A Flood of A.I. Slop + Searching for Satoshi + the Hot Mess Express Returns

There’s just so much slop that at a certain point it makes the internet basically useless.

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.

• 0:34Kevin Roose?

  Casey, it's our second birthday.

• 0:35Casey Newton?

  Happy birthday, Kevin.

• 0:37Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork was born two years ago. We are now officially in our terrible twos.

• 0:42Casey Newton?

  We are, so don't be surprised if we start crying on the show and trying to flush your keys down the toilet. Don't put it past us.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  And if you listen to this show and you want to get us a birthday present, you actually can't. That's against the ethics policies of The New York Times. But you can do something even better, which is to subscribe to the new New York Times audio subscription. We talked about this last week on the show. This is basically a new subscription that you can get through Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Subscribers will be able to get full access to every episode of Hard Fork and all the other great New York Times podcasts. And that will support the work that we do here and across the rest of the Times audio department. To reiterate, because we did get some emails about this, you will still be able to listen to Hard Fork for free.

• 1:35Kevin Roose?

  The most recent episodes are going to keep being posted for free wherever you listen, even if you don't subscribe. But we want to encourage you to support our work and our colleagues' work by getting a subscription. Thank you and good night.

• 1:50Casey Newton?

  And good morning.

• 1:50Kevin Roose?

  And good morning.

• 1:51Casey Newton?

  And now we just woke up.

• 1:52Kevin Roose?

  You can learn more and subscribe at nytimes.com/podcasts.

• 2:03Kevin Roose?

  Well, they're announcing the Nobel Prizes this week, Casey.

• 2:06Casey Newton?

  That's right.

• 2:07Kevin Roose?

  And for another year, we've been shut out.

• 2:10Casey Newton?

  That's right. But for the first time, a hard-fought guest did win the Nobel Prize.

• 2:14Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 2:14Casey Newton?

  Demis Hassabis just won the Nobel Prize for, what was it again?

• 2:20Kevin Roose?

  For chemistry.

• 2:21Casey Newton?

  Oh, I was gonna say literature. But that makes sense to me, too. No, it's because AlphaFold, which is the DeepMind technology that is sort of helping us understand the structure of proteins, has been like a huge deal. And Demis co-created it. So it makes sense to me.

• 2:36Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So congrats to Demis and his collaborator, John. What's John's last name?

• 2:44Casey Newton?

  John Jumper.

• 2:45Kevin Roose?

  John Jumper.

• 2:45Casey Newton?

  Incredible name. Sounds fake. Not. His name is John Jumper. Now, what's the biggest prize you'd say you ever won?

• 2:52Kevin Roose?

  Let's see. I won the reading prize at my public library in 5th grade.

• 2:56Casey Newton?

  And did that come with a free personal pan pizza?

• 2:58Kevin Roose?

  Sure did.

• 2:59Casey Newton?

  At Pizza Hut?

• 3:00Kevin Roose?

  It sure did. How'd you know?

• 3:01Casey Newton?

  Because for some reason, this happened to every child in America. There was a period of time in America where if you just read enough books, you'd get a free pizza. They should bring that back.

• 3:09Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Casey Newton?

  The best reward that I got for participating in a school fundraiser in middle school was if you sold one box of candy, you got to go to the concert. And then, you know, whatever company was putting together this fundraiser would sort of go out and like, reach out to these up-and-coming acts and say, hey, do you want to perform in front of a bunch of indifferent 12-year-olds? And the year that I was there at Washington Middle School, I swear to God, Kevin, we sit down for this concert that has been so hyped up, and the man gets on the microphone, and he says, "Please welcome to the stage The Backstreet Boys." Now, at the time, none of us had ever heard of The Backstreet Boys.

• 3:45Kevin Roose?

  Wait, really?

• 3:45Casey Newton?

  Because they hadn't released any songs yet. And so they come and they do their little... And I will never forget, they...

• 3:51Kevin Roose?

  It was the actual Backstreet Boys.

• 3:52Casey Newton?

  It was the actual Backstreet Boys. And then, you know, I don't know, six, seven years later, I'm like, driving down the road, and I turn on the radio, and I'm hearing some pop song. I'm like, ooh, it's kind of catchy. And the man, the DJ, says, as they come out of the song, "And that was The Backstreet Boys." And I almost swerved off the road because I thought, I knew them way back when. And they actually played touch football with us at recess.

• 4:13Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 4:13Casey Newton?

  We have to hand it to The Backstreet Boys for doing that.

• 4:15Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 4:16Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 4:16Kevin Roose?

  That's a great story.

• 4:17Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So Demis Hassabis might be feeling pretty good about his Nobel Prize, but I'm telling you, there's nothing like saying The Backstreet Boys in 1993.

• 4:30Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Russ, a tech columnist at The New York Times.

• 4:32Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Noon from Platformer.

• 4:33Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 4:34Casey Newton?

  This week, in the wake of Hurricane Helene, a storm of slop will dig into the rise of AI misinformation in politics this election season. Then filmmaker Cullen Hoback on his controversial new documentary about the history of Bitcoin and why he thinks he's found the real Satoshi Nakamoto. And finally, Kevin, the train has returned to the station. It's time to reboard the Hot Mess Express.

• 4:56Kevin Roose?

  Toot toot.

• 5:06Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, it's time to talk about slop.

• 5:08Casey Newton?

  It is. Time to open up the slop shop. This is going to be one stop shopping for slop here today on Hard Fork, Kevin.

• 5:16Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So the big news this week in the country is this rash of hurricanes that is ripping through the southeast and Florida. And there's been a lot of talk online, not just about the actual natural disasters that are occurring here, but the kind of AI-generated content that is polluting the information ecosystem when it comes to what these storms are doing, how people are responding to them. And it's generated a lot of talk about AI slop. So today, let's talk about what AI slop is, how it's operating in this moment of natural disasters, and what we're learning about kind of how the internet is changing in response to all this AI slop.

• 6:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you know, Kevin, the aftermath of any natural disaster is always chaotic. There is always some level of misinformation that's flying around. But the aftermath of these storms really has felt different because now people who have strong motivations to spread misinformation have a new technological tool in their arsenal. And it feels like it is changing the way that a lot of Americans are understanding what's happening.

• 6:25Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And I remember a few years ago when there were the wildfires in the West, and there were all these stories about the misinformation that was spreading at the time about, you know, there being, you know, directed energy beams that were causing the Wildfires and things like that. And that was all happening through sort of normal means of producing these, you know, false theories and spreading them on social media. But now we have tools that are available to everyone with an internet connection that can be used to create lifelike images or even videos of some of this stuff and use that to sort of fool people into believing whatever they want.

• 7:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 7:00Kevin Roose?

  So let's talk about AI slop today. But first, I would love for you to give me a clear and concise definition of what AI slop means.

• 7:09Casey Newton?

  Sure. So I would say that slop is low quality content that is generated using artificial intelligence. It is often imagery, right? It can be a still image. Increasingly, we're seeing video, but it can be text as well. And often this stuff is shared kind of without any regard to whether it is true or false. And because it is so cheap and easy to generate, if left unchecked, it can quickly flood online spaces. And this year, the word slop has really taken hold as the description for this. You can almost think of it, Kevin, as a kind of counterpart to spam, right?

• 7:50Casey Newton?

  And in the same way that your email spam filter gets clogged every day with nonsense messages from people trying to scam you, we're now starting to see social networks and other online forums get flooded with this very low quality AI generated stuff.

• 8:05Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's a great definition. I really like that. I think it's also important to note that it's not just AI generated. It can also be AI enhanced, AI edited. You know, the sort of line between what is AI and what is not is sort of blurring as tools become more present in like everyday software applications like Photoshop. So let's talk about what has been happening this week. All year, we've had these pieces sort of bemoaning the state of AI slop and how it's taking over online forums and fooling a bunch of people. But this week felt like a real moment of inflection for the AI slop era. In response to Hurricane Helene in particular, there were just-

• 8:47Kevin Roose?

