Jonathan Haidt Strikes Again + What You Vibecoded + An Update on the Forkiverse

“If we can’t win on social media, then we definitely can’t win on A. I.,” says Haidt.

• 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.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Casey, did you hear about the new vehicle that stole the show at CES this year?

• 0:39Speaker 02

  What vehicle was that?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  It was from our good friend Will I Am of the Black Eyed Peas, who we interviewed once in a very, I would describe as a psychedelic experience.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Absolute fever dream of a day.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Well, he is out with a new electric, AI-powered, brain-on-wheels. It is essentially an electric tricycle. It's called Trinity, and it looks insane. Can I show you this?

• 1:03Speaker 02

  I need to see this.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:05Speaker 02

  Oh, my goodness. This looks like the head of the xenomorph in Alien has been decapitated and has had wheels attached to it.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  Yes. It looks insane. It's like a three-wheeled electric scooter with a top over it. Very sleek, very aerodynamic. I personally would love to die in one of these.

• 1:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  I would love to just be absolutely demolished by an 18-wheeler in one of these.

• 1:29Speaker 02

  This actually does, like, just looking at this, this does seem to me like it would be Will I Am's favored mode of transportation. Like, I can just imagine him. It's like, time to take the kids to school, and he's like, get in this thing, guys. We're gonna be 2000 and late.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  That's a Black Eyed Peas joke.

• 1:46Speaker 01

  Let's get this party started.

• 1:53Speaker 01

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

• 1:55Speaker 02

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:56Speaker 01

  And this is Hard Fork.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  This week, anxious generation author Jonathan Haidt returns to the show with new research on how social media is harming teens. Then, we asked you for your Claude code experiments, and you blew us away. We'll share some of our favorites. And finally, it's a trip to the Ford universe. Thousands of you have now joined our Fediverse experiment, and search engine host PJ Vogt is here to talk about what we've learned so far. Such as Vladimir Putin? He's a problem.

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Not a good guy.

• 2:32Speaker 01

  Well, Keith, we got a big show this week. Lots to talk about, but let's start with social media because there's been a lot happening in that world.

• 2:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know, last week we talked about the nudification scandal over at Grok, and there's been a bunch more news about that this week. The US Senate managed to pass a bill on Tuesday that would allow victims of these sorts of non-consensual sexually explicit images to sue over, you know, the creation of those images.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and Grok also rolled back its image generation feature for free users. You now have to be a paid user to Grok to nudify people against their consent.

• 3:06Speaker 02

  If you want to commit a crime, that's a premium feature now. Okay, that's going to be behind the paywall.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  Yes, so they are not rolling that back fully, of course, because it is generating a huge amount of engagement for them, but they do seem to acknowledge that some people were taking it too far.

• 3:20Speaker 02

  That's right, Kevin, and it is really this exact sort of phenomenon that is happening on social media that has led our guest this week to really lead a charge and say, when it comes to younger people, we actually just need to keep them away from this stuff altogether.

• 3:34Speaker 01

  Yes, this name of our guest today, Jonathan Haidt, will be familiar to longtime Heart Fork listeners. He came on the show back in March 2024, when his book, The Anxious Generation, came out. Since that time, that book has become a mega bestseller. Jonathan has become a leading advocate for things like phone bans in schools and these social media restrictions like the one we talked about in Australia that just went into effect. And there's been a lot of discussion about Haidt's thesis that social media and widespread smartphone use is harming mental health for kids and teens, and a lot of arguments about the science in that book, whether the studies that Haidt and others have cited as proof

• 4:16Speaker 01

  that social media is harming children are actually holding up under scrutiny.

• 4:21Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. And as a matter of fact, Kevin, Jonathan Haidt and his fellow researcher Zachary Roush have new research out this week, which gave us an excuse to bring him back on the show.

• 4:33Speaker 01

  Yes, and this new research by Jonathan and Zachary is designed to address Address one of the primary criticisms that his book got, which was about the difference between correlation and causation. So we're going to talk about that research and we're also going to talk about what's been happening since his book came out.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, as he has become the world's hater in chief of social media. So let's bring in Jonathan Haidt.

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Jonathan Haidt, welcome back to Hard Fork.

• 5:03Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. Great to be back.

• 5:04Speaker 01

  You've been a busy man. You joined us originally just as your Anxious Generation book was going out into the world. The book has now spent 88 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller list. That's a lot of weeks. It sold a bunch of copies, led to discussions all around the world, and follow-on projects like a book you and my friend Catherine Price just wrote called The Amazing Generation, which is aimed at kids and teens. And now you are back with a new paper, or papers, about this issue of social media and mental health. You have a new post on your Substack called Mountains of Evidence, and you're here to talk about that today. So just give us the TLDR here, Jonathan. What is the most important new finding in your research since your book came out?

• 5:46Speaker 03

  So when my book came out, I thought that the main problem was mental health. And there's a big debate in the academic world. Well, OK, people who use social media more are more depressed. But is that correlation or is it causation? And that has kind of defined the scope of the debate. And that's gone on for a couple of years now. And it's what Mark Zuckerberg says to defend himself. Oh, there's no evidence of causation. Well, guess what? There are tons and tons of evidence of causation, and Meta did some of the best studies to show it. There's so many different kinds of evidence, including what the kids themselves say, what the parents say, what the teachers say. Like, everybody sees it. That's evidence. And then there are experiments with random assignment that show that when you get off social media for at least a week, depression gets less. So I was collecting all that evidence for this big review paper.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  That's one of the two projects. And while we were working on that, there was additional dumps of studies from Meta that come out in the Attorney General's lawsuits against them. They post them online, and there's all kinds of information in the briefs. So we catalogued them at a new website we put up called metasinternalresearch.org. And that includes a couple of true experiments. So the evidence for causality is now overwhelming. People have to stop saying, oh, it's just correlational.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So when you say the evidence for causality is overwhelming, break that down for us a little bit. Like, what is your understanding of the mechanisms by which social media is harmful to children?

• 7:10Speaker 03

  Yes, so Arturo Behar, a whistleblower, brought out this survey that Meta did, the Bad Experiences and Encounters Framework. So Meta itself, they'd done tons of research. They collected, you know, what are kids saying? What's happening to them? What they found is, let's see, they get very high rates of sexual harassment, around 15% each week, each week. They have some, some person approaching you sexually. So they got a lot of that. Let's see, what else do they have here? They get bullying, they see violence, they see hardcore porn. Oh, the biggest, clearest one, I think, actually is sextortion. That's the one that just stands out like a sore thumb. You know, kids, if you're on social media, you can get sextored. If you're not, you can't, really.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  And the kids who get sextored are deeply shamed. You know, they shared a picture of themselves, these teenage boys, usually. And then their lives are ruined, and some of them commit suicide. So anyway, I'm just saying, there's so many different mechanisms by which kids are getting harmed. And depression and anxiety is just, those are just two of the pathways.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  So you're saying that it's not any one thing. You're saying that the overall environment is so dangerous that it is difficult, maybe impossible, to use a social network like Instagram over an extended period of time and not have one or likely multiple of these harms hit you in some way? That answer somewhat surprises me because I feel like the usual answers we hear is like, well, it's negative social comparison, right? Like, it seems like my friends are living a more exciting life than I am, and now I'm upset. Or like, the algorithm has driven me into a rabbit hole. And like, I started out a little curious about losing weight, and now I have an eating disorder.

• 8:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  So like, how has your understanding of like, the mechanisms of harm changed, if it has at all, since you wrote your book?

• 8:52Speaker 03

  Sure. So when I started the book, I thought that the story was going to be girls using social media get depressed in part by social comparison. That's what everyone was talking about, you know, five years ago. And that's definitely one of the mechanisms. And I didn't know what the story was for boys when I started. And by the end of the book, and especially since the book came out, what I realized is it's the whole goddamn environment. It's all the fish hooks dangled in front of boys. You want porn, gambling, vaping, sports betting. You know, even crypto investing is gamified.

