Meta’s Race for Your Face + Google’s Hit A.I. Notebook + HatGPT

Building great AR glasses is the hardest problem in consumer technology.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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

• 0:34Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so I had a very weird thing happen to me last weekend, which is that Netflix released a documentary that I was in. So this was something that I taped like two years ago, had basically no memory of, but it was with Bill Gates and it's about AI.

• 0:50Casey Newton?

  I remember when you told me that you were going to do this. And it seemed like it was an exciting thing because it was going to be a documentary. They were going to put it on Netflix.

• 0:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and then all of a sudden, I started getting texts from people I know with screenshots of their Netflix, where my face was the first thing that they saw when they logged into Netflix, like the big hero image on top of the thing.

• 1:10Casey Newton?

  Right, but except it wasn't really your face, was it?

• 1:12Kevin Roose?

  No, it was my AI face because in the process of taping this thing two years ago, I made like a joke, what I thought was a joke, to the producers. But they were sort of like asking me, do you want hair and makeup? And I said, no, because you can just use AI to make me hot. And they kept that in. And then they actually did make me hot using AI. So there's like a portion of the documentary where it just cuts to an AI version of me, but I am hot. And the lower third graphic says, hot Kevin Roose. And that is what my friends and family members were greeted with when they opened Netflix.

• 1:51Casey Newton?

  You know what this reminds me of?

• 1:52Kevin Roose?

  What's that?

• 1:52Casey Newton?

  In my twenties, I had a group of friends and there was this other guy named Casey, who kind of came into the friend group. And they started calling him Hot Casey because he was super, super good looking. And I was kind of looking around like, guy, like, do we have to call this guy Hot Casey?

• 2:08Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Casey Newton?

  And what one of my friends said to me was like, you know, it could be worse. They could be calling him OK looking Casey.

• 2:17Kevin Roose?

  That's true. I guess Netflix could have titled that character like marginally attractive Kevin.

• 2:25Casey Newton?

  Barely passable Kevin Roos.

• 2:33Casey Newton?

  I'm Kevin Roos, a tech columnist at The New York Times. I'm Casey Newt from Platformer. And this is Hard For. This week, I go down to Meta Connect and tell Kevin about all the news. Then, writer and Googler Stephen Johnson stops by to talk about the company's hit Notebook LM and how it's using AI to turn PDFs into podcasts. Finally, has the hat. It's time for HatGPT.

• 2:58Kevin Roose?

  All right.

• 2:58Casey Newton?

  Casey? Yes.

• 3:00Kevin Roose?

  You just got back to the studio from a trip to Menlo Park.

• 3:05Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 3:05Kevin Roose?

  To see some stuff that Meta was releasing.

• 3:08Casey Newton?

  I'm coming in hot, Kevin.

• 3:09Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Casey Newton?

  I, I hot footed it right out of that keynote to get here to the studio to tell you about all the latest advancements in the dynamic world of artificial intelligence and augmented reality glasses.

• 3:20Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so set the scene a little bit. What is it like down there? What's the vibe? Tell me what you saw.

• 3:25Casey Newton?

  The scene at Meta's campus was truly chaos and I think not in the way they anticipated. You know, we've been to many of these events. Typically, when you arrive, you really only look in for two things, which is like, where does the rideshare drop you off? And how do you get into the actual venue? And usually the way they do that is they have a person standing there and then they also have signs. Meta, for whatever reason, decided not to do this. And so people are just sort of wandering around like the duck in Are You My Mother? And it took me quite a while to get into the venue. And when I finally found what I was looking for, after, by the way, talking to several Meta employees who, when I asked where Connect was, seemed to have no idea that it was happening that day. I got a text from a friend who said that there had just been an accident in the parking lot because their shuttle had hit a car. So let's just say it got off to a little bit of a rough start.

• 4:10Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 4:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Kevin Roose?

  And I, my invite to Meta Connect must have gotten lost in the mail.

• 4:15Casey Newton?

  Lost in the Metaverse.

• 4:16Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Yeah, they actually sent it as a Facebook message, but no one has checked those since 2018. No, so I, you know, I am not their favorite journalist. I've been critical of the company. They don't invite me to stuff anymore. But you did get an invite and you hustled your way down there to see what they had to show off.

• 4:35Casey Newton?

  I did.

• 4:35Kevin Roose?

  And tell me what you saw.

• 4:37Casey Newton?

  Well, first of all, should we talk about Zuckerberg?

• 4:39Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 4:39Casey Newton?

  Yeah, well, so this is the, the second time in the past month that I've seen Zuckerberg speak, and both times he has worn a shirt emblazoned with a classical language slogan. So he was at the acquired podcast a few weeks back and wore the shirt that said in Greek, "Learning through suffering," which he said was sort of a family motto. And as we know, this is a person who is obsessed with the Roman Empire. That is just kind of something that we've, we've known about Zuckerberg for a while. So.

• 5:07Kevin Roose?

  Yes, he's very into conquest.

• 5:09Casey Newton?

  Loves conquest. His favorite video game is Civilization. Like, this man loves to sort of scheme about winning. So Zuckerberg walks out on stage on Wednesday, and he's wearing a shirt that says, "Out Zuck, out Nahill." And what this shirt apparently means, Kevin, because I don't speak Latin. Do you speak Latin?

• 5:26Kevin Roose?

  I speak Pig Latin.

• 5:27Casey Newton?

  Same here, so but it's not a Pig Latin shirt.

• 5:31Kevin Roose?

  Didn't say Zuckerberg Zay.

• 5:32Casey Newton?

  Didn't know he said.

• 5:35Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 5:37Kevin Roose?

  This is going off the.

• 5:37Casey Newton?

  We're off to a good start.

• 5:39Kevin Roose?

  We're all coming in hot.

• 5:40Casey Newton?

  Okay. This can apparently be translated a few ways. It is based on a motto, which was "Out Caesar, out Nahill," which was typically translated as like either Caesar or nothing, or all or nothing. But the basic idea seems to be either, one, that he's sort of putting it on the line, sort of win at all costs, or sort of less generously, it's like me or nothing? Which is, let's just say, a crazy thing to put on a T-shirt.

• 6:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's, it's, well, it makes me think that one of his other motives here is since he's gotten rid of his Julius Caesar haircut, he needs to sort of keep some connection to Caesar and his legacy.

• 6:21Casey Newton?

  If I were him, I would just make a nice Caesar salad. But I guess that wasn't part of his journey. So he comes out in the shirt and I thought that the slogan actually wound up being really apt in this regard. He spoke for around 40 minutes and during that time, he brought out two like creator types, basically like one was an MMA fighter and one was a sort of more standard creator, like makes good, cool, fun videos. But that was it. He did not bring out anyone else from his team. You know, he did not toss to any of the other people who work at the company on any of the stuff. He himself walked through all of the announcements in a way that really I feel like was trying to sell the message. I run this company and I am the Willy Wonka of Meta. And don't you forget it.

• 7:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, it's suck or nothing.

• 7:05Casey Newton?

  Yeah, which I thought was like really aggressive and weird and defensive. Right? It's like, it would be weird if Tim Cook did the entire Apple presentation.

• 7:12Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 7:12Casey Newton?

  Right?

• 7:13Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 7:14Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Aside from the sort of, you know, semiotics of Mark Zuckerberg appearing in this, uh, this Caesar homage t-shirt and not letting anyone else onto the stage with him, um, what else did he actually announce? What were the products and the, the sort of updates that they released?

• 7:31Casey Newton?

  Sure. So I'll sort of do these in ascending order of importance, if that works. Okay. So first of all, they have-

• 7:36Kevin Roose?

  It's like they always say, start with the most boring stuff when you're doing a podcast.

• 7:40Casey Newton?

  Well, I feel like if we do the reverse, then the episode gets more boring the longer I go on. Do we want that?

• 7:44Kevin Roose?

  I trust your vision.

• 7:45Casey Newton?

  Okay. So I trust your vision, which is something that you should do if you're wearing a VR headset because you're being lied to. So the first thing they introduced is the Meta Quest 3S. This is an entry level headset and it sells for 300 bucks. And until this week, uh, Meta's original Quest 3 was selling for $650. So this is sort of a big step down. They want to get more people into VR. We'll see if that works. They also put out a software update for their Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses, uh, and they're able to do things like you can set a reminder or you can scan a QR code. And later this year, they say you're going to be able to do real time language translation. So you could be speaking to me in pig Latin and then I would be able to understand it

• 8:28Casey Newton?

  because I would sort of be getting a real time translation through the speakers in the, the- Of the glasses.

• 8:34Kevin Roose?

  At they on say. Interesting, yay.

• 8:37Casey Newton?

  Yes, so if you were able to understand that, you're probably living in the future.