  A ton of images going around, these AI slop generated images of the hurricane and its aftermath. So Casey, describe some of what people were seeing on their feeds this week.

• 8:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so there was one very widely viewed image of what appeared to be a little girl in a boat on a flooded street, holding a puppy and shivering. So that one got a lot of play. There was another one that purported to depict President Trump walking around a flooded street in a life preserver with another person. And then possibly my favorite was one that purported to show President Trump in a suit, sort of up to his shoulders in water, cradling a newborn behind an American flag that for some reason had been lowered behind him into the floodwaters of the street.

• 9:38Kevin Roose?

  And was not wet.

• 9:39Casey Newton?

  And was not wet.

• 9:41Casey Newton?

  How does he do it?

• 9:43Casey Newton?

  How does he do it?

• 9:44Kevin Roose?

  And, you know, presumably some of the people who are sharing this stuff don't know that it's fake. You know, these are not the most sophisticated AI images I've ever seen, but they're not terrible. If you're scrolling quickly through a feed and you didn't know any better, you might say, oh, that's real. But do you believe that the people who are spreading this stuff know that it is fake and AI generated and just don't care?

• 10:07Casey Newton?

  You know, it's really impossible to say, Kevin, and for this reason, we don't actually know the original source of these images. So some journalists who have looked into it, including Brian Broderick at Garbage Day and Jason Keebler at 404 Media, did their best to find the initial place where these images were shared. And while Facebook groups appear to have been one place, there's also another forum called patriots.win. We don't know who was the actual author of these images, so it gets hard to understand their motivation. However, earlier this year, Jason did a lot of reporting about the rise of an earlier, and I would argue funnier, generation of AI slop. This was, of course, Shrimp Jesus.

• 10:49Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 10:49Casey Newton?

  Remember Shrimp Jesus?

• 10:50Kevin Roose?

  Of course.

• 10:50Casey Newton?

  So Shrimp Jesus was this sort of series of very strange AI images that purported to show Jesus like. Made out of crustaceans. And when Jason looked into it, he found that there were a lot of creators, often in developing countries, who were taking advantage of Meta's creator incentive programs to essentially get paid for generating as many views as they could. And they found that, you know, even though many of us coastal elites find this stuff sort of distasteful, it turns out there's a huge market for it on Facebook. People love looking at trip Jesus.

• 11:24Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 11:24Casey Newton?

  And so on one hand, Kevin, there is a chance that this stuff is being created by essentially political operatives or partisans who are trying to make an impact on the election. And certainly I would argue the people who are sharing it online, many of them fall into that camp. But I think there's just as good of a chance that the people who created these images initially are not necessarily partisans, but might have just been trying to make some money on Facebook.

• 11:47Kevin Roose?

  Right. Just make something that's shareable, that'll get viewed and that'll make you some money through whatever you're selling on your page or some type of creator program that pays out based on how popular your content is.

• 11:58Casey Newton?

  Exactly.

• 11:59Kevin Roose?

  So, yeah, I mean, in this case, the ones of Trump holding a baby, you know, while the mysteriously dry American flag lowers into the waters behind him. Like, that seems probably partisan to me. Like, the motive for that seems like, oh, let's create this fake AI image of Donald Trump, like heroically rescuing a baby from a flood. It's hard to see how that would generate a ton of revenue for anyone. But that does seem like something that you could point to and say, look at how well Donald Trump is handling emergencies relative to the Biden administration.

• 12:29Casey Newton?

  And that goes to, well, why have these images taken off this week? And the reasons are just plainly partisan, right? We are in the final weeks before an election. We've just had a series of major natural disasters. I think a lot of folks remember President George W. Bush's botched response to Hurricane Katrina, which greatly damaged him. And they're looking at this situation and they're saying, well, if we can make a similar case that the Biden administration has botched the response to Hurricane Helene, maybe Donald Trump will have a better chance of winning the election. And so we've seen a lot of right wing leaders, politicians, political operatives.

• 13:08Casey Newton?

  Sharing these images online to push the narrative that, you know, not only has the Biden administration done a bad job, but but sort of saying that like FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, isn't even doing anything.

• 13:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this was something that Elon Musk has been posting a lot about is how he thinks that FEMA is falling down on the job. And, you know, based on these sort of like erroneous or just fictional claims, he's sort of boosting it from his account, which is obviously huge.

• 13:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And to me, that's where this gets into the realm of the truly dark, Kevin, because while the AI slop is the the sort of shiny new technological feature of this, as we said a bit earlier, spreading misinformation after natural catastrophes has happened basically after every national catastrophe. What is different here is people are seeing an opportunity to, in some cases, just make up entirely fictional narratives about what the federal government, you know, allegedly is not doing after this natural disaster, and then quickly generating evidence to support it online, right?

• 14:14Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 14:15Casey Newton?

  Generating these fictional images that they can share that say, you know, look, like, look at this shivering little girl, you know, this shivering little girl is a sort of icon of the administration's botched response to this hurricane, never mind the fact that this little girl doesn't even exist.

• 14:31Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I guess one question that I have about this stuff is not, you know, obviously, it's pretty widespread, like, these are not sort of fringe posts that are getting 17 views, right? Some of these have gotten millions and millions of views and shares and comments. So they're very popular. But do you think they're actually convincing people? Or is this just sort of entertainment that we may be reacting too strongly to? Or do people believe this stuff?

• 14:54Casey Newton?

  Well, so this is the right question, right? I think a lot of times discussions about misinformation feel really tedious because it's not clear what effects this kind of thing is having. But there was a great story in your outlet this week, Kevin, The New York Times, by Emily Cochrane, Christopher Flavell, Michael Deshier, and Tiffany Su, and they talked to local Officials who are working on the disaster response. And what they told the reporters is our phones are ringing off the hook from people who believe this misinformation and are mad at us. And they're actually distracting us from the rescue work that we need to do. They talked to a woman named Samantha Montano, who's an assistant professor of emergency management at the Massachusetts Maritime Academy.

• 15:39Casey Newton?

  And she said, quote, "I have been doing disaster work for nearly 20 years, and I cannot think of another acute disaster where there has been this much misinformation."

• 15:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so, OK, there is still a lot of questions about that kind of supply chain for AI slop, where it originally comes from. But there's also the distribution piece, too, which is like, who is actually spreading this stuff?

• 16:01Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so a number of high-profile, right-wing accounts have been sharing this stuff online. Utah Senator Mike Lee reposted the girl with the puppy on his personal X account, although he did later delete it. That same image was shared by Amy Kramer, who is a Republican National Committee woman and a co-founder of Women for Trump. And, you know, Kevin, I thought this was interesting, because after she was called out for posting this fake image, she said, quote, "I don't know where this photo came from, and honestly, it doesn't even matter. It is seared into my mind forever. There are people going through much worse than what is shown in this pic, so I'm leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right

• 16:46Casey Newton?

  now." So that's a pretty rich text, I would say.

• 16:50Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 16:51Casey Newton?

  Because what it's telling us is we're now in a world where we share things not because they're true, but because they're emblematic of the way that we feel.

• 17:01Kevin Roose?

  Right, they feel true.

• 17:02Casey Newton?

  Yeah, they feel true.

