SBF Arrested + 2023 Predictions + Your Questions Answered

The year of the “mini-Musk” chief executive, the end of homework as we know it, a crackdown on TikTok and other predictions for 2023. Also, Sam Bankman-Fried’s arrest and answers to our listener questions.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:33Casey Newton?

  Kevin, I'm sitting with you here in the studio, and I have to ask, is that a fidget spinner that's in your hands?

• 0:39Kevin Roose?

  It is. I did recently acquire a fidget spinner, actually inspired by some of our conversations about Sam Bankman-Fried, who also is a big fan of the fidget spinner and, you know, a guy I really seek to emulate.

• 0:53Casey Newton?

  I didn't realize that SBF was a fidget spinner guy. Like, what do we know about his relationship with fidget spinners?

• 0:58Kevin Roose?

  Well, he used one, or I don't know if they let you have fidget spinners in jail, but he did use one, and it was a way to deal with his nervous energy. But this one that I have, it's not just a normal fidget spinner. It's a new one that has these little bubbles that pop.

• 1:16Casey Newton?

  Wow, I mean, this is a show about advancements in technology, and so I just want to thank you for bringing that one onto the show.

• 1:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:22Casey Newton?

  You know, SBF went from a fidget spinner to spinning one of the greatest financial frauds in history. So I'm looking forward to seeing what you're going to spin in 2023.

• 1:36Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos, tech columnist for The New York Times.

• 1:38Casey Newton?

  And I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:40Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 1:42Casey Newton?

  This week on the show, a conversation with The Times' David Yaffe Bellany about the arrest of Sam Bankman-Fried. Later in the show, Kevin and I make our big 2023 predictions. And finally, after weeks of anticipation, we will take your questions from the mailbag. Plus, a holiday treat.

• 2:00Kevin Roose?

  Holiday treat, you say?

• 2:01Casey Newton?

  Mmm.

• 2:11Kevin Roose?

  All right. Casey, you ready?

• 2:13Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 2:14Kevin Roose?

  David, you ready?

• 2:14Speaker 03

  I'm ready.

• 2:16Kevin Roose?

  David Jaffe Bellany, aka D Y B, welcome to Hard Fork. Great to have you here.

• 2:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 2:22Kevin Roose?

  Since you're in the studio with us, I thought we should call this segment the I R L S B F F T X F A Q with D Y B.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  Sounds great. I approve.

• 2:35Kevin Roose?

  So, David, you cover crypto for the New York Times, and we're here, of course, to talk about what has become the biggest story in crypto. Sam Bankman-Fried, the former billionaire and CEO of F T X, has been arrested. So I'm curious, was this on your 2022 bingo card?

• 2:54Casey Newton?

  No, we can't use this formulation. Here's what we learned about bingo cards in 2022. No one had anything on their bingo card, okay? The bingo cards were constant surprises.

• 3:02Kevin Roose?

  Well.

• 3:03Casey Newton?

  I think it is fair to say that no one saw this coming. Yeah?

• 3:05Kevin Roose?

  Did you see this coming? Did you see S B F getting arrested as a possibility this calendar year?

• 3:11Speaker 03

  No, I definitely didn't. I mean, I think at the beginning of the year, I spent some time with Ben McKenzie and Jacob Silverman, two of the biggest crypto critics. And they were arguing that this whole house of cards would collapse really soon. You know, a lot of their arguments struck me as pretty plausible. And so I went into it with, I think, a healthy dose of skepticism about the long-term viability of a lot of this. But I was in the Bahamas in April for F T X's big conference, writing a story about Sam Bankman-Fried. You know, I had plenty of questions about how the business was run and about whether what they were doing was actually good for consumers and that sort of thing. But like everyone else, I didn't anticipate that the whole thing was a massive fraud that would collapse over the course of a month and leave S B F in a Bahamian prison.

• 3:54Casey Newton?

  And so, I mean, we will get to everything that has put this man in prison. But can you just give us a little flavor of what it was like to be in the Bahamas in April as this company is at the height of its powers? Was this a jubilant moment in the lives of the F T X employees?

• 4:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it was a giant party. There was F T X branded beer cans at the lunch area. You had to walk through a giant casino at the Bahama Resort to get to the conference area, which I thought was, you know,

• 4:23Kevin Roose?

  A little on the nose.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  A little interesting symbolism there.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I was I was there to write about Sam and a lot of what I was doing was trying to kind of follow him around and he was getting stopped in the hallways like he was a rock star, you know, people were taking selfies with him or saying, you know, Sam, Sam, like, say happy birthday into my camera so I can send this to my friend, you know. At one point, his mother was like trying to get his attention and some like crypto guy like got in between them was like, Sam, Sam, like, I want to talk to you. It was like he was this, he was, he was this sort of huge celebrity. He was on stage kind of rubbing shoulders with Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. I think there's a photo now of kind of Bill Clinton giving him a sort of like a fatherly clap on the shoulder. You know, that was the vibe at Crypto Bahamas, but it was also weird. It always felt weird, you know? It was a bunch of kind of 20 something, early 30s crypto people who just kind of descended

• 5:13Speaker 03

  on this island nation, you know, they were living in a resort. So the whole thing was strange. It set off maybe a few alarm bells, but it certainly didn't scream to me, the whole thing is a fraud.

• 5:24Casey Newton?

  And I will say, this sounds like it could have been an iconic season of The White Lotus. But why don't we get to what happened this week? SBF, I understand, is now in jail. So what happened and what's he being charged with?

• 5:37Speaker 03

  He's being charged with sort of all manner of fraud against investors, against people who lent money to FTX and Alameda, against customers. He's got eight counts of criminal charges in the Justice Department, but he's also got civil charges from the SEC and the CFTC. And, you know, what we learned from those charges was that this went back years and years. I mean, the allegation is that it was a fraud from the start. You know, from the very beginning of FTX, SBF was taking customer money and using it to make political contributions, to buy lavish real estate in the Bahamas, to invest in other companies and just to expand this empire.

• 6:15Kevin Roose?

  And this is a very different story, right, from the one that SBF himself has been telling for the past few weeks as he's been on this kind of grand media tour. He's been saying essentially that this started off as a legitimate crypto exchange with a hedge fund attached. They made some boneheaded accounting errors and all of a sudden they're missing all this money. And the story that it sounds like came out in these indictments is that none of that was true, that not only was he using customer deposits to fund risky bets and investments and political contributions from the beginning, but that a lot of the acquisitions that FTX had made of other crypto companies was in part A way to get more money into the system so that he could use that and co-mingle it

• 6:59Kevin Roose?

  with Alameda's funds and do all this treaty stuff with it.