• 9:25Speaker 01

  In this paper, you've tried to sort of decouple two questions. One of them is what you call the historical population question. Basically, like the sort of restatement of the thesis of the anxious generation, which is like, you know, an entire generation raised on social media is showing all these effects on their mental health from this technology. And the other is just the sort of product safety question. Are these products as currently constituted safe for children and teens? What are you trying to do by sort of decoupling these questions? I'll tell you how I read that. I read that as like, oh, hey, Hyde is getting a little wobbly on one of the two sort of prongs of his argument there, basically saying, you know, we may or may not be able to solve this historical population question. But when it comes to the question of product safety,

• 10:10Speaker 01

  we can answer that one now. So am I reading that correctly?

• 10:13Speaker 03

  Well, yes, you are, except I wouldn't use the word wobbly. So let me explain that. My interest in separating the two questions came about because there was this report issued by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in late 2023. And the report comes out and it has a chapter showing all these harms, all these ways that it's harming kids. But yet, in the summary of the report, there was this sentence. It says, "Our review, quote, 'did not support the conclusion that social media causes changes in adolescent health at the population level.'" So I read this, I'm like, what the hell, guys? You have a whole chapter showing how it's hurting kids. What does it mean, the population level? And what I realized by reading further, what they mean is we're not confident that this is what caused those big increases after 2012.

• 11:01Speaker 03

  And okay, he's right. Because how do you prove something happened in history? It's very hard. You can't run experiments. So I will grant that we can't be 100% certain that what I said in The Anxious Generation is right. Can't be 100% certain. I'd love to hear another hypothesis, but the historical question is very hard to settle. But that's not what people want to know. What parents want to know and what legislators want to know is, is this consumer product, which all kids are consuming massive quantities of, is this consumer product hurting kids? That's what they want to know. And guess what? We have seven different lines of evidence saying, yes, it's hurting kids. The kids say it, the teachers say it, the experiments say it, the correlation, and meta. I mean, my god, the data they have on harm is astonishing. So that's why I think it's important to separate the two questions.

• 11:46Speaker 03

  In science and social science, we're very careful about causality. We have to be certain about causality before we say X caused Y. And so I can't say that I'm certain that social media caused the big increase in 2012, but I can say I'm 99.9% confident at this point that social media is hurting kids by the millions.

• 12:03Speaker 02

  Hmm. You're understandably, and I think appropriately, very critical of the tech executives here. But I'd also note that parents gave kids these phones and schools allowed them and regulators did nothing for a decade. So if we're assigning blame for this situation, how much falls on everyone else involved?

• 12:21Speaker 03

  I would say close to zero for this reason. The whole key to solving this problem, the reason we didn't solve it for so long, is that it's a series of collective action traps. And I'm a social psychologist. What we do for a living is we look at the ways that we influence each other, and there are certain situations where, you know, yeah, I don't want to give my 10-year-old a phone, but, you know, everyone else has one and she's being left out. So the phones and the, and social media, all these things, they put us in a trap, and so we feel we have to give in. And so since that's the situation, I can't blame the people. My rule as a social psychologist, if one person does something really bad, that might be a bad person. If everybody in a situation is doing something bad,

• 13:05Speaker 03

  that's guaranteed to be a bad situation. So, no, I don't blame, I mean, look, of course, parents should stand up and parent, but look, so many of us are trying and it's really, really hard. It's really, really, everybody's fighting all the time with their kids over this tech. We didn't ask for these fights. So I don't blame the parents. I don't blame the teachers. I blame the companies.

• 13:22Speaker 01

  John, your life has changed quite a bit since we last talked to you. Your career has shifted from just, you know, being sort of more of a pure research and public intellectual to really being an activist on this issue. And I'm curious what that's been like for you and what you've learned about advocacy in this new role of yours. What actually seems to change people's minds who may be reluctant when they first encounter some of the ideas you are pushing?

• 13:49Speaker 03

  No, well, thank you for that. Yeah, it's true. My life has changed a lot. You know, I've been a scholar and a researcher for a very long time. And I've started multiple organizations that try to translate findings from behavioral sciences to help important institutions work better. That's kind of my mission statement as an academic. So I've done some of that throughout my career. And when the anxious generation came out in March of 2024, I thought I was going to promote it for a few months, take the summer off, recover, and then get back to work on the big book I'm supposed to write on democracy. But because this whole thing blew up and because mothers around the world stood up and started saying, where do we sign up? Let's go, let's change. We got to save our kids. So many people are coming to me saying, how can I help? What can we do? Legislators were calling me, governors were calling me. Because here's the thing, if you're a parent, you've seen it.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  Everybody has seen the problem and nobody really knew what to do about it because it's a collective action trap. And so, since the book proposed four norms to get out of the trap, no smartphone before high school, no social media before 16, phone-free schools, more independence, free play, and responsibility in the real world. I proposed these four norms and people are adopting them all around in other countries that I haven't even been to. So I realized, I'm 62. God knows how many years I have left with a brain that's still functioning. You know, I can't count on more than 10. And so, how am I going to spend those remaining good years? I could write another book on democracy, which will be out of date by the time it comes out because my God, things are changing fast. Or I could devote myself to pushing for phone-free schools and raising the age.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm curious. I know you probably can't tell us about all of the, you know, private meetings you're having with lawmakers and heads of state and, you know, tech executives. But just give us the flavor of like one meeting with someone important or influential as you've been schlepping all over, you know, hawking your book and talking about this message.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, sure. So, you know, the surprise for me has been how easy this has been, that everywhere I go, I'm pushing on open doors because everyone who's a parent has seen it. It's very popular among voters. And so I think the best example of an answer to your question is this. I did a quick trip to Paris, Amsterdam and London back in April of last year. And I worked with More in Common, a wonderful group that does all kinds of pro-democracy stuff. And they set up a dinner party for me to talk to members of French society and psychiatrists. It was really interesting. And one of the people there was in the French parliament. And he said, "Oh, you should talk to Macron." "Oh, I'd love to, but you know, I'm leaving in two days." He said, "I'll call him." And the next day, I get a call from Macron's office, "Can you come in tomorrow?"

• 16:17Speaker 03

  So I had a half hour meeting with Macron in which I showed him the data because I was told in advance, he loves data, you know, you can show him evidence. So I went through it with him. I said, "Look, here's what's happening. You know, here's what we know." And he thought about it and he said, as he was saying goodbye to me, he said, "We will act." And he sure did. He's, you know, he's really been pushing. What he said to me then was, "I'm going to push it. This should be an EU thing. And if we can't get it through the EU, then I'll do it in France." So that's just, I mean, that was the most spectacular one. I was really surprised by that. But that's what I'm getting at, that everyone sees it. Everyone cares about this.

• 16:53Speaker 01

  John, there's now this group of plaintiff's lawyers and law firms, I'm sure you know many of them and have worked with them before, who go around the country sort of looking for evidence of social media harms, especially against children. They bring these big lawsuits, these class action suits, they sue the tech companies, they try to get these huge settlements out of them. I'm curious what your thoughts on that system are. It's largely grown up since you published your book. And a lot of them cite your work as evidence that these companies should be held liable through the courts and should be forced to pay out huge settlements to the families of the victims here. Are you comfortable with that as sort of a makeshift solution until regulators get their act together? Does that feel like an optimal way of addressing these harms?

• 17:37Speaker 03

  Well, I think it seems to be the only way that we have. Let's imagine that there was a new consumer product introduced, you know, some new toy or a new kind of candy bar with some new ingredient. And if we knew from internal reports from the companies that they deliberately designed it to be addictive, they put something addictive in it. And then, a couple of years after introduction, 90% of kids are eating 10 candy bars a day and diabetes is going up, they're not eating healthy food, and we see rates rising around the world. At some point, there might be somebody who says, maybe this is not a safe consumer product. Maybe this company should be held liable for the harm it's conflicting on literally hundreds of millions of kids, literally hundreds of millions.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Because social media is used by almost all kids. I mean, there are some countries where it's not, but in the medium to high-income countries, it's almost universal. This is, we all know someone who has a kid who's been hospitalized, eating disorders, suicide. We all know people. It is everywhere. And these companies have never faced a jury, ever. No one has succeeded in holding responsible what they did to their kids. So this is an outrage. And so these lawyers who are taking these cases, yeah, they're heroes.

