TikTok’s Spying Scandal + ChatGPT Puts Google on Notice + Phone Jail

Calls to ban TikTok or force its sell-off from its parent company ByteDance are gaining momentum, especially after reports of ByteDance’s surveillance of several U. S. journalists. And could Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI mark the end of Google’s search monopoly? Plus: New Year's resolutions, including locking up your phone.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Your agents can talk to each other. They still can't think together. That's the gap Outshift by Cisco is closing. Outshift is Cisco's incubation engine, building the internet of cognition, shared intent, shared memory, and guardrails that allow agents to work together from anywhere. Open source protocols and code, a system for intelligence that scales. Read the paper and experience the demo at outshift.com. That's O-U-T-S-H-I-F-T dot com.

• 0:32Kevin Roose?

  Casey. Happy New Year. It's so good to be back in the studio. How are you?

• 0:37Casey Newton?

  I am great, and I am extremely excited to be back making hard work.

• 0:42Kevin Roose?

  How was your break?

• 0:43Casey Newton?

  It was a lot of fun. One of my favorite things was getting a DM from a high school student who said that after listening to us, he had used ChatGPT to finish his assignments before finals.

• 0:52Kevin Roose?

  Amazing.

• 0:52Casey Newton?

  So.

• 0:53Kevin Roose?

  Changing lives.

• 0:54Casey Newton?

  Changing lives, one episode at a time. How was your holiday?

• 0:57Kevin Roose?

  It was good. You know, I caught up on my classical Latin studies. I watched some Criterion film collection. I just did a lot of very productive. No, I watched movies and ate cookies and fixed my mom's router, as a good tech columnist son should do.

• 1:14Casey Newton?

  Did you really have to fix the router?

• 1:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I did. It was like, it was, you know, she's got nominally high-speed internet, but it's like, it basically dial up in there. And I was like, what's going on? After like years of this, suffering through my mom's, you know, bad Wi-Fi, I was like, finally, like, you know, I'm just gonna do this. Like, a good son should fix his mom's Wi-Fi router. So I did.

• 1:35Casey Newton?

  I mean, routers, to me, are a sort of, you know, final frontier in terms of difficulty. You know, whenever you have to log into the router, it's like you're sort of Googling, trying to figure out, you know, what is, what's the right address to go to? What is the sort of default system password? But you actually made it into the router.

• 1:49Kevin Roose?

  I did, I did. I hacked the mainframe, and she's getting decent download and upload speeds now. So, you know, now we can, now we can video chat from my mom's house.

• 1:59Casey Newton?

  Can I tell you how I solved the problem of always being asked to fix things at my parents' house over the holidays?

• 2:04Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 2:04Casey Newton?

  We started doing Christmas at my brother's.

• 2:19Kevin Roose?

  I'm Kevin Roos. I'm a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newton from Platformer. This week, we talked to Forbes reporter Emily Baker White about why TikTok spied on her and what that means for the app's future. Also, ChatGPT has Google on high alert, and my phone now lives in a box.

• 2:49Kevin Roose?

  Casey, in our last episode before the holiday break, we were doing predictions. One of my predictions was that in 2023, the US government would finally ban TikTok. Which, at the time, I thought was a very melodramatic prediction. Yeah, you kind of looked askance at me, like, who is this guy and what is he smoking? But two things happened over the break that made me even more confident that my prediction is going to come true. The first is that the Biden administration, as part of its spending bill, passed a provision that would ban TikTok from government-owned devices. The second thing, which I think for people who favor a ban on TikTok is kind of a smoking

• 3:31Kevin Roose?

  gun, is that the company was found to have surveilled at least three American journalists. One of them is Emily Baker White from Forbes, who's here with us today. Emily, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 3:43Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 3:44Kevin Roose?

  So tell us about this scoop. What made TikTok and ByteDance spy on you?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  So I started reporting on TikTok and ByteDance last year when I was at BuzzFeed News. I reported on something called Project Texas, which is basically the company's efforts to try to rewire its data systems to narrow the number of people abroad that can access sensitive US user data. And after I started reporting on this, a source leaked me audio from over 80 internal meetings at TikTok and ByteDance about Project Texas. And I published a story about it. And after that, I think TikTok and ByteDance kind of freaked out a little bit. And they started a leak investigation called Project Raven.

• 4:24Kevin Roose?

  Sounds really hardcore.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  The goal of the investigation was to find out who was sourcing me. And part of the investigation entailed a ByteDance team. This is a team that doesn't work for TikTok. It works for TikTok's parent company, ByteDance, using the TikTok app to track my location via my IP address to try to see if I was meeting with any TikToker ByteDance employees, which means they were also tracking their employees' IP address-based location as well.

• 4:50Casey Newton?

  I mean, as a reporter, this is one of the scariest things that you could find out, right? You know, all of us, in the course of our work, are talking to folks who are not authorized to speak with us. We take every step we can to protect them. But we also sort of do it assuming that the company is not going to look too hard, in most cases, for who we're talking to, right? It's usually not going to be worth it to them. So, you know, what can you tell us about sort of how you found out that this was happening? And how did you react?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I found out about Project Raven through sources inside the company. I'm not going to tell you much more than that. But eventually, I was able to review internal materials that let me know about this project. And we first reported on this in October. But we reported on it in a much more general way than we ultimately did in December in order to protect sources, right? So I wasn't going to say exactly what I knew, because doing so could have let the company know who was talking to me. And so that report that we put out in October used a higher level of generality. We said that there was a plan to track the locations of individual US citizens. I knew at the time that I was among those people.

• 6:00Speaker 03

  But we didn't say for what purpose, and we didn't say who the people were. And when we published that story in October, TikTok and ByteDance didn't actually deny it. But they went on Twitter, and they said my reporting lacked integrity. They said that it wasn't possible that the app could have been used to track location, because it doesn't track GPS-level location, which I assume is true. But we know that there are other ways to get location, and IP address is one of those ways. And they said that TikTok had never been used to target journalists. And they later admitted, three days before Christmas, that it had.

• 6:34Casey Newton?

  So there's a lot there I want to drill down on, but I sort of want to ask, like, when you learn about the ominously named Project Raven and you learn that you've been targeted, that the company has your IP address and is using that to try to figure out who your sources are, how did you feel?

• 6:51Speaker 03

  Unimpressed, sort of disappointed, honestly. Like, first of all, I'm a millennial. I don't like when my phone talks at me without my permission. I just like, I don't like autoplay videos in any context. And so like, I've never gotten very into TikTok. I like, used it a little bit, a couple of times, but like, I just deleted it off my phone and was like, really, guys? Who decided that this was a good cost benefit decision?

• 7:15Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 7:15Casey Newton?

