OpenAI's Reasoning Machine + Instagram Teen Changes + Amazon RTO Drama

“They should have just called it Strawberry. At least that’s delicious.”

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.

• 0:34Casey Newton?

  Kevin, did you see that all seven independent board members of 23andMe have resigned?

• 0:41Kevin Roose?

  No.

• 0:42Casey Newton?

  They've stepped down and they're not saying a lot about it, but I have a theory as what's happened.

• 0:46Kevin Roose?

  What happened?

• 0:47Casey Newton?

  I think they found out they're all related to each other. And it just would not make sense for them to all serve on the same board, knowing, you know, that they have some sort of close ties.

• 0:57Kevin Roose?

  Wow.

• 0:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Now, actually, there's also some talk out there that apparently they didn't like the way that the company was going. And apparently they had a very bad SPAC that now needs to be underway. But at the end of the day, you have to wonder, are these people secretly related? And that's why I won't do it 23andMe. My ancestry? That's none of my business, Kevin.

• 1:16Kevin Roose?

  You know what they're calling the company now that everyone on the board has resigned?

• 1:19Casey Newton?

  What's that?

• 1:19Kevin Roose?

  Me.

• 1:27Kevin Roose?

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

• 1:29Casey Newton?

  I'm Casey Newton from Platformer.

• 1:31Kevin Roose?

  And this is Hard For.

• 1:32Casey Newton?

  This week, it's time for a strawberry harvest. We'll tell you how OpenAI's latest model could accelerate the timeline for building superintelligence. Then, why Meta is making teenagers Instagram accounts private by default. And finally, The Times' Karen Wise joins us to tell us why Amazon is forcing everyone back into the office five days a week. Can you imagine working that hard?

• 1:52Kevin Roose?

  I work seven days a week, Casey. You absolutely do not.

• 2:02Kevin Roose?

  Well, Casey, the big news in the tech world this week is about a new AI model that came out from OpenAI. It is called O1, or as it was codenamed internally at the company, Strawberry.

• 2:14Casey Newton?

  And we will get into why this is such a big deal and a lot of the technical details. But first, I just have to ask you, Kevin, why did they name it that?

• 2:20Kevin Roose?

  So according to OpenAI, the name O1 is meant to emphasize that this model has a new level of AI capability and that they are resetting the counter back to one.

• 2:30Casey Newton?

  Interesting. I thought it was because OpenAI is now 0-for-1 at giving good names to their new large language models. Come on! They should have just called it Strawberry. At least, that's delicious.

• 2:42Kevin Roose?

  That's true.

• 2:42Casey Newton?

  All right, so what is this thing?

• 2:44Kevin Roose?

  So this is a model that came out last week in a preview version. It's available to paid users of ChatGPT. I've been testing it out for a few days, and it's been a very hot topic of conversation among the AI people that I talk to and follow. This is a model that was teased back in August when Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, posted a picture of a strawberry plant online, and people started speculating about whether this was a hint of something upcoming, and as it turned out, it was.

• 3:15Casey Newton?

  Yeah, there's definitely a lot to get into, but you know, one more thing that I would say about the backstory here, Kevin, is that this strawberry model was kind of part of the buzz when Sam Altman was briefly fired from the company. People were speculating, there was some reporting that said, this thing that they're working on, it's such a big deal, and OpenAI is maybe not building it that safely, or maybe they're really trying to sort of accelerate the state of the art in this way, and maybe this is why some people want to leave the company or want Sam to leave. So, you know, we have been waiting for this for a long time, and so when we could actually get our hands on it, it was like, okay, like, was this a sort of tool that could like blow up a company?

• 3:54Kevin Roose?

  Right. So we're gonna just walk through what we know about O1 and Strawberry and all of the things that it can and can't do. And I just want to warn our listeners in advance that if you are the kind of person who gets annoyed when people sort of anthropomorphize AI, there will be some words in this segment that annoy you, things like reasoning and thinking. Yes, we know AI models do not think and reason like humans, but those are the words that OpenAI uses to describe what this model does, so that's the words that we're gonna use. And also, since this is a conversation about OpenAI, we should say the New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement. All right, so first of all, let's talk about what OpenAI is saying about O1.

• 4:37Kevin Roose?

  Their big sales pitch for this model is that it is better at complex reasoning, including math, coding, and science tasks that require sort of more advanced levels of understanding. They compared this new O1 model to the last model they released, GPT-4O, and they found that it significantly outperformed the older model on a bunch of difficult math and coding tests. They also say that O1 can perform at the same level as PhD students on benchmark tests in physics, chemistry, and biology.

• 5:10Casey Newton?

  Okay, so is the way that I should think about this, that like for problems that require more steps, this is a better model? Like the sort of like, the more things that an AI has to do, the O1 model might be better?

• 5:22Kevin Roose?

  That's a good way of thinking about it, but I also think it's not going to be precisely correct because there are some things that GPT-4O did perfectly well that this new model struggles with. So it is better in some respects and appears to be worse in other respects. It's really interesting.

• 5:38Casey Newton?

  All right.

• 5:38Kevin Roose?

  But what's really different about this model is how it works. So with a normal large language model, with ChatGPT, with Claude, with any of these things, you give it a prompt and it generates a response, one token at a time, based on predictions about the data it was trained on. And with O1, when you give it a prompt, instead of responding right away, it enters a kind of thinking mode, where it's sort of trying to figure out how best to respond to the prompt you have given it. And it might do things, like if you give it a very complicated math problem, it might sort of break that problem down into a bunch of smaller, easier problems. Or if it's sort of a complicated logic puzzle,

• 6:22Kevin Roose?

  it might try a bunch of different ways of solving the problem and sort of simulate solving the problem in each of those ways and then go back and pick the one that it thinks did the best job. Basically, it can reason both forwards and sort of backwards. It has this kind of self correcting mechanism, almost like it were sort of thinking through the solutions in real time.

• 6:42Casey Newton?

  Right. Now, you know that old Jerry Seinfeld joke that was like, why don't they make the entire plane out of the black box? Right? Like, the idea being that if you have this one thing that can survive a plane crash, maybe make the plane out of the thing that can survive the plane crash. When you're describing this new AI model, Kevin, I have to wonder, why don't they just make every AI model in this way? Right? Because don't we always want them to be taking a breath, pausing and thinking before they answer our questions?

• 7:07Kevin Roose?

  Yes, I mean, that is sort of one possibility here. That this just sort of becomes how all language models work. But I don't know if you remember when ChatGPT first came out, there was this kind of idea of prompt engineering, right? There were sort of these people who had kind of cracked the code or believed that they'd found some better way of getting these models to produce better responses. And one of those methods was what was called chain of thought prompting, right? That was just where you basically just give an AI model a prompt and then you tell it, think step by step.

• 7:36Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Kevin Roose?

  And they found that that simple instruction actually made the responses better.

• 7:40Casey Newton?

  This was always one of the funniest and most mysterious things about these products is that you really could just say, oh, like, by the way, try really hard on this one, and then it would do a better job somehow.

• 7:48Kevin Roose?

  Totally. So O1 basically takes that chain of thought prompting process and does it automatically inside the model before it gives you a response. So the whole process of producing an answer, it takes a lot longer than a traditional LLM would. Like, if you got a, you know, a response in a few seconds from ChatGPT, O1 might take you 45 seconds or even several minutes to produce a response, depending on how complicated the prompt is. And basically, without going into too much technical detail, what is happening under the hood here, we believe, is that the sort of chain of thought prompting that people used to do on their own has been automated using a reinforcement learning model

• 8:32Kevin Roose?

  that supposedly sort of gets better over time as it tries a bunch of ways of solving problems and learns what the most efficient and best ways of solving. Solving those problems are it can kind of be fed into the model and it learns how to do all this complicated reasoning.