• 17:03Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I remember I did a story a few years ago about a QAnon believer and influencer, a woman on the Upper East Side of New York, who was just sharing all of this crazy QAnon stuff. And at one point, I asked her, like, you know, because she knew that some of it was not true, or it was at least not verified. It's like, well, why do you share it then? And she's like, well, it just, it performs well, like, my followers love it. And they don't care if it's true. And frankly, I don't care if it's true because it feels true. And I think that's a depressing but accurate read of the psychology of a lot of people who are sharing this stuff. It really does not matter to them. And even after it is pointed out that the thing that they have just shared to their followers is false, there's not like

• 17:46Kevin Roose?

  a taking stock, there's not a sort of like, maybe I'll do better next time. You just sort of post through it and you say, well, it feels true.

• 17:54Casey Newton?

  Yes. And I think that this is the most important piece of the misinformation story and the one that we talk about the least, which is the demand side for it, right? There are a lot of people who want it to be true, that the Biden administration is messing up the response to Hurricane Helene because it will give them a better shot of winning the election. And that is a very powerful engine that drives essentially all of the behavior that we're talking about today.

• 18:19Kevin Roose?

  I mean, I've been thinking about this more broadly than the recent hurricane misinformation, but just, it feels like the internet is starting to sort of break under the weight of AI slop. And this is something that we've been talking about for a while now, but it really does feel like things are starting to come to a head. And I think that generative AI and AI slop is sort of hurting the web in one specific way, which is that it is sort of just generating this content on a scale that makes it very hard to find what you actually want. And I was thinking about this recently. Have you ever read any Boras?

• 18:59Casey Newton?

  I've read a bit of Boras. The nice thing about Boras is all the stories are really short.

• 19:02Kevin Roose?

  Very short.

• 19:02Casey Newton?

  You could read it in line at Starbucks.

• 19:04Kevin Roose?

  It's true. So I just remember this one Boras story that I read in college called The Library of Babel. And it's about this fictional library in which a copy of sort of infinite numbers of books are stored. And not just all the books ever written, but like every possible combination of letters and symbols exists in this library. And when they built it, the people who built this library of Babel thought like, this is going to be great. The greatest works of humanity will be in this library by definition, if it includes all the possible combinations of letters. And then they realize, like, oh, it's actually useless to have a library with every possible book, with every possible combination of letters in it, because you can't find

• 19:49Kevin Roose?

  the things you're looking for. It's as useful as a library with no books in it at all.

• 19:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 19:55Kevin Roose?

  And I feel like we are kind of arriving at a similar place with AI slop on the internet, where it's not that the problem is that all this stuff is bad, or even that some of it is, you know, might not be good quality. It's that there's just so much of it that the job of sifting through it all just becomes impossible. And maybe at a certain point, it does make the internet basically useless.

• 20:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and particularly in these really high stakes situations after natural disasters, Kevin, I think that's something that we want to pay attention to, right? Like, we need to have, like, very good signal to people who are struggling in the aftermath of disasters to hear from their government, to know what FEMA is really doing for them, how they can get assistance if they need it. And a world where the online conversation is taken over by people sharing fake images and lies, saying that the government isn't doing anything, they're blocking the distribution of disaster relief, that creates a real problem. I think the second thing, in addition to the sort of loss of signal that I think we need to work on, is essentially just digital literacy, right? We need people who are on Facebook

• 20:59Casey Newton?

  and X and every other online platform to know that increasingly, the images that they see will either be generated or heavily modified by AI. And they should take that into account when forming their view about what's happening in the world. I think the platforms could lead that effort if they wanted, but honestly, I would like to see the government do some sort of digital literacy effort here as well, because I don't think this should just were to be a volunteer effort by the industry. On the platform side, though, they can absolutely do more to highlight when images have been created or heavily modified using AI. And in fact, a lot of the platforms have, when I was looking through Facebook this week, trying to find some of these images, I did find many that had been

• 21:41Casey Newton?

  hidden behind some sort of screen, saying, hey, what you're about to see has been raided by our third-party fact-checkers as false. And that's good. We've also seen Tools that would label these images saying, hey, we can sort of detect that this has been made with AI. I would say so far the platforms have been pretty shy about displaying those too boldly. And I do think it's tricky to understand exactly like, how do you want to show that to people? But I think that particularly in the aftermath of a natural disaster, you want to make it pretty prominent, right? You want people to know that that shivering little girl doesn't really exist.

• 22:17Kevin Roose?

  I have a question about where all this is heading. I think it's easy right now to sort of dismiss like AI slop because so much of it is low quality and sort of obviously fake to those of us who, you know, consider ourselves discerning internet consumers. But if we assume for the moment that like this stuff is going to get better and that, you know, in a year or two years or five years, you know, the, the quality of AI generated content will, will approach or even exceed the quality of sort of the best or even the median human content. Does that change what the internet looks like if it's not just slop we're talking about,

• 22:55Kevin Roose?

  but it's just sort of like an overwhelming surplus of AI generated content of all kinds, good, bad and in between?

• 23:04Casey Newton?

  I mean, one possible outcome that I could see there, Kevin, is a return to putting trust in institutions over individuals, right? I would say that over the past 20 years, people have tended to trust big institutions like major newspapers or the government much less because they're constantly being attacked on social media. And they've tended to trust individuals a lot more because they can see that person's face and they can look them in the eye and they can say, hey, I trust what this person has to say. What I'm wondering is, in a world that is dominated by slop, do people say, you know what, I actually, I'm not sure that I can trust all these random faces I'm seeing all over social media anymore.

• 23:46Casey Newton?

  Maybe I've been burned a few times by trusting slop that this person shared. And maybe if I can sort of separate myself from the fact that this person is always telling me what I want to hear, I'm actually going to go out and seek a source where I know that that information. Has been vetted, right? Maybe that's not the majority use case here, but I can see more people wanting it over time. Because, you know, as partisan and emotional as many of these discussions can be, I do believe that most people, at the end of the day, want to know what is true. And in a world dominated by AI slop, I think what is true is probably, you're probably going to need an institution to help you figure that out.

• 24:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it also makes me wonder if what is prized among people who make things on the internet is going to change. Like, maybe we're moving from an era of the creator economy into something more like a curator economy, right? Where the people who will be trusted, will have status, will be sort of widely followed online, will not just be people who make stuff, but they'll also be people with sort of good judgment about what is real and what is not. There'll be people who, you know, most people don't have hours a day to sort of sift through everything they look at online and say like, what's true and what's not? What's slop and what's real? They're going to put that trust in someone or maybe an institution. And the value, I can see the value of curation

• 25:09Kevin Roose?

  really going up.

• 25:10Casey Newton?

  Well, I love that you basically just described my job at Platformer.

• 25:15Kevin Roose?

  Well, I, have you ever been fooled by a piece of AI slop?

• 25:19Casey Newton?

  Oh, of cour-, well, wait, I'm trying to think. AI slop. I mean, yes, I'm pretty sure that when I saw the Pope in a puffer coat, I thought it was real.

• 25:26Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 25:26Casey Newton?

  Because he just looks so cool.

• 25:28Kevin Roose?

  I know.

• 25:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah, of course, if you don't remember this, you can just Google Pope in a puffer coat and you'll see, you know, one of the sort of early viral pieces of AI slop, which was, you know, Pope Francis in a coat that he does not own, but it was very beautiful.

• 25:40Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that was the one that got me, too.

• 25:42Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 25:43Casey Newton?

  What is it about that coat?

• 25:44Kevin Roose?

  I don't know. It's very swaggy. Great coat.

• 25:51Casey Newton?

  When we come Hoback, it's Colin Hoback. The director of a new documentary thinks he's found the real Satoshi Nakamoto.

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• 27:34Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, this week, we are talking about one of the greatest mysteries of the last 20 years on the internet. And no, I'm not talking about when you're going to write a good newsletter.

• 27:45Casey Newton?

  Wow, well, you're coming in hot, Kevin, but you're right. This is a real whodunit. And it's the rare sort of happy whodunit, and then there's like no body anywhere. It's just the question of who created Bitcoin?