• 7:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that is very clear from the charges that he sort of denied in his media appearances is that he was very involved in Alameda. I mean, that's one thing that he has disputed on this media tour. Like he said, I didn't know what was going on in Alameda. I wasn't running it. I stepped back. I was overstretched. But especially if you look at the CFTC's complaint, there's very specific instances of messages where he is specifically discussing Alameda trades and that type of thing. And that supports that reporting that I and other people have done, that like he always had a hand in trades at Alameda, that he was involved in venture investment decisions and that sort of thing.

• 7:37Kevin Roose?

  So now SBF is where? Is he still in the Bahamas, in jail? Has he been extradited to the United States? What is his current status?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  He's in custody in the Bahamas. The extradition process can take weeks or months to unfold. It's not totally clear yet whether he's going to be contesting the extradition. If he did, there'd be like a legal fight in the Bahamas over whether he gets moved to the United States. There's an extradition hearing scheduled for February 8th. So that's the kind of a next date. Mark your calendars, get your plane tickets to the Bahamas.

• 8:08Kevin Roose?

  Sounds like you're going to have to be spending a lot of time in the Bahamas this winter. I'm sorry.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Real hardship reporting assignment, yes.

• 8:14Kevin Roose?

  Hope you get hazard pay. In light of the charges that have come down this week against Sam Bankman-Fried, does his media tour of the past couple of weeks, his sort of very freewheeling, like it seemed like he was being interviewed by everyone, like random guys on Twitter Spaces? What do you make of that, that he knew that this was happening and in the works and probably going to happen, and he was kind of trying to road test his defense? Why did he do this insane media tour?

• 8:43Casey Newton?

  And how bad was it for his legal defense?

• 8:46Speaker 03

  Obviously, no criminal defense lawyer in the world is going to tell you that it's a good idea to go talking to the media when you're under criminal investigation. The basic advice is just shut up, don't say anything, don't incriminate yourself, don't lock yourself into a narrative that when you get to court and you actually see the charges, you might want to deviate from. However, it's not as As if like Sam wouldn't have been charged if he hadn't been talking to the media like it's clear that the investigators at all these agencies had plenty of evidence available to them. But some of his statements over the last couple of weeks were cited in these complaints. So, you know, it's coming back to bite him already. But yeah, it was pretty extraordinary to watch. I mean, I talked to him very shortly after the bankruptcy. We did the first interview with him afterwards and he was pretty cagey, but he said some stuff.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  We ran our story and then, you know, like fast forward a week and a half, he's talking to literally every news outlet under the sun. He's like getting on Twitter spaces with crypto influencers who are like clamoring to ask him questions and like shouting over each other. And it was just this kind of bizarre spectacle.

• 9:46Kevin Roose?

  So at the same time that these charges against Sam Bankman Fried were unsealed, the House Financial Services Committee in the US was holding a hearing that SBF was actually supposed to attend. He didn't attend. It's not something that you can attend from a Bahamian jail cell. So I wanted to just talk about that hearing because I did watch a couple of clips from that and they were pretty remarkable. Sam Bankman Fried did not appear, but John Ray, who is the new CEO of FTX, who we've talked about on the show before, who was the cleanup guy, who was sort of brought in not only to help make sense of what happened at FTX, but he was also the Enron cleanup guy before that.

• 10:28Kevin Roose?

  And I just thought we should play a clip from his opening statement in this House Financial Services Committee hearing.

• 10:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. FTX Group's collapse appears to stem from absolute concentration of control in the hands of a small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals.

• 10:44Kevin Roose?

  A small group of grossly inexperienced and unsophisticated individuals.

• 10:49Speaker 03

  Just a savage burn. I mean, he did. He did start out this whole process by saying, I did Enron and this is the worst thing I've ever seen. So the burns don't get much worse than that.

• 10:58Kevin Roose?

  That is true. That is true. I also loved the part later in his testimony where he talked about how FTX executives kept their corporate records. So let's play that.

• 11:11Speaker 04

  Literally, you know, there's no record keeping whatsoever. It's the absence of record keeping. Employees would communicate invoicing and expenses on Slack, which is essentially a way of communicating for chat rooms. They use QuickBooks, a multi-billion dollar company using QuickBooks. QuickBooks? QuickBooks. Nothing against QuickBooks, very nice tool, just not for a multi-billion dollar company.

• 11:40Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so we have the now infamous QuickBooks Exchange where it's revealed that FTX, this multi-billion dollar venture-backed company in the Bahamas, was using QuickBooks for its accounting. This is not presumably a place where a lot of multi-billion dollar companies do their accounting.

• 11:56Casey Newton?

  No, QuickBooks is very much like Baby's First Business, which is the sort of business that I run. It's like, what's like sort of the bare minimum that you would need to like create and send an invoice? So the idea that you're like processing billions of dollars on it, I think is a little kooky.

• 12:11Speaker 03

  I know in some of the bankruptcy papers, John Ray also took issue with the fact that a lot of business was conducted on basically on Signal, like with through disappearing messages.

• 12:19Kevin Roose?

  Wow. I mean, from what you know about the company and your reporting and your conversations with employees, was that kind of lax record keeping a red flag to any of them? Like, were they asking like, why are we doing our invoicing in QuickBooks?

• 12:33Speaker 03

  Not really. I mean, one thing that's become clear to me in conversations I've had with people who believed in the company, worked at the company, didn't know anything about the fraud and are now watching this all kind of collapse in front of them is that they really thought they were on to something, that the way that Sam thumbed his nose at VCs meant, oh, we're actually smarter than VCs. We don't have to listen to them. The fact that he kept the company's size at about 300 employees, even though its competitors were more than 10 times larger, they thought, oh, well, we're running a kind of like lean mean operation and we're avoiding the bloat that Coinbase is dealing with, that sort of thing. They really kind of bought into that. And in retrospect, it all seems sort of foolish and people are thinking, why didn't I ask tougher questions at the time? But psychologically, it sort of makes

• 13:18Speaker 03

  sense that you would sort of embrace the things that were odd about the company and kind of interpret them as, oh, we're just smarter than the others.

• 13:27Casey Newton?

  So let's talk about what, if anything, this means for the crypto world at large. And maybe the first thing to ask is sort of, how have crypto folks been responding to this news?

• 13:38Speaker 03

  The crypto world is just furious, just apoplectic angry.

• 13:42Casey Newton?

  At Sam Bankman-Fried, not at the fact that he was arrested.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  No, at Sam Bankman-Fried, absolutely. He is public enemy number one among crypto people. To a degree, some of the anger is designed to make a point that's important for crypto people to make, which is that we're not like him. Regulators don't assume that we're like him. And it's kind of an existential issue for crypto. There are also more substantive things that crypto people are arguing, like, oh, this wasn't really a crypto problem. This was basic financial fraud. It had nothing to do with any of the unique, specific technological aspects of cryptocurrency. And in fact, the way that we prevent this in the future is to really lean in to transparency and decentralization and all of those founding values of crypto.