• 18:50Speaker 02

  You know, there's this other dimension to it too, Jonathan, which is that, you know, your book, Understandably, focuses on the crisis with children, but adults are very much living their own version of this, right? Like, I was having coffee with some friends at the New Year. Two of them are product managers in tech, and I asked them, hey, you know, what do you want your 2026 to be about? And they said, I need to change my relationship with my phone. And they have implemented so many different tricks. They're putting it in black and white, they're setting screen time limits, they're leaving it in another room an hour before they go to bed. Like, the systems that people are having to devise just to try to reclaim their own time and attention are getting ever more sophisticated. And this is among the people who are building the things on the phones, right?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  So I'm curious how you think about sort of bringing some of these same arguments out of childhood and into adulthood, because it seems to me like this goes sort of well beyond what is happening to kids under 18.

• 19:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. And I think that's why we're winning. That's why it's so easy to get laws to protect kids all over the world because we all see it. All we adults, we're all overwhelmed. I'm overwhelmed. I can't read a book anymore. There's too much other stuff coming in. I haven't focused on adults only because I don't want to legislate for adults. I don't want to tell adults what to do, but damn it, I don't want the companies, you know, sucking my children into toxic spaces without my knowledge or permission.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  To speak a little bit about Australia this week, Meta shut down about 550,000 accounts belonging to teens under this new Australian law that just went into effect banning social media for kids under 16. Jonathan, I'm so curious if you have a prediction about what is about to happen in Australia, because it seems like we have this great natural experiment now. What are you looking for? And how confident are you that that your own view that if you just simply remove phones and social media from schools, that kids' mental health will improve?

• 20:43Speaker 03

  Well, removing phones from schools, we know, I will know soon, removing the whole deal from schools seems to greatly improve attention, friendship, discipline problems go down. So in the phone-free schools, the data is pouring in. I've never heard of a school that was unhappy about it or that reversed it. So I'm sure we're going to see that learning improves, friendship improves, fun in school improves, which means that truancy will go down. And I think that will have a measurable impact on mental health. That's in the schools. Now, what Australia did is even bolder, which is they said, we're going to put it on the companies. We're going to say that you have to be 16 to open an account where you sign a contract to give away your data, your rights, without your parents' knowledge or permission. You can't do that till you're 16. At 16, you can do whatever you want. But before 16,

• 21:28Speaker 03

  you can't do that. And so here's the question. What percentage of Australia's kids will actually be off of social media? And we don't know. If the Australia bill is effective at getting social media used down below, say, 20%, then I think we will see, over time, kids have to sort of remember how to do other things other than scroll. I think we will see benefits, especially if the Australians do the full program, which is, hey, go out and play, which is what that's what the prime minister keeps saying, go out on the footy field, he says. So if we can succeed in restoring a play-based childhood, then we're going to see, I think, big benefits to mental health.

• 22:03Speaker 01

  And like, how long should we let that natural experiment run? Like, if five years from now, there's been no significant improvement in mental health among young people in Australia, would you conclude that this was a wrong hypothesis of yours? That we just didn't let it run for long enough? Like, when should we sort of judge the success or failure of this intervention?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  Yeah. First of all, tell me when we get to, say, 60 or 70% of kids actually being off. And so the effectiveness matters. And this is a cat and mouse game, so the companies are going to have to up their game. So we'll see. But once we get to, say, 70% of kids are actually off, now we've broken the collective action trap. Now kids can be off. Now parents can say no more easily. And once we get there, I think, you know, within a year, we're going to start seeing lots of reports of different behavior. Will that show up in the national statistics? Not for a couple of years. It takes a couple of years before it'll sort of show up in these big national surveys we have. But five years, if we don't see anything budge in five years, I would then have to conclude that I was wrong

• 23:07Speaker 03

  in thinking that reducing social media use would improve mental health. But here's the thing. This whole debate has been framed around mental health. And so if it doesn't improve mental health, does that mean we should undo it? I would say no. I would say, tell me how many kids have been sextorted. Tell me how many kids have died from drug overdose deaths. Let's look at all the other ancillary harms. And then we can decide whether it was a good policy.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  You know, Jonathan, over time, I have to say, I have, I have become more sympathetic to your point of view. Like, I started this debate very much coming from the viewpoint of free expression, wanting to let kids communicate themselves online, wanting them to be able to explore their interests, connect with people like them. Over time, I have just become more persuaded by the product safety argument. I have read the internal documents. I have talked to the people who work at these companies. I do not believe that they care or are investing in protecting kids the way they should be. And to me, that argument is just sort of starting to carry the day. But I was having a conversation with my sister-in-law about this stuff over Thanksgiving. We were talking about some of these issues. And she let me know that she kind of took issue with a comment I'd made on a previous episode,

• 24:12Speaker 02

  where I said, you know, the one argument that you never hear anybody making is that Instagram is really good for kids. Which I still basically believe.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I hadn't heard that argument.

• 24:22Speaker 01

  And you've heard it from some. And my sister-in-law made a version of this argument to me, which is that, you know, for my nephew, he has an Instagram account, he's 13, and he is able to explore his interests, which include gymnastic and cooking. And so when she, you know, looks at his own usage of Instagram, she says, this like basically seems okay to me. My question is, what avenues do you hope that children use to explore their interests in a world where we do just yank that away from them?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I think last time I was on, we talked about a related topic, and I said, you've got to separate the internet from social media. Social media is a part of the internet. It's one of the worst parts. It's the one that's hurting kids the most. But look, all of us on this call, we're all old enough to remember the 90s when we first got to look at the internet. It was amazing. And, you know, if you're LGBTQ in rural areas, suddenly like you can find information, you can find people. I mean, it was amazing the way it brought people together. So I would never take that away. I would never say, kids shouldn't be on the internet. So do they also need platforms that use algorithms to force-feed them whatever content was most upvoted by people based on the extremity

• 25:31Speaker 03

  of its emotions or expressions? Does your nephew benefit from having Instagram pick what he sees as opposed to having him type in what he's looking for? If you take away social media from kids, I don't see any loss.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm curious, because like Casey, I am also pretty hyped-pilled at this moment in time. I am pretty convinced of the arguments you're making. But I would say that the one criticism I might have is like, to me, it feels a little bit like you are fighting the last war. Because when I go to schools, high schools now, and meet high school students, they tell me like, we are talking with AI companions now. That is the thing that we are doing. And I have this sort of fear in the back of my mind that like, you will succeed at getting social media banned for under 16s all over the world. And then it will be like, there's this new threat that we weren't even paying attention to. And we will pine for the days when teens were using social media to at least, at least they were communicating

• 26:31Speaker 01

  with other people, and not these like AI companions. So do you worry at all that you have sort of not kept pace with the state of the technology?

• 26:39Speaker 03

  No, this is a strategic move for this reason. AI is so new and it's morphing so fast. And in the research community, it takes us five, 10, 20 years to figure anything out. So we've been arguing about social media for a long time. I think we've got it. I think I'm going to win on this issue. Now, it's a normal academic debate. There are researchers who look at the data and they see something different. But here's the way I'm thinking about it. If we can't win on social media, if we can't get consensus that this is bad and that governments should do something, if we can't win on that, then just give up on AI. Just say it's game over. Our kids are gone. We're never going to see them again. The boys are going to have sexy chatbots their whole lives. They're never going to reproduce. So if we can't win on social media, then we definitely can't win on AI.

• 27:23Speaker 03

  And since we are winning on social media, and since governments around the world are waking up to the fact that they have an obligation to protect kids, a lot of them have never done anything, especially our federal government, has never done a single thing, never, ever, to protect kids on the internet. So governments are waking up. And so the faster we can win on social media and delaying phones and more play and phone free schools, then we have a chance, a chance. At least we can try to make the case, just get it out of elementary school. Just don't let kids be talking with chatbots when they're little.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  Do you miss your obscure academic life at all? Does it bother you to be a public intellectual and advocate, a man of mystery, a man on a mission?