• 27:57Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So for years now, there's been frantic speculation and investigation about the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, who published the Bitcoin White Paper all the way back in 2008. No one has known who Satoshi Nakamoto is or was, but there have been lots of different theories floated around over the years.

• 28:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you know how like every few years they reboot Spider-Man and just like cast a new person in the role of Spider-Man? That's sort of how it feels like it's been with Satoshi Nakamoto. Every three years or so, some journalist comes forward and says, aha, I finally got it. And then three years later, somebody comes in and does it all over again.

• 28:36Kevin Roose?

  Yes, so this week, we got a new potential Satoshi Nakamoto.

• 28:40Casey Newton?

  There's a new Nakamoto in town, and like other previous Nakamotos, he's denying that he's Nakamoto.

• 28:46Kevin Roose?

  Right, right. So this new Satoshi Nakamoto candidate comes to us courtesy of Colin Hoback. Colin is a documentary filmmaker, and his new movie just came out this week. It's called Money Electric: The Bitcoin Mystery. Colin previously did a movie about the QAnon conspiracy theory called Q Into the Storm, which was an attempt to sort of unravel that mystery of who was behind this big conspiracy theory.

• 29:13Casey Newton?

  And we should say, in that case, I think they did actually nail the person.

• 29:16Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I think a lot of people found his conclusion in that film very credible. And I watched this movie, I was given a screener of it several days before it came out, and I watched it over the weekend. And I went in very skeptical, I thought, oh, here we go, there's another one of these theories about Satoshi Nakamoto. And by the end of the film, I was fairly convinced that Colin had done it again, that he had actually uncovered the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto.

• 29:39Casey Newton?

  And who does he think Satoshi Nakamoto is, Kevin?

• 29:42Kevin Roose?

  So Colin makes the case in his film that Satoshi Nakamoto is a guy named Peter Todd. Peter is not one of the usual suspects whose name gets floated a lot during these Satoshi Nakamoto investigations, but he was an early contributor to the Bitcoin project. But I was actually more impressed by the kind of other thing that the film did, which is just that it convinced me that who Satoshi Nakamoto is actually matters.

• 30:07Casey Newton?

  Which is what?

• 30:08Kevin Roose?

  Which is, you know, obviously, there's sort of the financial angle, right? This is a person who presumably controls, you know, billions of dollars worth of this cryptocurrency now, and so I think it's important to understand, you know, who that person is. But this is also- Like a movement, like whatever you think of Bitcoin, whether you think it's a scam or it's worthless or whatever, like it has had a profound impact on global finance. It's this trillion dollar industry. It's also influencing a lot of central banks around the world and how they're thinking about starting their own digital currencies. Obviously, it's created this tribe of kind of Bitcoin true believers who are now very influential in US politics. So I just think it's had a big impact on the world. Even if you are not a person who cares about Bitcoin itself,

• 30:52Kevin Roose?

  I think you will care about this film because it just illustrates the many ways that this single invention has sort of rippled out into the world.

• 30:59Casey Newton?

  Absolutely, and you know, I really agree with you that who Satoshi is does matter, even if you're not a Bitcoin person yourself. For my own part, I remain skeptical that Peter Todd is Satoshi, although I do think the film is a valiant effort to uncover the identity of Satoshi. And if nothing else, if you watch this film, I think you'll have a lot to talk about with all your Bitcoin friends.

• 31:21Kevin Roose?

  All right, let's bring in Colin Hobeck.

• 31:29Kevin Roose?

  Colin Hobeck, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  Excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 31:33Kevin Roose?

  Can you just start by explaining why you took on this story, the pursuit of the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto? Like, what convinced you that this was worth this many years of your life to try to figure out who Satoshi Nakamoto is?

• 31:49Speaker 05

  Well, in the beginning, I wasn't actually convinced, you know, because it's one of those mysteries that's just been hanging for so long. And it's like, you start to think, well, like, if it could have been solved, it probably would have been solved. But I put together a list of five people who seemed like likely suspects and said, OK, if I can get access to maybe one of these guys, it would make sense to start picking around the edges of this story.

• 32:15Kevin Roose?

  And what was your pitch to those people when you started approaching them? Because a lot of these people, you know, they've been hearing all the speculation about who is Satoshi for like more than a decade at this point. And I'm sure reporters have reached out to them hundreds of times, trying to piece together various fragments of evidence. So how did you approach these people who you thought might be Satoshi or might be connected to Satoshi? What did you tell them you were working on? And how did they respond?

• 32:43Speaker 05

  I mean, I try to be very upfront. I said, this is a story that's looking at the origins of Bitcoin to understand how it became what it became, but then also perhaps understand Satoshi's motives and maybe figure out who Satoshi was. So this is how I kind of pitched it. And the first interview I did was with Adam Back. He's the cryptographer who invented something called hashcash, which is really one of the key technological aspects of Bitcoin. And Adam Back was also the first person that Satoshi had ever reached out to. So that was the jumping in point. You know, his answers were pretty suspicious.

• 33:28Speaker 05

  And after that, I said, all right, well, maybe there is a story here.

• 33:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah. So let's talk about the investigation into the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto. Tell us about Peter Todd.

• 33:41Speaker 05

  Peter Todd was like a self-taught coder, a super genius, super genius. He starts communicating with Adam Back and some of the other cypherpunks at the age of 15. Now Bitcoin's white paper, the sort of blueprint for Bitcoin, is released in 2008. Peter Todd would have been 23 at the time. And Bitcoin itself is launched in 2009. Peter Todd, I mean, prior to Bitcoin, he was in art school, but he was very focused in those early years. There's these old emails you can find where he was trying to turn hashcash, which is Adam Back's invention, into a real currency, like a workable version of cash for the internet,

• 34:26Speaker 05

  something that would maintain that sense of privacy that you get when you buy something with cash just online, right? And he was very focused on this, which I found fascinating for a 15-year-old, right?

• 34:39Casey Newton?

  In your film, Peter also comes across as like quite ideological about sort of the need for internet money and private money. And I wonder if you could share a little bit about what was that philosophy that was driving him from such a young age to want something like a hashcash or a Bitcoin to exist?

• 34:56Speaker 05

  I was also very curious about what he was like as a kid. It was not easy to find some of these details around him. I think he's best described as, he said it himself, he's a young libertarian. I think he self-describes more as a soft libertarian.

• 35:11Kevin Roose?

  That's a libertarian who doesn't go to the gym?

• 35:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean libertarianism is a big umbrella, right? So yeah, you have your libertarians who don't go to the gym. You have your anarcho-capitalists. You have ones who don't believe that any state should exist at all. Peter Todd is not one of those. He's someone who understands that governments will exist.

• 35:33Kevin Roose?

  Got it.

• 35:33Speaker 05

  But he also stands in opposition to them.

• 35:36Kevin Roose?

  And the breadcrumbs that led you to Peter Todd, I think we should just say they're complicator, right? There's a reason this film is as long as it is because it does take a lot of background information to just be able to understand how you started piecing together the clues that led you to Peter Todd as the suspect for Satoshi Nakamoto. But can you just give us like, what is your best piece of evidence that led you to claim that Peter Todd and Satoshi Nakamoto are the same person?

• 36:04Speaker 05

  Sure. So Peter Todd is masterful at muddying the waters. And in the film, you get to go on this journey where you're conversing with people who have interacted with Todd in the past and have been disoriented by this. Some people think he works for the, you know, he's a government agent trying to undermine Bitcoin. There's all these wild narratives that have formed around him. But the key piece of evidence and the thing that started to unlock this for me, he makes this post in 2010. And he's only made three posts on the forums up until this point. And that post really reads like a continuation of a thought of what Satoshi had just written.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  You know, it's like an hour and a half later and Peter Todd is the only one to add on to this post with a deep knowledge of how the system that Satoshi was describing was working.