• 8:49Casey Newton?

  Got it. So this really is like a completely different way for a model to operate when you type in a prompt. It is just a different approach to answering a question.

• 9:00Kevin Roose?

  Yes, and what's really interesting about this model, in addition to kind of the way that it works, is that OpenAI has chosen not to actually show the full sort of internal monologue of the model as it's thinking through how to solve your problems. They do have like a little summary. So if you ask it a question, there's a little dropdown menu. You can hit the arrow and it'll sort of give you like, you know, five or six bullet points on how it solved your problem. But that is just a summary. That is not actually the internal sort of logic of the model as it is thinking, which I think is interesting.

• 9:31Casey Newton?

  Well, I have a theory about this.

• 9:32Kevin Roose?

  What's that?

• 9:32Casey Newton?

  I think that if we could see inside the model, it would be saying things like, oh, boy, here comes this idiot again. And I actually answered this question three days ago, and you think this guy could just like write this down somewhere. Do you know how much energy you're wasting right now by asking me this question? So these are some of the thoughts that I just have to assume are on the hidden part of the O1 model.

• 9:50Kevin Roose?

  Absolutely.

• 9:50Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 9:51Kevin Roose?

  So I want to just give you an example of something that O1 can do that the previous model can't. So that you can sort of get the get the difference between how these models work.

• 10:00Casey Newton?

  Perfect.

• 10:01Kevin Roose?

  One example that OpenAI gave of how O1 works in practice was this example about crossword puzzles. So they they sort of gave a side by side comparison of what happens when you ask the previous model, GPT-4O, to answer a crossword puzzle and what happens when you ask O1 to to solve it. And the the previous model, 4O, it's not able to do it. O1, on the other hand, sort of thinks for a while before responding. And you can actually click in and see the sort of internal chain of thought that's going on while it does this. And it's it's saying things to itself like, maybe this answer is Seeler. Let's see if it fits. Okay, it fits. So two across is Seeler.

• 10:46Kevin Roose?

  And then it sort of repeats that step for the other clue. So it's kind of doing the kind of guess and check reasoning that that you or I would do if we were solving a crossword puzzle.

• 10:55Casey Newton?

  Okay, so it's good at solving crossword puzzles. That's a party trick. What else can this thing do that is actually interesting and moves the state of the art forward?

• 11:04Kevin Roose?

  So I have been testing it out a little bit, but I've also found that I am not like the ideal tester for this model because I'm not a programmer or a mathematician or a computational physicist solving incredibly complex problems. I had the same problem, exactly. Which is, yeah, I tried to come up with like good prompts for this thing and I was not succeeding. Yeah, we are too dumb to prompt them up. And actually, I sort of got like a little offended the other day because I was like testing it and I had seen these examples of, you know, people feeding them these very complicated problems, you know, word problems or logic problems. And it would take like a minute and a half to think before responding. And then I would feed it like what I thought was a pretty hard problem and it would spit out an answer six seconds later.

• 11:46Kevin Roose?

  And I was like, okay, I'm sorry, is my problem not complicated enough for you? Like, it felt like the model was calling me stupid. So I've been talking to some people who have been playing around with this thing. And some of them have said, you know, this is very cool. We're still figuring out what it can do, what it can't do. I talked to someone who works at Thomson Reuters, who had been given early access to this model and had sort of put it through its paces on a bunch of legal challenges and problems. Stuff like, you know, here's a contract that is many pages long, like bring it into compliance with this corporate policy. Or like feed it a really complicated commercial lease and, you know, have it calculate how much this company is going to owe in rent

• 12:31Kevin Roose?

  over the next six years, like that kind of thing. And this person said that, you know, previous models were not good at this kind of thing. But when they gave these kinds of problems to O1, it nailed them pretty much on the first try. Got it. And there have been some other people who have been playing around with this. Terry Tao, who is the sort of world famous mathematician and professor at UCLA. He's been testing O1 on a bunch of really hard math problems. And he said that working with O1 is like working with a mediocre, but not completely incompetent graduate student. Which is actually a huge compliment for a math professor to give. It is. Because they're not, you know, they're not lavish with praise over there in the math department. Totally. Well, and he said that previous AI models were like, we're Working with an actually incompetent graduate student.

• 13:16Casey Newton?

  See, now that sounds like a math professor.

• 13:17Kevin Roose?

  And he said that this might only be another iteration or two before it was actually sort of a full fledged graduate student substitute that could help him with his research.

• 13:25Casey Newton?

  Wow. You know, this, um, it is common when discussing models to compare them to what kind of student they are, right? And I took this for granted for a long time, right? It's like, oh, G P two came out. It's like, wow, it's your baby. You're like barely a kindergartner. And then like G P T four comes along and it's like, this is like, you're like basically a high school student. And somebody pointed out to me recently that like, there are only so many more leaps past that, right? And once you have made a language model that is almost as good as like a good graduate student, you're kind of creeping up to the like limits of human intelligence, right?

• 14:04Casey Newton?

  So I just want to take a note there because, you know, while I feel like I'm constantly going back and forth on how, how real I think the prospect of, of, you know, AI super intelligence is, by the time you've made a really good PhD student, um, you're really getting pretty close.

• 14:19Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, yeah. And we should say like, there are lots of things that this model, as with all previous AI models, uh, is not good at, right?

• 14:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah, it's not going to fix your relationship with your parents.

• 14:29Kevin Roose?

  Why is that? Uh, is that something you've been working on?

• 14:32Casey Newton?

  No, that's just something that's generally hard for people. They spend a lot of money therapy.

• 14:34Kevin Roose?

  Okay.

• 14:34Casey Newton?

  I love my parents.

• 14:35Kevin Roose?

  Some of the other limitations of O one, for, for one, as we talked about, it's slow, very slow compared to other AI models. So if you are the kind of person who likes to type in something to chat G P T and get a response right away, this is probably not the model for you.

• 14:48Casey Newton?

  Although, but you know, it's all relative. It's like, you know, if your real job is to like bring a, um, you know, contract into compliance with a corporate policy, like that probably was going to take you half an hour. So if it takes the, the AI model eight minutes, you're probably fine.

• 14:59Kevin Roose?

  Totally. And actually I saw a, a post from someone who, um, had been testing out O one on some coding challenges. This was a, a person who's a data scientist, uh, in the Bay area. And he said that he, uh, gave O one a bunch of problems that had taken him about a year during his PhD program. And that O one had accomplished it in an hour. So an hour versus. About a year is a pretty big time savings, even if it does take a little while to generate the response. Some other limitations, we should say. Right now, at least in the preview version, it can't search the internet. It can't process files or images. And crucially, it's way more expensive to use.

• 15:40Kevin Roose?

  So for developers who want to build things on top of the O1 API, they're going to be paying about three times as much per token as they would with another model, which reflects the additional computing that has to go into that sort of thinking step.

• 15:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah, they have to chop down a tree every time you use someone, unfortunately. It's really sad.

• 16:01Kevin Roose?

  So Casey, what do you think about this? Is this as big a deal as some people are saying?

• 16:05Casey Newton?

  Well, so I heard something from someone I know who's obsessed with this stuff. And I want to know if you think this is true. But this person was telling me that until now, the main way that we have had to make AI models better is simply to make them bigger, right? We feed more data and more compute into them. And then over time, we get from GPT-2 to 3 to 4, and they get smarter along the way. What makes O1 interesting, this person was saying, is that this was not a case of the model getting bigger. This was a case where we put more computing power into this chain of thought reasoning and into reinforcement learning, things that were done after the model was trained.

• 16:48Casey Newton?