  It's definitely the case that like, if you had been conducting all of your communications with your sources over TikTok DM, like, that probably would have been a bad move on your part.

• 7:23Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, it is not totally unprecedented for a tech company to do this, right? I mean, a couple of years ago, Uber was found to be, you know, looking up journalists' ride histories. I think Microsoft got in trouble because it looked at a journalist's Hotmail account. So this kind of thing happens, but it's rare because it's so risky.

• 7:43Casey Newton?

  But also, and just to sort of like, get into like, the why this really matters, one of the reasons that TikTok is in such trouble right now, one of the reasons that we're seeing bans across states and the federal government, is so many lawmakers and regulators are concerned that TikTok data could be used against Americans, in part to surveil them. And until recently, you know, TikTok could dismiss that as a conspiracy theory. And yet now, we know that it was actually true, that the company did, at least in this case, surveil Americans.

• 8:12Kevin Roose?

  So Emily, I'm curious, like, what's been the fallout at ByteDance and TikTok from your reporting on this Project Raven surveillance operation?

• 8:21Speaker 03

  I think a lot of people inside the company are horrified that this happened. Like, they say they have closed this particular data opening for people in China to access US user data. But I think it just shows that really... A couple of people who have access to user data in a way that maybe isn't unreasonable on its face. Couple of people can pull some data that they're not really supposed to pull. And at a company of this size, given the number of people who need access to user data for their job, data access controls across geographic boundaries are really hard and really tricky. And I think that's sort of-

• 9:01Kevin Roose?

  But my understanding is that this wasn't just some low level employee in the IT department sort of getting curious about who you were talking to. Like, this had buy-in from some of the highest levels of ByteDance, right?

• 9:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, ByteDance and TikTok have certainly tried to frame this as a few bad actors. If it was a few bad actors, it was a few bad actors receiving orders from their bad actor bosses. So it definitely wasn't rogue people, but it shows how easy it would be for rogue people to do this. I just think it's a terrible unforced error. Why would you think this is a good idea? And I say that for all of these companies that have done this. Like, what are you guys thinking?

• 9:40Kevin Roose?

  Right. And I think the theme that's been running through a lot of your coverage, at least as I read it, is that ByteDance and TikTok, they're in kind of this fight for their life in the United States. And part of how they're trying to survive this regulatory scrutiny is by claiming and demonstrating that even though ByteDance owns TikTok, they operate at arm's length. There aren't people in Beijing who are pulling the strings on TikTok in the US. And what your reporting has shown is I think that those ties are much closer than ByteDance and TikTok have been letting on, that there are lots of Chinese nationals making decisions about US TikTok. The systems that these two companies use are, in fact, use a lot of the same tools.

• 10:24Kevin Roose?

  That it's sort of a big mess of how would you even untangle those? So I think that, to me, felt like the insight that you've been reporting toward is that this company is not being totally forthright about the level of involvement that its parent company ByteDance has with its US operations. Is that a fair reading?

• 10:43Speaker 03

  I think definitely yes. And one of the things that makes this tricky is like, there's nothing nefarious about Chinese nationals making decisions about how to run a tech company, right? Like, that's a super normal thing.

• 10:52Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 10:52Speaker 03

  But I think where the company gets in trouble is its representations about who is in charge, who is making what decisions, and how entangled TikTok and ByteDance really are. Like, I have one source who had a contract with TikTok, but got a W2 from ByteDance. I have another source who got some of their checks from TikTok from ByteDance. Every at TikTok email alias is actually an at ByteDance email alias, like the systems are linked. Everybody at TikTok uses ByteDance's VPN called Seal. Everybody at TikTok uses ByteDance's internal Slack equivalent, which is called Lark. And so, again, there's sort of nothing nefarious about this, but ByteDance has built dozens of apps.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  It's known as an app factory. And at first TikTok was just another one of those. And so, all of the dozens and dozens of internal tools that make the app run, and every major tech company has such tools, were built by engineers in China and largely have been managed by engineers in China. And so, I think TikTok and ByteDance are really trying to separate all of those systems. But it's really hard to separate them, and it's really hard to know if you've got them all, just knowing how big the backend of a company of this size is.

• 12:12Kevin Roose?

  So there's sort of like two buckets of concern in Washington about TikTok, right? There's the sort of data misuse surveillance spying concern that TikTok could essentially be used by the Chinese government to spy on the location or the data of American citizens. There's also kind of this influence bucket, the sort of China could use TikTok and the Chinese government could use TikTok to sort of insert propaganda or pro-Chinese sentiment into its apps so that American users of these apps would get a sort of distorted picture of life in China or just that TikTok would be used in some way to undermine US interests. Of those two buckets, which do you think?

• 12:57Kevin Roose?

  People should be more concerned about.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  I love this question. Honestly, I have spent more time reporting on the bucket that I think Ezra Klein called it the data espionage bucket. And I think that one gets talked about more. But the second one is like way, I think, under discussed because recommendations algorithms are complex. We know this, but we also know that they can influence public opinion in all kinds of ways. And I feel like we've talked a lot about this when it comes to Facebook, when it comes to YouTube. Um, and somehow we haven't talked about it with TikTok as much, and I think we should.

• 13:38Speaker 03

  Because very subtle changes to a recommendations algorithm that is powering many millions of phones can change how people think about an election or a pandemic, right? And, and like, we know this from the other platforms. It's just as true when it comes to TikTok, but now we have this sort of additional layer of geopolitics.

• 13:59Casey Newton?

  Right, like you think about what the Russians had to do to interfere in the 2016 election. And it was like, well, they had to buy a bunch of Facebook ads. They had to create Facebook pages and Facebook groups and a bunch of like fake people. Then they had to like trick Americans into going to rallies, right? Just to sort of sow dissent. But like, if you're the Chinese government and you can just make a handful of phone calls to ByteDance. I'm not saying this has happened, but you could just sort of imagine it happening. And they're like, you know, why don't we just sort of amplify a lot of like content of Americans screaming at each other and a lot of, you know, content about like the dysfunctional American politics. And then maybe amplify some content about, you know, how beautiful China is, what a great vacation destination it is, and how much people love their leaders there. And then, you know, maybe you, you throw in like a viral American flag burning challenge at some point, right?

• 14:44Casey Newton?

  And like, you could do all of this, and to your point, Emily, there are no fingerprints on the algorithm, so nobody knows where it's coming from.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right. And I think it's worth noting that people have told me that ByteDance has done this before, and we know that the Chinese government has done this before. So on that first part, I reported a story over the summer about an app called TopBuzz, which was a news aggregator app run by ByteDance. It no longer exists. But former employees of ByteDance told me that TopBuzz had essentially like stickied or pinned to the top of its feed, what they referred to as pro-China messages. Uh, I don't think this was like President Xi standing on a tank type of thing. I think it was like cute panda videos. And I don't know where exactly the orders for this came from, but people told me that it had happened.