• 14:29Speaker 03

  Now, if there's one thing we've learned over the last 15 years of crypto's existence, it's that those things are actually incredibly difficult to execute in the real world, which is why we ended up with a company like FTX in the first place. However, that is the sort of thing that crypto people are arguing as they try to distance themselves from this.

• 14:45Casey Newton?

  So let me ask you on that point of this idea that FTX is not really a crypto story. My understanding is that a significant portion of both FTX and Alameda's assets were these crypto coins that they'd invented out of thin air that then served as collateral for some of the risky trades they were doing. And so I read that and I think, I don't know that you could have done an FTX-like scam had you not been propping it up with these crypto coins. But I'm curious what you make of the argument that this isn't really a crypto story.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, 100%. One thing that Alameda was doing was taking this token that FTX had invented called FTT and borrowing against it, basically. Invent fake money so that you can use it to borrow real money. It's sort of genius. And that's obviously something that could only have happened in this bizarre world of an emerging new form of finance. So in that way, it's 100% a crypto story. And you have to take what the crypto community is saying with a grain of salt, because, like I said before, it's a matter of life and death for them. And they Need to kind of push this story that like it wasn't really about crypto. At the same time, they are right in saying that like the basic fraud that happened didn't have anything to do with with crypto like, you know,

• 15:59Speaker 03

  taking customer money and using it to buy stuff for yourself is something that you can do with traditional currency.

• 16:04Kevin Roose?

  And has happened, has been done. Yeah, well, it's happened. I mean, MF Global, I mean, there have been firms in traditional finance that have done similar things, but not on anywhere this big a scale.

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, it depends how you measure it, but yeah, I mean, this is this is a pretty remarkable level of fraud.

• 16:21Kevin Roose?

  So David, I'm curious, like, as someone who's been covering crypto this year, we're in a, it's our last episode of the year, we're in a reflective mood, we're doing some year end predictions. When we started this year, crypto was, you know, had an all time high, NFTs were selling for millions of dollars. You know, people were very excited, celebrities were endorsing it at the Super Bowl.

• 16:43Casey Newton?

  People were creating podcasts with names like Hard Fork.

• 16:47Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, all these signs of just irrational exuberance. And now in December, we're at a point where the guy who oversaw the Enron bankruptcy is standing in front of Congress, telling people about how one of the biggest crypto exchanges in the world was using QuickBooks and doing their accounting over Slack. What, if anything, do you feel like you've learned during this crazy tumultuous year?

• 17:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, one thing that people who work in crypto and people who cover crypto say is that like, you know, crypto years are like dog years, basically. And that, you know, really in the last 11 months or so, we've really had like 10 years of financial evolution and collapse and all that sort of thing. And, you know, everything sort of imploded much, much faster than than anybody anticipated. I think even the kind of fiercest crypto skeptics, you know, many of whom have improved right on all kinds of things, you know, didn't expect that it would it would happen this quickly. In terms of like what's coming next for next year, I mean, more dominos are gonna fall. Like, we've seen kind of delays in the cause and effect of the crypto crash.

• 17:51Speaker 03

  So the firms that are teetering because of their links to FTX are maybe going to be able to survive for a few more months and then everything will come crashing down again. You know, I think that there are more stories of collapse and fraud to come.

• 18:04Casey Newton?

  Well, I'd love to have something to look forward to.

• 18:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it sounds like you're gonna be busy.

• 18:08Casey Newton?

  D Y B, thanks for the I R L F A Q.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. Anytime.

• 18:19Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we're going to make our predictions for 2023.

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• 20:11Kevin Roose?

  All right, Casey, it is time for our year end predictions.

• 20:15Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 20:15Kevin Roose?

  In preparation for this episode, I came up with three predictions for next year in the tech world. I believe you also came up with three predictions for next year in the tech world.

• 20:26Casey Newton?

  I did.

• 20:27Kevin Roose?

  And I thought it'd be fun if we could sort them into buckets of high confidence, medium confidence, and low confidence. So maybe something that you're 80% sure will happen, something that you're 50% sure will happen, and something that you're only 20% sure could happen, but it's a fun thing to think about. So do you want to go first?

• 20:47Casey Newton?

  Sure, I'll go first.

• 20:48Kevin Roose?

  What's your highest confidence prediction for 2023?

• 20:52Casey Newton?

  My high confidence prediction is that in 2023, the media's divorce from Twitter will begin in earnest, and that to the extent that Twitter and the media are inextricably linked, that will be much less true at the end of 2023.

• 21:08Kevin Roose?

  Twitter and the media are consciously uncoupling in 2023.

• 21:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Elon Musk has managed it in such a way that I think increasingly, the sort of mainstream users of the platform are somewhere in between nervous to outrage about what's going on. You know, over the past week, we saw him smear his former head of trust and safety in a really gross way that also, by the way, sent that person into hiding because he now faces so many death threats. And I don't know, man, I looked around and I said, I don't think I really want to be here anymore. And so, you know, I wrote a piece this week saying that I basically put my Twitter into like post-only mode, like I'm gonna, I'm gonna post new additions on my newsletter and like that's it, no more replies, like

• 21:57Casey Newton?

  no more having fun in the comments. And, and since then, I've seen some of my friends start to do the same thing. So this is gonna be a multi-month process. It might take all year, right? Like I have been looking at an open Twitter client 12 hours a day for like over a decade. It's hard to sort of find new alternatives for that overnight. But I think in 2023, the Twitter and media-

• 22:20Kevin Roose?

  A love affair is going to really unravel.

• 22:23Casey Newton?

  And I should say, this makes me extremely sad. Like, my own career and Twitter have been inextricably linked. Building an audience there has helped me get the past several jobs that I've had. It's been the way that I get most of my news for over a decade is where I've met some of my best friends.

• 22:42Kevin Roose?

  It's probably how we met.

• 22:43Casey Newton?

  It is how we met. So this is a really sad moment for me. And yet, when you look at what's happening around there, I don't know how, a year from now, most people aren't going to come to the same conclusion that I have, which is, it's time to build some lifeboats to somewhere else.

• 22:58Kevin Roose?

  So I read your newsletter this week, and I confess that my first reaction was kind of like, he'll be back. Like, because it's sort of a cliche at this point. Like, people write their, like, why I'm leaving Twitter column, and then, six weeks later, they're back on, and they have some justification for why they have to continue using it. But you seem to be serious about it.