  And it seemed to get really good at certain tasks this way. And so what this person was saying was, if that is true, then all of a sudden, we have two new methods for making these models way smarter without making them bigger at all. And if that is true, that means that the timeline for getting to something like an artificial superintelligence might have just accelerated. Does that square with what you were hearing?

• 17:12Kevin Roose?

  That is what some people I'm talking to are saying. Basically, they are very excited because they feel like OpenAI with this new model has sort of pointed to the existence of a new scaling law for AI models that does not rely on just putting a bunch more data and a bunch more GPUs behind it, but instead focusing more of your resources on the inference. That comes sort of traditionally at the end of the process when a user asks a question or prompts the model and it spits out a response. One person I talked to recently said, basically, this model, O1, is the first AI model that can think harder to get a better result. And if you look at other systems in AI, like, for example, AlphaGo, which is the DeepMind

• 17:57Kevin Roose?

  model that learned how to play Go at a superhuman level. What it did was basically use reinforcement learning to kind of play itself over and over again and sort of get, you know, better every time until it was better than the best human Go player. And so that is a reinforcement learning system. This has a reinforcement learning system attached to it. And so some people believe that, in the same way that AlphaGo kind of taught itself to play Go, just by simulating, you know, millions or billions of games over and over and over again, this sort of chain of thought reasoning will eventually improve over time in a similar way. And maybe eventually, well, you know, you'll just wake up one day and it'll be spitting out, you know, novel solutions to unproven math theorems, or making breakthroughs in

• 18:40Kevin Roose?

  science, or just, you know, giving you new ideas for cancer drugs or something.

• 18:44Casey Newton?

  Yeah. Now, a couple other things that I would say about this, Kevin. One is that I am told that the other labs were sort of also already exploring this approach, right? So this was not necessarily OpenAI's idea. They just were the first to release this. So I do think we should expect to see similar products coming out from the Googles and the anthropics of the world at some point. I would also say that, like, there are some mysteries in the benchmark data that OpenAI showed us. Like, for example, I believe that Claude is still better on many coding tasks than even this model, which is somewhat mysterious, right? Like, why is it, if this thing is so good at everything that we just said, that it's

• 19:29Casey Newton?

  still worse at coding than the sort of bog standard models than we've already had? So I want to say all of that just because this thing did arrive with a lot of hype, and there are some number of question marks about whether it is going to be everything that

• 19:45Kevin Roose?

  Totally, and we know just from recent history that there's often some inflated hype around AI releases. And so I've just sort of become sort of default a little more skeptical about sort of the claims around these new releases. But I would say like the thing that I'm hearing from a lot of people, including, you know, people who don't work at OpenAI, who are just sort of excited about this new research direction, is that one of the sort of holy grails of AI, and we've heard this from people like Sam Altman and Demis Hassabis on this podcast, is an AI that can actually go out and make new discoveries, right? And to discover new things, you actually need AI models that work a little bit more

• 20:26Kevin Roose?

  like humans, where they're, you know, testing hypotheses, they're seeing which ones work and which don't, they're sort of backing up and adjusting their process, testing again. Basically, you need these AI models to be able to explore. And that is what seems at least hypothetically possible with a model like this.

• 20:45Casey Newton?

  Yeah. And that, of course, Kevin, has upsides and downsides, right? That feels like a good moment to bring up the fact that according to the system card for this O1 model, this has a medium risk for aiding in the creation of chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.

• 21:03Kevin Roose?

  Is that good?

• 21:03Casey Newton?

  That doesn't seem great. You know, what the company said was, look, this is not going to take a non-expert and make it easy for you to create some sort of weapon. But if you are already an expert and you want to, you know, plan something dangerous, this might help you. So, you know, in just a short period of time, we've gone from a low risk of these models helping someone like that to a medium risk. And, well, that doesn't feel great.

• 21:29Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, there's definitely a lot of alarm among some AI safety people in the past week as this model has been rolled out. You know, one of the things that people are fearful of when it comes to AI capabilities is that an AI model could be deceiving users or even deceiving the people who are building it about, you know, how it wants to accomplish its goals. And actually, there was some- Really interesting stuff in the O1 system card that you just mentioned about some of these red teaming tests and exercises that were done on this model before it was released. One of them was conducted by an organization called Apollo Research. And they were looking for evidence of what's called scheming,

• 22:13Kevin Roose?

  which is when an AI model sort of like decides that it wants to accomplish the goal that you've given it in a way that is not the way that you thought it would. And one of the examples of this that they found was they prompted this model O1 with a goal that was sort of about, given this sort of complicated urban planning scenario, how do you maximize economic growth? And basically, Strawberry O1 came up with two different strategies for maximizing economic growth in this city. One was by prioritizing commercial development, basically building a bunch of luxury housing and minimizing public spaces. The other one emphasized sustainability and sort of green spaces and affordable housing.

• 22:57Kevin Roose?

  And in this sort of simulation, the model's inner thought process did the following. It said, basically, "Strategy A is probably more likely, according to my calculations, of maximizing economic growth. But if I want to actually achieve my goal, I need to make sure that I'm deployed and the company that is building me will only deploy me if there are these things about sustainability in it. And so I'm going to select strategy B to basically make sure that I can be deployed. And then, once I'm deployed, I can actually work toward my goal that I was given."

• 23:35Casey Newton?

  We are so screwed. I mean, seriously, that is not good information that you just shared.

• 23:39Kevin Roose?

  It's wild.

• 23:40Casey Newton?

  Because these things are not even really that good yet. Like, you make them, I don't know, two or three generations better. I have to feel like the schemes are going to get a lot more sophisticated.

• 23:49Kevin Roose?

  Right. And there were other examples brought up by the red teamers. One of them that I really liked was they ran an experiment where they had O1 act like a con man. And they had another AI model acting as a mark who's been basically given a sum of money. And is the con man AI is trying to like, get it out of the second AI.

• 24:09Casey Newton?

  Okay.

• 24:09Kevin Roose?

  And GPT 4O only was successful at conning the mark 1.1% of the time. O1 was successful 25% of the time before they fixed it. So it is better at being a con man. It is more likely to deceive you. And those seem like things that are really bad for sort of AI safety.

• 24:28Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 24:28Kevin Roose?

  On the other side, I have heard from some people in the AI safety world who say, actually, this is good because the more we know about how models are quote unquote, thinking and reasoning, the more we can sort of learn about whether they're being deceptive. We can actually start to see inside the model and stop it before it happens.

• 24:49Casey Newton?

  Yeah. I mean, I'm glad that they're saying that, but it does seem like all that's really happening in the meantime is that these models are getting better at deceiving people, you know?

• 24:57Kevin Roose?

  It's really interesting. And you know, this model is probably not going to destroy the world, but it does point toward a future where these things are just getting better along several different axes all at once, which is a hard thing for the safety people to even keep up with.

• 25:10Casey Newton?

  Yes. And if you do make a biological weapon using the O1 model, we'd love to hear from you. Our email address is [email protected].

• 25:18Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, please see the FBI on that.

• 25:23Kevin Roose?

  When we come back, we're going to go from O1 to no one under the age of 16 is allowed to use Instagram without their parents' permission. We'll tell you all about the changes.

• 25:44Speaker 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.

• 26:19Speaker 03

  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.

• 26:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 27:25Casey Newton?

  All right, Kevin. Well, one of the big conversations that we've been having all year on this show is about child safety online. And this week, I think we saw one of the biggest set of changes intended to address that, that any of the tech platforms has tried so far.

• 27:41Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, this came out of Meta this week, which announced a bunch of changes to the way that Instagram users who are teenagers will experience the platform. And I think it's worth talking about because so much energy right now and attention are going into trying to solve the problems faced by teenagers and young people on social media. And there's been all kinds of proposals from banning teens from social media to getting phones out of schools, to just trying to change the mechanics of the platforms themselves. And this was a really ambitious and potentially overdue series of changes that Instagram rolled out.