• 15:35Speaker 03

  I danced and I that, by the way, um, when I reported on it. So there's that out there. And then we know from what the Chinese government has done on other social platforms that they do run influence campaigns. I reported a story with a colleague of mine, Ian Martin, about how the Chinese government had through an entity called Media Links, run a bunch of TikToks about American politics, about like specific politicians before the 22 midterms. And TikTok is still the only major social platform out there today that doesn't label state media accounts. And they say they've been working on this for a long time. They rushed out labels on Russian state media accounts after Russia invaded Ukraine.

• 16:18Speaker 03

  But the rest of their state media policy has been in limbo. And man, if I worked there, I would be making some noise about getting that out faster. Because if, like all other platforms, they just label Chinese state media as Chinese state media, they would be able to say, yeah, governments run, you know, these accounts on our platform, they run them on all platforms.

• 16:41Kevin Roose?

  Right, I mean, I think inside TikTok, from the folks that I've, I've talked to there, there's a feeling that this kind of theory that they're, you know, puppet of the Chinese government is like a xenophobic, sort of red panic sentiment.

• 16:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:55Kevin Roose?

  And, you know, I thought that for a while. And then I'm like, well, but there is all this documented history of TikTok being used and, and other ByteDance products being used in these exact ways. Like it, it feels like a conspiracy that we've learned in part through your reporting is, is actually true.

• 17:13Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I was in the same boat as Kevin, also having those conversations with the TikTok employees. And like then last summer, I did read your story about Top Buzz. And I thought, wow, this thing that for so long they have sort of dismissed and waved away and said we would never do, you suddenly had this reporting and said, no, it actually did happen. And so now time and time again, TikTok has told us one thing and then something else has turned out to be true, which I think has led us to this place now where governors and lawmakers have said enough is enough. We just don't trust this company.

• 17:42Kevin Roose?

  Right, right. I wanna- Talk about what's happening in Washington now. And over the past couple of months, it really seems like this momentum in this effort to ban TikTok or otherwise kind of separate the US part of TikTok from ByteDance is really gaining steam. So can you just catch us up on like, what sort of pressure is TikTok facing at the moment? Who is taking a look at them? Who is making decisions about their future in the US?

• 18:11Speaker 03

  For the past several years, TikTok has been negotiating a national security agreement with CFIUS, the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. And CFIUS is a panel of a bunch of government agencies that work together to try to assess the risk caused by foreign ownership of companies and figure out what to do about it. And TikTok and CFIUS thought they were going to be done negotiating this contract a long time ago, several times now. They've had a lot of deadlines that they've missed, and that's probably not terribly uncommon. But I do think as, as CFIUS has sort of learned more about TikTok, various like different fears have arisen. And I think just sort of going back to Project Texas, this is TikTok's big effort to ameliorate

• 18:56Speaker 03

  national security concerns and to rebuild TikTok to sort of sever most of its ties to the ByteDance backend that created it. They've spent a huge amount of money on this. They've spent a huge amount of time on it. They're, they're really trying to make it work. And I think the problem is that, I was talking to someone at one point who said it's like trying to untangle a pile of spaghetti. And I think that's really true. Just the, the way that these things are built, data flows all kinds of directions all the time to power, I don't know, a sales dashboard here or a data pipeline over here that's,

• 19:42Speaker 03

  you know, helping this monetization tool, right? Like, again, this isn't nefarious data flowage, it's just data flowage. That's just how these things are built. And even cataloging and understanding all of the tools and then all of the ways that data flow inside the tools is so hard, especially given that a lot of people who built the tools aren't there anymore.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  That I think a lot of people are just really worried about being able to prove that they've gotten them all.

• 20:08Kevin Roose?

  Hmm, uh huh. I want to play you a clip from the CEO of TikTok, Shou Chu, who got interviewed by my colleague Andrew Ross Sorkin at our Dealbook Summit. And in this clip, Shou Chu talked about some of these data access issues. And I just want to play that clip for you and get your reaction to it.

• 20:29Speaker 04

  So let me ask you this. So this is FBI leader Chris Wray to the House Homeland Security Committee. He said he's quote, "extremely concerned that under Chinese law, Chinese companies are required to do whatever the Chinese government wants them to do in terms of sharing information or serving as a tool of the Chinese government." What happens in the reality behind the scenes in terms of how this actually works or happens?

• 20:52Speaker 05

  So the FBI director, through his team, through CFIUS, has access to the discussions and the plans that we are building to solve and address this problem. And I'm very confident that this will address the concerns that he has raised. Now, for us, you know, no US, no foreign government has asked us for US user data before. Really, they haven't. And if they did, we would say no. We have a transparency report that we publish every quarter, like most other consumer internet companies. And in that report, we spell out the details of the various data requests that various governments around the world have asked of the citizens of their country. And we want to make it very transparent.

• 21:35Speaker 05

  So you can keep your eye on that report to see, you know, the kind of requests that we are disclosing.

• 21:41Speaker 03

  So one thing is that TikTok has repeatedly said they've never been asked for data. This gets back to the sort of porous relationship between TikTok and its parent company. I would like to hear ByteDance answer that question, and I'm not sure they ever squarely have.

• 21:55Speaker 03

  And I can't help but think of a great piece of reporting the New York Times did a while back about the limits of Shou Chu's power, right? And the fact that some decision making about TikTok has happened among ByteDance leadership instead of TikTok leadership. And I think if ByteDance were answering under all of those questions, I think we would get a broader picture. Because as we know, at least as of when I was being surveilled, ByteDance employees who never report into the TikTok leadership chain had access to my IP address.

• 22:28Kevin Roose?

  Right. And so in other words, if ByteDance had to answer the same question under oath, they would probably have to say, well, like, yes, in fact, we have been asked for user data by some governments around the world. You know, also, all of us have reported on platforms like, you know, Google and Meta and Twitter. And all of those platforms get requests for user data all the time. And they publish reports where they're getting tens of thousands of requests. So the idea that TikTok, which is one of the largest platforms in the world, has never gotten a request for user data from a government, it just strains credulity.

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do know that that happens all the time and that these platforms do turn over stuff all the time. I don't know that ByteDance would answer the question differently. I just want to point out that they they haven't answered it. I'd like to hear their answer.

• 23:10Kevin Roose?