• 23:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and by the way, I think it's totally fair to say you'll be back, because everyone I know who has said this in the past did come back in some way. But, you know, I do think it is different this way for a couple of reasons. You know, one, I think that Twitter, the product, is going to get worse, not better, right? I don't think it's improved in any meaningful way since Elon bought it. I'm not sure what is going to happen in the next three months or so that is going to make people feel like they've got to be there. Two, I do think more users are starting to explore alternatives. I'll be the first to admit, they're not amazing. I don't think Mastodon is what Twitter was.

• 23:55Kevin Roose?

  Not it.

• 23:56Casey Newton?

  But I've been spending some time on it this week, and I have been, I'll say, pleasantly surprised by how many of the people who I follow daily on Twitter are already there, kind of trying to make a go of it. And I've also been getting emails from people, including some who used to work at Twitter, saying, hey, we're working on a new thing, we want to show you this beta, like, we think that we can sort of come up with a better way to do this. So I'm expecting to see a lot of experimentation around this in 2023. And again, Twitter is not going to be unseated overnight. But look, let's face it, a lot of publishers have been dying for a reason, to get themselves and their reporters off of Twitter. Twitter, for all the good things it does, I think, also has a lot of really corrosive effects on the news business. And maybe if we weren't all spending 12 hours a day there, I don't know,

• 24:41Casey Newton?

  we could even get some better journalism.

• 24:43Kevin Roose?

  So that's your high confidence prediction.

• 24:45Casey Newton?

  What's yours?

• 24:45Kevin Roose?

  So my high confidence prediction for 2023 is that it's going to be the year of the mini Musk. So I think what we've seen this year is that Elon Musk has been flailing at Twitter, struggling, but there is this one group of people in Silicon Valley who really admires him and what he's doing and the way that he's been managing that company. And that is his fellow CEOs. So I've talked to a number of CEOs and investors. I know you have too. You know, maybe they don't agree with all the moves he's making at Twitter, but they love his management style.

• 25:19Casey Newton?

  They really do.

• 25:20Kevin Roose?

  And they're like using it as a playbook. They're saying to themselves like, wait a minute, I can just fire a bunch of people with an email and get away with it. Like I can disband employee resource groups and-

• 25:33Casey Newton?

  Force them to sleep in the office.

• 25:34Kevin Roose?

  Force them to sleep in the office and make them sign pledges that they'll be extremely hardcore. Like it really does feel like there's a kind of awakening happening among bosses, frankly, in Silicon Valley who see Elon Musk doing all these things, getting away with it for the most part, and thinking to themselves like, why can't I do that too?

• 25:56Casey Newton?

  Right, and you know, we should say that for a lot of people, this has sort of always been their reality, but in Silicon Valley, over the past 10 years in particular, there was this move toward giving workers more power. And it wasn't a voluntary move, right? It came about because engineers were in short supply. They were in hot demand and so they could actually ask for things like perks at the office and companies would compete to give them those perks. And instead of creating a utopia, I think a lot of CEOs felt like they just got a workforce that was extremely entitled and unhappy anyway. And so what's the point? And as we sort of head into a shakier economy, if you can claw back all of that stuff and tell everybody, no more Mr. Nice Guy, you're just gonna have to work super hard, they're gonna do it.

• 26:41Casey Newton?

  So I completely agree with you. I think 2023, we're gonna see just a lot of these reactionary CEOs trying to claw back whatever gains the labor movement has made for past 10 years.

• 26:50Kevin Roose?

  Okay, what's your medium confidence prediction?

• 26:53Casey Newton?

  Confidence prediction, I think that in 2023, ChatGPT and tools like it are going to upend the world of education.

• 27:01Kevin Roose?

  Tell me more.

• 27:02Casey Newton?

  So last week, we talked a lot about ChatGPT, this AI chatbot. And afterwards, we got this wonderful email from a teenager who said that more and more kids in her class are using it to do schoolwork. She told us she was able to finish a science project with it. She also used it to make a poem that she wrote better. And her classmates are doing really similar things. So it just seems obvious to me that more and more kids are going to start doing this as soon as they can.

• 27:27Kevin Roose?

  This is going to be the biggest tool of the second semester of the school year.

• 27:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah, if you thought the TI 83 calculator was hot in 1996, buckle up, buddy.

• 27:38Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this is going to be what everyone is secretly sneaking a look at below their desk during exams.

• 27:44Casey Newton?

  But I think that by January, we're going to be having a huge national conversation about this, right? Like, we may be having congressional hearings about how ChatGPT is destroying, like, secondary education in this country.

• 27:55Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think that's a great prediction. And I would actually say that's like, I have fairly high confidence about that one. I was on a radio show this week with a high school English teacher who was talking about this exact topic of ChatGPT being used for homework. And his basic thesis was that this is going to destroy the high school English assignment as we know it. Because so much of what you do in high school English class, in particular, is reviewing books, doing expository essays, synthesizing, you know, various ideas. Like, these are things that, that, you know, students have been using Cliff Notes for for decades. But it is now just so much easier to just put a prompt into a thing and get back, like, a perfect five paragraph essay.

• 28:37Kevin Roose?

  So I think we're going to start to see some interesting cat and mouse games there with, like, teachers trying to figure out how to detect when the answers from on the essay have been generated with ChatGPT. I think we're also going to start to see a return to oral essays and in-class exams rather than take-home exams. Kind of the way like some math tests, like you can't bring in your TI 83 graph. And calculator, I think we'll start to see in person exams taking over for at home assignments.

• 29:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think this is going to be a huge story next year, and I'm sure we will have a lot more to say about it here on Hard Fork. But how about you hit me with a medium confidence prediction?

• 29:18Kevin Roose?

  All right, my medium confidence prediction is that 2023 is the year that TikTok gets banned in the United States.

• 29:24Casey Newton?

  Well, you're medium confident about this?

• 29:26Kevin Roose?

  I'm medium confident about this.

• 29:28Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 29:28Kevin Roose?

  And I admit, it's a little bit of a cheat because I think just this week, we've seen an escalation of the TikTok battle. Marco Rubio and a bipartisan group of House legislators proposed a bill this week that would effectively ban TikTok in the United States. There's some difference between why Republicans want to ban TikTok and why Democrats are skeptical of TikTok. Republicans generally are more sort of seeing this as a national security threat. They accuse TikTok of sort of spying on US users. Democrats, from what I've seen, are more broadly worried about the use of the platform to distribute propaganda or to influence in some way, content moderation in a pro-China direction.

• 30:12Kevin Roose?

  And they're worried about that, not necessarily the stealing or misuse of data from US users. I don't know for sure how this will end. I don't have a ton of confidence whether it's going to end with just an outright ban or whether it'll be some sort of forced divestment. One interesting possibility is that a US company could bid for TikTok the way that it sort of happened during the Trump administration with Oracle and Microsoft. I also think we could see a company like Disney make a bid for TikTok in their US assets. So I don't know whether ByteDance would do that, but I think if it's forced to, it obviously will. It would rather get something for the assets of US TikTok rather than just shutting it down and exiting that market altogether.

