This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions. You see WWE is coming to Netflix?
I did.
Yeah.
Are you excited?
Yeah, I think it could be a good thing. I think it could make wrestling into a thing that people didn’t have to apologize for watching.
Now, this is a thing, because I used to wrestling back when I was a teen. And then I would talk about it with people, and they’d be like, you watch wrestling? And they would roll their eyes, or their eyebrow would raise a little bit.
They shamed you.
They shamed me.
Yeah.
And that’s not the reason I stopped watching, but that was one of the reasons. But do you feel a social stigma as a result of your wrestling fandom?
Yes, absolutely. But the interesting thing about Netflix is Netflix has taken so many things that seemed obscure or weird and just made them popular. So whether it’s Formula One racing with “Drive to Survive” or golf with “Full Swing” or “Suits” with Meghan Markle, the Netflix algorithm just takes stuff that nobody used to watch and then makes it the center of the world.
Yeah.
So wrestling could have a huge 2025.
That’s true.
You heard it here first.
Wow.
Yeah.
When are we going to do a tag team wrestling act?
I mean, as soon as the “All In” podcast is ready to rumble.
That’s two on four. Do you think we could take them?
Absolutely. Yes, yeah.
Well, you’re very tall, so we’ve got a height advantage.
And you’ve got a lot of heart. [MUSIC PLAYING]
I’m Kevin Roose, a tech columnist for “The New York Times.”
I’m Casey Newton from Platformer.
And this is “Hard Fork.”
This week, how AI is fueling a newspocalypse. Then Andreessen Horowitz investor Chris Dixon makes the case that crypto still has a bright future, and we have questions. And finally, it’s time for the year’s first installment of HatGPT.
All right, Casey, we have to start this week by talking about what is happening in the media industry, because it has been a very bad last couple of weeks for a lot of these iconic publications. Just in the last week or so, “The LA Times” has conducted a big round of layoffs. More than 20 percent of the newsroom in total has been laid off by that newspaper. “Pitchfork,” the iconic music publication, is being wrapped into “GQ” with its top editor departing. “Sports Illustrated” laid off most of its unionized staff after some complicated maneuvering by the corporate owners. “Time Magazine” also conducted layoffs.
And Artifact, the news aggregator app that we talked about last year on the show started by the co-founders of Instagram, it announced that it was also shutting down basically saying, we don’t see a future where there’s a sustainable model for a product like this in the news industry.
Yeah, I think it is really important. The past couple of weeks seem like a time when more and more people are going to just visit websites they used to visit and realizing that they’re not there or they’ve lost a huge chunk of their staff. And I think the web and frankly our culture just feel less vibrant right now than they did even just a year ago.
Yeah, and I think we should just start by saying the problems that the news business has today that we’re seeing play out in all of these layoffs and all this consolidation, there’s no one single reason for them. I mean, this is a long story that goes back 20 or 30 years, some parts of it.
There’s also a piece of it that has, frankly, not that much to do with technology. We’ve seen a lot of, you could call it, financialization of the media business. A lot of struggling, especially local and regional newspapers and TV stations, have been bought up and consolidated by hedge funds and private equity firms that have strip mined them for cash and left these desiccated husks out there in the world.
So this is not purely a story about Silicon Valley and tech power destroying what was left of the legacy media business, but it does have a lot of crossover with what’s happening in tech. And so I thought today we should just talk about the troubles that we’re seeing in the news industry, what’s behind them, and where we think things should go from here.
So, Casey, what’s your capsule theory about why the media is struggling so badly right now?
I mean, the internet has just profoundly changed both how people find their news and how that news is monetized. That’s the story in a nutshell. We can dive into those things, but at the end of the day, we’re just living through a historic shift in the way that people get their information. And I do think, unfortunately, that a lot of folks in the media industry have been too slow to wake up to those changes and get out in front of them.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I think there have been a lot of media companies that have clung to business models long after it was clear that those business models were endangered. I don’t think we’ve seen as much experimentation from some of the media companies as I might have liked, but I don’t want to put this all at the feet of the journalists and the media companies who are trying to navigate this, because there are some larger shifts going on in the world that I think relate directly to the struggles that the media business is having.
Yeah, and I mean, the journalists are doing great. I mean, one of the things that makes these stories so upsetting is that none of these journalists are losing their jobs because they were bad at being journalists. They’re all great at being journalists. It was just their boss woke up one day and said, I don’t want to pay for you anymore.
So anyways, well, look, there’s a bunch of things we can talk about, but maybe let’s just start with ads. Kevin, would that be a fair place to start?
Yeah, I think this is the classic first explanation. The prime mover in all of this is that the media industry has basically been reliant on ads and local businesses in their city advertising used cars or apartments for rent. Classifieds were a big source of revenue, and we know what happened with all of that — it all moved online to platforms like Craigslist and Facebook. And all of a sudden, you just didn’t have that plank in your business model if you’re a media company.
Yeah, well, and also the internet just enabled much more effective forms of advertising. It used to be that, well, if I wanted to sell a used car in Phoenix, Arizona, I would buy an ad in “The Arizona Republic,” the local newspaper there. And I would just trust that whoever was looking for a used car, they would find it.
Well, now I can just go on to one of these big tech platforms and say, show me people who you think are actively in the market for used cars who make this much money who live in this zip code, and you can reach them directly. And it is Google and Facebook in particular that figured out that particular mousetrap. And so over the past 20 years, we’ve just seen the two of them build these incredible ad businesses, and it has come at the expense of those media companies that used to make money off of used cars and everything else you just described.
Right, but that’s a fairly old story. That’s been going on for 20 years at this point. I think the question I have is why things seem to be falling off a cliff right now. And I think looking into this a little bit, talking to some folks at different publications that have been affected by the ad market, it really seems like there’s been a pullback in the broader ad market by advertisers. They are not spending as much on any ads, whether it’s Google or Facebook or newspapers and magazines or TV stations.
But I think the second big macro trend that can help us understand what’s going on in the media business right now is the changing nature of the relationship between publications, people who put things on the internet, and the platforms that distribute that information.
Well, interesting you say that. I thought you were going to say the changing relationship between publications and their audiences.
Well, say more about that.
So I think in the early days, the internet seemed really exciting, because all of a sudden if you were a local publication, your total addressable market went from Phoenix, Arizona to the entire world. And so stories that once might have gotten a few hundred or thousand views all of a sudden could get millions. That was really exciting.
But when social networks came along, and as Google became more predominant, people stopped visiting the home pages of those publications, and so they could no longer rely on that direct relationship they had with their audiences. And as people became more used to using Facebook and using Google, that is where all of the traffic started to come from, which was really exciting because you could get those millions of views. But at the same time, it was destroying the relationship between the publisher and the audience.
So publishers no longer really had audiences. What they had instead was traffic. They had a steady stream of drive-by users who were coming in. Often I believe people didn’t even know what publications they were reading because it was just the first thing that popped up on Google, or it was just a little link they happened to see on Facebook.
And for a while, again, publishers were OK with this because they were seeing more views for stories than they’d ever seen in their entire lives. And if you’ve been in the advertising business, really goal number one is just to aggregate as many eyeballs as you could. And so in the 2010s, you see the rise of these publishers like BuzzFeed, which were getting hundreds of millions of page views every single month and which looked like they were going to be unbeatable iconic media companies for decades to come.
But then the spigot got turned off, and that is what started a lot of the problems we’re seeing today.