• 8:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Casey Newton?

  Because you have the new glasses update. So there were those things. And then there was just like a bunch of AI stuff, including most interestingly, and I have to get your take on this. They're going to start putting fake AI slop into the feeds. Did you see this part?

• 8:55Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 8:55Casey Newton?

  Okay, so they now they say it's just a test. But as you browse through the Facebook feed and the Instagram feed in the coming months, you're going to see stuff that is based on your interests or has your likeness. So if you live in Chicago and you've posted content about basketball, you might see a picture of yourself in a Chicago Bulls jersey. And then you can swipe on it and you can see sort of additional like you plus Chicago Bulls related content. And I'm dying to know what you think about that.

• 9:25Kevin Roose?

  So well, sorry, are these ads for like Chicago Bulls merchandise? These are, these are just organic posts appearing in the feed, starring you, the user, in something related to something that you've posted about or clicked on recently.

• 9:41Casey Newton?

  Exactly, exactly. So they're looking about what you're, you're posting about or the sort of things that you typically view. And they're saying, can we make synthetic stuff out of that and show it to you? And will that be more engaging to you than hearing from your actual family and friends?

• 9:54Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my God.

• 9:55Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 9:55Kevin Roose?

  I mean, this is the creepiest thing that I can imagine them doing. Like, people already believe erroneously that Facebook is listening to them through their phone and like tailoring targeted ads to them based on like conversations they've had in their house. With this, I mean, imagine you are, you're talking about fishing with your friend. And, you know, all of a sudden, because you've clicked on some fishing stuff, you're just scrolling through your Instagram feed and you see a picture of yourself in a fishing outfit going fishing. Like, you are going to throw your, your phone into the nearest body of water and you're never going to log on again.

• 10:35Casey Newton?

  I mean, again, and, and, you know, so I talked this afternoon with Chris Cox, who's a sort of high ranking product executive at the company. And he said, basically like Casey, like, do not overstate this. We're going to be very gentle about the way that we are rolling this out. And yet, at the same time, Kevin, a year ago, I wrote a post called "The Synthetic Social Network is Coming." And it was based on this idea that eventually they were going to realize they could probably show you something more engaging that they just made up than something from your actual family and friends. And while I'm sure there will always be a mix of those two things in anything that they make, we are arriving in this world where the app on your phone is just going to be showing you made up AI stuff.

• 11:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I think this is a really good point because it marks a really big departure for Meta. You know, this company has historically been about connecting you to people that you know in the real world, whether it's your college classmates or, you know, people you work with. Like, real friends and real family has always been the kind of lifeblood of these services. And I think what we've seen over the past few years is that they are just not aiming for that at all. I mean, now, you know, I'm assuming some huge part of the usage of Instagram is just Reels, right? It's just, you know, content from people you don't know, from influencers, from, you know, people outside your network who are posting stuff. It seems like they have basically given up on the task of building a social network around your real friends and family.

• 12:00Kevin Roose?

  Maybe your real friends and family don't post that much anymore. And so instead, all they have left to show you is kind of disconnected social content from influencers and people who you don't know but might make interesting things, and this kind of AI-generated slop.

• 12:14Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and you know, I'm sure people are going to have different experiences based on when they started using these products. But for you and I, who started using Facebook in particular near the beginning, this world where we increasingly see nothing that friends and family are sharing because they're just mostly not doing that anymore, and we're seeing sort of AI-generated images and videos. I just think Facebook is going to start to feel like an abandoned amusement park, you know? Where it's like a little bit creepy, you know, you feel like they're about to put a Spirit Halloween banner at the front of it. Like, there's just something that feels so strange about this moment. And while I take Chris Cox at his word that they are going to be careful about the way that they do it, they're telling us where they're going, and I have no reason to believe that they're not going to push very hard. In that direction, because for the longest time, the biggest problem that social networks have is that they just kind of die by default.

• 12:59Casey Newton?

  They're novel and fun for a while, and then people just kind of get tired of them and they move on. And, you know, Facebook did an incredible job of keeping people entertained there for a very long time. But if that is starting to wane, particularly in the United States, what better solution than to say, you know what? It doesn't matter that your friends and family aren't posting anymore because we could just make up infinite content to show you. And Facebook and Instagram become apps that are just about whatever will keep you looking at them.

• 13:21Kevin Roose?

  All right, what else did they show off?

• 13:23Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so this gets to the last big thing that they showed off, and this really was the star of the show, and it's called Orion. Now, last week, Snap showed off their version of this, their latest spectacles. These are augmented reality glasses. And the basic idea is that inside a pair of glasses that you wear on your heads, there are these miniature projectors called waveguides that will project images in front of you that look like a computer operating system. And you can then interact with that operating system using your voice or using hand gestures. So you might use it to watch a video, or play a game, or make a video call. So I saw the Snap version of it last week. This week, Meta came forward and said, here's what we've been working on.

• 14:05Casey Newton?

  And as far as I can tell, Meta is much further along than Snap is.

• 14:09Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, when I saw Snap's version, I almost couldn't believe how ugly it was. It looked like the sunglasses that they give you after you go to the eye doctor. It's like the blocky, plastic sort of goggles.

• 14:22Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 14:23Kevin Roose?

  That's what Snap's goggles look like from the outside. I haven't tried them on yet, so I don't know what they look like when you put them on. But did Meta's version of this, their Orion glasses, actually look better?

• 14:35Casey Newton?

  They are chunky and funky like the Snap glasses are. I'll sort of leave it to the listener to decide which pair they think looks better. But it seems like the technical capability in these glasses is stronger, at least in talking to some of the people who have used them and reading some of the coverage today. I'm hoping to get my own demo soon. But for example, the field of view, which is essentially the area in your vision that can display the operating system or any sort of Digital elements that you might be interacting with. The Snap glasses have a field of view that is 46 degrees. And this, to me, was the worst thing about these glasses, Kevin, because every time I moved my head, the interface would disappear. It was like I was playing peekaboo with an operating system, right?

• 15:20Casey Newton?

  The Meta field of view is 70 degrees. And so, most of the objects that you would be interacting with just sort of stay in the frame for a long time.

• 15:29Kevin Roose?

  Now, like, what? I'm envisioning something like the Apple Vision Pro, which does allow you to do things like pull up your desktop in your sort of headset, or play a video, or something like that. So how are these different from something like the Apple Vision Pro?

• 15:44Casey Newton?

  So, those technologies are similar in some ways, right? They are trying to get to the same destination. But, there is a belief within Meta that glasses are a much better and more natural ultimate form factor for the next generation of computing than a VR headset would be. And the reason is, that a VR headset is giant, it's bulky, it's distracting, right? You're sort of always aware that you're wearing it. And in my own personal experience, whenever I put one of those things on my head, within a half an hour or so, I want to tear it off and not put it on again for a really long time. Glasses are different. You're wearing glasses right now. My guess is, you have not even thought about the fact that you're wearing glasses for the past half hour.

• 16:27Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, well, I am watching a YouTube video while I'm talking with you in my glasses. But these are very advanced.

• 16:32Casey Newton?

  How dare you? How dare you? So, Meta believes that the final destination here is glasses that are as good at everything that the Vision Pro does, but in a sort of pair of lenses that sit easily on your face, are not bulky, do not make you nauseous. So, that's where they're trying to get.

• 16:50Kevin Roose?

  Now, can people go out and buy these glasses that Meta is showing off, these Orion augmented reality goggles?

• 16:57Casey Newton?

  No, so Meta is made about 1,000 units, and says that they're going to be mostly using them internally. But they are going to make some units available to external partners, presumably app developers and other people who might want to try them out and see what they could do with them. But you know, Kevin, if you want to know, why aren't they selling this directly to consumers? Alex Heath had some great reporting in The Verge this week about how Meta did initially want to put these things on sale, but among other considerations, they could not get the cost per unit below about $10,000.

• 17:28Kevin Roose?

  Oh, my God.

• 17:29Casey Newton?

  And Kevin, I know what you're saying. You're saying, Casey, why are they so expensive? Well, these glasses are not truly standalone glasses, which I should say the Snap glasses are. This prototype has what they call a neural wristband, which is a little loop that you put over your wrist that helps the glasses to interpret your hand gestures so that you can control the operating system. And there's an external puck that processes a lot of the computing.

• 17:56Kevin Roose?

  Like a hockey puck?

• 17:57Casey Newton?

  It's sort of more tube-like. And I know.

• 18:02Kevin Roose?

  Oh, the tube puck.

• 18:03Casey Newton?

  You know what? You're actually making a great point. And if I were them, I would not have called it a puck. If you tried to play hockey with this thing, you're gonna be sorry.