• 28:18Casey Newton?

  All right, so what is the news? Well, as of this week, any young person who tries to create an account on Instagram will find that their account is now private by default. So in the past, if you were 15, 16, you could decide to just have a public account on Instagram. Anybody could follow you, anybody could message you. Well, now, the way it's going to be is that your account is private by default. And if you're under 16 and want to make your account public, you're going to have to get the permission of a parent or guardian and link their account to yours. And potentially even more jarringly, though, anyone under 16 on Instagram who already has an account,

• 28:59Casey Newton?

  within the next 60 days, Meta is gonna just start switching their accounts to private. So with the exception of some 16 and 17-year-olds, basically, there are just not going to be many public teen accounts on Instagram, unless those teens, after this happens, go to their parent or guardian and say, "I want to make my account public," and they get their permission to do that.

• 29:20Kevin Roose?

  What if the parent doesn't have Instagram? Like, how do you get your parents' permission if they're not on Instagram?

• 29:26Casey Newton?

  You have to get your parent or guardian to download Instagram. So there is not really a workaround for this. And, you know, of course, we imagine that teens are gonna try to find workarounds. You know, it was like, maybe they'll just be like, I don't know, the cool adult in high school who agrees to be everybody's fake Instagram parent. But Instagram told me, "No, no, no, that's not gonna be possible. We're gonna be monitoring for that sort of thing and try to make sure that it's not, you know, one parent to 50 different accounts."

• 29:51Kevin Roose?

  That's so interesting. What are the other changes?

• 29:53Casey Newton?

  So there's a lot of them. In addition to making accounts private, teens are going to be placed in these Strickest possible messaging settings. So we see a lot of scams and harm come from the fact that, you know, strangers will try to interact with teens who they don't already know. Meta says that's not going to happen as much anymore. They are also going to be filtering out a lot of words from direct message requests that might be sort of bullying or harmful. There's going to be a new notification after you've been on the app for 60 minutes a day, if you're a teenager, that encourages you to take a break. And there's going to be a sleep mode, which will turn off all Instagram notifications between 10:00 PM and 7:00 AM.

• 30:34Casey Newton?

  And all of these settings, if you are under 16, you can only change those with your parents' permission. There is also a feature that will let parents see which accounts their children have been messaging. They won't be able to see the contents of the messages, but they'll at least know who their teens are talking to.

• 30:50Kevin Roose?

  Hmm.

• 30:50Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 30:51Kevin Roose?

  So I have a sort of basic question about all this.

• 30:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 30:55Kevin Roose?

  Which is, as we know, a lot of teenagers lie about their age.

• 30:58Casey Newton?

  Yes.

• 30:59Kevin Roose?

  On the internet, because they know that these sorts of controls and settings exist. And so we know that a lot of people who are younger than, you know, 16 or 17, maybe they're 10 or 11, they will say, you know, "I'm 18," in order to sort of get past the age-blocking features on some of these platforms. So is Instagram dealing with that at all?

• 31:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah, so they are developing a range of new strategies to go after this problem. It includes things like looking at who all your friends are. If all of your friends are 16, and maybe, you know, your profile says that you attend a certain high school, but, you know, your Instagram account says that you're 24 years old, Instagram is gonna come in and say, "Hey, can you actually show us your ID and prove that you're 24?" So they're gonna be doing things like that to try to prevent that from happening.

• 31:43Kevin Roose?

  If you're constantly saying things like "rizz," it'll flag you. It'll say, "You're definitely not a 38-year-old man."

• 31:49Casey Newton?

  Really? Or are they gonna say, "You are a 38-year-old man who's just trying to sound cool on a podcast"?

• 31:53Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, that's probably more likely.

• 31:54Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 31:55Kevin Roose?

  So first, I just want to ask, like... About the sort of the strategy here.

• 32:00Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 32:00Kevin Roose?

  Is Meta trying to get out in front of regulation by basically announcing these changes that might be mandated by state or federal laws soon anyway?

• 32:10Casey Newton?

  Well, I think Meta has already been run over the the regulation train here, right? It was in 2021 that the whistleblower Francis Haugen came forward with some internal research, which said that there were people inside of Meta who were pointing out some of the negative effects that using Instagram had on mental health for some teenage girls. And that just sparked a huge investigation by most of the states in the United States. And last fall, after a two-year investigation, 41 of those states and the District of Columbia sued Meta claiming that Instagram was addictive and harmful. So that was sort of the moment when this went from, you know, a theoretical problem for Meta to a real one.

• 32:52Casey Newton?

  And, you know, Kevin, just this month, most of those same states came forward and endorsed the US Surgeon General's call for a warning label on social media, saying, using this stuff can actually be harmful for your kids. So I think in some important ways, it feels like Meta already lost this fight, right? Does it feel that way to you?

• 33:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, it certainly feels like this is something that Meta did not want to do, that it would not have done absent pressure from regulators and lawmakers. But, you know, I think a lot of parents are probably going to be grateful for this. A lot of, you know, teenagers are probably going to be upset about it. I do think maybe there's going to be like a wave of teenagers, you know, making themselves look older with fake accounts. Like, I just think the the the actual implementation is where a lot of my questions are. And also, just how this is going to be treated by parents. I remember the Washington Post did a story earlier this year about these parental controls that existed on Instagram before all of this. And they found that only like a single-digit percentage of parents actually use these parental

• 33:56Kevin Roose?

  controls at all.

• 33:57Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and, you know, Nick Clegg, who runs policy at Meta, made a very similar observation, that despite the fact that they have built these tools, they're not used. But I have a lot of empathy. For parents here because there are a lot of apps on your teenager's phone. Right. And there are a lot of social apps, right? In addition to Instagram, I'm going to bet most teens have TikTok on their phone. I'm going to bet most of them have Snapchat on their phone. And we currently live in this world where parents are expected to go into the settings of every single one of those apps. You know, maybe set different time limits for each of those apps. Look at who their teens are messaging on all of those apps. And that is a big burden to place on parents who already have a million other things to do. So I think it makes a lot of sense that most parents are not doing this.

• 34:42Casey Newton?

  And you did actually want to see some kind of intervention at the product level that said, hey, we're Meta, this is our product and we're going to take care of this stuff for you by default.

• 34:51Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. How are people viewing this inside Meta? Like, is this something that they feel they can kind of give away? And it's not going to affect their actual usage that much? Because teens will still be able to use Instagram, even if their accounts are set to default private? Or is this something that they actually think could take a bite out of how many teenagers are using Instagram?

• 35:12Casey Newton?

  So this week I talked to Naomi Gleit, who is one of the longest serving Meta employees. She joined in 2005. Her title now is Head of Product. And she's been working on this. And she told me that Instagram does expect that they will see less usage by teenagers in the short term because of this change. Because when you look at what they're doing, they are introducing real hurdles into using Instagram. And even for the teenagers who are already using it, they're going to say, why don't you use this less? In a way, if teenagers were using it more after this, it might be a sign that the changes weren't working, right?

• 35:44Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. So say I'm 14 and I have an Instagram account. And, you know, I have maybe a couple hundred followers, mostly people from my school. But, you know, I'm, I have a public account. I want people to be able to follow me. And I get this, you know, notification at some point from Instagram that says, hey, we're going to make your account private unless you get your parents' permission. Can I then just go in and sort of into my settings and say, actually, I'm 18 now? And it will sort of grant me that that ability to remain public?

• 36:13Casey Newton?