• 30:57Casey Newton?

  So I think you're wrong about this one, Kevin. The best bet that you could have made over the past five years when it came to any question of tech regulation was that nothing would happen because guess what? Nothing happened, right? Do you know how many times I've heard that a bipartisan group of lawmakers had proposed something over the past five years? Because it was a lot. You know what happened to all those proposals? They went nowhere. Whether it was antitrust, section 230, you name it, right? People had so many ideas and they went nowhere. I think that 2023 ends with TikTok as still an app that is owned by ByteDance.

• 31:26Kevin Roose?

  We'll see who's right.

• 31:27Casey Newton?

  All right, let's get to our lowest confidence predictions. And I will start with mine. I predict that the Supreme Court will uphold the Texas and Florida social media laws and make content moderation illegal there.

• 31:40Kevin Roose?

  Go on, because I haven't followed these laws as carefully as you have.

• 31:43Casey Newton?

  So in Texas and Florida this year, the state legislatures passed laws that would make it illegal for companies like Facebook, Twitter, TikTok to remove content based on its political viewpoint. Of course, the trade groups sued and the cases made their way through the legal system and are now headed toward the Supreme Court, which is expected to accept these cases and hear them in 2023. So what would these laws mean in practice? Well, it would mean that if you posted something like, people should not be forced to take the vaccine because it's dangerous. Platforms would not be able to take that down, even if, you know, they thought that that was a danger to public health.

• 32:26Casey Newton?

  It would also seem to mean that if you were, for example, a Nazi and you wanted to post on Facebook, hey, everybody, come join the Nazi party, Facebook would not be able to remove that because that would be considered a political viewpoint. Now, if you talk to people with these platforms, they will tell you the reason that they take those posts down is one, because, yes, they think they're bad, but also it's like essential to their business. Their users do not want to be around Nazis, right? That drives people away and it makes them less money. And so there's this open question of, well, if they're not able to remove Nazi content, how do these platforms even survive? At the same time, Justice Clarence Thomas has written that he believes that these platforms should be treated

• 33:08Casey Newton?

  more like railroads or telecom lines, you know, what he would call a common carrier. You know, a telephone company, you know, can't not let-

• 33:17Kevin Roose?

  A dumb pipe. They can't, they can't judge the content or downrank or remove it. All they have to do is transmit it.

• 33:24Casey Newton?

  Exactly. In which case, you're going to have potentially two very different like versions of Facebook and YouTube and TikTok in this country. One that is just moderated normally and another in Texas and Florida that is full of crazy hate speech.

• 33:42Kevin Roose?

  And you think they would actually segment it out like that? Or would it be like what happens with car emission laws where like California makes a law? And everyone else follows it because the automakers don't want to make two versions of the same car?

• 33:55Casey Newton?

  So I talked with somebody who works on this stuff at a big platform recently. And they were saying that at this point, they honestly have no idea. Whatever they decide will require massive engineering resources. There's a thought that maybe you would have a like Texas Florida switch. So it's like, if you live in Texas or Florida, you get there and you see the default. And it says, by the way, you know, welcome to the new default YouTube, for example. It's full of horrible things. If you would like to get a normal, good version of YouTube, flip this switch.

• 34:28Kevin Roose?

  Right. Like pay for YouTube premium and get fewer ads. It's like, it's like VPN in from another state and get fewer Nazis. It's like really dark.

• 34:36Casey Newton?

  So absurd. I can't even believe you're having this conversation. But yes, anyway, the reason this is a low confidence prediction is I think there are better reasons to maintain the status quo than to enable this sort of chaos. And yet you look at the political makeup of the court and it seems quite plausible to me that we are headed into the absolute content moderation wilderness next year.

• 34:59Kevin Roose?

  All right, here we go. My low confidence prediction for 2023 is that we will discover that the entire field of quantum computing has been a hoax.

• 35:15Kevin Roose?

  I thought of this the other day when I was reading a story in the New York Times, a very good story, about a group of researchers who had simulated a pair of black holes in a quantum computer and sent a message between them through a shortcut in spacetime called a wormhole. I just realized, like, I probably get 10 pitches a week for some quantum computing thing, and I'm never actually sure that they're real.

• 35:41Casey Newton?

  I mean, just because I imagine this will be torture for you, how would you define quantum computing?

• 35:46Kevin Roose?

  You know, I absolutely could not define quantum computing.

• 35:50Casey Newton?

  I mean, let me just say, when the quantum computing people hear this, they're gonna get so mad.

• 35:54Kevin Roose?

  Oh, we're gonna get so many angry emails from physicists.

• 35:56Casey Newton?

  Don't say we, I didn't say this. I'm not signing on to this. Like, a lot of credible people believe that this is possible.

• 36:01Kevin Roose?

  I'm sure that there are people who are much smarter than either of us, who know for a fact that quantum computing is real. Do not cancel Casey for my bad quantum computing opinion.

• 36:11Casey Newton?

  I'm taking the opposite side of this bet. Please send all feedback on this prediction to Kevin Roos.

• 36:17Kevin Roose?

  All right, Casey, those are our predictions for the year 2023.

• 36:21Casey Newton?

  So good. I think at least two of those will come true. That's my guess.

• 36:25Kevin Roose?

  I'm hoping for six out of six.

• 36:26Casey Newton?

  Well, and here's the hard-fort promise: we will make fun of ourselves as ease of these predictions does or does not come true.

• 36:32Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 36:39Kevin Roose?

  After the break, we're gonna open up the mailbag and take some listener questions.

• 36:54Speaker 05

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• 37:29Speaker 00

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• 38:00Speaker 07

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• 38:35Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin. So for the past several weeks now, we've been asking listeners to send in questions to the Hard Fork Mailbag. And today, we're opening the mailbag, we're reaching in, and we're pulling out the finest questions that listeners have had to offer.

• 38:49Speaker 08

  It's mail day, baby.

• 38:50Casey Newton?

  So, call up the mailman.

• 38:54Casey Newton?

  Invite him in.

• 38:55Speaker 08

  You're so corny.

• 38:56Casey Newton?

  Pour him a glass of milk.

• 38:57Speaker 08

  Come on.

• 38:58Casey Newton?

  We're diving into the mailbag. Let's hear our first question.

• 39:02Speaker 09

  Hi, my name is Kevin.

• 39:03Speaker 08

  Great name.

• 39:04Speaker 09

  When FTX went bankrupt, it was widely reported that SBF lost billions of dollars in mere days. My question is, did he really? It seems like the majority of his supposed assets were some cryptographic keys, not anything that would be traditionally considered wealth. Should the financial or tech press say a person is high net worth when their assets are volatile or just plain made up? Doesn't that add validity to an economic system rife with Ponzi schemes and scams?