• 28:07Speaker 03

  Yes, in that I'm working all the time now and I really want to just take the summer off. I want to try reading books. I think if I read physical books, maybe I'll be able to finish one. But I have had a feeling of efficacy, a feeling that I've been working on this for a long time. And I feel like now I've been gifted the chance to actually make a difference in the world. And it's a kind of satisfaction beyond anything I've known in my life. So I do miss a lot. But I'm actually really energized and I'm actually pretty happy these days.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  That's great. You know, I'll tell you this story. When I was pitching my book early last year, I was going around to different publishers. And you know, you've made it when they, the only pitch they wanted was like the anxious generation, but for AI. It was like, every publisher was like, I was like, no, it's not really what I'm working on. It's going to be more of a history thing. And they're like, are you sure? Are you sure you don't want to write the anxious generation but for AI? I was like, yes, I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm pretty sure John's gonna do that. But anyway, you have made a splash. And yeah, if, if you have any tips on selling a book, I'll use them this fall.

• 29:14Speaker 03

  Okay. I'd be happy to, I'd be happy to read your book if you want someone to read a dense copy. Because I am moving, that's my next question.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  But you just told me you can't read a book anymore. So, you know, I don't trust you.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  Next summer, I'll try to read, send it to me electronically and I'll, and I'll, then I'll feed it into ChatGPT and it'll give me a chapter by chapter summary.

• 29:30Speaker 01

  Good, good. That's great.

• 29:31Speaker 03

  That's what I do now.

• 29:31Speaker 01

  That's what I'm going for.

• 29:37Speaker 01

  Change charts at home.

• 29:38Speaker 02

  I have to say, it's actually very comforting to me that even Jonathan Hyde is having ChatGPT read books for him. Because obviously I do that as well, but I feel bad about it. But I would, now I feel fine.

• 29:47Speaker 01

  This is the thing, no one has read a book since 2021 and they're just lying about it.

• 29:51Speaker 02

  The people are reading one kind of book, which is romanticy. So if I ever wrote like a social science treatise, I would try to put it in a world where like dark fairies were having sex with each other.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Have you thought about that, John?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  Something to consider.

• 30:05Speaker 03

  Actually, actually, that is actually the way we open up our children's book. Okay, it's not sex, but it is, but it actually is, it actually does open, it does open with a story about dark fairies.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Look at that!

• 30:17Speaker 03

  Evil wizards.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  By the way, I love the pandering of the adults, it's the anxious generation. But when you want to talk directly to the kids, all of a sudden, they're amazing.

• 30:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, but the kids better hold out some hope.

• 30:28Speaker 02

  That's true, that's true.

• 30:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right, John, thanks so much.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  All right, thanks, Jonathan.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  All right, guys, thanks so much for having me back. Take care.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  When we come back, is Claude Code a new ChatGPT moment? We'll talk about what you all have been vibe coding, including a website for door handles.

• 30:48Speaker 03

  How are we gonna handle that?

• 31:02Speaker 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.

• 31:36Speaker 04

  Modern enterprise is made up of a lot of moving parts, and Comcast Business helps you orchestrate it all. With SD-WAN working at scale to keep 150 hospital locations connected and working as one. Plus, SASE and zero-trust security protecting financial data across a bank's 2,000 branches. And AI-powered networking that optimizes traffic across five continents. No one does business like Comcast Business.

• 32:05Speaker 05

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

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Well, Casey, it's been another big week for Claude and Claude Code, which I think seems to be having kind of a ChatGPT moment.

• 32:49Speaker 02

  You know, I texted you earlier this week, and I said, is it crazy to say that Claude Code feels like the most important thing that has happened in AI since ChatGPT? I realize that may sound crazy to some of our listeners, but I feel like we can make the case.

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I think so, too. I think this is a big, big moment, Especially for people who are sort of code inclined or code curious. We've continued to see many, many posts on social media about people's experiments with Claude code. It seems like it is actually creating something of an infrastructure crisis for Anthropic, which is also something that happened to OpenAI during their original ChatGPT moment. They just like could not keep up with the demand and the site kept going down. But I would say like the larger thing that has been going on is that non-coders are starting to experiment with this tool. Anthropic also released a version of Claude code for non-coders this week called CoWork, which sort of sits in the Claude desktop app and allows you to sort of attempt various tasks

• 33:45Speaker 01

  using the same sort of agent-like framework that Claude code uses, but in a way that's slightly less intimidating than opening up a terminal app.

• 33:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and if you think about what the ChatGPT moment was, it was a time when millions and millions of people realized simultaneously that you can ask questions and get pretty good answers, and you can generate text for many useful purposes. The Claude code moment, I feel like, is the next evolution where people are saying, I can now build something that is useful to me even though I don't really know what I'm doing. And whereas maybe six months ago, the results I would have gotten were pretty bad or would have required a lot of technical know-how, I can now come in and I can type in a box and I can get basically exactly what I want. And that is actually huge.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  It's huge, and I had a version of that experience myself too in the past week because the Read It Later app that I built, Stash, we talked about my vibe coding experiment last week. I got so many responses from people who are saying, hey, can I use this thing? Are you going to like distribute this and put it in the App Store? That I just decided, you know what, I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna release Stash to the world. And so I had Claude code go in and like prepare a version of this for the public, build me a little landing page. You can now download it and try it for yourself at kevinroose.com/stash. And it is working better than I ever expected. And it remains sort of incredible to me that I did all of this as me, an idiot who does not know how to code. I was able to, in a matter of hours, build and release a working software. Software products.

• 35:16Speaker 02

  You know, first of all, congratulations for the launch of Stash. People have been really excited about this. My absolute favorite was you posted about this on X and somebody responded, "Will it parse my X bookmark graveyard?" And you responded, "I have honestly no idea what it will do." And I laughed so hard when I wrote that. I thought, finally, an honest software developer who just admits that we don't know how any of this stuff works.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  I like, I have no idea how any of this works. I have no idea if it works. It works for me, but I am very delighted that I was just able to sort of vibe, launch this software product into the world with like, honestly, not that much work. It was not that hard. I did not use any special prompting tricks. I'm not even that good at using Claude code. And yet I was able to conduct an act of software engineering that now other people are downloading and using for themselves. I did have one incident that I want to tell you about, which is that I accidentally had what I believe is my first AI security breach, which was that when I launched the version of this public Stash app that I was open sourcing, it did inadvertently reveal my credentials on several of the sites that I used.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  So I had to go back to Claude and be like, hey, could you scrub my personal information out of there?

• 36:28Speaker 02

  That's a, I didn't know you had any credentials to do what you do. But you know, we want to talk about a few different things with Claude code this week. And we want to begin with listener responses because last week we asked you, hey, what are you building? And we were absolutely delighted with the response. We have gotten so many messages from you all over the past few days to our email, of course, but also in the forkiverse, the Fediverse server that we set up that we're going to be talking about a little bit later in the show. But we just wanted to highlight a few of our favorites because I think they speak to the breadth of what people are able to build and also how little experience folks had before they started trying these things.

• 37:08Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think this is like more than just a kind of show and tell segment because for me, like, there is something different about trying to do this stuff yourself versus just listening to us talk about it on our podcast. I really think that our listeners who listened to our episode last week and then went out and tried to vibe. Code things for themselves were a lot of them shocked by how easy it was by how good the results were. And I think it, you know, for you, I was joking with you over text this week that it seemed like you were feeling the AGI in a way that maybe you hadn't before. So I think for our listeners, maybe this past week has been an experience of starting to feel that, feel the progress, feel the capabilities improving, feel that things that were impossible

• 37:51Speaker 01

  even a few months ago are now becoming possible.

• 37:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So as we get in to what we heard from listeners, it is important that I make the following disclosure. My boyfriend works at Anthropic and I would go a step further and say, if you are feeling like this is edging into shill territory, I really do think you could probably do a lot of similar things with Codex, which is OpenAI's sort of Claude code equivalent. I'm told Google has one as well, but due to the ongoing disaster of Google Marketing, I truly cannot remember what it's called. Maybe you could Google it.