Yeah, and I think for people who are not in the news business, it can be hard to imagine how influential these tech platforms are and one how one tweak made by a team of engineers at Facebook or Google can really cascade throughout the entire news ecosystem. So for example, Facebook in recent years has made a conscious and deliberate decision to pivot away from news. They were mad at the media industry for being so mean to them in coverage. This is real.
Well, I mean, they also just got unending blowback from everyone who didn’t like everything about news on Facebook, right?
Right, and I think we should also say that the people who run some of these tech platforms have made a conscious decision to deprioritize news for their users. So Facebook famously has pivoted away from news. They were getting all kinds of criticism for promoting and boosting polarizing political content around the 2016 and 2020 elections.
They were responding to users who were complaining about all this like polarizing news showing up in their feeds. They were also mad at the news industry for being mean to them in coverage over the years, and so Facebook decided to dial down news so that people who were going on to Facebook would see less of it. And that has had a tremendous impact on digital publishers.
There have been some recent reports that traffic to news publishers from social media apps like Facebook and Instagram has plummeted. CNBC recently reported using data from Chartbeat that Meta-owned apps were accounting for just 33 percent of overall social media traffic to news publishers. That was down from 50 percent just a year ago.
So that’s the industry-wide figure, but certain publishers, especially publishers that focus on political news or that have a more partisan point of view, the declines you’re hearing about are even steeper. Mother Jones, this progressive political outlet based here in the Bay Area, said that it had experienced a 99 percent plunge in traffic from Facebook compared to several years ago.
Now, I’m no digital traffic expert, but a 99 percent plunge seems bad.
Yeah, and there are a couple of things I want to say about what you just said. One is that in addition to your recap, which I agree with everything, some countries have also started to pass laws saying that if companies like Facebook and Google want to include links to publications on their platforms, they’re going to need to strike deals with publishers essentially to just pay them off and make them go away. And I think that this has actually been another reason why Facebook in particular has said the heck with you guys, because we’ve already seen we can take news off our platform, and our users don’t care.
So that’s something. The other thing that I would say is, while I think it is great that there was this period where particularly nonprofit outlets like Mother Jones could do a bunch of fundraising by using this cheap or free Facebook traffic that they were getting, at the same time, it got too many publishers addicted to this fire hose. And as they were getting addicted to it, they were losing those direct connections with their audience. What do I mean by a direct connection? I mean something that is not being mediated by some sort of ranking algorithm.
So I did start a newsletter because I did see the Facebook thing in particular, and it scared me. And I thought if digital media is going to have a future, it is going to be that readers know what publication they are reading when they are reading it. They feel positively about it, and they want to support it in some way.
So I do think a lot of what we’ve seen in the past couple of weeks is that particular chicken coming home to roost, is that there are now publications that got addicted and got huge on the backs of this traffic that was being delivered to them by algorithms. And when the algorithm changed, the rug got pulled out from underneath them.
Right. So I think a lot of media companies right now are saying we don’t want to be dependent on Facebook and Google for our continued existence. They’re looking to pivot to different kinds of distribution strategies that aren’t as reliant on staying in the good graces of social platforms, but it’s been a really hard transition for a lot of publications.
And they’re not going fast enough, and we should talk about what is happening with Google as well. Google is the other big hose of traffic. And even as Facebook has declined as a traffic source, Google is still right up there. And whatever publications you are reading, listeners, I guarantee you that Google is providing a huge amount of traffic to those websites, and the traffic is usually not somebody googling the name of the publication. It is them googling a subject or how to do something or looking for the best laptop of 2024, and so much of the digital media infrastructure that we have is supported by Google sending that traffic.
But for reasons that we should get into right now, the nature of that traffic is quite precarious, and I think every publisher should assume that very soon it is going to start declining quite rapidly.
Yeah, and let’s talk about that Google factor, but first I just want to acknowledge the elephant in the room, which is that these problems are not affecting all publishers and the entire media ecosystem equally. Ezra Klein, my colleague at “The Times,” had a great column recently about the news apocalypse, and he pointed out that these changes that you’re describing to the news ecosystem, they have hit the middle of the news industry the hardest.
“The New York Times” is doing quite well by the standards of the news industry. Also, there’s a real bright spot in your part of the news industry, which are these newsletters that go direct to consumer that you pay for as a subscriber. That business is still quite good. So we are in some ways sitting at the ends of this barbell shaped news ecosystem right now.
We are the lucky ones, we should say. We feel that. We feel grateful for that.
Totally. But there’s this entire world out there of mid-sized publications that is really, really struggling right now. So let’s talk about the AI piece of this, because I think this is a part of the conversation that is starting to be discussed is the effect that AI and generative AI are having on the business models of what remains of the media industry.
So you recently wrote about “Pitchfork,” the music publication that was folded into “GQ,” and you made a case that this is, in some ways, related to the rise of AI. Walk me through your argument there.
Yeah, so I should say I’m a huge fan of “Pitchfork.” And while it remains to be seen what happens to it, it does still exist in some form, and I’m grateful at least for that. “Pitchfork” has turned me on to so much amazing music over the years.
The thing that younger folks may not recall is that music, new music used to cost $18. You used to have to go to a store and buy it. And so that created, essentially, a job for “Pitchfork” as a publication to go out there, scour the landscape, listen to everything, and then come back and say, hey, here is what is actually worth your time and money.
And then in 2011, Spotify launches in the United States. And all of a sudden, me, a person who used to say like, oh, OK, that’s getting a good review. Is this worth going out and spending money on? OK, I’ll spend some amount of money on this. All of a sudden, it was like money was out of the equation. I had my Spotify for $10 a month. I was listening to anything I wanted for pennies a day, and all of a sudden I didn’t feel that same need to seek out a “Pitchfork” review.
Because as good as the writing is and remains, it wasn’t serving that same function that it used to for me. I used to look to “Pitchfork” to educate me musically. Tell me about artists from the ‘60s, ‘70s, ‘80s, before I was paying attention to pop music, and it did an amazing job at that. Spotify for the most part would show me new stuff.
Well, Spotify, as it has improved its own AI systems, it’s now really good at saying, oh, hey, Casey, you like the Beatles. Here are some other acts from the ‘60s that were contemporaries of theirs that made some great music as well. And so now Spotify is playing the role that a music publication that once had a team of 20, 30, 50, who knows how many people, who are all trying to educate me about music that is now just all being done by math.
And I don’t want to say that it is perfect or even better than the human beings, but in practice, because Spotify is the point where I’m consuming all music already, it is just effortless for me to let it do that job. And I think it creates a kind of existential crisis if you’re a music critic. It is asking you to effectively change your job. That’s an editorial problem more than it is a business problem, but I do think we should point it out because the story of tech and media isn’t just the money dried out. It is that as we go through these technological shifts, they call for new kinds of publications to answer that moment.
Yeah, so I think that’s the first shoe to drop with AI and the news business is the fact that people are now turning to AI to curate their information but also their taste. The new tastemakers are not critics and publications. They are algorithms and AI DJs, and I think you can extrapolate that across the industry.
But there’s this other, newer factor that I think is starting to become a real issue, which is that generative AI is rising up through search. So if you do search on Google for something like “best laptop 2024,” some of the results that you might get are, in fact, AI generated pages from these AI content farms. And I think we should explain why that’s a potentially very bad thing for traditional publishers.
Yeah, so like “best laptop 2024” is one of the most valuable searches that there probably is on Google.
People pay a lot of money to be the first result or the first ad shown to people who search for that term.