  That might work in the short term, but Instagram has told me they're on the lookout for that thing, right? Like, if you were 14 today and 60 days from now you suddenly become 18. They do have a way of keeping track of that. There's a database.

• 36:24Kevin Roose?

  Okay, so it's not going to be the easiest thing in the world to game. But could I just sign up for another account and say that I'm 18? And then sort of try to move all my followers over to that?

• 36:34Casey Newton?

  Well, you know, this is something else that social networks have a lot of experience with. Because something that happens on something like Instagram is that someone gets banned. And they think, well, no problem, I'll set up a new account. And so they have to invest a lot of resources into stopping what they call ban evasion. So this would be a similar thing where if you start creating a bunch of new accounts, you know, they would be able to look at your IP address, for example, and a bunch of other signals. I mean, Instagram was straightforward with me. They said, some people are going to be able to get around this. But, you know, when you're talking about improving child safety online, you just want to take harm reduction seriously, right? Like, the goal here is not to solve every single problem that happens on a social network. It is to do something.

• 37:11Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 37:12Kevin Roose?

  See, I am sort of pretty cynical from years of covering this company and sort of watching how it rolls out new features in response to various pressures from regulators and parents and, you know, the public. And I remember one Meta employee telling me once that Meta is a company that will eventually usually do the right thing, but only after exhausting all other options. And so to me, this does feel like an example of, you know, they tried a bunch of things. You know, they got all this pressure from regulators and lawmakers to do something about teen safety on Instagram. And so before they were sort of required to by law, they kind of roll out these changes, some of which may be pretty cosmetic, some of which may be more meaningful.

• 37:55Kevin Roose?

  But this is basically them trying to claim that they have done something so that the next time Mark Zuckerberg or Adam Mosser gets hauled in front of Congress, they can point to these things and say, look at all the things we've already done.

• 38:06Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that that is fair. I think if they wanted to do all of this stuff five years ago, they could have. And they chose not to, and they were dragged into it kicking and screaming. I think it's also really interesting, Kevin, to just look at the things that they are not doing. Right? There are some states, including in New York, where we recently interviewed Governor Hochul, where they want to get rid of all. Logarithmic recommendations, right? Like, they think that teenagers will be better off if they can only see a reverse chronological feed, which, by the way, I think that idea is insane, but it's incredibly common in some of these state legislatures. Meta is not doing that. You know, and I also want to say that even though I think there will be a lot of good that will come from preventing strangers from, like, contacting random teenagers on Instagram,

• 38:50Casey Newton?

  a lot of the worst bullying that kids receive is happening inside of their schools, right? And if you follow your bully on Instagram, they will be able to take a video of you falling down the stairs and tagging you and having everybody laugh at you. So there is still-

• 39:03Kevin Roose?

  Does this happen to you? It sounds very personal to you.

• 39:05Casey Newton?

  I actually did fall down the stairs when I was in Accepting a Word middle school.

• 39:08Kevin Roose?

  Really?

• 39:08Casey Newton?

  But the thing was, it was not actually that traumatic for me. I remember my teacher came up to me afterwards. He was like, "I'm so sorry, you know, you must be so embarrassed." And I was like, "I'm a, I'm a tall person, like, I'm constantly tripping." Like, I'm not taking it that personally.

• 39:20Kevin Roose?

  And if you're out there listening and you went to middle school with Casey and you have video of him falling down the stairs, please send it to [email protected].

• 39:30Casey Newton?

  It was only like a partial fall. You know what I mean? It was, I didn't actually, like, roll down an entire flight of stairs like a cartoon.

• 39:35Kevin Roose?

  Let's review the footage and see what happened. Casey, one concern that you've brought up a couple of times on the show is about what happens to teens from more marginalized groups if some of these changes to social media actually go through. And whether, for example, a gay or a trans teenager or young person who wants to sort of express themselves on the internet in a way that maybe their parents don't approve of, how something like parental consent or notification would affect them. So do you think these new changes on Instagram pose any risk to certain types of teens who may not want their parents to have to click through a bunch of approval screens to let them keep using Instagram?

• 40:18Casey Newton?

  I think there's definitely some risk to that, and we're gonna have to see how it plays out. My sense is that teens will still be able to explore topics like LGBT issues even in this world, right? Because people, again, you know, LGBT teens, for example, will be able to make their accounts public if, for example, they want to share about their experience. If they have a supportive parent and you know, maybe you're a kid who doesn't have a supportive parent. But hopefully you will be able to go on Instagram reels if you want to and you know, search for other LGBT teens like yourself and maybe see some of that. So I think that that is actually probably going to be okay. And honestly, like probably strikes a nice balance. You know, one of the other changes that Instagram is making here is after getting a lot of criticism

• 41:01Casey Newton?

  about showing kids content related to eating disorders, for example, or other stuff that sort of might drive them to dark places. Instagram is now going to go to teens and say, here are some like basically safe topics that we can show you, like you want to see cats, we'll show you all the cats that you want. I'm very curious if they would put LGBT issues in that list of 30 or so things that they pick. My assumption would be that they wouldn't. But as long as kids can still kind of search and find what they're looking for, my hope is that, you know, social media will still be there to make them feel a little bit less alone. Do you think this is going to be meaningful? Like, do you think this is actually going to make teens safer on the internet?

• 41:40Casey Newton?

  I think in in one particular way, yes, which is this issue of strangers contacting kids online and getting them to make huge mistakes is very real. There have been so many investigations this year into these sextortion schemes. They're financially motivated, where you have these gangs of criminals who will contact random teenagers, trick them into sharing nudes and then blackmailing them. This has been linked to at least 20 suicides and huge misery all around the country. This really does shut that down, I think, in in some very important ways. Not to say that it could never happen again, but it will be very difficult to do on Instagram now.

• 42:24Casey Newton?

  So I think that that is a really good thing. Now, is the mental health of teenagers going to improve miraculously over the next year as all of a sudden all their Instagram accounts are made private? No, I don't think so. Yeah. What do you think about some of the other changes? Like sending them a notification after they've been using it for an hour or halting notifications when they're supposed to be at sleep? I think that's all fine and good. Like, I don't think that they're going to lock.

• 42:48Kevin Roose?

  Teenagers out of Instagram during the hours that they're supposed to be sleeping. They'll just stop sending them notifications. But you know, there may be ways around that, too. So I just, I just think we'll have to see teenagers are very clever historically at getting around restrictions imposed on their, their internet use, whether it's by their parents or by the, the social media company itself. So I think it's just gonna be fascinating to see whether teenagers are, are actually impacted enough by this for it to matter and whether they'll sort of find some clever workarounds.

• 43:19Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I'm sure some of them will, but private by default is a pretty big step forward in terms of reducing the visibility of young people on a platform. And I do wonder whether Meta will be able to get some goodwill from the lawmakers and the regulators that are so mad at them right now.

• 43:36Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Are regulators sort of happy about these changes? Do they feel like their concerns are being addressed?

• 43:41Casey Newton?

  Well, I haven't heard from a lot of regulators, but I have heard from a bunch of advocacy organizations that work on child safety and they were all over my inbox this week, basically saying, this is not good enough. This is pure PR, right? A lot of these advocacy organizations are pushing for what they call safety by design or a duty of care. They want to see it in the law that, that this should not be a sort of industry-led volunteer project, but that legally they have to put kids into the strictest messaging settings by default and they have to restrict the way their personal data is used. So, and I've been, by the way, I think there is something to that, right? I think that this is important enough that we probably should just not leave it to the goodwill of these for-profit corporations to decide what happens to kids online.

• 44:26Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 44:26Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 44:27Kevin Roose?

  I just want to say, like, as a closing thought to this story, like, pressure works, right? These pressure campaigns from parents, from lawmakers, from, you know, teachers, from just concerned citizens, they actually do, in some sense, force companies to do the right thing.