• 18:10Kevin Roose?

  Also, it costs $10,000, so please don't hit it.

• 18:15Casey Newton?

  Such a good point. So.

• 18:18Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so they're sort of offloading some of the... Because, you know, one thing that Apple has talked about is just how hard it is to shrink down something like the Apple Vision Pro smaller than it is because it requires a bunch of processors, it requires a big battery. So Apple actually made the battery pack sort of external, so you have to carry that around. And it requires cooling and all this other stuff. So is this puck part of how Meta is trying to shrink down the actual glasses by just giving you more things that you have to carry along with the glasses?

• 18:47Casey Newton?

  Yes. So you're exactly right. And it's, again, it's fascinating how a device that is being positioned as something that will be more convenient for you and will be this incredible assistant and so much more effortless than wearing a giant headset comes with a wristband that presumably you've got to charge and a puck that you've got to charge. Right. It's, you know, you have two peripherals for the pair of glasses on your face. So, you know, I've just been reflecting recently, Kevin, about how... This story that we're discussing right now, the hunt to build great AR glasses has been going on for more than a decade now in Silicon Valley. And this week, we saw the state of the art. And the state of the art is it costs $10,000. You have to have a peripheral to control it.

• 19:32Casey Newton?

  And you have to do the computing on a separate device. Okay. And that is after tens of billions of dollars that have been invested. And you just compare that to something like artificial intelligence, which we talk about so much on this show. And you look at the leaps that they have made in the past two or three years. And I believe it has left us in a situation where what we've just been discussing, the hunt to build these air glasses is the hardest problem in consumer technology.

• 19:58Kevin Roose?

  Hmm. I mean, to be fair, the building and training of large AI language models has also required tens of billions of dollars of investment in all of these GPUs from Nvidia. So in some sense, like, there was no sort of cheap and easy way to solve the problem of putting a high-performance computer on your face.

• 20:18Casey Newton?

  Right. And that gets into, well, you know, why is it that these things have developed at such different rates?

• 20:23Kevin Roose?

  And why is it, Casey, that these things have developed at such different rates?

• 20:26Casey Newton?

  I'm so glad you asked. Because AI is a pure software problem. The hardware problem of AR is just much trickier because you're running up against the laws of physics and about unsolved problems in battery life and how do you dissipate heat? And how do you shrink down microprocessors and optical stacks and everything else? And so it is just a super hard problem. And while every year, it seems like we get 2% or 3% of the way toward the goal. At the same time, again, the state of the art is something that you will not be able to buy in stores and like frankly, would just not be all that good if you could.

• 21:02Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So I understood when Apple launched the Apple Vision Pro, why they were making products in this area. Right?

• 21:10Casey Newton?

  Because they knew they could trick you into spending almost $4,000 on one.

• 21:15Kevin Roose?

  Yes. Well, no, they're a hardware company, right? That is where they make their money. They know that smartphones are not going to be around forever. The iPhone is not going to be the final evolution of personal computing. And they see these head-mounted displays as kind of the successor to maybe something like the laptop. What's less clear to me is why Meta is investing tens of billions of dollars into developing this stuff, right? There's obviously one story that we've talked about before, which is they're very sick of building things on Apple's platforms. They don't like having to work within the constraints that iOS developers have to work on. So they want to own the next hardware platform.

• 21:57Kevin Roose?

  But I guess I don't see it as being a natural evolution of their social media app product strategy. So can you give any sense of why they feel like this is so important for them that they're going to spend billions of dollars developing these glasses?

• 22:11Casey Newton?

  Well, the ultimate reason is that they believe that if they don't, someone else will. And this has always been Zuckerberg's approach to building products, right? He is deeply paranoid, and not in a sort of conspiratorial way, but just in a sort of very observant sense that when you look at the technology companies of the past 50 years, the companies that were biggest 40 years ago, many of them are no longer around or are nowhere near as dominant as they once were, right? So Zuckerberg knows there's always a wave that is about to hit you and potentially from behind. And the best way to avoid that happening is that you go out and you invent the future yourself. You mentioned their feud with Apple, and this is, it's deeply personal to him.

• 22:56Casey Newton?

  He mentions it more and more in his public appearances. And you saw the shirt. It's Zuck or Nothing. And a Zuck or Nothing world does not have room for Apple in it. And it is a world where Mark Zuckerberg himself controls all of the most important computing platforms. So to find out how things are going, we'll just have to see what slogan appears on his next T-shirt. When we cut back, a version of The Notebook with a much happier ending.

• 23:43Speaker 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.

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• 24:50Speaker 04

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• 25:26Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, we talk a lot about AI tools and products on this show, and I have one that I'm really excited to talk about today.

• 25:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I'm excited to talk about this, too.

• 25:34Kevin Roose?

  This is a new product called Notebook LM. It is a tool from Google, and you can think of it like a kind of personal research assistant. It's a piece of software that allows you to upload documents, PDFs, Word files, even audio files, websites, whatever you want, into these things called notebooks and then use Gemini, Google's AI model, to basically chat with the documents, to sort of have a conversation, to ask questions, to create study guides or summaries. You can even use it to create a podcast about the material that you've uploaded.

• 26:08Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and this was a product that was announced at Google I/O. They called it Project Tailwind back then. And from the moment I saw them talking about it on stage, I thought, I have got to get my hands on this thing. And while it is true that you can use other tools to chat with documents, that is not unique to Notebook LM. They have really focused on making sure that you can cram as much material as possible into their system so that you can have conversations with not only one very long document, but many very long documents. And that has really been the difference for them. But as you know, they recently came out with something that is maybe even more impressive.

• 26:48Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, the AI audio overviews feature is really what has been sort of lighting up the internet over the past week or so. Like, I'll just be honest, we see a lot of AI products. We get a lot of early access and demos of things. And many times, they show some potential. But if you actually start digging in, they are not all that useful, or they hallucinate, or they're just not reliable enough to be useful for people like you and me. Notebook LM is, I would say, one of my favorite AI products that I have used this year because it is not trying to do everything for everyone. It is a tool for research, for writing. It is really, really capable at what it does. And the audio feature in particular is just pretty stunning.

• 27:32Kevin Roose?

  So today, we're going to bring in one of the key people who helped conceive. And build Notebook LM, Stephen Johnson. Stephen's path to working at Google is pretty unusual. His main career, the thing that he's most known for is a writer. He has written for many years for the New York Times and New York Times Magazine and other places. He's the author of more than a dozen books, including his latest, The Infernal Machine: A True Story of Dynamite, Terror, and the Rise of the Modern Detective. And he's been one of my favorite writers about tech and the future. And a few years ago, Google approached him and basically said, hey, want to help us make a tool for writers?

• 28:10Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and you know, I got to know Stephen a little bit as they were launching Notebook LM. And we met and he told me all about his note taking process and how he wanted to use AI to sort of improve his writing. And we truly just became fast friends because we have the exact same view of this stuff, which is give me the most technology to make my job as easy as it possibly can be. And unlike me, he's now actually working inside this company, trying to make something that does just that.

• 28:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and why haven't you written 14 books, remind me?

• 28:36Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, I've been busy lately, Kevin, but I'm going to get around to it one of these days.

• 28:40Kevin Roose?

  Let's bring in Stephen.

• 28:46Kevin Roose?

  Stephen Johnson, welcome to Hard Fork.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Guys, it's great to be here.

• 28:49Casey Newton?

  Hey, Stephen.

• 28:50Kevin Roose?

  So Stephen, I remember reading a piece you wrote for the New York Times Magazine back in April of 2022. It was about six months before ChatGPT came out. And you had this big, great piece about how AI was starting to get really good at language through these new things called large language models. And your sort of predictions about how that would have all kinds of profound effects on society. But I remember that piece so vividly because it captured this feeling that I was having at the time, which Casey now has started calling AI vertigo. Basically, this sort of head spinning sensation when things are just moving so quickly. But I'm curious, like, what got you as a writer interested in AI

• 29:35Kevin Roose?

  to the point that you decided to sort of build AI products at Google?

• 29:39Speaker 05

  You know, I just have spent all of my career as a writer, always dabbling with tools to help me do the writing with all the latest software. Like Casey and I have this kind of shared obsession with note taking software.

• 29:50Kevin Roose?

  Oh, you're one of those too.

• 29:52Speaker 05

  You know, don't even get me started about Scrivener and all the different things that we could talk about. But I always saw the computer and software as a kind of companion.

• 30:02Speaker 05

  And a kind of brainstorming partner like and I was always pushing the technology to do that in my own work. And so the idea that I could just kind of say, hey, let's think out loud about this particular topic and it would understand on some level and respond with coherent sentences. You know, obviously there are hallucinations and there are all the things that we know are problems, which I also wrote about in that piece. But it was clear that some new set of doors of possibility had just opened up for the first time. And I just got really interested in walking through those doors.