• 37:00Kevin Roose?

  He's basically correcting Satoshi.

• 37:02Speaker 05

  It's a correction post. It's a correction post. Yeah, I think that's the best way to put it. And what it looked like to me is that Peter had logged out of the Satoshi account. Logged into this new account, not realized he'd logged in, and written this correction post. And then both he and Satoshi evaporate after this. And clearly, it indicates an unbelievable degree of involvement at that time. To be able to correct Satoshi on a very minute detail about something called Replace by Fee, which is a technical solution that he would add to Bitcoin himself years later. But he would invent this whole character

• 37:47Speaker 05

  and construct this whole wild narrative with an email hack and all of this stuff, just so basically he could have an excuse to write Replace by Fee. So we're talking about a guy who loves playing these kinds of games, loves playing with alternate identities. And I think that that speaks to why this mystery has stood for so long.

• 38:10Casey Newton?

  What's your personal level of confidence that Peter is Satoshi?

• 38:14Speaker 05

  I mean, look, I think that based on the evidence, we make a hell of a case. I'm very confident in the case that we make. And ultimately, I mean, I'm hoping that the audience will watch and come to their own conclusions. But all of the evidence that I've got winds up with him. When you parse through all of the evidence, you look at his history, the timing, the writing style. You know, there was a recent batch of emails that came out as a byproduct of a court case against a guy who was claiming to be Satoshi, Craig Wright, who is not Satoshi. He was proven to be a fraud in court. But in order to prove him as a fraud, some of the folks who were messaging with Satoshi very early on

• 38:59Speaker 05

  had to release their emails. And within those emails, it shows...

• 39:06Speaker 05

  Someone who is kind of struggling with cash as being the person behind the Satoshi account and someone who has kind of troll-like lexicon. He uses the word retarded. And I think that Satoshi saying a word like that, just casually, really starts to narrow down your options on who Satoshi might be.

• 39:29Casey Newton?

  Hmm. For me, there's two things that I always get hung up on in the conversation about, you know, who is Satoshi. One is, we live in a society where everyone wants credit for everything, even things that they didn't do, right? You know, Craig Wright apparently was one of these people. You know, so the idea that the person who created this, you know, global phenomenon, maybe changed the course of history, does not want to take credit for in public, it's just always been very hard for me to understand. The second thing, as your film goes into in great detail, is that Satoshi owns Bitcoins worth at least $60 billion right now for its current selling price, could be worth much more in the future. The idea that, you know, someone who, as you just said, Colleen, was quite poor, would

• 40:13Casey Newton?

  just not want access to the $60 billion, leads me to feel like, this person has to be dead, whoever this is.

• 40:22Speaker 05

  Well, I think this is why a lot of folks in the space want to believe that, that he's dead. Why wouldn't he have tapped that massive chest? But here's what I'll say, is that there is a pattern that was revealed by an error in Bitcoin's code that showed what is believed to be Satoshi's stash of a million or so Bitcoin. That bug gets fixed in 2013. Satoshi could have easily been mining long after that. Satoshi could have also had another computer or other things that didn't fit that pattern up until that time. What I'm saying is I think that Satoshi could be perfectly well off without having to touch any of the stash that's a part of that pattern.

• 41:05Speaker 05

  So that's point one. I think point two would be, you know, why not take the credit for it? I think the motivations over time have shifted of like, why to protect Satoshi's identity? You know, we make this case in the film, and this is what I believe. Most people have thought Satoshi used anonymity because they knew that Bitcoin was going to be this massive success, right? But in the beginning, the cryptography mailing list, the cryptographers there largely papooed the idea. But something that I hadn't considered for a large portion of the investigation is, what if the reason for anonymity wasn't because they knew this thing was going to be a success? And that they needed, you know, to protect their identity?

• 41:48Speaker 05

  But because they weren't prominent, they hadn't written any papers before. They were unknown, and they wanted their ideas to be taken seriously. And this is another part of the sort of cypherpunk ethos is like, oh, well, you know, if you use anonymity, then the ideas can be judged at face value, rather than using credibility as the metric. And when you think about it in that light, it makes a lot more sense why Satoshi might have needed said anonymity. Now, once it became a success, the motivation might shift, right? At that point, you go, okay, well, this thing is getting bigger than I was expecting.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  Maybe you want to be able to kind of continue working on it, but sort of living your life in a kind of Clark Kent Superman fashion. Where, yeah, there's this Satoshi character, but then I'm also, but then also over here, I'm a real person kind of reporting on myself or whatever. So I think that's the sort of dynamic at play here. I believe that Satoshi disappears, and then Peter Todd reemerges and injects himself in the narrative, and kind of interacts with his alter ego. I mean, this is something I saw in Q as well. It's almost like the people who run these anonymous accounts can't help but interact with their alter egos in some way, bake themselves into the narrative, because it makes them look, I think in their minds, perhaps, less suspicious.

• 43:14Speaker 05

  And then I think as time went by, I mean, Peter really muddied the waters, made himself look like the anti-Satoshi. And if there were people in Bitcoin who knew this secret, they would probably think it's bad for Bitcoin if he did end up being Satoshi.

• 43:27Kevin Roose?

  Right, because he's a pretty controversial figure in the Bitcoin community already, even before your film came out, he was sort of seen as like a troll, or just someone who was like, had a lot of controversial opinions about things related to crypto and other things, too. So, not someone who you'd want to say like, this is the person who started our whole movement.

• 43:45Casey Newton?

  Although, if you are that troll, to me, it's like, all the more reason to be like, by the way, I'm Satoshi, because that instrument, that immediately gives you so much more credibility in all the online fights that you're starting.

• 43:54Kevin Roose?

  Right, right.

• 43:55Speaker 05

  Well, you saw up until the film released, he did that all the time. He'd say, oh, I'm Satoshi, anytime someone would ask him, and they would just brush it off and move on.

• 44:02Kevin Roose?

  Right, but he was not someone who was-

• 44:05Speaker 05

  It's part of the troll-like behavior, though.

• 44:07Kevin Roose?

  Exactly. There's the, they sort of do this like, I am Spartacus thing, where they all say, I am Satoshi, as a means to like, preserve the identity of the real Satoshi. I mean, the, the scene that is sort of the climactic scene in the film, is this confrontation, where you basically, you know, are interviewing Peter Todd and Adam Back, his kind of mentor, and you present him with your case, that he is Satoshi Nakamoto. Walk us through what happened there, and how he reacted.

• 44:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, so it was a bit of a challenge, getting both Adam and Peter to be in the same place at the same time, to answer these questions. And I felt that that was really the only way that we could get to the bottom of this, if there was any way at all. And Peter loves to go caving, so I was like, alright, maybe I can get these guys to go on an adventure, if we find some crazy, you know, Soviet-era ruins. So we tracked those down, and I suggested to Peter, ah, maybe we should go on this adventure. Can you, do you think you'd get Adam to go with us? And so, kind of a producing miracle, but they

• 45:20Speaker 05

  both agreed. And so, we drive out to this decrepit steelworks factory, and pretty early on, I start going through the evidence. I start with Adam Back, and all of the reasons why it looked like Adam was Satoshi, unless he was covering for someone.

• 45:41Speaker 05

  And then in that moment, Peter, once again, kind of deflects and says, no, no. Well, here's all, actually, you're missing all of the evidence that does point it at him. So I started asking, you know, okay, like, why did you write pro tip? If you start a revolutionary currency, you should frame someone back in 2014. And eventually coming to some of this alter ego that he had seemingly invented and trying to get to the bottom of that, why he did that. And then eventually putting together this theory and holding the camera as steady as I can, as I just paint the theory as directly as I can.