That’s one reason. The second reason is if you are a publication and you’re even vaguely associated with tech, you have a huge incentive to write an article called “best laptop of 2024.” And whatever laptop you decide, you’re going to put an affiliate link on that. So if I’m in the market for a new laptop, I find it on some website. I click the link. I buy it off of Amazon or whatever. Amazon is going to share some of that money with the publisher, and this has become a huge source of revenue for publishers over the past decade or so.
As the advertising market has declined for them, affiliate link revenue has been a bright spot. It’s helped to prop up a lot of these publications, helped to preserve a lot of jobs in journalism. Well, now you introduce AI into the equation, and Google has this product, SGE, Search Generative Experience, and it gets that “best laptop 2024.” It could just show you 10 websites that wrote a best laptop 2024 article, or it could summarize them, pick out its own best laptop 2024, show its own affiliate link, and keep all of the revenue for itself. And the question that you should be asking if you’re a publisher is why would Google continue to send traffic to you in the future when it can just keep the money for itself?
Right. So I think a lot of publishers are very nervous about these kind of generative AI powered search engines. “The New York Times” actually cited an example very much like the one you just provided about the best laptop of 2024 in its lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft that was filed late last year, basically saying these AI chat bots that are hooked up to the internet and can go retrieve real time data, they are essentially a substitute for journalism. Because if you can say what is “The Wirecutter’s” best recommendation for a ceiling fan — is that a?
Yeah, I will not buy a ceiling fan without checking with “The Wirecutter.”
So if you go to “The Wirecutter”—
I had an uncle who was decapitated by a bad one.
[LAUGHS]:: So if you go to “The Wirecutter” looking for their best ceiling fan recommendation, and you end up buying a ceiling fan through that affiliate link, “The New York Times,” which owns “Wirecutter,” may get a cut of that. But if you can just go to ChatGPT with browsing enabled or one of these other AI search products, you might just get that pulled out from “The Wirecutter” article with no affiliate link and no revenue shared back with “The Wirecutter.”
Yeah, that’s right.
So OK, to basically sum up the diagnosis of the problem here, we have these challenges with media that date back at least a decade and probably two of the decline of their advertising businesses, a shift away from having direct relationships with readers to now being intermediated by these tech platforms, and we now have these AI tools that are threatening various facets of the industry from AI generated spam showing up in Google results to chat bots that can just summarize information rather than actually directing people to the websites of publishers.
Oh, we didn’t even talk about the fact that AI spam is now outperforming some legitimate news stories.
Yeah say more about that.
Well, so this month there was this group of researchers based in Germany who released a year long study. It was called “Is Google getting worse? A longitudinal investigation of SEO spam in search engines.” And they were trying to figure out if they could measure empirically whether Google search results were getting worse by turning up more low quality content.
So they researched a bunch of product searches, so like the best laptop 2024 thing. And they found that, yes, Google results for product terms did seem to pull up a lot of spam and low quality content. My strong suspicion is that a lot of this was AI generated. And if it wasn’t already, certainly it will be in the future.
And so now if you are the publication that’s still writing “best laptop 2024” articles, you’re not just competing against the many other newsrooms on the internet that are creating that sort of thing. You’re now also going to be competing against AIs, and it could be a lot of AIs.
It could be infinite AIs, and that is a challenge that I think Google has truly not even begun to answer, in part because they’ve said we’re basically OK with AI-created web pages. We don’t have a rule against AI-created web pages. I’m not even sure that they should have a rule against AI-created web pages, but I do know that they have a strong incentive to have good search results, at least until they replace all their search results with AI.
Right. Right, this seems like a short term problem that will eventually be replaced by a much bigger, longer term problem. So if that’s the diagnosis of what is happening in the media industry today, what is the prescription? Where can news publishers look if they want to build sustainable businesses in the year of our Lord 2024?
I think it all has to start with reimagining the cost structure of a business. So we used to think about media businesses in terms of we will hire a newsroom of this many reporters. We will have a back office function with human resources and bookkeepers and accountants and an in-house lawyer and everything.
And if you are a medium-sized publication or you want to start a medium-sized publication, that I think is the thing that is just the hardest to do right now. We do not really have any visibility into how you do that sustainably. So where I would like to see more attention going is toward these very small newsrooms and these journalist-owned collectives.
One of my favorite stories in media, one that makes me the most optimistic, is this site called Defector, which was started by a bunch of former writers at Deadspin, the old sports blog. And these folks were so talented, and their audience loved them so much. They had a very authentic connection with their audience who loved the way that they talked about sports and politics.
And so when they started up their own thing and they say, hey, come support us, a lot of people were willing to come, show up, and pay them. And they actually share all their financials every year, which I think is amazing. And in their most recent report, you can see they’re doing pretty well. They share most of the revenue they make with the people who are writing the website.
It feels like they have found a path forward. It’s not maybe as big as “Pitchfork” was. It’s probably not as big as Deadspin. But it is bigger than Platformer, and it is doing meaningful work. We’re seeing other people adopting this model.
Some of my favorite reporters from Vice News’s old Motherboard vertical, which was their vertical that covered tech, they recently started something called 404 Media. It’s the same thing, very small nucleus of incredibly talented reporters, and they are now just asking people to come support their work directly. They’ve already broken so much news.
So if you are a journalist and you want to find a sustainable path in this industry, I would be thinking about these collectives. I also am a big believer in the solo creator model or the maybe one, two, three person newsroom model, which I’m trying out myself now.
I talk with journalists all the time who are considering making that move. I have been trying to provide the best assistance I can to some folks that are, and some of them have actually thrived. And the final thing I would say, Kevin, is I would love to see the millionaires and the billionaires take a look at what folks like Defector and 404 are doing.
The classic move for a billionaire is to be like, what is some prestigious old property that’s losing a lot of money that I could take over and maybe help it lose slightly less money and just bask in the fact that I own “The Washington Post” or something like that? These folks could lose so much less money and could have such a bigger impact on journalism and democracy if they just went to 404, they went to Defector, they went to one of these other collectives and they said, you know what? I’m just going to give you $5 million a year. See what you could do with it.
Maybe you decide you want to hire 10 more people. Maybe you want to invest in a really cool website. Maybe you want to launch some really expensive investigations. But man, if you are a rich person and you just want to be a patron of some journalism organization, I’m telling you, it is in these small collectives where you are going to get so much more bang for your buck.
Yeah, I think there’s something to that. I think especially for local and regional news, it makes sense to consider alternative ways of funding yourself. One of my favorite examples of a local news startup that I really love is Cityside, which is out in the Bay Area where I live. It started with a website called Berkeleyside, which was a hyperlocal digital publisher that was just a handful of people who were covering local news in Berkeley, California.
There’s now a publication called Oaklandside. So they’re expanding to other cities in the area, and they really have an interesting mix of funding. Some of it comes from grants and foundations. Some of it comes from wealthy benefactors who decide to support this as a quasi philanthropic exercise. And I think it’s just a really interesting model for local news.
I don’t know if that works at the same way on the kind of national or global scale. And so my recommendation for the news industry when it comes to these bigger national and global publications is to get back to basics. There’s this famous saying in Silicon Valley. It’s the motto of the Y Combinator startup accelerator.
They like to say, make something people want. And I think that has to be at the center of what media organizations are trying to do. We cannot have a sustainable news industry if it is dependent on the largesse of billionaires, on the availability of grants. I’ve even heard some people talk about maybe the government should fund news production. Maybe we should have employers bundling subscriptions, offering subscriptions to news publications as part of their employee benefits packages.