  Right. So, right now TikTok is furiously trying to pull off this Project Texas thing that would involve migrating all of its US operations to servers controlled by Oracle and sort of making the division between TikTok and ByteDance more clear and hardening it. But it seems like all of this is going to end up being too little, too late for regulators in Washington. Politico reported just last month that the Department of Justice and the Treasury Department were in sort of the final stages of a deal with TikTok and that there was some disagreement about whether TikTok would be forced to sell its US operations to an American company, or whether it would just have some kind of lighter

• 23:55Kevin Roose?

  punishment, like having to do this Project Texas thing, maybe set up like a security council made up of US citizens. So what do you think the resolution here is likely to be? I know you're not a fortune teller, but do you have a sense of where this is going to end up? Are we going to see TikTok sold to a US company this year?

• 24:14Speaker 03

  I don't know. Sorry for that lame answer, but I think it is more likely that CFIUS will mandate a sale to a US company than it previously was. I'll say that. I think there is definitely momentum in that direction. There are also lawmakers of both parties, people in both houses of our legislature who are who are saying, too little, too late, who are saying, like, hey, CFIUS, y'all better do something, or else we're going to. And I think that gets to one sort of overarching point here, which is that right now, there's no national security agreement. And so the people who are worried that TikTok Is a national security risk and needs a solution.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  Right now, they're just operating without whatever solution people want that to be. So I understand why people are getting impatient.

• 25:04Kevin Roose?

  Uh huh. You also reported one of your stories last year, featured some TikTok and ByteDance employees kind of talking about Project Texas and basically implying like, it's kind of all for show. Like, yes, the data will be on Oracle servers, but really, it's going to be us like running our own virtual machines. And so Oracle won't really be able to like, control what we do. So do you get the sense that this is just kind of a project for PR purposes? Or will this actually take ByteDance's ability away to control TikTok in any meaningful way?

• 25:42Speaker 03

  I don't think we know that yet. I would say, it seems a little cheap to say it's just for show. That they're, they have stood up departments, they have like paid contractors gazillions of dollars to help them catalog all their internal tools. If it's for show, it's really expensive for show. But I think people are still worried that it won't be a complete fix. And I think that is maybe the fairer way to, to say it might not be good enough. I think saying it's just for show probably minimizes a lot of work that a lot of people have done who are really trying to fix a problem. But I understand why skeptics say it might not be good enough.

• 26:25Casey Newton?

  Also, it's like, at every company, there are people acting in good faith to do the right thing, and there are people trying to undermine them. And the question is like, who has the most power in this situation? Right? Like, I think there have been a lot of good faith efforts within TikTok, based on my own conversations with some of their executives, in which they're trying to do everything that Emily just pointed out. And then, thanks Emily's reporting, we also know that there are people, you know, spying on them. I will say, just as an aside, it's very funny to me that the question of is, is TikTok, you know, sort of above board, is now being left to Larry Ellison's Oracle Corporation, which I would say is historically one of the most like ruthless and conniving companies of all time. Larry Ellison, also famous for cheating to win the America's Cup yacht race. So if I were personally choosing who I wanted to like audit TikTok's books, it would not be the Oracle Corporation.

• 27:11Kevin Roose?

  Well, I-

• 27:11Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, what about a yacht race?

• 27:13Casey Newton?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you don't, if you don't know about Larry Ellison cheating to win a yacht race, ask ChatGPT to tell you about that.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 27:22Kevin Roose?

  It's a legendary story in the history of American technology executives. So Emily, after all the reporting you've done on TikTok and ByteDance, do you think TikTok is a national security risk to the United States? Should it be banned?

• 27:40Speaker 03

  Those are two different questions. I don't necessarily think a TikTok ban is the best answer, because I think this won't be the only time this ever happens. We live in a global interconnected technological world. And whether it's an app that has ties to the Iranian government or the Saudi government or whatever, there will be apps that have ties to governments with which the US has uncozy relationships. I think it is reasonable to worry about how governments, including our own, want to use the massive amount of information

• 28:25Speaker 03

  available through these tech giants that we use and rely on all the time. I think just saying TikTok's a national security risk, we need to ban it. First of all, it doesn't create useful precedent for the next time this happens. And ideally, we will have a system where someone figures out sort of what the principles are, figures out what the risks are and figures out what we think we need to do to mitigate those risks. I also think a lot of the risks posed by TikTok are also posed by a bunch of domestic companies, too.

• 28:55Kevin Roose?

  Right, this is sort of the, well, Facebook collects data on us all the time, too, argument.

• 29:01Speaker 03

  Totally, collects data and also influences what we, what information we consume. And so there are people who talk about how we should have a national data privacy law, and that might be a good thing. There are people who talk about how we should mandate more transparency about how companies influence what content we consume, and that seems like a good thing. And there may be another sort of geopolitical, international relations type of thing that you would want to layer on top of things for companies that have some relationship with foreign governments, too. But I guess just saying, let's ban TikTok, it's scary and bad, doesn't seem like the most sophisticated solution to the problem.

• 29:46Casey Newton?

  So I asked TikTok to comment on the revelations that its employees had been spying on Emily and others. And this is what a spokeswoman told me over email. Quote, "The misconduct of certain individuals who are no longer employed at ByteDance was an egregious misuse of their authority to obtain access to user data. This misbehavior is unacceptable and not in line with our efforts across TikTok to earn the trust of our users. We take data security incredibly seriously, and we will continue to enhance our access protocols, which have already been significantly improved and hardened since this incident took place."

• 30:20Kevin Roose?

  Two final questions. One, is there anything you'd like to say to the ByteDance employee who's monitoring this podcast recording?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  My IP address won't help you.

• 30:29Kevin Roose?

  Oh, boy. And, and last question, if TikTok is banned in the United States in part because of your reporting, are you ready to face the wrath of hundreds of billions of teenagers? No, millions of teenagers in the US.

• 30:43Speaker 03

  I, I, I think, I think the kids are smarter than we give them credit for. Um, and I think if they're angry at regulators for, for doing a thing, they won't just be angry because their memes are gone. They'll be angry because they think the solution wasn't the best solution. I don't know. I have more faith in teenagers than other people, I guess.

• 31:06Casey Newton?

  Emily Baker White, you're a legend. Thank you for coming.

• 31:08Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, thanks so much.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Thanks, guys.

• 31:16Casey Newton?

  When we come back, ChatGPT puts Google on notice.

• 31:23Speaker 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.

• 31:55Speaker 06

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all: legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only. Availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 32:28Speaker 07

  Today's AI builders need infrastructure that scales with their ambitions. Irene 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. Irene'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. Irene, AI cloud for the next big thing.

• 33:02Kevin Roose?

  So, news broke this week that Microsoft and OpenAI are working together on a ChatGPT-powered version of Bing. This was a story in The Information, which was sourced to two people with direct knowledge of the plans. It said, basically, Microsoft is going to launch a version of Bing that uses the AI behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries, and that Microsoft hopes that this new feature, which it wants to launch before the end of March, is going to help it compete with Google. Microsoft is doing it. Bing GPT is going to be a reality.