• 46:19Speaker 05

  And watch his reaction, watch Adam's reaction, see how he's kind of absorbing what I'm saying. He's at a loss for words and this is not a guy who is often at a loss for words. I'd never seen that happen before.

• 46:39Kevin Roose?

  He's sweating. I think like he's, he's maybe not literally sweating, but like it's, it's a, you, you see like how surprised and nervous he is and he's sort of stammering and he can't really figure out how he wants to respond. I mean, that must've just been a very high adrenaline moment for you, holding the camera there after three years of work to finally be sort of like confronting your suspect.

• 47:02Speaker 05

  Yes, the amount of sort of butterflies, tension in my stomach, the adrenaline, I think it translates, as does his intensity and his response.

• 47:15Kevin Roose?

  You know, in the film, he, he does, after he's done stammering, he does eventually say like, I'm not Satoshi. And I've been emailing him a little bit this week. He says he's not Satoshi, that you got it all wrong. He sort of accused you of being a conspiracy theorist. And I just wonder if you have like a response to that.

• 47:35Speaker 05

  Well, it doesn't surprise me. He's had a year and some change to figure out how he was going to respond. He's had something pinned to his profile since we had that interaction. In the months that followed, he tried to minimize the correction post. He's a master of game theory, and I view all of this as just more of his game theory. And distraction. I think that the evidence is helpful. It pointed us in the direction, but his reaction in many respects is even better evidence.

• 48:12Casey Newton?

  I will say that, you know, like doing something really big and then not wanting credit or attention, there is something Canadian about that. I do think that that is a point in the favor of the Peter Todd case.

• 48:24Kevin Roose?

  Why don't you think Peter Todd has been a suspect? I mean, thousands of people have been looking into this for years and years and years. And like Peter Todd was not in the top 10 or maybe even the top 20 suspects of who Satoshi could be. So why do you think he escaped scrutiny for so long?

• 48:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think that he's really become adept at figuring out how to muddy the waters in such a way that even with a case that's being made like this with a lot of strong evidence, the community isn't prepared to even entertain it. There were a couple of instances where people had brought it up, but they would just get laughed off the forums. So he had been suspected occasionally, but for the most part, it was just discounted.

• 49:14Kevin Roose?

  Right. I mean, I think we should just say, like, in the interest of fairness, this is not like a smoking gun case, right? In order to definitively prove that Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, you would have to do something like catch him using the private keys to Satoshi's Bitcoin wallets or something like that. But let's say you're right, and Peter Todd is Satoshi Nakamoto, and the evidence that you've laid out holds up. Do you think that changes anything for Bitcoin or its future?

• 49:49Speaker 05

  Well, I think the best outcome from this would be if, say, in the next couple of weeks Satoshi burns the entire stash, burns the millionaire so coins.

• 50:04Kevin Roose?

  Burn, meaning like destroys in a cryptographically irreversible way.

• 50:08Speaker 05

  Cryptographically, in a public way for all to see on the blockchain, which is Bitcoin's public record-keeping service. Anyone would be able to see it, it'd be totally verifiable, it'd be the best thing for Satoshi and the best thing for Bitcoin. It would be a almost Christ-like thing to be able to do something like that, or it's like throwing the one ring into the volcano. But assuming they still have access to the keys, you know, all of this goes away if you do, if that were to happen.

• 50:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I think it would deflate the community if they knew that it was, you know, because so much of the myth around Bitcoin and the reason that people love it is because it does have this kind of murky origin story, like, you know, it just, people talk about it like an immaculate conception, you know, this thing just sort of basically sprang out of the ether into existence. And of course it didn't, someone came up with it, someone wrote the white paper. And I just think if you, if you pull back the curtain and it's just some guy, I think that does actually maybe weaken the case for Bitcoin over time.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  You know, I think you're right in the short run, but I think in the long run, this mystery actually is also, is starting to become an albatross hanging around Bitcoin's neck. And getting over that would be probably a benefit to Bitcoin, just to have some resolution there. You know, also, a lot of folks have had their privacy invaded over, over the years so that Satoshi could keep theirs, you know, and there's an easy way to stop that, which is just to come clean, to burn the coins. So I think the ball's really in Satoshi's court here. There are some clear steps that could be made to bring this all to a poetic conclusion.

• 51:55Kevin Roose?

  Thanks so much, Colin.

• 51:58Speaker 05

  Thanks, Colin. All right. Thank you, Kevin. Thank you, Casey.

• 52:03Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, it's time to pack your bags and grab your tickets. The Hot Mess Express is pulling into town.

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• 54:08Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, is it just me or has this been a messy week for Silicon Valley news?

• 54:12Kevin Roose?

  A very messy week.

• 54:13Casey Newton?

  It seems like everywhere we look, there's one calamity after another. And when that happens on the show, we like to do a little segment that we call Hot Mess Express.

• 54:21Kevin Roose?

  All aboard.

• 54:33Casey Newton?

  Well, if you're just listening, you cannot see that Kevin and I are wearing our train conductor hats, and we do have a child's train set laid out before us here in the studio. And on that train set, Kevin, in a box car, are a series of paper slips. And what we are going to do is we are going to pull those slips out of the car, discuss the news, and then award them a rating on our official Hot Mess Thermometer.

• 54:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and if you're not watching the video version of this show on YouTube, if you're just listening to the podcast, you are missing our gradual transformation into children's prop comedians.

• 55:07Casey Newton?

  I thought you were gonna say very hot people, but also that.

• 55:12Casey Newton?

  Shall we draw the first slip out of the Hot Mess Express, Kevin?

• 55:15Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it.

• 55:16Casey Newton?

  All right, what do you have for us?

• 55:18Kevin Roose?

  First up on the Hot Mess Express, Comcast discovers thing people hate more than paying $150 a month for cable.

• 55:25Casey Newton?

  Well, I can't imagine what that could be, Kevin. What is it?

• 55:28Kevin Roose?

  Well, there was a data breach that resulted in the leak of the social security numbers of over 230,000 Comcast customers.

• 55:37Casey Newton?

  And we're actually gonna read the names of those customers, just so you know if you're affected. Okay, we're gonna start off with Adam Adamson.

• 55:45Kevin Roose?

  What's his social security number?

• 55:47Casey Newton?

  Okay, I'm getting word we're not supposed to say that.

• 55:49Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 55:49Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 55:50Kevin Roose?

  Casey, what do you make of this mess?

• 55:51Casey Newton?

  Well, Kevin, I'll be the first to say it's bad. I'm coming out against data breaches, and I don't care who knows it. You know, Kevin, as bad as this is, I have to say, I think that it's only gonna be a warm mess for me. And the reason is because last October Comcast had a data breach that affected 35 million Comcast customers, which, according to my research, is actually most Comcast customers were affected by this. So 237,703 Comcast customers, while surely that is gonna be a huge inconvenience to them, it is frankly just a warm mess compared to what happened to almost all customers just last year.

• 56:31Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and it's not very popular to defend cable companies in this day and age, but I think I will agree with you that this is only a warm mess, in part because I don't think that social security numbers- Being leaked should be as big a deal as they are. This is sort of one of my hobby horses.

• 56:46Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 56:46Kevin Roose?

  It should not be a secret what your social security number is.

• 56:49Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 56:50Kevin Roose?

  That number was never supposed to be sort of a unique identifier used for security purposes. That's not the point of social security numbers. And it should not be possible, if your social security number does get leaked, to use it to steal your identity or steal your money or anything else.

• 57:05Casey Newton?

  I agree with you, Kevin, and I think it's time for you to be part of the solution. What is your social security number?

• 57:12Casey Newton?

  Wait, we don't have time for that. There's another train coming down the tracks.

• 57:17Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 57:18Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 57:18Kevin Roose?