And I just really think that all of those strategies are sort of missing the fundamental point, which is that in order to succeed, you have to make something that people want to pay for. People should not have to be guilted or pressured or cajoled into subscribing to their favorite publication. It should be something that they want to do. And I think in the last decade or two since I’ve been in media, journalists have really lost a sense of entrepreneurship and creativity.
It’s almost become a dirty word in certain parts of the media industry to care too much or to know too much about how your company or your journalism organization makes money. We’ve cleaved that off into a separate part of the industry. And look, there are good reasons for that. I don’t necessarily want the investigative reporters covering Congress to be thinking about their web traffic or how many subscriptions their stories are converting, but I do think that we as an industry could benefit from a little more entrepreneurial thinking and just trying stuff and thinking about not only what is the best story to tell here, but what is the thing that people are actually willing to pay for?
Yeah, I want to say something about the make people want point, because it is a really important one. For a long time now, when new publications have been started, it is often started around an advertising category. I’m not going to name the publications over the past few years that were started by companies thinking like, we need a tech vertical.
And they would spin something up. They would lavishly fund it for a while. But then once the ads didn’t turn out to be there, the plug got pulled on it. Well, that was because there’s already a lot of tech coverage. And if you don’t show up in the market with some sort of unique editorial insight, the market is probably going to reject you, unless you just happen to have the most talented people in the world working there.
So again, this is like one of the reasons why media is such a hard business is it is not even enough to have a good business model, which is already enough of a challenge on its own. You have to have an existential reason for being, and it is just in the nature of media for the existential reason you find to not last that long. You actually have to constantly reinvent yourself.
When I started writing a newsletter, it was just about that day’s problem at Facebook, and there were a lot of them, and it sustained my newsletter for years. But then one day, that was an old story, and the newsletter had to be about something else. And publications find themselves in that spot all the time. And it is super hard, but if we want to rebuild that middle of media, we need folks that build publications that have a dedicated reason for being and they need to be able to evolve that over time.
Yeah. You know, Casey, I think a point that often goes underappreciated in these discussions is that news as kind of a standalone product has very rarely been profitable on its own without some adjacent business subsidizing it. So there used to be this saying at “The New York Times”— I don’t know if it was ever true or not — that the crossword puzzle paid for the Baghdad Bureau. You have these lightweight sections, like games and puzzles and comics, that get people in, and then you use the revenue generated by those things to pay for the very expensive foreign desk.
And this is true at a lot at a different kinds of publications and media organizations — radio stations hosting music festivals. I remember a few years ago when BuzzFeed’s Tasty section, their cooking recipe section of their website got very popular, they started a line of cookware that they would sell in stores. So there have always been these kind of attempts by media organizations to use an adjacent business to subsidize the newsgathering one.
Yeah, which is why we’re adding comics to Platformer. So look forward to “Marmaduke” starting next week.
So what is an adjacent product that you think could make money for news organizations today?
I think pro wrestling obviously comes to mind.
Honestly, it could work. You could pay — people would pay to see David Brooks and Maureen Dowd go at it.
I mean, so much of digital media is just people dunking on each other. Why not put it in the squared circle and see everyone at SummerSlam?
I love this, a cage match. That’s better than my idea, which was an app that would allow you to tap the expertise of world class writers to write your dating app profiles and messages for you. Call this Cyrano.
Yes, writers famously good at dating and in relationships. Those are the people you want writing that for you.
When we come back, crypto investor Chris Dixon talks about blockchains, Web3, and where the industry went wrong.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
So, Casey, we have talked a lot on this podcast about what’s happening in the cryptocurrency world and all of the various scandals and misdeeds and Ponzi schemes and collapses that have befallen big crypto companies over the last few years.
We do. In fact, let’s do a live update on the price of Dogecoin, Kevin. Right now as we record this, the price of Dogecoin is 7.9 cents. So I hope that helps you as you make your investment decisions.
So we spend a lot of time joking and being glib about what’s going on in crypto because there have been just so many disasters over the past few years, especially. But I think we also have to treat this as a serious subject, because there are a lot of people in Silicon Valley still to this day who believe that despite all the scandals, despite the fact that FTX and Binance have collapsed, and Sam Bankman-Fried is in jail, and the crypto market is a fraction of its former self, there are people who are influential in the tech industry who think that all of this is due for a rebound and that crypto will actually be an important part of our technological future.
Yeah, and wouldn’t you say that one of the things that those folks have in common is that they have a lot of money riding on the outcome?
Some of them do, yes. And some of them just believe in the theoretical underpinnings of crypto, the idea of decentralization and taking away the intermediaries of big tech who have been controlling the experiences online of billions of people. So this week we had an opportunity to talk to one of the enduring crypto optimists in Silicon Valley, and I think he’s actually someone who both you and I have respected and relied on as a source of wisdom and information for a long time. And that’s Chris Dixon.
Chris is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm founded by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who has become one of the biggest investors in crypto and Web3. The Information called him Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto king. In addition to being an investor, Chris is also someone who’s been blogging and thinking about the future of the internet for a very long time. And his firm has led investments in a bunch of leading crypto companies, including Coinbase, OpenSea, and Yuga Labs, which is the company that makes the Bored Ape Yacht Club NFT collection.
And to this day, he remains optimistic that crypto is not dead, and in fact blockchain networks, which is what he prefers to call it, are going to be an important part of the future of the internet and a way for ordinary people to take back power from some of these centralized tech platforms.
Mhm. Yeah, and I should say, Kevin, I actually just don’t share that view at all. I feel burned by everything that I wrote about crypto, and Chris was one of the people who made me take crypto seriously because I thought, look, if this person is serious about it, then I need to assume that something positive is going to come out of this. And I have not had a chance to talk to him since all of this stuff started to shake out in the market. So when we found out that he had a new book coming out, we said, well, maybe this is the chance where we can ask him the hard questions that we’ve had.
Yeah, so Chris just wrote a new book detailing his vision for the future of crypto and blockchains. It’s called “Read Write Own.” And I thought, well, maybe this is our chance to ask a person who’s really in some ways responsible for a lot of the big investments that have propped up the crypto world. Maybe this is a chance to understand why he’s still optimistic about where crypto is headed despite all of the evidence that suggests that this industry is in real trouble.
Chris Dixon, welcome to “Hard Fork.”
Thanks for having me.
So we’re going to talk about your new book, “Read Write Own.” But first I want to recall or recollect a conversation that you and I had about 10 years ago. I don’t know if you remember this, but I’d been following —
I think we were in SF or something. I remember being on a pier or something. Is that right? Is this correct or no?
Yeah, we were getting coffee at the Ferry Building in San Francisco.
Did I say something that was — I made a bad prediction.
Well, you told me that you’d gotten really interested in crypto. And I remember this conversation because this was during the first big Bitcoin boom, and there was a lot of exuberance. People were making tons of money.
And I remember you telling me you guys in the tech media, you need to pay attention to crypto, because it’s a really fascinating story, and it’s a lot bigger than just Bitcoin. These blockchain things, they’re going to be a really big deal. A lot of the smartest programmers in Silicon Valley are working on this stuff, and it’s going to turn into real valuable products that will revolutionize the tech industry.
And I remember that conversation for me was a moment where I started to look at crypto more seriously and cover it in a more serious way. And fast forward a decade, I think you were right that crypto has been a very interesting story, but I think not for the reasons that you and I would have predicted a decade ago. We’ve got these massive scams, exchanges collapsing, executives going to jail, billions of dollars being made and lost overnight.