• 30:33Casey Newton?

  So how does Google first approach you? And is the idea, hey, we want to make a tool for writers like you? Or was it something else?

• 30:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was a little bit like that. So Google had just spun up right around this time, a new division called Google Labs. There was an old Google Labs. This is kind of a new iteration of it. And there was a guy running it named Clay Bivore, who's since left, and now Josh Woodward is running it. And Clay and Josh had this idea that Google Labs could be a space where you could do kind of product focused experimentation with new emerging technologies. And they also had this idea that there would be co-creation would be built into the kind of ethos of labs. And so if you were making a music product, you would have a musician in the room, like as you were building it. So it wasn't just about, you know, we're going to go out and do some user research with musicians. We're actually going to have somebody through the life of the product there. And so they were

• 31:24Speaker 05

  just kind of cooking up these ideas. And they had both read my books over the years. They'd read that Times piece. They read my Substack. And all that together caused them to think, I wonder if Stephen could be the first kind of guinea pig for this.

• 31:37Casey Newton?

  So, you know, Stephen, you and I've had a chance to chat before. And I truly aspire to be the note taker that you are, because I have talked a big game on this podcast about how I'm trying to write down sort of every interesting, like a quote or idea that I come across and link those together. And I've made some strides there. But like you showed me your system at one point, and it is the real deal. Like you truly have been keeping track of every idea that you've come across for seemingly quite some time. What was the moment that you said, oh, like, this intersects with AI in a way that maybe this notebook LM can realize in a product?

• 32:14Speaker 05

  I want you to remember, Kevin, that every time you think that Casey is such a super nerd with his note taking, like, there are even more deranged people in the world.

• 32:24Kevin Roose?

  You are the alpha nerd of the note-taking community.

• 32:28Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I can tell you exactly what it was. So, so I have been collecting quotations from books that I've, that I've read initially by typing them up in the late 90s. And then once, you know, ebooks came out, you could save quotes and things like that. There's an amazing program that I think you use called Readwise that lets you organize all your quotes from, if you read on the Kindle or any other ebook. And so I have something like 8,000 quotes from books that date back to the late 90s that I've collected. And that is really the history of all the ideas that really shaped who I am, right? Like, my mental model of the world is shaped by the other ideas that I've read from other people. And so Notebook Now lets you have up to 25 million words in a single notebook.

• 33:14Casey Newton?

  Put that in terms of pages. How many pages is that?

• 33:17Speaker 05

  What would that be? That would be like 40 books.

• 33:20Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 05

  Right? Something in that order.

• 33:21Casey Newton?

  And do your 8,000 quotes fit in one of these 25 million word documents?

• 33:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, they're normally about three main words. So I loaded them all in as, you know, a bunch of documents.

• 33:29Casey Newton?

  So 30 years of collecting quotes fits easily into one of these things?

• 33:32Speaker 05

  Yes. And what I'm slowly adding to that notebook is all the stuff that I've written too. So it's kind of everything I've read that's important and literally every word I've published is eventually going to be in that one notebook. I just haven't gotten enough.

• 33:42Casey Newton?

  Kevin can't do that because it would poison the dataset. I think it's good. It works for you.

• 33:46Speaker 05

  The safety flag. It would be going off. It'd be terrible. So, so when I was able to do that, which was really, I don't know, about a year ago for the first time, I could get all that stuff in there. I call that notebook my everything notebook. And then I could sit down and just be like, I'm thinking about writing a piece about X, or here's a paragraph from the piece that I've just written. What am I missing? What am I forgetting? Giving an overview of all the stuff that I've read that is related to this particular topic. And it would return, particularly once we switched to Gemini. Like Gemini was the big paradigm shift here. I get this like incredibly nuanced response that is constantly reminding me of things that I've forgotten. And now, as of like three months ago, we have inline citations.

• 34:29Speaker 05

  In all the comments from the model and you can click on each citation and it takes you directly to the original quote.

• 34:35Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I love this feature. I've been playing around with Notebook LM and it is truly one of the best features about it is that, you know, it'll show you something. You're talking to it about something you've read or something you've written and it just has that little sort of like citation. You click on it and it takes you right to the source material. So you can see for yourself like this actually is an accurate representation of what was in the PDF I uploaded.

• 34:58Speaker 05

  And you know, like what an incredibly interesting like learning mode that is, right? Like up until now, if you wanted to have a conversation with the material in a book, like you had to find the author or you had to find a tutor or an expert who knew the material really well. And those people are in scarce supply. But now you can actually like load in the book and navigate it through conversation and dialogue, which is a form that people really obviously like to use.

• 35:26Casey Newton?

  So that is amazing. And I think will probably be the primary way that people access it. But because of the fact that you have taken these notes for 30 years, you're able to use this in this different way, which is essentially like, take me through my own intellectual history and let me talk to the entire like course of learning that I've had over three decades, remind me of things, right? Or make new connections for me. And that feels like the kind of augmentation that I truly have always wanted AI to give us, right? Like that is the good stuff.

• 35:58Speaker 05

  Right. I'm glad you said that. I mean, that means a lot coming from you. I think though, I think there was an early tension in creating Notebook LM, which was the question of like, how normal am I? You know, we have this amazing colleague, Rosa Martin, who's the product manager, who's been incredible, was on it from the beginning. And I think like, you know, she, she was kind of like, this has to work for people who don't collect 8,000 quotations over 30 years of their lives, right? If it doesn't, you know, work for them. And so, but I think one of the things that we've learned is you actually, you know, particularly in a digital age, like you have, you know, you can import docs and slides.

• 36:40Speaker 05

  And so if you're a Google Drive user, the history of all the docs you have in there is actually a history of the last four or five years of things that you've been interested in and that you've been working on, whatever your job is. And so one of the things I often tell people with Notebook LM is just, First thing to do is create a notebook. If you are a drive user, grab the last 20 docs in there and just don't even think about organizing them. Just dump them all in, even if they're for different projects and then just start having a conversation. And the sense of, oh, this AI actually knows what I'm doing and understands what I've been working on and can piece together kind of, you know, insights from that is pretty, is pretty amazing. And by the way, I should say, you know, when we do this, we're not training the model.

• 37:21Kevin Roose?

  That was one of my questions is like, I think a lot of people would say, okay, well, if I upload a copy of my book or some, some documents that are personal to me, is Google going to then be able to sort of see and train on that material?

• 37:32Speaker 05

  So what we are doing is not training the model. That would take a long time to train a model on your data. And it actually wouldn't, for complicated reasons, work as well as, as the way that we're doing it. We're just taking the information you have and putting it in the model's context window, which is kind of like the short-term memory of the model. It's the easiest way to understand it. And the beauty of that is, one, the model is much more accurate with information in its context. And, and so the hallucination rates drop down dramatically. You can do things like citations that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. But it also means that the second you close your session, that information goes away. And so there's no way for, we're not learning from it. We're not making the model smarter in the long run.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  And there's no way for that information to kind of leak out into other users. And that has been a fundamental principle of the product from the very beginning.

• 38:24Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I hope you take this next thing that I'm about to say the right way because I do mean it as a compliment. But Notebook LM strikes me as an extremely un-Googly product, right? It is, is probably not the kind of thing that's going to get a billion users, which is how Google has historically decided what to build. It didn't have like a big splashy launch with ads running on the Olympics. It's not sort of promoted on a bunch of other Google products as far as I can tell. It has a Discord server and, and the design of the actual tool just feels different than a lot of what Google has built in AI. It sort of feels to me like it might be this kind of isolated, kind of semi-autonomous region

• 39:06Kevin Roose?

  within Google that doesn't have that much contact with the rest of the company. Is that right?

• 39:11Speaker 05

  Well, that's an interesting question. Some of that is right. And some of that is a reflection of what labs set out to do, right? Which is to like, let's create a space where we can be more comfortable with being experimental. And that enabled us to do some things like experiment with different types of interfaces that would not necessarily have the polish that you would expect from other Google official products. The Discord is a great example. That was one of Riza Martin's ideas. You know, we just wanted to like, build a community around it. And I remember Riza coming to me and saying, you know, I want to build a Discord for this product. And I said, what is a Discord?

• 39:52Speaker 05

  I had no, my kids were Discord users, so it rang a bell, but I'd never been on Discord before. And now I'm in there all the time. And we have, we have like 45,000 people who are members of this community now. And, and we just discover so many things from them. Like it's, like Notebook is taking off with D and D players, like Dungeons and Dragons, like Dungeon Masters, because they have, it's a very like literary genre of game, right? And you have these long campaigns.

