coherent and structured way. But I also think that like, that's something that's really beautiful and special about the internet is that anyone can have access and can get involved in sort of the in the plumbing of it and work on it if they want to. And, you know, maybe the thing that solidifies and kind of reinforces that infrastructure is the fact that people are becoming more technically savvy and more people are getting involved in those projects. You know, I think I think that's sort of the dream. I'm still kind of like in the the web should be free mindset, I think. And I kind of, you know, I don't love the idea of saying, OK, like, you know, we're gonna. Have a, I don't know, a national internet

• 1:13:57Speaker 08

  infrastructure board that's going to run the internet.

• 1:14:00Kevin Roose?

  Totally. I mean, obviously, this particular outage has largely been resolved, but are there other things that you're still waiting for? Are there other shoes to drop here? What do you think comes next in the CrowdStrike story?

• 1:14:14Speaker 08

  So I think a couple of things. One, I mean, things are mostly back to normal, but you know, I'm still seeing blue screens here and there at the gym and the airport, et cetera. And so, you know, I think there's still remediation to be done there. And then, you know, I think there's still a need for a public accounting of what exactly went wrong and how we got to this point. And, you know, I know CrowdStrike CEO has been asked to come and testify in Congress. So I think it'll be interesting to see what he says about the process and how they got to this point.

• 1:14:45Casey Newton?

  But in the meantime, Kevin and Kate, I am pleased to tell you that some level of justice has already been delivered. This just broke on TechCrunch. CrowdStrike has offered a $10 apology gift card to say sorry for the outage. This sounds like a joke. It is not. They have been emailing customers to offer them a $10 Uber Eats gift card as an apology. And the accompanying email says, "We send our heartfelt thanks and apologies for the inconvenience. To express our gratitude, your next cup of coffee or late night snack is on us."

• 1:15:18Kevin Roose?

  Is that real?

• 1:15:19Casey Newton?

  This is real. I will, I guess I will share this in the chat.

• 1:15:22Kevin Roose?

  A $10 Uber Eats gift card?

• 1:15:24Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:24Kevin Roose?

  Sorry, we screwed up your entire infrastructure and made hundreds of thousands of people miss their flights. Here's $10. I think that's lovely.

• 1:15:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So thank you to CrowdStrike for resolving this issue with a gift card and we won't be discussing it any further.

• 1:15:43Casey Newton?

  Kate, thanks for coming in and may the forces of the internet protect your computer from CrowdStrike.

• 1:15:48Speaker 08

  Casey, thank you so much. This is so fun.

• 1:15:50Kevin Roose?

  Thanks for coming by.

• 1:16:10Speaker 00

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• 1:17:54Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Alicia Batytoop, Marian Lozano, Diane Wong, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Poohing Tam, Kate LaPreste, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected]. Keep those direct cash transfers coming. What's your Venmo again?

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