• 39:33Kevin Roose?

  So I'll take this one. I think the question is, you know, does someone having essentially the cryptographic key to a crypto wallet mean that they own what's inside that wallet or that those tokens inside that wallet represent real assets? And I would just say that like they do insofar as, you know, most people do not physically keep all of their cash in their house under their mattress. We all have, you know, passwords to online bank accounts. Those bank accounts, yes, they're insured, but it's all just entries on a bank's database. You don't actually, the bank's not physically keeping your cash in a vault with your name on it. And so I think in that way, it's not so different.

• 40:17Kevin Roose?

  I think I would say that someone who controls the keys to a crypto wallet that contains cryptographic assets that are valued by the market at billions of dollars, I think it's fair to call that person a billionaire.

• 40:30Casey Newton?

  Also, I mean, if the question was like, was this all just paper wealth? Like, sure, like in a way, it's true of any rich person, you know, like a Jeff Bezos, a Mark Zuckerberg, a lot of their value is tied up in stock that they're not going to sell anytime soon. At the same time, Sam Bankman-Fried was donating millions and millions of dollars. He was spending millions and millions of dollars. Those were all real dollars that he had that he spent on things. So yes, SBF was rich AF. And that's that on that.

• 40:58Speaker 10

  Hi, this is Scott from Tacoma. I've read that there are consent decrees in place against Twitter about content moderation. So if Elon is laying off the content moderation teams, that seems like it could be a problem. I'm wondering how this works and how big any fines might be.

• 41:14Casey Newton?

  So this is a great question. Your memory is correct that Twitter did reach an agreement about a consent order from the Federal Trade Commission, and that happened in March of 2011. However, it was not about content moderation. Rather, it barred Twitter for 20 years from, quote, misleading consumers about the extent to which it protects the security, privacy, and confidentiality of non-public consumer information, including the measures it takes to prevent unauthorized access to non-public information and honor the privacy choices made by consumers, end quote. So what does that mean? It means that Twitter has to be really careful with your data. You know, earlier this year, the company had to pay a $150 million fine because, you know, when you sign up for two-factor authentication and give Twitter your phone number so it can text you a code every time you

• 41:58Casey Newton?

  need to log in? Well, it turns out Twitter was taking those phone numbers and trying to build an advertising profile for that person. The FTC was like, you can't do that. That is a violation of this consent order. So, you know, there's a lot happening at Twitter right now, and some of it does involve that non-public information. And I am not Lena Khan. I'm not the FTC, and I cannot tell you if Twitter has violated this order. But we know that the FTC has said that it's tracking developments at Twitter with, quote, "deep concern," and that if it does violate this order, you better believe we'll come after you.

• 42:30Kevin Roose?

  And as we know, Elon Musk is a person who takes warnings from regulators and agencies of the government very seriously. Big rule follower personality. He's a big color inside the lines guy. People pleaser. So I imagine that he's, he's up at night worrying about that possibility of being chastised by the FTC every day. Let's get the next question.

• 42:52Speaker 11

  Hi, this is Liz. I would love to hear your take on how far we are from fully realized self-driving cars. When will I be able to say, call a Lyft, have it show up my house without a driver, and take me to the airport?

• 43:04Casey Newton?

  So I think that the answer to this question is, it really depends on where you live. I had a friend last weekend tell me this story about how he was out late with someone, and they had been wanting to try these new Cruise self-driving cars in San Francisco. We're here in San Francisco. And he was able to open up the Cruise app and summon a cruise. Cruise is a company that makes self-driving cars. They have a taxi program that is live in San Francisco. It doesn't even yet go to all of San Francisco, and it actually won't even come to your exact location. You might have to walk a couple of blocks away. But my friends ordered the car. It showed up. There was not a driver inside. They got in and it took them home. So depending on where you live, you might already be able to do this.

• 43:49Casey Newton?

  This is a classic case of the future is already here. It just isn't evenly distributed. Let's go to the next question.

• 43:56Speaker 12

  Hello, Casey and Kevin. I'm currently listening to Kevin's book, Future Proof, and I'm amazed by how quickly AI has outpaced even his most optimistic predictions. So my question for Kevin, given the accelerating pace of AI development, which prediction or rule from your book would you most like to go back and change? Also, Casey probably won't remember me, but we used to work together. I was part of the original group that started The Verge, so in a way, Casey owes me his entire career. Love the podcast. Keep up the good work.

• 44:29Kevin Roose?

  Wow, somebody brave enough to take credit or blame for your entire career. We love it.

• 44:34Casey Newton?

  Hello, Dan. Thank you for inventing The Verge.

• 44:37Kevin Roose?

  Dan, thank you for giving birth to baby journalist Casey. He's turned into a fine young man and we're all very proud of him. And thank you for listening to my book. So I wrote this book a few years ago, and at the time, this was before sort of the explosion of generative AI in the last year or two. The biggest thing in the AI world was something called RPA, which stands for robotic process automation. And it is literally the most boring set of three words that I can imagine putting in a sentence together. But it was all the rage in corporate America. And what it is basically is just a series of very dumb bots that you can use to automate

• 45:21Kevin Roose?

  sort of routine office functions. And that was a, you know, multi-billion dollar industry. There were all kinds of companies making a ton of money doing this kind of RPA. A integration at big old line companies. And I thought that that was kind of going to be the first wave of disruption from these tools. And that was something that I was scared about. So I wrote a chapter in my book called Beware of Boring Bots. Because I was sort of under the impression that like, while the, you know, all of the hype was around like self-driving cars and stuff like that, the real labor disruption was going to come from these kind of like boring back office RPA implementations.

• 46:01Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 46:02Kevin Roose?

  So I think I was wrong about that. I mean, I think that one thing I got wrong is I underestimated how slow big companies, big old line companies were going to be to automate the jobs that they could automate. You know, this is not fancy AI technology that's being released by OpenAI and Google. This is like stuff that was technically possible 10 years ago, but that big companies in like the beverage industry are just now getting around to installing on their machines. And I think I underestimated just how much inertia there is in the IT departments of big companies and how resistant they are even to do something as simple as like installing a little RPA bot.

• 46:40Casey Newton?

  Well, hopefully you'll make better predictions in your next book about AI.

• 46:43Kevin Roose?

  But I think to to finish that thought, like, I think I underestimated how much was going to happen in fields like generative AI. I didn't foresee the just massive explosion of capability that we've seen in the past couple of years. And I think that actually I would revise that prediction. I don't think that these tools are going to cause mass unemployment and the loss of jobs either. But I do think that they're going to radically transform white collar workplaces. I don't think it's going to be in the IT departments. I think it's going to be in areas like copywriting and sales and customer service. I think that's where these tools are going to be most useful. It's not going to be kind of in the bowels of accounts payable. All right, next question.