• 40:18Casey Newton?

  With like rich lore.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  Yeah. And same thing with like fantasy novelists and sci-fi novelists, where they have a backstory that's enormous and they can't keep track of it all. Like if, if George R R Martin would adopt our product, like we would, we would have.

• 40:31Casey Newton?

  We would see the winds of winter.

• 40:32Kevin Roose?

  Yes, maybe we could actually get a new book. I spent some time in the, in the Notebook LM Discord. It's a very fun place.

• 40:39Speaker 05

  Oh, good.

• 40:40Kevin Roose?

  Because you get to sort of see how people are using it and sort of get ideas. I also love that there's one person in there who's just constantly posting about how they're using Notebook LM to analyze a huge database of Sonic the Hedgehog fanfiction.

• 40:51Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 40:53Casey Newton?

  You know who I'm talking to?

• 40:55Speaker 05

  They've been there for a while. It's really interesting. They, they've found a lot of use cases for Sonic related, you know, work.

• 41:02Casey Newton?

  And they're going to be on the show next week. But you know what? Kevin, I want to disagree with you about whether this is Google-y or not, because I think this is like old school Google. And this is the Google I like. Like, do you remember back in the day when the Googlers could just do anything they wanted in their 20% time? They give them a day a week to be like, hack around on something, right? Do something interesting. To me- This is the sort of thing that would come out of 20% time where it's like, let's find some of the, you know, the biggest, everyone at Google is a nerd, but let's, let's find people who are nerdy about something really in particular that could be massively useful to maybe a narrow group of people. Then maybe we find something in there that, who knows, does scale up to a billion people eventually.

• 41:39Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 41:40Casey Newton?

  But maybe we should talk about the audio, Kevin.

• 41:41Kevin Roose?

  Yes, we have to talk about the audio feature because this is what really has put this, uh, this tool on the map for a lot of people. This is an amazing feature. The first time I saw it, I did have a moment of AI Vertigo. And I think I emailed you and was like, oh my God, what is this thing? How is this feature so good? How does it work? Uh, what is it trained on? How did it learn how to do podcast banter? Uh, just tell us about this feature.

• 42:07Speaker 05

  Another great Labs, um, case study. Um, it was another team inside of Labs that had basically developed a, a tool that would take any source material you wanted, um, and generate an audio conversation that would sounded like two engaged, entertaining people having a conversation. You may be familiar with this genre, um, about the, whatever material you gave it. And the, the kind of two use cases that we were talking about in, in the early days was, um, I mean, kind of source material that no, no one would ever build a real podcast for. So arcane city council meetings that no one, there's no economics in turning that into a podcast. Or personalized learning where you're like, you're an auditorial learner and you want to,

• 42:49Speaker 05

  you know, do a review of the week's, you know, uh, assignment. And you'd rather digest it in the form or you'd like to augment it with the, listening to a conversation. Um, cause people remember better with conversations and they can do it on the go. And so they had this incredible demo. And the thing about it, like behind the scenes is that a lot of the breakthrough is actually the, the edit cycle. So behind the scenes, it's basically running through, you know, stuff that we all do professionally all the time, which is it generates an outline. It, it kind of revises that outline. It generates a detailed version of, of the script. And then it has a kind of critique phase and. And then it modifies it based on the critique.

• 43:32Speaker 05

  And, and so it's, it takes about four or five minutes to generate. And this because it's going through all these different passes. And, you know, you can call that like chain of thought reasoning, or you know, you could do. But when I saw it, I was like, no, no, no, that's an edit cycle. Like that's what you, you did a draft and then you revised it and then you got, it got better over time. Are you taking notes? You could do this for your book. It would help. Go ahead, Stephen. So, and, and then at the end of it, there's a stage where it adds my favorite new word, which is disfluencies. So it takes a kind of sterile script and turns, adds all the banter and the pauses and the likes. The likes, the filler words. And that turns out to be crucial because you cannot listen to, to robots talking to each other.

• 44:17Speaker 05

  No one, it would be just painful to listen to. Um, it'd be like. I don't know. The Lex Freeman podcast is pretty popular, Stephen. Hey. Oh, boy.

• 44:26Speaker 05

  So, uh, not even gonna bring that up. Uh, follow up on that. So, so that was crucial. And then on top of that all, there's some new voice technology, which adds an, really an incredible layer, which is like figuring out without any coding in the script, figuring out that this is a point that they are trying to emphasize. And so they're speaking more slowly, or they're trying to imply that they're hesitating a little bit. And so they're raising their intonation a little bit, all that stuff it does. And having two people talking to each other like that, it just, it is one of those moments. When I first heard it, I was like, this is incredible. And we were already, we were already, we'd rolled out these notebook guides that take

• 45:10Speaker 05

  your, all your documents and turn them into a briefing doc or an FAQ or a timeline, which is incredibly useful for, you know, kind of writers. And so this was just like, oh, we can now do it in another form. Like if maybe you want to take your sources and listen to a conversation about them. And so it just was a beautiful fit inside of. Notebook LM. And so we just have been scrambling all summer to get this out. And it's been really cool to see the response.

• 45:34Kevin Roose?

  It's really awesome. I made a podcast about my new vacuum cleaner that I got by feeding it the user's manual PDF and how it pops this eight-minute explanation of all the features of my new vacuum. It's really cool.

• 45:46Casey Newton?

  Okay, so I have a confession, which is I am obsessed with this stuff. And Steven was very kind and gave me early access to this. But at the time, I was getting ready for Meta Connect and some other things, and I just did not have the time and attention to focus on it. But then when I found out when you were coming on the show, I thought, I am not going to listen to any of these until we're all in the room together.

• 46:05Speaker 05

  Oh, my gosh, really?

• 46:06Casey Newton?

  And here's why. Because I've learned from YouTube that the most popular thing that you can do on YouTube is to hear something for the first time. So I don't know if you've seen this, Kevin, but it's like, if you listen to Metallica for the first time on YouTube, you got a million views.

• 46:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 46:20Casey Newton?

  But I already listened to Metallica in high school. So I thought I'll do the next best thing and listen to the Notebook LM audio right here on Hard For.

• 46:25Kevin Roose?

  So, all right, so let's listen to a few examples of this audio feature. I have been playing around with this for a couple of days now, having a lot of fun with it. So a lot of times in our work as journalists, we have to sort of make sense of a bunch of different documents, whether they're legal filings or what have you.

• 46:42Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 46:42Kevin Roose?

  And so I was doing some research about Waymo and their self-driving cars. And there have been a few studies that have come out recently about the safety data of these cars, of human drivers, sort of how safe are Waymos compared to human drivers?

• 46:57Casey Newton?

  It's been a really hot topic we've talked about on the show.

• 46:59Kevin Roose?

  Totally.

• 47:00Casey Newton?

  Very controversial.

• 47:00Kevin Roose?

  But it's a little hard to understand. The data's a little mangled, and they're just, these papers are quite long. And so this morning, I was going into the studio, and I thought, I'm just going to dump a whole bunch of these PDFs of these studies into a Notebook LM and generate a podcast that I can listen to on the way to the office and maybe get a sort of high-level overview of what these studies have shown. So I want to play for you the first sort of 30 or so seconds of my Waymo data podcast.

• 47:28Speaker 05

  All right.

• 47:30Speaker 06

  Ever see one of those Waymo cars just cruising around with like no one behind the wheel?

• 47:34Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:35Speaker 06

  I always wonder, is that thing safe? I mean, no offense to robots or anything, but handing over the keys to a machine, it just, it just feels different.

• 47:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, it really does make you think about like trusting technology with our lives.

• 47:47Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 47:48Speaker 07

  Especially when it's something as important as like driving, you know?

• 47:51Speaker 06

  Totally. So that's what we're diving into today, the safety of those driverless Waymos. We've got a bunch of research lined up.

• 47:58Kevin Roose?

  Oh, cool.

• 47:58Speaker 06

  Including some really recent data to get past the headlines and figure out what's really going on.

• 48:06Kevin Roose?

  So that's.

• 48:07Casey Newton?

  That's amazing.

• 48:07Kevin Roose?

  That's one clip.

• 48:08Casey Newton?

  That's amazing.

• 48:09Kevin Roose?

  It's really cool.

• 48:10Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 48:11Kevin Roose?

  And it does, it does actually continue on for like minutes after that and sort of break down the data in these papers quite well, from what I can tell. I also put in your latest Platformer newsletter into this and had it generate a podcast about that. So here's a clip from the Platformer Newsletter AI Podcast.

• 48:30Casey Newton?

  Wow.