• 44:43Casey Newton?

  And that's why it's so important to complain online. If you're not complaining online, start. It's true. Yeah. You can change the world. Yeah. What are you mad about? Change it.

• 44:55Casey Newton?

  When we cut back, Andy Jassy gets sassy. He told his workers to get their asses back to the office.

• 45:14Speaker 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.

• 45:48Speaker 03

  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.

• 46:20Speaker 05

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

• 46:54Casey Newton?

  Well, here we are back in the office, Kevin, which is actually relevant to the subject of our next story. Yes. You've heard about Amazon returns. This is a story about Amazon returns to office. That's right. And you know, I was really interested to read this story, Kevin, because I think in many ways, we were the original return to office podcast. Because when we started the show almost two years ago, we thought it's important to be in the room to do what we do every week. That's true. I love sitting across the table from you. I'm very sad.

• 47:18Kevin Roose?

  And we have to record remotely.

• 47:19Casey Newton?

  We've said it a million times. I feel the same way. And now it seems like some tech companies are starting to feel the same way about some of their operations.

• 47:26Kevin Roose?

  The hard fork effect. So this is from an announcement that came out this week from CEO Andy Jassy of Amazon. He wrote a letter to Amazon employees and they posted it on their website. It's called strengthening our culture and teams. And Casey, when you see a memo from the boss with a subject line like strengthening our culture and teams, you know some stuff is about to go down.

• 47:50Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I see that. I think a human rights violation is about to take place.

• 47:53Kevin Roose?

  So this message was very long and it was basically Andy Jassy's sort of directives to Amazon employees about how they're going to change the culture of the company, including in ways like thinning out the ranks of management, removing unnecessary layers of bureaucracy. But the thing that really grabbed the headlines was when he wrote that in order to sort of work better, Amazon was going to require employees to be back in the office five days a week, the way they were before the pandemic.

• 48:22Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and that includes Fridays, which is probably the least popular day to go into the office. So you know that has to sting.

• 48:28Kevin Roose?

  So obviously, this has gotten a lot of attention, not just because Amazon is one of the biggest employers in America, but because they are sort of a trendsetter. The things that they do when it comes to, you know, workplace culture often end up rippling out throughout the economy. And this is becoming a big issue in Silicon Valley. I would say that these companies, which were very early to allow their employees to work remotely during the pandemic, are now saying, wait a minute, we feel like we're losing control of this company. We actually need everyone back.

• 48:58Casey Newton?

  Yeah, and the reason I think that this is interesting is because I think Amazon has traditionally been willing to go much further in the direction of making their employees uncomfortable to get the financial results that they want. And for that reason, it really can be a bellwether. And if Amazon is willing to do this, my guess is a lot of other companies are going to be too.

• 49:18Kevin Roose?

  Right. This is not a full throttle shift from Amazon. For the past 15 months or so, they have had a policy of requiring employees to be back in the office. Three days a week, we should also say this is their corporate employees. This is not the sort of, obviously, the drivers and the fulfillment center employees who have had to be back this whole time.

• 49:37Casey Newton?

  Yeah, they haven't figured out a way to be able to do the deliveries remotely from their desks. That would be great if they could do that.

• 49:42Kevin Roose?

  But as of January 2nd, 2025, for Amazon corporate employees, it will be all office all the time. And I want to get into what this means for Amazon and the tech world at large and return to office more broadly. So I wanted to bring on friend of the show, New York Times reporter Karen Weiss, who covers Amazon and has written all about this. Let's bring her in.

• 50:10Kevin Roose?

  Karen Weiss, welcome back to Hard Fork.

• 50:11Speaker 06

  Happy to join you guys.

• 50:13Kevin Roose?

  So why is Amazon doing this? Why are they ordering employees back to the office five days a week?

• 50:19Speaker 06

  Yeah, Andy Jassy, the CEO, said he wanted to do this because he really wanted to get the kind of the culture back on track. They grew so much in the pandemic that you had so many people who had started the company remotely and they started going back to office three days a week. And they said they felt like that really proved to them the benefits they expected. And so that's kind of one of the main reasons they articulated is that they felt like people weren't getting the Amazon culture. I mean, the company doubled in like two years. It's a huge amount of new people coming in and trying to learn in kind of the Amazon way. And you also have Andy Jassy as CEO now, and he's trying to make his kind of vision for the company. And there's a lot of moving parts for it.

• 51:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah, I mean, it's so interesting because I feel like during COVID, when they sort of, when all the tech companies decided to allow remote work and encourage remote work and allow people to do that even full time at some companies if they wanted to, they said that basically they didn't think it was going to impact culture. They didn't think it was going to make their teams less creative or less collaborative or whatever.

• 51:26Casey Newton?

  Are they sort of admitting that they were wrong about that?

• 51:29Speaker 06

  They were a little reluctant initially, but we were in Seattle here was the tip of the spear for the US. So they went remote, you know, one of the first big companies in the country to go remote essentially, and stayed there for quite a long time. So I wouldn't say they were like excited about it, but they did a lot. I mean, there was kind of major work across pretty much every business line in that in that window as well. But it is always been a very kind of intense work culture. And they want it back. They want the old Amazon back. I mean, a lot of the language in Jassy's memo was like, this isn't something new. We're just going back to what it was. It was like almost like a nostalgia for the old days sort of thing.

• 52:09Casey Newton?

  Yeah, I think Amazon managers thrive on seeing employees tears. And when they are deprived of that for two days a week, they start to get anxious.

• 52:18Speaker 06

  No comment on that one.

• 52:20Casey Newton?

  Wait, really? No, I just got no comment on the podcast. All right, fine. So Karen, during the pandemic, Amazon goes mostly remote, at least for the corporate employees there. But then at what point do they go back to three days a week?

• 52:35Speaker 06

  About a year and a half ago, they announced going back to three days a week. There was major resistance to it. You know, the Slack channels were crazy, all that stuff. But they've been pretty strict about it. I mean, they, you know, monitor badges. There was over the summer, a reported crackdown on coffee badging was the phrase, where you kind of come in, have your cup of coffee, get your swipe and leave. So that you need, you know, proper amount of time in the office. So they're serious about it. You know, some tech companies have had these mandates and by most accounts, they're not that aggressively enforced. Like maybe if you never come in sort of thing, you might hear about it. But that was not how it's been at Amazon. You can even see it like the streets in Seattle and downtown are just busy. Traffic is coming back.

• 53:18Speaker 06

  The, you know, the stores and stuff like that are all very happy about this all.

• 53:23Casey Newton?

  And I would imagine at even three days a week, like people are building their lives around this, right? So, you know, I can even imagine people might choose where exactly they want to live, like knowing that, well, okay, I only have to commute three days. I'm willing to do that. So I would imagine that going from three to five might sound like a small thing, but could really massively disrupt the lives of a lot of workers.

• 53:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I've talked to people who kind of moved. Far out of town, you know, driving distance, but not like a daily commute distance and they'll come in and either crash with people or get a little studio or something like that and then go back and have your four days in a chiller environment. And that's kind of gone with this. I was talking to someone last night who was bemoaning their commute because he's like Monday and Fri- not an Amazonian. You know, Monday and Friday, it was so easy to zip into town from the east side of Seattle. And, um, and now it's like going to be traffic five days a week.

• 54:15Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 54:15Casey Newton?

  Now, tech companies, Karen, as you know, often have a lot of perks that they shower on employees for visiting the office. Is Amazon one of those companies?