And meanwhile, as I look around, I can’t actually see any tangible examples of where blockchains have transformed much of anything. And a lot of the really smart programmers that you were talking about have left crypto and are pivoting to building AI. So my first question to you is just what happened?
Yeah, look. I do think it went off — I mean, I’m not disagreeing with you. I think it did not go the way that I wanted it to go. To the extent you want to get into it, I would describe the last 2022 to 2023 as starting off very promising for somebody like me who is interested in applications and utility. I thought there were some really interesting things built. And then I think it went off the rails. And honestly, part of writing this book — I started writing this book after that — I was reflecting on, do I want to keep doing this? I don’t want to be part of this casino culture. Is that something fundamental to technology, or is it just so far the wrong people, the wrong products have been built?
I believe it’s the second. It’s the latter of those. And look, I’ll just also put it in the context of there are many millions of people who are very excited about the idea that you can have a financial service where there is no company behind it, where it’s truly owned and operated by a community. I think the one thing I was right about, Kevin, is that idea has resonated deeply, and if there’s another proposal for how to fight consolidation of the internet, I’m open to it. But this is my proposal, I guess.
Yeah, and we’ll get into could blockchain still realize the vision that you had back then, but I just want to say, Chris, I’ve known you for a long time. You invested in a lot of stuff before crypto that I thought was super interesting. And when you got into crypto, to me, this was one of the big signals for me as it was for Kevin, it’s time to take this seriously.
And over the next few years, I think what happened is I tried to be one of the journalists keeping an open mind about stuff and not assuming that everything was a fraud or a scam. But when I look back on what I wrote in ‘21 and ‘22, the stuff that I covered was at best irrelevant and at worst was stuff that people lost a whole lot of money on. So when you’re coming back around with a book and saying let’s take the blockchain seriously, I just have this lingering hangover of like, I tried it, and I like deeply regret what I wrote about before.
Yeah, but Casey, I mean, in fairness, I started an AI company in 2008. It was called Hunch, and I sold it to eBay in 2011. And frankly, it wasn’t the success that I would have hoped it was. And if you’d asked me in 2012, I would have given you a list of reasons why it didn’t work.
And in reality, it was timing. It was timing. And look, the first neural network paper was 1943. right it was McCulloch and Pitts. And then there was Turing, and his paper was in 1950. I think he predicted in 20 years we’d have intelligent machines that pass the Turing test.
There was a so-called AI bubble in the ‘80s. And then it worked. And why did it work? Because there’s a lot of smart people and everything else, but a lot of it was because of video games, because video games drove GPUs, and it got better.
I think that from the outside — you guys are tech journalists and you know this, but from the outside view, sometimes these things look like they’re sort of Immaculate Conception. In reality, there’s these messy background stories. So look, I agree with you. Again, you’re right. It hasn’t realized its potential. Does that mean it will never realize its potential? I don’t think that’s the case.
So, Chris, this book “Read Write Own” is a collection of your thoughts about crypto and blockchains and what you think the future of decentralization might be. What is the main argument, in a couple of sentences, of this book?
So the main argument is that the original promise of the internet was to be a democratically controlled system where creators, entrepreneurs, companies could build direct relationships with their audiences. In the meantime, a set of large companies stepped in the middle and became intermediaries. And that’s Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Google, et cetera.
And that has been incredibly beneficial to those companies and I think has significantly hurt the rest of the participants of the internet. And so I am very concerned that the internet is going to become like old broadcast TV, where you have ABC, CBS, and NBC, and that’s it. And I think that is a bad outcome for creators, for entrepreneurs, by the way, for venture capitalists. We are in the business of funding startups and having a dynamic internet. And I think we’re headed there.
And then we have this technology come along, which I think of blockchains as — the core argument of the book is if web 1 protocol is like email, are thesis, and Web2 systems like Facebook are antithesis. I see blockchains as synthesis. They’re the best of both worlds.
I use the phrase, the societal benefits of protocol networks, of early web protocol, web and email protocols, but some of the competitive advantages of the Web2 networks. That’s my argument. And so I think you could build — So for example, I think a very critical moment that led to the consolidation of the internet was the fall of RSS, was the fact that — so in 2007 or ‘08 — for those who don’t know, RSS is an open protocol, like email and the web, which allows for social networking features. And people forget this now, but in 2008 or so, RSS was a legitimate competitor to Twitter and Facebook. RSS is now — it’s used in podcasting. It’s used in niche things, but it’s clearly not dominant.
It has a user base that’s a fraction of the size of Twitter and Facebook and things like this. And look, the aggregate revenue of the top social networks last year was $150 billion. That money went to those companies. Had RSS won, I believe the vast majority of that money would have gone to the edges of the network. That has huge economic — so these topics of how do you architect these networks has profound economic consequences. It has profound cultural consequences. It has political consequences.
Who gets to decide who has a platform? Who gets to decide how the algorithms work? Who gets verified? Should it be an $8 thing? Should it be because you know a friend at Twitter? I think all of these systems — I don’t think that because you happen to build a popular social network you should get to decide how global economics, culture, and politics works, which is the system that we have today and we’re heading towards.
So the core argument is there is a new technology, which admittedly has a sullied name because of the casino and other kinds of things. But there’s another side to the coin.
He asked for a couple sentences, and you really took that challenge. Here’s a —
Yeah, those were sentences in the William Faulkner sense of the word.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I think maybe something that could help make this discussion a little less abstract is talking about particular projects or particular companies. And I want to ask you about a company and a project in crypto that I wrote about a few years ago called Helium. This is also a company that your firm invested in. This was a company, they were making these essentially wireless routers that you could put in your house or on your roof or at your office, and these things would basically provide connectivity to devices around you. And at the same time, they would also mine a cryptocurrency token.
And so the idea was that you would — instead of Comcast or whoever like spending billions of dollars to build out a new wireless network, you could essentially incentivize ordinary people to do this by giving them some crypto in exchange for providing these routers to the network. And at the time, I thought that sounds like a cool idea. It’s an original way to bootstrap a big expensive infrastructure project.
So I wrote about it. And I was pretty positive about it. And then afterwards, it became clear that this whole thing was essentially a house of cards, that no one, barely anyone was actually using the network. The company insiders and executives had secretly given themselves a big percentage of the tokens.
I don’t agree with the criticism.
Well, let me just let me finish the question. And essentially this company had made itself look more successful than it really was. The token price crashed, and the subreddits and places where people who were big proponents of Helium started to fill with just people complaining that they had lost all this money or spent all this money on routers that weren’t giving them back anything in return.
People write to me all the time even today who feel burned by Helium and are mad at me for writing about it. But you actually write in your book that Helium is a good example of crypto’s usefulness. So I’m curious, what in your mind did Helium prove?
Yeah, and I think in the book I say Helium solved half of the problem, and let me explain that. So this has been an idea that I’ve heard about for 20 years, which is the idea of wouldn’t it be an interesting entrepreneurial idea if we could create a grassroots Verizon? But the challenge is the chicken and egg problem, which is the challenge with a lot of tech businesses. You got to do two sides of the market.
And so the insight that Helium had is that you can use financial incentives to help with one side of the market, in the supply side of the market. They did a good job on the supply side, which is farther than any other attempt got. They had not built out the demand side. They are building it out now, and I believe they’re making progress. I’m not personally deeply involved, but I mean, this idea that it was going to happen overnight, it’s a really big, ambitious idea. These things take time.