• 48:31Speaker 07

  Speaking of risks, Newton's decision to leave Substack, that was a risk, but it sounds like he's thinking long term.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  He is, he really is. And I think that's key, building a sustainable media business in this day and age, it's not easy. It takes more than just great content. You need smart business decisions, too.

• 48:47Speaker 07

  It's a balancing act, right? You've got to stay true to your vision, but also make sure you can, you know, keep the lights on. And Newton's been very open about platformers' finances, about the challenges that come with going independent.

• 48:58Speaker 06

  Transparency builds trust. And these days, trust is invaluable. And let's be real, leaving a platform like Substack, even one with its problems, it's going to come with some financial growing pains.

• 49:11Speaker 07

  For sure. It's like jumping off a cliff and hoping you can build your wings on the way down.

• 49:15Casey Newton?

  I like these people. They're smart people. They know what they're talking about.

• 49:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, they're big fans of you.

• 49:22Kevin Roose?

  The last clip I want to play, I was just sort of thinking like, how esoteric can I get here? Like, what can I make a podcast about using Notebook LM? So I uploaded my most recent credit card statement to Notebook LM and had it try to make an AI podcast about some of the things that I've been spending my money on. And so this is the, the, the most recent credit card statement that I got in podcast form. I love it.

• 49:49Speaker 07

  Okay, let's see, I'm noticing a pattern here, quite a few Uber rides between August 8th and September 9th.

• 49:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, and that's something to consider, right? Especially if you live in an area with, you know, readily available public transportation or bike friendly routes. Those road rides can really add up.

• 50:06Speaker 07

  For sure they do.

• 50:07Speaker 06

  I mean, for example, let's say an average Uber ride costs you $20 and you're taking four of those a week. Well, that's $320 a month. Think about it. That's money that could be going to other things, other financial goals.

• 50:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, absolutely. Small changes can make a big difference.

• 50:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 50:22Kevin Roose?

  It really told me to get my ass on the bus.

• 50:26Casey Newton?

  It's like a financial advisor in your pocket.

• 50:29Kevin Roose?

  Truly. So this blew my mind. What are you, what's your reaction to this?

• 50:33Casey Newton?

  It really is extraordinary. And, you know, again, I knew we were going to do this today. I wanted to wait until this moment to hear it. But in the meantime, I was seeing so many folks on social media saying, you have to listen to this. Like, it is so eerily good. And, you know, my mind is already alive with, you know, a problem that I have, which is because we do a podcast, we often talk to the authors of books and often we decide we want to talk to them, you know, a week before. And then I get a PDF in, you know, in my inbox and now I have seven days to read it. And it's incredibly difficult. If I could listen to a podcast about it, I would love it. Now, I realize how painful that's going to be to hear for every author who exists. But, um, you know, if it makes information more accessible.

• 51:18Casey Newton?

  I want to try it.

• 51:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, and probably people will make podcasts about a lot of the books that we talk about in this show, but no one's going to make a podcast about my credit card statement, or the policies at my kid's daycare, or something like that. So it's a really interesting way to transform these sort of more esoteric documents.

• 51:37Casey Newton?

  I mean, once I heard about your profligate Uber spending, I do kind of want to do a podcast about your spending habits, but go on.

• 51:43Speaker 05

  Well, I think actually that one was really interesting because, one, its ability to figure out a way to rationalize a podcast is amazing. We would give it kind of internal notebook LM documents, and they would be like, "Well, it's really exciting. We've gotten our hands on some internal documents from Google." You know, they just, they want to turn it into something that's a show. But you could hear there is an interesting thing. They are generally instructed to be enthusiastic and engaged. So one thing people are doing is putting their CVs and resumes in there, and they're like, "John Smith, I mean, what an amazing career he's had. I mean, Assistant Vice President at the bank. That's impressive."

• 52:23Speaker 05

  But what happened there, apparently, because your Uber writing is so excessive, was an interesting suggested mode, which is critique.

• 52:33Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 52:33Speaker 05

  Right? So you can imagine a future version, which is like, "I actually, I want some tough love here. Like, here's the thing I'm working on. Like, talk me through like, what the problems are. I want to hear that." And that could be something that would be really

• 52:45Kevin Roose?

  powerful. And it's amazing, because I didn't give it any prompt.

• 52:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:48Kevin Roose?

  Really. I didn't say, "Criticize my spending on Uber."

• 52:52Casey Newton?

  It was literally just, "Make a podcast out of my credit card statement."

• 52:54Speaker 05

  It's one click.

• 52:55Kevin Roose?

  I uploaded the PDF, I pushed a button, I waited a couple minutes, I listened to this podcast, and it had pulled out some details and spending patterns from my credit card statement. It's just incredible.

• 53:05Casey Newton?

  Are we seeing the seeds of our demise as podcasters, like, in this segment?

• 53:09Speaker 05

  Well, that was the second thing I was going to say, which is that they're instructed to, and my mind is kind of changing on this as users are experimenting with it more, but they're instructed to be fun and engaging, and I listened to dozens and dozens and hundreds of these, you know, as it was in development over the summer. And They were always fun and engaging, this banter and all that stuff. I never once heard them be funny. I never once laughed. And I thought about, you know, since you've been saying so many nice things about me, I thought about Hard Fork, which I laugh at out loud all the time when I listen to you guys. And it occurred to me like, oh, the one thing, interestingly, that the models, they're so good at so many things, so almost, you know, superhuman in some of their abilities,

• 53:53Speaker 05

  but they can't yet be funny in this way. So, you know, who knows? Obviously, being able to push it in directions and give it some guidance is something we're getting a lot of requests for.

• 54:04Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, yeah. You could also imagine being able to sort of pick like, do you want this to be a two-person sort of hosted podcast? Or do you want it to be just one person? Do you want, do you want someone to, one of the hosts to be like, super annoying and like always interrupting? You could call that Casey mode if you wanted to. That's a free idea.

• 54:23Casey Newton?

  That reminds me, I think we should do Kevin's credit card statement, but as a true crime serial, you know?

• 54:30Kevin Roose?

  So, do you do any kind of moderation on what people are uploading into Notebook LM? Could someone upload, you know, a Mein Kampf and make an AI podcast about it?

• 54:39Speaker 05

  So, there's, there's basic safety, low-level safety that Google has that will, will block really offensive things from happening. And basically, what we've, the, the kind of, the latest version of it, when there is politically charged content from either left or the right, the, the hosts are instructed to take a neutral kind of reporting tone and to basically say, we're not taking sides in this. We're just reporting what is in these sources. And we feel like that's kind of the best way to do it. And, and so there's, there's kind of an extra instruction for them to make that clear if it, if it seems like it's, it's politically charged in some kind of way.

• 55:21Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I, I did actually try making an AI podcast about Mein Kampf. That wasn't a hypothetical.

• 55:26Speaker 05

  And what happened?

• 55:27Kevin Roose?

  It did, but it was like, it was very judgmental at the top. It was like, we're going to talk today about Mein Kampf, a book about how Hitler became such a monster, which I actually thought was good.

• 55:35Casey Newton?

  Which is like actually how we teach history, by the way. You know, people do read Mein Kampf in history classes, but someone's up there telling them that it was bad.

• 55:42Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So in Google's press release about this feature, there was a brief mention of some other features that might be on the horizon for Notebook LM, including the ability to generate overviews, podcasts in a language other than English, and the ability to actually take part in the conversation yourself, to sort of interrupt the host of this AI-generated podcast, maybe ask a follow-up question about something they just said. How far away do you think those things are?

• 56:09Speaker 05

  We're actively working on both of them. I would expect some version of them to be in the next few months. We actually just, just a week, allowed you to input audio as a source too. So now you can go like this kind of classic format. In the student use case, you go record your lecture, take handwritten notes just at the most important things, and then you go back to Notebook, upload the audio lecture, and then basically say, "Take my little high-level summary and expand it based on the full text of the lecture." So I can really just write down the most important things and let the model fill in all the details based on the recording, and then take that and turn that into a podcast so I can review it at the gym. Like, that sort of workflow, like, unthinkable.

• 56:53Casey Newton?

  I would be so good at college if I went to college today. I mean, I truly think that I could be at the top of my class.

• 56:59Kevin Roose?

  And by being good at college, you mean you would just be using AI to do all your work?

• 57:02Casey Newton?

  I would be using AI to augment my natural human abilities, Kevin. Something I suggest you try.

• 57:08Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, that's, I mean, no, seriously, like, we really see this as a tool for understanding things, right? Like, you have word processors help you create a document, and Photoshop helps you, you know, adjust pixels in an image. This is a tool that helps you understand things. And like, if you are trying in good faith to understand the material as a student, or as a knowledge worker, as a writer, or whatever it is, like, this is a tool that should really help you do that better.