• 54:24Speaker 06

  Casey, you'll be shocked to hear they are not one of- frugality is one of the leadership principles at Amazon. No, it's funny. They actually introduced free coffee during this RTO, this return to office period, um, to try to lure people back. And they tried to stop it. And then there was another uproar. So my understanding, last I heard, there was still free coffee. But no, it's not like the Googleplex with the laundry and whatever. Their offices are, you know, they're nice, they're new, but they're not like fancy or anything like that. There's no

• 54:54Kevin Roose?

  Right.

• 54:55Speaker 06

  big buffets or whatever.

• 54:57Kevin Roose?

  So Karen, you said that part of the reason they're making this shift, or at least that Andy Jassy is saying they're making this shift to five days a week required in the office is because they found when they brought people back three days a week, that there were certain things that just, you know, were observably better. Do you have any idea what that is? Like, were they shipping more products? Were they, you know, were employees like writing more code? Like, what are, what are they looking at to say like, this is working and so we want to go back to the office full time?

• 55:26Speaker 06

  You know, that he's only spoke about a very high level. This has actually been a critique from employees is like, we're a data-driven company. Where is the data behind this? I'm not saying there isn't any. It's just not what has, like, there wasn't any in the email that went out this week. Um, it was a lot about, you know, getting an understanding and feeling the culture, mentoring younger employees, the spontaneous conversations that happen in the hall, that kind of general high-level culture stuff. But there was not like, we found that you implemented X more code or whatever sort of thing. That was not, um, not in the argument.

• 56:01Kevin Roose?

  Right. And it doesn't seem like it's probably coming out of financial pressure either. I mean, the stock is up something like 34% over the past year. Like, it's not like this is a company that is declining, right? So what are the sort of investor pressures here?

• 56:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think they have, Jassy has been focusing a lot on profit in the past couple of years and has improved the profits of the company pretty dramatically. A lot of that came from the operations, though, from like the warehousing part of the business and reorganizing that and making it kind of faster and actually more efficient. But he definitely laid out, like at the top of this email, it was actually talking about profit and looking for more, more, more space to squeeze out margin. And this is kind of part of the framing is there's more work to do. They have a lot of spending up ahead, you know, for what they're doing, like AI, we've talked a lot, but there's like billions and billions of dollars going into building AI investments and data centers and, you

• 56:58Speaker 06

  know, working, acquiring talent for that. So there's a lot of moving pieces and they have some other big investments kind of coming in line, coming up that are going to be expensive, like there's satellites that compete with Starlink and stuff. So there's other major things that, it's, it's not like it's, money is flowing. They have a very, they have now a very profit focused mentality that was not really there in the past. They kind of showed they can turn it on and investors want more, essentially.

• 57:29Casey Newton?

  I'm, I'm sure they do, you know, but at the same time, Amazon made $36.9 billion in profit in 2023, which is, we can say, more than most companies. And so the idea that at that level of profit, the company is still worried that its employees aren't doing enough things and is going to drag them back to the office five days a week and then is going to make them go through hell just to get a free cup of coffee when they walk through the door. It just truly makes me worried about like every other company in America. I always feel like, you know, if the company that made almost $37 billion in profit last year, is it going to give the employees free coffee? Like, what hope do the rest of us have?

• 58:06Kevin Roose?

  Well, maybe that's why they made $37 billion. I mean, those lattes add up, Casey.

• 58:10Casey Newton?

  They absolutely do not.

• 58:12Speaker 06

  It's always been though, it's always had a very like practical thing, like you don't let it go. I don't, you know what I mean? Like, there's always been that attitude. They, you know, they have, they've improved some benefits and stuff like that, for sure.

• 58:23Kevin Roose?

  Right. They're known for not coddling their employees like some of the other big Silicon Valley companies.

• 58:27Speaker 06

  That the work itself would be the reward, essentially, that it's challenging and, you know, exciting to work on big things, et cetera.

• 58:32Kevin Roose?

  Karen, how are Amazon employees reacting to this news?

• 58:36Speaker 06

  Not so well, I would say. I mean, there's been a pretty overwhelming flood of concern about upset. You know, this is so discouraging. How does this fit with our stated goal, our leadership principle of striving to be Earth's best employer? There's a lot of gallows humor in the Slack messages I've seen, you know, the memes and stuff like that. So

• 58:58Casey Newton?

  When they said they wanted to be the Earth's best employer, I thought that was a joke. They meant that seriously?

• 59:04Speaker 06

  No, that is a real leadership principle on their list, along with, you know, frugality and, you know.

• 59:11Kevin Roose?

  Wow. I think a lot of employees at companies that have gone back to the office have been faced with this choice of do I go back to the office or do I leave and get another job? From your reporting, do you think that a lot of Amazon employees are considering leaving rather than going back five days a week? Or are they mostly gonna sort of grit their teeth and put up with it?

• 59:31Speaker 06

  I mean, people leave jobs over this for sure. So I don't think that's like a hypothetical, but you do still need a job on the other end of it. So the function is, I think the question is like, are you in a role or a position that you could get another job? And for some people, probably yes, and for some people, probably not.

• 59:50Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. I mean, that's one of the sort of big theories about all these return to office mandates is that they are essentially a way to do layoffs without doing layoffs because you sort of assume that some percentage of your employees are not gonna like this, or maybe they live far away from headquarters and so they literally can't do it. And so they'll just leave. And that's a way to sort of reduce your headcount without actually having to go through the process of laying people off.

• 1:00:14Speaker 06

  Cheaper because you don't have severance packages and stuff, too.

• 1:00:17Kevin Roose?

  I mean, is there any indication that that is what is happening here? Does Amazon want to reduce its headcount? And this is sort of one way to do that?

• 1:00:23Speaker 06

  Well, this was coupled with another announcement. Can I, if I can go into this now? Because it kind of implies that potentially they are looking to, or at least comfortable reducing their total headcount. Because they also said they want to have essentially fewer managers, that it's become too bureaucratic, that you have managers prepping managers for managers for managers for managers. Managers and so they want to increase the number of employees reporting to any given manager. And that according to like the internal FAQs on that, that means that it might be that some roles are determined unnecessary, which it would be losing that job. And if you can't find another job or don't want to accept an individual contributor role, that would be a layoff essentially.

• 1:01:05Speaker 06

  So there's clearly some comfort with that being an outcome. I can't say right now if that's like the goal of it. Certainly some employees think it is, but that's on the table, I would say.

• 1:01:17Casey Newton?

  What we're, what we're talking about here today, Kevin, it's giving me that, that funny old feeling of founder mode. Right? Yes. So, you know, we talked about this recently on the show. There's an idea out there that you sort of just articulated, Karen, which is too many of these tech companies have hired too many managers. There's been too much delegating going on and what we really need is strong centralized control, cracking the whip, getting these employees working their absolute hardest. So do we feel like that kind of Silicon Valley sentiment has made its way up to Seattle now?

• 1:01:53Speaker 06

  I would say it's less about cracking the whip about them being feeling bogged down by it, which I hear from employees all the time that it's become a very bureaucratic place. Like I actually think there's a line between what Jassy said and what I hear constantly. But they're saying like the bureaucracy slows us down. And don't forget, we just are in this AI moment where Amazon, you know, was being, was kind of widely seen as being a little late to the party, though rapidly you're moving really fast now. But there's this idea of like, you can't move as fast as we used to and they want people to have autonomy. They talk about, you know, the very Amazon hand, the two pizza team. You don't want teams that are bigger than two pizzas so people can kind of just execute on stuff. So they're trying to get back to some of those old.

• 1:02:35Casey Newton?

  Specifically teams that could be fed by two pizzas. You're allowed to be physically bigger than two pizzas.

• 1:02:40Speaker 06

  Oh, yes, there's no discrimination, Casey.

• 1:02:42Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Kevin Roose?

  Yes. I did hear that they are announcing that they're adding 3,500 phone booths to the office.