• 38:21Speaker 01

  It's called Intigravity.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  Perfect. So maybe try that. The point is, these tools are now available and they're really good and we want to get into it and talk about what you all are building.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  And that's a good chance to make my disclosure too, which is that I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft and Perplexity over alleged copyright violations related to the training of AI models. Okay, so first up, we got some great examples from our listeners of websites that they have been building. We talked on the show last week about how we had each redesigned our own websites using these tools. One of those came from our listener Gina, who had never vibe coded before, but after last week's episode told us that she had gone out and designed her own website. She says it took her about two and a half to three hours. And I'm going to look at it right now. Looks great. Gina, it's got some nice animations.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  She even told us that it has an Easter egg on it. If you hit Ctrl M, it pulls up what looks like a MySpace profile from the 90s. Very cool. Congrats on your new website, Gina.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, super, super fun. Love the Easter egg there. You know, another website that we got came in from Sarah Haggard. She built a book site for book recommendations. It turns out that over the winter break, she wanted To catalog her books so that she could give her husband a list of books she already has read so that he doesn't accidentally buy her a duplicate. And she was able to do that, but then went a lot further. And now has a website where you, the listener, can go on to sarahsbooks.com, S A R A H S books.com. And she will make a book recommendation, depending on what your mood you're in. If you want a beach read, if you want a story about women's empowerment, many other categories in there.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  You can create your own account. Like, it is a full-featured web app. And I guess after she put it up, she got in touch with the founder of Goodreads. And now they're going to get together and have a fun conversation. So this is someone else who does not have a lot of technical experience, built something to scratch her own itch, and it is super cool.

• 40:24Speaker 01

  And I'll just say, there's something very romantic about vibe coding for your partner.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Lot of alpha there.

• 40:31Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Go to your partner today and say, what would you like me to build you, sweetheart? And then just see if you can whip it up.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  All right, one more website. We heard from a listener who turned his family's Christmas letter into an 80s text adventure inspired by the video game Zork. This is from listener David Phillips. He asked us not to read out the name of the website since it's got information about his kids on it. But I'm looking at it right now. It looks very cool, very good idea for the annual holiday letter.

• 41:02Speaker 02

  It's got like green text on a black screen. It's like very much conjuring like an 80s like CRT monitor. And a really fun detail that he puts on the website is that his stepfather actually worked on the original Zork game. And so this is actually kind of like a family tribute, as much as it is a vibe coding project. And I just, I love that aspect of it.

• 41:24Speaker 01

  Yes. We also heard from several small business owners who told us that Claude Code and other agentic coding tools were allowing them to build tools that they otherwise would have had to pay a lot of money to someone else to build for them. My favorite of these was from Joe. He is a welder. Great AI-proof job of the future, by the way. And he said that he has no experience programming. But over the past few months, Joe told us that he has been teaching himself to build tools for his business. He said, quote, "I built an MCP server that has turned my Claude chat window into a personal assistant." He said it's able to track jobs, help him create estimates, organize PDFs and contracts. He said he's

• 42:05Speaker 01

  even connected Claude to the 3D modeling program that he uses, which has helped him build complex programs for CNC, which is sort of the computerized cutting and etching technology that that many builders use. He says he's used Claude code to make agents to search for potential work in his area and write a weekly lead generator for him. So I just thought this was a really interesting example of what might seem like a low-technology business, but that is actually able to go out there and build some software that helps him get some more business.

• 42:35Speaker 02

  Yeah. And he added his email in a way that really affected me. He said, "I really want people in my demographic to understand that this isn't, 'I asked ChatGPT to write an email,' or, 'Can you generate an image that has the correct spelling?'" This is, to me, "I built my own business infrastructure from scratch with an AI pair programmer despite having zero formal training and a high school education."

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Totally.

• 42:56Speaker 02

  Pretty cool.

• 42:57Speaker 01

  Another example we got was from Faye Bell, a listener who runs her own business selling wallpaper to interior designers. She told us about a special tool that she has been creating called the Wallpaper Calculator, which we can look at over here. It is at her website. And this is a tool that basically allows a potential client, an interior designer maybe, to calculate exactly how much wallpaper they need to cover a particular wall. This tool, she said, also generates a layout diagram so that clients can sort of visualize what the wallpaper will look like in their space. She said this is something that she's always been doing by hand in tools like Photoshop or InDesign. But now the clients could just do it themselves and save themselves the time.

• 43:42Speaker 02

  Yeah. And Faye wanted to let us know that she had no previous coding experience and she loves That she can do this without having to like pay any like hosting costs like she doesn't have to like buy this software from some third-party provider. Those can be really expensive services and she just did it for her damn self.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  One more that caught our attention came from a dad who made a web app to track a hilariously specific chore he had asked his kids to complete. Simon wrote that it was the week before Christmas and his wife and he decided that their kitchen needed a tune-up. So they ordered new handles for the doors and drawers in their kitchen and it was 70 handles in all. And to motivate their children to help them with this project, Kevin, they offered the kids a dollar per handle change. And he had noticed that in the past, they had quickly lost interest, believe it or not, when given the handle replacement task. So this time he spun up a web app to log their efforts.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  And we pulled up this web app and the first thing it tells you when you open it is that the project is now complete and all 70 handles were replaced. So this was a success, but basically there's a leaderboard for his four children. You can see who made the most money. They were able to cash out their winnings via Apple Cash to the bank or via chocolates, which I love. And it was Ben who came in number one with 44 handles replaced. Vic came in at zero. So I guess Vic was was holding out for a higher wage to get involved in the knob replacement business. But just again, this is so like wacky and was this necessary? Absolutely not.

• 45:18Speaker 02

  But what I love about this project is it speaks to a theme that I felt in so many of the things that listeners sent us, which is the joy of creation. It is fun to make things. It is fun to have a dream and to be able to quickly realize it. And so, yeah, I just love this one.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  What excites me is less the products themselves. It is that people, I think, are starting to understand the pace and trajectory of AI progress through using these tools. A year ago, you could not type into a box, make me a website for my family's handle replacement project, or make me a tool for my small business that allows people to estimate the wallpaper needs of their project. And now you can. And I think unless you have really spent time, even a couple of minutes using one of these tools, you really do not understand the state of the art. And so I think a lot of people unfortunately are in the same position that they, you know, we were in back when ChatGPT came out in 2022, which is like they are opining on a technology that they

• 46:16Speaker 01

  do not actually understand because they have not experienced it for themselves. And so for the listeners out there who are listening to this and saying, okay, well, these projects sound great, but what does this have to do with me or my life? I would just say there is no better way right now in 2026 to get a handle on what the frontier of AI progress looks like than to come up with a project, no matter how silly or trivial seeming, give it to one of these AI coding agents and watch what it does.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  I agree with that. You know, what I would say, Kevin, is to me, this stuff is the flip side of slop. This is anti-slop, right? If slop is about a world where every surface online seems like it's being taken over by these digital creations that you didn't ask for, that you find confusing, they blur the line between reality and fiction, and they just sort of make you feel hypnotized and gross. This is the reverse of that. This is real people saying, I have a need in my life and I'm going to go make it with my own hands. And we've always talked about AI as a dual-use technology. We do spend a lot of time on the show talking about its many downsides, which are huge and real and scary. But there is

• 47:21Speaker 02

  also upside here, which is at least in this moment, this can be an empowering tool. And so to me, I think one reason why I was so delighted to see all these listener responses was they spoke to the way that technology tools can still empower us.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  Yes. And it also gave me an experience that I had not had before, which is that I now understand how annoying it is to build and release software products in the world only to have users tell you everything that is wrong with them. Like five minutes after I made my Stash app public and put it up on GitHub so that people could download it and use it themselves, I started getting feature requests. It was like, are you not impressed by the app that I have made and released to you for free? Already, I understand in a more visceral and embodied Away the pain of our listeners who are product managers at big tech companies.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Yes, but you also now just have a perfect thing you can say back to them, which is just fork it and make the version yourself, right? Go vibe code your own feature.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  Take it up with Claude.

• 48:18Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:19Speaker 01

  So Casey, when you were texting me and talking about how amazed and impressed you were by this technology, how this felt like a chat GPT moment, what has been the most surprising thing for you since our segment last week about your experience with these tools?