• 33:34Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so, great report in The Information. I learned so much about Bing, and one of the things that I learned was that, apparently, when Microsoft signed the deal with OpenAI to work together in 2019, this was essentially always the plan. And, in fact, they've been using these earlier versions of GPT in various aspects of Bing. The reason we didn't know this until this week is because no one has used Bing since 2019.

• 34:01Casey Newton?

  But if you were to go there, you would apparently see rudiments of GPT already in the search engine. But of course, what is much more interesting is the idea that we had sort of talked about, which is, man, what if there is a search engine that it delivers results that look much more like what we've all been enjoying on ChatGPT, but in something like Google or Bing?

• 34:24Kevin Roose?

  Right. And you had this great riff about how you'd started using ChatGPT for different kinds of searches, like what kinds of shoes should a man have in his wardrobe and how the results you were getting were a lot better than results you were getting from Google. And apparently you weren't the only one who felt that way because we also learned that inside Google, ChatGPT is causing a lot of chaos. So my colleagues at The Times, Nico Grant and Cade Metz, talked to a bunch of people inside Google and reported on a story on December 21st that Google's management had declared a code red that was essentially the corporate equivalent of like pulling the

• 35:04Kevin Roose?

  fire alarm over ChatGPT, that there were worries among very high ranking Google executives that ChatGPT could in fact take a bite out of Google's extremely profitable, extremely well entrenched search business and had basically redirected a ton of engineers and product people to trying to implement some kind of competitor to ChatGPT as quickly as possible, which I just thought, what an amazing thing. I mean, Google, one of the most stable internet businesses of all time, one of the most profitable. And Google search is just this kind of unassailable monopoly of just cash printing and has been for so long.

• 35:49Kevin Roose?

  And here comes OpenAI and this ChatGPT thing, and a couple of weeks after this thing goes public, Google is pulling the fire alarm.

• 35:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, so, you know, I was talking to Google people and they tend to talk about ChatGPT sort of dismissively, right? Like, they like to call it a demo, you know? And yet here along came this demo and next thing you know, they've got a code red, which by the way, I've tried to look into like what it means to declare a code red inside a tech company. My familiarity with code red is mostly from the classic film A Few Good Men.

• 36:20Kevin Roose?

  Mine is from the Mountain Dew variety.

• 36:23Casey Newton?

  Within you, there are two code reds. But it does seem like the company is trying to figure this out. And of course, I can't wait to see what they're going to do. Look, we know that they have a large language model of their own. We know they're very impressed by it. They have talked about it nonstop for years, but they have a lot of really tricky issues to work out with how to release it to the public. And so this is a really interesting one for me because it's a rare case where the issue is much less about the technology, I think, because I think both sides sort of have a good and working thing. And it's much more about what kind of products do you build? What are the user interfaces? What are the safety measures that you put into place? And what's the business model?

• 37:08Casey Newton?

  And those are questions that Google has not had to ask itself in a serious way, in an existential way, for a really long time.

• 37:14Kevin Roose?

  Right. It's just kind of taken for granted that there's this search machine that is just going to keep printing cash quarter after quarter after quarter, you know, billions of dollars a quarter that it just doesn't really have to work for all that hard because it's Google. Because when you want to learn something, you go to Google because Google is the verb that has taken root in our culture as like the thing that means to search for something. It is so much more entrenched than like TikTok or Facebook or even any of these other apps that just seem kind of untouchable. Google is kind of bedrock in the tech world. And so it's really interesting to see how quickly they have gone from kind of dismissing this thing to now panicking over it.

• 37:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, and look, I'm somebody who has been really critical of Google's search in recent years because I feel like they have come to take their users' presence for granted, right? You know, we've talked about how often when you search for something on Google, you don't really get back an answer, you get a research project, right?

• 38:11Kevin Roose?

  You have to search Reddit.

• 38:12Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Kevin Roose?

  You have to like search on Google, say Reddit, and then whatever you want to find. If you want to find like an actual answer that's written by a human. And it's been that way for years. It's totally maddening.

• 38:20Casey Newton?

  There's this whole industry of search engine optimizers whose job it is essentially to ruin Google's search results and just fill them up with sponsored crap, right? And so what the OpenAI folks have shown With ChatGPT is that a different way is possible. And that even though the search results that you're getting from ChatGPT are riddled with errors, they can provide some offensive stuff and they do result on just sort of like mulching a lot of labor from writers and journalists into this sort of undifferentiated like pablum of sentences. It's still very useful and can be very entertaining. And so I think this is a case where the genie is out of the bottle a little bit. And now we have to see who's going to capitalize.

• 39:05Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and I have a couple of things to say about this. One is what an amazing strategic move by Microsoft. I mean, years ago, to make this investment, I think their billion dollar investment in OpenAI is going to go down as one of the greatest technology investments of all time.

• 39:19Casey Newton?

  Hundred percent agree.

• 39:20Kevin Roose?

  I think it goes Google buying YouTube, Facebook buying Instagram, OpenAI investment by Microsoft. Like, I just think if this makes Bing a legitimate competitor to Google, it will be such a huge deal to Microsoft's future that it's going to make their initial investment look so smart.

• 39:39Casey Newton?

  And let's let me just put a couple of numbers on that from the information story. So Bing, which we all sort of laugh about as a search engine, despite being a sort of also ran in the search market, made $11 billion last year. Or rather, we should say, Microsoft's ad business, for which Bing accounts for the majority, made $11 billion last year. That's not bad, right?

• 39:57Kevin Roose?

  That's not nothing.

• 39:58Casey Newton?

  Twitter's revenue in 2021, about $5 billion, okay? Google makes 10 times that.

• 40:02Kevin Roose?

  Wait, Bing is twice as big as Twitter?

• 40:05Casey Newton?

  I almost fell off my chair when I read this, but yes, that's correct.

• 40:09Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 40:09Casey Newton?

  So then you have Google, which is making about 10 times what Bing is making in search results, right? So if Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, can take Bing from like $11 billion to $50 billion over the next few years, you're absolutely right. I think we will already look back at him as like a generationally talented CEO, but this man, this could really cement his legacy.

• 40:30Kevin Roose?