I understand the supply and the demand sides of that market. But I think another way to describe what happened with Helium is that they used casino-like economics to build an infrastructure project that no one wanted or that very few people actually had real use cases for. So I don’t —
They —
Yeah.
Well, they first they started off with this — I forgot the name of it. It was LoRa something. It was some weird —
LoRaWAN, of course.
Which was a mistake. Which is a mistake, and they switched it to 5G. So that was the first thing. And now they have — you can go get it. You can go. There’s a service where you can go sign up, and I think it backhauls — it backfills with T-Mobile or something, and it uses Helium wherever it can, and then it backfills with — if it doesn’t have coverage in that area, it backfills with T-Mobile. And they’re building that out. And so and that just simply takes time.
I guess I don’t understand the criticism that — look, I mean, one of the points I make in the book is that subsidization is a very, very old tactic among internet companies. Why do all these companies have to raise many, many, many billions in venture capital? Because a lot of their proposed pitches they subsidize. I see Helium as, OK, now the forces of openness have financial tools —
But someone did subsidize the building of the Helium network. It was the people who thought that they could get rich on Helium tokens and bought a bunch of these useless routers and hooked them up to the internet. We can move on from Helium, but I think that is a very clear example of how something that looks to people in crypto like a successful example of bootstrapping some project that wouldn’t have gotten funding otherwise or would need venture capital otherwise, if you drill down one layer, it actually is just spreading the risk and the subsidies around to a bunch of normal people who just got snookered into participating in this thing.
Wait a second. A couple of things I’ll say — first of all, we have not ever been involved with a project that sold tokens to the public, just to be clear. I don’t know what these people are referring to, but like Helium — I guarantee you, because no company we’re involved with nor would we ever would we allow them to do this — sells tokens to the public.
No, you would earn tokens by plugging in your router.
Everyone else earns them through airdrops, so that’s just to be clear. So this idea that they’re somehow selling these things to retail investors, that’s simply not true.
I mean, I’m on these subs. I can show you the posts on these subreddits if you want, but there are people who spent thousands of dollars because someone told them that you plug in this router, and it makes you crypto, and you get rich off this.
I mean, people shouldn’t — I don’t think the company said that.
No, no, no.
They shouldn’t have said that.
Right, but in an environment where you have a token that’s sort of — anyway, we can move on. But Casey, I want to let you jump in.
So yeah, shift away from Helium. But I do think that there is an idea here worth exploring, which is what happens when you financialize a network? As I’ve observed some of these networks rise and fall, it seems to me that when you at least plant the seed with people that they can make good — maybe not get rich but just get paid by doing something, you wind up attracting a different kind of person than if you’re just YouTube and you just say, hey, show up here and upload your videos.
I mean, the thing that I’m thinking of is Axie Infinity, which is a company, an Andreessen Horowitz company that I wrote about. If you haven’t heard of it, it was a game reminiscent of “Pokemon.” It let players earn cryptocurrency from battling their little monsters, which are called Axies. Those Axies are also NFTs. You have to buy one to play the game or you could rent them from their owners.
When I wrote about it in 2021, it was taking off in the Philippines. People were earning more than the minimum wage by playing it. I thought that’s pretty interesting, and I wrote about it. But the financial nature of it essentially required that new investors would come in to prop up the price just like you would find in a traditional Ponzi scheme. And then eventually $625 million worth of tokens were stolen, and the game’s whole economy collapsed.
So I’m trying to understand, while obviously we would wish that the hack hadn’t happened and maybe we learned some lessons about the network, but as far as I can understand it, Axie is your dream of a blockchain-based future where people have skin in the game. They have a piece of the action, and it just seems like it is not doing good things.
No. So OK, look. The way I view it is — and I think the Axie team would say this — the focus was way too much on the financial aspects. One of the lessons from things like Axie is that the primary goal needs to be a fun game outside of the financial aspects. So you need something let’s just say like “Roblox” or “Eve Online.”
And I think there needs to be policy approaches. By the way, I say this in the book, and we say this publicly. I think, for example, having much, much longer lock-ups on all tokens would be a significant improvement, because I think you would just remove a whole class of mercenary behavior.
I don’t think we should be against people having a profit motive. I think the real harm is in the short-term profit motive. And I think some of that probably has to be achieved through policy. Some of it has to be achieved through better products. But to me, it’s throwing the baby out with the bathwater to say that because some early attempts over financialized things there should never be digital services where you can have peer-to-peer economies where the users can earn financial rewards.
I don’t think it means we have to kill blockchains. I do think it means we have to be thoughtful about how we incorporate those legitimate criticisms into better designs.
Well, my view isn’t that this stuff should be banned forever. It’s not even that people should stop noodling on this thing. That is fine to me. I just feel like until someone makes one cool thing that is not just remittances with a blockchain, I’m just inclined to ignore it. Because when I look at the amount of talent, capital, and time that has gone into it, there’s basically never been a technology in the history of Silicon Valley, as far as I can tell, where more time, money, and talent went into it and produced as little as we have so far gotten out of the blockchain.
I don’t know. I mean, when I started my career in the early 2000s, people would have said that about telecom equipment. And I don’t know. I feel like I’ve gone through my whole career with these ups and downs, and people say we overinvested in something. And cryptos I think are — I don’t know I don’t the exact percentages, but I don’t think it’s a huge percentage of total venture investment these days.
Yeah. We talked recently on the show about the Bitcoin ETFs that have just been approved for trading, basically letting people buy and sell things that track the price of Bitcoin in their retirement funds or whatever. And that’s something that a lot of people in the Bitcoin world have been optimistic about.
I know you’re not a Bitcoin laser eyes guy, but as you look out across the crypto landscape today, what are the projects that make you optimistic?
A lot of my career has been focused on creative people. The most disliked area I’m still the most excited about, which is NFTs, I think NFTs are a really powerful way for creative people. Just take musicians as an example. So music is an area where users love music. Users love to pay for music. There’s lots of talented musicians.
The problem today is these intermediaries. And it’s the labels. It’s Spotify. It’s a whole bunch of different layers of intermediaries. So we have two companies, for example, doing music-related NFTs. And it’s like you get an NFT, and it’s a digital collectible, and it’s a backstage pass, and it’s proof that you were the first one that liked the musician, and you can go to a special event, and there’s just a whole bunch of experiments happening. But I think that this is a very powerful tool, blockchains and NFTs and these things for thinking about new business models for creative people.
And I mean, I guess I should say, I should be rooting for that idea. And I guess I am. I mean, if what you just described comes to pass, then hopefully that’s something I would be able to take advantage of. I’m doing a lot of the things that you say. I do run my own business. I am a solo creator. I have been able to forge a direct relationship with an audience using email.
It’s awesome. Everything that you’re describing is beyond my wildest dreams. I have a community on Discord that gives me ideas and pushes back on me when I’m wrong. All that stuff is amazing. I just keep coming back to the fact, it’s like I do it using today’s internet, and I’ve even been able to do it with a pretty low take rate.
So I’ll just be curious to see what winds up being on the blockchain that enables me to accelerate that. I’m still open to the idea.
Yeah. I think making money would be one, and that’s NFTs and other kinds of new interesting experiments. I assume, Casey, you’re still dependent on these big social networks for distribution and things too. I mean, email lets you deliver the thing, but how do you acquire new users? And Discord, at some point maybe they deprioritize links the way the Twitter is. And maybe I don’t know. And I think in that world, do you want people, entrepreneurs, building alternative sets of tools that might provide an outlet? That’s my argument.