• 48:33Speaker 02

  Well, I just keep having new ideas for stuff to build. Like, I assume that I would run out after coming up with one or two things, but every time I have an idea and I could just make it, it just gives me the confidence to go out and build like three or four new things. So I'm moving away from thinking like, this is a fun little like proof of concept demo and thinking of it more as like, this is just a tool that I have now. And if I have some sort of like itch when it comes to software, my default assumption now is I can probably quickly build some version of it.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm finding that I'm having to sort of retrain myself or rewire my brain a little bit because my impulse when I like encounter something annoying or a problem that I'm having in my life is not to like go build a piece of software to address that. It's just like not part of how I live my life. But now I'm finding that like more and more times a day, like that sort of bell is going off in my head, the like, oh, I could probably build something or Claude could probably build something to help me with this. So we are actually going to be doing a demo of how we vibe code with Claude code. We're going to be doing that on our YouTube channel. You'll be able to see that next week. But if you are someone who has been maybe curious about this, maybe we've piqued your curiosity a little bit, but you're still a little bit intimidated by it. Hopefully that will give you the tools you need to get started.

• 49:47Speaker 02

  When we come back, we're forking around in the forkiverse with our friend PJ Vogt.

• 49:51Speaker 01

  Our co-founder PJ Vogt. Get it right.

• 50:25Speaker 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.

• 50:59Speaker 05

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

• 51:34Speaker 04

  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.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  Well, Casey, listeners to the Hard Fork Podcast will know that we released an extra episode this week detailing our experiment with PJ Vogt of the Great Search Engine Podcast and the new social network that we started, the Forkiverse.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  That's right. The Forkiverse has been up and running for just about a week now, as you will hear this podcast episode. And I have to say, Kevin, the response has been overwhelming.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Truly wild. One of the wildest things I've ever experienced in my career.

• 52:35Speaker 02

  When you had this idea to run this experiment, the maximum amount of people that you can imagine wanting to join with us in this federated server that we set up was about 2,000 people. And today, we can report here on the Hard Fork Show that more than 4,000 souls have now joined us within the Forkiverse, threatening to overwhelm and perhaps destroy it.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Yes. And we have already had our first content moderation scandal, some of our first technical hiccups. We were sort of speedrunning the life of a social media company in the year 2026. And so today, we wanted to give some updates on how the Forkiverse is going. So we've invited back our third co-founder with us, PJ Vogt from Search Engine is here. He's here virtually.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  Thank you for having me. I've been called a lot of things, but never founder.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  How does it feel?

• 53:25Speaker 06

  Honestly, I'm surprised at how much I'm already learning about the internet by being a person who cares about even maintaining a very small community on it. I've only ever been a community member, not a community architect. It's strange. It's very strange.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Well, so let's talk about the flavor of the Forkiverse so far. You know, it can be, I think, a mistake to start any kind of social product and not give people an idea of what to do. And I think one of the smart things that PJ did as we were setting up the Forkiverse was to give people a prompt. He said, hey, something you could do if you want is just post a picture of where you're listening to this podcast episode from. And so when I logged on to the Forkiverse, a lot of what I saw was just people posting really fun photos. And I think it contributed to the sense of, hey, we are not here to be super serious. We are not here to solve the great issues of the world. We just kind of want to hang out

• 54:22Speaker 02

  and meet each other. And so I have actually been delighted at the flavor of the Forkiverse because it really has seemed like a bunch of people who like the same podcast coming together and saying hello to each other.

• 54:32Speaker 01

  Yes, and I think because PJ, you posted your version of the episode a couple of days before we did, at first, the people who were trickling in were mostly like, search engine fans. So I got to observe some things about your audience, which is that many of your listeners live these like, bucolic lives on farms in British Columbia, where they're just like, listening to podcasts while they work in their like, woodworking studios. Your listeners really seem to be having a good time out there.

• 54:59Speaker 06

  I learned the same thing about my listeners. It was so cool. The amount of people who are like, "I'm in a cabin somewhere far away, working on my ceramics." And I was like, "That's so cool." I had no idea. And it solved for me, one of the things that I don't like about podcasting, which is that it's so one-way. I don't know, I'm someone who's sometimes suspicious of online community, that it actually can feel like community. And I will say that in week one of the Forkiverse, meeting both search engine listeners and Hard Fork listeners, to me, it does feel like community. It feels like a bunch of strangers, politely, friendly, jokily, kind of just being like, "Here's who I am. Here's who I am." I've really liked it.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  I noticed over the past week that people were using it to talk to Kevin and I about the most recent episode of the show. We heard a lot about people's vibe coding projects, which is something we had talked about in last week's episode. And so that was something else that was fun for me, was when I got to visit the site, I just got to see a lot of people saying, "Hey, check out this website that I made." And it was really nice.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think for a lot of people, like, those sort of prompts, or at least like, sort of collective topics that can serve the function that like, alcohol serves at a party, which is just kind of like, the social lubricant that like, makes everyone more likely to hang out and have a good time. So, we should do more of that.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, that's kind of the fun stuff. Let's talk about the tedious, sweaty, behind-the-scenes work that goes into making the Fediverse possible. So, Kevin, in the first few days of people joining the network, you were getting a notification every single time somebody requested to join. Have you figured out how to turn that off?

• 56:36Speaker 01

  No, I still get them, but now I've just filtered them out of my inbox because they were arriving at a rate of like several per minute. And I was just like, you know, one thing that I like about the Forkiverse and the way that it was sort of set up, I cannot claim any credit for this because this is just part of the hosting service that we use, but it like makes people write a little blurb about why they want to join. And so it was actually kind of delightful to have those blurbs. I accepted every single request, even when they didn't write anything in that box, but I did like it when they did.

• 57:05Speaker 02

  Well, give us some flavor of what sort of things were people saying? Why did they say they wanted to join the Forkiverse? And how disappointed do you think they've been with what they found waiting there?

• 57:14Speaker 01

  So some people just said, you know, I'm a fan of the show and I like, I heard about it on the podcast and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A lot of people were expressing how burnt out and exhausted they were by other social media experiences. Sort of typical comment that I got just 11 minutes ago, someone said, just wanted to thank you for this platform because I'm one day in and already having a civil discussion about Gen AI art, whereas on Reddit, Blue Sky, and even Hacker News, I would probably be immediately shouted down. So it does seem like people are grateful for just a new place to type that has a slightly different vibe to it.

• 57:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. As you say, Kevin, we have had just, you know, many hundreds, probably thousands of people logging on to have a good time, but the server is federated, which means that people can interact with us even if they have not joined the Forkiverse, right? People can follow us in the Fork, like I'm Casey at theforkiverse.com. If you have an account on Mastodon or some other, you know, spot in the Fediverse, you can just follow me. And so we can hear from other people. And I would say that that has resulted in some content moderation issues.

• 58:18Speaker 01

  I was just surprised how quickly like the bad guys showed up. I was looking at the moderation reports. I think I took a screenshot of this one. There's a user who showed up from another server. This person wasn't a Forkiverseian, but they were causing trouble here, who sent the following messages in quick succession, all to accounts that seem like they are held by women. Hello, how are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing today? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing? Hello, my beautiful lady, how are you doing? And it nice meeting you on here?

• 58:54Speaker 02

  Wow. So somebody who really kind of wanted to connect and meet new people in the Fediverse.

• 58:59Speaker 06

  A real sort of Don Juan. He was bothering users. There was also like a virulently racist person. Like, he was using all of the slurs right away. And I was just like, how did you find us? Like, we're a community for sweet people.

• 59:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is amazing. I got, I received the reports as well, and I saw one, and I thought, yeah, you know, if I have a moment, let me see if I can take care of this. And it was somebody who had used just one slur, but I'd say it was one of the bad ones. So I had to block them. But I had, I had sort of like the same reaction that you did, PJ, which is like, truly, why would you spend any time on this? You know, is like, the idea that you would use part of your one wild and precious life to come to the fork verse and say these things to our users? Like, what's going on with you?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  Now, I am curious whether either of you felt the sort of power of the so-called ban hammer. Like, did, do you feel like you became drunk with authority banning these users with no, no process for appeals?

• 59:59Speaker 02

  Honestly, yes. Like, I think there are certain places where you want to have a very, like, rigid principles-based content moderation system, like most of the big platforms that we would use. I would say, you know, Instagram, TikTok, Reddit, you want them to have those kinds of systems. When it comes to like, a fun experiment that some friends put together to see what would happen, I feel no attachment to that idea whatsoever. So it's like, if I don't like the vibe of your post, and it bothered somebody else, like, by default, you are just going to be gone, and there are not going to be appeals. Is that bad?