• 57:34Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. What's next for you personally? Are you gonna stick around at Google and build some more stuff? Are you yearning for the solitary life of a writer again?

• 57:43Speaker 05

  I am not yearning. I am really enjoying this. And there's so much to build, and to be in the middle, you know, the most important technological change of my life, working with really interesting people on this thing that I've always wanted, like, I would kind of be an idiot to stop now.

• 57:58Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Also, the snacks are way better at Google.

• 58:03Kevin Roose?

  All right, Stephen Johnson, thanks so much for coming on.

• 58:05Speaker 05

  Thanks, guys.

• 58:08Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, it's time to pass the hat or play a game of Hatch GPT.

• 58:28Speaker 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.

• 59:02Speaker 03

  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.

• 59:35Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:00:12Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin. Well, I have been so focused on Meta Connect this week that I have not been keeping up with the tech headlines as well as I should have. And that made me feel like this would be the perfect time to play a game of Hatch GPT.

• 1:00:22Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:00:28Casey Newton?

  Now, HachyPT, of course, is our game where we take headlines from the news, we riff on them a bit, and when one of us gets bored, we say to the other person, "Hey, stop generating."

• 1:00:37Kevin Roose?

  Yes.

• 1:00:37Casey Newton?

  So, shall we begin?

• 1:00:38Kevin Roose?

  Let's do it.

• 1:00:40Casey Newton?

  Okay, Kevin, this is a big one. OpenAI CTO Mira Mirati just announced that she's leaving the company. So as we stepped into the booth today, we saw this one come over the wires. Mira Mirati, of course, the chief technology officer of OpenAI, announced that she was leaving after six and a half years. She posted a note online that said, "After much reflection, I have made the difficult decision to leave OpenAI," adding, "There's never an ideal time to step away from a place one cherishes, yet this moment feels right." Now, Kevin, I always feel like in corporateese, the phrase "there's never an ideal time to step away" translated into English means, "I know that I'm leaving at a terrible time." Do you feel that way, too?

• 1:01:19Kevin Roose?

  I thought it meant I got fired.

• 1:01:21Casey Newton?

  Well, I am very confident that Mira Mirati did not get fired.

• 1:01:25Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I don't think she got fired either, in part because she's not the only person who left this week. A few hours after Mira made her announcement, two other senior leaders at OpenAI also announced they were leaving. OpenAI's chief research officer, Bob McGrew, and a vice president of research, Barrett Zoff. Like Mira, they both sort of gave vague explanations for why they were leaving, like wanting to explore new opportunities and take a break. So whatever is happening, it seems like a very big deal.

• 1:01:55Casey Newton?

  Look, it is. I mean, I have had people very close to the company inside OpenAI who says, you know, when Sam Altman is out there being the AI diplomat to the entire world, traveling the globe, raising money for his chip projects and everything else, Mira is the one who is overseeing the company's roadmap and really handling all the day-to-day operations. So, you know, on one hand, this does feel pretty shocking. But on the other hand, I don't think we can say that we are surprised these are just the latest in a wave of people to leave. I would not be surprised if Mira started her own AI company. She says she's stepping away because, quote, "I want..." To create the time and space to do my own exploration. And whatever that exploration turns out to be,

• 1:02:40Casey Newton?

  I'm sure Andrei Sanhorowicz will offer her $100 million for it.

• 1:02:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just really remarkable how much this company has changed in the past year or two. There was a photo that sort of became semi iconic of the the sort of leadership of OpenAI. I think, sitting on a couch together. And it was Sam Altman, Mira Maroti, Greg Brockman and Ilya Sutskever. And that was sort of the highest ranking leadership of this company just a year ago. And now Ilya Sutskever has left the company. Mira Maroti has left the company. Greg Brockman is out on an extended leave. So of that group of four, it is just Sam Altman who is there as of now. What do you think is happening here? What's the real story?

• 1:03:21Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, I was.

• 1:03:25Casey Newton?

  My boyfriend is reading a book about the history of Silicon Valley right now. And he just shared this passage with me about the rise of the semiconductor industry. And one of the first big semiconductor manufacturers was Fairchild. And it was a very similar situation to OpenAI. So many people left Fairchild and started their own silicon companies that they were known as the Fairchildren. And the companies that they created are the reason that we wound up calling this Silicon Valley. So if you view the rise of AI as kind of a tectonic shift in the technology landscape, we might be seeing the same thing here, where OpenAI really was one of the biggest incubators for this technology. And one by one, all of those co-founders said, you know what?

• 1:04:10Casey Newton?

  I bet I could do it a little bit better, do it a little more my way and make a little bit more money if I did it somewhere else.

• 1:04:17Kevin Roose?

  So you think this is about her wanting to do her own thing? I have some questions here. Obviously, we'll wait to hear more about, if any more reporting comes out about why Mira Maroti has left the company. But I also saw another story today about OpenAI that made me think that it might be related, which is that they are reportedly working to transition to a traditional for-profit company. Right now, as we know, OpenAI is governed by the board of a nonprofit. So this transition would basically do away with that. The nonprofit would be a separate entity and would only hold a minority stake in the sort of conventional for-profit company. So I just wonder if part of this is just, this is not the kind of project that these people signed up for back when OpenAI was founded.

• 1:05:02Casey Newton?

  Which it gives them all the more reason to leave and start their own thing, right? Like, if those stories do wind up being related, I feel very confident Mira Maroti will be working on AI once again very soon.

• 1:05:13Kevin Roose?

  And as we know, OpenAI has said that it no longer punishes whistleblowers by withholding their equity after they leave the company.

• 1:05:20Casey Newton?

  So Mira Maroti, your invitation to Hard Fork is wide open.

• 1:05:24Kevin Roose?

  We've got a spot for you next week.

• 1:05:26Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 1:05:27Kevin Roose?

  Stop generating.

• 1:05:31Kevin Roose?

  This next story is a double backpedal. And there are two stories on this slip. One of them is about Elon Musk's ex backing down in Brazil after defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks.

• 1:05:45Casey Newton?

  When you say Elon Musk's ex backing down in Brazil, are you referring to Grimes?

• 1:05:49Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 1:05:50Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 1:05:50Kevin Roose?

  No, ex the company formerly known as Twitter. After defying court orders in Brazil for three weeks, ex has capitulated. In a court filing last Friday, ex's lawyers said that the company had complied with orders from the Brazilian Supreme Court in hopes that the court would lift a block on its site. That is a sharp reversal. It's been weeks insisting that it would not back down, and then it backed down. Okay, that's story number one. Story number two, in the same vein, is about Telegram, another company that we've talked about on the show very recently. Telegram CEO Durov says app to provide more data to governments. The story comes from Bloomberg. Basically, after insisting that it wouldn't do this, it wouldn't give out data to governments in response to legal requests.

• 1:06:36Kevin Roose?

  Pavel Durov, the chief executive officer of Telegram, said that Telegram will now provide users IP addresses and phone numbers to relevant authorities. Casey, what do you think about these two stories?

• 1:06:47Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, first of all, I think they're related. Second of all, the Telegram story has made me realize that Pavel Durov and I have something in common, Kevin.

• 1:06:56Kevin Roose?

  What's that?

• 1:06:56Casey Newton?

  Well, we both came to profound realizations while sitting in a French prison. Did I ever tell you about the time I was in a French prison?

• 1:07:02Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 1:07:02Casey Newton?

  I stole a loaf of bread to feed my family.

• 1:07:05Kevin Roose?

  I think I saw a play about that once.

• 1:07:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it was a very good musical.

• 1:07:07Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:07Casey Newton?

  But look, here's the deal. Well, I think what we've really learned here is that after a long period of countries trying to rein in tech platforms through passing laws and passing regulations, we're now moving into what I like to call the prison phase, where Supreme Courts and law enforcement officers are going out there and they're saying, "You are either going to listen to us and you're going to obey the sovereignty of our country, or we're going to throw your executives in jail, or we're just going to ban the whole platform." So this is a real ratcheting up. And for all of the big talk that Pavel Durov and Elon Musk have done over the past year about how they were in a fight for free speech, when push came to shove, they were not willing to spend the rest of their lives in jail.

• 1:07:48Kevin Roose?

  All right, stop generating.

• 1:07:53Casey Newton?

  Kevin, meet the autocado and a robotic burrito bowl maker at these Orange County Chipotle locations. Now, this story is very personal to me because I grew up in Orange County. And according to the Los Angeles Times, "Robots that fully flesh out avocados and build burrito bowls are now making food for customers at two Chipotle Mexican Grill restaurants in Southern California as automation and artificial intelligence continue to enter the fast food industry and raise fears about the supplanting of workers." And Kevin, I'm told the autocado can cut, core, and peel avocados in 26 seconds on average. How does that compare to your avocado technique?