Yeah. Chris, before we let you go, I think there will be people who listen to you talking about this stuff and think that makes a lot of sense to me. I think there will be other people who say, this is just someone who has invested billions of dollars into crypto companies who is talking his own book and going on this press tour to essentially do marketing for the blockchain and Web3 investments of Andreessen Horowitz crypto.
I’m curious, if you didn’t have money on the line, if you didn’t have skin in the game, both your own personal capital and your investors’ money, would you still be this optimistic?
I don’t know. I mean, look, I’ve been optimistic my whole career. I mean, I started in the internet downturn. And so I started my first company in 2003-4. And that was not a popular time to be doing internet startups. It really wasn’t. It was quite hard to raise money.
And so look, I’ve just seen my whole career, every time there’s been a bunch of smart people, it doesn’t work for a while, and then eventually it does. And I have yet to see the really smart people eventually not get it to work, OK? So I don’t know, Kevin. Also I would say if you read this book, I think a lot of people are surprised when they read this book.
It’s not like “seven cool things written by fund manager” kind of book. I try to be give pros and cons. And as I said, it was a test for myself. And so look, I mean, look, obviously I have an interest in this. I mean, you could argue the causality goes the other way. I also work in this business because I am optimistic, and I believe in it. So you could argue either way.
But yes, we have skin in the game. I also think we have a bigger skin in the game, which is I do think that if we don’t have blockchains, I think it really, really will hurt tech startup activity. So the whole venture industry is based on this cyclical new companies, the daddy line dies, and the baby line is born. And if we just have a bunch of daddy lines forever, that’s not good for venture capital.
So yes, I’m self interested, but I would argue the causality goes the other way. I’m in the business because I do believe in tech. Also, I grew up on Unix. I grew up on the web. I am an open source maximalist. I would like to see everything open source, and I see blockchains as an extension of that.
But I would hope people could read the book. And if they have a critique, critique the book and not the motives behind it.
Yeah. Well, we’ll end there. Chris Dixon, thank you for coming on. The book is “Read Write Own, Building the Next Era of the Internet.” And you’ve been a good sport here while we grilled you, so thanks for coming on.
Thanks, Chris.
Those were tougher questions, but they were good. They were good, and you guys were fair. Thank you.
All right. Thanks for coming, Chris.
OK, thanks. OK. All right, take care.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
When we come back, it’s time to play a round of HatGPT.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Casey, it’s time to pass the hat. We’re playing a game of HatGPT.
Our segment on this show where we take news headlines from the week out of a hat and generate some plausible sounding language about them until one of us tells the other one to stop generating. And this week we actually have in our possession a brand-new HatGPT hat.
That’s right. We had a wonderful listener who went and sent this to us. Now, if you are not watching the YouTube show, this is a cloth bucket hat that I think started as a plain white bucket hat but was tie-dyed with blue and yellow and says HatGPT in the “Hard Fork” font. It’s frankly a beautiful hat.
It’s a beautiful hat. It was sent to us by listener Gwan Yip who said that he designed it using generative AI. So thank you, Gwan. And we will use this hat today, and hopefully more hats will keep pouring in, and we’ll just develop a little bit of a hat collection.
Now, if it was designed using generative AI, does that mean that there’s potentially a hidden code in this?
[LAUGHS]: I don’t know. Check the brim.
Yeah, well, oh, actually it does say, “The future is already here” on the inside of the hat. So there is a bit. And if you flip it around, it does say, “Stop generating stuff.”
Wow.
Wonderful hat. Hats off to Gwan Yip. Thank you.
All right, so here are our news stories for the week. Put them in the hat.
All right.
And you can mix them up.
And let me pull out of the first.
Yeah, you pull the first one.
OK. Let’s see. “Google employees blast profoundly boring management which lacks visionary leader among layoffs.” This is from “The New York Post,” and it is a story about a post on LinkedIn from a Google employee named Diane Hirsch Thoreau. And she wrote on her LinkedIn page, quote, “from the c-suite to the SVP’s to the VPs, they are all profoundly boring and glassy-eyed.” The full post really is worth reading in its entirety. She goes off and basically says this company lacks all vision.
So this post was very long, and it basically outlined a lot of the problems that this Google employee sees with the sclerotic bureaucracy at Google. And that is quite a thing to write in LinkedIn about your bosses and your boss’s boss.
Well, it’s very good writing too. I mean, this is a post that comes in response to Google’s recent layoffs. And I think the point that this employee is making is it really seems like these layoffs are being done at random. This employee did not feel like there is a grand strategy that is being executed, and so now this person, like so many other people at Google, are just like, how secure is my job here? They feel like they don’t know where things are going.
So look, in an organization of tens of thousands of employees, you’re always going to have some folks there that think that the company doesn’t have a vision or whatever. I don’t work at Google. I don’t know how true I would find this if I worked there. But what I will say is that in the meantime, Diane Thoreau has done the impossible. She has made LinkedIn seem interesting.
So thank you, Diane. This was an incredible post, and we would love to see more posts like this.
Yeah, more sounding off on your bosses on LinkedIn, please.
Go off, queens.
Stop generating. OK, my turn.
All right.
Pass the hat.
Here’s the hat.
“YouTube and Spotify won’t launch Apple Vision Pro apps, joining Netflix.” This story’s from Bloomberg. Basically, YouTube, Spotify, and a few other major developers like Netflix have said that they are not going to make versions of their apps for the Apple Vision Pro which is, of course, what they’re calling a spatial computing headset that comes out from Apple in just a few days.
Yeah, that’s right. And this is a surprise because for the past decade plus, when Apple would come out with a new device, whether it would be the iPad, the watch, developers were racing to be on this thing because they thought there’s going to be a big new market there. And if we can be the first movers, we can guarantee that we will reap the rewards. And now you have two of the biggest companies that exist, who you just take for as a given that there’s going to be a Netflix app or a YouTube app, and these companies have said, you know what? We’re going to pass on this one for right now.
Yeah, it’s really surprising in part because part of what spatial computing headsets might be really good for is watching a movie or watching a video in an IMAX-like experience with your headset. So I don’t know. Do you think this signals that developers don’t think this product is going to be a success?
Or there’s another theory that was advanced by Ben Thompson this week that this is actually developers getting back at Apple for the drama around some of their App Store decisions over the past few years and saying, well, if you guys are going to insist on taking a 30 percent cut of our revenue, we’re going to fight back by refusing to make these apps that might convince people to buy your $3,500 face computer.
Yeah, look. Developers don’t build apps out of goodwill. They build apps to make money, and Apple has instituted a lot of rules that ensure that some percentage of the revenue generated goes to Apple and not these developers. And so if you are Google thinking about the YouTube app or you’re Netflix, you might just say, you know what? First of all, Apple’s not even going to sell that many of these things. The estimates are maybe it sells a half a million of them in the first year. How much incremental revenue can a YouTube or a Netflix generate from there being a half a million of these new devices?
So in the end, if there wind up being tons and tons of these Vision Pro headsets everywhere, I’m sure that YouTube and Netflix will come around. But in the meantime, I do think it’s interesting that they are needling Apple a little bit and saying, hmm, let’s wait and see.
Yeah.
Now we should say, you will be able to look at video in the web browser if you buy one of these things. So you can still access YouTube. You can still access Netflix, but you’re not going to be able to do it via the App Store.
Yeah.
Wait. Now it’s my turn.