• 47:28Speaker 13

  Hi, Kevin and Casey. Huge fan of the show. My name's Olivia and my question involves the metaverse, namely the future of it. I'm kind of afraid of the metaverse because I imagine it becoming so prevalent and involved in society, like the iPhone and taking place of real human interactions. Like, are we becoming the humans from WALL-E? Will meta concerts replace real ones or meta hikes take place of going outside? Or am I anxious for no reason, totally missing the golden purposes of the metaverse? I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts. Thank you.

• 48:01Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what do you think?

• 48:02Casey Newton?

  I mean, first of all, Olivia, how dare you question the wisdom of Silicon Valley? And sort of, you know, the idea that they wouldn't know what was best for you and your family? I think you owe these people an apology. No, of course, like, of course, this is the right question. You know, I remember, you know, last year, I was interviewing Mark Zuckerberg when he was sort of first announcing that they were going to pivot this company to the metaverse. This was one of my questions for him was like, if we're living in a world that is primarily like mediated by technology, where you're sort of wearing something on your face at all times and is perpetually connected to the internet, is that a good thing? And what he said to me was like, look, it's never going to totally replace real life. Like, people are still going to go surf and I love going outside and other people will too.

• 48:42Casey Newton?

  But it is undeniable that the goal of this technology is to be so mesmerizing and so hypnotically entertaining that you never take it off. So this is the right time to ask yourself what relationship you want to have with that technology, if and when it comes along.

• 48:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and I would just point out that, you know, this concept of the metaverse, which itself came from science fiction, it's never like talked about in science fiction as like something that arises when like the real world is going really well. It's usually, you know, the world is falling apart. It's uninhabitable. There's climate change. It's a dystopian hellscape. And so people are escaping into the metaverse through their, through their VR headsets or whatever. I, I think I'm, I'm optimistic when I see just how unpopular some of these early metaverse experiences have been. And obviously, the technology will get better and they'll get, you know, more compelling.

• 49:37Kevin Roose?

  But, you know, I attended a metaverse concert and it was not fun. It was nowhere near as good as-

• 49:46Casey Newton?

  Wait, who did you see in the metaverse?

• 49:48Kevin Roose?

  I saw the, the Travis Scott concert in Fortnite.

• 49:52Casey Newton?

  Oh, Fortnite, yeah, yeah.

• 49:53Kevin Roose?

  And, and, you know, it was kind of cool on like a novelty level, but it was not a concert. It was watching something in Fortnite.

• 50:04Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you're basically watching a YouTube video at that point. But I think it's still going to be a long while yet before this question, which I think is a very good question, will feel pressing.

• 50:14Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 50:15Casey Newton?

  All right. Well, I think that's all the time we have for listeners' questions today. But Kevin, I believe that you and I have each written a secret question for each other.

• 50:24Kevin Roose?

  Oh, wow. I forgot about this. Oh, yeah. So I did write a secret question for you. Do you want me to go first or do you want to go first?

• 50:30Casey Newton?

  Yeah, go first.

• 50:30Kevin Roose?

  Okay. My question for you. If tomorrow, a wealthy platformer benefactor offered you $100 million on the condition that you could only use technology invented in the year 2000 or earlier for the rest of your life, would you take the deal?

• 50:51Casey Newton?

  Oh, man. Well, you know, I'm not one of those that thinks of like the pre iPhone era as a halcyon time where I, you know, only read 600-page historical biographies.

• 51:08Kevin Roose?

  No, we're not talking the Stone Age. We're talking the BlackBerry.

• 51:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 51:11Kevin Roose?

  We're talking Windows 98. We're talking Winamp. We're talking Napster.

• 51:17Casey Newton?

  Look, no one is going to believe me when I say that I would not accept this offer. But I would for a couple of reasons. One-

• 51:26Kevin Roose?

  You would accept the offer?

• 51:26Casey Newton?

  I would not accept the offer.

• 51:27Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 51:28Casey Newton?

  Because I like what I do too much, right? I like being part of what is new and what is next. And so I would sadly have to say no to my platform benefactor.

• 51:37Kevin Roose?

  Wow. Strong position. I respect it.

• 51:39Casey Newton?

  So here's my secret question for you. What part of writing your column do you think it is ethical to outsource to AI? And what parts will you always insist on doing yourself?

• 51:50Kevin Roose?

  Great question. So I will make a confession here on this podcast that I have tried to write parts of my column using AI. I've been testing out an app called Lex that is sort of like a Google Doc with a GPT-3 built into it. And I've tried. I've said, you know, I wonder, I'm sort of stuck on this paragraph. I wonder if it could help me figure out a way to complete this thought. And, you know, sometimes what it comes up with is passable, but it's not good. It's not like something that I would be happy to pass off as my own,

• 52:32Kevin Roose?

  even if it were ethical to do so, which I don't think it would be. So I think that the part of- This process of column writing that AI could be really useful for. Sort of the outlining and the background collection and research. Like, I'm gonna write a column about self-driving cars. Give me five major milestones in the history of self-driving cars. And I would put that into ChatGPT or some other AI. And I would get back those sort of wireframe bullet points. And then I could use that as sort of an outline to sketch kind of the short history of self-driving cars.

• 53:14Kevin Roose?

  But I wouldn't actually be copying and pasting any of the text verbatim, because it just frankly, isn't that unique or interesting or stylish. I feel like I'm, maybe this is hubris, but I still feel like I'm a better writer than ChatGPT in most instances. And so I feel like that will be the part of it that I feel like is ethical and very useful potentially to outsource to AI is kind of the drafting of the first sort of initial outline of the column.

• 53:46Casey Newton?

  Right, so it's kosher to use AI as a research assistant, but the actual writing needs to come out of your brain.

• 53:53Kevin Roose?

  Maybe, I mean, maybe it'll get to a point with GPT-4 where it's better than I am. And then I'll have to like have some hard thoughts about what I can sort of ethically and spiritually stand outsourcing to the AI. I mean, I certainly think that it could be useful for, for example, sort of coming up with counter arguments. So one thing that I do when I'm writing is I try to anticipate what people might object to. You know, what good points people might make in response to some argument that I'm making. And you know, I feel like I'm okay at that. But a GPT-3 or GPT-4 might be better at it. I might be able to paste in my column and say, you know, what are three counter arguments to this?

• 54:37Kevin Roose?

  And then maybe find a way to address those if I feel like they're compelling enough.

• 54:40Casey Newton?