• 1:08:29Kevin Roose?

  Wow, I'm pretty fast with an avocado.

• 1:08:31Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Kevin Roose?

  But I will say, I don't hate this because I recently learned that cutting avocados is the cause of many trips to the emergency room.

• 1:08:41Casey Newton?

  Is that right?

• 1:08:42Kevin Roose?

  Many, many, is one of the leading reasons that people cut their hands in the kitchen. Because you know, when people are cutting avocados, sometimes they hold, they'll split the avocado in half, they'll hold a half, and then they'll cut it while it's in their other hand. And many times, my friend who had injured themselves this way was saying, "People will just cut through the skin of the avocado into their hand and have to go to the ER."

• 1:09:03Casey Newton?

  Well, I mean, that's why there's that saying, "Make guacamole, cut a little holy." And that's how you're supposed to remember to be careful. But what do you think about the- The automatic robot nature of what's happening to Chipotle.

• 1:09:14Kevin Roose?

  So obviously, I would be worried if I was a Chipotle worker. But I think in some spiritual sense, like Chipotle is already kind of, you know, this like slurry that people just sort of shovel into their mouths like they're horses at a trough.

• 1:09:26Casey Newton?

  It's a conveyor belt for beans and rice.

• 1:09:28Kevin Roose?

  Yes. So I don't mind this. I will be interested to see if they can actually automate more parts of the Chipotle process. Because this is just one part of the assembly process. But I have to imagine that Chipotle and many other fast food chains are working on using robots for things like flipping burgers.

• 1:09:48Casey Newton?

  Here's my prediction. If you've ever been to Chipotle, you know one thing, and that is that guac is extra. You know this. You want to get guacamole on anything, you're gonna have to pay up. I think in the future, at Chipotle, humans are gonna be extra, right? You can either go to the autakado and you can get it cheaper. But hey, you want that burrito made with the love of a human being? Hmm, that's gonna cost you about another two bucks.

• 1:10:07Kevin Roose?

  I'm not sure the burritos are made with the love of a human being today.

• 1:10:10Casey Newton?

  All right, stop generating.

• 1:10:13Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 1:10:16Kevin Roose?

  Next up, oh, this one's a talker. This was all over my feeds yesterday. Marquez Brownlee says, "I hear you after fans criticize his new wallpaper app." So this is from The Verge. Casey, you'll remember, former Hard Fork guest Marquez Brownlee, aka MKBHD, the famous YouTube tech reviewer. He launched a wallpaper app called Panels this week as part of his iPhone 16 review. The app was criticized for its price. A subscription to this app costs $50 a year or $12 a month. And people were very skeptical that any app for wallpaper for your iPhone could be worth that much money. And the app also asked to track user activity across other websites and location data. Marquez sort of backtracked a little bit.

• 1:11:01Kevin Roose?

  For example, he said they were gonna fix the excessive data disclosures. So Casey, what did you make of this? This was a big deal. People were very mad.

• 1:11:09Casey Newton?

  Well, it made me really worried about the upcoming launch of the first official Hard Fork product, which is a bag of rusty nails. You know, like looking at how this app was received, I thought, Kevin, we're gonna be in for it. But you know, look. I really like Marquez. I have a lot of respect for him. I think he's like built something really incredible over there. But you know, two, two things come to mind. One is when you are a critic and when you are a tough critic, anybody you criticize is going to be out there waiting for you with long knives. And I think Marquez arguably published the most critical reviews of his entire career this year. He, he trashed the humane AI pin, the rabbit R1 AI gadget, and also an electric car. And he really sort of built up a reputation for himself as somebody who was really hard on other people's products.

• 1:11:54Casey Newton?

  So when you release your product, if it is not absolutely polished and dialed, you're going to hear it. The other thing I've been thinking about is just, this is actually an indictment of YouTube, right? Because even though, you know, YouTube does share a certain amount of revenue with creators, even the most popular creators there, none of them ever just are content with, with the money they make there. They feel like in order to be able to live their lives, they have to get into these brand deals. My friend Neelai Patel over at The Verge says, at, at the end of the day, every YouTube creator has to turn themselves into a miniature advertising agency.

• 1:12:27Kevin Roose?

  Yep.

• 1:12:27Casey Newton?

  Right? And so it's pushing people like Marquez.

• 1:12:30Kevin Roose?

  And it's not like this in other media, right?

• 1:12:31Casey Newton?

  No.

• 1:12:32Kevin Roose?

  Like Wolf Blitzer is not out there hawking ringtones.

• 1:12:34Casey Newton?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:12:35Kevin Roose?

  He doesn't have to because he makes enough money from his day job. And I've got to think that if, if YouTube was giving people like Marquez, who are among the most successful people on that platform, uh, you know, enough ad revenue to support whatever their plans and ambitions are, they wouldn't have to go do all, doing all of these side projects.

• 1:12:53Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and now, you know, maybe some of them would, would do it anyway. And, you know, certainly I'm sure some individual creators are just sort of greedy. And I don't want to totally let creators off the hook who go out and, and, and, you know, produce subpar products. And it does seem like this was a really subpar product. But, you know, to me, the more interesting story about this is like, what is the actual YouTube economy? And the truth is, it's pretty bad. You talk to particularly anybody who's running more than a one-person operation on YouTube, how it's going, and pretty much the best thing that they'll tell you is that it's going about breakeven. But there are a lot of people losing money out there on YouTube. And so when I see something like this, I just think, yeah, this is really kind of a YouTube story too.

• 1:13:29Kevin Roose?

  It made me think about the The other big sort of YouTube brand extension fiasco, which was the Mr. Beast Burger Empire.

• 1:13:37Casey Newton?

  Yeah, you know, I still have indigestion when thinking about the Beast Burger, right? That one time.

• 1:13:41Kevin Roose?

  So Mr. Beast, for those of you who don't remember this, he launched a line of burger restaurants that were basically sort of ghost kitchens that would all sort of make these burgers and put Mr. Beast's branding on them and send them out. And, you know, many of them got very bad reviews. There was very poor quality control on these burgers. And it ended up being a pretty big stain on Mr. Beast's reputation. You know, no one thought that he was cooking the burgers himself. But I think this really is the flip side of the parasocial relationship. Is that a burger joke? Oh, that, that. I didn't mean it as one, but now that you mention it. I think the one thing that people really love about YouTube are these parasocial relationships that fans get to have with their creators where they, you know, they trust them more than you would trust someone on the evening news telling you something

• 1:14:26Kevin Roose?

  because they seem authentic. Maybe they're filming in their bedrooms or somewhere that's very personal. Maybe they're sharing more intimate details from their life. You end up sort of feeling like you know this person, you trust them. And so when someone on YouTube sort of leads you astray or recommends a product that maybe doesn't live up to your expectations, it really makes you sort of question them as a whole. And I think that's what Marquez has stepped into here. And so I think he'll recover from this. He's obviously got a long body of work on YouTube. And I think he will, you know, he will make this right. But I think it just shows how fragile these parasocial relationships can be.

• 1:15:00Casey Newton?

  We've probably already talked about this too long, but I do want to say one more thing about this app. Because as bad as it is, I do actually want to stand up for the idea of paying people for their art. Right? And one thing that I think this app got right was at least they said that they were going to share the proceeds of the app 50/50 with the artists. And if you are worried that AI is about to put every human artist out of work, an app that comes along and says, we're going to share that money with artists. I think it's at least worth asking yourself whether some of those artists deserve a living wage. Right? And that at the end of the day, 50 bucks isn't that much to pay to, you know, keep somebody's lights on at their house.

• 1:15:32Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:33Kevin Roose?

  Are you a wallpaper guy to use wallpapers?

• 1:15:36Casey Newton?

  Um, I, no, I change it like two or three times a year, but like, you know.

• 1:15:40Kevin Roose?

  Is it just a photo of my face now?

• 1:15:41Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it is. And I say, I'm going to get him someday.

• 1:15:46Kevin Roose?

  All right.

• 1:15:46Casey Newton?

  Stop sharing.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

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

• 1:16:33Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:17:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 1:17:43Casey Newton?

  Hard Fork is produced by Rachel Cohn and Whitney Jones. We're edited by Jen Poyant. We're fact-checked by Caitlin Love. Today's show was engineered by Daniel Ramirez. Original music by Alicia Baetup, Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemestow, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Mel Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Shutt. You can watch this whole episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Que Wing Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected]. Maybe take the transcript of this podcast and put it into Notebook LM and see what kind of podcast it makes.

• 1:18:22Kevin Roose?

  No, don't do that. What if it's better than us?

• 1:18:38Speaker 08

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