  Totally. My other thing that I'm wondering about is cost here, because something that I heard from folks who, you know, who sort of understand search and large language models and ChatGPT, ChatGPT is Not free to run, right? Every query that you run it, it's been estimated it costs like a cent or two in just computing power. You know, you have to pay for basically this huge, you know, machine running on these giant supercomputers. And so people who, you know, are close to Google were sort of poo pooing ChatGPT and saying like, we could never do something like that because I think Google processes something like eight and a half billion queries a day. And so if you had to sort of ask a large language model like a ChatGPT,

• 41:13Kevin Roose?

  every time you ran a query on Google, like that would add up very quickly. You'd be spending millions of dollars a day just for the processing power to run the large language model in the background. So I'm very curious how Microsoft is going to scale this, whether it really is going to cost them a cent or two every time someone searches on Bing, because that could get expensive really quickly.

• 41:36Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and so the question becomes, well, how do you make money from a search engine like this? Search is a really good business because so often people are essentially telling you what they want to buy, right? There's, you know, you're Googling hotels and flights and cars and clothes. And there are all sorts of ways that you can just sort of stick an ad in there and then you wind up making a ton of money when that person converts into a sale. ChatGPT, I think, does offer a lot of similar promise. When I say, hey, what kind of shoes should I have in my wardrobe? Instead of just saying, well, here are the 10 kinds of shoes, there's no reason ChatGPT couldn't say, and here's where to buy them. And here's some images of those shoes, right? And here's the ones that are on sale right now.

• 42:14Casey Newton?

  So I think the question is, will ChatGPT-like search results be so much better that they convert better? And the resulting sales essentially offset the increased computing costs, at least in the short term. And then over the long term, does Moore's law kick in? And this stuff just basically becomes as cheap as Google search over the next five to 10 years.

• 42:34Kevin Roose?

  Right, I mean, that's the bet that I would be making if I, or Google is like, yes, it costs a cent or two to do a query on ChatGPT now, but that's not going to stay that way forever. I do think there's an interesting sort of conundrum in here. There was someone quoted in the Times story that I thought was really interesting and made an interesting point. It was a former Google employee who now runs a startup. And they said that actually that plugging something like ChatGPT into a search engine like Google could actually hurt the business of ads. They said, quote, "If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won't click on any ads." So basically saying like if your shoe query does, you know, does come back with the

• 43:18Kevin Roose?

  perfect set of shoes, why would you need to click on ads because you'll have the answer right there and you can go look for it yourself? Like, is there something that that person is missing about the relationship between the quality of the search result and how likely you are to click on an ad?

• 43:33Casey Newton?

  Well, a huge part of Google's ad business is putting their ads on websites, right? You know, so Google is sort of synonymous with the web because it funds so much of the web. I think the real issue here is that if ChatGPT spares you from having to browse the web, then yes, that is a huge impact on their business, right? And I think it's also gonna just frankly, trigger regulatory concerns. So this is probably a good time to talk about the fact that over the years, Google has routinely gotten in trouble for doing stuff that I just don't think is that big a deal. For example, they will show you like a snippet of a news story in Google News along with a headline, and they had to stop doing this in Spain. Google News pulled out of Spain for years because it was

• 44:16Casey Newton?

  illegal to show tiny snippets of text from these websites without paying a licensing fee, right? Imagine what regulators are gonna say around the world when Google says, we took the entire web, we put it into a blender, and we trained a large language model on it, and we will now serve you the entire knowledge of humanity with no links back to the source material. Google will be like under a raid, right? Like, they will, they will try to shut the company down if it does that. And so I think it's in a really precarious position. Now, right now, I think regulators, for the most part, have not heard of ChatGPT, so this probably isn't on their radar.

• 44:48Kevin Roose?

  Except for the ones who listen to Hard Fork, shout out.

• 44:50Casey Newton?

  And by the way, you're the best regulators in the entire world. Let us know if you want to come on the show. But this really is going to be, I think, one of the next turns of the screw, is when people saying, hey, wait a minute, what is the actual source material for all this stuff? Why aren't you crediting any of the sources? Why aren't any of the people who contributed their labor to this being compensated for it, right? And you can just sort of imagine a sort of big regulatory crackdown coming that tries to stop this stuff from taking the next steps.

• 45:16Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think that is possible. I think it's gonna take at least a decade. We're still catching Up to the last big wave of technology. But I do think this is a really interesting time at Google, which is sort of navigating all of this. Plus these larger sort of macro trends we've been talking about, the, you know, interest rates and cost cutting and advertising slowdown. So I think this is in general, like one of the things that I'm going to be looking at this year as one of the emerging rivalries in tech is between Google and Microsoft, who have competed in various ways over the years, but never when it comes to, you know, core search. Bing has never, I would guess, kept many Google executives up at night worried about the future of their own search product.

• 46:01Kevin Roose?

  And maybe now they will.

• 46:02Casey Newton?

  I think this is absolutely going to be one of the most delicious stories of the year. And I think you might see Google search change more in like the next two years than it has in the past 10. And frankly, I think that'll be good for us.

• 46:14Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my God, I can't believe like it's it needs a refresh. And if this is the kick in the pants that gives them the desire and the resources to make Google search better somehow, like I am all for it.

• 46:25Casey Newton?

  So we approve of the code red.

• 46:27Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 46:27Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 46:28Kevin Roose?

  Mountain Dew variety and Google.

• 46:32Kevin Roose?

  But I do think one more thing I'll say on this is I do understand the position that Google, you know, some folks inside Google have taken, which is we can't deploy this safely, so we're not going to do it yet. We're going to keep it internal. We're going to keep testing it. I do think that OpenAI as a startup has more leeway to put something out there that isn't perfect and can be misused. Because, you know, they're not under regulatory scrutiny by every agency in the world. They're not, you know, a trillion dollar internet company. They're having investment from one in Microsoft, but they're not under the same level of scrutiny as Google. And so I understand and appreciate the position that Google is in.

• 47:17Kevin Roose?

  It built this stuff. It came up with the technology that powers large language models.

• 47:22Casey Newton?

  Google is the T in GPT.

• 47:23Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, they invented the transformer and yet they have been like lapped by these smaller outfits like OpenAI.

• 47:31Kevin Roose?

  Who just come in, take this code, make their own versions of it, and then release it to the public and don't have to spend a lot of time sort of dealing with regulators and politicians yet. All that could happen. So I understand why they're moving slowly, but I think this is a moment where they either need to start making moves to improve Google search or risk getting left in the dust.

• 47:54Casey Newton?

  I think Google has benefited enormously over the past half a decade or so from being a generally cautious company. But I do think it's moving into a mode where it's probably going to have to take on some more risk.

• 48:03Kevin Roose?

  One other thing that's sort of incredible to me about this story is that ChatGPT, this thing that is now reportedly being built into Bing, still has no idea whether the stuff it's saying is true or not. Like, that feels like a pretty big liability for me if I'm Microsoft and I'm looking at this. Like, you can get good search results from ChatGPT, but you can also get horrible search results from ChatGPT. So how do you think it's going to navigate that? Like, is it gonna, you know, put a caveat on all the search results, saying this may or may not be a hallucination of our AI language model? Like, how do they deal with the fact that these products still sometimes spew out stuff that is just totally wrong?