Yeah, your turn.
All right. “New Hampshire investigating fake Biden robocall meant to discourage voters ahead of the primary.” This is from the AP. The New Hampshire attorney general’s office Monday said it was investigating reports of an apparent robocall that used artificial intelligence to mimic President Joe Biden’s voice and discourage voters in the state from coming to the polls during Tuesday’s primary election.
One of the quotes here was apparently fake Biden said, quote, “save your vote for the November election,” as if we are only allowed to vote in one of the two, which is not true. Also, this happened in New York, so there was AI-generated audio of a Manhattan Democratic boss Keith Wright. This is according to Politico. Keith Wright was apparently talking smack about another assembly member in this audio, but the audio itself, which was this 10-second clip, was apparently a fake.
And so here, Kevin, we’ve talked about the threat of deepfakes to elections. And I think we’ve talked a lot about images and video, but here it is already showing up in national and local elections, and it is audio.
Yeah. What’s interesting to me is like it doesn’t sound like this deepfake that was played for voters in New Hampshire of Joe Biden telling them not to go to the polls. No one actually was fooled that this was actually Joe Biden calling them. We’ve just become so accustomed to these pre-taped robocalls, but I confess this arrived faster than I thought it would.
Yeah, I would agree with that. I would say if you’re wondering, how do I protect myself against robocalls in this election, I would just suggest not answering your phone until January.
Yeah, that was my question. Who is picking up the phone in the year 2024?
Don’t pick up. If you don’t recognize the number, it’s nothing good for you, OK? Nobody whose number is not already in your phone has anything good to tell you on the phone.
That’s true.
Yeah, let them maybe send you an email.
Yeah.
All right, stop generating!
[RUMMAGING]
“HP CEO evokes James Bond style hack via ink cartridges.” This is from Ars Technica. “Last Thursday, HP CEO Enrique Lores addressed the company’s controversial practice of bricking printers when users load them with third party ink. He said, ‘we have seen that you can embed viruses in the cartridges.’”
This is apparently supposed to justify why you have to buy their ink cartridges instead of ordering one from a third party on Amazon or something.
Which would probably be cheaper and just as good. There was a time, Kevin, when you could put a lot of different cartridges into your printers, but then the printer companies wised up and they said, well, why don’t we lock them down and create essentially these Keurig machine style things where only Keurig pods work in your Keurig coffee maker. Well, same thing for the printer ink.
But instead of just saying, we’re incredibly greedy and will stop at nothing to take all of your money for printer ink, they said, if you use another cartridge, people could literally die. That’s what they said.
It could infect your computer with a virus. Now, I’m not a security expert, but that doesn’t seem very plausible to me. Do you think there’s any way that a virus could actually infect you through your printer cartridge?
Let me just say, there has never been anything I’ve been less scared of than a virus in my printer. I truly am not scared.
Do you have a printer?
I actually don’t have a printer, and I need one.
Wow.
Yeah.
Why do you need a printer? I have a laser printer, but it doesn’t take ink cartridges. It takes toner cartridges.
And what’s the difference between toner and ink?
I have no idea.
OK, great.
Couldn’t tell you.
All right, stop generating.
OK.
Now, this one is an activity.
Oh, boy!
Kevin, your colleague Stuart Thompson published a quiz. We have to guess which faces in this quiz were made by AI, and we are invited to try it out and see how we do. If you’d like to play along at home, we’re going to put a link to it in our show notes.
OK, so it’s a 10-question quiz. For each question, it shows you a face and asks you if the face was made by AI. So should we take it together?
Let’s take it together.
I’m going to share my screen.
OK. Number one, this is a man. I’m going to say fake.
That one looks like AI to me. His eyes are too close together.
All right. And that’s a real person.
I apologize to whoever’s eye distance I accidentally just insulted. OK, this one kind of looks like a high school gym teacher. I’m going to say real.
Totally real. And we are wrong again. That is an AI image. Wow.
OK, we’re zero for two.
Another.
So I did hear once that the way to tell on an AI face is by looking at the ear lobes because AI is not good at doing ear lobes that look like real people’s ear lobes. So how do these ear lobes look?
Well, let’s see.
I’m going to say fake. They look a little too — a little too connected.
Fake lobes. Yes! We got it.
OK, this one, what do you think about this one?
I think this one is fake because before we started, I said it was real, and it was fake.
[LAUGHS]: So you cheated.
I thought we were going to take the test separately.
OK.
Correct. That is an AI image.
OK, let’s try another one.
OK.
All right, now we’ve got a —
Young lady.
She is blonde, blue eyes. I would say — can’t really see the ear lobes. I’m going to say real.
Real.
No, it’s AI.
Oh my God.
This is so hard.
There’s another woman. This has a lot of bokeh in the background.
What’s bokeh?
That’s the blurring in the background.
Look at you, Ansel Adams. OK.
I think this is real. Like there’s some just —
The eyebrow looks kind of weird to me. I’m going to say AI.
I’m going to say real.
OK. Oh, you were right.
All right. So here’s a person who, I would say, respectfully, has a head shaped like a trapezoid in a way that makes me feel like he’s fake.
I’m going to say fake too just because the hairline is — either this is a fake image or this person’s barber owes them an apology.
Oh my god.
Oh, no! I love how this AI quiz has turned into us just insulting the real faces and appearances of real people.
I want to say to this man, while I did say you have a head shaped like a trapezoid, I think I say it was in a hot way. It’s a hot — it’s a hot shape for your head, and just look. That’s a beautiful man. That’s a beautiful man. OK.
OK.
We’re trying another. There’s a woman wearing glasses. And I mean at this point, I have completely lost any sense of what is real and fake, and I truly am just flipping a coin.
Yeah.
I’m saying real.
I’m going to say real too.
OK, we’re saying real. Oh my God.
It’s AI.
Oh, Jesus! OK. There’s a man. This has got to be real.
I don’t know. I don’t trust my own instincts anymore. So I’m going to say fake even though I think it looks realistic.
I’m saying real. All right. We got another one.
We got another one.
I think this is the last one.
This is the last one.
OK. AI.
Nope. That was a real person. Wonderful. OK, so we’re 4 out of 10, 40 percent.
I’m not great at math, but that’s not a passing grade.
No, we have failed out of AI facial recognition school.
So I’ve taken a few of these “is this thing AI-generated or not” tests and quizzes over the years, and this is definitely the hardest one.
Look, if you just want to do some shenanigans in the world and those shenanigans are going to start with you creating a fake LinkedIn profile, you’re in heaven. Because one of these images would get you anywhere you needed to go.
So I think this is just a sign that we just cannot reliably tell. If you and I, students of AI, cannot score higher than a 4 out of 10 on this quiz, no one can.
We’re hosed. All right, stop generating.
All right, that’s it for this week on HatGPT.
We’ll close up the old hat, put it back on its pedestal where it belongs.
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“Hard Fork” is produced by Rachel Cohen and Davis Land. We had help this week from Kate LoPresti. We’re edited by Jen Poyant. This episode was fact checked by Caitlin Love. Today’s show was engineered by Corey Schreppel. Original music by Elisheba Ittoop, Marion Lozano, and Dan Powell.
Our audience editor is Nell Gallogly. Video production by Ryan Manning and Dylan Bergersen. If you haven’t already, you can check us out on YouTube at youtube.com/hardfork.
Special Thanks to Paula Szuchman, Pui-Wing Tam, Kate LoPresti, and Jeffrey Miranda. You can email us at [email protected].
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