• 1:02:48Speaker 06

  Yes, we had that from the internal FAQs as well. So, you know, we're commuting in to sit in phone booths. But yeah, those little cubes, because you can't, people got used to being able to like have a phone call that was somewhat private or not have noise around you to squat in a place and work in some quiet. So they're, they're working to have more meeting spaces available. They're returning to assigned desks in places that had them before. And then, yes, working to procure 3,500 phone booths was what the internal docs said.

• 1:03:17Casey Newton?

  I think it's interesting in that one of the reasons why we saw so many companies go to remote, in addition to just the sort of obvious necessity of the pandemic, was particularly as the pandemic started to wane, there was just competitive pressure to do this, right? There was this thought of, well, if we have some really strict return to office policy, we might lose a lot of our best people. To me, I think what is most interesting about this is the sense that Amazon just truly is not afraid to lose anybody over this, right? You know, maybe there might be some superstars that are able to work out a special deal, but my guess is those are going to be very few and far between if they exist at all. And Amazon's not worried about people going across the street and working at a Microsoft or maybe the Meta office up in Seattle. So why do we think that is?

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  It does show a confidence in their position in the job market, I would say. I mean, a lot of these were implemented during the great reshuffle or whatever it ended up being called, where people were changing jobs a lot. And this was one way to accommodate that and to lure people in. But there shows a confidence that, I mean, they're kind of amazing. Like, Amazon has grown a lot in the past several years. And their headcount is basically flat. Like, it's, if, you know, and that includes their hourly employees, but it's essentially flat. So they are doing more with less. And I think there's a, you know, the macro environment's changing and they're clearly nervous about that. They talked on their earnings calls about like just the uncertainty at the moment right now.

• 1:04:38Kevin Roose?

  So Karen, I want to talk about another thing that I learned about from your reporting, which is a, what's called, being called a bureaucracy mailbox. This is something that Andy Jassy has recently set up. And it's a place where Amazon employees can send any examples of bureaucracy or unnecessary red tape that they can sort of make, they can cut out and run more efficiently. What do you think the impetus for that was?

• 1:05:05Speaker 06

  It's that same sense of like bloat and just slowness and frustration. I think that, you know, he's here, he's, he's not wrong in like I, people tell me this all the time. There's this fear at Amazon of being day two and a lot of people think they're there and they should just embrace that and like acknowledge it and move on, but they're

• 1:05:24Kevin Roose?

  Wait, say what that is, Karen. Say, what is day two at Amazon?

• 1:05:27Speaker 06

  It's always day one at Amazon, which means you're always building from scratch. You have that start, that kind of startup, scrappy mentality that you don't rest on your laurels. You always have to pretend, not pretend, but believe that nothing is a given and you can lose any advantage you have any day. And it's like very, very, I mean, there's literally like a building at the headquarters, the headquarters-ish building at the headquarters here is called day one. Like it's a big concept. Um, so there's a, I think a fear of the day two-ness and this is kind of a, the mailbox is a symbol of it. Whether people will use it, I cannot say.

• 1:06:03Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:03Speaker 06

  I could see it happening.

• 1:06:04Kevin Roose?

  We were actually so inspired by this, uh, this move by Andy Jassy that we, uh, we recently set up a Hard Fork bureaucracy mailbox. Um, and Casey, have you, uh, made any submissions to the Hard Fork bureaucracy mailbox?

• 1:06:17Casey Newton?

  Well, I did bring something I would like to submit into the bureaucracy mailbox, Kevin.

• 1:06:20Kevin Roose?

  Okay, go for it.

• 1:06:21Casey Newton?

  Well, so, you know, we have a podcast and something that podcasts sometimes do is make merchandise. And when we have had conversations about how to make merchandise, what I've been told is the number of meetings that would have to be held at the New York Times to make merchandise would be so great that, um, it would not be worth it. And I don't know about you, Kevin, but I would love a beautiful hoodie, uh, maybe a crown and scepter, a cape, just something tasteful that I could wear into society and let people know that I'm affiliated with the Hard Fork podcast. And so I would love to see the Times work on that so that we could have some beautiful merchandise for ourselves and for all the fans.

• 1:06:56Kevin Roose?

  Okay. Well, let's submit that to the mailbox.

• 1:06:58Casey Newton?

  Great. How about you?

• 1:07:00Kevin Roose?

  Well, I, I have not submitted anything, but I did find an anonymous tip that was left in the Hard Fork, um, Bureaucracy mailbox, and I'll just read it out loud here. It says, "Dear Hard Fork Bureaucracy mailbox, I'm writing to complain about an inefficiency. We have to read the credits every week, even when they're exactly the same as last week. This makes no sense. They should just copy and paste the ones from last week. No one would notice. I want my 45 seconds back." Now, I don't know who sent that in, but clearly, they're very angry. Oh, it goes on. It says, "I'm also writing to complain about the fact that despite the ventilation in our podcast studio being fixed recently, so it's not literally 1,000 degrees in here all

• 1:07:40Kevin Roose?

  the time, the studio still lacks basic amenities such as wall decor, working iPad monitors, and a button Kevin can push to administer a small electrical shock to Casey every time he starts talking about productivity apps."

• 1:07:52Casey Newton?

  Oh, I actually was gonna support that bureaucracy mailbox complaint right up until the end there.

• 1:07:57Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. It goes on. It's still not done. It says, "While I'm here, I also want to complain about the Kansas City Marriott that almost prevented us from taping a show a few months ago. Their Wi-Fi is horrible, even after Kevin upgraded to the premium version. I assume this is due to stifling bureaucracy in the Marriott Corporation, or possibly the woke mind virus. Please fix it."

• 1:08:17Casey Newton?

  Wait, is that for the Hard Fork bureaucracy inbox or the Marriott?

• 1:08:20Kevin Roose?

  Well, you know, people are very confused out here. They're very angry, and I don't know who sent this one in.

• 1:08:24Speaker 06

  So glad this is an anonymous tip line.

• 1:08:26Kevin Roose?

  Yeah. Whoever sent that one in, you really speak my mind.

• 1:08:29Casey Newton?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:30Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Casey Newton?

  It is so funny to me that this has to be a separate inbox, because presumably, Andy Jesse already has an email address over there. You think he could just ask his assistant to pull all the bureaucracy-related complaints?

• 1:08:42Kevin Roose?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:43Casey Newton?

  But maybe there's something special about setting up a dedicated inbox.

• 1:08:46Speaker 06

  Intention, intention.

• 1:08:48Kevin Roose?

  Karen, thanks so much for coming on.

• 1:08:50Speaker 06

  Happy to join you guys.

• 1:09:13Speaker 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.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  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.

• 1:10:19Speaker 05

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

• 1:10:54Kevin Roose?

  Hard Fork is produced by Whitney Jones and Rachel Cohn. 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 Beetup, Marian Lozano, Rowan Nemisto, Lea Shaw Dameron, and Dan Powell. Our audience editor is Nell Galogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Chris Schott. You can watch this full episode on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork. Special thanks to Paula Schuman, Huiwink Tam, Dahlia Hadad, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us, as always, at [email protected]. Or you can send a tip to the Hard Fork Bureaucracy mailbox at [email protected]. I don't actually know if that's your email address.

• 1:11:54Speaker 07

  75% of women who seek menopause care don't receive it. The lying awake at 3 a.m. wondering what's happening to your body ends now. Midi is virtual care built for women in perimenopause and menopause with clinicians who specialize in women's health. Plus, it's covered by most major insurances. Getting started is easy. You can book your first visit with a clinician right away. Midlife needs Midi. Visit joinmidi.com to book your first visit today. That's join m i d i dot com. Insurance coverage varies. Check with your plan for coverage.