• 48:40Casey Newton?

  It's the right question, and this is one where I think that we're all just going to have to, like, undergo a societal evolution where we understand that we're using these tools that might not always be right. You know, I remember growing up and being told by professors, you know, not to rely on Wikipedia because it couldn't always be trusted. And what did we do? Did we stop using Wikipedia? No, we used it even more. We just sort of understood that we were probably going to need a second and third source before we put anything into a paper that we were writing. I think you're going to see something happen similar with with GPT, right? Where it is a starting point for a lot of people. It's like me with our now overused example about buying shoes. It's like, I might look up a second source, but it gave me a very good start, and now I can sort of take that and take the next steps much more easily. And so I think if we see these things more as a first step

• 49:23Casey Newton?

  rather than a final step, we'll probably be able to make great use of them.

• 49:26Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 49:33Kevin Roose?

  We'll be right back.

• 49:42Speaker 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.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all: legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only. Availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 50:47Speaker 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 LAN 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.

• 51:22Casey Newton?

  So Kevin, you mentioned something to me the other day that I need to hear everything about. You have begun putting your phone into some sort of box.

• 51:33Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, so this is part of my New Year's resolution 2023. I am going into therapy with my phone. We are going to couples counseling, me and my phone.

• 51:45Casey Newton?

  And I feel like not for the first time.

• 51:46Kevin Roose?

  No, no, no, no, I have a long, you know, we have a long and tortured relationship, me and this phone. So a couple of years ago, I did a phone detox, like a 30 day program that was meant to separate me from my phone, which worked pretty well. Then COVID happened, then I had a baby, then I had all this time where I was just sitting around like feeding bottles and stuff. And so my phone use started to creep back up and, you know, I'm not very happy about that, so.

• 52:17Casey Newton?

  Enter the box.

• 52:18Kevin Roose?

  Enter the box. You know, I don't want to say too much about this particular box because I just started using it. And honestly, I'm not sure if I like it or not, but it is a box. It's called R O. It has some chargers in there, like little slots. You can put like four phones in there. So I put my phone in there and it has like a, like a sensor on it. So when I put my phone in, it like starts a timer and it's like basically in phone jail. And then when you take it out, it sort of congratulates you and said like, hey, you know, you, you got an hour of your life back or something like that.

• 52:50Casey Newton?

  Wait, when you say it congratulates you, like, is there like a voice that like comes out of the box?

• 52:54Kevin Roose?

  There's like a push notification on your phone. It connects via Bluetooth.

• 52:56Casey Newton?

  You can't read it because your phone is in the box.

• 52:58Kevin Roose?

  Well, you take your phone out and it says, you know, you successfully put down your phone for three hours. You miserable person. I guess that's a victory. Feel good about that if you want. So one thing that really hurt my phone use over the pandemic was that I started sleeping with my phone in my bedroom again. And like every expert in this field will tell you like, that is the single worst thing you can do. Because like you reach for your phone, you know, you get the light in your eyes. It's over, you're not going back to sleep.

• 53:28Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 53:28Kevin Roose?

  So that definitely happened to me. So part of this is, you know, the box, it's in my kitchen. It's not in my bedroom, so I put my phone to bed, put my AirPods to bed and I go to bed.

• 53:38Casey Newton?

  Right, okay, backing up then. So one time of the day that you use the box is at night. Are there other times during the day when the phone goes in the box?

• 53:48Kevin Roose?

  Yes, like, you know, doing dinner with the family. I'll put my phone in the box. I will say, you can, you can still hear it buzzing from inside the box. So there's a little bit of like, I need to figure out how to deal with that. But it has been good so far. I've not, I'm horrible. Like, I'm not a good user of this box yet, but I'm getting there. I also installed, have you heard of OneSec?

• 54:13Casey Newton?

  No, I have not.

• 54:14Kevin Roose?

  So I'll show you this. It's, it's cool. It's like a little app. And I, this is not sponsored content. In fact, I bought a lifetime subscription yesterday. So if I try to go to, say, Instagram on my phone, I get a little thing.

• 54:32Casey Newton?

  Wow, it just, like, a sort of a takeover of your screen just happened. And this app just said, it's time to take a breath.

• 54:39Kevin Roose?

  So it's, it basically puts like a, like a five or 10 second pause in between when you open an app. And what now you can see, it says, it says, four attempts to open Instagram within the last 24 hours. I did just install this last night. And then you can choose, like, I don't want to open Instagram or continue to Instagram. So it's sort of like, just puts a little speed bump in between you and your problem apps.

• 55:07Casey Newton?

  Right. It's like, you, you have to ask, like, the, the principal if it's okay to, like, leave class early. And the principal says, well, this is the fourth escaped attempt you've made, but we'll allow it this time.

• 55:18Kevin Roose?

  It'll still let you. It's not a hard, the thing I like about it is it's not like a hard, and I've, I've used these blockers before where it's like, don't, do not let me open Twitter for the next 12 hours.

• 55:28Casey Newton?

  Right.

• 55:29Kevin Roose?

  Which is kind of a brute force method. What I like about this is you can still get there. It's just kind of annoying, and it takes a little while, and it kind of like, makes you only do it when you really want to use the app, rather than just like, sort of have it.

• 55:41Casey Newton?

  It forces you to be more intentional about the way that you use these things.

• 55:44Kevin Roose?

  Exactly.

• 55:45Casey Newton?

  Okay, so you, now that your phone is in a box, and when it's out of the box, it's telling you not to use all the apps on your phone. Like, what has been the effect of this, like, on your life so far?

• 55:54Kevin Roose?

  Uh, it's just complicated it a lot. Like, it just means that I spend a lot of time pretending to do deep breathing, waiting for my thing to go away.

• 56:02Casey Newton?

  Is it phone time yet, Box? No, Box. When may I open you?

• 56:07Kevin Roose?

  I do feel a little bit like I'm, I'm, you know, the hamster in the cage, just flicking at the lever to like, get another treat. Like, it makes the, the addiction dynamic so much clearer.

• 56:18Casey Newton?

  I mean, this is such an interesting story to me because I know there are so many people out there who have such a tortured relationship with their phone, with the apps on their phone. They know that they need it in their life, but they don't like the way they're using it. They wish they used it less. They wish they had deleted some of the apps on it. And yet it has like, never once occurred to me to take any of the steps that you're taking.

• 56:42Kevin Roose?

  You're not like a, you're not a screen time warrior?

• 56:45Casey Newton?