  Actually, my favorite, can I say one more thing about social security numbers?

• 57:20Casey Newton?

  Say it.

• 57:21Kevin Roose?

  Do you know that social security numbers go east to west?

• 57:24Casey Newton?

  How so?

• 57:25Kevin Roose?

  This is one of my favorite facts about social security numbers. So you were born in California, right?

• 57:30Casey Newton?

  I was.

• 57:30Kevin Roose?

  So that means that your social security number probably starts with a five or a six.

• 57:34Casey Newton?

  It starts, well, I'm not gonna say. But let me just say, not a bad guess.

• 57:38Kevin Roose?

  So they, the way they do it is that the, the first three numbers of your social security number correspond to where you were born. And numbers on the east side of the country start with zeros and ones, and numbers on the west side of the country start with fives and sixes.

• 57:51Casey Newton?

  That's so interesting. And then the last three numbers are just your IQ. So go ahead and look, and it'll tell you everything you need to know.

• 57:57Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 57:57Kevin Roose?

  All right. Next up, you pull the next one.

• 58:00Casey Newton?

  Can you pull it and hand it to me?

• 58:01Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 58:01Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 58:02Kevin Roose?

  I'm not your monkey.

• 58:03Casey Newton?

  Okay, great. I'll just rearrange the entire studio.

• 58:06Kevin Roose?

  You have longer arms.

• 58:10Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 58:11Kevin Roose?

  Get back in front of the microphone.

• 58:13Casey Newton?

  Okay. All right. Next up on the Hot Mess Express, Kevin, who ordered Chinese feud? Here's what happened, Kevin. News broke over the last weekend that Chinese hackers had penetrated the networks of a bunch of US broadband providers, including Verizon, AT&T, and Lumen. And Kevin, do you know what group these hackers belong to?

• 58:33Kevin Roose?

  What group do they belong to?

• 58:34Casey Newton?

  Salt Typhoon. Salt Typhoon is how my friend Alex seasons his steak. But it's also a terrifying hacking group based in China. And they appear to have collected data on internet traffic and the browsing histories of millions of Americans and businesses, large and small. And the Wall Street Journal Kevin actually characterized this breach as potentially catastrophic. So, you know, what are the hackers doing with this information? We don't really know. The government is investigating. But here is where it gets a little messy. The Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, Kevin. Do you know about this law?

• 59:09Kevin Roose?

  Uh, no, but I know a child named CALEA.

• 59:12Casey Newton?

  Oh, really?

• 59:12Kevin Roose?

  Hi, CALEA.

• 59:13Casey Newton?

  Hi, CALEA. What's your social security number? So, CALEA, the law, was passed in 1994, when the internet was still very young. And in fact, just the year previously, I had seen the Backstreet Boys perform at Washington Middle School. But Kevin, here's why this law was important. It required communications officers to allow the government to tap into customer information when they were presented with a lawful order. So, in other words, they have to maintain what security professionals often call a backdoor. And if you talk to any security professional, what they will tell you is, you do not want to install backdoors for law enforcement, because inevitably, those backdoors get exploited by our adversaries.

• 59:54Kevin Roose?

  Right. This is a big talking point among, uh, security folks is like, it's impossible to build a backdoor into a piece of technology that only the good guys can use.

• 1:00:04Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 1:00:04Kevin Roose?

  Invariably, uh, whenever people try to design a backdoor into a piece of software so that law enforcement can, uh, sort of, you know, tap your phone, or get access to your email, or what have you, that, uh, ends up being exploited by malicious actors as well.

• 1:00:19Casey Newton?

  That's right. And that appears to have been what happened here. China was able to use the, uh, the sort of rails that were established by this law to penetrate our networks. And now, apparently, they're laying the groundwork for what could be a major cyber attack. So, Kevin, what kind of mess would you say this is?

• 1:00:36Kevin Roose?

  This is, this is a hot mess. This is an official hot mess. It just seems to me like every year or two, we get evidence of some new massive hack, uh, related to China or the Chinese government. Like, there was that hack, uh, a number of years ago of, uh, the Office of Personnel Management, OPM, that resulted in a bunch of information about federal employees being stolen, apparently by China.

• 1:00:58Casey Newton?

  We have the ODB hack where old dirty bastard did a guest verse on a Mariah Carey song.

• 1:01:04Kevin Roose?

  I didn't hear about that one.

• 1:01:05Casey Newton?

  It was actually a pretty good verse.

• 1:01:06Kevin Roose?

  But I genuinely think this is a very messy story and it goes to one of the biggest topics in cybersecurity today, which is the, the growing cyber war between the US and China.

• 1:01:17Casey Newton?

  Absolutely. And what I will say about this hot mess is the next time that you hear some law enforcement agencies or some government regulators saying, we need to create a backdoor in your secure end-to-end encryption apps like WhatsApp and Signal, I want you to say, hey, remember how China used one of those exact backdoors to hack into our networks?

• 1:01:37Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 1:01:39Kevin Roose?

  Next up on the Hot Mess Express, Snoopy hates you.

• 1:01:43Casey Newton?

  What? Snoopy hates me? What did I do?

• 1:01:47Kevin Roose?

  So this is a story that came out over the last week or so about a major dust-up, a major mess between two rival fan communities of Snoopy, the cartoon dog.

• 1:01:59Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, Kevin, I've always thought of the Snoopy fandom as a state and happy place for people to share warm childhood nostalgia. So I'm sure whatever they're feuding about could not possibly be that serious.

• 1:02:09Kevin Roose?

  So the feud started recently when a Snoopy fan account called Snoopy Weekly posted an image of Donald Trump drawn in the style of Charlie Brown, shaking hands with Snoopy along with an endorsement that ended with make America great again. This, of course, was sort of very controversial in the bipartisan Snoopy coalition.

• 1:02:31Casey Newton?

  Snoopy has generally stayed out of politics and I believe he has not previously made an endorsement in a presidential race.

• 1:02:37Kevin Roose?

  True. And so there were other communities of Snoopy fans who responded with comments on this post, including one that said Snoopy hates you, which is just a pretty harsh thing for a Snoopy fan to say to another Snoopy fan.

• 1:02:50Casey Newton?

  Very much so.

• 1:02:50Kevin Roose?

  Others accused Snoopy Weekly of a recent, quote, "aggressive fascistic push", and pointed people to another fan site, Daily Snoopy's, where Snoopy has appeared to show support for Palestinians and progressive causes.

• 1:03:06Casey Newton?

  Oh my goodness. Well, you know, Kevin, it just goes to show that we're living in such polarized times that politics can't Can't help but find their way into previously sacred spaces such as the Snoopy fandom.

• 1:03:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:19Casey Newton?

  I just feel like the great thing about these fandoms is that they are, you know, a lot of these fan accounts are operated by, you know, individual people and those people just have their own challenges in their lives. And so sometimes one of these fan accounts will go dark for a while and the person will come back and people will go, oh, welcome back. Where have you been? And they'll say like, oh, I was in prison, you know, or, oh, you know, I had like a major like mental health crisis. And it's like, you know, but now I'm back and here's more images of Taylor Swift. So yeah, always, always a good time on the internet.

• 1:03:41Kevin Roose?

  What an inspiring internet we've built.

• 1:03:42Casey Newton?

  Wait, what kind of mess did we decide this is?

• 1:03:44Kevin Roose?

  I don't know. What do you think?

• 1:03:45Casey Newton?

  I think this is a hot mess. Like, like a Snoopy fan account went dark after endorsing in the presidential election. That's so needlessly messy.

• 1:03:56Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:57Casey Newton?

  It's ridiculous.

• 1:03:57Kevin Roose?