  Right, until now, if you wanted to find out why your argument was stupid, you had to tweet out a link to your story. And then you find out in a hurry, buddy. But we're moving into a new age and we're not gonna have to tweet.

• 54:52Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I wanna be, I would rather be dunked on by an AI than by hundreds of strangers on Twitter. All right. I would just like to thank everyone who wrote in with questions, sent in their questions over DM. We couldn't get to all of them, but they were really thoughtful.

• 55:09Casey Newton?

  And we will take your questions again.

• 55:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, we'll do this again. And, you know, I'm feeling reflective and sentimental at the end of the year, and I just want to say thank you to everyone who's been on this journey with us. We've had so much fun making this show every week, and it's been so rewarding to hear from people who listen to the show, who have questions and comments about it, even the people who say that I say like too much.

• 55:29Casey Newton?

  I love you. And I definitely say you know too much, and I'm working on that, by the way. But yes, just to echo that sentiment, what a fun first few episodes it has been. I truly feel like we are just getting started.

• 55:45Kevin Roose?

  Before we turn off our microphones and say goodbye for the year, we have a special Christmas Easter egg. Christmas egg? Christmas egg.

• 55:55Casey Newton?

  Have you ever celebrated Christmas before? Well, it's an Easter egg, but it's for Christmas.

• 56:01Kevin Roose?

  About the holidays.

• 56:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah. You know what we should call it? A stocking stuffer.

• 56:04Kevin Roose?

  A stocking stuffer. Last night, when we were getting ready for this, I had the questionable idea to have ChatGPT write us the lyrics to a tech-themed Christmas carol.

• 56:17Casey Newton?

  Oh, and it's so beautiful.

• 56:18Kevin Roose?

  And we're gonna sing it for you right after the break.

• 56:36Speaker 05

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• 57:11Speaker 00

  AI spend is growing fast, but most businesses still can't see exactly where that money is going. Ramp gives businesses visibility and control across AI providers with real-time guardrails by team and model, helping ensure spend goes to the highest ROI areas. Stop guessing where your AI spend is going. Get started with Ramp. And if you're new to Ramp, you can get $250 off at ramp.com/hardfork. Go to ramp.com/hardfork. Ramp.com/hardfork.

• 57:43Speaker 07

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Iron is a vertically integrated AI cloud platform, delivering data centers, compute, and software for AI training and inference, underpinned by its expansive portfolio of land and grid-connected power in renewable-rich regions globally. Iron's AI cloud gives direct access to Nvidia GPUs, scalable from hundreds to thousands. For builders, that means direct access to AI compute, rapid scaling, and predictable pricing. Iron, AI cloud for the next big thing.

• 58:18Kevin Roose?

  So I'll just say, before we start singing this song, that the prompt that I gave ChatGPT was, write a Christmas carol to the tune of Jingle Bells with lyrics about the tech world going into 2023. And then I gave it some suggestions of possible topics that it might want to include. And did you edit the text that it spat out a little bit? Because it's not great at meter.

• 58:43Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 58:44Kevin Roose?

  So we did a little condensing, along with our amazing accompanist here, Alicia Bitutu, from the audio team at The New York Times, who helped me whip this into shape and make it somewhat presentable. Okay, you ready?

• 58:57Speaker 08

  I don't know.

• 58:59Kevin Roose?

  Play the karaoke.

• 59:00Speaker 08

  Play the karaoke.

• 59:03Kevin Roose?

  I'll take the first verse.

• 59:04Speaker 08

  All right.

• 59:07Kevin Roose?

  Dashing to... Oh, sorry, wrong key. It's slower than I thought. This is off to a great start.

• 59:13Speaker 08

  We're gonna be here for three hours.

• 59:14Kevin Roose?

  Sorry, play again.

• 59:21Kevin Roose?

  Dashing through the news in a world of constant views. Tech world's in chaos. SBF falls to his doom. Elon's on Twitter, taking over with his tweets. Dolly and ChatGPT, AI apps that can't be beat.

• 59:43Speaker 08

  Oh, tech world.

• 59:45Kevin Roose?

  Tech world.

• 59:47Speaker 08

  2023.

• 59:49Kevin Roose?

  We'll see a world full of endless possibilities.

• 59:54Speaker 08

  Oh, tech world.

• 59:57Kevin Roose?

  Tech world.

• 59:58Speaker 08

  2023.

• 1:00:00Kevin Roose?

  We'll see a world full of endless possibilities. All right, you go.

• 1:00:07Casey Newton?

  Metaverse has no legs. TikTok is on the rise. People join Mastodon to avoid Twitter's lies. Crypto has collapsed. Investors in a state of shock. But the tech world soldiers on despite the chaos and rocks.

• 1:00:28Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:00:29Speaker 08

  Oh, tech world.

• 1:00:31Kevin Roose?

  Oh, tech world.

• 1:00:32Speaker 08

  2023.

• 1:00:35Kevin Roose?

  We'll see a world full of endless possibilities.

• 1:00:40Speaker 08

  Oh, tech world.

• 1:00:42Kevin Roose?

  Oh, tech world.

• 1:00:44Speaker 08

  2023.

• 1:00:46Kevin Roose?

  We'll see a world full of endless possibilities.

• 1:00:56Casey Newton?

  Before we go, you know what I want for Kevin this year at Christmas? Wait.

• 1:01:00Casey Newton?

  I've got to stop calling you Christmas. Before we go, you know what I want for Christmas this year, Kevin?

• 1:01:05Kevin Roose?

  What do you want?

• 1:01:05Casey Newton?

  I would love more people to follow our TikTok, which you can find at Hard Fork.

• 1:01:09Kevin Roose?

  That's all we want for Christmas this year.

• 1:01:11Casey Newton?

  And speaking of Hard Fork, it's produced by Davis Land. We were edited this week by Sarah Sarason. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our incredible original music is by Dan Powell, Alicia McEtoop, Rowan Emistow, and Marian Lozano. Special thanks to Hannah Ingber, Mel Galogly, Kate LaPresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected]. That's all for this year, unless something truly wild happens. Then we'll be back, maybe, who knows? But any time, happy holidays. We'll see you down the dusty trail.

• 1:01:45Kevin Roose?

  We're leaving that outro line in 2022.

• 1:01:49Casey Newton?

  You don't like we sleen down the dusty trail? We're gonna have it on merchandise. I want it on coffee mug.

• 1:02:31Speaker 00

  AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done, the questions they ask, the decisions they make, and the routine tasks they can hand off. And nobody understands that better than NetSuite. That's why they put together a free expert guide you need to grab today. Aligning for the agentic era, how AI is changing everyday work. Download it and you'll see exactly how AI is reshaping work across every part of your organization and how to make sure you come out ahead. Get your free guide at netsuite.com/NYT. netsuite.com/NYT.