  You know, I think I was before the pandemic. And then I think the pandemic happened and I thought, the debate is over and screen time has won. Like, the screen is the only thing that is tethering me to human connection right now. And so I'm just going to sort of lean into the moment that I'm in. And it is like a virtual metaverse moment, baby.

• 57:03Kevin Roose?

  You are merging with the screen.

• 57:04Casey Newton?

  I'm like, ready to go full on bionic. I want just like a ticker of Mastodon posts, like going through my mind at all times.

• 57:11Kevin Roose?

  Wow. So I, I do think that something happened during COVID where it was like, it was basically futile and useless to try to lower our screen time. Cause like, what else were we gonna do?

• 57:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 57:23Kevin Roose?

  But I do think now that life has stabilized a little bit. I, I think actually what tipped me over toward being worried again about myself was having a kid, honestly. And like, watching the way, you know, my kid's too young to use a phone, but someday he will. And already he's like, obsessed with it. Like, will crawl across the room to get to the phone because he sees me staring at it all the time. So that's where I'm like, I don't actually like how much I'm using my phone. I'm trying to be much more intentional about it. I'm not going cold turkey. I'm not doing anything, I'm not getting one of those like dumb phones that they sell now for like hardcore people. But I am trying to be more intentional, putting in these little speed bumps. And this box, I don't know if it's gonna stick. But I'm trying it.

• 58:05Casey Newton?

  There is something really almost chilling about like looking into the eyes of a baby that is looking at a screen. You know, where they go from sort of infinitely distractible and, you know, sometimes irritable or sometimes really engage with you. And then they just see the flicker of a screen and they become hypnotized. It doesn't even matter what's on the screen. It's something about like the glow of the pixels and they're just completely transfixed. So I can understand having a kid and thinking, you know, I want to change my relationship with this thing. You know, I think a question that I have is like, is the phone really the problem? Like, are you solving at the level of the problem here?

• 58:45Casey Newton?

  Or is the real issue like maybe something a little bit higher level about like, well, why are you opening Instagram 30 times a day?

• 58:53Kevin Roose?

  The void in my soul, is that the real problem?

• 58:55Casey Newton?

  I'm trying to figure out a way to have this conversation without making you do therapy live on the podcast. But like, you know, I mean, look, you know, I have been sort of gently laughing at this whole situation the whole time. But look, the truth is, I have also had to come up with my own more intentional relationship to certain of the apps that I use. At various points in my life, you know, the gay hookup apps like the Grindr. Man, did I have to work on my relationship with that. And there were times when I'd finally delete that thing from my phone. And it was like I had finally shut Pandora's box, you know? So I very much sympathize with this idea that sometimes, you know, depending on the app and depending on your personality, you just will not be able to pull yourself away from it. At the same time, again, I wonder, it's like, well, is the app really the issue here? You know, is there maybe just something else going on with you?

• 59:40Casey Newton?

  And the reason I think that's important is because it goes to the question of like, is this box actually going to work for you or not in the long run?

• 59:45Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And I think, you know, I like that there are technologists out there who are trying to use technology to solve a technological problem, right? That we have these like limiting apps, these, you know, speed bump apps, these boxes that have Bluetooth and send you push alerts and basically gamify the process of like getting off your phone. I appreciate, and I think that's a worthy space for, you know, innovation. I also just, I think you're probably right that there's, there are some problems that technology can't solve and this may be one of them. So I'm going to look deep within myself.

• 1:00:20Kevin Roose?

  And I'm going to continue to try to use this box until it tells me I'm doing a good job because I am a hamster in a cage.

• 1:00:25Casey Newton?

  Well, if nothing else, putting your phone in a box does seem like a good way to keep TikTok from spying on you. But you know. I think because this is a technology podcast and we do need to keep up on the trends. You know, my commitment to you and the listeners is that I'm actually going to use my phone more this year. That's my big resolution is I am going to, here's the thing, the more time I spend on the internet, the better my life gets. Like, I wish I could tell you that, you know, spending all day reading Mastodon posts has like left me invalid, but no, it's like, things are going great.

• 1:00:53Kevin Roose?

  You are just a cybernetic citizen of the future. No, I want to be clear that like, I am not anti-phone. One of the things that my phone detox coach helped me with a few years ago, this woman named Catherine Price, who's amazing, shout out Catherine.

• 1:01:08Casey Newton?

  Real thing, by the way, you did have a coach, like this was a, there was a process you went through. Yeah.

• 1:01:12Kevin Roose?

  Oh, yeah. Total process. She has a 30 day program. She put me through it and it was life-changing. It was genuinely like made all my relationships better, like really gave me time back. I was much more productive. So I really think there's like a benefit in not getting off your phone, but in resetting your relationship with it. I think that's just a healthy thing to do. I think for me, I have to make sure that I am still in the driver's seat of that relationship, right? That I, that my phone is working for me and not the other way around because it is so easy to just let the phone become the boss.

• 1:01:48Casey Newton?

  Yep. And you know what? In 2023, we want you to be your own damn boss. You tell that, you put that phone in the box and you say, I got this phone.

• 1:01:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So my phone is right now not in a box, but it's going to go back in a box as soon as I get home. And if you're trying to reach me.

• 1:02:05Casey Newton?

  You can't.

• 1:02:06Kevin Roose?

  Send a postcard.

• 1:02:21Speaker 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.

• 1:02:53Speaker 06

  Ripple has been powering modern finance for a decade. It's not our first trip around the blockchain, and it won't be our last. We're leading the charge to bridge the gap between existing financial systems and the future of finance. You can have it all: legacy, stability, and digital innovation. Systems that work with your other systems. Because with the right partner, the question isn't crypto or traditional finance. The question is simply, why choose? A new standard of modern finance. It's happening with Ripple. For informational purposes only. Availability of products can vary and may be provided by different Ripple entities.

• 1:03:26Speaker 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.

• 1:04:02Kevin Roose?

  That's it for this week. Hard Fork is produced by Davis Land. We're edited by Paula Schuman. This episode was fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Original music by Dan Powell, Alicia Bietup, Marian Lozano, and Rowan Nemisto. Special thanks to Hannah Ingber, Nell Galogly, Kate LaPreste, and Jeffrey Miranda. As always, you can email us at [email protected]. That's all for this week. See you next time.

• 1:05:03Speaker 08

  Companies are pouring money into AI, but few leaders can explain how those AI investments work with the systems you already have. You know, the ones that actually run your business? Without systems, you don't have to start over with AI. You can choose the projects where AI will have the most impact. And Outsystems gives you the platform to make it agentic on your terms, with complete control every step of the way. So you can trust AI with the mission-critical systems that run your business. Own your agentic future. Learn more at outsystems.com/NYT. That's outsystems.com/NYT.