• 1:00:31Speaker 06

  I, I mean, I agree with you, so I don't think it's bad. Like, I just feel like this clubhouse is small enough that we can be arbitrary, as long as we're arbitrarily following some non-arbitrary rules. I had a moment where someone showed up from another instance, like another part of the Fediverse, a different Mastodon server. Do I have the technical nomenclature right?

• 1:00:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. And they were like, they were like, no one should go to the fork verse, because PJ is problematic, he's bad, this isn't even real federated, whatever. And it was a real moment where I was like, oh, my God, this person's not being very nice to me. I could ban them from the entire internet we've created. And I was proud. All I did was block them from my account. I was like, you know what? There's nothing in the rules that says that you can't be mean to me. You can be mean to me. But I, I felt the, the little whisper of the demon that has driven Elon Musk into like, planets unknown.

• 1:01:23Speaker 02

  Well, that's very principled of you to not not ban him. I don't know that I would have been so kind. Now, we've, listen, we've been avoiding the elephant in the room for too long. Kevin, tell us about the Russian disinformation campaign that the Forkiverse has been a part of.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Our one week old social network has already become entangled with a Russian disinformation campaign. This was an email I got from the Fediverse Trust and Safety Team, which is sort of a group of people who sort of oversee trust and safety in a sort of a decentralized way for the entire Fediverse, not just our server.

• 1:01:56Speaker 02

  They're doing the Lord's work over there.

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  They truly are. And the executive director of IfTAS, whose name is Jazz, wanted to alert us to the fact that the Forkiverse is what's called an open registration service, one where, you know, anyone can sign up and register. And they said that open registration services, especially on the Fediverse, are being targeted by a pro-Russia propaganda network that they are calling, and this is the most delightful part, Portal Combat.

• 1:02:26Speaker 02

  Portal Combat?

• 1:02:28Speaker 01

  Yes, Portal Combat. So this is what they have called a Russian network that is creating hundreds of accounts on servers, including Blue Sky and Mastodon. And according to IfTAS and the French government, this network's main aim seems to be to get onto these open registration platforms and to start spreading misinformation about the war in Ukraine, along with criticism of Western governments. And they were just kind of flagging this to us as a courtesy because our Mastodon server was growing very quickly and they just wanted to say, hey, just FYI, this is happening to a bunch of other servers.

• 1:03:10Speaker 01

  But have you guys noticed in your moderation, any posts or users that seem suspiciously pro Kremlin?

• 1:03:18Speaker 02

  So I haven't, but like, I don't follow all 4,000 people in the Forkiverse. And this is a challenge of running a big server like this, is that you typically are not seeing even a fraction of the content that is on the server. You're relying on user reports. And so unless a bunch of users said, hey, we're seeing a bunch of like suspiciously pro-Russian propaganda in our feeds, we might be unaware of a problem like this. So that's a legitimate problem.

• 1:03:45Speaker 06

  I have a question for you guys.

• 1:03:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, let's hear it.

• 1:03:48Speaker 06

  I'm just curious, like, To me, the place where this has exceeded my, I guess, modest expectations is it is just a website that I'm surprised to find how much I'm enjoying checking, which I honestly did not think we'd clear that bar. I'm curious if it clears that bar for you guys, like if you're just as a user liking it.

• 1:04:05Speaker 02

  It has, and for this reason. So I spend most of my time on social networks these days on Blue Sky and Threads. Blue Sky is a very politics dominant network. So whatever the political story of the day is there, it feels like everyone I follow only wants to talk about that. And that's despite the fact that I've sought out people who are mostly posting about tech news. Threads, which some people call the gas leak social network, is a series of completely disconnected posts from people who, you know, they just lost their husband, or they put on a dress for the first time in 30 years and wanted to take a picture of it, and then occasionally post from TechCrunch. I happen to enjoy the insanity of Threads, but I can't always say I know what to do when I show up there.

• 1:04:49Speaker 02

  When I go to the Forkiverse, I truly feel like I'm just, I'm just interacting with people who like podcasts. And so I feel freer to just share like silly little jokes that might not feel welcome in some of the other places I'm online, you know. So the other day, I think it was this weekend, and I was taking a look at how many people had signed up. And so I posted, "Good morning, the Forkiverse. Another 200 people or so joined us overnight, and now the fire marshal is here. He's doing a sexy little dance." Wait a minute, does this guy even work at the fire department? And here's my point, I couldn't have posted that on Blue Sky. No one would have even understood what that meant. But it felt really good to post on the Forkiverse.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  I love that we've progressed to the phase where our podcast is just us reading a series of Forkiverse posts out loud.

• 1:05:40Speaker 02

  I got news for you. Most content is just people reading the equivalent of tweets.

• 1:05:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. PJ, did you post anything on the Forkiverse this week that you're especially proud of? Oh, you posted the dress?

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  I posted the dress.

• 1:05:53Speaker 06

  I'm trying to juice engagement, so I posted the viral dress from, what was it, 2014 that was either blue and black or white and gold. And I pretended like I just discovered it and I asked people to tell me what color it was.

• 1:06:05Speaker 01

  Wow, so you, I thought I was gonna be our resident growth goblin, but it turns out that you are actually our growth goblin.

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  Oh, absolutely. It turns out like I want, I also got in trouble because I had a post where I said, make this go viral, which I was like, kind of joking, but then people were jokingly boosting it. And a Fediverseian showed up to tell me that the point of the Fediverse is not virality and it's not attention. And if I'm trying to go viral, I'm misunderstanding the entire reason for being in the place where I found myself. And honestly, it was fun to be scolded.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  That brings us to an important part of the conversation today, which is people who have been on the Fediverse for a long time, who have opinions about how we should be doing the Fediverse. So I got us embroiled in a bit of a controversy over the past day because one of these folks who's been in the Fediverse for a long time, sent a post to me that I didn't appreciate, that was basically saying, you know, you guys are being very irresponsible with the server. You have now brought on 4,000 people onto the Fediverse, but you have said that you are just basically doing this as an experiment. And someday, you know, there might not be funding for the Forkiverse, and it might go away. And these 4,000 people are going to be left high and dry. And so you need

• 1:07:23Speaker 02

  to lay out your plan to fund the Forkiverse until the heat death of the universe, or shame on you, was like basically the vibe that I was getting. And I'm reading this and I'm losing my mind. I'm saying, the thing is four days old. Also, do you know what's really easy to do? Create a new frickin' account on the Fediverse. It'll take you five minutes. Like, worst case scenario is really not that bad.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:45Speaker 02

  Now, I'm sure some people are gonna wonder, you know, we just spoke to Jonathan Haidt about the dangers of social media. Now, here we are promoting, you know, this, the social media platform for other people to use. So I guess Kevin, PJ, like, what is our feeling? If you are 16 and younger, should you be allowed to access the Forkiverse?

• 1:08:03Speaker 01

  No, and in fact, when we were setting up the server, there was a thing in there that says, what is the minimum age for people on your server? And I set it to 18.

• 1:08:11Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 1:08:11Speaker 01

  Because I'm a responsible person. Now, am I doing anything to verify that? Absolutely not. Have we installed any of these like Australian style sort of AI powered age determination tools? No, I have not. We are working on the honor system, but if I see you posting about your LaBoobos and your Minecraft server and your middle school math homework, I'm kicking you off.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  Junior.

• 1:08:35Speaker 02

  So you heard it here first. You do not access the Forkiverse if you're under 18. Do not access it from school. Do your homework, listen to your parents.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. No phones till you're 30.

• 1:08:47Speaker 02

  No phones till you're 30. You heard it here first.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  You have to have a 401K before you can have a phone.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  If you don't have lower back pain when you wake up in the morning, stay the hell off the Forkiverse. All right. So let's, let's move right along here. We've had our first content moderation scandal. There's of course the Russian influence campaign and the dress is generating a lot of discourse. I think the question now is like, what next fellas? Like we, we accidentally got 4,000 people in a room. What do we want to do with them? You could tell they've thought a lot about it from the blank expression on their faces.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Just a dog staring.