  It's messy. It didn't, it didn't need to be this way. And actually, my understanding is that Charles Schultz, the creator of the Peanuts, took a lot of pains to keep Snoopy out of partisan politics. Basically, he just, he wanted Republicans and Democrats to love the Peanuts universe. And so, you know, he's sort of rarely waded into charged political topics.

• 1:04:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Snoopy refused to campaign for Warren Harding in 1926.

• 1:04:26Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 1:04:29Casey Newton?

  Next up, Kevin. It's a WordPress nerd mess. You know WordPress?

• 1:04:34Kevin Roose?

  Yes, the blogging platform.

• 1:04:35Casey Newton?

  The blogging platform that powers much of the web. For the past few weeks, Kevin, two factions of the WordPress community have been in all out war. There have been public insults, cease and desist letters, and employees are accepting buyouts just to escape the chaos.

• 1:04:56Kevin Roose?

  So I saw some headlines about this and then I started trying to understand what was going on at WordPress and this mess. And I truly could not understand it. So maybe you can give me like the 20 second capsule version of what all the drama is about.

• 1:05:11Casey Newton?

  Sure. So WordPress is free, open source technology.

• 1:05:15Kevin Roose?

  You have 18 seconds.

• 1:05:21Casey Newton?

  Now it's 13. Okay, we did call it the Hot Mess Express. It's not the Hot Mess long version. So WordPress is free, open source technology, which means anyone can use it, including for commercial purposes. And one of the reasons that the WordPress ecosystem is so big, you know, some people say it powers up to 43% of all websites on the internet, is because anybody can just take the software and build their own thing and they can make money with it, right? So so far, that's great. Everybody's winning. But here's the thing. Along comes a private for-profit company called WP Engine, and they start to make lots and lots of money off of WordPress. But, and here's the catch, Kevin, they don't really contribute very much back to the ecosystem. So the etiquette of open source is if you use

• 1:06:06Casey Newton?

  this product, you should be improving it. You should be forking it. You should be pushing your little changes and your little bug fixes. But WordPress's founder, Matt Mullenweg, is arguing that WP Engine has been a bad actor in the ecosystem by essentially taking all of the good that WordPress ever created, hoarding it and reselling it and not contributing its fair share. Hmm. So that is the argument. But here's the thing. That's not actually how open source software really works. So if you want to know, well, what is the argument against what Matt Mullenweg is saying? It's like, look, whatever they're complaining about, these are not the terms on which open source software is offered, right? The terms are, I'm giving you this.

• 1:06:50Casey Newton?

  I'm making no warrant that it is, you know, safe or whatever, like it's essentially, you know, buyer beware. But once you take it, you can do what you want with it. And so for them to come in afterwards and say, well, we've just decided that you have to pay us 8% of your revenues or we'll see you in court. If, if nothing else, it is a breach from how these kinds of disputes are normally handled. Hmm. Kevin, what makes this even messier is Mullenweg's own entanglement with the broader WordPress universe. He is the owner of wordpress.com, which itself sells these services commercially. And so some people are arguing that- That he is being hypocritical, you know, is Wordpress.com contributing to the open source community?

• 1:07:34Casey Newton?

  There's there's sort of a lot in there. And again, it's very personal and it's very entangled and it's very messy.

• 1:07:40Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 1:07:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:41Kevin Roose?

  Okay, I almost understand what's going on at Wordpress now. Thank you for that. How would you rate this on the hot mess thermometer?

• 1:07:47Casey Newton?

  This is a very hot mess. I'm not going to say it's a nuclear mess, but I'm going to say it's a very hot mess. It is, here's the thing, it is, feels very personal for something that ultimately is just about open source software that makes websites. There is clearly so many hurt feelings here. There are so many accusations and at the end of the day, you know, it's not really clear to me that it's going to matter that much to anyone who uses the internet. So that just feels very messy, you know?

• 1:08:16Kevin Roose?

  Yes. I would say it's a, it's a, it's a very hot mess too, because if I've learned one thing over the past year, it is that open source software developers will get very, very angry at you for, for doing things they don't like. This happened to me, I was, I'm not going to tell the story.

• 1:08:33Casey Newton?

  No, let's get into it. No, what's the, what's the worst thing that ever happened to you because of open source software?

• 1:08:37Kevin Roose?

  Well, I made a joke in a column about an open source database called Postgres that sort of implied that it was too nerdy to understand and, and people got really mad. I got a lot of Linux developers emailing me. Let me just say, that was a hot mess.

• 1:08:53Casey Newton?

  And that's why it's important that your social security number never leaked.

• 1:08:56Kevin Roose?

  Yes, it's true.

• 1:08:58Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 1:09:01Kevin Roose?

  Last stop on the Hot Mess Express today, Chrome Away From Home. This is a story about Google and its seemingly endless antitrust struggles. This week, the DOJ made a court filing in its antitrust case against Google, suggesting that one of the things that they want the Department of Justice to do is to force Google to break up.

• 1:09:25Casey Newton?

  Mm hmm. Yes, Kevin, we've now entered the remedy phase, which is of course Jason Mraz's favorite phase of any antitrust trial. And the Department of Justice has put forth what it thinks would sort of right the ship, would prevent Google from having An unfair advantage in maintaining its illegal monopoly in search.

• 1:09:42Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and one of the things that the DOJ wrote in this filing is that they are considering forcing Google to basically spin off certain products, including Google Chrome, Google Play, and Android, to basically stop them from using those products to give an unfair advantage to their search business. So Casey, what do you make of this mess?

• 1:10:01Casey Newton?

  Sounds great to me. I mean, honestly, like, you know, I don't know what benefit I'm getting as a consumer from the fact that Google owns Chrome, right? I'm not really sure what benefit I'm getting from Google owning Android. I see all the benefits from Google, you know, owning the sort of vast swath of the web, but for me, you know, it's much less clear. So, you know, Google put out a blog post today where they said this would harm consumers, it would be bad for privacy, and it would discourage innovation, suggesting essentially that Google would simply stop trying if it no longer owned, you know, all of these services. I think they're crocodile teeters, and I'm very excited to see the DOJ make this full case in the weeks ahead.

• 1:10:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and who knows if this will stand up? Who knows if they'll actually go all the way toward forcing a breakup? A lot of people have sort of been speculating that they'll go for some sort of halfway remedies that would sort of make Google's life a little bit harder, but wouldn't force them to actually split off any parts of the company. This would be a big deal. If it did happen, it would be the biggest deal since the Microsoft antitrust case, certainly.

• 1:11:01Casey Newton?

  Some are saying it'd be the messiest breakup since the Love is Blind season finale.

• 1:11:04Kevin Roose?

  It's a great topical TV joke.

• 1:11:08Casey Newton?

  I haven't watched the show, but people are saying that.

• 1:11:10Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:11:10Casey Newton?

  So what kind of mess do you think this is?

• 1:11:12Kevin Roose?

  This, I would say, for now, this is sort of a simmering mess. This is like a medium mess that has a potential to boil over if the DOJ does, in fact, decide to pursue the big remedies.

• 1:11:25Casey Newton?

  I think that's fair. I would say that it is not a mess. This is actually just the wheels of justice turning in the manner that I wish they would more often, which is to go tackle the biggest problems on the internet and attempt to resolve them in favor of the consumer. So our thanks to the Department of Justice. And with that, Kevin, it's time for the train to once again leave the station.

• 1:11:45Kevin Roose?

  Bye-bye, Hot Mess Express.

• 1:11:59Speaker 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.

• 1:12:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:13:08Speaker 06

  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.

• 1:13:41Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyat. We're fact-checked by Will Peichl. Today's show was engineered by Chris Wood. Original music by Pat McCusker, Rowan Nemesto, Leah Shaw-Damren, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Golubli. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. Go watch this whole show on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Pui Wing Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected] with your Satoshi Nakamoto theory.

• 1:14:31Speaker 04

  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.