• 1:09:27Speaker 02

  I really hope you're watching this on YouTube just so that you can see the dull stare.

• 1:09:31Speaker 01

  I was waiting for PJ to respond. PJ's our chief. PJ's our growth goblin. PJ, what next?

• 1:09:38Speaker 06

  Okay, so I'm looking for, are you guys familiar with the concept of a scissor statement?

• 1:09:43Speaker 02

  Yes, a sort of a statement that's sort of like neatly separates one group from another.

• 1:09:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, it's like, it's a divisive piece of content that immediately everyone has to take a side. There's, obviously we live in a country that's constantly producing things that are like scissor statements. What I am looking for this week, myself personally, are things like the dress, like benign is a hot dog a sandwich? Like almost like corny millennial era. I'm just trying to generate conversation that people want to participate in that goes beyond, hey, I'm here. Who are you? Like, I'm trying to get people in discussion, but not discussion about like the vast and intractable problems of the republic. Like I'm just trying to get past small talk to fun talk.

• 1:10:31Speaker 02

  I think we should do a thing that's sort of like, "Search engine listeners are like this and hard fork listeners are like that." You know?

• 1:10:39Speaker 06

  You think we need beef between the show?

• 1:10:42Speaker 02

  I don't even know if it has to be a beef. It just has to be like stereotypes about the listeners. You know, it's like, what kind of clothes do they wear? And what kind of cars do they drive? And that sort of thing.

• 1:10:52Speaker 01

  Hmm, yeah.

• 1:10:53Speaker 02

  I like that. Well, we've already learned that search engine listeners categorically live in the woods and on farms. Whereas I think the hard fork listeners have a little bit more of an urban flavor to them.

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  Part of the laptop class.

• 1:11:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. Um, here's a question. Have we achieved our goals with the Fediverse? Or is there another goal yet to reach?

• 1:11:17Speaker 06

  I want more growth. I want this to become a place that is beyond just, um, like, I think we've already succeeded past goal one, which is like, it exists. People enjoy it. I enjoy going there. You guys enjoy going there. I think goal two is like, can this be more than a public community board for two podcasts? Even if it just means a public community board for three podcasts.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. We would, we would take the Joe Rogan Show listeners if they, if they want to sign up.

• 1:11:45Speaker 06

  I want to hear about their meat smoking tips. I want to hear about how they're a bow hunting elk. I want to know their peptide stack.

• 1:11:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, what are you injecting? If you're, if you're listening to that show. Um, well, speaking of that, you know, one of the most frequent questions that we get over on the Forkiverse is about how many people can fit in the server before it explodes. We had originally told them, we think there can only be 2,000. There are now 4,000. What is our answer to that question?

• 1:12:09Speaker 01

  So I dug into this a little bit because as the site was growing, as we sort of saw the dashboards keep ticking up as it looked like we were approaching our limits, I reached out to Hugo, the very nice man who runs the Masto Host, hosting platform that the Forkiverse uses. And I sort of said, hey, it looks like we're growing like faster than we anticipated. Are we going to have to like upgrade our plan soon? He basically said, no, it's not like a hard cap, but like if you exceed that, you know, number of active users for, uh, you know, some sustained period of time, like we will have to talk about. Upgrading your plan. So we are not yet at the point of having to shell out for an even bigger bespoke plan. And I will say, our users on the fork verse are being very nice and courteous.

• 1:12:52Speaker 01

  Some of them heard what we said about the maximum files upload sort of storage size that we have. And they have been uploading very grainy, low resolution photos.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  This is my favorite norm in the Fediverse is people uploading downscaled black and white images to try to help us stay under our storage cap. Like truly every single person who has done that, you, you are a hero of the fork verse.

• 1:13:16Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 1:13:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Speaker 01

  So can I like offer maybe a little bit of a downer note on what has otherwise been a very exciting week for the fork verse? Which is that all of this growth scares me.

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  Really?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  Like I see people showing up to this website, having a great time. And I just think we are going to invariably let these people down. Like I do not want people entrusting any part of their daily fulfillment and routine to our little stupid hobby project. Because like we are not like devoting our entire lives to this. And I just worry that somebody somewhere is going to be let down or hurt because of something that we have done or more likely failed to do.

• 1:13:58Speaker 02

  I think that's a fair point. I would also say, Kevin, you and I have now been letting people down for over three years on this podcast. They're used to it. If you, here's what I'll say. If you are running a small business and you're thinking about like maybe putting your fork inverse handle on a business card, or maybe painting it onto the shop window, maybe give it a year, see if it's still around, you know? Don't, don't rush into anything. This absolutely is an experiment. Things could go wrong. I think we can commit that like if we decide to wind it down, we will have some kind of off board. Like we will explain to you how you can transfer your account onto another server. You know, we will try to be responsible in that regard.

• 1:14:36Speaker 02

  But like, I personally am like, if this is like a fun throwaway thing that I do for a year and then never look back, maybe that was just a good use of my time online.

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it does make me feel a little bit of sympathy for the sort of social media barons that we have covered and talked to over the years, who I think live in fear of their most active and invested users sort of revolting against them. We've seen this with YouTube, we've seen this with Instagram, we see this like many communities grow so large and so fundamental to people's lives and businesses that anytime they make like a little change, even if it's like a couple pixels here, a couple pixels there, like sets off this cascading chain reaction of failures for like everyone who depends on this as vital infrastructure. And so like for the moment, I am glad that we are not vital infrastructure for anyone. And I'm a little nervous if we ever start

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  to edge in that direction for anyone, even if it's as simple as this is a place I like to go every day while I have my coffee in British Columbia.

• 1:15:35Speaker 02

  Do you worry that visiting the Forkiverse a lot could radicalize teenagers into listening to podcasts?

• 1:15:42Speaker 02

  God, I hope so.

• 1:15:45Speaker 02

  All right, well, we will have further updates on the Forkiverse as events continue to transpire. But PJ, I want to thank you so much for helping us put this project together, for making such a great episode about it. If you haven't listened to it yet, go listen to to the search engine episode that they did. You can actually find a version of it right here in our feed. But yeah, we will be back at you at some point in the future. Once the Russians successfully conquer the Forkiverse, you'll hear about it here. You will hear about it here.

• 1:16:56Speaker 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.

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  Building and scaling AI today can feel pretty chaotic, mostly because teams are juggling too many fragmented tools at once. That's where OutSystems comes in. OutSystems gives you one unified Agentic Systems Platform to manage your entire portfolio of agents, apps, and workflows. You get to innovate at the speed of AI, but with the security, governance, and control your enterprise actually needs. And the results are already there. A major manufacturer used OutSystems to build a multi-agent system that analyzes blueprints, and a global bank cut their development time by 60%. Own your Agentic future today at outsystems.com/NYT.

• 1:18:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  One more thing before we go for any of our LA listeners. We wanted to let you know that on Tuesday, January 20th, Times Opinion is holding a live event on the first year of Trump's second term. The editor of New York Times Opinion, Katie Kingsbury, and columnist Jamelle Bouie and Ross Douthat will be taking stock of the administration's biggest actions and where it all means for the country and the world as we know it. So we'll be including a link to the event in the show notes. Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Veeran Pavik. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love and Will Peichl. Today's show was engineered by Katie McMurren. Our executive producer is Jen Poyant. Original music by Lea Shaw-Damren, Alyssa Moxley, and Dan Powell.

• 1:19:24Speaker 02

  Video production by Sawyer Roque, Rebecca Blandon, Jake Nickel, and Chris Schott. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Hui Wing Tam, and Dahlia Hadad. You can email us at [email protected] with what you've been seeing in the for commerce.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  Building and scaling AI today can feel pretty chaotic, mostly because teams are juggling too many fragmented tools at once. That's where OutSystems comes in. OutSystems gives you one unified agentic systems platform to manage your entire portfolio of agents, apps, and workflows. You get to innovate at the speed of AI, but with the security, governance, and control your enterprise actually needs. And the results are already there. A major manufacturer used OutSystems to build a multi-agent system that analyzes blueprints, and a global bank cut their development time by 60%. Own your agentic future today at outsystems.com/NYT.